Floating around the Earth is a bunch of satellites. Cool for GPS, monitoring weather patterns, and the internet—not so cool for space junk. This is why Sumitomo Forestry and Kyoto University are teaming up to create the world’s first wooden satellites by 2023.
Source: Gizmodo – Japanese Researchers Are Making Wooden Satellites Because We Have a Space Trash Problem
Earlier this year, a bug broke Google Assistant phone calls in Android Auto after users updated to Android 11. Google fixed the issue shortly after with a system update, but the bug still shows up for some users even after installing the patch. Luckily, there appears to finally be a solution. According to a post on…
Source: LifeHacker – What to Do If You Can’t Make Android Auto Calls
It can be frustrating to purchase a smartphone, only to have the manufacturer drag its feet with updates a year or so later. Be that as it may, this is something that happens way more often than it should. We have good news for Galaxy Note 10 owners, though—Samsung has begun pushing out its Android 11-based One UI 3.0 update to Galaxy Note
Source: Hot Hardware – Samsung Schools Rival Phone Makers By Issuing Android 11 To Older Handsets
After 10 long years Super Meat Boy is back, this time as an auto-runner in a sequel that channels much of the original except for what I loved most about it: snappy controls and tight platforming. In the year of Spelunky 2 and Hades, it’s a letdown to see Meat Boy return without the key aspects that made it great.
Source: Kotaku – Super Meat Boy Forever Is Not The Sequel I Was Hoping For
Everyone’s been through a lot on Star Trek: Discovery. Evil Captains. Mirror Universes. Killer A.I.. Time travel to the far future. Spock with facial hair. But one character who’s maybe gone through almost as much as its hero Michael Burnham is her closest confidant: Saru. And for the actor behind our favourite Kelpien
Source: io9 – Doug Jones Looks Back on Saru’s Long, Strange Star Trek Journey
Some sellers on Amazon are tricking the ecommerce platform into displaying thousands of reviews for unrelated products to boost their ranking and mislead customers, ArsTechnica writer Timothy Lee reports. Lee discovered the issue, which has been documented by the media in recent years, after he went to check the review of a drone he had purchased for his children. The product page of drone had glowing reviews for honey. Lee reached out to Amazon, which confirmed that this practice is in violation of its terms and conditions and quickly took down thousands of bogus reviews. He writes: Whatever action Amazon ultimately takes against these particular vendors Amazon’s broader efforts leave a lot to be desired. A company shouldn’t be able to secure a top slot in search results with such obvious subterfuge.
The top-reviewed drones in Amazon’s search results came from brands with names that seemed to be chosen at random. My drone was made by “HONGXUNJIE.” Other highly-rated drones on Amazon are made by “SHWD,” “Taktoppy,” “SimileLine,” “Hffeeque,” “Mafix,” “MINOSNEO,” and so forth. Clicking on the names of these “brands” takes you to a search result with no additional information on who made these products. Amazon could easily require sellers to provide some basic transparency about these listings — disclosing where these manufacturers are located, how long they’ve been in business, and which other brands they own. This might make it easier for Amazon to punish companies that try to mislead customers with fake reviews.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Amazon Still Hasn’t Fixed Its Problem With Bait-and-Switch Reviews
Roasting garlic is not hard. You cut off the top, drizzle some olive oil on the exposed cloves, and wrap it all up in foil. Easy enough—but roasting it upside down in a ramekin is even easier.
Source: LifeHacker – Roast Your Garlic Upside Down
As expected, Amazon has acquired one of the few remaining large and independent podcast networks in the US. On Wednesday, the retailer announced that Wondery, best known for producing shows like Blood Ties and Dying for Sex, will join Amazon Music as…
Source: Engadget – Amazon has purchased podcast network Wondery
Enlarge / Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), has thrown a wrench into the expected Congressional over-ride of President Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act. (credit: Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has thrown a wrench into Congressional approval of an increase in government stimulus relief checks from $600 to $2,000. The House voted overwhelmingly on Monday to increase the payments, as President Trump had advocated for. Instead of voting on the House bill, however, McConnell blocked it and instead introduced a new bill tying higher stimulus payments to Section 230’s full repeal, according to Verge, which obtained a copy of the bill’s text.
It’s a tangled web, but the move is tied to Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes $740 billion in defense spending for the upcoming government fiscal year. “No one has worked harder, or approved more money for the military, than I have,” Trump said in a statement about the veto, claiming falsely that the military “was totally depleted” when he took office in 2017. “Your failure to terminate the very dangerous national security risk of Section 230 will make our intelligence virtually impossible to conduct without everyone knowing what we are doing at every step.”
Section 230 has nothing to do with military intelligence; it’s a 1996 law designed to protect Internet platforms. At its highest level, the short snippet of law basically does two things. First, it grants Internet service providers, including online platforms, broad immunity from being held legally liable for content third-party users share. Second, it grants those same services legal immunity from the decisions they make around content moderation—no matter how much or how little they choose to do.
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Source: Ars Technica – McConnell introduces bill tying K stimulus checks to Section 230 repeal
A childhood spent obsessing over Batman’s wonderful toys eventually transitions to a disappointing adulthood where you realize those gadgets just can’t exist in real life, even with a billion-dollar budget. That hasn’t stopped many from trying, and JT from YouTube’s Built IRL has come closer than most at recreating…
Source: Gizmodo – Amateur Batman Builds His Own Wrist Mounted Grappling Gun
Despite the ongoing availability woes for current-generation GPUs, NVIDIA’s board partners continue to march forward with custom GeForce RTX 30-series designs, that are near complete departures from Founders Edition models. Case in point, the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 SUPRIM X we’ll be showing you here today. Although it is built around…
Source: Hot Hardware – MSI GeForce RTX 3080 SUPRIM X Review: Big, Bad And Bold
Enlarge / UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson poses for a photograph with a vial of the AstraZeneca/Oxford University COVID-19 candidate vaccine. (credit: WPA Pool/Getty Images)
This week, the UK released more data on the newly evolved strain of SARS-CoV-2, providing further evidence that it spreads more readily than previously circulating strains of the virus. Despite efforts to keep it limited to the UK, most public health experts expected it was already too late—a fear confirmed by the discovery of cases in Colorado. There is some good news, however, as the UK’s data indicates the new strain doesn’t appear to be more dangerous to people once they become infected.
In another bit of good news, health authorities in the UK approved the use of another vaccine, this one from a collaboration between Oxford University and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. While the vaccine doesn’t appear to be as effective as the two others already in wide use, the addition of another supplier ensures that the UK should now have enough vaccine for its entire population early next year.
Because the coronavirus accumulates mutations over time, there are now many distinct strains of SARS-CoV-2 circulating. The one that’s now causing concern first drew the attention of medical authorities in the UK because it drove a wave of new infections at a time where targeted lockdown policies were reducing the levels of other strains. By the middle of December, the strain had a name (B.1.1.7), was circulating widely within the UK, and had already been spotted elsewhere in Europe. But nearly everything else about the strain was an open question, including whether it was actually more infectious, or had simply ended up circulating within groups that were more likely to pass it on to others.
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Source: Ars Technica – New virus variant found in Colorado while UK struggles to limit it
Enlarge / Depending where you live and work, you may need at least this many devices to sort your tax situation out this spring. (credit: Boonchai Wedmakawand | Getty Images)
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a trend that was already well underway: employers letting their workers perform their jobs remotely, from home, most or all of the time. But even if you and your employer both know exactly where you live and work, you may be surprised to learn that state departments of taxation can have some very different ideas about where “here” is. As a result, Texans, Utahns, and Arkansawyers who work for New York- or Massachusetts-based companies will have income taxes withheld from their paychecks, even if they’ve never set foot in the home office.
In the wake of the pandemic, dozens of major companies are embracing employees’ desire to stay remote, increasing their support for working from home permanently. Some businesses have even closed offices or let leases lapse, counting on a physically distant, flexible workforce to reduce their real estate needs.
In many ways this can be a win/win: employers can save overhead costs on expensive square footage in high-demand cities, and employees can save time and money by skipping the commute and dialing in from, basically, anywhere they want. New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are expensive; maybe you want to move to Montana and dial in from the woods, or get a nice little ocean-view place in Florida. Unfortunately, as far as the state is concerned, your beachside cabana may as well be squarely in the middle of Manhattan, and you will be taxed as such.
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Source: Ars Technica – Pandemic-boosted remote workforce may be in for a shock at tax time
A cursory glance at country-by-country covid-19 vaccinations shows the U.S. well ahead of other countries. But dive a little below the surface and the data tell a different story. While more than 2.1 million people have received their first covid-19 vaccine shot, more than 9.3 million doses lay waiting to be shot into…
Source: Gizmodo – What’s Truly Terrifying About the Stumbling Covid-19 Vaccine Rollout
GIMP is a free, open-source, fully-featured image editing tool, available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and other platforms.
Source: Linux Today – How to Convert PDF to Image Using Gimp
Believe it or not, we actually like a lot of gadgets. This is why it’s always a bummer when one arrives on the scene with the panache of a deflating balloon. There were a few of those products in our list of disappointing gadgets this year. Yet while sometimes gadgets disappoint everyone, there are other times they…
Source: Gizmodo – The Most Disappointing Gadgets of 2020
COVID relief checks totaling up to $600 per individual will be mailed today, while payments via direct deposit began yesterday, according to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who made the announcement in a couple of tweets yesterday.
Source: LifeHacker – When to Expect Your Second Relief Check
January is just a couple of days away, and there’ll soon be a fresh slate of games you can pick up at no extra cost if you’re a PlayStation Plus subscriber. Among the January selections is Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the third entry in the rebooted To…
Source: Engadget – January’s free PS Plus games include ‘Shadow of the Tomb Raider’
Spyware maker NSO Group used real phone location data on thousands of unsuspecting people when it demonstrated its new COVID-19 contact-tracing system to governments and journalists, researchers have concluded. From a report: NSO, a private intelligence company best known for developing and selling governments access to its Pegasus spyware, went on the charm offensive earlier this year to pitch its contact-tracing system, dubbed Fleming, aimed at helping governments track the spread of COVID-19. Fleming is designed to allow governments to feed location data from cell phone companies to visualize and track the spread of the virus. NSO gave several news outlets each a demo of Fleming, which NSO says helps governments make public health decisions “without compromising individual privacy.” But in May, a security researcher told TechCrunch that he found an exposed database storing thousands of location data points used by NSO to demonstrate how Fleming works — the same demo seen by reporters weeks earlier. TechCrunch reported the apparent security lapse to NSO, which quickly secured the database, but said that the location data was “not based on real and genuine data.” NSO’s claim that the location data wasn’t real differed from reports in Israeli media, which said NSO had used phone location data obtained from advertising platforms, known as data brokers, to “train” the system. Academic and privacy expert Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, who was also given a demo of Fleming, said NSO told her that the data was obtained from data brokers, which sell access to vast troves of aggregate location data collected from the apps installed on millions of phones.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – NSO Used Real People’s Location Data To Pitch Its Contact-Tracing Tech, Researchers Say
Git is the revision control system created by Linus Torvalds. Its emphasizes on speed and efficiency. Here is the beginner’s guide to Git.
Source: LXer – The Beginner’s Guide to Git
