This initiative was first proposed in February 2022, but the European Parliament and Commission only reached a provisional agreement on Thursday. This new scheme comes amidst rising concerns about Russian and Chinese military advances in outer space and a surge in satellite launches. In response, the 27-nation bloc wants to reclaim its internet strategic autonomy and competitive position in space. “The secure connectivity program will build a multi-orbital constellation of hundreds of satellites, which will cover the EU’s need for secure communication services and will underpin our position as one of the main players in space,” said Martin Kupka, Czech minister for transport, in the associated press release....

Everyone’s talking about the Facebook Papers, and we’re here to summarize them for you, so you don’t have to spend days of your life reading them. Let’s dive right into them. What are the Facebook Papers? The Facebook Papers are a set of documents that former Facebook employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, obtained before leaving the company. She submitted these documents to the Security Exchanges Commission (SEC) earlier this year, and now they are available to a consortium of news outlets....

The Facebook whistleblower told European lawmakers that the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) could set a “global gold standard” for online safety — as long as they make a few tweaks. The new rules — which are due to be finalized next year — are meant to improve content moderation. Haugen’s comments on the regulation shone further light on how she wants online platforms to be policed. Regulating big tech Haugen had previously suggested a range of measures to curb harmful content:...

Enter the Fiido X. Launching on Indiegogo today, the bike offers a refreshed, cleaner design than the D11 that tidies up most of my biggest pain points with the original. It also includes a torque sensor, which has the potential to make for a dramatically smoother pedaling experience, as well as improving range somewhat. It’s currently going for an introductory price of $1,099 for the model most people will want, or $899 for a lighter model with reduced range....

Bold claims, given the myriad earbuds launching every week. Still, Samsung says the headphones can “reduce background noise by up to 99%,” although a footnote in the press release clarifies that number applies to the very specific frequency of 118.43 Hz. Meanwhile, an ambient sound mode can boost the sound around you by up to 20 decibels. More interesting is that the headphones can automatically switch noise canceling levels depending on what you’re doing....

If you’d told someone 20 years ago that by 2021, you could control practically everything in your home through a device that costs less than $20, no one would have believed you. Yet enter the smart speaker revolution and behold — devices that cost less than a large pizza can answer your questions, read you your messages, tell you the weather, play you music, and control a vast network of web-enabled home devices in one compact voice-driven little hockey puck....

At the current rate of growth, it appears we’ll have to turn Earth into Coruscant if we want to keep spending unfathomable amounts of energy training systems such as GPT-3 . The problem: Simply put, AI takes too much time and energy to train. A layperson might imagine a bunch of code on a laptop screen when they think about AI development, but the truth is that many of the systems we use today were trained on massive GPU networks, supercomputers, or both....

And as it turns out, the company held true to its word. Today, the German brand announced that its concept car successfully completed a long-range test of 1,008km (626 miles) in real-world conditions. The EV traveled across various European cities, starting in Germany, then on to Italy and Switzerland, before arriving at its final destination, the town port of Cassis in the French Riviera. The entire trip lasted 12 hours with an average speed of 87....

Electric vehicles present a unique opportunity for carmakers to show off unique designs. As motors and batteries can easily be built into the floor pan of the vehicle it lets designers have a lot more freedom with what they plonk on top. Companies like General Motors and Rivian have developed what they call “skateboards,” which allow them to use the same power and drivetrain on a host of vehicles and change the body work depending on customer needs....

The list of games included Diablo 3, Overwatch, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and they disappeared from GeForce Now around Tuesday. At the time, a spokesperson on the GeForce Now forums made it clear to users that they would just have to deal with it: “As we take GeForce NOW to the next step in its evolution, we’ve worked with publishers to onboard a robust catalog of your PC games....

You know, something as iconic and fresh as the iPod, as futuristic as the iMac G3, or as plain gorgeous as the iPhone 4? No, aside from a few vaguely interesting products (like the new cheese-grater Mac Pro) the majority of Apple’s new products have taken quite a safe, expected approach to design. But, a new patent the company has filed for a single glass sheet iMac could be the shot of adrenaline design-hungry Apple fans need....

The latest car registration figures show that 2021 was up just 1% on a COVID-ravaged 2020 – and production actually went into reverse gear. In November 2021, UK car production dropped by almost 29%, the fifth consecutive month of output falling, and the worst since the mid-1980s. October’s figures had been the worst since the 1950s. Overall, car making up to November 2021 was 6.2% below that of 2020, with 797,261 cars made – worse even than a year in which UK production was so badly affected by factory stoppages caused by the first lockdowns....

At least, that’s one way of looking at it. But emergent new theories and ages-old philosophical assertions are beginning to find a foothold in cutting-edge quantum physics research. And it’s beginning to look more and more like we might actually be the center of the universe after all. That’s not to say Earth or the Milky Way is at the geographical center of the universe. It’d be arrogant to make such a literal assumption....

The note, which will be printed on polymer, has a ticker tape showing a binary code: 1010111111110010110011000. You can see the the code to the left of Turing’s photo. While the number might seem random at first, it actually contains a piece of information about Turing’s life, as spotted by eagle-eyed Twitter users. When converted, the binary code reveals Turing’s birth date in decimals – 23061912 or June 23, 1912....

We hate to bring this up…but summer is almost over. Of course, most of us probably spend the entire season locked inside the house. So not exactly the most monumental of summers anyway. However, hope springs eternal. Fall has to start turning some things around, right? Sure, of course it does. You can start off your new fall positive attitude by picking up a cool new tech trinket now, each at prices up to 57 percent off....

Let’s take a look. Dronedek drone docking stations I’ve raised the challenge of what I call “the last steps” to get the package to the customer. This especially becomes a challenge when they don’t have a backyard for easy drop-off. US company Dronedek might just have the solution. The company has patented a connected, climate-controlled, solar-powered drone docking station. It enables mailboxes to receive both packages and food deliveries. The drone lands on the box and drops the package into the box, later opened by the customer using an app....

Liberation, education, and pleasure are perhaps not words you’d immediately associate with hacking. Yet a growing community of vibrator hackers, found in online forums, sextech hackathons and DIY sex toy workshops, are programming their sex toys in experimental ways in order to take the advancement of sextech into their own hands (while tackling the taboo of pleasure). Of course, in the wrong hands, hacking knowledge can lead to sensitive data leaks and non-consensual control over your most intimate devices....

The system aims to reduce the risks drones pose to aircraft. Not only can they collide with planes, but they can also interfere with radio signals, causing a pilot to lose control of the aircraft. These risks have already caused chaos at a number of airports. Most notoriously, London’s Gatwick airport was forced to shut down in December 2018 after drones were spotted near the runway. The incident affected around 1,000 flights and 140,000 passengers....

If it helps, the puzzle above relates specifically to Verifiable Delay Functions (VDFs), which AWS describes as “low-level building blocks” for cryptography. t=2^30 N=12406669568412474139879892740481443274469842712573568412813185506497689533 7309138910015071214657674309443149407457493434579063840841220334555160125016 3310409336906745695712173376302391915172057213101976083872398463643608502208 9677296497856968322944926681990341411705803010652807392863301711868982662559 4484331 Once properly developed, ADFs are thought to remove some of the trust problems associated with Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains, particularly when working with pseudorandom numbers (which are neither trustless or truly random). “The Ethereum ecosystem alone currently uses on the order of 850 megawatts to extend blocks....

A 2002 National Geographic survey demonstrated that only about 17% of adults in the US could point to Afghanistan on a map. And this was less than a year removed from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, so you can be certain the Middle East was splayed across 24-hours news networks ad infinitum. You’d be forgiven, then, if you didn’t think highly of the so-called “wisdom of crowds.” But there’s a new AI-human hybrid forecasting paradigm that’s showing incredible improvements over the old “majority rules” method of crowd-sourcing predictions....