Amazon has been testing the program with a few customers, but now it becomes official.
Enlarge/ Completed customer orders are seen in their boxes, awaiting delivery, at the Amazon Fulfillment Centre on November 14, 2018, in Hemel Hempstead, England. (credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images)
On Thursday, Amazon announced that it would be making a program widely available to Amazon Prime members that would allow them to schedule all deliveries for a single day, once a week. The so-called "Amazon Day" service will be voluntary and targets customers who are concerned about their carbon footprint.
Grouping purchase deliveries will help Amazon cut down on emissions associated with sending a delivery truck to the same house multiple times a week, and the company says holding orders for a single day during the week will also allow it to group orders within a single package, thereby reducing packaging. Customers can select their preferred day of the week to receive shipments. According to CNN, customers can add items to their Amazon Day shipment up until two days in advance of the shipment.
Customers can also chose to remove an item from "Amazon Day" delivery, having it shipped more expeditiously if necessary. Select Prime members have already had access to the program, but it was made available to all Prime members as of today.
On Thursday afternoon, Tesla announced that it's finally ready to start selling the cheapest versions of its Model 3 electric vehicle. For $35,000—before any federal or local tax incentives—you can now order a rear-wheel drive Model 3 Standard Range. This car gets black paint and the as-yet unseen standard interior, which means manual (not power assisted) seat and steering adjustment, cloth trim, and a stripped-down audio system. Tesla says the cheapest Model 3 will have 220 miles of range, will hit 60mph (96km/h) in 5.6 seconds before topping out at 130mph (209km/h).
The company is also now offering a $37,000 Model 3 Standard Range Plus. This upgrades the performance slightly—now it's got 240 miles (386km) of range, shaves 0.3 seconds off the 0-60 time, and adds 10mph (16km/h) in top speed. And you get a "Partial Premium" interior, which restores the power seats, vegan synthetic leather, and a better audio system, among other features.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that anyone in the US who orders one of the new Model 3s should take delivery before June (when the IRS tax credit halves again), but priority will go to reservation holders.
The release earlier this month of a preview Windows 10 build that isn't due until 2020 was a little strange. At the time, Microsoft said vaguely that it was because of features that "require a longer lead time," with no indication of what those features are.
The core parts of Windows—the kernel, file system, networking stack, hypervisor, security subsystem, and so on—underpin a wide range of Windows variants, including Windows 10, Windows Server 2019, HoloLens, Xbox One, and Azure. According to Foley, Microsoft makes two releases of these core parts each year, in June and December. The various Windows variants build on these dual releases.
Millions of people use dedicated proxy sites to bypass pirate site blockades. “Unblocked” has grown to become a leader in this field, which has made the site a target in its own right. This has resulted in an ongoing game of cat-and-mouse that has led to dozens of forced domain name changes.
The entertainment industries generally view website blocking as one of the best tools available to prevent people from pirating.
The practice has been around for over a decade and has slowly expanded to more than 30 countries around the world.
While these blockades may help to deter some casual pirates, there are plenty of people who find their ways to pirate content through workarounds. VPN services are often used as well as dedicated proxy sites, including those provided by “Unblocked.”
Unblocked started in 2013, mainly in response to the UK blocking efforts. It began with links to a few dozen blocked pirate sites, and today that number has grown to more than a hundred.
The site quickly gained popularity. While that’s usually good news, in this case it presented a problem as well, since the Unblocked site itself has now become a blocking target. It didn’t take long before it was added to various blocklists, which means that it has to regularly ‘relocate’.
In recent years this has resulted in domain change after domain change. Initially, this only happened sporadically, but the Unblocked team informs TorrentFreak that it’s done roughly once a month now, usually after users report new blockades.
Just a few weeks ago the site moved from unblocked.llc to unblocked.cx to evade another block, for example. However, the latter domain was swiftly suspended by the domain name registry CoCCA.
Domain suspensions are not common, but they happen. In this case, the registry took action after a complaint from a copyright holder, the Unblocked team informs TorrentFreak.
“We contacted the registry and they said the use of unblocked.cx was against their TOS and showed us an automated DMCA complaint they received regarding some movie links. We then changed the domain to unblocked.pet.
“Unblocked.pet is the 38th domain for the site,” the Unblocked team adds.
Unblocked
To stay true to its name, the site has to find new domain names time and again. The total count of 38 domain names thus far says enough. While this is a nuisance for the operator, it doesn’t appear to hurt the userbase too much.
“We haven’t noticed any major shifts in traffic caused by the blocks. As long as we have a new domain up and running, people are able to find it immediately through different means,” the Unblocked team notes.
“After domain updates, traffic levels return to normal after about one or two days. It takes a little more time for traffic to recover after a domain suspension, such as what we just saw with unblocked.cx.”
After losing the .cx domain it took four to five days for the traffic levels to recover. That was also the case a few years earlier when the CoCCA registry suspended Unblocked’s .pe domain name.
It appears that Unblocked users have become accustomed to regular changes. They can usually find the new domain through the official Twitter account, or by going to the GitHub mirror, which has been operational since 2015.
In any case, Unblocked is determined to keep going, and the site will probably burn through a few more domains before the end of the year.
YouTube will now take stronger action to prevent predatory comments posted on videos of children. According to a blog post, YouTube will suspend comments on videos that feature minors that "could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior." This measure is designed to prevent predatory commenters from gathering in the comments section of such videos.
While the word "all" isn't used to describe the to-be-comment-free videos, YouTube explains that only a "small number" of creators will be able to keep their comment sections enabled on videos that include kids.
"These channels will be required to actively moderate their comments, beyond just using our moderation tools, and demonstrate a low risk of predatory behavior," YouTube's blog post says. "We will work with them directly, and our goal is to grow this number over time as our ability to catch violative comments continues to improve."
Motorola’s latest mid-range smartphone is now available in the US. First unveiled earlier this month in Brazil, the Moto G7 features a 6.2 inch display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and dual rear cameras. It&#…
Motorola’s latest mid-range smartphone is now available in the US. First unveiled earlier this month in Brazil, the Moto G7 features a 6.2 inch display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and dual rear cameras. It’s available unlocked from the Motorola website for $299 and the phone supports Verizon, AT&T, […]
You know how the SD Association just introduced a new MicroSD Express standard that would make it possible for next-gen microSD cards to offer speeds as high as 985 MB per second? The CompactFlash Association just went a step further by unveiling a new…
You know how the SD Association just introduced a new MicroSD Express standard that would make it possible for next-gen microSD cards to offer speeds as high as 985 MB per second? The CompactFlash Association just went a step further by unveiling a new CFexpress 2.0 specification with theoretical top speeds as high high as […]
Google takes its smartphone market strategy to cars, starting with the Polestar 2.
This is the Polestar 2, the first long-range battery EV from Volvo's new spinoff. [credit:
Polestar
]
Volvo's newest brand, Polestar, took the wraps off the Polestar 2 yesterday, the company's all-electric Tesla Model 3 fighter. Polestar has done some interesting rethinking of how a car should work (The car starts via a chair-mounted pressure switch! It has a crazy ownership subscription plan!). And one of the more wide-ranging features is in the infotainment system: this is the first car with Android Auto built in.
Previously, we've seen a smartphone app from Google called "Android Auto" that, like Apple's CarPlay, runs on your smartphone and uses the car display as an external monitor. This project with Polestar is a full-blown operating system instead of a single app, and it is built into the car's hardware instead of running on your smartphone. It doesn't really have a name yet. Volvo was just calling it "Android," and Google in the past has referred to it as both "Android Automotive" and "Android Auto built-in."
Since at least 2014, Google has been on a mission to expand its phone-operating-system business into a car-operating-system business. Google's plan for car manufacturers really is a direct extension of how Android phones work: Google builds a special car version of the Android OS and car manufacturers build the hardware. Car manufacturers can skin Android to make it look different from the competition, but they all share Google's app ecosystem, which includes the Play Store, Google Maps, and the Google Assistant. Car manufacturers get a much more capable, more compatible OS than they could build themselves, and Google gets revenue from ads and the app store.
Underwater archaeologists are searching the waters off Playa Villa Rica, about 75 kilometers (46.6 miles) north of Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf coast, for what’s left of conquistador Hernán Cortés’ long-abandoned fleet.
Scouring the seafloor
In 1519, at the very last moment, the Spanish governor of Cuba revoked the charter of an expedition to Mexico after a fierce argument with its leader. But the defiant Cortés set sail with 11 ships and 300 men anyway, and by July, he had worked his way along the Yucatan coast to Veracruz. There, eager to march inland to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, Cortés destroyed 10 of his 11 ships, cutting off his men’s only hope of retreat and leaving them with no option but to head inland.
The expedition ultimately destroyed the Aztec Empire and began the long and often brutal process of colonizing Mexico. Almost no one gave the ships a second thought.
Underwater archaeologists are searching the waters off Playa Villa Rica, about 75 kilometers (46.6 miles) north of Veracruz on Mexico’s Gulf coast, for what’s left of conquistador Hernán Cortés’ long-abandoned fleet.
Scouring the seafloor
In 1519, at the very last moment, the Spanish governor of Cuba revoked the charter of an expedition to Mexico after a fierce argument with its leader. But the defiant Cortés set sail with 11 ships and 300 men anyway, and by July, he had worked his way along the Yucatan coast to Veracruz. There, eager to march inland to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, Cortés destroyed 10 of his 11 ships, cutting off his men’s only hope of retreat and leaving them with no option but to head inland.
The expedition ultimately destroyed the Aztec Empire and began the long and often brutal process of colonizing Mexico. Almost no one gave the ships a second thought.
The entertainment industries generally view website blocking as one of the best tools available to prevent people from pirating. 
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