Month: April 2025

Gesunkene Preise machen die Installation eines Akkus für Balkonkraftwerke attraktiver. Davon will auch Anker mit der Solarbank 3 profitieren. Ein Bericht von Friedhelm Greis (Balkonkraftwerk, Powerstation)

Trump glaubt: Die 104-prozentigen Zölle auf Wareneinfuhren aus China könnte Apple umgehen, wenn iPhones in den USA hergestellt würden. (iPhone, Apple)

Cloudbasierte Infrastrukturen erfordern umfassende Sicherheitsstrategien. Dieses Online-Training zeigt, wie Microsoft-365-Umgebungen wirksam gegen Angriffe abgesichert und moderne Schutzmechanismen implementiert werden. (Golem Karrierewelt, Office-Suite)

Durch die Cloud-Dienste der Hyperscaler erzielen die USA einen Überschuss. Man müsse jetzt das Umfeld des Autokraten Trump treffen, so der Chef des Instituts der deutschen Wirtschaft. (Cloud, Politik)

Last week, Nintendo made waves across the game industry by announcing that Mario Kart World would sell for a suggested price of $80 in the US. That nominal price represents a new high-water mark both for Nintendo and for the game industry at large, which has generally reserved prices above $70 for fancy, trinket-laden collectors' editions or Digital Deluxe Editions that include all variety of downloadable bonuses.

When you adjust historical game prices for inflation, though, you find that asking $80 for a baseline game in 2025 is broadly in line with the prices big games were commanding 10 to 15 years ago. And given the faster-than-normal inflation rates of the last five years, even the $70 nominal game prices that set a new standard in 2020 don't have the same purchasing oomph they once did.

The data

To judge Mario Kart World's $80 price against historical trends, we first needed to figure out how much games cost in the past. To do that, we built off of our similar 2020 analysis, which relied on scanned catalogs and retail advertising fliers for real examples of nominal console game pricing going back to the Atari era. For more recent years, we relied more on press reports and archived digital storefronts to show what prices new games were actually selling for at the time.

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A leak of 190,000 chat messages traded among members of the Black Basta ransomware group shows that it’s a highly structured and mostly efficient organization staffed by personnel with expertise in various specialities, including exploit development, infrastructure optimization, social engineering, and more.

The trove of records was first posted to file-sharing site MEGA. The messages, which were sent from September 2023 to September 2024, were later posted to Telegram in February 2025. ExploitWhispers, the online persona who took credit for the leak, also provided commentary and context for understanding the communications. The identity of the person or persons behind ExploitWhispers remains unknown. Last month’s leak coincided with the unexplained outage of the Black Basta site on the dark web, which has remained down ever since.

“We need to exploit as soon as possible”

Researchers from security firm Trustwave’s SpiderLabs pored through the messages, which were written in Russian, and published a brief blog summary and a more detailed review of the messages on Tuesday.

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A number of things happened after the Trump administration announced a set of global tariffs last week. Global stock markets have tanked. Some device makers have temporarily paused sales of certain devices or delayed plans to start taking orders of others. And while some countries that have been hit hard by tariffs are trying to […]

The post Lilbits: Bigme’s HiBreak E Ink phone (without the phone), India’s mix & match laptop refurbishers, and 104 percent tariffs on Chinese imports appeared first on Liliputing.

Coffee is one of the most popular beverages in the world, counting many scientists among its fans. Naturally those scientists are sometimes drawn to study their beloved beverage from various angles with an eye toward achieving the perfect cup.

While espresso has received the lion's share of such attention, physicists at the University of Pennsylvania have investigated the physics behind brewing so-called "pour-over" coffee, in which hot water is poured over coffee grounds in a filter within a funnel-shaped cone and allowed to percolate and drip into a cup below. The trick is to pour the water from as high as possible without letting the jet of water break up upon impact with the grounds, according to their new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

In 2020, we reported on a mathematical model for brewing the perfect cup of espresso with minimal waste. Many variables can affect the quality of a steaming cup of espresso, including so-called "channeling" during the brewing process, in which the water doesn't seep uniformly through the grounds but branches off in various preferential paths instead. This significantly reduces the extraction yield (EY)—the fraction of coffee that dissolves into the final beverage—and thus the quality of the final brew. That, in turn, depends on controlling water flow and pressure as the liquid percolates through the coffee grounds.

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Es gibt neue Informationen aus dem Korruptionsfall, den der belgische Geheimdienst aufgedeckt haben will. Huawei-Lobbyisten sollen verantwortlich sein. (Huawei, Politik)

Twitch has struck a deal with Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) to eject itself from a lawsuit over an ad boycott shortly following Musk's takeover of Twitter in October 2022.

In a court filing Monday, X lawyers provided no details on the deal but explained that "X and Twitch have entered into a memorandum of understanding resolving the action as to Twitch," so long as "certain conditions" are met by December 31.

Musk has called for "criminal prosecution" of anyone involved in the ad boycott. But while Twitch was one of about a dozen companies that X directly accused of conspiring to withhold billions in ad revenue from then-Twitter, it was not part of X's initial complaint. The livestreaming service was only added to the lawsuit after X amended its complaint in November to pull in more advertisers, and since then, Twitch has never responded to any of X's accusations. Instead, in its filing, X speaks for Twitch.

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