Month: May 2023

Enlarge / Rivian pick-up trucks on the assembly line in Normal, Illinois. (credit: Bloomberg)

Spotting an electric truck on the road remains a novelty in most of the US, but not Normal, Illinois.

The town in the Midwestern corn belt is home to the manufacturing operations of Rivian, the battery-powered vehicle start-up worth more than Ford or Volkswagen soon after it listed 18 months ago.

Rivian’s market capitalization has since crumbled from a peak of $162 billion to $12.5 billion in the face of production shortfalls and intensifying competition from carmakers both established and new. It is expected to report a $1.7 billion operating loss on $654 million in revenue in first-quarter results due on Tuesday, according to a compilation of analysts’ estimates.

Enlarge / Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin really knows how to fill out a hard hat. (credit: Yegor Aleyev / TASS via Getty Images)

Dmitry Rogozin was fired as director general of Russia's main space corporation, Roscosmos, nearly a year ago. He has spent much of the time since near the front lines of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, sharing various hateful, threatening, and nationalistic sentiments on his Telegram account.

Occasionally, however, the pugnacious politician still opines about space on his "Rogozin at the Front" social media account. He did so this weekend, calling into question whether the United States really did land astronauts on the Moon.

During his four-year tenure at Roscosmos, Rogozin wrote, he asked his leadership team to look into whether NASA had actually landed a dozen astronauts on the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After all, Rogozin reasoned, "It was not clear to me how the United States, at that level of technological development of the '60s of the last century, did what they still cannot do now?"

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

By now, you’ve likely heard that passwordless Google accounts have finally arrived. The replacement for passwords is known as "passkeys."

There are many misconceptions about passkeys, both in terms of their usability and the security and privacy benefits they offer compared with current authentication methods. That’s not surprising, given that passwords have been in use for the past 60 years, and passkeys are so new. The long and short of it is that with a few minutes of training, passkeys are easier to use than passwords, and in a matter of months—once a dozen or so industry partners finish rolling out the remaining pieces—using passkeys will be easier still. Passkeys are also vastly more secure and privacy-preserving than passwords, for reasons I'll explain later.

This article provides a primer to get people started with Google's implementation of passkeys and explains the technical underpinnings that make them a much easier and more effective way to protect against account takeovers. A handful of smaller sites—specifically, PayPal, Instacart, Best Buy, Kayak, Robinhood, Shop Pay, and Cardpointers—have rolled out various options for logging in with passkeys, but those choices are more proofs of concept than working solutions. Google is the first major online service to make passkeys available, and its offering is refined and comprehensive enough that I’m recommending people turn them on today.

Enlarge / Dirk Hilgenberg was appointed to take over Cariad from Christian Senger in 2022; now he's to be replaced by someone from Bentley. (credit: Volkswagen Group)

Volkswagen Group's troubled software division Cariad is getting new leadership again. According to Reuters, later today, VW Group is expected to announce that it's replacing Cariad's current boss with Bentley's Peter Bosch. The division was created in 2019 to consolidate software development for VW's 10 different brands under one roof. But it's been anything but smooth sailing ever since, resulting in delays to new models and even the firing of former VW CEO Herbert Diess in 2022.

Cariad was originally charged with developing three different automotive software platforms concurrently. One platform, called E3 1.1, is for VW Group's mass-market electric vehicles like the VW ID.4.

E3 1.2 will debut in the more upmarket EVs currently under development by Audi and Porsche and should appear first in the electric Porsche Macan and Audi's A6 e-tron and Q6 e-tron. But those models have been delayed due to development difficulties and now won't appear until 2024.

Enlarge (credit: Red Hook Studios)

The worst thing you can do when playing Darkest Dungeon 2 is compare it to its beloved 2016 predecessor. Darkest Dungeon was essentially a 2D XCOM, complete with a base that you managed and upgraded over a long campaign.

Darkest Dungeon 2 is decidedly not that. Instead, it’s a roguelite.

Rather than embarking on a long campaign filled with dozens of units to manage and upgrade as you did in the first game, here, you go on one-and-done “runs” with a stable cast of characters. As you play, you collect a meta-currency to unlock new items and upgrade your characters, stats, and stagecoach between runs.