The battle of the bloviating billionaires could be on hold for the foreseeable future. Elon Musk says he may need surgery, casting more doubt on his proposed cage match with Mark Zuckerberg.
Musk noted on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday evening that he's receiving an MRI on his neck and upper back today. He'll find out later this week whether he'll need surgery before going toe-to-toe with Zuckerberg, which is definitely not an attempt to get a doctor's note to weasel out of the duel.
Exact date is still in flux. I’m getting an MRI of my neck & upper back tomorrow.
May require surgery before the fight can happen. Will know this week.
Not only would surgery postpone that fight indefinitely, it could impact Musk's work at his various companies. As CNBCnotes, Tesla's share price dropped by over two percent on Monday morning. Along with running the automaker, Musk is also the owner and chief technical officer of X and CEO of SpaceX.
There wasn't a confirmed date for the planned fight. Zuckerberg said he proposed an August 26 fight night, but claimed Musk hadn't responded. "Not holding my breath," the Meta CEO wrote on Threads.
Both men have been training for the potential showdown and publicly needling each other in the meantime. If and when it happens, Musk said the fight will be streamed on X, with all proceeds going to a veterans' charity. Zuckerberg couldn't resist poking fun at Musk over that too. "Shouldn't we use a more reliable platform that can actually raise money for charity?," he asked.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/elon-musk-says-he-might-need-surgery-before-any-cage-fight-with-mark-zuckerberg-154237731.html?src=rss
Google is taking aim at the likes of Grammarly with a feature it added to Search recently. The service now includes a grammar checker, which can analyze the construction of a phrase or sentence and offer suggestions if it something seems off.
Punching in a phrase like “grammar check,” “check grammar” or “grammar checker” will make sure the tool activates, as 9to5 Google points out. But Search might still offer grammar suggestions if you don’t include one of those phrases with your query.
If the tool notices an error, including a spelling mistake, Google will rewrite the sentence and indicate what’s different. You’ll easily be able to copy the corrected phrase or sentence by hovering over it. If your grammar is spot on, the tool will give you a dopamine-inducing green checkmark, but not, sadly, a gold star.
Unsurprisingly, the tool is powered by artificial intelligence. It might not always be accurate, especially if you ask it to review a phrase or fragment instead of an entire sentence. If you spot something wrong with a suggestion (or want to help the system understand that its correction was helpful), you can provide feedback.
The tool will only be available in English for the time being, but it's worth noting that it won't run if the phrase or sentence violates Search policies. It won't check the grammar for dangerous, harassing, medical, sexually explicit or terrorist content, or anything to do with violence and gore. You might have to look elsewhere to make sure that a phrase or sentence containing profanity or vulgar language is grammatically correct too.
Google has, of course, offered grammar tools in Gmail and Google Drive for a long time now. Bringing one to Search makes a lot of sense, given that it has a dictionary tool in its extensive bag of tricks. It'll save you having to open Google Docs or another app. You won't necessarily have to bust out a dusty copy of The Elements of Style either.
However, many people just focus on the keywords when they search for something on Google and don't write complete sentences or grammatically correct phrases (e.g. "hard boiled egg how long"). The AI will have to make an educated guess as to whether someone wants their grammar to be checked or not. Otherwise, Search could push the information they're looking for even further down the page.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-search-now-has-an-ai-powered-grammar-checker-144539934.html?src=rss
After a ransomware attack in June, the Colorado Department of Higher Education (CDHE) notified students on Friday of a potential data leak. In June, "unauthorized actor(s)" not yet publicly identified accessed CDHE systems in a ransomware attack. While authorities continue to investigate the full extent of the damage, the department has disclosed that the attack breached personally identifiable information like names and social security numbers.
"The review of the impacted records is ongoing and once complete, CDHE will be notifying individuals who are potentially impacted by mail or email to the extent we have contact information," CDHE wrote in a Notice of Data Incident. But the department warns students that the impact of the breach reaches across programs, from public schools to adult education initiatives, over a 16 year time period.
In response, CDHE is offering free access to Experian credit monitoring and identity theft protection to protect their data. The department recommends impacted groups keep an eye on their account statements and credit reports for suspicious activity.
Education systems are a popular target for ransomware attacks. In 2022, at least 44 colleges and 45 school districts reported ransomware attacks, compared to 88 total education departments in 2021, according to data from Emsisoft. The Government Accountability Office recommended that the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security coordinate to evaluate school cybersecurity efforts across the country.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/colorado-department-of-education-data-leak-personal-information-143001196.html?src=rss
Amazon is running another sale on its Fire TV Stick media streamers, with the Fire TV Stick 4K Max available for $27. We've seen the 4K streaming stick fall as low as $25 in recent weeks, but this deal is still roughly $20 below the device's average street price. The standard Fire TV Stick is also on sale for $25, but since the Max brings a performance boost for only a couple dollars more, we recommend getting the higher-end model instead.
Though it's a couple years old, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max is still relatively fast to load menus and switch between apps. Its remote has Alexa support baked in, so it can tie neatly into other Alexa-compatible smart home devices. It supports just about all the major streaming services and HDR standards, as well as Dolby Atmos audio. Unlike the base Fire TV Stick 4K, it also includes a WiFi 6 radio, though you'll need a compatible router and a particularly fast internet connection to see any advantage from that.
The main caveat, as with most Fire TV devices, is software. Compared to similarly-priced streamers from Roku and Google, Amazon's Fire OS is generally more aggressive about displaying ads on the home screen and nudging you toward the company's own services throughout the UI. You'll get the most out of it if you already use services like Prime Video on a regular basis. There's also no support for Google Cast (unlike Google's Chromecast) or Apple AirPlay (unlike various Roku streamers).
We broadly recommend the Roku Streaming Stick 4K and Google Chromecast to most people in the market for an affordable streaming stick for those reasons. Right now, though, both of those devices cost about $20 more. If all you need is a cheap and quick way to get more streaming apps on your TV, the Fire TV Stick 4K is still a fine value at this price.
It's early August and that means the back-to-school season is closing in on us fast. For those looking to invest in a new laptop for the upcoming semester, Amazon has a sale on the latest 15-inch MacBook Air that brings many models down to their lowest price yet. At the time of writing this, every color of the 256GB MacBook Air M2 is $200 off and down to $1,099, and the 512GB model in starlight is also $200 off and down to $1,299. Regardless of the size you get, the Air M2 is one of our favorite laptops at the moment, and it's even better when you can grab it on sale like this.
The 15-inch MacBook Air takes everything we loved about the 13-inch model and make it just a little bit bigger. Like it's smaller sibling, the 15-inch laptop has impressive performance thanks to Apple's M2 chipset, a comfortable keyboard and trackpad and a battery life that exceeded the 18 hours that the company promised in our video playback testing.
The bigger screen has a 2,880 x 1,864 resolution, but it shares the same pixels per inch (224) as that of the 13-inch version. Although it's not a mini LED display like you'll find on the MacBook Pros, it's still a lovely Liquid Retina panel with 500 nits of brightness and a 60Hz refresh rate. The extra screen space will definitely come in handy in a lot of different workflows, and since the 15-inch MacBook Air is nearly as thin and light as the 13-inch model, it's remains quite portable.
The biggest gripe with the 15-inch Air that we should call out, especially now, is that Apple's M2 chipset is one year old at this point and there's a possibility that we see new, M3-powered Macs debut this fall. This time of year, it's worth waiting to pick up a Mac if you absolutely must have the latest and greatest. However, it's likely that Apple will not retire the M2 MacBooks even if it launches M3 machines in the fall; the company currently sells the M1 MacBook Air alongside the M2 laptops, so we expect the M2 machines to stick around for a while even after the latest devices come out.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apples-15-inch-macbook-air-m2-models-are-up-to-200-off-right-now-135843112.html?src=rss
Last year, WhatsApp released a series of new updates to make sending voice messages an overall better experience, and now it's bringing the whole group in on it. The messaging app has released a beta version of voice chats — a feature that creates an ongoing group audio conversation, reports WABetaInfo. The first sign of voice chats came earlier this year under the name audio chats but didn't provide much other info than its mere existence.
WABetaInfo
Though it sounds similar, this update isn't exactly the same as starting a group call, giving a much more Discord-like feel than when you typically give your friends a ring. Anyone with the update should see a waveform symbol in the upper right corner of their group chat. Pressing the icon starts a group voice chat and will say voice chat opened with a microphone to its left and a red X to its right. Everyone else in the group will receive a push notification, the same as any message, instead of their phone ringing. They will see a banner at the top of the chat box letting them know how many people are chatting now and giving them the option to connect.
Voice chats are protected by end-to-end encryption just like any other messages sent and also shut off if no one has been active in it for an hour. WhatsApp voice chat only appears to be available in beta for Android users right now but will allegedly appear for more people in the coming days.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/whatsapps-latest-feature-lets-you-jump-in-and-out-of-group-voice-chats-121045597.html?src=rss
It’s wild to me that a phone costing north of a grand is somehow midrange, but that’s the mad, mad world of foldables. The Morning After’s own Mat Smith reviewed Motorola’s new 2023 Razr, a lower-end device below the flagship Razr+, and found it wanting in so many ways. Performance isn’t great, the cameras are poor and the cover display is so small it’s unusable.
In the UK, this handset is retailing for around $1,025, and while currency conversions aren’t an exact science (well…) that figure is officially Too Much for Smith’s wallet. He says that, when the handset arrives in the US, if it isn’t priced under $800, then don’t even think about it. And, even if it is, is the joy of a folding display really worth the underwhelming package that surrounds it?
– Dan Cooper
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If you’re caught using exploits, you will be named and shamed.
I’m no fan of a culture too quick to name and shame – we’re all running the same race but carrying baggage of varying weights upon our backs. But Activision feels there’s an exception for those folks playing Call of Duty online with cheat software running in the background. The latest update to its Ricochet anti-cheat system will detect users playing less than fair, boot them from the game and let everyone know they’ve been dealing with a cheater.
Nomono’s all-in-one podcast studio has a list of features long enough to get Devindra Hardawar to spend time playing with it. For $2,490, you get an egg-shaped charging case with four wireless lavalier microphones and a space recorder for capturing room tone. Once you’re done bantering, the audio is instantly uploaded to a cloud server for easy editing, but that’s not ready to go right now. If you’re a budding podcaster with the better part of three grand to spare and are curious if you should pick one up, read all of Devindra’s review to find out more.
Google has always gone the extra mile to keep its employees on its campus for as long as possible. Now, as it tries to claw people back to the office, it’s offering cheap nights in its campus hotel to encourage people to ditch working from home. Because, you know, the thing great companies value is the quality of your presenteeism, not the quality of your work.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-motorolas-new-razr-is-not-a-good-phone-111521672.html?src=rss
Now's the time to snag a new Google phone without paying full price. The tech company's Pixel 7a smartphone is 11 percent off right now — down to $444 from $499 in all available colors. This deal is the best we've seen for the Google Pixel 7a 128GB since it first launched in May.
Google's Pixel 7a is one of our favorite mid-range smartphones and scored a 90 in our review due to how much it works like a Pixel 7 but for a lower price. For starters, it lasted 17 hours and 41 minutes during our video rundown test, just 13 minutes short of its older sibling. It also has a 6.1-inch OLED screen, a 2400 x 1080 display and a 90Hz refresh rate. The Pixel 7a features a high-res 65-MP rear camera and a 13-MP selfie camera.
A few other devices in the Google Pixel family, such as the tablet, are also on sale. A 12 percent discount drops the Google Pixel Tablet (equipped with a charging speaker dock) down to $439 from $499. Plus, the Google Pixel Buds Pro and A-Series have sales running, with the Pro model dropping 30 percent to $139 from $200. If you want something even cheaper, the Google Pixel Buds A-Series are down to $60 from $100 — a 40 percent discount.
If you've still been hemming and hawing about whether Sony's PlayStation 5 is worth dropping half a grand for, you're in luck. One of the best gaming consoles on the market is having a nice sale to start your week off right. Right now, Sony's PS5 disc model is down to $449 from $500 — a solid 10 percent discount. Sure, it's not a massive chunk of change, but $50 can buy you a game or two or even an extra controller.
Sony's PS5 was a solid choice when it first came out in 2020 (we gave it an 87 at the time) and has seen active improvements in the few years since. Most recently, a software beta update has added more accessibility options, like the ability to use a second controller for assistance in games. It also doubled M.2 SSD limits from 4TB to 8TB and added Dolby Atmos support to increase the number of devices you can play sound through.
Whether you go for the console or have one already, you can take advantage of some accessories also being on sale. The DualSense Wireless Controller is down to $49 in almost every color, from classic White to Galactic Purple. Sony's PlayStation Pulse 3D Wireless Headset is even at an all-time low price in its Gray Camouflage model, down to $70 from $100. All in all, this is a very good time to hop fully on the PS5 train.
America didn't get around to really addressing child labor until the late '30s when Roosevelts New Deal took hold and the Public Contracts Act raised the minimum age to 16. Before then, kids could often look forward to spending the majorities of their days doing some of the most dangerous and delicate work required on the factory floor. It's something today's kids can look forward to as well.
InHands of Time: A Watchmaker's History, venerated watchmaker Rebecca Struthers explores how the practice and technology of timekeeping has shaped and molded the modern world through her examination of history's most acclaimed timepieces. In the excerpt below, however, we take a look at 18th- and 19th-century Britain where timekeeping was used as a means of social coercion in keeping both adult and child workers pliant and productive.
Although Puritanism had disappeared from the mainstream in Europe by the time of the Industrial Revolution, industrialists, too, preached redemption through hard work — lest the Devil find work for idle hands to do. Now, though, the goal was productivity as much as redemption, although the two were often conveniently conflated. To those used to working by the clock, the provincial workers’ way of time appeared lazy and disorganized and became increasingly associated with unchristian, slovenly ways. Instead ‘time thrift’ was promoted as a virtue, and even as a source of health. In 1757, the Irish statesman Edmund Burke argued that it was ‘excessive rest and relaxation [that] can be fatal producing melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder’ while hard work was ‘necessary to health of body and mind’.
Historian E.P. Thompson, in his famous essay ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, poetically described the role of the watch in eighteenth-century Britain as ‘the small instrument which now regulated the rhythms of industrial life’. It’s a description that, as a watchmaker, I particularly enjoy, as I’m often ‘regulating’ the watches I work on — adjusting the active hairspring length to get the watch running at the right rate — so they can regulate us in our daily lives. For the managerial classes, however, their watches dictated not just their own lives but also those of their employees.
In 1850 James Myles, a factory worker from Dundee, wrote a detailed account of his life working in a spinning mill. James had lived in the countryside before relocating to Dundee with his mother and siblings after his father was sentenced to seven years’ transportation to the colonies for murder. James was just seven years old when he managed to get a factory job, a great relief to his mother as the family were already starving. He describes stepping into ‘the dust, the din, the work, the hissing and roaring of one person to another’. At a nearby mill the working day ran for seventeen to nineteen hours and mealtimes were almost dispensed with in order to eke the very most out of their workers’ productivity, ‘Women were employed to boil potatoes and carry them in baskets to the different flats; and the children had to swallow a potato hastily … On dinners cooked and eaten as I have described, they had to subsist till half past nine, and frequently ten at night.’ In order to get workers to the factory on time, foremen sent men round to wake them up. Myles describes how ‘balmy sleep had scarcely closed their urchin eyelids, and steeped their infant souls in blessed forgetfulness, when the thumping of the watchmen’s staff on the door would rouse them from repose, and the words “Get up; it’s four o’clock,” reminded them they were factory children, the unprotected victims of monotonous slavery.’
Human alarm clocks, or ‘knocker-uppers’, became a common sight in industrial cities.* If you weren’t in possession of a clock with an alarm (an expensive complication at the time), you could pay your neighborhood knocker-upper a small fee to tap on your bedroom windows with a long stick, or even a pea shooter, at the agreed time. Knocker-uppers tried to concentrate as many clients within a short walking distance as they could, but were also careful not to knock too hard in case they woke up their customer’s neighbors for free. Their services became more in demand as factories increasingly relied on shift work, expecting people to work irregular hours.
Once in the workplace, access to time was often deliberately restricted and could be manipulated by the employer. By removing all visible clocks other than those controlled by the factory, the only person who knew what time the workers had started and how long they’d been going was the factory master. Shaving time off lunch and designated breaks and extending the working day for a few minutes here and there was easily done. As watches started to become more affordable, those who were able to buy them posed an unwelcome challenge to the factory master’s authority.
An account from a mill worker in the mid-nineteenth century describes how: ‘We worked as long as we could see in the summer time, and I could not say what hour it was when we stopped. There was nobody but the master and the master’s son who had a watch, and we did not know the time. There was one man who had a watch … It was taken from him and given into the master’s custody because he had told the men the time of day …’
James Myles tells a similar story: ‘In reality there were no regular hours: masters and managers did with us as they liked. The clocks at factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloaks for cheatery and oppression. Though it is known among the hands, all were afraid to speak, and a workman then was afraid to carry a watch, as it was no uncommon event to dismiss anyone who presumed to know too much about the science of Horology.’
Time was a form of social control. Making people start work at the crack of dawn, or even earlier, was seen as an effective way to prevent working-class misbehavior and help them to become productive members of society. As one industrialist explained, ‘The necessity of early rising would reduce the poor to a necessity of going to Bed bedtime; and thereby prevent the Danger of Midnight revels.’ And getting the poor used to temporal control couldn’t start soon enough. Even children’s anarchic sense of the present should be tamed and fitted to schedule. In 1770 English cleric William Temple had advocated that all poor children should be sent from the age of four to workhouses, where they would also receive two hours of schooling a day. He believed that there was:
considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed for at least twelve hours a day, whether [these four-year-olds] earn their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them ...
Because we all know how entertaining most four-year-olds would find ten hours of hard labor followed by another two of schooling. In 1772, in an essay distributed as a pamphlet entitled A View of Real Grievances, an anonymous author added that this training in the ‘habit of industry’ would ensure that, by the time a child was just six or seven, they would be ‘habituated, not to say naturalized to Labour and Fatigue.’ For those readers with young children looking for further tips, the author offered examples of the work most suited to children of ‘their age and strength’, chief being agriculture or service at sea. Appropriate tasks to occupy them include digging, plowing, hedging, chopping wood and carrying heavy things. What could go wrong with giving a six-year-old an ax or sending them off to join the navy?
The watch industry had its own branch of exploitative child labour in the form of what is known as the Christchurch Fusee Chain Gang. When the Napoleonic Wars caused problems with the supply of fusee chains, most of which came from Switzerland, an entrepreneurial clockmaker from the south coast of England, called Robert Harvey Cox, saw an opportunity. Making fusee chains isn’t complicated, but it is exceedingly fiddly. The chains, similar in design to a bicycle chain, are not much thicker than a horse’s hair, and are made up of links that are each stamped by hand and then riveted together. To make a section of chain the length of a fingertip requires seventy-fi ve or more individual links and rivets; a complete fusee chain can be the length of your hand. One book on watchmaking calls it ‘the worst job in the world’. Cox, however, saw it as perfect labor for the little hands of children and, when the Christchurch and Bournemouth Union Workhouse opened in 1764 down the road from him to provide accommodation for the town’s poor, he knew where to go looking. At its peak, Cox’s factory employed around forty to fifty children, some as young as nine, under the pretext of preventing them from being a financial burden. Their wages, sometimes less than a shilling a week (around £3 today), were paid directly to their workhouse. Days were long and, although they appear to have had some kind of magnification to use, the work could cause headaches and permanent damage to their eyesight. Cox’s factory was followed by others, and Christchurch, this otherwise obscure market town on the south coast, would go on to become Britain’s leading manufacturer of fusee chains right up until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
The damage industrial working attitudes to time caused to poor working communities was very real. The combination of long hours of hard labor, in often dangerous and heavily polluted environments, with disease and malnutrition caused by abject poverty, was toxic. Life expectancy in some of the most intensive manufacturing areas of Britain was incredibly low. An 1841 census of the Black Country parish of Dudley in the West Midlands found that the average was just sixteen years and seven months.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-hands-of-time-rebecca-struthers-harper-143034889.html?src=rss
