Technology News

A 55-year-old software developer faces up to 10 years in prison for deploying malicious code that sabotaged his former employer's network, allegedly costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.

The US Department of Justice announced Friday that Davis Lu was convicted by a jury after "causing intentional damage to protected computers" reportedly owned by the Ohio- and Dublin-based power management company Eaton Corp.

Lu had worked at Eaton Corp. for about 11 years when he apparently became disgruntled by a corporate "realignment" in 2018 that "reduced his responsibilities," the DOJ said.

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It has been an uncharacteristically messy start to the year for the world's leading spaceflight company, SpaceX.

Let's start with the company's most recent delay. The latest launch date for a NASA mission to survey the sky and better understand the early evolution of the Universe comes Monday night. The launch window for this SPHEREx mission opened on February 28, but a series of problems with integrating the rocket and payloads have delayed the mission nearly two weeks.

Then there are the Falcon 9 first stage issues. Last week, a Falcon 9 rocket launched nearly two dozen Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit. However, one of the rocket's nine engines suffered a fuel leak during ascent. Due to a lack of oxygen in the thinning atmosphere, the fuel leak did not preclude the satellites from reaching orbit. But when the first stage returned to Earth, it caught fire after landing on a droneship, toppling over. This followed a similar issue in August, when there was a fire in the engine compartment. After nearly three years without a Falcon 9 landing failure, SpaceX had two in six months.

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Google didn't explain exactly why it shipped a mandatory software update to the Pixel 4a, an Android phone from 2020, earlier this year. The nature of that update, which gave some models all but unusable battery life, provided some clues, as did later software analysis. But now, Australian authorities have provided a more concrete answer: battery overheating and fire risk.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's (ACCC) Product Safety arm issued a recall for the Pixel 4a late last week. The reason, the commission said, is that Google's firmware update and battery changes served to "mitigate the risk of overheating" because "an overheating battery could pose a risk of fire and/or burns to a user."

Do you own this product? Credit: ACCC Product Safety

In the US and elsewhere, Google's messaging did not use the term "recall." Google stated on its "Pixel 4a Battery Performance Program" page that "certain" Pixel 4a models "require a software update to improve the stability of their battery’s performance," which also "reduces available battery capacity and impacts charging performance." Google said it is still safe to charge a Pixel 4a.

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Google has gotten its first taste of remedies that Donald Trump’s Department of Justice plans to pursue to break up the tech giant’s monopoly in search. In the first filing since Trump allies took over the department, government lawyers backed off a key proposal submitted by the Biden DOJ. The government won't ask the court to force Google to sell off its AI investments, and the way it intends to handle Android is changing. However, the most serious penalty is intact—Google's popular Chrome browser is still on the chopping block.

"Google’s illegal conduct has created an economic goliath, one that wreaks havoc over the marketplace to ensure that—no matter what occurs—Google always wins," the DOJ filing says. To that end, the government maintains that Chrome must go if the playing field is to be made level again.

The DOJ is asking the court to force Google to promptly and fully divest itself of Chrome, along with any data or other assets required for its continued operation. It is essentially aiming to take the Chrome user base—consisting of some 3.4 billion people—away from Google and hand it to a competitor. The government will vet any potential buyers to ensure the sale does not pose a national security threat. During the term of the judgment, Google would not be allowed to release any new browsers. However, it may continue to contribute to the open source Chromium project.

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Stay hydrated in style and cut down on single-use plastic with our favorite bottles—now updated with information on lead.

Apple's midrange tablet is now an option for creatives and gamers alike, but it lacks exciting upgrades all around.

Looking for something extra cozy to sleep in? These flannel sheets are the softest you'll find, whether you're looking for luxurious velvet flannel or something light enough for a hot sleeper.

In New York and other cities where congestion pricing policies, bike infrastructure projects, and car bans have been put in place, cyclists are finding the streets more welcoming.

The Spark 2 from Positive Grid looks like a miniature old-school amp, but it is, essentially, a computer with some knobs and a speaker. It has Bluetooth, USB-C, and an associated smartphone app. It needs firmware updates, which can brick the device—ask me how I found this out—and it runs code on DSP chips. New guitar tones can be downloaded into the device, where they run as software rather than as analog electrical circuits in an amp or foot pedal.

In other words, the Spark 2 is the latest example of the "software-ization" of music.

Forget the old image of a studio filled with a million-dollar, 48-track mixing board from SSL or API and bursting with analog amps, vintage mics, and ginormous plate reverbs. Studios today are far more likely to be digital, where people record "in the box" (i.e., they track and mix on a computer running software like Pro Tools or Logic Pro) using digital models of classic (and expensive) amplifiers, coded by companies like NeuralDSP and IK Multimedia. These modeled amp sounds are then run through convolution software that relies on digital impulse responses captured from different speakers and speaker cabinets. They are modified with effects like chorus and distortion, which are all modeled, too. The results can be world-class, and they're increasingly showing up on records.

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The giant extinct shark species known as the megalodon has captured the interest of scientists and the general public alike, even inspiring the 2018 blockbuster film The Meg. The species lived some 3.6 million years ago, and no complete skeleton has yet been found. So there has been considerable debate among paleobiologists about megalodon's size, body shape, and swimming speed, among other characteristics.

While some researchers have compared megalodon to a gigantic version of the stocky great white shark, others believe the species had a more slender body shape. A new paper published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica bolsters the latter viewpoint, also drawing conclusions about the megalodon's body mass, swimming speed (based on hydrodynamic principles), and growth patterns.

As previously reported, the largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon (formally Otodus megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we're not entirely sure how large megalodon were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives.

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From beach days to board meetings, these top totes are designed to protect your valuables, and then some.

TCL’s upgraded 6 Series skips the brightness blast for impressively balanced performance.

This new wide-plate straightening iron has only one temperature setting, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

From comforters to sheets, pillows, and bed frames, here’s how to keep your bed in tip-top shape.

By proving a broader version of Hilbert’s famous 10th problem, two groups of mathematicians have expanded the realm of mathematical unknowability.

Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words—mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like—that don’t convey any information about the topic of the conversation itself. For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins of language when speakers aren’t as articulate as they’d like to be.

But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation as well as tools to negotiate mutual understanding. That puts them at the heart of language itself—and they may be the hardest part of language for artificial intelligence to master.

“Here is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose, that we barely noticed,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, “that turns out to upend our ideas of what makes complex language even possible in the first place.”

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These tips and tricks will help your dreams stay sweet.

See how we're celebrating International Women's Day and Women's History Month across our productsSee how we're celebrating International Women's Day and Women's History Month across our products