The event was originally supposed to run from January 6-9 in Las Vegas. Gary Shapiro, president of the CTA, revealed the digital event. He said that, while the company hoped to bring everyone together in Vegas again, “but given the current public health concerns, it’s just not possible to bring everyone safely together.” While I’ve never been myself, I’ve heard that CES requires having many, many people to pile into a convention center closely (which, as a claustrophobe, makes my skin crawl)....

The days of phones getting smaller and smaller are over. I mean, who really wants a device that they might actually lose in, say, a shoe? Not me, for one. No, what we need are bigger phones. Phones with huge screens. Phones with huge amounts of storage. Phones you can use to defend yourself from attackers. Phones big enough to surf on. Phones like the 1TB Samsung Galaxy S10+. And, wait, hold on, what’s that?...

Few things in life are as satisfying as returning home from work and sinking into your favorite video games. Whether that means taking out enemies in a Battle Royale game, crushing your rivals in FIFA, or exploring vast uncharted worlds, we could all do with a bit of escapism. While all these games are super colorful, it’s fun to have a controller with some style too. So, here’s a deal that’s sure to get your attention: The Sony DualShock 4 Wireless Controller’s selling for just $39....

Unsurprisingly, China is the largest electric vehicle producer and makes up nearly half (44%) of the global EV production through 2020, with 4.6 million units in manufacturing and sales. But while one would expect to find the US at least in second place, it’s Europe which represents the following 25%. It has made 2.6 million EVs this year and sold 3.2 million. So, the States only come third, with 18% of cumulative EV manufacturing, which is, in fact, down from 20% in 2017....

Google revealed it’s taking steps to wipe intrusive ads from its browser experience, particularly ones that consume a disproportionate amount of battery, processing power, and bandwidth without the knowledge of users. Such examples include ads with hidden cryptocurrency miners or poor network usage optimizations. “Chrome will limit the resources a display ad can use before the user interacts with the ad,” the company said. “When an ad reaches its limit, the ad’s frame will navigate to an error page, informing the user that the ad has used too many resources....

The last decade’s growing interest in deep learning was triggered by the proven capacity of neural networks in computer vision tasks. If you train a neural network with enough labeled photos of cats and dogs, it will be able to find recurring patterns in each category and classify unseen images with decent accuracy. What else can you do with an image classifier? In 2019, a group of cybersecurity researchers wondered if they could treat security threat detection as an image classification problem....

Tweet of the Week The good news: 2020 is coming to an end. The bad news: It’s taking Coronavirus in Context with it. We’re sunsetting this newsletter because it’s run its course. The pandemic still rages around us. And, yes, there are several amazing vaccines on the way. There really is a lot going on and a lot more to be said about COVID-19. But this newsletter was always meant to be temporary....

Court documents shared by CoinDesk and dated January 14 state that a third party has “provided the necessary information and key slice to unlock the encrypted file.” The documents allude to a mysterious figure, known as the bonded courier, who allegedly held the private keys needed to access Wright’s Bitcoin stash. The bonded courier was originally due to appear in January 2020 and Wright, who is embroiled in an ongoing lawsuit with the Kleiman estate over the ownership of Bitcoin, was recently granted an extension to unlock the trust where the cryptocurrency was held....

My drawing skills remained limited to drawing doodles on the back page of my notebook. But hey, if you are someone who’s into painting or want to pick up sketching this is the perfect time to do so. While you might not be able to sit on riverbanks and draw poetic sunsets, you can get enough inspiration through your screen. Here are some tools to help you do that:...

One region where hunger and poverty continue to blight the lives of millions, affecting the survival and development of children, in particular, is in West and Central Africa. For the UN to develop effective policies for reducing persistent poverty and hunger, they first needed a clear picture of the scale of the crisis, – including how many children are still affected by malnutrition. Our project explored whether the measures used in UN reports provide an accurate picture of the full scale of malnutrition, and progress made, in West and Central Africa....

We’re all freaking out about our online security. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are worried that their information is vulnerable when they’re on a public WiFi network. Meanwhile, almost 65 percent don’t feel safe even when they’re online in their very own homes. As front-line protection, a virtual private network (VPN) is a great start, with up to 35 percent of Americans already using a VPN for anonymous browsing, logging into work systems, or making purchases online....

The 2020 XPS 13, fixes the laptops few flaws by cutting out the bottom bezel,, and making the keyboard larger. These changes were first brought to the XPS 13 2-in-1, a convertible laptop released last year, but it’s nice to see some changes to the company’s mainstream (and slightly more powerful) model. By mostly removing the bottom bezel, the XPS-13 now sports a slightly larger 13.4-inch display with a 91....

Ten Democrats led by Congresswoman Robin Kelly of Illinois state sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking which initiatives had been scaled back, and what diversity training Google now provides to its global workforce. The letter was written in response to an NBC News investigation alleging that Google had scaled back its diversity programs to avoid accusations of an anti-conservative bias. Citing interviews with six current and ex-employees, NBC News found that the teams responsible for those initiatives had been downsized, and that staff had been discouraged from even using the word diversity at work....

You might recognize the case from a year-long civil battle over the same theft that resulted in Waymo being awarded nearly a quarter-billion dollars worth of Uber stocks (Google’s lawyers must be amazing!). And, of course, you might recognize Levandowski as the AI engineer who started a church, The Way of The Future, that worships AI. Yep. That guy. His big coming out as the steward for tomorrow’s gods (that’d be the AI) happened in a Wired article (pay-walled) where he gave a candid interview....

In the book I’m currently reading, there’s a scientist who is doing a lot of thinking. It’s not just some ‘everyday thinking’ mind you, but constructive, scientific thinking. She’s gone as far as to eliminate ALL distractions around her, to make sure it’s impossible for her to lose her train of thought. And what’s her biggest distraction? Her phone. Now I agree that our phones can be hugely distracting. I just checked my statistics, and last week I picked my phone up 90 times a day on average… and that’s actually 17% down from the week before that....

We tested our digital nucleic acid memory (dNAM) by storing the statement “Data is in our DNA!\n.” We described the research in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications on April 22, 2021. Previous methods for retrieving data in DNA require the DNA to be sequenced. Sequencing is the process of reading the genetic code of strands of DNA. Though it is a powerful tool in medicine and biology, it wasn’t designed with DNA memory in mind....

The process dates back to February 2020, when Nasa announced that four missions were to undergo a nine-month peer-review process for feasibility. They were all part of the Discovery program, started by Nasa in 1992 to bring together scientists and engineers to create exciting, groundbreaking missions. Set aside from the flagship missions – such as Curiosity and Perseverance – the missions operating under Discovery have taken unique and innovative approaches to exploring the solar system....

Whether it’s a coffee cup spilling over your laptop or a virus deleting all of your files, there’s no shortage of threats that can turn your thousand-dollar computer into a high-tech doorstop. And, while the hardware damage is painful enough, it’s the additional loss of your precious files that really twists the knife. That’s why every self-respecting computer user should be investing in cloud backup. There are plenty of solutions out there, but few can match the value of Polar Backup, which is offering users a whopping 2TB of cloud backup for life for only $60 today....

Twitter has already confirmed this blunder on — you guessed it — Twitter, but an official fix is still on the way. In the meantime, there are a few workarounds you can try to get the app to run as expected. Obviously, the easiest way to avoid this issue altogether is by not updating the app. Indeed, that’s what Twitter suggests. — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) January 21, 2020 If you’re one of the unlucky users that got the automatic update, though, there’s still a way to get the app to work....

According to a report by Dutch news outlet NOS, the department responsible for moveable property (DRZ), within the Ministry of Finance, is selling the mobility devices. The matter was uncovered by Legaal Rijden, a Dutch group that’s lobbying for the legalization of electrified personal mobility tech. [Read: E-scooters are just as safe as cycling, but that’s not saying much] In the Netherlands, e-scooters are illegal when used on public roads, but there are no restrictions on buying and selling them to use on private land....