Month: July 2018

Elon Musk making “kid-sized submarine” to rescue teens in Thailand cave

“Construction complete in about 8 hours,” the tech billionaire tweeted Saturday.

Enlarge / SpaceX CEO Elon Musk speaks at the International Astronautical Congress on September 29, 2017 in Adelaide, Australia. (credit: Mark Brake/Getty Images)

Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday that a team of SpaceX engineers is hours away from completing work on a "tiny kid-sized submarine" that could be used to extract 12 teenagers and preteens who are stranded with their soccer coach in a flooded cave in Thailand. Musk has had a team of engineers working on the problem for the last couple of days and has been keeping the world updated on the work via Twitter.

On Thursday night, Musk tweeted about an idea to use an inflatable nylon tube to help the kids escape. By Friday afternoon, Musk's thinking had evolved. He tweeted that his team was working on building "double-layer Kevlar pressure pods with Teflon coating to slip by rocks." A mid-day tweet on Saturday provided another update:

And this isn't just a theory: Musk says that his team is building the contraption now. "Construction complete in about 8 hours, then 17 hour flight to Thailand," Musk tweeted just before noon, California time.

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Fake Kim Dotcom Twitter Accounts Still Scamming Cryptocurrency

With an impressive 732,000 Twitter followers, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is no lightweight on the social networking platform. Unfortunately, however, some people are trying to exploit the entrepreneur’s popularity in order to scam cryptocurrency from the public. Thankfully, the tricks of the criminals are easily avoided.

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For the past several years, Twitter has been the platform most used by Kim Dotcom to get his messages out to the public.

Whenever there’s been a development in his long-running case, Twitter is usually the first place to find up-to-date information.

With his larger-than-life persona, Kim has developed a huge following. He currently has more than 732,000 followers on his official account, something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by those looking to generate profit from his significant profile.

Kim’s tweets are regularly piggybacked by criminals seeking to trick the public into handing over cash. Exploiting a weakness in the way Twitter displays tweets and replies, they’re able to use fake accounts that look like his in order to promote their agenda.

It begins with the real Kim but goes somewhere dark

As the image above shows, a genuine Tweet by Kim to his followers is followed by others which claim to be him giving away cryptocurrency. Upon closer inspection, however, it’s clear that while the names and images match, the underlying Twitter usernames are quite different.

This particular scam leads to a Tumblr blog which has Kim’s name in the URL. For added credibility, it also adds a ‘Medium’ logo at the top and a faked “13.2K” claps at the bottom. In the middle, the offer is made clear.

“It has been an exciting past year. Thanks to your support, I am giving away 10,000 Ethereum!” the fake Kim Dotcom writes.

“To identify your address, please send .5-10 ETH to the payment address and I will immediately send you 5-100 ETH back to the address you sent it from. If you are late, your ETH will be instantly returned.

“I know it has been a rough past few months for Cryptocurrency hodlers, but maybe this gift will cheer you up!”

Needless to say, the offer of free cryptocurrency is completely fake, with the scam designed to part Kim Dotcom fans from their money. For added effect, the blog post has plenty of comments (all fake of course) which falsely claim that ETH has been sent to “Kim’s account” and he has been kind enough to send plenty back for free.

With some fake users claiming to have received as much as 55 ETH from Kim (1 ETH is currently around $460.00) the temptation must be high to get involved. Rest (un)assured, there’s only one person getting rich from this scam.

Unfortunately, several groups have jumped aboard the gravy train. As can be seen from the image below, scammers are jumping on Kim’s recent tweets to promote their criminal activity in the hope that people hand over their hard-earned cash.

Same scam, different presentation

These attempted scams aren’t new and have been going on for some time now. However, on the back of the news this week that Kim’s latest effort to avoid extradition to the United States has failed, the scammers are jumping onto Kim’s posts and exposing thousands more visitors to fraud on a larger scale.

Thankfully, there’s some advice from the genuine Kim Dotcom on how to easily avoid online criminals exploiting his name.

“Unfortunately there are many fake Kim Dotcom accounts on Twitter offering free gifts and free crypto. Don’t fall for those scams. The only real Kim Dotcom account on Twitter is the one with the blue verification tick next to my name,” he previously explained.

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Outlook.com the latest site to copy Ars, offer “dark mode”

We’ve been doing this for years.

The most popular feature request for Microsoft's Outlook.com has been to add a dark/night theme that replaces the eye-searing white with a calming dark grey, making it less visually traumatic to check your e-mail after dark. Microsoft has now announced that this is coming soon, as spotted by The Verge.

The new theme will be based on a special dark theme that was offered last Halloween. Since then, it's apparently been "redesigned multiple times" and the company claims that it will be "the best Dark Mode of any leading e-mail client."

But as exciting as this is (along with Microsoft's dark mode work in Explorer) I can't help but feel it's all a little old hat. A dark mode? On a website? Why, we've been doing this at Ars for years. Click that little hamburger menu up at the top of each page, and you can switch between conventional dark-on-light text and the eyeball-friendly light-on-dark.

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All highs, no lows: The 2018 Mazda MX-5 Miata

Driving one will rekindle your sense of joy.

Jonathan Gitlin

If one anecdote can sum up how good the current Mazda MX-5 Miata is, consider the following. Thanks to this job, I drive a lot of press fleet cars–between two and four a month depending on my travel schedule. And during the course of the last year, the little MX-5 has been the only one I've just driven around for hours with no other objective than enjoying the experience—supercars included. What makes it even more remarkable is that Mazda hit on this formula 29 years ago.

Evolutionary outlier

Three decades is a long time, even in car years. When the first MX-5 (the NA model) went on sale in 1989, it was a remarkable thing, combining the brio of sporty rear-wheel drive European roadsters from the 1960s with something those cars struggled with: reliability. It was small, light, and not very powerful. A 1.6L four-cylinder engine made just 115hp (86kW) and 100ft-lbs (136Nm), and the car ran on 14-inch wheels. But that was more than enough to put a smile on your face the instant you found a corner.

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Streaming: Audible per Sprachsteuerung auf Sonos-Lautsprechern nutzbar

Seit Kurzem können Sonos-Nutzer den Hörbuch-Dienst Audible auf ihren drahtlosen Lautsprechern nutzen. Zusätzlich geht das jetzt auch mit Sprachkommandos: Ein entsprechendes Update verteilt der Hersteller gerade. (Sonos, Sound-Hardware)

Seit Kurzem können Sonos-Nutzer den Hörbuch-Dienst Audible auf ihren drahtlosen Lautsprechern nutzen. Zusätzlich geht das jetzt auch mit Sprachkommandos: Ein entsprechendes Update verteilt der Hersteller gerade. (Sonos, Sound-Hardware)

Monster energy project wants to use Loch Ness as a giant battery

A different kind of Loch Ness Monster.

Enlarge / Loch Ness, seen from Fort Augustus in Scotland. (credit: Getty Images (Jeff J Mitchell))

A company called Intelligent Land Investments (ILI) is proposing a huge 2.4 gigawatt-hour pumped hydroelectric project right next to the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland. The project, called "Red John" after the Scottish name for a source pool in the area, could deliver up to 400 megawatts of power for six hours—a feat that Wired UK says could double Scotland's already-considerable wind capacity.

Pumped hydro is an old concept, and such systems have been used to store energy long before utility-scale chemical batteries were economically feasible. Pumped hydro projects need a lower reservoir as well as a higher reservoir. When electricity is plentiful, pumps work to lift water from the lower reservoir to the higher reservoir; when electricity is scarce, operators use gravity to send water from the higher reservoir through a turbine and back down to the lower reservoir, generating greenhouse-gas-free electricity.

A diagram of the Red John project.

A diagram of the Red John project. (credit: Intelligent Land Investments)

The advantage of pumped hydro is that it's disbatchable. While wind turbines and solar panels require the wind and sun to make electricity, energy from pumped hydro is ready whenever we want it. Scotland in particular has been aggressive about adding offshore wind to its energy mix, but you can only build out so many wind turbines before you need to add energy storage or develop massive transmission projects, because if the wind slacks in one region, power has to be added to the grid to maintain a constant frequency.

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Steve Ditko: Zeichner von Spiderman ist gestorben

Steve Ditko schuf zusammen mit Stan Lee einen der ikonischsten Marvel-Superhelden des 20. Jahrhunderts: Spiderman. Der Spinnenmann mit dem rot-blauen Anzug und der Gesichtsmaske stammt aus der Feder des Comic-Zeichners. Nun ist Ditko in New York gestor…

Steve Ditko schuf zusammen mit Stan Lee einen der ikonischsten Marvel-Superhelden des 20. Jahrhunderts: Spiderman. Der Spinnenmann mit dem rot-blauen Anzug und der Gesichtsmaske stammt aus der Feder des Comic-Zeichners. Nun ist Ditko in New York gestorben, er wurde 90 Jahre alt. (Marvel, Internet)

Lautsprecher: Sonos will an die Börse

Sonos trat vor gut 15 Jahren mit der Idee an, mit drahtlosen Geräten Musik im Haushalt zu verteilen. Mit dem Aufkommen von Streaming-Anbietern wuchs das Unternehmen, jetzt soll ein Börsengang Geld für mehr Wachstum bringen. Doch dabei gibt es Risiken. …

Sonos trat vor gut 15 Jahren mit der Idee an, mit drahtlosen Geräten Musik im Haushalt zu verteilen. Mit dem Aufkommen von Streaming-Anbietern wuchs das Unternehmen, jetzt soll ein Börsengang Geld für mehr Wachstum bringen. Doch dabei gibt es Risiken. (Sonos, Sound-Hardware)

Pirates Are Increasingly ‘Going Legal’ in France

While the French Government mulls how to counter streaming piracy, local pirates are increasingly going legal. Not only are there less French pirates, the remaining ones are also consuming less and are increasingly signing up with legal streaming services such as Netflix.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

France has been fighting on the anti-piracy enforcement frontline for more than a decade now.

The country was the first to introduce a graduated response system, Hadopi, where Internet subscribers risked losing their Internet connections if they were caught sharing torrents repeatedly.

Today this approach is no longer as effective as it once was. The bulk of all online piracy has moved from P2P downloading to streaming, which isn’t traceable by anti-piracy watchdogs.

For this reason, the French Government is now considering to institute a national streaming site blacklist. Interestingly, however, it appears that even without such measures, online piracy is on the decline.

A new report published by consultancy firm EY reveals that the number of French pirates has dropped by 8%, from 11.6 million in 2016, to 10.6 million last year. The remaining pirates also downloaded and streamed less infringing content than the year before, with consumption dipping 4%.

Piracy predominantly affects the movie industry, with 94% admitting to downloading or streaming films. While that’s bad news for Hollywood, the report is not all doom and gloom.

In fact, it appears that pirates are increasingly “going legal.” This doesn’t mean that they have quit their copyright infringing habits completely, but they are more likely to pay for access too.

In the span of a year, the number of pirates without a video on demand subscription dropped by nearly 30%. The result is that more than half of all pirates also pay for a legal movie streaming service now.

EY further signals a significant drop in TV show piracy, which it links to the increasing popularity of paid streaming services.

“We see a significant drop in the pirating of series which is not without a link to the boom in SVoD platforms,” ScreenDaly quotes from the report.

Netflix is clearly leading the charge here. The streaming service saw a significant increase in pirate consumers last year.

“Netflix has managed to reel in pirate consumers who weren’t signed up with a legal service before. In 2017, there were 20% more pirate consumers paying for a Netflix subscription than the year before,” EY’s report states.

This suggests that the main goal of movie studios and other content providers is to make sure that their work is widely available on legal streaming platforms. Ideally, without any delays and at a reasonable price.

It’s not all roses, of course. The more than 10 million pirates that remain reportedly cause around 1.18 billion euros in losses, which translates to more than 100 euros per pirate.

That’s still quite a few extra Netflix subscriptions to go…

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