Ten years after Elon Musk’s Twitter account was giving out free Teslas and the PlayStation Network was shut down, the then-teenage hacker behind it all is finally having his story told. The trailer for the new Max docuseries, Most Wanted Teen Hacker, previews how Finnish hacker Julius Kivimäki’s cyber exploits will be…
A robotic lander developed by a Japanese company named ispace plummeted to the Moon’s surface Thursday, destroying a small rover and several experiments intended to demonstrate how future missions could mine and harvest lunar resources.
Ground teams at ispace’s mission control center in Tokyo lost contact with the Resilience lunar lander moments before it was supposed to touch down in a region called Mare Frigoris, or the Sea of Cold, a basaltic plain in the Moon’s northern hemisphere.
A few hours later, ispace officials confirmed what many observers suspected. The mission was lost. It’s the second time ispace has failed to land on the Moon in as many tries.
The Nintendo Switch 2 offers plenty of functionality right out of the box, especially considering it can be used in both handheld and docked modes without the need for add-ons of any sort to just jump into a game.
The latest Apple iPad Mini is on sale via Amazon, bringing the 128GB model down to a record-low price. Each Wi-Fi-only model has been discounted by $100, so the 128GB version is $399, the 256GB tablet is $499 and the beefy 512GB model is $699. This deal applies to multiple colorways.
This is one of the best Apple tablets, and the only choice for those looking for a compact iPad. It’s the company’s most powerful tablet in this size, as the A17 Pro chip is plenty capable. An M-series chip would have been nice, but it’s not in the cards just yet. Having said that, this is still a full-featured iPad that can hang with its larger cousins.
It offers support for the Apple Pencil Pro, which is handy, and the 12-megapixel camera on the rear takes decent shots, even in low light. The camera is also a decent choice for scanning documents and QR codes, as noted in our official review. The speakers sound much better than one would expect, though this has become the norm with recent Apple products.
The display looks nice, but it is just a standard LCD with a 60Hz refresh rate. Apple tends to reserve its best screen technology for the higher-end tablets. There’s no Face ID here, but that’s not a deal breaker for me, as I actually prefer Touch ID or just quickly typing in a four digit security code.
Check out our coverage of the best Apple deals for more discounts, and follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/the-latest-ipad-mini-drops-to-a-record-low-price-170558317.html?src=rss
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off on Monday with the company’s standard keynote presentation—a combination of PR about how great Apple and its existing products are and a first look at the next-generation versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and the company’s other operating systems.
Reporting before the keynote rarely captures everything that Apple has planned at its presentations, but the reliable information we’ve seen so far is that Apple will keep the focus on its software this year rather than using the keynote to demo splashy new hardware like the Vision Pro and Apple Silicon Mac Pro, which the company introduced at WWDC a couple years back.
If you haven’t been keeping track, here are a few of the things that are most likely to happen when the pre-recorded announcement videos start rolling next week.
The Document Foundation announced today the general availability of LibreOffice 25.2.4 as the fourth maintenance update to the latest LibreOffice 25.2 office suite series with more bug fixes.
Once they’ve found a place they love, most home shoppers shift to considering the hard numbers: The selling price or the monthly rent, the estimated taxes, the square footage, their mortgage rate, etc. Often lost in the shuffle are questions about the utilities—the gas, electricity, water, and internet services that power a home and make it comfortable and livable.
Utilities exist in the background of our lives, and if you previously rented, some may have been folded into your monthly payment, so many buyers don’t think about them much before moving in. After all, it’s not like your new home just won’t have gas and water, right? But there’s a lot more to your utilities than simply having them. Here are the questions you should be asking about the utilities in any home you’re thinking of buying.
The most obvious question that a lot of homebuyers neglect to consider is what the average bill will be for each utility. The cost of natural gas, electricity, water, and internet varies considerably from place to place—often just within a few miles or based on time of usage. If your utility costs have previously been hidden in your rent payments, you might not even be aware of what you’ve been paying for these services, because the landlord is definitely passing the costs along to you. Even if you know very well what your utilities cost you in your old place, there’s no guarantee those bills will be similar in the new house.
The best way to know what you’re getting yourself into, budget-wise, is to ask the current owners what their monthly bills are on average. Better yet, ask to see a year’s worth of utility bills for each relevant service so you can get an idea of what you’ll be paying. The average overall cost for electricity, water, gas, and internet around the U.S. is about $330 per month, so if the number you hear is significantly higher than that, you might need to dig in deeper to find out why.
Something few think to ask is whether the home they’re considering shares any gas or electric supply (or any other utility you might have to pay for, like sewage or water) with a neighboring property. When my own next-door neighbor launched a major renovation of his house, he discovered (to his dismay) that he shared a gas supply pipe with his neighbor on the other side, which the local utility then insisted had to be separated. This significantly delayed the project as he struggled to coordinate with the city and the utility company to get the work done.
It’s not uncommon for attached row homes or homes that were originally built as duplexes (or twin homes) to have at least one shared electric meter, often in the garage. One homeowner on Reddit posted a worry about charging an electric car in the future because his garage shared electricity with his next-door neighbor in what is essentially a two-owner condominium situation. Making sure your utilities are wholly separate from your neighbors’ can spare you trouble down the line—or at least prepare you for future problems.
Smart meters now make up more than 70% of utility meters in the U.S.—but that leaves a lot of old-fashioned meters out there that need to be read manually. That means someone will come to your house once a month, physically enter it to read your meters if they are located inside, or you’ll be stuck reading and self-reporting your meters. And if you forget or the utility workers can’t gain access for a while, the utility will estimate your bills, which can lead to unexpected balloon payments later.
The kind of smart meter matters, too. Some smart meters must be read from outside your home via a wireless signal, which means a utility worker may still need limited access to your property in order to get close enough, while others send the information directly to the utility with no interaction necessary. Knowing all this will prepare you for a small but important aspect of living in that home.
If you’re buying a house, your finances are probably in order—today. But none of us know what’s coming tomorrow, and you wouldn’t be the first person to become house poor after the fact. Asking about the availability of subsidies or utility bill assistance programs in your area is good due diligence. You may never need to worry about paying the power bill, but if you find yourself struggling after a layoff, medical procedure, or other financial emergency, having that information on hand can make things a lot less stressful.
It’s almost a cliche for house hunters to run the water in every bathroom and the kitchen to judge the water pressure—but this isn’t really an effective way to test that aspect of your new home. Bringing a water pressure gauge as part of your house hunting tool kit will give you a better idea, but you should also ask the current owners whether the water pressure is consistent.
Getting a good reading when you’re touring the place is just a single data point. Other things to ask about in terms of the quality of the utilities include:
Does the water pressure plunge when more than one appliance is running?
How are the internet speeds? Are there slowdowns during heavy-usage periods, or dead spots in the house that might require you to buy a mesh router system?
Does the electricity ever flicker, or does the home experience frequent brownouts or blackouts?
Is the water hard? Will you need a softener?
How often does the area experience water main breaks?
How quickly do the local utility companies respond to problems (especially emergencies)?
The location of your appliances is important, but is often overlooked. Some questions you should ask about the placement of the water heater, furnace, and other aspects of your potential new home’s utilities. Check out the mechanical area if you can, and consider whether it’s easily accessible—will workers (or you) be able to get in there to make repairs or perform maintenance? Will there be difficulties getting replacement units in and old units out?
Another consideration is the level your appliance will be located on. If they’re in the basement or crawl space, does the area flood? Will their air filters have to work overtime due to dust and other environmental factors? And if utility workers will need to read your meters—where are they located? Will you have to give someone a tour of your messy house every time the meters are read?
The number in the model name describes the router’s main feature: full WiFi 7 (802.11be) support with up to 18,000 Mbps
Apple will lose the ability to collect commissions on external iOS purchases in Europe starting June 23, following a European Commission ruling that hinges on the grammatical interpretation of a single comma in the Digital Markets Act. The dispute centers on Article 5.4, which requires gatekeepers to allow business users “free of charge, to communicate and promote offers, including under different conditions […], and to conclude contracts with those end users.”
Apple contends that “free of charge” applies only to communication and promotion activities, not contract conclusion, allowing the company to maintain its commission structure on external transactions. The European Commission interprets the comma before “and to conclude contracts” as creating an enumeration where the free-of-charge requirement applies to all listed activities, including purchases made outside Apple’s payment system.
Under the new ruling, Apple can collect commissions only on the first external transaction between users and developers, with all subsequent purchases and auto-renewed subscriptions exempt from fees. The company faces daily penalties of up to $53.5 million for non-compliance and has already been fined $570 million. Apple’s internal forecasts estimate potential annual losses of “hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars” in the US alone, though Europe demands stricter changes than those projections assumed.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nyxt is an unusual web
browser that tries to answer the question, “what if Emacs was a
good web browser?”. Nyxt is not an Emacs package, but a full
web browser written in Common Lisp and available under the BSD
three-clause license. Its target audience is developers who want a
browser that is keyboard-driven and extensible; Nyxt is also developed
for Linux first, rather than Linux being an afterthought or just a
sliver of its audience. The philosophy (as described in its FAQ)
behind the project is that users should be able to customize all of
the browser’s functionality.
In 2019, we told you about a new interactive digital “murder map” of London compiled by University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner. Drawing on data catalogued in the city coroners’ rolls, the map showed the approximate location of 142 homicide cases in late medieval London. The Medieval Murder Maps project has since expanded to include maps of York and Oxford homicides, as well as podcast episodes focusing on individual cases.
It’s easy to lose oneself down the rabbit hole of medieval murder for hours, filtering the killings by year, choice of weapon, and location. Think of it as a kind of 14th-century version of Clue: It was the noblewoman’s hired assassins armed with daggers in the streets of Cheapside near St. Paul’s Cathedral. And that’s just the juiciest of the various cases described in a new paper published in the journal Criminal Law Forum.
The noblewoman was Ela Fitzpayne, wife of a knight named Sir Robert Fitzpayne, lord of Stogursey. The priest was her erstwhile lover, John Forde, who was stabbed to death in the streets of Cheapside on May 3, 1337. “We are looking at a murder commissioned by a leading figure of the English aristocracy,” said University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner, who heads the Medieval Murder Maps project. “It is planned and cold-blooded, with a family member and close associates carrying it out, all of which suggests a revenge motive.”
This is a video from WIRED of entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware answering questions about insects that were submitted by internet users, including could cockroaches survive a nuclear war? Do dragonflies and flies coordinate their flight while mating? Why do crickets chirp? Are tarantulas dangerous? PLUS MORE. Sooooo much more. I feel like I just earned a bachelor’s degree in entomology after watching the whole half hour. Plus whenever I hear my girlfriend scream I relocate the bug outside with no issues. I’m practically a bug whisperer. Don’t crawl in my butt when I’m sleeping.
Everyone in quantum computing agrees that error correction will be the key to doing a broad range of useful calculations. But early every company in the field seems to have a different vision of how best to get there. Almost all of their plans share a key feature: some variation on logical qubits built by linking together multiple hardware qubits.
A key exception is Nord Quantique, which aims to dramatically cut the amount of hardware needed to support an error-corrected quantum computer. It does this by putting enough quantum states into a single piece of hardware, allowing each of those pieces to hold an error-corrected qubit. Last week, the company shared results showing that it could make hardware that used photons at two different frequencies to successfully identify every case where a logical qubit lost its state.
That still doesn’t provide error correction, and they didn’t use the logical qubit to perform operations. But it’s an important validation of the company’s approach.
An anonymous reader shares a report: There are more than 1,000 technology unicorns, meaning venture-backed companies worth $1 billion or more, but at least one in 5 are likely to fail, said Rich Wong, a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners. “I think maybe out of that thousand, 20% fully die. The end,” Wong said on Thursday at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco.
The estimate reinforces what’s become a grim calculus for many companies. Tech start-up valuations soared during the 2021 pandemic boom — before crashing back to earth, as interest rates rose and venture capital investments fell. Of the companies that don’t fail, about half will be stuck — muddling along without being able to grow bigger or go public, Wong said. Some of those may “ultimately have reality set in,” and sell themselves for lower prices than once seemed feasible. Others, not quite failing, “will be a bit zombie-ish and grind on,” he said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tesla has been awfully cagey with its self-driving data this week. Reuters is now reporting that Tesla is trying to stop the city of Austin from handing over public records involving its robotaxi operations in the city, which are set to expand this month. This comes just a few days after the automaker asked a judge to prevent the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from releasing certain data related to crashes that involved its cars with self-driving features.
Reuters says that it requested two years’ worth of communications between Tesla and Austin officials in February, shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Austin would play home to the robotaxi experiment.
Dan Davis, an Austin public information officer, told Reuters in April that “third parties” were asking the city to withhold these records in the interest of protecting “privacy or property.” After the publication escalated the matter to the Texas Attorney General’s office, an attorney for Tesla wrote Ken Paxton opposing the release of what it called “confidential, proprietary, competitively sensitive commercial and/or trade secret information.”
Reuters also spoke with Neal Falgoust, an Austin Law Department official overseeing public records issues about the matter. Falgoust told reporters that the city of Austin doesn’t take any particular position on the confidentiality of the materials involved. When Reuters pressed further, asking if the people of Austin have a right to information about the driverless cars that would be traversing their streets, Falgoust did not respond.
Tesla said just last week that it had been testing driverless Model Ys in Austin for several days, which Elon Musk said was a month ahead of schedule. This would not be the first fleet of autonomous taxis on the streets of the Texas capital, with Waymo operating there since 2023 within a specific geofenced area. Waymo has also partnered with Uber in Austin since March.
By Texas law, the Attorney General’s office has 45 business days to decide whether the city of Austin is required to make these records public, which would be next week.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/tesla-is-reportedly-blocking-the-city-of-austin-from-releasing-robotaxi-records-155643815.html?src=rss
Not-E3 is in full swing today with Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest Live showcase scheduled for the evening of June 6. No one but the Game Awards host and his close circle of confidants and business partners knows what will be announced during the event, but fans are once again praying for the impossible as fanatics…
Apple‘s AirPods Pro 2 earbuds are on sale for $170 via Amazon. This is close to a record low price and represents a discount of 32 percent, as the typical cost is $249.
This model easily made our list of the best wireless earbuds, and this is particularly true for those tied to the Apple ecosystem. The earbuds seamlessly switch between Apple devices, which is handy. The transparency mode is fantastic and the ANC is solid.
They also sound great, thanks to a new amplifier, driver and transducer, in addition to updated algorithms. We found that they offered a “massively improved” experience over the first-gen version of these earbuds. Music even sounds better at lower levels here, which is something we noticed in our official review.
The battery life is just average, with six hours of listening per charge and 30 hours with the case. The major downside with these earbuds is the price. No matter how you slice it, $249 is a whole lot of money. Luckily, today’s sale alleviates some of that sticker shock.
Check out our coverage of the best Apple deals for more discounts, and follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/apples-airpods-pro-2-are-back-on-sale-for-170-154646082.html?src=rss
Discover what the end of standard support for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS means for users. Learn about upgrade options and continued security updates.
The post Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Reaches End of Standard Support appeared first on Linux Today.
This week, Republicans in Congress and the executive branch stepped up their efforts to roll back clean vehicle legislation and regulations. Antipathy toward environmental protections was a hallmark of the first Trump administration, but in his second term, the president and his congressional allies are redoubling their efforts to allow cars to pollute more and limit the adoption of electric vehicles.
Congressional republicans have been working on a budget bill that would radically transform many aspects of American life. Among the environmental protections being stripped away in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (yes, that’s what it’s called) is a repeal of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s rules on “greenhouse gas and multi-pollutant emissions standards.”
These regulations are meant to limit the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the US vehicle fleet, a major driver of climate change, as well as the noxious pollutants containing sulfur and nitrogen compounds that have more immediate and deleterious effects on human health. And if the budget bill is sent to Trump to sign, the existing Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) rules, implemented in 2022, and the future rules meant to take effect next year will be no more.