Elon Musk Admits Tesla Has Quality Problems

In an interview on Tuesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk sat down with one of Tesla’s harshest critics, Sandy Munro, and discussed the issues that plagued early Model 3s. CNN reports: In early 2018 engineering consultant Sandy Munro, who tears apart and reverse-engineers cars to assess quality, issued a brutal appraisal of the Model 3 citing “flaws that we would see on…

Biofuel-Powered Rocket Makes Historic Launch in Maine

Despite bad weather and early technical difficulties, employee-owned bluShift Aerospace “made history Sunday afternoon when it launched its prototype rocket, Stardust 1.0,” reports Maine’s Portland Press Herald:
The company became the first in Maine to launch a commercial rocket and the first in the world to launch a rocket using bio-derived fuel… It carried three payloads, two commercial and one, free of…

Is Misinformation on Nextdoor Impacting Local Politics?

Was Nextdoor’s impact on the world exemplified by a crucial funding referendum for the Christina School District of Newark, Delaware? Medium’s tech site OneZero reports: As the 2019 referendum approached, I saw Nextdoor posts claiming that the district was squandering money, that its administrators were corrupt, and that it already spent more money per student than certain other districts with higher…

MacOS Malware Used Run-Only AppleScripts To Avoid Detection For Five Years

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: For more than five years, macOS users have been the targets of a sneaky malware operation that used a clever trick to avoid detection and hijacked the hardware resources of infected users to mine cryptocurrency behind their backs. Named OSAMiner, the malware has been distributed in the wild since at least 2015 disguised…

Theia 456 is a stretched-out stream of sibling stars

A close look at the “stellar stream” known as Theia 456 finds it contains contains 468 stars born at the same time. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/theia-456-stellar-stream-468-stars-born-together…

Scraped Parler Data Is a Metadata Gold Mine

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Embattled social media platform Parler is offline after Apple, Google and Amazon pulled the plug on the site after the violent riot at the U.S. Capitol last week that left five people dead. But while the site is gone (for now), millions of posts published to the site since the riot are not….

Bitcoin Miners in Nordic Region Get a Boost From Cheap Power

The Nordic region once again has become a lucrative place to mine crypto-currencies, thanks to a plunge in electricity prices. From a report: The wettest weather in at least 20 years boosted production from hydro-electric plants, leaving Sweden and Norway with some of the lowest power prices in the world. The resulting glut in the most important raw material for making…

Scott Hanselman’s 2021 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

Scott Hanselman: Everyone collects utilities, and most folks have a list of a few that they feel are indispensable. Here’s mine. Each has a distinct purpose, and I probably touch each at least a few times a week. For me, “util” means utilitarian and it means don’t clutter my tray. If it saves me time, and seamlessly integrates with my life,…

Cable Companies Can No Longer ‘Rent’ You the Router You Already Own

Is your internet service provider charging you every month for the cable modem or router that you purchased with your own money? Or, perhaps, have you never bothered to buy those items because you couldn’t escape the fee? That fee is illegal as of yesterday. From a report: Last year, Congress passed a law that should have fixed this ridiculous loophole…

Venezuela’s Socialist Regime Is Mining Bitcoin In a Bunker To Generate Cash

The socialist regime once cracked down on bitcoin miners. Now it’s mining the digital asset itself. From a report: At a military base outside Caracas, Venezuela, state video footage shows officers in green fatigues cut a blue ribbon donned with a cluster of glossy balloons. Then, the men pry open the doors of a narrow, dimly-lit bunker. But the balloons weren’t…