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For many of us, a lot of the screens we view daily can easily be OLED. The iPhone in your pocket. The screen on the new laptop you finally bought. That luxurious 4K TV and even that beloved Nintendo Switch. But OLED awesomeness has far from proliferated computer monitors—especially if you're not into gaming.

Numerous hurdles limit OLED monitor adoption, including concerns about screen burn-in. But one thing we're hoping to see in 2023 is a greater selection. Right now, you can count the number of OLED monitors that aren't 42-inch-plus juggernauts or push refresh rates that require serious GPUs on one hand. OLED monitors that focus on productivity, photo editing, or HDR get minimal love.

By the time 2023's done, we hope there's more than a handful of OLED monitors available to interest non-gamers. We don't expect homes and offices to become flooded with them, but 2023 could be a big step to OLED monitors having the variety and availability that OLED TVs and other devices have enjoyed for years.

(credit: Dsimic)

A developer's cryptographic signing key is one of the major linchpins of Android security. Any time Android updates an app, the signing key of the old app on your phone needs to match the key of the update you're installing. The matching keys ensure the update actually comes from the company that originally made your app and isn't some malicious hijacking plot. If a developer's signing key got leaked, anyone could distribute malicious app updates and Android would happily install them, thinking they are legit.

On Android, the app-updating process isn't just for apps downloaded from an app store, you can also update bundled-in system apps made by Google, your device manufacturer, and any other bundled apps. While downloaded apps have a strict set of permissions and controls, bundled-in Android system apps have access to much more powerful and invasive permissions and aren't subject to the usual Play Store limitations (this is why Facebook always pays to be a bundled app). If a third-party developer ever lost their signing key, it would be bad. If an Android OEM ever lost their system app signing key, it would be really, really bad.

Guess what has happened! Łukasz Siewierski, a member of Google's Android Security Team, has a post on the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative (AVPI) issue tracker detailing leaked platform certificate keys that are actively being used to sign malware. The post is just a list of the keys, but running each one through APKMirror or Google's VirusTotal site will put names to some of the compromised keys: Samsung, LG, and Mediatek are the heavy hitters on the list of leaked keys, along with some smaller OEMs like Revoview and Szroco, which makes Walmart's Onn tablets.

Enlarge / An early augmented reality demo by Apple, using a smartphone instead of a headset. (credit: Apple)

Apple's mixed-reality headset is still on track for an unveiling sometime next year, and its future operating system has a new name, according to a report published Thursday.

Bloomberg claims the name of the operating system has changed from the previously leaked "realityOS" to "xrOS." XR stands for extended reality—sometimes also called mixed reality—a commonly used catch-all term for both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), as well as experiences that combine aspects of both.

In reports and leaks to date, Apple's next upcoming headset has been said to be an XR one, not strictly a VR or AR one—though there are also rumors of an AR-focused device that would launch later. The headset is set for a launch sometime next year, though it has been delayed many times before and may be yet again.

Enlarge / Nvidia's 12VHPWR power cable adapter, as shipped with an RTX 4080. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nvidia's new RTX 4090 and 4080 GPUs both use a new connector called 12VHPWR to deliver power as a way to satisfy ever-more power-hungry graphics cards without needing to set aside the physical space required for three or four 8-pin power connectors. But that power connector and its specifications weren't actually created by Nvidia alone—to ensure interoperability, the spec was developed jointly by the PCI Express Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG), a body whose members include Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Arm, IBM, Qualcomm, and others.

But the overheating and melting issues experienced by some RTX 4090 owners recently have apparently prompted the PCI-SIG to clarify exactly which parts of the spec it is and is not responsible for. In a statement reported by Tom's Hardware, the group sent its members a reminder that they, not the PCI-SIG, were responsible for safety testing products using connector specs like 12VHPWR.

"Members are reminded that PCI-SIG specifications provide necessary technical information for interoperability and do not attempt to address proper design, manufacturing methods, materials, safety testing, safety tolerances, or workmanship," the statement reads. "When implementing a PCI-SIG specification, Members are responsible for the design, manufacturing, and testing, including safety testing, of their products."

Enlarge / Proton Calendar's iOS app aims to offer most of the same niceties as other calendar apps, but with more peace of mind about your data. (credit: Proton)

Proton Calendar, which claims to be the "world's only" calendar using end-to-end encryption and cryptographic verification, has arrived on iOS, giving those seeking a more secure work suite an alternative to Google, Apple, and the like.

Proton Calendar is pitched as offering encryption for all event details, as well as "high-performance elliptic curve cryptography (ECC Curve25519)" to lock it. The web app version of Proton Calendar is open source, with the code for mobile apps to come next, Proton says. Proton also notes that it never finds out who you've invited to an event, and it allows for inviting people outside the Proton ecosystem, letting people "cryptographically verify that it was you who invited them."

Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, said in an interview with Wired in May that calendars are an "extremely sensitive" record of your life and that protecting them is essential. Encryption protects your calendar data from government requests, data leaks, or "a change in business model of your cloud provider."

Enlarge / Eufy's camera footage is stored locally, but with the right URL, you can also watch it from anywhere, unencrypted. It's complicated.

When security researchers found that Eufy's supposedly cloud-free cameras were uploading thumbnails with facial data to cloud servers, Eufy's response was that it was a misunderstanding, a failure to disclose an aspect of its mobile notification system to customers.

It seems there's more understanding now, and it's not good.

Eufy didn't respond to other claims from security researcher Paul Moore and others, including that one could stream the feed from a Eufy camera in VLC Media Player, if you had the right URL. Last night, The Verge, working with the security researcher "Wasabi" who first tweeted the problem, confirmed it could access Eufy camera streams, encryption-free, through a Eufy server URL.

Enlarge / Yep, that's what I thought it would look like. (credit: OnLeaks and Smartprix)

The design of the Pixel 7a does not seem like it will contain many surprises. OnLeaks has a fresh render for Google's next mid-range phone, and it looks like a mini Pixel 7. Usually, these renders are based on CAD information passed out to accessory manufacturers, so the sizes and shapes are usually accurate, but things like the colors and materials are up for interpretation.

If rumors are true, this will be Google's fourth phone to keep the camera-bar design going. The Pixel 6 and 6a camera bar had a clear glass or plastic covering around the camera lenses, while the Pixel 7 switched to an opaque, solid aluminum camera bar. Google likes these phones to look the same, so it's a safe bet the Pixel 7a will also get a solid camera bar. Whether that's aluminum or some other material is still up for interpretation. The front is also predictable and looks just like the Pixel 6a, with a flat screen and what the report calls "thick bezels."

Elsewhere in the Pixel rumor mill, big upgrades are expected for the Pixel 7a. Android researcher Kuba Wojciechowski has been tracking the Pixel 7a (codenamed "Lynx" and "Pixel 22 Mid-range") via the Android codebase, which reveals additions like (slow) 5 W wireless charging and the same Samsung GN1 main camera as what's in the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, along with a Sony IMX787 for the wide-angle sensor. The new sensors would be a big camera upgrade. Currently, the Pixel 6a's main camera is the venerable Sony IMX363, a sensor that Google has been using (with one minor revision) since the Pixel 2. A fresh set of sensors would make sense, given that the IMX363 is around six years old now.

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Elon Musk said he had a “good conversation” with Apple chief executive Tim Cook and “resolved the misunderstanding” about his claim that Twitter could be removed from the App Store, just days after the world’s richest man unleashed a tirade against the most valuable tech company.

In a tweet on Wednesday, Musk said that “Tim was clear that Apple never considered” potentially removing Twitter from the App Store, describing it as a “misunderstanding.”

Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last month, also thanked Cook for “taking me round Apple’s beautiful HQ,” and posted a video from Apple Park.

Enlarge / Benj Edwards' computer running The Cave BBS in 1994. (credit: Benj Edwards)

Thirty years ago last week—on November 25, 1992—my BBS came online for the first time. I was only 11 years old, working from my dad's Tandy 1800HD laptop and a 2400 baud modem. The Cave BBS soon grew into a bustling 24-hour system with over 1,000 users. After a seven-year pause between 1998 and 2005, I've been running it again ever since. Here's the story of how it started and the challenges I faced along the way.

Enter the modem

In January 1992, my dad brought home a gateway to a parallel world: a small black plexiglass box labeled "ZOOM" that hooked to a PC's serial port. This modem granted the power to connect to other computers and share data over the dial-up telephone network.

While commercial online services like CompuServe and Prodigy existed then, many hobbyists ran their own miniature online services called bulletin board systems, or BBSes for short. The Internet existed, but it was not yet widely known outside academic circles.

Enlarge / The 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

It looks like the first benchmarks of Apple's upcoming M2 Max chip have leaked in Geekbench's database.

When users run the over-the-shelf version of the Geekbench 5 benchmarking tool, the scores are logged to a public database of results and are tied to entries for specific hardware. In this case, the result (which was discovered by a Twitter user) is listed under a product labeled "Mac14,6" running the as-yet-unreleased operating system "macOS 13.2 (Build 22D21)." The entry also noted that the chip had 12 cores.

The chip in question is likely destined for MacBook Pro and Mac Studio models that will launch sometime next year. As for the results: The overall single-core score is 1,853, and the multicore score is 13,855. The more granular scores like crypto, integer, and floating point generally track along the same lines when compared to this chip's predecessor, the M1 Max.

Enlarge / A Talon robot, one of the models in the SFPD robot lineup. (credit: QinetiQ)

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted to allow the San Francisco Police Department to use lethal robots against suspects, ushering the sci-fi dystopia trope into reality. As the AP reports, the robots would be remote-controlled—not autonomous—and would use explosives to kill or incapacitate suspects when lives are at stake.

The police have had bomb disposal robots forever, but the Pandora's box of weaponizing them was originally opened by the Dallas Police Department. In 2016, after failed negotiations with a holed-up active shooter, the DPD wired up a disposal robot with explosives, drove it up to the suspect, and detonated it, killing the shooter. The SFPD now has the authority to make this a tactic.

The police equipment policy being drafted details the SFPD's current robot lineup. The SFPD has 17 robots in total, 12 of which are currently functioning. The AP says that the police department doesn't have any "pre-armed" robots yet and "has no plans to arm robots with guns" but that it could rig up explosives to a robot. Some bomb disposal robots do their "disposal" work by firing a shotgun shell at the bomb, so in essence, they are already rolling guns. Like most police gear, these robots have close ties to the military, and some of the bomb disposal robots owned by the SFPD, like the Talon robot, are also sold to the military configured as remote-controlled machine-gun platforms.

Enlarge / An iPhone and Apple Watch showing the crash detection feature. (credit: Apple)

Apple released a minor software update for iPhones today. Unlike many of its other iOS updates, the new iOS 16.1.2 was not released in tandem with updates to Apple's other operating systems like macOS or watchOS.

iOS 16.1.2 primarily does two things, per Apple's release notes: it improves compatibility with unspecified wireless carriers, and it optimizes the Crash Detection feature on the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro, and iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Apple hasn't gone into detail about what kinds of optimizations we're talking about. Crash Detection is a newly introduced feature that can notify emergency services when the phone's internal sensors have detected that you've been in an automobile accident. Apple developed algorithms that look at a variety of data from the phone's sensors (such as the accelerometer and G-force sensors) and other factors like microphone activity to attempt to accurately detect crashes.

Enlarge / Anker's cameras store their footage on a local base. Thumbnail images of faces, however, were uploaded to cloud servers. (credit: Eufy)

Eufy, a smart home brand of tech accessory firm Anker, had become popular among some privacy-minded security camera buyers. Its doorbell camera and other devices proudly proclaimed having "No Clouds or Costs," and that "no one has access to your data but you."

That's why security consultant and researcher Paul Moore's string of tweets and videos, demonstrating that Eufy cameras were uploading name-tagged thumbnail images to cloud servers to alert owners' phones, likely unencrypted, stung smart home and security enthusiasts so hard this week.

Moore, based in the UK, started asking Eufy rhetorical questions about its practices on Twitter starting November 21. "Why is my 'local storage" #doorbellDual storing every face, without encryption, to your servers? Why can I stream my camera without #authentication?!" Moore also posted lines from "source code & API responses" that suggested a very weak AES key was being used to encrypt video footage.

Enlarge / The very first of the butterfly-switch keyboard designs, as introduced in the 12-inch MacBook from 2015.

If you bought a MacBook with one of Apple's low-profile butterfly-switch keyboards, if you ever had the keyboard repaired, and if you live in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, or Washington state, good news! A judge has approved a $50 million settlement to a class-action lawsuit that Apple agreed to in July, meaning that payouts to affected users (and the attorneys involved) can begin soon.

According to Macworld, there will be three tiers of payouts: $50 to people who had individual keycaps replaced, $125 to people who had one keyboard replacement, and $395 to people who had to go in for two or more replacements.

For those unfamiliar, MacBooks introduced between 2015 and 2019 used a new low-profile keyboard with a "butterfly" switch mechanism that saved space but also resulted in firmer keys that moved less than they did before. Early complaints were mostly subjective and centered on the keyboard's feel compared to previous scissor-switch designs. But as time passed, it became clear that butterfly-switch keyboards also failed at a higher rate than the scissor-switch designs. These problems persisted despite at least four major revisions to the butterfly-switch mechanism.

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Trackballs aren't exactly a trendy PC accessory. Their heavy, clunky builds bring dated vibes to office setups. And despite 73 years of existence, trackballs have been usurped by modern mice and trackpads as the preferred forms of computing input. But despite their low mainstream popularity, trackball mice still hold a place in many people's hearts.

If you have a physical issue such as carpal tunnel syndrome or a repetitive strain injury that makes repeated movements difficult and/or painful, you may be one of those people holding onto a trackball mouse. While generally larger and heavier than traditional mice, trackball mice make it easier to keep your hand and arm in a neutral position and avoid pronation.

Kensington released the wireless SlimBlade Pro Trackball mouse this week. (credit: Kensington)

And because you don't push trackball mice around the top of your desk, they can be more accommodating of tight workspaces. Some trackball fanatics also praise the precision they can achieve with the gentle twisting of the right trackball. But there's definitely a learning curve to using them, and they aren't for everyone. And a good trackball mouse may not be as fast or precise as your best PC mouse with a traditional design.

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Android OEMs still don't provide the six years of updates you get with Apple phones, but some manufacturers are trying to close that gap. OnePlus is adding an extra year to its smartphone update promise and is now offering four years of major OS updates and five years of security updates.

Timeline-wise, this plan matches Samsung's, though Samsung offers monthly security updates and OnePlus doesn't. The company is still only promising security updates every other month, so it can't do too much bragging. Android-maker Google—who you'd think would have the best update plan—is in a distant third, with only three years of OS updates and five years of security updates.

There's still the timing of updates to consider. Execution-wise, OnePlus is faster than Samsung, as it took OnePlus just one month to ship Android 13 to its latest flagship, whereas Samsung took two months. Google wins here, as it's still the only Android company that offers an Apple-like update experience with day-one updates.

Enlarge / Intel's new "Raptor Canyon" NUC Extreme (rear) is a lot larger but also a lot more capable than previous NUC Extreme boxes (front). (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Intel's NUC (Next Unit of Computing) desktops rose to prominence about a decade ago by being small; they were essentially laptops without screens or batteries, crammed inside a tiny box.

But in the years since, Intel has flirted with larger NUCs. They have always been relatively small, but as they graduated from dedicated laptop GPUs to regular dedicated GPUs to even-larger dedicated GPUs, the NUC Extreme PCs have steadily grown to the point that they're now encroaching on do-it-yourself desktops built around mini ITX motherboards, small SFX power supplies, and other size-conscious components.

Enter "Raptor Canyon," the latest and largest in Intel's line of desktop PCs. It replaces the "Dragon Canyon" NUC design and improves upon it by making room for longer triple-slot GPUs—up to 12 inches (or just over 300 mm) long. That's not enough space for one of Nvidia's massive RTX 4090 and 4080 cards, but it can fit just about anything else.

Enlarge / The Pixel Watch colors and their default bands. There are three watch body colors here: black, silver, and gold.

Google recently launched the Pixel Watch and breathed new life into Wear OS after years of neglect, but how serious is Google about its second swing at the smartwatch market, really? Getting its flagship apps up and running on the platform would be a good sign of support, and a new report from 9to5Google says some heavy hitters are on the way. The report says: "We’ve learned that Google is testing both Gmail and Calendar for Wear OS. The experience has been described as “full” to us, though we weren’t able to find out whether this involves event creation or composing new emails."

Building any wearables apps would be a big step for the Google Workspace suite, which, for whatever reason, has been very wearable-hesitant over the last eight years. Workspace doesn't even have apps for the Apple Watch, let alone Wear OS. Google's biggest productivity competitor, Microsoft, has an Outlook app for both wearable platforms.

Wear OS mirrors your smartphone notifications, so for something like Gmail, you can still see and read a new Gmail message if it arrives in your notifications, and you can send a reply. You can even send a new email by voice if you know the address or have a contact, all without the app. What you can't do are most of the normal browsing tasks, like looking through your inbox and searching your older mail. It would also be nice to have watch-centric notification options, as opposed to just mirroring the settings for your phone.

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There was a time when laser printers were a luxury. High prices pushed them out of the budgets of most homes and small businesses decades ago, but they eventually became more affordable. But now, printer-vendor Epson is turning its back on the technology in favor of inkjet alternatives and self-bestowed sustainability cred.

As noted by The Register on Monday, Epson announced last week that it will stop selling and distributing laser printers by 2026, affecting both its consumer and business users. The Seiko-owned company proudly declared that the move is being done in the name of "sustainability," but the company still has a long way to go in that department.

Laser printers and sustainability

Epson's announcement said that its decision to focus completely on inkjet printers over laser ones is about the planet. And this is largely based on how laser printers work compared to inkjet. Laser printers rely on a laser, drum, toner, and heat to print an image. Inkjet printers, meanwhile, use nozzles to deposit ink.

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  Low-polygon models, blurry textures, and low-resolution effects are replaced with shiny new upgrade in Portal with RTX. [credit: Nvidia ]

Valve's first-person puzzle-platformer Portal was a genuine phenomenon when it was released back in 2007, and its core gameplay mechanics—solving puzzles and thwarting enemies by shooting interconnected portals onto various surfaces—still hold up today. But the game's visuals haven't aged as well, particularly its low-resolution textures; it was built using the same game engine and some of the same assets as 2004's Half-Life 2, and there's only so much that a modern GPU can do to spruce it up.

Enter Portal with RTX, a remastering of the game with ray-tracing effects and other improvements that Nvidia says will be available for free to all Portal owners starting on December 8. The update was originally announced in September alongside the RTX 4000-series GPUs. Developed by Lightspeed Studios, Portal with RTX doesn't just add fancy lighting effects to the original but also includes "hand-crafted hi-res physically-based textures" and "enhanced high-poly models" that substantially overhaul the aging game's visuals for the modern era.

As a DirectX 9 game from early in the Xbox 360 lifespan, the original Portal runs well on just about anything, including old Intel-integrated GPUs. But Portal RTX's system requirements are a lot higher; Nvidia lists the RTX 3060 as the minimum recommended GPU and says it can achieve "playable" 30 FPS frame rates at 1080p with DLSS enabled. Jumping to 60 FPS at 1080p requires an RTX 3080 with DLSS enabled, while hitting 60 FPS at 4K will require at least an RTX 4080 with DLSS 3 enabled. The CPU and RAM requirements also climb along with the GPU requirements (check the Nvidia-provided system requirements table below).