As 2019 nears, the New Horizons spacecraft is zooming toward mysterious space rock Ultima Thule on a historic flyby. NASA New Horizons to photograph Ultima Thule in historic New Year's flyby – CNET Source: CNet
Read MoreEcho Huang / Quartz: China-owned spacecraft maker CASIC launches first of 156 satellites intended to provide internet service by 2022 to rural China and then to developing countries — Over the weekend, China launched a satellite into low-earth orbit, the first step of a plan to provide global satellite internet … China-owned spacecraft maker CASIC
Read MoreJohansson, one of the world’s highest-paid actresses, spoke to The Washington Post in an exclusive interview: “The Internet is just another place where sex sells and vulnerable people are preyed upon.” Scarlett Johansson on fake AI-generated sex videos: ‘Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image’ Source: Washington Post Tech
Read MoreThe hottest toy of the year was a glittering, baby-pink plastic suitcase that we buy without knowing what’s inside. Why Do You Love a L.O.L. Surprise? Source: NY Times Tech
Read MoreGet a closer look at the main character in the upcoming live-action Pokemon movie. Ryan Reynolds shares a behind-the-scenes peek at Detective Pikachu – CNET Source: CNet
Read MoreDrew Harwell / Washington Post: How deepfakes, AI-generated videos that graft a person’s face onto another’s body, have been weaponized to harass and humiliate their subjects, mostly women — “Deepfake” creators are making disturbingly realistic, computer-generated videos with photos taken from the Web, and ordinary women are suffering the damage. How deepfakes, AI-generated videos that
Read MoreInsurance is a funny business. Life insurance, for example, is essentially betting someone you will die before your time. With the recent focus on companies getting hacked, it isn’t surprising that cybersecurity insurance is now big business. Get hacked and get paid. Maybe. The reason I say maybe is because of the recent court battle
Read MoreYou can be the person who knows all the ins and outs of using Cisco systems to drive your business with the training in the Ultimate Cisco Certification Super Bundle. You can get the whole thing now for $40 with promo code: NEWYEAR2019. For , there won’t be a Cisco networking question that you can’t
Read MoreMeng Jing / South China Morning Post: Beijing plans to adopt facial recognition-enabled smart locks in its public housing projects involving 120K tenants in 2019 to crack down on illegal subletting — – The smart lock is one of the latest hi-tech tools authorities are using to keep an eye on its citizens Beijing plans
Read MorePicture the keypad of a telephone and calculator side by side. Can you see the subtle difference between the two without resorting to your smartphone? Don’t worry if you can’t recall the design. Most of us are so used to accepting the common interfaces that we tend to overlook the calculator’s inverted key sequence. A
Read MoreThe Russian-built Tupolev Tu-144 beat the Concorde into the air by two months. But the supersonic plane would enjoy a far less successful career. Before the Concorde, there was 'the Concordski' – CNET Source: CNet
Read MoreThe next 12 months has Roadshow editors eager for a pickup truck, a crossover and a lot of sports cars. Cars we're most looking forward to driving in 2019 – Roadshow Source: CNet
Read MoreNot that we don’t love Star Trek, but the writers could never decide if ion propulsion was super high tech (Spock’s Brain) or something they used every day (The Menagerie). Regardless, ion propulsion is real and we have it today on more than one spacecraft. However, MIT recently demonstrated an ion-powered airplane. How exciting! An
Read MoreGlobes Online: Der Spiegel: Volkswagen is planning to write off over $300M it invested in Gett, as the Israeli startup struggles to compete with Uber, Lyft, Didi, and others — “Der Spiegel” reported that Volkswagen would write off its over $300 million investment in the Israeli taxi hailing company. Der Spiegel: Volkswagen is planning to
Read More[This Old Tony] is no stranger to quality tools, but he started on a mini lathe. Nostalgia does not stop him from broadcasting his usual brand of snark (actually, it is doubtful that anything short of YouTube going offline will stop that). He rates the lathe’s ability to machine different materials and lets you decide
Read MoreCardano is an open-source blockchain and smart contracts platform, supported by the namesake cryptocurrency Cardano (ADA). The project is a direct competitor to Ethereum, and the two organizations also share a co-founder between them — Charles Hokinson. Hokinson claims that Cardano has cracked the problem of scalability with blockchains through its ‘Ouroboros‘ proof of stake
Read MoreAria Thaker / Quartz: In an year of breaches, data leaks, and reports of starvation deaths due to faulty implementation, India’s Aadhaar had its constitutional status upheld in 2018 — After almost a decade since its launch, India’s controversial biometric identity programme, Aadhaar, finally got a measure … In an year of breaches, data leaks,
Read More[Jiska Classen] and [Dennis Mantz] created a tool called Internal Blue that aims to be a Swiss-army knife for playing around with Bluetooth at a lower level. The ground for their tool is based in three functions that are common to all Broadcom Bluetooth chipsets: one that lets you read arbitrary memory, on that lets
Read MoreShannon Bond / Financial Times: Inside Uber’s serious incident team for US where ~130 investigators deal with reports of crashes, physical altercations, sexual misconduct, theft, and stalking — There is space for scores of people in a section of Uber’s office in downtown Phoenix but on a recent weekday morning only a handful … Inside
Read MoreRFID is a workhorse in industrial, commercial, and consumer markets. Passive tags, like work badges and key fobs, need a base station but not the tags. Sensors are a big market and putting sensors in places that are hard to reach, hostile, or mobile is a costly proposition. That price could drop, and the sensors
Read MoreTimothy B. Lee / Ars Technica: Big players in autonomous driving like Uber, Tesla, and Waymo had a disappointing 2018, but several startups with a “minimum viable product” made good progress — Big companies struggled but small ones moved forward. — As 2018 dawned, expectations for self-driving vehicles were sky-high: Big players in autonomous driving
Read MoreAs 2018 draws to a close, many members of the crypto community will be happy that they made it through to the end of another volatile year. Many can still be heard repeating their mantra of “I believe in the tech” to anyone that will care to listen. The battle scars of 2018 will ensure
Read MoreEric Bellman / Wall Street Journal: How Amazon is opening tiny stores, adding local language descriptors, and accepting cash payments to target the 800M people living outside India’s big cities — The retailer is targeting hundreds of millions of new online shoppers in India’s countryside by adding Hindi and videos … How Amazon is opening
Read MoreNew York Times: In a formerly undisclosed memo from March, a top FTC enforcement official said Facebook wasn’t at fault for Cambridge Analytica’s abuses; FTC says probe ongoing — Last spring, soon after Facebook acknowledged that the data of tens of millions of its users had improperly been obtained … In a formerly undisclosed memo
Read MoreAndrew Tarantola / Engadget: AI image processing for computer vision, facial recognition, image generation, and other applications saw marked improvements in 2018 — Computer scientists have spent more than two decades teaching, training and developing machines to see the world around them. AI image processing for computer vision, facial recognition, image generation, and other applications
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