It's the ultimate peace of mind for winter power outages.
Environment Possible ad Read on GizmodoGoogle has halted production of the Nest Wifi, and Amazon is clearing out the remaining stock.
Business Possible ad Read on GizmodoDiscord has been suddenly blocked in Russia and Turkey since yesterday due to illegal activity residing on the platform, leaving legitimate users in those countries unable to visit the website or connect to the service....
Politics Read on Bleeping ComputerFor the third year in a row, Amazon is ringing in the fall with a second Prime Day event. This year’s two-day shopping event — dubbed Prime Big Deal Days — runs through the end of today, October 9th, giving Amazon Prime subscribers a chance to chip away at their holiday wishlist before Black Friday and Cyber Monday land later this year. Amazon already has a glut of great deals on offer, and we’re seeing steep discounts on Amazon’s own devices, including Fire tablets, Echo speakers, Eero routers, Kindles, and more. The online retailer is also slashing prices on a variety of other electronics, from noise-canceling headphones and earbuds to video doorbells and some of our favorite robot vacuums. As usual, we’ll be scouring Amazon’s landing...
Business Read on The VergeForeign influence campaigns, or information operations, have been widespread in the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election. Influence campaigns are large-scale efforts to shift public opinion, push false narratives, or change behaviors among a target population. Russia, China, Iran, Israel, and other nations have run these campaigns by exploiting social bots, influencers, media companies, and generative AI. At the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media, my colleagues and I study influence campaigns and design technical solutions—algorithms—to detect and counter them. State-of-the-art methods developed in our center use several indicators of this type of online activity, which researchers call inauthentic coordinated behavior. We identify clusters of social media accounts that post in a synchronized fashion, amplify the same groups of users, share identical sets of links, images or hashtags, or perform suspiciously similar sequences of actions. We have uncovered many examples of coordinated inauthentic behavior. For example, we found accounts that flood the network with tens or hundreds of thousands of posts in a single day. The same campaign can post a message with one account and then have other accounts that its organizers also control “like” and “unlike” it hundreds of times in a short time span. Once the campaign achieves its objective, all these messages can be deleted to evade detection. Using these tricks, foreign governments and their agents can manipulate social media algorithms that determine what is trending and what is engaging to decide what users see in their feeds. Read full article
Crime and Courts Read on Ars TechnicaIt’s not a successor to the Switch, but Nintendo does have a new piece of hardware to announce: a motion-controlled alarm clock. The device is called Alarmo, and it “responds to your movements,” which means you can snooze it with a gesture or stop it by actually getting out of bed. It costs $99.99 and will be available in early 2025, though Nintendo says Switch Online subscribers can purchase it early right now. It appears this is the mystery Nintendo gadget that hit the Federal Communications Commission last month, which revealed that the device features a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi radio and a 24GHz mmWave sensor. In addition to the motion features, a big part of the device appears to be its immersive sounds, which are pulled from five different...
Entertainment Read on The VergeCasio Japan is releasing a new desk clock that will be familiar to those who’ve eschewed smartwatches in favor of simpler digital timepieces. It’s a supersized version of the Casio A158W digital watch that could make for a great nightstand alarm clock, although you may not want to hide its retro charm in your bedroom. Officially called the DQD-851J-8JF, the clock will be exclusively available in Japan starting on October 25th for 4,378 yen (around $29). That’s even cheaper than the Casio A158W watch because the clock is made from plastic instead of stainless steel. The desk clock also lacks a stopwatch and a chime that rings at the top of each hour but adds features not found on Casio’s basic digital watches like a thermometer and a...
Politics Read on The Verge TechThe Eerste Kamer, the Dutch Senate, has rejected the Schoof I Cabinet’s plan to use state emergency law to declare an asylum crisis and implement measures without parliament and the Senat
Crime and Courts Read on NL TimesThis deal may not last until tonight.
Business Possible ad Read on GizmodoThe Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to three scientists today — two of whom are significant figures at Google DeepMind — for their work around proteins, which the Nobel Prize committee describes as the “chemical tools of life.” DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and senior DeepMind research scientist John Jumper received the award for creating the open-source AlphaFold2 AI model to calculate the structure of human proteins. “With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified,” the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its announcement. David Baker, who shares the prize with Hassabis and Jumper, was awarded for “computational...
Politics Read on The Verge ScienceOne of the best deals ever for a powerful 4TB SSD.
Business Possible ad Read on GizmodoAmazon is introducing new Ring subscription plans, including a tier that'll bring 24/7 recording and AI-powered video search.
Business Read on TechCrunchPlus, get another tiny look at Tom Hardy's last symbiotic ride in new footage from Venom: The Last Dance.
Entertainment Read on GizmodoThe Amazon-owned home-surveillance business will offer users the ability to search footage for specific objects and actions. WIRED gave it a try.
Business Read on WIRED BusinessAfter keeping Century under wraps for several months, the startup gave TechCrunch a peek under the hood.
Politics Read on TechCrunchSaber Interactive says its game A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead will have a fitting feature that might seem obvious but wasn’t guaranteed: using your microphone, the game will alert the in-game monsters to your presence if they hear you make a sound — both in the game and out. And if they hear you, they come for you. Just like in the movie! The microphone part is optional, though I’d definitely turn it on myself. While Saber says giving the game access to your microphone could mean that the game’s monsters can “detect every sound you make in real life,” it appears from the trailer that even your controller vibrating or your dryer running could put you in danger. A Quiet Place is far from the only game to use a microphone as part of play...
Entertainment Read on The Verge TechRing’s new Smart Video Search lets you search through recorded footage to find everything from a lost cat to a red sweater. According to Ring, the AI-powered feature can locate specific events in your Ring video history based on natural language searches, such as “a black cat at night,” “a red truck in the rain,” and “a kid riding a bike yesterday.” Compared to Ring’s current smart notifications, which can alert you to doorbell rings, people, or packages, Smart Video Search opens up a whole new level of historical insight. The feature is launching today in beta for users in the US with the Ring Protect Pro plan ($19.99 a month). At launch, Ring says it can search for queries related to animals, vehicles, packages, and people, which can...
Politics Read on The Verge TechIt’s been the stuff of science fiction for decades: to provide gigawatts of cheap, clean power anywhere on Earth, day or night, using satellites that collect and transmit solar energy directly on orbit. Aetherflux, a new startup emerging from stealth Wednesday, says it is developing a novel design for space-based solar to unlock this energy […]
Politics Read on TechCrunch