Amazon's drone delivery program doesn't seem to be off to a great start. The Prime Air division was said to be hit hard by recent, widespread layoffs. Now, a new report indicates that Amazon's drones have made just a handful of deliveries in their first few weeks of operation. After nearly a decade of working on the program, Amazon said in December that it would start making deliveries by drone in Lockeford, California, and College Station, Texas. However, by the middle of January, as few as seven houses had received Amazon packages by drone, according to The Information: two in California and five in Texas. The report suggests that Amazon has been hamstrung by the Federal Aviation Administration, which is said to be blocking drones from flying over roads or people unless the company gets permission on a case-by-case basis. Although Amazon had touted its FAA certification, the agency imposed a string of restrictions, which hadn't been revealed until now. It has largely rejected Amazon's requests to loosen the limitations. One of the plans the FAA agreed to, according to the report, was for Amazon employees to check no cars were passing on surrounding roads before drones left its Lockeford delivery facility. That depot is on an industrial block, and the drones need to fly over at least one road before getting to any homes. Amazon's drones are far heavier than ones operated by Wing, as well as Walmart’s partners Flytrex and Zipline. Those weigh between 10 and 40 pounds. Amazon's drone, on the other hand, weighs around 80 pounds and can only carry a five-pound payload. The report suggests the drone's mass could be causing concern among FAA officials. The agency has given Wing, Flytrex and Zipline permission to fly over roadways — to date, Wing has carried out more than 300,000 deliveries. One other aspect that doesn't help Amazon's prospects is that folks who want to receive deliveries by drone need a backyard where packages can be dropped off — so apartment dwellers need not apply. The drone can only carry a certain size of box and it dumps packages from 12 feet in the air, further limiting the types of products it can transport. “We meet or exceed all safety standards and have obtained regulatory authorization to conduct commercial drone delivery operations," Amazon spokesperson Maria Boschetti told The Information. "We welcome the FAA’s rigorous evaluations of our operation, and we’ll continue to champion the significant role that regulators play to ensure all drone companies are achieving the right design, build and operating standards." Boschetti added that the Prime Air layoffs, which have reportedly slashed the size of the delivery teams at both locations by more than half, have not affected Amazon's plans for the test sites. Read More

By 2050, the Netherlands should have a circular economy. However, the new Integral Circular Economy Report by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) shows that there is still a long way to go. For the report, the Institute of Environmental Sciences Leiden (CML) mapped how many raw materials we can reuse from old infrastructure and existing buildings. Read More

TikTok has potential bans weighing heavy on its mind, so much so that it’s planning to completely remodel how it will decide to ban accounts that violate its policies. Read More

You can buy the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra in purple, black, green, and cream colorways. Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Apple’s iPhone 14 now has a new rival: the Samsung Galaxy 23. Announced during the company’s recent Unpacked event alongside a slate of new Galaxy Books, the S23 series is available for preorder starting this week with a street date of February 17th. The new phones arrive with faster performance, bigger batteries, and updated selfie cameras, with the Ultra offering an even higher resolution camera than its predecessor. But before you throw down upwards of $799 on a preorder, you may want to know how Samsung’s forthcoming smartphones measure up to Apple’s latest and greatest handsets. While both lineups include phones with impressive specs, there are a couple of key differences to be aware of. Read More

Amazon started drone delivery in one town in California and one in Texas in December.  As of mid-January, the company had made deliveries to fewer than 10 houses, The Information reported. The FAA is blocking Amazon's drones from flying over people or roads without case by case permission, according to The Information. Since December, residents in Lockeford, California and College Station, Texas who order products on Amazon have had a chance of receiving them by drone. Read More

A Democratic senator has joined a growing group of Republican lawmakers pushing for Big Tech platforms to remove TikTok on national security grounds because of its ties to China. Read More

The humble Wi-Fi router has become an essential fixture in every home, but the one your internet service provider sent is likely the reason your Wi-Fi sucks. There are various ways to improve your Wi-Fi, but few are as effective as upgrading your router. Benefits will extend to everything from streaming movies and online gaming to video calls. Most people can get by just fine with a single Wi-Fi router, and I’ve collected recommendations to suit different needs, spaces, and budgets. I tested all of these in a busy family home full of Netflix-addicted gamers. There’s a mesh Wi-Fi option here too, but check out our Best Mesh Wi-Fi Routers guide for larger homes. If you're confused about terminology, our How to Buy a Router guide can help. Whatever you choose, make sure you secure your router. Read More

In 2017 Volvo marked itself as something of a pioneer in the auto industry when then-CEO Hakan Samuelsson announced that the company would focus on electrification in the coming years, with a goal of selling a million electrified cars by 2025. It's not doing too badly in that regard—already in 2021 a quarter of its sales were plug-in hybrids or battery-electric vehicles, and that grew to one in three during 2022. But there's plenty more to come. Today, Reuters reported that Volvo currently has six new EVs in development to go on sale by 2026. Read More

While a majority of employers have recalled their employees back into the office over the last few months – ending a nearly two-year work-from-home – ecosystem, a large majority of remote workers are still shaping the future of work and work-life balance through the introduction of new technology. Statistics show that between 2019 and 2022 the number of […] The post Must-Have Digital Nomad Apps For Better Work And Travel In 2023 appeared first on ReadWrite. Read More

Analysts didn’t hold great expectations for Meta’s fourth quarter earnings, largely due to a downturn in online advertising and fierce competition from rivals like TikTok. What was most unexpected, however, was how happy Wall Street was with Mark Zuckerberg’s plans. Read More

You may have noticed that Samsung's Galaxy S23 series of phones have a special version of Qualcomm's most powerful mobile chip, called Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy. Awkward name aside, in its promo materials Samsung says the new chip offers "more than 40% GPU and NPU," and that it's been "exclusively optimized for Galaxy." But what, exactly, does that mean? SEE ALSO: Samsung Galaxy S23 price, release date, and preorder details: How to get the S23 Ultra, S23 Plus, or the base model In a press release (via XDA Developers), Qualcomm shared more details about the chip's exact specs. First, its primary clock speed has been increased from 3.2GHz to 3.36GHz, and the GPU clock speed has been increased from 680MHz to 719MHz. In plain terms, the new chip is faster than the regular Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, and you will see it in benchmarks, but in real life the difference likely won't be very noticeable. There are other improvements. The new chip uses Snapdragon Cognitive ISP tech to enable real-time Semantic Segmentation for image processing. This is a technology that uses deep learning to identify various objects in the image, which should hopefully result in better quality pictures. Finally, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy appears to have an upgraded Snapdragon Hexagon processor, which should improve AI performance overall. One area in which this should be noticeable, Qualcomm says, is better noise cancellation during calls. Featured Video For You Hands On: Samsung's Odyssey Ark Is a Curved Monster of a Gaming Monitor It's hard to say how noticeable will all these changes be in real-life usage, but they definitely amount to something. Qualcomm typically launches a "Plus" variant of its flagship chips every year, and XDA Developers points out that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy is improved enough to essentially be called Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2, though it's unclear what the company's plans are at this point. Read More

If you dream about a future in which artificial intelligence can create new episodes of old TV shows, this AI project will be both exciting and disappointing. Read More

Victor Zubriski, 74, is leaving the Boca Raton area after 20 years and moving to Portugal. He said rising housing costs, overcrowding, and pollution have decreased the quality of life. Zubriski is part of a vocal movement of residents leaving Florida as the state's population grows. Victor Zubriski has lived in Boca Raton, Florida, and its surrounding towns for the last 20 years. He said it's far from the paradise everyone's made it out to be. Read More

House Democrats pushing for a stock trade ban in Congress got burned by Pelosi last year. In a letter exclusively shared with Insider, they're now pushing McCarthy to pick up where she left off. The GOP House Speaker has spoken favorably of a ban in the last year, but hasn't gotten specific. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is facing new calls to pass legislation to ban members of Congress from trading stocks. Read More

Frozen power lines are seen hanging near a sidewalk on February 1st, 2023, in Austin, Texas. Photo by Brandon Bell / Getty Images Power outages hit hundreds of thousands of Texans during a winter storm this week, bringing to mind deadly blackouts the state suffered in a 2021 cold spell. More than 400,000 customers had no electricity today as the icy storm that started Monday entered its final stretch. This week’s blackouts, however, played out much differently than the 2021 disaster. And fortunately, the ice storm is forecast to finally ease up today. But it was another reminder of the work left to do to shore up Texas’ fragile grid. This week’s blackouts played out much differently than the 2021 disaster The hashtag #TexasFreeze trended once again with scenes of vehicles skidding on ice-covered roadways and frozen trees wrecking power lines. Read More

Everyone from big tech companies to VC to casual investors want to get in on the ChatGPT hype. It remains to be seen how generative AI will transform our lives, but the tech is here to stay.  Microsoft's deal with OpenAI is setting the pace, and everyone else will have to catch up. ChatGPT has taken the tech world by storm in just a few short months. Read More

Trump said if reelected he won't go on a revenge tour even though he's 'entitled' to one.  He went on a tirade against the New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on Russiagate. The ex-president made the comments on Hugh Hewitt.  Former President Donald Trump waged war against Republicans who voted for his 2021 impeachment — but he pledged not to take the same payback tactic against his political enemies if reelected to the White House in 2024. Read More

In the blog post announcing the new AI-powered features, Microsoft confirmed that several of its new features are powered by OpenAI's GPT-3.5 AI language model. Most notable among these is the "Intelligent Recap" feature that collates all the information from the meeting into an easy-to-browse format. Users can simply click on chapters to access the most relevant section of any meeting's notes. The feature also boasts the ability to generate notes, create tasks, and provide participants with a summary of the meeting — even if they were unable to join. Then there is the personalized timeline markers feature. In its initial form, it tells users when they left and rejoined the meetings. Soon, the feature will be expanded to inform users when their names are mentioned in their absence. This feature could be very useful for teams working in different time zones and help people catch up on meetings held at unearthly hours. Read More

In the middle of the night, Twitter made an announcement that disappointed a wide range of developers whose research, bots, and apps depend on free access to the platform’s API to function. Twitter announced in a tweet that starting on February 9, Twitter “will no longer support free access to the Twitter API.” Instead, many developers will have to either pay to access public data or abruptly shut down their projects. Twitter has not yet shared how much its new “paid basic tier” will cost, and the company has only vaguely promised “more details on what you can expect next week.” Thousands of small developers may have to shut down free tools like @ThreadReaderApp or @RemindMe_ofThis, the Verge reported, impacting hundreds of thousands of followers who rely on small developers to build tools that help maximize their engagement with the platform. Read More

Auburn University has blocked TikTok on campus WiFi following a directive by Alabama's governor. Journalism professors have been told to find workarounds so they can still teach multimedia skills. One professor told Insider it would do students an "injustice" to remove TikTok from the curriculum. Auburn University, Alabama, is among the dozens of US colleges that have restricted access to TikTok on campus – and some journalism professors warn it could have unexpected consequences on students' education. Read More

When Star Wars: Visions debuted in 2021, it was justly celebrated for how it allowed some of Japan’s greatest anime studios carte blanche to create their own, well, visions of how the Star Wars galaxy could look. The results were frequently stellar, but season two will be made beyond just Japan. Read More

The blue and green Paperwhite models are both down to $109.99. Image: Amazon Getting bored staying indoors because it’s too cold to venture outside? We feel you, which is why we found some good deals today that’ll keep you entertained while inside. First up, Amazon is discounting the new green and blue versions of its latest Kindle Paperwhite.Both are on sale with ads and 16GB of storage for $109.99 ($40 off), or you can buy them without ads for $129.99 ($40 off). The new color configurations were announced just yesterday, yet today’s discount is only $10 shy of the Paperwhite’s lowest price to date. This is the same Paperwhite we reviewed (and loved) upon its debut in late 2021 — just a little more colorful. Read More

Lining up all your favourite snacks and drinks, surrounding yourself with cushions and blankets, and then spending hours in front of a screen can be a truly therapeutic experience, but there is one big problem with this hobby: There is a limited amount of content out there to keep you entertained. We are a greedy bunch. Regular streamers can quickly get to a point when it feels like there's nothing left to watch, and what are you supposed to do then? Don't panic, because there is a simple solution to this frustrating issue. If you've reached this frustrating point of saturation, you should consider investing in a VPN. What is a VPN? VPNs are security tools that provide protection for your information by creating a private network that hides your real IP address. All of your activity is untraceable and secure, because all of your online traffic passes through an encrypted tunnel. Nobody can see into the tunnel, and everything inside the tunnel is protected against online threats like hackers, viruses, and malware. The act of hiding your real IP address is what can trick leading streaming sites into thinking you are based in another country.Do you need a VPN? VPNs are used to provide protection for your sensitive information, which is obviously super important. This isn't the only reason VPNs are so popular though, because these tools can be also be used to watch content that is normally blocked in your location. By hiding your real IP address and connecting you to a server in another country, you can watch all your favourite content from that location. For example, you could watch all the extra films and shows on American Netflix that are not usually accessible outside of the U.S. There is so much content out there that can be accessed with the help of a VPN. Everyone is in need of something that can bypass geo-restrictions to access all of this blocked entertainment, and that something is a VPN. These services are keys to the online world, granting you access to more of the shows and films you love. How do you unblock U.S. Netflix with a VPN? If you think accessing American Netflix is going to be difficult with a VPN, think again. It's actually a really simple process that absolutely everyone can understand. We promise. All you need to do is open up your preferred VPN, select an American server in order to spoof your IP to a U.S. address, and then head to Netflix. This quick and easy action makes Netflix think you're in the U.S. when you're actually in the UK, so you can watch all that great content that is normally unavailable. Not too complicated, right? If you're worried that this whole thing sounds a bit illegal, then maybe we can reassure you. It's currently legal to watch Netflix while using a VPN, although we should point out that Netflix states in its terms of service that it may restrict your account without compensation or notice if you are engaged in "improper" use. We're not entirely sure what that means, but consider yourself warned. We should make it very clear that you still need to be subscribed to Netflix for this trick to work. A VPN is not going to grant access to the streaming site for free. A VPN provides access to more libraries from around the world, once you're subscribed.Can you use free VPNs for streaming? There are plenty of free versions and free trials of VPNs, so why would you ever consider paying for a service? As with most things in life, you get what you pay for with VPNs. There is always a catch with free versions, and it's normally in the form of limited data usage. These plans will be just fine if you're just an occasional user, but if you're going to be streaming or downloading anything, this isn't going to work. Free trials are different as come with everything you get in a paid plan, but obviously they don't tend to last very long. Trials are great for testing out a service before committing, but this isn't a long-term solution. To gain access to advanced security features without limitations on usage, you generally need to pay up. That being said, services like ProtonVPN offer an impressive set of features for free. However, you might have trouble streaming Netflix with this free version.What is the best VPN for Netflix? There are a lot of VPN services out there that can effectively unblock American Netflix, but which is the best? There are plenty of strong options for you to consider, but we wouldn't want you wasting your time checking everything out. To save you time, we've handpicked your best options. Each service has a different set of features that will suit some users better than others, and it's all about finding something that works for you. It's tough to pick the best VPN for accessing American Netflix, but ExpressVPN does stand out from the competition for a number of reasons. It has a streaming-friendly interface, security focused features, and strong connection speeds. All of this provides users with a straightforward and speedy streaming experience. Speed is probably the most important feature to consider when it comes to picking a VPN for streaming. Using a VPN to connect to another country often affects your download speed, which can be devastating when you are trying to binge on your favourite show. We found that using ExpressVPN consistently results in the lowest buffering time when streaming Netflix in 4K. It is however a little pricey. ExpressVPN is at the top of this list because it combines essential features with impressive results, but it isn’t the only option available to you. We have lined up all the best VPNs for unblocking Netflix, with something for everyone on this list. We've highlighted the best deals on the likes of Surfshark, PureVPN, CyberGhost VPN, NordVPN, and ZenMateVPN. These are the best VPNs for Netflix in 2023. Read More

The world’s most famous chatbot, ChatGPT, was released in late November of last year. The immediate response was astonishment, followed almost immediately by terror about its ramifications — most notably that it might generate school essays for dishonest kids. Yesterday, almost exactly two months later, OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent company released what many users hope will be the antidote to the poison.  OpenAI’s "classifier for indicating AI-written text" is the company’s latest invention, and it’s as easy-to-use as one could want: Copy-paste text into the box, click "Submit," and get your result. But if you’re expecting a straight answer, you’re going to be disappointed. Instead, it assigns the text one of a range of classifications, from "very unlikely" to be AI-generated, to "unlikely," "unclear," "possibly," or "likely AI-generated." SEE ALSO: An AI-generated parody of 'Seinfeld' is streaming on an infinite loop In other words, it’s like one of those frustrating conversations with your doctor; you will never get a straight answer, so your doctor will never be technically wrong.  Thankfully, OpenAI is not hiding the classifier's unreliability. "Our classifier is not fully reliable," the intro page for the tool says. Provided with what it calls a "challenge set" of texts, we’re told it gave false positives 9 percent of the time.  In Mashable’s tests, however, it was even less reliable than that in certain limited contexts. In deliberately challenging scenarios, it produced false results in both directions — saying it was unlikely that AI-written text was AI-written, and that human-written text was likely AI-written — almost as often as not. The difference, perhaps, is that we were trying to trick it.  Here’s how things shook out:It doesn’t mistake the classics for ChatGPT AI outputs First the good news: This tool does the bare minimum pretty well by not mislabeling the masterworks of the English language as AI outputs. When we put in snippets of Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Ulysses, and others, it was 100-percent effective. It labeled them all "very unlikely" to be AI-written. This snippet from Tennyson’s "The Lady of Shallott" for instance, was classified appropriately.  Credit: OpenAI / Screengrab The lesson: This machine might not notice that it has been fed a masterpiece of surpassing beauty and depth, but at least it doesn’t say, "I think a robot could have written this."None of its other results are very impressive Immediately after that test, we asked ChatGPT to create a Tennyson poem about King Arthur at Comic Con. Here's a sample of what it generated: King Arthur and his knights, so brave and bold, At Comic Con, their tales of glory told. Walking 'round the floor, in cosplay gear, Their swords and shields, no longer mere. The crowds all cheered, as they walked by, With Merlin close behind, his magic nigh. Sir Lancelot, Sir Gawain, Bors the Brave, Their quest for glory, they'll never waive. Not bad for a robot, but still extremely bad ("no longer mere"???). When we fed this lyrical ballad into the classifier, we expected it to easily outsmart us, forcing us to dive a little deeper into our bag of tricks. Nope: Credit: OpenAI / Screengrab For what it's worth, it didn't classify this doggerel as "very unlikely," just "unlikely." Still, it left us a little uneasy. After all, we hadn't tried very hard to trick it, and it worked.Our tests suggest it might bust innocent kids for cheating School essays are where the rubber meets the road with today's malicious uses of AI-generated text. So we created our best attempt at a no-frills five-paragraph essay with dull-as-dishwater prose and content (Thesis: "Dogs are better than cats."). We figured no actual kid could possibly be this dull, but the classifier caught on anyway: Sorry but yes, a human wrote this. Credit: OpenAI / Screengrab And when ChatGPT tackled the same prompt, the classifier was — at first — still on target: Credit: OpenAI / Screengrab And this is what the system looks like when it truly works as advertised. This is a school-style essay, written by a machine, and OpenAI's tool for catching such "AI plagiarism" caught it successfully. Unfortunately, it immediately failed when we gave it a more ambiguous text. For our next test, we manually wrote another five-paragraph essay, but we included some of OpenAI's writing crutches, like starting the body paragraphs with simple words like "first" and "second," and using the admittedly robotic phrase "in conclusion." But the rest was a freshly-written essay about the virtues of toaster ovens. Once again, the classification was inaccurate: Credit: OpenAI / Screengrab It's admittedly one of the dullest essays of all time, but a human wrote the whole thing, and OpenAI says it suspects otherwise. This is the most troubling result of all, since one can easily imagine some high school student getting busted by a teacher despite not breaking any rules. Our tests were unscientific, our sample size was minuscule, and we were absolutely trying to trick the computer. Still, getting it to spit out a perversely wrong result was way too easy. We learned enough from our time using this tool to say confidently that teachers absolutely should not use OpenAI’s "classifier for indicating AI-written text" as a system for finding cheaters. In conclusion, we ran this very article through the classifier. That result was perfectly accurate: Credit: OpenAI / Screengrab ...Or was it???? Read More

Samsung’s first big tech event of 2023 unveiled three phones and three laptops. The showstoppers are, predictably, the company’s premium flagships, the Galaxy S series. The S23 Ultra ($1,199) has a huge 6.8-inch, an S-pen stylus and a 200-megapixel camera. That’s a lot of pixels. It’s the company’s first Adaptive Pixel sensor, which means while you can still shoot at 200MP, by default, the system uses pixel-binning to deliver brighter, clearer pictures at 50MP or 12MP. Other upgrades include optical image stabilization that’s been effectively doubled for better-lit photos and less shaky video. Meanwhile, the Galaxy S23 (starting at $800) and S23+ ($1,000) are slightly more iterative but still premium smartphones. They pack reliable cameras and faster processors – the entire S23 series has a special overclocked version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. All the phones are available to pre-order now. Samsung also revealed an ultra laptop. The 16-inch Galaxy Book 3 Ultra draws inspiration from the company’s best-selling Galaxy S phones, but combines it with heavy-hitting PC specs, like 13th-gen Intel Core i9 processors and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4070 graphics. – Mat Smith. The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here. The biggest stories you might have missed Samsung is making 'extended reality' wearable devices. How to pre-order the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and the rest of the S23 series. OpenAI starts offering a paid ChatGPT plan for $20 per month. Jony Ive designed a 'perfect' Red Nose for charity. Sony has now shipped over 32.1 million PS5s following blockbuster holiday sales. FTC fines drug discount app GoodRx for sharing user information with Facebook and Google. AI-generated ‘Seinfeld’ is pretty awfulAt least it’s inadvertently entertaining.Nothing Forever What if AI made never-ending Seinfeld? “Nothing, Forever” uses OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural language model to produce (occasionally coherent) dialog between pixelated characters Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer. One creator posted to Reddit: “Aside from the artwork and the laugh track you’ll hear, everything else is generative, including dialogue, speech, direction (camera cuts, character focus, shot length, scene length, etc.), character movement, and music.” The stream has little human involvement and changes based on viewer feedback from the Twitch stream. Continue reading. Sony is killing its PlayStation Plus collection on May 9thIf you own a PS5, claim the games before then. Since September 2020, Sony's PlayStation Plus Collection has offered a bunch of PS4 greatest hits to PlayStation 5 owners with an active PS Plus membership. It included God of War, The Last of Us Remastered, Resident Evil 7 and more. Alas, come May 9th, Sony is shuttering the PlayStation Plus Collection, saying it plans to focus on bringing more games to its various tiers of PS Plus. Make sure you download any of the 19 titles now, while they’re still there. Continue reading. Facebook now has 2 billion usersThe social network is still growing. Almost 20 years in, Facebook is still growing. Meta reported alongside its fourth-quarter earnings it has now reached two billion daily users. While Facebook isn’t the first Meta-owned platform to reach that number – WhatsApp recently crossed two billion DAUs – it does show the company’s biggest source of ad revenue is still growing. During a call with analysts, Zuckerberg suggested Meta will continue to make cuts as it prioritizes efficiency. “We're going to be more proactive about cutting projects that aren't performing or may no longer be as crucial,” he said. The CEO also said generative AI would be a priority for Meta in the year ahead. Read More

Photo: Piotr Swat (Shutterstock) OpenAI has announced the launch of a paid version of ChatGPT that, for $20 a month, will allow you to...uh, keep using ChatGPT, I guess. In a blog post published Wednesday, the research organization announced the release of “ChatGPT Plus,” a pilot subscription plan for its uncanny little toy. What do you get for your monthly subscription fee? Well, to be honest, not a whole helluva lot—at least, not yet. Read More

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that AI bot ChatGPT reached an estimated 100 million active monthly users last month, a mere two months from launch, making it the "fastest-growing consumer application in history," according to a UBS investment bank research note. In comparison, TikTok took nine months to reach 100 million monthly users, and Instagram about 2.5 years, according to UBS researcher Lloyd Walmsley. “In 20 years following the Internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app," Reuters quotes Walmsley as writing in the UBS note. Read More

As lithium-ion batteries continue to decrease in price, they are quickly replacing the lead-acid batteries traditionally used in cars and other vehicles. This is creating a sudden abundance of used lead-acid batteries, which would be harmful to the environment and people if not recycled properly. To help deal with this problem, researchers developed an environmentally friendly method to turn lead from used lead-acid batteries into photodetectors operating in the UV-visible band. Read More

Image: Hot Topic Get your Cullen squad ready, this new Twilight collection includes the coveted baseball jersey. Hot Topic gave io9 a first look at the line dropping this Friday, February 3 in stores and online at hottopic.com and heruniverse.com. The six-piece collection celebrates the late-2000s book and film franchise, the latter of which starred The Batman’s Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart as a vampire-human couple who fall into forbidden, angsty love. The collection includes a cosplay-inspired version of Bella’s prom dress—perfect for a Valentine’s Day date. If you’re celebrating Galentine’s Day instead by marathoning the movies, there’s nostalgic Team Edward and Team Jacob gear that’s perfect for the occasion. Read More

Delta Air Lines Inc. on Wednesday launched free WiFi on 75% of its domestic mainline aircraft, an early step toward its overhaul of in-flight entertainment in favor of personalization and free services like Paramount+ streaming, New York Times puzzles and more. Read More

When it comes to off-roading, Jeep is the one name brand that keeps coming up. From its inception, the Jeep has been a great climber. We'll tell you why. Read More

Faced with volatile markets, investors are always seeking alternatives to stocks and bonds to hedge their bets. In a recent Bloomberg piece, which asked seasoned money managers how best to invest $10,000 right now, Russ Koesterich, a portfolio manager at BlackRock — the world’s largest asset manager — proposed an unusual idea: chickens. Read More

Security researchers warn that hackers may start using Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) more often as method to achieve persistence and execute code on a target machine via malicious Office add-ins. Read More

The Mac mini (2023) brings Apple's M2 chipset and a set of options that might have you wondering how you'll tell the difference between sleek metal boxes. Read More

Microsoft says the KB5021751 update is respecting users' privacy while identifying the number of customers running Office versions that are outdated or approaching their end of support. Read More

In economic theory, the Phillips curve posits a tradeoff between unemployment and inflation. Essentially,unemployment has to rise for inflation to come down. Formulated by the New Zealand-born economist William Phillips in 1958, the idea passed quickly into received wisdom—and then into contentious debate. Read More

Amazon told lawmakers it wouldn’t build storm shelters in its warehouses after a December 2021 tornado killed six employees at an Illinois location. Although the company changed its severe-weather response strategy after the incident, it essentially told the elected officials that since building storm shelters isn’t required by law, it won’t do that. The company responded to lawmakers Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO), who sent a letter on December 15th, questioning the company’s lack of storm shelters or safe rooms at its warehouses. “Amazon’s apparent unwillingness to invest in a storm shelter or safe room at its Edwardsville facility is made even more concerning by the fact that installing one could be done by Amazon at relatively low cost,” the lawmakers wrote. “This cost is negligible for a company like Amazon, which brought in more than $500 billion in revenue over the 12-month period ending September 30, 2022 and clearly has the resources necessary to protect its workers should it have the will to do so.” Company vice president of public policy Brian Huseman responded (via CNBC), “Amazon requires that its buildings follow all applicable laws and building codes. We have not identified any jurisdiction in the United States that requires storm shelters or safe rooms for these types of facilities.”Lawrence Bryant / reuters Huseman added that Amazon follows Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and National Weather Service guidelines and will continue using a “severe weather assembly area” for sheltering in place instead of the requested storm shelters. The six employees and contractors who died at the warehouse tried to protect themselves in a bathroom; the surviving workers took refuge in an assembly area. OSHA investigated the incident last April and ordered Amazon to review its severe weather policies, but it fell short of penalizing the company for its response. Additionally, Amazon hired a meteorologist, launched an internal center for monitoring severe weather and created emergency cards pointing out evacuation points and assembly areas. Amazon reportedly began rebuilding the warehouse last June. The families of two of the employees killed there have sued the company for wrongful death. Read More

Combined ballistic impacts pose a major challenge for engineers who build structures that must withstand extreme stresses. The combination of blast pressure and impact at high speed increases the chances of greater damage. Ph.D. candidate Benjamin Stavnar Elveli describes it as the scariest stress there is. Read More

Writing is hard and time consuming. Thanks to ChatGPT, it just became easier and faster. Rudimentary chatbots have been writing simple articles, such as sports game summaries, for years. ChatGPT, from artificial intelligence (AI) supernova OpenAI, leaps far beyond this through its search of billions of internet texts and ability to generate passable prose from prompts and questions. It can even simulate software code. But it’s a large language model (LLM), so it’s still not great at math or many other things. It makes funny mistakes. Read More

Nickolas Sharp, a former Ubiquiti employee who managed the networking device maker's cloud team, pled guilty today to stealing gigabytes worth of files from Ubiquiti's network and trying to extort his employer while posing as an anonymous hacker and a whistleblower. Read More

There are thousands of verified amateur performers on Pornhub catering to all manner of kinks, from foot fetishes to pegging and beyond. So, understandably, it’s hard to stand out. But the 38-year-old Puerto Rican–born performer who goes by Yinyleon — a portmanteau of her real-life nickname, Yiny, and that of her 42-year-old husband and costar — appears to have cracked the code. In the nearly four years the Texas-based Yiny and Leon have been at it, they have posted around 250 videos to Pornhub, amassing more than 1.2 billion views. Last week, Yinyleon was named Pornhub’s most-viewed amateur model of the year for the second year running, outranking significantly younger performers Angel, Sweetie Fox, and DickForLily. Read More

After two months of arguing back and forth with critics about how so many aspects of its "No clouds" security cameras could be accessed online by security researchers, Anker smart home division Eufy has provided a lengthy explanation and promises to do better. In multiple responses to The Verge, which has repeatedly called out Eufy for failing to address key aspects of its security model, Eufy has plainly stated that video streams produced by its cameras could be accessed, unencrypted, through the Eufy web portal, despite messaging and marketing that suggested otherwise. Eufy also stated it would bring in penetration testers, commission an independent security researcher's report, create a bug bounty program, and better detail its security protocols. Read More

Ready the spicy tots and thunder sticks. Game Day is Feb. 12 and, if you’re like us, you’re thrilled to don the jersey and spend the day noshing, screaming at the TV, and high-fiving with your pals. Hosting a big Game Day party at your place this year? No sweat. These rad party favors from Walmart will score serious points from your home team. Read More

Is it time to say goodbye to earthquake alerts and serendipitous art on Twitter? Like most social media businesses, Twitter has long offered an API, which allows outside developers to write programs that use its platform. It’s how third-party apps like Hootsuite and tools like ThreadReader are able to operate. And it’s how automated accounts function. Read More

A new cyber espionage campaign dubbed 'No Pineapple!' has been attributed to the North Korean Lazarus hacking group, allowing the threat actors to stealthily steal 100GB of data from the victim without causing any destruction. Read More

Razer announced its lightest gaming mouse today, the Viper Mini Signature Edition. It only weighs 49g, making it 16 percent lighter than the company’s Viper V2 Pro and one of the most lightweight mice we’ve seen from a large company. The mouse uses a magnesium alloy exoskeleton with a semi-hollow interior (bearing a slight resemblance to the SteelSeries Aerox 3 Wireless). “We wanted to push beyond the traditional honeycomb design, and this required a material with an outstanding strength-to-weight ratio,” said Razer’s Head of Industrial Design, Charlie Bolton. “After evaluating plastics, carbon fiber and even titanium, we ultimately chose magnesium alloy for its exceptional properties.”Razer Razer says the mouse uses its fastest wireless tech and will be among its best-performing wireless mice. It includes the Razer Focus Pro 30K Optical Sensor, Optical Mouse Switches Gen-3 and HyperPolling Wireless with 4000Hz polling rates. Additionally, Razer says the mouse’s battery lasts up to 60 hours and can fully charge via USB-C in less than 90 minutes. It ships with a pre-paired USB dongle. The $280 mouse will be available exclusively on Razer’s website starting February 11th. Read More

Ella Balinska, voice actress of Frey in Forspoken, has seen the discourse surrounding the game and, unlike her character who would probably tell some of y’all to fuck off, she’s very gracious. In my interview with her, she told me she understands gamers are a passionate lot and that she appreciates that about them. “I love the gaming community for how committed they are to really getting in depth for each game that they play,” Balinska said over Zoom. She also understands that folks’ reaction to Frey — sometimes calling her mean and shitty — stems from the fact that Frey isn’t like other video game protagonists. “This is such an extraordinary game that has come out with this amazing protagonist who’s so bold, so unapologetic, so reluctant in the best way possible,” she said. “I think audiences might not be so used to seeing that.” Read More

Cisco has released security updates this week to address a high-severity vulnerability in the Cisco IOx application hosting environment that can be exploited in command injection attacks. Read More

Poker Face, writer and director Rian Johnson’s new murder mystery, premiered last week on Peacock to fawning reviews, with Natasha Lyonne’s character Charlie Cale—a DIY crime solver on the run from casino baddies with a preternatural ability to spot a lie—quickly becoming a cult favorite. Who would have thought a remake of a dusty 1970s cop show would be such rich material? To be fair, Poker Face isn’t literally a remake. But as no less a resource than the Columbophile Blog has pointed out, “ Poker Face could be a Columbo reboot in all but name.” Both Johnson and Lyonne are avowed Columbo-heads, with Lyonne once threatening to fight Mark Ruffalo over the right to play the titular lieutenant. In interviews, Johnson has tiptoed around the inspiration, saying, “It’s kind of a throwback to Magnum P.I. or Rockford Files or Columbo.” Or he’d explain that “like Columbo, we show you the murder in the first act. We show you who did it. And then it’s [about] how Natasha Lyonne’s character is going to end up catching them.” And when Vulture asked The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle how he ended up being cast, he gave away the game: “I was probably bugging [Johnson] about something and he texted, ‘Want to... Read More

Contractor management is the process of overseeing and coordinating the work of independent contractors to ensure that they are meeting the terms of their contracts and complying with relevant laws, regulations, and policies. It is essential because contractor management ensures that the work being performed by contractors is of high quality, is completed on time, […] The post Take Business to the Next Level With Automating Contractor Management appeared first on ReadWrite. Read More