Electricity from sunlight costs less, a hopeful sign for developing nations building out their power grids. From a report: In a dusty northwest India desert dotted with cows and the occasional camel, a solar-power plant is producing some of the world’s cheapest energy. Built in 2018 by India’s Acme Solar Holdings, it can generate 200 megawatts of electricity, enough to power…
Tag: trackers
Why Is ‘Birds of Prey’ Suffering at the Box Office?
The Warner Brothers/DC film Birds of Prey “is proving not to be the February box office success industry observers had hoped,” according to The Wrap: After grossing $13 million on Friday from 4,236 screens, the film is now estimated to earn an opening weekend of $34 million, which would be the lowest start for a DC Comics adaptation since the $5.3…
Albatrosses Outfitted With GPS Trackers Detect Illegal Fishing Vessels
schwit1 shares a report from the Smithsonian: Capable of following fishing boats into remote regions out of reach of monitoring machines like ships, aircraft and even certain satellites, these feathered crimefighters could offer a convenient and cost-effective way to keep tabs on foul play at sea — and may even help gather crucial conservation data along the way. […] On top…
Annual Global PC Shipments Grow For the First Time in 8 Years
Annual global PC shipments rose for the first time in eight years, according to data released by industry tracking firms late Monday. New submitter mimil writes: International Data Group said late Monday that global PC shipments rose 2.7% year-over-year to 266.7 million units, the first annual gain since 2011, when PC shipments rose 1.7%. “This past year was a wild one…
‘Why I Finally Switched from Chrome to Firefox – and You Should Too’
In 2018 an associate technology editor at Fast Company’s Co.Design wrote an article titled “Why I’m switching from Chrome to Firefox and you should too.” Today shanen shared a similar article from Digital Trends. Their writer announces that after years of experimenting with both browsers, they’ve also finally switched from Chrome to Mozilla Firefox — “and you should too.” The biggest…
Watch Santa Travel Across 3D Globe Via NORAD’s Santa Tracker
dryriver writes: Santa — flying over Australia right now — is flying across the globe and dropping gifts along the way. Using NORAD’s Santa Tracker, we can watch him flying over a Google Earth-style 3D satellite map in realtime. “NORAD’s radars detected Saint Nick’s sleigh departing the North Pole just after 4 a.m. ET on Tuesday morning, shortly after he reviewed…
Mozilla’s Annual Buyer’s Guide Rates Amazon and Google Security Cameras ‘Very Creepy’
“Be Smart. Shop Safe,” warns Mozilla’s annual buyer’s guide for secure connected products. Based on their conversations with developers and dozens of privacy experts, they’ve awarded smiley faces with different expressions to rate products from “Not Creepy” up to “Super Creepy”. “While the variety of smart devices on offer is rapidly increasing, so are the number of products that pay no…
New Tracking Prevention in Microsoft’s Edge Will Hit Google the Hardest
Microsoft’s Edge browser is built on the same open source code as Google Chrome. But Ed Bott, writing for ZDNet, noticed something interesting: On January 15, 2020, Microsoft is scheduled to roll out a completely revamped Edge browser to the general public. That browser, which is available for beta testing now on all supported versions of Windows and MacOS, includes a…
Antivirus Vendors and Non-Profits Join To Form ‘Coalition Against Stalkerware’
Ten organizations today announced the creation of the Coalition Against Stalkerware, the first global initiative of its kind, with the sole purpose of fighting against stalkerware. From a report: Also known as spouseware, stalkerware is a smaller category of the spyware class. Stalkerware refers to apps that abusive partners install on the devices of their loved ones without their knowledge or…
Buying Fitbit Won’t Save Google’s Failing Wear OS
David Ruddock of AndroidPolice technology blog tries to make sense of last week’s $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit by Google. He argues that Fitbit’s offerings — hardware, software, engineering talent, or even patent wall — can’t save Google’s wearable operating system Wear OS. From his column: Hardware is what Google is after, with a blog post cleatly stating its acquisition of…