“Everything is gone”: Russian business hit hard by tech sanctions

Enlarge (credit: vladimir18 | Getty Images)

Russian companies have been plunged into a technological crisis by Western sanctions that have created severe bottlenecks in the supply of semiconductors, electrical equipment, and the hardware needed to power the nation’s data centers.

Most of the world’s largest chip manufacturers, including Intel, Samsung, TSMC and Qualcomm, have halted business to Russia entirely after the US, UK, and Europe imposed export controls on products using chips made or designed in the US or Europe.

This has created a shortfall in the type of larger, low-end chips that go into the production of cars, household appliances, and military equipment. Supplies of more advanced semiconductors, used in cutting-edge consumer electronics and IT hardware, have also been severely curtailed.

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After 9 difficult months, Firefly is set to take its next shot at orbit

Enlarge / Firefly's second Alpha rocket is shipped from its test site in Texas to California in May. (credit: Firefly)

Nine months have passed since Firefly's Alpha rocket launched for the first time, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Unfortunately, one of the rocket's four main engines failed about 15 seconds into the flight, and the rocket was lost about two minutes later.

The period since then has been a difficult one for the company and its founder, Tom Markusic. In addition to dissecting the cause of the Alpha failure, Firefly also ran afoul of rules set by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, CFIUS.

In December, the Air Force blocked Firefly from working at the Vandenberg launch site due to these CFIUS complications with the company's primary investor, Ukrainian Max Polyakov. Eventually, the issue was resolved this spring after Polyakov sold his interest in Firefly, and Firefly regained access to the launch site. But it was a messy and distracting situation at a time when Firefly needed to focus on reaching orbit.

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Buick revives the Electra as an electric SUV in 2024

Enlarge / This Buick Wildcat EV concept is not destined for production, but it is supposed to tell us something about how future Buick Electra EVs might look. Just squint and imagine it's an SUV. (credit: Buick)

Good news, Buick fans. Rather than suffer the fate of former General Motors brands like Pontiac, Saturn, Oldsmobile (as well as Holden, Saab, Daewoo, etc), Buick is getting a revamp as it prepares for an all-EV lineup by 2030. These new Buick EVs will sport a famous name from Buick's past as the brand revives the Electra name.

The first Buick Electra EV is due in 2024, and other than the fact that it will use GM's family of Ultium batteries and drive motors, it's not sharing too many specifics. But it has unveiled a new concept called the Wildcat EV that it says shows the brand's new body language, including a low-mounted grille, turbine-look wheels, and tick-shaped light elements at the front and rear.

"The Wildcat EV concept represents the real design future for the brand," said Global Buick and GMC Design Executive Director Sharon Gauci. "Buick has always been forward-looking and this expression is a glimpse of where we’re going, and the optimism we have for the limitless possibilities of an electric future."

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Diablo Immortal impressions: A good smartphone game saddled with F2P nonsense

Enlarge / Welcome to hell. By that, we mostly mean Diablo Immortal's setting, but that sentence could also describe the figurative distaste we have for the new game's economic choices. (credit: Activision Blizzard)

The best thing about Diablo Immortal is that it is a fun, professionally crafted action-RPG befitting the Diablo name. The new Activision Blizzard game, launching on iOS and Android later on Wednesday and Windows PCs on Thursday, immediately impresses as one of the better smartphone-first action-RPG games on the market. And my 10 hours in its universe have thus far allayed my previous fears about its production values.

The worst thing about Diablo Immortal is its economy. My pre-release testing of the final game was regularly marked with menus and in-game characters alike selling me new types of "orbs," "stones," gold, and other confusing paths to microtransactions. At best, the game can be enjoyed despite this nonsense.

But the bean counters at Activision Blizzard aren't willing to offer a one-time purchase in Diablo Immortal for fair, nag-free adventuring. (Worse, as of press time, the game publisher appears to double down on a particular 2012 fiasco.) That's doubly tragic when the game is otherwise a fun, smartphone-friendly option for one more dungeon run—which leaves me stuck between recommending a perfectly fine smartphone adventure and warning about its ickiest caveats.

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World’s first ammonia-powered zero-emissions tractor starts testing

Enlarge / This John Deere tractor uses Amogy's "ammonia to power" zero-emissions system. (credit: Bryan Banducci)

The world's first ammonia-powered zero-emissions tractor successfully completed its first demonstration run at the Advanced Energy Center at Stony Brook University in New York last week. The midsized John Deere tractor had its diesel engine replaced with an "ammonia to power" system developed by a startup called Amogy. The system converts the energy-dense chemical into hydrogen, which then powers a 100 kW hydrogen fuel cell.

Although most EV coverage is devoted to consumer-oriented passenger cars and light trucks, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles represent more than a quarter of US vehicle emissions and are important targets for decarbonization. The low-energy density of batteries and their long charging times make fuel cells an attractive zero-emissions solution, and we've looked at the potential uses for hydrogen fuel cells in trains, trucking, and mining in the past.

But even the greenest hydrogen still isn't very energy dense, and outside of California there's little hydrogen infrastructure to rely upon.

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EBayer tries to sell prototype Pixel 7, provides lots of pictures

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  You really can buy anything on eBay. [credit: archive.org ]

Google shocked us all when it decided to reveal the Pixel 7 live at Google I/O a few weeks ago. The phone, which isn't due out until at least the fall, was officially confirmed as the "Pixel 7" and "Pixel 7 Pro" with promises of next-gen Google Tensor chips, a polished aluminum camera bar, and a few official pictures of the back. We can learn a bit more about the device now, though, thanks to ...an eBay listing?

Over the long weekend, some eBay seller had the bright idea to try to sell a prototype Pixel 7. The $530 listing of what is surely a stolen item has been pulled from eBay, but you can still see an archive of the listing here. The seller listed the item saying it "comes with android 13 and pixel apps in development stage. Selling as is. No guarantees of any sort." Hmmm. The seller at least scored what counts as the first in-person pictures of the Pixel 7, showing the device from all angles.

The Pixel 7, complete with that new camera bar and identifying prototype line symbols in the bottom third. (credit: meetveeru)

The Pixel 7 is very close to the Pixel 6, so there's not a ton to look at, but this gives us a good look at that new camera bar. The Pixel 6 camera bar has one big sheet of glass across the entire back, while the Pixel 7's camera bar is a big block of aluminum, with a smaller glass cover for the lenses. The Pixel 7's smaller camera glass should make it less susceptible to glare—it was easy for light to bounce around inside of the Pixel 6's huge glass camera cover. The new look is aesthetically a downgrade, though. The Pixel 6 camera bar was a simple, continuous black strip that contrasted against the body color, while this aluminum is trying to match the glass body color, failing, and then has a black blob inside it for the camera lenses.

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Updated Surface Laptop Go leaks in retailer ad, promises big GPU performance boost

Enlarge / The original Surface Laptop Go. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go was originally introduced in October 2020 as a smaller, lighter, and more budget-friendly member of the Surface family, but it hasn't been updated since then. That may change soon, according to a leaked retail ad spotted by The Verge—it said that a spruced-up version of the Surface Laptop Go could be available for preorder as soon as June 2.

Intel's 12th-gen processors have been available for a while now, and in that context, the new Laptop Go's hardware isn't very exciting. The laptop was listed with a Core i5-1135G7, a quad-core CPU originally launched in late 2020 that we've seen in tons of other laptops in the last two years. The new Laptop Go appears to use the same 12.4-inch touchscreen, the same un-backlit keyboard and fingerprint sensor, and the same complement of ports (one USB-C, one USB-A, a headphone jack, and a Surface Connect port). The laptop will also ship with Windows 11—the current model fully supports Windows 11 but still ships with Windows 10 in S Mode out of the box.

Though it's almost as old as the original Surface Laptop Go, the i5-1135G7 would be an interesting upgrade to the current laptop's i5-1035G1. It has the same number of CPU cores, but there are big increases to the base and boost clock speeds. The Iris Xe integrated GPU would also be considerably faster, thanks to a newer GPU architecture, a higher GPU clock speed, and more than twice as many execution units (80, up from 32). A gaming laptop it ain't, but, especially at the screen's native 1536×1024 resolution, it should be fast enough to play older and less-demanding games.

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