Technology

Une fusée SpaceX Falcon-9 transportant la mission Crew-8 est lancée du centre spatial Kennedy de la NASA, en Floride, le 3 mars 2024. CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP Trois astronautes américains et un russe ont décollé dimanche 3 mars au soir de Floride vers la Station spatiale internationale (ISS), où ils séjourneront environ six mois. Initialement prévu samedi, le lancement avait été reporté de vingt-quatre heures à cause d’une météo défavorable. La fusée Falcon-9 de SpaceX a décollé à 22 h 53 heure locale (4 h 53 à Paris lundi) du centre spatial Kennedy, illuminant le ciel nocturne d’un long et brillant panache de flammes orangées. Quelques minutes après la mise à feu, le lanceur survolait l’océan Atlantique à une vitesse de quelque 9 ...

The future for physical video games looks bleak. Major console hardware makers seem to be inching toward removing ways to play discs at all: leaked Microsoft documents revealed a potential disc-less Xbox Series X (though the company says it isn’t completely giving up on the format), while the “slim” PS5 has a detachable disc drive that requires an internet connection to pair with a new console. You can get most games digitally nowadays, but there are plentiful stories about people losing access to games they’ve purchased when digital storefronts shut down or because of licensing issues or unexplained bans. Because of the many issues with digital ownership, Josh Fairhurst, the CEO of physical game maker Limited Run Games, thinks that people will still care about physical media. “The minu...

Ring confirmed to The Verge that it has stopped selling its Ring Car Cam, a dashcam / security camera hybrid that records the road and the driver while in motion and acts as a security camera when a vehicle is parked. The product, which launched at CES 2023, has been hard to come by since going on sale last January, and customers who tried to purchase one in the last few months are finding those orders canceled."We've experienced ongoing delays with Car Cam and have decided to stop the sale of the device," Ring spokesperson Andrea McDonald told The Verge in an email. "Customers who purchased a Car Cam will continue to receive software updates and support. We remain excited about opportunities to innovate in the auto space." McDonald declined to elaborate on what type of delays or whethe...

Rodriguez — whose company owned and operated the Call of Duty League’s OpTic Texas team — and now-retired OpTic player Seth “Scump” Abner are seeking $680 million in damages. In a lawsuit filed Thursday, the pair claim that Activision Blizzard’s “unlawful 100 percent monopoly” over the league forced them into financially ruinous partnerships at the risk of being unable to compete in the League.Before the arrival of the Call of Duty League, competitive Call of Duty tournaments were hosted by independent third-party organizers and featured an “open” structure whereby any team could sign up and participate. However, when Activision Blizzard initiated the CDL in 2019, it changed this structure. Instead of offering multiple tournaments to teams throughout the year, there would be only one. F...

In its post, Apple argues that web apps are built “directly on WebKit” — the engine used by Safari — allowing web apps to “align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS.” With the change to iOS 17.4, websites added to the homescreen now act only as bookmarks that open a new tab in your browser, rather than (potentially) standalone services capable of doing things like sending notifications and showing badges, a feature Apple just added to web apps last year. Progressive web apps on iOS are also capable of storing data separately from your browser instance, which comes in handy if there’s a site you want quick access to and don’t want to keep signing in. Some services, like Facebook Gaming, use web apps as a way to get around the Apple App Store and its fees.Now that a...

For three decades, a tiny text file has kept the internet from chaos. This text file has no particular legal or technical authority, and it’s not even particularly complicated. It represents a handshake deal between some of the earliest pioneers of the internet to respect each other’s wishes and build the internet in a way that benefitted everybody. It’s a mini constitution for the internet, written in code. It’s called robots.txt and is usually located at yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. That file allows anyone who runs a website — big or small, cooking blog or multinational corporation — to tell the web who’s allowed in and who isn’t. Which search engines can index your site? What archival projects can grab a version of your page and save it? Can competitors keep tabs on your pages for the...

In the world of tiny houses, where every square inch counts, French company Baluchon is pushing the boundaries. Their latest creation, the Ellèbore, challenges conventional layouts by flipping the script – quite literally. Let’s dive into the details of this intriguing tiny home.CLICK TO GET KURT’S FREE CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH SECURITY ALERTS, QUICK VIDEO TIPS, TECH REVIEWS AND EASY HOW-TO’S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER The Ellèbore exterior (Baluchon) (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)The upside-down approachBaluchon’s mission is clear: extract as much livable space as possible from their compact designs. The Ellèbore achieves this by turning the traditional layout on its head. Imagine a house where the bedroom resides downstairs, leaving room for a versatile living area above. It’s like a tiny hous...

There was a very nice video by Marques Brownlee last year on the moon picture. Everyone was like, ‘Is it fake? Is it not fake?’ There was a debate around what constitutes a real picture. And actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene – is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop.

L’agence spatiale japonaise (JAXA) a annoncé lundi 22 janvier avoir éteint l’alimentation électrique de son module SLIM moins de trois heures après son alunissage historique de samedi, afin d’économiser ses batteries en vue d’un possible redémarrage. Il existe une « possibilité » que le module japonais SLIM, qui a rencontré un problème de panneaux solaires, puisse être relancé, a ajouté la JAXA. « Selon les données télémétriques, les cellules solaires de SLIM sont orientées vers l’ouest. Si la lumière du soleil frappait la Lune par l’ouest à l’avenir, nous pensons qu’il serait possible de produire de l’énergie, et nous nous préparons actuellement à la restauration », a déclaré l’agence spatiale. « Nous avons pu terminer la transmission des données tec...

No one on North Sea TikTok ever seems to know how they got there. They were just innocently scrolling their feeds from dance challenge to gardening tip to relationship update to workout video to standup comedy clip, when suddenly, they’re dropped into some of the most treacherous waters on the planet. The videos are almost always the same: 60 seconds of waves crashing over the hulls of unsuspecting ships, workers hanging off of oil rigs while storms roil around them, water coming onto the deck of a boat at such speed, you can’t imagine how even the camera survived. “I don’t know why my feed is filled with videos of the North Sea,” a thousand commenters always say, “but I love it.”I can’t say exactly how the trend started (because TikTok’s platform search tools are horrifically bad), but...