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."

Hot Hardware reports: When it comes to mechanical hard disk drive (HDDs), you'd be very hard pressed to find any data on failure rates reported by any of the major players, such as Western Digital, Seagate, and the rest. Fortunately for us stat nerds and anyone else who is curious, the folks at cloud backup firm Backblaze frequently issue reliability reports that give insight into the how often various models and capacities give up the ghost. At a glance, Backblaze's latest report highlights that bigger capacity drives -- 12TB, 14TB, and 16TB -- fail less often than smaller capacity models. A closer examination, however, reveals that it's not so cut and dry.

[...] In a nutshell, Backblaze noted an overall rise in the annual failure rates (AFRs) for 2022. The cumulative AFR of all drives deployed rose to 1.37 percent, up from 1.01 percent in 2021. By the end of 2022, Backblaze had 236,608 HDDs in service, including 231,309 data drives and 4,299 boot drives. Its latest report focuses on the data drives. [...] Bigger drives are more reliable than smaller drives, case close, right? Not so fast. There's an important caveat to this data -- while the smaller drives failed more often last year, they are also older, as can be seen in the graph above. "The aging of our fleet of hard drives does appear to be the most logical reason for the increased AFR in 2022. We could dig in further, but that is probably moot at this point. You see, we spent 2022 building out our presence in two new data centers, the Nautilus facility in Stockton, California and the CoreSite facility in Reston, Virginia. In 2023, our focus is expected to be on replacing our older drives with 16TB and larger hard drives," Backblaze says.

Coal in the US is now being economically outmatched by renewables to such an extent that it's more expensive for 99% of the country's coal-fired power plants to keep running than it is to build an entirely new solar or wind energy operation nearby, a new analysis has found. From a report: The plummeting cost of renewable energy, which has been supercharged by last year's Inflation Reduction Act, means that it is cheaper to build an array of solar panels or a cluster of new wind turbines and connect them to the grid than it is to keep operating all of the 210 coal plants in the contiguous US, bar one, according to the study.

"Coal is unequivocally more expensive than wind and solar resources, it's just no longer cost competitive with renewables," said Michelle Solomon, a policy analyst at Energy Innovation, which undertook the analysis. "This report certainly challenges the narrative that coal is here to stay." The new analysis, conducted in the wake of the $370bn in tax credits and other support for clean energy passed by Democrats in last summer's Inflation Reduction Act, compared the fuel, running and maintenance cost of America's coal fleet with the building of new solar or wind from scratch in the same utility region. On average, the marginal cost for the coal plants is $36 each megawatt hour, while new solar is about $24 each megawatt hour, or about a third cheaper. Only one coal plant -- Dry Fork in Wyoming -- is cost competitive with the new renewables. "It was a bit surprising to find this," said Solomon. "It shows that not only have renewables dropped in cost, the Inflation Reduction Act is accelerating this trend."

"The manufacture of 'green steel' moved one step closer to reality Friday," reports the Associated Press, "as Massachusetts-based Boston Metal announced a $120 million investment from the world's second-largest steelmaker, ArcelorMittal."

Boston Metal will use the injection of funds to expand production at a pilot plant in Woburn, near Boston, and help launch commercial production in Brazil.

The company uses renewable electricity to convert iron ore into steel. Steel is one of the world's dirtiest heavy industries. Three-quarters of world production uses a traditional method that burns through train loads of coal to heat the furnaces and drive the reaction that releases pure iron from ore. Making steel releases more climate-warming carbon dioxide than any other industry, according to the International Energy Agency — about 8% of worldwide emissions. Many companies are working on alternatives.

The financial package by global steel giant ArcelorMittal is the biggest single investment made to date by the firm's carbon innovation fund. Microsoft is another investor. Tadeu Carneiro, CEO of Boston Metal, said its technology is "designed to decarbonize steel production at scale" and would "disrupt the industry." The company's technology was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professors Donald Sadoway and Antoine Allanore, experts in energy storage and metallurgy respectively, are the founders....

Boston Metal said it can eliminate all carbon dioxide from its steel production and hopes to ramp up production to millions of tons by 2026. As a bonus, it said, it is able to extract metals from slag normally considered waste.

GoTo (formerly LogMeIn) is warning customers that threat actors who breached its development environment in November 2022 stole encrypted backups containing customer information and an encryption key for a portion of that data. From a report: GoTo provides a platform for cloud-based remote working, collaboration, and communication, as well as remote IT management and technical support solutions. In November 2022, the company disclosed a security breach on its development environment and a cloud storage service used by both them and its affiliate, LastPass. At the time, the impact on the client data had yet to become known as the company's investigation into the incident with the help of cybersecurity firm Mandiant had just begun.

The internal investigation so far has revealed that the incident had a significant impact on GoTo's customers. According to a GoTo's security incident notification a reader shared with BleepingComputer, the attack affected backups relating to the Central and Pro product tiers stored in a third-party cloud storage facility. "Our investigation to date has determined that a threat actor exfiltrated encrypted backups related to Central and Pro from a third-party cloud storage facility," reads the notice to customers.

Shadow is making its first acquisition as it announced that it would snatch up Genymobile, the company behind Genymotion. From a report: Shadow is better known for its cloud computing service that works particularly well for cloud gaming. It also offers a cloud storage service based on Nextcloud. As for Genymobile, the French startup has been around for more than a decade. It has specialized in low-level Android development. And in particular, it has developed a popular Android emulator so that developers can test their apps on multiple configurations and following different scenarios. Terms of the deal are undisclosed. Genymobile's co-founder and CTO Arnaud Dupuis will stay at the company and act as the chief executive of Genymobile starting March 1st. Genymobile's existing CEO Tim Danford will step back from the company's day-to-day activities and move to an advisor role.

An anonymous reader writes: If you've searched for external SSDs on Amazon.com recently, you may have noticed something weird: mixed in with the 1TB and 2TB drives from brands like Samsung and SanDisk are a bunch of listings for 16TB SSDs, mostly around $100, and with surprisingly high user ratings. Every single one is a scam, even if they're shipped by Amazon. Josh Hendrickson -- Editor-in-Chief of Review Geek -- bought one of the "16TB SSDs" and tore it down to reveal a generic 64GB microSD card on a USB 2.0 card reader. Adrian Kingsley-Huges, writing for ZDNet in May 2022, found the exact same thing. Different packaging and different case colors, but the same trick.

The Verge confirmed that several fake 16TB drives showed up on the first page of results for "external SSD," and over half the results for "16TB SSD" were fakes -- the rest were either 16TB enterprise hard drives, multi-drive enclosures, and one actual 16TB external drive, which costs $2,400 and contains two 8TB SSDs. While the top fake had a 3.6-star rating, the next two were 4.8 and 4.2, respectively. How are such obvious fakes getting such high ratings? It's the scam Hendrickson calls "review merging," and Consumer Reports calls "review hijacking." As Hendrickson explains, some third-party sellers take old listings and replace them with new items, leaving the reviews but changing everything else. A quick scan of one fake 16TB drive listing showed five-star reviews for laptop chargers, basketball backpacks, stickers, screen protectors, Mardi Gras beads, and mousepads. The sellers gather good reviews for cheap generic products, swap in a more expensive fake, and then take it down when bad reviews start piling up.

The Mac Mini is Apple's next computer to get the bump up to the M2 chip -- and this time around, it's being offered with the Pro version of Apple's processor, too. From a report: The new model was announced this morning in a press release, with a starting price of $599, and is available to order today, with availability beginning Tuesday, January 24th. The Mac Mini's baseline configuration includes the M2 chip, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. It features an HDMI port, Gigabit Ethernet, and a standard headphone jack, alongside two USB-A ports and two Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) ports -- an upgrade from the Thunderbolt 3 ports on the previous generation.

The M2 Pro configuration of the new Mac Mini features 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD storage, and an additional two Thunderbolt 4 ports alongside the ports already available on the standard M2 model. This configuration will set you back $1,299, more than double the price of the baseline model. This is the first time Apple has brought Pro-tier chips to the Mini. The Mini was previously only offered with the entry-level M1 chip -- the same one used in MacBook Air. This time, it's being offered with one of Apple's more powerful chip series. The M2 Max, however, is so far only being offered in the MacBook Pro.

Swiss company Climeworks announced Thursday that it has successfully taken carbon dioxide out of the air and put it in the ground where it will eventually turn into rock in a process that has been verified by an independent third-party auditor. It the first time a company has successfully taken carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, put it underground to be locked away permanently and delivered that permanent carbon removal to a paying customer. CNBC reports: The development has been a long time coming. Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher co-founded Climeworks in 2009 as a spinoff of ETH Zurich, the main technical university in Switzerland's largest city. They have been scaling the technology for direct carbon removal, wherein machines vacuum greenhouse gasses out of the air. have all bought future carbon removal services from Climeworks in a bid to help kick-start the nascent industry. Now Climeworks is actually removing the carbon dioxide and putting it underground in a process that has been certified by DNV, an independent auditor.

The cost of carbon dioxide removal and storage for these corporate clients is confidential and depends on what quantity of carbon dioxide the companies want to have removed and over what period of time. But the general price for carbon removal runs to several hundred dollars per ton. Individuals can also pay to Climeworks to remove carbon dioxide to offset their personal emissions.

Climeworks' largest carbon dioxide removal facility is located in Iceland, where it partners with CarbFix, which stores the gas underground. CarbFix dissolves carbon dioxide in water then intermingles that mixture with basalt rock formations. Natural processes convert the material to solid carbonate minerals in about two years. In June, Climeworks announced it had begun construction of its second commercial-sized plant in Iceland that will capture and store 36,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide.

Sony has a pair of new Android Walkmans out, the NW-A300 and NW-ZX700. Ars Technica reports: We'll start with the most consumer-friendly of the two, the NW-A300. This basic design debuted in 2019 with the NW-A105, but that shipped with Android 9. This is an upgraded version of that device with a less-ancient version of Android, a new SoC, and a scalloped back design. In Sony's home of Japan, the 32GB version is 46,000 yen (about $360), while in Europe, it's 399 euro (about $430). The NW-A300 is a tiny little device that measures 56.6x98.5x12 mm, so pretty close to a deck of playing cards. [...] The front is dominated by a 3.6-inch, 60 Hz, 1280x720 touchscreen LCD. There's 32GB of storage, and the device supports Wi-Fi 802.11AC and Bluetooth 5. That's about all Sony wants to talk about for official specs. It touts "longer battery life" but won't say how big the battery is, promising only "36 hours* of 44.1 KHz FLAC playback, up to 32 hours* of 96 KHz FLAC High-Resolution Audio playback." Presumably, that's all with the screen off. [...] This is a music player, so of course, there's a headphone jack on the bottom of the unit. You'll also find a spot for a lanyard, a speedy USB-C 3.2 Gen1 port for quick music transfers, and a MicroSD slot for storing all your music. Buttons along the side of the device also give you every music control you could want, like a hold switch, previous, play/pause, next, volume controls, and power.

There's another new Sony Walkman, the NW-ZX700. It's 104,500 yen ($818) in Japan, and while that sounds like a lot for a portable music player, it's actually a relative bargain compared to the "Signature Series" NW-WM1ZM2, which goes for an eye-popping $3,700 thanks to audiophile hocus-pocus like a "gold plated, oxygen-free, copper body." Anyway, back to this $800 model. Unlike regular phone equipment, this has a proper audio amplifier with big, beefy capacitors to power the analog audio output. That makes it much bigger than the A300, at 72.6x132 mm and a whopping 17 mm thick. It also has two audio outs: a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack and a 4.4 mm "balanced" audio jack, which is used by some high-end audio equipment. I'm sure Sony has a wonderful headphone collection to match. [...] Both this and the A300 use the S-Master HX digital amplifier chip, which supports Sony's high-resolution "NativeDSD" audio format, which is also used on Super Audio CDs. If you're some kind of heathen that is just streaming 128kb Spotify, Sony's "DSEE Ultimate" feature dubiously claims to be able to "upscale" your music with AI. There's also a "Vinyl Processor" that will add record player noises to your audio for an "authentic listening experience."

Microsoft is introducing a new consumer tier to its Microsoft 365 subscription offerings. From a report: Priced at $1.99 per month, Microsoft 365 Basic is designed to replace the 100GB OneDrive storage option with some extra features that sit in between the free option and the $6.99 a month Personal subscription. Microsoft 365 Basic will be available worldwide on January 30th with 100GB of cloud storage, an ad-free Outlook web and mobile experience, and enhanced security features. The security features include data encryption for an Outlook mailbox, suspicious link checking, and virus / malware scanning for attachments. Existing OneDrive 100GB storage customers will be automatically upgraded to Microsoft 365 Basic at the same $1.99 monthly rate. [...] The main difference between the $6.99 Personal subscription and this new $1.99 Basic one (other than the amount of cloud storage) is that Microsoft 365 Basic doesn't include access to the desktop versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps. Basic subscribers will have to use the web or mobile versions instead.

Seattle public schools have sued the tech giants behind TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, accusing them of creating a "mental health crisis among America's Youth." Engadget reports: The 91-page lawsuit (PDF) filed in a US district court states that tech giants exploit the addictive nature of social media, leading to rising anxiety, depression and thoughts of self-harm. "Defendants' growth is a product of choices they made to design and operate their platforms in ways that exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of their users into spending more and more time on their platforms," the complaint states. "[They] have successfully exploited the vulnerable brains of youth, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of Defendants' social media platforms."

Harmful content pushed to users includes extreme diet plants, encouragement of self-harm and more, according to the complaint. That has led to a 30 percent increase between 2009 and 2019 of students who report feeling "so sad or hopeless... for two weeks or more in a row that [they] stopped doing some usual activities." That in turn leads to a drop in performance in their studies, making them "less likely to attend school, more likely to engage in substance use, and to act out, all of which directly affects Seattle Public Schools' ability to fulfill its educational mission." Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act means that online platforms aren't responsible for content posted by third parties. However, the lawsuit claims that the provision doesn't protect social media companies for recommending, distributing and promoting content "in a way that causes harm."

"To date, about 500 people have been put in cryogenic stasis after legal death," writes a Bloomberg Opinion technology columnist, "with the majority of them in the U.S.

"But a few thousand more, including Emil Kendziorra, are on waiting lists, wearing bracelets or necklaces with instructions for emergency responders. " Kendziorra, 36, runs Berlin-based Tomorrow Biostasis GmbH, one of the first cryonics businesses in Europe to join a market dominated by American firms organizations like The Alcor Life Extension Foundation and The Cryonics Institute. The former cancer doctor has several hundred people on his firm's waiting list. They skew to their late 30s, male and tend to work in technology. Patients can choose to have their entire body preserved and held upside down in a four-person dewars, a thermos-like aluminum vat filled with liquid nitrogen, or just preserve their brain, which is cheaper.

Kendziorra says cryopreservation overall has become less expensive over the past few decades on an inflation-adjusted basis, a claim that he bases on historic prices published by his peers, who he says are making a collective effort to bring down costs. That could be critical to shifting cryonics from a fringe pursuit to something a little more mainstream, especially since it is no longer just for billionaires like PayPal Inc. co-founder Peter Thiel (who has reportedly signed up with Alcor). Kendziorra, for instance, has made cryonics just another monthly subscription by capitalizing on insurance, he told me during a Twitter Spaces discussion on cryonics last month. His customers pay a 25-euro ($26.54) monthly fee to Tomorrow Biostasis, and they also make the company the beneficiary of a minimum 100,000-euro life insurance payout upon their legal death. Kendziorra says that covers the full cost of cryonics including the biggest outlay: maintenance over the next century or so.

All told, most of his customers are paying about 50 euros a month for both the company's subscription fee and the life insurance policy for the option of a long sleep at death. Of course, most companies don't survive for more than a century, so Tomorrow Biostasis also partners with a non-profit group in Switzerland to carry out the storage of customers on its behalf.... The domain itself is largely funded by wealthy individuals including CEOs of tech companies, angel investors and scientists, Kendziorra says, adding that for them to invest in his own firm, their primary motivation shouldn't be "monetary" but rather to help further the field.

The mechanics all sound sensible, but that still leaves the question of whether cryonics will work, medically speaking. Doctors and scientists have used words like quackery, pseudoscience and outright fraud to describe the field. Clive Cohen, a neuroscientist from Kings College London, has called it a "hopeless aspiration that reveals an appalling ignorance of biology." The Association of Cryobiology has compared it to turning a hamburger back into a cow.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) will now automatically encrypt all new objects added on buckets on the server side, using AES-256 by default. BleepingComputer reports: While the server-side encryption system has been available on AWS for over a decade, the tech giant has enabled it by default to bolster security. Administrators will not have to take any actions for the new encryption system to affect their buckets, and Amazon promises it won't have any negative performance impact. Administrators may leave the system to encrypt at the default 256-bit AES or choose one of the alternative methods, namely SSE-C or SSE-KMS.

The first option (SSE-C) gives bucket owners control of the keys, while the second (SSE-KMS) lets Amazon do the key management. However, bucket owners can set different permissions for each KMS key to maintain more granular control over the asset access system. To confirm that the changes have been applied to your buckets, admins can configure CloudTrail to log data events at no extra cost. Then perform a test object upload, and look in the event logs for the "SSEApplied": "Default_SSE_S3." field in the log for the uploaded file. To retroactively encrypt objects already in S3 buckets, follow this official guide. "This change puts another security best practice into effect automatically -- with no impact on performance and no action required on your side," reads Amazon's announcement.

"S3 buckets that do not use default encryption will now automatically apply SSE-S3 as the default setting. Existing buckets currently using S3 default encryption will not change."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, Mercedes-Benz announced that it is entering the DC fast-charging arena for electric vehicles. The German automaker is in the midst of an electrification push and a plan to be carbon-neutral by 2039, and it evidently doesn't believe that the current charging infrastructure is as good as its new EVs, so it's doing something about the situation. Mercedes says it plans to deploy more than 10,000 fast chargers around the world, starting in North America. The new network is separate from and independent of Ionity, the European fast-charging network backed by Mercedes, BMW, Ford, and Volkswagen. Here in the US, Mercedes is partnering with the charging company ChargePoint and MN8 Energy, a solar and battery-storage company. Together, they will deploy more than 2,500 DC fast chargers at more than 400 sites around the US by 2027.

The chargers will feature plug-and-charge compatibility and won't be restricted to Mercedes' EVs. Mercedes also says the locations and surroundings will be carefully chosen -- all too often, banks of DC chargers are located in desolate and lonely corners of mall parking lots that can make charging at night a stressful experience for some drivers. So the OEM plans to build the chargers "with food outlets and restrooms situated nearby." It also says there will be surveillance cameras and other security in place to provide "a safe and secure charging environment." Expect a minimum of four DC chargers at each hub, similar to an Electrify America charging location. But some hubs will have as many as 12 chargers, and there are plans for as many as 30 in some locations. The hubs will use ChargePoint's modular Express Plus system, which is capable of up to 500 kW per charging port, although Mercedes says that chargers will be "up to 350 kW" in power. And load management will ensure that if multiple EVs are charging at the same time, one charger doesn't end up throttling the rest.

In keeping with the company's 2039 sustainability goals, the electricity it uses will come from green energy suppliers or come with renewable energy certificates. Some hubs will use solar to power the lighting and security cameras. None of this will be particularly cheap. In fact, the initiative will cost more than $1.1 billion (1 billion euro) over the next six or seven years, with the costs split evenly between Mercedes and MN8 Energy. And this is just the start -- plans for more charger deployment in Europe and China will be announced in the future.

At CES this week, AMD announced a suite of new chips for notebooks and desktop computers, with one notable announcement being the company's new AMD Ryzen 7040 series of processors for ultrathin notebooks that will compete with Apple's M1 Pro and M2 chips. MacRumors reports: The AMD Ryzen 7040 series of chips are "ultrathin" processors based on the 4nm process, and the highest-end chip part of the family is the Ryzen 9 7940HS. The Ryzen 9 7940HS has eight cores, 16 threads, and 5.2GHz boost speeds. Announcing the new chip, AMD CEO Lisa Su made bold claims about its performance, saying it's up to 30% faster than Apple's M1 Pro chip. In specific tasks, AMD claims the chip is 34% faster in multiprocessing workloads than the M1 Pro and 20% faster than the M2 in AI tasks.

One cornerstone of Apple silicon is energy efficiency, and in that area, AMD claims the new AMD Ryzen 7040 series will offer 30+ hours of video playback in ultrathin notebooks. Built directly into the series of chips is Ryzen AI, a dedicated AI engine embedded in the processor. AMD chips configured with Ryzen AI are 20% faster in AI tasks than Apple's M2 chip while being 50% more energy efficient, according to the company.

To showcase the new chip's performance, AMD compared the performance of a high-end Intel chip, the M1 Pro, and its new Ryzen 9 7940HS processor rendering an object in the popular application Blender. In the time-lapsed video shown on stage, the M1 Pro lags behind the Ryzen 9 7940HS in rendering the object. AMD says it made its performance claims against a MacBook Pro with M1 Pro, 32GB of unified memory, and 1TB of SSD storage running macOS Monterey. The M1 Pro is not Apple's highest-end and most powerful chip for laptops, which is the M1 Max, and AMD did not compare its chip to the M1 Max. After roasting the M1 Pro, Ian Zelbo from FrontPageTech noticed AMD running their CES keynote on multiple 14-inch MacBook Pros. "Obviously these are contracted employees, and it means nothing," he tweeted. "I just always find stuff like this hilarious."

We do too... It's akin to the "Twitter for iPhone" line on tweets that have gotten Android promoters in hot water multiple times over the past several years.

One of the prominent developers behind the bitcoin blockchain said he has asked the FBI to assist him in recovering $3.6 million worth of the digital coin that was stolen from his storage wallets on New Year's Eve. From a report: Luke Dashjr is a developer of the Bitcoin Core, an app that runs 97 percent of the nodes making up the bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin Core derives from the software developed by the anonymous bitcoin inventor who uses the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. That software was called simply Bitcoin but was later changed to Bitcoin Core to distinguish it from the coin. Dashjr has been contributing to the Bitcoin Core since 2011 and has long championed the concept of decentralization that the cryptocurrency was founded on.

On New Year's Day, Dashjr took to Twitter to report that his entire bitcoin holdings -- worth roughly $3.6 million -- were "basically all gone." He said the hack stemmed from the compromise of a PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) key that he used to ensure that his downloads of Bitcoin Core and a smaller app known as Bitcoin Knots weren't laced with malware. He said all his computers were compromised and urged people to hold off downloading new versions for the time being. "So to be clear: DO NOT DOWNLOAD BITCOIN KNOTS AND TRUST IT UNTIL THIS IS RESOLVED," he wrote. "If you already did in the last few months, consider shutting that system down for now." In the same thread, the developer said he had contacted the FBI and police but hadn't received a response. "What the heck @FBI @ic3. Why can't I reach anyone???" he wrote. "I paid those taxes and the police don't care. What a scam."

An anonymous reader shares a report: EA says that a temporary "data storage issue" led to the corruption of many Madden NFL 23 players' Connected Franchise Mode (CFM) save files last week. What's worse, the company now estimates it can recover fewer than half of those corrupted files from a backup. The issue started last Monday, December 26, when EA tweeted that it was "aware of players experiencing connection issues when trying to connect to CFM." That problem lasted until Wednesday, December 28, when EA announced that subsequent server maintenance meant that "users should now be able to play CFM without issue."

But users who attempted to log in to play online franchise games during a 22-hour period ranging from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning saw their franchise save data corrupted by the aforementioned "data storage issue," as EA confirmed over the weekend. And while EA says some of those corrupted save files can be recovered from a backup, it adds that the development team is "currently projecting around 40% of leagues to be recovered." Players that didn't log in during the outage period last week should be unaffected, EA says, adding that CFM is now "up and running" and is "safe to log in and play." But the company offered a similar message on Wednesday afternoon, just before the period that led players who logged in to lose their save files in the first place.

Alienware is unveiling a refreshed lineup of its M- and X-series gaming laptops at CES 2023. Like some other laptop companies, including Razer and Acer, Alienware is shifting focus away from 15- and 17-inch laptops toward thin, powerful 16- and 18-inch models. From a report: The brand is going big with the new M18, an 18-inch model that's being pitched as a desktop replacement. This is actually a resurrection following the M18's previous spec update way back in 2015. The 2023 model will feature Intel's 13th Generation HX CPUs and Nvidia's RTX 4090 mobile graphics card. The latest processors and graphics options from AMD will be available in the M18 later in 2023. Not only is the M18 massive and powerful -- it's a big deal in other ways. It can be configured with an 18-inch QHD Plus screen in the taller 16:10 aspect ratio and set up to include a ton of ports, including two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI 2.1, Ethernet, an SD card reader, and many others. It supports user-upgradeable dual DDR5 RAM slots, and you can also cram up to 9TB of NVMe M.2 storage in it. This model starts at $2,099, but the first configuration it's releasing will cost $2,899.