Hands on Logitech has launched a pleasing yet barkingly mad mouse called Lift, the latest in the company's line of ergonomic input devices.

The Lift is a shrunken version of the MX Vertical mouse, replete with the 57° vertical angle of its bigger brother except aimed at those with smaller hands.

We were given left and right-handed versions to play with, and there is no doubt it's unusual looking. However, much like the MX Vertical, the Lift's angle is all about the ergonomics, and designed for a better wrist posture.

Not your writer's hand (credit: Logitech)

In our time with the mouse we'd have to say that a bit of relearning is required but, having grown accustomed to it, it did prove comfortable for this writer's stubby digits.

As well it should – Logitech has set a $69.99 suggested retail price for the device, which comes in graphite, off-white, and rose colors.

The graphite version is made with 70 percent recycled plastic while the rose and off-white use 54 percent, Logitech said. The box and paper packaging are also recyclable.

We wondered if the appearance might make the mouse a bit niche. Logitech's response was: "A lot of ergonomic devices are stigmatized because they look like medical devices. Logitech is a design company, and a big focus is making sure ergonomic devices look inviting and desirable, so uptake is boosted."

We're not so sure – despite the curves, it might not be immediately obvious to users that this is indeed a mouse. That said, Logitech pointed out that "ergonomic devices are now being highly demanded in enterprises" as workplaces look to improve employee conditions.

In use, the mouse fulfills the role of optical mouse with aplomb. We can't imagine gamers switching out their preferred tool for one of these, but as an alternative to the traditional form factor or the trackball, it works well and is positively festooned with buttons. It also has a USB adapter concealed near the battery beneath a magnetically closed cover. Bluetooth is supported and the replaceable battery should last for two years, according to Logitech (this is not a rechargeable device).

Logitech Lift off-white (credit: Logitech)

We only tried it with a Windows 10 PC, although macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, iPadOS, and Android are supported. In our testing it connected with zero fuss as one would expect nowadays. It is also very quiet in use – the trackwheel is nearly silent, as are the frequently used left and right mouse button, mounted on the side for use in that all-important 57° position.

Overall we came away impressed with Logitech's latest foray into ergonomic design. The plastics feel of a decent quality and once one has become accustomed to the device (it took this writer about an hour) going back to a traditional mouse feels equally odd. The price, however, could well put some off. Microsoft's ergonomic mouse, for example, will set you back $49.99 ($28 during the sale at time of writing). Then again, Logitech's larger MX Vertical has a current suggested retail price of $99.99 (although it is rechargeable).

The Lift, being noticeably smaller, feels like a better option. If an enterprise is considering equipping workers with input devices and the budget allows, then it's certainly worth consideration. So long as one can get over the vague oddness of its appearance. ®

Analysis Intel promises that a costly ramp in production of 10nm processors, which includes the forthcoming Sapphire Rapids server chips, will pay off in the second half of the year to counter a slowdown in the PC business.

In the x86 titan's first-quarter earnings call Thursday [PDF], the semiconductor maker stuck with its previous forecast for full-year revenue of $76 billion, even though sales for its biggest moneymaker, the Client Computing Group, are slower than expected in the first half of the year.

The PC business unit saw revenue dip 13 percent year-over-year to $9.3 billion in the first quarter, and that trend is expected to continue in the second quarter, CFO David Zinsner warned on the call. On the other hand, Intel's other business units, including the Datacenter and AI Group and Network and Edge Group, all grew in the first quarter.

Even as NASA publishes images demonstrating progress in the commission of the James Webb Space Telescope, preparations are being made to ground the Boeing 747-based Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) for good.

The end of operations was announced on April 28, confirming that there would be no more mission extensions for the modified Boeing 747 SP and its telescope. Operations will cease "no later than Sept 30, 2022" once the current mission extension comes to an end.

SOFIA, a joint project between NASA and partners at the German Space Agency at the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), was on borrowed time. Development began in 1996, first light was seen in 2010 and the platform was declared fully operational in 2014.

Atlassian has reported robust figures for its Q3 2022 ended March 31 in which revenues were up, net income was in the red and questions over the recent outage continue to linger.

As a reminder, Atlassian's very own Who, Me? moment occurred April 4 when a script used to deactivate instances of a standalone application instead managed to delete the sites of approximately 400 customers, according to a lengthy explanation by CTO Sri Viswanath.

It took until the end of April 18 for the company to recover everything.

Microsoft appears to be planning a VPN-like solution for its Edge browser judging by a support page for the upcoming feature.

The change is described as a "preview feature." It has yet to show up on our Canary and Dev versions of Microsoft's browser, however.

The theory is that by using the Microsoft Edge Secure Networking functionality, one will be kept safe from miscreants when joining networks that "may not be adequately secure."

Facebook parent company Meta has a new project that's grounded in the physical realm: using artificial intelligence to discover new formulas for green concrete.

Concrete is foundational to modern construction, but the manufacturing process is a huge source of carbon emissions. Manufacturing cement, one of the primary ingredients in concrete, is responsible for around 8 percent of global carbon emissions, which reportedly makes it the largest single industrial emitter. And that's just the cement – lots of other stuff with its own trail of carbon emissions goes into concrete.

Meta, which is currently working on eight datacenter projects, pours a lot of concrete.

Ransomware groups in recent years have ramped up the threats against victims to incentivize them to pay the ransom in return for their stolen and encrypted data. But a new crew is essentially destroying files larger than 2MB, so data in those files is lost even if the ransom is paid.

The group behind the Onyx operation is overwriting the data in those files with trash data rather than encrypting it, so the data cannot be recovered via a decryption key. Given that, victims of Onyx ransomware attacks are being urged not to pay the ransom.

"There's a big problem: as the ransomware they are using is a trash skidware, it's destroying a part of the victims' files," analysts at the Malware Hunter Team wrote in a tweet. "Would say, no company should pay to these idiots as smaller files decryptable, big they can't decrypt, but they are stealing files too."

Sales of cloud infrastructure services are still expanding by roughly a third every quarter – despite the maturing market – and in Q1 they leaped 34 percent to hit $55.9 billion.

According to tech research firm Canalys, cloud spending was around $2 billion more than in the previous quarter and $14 billion more than in Q1 2021. The top three cloud service providers – AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – added 42 percent in sales collectively over the last year as their share of the market hit 62 percent.

Although it is more than 16 years since AWS launched as a commercial cloud service, base market growth seems unabated.

Apple is warning that lockdowns of factories in Shanghai due to COVID-19 and industry-wide silicon shortages will hurt its sales by between $4 billion to $8 billion in the next quarter.

On an earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said the "constraints are primarily centered around the Shanghai corridor" but "on a positive front, almost all of the affected final assembly factories have now restarted."

Cook added: "So the the $4 billion to $8 billion range reflects various ramps of getting back up and running. We're also encouraged that the COVID case count that's been reported in Shanghai has decreased over the last few days."

There are doubts about the future of the new read-write NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, because its author is not maintaining the code, or even answering his email, leaving the code orphaned, says a would-be helper.

It took a long time and a lot of work to get Paragon Software's NTFS3 driver merged into the Linux kernel. It finally happened in kernel release 5.15 on the 31st October 2021. It has received no maintenance since.

AWS shone in an otherwise subdued set of financials from megacorp Amazon last night.

While Amazon.com registered a loss [PDF] in operating income for both its North American and International arms ($1.6 billion and $1.3 billion respectively) and a drop in International net sales, AWS continued to notch up impressive gains, with revenue rising to $18.4 billion for the three months ended March 31 from $13.5 billion in the same period last year.

The performance of AWS will have increased calls for the division to be spun out into its own entity despite protestations from boss Adam Selipsky last month.

As cybercriminals become more sophisticated and their attacks more destructive and costly, private security firms and law enforcement need to work together, according to Interpol's Doug Witschi.

It's tough to argue with either of these two statements. But considering the constant barrage of ransomware-attack headlines, as well as politicians' calls for more public-private threat intelligence sharing, they both begin to sound a bit hollow.

Witschi, the assistant director for cybercrime threat response and operations at Interpol, told The Register about recent successes that the agency's Gateway cyber-threat intel sharing project has had, and the increasingly well-funded, targeted attacks that law enforcement agencies are trying to prevent. 

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