ASUS and Qualcomm have teamed up to make a smartphone that shows off some of the latter's mobile tech. Although the phone is ostensibly for the 1.6 million members of the Snapdragon Insiders program (which is a bit like Microsoft's Windows Insider early-access scheme), it'll be more broadly available by August. From a report: The snappily named Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders harnesses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 5G chipset with a 2.84 GHz octa-core processor and the Adreno 660 GPU. It has what Qualcomm describes as "the most comprehensive support for all key 5G sub-6 and mmWave bands" of any device, along with WiFi 6 and WiFi 6E support with speeds of up to 3.6 Gbps. You'll get 16GB of LPDDR5 memory and 512GB of storage. The 6.78-inch AMOLED display from Samsung has a 144 Hz refresh rate, which could help make it a solid gaming phone. The screen has up to 1,200 nits of brightness and it's HDR10 and HDR10+ certified. The phone has three rear cameras: a 64MP main lens, 12MP ultrawide camera and 8MP telephoto. The array can capture video in up to 8K. The device also has a 24MP front camera and AI auto-zoom. You'll be able to buy the $1,499 device at ASUSTeK's eShop and other retailers.

A prenatal test taken by millions of pregnant women globally was developed by Chinese gene company BGI Group in collaboration with the Chinese military and is being used by the firm to collect genetic data, a Reuters review of publicly available documents found. From the report: The report is the first to reveal that the company collaborated with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to develop and improve the test, taken in early pregnancy, as well as the scope of BGI's storage and analysis of the data. The United States sees BGI's efforts to collect and analyze human gene data as a national security threat. China's biggest genomics firm, BGI began marketing the test abroad in 2013. Branded NIFTY, it is among the world's top selling non-invasive prenatal tests (NIPT). These screen a sample of blood from a pregnant woman to detect abnormalities such as Down's syndrome in a developing fetus. So far more than 8 million women globally have taken BGI's prenatal tests, BGI has said. NIFTY is sold in at least 52 countries, including Britain, Europe, Canada, Australia, Thailand and India, but not the United States.

BGI uses leftover blood samples sent to its laboratory in Hong Kong and genetic data from the tests for population research, the company confirmed to Reuters. Reuters found the genetic data of over 500 women who took the test, including women in Europe and Asia, is also stored in the government-funded China National GeneBank in Shenzhen, which BGI runs. Reuters found no evidence BGI violated privacy agreements or regulations; the company said it obtains signed consent and destroys overseas samples and data after five years. "At no stage throughout the testing or research process does BGI have access to any identifiable personal data," the company said. However, the test's privacy policy says data collected can be shared when it is "directly relevant to national security or national defense security" in China. BGI said it "has never been asked to provide -- nor provided -- data from its NIFTY tests to Chinese authorities for national security or national defense purposes." "Non-invasive prenatal testing kits marketed by Chinese biotech firms serve an important medical function, but they can also provide another mechanism for the People's Republic of China and Chinese biotech companies to collect genetic and genomic data from around the globe," the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center said.

China's foreign ministry said Reuters' findings reflected "groundless accusations and smears" of U.S. agencies.

Nintendo is announcing a new Switch model today with a larger 7-inch 720p OLED display. While rumors had suggested this new Switch would ship with a new Nvidia chip inside, it doesn't look like that's the case. From a report: Nintendo lists this Switch OLED model as only supporting 1080p via TV mode, and rumors had suggested 4K support, thanks to a rumored Nvidia chip upgrade. The Switch OLED model will go on sale for $350 starting on October 8th. Other than the new screen, this revised model includes an adjustable stand for tabletop play, 64GB of built-in storage (up from 32GB), a new dock with a wired ethernet port built in, and improved audio for handheld or tabletop play. Nintendo only mentions "up to 1080p via HDMI in TV mode" for the TV dock, so the rumored 4K mode isn't part of this OLED Switch.

California's energy commission has funded dozens of projects "serving as test beds for policies that might lead to commercialization of microgrids," reports the Associated Press: When a wildfire tore through Briceburg nearly two years ago, the tiny community on the edge of Yosemite National Park lost the only power line connecting it to the electrical grid. Rather than rebuilding poles and wires over increasingly dry hillsides, which could raise the risk of equipment igniting catastrophic fires, the nation's largest utility decided to give Briceburg a self-reliant power system. The stand-alone grid made of solar panels, batteries and a backup generator began operating this month.

It's the first of potentially hundreds of its kind as Pacific Gas & Electric works to prevent another deadly fire like the one that forced it to file for bankruptcy in 2019.

The ramping up of this technology is among a number of strategies to improve energy resilience in California as a cycle of extreme heat, drought and wildfires hammers the U.S. West, triggering massive blackouts and threatening the power supply in the country's most populous state... "I don't think anyone in the world anticipated how quickly the changes brought on by climate change would manifest. We're all scrambling to deal with that," said Peter Lehman, the founding director of the Schatz Energy Research Center, a clean energy institute in Arcata. The response follows widespread blackouts in California in the past two years that exposed the power grid's vulnerability to weather. Fierce windstorms led utilities to deliberately shut off power to large swaths of the state to keep high-voltage transmission lines from sparking fire. Then last summer, an oppressive heat wave triggered the first rolling outages in 20 years. More than 800,000 homes and businesses lost power over two days in August.

During both crises, a Native American reservation on California's far northern coast kept the electricity flowing with the help of two microgrids that can disconnect from the larger electrical grid and switch to using solar energy generated and stored in battery banks near its hotel-casino. As most of rural Humboldt County sat in the dark during a planned shutoff in October 2019, the Blue Lake Rancheria became a lifeline for thousands of its neighbors: The gas station and convenience store provided fuel and supplies, the hotel housed patients who needed a place to plug in medical devices, the local newspaper used the conference room to put out the next day's edition, and a hatchery continued pumping water to keep its fish alive... During a few hours of rolling blackouts last August, the reservation's microgrids went into "island mode" to help ease stress on the state's maxed-out grid...
State facilities are planning to quadruple the amount of battery storage from 500 megawatts to 2,000 megawatts by this August.

But unfortunately, "There are setbacks too: An intensifying drought is weakening the state's hydroelectric facilities..."

Apple executives have taken swipes at Google in the past over its privacy practices. But the iPhone maker trusts Google enough so that over the past year it has dramatically increased the amount of Apple user data it stores in Google's cloud, The Information reported [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter. From the report: The increase cements Apple's status as the largest corporate client for Google's storage service, dwarfing other high-profile Google customers such as ByteDance and Spotify. As of mid-May, Apple was on track to spend around $300 million on Google cloud storage this year, which would represent an increase of roughly 50% from all of 2020, the person said. Inside Google's cloud unit, the person said, staffers have even given Apple a code name that hints at its size: Bigfoot.

While it will come as no comfort to those who had their Western Digital My Book Live NAS drives wiped last week, it seems they were attacked by a combination of two exploits, and possibly caught in the fallout of a rivalry between two different teams of hackers. Tom's Hardware reports: Initially, after the news broke on Friday, it was thought a known exploit from 2018 was to blame, allowing attackers to gain root access to the devices. However, it now seems that a previously unknown exploit was also triggered, allowing hackers to remotely perform a factory reset without a password and to install a malicious binary file. A statement from Western Digital, updated today, reads: "My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices are under attack by exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities present in the device ... The My Book Live firmware is vulnerable to a remotely exploitable command injection vulnerability when the device has remote access enabled. This vulnerability may be exploited to run arbitrary commands with root privileges. Additionally, the My Book Live is vulnerable to an unauthenticated factory reset operation which allows an attacker to factory reset the device without authentication. The unauthenticated factory reset vulnerability [has] been assigned CVE-2021-35941."

Analysis of WD's firmware suggests code meant to prevent the issue had been commented out, preventing it from running, by WD itself, and an authentication type was not added to component_config.php which results in the drives not asking for authentication before performing the factory reset. The question then arises of why one hacker would use two different exploits, particularly an undocumented authentication bypass when they already had root access through the command injection vulnerability, with venerable tech site Ars Technica speculating that more than one group could be at work here, with one bunch of bad guys trying to take over, or sabotage, another's botnet. Western Digital advises users to disconnect their device(s) from the internet. They are offering data recovery services beginning in July, and a trade-in program to switch the obsolete My Book Live drives for more modern My Cloud devices.

MojoKid writes: Intel recently shifted its storage strategy somewhat and is now catering its flagship Optane SSD P5800X, which was formerly targeted solely at data centers, to workstation users. The Optane SSD P5800X is based on a proprietary PCIe Gen 4x4 native controller and it features Intel's second-generation Intel Optane memory. In terms of performance, in some of the first benchmark numbers to hit the web, the drive is an absolute beast in the workloads that matter most for the vast majority of workstation users and enthusiasts. Random reads and writes are exceptionally good and access times at low queue depths are best-of-class. The Optane SSD P5800X's sequential transfers, while strong, aren't quite on the same level as some of today's fastest NAND-based PCIe 4 solid state drives, but they do exceed 7GB/s, which is still extremely fast. Overall, it's essentially the fastest SSD ever made. Endurance is off the charts too. However, all of that SSD horsepower comes at a price though, at a little over $2.50 per Gig and over $2,000 for an 800GB drive. With capacities of 400GB, 800GB and 1.6TB, the new Intel Optane SSD P5800X is shipping and available now.

Mac OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion can now be downloaded for free from Apple's website. "Apple has kept OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion available for customers who have machines limited to the older software, but until recently, Apple was charging $19.99 to get download codes for the updates," notes MacRumors. "The $19.99 fee dates back to when Apple used to charge for Mac updates. Apple began making Mac updates free with the launch of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, which also marked the shift from big cat names to California landmark names." From the report: Mac OS X Lion is compatible with Macs that have an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor, a minimum of 2GB RAM, and 7GB storage space. Mac OS X Mountain Lion is compatible with the following Macs: iMac (Mid 2007-2020), MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer), MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer), MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer), Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer), Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer), and Xserve (Early 2009). Macs that shipped with Mac OS X Mavericks or later are not compatible with the installer, however.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In early 2020, security researchers were baffled to discover that a ransomware gang had come up with an innovative trick that allowed it to run its payload inside virtual machines on infected hosts as a technical solution that bypassed security software. One year later, that technique has spread among the cybercrime underground and is now used by multiple ransomware operators. Initially seen with the Ragnar Locker gang in May 2020, the technique was also adopted by a Maze ransomware subgroup later in the year and has been recently spotted in attacks where the Conti and MountLocker ransomware strains were deployed. In hindsight, it should be no surprise that this technique is becoming more popular, as it has tangible benefits for any threat actor. The general idea behind such an attack is that a ransomware gang that has a small foothold on an infected host can download and install VM software. The ransomware gang will then start a VM instance, share the host computer's storage space with the VM, and then proceed to encrypt the victim's files from within the VM, where the host's antivirus software cannot reach and detect the ransomware during execution.

Some users who bought an external hard drive that's delightfully shaped like a book ended up with "terabytes' worth of data, years of memories and months of hard work vanished in an instant," reports Engadget. (Though according to a new statement from Western Digital, "Some customers have reported that data recovery tools may be able to recover data from affected devices, and we are currently investigating the effectiveness of these tools.")

But why were these deletions from "My Books" happening in the first place? A Slashdot reader shares the first clue from Engadget's report: Several owners looked into the cause of the issue and determined that their devices were wiped after receiving a remote command for a factory reset. The commands starting going out at 3PM on Wednesday and lasted throughout the night. One user posted a copy of their log showing how a script was run to shut down their storage device for a factory restore.
Friday Western Digital's statement offered much more detail: Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices are being compromised through exploitation of a remote command execution vulnerability... The log files we have reviewed show that the attackers directly connected to the affected My Book Live devices from a variety of IP addresses in different countries. This indicates that the affected devices were directly accessible from the Internet, either through direct connection or through port forwarding that was enabled either manually or automatically via UPnP.

Additionally, the log files show that on some devices, the attackers installed a trojan with a file named ".nttpd,1-ppc-be-t1-z", which is a Linux ELF binary compiled for the PowerPC architecture used by the My Book Live and Live Duo. A sample of this trojan has been captured for further analysis and it has been uploaded to VirusTotal.

Our investigation of this incident has not uncovered any evidence that Western Digital cloud services, firmware update servers, or customer credentials were compromised. As the My Book Live devices can be directly exposed to the internet through port forwarding, the attackers may be able to discover vulnerable devices through port scanning...

At this time, we recommend you disconnect your My Book Live and My Book Live Duo from the Internet to protect your data on the device by following these instructions on our Knowledge Base. We have heard customer concerns that the current My Cloud OS 5 and My Cloud Home series of devices may be affected. These devices use a newer security architecture and are not affected by the vulnerabilities used in this attack. We recommend that eligible My Cloud OS 3 users upgrade to OS 5 to continue to receive security updates for your device

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCGamesN: Microsoft has finally debuted Windows 11, and it's not just packing auto HDR and native Android apps. The long-teased DirectStorage API that's meant to cut down loading times on gaming PCs much in the same way the Xbox Velocity Architecture speeds things up on Microsoft's consoles is on its way, and it won't be coming to Windows 10 like we originally thought. The Windows 11 exclusive feature improves communication between your storage device and graphics card, allowing assets to load quicker without having to pass through the CPU first. Naturally, this means more time spent gaming and less time reading the same hints as you move from area to area.

It'll work best with systems that are dubbed 'DirectStorage Optimized', containing the right hardware and drivers for the job. If you're more of the DIY type that prefers to build the best gaming PC yourself, requirements demand an NVMe SSD with 1TB of storage or more. PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs and the latest GPUs from Nvidia and AMD will offer a better experience, but DirectStorage will still work with older standards like the third generation PCIe 3.0 -- you won't have much luck with 2.5-inch SATA drives, though. DirectStorage will only work with games built using DirectX 12, so there's no telling how many titles will support the feature when you upgrade to Windows 11 for free later this year.

The specs required to run Microsoft's new Windows 11 OS are only slightly higher than Windows 10's current requirements. All you'll need is a 64-bit CPU (or SoC), 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage. The Verge reports: This marks the end of Windows support for older 32-bit hardware platforms, even though it will continue to run 32-bit software. The fastest way to find out if your system can handle Windows 11 is to download Microsoft's PC Health App, which will automatically tell you if your specs and settings are ready for the new OS. The system requirements listed by Microsoft are [available here].

PuceBaboon writes: Ars Technica is reporting that some owners of Western Digital's My Book network-connected disk drives are experiencing data loss on their devices. The as yet unverified problem appears to be an externally initiated factory-reset, resulting in a loss of all existing data. At this early stage, Western Digital is warning users that they should disconnect their devices from the internet to protect their data. A thread on Western Digital's support forum alerted Ars Technica of the problem. Western Digital representatives write in an email: The incident is under active investigation from Western Digital. We do not have any indications of a breach or compromise of Western Digital cloud services or systems. We have determined that some My Book Live devices have been compromised by a threat actor. In some cases, this compromise has led to a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device. The My Book Live device received its final firmware update in 2015. At this time, we are recommending that customers disconnect their My Book Live devices from the Internet to protect their data on the device. We have issued the following statement to our customers and will provide updates to this thread when they are available: https://community.wd.com/t/action-required-on-my-book-live-and-my-book-live-duo/268147
UPDATE (6/26): Western Digital wrote Friday that "Some customers have reported that data recovery tools may be able to recover data from affected devices, and we are currently investigating the effectiveness of these tools." After reviewing logs from their affected customers, the company now believes the affected devices were directly accessible from the Internet, allowing attackers to remotely install a malicious Trojan file.

"Our investigation of this incident has not uncovered any evidence that Western Digital cloud services, firmware update servers, or customer credentials were compromised. As the My Book Live devices can be directly exposed to the internet through port forwarding, the attackers may be able to discover vulnerable devices through port scanning."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputing: The Ragnar Locker ransomware gang have published download links for more than 700GB of archived data stolen from Taiwanese memory and storage chip maker ADATA. A set of 13 archives, allegedly containing sensitive ADATA files, have been publicly available at a cloud-based storage service, at least for some time. [...] Two of the leaked archives are quite large, weighing over 100GB, but several of them that could have been easily downloaded are less than 1.1GB large. Per the file metadata published by the threat actor, the largest archive is close to 300GB and its name gives no clue about what it might contain. Another large one is 117GB in size and its name is just as nondescript as in the case of the first one (Archive#2). Judging by the names of the archives, Ragnar Locker likely stole from ADATA documents containing financial information, non-disclosure agreements, among other type of details.

The ransomware attack on ADATA happened on May 23rd, 2021, forcing them to take systems offline, the company told BleepingComputer. As the Ragnar Locker leak clearly shows, ADATA did not pay the ransom and restored the affected systems on its own. The ransomware actor claims stealing 1.5TB of sensitive files before deploying the encryption routine, saying that they took their time in the process because of the poor network defenses. The recently leaked batch of archives is the second one that Ragnar Locker ransomware publishes for ADATA. The previous one was posted earlier this month and includes four small 7-zip archives (less than 250MB together) that can still be downloaded.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on "renewed interest in cables that can power consumers in one country with electricity generated hundreds, even thousands, of miles away in another" and possibly even transcontinental, submarine electricity superhighways: Coal, gas and even nuclear plants can be built close to the markets they serve, but the utility-scale solar and wind farms many believe essential to meet climate targets often can't. They need to be put wherever the wind and sun are strongest, which can be hundreds or thousands of miles from urban centers. Long cables can also connect peak afternoon solar power in one time zone to peak evening demand in another, reducing the price volatility caused by mismatches in supply and demand as well as the need for fossil-fueled back up capacity when the sun or wind fade. As countries phase out carbon to meet climate goals, they'll have to spend at least $14 trillion to strengthen grids by 2050, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That's only a little shy of projected spending on new renewable generation capacity and it's increasingly clear that high- and ultra-high-voltage direct current lines will play a part in the transition.

The question is how international will they be...?
The article points out that in theory, Mongolia's Gobi desert "has potential to deliver 2.6 terawatts of wind and solar power — more than double the U.S.'s entire installed power generation capacity — to a group of Asian powerhouse economies that together produce well over a third of global carbon emissions..." The same goes for the U.S., where with the right infrastructure, New York could tap into sun- and wind-rich resources from the South and Midwest. An even more ambitious vision would access power from as far afield as Canada or Chile's Atacama Desert, which has the world's highest known levels of solar power potential per square meter. Jeremy Rifkin, a U.S. economist who has become the go-to figure for countries looking to remake their infrastructure for the digital and renewable future, sees potential for a single, 1.1 billion-person electricity market in the Americas that would be almost as big as China's. Rifkin has advised Germany and the EU, as well as China...

Persuading countries to rely on each other to keep the lights on is tough, but the universal, yet intermittent nature of solar and wind energy also makes it inevitable, according to Rifkin. "This isn't the geopolitics of fossil fuels," owned by some and bought by others, he says. "It is biosphere politics, based on geography. Wind and sun force sharing...."

If these supergrids don't get built, it will be because their time has both come and gone. Not only are they expensive, politically difficult, and unpopular — they have to cross a lot of backyards — their focus on mega-power installations seems outdated to some. Distributed microgeneration as close to home as your rooftop, battery storage, and transportable hydrogen all offer competing solutions to the delivery problems supergrids aim to solve.

In the longest biological experiment on the International Space Station yet, freeze-dried mouse sperm remained viable after nearly six years in space. Exposure to space radiation didn't seem to harm the sperm's DNA or the cells' ability to produce healthy "space pups," researchers report in Science Advances. Science News reports: That may be good news for future spacefarers. Scientists have worried that chronic exposure to space radiation might not only put astronauts at risk for cancer and other diseases, but also create mutations in their DNA that could be passed down to future generations. The new results hint that deep-space travelers could safely bear children. Studying how space radiation affects reproduction is tricky. Instruments on Earth can't perfectly mimic space radiation, and the ISS lacks freezers for long-term cell storage. So biologist Teruhiko Wakayama of the University of Yamanashi in Kofu, Japan and colleagues freeze-dried sperm, allowing it to be stored at room temperature. The team then sent sperm from 12 mice to the space station, while keeping other sperm from the same mice on the ground.

After returning the sperm cells to Earth, rehydrating them and injecting them into fresh mouse eggs, the team transferred those embryos to female mice. About 240 healthy space pups were born from sperm kept on the ISS for nearly three years; about 170 others were born from sperm kept on the space station for nearly six years. Genetic analyses revealed no differences between these space pups and mice born from sperm stored on the ground. Space pups that mated as adults had healthy children and grandchildren.

Apple has begun testing passkeys, a new authentication technology it says are as easy to use as passwords but vastly more secure. Part of iCloud Keychains, a test version of the technology will come with iPhones, iPads and Macs later this year. From a report: To set up an account on a website or app using a passkey, you first choose a username for the new account, then use FaceID or Touch ID to confirm that it's really you who's using the device. You don't ever pick a password. Your device handles generation and storage of the passkey, which iCloud Keychain synchronizes across all your Apple devices.

To use the passkey for authentication later, you'll be prompted to confirm your username and verify yourself with FaceID or Touch ID. Developers must update their login procedures to support passkeys, but it's an adaptation of the existing WebAuthn technology. "Because it's just a single tap to sign in, it's simultaneously easier, faster and more secure than almost all common forms of authentication today," Garrett Davidson, an Apple authentication experience engineer, said Wednesday at the company's annual WWDC developer conference.

Graphene can be used for ultra-high density hard disk drives (HDD), with up to a tenfold jump compared to current technologies, researchers at the Cambridge Graphene Center have shown. Phys.Org reports: The study, published in Nature Communications, was carried out in collaboration with teams at the University of Exeter, India, Switzerland, Singapore, and the US. [...] HDDs contain two major components: platters and a head. Data are written on the platters using a magnetic head, which moves rapidly above them as they spin. The space between head and platter is continually decreasing to enable higher densities. Currently, carbon-based overcoats (COCs) -- layers used to protect platters from mechanical damages and corrosion -- occupy a significant part of this spacing. The data density of HDDs has quadrupled since 1990, and the COC thickness has reduced from 12.5nm to around 3nm, which corresponds to one terabyte per square inch. Now, graphene has enabled researchers to multiply this by ten.

The Cambridge researchers have replaced commercial COCs with one to four layers of graphene, and tested friction, wear, corrosion, thermal stability, and lubricant compatibility. Beyond its unbeatable thinness, graphene fulfills all the ideal properties of an HDD overcoat in terms of corrosion protection, low friction, wear resistance, hardness, lubricant compatibility, and surface smoothness. Graphene enables two-fold reduction in friction and provides better corrosion and wear than state-of-the-art solutions. In fact, one single graphene layer reduces corrosion by 2.5 times. Cambridge scientists transferred graphene onto hard disks made of iron-platinum as the magnetic recording layer, and tested Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) -- a new technology that enables an increase in storage density by heating the recording layer to high temperatures. Current COCs do not perform at these high temperatures, but graphene does. Thus, graphene, coupled with HAMR, can outperform current HDDs, providing an unprecedented data density, higher than 10 terabytes per square inch.

Engineers at MIT have recently announced that they have successfully developed a programmable fiber. Interesting Engineering reports: Featured in Nature Communications, this new research could result in the development of wearable tech that could sense, store, analyze, and infer the activity(s) of its wearers in real-time. The senior author of the study, Yeol Fink, believes that digital fibers like those developed in this study could help expand the possibilities for fabrics to "uncover the context of hidden patterns in the human body that could be used for physical performance monitoring, medical inference, and early disease detection." Applications for the technology could even expand into other areas of our lives like, for example, storing wedding music within the bride's gown.

The fibers were created by chaining hundreds of microscale silicon digital chips into a preform to make a new "smart" polymer fiber. By using precision control, the authors of the study were able to create fibers with the continuous electrical connection between each chip of tens of meters. These fibers are thin and flexible and can even be passed through the eye of a needle. This would mean they could be seamlessly (pun intended) woven into existing fabrics, and can even withstand being washed at least ten times without degrading. This would mean this wearable tech could be retrofitted to existing clothing and you wouldn't even know it's there. Such innovation is interesting, but it could open up doors for applications only ever dreamed of.

The fiber also has a pretty decent storage capacity too -- all things considered. During the research, it was found to be possible to write, store, and recall 767-kilobit full-color short movie files and a 0.48-megabyte music file. The files can be stored for two months without power. The fibers also integrate a neural network with thousands of connections. This was used to monitor and analyze the surface body temperature of a test subject after being woven into the armpit of the shirt. By training the neural network with 270-minutes of data the team got it to predict the minute-by-minute activity of the shirt's wearer with 96% accuracy. The fibers are also controlled using a small external device that could have microcontrollers added to it in the future.

Apple is rolling out some updates to iCloud under the name iCloud+. Existing paid iCloud users are going to get those iCloud+ features for the same monthly subscription price. From a report: In Safari, Apple is going to launch a new privacy feature called Private Relay. It sounds a bit like the new DNS feature that Apple has been developing with Cloudflare. Originally named Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS, Private Relay could be a better name for something quite simple -- a combination of DNS-over-HTTPS with proxy servers. When Private Relay is turned on, nobody can track your browsing history -- not your internet service provider, anyone standing in the middle of your request between your device and the server you're requesting information from.

The second iCloud+ feature is 'Hide my email.' It lets you generate random email addresses when you sign up to a newsletter or when you create an account on a website. If you've used 'Sign in with Apple,' you know that Apple offers you the option to use fake iCloud email addresses. This works similarly, but for any app. Finally, Apple is overhauling HomeKit Secure Video. With the name iCloud+, Apple is separating free iCloud users from paid iCloud users. Basically, you used to pay for more storage. Now, you pay for more storage and more features. Subscriptions start at $0.99 per month for 50GB (and iCloud+ features).