Saturday, February 12, 2022

Saturday Technology News and More...

Technology News and More...




NASA Webb Telescope•
5KMashable / 15h
We thought we'd never see the giant James Webb Space Telescope ever again. The space observatory has traveled to its distant cosmic outpost , nearly a million miles from Earth. It doesn't carry any surveillance cameras dedicated to monitoring the instrument as it traveled through space and unfurled. They were too complicated, and risky, to add . But NASA still found a way to take a (somewhat coar



500+How-To Geek / 18h
Finding a next-gen console is practically impossible these days. So, maybe you should settle for a mini fridge. Microsoft finally launched its official Xbox Mini Fridge, a large replica of the Xbox Series X with incredible thermal performance. Read This Article on Review Geek ›



We finally saw a new Kindle Paperwhite in late 2021, and it’s a great ereader, with a long-awaited USB-C port, a bigger, brighter screen, better battery life, and an assortment of other upgrades. But given how long it had been since the last model, this still isn’t quite as much of an upgrade as we might have liked. So we’ve therefore got a significant wish list for the next Kindle Paperwhite, wh




Whether you’re looking for an indulgent Saturday night treat, or the perfect Sunday roast, pork belly is up there as one of the tastiest meats to cook. The combination of the succulent juicy flesh, and the crisp rind (that offers a satisfying crunch when bitten into), is quite frankly, delicious. However, getting that gorgeous crisp crackling is no mean feat. It requires high temperatures, as wel



Enjoying a barista-worthy coffee at home not only saves money over getting your daily caffeine fix from a coffee shop, but we’ve found an even greater benefit: impress your friends and family by offering them an array of different hot drink options when they come to visit. Nespresso is one of the biggest names in single-serve coffee makers . Also known as pod coffee machines, they use capsules co
YESTERDAY



If there’s one thing you can count on in this world, it’s that if you need a picture or video with image quality that seems straight out of 2015 (or even earlier), you can turn to your computer's built-in webcam. If we sound salty about this, it probably has something to do with the fact that we've seen a grainy, backlit image every single day for the last couple of years. The good news is that d



SAVE 83%: Private Internet Access lets you connect 10 devices simultaneously, meaning your data and identity will always be protected. A one-year subscription to Private Internet Access is on sale for £32.49 — 67% on list price. Investing in a VPN is one of the best choices you can make to protect your online data and identity, but which VPN is right for you? It's a difficult question because the



TL;DR: The Wall Street Survival and Stock Trading Guide Bundle is on sale for £22.11, saving you 98% on list price. Trading and investing stocks can be a finicky game — particularly if you don’t know what you’re doing. Whether you’re ready to throw your hat in the ring or you just want a bit more education before making these potentially game-changing decisions, this Wall Street Survival and Stoc



TL;DR: The Ultimate Mixology and Cocktail Trainer Bundle is on sale for £22.11, saving you 97% on list price. If your idea of a good cocktail is pouring a splash of orange juice into your champagne, you could probably use some pointers. And why not get those pointers from a world champion mixologist? The Ultimate Mixology and Cocktail Trainer Bundle features five courses taught by Paul Martin, a



SAVE 65%: NordVPN is one of the best services for unlocking extra content on the most popular streaming platforms. A one-year subscription to NordVPN is on sale for £43.66, saving you 58% on list price. Unlocking all of that extra content on the American version of Netflix is not difficult. You don't need to be a cloaked hacker in a dark room, frantically adding code to bypass the restrictions of



AMD Xilinx Acquisition•
Chipmaker AMD is expected to complete its planned $35bn takeover of the semiconductor firm Xilinx early next week now that the deal has received approval from all necessary regulatory authorities. Now that the mandatory Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act waiting period has expired in the US, both companies are preparing to finalize their deal with AMD expecting the acquisition to be complete on or aroun



Cisco $20B Offer Splunk•
No deal is currently on the table, according to two people familiar with the talks, but Cisco could pay more than $20 billion, one said.



Netflix Docuseries Bitcoin•
28Gizmodo / 6h
The news of one of the biggest money laundering schemes in history captivated the world on Tuesday, not so much because of the crime—which involved $4.5 billion in bitcoin and is, yeah, a big deal—but rather because of the couple accused of carrying it out. They are the weirdo Bonnie and Clyde of the crypto world , and… Read more...



Samsung Galaxy S22•
Mashable's Deputy Tech Editor J oseph Volpe is here to unbox and give his first impressions on Samsung's flagship phones for 2022.



UK CMA Google PS Sandbox•
Google's plan to replace third-party cookies with its new Privacy Sandbox standards is one step closer to becoming a reality after receiving approval from the UK's competition regulator. The Competition and Markets Authority ( CMA ) has announced that it has formally accepted the search giant's commitments regarding how it will develop its new standards in such a way that they don't impede compet



Wilson Indian Two Pegasus•
Gizmodo / 7h
For at least a decade, a shadowy hacker group has been targeting people throughout India, sometimes using its digital powers to plant fabricated evidence of criminal activity on their devices. That phony evidence has, in turn, often provided a pretext for the victims’ arrest. Read more...



23Mashable / 8h
Death on the Nile docks on the wrong side of every nautical quip in the metaphoric movie review harbor. There's no wind in this story's sails. Its protagonist can't scrape through the scum. Bow to stern, it sinks — dragged into the icy depths by strange editing, cumbersome dialogue, goofy CGI, and dangling details that just don't fit. Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express follow-up, whic



Netflix's offerings extend far beyond the big-budget blockbusters of Hollywood. They might not be the first movies that pop up on your trending section, but the streaming giant has an excellent range from around the world — and we've rounded up the best of them below. (In this case, we're defining "international" as anything that wasn't made in the U.S.). From the gritty coming-of-age realism of



100+Mashable / 9h
Are you making the most out of your Amazon Prime subscription? Sure, you know to turn to Prime Video when it's time to rent or purchase major new releases. But if you're not keeping an eye on the rotating movies included with the service you already have, then you're probably missing out on the awesome "free" films that Prime Video gets you. From heralded rom-coms to creepy horror, daring dramas,



Gizmodo / 9h
Read more...



Gizmodo / 9h
In case attempting to buy a graphics card at or near retail prices hasn’t been demoralizing enough, Best Buy is here to kick us while we’re down. The retailer is exploiting the ongoing supply shortage and our resulting desperation to force customers into paying another $200 for a shot at buying a graphics card. Read more...



Cybersecurity Asset•
29TechCrunch / 9h
In the world of cybersecurity, you can’t secure something if you don’t know it’s there. Enter cybersecurity asset management, an admittedly unsexy fragment of the booming industry that investors have shown an ever-increasing appetite for over the past 18 months. The cybersecurity industry experienced what is being hailed by some as a “golden year” — funding for cyber startups climbed by 138% to $




Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Friday, February 11, 2022! Today we’re talking big rockets, self-driving cars, tech stocks getting rekt, and more. It’s a fun, and good mix of news. Enjoy! – Alex The TechCrunch Top 3 Rocketship, or big vapor phallus ? At an event about SpaceX’s huge Starship launch system, more questions were left open than closed off, it appears. TechCrunch’s Darrell Etheri



Gizmodo / 10h
In late 19th century Spain, at the end of the Third Carlist War, a bomb levels an orphanage and everyone perishes—except one girl (Haizea Carneros), who’s pulled from the wreckage by a mysterious woman (Itziar Ituño). As vampire movie All the Moons explains, what happens next is a miracle wrapped in a nightmare. Read more...



Intel Bitcoin Mining•
Intel has announced its plans to fully embrace blockchain technology and finally enter the bitcoin mining space with brand new chips that will be available later this year. In a new blog post , the chip giant explained that it has developed a roadmap of energy-efficient accelerators that will ship in 2022. Intel is also conscious of the fact that “some blockchains require an enormous amount of co



You'd think that after Hertz realized they were mistakenly sending customers to jail, and facing a class action lawsuit, they would take steps to ensure they stop doing it if for no other reason that it would look bad in court to continue but also because post-bankruptcy incidents wouldn't receive shielding by the bankruptcy court . And yet I heard from a reader this morning about another inciden



Tyler Cowen is an economist and writer who co-founded the popular blog, MarginalRevolution . A professor at George Mason University, Cowen was named one of the Economist’s top 36 economists who were most influential over the past decade. He’s a popular thinker and blogger in a world of academics, and his work has appeared in Bloomberg and the New York Times. All this is to say that he’s a smart g



One of the best deals in the travel world is the Southwest Companion Pass . It lets you take along a companion for free (plus applicable taxes and fees) on an unlimited number of Southwest flights for the lifetime of the pass. For Southwest frequent flyers, this can easily be worth thousands of dollars a year in value. But how do you unlock this valuable golden ticket of sorts? Well, you’ll need



30Mashable / 10h
Jim Halpert and Pam Beesly got married more than 10 years ago, but if you'd like to check out their wedding website today, that's absolutely a thing you can do. On the latest episode of the Office Ladies podcast , former co-stars Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey spoke with showrunner Greg Daniels about the two-part Season 6 episode, "Niagara," which shows Jim and Pam's wedding at Niagara Falls. Da



Mashable / 10h
You love tweets. You hate tweets. You indifferently scroll through tweets at 1 a.m. when sleep simply won't come to you. It's the relationship pretty much everybody who uses Twitter has with Twitter. Sure, the social site can be awful but also sometimes it can really make you laugh. That's nice. Laughing is nice, isn't it? Sure is. SEE ALSO: The only recipe you need for air fryer chicken wings An



Enlarge / Rim fragments of a chamber pot being excavated at a Roman villa site in Sicily. (credit: R.J.A. Wilson) Ancient Roman archaeological sites are littered with ceramic pots, and it can be challenging to definitively determine the purpose of any given pot—for instance, if it was used for storage or as a portable toilet (chamber pot). Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Univ



Wordle The New York Times•
22Engadget / 10h
Have you ever typed out an NSFW word (or two or five) on Wordle in a fit of frustration? Well, it’s time for you to get your verbal recall skills out of the gutter. The New York Times has yanked a handful of gendered slurs from Wordle’s internal dictionary, reported Polygon on Friday. The words “bitch”, “whore” and “sluts” have been removed from the game’s word list . In other words, (no pun inte



83TechCrunch / 10h
Utah-based proptech Homie has laid off one-third of its staff, according to reports. Hunter Richardson, former director of talent a dvisory and acquisition at Homie, posted on LinkedIn that he was among the one-third affected but declined to comment on his being let go. Homie was founded in 2015, and according to its CEO and co-founder Johnny Hanna’s LinkedIn page, it most recently employed “over



$5B Charging Stations•
Gizmodo / 11h
The U.S. Department of Energy announced it will invest about $5 billion into a nationwide electric vehicle charging network, in hopes of making electric vehicle charging “accessible to all Americans” to encourage more people to trade gas-guzzling cars for electric. Read more...



Gizmodo / 11h
Some things just don’t mesh well together. On their own, for example, dogs and robots are pleasant, sometimes even joyous additions to the human experience. When combined though, they can lead to dystopic results. Despite the uncomfortable optics, “robo-dogs” have experienced a resurgence in recent years, particularly… Read more...



Gizmodo / 11h
The cast of the upcoming Star Wars: Ahsoka show continues to grow , this time with a Marvel and Star Wars alum. Ray Stevenson, who voiced Gar Saxon on Star Wars Rebels and The Clone Wars , as well as played Volstagg in the Thor films, is reportedly joining Rosario Dawson in a galaxy far, far away. And we think we know… Read more...



1KFuturism / 11h
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has once again expressed one of his favorite talking points: the demise of civilization. It’s a theme he’s touched upon countless times before. It’s a convenient narrative, after all, to justify taking humanity to Mars and establishing a self-sustaining city there — while Earth crumbles to dust. “I’m going to be frank, civilization is feeling a little bit fragile these days,”



Mashable / 11h
Have you seen the latest TikTok trend? You know, those livestreams. The live videos in question involve a user, typically a young, clothed woman, simulating sex. The problem with the videos is that they're being pushed to users who are not consenting to viewing sexual content or seeking it out on the app. TikTok removes these simulated sex livestreams once they are aware of them, but that is not



SlashGear / 11h
Another one bites the dust as Google is killing off one of the last remnants of its social network in favor of a slightly different service called Spaces.



A new and expansive coral reef system has been discovered off the coast of Tahiti on the border of the ocean's "twilight zone," and shows encouraging signs of resilience against global climate change. The new reef was found at a depth between 30 and 65 meters beneath the surface of the ocean, with its deepest parts approaching a depth where light struggles to reach. The reef stretches roughly thr



The big game is almost here, which means time is running out to score Super Bowl TV deals on your most sought-after 4K, QLED, and OLED displays. We've been scouring through all the top offers from retailers like Best Buy, Amazon, and Walmart to bring you the 10 best Super Bowl TV deals happening right now. We've listed our favorite bargains below, which consists of everything from a budget 43-inc



New York James Super•
A ton of people are going to bet on the Super Bowl this Sunday. Sports betting is legal in some form in 30 states, and 31.4 million Americans are expected to put down a total of $7.61 billion on the game, according to projections from the American Gaming Association . Read more...




Engadget / 11h
Amazon has shared more details of how it will integrate Comixology into its other services. The internet giant has posted an updated FAQ explaining key parts of the transition, including some timelines. Most notably, Comixology will no longer fulfill pre-orders for comic books released February 17th or later — you'll have to cancel them and re-order through Amazon. In that sense, the transition i



SlashGear / 11h
While there are several months left to go before the James Webb Space Telescope is fully prepared for max science, the first photos have arrived.



Spanish Spain SIM Swapping•
23Ars Technica / 11h
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Authorities in Spain said they broke up a SIM-swapping crime ring that used identity theft and falsified documents and texts to target victims’ bank accounts. In a press release , Spain’s National Police agency said it arrested eight individuals in connection with the operation, which began no later than last March. The suspects, the authorities said, posed as bank



Editor’s note: This post has been updated with new information. One of the most valuable airline benefits out there is the Southwest Companion Pass , which allows benefit holders to bring along a companion for (almost) free on Southwest flights — you’ll just pay taxes and fees starting at $5.60 each way. You can earn a Companion Pass by accumulating qualifying Rapid Rewards points or flying a cer



27TechCrunch / 11h
Amit Anand Contributor Amit Anand is a founding partner of Jungle Ventures and an early pioneer and leader in the development of Southeast Asia’s venture capital industry. More posts by this contributor Predicting the next wave of Southeast Asia tech giants Investors are doubling down on Southeast Asia’s digital economy It was only a matter of time. As more tech companies go public, the necessary



Romance FTC 2021 Last Year•
The US Federal Trade Commission ( FTC ) has released a new report revealing that scammers managed to swindle a record $547m out of Americans looking for love online last year. Over the past five years though, Americans have reported losing a staggering $1.3bn to romance scams which is more than any other fraud category tracked by the FTC. Just like with other fraudsters, romance scammers often cr



FDA Pfizer Under 5•
80Ars Technica / 12h
Enlarge / A child getting a vaccination on February 19, 2021, in Bonn, Germany. (credit: Getty | Ute Grabowsky ) The Food and Drug Administration, Pfizer, and BioNTech announced on Friday that they are abandoning plans to pursue the authorization of a two-dose regimen of COVID-19 vaccines for children ages 6 months to 4 years. Instead, they will again put the possibility of an authorization on ho



500+The Points Guy / 12h
Visitors headed to one Florida theme park this weekend are in for a big COVID-19 policy change. Universal Orlando just announced a major adjustment to its face-covering policies, according to WDW News Today . From Saturday, Feb. 12, fully vaccinated visitors will no longer need to wear face masks, either outdoors or indoors. This includes all restaurants, shops, transportation and indoor hotel pu



42Wired / 12h
The platform’s search engine is funneling sports fans into watching political content about China.



30Gizmodo / 12h
The timeline on covid-19 vaccines for U.S. children under 5 years will be postponed yet again. On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration announced it would cancel a key meeting set for next week on the potential approval of Pfizer and BioNTech’s under-five vaccine, and that it would now wait for additional data… Read more...



After months of rumors about the new Sonos wireless headphones , the company’s CEO has finally weighed in on when, exactly, we might see them appear – unfortunately, it wasn’t good news. CEO Patrick Spence told investors that Sonos will be “focused on launching new products in our existing product categories" for the remainder of this financial year. Since headphones would constitute a new produc



Gizmodo / 12h
Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round up of the latest and greatest in toy news. This week: Hasbro goes back to Star Wars with big new playsets and big new droids, Lego asks us what we really really want, and Doctor Strange magics himself up a new Multiverse of Madness figure. Check it out! Read more...



Russian Minecraft FSB•
500+Futurism / 12h
A group of Russian teenagers got in trouble this week for allegedly planning to blow up a fake government building they’d built in Minecraft, according to EuroNews — as opposed to, you know, one that actually exists in the real world. Two of the three teens were cleared of charges because they cooperated with authorities, but Nikita Uvarov, age 16, was sentenced to five years in prison by a Siber



62Futurism / 12h
Second Act Some things are just too good to be true. Take MoviePass, the theater subscription service that spiraled into bankruptcy only a few short years ago . Unlimited theatre visits turned out to be unsustainable, but now the app is coming back, and it wants your eyeballs — literally. Yesterday, Gizmodo reported that MoviePass is coming back with a vengeance and a new app. At a live event in



Most people new to the gym don’t give much thought to which direction the plates face on a barbell. But serious lifters have very strong opinions about it, and in time, you too will need to choose a side. But why does anyone care? Let’s examine the controversy. Read more...



SlashGear / 12h
The Google Nexus Q was a unique device in its industrial design, its software, and its approach toward handling media of the future - so why did it fail?



NASA Webb Telescope•
The first image we've seen from the James Webb Space Telescope has been released by NASA, but don't get too excited just yet. The image, which NASA published online on Friday , shows the star HD 84406 as seen from each of Webb's 18 primary mirror segments. At the moment, those segments are not in alignment with each other, so the image effectively shows a single star from 18 different angles. (Im



100+Gizmodo / 12h
A burgeoning effort to replicate Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” protest here in the United States shows every sign of becoming mired in dysfunction, as adherents of diverging conspiracy theories struggle to find common cause to ignite their own nationwide trucker-themed movement. Read more...



If you’re a fan of Marvel’s Netflix shows, you’re going to want to make sure you watch them all because they’re scheduled to leave Netflix on February 28, 2022. Read This Article on How-To Geek ›



OnePlus just announced that it’s working on the OxygenOS 13 update to arrive alongside Android 13 for its smartphones. The news should surprise many, considering we didn’t expect to see another OxygenOS release following the merger with Oppo in 2021. Read This Article on Review Geek ›




SlashGear / 12h
Pfizer delays seeking authorization for vaccinations against COVID-19 for children under the age of 5. This is for Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 (Comirnaty).



Los Angeles Super Bowl•
26Gizmodo / 12h
This year’s Super Bowl in Los Angeles could see record-setting temperatures in the middle of winter. The heat wave is helping fires to spark in the region, even in the usually fire-free winter months. Read more...



500+The Points Guy / 12h
Nevada became the latest U.S. state to drop its indoor COVID-19 mask mandate Thursday, affecting resorts, casinos, restaurants, bars and showrooms, including in Las Vegas . For more TPG news delivered each morning to your inbox, sign up for our daily n


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