Month: September 2024

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | picture alliance )

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, in his first public comments since being arrested by French authorities, said that Telegram is not an "anarchic paradise" but promised that the platform will enhance its moderation of harmful content.

While Telegram has room for improvement, "the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue," Durov wrote on Telegram yesterday. "We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (like this or this). We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster."

The links Durov provided go to Telegram channels that report the number of groups and channels banned for terrorist content and child-abuse content. Telegram has been criticized by groups such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) for allegedly not cooperating on removal of child sexual abuse material.

Voting really feels good to this werewolf. (credit: State of Michigan)

You can't just ask the Internet to vote on something and assume you'll get a "normal" result.

The town of Fort Wayne, Indiana, learned this the hard way in 2011, when an online vote to name a new government center in town went with "Harry Baals." Though Mr. Baals was in fact a respected former mayor of the town back in the 1930s, contemporary officials weren't convinced that his name was chosen out of merely historical interest.

Or there was the time in 2015 when the British Columbia Ferry Service asked Internet users to name its newest ships and perhaps win a $500 prize. Contest entries included:

Enlarge / Other automakers have half-heartedly tuned their EVs, but Hyundai's N brand has gone all-out with the Ioniq 5, and the results are spectacular. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Hyundai's transformation over the past decade and a half has been one to watch. The automaker went on a hiring spree, luring design and engineering talent away from the likes of BMW and Audi to grow its own competency in these areas. It worked—few can rival the efficiency or charging speed of the current crop of Korean electric vehicles, for instance. And Hyundai's N division has shown it can turn prosaic underpinnings into performance cars that push all the right buttons. Both of those things are on vivid display with the Ioniq 5 N.

The regular Ioniq 5 has been on sale for a while now, long enough to have just received a facelift. It's one of our favorite EVs, with styling that calls back to the angular hatchbacks of the 1980s and an 800 V powertrain that's easily best-in-class. Now, the company's in-house tuners have had their way with it, applying lessons learned from rallying and touring car racing to up the fun factor.

It's not exactly a novel approach, even for EVs. Kia beat Hyundai to the punch with the EV6 GT; the car is fearsomely fast, but I found it less compelling than the normal version, which is cheaper, less powerful, and more efficient. In fact, I'm on record as saying that when looking at EVs, the cheapest, least-powerful version is almost always the one to get.

Enlarge / "Hmm, no signal here. I'm trying to figure it out, but nothing comes to mind …" (credit: Getty Images)

One issue in getting office buildings networked that you don't typically face at home is concrete—and lots of it. Concrete walls are an average of 8 inches thick inside most commercial real estate.

Keeping a network running through them is not merely a matter of running cord. Not everybody has the knowledge or tools to punch through that kind of wall. Even if they do, you can't just put a hole in something that might be load-bearing or part of a fire control system without imaging, permits, and contractors. The bandwidths that can work through these walls, like 3G, are being phased out, and the bandwidths that provide enough throughput for modern systems, like 5G, can't make it through.

That's what WaveCore, from Airvine Scientific, aims to fix, and I can't help but find it fascinating after originally seeing it on The Register. The company had previously taken on lesser solid obstructions, like plaster and thick glass, with its WaveTunnel. Two WaveCore units on either side of a wall (or on different floors) can push through a stated 12 inches of concrete. In their in-house testing, Airvine reports pushing just under 4Gbps through 12 inches of garage concrete, and it can bend around corners, even 90 degrees. Your particular cement and aggregate combinations may vary, of course.