Starting in May, Dell employees who are fully remote will not be eligible for promotion, Business Insider (BI) reported Saturday. The upcoming policy update represents a dramatic reversal from Dell's prior stance on work from home (WFH), which included CEO Michael Dell saying: "If you are counting on forced hours spent in a traditional office to create collaboration and provide a feeling of belonging within your organization, you’re doing it wrong."
Dell employees will mostly all be considered "remote" or "hybrid" starting in May, BI reported. Hybrid workers have to come into the office at least 39 days per quarter, Dell confirmed to Ars Technica, which equates to approximately three times a week. Those who would prefer to never commute to an office will not "be considered for promotion, or be able to change roles," BI reported.
"For remote team members, it is important to understand the trade-offs: Career advancement, including applying to new roles in the company, will require a team member to reclassify as hybrid onsite," Dell's memo to workers said, per BI.
Airbnb, like hotels and rival vacation rental site Vrbo, will no longer allow hosts to record guests while they're inside the property. Airbnb previously allowed hosts to have disclosed cameras outside the property and in "common areas" inside, but Airbnb's enforcement of the policy and the rules' lack of specificity made camera use troubling for renters.
Airbnb announced today that as of April 30, it's "banning the use of indoor security cameras in listings globally as part of efforts to simplify our policy on security cameras and other devices" and to prioritize privacy.
Cameras that are turned off but inside the property will also be banned, as are indoor recording devices. Airbnb's updated policy defines cameras and recording devices as "any device that records or transmits video, images, or audio, such as a baby monitor, doorbell camera, or other camera."
On one level, we have fireflies figured out. We know the enzyme they use to make light (called luciferase), as well as the chemicals they use in the light-generating reaction. We know them so well that we've turned them into useful tools for studying other aspects of biology, such that lots of people who have never even seen a firefly have used firefly luciferase in the lab.
But on another level, there's a lot we don't understand. Fireflies clearly exercise a level of control over when they light up, and they do so only in specialized organs. And there's nothing like that organ in other species. So, somehow, fireflies evolved an elaborate light-producing organ, and there's no sign of any potential precursors in related species. Which makes it a bit of a mystery.
Now, a pair of researchers from Wuhan, China, (Xinhua Fu and Xinlei Zhu) have started unraveling what's going on at the level of the genes responsible. And, while they haven't produced a complete picture of how evolution built the fireflies, they've brought us a lot closer.
Apple has changed its stance on allowing web apps on iPhones and iPads in Europe and will continue to let users put them on their home screens after iOS 17.4 arrives. They will, however, have to be "built directly on WebKit and its security architecture," rather than running in alternative browsers, which is how it had worked up until new legislation forced the issue.
After the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) demanded Apple open up its mobile devices to alternative browser engines, the company said it would remove the ability to install home screen web apps entirely. In a developer Q&A section, under the heading "Why don't users in the EU have access to Home Screen web apps?", Apple said that "the complex security and privacy concerns" of non-native web apps and what addressing them would require "given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps," made it so that the company "had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU." Any web app installed on a user's home screen would have simply led them back to their preferred web browser.
Apple further warned against "malicious web apps," which, without the isolation built into its WebKit system, could read data, steal permissions from other web apps, and install further web apps without permission, among other concerns.
European Commission officials are probing Apple's decision to remove home screen web apps from iPhones and iPads in Europe. The EC confirmed it is seeking information from Apple and app developers who would be affected by the change, kicking off a process that could lead to a formal investigation.
"We are indeed looking at the compliance packages of all gatekeepers, including Apple," a European Commission spokesperson told Ars. "In that context, we're in particular looking into the issue of Progressive Web Apps, and can confirm sending the requests for information to Apple and to app developers, who can provide useful information for our assessment."
Apple is removing the ability to install home screen web apps in Europe when iOS 17.4 is released, claiming it is too hard to keep offering the feature under the European Union's new Digital Markets Act (DMA).
For some, having to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic was stressful. Parents balanced job duties while caring for children. Some struggled to set up a home office and adjust to new tools, like video conferencing. Lonely workdays at home added to social isolation. The line between work and life blurred.
For others, working from home was a boon—comfort, convenience, flexibility, no commuting or rush-hour traffic, no office-environment distractions. When the acute aspects of the pandemic receded, some who at first struggled began to settle into a work-from-home (WFH) groove and appreciated the newfound flexibility.
Then, bosses began calling their employees back to the office. Many made the argument that the return-to-office (RTO) policies and mandates were better for their companies; workers are more productive at the office, and face-to-face interactions promote collaboration, many suggested. But there's little data to support that argument. Pandemic-era productivity is tricky to interpret, given that the crisis disrupted every aspect of life. Research from before the pandemic generally suggested remote work improves worker performance—though it often included workers who volunteered to WFH, potentially biasing the finding.
Wyze cameras experienced a glitch on Friday that gave 13,000 customers access to images and, in some cases, video, from Wyze cameras that didn't belong to them. The company claims 99.75 percent of accounts weren't affected, but for some, that revelation doesn't eradicate feelings of "disgust" and concern.
Wyze claims that an outage on Friday left customers unable to view camera footage for hours. Wyze has blamed the outage on a problem with an undisclosed Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner but hasn't provided details.
Monday morning, Wyze sent emails to customers, including those Wyze says weren't affected, informing them that the outage led to 13,000 people being able to access data from strangers' cameras, as reported by The Verge.
Wyze cameras have been unreliable for many users for more than nine hours today, with cameras disappearing from the Wyze app or simply reporting errors when owners try to view them.
Users started reporting issues on Down Detector just before 4 am Eastern time, and the company issued a service advisory at 9:30 am. As of 1 pm, the company stated that its "metrics show that devices are starting to recover," and later that there was "continued improvement," but it was still investigating history viewing issues. At 1:15 pm, an Ars writer was able to view his Wyze v3 camera feed and update its firmware.
A Wyze employee updated the service advisory at 2:28 p.m. Eastern to note "continued improvement for device connection recovery." They added that the Event tab in the Wyze app, where one can see prior recordings activated by motion or other detections, is disabled, "to investigate a possible security issue," and it will be back soon.
Apple is removing the ability to install home screen web apps from iPhones and iPads in Europe when iOS 17.4 comes out, saying it's too hard to keep offering the feature under the European Union's new Digital Markets Act (DMA). Apple is required to comply with the law by March 6.
Apple said the change is necessitated by a requirement to let developers "use alternative browser engines—other than WebKit—for dedicated browser apps and apps providing in-app browsing experiences in the EU." Apple explained its stance in a developer Q&A under the heading, "Why don't users in the EU have access to Home Screen web apps?" It says:
Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps. And so, to comply with the DMA's requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU.
It will still be possible to add website bookmarks to iPhone and iPad home screens, but those bookmarks would take the user to the web browser instead of a separate web app. The change was recently rolled out to beta versions of iOS 17.4.
Here's a short summary of the next 7,000-ish words for folks who hate the thing recipe sites do where the authors babble about their personal lives for pages and pages before getting to the cooking: This article is about how to install bind and dhcpd and tie them together into a functional dynamic DNS setup for your LAN so that DHCP clients self-register with DNS, and you always have working forward and reverse DNS lookups. This article is intended to be part one of a two-part series, and in part two, we'll combine our bind DNS instance with an ACME-enabled LAN certificate authority and set up LetsEncrypt-style auto-renewing certificates for LAN services.
If that sounds like a fun couple of weekend projects, you're in the right place! If you want to fast-forward to where we start installing stuff, skip down a couple of subheds to the tutorial-y bits. Now, excuse me while I babble about my personal life.
(Hi, Lee.)
The leaders of Home Assistant declared 2023 the “Year of the Voice.” The goal was to let users of the DIY home automation platform “control Home Assistant in their own language.” It was a bold shot to call, given people’s expectations from using Alexa and the like. Further, the Home Assistant team wasn’t even sure where to start.
Did they succeed, looking in from early 2024? In a very strict sense, yes. Right now, with some off-the-shelf gear and the patience to flash and fiddle, you can ask “Nabu” or “Jarvis” or any name you want to turn off some lights, set the thermostat, or run automations. And you can ask about the weather. Narrowly defined mission: Accomplished.
In a broader, more accurate sense, Home Assistant voice control has a ways to go. Your verb set is limited to toggling, setting, and other smart home interactions. The easiest devices to use for this don’t have the best noise cancellation or pick-up range. Errors aren’t handled gracefully, and you get the best results by fine-tuning the names you call everything you control.
I've set up dozens of smart home gadgets across two homes and two apartments over the last five years. I have a mental list of brands I revere and brands from which nothing shall ever be purchased again. In my current abode, you can stand in one place and be subject to six different signal types bouncing around, keeping up the chatter between devices.
What can I say? I'm a sucker for a certain kind of preparedness and creativity. The kind that's completely irrelevant if the power goes out.
When I started at Ars in the summer of 2022, the next generation of smart home standards was on the way. Matter, an interoperable device setup and management system, and Thread, a radio network that would provide secure, far-reaching connectivity optimized for tiny batteries. Together, they would offer a home that, while well-connected, could also work entirely inside a home network and switch between controlling ecosystems with ease. I knew this tech wouldn't show up immediately, but I thought it was a good time to start looking to the future, to leave behind the old standards and coalesce into something new.
Amazon Ring has shut down a controversial feature in its community safety app Neighbors that has allowed police to contact homeowners and request doorbell and surveillance camera footage without a warrant for years.
In a blog, head of the Neighbors app Eric Kuhn confirmed that "public safety agencies like fire and police departments can still use the Neighbors app to share helpful safety tips, updates, and community events," but the Request for Assistance (RFA) tool will be disabled.
"They will no longer be able to use the RFA tool to request and receive video in the app," Kuhn wrote.
A midwife in New York administered nearly 12,500 bogus homeopathic pellets to roughly 1,500 children in lieu of providing standard, life-saving vaccines, the New York State Department of Health reported yesterday.
Jeanette Breen, a licensed midwife who operated Baldwin Midwifery in Nassau County, began providing the oral pellets to children around the start of the 2019–2020 school year, just three months after the state eliminated non-medical exemptions for standard school immunizations. She obtained the pellets from a homeopath outside New York and sold them as a series called the "Real Immunity Homeoprophylaxis Program."
The program falsely claimed to protect children against deadly infectious diseases covered by standard vaccination schedules, including diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (covered by the DTaP or Tdap vaccine); hepatitis B; measles, mumps and rubella (MMR vaccine); polio; chickenpox; meningococcal disease; Haemophilus influenzae disease (HiB); and pneumococcal diseases (PCV).
Any great effort to generate appreciation for Nintendo's classic platforms, done outside Nintendo's blessing, has a markedly high chance of incurring Nintendo's wrath. This seems to apply even when Nintendo has not actually moved to block something, but merely seems like it might.
That's why, one week after announcing that his years-long "demake" of Valve's classic Portal to the Nintendo 64 platform had its "First Slice" ready for players, James Lambert has taken down Portal 64. There's no DMCA takedown letter or even a cease-and-desist from Nintendo. There is, as Lambert told PC Gamer, "communication with Valve" that "because the project depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries, [Valve] have asked me to take the project down."
Ars contacted Valve and Nintendo for comment and will update the post with any new information. Lambert could not be reached for comment.
As a scientist heavily engaged in science communication, I’ve seen it all.
People have come to my public talks to argue with me that the Big Bang never happened. People have sent me handwritten letters explaining how dark matter means that ghosts are real. People have asked me for my scientific opinion about homeopathy—and scoffed when they didn’t like my answer. People have told me, to my face, that what they just learned on a TV show proves that aliens built the pyramids and that I didn’t understand the science.
People have left comments on my YouTube videos saying… well, let’s not even go there.
James Lambert has spent years making something with no practical reason to exist: a version of Portal that runs on the Nintendo 64. And not some 2D version, either, but the real, blue-and-orange-oval, see-yourself-sideways Portal experience. And now he has a "First Slice" of Portal 64 ready for anyone who wants to try it. It's out of beta, and it's free.
A "First Slice" means that 13 of the original game's test chambers are finished. Lambert intends to get to all of the original's 19 chambers. PC Gamer, where we first saw this project, suggests that Lambert might also try to get the additional 14 levels in the Xbox Live-only Portal: Still Alive.
So why is Lambert doing this—and for free? Lambert enlists an AI-trained version of Cave Johnson's voice to answer that question at the start of his announcement video. "This is Aperture Science," it says, "where we don't ask why. We ask: why the heck not?"
Matter, as a smart home standard, would make everything about owning a smart home better. Devices could be set up with any phone, for either remote or local control, put onto any major platform (like Alexa, Google, or HomeKit) or combinations of them, and avoid being orphaned if their device maker goes out of business. Less fragmentation, more security, fewer junked devices: win, win, win.
Matter, as it exists in late 2023, more than a year after its 1.0 specification was published and just under a year after the first devices came online, is more like the xkcd scenario that lots of people might have expected. It's another home automation standard at the moment, and one that isn't particularly better than the others, at least how it works today. I wish it was not so.
Setting up a Matter device isn't easy, nor is making it work across home systems. Lots of devices with Matter support still require you to download their maker's specific app to get full functionality. Even if you were an early adopting, Matter-T-shirt-wearing enthusiast, you're still buying devices that don't work quite as well, and still generally require a major tech company's gear to act as your bridge or router.
Humana, one the nation's largest health insurance providers, is allegedly using an artificial intelligence model with a 90 percent error rate to override doctors' medical judgment and wrongfully deny care to elderly people on the company's Medicare Advantage plans.
According to a lawsuit filed Tuesday, Humana's use of the AI model constitutes a "fraudulent scheme" that leaves elderly beneficiaries with either overwhelming medical debt or without needed care that is covered by their plans. Meanwhile, the insurance behemoth reaps a "financial windfall."
The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court in western Kentucky, is led by two people who had a Humana Medicare Advantage Plan policy and said they were wrongfully denied needed and covered care, harming their health and finances. The suit seeks class-action status for an unknown number of other beneficiaries nationwide who may be in similar situations. Humana provides Medicare Advantage plans for 5.1 million people in the US.
This year has been marked by many terrifying things, but perhaps the most surprising of the 2023 horrors was … eye drops.
The seemingly innocuous teeny squeeze bottle made for alarming headlines numerous times during our current revolution around the sun, with lengthy lists of recalls, startling factory inspections, and ghastly reports of people developing near-untreatable bacterial infections, losing their eyes and vision, and dying.
Recapping this unexpected threat to health, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday released an advisory titled "What You Should Know about Eye Drops" in hopes of keeping the dangers of this year from leaking into the next. Among the notable points from the regulator was this stark pronouncement: No one should ever use any homeopathic ophthalmic products, and every single such product should be pulled off the market.
I know there are people who will want to buy the Homey Pro. I’ve seen them on social media and in various home automation forums, and I’ve even noticed them in the comments on this website. For this type of person, the Homey Pro might serve as a specialized, locally focused smart home hub, one that's well worth the cost. But you should be really, truly certain that you’re that person before you take a $400 leap with it.
Homey Pro is a smart home hub pitched primarily at someone who wants to keep things local as much as possible, forgoing phone apps, speakers, and cloud connections. That means using the Homey Pro to boost a primarily Zigbee or Z-Wave network, while also looping in local Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even infrared remotes. It’s for someone willing to pay $400 for a device that offers robust local or cloud backups, professional design, advanced automation, and even a custom scripting language, along with access to some “experiments” and still-in-progress tech like Matter and Thread. It’s for someone who might want to add a select cloud service or two to their home, but not because they have no other option.
But this somebody has also, somehow, not already invested in Home Assistant, Hubitat, or HomeBridge, which are more open to both add-on hardware (like new capabilities added on by USB stick or GPIO pins) and deep tinkering. It's someone who is willing to check that every device they want to control will work with Homey. While the device offers a pretty sizable range of apps and integrations, it’s far from the near-universal nature of major open-source projects or even the big smart home platforms. And you have to do a little checking further, still, to ensure that individual products are supported, not just the brand.
Modern EVs have some pretty huge batteries, but like their gas-powered counterparts, the main thing they do is sit in one place, unused. The Ford F-150 Lightning was built with two-way power in mind, and soon it might have a use outside emergency scenarios.
Ford and Resideo, a Honeywell Home thermostat brand, recently announced the EV-Home Power Partnership. It's still in the testing phases, but it could help make EVs a more optimal purchase. Put simply, you could charge your EV when it's cheap, and when temperatures or demand make grid power time-of-use expensive (or pulled from less renewable sources), you could use your truck's battery to power the AC. That would also help with grid reliability, should enough people implement such a backup.
The F-150 Lightning already offers a whole-home backup power option, one that requires the professional installation of an 80-amp Ford Charge Station Pro and a home transfer switch to prevent problems when the grid switches back on. Having a smart thermostat allows for grid demand response, so the F-150 would be able to more actively use its vehicle-to-home (V2H) abilities.
The elusive, addictive gameplay that has been haunting my dreams for years.
As 2023 draws to a close—and as we start to finalize our Game of the Year contenders—I really should be catching up on the embarrassingly long list of great recent releases that I haven't put enough time into this year. Instead, over the last few days, I've found myself once again hooked on a simple, addictive, and utterly unique Japanese Windows freeware game from the late '90s that, until recently, I thought I had lost forever.
Pendulumania is a cult classic in the truest sense of the word: Few people have heard of it, even in hardcore gaming circles, but those who have experienced it tend to have very fond memories of it. And while I shared those memories, it wasn't until this week that I've been able to share my effusive praise for a game whose name and playable executable had eluded me for well over a decade.
The mechanics of Pendulumania are incredibly simple. You use the computer mouse to control a metal ring, which is attached via an elastic string to a white ball. The object is to carefully move the ring so the stretchy string and gravity can nudge the ball around a 2D plane, crashing into floating scoring orbs to collect points (colored orbs that randomly appear can make the ball larger or the string stronger as well). Be careful, though; if the elastic string stretches too far, it will break and your game will be over.
UnitedHealthcare, the largest health insurance company in the US, is allegedly using a deeply flawed AI algorithm to override doctors' judgments and wrongfully deny critical health coverage to elderly patients. This has resulted in patients being kicked out of rehabilitation programs and care facilities far too early, forcing them to drain their life savings to obtain needed care that should be covered under their government-funded Medicare Advantage Plan.
That's all according to a lawsuit filed this week in the US District Court for the District of Minnesota. The lawsuit is brought by the estates of two deceased people who were denied health coverage by UnitedHealth. The suit also seeks class-action status for similarly situated people, of which there may be tens of thousands across the country.
The lawsuit lands alongside an investigation by Stat News that largely backs the lawsuit's claims. The investigation's findings stem from internal documents and communications the outlet obtained, as well as interviews with former employees of NaviHealth, the UnitedHealth subsidiary that developed the AI algorithm called nH Predict.
Authorities on Wednesday arrested the owners of a southern Colorado funeral home after discovering 190 decaying, improperly stored bodies at their facility—a discovery made only after reports of a putrid smell seeping from the facility.
Jon and Carie Hallford, the owners of the Return to Nature Funeral Home, which claimed to provide environmentally friendly "green" burials, were arrested in Wagoner, Oklahoma, according to a news release from the office of Michael Allen, the district attorney for Colorado's 4th judicial district.
The Hallfords were arrested without incident on four felony charges: abuse of a corpse, theft, money laundering, and forgery. The probable cause affidavit is sealed, but Allen told reporters at a press conference Wednesday that he would not contest releasing it to the public at a later date, according to NPR.
Drug store giant CVS revealed late last week that it is voluntarily pulling some common cold and flu medicines from its shelves because they don't work—while many other ineffective products remain on the shelves.
The move by CVS comes after an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration last month voted unanimously that the common decongestant, phenylephrine, is ineffective at treating a stuffy nose. But it comes ahead of the FDA itself acting on the vote, which will likely lead the agency to revoke phenylephrine's approval, eventually.
In a statement to Ars, a CVS spokesperson suggested the FDA advisory panel's vote was the impetus for the change, but that it would "follow direction from the FDA."
Authorities on Tuesday reported removing the improperly stored remains of at least 189 people from a southern Colorado funeral home where the owner said he practiced taxidermy.
The home, the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado, had claimed to conduct environmentally friendly "green" burials. It first came to the attention of local authorities after reports of a putrid smell pouring from the company's neglected building. On October 4, local and federal authorities executed a search warrant and initially found 115 improperly stored bodies at the facility, which is around 100 miles south of Denver and sits in Fremont County.
That same day, a Colorado state official—Zen Mayhugh, the program director of the Office Funeral Home and Crematory Registration—spoke directly with the owner and operator of Return to Nature, Jon Hallford. In the conversation, Hallford acknowledged that he had a "problem" at the facility and claimed he practiced taxidermy there.
Before last week, owners of certain Mazda vehicles who also had a Home Assistant setup could create some handy connections for their car.
A glimpse at some of Home Assistant's Mazda data potential, before it was removed. (credit: Phish / CX70 Forum)
Mazda, however, had issues with the project, which was largely the free-time work of one software developer, Brandon Rothweiler. In a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent to GitHub, Mazda (or an authorized agent) alleges that Rothweiler's integration: