Meta has followed through on its threat promise to bring NFT (non-fungible token) support to Facebook. Users can now post digital collectibles that they have in their digital wallets across Facebook and Instagram. After they connect digital wallets to one app, they'll be able to access NFTs from both of them.
The company is making the move a few weeks after it expanded access to Instagram's NFT functions in dozens more countries. It started testing NFTs on Facebook earlier this summer. Meta is moving deeper into NFT territory even though the market for the digital tokens has nosedived in recent months. There are indications that Meta is working on a marketplace where people can buy and sell NFTs, but whether people will actually use it remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, here's Snoop Dogg and Eminem's MTV Video Music Awards performance, which featured animated versions of their NFTs. In terms of bleak visions of the near future, The Last of Us has nothing on this.
Full performance of Snoop Dogg & Eminem featuring Bored Ape Yacht Club at the #VMA’s.
A new Mafia game is on the way. Series publisher 2K Games and Hanger 13, the studio that worked on Mafia III and Mafia: Definitive Edition, announced the news in a blog post celebrating the franchise’s 20th anniversary.
“I'm happy to confirm we've started work on an all-new Mafia project,” said Roman Hladík, Hanger 13 general manager. “While it's a few years away and we can't share anything more right now, we're really excited to keep working on this beloved franchise and to entertain our players with new stories.”
The studio did not share any other details on the project. Its most recent release was 2020’s Mafia: Definitive Edition, a remake of the franchise’s original 2002 entry. According to a Kotaku report published earlier this year, Hanger 13 has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs since the studio completed work on Mafia III in 2016. The most recent occurred in May after 2K reportedly canceled a game that Hanger 13 had been working on for a while and that the publisher had funded to the tune of $50 million. That same month, Kotaku published a separate report revealing that the studio was also working on a Mafia prequel set in Italy and built on top of Unreal Engine 5. It’s unclear if that project is the game 2K and Hanger 13 announced today.
If you want to revisit the series or play it for the first time, 2K also announced today it would give the original game away on Steam between September 1st and 5th. You can also buy Definitive Editionon sale until September 8th.
The Federal Trade Commission has sued a data broker called Kochava, alleging the company sold geolocation information that could be used to reveal visits to sensitive locations. The agency says the data could show movements to and from reproductive health clinics, places of worship and addiction recovery centers, as well as homeless and domestic violence shelters.
"By selling data tracking people, Kochava is enabling others to identify individuals and exposing them to threats of stigma, stalking, discrimination, job loss and even physical violence," the agency said. It wants Kochava to stop selling such data and to delete sensitive geolocation information it has collected. Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said the move is an attempt to protect people's privacy.
The FTC says the data includes timestamped latitude and longitude locations that are matched with unique mobile device identification numbers. It alleged that Kochava's custom data feeds allow its customers "to identify and track specific mobile device users." The agency claims that someone who buys the data could compare the location of a phone (especially if it's in the same place overnight) against property records to identify someone and follow their movements. In fact, using a data sample, the FTC says it was able to track a device from a reproductive health clinic to a single-family residence, as well as other locations.
In June, the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, which had conferred a nationwide right to safe abortion access since the early '70s. After that decision, Google started deleting abortion clinic visits from users' location history. The FTC is going a step further by trying to halt the sale of device-level geolocation data that could be used to identify someone who visits or even works at a reproductive health clinic.
France is preparing to launch a new electric vehicle subsidy program that would give people the ability to lease an EV for €100 ($100) per month. Budget Minister Gabriel Attal announced the plan over the weekend on the country’s LCI news channel, reports Bloomberg. “We know that for many French [EVs] remain very expensive,” he said, adding that the government was working to figure out how quickly it could implement the measure.
Under a subsidy scheme that’s similar to the one introduced by the US Inflation Reduction Act, French car buyers can currently receive as much as €6,000 off electric vehicles that cost less than €47,000. Consumers can also take advantage of a federal trade-in program to get money for their old combustion-engine cars. Despite those incentives, EVs only accounted for 12 percent of new vehicle sales in France during the first seven months of 2022.
For context, France is significantly behind on that front compared to countries like Norway. Last year, battery-electric and hybrid vehicles made up nearly two-thirds of all new car sales within the Nordic country. Much of what’s driving adoption there is a subsidy scheme that allows car buyers to avoid taxes that are found on internal combustion engine cars.
Attal’s announcement follows months of extremely hot weather across France as Europe and the world feel the brunt of worsening climate change. After enduring multiple heatwaves throughout June and July, parts of Paris saw temperatures rise to 36 degrees Celsius (nearly 100 Fahrenheit) earlier this month.
Amid Elon Musk's legal battle with Twitter, his attorneys have now subpoenaed the company's former security chief, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, to appear for a deposition on September 9th. Zatko last week submitted a lengthy whistleblower complaint against Twitter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. He accused the company of (among other things) having "egregious" security issues. Zatko suggested the problems may pose a national security risk.
In the subpoena, which was filed on Monday and obtained by The Verge, Musk's attorneys request materials related to how Zatko’s tenure at Twitter ended and what stock, if any, he owns in the company. There are also demands for documents that might indicate any illegal activity by Twitter or foreign intelligence agents it employs. Perhaps most pertinently to Musk's attempt to back out of his agreement to buy Twitter, the subpoena asks for information connected to the monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) metric Twitter uses, as well as documents Zatko has on Twitter's alleged spam problem.
Zatko claimed in the complaint that Twitter lied to Musk about the prevalence of bots and spam accounts, as The Washington Post notes. Musk has accused Twitter of fraudulently masking the true number of bots. In his bid to abandon the acquisition, Musk said Twitter made “false and misleading representations” about how many phony accounts are on the platform.
Meanwhile, Senate and Congressional committee leaders are investigating Zatko's claims. The whistleblower is set to appear at a Judiciary Committee hearing five days after he's scheduled to be deposed in Musk's case against Twitter. Zatko's assertions have been disputed by Twitter and its CEO Parag Agrawal.
Netflix has secured non-exclusive streaming rights to a handful of classic anime titles. Variety reports the company recently signed an agreement with Nippon TV to bring Berserk, Claymore, Death Note, Parayste: The Maxim and nine other shows and movies to viewers worldwide.
Of that group, Netflix plans to stream Hunter X Hunter first. As of September 2nd, the adaptation of Yoshihiro Togashi’s classic manga series will be available in 104 countries. A few titles, including Death Note and Hunter X Hunter, have been staples of Netflix’s anime catalog in North America for years. In fact, the former is so popular on the platform Netflix gave the Duffer brothers the green light to produce another live-action adaptation of the series. Other notable additions include Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting!, Monster and Nana,
The deal will also give anime fans a chance to watch some of those series on a platform that isn’t Crunchyroll. Ever since Sony acquired the streaming service for nearly $1.2 billion in 2020 and began migrating the Funimation catalog over, Crunchyroll has, for better and worse, been the dominant player in the overseas anime market.
T-Mobile is offering those on the Magenta Max plan another perk. Starting on August 31st, Apple TV+ will be included with the plan. The carrier previously offered users on certain plans a year of access. However, this is an ongoing promotion. T-Mobile says customers will be able to stream Apple TV+ at no extra cost as long as they remain a Magenta Max subscriber.
For several years, T-Mobile has bundled Netflix access with certain plans. Magenta Max members also get a year of Paramount+, along with YouTube TV and Philo discounts. Meanwhile, Magenta subscribers will get six months of Apple TV+.
Ongoing Apple TV+ access is a decent bonus, considering that there's quite a bit worth checking out on the platform these days. Among other original shows and movies, you'll be able to stream this year's Oscar Best Picture winner Coda, awards magnet Ted Lasso and the engrossing Severance. Apple has also added sports to the service, starting with MLB Friday Night Baseball games. Major League Soccer matches will be available on the platform next year.
Over the years [Integza] has blown up or melted many types of jet engine, including the humble pulsejet. Earlier improvements revolved around pumping in more fuel, or forced air intakes, but now it’s time for a bit more refinement of the idea, and he takes a sidestep towards the more controllable detonation engine. His latest experiment (video, embedded below) attempts to dial-in the concept a little more. First he built a prototype from a set of resin printed parts, with associated tubing and gas control valves, and a long acrylic tube to send the exhaust down. Control of the butane and air injection, as well as triggering of the spark-ignition, are handled by an Arduino — although he could have just used a 555 timer — driving a few solid state relays. This provided some repeatable control of the pulse rate. This is a journey towards a very interesting engine design, known as the rotating detonation engine. This will be very interesting to see, if he can get it to work.
Supersonic exhaust plume with the characteristic ‘mushroom’ shape
Detonation engines operate due to the pressure part of the general thrust equation, where the action is in the detonative combustion. Detonative combustion takes place at constant pressure, which theoretically should lead to a greater efficiency than boring old deflagration, but the risks are somewhat higher. Apparently this is tricky to achieve with a fuel/air mix, as there just isn’t oomph in the mixture. [Integza] did try adding a Shchelkin spiral (we call them springs around here) which acts to slow down the combustion and shorten the time taken for it to transition from deflagration to detonation.
It sort of worked, but not well enough, so running with butane and pure oxygen was the way forward. This proved the basic idea worked, and the final step was to rebuild the whole thing in metal, with CNC machined end plates and some box section clamped with a few bolts. This appeared to work reasonably well at around 10 pulses/sec with some measurable thrust, but not a lot. More work to be done we think.
We hinted at earlier work on forced-air pulsejets, so here that is. Of course, whilst we’re on the subject of pulsejets, we can’t not mention [Colinfurze] and his pulsejet go kart.
Throughout my childhood and much of my adult life, homemade ice cream was something that happened at least once every summer. Whether it was church gatherings or family cookouts, rarely did a summer go by without sitting around a White Mountain ice cream maker chattering away as it churned a batch of banana or peach. I can also recall a few times having to use a hand-crank model, which took about five people tag-teaming to complete the task.
Unfortunately, White Mountain’s products can be hard to find in-stock these days, so after a few weeks of keeping an eye on Amazon, my wife went with a recommendation from Good Housekeeping for Father’s Day. Cuisinart’s Pure Indulgence 2-quart (ICE-30BCP1) ice cream maker is a compact countertop model that takes up about the same amount of space as a food processor. It has a bowl insert that you stick in the freezer to chill and a plastic dasher churns away your ice cream, frozen yogurt or sorbet while you sit on the couch.
My first attempt at using the ICE-30BCP1 wasn’t great. I went by the included directions which said the bowl could be ready for use in six hours. The guidance was if you took the bowl out of the freezer and didn’t hear any liquid sloshing around, it was ready to use. Well, this wasn’t the case for me, and as I would find, it wasn’t for lots of other people on the internet are using similar ice cream makers either. In reality, the bowl needs to sit in the freezer for 24 hours before use, and now I begin the process on Thursday to make a batch on Saturday or Sunday.
Billy Steele/Engadget
In fairness, Cuisinart explains the freezing process can take up to 22 hours depending on the temperature of your freezer, but mine is a chest unit in the garage not the one attached to my fridge. We were also eager to use it quickly the first time we opened the box. As you might expect, the company recommends you just store the bowl in the freezer so it’s ready to go at all times. I don’t have the space to do this, so the Thursday-to-Saturday timeline has served me well in subsequent batches.
Once I figured out the bowl prep, the ICE-30BCP1 was easy to use. I’ve been working through different recipes, some you have to cook and cool, others you simply mix and freeze. So long as the liquid going in is around 40 degrees when you start, this ice cream maker has no trouble completing the churning process in 25-35 minutes. Of course, the texture is still quite soft, which is a trademark of homemade ice cream to me. If you prefer yours a little firmer, a couple of hours in the freezer typically sets everything nicely. So far, I’ve made House of Nash Eats’ peach, Serious Eats’ fresh pineapple and two batches of the peanut butter cup in Cuisinart’s user manual. They’ve all turned out great.
There’s no denying an appliance like the ICE-30BCP1 is more convenient than what White Mountain offers, but there are niceties I miss. The primary one being all the chats around the ice cream maker while you’re waiting for the thing to do its job. You know the ones: the best place to get homemade ice cream if you’re not making it yourself, which place has the best peach and the time we messed up and got salt in the canister.
Indeed, Cuisinart keeps you from a briney final product since you don’t need rock salt and ice (or to constantly monitor both). And once you get the hang of the whole process, the only problem you’ll have is deciding on your next recipe.
Google's Pixel 6a has hit a new low price after going on sale just a week ago. You can now pick one up for $370 in "charcoal" or "sage" colors for a savings of $79 off the regular price (19 percent off) — $20 cheaper than the previous deal. That's a great price on an already affordable, nearly new handset that offers a lot of bang for the buck.
The Pixel 6a is a top mid-range smartphone pick, offering the same Tensor chip as the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, while giving you the purest Android experience possible. It offers excellent camera quality for the price, with the two 12-megapixel rear cameras and 8-MP front sensor delivering bright, colorful pictures and video. It also comes with a very distinctive design, along with a sharp 6.1-inch screen, long-lasting battery and more.
You don't get everything available in the flagships, of course. The 60Hz refresh rate isn't as smooth as the higher-end Pixels or Samsung's A53. Storage is limited to 128GB, there's no wireless charging and Google dropped the headphone jack we loved on the Pixel 5a — so you'll need a dongle for wired audio. Still, there aren't many other phones that can match it in this price range, particularly considering the discount.
