Month: December 2022

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency / Contributor | Anadolu)

Yesterday, Twitter safety chief Ella Irwin was supposed to meet with Twitter’s independent Trust and Safety Council by Zoom for an “open conversation and Q&A,” AP News reported. Instead, council members received an email dismissing them entirely.

Twitter has declared that it is officially in a “new phase” when it comes to trust and safety.

“We are reevaluating how best to bring external insights into our product and policy development work,” an email, simply signed "Twitter," informed the council. “As part of this process, we have decided that the Trust and Safety Council is not the best structure to do this.”

Enlarge / An artist's concept of the Lunar Gateway that includes elements from international partners. (credit: NASA/Alberto Bertolin)

Relations between NASA and Russia's state-owned space corporation were fairly robust five years ago when the two parties signed a joint statement that discussed partnering on the development of a space station orbiting the Moon, called the Lunar Gateway. At the time, Russia's Roscosmos was expected to provide an airlock for the facility.

Much has happened in the five years since then, of course. In 2020, as NASA began to more concretely formulate its plans for lunar exploration under the Artemis program, Russia started to pull away.

"In our view, the Lunar Gateway in its current form is too US-centric, so to speak," said then-Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin. "Russia is likely to refrain from participating in it on a large scale." At the time, Rogozin also expressed disdain for the "Artemis Accords" created by NASA, which established a set of principles to guide cooperation among nations participating in the agency’s 21st-century lunar exploration plans.

Enlarge / The export controls were aimed at complicating Chinese efforts to use high-end US technology for military applications, such as nuclear warhead modeling and hypersonic weapons. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

China has hit back against sweeping US export controls on chips, filing a dispute with the World Trade Organization and escalating the tech war between the two countries.

China’s commerce ministry said on Monday its WTO complaint was a legal and necessary measure to defend its “legitimate rights and interests,” after the US Department of Commerce introduced sanctions in early October to make it harder for China to buy or develop advanced semiconductors.

“At a minimum, the case is about China pushing back on how it’s perceived as an unfair actor in the global trading world,” said Ben Kostrzewa, an expert on US-China trade relations at Hogan Lovells.

Enlarge / Plugable's Bluetooth 5.0 USB adapter in a desktop PC. (credit: Plugable)

No, industry specs and updates aren't going to stop arriving. But keeping your computer up to date with the latest wireless standards, like Bluetooth, is still a good step in future-proofing. While it's not the only product of its kind, the Plugable USB-BT5 USB-A adapter announced today looks like a cheap and simple way to bring Bluetooth 5.0 to your PC.

Bernie Thompson, founder and CTO at the Redmond, Washington-based company told us that the adapter supports link rates of up to 3Mbps. You also get connectivity with up to seven devices and a max distance claim of 131 feet (40 m). Like with any Bluetooth product, max supported distance will vary depending on environmental factors, such as walls and appliances in the area.

Plugable's adapter works like a Bluetooth radio for the computer's OS, and the only OSes the dongle supports are Windows 11 and Windows 10. With Microsoft ending support for Windows 7 and 8 next month, the lack of older Windows OSes may not be too surprising.

Enlarge / Honda started using VR in car design in 2017, which came in handy once coronavirus made collaborating in person impossible. (credit: Honda)

After March 2020, every automaker on the planet had to rethink how it leveraged technology. Everything from design and engineering to key partnerships needed to be rethought to keep businesses running. While Honda may not be the automaker you think of as pushing the automotive tech envelope, its long-time presence in Silicon Valley and its forward-thinking made it relatively early to the advanced tech-design game when the pandemic hit.

To that end, Honda has been using virtual reality design systems, and its long-time relationship with Google, to bring better products to Honda customers. We got an exclusive peek inside the VR studio and a brief look at Honda’s new "Google Built-In" experience coming to the 2023 Honda Accord, and perhaps a few hints at what could be coming for Honda owners and drivers alike.

Inside the Honda VR studio and a virtual Honda Prologue EV

Honda has built a completely digital design studio that helps designers and engineers on opposite sides of the world collaborate on future designs, including one of Honda’s first consumer battery-electric vehicles.