Month: January 2018

I am pretty nutty when it comes to energy efficiency. It upsets me to know that if the morons who built my house had used the latest information available at the time, my house would require almost no heating. One thing that really gets me excited is the prospect of reusing waste energy. I like the idea of taking energy that would otherwise be destined to diffuse out into the environment and turning it into something useful.

As such, it was inevitable that a paper on recovering microwave energy would catch my eye. And, yes, I shall inflict it on you, too. Unfortunately, harvesting Wi-Fi radiation doesn't seem like it will win us very much. But before we get to that, let's take a look at the very cool ideas behind the harvester.

Stopping reflections

The basic idea behind harvesting Wi-Fi radiation is a very old one: just construct a circuit that absorbs all that microwave energy. Let's take a very artificial situation: imagine a microwave traveling along a bit of coaxial cable. A coaxial cable consists of a central conducting wire enclosed in a cylinder of non-conducting dielectric material, all wrapped in a conductor. The power from the microwaves is not transmitted "in" the central wire. It is actually in the electric and magnetic fields in the dielectric. These propagate as waves down the cable with a speed that is partially given by the properties of the dielectric material.

Jonathan Gitlin

DETROIT—New cars today are as much wheeled, wearable computers as they are modes of transport. But if you wanted to pick a new vehicle that was as far away from the brave new connected mobility future we keep hearing so much about, you couldn't do much better than the Mercedes-Benz G-Class. Better known to its fans—which are legion—as the Geländewagen, the boxy four-wheel drive vehicle has been in production since 1979, changing very little in the intervening time. Despite this, it continues to find buyers, a fact more remarkable when you consider that this automotive antique comes with a price tag to match. (The outgoing model starts at $123,600!)

Most other OEMs would eventually consign such an old model to the archives, but not Mercedes-Benz. It has reworked the SUV to give the G-Class an all-new interior, some 21st-century technology, and sorely needed handling improvements while retaining that angular 1970s look.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Jonathan Kitchen)

Municipal broadband networks generally offer cheaper entry-level prices than private Internet providers, and the city-run networks also make it easier for customers to find out the real price of service, a new study from Harvard University researchers found.

Researchers collected advertised prices for entry-level broadband plans—those meeting the federal standard of at least 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds—offered by 40 community-owned ISPs and compared them to advertised prices from private competitors.

The report by researchers at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard doesn't provide a complete picture of municipal vs. private pricing. But that's largely because data about private ISPs' prices is often more difficult to get than information about municipal network pricing, the report says.

Enlarge / It looks like this patent image that surfaced in 2016 is as close as we're going to get to a Nintendo-approved VR headset anytime soon.

Readers with decent memories may remember early 2016, when Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said the company was looking into the virtual reality space at an investor's briefing. Coming months before we had concrete details on the company's upcoming Switch, the statement set off industry alarm bells about Nintendo's potential future plans. A vague Nintendo patent for a head-mounted tablet holster that surfaced in late 2016 got the chatter going even further.

Fast forward to today, and it's increasingly clear that Nintendo has finished "looking" and has decided VR shouldn't be part of its plans for the time being. The latest evidence comes from a recent interview with Nintendo France General Manager Philippe Lavoué in French publication Les Numeriques. "If you look at VR headsets, I doubt they can appeal to the mainstream," Lavoué said in a translation of that interview. "Consumers are not patient with entertainment if you’re not able to deliver an all-inclusive package."

Lavoué goes on to downplay any need for Nintendo to invest in hardware capable of full 4K images, saying that the TV display technology has "not been adopted by the majority" and would therefore be a premature investment for the company. "And what novelty would we bring compared to our competitors?" he said. "If we do the exact same thing as everyone else, we’re bound to die because we are smaller than them. With the Switch, we offer different uses, adapted to players’ pace of life. Its advantage is being able to fit into your daily life."

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Android OEM OnePlus says it's investigating claims of credit card numbers being stolen from customers who have purchased a phone from OnePlus' site.

Over the weekend, a customer claimed on a thread on the OnePlus forums that recent credit card fraud he experienced was connected to his OnePlus purchase. Almost 100 people have chimed in on the thread's poll, claiming they too experienced fraudulent charges after making a OnePlus purchase.

A FAQ from OnePlus says its e-commerce platform is built with "custom code" and that "card info is never processed or saved on our website." It says credit card data is "sent directly to our PCI-DSS-compliant payment processing partner over an encrypted connection, and processed on their secure servers.​"

NASA

After spending three months at a temperature of just 20°C above absolute zero, the massive James Webb Space Telescope emerged from a large vacuum chamber at the end of 2017. Now, after reviewing data from testing done there, scientists have given the instrument a clean bill of health, moving it one step closer to space.

"We now have have verified that NASA and its partners have an outstanding telescope and set of science instruments," said Bill Ochs, the Webb telescope project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "We are marching toward launch."

A trio of French media reports over the weekend accuse high-profile PlayStation developer Quantic Dream (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, the upcoming Detroit: Become Human) of fostering a "toxic corporate culture" where inappropriate behavior and homophobic, racist, and sexist jokes were tolerated, if not encouraged.

The reports spring from a complaint reportedly filed last spring by five former Quantic Dream employees, centering on what French newspaper Le Monde describes as "degrading photomontages." French magazine CanardPC includes some examples of those (NSFW) montages on its Web version, showing Quantic Dream employees photoshopped onto sexually suggestive or explicit images. Le Monde's report cites a collection of roughly 600 such images that circulated around the company via group email since 2013, including some with "homophobic or sexist slurs." French online news site Mediapart has a similar report.

Quantic Dream founder David Cage is accused in the Le Monde piece of making racist remarks toward a Tunisian employee surrounding CCTV footage of a burglary. Cage is also accused of making repeated dirty jokes in work situations and sexist remarks about female cast members in his games.

Enlarge / The Nyhavn canal in Copenhagen, Denmark. (credit: Chad Sparkes)

Over 1,000 young people are facing charges in Denmark after allegedly sharing two sexually explicit videos and a photograph involving underage subjects on Facebook Messenger. Danish police announced the charges on Monday morning, according to the Danish publication The Local.

The sharing occurred in late 2017 and depicted a sexual encounter between two 15-year-olds. The young people charged with sharing the materials ranged in age from 15 to the early 20s. When Facebook learned that the material was being shared, the company notified US authorities, who in turn alerted authorities in Denmark.

“We want to give out a warning to young people: think about what you’re doing," said Flemming Kjærside of Denmark's National Cyber Crime Center in a statement. "But they possibly do not know that it is illegal and that they can be convicted for distributing child pornography."