The most pow­er­ful MacBook Pro ever is here. With the blaz­ing-fast M1 Pro or M1 Max chip — the first Apple sil­i­con de­signed for pros — you get ground­break­ing per­for­mance and amaz­ing bat­tery life. Add to that a stun­ning Liquid Retina XDR dis­play, the best cam­era and au­dio ever in a Mac note­book, and all the ports you need. The first note­book of its kind, this MacBook Pro is a beast.

Supercharged for pros.

The most pow­er­ful MacBook Pro ever is here. With the blaz­ing-fast M1 Pro or M1 Max chip — the first Apple sil­i­con de­signed for pros — you get ground­break­ing per­for­mance and amaz­ing bat­tery life. Add to that a stun­ning Liquid Retina XDR dis­play, the best cam­era and au­dio ever in a Mac note­book, and all the ports you need. The first note­book of its kind, this MacBook Pro is a beast.

Available start­ing 10.26

Watch the event

Watch the film

View in AR

The most pow­er­ful MacBook Pro ever is here. With the blaz­ing-fast M1 Pro or M1 Max chip — the first Apple sil­i­con de­signed for pros — you get ground­break­ing per­for­mance and amaz­ing bat­tery life. Add to that a stun­ning Liquid Retina XDR dis­play, the best cam­era and au­dio ever in a Mac note­book, and all the ports you need. The first note­book of its kind, this MacBook Pro is a beast.

Supercharged for pros.

The most pow­er­ful MacBook Pro ever is here. With the blaz­ing-fast M1 Pro or M1 Max chip — the first Apple sil­i­con de­signed for pros — you get ground­break­ing per­for­mance and amaz­ing bat­tery life. Add to that a stun­ning Liquid Retina XDR dis­play, the best cam­era and au­dio ever in a Mac note­book, and all the ports you need. The first note­book of its kind, this MacBook Pro is a beast.

Available start­ing 10.26

Watch the event

Watch the film

View in AR

Up to 32GB of uni­fied mem­ory

Up to 64GB of uni­fied mem­ory

M1 Pro and M1 Max scale the amaz­ing M1 ar­chi­tec­ture to new heights — and for the first time, they bring a sys­tem on a chip (SoC) ar­chi­tec­ture to a pro note­book. Both have more CPU cores, more GPU cores, and more uni­fied mem­ory than M1. Along with a pow­er­ful Neural Engine for su­per­charged ma­chine learn­ing and up­graded me­dia en­gines with ProRes sup­port, M1 Pro and M1 Max al­low pros to do things they never could be­fore.

M1 Pro takes the ex­cep­tional per­for­mance of the M1 architecture to a whole new level for pro users. Even the most am­bi­tious pro­jects are eas­ily han­dled with up to 10 CPU cores, up to 16 GPU cores, a 16‑core Neural Engine, and ded­i­cated en­code and de­code me­dia en­gines that sup­port H.264, HEVC, and ProRes codecs.

M1 Max is the most pow­er­ful chip ever cre­ated for a pro note­book, with 10 CPU cores, up to 32 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine. It de­liv­ers two times faster graph­ics pro­cess­ing and dou­ble the mem­ory band­width of M1 Pro. And it has a ded­i­cated me­dia en­gine for de­code and two for en­code — with up to two times faster video en­cod­ing — and two ProRes ac­cel­er­a­tors for even higher mul­ti­stream per­for­mance.

The new MacBook Pro is avail­able in 14- and 16-inch mod­els. Each can be con­fig­ured with the M1 Pro or M1 Max chip and of­fers un­prece­dented lev­els of pro per­for­mance. So you can ma­nip­u­late mil­lions of poly­gons in Cinema 4D, edit up to seven streams of 8K ProRes video in Final Cut Pro, or grade color in HDR on 8K 4x4 ProRes video — all miles away from the edit bay.

Ferocious per­for­mance with game‑chang­ing bat­tery life — that ef­fi­ciency is the magic of Apple sil­i­con. A sin­gle charge lets you com­pile up to four times as much code in Xcode or edit im­ages for up to twice as long in Lightroom Classic. And un­like other note­books, MacBook Pro de­liv­ers the same amaz­ing per­for­mance whether it’s plugged in or not.

The coolest part. Advanced ther­mal sys­tems move 50 percent more air, even at lower fan speeds. And thanks to the ef­fi­ciency of Apple sil­i­con, the fans never turn on for many tasks you do every day.

Fast. And vast. Get jaw-drop­ping read speeds from the up to 8TB SSD — up to 7.4GB/s or two times the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion. So you can open 8K videos in­stantly or store hun­dreds of thou­sands of RAW pho­tos at once.

The new MacBook Pro is the first to put a sys­tem on a chip (SoC) into a pro note­book. Other pro sys­tems use power-hun­gry CPUs, dis­crete GPUs, and mul­ti­ple chips, each work­ing sep­a­rately. M1 Pro and M1 Max com­bine the CPU, GPU, I/O, and Neural Engine in a sin­gle SoC with uni­fied mem­ory. As a re­sult, M1 Pro and M1 Max not only crush in­ten­sive work­flows that were once im­pos­si­ble on a note­book — they also pro­vide in­cred­i­ble bat­tery life.

Connected at the chip. Other pro note­books need to copy data back and forth over a slower in­ter­face. Not the new MacBook Pro. Its CPU and GPU share a sin­gle pool of uni­fied mem­ory. That means every part of the chip con­nects to data and mem­ory with­out need­ing to copy it, so every­thing you do is faster and more ef­fi­cient.

M1 Pro and M1 Max CPUs each lever­age up to eight high-per­for­mance cores and two high-ef­fi­ciency cores to de­liver faster pro­cess­ing at a tenth of the power. Their GPUs have ac­cess to lower-la­tency data with vastly im­proved power ef­fi­ciency for un­matched per­for­mance per watt.

Missouri gov­er­nor vows crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion of re­porter who found flaw in state web­site

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch no­ti­fied a state agency and held its story while a prob­lem that risked ex­pos­ing the so­cial se­cu­rity num­bers of Missouri teach­ers was fixed

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson dur­ing a press con­fer­ence on Feb. 5, 2021 (photo cour­tesy of Missouri Governor’s Office).

On Tuesday, a re­porter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch alerted the state that Social Security num­bers of school teach­ers and ad­min­is­tra­tors were vul­ner­a­ble to pub­lic ex­po­sure due to flaws on a web­site main­tained by Missouri’s de­part­ment of ed­u­ca­tion.

The news­pa­per agreed to hold off pub­lish­ing any story while the de­part­ment fixed the prob­lem and pro­tected the pri­vate in­for­ma­tion of teach­ers around the state.

But by Thursday, Gov. Mike Parson was la­bel­ing the Post-Dispatch re­porter a “hacker” and vow­ing to seek crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion.

“The state does not take this mat­ter lightly,” Parson said Thursday at a hastily called press con­fer­ence. He re­fused to take ques­tions af­ter­ward.

Parson said he had re­ferred the mat­ter to the Cole County Prosecutor and has asked the Missouri State Highway Patrol to in­ves­ti­gate.

“This ad­min­is­tra­tion is stand­ing up against any and all per­pe­tra­tors who at­tempt to steal per­sonal in­for­ma­tion and harm Missourians,” he said.

According to the Post-Dispatch, one of its re­porters dis­cov­ered the flaw in a web ap­pli­ca­tion al­low­ing the pub­lic to search teacher cer­ti­fi­ca­tions and cre­den­tials. No pri­vate in­for­ma­tion was clearly vis­i­ble, but teacher Social Security num­bers were con­tained in HTML source code of the pages.

The state re­moved the search tool af­ter be­ing no­ti­fied of the is­sue by the Post-Dispatch. It was un­clear how long the Social Security num­bers had been vul­ner­a­ble.

In a press re­lease Wednesday, the Office of Administration Information Technology Services Division said that through a multi-step process, a “hacker took the records of at least three ed­u­ca­tors, de­coded the HTML source code, and viewed the so­cial se­cu­rity num­ber of those spe­cific ed­u­ca­tors.”

The state is un­aware of any mis­use of in­di­vid­ual in­for­ma­tion or even whether in­for­ma­tion was ac­cessed in­ap­pro­pri­ately out­side of this iso­lated in­ci­dent.

Parson said Thursday that he was­n’t sure why the re­porter ac­cessed the in­for­ma­tion. He claimed it was part of a “political game by what is sup­posed to be one of Missouri’s news out­lets.”

“The state is com­mit­ted to bring to jus­tice any­one who hacked our sys­tem and any­one who aided and abet­ted them to do so,” Parson said, later ar­gu­ing that the re­porter was “attempting to em­bar­rass the state and sell head­lines for their news out­let.”

Republican state Rep. Tony Lovasco, who ac­cord­ing to his leg­isla­tive bi­og­ra­phy has worked in soft­ware de­ploy­ment and main­te­nance, tweeted Thursday that “it’s clear the Governor’s Office has a fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of both web tech­nol­ogy and in­dus­try stan­dard pro­ce­dures for re­port­ing se­cu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.

“Journalists re­spon­si­bly sound­ing an alarm on data pri­vacy is not crim­i­nal hack­ing,” he said.

Chris Vickery, a California-based data se­cu­rity ex­pert, told The Independent that it ap­pears the de­part­ment of ed­u­ca­tion  was “publishing data that it should­n’t have been pub­lish­ing.

“That’s not a crime for the jour­nal­ists dis­cov­er­ing it,” he said. “Putting Social Security num­bers within HTML, even if it’s ‘non-display ren­der­ing’ HTML, is a stu­pid thing for the Missouri web­site to do and is a type of bone­headed mis­take that has been around since day one of the Internet. No ex­ploit, hack­ing or vul­ner­a­bil­ity is in­volved here.”

In ex­plain­ing how he hopes the re­porter and news or­ga­ni­za­tion will be pros­e­cuted, Parson pointed to a state statute defin­ing the crime of tam­per­ing with com­puter data. Vickery said that statute would­n’t work in this in­stance be­cause of a re­cent de­ci­sion by the U. S. Supreme Court in the case of Van Buren v. United States.

The court ruled in that case that some­one vi­o­lates the law when they ac­cess files or other in­for­ma­tion that is off-lim­its to them. In Missouri, Vickery said, the state was pub­lish­ing “the HTML source to the pub­lic in­ter­net, with no hur­dles of a pass­word or other req­ui­site form of au­then­ti­ca­tion chal­lenge, means the pub­lic can rea­son­ably as­sume to be au­tho­rized to view that con­tent for the pur­poses of laws re­lated to ‘computer tres­pass’ forms of of­fense.”

The Post-Dispatch pub­lished a state­ment in re­sponse from its at­tor­ney, say­ing the re­porter “did the re­spon­si­ble thing by re­port­ing his find­ings to (the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) so that the state could act to pre­vent dis­clo­sure and mis­use.

“A hacker is some­one who sub­verts com­puter se­cu­rity with ma­li­cious or crim­i­nal in­tent,” the state­ment con­tin­ued. “Here, there was no breach of any fire­wall or se­cu­rity and cer­tainly no ma­li­cious in­tent. For DESE to de­flect its fail­ures by re­fer­ring to this as ‘hacking’ is un­founded. Thankfully, these fail­ures were dis­cov­ered.”

House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, D-Springfield, said the Post-Dispatch de­serves praise for dis­cov­er­ing a prob­lem, not threats.

“The gov­er­nor should di­rect his anger to­wards the fail­ure of state gov­ern­ment to keep its tech­nol­ogy se­cure and up to date and to work to fix the prob­lem,” she said, “not threaten jour­nal­ists with pros­e­cu­tion for un­cov­er­ing those fail­ures.”

▪ You must give Missouri Independent credit, in­clud­ing https://​mis­souri­in­de­pen­dent.com and au­thor.▪ If you pub­lish on­line, in­clude the links from the story, and a link to Missouri Independent.▪ Stories may be edited for in-house style or to shorten. More sub­stan­tial changes should be noted as ad­di­tional and con­ducted by your pub­li­ca­tion.▪ You can pub­lish our graph­ics and any pho­tos that are cred­ited to Missouri Independent with the sto­ries with which they orig­i­nally ap­peared. For any other uses, you must seek per­mis­sion from us at [email protected]▪ If you share the story on so­cial me­dia, please men­tion @MO_Independent on Twitter and mis­souri­in­de­pen­dent on Facebook.▪ Don’t sell ads against the story. Feel free, how­ever, to pub­lish it on a page with ads you’ve al­ready sold.▪ Content should not be pub­lished be­hind a pay­wall; please reach out to the ed­i­tor-in-chief if you have ques­tions about your par­tic­u­lar pay­wall sys­tem.Mis­souri gov­er­nor vows crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion of re­porter who found flaw in state web­site

<h1>Missouri gov­er­nor vows crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion of re­porter who found flaw in state web­site</​h1>

<p class=“by­line”>by Jason Hancock, <a href=“https://​mis­souri­in­de­pen­dent.com”>Missouri Independent</a> <br />October 14, 2021</p>

On Tuesday, a re­porter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch alerted the state that Social Security num­bers of school teach­ers and ad­min­is­tra­tors were vul­ner­a­ble to pub­lic ex­po­sure due to flaws on a web­site main­tained by Missouri’s de­part­ment of ed­u­ca­tion.

The news­pa­per agreed to hold off pub­lish­ing any story while the de­part­ment fixed the prob­lem and pro­tected the pri­vate in­for­ma­tion of teach­ers around the state.

But by Thursday, Gov. Mike Parson was la­bel­ing the Post-Dispatch re­porter a “hacker” and vow­ing to seek crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion.

“The state does not take this mat­ter lightly,” Parson said Thursday at a hastily called press con­fer­ence. He re­fused to take ques­tions af­ter­ward.

Parson said he had re­ferred the mat­ter to the Cole County Prosecutor and has asked the Missouri State Highway Patrol to in­ves­ti­gate.

“This ad­min­is­tra­tion is stand­ing up against any and all per­pe­tra­tors who at­tempt to steal per­sonal in­for­ma­tion and harm Missourians,” he said.

According to the Post-Dispatch, one of its re­porters dis­cov­ered the flaw in a web ap­pli­ca­tion al­low­ing the pub­lic to search teacher cer­ti­fi­ca­tions and cre­den­tials. No pri­vate in­for­ma­tion was clearly vis­i­ble, but teacher Social Security num­bers were con­tained in HTML source code of the pages.

The state re­moved the search tool af­ter be­ing no­ti­fied of the is­sue by the Post-Dispatch. It was un­clear how long the Social Security num­bers had been vul­ner­a­ble.

In a press re­lease Wednesday, the Office of Administration Information Technology Services Division said that through a multi-step process, a “hacker took the records of at least three ed­u­ca­tors, de­coded the HTML source code, and viewed the so­cial se­cu­rity num­ber of those spe­cific ed­u­ca­tors.”

The state is un­aware of any mis­use of in­di­vid­ual in­for­ma­tion or even whether in­for­ma­tion was ac­cessed in­ap­pro­pri­ately out­side of this iso­lated in­ci­dent.

Parson said Thursday that he was­n’t sure why the re­porter ac­cessed the in­for­ma­tion. He claimed it was part of a “political game by what is sup­posed to be one of Missouri’s news out­lets.”

“The state is com­mit­ted to bring to jus­tice any­one who hacked our sys­tem and any­one who aided and abet­ted them to do so,” Parson said, later ar­gu­ing that the re­porter was “attempting to em­bar­rass the state and sell head­lines for their news out­let.”

Republican state Rep. Tony Lovasco, who ac­cord­ing to his leg­isla­tive bi­og­ra­phy has worked in soft­ware de­ploy­ment and main­te­nance, tweeted Thursday that “it’s clear the Governor’s Office has a fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of both web tech­nol­ogy and in­dus­try stan­dard pro­ce­dures for re­port­ing se­cu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.

“Journalists re­spon­si­bly sound­ing an alarm on data pri­vacy is not crim­i­nal hack­ing,” he said.

Chris Vickery, a California-based data se­cu­rity ex­pert, told The Independent that it ap­pears the de­part­ment of ed­u­ca­tion  was “publishing data that it should­n’t have been pub­lish­ing.

“That’s not a crime for the jour­nal­ists dis­cov­er­ing it,” he said. “Putting Social Security num­bers within HTML, even if it’s ‘non-display ren­der­ing’ HTML, is a stu­pid thing for the Missouri web­site to do and is a type of bone­headed mis­take that has been around since day one of the Internet. No ex­ploit, hack­ing or vul­ner­a­bil­ity is in­volved here.”

In ex­plain­ing how he hopes the re­porter and news or­ga­ni­za­tion will be pros­e­cuted, Parson pointed to a state statute defin­ing the crime of tam­per­ing with com­puter data. Vickery said that statute would­n’t work in this in­stance be­cause of a re­cent de­ci­sion by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Van Buren v. United States.

The court ruled in that case that some­one vi­o­lates the law when they ac­cess files or other in­for­ma­tion that is off-lim­its to them. In Missouri, Vickery said, the state was pub­lish­ing “the HTML source to the pub­lic in­ter­net, with no hur­dles of a pass­word or other req­ui­site form of au­then­ti­ca­tion chal­lenge, means the pub­lic can rea­son­ably as­sume to be au­tho­rized to view that con­tent for the pur­poses of laws re­lated to ‘computer tres­pass’ forms of of­fense.”

The Post-Dispatch pub­lished a state­ment in re­sponse from its at­tor­ney, say­ing the re­porter “did the re­spon­si­ble thing by re­port­ing his find­ings to (the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) so that the state could act to pre­vent dis­clo­sure and mis­use.

“A hacker is some­one who sub­verts com­puter se­cu­rity with ma­li­cious or crim­i­nal in­tent,” the state­ment con­tin­ued. “Here, there was no breach of any fire­wall or se­cu­rity and cer­tainly no ma­li­cious in­tent. For DESE to de­flect its fail­ures by re­fer­ring to this as ‘hacking’ is un­founded. Thankfully, these fail­ures were dis­cov­ered.”

House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, D-Springfield, said the Post-Dispatch de­serves praise for dis­cov­er­ing a prob­lem, not threats.

“The gov­er­nor should di­rect his anger to­wards the fail­ure of state gov­ern­ment to keep its tech­nol­ogy se­cure and up to date and to work to fix the prob­lem,” she said, “not threaten jour­nal­ists with pros­e­cu­tion for un­cov­er­ing those fail­ures.”

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a net­work of news bu­reaus sup­ported by grants and a coali­tion of donors as a 501c(3) pub­lic char­ity. Missouri Independent main­tains ed­i­to­r­ial in­de­pen­dence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for ques­tions: info@mis­souri­in­de­pen­dent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on Facebook and Twitter.

Our sto­ries may be re­pub­lished on­line or in print un­der Creative Commons li­cense CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, pro­vide proper at­tri­bu­tion and link to our web site. Please see our re­pub­lish­ing guide­lines for use of pho­tos and graph­ics.

Jason Hancock has been writ­ing about Missouri since 2011, most re­cently as lead po­lit­i­cal re­porter for The Kansas City Star. He has spent nearly two decades cov­er­ing pol­i­tics and pol­icy for news or­ga­ni­za­tions across the Midwest, and has a track record of ex­pos­ing gov­ern­ment wrong­do­ing and hold­ing elected of­fi­cials ac­count­able.MORE FROM AUTHOR

Apple has of­fi­cially an­nounced its most pow­er­ful chips ever: the M1 Pro and M1 Max, souped-up ver­sions of the M1 chip that it de­buted last fall and the heart of its new MacBook Pro mod­els.

The orig­i­nal M1 chip was an­nounced a lit­tle less than a year ago as Apple’s first in-house, Arm-based chip for lap­tops. At launch, it was fea­tured in Apple’s re­vamped MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the en­try-level Mac Mini, in ad­di­tion to the 2021 iMac and iPad Pro re­freshes.

But as good as the M1 chip was, it was only a so­lu­tion for re­plac­ing Intel on Apple’s en­try-to-mid level hard­ware, with its high-end MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac Mini mod­els (meant for de­vel­op­ers, pro­gram­mers, graphic de­sign­ers, and other more de­mand­ing work­loads) all no­tably still stick­ing with Intel’s chips for the last year.

The M1 Pro and M1 Max are Apple’s long-awaited an­swer to that is­sue: while both are built on the same 5nm process, Apple is promis­ing big jumps in per­for­mance here.

For the M1 Pro, Apple promises 70 per­cent bet­ter CPU per­for­mance and twice the graph­ics per­for­mance com­pared to the M1. While the ba­sic ar­chi­tec­ture is still the same on the M1 Pro, Apple is up­ping the hard­ware here in a big way, with a 10-core CPU that of­fers eight per­for­mance cores and two ef­fi­ciency cores, along with a 16-core GPU with 2,048 ex­e­cu­tion units.

The new chip also sup­ports more RAM, with con­fig­u­ra­tion op­tions up to 32GB (although, like the M1, mem­ory is still in­te­grated di­rectly into the chip it­self, in­stead of user-upgrad­able) with 200GB/s mem­ory band­width. In to­tal, the M1 Pro has 33.7 bil­lion tran­sis­tors, roughly twice that num­ber of tran­sis­tors that the M1 has.

But Apple is­n’t stop­ping there: it also an­nounced the even more pow­er­ful M1 Max, which has the same 10-core CPU con­fig­u­ra­tion, with eight per­for­mance cores and two ef­fi­ciency cores. But the M1 Max dou­bles the mem­ory band­width (to 400GB/s), RAM (up to 64GB of mem­ory) and GPU (with 32 cores, 4,096 ex­e­cu­tion units and four times the GPU per­for­mance of the orig­i­nal M1.) The M1 Max fea­tures 57 bil­lion tran­sis­tors, mak­ing it the largest chip that Apple has made yet. The new chip also means that you can con­nect up to four ex­ter­nal dis­plays to a sin­gle de­vice.

For com­par­i­son, the orig­i­nal M1 of­fered a clas­sic Arm mix of eight CPU cores: four per­for­mance cores for more de­mand­ing tasks and four high-ef­fi­ciency cores for ex­tend­ing bat­tery life. The M1 also of­fered ei­ther a seven-core or eight-core GPU, de­pend­ing on the com­puter model, and only al­lowed ei­ther 8GB or 16GB of RAM.

Apple also promised that the new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips of­fer up to 1.7 times bet­ter CPU per­for­mance per watt com­pared to both the reg­u­lar M1 and un­spec­i­fied four-core and eight-core PC lap­top chips — al­though the com­pany did­n’t give hard num­bers, or iden­tify what other chips it was com­par­ing things to, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to as­cer­tain just how the new chips will hold up in the real world.

Developing… we’re adding more to this post, but you can fol­low along with our MacBook Pro event live blog to get the news even faster.

Canon USA is be­ing sued for not al­low­ing own­ers of cer­tain print­ers to use the scan­ner or fax­ing func­tions if they run out of ink.

David Leacraft, a cus­tomer of Canon, filed the class ac­tion law­suit on Tuesday al­leg­ing de­cep­tive mar­ket­ing and un­just en­rich­ment by the printer man­u­fac­turer.

While us­ing his Pixma MG6320 printer from Canon, the plain­tiff was sur­prised to dis­cover that the “all-in-one” ma­chine would refuse to scan or fax doc­u­ments if the printer ran out of ink.

As ink is not nec­es­sary to per­form scans or faxes, the ar­gu­ment is that the printer fea­tures should con­tinue to work even if there is no ink in the de­vice.

“Plaintiff Leacraft would not have pur­chased the de­vice or would not have paid as much for it had he known that he would have to main­tain ink in the de­vice in or­der to scan doc­u­ments,” reads the com­plaint for the class ac­tion law­suit.

Since at least 2016, other cus­tomers have con­tacted Canon about this ex­act prob­lem [1, 2] and were told by sup­port agents that ink car­tridges must be in­stalled and con­tain ink to use the print­er’s fea­tures, as shown by the agen­t’s re­sponse be­low.

The com­plaint fur­ther il­lus­trates with im­ages of a Pixma MG2522 box that Canon ad­ver­tises its All-in-One print­ers as in­clud­ing three dis­tinct fea­tures - print, copy­ing, and scan­ning.

However, there is no warn­ing to show that ink is re­quired for all of these fea­tures.

Further posts [1. 2] found by BleepingComputer also shows Canon telling cus­tomers that all inks tanks must con­tain ink if they wish to print in greyscale, as it may dam­age the printer.

“The PIXMA MX710 must have all ink tanks in­stalled and they all must con­tain ink. If you at­tempt to print with no ink or an empty ink, you would risk dam­ag­ing the printer,” a sup­port agent posted to the Canon fo­rums.

As such, the class ac­tion law­suit states that con­sumers had been de­ceived into buy­ing a prod­uct that was de­signed to ar­ti­fi­cially and un­eth­i­cally in­tro­duce func­tional bot­tle­necks by ty­ing them to ink lev­els, even if there’s no prac­ti­cal link be­tween them.

“As op­posed to the “single func­tion” print­ers it sells, Canon calls these mul­ti­func­tion de­vices a “3-in-1” or “4-in-1” for the fact they pur­port­edly pro­vide three or four func­tions,” reads the class ac­tion com­plaint against Canon USA.

“In truth, the All-in-One Printers do not scan or fax doc­u­ments when the de­vices have low or empty ink car­tridges (the “Design Issue”), and Canon’s ad­ver­tis­ing claims are false, mis­lead­ing, and rea­son­ably likely to de­ceive the pub­lic.”

According to the law­suit, Canon is only do­ing this to in­crease its prof­its by sell­ing re­place­ment ink car­tridges, hence the ac­cu­sa­tions for un­just en­rich­ment.

Considering that printer inks ex­pire typ­i­cally af­ter two or three years, even if some­one rarely or never prints on these all-in-one ma­chines, they would be prac­ti­cally forced to keep buy­ing new ink just to use all func­tions of the de­vice.

“There is no rea­son or tech­ni­cal ba­sis for man­u­fac­tur­ing the All-in-One Printers with an ink level de­tec­tion func­tion that causes the scan­ner to stop func­tion­ing when ink is low or empty. Canon de­signed the All-in-One Printers in such a way to re­quire con­sumers to main­tain ink in their de­vices re­gard­less of whether they in­tend to print,” con­tin­ues the com­plaint.

“The re­sult is an in­crease in ink sales from which Canon ob­tains sig­nif­i­cant prof­its.”

The law­suit was filed in the District Court for the Eastern District of New York and seeks at least $5,000,000 in awards, ex­clu­sive of in­ter­est, fees, and lit­i­ga­tion costs.

The al­leged vi­o­la­tions al­leged in the com­plaint are:

If you have bought an all-in-one printer from Canon and faced sim­i­lar prob­lems, you could be el­i­gi­ble for re­ceiv­ing com­pen­sa­tion in the fu­ture.

However, it is im­por­tant to note that this class ac­tion was filed this week and is not ap­proved by the court yet, so it’s too early in the process right now.

BleepingComputer con­tacted Canon USA with ques­tions re­gard­ing this law­suit but did not re­ceive a re­sponse.

The Blender Foundation, the or­ga­ni­za­tion be­hind the pop­u­lar open source 3D cre­ation tool “Blender”, to­day an­nounced that Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member to sup­port con­tin­ued core de­vel­op­ment for Blender.

Alongside a con­tri­bu­tion to the Development Fund, Apple will pro­vide en­gi­neer­ing ex­per­tise and ad­di­tional re­sources to the Blender HQ and de­vel­op­ment com­mu­nity to help sup­port Blender artists and de­vel­op­ers.

What is the Blender Development Fund?

The Blender Development Fund ac­cepts do­na­tions to sup­port ac­tiv­i­ties to pro­vide free and open ac­ces­si­ble ser­vices for all Blender con­trib­u­tors — in­clud­ing pro­fes­sion­als and cor­po­ra­tions — on the blender.org web­sites. Support ac­tiv­i­ties in­clude bug fix­ing, code re­views, tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion and on­board­ing.

The fund will also pro­vide grants and sub­si­dies to de­vel­op­ers on generic and widely agreed de­vel­op­ment pro­jects.

Spotify’s whole busi­ness model re­lies on keep­ing you lis­ten­ing and be­ing able to pre­dict what songs you’ll want to hear next. But Cornell re­searchers re­cently asked the ques­tion: Why do they still not let you vote down a song?

The re­search team re­cently de­vel­oped a rec­om­men­da­tion al­go­rithm that shows just how much more ef­fec­tive Spotify would be if it could, in the style of plat­forms like Pandora, in­cor­po­rate both likes and dis­likes.

Specifically, they demon­strated that a lis­tener is roughly 20 per­cent more likely to “like” a song if the al­go­rithm is trained on 400,000 likes and dis­likes, com­pared to an al­go­rithm trained only on that amount of likes.

“An al­go­rithm that only has ‘likes’ may help you dis­cover songs that you re­ally en­joy, but it also has a greater chance of rec­om­mend­ing songs you don’t like,” said Sasha Stoikov, se­nior re­search as­so­ci­ate at Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan, part of Cornell Engineering’s School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, and lead au­thor on a new pa­per about the sys­tem, which he calls “Piki” (as in “picky”).

The pa­per,  was pub­lished Sept. 15 and will be pre­sented at the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. The pa­per was co-au­thored with Hongyi Wen, a doc­toral stu­dent at Cornell Tech.

Piki se­lects mu­sic from a data­base of roughly 5 mil­lion songs and in­cen­tivizes users by giv­ing them $1 for every 25 songs they rate. The Piki in­ter­face plays a song, and then gives the lis­tener the abil­ity to rate it af­ter dif­fer­ent amounts of time. Specifically, the user can “dislike” the song af­ter 3 sec­onds, “like” the song af­ter 6 sec­onds and “superlike” it af­ter 12 sec­onds.

“This in­cen­tivizes the user to vote truth­fully,” Stoikov said. “To dis­like a song is easy — to like one, you have to ac­tu­ally in­vest time in it.”

Spotify’s al­go­rithms im­pact more than just lis­ten­ers. The re­search also shows how they make it more dif­fi­cult for lesser-known artists to break through, be­cause their songs don’t have enough likes to be rec­om­mended to a wide au­di­ence.

“Since al­go­rithms of­ten are trained on whether or not an in­di­vid­ual lis­tens to a song rather than if the lis­tener likes or dis­likes the song, they fa­vor well-known artists who are more of­ten heard, rec­om­mended on playlists and re­mem­bered at the search bar,” Stoikov said.

The team’s ul­ti­mate goal with Piki is to work with record la­bels to help them de­ter­mine which songs are more at­trac­tive to lis­ten­ers be­fore they go live on larger mu­sic plat­forms.

Stoikov said fu­ture re­search may fo­cus on other stream­ing plat­forms such as Netflix, in­cor­po­rat­ing more ad­vanced al­go­rithms or mod­el­ing how the al­go­rith­m’s ob­jec­tives are tied to the busi­ness ob­jec­tives of other im­por­tant stake­hold­ers such as stream­ing plat­forms and record la­bels.

Adam Conner-Simons is di­rec­tor of com­mu­ni­ca­tions at Cornell Tech.

The fol­low­ing sub­scrip­tion-only con­tent has been made avail­able to you by an LWN sub­scriber. Thousands of sub­scribers de­pend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free soft­ware com­mu­ni­ties. If you en­joy this ar­ti­cle, please con­sider sub­scrib­ing to LWN. Thank you for vis­it­ing LWN.net!

Concerns over the per­for­mance of pro­grams writ­ten in Python are of­ten over­stated — for some use cases, at least. But there is no get­ting around the prob­lem im­posed by the in­fa­mous global in­ter­preter lock (GIL), which se­verely lim­its the con­cur­rency of multi-threaded Python code. Various

ef­forts to re­move the GIL have been made over the years, but none have come any­where near the point where they would be con­sid­ered for in­clu­sion into the CPython in­ter­preter. Now, though, Sam Gross has en­tered

the arena with a proof-of-con­cept im­ple­men­ta­tion that may solve the prob­lem for real.

The con­cur­rency re­stric­tions in the CPython in­ter­preter are dri­ven by its garbage-col­lec­tion ap­proach, which uses ref­er­ence counts on ob­jects to de­ter­mine when they are no longer in use. These counts are busy; many types of ac­cess to a Python ob­ject re­quire a ref­er­ence-count in­cre­ment and (eventually) decre­ment. In a multi-threaded pro­gram, ref­er­ence-count op­er­a­tions must be per­formed in a thread-safe man­ner; the al­ter­na­tive is to risk cor­rupted counts on ob­jects. Given the fre­quency of these op­er­a­tions, cor­rup­tion in multi-threaded pro­grams would be just a mat­ter of time, and per­haps not much time at that. To avoid such prob­lems, the GIL only al­lows one thread to be run­ning in the in­ter­preter (i.e. to ac­tu­ally be run­ning Python code) at a time; that takes away al­most all of the ad­van­tage of us­ing threads in any sort of com­pute-in­ten­sive code.

The ref­er­ence-count prob­lem can be triv­ially solved (for a rel­a­tively ad­vanced value of “trivially”) by us­ing atomic op­er­a­tions to in­cre­ment and decre­ment the counts. There is just one lit­tle prob­lem with this so­lu­tion, as out­lined in this

de­sign doc­u­ment posted by Gross:

The sim­plest change would be to re­place non-atomic ref­er­ence count

op­er­a­tions with their atomic equiv­a­lents. However, atomic

in­struc­tions are more ex­pen­sive than their non-atomic

coun­ter­parts. Replacing Py_INCREF and Py_DECREF with atomic

vari­ants would re­sult in a 60% av­er­age slow­down on the

pyper­for­mance bench­mark suite.

Given that the vast ma­jor­ity of Python pro­grams are sin­gle-threaded (and likely to re­main so), it is not sur­pris­ing that there has never been much ap­petite for so­lu­tions that im­pose this sort of cost.

Gross has taken three dif­fer­ent ap­proaches to the CPython ref­er­ence-count prob­lem, the first of which is called “biased ref­er­ence counts” and is de­scribed in this

pa­per by Jiho Choi et al. With this scheme, the ref­er­ence count in each ob­ject is split in two, with one “local” count for the owner (creator) of the ob­ject and a shared count for all other threads. Since the owner has ex­clu­sive ac­cess to its count, in­cre­ments and decre­ments can be done with fast, non-atomic in­struc­tions. Any other thread ac­cess­ing the ob­ject will use atomic op­er­a­tions on the shared ref­er­ence count.

Whenever the own­ing thread drops a ref­er­ence to an ob­ject, it checks both ref­er­ence counts against zero. If both the lo­cal and the shared count are zero, the ob­ject can be freed, since no other ref­er­ences ex­ist. If the lo­cal count is zero but the shared count is not, a spe­cial bit is set to in­di­cate that the own­ing thread has dropped the ob­ject; any sub­se­quent decre­ments of the shared count will then free the ob­ject if that count goes to zero.

This al­go­rithm im­proves ref­er­ence-count per­for­mance be­cause, of all the ob­jects that any thread will cre­ate, few will be shared with other threads. So, most of the time, the shared ref­er­ence count will be un­used and the cost of us­ing atomic op­er­a­tions to ma­nip­u­late that count will be avoided.

There are, nat­u­rally, some sub­tleties in how the ref­er­ence counts are han­dled. One of those is that, for rea­sons to be de­scribed next, the two least-sig­nif­i­cant bits of the lo­cal ref­er­ence count are re­served. An in­cre­ment to the lo­cal ref­er­ence count, thus, adds four to that count. These de­tails are hid­den in the and

macros, so most code need not be aware of them.

Some ob­jects are heav­ily shared be­tween threads, though; these in­clude sin­gle­tons like , , and , as well as small in­te­ger val­ues, some type ob­jects, and more. These ob­jects will also never go away dur­ing the ex­e­cu­tion of the pro­gram — they are “immortal” ob­jects for which ref­er­ence count­ing is a waste. Gross’s CPython in­ter­preter marks these ob­jects by set­ting the low­est sig­nif­i­cant bit in the lo­cal ref­er­ence count. If that bit is set, the in­ter­preter does­n’t bother track­ing ref­er­ences for the rel­e­vant ob­ject at all. That avoids con­tention (and cache-line bounc­ing) for the ref­er­ence counts in these heav­ily-used ob­jects. This “optimization” ac­tu­ally slows sin­gle-threaded ac­cesses down slightly, ac­cord­ing to the de­sign doc­u­ment, but that penalty be­comes worth­while once multi-threaded ex­e­cu­tion be­comes pos­si­ble.

Other ob­jects in Python pro­grams may not be im­mor­tal, but they are still long-lived; func­tions and mod­ules fall into this cat­e­gory. Here, too, it can make sense to avoid the cost of ref­er­ence count­ing. The idea makes even more sense when one re­al­izes that many func­tion and mod­ule ob­jects, by virtue of ap­pear­ing in the dic­tio­nary, es­sen­tially form ref­er­ence-count cy­cles any­way and their counts will never go to zero. For these ob­jects, a tech­nique called “deferred ref­er­ence count­ing” is used; the sec­ond-least-sig­nif­i­cant bit in the lo­cal ref­er­ence count is set, and (most) ref­er­ence count­ing is skipped. Instead, a garbage-col­lec­tion pass is used to find and free un­used ob­jects.

“Most” ref­er­ence count­ing is skipped be­cause the CPython in­ter­preter does not, on its own, have a com­plete pic­ture of whether an ob­ject us­ing de­ferred ref­er­ence count­ing is truly un­used. Specifically, ex­ten­sion code writ­ten in C could be hold­ing ref­er­ences that the in­ter­preter can­not see. For this rea­son, ref­er­ence count­ing is only skipped within the in­ter­preter it­self; any other code will ma­nip­u­late the ref­er­ence counts as usual.

The ref­er­ence-count­ing changes are a key part of Gross’s work, but not all of it. The in­ter­preter’s mem­ory al­lo­ca­tor has been re­placed with mi­mal­loc, which is thread-safe, fast, and is able to eas­ily sup­port garbage-col­lec­tion op­er­a­tions. The garbage col­lec­tor it­self has been mod­i­fied to take ad­van­tage of mi­mal­loc, but is still “a sin­gle-threaded, stop-the-world im­ple­men­ta­tion”. A lot of work has gone into the list and dict im­ple­men­ta­tions to make them thread-safe. And so on.

Gross has also put some sig­nif­i­cant work into im­prov­ing the per­for­mance of the CPython in­ter­preter in gen­eral. This was done to ad­dress the con­cern that has blocked GIL-removal work in the past: the per­for­mance im­pact on sin­gle-threaded code. The end re­sult is that the new in­ter­preter is 10%

faster than CPython 3.9 for sin­gle-threaded pro­grams. That will cer­tainly sweeten the pot when it comes to ac­cep­tance of this work, though, as Guido van Rossum noted, the Python de­vel­op­ers could al­ways just take the per­for­mance im­prove­ments with­out the con­cur­rency work and be even faster yet.

That seems like an un­likely out­come, though, if this work stands up to closer scrutiny. When pointed to the “ccbench” bench­mark, Gross re­ported

speedups of 18-20x when run­ning with 20 threads. That is the kind of con­cur­rency speedup that Python de­vel­op­ers have been want­ing for a long time, so it is un­sur­pris­ing that this work has seen an en­thu­si­as­tic re­cep­tion.

As an added bonus, al­most all Python pro­grams will run on the mod­i­fied in­ter­preter with­out changes. The biggest source of prob­lems might be multi-threaded pro­grams with con­cur­rency-re­lated bugs that have been masked by the GIL un­til now. Extensions writ­ten in C will need to be re­com­piled, but most of them will not need to be changed un­less they (as some ev­i­dently do) ac­cess ref­er­ence counts di­rectly rather than us­ing the pro­vided macros.

The end re­sult thus ap­pears to be a GIL-removal ef­fort that has a rather bet­ter-than-av­er­age chance of mak­ing it into the CPython in­ter­preter. That would be cause for a lot of re­joic­ing among Python de­vel­op­ers. That said, a change this fun­da­men­tal is un­likely to be rushed into the CPython main­line; it will take a lot of test­ing to con­vince the com­mu­nity that it is ready for pro­duc­tion use. Interested de­vel­op­ers may be able to has­ten that process by test­ing this work with their pro­grams and re­port­ing the re­sults.

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Download and in­stall the lat­est apk of from the re­leases tab on your Quest

Restart your Quest

(If you want your ac­count back just restart your Quest and con­nect with the Oculus Phone App)

Download and in­stall the lat­est apk of from the re­leases tab on your Quest

Follow the steps in Remove Accounts sec­tion first.

!Warning! You won’t be able to re­move this app with­out a fac­tory re­set af­ter run­ning the fol­low­ing com­mand

Run this com­mand (if you haven’t be­fore) adb shell dpm set-de­vice-owner com.bos.ocu­less/.​De­vAd­min­Re­ceiver

Click on “TELEMETRY” in the app

Download and in­stall the lat­est apk of from the re­leases tab on your Quest

Follow the steps in Remove Accounts sec­tion first.

!Warning! You won’t be able to re­move this app with­out a fac­tory re­set af­ter run­ning the fol­low­ing com­mand

Run this com­mand (if you haven’t be­fore) adb shell dpm set-de­vice-owner com.bos.ocu­less/.​De­vAd­min­Re­ceiver

Click on “DISABLE UPDATES” in the app

Only use for to dis­able teleme­try and up­dates

Download and in­stall the lat­est apk of from the re­leases tab on your Quest

Click on every ac­count (typically only Oculus and Facebook)

Click “REMOVE ACCOUNT”

(Your ac­counts should re­turn af­ter like 5 min­utes or a restart)

You can’t per­form that ac­tion at this time.

You signed in with an­other tab or win­dow. Reload to re­fresh your ses­sion.

You signed out in an­other tab or win­dow. Reload to re­fresh your ses­sion.

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010, and every year since, it has made it a point to cel­e­brate “Birthday Week” with a raft of launches. By far, the show-stop­per this year was the an­nounce­ment of R2 Storage, an S3-compatible Object Storage ser­vice that di­rectly takes aim at AWS’ “Hotel California” busi­ness model. This has been ex­tremely well re­ceived, go­ing by the re­sponse on HN and Twitter. In its past 5 birth­days, Cloudflare has gone from world-class CDN to of­fer­ing:

…and de­clar­ing that they will be “the fourth ma­jor pub­lic cloud”. When your mar­ket cap is $36 bil­lion and your next biggest com­peti­tor is worth $1.6 tril­lion (~45x larger, al­beit not pure-play), this is a bold state­ment. Many star­tups are try­ing by of­fer­ing spe­cial­ized Cloud Distros, but all build­ing with AWS as the pre­sump­tive win­ner of the “first layer cloud” rather than try­ing to com­pete.

My re­al­iza­tion: The big 3 clouds are play­ing Chess, but Cloudflare is play­ing Go.

While the tech in­dus­try is used to come-from-be­low dis­rup­tion, and the soft­ware in­dus­try is in­creas­ingly grasp­ing class-for-the-masses atomic con­cepts, I be­lieve Cloudflare is writ­ing a new play­book that is the lit­tle-guy coun­ter­part of the em­brace, ex­tend, ex­tin­guish model used by Microsoft.

Because it in­volves API com­pat­i­bil­ity, this play­book is par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to de­vel­oper tools, and is pro­tected by the Supreme Court rul­ing in Google v Oracle. If I were to sum­ma­rize it in three words, look­ing over Cloudflare’s his­tory and an­nual re­port, I might call it:

Establish: Establish a foothold in some­thing in­cum­bents don’t care enough about

Envelop: Reverse-proxy some­thing that in­cum­bents don’t serve cus­tomers well on

Expand: cross-sell other pre­mium prod­ucts and ser­vices un­til they are more cus­tomers of you than they are cus­tomers of the in­cum­bent.

Given Cloudflare’s fun­da­men­tally less-cen­tral­ized ap­proach to grow­ing its cloud, it is no sur­prise that it an­nounced its first Ethereum prod­uct this Birthday Week; al­though it re­mains to be seen if a Web2-native com­pany can re­ally drop enough of its as­sump­tions to han­dle Web3 threats or op­por­tu­ni­ties. If we are truly in the “early Internet” days of Web3, only the para­noid might sur­vive here. Fortunately, Prince seems to be a vo­cal fan of Andy Grove as well.

Our cur­rent build tools for the web are 10-100x slower than they could be. The main goal of the es­build bundler pro­ject is to bring about a new era of build tool per­for­mance, and cre­ate an easy-to-use mod­ern bundler along the way.

Check out the get­ting started in­struc­tions if you want to give es­build a try.