Just a year ago, the Autopilot of the Tesla Model X was hacked, and not just once. In one instance, Israeli researchers at Ben Gurion University tricked the car by flashing “phantom” images on a road, wall or sign, causing it to unexpectedly brake or steer in the wrong direction. A few months later, Lennert Wouters, a researcher at KU Leuven, “stole” a Tesla Model X in 90 seconds, Wired reported....
If you told me a decade ago that I’d be enthusiastically writing something praising lightbulbs, I would’ve probably shaken my head in disgust at my future self. Thing is, I don’t feel any shame: lightbulbs in our current technological age are cool. Changing the lighting in your house with only your voice is just a badass feeling. There’s no other way to describe it, it’s the sort of future that Star Trek promised us....
There are a whole load of good Android phones out there, but there aren’t many great ones. In that category (which we’ve discussed before) there are a handful of companies making top class devices: Samsung are one. And another? Google. The tech giant’s Pixel phones are some of the best on the market, with the Pixel 3 getting strong reviews across the board. Hell, we’re big fans of the devices....
Some of these developments in the way people spend their money, powered by the latest technology, will soon be appearing on a device near you. Indeed, at the start of this year, The Economist suggested that retailers everywhere should look to China, and some are already doing so. So what will China’s “retail revolution” bring to the rest of the world? Here are five concepts for global consumers to be on the lookout for…...
The system aims to merge the NHS’s vast but hugely fragmented datasets to predict where ventilators, beds, and staff are needed. This tricky task has been entrusted to one of the world’s most controversial tech companies: Palantir, the $20 billion data-mining giant funded by the CIA and used by Immigration and Customers Enforcement in workplace raids. Palantir will integrate an array of healthcare information into a single data store through the company’s Foundry software, a data integration tool used by US spy agencies to analyze intelligence....
It’s a tried and true story of the tech industry. Even while sectors like cloud computing explode in usage, requiring scores of new cloud engineers and admins to keep it all in line, companies are running up against a major problem. As tech staffing firm Robert Half International confirms, there just aren’t enough people with the talent to fill those multiplying positions. Meanwhile, cloud engineering sits in Half’s top 5 Highest Paying IT Jobs of 2021 with an average median starting salary of $146,000....
But the COVID-19 crisis could see this dynamic evolve towards more cordial partnerships. Several North American transport leaders at a recent Cities Today Institute roundtable agreed that the pandemic has highlighted how micromobility services such as rented scooters and shared bikes are now a crucial part of the transport mix in many cities, and therefore may need to be better supported as such. During COVID-19 lockdowns, micromobility companies, alongside public transport operators, have seen their ridership plummet, though many offered services to help essential workers continue to get around....
Now our new paper, published in Nature Astronomy, has come to a conclusion that may unleash a crisis in cosmology – if confirmed. We show that the shape of the universe may actually be curved rather than flat, as previously thought – with a probability larger than 99 percent. In a curved universe, no matter which direction you travel in, you will end up at the starting point – just like on a sphere....
No matter how many new build-your-own-website services spring up, none have dislodged WordPress as the undisputed content management system king. More than 1 in 3 websites run on WordPress with over 500 new ones popping up literally every day. But, for how great WordPress is, it can be frustrating to use if you’re new to coding and want something that’s a little more sophisticated than your run-of-the-mill WordPress site. That’s why there’s WP Page Builder, and it’s now over 90 percent off at just $49 from TNW Deals....
Sometimes I just want to indulge in a good movie, even if it’s a bit long, you know that there’s an end to a story. So, if you want a bit of a breather from switching to one show to another, here’s how you can watch movies for free. Mubi, which has a great selection of indie movies, is offering 90-days of free subscription. Open culture has a list of more than 1,150 free movies ranging from Korean titles to Hollywood classics....
Well, now Dell has one of those too – stand included. Wordily dubbed the UltraSharp 32 HDR PremierColor Monitor, the 4K 32-inch monitor packs the high-end performance you’d hope for five grand. Notably, the display uses mini-LED backlighting for two thousand backlighting zones, compared to the 576 zones in the Pro Display XDR. This, combined with 1,000 nits of peak brightness, should allow for contrast levels of 1,000,000:1 with HDR activated or 1,300:1 without using local dimming....
Destruction AllStars, in case you weren’t aware, is a sort of G-rated Twisted Metal, in that involves driving a bunch of cars around an arena and smashing them into each other. The company revealed in a blog post just that it’d delayed the game. It didn’t say whether the game was unfinished, or if there was some other reason. Let’s just say Sony can’t take any shots at Microsoft over delaying a launch title like Halo Infinite, because this is the closest delay I’ve seen to the original release....
You’re sitting at your desk, searching for hours on the Holy Internet something you need. You want to create a superb product, or you want to improve some technical skills you lack for your dream job. You want to build a great personal project. But you miss something. This is something simple but difficult to grasp. Something everybody speaks about, but only the chosen ones know its true meaning. Something almost magical....
Some companies and organizations use a series of tools to track you online in order to place advertisements and measure their effectiveness. Some of these tools, like third-party tracking cookies, have been around for over a decade. They include cross-site tracking cookies, tracking pixels, social trackers, content trackers, among others. There is another, less known but more invasive form of cross-site tracking: browser fingerprinting, and it’s gaining traction among advertisers....
You can search for your phone number or email address to check the orders you’ve placed. The dreaded part is that the data contains information about your order location, apart from your phone number and email ID. This makes it easy for scammers or spammers to locate your home and office address. TNW talked to people who were able to search their order history along with their details; even I got to know how many pizzas I ordered while watching TV....
Or, at the very least, media outlets have come to realize that news of “mysteries solved” and “hidden treasures revealed” generate traffic and clicks. So I’m never surprised when I see AI-assisted revelations about famous masters’ works of art go viral. Over the past year alone, I’ve come across articles highlighting how artificial intelligence recovered a “secret” painting of a “lost lover” of Italian painter Modigliani, “brought to life” a “hidden Picasso nude”, “resurrected” Austrian painter Gustav Klimt’s destroyed works and “restored” portions of Rembrandt’s 1642 painting “The Night Watch....
Snowden made headlines across the globe after leaking highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) when he was a CIA employee and subcontractor. The leak revealed several global surveillance programs, many operated by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the help of telecommunication companies and European governments, prompting a global discussion about national security and individual privacy. Speaking via video conference at Bitcoin 2019, an industry conference held in San Francisco over the past couple of days, Snowden said: “The servers that I used to transfer this information to journalists were paid for using Bitcoin....
Walking on the streets of Cairo, it’s now common to see colorful billboards bearing the distinct logo of Fawry, an e-payments platform which has gained funding big enough to attain unicorn status. Other startups like Vezeeta and Swvl are not only offering seamless essential services to a wide client base, but also attracting major investments that boost Egypt’s track record in the tech startup space. According to Walid Faza, Chief Operating Officer at MSA Capital, Egypt is now seen as the tech hub of Africa, and a lot of products coming out of the country could scale to the rest of the continent with sufficient funding....
When organizations grow too big, you can feel the empathy dissipate. This is more clear from the outside than the inside. On the inside are people who mean well, but are also a part of the system. That’s why they have trouble realizing the influence and effect this system has on the world around it. But if you’re on the outside and experience the full force of its meat-grinding impact, it becomes painfully clear....
The European Union’s executive arm has noticed a 12% drop in ads served per visit on sites known to infringe on intellectual property rights across Europe, TorrentFreak reports. The Commission revealed the findings in a new report documenting the progress of the campaign. Despite the decline in overall ads, though, data shows the number of branded advertising campaigns — ads attributed directly to specific brands — has grown. “Although fewer ads were found per visit, the percentage of branded advertising post-MoU has increased from 38% to 52%,” the report notes....
