At first, it seems the perfect foible, until you remember bendable phones are only meant to bend one way. The star of this most recent bit of tech gore is the Royole Flexpie, a phone that beat Samsung and Huawei to the punch in making the world’s first foldable phone. You can watch the whole thing below before reading on if you want to avoid spoilers: Before the folding test, JerruRigEverything – who’s real name is Zack Nelson – goes through his usual gamut of other tests....

Instead, the newly published Integrated Rail Plan for the North and the Midlands, sets out proposals to upgrade existing lines to reduce journey times between the cities sooner (although not by as much). This contrasts with previous statements made in February 2020 committing the government to building the full HS2 network. It also leaves a substantial section of the north of England without a high-speed rail connection to the rest of the country....

But this always-on approach can also lead to higher risk of stress and even burnout. While, since the pandemic started, employee burnout has been put in the spotlight, leadership burnout still remains taboo. “Particularly in technology, the spirit of entrepreneurship is fast becoming one of toil, long hours, and self-sacrifice,” writes James Routledge, founder and mental health author, in The Guardian. 70% of tech startups fail — no wonder leaders are chained to their Slack....

The most appealing feature of the pair is projecting a 140-inch virtual screen in front of your eyes, to privately watch whatever you like with a movie-theater experience. Think of it as your personal projector you can move around with. However, there are no AR features, so don’t expect any of that trickery. The company launched the first-gen glasses, called the NXTWEAR G, last year. But they were clunky looking and uncomfortable to wear....

If you’re working from home right now, it can be a little jarring. If you’re one of the millions out of work at home right now, that feeling moves from jarring to alarming. But with so many rooted at home now trying to figure out how to make things work or decide their next big move, this is a golden opportunity to change up. Whether you’re looking to bolster your professional skillset, expand your reach or get a freelance career or side hustle off the ground, all this downtime is the perfect moment to refocus and chart a new course....

This example portrays one of the dangerous characteristics of machine learning models, which can be exploited to force them into misclassifying data. (In reality, the box could be much smaller; I’ve enlarged it here for visibility.) This is an example of data poisoning, a special type of adversarial attack, a series of techniques that target the behavior of machine learning and deep learning models. If applied successfully, data poisoning can provide malicious actors backdoor access to machine learning models and enable them to bypass systems controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms....

First off, bit depth is one of two metrics involved in measuring the quality of a piece of digital music. The first of these is sampling rate. We’ve covered what this is here, but for a short summary it’s the number of “samples” taken per second from an analog sound wave to turn it digital. Think of it like the audio version of a TV’s frame rate: lots of individual points played one after to give the impression of ever-flowing sound....

Black holes – regions in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape – are a hot topic in the news these days. Half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Roger Penrose for his mathematical work showing that black holes are an inescapable consequence of Einstein’s theory of gravity. Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel shared the other half for showing that a massive black hole sits at the center of our galaxy....

According to the company, the problem is that the vehicle might lose propulsion. As such, nearly 2,200 vehicles will be recalled for a software update, with some 600 of them in its home market of Sweden. It has directed customers to bring the vehicle by to their local service station and have the issue sorted via a software update. A Polestar spokesperson told Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri, “There have been no accidents or personal injury....

If you’ve ever wondered where it’s easier to own an electric vehicle, a non-profit organization just published a chart that will give you the latest state rankings. The nonprofit and nonpartisan American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) this week released the State Transportation Electrification Scorecard that grades U.S. states on their progress in enabling residents and businesses to use and charge electric vehicles. The Scorecard found California the clear leader among states, scoring 91 or 100 possible points....

The case argues that the firm uses its position of power to distribute apps through the Play Store, and charges a hefty cut from app developers. Notably, Google charges 30% fees for in-app purchases from developers — which is the same as the Apple App Store charges. In March, the Big G slashed commissions for developers earning less than $1 million annually to 15%. Notably, after a backlash in India — Google’s largest market — last year, it deferred the 30% fees for apps developed in the country until September 2021....

If you or anyone else has ever uploaded a picture with your face in it to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or just about any website, there’s a very good chance you’re in Clearview AI’s database. What does that mean? Clearview AI employees, millions of law enforcement agents, and anyone with access to the company’s data (which was recently exposed in a massive breach) can identify you as easily as snapping a photo with a smartphone or uploading a pic to an app....

The number of listed companies worldwide peaked at 45,743 in 2014 but had slipped to 43,248 by 2019 according to the World Bank. The numbers in major markets such as the US, UK, France, and Germany have all been trending down. In 2020, there were 47 deals to take companies private worth a total of US$40 billion (£29 billion), which was well down from the 62 deals worth US$88 billion in 2019, though the numbers were considerably up in Asia....

Just think smaller. Per a Facebook AI blog post: Facebook’s created a new system called SoundSpaces that gives robots the ability to interpret sounds. Current virtual assistants merely listen for wake words and then use natural language processing to interpret verbal commands as triggers. While the microphone array technology behind some of these assistants is impressive, they’re merely designed to pick up voices in noisy environments. In order for a robot to retrieve a phone ringing in another room it has to be able to “hear,” the sound and determine where, relative to it’s own current position, it’s coming from....

By: Aaron Sankin We’ve all been there: very politely asking the internet for a video of a cat engaging in some wacky antics. And then … the internet pauses, seeming to consider the request. What’s the problem here? It might be you (sorry). It might be the infrastructure you’re working with. It might be your internet provider. Let’s explore some causes and solutions together. What is a “good” internet speed?...

In a world where tech products are now our lifeline to the world, what challenges and considerations are facing those who build them? Whereby’s co-founder Ingrid Odegaard met up with Jon von Tetzchner, founder of web browsers Vivaldi and Opera to talk about why privacy matters, Norwegian work culture, and designing products with a community of users. This article was originally published on the Whereby blog. You can read it here....

Amidst the ongoing Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, a number of refugees from the community currently based in the US and UK have sued Meta to the tune of $150 billion, for failing to clamp down on hate speech against the minority group. Before we look at the allegations against the company, a quick recap of what happened. Background In 2017, the Burmese military forces began a ‘clearance operation’ to drive out more than half a million Rohingya Muslims from the country....

We all know it takes decades to build up trust, but only a few days, or even hours, to lose it. In Denmark, where I live, we are good at trusting one another. It is common for Danish startups to grant their employees ‘trust with responsibility’ by allowing them to make important decisions on their own. In fact, according to OECD, Danes are one of the most trusting countries in the world....

Software giant Oracle, aircraft manufacturer Boeing, and telecoms giant AT&T have borrowed the most; they’ve issued corporate bonds worth $25 billion, $20 billion, and $12.5 billion respectively in 2020, reports the Financial Times citing data gathered by Refinitiv. [Read: A look at the $17 billion stock portfolio of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation] In fact, investment-grade companies in the US are issuing bonds much faster than in recent years, having raised $504 billion over the same period in 2019....

NSO Group, the Israeli cyber intelligence firm behind Pegasus, insists that it only licenses its spyware to vetted government clients in the name of combating transnational crime and terrorism. It has labelled reports from investigative journalists a “vicious and slanderous campaign” upon which it will no longer comment. Yet the founder and chief executive of NSO Group previously admitted that “in some circumstances our customers might misuse the system.” Given that the group has sold its spyware to a reported 40 countries, including some with poor records of corruption and human rights violations, it’s alleged that Pegasus has been significantly misused, undermining the freedom of the press, freedom of thought and free and open democracies....