ArduinoMania

It’s another cryptic graphic from Apple for fans to obsess over. Yep, it’s time for more new products from Apple, and rumors suggest an updated iPhone SE could be on the horizon. The text accompanying the invite, “Peek performance,” could mean more news from Apple’s silicon arm. Maybe we’ll get a glimpse at its M2 processor for future Macs.

The iPhone SE deserves a refresh to bring it in line with the rest of Apple’s phone lineup. It still has a home button! In 2022! This year's model may get Face ID and 5G support, with a design similar to 2018's iPhone XR. As Apple’s cheapest iPhone, the most interesting part will be where the price lands. How much cheaper than the iPhone mini?

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

• Rivian hikes the base price of its quad-motor R1T pickup by $12,000

• AMD, ARM and Intel back a universal standard for chiplets

• Bungie will ban 'Destiny 2' players who run the game from a Steam Deck

• Twitter may soon add a dedicated tab for podcasts

• US soccer matches are coming to HBO Max

What do economic sanctions mean for Russia's space program

What about the ISS?

Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters

Following economic sanctions and financial constraints from the US, EU and the UK, Russia issued retaliatory sanctions of its own against Western companies. On Wednesday, Roscosmos announced it will not launch the next round of 36 OneWeb internet satellites scheduled for liftoff on March 4th from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Meanwhile, NASA remains optimistic the sanctions will not adversely impact ongoing collaborative space programs, like the running of the ISS, which has been a joint US–Russian effort from the start. But that could change.

Continue reading.

Biden wants to ban advertising aimed at kids

'It’s time to demand tech companies stop collecting personal data on our children.'

In his first State of the Union address, President Biden asked Congress to implement new laws to increase child safety on Facebook, TikTok and other social media platforms. Much of the motivation for change appears to have come from the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who attended the address as a guest of Jill Biden. Haugen recently testified before Congress, accusing Facebook parent, Meta, of disregarding child safety on the platform. The White House will ask for funding to study the question of child safety on social media.

Continue reading.

UN starts working towards a global plan to curb plastic pollution

The treaty could end up being as important as the Paris Climate Accord.

After a week of negotiations in Nairobi, the United Nations has agreed to start working on the first-ever global plastic pollution treaty. It's not likely to be ready before 2024, but according to the UN, it could end up being as important as the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. In 2019, the organization found plastic pollution is 10 times worse than it was in 1980.

Continue reading.

Polestar's second concept car is a convertible

With a drone inside.

Polestar

Capturing the spirit of ‘80s and ‘90s kids' toys, Polestar’s new concept car is the O2. “Polestar O2 is our vision of a new era for sports cars," Polestar’s Head of Design, Maximilian Missoni, said in a press statement. "By mixing the joy of open-top driving with the purity of electric mobility, it unlocks a new mix of emotions in a car."

Drivers will also be able to film their top-down adventures with the O2's integrated cinematography drone. Developed in collaboration with Hoco Flow, this autonomous camera drone rides in an area of negative pressure generated from an airfoil. The drone can follow along at speeds up to 56MPH, and owners can edit and share the captured footage from the central infotainment system.

Continue reading.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S8+ review

Truly the best Android tablet?

The Galaxy Tab S8+ has a brilliant OLED display, class-leading performance, a speedy fingerprint sensor and a premium design. Throw in an S-Pen and Samsung’s recipe makes for a high-end Android tablet that's hard to beat. And there aren’t many rivals around to beat it. In his review, Sam Rutherford puts it best: “There are two kinds of Android tablets: Samsung's Galaxy Tab S line and everything else.”

Continue reading.

Ford splits business into separate EV and combustion units

The EV part is getting increasingly more important.

Ford is splitting its car manufacturing business into separate EV-only and internal combustion engine (ICE) divisions to help it fight both "new EV competitors" and conventional challengers. Its electric part, Model e, is meant to speed up large-scale development of EVs while producing connected vehicle technology for all of Ford’s vehicles.

Continue reading.

Aloy is a little less obsessed with her stash in 'Horizon Forbidden West'

The latest patch is here to save a bit of your sanity.

Guerrilla Games’ new patch for Horizon Forbidden West addresses a number of issues that have been part of the game since launch. This includes a major bug that prevented players from completing the “Reach for the Stars” main quest. For instance, Aloy’s ally Varl won’t get stuck swimming anymore. But perhaps the best improvement is Aloy won’t mention her stash as frequently. Until now, any time she picked up resources she couldn’t carry, they’d be spirited away to her stash box, and she would let you know. Almost. Every. Darn. Time.

Continue reading. 

Elon Musk says Tesla will do nothing to stop United Auto Workers (UAW) from holding a union vote at the company's Fremont, California factory. In a tweet, the company chief said Tesla's real challenge in the Bay Area is negative unemployment, so it treats and compensates its "(awesome) people well" or they'd just leave otherwise. 

Musk posted the tweet in response to Kiss co-lead singer Gene Simmons who sided with the executive when he called out the President for not mentioning Tesla in his State of the Union Address. The President only praised Ford and General Motors for investing billions of dollars in their efforts to release electric vehicles, thereby generating thousands of jobs in the process. As Bloomberg notes, Biden is a labor union supporter and often snubs Tesla, which has a non-unionized workforce, in his speeches and interviews.

In a follow-up tweet, Musk claimed that Tesla factory workers have the highest compensation in the auto industry, posting an interview of GM CEO Mary Barra as his source. In the interview, news anchor and journalist Andrew Sorkin said Tesla's non-unionized workers were earning more than their unionized counterparts. Barra said she'd have to see more information, since one must also take benefits and not just wages into account, but that what Sorkin said wasn't the case last time she checked. 

The UAW has been working to unionize Tesla for years, and Musk has criticized those efforts from the start. When a Fremont production worker claimed poor working conditions and low pay in 2017, Musk reportedly sent out a letter to employees with a point-by-point takedown while also slamming UAW. He said the union's true allegiance is to the "giant car companies, where the money they take from employees in dues is vastly more than they could ever make from Tesla."  

In the same year, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against the automaker after investigating complaints of unfair labor practices. According to the NLRB, workers said Tesla "coerces and intimidates" them with a confidentiality agreement that prevents them from discussing unionization. In 2018, the NLRB found that the company violated labor laws when it fired union activist Richard Ortiz and ordered it to compensate him for loss of earnings and benefits. 

The labor board also ordered Musk to delete a tweet that might sound like a threat to employees. In the tweet, Musk similarly invited efforts to unionize. "Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so [tomorrow] if they wanted," he wrote. However, he also said: "But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?" NLRB chair Wilma Liebman explained at the time that to an employee, that may sound like they'll no longer have stock options if they vote to unionize. As Electrek notes, Tesla offers its stock compensation program to most of its employees, and the company's rising stock prices makes it a very valuable benefit. 

Samsung is looking into reports that it has been limiting the performance of a large number of apps on some Galaxy smartphones, Android Authority has reported. It has reportedly been using something called the Game Optimizing Service (GOS) to throttle up to 10,000 apps (likely to save battery life), including many that have nothing to do with gaming like Netflix, TikTok and Microsoft Office. 

Making the optics worse is the fact that it's not throttling benchmark apps like 3DMark, GeekBench 5 and PCMark, so you'd see no problem with your device if you ran one of those. Samsung is apparently aware of the issue and is investigating it, according to Android Authority, although it hasn't officially confirmed that yet.

The throttling was spotted by Korean users who posted a list of 10,000 apps that are apparently affected. Since the problem was revealed, Samsung's Korean forums have exploded with complaints from users about the GOS issue. "I paid a lot of money to buy a sports car that can go up to 300 km/h, but for safety reasons, I put a speed limit on it so that it can run only 150 km/h," noted one user sarcastically. 

In one case, a user took the popular 3DMark benchmark app and renamed it to an app called Genshin Impact that's on the throttled list. After renaming, 3DMark ran with a score less than half of what it ran with the correct name. The GOS app was present on some smartphones like the Galaxy S21 Plus and could not be disabled, but not others like the new Galaxy S22 series, according to Android Authority. 

OnePlus recently admitted throttling apps with its latest smartphones in order to save battery life, prompting Geekbench to delist the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro from its Android Benchmark chart. After being called out, it tweaked the settings in order to match each app's performance requirements with the appropriate power required. 

The following contains moderate spoilers for the first three episodes of ‘Star Trek: Picard’ season two, but not much more than what was seen in earlier teasers and trailers.

The first season of Picard was controversial, to say the least. Many fans were happy to see old friends again; others weren’t so thrilled at the grimdark direction Starfleet and the Federation went in the 20 years since we’d last seen their 24th century incarnations. Still, we got a look at how technology evolved, met some intriguing new characters and in the finale, at least, everything seems to have been put right.

It’s that brighter world where the second season of Picard begins, with synthetic beings now legal — which is handy, given that at the end of last season Jean-Luc Picard was transferred into an android body. It left me and much of the audience wondering if and how this would affect future stories. The answer comes pretty quickly in season two, now with new showrunner Terry Matalas at the helm. It doesn’t really matter. It’s not made clear exactly who does and who doesn’t know, but Jean-Luc Picard is still subject to the ravages of age while enjoying all the legal protections he would have had as a flesh-and-blood being (he still owns the vineyard, for one thing). Even Q, when he inevitably appears, treats Picard as the same being he’s always been.

CBS

Viewers may be familiar with the “Ship of Theseus” thought experiment, recently brought up in the finale of last year’s WandaVision. Basically, the idea is that if you slowly replace the parts of a ship over time, and then reassemble the old parts into another ship, which one is the original ship? In Picard, they suggest that the essence of a human being is their intelligence, so the real Jean-Luc Picard is the synthetic being that’s walking around on Earth right now. The problem with this, however, is that this hasn’t always been how Star Trek worked. While characters like Miles O’Brien and Harry Kim were replaced by duplicate versions of themselves, “Thomas” Riker was decidedly not given the same courtesy. It seems that duplicates are acceptable only when they replace someone we’ve otherwise lost.

During press interviews, even Patrick Stewart admitted the synthetic body issue was “a real mess.” Thankfully, the show smartly moves past it. It’s been at least a year and a half since the events of the first season, meaning we’re now in the 25th century. Picard has returned home and assumed the chancellorship of Starfleet Academy. Both Rios and Raffi have gone back to the fleet, and even Elnor is now attending school as a cadet (as the first full-blooded Romulan at the Academy). It’s the nice shiny future we’ve always loved to see on Star Trek, complete with some banging costume design and fun updated tech. Last season I noted how nice it was to see the continuation of the “synthetic being” storyline that ran through The Next Generation, and having all the characters settled into new positions leaves plenty of room to explore other facets of 25th-century technology and society.

CBS

However, Picard hasn’t become a happy show overnight. A new crisis quickly emerges, with a rift in subspace demanding Picard’s attention and putting the entire fleet at risk. This is where Q comes in, shunting Picard and his close compatriots over to an altered timeline where the genocidal “Confederation” rules the Alpha Quadrant with an iron fist. This isn’t the Mirror Universe that we’re familiar with from previous shows like the original series, Deep Space Nine and Discovery. In this version, Earth is still very much in charge, having wiped out multiple species with the Borg next on its list.

It’s not entirely clear in the first three episodes how this alternate reality was created, or why Q picked the La Sirena crew over any of Picard’s friends from the Enterprise-D. But it’s really just a tool that lets the show dabble in another Star Trek mainstay: time travel. Rather than create some new device or strange spatial phenomenon that sends the crew back in time, their method of traversing through the centuries harkens back to a method seen in the original series, one later repeated in the The Voyage Home. The ship slingshots around the sun, a technique that requires precise calculations that only someone like Spock can provide… or the Borg Queen, in this case. It’s not necessarily scientifically accurate, but it is a nice callback for a franchise spanning over 60 years, especially when fans have a tendency to try to square every inconsistency with their own theories instead of just embracing the chaos.

CBS

And chaos awaits the crew as they slide into the fair year of 2024, just a notch ahead of our own time so there’s very little difference in tech to worry about. Raffi and Seven are aghast at the poverty on display in 20th-century Los Angeles, which points to why the show’s writers chose this year instead of 2022 or 2023: 2024 is the date of the infamous “Bell Riots” as seen on Deep Space Nine’s “Past Tense.”

At that point, the poor and indigent residents interned in “Sanctuary Districts” in San Francisco struck back against the degrading conditions they were forced to live in, eventually prompting higher level changes that would eventually lead to the Federation we all know and love. Whether Picard and friends will end up playing a role in those pivotal events remains to be seen, but the third episode hints at Rios getting some taste of injustice as an undocumented Latino man –though he’s undocumented for a time travel reasons and not because of immigration.

Overall, the beginning of Picard plays like a greatest hits reel: We’re treated to the return of classic baddies like Q and the Borg, other characters are referenced in passing for some fun Easter eggs, and time travel episodes of Star Trek tend to be a blast so I hope that this will be a good storyline. In a way it’s a warm blanket of nostalgia to calm the audience after the mess that was season one. But if you were hoping to actually explore the galaxy and see more of the 25th century, season two looks to be yet another letdown.

Netflix has been the victim of two big on-set robberies in the space of two days, Variety has reported. On February 24th, $200,000 worth of antique props were reportedly stolen after thieves broke into vehicles used for production of The Crown. And just a day later, 20 thieves with covered faces broke onto the set of Lupin while star Omar Sy was filming and made off with €300,000 ($333,000) worth of equipment. 

The Lupin heist happened in a northwest Paris suburb called Nanterre. The thieves reportedly set off mortar-style fireworks before making off with the equipment. "There was an incident on Feb. 25 while filming the upcoming [part 3] season of Lupin," Netflix confirmed to Variety. "Our cast and crew are safe and there were no injuries." Nanterre authorities have launched an investigation.

Lupin is Netflix's second-biggest international hit after Squid Games and has helped touch off a production boom in the French capital, along with series like Emily in Paris and Call My Agent. Recently, France decreed that streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ must reinvest at least 25 percent of revenue earned in the country on local productions. 

Sy is once again in the role of Assane Diop, a character inspired by the Arsène Lupin gentleman thief/master of disguise detective developed by French author Maurice Leblanc. Just hours after the attack, Sy appeared at France's Cesar awards to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Intouchables (Untouchables). 

Much as Hyundai did yesterday, Kia has announced an electrification roadmap at its 2022 Investor Day, promising to have 14 fully electric models by 2027 and sales of 1.2 million EVs by 2030. It also revealed that its EV9 SUV, unveiled in concept form last November at the LA Auto Show, will be the first to use autonomous driving tech it calls "Automode." 

Kia's roadmap builds on its "Plan S" development strategy announced early in 2021 that included new branding and a plan to introduce of seven EVs by 2027. Now, the company plans to double that with 14 BEV (battery electric vehicle) models available by 2027 and total EV sales of 1.2 million by 2030. It also projects to sell 4 million vehicles annually by 2030, so EVs would make up just over a quarter of that — while automakers like Mercedes-Benz plan to only sell BEVs by 2030. 

The strategy is still ambitious, as it's starting with 160,000 BEV sales this year and plans to ramp that up by five times to 807,000 units in 2026 and 1.2 million by 2030. To hit those targets, Kia will introduce at least two new electric vehicles per year. A couple of those will be electric pickup trucks, including a "dedicated electric pickup truck and a strategic model for emerging markets," the company said. 

Kia

In the near term, Kia plans to launch its flagship electric vehicle, the EV9 SUV, by 2023. The concept version it teased last year had squared-off Range Rover-ish lines, a massive 27-inch display and a Tesla-like yoke instead of a steering wheel. Kia now says that it will be around 5 meters long, accelerate to 100 km/h (62 MPH) in five seconds, and travel 540 km (340 miles) on a charge — while giving you an extra 100 km of range with just six minutes of charging. 

The EV9 will also offer over the air (OTA) and FoD (feature on demand) services for the first time, allowing owners to easily update their vehicle's software. "In addition, it will be the first model to be equipped with Kia’s advanced AutoMode autonomous driving technology," it said. Automode will be "rapidly expanded" throughout its lineup after that.

What is Automode, you might ask? All we know so far is that it's "a range of autonomous driving technologies" that will include a "Highway Driving Pilot" feature that works by itself without driver intervention on highway sections. It will also be improved as the technology develops via wireless updates. It sounds like at least Level 3 self-driving, something still only available from a few automakers, so we'll have to see how that goes for Kia. 

In its press release, Kia offers more details about how and where it plans to sell EVs, PHEVs, and hybrid models around the world. However, it has already overhauled its plans substantially just over the past year, and is likely to do so again. Given the early success (2,126 units sold in February) and generally glowing reviews of the EV6, Kia has reason to be confident about future EV plans. 

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has reportedly approved a petition for another Amazon warehouse union election, the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) has tweeted. If a vote goes ahead, the LDJ5 facility will be the second in Staten Island to hold a union election and the third in the US, according to The Verge. 

The ALU originally petitioned the NLRB to hold union elections for all facilities on Staten Island. However, it withdrew that and decided to focus on one warehouse at a time, subsequently receiving approval to hold an vote at the JFK8 facility starting on March 25th. It later petitioned for an election at LDJ5, which requires the NLRB to confirm that there's sufficient interest.

Amazon has acknowledged the NLRB decision, according to a screenshot of a note texted to employees by Amazon, tweeted by Vice's Lauren Kaori Gurley. "Today, March 2, the National Labor Relations Board notified us that it has found the ALU met the criteria to continue processing the ALU's petition to have an election at LDJ5," the message reads. Amazon and the NLRB have yet to officially respond, but if the report is accurate, the next step would be an NLRB hearing followed by a decision about a vote date.  

One Amazon union election has already been held at Amazon's Bessemer, Alabama facility, and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union union lost the vote by a count of 1,798 to 738. However, the NLRB determined that Amazon interfered with the election and ruled that a new vote could be held starting on February 4th. Counting is set to begin on March 28th.

Spotify has shut down its Moscow operations indefinitely in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, reported Variety. The streaming platform had just opened a representative office in Moscow last month, after a new Russian law required foreign tech companies with an audience of over 500,000 users to establish an office in the nation by 2022. But the law is new enough that most of the companies impacted (a list that includes Meta, Twitter and Telegram) have yet to comply. So far, Spotify, TikTok and Apple have opened offices in Russia.

Users in Russia will still be able to access Spotify. “We think it’s critically important to try to keep our service operational in Russia to allow for the global flow of information,” according to the statement provided to Variety by a Spotify spokesperson.

Spotify will also yank RT and Sputnik News off its platform, both Kremlin-funded news outlets with a massive global audience. Critics say both outlets function as propaganda tools for the Russian government and their foreign policy interests. Canada and the EU have both banned Russian state programming from their airwaves in recent days, and both outlets are under investigation in the UK. 

But it's still pretty easy to view such Kremlin-backed outlets in the US. The National Association of Broadcasters has called for US broadcasters to stop airing RT, RT America and Sputnik News; so far only DirectTV and Roku has complied. Both Apple and Google have also removed apps from these outlets from their app stores. 

But most other platforms, including Meta, TikTok and YouTube, are merely demoting or downranking Russian state-backed channels in the United States, though they are banning them outright in the European Union. Meta has stopped recommending RT and Sputnik News channels in the feeds of Facebook Main and Instagram, but users can directly go to the pages themselves.

Did Facebook's college-focused Campus social network leave you feeling cold? You're not the only one. Consultant Matt Navarra and TechCrunch report parent company Meta is shutting down Facebook's Campus pilot project on March 10th. In a message to users, Facebook said it had learned the "best way" to help students was through college groups.

Facebook will delete Campus profiles, posts and other data after the cutoff date. You can download any data before then, however, and Facebook is suggesting related school groups to help ease the transition.

The Campus pilot launched in September 2020 as a partial throwback to the original student-focused Facebook. You needed a .edu address to sign up — in theory, this let the college crowd mingle without relatives and other outsiders poking in. It was only available from the "More" section of Facebook, though, and didn't get its own app. You might not have known Campus existed, in other words, and it wasn't clear this was a truly separate space.

The closure comes just days after Instagram said it would shut down its standalone IGTV app in mid-March, and reflects a long history of Meta brands pulling apps and services that don't pan out. Meta still appears content to take risks on products, and it won't hesitate to drop those products if they fail.

A group of state attorneys general is investigating TikTok. They're seeking information to determine if and how the service increases the risks of online harm to children. It's an expansion of a probe the AGs opened into Instagram in November concerning the effect of that app's on teens. Specifically, the prosecutors are looking into whether TikTok and Instagram put the public at risk and if they broke state consumer protection laws.

A bipartisan group of eight AGs from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee and Vermont is leading the probe, as The Wall Street Journal reports. AGs from several other states have joined them.

“Today, attorneys general across the nation joined an investigation into TikTok for providing and promoting its social media platform to children and young adults while use is associated with physical and mental health harms,” the AGs said in a statement. "The investigation will look into the harms such usage causes to young users and what TikTok knew about those harms."

Among other things, the coalition will look into the ways TikTok tries to boost engagement among young users, including the "frequency of engagement" with the platform and how long kids spend using it. 

"We care deeply about building an experience that helps to protect and support the well-being of our community, and appreciate that the state attorneys general are focusing on the safety of younger users," a TikTok spokesperson told Engadget. "We look forward to providing information on the many safety and privacy protections we have for teens." 

The spokesperson noted that TikTok limits some features by age, offers parents tools and resources and builds the wellbeing of younger users into its policies. The Federal Trade Commission fined TikTok $5.7 million in 2019 over reported violations of child privacy rules.

The Instagram probe followed the publication of an investigation by The Journal based on leaked internal research from Instagram parent Meta. According to the report, the data suggested using Instagram was linked to an increased risk of mental and physical health harms to teens.

The prosecutors are investigating Meta "for providing and promoting the social media platform Instagram to children and young adults despite knowing that such use is associated with physical and mental health harms." Meta said at the time that the accusations were "false" and that AGs showed "a deep misunderstanding of the facts." Around that time, the company halted work on a version of Instagram for kids.

At the State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Joe Biden urged Congress to "ban targeted advertising to children" and called on tech companies to "stop collecting personal data on our children." Last month, two bipartisan Senators introduced a bill that seeks to instruct the Federal Trade Commission to look into ways of reducing "the harm of algorithmic amplification and social media addiction."