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If Google’s Pixel Pro family has had your interest for a while, but the thought of using a phone with a curved display prevented you from buying the Pixel 7 Pro or Pixel 6 Pro, the Pixel 8 Pro could be interesting. According to an Android Authority report published Saturday, Google’s next flagship will feature a flat display.

After writing last week about the camera upgrades Google has planned for the Pixel 8 family, leaker Kamila Wojciechowska says the Pixel 8 Pro will sport a 6.7-inch OLED panel sourced from Samsung with a 1,344 x 2,992 resolution and 490 PPI pixel density. If you don’t have a Pixel 7 Pro on hand, each figure is slightly smaller than the specs offered by Google’s current flagship, which features a curved 6.71-inch display with a 1,440 x 3,120 resolution and 512 PPI pixel density. However, according to Wojciechowska, the Pixel 8 Pro’s screen will get much brighter, reaching 1,600 nits of peak brightness – compared to 1,000 nits on the Pixel 7 Pro – when displaying HDR content. Additionally, the 120Hz panel will be able to transition more smoothly between refresh rates.

As for the Pixel 8, it too is slated to receive a new display. Interestingly, the device will reportedly feature a smaller screen than the one found on the Pixel 7. Android Authority claims the phone will ship with a 6.17-inch screen that has a 1,080 x 2,400 resolution. That’s the same resolution as the Pixel 7’s 6.31-inch screen, meaning the new phone will offer a higher dot pitch. Moreover, the screen reportedly offers 1,400 nits of peak brightness, up from 1,000 on its predecessor, and a 120Hz refresh rate instead of 90Hz like the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7a. Speaking of Google’s latest mid-range phone, there have been rumors the 7a could be the company’s final a-Series phone, which may explain why the Pixel 8 reportedly comes with a smaller display.

Android Authority reports both the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro will feature more rounded corners than Google’s current pair of high-end phones, corroborating a previous report from leaker Steve Hemmerstoffer. That change would make them easier to use with one hand. Between their new displays and the larger primary camera sensor Google reportedly plans to equip the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro with, the company’s new phones are shaping up nicely. Expect more information to come out about devices in the weeks and months leading up to their release later this year.

Earlier this month, a group known as Anonymous Sudan took credit for a service outage that disrupted access to Outlook, OneDrive and a handful of other Microsoft online services. After initially sharing little information about the incident, the company confirmed late Friday it had been the target of a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks. In a blog post spotted by the Associated Press (via The Verge), Microsoft said the attacks “temporarily impacted” the availability of some services, adding they were primarily designed to generate “publicity” for a threat actor the company has dubbed Storm-1359. Under Microsoft's threat actor naming convention, Storm is a temporary designator the company employs for groups whose affiliation it hasn’t definitively established yet.

“We have seen no evidence that customer data has been accessed or compromised,” the company said. In a statement Microsoft shared with the Associated Press, the tech giant confirmed Anonymous Sudan was responsible for the attacks. It’s not clear how many Microsoft customers were affected by the attacks, or if the impact was global. The company believes Storm-1359 likely relied on a combination of virtual private servers and rented cloud infrastructure to carry out its operation.

Per Bleeping Computer, Anonymous Sudan began carrying out cyberattacks at the start of 2023. At the time, the group claimed it was targeting countries that meddle in Sudanese politics and promote anti-Muslim policies. However, some cybersecurity researchers believe the group is in fact an offshoot of the Kremlin-affiliated Killnet gang, and the reference to Sudan is a false flag designed to mislead casual onlookers. The likelihood of that link became more apparent on Friday when Anonymous Sudan said it was forming a “Darknet Parliament” with Killnet and Revil, another pro-Russian gang. As a first order of business, the alliance threatened to target SWIFT, the international interbanking system the United States and European Union cut Russia off from in response to its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.

The Biden administration on Friday announced $930 million in grants designed to expand rural access to broadband internet. Part of the Department of Commerce’s “Enabling Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure Program,” the grants will fund the deployment of more than 12,000 miles of new fiber optic cable across 35 states and Puerto Rico. The administration said Friday it expects grant recipients to invest an additional $848.46 million, a commitment that should double the program's impact.

“Much like how the interstate highway system connected every community in America to regional and national systems of highways, this program will help us connect communities across the country to regional and national networks that provide quality, affordable high-speed internet access,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said.

According to the Commerce Department, it received over 260 applications for the Middle Mile Grant Program, totaling $7.47 billion in funding requests. The agency primarily awarded grants to telecom and utility companies, though it also set aside funding for tribal governments and nonprofits. Per Gizmodo, the largest grant, valued at $88.8 million, went to a telecommunications company in Alaska that will build a fiber optic network in a part of the state where 55 percent of residents have no internet access. On average, the Commerce Department awarded $26.6 million to most applicants. Grant recipients now have five years to complete work on their projects, though the administration hopes many of the buildouts will be completed sooner.

In addition to creating new economic opportunities in traditionally underserved communities, the government says the projects should improve safety in those areas too. “They can improve network resilience in the face of the climate crisis, and increasing natural disasters like wildfires, floods, and storms, creating multiple routes for the internet traffic to use instead of just one, like a detour on the freeway,” White House infrastructure coordinator Mitch Landrieu told Bloomberg.

The funding is just one of many recent efforts by the government to close the rural digital divide. At the start of last year, the Federal Communications Commission announced an accountability program designed to ensure recipients of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund properly spend the money they receive from the public purse.

The problem with studying the universe around us is that it is simply too big. The stars overhead remain too far away to interact with directly, so we are relegated to testing our theories on the formation of the galaxies based on observable data. 

Simulating these celestial bodies on computers has proven an immensely useful aid in wrapping our heads around the nature of reality and, as Andrew Pontzen explains in his new book, The Universe in a Box: Simulations and the Quest to Code the Cosmos, recent advances in supercomputing technology are further revolutionizing our capability to model the complexities of the cosmos (not to mention myriad Earth-based challenges) on a smaller scale. In the excerpt below, Pontzen looks at the recent emergence of astronomy-focused AI systems, what they're capable of accomplishing in the field and why he's not too worried about losing his job to one.  

Riverhead Books

Adapted from THE UNIVERSE IN A BOX: Simulations and the Quest to Code the Cosmos by Andrew Pontzen published on June 13, 2023 by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2023 Andrew Pontzen.

As a cosmologist, I spend a large fraction of my time working with supercomputers, generating simulations of the universe to compare with data from real telescopes. The goal is to understand the effect of mysterious substances like dark matter, but no human can digest all the data held on the universe, nor all the results from simulations. For that reason, artificial intelligence and machine learning is a key part of cosmologists’ work.

Consider the Vera Rubin Observatory, a giant telescope built atop a Chilean mountain and designed to repeatedly photograph the sky over the coming decade. It will not just build a static picture: it will particularly be searching for objects that move (asteroids and comets), or change brightness (flickering stars, quasars and supernovae), as part of our ongoing campaign to understand the ever-changing cosmos. Machine learning can be trained to spot these objects, allowing them to be studied with other, more specialized telescopes. Similar techniques can even help sift through the changing brightness of vast numbers of stars to find telltale signs of which host planets, contributing to the search for life in the universe. Beyond astronomy there are no shortage of scientific applications: Google’s artificial intelligence subsidiary DeepMind, for instance, has built a network that can outperform all known techniques for predicting the shapes of proteins starting from their molecular structure, a crucial and difficult step in understanding many biological processes.

These examples illustrate why scientific excitement around machine learning has built during this century, and there have been strong claims that we are witnessing a scientific revolution. As far back as 2008, Chris Anderson wrote an article for Wired magazine that declared the scientific method, in which humans propose and test specific hypotheses, obsolete: ‘We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.’

I think this is taking things too far. Machine learning can simplify and improve certain aspects of traditional scientific approaches, especially where processing of complex information is required. Or it can digest text and answer factual questions, as illustrated by systems like ChatGPT. But it cannot entirely supplant scientific reasoning, because that is about the search for an improved understanding of the universe around us. Finding new patterns in data or restating existing facts are only narrow aspects of that search. There is a long way to go before machines can do meaningful science without any human oversight.

To understand the importance of context and understanding in science, consider the case of the OPERA experiment which in 2011 seemingly determined that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light. The claim is close to a physics blasphemy, because relativity would have to be rewritten; the speed limit is integral to its formulation. Given the enormous weight of experimental evidence that supports relativity, casting doubt on its foundations is not a step to be taken lightly.

Knowing this, theoretical physicists queued up to dismiss the result, suspecting the neutrinos must actually be traveling slower than the measurements indicated. Yet, no problem with the measurement could be found – until, six months later, OPERA announced that a cable had been loose during their experiment, accounting for the discrepancy. Neutrinos travelled no faster than light; the data suggesting otherwise had been wrong.

Surprising data can lead to revelations under the right circumstances. The planet Neptune was discovered when astronomers noticed something awry with the orbits of the other planets. But where a claim is discrepant with existing theories, it is much more likely that there is a fault with the data; this was the gut feeling that physicists trusted when seeing the OPERA results. It is hard to formalize such a reaction into a simple rule for programming into a computer intelligence, because it is midway between the knowledge-recall and pattern-searching worlds.

The human elements of science will not be replicated by machines unless they can integrate their flexible data processing with a broader corpus of knowledge. There is an explosion of different approaches toward this goal, driven in part by the commercial need for computer intelligences to explain their decisions. In Europe, if a machine makes a decision that impacts you personally – declining your application for a mortgage, maybe, or increasing your insurance premiums, or pulling you aside at an airport – you have a legal right to ask for an explanation. That explanation must necessarily reach outside the narrow world of data in order to connect to a human sense of what is reasonable or unreasonable.

Problematically, it is often not possible to generate a full account of how machine-learning systems reach a particular decision. They use many different pieces of information, combining them in complex ways; the only truly accurate description is to write down the computer code and show the way the machine was trained. That is accurate but not very explanatory. At the other extreme, one might point to an obvious factor that dominated a machine’s decision: you are a lifelong smoker, perhaps, and other lifelong smokers died young, so you have been declined for life insurance. That is a more useful explanation, but might not be very accurate: other smokers with a different employment history and medical record have been accepted, so what precisely is the difference? Explaining decisions in a fruitful way requires a balance between accuracy and comprehensibility.

In the case of physics, using machines to create digestible, accurate explanations which are anchored in existing laws and frameworks is an approach in its infancy. It starts with the same demands as commercial artificial intelligence: the machine must not just point to its decision (that it has found a new supernova, say) but also give a small, digestible amount of information about why it has reached that decision. That way, you can start to understand what it is in the data that has prompted a particular conclusion, and see whether it agrees with your existing ideas and theories of cause and effect. This approach has started to bear fruit, producing simple but useful insights into quantum mechanics, string theory, and (from my own collaborations) cosmology.

These applications are still all framed and interpreted by humans. Could we imagine instead having the computer framing its own scientific hypotheses, balancing new data with the weight of existing theories, and going on to explain its discoveries by writing a scholarly paper without any human assistance? This is not Anderson’s vision of the theory-free future of science, but a more exciting, more disruptive and much harder goal: for machines to build and test new theories atop hundreds of years of human insight.

At its Tudum 2023 event today, Netflix revealed new trailers for two highly anticipated live-action adaptations of beloved animated series. One Piece gets a full trailer ahead of its August 31st premiere on the streaming service, while we’ll have to settle for a brief teaser trailer for Avatar: The Last Airbender, which won’t arrive until 2024.

The 90-second One Piece trailer shows the cast and settings of the live-action take on the manga and long-running anime series. We see plenty of star Iñaki Godoy as the naive but kind protagonist Monkey D. Luffy, who can stretch like rubber. The other Straw Hat Pirate crew members are Mackenyu as Roronoa Zero, Emily Rudd as Nami, Jacob Romero Gibson as Usopp and Taz Skylar as Sanji.

Meanwhile, the 37-second Avatar: The Last Airbender teaser doesn’t give us any shots of the cast or environments from the live-action remake. Instead, we see symbols of the four nations (Water Tribes, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation and Air Nomads) fading in and out. Each includes a subtle audio cue corresponding to its element. Whenever we do finally see its cast, it will include Gordon Cormier as Aang, Kiawentiio as Katara, Ian Ousley as Sokka and Daniel Dae Kim as Fire Lord Ozai.

You may recall from a few years back that Avatar: The Last Airbender original series creators Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko departed the project, raising questions about how faithful the new adaptation will be to the source material. “I realized I couldn’t control the creative direction of the series, but I could control how I responded,” DiMartino said in 2020. “So, I chose to leave the project. It was the hardest professional decision I’ve ever had to make, and certainly not one that I took lightly, but it was necessary for my happiness and creative integrity.” Still, he added at the time that the Netflix adaption “has the potential to be good.” We’ll have to wait until next year to find out.

When Samsung hosts its next Unpacked event in Seoul next month, the company is widely expected to announce a new Galaxy Z Flip device with a larger cover display. Now we have a better idea of exactly how much bigger the Z Flip 5’s external screen could be when it arrives later this year.

An alleged marketing render shared by MySmartPrice (via The Verge) shows a phone with a secondary display that covers most of the front of the device when you have it flipped closed. MySmartPrice didn’t share the size of the cover display, but judging from the render, it’s significantly larger than the 1.9-inch one found on the Z Flip 4. Additionally, it appears Samsung has found a more elegant way to shape the display around the Z Flip 5’s main camera array than Motorola has done with the Razr+.

MySmartPrice

Naturally, a larger cover display would make it easier to frame selfies with the Z Flip’s main camera, but there are also some potential drawbacks. For one, a bigger secondary screen would impact battery life on the Z Flip 5 unless Samsung equips the phone with a higher-capacity battery. It’s also worth pointing out that a small cover screen is part of the Z Flip 4’s appeal. The minimal functionality it offers is a good way to partially unplug from the typical distractions that come with a smartphone while still having easy access to some information.

Samsung is expected to announce the Galaxy Z Flip 5, alongside the Galaxy Z Fold 5, in late July. We’ll find out then if the company’s latest foldable display flip phone has a bigger screen.

Netflix just dropped the first reveal trailer for the forthcoming 3 Body Problem science fiction series at its Tudum fan event, along with a premiere month of January. This is a short delay for the anticipated series, as it was originally supposed to air this year.

If the name of the show sounds familiar, it’s likely for two reasons. First of all, the showrunners are the former Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with Alexander Woo. Despite the bone-deep hatred among viewers for the final season of HBO’s fantasy epic, Benioff and Weiss are still a known quantity that could draw in some eyeballs.

Secondly, 3 Body Problem is based on a highly successful book series, just like Game of Thrones, only this one is already finished. Let’s hear it for pre-existing endings! The book series, authored by Chinese writer Liu Cixin, is one of the most celebrated sci-fi epics of recent years, so we could be in for something special here.

To that end, Netflix dropped a trailer that’s heavy on eye candy and light on story. That’s okay, though, as those who want spoilers can just read the books. Some of the actors set to star in the series include Benedict Wong (The Martian, Doctor Strange), Eiza González (Baby Driver) and Game of Thrones veterans John Bradley and Liam Cunningham.

January is not that far off, so we don’t have long to wait until we learn all about the titular three bodies and any associated problems. Here’s hoping Benioff and Weiss earn back some goodwill with this show. At any rate, this is a much cooler idea than that weird alt history/slavery thing that the duo almost pushed through at HBO.

Netflix is finally offering a peek at its Squid Game reality show. The streaming service has shared a teaser trailer for Squid Game: The Challenge, a competition series now set to premiere this November. The clip doesn't reveal much of how contestants will participate, but it's evident that Netflix is trying to recreate as much of the original production's atmosphere as possible — right down to the giant "red light, green light" doll. Without the bloodshed, of course.

The 10-episode run has 456 people competing in events both "inspired" by Squid Game and new for the show. The winner receives a large $4.56 million prize, so there's a strong incentive to stick through to the end. Netflix filmed the series earlier this year.

There's no mystery behind the existence of The Challenge: it's a bid to capitalize on the success of Squid Game. The Korean drama remains Netflix's most popular TV show of all time, with over 1.6 billion viewing hours as of June (even Stranger Things season 4 has 'just' over 1.3 billion). Given that Netflix is fond of spinoffs for popular shows, it may have just been a matter of time before the company built on demand for its best-known series.

There isn't as much pressure to release Squid Game: The Challenge as there was upon its announcement in 2022, when Netflix dealt with rare subscriber losses. The company is in a stronger position as of mid-2023 — it added nearly 1.8 million subscribers in the first quarter, and appears to be reaping the rewards of a password sharing crackdown. The firm still faces stiff opposition from rivals like Amazon, Disney and Paramount, however, and a series like this could be key to growing viewership alongside expected blockbusters like 3 Body Problem and the next seasons of Bridgerton and The Witcher.

When more than 8,000 subreddits went dark for 48 hours earlier this week to protest Reddit’s forthcoming API changes, there were signs the action had an immediate effect on the platform. On the morning of the first day of the protest, Reddit suffered a “major outage” affecting its desktop and mobile websites, as well as mobile apps. Days later, company CEO Steve Huffman went on a media offensive where he attempted to cast aggrieved users and moderators, many of whom give countless hours of their free time to make Reddit the vibrant platform it is today, as unreasonable. “These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free,” he said in an interview with The Verge.

But beyond those signs, it was hard to tell how much of a practical effect the protest had on the website’s traffic. Now we have a better idea. According to data provided to Engadget by internet analytics firm Similarweb, the impact was small but noticeable. On the day before the blackout began on June 12th, Similarweb logged more than 57 million daily visits to Reddit across desktop and mobile web clients. By the end of the first day of the protest, daily visits were below 55 million. Then, at the end of June 13th, Similarweb recorded fewer than 52 million daily visits to Reddit. Compared to the website’s average daily volume over the past month, the 52,121,649 visits Reddit saw on June 13th represented a 6.6 percent drop.

Over that same time period, Similarweb recorded a more dramatic decrease in the amount of time Reddit users were spending on the platform. The day before the protest began, an average session on the website was about eight minutes and 31 seconds long. A day later, that metric fell to seven minutes and 17 seconds, or the lowest that stat has been in the past three years. Reddit did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request.

Looking forward, a temporary drop in daily traffic is unlikely to affect Reddit’s near-term prospects. But as many subreddits continue to protest the company’s plans and its leadership contemplates policy changes that could change its relationship with moderators, the platform could see a slow but gradual decline in daily active users. That’s unlikely to bode well for Reddit ahead of its planned IPO and beyond.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and Binance have come to an agreement that will allow the cryptocurrency exchange to continue operating in the US until a lawsuit filed by the SEC earlier this month is resolved. The regulator sued Binance and founder Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, on June 5th, alleging the company had artificially inflated trading volumes, mixed and diverted customer assets and failed to restrict US investors from trading on Binance.com when they were supposed to stay on a separate US system.

After announcing the charges, the SEC sought to freeze Binance’s US assets. The regulator said the move was necessary to protect customer funds and prevent the company from potentially moving money abroad. Binance, meanwhile, argued an asset freeze would put it out of business in the US. On Tuesday, the judge overseeing the litigation ordered the two sides to come to a compromise that would safeguard customer assets. 

In a court filing seen by The New York Times, the SEC said Friday that Binance had agreed to move all assets belonging to US customers stateside. Additionally, the company’s US operation is prohibited from providing access or control of domestic assets or funds to Binance’s international operation or Zhao. Until the ligation is resolved, Binance.US is "solely" allowed to transfer assets “to make payments for expenses or to satisfy obligations incurred in the ordinary course of business.” Additionally, the exchange is required to create new customer wallets which its international employees can’t access. The deal still needs approval from Judge Amy Berman – and won’t resolve the SEC lawsuit even if it’s put in place.

“Given that Changpeng Zhao and Binance have control of the platforms’ customers’ assets and have been able to commingle customer assets or divert customer assets as they please, as we have alleged, these prohibitions are essential to protecting investor assets,” the SEC said Saturday. “Further, we ensured that US customers will be able to withdraw their assets from the platform while we work to resolve the alleged underlying misconduct and hold Zhao and the Binance entities accountable for their alleged securities law violations.”

Zhao took to Twitter on Saturday morning to comment on the deal. “Although we maintain that the SEC's request for emergency relief was entirely unwarranted, we are pleased that the disagreement over this request was resolved on mutually acceptable terms,” he posted. “User funds have been and always will be safe and secure on all Binance-affiliated platforms.”

The SEC’s lawsuit against Binance is part of a broader crackdown by the watchdog against the crypto industry. At the end of last year, the agency accused FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried of carrying out an alleged multi-year scheme to defraud investors. One day after suing Binance, the SEC filed a complaint against Coinbase, the largest crypto trading platform in the US, alleging the company had failed to register as a broker, national securities exchange or clearing agency.