An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: If you don't want to pay for in-car subscriptions every month, no problem: Just pay it all upfront. That's the line from General Motors today after news spread that it's making a three-year, $1,500 OnStar connected services subscription a mandatory "option" for new Buick, GMC, and Cadillac Escalade models. The subscription, which enables things like using your phone as a key fob, data-enabled navigation, audio streaming, and Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant, is still optional on other GM vehicles, with the Premium package running $49.99 a month. But don't be surprised if this new setup spreads across the automaker's full portfolio.

The $1,500 charge for OnStar will effectively raise the base prices of these cars, though the exact increase varies from model to model. All Buicks will see a price increase of $1,500. Higher trim GMCs will see an increase of as little as $905 with the Hummer EV getting no MSRP boost. Base model GMC pickups, the Sierra and Canyon, are hit the hardest with a $1,675 increase. By far the most common price hike is $1,500, which also applies to the Cadillac Escalade, Automotive News reports. Speaking to GM Authority, a spokesperson said making customers pay for the service will "enhance [their] vehicle ownership experience." They went on to state that "By including this plan as standard equipment on the vehicle, it provides more customer value and a more seamless onboarding experience." The automaker confirmed to AN that buyers who don't activate OnStar and have no desire to use the services will not be offered a discount. Further reading: BMW Starts Selling Heated Seat Subscriptions For $18 a Month

Pew Research has published a new report that examines social media usage trends among US teens. The organization found that a whopping 95 percent of them use YouTube, while 19 percent are on the platform "almost constantly." Engadget reports: Perhaps unsurprisingly, two-thirds (67 percent) said they used TikTok, with 16 percent claiming they are on the app "almost constantly." The third most-popular social media platform among teens is Instagram, per Pew, with 62 percent using it. A tenth say they use it almost all the time -- despite the app occasionally telling them to take a break. A previous poll conducted in 2014-15 found that 52 percent were using Instagram (Pew didn't ask about YouTube usage for that survey and TikTok didn't exist at the time).

Snapchat also rose among teens, with 59 percent using it in 2022, compared with 41 percent in the previous poll. Facebook was the top social media app among teens seven years ago, with 71 percent of them using it, but that figure has dropped to 32 percent. Teen adoption of Twitter (down from 33 percent to 23 percent) and Tumblr (14 percent to five percent) has fallen over the same period too. The 2014-15 poll didn't ask about Twitch, WhatsApp or Reddit. These days, a fifth of teens use Twitch, 17 percent are on WhatsApp and 14 percent are accessing Reddit.

LG Display has shown off some interesting ideas as it looks to change the way OLED panels work, from positing bizarre form factors to addressing dimmer brightness levels compared to LED alternatives. Now, the panel maker is exploring a new approach to OLED TV audio. From a report: Today, LG Display announced its creation of a 97-inch OLED EX TV panel that debuts the company's Cinematic Sound OLED (CSO), "which allows the display to vibrate and generate the sound directly from the display without separate speakers."

"A 5.1 channel sound system is embedded into the widescreen, creating a performance that offers a cinematic level of immersion," LG Display said. Sony has used similar technology called Acoustic Surface in OLED TVs since 2017. These sets also don't use speakers and instead vibrate actuators behind the display. However, Sony doesn't compare Acoustic Surface to 5.1 surround sound. Instead, it encourages users to connect their own gear to the set and to use the TV as the center channel for a surround sound setup. Considering audio will be coming from a central point rather than all around you, it's hard to imagine LG Display's gargantuan TV panel can deliver the surround sound experience of a movie theater.

The preliminary Mercury Research CPU market share results are in for the second quarter of 2022, arriving during what is becoming a more dire situation for the PC market as sales cool after several years of stratospheric growth. From a report: According to the recent earnings report from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, the recovery will be a long one. Still, for now, AMD appears to be weathering the storm better than its opponents as it continued to steal market share from Intel in every segment of the CPU market. The desktop PC market is still on fire, but it isn't a good kind of fire. Intel issued a dire earnings report last week -- the company lost money for the first time in decades, partially driven by PC declines. Intel also announced it was delaying its critical Xeon Sapphire Rapids data center chips and killing off another failing business unit, Optane; the sixth unit retired since new CEO Pat Gelsinger took over.

In contrast, AMD's revenue was up 70% year-over-year as the company continued to improve its already-great profitability. AMD is firing on all cylinders and will launch its Ryzen 7000 CPUs, RDNA 3 GPUs, and EPYC Genoa data center processors on schedule. That consistent execution continues to pay off. AMD continued to take big strides in the mobile/laptop market, setting another record for unit share in that segment with 24.8%. AMD also gained in the server market for the 13th consecutive quarter, reaching 13.9% of the market. Notably, AMD's quarterly gain in servers is the highest we've seen with our historical data, which dates back to 2017.

Google Fiber plans to bring its high-speed internet service to multiple cities in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nebraska and Nevada over the next several years in its first big expansion since it spun out as an independent Alphabet unit in 2015. From a report: In his first media interview since becoming chief executive of Google Fiber in February 2018, Dinni Jain told Reuters on Wednesday that his team was finally prepared to "add a little bit more build velocity" after over four years of sharpening operations. The anticipated expansion to 22 metro areas across the United States from 17 today includes previously announced projects to launch in Mesa, Arizona and Colorado Springs, Colorado. The choices were based the company's findings of where speeds lag. "There was an impression 10 years ago that Google Fiber was trying to build the entire country," Jain said. "What we are gesturing here is, 'No, we are not trying to build the entire country.'"

True 5G wireless data, with its ultrafast speeds and enhanced security protections, has been slow to roll out around the world. As the mobile technology proliferates -- combining expanded speed and bandwidth with low-latency connections -- one of its most touted features is starting to come in to focus. But the upgrade comes with its own raft of potential security exposures. From a report: A massive new population of 5G-capable devices, from smart-city sensors to agriculture robots and beyond, are gaining the ability to connect to the internet in places where Wi-Fi isn't practical or available. Individuals may even elect to trade their fiber-optic internet connection for a home 5G receiver. But the interfaces that carriers have set up to manage internet-of-things data are riddled with security vulnerabilities, according to research that will be presented on Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. And those vulnerabilities could dog the industry long-term. After years of examining potential security and privacy issues in mobile-data radio frequency standards, Technical University of Berlin researcher Altaf Shaik says he was curious to investigate the application programming interfaces (APIs) that carriers are offering to make IoT data accessible to developers.

These are the conduits that applications can use to pull, say, real-time bus-tracking data or information about stock in a warehouse. Such APIs are ubiquitous in web services, but Shaik points out that they haven't been widely used in core telecommunications offerings. Looking at the 5G IoT APIs of 10 mobile carriers around the world, Shaik and his colleague Shinjo Park found common, but serious API vulnerabilities in all of them, and some could be exploited to gain authorized access to data or even direct access to IoT devices on the network. "There's a big knowledge gap. This is the beginning of a new type of attack in telecom," Shaik told WIRED ahead of his presentation. "There's a whole platform where you get access to the APIs, there's documentation, everything, and it's called something like 'IoT service platform.' Every operator in every country is going to be selling them if they're not already, and there are virtual operators and subcontracts, too, so there will be a ton of companies offering this kind of platform."

Mark Cuban, the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner and avid crypto enthusiast, is not sold on the metaverse. "The worst part is that people are buying real estate in these places. That's just the dumbest shit ever," he told the crypto-themed YouTube channel Altcoin Daily this past weekend. From a report: Cuban's comments come as the hype surrounding the metaverse -- a term that loosely describes an emerging virtual world where people can hang out, play, and shop -- seems to be cooling. Last November, Facebook changed its name to Meta, spurring a flurry of excitement about the potential of the metaverse, which fueled a land grab for digital plots in so-called metaverse platforms created by the likes of the Sandbox and Decentraland.

These platforms enable investors to buy land as an NFT, which can be developed with virtual buildings or experiences or resold on secondary markets like NFT exchange OpenSea. Companies like Warner Music Group, Atari, Samsung, and Adidas have all bought digital land -- a move that Cuban, based on his latest comments, appears unlikely to follow. Cuban also isn't buying the central claim of metaverse land speculators that scarcity will make these digital plots valuable. "It's not even as good as a URL or an ENS [Ethereum naming service], because there's unlimited volumes that you can create," he said during the YouTube interview. Despite being an investor in Yuga Labs, the owner of popular NFT collections Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, Cuban said he was not a fan of the company's land sale, which raised about $317 million for its metaverse platform Otherside in April. "I still thought it was dumb to do the real estate. That was great money for them, you know, but that wasn't based off a utility," he said.

Jared Mauch, the Michigan man who built a fiber-to-the-home Internet provider because he couldn't get good broadband service from AT&T or Comcast, is expanding with the help of $2.6 million in government money. From a report: When we wrote about Mauch in January 2021, he was providing service to about 30 rural homes including his own with his ISP, Washtenaw Fiber Properties. Mauch now has about 70 customers and will extend his network to nearly 600 more properties with money from the American Rescue Plan's Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds, he told Ars in a phone interview in mid-July.

The US government allocated Washtenaw County $71 million for a variety of infrastructure projects, and the county devoted a portion to broadband. The county conducted a broadband study before the pandemic to identify unserved locations, Mauch said. When the federal government money became available, the county issued a request for proposals (RFP) seeking contractors to wire up addresses "that were known to be unserved or underserved based on the existing survey," he said. "They had this gap-filling RFP, and in my own wild stupidity or brilliance, I'm not sure which yet, I bid on the whole project [in my area] and managed to win through that competitive bidding process," he said. Mauch's ISP is one of four selected by Washtenaw County to wire up different areas.

Mauch's network currently has about 14 miles of fiber, and he'll build another 38 miles to complete the government-funded project, he said. In this sparsely populated rural area, "I have at least two homes where I have to build a half-mile to get to one house," Mauch said, noting that it will cost "over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served." The contract between Mauch and the county was signed in May 2022 and requires him to extend his network to an estimated 417 addresses in Freedom, Lima, Lodi, and Scio townships. Mauch lives in Scio, which is next to Ann Arbor. Although the contract just requires service to those 417 locations, Mauch explained that his new fiber routes would pass 596 potential customers. "I'm building past some addresses that are covered by other [grant] programs, but I'll very likely be the first mover in building in those areas," he said. Under the contract terms, Mauch will provide 100Mbps symmetrical Internet with unlimited data for $55 a month and 1Gbps with unlimited data for $79 a month.

DNSFilter, a Washington, D.C.-based provider of DNS-based web content filtering and threat protection, has announced it's acquiring Guardian, a privacy-protecting firewall for iOS. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. From a report: Guardian was founded in 2013 by Will Strafach, a security researcher and former iPhone jailbreaker who in 2017 discovered that AccuWeather was secretly sending precise location data to a third-party company without a user's permission. The company's "smart firewall" iPhone app blocks apps from sharing users' personal information with third-parties, such as IP addresses and location data, by funneling data through an encrypted virtual private network (VPN). The startup, which claims to have so far blocked more than 5 billion data trackers and 1 billion location trackers, recently joined forces with Brave to integrate its firewall and VPN functionality into its eponymous non-tracking browser.

According to Bloomberg, the Department of Justice is preparing to sue Google as soon as next month, "capping years of work to build a case that the Alphabet unit illegally dominates the digital advertising market." From the report: Lawyers with the DOJ's antitrust division are questioning publishers in another round of interviews to refresh facts and glean additional details for the complaint [...]. Some of the interviews have already taken place and others are scheduled in the coming weeks [...]. They build on previous interrogations conducted during an earlier stage of the long-running investigation [...].

An ad tech complaint, which Bloomberg had reported was in the works last year, would mark the DOJ's second case against Google following the government's 2020 lawsuit alleging the tech titan dominates the online search market in violation of antitrust laws. Still undecided is whether prosecutors will file the case in federal court in Washington, where the search case is pending, or in New York, where state attorneys general have their own antitrust case related to Google's ad tech business [...].

In addition to NVIDIA being busy working on transitioning to an open-source GPU kernel driver, yesterday they made a rare public open-source documentation contribution... NVIDIA quietly published 73k lines worth of header files to document the 3D classes for their Fermi through current-generation Ampere GPUs. Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: To NVIDIA's Open-GPU-Docs portal they have posted the 73k lines worth of 3D class header files covering RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs back through the decade-old GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics processors. These header files define the classes used to program the 3D engine of the GPU, the texture header and texture sampler layout are documented, and other 3D-related programming bits. Having all of these header files will be useful to the open-source Nouveau driver developers to save on their reverse-engineering and guessing/uncertainty over certain bits.

NVIDIA's Open GPU Kernel Driver is for only GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" series and newer, so it's great seeing NVIDIA now posting this documentation going back to Fermi which is squarely to help the open-source community / Nouveau. [...] The timing of NVIDIA opening these 3D classes back to Fermi is interesting and potentially tied to SIGGRAPH 2022 happening this week. Those wanting to grab NVIDIA's latest open-source GPU documentation can find it via this GitHub repository.

Burger King has just emailed thousands of customers with a blank order email receipt. The Verge reports: The blank emails started appearing at around 12:15AM ET, leaving Burger King customers confused whether the company has been breached by a hungry hacker attempting a midnight feast, or if the emails are simply a giant whopper of a mistake. Twitter users were quick to turn to the social network in a state of confusion over the blank emails, with some even receiving two Burger King emails in an apparent double whopper of a mistake. The order emails are totally blank, and were sent by Burger King's main promotional marketing email address.

After this story was published, an email from "BK PR Team" responded to our request for more information, claiming the issue was "the result of an internal processing error." We have asked for a specific individual to attribute the information to.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft has published a knowledge base article acknowledging a problem with encryption acceleration in the newest versions of Windows that could result in data corruption. The company recommends installing the June 2022 security updates for Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 "to prevent further damage," though there are no suggested solutions for anyone who has already lost data because of the bug.

The problems only affect relatively recent PCs and servers that support Vector Advanced Encryption Standard (VAES) instructions for accelerating cryptographic operations. Microsoft says affected systems use AES-XTS or AES-GCM instructions "on new hardware." Part of the AVX-512 instruction set, VAES instructions are supported by Intel's Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake, and Alder Lake architectures -- these power some 10th-generation Core CPUs for laptops, as well as all 11th- and 12th-gen Core CPUs. AMD's upcoming Zen 4 architecture also supports VAES, though by the time these chips are released in the fall, the patches will have had plenty of time to proliferate. Microsoft says that the problem was caused when it added "new code paths" to support the updated encryption instructions in SymCrypt, Windows' cryptographic function library. These code paths were added in the initial release of Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022, so the problem shouldn't affect older versions like Windows 10 or Windows Server 2019.

The initial fix for the problem, provided in Windows' June 2022 security update package (Windows 11 build 22000.778), will prevent further damage at the cost of reduced performance, suggesting that the initial fix was to disable encryption acceleration on these processors entirely. Using Bitlocker-encrypted disks or the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol or accessing encrypted storage on servers will all be slower with the first patch installed, though installing the July 2022 security updates (Windows 11 build 22000.795) should restore performance to its previous level.

Ford Motor on Tuesday became the latest automaker to raise the price of electric vehicles when it significantly increased prices of its popular F-150 Lightning because of rising materials costs. From a report: The company began making the Lightning in April and had sold more than 4,400 through the end of July. Ford has taken reservations for more than 200,000, and the higher prices will go into effect for the 2023 model year. Ford said it was increasing the starting prices of the truck by $6,000 to $8,500 for newly ordered vehicles. After the increase, the truck will cost from $46,974 for a base model to $96,874 for a Platinum version with an extended-range battery pack.

The increases do not affect customers who have already placed orders and are waiting for their trucks. Reservations give customers a spot in line to place an order to buy a truck. Ford stopped taking orders because of strong demand but said it would resume doing so on Thursday, when the new prices go into effect. "We've announced pricing ahead of reopening order banks so our reservation holders can make an informed decision around ordering a Lightning," said Marin Gjaja, chief customer officer for Ford's electric vehicle division, known as Model e, in a statement.

Google is kicking off a new publicity campaign today to pressure Apple into adopting RCS, the cross-platform messaging protocol that's meant to be a successor to the aging SMS and MMS standards. From a report: The search giant has a new "Get The Message" website that lays out a familiar set of arguments for why Apple should support the standard, revolving around smoother messaging between iPhone and Android devices. Naturally, there's also a #GetTheMessage hashtag to really get those viral juices flowing. For most people, the problems Google describes are most familiar in the form of the green bubbles that signify messages to Android users in Apple's Messages app. While the iPhone app uses Apple's own iMessage service to send texts between iPhones (complete with modern features like encryption, support for group chats, and high-quality image and video transfers), they revert to old-fashioned SMS and MMS when texting an Android user. Not only are these messages shown in a color-clashing green bubble but also they break many of the modern messaging features people have come to rely on.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed a bipartisan bill that aims to strengthen U.S. competitiveness with China by investing billions of dollars in domestic semiconductor manufacturing and science research. From a report: "Today is a day for builders. Today America is delivering," Biden said at the signing ceremony outside the White House. He was joined by a crowd of hundreds, including tech executives, union presidents and political leaders from both parties. The bill, dubbed the Chips and Science Act, includes more than $52 billion for U.S. companies producing computer chips, as well as billions more in tax credits to encourage investment in semiconductor manufacturing. It also provides tens of billions of dollars to fund scientific research and development, and to spur the innovation and development of other U.S. tech. The Biden administration also contended that the legislation will "unlock hundreds of billions more" in private spending in the industry. The White House said Tuesday that multiple companies, "spurred" by the chips bill, have announced more than $44 billion in new semiconductor manufacturing investments.

Mobile app marketing company AppLovin on Tuesday made a $17.54 billion all-stock offer to buy online gaming business Unity Software. From a report: Palo Alto-based AppLovin said the deal would have an enterprise value of about $20 billion, an 18% premium on San Francisco-based Unity's Monday closing price. AppLovin said in a news release that its offer would create a company with a combined market cap of about $35 billion. The non-binding offer appears to be aimed at warding off potential damage to AppLovin's business by a plan Unity announced about a month ago to buy Israel-based app monetization company ironSource for $4.4 billion. A number of Unity shareholders and game developers have reportedly expressed dissatisfaction with the IronSource deal, which may help AppLovin win support for its offer. While Unity investors would hold 55% of shares in the combined company, AppLovin's would have 51% of the voting power. Unity chief John Riccitiello would be CEO under the proposal and AppLovin chief Adam Foroughi would be chief operating officer. A Unity spokesperson acknowledged the offer in a neutral statement the company issued on Tuesday morning, saying, "We have received the offer from AppLovin and our board will thoroughly evaluate it."

Several weeks after taking over Ukraine's southern port city of Kherson, Russian soldiers arrived at the offices of local internet service providers and ordered them to give up control of their networks. From a report: "They came to them and put guns to their head and just said, 'Do this,'" said Maxim Smelyanets, who owns an internet provider that operates in the area and is based in Kyiv. "They did that step by step for each company." Russian authorities then rerouted mobile and internet data from Kherson through Russian networks, government and industry officials said. They blocked access to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, as well as to Ukrainian news websites and other sources of independent information. Then they shut off Ukrainian cellular networks, forcing Kherson's residents to use Russian mobile service providers instead.

What happened in Kherson is playing out in other parts of Russian-occupied Ukraine. After more than five months of war, Russia controls large sections of eastern and southern Ukraine. Bombings have leveled cities and villages; civilians have been detained, tortured and killed; and supplies of food and medicine are running low, according to witnesses interviewed by The New York Times and human rights groups. Ukrainians in those regions have access only to Russian state television and radio. To cap off that control, Russia has also begun occupying the cyberspace of parts of those areas. That has cleaved off Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Kherson, Melitopol and Mariupol from the rest of the country, limiting access to news about the war and communication with loved ones. In some territories, the internet and cellular networks have been shut down altogether.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you watched ESPN2 during its stint last weekend as "ESPN8: The Ocho," you may have seen some odd, meme-friendly competitions, including corgi racing, precision paper airplane tossing, and slippery stair climbing. Or you might have seen "Excel Esports: All-Star Battle," a tournament in which an unexpected full-column Flash Fill is announced like a 50-yard Hail Mary. It's just the latest mainstream acknowledgment of Excel as a viable, if quirky, esport, complete with down-to-the-wire tension and surprising comebacks. [...]

Featured in this all-star battle was 2021 FMWC World Cup winner Diarmuid Early, an FMWC grandmaster from Ireland who claims 10,000 hours in Excel. (He would be Lambda if he were a function, he said.) The winner of the first championship in 2020, Joseph Lau (28,600 hours, Isological), also competed, along with six other highly ranked function warriors. Diarmuid took a commanding lead in the first slot-like task, racking up more points more quickly in a first round than anyone has in an FMWC competition. Others faced the kinds of challenges that regular users see in less combative Excel work. Polish competitor Gabriela Stroj told the hosts that "one stupid error" -- leaving a formula linked to the wrong sheet -- likely cost her hundreds of points. David Brown from the US said that his major problem was pasting from his 32-bit Windows-based Excel to the official online Excel answer sheets, which left his formulas treated as text.

The top four of the eight competitors moved on to round 2, simulating a yacht regatta in Excel. Diarmuid and third-ranked Andrew Ngai made it through. The two competed on creating a score-tracking mechanic for an entirely Excel-based retro-style 2D platformer, "Modelario." Ngai eked out the win, although with only 411 of a total 1,000 possible points. Ngai's reward for a more than two-hour cell-based marathon: a trip to Tucson, Arizona, for the FMWC finals. You can watch the full two-hour-and-48-minute all-star battle, which ESPN edited down to 30 minutes, here. You can also try the Excel tasks used in last weekend's battle yourself, as the organizers (the Financial Modeling World Cup) made all three of them available to download.

The ongoing worldwide semiconductor shortage will cause more than 100,000 vehicles to be cut from North American production schedules this week, Automotive News reported Sunday. Over 180,000 vehicles are expected to be dropped globally. CNET reports: The data, which comes from AutoForecast Solutions, says North American factories have been forced to cut nearly 1.06 million vehicles from production schedules this year due to the chip shortage. This puts North America as the most heavily impacted region so far. AFS' data shows nearly 3 million vehicles have been cut so far in 2022, and the agency expects that number to grow to more than 3.8 million by the end of the year. [...] The auto industry may not recover from the chip shortage until 2023 or beyond. Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AFS, affirmed this reasoning earlier this year: "This is not a quickly solvable issue."