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Some vehicles of our near future appear to be more certain to succeed than others. Ebikes and electric cars are carving themselves a niche as transport options that are more sustainable than outgoing fossil fuel based alternatives. Escooter sharing schemes are having a moment, too. It’s too soon to tell how they’ll pan out, but the schemes were recently fast-tracked to British streets to offer socially distanced mobility options amid the coronavirus pandemic....

Whether or not Apple is going to drop its trackers soon is point of contention, but I know something that’s not: these obviously fake AirTags currently making the rounds. Looks a lot like this previously reported patent, but take it with a bit of salt though since something similar is easily reproducible in China. pic.twitter.com/HHRi2p4Cyu — Fudge (@choco_bit) November 9, 2020 Let’s have a closer look at them: To be fair, these aren’t fake AirTags per se, but a fake AirTags carry case....

Up front: Wu Dao is a multi-modal AI system. That means it can do a bunch of different things. It can generate text, audio, and images, and, according to Engadget, it can even “power virtual idols.” The reason for all the hullabaloo surrounding Wu Dao involves its size. This AI model is huge. It was trained using a whopping 1.75 trillion parameters. For comparison, OpenAI’s biggest model, GPT-3, was trained with just 175 billion....

CRISPR-powered stocks Intellia Therapeutics (NTLA), Editas Medicine (EDIT), and Beam Therapeutics (BEAM) have now jumped 13%, 11%, and 6% respectively. CRISPR Therapeutics (CRSP), co-founded by one of the Nobel winners Emmanuelle Charpentier, is also up more than 11% since Wednesday morning. Collectively, these four CRISPR stocks are now worth nearly $12.2 billion — up from $6.5 billion in February with nearly $430 million added to their market values overnight. Now valued beyond $7....

Heather “Razzlekhan” Morgan and Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein were arrested for conspiring to launder Bitcoin that’s now worth $4.5b billion While Bonnie and Clyde’s rise and fall played out in the press, their crypto counterparts chronicled their lives on social media. This is the love story of Dutch and Razzlekhan, the (alleged) crime couple who stole our hearts. Chapter 1: Love at first sight The couple hasn’t revealed how they first met, but they clearly had lots in common....

The service will take off with a monthly subscription fee of £5.99/€6.99 (about $8) per month, but you can grab a yearly subscription at a discount for £59.99/€69.99 (about $78). That’s a tad more expensive than the US, where a monthly subscription amounts to $6.99. [Read: There’s a new streaming competitor on the block, The Pirate Bay] The Walt Disney Company has not clarified why Disney+ the reason for pushing the date, but hopefully it goes better than its US launch, which was riddled with technical issues....

So if that box of Cookie Crisp (part of a balanced breakfast, they say) feels a little light, you’re not imagining things; General Mills has decreased its family size boxes from 19.3 ounces to 18.1 ounces. Economist Pippa Malmgren coined the term “shrinkflation” to describe instances where companies reduce the size of products while retaining prices. However, prices aren’t staying the same. In May 2021, global food prices were the highest they’ve been since 2011....

Among the many privacy-enhancing tools, one of the best known is the Chrome Incognito window, Google’s version of private browsing. Incognito window provides a measure of privacy if you’re browsing on a shared computer. But it’s far from being a perfect solution. Unfortunately, many people don’t understand the privacy implications of Google’s Incognito window and end up trusting it more than they should. According to a study by researchers at the University of Chicago and Leibniz University of Hannover, many users wrongly think Google’s Incognito mode and other private browsing windows will protect them against malware, advertising, tracking codes and the monitoring by connection gateways....

We’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say it isn’t pretty. And that means any crewed missions to the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else beyond the Earth’s gravitational field have an undeniable time limit on them. Until we solve the whole gravity problem, permanent off-world colonies are pretty much a non-starter. And, despite what a century of science fiction may have led you to believe, artificial gravity only exists in rudimentary experimental forms....

According to a Department of Justice statement, former Ethereum advisor Steven Nerayoff and Michael Hlady were arrested after supposedly threatening to “destroy a startup cryptocurrency company if they were not paid millions of dollars” worth of Ethereum. “As alleged, Nerayoff and Hlady carried out an old-fashioned shakedown, to be paid off with 21st century cryptocurrency,” United States Attorney Richard Donoghue said in the statement. The targeted company was an unnamed Seattle-based startup that uses cryptocurrency to reward customer loyalty....

Even though the 80’s were a long time ago, the term hacker still elicits an instantly negative response from most people. While there’s no doubt hackers have often been malicious bad actors in the dark recesses of the web, a new breed of cyber infiltrators, known commonly as ethical hackers, are carving out a new reputation testing and securing vital computer systems for some of the world’s largest organizations. Heck, hackers are even helping in the fight against COVID-19....

These management systems offer an array of valuable capabilities like remote monitoring, scheduling, and user billing. However, they come with a significant drawback: as with virtually every device connected to the internet, they’re prone to cyberattacks. A team of researchers led by Elia Bou Harb, director of the University of Texas Cyber Center for Security and Analytics, wanted to explore the real-life implications of cyberattacks against EV charging systems, and how to utilize cybersecurity countermeasures to mitigate them....

The new Apple Silicon lineup promises dramatic performance and battery life improvements thanks to a more efficient architecture, though developers now have to make the transition to make the most of the new hardware. Here’s everything Apple announced at a fairly concise event. Apple M1 chip Apple’s M1 chip is designed for compact devices. It makes its debut in the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini. The chip appears to essentially be a superpowered version of the A14 Bionic that debuted in the new iPad and iPhones, adding two cores to the CPU and doubling the core count on the GPU....

iOS 14 now lets you install widgets on your screen — a useful new feature that completely changes how your phone screen looks, depending on how many of them you use. So how do you use them? Let us explain. Apple introduced several new features to iOS 14 that change the way the phone looks — including the ability to hide apps without deleting them. But one that changes how you use the apps themselves is the ability to use widgets on your main app pages — up to now, they’d only been visible in the Today View page (the one that you can usually find by scrolling all the way to the left on your screen)....

On 3 January 2020, US President Donald Trump authorized the military’s use of an MQ-9 in the assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleiman, a Major General in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who served as the commander of its clandestine operations division since 1998. According to the White House, Soleiman was targeted because he represented an “imminent threat.” As of the time of this writing the Trump administration has declined to reveal any details about the threat, but has corroborated reports that the military strike was designed and executed as an assassination....

On one hand, EVs make great towing machines. They can be quite weighty, so stability is never an issue. They have tonnes of torque, so pulling a load is never a struggle. But there’s one issue, range. Attaching a trailer that’s heavy and ruins the car’s aerodynamics can have a dramatic impact on how far you can actually drive. But how much impact? Well, the folks over at Camp365 — a company that makes folding caravan type things — gave one of their trailers to a couple of Tesla enthusiasts to see how much towing affects an EVs range....

“In the last few years, there are a lot of important social issues that Facebook and the other big internet companies are really at the center of in society,” Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg told Nikkei, while highlighting his desire to take a “look before-you-leap approach” before launching any new technologies. Prior to scandals, such as the Cambridge Analytica data fiasco, the tech billionaire said Facebook’s approach had consisted of building a tool and retroactively fixing any issues if people were using it in a bad way, but recent events have shown this approach is no longer valid....

The Oculus Quest 2 is the latest step in Facebook’s long-term strategy of making VR more accessible and popular. Facebook recently brought all its VR work under the umbrella of Facebook Reality Labs, it has announced new applications like the Infinite Office VR workplace, and will also require a Facebook login for future Oculus devices. The compulsory link to Facebook has many consumers concerned, considering the social media giant’s chequered history with privacy and data....

The high school in Skellefteå conducted a pilot program last fall where the attendance of 22 students over a period of three weeks was taken with the help of facial recognition technology, instead of good ol’ fashioned roll call, according to Computer Sweden. Not so surprisingly, the Swedish DPA found that the program violated several GDPR articles — the EU’s new robust privacy regulation. The school failed to consult the Swedish DPA before launching its program and didn’t do a proper impact assessment....

I thought we’d moved on from stuff like this. It’s not 2017 anymore, but obscure and useless cryptocurrencies are still trying as they might to be A Thing. In recent weeks, you might have seen headlines touting Fiat’s new partnership with cryptocurrency KiriCoin — but please, don’t get swept up by its novelty. According to a press release by Fiat’s owner Stellantis, KiriCoin is embedded in the ever lovable Fiat 500’s accompanying app....