After months and years of rumors and official hints , Nintendo has finally pulled back the curtain on the Switch 2 with a first-look trailer (and sparse promo web site ) highlighting many small changes from the old Switch.

The short trailer shows off the Switch 2's larger tablet and screen, and a slightly more rounded edge on the top and bottom. The new system also sports an additional USB-C port on the top (next to a headphone jack) and a wider, U-shaped kickstand along the backside that can support the system at a number of wider angles.

The trailer also shows off black Joy-Cons that are significantly larger than those on the original Switch, with colored accents behind the joystick itself. An extended, colored Joy-Con "rail" on the inner edge features wider shoulder buttons and a new connector in the center. Rather than sliding in vertically, like the plastic rail on the Switch Joy-Cons, the controllers on the Switch 2 snap in horizontally with what appears to be a magnetic connection , and disconnects with the aid of a horizontal lever to the side of the shoulder buttons.

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For the past seven months—and likely longer—an industry-wide standard that protects Windows devices from firmware infections could be bypassed using a simple technique. On Tuesday, Microsoft finally patched the vulnerability. The status of Linux systems is still unclear.

Tracked as CVE-2024-7344, the vulnerability made it possible for attackers who had already gained privileged access to a device to run malicious firmware during bootup. These types of attacks can be particularly pernicious because infections hide inside the firmware that runs at an early stage, before even Windows or Linux has loaded. This strategic position allows the malware to evade defenses installed by the OS and gives it the ability to survive even after hard drives have been reformatted. From then on, the resulting "bootkit" controls the operating system start.

In place since 2012, Secure Boot is designed to prevent these types of attacks by creating a chain-of-trust linking each file that gets loaded. Each time a device boots, Secure Boot verifies that each firmware component is digitally signed before it’s allowed to run. It then checks the OS bootloader's digital signature to ensure that it's trusted by the Secure Boot policy and hasn't been tampered with. Secure Boot is built into the UEFI—short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface—the successor to the BIOS that’s responsible for booting modern Windows and Linux devices.

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Electric vehicle chargers are increasingly a target of vandals , often in search of copper. "Even at our headquarter site here in Campbell, in Silicon Valley, we've had our site vandalized twice," said Rick Wilmer, CEO of ChargePoint. His customers are starting to get fed up with the problem, too, and so Wilmer has had the company hard at work on a solution: an uncuttable cable, which should be ready to deploy by early summer.

"I literally got so frustrated ... I was at home in my own workshop, building prototypes and taking all my nastiest tools to them, to try and cut them, to see what we could come up with," Wilmer told me. It's a simple idea, involving hardened steel and "some other polymer materials that are just really hard to cut through," Wilmer said.

As well as making cables for its own chargers, ChargePoint plans to license its invention to others in the industry. "So we've collaborated with a few [cable vendors] to build these cables... and we can refer anyone that's interested to those vendors and give [them] permission to build cables with this technology for someone other than us," Wilmer said.

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Yesterday was Wikipedia Day, celebrating the first edit made to the online encyclopedia on January 15, 2001. It's a tricky kind of celebration because, for many of us, every day is a Wikipedia Day. Scanning a new Wikipedia tab can feel like turning on a faucet, using a resource that has seemingly always been there and dispensed evenly, almost magically, from the Internet pipes.

But that's not where Wikipedia comes from. It comes from editors, who are volunteers that add missing topics, update pages when new things happen, and settle debates ranging from grammar ticks to deep philosophy. Author Stephen Harrison has written about these people for Slate, WIRED, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Now, he's exploring their distinctive lives, interests, and conflicts of this tribe in a fiction tome, The Editors .

The Editors follows Morgan Wentworth, a recently laid-off journalist, who scopes out a freelance story at a global conference for the book's Wiki stand-in, Infopendium. Wentworth sees the breadth of ages, personalities, and motivations among the editors and comes to appreciate their dedication. Then, a hacker breaks in, posts a cryptic message, and triggers Wentworth's expanding investigation into a global struggle over truth and information.

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Early on Thursday morning, a Saturn V-sized rocket ignited its seven main engines, a prelude to lifting off from Earth.

But then, the New Glenn rocket didn't move.

And still, the engines produced their blue flame, furiously burning away methane.

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Lots of startups use Google's productivity suite, known as Workspace, to handle email, documents, and other back-office matters. Relatedly, lots of business-minded webapps use Google's OAuth, i.e. "Sign in with Google." It's a low-friction feedback loop—up until the startup fails, the domain goes up for sale, and somebody forgot to close down all the Google stuff.

Dylan Ayrey, of Truffle Security Co., suggests in a report that this problem is more serious than anyone, especially Google, is acknowledging. Many startups make the critical mistake of not properly closing their accounts—on both Google and other web-based apps—before letting their domains expire.

Given the number of people working for tech startups (6 million), the failure rate of said startups (90 percent), their usage of Google Workspaces (50 percent, all by Ayrey's numbers), and the speed at which startups tend to fall apart, there are a lot of Google-auth-connected domains up for sale at any time. That would not be an inherent problem, except that, as Ayrey shows, buying a domain allows you to re-activate the Google accounts for former employees if the site's Google account still exists.

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On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments that could determine if a Texas age-gating law preventing kids from accessing pornography online is overly burdensome for adults. A ruling against Texas could put an end to allegedly invasive age-verification laws in nearly 20 states.

A decision isn't expected until summer 2025, so it's too soon to say which way the court is leaning.

The question before the court is whether the 5th Circuit was right to stay a preliminary injunction that had previously been blocking Texas from enforcing the law or whether that decision should be reversed and remanded based on the level of constitutional scrutiny that the 5th Circuit applied.

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Daredevil is among my favorite stories in the Netflix Defenders universe—along with Jessica Jones— in large part because Wilson Fisk (aka Kingpin, played to perfection by Vincent D'Onofrio), was such an incredibly complex and even occasionally sympathetic villain in the first and second seasons. I'm far from alone in this assessment, which explains why it was such a blow to fans when Netflix canceled the critically acclaimed Daredevil (and the rest of its Defenders series) in 2018, despite the showrunners' plans for a fourth season.

Charlie Cox's titular vigilante hero has since made a couple of cameos in other Marvel projects, most notably as a one-night stand for Tatiana Maslany's She-Hulk in 2022. That kept hope alive that Daredevil might be revived and/or re-imagined. The hope has paid off because Marvel Studios just released a trailer for the new nine-episode series Daredevil: Born Again . And the studio has already confirmed a second season as part of the MCU's Phase Five .

D'Onofrio's Fisk (who also appeared in the limited series Echo and Hawkeye ) is back, of course. Per the official premise: "Murdock, a blind lawyer with heightened abilities, is fighting for justice through his bustling law firm, while former mob boss Wilson Fisk pursues his own political endeavors in New York. When their past identities begin to emerge, both men find themselves on an inevitable collision course."

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A Washington-based launch company announced Wednesday that it has raised $260 million in Series C funding, a significant capital raise at a time when it has become more difficult for some space companies to attract funding.

"The market is tough, but I think what we’re doing is poised to go straight to the end state of the industry, and I think investors recognize that," said Andy Lapsa, Stoke Space's co-founder and chief executive officer, in an interview with Ars after the announcement.

By "end state of the industry," Lapsa means that Stoke is developing a fully reusable, medium-lift rocket named Nova. The vehicle's first stage will land vertically, similarly to a Falcon 9 rocket, and the second stage, which has a novel metallic heat shield and engine design, will also land back on Earth.

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