News: Technology News

YouTube limits viewers to three videos if an adblocker is detected

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 19:25:29 +0000

Do you remember several years ago when it became trendy for websites to detect adblockers and make you disable them? Well, it looks like that’s coming to YouTube.

According to Redditor Reddit_n_Me, YouTube now issues a popup to people using an adblocker on YouTube that informs them they can only watch three videos while blocking ads. It then gives you the option to allow ads or try YouTube Premium, which gives you an ad-free experience for a monthly fee.

Neowin already reported on the fact that YouTube was trialling a popup to stop adblockers but it seems that the latest iteration of the blocker is more lenient and allow you to watch three videos before you're made to turn off the adblocker.

In the popup shown to users, it reads:

It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback will be blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled.
Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide.
You can go ad-free with YouTube Premium, and creators still get paid from your subscription.

According to the Reddit user, he was using Adblock with Chrome when the notification popped up. It’s not clear whether all adblocking software will cause the popup to trigger or just some of them.

The popup has been confirmed by YouTube to BleepingComputers. The company said that it was running a small experiment globally that urges YouTubers to allow ads or try YouTube Premium - if you haven’t seen the popup but use an adblocker, it probably just means you’re not included in the trial.

YouTube Premium is not exactly the cheapest option around, coming in at $11.99/£11.99/CAD $11.99/AU $14.99 per month. YouTube Premium is also not available everywhere in the world so some people would be forced into watching ads.

We’ll have to wait and see if the notification becomes a permanent fixture but for now, it’s limited to just a select group of users.

Let us know in the comments if you have seen this popup and which browsers and adblocker combo you use.

As an online publication, Neowin too relies on ads for operating costs and, if you use an ad blocker, we'd appreciate being whitelisted. In addition, we have an ad-free subscription for $28 a year, which is another way to show support!

Source and Image: Reddit_n_Me (Reddit) via BleepingComputer

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Twitter tells lurkers to sign in or go home

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 19:22:37 +0000

A few months ago, Neowin broke the news that Twitter now required users to sign in to use the search feature. Now, The Verge is reporting that you can’t even see anything on Twitter anymore without first signing in.

You can try out the new “experience” in an incognito tab, just head over to Twitter without signing in and try and view some tweets. A login prompt appears and if you decide not to sign in, you get bounced to Twitter’s rarely-seen homepage where you can sign in or make an account.

Making users sign in to view any content is a massive reversal for the company. After Elon Musk took over the platform, he hired George Hotz, albeit not for very long because the hacker resigned, to open up the search feature for non-users. Hotz did open up the search for all but this was reversed in April.

It’s unclear why this change has been made but the company may be pushing people to sign up so that it can target adverts at them and make money from their visits to the platform. If Twitter is lucky, it may also convert some of those new sign-ups into paying Twitter Blue customers.

Last month, Twitter announced that Linda Yaccarino, a veteran sales chief, would be taking over the company. Following the news, the advertising company GroupM retracted a declaration that called Twitter “high risk” to brands due to Musk sounding off on the platform every other day.

For a period of time at the end of 2022, Elon Musk became so toxic to Twitter that Mastodon, rival open-source software, reported a massive spike in sign-ups across third-party servers. While the number of new signups is not as sharp as it once was, the total number of users across servers continues to grow much faster than before Musk’s Twitter takeover.

Source: The Verge

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Reddit Won’t Be the Same. Neither Will the Internet

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 19:17:06 +0000

Subreddits and third-party apps are going dark in response to Reddit’s proposed API changes. It’s the latest front in a labor battle between algorithms and the humans who feed them.

Today is the day the internet feared.

Maybe it wasn’t an active fear, not a doomsday everyone knew was coming, but still one that almost seemed inevitable: The magic of Reddit is gone. As of today, June 30, 2023, several mobile apps for browsing the platform are closing up shop ahead of a new initiative from Reddit to charge for access to its API. It’s the culmination of weeks of revolt from users and mods upset that the move will price out the third-party developers responsible for the apps that help make the community what it is. Even if the decision is ultimately rolled back, it’s a moment that has shifted the culture of Reddit forever. And shifted the internet with it.

If all of this sounds like a lot of fretting over something as wonky as an API change, it’s not. It’s indicative of a growing new awareness of what constitutes labor on the internet, and how communities can have their work mined for money-making ventures. Specifically, ones powered by artificial intelligence.

When the company announced the API change in April, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times one of the main reasons for the move was that it would compel companies using Reddit’s archives for AI training to pay up. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Huffman said. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

But charging for the API doesn’t affect just companies like OpenAI, Google, and others that are using Reddit discussions to train artificial intelligence systems. After the company announced the change, popular Reddit apps like Apollo and Reddit Is Fun announced that they’d shutter rather than pay the fees, which Apollo developer Christian Selig estimated would cost some $20 million annually.

To protest Reddit’s decision, mods of nearly 9,000 subreddits switched the groups to private earlier this month, depleting the vibrancy of conversation on the site, and even impacting Google search results. Hoffman said in a leaked memo to employees that the dustup would “pass,” but as Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told my colleague Boone Ashworth, it’s the kind of thing that can wreck a platform. “Like with Twitter, it's not a big collapse when a social media website starts to die, but it is a slow attrition unless they change their course,” Mir said.

And, like with Twitter, it’s the kind of shake-up that makes users realize the value they give to tech companies—for free—even if they just mean to give it to the community. A poster on one subreddit dedicated to saving the third-party apps broke it down succinctly: “Never forget how Reddit began as an empty website, which its founders populated with hundreds of fake accounts to give the illusion of activity and popularity—Remember that without us, the users, Reddit would be nothing but [Hoffman’s] digital dollhouse.” (Disclosure: WIRED is a publication of Condé Nast. Advance Publications, Condé Nast’s parent company, holds an ownership stake in Reddit.)

If all of this is starting to sound like a labor movement, that’s because it is. AI’s rise has caused a revaluation of what people put on the internet. Artists who feel their work was scraped by AI without credit or compensation are seeking recourse. Fan fiction writers who shared their work freely to entertain fellow fans now find their niche sex tropes on AI-assisted writing tools. Hollywood screenwriters are currently on strike to make sure AI systems aren’t enlisted to do their work for them. No, TV and film writers don’t write for the internet, but so much of what they create ends up online anyway, ready to be plucked.

If this truly is the end of Reddit as the world has known it, that would be tragic. Reddit, for all of its flaws, is still one of the last true communities on the internet. Its mods are volunteers, its users just generally enjoy the things they’re there to read and post about. It’s easy to see why watching their content get turned into a commodity might cause what Intelligencer called an “existential dilemma.” Online life has always been a hustle (it’s me, hi), but for those who didn’t necessarily want to be influencers, it’s also been a labor of love. What this recent disruption has shown, if anything, is that they were destined to be cogs too. Even if that’s not what any of them signed up for.

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Google tells Canada it won’t pay “link tax,” will pull news links from search

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 19:07:21 +0000

Canada requiring payments from tech to news orgs; similar bills pending in US.

In response to a new Canadian law requiring payments to news organizations, Google said it will remove links to Canadian news sources from Google Search and Google News for users who access the services in Canada. Google's announcement yesterday followed a similar announcement by Meta that it will end news access on Facebook and Instagram.

The new law's "duty to bargain" requires large search engines and social media services to negotiate payments with news businesses or groups of news businesses. The law requires mediation and then arbitration if negotiations don't result in a deal. The law is expected to take effect in six months.

"We have now informed the Government that when the law takes effect, we unfortunately will have to remove links to Canadian news from our Search, News and Discover products in Canada, and that [bill] C-18 will also make it untenable for us to continue offering our Google News Showcase product in Canada," Google President of Global Affairs Kent Walker wrote yesterday.

Google complained that Canada's Online News Act "requir[es] two companies to pay for simply showing links to news, something that everyone else does for free. The unprecedented decision to put a price on links (a so-called 'link tax') creates uncertainty for our products and exposes us to uncapped financial liability simply for facilitating Canadians' access to news from Canadian publishers. We have been saying for over a year that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism in Canada and may result in significant changes to our products."

Canada official blasts Big Tech

With the law now approved, the Department of Canadian Heritage is tasked with drafting regulations to implement it. In a tweet, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez criticized Google's announcement that it would pull news links in Canada.

"Big tech would rather spend money changing their platforms to block news from Canadians instead of paying a small share of the billions they make in advertising dollars. Canadians won't be bullied. Big tech isn't bigger than Canada," Rodriguez wrote. "The Online News Act is simple. Tech giants should compensate news organizations fairly for their work," Rodriguez also wrote.

Google took a similar position against an Australian "link tax" law in January 2021. But Google agreed to pay for news in Australia just weeks later. An Australian government report in December 2022 said the law "has been a success to date," resulting in "over 30 commercial agreements between digital platforms (Google and Meta) and a cross section of Australian news businesses."

Google also agreed to pay French news sites.

Similar US bill is controversial

In the US, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) in March reintroduced their Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), which would provide an antitrust exemption "for publishers of online content to collectively negotiate with dominant online platforms regarding the terms on which content may be distributed." The bill was advanced to the full Senate by the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 14-7 vote on June 15.

"We've seen a massive decline in local news over the past few decades driven, in part, by large online gatekeepers like Google and Facebook siphoning away more and more of the advertising revenue that news organizations have traditionally relied upon to fund their work," Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said. "The JCPA... will help reverse this trend by allowing news publishers... to band together and enter into structured negotiations with the biggest online platforms over access to news content."

The proposed US law was opposed by the tech industry and about two dozen advocacy groups, which wrote in a letter that the "bill forces platforms to carry and pay for the content of any digital journalism provider that becomes part of a joint negotiation entity, regardless of how extreme their content."

The letter criticized a proposed arbitration process, noting that publishers and Facebook and Google have provided dramatically different estimates of the value of news to the online platforms. "The values are simply irreconcilable: by definition, the arbitrators will be choosing from wildly inflated or deflated offers. The bill is also artificially one-sided—it precludes consideration of any benefit provided to any negotiating publisher or broadcaster for being listed in search or gaining reach on a platform. And any negotiation structured so that one party cannot walk away from the table is inherently not 'fair' or 'level,'" the letter said.

California considers “journalism usage fee”

There's also a California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) that would require "journalism usage fee payments" from online platforms to news providers. Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman called the proposal unconstitutional and wrote a letter to state senators urging them to reject it.

In addition to arguing that the proposed state law would violate the First Amendment, Goldman said it is "unlikely to create or sustain any journalism at all" and "will simply enrich the journalism operators' stockholders, even if they don't spend any payments on journalism at all."

"The 'arbitrations' will likely set royalties that are greater than the profits of the associated content, which encourages online services to categorically remove that content," Goldman wrote. "If so, CJPA counterproductively would make journalism more obscure and further impoverish journalism operations by reducing their referral traffic."

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Orchestra-conducting robot wows audience in S. Korean capital

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 16:09:05 +0000

Seoul (AFP) – A South Korean-made robot made its debut as an orchestra conductor before a sell-out crowd in Seoul on Friday, wowing the audience with a flawless performance in place of a human maestro.

Named "EveR 6", the five-foot-ten-inch-tall (1.8m) robot guided more than 60 musicians of the National Orchestra of Korea who were playing traditional Korean instruments.

The robot successfully guided the compositions, both independently and in collaboration with a human maestro who was standing next to it for about half an hour, entertaining the more than 950 audience members who had packed the National Theater of Korea.

The robot was showered with applause when it first appeared from below the stage on a lift and turned to face the audience, bowing in greeting.

Throughout the performance, the robot's blue eyes stared unblinkingly at the musicians, only nodding its head in time to the music.

The rookie performed well on its stage debut, audience members said.

The machine is not capable of listening or improvising in real-time, its developers say © Handout / National Theater of Korea/AFP

"I came here worried whether this robot could pull this off without a glitch," Kim Ji-min, a 19-year-old college student majoring in music, told AFP.

"But I found it to be in great harmony with the musicians... It felt like a whole new world for me."

While there have been musical performances led by robotic conductors in the past, including a 2017 concert led by the robot YuMi in Italy, this was the first time South Koreans were able to witness a robotic conductor on stage.

EveR 6, developed by the state-run Korea Institute of Industrial Technology, was programmed to replicate the movements of a human conductor through motion capture technology.

The machine is not capable of listening or improvising in real-time, however.

EveR 6's developers are currently working on enabling the robot to make gestures that are not pre-programmed, said Lee Dong-wook, the robot's engineer.

Improvising and communicating with musicians in real-time is the next big step, said Song Joo-ho, a music columnist who came to see the performance.

"It needs to improvise in real-time when musicians make a mistake or things go wrong."

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Reddit will remove mods of private communities unless they reopen

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 09:21:18 +0000

‘This is a courtesy notice to let you know that you will lose moderator status in the community by end of week.’

Reddit has informed moderators of protesting communities that are still private that they will lose their mod status by the end of the week, according to messages seen by The Verge. If a moderator tells Reddit they are interested in “actively moderating” the subreddit, the company says it will “take your request into consideration.”

Here is the full message, which we have confirmed was sent to moderators of at least two subreddits:

After sending a modmail message on June 27, 2023, your mod team indicated that you do not want to reopen the [name of subreddit] community. This is a courtesy notice to let you know that you will lose moderator status in the community by end of week. If you reply to let us know you’re interested in actively moderating this community, we will take your request into consideration.

In message threads we’ve seen, moderators of both subreddits told ModCodeofConduct they do want to reopen, but said they would need Reddit make changes before they would.

“We see no reason to reopen as I don’t think we’re the bad guys here,” yoasif, an r/firefox moderator who received the message, tells The Verge in an email. “Reddit has had a chance to reconcile with the protest for weeks now, and they haven’t.”

However, although r/firefox was private when we first published this article, it has since reopened — though it’s now a community focused on red pandas instead of the Mozilla web browser. “Those who know the subreddit and have been here for a long time know that it has been actively moderated for years in order to maintain a positive environment,” the moderators wrote in a post. “We don’t wish to let the subreddit fall into the hands of someone who would undo the good work we have done or would even foster an anti-Mozilla community here.

“All legacy technical posts will remain available so that searching for help related to the browser is still available, but henceforth and until the reddit admins appropriately reply to our concerns, the only new submissions allowed will be ones that contain the cuddly fuzzy little animals from which the subreddit indirectly received its name:‌ the red panda! Also known as fire foxes.” At some point down the line, browser-related posts will be allowed again, the moderators said.

Reddit’s declaration that it is going to remove the mods follows escalating messages from the company this week that indicated it might take action against them. On Tuesday, the Reddit admin (employee) account ModCodeofConduct asked some moderators of private subreddits (a designation that means the community is only accessible to approved users) to let it know within 48 hours if they planned to reopen their communities.

But when some replied, the admin took a far more aggressive tone. “This community remaining closed to its [millions of] members cannot continue” past the deadline, ModCodeofConduct wrote in one message seen by The Verge. “This community will not remain private beyond the timeframe we’ve allowed for confirmation of plans here,” the admin added. ModCodeofConduct also argued that switching to private in protest is a violation of the Moderator Code of Conduct.

Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt declined to comment.

Although more than 8,000 communities went dark earlier this month in protest of the company’s imminent API pricing changes, many subreddits have since reopened; according to one tracker, about 2,300 remain private or restricted in some form. Some, like r/firefox, have reopened with a twist.

Update June 29th, 10:25PM ET: r/firefox has reopened.

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Windows Copilot Preview is now available for testing

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 19:25:44 +0000

In May 2023, during the annual Build conference, Microsoft announced Windows Copilot—a feature that integrates the power of AI into Microsoft's desktop operating system. After a month of waiting, Windows Copilot is finally here, and you can test it in the latest Windows 11 preview build.

Windows Copilot Preview is gradually rolling out to insiders running the latest Windows 11 build 23493 (Dev Channel). In addition, you need to update Microsoft Edge to version 115.0.1901.150 or higher.

Since Windows Copilot is a controlled feature rollout, you may not get access to it right after installing the latest build. As it usually goes with such an approach, Microsoft promises to expand the rollout soon and provide the necessary policies to let IT administrators manage the experience within their organizations.

You can invoke Windows Copilot Preview by pressing Win + C or clicking the corresponding icon on the taskbar. The assistant will pop out of the right side of the screen, allowing you to interact with the assistant without obscuring existing windows and apps.

Microsoft stresses that the first implementation of Windows Copilot is a public preview, so not everything the company has shown at the Build conference is available right away. Still, even in its current form, Windows Copilot can perform plenty of actions, such as enable dark mode, take a screenshot, turn on or off do not disturb mode, and more. Also, you may notice "inline recommendations" or ads Microsoft considers relevant to you.

In addition to not having some of the previously announced features, Windows Copilot in its current form has a few known issues:

You can use Alt + Tab to switch out of Windows Copilot, but not back into it. Windows + C will move focus back to Windows Copilot.
When first launching or after refreshing Copilot while using Voice Access you'll need to use "Show grid" commands to click in the "Ask me anything" box for the first time.

Keep in mind that things Microsoft tests in the Windows Insider program can and will evolve with time and new preview builds. If you do not like something or have an idea for improvement, be sure to file your feedback using the button with three dots at the top right corner of the Windows Copilot UI. Also, check out other new features Microsoft introduced in Windows 11 build 23493.

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New AI-based Microsoft Shopping features added to Bing search, Bing Chat, and Edge browser

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 19:22:54 +0000

Microsoft wants to make shopping online easier when using the Bing search engine, Bing Chat, and the Edge web browser. Today, it announces new Microsoft Shopping features that will use generative AI to give online buyers some new options.

In a post on the Bing blog today, Microsoft stated it has added new Shopping Guides in Bing and Bing Chat in the US, and in Edge worldwide. It offered an example of how this will work:

Start by going to Bing.com and typing “college supplies” into the search box. Your shopping assistant for the web will do the research for you, using AI to generate a tailored Buying Guide that tells you what to look for in each category, offers product suggestions, and shows the specifications of multiple, similar items next to each other in a smart compare table, so you can quickly compare options without having to click around to various websites.

A new feature for generative AI created review summaries is also rolling out worldwide. Microsoft stated:

While shopping for headphones, you can open Bing Chat in the Edge sidebar and Bing will suggest what aspects to consider when shopping for headphones like sound quality, fit and device compatibility. And when you find a specific pair you like, you can ask Bing Chat in Edge to briefly summarize what people are saying about it online and provide a quick look at top insights and popular opinions about the product.

Finally, the new Price Match feature is rolling out in the US now. It will allow users to not only find the best price online for a product, but it will alert and assist users after they buy something by matching the price if it goes down following the purchase. Microsoft stated:

We’ve partnered with top US retailers with existing price match policies and will be adding more over time. Price Comparison and Price History are built-in browser features that help ensure you’re buying at the right place and time, and Edge helps you automatically apply coupons and cashback when shopping online, right from Bing Chat.

While these new features are rolling out for some users now, it's possible it might take a while for Microsoft to enable all Bing and Edge users to access these Shopping features.

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Dying Light 2 gets "horror-like" nights, better parkour, community maps and more

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 19:19:24 +0000

Techland is back with another major update for its latest zombie action survival entry Dying Light 2. Dubbed the Good Night Good Luck update, it brings a complete overhaul to the night running experience and parkour physics, while also adding built-in community map support, throwable melee weapons, and a lot more.

Back in April, Techland delivered a major update to the game that brought in a wealth of highly-requested features. This included physics improvements to bodies, more brutal combat, and better rag dolls, among other changes. The developer is continuing the overhaul spree with the latest drop.

Nights in Dying Light 2 now has a "heavier, almost horror-like feel" according to the developer. Players will find that nighttime visibility has dropped a lot, with the flashlight (now sporting dynamic shadows) being an essential tool for getting around. Volatiles can be found roaming around now too, adding an extra layer of tension.

Traversing across the city will now feel less floaty as well. Brand-new animations, better air control, and keeping momentum intact after pulling off moves are all a part of the update. Players can even slide down billboards using their knives now, action movie-style.

Techland has also introduced a parkour setting that can be toggled named 'Physical'. When enabled, this will offer a more manual and challenging parkour experience more akin to the first game's running style.

The third major addition of this update is Mod-io integration. With this, players can easily jump into community-made maps straight from the main menu without needing any third-party tools. Only PC players can utilize this feature for now, but Techland is working on bringing it to consoles and the Steam Deck later this year. Co-op and script support are also being worked on for modded maps as well.

Other changes include a Screen Space Reflections 'Ultra' option on PC for those who want even more eye candy, a new Harran Sunset colour grading option to make the game look more like the first entry, and a whole lot of bug fixes. Read the complete list of changes here.

The Dying Light 2 version 1.11 Good Night Good Luck update is now available across PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.

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Speed matters: How Ethernet went from 3Mbps to 100Gbps… and beyond

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 19:15:52 +0000

One of the biggest computing inventions of all time, courtesy of Xerox PARC.

With Ethernet turning 50 this year, Ars is resurfacing this feature on the development and evolution of Ethernet that was originally published in 2011.

Although watching TV shows from the 1970s suggests otherwise, the era wasn't completely devoid of all things resembling modern communication systems. Sure, the 50Kbps modems that the ARPANET ran on were the size of refrigerators, and the widely used Bell 103 modems only transferred 300 bits per second. But long-distance digital communication was common enough, relative to the number of computers deployed. Terminals could also be hooked up to mainframe and minicomputers over relatively short distances with simple serial lines or with more complex multidrop systems. This was all well known; what was new in the '70s was the local area network (LAN). But how to connect all these machines?

The point of a LAN is to connect many more than just two systems, so a simple cable back and forth doesn't get the job done. Connecting several thousands of computers to a LAN can in theory be done using a star, a ring, or a bus topology. A star is obvious enough: every computer is connected to some central point. A bus consists of a single, long cable that computers connect to along its run. With a ring, a cable runs from the first computer to the second, from there to the third and so on until all participating systems are connected, and then the last is connected to the first, completing the ring.

In practice, things aren't so simple. Token Ring is a LAN technology that uses a ring topology, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the network cabling, because computers are hooked up to concentrators (similar to today's Ethernet switches). However, the cable does in fact form a ring, and Token Ring uses a somewhat complex token-passing system to determine which computer gets to send a packet at which time. A token circles the ring, and the system in possession of the token gets to transmit. Token Bus uses a physical bus topology, but also uses a token-passing scheme to arbitrate access to the bus. A token network's complexity makes it vulnerable to a number of failure modes, but such networks do have the advantage that performance is deterministic; it can be calculated precisely in advance, which is important in certain applications.

But in the end it was Ethernet that won the battle for LAN standardization through a combination of standards body politics and a clever, minimalist—and thus cheap to implement—design. It went on to obliterate the competition by seeking out and assimilating higher bitrate protocols and adding their technological distinctiveness to its own. Decades later, it had become ubiquitous.

If you've ever looked at the network cable protruding from your computer and wondered how Ethernet got started, how it has lasted so long, and how it works, wonder no more: here's the story.

Brought to you by Xerox PARC

Ethernet was invented by Bob Metcalfe and others at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the mid-1970s. PARC's experimental Ethernet ran at 3Mbps, a "convenient data transfer rate [...] well below that of the computer's path to main memory," so packets wouldn't have to be buffered in Ethernet interfaces. The name comes from the luminiferous ether that was at one point thought to be the medium through which electromagnetic waves propagate, like sound waves propagate through air.

Ethernet used its cabling as radio "ether" by simply broadcasting packets over a thick coaxial line. Computers were connected to the Ethernet cable through "taps," where a hole is punched through the coax cladding and the outer conductor so a connection can be made to the inner conductor. The two ends of the coax cable—branching is not allowed—are fitted with terminating resistors that regulate the electrical properties of the cable so signals propagate throughout the length of the cable but don't reflect back. All computers see all packets pass by, but the Ethernet interface ignores packets that aren't addressed to the local computer or the broadcast address, so the software only has to process packets targeted at the receiving computer.

Other LAN technologies use extensive mechanisms to arbitrate access to the shared communication medium. Not Ethernet. I'm tempted to use the expression "the lunatics run the asylum," but that would be unfair to the clever distributed control mechanism developed at PARC. I'm sure that the mainframe and minicomputer makers of the era thought the asylum analogy wasn't far off, though.

Ethernet's media access control (MAC) procedures, known as "Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detect" (CSMA/CD), are based on ALOHAnet. This was a radio network between several Hawaiian islands set up in the early 1970s, where all the remote transmitters used the same frequency. Stations transmitted whenever they liked. Obviously, two of them might transmit at the same time, interfering with each other so both transmissions were lost.

To fix the problem, the central location acknowledges a packet if it was received correctly. If the sender doesn't see an acknowledgment, it tries to send the same packet again a little later. When a collision occurs because two stations transmit at the same time, the retransmissions make sure that the data gets across eventually.

Ethernet improves on ALOHAnet in several ways. First of all, Ethernet stations check to see if the ether is idle (carrier sense) and wait if they sense a signal. Second, once transmitting over the shared medium (multiple access), Ethernet stations check for interference by comparing the signal on the wire to the signal they're trying to send. If the two don't match, there must be a collision (collision detect). In that case, the transmission is broken off. Just to make sure that the source of the interfering transmission also detects a collision, upon detecting a collision, a station sends a "jam" signal for 32 bit times.

Both sides now know their transmission failed, so they start retransmission attempts using an exponential backoff procedure. On the one hand, it would be nice to retransmit as soon as possible to avoid wasting valuable bandwidth, but on the other hand, immediately having another collision defeats the purpose. So each Ethernet station maintains a maximum backoff time, counted as an integer value that is multiplied by the time it takes to transmit 512 bits. When a packet is successfully transmitted, the maximum backoff time is set to one. When a collision occurs, the maximum backoff time is doubled until it reaches 1024. The Ethernet system then selects an actual backoff time that's a random number below the maximum backoff time.

For instance, after the first collision, the maximum backoff time is 2, making the choices for the actual backoff time 0 and 1. Obviously, if two systems both select 0 or both select 1, which will happen 50 percent of the time, there is another collision. The maximum backoff then becomes 4, and the chances of another collision go down to 25 percent for two stations wanting to transmit. After 16 successive collisions, an Ethernet system gives up and throws away the packet.

There used to be a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding the performance impact of collisions. But in practice they're detected very quickly and the colliding transmissions are broken off. So collisions don't waste much time, and CSMA/CD Ethernet performance under load is actually quite good: in their paper from 1976 describing the experimental 3Mbps Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs showed that for packets of 500 bytes and larger, more than 95 percent of the network's capacity is used for successful transmissions, even if 256 computers all continuously have data to transmit. Pretty clever.

Standardization

In the late 1970s, Ethernet was owned by Xerox. But Xerox preferred owning a small piece of a large pie rather than all of a small pie, and it got together with Digital and Intel. As the DIX consortium, they created an open (or at least multi-vendor) 10Mbps Ethernet specification and then quickly ironed out some bugs, producing the DIX Ethernet 2.0 specification.

Then the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) got into the game. Eventually, it produced standard 802.3, which is now considered the official Ethernet standard—although the IEEE carefully avoids using the word "Ethernet" lest it be accused of endorsing any particular vendor. (DIX 2.0 and IEEE 802.3 are fully compatible, except for one thing: the layout and meaning of the Ethernet header fields.)

Even right at the beginning, engineers realized that having a single cable snaking through a building was limiting, to say the least. Simply branching the thick coaxial cable wasn't possible; that would do bad things to the data signals. The solution was having repeaters. These regenerate the signal and make it possible to connect two or more Ethernet cables or segments.

The 9.5mm thick coaxial cable also wasn't the easiest type of cabling to work with. For instance, I once saw two telecom company guys hammer on a couple of thick coax cables that went through a wall in order to bend the cables downward. This took them the better part of an hour. Another one told me that he keeps a nice big piece of the stuff in his car: "If the police find a baseball bat in your car they call it a weapon, but a piece of coax works just as well in a fight and the police never give me any trouble."

Although less thug-repellant, thin coax is much easier to use. These cables are half as thin as thick ethernet and look a lot like TV antenna cable. Thin coax does away with the "vampire taps" that allow new stations to attach anywhere to a thick coax segment. Instead, thin cables end in BNC connectors and computers are attached through T-connectors. The big disadvantage of thin coax Ethernet segments is that if the cable gets interrupted somewhere, the whole network segment goes down. This happens when a new system is connected to the network, but it also happens often by accident, as coax loops have to run past every computer. There had to be a better way.

In the late 1980s, a new specification was developed to allow Ethernet to run over unshielded twisted pair cabling—in other words, phone wiring. UTP cables for Ethernet come as four pairs of thin, twisted cables. The cables can be solid copper or made of thin strands. (The former has better electrical properties; the latter is easier to work with.) UTP cables are outfitted with the now-common RJ45 plastic snap-in connectors. 10Mbps (and 100Mbps) Ethernet over UTP uses only two of the twisted pairs: one for transmitting and one for receiving.

A slight complication to this setup is that every UTP cable is also its own Ethernet segment. So in order to build a LAN with more than two computers, it's necessary to use a multiport repeater, also known as a hub. The hub or repeater simply repeats an incoming signal on all ports and also sends the jam signal to all ports if there's a collision. Complex rules limit the topology and the use of hubs in Ethernet networks, but I'll skip those as I doubt anyone still has interest in building a large scale Ethernet network using repeater hubs.

This setup created its own cabling issues, and they're still with us. Computers use pins 1 and 2 to transmit and pins 3 and 6 to receive, but for hubs and switches, this is the other way around. This means that a computer is connected to a hub using a regular cable, but two computers or two hubs must be connected using "crossover" cables that connect pins 1 and 2 on one side with 3 and 6 on the other side (and vice versa). Interestingly, FireWire, co-developed by Apple, managed to avoid this failure of user-friendliness by simply always requiring a crossover cable.

Still, the end result was a fast and flexible system—so fast, it's still in use. But more speed was needed.

The need for speed: Fast Ethernet

It's hard to believe now, but in the early 1980s, 10Mbps Ethernet was very fast. Think about it: is there any other 30-year-old technology still present in current computers? 300 baud modems? 500 ns memory? Daisy wheel printers? But even today, 10Mbps is not an entirely unusable speed, and it's still part of the 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet interfaces in our computers.

Still, by the early 1990s, Ethernet didn't feel as fast as it did a decade earlier. Consider the VAX-11/780, a machine released in 1977 by Digital Equipment Corporation. The 780 comes with some 2MB RAM and runs at 5MHz. Its speed is almost exactly one MIPS and it executes 1757 dhrystones per second. (Dhrystone is a CPU benchmark developed in 1984; the name is a play on the even older Whetstone benchmark.) A current Intel i7 machine may run at 3 GHz and have 3GB RAM, executing nearly 17 million dhrystones per second. If network speeds had increased as fast as processor speeds, the i7 would today at least have a 10Gbps network interface, and perhaps a 100Gbps one.

But they haven't increased as quickly. Fortunately, by the 1990s, another LAN technology was ten times faster than regular Ethernet: Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI).

FDDI is a ring network running at 100Mbps. It supports a second, redundant ring for automatic failovers when the primary ring breaks somewhere, and an FDDI network can span no less than 200 kilometers. So FDDI is very useful as a high-capacity backbone between different LANs. Even though Ethernet and FDDI are different in many ways, it's possible to translate the packet formats, so Ethernet and FDDI networks can be interconnected through bridges.

Bridges are connected to multiple LAN segments and learn which addresses are used on which segment. They then retransmit packets from the source segment to the destination segment when necessary. This means that, unlike in the case of a repeater, communication (and collisions!) local to each segment remain local. So a bridge splits the network into separate collision domains, but all the packets still get to go everywhere, so the bridged network is still a single broadcast domain.

A network can be split into multiple broadcast domains using routers. Routers operate at the network layer in the network model, one step above Ethernet. This means that routers strip off the Ethernet header upon reception of a packet and then add a new lower layer header—Ethernet or otherwise—when the packet is forwarded.

FDDI was useful to connect Ethernet segments and/or servers, but it suffered from the same "oops, didn't mean to step on that cable!" problems as thin coax Ethernet, coupled with high cost. CDDI, a copper version of FDDI, was developed, but it didn't go anywhere. So the IEEE created Fast Ethernet, a 100Mbps version of Ethernet.

10Mbps Ethernet uses "Manchester encoding" to put bits on the wire. Manchester encoding transforms each data bit into a low and a high voltage on the wire. Then, 0 is encoded as a low-high transition and a 1 as a high-low transition. This basically doubles the number of bits transmitted, but it avoids issues that can come up with long sequences of only zeros or only ones: transmission media typically can't maintain "low" or "high" for extended periods—the signal starts to look too much like a DC potential. Also, clocks will drift: did I just see 93 zero bits or 94? Manchester encoding avoids both these problems by having a transition between high and low in the middle of each bit. And both coax and category 3 UTP can handle the additional bandwidth.

Not so much for 100Mbps, though. Transmitting at that speed using Manchester encoding would be problematic on UTP. So instead, 100BASE-TX borrows from CDDI a 4B/5B MLT-3 encoding. The 4B/5B part takes four bits and turns them into five. This way, it's possible to ensure there are always at least two transitions in every five-bit block. This also allows for some special symbols such as an idle symbol when there is no data to transmit.

The Multi-Level Transmit 3 encoding then cycles through the values -1, 0, +1, 0. If a bit in a 4B/5B block is one, a transition to the next value is made. If the bit is zero, the signal stays at the previous level this bit period. This limits the maximum frequency in the signal, allowing it to fit within the limitations of UTP cabling. However, the UTP wiring must conform to the tighter specifications of category 5, rather than category 3 for 10BASE-T. There are many other Fast Ethernet cabling specifications than 100BASE-TX over cat 5 UTP, but only 100BASE-TX became a mass market product.

From bridges to switches

Fast Ethernet uses the same CSMA/CD as Ethernet, but the limitations on cable length and numbers of repeaters are much more stringent to allow collisions to be detected in a tenth of the time. Soon, 10/100Mbps hubs started to appear, where 10Mbps systems were connected to other 10Mbps systems, and 100Mbps systems to 100Mbps systems. Of course, it's helpful to have communication between both types of computers, so typically these hubs would have a bridge between the 10Mbps and 100Mbps hubs inside.

The next step was to simply bridge between all ports. These multiport bridges were called switching hubs or Ethernet switches. With a switch, if the computer on port 1 is sending to the computer on port 3, and the computer on port 2 to the one on port 4, there are no collisions—the packets are only sent to the port that leads to the packet's destination address. Switches learn which address is reachable over which port simply by observing the source addresses in packets flowing through the switch. If a packet is addressed to an unknown address, it's "flooded" to all ports, the same as broadcast packets.

One limitation that applies to hubs and switches alike is that an Ethernet network must be loop-free. Connecting port 1 on switch A to port 1 on switch B and then port 2 on switch B to port 2 on switch A leads to immediate catastrophic results. Packets start circling the network and broadcasts are multiplied as they are flooded. However, it's very useful to have backup links in a network so that when a primary connection goes down, traffic continues to flow over the backup.

This problem was solved (for switches) by creating a protocol that detects loops in an Ethernet network and prunes connections until the loops are gone. This makes the effective network topology look like what mathematicians call a tree: a graph where there's no more than one path between any two points. It's a spanning tree if there's also at least one path between any two points, i.e., no network nodes are left unconnected. If one of the active connections fails, the spanning tree protocol (STP) is executed again to create a new spanning tree so the network keeps running.

The spanning tree algorithm was created by Radia Perlman at DEC in 1985, who also immortalized the algorithm in the form of a poem:

		Algorhyme

        I think that I shall never see
        a graph more lovely than a tree.
        A tree whose crucial property
        is loop-free connectivity.
        A tree that must be sure to span
        so packet can reach every LAN.
        First, the root must be selected.
        By ID, it is elected.
        Least-cost paths from root are traced.
        In the tree, these paths are placed.
        A mesh is made by folks like me,
        then bridges find a spanning tree.

                         Radia Perlman

Even more speed: Gigabit Ethernet

Fast Ethernet was standardized in 1995, but only three years later, the next iteration of Ethernet came around: Gigabit Ethernet. As before, speed was increased by a factor of ten and, as before, some technology was borrowed elsewhere to hit the ground running. In this case it was Fibre Channel (apparently of British descent), a technology mostly used for storage networks. Gigabit Ethernet is extensively used over different kinds and lengths of fiber, where it hews more closely to its Fibre Channel pedigree.

But for 1000BASE-T, the IEEE needed to open a new bag of tricks borrowed from 100BASE-T2 and 100BASE-T4, Fast Ethernet standards that never got any traction, as well as 100BASE-TX. For one thing, the UTP cabling requirements were upped again to category 5e, and 1000BASE-T uses all four twisted pairs—in both directions at the same time.

This requires some advanced digital signal processing, similar to what happens in dial-up modems but at some 10,000 times the speed. Each wire pair transmits two bits at a time using 4D-PAM5. The 4D means four data symbols (two bits), the PAM5 is Pulse Amplitude Modulation with five signal levels. This happens at a rate of 125 million symbols per second—the same rate as Fast Ethernet. There's also a complex bit scrambling procedure that makes sure that various properties, such as possible interference, are optimized.

The CSMA/CD mechanism depends on the first bit of a packet traveling all the way across a collision domain before a station transmits the last bit of a packet so that there is a shared notion of "transmitting at the same time." With transmission times much reduced by the higher bitrate, the physical size of collision domains already had to be reduced for Fast Ethernet, but for Gigabit Ethernet this would have to shrink to maybe 20 meters—clearly unworkable. To avoid this, Gigabit Ethernet adds a "carrier extension" that more or less pads packets to 512 bytes so that aggregate cable lengths of 200 meters remain usable.

However, as far as I know, no vendors implement the above scheme; they assume the presence of switches instead. With a switch, or with a direct cable between two computers, CSMA/CD is unnecessary: the two sides can simply both transmit at the same time. This is called full duplex operation, as opposed to half duplex for traditional CSMA/CD operation. The UTP Ethernet variants support an additional autoconfiguration protocol that allows two Ethernet systems to negotiate which speed to use, in full or half duplex mode.

Before the autonegotiation protocol was widely used, people would sometimes manually configure one system to use full duplex, but the other would use half duplex. With little traffic, this causes few problems, but as traffic increases, more and more collisions occur. These will be ignored by the system that is in full duplex mode, leading to corrupted packets that aren't retransmitted. Autonegotiation works very reliably these days, so there is no longer any reason to turn it off and invite problems.

Ludicrous speed: 10 Gigabit Ethernet

A common way to create a LAN in a building or office these days is to have a series of relatively small switches, perhaps one per wiring closet where all the UTP cables come together. The small switches are then connected to a bigger and/or faster switch that functions as the backbone of the LAN. With users on multiple floors and servers concentrated in a server room, there's often a lot of bandwidth required between the switches, even if individual computers don't come close to saturating a Gigabit Ethernet connection. So even though computers with a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection aren't common even today, 10GE was badly needed as a backbone technology. The standard was published in 2002.

In the telecom world, a technology called SONET or SDH (Synchronous Optical Networking, Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) was/is used to transmit large numbers of phone calls and also data in digital form over fiber. SONET is available in speeds of 155Mbps, 622Mbps, 2.488Gbps... and 9.953Gbps! That was too perfect to resist, so one form of 10GE adopts a low-level SONET/SDH framing. This is called the WAN (Wide Area Network) PHY (as in: physical layer). But there's also a LAN PHY, which runs at 10.3125Gbps. Ten Gigabit Ethernet no longer supports half-duplex CSMA/CD operation; it's only full duplex operation at this speed.

Both the 10GE WAN PHY and most LAN PHY variants use fiber. Making Gigabit Ethernet run over UTP as well as it does wasn't easy. This is even more true for 10 Gigabit Ethernet; it works very well over fiber, even over fairly long distances, making it very popular with Internet Service Providers. But it required quite a bit of magic to make 10GE run over UTP—it took until 2006 for the 10GBASE-T standard to be published. 10GBASE-T needs even better cables than 1000BASE-T—category 6a to reach 100 meters. Cat 6a uses thicker insulation than Cat 5e, so it doesn't always physically fit where older cables went.

10GBASE-T also increases the number of symbols per second from 125 million for fast and Gigabit Ethernet to 800 million and the PAM levels from 5 to 16, encoding 3.125 instead of 2 bits per symbol. It also soups up the echo and near-end crosstalk cancellation and other signal processing that was introduced with Gigabit Ethernet over UTP and adds Forward Error Correction (FEC) to repair incidental transmission errors.

Reaching for 100 Gigabit Ethernet

After 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 100Gbps was the obvious next step. However, transmitting at 100Gbps over fiber has numerous challenges, as the laser pulses that carry information through fiber become so short that they have a hard time maintaining their shape as they travel. The IEEE therefore kept open the option to make a smaller step towards 40Gbps instead of its customary tenfold boost in speeds.

Currently, there are a large set of 100GBASE-* standards, but many of them use four parallel data paths to reach 40 or 100Gbps and/or only work over short distances. Work is still ongoing to create the one 100GBASE standard to rule them all.

Ethernet’s future

It's truly mindboggling that Ethernet managed to survive 30 years in production, increasing its speed by no less than four orders of magnitude. This means that a 100GE system sends an entire packet (well, if it's 1212 bytes long) in the time that the original 10Mbps Ethernet sends a single bit. In those 30 years, all aspects of Ethernet were changed: its MAC procedure, the bit encoding, the wiring... only the packet format has remained the same—which ironically is the part of the IEEE standard that's widely ignored in favor of the slightly different DIX 2.0 standard.

All this backward compatibility is actually a problem: at 10Mbps you can send some 14,000 46-byte packets per second, or 830 1500-byte packets. But even at GE speeds, the 1500-byte maximum is an issue. Many modern Gigabit Ethernet network cards actually let the TCP/IP stack transmit and receive much larger packets, which are then split into smaller ones or combined into larger ones to make life easier for the CPU, as most of the processing is per packet, independent from how large a packet is. And sending as many as 140 million 46-byte packets per second at 100GE is ridiculous. Unfortunately, allowing larger packets would break compatibility with older systems, and so far the IEEE has always punted on changing this.

LANs are now everywhere, if only to provide an onramp to the Internet. Ethernet in its various flavors has been spectacularly successful, pushing out all competing LAN technologies. The only reason Ethernet growth has slowed over the past decade is because wireless LANs (in the form of Wi-Fi) are so convenient. (And Wi-Fi is very compatible with wired Ethernet.) But wired and wireless are largely complementary, so even though more and more computers go through life with an unoccupied Ethernet port—or even lack one altogether—Ethernet is always there to deliver the speed and reliability that the shared wireless ether keeps struggling to provide.

Terabit Ethernet?

Will there ever be Terabit Ethernet, running at 1,000Gbps? On the one hand, this seems unlikely, as transporting 100Gbps over fiber is already a big challenge. On the other hand, in 1975 few people would have guessed that today's students would go to class carrying affordable computers with 10Gbps ports.

CPU designers solved a similar problem by using multiple parallel cores. Gigabit Ethernet already uses parallelism by using all four wire pairs in a UTP cable, and many 40Gbps and 100Gbps Ethernet variants over fiber also use parallel datastreams, each using a slightly different wavelength laser light. Under-sea cables already transport multi-terabit aggregate bandwidths over a single fiber using dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), so this seems an obvious opportunity for Ethernet to once again take existing technology, streamline it, and aggressively push the price down.

Or maybe it doesn't have to. When I e-mailed Radia Perlman to ask permission to use the Algorhyme poem, she mentioned a new technology called Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL), which should allow for building flexible, high-speed Ethernet networks using "lots of links" rather than a single fast link. In any event, it seems likely that the future of high-speed Ethernet involves some form of parallelism.

I can't wait to see what the next 30 years bring for Ethernet.

Source

Baldur's Gate 3 release date moved up for PC, delayed for PS5, still working on Xbox

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 19:13:55 +0000

PC gamers won't have to wait as long to play Baldur's Gate 3. The long awaited Dungeons and Dragons' based RPG sequel will be released a few weeks earlier than planned on the PC platform.

Originally planned for release on August 31 for both PC and PS5 platforms, Larian has confirmed that the PC edition will now release on August 3. The somewhat bad news is that the PS5 version will be delayed a few days, and will now launch on September 6. Larian stated:

Baldur’s Gate 3 is targeting 60 frames-per-second and we’re close to achieving that on the platform but need a bit more extra time. We don’t want to compromise on quality, and feel it would be a shame to downscale to 30fps or make other compromises to hit an arbitrary date.

Larian also offered a small update on the possible launch of the Xbox Series X and S version:

We’re optimistic about Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Xbox Series X, but in order to announce and release the game on Xbox, we need to ensure that the game is performing without compromise across the entire Xbox X|S ecosystem, in multiplayer and with split-screen. We already put a lot of effort into making it work and will continue to do so. Like with the PS5 version, we’ll release it when it’s ready. We’ll update you as soon as we can.

In a separate article on IGN, it's confirmed that Larian is having issues with split-screen support on the Xbox Series S console. Larian Studios head Swen Vincke admits that there "may be some compromises we have to make" to launch the game on the Xbox platform.

Larian also said that player characters in Baldur's Gate 3 will now be able to go up to level 12, instead of just level 10, which should allow for more unlocks of abilities. Also, two new races, Dragonborn and Half-Orcs. have been added to the game, giving it a total of 11 races and 31 subraces. There will also be 12 classes, including the newly revealed Monk class, and 46 subclasses. You can learn a lot more about the new additions to the game on the Baldur's Gate 3 Steam page.

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PCIe 7.0 Announced, PCIe 6.0 Devices Releasing Next Year

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 09:36:35 +0000

While PCIe 7.0 was just announced, PCIe 6.0, which was announced more than a year ago, has yet to see any hardware. That could change next year.

A few days ago, PCI-SIG, a group of companies governing the PCI and PCIe standards, announced the specs for PCIe 7.0.

PCIe 7.0 has many improvements over PCIe 6.0. The most important one is that it doubles the bandwidth that is found in PCIe 6.0. While PCIe 6.0 supports the bandwidth of 256 GB/s at x16 lanes, PCIe 7.0 doubles it to 512 GB/s.

PCI-SIG PCIe 7.0 Speeds Compared To The Previous Versions. Credit: PCI-SIG.

PCI-SIG says the main goals of PCIe 7.0 are:

Delivering 128 GT/s raw bit rate and up to 512 GB/s bi-directionally via x16 configuration
Utilizing PAM4 signaling
Focusing on the channel parameters and reach
Continuing to deliver the low-latency and high-reliability targets
Improving power efficiency
Maintaining backwards compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe technology

The announcement also says that it will fulfill the need for a reliable, high-speed, low-latency I/O interconnect.

PCI-SIG says PCIe 7.0’s technology will expand data-intensive applications and markets, including 800 Gig Ethernet, High Performance Computing (HPC), Quantum Computing, Hyperscale Data Centers, Cloud and other things.

But what about PCIe 6.0. While we talk about PCIe 7.0, we have yet to see any devices with PCIe 6.0. It looks like we might see them next year.

PCIe 6.0 Devices Next Year

PCIe 6.0 was announced more than a year ago. With 256 GB/s bandwidth, which again doubles the 128 GB/s bandwidth in the PCIe 5.0 specs.

However, there aren’t any devices that have been released with PCIe 6.0 support yet. We are only now seeing PCIe 5.0 based SSDs start to come on the market.

XDA reports that, as per the latest presentation, we will start seeing PCIe 6.0 based devices in March 2024. Not only that, it’s only in 2027 that PCIe 7.0 based devices will become available.

That is because the specifications for PCIe 7.0 are not finalized. It will happen only two years later.

Faster PCIe Not Always Required

One of the biggest beneficiaries of a faster PCIe bus on the consumer side are SSDs, which allow faster data transfer.

However, newer PCIe 5.0 SSDs, for example, not only need a higher quality, expensive controller, but they also require either passive or active cooling.

This means that making PCIe 6.0 based SSDs is going to be even harder. Means they are going to be even more expensive. Not to forget, most people are not going to get that much of a noticeable benefit out of it.

But what about graphics cards? The thing is, one doesn’t need a faster PCIe bus for graphics cards, at least not right now. For two reasons.

First, there’s no PCIe 5.0 graphics card yet. When they are available, PCIe 6.0 will become a standard by then.

The second reason is that, as we mentioned in our article, there’s hardly any difference between PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 in gaming when using graphics cards. That’s because graphics cards are still not able to completely utilize all the bandwidth available in the PCIe bus.

If that is not enough, even TechPowerUp did some benchmarks with a lot of games. In it, they found that when running Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, the difference between PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 is just 3% at max (page 28). That too at 1080p. At 4K, the difference is even smaller at 2%.

So yes. These new PCIe versions are much welcomed. But they are mostly useful for servers and SSDs. Graphics cards, at least for now, aren’t unlikely to benefit much from it, hence, they don’t really require it.

Source

Next-Gen Nvidia RTX 5000 GPU Are At Least Two Years Away

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 09:34:19 +0000

As per the latest rumors, users will have to wait two more years for the RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 and RTX 5060 graphics cards.

When Nvidia released the RTX 4000 series to much fanfare, the initial reactions were great. That’s because the RTX 4090 provided an excellent uplift in performance over the previous-gen RTX 3090 and 3090 Ti. This was despite how expensive the RTX 4090 was.

However, the later announcements in the series didn’t receive that much praise. Because the reviews for the RTX 4080, RTX 4070 and RTX 4060 (8GB Ti) aren’t that great. This has led to sales not being upto the mark.

In-fact, the RTX 4070 is selling so badly that Nvidia had even halted its production. So if the RTX 4000 series is having problems selling, one wonders if Nvidia will release the RTX 5000 series soon. It looks like that’s unlikely to happen.

Next-Gen RTX Might Come In 2025

Nvidia RTX 5000 Roadmap Leak. The circled GPU architecture is most likely going to feature in the RTX 5000

lineup. Original Image Credit: HardwareLuxx.

HardwareLuxx (translated), via VideoCardz, has gotten hold of a leaked roadmap for all the upcoming Nvidia graphics card series.

The roadmap reveals that the next generation of Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics cards is highly unlikely to follow the 2-year release roadmap that Nvidia usually follows.

Instead, the RTX 5000 series of graphics cards is going to follow a 30-month cycle and will be released only in 2025.

This comes after reports that say that the Nvidia RTX 5000 series will be released on the 3nm process of TSMC.

Reasons Behind This Delay

There could be two reasons why Nvidia is delaying the release of the GeForce RTX 5000 graphics cards.

The first is that, as mentioned above, the RTX 4000 series is not selling much. Except for the RTX 4090, all others are uninspiring for critics and buyers.

They are massively cut down over previous-gen as far as specs are concerned. They are expensive. Not to forget, Nvidia seems to be selling the RTX 4070 as the RTX 4080, the RTX 4060 as the RTX 4070 and the RTX 4050 as the RTX 4060.

Shader Unit count of various Nvidia graphics cards by models and generations.

Credit: @theterk.

Just see this user-created image shared by @theterk on Twitter. It shows the shader units for Nvidia graphics card series and models. See how much of a cut down the RTX 4000 models are compared to their RTX 3000 counterparts.

The second reason Nvidia could be delaying the release of consumer graphics cards is that Nvidia’s new data-center and server graphics cards are selling on a massive scale. All the companies are rushing towards buying them and giving Nvidia huge orders for them.

This means that there are some rumors going around that not only is Nvidia giving all the attention to them, but in fact they are diverting their resources away from consumer GPUs to data center and server GPUs.

But all that said and done. Nvidia could still release a refresh of the RTX 4000 series and model those cards as SUPER versions. In fact, as per the YouTuber Graphically Challenged, that could happen soon. By soon, it could mean this year or next year.

It’s not something new for Nvidia, as they have done so before too. Like we had seen in the RTX 2060 SUPER’s case. Hopefully, it will make these cards cheaper and more affordable for everyone.

Source

Reddit is telling protesting mods their communities ‘will not’ stay private

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 09:31:30 +0000

‘This community will not remain private beyond the timeframe we’ve allowed for confirmation of plans here.’

Reddit is pressuring moderators who have set their subreddits to private to reopen their communities this week, according to messages seen by The Verge. The company has given moderators deadlines to lay out their plans for reopening but said that they can’t stay closed.

The timeframes given generally indicate a deadline of sometime Thursday afternoon. Reddit was vague about the exact repercussions but seemed to suggest this was the final warning stage.

“This community remaining closed to its [millions of] members cannot continue” beyond the deadline, the admin (Reddit employee) account ModCodeofConduct wrote in a note to one of the biggest Reddit communities that’s still private.

After a mod replied, ModCodeofConduct went even further. “[Millions of] members have lost complete access to this community and that is not going to continue,” the account said. “Wanting to take time to consider future moderation plans is fine, but that must be done in at least a ‘restricted’ setting. This community will not remain private beyond the timeframe we’ve allowed for confirmation of plans here.”

In a conversation with moderators of a different subreddit, ModCodeofConduct told them that “continued violation of [Rule 4 of the Moderator Code of Conduct] over the next 31 hours will result in further action.” Rule 4 of that document is “Be Active and Engaged.” That subreddit has since reopened, though in an “archive” mode where new posts will be automatically removed.

Reddit has been pushing for protesting communities to reopen for weeks, telling them it would replace “inactive moderation,” “mods vandalizing communities,” and “subreddit squatters” with active mods. While many subreddits have reopened as normal, some have switched from private, which bars users from seeing any posts in the community, to restricted, where content is viewable but only certain users are allowed to post or comment.

When restricted, even if most users can’t post in a community, they can still see posts (which has the added benefit of making any links from that subreddit that show up in Google search results actually useful). But for the few that are holding out in private mode, it appears Reddit wants to change that.

While the company said in a June 15th fact sheet that it is not “unilaterally reopening communities,” the new rhetoric could indicate that Reddit is re-evaluating that approach.

Reddit declined to comment.

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Apple is within touching distance of a $3 trillion market cap

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 09:30:53 +0000

On Wednesday, Apple put in new share price highs putting it in touching distance of a $3 trillion market cap. The company passed the $2 trillion mark in April 2020 and the $1 trillion milestone in 2018. It currently sits at $2.98 trillion.

The company’s 15.7 billion shares are currently trading for $189.25 each as of Wednesday’s close and to reach the $3 trillion market cap, the company needs to see its share hit around $190.52. The stock price is already up $4 from the lows this week so eking out another dollar increase shouldn’t be too difficult.

The Relative Strength Index (RSI) indicator currently shows the RSI above the RSI moving average which suggests the price could continue to see some more upward momentum which could take us to the $3 trillion market cap soon. At the same time, the RSI is at 71.42 and anything over 70 indicates an asset is overbought and due for a pullback, so it really could go either way.

If Apple did pass the $3 trillion market cap, it would be the first company to do so in history. Microsoft is the second largest company at $2.50 trillion and in third is Saudi Aramco at $2.08 trillion.

These three companies are the only ones that have attained a $2 trillion status and Alphabet, Amazon, NVIDIA, Tesla, and META are quite far behind now despite being the next largest companies after the top three. Alphabet has a market cap of $1.53 trillion and Meta’s is $731.12 billion.

Due to the popularity of Apple, the stock’s price has been pretty resilient for years. Even during the 2008 financial crash, Apple’s stock price only fell 15% below its three-year moving average temporarily before quickly recovering. This is in contrast to the S&P 500 which fell by more than 48% and took longer to recover.

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The huge Minecraft subreddit will no longer get any official messages from Mojang

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 21:23:19 +0000

The Minecraft subreddit has become one of the most popular ways that fans of Mojang and Microsoft's hit sandbox game could communicate with each other and also with team members at Mojang. It currently has over 7 million users. However, being able to get official updates from the dev team, or anything else from Mojang members, will no longer be available on that subreddit, at least for a while.

In a post on the Minecraft subreddit (via PC Gamer) by user "sliced_lime", who is labeled as the "Minecraft Java Tech Lead" (PC Gamer identifies that person as Mojang's Mikael Hedberg), it was revealed that no one from the game's development team will be posting on the subreddit anymore.

The post states:

As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to rule and moderation changes across many subreddits. Because of these changes, we no longer feel that Reddit is an appropriate place to post official content or refer our players to.

This is almost certainly a reference to Reddit's decision to charge money to access its APIs starting July 1. This has led to not only a number of popular third party Reddit apps planning to shut down after Friday, June 30, but also caused a large amount of subreddits to go dark in protest. In response to these protests, Reddit management has reportedly put pressure on community moderators to reopen these subreddits. It even allegedly tried to remove and replace moderators.

The message from the Mojang dev indicates that the team will continue to take feedback about Minecraft on their official social media accounts, and also on the Minecraft feedback site. However, the fact that it is departing an online location with a massive audience that loves its game shows that Reddit's sudden changes in rules and its efforts to deal with the protests afterward will have big consequences.

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Google Translate For Ancient Cuneiform? Archaeologists Have Used AI To Find A Way

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 17:29:41 +0000

5,000-year-old clay tablets can now be decoded using artificial intelligence.

Archaeologists and computer scientists have worked together to create an artificial intelligence (AI) program capable of translating ancient cuneiform texts. The researchers say their goal is for the program to form part of a “human-machine collaboration”, which will assist future scholars in their study of archaic languages.

Cuneiform is thought to be the oldest writing system in the world. Recorded by gouging symbols into clay tablets, it was originally developed by the Mesopotamians in what is now Iraq, where it started out as a way of keeping track of bread and beer rations. The system quickly spread throughout the ancient Middle East, where it remained in use continuously for over 3,000 years.

Thousands of documents, most written in either the Sumerian or Akkadian languages using the cuneiform script, survive to this day; but translating them can be a major headache. For one thing, there simply aren’t that many people with the necessary expertise.

For another, the texts are often broken up into fragments.

Apart from that, it’s really hard to translate a text without a good sense of the cultural context in which it was written. Since we can’t speak to the Mesopotamians and ask them things like, “Why is this joke supposed to be funny?”, that does present a barrier.

That’s where AI comes in. A multidisciplinary team, led by Gai Gutherz of Tel Aviv University and Shai Gordin of Ariel University, Israel, has developed a convolutional neural network approach that essentially acts like Google Translate for ancient Akkadian.

There are two versions of the model. One translates directly from Unicode representations of the cuneiform characters – the computational equivalent of each individual symbol used in the writing system.

The other requires the cuneiform to first be transliterated into the Latin alphabet – this is the usual first step for human translators when approaching these documents. Helpfully, the authors cracked this first step in a previous study, with a machine-learning approach that could transliterate and segment Unicode cuneiform with 97 percent accuracy.

The model that used the transliterated text performed slightly better, which is perhaps unsurprising. Cuneiform is complex. As the authors explain, each individual glyph can have one of three different functions, which greatly expands the number of possible translations for a piece of text: “For example, the sign 'UD,' originally a pictograph of the Sun(-god), has more than 17 phonetic and 6 logographic values that can only be securely read in context. Sometimes, even experts cannot figure out the proper sign value.”

The program is not perfect – it works best with shorter sentences of 118 characters or fewer, and it did occasionally produce “hallucinations”, strings of perfectly correct English that unfortunately bore no resemblance to the Akkadian it was supposed to be translating. As we know, hallucinations are an occupational hazard of working with AI.

However, in the majority of cases, the translation produced by the program had a high degree of accuracy, particularly with more formal texts like royal decrees. The sentence length limitation also shouldn’t pose too much of a problem in the real world, since cuneiform tends to be divided up into manageable sections on the clay tablets.

Even more excitingly, the program was able to faithfully reproduce the style of each text, something that the researchers did not expect: “In almost every instance, whether the [translation] is proper or not, the genre is recognizable. This provides a kind of summary of the context, recognizing the main content elements of the Akkadian text.”

This is where the “human-machine collaboration” comes into play. In the future, the team envisages that their program could provide a useful first pass at a text, saving valuable time for scholars who would then be able to refine the translation further.

Deciphering ancient texts has already led humanity to some fascinating finds, and using AI to streamline the process will open the door to many more discoveries.

The study is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.

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NVIDIA RTX 4060 overclocking is underwhelming

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 06:47:28 +0000

Limited benchmarks show less than impressive overclocked performance from the RTX 4060.

What you need to know

Partial reviews are in for the NVIDIA RTX 4060, though content creators are only allowed to share very specific pieces of information at this time.
The RTX 4060 delivered 27% better performance than the RTX 3060 when running Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p in testing by YouTuber JayTwoCents.
Overclocked benchmarks for the GPU were less impressive.
The RTX 4060 will go sale on June 29 at $299.

Full NVIDIA RTX 4060 reviews haven't dropped yet, but NVIDIA gave access to certain creators and journalists for a partial embargo. YouTuber JayTwoCents and some others were given early access to the GPU to share very specific benchmarks and thoughts. A recent video by JayTwoCents shared how the RTX 4060 performed when running Cyberpunk 2077.

The RTX 4060 delivered a 27% boost in performance when compared to the RTX 3060 when running Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p. That's a respectable increase across a single generation and aligns with previous benchmarks shared by NVIDIA.

Less impressive were the overclocking figures seen in testing by JayTwoCents. Increasing the power draw by 20% over stock settings, the FPS of the RTX 4060 when running Cyberpunk 2077 only jumped from 81 to 82.5.

As explained by our colleagues at Tom's Hardware, the RTX 4060's performance when overclocked is not surprising. In fact, it likely isn't even disappointing to most people. The RTX 4060 is a more efficient card than its RTX 40-Series siblings. It's not designed to take advantage of increased power draw or overclocking.

Perhaps more important the overclocked performance is how it handled ray tracing. JayzTwoCents noted that he did not recommend the RTX 2060 or 2060 Ti for ray tracing. He argued that the RTX 3060 improved ray tracing, but not enough.

"40-Series 60-series card with DLSS 3, frame gen on, and running ray tracing now, to get you this kind of FPS in a title as demanding as Cyberpunk? Shows now the extra feature sets are something that's worth considering," he said.

All of these figures are important to place in context. Cyberpunk 2077 is a demanding game, but it also supports DLSS 3, ray tracing, and path tracing. NVIDIA likely chose to let creators test out its new GPU with the specific game to showcase the RTX 4060 in its best light. We'll have to wait until full reviews come out to get a complete gauge of what the RTX 4060 can do with the best PC games.

Source

Major Diablo IV 1.0.3 patch released; more XP when completing Nightmare Dungeons and more

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 06:46:07 +0000

Blizzard has released a number of smaller client and server-side patches for its hit action-RPG game Diablo IV since it launched earlier in June. Today, the developer released a much larger 1.0.3 patch for the game with a ton of bug fixes and some game balance changes as well.

The patch, which covers the game's PC, Xbox, and PlayStation versions, adds a lot more XP for completing Diablo IV's Nightmare Dungeons, along with killing monsters in Nightmare Dungeons. Players can also expect more bonus XP when opening Helltide chests, and more experience with completing individual Whispers. There have also been some balance changes for the game's player classes.

Here are the full 1.0.3 change notes from Blizzard's site:

Bug Fixes

Dungeons, Events, and other Activities

Fixed an issue where players couldn’t engage with the Dead Man's Dredge dungeon boss.
Fixed an issue where certain Whispers couldn’t be completed.
Fixed an issue where the Those Who Call the Storm event wouldn’t register as completed.
Fixed an issue where the Those Who Call the Storm event would place a permanent de-buff on the player that would gradually drain health.
Fixed an issue where enemies could spawn behind the Sealed door in the Cultist Refuge dungeon, blocking dungeon progression.
Fixed an issue where characters could be damaged and killed during the Stronghold completion cutscene. (Not the valiant triumph we planned)
Fixed an issue where the level 100 Pinnacle Boss would appear again with no health bar if killed during a specific phase.
Fixed an issue where progression could be blocked in the Fallen Temple Capstone Dungeon.
Fixed an issue that resulted in a crash or freeze if players entered the Untamed Thicket dungeon during the Fangs of Corruption quest.

Gameplay Fixes

Fixed an issue where the Insatiable Fury and Mad Wolf’s Glee items prevented Druids from transforming into the Werebear or Werewolf Forms.
Fixed an issue where Spider Host enemies would remain upright after exploding and dying.
Fixed an issue where equipment with socketed Gems couldn’t be mass-salvaged.
Fixed an issue where players were unable to teleport to Cerrigar while in the Cerrigar and Cerrigar Outskirts subregions.
Fixed an issue where Corpse Tendrils would cause the corpse visual to disappear.
Fixed an issue where the camera would not zoom out when joining a World Boss encounter.
Fixed an issue where Barbarian players would get stuck between Bone Walls after using Charge.
Fixed an issue where Rogue players would remain invisible to other players after using the Concealment Skill in Fields of Hatred.
Fixed an issue where Airidah's tornados would cause the player to be stuck in a knockback state if hit by multiple tornados at once.
Fixed an issue where pressing any button on controller while Dazed would halt all player input.
Fixed an issue where Caches with World Tier conditions could be brought into higher World Tiers and provide rewards for that world tier.
Fixed an issue where the Skeleton Warrior upgrade for increasing Thorns damage was not properly applying.
Fixed an issue where the Burning Instinct power on the Sorcerer Paragon board did not account for Base Critical Damage in its damage calculation.
Fixed an issue where the player could move in-game during the Leave Game countdown.

Local Co-Op

Fixed an issue where the second player that closes the Region Progress menu would be locked in the World Map during Local Co-Op play.
Fixed an issue where some quests would not properly progress for all players in Local Co-Op play.
Fixed an issue where the preview slot for item upgrades would only display for Player 1 during Local Co-Op play.
Fixed an issue where buttons in the store would become un-interactable for player 2 during Local Co-Op play.
Fixed an issue where targeting the same enemy would show different health bars for each player during Local Co-Op Play.
Fixed an issue where the Spirit Boons menu couldn’t be closed by player 2 if player 1 had it open during Local Co-Op play.
Fixed an issue where the remaining player would not be able to move on their mount if the other player exited the game during Local Co-Op play.

Quests

Fixed an issue where the NPC Lacthan could duplicate during multiple quests.
Fixed an issue where progression of the Malign Devotion quest could become blocked if the player left the cellar as Lakren started to stand up.
Fixed an issue where players would have their progression in the Apex of Misery quest blocked if they teleported away and back during the Destroy the Risen Remains objective.
Fixed an issue where the player character would get blocked if they sat on a chair to talk to a NPC during the Demon Ledger quest.
Fixed an issue where Brol and Mother's chosen would move oddly during the eavesdropping cutscene if the player was near the broken wall.
Players may now re-enter the boss area after the Follower has joined them during the Storming the Gates quest.
Fixed an issue where the Illusion Woods Statue could become un-interactable during the Wayward quest.
Fixed an issue where the True Potential Rogue Class Quest sometimes couldn’t properly be completed.

Fixed an issue where Chat could be expanded even when the Chat is not visible.
Fixed an issue where a party member's HP bar would appear to be 0 if they left the vicinity of their party while not at full health.
Fixed an issue where the "GPU not Supported" message would display broken text.
Fixed an issue where the particles for Druid's Spirit Boons would persist after closing the associated menu.
Fixed an issue on Xbox Consoles where the cross-network play notification would display in-game even if cross-network play was disabled.
Fixed an issue that displayed an empty notification to new players when world bosses appeared.
Fixed an issue where the Potion Upgrade icon would be missing when playing with a controller.
Fixed an issue where the Town Portal progress bar would be visible while in menus.
Fixed an issue on PC where the Tab key would not open the Map if the Materials panel was open.
Fixed an issue where the Spur ability for mounts would display as "Not yet learned."
Fixed an issue where the Linked Item menu would persist on screen when switching between Keyboard & Mouse input and Controller input.
Fixed an issue where players would receive improper messaging when undoing the deletion of a Hardcore character.
Fixed an issue where the Interact wheel prompt would appear over vases near the Fate's Retreat Waypoint.
Fixed an issue where the Socket button would persist if the player swapped tabs.
Fixed multiple instances where Pins on the map from either a quest or the player would not function properly.
Fixed multiple instances across a variety of menus where text wouldn’t display properly.
Fixed multiple issues with health bars not displaying accurately during PvP activities.
Various other improvements to the UI experience.
Various localization fixes.
Fixed an issue where the Purveyor of Curiosities’ menu would erroneously display item quality on some items (this didn’t affect what item quality was available to gamble for).

Miscellaneous

Fixed an issue where users couldn't create a Clan when their language was set to Russian or Spanish.
Fixed an issue where the Shop would not properly load if the player dies while in Checkout.
Fixed an issue where multiple cutscenes would not play if the player engaged with them when in a party of 3 or more players on Xbox Series S, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.
Fixed an issue where the Randomize Look and Swap Body Type actions in the Shop didn't function when viewing Cosmetic Armor.
Fixed an issue where the PlayStation 5 screen reader wouldn't function properly.
Fixed an issue where emotes from the Shop would not always function when used with a controller.
Fixed an issue where the Player character's eye would display improperly during the Lorath's cabin cutscene in the Prologue.
Various stability, performance, and visual improvements across all platforms.
Fixed an issue where players using laptops with certain dedicated Graphics Cards would not be able to play the game.

Gameplay Adjustments

Experience Rewards

Significantly increased the experience awarded for completing Nightmare Dungeons.
Significantly increased the experience gained from killing monsters in Nightmare Dungeons.
Helltide chests now provide substantially more bonus experience when opened.
Significantly increased rewarded experience from completing individual Whispers across the board.
Fixed an issue where no experience was awarded for completing the hold out style event that can occur after finishing dungeon objectives.

General

The Helltide Roaming bosses will now more consistently drop higher quality loot.
Players can now teleport to their Nightmare Dungeon directly through the map.
Weekly bonus caches from world bosses no longer have a level requirement for opening.
Developer's Note: We are currently working on increasing the monster and elite density of end-game content and plan to introduce this change early in Season 1.

Balance Changes

Developer's Note: We’re continuing our efforts to make all Class builds feel fun and powerful with another round of balance updates. In particular, we have seen community feedback stating that Basic Skills aren’t impactful enough in combat. These changes will not change the fundamental relationship between Basic Skills and Core Skills, but we hope that they help smooth out the leveling experience while we explore additional ways to strengthen them. We are also increasing the power of some Skills that players feel are lagging behind their peers. As we look forward to future updates, we’re monitoring other heavily discussed topics, such as Minion survivability and build parity. Please keep sending us your feedback, and we'll see you in Sanctuary!

Barbarian

Skills
- Lunging Strike
- Base damage increased from 30% to 33%.
- Fury generated increased from 9 to 10.
Bash
- Fury generated increased from 10 to 11.
- Enhanced Bash's Fortify increased from 10% to 20%.
Frenzy
- Base damage increased from 20% to 22%.
Flay
- Bleeding base damage increased from 36% to 40%.
- Fury generated increased from 9 to 10.
- Enhanced Flay's Vulnerable chance increased from 10% to 15%.
Double Swing
- Base damage increased from 36% to 40%.
Kick
- Cooldown reduced from 17 to 13 seconds.
- Base damage dealt to enemies Knocked Back into terrain increased from 54% to 70%.
Charge
- Enhanced Charge's base damage dealt to enemies Knocked Back into terrain increased from 15% to 30%.
Leap
- Mighty Leap Slow increased from 50% to 70%.
Iron Skin
- Enhanced Iron Skin's Barrier increased from 10% to 20% of Maximum Life.
Call of the Ancients
- Prime Call of the Ancients Bonus Attack Speed increased from 10% to 20%.
Iron Maelstrom
- Cooldown reduced from 60 to 45 seconds.
- Prime Iron Maelstrom Bonus Critical Strike Chance increased from 10% to 30%.
- Prime Iron Maelstrom Bonus Critical Strike Damage increased from 20% to 40%.
Bounding Slam
- Base damage increased from 75% to 112%.
Legendary Aspects
- Developer's Note: The below includes changes to flat damage Legendary Aspects. These effects scale with Item Power. For example, at 820 Item Power Bul-Kathos' Earthquake increases from 1747-3404 to 2687-3717 damage.
Bul-Kathos
- Earthquake flat damage increased from .39-.76 to .6-.83.
Earthquake
- Earthquake flat damage increased from .39-.76 to .6-.83.
Dust Devil's
- Dust Devil flat damage increased from .16-.25 to .22-.32.
Windlasher
- Dust Devil flat damage increased from .16-.25 to .22-.32.
Devilish
- Dust Devil flat damage increased from .20-.36 to .24-.38.
Iron Warrior
- Damage Reduction increased from 10-20% to 15-25%.
Items
Overkill
- Damage increased from 16%-30% to 24-38%.
Hellhammer
- Flat damage increased from .3-.5 to .6-.8.

Druid

Skills
Earthspike
- Base damage increased from 16% to 17%.
- Spirit generated increased from 10 to 11.
- Fierce Earthspike Fortify increased from 4% to 8%.
Wind Shear
- Base damage increased from 17% to 18%.
- Spirit generated increased from 12 to 13.
Claw
- Base damage increased from 20% to 22%.
- Spirit generated increased from 10 to 11.
- Wild Claw Double Attack Chance increased from 10% to 15%.
- Fierce Claw base damage increased from 10% to 15%.
Maul
- Base damage increased from 20% to 22%.
- Spirit generated increased from 14 to 15.
- Enhanced Maul Fortify increased from 2% to 3%.
Lightning Storm
- Enhanced Lightning Storm duration increased from 4 to 6 seconds.
- Primal Lightning Storm's chance to Immobilize increased from 8% to 12%.
Shred
- Third Attack base damage increased from 60% to 70%.
- Enhanced Shred Healing increased from 1% to 2% of Maximum Life.
- Raging Shred's base damage increased from 51% to 70%.
- Primal Shred's Bonus Critical Strike Damage increased from 20% to 30%.
Wolves
- Cooldown reduced from 14 to 11 seconds.
- Ferocious Wolfpack Lucky Hit chance increased from 10% to 40%.
Hurricane
- Base damage increased from 97.5% to 134%.
Rabies
- Base Poisoning damage increased from 53% to 76%.
Cataclysm
- Base damage increased from 52% to 64%.
Lacerate
- Base damage increased from 400% to 460%.
Petrify
- Critical Strike Damage Bonus increased from 25% to 30%.
Pummel
- Base damage increased from 140% to 180%.
Passives
Bestial Rampage
- Attack Speed Bonus increased from 20% to 25%.
- Damage Bonus increased from 20% to 30%.
Nature’s Fury
- Chance to cast a free spell increased from 20% to 30%.
Lupine Ferocity
- Damage Bonus increased from 60% to 70%.
Legendary Aspects
Runeworker's Conduit
- Flat damage increased from 1 to 1.4.
Mangled
- Chance increased from 20-30% to 30-40%.
Seismic-Shift
- Cooldown decreased from 2.5-1.5 to 2-1 seconds.
Blurred Beast
- Damage increased from 60-90% to 70-100%

Necromancer

Skills
Reap
- Base damage increased from 12% to 13%.
- Acolyte Reap's Cooldown between Corpses reduced from 5 to 4 seconds.
Decompose
- Base damage increased from 30% to 33%.
- Base Essence generated per second increased from 7 to 8.
- Corpses formed frequency increased from 2.5 to 2 seconds.
Hemorrhage
- Base damage increased from 25% to 27%.
- Essence generated increased from 8 to 9.
Bone Splinters
- Base damage increased from 8% to 9%.
- Essence generated increased from 6 to 7.
Sever
- Initial base damage increased from 63% to 66%.
- Enhanced Sever's return base damage increased from 25% to 40%.
Blood Lance
- Supernatural Blood Lance Overpower requirement reduced from 8 to 6 casts.
Bone Prison
- Cooldown reduced from 20 to 18 seconds.
- Dreadful Bone Prison's Fortify increased from 5% to 8%.
Iron Maiden
- Base damage increased from 10% to 20%.
- Horrid Iron Maiden damage bonus increased from 15% to 20%.
Corpse Tendrils
- Blight Corpse Tendrils chance to spawn a Blood Orb increased from 30% to 35%.
Bone Spikes
- Base damage increased from 80% to 120%.
Raise Skeleton and Golem
- Minions will now always engage targets with a cast Curse.
Passives
Kalan’s Edict
- Damage taken duration requirement reduced from 3 to 2 seconds.
Rathma’s Vigor
- Healthy duration requirement reduced from 15 to 12 seconds.
Spiked Armor
- Thorns increased from .08/.16/.24 to .1/.2/.3.
Legendary Aspects
Bursting Bone
- Flat damage increased from .022-.03 to .045-.06.
Flesh-Rending
- Essence gained increased from 10-20 to 20-40.
Fastblood
- Ultimate Cooldown Reduction increased from .5-1 to 1-1.5 seconds

Rogue

Skills
Invigorating Strike
- Base damage increased from 23% to 25%.
Blade Shift
- Base damage increased from 15% to 16%.
Heartseeker
- Base damage increased from 22% to 24%.
- Primary Heartseeker damage increased from 30% to 75%.
Forceful Arrow
- Base damage increased from 20% to 22%.
Barrage
- Base damage increased from 20% to 22%.
Caltrops
- Methodical Caltrop's Chill increased from 20% to 25%.
Smoke Grenade
- Cooldown reduced from 15 to 13 seconds.
Rain of Arrows
- Cooldown reduced from 60 to 55 seconds.
- Prime Rain of Arrows imbuement potency increased from 20% to 30%.
Volley
- Base damage increased from 70% to 105%.
Passives
Close Quarters Combat
- Damage bonus increased from 20% to 30%.
Legendary Aspects
Escape Artist
- Cooldown decreased from 100 to 45 seconds.
Umbrous
- Lucky Hit Chance to gain a Dark Shroud increased from 30-50% to 40-60%.
Items
Eyes in the Dark
- Increased Death Trap Cooldown reduced from 30-15% to 20-15%

Sorcerer

Skills
Spark
- Base damage increased from 8% to 10%.
- Enhanced Spark damage increased from 5.6% to 7%.
- Flickering Spark chance increased from 3% to 4%.
Frostbolt
- Base damage increased from 35% to 38%.
Firebolt
- Burning damage increased from 40% to 44%.
Charged Bolt
- Base damage increased from 28% to 30%.
Incinerate
- Base damage increased from 49% to 54%.
- Enhanced Incinerate damage increased from 15% to 25%.
- Greater Incinerate Immobilize requirement reduced from 4 to 3 seconds.
Fireball
- Mana cost decreased from 40 to 35.
Frozen Orb
- Initial base damage increased from 32% to 36%.
- Explosion base damage increased from 29% to 34%.
- Greater Frozen Orb chance to apply Vulnerable increased from 25% to 30%.
Blizzard
- Base damage increased from 120% to 130%.
Ice Blades
- Chance to apply Vulnerable increased from 30% to 40%.
Lightning Spear
- Summoned Lightning Spear's maximum Damage Bonus increased from 100% to 160%.
Crackling Energy
- Base damage increased from 15% to 20%.
Freezing Wake
- Base damage increased from 60% to 110%.
Legendary Aspects
Abundant Energy
- Chance to chain to an additional enemy increased from 20-30% to 30-40%.
Singed Extremities
- Slow amount increased from 25-35% to 40-60%.
Incendiary
- Chance to restore Mana increased from 5-10% to 12-17%.
Snowguard's
- Damage Reduction increased from 10-15% to 20-25%.
Concentration
- Mana Regeneration increased from 10-20% to 20-30%.
Items
Flamescar
- Flat damage increased from .1-.2 to .2-.3.
Staff of Lam Esen
- Damage Reduction reduced from 40-30% to 35-25%

Blizzard has plans to launch at least two expansion packs for Diablo IV, although details have yet to be revealed.

Source

Seagate FireCuda 540 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD revealed; read and write speeds up to 10,000 MB/s

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 19:13:28 +0000

Seagate is launching its first Gen5 M.2 NVMe SSD product today with the Seagate FireCuda 540. This SSD is targeting content creators and high-end PC gamers with its speed, as its sequential read and write speeds can go up to 10,000 MB/s. That's up to 50 percent faster than comparable Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSD products.

In an email press release, Seagate stated:

With the latest 3D TLC NAND technology and built with a Seagate-validated E26 controller, the FireCuda 540 provides the most advanced speed and durability—allowing users to push limits when gaming or creating content. Plug-and-play compatible with all PCIe Gen5 motherboards and backwards compatible with PCIe Gen4, the drive is accessible and ready for trailblazing. 

“Gamers and content creators have asked for performance of PCIe Gen5 technology and we’ve listened,” said Lance Ohara, Vice President of Product Line Management at Seagate Technology. “Seagate is thrilled to bring the fastest and best technology to the gaming and content creating community.”

In addition to its high read and write speeds, the Seagate FireCuda 540 SSD supports 1.8M mean time between failures (MTBF) and up to 2,000 TB of total bytes written (TBW). That means owners could in theory write and delete up to 1TB of data on the SSD per day for the next five years.

While only one PC game, Forspoken, currently supports Microsoft's DirectStorage feature for faster performance for PC games, the Seagate FireCuda 540 does support DirectStorage for that game and for future PC game support like Diablo IV.

The new product is also supported by Seagate’s three-year Rescue Data Recovery Service plan and a five-year limited warranty, Seagate’s SeaTools 5.0 software tools can also be used to monitor the SSD's performance, health, and more.

The new Seagate FireCuda 540 should be available for sale starting today. It will launch with a 1TB model for $179.99 and a 2TB version for $299.99.

Source

Microsoft reveals analog optical computer which uses photons and electrons to process data

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 19:12:55 +0000

We have reported before on some people believing that normal transistors for building PCs may be reaching the limits of "Moore's Law". Intel's Gordon Moore, who passed away earlier this year, claimed that transistors would double on a processor every two years.

Today, Microsoft Research revealed it is working on a computer for the past three years that uses photons and electrons, rather than transistors, to process data. It's called the Analog Iterative Machine (AIM), and in a blog post, it describes how it will get around Moore's Law and how it could be used to help solve specific issues.

Microsoft says:

Analog optical computing thus involves constructing a physical system using a combination of analog technologies – both optical and electronic – governed by equations that capture the required computation. This can be very efficient for specific application classes where linear and non-linear operations are dominant. In optimization problems, finding the optimal solution is akin to discovering a needle in an inconceivably vast haystack. The team has developed a new algorithm that is highly efficient at such needle-finding tasks. Crucially, the algorithm’s core operation involves performing hundreds of thousands or even millions of vector-matrix multiplications – the vectors represent the problem variables whose values need to be determined while the matrix encodes the problem itself.

In another blog post, Microsoft says that Lee Braine of the Barclays financial company is using the Analog Iterative Machine to help solve the tracking of massive amounts of transactions of money into stock purchases. Microsoft stated:

The problem is difficult to solve because of the volume of transactions. Braine says these transactions are usually described as delivery versus payment. A simple example is the delivery of a security for a cash payment – 100 shares in a company for $1,000. The problem is that every transaction and every player is subject to various constraints, including regulations and the balances available.

The amount of these kinds of trades is staggering. He cited the example of just one clearing house, DTCC, whose subsidiaries processed transactions worth $2.5 quadrillion in 2022. (One quadrillion is equal to 1,000 trillion.) Because clearing houses are used by most large banks, the research has the potential to benefit the entire banking system.

Barclays will use Microsoft's AIM in a one-year trial. If it is successful, using this kind of optical computer could be used in other types of financial duties like fraud detection.

Source

US announces $42 billion program for affordable high-speed broadband

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 04:02:03 +0000

The US government has announced the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program that plans to deliver reliable, affordable high-speed internet to everyone in the country by the end of the decade. $42.45 billion has been allocated to the program.

The White House said that it’ll award states anywhere from $27 million to $3.3 billion, based on the areas’ needs. 19 states will be given more than $1 billion with the top ten states being Alabama, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.

Aside from states, Washington DC and the territories, such as American Samoa and Puerto Rico, will also be given money. To see how much your state or territory will receive, check out the table on this page.

The program is the largest internet funding announcement in history according to the administration. Over a three-week period, President Biden, Vice President Harris, First Lady Jill Biden, Cabinet members, and Senior Administration Officials will “fan out” across the country to highlight the benefits of the program including investments, jobs, and new projects.

“Put simply, high-speed Internet is a necessity in today’s society,” said Mitch Landrieu, Senior Advisor to the President and White House Infrastructure Coordinator. “Just like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act made a historic investment in rural areas bringing electricity to nearly every home in America, President Biden and Vice President Harris are committed to leaving no community behind as we connect everyone in America to high-speed Internet.”

The BEAD funding will be used to deploy or upgrade broadband networks across all of the country and territories so that everyone has access to decent internet. The completion date for this upgrade is expected to be 2030 and any remaining funding will be used “to pursue eligible access-, adoption-, and equity-related uses".

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Reddit mods are calling for an ‘affordable return’ for third-party apps

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 04:01:27 +0000

They also want Reddit to appoint a ‘Moderator Advocate’ at the company.

Moderators of some of Reddit’s most popular communities have posted open letters to the company with a series of requests regarding many key issues at the heart of the recent protests on the platform. The requests include a way for third-party apps to make an “affordable return,” improvements to moderation tools and accessibility options that “match or exceed” what’s available with third-party apps, and filling a senior-level role of “Moderator Advocate” at the company.

More than 8,000 subreddits went dark earlier this month in protest of the company’s planned API pricing changes that will force apps like Apollo and rif is fun for Reddit to shut down on June 30th. Some subreddits continued to stay dark after the original 48-hour plan, but many moderators have reopened their communities after feeling pressure from Reddit itself. (A few communities have found some creative ways to reopen.)

The open letters are largely the same, calling for “a return to the productive dialogue that has served us in the past” between users and administrators (Reddit employees) and listing out a series of requests (taken from r/Funny’s letter😞

Commit to exploring ways by which third-party applications can make an affordable return.

Commit to providing moderation tools and accessibility options (on Old Reddit, New Reddit, and mobile platforms) which match or exceed the functionality and utility of third-party applications.

Commit to prioritizing a significant reduction in spam, misinformation, bigotry, and illegal content on Reddit.

Guarantee that any future developments which may impact moderators, contributors, or stakeholders will be announced no less than one fiscal quarter before they are scheduled to go into effect.

Work together with longstanding moderators to establish a reasonable roadmap and deadline for accomplishing all of the above.

Affirm that efforts meant to keep Reddit accountable to its commitments and deadlines will hereafter not be met with insults, threats, removals, or hostility.

Publicly affirm all of the above by way of updating Reddit’s User Agreement and Reddit’s Moderator Code of Conduct to include reasonable expectations and requirements for administrators’ behavior.

Implement and fill a senior-level role (with decision-making and policy-shaping power) of “Moderator Advocate” at Reddit, with a required qualification for the position being robust experience as a volunteer Reddit moderator.

The letters conclude by saying that while the company has “all but entirely eroded” its trust with those who wrote the letters, “we hope that together, we can begin to rebuild it.” The writers have asked for a response from Reddit by June 29th — a day before many third-party apps are set to shut down.

Communities that have shared open letters include r/Funny (more than 50 million subscribers), r/Showerthoughts (more than 27 million subscribers), and r/Jokes (more than 26 million subscribers). r/PICS and r/GIFs also shared letters but under seemingly tongue-in-cheek posts asking anyone who posts any Not Safe For Work (NSFW) content — including profanity — to mark that content as such so that the moderators do not need to make the entire community NSFW. (Reddit has said that it’s “not acceptable” for communities to go NSFW in protest.)

Despite the protests, Reddit has largely stood its ground. In an interview with The Verge, CEO Steve Huffman maintained that the company would not “subsidize businesses built on taking our data for free,” and in a memo obtained by The Verge, Huffman told employees that the blowup “will pass.” However, the company has made some concessions to address concerns from the accessibility community, including exempting accessibility-focused apps from the API pricing changes and promising to ship accessibility upgrades for moderators to its mobile apps by July 1st.

Reddit didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. According to Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt, “We’ll no longer comment on hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, or baseless accusations from The Verge. We’ll be in touch as corrections are needed.”

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Diablo IV may become the next game to finally support Microsoft's DirectStorage

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 19:38:52 +0000

We have been waiting (and waiting) for another PC game to announce it would add support for Microsoft's DirectStorage feature, and now it looks like it will be Blizzard's hit action-RPG Diablo IV.

PC Gamer got a quote from an unnamed member of the game's development team, who stated:

MS DirectStorage is currently not enabled, but we are planning on enabling it in the future.

The DirectStorage API was first revealed for Windows back in March 2022. It used technology that was first developed for Microsoft's Xbox consoles that used SSDs for storage. The idea was that Windows game developers could also access features for its titles with PCs that had SSDs, which would result in faster loading times, more frames per second and overall better performance.

Right now, the only PC game that supports DirectStorage is Square Enix's Forspoken. The PC version launched in January 2023, which included its support only for Windows 11- based PCs. Post-release info showed that at lower 1080p resolutions, the game ran at a much higher frame rate compared to PCs without the DirectStorage feature.

Recently Microsoft launched DirectStorage 1.2 which added, among other things, buffered IO mode. This would allow DirectStorage games to use old-fashioned hard drives as well as SSDs for improved game performance.

Hopefully, when Diablo IV adds DirectStorage support in a future update, it will take advantage of the new 1.2 version's new feature for hard drives and SSDs. We would also hope that we will get more games that will include support for this feature now that it will work on a wider variety of PCs.

Besides Diablo IV, the only other game that has indicated it will support DirectStorage in a forthcoming update is Crytek's Hunt: Showdown. That's because the game will get a major engine update to CryEngine 5.11, which will also add support for DirectX 12 and more,

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Arduino announces the UNO R4 board family with better performance, USB-C, and more

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 19:36:56 +0000

Arduino has announced the new UNO R4 board family, a new platform for enthusiasts, hobbyists, students, and professionals to create prototypes, innovative solutions, and other interactive electronic projects.

Arduino boards are a simple and accessible method of developing devices and systems, especially for people without extensive knowledge of electronic devices. The new UNO R4 family preserves well-known features, form factor, and compatibility while delivering improved performance and new capabilities.

The Arduino UNO R4 Minima and the Arduino UNO R4 Wi-Fi boards.

The Arduino UNO R4 is available in two variants: UNO R4 Minima and UNO R4 Wi-Fi. As the names imply, the R4 Wi-Fi includes Bluetooth LE and Wi-Fi connectivity, while the R4 Minima provides a slightly simpler feature set.

Both boards are powered by the Renesas RA4M1 microcontroller based on ARM Cortex M4 (48MHz), and the onboard memory includes 256KB Flash and 32KB SRAM. Larger memory (16x) and faster clock speed (3x) make it possible to perform more precise calculations and handle more complex projects.

In addition to maintaining the form factor of the UNO R3, the new Arduino boards keep the same 5V operating voltage with a higher 6-24V input voltage. To handle the increased operating voltage, Arduino implemented an enhanced thermal decide and several protections that reduce the risk of damaging the board due to wiring mistakes.

Unlike its predecessor, the UNO R4 board family features a USB-C programming port (the R3 has USB-B) and a bunch of new onboard peripherals, such as a 12-bit DAC, CAN BUS, OP AMP, and SWD port. Arduino says these additions allow for more advanced projects.

Besides Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the UNO R4 Wi-Fi has a built-in LED matrix with 96 dots arranged 12x8. There is also a Qwiic I2C connector, the industry standard for prototyping without soldering or complex wiring. Finally, the UNO R4 Wi-Fi has a built-in error-catching mechanism to detect crash-inducing operating (for example, division by zero).

Here is how the Arduino positions the new UNO R4 Minima and its Wi-Fi-enabled sibling:

	Arduino R4 Minima	Arduino R4 Wi-Fi
Makers	Affordable and powerful, the Arduino UNO R4 Minima is the best first step to become a maker.	A complete platform to quickly prototype your next IoT projects. Focus on your idea, the Arduino UNO Wi-Fi has everything you need.
Education	An affordable and accessible option for educators looking to include Arduino in their curriculum.	The UNO R4 Wi-Fi has everything from basic to IoT projects, making it an ideal choice for classroom use. Wi the Qwiic connector, educators can focus on teaching code instead of wiring and soldering.
Professional	An accessible and robust way to prototype projects based on the Renesas RA4M1 microcontrollers.	An accessible and robust way to prototype projects with IoT connectivity, CAN, and more.

The Arduino R4 Minima will be available in early July 2023 with a $20 (18 EUR) price tag. The Arduino R4 Wi-Fi will go on sale around the same time for $27.5 or 25 EUR. Arduino also highlights that the UNO R3 is not being discontinued, and the previous-gen boards will remain on sale with no deprecation plans.

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