Technology News

Alphabet is spinning out laser-based Internet company Taara from its “moonshot” incubator, hoping to turbocharge the start-up that provides high-bandwidth services to hard-to-reach areas in competition with Elon Musk’s Starlink network of satellites.

Taara is the latest project to spring from X—Alphabet’s experimental hub that produced AI lab Google Brain and Waymo’s self-driving cars—and has its origins in a concept called Loon. That envisaged shooting beams of light between thousands of balloons floating on the edge of space to provide phone and Internet services across remote areas.

Loon was wound up in 2021 due to the political and regulatory hurdles to flying the balloons and the difficulty of servicing the 20-mile-high equipment. However, its lasers found a second life on Taara’s towers under engineer Mahesh Krishnaswamy.

Read full article

Comments

Bitwarden is open source and secure, has support for passkeys, and costs just $10 per year.

Never miss a delivery. These WIRED-tested picks will help you keep tabs on your front door from anywhere.

Snuggle up under our favorite comforters for every season and every budget.

Cadillac provided flights from Los Angeles to San Fransisco and accommodation so Ars could drive the Escalade IQ. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

SAN FRANCISCO—Newsflash: The new electric Cadillac Escalade IQ weighs over 9,000 lbs, or a fair amount more than 4,000 kilograms. For context, that figure works out to almost exactly half again as much as the 682 hp (509 kW) Escalade V that comes equipped with a barking-mad 6.2 L supercharged V8. Yet the latest and supposedly greatest from Cadillac needed to weigh so very much to achieve a class-leading range target of 460 miles (740 km), thanks to a 205 kWh battery pack.

The Escalade IQ shares a modular General Motors (formerly Ultium) chassis and battery pack with the gargantuan Hummer EV, and even more hardware with the Silverado and Sierra pickup truck siblings. As opposed to trying to attract rugged work truck and off-roading cred, though, for Cadillac that kind of range figure seemed necessary to appeal to a "no compromise" lifestyle that Escalade buyers might well expect while considering a switch to fully electric power.

And the new IQ certainly puts down plenty of instantaneously available grunt, and despite its mass, it can punch out a 0–60 time in under five seconds with the Velocity Max button pushed, thanks to dual motors rated at 750 hp (560 kW) and 786 lb-ft (1,065 Nm).

Read full article

Comments

Learn more about Google Research’s FireSat project, built to detect small wildfires.Learn more about Google Research’s FireSat project, built to detect small wildfires.

Learn more about Google Research’s FireSat project, built to detect small wildfires.Learn more about Google Research’s FireSat project, built to detect small wildfires.

Learn how our AI Collaboratives for wildfires and food security are taking a new funding approach to help people around the world.Learn how our AI Collaboratives for wildfires and food security are taking a new funding approach to help people around the world.

The first satellite for the FireSat constellation officially made contact with Earth. This satellite is the first of more than 50 in a first-of-its-kind constellation de…

After testing nearly two dozen mattresses, I have some tips on how you can find the best mattress for you, from firmness and materials to deciphering warranties.

Back when EV enthusiasm was higher, there were fits and starts of vehicle-to-home concepts and products. If EVs and their ginormous batteries are expensive, resource-intensive purchases, the thinking went, maybe we should get something more out of them than just groceries and school pick-ups. Maybe we could find other things for that huge battery to do during the 95 percent of time it spends parked in or near our homes.

An EV powering your whole home, or even pushing power back to the grid, is something higher-end EVs might do at some point with some utilities. I have a Chevy Bolt, an EV that does not have even a three-prong 110 V plug on it, let alone power-your-home potential. If I wanted to keep the essentials running during an outage, it seemed like I needed to buy a fuel-based generator—or one of those big portable power stations.

Or so I thought, until I came across inverter kits. Inverters take the direct current available from your vehicle's 12V battery—the lead-acid brick inside almost every car—and turns it into alternating current suitable for standard plugs. Inverters designed for car batteries have been around a long time, opening up both novel and emergency uses. The catch is that you have to start the car's gas engine often enough to keep the battery charged.

Read full article

Comments

President Trump’s anti-DEI playbook doesn’t just affect the makeup of America’s workplaces. It also impacts cultural production. Just ask Netflix’s former head of diversity.

Thousands of US Department of Agriculture employees, including food inspectors and disease-sniffing-dog trainers, remain out of work, leaving food to rot in ports and pests to proliferate.

Thousands of US Department of Agriculture employees, including food inspectors and disease-sniffing-dog trainers, remain out of work, leaving food to rot in ports and pests to proliferate.

The electric return of Renault’s iconic sports car has just taken a step closer to reality—and we got our first glimpse of it.

Open source software used by more than 23,000 organizations, some of them in large enterprises, was compromised with credential-stealing code after attackers gained unauthorized access to a maintainer account, in the latest open source supply-chain attack to roil the Internet.

The corrupted package, tj-actions/changed-files, is part of tj-actions, a collection of files that's used by more than 23,000 organizations. Tj-actions is one of many GitHub Actions, a form of platform for streamlining software available on the open source developer platform. Actions are a core means of implementing what's known as CI/CD, short for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (or Continuous Delivery).

Scraping server memory at scale

On Friday or earlier, the source code for all versions of tj-actions/changed-files received unauthorized updates that changed the "tags" developers use to reference specific code versions. The tags pointed to a publicly available file that copies the internal memory of severs running it, searches for credentials, and writes them to a log. In the aftermath, many publicly accessible repositories running tj-actions ended up displaying their most sensitive credentials in logs anyone could view.

Read full article

Comments

We’ve rounded up our favorite speakers that let you talk to Alexa, from the best Echo speakers to third-party options like the Sonos Era.

Keep your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods topped up with these WIRED-tested docking systems.

Building a new computer or looking to upgrade your memory? Here are our favorite options right now.

Attention Apple users: Rain Design makes the best minimal, fuss-free stands for Macbooks, iMacs, iPads, and iPhones.