Month: October 2023

Enlarge / It meant spending most of the week on the road, but who would say no to a chance to drive Porsche's very first car? Not I. (credit: Tangent Vector/Porsche)

CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA, Calif.—Every few years, Porsche holds a big celebration of its racing heritage at the Laguna Seca racetrack in Monterey, California. Called Rennsport Reunion, it's a big deal, drawing a far bigger attendance than when racing series like IndyCar or IMSA visit. And attendees are a passionate crowd, prepared to wait in line for an hour or more just to visit the official merch store.

Rennsport Reunion 7 took place last week, and it was a special one, as this year is Porsche's 75th anniversary. Among the cars brought over from the company museum was the very first to ever bear the Porsche name, the prototype 356/1 roadster.

And Porsche let us drive this priceless artifact.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Anton Petrus)

The Federal Communications Commission said it has issued a space debris enforcement action for the first time ever by imposing a fine of $150,000 on Dish for failing to properly deorbit a TV satellite.

"To settle this matter, Dish admits that it failed to operate the EchoStar-7 satellite in accordance with its authorization, will implement a compliance plan, and will pay a $150,000 civil penalty," the FCC said in an order issued yesterday. The FCC said the action is "a first in space debris enforcement" and part of its increased focus on satellite policy that included the establishment of a Space Bureau. The FCC added:

The FCC's investigation found that the company violated the Communications Act, the FCC rules, and the terms of the company's license by relocating its direct broadcast satellite ("DBS") service EchoStar-7 satellite at the satellite's end-of-mission to a disposal orbit well below the elevation required by the terms of its license. At this lower altitude, it could pose orbital debris concerns.

FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan Egal called the consent decree "a breakthrough settlement, making very clear the FCC has strong enforcement authority and capability to enforce its vitally important space debris rules."

Enlarge (credit: James Marshall/Getty Images)

Soheil Feizi considers himself an optimistic person. But the University of Maryland computer science professor is blunt when he sums up the current state of watermarking AI images. “We don’t have any reliable watermarking at this point,” he says. “We broke all of them.”

For one of the two types of AI watermarking he tested for a new study— “low perturbation” watermarks, which are invisible to the naked eye—he’s even more direct: “There’s no hope.”

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  This is the Framework Laptop 13. We're using the same pictures as a previous review because it's the exact same laptop. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

The Framework Laptop 13 is back again.

My third review of this laptop is probably the one that I (and many Framework-curious PC buyers) have been the most interested to test, as the company has finally added an AMD Ryzen option to the repair-friendly portable. Updates to the Intel version of the Framework Laptop have boosted CPU performance, but its graphics performance has been at a standstill since the Framework Laptop originally hit the scene in mid-2021.

Even AMD's latest integrated graphics won't make a thin-and-light laptop a replacement for a gaming PC with dedicated graphics, but a bit more GPU power makes the Framework Laptop that much more versatile, making it easier to play games at reasonable resolutions and settings than it is on Intel's aging Iris Xe graphics hardware.

Enlarge (credit: Liu Guanguan/China News Service)

Meta is preparing to charge EU users a $14 monthly subscription fee to access Instagram on their phones unless they allow the company to use their personal information for targeted ads.

The US tech giant will also charge $17 for Facebook and Instagram together for use on desktop, said two people with direct knowledge of the plans, which are likely to be rolled out in coming weeks.

The move comes after discussions with regulators in the bloc who have been seeking to curb the way big tech companies profit from the data they get from their users for free, which would be a direct attack on the way groups such as Meta and Google generate their profits.

Enlarge / Marcin Wichary's photos of an Olivetti Praxis 48 electric typewriter. (credit: Marcin Wichary)

It's the 150th anniversary of the QWERTY keyboard, and Marcin Wichary has put together the kind of history and celebration this totemic object deserves. Shift Happens is a two-volume, 1,200-plus-page work with more than 1,300 photos, researched over seven years and cast lovingly into type and photo spreads that befit the subject.

You can preorder it now, and orders before October 4 (Wednesday) can still be shipped before Christmas, while orders on October 5 or later will have to wait until December or January. Preorders locked in before Wednesday also get a 160-page "volume of extras."

Wichary, a designer, engineer, and writer who has worked at Google, Medium, and Figma, has been working in public to get people excited about type, fonts, and text design for some time now. He told the Twitter world about his visit to an obscure, magical Spanish typewriter museum in 2016. He put a lot of work into crafting the link underlines at Medium and explaining font fallbacks at Figma. Shift Happens reads and looks like Wichary's chance to tell the bigger story around all the little things that fascinate him and to lock into history all the strange little stories he loves.