Samsung Is Reportedly Planning To Raise Chip Prices By 20%

Samsung is currently considering raising the cost of its semiconductor products by up to 20%, as well as those it manufactures for other companies, which would ultimately lead to consumers paying more for new devices. PC Magazine reports: As Bloomberg reports, the price hike consideration is in response to just about everything in the world getting more expensive, including the cost of raw materials and the logistics surrounding production pipelines. The final price increase is expected to be linked to sophistication of the components being manufactured, but that still means vendors will end up paying between 15-20% more for chips. Samsung is a huge player in the semiconductor industry, producing processors for a wide-range of industries, as well as memory products, storage solutions, and foundry solutions which allow other semiconductor products to be manufactured. Adding up to a 20% price rise across all those sectors will inevitably push up prices for any products that use Samsung components.

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AT&T Is About To Get Away With Its Bogus $1.99 ‘Administrative Fee’

Sean Hollister writes via The Verge: Since 2013, AT&T has quietly bilked customers out of hundreds of millions of dollars with a bogus “administrative fee,” a fee it more than doubled to $1.99 a month in 2018. For a few years there, a California class-action lawsuit made it seem like AT&T might finally get taken to task. But this week, both sides told a judge they’d settle for just $14 million — meaning customers may get less than 10 percent of what they paid AT&T, while AT&T gets to keep on charging them. According to the proposed settlement agreement in Vianu v. AT&T Mobility — which still needs to be approved by a judge — just about every AT&T Wireless postpaid customer in California since 2015 will be eligible for an estimated payment of between $15 and $29.

But again, that’s only a fraction of what AT&T’s own records show it charged: $180 per customer on average since 2015, according to documents. The settlement “represents a refund of approximately 6-11 months of the average fees,” they read. Meanwhile, the lawyers are likely to get $3.5 million. “The estimated payment amount represents a strong result for the Settlement Class, particularly given the substantial risks, costs, and delay of continued litigation,” reads the proposed settlement agreement, going on to list all the ways that the lawyers suing AT&T believe that AT&T might still win the case. […]

Oh, and you won’t even get a check in the mail if you’re still an AT&T customer, assuming this version of the settlement is approved. The money will be credited back to your AT&T account, where AT&T can dip its hand right back in again for that $1.99 — or more if it feels emboldened enough to increase the fee yet again. (Admittedly, the AT&T account could be a more reliable way to make sure customers get money back.) The settlement websites can be found here.

An AT&T spokesperson issued the following response: “We deny the allegations in this lawsuit because we clearly disclose all fees that are charged to our customers. However, we have decided to settle this case to avoid lengthy, expensive litigation.”

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The Milky Way’s Black Hole Comes to Light

Astronomers announced today that they had pierced the veil of darkness and dust at the center of our Milky Way galaxy to capture the first picture of “the gentle giant” dwelling there: A supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of 4 million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and a violently bent space-time. From a report: The image, released in six simultaneous news conferences in Washington, D.C., and around the globe, showed a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing an empty space as dark and silent as death itself. The new image joins the first ever picture of a black hole, produced in 2019 by the same team, which photographed the monster at the heart of the M87. The new image shows new details of the astrophysical violence and gravitational weirdness holding sway at the center of our placid-looking hive of starlight.

Black holes were an unwelcome consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which attributes gravity to the warping of space and time by matter and energy, much as a mattress sags under a sleeper. Einstein’s insight led to a new conception of the cosmos, in which space-time could quiver, bend, rip, expand, swirl and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole, an entity with gravity so strong that not even light could escape it. Einstein disapproved of this idea, but the universe is now known to be speckled with black holes. Many are the remains of dead stars that collapsed inward on themselves and just kept going. But there seems to be a black hole at the center of nearly every galaxy, ours included, that can be millions or billions of times as massive than our sun. Astronomers still do not understand how these supermassive black holes have grown so big.

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Cress Seeds Grown in Moon Dust Raise Hopes for Lunar Crops

The prospect of growing crops on the moon has edged a little closer after researchers nurtured plants — some more successfully than others — in lunar soil for the first time. From a report: Scientists planted thale cress seeds in moon dust brought back by three Apollo missions and watched them sprout and grow into fully fledged plants, raising the potential for astronauts to farm off-world crops. But while the plants survived in the lunar soil, or regolith, they fell short of thriving, growing more slowly than cress planted in volcanic ash, developing stunted roots, and showing clear signs of physiological stress.

“We found that plants do indeed grow in lunar regolith, however they respond as if they are growing in a stressful situation,” said Dr Anna-Lisa Paul, a molecular biologist at the University of Florida. Thale cress, or Arabidopsis thaliana, is a small flowering plant related to broccoli, cauliflower and kale. “It’s not especially tasty,” Paul added. The experiments are the first to investigate whether plants can grow in lunar soil and follow an 11-year effort to obtain the rare material. Because the soil is so precious, Nasa loaned only 12g of it — a few teaspoons — to the researchers who conducted the tests. Scientists have long wondered whether the moon could support crops, but with space agencies now planning to return humans to the surface, and potentially build lunar settlements for visitors, the question has become more pressing.

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Blocking Inflammation May Lead To Chronic Pain

Using anti-inflammatory drugs and steroids to relieve pain could increase the chances of developing chronic pain, according to researchers from McGill University and colleagues in Italy. Neuroscience News reports: Their research puts into question conventional practices used to alleviate pain. Normal recovery from a painful injury involves inflammation and blocking that inflammation with drugs could lead to harder-to-treat pain. […] In the study published in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers examined the mechanisms of pain in both humans and mice. They found that neutrophils — a type of white blood cell that helps the body fight infection — play a key role in resolving pain. Experimentally blocking neutrophils in mice prolonged the pain up to ten times the normal duration. Treating the pain with anti-inflammatory drugs and steroids like dexamethasone and diclofenac also produced the same result, although they were effective against pain early on.

These findings are also supported by a separate analysis of 500,000 people in the United Kingdom that showed that those taking anti-inflammatory drugs to treat their pain were more likely to have pain two to ten years later, an effect not seen in people taking acetaminophen or anti-depressants. “Our findings suggest it may be time to reconsider the way we treat acute pain. Luckily pain can be killed in other ways that don’t involve interfering with inflammation,” says Massimo Allegri, a Physician at the Policlinico of Monza Hospital in Italy and Ensemble Hospitalier de la Cote in Switzerland.

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ICE ‘Now Operates As a Domestic Surveillance Agency,’ Think Tank Says

Although it’s supposed to be restricted by surveillance rules at local, state and federal levels, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has built up a mass surveillance system that includes details on almost all US residents, according to a report from a major think tank. Engadget reports: Researchers from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology said ICE “now operates as a domestic surveillance agency” and that it was able to bypass regulations in part by purchasing databases from private companies. “Since its founding in 2003, ICE has not only been building its own capacity to use surveillance to carry out deportations but has also played a key role in the federal government’s larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives,” the report’s authors state. “By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time.”

The researchers spent two years looking into ICE to put together the extensive report, which is called “American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century.” They obtained information by filing hundreds of freedom of information requests and scouring more than 100,000 contracts and procurement records. The agency is said to be using data from the Department of Motor Vehicles and utility companies, along with the likes of call records, child welfare records, phone location data, healthcare records and social media posts. ICE is now said to hold driver’s license data for 74 percent of adults and can track the movement of cars in cities that are home to 70 percent of the adult population in the US.

The study shows that ICE, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, has already used facial recognition technology to search through driver’s license photos of a third of adults in the US. In 2020, the agency signed a deal with Clearview AI to use that company’s controversial technology. In addition, the report states that when 74 percent of adults hook up gas, electricity, phone or internet utilities in a new residence, ICE was able to automatically find out their updated address. The authors wrote that ICE is able to carry out these actions in secret and without warrants. Along with the data it acquired from other government departments, utilities, private companies and third-party data brokers, “the power of algorithmic tools for sorting, matching, searching and analysis has dramatically expanded the scope and regularity of ICE surveillance,” the report states. The agency spent around $2.8 billion on “new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing initiatives,” according to the report. Approximately $569 million was spent on data analsys, including $186.6 million in contracts with Plantir Technologies.

“ICE also spent more than $1.3 billion on geolocation tech during that timeframe and $389 million on telecom interception, which includes tech that helps the agency track someone’s phone calls, emails, social media activity and real-time internet use,” adds Engadget.

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Jeffrey Snover Claims Microsoft Demoted Him For Inventing PowerShell

PowerShell inventor Jeffrey Snover has aired some grievances about how his indispensable tool once got him demoted. The Register reports: The Microsoft Technical Fellow discussed the incident in a weekend Twitter thread that started when controversial investor Peter Thiel discussed the virtues of courage. “Courage is a key characteristic of future leaders and previous employees,” Snover joked in response to Thiel’s musings. He also asserted that “many people focus on getting their boss to pat them on the head rather than address problems.” Snover said he was urged by friend Kevin Kean — who served as director of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) in the mid 2000s — not to reveal PowerShell, as it may not well be received.

This is not the first time Snover has revealed his demotion, but he hasn’t previously discussed his profound embarrassment — or that he kept it secret from everyone other than his wife. “I never mentioned it to anyone for over a decade until I got promoted to Distinguished Engineer,” tweeted Snover, who was given the honor in March 2009. Snover then contrasted Microsoft’s policy for company-related passion projects to Google’s famous 20 percent rule.

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Lawmakers Offer Bill To Regulate Volume of Commercials On Streaming Services

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) on Tuesday introduced a bill to regulate the volume of commercials shown on streaming platforms. The Hill reports: The bill is known as the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Modernization Act. It would modernize policies regarding ads on streaming services, saying that “the volume of commercials on streaming services cannot be louder than regular programming,” according to Eshoo. It would also ramp up the Federal Communications Commission’s ability to investigate and enforce violations of the original CALM Act and require a study into its effectiveness.

Eshoo added that since she and Whitehouse created the original CALM Act, streaming service providers have “recreated the problem of loud ads because the old law doesn’t apply to them.” “Today, we’re updating the legislation for the benefit of consumers who are tired of diving for the mute button at every commercial break,” Eshoo added.

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