Month: November 2016

After mothballing Comma One, George Hotz releases free autonomous car software

Highway safety regulators called, so Hotz opted to offer a product with less liability.

Enlarge / A sketch of the Comma Neo. (credit: Comma.ai)

In Silicon Valley, hacker George Hotz gained fast fame after being the first to unlock an iPhone. He recently capitalized on his reputation and turned to hacking cars, raising millions in funding to build a third-party device that would give average, everyday cars autonomous functionality. He called this device the Comma One and the company making it Comma.ai.

But the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sent Hotz a letter in October asking him to detail how the product works, as well as how the safety features built into the Comma One work, or face an ever-growing fine. Hotz abruptly canceled the product, tweeting, “The comma one is cancelled. comma.ai will be exploring other products and markets.” Then on Tuesday night this week, Hotz started tweeting hints that the Comma One could be revived, at least partially. He also posted a video of what appeared to be a Comma One-type device driving on the 280 highway.

On Wednesday morning, Hotz held a press conference in a San Francisco home to announce that instead of reviving the Comma One as a market-ready device, Comma.ai would be giving away its self-driving software—called Open Pilot—as well as plans for compatible hardware, called Comma Neo—for free, according to The Verge.

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Incredible discovery of 40,000-year-old tools for art and engineering

Humans began making paint and glue at roughly the same time with the same tools.

Evidence from a cave in eastern Ethiopia has revealed something extraordinary about the origins of symbolic thought among humans. Forty thousand years ago, Porc-Epic Cave was surrounded by lush grassland full of lakes and rivers. It was home to a thriving community of people who devoted considerable time to processing ochre, a reddish powder used for a variety of things including paint. Writing in PLoS One, anthropologists Daniela Eugenia Rosso, Africa Pitarch Martí, and Francesco d’Errico describe how they worked with the National Museum of Ethiopia to analyze these Middle Stone Age people's ochre-making tools. What they found was that this workshop's artisans produced a far more complicated array of substances than anyone had understood before. Some were used for art and decoration, and others were used for engineering better weapons.

Anthropologists often use ochre processing as a proxy for the origins of human symbolic thought. That's partly because ochre is relatively difficult to make, requiring a few steps and at least two kinds of tools. As the researchers write, ochre comes from "rocks containing a high proportion of iron oxides, often mixed with silicates and other mineral substances, which are red or yellow in color, or are streaked with such shades." Ochre itself is made by pulverizing the rock with one kind of tool and then reducing it to a powder between two grindstones.

There are many aesthetic uses for ochre, including as fabric dye, paint for cave walls, or a stain for rocks and other materials. All these artistic or cosmetic uses imply symbolic thought. But early humans used ochre for utilitarian purposes, too. The powder was mixed with other adhesives to keep weapons snugly attached to their hafts. Put simply, ochre was a key ingredient in glue.

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Virgin Media launches 14 inch TellyTablet in the UK

Virgin Media launches 14 inch TellyTablet in the UK

Sometimes you want to watch TV while plopped down on the coach and staring at a 50 inch screen. But sometimes you might want a smaller screen that you can pick up and carry with you to the kitchen, bedroom, or lavatory. And if you you’re a Virgin Media customers in the UK, you’ll have a new option for a portable screen starting in December.

The company has unveiled a new 14 inch Android tablet called the TellyTablet.

Continue reading Virgin Media launches 14 inch TellyTablet in the UK at Liliputing.

Virgin Media launches 14 inch TellyTablet in the UK

Sometimes you want to watch TV while plopped down on the coach and staring at a 50 inch screen. But sometimes you might want a smaller screen that you can pick up and carry with you to the kitchen, bedroom, or lavatory. And if you you’re a Virgin Media customers in the UK, you’ll have a new option for a portable screen starting in December.

The company has unveiled a new 14 inch Android tablet called the TellyTablet.

Continue reading Virgin Media launches 14 inch TellyTablet in the UK at Liliputing.

Reddit CEO who altered comments apologizes, unveils subreddit filtering

Huffman says the current climate of disrespect on Reddit “is not sustainable.”

(credit: Eva Blue)

A week after Reddit CEO Steve Huffman conceded that he altered comments of his online critics on the site he co-founded, Huffman took to Reddit on Wednesday to apologize. He then unveiled r/all filtering and announced "a more proactive approach to policing" the site.

Huffman

Huffman (credit: Penn State)

"I am sorry: I am sorry for compromising the trust you all have in Reddit, and I am sorry to those that I created work and stress for, particularly over the holidays," he said. "It is heartbreaking to think that my actions distracted people from their family over the holiday; instigated harassment of our moderators; and may have harmed Reddit itself, which I love more than just about anything."

Over the Thanksgiving holiday week, Huffman committed the ultimate Reddit taboo. He edited negative comments directed at him and substituted his handle with the names of moderators of a pro-Donald Trump subreddit called "r/the_donald." Huffman, who goes by the handle "spez," was under fire for banning the "Pizzagate" conspiracy board from the site because of breaches to a policy about posting personal information about others.

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Firefox and Tor release urgent update for 0-day that’s under active attack

Critical deanonymization flaw resides in Windows, Mac, and Linux. Patch now.

Developers with both Mozilla and Tor have published browser updates that patche a critical Firefox vulnerability being actively exploited to deanonymize people using the privacy service.

"The security flaw responsible for this urgent release is already actively exploited on Windows systems," a Tor official wrote in an advisory published Wednesday afternoon. "Even though there is currently, to the best of our knowledge, no similar exploit for OS X or Linux users available, the underlying bug affects those platforms as well. Thus we strongly recommend that all users apply the update to their Tor Browser immediately."

The Tor browser is based on the open source Firefox browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla officials on Tuesday released version 50.0.2 for the mainstream versions of Firefox. According to the release notes, it includes a fix for the vulnerability, which is rated as critical.

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What we’ll be looking for in laptops for 2017

There’s a bunch of technology that systems need to start including.

Certain pieces of technology tend to stick around. USB has been the connector of choice for all manner of peripherals for two decades, and ATA hard disks, first parallel and now serial, have a history back to 1986. Over the last few years, however, we've started to see real alternatives to these technologies hit the market, with NVMe storage and Thunderbolt 3 for attaching devices.

Similarly, touchpads have gone from dumb mouse emulators (often using the venerable PS/2 interface) to complex multi-finger pressure sensing devices with the Precision Touchpad specification.

We've also seen formerly niche capabilities, such as biometric authentication, move into the mainstream. Both facial recognition and fingerprints continue to become familiar parts of the hardware landscape.

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Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau gives go-ahead to two oil pipeline projects

Would carry more oil sands crude to ports in British Columbia and Wisconsin.

Pipeline in Alberta, Canada. (credit: jasonwoodhead23)

In the US, the proposed Keystone XL pipeline meant to carry oil from Alberta, Canada’s oil sands to refineries in Illinois and on the Gulf Coast ultimately died due to stiff opposition. That wasn’t the only route Alberta’s oil industry is pursuing to get its oil to market, though. On Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced decisions on three major pending pipeline projects. One was rejected, but two received a thumbs-up.

The especially controversial Northern Gateway pipeline would have carried oil from Edmonton, Alberta, to a port in Kitimat, British Columbia. Trudeau said this new pipeline would not be approved, citing environmental concerns for the newly protected Great Bear Rainforest that covers islands along the coast that would see greatly increased oil tanker traffic.

But a major proposal to expand the capacity of the Trans Mountain pipeline from Edmonton to a port near Vancouver will proceed. A second pipeline will be built to parallel the existing one, boosting the capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels per day. That will, at least, replace the volume currently being transported to the coast by rail as it heads to markets in Asia.

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Cablevision owner replacing cable with fiber, pledges 10Gbps speeds

Altice, 4th largest US cable company, will bring fiber to millions of homes.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Kalief Browder)

Altice USA, which recently became the country's fourth largest cable company by purchasing Cablevision and Suddenlink, today announced a big project to replace cable with fiber-to-the-home technology. Altice said it intends to "deliver broadband speeds of up to 10 Gbps across its footprint."

Based in the Netherlands, Altice purchased Suddenlink in December 2015 and Cablevision in June this year. The Altice USA division has 4.1 million broadband subscribers and 3.6 million pay-TV subscribers. Counting customers who subscribe to one or more services, Altice USA has 4.6 million customers in 20 states.

Cable dominates the US broadband market, easily outperforming DSL networks that use old copper telephone lines. But fiber is generally even faster than cable, especially in upload speeds, so cable companies including Comcast have been building fiber-to-the-home in some areas.

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Dealmaster: Cyber Week continues with deals on Dell Latitude 15, XPS 13, and more

The deals aren’t sold out yet, so get them while you can.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we're back with more Cyber Week deals for you. This entire week you can save a lot of money on a bunch of electronics, including the Dell Latitude 15 3000 laptop with a Core i7 processor and an Nvidia GPU or Dell XPS 13 laptops with Kaby Lake processors and 8GB of RAM, just to name a few. Below is a huge list of deals on desktops, TVs, smart home devices, and more, and you can check out even more Cyber Week Deals at TechBargains.

Featured Deals

PCMag Editor's Choice NordVPN Anonymous VPN 2-Year Service ($3/month) for $72 (list price $286.80).

Laptop & Desktop Computers

Electronics and Components

HDTVs & Home Theater

Home and Miscellaneous

Smart Home and Connected Devices

Movies

Toys

Didn't find what you want? See all the See the latest Cyber Week Deals at TechBargains.

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Deals of the Day (11-30-2016)

Deals of the Day (11-30-2016)

Remember yesterday, when I pointed out that the Microsoft Store was selling the Acer Switch Alpha 12 for $449? That was a pretty good price.

You know what’s a better price? $379.

Microsoft has slashed the price for this 12 inch, 2-in-1 Windows tablet by another $70, making the tablet with a QHD display, a Core i3 Skylake processor, and a detachable keyboard significantly cheaper than Microsoft’s Atom-powered Surface 3 tablet without a keyboard.

Continue reading Deals of the Day (11-30-2016) at Liliputing.

Deals of the Day (11-30-2016)

Remember yesterday, when I pointed out that the Microsoft Store was selling the Acer Switch Alpha 12 for $449? That was a pretty good price.

You know what’s a better price? $379.

Microsoft has slashed the price for this 12 inch, 2-in-1 Windows tablet by another $70, making the tablet with a QHD display, a Core i3 Skylake processor, and a detachable keyboard significantly cheaper than Microsoft’s Atom-powered Surface 3 tablet without a keyboard.

Continue reading Deals of the Day (11-30-2016) at Liliputing.