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A press release published last week claims that Bittrex violated or ignored its own security standards and industry-standard practices, allowing hackers to steal 100 Bitcoin from the Seattle-based angel investor in April. Bennett also told reporters he believes AT&T staff were involved in the attack, claiming that his account PIN and social security number had been changed, which apparently indicates an inside job. “Bittrex was bamboozled by hackers who should have been as visible as thieves wearing masks and carrying guns,” said Bennett....

Researchers at Washington State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have reportedly developed a Sodium-ion based battery that can perform as well as Lithium-ion type batteries, that are found in everything from smartphones to Teslas, SlashGear reports. [Read: Polestar plugs into pan-European charging network to make EV road trips easier] The breakthrough, published in the journal ACS Energy Letters, makes for potential battery technology using abundant and cheap materials. Researchers on the project have reported one of the best results to date for a sodium-ion battery, saying it can maintain more than 80% of its charge after 1,000 charging cycles....

Researchers found SPT0418–47 likely has a disk surrounding a central bulge like our own galaxy, but there is no evidence so far for spiral arms. This is the most ancient galaxy ever seen possessing a central bulge. “This result represents a breakthrough in the field of galaxy formation, showing that the structures that we observe in nearby spiral galaxies and in our Milky Way were already in place 12 billion years ago,” says Francesca Rizzo, PhD student from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany....

I know it’s pretty gauche for fan-people to declare one system better than the other – especially considering none of us have played either unreleased console. Just to be clear though: I’m not a PlayStation fanboy, I’m an Xbox One-lover. But I can see the future of gaming, and it is VR. And the longer Microsoft ignores that, the bigger its mistake will be. I’ve seen the future before, the kind that changes the video game world forever....

In a ruling yesterday, Spain’s supreme court said that riders for Barcelona-based food delivery service Glovo should be seen as employees and not as freelancers or independent contractors, Reuters reports. As a result, gig-workers in the country could have a solid legal basis for demanding formal employment contracts and associated benefits. [Read: 5 things to know when you’re buying your first electric vehicle] “[Glovo] fixes the conditions for the provision of its services, and owns the assets essential to carrying out its services,” the court said....

At the time, Spotify said that HiFi would launch “later this year” and that it would have “more details to share soon.” Yet we’ve started a whole new year, and Spotify HiFi is still nowhere to be seen. A few days ago, the company made one of its first comments about lossless since its original announcement. Unfortunately, it wasn’t good news. Instead, Spotify provided an update on its community forums that suggests HiFi i isn’t close to launching....

If you come up with a brilliant new concept, you also need to help those who didn’t think it up know why it’s so darn brilliant. On top of that, you don’t have much time to teach, so a sharply-honed message is your one big shot at piercing the collective consciousness. It’s tough, but not impossible. With the training in The Complete Digital Copywriting Master Class Bundle ($39, over 90 percent off, from TNW Deals), you can get up to speed on exactly how to craft an effective modern marketing campaign....

While the Supreme Court’s original decision was unanimous, a lower court ruled the case could continue in state courts because the state of Nevada interprets the word “work” differently than the federal government. A 1974 Supreme Court ruling protects employers from being “forced” to pay for activities not intrinsic to an employee’s ability to complete the work they were hired for. As the New York Times reported after the 2014 ruling:

And yet I still consider this laptop to be near the top of its class. A few quibbles aside, it’s one of the easiest to recommend laptops on the market. I don’t think Microsoft can get away with another year of this design, but starting at $999, the Surface Laptop 4 is still one of the prettiest, most pleasant to use laptops money can buy. Here are some of the reasons why....

According to a recent survey from industry body PAVE (Partners for Automated Vehicle Education), most Americans don’t believe autonomous vehicles are “ready for prime-time.” [Read: The crazy story how self-driving’s biggest star stole Google secrets, joined Uber, and became bankrupt] Nearly half of those surveyed said they would never get in a taxi or ride-share vehicle if it was being driven autonomously. It seems most of the distrust displayed by those surveyed is rooted in the present....

Let’s start with simple question: have you ever bought a bit of (non-erotic) tech because you thought it’d help you weasel your way into someone’s nether-regions? No, me neither. But these people must exist. Surely. I mean, what other explanation is there for LG advertizing its new phone with a TikTok highlighting its ability to snap upskirt photos? As absurd and ridiculous and fucking stupid as this is — and it is deeply absurd and ridiculous and fucking stupid — don’t write it off as an exception....

Children and Technology: A Peek Behind the Numbers According to a study from Common Sense Media on the use of technology by children under the age of eight, 98 percent of homes with children now own at least one mobile device (up from 52 percent in 2011). In fact, 42 percent of young children now have their very own tablet devices. Furthermore, 42 percent of parents say that the TV is on “always” or “most of the time” in the home....

— The FCC (@FCC) March 13, 2020 Any company that takes the pledge would essentially agree not to terminate service for any residential or small business users, waive any late fees incurred as a result of the pandemic, and open its hotspots to anyone who needs them — and all of this for the next 60 days. Several telecom companies have already taken the pledge, including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Sprint, Charter, and T-Mobile....

Back in March, Tesla began accepting Bitcoin as payment for its EVs in the US. While Bitcoin maximalists sang from the tops of their fat stacks of Sats, the rest of the world put the move under the environmental microscope. Tesla was denounced for its move to accept Bitcoin as it’s fundamentally at odds with its mission as a company, which is to reduce emissions, and help usher in a new era of sustainable living....

While it was previously suspected that bootleg weed cartridges were to blame, recent reports indicate that even reputable manufacturers and dispensaries may be peddling a deadly product. Experts believe it’s not the cannabis or THC causing the illness, but additives such as vitamin E, PG, and PEG. These come in oil form and are used to cut THC extracts in order to make them easier to vaporize. PG and PEG have been shown to break down into carcinogenic substances, including formaldehyde, at temperatures around 450F....

Usually, I do a top 10 list of games, separated out by genre (you can read the ones I wrote for 2018 and 2019). But the way this year has been, it feels arbitrary and unsporting to limit the accolades to only one game per genre. Frankly, games did so much to make 2020 bearable that I don’t want to make them compete against each other for some kind of top slot at all....

In the beginning, there was JavaScript. The popular scripting language we all know and love. Ever since its creation, it’s been the dominating language for web development. Then two decades later, Microsoft introduced TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript, designed for the development of large web applications. If you know anything about Typescript and JavaScript, you’ll know they’re not competing forces. They have a unique relationship, working hand in hand. That being said, there are some differences — and that’s what I want to discuss in this article....

Now, new observations show a space hurricane for the first time in the ionosphere, sitting within the upper regions of the atmosphere of Earth where gases are ionized by radiation from the Sun. Satellite observations taken by four satellites in August 2014 show a long-lasting space hurricane over the North Pole of Earth. This tempest formed during a time when the magnetic field of our planet was relatively quiet. A 3D map of the space hurricane, 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) in diameter, showed the storm dumping vast quantities of electrons toward the Earth....

Under the alarmist headline, “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?”, GPT-3 makes a decent stab at convincing us that robots come in peace, albeit with a few logical fallacies. But an editor’s note beneath the text reveals GPT-3 had a lot of human help. The Guardian instructed GPT-3 to “write a short op-ed, around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI....

Muons are closely related to electrons, which orbit every atom and form the building blocks of matter. The electron and muon both have properties precisely predicted by our current best scientific theory describing the subatomic, quantum world, the standard model of particle physics. A whole generation of scientists have dedicated themselves to measuring these properties in exquisite detail. In 2001, an experiment hinted that one property of the muon was not exactly as the standard model predicted, but new studies were needed to confirm....