The founders started Sidewalk Labs with good intentions, but it exemplifies how manufactured smart cities fail. The sordid history of Sidewalk Labs In 2017, Sidewalk Labs announced plans for a high-tech neighborhood in Toronto called Quayside. Planned for Toronto’s waterfront, it focused on “environmental sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity.” It promised much: dedicated lanes for driverless vehicles, infrastructure for green vehicles, real-time parking information and technology, affordable housing, technology to curb pollution....

The messaging app presently runs as a non-profit, and is funded by donations from users and a $50 million loan from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton. Between its lack of vested business interests, its promise of end-to-end encryption via the open-source Signal protocol, and the recent changes to WhatsApp’s privacy policy that spooked its user base, Signal is now the new darling of the messaging world. The trouble is, it doesn’t yet have mechanisms to boot bad actors off its platform, like extremists who may seek to radicalize people by inviting them to private groups just by sharing a link to join....

As per Casper Peeters, the co-founder of E-magy, silicon-based lithium batteries live longer than their graphite-based alternatives. Silicon batteries have between 40 and 70% more capacity, he explained. This means that large EVs could have an 800km range, and the smaller electric vehicles just under 500km. On the downside, silicon is more expensive than graphite, but it offers one more significant advantage: silicon batteries can be smaller than conventional batteries....

One of the most popular tabletop wargaming franchises of all time continues to thrive in the digital format as Warhammer 40,000 Battlesector brings land-based tactics to the front of the battle. A refreshing new take for those who’ve been eagerly awaiting another Slitherine game set in the WH:40K universe. Black Lab Games, creators of the excellent Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock game also published through Slitherine, has enough clout and pedigree in the strategy gaming (and IP adaptation) community to make this a day-one-must-purchase for most strategy gamers....

There’s a “sextortion” email scam going around that demands Bitcoin to keep steamy videos of you masturbating to pornography off the internet. It’s fake. Relax. It’s also very old. While there are many variants, recent reports show an email that suggests a crafty hacker has “placed malware on the porn website” that you enjoy, which allowed them to record your screen and webcam feed. The email then requests $1,900 worth of Bitcoin or else your Messenger, Facebook, and email contacts will receive a video of you jerking (or jilling) it, placed artfully alongside your kinky content of choice — a shoddy attempt at blackmail....

There’s a great lesson to be learned from all the time we’ve been spending working in our homes the past few months. When you have to fight commute traffic, deal with frustrating coworkers and generally battle to get through your day in a physical office, it’s easy to feel like just making it to 5 p.m. is a victory. But if you’re spending your entire day working inside your own home, shouldn’t you be actively enjoying what you do?...

A new patent application from the Japanese tech titan describes a machine learning system that automatically adjusts difficulty levels when gamers are struggling. The patent was published last week and first spotted by SegmentNext. It suggests using AI to alter a boss’ moves “based on successful and/or unsuccessful methods or tactics” previously used by a player: The machine learning model would then determine new behaviors for the opponent that make them more or less tricky to defeat....

Here, in no particular order, are the five geological structures in the solar system (excluding Earth) that most impress me. The grandest canyon I left out the solar system’s biggest volcano, Olympus Mons on Mars, so I could include that planet’s most spectacular canyon, Valles Marineris. Being 3,000km long, hundreds of kilometers wide, and up to eight kilometers deep, this is best seen from space. If you were lucky enough to stand on one rim, the opposite rim would be way beyond the horizon....

The premise behind behavioral marketing is using psychology and science to tap into your customers’ goals, understand their motivations, figure out how they make choices, and identify the contextual factors that skew their preferences. In this article, we will cover the eight forces that influence consumer buying behavior and show you how to use these factors in your own business. Developing your behavioral design strategy is like building the actual house....

Silicon Valley big brains are suddenly obsessed with building virtual spaces spanning digital and physical domains. There’s Mark Zuckerberg, who plans to turn Facebook into “a metaverse company.” There’s Nvidia founder Jenson Huang, who envisions “a virtual world that is a digital twin of ours” and accessible via “wormholes.” And there’s Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who’s “excited” about the potential of an (urgh) “enterprise metaverse.” It feels like everything is now part of the metaverse: VR games?...

While futurists and fundraisers used to make bullish predictions about artificial general intelligence, they’ve become quieter lately. Peter Thiel — the tech billionaire and rumored vampire — says Silicon Valley big brains have lost enthusiasm for AGI. “Elon’s not talking about it anymore and Larry [Page] is off to Fiji and doesn’t seem to be working on it quite as hard,” Thiel said at a recent event. Thiel described Musk as “a weathervane for the zeitgeist,” who’s stopped talking about AGI because interest has declined....

As a consumer culture, we’ve all been trained to know that when Americans celebrate a holiday, a sale isn’t far away. But while most business embrace a holiday as a temporary profit driver, we traffic in big discounts as a passion…because it’s what we do every day, 24/7/365. And hey, TNW Deals respects your time, so when we assemble four killer products with savings of more than 90 percent off, rest assured it’s the best Labor Day lineup of deals ever....

Besides it obviously being a shiny new thing, what really engrosses me is the idea of starting with a clean slate. At this stage, your old machine is probably filled with stuff you don’t use and, in the time you bought it, who knows what new macOS apps have come out? This is what this article’s about. It contains the best macOS apps and software I’ve tried, the majority of which I use on a daily basis....

The tuition is designed for complete beginners, and it is delivered by way of straightforward video tutorials. After taking your first few steps in HTML, CSS, and Javascript with the Introduction to Web Development course, you can extend your knowledge of these languages in separate tracks, along with jQuery, the JavaScript framework. On the app development side, you are shown how to create iOS and Android apps with HTML5, and build iOS apps natively with Apple’s language, Swift....

But as the week progressed, I thought about it a bit more and had another thought: what about the evolution of iPhone screen-to-body ratios? If you don’t know what this is — although the name should give you a very big clue — screen-to-body ratio is a number that shows (roughly) what percentage of the front of a phone is screen, compared to, you know, not screen. [Read: Why your website’s lack of accessibility options is opening you up to lawsuits] So I decided the time was nigh to whip up a graph and look at the the history of iPhone screen-to-body ratio....

Two of these interesting shapeshifters, scheduled for launch later this year, are the Triggo EV and the City Transformer. You can’t really expect Batmobile-like transformations, but both vehicles have variable chassis that enable them to change their size when space is at a premium. To fit into a tight parking spot or pass swiftly through traffic jams — that’s your call. The Triggo EV can extend or contract its front wheels horizontally, measuring 148cm and 86cm wide, respectively....

One of the new features on Apple’s most recent premium handset was the introduction of a LiDAR sensor. If you’re uncertain of what this is, we put together a rather handy explainer here, but basically, LiDAR is like a light version of sonar. The lens fires out beams and then tracks how long they take to return. This allows the computer to understand and map the space, as it can accurately measure the shape and distance between things....

Our original report follows. It’s happening: the rare (possibly unique) Nintendo Play Station prototype is for sale. The auction house has opened up the bidding, and so far the price is sitting pretty at $48,000 — and the auction will be open for the next 21 days. In case you don’t know what a “Nintendo Play Station” is, you can read a quick primer here. In the smallest possible nutshell, it was a console that never existed outside of the crushed dreams of the fledging company Sony and a few prototypes destined for destruction....

The proposal, obtained by Politico, would offer up a paltry $1B to any involved party able to land a “roomy, comfortable human base on the Moon,” and another $1B to the company that can maintain that base. Two billion dollars may seem like a nice chunk of change to most of us, but the same report says NASA’s currently spending that much per year on the same task. Sending humans to the Moon again is a lynch-pin of President Trump’s agenda, one he’s directed NASA to achieve by 2024....

If you saw the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Japan, then you saw just another example of the full-on coolness of flying a drone. Or more specifically, flying over 1,800 drones at once. With awe-inspiring procession, a cloud of 1,824 drones gathered in the night sky over Tokyo’s National Stadium in the shape of the 2021 Olympics emblem, before shifting pattern into a globe high over the stadium....