With its App Tracking Transparency policy launched in April, Apple overhauled its iPhone lineup’s privacy settings to give users more control over their data. That decision cost Snap, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube an estimated $9.85 billion in lost revenue in the second half of this year, the Financial Times reports.
The White House press secretary said she last saw the president on Tuesday.
Leaders of the world’s biggest economies have agreed to stop funding coal-fired power plants in poor countries.
The fight against ransomware attacks continues, this time on the other side of the Atlantic. Following a two-year investigation, Europol announced this week that it had captured 12 individuals in various criminal organizations who were “wreaking havoc across the world” by launching ransomware attacks on critical…
Nintendo puts the spotlight on Mario so much that when they turn their eye to his younger brother Luigi, it makes those moments shine all the brighter. So it goes with Lego: as of a couple months ago, the green plumber has his own Super Mario Starter Course, and now he’s getting some sets all to himself. Well, and the…
The hunt for exoplanets is venturing beyond the Milky Way. Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have detected what might be the first signs of a planet in another galaxy. The team noticed dips in X-ray brightness that hint at a planet transiting in front of a star in the Messier 51 (aka M51) galaxy 28 million light-years away. For context, all the exoplanet candidates in the Milky Way are no more than 3,000 light-years from Earth — this planet would easily set a distance record if confirmed.
The very nature of stars made the feat possible. As the researchers had to focus on X-ray bright binary systems where the region of bright rays is relatively tiny, the transit was considerably easier to spot. Conventional detection of nearby stars requires much more sensitive light detection, as a planet might only block a small amount of light from a given star.
The planet itself is believed to be as large as Saturn, but would orbit its hosts (a star 20 times the mass of the Sun as well as a black hole or neutron star) at twice the distance.
Scientists didn’t believe the dimming was due to gas clouds or dust, as those aren’t consistent with the event they recorded in M51. A planet, however, would line up with the data.
The challenge, as you might guess, is verifying that data. The planet’s large orbit could rule out another transit for roughly 70 years, and it wouldn’t be clear exactly when astronomers would have to take a look. The three-hour transit of this planet candidate didn’t provide a large window. That’s also assuming the ‘living’ star doesn’t explode and bathe the planet in radiation.
If there’s ever a confirmation, though, the discovery would be very significant. While there aren’t many doubts that planets exist in other galaxies, it would be useful to have evidence of their existence. This could also significantly widen the scope of future planetary searches to include the galactic neighborhood, not just close-by stars.
Roblox is finally returning to normal after a nearly three-day outage. The gaming platform’s developer said it was “incrementally” bringing regions back to service after having pinpointed the cause roughly three hours earlier. The company had a possible candidate on October 30th, but didn’t narrow it down until a day later.
The company didn’t detail the cause, but had previously ruled out particular “experiences or partnerships.” Some had blame the outage on a Chipotle promo that launched half an hour before the failure took place on the evening of October 28th.
Whatever the reason for the outage, it may have had a lasting effect. Roblox has over 40 million daily users, and has been home to major concerts in recent months. That could leave more than a few frustrated kids, not to mention parents and creators wondering about the long-term reliability of the platform.
Quick update as we work to get things back to normal. We are incrementally bringing regions back online.
— Roblox (@Roblox) October 31, 2021
As Apple continues to cull its catalog of Intel-powered Macs, it looks like the 21.5-inch iMac is finally being put out to pasture. Yet another causality of Apple’s shift to using its homegrown M1 processor in every product.
We’ve covered weekend box offices for the month of October pretty extensively. It was hard not to with big tentpoles like Venom, Dune, and Halloween Kills, and it seems to have paid off in the long run, because domestically, things were the best they’ve been for theaters in a fairly long time.
Lenovo’s next ThinkBook Plus might be more practical, at least if you’e a budding artist. Well-known leak purveyor Evan Blass has shared what he said is an image of a 17-inch ThinkBook Plus model. Unlike the current 13.3-inch system, though, you wouldn’t have to flip your machine around to use an e-paper display on the back. Instead, you’d have a pen-capable color display next to the keyboard you could use to draw or take handwritten notes.
Blass didn’t share other details, but the 17-inch ThinkBook Plus would seemingly have an extra-wide main display and fit in a full keyboard along with a large trackpad. We’d expect reasonably speedy internals to help drive the second display, much like the vaguely comparable ASUS ZenBook Duo.
It’s not certain when this extra-large ThinkBook Plus would ship. Lenovo has historically reserved some of its largest laptop introductions for CES in January, but that doesn’t preclude the company from a last-minute launch for the holidays. Either way, the image suggests Lenovo hasn’t given up on the Plus concept — if anything, it’s exploring new concepts that might prove appealing for creatives and others who shied away in the past.
Have you guys seen this yet? 17-inch ThinkBook Plus from Lenovo… pic.twitter.com/OElc5ZM3pb
— Ev (@evleaks) October 31, 2021
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