TikTok will temporarily restrict users in Russia from livestreaming and uploading new videos to its platform, the company announced on Sunday. It said it was doing so in response to the country's recently enacted “fake news” law, which threatens up to 15 years in jail for individuals accused of spreading misinformation. "We have no choice but to suspend livestreaming and new content to our video service in Russia while we review the safety implications of this law," TikTok said. 

The company went on to note in-app messaging would not be affected by the decision. "We will continue to evaluate the evolving circumstances in Russia to determine when we might fully resume our services with safety as our top priority," TikTok added.

Developing...

If you’re not excited about Apple’s upcoming Peek Performance keynote, you’re not the only one. According to most reports, the company will announce new iPhone SE and iPad Air models at the event. It’s not the most exciting stuff. But according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple could have a surprise up its sleeve that would make Tuesday considerably more interesting. In his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman writes he “wouldn’t rule out” Apple previewing a next-generation display at the event.

He reports the company completed development on a new monitor “months ago,” and had originally planned to release it “soon after” the launch of last year’s MacBook Pro. Given there have been reports suggesting Apple will announce a new high-end Mac mini at the event, a matching display doesn’t sound out of the realm of possibility. To that point, Apple has reportedly been working on two new monitors for the past few years. A report from 9to5Mac published earlier in the week shed light on a possible 7K successor to the Pro Display XDR that will feature an A13 processor to offload some processing tasks. The monitor Gurman references would appear to be a more affordable model that would succeed the company’s long discontinued Thunderbolt Display.

If you're looking to add a new streaming device to your living room setup or replace an aging one, you can grab one of Amazon's Fire TV devices now for less. The company has discounted many of its streaming devices to near record-low prices, including the Fire TV Stick 4K, which is only $30 right now. The Fire TV Stick Lite is 33 percent off and down to $20, while the Fire TV Cube is back down to its all-time low of $70, too.

The Fire TV Stick 4K is a great option if you want a low-profile streaming device that can handle 4K content. It also supports Dolby Vision and HDR, plus it comes with the Alexa Voice Remote, which lets you search for and launch content with voice commands. The Fire TV Stick Lite, on the other hand, is Amazon's most affordable streaming device with supports for 1080p streaming. It's best for those with tight budgets, or those that just want to make an old TV with an HDMI port a bit smarter.

Amazon's Fire TV Cube remains its most powerful streaming device with a hexa-core processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. It supports 4K, HDR content with Dolby Vision and Atmos, and it has picture-in-picture live view as well. You're also getting hands-free Alexa controls, too, which means the Cube's built-in speaker will hear and recognize your commands to turn off your lights or check the weather, even with your TV is off. It's arguably the best option if you want a higher-end streaming device and you already have a lot of Alexa-enabled devices in your home.

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iPhone 12 and 13 owners take note, Amazon has launched a one-day Anker sale that includes a handful of products from the company’s MagGo line of MagSafe-compatible accessories. To start, you can pick up Anker’s 622 magnetic battery in Interstellar Gray, Dolomite White and Misty Blue for $45, instead of $60. As far as battery packs go, this 5,000mAh model has a handful of nifty features. It includes a built-in foldable kickstand that allows you to stand your iPhone 12 or 13 upright. It also comes with a USB-C port, so you can charge your iPhone without a Lightning cable.

Another accessory that’s on sale is the 633 wireless charger. The Interstellar Gray model is currently priced at $84, down from $120. The 633 is perfect for those who own both a recent iPhone and a pair of AirPods Pro since it can charge both devices simultaneously. It also comes with a 5,000mAh battery pack that attaches to your iPhone 12 or 13. Anker claims the power cell will extend the battery life of your phone by up to 17 hours. The magnet that attaches the two together is strong enough that you can orient the device horizontally and it will stay in place.

Lastly, also on sale is the 637 desktop charging station. If you’ve read our iPhone accessory guide, you know all about this monster of a dock. Not only can it wirelessly charge an iPhone, but it also comes with two USB-A ports, two USB-C connections and three AC outlets. It also looks pretty adorable with its spherical design. You can currently pick up the Anker 637 MagGo dock for $75, instead of $100. What’s more, you don’t have to skip the model you most want since all three available colors are included in the sale.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Cogent Communications, an internet backbone provider that carries approximately 25 percent of all global web traffic, has begun cutting ties with Russian businesses in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The company told The Washington Post it was doing so to prevent the Kremlin from using its network to carry out cyberattacks and spread misinformation about the ongoing conflict.

“Our goal is not to hurt anyone. It’s just to not empower the Russian government to have another tool in their war chest,” Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer told the outlet, adding “it was a tough decision.” In a statement to ZDNet, the company said it was also complying with European Union sanctions against Russia Today and Sputnik. “Cogent is not otherwise restricting or blocking traffic originating from or destined for Russia. Cogent continues to provide services to Ukraine,” the company added.

The move is expected to disrupt and slow down internet connectivity. Some of Cogent’s Russian clients include state-owned telecom operator Rostelecom, one of the country’s largest internet providers, and wireless carriers Megafon and Veon. Cogent said it was working with some of those companies to provide them extensions.

Some experts worry the move will also prevent Russians from accessing information that doesn’t come from the Kremlin. “I would like to convey to people all over the world that if you turn off the Internet in Russia, then this means cutting off 140 million people from at least some truthful information,” Mikhail Klimarev, the executive director of Russia’s Internet Protection Society, told The Washington Post. “As long as the Internet exists, people can find out the truth. There will be no Internet — all people in Russia will only listen to propaganda.”

To that point, Russians already can’t access Facebook and Twitter after the country’s government moved to restrict those platforms. They may soon lose access to Wikipedia as well.

Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming service recently added Flight Simulator, allowing you to play the game on Xbox One, phones, tablets and web browsers via the cloud. But unlike the PC version of the title, you can’t use a keyboard and mouse to control your plane. However, that’s about to change, according to Flight Simulator head Jorg Neumann.

In a developer Q&A spotted by Windows Central, Neumann said Microsoft is working on adding platform-level support for the feature, suggesting most games on Xbox Cloud Gaming could eventually include the input method. “So the platform team is working on this. I know I can't give a date because it's the platform team. I don't know their dates, but it's coming," he said. “I’m hoping it will be done by June or so, but I can’t ever tell.”

Responding to The Verge, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the company was working on the feature but declined to provide a release date. “At launch, Microsoft Flight Simulator supports standard controller inputs for cloud gaming,” they said. “The team is experimenting with touch/gyro and is excited to embrace M&K once it’s available on the platform but we have no specific announcements or timing to share at this time.”

Keyboard and mouse support would be a useful addition to Xbox Cloud Gaming for a couple of reasons. For one, it would allow PC and Mac owners to play games like Halo Infinite without buying a gamepad. Instead, they could use the peripherals they already have on hand. Secondly, it would make it easier for Microsoft to bring PC exclusives like Age of Empires IV to the service.

Amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, PayPal has temporarily stopped offering its services in Russia, according to Reuters. In a tweet spotted by The Verge, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov shared a letter from PayPal CEO Dan Schulman confirming the move. “Under the current circumstances, we are suspending PayPal services in Russia,” Schulman states in the letter. “PayPal supports the Ukrainian people and stands with the international community in condemning Russia’s violent military aggression in Ukraine." 

A spokesperson for PayPal told Reuters the company would continue to allow withdrawals “for a period of time, ensuring that account balances are dispersed in line with applicable laws and regulations.” Before its latest decision on Saturday, the company had previously stopped accepting new Russian users as of March 2nd. PayPal’s current suspension includes its Xoom money transfer service. It’s worth noting western sanctions had already made it so that Russian consumers couldn’t make online purchases from retailers registered in the US and EU, so the suspension may not be as disruptive as it seems. 

Some of Samsung’s confidential data has reportedly leaked due to a suspected cyberattack. On Friday, South American hacking group Lapsus$ uploaded a trove of data it claims came from the smartphone manufacturer. Bleeping Computer was among the first publications to report on the incident.

Among other information, the collective says it obtained the bootloader source code for all of Samsung’s recent devices, in addition to code related to highly sensitive features like biometric authentication and on-device encryption. The leak also allegedly includes confidential data from Qualcomm. The entire database contains approximately 190GB of data and is actively being shared in a torrent. If the contents of the leak are accurate, they could cause significant damage to Samsung.

According to The Korean Herald, the company is assessing the situation. We’ve reached out to Samsung for comment.

If Lapsus$ sounds familiar, it’s the same group that claimed responsibility for the recent NVIDIA data breach. In that incident, Lapsus$ says it obtained approximately 1TB of confidential data from the GPU designer, including, the group claims, the schematics and driver source code. The collective has demanded that NVIDIA open source its drivers and remove the cryptocurrency mining limiter from its RTX 30-series GPUs. It’s unclear what, if any demands, Lapsus$ has made of Samsung. The group has previously said its actions haven’t been politically motivated.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said some governments recently told the company to block Russian media outlets from its Starlink satellite broadband service. In a tweet he sent out early Saturday, Musk declared the company would not comply with the request "unless at gunpoint." According to Musk, the demand hadn't come from Ukraine. "Sorry to be a free speech absolutist," he added.

Musk also said SpaceX would temporarily shift its priorities to focus on cybersecurity and overcoming signal jamming, a decision he noted would cause "slight delays" in the rollout of its Starship reusable rocket and Starlink V2 satellites.

SpaceX's position puts it at odds with a growing list of companies that have blocked access to Russian state media across Europe in the wake of the country's invasion of Ukraine. On February 27th, the European Union said it would ban Russian state-backed media outlets Russia Today and Sputnik for their role in spreading misinformation and "lies to justify Putin's war." Both Facebook and YouTube were quick to comply with the order, restricting access to the outlets across their European footprint.

Mildred Dresselhaus' life was one in defiance of odds. Growing up poor in the Bronx — and even more to her detriment, growing up a woman in the 1940s — Dresselhaus' traditional career options were paltry. Instead, she rose to become one of the world's preeminent experts in carbon science as well as the first female Institute Professor at MIT, where she spent 57 years of her career. She collaborated with physics luminaries like Enrico Fermi and laid the essential groundwork for future Nobel Prize winning research, directed the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy and was herself awarded the National Medal of Science. 

In the excerpt below from Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus, author and Deputy Editorial Director at MIT News, Maia Weinstock, tells of the time that Dresselhaus collaborated with Iranian American physicist Ali Javan to investigate exactly how charge carriers — ie electrons — move about within a graphite matrix, research that would completely overturn the field's understanding of how these subatomic particles operate.  

MIT Press

Excerpted from Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus by Maia Weinstock. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2022.

A CRITICAL ABOUT-FACE

For anyone with a research career as long and as accomplished as that of Mildred S. Dresselhaus, there are bound to be certain papers that might get a bit lost in the corridors of the mind—papers that make only moderate strides, perhaps, or that involve relatively little effort or input (when, for example, being a minor consulting author on a paper with many coauthors). Conversely, there are always standout papers that one can never forget—for their scientific impact, for coinciding with particularly memorable periods of one’s career, or for simply being unique or beastly experiments.

Millie’s first major research publication after becoming a permanent member of the MIT faculty fell into the standout category. It was one she described time and again in recollections of her career, noting it as “an interesting story for history of science.”

The story begins with a collaboration between Millie and Iranian American physicist Ali Javan. Born in Iran to Azerbaijani parents, Javan was a talented scientist and award-winning engineer who had become well known for his invention of the gas laser. His helium-neon laser, coinvented with William Bennett Jr. when both were at Bell Labs, was an advance that made possible many of the late twentieth century’s most important technologies—from CD and DVD players to bar-code scanning systems to modern fiber optics.

After publishing a couple of papers describing her early magneto-optics research on the electronic structure of graphite, Millie was looking to delve even deeper, and Javan wanted to help. The two met during Millie’s work at Lincoln Lab; she was a huge fan, once calling him “a genius” and “an extremely creative and brilliant scientist.”

For her new work, Millie aimed to study the magnetic energy levels in graphite’s valence and conduction bands. To do this, she, Javan, and a graduate student, Paul Schroeder, employed a neon gas laser, which would provide a sharp point of light to probe their graphite samples. The laser had to be built especially for the experiment, and it took years for the fruits of their labor to mature; indeed, Millie moved from Lincoln to MIT in the middle of the work.

If the experiment had yielded only humdrum results, in line with everything the team had already known, it still would have been a path-breaking exercise because it was one of the first in which scientists used a laser to study the behavior of electrons in a magnetic field. But the results were not humdrum at all. Three years after Millie and her collaborators began their experiment, they discovered their data were telling them something that seemed impossible: the energy level spacing within graphite’s valence and conduction bands were totally off from what they expected. As Millie explained to a rapt audience at MIT two decades later, this meant that “the band structure that everybody had been using up till that point could certainly not be right, and had to be turned upside down.”

In other words, Millie and her colleagues were about to overturn a well-established scientific rule—one of the more exciting and important types of scientific discoveries one can make. Just like the landmark 1957 publication led by Chien-Shiung Wu, who overturned a long-accepted particle physics concept known as conservation of parity, upending established science requires a high degree of precision—and confidence in one’s results. Millie and her team had both.

What their data suggested was that the previously accepted placement of entities known as charge carriers within graphite’s electronic structure was actually backward. Charge carriers, which allow energy to flow through a conducting material such as graphite, are essentially just what their name suggests: something that can carry an electric charge. They are also critical for the functioning of electronic devices powered by a flow of energy.

Electrons are a well-known charge carrier; these subatomic bits carry a negative charge as they move around. Another type of charge carrier can be seen when an electron moves from one atom to another within a crystal lattice, creating something of an empty space that also carries a charge—one that’s equal in magnitude to the electron but opposite in charge. In what is essentially a lack of electrons, these positive charge carriers are known as holes.

MIT Press

FIGURE 6.1 In this simplified diagram, electrons (black dots) surround atomic nuclei in a crystal lattice. In some circumstances, electrons can break free from the lattice, leaving an empty spot or hole with a positive charge. Both electrons and holes can move about, affecting electrical conduction within the material.

Millie, Javan, and Schroeder discovered that scientists were using the wrong assignment of holes and electrons within the previously accepted structure of graphite: they found electrons where holes should be and vice versa. “This was pretty crazy,” Millie stated in a 2001 oral history interview. “We found that everything that had been done on the electronic structure of graphite up until that point was reversed.”

As with many other discoveries overturning conventional wisdom, acceptance of the revelation was not immediate. First, the journal to which Millie and her collaborators submitted their paper originally refused to publish it. In retelling the story, Millie often noted that one of the referees, her friend and colleague Joel McClure, privately revealed himself as a reviewer in hopes of convincing her that she was embarrassingly off-base. “He said,” Millie recalled in a 2001 interview, “‘Millie, you don’t want to publish this. We know where the electrons and holes are; how could you say that they’re backwards?’” But like all good scientists, Millie and her colleagues had checked and rechecked their results numerous times and were confident in their accuracy. And so, Millie thanked McClure and told him they were convinced they were right. “We wanted to publish, and we... would take the risk of ruining our careers,” Millie recounted in 1987.

Giving their colleagues the benefit of the doubt, McClure and the other peer reviewers approved publication of the paper despite conclusions that flew in the face of graphite’s established structure. Then a funny thing happened: bolstered by seeing these conclusions in print, other researchers emerged with previously collected data that made sense only in light of a reversed assignment of electrons and holes. “There was a whole flood of publications that supported our discovery that couldn’t be explained before,” Millie said in 2001.

Today, those who study the electronic structure of graphite do so with the understanding of charge carrier placement gleaned by Millie, Ali Javan, and Paul Schroeder (who ended up with quite a remarkable thesis based on the group’s results). For Millie, who published the work in her first year on the MIT faculty, the experiment quickly solidified her standing as an exceptional Institute researcher. While many of her most noteworthy contributions to science were yet to come, this early discovery was one she would remain proud of for the rest of her life.