An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's reputation for aggressively killing products and services is hurting the company's brand. Any new product launch from Google is no longer a reason for optimism; instead, the company is met with questions about when the product will be shut down. It's a problem entirely of Google's own making, and it's yet another barrier that discourages customers from investing (either time, money, or data) in the latest Google thing. The wide public skepticism of Google Stadia is a great example of the problem. A Google division with similar issues is Google Cloud Platform, which asks companies and developers to build a product or service powered by Google's cloud infrastructure. Like the rest of Google, Cloud Platform has a reputation for instability, thanks to quickly deprecating APIs, which require any project hosted on Google's platform to be continuously updated to keep up with the latest changes. Google Cloud wants to address this issue, though, with a new "Enterprise API" designation.

Enterprise APIs basically get a roadmap that promises stability for certain APIs. Google says, "The burden is on us: Our working principle is that no feature may be removed (or changed in a way that is not backwards compatible) for as long as customers are actively using it. If a deprecation or breaking change is inevitable, then the burden is on us to make the migration as effortless as possible." If Google needs to change an API, customers will now get a minimum of one year's notice, along with tools, documentation, and other materials. Google goes on to say, "To make sure we follow these tenets, any change we introduce to an API is reviewed by a centralized board of product and engineering leads and follows a rigorous product lifecycle evaluation."

Despite being one of the world's largest Internet companies and basically defining what modern cloud infrastructure looks like, Google isn't doing very well in the cloud infrastructure market. Analyst firm Canalys puts Google in a distant third, with 7 percent market share, behind Microsoft Azure (19 percent) and market leader Amazon Web Services (32 percent). Rumor has it (according to a report from The Information) that Google Cloud Platform is facing a 2023 deadline to beat AWS and Microsoft, or it will risk losing funding. Ex-Googler Steve Yegge laid out the problems with Google Cloud Platform last year in a post titled "Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You." Google's announcement seems to hit most of what that post highlights, like a lack of documentation and support, an endless treadmill of API upgrades, and Google Cloud's general disregard for backward compatibility. Yegge argues that successful platforms like Windows, Java, and Android (a group Yegge says is isolated from the larger Google culture) owe much of their success to their commitment to platform stability. AWS is the market leader partly because it's considered a lot more stable than Google Cloud Platform.

Today, Amaon said it will be upgrading almost every plug-in Echo smart speaker to support Matter, a cross-platform open-source standard coming later this year. This includes most Echo and Echo Dot speakers and every Echo Studio, Echo Show, Echo Plus, and Echo Flex. "In fact, the only Echo smart speakers that won't get upgraded to Matter are the first-gen Echo, first-gen Echo Dot and Echo Tap," reports The Verge. From the report: While the company doesn't provide a timeline for those upgrades, the general idea is that Matter will launch by late 2021, so it shouldn't be long until Amazon's newest and / or more popular devices receive the capability. A bigger question is whether any of them will work as Matter hubs. Google announced in May that in addition to upgrading its Nest devices to Matter, it would allow its devices that support the Thread protocol (like the Nest Wi-Fi, Nest Hub Max, and second-gen Nest Hub) to double as connection hubs for Matter, too, not simply as a voice assistant to control Matter gadgets. But while Amazon's Eero routers were early to adopt Thread, Amazon's Echo smart speakers were not.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: United Airlines is adding a long-awaited feature to the in-flight entertainment seatback screens of its new Boeing 737 Max 8 jets -- support for Bluetooth headphones. The company is making the upgrade as part of "United Next," a new plan to expand and modernize its fleet with what it says are larger, fuel-efficient jets and a more comfortable in-flight experience. Adding seatback screens made a huge difference in how tolerable flying is, but it's been held up by lagging audio support that The Verge has even written a guide to getting around. And this isn't a problem unique to United. Other airlines like Delta or JetBlue have been offering seatback screens for years, but have also saddled flyers with analog audio. United just might be one of the first airlines to start the next wave of inflight entertainment improvements (hopefully).

However, there's room for things to go a bit sideways. As part of its upgrades, United's new 737 Max 8 jets offer 10 or 13-inch inflight entertainment screens on the backs of all seats, which might mean a lot of people trying to connect to Bluetooth at once. That could cause interference, and might also make the process of connecting your headphones more of a chore if you're having to hunt through multiple devices trying to pair in the same menu. United currently only offers Bluetooth on its Max 8 jets which it says should start flying this summer. The company didn't share how it plans to address issues with Bluetooth, but said it's still "studying the technology."

Today, YouTube TV announced a 4K Plus add-on package with offline downloads, 5.1 Dolby audio, and features that make it easier to watch live sports. From a report: YouTube TV is already one of the pricier streaming services out there -- at $64.99 per month, you might not save much money by choosing YouTube in lieu of your cable service. Hulu + Live TV is priced the same, but offers a Disney+ and ESPN+ add-on for a total of $72.99 per month. But if you want to kick your video quality (and your monthly bill) up a notch, you can now enable 4K streaming for an extra $19.99 per month, bringing your grand total to $84.98 monthly.

The 4K Plus add-on package will also allow subscribers to download shows from DVR to watch offline -- currently, that's not possible on the standard $64.99 per month package. Meanwhile, the 5.1 Dolby audio capabilities will be a free addition for all YouTube TV members -- in a blog post, the company says this has been one of users' "biggest requests." The sports upgrades also come at no additional cost -- one new feature will let viewers jump to key plays and specific highlight moments when watching a DVR recording or trying to catch up live.

After weeks of leaks and hype, Microsoft today officially announced Windows 11, the next version of its desktop operating system. From a report: While the company may have once said that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows, forgoing major point launches for a regular cadence of bi-annual upgrades, but it clearly believes that the changes -- and especially the redesigned user interface -- in this update warrant a new version number. Microsoft plans to release Windows 11 to the general public by the holidays, so we can probably expect it sometime around late November. Before that, we'll likely see a slew of public betas. If you followed along with the development and eventual demise of Windows 10X, Microsoft's operating system with a simplified user interface for dual- and (eventually) single-screen laptops, a lot of what you're seeing here will feel familiar, down to the redesigned Start menu. Indeed, if somebody showed you screenshots of Windows 11 and early previews of Windows 10X, you'd have a hard time telling them apart.

As Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay noted in today's announcement, the overall idea behind the design is to make you feel "an incredible sense of calm," but at the same time, the Windows team has also worked to make it a lot faster. Windows Updates, for example, are supposed to be 40 percent faster, but Panay also noted that starting up your machine and even browsing should feel much faster.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low-earth orbit in 1990 with an even older computer. Over the next 13 years it received upgrades and repairs from astronauts on five different visits from America's Space Shuttle.

But now in 2021, "NASA continues to work on resolving an issue with the payload computer on the Hubble Space Telescope," reports SciTechDaily — though "The telescope itself and science instruments remain in good health." The operations team will be running tests and collecting more information on the system to further isolate the problem. The science instruments will remain in a safe mode state until the issue is resolved...

The computer halted on Sunday, June 13. An attempt to restart the computer failed on Monday, June 14. Initial indications pointed to a degrading computer memory module as the source of the computer halt. When the operations team attempted to switch to a back-up memory module, however, the command to initiate the backup module failed to complete. Another attempt was conducted on both modules Thursday evening to obtain more diagnostic information while again trying to bring those memory modules online. However, those attempts were not successful.

One of the internet's foundations just got an upgrade. From a report: Quic, a protocol for transmitting data between computers, improves speed and security on the internet and can replace Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, a standard that dates back to Ye Olde Internet of 1974. Last week, the Internet Engineering Task Force, which sets many standards for the global network, published Quic as a standard. Web browsers and online services have been testing the technology for years, but the IETF's imprimatur is a sign the standard is mature enough to embrace fully.

It's extremely hard to improve the internet at the fundamental level of data transmission. Countless devices, programs and services are built to use the earlier infrastructure, which has lasted decades. Quic has been in public development for nearly eight years since Google first announced Quic in 2013 as an experimental addition to its Chrome browser. But upgrades to the internet's foundations are crucial to keep the world-spanning communication and commerce backbone humming. That's why engineers spend so much effort on titanic transitions like Quic, HTTPS for secure website communications, post-quantum cryptography to protect data from future quantum computers, and IPv6 for accommodating vastly more devices on the internet.

Framework is one of an increasing number of companies working to address planned obsolescence by creating products that are incredibly customizable and easy to repair. Today, the company's Framework Laptop is up for preorder, starting at $999 and shipping at the end of July. TechCrunch reports: There are three basic configurations -- Base, Performance and Professional, ranging from $999 to $1,999, upgrading from an Intel Core i5, 8GB of Ram and 256GB of storage to a Core i7 and 32GB/1TB. Windows also gets upgraded from Home to Pro at the top level. At $749, the company offers a barebones shell, where users can plug in their own internals.

Other upgrades include: "On top of that, the Framework Laptop is deeply customizable in unique ways. Our Expansion Card system lets you choose the ports you want and which side you want them on, selecting from four at a time of USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, DisplayPort, MicroSD, ultra-fast 250GB and 1TB storage, and more. Magnetic-attach bezels are color-customizable to match your style, and the keyboard language can be swapped too."

The Biden administration gave approval Tuesday to the nation's first commercial-scale offshore wind farm, which is scheduled to begin construction this summer. The New York Times reports: The Vineyard Wind project calls for up to 84 turbines to be installed in the Atlantic Ocean about 12 nautical miles off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Mass. Together, they could generate about 800 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 400,000 homes. The administration estimates that the work will create about 3,600 jobs. The project would dwarf the scale of the country's two existing wind farms, off the coasts of Virginia and Rhode Island. Together, they produce just 42 megawatts of electricity. In addition to Vineyard Wind, a dozen other offshore wind projects along the East Coast are now under federal review. The Interior Department has estimated that by the end of the decade, some 2,000 turbines could be churning in the wind along the coast from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Electricity generated by the Vineyard Wind turbines will travel via cables buried six feet below the ocean floor to Cape Cod, where they would connect to a substation and feed into the New England grid. The company said that it expects to begin delivering wind-powered electricity in 2023. The Biden administration said that it intended to fast-track permits for other projects off the Atlantic Coast and that it would offer $3 billion in federal loan guarantees for offshore wind projects and invest in upgrades to ports across the United States to support wind turbine construction. [...] The administration has pledged to build 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind in the United States by 2030. It's a target the White House has said would spark $12 billion in capital investments annually, supporting 77,000 direct and indirect jobs by the end of the decade. If Mr. Biden's offshore wind targets are met, it could avoid 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, while creating new jobs and even new industries along the way, the administration said.

"Chromium-based web browser Opera is all set to fully integrate with blockchain domain name provider Unstoppable Domains," reports TechRadar, "in a bid to provide millions of its users with decentralized web access." Opera users will now be able to access decentralized websites hosted via the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) using Unstoppable Domains' popular .crypto NFT addresses from the Opera browser. This will include platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows, Mac or Linux. Right now, Opera has over 320 million monthly active users across its offerings, following the addition of a crypto wallet to its browsers in 2019.

Unstoppable Domains was launched in 2018 and provides domain names to users with no renewal fees. Users of Unstoppable Domains are granted full ownership and control when they claim a domain because it is minted as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Domain names such as .crypto replace complex wallet addresses for payments across over 40 cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges in addition to accessing the decentralized web through Opera.

Maciej Kocemba, Product Director at Opera said that the company believes in giving all people the ability to access the full web, regardless of the technology behind it.
The Opera product director was further quoted by Business Insider: "We have always supported web innovation, and the decentralized web or Web3 is the natural next wave. Making Unstoppable Domains accessible in the Opera browsers means our users can try blockchain technologies for themselves. Registering your .crypto domain, which is forever yours, is a great first step into Web3," the company's product director Maciej Kocemba said.

Opera is quickly becoming a leader in pushing for the adoption of Web 3.0, also often described as the decentralized web.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hackers backed by nation-states are exploiting critical vulnerabilities in the Pulse Secure VPN to bypass two-factor authentication protections and gain stealthy access to networks belonging to a raft of organizations in the US Defense industry and elsewhere, researchers said. At least one of the security flaws is a zero-day, meaning it was unknown to Pulse Secure developers and most of the research world when hackers began actively exploiting it, security firm Mandiant said in a blog post published Tuesday. Besides CVE-2021-22893, as the zero-day is tracked, multiple hacking groups -- at least one of which likely works on behalf of the Chinese government -- are also exploiting several Pulse Secure vulnerabilities fixed in 2019 and 2020.

Used alone or in concert, the security flaws allow the hackers to bypass both single-factor and multifactor authentication protecting the VPN devices. From there, the hackers can install malware that persists across software upgrades and maintain access through webshells, which are browser-based interfaces that allow hackers to remotely control infected devices. Multiple intrusions over the past six months have hit defense, government, and financial organizations around the world, Tuesday's post reported. Separately, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said that targets also include US government agencies, critical infrastructure entities, and other private sector organizations." Mandiant said that it has uncovered "limited evidence" that tied one of the hacker groups to the Chinese government. Dubbed UNC2630, this previously unknown team is one of at least two hacking groups known to be actively exploiting the vulnerabilities. Tuesday's blog post also referred to another previously unseen group that Mandiant is calling UNC2717. In March, the group used malware Mandiant identifies as RADIALPULSE, PULSEJUMP, and HARDPULSE against Pulse Secure systems at a European organization. Pulse Secure on Tuesday published an advisory instructing users how to mitigate the currently unpatched security bug.

Arm unveiled the biggest overhaul of its technology in almost a decade, with new designs targeting markets currently dominated by Intel, the world's largest chipmaker. From a report: The Cambridge, U.K.-based company is adding capabilities to help chips handle machine learning, a powerful type of artificial intelligence software. Extra security features will lock down data and computer code more. The new blueprints should also deliver 30% performance increases over the next two generations of processors for mobile devices and data center servers, said Arm, which is being acquired by Nvidia. The upgrades are needed to support the spread of computing beyond phones, PCs and servers, Arm said. Thousands of devices and appliances are being connected to the internet and gaining new capabilities through the addition of more chips and AI-powered software and services. The company wants its technology to be just as ubiquitous here as it is in the smartphone industry.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Live Science: A U.S. Air Force base in Texas has taken the first steps to guard against an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. But what, exactly, is an EMP, and how big is the threat...? An EMP is a massive burst of electromagnetic energy that can occur naturally or be generated deliberately using nuclear weapons. While many experts don't think EMPs pose a big threat, some people argue that these types of weapons could be used to cause widespread disruption to electricity-dependent societies.

"You can use a single weapon to collapse the entire North American power grid," said defense analyst Peter Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Commission, which was set up to assess the threat of EMP attacks but shut down in 2017. "Once the electric grid goes down, everything would collapse," Pry told Live Science. "Everything depends on electricity: telecommunications, transportation, even water.... We've arrived at a place where a single individual can topple the technological pillars of civilization for a major metropolitan area all by himself armed with some device like this," he said...

The threat posed by EMPs is far from settled, though. A 2019 report by the Electric Power Research Institute, which is funded by utility companies, found that such an attack would probably cause regional blackouts but not a nationwide grid failure and that recovery times would be similar to those of other large-scale outages... "There are other ways that adversaries can achieve some of the same outcomes, some of which would be cheaper and some of which would be less discernible," Frank Cilluffo, director of Auburn University's McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security, told Live Science. Such alternatives might include cyberattacks to take out critical infrastructure, including the electric grid, or even efforts to disrupt space-based communications or the GPS system that modern society is so reliant on.

Work to protect against EMPs makes sense... but these upgrades shouldn't distract from efforts to shore up defenses against more probable lines of attack, Cilluffo said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some Comcast customers received an unwelcome surprise yesterday morning when their upload speeds were suddenly lowered from 20Mbps to 16Mbps. Comcast was raising download speeds on its "Extreme Pro" tier from 600Mbps to 800Mbps -- good news, to be sure -- but the plan's relatively paltry 20Mbps upload speeds received a simultaneous 20 percent cut. Customers affected by the change complained to Comcast, and two of them emailed Ars yesterday. When we passed these complaints on to Comcast public relations, a spokesperson initially told us that "there was no change to the upstream speed." But after we pointed out that customers were in fact getting reduced upload speeds, Comcast investigated further and discovered it made a mistake while rolling out download-speed upgrades for some of its plans.

"The customers who received the [download] speed increase last night should now be seeing the correct upload speeds in their usage meter," Comcast told Ars last night. "When we pushed the speed increase overnight, there was an issue with how the upload speeds were provisioned, which is why the meter and our internal tools that our care agents use were showing the upload speed of 16Mbps. Once you notified us, we quickly looked into it and everything should be correct now." The fix is rolling out automatically so customers don't have to do anything, Comcast said. "For a period of less than 24 hours, customers would have seen slightly slower upload speeds," Comcast told us. "This issue only impacted customers in our Central markets who received this [download] speed increase from 600Mbps to 800Mbps." Comcast told us that the problem affected users in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

David Plummer is a retired Microsoft operating systems engineer, "going back to the MS-DOS and Windows 95 days." (He adds that in the early '90s he'd fixed a few handle leaks in the early source code of Linux, "and sent my changes off to Linus at Rutgers.")

This weekend on YouTube he shared his thoughts on "the classic confrontation: Windows versus Linux," promising an "epic operating systems face-off." Some highlights: On Usability: "Linux's itself lacks a proper user interface beyond the command line. That command line can be incredibly powerful, particularly if you're adept with Bash or Zsh or similar, but you can't really describe it as particularly usable. Of course most distributions do come with a desktop user interface of some kind if you prefer, but as a bit of a shell designer myself, if I might be so bold, they're generally pretty terrible. At least the Mint distribution looks pretty nice.

"Windows, on the other hand, includes by default a desktop shell interface that, if you set aside the entirely subjective design aesthetics, is professionally designed, usability tested and takes into consideration the varying levels of accessibility required by people with different limitations. In terms of usability, particularly if you do include accessibility in that metric, Windows comes out ahead..."

On Updates: "Windows users are well served by a dedicated Windows Update team at Microsoft, but the process has occasionally had its hiccups and growing pains. It's very easy to update a Linux system, and while there's no professional team sitting by the big red phone ready to respond to Day Zero exploits, the updates do come out with reasonable alacrity, and in some cases you can even update the kernel without rebooting.

"Keep in mind, however, that Linux is a monolithic kernel, which means that it's all one big happy kernel. Almost everything is in there. If they hadn't started to add that ability a few years back, you'd be rebooting for every driver install. The reality is that some parts of the Linux kernel are just going to require a reboot, just as some parts of the Windows system are going to as well. I think we can likely all agree, however, that Windows software is hardly selective about rebooting the system, and you're asked to do it far too often.

"While we're on the topic of upgrades, we can't overlook the fact that upgrades are generally free in the Open Source world, unless you're using a pre-built distribution from a vendor. To it's credit, though, I don't remember the last time Microsoft actually charged for an operating system upgrade if you were just a normal end user or enthusiast. Still, this point goes to Linux."
Plummer also says he agrees with the argument that open source software is more open to security exploits, "simply because, all else equal, it's easy to figure out where the bugs are to exploit in the first place," while proprietary software has professional test organizations hunting for bugs. "I think it's a bit of a fallacy to rely on the 'many eyeballs' approach..."

Yet he still ultimately concludes Linux is more secure simply because the vast universe of Windows makes it a much more attractive target. Especially since most Windows users retain full administrator privileges...

The Seattle Times reports: Haunted by the two deadly crashes of Boeing 737 MAX jets and his agency's role in approving the plane, veteran Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) safety engineer Joe Jacobsen is stepping forward publicly to give the victims' families "a firsthand account of what the truth is." In a detailed letter sent last month to a family that lost their daughter in the second MAX crash in Ethiopia two years ago this week, and in interviews with The Seattle Times, Jacobsen gave the first personal account by an insider of the federal safety agency's response to the MAX crashes...

He believes additional system upgrades are needed beyond Boeing's fix for the MAX that was blessed by the FAA and other regulators.

And Jacobsen argues that the plane would be safer if Boeing simply removed altogether the new software — the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) — that went wrong in the two crashes that killed 346 people. Jacobsen also calls for the replacement of some of the people at "the highest levels of FAA management," whom he blames for creating a culture too concerned with fulfilling the demands of industry. In his letter and interview, Jacobsen also described in more depth than previously reported how an autothrottle system issue may have contributed to the crash in Ethiopia in March 2019.

Boeing and the FAA said in separate statements they believe the MAX is fixed and safe, and that regulators worldwide have validated this conclusion...

A week after the Lion Air crash on Oct. 29, 2018, Jacobsen received an email from a colleague asking if there was an issue paper on MCAS. "This was the first day that I heard about MCAS," he wrote. "We had no issue papers, and if we had, I would have been the engineer responsible for providing technical content and comment on such an issue paper." When he did get a look at the system, Jacobsen said he was "shocked to discover that the airplane was purposely designed and certified to use just one AOA (Angle of Attack) input for a flight critical function."

If given the chance during the original certification, he's certain that he and "6 to 8 of our most experienced engineers in the Seattle office" would have identified that as a serious design flaw because there's "a long history of AOA sensor failures."

Instead, Boeing minimized MCAS and kept the details of its assessment to itself...
The article also argues that Boeing itself didn't grasp the danger of its system. "Michael Teal, 737 MAX chief engineer, testified to Congress that he first learned only after the Lion Air crash that MCAS relied on a single sensor.

U.K. authorities have launched an investigation into Apple's App Store over concerns it has a dominant role that stifles competition and hurts consumers. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said Thursday it was looking into "suspected breaches of competition law" by Apple. The announcement adds to regulatory scrutiny of the iPhone maker's app distribution platform, which is also the subject of three antitrust probes by the European Union's executive Commission. Apple said the App Store is "a safe and trusted place for customers" and a "great business opportunity for developers." The investigation was triggered in part by complaints from app developers that Apple will only let them distribute their apps to iPhone and iPad users through the App Store. The developers also complained that the company requires any purchases of apps, add-ons or upgrades to be made through its Apple Pay system, which charges up to 30% commission. "Millions of us use apps every day to check the weather, play a game or order a takeaway," Andrea Coscelli, the authority's CEO, said in a statement. "So, complaints that Apple is using its market position to set terms which are unfair or may restrict competition and choice -- potentially causing customers to lose out when buying and using apps -- warrant careful scrutiny." The watchdog said it would consider whether Apple has a "dominant position" in app distribution for Apple devices in the U.K., and, if it does, whether the company "imposes unfair or anti-competitive terms on developers" that results in less choice or higher prices for consumers buying apps and extra.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Volvo's entire car lineup will be fully electric by 2030, the Chinese-owned company said on Tuesday, joining a growing number of automakers planning to phase out fossil-fuel engines by the end of this decade. "I am totally convinced there will be no customers who really want to stay with a petrol engine," Volvo Chief Executive Hakan Samuelsson told reporters when asked about future demand for electric vehicles. "We are convinced that an electric car is more attractive for customers." The Swedish-based carmaker said 50% of its global sales should be fully-electric cars by 2025 and the other half hybrid models.

Owned by Hangzhou-based Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, Volvo will launch a new family of electric cars in the next few years, all of which will be sold online only. On Tuesday it unveiled the first of those models, the C40, a fully electric SUV, which will have an initial battery range of around 420 kilometers (261 miles). Volvo will include wireless upgrades and fixes for its new electric models -- an approach originally pioneered by electric carmaker Tesla Inc. This means the C40's range will be extended over time with software upgrades, Chief Technology Officer Henrik Green said. Volvo said it will "radically reduce" the complexity of its model line-up and provide customers with transparent pricing. The carmaker's global network of 2,400 traditional bricks-and-mortar dealers will remain open to service vehicles and to help customers make online orders.

necro81 writes: Back in March 2020, NASA shut down the Australia dish in its Deep Space Network for repairs and upgrades. For the duration of the outage, NASA had no means for communicating with Voyager 2. From the NYTimes:

On Friday, Earth's haunting silence will come to an end as NASA switches that communications channel back on, restoring humanity's ability to say hello to its distant explorer.

Because of the direction in which it is flying out of the solar system, Voyager 2 can only receive commands from Earth via one antenna in the entire world. It's called DSS 43 and it is in Canberra, Australia. It is part of the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which along with stations in California and Spain, is how NASA and allied space agencies stay in touch with the armada of robotic spacecraft exploring everything from the sun's corona to the regions of the Kuiper belt beyond the orbit of Pluto. (Voyager 2's twin, Voyager 1, is able to communicate with the other two stations.)

A round-trip communication with Voyager 2 takes about 35 hours --17 hours and 35 minutes each way....

While Voyager 2 was able to call home on the Canberra site's smaller dishes during the shutdown, none of them could send commands to the probe....

NASA ... did send one test message to the spacecraft at the end of October when the antenna was mostly reassembled.

An international team of astronomers has found signs that a habitable planet may be lurking in Alpha Centauri, a binary star system a mere 4.37 light-years away. It could be one of the closest habitable planet prospects to date, although it's probably not much like Earth if it exists. From a report: The new findings: The Alpha Centauri system's potential to host life-bearing worlds has always intrigued scientists, but no known exoplanets have ever been established there -- in part because the close proximity meant it was too bright for astronomers to really narrow in on any planetary objects in the area. But in a paper published in Nature Communications on Wednesday, an international team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile found a bright thermal imaging signal coming from the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A. The signal was derived through Near Earths in the Alpha Center Region (NEAR), a $3 million project supported by the ESO and Breakthrough Watch. The latter is an initiative backed by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to look for Earth-size rocky planets around Alpha Centauri and other star systems within 20 light-years of us. NEAR was able to push forward upgrades to the VLT that included a thermal chronograph, which can block stellar light and look for heat signatures coming from planetary objects as they reflect the light from their star. It found the signal around Alpha Centauri A after analyzing 100 hours of data.