Elon Musk tweet-announces a $78,000 performance Model 3 with all-wheel drive

Found on Ars Technica on Sunday, 20 May 2018
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What you get for all that extra cash will be the ability to go 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds, with 155 mph top speed and at range of 310 miles. "Cost of all options, wheels, paint, etc is included (apart from Autopilot)," Musk tweeted.

It's been a rocky year, with Musk admitting early on that his California and Nevada factories were in "production hell" as quarter after quarter slipped by with disappointing Model 3 production numbers. Only recently has the company been able to push out a significant number of cars per week, although investors have remained wary of Musk's often overly-optimistic projections.

That's all cute and sweet, but for mass adoption Tesla needs to focus more on the lower price segment. On the other hand Musk might like to keep it expensive to lower the order numbers since production cannot keep up.

FM Radio faces Government switch-off as Digital listening passes 50% milestone

Found on I News on Saturday, 19 May 2018
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Analogue radios could be consigned to the dustbin of history after figures showed that the majority of all UK radio listening was via digital devices for the first time.

The new digital figure includes listening through DAB sets, cars, voice-controlled speakers and online. For the first time that audience share is greater than analogue platforms – FM and AM.

Analog is superior though; it has a better coverage and works well in emergency situations.

Verizon plays with data caps in limited billing trial

Found on CNet News on Friday, 18 May 2018
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The company's high-speed internet plan showed a data limit of 150GB, while its high-speed internet enhanced plan had a limit of 250GB, according to a Thursday report by consumer group Stop the Cap.

"The purpose of the trial was more the idea of accurately collecting and displaying usage in billing."

Data caps are always very unliked. Especially if accounts were previously sold as "unlimited".

As the Web moves toward HTTPS by default, Chrome will remove “secure” indicator

Found on Ars Technica on Thursday, 17 May 2018
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Back in February, Google announced its plans to label all sites accessed over regular unencrypted HTTP as "not secure," starting in July. Today, the company described the next change it will make to its browser: in September, Google will stop marking HTTPS sites as secure.

Most HTTP sites will get a regular gray "Not secure" label in their address bar. If the page has user input, however, that gray label will become red, indicating the particular risk the page represents: Web forms served up over HTTP could send their contents anywhere, making them risky places to type passwords or credit card numbers.

Actually, even with SSL/TLS a web form can send the content anywhere. It looks like some people do not have much of a clue. If your form sends the data to a third party server via https, it's still secure. Having a certificate does not automagically remove any risks; unless every single certificate would have go through an EV process which would drastically reduce the shady systems who get their trusted DV certificates by free services like Let's Encrypt.

Unskippable Snapchat ads are here

Found on CNet News on Wednesday, 16 May 2018
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Snapchat began testing the new ad format -- first spotted by AdAge -- in the US on Monday. These unskippable video ads, aka commercials, are only running in Snapchat Shows, not across the entire app.

Another big nail in the coffin.

Germany’s Typhoon problem: Only four fighters can be made combat ready

Found on Ars Technica on Tuesday, 15 May 2018
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If you thought the US Department of Defense's procurement adventures with the F-35 and other big-budget weapons systems are bad, you might want to check out what's going on in Europe, where defense procurement battles have left most of the German Luftwaffe grounded for lack of parts.

In fact, only 10 aircraft currently have all their systems functioning, because of a problem that has plagued the defensive aid subsystem (DASS) of Germany's version of the Typhoon.

And as Der Spiegel's Matthias Gebauer was told by a Bundeswehr source, "We can say with a good conscience that large parts of the [German armed forces] are mission ready, because there is currently no mission."

How german politicians still can look others straight into the face is hard to understand when they produced so much excessive failures and caused massive problems.

Wah, encryption makes policing hard, cries UK's National Crime Agency

Found on The Register on Monday, 14 May 2018
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"Since 2010, communication service providers have migrated to encrypted services 'by default', a process that accelerated following the Snowden disclosures," said the National Strategic Assessment of Serious and Organised Crime 2018.

Rudd had previously spoken out about encryption, often prompting criticism due to her apparent lack of understanding.

Well, that's the entire point of encryption. So it is just doing its job.

OnePlus 6 images reportedly leaked by Amazon Germany

Found on CNet News on Sunday, 13 May 2018
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German tech site Winfuture posted images of the front and back of the Chinese phonemaker's new flagship handset, saying they were originally posted by Amazon's German marketplace.

The alleged leak comes three days before OnePlus is expected to launch its next marquee phone in London. Wednesday's unveiling will also be a fan event, with admission tickets to the event selling out in just a few hours.

Welcome to the sick world of marketing, where the release of a product for daily use gets celebrated like the first newborn child. Not to mention that nobody believes anymore that "leaked photos" got indeed accidentally leaked.

Hacker Shuts Down Copenhagen’s Public City Bikes System

Found on Bleeping Computer on Saturday, 12 May 2018
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An unidentified hacker has breached Bycyklen —Copenhagen's city bikes network— and deleted the organization's entire database, disabling the public's access to bicycles over the weekend.

Bycyklen described the hack as "rather primitive," alluding it may have been carried out "by a person with a great deal of knowledge of its IT infrastructure."

Bycyklen said on Facebook that fixing the problem required a manual update of all bikes. Employees restored 200 bikes on Saturday after tracking down bicycles and rebooting the attached Android tablet.

You would assume that restoring the database from backup would bring everything back up. It's somewhat odd that all bikes would require physical intervention.

Cash payment crackdown to counter tax evasion and black economy

Found on The Guardian on Friday, 11 May 2018
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The Turnbull government has turned its attention to the “black economy” in an attempt to raise billions of extra dollars and intends to limit cash payments for purchase goods and services to $10,000.

As part of the cash-in-hand crackdown the government will introduce an economy-wide cash payment limit of $10,000 to reduce money laundering and tax evasion, to apply from 1 July 2019.

That won't do anything to stop tax evasion or black economy. Tax evasion is done professionally on a much bigger scale (hello Apple, Amazon and Google) while black economy just works because of person-to-person payments. All it does is pave the way for the complete elimination of cash; and with cash gone, banks and governments get a much tighter grip on citizens.