Month: July 2021

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  The inside of the MagSafe Battery Pack.

This week, Apple launched the MagSafe Battery Pack for the iPhone 12, iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max. But until the product found its way into peoples' hands, there were some unknowns.

Some of those questions have now been answered in a new teardown video by Charger Lab.

While there had been clues suggesting that the MagSafe Battery Pack measured in at just over 11 watt-hours, we weren't 100% sure. Now we have confirmation. The battery pack has two identical batteries inside it, each labelled as 5.733 Wh. In total, the MagSafe Battery Pack has a capacity of 1460 mAh. And voltage? That's 7.62V.

Enlarge / Blocking individual users in Google Drive! Finally! (credit: Google)

A notification pops up on your phone: "Click here for hot XXX action!"

It's Google Drive again. Someone shared a document containing that title, and now your phone is begging you to look at it. Even if you ban Google Drive from generating phone notifications, you'll still get emails. If you block the emails, you'll have to see the spam when you click on the "shared" section of Google Drive. The problem is that Drive document sharing was built with no spam-management tools. Anyone who gets a hold of your email is considered to be an important sharer of valid documents, and there has been nothing you can do about it—until now.

Google officially acknowledged the problem back in 2019, and the company said it was making spam controls "a priority." Now, more than two years later, Google is finally rolling out the most basic of spam tools to Google Drive sharing—you can block individual email addresses! The company announced this feature in May, but the tool is rolling out to users over the next 15 days. Soon, once the spam arrives in your Google Drive, you'll be able to click the menu button next to the item and choose "block user."

Enlarge (credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Heraklion was ancient Egypt’s largest port on the Mediterranean Sea. Today, the ancient city lies submerged beneath Abu Qir Bay, a few kilometers off the coast of Alexandria. Archaeologists recently discovered the wreck of a warship from the city’s final years buried in the seabed for 2,100 years beneath five meters of clay and crumbled pieces of an ancient temple to the Egyptian god Amun.

A fast but unlucky warship

The outline of the wrecked ship suggests speed. Its 25 meter-long hull is about six times longer than it is wide, meaning that it was a long, sleek vessel built to race through the water. Clearly, this was no cargo vessel; ships built to haul cargo or passengers tend to be wider, built for capacity rather than speed and agility. The team of archaeologists from the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology who discovered the wreck say it was probably a warship, and its captain picked an unlucky day to tie up in the channel that flowed along the south side of the Temple of Amun in Heraklion.

Some of the city’s inhabitants called the place Heraklion; others called it Thonis, and archaeologists have found stone monuments inscribed with both names together. Coins and bits of pottery found among the city’s submerged ruins suggest that Thonis-Heraklion flourished from the 500s to the 300s BCE. When Alexander the Great founded Alexandria 32 kilometers to the southeast in 331 BCE, the new city replaced Thonis-Heraklion as Egypt’s largest Mediterranean port, and the older city began to decline.

Enlarge (credit: CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP)

A new bill introduced Thursday would hold Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies responsible for amplifying conspiracies and falsehoods about vaccines, COVID cures, and other health misinformation.

“For far too long, online platforms have not done enough to protect the health of Americans,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), one of the bill’s sponsors. “These are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world, and they must do more to prevent the spread of deadly vaccine misinformation.”

If signed into law, the Health Misinformation Act would strip Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies of some immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which currently prevents Internet firms from being held liable for most content posted on their platforms. The carveout proposed by Klobuchar and Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) would eliminate that legal shield in instances where a platform “promotes health misinformation through an algorithm,” the bill says.

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  Audi Sport is trying something new in 2022 with an attempt at the Dakar Rally using this wild-looking creation. [credit: Audi Sport ]

Audi's DTM program—think the German equivalent of NASCAR—ended at the end of 2020, and 2021 is the German automaker's final year in Formula E. But the investment that Audi Sport made in both those programs will not go to waste, as aspects of each are combining to power an outrageous-looking machine designed to compete in the Dakar Rally. Unveiled online today, the car is called the Audi RS Q e-tron, and Audi says that campaigning it in one of the world's toughest off-road races will let the company test and develop its electric powertrains "under extreme conditions."

Although Audi's racing exploits have mostly taken place on the confines of race tracks for the last few decades, the brand has a strong link with rallying; it used the World Rally Championship in the 1980s to demonstrate its quattro all-wheel-drive technology. They might both involve rallying, but Dakar is a tougher challenge than the WRC, as it's contested over two weeks in remote places, with distances of 500 miles (800 km) a day.

"That's a very long distance," says Andreas Roos, who is responsible for the Dakar project at Audi Sport. "What we are trying to do has never been done before. This is the ultimate challenge for an electric drivetrain."

Enlarge / A Wear OS watch. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google has provided a few more details about its upcoming Wear OS update plans. As we've reported, Google and Samsung are teaming up to resurrect the struggling Wear OS. Samsung is ditching Tizen watches and bringing its Exynos SoCs to the Wear OS platform, and Google will start Wear OS development again after mostly ignoring the operating system for the past few years.

The post on the official Wear OS forums is titled "What Wear OS 3 means for you," and it describes what will be a rocky transition to the new OS. First, it's important to note that the post is formally calling the revamped Wear OS "Wear OS 3," a detail Google has left out of all its official statements so far, opting for "unified platform," "the new version of Wear OS," or some other clunky descriptor. It's version 3! This lines up with our count; it's the first major Wear OS update since Wear OS 2 in 2018.

Next, we get a list of devices being updated from Wear OS 2 to 3. It's not long: