wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Security researchers at Google's Project Zero have picked apart one of the most notorious in-the-wild iPhone exploits and found a never-before-seen hacking roadmap that included a PDF file pretending to be a GIF image with a custom-coded virtual CPU built out of boolean pixel operations. If that makes you scratch your head, that was exactly the reaction from Google's premier security research team after disassembling the so-called FORCEDENTRY iMessage zero-click exploit used to plant NSO Group's Pegasus surveillance tool on iPhones.

"We assess this to be one of the most technically sophisticated exploits we've ever seen," Google's Ian Beer and Samuel Grob wrote in a technical deep-dive into the remote code execution exploit that was captured during an in-the-wild attack on an activist in Saudi Arabia. In its breakdown, Project Zero said the exploit effectively created "a weapon against which there is no defense," noting that zero-click exploits work silently in the background and does not even require the target to click on a link or surf to a malicious website. "Short of not using a device, there is no way to prevent exploitation by a zero-click exploit," the research team said.

The researchers confirmed the initial entry point for Pegasus was Apple's proprietary iMessage that ships by default on iPhones, iPads and macOS devices. By targeting iMessage, the NSO Group hackers needed only a phone number of an AppleID username to take aim and fire eavesdropping implants. Because iMessage has native support for GIF images (especially those that loop endlessly), Project Zero's researchers found that this expanded the attack surface and ended up being abused in an exploit cocktail that targeted a security defect in Apple's CoreGraphics PDF parser. Within Apple's CoreGraphics PDF parser, the NSO exploit writers abused Apple's implementation of the open-source JBIG2, a domain specific image codec designed to compress images where pixels can only be black or white. Describing the exploit as "pretty terrifying," Google said the NSO Group hackers effectively booby-trapped a PDF file, masquerading as a GIF image, with an encoded virtual CPU to start and run the exploit. Apple patched the exploit in September and filed a lawsuit seeking to hold NSO Group accountable.

Reddit on Wednesday announced that it has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. CNBC reports: The social media company did not make the filing publicly available. The company also did not say how many shares would be offered nor the price range for the proposed offering. Although Reddit was created in 2005, it has taken a unique road toward going public.

Conde Nast Publications acquired Reddit in 2006. The social media services remained a part of the publication company until it was made an independent subsidiary in 2011. Since then, it raised a series of funding rounds from venture capital firms. Most recently, the company announced that it had raised a $700 million round in August 2021 at a valuation of more than $10 billion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Light Reading: Comcast confirmed that it won't activate data caps and usage-based broadband policies in its Northeast division in 2022, effectively extending an earlier delay to keep the policy out of the region through the end of 2021. There's still no telling whether Comcast will revisit the plan for 2023 and beyond. "We don't have plans to implement our data usage plan in our Northeast markets in 2022 at this time," a Comcast official told Light Reading. Word of Comcast's latest decision follows one made in February 2021 to delay the implementation of data usage and capping policies in its Northeast division until 2022.

Comcast had activated usage-based policies in its Northeast division (which includes parts of 13 states and Washington, D.C., and areas where the cable op competes with the cap-free Verizon Fios service) in early 2021. But Comcast put the policy back on ice there after catching heat from lawmakers about introducing the policy during a pandemic that had forced people to work and school from home and vastly increase their broadband data consumption. Comcast's data usage policies are still active in its Central and West divisions. Comcast restored and updated its data usage policies in July 2020, raising the monthly limit to 1.2 terabytes -- 200 gigabytes more than the 1TB limit that was in place prior to the original COVID-19 outbreak. "Under the current plan, residential broadband customers who exceed 1.2TB of data per month are charged $10 for each additional bucket of 50GB, up to a maximum of $100 per month (Comcast's maximum data overage charge prior to the pandemic was $200)," the report notes. "Comcast also sells a standalone unlimited data option that costs an additional $30 per month."

Alphabet's Google is facing potentially heavy fines in Russia after a court ruled it must unblock the YouTube account of a TV channel owned by a sanctioned ally of President Vladimir Putin. From a report: The Moscow Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeals on Thursday upheld an April ruling that ordered the U.S. technology giant to restore the Tsargrad account or face a daily fine, the channel said in a statement Thursday. Settlement talks between the two sides failed to yield a deal in August. Russia has stepped up confrontation with foreign social media and internet companies in what the government calls a campaign to uphold its digital sovereignty. Regulators have levied fines and slowed content in a bid to force companies including Google and Twitter to delete posts encouraging unauthorized protests and other material deemed illegal. In September, Google and Apple removed a protest-voting app from their Russian stores as parliamentary elections got underway after the authorities threatened to imprison their local staff. Google now faces a daily fine of 100,000 rubles ($1,360), which will double each week that the company refuses to comply. Tsargrad said the court capped the total fine at 1 billion rubles in the first nine months and then it will be allowed to grow further. Under Russian law, there's no upper limit on the potential fines.

Alphabet's smart city project is winding down and Google will take over its products. From a report: Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff announced the news in a letter, in which he noted he is stepping down for health-related reasons. A spokesperson confirmed to Engadget that Sidewalk Labs products will be folded into Google, though Alphabet plans to spin out Canopy Buildings as a separate company. "Starting next year, Sidewalk products Pebble, Mesa, Delve, and Affordable Electrification will join Google, becoming core to Google's urban sustainability product efforts," Doctoroff wrote. "These products will continue to be led by Sidewalk Labs President of Urban Products Prem Ramaswami and Chief Technology Officer Craig Nevill-Manning, both Google alumni, and the teams will continue to execute on their vision and serve customers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: On December 1, hours before Texas' social media law, HB 20, was slated to go into effect, a federal court in Texas blocked it for violating the First Amendment. Like a similar law in Florida, which was blocked and is now pending before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the Texas law will go to the Fifth Circuit. These laws are retaliatory, obviously unconstitutional, and EFF will continue advocating that courts stop them. In October, EFF filed an amicus brief against HB 20 in Netchoice v. Paxton, a challenge to the law brought by two associations of tech companies. HB 20 prohibits large social media platforms from removing or moderating content based on the viewpoint of the user. We argued, and the federal court agreed, that the government cannot regulate the editorial decisions made by online platforms about what content they host. As the judge wrote, platforms' right under the First Amendment to moderate content "has repeatedly been recognized by courts." Social media platforms are not "common carriers" that transmit speech without curation.

Moreover, Texas explicitly passed HB 20 to stop social media companies' purported discrimination against conservative users. The court explained that this "announced purpose of balancing the discussion" is precisely the kind of government manipulation of public discourse that the First Amendment forbids. As EFF's brief explained, the government can't retaliate against disfavored speakers and promote favored ones. Moreover, HB 20 would destroy or prevent the emergence of even large conservative platforms, as they would have to accept user speech from across the political spectrum. HB 20 also imposed transparency requirements and user complaint procedures on large platforms. While these kinds of government mandates might be appropriate when carefully crafted -- and separated from editorial restrictions or government retaliation -- they are not here. The court noted that companies like YouTube and Facebook remove millions of pieces of user content a month. It further noted Facebook's declaration in the case that it would be "impossible" to establish a system by December 1 compliant with the bill's requirements for that many removals. Platforms would simply stop removing content to avoid violating HB 20 -- an impermissible chill of First Amendment rights.

Clear Secure, an identification services company known for its expedited screening product for air travelers, is bringing its biometric sign-up scanners to locations beyond airports. The Wall Street Journal reports: The company has temporarily installed the biometrics machines this month inside a Showfields Inc. interactive mall and at a Rimowa Distribution Inc. luggage store in New York City as well as a Rimowa in San Francisco. Clear's main product, Clear Plus, checks travelers' identities at airport security using biometrics such as iris scans, and lets them skip the wait for agents to check their photo IDs. Enrollment typically begins online but customers usually must go to a Clear airport location to scan their biometrics. Annual memberships cost $179.

Clear created the temporary installations to showcase its technology more widely and to expose consumers to its products beyond travel, said Caryn Seidman Becker, chief executive of the company. Other products include Clear Stadium Access, a product that lets people skip long lines at sports and entertainment venues. The pop-ups are also offering Clear gift cards, a first for the company. The company also wanted to address pent-up demand from consumers who traveled less during the pandemic, Ms. Seidman Becker said.

Major U.S. air carriers warned on Wednesday that plans by AT&T and Verizon to use spectrum for 5G wireless services could be highly disruptive to air travel and cost air passengers $1.6 billion annually in delays. Reuters reports: Trade group Airlines for America (A4A) said if a new Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) directive for addressing potential interference from wireless transmissions had been in effect in 2019 "approximately 345,000 passenger flights, 32 million passengers, and 5,400 cargo flights would have been impacted in the form of delayed flights, diversions, or cancellations." At a hearing Wednesday, senators urged airlines to work to find a resolution. United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said the 5G wireless issue "is the biggest and most damaging potential issue facing us. We want nothing more than to work to a solution." Southwest Airlines Chief Executive Gary Kelly said the FAA directive "would significantly impact our operations once it is deployed on Jan. 5." The wireless carriers are set to begin using the spectrum in just three weeks. Last week, the FAA issued new airworthiness directives warning interference from 5G wireless spectrum could result in flight diversions.

The aviation industry and FAA have raised significant concerns about potential interference of 5G with sensitive aircraft electronics like radio altimeters. In November, AT&T and Verizon agreed to delay the commercial launch of C-band wireless service until Jan. 5 after the FAA raised concerns. They also adopted precautionary measures for six months to limit interference. The FAA directives order revising airplane and helicopter flight manuals to prohibit some operations requiring radio altimeter data when in the presence of 5G C-Band wireless broadband signals. Aviation industry groups said they were insufficient to address air safety concerns. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, who did not immediately comment on the airlines' analysis, has said she believes the issues can be resolved and spectrum safely used.

For a brief moment, their worlds had changed. From a report: On Tuesday afternoon a Coinbase "display issue" changed the balances of an untold number of customers' accounts -- making many of them billionaires in the process. Billionaires on paper, that is, because as Coinbase hastily pointed out in a statement on Twitter, no real trading was affected by the glitch. "We're aware some customers are seeing inflated values for non-tradable crypto assets on Coinbase.com and Coinbase Wallet," read the Coinbase statement acknowledging the error. "This is a display issue only and does not impact trading." But that message came too late for those who saw their inflated accounts and, if even only for a heart-stopping minute, thought they were rich.

The Internet Association, once branded as Silicon Valley's most important trade group in Washington, is shutting down. From a report: The organization offered no specific reason for its decision to disband, which POLITICO had reported Tuesday night. But the group has struggled with financial woes after Microsoft pulled its support earlier this year, and it has fought to maintain relevance on Capitol Hill despite being torn by competing pressures from its huge and smaller member companies on issues like antitrust. The group also faced internal growing pains under new leadership, as POLITICO reported earlier this year.

"Our industry has undergone tremendous growth and change since the Internet Association was formed almost 10 years ago, and in line with this evolution, the Board has made the difficult decision to close the organization at the end of this year," the organization said in a statement Wednesday. It added: "IA has made great progress on its mission to foster innovation, promote economic growth, and empower people through a free and open internet." IA, a nine-year-old group that once called itself "the unified voice of the internet economy," was previously a powerhouse in Washington, even as member companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon fell out of favor on both sides of the aisle.

Apple has quietly nixed all mentions of CSAM from its Child Safety webpage, suggesting its controversial plan to detect child sexual abuse images on iPhones and iPads may hang in the balance following significant criticism of its methods. From a report: Apple in August announced a planned suite of new child safety features, including scanning users' iCloud Photos libraries for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), Communication Safety to warn children and their parents when receiving or sending sexually explicit photos, and expanded CSAM guidance in Siri and Search. Following their announcement, the features were criticized by a wide range of individuals and organizations, including security researchers, the privacy whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Facebook's former security chief, politicians, policy groups, university researchers, and even some Apple employees.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google doesn't accept cryptocurrencies for ad buying, its payments service or its app store. Until recently, Google had banned several categories of crypto ads. Google hasn't touched NFTs. In a recent interview with Bloomberg Television, Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai copped that he "dabbled" in crypto, but didn't own any. Some staffers at Google have also dabbled with the technology, according to multiple current and former employees at the company. Still, Google hasn't laid out a plan for inserting itself into web3. A Google spokesperson said its mobile payments service is "working with several companies" such as Coinbase, Bitpay and Gemini "to support crypto cards, which transact in fiat currencies."

There are a few reasons Google might not want to dive into the new arena -- one is defensive. Web3 evangelists see the technology as "decentralized," controlled by its many participants. They draw stark contrasts to the business models of Google, Facebook and Amazon. These boosters see the blockchain as inherently trustworthy, unlike the current web titans. "Can't do evil > don't be evil," tweeted Chris Dixon, an Andreessen Horowitz partner, in a clear dig at Google. And many Silicon Valley visions for web3 activity, search engines and media decidedly don't involve advertising, Google's main business. But the company isn't completely averse to cryptocurrency. Google has been willing to take crypto money for its cloud business. In September, the division signed a deal with Dapper Labs, a Canadian blockchain company. It also has agreements with Hadera, Block.one and others. Given web3's escalating computing demands, Google will certainly look to ink more of these. (Google will have to weigh crypto's energy needs versus the company's zero-emissions targets.) In some ways, the wait-and-see strategy is typical of Pichai, who has a more deliberate management style than his predecessors. And that doesn't mean the company isn't quietly exploring the technology.

According to job listings on LinkedIn, Google appears to be working on an augmented reality device and operating system to pair with it. Ars Technica reports: On LinkedIn, operating system engineering director Mark Lucovsky announced that he has joined Google. He previously headed up mixed reality operating system work for Meta, and before that he was one of the key architects of Windows NT at Microsoft. "My role is to lead the Operating System team for Augmented Reality at Google," he wrote. He also posted a link to some job listings at Google that give the impression Google is getting just as serious about AR as Apple or Meta.

As 9to5Google discovered, one of the listings ("Senior Software Developer, Embedded, Augmented Reality OS") described Google's objective in clear terms: "Our team is building the software components that control and manage the hardware on our Augmented Reality (AR) products. These are the software components that run on the AR devices and are the closest to the hardware. As Google adds products to the AR portfolio, the OS Foundations team is the very first software team to work with new hardware." Other job listings say new hires will be working on an "innovative AR device." And one specifies that Google is "focused on making immersive computing accessible to billions of people through mobile devices." The roles are largely in the United States, but some are located in Waterloo, Ontario -- the HQ of Canadian smart glasses maker North, which Google acquired in 2020.

Gizmodo's David Nield explains what Web3 is, what it will mean for the future, and how exactly the third-generation internet differs from the first two. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from his report: Let's cut to the chase: For Web3 evangelists, it's a revolution; for skeptics, it's an overhyped house of cards that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. [...] As you might remember if you're of a certain age, Web 1.0 was the era of static webpages. Sites displayed news and information, and maybe you had your own little corner of the World Wide Web to show off your personal interests and hobbies. Images were discouraged -- they took up too much bandwidth -- and video was out of the question. With the dawn of the 21st century, Web 1.0 gave way to Web 2.0 -- a more dynamic, editable, user-driven internet. Static was out and webpages became more interactive and app-like (see Gmail, for example). Many of us signed up for social media accounts and blogs that we used to put our own content on the web in vast amounts. Images and video no longer reduced sites to a crawl, and we started sharing them in huge numbers. And now the dawn of Web3 is upon us. People define it in a few different ways, but at its core is the idea of decentralization, which we've seen with cryptocurrencies (key drivers of Web3). Rather than Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook (sorry, Meta) hoarding everything, the internet will supposedly become more democratized.

Key to this decentralization is blockchain technology, which creates publicly visible and verifiable ledgers of record that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere. The blockchain already underpins Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as well as a number of fledging technologies, and it's tightly interwoven into the future vision of everything that Web3 promises. The idea is that everything you do, from shopping to social media, is handled through the sane secure processes, with both more privacy and more transparency baked in. In some ways, Web3 is a mix of the two eras that came before it: The advanced, dynamic, app-like tech of the modern web, combined with the decentralized, user-driven philosophy that was around at the start of the internet, before billion- and trillion-dollar corporations owned everything. Web3 shifts the power dynamic from the giant tech entities back to the users -- or at least that's the theory.

In its current form, Web3 rewards users with tokens, which will eventually be used in a variety of ways, including currency or as votes to influence the future of technology. In this brave new world, the value generated by the web will be shared out between many more users and more companies and more services, with much-improved interoperability. NFTs are closely linked to the Web3 vision. [...] For our purposes here, the link between cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and Web3 is the foundation: the blockchain. Throw in some artificial intelligence and some machine learning to do everything from filter out unnecessary data to spot security threats, and you've got just about every emerging digital technology covered with Web3. Right now Ethereum is the blockchain attracting the most Web3 interest (it supports both a cryptocurrency and an NFT system, and you can do everything from make a payment through it to build an app on it).

Open source is no place for secrets. From a report: This is a critical time for the Good Chip Intel. After the vessel driftied through the Straits of Lateness towards the Rocks of Irrelevance, Captain Pat parachuted into the bridge to grab the helm and bark "Full steam ahead!" Its first berth at Alder Lake is generally seen as a return to competitive form, but that design started well before Gelsinger's return and there's still zero room for navigational errors in the expeditions ahead. At least one of the course corrections looks a bit rum. Intel has long realised the importance of supporting open source to keep its chips dancing with Linux. Unlike the halcyon days of Wintel dominance, though, this means being somewhat more open about the down-and-dirty details of exactly how its chips do their thing. You can't sign an NDA with the Linux kernel.

Chipmakers are notoriously paranoid: Silicon Valley was born in intrigue and suspicion. Despite Intel's iconic CEO Andy Grove making paranoia a corporate mantra, Intel became relatively relaxed. Qualcomm and Apple would throw you into their piranha pools merely for asking questions if they could, while Intel has learned to give as well as take. But it may be going back to bad habits. One of the new things not open to discussion is something called Software Defined Silicon (SDSi), about which Intel has nothing to say. Which is odd because it has just submitted supporting code for it to the Linux kernel. The code itself doesn't say anything about SDSi, instead adding a mechanism to control whatever it is via some authorised secure token. It basically unlocks hardware features when the right licence is applied. That's not new. Higher performance or extra features in electronic test equipment often comes present but disabled on the base models, and the punter can pay to play later. But what might it mean in SDSi and the Intel architecture?

It is expensive for Intel and OEMs alike to have multiple physical variants of anything; much better if you make one thing that does everything and charge for unlocking it. It's a variant of a trick discovered by hackish school kids in the late 1970s, where cheaper Casio scientific calculators used exactly the same hardware as the more expensive model. Casio just didn't print all the functions on the keyboards of the pleb kit. Future Intel chips will doubtless have cores and cache disabled until magic numbers appear, and with the SoC future beckoning that can extend to all manner of IO, acceleration, and co-processing features. It might even be there already. From engineering, marketing, and revenue perspectives, this is great. Intel could make an M1-like SoC that can be configured on the fly for different platforms, getting the design, performance, and fab efficiencies that Apple enjoys while making sense for multiple OEMs. There could be further revenue from software upgrades, or even subscription models.

Five days after Facebook changed its name to Meta, an Australian artist found herself blocked, with seemingly no recourse, from an account documenting nearly a decade of her life and work. From a report: In October, Thea-Mai Baumann, an Australian artist and technologist, found herself sitting on prime internet real estate. In 2012, she had started an Instagram account with the handle @metaverse, a name she used in her creative work. On the account, she documented her life in Brisbane, where she studied fine art, and her travels to Shanghai, where she built an augmented reality company called Metaverse Makeovers. She had fewer than 1,000 followers when Facebook, the parent company of Instagram, announced on Oct. 28 that it was changing its name. Henceforth, Facebook would be known as Meta, a reflection of its focus on the metaverse, a virtual world it sees as the future of the internet. In the days before, as word leaked out, Ms. Baumann began receiving messages from strangers offering to buy her Instagram handle. "You are now a millionaire," one person wrote on her account. Another warned: "fb isn't gonna buy it, they're gonna take it." On Nov. 2, exactly that happened.

Early that morning, when she tried to log in to Instagram, she found that the account had been disabled. A message on the screen read: "Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else." Whom, she wondered, was she now supposedly impersonating after nine years? She tried to verify her identity with Instagram, but weeks passed with no response, she said. She talked to an intellectual property lawyer but could afford only a review of Instagram's terms of service. "This account is a decade of my life and work. I didn't want my contribution to the metaverse to be wiped from the internet," she said. "That happens to women in tech, to women of color in tech, all the time," added Ms. Baumann, who has Vietnamese heritage.

Google's Pixel 6 line may have served as Android 12's big debut for higher-end phones, but Android 12 (Go edition) plans to bring many of the enhancements and features of Android 12 to lower-end phones, too. Google on Tuesday unveiled a host of new features for the Go edition that are set to roll out to devices in 2022. From a report: Google says that in addition to speed enhancements that'll help apps launch up to 30% faster, Android 12 (Go edition) will include a feature that'll save battery life and storage by automatically "hibernating apps that haven't been used for extended periods of time." And with the Files Go app, you'll be able to recover files within 30 days of deletion. Android 12 (Go edition) will also help you easily translate any content, listen to the news and share apps with nearby devices offline to save data, Google says. The company said Android Go has amassed 200 million users.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has told federal civilian agencies to patch systems affected by the Log4Shell vulnerability by Christmas Eve. From a report: The agency has added yesterday the Log4Shell bug (CVE-2021-44228) to its catalog of actively-exploited vulnerabilities, along with 12 other security flaws. According to this catalog, federal agencies have ten days at their disposal to test which of their internal apps and servers utilize the Log4j Java library, check if systems are vulnerable to the Log4Shell exploit, and patch affected servers. All of this must be done by December 24, according to a timeline provided in the catalog. In addition, CISA has also launched yesterday a dedicated web page providing guidance to the US public and private sector regarding the Log4Shell vulnerability.

The U.K.'s antitrust watchdog has given the clearest signal yet that interventions under an upcoming reform of the country's competition rules will target tech giants Apple and Google -- including their duopolistic command of the mobile market, via iOS and Android; their respective app stores; and the browsers and services bundled with mobile devices running their OSes. From a report: So it could mean good news for third-party developers trying to get oxygen for alternatives to dominant Apple and Google apps and services down the line. Publishing the first part of a wide-ranging mobile ecosystem market study -- which was announced this summer -- the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said today that it has "provisionally" found Apple and Google have been able to leverage their market power to create "largely self-contained ecosystems"; and that the degree of lock-in they wield is damaging competition by making it "extremely difficult for any other firm to enter and compete meaningfully with a new system." "The CMA is concerned that this is leading to less competition and meaningful choice for customers," the watchdog writes in a press release. "People also appear to be missing out on the full benefit of innovative new products and services -- such as so-called 'web apps' and new ways to play games through cloud services on iOS devices."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Four years running, we've been jazzed by the potential of HDMI 2.1 -- the relatively new video connector standard that can provide variable refresh rates (VRR), automatic low latency connections (ALLM), and of course, a giant pipe with 48Gbps of bandwidth (and fixed rate signaling) to deliver up to 10K resolution and up to a 120Hz refresh rate depending on your cable and compression. But today, I'm learning that not only are all of those features technically optional, but that the HDMI standards body owner actually encourages TV and monitor manufacturers that have none of those things -- zip, zilch, zero -- to effectively lie and call them "HDMI 2.1" anyhow. That's the word from TFTCentral, which confronted the HDMI Licensing Administrator with the news that Xiaomi was selling an "HDMI 2.1" monitor that supported no HDMI 2.1 features, and was told this was a perfectly reasonable state of affairs. It's infuriating.

It means countless people, some of whom we've encouraged in our reviews to seek out HDMI 2.1 products, may get fooled into fake futureproofing if they don't look at the fine print to see whether features like ALLM, VRR, or even high refresh rates are possible. Worse, they'll get fooled for no particularly good reason: there was a perfectly good version of HDMI without those features called HDMI 2.0, but the HDMI Licensing Administrator decided to kill off that brand when it introduced the new one. Very little of this is actually news, I'm seeing -- we technically should have known that HDMI 2.1's marquee features would be optional for a while now, and here at The Verge we've seen many a TV ship without full support. In one story about shopping for the best gaming TV for PS5 and Xbox Series X, we characterized it as "early growing pains."