As part of the unprecedented $14.7 billion settlement
released earlier today, Volkswagen will offer substantial cash payments to owners of the 482,000 diesel four-cylinder cars affected by the emissions cheating scandal. If you own one of Volkswagen’s NOx-spewing machines
, here are step-by-step instructions on how you can calculate how much money you’re owed.
Source: LifeHacker – Here’s Exactly How Much Volkswagen Will Pay You For Your Diesel Car
So far, Nighthawk has had a real estate developer pushing gentrification and cops profiling young black people. I can’t remember the last time a mainstream superhero comic tackled institutional racism this directly. It’s kind of breathtaking.
Source: io9 – Nighthawk Is A Superhero Who’s Trying to Fight Racism Head-On
Google announced today that it has updated Google Maps and Google Earth using tons of data from NASA’s newest Landsat satellite. You should be seeing the updated imagery in both apps soon. I snagged the example image below from the announcement page to give you an idea of the difference in quality:
Three years ago we introduced a cloud-free mosaic of the world in Google Earth. Today we’re rolling out an even more beautiful and seamless version, with fresh imagery from Landsat 8 satellite and new processing techniques for sharper images than ever before. Satellite images are often cloudy, but not always over the same place, so we looked at millions of images and took the clearest pixels to stitch together this cloud-free and seamless image.
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Source: [H]ardOCP – Google Updates Maps And Earth NASA Satellite Imagery
The updated Get Windows 10 app, with its decline option.
Microsoft is finally ending the malware-like trickery of the “Get Windows 10” upgrade offer that’s shown to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users.
Mary Jo Foley reports that a clearer upgrade promotion will roll out this week. It will have three options—”Upgrade now,” “Choose time,” and “Decline free offer”—with the last of these options dismissing the update altogether. Critically, pressing the X in the corner of the window will have the same effect as the decline option.
This change addresses one of the most unpleasant features of the promotion: some weeks ago, Microsoft changed the behavior of the X button to make it simply defer the upgrade rather than decline it altogether. This behavior was contrary to any reasonable expectations Windows users might have, and contrary to the way the promotion behaved at its introduction.
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Source: Ars Technica – Windows 10 upgrade will soon be easier to reject
Popular note-taking and organizational app Evernote is in the process of making a few changes. Starting today, if you use its free plan, you’ll only be allowed to sync your notes between two devices. Anything more than that and you’ll be expected to…
Source: Engadget – Evernote’s free plan no longer lets you sync more than two devices
Dark hallways, bloody murder, cockroaches, and creeps. Resident Evil 7‘s new demo Beginning Hour is eager to return the horror franchise back to something subtler and terrifying. It is slow. It is quiet. And yeah, it’s also pretty dang scary!
Source: Kotaku – Why The Resident Evil 7 Demo Is So Scary
Swiss Army Man opened in limited release last weekend and expands on Friday. And when that happens, we’re no longer going to refer to it as the “farting corpse movie.” It’s so much more than that. It’s a revelation, in a way, and one of the reasons is hinted at in this new clip.
Source: io9 – What Does the Farting Corpse Movie Swiss Army Man Have to Do With Jurassic Park?
Following its acquisition of Magic Pony earlier this month, Twitter confirmed to me on Tuesday that it had hired Alessandro Sabatelli as its new Director of VR and AR. He will head up the Augmented Reality team within Twitter Cortex, the company’s up…
Source: Engadget – Twitter confirms it’s launching an AR division with new hire
An anonymous reader writes:Three US healthcare organisations are reportedly being held to ransom by a hacker who stole data on hundreds of thousands of patients. The hacker has also put the 650,000 records up for sale on dark web markets where stolen data is traded. Prices for the different databases range from $100,000 to $411,000. Buyers have already been found for some of the stolen data, the hacker behind the theft told news site Motherboard. No information about the size of the ransom payment sought by the data thief has emerged, although he did say it was “a modest amount compared to the damage that will be caused to the organisations when I decide to publicly leak the victims.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – US Healthcare Records Offered For Sale Online
The Last Leviathan is a new Steam game about physics-based ship building. If you can dream it, you can make it and then use it to sail an open ocean. Even if it’s Mega Man or a giant floating dick. I mean, you had to have seen that coming.
Source: Kotaku – Watch Us Play The Last Leviathan, An Open World Pirate Ship Building Game
Dual monitors are great, but if you don’t have the desk space to spare, this dual monitor arm can lift them up off your workspace for just $28. It should clamp onto basically any desk, and the arms can support any 27″ or smaller VESA -compatible screens.
Source: Kotaku – Level Up Your Battle Station With a Dual Monitor Mount
Today, Evernote announced a change to its pricing plan alongside a new limitation for it’s free service. Both the Plus and Premium paid tiers get a price bump while the Basic plan now restricts you to just two devices.
Source: LifeHacker – Evernote Limits Device Sharing for Free Users, Bumps Up the Price of Paid Plans
Over the past 30-ish hours, the Supreme Court struck down
a Texas anti-abortion law, Liz Warren spent a solid 15 minutes burning Trump, and the GOP let Crooked Hillary get away with Benghazi
once and for all. And throughout all of it, red-faced Twitter egg king Donald Trump hasn’t made a peep. Something’s not right.
Source: Gizmodo – Why Has Donald Trump Stopped Tweeting?
(credit: CDC)
As Zika virus outbreaks continue to rage in South and Central America, lapping at US borders, scientists are making significant strides toward an effective vaccine.
Two types of experimental Zika vaccines, a DNA vaccine and an inactivated virus vaccine, were each able to completely protect mice with one dose, researchers report Tuesday in Nature. The animal data—the first to be published for Zika vaccines—follows news last week that the Food and Drug Administration gave two companies the green light to test another Zika DNA vaccine in humans. The companies, not associated with the researchers behind today’s study, reported that they have done similar animal studies with their vaccine, but they didn’t publish the results.
With today’s animal data, researchers are hopeful about the fate of the vaccines. “The protection was striking,” Dan Barouch, a study coauthor and vaccine researcher at Harvard Medical School, said in a press briefing. “Of course we need to be cautious about extrapolating results from mice into humans,” he noted, but the strength of the findings “certainly raise optimism” that we’re on our way to a safe and effective vaccine.
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Source: Ars Technica – Experimental Zika vaccines work in mice, protect with one shot
Whoever ends up dying from an acute case of Louisville Slugger syndrome in The Walking Dead’s seventh season premiere, it might console him or her to know that the show the survivors won’t be understaffed for long. Two new characters have been added to the cast, and they seem to be exclusive to the TV series.
Source: Gizmodo – The Walking Dead Adds Two New Characters Who Will Eventually Die Horribly
Whoever ends up dying from an acute case of Louisville Slugger syndrome in The Walking Dead’s seventh season premiere, it might console him or her to know that the show the survivors won’t be understaffed for long. Two new characters have been added to the cast, and they seem to be exclusive to the TV series.
Source: io9 – The Walking Dead Adds Two New Characters That Will Eventually Die Horribly
Yo-yo tricks are already a miracle of physics. But Ben Conde specializes in a type of yo-yo with an unattached string, and does things that defy all logic. But there’s one sneaky feature that makes these contraptions work.
Source: Gizmodo – What Dark Magic Makes This Weird Yo-Yo Work?
Launched in 1977, the Voyager 1 and 2 are still exploring interstellar space today. Both probes have flown by Jupiter and Saturn while the Voyager 2 has made its way to Uranus and Neptune too. The Voyager space program has traveled further in space than anything ever has and serves as a wonderful reminder of how much farther we can go. Santiago Menghini made this short tribute to the program using animation and real archival footage to stitch together a poetic story of its ongoing journey.
Source: Gizmodo – This Animated Tribute to the NASA Voyager Space Program Is Simply Stunning
For those of you experiencing crashes after installing the 364.47 drivers, there are new drivers out today that fix the problem. It seems the bug affected people running Windows 10 and multi-monitor set-ups but, it wouldn’t hurt to update to this latest driver anyway in the mean time.
We have received reports of some users having issues installing today’s Game Ready Driver. Initial investigation suggests the issue is isolated to multiple-monitor configurations. Should you experience issues, you can either disconnect one monitor during the driver installation (and reconnect once completed) or you can uninstall the driver through Windows Safe-Mode and revert to a previous version.
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Source: [H]ardOCP – New NVIDIA Game Ready Driver Fixes Crashing
An anonymous reader writes: The Cyberspace Administration of China has imposed new regulation for the mobile app community, requiring that developers keep a close watch over users and keep a record of their activities. However, the proposed legislation would also prevent apps from requesting unnecessary access to users’ contacts, camera, microphone and other spurious installation requests. The regulator introduced the new laws in the name of cracking down on illegal use of mobile platforms for the distribution of pornography, fraud and the spread of ‘malicious’ content.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – China Tells App Developers To Increase User Monitoring