From Tokyo to San Francisco, mobile game studios have sparred for years to captivate a fickle audience, fostering an overlooked problem -- the average title has become so huge that players can no longer fit more than a few on their phones. From a report: Japanese games publisher Gree expects an impending reckoning over escalating costs and ballooning file sizes, as developers pack their games with increasingly intricate graphics, voice acting and larger storylines, all to get players spending. That's creating a winner-takes-all situation that could winnow out smaller studios in coming years, Gree Senior Vice President Yuta Maeda said in an interview. The situation will only get worse as console veteran Sony -- no stranger to space-hogging hits -- prepares to invade the mobile arena. "Production of mobile games can't avoid becoming more complex, time-consuming and larger-scale, which will inevitably result in bigger app sizes," Maeda said. "Companies that survive in the market will only be the ones that can keep up with that trend."

The spending poured into today's A-list mobile titles -- MiHoYo's Genshin Impact, for instance, started with a $100 million budget -- rivals Hollywood blockbusters and is yielding better production values than ever, but also an outsized footprint. That game can occupy upwards of 20 gigabytes of storage, which is a huge chunk of what most people have available on their phones. With memory upgrades not keeping pace, the result is fewer games can vie for attention. Sony, one of the giants of console gaming, has laid out plans to bring its high-profile PlayStation franchises to mobile platforms. Rival Microsoft is also building an Xbox mobile gaming store. All of that piles pressure on the entrenched free-to-play business model followed by Gree and others. These publishers rely on monetizing in-game items and upgrades, regularly adding more content players can buy and play with. The most common workaround from game studios is to put only a basic installer in app stores, which then downloads further game assets once the player starts. Gree uses it with Heaven Burns Red, which is an initial 1GB and grows beyond 10GB for players who want the full experience.

The availability of Comcast's promised internet speed boosts has a catch: users need to purchase a $25-per-month xFi Complete add-on. Ars Technica reports: "As markets launch, Xfinity Internet customers who subscribe to xFi Complete will have their upload speeds increased between 5 and 10 times faster," an announcement last week said. "xFi Complete includes an xFi gateway, advanced cybersecurity protection at home and on the go, tech auto-upgrades for a new gateway after three years, and wall-to-wall Wi-Fi coverage with an xFi Pod [Wi-Fi extender] included if recommended. Now, another benefit of xFi Complete is faster upload speeds."

Comcast is deploying the speed upgrade in the Northeast US over the next couple of months. Plans with 10Mbps upload speeds will get up to 100Mbps upload speeds once the new tiers roll out in your region -- if you pay for xFi Complete. Comcast told Ars that faster upload speeds will come to customer-owned modems "later next year" but did not provide a more specific timeline. There is a cheaper way to get the same xFi Gateway with Wi-Fi 6E, as Comcast offers the option to rent that piece of hardware for $14 a month. But Comcast is only making the upload boost available to those who subscribe to the pricier xFi Complete service. While the standard monthly rate for xFi Complete is $25, new customers who sign up by December 31 can get it for $20 monthly during the first year of service.

We asked Comcast today if there's any technical reason it can't deliver the higher upload speeds on customer-owned equipment. A company spokesperson responded that Comcast is working on bringing faster uploads to non-Comcast modems. "We intend to extend the experience to customer-owned modems later next year and are working through the technical requirements as we learn," Comcast said. "We started offering it with our own equipment first and now are working through how to extend to customer-owned equipment." Comcast also said that giving the upload boost to xFi Complete customers first follows its "typical validate, test, and certification process for a new network innovation." But if the reasons for limiting the upload boost to Comcast hardware initially are purely technical instead of revenue-based, it's not clear why people who rent the gateway for $14 a month shouldn't get the same benefit.

It's been a long time since Microsoft updated its Surface Studio line of all-in-one PCs. While rumors had suggested a Surface Studio 3 was on the way, Microsoft is debuting its Surface Studio 2 Plus today instead -- an upgrade on the Surface Studio 2 that launched four years ago. It includes some important upgrades on the inside, but the exterior is practically the same, and it all starts at an eye-watering $4,299. From a report: The Surface Studio 2 Plus will ship with Intel's 11th Gen Core i7-11370H processor, a chip that's rapidly approaching two years on the market. We're about to enter Intel's 13th Gen era, so it's hugely disappointing to see Microsoft not move to 12th Gen H series chips or wait for Intel's latest and greatest. "Our goal was ship to market sooner, especially for a lot of our commercial customers... so we focused on stability and supply with known good parts because the difference from 11th to 12th Gen on the H series wasn't something we needed to push for," explains Pete Kyriacou, vice president of program management at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge. Despite the disappointing CPU choice, Microsoft has opted for a graphics card upgrade here. The Surface Studio 2 Plus comes with Nvidia's RTX 3060 laptop GPU with 6GB of VRAM. Microsoft has redesigned its Surface Studio 2 Plus motherboard, and the RTX 3060 itself will be running at around 60-70 watts in a laptop configuration. Microsoft hides all of the components in the Studio 2 Plus inside a little laptop-like enclosure underneath the 28-inch display.

"Starting with the Ubuntu 16.04 edition and including the later LTS versions, Canonical will offer expanded security coverage for critical, high, and medium Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) to all of Ubuntu's open-source applications and toolchains for ten years," reports ZDNet.

"Yes, you read that right, you get security patches not just for the operating system, but for all of Ubuntu's open-source applications for a decade." Most of these are server programs, such as Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Drupal, Nagios, Redis, and WordPress. But, it also includes such developer essentials as Docker, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Python 2, and Rust. Altogether, Canonical is supporting more than 23,000 packages. Indeed, it's now offering security for, as Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's CEO, said, "Security coverage to every single package in the Ubuntu distribution."

Canonical isn't doing this on its own. It's offering free, improved security in partnership with the security management company Tenable. Robert Huber, Tenable's Chief Security Officer, said, "Ubuntu Pro offers security patch assurance for a broad spectrum of open-source software. Together, we give customers a foundation for trustworthy open source."

Beyond ordinary security, Canonical is backporting security fixes from newer application versions. This enables Ubuntu Pro users to use the Ubuntu release of their choice for long-term security without forced upgrades. Happy to keep using Ubuntu 20.04? No problem. You can run it until April 2030. Knock yourself out....

Users can obtain a free personal Ubuntu Pro subscription at ubuntu.com/pro for up to five machines. This free tier is for personal and small-scale commercial use.
Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Ubuntu's parent company company Canonical, explains in a new video that Ubuntu "is now the world's most widely used Linux..."

"What makes most proud, though, is that we have found a way to make this available free of charge to anybody for their personal and for small-scale commercial use.... full commercial use for you, and any business you own, on up to five machines."

Great Firewall Report (GFW), an organization that monitors and reports on China's censorship efforts, has this week posted a pair of assessments indicating a crackdown on TLS encryption-based tools used to evade the Firewall. The Register reports: The group's latest post opens with the observation that starting on October 3, "more than 100 users reported that at least one of their TLS-based censorship circumvention servers had been blocked. The TLS-based circumvention protocols that are reportedly blocked include trojan, Xray, V2Ray TLS+Websocket, VLESS, and gRPC." Trojan is a tool that promises it can leap over the Great Firewall using TLS encryption. Xray, V2ray and VLESS are VPN-like internet tunneling and privacy tools. It's unclear what the reference to gRPC describes -- but it is probably a reference to using the gRPC Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework to authenticate client connections to VPN servers.

GFW's analysis of this incident is that "blocking is done by blocking the specific port that the circumvention services listen on. When the user changes the blocked port to a non-blocked port and keep using the circumvention tools, the entire IP addresses may get blocked." Interestingly, domain names used with these tools are not added to the Great Firewall's DNS or SNI blacklists, and blocking seems to be automatic and dynamic. "Based on the information collected above, we suspect, without empirical measurement yet, that the blocking is possibly related to the TLS fingerprints of those circumvention tools," the organization asserts. An alternative circumvention tool, naiveproxy, appears not to be impacted by these changes. "It's not hard to guess why China might have chosen this moment to upgrade the Great Firewall: the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party kicks off next week," notes the Register. "The event is a five-yearly set piece at which Xi Jinping is set to be granted an unprecedented third five-year term as president of China."

Magic Leap's second take on augmented reality eyewear is available. "The glasses are still aimed at developers and pros, but they include a number of design upgrades that make them considerably more practical -- and point to where AR might be headed," reports Engadget. From the report: The design is 50 percent smaller and 20 percent lighter than the original. It should be more comfortable to wear over long periods, then. Magic Leap also promises better visibility for AR in bright light (think a well-lit office) thanks to "dynamic dimming" that makes virtual content appear more solid. Lens optics supposedly deliver higher quality imagery with easier-to-read text, and the company touts a wider field of view (70 degrees diagonal) than comparable wearables.

You can expect decent power that includes a quad-core AMD Zen 2-based processor in the "compute pack," a 12.6MP camera (plus a host of cameras for depth, eye tracking and field-of-view) and 60FPS hand tracking for gestures. You'll only get 3.5 hours of non-stop use, but the 256GB of storage (the most in any dedicated AR device, Magic Leap claims) provides room for more sophisticated apps. The base model of the glasses costs $3,299, with the Enterprise model amounting to about $5,000.

NASA announced Thursday that it plans to study the possibility of using SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle to boost the aging Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit. Ars Technica reports: The federal agency has signed a "Space Act Agreement" with SpaceX to conduct a six-month study to determine the practicability of Dragon docking with the 32-year-old telescope and boosting it into a higher orbit. The study is not exclusive, meaning that other companies can propose similar concepts with alternative rockets and spacecraft. [...] Among the questions the new Hubble study will answer is the cost of such a mission and its technical feasibility. The principal goal is to boost Hubble's altitude from its current level of 535 km to 600 km, the same altitude it was at when first launched in 1990. Since the fifth and final servicing mission in 2009, Hubble has slowly been losing altitude, and this process is expected to accelerate as the telescope gets lower.

The telescope's project manager, Patrick Crouse, said during a teleconference with reporters that in absence of a re-boost mission, NASA might have to launch a propulsion module to the telescope by the end of the 2020s. This would ensure Hubble makes a controlled reentry into Earth's atmosphere and lands in the Pacific Ocean. A Dragon mission to boost Hubble's altitude could add 15 or even 20 years of orbital lifetime, Crouse said. The study will also look at potential servicing options, although nothing like the detailed instrument replacements and major upgrades performed during Hubble servicing missions with NASA's space shuttle. Rather, engineers from NASA and SpaceX will assess the feasibility of replacing the gyroscopes that control the pointing of the telescope. Only three of the spacecraft's six gyroscopes remain in working order.

Apple could decide to release its remaining products for 2022, which includes an updated iPad Pro, Mac mini, and 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, through a press release on its website rather than a digital event, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. MacRumors reports: In his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman said that Apple is currently "likely to release its remaining 2022 products via press releases, updates to its website and briefings with select members of the press" rather than a digital event. Rumors had suggested that Apple was planning a second fall event in October that would focus on the Mac and iPad, but that may no longer be the case. Apple has three things on the roster for the remainder of 2022: an 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the M2 chip, an updated Mac mini with the M2 and yet announced "M2 Pro" chip, and updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros.

Apple announced the M2 chip in June for the redesigned MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro earlier this June at WWDC. Other than the new chip, the updates to the Mac and iPad will be relatively incremental upgrades with no major design changes rumored for the products. Apple has released products via press release in the past, such as the AirPods Max and the original AirPods Pro.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: A nuclear fusion reaction has lasted for 30 seconds at temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees celsius. While the duration and temperature alone aren't records, the simultaneous achievement of heat and stability brings us a step closer to a viable fusion reactor -- as long as the technique used can be scaled up. [...] Now Yong-Su Na at Seoul National University in South Korea and his colleagues have succeeded in running a reaction at the extremely high temperatures that will be required for a viable reactor, and keeping the hot, ionized state of matter that is created within the device stable for 30 seconds.

Controlling this so-called plasma is vital. If it touches the walls of the reactor, it rapidly cools, stifling the reaction and causing significant damage to the chamber that holds it. Researchers normally use various shapes of magnetic fields to contain the plasma -- some use an edge transport barrier (ETB), which sculpts plasma with a sharp cut-off in pressure near to the reactor wall, a state that stops heat and plasma escaping. Others use an internal transport barrier (ITB) that creates higher pressure nearer the center of the plasma. But both can create instability. Na's team used a modified ITB technique at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device, achieving a much lower plasma density. Their approach seems to boost temperatures at the core of the plasma and lower them at the edge, which will probably extend the lifespan of reactor components.

Dominic Power at Imperial College London says that to increase the energy produced by a reactor, you can make plasma really hot, make it really dense or increase confinement time. "This team is finding that the density confinement is actually a bit lower than traditional operating modes, which is not necessarily a bad thing, because it's compensated for by higher temperatures in the core," he says. "It's definitely exciting, but there's a big uncertainty about how well our understanding of the physics scales to larger devices. So something like ITER is going to be much bigger than KSTAR". Na says that low density was key, and that "fast" or more energetic ions at the core of the plasma -- so-called fast-ion-regulated enhancement (FIRE) -- are integral to stability. But the team doesn't yet fully understand the mechanisms involved. The reaction was stopped after 30 seconds only because of limitations with hardware, and longer periods should be possible in future. KSTAR has now shut down for upgrades, with carbon components on the wall of the reactor being replaced with tungsten, which Na says will improve the reproducibility of experiments. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

Sunnova is one of America's largest rooftop solar companies, according to the New York Times. But they've now applied to California's Public Utilities Commission for permission to become the state's first solar (and storage) micro-utility, initiating formal steps to qualify and "request a certificate to construct and operate microgrids," targetting new home developments that aren't yet connected to the grid.

"We see a future where communities, neighborhoods, and businesses can operate independently from the legacy grid with sustainable energy sources that provide uninterrupted power," says the company's founder and CEO. "We believe microgrids address a strong need in the market for more robust energy solutions and better connectivity...." But he's also offering touting another possible benefit: "relief that the existing transmission and distribution system will experience given that most of the power that will be consumed by these communities will be generated locally from renewable resources."

The company likes to point out that America's recently-passed climate bill included tax incentives to encourage microgrids. But the New York Times describes it as "a business model that is illegal in much of the United States." Sunnova said it would offer those residents electricity that was up to 20 percent cheaper than the rates charged by investor-owned utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison. If approved by regulators, the micro-utility model, also known as a microgrid, could undermine the growth of those larger utilities by depriving them access to new homes or forcing them to lower their rates to keep that business. Sunnova executives argue that the approach they are seeking approval for was authorized under a California law passed almost two decades ago for a resort just south of Lake Tahoe. In addition, the company says advances in solar and battery technology mean that neighborhoods can be designed to generate more than enough electricity to meet their own needs at a lower cost than relying on the grid.

"If they don't want to choose me, that should be their right; if they don't want to choose you, that should be their right, too," said John Berger, the chief executive of Sunnova.

A small number of homeowners have gone off the grid as the cost of solar panels and batteries has fallen. But doing so can be hard or impossible. Some local governments have rejected permits for off-grid homes on health and safety grounds, arguing that a connection to the grid is essential. But connecting a single home to the grid can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, which means an off-grid system may actually be cheaper — especially for properties in remote areas, or in places where the local grid is at its capacity and would require significant upgrades to serve more homes. Off-grid setups can also be appealing because once a system is paid off, the cost of operating and maintaining it is often modest and predictable, whereas utility rates can move up sharply.... The nationwide average retail electricity rate increased 11 percent in June from a year earlier, according to the Energy Information Administration.

But the kind of micro-utilities that Sunnova hopes to create have also had problems. The utopian visions of generating electricity where it is used have often run into maintenance and other problems. Many tiny utilities created under such models in the United States and Canada were later swallowed up by larger power companies.... Sunnova's microgrid approach could suffer a similar fate. But the costs of solar panels and batteries have tumbled over the last decade, making the energy that off-grid systems generate much more affordable....

Utilities have been pressing regulators to reduce the compensation homeowners receive for the excess solar energy their rooftop systems send to the grid. The companies have argued that customers with solar panels are being offered generous credits for power that they are not contributing adequately toward the cost of maintaining power lines and other grid equipment....

Building and operating microgrids could provide a steady source of income to companies like Sunnova. That could essentially transform the rooftop solar companies into the kinds of utilities that they have long fought against.
Sunnova bills itself as an "Energy as a Service" company, and they expect their microgrids to experience 30 minutes or less of outages each year, the Times points out, "compared with an average of two hours a year at California's large investor-owned utilities."

In the article, the chief executive of home-building company Lennar says they've already formed a partnership with Sunnova. "We value the current electric grid and we're intrigued by new microgrid solutions that can supplement and support the traditional utility grid and help solve reliability during extreme weather and peak demand."

Responding to a three-year-old complaint, Microsoft today said that it would fix its unfair licensing terms in the EU. From a report: "We recognize the importance of a competitive environment in the European cloud provider market, in which smaller competitors can thrive," a new post to the Microsoft Corporate Blogs notes. "It is therefore critical for us to remain mindful of our responsibilities as a major technology company." In 2019, several Microsoft customers in the EU complained that the software giant was making it prohibitively expensive to run Windows and Office workloads on non-Azure cloud platforms like AWS and Google Cloud, triggering inquiries from EU antitrust regulators. Microsoft immediately responded that the complaints were "valid," but it did nothing to address them in any material way.

In May 2022, Microsoft finally came up with a response, announcing that it would make it less expensive for customers to run Microsoft software like Windows, Windows Server, Office, and SQL Server on non-Microsoft cloud platforms in the EU. But it wasn't until today that the software giant announced the details and timing of this plan. Now, Microsoft says that it will implement "major revisions and upgrades to its outsourcing and hosting terms" that go into effect on October 1, 2022. It will be easier and more cost-effective for customers to use Microsoft software on competing cloud platforms, it says, and for its partners to build hosted desktop and server solutions that meet their customers' needs.

Ethereum's developers have officially confirmed September 6 as the date for Ethereum's long-anticipated transition from proof of work to proof of stake, known as The Merge. From a report: "Following years of hard work, Ethereum's proof-of-stake upgrade is finally here!" the Ethereum Foundation wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. "The successful upgrade of all public testnets is now complete, and The Merge has been scheduled for the Ethereum mainnet." The Merge will be split into two upgrades, called Bellatrix and Paris. Bellatrix is timed to occur at 11:34 AM UTC on September 6 and Paris will be triggered sometime between September 10 and September 20, according to the blog post. Proof of stake relies on validators instead of miners. Instead of expending lots of computing power, like proof-of-work miners do, proof-of-stake validators lock up sums of money to prove their trustworthiness to the network. The switch has been a long-held goal for Ethereum's developers. In the final testing step, the Goerli testnet successfully merged on August 10.

"After a slight delay due to an installer issue, the first point release for Ubuntu 22.04 has been officially released," swrites Jack Wallen for TechRepublic.

"Although point releases are often overlooked by users, because they aren't major upgrades, this time around you should certainly run the upgrade immediately." The biggest reason is that this point release combines all of the security fixes and improvements that have been added since the initial release of Jammy Jellyfish. So, if you haven't bothered to upgrade Ubuntu 22.04 since you first installed it, which you should have been doing all along, this point upgrade will add everything you've missed in one fell swoop. One of the biggest upgrades for end users will be the ability of 20.04 users to upgrade to the latest release without having to touch the command line. At some point, users of 20.04 will see an upgrade prompt on their desktops, allowing them to easily make the jump to 22.04.1. This is a big deal because previously such upgrades would have required running several commands. That means no more:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
sudo do-release-upgrade -y

Another point release found in 22.04.1 is GNOME 42, which features a new enhanced dark mode and switches to Wayland by default, with the inclusion of Xorg for unsupported hardware.

"California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday proposed extending the life of the state's last operating nuclear power plant by five to 10 years," reports the Associated Press, "to maintain reliable power supplies in the climate change era." Newsom's draft proposal includes a potential forgivable loan for PG&E for up to $1.4 billion and would require state agencies to act quickly to clear the way for the reactors to continue running. The seaside plant located midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco produces 9% of the state's electricity. The proposal says its continued operation beyond 2025 is "critical to ensure statewide energy system reliability" as climate change stresses the energy system....

Newsom clearly wants to avoid a repeat of August 2020, when a record heat wave caused a surge in power use for air conditioning that overtaxed California's electrical grid. That caused two consecutive nights of rolling blackouts for the state, affecting hundreds of thousands of residential and business customers. The Newsom administration is pushing to expand clean energy, as the state aims to cut emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. Nuclear power doesn't produce carbon pollution like fossil fuels, but leaves behind waste that can remain dangerously radioactive for centuries.

The California Legislature has less than three weeks to determine if it will endorse the plan and attempt to extend the life of the plant — a decision that would be made amid looming questions over the costs and earthquake safety risks.... The Democratic governor, who is seen as a possible future White House candidate, has urged PG&E for months to pursue a longer run beyond a scheduled closing by 2025, warning that the plant's power is needed as the state transitions to solar, wind and other renewable sources of energy.
One concerned Democratic state Senator (from the district housing the plant) argued that another earthquake fault was discovered near the plant in 2008, and reminded the Associated Press that "seismic upgrades were never totally completed. Will they address that?"

The world's largest smartphone market is in deep trouble. China saw a 14.7% decline in phone shipments in the second quarter, according to research firm IDC. And multibillion-dollar pillars of the industry like Xiaomi Corp., Vivo and Oppo all reported steep sales declines. From a report: Many factors drove the fall, including a strict Covid Zero policy that torpedoed demand, but the bigger issue is one that's long been feared by the country's smartphone makers. China's 10-year-plus smartphone boom, fueled by new buyers and ceaseless upgrades, is likely coming to an end. China was eager to become a mobile nation a decade ago. It used state capital to build 4G base stations in almost every village, enabling brands like Oppo and Vivo to sell chic-looking devices to hundreds of millions of people in rural areas, most of whom had never tried a touchscreen. Apple, Samsung Electronics and Motorola pursued tech-savvy city dwellers with more expensive options. (Although the latter two quickly fell out of the game due to product flaws, marketing missteps and geopolitical pressures.)

More recently, smartphone makers saw an opportunity as China pushed toward advanced 5G networks. But few saw the trouble already brewing. A key problem is that China's massive smartphone market has become highly saturated. The country has more than 1.6 billion active mobile phone accounts by the end of last year compared to its 1.4 billion population. The penetration rate is well above the global average and has led to fierce competition. The need to replace phones has also dwindled. The life cycles of smartphones are getting longer, and can be stretched when the economy isn't doing well. The price of 5G service has prompted many people in China to simply keep their adequate 4G subscriptions.

Apple's upcoming entry-level iPad is rumored to cut the 3.5mm headphone jack, joining the iPad Pro, iPad Air, iPad Mini, and the entire iPhone lineup. The Verge reports: MySmartPrice says the CAD renders are sourced from a case maker working on accessories for what will be the 10th-generation iPad. It's a substantial redesign from the classic iPad design that has been left largely untouched for years; Apple increased the display size slightly in 2017 and has made other internal hardware upgrades, but the overall look has remained consistent. It appears that's about to change, with the new iPad sharing the same flat-sides aesthetic as recent iPhones, iPads, the 14-inch / 16-inch MacBook Pro, and 2022 MacBook Air. Both 9to5Mac and MacRumors reported on the renders. But as always, treat these easily faked images with a healthy amount of skepticism.

The home button remains present, which means so do the sizable bezels above and below the display. MySmartPrice reports that the screen should be larger than the current 10.2-inch model, and there's a redesigned camera on the iPad's back reminiscent of the module from the iPhone X. The revamped iPad has a USB-C port, which would complete the transition for Apple's tablet line. These renders also include quad speakers, and that's where I get somewhat doubtful of what we're seeing: only the iPad Pro is currently outfitted with four speakers, so if this pans out, the base-level iPad would be leapfrogging both the iPad Air and Mini in the audio department. That strikes me as unlikely, but it could also serve as Apple's justification for nixing the headphone jack from a product used in many classrooms and other scenarios where support for affordable wired headphones has been meaningful.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Siemens and Philadelphia-based ConnectDER have partnered to debut a groundbreaking simple home EV charger connector. Previously, homeowners who wanted to install EV chargers might have had to spend thousands of dollars to modify their home's electrical panel. This new proprietary plug-in adapter will eliminate that cost and allow installation and connection in minutes. ConnectDER makes meter collars that are installed between the home's meter and the meter socket to create a single plug-and-play access point for distributed energy resources (DER) installation. In other words, the collars easily add new electrical service capacity for things like solar and energy storage. Now ConnectDER will exclusively manufacture and supply a proprietary plug-in EV charger adapter to Siemens.

The new adapter will enable electric car owners to charge their EVs by connecting chargers directly through the meter socket, which is on every home. It provides more useable capacity by monitoring total load and controlling the EV circuit to ensure the total capacity rating is within the limit. Bypassing the electrical panel reduces the EV charger installation cost by around 60 to 80% because electrical panel upgrades aren't needed. [...] Nearly half of US home electrical panels previously would have needed upgrades to allow the installation of a typical Level 2 charger, usually a 7-11kW device requiring 40-60 Amps on a 240V line. A Siemens spokesperson said that the company is still finalizing pricing, but "it will be a fraction of the cost of a service panel upgrade or other modifications often needed to make for a charger. Additionally, in some cases, the cost may be fully borne by utility programs."

The adapters themselves are expected to be available by first quarter 2023.

Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed raising the minimum definition of broadband to 100Mbps for downloads and 20Mbps for uploads. Engadget reports: The previous 25/3 benchmark is both outdated and hides just how many low-income and rural internet users are being "left behind and left offline," Rosenworcel said. The chair said multiple pieces of evidence supported the hike, including requirements for new network construction stemming from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The FCC had already proposed upgrades to rural speeds through a special program, but this would affect the definition of broadband regardless of where users live in the country.

Rosenworcel also wanted the minimum speed to evolve over time. She proposed setting a much higher standard of 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up for some point in the future. The leader further suggested more criteria for determining the "reasonable and timely" rollout of broadband, including adoption rates, affordability, availability and equitable access.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Fifty-four members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are protesting what they call a "radical proposal" to require payments from online service providers to Internet service providers. Noting that Europe's 2015 "Open Internet Regulation ensures that citizens are free to use whichever apps and websites they wish," the MEPs said they have "deep concern about the European Commission's plans to change our net neutrality legislation in the upcoming Connectivity Infrastructure Act to be proposed in autumn, without having consulted the public, technology experts, academics, civil society, or expert regulatory agencies."

No specific proposal has been released, but "statements to the press indicate that a new provision would require payments from online service providers to broadband providers -- ostensibly to fund the rollout of 5G and fiber to the home," the MEPs wrote in the letter yesterday (PDF) to the European Commission. The letter cited a May 2 Reuters article that said, "Tech giants such as Google, Meta, and Netflix may have to bear some of the cost of Europe's telecoms network, Europe's digital chief Margrethe Vestager said on Monday, following EU telecoms operators' complaints." The MEPs' list of references also includes two Ars Technica articles from 2012 when a similar proposal was being discussed.

Vestager reportedly said at a news conference that "there are players who generate a lot of traffic that then enables their business but who have not been contributing actually to enable that traffic. They have not been contributing to enabling the investments in the rollout of connectivity... and we are in the process of getting a thorough understanding of how could that be enabled." [...] The MEPs' letter further argued that charging websites for access to broadband consumers would help ISPs abuse their monopolies: "Adopting a model that allows for or mandates access fees would be a disastrous return to the economic model for telephony, where telecommunications companies and countries leveraged their termination access monopolies to make communication expensive. Because phone companies had a monopoly over their customers, they could charge exorbitant prices to anyone seeking to call their customers. Broadband providers have the same monopoly over their customers. Allowing them to charge content providers for access could cause significant harm to the Internet economy." The MEPs also doubt such fees would improve broadband connectivity, saying that "factors such as permits or construction capacities can act as more severe barriers than lack of funding." They urged the European Commission to take its time and open an official consultation, saying, "There is no emergency that requires action in autumn 2022."

The second quarter of 2022 brought major disruption to the PC market, as COVID lockdowns in China stymied manufacturing. Research firm Canalys: The latest Canalys data shows total shipments of desktops and notebooks fell 15.0% annually to 70.2 million units, the lowest level since a similar disruption occurred in Q1 2020. Demand headwinds, especially from consumers, have also ramped up as inflation remains unchecked in many of the world's largest PC markets. Notebook shipments fell 18.6% in Q2 2022 at 54.5 million units, down for a third consecutive quarter as education procurement remained muted compared with the same quarter a year ago. Desktops fared much better, posting modest growth of 0.6% to 15.6 million units as the strength of commercial demand amid the further opening of economies helped spur investment in desktop refreshes and upgrades. The premium commercial segment will remain a bright spot for the overall PC market this year, despite mounting challenges in the global macroeconomic outlook.