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Flagship smartphone prices have been rising in recent years, and it’s not unusual for companies to charge $1000 or more for a state-of-the-art phone that you’ll probably replace within 2-3 years. But not everyone wants to spend that kind o…
Flagship smartphone prices have been rising in recent years, and it’s not unusual for companies to charge $1000 or more for a state-of-the-art phone that you’ll probably replace within 2-3 years. But not everyone wants to spend that kind of money, which is why mid-range phones actually tend to outsell flagships. So half a year […]
The post The $700 Samsung Galaxy S20 FE is a cheaper flagship appeared first on Liliputing.
Tesla’s big “battery day” event, explained.
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)
Tesla's business model depends on continuous improvements in the cost and energy density of batteries. When Tesla was founded in 2003, it was barely possible to build a battery-powered sports car with a six-figure price tag. Over the next 15 years, cheaper and more powerful batteries enabled Tesla to build roomier cars with longer ranges at lower prices.
Tesla expects that progress to continue—and maybe even accelerate—in the next few years. And it isn't waiting for other companies to come up with better battery designs. In recent years, Tesla has had a large team of engineers re-thinking every aspect of Tesla's batteries, from the chemistry inside the cells to the way the batteries are incorporated into vehicles.
At a much-touted Tuesday event, Tesla pulled back the curtain on a suite of improvements the company hopes to roll out in the next three years. In total, Tesla says that all of these innovations put together will enable a 56-percent reduction in the per-kWh cost of its batteries.
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Gaze upon it, but don’t expect answers to your questions. Yet.
It's a busy week for all things Xbox. On Monday, Microsoft confirmed its acquisition of the Bethesda and ZeniMax game-dev family to fuel the Xbox ecosystem going forward. On Tuesday, the company launched preorders for this November's Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.
And today, Microsoft topped all of that off by shipping us a "non-final" Series X of our own—and I have immediately begun testing it.
The "non-final" Xbox Series X, photographed before we powered it on. [credit: Sam Machkovech ]
As the above gallery shows, Ars Technica received a package from Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, containing a "non-final" Xbox Series X console, the brand-new Xbox gamepad, and a 1TB "storage expansion" card, as built to the Xbox Velocity Architecture spec and made by Seagate. Nothing else came in this box (besides an HDMI 2.1 cable and a power cord, anyway).
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Canceled design included intriguing “3D” button, familiar control layout.
PlayStation buttons? On a phone?! [credit: Taobao ]
There is an alternate universe where Sony Ericsson's 2011 release of the Xperia Play was a huge success. In that universe, a substantial portion of today's mobile games are played on similar successor devices, complete with physical buttons and d-pads that slide out from underneath the screen.
Today, we get a brief glimpse into that universe via late leaked photos of what seems to be a prototype of a planned Xperia Play 2.
The above photos (as discovered on the Sony Xperia subreddit) originate from a reseller on China's Taobao platform, which specializes in person-to-person sales of new and used goods. Ars can't independently verify the authenticity of the images, but they do line up somewhat with concept art for the Xperia Play 2 that leaked in 2012.
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Intel’s new 11th-gen Core “Tiger Lake” processors for laptops and low-power desktops are grabbing a lot of attention thanks to a big graphics boost and a more modest bump in CPU performance. But this year Intel is also giving its low…
Intel’s new 11th-gen Core “Tiger Lake” processors for laptops and low-power desktops are grabbing a lot of attention thanks to a big graphics boost and a more modest bump in CPU performance. But this year Intel is also giving its low-cost, low-power “Atom” chips a major update. A bunch of new chips with “Tremont” CPU […]
The post Intel launches Elkhart Lake: 10nm Atom, Celeron, and Pentium chips for embedded applications appeared first on Liliputing.
Der Hacker 0rbit ist wegen des Ausspähens von Promis und der Veröffentlichung deren Daten verurteilt worden. Offenbar nutzte er den Dienst Weleakinfo. (Politiker-Hack, Datenschutz)
Der Hacker 0rbit ist wegen des Ausspähens von Promis und der Veröffentlichung deren Daten verurteilt worden. Offenbar nutzte er den Dienst Weleakinfo. (Politiker-Hack, Datenschutz) In a letter sent to the European Commission, a large group of anti-piracy organizations and copyright holders calls for stricter online identity checks. As part of Europe’s planned Digital Services Act, online services such as hosting companies, domain registrars, and advertisers, should be required to perform “know your customer” checks. This can help to combat all sorts of illegal activity including online piracy.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Anonymity is a great good on the Internet but increasingly there are calls for stricter identity checks.
Such requirements are not new. In daily life many people have encountered situations where they had to prove their identity. When opening a bank account, for example. But online it is rare.
If it’s up to a large group of organizations with ties to copyright industries, this should change. They call for stricter policies so that hosting companies, domain registrars, and advertisers must properly check who their customers are.
This message was sent in a letter to the European Commission this week. The signatories include anti-piracy outfits such as MPA, BREIN, BPI, IFPI, and RettighedsAlliancen, as well as the international brands Heineken, Nike, and Philips. Together, they call for thorough “know your customer” requirements.
The letter was sent in response to a public inquiry on Europe’s proposed Digital Service Act, which will determine how online services and platforms are regulated. The senders zoom in on one element, namely, the “Know Your Business Customer” requirements for online platforms.
In the impact assessment published by the European Commission, such a requirement is highlighted. However, that ‘online’ applies to online marketplaces only. This is a missed opportunity and should be broadened, the letter notes.
According to European law, online businesses are already required to identify themselves based on Article 5 of the e-Commerce Directive. However, this is often ignored by bad actors. This is where the new requirements could prove helpful.
“The DSA represents a real opportunity to rectify the situation that allows bad actors to ignore Article 5 of the ECD with impunity,” the letter explains.
“A business cannot go online without a domain name, without being hosted, or without advertisement or payment services. These intermediary services, having a direct relationship with the business, are therefore best placed to make sure that only businesses that are willing to comply with the law have access to their services.”
The copyright holders and anti-piracy groups state that these checks won’t involve any active monitoring. Some simple due diligence checks based on information that’s publicly verifiable is already sufficient.
At the moment, scammers, counterfeiters, plus pirate sites and services can operate relatively easily in the dark. They often provide false information, when registering a domain name for example. More detailed checks could make this harder.
Knowing who’s behind a pirate site or service obviously makes enforcement efforts much easier. And when the provided information turns out to be false, the customers should be disconnected.
“Should the information provided prove to be manifestly wrong, or the intermediary be notified that the business customer isn’t who it claims to be, the intermediary should stop providing services until the business customer remedies the situation.”
Bad actors have been flaunting the law for years and the Digital Service Act provides an opportunity to fix this, the letter notes. Implementing stricter checks facilitates a “safe and trustworthy online environment” and will make it harder to “distribute illegal content,” the senders add.
TorrentFreak spoke to Tim Kuik, director of Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, which is one of the letter’s signatories. He says that it’s no surprise that criminals use fake identities online. However, that intermediaries are not properly verifying the identities of customers is surprising.
“On the one hand, we see upstream providers that are reluctant to disclose customer identity to injured parties who then can not hold the perpetrators liable. On the other hand, we see that when customer identity is disclosed – ultimately providers have to in case of illegal activity – it is fake, either completely made up or of unsuspecting people and their addresses.”
“This frustrates enforcement against all kinds of illegal activity while intermediaries – unknowingly or not – indirectly earn income from it,” Kuik adds.
BREIN has repeatedly emphasized the importance of proper customer identification. Earlier this year it sued several hosting providers that worked with the pirate streaming CDN Moonwalk, to require these companies to verify the identity of customers and require resellers to do the same.
“The latter is necessary because we see a tendency of upstream providers using foreign parties either offshore or to sell in their respective countries, who then do not have true identity information and refuse to provide other identifying information,” Kuik tells us.
The idea to use stricter ‘know your customer’ regulations as a tool to thwart piracy is a hot topic. Just a few weeks ago, a group of prominent anti-piracy groups discussed the same matter in a webinar, which also involved Europol and the Italian Financial Police
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A copy of the letter sent to Brussels earlier this week is available here (pdf)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
After much anticipation, the crossover goes on sale today at $39,995.
This is our first look at the 2021 VW ID.4, the brand's new battery-electric crossover. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]
On Wednesday, in an Internet livestream, Volkswagen unveiled the ID.4 crossover. Designed from the ground up as a battery-electric vehicle, it's part of a huge electrification plan that VW embarked on in the wake of dieselgate and the first of the new VW BEVs to reach these shores. More than that, it was designed with the US market firmly in mind. No edgy European hatchback or city car here—this is pure crossover.
The ID.4 is one of a number of new BEVs that VW is building using a big box of interchangeable parts called MEB (Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten or Modular Electrification Toolkit). (Yes, that is a whole lot of acronyms.) We've seen MEB wrapped up in a number of different concept cars over the past few years and even drove one last year. But the first production model—the Europe-only ID.3 hatchback—started deliveries across the pond a few weeks ago, following some software- and COVID-19-related delays.
That car was deemed too much of a risk for the US market, which emphatically likes its VWs as crossovers these days. I got a chance to poke around a production prototype last week, and it's one of those rare cases where the transformation from concept to road-legal actually improved things. Size-wise, it's a little smaller than a VW Tiguan, at 180.5 inches (4,585mm) long, 72.9 inches (1,852mm) wide, and 64.4 inches (1,636mm) tall. There are some styling tricks in effect—the black panels along the sills and the trailing edges of the C pillars—but as with the Ford Mustang Mach-E, they're actually quite successful in detracting from some of the ID.4's visual bulk. For those keeping score, the drag coefficient is 0.28; no word on frontal area, though.
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Mike Morhaime steht für die besten Jahre von Blizzard. Nun gründet er mit vielen Ex-Kollegen ein neues Studio mit zwei Teams. (Blizzard, Command & Conquer)
Mike Morhaime steht für die besten Jahre von Blizzard. Nun gründet er mit vielen Ex-Kollegen ein neues Studio mit zwei Teams. (Blizzard, Command & Conquer) England verschärft die Coronaregeln wieder
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