During the CES 2023 in Las Vegas today, Asus announced an upcoming feature that allows users to view and work with content in 3D without wearing 3D glasses. Ars Technica reports: Similar technology has been used in a small number of laptops and displays before, but Asus is incorporating the feature for the first time in OLED laptop screens. Combined with high refresh rates, unique input methods like an integrated dial, and the latest CPUs and laptop GPUs, the company is touting the laptops with the Asus Spatial Vision feature as powerful, niche options for creative professionals looking for new ways to work.

Asus’ Spatial Vision 3D tech is debuting on two laptops in Q2 this year: the ProArt Studiobook 16 3D OLED (H7604) and Vivobook Pro 16 3D OLED (K6604). The laptops each feature a 16-inch, 3200×2000 OLED panel with a 120 Hz refresh rate. The OLED panel is topped with a layer of optical resin, a glass panel, and a lenticular lens layer. The lenticular lens works with a pair of eye-tracking cameras to render real-time images for each eye that adjust with your physical movements. In a press briefing, an Asus spokesperson said that because the OLED screens claim a low gray-to-gray response time of 0.2 ms, as well as the extremely high contrast that comes with OLED, there’s no crosstalk between the left and right eye’s image, ensuring more realistic looking content. However, Asus’ product pages for the laptops acknowledge that experiences may vary, and some may still suffer from “dizziness or crosstalk due to other reasons, and this varies according to the individual.” Asus said it’s looking to offer demos to users, which would be worth trying out before committing to this unique feature.

On top of the lenticular lens is a 2D/3D liquid crystal switching layer, which is topped with a glass front panel with an anti-reflective coating. According to Asus, it’ll be easy to switch from 2D mode to 3D and back again. When the laptops aren’t in 3D mode, their display will appear as a highly specced OLED screen, Asus claimed. The laptops can apply a 3D effect to any game, movie, or content that supports 3D. However, content not designed for 3D display may appear more “stuttery,” per a demo The Verge saw. The laptops are primarily for workers working with and creating 3D models and content, such as designers and architects. The two laptops will ship with Spatial Vision Hub software. It includes a Model Viewer, Player for movies and videos, Photo Viewer for transforming side-by-side photos shot with a 180-degree camera into one stereoscopic 3D image, and Connector, a plug-in that Asus’ product page says is compatible with “various apps and tools, so you can easily view any project in 3D.”

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The WPC announced during CES 2023 that the next generation of the Qi standard, named “Qi2,” was built with Apple’s help. 9to5Mac reports: The new standard aims to improve the efficiency and interoperability of the technology, which is why it will have a “Magnetic Power Profile” at its core. As explained by WPC, this Magnetic Power Profile essentially works like Apple’s MagSafe. As a result, Qi2 accessories will be perfectly aligned with the devices, thus improving energy efficiency and fast charging. And of course, since it was developed in partnership with Apple, the Qi2 standard will also work with MagSafe by default.

Currently, MagSafe is a proprietary standard from Apple, and even accessory manufacturers have to pay to use such a standard. While Apple can still technically limit some features to MagSafe certified accessories, the announcement of the Qi2 standard is good news to ensure that this type of accessory is compatible with different phones. The new Qi2 standard will replace its Qi predecessor once it becomes available. WPC says that one billion Qi devices are expected to be sold globally by 2023. The first Qi2 certified devices and accessories are expected to be introduced by the end of the year.

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Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: While Mesa’s development has been very vibrant this year, the X.Org Server development pace has continued pulling back greatly from its late 00’s and early 10’s highs. This year saw just 156 commits to the xserver Git master branch, down from 331 last year and well off the highs of 2,114 as the most ever back in 2008. This jives with the downward pace over the past decade of the number of new commits continuing to slide. But it’s not just on a commit basis but in overall code churn, 2022 was another low for the X.Org Server. With the 156 commits this year, there were just 3,618 lines of new code added and 888 lines removed…. Compared to last year with its 331 commits seeing 31.4k new lines and 179k lines removed.

The X.Org Server development this year on a commit basis hasn’t been as low since 2003 when there were just 125 commits under their old development model and even back then meant there was +865k lines /680k lines removed across that span of commits. There hasn’t been so little code churn to the X Server since 2002. […] This year saw commits from just 32 different email addresses, down from 48 in prior years and that number of different authors hasn’t been so low since 2003 when there were just 10 recorded. Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat was the most prolific committer to the X.Org Server this year with nearly a quarter of the commits. Following Olivier was Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia, Peter Hutterer, Michel DÃnzer, Alan Coopersmith, and Sultan Alsawaf. This year’s X.Org Server development metrics can be found here.

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At least three major torrent sites are currently exposing intimate details of their operations to anyone with a web browser. TorrentFreak understands that the sites use a piece of software that grabs brand-new content from other sites before automatically uploading it to their own. A security researcher tried to raise the alarm but nobody will listen. From the report: To get their hands on the latest releases as quickly as possible, [private torrent sites, or private trackers as they’re commonly known] often rely on outside sources that have access to so-called 0-Day content, i.e, content released today. The three affected sites seem to have little difficulty obtaining some of their content within minutes. At least in part, that’s achieved via automation. When outside suppliers of content are other torrent sites, a piece of software called Torrent Auto Uploader steps in. It can automatically download torrents, descriptions, and associated NFO files from one site and upload them to another, complete with a new .torrent file containing the tracker’s announce URL. The management page [here] has been heavily redacted because the content has the potential to identify at least one of the sites. It’s a web interface, one that has no password protection and is readily accessible by anyone with a web browser. The same problem affects at least three different servers operated by the three sites in question.

Torrent Auto Uploader relies on torrent clients to transfer content. The three sites in question all use rTorrent clients with a ruTorrent Web UI. We know this because the researcher sent over a whole bunch of screenshots and supporting information which confirms access to the torrent clients as well as the Torrent Auto Uploader software. The image [here] shows redactions on the tracker tab for good reason. In a regular setup, torrent users can see the names of the trackers coordinating their downloads. This setup is no different except that these URLs reference three different trackers supplying the content to one of the three compromised sites.

Rather than publish a sequence of completely redacted screenshots, we’ll try to explain what they contain. One begins with a GET request to another tracker, which responds with a torrent file. It’s then uploaded to the requesting site which updates its SQL database accordingly. From there the script starts checking for any new entries on a specific RSS feed which is hidden away on another site that has nothing to do with torrents. The feed is protected with a passkey but that’s only useful when nobody knows what it is. The same security hole also grants direct access to one of the sites tracker ‘bots’ through the panel that controls it. Then there’s access to ‘Staff Tools’ on the same page which connect to other pages allowing username changes, uploader application reviews, and a list of misbehaving users that need to be monitored. That’s on top of user profiles, the number of torrents they have active, and everything else one could imagine. Another screenshot featuring a torrent related to a 2022 movie reveals the URL of yet another third-party supplier tracker. Some basic queries on that URL lead to even more torrent sites. And from there, more, and more, and more — revealing torrent passkeys for every single one on the way.

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A new leak could confirm rumors that Nvidia’s planning on releasing the “unlaunched” 12GB RTX 4080 graphics card as the RTX 4070 Ti. From a report: The company briefly posted the specs for its upcoming RTX 4070 Ti GPU on its website, but Twitter user @momomo_us managed to snag a screenshot before Nvidia pulled the page down. So far, the leaked specs look identical to that of the 12GB RTX 4080, with the chip sporting 7,680 CUDA cores, a 2.61 GHz boost clock, and 12GB of memory. It also says the GPU could run 4K at up to 240Hz or 8K at 60Hz with DSC and HDR, while an included chart indicates that the RTX 4070 Ti could outperform the RTX 3080 by about 3.5 times when playing Cyberpunk 2077 with its new Ray-Tracing: Overdrive mode. In October, Nvidia faced criticism over its decision to launch the 12GB RTX 4080 GPU under the RTX 4080 moniker because of how much it differs from its much more powerful 16GB counterpart.

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The new year has just begun, but the cosmos are already set to make history in 2023. From a report: A comet discovered less than a year ago has traveled billions of miles from its believed origins at the edge of our solar system and will be visible in just a few weeks during what will likely be its only recorded appearance. The comet, C/2022 E3 (ZTF), was first seen in March 2022 as it made its way through Jupiter’s orbit. According to NASA, it’s a long-period comet believed to come from the Oort Cloud, the most distant region of Earth’s solar system that’s “like a big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris” that can get even bigger than mountains. The inner edge of this region is thought to be between 2,000 and 5,000 astronomical units (AUs) from the sun — between 186 billion and 465 billion miles.

This means that C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has made a rare, once-in-a-lifetime journey to be close to Earth. “Most known long-period comets have been seen only once in recorded history because their orbital periods are so, well, long,” NASA says. “Countless more unknown long-period comets have never been seen by human eyes. Some have orbits so long that the last time they passed through the inner solar system, our species did not yet exist.”

Now, the recently discovered E3 comet, which has been seen with a bright greenish coma and “short broad” dust tail, is set to make its closest approach to the sun on January 12. It will make its closest approach to Earth on February 2. Astrophotographer Dan Bartlett managed to capture an image of the comet in December from his backyard in California. He was able to see “intricate tail structure” in the comet’s plasma tail, he said, and “conditions are improving.”

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Power plants that burn coal and natural gas to produce electricity had significant drops in generation as a winter storm hit the US Southeast, forcing blackouts that left hundreds of thousands in the dark. From a report: Duke Energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority cut power to homes and businesses during the holiday season as an extreme winter storm pummeled the region. Duke instituted rotating outages Dec. 24 that interrupted service to about 500,000 customers, while TVA for the first time in its history had rotating blackouts Dec. 23 and Dec. 24. The disruption was the latest instance of a major failure to generate electricity in the US following a storm or natural disaster, a trend that’s brought attention to the state of the nation’s energy infrastructure and its dependence on fossil fuels to keep the lights on even as the Biden administration advocates for a transition to renewable energy.

The failure of coal and gas highlights how even the power sources that have long served as the backbone of the US electrical grid can still falter, especially as the South sees its population increase and relies more on electric heat. TVA saw power generation from coal plants drop about 68% from more than 4 gigawatts early Dec. 23 to a low of about 1.5 gigawatts on Dec. 24, according to federal data. While gas generation increased Dec. 23, on Dec. 24 it fell roughly 25% from about 11.5 gigawatts to less than 9 gigawatts as the utility ordered outages for almost six hours. High winds damaged several of the protective structures at the Cumberland Fossil Plant, the biggest TVA coal plant, as well as multiple gas-fired combustion turbines used during peak power periods, a TVA representative said in an email.

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“Starting next year, Nintendo fans can step through a life-size warp pipe and enter the Mushroom Kingdom,” reports Bloomberg, “for the first time on American soil.”

Bloomberg shares its reaction after “an early preview tour of the land as it finalizes construction,” noting that it has “a chirping soundtrack of cheerful instrumentals and distant coin clinks.”

Super Nintendo World, an interactive replica of Nintendo’s dynamic lands and characters, will bring its colorful chaos to Universal Studios Hollywood when it opens on Feb. 17, 2023. The expansion provides an opportunity to race alongside Mario and Luigi before meeting them face to face, and it will bring video game-inspired dining, retail and merchandise to the California theme park inside an immersive, bowllike structure lined with spinning coins and turtle shells….

Whether Koopa Troopas in motion or a fake desert set against the actual skies, there’s always something to look at — and somewhere intriguing to head first. Its marquee attraction, Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge, puts riders in augmented reality-enabled helmets to experience the Mario Kart racing game firsthand while the challenge plays out virtually in front of them….

Super Nintendo World was released at Universal Studios Japan in March 2021, but its arrival stateside marks Universal Studio Hollywood’s largest opening since its Wizarding World of Harry Potter expansion in 2016, and it’s the first of Nintendo’s notable footprints on domestic soil. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, starring Chris Pratt, hits theaters in April, and a third iteration of Super Nintendo World will open with Epic Universe, the all-new theme park arriving at Universal Orlando Resort in 2025.

In each iteration, the main draw is the Mario Kart experience. Here, riders in four-passenger vehicles will join Team Mario to compete across multiple courses for the Golden Cup — a familiar process to anyone who’s played Nintendo’s racing challenge back home.

The article reminds readers that “all attendees can punch blocks (with more force than one may anticipate) and re-create other moments in the Mushroom Kingdom.”
But they ultimately describe the experience as a kind of “overwhelming immersion, transporting people to a location they’ve previously seen, but never before in real life.”

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Guess what’s finally entering America’s public domain today? Appropriately enough, it’s Marcel Proust’s 1927 novel Remembrance of Things Past.

Also entering the public domain today are thousands of other books, plus the music and lyrics of hundreds of songs, and even several silent movies.

Fritz Lang’s sci-fi classic Metropolis enters the public domain today — and so does the Laurel & Hardy comedy Battle of the Century (which culminates with one of Hollywod’s first pie fights), according to Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain:
This is actually the second time that Metropolis has gone into the US public domain. The first was in 1955, when its initial 28-year term expired and the rights holders did not renew the copyright. Then in 1996 a new law restored the copyrights in qualifying foreign works. Metropolis, along with thousands of other works, was pulled out of the public domain, and now reenters it after the expiration of the 95-year term, with the once missing scenes available for anyone to reuse.
They also note that some material is in the public domain from the beginning, including government works like the images from the James Webb telescope.

But for other works, today is a big and important day, writes the Associated Press:
Alongside the short-story collection “The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes,” books such as Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse,” Ernest Hemingway’s “Men Without Women,” William Faulkner’s “Mosquitoes” and Agatha Christie’s “The Big Four” — an Hercule Poirot mystery — will become public domain as the calendar turns to 2023. Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost.

The works from 1927 were originally supposed to be copyrighted for 75 years, but the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act delayed opening them up for an additional 20 years. While many prominent works on the list used those extra two decades to earn their copyright holders good money, a Duke University expert says the copyright protections also applied to “all of the works whose commercial viability had long subsided.”

“For the vast majority — probably 99% — of works from 1927, no copyright holder financially benefited from continued copyright. Yet they remained off limits, for no good reason,” Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, wrote in a blog post heralding “Public Domain Day 2023.” That long U.S. copyright period meant many works that would now become available have long since been lost, because they were not profitable to maintain by the legal owners, but couldn’t be used by others. On the Duke list are such “lost” films like Victor Fleming’s “The Way of All Flesh” and Tod Browning’s “London After Midnight….”

Also entering the public domain today:

– Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop
– A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six (illustrations by E. H. Shepard)
– Franklin W. Dixon’s The Tower Treasure — the first Hardy Boys book
– Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf (German version)
– The song “My Blue Heaven”
– Songs by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong
– Alfred Hitchcock’s early silent movie The Lodger

The UK-based newspaper the Observer adds:
For those readers who do not reside in the US, there is perhaps another reason for celebrating today, because copyright terms are longer in the US than they are in other parts of the world, including the EU and the UK. And therein lies a story about intellectual property laws and the power of political lobbying in a so-called liberal democracy…. The term was gradually lengthened in small increments by Congress until 1976, when it was extended by 19 years to 75 years and then in 1998 by the Sonny Bono Act. So, as the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig puts it, “in the 20 years after the Sonny Bono Act, while 1 million patents will pass into the public domain, zero copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a copyright term”….

[T]he end result is that American citizens have had to wait two decades to be free to adapt and reuse works to which we Europeans have had easy access….

The issue highlighted by Public Domain Day is not that intellectual property is evil but that aspects of it — especially copyright — have been monopolised and weaponised by corporate interests and that legislators have been supine in the face of their lobbying. Authors and inventors need protection against being ripped off. It’s obviously important that clever people are rewarded for their creativity and the patent system does that quite well. But if a patent only lasts for 20 years, why on earth should copyright last for life plus 70 years for a novel?

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The Australian city of Melbourne recently posted QR codes its citizens could use to report grafitti, reports Australia’s public broadcaster ABC.

Unfortunately, someone overlaid “a number” of those QR codes with “alternative” QR codes leading to a pro-graffiti documentary:

The City of Melbourne is investigating how many of the QR codes have been affected and is assessing whether an alternative will be needed in future…. The lord mayor said the City of Melbourne had initiated discussions with Victoria Police and would draw on CCTV footage to see “how we can catch those culprits”. […]

The Lord Mayor did not believe the compromised QR codes had resulted in more graffiti in the city. “I think this is more of a PR effort by the vandals,” she said.

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