Intel is making a NUC desktop that’s big enough for a triple-slot GPU

Microsoft’s head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, has just revealed the company’s dedicated Xbox game streaming device. Spencer published a photo of the device on Twitter, where you can see it sitting on top of his shelf in his Microsoft office space. It’s a small white box, that resembles the look of the Xbox Series S and will be dedicated to accessing Xbox games over the company’s Xbox Cloud Gaming service.

 

Microsoft first announced it was planning an Xbox streaming device last year, and many had incorrectly assumed it would be a stick that would plug directly into a HDMI port. While Microsoft is still working on this Xbox streaming console, codenamed Keystone, it will be more of a box or puck-like device that attaches to monitors and TVs.

 

Keystone on top of Phil Spencer’s shelf.

Image: Phil Spencer (Twitter)

 

 

The Xbox streaming device will also likely include access to media apps like Netflix and a lightweight user interface to launch Xbox games. Microsoft acknowledged the Keystone name earlier this year, but revealed it was still working on a new revision of the device. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the Xbox team continues to work on its streaming device, and still plans to bring it to market.

 

Microsoft has managed to launch an Xbox TV app, though. Available on 2022 Samsung TVs and monitors, the Xbox TV app launches games from Xbox Cloud Gaming and supports streaming games at 1080p at up to 60fps. You simply log into your Microsoft account in the app and stream Xbox games just like you would through Xbox Cloud Gaming in a browser.

 

Microsoft hasn’t officially commented on the appearance of its Xbox streaming device, but the Xbox account on Twitter replied to Spencer’s tweet with “Now what did we say about putting old prototypes on your shelf boss.” That’s a big wink wink, nudge nudge if ever I’ve seen one.

 

Update, October 10th 2:05PM ET: Article updated with a response from the Xbox Twitter account.

 

This is Microsoft’s Xbox game streaming device

All YouTube users will soon have an account handle — but some will get to pick theirs earlier

Taiwan's role in global tech world

Taiwan is a leader in semiconductor production and is home to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) -- the world's largest contract chipmaker and a major supplier to various US companies including Apple. Taiwan has concerns of Chinese companies trying to poach chip talent and technical know-how of chip manufacturing. In addition, China's military drills near the island in an attempt to force it into accepting Beijing's sovereignty has made it a global issue. The island nation has found the US as an important international supporter.

What is foreign direct product rule, or FDPR

Recently, the US exercised a provision called the foreign direct product rule, or FDPR, that allows the US to control trading of US technologies. As per the provision, the US can stop any product from being sold if it has been made using American technology.

This means that the US can stop selling any semiconductor manufacturing company that uses American tools (which most do) to China, essentially crippling China's ability to develop technologies in supercomputing and military applications.

Source

Samsung and AMD’s profit slump suggests industry trouble for chipmakers

Windows 11 2022 Update issues galore

Throughout the week, we heard reports about tons of bugs and issues with the Windows 11 2022 Update (version 22H2). For starters, Microsoft has confirmed throughput performance degradation of up to 40% when copying large files weighing several gigabytes or more over SMB. That said, some users might experience this reduced performance when copying local files too. In fact, some users have also reported their copying speeds being cut down by more than half. The good news is that Microsoft seems to have figured out what's causing the slowdown so we should expect a fix pretty soon.

Another issue plaguing some Windows 11 customers is that they can't install the 2022 Update on workstations with dynamic disks. People with these configurations are being greeted with error 0x8007001. There's not much that customers can complain about though because Microsoft already has public advisories indicating that dynamic disks have been deprecated in Windows.

That's not all though. Microsoft has also warned IT admins that deploying the Windows 11 2022 Update via provisioning packages is currently broken. Interestingly, Windows Autopilot is unaffected by this issue.

We also heard from Windows 11 version 22H2 customers experiencing connectivity problems while using Remote Desktop. These include random disconnections and freezes, but Microsoft is investigating this as well.

Perhaps it's not such bad news that a lot of systems aren't Windows 11-ready despite Microsoft speeding rollout for version 22H2, eh?

Widgets (and more!)

Microsoft rolled out Windows 11 build 25217 to the Dev Channel a few days ago too. Besides fixing issues related to the tablet-optimized Taskbar and keyboard input, this release introduces support for third-party Widgets too. This is something that Microsoft first mentioned a few months ago but developers can now finally take advantage of this capability. Microsoft has also published detailed documentation explaining how to get started building these for Windows 11.

Build 25217 also features an updated Microsoft Store experience in the way of better discoverability and enhanced performance. There's also a hidden capability that allows users to reposition the Search button on the Taskbar and you can enable it by following our brief guide here.

Additionally, Microsoft also gave a sneak peek at a new Teams Chat experience on Windows 11. It focuses on video calling and gives you a preview of your video when you open the Chat app. It's currently available only for select Insiders on build 25217.

While we are on the topic of build 25217, it's worth noting that the same version number has also been made available for Windows Server Insider Preview, but as usual, there's no dedicated changelog.

Prior to rolling out build 25217 to the Dev Channel, Microsoft also released build 252112.1010 (KB5019342) in the same ring to test the pipeline. Furthermore, it made build 22621.608 (KB5017389) available to the Release Preview Channel with tabbed File Explorer, Suggested Actions, a new Taskbar overflow menu, and more in tow. There are other hints that some Windows 11 version 22H2 features could also make their way to version 21H2 for those not wanting to upgrade.

In related news, it seems like Windows 10 version 22H2 is close to release as ISO links for the version have been spotted online. No one really knows what improvements, if any, it will pack but there might be some enhancements to Defender.

And for those keeping track of the Windows 11 on Lumia project would be disappointed to know that the project has seemingly reached the end of the line because of Microsoft's updated ARM v8.1 requirements with the Windows 11 2022 Update.

Outlook and other app updates

Microsoft made some improvements on the Outlook front this week. It has started testing unfurling links in Outlook. What this means is that rich actionable card previews will be surfaced in Outlook whenever someone attaches select URLs. You can then take appropriate action directly from the card preview without opening the URL. Of course, this doesn't work by magic, with web and app developers required to make changes to their respective portals.

Microsoft has also fixed a bug in Outlook which was causing the app to crash or become unresponsive on startup. The crashfix is now available in the current channel version 2209 (build 15629.20156) and semi-annual enterprise channel (Preview) version 2208 (build 15601.20158).

PowerToys 0.63 is live too and a key improvement this time around is that the installer's size has been reduced by over 30%. Meanwhile, Microsoft Edge 106 is available in the Stable channel with better security and policy updates. And PolyBase has a new version in SQL Server 2022 boasting new features such as data virtualization, querying data at the locations where it is resident, and usage of REST APIs.

In third-party updates, Vivaldi 5.5 is out with Tasks Panel, a faster Address Field, support for Snap Layouts in Windows 11, improved Mail and Calendar onboarding, and more.

Speaking of updates, it's also worth highlighting that the Surface Pro X has netted Dolby Atmos support and improved performance in the October 2022 firmware update. Finally, the alleged specs of the entire Surface Laptop 5 have leaked online and it seems like AMD Ryzen fans are out of luck, check out the details here.

Git gud

On the gaming front, you might be interested to know that you might be able to get slightly better performance by turning off certain security features in Windows 11, but do so at your own risk and by weighing the potential benefits. Still, it's worth at least knowing about considering that apparently 25% of Steam gamers are now on Windows 11.

Meanwhile, Xbox gamers will want to check out this week's Deals with Gold headlined by Fallout and Max Payne franchises, Game Pass additions featuring A Plague Tale: Requiem, Scorn, Chivalry 2, along with three Xbox Free Play Days titles. You might even be able to nab certain Xbox controller variants for cheap on Amazon or grab some really cool gear as part of the Xbox + Doritos + Rockstar Energy partnership. As usual, don't forget to view this Weekend's PC Game Deals handpicked by Neowin News Editor Pulasthi Ariyasinghe while you are here.

There is a new build present in the Xbox Alpha Skip-Ahead ring as well. It comes with fixes for several issues, including the audio cutting out abruptly and force feedback not working with some steering wheels used to play racing games. There is also a fix so that local languages are used across the whole system software, where they weren’t before.

And while the company continues to face strict investigation in the UK, Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard has now been approved in Brazil.

Under the spotlight

Earlier in the week, I wrote an editorial that argued that Microsoft's latest changes to the Windows 11 Taskbar in the Insider Preview proves that simplicity just for the sake of simplicity isn't always worth it.

Meanwhile, forum member Adam Bottjen penned an editorial that complained about how unreliable ctrl c + ctrl v is in Windows. Although some of our readers have seemingly never experienced issues with it, many readers echoed Adam's sentiments.

Adam also wrote a handy guide on how you can quickly navigate to the search bar in a browser without using a mouse in his latest edition of Warwagon's Tech Tip Tuesday.

Fellow News Editor Paul Hill authored three guides in the past week too. The first is about using a tool that can scrub a lot of your Reddit activity in minutes.

And the second guide details how to do roughly the same on Twitter (what are you trying to hide, Paul? *wink wink*).

Finally, the last guide explains the process of earning Google Play credits or PayPal cash with Google Opinion Rewards.

Logging off

As we log off for this week, I want to direct your attention to not one, but two interesting stories of the week. The first is about an inside look at an early version of Windows 8 with a considerably different Task Manager app, IE 9, and multi-monitor setup. This version was never released to the public.

Meanwhile, the second piece is about an entrepreneur settling a trademark dispute with Microsoft over the product "Word Windows". The product has now been renamed to "Word Window" with both parties satisfied with the rebranding, catch up on all the juicy details here.

Microsoft Weekly: Windows 11 22H2 issues galore, Widgets, and Outlook updates

In 1977, David Mills, an eccentric engineer and computer scientist, took a job at COMSAT, a satellite corporation headquartered in Washington, D.C. Mills was an inveterate tinkerer: he’d once built a hearing aid for a girlfriend’s uncle, and had consulted for Ford on how paper-tape computers might be put into cars. Now, at COMSAT, Mills became involved in the ARPANET, the computer network that would become the precursor to the Internet. A handful of researchers were already using the network to connect their distant computers and trade information. But the fidelity of that exchanged data was threatened by a distinct deficiency: the machines did not share a single, reliable synchronized time.

Over decades, Mills had gained wide-ranging expertise in mathematics, engineering, and computer science. In the early seventies, as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, he’d written programs that decoded shortwave radio and telegraph signals. Later, largely for fun, he’d studied how the clocks in a power grid could wander several seconds in the course of a hot summer’s day. (The extent of their shifts depended not just on the temperature but on whether the grid used coal or hydropower.) Now he concentrated on the problem of keeping time across a far-flung computer network. Clock time, Mills learned, is the result of an unending search for consensus. Even the times told by the world’s most precise government-maintained “master clocks” are composites of the readings of several atomic clocks. The master clocks, in turn, are averaged to help create international civil time, known as Coördinated Universal Time and initialized as U.T.C.

To solve the problem of time synchronization on the ARPANET, Mills built what programmers call a protocol—a collection of rules and procedures that creates a lingua franca for disparate devices. The ARPANET was experimental and capricious: electronics failed regularly, and technological misbehavior was common. His protocol sought to detect and correct for those misdeeds, creating a consensus about the time through an ingenious system of suspicion. Mills prided himself on puckish nomenclature, and so his clock-synchronizing system distinguished reliable “truechimers” from misleading “falsetickers.” An operating system named Fuzzball, which he designed, facilitated the early work. Mills called his creation the Network Time Protocol, and N.T.P. soon became a key component of the nascent Internet. Programmers followed its instructions when they wrote timekeeping code for their computers. By 1988, Mills had refined N.T.P. to the point where it could synchronize the clocks of connected computers that had been telling vastly differing times to within tens of milliseconds—a fraction of a blink of an eye. “I always thought that was sort of black magic,” Vint Cerf, a pioneer of Internet infrastructure, told me.

Today, we take global time synchronization for granted. It is critical to the Internet, and therefore to civilization. Vital systems—power grids, financial markets, telecommunications networks—rely on it to keep records and sort cause from effect. N.T.P. works in partnership with satellite systems, such as the Global Positioning System (G.P.S.), and other technologies to synchronize time on our many online devices. The time kept by precise and closely aligned atomic clocks, for instance, can be broadcast via G.P.S. to numerous receivers, including those in cell towers; those receivers can be attached to N.T.P. servers that then distribute the time across devices linked together by the Internet, almost all of which run N.T.P. (Atomic clocks can also directly feed the time to N.T.P. servers.) The protocol operates on billions of devices, coördinating the time on every continent. Society has never been more synchronized.

For decades, Mills was the person who decided how N.T.P. should work (though he disputes the suggestion that he acted with total sovereignty). Quirky, prickly, authoritative, and sometimes opaque—“He does not suffer fools gladly,” one longtime collaborator said—he has served as the Internet’s Father Time. But his tenure is coming to an end. Mills was born with glaucoma. When he was a child, a surgeon was able to save some of the vision in his left eye, and he has always worked using very large computer displays. Around a decade ago, his vision began to fail, and he is now completely blind.

Examining computer code and writing out explanations and corrections have become maddeningly tedious. Drawing diagrams or composing complex mathematical equations is nearly impossible.

A couple of years ago, I visited Mills in his unassuming house in the Delaware suburbs. He and his wife, Beverly, have lived there since 1986, when Mills became a professor at the University of Delaware, a position he held for twenty-two years until his retirement. While we sat in his kitchen, our conversation was regularly interrupted by an automated voice announcing the time from the next room. The oven and microwave clocks were out of synch. Mills, who has a snow-white beard and wore a charcoal fisherman sweater, tracks the time for himself using a speaking wristwatch, which connects by radio signals to a master clock in Colorado.

He led me upstairs to his office, slowly making his way through the house by feeling for a series of memorized “navigation points.” At his desk, where a cat lay atop some crackling ham-radio equipment, Mills sat down at his computer. He used the keyboard to pull up a research paper he was working on, with suggestions for improvements to N.T.P. (He asks his wife and daughter to proofread what he types.) As he used the arrow keys to scroll, the computer spoke aloud. “This memo explores new security and protocol enhancements,” a voice said. “Blank. Table of contents. Blank. One. Two. Two point. . . . Three. Three. Four. Four point one. . . .” Soon, he got lost. “I do what I can using the voice that you hear,” Mills said. “But I observe myself and comment on the following: man was made to do English composition by eyeball.”

Technology doesn’t stand still. The Internet continues to grow in both scale and complexity; even as its infrastructure ages, our world depends upon its functioning to an ever-increasing degree. The continued evolution of the Internet’s time-synchronization system is essential. And yet Mills’s inability to swiftly contribute to N.T.P. has sapped his authority over it. In his absence, only a few people appear to be both capable and willing to oversee the critical yet overlooked software. A contest for influence over how clocks are kept in synch across the Internet has begun.

Mills was born in 1938 in Oakland, California, eleven years after the development of the first quartz clock and nine years before the construction of the first transistor. He took a steam-powered train to a school for the visually impaired, in San Mateo, and marvelled at the engineers who ran it. In his teens, he became a model-railroad and ham-radio enthusiast, communicating with friends and patching Navy Seabees at the South Pole through to their wives. His father, an engineer and salesman, co-founded National Oil Seal, a company that manufactured equipment to prevent leakage within machinery. (“You might not know what it is, but there are at least two of them in the engine of your car,” his father told him, of the seals.) His mother trained as a pianist at the Toronto Conservatory of Music before staying home to raise him and his two younger brothers.

The family moved around, and Mills’s teachers didn’t always accommodate his visual impairment. Mills recalls an eleventh-grade teacher telling him, “You’re never going to get to college”—a remark that was “like waving a flag in front of a bull,” he said. In 1971, Mills earned a Ph.D. in computer and communication sciences at the University of Michigan; after a two-year stint lecturing in Edinburgh, he moved with his wife and two children to the University of Maryland, which denied him tenure after five years. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Mills said. He started work at COMSAT, where he had access to funding from the Department of Defense, some of which was earmarked for the ARPANET. “It was a sandbox,” he later told an interviewer. “We just were told, ‘Do good deeds.’ But the good deeds were things like develop electronic mail, and protocols.” Part of the allure of the time-synchronization work, he told me, was that he was just about the only one doing it. He had his own “little fief.”

In N.T.P., Mills built a system that allowed for endless tinkering, and he found joy in optimization. “The actual use of the time information was not of central interest,” he recalled. The fledgling Internet had few clocks to synchronize. But during the nineteen-eighties the network grew quickly, and by the nineties the widespread adoption of personal computers required the Internet to incorporate millions more devices than its first designers had envisioned. Coders created versions of N.T.P. that worked on Unix and Windows machines. Others wrote “reference implementations” of N.T.P.—open-source codebases that exemplified how the protocol should be run, and which were freely available for users to adapt. Government agencies, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Naval Observatory, started distributing the time kept by their master clocks using N.T.P.

A loose community of people across the world set up their own servers to provide time through the protocol. In 2000, N.T.P. servers fielded eighteen billion time-synchronization requests from several million computers—and in the following few years, as broadband proliferated, requests to the busiest N.T.P. servers increased tenfold. The time servers had once been “well lit in the US and Europe but dark elsewhere in South America, Africa and the Pacific Rim,” Mills wrote, in a 2003 paper. “Today, the Sun never sets or even gets close to the horizon on NTP.” Programmers began to treat the protocol like an assumption—it seemed natural to them that synchronized time was dependably and easily available. Mills’s little fief was everywhere.

N.T.P. works by telling computers to send tiny, time-stamped messages to time-checking devices superior to them in a hierarchy. The hierarchy’s uppermost layer consists of servers that are closely connected to highly accurate clocks kept in tight synchronization with Coördinated Universal Time.

The time then trickles, from strata to strata, to the machines at the bottom of the hierarchy, such as ordinary laptops. The protocol tracks the instants that elapse as a time-checking message is sent, received, returned, and received again by its original sender. All the while, a collection of algorithms—the “popcorn spike suppressor,” the “huff-n’-puff filter”—sifts through the data, singling out falsetickers and truechimers and instructing the clocks on how to adjust their times based on what the time-stamped messages tell them.

Perfection is an elusive dream in engineering. Mills received a stream of complaints about N.T.P.’s hiccups, and also suggestions for possible patches and improvements. Unprecedented problems arose. Some hardware designers who’d built N.T.P. into their devices turned out to have configured it improperly; the devices sent suffocating swarms of messages to individual servers in places such as Wisconsin and Denmark. Some coders thought N.T.P. was to blame. “I got really angry, because my name was getting mentioned as sort of ‘I’m the single person choking the Internet,’ ” Mills said. He and others quickly wrote countermeasures, including a “kiss-o’-death” packet capable of quieting needlessly frequent time requesters. Meanwhile, some N.T.P. contributors began to bristle at Mills’s intransigent tendencies. Several objected to the kookiness of his code. “Be advised I dearly love the English patois and will on occasion torque the language to my personal whimsy,” Mills wrote, in response to a complaint.

In a 2000 essay, the software developer Eric S. Raymond describes the “benevolent dictator” model of open-source coding. In it, suggestions for improvements flow from a community of volunteers toward a single decider. Mills, receiving these suggestions, could be warm and enthusiastic but also obstinate and dismissive. “I am considered by most to be somewhat [of] a carmudgeon [sic] and I apologize in advance for my shortcomings,” he wrote, in an e-mail to an N.T.P. mailing list, in 2005. At the same time, he argued, “there are really important principles behind the design of this monkey.”

Poul-Henning Kamp, a developer who operated the briefly beleaguered Danish N.T.P. server, told me that, though Mills welcomed contributions to the more obscure elements of N.T.P., he grew harder to convince as collaborators “edged closer to the ‘crown jewels’ ”—the protocol’s core time-deciding algorithms. When Kamp first began engaging in the small N.T.P. community, in the late nineties, Mills struck him as a “jolly old elf, with a lot of wisdom to share and many interesting tales.” Still, Kamp understood the exhaustion and exasperation others felt. “You had to climb a very steep mountain to get anywhere at all with Dave,” he said. It wasn’t enough to come up with a patch that fixed a problem; Mills wanted “a mathematical analysis proving that it would do so in all cases.” Few other benevolent dictators expected this level of exactitude from their volunteers. As a result, almost no one else gained full insight into how N.T.P. worked. “I had a reason for doing this instead of that, but I wasn’t able to communicate in language that others in the crew would appreciate,” Mills recalled.

A programmer named Harlan Stenn has been Mills’s most devoted collaborator. Born in 1956 and raised in a Chicago suburb, Stenn fell in love with computers in high school because, he said, “I got very clear yes-or-no information about whether something was going to do the right thing, and to me that was very peaceful and enjoyable.” His contributions to N.T.P. began in the early nineties when he volunteered to make it easier for a systems administrator to tweak the software across an array of different devices. After Stenn’s ideas succeeded, Mills asked him to look at a backlog of bug reports.

By the mid-nineties, Mills entrusted Stenn with releasing new versions of the code. Stenn had started working at an insurance company, but his responsibilities there largely involved being around in case a system failed. He began devoting most of his working hours to N.T.P. The two often clashed, yet, a decade later, Stenn got Mills’s permission to take full control of N.T.P.’s reference implementation. Although they have collaborated for decades, they have never met in person; instead, Stenn has spent untold hours consulting Mills’s documentation and discussing the code with Mills over the phone. Stenn sometimes struggles to understand some of N.T.P.’s most complex functions, and told me that he considers Mills “a super genius.” Although most of the few dozen contributors to N.T.P. have come and gone over the decades, Stenn has remained. In 2010, after he concluded a term at Netflix, he took a two-year sabbatical from contract work and devoted it entirely to maintaining N.T.P.; he has not taken another full-time job since.

Technology companies worth billions rely on open-source code, including N.T.P., and the maintenance of that code is often handled by a small group of individuals toiling away without pay. In “Working in Public,” a book that explores the code-maintenance economy, the writer Nadia Eghbal notes how, even though “more people use open source code than ever before, its developers failed to capture the economic value they created.” Because the Internet is ever-changing, there’s always something to fix, and so “maintaining code for general public use quickly becomes an unpaid job you can’t quit.”

Stenn told me that he has received requests for free fixes from companies that charge customers for services that depend on N.T.P.; meanwhile, he has struggled to secure funding for his efforts. In 2011, he founded Network Time Foundation—in a Millsian twist, the name omits the “the”—which he hoped to make into a hub for those working on various time-synchronization systems. It gathers, through donations, roughly three hundred thousand dollars a year, which Stenn uses to pay part-time staffers, as well as his Internet, electricity, and grocery bills. He is sixty-six years old, and told me that he has burned through his retirement savings.

Bugs aren’t the only troubles that beset N.T.P. In 2011, N.T.P. servers at the U.S. Naval Observatory received a deluge of time requests, the majority of which came from what appeared to be Chinese agencies; the servers were forced to go offline for nine and a half hours. In 2014, trolls abused an N.T.P. command function to launch a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on a number of gaming platforms, temporarily shutting down their services. N.T.P. soon became a popular vector for such attacks; the same N.T.P. exploit was later used against a client of the cybersecurity provider and content-delivery network Cloudflare, in what was among the largest DDoS attacks in Internet history. These events helped spur competition. One open-source group, called NTPsec, whose current technical lead is Eric S. Raymond, cut out vast swaths of N.T.P.’s code, reasoning that fewer lines meant fewer vulnerabilities; another competitor, Chrony, was written from scratch, and prioritized synchronizing clocks quickly with less data, while omitting certain oft-unused modes of operation. It is still being maintained by Miroslav Lichvar, a Czech developer whom Stenn described as a “wizard.”

There have been more elemental concerns, too. The speed of the Earth’s rotation is affected by a variety of atmospheric and geologic factors, including the behavior of the planet’s inner layers; the reshaping of its crust, such as through the growth of mountains or bodies of magma; and the friction of the ocean’s tides against the seafloor. The aggregate effect of these forces has historically been to slow the rate at which the planet spins. In prior ages, days were, on average, shorter: seventy million years ago, a year consisted of three hundred and seventy-two days of twenty-three and a half hours each. The length of a day also fluctuates by a minuscule amount from month to month, season to season, and year to year. This erraticism has created a problem for timekeepers ever since it was first confirmed, in the early twentieth century. A further wrinkle developed in the following decades, when the world’s master clocks began keeping time by following the unvarying behavior of certain highly controlled atoms. The drifting duration of the day wanders out of synch with the steady marching of the atomic second, and this risks opening a rift between the time as told by atoms and the time as told by astronomy.

To address the problem, the world’s leading timekeepers began sprinkling in individual “leap” seconds in 1972 whenever the Earth’s slowing rotation put clocks just shy of a second out of synch with the time kept by atomic clocks; this practice realigns the clocks with the stars. So far, there have been thirty-seven leap seconds. When Mills wrote N.T.P., he accounted for them by allowing the protocol to count certain seconds twice. But some programmers, perhaps unaware of the existence of leap seconds, neglected to account for them. In 2005, engineers at Google realized that some of their systems were vulnerable to leap-second malfunctions. “They go, ‘I see time goes backward. That’s not supposed to happen. I will crash,’ ” Jamie Wilkinson, one of Google’s site-reliability engineers, told me; he explained that the programs would choose to shut down rather than risk corrupting user data.

Google began updating its internal version of N.T.P. But its programmers took a different approach to the issue: instead of counting a leap second twice, as N.T.P. does, Google’s systems effectively redefine the second for a certain period of time, during which they add a handful of milliseconds to each second, spreading out the addition of time rather than concentrating it. Google first utilized this approach, which it calls the leap smear, in 2008, in its internal systems. But in 2016 it introduced the leap smear to the rest of the Internet, via its N.T.P. servers.

Google considers the leap smear to be a useful and clever solution to a strange problem. And yet the simultaneous existence of two leaping techniques may sow confusion. If a device attempts to ascertain the time by consulting two sources, only one of which smears the second, it will struggle to distinguish a truechimer from a falseticker, and may settle on a minutely incorrect time. Nevertheless, other companies serving time to the public, including Amazon and Facebook, have begun offering smeared time as well.

“They should all be sent to bed without dinner,” Judah Levine, a physicist who has worked at NIST since 1969, told me, referring to the tech companies. Levine has maintained NIST’s own N.T.P. service for decades, and he and a select few of his colleagues are responsible for reconciling its master clocks with Universal Coördinated Time, often within billionths of a second. If the companies disliked leap seconds, Levine said, they should have lobbied for change through the intergovernmental bodies that have the power to abolish them. (Levine himself would prefer a world without leap seconds, and the U.S. government, with his help, has proposed eliminating them for the sake of computer systems; astronomers and other governments have objected. The next opportunity for formal discussion will come in 2023, and the matter is already actively being debated.) “There’s a process,” Levine said. “And if they don't like it they don’t get to say, ‘Well, I’m not going to play anymore. I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and tough luck on you.’ ” As one of the world’s preëminent observers of nanoscopic slices of seconds, Levine argues that there could be legal implications if computers disagreed about when a message was sent, or about when a stock trade occurred.

Meanwhile, for unknown reasons, the Earth’s rotation has been going against trend in recent years: instead of slowing, it has been accelerating. This year had the shortest day observed since people started tracking the length of the day, about a half century ago. If this development continues, then the world may need to remove a second rather than add one—a task that the architects of modern time synchronization have yet to attempt.

Coders sometimes joke, morbidly, about the “bus factor.” How many people need to get hit by a bus before a given project is endangered? It’s difficult to determine the bus factor for N.T.P., and time synchronization more broadly, especially now that companies such as Google have developed their own N.T.P.-inspired proprietary code. But it seems reasonable to say that N.T.P.’s bus factor is rather small. Eghbal, in “Working in Public,” describes code as “a living form of knowledge”; in the case of N.T.P., very few people possess that knowledge. Stenn said that for a long time he was reluctant to change his N.T.P. code too drastically, because significant alterations could untether it from Mills’s recollections; Mills is eighty-four, and his memory is resilient yet fitful. Sitting in his kitchen, Mills told me, “My brain is fried by age.”

There has not been a fully new version of N.T.P. since its fourth iteration, which was published in 2010. Now a subgroup of about two dozen contributors within the Internet Engineering Task Force (I.E.T.F.), the Internet’s principal standards body, is working toward version five. It may prove to be a dramatic departure from what currently exists. When the I.E.T.F. was created, decades ago, it was inspired by an early working group chaired by Mills. But his role in and influence over the N.T.P. community has waned. In the fall of 2020, Mills e-mailed the paper I’d seen him working on to the subgroup and received no substantive response for months. He wasn’t surprised. “I’m considered a bit of an old fogey,” Mills said. “When I was a professor, and I was in my twenties, my students thought of me as one of them. In the next twenty years, I was their father, and I was evil. And in the next twenty years, I was an old geezer and could be ignored.” Stenn has attempted to act as Mills’s emissary in the group, but has occasionally caused offense by doing so. In one instance, Stenn voted against a proposal on Mills’s behalf before Mills had had a chance to review it, and a fellow-member decried his “attempt to seize the mantle of Prof. Mills’ authority.” The member went on, “You are not acting as a faithful messenger and I will not accept your words as his.”

The subgroup working on version five of N.T.P. makes decisions by consensus. But Stenn, like Mills, is neither a skilled diplomat nor a committed one. “My goal isn’t to build consensus,” Stenn told me. “My goal is to have the best quality timekeeping stuff we can have.” Even as Stenn insists that he is not Mills’s intellectual equal, he believes that decades of experience have given him unique insight into the details and structure of the protocol, and how people actually use (and abuse) it. Some members, however, question Stenn’s authority, including whether the code he has devoted decades to maintaining should be considered the sole reference implementation of N.T.P. Many want to see their ideas reflected in the group’s output. A widely held view is that N.T.P. should become more modular and flexible so that it can be improved more frequently. A reverence for Mills bumps against a skepticism of whether what he built was truly optimal. “I think in the past there was a lot of ‘magic math’ in the algorithms, claiming ‘don’t ever change this, or the world will fall apart’ ;-),” one member has written.

It is difficult to know in what ways N.T.P. might be helped or hurt by having a larger community devoted to it. It has rarely, if ever, fostered such a community in the way that other open-source systems have. Unconvinced of version five’s trajectory, Stenn has largely chosen to continue focussing on version four. Meanwhile, a leading draft of the next version is being written by Miroslav Lichvar, the “wizard” Czech coder behind Chrony, the alternative to N.T.P. Lichvar is a somewhat mysterious presence in the N.T.P. community. One observer said, of him, “He’s extremely quiet, and nobody knows him.”

Lichvar got involved in N.T.P. around fifteen years ago, when he took over maintaining the open-source software firm Red Hat’s N.T.P. package. He soon sent ideas and patches to Mills, only to have them rejected. “That was frustrating,” he told me, over e-mail, after declining an initial interview request. “It seemed they were happy with what they had and were not interested in making major changes.” His years developing the Chrony code confirmed his admiration for Mills’s work, but also convinced him that alternative timekeeping algorithms can work effectively. He believes that N.T.P. should operate without specifying which time-synchronization algorithms must be used; to him, they are not crown jewels. “Chrony has different algorithms, which I think work better in most conditions, but I wouldn’t want to force them on anyone,” he said. “There certainly could be even better algorithms implemented.” Multiple people, including Stenn, told me that Lichvar is one of the most respected people in the I.E.T.F. working group, but Lichvar said that he doesn’t think of the group as having leaders. “It’s just a bunch of random people who usually have a hard time reaching a consensus,” he wrote.

Should Internet time synchronization run on rigorously tested and battle-worn but whimsical and arguably bloated code that someone may still struggle to fully understand, even after devoting decades to it? Or should it be based on a nimbler, less pedantic standard designed by people who can’t agree on what’s best? There won’t be one answer: no open-source author has enforcement power over what implementations companies and system administrators choose to deploy. (According to Stenn, much of the Internet still utilizes version three of N.T.P., which was published in 1992.) Finding consensus can be difficult for both clocks and people. In the meantime, our society continues to develop new uses for synchronized time, which demand further technical innovations. The Precision Time Protocol, which was first published in the early two-thousands, was designed primarily for automated robotic manufacturing; it offers especially close time synchronization for hardwired networks, and is now routinely used to synchronize financial trading.

In 2019, after years of effort, the I.E.T.F. released a standard for Network Time Security, a mechanism which adds capabilities atop N.T.P. in an attempt to make it more secure. (Time underlies much of the Internet’s cryptography infrastructure.) The expanding Internet of Things will only contribute to the ever-growing need for synchronization. Sharon Goldberg, a computer scientist at Boston University who worked on the Network Time Security effort, told me that she thinks time synchronization should have a cryptocurrency-like buzz around it (ideally with less controversy)—coders who contribute to it, she said, should feel proud enough to declare, “Everyone uses the software, it’s in everything, and I wrote it!” It’s striking how few people know Mills’s name, given how many know the pseudonym of whoever created Bitcoin.

Nowadays, Mills listens to books and papers on the big bang, and on Egyptian, Greek, Roman, English, Jewish, and Soviet histories; he spends time with his children, listens to TV alongside his wife, and plays with his radios. Every few months, Stenn asks him to explain some aspect of the current version of N.T.P. Mills is disgruntled about aging: each time he walks he feels on the verge of stumbling, and he told me on a recent phone call that he is concerned about his “geezer quotient.” He has more difficulty conceiving of and describing mathematical ideas, and his writing’s friskiness has faded. “I’m too busy trying to tease the meaning out of a sentence,” he said.

Despite this, he has been spending a couple of hours a day composing a paper that outlines a redesign of the “bare bones” of N.T.P. His aim is to revise and improve its basic model, and to simplify it. Today’s programming culture, he feels, is surprisingly expansionist: coders want “to add features, improve security, and do things that I thought would be out of the scope of what the protocol is expected to do.” Mills is unsure if he’ll be able to find someone to edit the paper; he fears that Stenn is too weighed down by “real-world issues” to aid him in his reconsideration of N.T.P.’s “foundational principles.” He doesn’t expect the paper to be read by many in the N.T.P. community, either. “I think they will ignore this one, too,” he said. I asked him why, then, did he keep working on it. “Because it’s there,” he said. “I like to improve what I do.” ♦

Source

The robot, which researchers say resembles an “ostrich without a head,” started the day with a few stumbles, but ultimately prevailed — running 100 meters in 24.73 seconds, slower than Usain Bolt’s record-setting 9.58 seconds, but still a Guinness world record for a bipedal robot, Oregon State University announced last week.

Cassie’s roughly 40 supporters were elated, cheering when it crossed the finish line. Its success was a seminal moment in robotic history, they said. Cassie’s speed and agility, honed by artificial intelligence training, showed that bipedal robots could maneuver in taxing real-world situations while maintaining balance, a problem that has plagued designers in the past.

The race built on Cassie’s 2021 successful completion of a 5K in roughly 53 minutes, which first showed Cassie could stay upright for long periods. It was also the capstone to about five years of work by engineering and machine learning researchers at Oregon State University and a spinout company, Agility Robotics, paving the way for more advanced designs.

 “This is the first big step to humanoid robots doing real work in the real world,” said Alan Fern, an artificial intelligence professor at Oregon State University who helped train Cassie. “Because [now], we can get robots to robustly move around the world on two legs.”

For decades, scientists, entrepreneurs and engineers have clamored for two-legged robots. In the 1960s, Japanese researchers created rudimentary prototypes of bipedal machines. In the past decade, engineers at MIT and the California Institute of Technology have tried to do the same. Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk debuted a two-legged humanoid robot, Optimus.

 But two-legged robots have always faced problems, researchers said, namely losing balance and falling down.

To solve that, Fern teamed up with Jonathan Hunt, an Oregon State University professor and co-founder of Agility Robotics, to train bipedal robots using machine learning and neural networks, which are algorithms that mimic the way a human brain works.

< Watch the video at the source page. >

 The research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a secretive government organization behind creations such as the internet.

Since 2017, the team has been training Cassie how to walk properly, using algorithms to reward the robot when it moves appropriately. “This is all inspired by Pavlovian psychology,” Fern said. “It just learns to anticipate these rewards and do the right thing.”

Once the team got the remote-controlled robot working well in simulation, the next step was seeing how it would handle real-world environments, where surfaces are uneven, friction can change and a robot’s mass can shift.

In 2021, when the team had Cassie run a 5K, it learned a few things. The robot was being “too stompy,” Fern said, and researchers started rewarding the robot when it smoothed out its gait. With this year’s successful 100-meter dash, the team is moving on to the next step: putting a torso and head on Cassie. (Agility Robotics is working on one called Digit.)

Fern said that will bring engineers one step closer to humanlike robots that could one day move around packages in warehouses, build homes or provide care for the elderly in homes.

But such advances come with their own challenges.

Humanoid robots with heads propped onto Cassie’s leg design will need the peripheral vision to navigate tricky terrain. “Now, Cassie has to look around the world,” he said, “understanding what objects are there and not running into them.”

The robot will also have to identify an object as something to pick up, and then be intelligent enough to do it the way a human would. (For example, Fern said, if a robot was asked to put boxes in a room, it should load boxes in from back to front.)

Most important, these robots must walk with intention. “When you’re in the real world,” Fern said, “sometimes you do have to actually pay attention to where you step.”

Still, engineering experts said it will be an uphill climb to replace humans with robots.

Nancy J. Cooke, a professor of human systems engineering at Arizona State University, noted that robots are getting very good at doing things like running or kicking a soccer ball. The harder part is creating a machine that interacts with humans in a natural way.

“What they’re lacking is really complex cognition,” Cooke said. “There’s still a deep understanding of humans that’s needed to interact with humans that they don’t have.”

Cooke also said it’s laudable that robots like Cassie are advancing the robotics industry, but it seems unnecessary to build machines that simply replicate what humans do. It might be more worthwhile, she said, to create robots that can do things humans cannot.

“Why [do] we want to rebuild ourselves?” she asked. “I think it’s a sci-fi thing, but other than entertainment value — I think it’s an overkill.”

Source

What to expect from the Microsoft Surface launch event

Hello Games has been delivering major updates to its space exploration and survival game No Man's Sky since its release in 2016. Coming in as the fourth content update of the year is Waypoint, bumping the game's version number to 4.0 and introducing a whole slate of changes and features. The update lands just as No Man's Sky launches on the Nintendo Switch.

Possibly the biggest addition to the game in 4.0 is the ability to create custom difficulty settings. Players can tinker with the economy, combat, survival elements, and more create the most optimal game experience they desire. Also, in addition to the Normal, Survival, and Creative difficulty presets, Hello Games has now introduced a Relaxed mode made specifically to reduce the grind of the sandbox.

For those looking for more performance, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 has also been added as a temporal upscaling option. It promises to preserve high image quality while improving frame rates for PC players using almost any graphics solution from AMD, Nvidia, or Intel.

Greatly increased level caps, redesigned inventory management pages, a new information portal for returning players to catch up on previously added features are now here too. Also available are new ease of use additions like the ability to disable head bob, an auto save function, faster scanning, and much more are a part of the update too.

The complete list of changes included in the No Man's Sky 4.0 Waypoint update can be found on the changelog page here. The update is now available for players on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch.

No Man's Sky 4.0 update overhauls the experience for new and returning players

What happened to the virtual reality gaming revolution?

Neeva is one of several search startups that is taking on the heavyweights Google Search and Bing. Founded by two former Google employees, it is an attempt to move away from the current advertisement-influenced search model towards one that is more user-friendly and useful.

Not only is Neeva promising an ad-free search environment, it is also guaranteeing that users are not tracked and that search results are not biased. Other features that set it apart from traditional search engines are options to customize the search experience, by prioritizing or downgrading certain sites or sources, or link to accounts on sites such as Dropbox, Figma or Slack, to include personal files in search results.

Neeva, like its rival Kagi, is available for free. Both finance search through premium accounts, which add functionality to the search experience.

The main idea behind both services is to finance operations solely through paying users. Currently, Neeva Premium is offered only in the United States, but the company announced plans to launch the premium option in the future in Europe as well.

Premium users gain access to new search engine features first, and get to use a VPN and password manager next to that.

Users from Germany, France and the United Kingdom get local search results for certain search topics, including stocks, weather, restaurants and more. French and German language versions of the interface are available as well.

Neeva uses its own index and Bing to deliver search results to users. The service supports image, video, news and maps searches, and search suggestions.

The search engine stores a "limited amount of information" about its users to "make the product better" for the individual user, according to the service's FAQ. The information is deleted after 90 days by default.

Closing Words

It remains to be seen how ad-free search engines like Neeva or Kagi fare in the coming months and years. There is certainly a market for unbiased and ad-free search results, but it is not clear how many Internet users are willing to pay for that privilege. Both services need paying customers in the future to finance operations.

For now, Neeva is set on expansion and less focused on revenue generation.

Now You: would you pay for unbiased ad-free search results?

Neeva search engine launches in Germany, France and the United Kingdom

Why Big Tech shreds millions of storage devices it could reuse

The Microsoft Store version 22209 comes with the following changes:

• While finding games in the Store, we now clearly show when they are “available with Game Pass” as well as the current available price. On the detail page of such a game, we updated the button design and added a new section to let you know what is included in the subscription.

  

   

• We’ve enhanced the library experience with simplified options and improved performance.

The Microsoft Store will install version 22209 automatically if you run Windows 11 Dev builds. It is also worth noting that today's changes and improvements will eventually make it to Windows 10, which also supports the redesigned Microsoft Store.

In case you missed it, Microsoft recently announced the Microsoft Store Ads platform, allowing developers to promote their apps in the search results. Also, the company revealed that Android apps on Windows 11 would soon be available in more than 30 countries.

Microsoft Store gets improved performance and discoverability

Criterion Games is back in the driving seat of Need for Speed development, following its Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted entries back in the day. The Burnout series developer today unveiled Need for Speed Unbound, the next installment of EA's arcade racing franchise that's hitting PC and current-gen platforms later this year. Watch the trailer above.

As evident by the gameplay footage, the studio is going for a new graphics style when compared to other Need for Speed entries. Criterion says it is delivering the "most realistic looking cars in Need for Speed history" with an added street art-inspired flair.

Players will be racing in the streets of Lakeshore City this time, with the plot surrounding a priceless car that was stolen from a family auto-shop. Artist ASAP Rocky is involved in the storyline as well, while also being featured in the original soundtrack, with brand-new music made just for the game.

Need for Speed Unbound's setting is described as follows:

To get to the top, risks must be taken. Choose how and when to put it all on the line, pulling huge drifts on the street, outdriving the cops, or placing side bets with your own earnings against rival racers. But remember, the faster you go, the more heated the chase is… Think smart, take bold decisions and run the streets of Lakeshore.

Criterion is promising a huge variety of car customization options that will now include "Driving Effects," alongside cosmetic items for the player character from popular fashion labels. Alongside the single-player campaign, Unbound will also ship with free roam and competitive street racing for those looking for multiplayer action. Find the full car list here.

Need for Speed Unbound comes out on December 2 on PC (EA app, Steam, Epic Games Store), Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 with pre-orders available now for $69.99. EA Play Pro members on PC will be able to dive into the game on day one for no extra cost as well.

Need for Speed Unbound announced, introduces a fresh art style to the franchise

The study was jointly conducted by renowned Chinese quantum physicist Pan Jianwei's team from the University of Science and Technology of China, and researchers from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics under the CAS.

They achieved high-precision free-space dissemination of time and frequency over 113 km for the first time in the world, a crucial step for establishing a global-scale optical clock network in the future, according to the study.

"It has been expected that an optical clock network connected by dissemination technology will open many exciting applications, including the next-generation definition of the unit of 'second,' testing general relativity, probing the changes of physical constants, searching for gravitational waves and dark matter, and long-range quantum networks," they wrote.

"To establish a global-scale optical clock network, it is essential to disseminate time and frequency with a stability of 10−19 over a long-distance free-space link," they added.

However, previous attempts at free-space dissemination of time and frequency at high precision did not extend beyond dozens of kilometers, according to the study.

"Here, we take a crucial step toward future satellite-based time-frequency disseminations," the authors wrote.

Source

Earlier today, Nvidia published a blog post detailing the performance one can expect in Overwatch 2 with its high end GPUs. And in the post, the company also included numbers for its freshly debuted RTX 4000 series.

According to Nvidia, one can expect over 500 fps in the title at 1440p when running the mighty $1,599 RTX 4090. The framerate cap is set to 600fps. So in case you are an Overwatch fan and are want to enjoy Overwatch 2 at its smoothest, this may finally be the time to buy the Asus ROG 500Hz G-SYNC monitor that was launched earlier this year in May. This one is a 1080p screen though so at 1440p, you will get even better anti-aliasing effect.

Meanwhile, the RTX 4080 16GB and the RTX 4080 12GB can deliver close to 370 fps and 300 fps respectively, which is still more than enough for most people. Nvidia has also shared performance figures for its last gen RTX 3080 (presumably the original 10GB model), RTX 3070, and RTX 3060.

Alongside the framerates, Nvidia has also added the system latency data (in ms). In the next chart, the firm has plotted the original latency and compared it with Nvidia Reflex enabled, alongside Nvidia's Boost for an overall perceivable improvement in latency. Nvida Reflex is similar to AMD's Anti-Lag feature.

Very few will actually need this kind of performance though as the system requirements for the game are unsurprisingly pretty modest.

Source: Nvidia

Nvidia wants you to buy its RTX 4090 so you can play Overwatch 2 at over 500fps

Google said it is also building Dedicated Cloud Interconnect sites, which link users’ on-premises networks with Google’s grid, in Nairobi (Kenya), Lagos (Nigeria), and South Africa (Capetown and Johannesburg), in its quest to provide full-scale cloud capabilities for its customers and partners in Africa.

Google plans to tap its private subsea cable, Equiano, which connects Africa and Europe to power the sites. Equiano has been under development since 2019 and has so far made four landings — in Togo, Namibia, Nigeria and South Africa.

South Africa now joins Google’s global network of 35 cloud regions and 106 zones worldwide, and the announcement follows the recent preview launch of regions in Malaysia, Thailand and New Zealand. Google Cloud regions allow users to deploy cloud resources from specific geographic locations, and access several services including cloud storage, compute engine, and key management system.

“We are excited to announce the first Google Cloud region in Africa. The new region will allow for the localization of applications and services. It will make it really easier for our customers and partners to quickly deploy solutions for their businesses, whereby they’re able to leverage our computer artificial intelligence or machine learning capabilities, and data analytics to make smarter business decisions as they go forward,” said Google Cloud Africa director, Niral Patel.

He added that the new region and interconnect sites will take its cloud computing services closer to its clients, allowing its customers to choose where to consume the products from.

“What we’re doing here is giving customers and partners a choice on where they’d like to store their data and where they’d like to consume cloud services, especially in the context of data sovereignty. This allows customers to then store the data in the country should they choose to do so… I guess for me the most important element is that it gives customers the element of choice,” Patel said.

The ability for users to choose where they store their data is increasingly critical as countries like Kenya implement privacy and data laws, which require companies to store their data within borders and process it through servers hosted locally.

The decision to set up a region in South Africa was informed by the demand for cloud services and the market’s potential. Still, the company is looking to launch in more markets within the continent as demand for its products soars. Its early adopters include large enterprise companies, and e-commerce firms like South Africa’s TakeAlot and Kenya’s Twiga.

“We continue to evaluate market demands as we work with our customers to see them transform and grow in these markets. We continuously make these assessments and it is on that basis, that we continue to invest,” Patel said.

According to research by AlphaBeta Economics, commissioned by Google Cloud, the South Africa cloud region will contribute over $2.1 billion to South Africa’s GDP and support the creation of more than 40,000 jobs by 2030.

Google Cloud, Azure by Microsoft, and AWS are the three biggest public cloud storage players in the world, according to data from Gartner, but it’s unclear why until now, Google has been absent in Africa.

Microsoft launched two cloud regions in South Africa: Cape Town and Johannesburg (only the cloud region in the latter remains active) in 2019, the same year Google announced it “had no plans to establish a cloud region or data center in Africa,” according to this report; however, it didn’t rule it from happening in the foreseeable future.

Amazon followed suit in 2020, scaling its AWS data centers to South Africa through Cape Town. Oracle, another major player, also established its data center in Johannesburg this year. In response to whether Google is playing catch up with the other cloud storage players, Patel and Nitin Gajria, the managing director of Google Africa, painted a picture whereby every major player is concerned about broadening the internet ecosystem in Africa through their data centers rather than vying for a more significant market share.

“In terms of where we are on the continent with the internet, the job to be done is thinking of how do we bring more people and businesses online, how do we help more entrepreneurs get access to capital and so on,” Gajria remarked. “In business parlance, this is less of a market share zero-sum game, but more of how do we work collectively across the private sector, public sector, civil society, to just build a large, vibrant internet ecosystem that helps broaden economies and businesses, as well as generate jobs.”

With Google’s launch, South Africa now houses four major cloud storage providers on the continent.

Source

The Nest Wifi Pro uses 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radio bands but is now adding 6 GHz to the list. It is a tri-band mesh network system to provide faster network services. The Nest Wifi Pro is accessible on older devices that use 2.4 and 5 GHz bands and can connect with almost 100 devices. However, it is incompatible with Google Wifi (Wi-Fi 5) or Nest Wifi. Google elaborated that the Wi-Fi 6 devices do not support 6 GHz radio bands preventing access to 160 MHz-wide radio channels; however, with Wi-Fi 6E, it is possible to do so. The upgrade allows more data flow totaling up to 5.4 Gbps, or 4.2 Gbps, outside the United States. You can read more details here.

The router can be set up by following the instructions using the Google Home application. Moreover, the app lets users monitor their networks, such as running speed tests, and comes with timely scanning for connection issues notified to the users, alongside steps to resolve the issue. Users can also access parental controls through the Family Wi-Fi settings, where they can set up Wi-Fi schedules to restrict Wi-Fi at wanted times. Lastly, Google hinted at the ability of these routers to become a Matter hub to control devices running the smart home protocol named Matter. Although, Matter is yet to launch to more devices.

Google also stated:

“We built safety and security measures directly into Nest Wifi Pro, at no additional cost, to help protect your connection. For example, in the Google Home app, you can see every device that’s connected to your network to help you easily identify and pause any that might look suspicious.”

A single Nest Wifi Pro router can provide network access to an area of up to 2,200 feet. It comes with a Thread border router which connects it to other Thread devices. The routers are available in colors labeled Fog, Snow, Linen, and Lemongrass. Nest Wifi Pro routers are available in packs of three, two, and one costing $399.99, $299.99, and $199.99, respectively. Pre-orders begin today and will arrive in stores and online from October 27, 2022.

Google's latest Nest Wifi Pro supports 6 GHz radio band and connectivity to more devices

The ideal smart home seamlessly anticipates your needs and instantly responds to commands. You shouldn’t have to open a specific app for each appliance or remember the precise voice command and voice assistant combination that starts the latest episode of your favorite podcast on the nearest speaker. Competing smart home standards make operating your devices needlessly complicated. It’s just not very … well, smart.

Tech giants try to straddle standards by offering their voice assistants as a controlling layer on top, but Alexa can’t talk to Google Assistant or Siri or control Google or Apple devices, and vice versa. (And so far, no single ecosystem has created all the best devices.) But these interoperability woes may soon be remedied. Formerly called Project CHIP (Connected Home over IP), the open source interoperability standard known as Matter is finally here. Some of the biggest tech names have signed on, like Amazon, Apple, and Google, which means that seamless integration may finally be within reach.

Updated October 2022: Added news of the Matter 1.0 specification release, the certification program, and some additional details.

Matter promises to enable different devices and ecosystems to play nicely. Device manufacturers need to comply with the Matter standard to ensure their devices are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and others. For folks building a smart home, Matter theoretically lets you buy any device and use the voice assistant or platform you prefer to control it (yes, you should be able to use different voice assistants to talk to the same product).

For example, you’ll be able to buy a Matter-supported smart bulb and set it up with Apple Homekit, Google Assistant, or Amazon Alexa—without having to worry about compatibility. Right now, some devices already support multiple platforms (like Alexa or Google Assistant), but Matter will expand that platform support and make setting up your new devices faster and easier.

The first protocol runs on Wi-Fi and Thread network layers and uses Bluetooth Low Energy for device setup. While it will support various platforms, you’ll have to choose the voice assistants and apps you want to use—there is no central Matter app or assistant. Overall, you can expect your smart home devices to be more responsive to you.

The Connectivity Standards Alliance (or CSA, formerly the Zigbee Alliance) maintains the Matter standard. What sets it apart is the breadth of its membership (more than 550 tech companies), the willingness to adopt and merge disparate technologies, and the fact that it is an open source project. Now that the software development kit (SDK) is ready, interested companies can use it royalty-free to incorporate their devices into the Matter ecosystem.

Growing out of the Zigbee Alliance gives Matter a firm foundation. Bringing the main smart home platforms (Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings) to the same table is an achievement. It is optimistic to imagine a seamless adoption of Matter across the board, but it has enjoyed a rush of enthusiasm with a range of smart home brands already signed up, including August, Schlage, and Yale in smart locks; Belkin, Cync, GE Lighting, Sengled, Signify (Philips Hue), and Nanoleaf in smart lighting; and others like Arlo, Comcast, Eve, TP-Link, and LG. There are more than 280 member companies in Matter.

Matter has been in the works for years. The first release was due in late 2020, but it was delayed to the following year, rebranded as Matter, and then touted for a summer release. After another delay, the Matter 1.0 specification and certification program is now finally ready. The SDK, tools, and test cases are available, and eight authorized test labs are open for product certification. That essentially means you can expect to see Matter-supported smart home gadgets going on sale as early as October 2022 after they’re certified. 

The CSA says the last delay was to accommodate more devices and platforms and ensure they all work smoothly with one another before release. More than 130 devices and sensors across 16 development platforms (operating systems and chipsets) are working through certification, and you can expect many more soon.

The road to smart home nirvana is paved with different standards, like Zigbee, Z-Wave, Samsung SmartThings, Wi-Fi HaLow, and Insteon, to name a few. These protocols and others will continue to exist and operate. Google has merged its Thread and Weave technologies into Matter. The new standard also employs Wi-Fi and Ethernet standards and uses Bluetooth LE for device setup.

Matter is not a single technology and should evolve and improve over time. It won’t cover every possible use case for every device and scenario, so other standards will continue to develop. The more platforms and standards merge with Matter, the greater its potential to succeed, but the challenge of making it all work seamlessly also grows.

Some devices will work with Matter after a firmware update. Others won’t ever be compatible. There’s no simple answer here. Many devices that currently work with Thread, Z-Wave, or Zigbee should be able to work with Matter, but it’s not a given that they will get upgrades. It is best to check in with manufacturers about specific devices and future support.

The first specification, or Matter 1.0, covers only certain categories of devices, including:

• Light bulbs and switches
• Smart plugs
• Smart locks
• Safety and security sensors
• Media devices including TVs
• Smart blinds and shades
• Garage door controllers
• Thermostats
• HVAC controllers

Security cameras and doorbells, robot vacuums, and other devices will likely be covered in a later specification.

To achieve compatibility with Matter, some brands, like Philips Hue, are updating their hubs. This is one way to sidestep the problem of incompatible older hardware. Updating hubs to work with the new Matter standard enables you to connect older systems, which will demonstrate that standards can coexist. But getting the full potential benefit of Matter will often require new hardware. Once you adopt the system, you should be able to get rid of hubs altogether. 

The underlying Thread technology in Matter allows devices, like smart speakers or lights, to act as Thread routers and create a mesh network that can pass data, increasing range and reliability. Unlike traditional smart home hubs, these Thread routers can’t see inside the packets of data they exchange. Data can be sent securely end-to-end by a network of devices from different manufacturers.

Fears about security and privacy have cropped up frequently on the smart home scene. Matter is designed to be secure, but we won’t know how secure until it is working in the real world. The CSA has published a set of security and privacy principles and plans to use distributed ledger 

technology and Public Key Infrastructure to validate devices. This should ensure folks are connecting authentic, certified, and up-to-date devices to their homes and networks. Data collection and sharing will still be between you and the device manufacturer or platform provider. 

Where before you had a single hub to secure, Matter devices will mostly connect directly to the internet. That makes them potentially more susceptible to hackers and malware. But Matter also provides for local control, so the command from your phone or smart display doesn’t have to go through a cloud server. It can pass directly to the device on your home network.

While the big platform providers can see the benefit in a common standard, they are not going to open up full control of their devices to their competitors. There will be a gap between the walled garden ecosystem experience and Matter functionality. Manufacturers will also keep certain features proprietary.

For example, you may be able to turn an Apple device on or off with a Google Assistant voice command, but you will have to use Siri or an Apple app to tweak some settings or access advanced features. Manufacturers signing up to Matter are under no obligation to implement the entire specification, so the extent of support is likely to be mixed.

Matter is presented as a smart home panacea, but only time will tell. Few, if any, innovations get everything right out of the gate. But there is potential value in seeing a Matter logo on a device and knowing it will work with your existing smart home setup, particularly in households with iPhones, Android phones, and Alexa devices. The freedom to be able to mix and match your devices and voice assistants is enticing.

No one wants to have to select devices based on compatibility. We want to choose devices with the best feature set, the highest quality, and the most desirable designs. Hopefully, Matter will make that easier. 

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Here’s What the ‘Matter’ Smart Home Standard Is All About

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When Google adds Matter support later this year, billions of Android devices, Google Nest smart speakers, smart displays, and routers will be able to control Matter devices.

Aside from Matter support, the new Google Home app will allow you to manage the smart home devices you care most about through a new Favourites tab, which will be the default tab. You can select the connected items you care most about and have quick access to them from there. The tab will also feature Spaces which sorts your connected devices into categories such as lights, camera, thermostats, and network devices. Eventually, you’ll be able to customize these too.

For people with Nest cameras, Google has brought new functionality to the Google Home app so that you can find important events. Using machine learning, the app will label events by type such as people, packages, vehicles, activities, and animals. For advanced users, the Google Home app will eventually get a new script editor that offers over 100 features to make your smart home do more.

The new Google Home app for Wear OS that was shown off earlier this year will be coming to Wear OS 3 devices next week. Google is also rolling out a new camera experience for the web version of Google Home, so you can check your cameras from your computer. Google will release the new app on Android and iOS to people in the Public Preview programme in a few weeks.

Google's Matter support and Home update will let you quickly add smart devices

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The news arrived during an investor strategy update by CD Projekt, sharing what the company has planned for its game studios in the future. While no specifics were detailed, Project Polaris is the codename given to the first game in this fresh trilogy, described as a "story-driven open-world RPG built on the legacy of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt".

Being that Project Polaris is still early in development, it will be some time before fans will get to re-enter the monster-filled universe. However, CD Projekt plans a relatively quick release schedule for the rest of the series once the first game is out. The full trilogy has a tight six-year release plan attached to it, and Unreal Engine 5 will be powering them.

That's not all, though, as the studio will be revisiting its Cyberpunk universe for a full-fledged sequel to 2077. This has the codename Orion, and no other information was announced. CD Projekt RED is in the middle of developing Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion right now, too.

CD Projekt RED will also try to ship multiplayer with most of these experiences too, though it's unclear what forms will these online elements take on its RPGs.

Outside those plans, CD Projekt RED is diving into a brand-new IP with the codename Hadar. Created "from scratch" by the studio, the mysterious IP is in very early stages of design currently. Elsewhere, CD Projekt-acquired developer The Molasses Flood is working on a fully multiplayer Witcher title codenamed Sirius. Lastly, yet another Witcher project, codenamed Canis Majoris, is under development at an unnamed third-party studio.

New Witcher trilogy and Cyberpunk 2077 sequel coming out of CD Projekt RED

The Nest Doorbell is a wired doorbell that prevents the need of recharging the batteries. It comprises of local storage that records hour-long footage of occurrences, in case of a poor WiFi connection. Users can rewind and replay up to five clips from three hours of video history without paying additional fees. However, if users wish to get more footage recording – 10 days of non-stop recording – they can buy the Nest Aware Plus subscription.

Google claims that the doorbell has improved image quality through image tuning that records events in a variety of lighting and weather. The Nest Doorbell prevents the fish-eye distortion that is usually seen in security camera footage and records in High Dynamic Range (HDR) to catch the most detail. Additionally, the company states the product has a lesser carbon footprint and is built from 43% recycled material.

According to DXOMark, a website that tests audio, battery, and image display in smartphones and cameras, Google’s Nest Doorbell comes with the best camera quality as it states:

“The Google Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd-gen) is the best camera doorbell we have tested so far in terms of image quality, with a high level of detail and accurate exposure, allowing you to easily recognize whoever is at the door, even at night.”

The doorbell can detect packages, pets, people, and vehicles and record specific areas through the Activity Zones feature. It also has a "talk and listen" feature that allows users to communicate with visitors either through pre-recorded messages or converse in real time. In case a visitor rings the doorbell, the users are notified through alerts; they can also connect the doorbell with Nest speakers or stick with their existing doorbell chimes.

Nest Doorbell is available in four colors

It can be controlled through the Google Home app, which has also been upgraded to enable users to manage their Nest devices. Google shared that users will be able to view the Nest doorbell and camera feeds on the web in the future. Users can also set a Household Routine for their Doorbells, where the bell can perform certain actions when someone interacts with it.

The Nest Doorbell is available in four shades: Linen, Snow, Ivy, and Ash (images above), with a starting price of $179.99 in the U.S. and $239.99 CAD in Canada, although only Snow and Ash colors are available in Canada.

Google unveils the wired Nest Doorbell that records footage in HDR

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