Category: World

Small Nudges Add Up To Big Electric Savings | Ars Technica

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Not all electricity is created equal. Utilities prioritize getting power from the cheapest sources available. That means that, as use rises to what’s typically a mid-afternoon peak, utilities end up sourcing ever more expensive supplies of electricity. By the time we reach the use typical of a late afternoon during a heat wave, the utilities have to call in the most expensive forms of power around—typically, the oldest, least-efficient, and most-polluting plants. So cutting down on energy use during these peak demand events is in a utility’s interests. And, since…

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If A.I. Doesn’t Replace Your Job, It May Make It Much More Pleasant | Digital Trends

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From The Matrix to Wargames and iRobot to Metropolis, movies and novels have threatened us with a revolution of AI and robots for decades, whether that’s through a violent uprising or just replacing us at our jobs. Today, those theoretical dystopian futures seem more realistic than ever. With the growth of smart assistants and advanced machine learning, there is a growing concern that in the decades to come, there may be very little work for humans to do. But for just a moment, let’s set aside our apocalyptic tendencies and…

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Will Self-Driving Cars Kill Parking? | TechCrunch

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Some people have postulated that autonomous ridesharing cars will never need to park and cities of the future will not need street parking, parking lots or parking garages. But parking is far from dead. In fact, the $100 billion market may be poised to grow. We’ve heard from parking startup founders that many Silicon Valley investors have rejected parking as a thing of the past, rallying around alternatives — for example, investing more than $100 million in valet parking startups that didn’t pan out. Even these parking investments are a drop in the bucket…

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Study Calls Out ‘Dark Patterns’ In Facebook And Google That Push Users Toward Less Privacy | TechCrunch

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More scrutiny than ever is in place on the tech industry, and while high-profile cases like Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in front of lawmakers garner headlines, there are subtler forces at work. This study from a Norway watchdog group eloquently and painstakingly describes the ways that companies like Facebook and Google push their users towards making choices that negatively affect their own privacy. It was spurred, like many other new inquiries, by Europe’s GDPR, which has caused no small amount of consternation among companies for whom collecting and leveraging user data…

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Is The Loonie The ‘Most Hated Currency’ In Markets Right Now? | CBC News

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The Canadian dollar has seen its share of volatility this year as trade tensions between the U.S. and Canada reached a fever pitch over the weekend. The currency is down more than five per cent against the U.S. dollar since hitting its highest point this year at the end of January. Even as it moved higher on Wednesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates, Mark McCormick, head of North American foreign exchange strategy at TD Securities, said the loonie “is probably the market’s most hated currency now,” based on his discussions with investors.…

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VPNFilter Malware Infecting 500,000 Devices Is Worse Than We Thought | Ars Technica

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Two weeks ago, officials in the private and public sectors warned that hackers working for the Russian government infected more than 500,000 consumer-grade routers in 54 countries with malware that could be used for a range of nefarious purposes. Now, researchers from Cisco’s Talos security team say additional analysis shows that the malware is more powerful than originally thought and runs on a much broader base of models, many from previously unaffected manufacturers. Besides covertly manipulating traffic delivered to endpoints inside an infected network, ssler is also designed to steal…

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How Do Apple’s Screen Time And Google Digital Wellbeing Stack Up? | The Verge

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Developer conference season is coming to an end with Apple’s WWDC this week, and the main takeaway is that between Google’s “Digital Wellbeing” and Apple’s “Screen Time,” the two biggest smartphone developers are taking some time to discourage smartphone overuse. On the surface, the two companies are taking very similar approaches with the tools they’re offering to present information to users. Apple and Google are both adding new dashboards, with options for more zoomed-out perspectives on how you’re spending your time, along with more granular views of how often you’re…

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FBI Urges Everyone To Reboot All Routers Immediately | Digital Trends

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Following reports that a type of malware has infected more than 500,000 routers used in homes and small businesses in more than 50 countries, the FBI is urging all consumers to reboot their routers. The VPNFilter malware was discovered by Cisco’s security researchers and affects routers made by Linksys, Mikrotik, Netgear, QNAP, and TP-Link. The U.S. Department of Justice said the authors of the VPNFilter were part of the Sofacy group that answered directly to the Russian government, Reuters reported, and that Ukraine was the likely target of the attack. “The VPNFilter…

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Electric Car Adoption Is Slowed Down By ‘Dismissive And Deceptive Car Dealerships’, Finds New Study | Electrek

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In the US, a study found that the electric vehicle shopping experience at car dealers is quite poor and a problem for EV adoption. Now, a new study finds a similar problem in Europe where “dismissive and deceptive car dealerships create barriers to electric vehicle adoption at the point of sale.” That’s the actual title of the research paper published in the Nature Energy science magazine by researchers from Aarhus University, Denmark and the University of Sussex. The study is based on “126 shopping experiences at 82 car dealerships across Denmark, Finland,…

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Google’s Selfish Ledger Ideas Can Be Found In Its Patent Applications – The Verge

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I trust by now we’ve all seen and been at least a little disturbed by The Selfish Ledger, the nearly 9-minute-long concept video from inside Google’s “moonshot factory” X labs. In the wake of it becoming public this week, Google quickly disavowed the video, claiming it was just a thought experiment “not related to any current or future products.” And yet, the company’s patent applications exhibit a mode of thinking that runs at least in parallel, if not on the exact same tracks, as The Selfish Ledger’s total data collection…

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