Get ready to do a double-take! The Rybka Twins will be auditioning for ‘AGT’ during the July 18 episode. Get to know these talented twin acrobats.
Get ready to do a double-take! The Rybka Twins will be auditioning for ‘AGT’ during the July 18 episode. Get to know these talented twin acrobats.
As our homes continue to get smarter, so does the need for additional precautions across devices. Now, the federal government is taking steps to make it easier for you to know the safety of certain devices. The Biden-Harris administration has announced the “US Cyber Trust Mark” program, which would certify and label Internet of Things (such as baby monitors and alarm systems) with powerful cybersecurity.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will determine the necessary cybersecurity qualifications for consumer-grade routers by the end of 2023. Bad actors can manipulate consumer-grade routers without strong security in place for eavesdropping and cyber attacks on other devices. Its criteria will determine if a product should be labeled and certified, using factors like incident detection capabilities and strong default passwords. At the same time, the US Department of Energy is working with National Labs, among other partners, to determine the best path forward to classify smart meters and power inverters as meeting cybersecurity requirements.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is filing for a national trademark to put on all certified items, and it plans to create a QR code that links to a database of products. “We knew that we didn’t want to create a label that said this product had been certified and secured and then stayed secure forever,” a White House official told reporters. “The QR code will give you up-to-date information on the ongoing adherence to cyber security standards.” Companies such as Logitech, Best Buy, Samsung Electronics and Amazon have expressed their support and intentions to improve cybersecurity in their product offerings.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-us-government-wants-to-label-secure-iot-devices-with-a-cyber-trust-mark-114551964.html?src=rss
The Neopets Team has huge plans for the once-beloved virtual pet website in hopes that it could finally catch up with the times. In a lengthy post on Medium, the team has announced that a new Neopets website is coming on July 20th. It’ll still live on the same URL, but it’ll contain all the brand’s announcements and links to all its different games and products. The people behind the revamp are currently trying to resolve bugs and mobile browser compatibility issues. They’re also exploring the use of Ruffle, a Flash player emulator, to make old Flash-based Neopets games playable again.
The company that owned Neopets planned to create an animated show based on the once-beloved virtual pet website, but it failed to release the series before it shut down. In its announcement, the Neopets team has revealed that it’s under new leadership and has raised over $4 million in funding for its future projects. The team members definitely seem optimistic for the future of the brand.
In fact, the team doesn’t intend to stop with a revamped website. Apparently, it has decided to transition to a mobile app and to build a social life-simulation game called World of Neopets from the ground up. At the moment, the plan is to develop a game from the perspective of a Neopet. Players will be able to decorate their homes, explore lands in 3D and play mini-games with their friends, akin to titles like Animal Crossing. It sounds like the project is still in its very early stages, though, and it remains to be seen if it will materialize.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/neopets-is-fixing-its-flash-games-and-working-on-a-social-life-sim-mobile-app-121509727.html?src=rss
Canon’s mirrorless EOS R mirrorless camera family now sits at a healthy 11 members, but most of those to date have been high-end models priced at over $1,000. Recently, though, the company has been wooing budget-minded shoppers with models like the $480 R100 and the subject of this review – the $680, 24-megapixel R50.
The R50 uses a 24-megapixel APS-C sensor from the $980 EOS R10, so image quality should be on par. Otherwise, you can think of the R50 as an RF-mount version of the older M-mount M50 Mark II – but with updates like uncropped 4K that make it better for creators. At the same time, it’s even lighter and smaller, so it’s ideal for travel, street photography and more.
Where the $480 R100 is aimed at the bottom end of the mirrorless market, the $680 R50 is targeting users a bit more serious about photography and content creation. Does it have enough going for it to entice such users? Let’s take a look.
The EOS R50 is diminutive in both weight and size, weighing in at just 375 grams with a battery and memory card. With a similarly light and small lens, like the 18-45mm kit or the new 28mm pancake model, it can easily slip into a small bag. Travelers and tourists will often settle for a smartphone rather than lugging around a heavy camera, but the R50 removes that barrier.
There’s a price to be paid in terms of usability, however. It has a relatively small grip that’s effectively unusable with large lenses, though it does have a nice rubber material so it shouldn’t slip out of your hands.
The R50 is also lacking in controls compared to other models. It has just a single dial to change settings, meaning you have to hit the exposure compensation button to toggle between shutter speed and aperture in manual mode. But since the camera is designed for beginners used to smartphones, it’s essentially designed to be controlled by the touchscreen. That works well enough, but the main menu items are a little small and fiddly.
The 2.95-inch touchscreen is nice though, with a relatively high 1.6 million dot resolution. As with all other Canon EOS R cameras, it fully articulates, making it useful for selfies and vlogging. The electronic viewfinder is on the low end though, being relatively small and with a low 2.36-million dot resolution.
With the same small battery as the EOS R10, it gets just 370 shots on a charge – perhaps the camera’s biggest weakness. It is, however, a significant improvement over the 305 shots you get with the original M50 II. Other features include a mic but no headphone port, a single slow UHS-I card slot, USB-C and micro HDMI ports and yes, a built-in flash that’s perfect for its target market.
One significant problem with budget-oriented cameras is the lack of a good autofocus system – something that’s crucial for camera novices. Luckily, the R50’s hybrid phase-detect autofocus is very solid. A simplified version of the AF from high end cameras like the R3, it tenaciously follows subjects and captures sharp photos.
It can track eyes, faces and heads, along with animals including dogs, cats, birds and horses. It also tracks vehicles like race cars, bicycles, trains and airplanes. You can either let the system choose a subject, or tap the touchscreen to select it yourself.
Performance is a little less dependable for animals and vehicles than it is for people. And subject tracking will often drop the subject if you’re too far away from it. But overall, the AI system is dependable, particularly with people.
That serves it well for burst shooting, which is surprisingly fast for such a small camera. It can grab frames at up to 12 fps in mechanical shutter mode or 15 fps in silent electronic mode. However, you’re limited to 42 JPEG images in a burst and just 7 uncompressed RAWs, due to the small buffer and slow memory card slots.
On top of the usual manual and auto shooting modes, the R50 has creative settings for beginners including something called A+ Advanced Auto. If it detects a scene that’s tricky to shoot due to high contrast or darkness, it takes four shots and combines them into a single JPEG image, much like smartphones have done for years. The results can be pleasing, but may also look overprocessed.
As you’d expect, there’s no in-body stabilization, so you’ll need to rely on optically stabilized lenses for that – and there are only two of those in the APS-C lineup. Those only deliver 4 stops of shake reduction, but it’s enough to allow for sharp shots at 1/10th of a second or so. When using the silent shutter function, beware that some rolling shutter effect is present, but it’s reasonably well controlled.
As the R50 shares the R10’s 24-megapixel sensor, photo quality is nearly the same. For normal shooting, I saw color accurate photos with skin tones leaning on the warm side as is typical with Canon’s color science. JPEGs strike a good balance between sharpening and noise reduction, while RAW files allow for a decent amount of room to tweak images.
Low-light performance isn’t amazing, though. ISO 6400 is pretty much a hard limit, and even then you won’t have a lot of room to boost blacks without getting tons of noise. And you don’t have in-body stabilization to help at low shutter speeds.
Luckily, the R50 does have a built-in flash that can fill in if you’re lacking light. Just make sure to dial the illumination levels down in the settings to avoid blowing out your subject.
Where the EOS R10 offers cropped 4K 60p video, the R50 is limited to 4K 30p. Luckily, that is uncropped, however, and supersampled from 6K. You’re limited to 1080p for slow-mo, but luckily it can shoot up to 120fps, though 60fps is considerably sharper.
It’s the cheapest camera on the market by far with 10-bit mode via the HDR PQ mode, though the footage requires some tweaking for normal usage. A C-Log mode that might boost dynamic range isn’t available, but it’s not really necessary for its intended market segment.
For a relatively small and cheap camera, the R50 offers excellent video quality. The oversampled video is very sharp, and colors are accurate and human friendly. The fact that 4K video isn’t cropped is a huge plus for vloggers.
The autofocus is also outstanding for a camera in this price bracket, with tenacious tracking that keeps focus sharp in most circumstances. It also has a “close-up demo mode” that works much like Sony’s product showcase mode, quickly switching focus from your face to any object you bring up to the camera.
The digital stabilization is OK for walking and talking, as long as you try to move smoothly. All of these things make the R50 an excellent camera for vloggers and content creators ready to step up from a smartphone.
With the R50, Canon has found a good balance between power and affordability. Where the R10 has a lot of competition at its higher $980 price point, the $680 R50 has only a few rivals
Its main competition is Sony’s $700 ZV-E10, which is slightly better for vlogging but not as good for photography. Another option is the $700 Nikon Z30, which offers a similar feature set but lacks an EVF and has less reliable autofocus.
If those models are too much, Canon just released the $480 R100, the least expensive new mirrorless camera on the market. Content creators may lean toward the Sony ZV-E10, but if you’re looking for a solid hybrid camera that can do everything, Canon’s R50 is a great choice.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/canon-eos-r50-camera-review-123006238.html?src=rss
In a raw new video, Selena Gomez gave fans a look inside her songwriting process for her 2019 Justin Bieber-inspired hit, ‘Lose You To Love Me.’
In a raw new video, Selena Gomez gave fans a look inside her songwriting process for her 2019 Justin Bieber-inspired hit, ‘Lose You To Love Me.’
BJ Griffin is bringing his multitude of talents to the ‘AGT’ stage in the July 18 episode. Here’s what you need to know about this contestant who will surely be a standout.
BJ Griffin is bringing his multitude of talents to the ‘AGT’ stage in the July 18 episode. Here’s what you need to know about this contestant who will surely be a standout.
Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and other current and former members of Tesla’s board of directors will return $735 million to settle claims that they massively overpaid themselves, Reuters has reported. The deal wraps up a saga that started in 2020 stemming from a lawsuit filed by a police and firefighter retirement fund challenging stock options granted to Tesla’s board starting in 2017. Directors also agreed not to receive compensation for 2021, 2022 and 2023, and change the way compensation is calculated.
Tesla’s current board includes Elon Musk, his brother Kimbal, Fox News mogul James Murdoch, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and former Tesla CTO JB Straubel. The case is separate from a lawsuit filed by shareholders against a $56 billion compensation package awarded to CEO Elon Musk.
The Police and Fire Retirement System of the City of Detroit accused Tesla’s board of giving itself unfair and excessive compensation in the form of 11 million stock options between 2017 and 2020, saying it grossly exceeded norms for a corporate board. The $735 million settlement will be paid back to Tesla in what’s called a “derivative lawsuit” — the largest ever awarded by Delaware’s Court of Chancerty, according to Reuters.
Tesla argued that stock options were used to ensure Director’s incentives were aligned with investor goals. Tesla has yet to comment on the affair, but in court documents, said that it agreed to settle to eliminate the risk of future litigation.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is fighting a separate lawsuit to defend his $56 billion pay package. It was brought by shareholder Richard Tornette, who claimed that “the largest compensation grant in human history” was given to Musk, even though he didn’t focus entirely on Tesla. In 2020, he received the first of 12 $700 million payments as part of that package.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tesla-directors-agree-to-return-735-million-following-claims-they-were-massively-overpaid-105506056.html?src=rss
How many times have you posted to Threads this week? After becoming the fastest-growing social network of all time, new data from analytics firm SimilarWeb suggests engagement on Threads has substantially declined from initial highs.
Threads saw daily active users decline from 49 million on July 7th to 23.6 million on July 14th, SimilarWeb writes in a new report. That’s still… millions, of course. And in the United States, which reportedly saw the highest engagement, use plummeted from 21 minutes per day to just over six minutes in the same period. To couch these estimates, SimilarWeb’s analysis is based only on Android app use, but it tallies with other companies’ findings – and anecdotally, I’ve seen my close friends and Threads favorites post a lot less.
In a Threads post on Friday, Instagram’s top exec, Adam Mosseri, suggested the company wasn’t particularly focused on engagement metrics at this stage. (Of course he’d say that.)
He wrote, “Our focus right now is not engagement, which has been amazing, but getting past the initial peak and trough we see with every new product and building new features, dialing in performance and improving ranking.”
– Mat Smith
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One of the last traces of the early Xbox era is going away. Microsoft is replacing Xbox Live Gold with a Game Pass Core tier on September 14th. The $60 per year (or $10 per month) subscription is necessary to play most online multiplayer games on consoles, but the other benefits will soon be a little more constrained. The company is sunsetting Games with Gold, which offered a steady flow of titles for Live subscribers. Instead, you’ll get a base collection of more than 25 games with new entries two to three times per year. Most of them are first-party games, like Doom Eternal, Forza Horizon 4 and Halo 5, but there will be the occasional third-party project, like Among Us and Human Fall Flat.
A typo has apparently routed millions of US military emails — some containing highly sensitive information — to Mali. The problem stems from entering .ml instead of .mil for the receiving email address domain. According to the Financial Times, the one-letter mistake has exposed data like “diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers” — and much more. Although the misdirected emails have (so far) landed with a contractor tasked with managing Mali’s country domain, control of .ml will soon revert to Mali’s government, which has ties to Russia.
Lt. Cmdr Tim Gorman, speaking for the Pentagon, told the FT the Department of Defense “is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorized disclosures of controlled national security information or controlled unclassified information seriously.” He said emails sent from .mil to .ml addresses “are blocked before they leave the .mil domain, and the sender is notified that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients,” which suggests the misdirected emails may have come from US military workers’ personal accounts.
Computer monitors keep evolving rapidly, with new technology like OLED Flex, QD-OLED and built-in smart platforms in the last year alone. That’s on top of big improvements in things like color accuracy, size and resolution. As there are a lot of products in this market and a lot of features, it can be overwhelming, so we’ve researched the latest models for all kinds of markets, whether you’re a gamer, business user or content creator. Read on to find out which model is the best for you and your budget.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-the-threads-honeymoon-may-be-over-111545931.html?src=rss
E-bike company VanMoof has declared bankruptcy for all its Dutch entities and aims to find a buyer in the “next few weeks.” The announcement comes alongside the court of Amsterdam’s withdrawal of suspension of payment proceedings and appointment of two trustees to oversee a possible third-party sale of the assets to ideally keep VanMoof functioning. The news came through a mass email to Dutch employees that was subsequently shared on Reddit.
Bankruptcy proceedings have come to VanMoof less than two years after it claimed to be the “most funded e-bike company in the world” while announcing a $128 million investment. Yet, trouble has been brewing for some time, with it allegedly costing more money to sell and service its bikes than people were paying for them. Dutch financial outlet FD reported an €11.9 million ($13.4 million) gross margin loss for VanMoof in 2021, with €8 million ($9 million) spent on repairs and replacements. The company’s international entities, in places like the United States and Taiwan, aren’t part of the bankruptcy proceedings.
VanMoof told employees there are “no funds to pay the salaries” long-term and gave them a six-week notice period in which they are expected to work and will receive their final payments. Part of this time will entail returning bikes currently in service back to customers. VanMoof is really leaning in on its employees to keep working hard, stating: “It is necessary to stay strong and to continue with your required work. We hope everybody keeps up their best efforts so we can secure a good future for this beautiful company and brand together.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/vanmoof-e-bikes-has-declared-bankruptcy-094041635.html?src=rss
Tesla has launched a feature called “Charge on Solar” that allows owners to fill up their electric vehicles’ batteries using only excess solar energy. As TechCrunch notes, the automaker started testing the capability in May, but now it’s more widely available to Tesla customers in the US and in Canada. The number of people who can access the feature, however, likely remains pretty limited. To start with, it will only be accessible to those who have newer Teslas — 2021 and later — who also have a Powerwall. That’s the company’s battery system that stores solar energy harnessed by solar panels.
To enable Charge on Solar, users will need to fire up their Tesla app, choose the feature and then set it up. They’ll then see a slider with a sun icon within the feature’s settings that they can drag left or right to set the charge limit. The vehicle will charge itself from solar and the grid like usual before it reaches the sun slider, ensuring users have enough power to get where they need to. But after reaching the sun slider, the vehicle will only charge itself using excess solar energy.
The Powerwall will still prioritize storing backup energy or charging other appliances when it’s in Storm Watch mode before allocating any excess solar power for vehicle charging. Charge on Solar will truly only charge EVs using excess energy, which is also why owners worried about not having enough juice can set a time limit for it. Of course, they can also adjust their charge limit, or switch off Charge on Solar entirely if they want to be absolutely sure that their batteries will get fully charged.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/teslas-charge-on-solar-lets-powerwall-owners-send-excess-energy-to-their-ev-102018496.html?src=rss
