Science fiction writer, journalist and longtime Slashdot reader, Cory Doctorow, a.k.a. mouthbeef, writes: My novella "Unauthorized Bread" -- originally published last year in Radicalized from Tor Books -- has just been published on Ars Technica: it's an epic tale of jailbreaking refugees versus the disobedient IoT appliances they're forced to use, and it's being turned into a TV show by The Intercept's parent company and a graphic novel by First Second with help from Jennifer Doyle. Making the story open access was in honor of the book being shortlisted for Canada Reads, Canada's national book award. The story builds on the work I've done with EFF to legalize jailbreaking, including our lawsuit to overturn parts of the DMCA. The story is part of a lineage with a long history of /. interest, starting with my 2002 Salon story 0wnz0red, and it only seemed fitting that I let you know about it!

Microsoft has published a blog post detailing exactly how it imagines dual-screen apps will run on devices like the Surface Duo and Surface Neo -- two foldable devices unveiled back on October that run Android and Windows 10X, respectively. The Verge reports: By default, an app will occupy a single screen according to Microsoft. Surface Duo or Surface Neo users can then span the app across both displays when they're in double-portrait or double-landscape layout. Microsoft envisions that app developers will experiment with different ways to utilize both screens. Some of these include simply using both screens as an extended canvas, having two pages of a document shown at once, using the second display as a companion or dual view of something, or having a master part of the app on one display and details on the second.

These are "initial app pattern ideas," according to Microsoft, and the company could well extend them based on developer feedback in the coming months. Microsoft is also releasing an Android emulator for the Surface Duo today to allow devs to test mobile apps. A Windows 10X emulator for the Surface Neo will arrive next month at around the same time that Microsoft plans to detail more of its dual-screen plans during a developer webcast. Microsoft's Android emulator will naturally support Android apps, and the Windows 10X version will include support for native Windows APIs to let developers detect hinge positions and optimize their win32 or Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps for these new devices. Microsoft is also proposing new web standards for dual-screen layouts, and is "actively incubating new capabilities that enable web content to provide a great experience on dual-screen devices."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today's example of smart stuff going dumb comes courtesy of Under Armour, which is effectively rendering its fitness hardware line very expensive paperweights. The company quietly pulled its UA Record app from both Google Play and Apple's App Store on New Year's Eve. In an announcement dated sometime around January 8, Under Armour said that not only has the app been removed from all app stores, but the company is no longer providing customer support or bug fixes for the software, which will completely stop working as of March 31.

Under Armour launched its lineup of connected fitness devices in 2016. The trio of trackers included a wrist-worn activity monitor, a smart scale, and a chest-strap-style heart rate monitor. The scale and wristband retailed at $180 each, with the heart monitor going for $80. Shoppers could buy all three together in a $400 bundle called the UA HealthBox. The end of the road is nigh, it seems, and all three products are about to meet their doom as Under Armour kills off Record for good. Users are instead expected to switch to MapMyFitness, which Under Armour bills as "an even better tracking experience." The company also set the UA Record Twitter account to private, effectively taking it offline to anyone except the 133 accounts it follows. Current device owners also can't export all their data. While workout data can be exported and transferred to some other tracking app, Record users cannot capture weight or other historical data to carry forward with them.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Internet routers running the Tomato alternative firmware are under active attack by a self-propagating exploit that searches for devices using default credentials. When credentials are found, the exploit then makes the routers part of a botnet that's used in a host of online attacks, researchers said on Tuesday. The Muhstik botnet came to light about two years ago when it started unleashed a string of exploits that attacked Linux servers and Internet-of-things devices. It opportunistically exploited a host of vulnerabilities, including the so-called critical Drupalgeddon2 vulnerability disclosed in early 2018 in the Drupal content management system. Muhstik has also been caught using vulnerabilities in routers that use Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) or DD-WRT software. The botnet has also exploited previously patched vulnerabilities in other server applications, including the Webdav, WebLogic, Webuzo, and WordPress.

On Tuesday, researchers from Palo Alto Networks said they recently detected Muhstik targeting Internet routers running Tomato, an open-source package that serves as an alternative to firmware that ships by default with routers running Broadcom chips. The ability to work with virtual private networks and provide advanced quality of service control make Tomato popular with end users and in some cases router sellers. The exploits use already infected devices to scan the Internet for Tomato routers and, when found, to check if they use the default username and password of "admin:admin" or "root:admin" for remote administration. The exploit causes Tomato routers that haven't been locked down with a strong password to join an IRC server that's used to control the botnet. The infection also causes the routers to scan the Internet for servers or devices running WordPress, Webuzo, or WebLogic packages that are vulnerable.

After developing the world's fastest camera a little over a year ago, Caltech's Lihong Wang decided that wasn't good enough and started working on an even faster device. A new paper published in the journal Science Advances details a new camera from Wang that can take up to 1 trillion pictures per second of transparent objects. Phys.Org reports: The camera technology, which Wang calls phase-sensitive compressed ultrafast photography (pCUP), can take video not just of transparent objects but also of more ephemeral things like shockwaves and possibly even of the signals that travel through neurons. Wang explains that his new imaging system combines the high-speed photography system he previously developed with an old technology, phase-contrast microscopy, that was designed to allow better imaging of objects that are mostly transparent such as cells, which are mostly water.

The fast-imaging portion of the system consists of something Wang calls lossless encoding compressed ultrafast technology (LLE-CUP). Unlike most other ultrafast video-imaging technologies that take a series of images in succession while repeating the events, the LLE-CUP system takes a single shot, capturing all the motion that occurs during the time that shot takes to complete. Since it is much quicker to take a single shot than multiple shots, LLE-CUP is capable of capturing motion, such as the movement of light itself, that is far too fast to be imaged by more typical camera technology. In the new paper, Wang and his fellow researchers demonstrate the capabilities of pCUP by imaging the spread of a shockwave through water and of a laser pulse traveling through a piece of crystalline material.

A PS5 leak posted on 4Chan, which was later reposted on Reddit, spills a bunch of information on the PlayStation 5 reveal event which is expected to take place in February. According to the leak, the PS5 will be unveiled on February 5 at a PlayStation Meeting event for the media. "The console design, controller, UI/home screen, certain features, console specs, talk from third parties/indie publishers, as well as announcements for PS5 exclusives will be shown," says the leaker.

The leak says the PS5 will support backwards compatibility with games from all 5 PlayStation platforms; PS4 accessories will be compatible on the new console as well; and the specs will rival Microsoft's Xbox Series X console. Furthermore, it states that the PS5 will launch worldwide in October 2020, priced at $499 in the U.S. It'll also be launched with several exclusive titles. You can read the full list of details here.

Pine64 will finally start shipping the pre-order units of PinePhone Braveheart Edition on January 17, 2020. Fossbytes reports: A year ago, PinePhone was made available only to developers and hackers. After getting better responses and suggestions, the Pine64 developers planned to bring Pinephone for everyone. In November last year, pre-orders for PinePhone Braveheart Edition commenced for everyone. But due to manufacturing issues coming in the way, the shipment date slipped for weeks, which was scheduled in December last year.

PinePhone Braveheart Edition is an affordable, open source Linux-based operating system smartphone preloaded with factory test image running on Linux OS (postmarketOS) on inbuilt storage. You can check on PinePhone Wiki to find the PinePhone compatible operating system such as Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, or Sailfish OS, which you can boot either from internal storage or an SD card.

On Monday, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) discussed the idea of introducing "binding measures" that would require chargers that fit all mobile phones and portable electronic devices. The company that would be impacted most by this legislation would be Apple and its iPhone, which uses a Lightning cable while most new Android phones use USB-C ports for charging. ZDNet reports: The EU introduced the voluntary Radio Equipment Directive in 2014, but MEPs believe the effort fell short of the objectives. "The voluntary agreements between different industry players have not yielded the desired results," MEPs said. The proposed more stringent measures are aimed at reducing electronic waste, which is estimated to amount to 51,000 tons per year in old chargers.

Apple last year argued that regulations to standardize chargers for phones would "freeze innovation rather than encourage it" and it claimed the proposal was "bad for the environment and unnecessarily disruptive for customers." Noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reckons Apple has a different idea in store: getting rid of the Lightning port and not replacing it with USB-C, which is a standard that Apple doesn't have complete control over. According to the analyst, Apple plans to remove the Lightning connector on a flagship iPhone to be released in 2021. Instead it would rely on wireless charging.

Google is working to improve the speed and security of on-device AI through a little-known initiative called Coral. The Verge reports: "Traditionally, data from [AI] devices was sent to large compute instances, housed in centralized data centers where machine learning models could operate at speed," Vikram Tank, product manager at Coral, explained to The Verge over email. "Coral is a platform of hardware and software components from Google that help you build devices with local AI -- providing hardware acceleration for neural networks ... right on the edge device." To meet customers' needs Coral offers two main types of products: accelerators and dev boards meant for prototyping new ideas, and modules that are destined to power the AI brains of production devices like smart cameras and sensors. In both cases, the heart of the hardware is Google's Edge TPU, an ASIC chip optimized to run lightweight machine learning algorithms -- a (very) little brother to the water-cooled TPU used in Google's cloud servers.

While its hardware can be used by lone engineers to create fun projects (Coral offers guides on how to build an AI marshmallow-sorting machine and smart bird feeder, for example), the long-term focus, says Tank, is on enterprise customers in industries like the automotive world and health care. Although Coral is targeting the world of enterprise, the project actually has its roots in Google's "AIY" range of do-it-yourself machine learning kits, says Tank. Launched in 2017 and powered by Raspberry Pi computers, AIY kits let anyone build their own smart speakers and smart cameras, and they were a big success in the STEM toys and maker markets. Tank says the AIY team quickly noticed that while some customers just wanted to follow the instructions and build the toys, others wanted to cannibalize the hardware to prototype their own devices. Coral was created to cater to these customers. The Coral team says it's trying to differentiate itself from the competition by tightly integrating its hardware with Google's ecosystem of AI services. "Coral is so tightly integrated with Google's AI ecosystem that its Edge TPU-powered hardware only works with Google's machine learning framework, TensorFlow, a fact that rivals in the AI edge market The Verge spoke to said was potentially a limiting factor," the report says.

"Coral products process specifically for their platform [while] our products support all the major AI frameworks and models in the market," a spokesperson for AI edge firm Kneron told The Verge. (Kneron said there was "no negativity" in its assessment and that Google's entry into the market was welcome as it "validates and drives innovation in the space.")

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Busan-based firm Jenax has spent the past few years developing J.Flex, an advanced lithium-ion battery that is ultra-thin, flexible, and rechargeable. With the arrival of so many wearable gadgets, phones with flexible displays, and other portable gizmos, "we're now interacting with machines on a different level from what we did before," says EJ Shin, head of strategic planning at Jenax. "What we're doing at Jenax is putting batteries into locations where they couldn't be before," says Shin. Her firm demonstrated some of those new possibilities last week at CES 2020 in Las Vegas.

The devices shown by Jenax included a sensor-lined football helmet developed by UK-based firm HP1 Technologies to measure pressure and force of impact; a medical sensor patch designed in France that will be embedded in clothing to monitor a wearer's heart rate; and wearable power banks in the form of belts and bracelets for patients who must continuously be hooked up to medical devices. To make batteries flexible, companies play around with the components of a battery cell, namely the cathode, anode, electrolyte, and membrane separator. In the case of Jenax, which has more than 100 patents protecting its battery technology, Shin says the secret to its flexibility lies in "a combination of materials, polymer electrolyte, and the know-how developed over the years." J.Flex is made from graphite and lithium cobalt oxide, but its exact composition and architecture remains a secret. "J.Flex can be as thin as 0.5 millimeters (suitable for sensors), and as tiny as 20 by 20 millimeters (mm) or as large as 200 by 200 mm," the report adds. "Its operating voltage is between 3 and 4.25 volts. Depending on the size, battery capacity varies from 10 milliampere-hours to 5 ampere-hours, with close to 90 percent of this capacity remaining after 1,000 charge-discharge cycles. Each charge typically takes an hour. J. Flex's battery life depends on how it's used, Shin says -- a single charge can last for a month in a sensor, but wouldn't last that long if the battery was powering a display."

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from The Verge: We've already seen Samsung's new rugged smartphone with a removable battery, the Galaxy XCover Pro, because the company revealed it on its Finnish website before taking it down. Today, though, the company is officially announcing the phone and that it's coming to the U.S. for $499. For that price, you're getting a phone with a swappable battery that's a meaty 4,050mAh, and the phone even supports 15W fast charging, as well as with special docks that use pogo pins. The XCover Pro is intended to be used by workers in industrial settings or out in the field, so that huge battery should theoretically let workers use their phones for longer and give them the option to swap in a fresh battery in a pinch.

Otherwise, the phone's specs are mid-range: a 6.3-inch 2220 x 1080 display (which Samsung says you can use when you have gloves on), a 2GHz octa-core Exynos 9611 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of internal storage (with support for microSD storage up to 512GB). For cameras, the phone has a 13-megapixel front-facing camera in a corner of the screen and two rear cameras: a 25-megapixel camera and an 8-megapixel camera. It'll also ship with the latest Android 10 and Samsung's One UI 2.0, contrary to information from the early reveal that indicated that the XCover Pro was running Android 9 Pie.

U.S. trade regulators said on Friday they will investigate wearable monitoring devices, including those made by Fitbit and Garmin, following allegations of patent violations by rival Koninklijke Philips and its North America unit. Reuters reports: The U.S. International Trade Commission, in a statement, said the probe would also look at devices by made by California-based Ingram Micro as well as China-based Maintek Computer and Inventec Appliances. Netherlands-based Philips and Philips North America LLC, in their complaint, are calling for tariffs or an import ban and allege the other companies have infringed on Philips' patents or otherwise misappropriated its intellectual property. Although the USITC agreed to launch an investigation, it said it "has not yet made any decision on the merits of the case" and would make its determination "at the earliest practicable time." "We believe these claims are without merit and a result of Philips' failure to succeed in the wearables market," Fitbit said in a statement.

In a statement to The Verge, Philips said that the company had attempted to negotiate licensing agreements with Fitbit and Garmin for three years, but talks ultimately broke down. "Philips expects third parties to respect Philips' intellectual property in the same way as Philips respects the intellectual property rights of third parties," a spokesperson said.

Samsung's "Galaxy XCover Pro" rugged smartphone includes a feature that all but disappeared from the market: a removable battery. "There are a handful of very low-end smartphones that still have removable batteries, but as a mid-ranger, this would be the highest-end removable-battery phone on the market," reports Ars Technica. From the report: It's hard to say if the XCover Pro is currently official or not. Samsung's Nordic division posted a CES press release that detailed the never-before-seen XCover Pro, complete with specs and pictures, alongside several other previously announced phones. A later update scrubbed all mention of the XCover from the press release. The release said the phone would be for sale in Finland on January 31 for $554, but since the release was pulled, it's unclear if that is still accurate.

Samsung Nordic listed the phone with a Samsung Exynos 9611 SoC, an eight-core, 10nm chip with four Cortex A73 cores and four Cortex A53 cores. This would make it a mid-range phone on par with the "Galaxy A" series. The phone has 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage that's expandable thanks to a microSD slot, and that sweet 4050mAh removable battery. The display design is... interesting. The display is a 6.3-inch 2400x1000 LCD, which is strange, as most Samsung phones use the company's OLED panels. Like most modern Samsung phones, this device also has a circular cutout in the display for the camera, and while this makes sense on devices with slim top bezels, the XCover's top bezel seems like it would have had plenty of room for a camera. As far as the "rugged" features go, the device features an IP69 water- and dust-resistance rating. There's also a push-to-talk button, side-mounted fingerprint sensor, two rear cameras (25MP + 8MP sensors), and a 13MP front sensor. Strangely, it appears to be running Android 9 Pie instead of the newer Android 10 OS.

Intel announced Thunderbolt 4 this week at CES, saying it will arrive in PCs later this year with Intel's new Tiger Lake processor. But, as CNET reports, "the all-purpose port won't be any faster at transferring data than the 4-year-old Thunderbolt 3." From the report: The chipmaker promised it would be four times faster than today's USB, then clarified it was talking about the USB 3.1 version at 10 gigabits per second. Thunderbolt 3, though, already can transfer data at 40Gbps. Still, you can expect other changes. "It standardizes PC platform requirements and adds the latest Thunderbolt innovations," Intel spokeswoman Sarah Kane said in a statement, adding that Intel plans to share more about Thunderbolt 4 later.

Thunderbolt, embraced first by Apple in 2011 and later by some Windows PC makers, has proved popular in high-end computing situations demanding a multipurpose connector. A single Thunderbolt port can link to external monitors, network adapters, storage systems and more. But Intel's years-long ambition to make Thunderbolt mainstream hasn't succeeded. Instead, USB remains the workhorse port.

An anonymous reader shares a blog post from Kevin Rooke, investment specialist and co-founder of blockchain marketing agency agency0x: Imagine a startup with $12 billion of revenue, 125%+ YoY revenue growth (two years in a row), and Apple-esque gross margins (30-50%). Without knowing anything else about the business, what would you value it at? $50 billion? $100 billion? More? That's Apple's AirPods business, the fastest-growing segment of the world's most valuable company. Though Apple doesn't share sales numbers for AirPods, industry analysts have converged on estimated sales numbers for each of the last 3 years. In 2017, Apple sold an estimated 15 million devices, each priced at $150. That gave Apple a $2.25 billion revenue boost, only a 1% boost to Apple's $215 billion iPhone revenue.

But in 2018, AirPods sales began to quiet Apple bears. 35 million pairs were sold, still priced at $150. That gave Apple an additional $5.25 billion in revenue, then representing 2.4% of iPhone revenue. And in 2019, Apple has pulled off yet another incredible year of AirPods sales. Apple sold an estimated 60 million units, but in 2019 the prices increased too. Apple's second generation AirPods launched at $200, and their newest variation, the AirPods Pro sell for $250. Assuming an even split of sales between Gen 1, Gen 2, and AirPods Pro, Airpods revenue was $12 billion in 2019. That's 4.5% of Apple's iPhone revenue. Investors are paying attention now. AirPods make as much money as Spotify, Twitter, Snap, and Shopify combined. And considering their triple-digit growth two years in a row, I would be shocked if AirPods didn't earn more money than Uber in 2020.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: "We want to miniaturize accelerator technology in a way that makes it a more accessible research tool," explained project lead Jelena Vuckovic in a Stanford news release. But this wasn't designed like a traditional particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider or one at collaborator SLAC's National Accelerator Laboratory. Instead of engineering it from the bottom up, they fed their requirements to an "inverse design algorithm" that produced the kind of energy pattern they needed from the infrared radiation emitters they wanted to use. That's partly because infrared radiation has a much shorter wavelength than something like microwaves, meaning the mechanisms themselves can be made much smaller -- perhaps too small to adequately design the ordinary way. The algorithm's solution to the team's requirements led to an unusual structure that looks more like a Rorschach test than a particle accelerator. But these blobs and channels are precisely contoured to guide infrared laser light pulse in such a way that they push electrons along the center up to a significant proportion of the speed of light.

The resulting "accelerator on a chip" is only a few dozen microns across, making it comfortably smaller than a human hair and more than possible to stack a few on the head of a pin. A couple thousand of them, really. And it will take a couple thousand to get the electrons up to the energy levels needed to be useful -- but don't worry, that's all part of the plan. The chips are fully integrated but can be put in a series easily to create longer assemblies that produce larger powers. These won't be rivaling macro-size accelerators like SLAC's or the Large Hadron Collider, but they could be much more useful for research and clinical applications where planet-destroying power levels aren't required. For instance, a chip-sized electron accelerator might be able to direct radiation into a tumor surgically rather than through the skin. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Riding through a remote valley in Mongolia on the back of his motorbike, adventurer Jamie Clarke let the hum of the engine and the wind echo in his mind while his thoughts wandered. After several hours, he pulled over to shake off his helmet and take a look at the map. This was what he loved about adventuring -- the solitude, the landscape and the feeling of being in charge of your own destiny. But when his 18-year-old son pulled up right behind him on his own motorcycle, he had a different take on the long ride they had just finished. For him, being alone in his thoughts was novel and unsettling. "Oh my God, that was terrible! I can't be left with my brain like that!" But that was precisely why the two had decided to embark on this adventure together.

Mr Clarke, a lifelong skier, mountaineer and trekker, had felt like he was losing touch with his son Khobe, who was always on his phone at their home in Calgary, Alberta. He blames himself, partly. He has a smartphone just like everyone else, and he enjoyed playing games with his son on his Blackberry when he was small. [...] For a long time, he had dreamed of traveling across Mongolia on a bike. Now that his son was older, why not do it with him? About a year ago, he proposed it to Khobe. It wasn't an automatic hit. "I said no pretty quickly," Khobe says. "But it kind of turned into this fun idea it became such a thing of preparation that it was very exciting to go do it." Khobe got his motorcycle license and the two practiced longer trips. While his father has climbed Everest twice, Khobe had never climbed a mountain so he had to practice that, too. They left on July 28, and over the course of the next month travelled more than 2,200 kilometers (1,367 miles) across Mongolia by motorbike, horse and camel. "I think the whole time I was pretty consumed by missing my phone," Khobe says. "You realize how boring everything gets. When I'm bored I can just turn on YouTube or watch Netflix. What am I going to do, look at the stars and twiddle my thumbs?" But he also says getting to know his dad was worth it, especially the time they spent off the road in their tents or yurts just cooking and bonding. "I was surprised that when he's away from a work environment and family that he acts maybe closer my age," he says.

"It helped me see Khobe in a new way. I saw him as a kid who kept leaving his jacket on the table, not cleaning up the dishes," he says. "And I was able to see him step up to being a young man, and I was impressed by how well he was able to perform under pressure."

Rog Srigley, writer who teaches at Humber College and Laurentian University, offered his students extra credit if they would give him their phones for nine days and write about living without them. "What they wrote was remarkable, and remarkably consistent," he writes. "These university students, given the chance to say what they felt, didn't gracefully submit to the tech industry and its devices." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares what some of them said: "Believe it or not, I had to walk up to a stranger and ask what time it was. It honestly took me a lot of guts and confidence to ask someone," Janet wrote. (Her name, like the others here, is a pseudonym.) She describes the attitude she was up against: "Why do you need to ask me the time? Everyone has a cell phone. You must be weird or something." Emily went even further. Simply walking by strangers "in the hallway or when I passed them on the street" caused almost all of them to take out a phone "right before I could gain eye contact with them."

To these young people, direct, unmediated human contact was experienced as ill-mannered at best and strange at worst. James: "One of the worst and most common things people do nowadays is pull out their cell phone and use it while in a face-to-face conversation. This action is very rude and unacceptable, but yet again, I find myself guilty of this sometimes because it is the norm." Emily noticed that "a lot of people used their cell phones when they felt they were in an awkward situation, for an example [sic] being at a party while no one was speaking to them." The price of this protection from awkward moments is the loss of human relationships, a consequence that almost all the students identified and lamented. Without his phone, James said, he found himself forced to look others in the eye and engage in conversation. Stewart put a moral spin on it. "Being forced to have [real relations with people] obviously made me a better person because each time it happened I learned how to deal with the situation better, other than sticking my face in a phone." Ten of the 12 students said their phones were compromising their ability to have such relationships. Peter: "I have to admit, it was pretty nice without the phone all week. Didn't have to hear the fucking thing ring or vibrate once, and didn't feel bad not answering phone calls because there were none to ignore." "It felt so free without one and it was nice knowing no one could bother me when I didn't want to be bothered," wrote William.

Emily said that she found herself "sleeping more peacefully after the first two nights of attempting to sleep right away when the lights got shut off." Stewart: "Actually I got things done much quicker without the cell because instead of waiting for a response from someone (that you don't even know if they read your message or not) you just called them [from a land line], either got an answer or didn't, and moved on to the next thing."

dryriver writes: The 2010s were not necessarily the greatest decade to live through. AAA computer games were not only DRM'd and internet tethered to death but became increasingly formulaic and pay-to-win driven, and poor quality console ports pissed off PC gamers. Forced software subscriptions for major software products you could previously buy became a thing. Personal privacy went out the window in ways too numerous to list, with lawmakers failing on many levels to regulate the tech, data-mining and internet advertising companies in any meaningful way. Severe security vulnerabilities were found in hundreds of different tech products, from Intel CPUs to baby monitors and internet-connected doorbells. Thousands of tech products shipped with microphones, cameras, and internet connectivity integration that couldn't be switched off with an actual hardware switch. Many electronics products became harder or impossible to repair yourself. Printed manuals coming with tech products became almost non-existent. Hackers, scammers, ransomwarers and identity thieves caused more mayhem than ever before. Troll farms, click farms and fake news factories damaged the integrity of the internet as an information source. Tech companies and media companies became afraid of pissing off the Chinese government.

Windows turned into a big piece of spyware. Intel couldn't be bothered to innovate until AMD Ryzen came along. Nvidia somehow took a full decade to make really basic realtime raytracing happen, even though smaller GPU maker Imagination had done it years earlier with a fraction of the budget, and in a mobile GPU to boot. Top-of-the-line smartphones became seriously expensive. Censorship and shadow banning on the once-more-open internet became a thing. Easily-triggered people trying to muzzle other people on social media became a thing. The quality of popular music and music videos went steadily downhill. Star Wars went to shit after Disney bought it, as did the Star Trek films. And mainstream cinema turned into an endless VFX-heavy comic book movies, remakes/reboots and horror movies fest. In many ways, television was the biggest winner of the 2010s, with many new TV shows with film-like production values being made. The second winner may be computer hardware that delivered more storage/memory/performance per dollar than ever before.

To the question: What, dear Slashdotters, will the 2020s bring us? Will things get better in tech and other things relevant to nerds, or will they get worse?

harrymcc writes: Atari's first home computers, the 400 and 800, were announced at Winter CES in January 1980. But they didn't ship until late in the year -- so over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards has marked their 40th anniversary with a look at their rise and fall. Though Atari ultimately had trouble competing with Apple and other entrenched PC makers, it produced machines with dazzling graphics and sound and the best games of their era, making its computers landmarks from both a technological and cultural standpoint.