Category Archives: News

Article note: Shoot, I'd prefer it was an OLED, but that power model checks more boxes for me than anything else in the US market. MicroSD, 3.5mm jack, wireless charging, decent camera, not too much other bullshit. A little bigger than I'd prefer but not not comically large (...we still would have derided it as a phablet 10 years ago).

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  The 2024 Moto G and Moto G Power. [credit: Motorola ]

Motorola is launching the 2024 version of its "Moto G" budget phone. Today we've got two versions, the "Moto G 5G 2024" and the "Moto G Power 5G 2024" to pick from. The base Moto G 2024 is $199.99, while the Power version is $299.99.

The specs on the base model Moto G are all over the place. We've got a low-resolution, high refresh rate 6.6-inch, 120 Hz, 1612×720 LCD and a Snapdragon 4 Gen 1. The phone has a whopping 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 5000 mAh battery with 18 W wired charging. You get a lot of extras: a 3.5 mm headphone jack, NFC (!), a side fingerprint reader, and a microSD slot. The Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 is about as cheap of a chip as you can get from Qualcomm, a 6 nm chip with two Cortex A78 CPUs and six A55 CPUs. It seems criminal that these budget Qualcomm chips prioritize barely there 5G bands yet only support 802.11ac, AKA "Wi-Fi 5," which first hit smartphones in 2013.

On the back of the base-model Moto G is one real camera, a 50MP rear sensor, and a just-for-looks 2MP "macro" sensor. The front camera is 8MP.

Article note: Yes please. We know it's almost entirely ineffective and was simply imposed by post 9-11 panic, but it's turned into an extremely inefficient jobs program for the marginally-unemployable and a vast grift for rent-seeking security gadget and background check contractors, so it's become hard to kill.

Article note: Yeah, that sounds like academia. I have a recurring bit in my thesis where I make jokes about academia treating information from "stable pseudonyms on the Internet" as unreliable, even though, both from experience and study of structural incentives, it's way _way_ more reliable than any traditional academic output.

Article note: Huh, their raw video compression lawsuit is tangentially relevant to some research I've been working on so I was recently reading about them as adversaries. This seems like a pretty reasonable pairing, they aim at a similar prosumer/independent-pro niche in the still and video markets, and the underlying tech is largely the same.

Article note: The little new-media (from the big landscape shift when video got democratized) studio is eventually consumed and dissolved by the gigantic incumbent old media conglomerate.

Article note: Oh dip. For enterprise-ball-squeezer Broadcom to be that "generous" with patches, this must be bad enough they're worried about reputation damage and/or getting blamed for internet-scale problems.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

VMware is urging customers to patch critical vulnerabilities that make it possible for hackers to break out of sandbox and hypervisor protections in all versions, including out-of-support ones, of VMware ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, and Cloud Foundation products.

A constellation of four vulnerabilities—two carrying severity ratings of 9.3 out of a possible 10—are serious because they undermine the fundamental purpose of the VMware products, which is to run sensitive operations inside a virtual machine that’s segmented from the host machine. VMware officials said that the prospect of a hypervisor escape warranted an immediate response under the company’s IT Infrastructure Library, a process usually abbreviated as ITIL.

“Emergency change”

“In ITIL terms, this situation qualifies as an emergency change, necessitating prompt action from your organization,” the officials wrote in a post. “However, the appropriate security response varies depending on specific circumstances.”

Article note: Holy shit Apple is going hard on this. The EU just handed them a $2B fine in the Spotify case, and to add to their already substantial malicious compliance on the DMA, they've suspended Epic's (who have been among the most aggressive in perusing access) developer account. Microsoft got away with a not-even-as-bold implementation of this kind of shit for a couple years in the 90s before getting smacked down, but either some executives have a staggering amount of hubris, or the calculus on how much the walled garden and associated anti-competitive practices are worth is just so much lucre it seems worth it not to give any ground.

Article note: I thought her whole strategy was to wait and hope she became the defacto Republican candidate because Trump was rendered ineligible due to a conviction in one of his various felony cases or a stroke or something.

Article note: Not only do I agree that the APIs tend to be frustrating-at-best, this doesn't even get into the fact there will be at least two mutually-incompatible sets of crates offering platform code for any given platform. None of which will be feature complete. I want to like embedded rust, but it's just such a half-baked pain in the ass, and that's comparing to the current state of embedded full of vendored toolchain bullshit.

Article note: Good.

Enlarge / A car's hazard warning lights will need a physical control to get a five-star EuroNCAP score in 2026.

Some progress in the automotive industry is laudable. Cars are safer than ever and more efficient, too. But there are other changes we'd happily leave by the side of the road. That glossy "piano black" trim that's been overused the last few years, for starters. And the industry's overreliance on touchscreens for functions that used to be discrete controls. Well, the automotive safety organization European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) feels the same way about that last one, and it says the controls ought to change in 2026.

"The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes," said Matthew Avery, Euro NCAP's director of strategic development.

"New Euro NCAP tests due in 2026 will encourage manufacturers to use separate, physical controls for basic functions in an intuitive manner, limiting eyes-off-road time and therefore promoting safer driving," he said.