Just six months after its last flagship launch, Xiaomi has announced another one. The Xiaomi 12S Ultra packs a massive one-inch, 50.3-megapixel Sony IMX989 main sensor. And unlike the Sony Xperia Pro-I, the Xiaomi 12S Ultra apparently uses the entirety…
Geely buys majority stake in troubled phone maker Meizu
Chinese car giant Geely has purchased a majority stake in the now-small smartphone maker Meizu. Bloomberg reports that Meizu will be run as an independent company under Xingli Technology, another tech brand under Geely’s umbrella. That said, the pair a…
The latest Apple TV 4K is $150 right now
With so many streaming services now available, finding the right box or dongle to view them on can be a challenge. Apple’s own streamer, the uniquely-named Apple TV, is one of the best on the market, but its price can often put people off. With Prime Day just days away, Amazon has dropped the price of both the 32GB and 64GB models, dropping them by $29 to $150 and $170, respectively. That’s not quite the low of $130 we saw last month for the 32GB version, but it’s a great price nonetheless.
Buy 2021 Apple TV 4K (32GB) at Amazon – $150Buy 2021 Apple TV 4K (64GB) at Amazon – $170
Devindra Hardawar gave the 2021 Apple TV 4K a score of 90 in our review. The new model irons out some of the kinks from what was already a powerful media box. The updated remote is a lot more intuitive in the hand and the beefier A12 Bionic chip delivers both HDR video at 60 frames per second (if the content you’re playing supports it) and better game performance.
If it’s just basic streaming you’re after, the Apple TV is expensive compared to Google’s Chromecast, Amazon’s Fire TV and Roku’s range of media players. However, if you’re already invested in Apple’s ecosystem and want one of the best streamers available at its second-lowest price ever, now might be time to pull the trigger.
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Crosby, Stills and Nash return to Spotify after COVID-19 misinformation boycott
The music of Crosby, Stills and Nash is once again available to stream on Spotify. In February, the supergroup left the platform to protest Spotify’s inaction against Joe Rogan, who was accused of spreading COVID-19 misinformation through his podcast. …
NASA’s CAPSTONE satellite breaks from Earth’s orbit and heads toward the Moon
NASA’s grand plan to take humans back to the Moon for the first time in over half a century has taken another step forward. The 55-pound CAPSTONE (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment) cubesat has broken free of Earth’s orbit and is on its way to the Moon.
Rocket Lab launched CAPSTONE on an Electron rocket from New Zealand last week. Following six days of orbit-raising burns to build up enough speed, the pathfinding satellite set out toward the Moon. It’s a relatively slow trip, though. CAPSTONE won’t reach the Moon until November.
NASA will try to put CAPSTONE in a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit around the Moon, a feat that’s never been attempted before. The agency plans to use the same orbit for the Gateway space station, which will provide support for long-term lunar missions under the Artemis program. The outpost will have living quarters for astronauts and a lab. That mission won’t launch until at least 2024.
Meanwhile, it emerged last week that NASA has targeted a launch window of between August 23rd and September 6th for the Artemis 1 mission. It will send an uncrewed module around the Moon to assess how the journey might affect the human body. The agency ran a successful wet launch fueling test for Artemis 1 in June.
Hacker claims they stole police data on a billion Chinese citizens
A hacker (or group of hackers) claims to have stolen data on a billion Chinese citizens from a Shanghai police database. According to Bloomberg, the hacker is attempting to sell 23 terabytes of data for 10 bitcoin, which is worth just over $198,000 at the time of writing.
The data includes names, addresses, birthplaces, national IDs and phone numbers. The Wall Street Journal reports that the hacker provided a sample of the data, which included crime reports dating as far back as 1995. Reporters confirmed the legitimacy of at least some of the data by calling people whose numbers were listed.
It’s not yet clear how the hacker infiltrated the police database, though there have been suggestions that they gained access via an Alibaba cloud computing company called Aliyun, which was said to host the database. Alibaba said it’s investigating the matter.
The true scope of the leak is unknown. However, cybersecurity experts have dubbed it the biggest cybersecurity breach in China’s history.
Amazon starts making deliveries by e-bike and on foot in London
Amazon has started delivering packages by cargo e-bike and on foot in the UK for the first time as it makes more progress toward its climate goals. The company has opened a micromobility hub in central London. The company says the walkers and e-bikes will make more than a million deliveries a year from the hub in Hackney. It claims those trips will replace thousands of van deliveries.
At the outset, the e-bikes and on-foot couriers will be in service across more than a tenth of the city’s ultra low emission zone (ULEZ). E-bikes and fully electric vehicles are exempt from the London Congestion Charge and ULEZ fees, so Amazon and its delivery partners will avoid having to pay those.
Amazon plans to open more e-cargo delivery hubs in the UK in the coming months. It already has more than 1,000 electric delivery vans on the road in the country. Earlier this year, the company added five fully electric heavy goods vehicles to its UK fleet to replace diesel trucks.
This isn’t the first time Amazon has used cargo e-bikes. Euronews notes that they’re being used for deliveries in five cities in France and seven metropolitan areas in Germany. It also employs electric scooters in Italy and Spain. As of last November, the company was fulfilling two-thirds of deliveries in Paris with e-bikes, on-foot couriers and electric vans.
Under its Shipment Zero project, Amazon aims to deliver 50 percent of packages with net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. It expects to become net-zero carbon by 2040 as part of its Climate Pledge.
The company also plans to run its operations entirely on renewable energy by 2025. It will install more than 30,000 additional solar panels at its sites in Manchester, Coalville, Haydock, Bristol and Milton Keynes by the end of the year. Amazon has 18 on-site solar projects in the UK and it’s working to double that number by 2024.
Xiaomi 12S Ultra has a Leica camera with a massive 1-inch sensor
Merely six months after its previous flagship launch, today Xiaomi announced a trio of familiar-looking smartphones to mark the beginning of its partnership with Leica. The new 12S Series features MIUI 13 based on Android 12, and it runs on Qualcomm’s …
HBO Max halts original productions across large parts of Europe
HBO Max is halting original productions across much of Europe, Variety has reported. The streaming service confirmed that it will no longer produce originals in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Central Europe, the Netherlands and Turkey, leaving only Spain and France untouched. The news is part of a plan from parent Warner Bros. Discovery to cut some $3 billion in costs following its split from AT&T.
“We are reviewing our current content proposition on the existing services,” a spokesperson told Variety in a statement. “As part of this process, we have decided to remove a limited amount of original programming from HBO Max, as well as ceasing our original programming efforts for HBO Max in the Nordics and Central Europe. We have also ceased our nascent development activities in the newer territories of Netherlands and Turkey, which had commenced over the past year.”
Some of the service’s most praised shows including Lust (Sweden) and Kamikaze (Denmark) came from the Nordics and other affected regions. On top of ceasing production, HBO Max will remove those shows along with the Hungarian drama The Informant from its service globally. Projects already in production and other approved shows will reportedly continue — but they may be sold to other platforms, with Warner acting strictly as producer.
Streaming content production has been a bright spot in Europe, as Netflix and other platforms have hit the 30 percent local content quotas required in major markets there. HBO Max’s announcement may put a damper on that, though, as “redundancies are likely across [HBO Max’s] European business,” Variety noted.
More ominously, “similar decision-making for HBO Max is currently taking place in all territories where the streamer operates, which spans the U.S., Latin America and parts of Europe,” it added. Along with layoffs recently announced by Netflix, it’s the first sign of dark clouds during the era of peak TV.
Tesla EVs can now scan the road for potholes and adjust the suspension height
Tesla has introduced a software update that allows its vehicles to scan for potholes, broken pavement and other defects, Electrek has reported. It can then use that to generate “rough road map data,” and trigger the adaptive suspension in supported vehicles to adjust the ride height for more comfort.
Back in 2020, Musk tweeted that such a feature was coming, and this appears to be the first step. “This adjustment may occur at various locations, subject to availability, as the vehicle downloads rough road map data generated by Tesla cars,” the release notes state. That means pothole and other data should become increasingly refined as Tesla vehicles ply the roads.
The ride adjustment will only work in Tesla Model S and Model X cars with adaptive suspensions, Elektrek notes. It’s not clear if the Model 3 or Y vehicles also scan for rough roads, even if they lack the adaptive suspension to benefit from the data. Both the Model 3 and the Model S have eight cameras in total.
To enable the feature you’ll need the latest update 2022.20, then you tap “Controls > Suspension > Adaptive Suspension Damping, and select the Comfort or Auto setting,” Tesla notes, adding that “the instrument cluster will continue to indicate when the suspension is raised for comfort.”
Tesla isn’t the first automaker to think up pothole scanning technology. Some manufacturers like Ford have proposed features that even detect individual potholes and instantly damp the suspension, for example. Tesla’s system could be far more practical, though, by simply softening the ride parameters over known patches of rough road.