Month: November 2022

Enlarge / The right membrane can make hydrogen production much easier. (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko)

With renewable energy becoming cheaper, there's a growing impetus to find ways of economically storing it. Batteries can handle short-term fluxes in production but may not be able to handle longer-term shortfalls or seasonal changes in power output. Hydrogen is one of several options being considered that has the potential to serve as a longer-term bridge between periods of high renewable productivity.

But hydrogen comes with its own issues. Obtaining it by splitting water is pretty inefficient, energy-wise, and storing it for long periods can be challenging. Most hydrogen-producing catalysts also work best with pure water—not necessarily an item that's easy to obtain as climate change is boosting the intensity of droughts.

A group of researchers based in China has now developed a device that can output hydrogen when starting with seawater—in fact, the device needs to be sitting in seawater to work. The key concept for getting it to work will be familiar to anyone who understands how most waterproof clothing works.

Enlarge / The right membrane can make hydrogen production much easier. (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko)

With renewable energy becoming cheaper, there's a growing impetus to find ways of economically storing it. Batteries can handle short-term fluxes in production but may not be able to handle longer-term shortfalls or seasonal changes in power output. Hydrogen is one of several options being considered that has the potential to serve as a longer-term bridge between periods of high renewable productivity.

But hydrogen comes with its own issues. Obtaining it by splitting water is pretty inefficient, energy-wise, and storing it for long periods can be challenging. Most hydrogen-producing catalysts also work best with pure water—not necessarily an item that's easy to obtain as climate change is boosting the intensity of droughts.

A group of researchers based in China has now developed a device that can output hydrogen when starting with seawater—in fact, the device needs to be sitting in seawater to work. The key concept for getting it to work will be familiar to anyone who understands how most waterproof clothing works.

Enlarge / Jaguar's latest factory racing car is the I Type 6, its latest Formula E challenger. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

LONDON—On Wednesday, Jaguar Racing became the latest Formula E team to unveil its race car for the coming season. The sport has radical new technical rules for its third-generation race car, which is smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more efficient. This will be the British automaker's sixth season competing in the series, and its participation is for more than just marketing; Jaguar Land Rover's electrified road cars have benefited in tangible ways as a result, according to the team's technical manager Phil Charles.

"If you rewind back to 2017, that's the first time that [we used] our in-house inverter for the racing team," Charles told Ars. "We put a silicon carbide switching device, the Wolfspeed one actually... that gave us the ability to switch super fast. That was the push on our side—we want to switch faster and see if that can give us efficiency, which it did. So we've gotten over and over and over during these inverter development cycles, switching faster and faster and faster," he said.

At the time, few manufacturers looked at silicon carbide power electronics for road-going EVs. "Now everyone wants silicon carbide, and the reason they want it is the same reasons we do," Charles said. "So the tech that we pushed then has really caught up now—the race to road is really clear. If I kind of map our switching speed increase, we've done five evolutions with different topologies of the in-house inverter. Now the road cars are coming along and the benefit there is range, ultimately; it means smaller batteries."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

A European regulator today reportedly threatened Elon Musk with a continent-wide ban on Twitter if the company fails to enforce content moderation rules required by the Digital Services Act. Also today, Twitter claimed it hasn't changed any policies—even though it stopped enforcing rules against COVID misinformation.

"As we carry out this work, we want to assure you of a few things: First, none of our policies have changed," Twitter wrote in a blog post titled, "Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation."

Twitter made this claim just a week after the major reversal in how it handles COVID misinformation. "Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy," Twitter said. We wrote about the change yesterday.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Next summer, courts will decide whether Google is guilty of “misleading” millions of Google Play users by warning them against using any other app stores or services to download apps.

A judge this week granted class-action status to antitrust litigation that now covers 21 million Google Play customers in 12 states—Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—and five US territories, including American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. The lawsuit claims that Google’s misleading warnings led millions of customers nationwide to pay “artificially inflated” prices for apps they could have downloaded cheaper elsewhere.

Last year, dozens of state attorneys general sued Google on these same antitrust grounds. Those state enforcers alleged that Google made it impossible for other app stores to compete, and the company had a monopoly on Android apps. The legal teams for the customers suing are now joining forces with the states suing; if the customers win, Google owner Alphabet Inc. could be on the hook for an estimated $4.7 billion in damages from the class-action suit alone.

Enlarge / An iPhone and Apple Watch showing the crash detection feature. (credit: Apple)

Apple released a minor software update for iPhones today. Unlike many of its other iOS updates, the new iOS 16.1.2 was not released in tandem with updates to Apple's other operating systems like macOS or watchOS.

iOS 16.1.2 primarily does two things, per Apple's release notes: it improves compatibility with unspecified wireless carriers, and it optimizes the Crash Detection feature on the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro, and iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Apple hasn't gone into detail about what kinds of optimizations we're talking about. Crash Detection is a newly introduced feature that can notify emergency services when the phone's internal sensors have detected that you've been in an automobile accident. Apple developed algorithms that look at a variety of data from the phone's sensors (such as the accelerometer and G-force sensors) and other factors like microphone activity to attempt to accurately detect crashes.

Enlarge (credit: Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Google has removed two apps, one with more than 100,000 downloads, after receiving a report they were part of an illegal scheme that surreptitiously forwarded text messages that were used to create fraudulent accounts on third-party websites.

The first app, named Symoo, billed itself as an easy-to-use SMS messenger. Once installed, it would ask for the user’s phone number and then pretend to load the application. The app would then hang on the screen while, in the background, it copied every text received and sent it to goomy[.]fun, a website controlled by the developer.

The screen would hang indefinitely, so eventually many users would likely force-quit the app and uninstall it. During the time Symoo was running, however, the developer would use the number for a fee-based service that registered fake accounts on sites that require SMS-based verifications. While the app was running, the service would register accounts using the infected phone’s number and then copy the verification code returned by the site. Besides sending texts associated with the fake account creation, Symoo forwarded any texts the infected phone received from other parties.

Enlarge / Anker's cameras store their footage on a local base. Thumbnail images of faces, however, were uploaded to cloud servers. (credit: Eufy)

Eufy, a smart home brand of tech accessory firm Anker, had become popular among some privacy-minded security camera buyers. Its doorbell camera and other devices proudly proclaimed having "No Clouds or Costs," and that "no one has access to your data but you."

That's why security consultant and researcher Paul Moore's string of tweets and videos, demonstrating that Eufy cameras were uploading name-tagged thumbnail images to cloud servers to alert owners' phones, likely unencrypted, stung smart home and security enthusiasts so hard this week.

Moore, based in the UK, started asking Eufy rhetorical questions about its practices on Twitter starting November 21. "Why is my 'local storage" #doorbellDual storing every face, without encryption, to your servers? Why can I stream my camera without #authentication?!" Moore also posted lines from "source code & API responses" that suggested a very weak AES key was being used to encrypt video footage.

Enlarge / The very first of the butterfly-switch keyboard designs, as introduced in the 12-inch MacBook from 2015.

If you bought a MacBook with one of Apple's low-profile butterfly-switch keyboards, if you ever had the keyboard repaired, and if you live in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, or Washington state, good news! A judge has approved a $50 million settlement to a class-action lawsuit that Apple agreed to in July, meaning that payouts to affected users (and the attorneys involved) can begin soon.

According to Macworld, there will be three tiers of payouts: $50 to people who had individual keycaps replaced, $125 to people who had one keyboard replacement, and $395 to people who had to go in for two or more replacements.

For those unfamiliar, MacBooks introduced between 2015 and 2019 used a new low-profile keyboard with a "butterfly" switch mechanism that saved space but also resulted in firmer keys that moved less than they did before. Early complaints were mostly subjective and centered on the keyboard's feel compared to previous scissor-switch designs. But as time passed, it became clear that butterfly-switch keyboards also failed at a higher rate than the scissor-switch designs. These problems persisted despite at least four major revisions to the butterfly-switch mechanism.