Month: December 2024

It feels like tech workers have caught very few breaks over the past several years, between ongoing mass layoffs, stagnating wages amid inflation, AI supposedly coming for jobs, and unpopular orders to return to office that, for many, threaten to disrupt work-life balance.

But in 2024, a potentially critical mass of tech workers seemed to reach a breaking point. As labor rights groups advocating for tech workers told Ars, these workers are banding together in sustained strong numbers and are either winning or appear tantalizingly close to winning better worker conditions at major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

In February, the industry-wide Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) noted that "the tech workers movement is far more expansive and impactful" than even labor rights advocates realized, noting that unionized tech workers have gone beyond early stories about Googlers marching in the streets and now "make the headlines on a daily basis."

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Mehr als 8 Jahre nach der erstmaligen Ankündigung besteht die Schwerlastrakete von Blue Origin den letzten großen Test vor ihrem ersten Flug in den Orbit. (Raumfahrt, Jeff Bezos)

Die Marine Estlands wird zum Schutz der verbliebenen Estlink1-Verbindung eingesetzt, nachdem das Stromkabel Estlink2 beschädigt wurde. (Militär, Politik)

Hamburg treibt die Verkehrswende weiter voran. Künftig sollen elektrisch angetriebene Taxis die Fahrgäste befördern. (Verkehrswende, Elektroauto)

Seit Jahren fordert der CCC eine transparente Wahlsoftware. Wie sinnvoll das wäre, zeigt die Analyse eines weit verbreiteten Tools. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (38C3, Datenschutz)

Die quelloffene Gebäudeautomatisierungsplattform OpenHAB ermöglicht, alle smarten Geräte Hersteller- und protokollübergreifend zu vernetzen und über eine einzige App einheitlich zu steuern. Eine Anleitung von Florian Hotze (Hausautomation, Linux)

Doc Brown als fieser Klingone, Mike aus Breaking Bad, Dean Stockwell aus Quantum Leap und viele weitere Stars haben Star Trek ihre Aufwartung gemacht. Von Peter Osteried (Star Trek, The Walking Dead)

After a long day of stops and starts that stretched well into the evening, and on what appeared to be the company's fifth attempt Friday, Blue Origin successfully ignited the seven main engines on its massive New Glenn rocket.

The test firing as fog built over the Florida coast marks the final major step in the rocket company's campaign to bring the New Glenn rocket—a privately developed, super-heavy lift vehicle—to launch readiness. Blue Origin said it fired the vehicle's engines for a duration of 24 seconds. They fired at full thrust for 13 of those seconds.

"This is a monumental milestone and a glimpse of what’s just around the corner for New Glenn’s first launch," said Jarrett Jones,  senior vice president of the New Glenn program, in a news release. "Today’s success proves that our rigorous approach to testing–combined with our incredible tooling and design engineering–is working as intended."

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A brave YouTuber has managed to defeat a fake Nintendo lawyer improperly targeting his channel with copyright takedowns that could have seen his entire channel removed if YouTube issued one more strike.

Sharing his story with The Verge, Dominik "Domtendo" Neumayer—a German YouTuber who has broadcasted play-throughs of popular games for 17 years—said that it all started when YouTube removed some videos from his channel that were centered on The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Those removals came after a pair of complaints were filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and generated two strikes. Everyone on YouTube knows that three strikes mean you're out and off the platform permanently.

Suddenly at risk of losing the entire channel he had built on YouTube, Neumayer was stunned, The Verge noted, partly because most game companies consider "Let's Play" videos like his to be free marketing, not a threat to their business. And while Nintendo has been known to target YouTubers with DMCA takedowns, it generally historically took no issues with accounts like his.

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'Tis the season for many holiday traditions, including the Ugly Christmas Sweater—you know, those 1950s-style heavy knits featuring some kind of cartoonish seasonal decoration, like snowflakes, Santa Claus, or—in the case of Mark Darcy from Bridget Jones' Diary (2001)—Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. "It’s obnoxious and tacky, but also fuzzy and kind of wholesome—the fashion equivalent of a Hallmark Christmas movie (with a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek)," as CNN's Marianna Cerini recently observed.

Fashion (or lack thereof) aside, sweaters and other knitted fabric are also fascinating to physicists and mathematicians. Case in point: a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters examining the complex mechanics behind the many resting shapes a good Jersey knit can form while at rest.

Knitted fabrics are part of a class of intertwined materials—which also includes birds' nests, surgical knots, knotted shoelaces, and even the degradation of paper fibers in ancient manuscripts. Knitted fabrics are technically a type of metamaterial: an engineered material that gets its properties not from the base materials but from their designed structures. The elasticity (aka, stretchiness) of knitted fabrics is an emergent property: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. How those components (strands of yarn) are arranged at an intermediate scale (the structure) determines the macro scale properties of the resulting fabric.

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