An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: People who recovered from a bout of Covid-19 during one of the earlier waves of the pandemic appear to have a lower risk of contracting the delta variant than those who got two doses of the vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech SE. The largest real-world analysis (PDF) comparing natural immunity -- gained from an earlier infection -- to the protection provided by one of the most potent vaccines currently in use showed that reinfections were much less common. The paper from researchers in Israel contrasts with earlier studies, which showed that immunizations offered better protection than an earlier infection, though those studies were not of the delta variant. The results are good news for patients who already successfully battled Covid-19, but show the challenge of relying exclusively on immunizations to move past the pandemic. People given both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were almost six-fold more likely to contract a delta infection and seven-fold more likely to have symptomatic disease than those who recovered. The analysis also showed that protection from an earlier infection wanes with time. The risk of a vaccine-breakthrough delta case was 13-fold higher than the risk of developing a second infection when the original illness occurred during January or February 2021. That's significantly more than the risk for people who were ill earlier in the outbreak. Giving a single shot of the vaccine to those who had been previously infected also appeared to boost their protection. The long-term benefit of a booster dose of the inoculation, which has just recently begun in Israel, is unknown.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record, written by Catalin Cimpanu: The European Union's lead data protection supervisor has recommended on Thursday that personal data such as search queries & internet browsing history should not be used for the assessment of credit scores and creditworthiness. The recommendation comes from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), an independent agency attached to the EU that advises policymakers "on all matters relating to the processing of personal data."a document published on Thursday. In addition, the agency advises that providers of financial and credit services should also not be allowed to use health data, such as cancer data, as well as any special category of personal data under Article 9 of the GDPR for the calculation of credit scores. The EDPS recommendations follow a recent blog post for the International Monetary Fund, where researchers see the possibility of using the data from your browsing, search, and purchase history to create a more accurate mechanism for determining the credit rating of an individual or business.

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Hmmmmmm shares a report from SpaceNews: The National Natural Science Foundation of China has outlined a five-year project for researchers to study the assembly of ultra-large spacecraft. Scientists are being directed to meet the "urgent need" for the construction of ultra-large spacecraft. Preliminary research is to include studying the challenges of developing lightweight structures and subsequent on-orbit assembly and control. Though vague, the project would have practical applications for potential megaprojects including colossal space-based solar power stations. Such facilities would be based in geostationary orbit and span kilometers. These stations would collect solar energy and transmitting power to Earth through microwaves. Kilometer-scale, ultra-large spacecraft are described as "major strategic aerospace equipment for the future use of space resources, exploration of the mysteries of the universe, and long-term habitation in orbit," according to the project outline within the mathematical and physical sciences attachment to the released document. The plan, if approved, would aim for commercial, on-orbit gigawatt-level power generation by 2050. This would require more than 100 super heavy-lift Long March 9 launches and around 10,000 tons of infrastructure, assembled in orbit, according to Long Lehao, a chief designer of China's Long March rocket series.

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Eric Niiler writes via Wired: The landscape of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is both familiar and strange. Like Earth, Titan has rivers, lakes, clouds, and falling raindrops, as well as mountains of ice and a thick atmosphere. But instead of water, Titan's chemical cycle is composed of liquid methane, an organic molecule made from one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. Researchers believe this swirling mixture of methane, combined with the moon's nitrogen-laden atmosphere, surface water ice, and maybe some energy from either a volcano or a meteor impact, might have been the perfect recipe to create some kind of simple life form. [...] Now, A researcher has recreated Titan's environment in a small glass cylinder and mixed organic chemicals under the same temperature and pressure conditions found on that moon. Organic molecules that are liquid on Earth -- such as methane and benzene -- become solid icy mineral crystals on Titan because it's so cold, sometimes down to -290 Fahrenheit, according to Tomce Runcevski, an assistant professor of chemistry at Southern Methodist University, and the principal investigator on a study presented this week at the American Chemical Society meeting. In a series of experiments, Runcevski took tiny glass tubes, sucked the air out of them with a pump, and added water ice. Then, one at a time, he added nitrogen, methane, its chemical relative ethane, and other organic compounds. Each time, he varied the composition of the chemical mixture inside the glass cylinders to see what would happen. He next applied pressure -- equivalent to about 1.45 times Earth's atmosphere -- and reduced the temperature by surrounding the vials with extremely cold air. [...] Under that moon's atmospheric pressure and temperature, he found that two organic molecules abundant on Titan and toxic to humans here on Earth -- acetonitrile and propionitrile -- become a single crystalline form. On Titan, these two molecules are formed by the combination of nitrogen and methane, plus energy from the sun, Saturn's magnetic field, and cosmic rays. Acetonitrile and propionitrile start as a gas in the atmosphere, then condense into aerosols, and then rain down onto the moon's surface and become chunks of solid minerals in several forms. It's the first time that these two chemicals have been combined into a crystal shape on Earth under the conditions present on Titan. Another important finding is that the outer facet of the crystal also has a slight electric charge, or polarity, on its surface. That surface charge can attract other molecules such as water -- which would be necessary to form the building blocks of carbon-based life. This new experiment doesn't prove that there's life on Titan, but it means that researchers can discover new things about its weird, frigid surface environment even before the NASA Dragonfly spacecraft lands there.

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Slashdot has confirmed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware that after 18 years of legal maneuvering, SCO's bankruptcy case (first filed in 2007) is now "awaiting discharge." Long-time Slashdot reader rkhalloran says they know the reason: Papers filed 26 Aug by IBM & SCOXQ in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware for a proposed settlement, Case 07-11337-BLS Doc 1501: By the Settlement Agreement, the Trustee has reached a settlement with IBM that resolves all of the remaining claims at issue in the Utah Litigation (defined below). The Settlement Agreement is the culmination of extensive arm's length negotiation between the Trustee and IBM. Under the Settlement Agreement, the Parties have agreed to resolve all disputes between them for a payment to the Trustee, on behalf of the Estates, of $14,250,000. For the reasons set forth more fully below, the Trustee submits the Settlement Agreement and the settlement with IBM are in the best interests of the Estates and creditors, are well within the range of reasonableness, and should be approved. The proposed order would include "the release of the Estates' claims against IBM and vice versa" (according to this PDF attributed to SCO Group and IBM uploaded to scribd.com). And one of the reasons given for the proposed settlement? "The probability of the ultimate success of the Trustee's claims against IBM is uncertain," according to an IBM/SCO document on Scribd.com titled Trustee's motion: For example, succeeding on the unfair competition claims will require proving to a jury that events occurring many years ago constituted unfair competition and caused SCO harm. Even if SCO were to succeed in that effort, the amount of damages it would recover is uncertain and could be significantly less than provided by the Settlement Agreement. Such could be the case should a jury find that (1) the amount of damage SCO sustained as a result of IBM's conduct is less than SCO has alleged, (2) SCO's damages are limited by a $5 million damage limitation provision in the Project Monterey agreement, or (3) some or all of IBM's Counterclaims, alleging millions of dollars in damages related to IBM's Linux activities and alleged interference by SCO, are meritorious. Although the Trustee believes the Estates would ultimately prevail on claims against IBM, a not insignificant risk remains that IBM could succeed with its defenses and/or Counterclaims The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware told Slashdot that the first meeting of the creditors will be held on September 22nd, 2021.

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In Facebook's "widely viewed content report" released last week, The Verge's Casey Newton noticed something arguably just as damning as the spread of COVID-19 misinformation or rise of vaccine hesitancy: almost all of the most-viewed posts on Facebook over the past quarter were effectively plagiarized from elsewhere. From the report: Facebook's report details the top 20 most widely viewed posts on the network over the past three months. One of the posts was deleted before Facebook published it. Of the remaining 19, though, only four appear to have been original. The remaining 15 had been published in at least one other place first, and were then re-uploaded to Facebook, sometimes with small changes. [...] Facebook has long been home to reappropriated content, from the freebooting scandal during 2017's pivot to video to the more recent phenomenon of Instagram's Reels being flooded with videos bearing TikTok watermarks. But this kind of dumb, cheap growth hacking should sound familiar to anyone who paid even passing attention to the 2016 election. Russia's infamous Internet Research Agency commissioned a troll army to build up big followings on innocuous-seeming Facebook pages using a wide variety of engagement bait, then gradually shifted those pages to begin sharing more divisive political memes. That's all much harder to do now, thanks to a variety of measures Facebook has taken to make it more difficult for people to disguise their identities or countries of origin. The company now routinely removes networks of pages where the creators' identities are suspect. And it's worth saying that in the most recent election, inauthentic behavior of the 2016 variety did not play a significant role. Most importantly, Facebook now has a policy against "abusive audience building" -- switching topics and repeatedly changing a page's name for the purpose of growing a following. But it seems notable that for domestic actors, the tactics not only work, but remain the most effective way to reach a large audience five years later. Steal some questions that went viral somewhere else, spam them on your page, and presto: you're one of the most-viewed links for the entire quarter on the world's biggest social network. "The plagiarists who dominate Facebook's top 20 links are likely doing it primarily for clout and ill-gotten audience growth," Casey goes on to say. "But some of the other characters here appear to have more direct monetary incentives..."

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Tim Cook celebrated 10 years as Apple CEO by collecting and selling off three quarters of a billion dollars' worth of stock. CNN reports: The transactions were revealed in a regulatory filing Thursday, which showed that Cook had acquired and sold more than 5 million shares of the iPhone maker. As head of the world's most valuable company, Cook has received lofty stock awards in recent years. One of the incentives was tied to Apple's performance in the S&P 500 over the past three years. The stock award was triggered this week because the firm was one of the index's top performers, generating shareholder returns of nearly 192% from August 2018 to 2021, it said in a filing. Cook's windfall came just days after he also donated 70,000 Apple shares (worth about $10 million) to charity, according to a separate regulatory filing Tuesday. It did not disclose the name of the recipient. Cook joined Apple in 1998 and served in a variety of senior roles before assuming his current position, including chief operating officer and executive vice president of worldwide sales and operations. He was named CEO in August 2011, after co-founder Steve Jobs famously stepped down. Jobs died weeks later from complications of pancreatic cancer. Prior to joining Apple, Cook worked at Compaq and IBM (IBM).

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Just months after a CEO shakeup, Waymo is officially halting sales of its custom sensors to third parties. TechCrunch reports: The move sees the Alphabet-owned self-driving company unwinding a business operation just two years into its lifespan. Waymo confirmed the decision to Reuters, adding that it's now focusing on deploying its Waymo Driver tech across its Waymo One ride-hailing and Waymo Via trucking divisions. [...] Waymo began selling LiDARs -- the tech that measures distance with pulses of laser light -- to companies barring its autonomous vehicle rivals in 2019. It initially planned to sell its short-range sensor (known as Laser Bear Honeycomb) to businesses in the robotics, security and agricultural technology sectors. A form on its website also lists drones, mapping and entertainment as applicable industries. Waymo's fifth-generation Driver technology uses an array of sensors -- including radar, lidar, and cameras -- to help its cars "see" 360 degrees during the day and night, and even in tough weather conditions such as rain or fog. While its simulated and real world driving tests have helped it to amass a massive dataset that is crunched using machine learning-based software. According to anonymous sources cited by Reuters, Waymo intends to use in-house tech and external suppliers for its next-gen LiDARs.

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The City of Chicago filed two sweeping lawsuits against DoorDash and Grubhub for allegedly deceiving customers and using unfair business practices. From a report: The suits echo long-standing claims from restaurant owners that the platforms advertise delivery services for their businesses without their consent and conceal lower prices that restaurants offer directly to customers, outside of the platforms. The city also claims both platforms use a "bait-and-switch" method to attract customers with low delivery fees, only to charge additional ones when they are about to place their order. In separate statements, both DoorDash and Grubhub called the lawsuits "baseless." [...] In November, DoorDash stopped adding new restaurants that it doesn't have agreements with to its app. It also said it will remove restaurants that don't want to be listed within 48 hours of being notified.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Charlie Osborne: The parents of two teenagers allegedly responsible for stealing $1 million in Bitcoin are being sued. According to court documents obtained by Brian Krebs, Andrew Schober lost 16.4552 in Bitcoin (BTC) in 2018 after his computer was infected with malware, allegedly the creation of two teenagers in the United Kingdom. The complaint (.PDF), filed in Colorado, accuses Benedict Thompson and Oliver Read, who were minors at the time, of creating clipboard malware. The malicious software, designed to monitor cryptocurrency wallet addresses, was downloaded and unwittingly executed by Schober after he clicked on a link, posted to Reddit, to install the Electrum Atom cryptocurrency application. During a transfer of Bitcoin from one account to another, the malware triggered a Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM) attack, apparently replacing the address with one controlled by the teenagers and thereby diverting the coins into their wallets. According to court documents, this amount represented 95% of the victim's net wealth at the time of the theft. At today's price, the stolen Bitcoin is worth approximately $777,000. "Mr. Schober was planning to use the proceeds from his eventual sale of the cryptocurrency to help finance a home and support his family," the complaint reads. The pair, tracked down during an investigation paid for by Schober, are now adults and are studying computer science at UK universities. The mothers and fathers of Thompson and Read are named in the complaint. Emails were sent to the parents prior to the complaint requesting that the teenagers return the stolen cryptocurrency to prevent legal action from being taken. However, the requests, sent in 2018 and 2019, were met with silence. Schober's complaint claims that the parents "knew or reasonably should have known" what their children were up to, and that they also failed to take "reasonable steps" in preventing further harm. In response (.PDF), the defendants do not argue the charge, but rather have requested a motion to dismiss based on two- and three-year statutes of limitation. "Despite his knowledge of his injury and the general cause thereof, Plaintiff waited to file his lawsuit beyond the two and three years required of him by the applicable statutes of limitations," court documents say. "For this reason, Plaintiff's claims against Defendants should be dismissed." However, Schober's legal team has argued (.PDF) that the teenagers were not immediately traced, and roughly a year passed between separately identifying Read and Thompson. Schober's lawyers have requested that the motion to dismiss is denied.

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T-Mobile said a cyberattack earlier this month that exposed millions of customer records was carried out using specialized tools to gain entry to the network, followed by brute force-style hacking techniques to access user data. From a report: "In short, this individual's intent was to break in and steal data, and they succeeded," Chief Executive Officer Mike Sievert said Friday in a statement, the company's fullest account yet of what happened. The company has hired cybersecurity provider Mandiant and consulting firm KPMG to improve its defenses, he said. The breach, the fourth that has compromised T-Mobile customer records in as many years, involved personal information including names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and driver's license information. Sievert said the company is working with law enforcement and can't share further details of what happened. Further reading: T-Mobile Hacker Explains How He Breached Carrier's Security.

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Crucial and Western Digital have recently been caught swapping the TLC NAND used for certain products with inferior QLC NAND without updating product SKUs or informing reviewers of this change. Now, Samsung was caught doing something similar. Samsung is "swapping the drive controller + TLC for a different, inferior drive controller," according to ExtremeTech. "The net effect is still a steep performance decline in certain tests." From the report: The other beats of this story are familiar. Computerbase.de reports on a YouTube Channel, which compared two different versions of the Samsung 970 Plus. Both drives are labeled with the same sticker declaring them to be a 970EVO Plus, but the part numbers are different. One drive is labeled the MZVLB1T0HBLR (older, good) and one is the MZVL21T0HBLU (newer, inferior). Peel the sticker back, and the chips underneath are rather different. The Phoenix drive (top) is older than the Elpis drive on the bottom. Computerbase claims a production date of April 2021 for the Phoenix, but if the 2110 and 2123 codes are production dates, this would seem to indicate March and June. It's possible that Samsung uses specific numerical codes for each month. Either way, the Phoenix drive is older and faster and the Elpis drive is newer and slower. And -- just as we've seen from Crucial and Western Digital -- performance in some benchmarks after the swap is just fine, while other benchmarks crater. [...] The original 970 Plus starts with solid performance and holds it for the entire 200GB test. The right-hand SSD is even faster than the OG 970 Plus until we hit the 120GB mark, at which point performance drops to 50 percent of what it was. Real-world file copies also bear this out, with one drive holding 1.58GB/s and one at 830MB/s. TLC hasn't been swapped for QLC, but the 50 percent performance hit in some tests is as bad as what we see when it has been.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: China is not done with curbing the influence local internet services have assumed in the world's most populous market. Following a widening series of regulatory crackdowns in recent months, the nation on Friday issued draft guidelines on regulating the algorithms firms run to make recommendations to users. In a 30-point draft guideline published on Friday, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) proposed forbidding companies from deploying algorithms that "encourage addiction or high consumption" and endanger national security or disrupt the public order. The services must abide by business ethics and principles of fairness and their algorithms must not be used to create fake user accounts or create other false impressions, said the guidelines from the internet watchdog, which reports to a central leadership group chaired by President Xi Jinping. The watchdog said it will be taking public feedback on the new guidelines for a month (until September 26). The guidelines also propose that users should be provided with the ability to easily turn off algorithm recommendations. Algorithm providers who have the power to influence public opinion or mobilize the citizens need to get an approval from the CAC. Friday's guidelines appear to target ByteDance, Alibaba Group, Tencent and Didi and other companies whose services are built on top of proprietary algorithms.

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Unnervingly futuristic, these bulky, high-tech toothbrushes promise to scrub your choppers thoroughly in 20 seconds. WSJ: Dentists like Dr. Lana Rozenberg are overly familiar with two eternal fibs: that their clients floss regularly, and that they brush their teeth for at least two minutes twice a day. "Most people don't brush their teeth for two minutes," said the Manhattan-based industry veteran. "Thirty seconds is more like it," or under a second for each of their 32 teeth. But what if, in those 30 seconds, a device could reach the front, back and sides of every tooth at once? That's the proposition of new "whole mouth" toothbrushes, which rely on vibration and a preponderance of bristles packed inside a structure resembling a mouthguard to deliver an up-to-snuff scrubbing in as little as 20 seconds -- 10 each for top and bottom sets of teeth. "It helps make things way faster, way easier and feels a little more guaranteed because you actually feel it on each one of your teeth," said Kristopher Paul, a medical-transportation driver in St. Petersburg, Fla., who has bit down on a 360 Sonic Brush Pro ($70) each morning for the past year. Mr. Paul, 36, also likes the tool's 15-minute whitening mode, which combines a blue LED light and whitening gel to fade bothersome coffee stains.

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A team of scientists from a Swiss university has discovered a way to bypass PIN codes on contactless cards from Mastercard and Maestro. From a report: The now-patched vulnerability would have allowed cybercriminals to use stolen Mastercard and Maestro cards to pay for expensive products without needing to provide PINs on contactless payments. Discovered by a team from the Department of Computer Science at the ETH Zurich university, the attack is extremely stealthy and could be easily deployed in a real-world scenario if new bugs in contactless payment protocols are discovered. The general idea behind the attack is for an attacker to interpose itself between the stolen card and a vendor's Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminal, in what security researchers would normally call a Man/Person/Meddler-in-the-Middle (MitM) scenario. To achieve this, an attacker would require: a stolen card, two Android smartphones, a custom-made Android app that can tamper with a transaction's fields. The app is installed on both smartphones, which will act as emulators. One smartphone will be placed near the stolen card and act as a PoS emulator, tricking the card into initiating a transaction and sharing its details, while the second smartphone will act as a card emulator and be used by a crook to feed modified transaction details to a real-life PoS terminal inside a store.

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The U.S. intelligence community said Thursday that it was divided over the exact origin of Covid-19 in China. CNBC reports: "After examining all available intelligence reporting and other information, though, the IC remains divided on the most likely origin of Covid-19. All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident," the unclassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. In May, President Joe Biden ordered a closer intelligence review of what he described as two likely scenarios of the origins of the Covid-19. "Here is their current position: 'while two elements in the IC leans toward the [human contact] scenario and one leans more toward the [lab leak scenario] -- each with low or moderate confidence -- the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other," Biden said. Developing...

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Elise Blanchard, writing on Mozilla blog: [...] What happened in 1993 to suddenly make hyperlinks blue? No one knows, but I have some theories. I often hear that blue was chosen as the hyperlink color for color contrast. Well, even though the W3C wasn't created until 1994, and so the standards for which we judge web accessibility weren't yet defined, if we look at the contrast between black as a text color, and blue as a link color, there is a contrast ratio of 2.3:1, which would not pass as enough color contrast between the blue hyperlink and the black text. Instead, I like to imagine that Cello and Mosaic were both inspired by the same trends happening in user interface design at the time. My theory is that Windows 3.1 had just come out a few months before the beginning of both projects, and this interface was the first to use blue prominently as a selection color, paving the way for blue to be used as a hyperlink color. Additionally, we know that Mosaic was inspired by ViolaWWW, and kept the same gray background and black text that they used for their interface. Reviewing Mosaic's release notes, we see in release 0.7 black text with underlines appearing as the preferred way of conveying hyperlinks, and we can infer that was still the case until something happened around mid April right before when blue hyperlinks made their appearance in release 0.13. In fact, conveying links as black text with underlines had been the standard since 1985 with Microsoft 1, which some once claimed Microsoft had stolen from Apple's Lisa's look and feel. I think the real reason why we have blue hyperlinks is simply because color monitors were becoming more popular around this time. Mosaic as a product also became popular, and blue hyperlinks went along for the ride. Mosaic came out during an important time where support for color monitors was shifting; the standard was for hyperlinks to use black text with some sort of underline, hover state or border. Mosaic chose to use blue, and they chose to port their browser for multiple operating systems. This helped Mosaic become the standard browser for internet use, and helped solidify its user interface as the default language for interacting with the web.

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For Zapotec artist and weaver Porfirio Gutierrez, colour is a way to connect with his ancestors' way of life, which has sustained civilisations by living in symbiosis with nature. BBC: Back home in the village of Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico, Porfirio Gutierrez is referred to by his indigenous community as "El Maestro." In Ventura, California, where he lives now, and to the contemporary art world that he is courting, he is an artist with a mission. But for Gutierrez, the job is the same: to conserve, preserve and innovate, when necessary, generations' worth of wisdom and culture associated with the making of one thing that keeps everything interesting -- colour. But not just any colour. These colours are derived from nature, meaning that Gutierrez's charge is to discover new and old ways of plucking plants and insects straight out of the natural world and transform them into the pigments that give forth the glorious, rich, fullness of natural dyes. Bins of these dried plants and insects in Gutierrez's Ventura studio are all colours in waiting. The most unusual of them all is a shimmering silver bead-like insect called cochineal that will spend its next life as a luxurious red dye. These bugs are cultivated year after year in the same way that seeds are saved by farmers, passing environmental wisdom from generation to generation. Gutierrez cultivates his own cochineal on an impressive wall of prickly pear cactus leaves installed in his studio. The insects grow like parasites on the the leaves, consuming the cactus juice which produces carminic acid in their body cavities. When dried and ground they miraculously transform into a velvety powder and the base for a red colour. When compared with the synthetic dyes that are used today in essentially all our clothes and textiles, nature's version is almost always inexplicably better. It's the visual equivalent of a peach ripened by the tree, or a tomato baked in sunshine. Some lost part of you recognises that this is how it's supposed to be. Natural dyes are no different. Across time and cultures, we've been carpeting cave floors and dipping our jeans in dye, not because they won't otherwise function but because colour makes life's banal objects durable and our memories last longer. And if you are as blessed with knowledge as Gutierrez is, then that colour also grounds you spiritually and connects you to your ancestors' way of life -- a way of life that sustained civilisations by living in symbiosis with nature. A way of life that 500 years of colonisation has systematically erased.

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Microsoft is announcing today that it won't block people from installing Windows 11 on most older PCs. While the software maker has recommended hardware requirements for Windows 11 -- which it's largely sticking to -- a restriction to install the OS will only be enforced when you try to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 through Windows Update. From a report: This means anyone with a PC with an older CPU that doesn't officially pass the upgrade test can still go ahead and download an ISO file of Windows 11 and install the OS manually. Microsoft announced its Windows 11 minimum hardware requirements in June, and made it clear that only Intel 8th Gen and beyond CPUs were officially supported. Microsoft now tells us that this install workaround is designed primarily for businesses to evaluate Windows 11, and that people can upgrade at their own risk as the company can't guarantee driver compatibility and overall system reliability. Microsoft won't be recommending or advertising this method of installing Windows 11 to consumers.

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Duckstation, an emulator that allows users to run Playstation games, was recently made available for installation onto the latest generation of Xbox consoles. From a report: It's time to jog those nostalgia muscles, as the emulator will not only be able to play your PS1 favorites but also scale those games up to native 4K resolution at 60fps. In addition to the 4K treatment, Duckstation will let gamers improve the overall look of the emulation experience in a couple of other ways. Turning this on disables dithering, an effect that was built into the original Playstation hardware. Dithering in layman's terms was basically a function to improve depth of color by underpinning graphics with a series of lines or dots, which were then blurred by the system's video encoders. Turning this on helps improve graphic capabilities by smoothing out the blocky textures on 3D objects. The original low-poly graphics of the PS1 would often look cruder as they enlarged, so this function basically smoothes out those clunky compositions.

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