Hello everyone, on the eighteenth chapter of the Techy Sum, volume 1, here’s the news that you’ve been looking for:
📱Tech news💻:
- WhatsApp is back after down for almost two hours, today (25 October 2022) from 08:09 to 10:08 GMT. Meta so far not yet outline what’s the issue behind the problem with their “on-premises solution” yet.
- French authorities, the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL) have imposed the maximum possible fine for €20 million against Clearview AI, a biometric startup selling its controversial facial recognition technology to governments and law enforcement worldwide. The company were fined for violating GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) regulation that include unlawful processing of personal data (GDPR Article 6), individuals’ rights not being respected (Articles 12, 15, and 17), and lack of cooperation with the data protection authority (Article 31). The company must delete the data already acquired on French citizens or face an additional €100k fine per day after two-month grace period end from the ruling date.
- Apple Music (from $10 to $11, family plan price from $15 to $17, annual price from $99 to $109; increased due to increasing music licensing cost) and Apple TV+ (from $5 to $7, annual price from $50 to $70; increased due to nowadays better value content) subscribers see their subscription prices increase by $1 or $2 starting yesterday, while the Apple One (included Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and iCloud+, from $14.95 to $16.95, family plan price from $19.95 to $22.95; Premier tier (plus Apple News+ and Apple Fitness+ including previous family plan) price from $29.95 to $32.95) bundle jumps to $3. No other Apple subscriptions have hiked their prices so far.
- WCCFTech wrote a summary review article of iPad 10 and M2’s iPad Pro, collected from various tech site. What do you think of it? Comment your thoughts below.
- Samsung shares a list of 49 phone devices that will be getting Android 13 in the timeline of October 2022 until February 2023. Is your Samsung phone is in the list? Comment your thoughts below.
- Intel has updated the GNA (Gaussian and Neural Accelerator) co-processor in the current Linux driver kernel, found on AVX-512 instruction set up until almost-fused 12th generation, Alder Lake. It altered the coding to include the Linux Direct Rendering Manager framework or DRM. DRM engineers highly requested this integration to place the GNA library within the AI and DRM placements in the main Linux kernel and its subsystems.
- Contradicting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurnman statement, a report from Commercial Times backs up earlier claims of TSMC using its 3nm process to mass produce the M2 Pro and M2 Max. The M2 Pro, codename Rhodes Chop, will be equipped with a 10-core CPU and a 20-core GPU, while the M2 Max will be the more powerful of the two, codenamed Rhodes 1C, and is said to feature up to a 12-core CPU and 38-core GPU. As for the M2 Ultra and M2 Extreme, TSMC is now racing against time to fulfill orders for Apple. The M2 Ultra is codenamed Rhodes 2C and is said to double the CPU and GPU cores when compared to the M2 Max.
- According to Benchlife, the upcoming flagship RDNA 3 part should be called Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Videocardz corroborate (likely confirmed from their multiple sources too) that this name is indeed used by AMD for the new Radeon model. The XTX branding has not been used on any Radeon card since X1000 series (X1900XTX), released on 5 October 2005. (That was 17 years ago, mind you!)
- Memtest86+, an open-source project (free to use) that are rewritten from ground up from the original Memtest86 software, is now released on their GitHub page today.
- YouTuber TechTechPotato has taken a stab at guesstimating the production costs of the Ryzen 9 7950X. AMD pays roughly $20–25 per CCD (die; manufactured on 5 nm’s TSMC), which amounted to $40-$50 of 7950X’s two CCD. The single 6nm IOD has a production cost of $21, pretty much the same as the 5nm CCDs. The YouTuber indicates a price of $7-$8 for the packaging materials. Total cost are around $69–75 range.
- Via a post on the Linux Kernel Mailing List from Linus Torvalds himself, he said that they may drop the Linux kernel support for i486 CPU instruction this year, which the CPU instruction itself is way back to 1989. The idea received a certain amount of pushback, with the claim from some users that new hardware based on the superannuated silicon was still being shipped. When the same plan was raised a year ago, one user said they were still using a 486, and wanted to continue doing so. It all comes down to cmpxchg8b, an instruction that compares then exchanges eight bytes (or 64 bits) of information in the computer’s memory. Mailing list member, Peter Zijlstra, suggested Linux should only support processors capable of carrying this out, leaving the 32-bit 486 behind and meaning new Linux kernels would run on P5-class hardware or newer. The cmpxchg8b instruction is the culprit behind the original Pentium’s ‘F00F’ bug, which saw an affected CPU without operating system mitigations in place cease to function until it was rebooted when asked to execute the instruction. This may be carry out on the next Linux kernel 6.2 update. We shall see what happens next.
- TikToker mryeester discovered that along with coating the CPU with ‘Discord’ logo thermal paste design for maximum thermal paste coverage, by grounding up salt into much finer powder, and mixing it with the thermal paste, it actually lowered the CPU temperature from normal thermal paste’s 49 degrees Celcius to 46–47 degrees Celcius, a nice 2 to 3 degrees Celcius reduced temperature.
- Mark Zuckerberg’s faith in the metaverse remains strong, but not everyone shares his belief that this virtual/mixed reality vision is the future of how we work and play online. One of these is market research firm Canalys, which predicts that most business projects in the metaverse will have shuttered by 2025. At the company’s Channels Forum in Barcelona, Matthew Ball, chief analyst at the company, asked, “Is the metaverse the next digital frontier or an overhyped money pit? Tens of billions of dollars have already been invested, costs and delays to Meta’s own progress is a barometer.” Ball admit that gaming is one area where the metaverse could find success, as is “adult entertainment,” but the business sector will struggle. Rival research giant Gartner is more optimistic about the metaverse. It believes that a quarter of the world will spend at least one hour a day shopping, working, socializing, or learning in the virtual world by 2026, with 30% of organizations offering products or services in this digital landscape. Big tech companies such as Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, and Google keep investing in the metaverse, which consultants estimate that $177 billion has already been plowed into the platform, and that figure could hit between $5 trillion and $13 trillion by 2030.
- Tesla gets state funding of AUD$40 million for 260 new Supercharger bays (each have a rated output of at least 250kW, with 2+ bays having a rated output of 350kW) at more than 30 NSW addresses in Australia. The rest of 240 out of 500 EV (electric vehicle) charging networks will go to Ampol, BP, Evie Networks, NRMA, and Zeus Renewables. This is the largest, fastest and most comprehensive public EV charging network in Australia ever invested by the Australian government.
- Vivo “X90-series” new 50mm portrait glass lens leak suggests to be “the largest yet” (presumably on a Vivo smartphone) and will house an OIS-enabled f/1.6 Sony IMX758 in the X90-series devices, 1 or more of which may even have 2 of these new lenses for a potentially ground-breaking dual portrait mode. Leaker, Ben Geskin, as a reaction to Vivo’s Imaging Strategy Conference of 2022 conference, posted a render of what one of these smartphones might look like. The image suggests that it might sport 1 large, rear-panel-dominating yet off-center glass circle atop a large rectangular base, under which multiple individual lenses may or may not be hidden.
- The New Jersey General Assembly introduced a bill late last month that would make it illegal for manufacturers to charge vehicle owners to use pre-installed hardware. The bill are written by Assemblymen Paul Moriarty and Joe Danielsen. If made into law, the bill would prohibit dealers and vehicle manufacturers in New Jersey from even offering customers subscription services that utilize “components and hardware already installed on the motor vehicle at the time of purchase or lease.” This means if those cozy heated seats are present during the test drive, you can’t be charged on a monthly or annual basis to actually use them once you’re home. Entities found violating this regulation would be charged up to $10,000 for a first offense and $20,000 for any subsequent offense. The ban wouldn’t apply to any hardware that would present an “ongoing expense to the dealer, manufacturer, or any third-party service provider.”
- The researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) identified a chemical compound capable of replicating certain exercise benefits. In search of the right treatment, they developed their own method of monitoring muscle and bone cell health. They tested 296 chemical compounds for their effects on the proliferation and differentiation of myocytes, osteoblasts, and osteoclasts. Eight total compounds were found to improve cell health and differentiation. Of these, locamidazole or LAMZ, was capable of enhancing myoblast and osteoblast function, thus boosting muscle and bone tissue growth.
- U.S. will to begin giving IoT devices a cybersecurity rating, starting in 2023, as many homeowner and consumers from the States uses smart home gadgets, which is great for convenience but not so good for security, as DDoS (distributed denial of services) and hacking starting to be pretty common with IoT devices this day and age.
- Over the weekend, a group by the name of Black Reward, an anti-regime Iranian hacktivists stole at least 50 GB of files from the Nuclear Power Production and Development (NPPD) Company of Iran, a subsidiary of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI). It appears to have impacted the NPPD company email server, as Black Reward claims to have accessed 324 email inboxes and exfiltrated over 100,000 email messages. Shortly after announcing the data breach, the hacktivist group publicly shared the full 50 GB collection of stolen emails on Telegram, which also includes lots of spam and phishing messages with malicious attachments. Two days after posting the initial data dump, the hacktivist group shared a truncated version of the database with most of the spam and phishing messages removed. While preparing this second version of the stolen files, the hackers surfaced video footage showing what looks to be the inside of an Iranian nuclear facility. Beyond this video footage, Black Reward claims to have discovered private conversations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), contracts and agreements with domestic and foreign partners, construction, logistics, and strategic plans, information and documentation concerning Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant, and passports and visas belonging to Iranian and Russian specialists who work in the power plant, as well as related trip and mission details. The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran has published a response to the data breach, rejecting the view that any valuable data was stolen, and portrays the incident as little more than a publicity stunt meant to draw attention and foment negative media narratives.
- At a surprise session of the 90th Interpol General Assembly in New Delhi, India last week, Interpol unveiled the Interpol Metaverse, a VR space in which police officers can interact and trade information with one another as well as take a number of immersive policing courses. It includes a digital copy of its Lyon, France HQ campus, which delegates were invited to tour using their avatars during the launch. Supposedly for training’s sake, it even features a TSA-style airport security area and an “Immigration and Border Police” station. According to Interpol, its new police metaverse was born from a need to prevent criminal exploits in the VR world.
- Google announces official end-of-support date for Chrome on Windows 7, slated for 7 February 2023, the same day the stable release of Chrome 110 arrives. The date is significant as it matches Microsoft’s end of support for Windows 7 ESU and Windows 8.1 extended support on January 10, 2023, Google said. Older versions of Chrome will still work, but users won’t receive any more security or feature updates.
🎮Video game news🎯:
- Yesterday, Bethesda announced a next-gen free update in 2023 for Fallout 4, in lieu of 25th anniversary of the Fallout series. It will be available for Xbox Series, PlayStation 5, and PC. It’ll support 4K resolution and high frame rates, and bring more bug fixes and bonus Creation Club content. Bethesda is also offering active Prime Gaming subscribers the opportunity to claim the 25th anniversary bundle for Fallout 76, via Prime Gaming Rewards from 2 November 2022 until 2 February 2023, and includes a handful of in-game goodies. Active Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members can get the bundle too, redeemable from 27 October until 27 December 2022.
- The Uncharted: Legacy of Thieve’s Collection PC port hit a peak of just under 11,000 players, while Horizon Zero Dawn peaked at >56,000 players, while Spider-Man Remastered peaked at ~66,000, and God of War hit ~75,000, according to SteamDB. The problem likely boils down to timing, and the game’s age. Sony and Iron Galaxy released the title against Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, A Plague Tale: Requiem, and Gotham Knights. Meanwhile, Sony released its other PC ports in quieter periods of the year. Also, Uncharted 4 is the oldest title Sony has brought to PC, launched on PlayStation 4 in 2016.
- Teardown v1.2 by Tuxedo Labs make the process of discovering mods much easier, turns Teardown’s Muratori Beach map into a freely-accessible sandbox level from it’s previous reachable on only certain sections of the game’s campaign, adds support for multiple controllers, which is handy for all sorts of people, but especially for anyone looking to use a separate gamepad while playing on a docked Deck. The patch promises bugfixes and mysterious, nameless “updates to the game’s modding tools”.
- Dataminer Advaith has apparently discovered evidence that voice chat integration will come to PS5 in the near future, although nothing in the works for PS4 users outside of the already-available option to display game activity.
- Ahead of the release of the Winters’ expansion this week (on 28 October 2022), Capcom released a demo of the new Resident Evil Village third-person mode that will be included with the expansion. YouTuber ‘ElAnalistaDeBits’, and shows that, despite the increased Field of View, performance isn’t being affected on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S in the areas featured in the comparison video.
- WCCFTech interviewed NEXON, the developer behind The First Descendant, for Q&A (question & answer) about the game, UE5 (Unreal Engine 5) implementation, and future DLSS 3 support.
- Peter Alexander Kerkhof, an assistant professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, wrote in an article for the Leiden Medievalists Blog back in August of 2021, said that pigs are portrayed too pudgy, too stumpy, too pink, and too naked in video games with medieval settings.
- ‘Sexual assault’ custom game mode still made available in Overwatch 2’s v1.2 patch on single player mode, which involves you to “Flash to knock down your victims,” which refers to Cassidy’s old Overwatch 1 Flashbang ability and then says to “Tbag to fuck,” which is written with spaces, seemingly to get around a word filter. As you crouch, text appears on the top of the screen that says “raping…” Enemy heroes are then marked as “pregnant” and, eventually, a Torbjorn bot is spawned to simulate a child. Considering that this game is rated for all, it’s disgusting how Blizzard let this thing just gone unnoticed, especially if the kids are going to play this game. Oh well, Blizzard being Blizzard, why do they have to care if it doesn’t involves monetary profit and excessive censorship to appeal to some shareholder, right?
- Terraria becomes the first indie hit to break 1 million positive user reviews on Steam, which come alongside just a little over 22,000 negative reviews, giving it a 97% overall user rating — “overwhelmingly positive”. Congrats to Terraria, and may the indie gaming scene able to deliver quality games what most AAA gaming companies tends to sideline.
- Try this game today! Slow Roads, a beautiful driving game for browser, and V Rising, a vampire survival game (free-to-play on October 28 until November 1 of 2022).
- Call of Duty (CoD): Modern Warfare 2 (2022 edition) realistic (life-like) graphics gameplay gone viral simply for that. Does it even matching with better gameplay is another question. We all know what happened to CoD series this day and age… Move on, everyone.
🚀Space news🌌:
- On 30 September 2022, the telescope, Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA), which comprises 12 antennas, firstly installed of one antenna in 2014, was fully completed and inaugurated, and became the most powerful millimeter radio telescope in the Northern Hemisphere. It will assist the Event Horizon Telescope in studying black holes, stars, quasars, to name a few. The length of the tracks that all 12 antennas can move along has been extended from 2,500 feet (760 meters) to just over a mile (1.7 kilometers), according to a statement from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). The various configurations helping NOEMA function like a camera with a zoom lens, the maximum spatial resolution achievable by the telescope would allow it to detect a cellphone from over 310 miles (500 km) away.
- Meteor-hunting methods could be adapted to hunt for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up around 85% of the universe’s matter but remains invisible, one of it could be due to the massive particle sizes (as oppose to tiny particle sizes that are easily observable), researchers John Beacom, a professor of physics and astronomy at The Ohio State University and co-author of the study, said in a statement propose in a new paper, as they surprised that such a mature technique on hunting the meteor applicable to dark matter were gone unnoticeable for a very long time.
- The near-Earth asteroid Ryugu formed far from the sun, in the cold depths of the outer solar system, according to new analysis of two samples returned from Ryugu in 2019 by the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission. Early analysis indicated that the samples were the most pristine material ever seen in the solar system, incorporating dust older than the sun. Essentially, Ryugu has remained unchanged since it formed during the first 4 or 5 million years of solar-system history. The latest research on the samples shows that Ryugu hails from near the orbit of Neptune and was kicked inward by the migrating ice giant planets. Now, the researchers found that Ryugu contains higher abundances of some noble gases (these are inert, unreactive gases) including helium, neon, argon, krypton and xenon, but a lower abundance of the isotope nitrogen-15 than CI chondrites.
- Crew-4 pilot and NASA astronaut, Bob Farmer, said these companies should start to think about what new technologies could be coming, considering human factor, efficiency and sustainability into the commercial space stations. Crew-4 mission specialist Jessica Watkins, a geologist specializing in Mars who published a science paper while in space, urged a next-gen design to include a 360-degree cupola window similar to the one the ISS received in 2010 (or for that matter, the one that the Inspiration 4 mission flew on a modified SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule in 2021.). This will allows astronauts to “look out the window, and see the Earth below us, and make scientific observations”. Expedition 68 ISS commander, Samantha Cristoforetti, urged flexibility in the design as much as is feasible, especially in light of possible other users like space tourists coming on board. She said designers should be brought on board to assess “the usability and the pleasure of using such an object or feature”.
- A Soyuz-2.1b with Fregat upper stage rocket topped with three satellites for the Gonets (Mobile)-M communications constellation and a demonstration spacecraft called Skif-D lifted off and successfully into the orbit on Saturday, 22 October 2022 at 22:57 Moscow time (19:57 GMT) from Vostochny Cosmodrome, in far eastern Russia. Each of the three Gonets-M satellites — Gonets-M33, Gonets-M34 and Gonets-M35 — weighs about 617 pounds (280 kilograms), according to Anatoly Zak of RussianSpaceWeb.com, and injected at an altitude of about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers), designed to transmit data and provide mobile satellite communications services to mobile and stationary subscribers anywhere in the world. Skif-D, a demonstrator spacecraft, operate in a near-polar orbit about 5,015 miles (8,070 km) above Earth. It is “a prototype of the first Russian satellite for the broadband internet access in remote areas, such as Arctic regions of Russia,” Zak wrote. The Skif system is envisioned to eventually consist of 12 spacecraft, each of which will be able to beam down to Earth 100 gigabits of data per second, he added.
- The uncrewed Progress 80 freighter, which brought more than 3 tons of food and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) in February, undocked from the orbiting lab at 22:46 GMT on Sunday, 23 October 2022. A few hours later, Progress’ engines fired in a deorbit maneuver to send the cargo craft into a destructive re-entry in the Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.
- Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet of Earth-size rocky world, or “super-Earth,” that’s hot enough to melt gold and, as a result, may have no to thinner atmosphere. The exoplanet in question, called GJ 1252 b, is located 65 light-years away. It is much closer to its star than Earth is to the sun, and one side — its “dayside” — permanently faces its star, driving up temperatures on the exoplanet. When the astronomers used the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope to measure infrared radiation from GJ 1252 b as the exoplanet passed behind its star — an arrangement called a “secondary eclipse” — they discovered that the planet’s dayside temperatures reached a scorching 2,242 degrees Fahrenheit (1,228 degrees Celsius). GJ 1252 b has a surface pressure of no more than 10 bar, which indicates that its atmosphere — if it exists — must be substantially thinner than that of Venus. Further is needed to actually reveal the circumstances behind the exoplanet in question.
- A fleet of space telescopes unexpectedly detected the record-breaking gamma-ray burst GRB221009A on 9 October 2022, sparking concern among spacecraft operators about the blast’s odd signal that day. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia galaxy mapper sent a strange reading to its controllers on early afternoon that day, showing a surprising amount of high-energy particles hitting the spacecraft’s detectors. The engineers were puzzled for a while, but eventually realized that the spacecraft, built to measure precise positions of stars in our galaxy, detected the powerful gamma-ray burst GRB221009A which flashed at Earth from a distant world over 2 billion light-years away. Other ESA spacecraft picked up the signal, described as the most energetic gamma-ray burst ever detected, among them the sun-exploring Solar Orbiter and Mercury-bound BepiColombo. The data is still being analyzed.
- A trio of technicolor lakes in Ethiopia, each one a different color from the others, are the result of numerous factors, including water chemistry, depth and inhabiting wildlife, is visible in stunning detail in a satellite image, captured by Landsat 8 satellite, recently released online on 7 October 2022 on by NASA’s Earth Observatory. The three lakes are Lake Shala, which has a deep blue hue; Lake Abijatta, which is green in color; and Lake Langano, which has a sandy-yellow hue similar to the surrounding land. The lakes are located in Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley, around 124 miles (200 kilometers) south of the capital, Addis Ababa.
That’s all I’ve got for you this time! There’s a lot to look and write, to be honest, with this one. If you do enjoy our content, follow our Medium: techysum.medium.com, and join our Telegram channel too: t.me/techysum. We will post more there on the channel regarding any changes or updates. Feel free to share this to anyone that are also interested with the topic. It help us with continuously write newsletter like this.
We’ll be back with more news for you tomorrow for daily news. Take care and have a good day! Peace~
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News compiled by Daniel Suguwa, an amateur VTuber. You can reach him out on YouTube and Twitter.
For business related deal, please email to him at danielsuguwa@gmail.com.
