Ransomware has been a recurring problem throughout 2021, and the latest attack could be particularly severe for some workers. NBC Newsreports workforce management heavyweight Kronos has suffered a ransomware attack that could affect its ability to handle hours and payroll at well-known companies like GameStop, Honda and Whole Foods. With many final pre-Christmas paychecks slated to arrive this week, there's a concern some employees might not get paid in a timely fashion when they need it most.

Kronos reported the attack on December 11th, but it wasn't until December 13th the company warned it might take "several weeks" to fully restore functionality. The company didn't identify the perpetrators. It also couldn't completely rule out a connection to the recent Log4j vulnerability, but went through "rapid patching" and supply chain checks to make sure its systems weren't susceptible.

It's not clear how soon hours and payroll functionality might come back. In the meantime, though, companies have had to scramble to find alternatives. Whole Foods told NBC it had found a way to pay staff this week, but Honda only said it was "taking steps" to mitigate any problems. One anonymous Whole Foods worker said teammates had been asked to rely on paper punch sheets and handwritten schedules.

The Kronos incident illustrates the sheer breadth of ransomware victims in recent months, including a meat supplier and a key oil pipeline operator. It also underscores the fragility of modern workplace technology. While a payroll company might not be considered critical infrastructure like food or fuel providers, a cyberattack against it can still deal significant economic damage.

Ken Block’s Gymkhana series is ready to go electric. On Wednesday, the rally driver showed off his new Audi S1 Hoonitron, a purpose-built EV the automaker designed specifically for Block. Audi didn’t share many details on the prototype, but as you can see from the photo above, it pulls more than a few design cues from the company’s iconic Sport Quattro S1. That’s not by accident; it was that car that inspired Block to pursue his career.

Block promised to show off what the EV can do in a future video tentatively called “Elektrikhana.” It’s unclear if Travis Pastrana will join with a custom-built Solterra from Subaru. If you’ve not seen a Gymkhana event, they involve some of the most skillful driving you’ll see on a closed course. The S1 Hoonitron could significantly change how Block tackles the annual series. 

The instant torque of an EV should help with the constant drifting that’s involved in Gymkhana courses. The lower center of gravity could also make cornering a lot tighter. One thing we’ll have to see is if the S1 Hoonitron replicates the sound a rev limiter makes in a traditional internal combustion engine car. After all, that sound is part of the fun of watching rally car driving.

The latest Indie World Showcase stream has wrapped up, and while there was unfortunately no word about Hollow Knight: Silksong, Nintendo has revealed more details about other games that are coming to Switch. Among them is OlliOlli World, which will be released on February 8th.

The latest OlliOlli game from Roll7 (which Take-Two recently bought) is a skateboarding platformer, in which you score points by pulling off tricks as you make your way through the world of Radlandia. Along with there are two asynchronous multiplayer modes. In Gnarvana League, you'll duke it out for the highest score and the more you play, the more cosmetic items you'll unlock for your character. In the Gnarvana Portal mode, you can take on levels that are procedurally generated with a few customizable factors in mind, such as style, difficulty and length. You can share creations with other players using a code, which will work across all platforms.

Roll7 and publisher Private Division have also announced two expansions for OlliOlli World. The Void Riders DLC, which will arrive in summer, will add more levels, characters, gameplay options, cosmetics and a new biome. The second expansion is set for next fall, and more details will be revealed later.

As well as Switch, OlliOlli World is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. Pre-orders start today and the base version of the game costs $30. The Rad edition, which costs $45, includes both expansions. Owners of the base game will be able to buy the DLC separately. 

Other titles featured during the Indie World Showcase include Chicory: A Colorful Tale. The game, in which you paint the world to explore and solve puzzles, was a critical hit earlier this year. It’s available on Switch today. Also coming to the hybrid console today are the excellently named action platformer Dungeon Munchies, party game Let’s Play! Oink Games and stealth puzzle adventure Timelie, for which a demo will be available.

Don’t Starve Together and Omori are getting ported to Switch this spring. Among the new games that are setting sail for Switch are Sea of Stars, an RPG prequel to The Messenger (which will arrive in holiday 2022), puzzle title Aliisha – The Oblivion of Twin Goddesses (spring), Figment 2: Creed Valley (February, with a demo available today) and River City Girls 2 (summer).

The Google Glass vision isn’t dead. Or at least, it’s been resurrected by Oppo. Following last year's AR Glass concept, the new Oppo Air Glass will be available in Q1 2022 for a yet-to-be-announced price. It'll come in two parts: a detachable monocle (in black or white) and a separate frame. And no, you won't be able to attach the 30-gram device to your own glasses.

The focus here is on simple information, shown on a 640 x 480 image on a waveguide display. My favorite part might be the software Oppo is pitching, including a teleprompter display that you can set the scroll speed for. (Although, yes, you’d have to wear the thing in front of your audience…)

Oppo

For now, Oppo says the smartwear is China-only, so it might be an even rarer spot than Google’s original Glass.

— Mat Smith

LG’s StanbyME is a wireless TV on wheels

It has a battery that lasts three hours.

LG

LG is teasing two new TVs with unusual designs at CES 2022, one of which is the recently announced premium OLED Evo TV with a motorized cover. The other is, literally, a wireless TV on wheels. The StanbyME has a built-in battery, and you can roll it in and out of any room in your home. The 27-inch display is on a moveable stand with concealed wheels, and you can adjust its height to customize its position.

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Nintendo's year in review recounts your most-played Switch games of 2021

You can also see how your stats this year compare to those in 2020.

Nintendo is getting into the end-of-year review mood, emailing many of its users about how they spent time with their Switch throughout the last 12 months.

The 2021 iteration isn’t widely different from last year’s iteration. You’ll once again see the total number of hours you put in through the year and a count of all the games you played. There’s also a breakdown of how many hours you played each month, in addition to a look back at your most active day. You’ll see how much time you spent between handheld and docked modes, as well.

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Dell's latest laptop concept muses on easier-to-repair devices

And easier to recycle.

Dell

Dell might not be the most-loved PC company in terms of customer service, but it frequently tops corporate charts for environmentally friendly initiatives. Working with Intel, the company has created a new laptop called Concept Luna, with the aim of making future PCs easier to repair, reuse and recycle.

Dell said if it incorporated all the design ideas, it could reduce a computer's carbon footprint by up to 50 percent compared to current laptop models. Redesigned components make better use of space and improve passive cooling, while also reducing power demands. This, in turn, allows for a smaller battery with deep-cycle cells with a "long charge that can be maintained across many years of use, increasing refurbishment and reuse beyond the first product life it services," Dell said.

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Toyota's remote start key fob feature requires an $8 monthly subscription

It applies to models 2018 and later, with a free trial from 3 to 10 years.

To the consternation of some owners, Toyota's remote start key fob functionality requires a paid $8 per month subscription service. This applies to 2018 and later models, but recently came to light as the free trials of Toyota's Remote Connect subscription started to expire.

Toyota lets owners start vehicles like the RAV 4 PHEV remotely in two ways. One is over WiFi/LTE using its Remote Connect apps — these are what cost $8 per month or $80 per year. The other is by using the key fob. Unless they read the fine print, however, owners may not have known the key fob method was also part of the Remote Connect subscription. Toyota confirmed to The Drive that they need a paid subscription on every 2018 and newer Toyota model to use the function.

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The biggest news stories you might have missed

Android 12 Go Edition will make cheap phones faster and more efficient

YouTube TV may lose ESPN, ABC, FX and other Disney channels this week

Toyota's latest EV concepts include sports cars and a pickup

LastPass will launch new features faster after becoming independent

Fender's newest Acoustasonic guitar is cheaper, but not cheap enough

California suspends Toyota-backed Pony.ai's driverless testing permit

iFixit partners with Microsoft on official repair tools

Toyota now aims to roll out 30 electric vehicles by 2030, expanding on its plan to sell 15 fully electric models by 2025. It gave a taste of the future by previewing a broad range of EV concepts during a presentation.

Among those is a pickup, which could compete with the likes of Ford's F-150 Lightning and Rivian's R1T. As Autoblog notes, the Toyota Pickup EV looks very much like the Toyota Tacoma. As such, there could be an electric option for the next version of that pickup.

Toyota

Other models include a Sports EV and an FJ Cruiser-style Compact Cruiser EV. There are commercial models too, such as the Micro Box and Mid Box. Toyota once again showed off the self-driving e-Palette, which was used to transport athletes during this year's Summer Olympic and Paralympic games. The company pulled them from use at the Paralympics after the EV hit a visually impaired athlete. 

At the higher end of the spectrum, Toyota also revealed a lineup of Lexus electric EV concepts. It said the Electrified Sport should be able to go from 0-60 MPH in just over two seconds and have a range of about 435 miles. The brand also showed off an Electrified Sedan and Electrified SUV.

Toyota

Although Toyota has now committed to spend around $70 billion on electrifying its vehicles, its medium-term projections for EVs are relatively conservative. It expects to sell around 3.5 million EVs per year by 2030, which is around a third of its current volume of vehicle sales. 

By contrast, Volkswagen estimates that, by that time, half of its vehicle sales will be electric models, and by 2040, the majority of its sales in major markets will be EVs. After becoming an early leader in hybrid vehicle tech, Toyota is playing catchup with other automakers in the EV market, so making comparatively muted projections shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.

Meanwhile, Toyota recently announced plans to build a $1.29 billion EV battery factory in North Carolina by 2025. The company last month declined to join other automakers, including GM and Ford, in pledging to phase out fossil fuel-powered cars by 2040. However, Lexus plans to only sell EVs by 2035.

Ford's autonomous delivery experiments now include potentially vital services. The automaker is launching a six-month pilot project that will have self-driving shuttles bring fresh food to residents of a Detroit senior living center, the Rio Vista Detroit Co-Op Apartments, that might otherwise have challenges fetching groceries. The free-of-charge offering will have the "low-speed" vehicle drive a fixed route between a Ford facility and Rio Vista, with a safety driver and a remote team ready to take over if necessary.

Notably, the shuttle doesn't involve Ford's partner Argo — this is a distinct effort between Ford's in-house autonomy team and the company's Quantum Signal AI subsidiary. The two have modified the shuttle to help with packing and unloading food, but it's otherwise a stock machine (as far as autonomous shuttles go, at least).

There's certainly a degree of publicity grabbing involved — Ford is conducting a pilot that doubles as a goodwill campaign. This will help Ford study slower self-driving technology and remote control, though. It also hints at a future where driverless vehicles help seniors maintain their quality of life when travel is impractical.

Staying in your lane is a lot easier when you know how much of the road is yours to use. Unfortunately, America’s decades-long love affair with performing the absolute bare minimum of basic infrastructure maintenance has left many stretches of the nation’s highway lane markers faded, damaged and obscured. A new pilot program from Honda Research Institute USA could one day help local highway and traffic departments keep a closer eye on the state of the roads in their care, using the cars travelling upon them.

The Honda Road Condition Monitoring System leverages the cameras and GPS navigation systems already found in many of today’s automobiles to monitor the real-time conditions of roads and detect potential hazards. The onboard system will evaluate each stretch of lane marker as green, yellow, grey and red. Green and yellow denote ideal or good quality lane markers, while red indicates markers in need of repair and grey means that there are no markers present at all (like on city streets or rural roads).

The system captures road conditions using the vehicle’s cameras and other sensors, coordinating that feed with the onboard GPS to provide exact locations of any hazards or damage and then uploads that data to a secure server. Once the data is in the cloud, local highway and transportation departments will be able to access it through a web portal to see which stretches of roadway need to be repaired or repainted most urgently.

“We regularly inspect our roadways throughout Ohio and act quickly to address any issues, like faded or damaged pavement markings, that are identified. It’s a labor-intensive process. Good pavement markings are important to the drivers of today and the vehicles of tomorrow,” Ohio Department of Transportation Director Jack Marchbanks said in a statement Monday. “We’re excited to work with Honda to improve the process.”

Honda is working with the Ohio Department of Transportation for its upcoming pilot program, which is slated to begin early next year. During that study, obviously only select Honda vehicles will be recording datam, “to help enhance the efficiency of the road maintenance operation in Ohio,” according to a Monday press release. The research institute is looking to eventually connect entire fleets of Honda and Acura vehicles, allowing them to share data via V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) networks and provide real-time updates to their ADA systems.

Far too long ago (for our impatient souls), boutique console maker, Analogue, teased something exciting. A retro handheld that mimicked multiple classic systems, including: All the Game Boys, the Sega Game Gear, the Neo Geo Pocket and the Atari Lynx. Oh and more recently announced: the TurboExpress, too. In other good news, Analogue also just announced that orders for the Pocket will open again on December 14th (tomorrow). The slightly less good news is that at $220, it'll cost $20 more than originally planned, but you can blame the virus for that and its impact on supply chains.

Finally, it’s here and it’s… still just as exciting. So much so that the short time I've had with the Pocket isn't enough to give it the deep dive review it deserves. You have to remember, this thing not only plays old games from original cartridges. It does so using a party trick called field-programmable gate arrays (or FPGA). All you need to know is that FPGAs effectively mimic old consoles at the hardware level. When you plug in a game, it thinks it’s in an original Game Boy (or whichever system for the relevant adapter you might be using). Couple that with a display custom-designed to replicate vintage screens, quirks and all, and this has all the ingredients to be the most authentic retro handheld you can find. Our early testing with Game Boy (original) and Game Boy Advance games indicates this really is one of the most authentic experiences you can find.

Pretty much the moment you pick this thing up you know you’re in for a treat. If the original Game Boy had been released today with a Scandinavian design, this is what it would look like. The clean lines and monochrome aesthetic tell you this is all about the game; there are no garish colors of cliche nods to the '90s here. Just one dash of color on the left-hand side for the power button and that’s as flashy as things get.

The general layout broadly matches the first-gen and Game Boy color, with the screen up top and controls underneath. Though there are four thumb buttons instead of two as you’ll be able to create games for this yourself either with GB Studio or via the spare FPGA core Analogue added just for developers. There are shoulder buttons, too, as per the Game Boy advance.

Fortunately, the display is thoroughly modern and not like the squinty, if much loved, one from back in 1989. It’s also handily 10 times the resolution on both axes so it can serve up pixel-perfect renditions of your favorite original Game Boy titles. The way it reproduces original Game Boy games is quite remarkable.

Turn the Pocket on and the minimalist interface leads you straight to the good stuff: Playing games.

I won’t lie, firing up Tetris for the first time and changing the Pockets display mode to the original green-and-black game boy mode was quite the dash of nostalgia. I’ve played Game Boy games on several “modern” handhelds and none of them looked like this. Even the pixel grid of the original is here, the motion blur (if you want it), the sound. Everything felt just as it did all those years ago.

The same goes for Game Boy Advance games. If you ever owned the first model of GBA, you’ll (painfully) remember that it still didn’t have a lit screen. The Pocket does, but everything else matches, including a preset for that slight washed-out look that comes with just colors on a non-illuminated LCD. You can, of course, choose a more modern display mode if you like, but purists are going to love the attention to detail here.

The authenticity doesn’t stop at the fidelity of the games. The “link” port on the Pocket happens to be the same as the one found on the Game Boy Color and onwards. That means if you have the original hardware (or another Pocket) you can play with friends just like you would have back in the proverbial day. I do have the original hardware, and we’re testing those features right now which you’ll see in our full review.

In terms of compatibility, so far the only glitch we've had is with a very unofficial Game Boy Advance multicart, everything else has worked a charm — including fund stuff like the Game Boy Camera. The same goes for Game Gear titles, which is the only other platform we can try right now.

There’s so much more to cover here we kinda can’t wait to show you it all. There’s the dock accessory for playing on a TV with real controllers, there’s the aforementioned music-making app, there’s Analogue’s own operating system which hides more than a few perks and then there are the adapters for all the other consoles.

For now, we’re excited to say that the Pocket appears to deliver on its key promises. The hardware feels fantastic and we keep going back for more Tetris even when it's way past our bedtime. You’ll just have to wait a few more days for our comprehensive review.

After shutting down third-party PS5 console covers with legal threats, Sony has launched its own official $55 PlayStation five colors, the company announced. Those will go along with the DualSense controls it launched earlier this year, and introduce three new colors in the same galaxy-inspired theme.

The console covers (and matching controllers) will come in Midnight Black, Cosmic Red, Nova Pink, Starlight Blue and Galactic Purple. "Simply remove your original white PS5 console covers and click your new ones into place," the company said. "The PS5 console covers will be available for both the PS5 with the Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive and the PS5 Digital Edition." 

The Midnight Black and Cosmic Red PS5 console covers will be available starting in January 2022 in specific regions, including the USA, Canada, UK, France, Australia and China. The Nova Pink, Galactic Purple, and Starlight Blue models will launch in those same locations during the first half of 2022.

As you may remember, Sony recently launched new DualSense wireless controllers in Cosmic Red and Midnight Black. Now, it will also release new controllers in the other three colors (Nova Pink, Starlight Blue, and Galactic Purple) for $75 globally in January 2022 at participating retailers. 

As a reminder, last year a company called PlateStation unveiled replacement PS5 covers in colors like cherry red, black and jungle camo. However, the company subsequently announced on Twitter that it would be canceling all orders and processing refunds "due to patent and intellectual property issues" with Sony.

Now we can see why Sony asserted its IP rights so strongly. Given that it can't sell as many PS5 consoles as it would like due to semiconductor shortages, accessories like this will provide another revenue stream. Yes, console color and design aren't that important, but the new covers are a good option for the many folks who aren't that keen on white. Pre-orders are now open for the new controller colors ($75) and first two console covers ($55) — if you're planning to get one, let us know below. 

IBM and Samsung claim they’ve made a breakthrough in semiconductor design. On day one of the IEDM conference in San Francisco, the two companies unveiled a new design for stacking transistors vertically on a chip. With current processors and SoCs, transistors lie flat on the surface of the silicon, and then electric current flows from side-to-side. By contrast, Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) sit perpendicular to one another and current flows vertically.

According to IBM and Samsung, this design has two advantages. First, it will allow them to bypass many performance limitations to extend Moore’s Law beyond the 1-nanometer threshold. More importantly, the design leads to less wasted energy thanks to greater current flow. They estimate VTFET will lead to processors that are twice as fast and use 85 percent less power than chips designed with FinFET transistors. IBM and Samsung claim the process may one day allow for phones that go a full week on a single charge. They say it could also make certain energy-intensive tasks, including cryptomining, more power-efficient and therefore less impactful on the environment.

IBM and Samsung haven’t said when they plan to commercialize the design. They’re not the only companies attempting to push beyond the 1-nanometer barrier. In July, Intel said it aims to finalize the design for angstrom-scale chips by 2024. The company plans to accomplish the feat using its new “Intel 20A” node and RibbonFET transistors.