Month: July 2016

Facebook has been forced to restate its live video rules, after footage of a black man being shot and killed by police officers during a routine traffic stop in the US was viewed by millions—before being removed and returned under mysterious circumstances.

The company insists it will only remove a video of someone's death if it has been "used to mock the victim or celebrate the shooting."

Philando Castile’s death at the hands of a traffic police officer while he reached for his driver's licence in Minnesota on July 7 shocked the world, after his girlfriend Lavish Reynolds had the presence of mind to film the immediate aftermath and upload it to Facebook. It was online for about 10 minutes before disappearing for around an hour in what Facebook has insisted was "a technical glitch." He had been stopped for what Reynolds said was "a busted tail light."

German battery company Sonnen never made the grand splash in the US that Tesla made with its Powerwall. But the company has ambitions to match its US-native rival. Sonnen opened up its US headquarters in Los Angeles just this past January, at first selling a $10,000 battery called the “eco protect,” which offered off-grid capabilities to homeowners that wanted a backup in case of emergency.

This week, Sonnen announced a new stationary storage battery called the eco compact—a 4kWh lithium-iron-phosphate battery that homeowners can buy for self consumption, not just for backup power. The eco compact can be expanded by purchasing additional modules in 4kWh increments up to 16kWh. The base unit costs $5,950 plus installation, which Green Tech Media estimates would fall in the range of $900 to $3,000.

But Sonnen’s base price includes an inverter, and it guarantees the battery for up to 10,000 cycles, which could put it close to competitive with Tesla’s 7kWh Powerwall (which is actually only a 6.4kWh battery, according to the most recent specifications). SolarCity estimates Tesla’s Powerwalls cost about $7,340 after installation and the purchase of an inverter, but Tesla also only guarantees its Powerwall for 10 years or, according to an Australian warranty Green Tech Media cites, just 5,000 cycles. (Of course, this all could change in the coming months—rumor is that Tesla is gearing up to launch Powerwall 2.0 soon.)

We're in the midst of a major change sweeping the Web: the familiar HTTP prefix is rapidly being replaced by HTTPS. That extra "S" in an HTTPS URL means your connection is secure and that it's much harder for anyone else to see what you're doing. And on today's Web, everyone wants to see what you're doing.

HTTPS has been around nearly as long as the Web, but it has been primarily used by sites that handle money—your bank's website, shopping carts, social networks, and webmail services like Gmail. But these days Google, Mozilla, the EFF, and others want every website to adopt HTTPS. The push for HTTPS everywhere is about to get a big boost from Mozilla and Google when both companies' Web browsers begin to actively call out sites that still use HTTP.

The plan is for browsers to start labeling HTTP connections as insecure. In other words, instead of the green lock icon that indicates a connection is secure today, there will be a red icon to indicate when a connection is insecure. Eventually secure connections would not be labeled at all, they would be the assumed default.

Phone makers release new flagships every six to 12 months, which is a difficult pace to match if you're a chipmaker whose designs take between two and three years to make. That time gap is why chips like Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 821 exist—to give companies like Samsung and LG something "new" to use without going back to the drawing board and creating something from scratch.

The 821 is about as exciting a refresh as its model number implies: its Kryo CPU cores will run at a maximum clock speed of 2.4GHz, a roughly 10 percent increase from the 2.15GHz cores in the Snapdragon 820. There's no word on whether the 821's two slower cores in the CPU will be faster than the 1.6GHz in the current chip. Qualcomm's press release doesn't mention the GPU's speed increasing, and it says specifically that the 821 will use the same 600Mbps Snapdragon X12 LTE modem as the 820.

The clock-bumped Snapdragon 821 will be sold alongside the two Snapdragon 820 models. Qualcomm isn't saying which phones will use the 821, but rumors suggest that at least one of the two new HTC-made Nexus phones will include the faster chip. Enjoy your extra clock speed.