The auction house Sotheby's is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash in a big way, reports Forbes. Stephenson teamed with special effects and prop company Weta Workshop to create "a bespoke piece, a cultural and historical artifact, stemming from the unique mythology of his new and coming Snow Crash universe." "The sword took us a year to create and is one of the finest pieces of craftsmanship WETA has created," said Sir Richard Taylor, founder of WETA workshop. "The whole collection is then housed in a crate from a fictitious gaming company that in theory has owned this sword that has now come up for auction. It is an insane, inworld fusion of ancient craft with the digital age." Taylor adds that "the swords Tansu storage case itself is an, automated, internally driven, magnetically activated, very unique box, with hidden compartments, secret items, coded messages and other inworld special nods to the world Neal authored."

This auction will not only celebrate Stephenson's legacy and the lore of Snow Crash but could also serve as a springboard to expand the Snow Crash universe further. [Taylor adds that Stephenson is exploring "future transmedia developments".] For Taylor, they are at the cusp of creating a body of creative work that blurs the line between the physical and the digital, which we have been affectionately calling 'Masterworks for the Metaverse'.
The sword will, of course, have its own unique NFT "capturing every detail of its physical twin," and someone's already bid $60,000 for it.

Also up for auction are two original manuscripts for Snow Crash and the painting used as the original edition's cover art — but also two forgotten artifacts from the book's afterlife:

• "The only surviving materials from the original graphic novel concept for Snow Crash titled Dioxin Posse, ca. 1989"

• "The leather jacket meant to be worn by Y.T. in the original graphic novel concept for Snow Crash, featuring the 'Elmo' logo used by her group, the "Dioxin Posse," ca. 1989."

Zoom has sacked its president, Greg Tomb, a former Google employee who only began working at the company around 10 months ago. Insider reports: Zoom said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Tomb's termination was effective as of Friday. He will receive severance benefits in line with his employment arrangements, which are payable upon a "termination without cause," according to the SEC filing. The filing was signed off by Aparna Bawa, the chief operating officer at Zoom.

It is unclear who will take over Tomb's position as president of Zoom. A spokesperson from Zoom told Insider the company won't find a replacement for Tomb and declined to comment further. Tomb's LinkedIn profile shows that he joined Zoom as president in June 2022. Before this, he worked at Google for more than a year as the vice president of sales for Google Workspace, Security, and Geo Enterprise. Tomb was also previously a president at software firm SAP and computer programming provider Vivido Labs, according to LinkedIn. He is a member of the board of Pure Storage, a tech company, his LinkedIn profile said.

The first PCIe 5.0 SSDs are slated to ship this year with massive heatsinks and predictably high prices. Tom's Hardware reports: There are multiple M.2 PCIe 5.0 SSDs slated to ship this year, and the first model looks to be the Gigabyte Aorus Gen5 10000, which as the name inventively implies can deliver up to 10,000 MB/s. Earlier rumors suggested the drive would be able to hit 12,000 MB/s reads and 10,000 MB/s writes, so performance was apparently reigned in while getting the product ready for retail. The Gigabyte Aorus SSD uses the Phison E26 controller, which will be common on a lot of the upcoming models. Silicon Motion is working on its new SM2508 controller that may offer higher overall performance, but it's a bit further out and may not ship this year. The other thing to note with the Aorus is the massive heatsink that comes with the drive, which seems to be the case with all the other Gen5 SSD prototypes we've seen as well. Clearly, these new drives are going to get just a little bit warm.

The Gigabyte drive is currently listed on Amazon and Newegg, though the latter is currently sold out while the former is only available via a third-party marketplace seller -- at a whopping $679.89 for the 2TB model. That's almost certainly not the MSRP or a reflection of what MSRP might end up being once the drive becomes more widely available, which should happen in the coming month or two.

The other PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSD that's now available is the Inland TD510 2TB, available at Microcenter for just $349.99 -- assuming you have a Microcenter within driving distance. Inland is Microcenter's own brand of drive, and while the cooler that comes with the SSD isn't quite as large as the Aorus, it does feature a small fan for active cooling. Word is that the fan can be quite loud for something this small, so not a great feature in other words. Like the Aorus 10000, the Inland TD510 uses the Phison E26 controller and has the same 10,000 MB/s reads and 9,500 MB/s writes specification. Where Gigabyte doesn't currently list random read/write speeds, the Microcenter page lists up to 1.5 million IOPS read and 1.25 million IOPS write for the Inland drive. Both drives also have an endurance rating of 1,400 TBW, with read/write power use of around 11W.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Password management software firm LastPass says one of its DevOps engineers had a personal home computer hacked and implanted with keylogging malware as part of a sustained cyberattack that exfiltrated corporate data from the cloud storage resources. LastPass on Monday fessed up a "second attack" where an unnamed threat actor combined data stolen from an August breach with information available from a third-party data breach, and a vulnerability in a third-party media software package to launch a coordinated attack. [...]

LastPass worked with incident response experts at Mandiant to perform forensics and found that a DevOps engineer's home computer was targeted to get around security mitigations. The attackers exploited a remote code execution vulnerability in a third-party media software package and planted keylogger malware on the employee's personal computer. "The threat actor was able to capture the employee's master password as it was entered, after the employee authenticated with MFA, and gain access to the DevOps engineer's LastPass corporate vault," the company said. "The threat actor then exported the native corporate vault entries and content of shared folders, which contained encrypted secure notes with access and decryption keys needed to access the AWS S3 LastPass production backups, other cloud-based storage resources, and some related critical database backups," LastPass confirmed. LastPass originally disclosed the breach in August 2022 and warned that "some source code and technical information were stolen."

SecurityWeek adds: "In January 2023, the company said the breach was far worse than originally reported and included the theft of account usernames, salted and hashed passwords, a portion of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) settings, as well as some product settings and licensing information."

Atomic weapons are complex, sensitive, and often pretty old. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good simulations to trust their weapons work. From a report: Flattened cities, millions of people burnt to death, and yet more tortured by radioactive fallout. That harrowing future may seem outlandish to some, but only because no nation has detonated a nuclear weapon in conflict since 1945. Countries including the US, Russia, and China wield hefty nuclear arsenals and regularly squabble over how to manage them -- only last week, Russia suspended participation in its nuclear arms reduction treaty with the US. Thankfully, nuclear warheads mostly just sit there, motionless and silent, cozy in their silos and underground storage caverns. If someone actually tried to use one, though, would it definitely go off as intended? "Nobody really knows," says Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear weapons historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology. The 20th century witnessed more than 2,000 nuclear tests -- the vast majority carried out by the US and the Soviet Union. And while these did prove the countries' nuclear capabilities, they don't guarantee that a warhead strapped to a missile or some other delivery system would work today.

Surprisingly, as far as we know, the US has only ever tested a live nuclear warhead using a live missile system once, way back in 1962. It was launched from a submarine. The Soviet Union had performed a similar test the previous year, and China followed in 1966. No nation has ever tested a nuclear warhead delivered by an intercontinental ballistic missile. The missile could blow up on the launchpad, explains Wellerstein. No one wants to clean that mess up. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has, sadly, brought the specter of nuclear weaponry to the fore once again. In February, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed new strategic nuclear weapons systems had been placed on combat duty, and he threatened to resume nuclear testing. Russia's former defense minister, Dmitry Medvedev, has been particularly vocal about his country's readiness to use nuclear weapons -- including against Ukraine. Russia has around 4,500 non-retired nuclear warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit that focuses on security. Roughly 2,000 are considered "tactical" -- smaller warheads that could be used on, for example, a foreign battlefield. To our knowledge, Russia has not begun "mating" those tactical warheads to delivery systems, such as missiles. Doing so involves certain safety risks, notes Lynn Rusten of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a think tank: "It would be really worrisome if we saw any indication that they were moving those warheads out of storage."

If they were brought into operation, multiple things could in theory go wrong with these weapons. For one thing, the delivery systems themselves might not be reliable. Mark Schneider, formerly of the US Department of Defense's senior executive service, has written about the many problems Russia has faced with its missiles so far during the war with Ukraine. Last spring, US officials said between 20 and 60 percent of Russian missiles were failing, either in terms of not launching or not hitting the intended target. That doesn't necessarily matter, though, notes Schneider. When firing a nuclear warhead with a big explosive yield, "accuracy is much less relevant," he says. Russia certainly has enough missiles to get a nuclear weapon more or less to where it wants -- even if it takes more than one attempt. But what about the warheads themselves? Modern thermonuclear devices are complex bits of machinery designed to initiate a specific explosive sequence, sometimes called a fission-fusion-fission reaction, which releases a massive amount of energy. Wellerstein points out that some warheads designed decades ago are still part of nuclear arsenals. Over time, their parts must be carefully checked for degradation and refurbished or replaced. But certain components can become unavailable due to changes in manufacturing capabilities.

Their video says it all. Its official page brags it can "Transform your Librem 5 into a laptop."

But it all apparently started because Purism is proud that their Librem 5 line of phones run "the same desktop applications as our full-sized computers, just on a smaller screens," according to the announcement by Purism president Kyle Rankin: When only using the Librem 5 in its mobile form factor, it's easy to overlook that this is happening, as adaptive applications morph to fit the smaller screen.... It's only when you dock the Librem 5 that you really experience the power of convergence.... We have wanted to provide a lapdock kit to customers for some time now, and I've personally evaluated almost all of the options available to pick which one would best showcase the Librem 5. I'm so happy to announce that today we are launching our new Lapdock Kit and in this post I will explain a bit more about what's included and why it's a great companion to a Librem 5 or Librem 5 USA.

A lapdock is a docking station (or "dock") combined with a laptop shell. One approach to docking your Librem 5 is to get a USB-C hub and attach it to a power supply, monitor, keyboard and mouse, and we even sell those accessories for our Librem 5. Now imagine taking all of those components and squeezing them into a laptop form-factor, add a battery to power it, and you have a lapdock.

From the outside a lapdock looks no different from a standard laptop, but the difference is that a lapdock has no CPU, RAM or storage of its own. Instead, it uses the Librem 5 as the computer. Once docked, the Librem 5's screen extends to the lapdock screen, and you can use the keyboard and mouse on the lapdock to drag windows back and forth between screens. All of the applications are running on the Librem 5 and once docked, it behaves like a laptop running PureOS. Even better, the lapdock's battery charges the Librem 5 while it's docked, extending its run time. After evaluating a number of different options, we have decided to offer the Nexdock 360 in our Lapdock Kit....

The Lapdock Kit allows you to realize the power of having all of your apps and all of your data in one device that can fit in your pocket and act like a phone when you need it to, but then transform into a laptop when you want to type out an email, do some image editing or watch a video on a larger screen. The Lapdock Kit also allows you to run thousands of other desktop applications that haven't yet been updated to adapt to a phone's screen. Traditional Linux applications like the full LibreOffice suite, GIMP, Wireshark, Gqrx and many others run well on the Librem 5 with the addition of the Lapdock Kit's extra screen real estate.
"It demonstrates why we refer to the Librem 5 as a mobile computer in your pocket, and not just as a phone."

According to The Register, Google has been paying Apple a portion of search revenue generated by people using Google Chrome on iOS. From the report: This is one of the aspects of the relationship between the two tech goliaths that currently concerns the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Though everyone knows Google pays Apple, Samsung, and other manufacturers billions of dollars to make its web search engine the default on devices, it has not been reported until now that the CMA has been looking into Chrome on iOS and its role in a search revenue sharing deal Google has with Apple. The British competition watchdog is worried that Google's payments to Apple discourage the iPhone maker from competing with Google. Substantial payments for doing nothing incentivize more of the same, it's argued. This perhaps explains why Apple, though hugely profitable, has not launched a rival search engine or invested in the development of its Safari browser to the point that it could become a credible challenger to Chrome.

Having Google pay Apple "a significant share of revenue from Google Search traffic" passing through its own Chrome browser on iOS is difficult to explain. Apple does not provide any obvious value to people seeking to use Google Search within Google Chrome. One attempt to explain the arrangement can be found in an antitrust lawsuit filed on December 27, 2021, and subsequently amended [PDF] on March 29, 2022. The complaint, filed by the Alioto Law Firm in San Francisco, claims Apple has been paid for the profits it would have made if it had competed with Google, without the cost and challenge of doing so. "Because more than half of Google's search business was conducted through Apple devices, Apple was a major potential threat to Google, and that threat was designated by Google as 'Code Red,'" the complaint contends. "Google paid billions of dollars to Apple and agreed to share its profits with Apple to eliminate the threat and fear of Apple as a competitor."

These alleged revenue sharing arrangements -- which are known in detail only to a limited number of people and have yet to be fully disclosed -- have been noted by the UK CMA as well as the US Justice Department, which along with eleven US States, filed an antitrust complaint against Google on October 20, 2020. Reached by phone, attorney Joseph M. Alioto, who filed the private antitrust lawsuit, told The Register it would not surprise him to learn that Google has been paying Apple for search revenue derived from Chrome. He said Google's deal with Apple, which began at $1 billion per year, reached as high as $15 billion annually in 2021. "The division of the market is per se illegal under the antitrust laws," said Alioto. Apple and Google are currently trying to have the case dismissed citing lack of evidence of a horizontal agreement between the two companies, and other supposed deficiencies.

The Biden administration has outlined how states and nonprofit groups can apply for $27 billion in funding from a "green bank" that will provide low-cost financing for projects intended to cut planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. From a report: The so-called Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, created by Congress in the landmark climate law approved last year, will invest in clean energy projects nationwide, with a focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities. The Environmental Protection Agency expects to award $20 billion in competitive grants to as many 15 nonprofit groups that will work with local banks and other financial institutions to invest in projects that reduce pollution and lower energy costs for families.

Another $7 billion will be awarded to states, tribes and municipalities to deploy a range of solar energy projects, including residential rooftop solar, community solar and solar storage. EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the green bank -- modeled after similar banks established in states such as Connecticut, New York and California -- will unlock billions of dollars in private investment to enable neighborhoods and communities "that have never participated in the clean-energy economy to participate in full force" in creating green jobs.

Security camera company Arlo is reversing course on its controversial decision to apply a retroactive end-of-life policy to many of its popular home security cameras. The Verge reports: On Friday, Arlo CEO Matthew McRae posted a thread on Twitter, announcing that the company will not remove free storage of videos for existing customers and that it is extending the EOL dates for older cameras a further year to 2025. He also committed to sending security updates to these cameras until 2026. The end-of-life policy was due to go into effect January 1st, 2023, and removed a big selling point -- seven-day free cloud storage -- for many Arlo cams. McRae now says all users with the seven-day storage service will "continue to receive that service uninterrupted." But he did note that "any future migrations will be handled in a seamless manner," indicating there are changes coming still.

The thread did not provide details on specific models other than using the Arlo Pro 2 as an example of a camera that will now EOL in 2025 instead of 2024, as previously announced, with security updates continuing until 2026. There was also no update on the plans to remove other features, such as email notifications and E911 emergency calling, or whether "legacy video storage" will remain. The EOL policy applied to the following devices: Arlo Gen 3, Arlo Pro, Arlo Baby, Arlo Pro 2, Arlo Q, Arlo Q Plus, Arlo Lights, and Arlo Audio Doorbell.

Grappling with slowing sales growth and rising costs, Amazon is squeezing more money from the nearly 2 million small businesses that sell products on its sprawling online marketplace. From a report: For the first time, Amazon's average cut of each sale surpassed 50% in 2022, according to a study by Marketplace Pulse, which sampled seller transactions going back to 2016. The research firm calculated the total cost of selling on Amazon by tallying the commission on each sale, fees for warehouse storage, packing and delivery, as well as money spent to advertise on a site where hundreds of millions of products jostle for attention. Paying Amazon for logistics services and advertising is optional, but most merchants consider these a necessary part of doing business.

Sellers have been paying Amazon more per transaction for six years in a row, according to Marketplace Pulse, but were able to absorb the increases because the company was attracting new customers and rapidly increasing sales. That abruptly changed when pandemic lockdowns eased and people began traveling and dining out again, sucking the oxygen out of online shopping. Last year, Amazon generated the slowest sales growth in its history.

System76 is announcing a "fully redesigned" version of its AMD-only Linux-powered "Pangolin" laptop with an upgraded memory, storage, processor, and display.

9to5Linux reports: It features the AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor with up to 4.7 GHz clock speeds, 8 cores, 16 threads, and AMD Radeon 680M integrated graphics.... a 15.6-inch 144Hz Full HD (1920 x 1080) display [using 12 integrated Radeon graphics cores] with a matte finish, a sleek magnesium alloy chassis, and promises up to 10 hours of battery life with its 70 Wh Li-Ion battery. It also features a single-color backlit US QWERTY Keyboard and a multitouch clickpad. Under the hood, the Linux-powered laptop boasts 32 GB LPDDR5 6400 MHz of RAM and it can be equipped with up to 16TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD storage. Another cool feature is the hardware camera kill switch for extra privacy....

As with all of System76's Linux-powered laptops, the all-new Pangolin comes pre-installed with System76's in-house built Pop!_OS Linux distribution featuring the GNOME-based COSMIC desktop and full disk-encryption or with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Australian government will examine surveillance technology used in offices of the defense department, Defense Minister Richard Marles said on Thursday, amid reports that Chinese-made cameras installed there posed a security risk. "This is an issue and ... we're doing an assessment of all the technology for surveillance within the defense (department) and where those particular cameras are found, they are going to be removed," Marles told ABC Radio in an interview. Opposition lawmaker James Paterson said his own audit had revealed almost 1,000 units of equipment by Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology and Dahua Technology Co -- two partly state-owned Chinese firms -- were installed across more than 250 Australian government offices.

Paterson, the shadow minister for cyber security and countering foreign interference, urged the government to urgently come up with a plan to remove all such cameras. Marles said the issue was significant though adding: "I don't think we should overstate it." Hikvision said it was "categorically false" to represent the company as a threat to Australia's national security as it could not access the video data of end users, manage end-user databases or sell cloud storage in Australia. "Our cameras are compliant with all applicable Australian laws and regulations and are subject to strict security requirements," a spokesperson said in an emailed response.

EverWind Fuels has become the first green hydrogen producer in North America to secure the necessary permits for a commercial-scale facility on Tuesday. Reuters reports: Provincial authorities in Canada granted environmental approval for EverWind to begin converting a former oil storage facility and marine terminal at Point Tupper in Nova Scotia into a green hydrogen and ammonia production hub. [...] EverWind expects the project's first phase, producing and exporting 200,000 tonnes per annum, to be online in 2025, before ramping up to 1 million tonnes per annum the following year. The company has agreements with German energy firms E.ON and Uniper to acquire the production. "To get the permit is a big deal," said Vichie, who co-founded Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners and also worked at Blackstone. The green hydrogen produced by EverWind's facility will be combined with nitrogen and converted into ammonia before being shipped, in liquid form, in tankers to Germany, where it can be retained as ammonia or turned back into green hydrogen.

Production during the facility's first phase will be powered using wind and solar assets to be built nearby, Vichie said. The company in December leased 137,000 acres (55,440 hectares) which will eventually site turbines generating 2 gigawatts of wind energy, that will power production in its second, larger phase. "This provides an amazing green growth path for Atlantic Canada, where they have some of the world's best wind resources," Vichie said. The overall cost of the project is expected to be around $6 billion. Three banks are helping arrange debt funding, while Vichie's family office is providing equity capital, he said. In other hydrogen-related news, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted Universal Hydrogen approval to fly its 40+ passenger hydrogen electric plane.

Hundreds of used electric vehicle battery packs are enjoying a second life at a California facility connected to the state's power grid, according to a company pioneering technology it says will dramatically lower the cost of storing carbon-free energy. Reuters reports: B2U Storage Solutions, a Los Angeles-based startup, said it has 25 megawatt-hours of storage capacity made up of 1,300 former EV batteries tied to a solar energy facility in Lancaster, California. The project is believed to be the first of its kind selling power into a wholesale market and earned $1 million last year, according to Chief Executive Freeman Hall. B2U's technology allows the EV battery packs to be bundled together without having to be taken apart first. Founded in 2019, the company is backed by Japanese trading company Marubeni Corp.

By extending the batteries' lives, project developers can save both resources and costs. Hall estimates that a system like B2U's could lower grid-scale battery capital costs by about 40%. "Second life and re-use helps the overall lifecycle be more energy efficient, given all the efforts that go into making that battery," Hall said in an interview. "So you're getting maximum value out of it." Batteries are worked hard during their years powering vehicles, and over time their range deteriorates. But they still hold value as stationary storage, which has gentler demands, Hall said. The batteries in the B2U system are up to 8-years old and once powered vehicles built by Honda and Nissan.

Microsoft is retiring the existing Teams Free version for small business in favor of the similarly-titled Teams (free) on April 12th, and legacy data won't carry over. Engadget reports: Your office will have to pay for at least the Teams Essentials plan ($4 per user per month) to preserve chats, meetings, channels and other key info. As Windows Central explains, the new Teams (free) tier will require a new account. Data in the old app, now rebadged as Teams Free (classic), will be deleted. Anything you haven't saved by then will be gone, including shared files you haven't downloaded.

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Don't buy an Android phone in China, boffins have warned, as they come crammed with preinstalled apps transmitting privacy-sensitive data to third-party domains without consent or notice. The research, conducted by Haoyu Liu (University of Edinburgh), Douglas Leith (Trinity College Dublin), and Paul Patras (University of Edinburgh), suggests that private information leakage poses a serious tracking risk to mobile phone customers in China, even when they travel abroad in countries with stronger privacy laws.

In a paper titled "Android OS Privacy Under the Loupe: A Tale from the East," the trio of university boffins analyzed the Android system apps installed on the mobile handsets of three popular smartphone vendors in China: OnePlus, Xiaomi and Oppo Realme. The researchers looked specifically at the information transmitted by the operating system and system apps, in order to exclude user-installed software. They assume users have opted out of analytics and personalization, do not use any cloud storage or optional third-party services, and have not created an account on any platform run by the developer of the Android distribution. A sensible policy, but it doesn't seem to help much. Within this limited scope, the researchers found that Android handsets from the three named vendors "send a worrying amount of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) not only to the device vendor but also to service providers like Baidu and to Chinese mobile network operators."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As a smartphone operating system, Android strives to be a lightweight OS so it can run on a variety of hardware. The first version of the OS had to squeeze into the T-Mobile G1, with only a measly 256MB of internal storage for Android and all your apps, and ever since then, the idea has been to use as few resources as possible. Unless you have the latest Samsung phone, where Android somehow takes up an incredible 60GB of storage. Yes, the Galaxy S23 is slowly trickling out to the masses, and, as Esper's senior technical editor Mishaal Rahman highlights in a storage space survey, Samsung's new phone is way out of line with most of the ecosystem. Several users report the phone uses around 60GB for the system partition right out of the box. If you have a 128GB phone, that's nearly half your storage for the Android OS and packed-in apps. That's four times the size of the normal Pixel 7 Pro system partition, which is 15GB. It's the size of two Windows 11 installs, side by side. What could Samsung possibly be putting in there?!

We can take a few guesses as to why things are so big. First, Samsung is notorious for having a shoddy software division that pumps out low-quality code. The company tends to change everything in Android just for change's sake, and it's hard to imagine those changes are very good. Second, Samsung may want to give the appearance of having its own non-Google ecosystem, and to do that, it clones every Google app that comes with its devices. Samsung is contractually obligated to include the Google apps, so you get both the Google and Samsung versions. That means two app stores, two browsers, two voice assistants, two text messaging apps, two keyboard apps, and on and on. These all get added to the system partition and often aren't removable.

Unlike the clean OSes you'd get from Google or Apple, Samsung sells space in its devices to the highest bidder via pre-installed crapware. A company like Facebook will buy a spot on Samsung's system partition, where it can get more intrusive system permissions that aren't granted to app store apps, letting it more effectively spy on users. You'll also usually find Netflix, Microsoft Office, Spotify, Linkedin, and who knows what else. Another round of crapware will also be included if you buy a phone from a carrier, i.e., all the Verizon apps and whatever space they want to sell to third parties. The average amount users are reporting is 60GB, but crapware deals change across carriers and countries, so it will be different for everyone.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, speaking on an earnings call that was mostly focused on holiday results, made an off-the-cuff remark that could be quite telling about the company's future. Cook was fielding a question about whether the iPhone's rising average sales price was sustainable. After all, a top-of-the-line model that cost $1,150 in 2017 (the iPhone X with 256 gigabytes of storage) now fetches $1,600 (the iPhone 14 Pro Max with 1 terabyte).

His response: The price increase is no problem. In fact, consumers could probably be persuaded to spend more. "I think people are willing to really stretch to get the best they can afford in that category," Cook said on the call, noting that the iPhone has become "integral" to people's lives. Consumers now use the device to make payments, control smart-home appliances, manage their health and store banking data, he said. While Cook wouldn't say if he anticipates further price increases, he made a good argument for why even more upscale iPhones could make sense -- especially if they deliver new features. Apple has internally discussed adding a higher-end iPhone to the top of its smartphone lineup.

At Samsung's first Galaxy Unpacked event of the year, the company unveiled its new Galaxy S23 devices: the Galaxy S23, S23 Plus, and Galaxy S23 Ultra. Here's what The Verge's Allison Johnson says about the most premium phone of the bunch, the Galaxy S23 Ultra: Compared to the outgoing model, it comes with an updated processor, a new 200-megapixel main camera sensor, and a tweak to the form factor. The built-in S Pen is still here, naturally. And thankfully the price hasn't inflated. In fact, the starting MSRP of $1,199.99 now comes with 256GB of storage -- double last year's base model. It's a little extra shine on what was already Samsung's star smartphone. [...]

The S23 Ultra also features a very slight exterior redesign. The long edges of the phone are slightly less curved, so there's more of a flat surface to grip when you're holding the device. The back panel and the screen also curve around the sides a bit less, so you might be less likely to run your S Pen off the edge of the device, which tended to happen with the more rounded design. [...] That's the short list of what's new. What's not new is basically everything else: a 5,000mAh battery, IP68 dust and water resistance, and either 8GB or 12GB of RAM depending on the configuration. Your color options this year are phantom black, lavender, green, and cream [...]. [T]he S23 Ultra is up for preorder today and starts shipping on February 17th. "Samsung's trio of flagships for 2023 offer some refined designs -- which look a little iPhone-like, if I'm being candid -- with some camera, battery, and processor improvements over last year's S22 generation," adds The Verge's Antonio G. Di Benedetto. You can view a full list of specs here.

A startup founded by SpaceX veterans aims to realize the potential of a technology whose big promises have never quite come through. From a report: 3D printers -- which create objects by layering materials according to a plan sent by a computer -- have gained a reputation for being unwieldy, expensive and slow. There has been more progress on industrial uses, although there, too, major players have fallen into a multiyear funk. Venture capitalists continue to dedicate significant resources to startups promising innovations to fix the technology's underlying flaws. One particularly radical approach comes from Freeform Future, a five-year-old startup based in Los Angeles. The company has raised $45 million so far from investors including Founders Fund, Threshold Ventures and Valor Equity Partners. Instead of trying to build a single machine that can print three-dimensional objects, Freeform is looking to turn entire buildings into automated 3D-printing factories that would use dozens of lasers to create rocket engine chambers or car parts from metal powder.

The company, which has never before discussed its approach publicly, says the technique could allow it to make metal parts 25 to 50 times faster than is possible with current methods and at a fraction of the cost. Freeform's co-founder and chief executive officer, Erik Palitsch, spent a 10-year stint at SpaceX, Elon Musk's aerospace company. [...] Freeform, on the other hand, is creating machines that can fill a warehouse. Its current factory, in Hawthorne, California, used to serve as Keanu Reeves's motorcycle storage facility. (Freeform still ends up with some of the actor's mail.)

Inside, machines shuffle objects back and forth along rapidly moving conveyors, so the system can work on many things at once. Other companies have set up multiple printers in a single facility, but this strategy doesn't improve their speed, it just increases scale by having them work in parallel. Freeform, by contrast, is redesigning the process by which 3D printing can turn raw materials into finished products. In a sense, it's akin to the establishment of the assembly-line process pioneered by 20th century industrialists like Henry Ford. "We have to achieve a state of mass production to open this up to more industries," says Palitsch. "And you simply can't get there with a conventional machine."