Kiran Upadhyay

Apple had a pretty good quarter. And by “pretty good,” I mean it was the biggest quarter in history. And not just for Apple. For any company. Ever. This page charts the past record holders. Until today, Russia’s Gazprom (the largest natural gas extractor in the world) held the record at $16.2 billion in a quarter. Apple now holds the record: $18.04 billion in profit, fiscal Q1 of 2015. Absolutely. Insane. For reference, that means Apple makes around $8.3 million dollars per hour in profit (24 hours a day). Of the current Top 20 record holding earners, 15 are Oil/Gas producers — primarily ExxonMobil and Shell. The other five are all Apple, over various quarters. Via

Here is one more nail in Flash’s coffin: starting today, YouTube defaults to using HTML5 video on all modern browsers, including Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and the beta versions of Firefox. YouTube first introduced HTML5 support back in 2010. At the time it was still highly experimental. Over the years, as the HTML5 standard — and with it, its video implementation — matured, browser vendors started adding some of the features that were still missing in the early versions. For YouTube, that was support for Adaptive Bitrate, for example. The same technology that powers adaptive bitrates also makes it possible for YouTube to live-stream video to the Chromecast and game consoles like the Xbox and PS4. HTML5’s Encrypted Media Extensions have been somewhat controversial in the web standards community because they enable DRM support in web browsers. But as YouTube engineering manager Richard Leider notes in today’s announcement, support for this feature now enables the service to use a ...

iHeartMedia has today announced that its iHeartRadio streaming music service has surpassed 60 million registered users. Of course, “registered users” is a vague stat. Spotify now has over 60 million monthly active users and 15 million paying customers. Pandora has over 250 million registered users and had 77 million active users as of mid-2014. These numbers are tough to compare since iHeartRadio treats users a bit differently than most streaming services. Users can listen to iHeartRadio on their smartphone or on the web for free without ever registering. The app/website essentially connect users to an am/fm radio. But if users want to listen to playlists or use other, more personalized features on iHeartRadio, they have to register with the service. Registered user numbers can be misleading because the stat counts people no matter how long ago they registered and whether or not they still use a service. iHeartRadio might have a ton of unregistered users, both the registered ...

China is cracking down on VPNs, software that allows internet users to access Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and others services blocked in the country, according to state media and service providers. People’s Daily reports that China’s ‘Great Firewall’ internet censorship system was “upgraded for cyberspace sovereignty”, a move that affected the usage of at least three popular VPN services and attacked others with more vigor than usual. Strong VPN noted on its blog that it is suffering “connection issues” from China, while TunnelBear told TechCrunch it is investigating after reports from some China-based customers who “have been less successful in connecting over the last few weeks.” Furthermore, Astrill, a service that is well used by China’s expat and business community, this week alerted users of issues with its iOS client. An employee at Astrill reportedly told People’s Daily that the company did not know how long the disruption would last following the “upgrade,” although As...

Microsoft revealed a version of Windows that blends holograms with real world video to provide users with an augmented reality version of their environment that blends real objects with virtual, and virtual interface elements, information boxes and guidelines viewable via a wearable headset device. Windows Holographic provides ways for engineers to see instructions overlaid directly on the objects they’re working on, Microsoft said on stage, or offers a way for architects to survey and present their designs alongside clients even when separated by great distances. If you want a look at something very similar being done by a company that’s much younger, but aiming at something similar, take a look at Sulon Cortex and what they brought to CES. Read More

I’m Canadian so I get to bring you the following news: GoPro is partnering with the NHL and NHLPA to incorporate GoPro footage into live broadcasts of professional hockey games. The team-up marks the first time GoPro is partnering directly with a major pro sports league, and will use the company’s recently introduced Live Broadcast Solution built in tandem with Vislink. The live broadcast fun kicks off during the 2015 NHL All-Star Weekend, featuring GoPro cameras actually worn by on-ice players to provide real-time HD footage of the game from their perspective. GoPro plans to provide capture of HD content throughout the entire 2015 season, though, so you can expect more unique perspectives on all the action from regular games and play-offs, too. Sports broadcasters are clearly looking to incorporate more contemporary camera technology into their programming, with ESPN announcing earlier this week that it will start using drones in its Winter X Games coverage, and in fact the same...

Don’t have Amazon Prime? Want Amazon Prime? What d’ya know! Amazon Prime is on sale today — a rather rare occurrence. After Prime first launched, it was just $75 a year. In March of 2014, they bumped the price up to $99. Today, in celebration of Amazon’s wins at the 72nd Golden Globe Awards, they’ve dropped the price down to $72 bucks. That’s a roughly 27% discount, and is the cheapest I’ve ever seen Prime go (besides the free memberships they once offered students). It’s a proper Prime membership, too, with all the usual prime perks: unlimited cloud photo storage (as long as you’re a member), access to the Prime Video and Music services, access to Kindle Owner’s Lending Library (assuming you have a Kindle — not just a Kindle app on your iPad), and, the flagship feature, free two-day shipping on most (not all) Amazon items. One catch: technically, it’s only available to new members. If you already have Prime, Amazon wants you to cough up the standard fee. Because, hey, they...

Fresh off the heels of its first Golden Globes win, Amazon is taking advantage of the increased exposure its Netflix-like video streaming service, Prime Instant Video, is now receiving in order to onboard new Prime subscribers at a discounted rate. The company said this morning it will make the TV series “Transparent,” which took home two Golden Globes in January, available for free to everyone this Saturday as a part of special marketing promotion. At this time, Amazon is also offering customers the ability to sign up for Amazon Prime, which includes the video streaming service, at a discounted rate of $72. That’s a 25 percent-plus savings over the usual $99 price of an Amazon Prime membership, the company notes in its announcement. It’s also “72” dollars in reference to the 72nd Annual Golden Globes, which saw Amazon Studios taking home two awards this year, alongside competitor Netflix’s one win (Kevin Spacey for “House of Cards”) out of its seven nominations. “Transparent,...

Microsoft and NASA are teaming up to make remote working on the Red Planet a reality, using the newly announced HoloLens headset, and the Windows Holographic technology that it supports. The platform is called OnSight and is being developed out of NASA’s Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). It uses the Mars Curiosity rover as effectively a telepresence bot for scientists working out of the relative comforts of Earth’s atmosphere. Data piped from Curiosity will allow the OnSight software to build a 3D simulation of its surroundings on Mars, which scientists will be able to check out first-hand thanks to HoloLens’ ability to project virtual environments onto physical surroundings. The scientists will then be able to examine what’s being worked on by Curiosity from a first-person perspective, and then plan future activities for the rover to complete, as well as see simulations of their likely results. HoloLens and the holographic computing MS is using with the headset wo...

Persado, a startup that says it can automatically create and test different marketing emails and other promotional material, is announcing that it has raised $21 million in Series B funding. Co-founder and CEO Alex Vratskides told me that the automated approach allows marketers to try out many more versions of a message than they’d get with regular A/B testing (where human copywriters still generate the messages themselves). And since the technology has “no preconceived notion” of what the right approach is, it will create variants that a human might never even think of. At the same time, Vratskides insisted that the product is smart enough that you won’t just end up robotic or downright unintelligible messages. “We take the randomness of creativity out of this equation,” he said. “Our software platform generates the most persuasive language for communications — in this way, we eliminate the guesswork of copywriting.” The company describes its approach as “persuasion automati...

Things are getting pretty strange out there. Roughly a year ago I wrote a post entitled “This Industry Is Completely Ridiculous.” Since then, as you probably already know, our world has gotten even more surreal. If anything the ridiculousness is accelerating. It’s like the tech industry is subject to a Moore’s Law of weird. Consider: within the last month, Burning Man announced it was accepting Bitcoin donations, while Xapo declared it was (in some unspecified way) securing its Bitcoin wallets on satellites. Add those together, and what do you get? That’s right: we now live in a world where you can donate virtual cryptocurrency to an ephemeral city, from space. Back in foggy San Francisco, where security guards protect custom GIF projectors outside the BART tunnels that house the homeless, because that’s how America works, I humbly coined a new law: Read More

Microsoft promised a new build of Windows 10 next week, and also confirmed previous rumors that the first build of the operating system for smartphones will be released in February. If you are on Windows 7, Windows 8.1 or Windows Phone 8.1, you will be eligible for a free upgrade inside the first year of Windows 10. Microsoft made the announcement this morning at an event on its corporate campus outside of Seattle. On stage, Microsoft’s Terry Myerson pitched Windows 10 as a service, instead of simply an operating system that a user installs. Or, put more simply, the company views the next version of Windows as the hub of its various services. ------------------------------------------------------- By offering a free upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft is essentially working to grow the userbase of its next operating system, which will grow its developer opportunity. Microsoft needs to grow the cadre of developers that build programs for its platform. In the era of Android and iOS...

Ever wonder how much one makes as the head of Apple? Good news! Since Apple is a public company, that’s public information. They updated their charts for last year just this morning. Here’s how it all broke down in 2014: Tim Cook took in $9.2 million in 2014 — $1.7M of that as salary, $6.7M as non-equity compensation (that is, money he makes based on how the company performs). That’s over double what he made in 2013, which was roughly $4.2M. Newcomer Angela Ahrendts, hired away from Burberry to lead Apple’s retail strategy, earned $73M. The very vast majority of that ($70M) was in stock. CFO Peter Oppenheimer earned $4.5M before retiring in September. This was about double his 2013 compensation. Oppenheimer’s replacement, Luca Maestri, earned $14M — about $13M of which was stock and bonuses. iTunes/App Store/Apple Pay/Siri/Apple Maps/iCloud-boss Eddy Cue earned $24.M, $20M of which was stock. This is about 12x his 2013 compensation. Supply chain head (SVP of Operations) J...

Already-forgotten, anti-Facebook social network Ello today launched the ability to share music and video clips in its feed, but that won’t matter. Here in September gone in September, Ello hoped to dethrone Facebook by … not having ads. But while hipsters had fun hating on Zuck’s creation for a few days, they all went back to it and promptly ditched Ello. Now it’s left with $5.5 million squeezed out of some gullible investors and no reason to exist. Here’s the problem. Beating Facebook at its own game is like punching a wall 1.35 billion bricks thick. The network effect of its critical mass means you can’t usurp it by being a little better. The only social apps to really succeed since its launch have tried to go around Facebook’s wall by being different. Twitter – focuses on public content, not privacy Instagram – stripped out everything but photos for an easy, breezy, beautiful browsing experience built mobile-first Snapchat – made its content disappear, a refreshing alte...

Years ago, when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington was dreaming up ideas for what the original Crunchies statuette would look like, he drew inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In particular, that scene in the early part of the movie in which the apes start using bones as tools and weapons for the first time. Years have passed and our statuettes have changed ever so slightly, but we still hold tight to the primate tradition. And why not? We’re now in our 8th year of putting on the Crunchies and each year the event just keeps getting better. Anyway, we were reminded of all this not too long ago when the Crunchies Monkey stopped by our office to work for a few hours. Technology may have improved over the years, but he expressed the same level of frustration as his ancestors back in the Stone Age. Check out the video above to see what happened. Once you’ve done that, maybe you’ll want to vote for your favorite startups and help us pick winners for Crunchies categories like B...

The year 2014, in many respects, was all about digital security. It wasn’t just tech pundits or early adopters who were victimized – Snapchat, Target, and Sony Entertainment all showed us that no one is immune. And don’t get me started on the NSA. It’s our responsibility as internet explorers to protect ourselves. But according to SplashData’s yearly list of the worst passwords on the internet (as compiled by more than 3 million leaked passwords from 2014), we are kind of lazy about the whole “digital security” thing. At least when it comes to properly locking the gates with a strong password. Seriously. Just take a look at the full list: 1. 123456 2. password 3. 12345 4. 12345678 5. qwerty 6. 123456789 7. 1234 8. baseball 9. dragon 10. football 11. 1234567 12. monkey 13. letmein 14. abc123 15. 111111 16. mustang 17. access 18. shadow 19. master 20. michael 21. superman 22. 696969 23. 123123 24. batman 25. trustno1 Last year, ‘password’ topped the lis...

Are you one of the 600 million people on WhatsApp? Do you grow tired of having to type all of your messages through your phone? Good news! There’s now a desktop version. It’s a web app rather than a native client — and for now, at least, it seems to only play friendly with Google Chrome. But if you’re ready to dive in, you can find the new web-ready version of WhatsApp right over here… One weird catch: to log in on the desktop, you have to take a picture of a QR code through WhatsApp on your phone. This is necessary, presumably, because WhatsApp uses your phone number and SMS verifications rather than usernames/passwords. This currently works on Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry… but “due to Apple platform limitations” (WhatsApp’s words, there — we’re not sure what limitations they mean), iOS users are left out in the cold. On the platforms where it works, however, it’s very slick. Curiously, it seems as if it’s using your phone for more than just the initial login; ...

Remember ATLAS? That massive walking robot that DARPA is building with (the now Google-owned) Boston Dynamics? Last time we saw it, it had two major flaws that made it ever-so-slightly less intimidating: it was loud as hell, and it needed a big, thick support cable to keep it powered and upright. Both of those issues have been fixed. DARPA released a video today demonstrating the latest version of ATLAS, and it’s a doozy. DARPA says about 75% of the bot has been redesigned, with only the stuff below the knees staying the same. Whereas the previous generation ATLAS got its power through an unsightly cable tether (thus greatly limiting its range), the robot now carries its own power source on its back. It can operate for about an hour before its self-contained battery is drained. While the ATLAS in the video above is still held up by a support rope, it’s only for the safety of its operators — and not in the “Oh god, evil robot on the loose!” sense. Coming in at roughly 350 p...

“I declare all my Facebook photos are copyrighted” “Free Southwest Flights”, “Bigfoot spotted”. This is the kind of crap gullible people share on Facebook, until enough friends point out these are fake they delete them. Now the company’s getting proactive by reducing the News Feed visibility of hoaxes. Satirical content like The Onion will still fly, and Facebook won’t delete people’s foolishness, but it will show that content to fewer people and display a warning that it might be a sham. Every few months it seems a new diatribe goes viral, where people accuse Facebook of appropriating ownership for their content. They copy and paste a status update claiming this legally reserves their ownership. This is stupid, not only because Facebook doesn’t claim ownership of your content in that way, but because even if it did, a social media update is obviously not legal protection. Facebook actually published research on how memes like these spread through the feed. Now, it will use its...

So many eyeballs, so little growth. Or so Yahoo’s recent performance under Marissa Mayer could be summarized. Joining Yahoo as its head in 2012, Mayer quickly made a splash with a rapid series of acquisitions, from the billion dollar purchase of Tumblr to the $30 million acquisition of Summly. The performance of that strategy has been lackluster. While Yahoo has acquired nearly 50 companies during Mayer’s tenure, its financial results have done little to persuade investors that the company has found a path to growth. That has raised questions about the viability of the app studio model. Unlike platform product companies like Facebook, app studios rely on monetizing a portfolio of products. Among mobile app companies, this business structure is most common in the games industry, and indeed, there are certain parallels to Hollywood movie studios with their focus on entertainment franchises. There is one startup, though, that is proving that an app studio model can exist outside ...

Haven’t seen The Interview yet? It’s coming to Netflix on Saturday and will stream to subscribers for no additional cost. Netflix announced today that the scandalous Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy will be available to its U.S. and Canadian subscribers starting on Saturday. The terms of the deal were not announced, but this gives Sony another revenue stream for the film that is just barely covering its $46 million production costs. Sony announced today that The Interview brought in $40 million from on-demand rentals and another $6 million from theaters. The Interview was already available from various sources including YouTube and Amazon, but both services required users to rent the movie for a few dollars. Now it’s available to all of Netflix’s 39 million subscribers.

SpaceX, the space exploration startup helmed by ex-PayPal founder Elon Musk, has confirmed that it has raised $1 billion in new funding, in a round including Google and Fidelity, who join existing investors Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Valor Equity Partners and Capricorn. Google and Fidelity get an ownership stake just shy of 10 percent in exchange for their investment. A report from the WSJ broke yesterday that Google was considering a sizeable investment in SpaceX, with a valuation of more than $10 billion (which is in keeping with Google and Fidelity getting less than 10 percent ownership for their combined $1 billion contribution). The investment was said to be aligned with Google’s plans to make Internet connectivity more accessible on a global scale. The Information originally reported that Google was investing in SpaceX in order to support a satellite project specifically aimed at broadening Internet availability. Musk has discussed the project, which is being ...

It’s a standard Apple play to shave a few atoms off the waists of its gadgets come refresh time — allowing the company’s marketing department to crow about thinner flagships that also pack more power and boast better screens, or both. If rumors about a next generation model of the MacBook Air are to be believed, for instance, Apple is planning to slice the laptop’s thickness roughly in half, while boosting its display size from 11 inches to 12, mostly by reducing the bezel, so its overall footprint hardly grows at all. But this party trick of packing more into less requires something to give. Likely space for certain physical ports, in the case of the rumored skeletal MacBook Air. While, for current iPhone flagships, the 6.9mm thick (thin) iPhone 6 and the 7.1mm iPhone 6 Plus, a degree of form-factor integrity has clearly been lost in the quest to achieve size 0 smartphones — hence the bendgate saga. iPhones that weren’t quite so thin would probably have stood up a little more...

Xiaomi’s combination of well-spec’ed phones and low price tags drove the company to over 60 million sales last year. That progress saw it replace Samsung as China’s top-selling smartphone company and become the world’s third top selling phone maker in the process. The Chinese company’s flagship Mi devices typically retail for around $300 — its new Mi Note Pro notably breaks the $500 barrier for the first time — while its affordable Redmi family is sub-$150. For comparison, Apple’s top of the range iPhones sell for over $1,000 off contract, while the Samsung Note and GalaxyS families are similarly priced. So how can Xiaomi be so aggressive with its pricing? Many theories have been put forward, including claims that Xiaomi sells at cost and makes money from other services. Hugo Barra, the company’s VP of International, lifted the lid on some of the company’s secret sauce in an interview with TechCrunch in Beijing last week. Read More

Google is ending the Glass experiment. After today, Google will stop selling the novel device — at least in its current form. Google insists the product is still in development and it’s highly likely that a new version will eventually be released. News broke last week that the Google Glass will be pulled from the market and the project was spinning out of Google X skunkworks to exist as a standalone project.  Former Apple executive and Nest founder Tony Fadell is now overseeing the project. The future of Glass rests in capable hands. Glass launched with much fanfare three years ago in April 2012 and failed to become a consumer hit. But it did spark imaginative ideas, which could have been Google’s plan all along. As a Google spokesperson told us last week, the idea behind the Explorer program was always to see how people would use the technology. Now that Google has received quite a bit of feedback — both good and bad — it decided to close the program in order to focus o...

President Obama took executive action last November to further ease policies around skilled tech labor. However, our laws haven’t done much to help the foreign startup founders who create quite a few tech jobs here. A 2008 Kaufman Foundation study concluded that between 1995 and 2005, more than half of all Silicon Valley tech companies were created by immigrant founders, employing 560,000 workers and generating $63 billion in sales. But something changed in 2006. There was a commonly estimated 12 million illegals living in America at the time. New reforms that were supposed to make it easier for immigrants who’d been here a while to obtain worker visas seemed to be making it harder for those with startups. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 allowed those who’d been in the country for 2-5 years to stay, but would required them to return to their country of origin after 3 years. Meanwhile, those who’d been here less than 2 years would have to leave. Vivek Wadwha ...

Be My Eyes, a new Danish non-profit ‘startup’, has taken a commodity technology, the humble video call, and, by combining it with a community of sighted volunteers, used it as the basis for an iOS app that lets you help a visually-impaired person ‘see’ through their phone’s video camera. Specifically, Be My Eyes — which recently caught the attention of Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey — works as follows: If you’re a sighted person you register with the service and wait for the app to send you a notification that a visually-impaired person who has also signed up requires help. Once a match is found, the two of you are connected via an audio/video call, essentially enabling you to ‘lend’ your eyes to the visually-impaired person who points their phone’s rear-facing camera at whatever it is they want to see. The two of you then collaborate over the call to solve the problem. Unfortunately, however, I’ve been unable to try out the app for myself. Since officially launching yes...

Google ending its Glass Explorer program yesterday sparked a round of eulogies for the oft-ridiculed face computer. That’s premature at best. In its current form, Glass is undoubtedly dead, but there’s no reason to believe Google won’t relaunch it with a new version in the coming month — likely around its annual I/O developer conference. Despite plenty of early hype and generally positive coverage, Glass turned into a public relations issue for Google the day it went on sale. Google, which is typically quick to cancel failing projects, decided to stoically sit this one out. Now, Glass is becoming its own business unit inside of Google, Tony Fadell will oversee the program, and sales to businesses, developers and schools will continue. Google is also encouraging developers to continue writing apps for the platform. Those are not signs that Google plans to cancel the platform. With Fadell in charge, I doubt Google will only focus on business use cases. Fadell doesn’t do enterprise...

Paulina Raguimov never expected to get paid to make video games when she walked into her high school’s career fair at 16. She played them, sure. But when she walked up to the JumpStart booth to chat about the internships they had available, she had absolutely no experience with making games. “I didn’t even have a resume, I had only just become eligible to get a job at all,” she told me last week. Despite that, she liked what she heard and applied for the position. When she got to the interview, they didn’t ask about her lack of experience or place too much emphasis on her grades, instead focusing on her interests and personality. “I got lucky,” she says. “I was the worst student until I got the job.” Raguimov’s first role at JumpStart was as a production intern. Her responsibilities included quality assurance, the job that sounds appealing when you’re 12 but in reality is incredibly dull: endlessly playing games to find their bugs. She was taught to use bug-tracking tools and ...

A few years ago we wrote about something called a Kuratas, a robotic mech suit that allowed the wearer to fire a BB Gatling gun whenever they smile at their soon-to-be vanquished enemies. When it appeared in 2012 everyone thought it was a funny joke. Now it’s available on Amazon Japan for $1 million. The robot is obviously a bit hobbled – the powers that be don’t want us going all Mechwarrior down at the local mall – so it moves about five miles per hour and you can buy the arms separately. Created as more of an art project/Otaku exciter, the Kuratas is a real, albeit expensive, thing and would be an excellent graduation or Bat Mitzvah present. I, for one, welcome our huge Japanese robotic mecha overlords.

In a message sent to company executives, someone claiming to represent the hacker group calling itself the Guardians of Peace has given Sony Pictures Entertainment the go-ahead to release the film The Interview—with some minor caveats. First of all, they want any death scene for Kim Jong-un dropped from the film. "This is GOP. You have suffered through enough threats," the message, which was also posted to Pastebin, read. "The interview may release now. But be careful. September 11 may happen again if you don't comply with the rules: Rule #1: no death scene of Kim Jong Un being too happy;  Rule #2: do not test us again ; Rule #3: if you make anything else, we will be here ready to fight." Sony dropped plans for the release of the film following the cancellation of screenings by major theater chains. CNN had reported that an anonymous source at Sony had shared another email sent to executives  contradictory to this message in private, instructing the compa...

Games and the formula that leads to their success can be a bit of a mystery, perhaps more so on mobile. One of 2014’s big hits, both in terms of critical and audience success, was Monument Valley by ustwogames. The isometric 3D puzzler was breathtaking in terms of its visual design and had nice mechanics, and it managed to earn nearly $6 million in revenue from over 2.4 million individual app sales. But the cost of development might surprise you, as well as the completion rate for the game’s relatively short story among paying players. Monument Valley counted 2,440,076 official sales, which includes iOS, Google Play, Amazon Paid and Amazon Free (via featuring) app installs. iOS drove the brunt of the official DLs (the Android launch also resulted in a piracy rate of around 95 percent, ustwo revealed previously), while Amazon’s free release drove about 4 times as many downloads as did its paid sales. All told, those downloads drove $5,858,625 in revenue to date, with the single ...

Oh, you thought Elon Musk had moved on past the whole Hyperloop thing? That ultra high-speed transportation system he first started talking about back in 2013? That’s understandable. It’s been a while since he’s said much about it. He’s still thinking about it, though. In fact, he’s just committed to building a test track for the concept. Here are the key points of what we know about the Hyperloop system Musk wants to build: The first full-size Hyperloop track (read: not this test track) would run from LA to SF. Musk’s design group estimates the cost of the LA -> SF track to be around $6 billion. That trip, based on totally conceptual estimates, would take 35 minutes. The conceptual top speed is roughly 760 MPH. Musk believes the Hyperloop would work above ground or below ground. The concept works by sending pressurized pods through a tube. This tube is (theoretically/hopefully) kept at a partial vacuum, allowing the vehicle to move within significantly reduced air r...

Tesla Motors has recently been focused on improvements to its flagship electric vehicle, the Model S, giving it a second motor and Knight Rider-like self-driving capabilities. But Tesla was only able to build the Model S in the first place because of the practical experience it gained from constructing and selling the sedan’s predecessor, the Tesla Roadster. The Lotus-derived Roadster has mostly left the spotlight after its limited production run ended in 2012, but Tesla will be giving a late Christmas present to Roadster owners: existing Roadsters will be upgraded with changes that will boost the car’s range by 40 to 50 percent, up to a maximum of 400 miles on a single charge. The upgrades are described in a post on the Tesla Motors blog and are a combination of an upgraded 70kWh battery pack, a new aerodynamic kit to lower the Roadster’s drag coefficient from 0.36 to 0.31 (still far higher than the Model S’ streamlined 0.24), and new tires to lower the Roadster’s rolling resista...

“Whose phone charger is that sticking out of the wall? Oh. It must be Ben’s. Ben always leaves his charger at work. Classic Ben!” Alas, it’s not Ben’s charger. Hell, it’s not a charger at all. It’s actually a little spy device disguised as a phone charger, capable of sniffing out every key you type on that wireless keyboard on your desk. Oh, and it can send the stuff it picks up straight to the eavesdropper’s phone. Oh! Oh! And it’ll keep working even if you unplug it — it only pretends to turn off. That little box up top is built by Samy Kamkar (Yeah — the same Samy who built the self-titled worm that ravaged Myspace back in the day, and who built that crazy hands-free hacking necklace a few weeks back) who has dubbed it the “KeySweeper.” Before you panic and throw your keyboard in the trash, here is the good news: This specific device only affects certain wireless keyboards. Most notably, Microsoft-branded wireless keyboards. We’re still trying to dig up a more exhaustive lis...

LAS VEGAS—Router company D-Link has announced a set of new high-performance home routers, and they look rather exciting. Boasting four, six, or eight antennas and armed with a bright red angular body, they resemble giant robot bugs, or perhaps oversized Swiss Army knives that'll take your finger off if you handle them wrong. The six antenna AC3200, available now for an eye-watering $309.99, can operate at up to 600Mbps over 2.4GHz, and twin 1.3Gbps channels at 5GHz when used with 802.11ac adaptors. Four gigabit Ethernet ports provide wired connectivity (with a fifth for upstream WAN links), and it sports both USB2 and USB3 ports for media sharing. A 1GHz dual core processor powers it all. The slightly better in some ways, slightly worse in other ways, four antenna AC3100 will be available in the second quarter. This will support 1Gbps at 2.4GHz and 2.165Gbps at 5GHz. It'll have the same array of wired connections as well as a 1.4GHz dual core processor. The truly mon...

It’s been over a year since the first wave of cryptographic extortion malware hit computers. Since then, an untold number of individuals, small businesses and even local governments have been hit by various versions of malware that holds victims’ files hostage with encryption, demanding payment by Bitcoin or other e-currency in exchange for a key to reverse the damage. And while the early leader, CryptoLocker, was taken down (along with the “Gameover ZeuS” botnet) last June, other improved “ransomware” packages have sprung up to fill its niche—including the sound-alike CryptoWall. Ransomware is a strange hybrid of digital mugging and commercial-grade coding and “customer service”—in order to continue to be able to generate cash from their malware, the criminal organizations behind them need to be able to process payments and provide victims with a way to get their files back, lest people refuse to pay because of bad word-of-mouth. And to grow their potential market, the extortioni...

Code.org’s Code Studio will be training teachers in 60 different school districts in the U.S., including the 7 largest school districts with the highest diversity in the country. The New York City Department of Education, the Los Angeles Unified School District and Chicago Public Schools are districts that account for some of the lowest-income and highest diversity populations in the country. Other programs such as Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code and Black Boys Code work towards similar measures to incorporate minorities, but they do so at a smaller scale and through partner organizations rather than through the classroom. Code.org has reached into the homes of nearly 100 million people, including the White House. The U.S. government acknowledged Code.org’s efforts to reach students with the Hour of Code and President Obama became one of the 60 million to try coding through the program this past year. Code.org co-founder Hadi Partovi believes working through the public school...

We like to think that education changes people for the better, helping them critically analyze information and providing a certain immunity from disinformation. But if that were really true, then you wouldn't have low vaccination rates clustering in areas where parents are, on average, highly educated. Vaccination isn't generally a political issue. (Or, it is, but it's rejected both by people who don't trust pharmaceutical companies and by those who don't trust government mandates; these tend to cluster on opposite ends of the political spectrum.) But some researchers decided to look at a number of issues that have become politicized, such as the Iraq War, evolution, and climate change. They find that, for these issues, education actually makes it harder for people to accept reality, an effect they ascribe to the fact that "highly educated partisans would be better equipped to challenge information inconsistent with predispositions." The researchers l...

North Korea's negligible Internet connectivity appears to have faltered. First spotted by Internet performance management firm Dyn Research, North Korean routers have been inaccessible, and its scant IP allocation—just 1024 addresses—appears to be offline. Arbor Networks reports that North Korean systems have been sporadically under attack for several weeks, and that a sustained attack started earlier today. The attacks appear to be a mix of Network Time Protocol (NTP) and Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) amplification attacks, that allow attackers even with modest resources to generate large floods of traffic. Arbor's analysis suggests that the volume of traffic itself is not considerable; it peaked at just shy of 6Gbps on 20th December. That such a trickle of traffic is able to knock North Korea offline is testament to the country's virtually non-existent infrastructure. All of North Korea's Internet traffic passes through a peering connection with China ...

I’m cruising down the road at 45 mph when – ka-ching! – the sound of a cash register blares out from my iPhone. It’s one of now several deal-finding apps I have installed that alert me to nearby sales at local stores. I love the functionality they provide, but I’m not thrilled with the timing. The phone buzzes some more as the alerts roll in as I coast past the mall – it’s set back from the road, and I’m passing it, not driving to it. Why is my phone bothering me with alerts when I’m just trying to focus on the traffic? Everyone talks about the dangers of texting and driving, and our Pavlovian need to respond to incoming messages while behind the wheel. But scare campaigns focused on changing user behavior can only go so far – it’s time for some OS-level intervention. I’m not ignoring the fact there are today dozens of third-party applications that can either disable texting, alert to and monitor the number of times someone is texting at the wheel, or help you avoid texting thro...