Enlarge / "Galaxy AI is here," Samsung announces, while also noting that there are seven new devices they have for sale. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung, much like every large tech company on this planet, led its Galaxy Unpacked event with a focus on its own AI offering, Galaxy AI. There were folding phones, sure, but "Life Opens Up with Galaxy AI" was the first pitch of the event. The "Next Frontier of Mobile AI" is here, Samsung claimed, with "cross-device intelligence." But, in a familiar tone, the company said its AI will be personalized for users, good for humanity, and empowering for creators.

But, of course, the latest foldables, wearables, and a brand-new Galaxy Ring are "the ultimate way to experience Galaxy AI."

(credit: Samsung)

Galaxy Ring and Galaxy Watch Ultra

Aiming to put its Galaxy AI onto your wrist and fingers, Samsung announced a seventh version of its Galaxy Watch, a rugged and larger Galaxy Watch Ultra, and the first version of a Galaxy Ring.

Enlarge / Under-powered Samsung camera, meet over-powered 4G LTE dongle. Now work together to move pictures over the air. (credit: Georg Lukas)

Back in 2010—after the first iPhone, but before its camera was any good—a mirrorless, lens-swapping camera that could upload photos immediately to social media or photo storage sites was a novel proposition. That's what Samsung's NX cameras promised.

Unsurprisingly, Samsung didn't keep that promise too much longer after it dropped its camera business and sales numbers disappeared. It tried out the quirky idea of jamming together Android phones and NX cameras in 2013, providing a more direct means of sending shots and clips to Instagram or YouTube. But it shut down its Social Network Services (SNS) entirely in 2021, leaving NX owners with the choices of manually transferring their photos or ditching their cameras (presuming they had not already moved on).

Some people, wonderfully, refuse to give up. People like Georg Lukas, who reverse-engineered Samsung's SNS API to bring back a version of direct picture posting to Wi-Fi-enabled NX models, and even expand it. It was not easy, but at least the hardware is cheap. By reflashing the surprisingly capable board on a USB 4G dongle, Lukas is able to create a Wi-Fi hotspot with LTE uplink and run his modified version of Samsung's (woefully insecure) service natively on the stick.

Enlarge / Vehicles for sale at an AutoNation Honda dealership in Fremont, California, US, on Monday, June 24, 2024. (credit: Getty Images)

After "cyber incidents" on June 19 and 20 took down CDK Global, a software-as-a-service vendor for more than 15,000 car dealerships, forum and Reddit comments by service tech workers and dealers advised their compatriots to prepare for weeks, not days, before service was restored.

That sentiment proved accurate, as CDK Global last expected to have "all dealers' connections" working by either July 3 or 4, roughly two weeks' time. Posts across various dealer-related subreddits today suggest CDK's main services are mostly restored, if not entirely. Restoration of services is a mixed blessing for some workers, as huge backlogs of paperwork now need entering into digital systems.

Bloomberg reported on June 21 that a ransomware gang, BlackSuit, had demanded "tens of millions of dollars" from CDK and that the company was planning to pay that amount, according to a source familiar with the matter. CDK later told its clients on June 25 that the attack was a "cyber ransom event," and that restoring services would take "several days and not weeks." Allan Liska, with analyst Recorded Future, told Bloomberg that BlackSuit was responsible for at least 95 other recorded ransomware breaches around the world.

Enlarge / Apple has a lot to say about the third-party battery market in "Longevity, by Design," specifically about how many batteries fail to meet testing standards. (credit: Apple)

Earlier this week, Apple published a whitepaper titled "Longevity by Design." The purpose, Apple says, is to explain "the company's principles for designing for longevity—a careful balance between product durability and repairability." It also contains some notable changes to Apple's parts pairing and repair technology.

Here is a summary of the action items in the document's 24 pages:

• The self-service diagnostics tool that arrived in the US last year is now available in 32 European countries.
• True Tone, the color-balancing screen feature, can soon be activated on third-party screens, "to the best performance that can be provided."
• Battery statistics, like maximum capacity and cycle count, will be available "later in 2024" for third-party batteries, with a notice that "Apple cannot verify the information presented."
• Used Apple parts, transferred from one to another, will be "as easy to use as new Apple parts" in select products "later this year."
• Parts for "most repairs" from Apple's Self Service Repair program will no longer require a device serial number to order.

Changes timed to "later this year" may well indicate their arrival with iOS 18 or a subsequent update.

Enlarge (credit: Rivian)

Volkswagen is committing $5 billion to upstart EV company Rivian, with $1 billion in cash upfront and $4 billion over time. The companies aim to use this joint venture to deliver new vehicles "in the second half of the decade," according to the announcement, and the cash will likely help push along Rivian's next generation of vehicles, including more affordable models.

Oliver Blume, left, CEO of Volkswagen Group, and RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian. (credit: Rivian)

Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that the partnership "brings Rivian’s software and zonal electronics platform to a broader market through Volkswagen Group’s global reach and scale." VW Group, which also controls Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, and Ducati, among others, has a lot to gain from working with Rivian, particularly when it comes to software and ride control. Ars and most other reviewers have been impressed by Rivian's drive engineering and display software on the R1T truck, R1S SUV, and the second generations of them both, which majorly reworked the underpinnings and offerings, largely through design and software choices.

Volkswagen's recent software moves have been on an opposing trajectory. The Group's 2019 moves to align all its brands' software under one division, Cariad, with three platforms developed at once, has led to massive leadership shake-ups and restarts. We were not impressed with the ID.4's infotainment system in 2021, and further bugs in both system and screen software plagued the car, undermining what was otherwise regarded as a good wheels-on-road experience.

Enlarge / Blast away all the guilt you want in PowerWash Simulator, but there's no need to feel dirty in the real world about your backlog. (credit: Getty Images)

Gaming news site PCGamesN has a web tool, SteamIDFinder, that can do a neat trick. If you buy PC games on Steam and have your user profile set to make your gaming details public, you can enter your numeric user ID into it and see a bunch of stats. One set of stats is dedicated to the total value of the games listed as unplayed; you can share this page as an image linking to your "Pile of Shame," which includes the total "Value" of your Steam collection and unplayed games.

Example findings from SteamIDFinder, from someone who likely has hundreds of games from Humble Bundles and other deals in their library. (credit: SteamIDFinder)

Using data from what it claims are the roughly 10 percent of 73 million Steam accounts in its database set to Public, PCGamesN extrapolates $1.9 billion in unplayed games, multiplies it by 10, and casually suggests that there are $19 billion in unplayed games hanging around. That is "more than the gross national product of Nicaragua, Niger, Chad, or Mauritius," the site notes.

That is a very loose “$19 billion”

"Multiply by 10" is already a pretty soft science, but the numbers are worth digging into further. For starters, SteamIDFinder is using the current sale price of every game in your unplayed library, as confirmed by looking at a half-dozen "Pile of Shame" profiles. An informal poll of Ars Technica co-workers and friends with notable Steam libraries suggests that games purchased at full price make up a tiny fraction of the games in our backlogs. Games acquired through package deals, like the Humble Bundle, or during one of Steam's annual or one-time sales, are a big part of most people's Steam catalogs, I'd reckon.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Linux and its code are made by people, and people are not with us forever. Over the weekend, a brief message on the Linux kernel mailing list reminded everyone of just how much one person can mean to a seemingly gargantuan project like Linux, and how quickly that person can disappear.

Denise Finger, wife of the deceased, wrote to the Linux Wireless list on Friday evening:

This is to notify you that Larry Finger, one of your developers, passed away on June 21st.

LWN.net reckons that Finger, 84, contributed to 94 Linux kernel releases, or 1,464 commits total, at least since kernel 2.6.16 in 2006 (and when the kernel started using git to track changes). Given the sometimes precarious nature of contributing to the kernel, this is on its own an impressive achievement—especially for someone with no formal computer training and who considered himself a scientist.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Often times, when I am researching something about computers or coding that has been around a very long while, I will come across a document on a university website that tells me more about that thing than any Wikipedia page or archive ever could.

It's usually a PDF, though sometimes a plaintext file, on a .edu subdirectory that starts with a username preceded by a tilde (~) character. This is typically a document that a professor, faced with the same questions semester after semester, has put together to save the most time possible and get back to their work. I recently found such a document inside Princeton University's astrophysics department: "An Introduction to the X Window System," written by Robert Lupton.

X Window System, which turned 40 years old earlier this week, was something you had to know how to use to work with space-facing instruments back in the early 1980s, when VT100s, VAX-11/750s, and Sun Microsystems boxes would share space at college computer labs. As the member of the AstroPhysical Sciences Department at Princeton who knew the most about computers back then, it fell to Lupton to fix things and take questions.

Enlarge / Ford Mustang Mach E electric vehicles are offered for sale at a dealership on June 5, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois. (credit: Scott Olson / Getty Images)

CDK Global touts itself as an all-in-one software-as-a-service solution that is "trusted by nearly 15,000 dealer locations." One connection, over an always-on VPN to CDK's data centers, gives a dealership customer relationship management (CRM) software, financing, inventory, and more back-office tools.

That all-in-one nature explains why people trying to buy cars, and especially those trying to sell them, have had a rough couple of days. CDK's services have been down, due to what the firm describes as a "cyber incident." CDK shut down most of its systems Wednesday, June 19, then told dealerships that afternoon that it restored some services. CDK told dealers today, June 20, that it had "experienced an additional cyber incident late in the evening on June 19," and shut down systems again.

"At this time, we do not have an estimated time frame for resolution and therefore our dealers' systems will not be available at a minimum on Thursday, June 20th," CDK told customers.

Enlarge / Car designer Henrik Fisker poses with a Fisker Ocean at the Salvation Army California South Division's annual Sally Awards in June 2022. (credit: Michael Tullberg/Getty Images)

Fisker, the second EV firm started by legendary BMW and Aston Martin designer Henrik Fisker, has filed for bankruptcy and intends to sell its assets and restructure its debt. The almost inevitable outcome comes months after it paused manufacturing amid cash flow shortages, safety probes, and devastating reviews of its only product, the Fisker Ocean SUV.

Fisker's statement about the filing notes the firm's production of the Ocean "twice as fast as expected in the auto industry" and delivering "the most sustainable vehicle in the world." However, a Fisker spokesperson writes, "[L]ike other companies in the electric vehicle industry, we have faced various market and macroeconomic headwinds that have impacted our ability to operate efficiently."

Rumors of Fisker's bankruptcy have been circulating since March when the company suspended production of its Ocean for initially six weeks and then indefinitely. A month earlier, the company reported $273 million in 2023 sales but more than $1 billion in debt. Fisker's stock was pulled from the New York Stock Exchange in late March. Amid what many saw as a generalized weakening of EV demand, Fisker was particularly vulnerable.

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

A report by tech news site The Information suggests that Apple is shifting its augmented reality priorities. The next high-end version of the Vision Pro has purportedly been canceled while work continues on a more affordable version with a reduced feature set.

Citing both an employee in Apple's headset supply chain and one working in headset manufacturing for Apple, the report claims that the cheaper Vision product—perhaps around the $1,600 mark—is due before the end of 2025. Apple had originally intended to present this headset alongside the Vision Pro, similar to the models available in each iPhone release. The more affordable model would likely have fewer cameras, smaller speakers, and weigh less, though Apple has struggled to bring down the cost of the unit's displays.

Apple's efforts in augmented reality are closely watched by other players in the headset space, so even a momentary, situational step back from high-end headsets could have significant repercussions. The Information cites current and former Meta employees in describing how the company had killed plans for its own higher-end headset in January 2023, but it then began work on a new premium model five months after Apple's Vision Pro debut.

Enlarge (credit: Bandai)

Elden Ring was my first leap into FromSoftware titles (and Dark-Souls-like games generally), and I fell in deep. Over more than 200 hours, I ate up the cryptic lore, learned lots of timings, and came to appreciate the feeling of achievement through perseverance.

Months ago, in preparation for Elden Ring's expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree (also on PlayStation and Xbox, arriving June 21), I ditched the save file with which I had beaten the game and started over. I wanted to try out big swords and magic casting. I wanted to try a few new side quests. And I wanted to have a fresh experience with the game before Shadow arrived.

I have had a very fresh experience, in that this DLC has made me feel like I'm still in the first hour of my first game. Reader, this expansion is mopping the floor with me. It looked at my resume, which has "Elden Lord" as its most recent job title, and has tossed it into the slush pile. If you're wondering whether Shadow would, like Elden Ring, provide a different kind of challenge and offer, like the base game, easier paths for Souls newcomers: No, not really. At least not until you're already far along. This DLC is for people who beat Elden Ring, or all but beat it, and want capital-M More.