Here are a few of the tech stories I’ve found interesting over the last few days.
Solar Power Farm in Alberta Finds a Large Customer: Amazon
Amazon has signed a contract to purchase most of the electricity generation capacity from a massive new solar power farm in Vulcan County, Alberta. The solar farm began construction in late 2020 and when completed in 2022 will have a capacity of 465MW of power. Amazon will purchase up to 400MW of that capacity as part of the company’s plan to use renewable energy whenever possible.
The solar power farm itself will be the largest of its kind in Canada to date, though as the push for more sources of renewable energy only intensifies, it likely won’t be the last.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-amazon-solar-energy-power-vulcan-travers-1.6077152
Long Discontinued Western Digital MyBook Live Storage Device Suffers Massive Hack
Western Digital’s MyBook Live is an old product. The networked hard drive was released in 2011 and stopped receiving updates from the company in 2015. Late last week, people who are still using the MyBook Live started reporting that their data was being deleted from the device. It appears that a group of bad actors found two exploits in the internet connected storage devices, and were able to gain access and delete data from the drives. In some cases, users lost a decade of data, with no other copy to fall back on.
This is a scary situation that should serve as a couple of different reminders. First that using unsupported products carries risk. The MyBook Live is a 10 year old product that has not been supported for 6 years. Any product connected to the internet that is out of support is a risk, even more so if it holds your important data. The second is that data that is not backed up is very vulnerable. Important data and files should never only have one copy in one location. Users who truly lost data in this case would not be in such a difficult position if the data was backed up somewhere else. This is an important reminder of that.
Windows 11’s System Requirements Leave out Hundreds of Millions of Computers, Reasons Unclear
With the announcement of Windows 11 last week, Microsoft continued its time honoured tradition of fumbling the ball. Support documents posted by the company that listed system requirements state that only Intel 8th Generation Core processors and AMD Ryzen 2xxx and newer processors would be supported. That would mean that any PC released before 2018 is not able to run Windows 11. What remains confusing is that Intel 8th generation Atom processors are supported, While more powerful older processors are not. A supported Intel Atom processors has two processor cores and speeds as low as 1GHz, while a processor like the Core i7-7700k, with four processor cores and much faster speeds and performance, is not supported. An AMD Ryzen 7 1700X, with 8 processor cores is also not supported.
Microsoft attempted to clarify the reasons why, but their blog post was vague and uninformative, and answered few questions.
Communication continues to be Microsoft’s problem. The company refuses to explain why it is leaving out hundreds of millions of computers from Windows 11 support, and is marring what was otherwise a strong announcement of its next operating system.
Xbox Cloud Gaming Web App Officially Launches, Brings Xbox Series X Upgrades with it
Microsoft has taken Xbox Cloud Gaming in web browers out of beta. That means that all subscribers to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate can access cloud gaming through a web browser on Windows, Mac, and iOS. This greatly expands the availability of Xbox Cloud Gaming. Previously, it was only available as an Android app. The browser experience is not perfect, I find that there is more input lag than I am comfortable with, so hopefully it improves over time. It is also strange that there is no native Windows app for Xbox Cloud Gaming. Since, you know, it’s a Microsoft Product.
At the same time Microsoft formally flipped the switch on the Xbox Cloud Gaming Service upgrade to what it calls “custom Xbox Series X hardware.”. Users started noticing some titles appeared to be running on the newer systems a couple weeks ago, and it is now enabled universally. The upgrade from Xbox One S hardware to Xbox Series X for Xbox Cloud Gaming mainly unlocks the much faster load times that are one of the primary benefits of the new consoles. Where getting into a game on my Android phone would previously take up to 5 minutes, yesterday I was able to get playing less than a minute from launching the Game Pass App. That alone is a huge improvement, and makes Xbox Cloud Gaming much more viable for me
https://www.thurrott.com/games/xbox/252540/xbox-cloud-gaming-comes-to-windows-apple-devices
Government of Canada Accelerates Timeline for Shift Away From Gas Powered Vehicles
This week the Government of Canada announced that the goal of ending sales of gas powered vehicles was being moved up 5 years, from 2040 to 2035. The future is electric, and the sooner we get there, the better.