Sony has raised the price of PlayStation 5 in most major markets, citing "challenging economic conditions" such as high global inflation rates and adverse currency trends, the latest in a series of challenges engulfing the current generation gaming console. From a report: The new price, which largely varies between $30 to $80, goes immediately into effect in Europe, the UK, China, Australia, Mexico and Canada, the company said in a blog post. The revised price will hit Japan on September 15, said the Japanese conglomerate. The U.S. is not impacted by the price hike, the company confirmed. "While this price increase is a necessity given the current global economic environment and its impact on SIE's business, our top priority continues to be improving the PS5 supply situation so that as many players as possible can experience everything that PS5 offers and what's still to come," Sony said in the post.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Google has breached a European Union court ruling by sending unsolicited advertising emails directly to the inbox of Gmail users, Austrian advocacy group noyb.eu said on Wednesday in a complaint filed with France's data protection watchdog. The Alphabet unit, whose revenues mainly come from online advertising, should ask Gmail users for their prior consent before sending them any direct marketing emails, noyb.eu said, citing a 2021 decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJUE). While Google's ad emails may look like normal ones, they include the word "Ad" in green letters on the left-hand side, below the subject of the email, noyb.eu said in its complaint. Also, they do not include a date, the advocacy group added. "It's as if the postman was paid to remove the ads from your mailbox and put his own instead," said Romain Robert, program director at noyb.eu, with reference to Gmail's anti-spam filters that put most unsolicited emails in a separate folder. While any CNIL decision would be only applicable in France, it could compel Google to review its practices in the region.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A combination of psychedelics and therapy appears to help people with alcoholism cut down on the number of days per month they drink heavily, according to a new study. The Verge reports: Researchers used psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, to treat patients over eight months and saw a dramatic improvement in participants' drinking habits. Using psychedelics as treatments for alcoholism was a popular idea in the 1960s and 1970s, and studies on LSD found that it reduced alcohol misuse. But the approach went quiet in the decades after, according to an editorial published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry alongside the new study. The new research marks a "rekindling of interest," the authors of the editorial wrote. The study included 93 people with alcohol dependence. In the 12 weeks leading up to the study, the participants drank alcohol an average of around 60 days. Of those 60 drinking days, about half were heavy drinking days -- defined as five or more drinks a day for a man and four or more drinks in a day for a woman. People in the trial were randomly assigned to either take a capsule of psilocybin or an antihistamine twice over the course of the 36-week-long study. They had four sessions with therapists before the first time they took the drug, four sessions between the two drug doses, and four sessions after the second drug dose. Everyone in the study started drinking less after the first four weeks of therapy -- the percentage of heavy drinking days dropped from around half of all drinking days to around a quarter. But that number kept falling for the people who took psilocybin. After the end of the full study, they drank heavily on around 10 percent of the days when they drank. People who took the antihistamine were still drinking heavily on around a quarter of drinking days. The effects lasted for months after the second dose of the psilocybin, study author Michael Bogenschutz, a psychiatrist and director of the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine, stressed during a press briefing. "This suggests that psilocybin is treating the underlying disorder of alcohol addiction rather than merely treating symptoms," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan will restart more idled nuclear plants and look at developing next-generation reactors, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Wednesday, setting the stage for a major policy shift on nuclear energy a decade after the Fukushima disaster. Reuters reports: Japan has kept most of its nuclear plants idled in the decade since a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011 triggered a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Quake-prone Japan also said it would build no new reactors, so a change in that policy would be a stark turnaround. Kishida told reporters he had instructed officials to come up with concrete measures by the year end, including on "gaining the understanding of the public" on sustainable energy and nuclear power. Government officials met on Wednesday to hammer out a plan for so-called "green transformation" aimed at retooling the world's third-largest economy to meet environmental goals. Nuclear energy, which was deeply opposed by the public after the Fukushima crisis, is now seen by some in government as a component for such green transformation. Public opinion has also shifted, as fuel prices have risen and an early and hot summer spurred calls for energy-saving.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: South Korea has once again shattered its own record for the world's lowest fertility rate as it faces the prospect of its population of 51 million people more than halving by the end of this century. Korean women were estimated, based on 2021 data, to have an average of just 0.81 children over their lifetimes, down from 0.84 a year earlier, the statistics office said Wednesday. The number of newborns declined last year to 260,600, which equates to about 0.5% of the population. The number of women of child-bearing age fell 2% to 11,620,000 last year, signaling the fertility rate is only likely to deteriorate further. A typical Korean woman gave birth to her first child at age 32.6, up from 30.2 a decade earlier, according to the stats office. Her partner on average would be 35.1, compared with 33 a decade earlier. By region, the capital Seoul showed the lowest fertility rate at 0.63, while Sejong, home to government headquarters, had the highest at 1.28, according to the stats office. The most populous province, Gyeonggi, recorded 0.85, closer to the average. In the decades following the 1950-53 Korean War, the population at least doubled and in an effort to curb the baby boom in the early years of economic development, the government encouraged couples to have only one child. That policy was scrapped around the turn of the century as births started to sharply fall, prompting the government to spend tens of billion of dollars each year to encourage more children, but with little success so far. "Korea is the world's fastest-aging nation among economies with per capita GDP of at least $30,000," notes Bloomberg, citing United Nations global population projections and World Bank data. "By 2100, its population will fall by 53% to 24 million, up from a 43% decline forecast in 2019." "The forecast is a sobering reminder of the demographic threat and associated economic challenges confronting Bank of Korea Governor Rhee Chang-yong and President Yoon Suk Yeol, who both took office earlier this year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, researchers at MIT describe new aluminum-sulfur batteries that are made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials and can be charged in less than a minute. "The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee," reports MIT News. The caveat with this new kind of battery is that it requires a variety of molten salts that need to be "close to the boiling point of water." From the report: In their experiments, the team showed that the battery cells could endure hundreds of cycles at exceptionally high charging rates, with a projected cost per cell of about one-sixth that of comparable lithium-ion cells. They showed that the charging rate was highly dependent on the working temperature, with 110 degrees Celsius (230 degrees Fahrenheit) showing 25 times faster rates than 25 C (77 F). Surprisingly, the molten salt the team chose as an electrolyte simply because of its low melting point turned out to have a fortuitous advantage. One of the biggest problems in battery reliability is the formation of dendrites, which are narrow spikes of metal that build up on one electrode and eventually grow across to contact the other electrode, causing a short-circuit and hampering efficiency. But this particular salt, it happens, is very good at preventing that malfunction. The chloro-aluminate salt they chose "essentially retired these runaway dendrites, while also allowing for very rapid charging," Sadoway says. "We did experiments at very high charging rates, charging in less than a minute, and we never lost cells due to dendrite shorting." What's more, the battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery. "As you charge, you generate heat, and that keeps the salt from freezing. And then, when you discharge, it also generates heat," Sadoway says. In a typical installation used for load-leveling at a solar generation facility, for example, "you'd store electricity when the sun is shining, and then you'd draw electricity after dark, and you'd do this every day. And that charge-idle-discharge-idle is enough to generate enough heat to keep the thing at temperature." This new battery formulation, he says, would be ideal for installations of about the size needed to power a single home or small to medium business, producing on the order of a few tens of kilowatt-hours of storage capacity. For larger installations, up to utility scale of tens to hundreds of megawatt hours, other technologies might be more effective, including the liquid metal batteries Sadoway and his students developed several years ago and which formed the basis for a spinoff company called Ambri, which hopes to deliver its first products within the next year. For that invention, Sadoway was recently awarded this year's European Inventor Award. The smaller scale of the aluminum-sulfur batteries would also make them practical for uses such as electric vehicle charging stations, Sadoway says. He points out that when electric vehicles become common enough on the roads that several cars want to charge up at once, as happens today with gasoline fuel pumps, "if you try to do that with batteries and you want rapid charging, the amperages are just so high that we don't have that amount of amperage in the line that feeds the facility." So having a battery system such as this to store power and then release it quickly when needed could eliminate the need for installing expensive new power lines to serve these chargers. "The first order of business for the company is to demonstrate that it works at scale," Sadoway says, and then subject it to a series of stress tests, including running through hundreds of charging cycles. If you're looking for a detailed breakdown of how this new battery works, we recommend you check out Ars Technica's article here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York State Senate just introduced a bill that aims to improve safety around massive trucks and SUVs. Autoblog reports: Manhattan State Senator Brad Hoylman introduced the bill, which includes language requiring the NY DMV to dictate specific rules for vehicles over 3,000 pounds. One new regulation would be that the drivers of such cars have "direct visibility of pedestrians, cyclists, and other vulnerable road users from the driver's position." It's not clear exactly what enforcing that legislation would entail. However, the meat of Hoylman's bill centers on advanced safety technology. A summary of the legislation states, "Studies have shown that Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) alone can reduce traffic fatalities by 20%. This, in addition to Advanced Emergency Braking (AEB), Emergency Lane Keeping Systems (ELKS), drowsiness and distraction recognition technology, and rear-view cameras, would help prevent crashes from occurring in the first place." If you've never heard of ISA, you're not alone. The term is pretty broad in what it encompasses, including speed limit recognition and alerts, speed assist, and speed limiting. The tech is common in Europe, where automakers like Ford offer it in several models. Ford's flavor of speed limiting allows drivers to set a maximum speed and automatically limit the vehicle to within five mph of the posted speed limit. It's optional, however, so drivers can turn it off when desired. If passed, the legislation would require automakers to include those advanced driver assistance systems as standard equipment in new vehicles from 2024 on.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Denuvo, the company best known for its heavily-criticized PC gaming DRM technology, has set its sights on a new scourge: Nintendo Switch piracy. Kotaku reports: The software maker announced during GamesCom 2022 on Wednesday that it will begin selling a new product called Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection to prevent Switch games from being pirated on PC. It doesn't appear to be partnering with Nintendo on the initiative, which instead seems aimed mostly at third-party publishers of multiplatform games. "As with all other Denuvo solutions, the technology integrates seamlessly into the build toolchain with no impact on the gaming experience. It then allows for the insertion of checks into the code, which blocks gameplay on emulators," the company wrote in a press release. In the past, however, Denuvo's "checks" have been accused of making some games run worse. "Even if a game is protected against piracy on its PC version, the released version on Switch can be emulated from day one and played on PC, therefore bypassing the strong protections offered on the PC version," Denuvo wrote. "The Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection will ensure that anyone wishing to play the game has to buy a legitimate copy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Hackers are breaking into unsuspecting victims' Cash App accounts, a massively popular payment app, and stealing hundreds of dollars, according to victims Motherboard spoke to. In one person's case, they said, Cash App has not reimbursed them for the stolen funds. "It's scary!" Liz Shelby, who said their son was a victim of the hacking, told Motherboard in an online chat. "My son saved up some cash for a small vacation with his grandma. We put it in his Cash App before he left. He called me on Aug. 9, and told me that his money was gone." Shelby said that after she looked at the account she found that someone else had logged into it and sent themselves the money. Shelby said she's been emailing Cash App support, without success. Marvis Herring, another target, told Motherboard that hackers attempted to steal $1,400, in the form of two installments of $700. In those cases, Herring believes his bank blocked the fraudulent transactions. Motherboard saw many other people reporting on social media that their Cash App accounts had been compromised in some way. "The main thing I thought was weird is that I went to change my account password and there really isn't a password for Cash App accounts," Herring added. When users sign up to Cash App, they can use either an email address or a phone number to open an account. After doing so, they receive a login code sent to either of those. On fraud websites, dark web marketplaces, and social media, multiple people appear to be selling login details associated with Cash App accounts. Some of these peoples' listings specify that the logs contain the email address and password for a linked email account. Some of the listings may be scams, but those on the dark web marketplaces come from fraudsters who have received positive feedback from alleged customers, according to the review system that is common on such sites. One listing for hacked Cash App accounts said the vendor has sold that specific item multiple times. Fraudsters also appear to be offering Cash App accounts for another purpose: laundering money. Motherboard found multiple listings on a dark web marketplace offering these newly created and verified accounts. Cash App requires users to verify their identity to use some features, and this can require them providing their Social Security Number with the platform. These already verified accounts will allow fraudsters to buy Bitcoin through the Cash App without having to verify their identity, the listing suggests. [...] On its website, Cash App encourages users to make sure their linked email address has two-factor authentication enabled. The app also has an extra feature called Security Lock which means that each transfer requires the user to enter a PIN. "Preventing fraud is critically important to Cash App. We continue to invest in and bolster fraud-fighting resources by both increasing staffing and adopting new technology. We are constantly improving systems and controls to help prevent, detect, and report bad activity on the platform," a Cash App spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement. "For those who believe they have fallen victim to an identity-theft or account take-over scams, we encourage them to reach out to Cash App Support where we will review the account in question. If deemed fraudulent, we will take the necessary action starting with account closure and disablement of all applicable products."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The rise and catastrophic fall of what was once Canada's most valuable company is set for the big screen. CBC.ca reports: Blackberry will tell the story of Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion (RIM), creators of the titular device, which for a time was the world's most popular smartphone. The film stars Canadian actor Jay Baruchel as company co-founder Mike Lazaridis and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Glenn Howerton as co-CEO Jim Balsillie. The film was adapted from the 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry, by Sean Silcoff and Jacquie McNish. Toronto's Matt Johnson directs and also appears in the film as RIM's other co-founder, Doug Fregin. The cast also includes Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek and Michael Ironside. RIM was founded in 1984 by business partners Lazaridis and Fregin, who had previously worked together on a failed LED sign business. After a decade of dabbling in various other technology projects, they turned their attention to the two-way communications systems that would become the foundation for the BlackBerry device.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continuing the focus on delivering the world's fastest internet speeds that led Chattanooga's municipal utility to launch America's first comprehensively available Gig-speed internet service (2010) and the first 10-Gig internet service (2015), EPB has launched the nation's first community-wide 25 gigabits per second (25,000 Mbps) internet service. Chattanoogan reports: It is set to be available to all residential and commercial customers over a 100 percent fiber optic network with symmetrical upload and download speeds. Through a partnership with Hamilton County and the city of Chattanooga, the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Convention Center is EPB's first 25 Gig customer, making it the first convention center worldwide to offer such blazingly fast speeds over a broadband network. With this technology, the Convention Center will be able to simultaneously provide high bandwidth connectivity to thousands of smart devices to draw business conferences, e-gaming competitions, live streaming events and more. Hamilton County and the city of Chattanooga have each dedicated $151,000 in infrastructure funding for a total of $302,000 to cover the cost of installing new networking equipment and Wi-Fi access points throughout the convention center as well as much of the cost of providing multi-gig connectivity for the next five years. Once the new equipment is installed, visitors will be able to benefit from high-speed connectivity throughout the facility.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: California is expected to put into effect on Thursday its sweeping plan to prohibit the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, a groundbreaking move that could have major effects on the effort to fight climate change and accelerate a global transition toward electric vehicles. The rule, issued by the California Air Resources Board, will require that 100 percent of all new cars sold in the state by 2035 be free of the fossil fuel emissions chiefly responsible for warming the planet, up from 12 percent today. It sets interim targets requiring that 35 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the state by 2026 produce zero emissions. That would climb to 68 percent by 2030. The restrictions are important because not only is California the largest auto market in the United States, but more than a dozen other states typically follow California's lead when setting their own auto emissions standards. California's action comes on top of an expansive new climate law that President Biden signed last week. The law will invest $370 billion in spending and tax credits on clean energy programs, the largest action ever taken by the federal government to combat climate change. Enactment of that law is projected to help the United States cut its emissions 40 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade. Still, it will not be enough to eliminate U.S. emissions by 2050, the target that climate scientists say all major economies must reach if the world is to avert the most catastrophic and deadly impacts of climate change. To help close the gap, White House officials have vowed to couple the bill with new regulations, including on automobile tailpipe emissions. They have also said that reducing emissions enough to stay in line with the science also will require aggressive state policies. Experts said the new California rule, in both its stringency and reach, could stand alongside the Washington law as one of the world's most important climate change policies, and could help take another significant bite out of the nation's emissions of carbon dioxide. The new rule is also expected to influence new policies in Washington and around the world to promote electric vehicles and cut auto pollution. "This is huge," said Margo Oge, an electric vehicles expert who headed the EPA's transportation emissions program under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. "California will now be the only government in the world that mandates zero-emission vehicles. It is unique."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Both government and criminal hacking groups are still targeting Hikvision cameras with a vulnerability from 2021, according to reports from several security researchers. From a report: Cybersecurity firm CYFIRMA released a report this week saying Russian cybercriminal forums are awash with hackers looking to collaborate on exploiting Hikvision cameras using the command injection vulnerability CVE-2021-36260. "Specifically in the Russian forums, we have observed leaked credentials of Hikvision camera products available for sale," the company's researchers said. "These can be leveraged by hackers to gain access to the devices and exploit further the path of attack to target an organization's environment." CYFIRMA reported they found that more than 80,000 Hikvision cameras are still vulnerable to the critical command injection flaw, which carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10. Of the more than 80,000 vulnerable cameras, more than 100 nations and 2,300 organizations are impacted.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canalys' North American smartphone market share numbers are out, and the big mover for Q2 2022 is once again Google, which is seeing huge growth numbers thanks to the Pixel 6. Last quarter, Canalys had Google up 380 percent year over year, and this quarter, the company is up 230 percent! ArsTechnica adds: That sounds incredibly successful, but this is Google's tiny hardware division we're talking about, so it's all relative success. The company is now at 2 percent North American market share, having shipped 800,000 devices for Q2 2022. Along with last quarter, Google is now regularly hitting whole-digit market share numbers. That's good enough for fifth place, behind Apple (52 percent), Samsung (26 percent), Lenovo/Motorola (9 percent), and TCL (5 percent). Canalys also has a list of the best-selling models. The top five are all iPhones, of course, with the base model iPhone 13 taking the top spot, followed by the super-cheap iPhone SE. The iPhone 13 Mini, which is rumored to be selling so poorly that there won't be an iPhone 14 Mini, took the ninth spot. The first Android phone on the list, the flagship Galaxy S22 Ultra, clocks in at No. 6.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Silicon Valley startup Sanas has a lofty goal: to make call center workers sound white and American, no matter the country they're from. And that's just the beginning of their grand plan. The voice tech company's website features a photo of a smiling man, cropped so you only see a disembodied, toothy grin. Underneath the anonymous mouth, a demo invites you to "Hear the Magic" of Sanas. As you press play, you hear one side of a simulated conversation; a man with an Indian accent reads a familiarly tortured call center script about a missing package. Click the "With Sanas" slider, and the voice transforms instantly into something slightly robotic, a tad uncanny and unmistakably white. Since its August 2021 launch, Sanas has been showered with funding by investors. Amid a trying time for the tech industry, the "accent translation" company -- founded by three former Stanford students, Maxim Serebryakov, Shawn Zhang and Andres Perez Soderi -- snagged a $32 million Series A funding round in June 2022, which they claim is the largest ever for a speech technology service. One press release boasts that investors who tried the service called it "magical." Eventually, the company wants to expand beyond call centers by changing accents on consumer video and audio calls; Sanas has even mentioned an interest in film and TV. New voices are in the works, too: Someday, workers' accents may be "translated" into a Southern drawl for a caller in Louisville, or a Midwestern lilt for someone in Cleveland, instead of the more generic Standard American English, colloquially known as white person voice. "We don't want to say that accents are a problem because you have one," Sanas president Marty Sarim told SFGATE. "They're only a problem because they cause bias and they cause misunderstandings." The tacit promise of Sanas seems to be that callers will be more polite -- and more amenable to being helped -- if they think the person on the other end is more like them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Biden has announced a sweeping effort to forgive up to $20,000 of federal student loan debt for Pell Grant recipients, and up to $10,000 for other qualifying borrowers. Biden also extended the federal student loan payment pause through Dec. 31. From a report: "In keeping with my campaign promise, my Administration is announcing a plan to give working and middle class families breathing room as they prepare to resume federal student loan payments in January 2023," Biden said in a tweet on Wednesday. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement, "Today, we're delivering targeted relief that will help ensure borrowers are not placed in a worse position financially because of the pandemic, and restore trust in a system that should be creating opportunity, not a debt trap." To qualify for the $10,000 forgiveness, individual borrowers must earn less than $125,000 a year, or less than $250,000 a year for couples. To qualify for the $20,000 forgiveness, borrowers must meet those income requirements and must have received a Pell Grant in college. Pell Grants are designed to help low-income students pay for higher education.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest crisis that rocked the Greek government shows the bloc's surveillance problem goes beyond the notorious NSO Group. From a report: The ripple effects of the scandal are reaching the heart of the European Union. Over the past 13 months, it has been revealed that spyware had targeted opposition leaders, journalists, lawyers and activists in France, Spain, Hungary, Poland and even staff within the European Commission, the EU's cabinet-style government, between 2019 and 2021. The bloc has already set up an inquiry into its own use of spyware, but even as the 38-person committee works toward producing a report for early 2023, the number of new scandals is quickly mounting up. What sets the scandal in Greece apart is the company behind the spyware that was used. Until then the surveillance software in every EU scandal could be traced back to one company, the notorious NSO Group. Yet the spyware stalking Koukakis' phone was made by Cytrox, a company founded in the small European nation of North Macedonia and acquired in 2017 by Tal Dilian -- an entrepreneur who achieved notoriety for driving a high-tech surveillance van around the island of Cyprus and showing a Forbes journalist how it could hack into passing people's phones. In that interview, Dilian said he had acquired Cytrox and absorbed the company into his intelligence company Intellexa, which is now thought to now be based in Greece. The arrival of Cytrox into Europe's ongoing scandal shows the problem is bigger than just the NSO Group. The bloc has a thriving spyware industry of its own. As the NSO Group struggles with intense scrutiny and being blacklisted by the US, its less well-known European rivals are jostling to take its clients, researchers say. Over the past two months, Cytrox is not the only local company to generate headlines for hacking devices within the bloc. In June, Google discovered the Italian spyware vendor RCS Lab was targeting smartphones in Italy and Kazakhstan. Alberto Nobili, RCS' managing director, told WIRED that the company condemns the misuse of its products but declined to comment on whether the cases cited by Google were examples of misuse. "RCS personnel are not exposed, nor participate in any activities conducted by the relevant customers," he says. More recently, in July, spyware made by Austria's DSIRF was detected by Microsoft hacking into law firms, banks, and consultancies in Austria, the UK, and Panama.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Monday, Apple expanded its DIY repair program to include MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops equipped with M1 chips (including the Pro and Max). At least, in theory. The repairability experts at iFixit, who regularly dissect Apple's gadgets, have taken a look at the new program, and their outlook is...mixed. iFixit's Sam Goldheart writes that the new MacBook Pro guides "threw us for a loop." The issue: the documentation "makes MacBook Pros seem less repairable" than they have been in the past. From a report: The repair manual for replacing the 14-inch MacBook Pro's battery, for example, is a whole 162 pages long. (One of the first steps, of course, is "Read the entire manual first.") The reason the guide is so long, it turns out, is that replacing these batteries isn't just a matter of popping the battery out. A user needs to replace the entire top case and keyboard in order to replace the battery. Needless to say, it is unusual for a laptop battery replacement to require a full-computer teardown. And then, as Goldheart points out, there's the matter of the money. The "top case with battery" part that you'll need to purchase for the 2020 and 2021 MacBook Pro models is not cheap -- after rooting around Apple's store, Verge editor Sean Hollister found that you can expect to pay well upwards of $400 for the top case with battery after the repair credit. "Apple is presenting DIY repairers with a excruciating gauntlet of hurdles: read 162 pages of documentation without getting intimidated and decide to do the repair anyway, pay an exorbitant amount of money for an overkill replacement part, decide whether you want to drop another 50 bucks on the tools they recommend, and do the repair yourself within 14 days, including completing the System Configuration to pair your part with your device," Goldheart writes in summary. "Which makes us wonder, does Apple even want better repairability?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung has unveiled its latest lineup of NVMe solid state drives, the 990 Pro series. The company claims the SSD will reach almost the highest speeds that are theoretically possible from the PCIe 4.0 interface (PCI 5.0 SSDs will be much faster). Samsung hopes to deliver better performance for PC and console games, 4K and 8K content and other heavy data use cases. From a report: The 990 Pro boasts sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,450 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s. The 980 Pro offers up to 7,000 MB/s and 5,100 MB/s read and write speeds. The 990 Pro's random read and write speeds are up to 1,400K and 1,550K input/output operations per second, according to Samsung. The company says that marks up to a 55 percent improvement over the 980 Pro's performance. Moreover, the company says the 990 Pro will be more power efficient than the previous lineup by up to 50 percent. The new SSD will go on sale in October at a starting price of $179 for the 1TB model.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ethereum's developers have officially confirmed September 6 as the date for Ethereum's long-anticipated transition from proof of work to proof of stake, known as The Merge. From a report: "Following years of hard work, Ethereum's proof-of-stake upgrade is finally here!" the Ethereum Foundation wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. "The successful upgrade of all public testnets is now complete, and The Merge has been scheduled for the Ethereum mainnet." The Merge will be split into two upgrades, called Bellatrix and Paris. Bellatrix is timed to occur at 11:34 AM UTC on September 6 and Paris will be triggered sometime between September 10 and September 20, according to the blog post. Proof of stake relies on validators instead of miners. Instead of expending lots of computing power, like proof-of-work miners do, proof-of-stake validators lock up sums of money to prove their trustworthiness to the network. The switch has been a long-held goal for Ethereum's developers. In the final testing step, the Goerli testnet successfully merged on August 10.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.