Month: August 2019

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  The mophie 3-in-1 mat with AirPods, an Apple Watch, and an iPhone on it. [credit: Apple ]

Remember AirPower? You'd be forgiven if the answer is "no." In 2017, Apple introduced a Qi wireless charging mat by that name that could simultaneously charge an iPhone, an AirPods case, and an Apple Watch—or three items in any combination from those three. It was repeatedly delayed, and reports indicated that Apple was facing serious technical issues when developing it. In March of this year, Apple finally confirmed the product would never be released.

Except now a variation on the original concept has, and Apple is selling it in its store. Made by mophie, a popular Apple peripheral and accessory maker, it's one mat that charges three devices. It's called, well, the mophie 3-in-1 wireless charging pad.

To be clear, this does not fully realize the vision Apple originally laid out for AirPower. Whereas AirPower could charge three devices in any combination—say, two iPhones and a Watch, or two Watches and one AirPods case, or three iPhones—the mophie pad has a dedicated spot for each device type: iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods. Further, the Watch doesn't actually charge on the mat; it charges on a distinct surface that protrudes from the mat. And for AirPower, Apple imagined a software solution that would display on your iPhone's screen the charge status of every device on the mat. The mophie pad doesn't offer that.

Enlarge / Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). (credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

After a day of blistering criticism from Republicans, Twitter has reversed an earlier decision and restored the campaign account of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. His account had been frozen after tweeting out a video showing several protestors shouting violent threats against McConnell outside the senator's Kentucky home.

Twitter's rules ban anyone from posting videos that contain violence or threats of violence. The video in question included several apparent threats against McConnell, including a woman shouting "just stab the motherfucker in the heart please."

But weirdly, Twitter's policies don't draw distinctions based on the purpose or context of a posted video. A threatening video posted by someone making the threat is treated the same way as a video posted by the target of threatening remarks.

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  It feels a little strange to just agree with a headline slide in a product demo, but we can't find the lie here. [credit: AMD ]

When AMD debuted the 7nm Ryzen 3000 series desktop CPUs, they swept the field. For the first time in decades, AMD was able to meet or beat its rival, Intel, across the product line in all major CPU criteria—single-threaded performance, multi-threaded performance, power/heat efficiency, and price. Once third-party results confirmed AMD's outstanding benchmarks and retail delivery was a success, the big remaining question was: could the company extend its 7nm success story to mobile and server CPUs?

Yesterday, AMD formally launched its new line of Epyc 7002 "Rome" series CPUs—and it seems to have answered the server half of that question pretty thoroughly. Having learned from the widespread FUD cast at its own internally generated benchmarks at the Ryzen 3000 launch, this time AMD made certain to seed some review sites with evaluation hardware well before the launch.

The short version of the story is, Epyc "Rome" is to the server what Ryzen 3000 was to the desktop—bringing significantly improved IPC, more cores, and better thermal efficiency than either its current-generation Intel equivalents or its first-generation Epyc predecessors.

Enlarge / TV's Jonny Smith checks out the new Porsche Taycan EV for Fully Charged. (credit: Fully Charged)

If there's one car that's got everyone buzzing these days it's the Porsche Taycan. It's a new battery electric vehicle from the German automaker, a production version of the Mission E electric concept we first saw in 2015. Deliveries of the car start for some lucky customers before the end of this year, and that means Porsche is starting to open up about the new car.

Ars has an in-depth look at the tech inside the Taycan in the works, but you'll have to wait until September and the car's official launch before we can share that with you. In the meantime though, a few more details have emerged about the car thanks to a new video from the Fully Charged crew.

Fully Charged got an exclusive invite to test Taycan, and they sent Jonny Smith to an airstrip near Stuttgart to check the car out. Smith is no stranger to fast EVs, having turned a 1970s city car into the world's quickest EV. And after repeatedly demonstrating the Taycan's launch control—which won't be quite as quick as a Tesla P100D—he seems pretty impressed with the power delivery from the Porsche's permanent synchronous motors.

Enlarge (credit: Verizon)

A small library that lends out mobile hotspots is facing a tough budget decision because one of its borrowers accidentally ran up $880 in roaming fees, and Verizon refuses to waive or reduce the charges. The library has an "unlimited" data plan for the hotspots, but Verizon says it has to pay the $880 to cover less than half a gigabyte of data usage that happened across the border with Canada.

Tully Free Library in Tully, New York, a town of fewer than 3,000 people, lends out three Verizon hotspots to a rural population that has limited Internet access. The library started the hotspot-lending program with a grant from the Central New York Library Resources Council, which paid the bill for two years. Crucially, the service plan with Verizon blocked international roaming so that library borrowers wouldn't rack up unintentional charges if they happened to cross the Canadian border.

But when the grant ran out, Tully Free Library had to get a new contract and service plan, and the organization began paying the bill itself. The new plan seemed to be identical to the old one, but it enabled international roaming.

Enlarge / San Bruno, California, USA - January 11, 2012: YouTube Headquarters, located at 901 Cherry Avenue in San Bruno. The video-sharing site was founded in 2005 by three former employees of PayPal. (credit: JasonDoiy | Getty)

If it feels like certain high-profile YouTubers get way more lenience when it comes to content moderation than everyone else does, that's apparently because they really do, according to a new report.

The Washington Post spoke with almost a dozen former and current YouTube content moderators, who told the paper that the gargantuan video platform "made exceptions" for popular creators who push content boundaries.

“Our responsibility was never to the creators or to the users," one former moderator told the Post. "It was to the advertisers.”

Enlarge / The drugs totally work. We swear. (credit: www.quotecatalog.com)

It's not just longform journalism and apoplectic Internet commenters that prompt a "tl;dr" from readers. Research papers trigger it, too, as scientists are so inundated with the volume of new results that just barely keeping up is a struggle. According to University of Oxford psychiatrist Michael Sharpe, "Everyone is deluged with information."

Research papers give a brief summary of their contents in an information-rich "abstract" of the article—it's often the only text that's publicly available from a paywalled journal. Time-pressed researchers may rely on the abstract rather than investing in reading the lengthy paper, but those abstracts are not always reliable. A paper published this week in the journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine found that half of the 116 psychiatry and psychology articles they analyzed included some sort of spin that made the results look better than they were.

"These findings raise a major concern," Sharpe told the Science Media Centre, "especially as readers may draw conclusions on the basis of the abstract alone, without critically appraising the full paper."

Enlarge / A protestor outside an Amazon warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota on July 15, 2019. (credit: Annabelle Marcovici/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Around 80 Amazon warehouse workers in the Twin Cities suburb of Eagan, Minnesota staged a two-hour walkout on Thursday morning. It's the latest in a series of strikes and protests spearheaded by Amazon workers in the state.

Last month, a few dozen workers at another Amazon facility in Shakopee, Minnesota walked off the job on Prime Day—a massive sale that is one of Amazon's busiest days of the year. A December protest in Shakopee attracted 250 people.

Workers in Shakopee were demanding better pay and working conditions. The Eagan protests were more specific: workers were upset that Amazon wasn't providing enough parking for its workers. One worker told Gizmodo that some workers showed up more than an hour early in order to get a spot.