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Sufficiently Advanced Tech: Has Bugs

Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. He was a sci-fi writer, though, and not a security guy. Maybe it should read “Any sufficiently advanced tech has security flaws”. Because this is the story of breaking into a car through its headlight. In a marvelous writeup, half-story, half CAN-bus

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How Apple’s commitment to supporting old iPhones allowed it to capture a part of the US market once cornered by the inexpensive Android phones (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)

Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal: How Apple’s commitment to supporting old iPhones allowed it to capture a part of the US market once cornered by the inexpensive Android phones  —  It’s not just lavish marketing and the threat of green bubbles—Apple’s commitment to supporting old phones has allowed it to capture a part …

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Indian streaming service JioCinema plans to add 100+ films and TV series and charge for content; JioCinema had 22M viewers for an IPL cricket match on April 12 (P R Sanjai/Bloomberg)

P R Sanjai / Bloomberg: Indian streaming service JioCinema plans to add 100+ films and TV series and charge for content; JioCinema had 22M viewers for an IPL cricket match on April 12  —  Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s streaming service will add more than 100 films and TV series to its platform, building on the popularity

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Android Studio Flamingo upgrades UI tooling

Android Studio Flamingo, the latest version of the official IDE for Android app development, is available in a stable release. New features include Jetpack Compose and Material 3 templates, live editing for Compose UIs, and new app inspection capabilities. Accessible from developer.android.com and based on JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA 2022.2 IDE, Android Studio Flamingo is numbered

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Better Laser Cuts: Know Your Kerf

The recent crop of laser cutters are nothing short of miraculous. For a few hundred dollars you can get a machine that can easily engrave and — subject to materials — cut well, too. [Nate] has been taking advantage of a laser to make boxes that join together using finger joinery. The problem is, the

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A San Francisco federal judge rules Google must face trial, set for May 8, over Sonos’ patents, but invalidates two of four patents and narrows Sonos’ claims (Blake Brittain/Reuters)

Blake Brittain / Reuters: A San Francisco federal judge rules Google must face trial, set for May 8, over Sonos’ patents, but invalidates two of four patents and narrows Sonos’ claims  —  Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O) received a mixed ruling on Thursday from a San Francisco federal judge in a patent lawsuit brought by Sonos Inc

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Court filings in California’s suit against Amazon say the company blocked sellers from offering lower prices on rival sites despite claiming to end the policy (Malathi Nayak/Bloomberg)

Malathi Nayak / Bloomberg: Court filings in California’s suit against Amazon say the company blocked sellers from offering lower prices on rival sites despite claiming to end the policy  —  Amazon.com Inc. continued blocking sellers from offering lower prices on rival sites, despite assuring antitrust enforcers it ended …

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Kicad Autorouting Made Easy

One of the most laborious tasks in PCB layout is the routing. Autorouting isn’t always perfect, but it is nice to have the option, even if you only use it to get started and then hand-tune the resulting board. Unfortunately, recent versions of Kicad have dropped support for autorouting. You can, however, still use Freerouting

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Asus unveils ROG Phone 7 with a 6.78-inch AMOLED screen, 16GB RAM, 512GB storage, and clip-on cooling fan, starting at €999 and available for preorder in Europe (Ron Amadeo/Ars Technica)

Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica: Asus unveils ROG Phone 7 with a 6.78-inch AMOLED screen, 16GB RAM, 512GB storage, and clip-on cooling fan, starting at €999 and available for preorder in Europe  —  The clip-on fan interfaces with a trap door that opens up for internal cooling.  —  Some companies may be giving …

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A look at OpenAI’s “red team” of 50 academics and experts, hired in 2022 to look for issues such as toxicity, prejudice, and biases in GPT-4 before its release (Madhumita Murgia/Financial Times)

Madhumita Murgia / Financial Times: A look at OpenAI’s “red team” of 50 academics and experts, hired in 2022 to look for issues such as toxicity, prejudice, and biases in GPT-4 before its release  —  Microsoft-backed company asked an eclectic mix of people to ‘adversarially test’ GPT-4, its powerful new language model

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