getty-images – Page 2 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Dyson says it will spend $2.7 billion developing an electric car

Enlarge / James Dyson at the “James Dyson Award 2007” ceremony in Berlin. (Photo by Franziska Krug/Getty Images) (credit: Franziska Krug | Getty Images) To most people, the name Dyson conjures up images of vacuum cleaners and those powerful air dryers in public restrooms. Soon, you might be able to add “electric cars” to that list. In an e-mail to his staff, James Dyson revealed that the company has started work on a battery electric vehicle. According to the message , the project is expected to cost at least $2.7 billion (£2 billion), and, if all goes to plan, the EV should be launched in 2020. James Dyson just announced to @Dyson employees that we’ve begun work on a battery electric vehicle, due to launch in 2020. pic.twitter.com/yUZNvIsYIi — Dyson (@Dyson) September 26, 2017 The EV project is already 400-strong—that number includes some veterans of Aston Martin, Tesla, and BMW —and is “recruiting aggressively.” As Autocar notes, last year Dyson received a $21.4 million (£16 million) grant from the UK government. That is part of an ongoing strategy to provide funding to many of the country’s small-volume manufacturers and suppliers. Morgan, that most traditional of car makers, is one such recipient, as is another sports car outfit, Ariel . The BBC reports that half of the $2.7 billion investment will go toward developing the batteries for the EV, with the rest spent on the vehicle itself. Nor should we expect something cheap and cheerful, as Dyson is targeting the “tech end” of the market. According to Bloomberg, the car will use solid-state batteries , not lithium-ion. Recently, VW Group also committed to developing solid-state batteries for EVs. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Dyson says it will spend $2.7 billion developing an electric car

Feds in California are aggressively going after Silk Road, AlphaBay vendors

Enlarge / A stack of bitcoins sits among twisted copper wiring inside a communications room at an office in this arranged photograph in London on Tuesday, September 5, 2017. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images News ) Next month, a California drug dealer who recently pleaded guilty to selling on Silk Road, AlphaBay, and other sites is scheduled to be sentenced. According to federal authorities, David Ryan Burchard was one of the largest online merchants of marijuana and cocaine—he sold over $1.4 million worth of narcotics. Burchard was prosecuted in federal court in the Eastern District of California, which has quietly become a hub of cases against dealers from those notorious and now-shuttered Dark Web marketplaces. According to Lauren Horwood, a spokeswoman for the US Attorney’s Office in Sacramento, one of the primary hubs of this federal judicial district, there are currently 11 Silk Road and AlphaBay-related prosecutions underway. Four of the defendants have pleaded guilty, and, of those, two have already been sentenced, while the others’ cases are still ongoing. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Feds in California are aggressively going after Silk Road, AlphaBay vendors

MalwareTech’s legal defense fund bombarded with fraudulent donations

Enlarge / Marcus Hutchins. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images) Marcus Hutchins, the popular British security researcher, has a new legal headache beyond the criminal charges against him. Hutchins, AKA “MalwareTech,” pleaded not guilty two weeks ago to criminal charges in Wisconsin that accuse him of creating and distributing the Kronos malware that steals banking credentials. Now comes word that his legal defense fund was riddled with illicit donations. At least $150,000 in donations originated from stolen credit cards or fake credit card numbers, according to Tor Ekeland, a criminal defense attorney who is not on Hutchins’ defense team. Ekeland, who became popular in hacking circles for successfully defending Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, had started a legal fund on Hutchins’ behalf. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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MalwareTech’s legal defense fund bombarded with fraudulent donations

AlphaBay taken down by law enforcement across 3 countries, WSJ says

Enlarge / A bitcoin token stands in this arranged photograph in London, U.K., on Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2017. (credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images ) AlphaBay, one of the largest Tor-hidden drug websites that sprung up in the wake of Silk Road, has been shuttered for good after a series of law enforcement raids and arrests. The site mysteriously went dark earlier this month. Some users on Reddit suspected an “exit scam,” in which AlphaBay’s founders had shuttered the site and absconded with piles of bitcoins. According to the Wall Street Journal , which reported the news on Thursday, police in the United States, Canada, and Thailand collaborated to arrest Alexandre Cazes, who allegedly was the head of the online operation. The Canadian citizen was arrested on July 5 in Thailand, the same day that two raids on residences in Quebec, Canada, were executed. On Wednesday, Cazes was found dead, hanged in his Thai jail cell. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AlphaBay taken down by law enforcement across 3 countries, WSJ says

Struggling for survival, SoundCloud closes San Francisco, London offices

Enlarge / Alexander Ljung, CEO and co-founder of SoundCloud, seen here in 2013. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images) SoundCloud announced Thursday that it would be closing its San Francisco and London offices—firing 173 employees, or around 40 percent of its staff. The Berlin-based company has been struggling for years: it reported losses of over €51 million ($58.1 million) in 2015 —losses that have steadily grown since 2010. In January 2017 financial statements, the company said the losses “give rise to a material uncertainty about the Group’s ability to continue as a going concern.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Struggling for survival, SoundCloud closes San Francisco, London offices

Scammer who made 96 million robocalls should pay $120M fine, FCC says

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Besjunior ) The Federal Communications Commission today said that a scammer named Adrian Abramovich “apparently made 96 million spoofed robocalls during a three-month period” in order to trick people into buying vacation packages. The FCC proposed a fine of $120 million, but it will give the alleged perpetrator a chance to respond to the allegations before issuing a final decision. The robocalls appeared to come from local numbers, and they told recipients to “press 1” to hear about exclusive vacation deals from well-known hotel chains and travel businesses such as Marriott, Expedia, Hilton, and TripAdvisor, the FCC said. “Consumers who did press the button were then transferred to foreign call centers where live operators attempted to sell vacation packages often involving timeshares,” the FCC said. “The call centers were not affiliated with the well-known travel and hospitality companies mentioned in the recorded message.” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Scammer who made 96 million robocalls should pay $120M fine, FCC says

Red-light camera grace period goes from 0.1 to 0.3 seconds, Chicago to lose $17M

Enlarge (credit: Bruce Leighty / Getty Images News ) In the wake of recommendations that were part of a recent study of its red-light cameras , the Chicago Department of Transportation has agreed to immediately increase the so-called “grace period”—the time between when a traffic light turns red to when a ticket is automatically issued. Under the new policy, which was announced Monday, the grace period for Chicago’s red lights will move from 0.1 seconds to 0.3 seconds. This will bring the Windy City in line with other Americans metropolises, including New York City and Philadelphia. In a statement , the city agency said that this increase would “maintain the safety benefits of the program while ensuring the program’s fairness.” On Tuesday, the Chicago Tribune reported that the city would lose $17 million in revenue this year alone as a result of the expanded grace period. Michael Claffey, a CDOT spokesman, confirmed that figure to Ars. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple sold $4.2 billion of product in New Zealand, paid $0 local taxes

Enlarge / A customer in Apple’s store in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2010. A report by a major New Zealand newspaper found Apple hasn’t paid any taxes in New Zealand. (credit: Brendon O’Hagan / AFP / Getty Images ) The big technology story in New Zealand this weekend is about Apple’s tax bill. Or rather, the lack thereof. The electronics giant sold $4.2 billion (NZD) worth of products in New Zealand, but it didn’t pay any local tax at all. That’s according to a Saturday report from the New Zealand Herald . Apple did pay $37 million in income tax based on its New Zealand sales, but it paid that money to the Australian government, since that’s where the New Zealand operation is run from. The arrangement to send the tax on New Zealand profits to Australia has been in place since at least 2007. Experts confirmed the arrangement is legal under New Zealand law. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple sold $4.2 billion of product in New Zealand, paid $0 local taxes

5G specs announced: 20Gbps download, 1ms latency, 1M devices per square km

Enlarge (credit: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) The total download capacity for a single 5G cell must be at least 20Gbps, the International Telcommunication Union (ITU) has decided. In contrast, the peak data rate for current LTE cells is about 1Gbps. The incoming 5G standard must also support up to 1 million connected devices per square kilometre, and the standard will require carriers to have at least 100MHz of free spectrum, scaling up to 1GHz where feasible. These requirements come from the ITU’s draft report on the technical requirements for IMT-2020 (aka 5G) radio interfaces, which was published Thursday. The document is technically just a draft at this point, but that’s underselling its significance: it will likely be approved and finalised in November this year, at which point work begins in earnest on building 5G tech. I’ll pick out a few of the more interesting tidbits from the draft spec, but if you want to read the document yourself, don’t be scared: it’s surprisingly human-readable. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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5G specs announced: 20Gbps download, 1ms latency, 1M devices per square km

99.6% of new smartphones run iOS or Android; RIP Windows and Blackberry

Enlarge (credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) Remember those crazy days in 2011 and 12 when we thought that the mobile market might become a three-horse race between Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile, with Blackberry bringing up the rear? Well, I have bad if unsurprising news: by the end of last year, 99.6 percent of all new smartphones ran either Android or iOS—a return to the status quo that Ars first wrote about way back in 2009 . According to the latest figures from Gartner , both Android and iOS expanded their share of the market in 2016, while sales of Windows and Blackberry continued their free fall to the base of the cliff. Gartner, a research company that derives its figures from a range of sources, says that just 1.1 million Windows smartphones were sold in Q4 2016, down from 4.4 million in Q4 2015. Similarly, Blackberry device sales fell from 906,000 to 208,000. The action at the top of the sales table, between Apple and Samsung, was a little more exciting. For the first time since Q4 2014 Apple has apparently retaken pole position from Samsung, with 77 million iPhones shifted last quarter versus 76.8 million units for the Korean chaebol. Samsung still shipped the most smartphones over the course of 2016, but its share of the market decreased from 22.5 percent to 20.5. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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99.6% of new smartphones run iOS or Android; RIP Windows and Blackberry