Valve’s Steam Deck Will Run Linux-Based Steam OS – But Won’t Have a Fortnite Port

Liliputing reports:
When Valve’s Steam Deck begins shipping to customers later this month, the handheld gaming PC will be running a Linux-based operating system called Steam OS. And that could give gaming on Linux a bit of a boost.

While Valve’s game client has been able to run on Linux for years, as of last month just over 1% of Steam users were running Linux (and fewer than 3% were using macOS, with Windows holding a 96% share). It’ll be interesting to see if that starts to change once the Steam Deck hits the streets. And if it does, maybe we’ll see more game makers add support for Linux… but one of the most popular games around isn’t going to add Linux support anytime soon: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says the company has no plans to port Fortnite to Linux.

He says it’s because Epic doesn’t “have confidence that we’d be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations including custom ones,” but it’s an interesting take since Epic has already ported its anti-cheat software to support Mac and Linux devices including the Steam Deck.

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US Nuclear Power Plants Contain Dangerous Counterfeit Parts, Report Finds

At least some nuclear power plants in the US contain counterfeit parts that could pose significant risks, an investigation by the inspector general’s office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found. Those parts “present nuclear safety and security concerns that could have serious consequences,” says the resulting report (PDF) published on February 9th. The Verge reports: The investigation was conducted after unnamed individuals alleged that “most, if not all,” nuclear plants in the US have fake or faulty parts. The inspector general’s office uncovered problems with counterfeit parts at a few different plants as part of its investigation. The report also says that the DOE had separately flagged 100 “incidents” involving counterfeit parts just last year. It’s a problem that the US will have to crack down on if it moves forward with plans to include nuclear power in its transition to clean energy. Without greater oversight at the NRC, the report warns, the risk of counterfeit parts going unnoticed in the nation’s nuclear power plants could rise.

As part of its inquiry, the inspector general’s office looked for parts that are illegally altered to look like legitimate products, parts that are “intentionally misrepresented to deceive,” and parts that don’t meet product specifications. It sampled four power plants across the US and found evidence of counterfeit parts at one of those plants in the midwest. It also points to nuclear power plants in the Northeast, separate from those it sampled, where a “well-placed NRC principal” found that counterfeit parts were involved in two separate component failures.

The NRC might be underestimating the prevalence of counterfeit parts, the report warns, because the regulatory agency doesn’t have a robust system in place for tracking problematic parts. It only requires plants to report counterfeits in extraordinary circumstances, like if they lead to an emergency shutdown of a reactor. The report also notes that the NRC hasn’t thoroughly investigated all counterfeit allegations. There were 55 nuclear power plants operating in the US as of September 2021, and the inspector general’s office sampled just four for its report. NRC Public Affairs Officer Scott Burnell told The Verge in an email that “nothing in the report suggests an immediate safety concern. The NRC’s office of the Executive Director for Operations is thoroughly reviewing the report and will direct the agency’s program offices to take appropriate action.”

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Cisco Made $20 Billion-Plus Takeover Offer For Splunk

Zoom Update Prevents Microphone From Staying Active After Calls On Mac

Popular video conferencing platform Zoom this week released an important update to its macOS app following user reports about the microphone not being disabled after ending a conference. Luckily, according to the company, this was just a bug that has now been fixed. 9to5Mac reports: Since December last year, a number of users have been complaining about this bug in the Zoom Community (via The Register). According to them, the Mac’s microphone stayed active even after ending a Zoom conference — which certainly raised privacy concerns.

Zoom has confirmed that there was a bug in its macOS app that could cause the orange microphone-in-use indicator to appear even after leaving a call. According to a company representative, the latest version of the app no longer has this problem: “We experienced a bug relating to the Zoom client for macOS, which could show the orange indicator light continue to appear after having left a meeting, call, or webinar. This bug was addressed in the Zoom client for macOS version 5.9.3 and we recommend you update to version 5.9.3 to apply the fix.”

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Samsung Held An Event In the Metaverse. And It Didn’t Quite Go To Plan

Samsung held a launch event for its new Galaxy smartphones in a metaverse this week but many people struggled to gain access as they encountered technical difficulties. CNBC reports: The South Korean tech giant hosted the event Wednesday on Decentraland, a cryptocurrency-focused virtual world that users can create, explore and trade in. Decentraland, one of many metaverse efforts, is accessed via a desktop browser. Users create an avatar which they can then navigate around the blockchain-powered virtual world using a mouse and keyboard — something that isn’t exactly intuitive for non-gamers. The event specifically took place in Samsung 837X, a virtual building that Samsung has built on Decentraland that’s designed to be a replica of its flagship New York experience center. Samsung 837X is there all the time but there just happened to be an event inside the building’s “Connectivity Theatre” on Wednesday. But CNBC, and many others, struggled to find the 837X building and when we did many of us were unable to gain access to it.

When an avatar is first created on Decentraland, it lands in a sort of atrium where clouds appear to be gliding across the floor. There’s a round pool in the middle that has a worrying vortex in the center. Our avatar was soon surrounded by around 20 others. A chat box in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen was full of messages like “help” and “I hate this game.” One user named claireinnit#87fa, boldly claimed “we’re in the —-in future.” On the opposite side of the intimidating pool, three large boards read “classics, events and crowd.” An ad for Samsung 837X hang on the “crowd” board. Once clicked (easier said than done), you’re then given the option to “jump in.” After jumping in, you’re transported to Samsung’s little world on Decentraland and you can see the 837X building. There’s a pizza store next door, but not much else.

CNBC immediately noticed a large line of people at the main entrance to the 837X building. People were struggling to get in. Some users were getting their avatars to jump on other people’s heads as they clambered to the front of the queue but it didn’t help. The doors wouldn’t open and the chatbox was again full of pleas for help. A rumor circulated that a YouTuber had managed to find a way in, while a CNET journalist wrote on Twitter that they had managed to gain access by switching to the “ATHENA” server. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to do this. “Many people were unable to actually enter Samsung 837X before the event started,” wrote CNET’s Russell Holly. […] After around 30 minutes of trying to access Samsung’s building in the metaverse, CNBC gave up and went back to the real world.

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Intel’s Pay-As-You-Go CPU Feature Gets Launch Window

Intel’s mysterious Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) mechanism for adding features to Xeon CPUs will be officially supported in Linux 5.18, the next major release of the operating system. Tom’s Hardware reports: SDSi allows users to add features to their CPU after they’ve already purchased it. Formal SDSi support means that the technology is coming to Intel’s Xeon processors that will be released rather shortly, implying Sapphire Rapids will be the first CPUs with SDSi. Intel started to roll out Linux patches to enable its SDSi functionality in the OS last September. By now, several sets of patches have been released and it looks like they will be added to Linux 5.18, which is due this Spring. Hans de Goede, a long-time Linux developer who works at Red Hat on a wide array of hardware enablement related projects, claims that SDSi will land in Linux 5.18 if no problems emerge, reports Phoronix. “Assuming no major issues are found, the plan definitely is to get this in before the 5.18 merge window,” said de Goede.

Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) is a mechanism for activating additional silicon features in already produced and deployed server CPUs using the software. While formal support for the functionality is coming to Linux 5.18 and is set to be available this spring, Intel hasn’t disclosed what exactly it plans to enable using its pay-as-you-go CPU upgrade model. We don’t know how it works and what it enables, but we can make some educated guesses. […]

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Twitter Misses Ad Revenue, User Growth Estimates

Twitter reported weaker-than-expected quarterly advertising revenue and user growth on Thursday and forecast revenue short of Wall Street targets, indicating that its turnaround plan has yet to bear fruit. Reuters reports: Still, the social networking site said it made “meaningful progress” toward its goal of reaching 315 million users and $7.5 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2023, and said user growth should accelerate in the United States and internationally this year. Shares of the San Francisco-based company rose more than 8% after the results, but pared those gains in morning trading.

Monetizable daily active users, or users who see ads, grew 13% to 217 million in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, missing consensus estimates of 218.5 million, according to IBES data from Refinitiv. That was up from 211 million users in the previous quarter. […] Advertising revenue for the fourth quarter grew 22% year over year to $1.41 billion, missing analysts’ estimates of $1.43 billion. Twitter gained 6 million users during the quarter, but will need to add over 12 million each quarter over the next two years to hit its target of 315 million people by the end of 2023, said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, calling it “an incredibly lofty goal.”

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A Geomagnetic Storm May Have Effectively Destroyed 40 SpaceX Starlink Satellites

Elon Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink just got dealt an expensive blow — the company’s currently estimating that 40 of the 49 Starlink satellites it launched on February 3rd will be destroyed because of a geomagnetic storm. The Verge reports: The storm caused “up to 50 percent higher drag than during previous launches,” keeping the deployed satellites from reaching their proper orbit around the Earth. And while Starlink tried to fly them “edge-on (like a sheet of paper)” to reduce that drag, it now looks like as many as 40 of them will burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere instead of reaching their destinations. SpaceX recently crossed the 2,000 satellite launch milestone, and has plans to launch 12,000 if not a great many more — so losing 40 of them might not be a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. Still, that’s the vast majority of an entire Falcon 9 rocket’s Starlink launch capacity burning up in the atmosphere.

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TikTok Shares Your Data More Than Any Other Social Media App, Study Says

According to a recent study published by mobile marketing company URL Genius, YouTube and TikTok track users’ personal data more than any other social media apps. However, while YouTube mostly collects your personal data for its own purposes to serve you more relevant ads, TikTok mostly allows third-party trackers to collect your data — “and from there, it’s hard to say what happens with it,” reports CNBC. From the report: With third-party trackers, it’s essentially impossible to know who’s tracking your data or what information they’re collecting, from which posts you interact with — and how long you spend on each one — to your physical location and any other personal information you share with the app. As the study noted, third-party trackers can track your activity on other sites even after you leave the app.

To conduct the study, URL Genius used the Record App Activity feature from Apple’s iOS to count how many different domains track a user’s activity across 10 different social media apps — YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Messenger and Whatsapp — over the course of one visit, before you even log into your account. YouTube and TikTok topped the other apps with 14 network contacts apiece, significantly higher than the study’s average number of six network contacts per app. Those numbers are all probably higher for users who are logged into accounts on those apps, the study noted.

Ten of YouTube’s trackers were first-party network contacts, meaning the platform was tracking user activity for its own purposes. Four of the contacts were from third-party domains, meaning the social platform was allowing a handful of mystery outside parties to collect information and track user activity. For TikTok, the results were even more mysterious: 13 of the 14 network contacts on the popular social media app were from third parties. The third-party tracking still happened even when users didn’t opt into allowing tracking in each app’s settings, according to the study. “Consumers are currently unable to see what data is shared with third-party networks, or how their data will be used,” the report’s authors wrote.

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