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Truly, readers, friends, and enemies, I live a life you should be envious of. Hell, I’m literally writing this article while walking. If that’s not inspirational, I don’t know what is. You can catch the livestream of this seismic event right beneath this paragraph. So here you go: Of course, you might not be watching it live, but that’s fine too. Just stick on that livestream and soak up all that tasty, ASMR-influenced perambulation....

In it, Khalifa, Ty Dolla Sign, Sueco the Child, and Lil Yachty team up for a surprisingly chill groove full of enough Genesis references to put a smile on this Sonic fan’s face. There’s an opening groove to the beat of Metropolis Zone, a plethora of ring jingles, jaunts through Sonic’s Special Stages, and plenty of 16-bit pixel art to go around. It’s pretty darn catchy too. It’s no “Live and Learn” or “Escape from City” – there better be some Crush 40 in that movie, I swear – but it’ a welcome surprise altogether....

Autonomous vehicle company Waymo recently kicked off its One Trusted Tester program in San Francisco. It’s effectively a feedback program where riders can share their experiences directly with the team to help shape the future of autonomous driving in exchange for free rides. Can they convince those without concerns about the safety of autonomous vehicles to travel in them? San Francisco’s streets are busy with traffic. There are pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, and emergency vehicles....

The European Union wants to gain more control over international tech companies and achieve more independence in the digital arena. India has banned 177 Chinese apps on the grounds they are “prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India”. And in 2020, the then US President Donald Trump spent months attempting to ban the Chinese-made video-sharing platform TikTok or force its sale to an American owner. While some claimed Trump was piqued by a supposed prank against him by teenage TikTok users, a look at statements from US government officials over the course of the year shows geopolitical concerns were the main driver....

Cryptoland is real — and it can hurt you. Also, it can scam you out of quite a bit of cash. This crypto island project first gained public attention with a video that can only be described as unhinged and a Molly White Twitter thread. In the video, a pitch for buying stakes on the island via NFTs rubs shoulders with an animated video that seems closer to a crypto satire than a sales pitch....

Since the dawn of web design, we have measured our websites in pixels. A somewhat absolute measurement that describes the smallest visual unit of a screens resolution. I’ve developed a rather love-hate relationship with these little gremlins, certainly from an engineering point of view. On the one hand, the pixel is a ubiquitous measurement that is easy to visualize. Given its absolute nature, I know that a 2px border will be the same width on my desktop, my iPhone, and my tablet....

These patches include fixes for bugs that allowed hackers to send unsolicited images through malicious stickers, and to execute code after the receiver answer a video call. The company said no users were impacted by these bugs. WhatsApp said this new page will help researchers to study WhatsApp’s security architecture: WhatsApp has faced some severe security problems in a couple of years. However, the most critical bug allowed hackers to install spyware through audio calls....

Because WhatsApp is encrypted – and so offers users far greater protection from prosecution than Twitter or Facebook – it has become particularly notorious for spreading “fake news”. This is a major concern in Africa, where WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in 40 countries. This is due to its low cost and the ability to easily share messages with both individuals and groups. But is this really how WhatApp is used?...

Apple has so far done no policing of its customer reviews, as far as I’m aware. Unlike some manufacturers that try to hide negative reviews, Apple has typically kept them on display, even when products received low ratings. As far as I’m concerned, that actually makes me trust the company more. AppleInsider’s tipster noticed the reviews were removed from US, UK, and Australian Apple stores, pointing to a purposeful move rather than a mistake on Apple’s part....

Given this is an event of extreme public interest, it’ll be streamed by multiple sources. C-SPAN has a special landing page just for the impeachment, where it’ll stream the event live. PBS Newshour will also have a livestream from its YouTube channel: If you don’t want to go to any of those sites, the House Intelligence YouTube channel will broadcast the event live. You can find the stream here: The public hearings are set to begin tomorrow at 10 AM EST....

Two high-profile cyberattacks on critical infrastructure companies over the past month have shone what experts say is a much-needed spotlight on the rising threat of ransomware. An attack against Colonial Pipeline in May forced the company to temporarily shut down 5,500 miles of pipeline that it said supplies nearly 45 percent of the East Coast’s fuel. Colonial eventually paid the extortionists—a group known as DarkSide—nearly $5 million in Bitcoin. The FBI has since recovered roughly half of the ransom....

Failure has always been the hallmark of entrepreneurship – only around 50% of businesses survive their first five years. And not only are the chances of survival slim, but there is evidence that on average business owners earn less than if they had remained as someone else’s employee. They also work substantially longer hours than their counterparts in paid employment. So what sort of person decides to leave the relative security and comfort of employment and invest on average 70% of their wealth on the high risk lottery ticket that is entrepreneurship?...

But the skin tone modifier is notably missing for one particular hand-themed emoji: ?. It’s a mystery that has troubled Redditors for years. Determined to get Reddit the answer it deserves, I set out on a quest to find out why that is. “What makes the handshake emoji different to most other emojis is that it includes the hands of two people,” emoji historian and founder of Emojipedia, Jeremy Burge, told TNW....

Square is acquiring the company in an all-stock deal, the final transaction will take place in the first quarter of 2022. The company wants to integrate AfterPay into its current offerings so that “the smallest of merchants” can offer pay later services. AfterPay was founded by Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen in 2015 to let customers buy goods, and pay for them later. The firm started its services in Australia and New Zealand, and later expanded to other markets such as the US, the UK, and Canada....

The concerns stem from the fact that Tesla is using a conventional video camera, rather than infrared alternatives that other carmakers use (but more on that later). “Any time video is being recorded, it can be accessed later,” senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, John Davisson, told Consumer Reports. “There may be legal protections around who can access it and how, but there’s always the possibility that insurance companies, police, regulators, and other parties in accidents will be able to obtain that data....

Occasionally, Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic gets a mention too, but the Brit being a relative pauper, and his space plane lacking the phallic majesty of his fellow billionaires’ rockets, he has received diminishing attention in recent weeks. The Musk v Bezos rivalry makes for good press and is stoked occasionally in tweets by both parties, but is it real? Probably not, according to our research, published in the book The New Patriarchs of Digital Patriarchy: Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power, which analyses 95 popular books about the technology industry....

Unfortunately, many SaaS companies forget about it and concentrate their efforts on generating new leads. The costs of acquiring new customers get very high, really quick. And if you’re unable to bind your user to your product, it is completely useless. Most people judge the performance of a SaaS-company on its MRR while judging a company on its NDR might give much more valuable insight. Why? Well, it’s not uncommon that a company’s MRR increases while their NDR deteriorates....

The impassioned pitch for cash gives the impression that the site is struggling to stay afloat. But the reality is very different, as freelance journalist Andreas Kolbe elucidated in the Daily Dot last week. In an eye-opening piece, Kolbe explains that the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), which owns Wikipedia, is actually richer than ever before. Kolbe, a former co-editor-in-chief of Wikipedia’s community newspaper, The Signpost, argues that the non-profit’s rising revenues and record-breaking annual donations are easily sufficient to keep the site operating....

But other takeovers are more hostile in nature. Not every company wants to be taken over. This is the case with Elon Musk’s US$43 billion bid to buy Twitter. Companies have various measures in their arsenal to ward off such unwanted advances. One of the most effective anti-takeover measures is the shareholder rights plan, also more aptly known as a “poison pill.” It is designed to block an investor from accumulating a majority stake in a company....

In short, it was a mess. Thankfully, Microsoft has provided some much-needed clarity and opened up (unofficial) compatibility to many more PCs. It seems pretty much any PC that can run Windows 10 will, in fact, be able to install Windows 11. It just might not be easy for you to do so. While everyone with an officially compatible PC will be able to install Windows 11 via a simple update, those who wish to update their PC on unsupported hardware will have to do so via Windows 11 ISO file....