One of the magical things about near-field communication technology (NFC) is that tags don’t need a battery to communicate — you’ll never need to buy a new coin cell for your employee badge, because the badge scanner wirelessly beams enough power to the badge to verify it’s legit. Now, chipmaker Infineon wants to make the…
Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images With a months-long recess on the horizon, House progressives are urging Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to act fast on two competition bills that would better equip antitrust enforcers to take on major tech firms. In a letter sent to Schumer on Friday, more than a dozen Congressional Progressive Caucus…
It was a slow summer week at the Board with just 23 new petitions—one post grant review and 22 inter partes reviews; in district court, a relatively average 63 new filings and 53 terminations rounded out the count. The major streaming companies, including Disney, challenged WAG Acquisitions [of Woodsford Litigation Funding] patents before the Board;…
Enlarge / An Electron rocket launches the NROL-162 mission on July 13. (credit: Rocket Lab) Welcome to Edition 5.04 of the Rocket Report! Be sure and read to the end, as most of the news this week concerns heavy-lift rockets, or at least proposed heavy-lift rockets. Also, there will be no newsletter next week as I’ll…
Ceiling space is so underutilized. Jean Levasseur A gloriously vibrant, thriving plant (or several) can really transform a space and help make a house a home. In the wrong spot, though, they can be a nuisance—no one likes to carefully shimmy past the delicate leaves of a Hosta to get from the couch to the…
Not all speakers are made equal, which is also true of listeners. Some people are content with something cheap for their audio — as long as they can hear it, it’s a success. But audiophiles fall into a very different category. The speaker needs to sound amazing and nuanced. Thankfully, we understand the demands and…
Heads up, puzzlers. The latest Nintendo Switch Online update has brought an obscure, albeit excellent, Kirby game to the service. If you’re a Nintendo Switch Online subscriber, you can now stream Kirby’s Avalanche via the service’s digital SNES library. Based on Sega’s classic blob matching puzzler, Puyo Puyo, it probably isn’t the first SNES Kirby…
Google has addressed recent US government calls to crack down on threats related to the Log4j vulnerability, saying it backs the warnings and unveiled how exactly it plans to fight back. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently published a report on the Log4j vulnerability, saying it could linger on unpatched endpoints for as…
Although Motorola has been teasing the release of the next Razr foldable for some time, the company has now officially set a launch date for the arrival of its next foldable of August 2. The ‘dual flagship’ event that Motorola shared news of via Chinese social media platform Weibo is also set to play host…
Developers are finally able to get Ubuntu 22.04 LTS pre-installed on the Dell XPS 13 Plus flagship laptop. Additionally, Dell XPS 13 Plus owners are also now able to install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and receive the same optimizations for their hardware that will come pre-installed on the Developer Edition. This ability to have Linux pre-installed…