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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) 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. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge / The Android 15 logo. This is "Android V," if you can't tell from the logo. (credit: Google) It's that time of year again. Android is going to start its ~8-month-long beta process with the release of a new major OS version. The Android 15 Developer Preview is out today for the Pixel 6, 7, and 8, Pixel Fold, and Pixel Tablet. This release should mark the end of major OS support for the Pixel 5 and 5a series. So what's new? It's hard to know too much with only the simple text descriptions we're getting, but we have a few bullet points. "Partial screen sharing" will let users share or record individual app windows instead of the entire screen. Phones don't have much of a difference between an app window and a full screen, but it would be nice if this blocked incoming notifications from showing up on your screen share. It would also be nice for tablets. Android is surfacing an API that supports the Linux kernel's fs-verity feature. This will let you store a read-only file on a read-write file system and cryptographically sign it to ensure it hasn't been maliciously tampered with. Google apparently wants app developers to use this, saying, "This leads to enhanced security, protecting against potential malware or unauthorized file modifications that could compromise your app's functionality or data." Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A core developer of Nginx, currently the world's most popular web server, has quit the project, stating that he no longer sees it as "a free and open source project… for the public good." His fork, freenginx, is "going to be run by developers, and not corporate entities," writes Maxim Dounin, and will be "free from arbitrary corporate actions." Dounin is one of the earliest and still most active coders on the open source Nginx project and one of the first employees of Nginx, Inc., a company created in 2011 to commercially support the steadily growing web server. Nginx is now used on roughly one-third of the world's web servers, ahead of Apache. A tricky history of creation and ownership Nginx Inc. was acquired by Seattle-based networking firm F5 in 2019. Later that year, two of Nginx's leaders, Maxim Konovalov and Igor Sysoev, were detained and interrogated in their homes by armed Russian state agents. Sysoev's former employer, Internet firm Rambler, claimed that it owned the rights to Nginx's source code, as it was developed during Sysoev's tenure at Rambler (where Dounin also worked). While the criminal charges and rights do not appear to have materialized, the implications of a Russian company's intrusion into a popular open source piece of the web's infrastructure caused some alarm. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Nvidia used to be a gaming GPU company, but the company's value has absolutely skyrocketed thanks to the AI craze and a GPU's value in accelerating AI workloads. A few purpose-built chips later, like the H100 Tensor Core GPU (with a price of $25,000-$40,000!) and A100, and Nvidia's stock is up 50 percent this year. At press time, Nvidia's market cap is now $1.8 trillion, beating Amazon ($1.76 trillion) and Google's parent company, Alphabet ($1.77 trillion), to become the world's fourth most valuable company. How much further can Nvidia's blazing stock rally go? Next up on the 'highest market cap' list is Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia, at $2.0 trillion; then Apple, at $2.8 trillion; and another company riding the AI wave, Microsoft, at $3 trillion. Nvidia's next earnings report is February 21. The last one was for Q3 2023, showing that the company is basically selling every AI chip it can make. Revenue was up 206 percent from the same quarter last year, and of the company's $18.12 billion in revenue, $14.51 billion was generated by its AI/data center division. Q4 will probably be another record-setting quarter for the company, and coming up in Q2 2024, Nvidia will launch its next-gen AI chip, the HGX H200 Tensor Core GPU. A TrendForce estimate puts Nvidia's AI server market share at 60–70 percent. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Singer-songwriter worked on the record from New York City's Electric City Studops with collaborators Daniel Tashian and Ian FitchukView the full article

Kacey Musgraves teased a new album on Grammy night, and today she’s ready to announce it for real. Deeper Well, her first LP since 2021’s star-crossed, is out next month. View the full article

Don Van Vliet was born to be a cult artist. Van Vliet, better known to most of us as PJ Harvey, pioneered an unhinged, experimental form of rock ‘n’ roll. He never made much commercial impact, but he inspired generations of artists. One of those artists was young Polly Jean Harvey, who grew up listening to Beefheart because her parents were fans. Apparently, Van Vliet was also inspired by PJ Harvey — or, at least, by PJ Harvey’s cat. View the full article

Trio will play concert during solar eclipse to coincide with April record releaseView the full article

Last year, This Is The Kit released a new album, Careful Of Your Keepers, and it was produced by Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys. Today, they’re sharing a cover of Rhys’ “Sensations In The Dark,” which appears on his 2011 album Hotel Shampoo. View the full article

Last month, Jlin announced a new album, Akoma, which boasts some heavy-hitting guest spots from Björk, Philip Glass, and Kronos Quartet. Its lead single was “The Precision Of Infinity” (the one that features Glass), and it landed on our best songs of the week list. Today, Jlin has shared another track from it, the dark and shapeshifting “Auset.” Check it out below. View the full article

In 2023, less than a year before his death, the outlaw legend looked back on a lifetime of starting shit and burning bridgesView the full article

Usher will headline this weekend’s Super Bowl halftime show, Post Malone will sing “America The Beautiful,” and Tiesto will be the game’s official in-show DJ. You’ll also probably see Taylor Swift cheering along for the Chiefs if she can figure out her flight. But those aren’t the only artists you’ll be seeing during Super Bowl LVIII. View the full article

Vampire Weekend have officially announced their fifth album, which is called Only God Was Above Us and will be out on April 5. The band’s follow-up to 2019’s Father Of The Bride was “inspired and haunted by 20th century New York City,” per a press release, and recording locations include Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo. It was produced by Ezra Koenig and Ariel Rechtshaid, mixed by Dave Fridmann, and mastered by Emily Lazar. View the full article

The singer-songwriter gave the recital a London art gallery that's showing the late art rocker's paintingsView the full article

Over the past few years, IDLES have strung together a succession of fiery, theatrical performances on American late-night shows. The band probably owes a pretty good chunk of their reputation to moments like those. IDLES might come off gimmicky on record, but they can also summon serious intensity in unforgiving TV-studio environs. Last night, they added another big performance to their resume. View the full article

Last year, mui zyu released her debut album Rotten Bun For An Eggless Century, which led us to name her an Artist To Watch and landed her on our annual Best New Bands list. Today, Eva Liu, the musician behind mui zyu, is releasing a new song, the languid and melancholy “everything to die for.” View the full article

Crowded House have shared a new single, “Oh Hi,” their first new music since the release of their 2021 full-length Dreamers Are Waiting. Bandleader Neil Finn shared a demo of this track a couple years ago, and it’s inspired by his work with the nonprofit So They Can, which builds schools in Kenya and Tanzania. “I’m hoping the song comes across without needing to know the backstory,” Finn shared. “But it’s very much inspired by these incredible kids and their magnificence.” Listen below. View the full article

Twenty years is an impossibly long time, and it’s also the blink of an eye. Twenty years is now how long it’s been since Kanye West released his debut album The College Dropout; the album’s birthday is Saturday. I can see that 2004 release date in my head like it’s playing on TV. I remember exactly which shelf of the now-shuttered record store had the CD on display, and I can remember practically sprinting to the counter to pay for it, then back to my apartment to throw it on. I’m still the person who bought that CD, and Kanye West is still the person who made it, but we are also very different people. In the case of Kanye West, most of the changes have not been good. View the full article

The singer and songwriter's third studio album, Don't Forget Me, is set for release on April 12 View the full article

Detroit-born baritone and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee was with the Spinners from their 1954 formation until his retirement in 2023 View the full article

The song is the band's first new music since 2021View the full article

"Going Home (Theme From Local Hero)” features Bruce Springsteen, David Gilmour, Slash, Ronnie Wood, Joan Jett, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Sting, and the final recording by Jeff BeckView the full article

"I'm dying to know what she wants to talk to me about"View the full article

The British rock band will release their fifth LP, Tangk, next weekView the full article

Enlarge (credit: Getty) Chromebooks and MacBooks are among the least repairable laptops around, according to an analysis that consumer advocacy group US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) shared this week. Apple and Google have long been criticized for selling devices that are deemed harder to repair than others. Worse, PIRG believes that the two companies are failing to make laptops easier to take apart and fix. The "Failing the Fix (2024)" report released this week [PDF] is largely based on the repairability index scores required of laptops and some other electronics sold in France. However, the PIRG’s report weighs disassembly scores more than the other categories in France's index, like the availability and affordability of spare parts, “because we think this better reflects what consumers think a repairability score indicates and because the other categories can be country specific,” the report says. PIRG's scores, like France’s repair index, also factor in the availability of repair documents and product-specific criteria (the PIRG’s report also looks at phones). For laptops, that criteria includes providing updates and the ability to reset software and firmware. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article