Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and musician Jay-Z have pledged 500 bitcoin (around $23.3 million) toward ₿trust, an endowment to fund bitcoin development, Dorsey announced on Twitter today. The CEO said development will initially be focused on teams in Africa and India, but that he and Jay-Z plan to give “zero direction” to the plans. ₿trust is currently looking for three board members, with an application form noting its mission is to “make bitcoin the internet’s currency.”
Africa and India are two interesting markets in which to focus bitcoin development. As TechCrunch notes, cryptocurrencies have grown increasingly popular throughout the African continent for making cross-border transactions cheaper, and in some cases being resistant to government control. Nigeria is reportedly second only to the US in terms of the amount of bitcoin traded in the country in the last five years.
JAY-Z/@S_C_ and I are giving 500 BTC to a new endowment named ₿trust to fund #Bitcoin development, initially focused on teams in Africa & India. It‘ll be set up as a blind irrevocable trust, taking zero direction from us. We need 3 board members to start: https://t.co/L4mRBryMJe
— jack (@jack) February 12, 2021
Meanwhile, the Indian government is currently looking to ban private cryptocurrencies in the country, Bloomberg reports, while also investigating the creation of an official digital currency. TechCrunch notes that cryptocurrency development in the country has been slow, despite its strengths in software development.
Dorsey has been a longtime supporter of cryptocurrency, and this has been reflected in the actions of his companies. His payments platform company Square has accepted bitcoin as a form of payment since 2014 and announced it had purchased $50 million in bitcoin last year as an investment in cryptocurrency.
At the time, Square said it believed bitcoin could be the currency of the future and that cryptocurrency is an “instrument of economic empowerment.” Earlier this week, Twitter’s chief financial officer said the company was looking into how it might pay its employees or vendors in bitcoin in the future.
₿trust is the second major bitcoin investment announced this week. On Monday, Tesla said it had invested $1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency and was hoping to take it as a payment method in the near future.
One of the most frustrating tasks for many of us these days is finding how and where to get an appointment for a COVID-19 vaccination. It can be a real exercise in exasperation: the websites are often difficult to navigate and prone to frequent crashes; in addition, after finding an open appointment slot and filling out multiple pages of questions, you are often told that the opening has disappeared.
In view of all this, we’ve tried to gather as much helpful information as we can about ways to research and snag vaccination appointments for yourself and others. We’ll update this as more information presents itself.
Research the vaccination qualifications in your state
To begin with, it’s a good idea to try to pin down if you or the person you are assisting is currently qualified for the COVID-19 vaccine. Find the vaccine information site (or sites) that is being run by your state and / or city. This will also help you figure out when you might be qualified if you aren’t already. If you can’t find it via a quick search, NBC News has created a simple website that lets you find out what the current situation is in your specific state. Prescription company GoodRx offers similar information.
Find all the places that might offer appointments
There are, fortunately or unfortunately, many different sites where you can go to find out if you can get an appointment to be vaccinated.
For example, here in New York City, we’ve had to navigate separate sites run by the city and the state. Various hospital systems also have their own sites, as do pharmacies such as Walgreens and CVS, which have recently begun offering appointments for vaccinations. It’s a lot to check — and it can be enormously confusing.
As a result, your first step is probably to check your state’s government health website (searching your state name and “COVID vaccine” will probably do it). If you’re an urban dweller, check for your city’s information site as well.
While most personal physicians do not have access to vaccines, your doctor may be able to tell you some of the places to check. Other resources include your local hospital system, your union (especially if your employment qualifies you for a vaccination), and, of course, friends and colleagues, many of whom have probably been doing their own searches.
As you find resources and sites, make sure to bookmark them. I keep a folder on my bookmarks bar called “COVID” — you may want to name yours something more cheerful.
Looking for an available vaccine appointment can be frustrating, but persistence can pay off.
Have all your information ready
Many of us who have tried to register for vaccination appointments have gone through the experience of filling out several screens of information only to find that, by the time we got to the end, the appointment was gone. So it’s a good idea to have all your data — such as your name, age, address, insurance info, and the registration ID / password for the site — immediately at hand. The faster you can go through the registration process, the more likely you are to actually get an appointment.
Verge colleague Cory Zapatka says that he highly recommends using a password manager if you have one. He created accounts with all the vaccination sites in his area, even if they didn’t have appointments available at the time, so that if / when the time came, he could just auto-fill and get in right away.
And if you do get an appointment, make sure you have the appropriate paperwork already handy — especially since available appointments can be last minute. Necessary paperwork could include proof of employment, proof of age, or proof of a qualifying condition. Since the last one may require a doctor’s note or other record, it’s a good idea to call your doctor now — or if you’ve got access to a doctor’s or hospital website, that may offer you access to the proof you need.
One more thing: check to see if you’ve gotten all the email that has been sent to you by your vaccine supplier. At least one staff member of The Verge found a necessary consent form hiding in her spam folder.
Watch for news of upcoming vaccination sites
Keep an eye on the news. More and more sites and hubs are being added as the US gears up for a stronger push. If you see a news item saying that a hub is about to open, find the site for the hub and keep checking — once it does open, the available slots will probably go quickly.
One thing that sometimes helps is to look for patterns in the appearance of new appointments. For example, when I heard that the pharmacy chain Walgreens was going to begin giving out vaccines in my area, I spent a couple of days going onto the site, and suddenly realized that there was a pattern: the company was only scheduling appointments two to four days in advance and was adding new appointments each day just after midnight. Once I understood the pattern, I was able to get appointments for a couple of friends, and let others know about it as well. (Note: since vaccine supplies and scheduling methods can change on a dime, this particular strategy may no longer work by the time you read this.)
Sites like the NYC Vaccine List can help by gathering together available resources in one place.
Look for help online
There are a number of online resources popping up headed by developers and other technology-savvy folks who have taken the time and effort to try to make sense of this confusion. (Thanks to The Washington Post and The New York Times for some of these listings.)
A NYC site called TurboVax pulls “the latest appointments from 43 city and state-run vaccine sites in the NYC area” and puts them on Twitter. Followers who set their Twitter notifications for @turbovax can quickly find out about newly opened appointment slots.
Another called NYC Vaccine List uses a combination of scripts and checks by volunteers to scour various sites for openings.
In California, VaccinateCA checks pharmacies and hospitals for information about open appointments.
Vaccinate NJ also uses volunteers to try to help state residents find vaccine opportunities.
Covid 19 Vaccine TX is a crowdsourced resource for registering with local counties and finding locations where vaccines may be available.
The MA Covid Vaccine Appointments site offers lists of and links to sites with available appointments
By the way, if you’re a developer and / or coder who wants to help, check out US Digital Response, an independent organization which, according to its website, “connects experienced, pro-bono technologists with local government and non-profit organizations responding to crisis.”
If you are able, it’s a good idea to reach out and help those who may not be able to get appointments on their own.Photo by Davide Pischettola / NurPhoto via Getty Images
If you can, help others
One of the worst things about the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines is that those who need it the most are often the least likely to be able to navigate the technology required to get an appointment: older people, differently abled people, or those who don’t have or can’t afford computers and / or internet connections.
If you have the time and talent, reach out to anyone you know who may not be able to get an appointment on their own. This could be as simple as finding phone numbers they can call to try to schedule an appointment, going online and getting an appointment for them, or helping them get to and from the vaccination site.
You could also see if there are any groups that are organizing help. The West Side Rag, for example, reports that a group of New Yorkers created the Vaccine Appointment Assistance Team (VAAT) to help their non-technically-savvy neighbors navigate the process. (At the time this was written, because of low supplies of vaccine, VAAT had temporarily suspended their services.)
Look for leftover vaccine
While the vaccines can last for six months while they’re kept frozen, once thawed and refrigerated, the Pfizer vaccine will last five days while the Moderna vaccine will last for 30 days. As a result, when people don’t show up for their appointments, some centers will offer vaccinations to those who may not immediately qualify rather than waste vaccines that would otherwise be rendered unusable.
However, running to a nearby pharmacy or vaccine hub in the hit-and-miss hopes that there will be some shots waiting at the end of the day isn’t the most effective way to be vaccinated. (Besides, getting hypothermia while waiting in the cold isn’t going to help.) At least one group is trying to ameliorate the situation: a pilot project called Vaccination Standby says that it will monitor providers around the US for word of extra doses and text notifications to those whose zip codes are near the site.
There are also local organizations that are offering standby lists. For example, Buncombe County in North Carolina has a vaccination waitlist and standby list, as does the Monroe County Health Department in Indiana. Check your local government site to see if there’s one in your area.
Be persistent!
Yes, it’s frustrating as hell, but keep at it. If a website crashes, try again. If you’re dropped from a phone call, call again (and have a game, video, or book ready to keep yourself occupied while you’re on hold). If you can’t find anything during working hours, try late at night or very early in the morning.
Persistence may be one of the most important aspects to getting an appointment for a COVID-19 vaccination. You may be tempted to give up, especially after hitting the “no appointments available” wall time and time again. But until vaccine production is ramped up enough to cover more of our population, and until distribution becomes more organized and easier to manage, simple stubbornness may be your best tool.
And hopefully this article, and all the advice it contains, will soon be unnecessary.
Astronomers discovered the stars closest to our Solar System more than 100 years ago. There’s the three-star Alpha Centauri system about four light-years away and Barnard’s star about six light-years out.
But our celestial neck of the woods might be more crowded than we ever thought possible. In the past 25 years, astronomers have been identifying new objects that are also just a few light-years away: mysterious worlds known as brown dwarfs. Too large to be a planet but too small to become a star, brown dwarfs put out very little visible light, yet they glow brightly in the infrared. New infrared-enabled telescopes can image brown dwarfs effectively and have led to a raft of new discoveries — including a pair of dwarfs just past Barnard’s star. This pair is now the third-closest known system to ours.
There are untold thousands of unidentified brown dwarfs hiding in telescope imagery right now, but they aren’t exactly easy to pick up: they register as tiny smudges against a sea of other stars, galaxies, and photographic aberrations. It takes a careful human eye to spot them, so researchers interested in brown dwarf discovery find themselves in a bind: how to manually sift through millions of images of the night sky?
A few years back, a group of astronomers came up with a clever solution to that problem: a worldwide citizen-science effort that allows anyone with an internet connection to search through telescope imagery for new worlds. The project leverages an age-old trick to tease movement out of celestial imagery, and it’s allowed volunteers to locate thousands of new brown dwarfs. The effort may unearth worlds even closer to our Solar System than Alpha Centauri and could even turn up the Bigfoot of our Solar System: a hypothesized Planet 9.
Check out the video above to see how world-hunting works, and try it out for yourself on the project website.
By now, you’ve probably heard the theoretically scary story of how hackers managed to infiltrate the computer systems at a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida and remotely control the chemical levels — but it turns out that description gives the hackers far, far too much credit.
The reality? The water treatment plant itself left off-the-shelf remote control software on these critical computers — and apparently never, ever bothered to change the password.
An official cybersecurity advisory about the incident from the state of Massachusetts (via Ars Technica) explains that the SCADA control system was accessed via TeamViewer, the kind of remote desktop application an IT administrator might roll out to remotely troubleshoot computers — not something you’d generally want hooked up to a critical system. More importantly, and here I will just quote the Massachusetts report verbatim:
Further, all computers shared the same password for remote access and appeared to be connected directly to the Internet without any type of firewall protection installed.
Yes, just like Florida’s Department of Health, this Florida water treatment plant apparently didn’t bother to issue individual passwords for software that could give anyone complete access to any of their computers and their water treatment system.
In other words, any employee could adjust the entire town’s water supply on a whim from anywhere in the world. Which is probably what happened: former US cybersecurity czar Christopher Krebs testified earlier today that it was “very likely” an insider, possibly a disgruntled employee. Someone who would already have access, which wouldn’t make this much of a “hack” at all.
In later remarks, @C_C_Krebs clarifies: “It’s possible that this was an insider or a disgruntled employee. It’s also possible that it’s a foreign actor.” … But “we should not jump to a conclusion that it’s a sophisticated” adversary.
— Ellen Nakashima (@nakashimae) February 10, 2021
It’s not like the water treatment plant was even using that software, by the way: Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said the plant had actually stopped using TeamViewer six months ago, according to The Wall Street Journal.
It should probably go without saying that you shouldn’t leave critical public infrastructure easily accessible from anywhere in the world, but the FBI is saying it anyhow, according to ZDNet; the agency sent out an alert today warning against TeamViewer, bad passwords and Windows 7, which Microsoft no longer supports with security updates but the water treatment plant still had installed.
Sadly, reports at Vice and Cyberscoopsuggest that lax security (including TeamViewer specifically) and aging infrastructure are all too common at small public utilities, which may not have the budget, expertise or even the ability to control their own security systems, which are often farmed out to third parties.
The good news is that a plant operator quickly noticed the intrusion, reversed it, and it seems no one was harmed.
Security researcher Alex Birsan has found a security vulnerability that allowed him to run code on servers owned by Apple, Microsoft, PayPal, and over 30 other companies (via Bleeping Computer). The exploit is also deviously simple, and it’s something that many large software developers will have to figure out how to protect themselves from.
The exploit takes advantage of a relatively simple trick: replacing private packages with public ones. When companies are building programs, they often use open-source code written by other people, so they’re not spending time and resources solving a problem that’s already solved. For example, I’ve worked on websites that had to convert text files to webpages in real time. Instead of writing code to do it ourselves, my team found a program that did that and built it into our site.
These publicly available programs can be found on repositories like npm for NodeJS, PyPi for Python, and RubyGems for Ruby. It is worth noting that Birsan found those repositories could be used to carry out this attack, but it’s not limited to just the three.
In addition to these public packages, companies will often build their own private ones, which they don’t upload, but instead distribute among their own developers. This is where Birsan found the exploit. He discovered if he could find the names of the private packages used by companies (a task that turned out to be very easy in most cases), he could upload his own code to one of the public repositories with the same name, and the companies’ automated systems would use his code instead. Not only would they download his package instead of the correct one, but they would also run the code inside it.
To explain this with an example, imagine you had a Word document on your computer, but when you went to open it, your computer said, “Hey, there’s another Word document on the internet with the same name. I’ll open that one instead.” Now imagine the Word document could then automatically make changes to your computer. It’s not a great situation.
It seems like the companies agreed that the problem was serious. In his Medium post, Birsan wrote that “the majority of awarded bug bounties were set at the maximum amount allowed by each program’s policy, and sometimes even higher.” For those unfamiliar, bug bounties are cash rewards companies pay out to people who find serious bugs. The more severe the bug, the more money they’ll pay.
According to Birsan, most of the companies he contacted about the exploit were able to quickly patch their systems so they were no longer vulnerable. Microsoft has even put together a white paper explaining how system administrators can protect their companies from these kinds of attacks, but it’s frankly astonishing that it took this long for someone to figure out that these massive companies were vulnerable to this sort of attack. Thankfully, this isn’t the type of story that ends with you having to immediately update every device in your house, but it seems like it will be a long week for system administrators who now have to change the way their company uses public code.
Twitter has refused an order from the Indian government to block certain Twitter accounts, including ones from politicians, activists, and journalists that were critical of the government’s response to a protest carried out in the country’s capital in January.
In a blog post on Wednesday, Twitter explained that, while it has started blocking some accounts, it has “not taken any action on accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and politicians” because it believes doing so would “violate their fundamental right to free expression under Indian law.”
Starting at the beginning of February, the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has sent orders to Twitter to block a number of accounts and hashtags connected to mass protests that have gripped the country. Many of the accounts were critical of the Indian government and its response to the protests, including the official Twitter account of a prominent magazine The Caravan. According to BuzzFeed News, the government ordered the accounts suspended because they were “spreading misinformation about protests.”
Twitter initially complied with the orders,a decision that drew significant criticism from civil rights groups. Some activists called the action censorship, while others accused of Twitter bowing to government overreach.
The protests have been building since November, and have resulted in violence, deaths, and internet blackouts in parts of the country’s capital region. Tens of thousands of farmers have gone on strike over the course of the protests, according to the BBC. The farmers are concerned about changes to agricultural laws in India that they fear could cut their income. Farming policy is a hugely important issue in India. According to CNN, 58 percent of the people in the country make their money primarily through agriculture.
Twitter’s justification for unblocking the accounts, in opposition to government orders, is it believes keeping them inaccessible “would violate their fundamental right to free expression under Indian law.” In its blog post, Twitter says it “do[es] not believe that the actions [it has] directed to take are consistent with Indian law,” and that unblocking the accounts is consistent “with [its] principles of defending protected speech and freedom of expression.”
Weber is expanding its line of internet-connected grills to encompass its popular gas models, including the company’s entry-level Spirt lineup, offering Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity for tracking temperature and an integrated digital display.
Connected grilling isn’t a new concept for Weber: the company has offered a line of iGrill meat thermometers for years as add-ons for its existing grills, and last year, it debuted its second-generation Weber Connect smart grilling hub accessory, which offers a newer and more advanced Weber Connect app. It has also offered Weber Connect smart grilling features on its SmokeFire pellet smoker (in a similar manner to Trager’s WiFIRE smokers).
Including smart technology to control things like temperature or monitor doneness makes a bit more sense for a pellet smoker, though — which, by the very nature of its cooking technique, demands longer cook times at lower temperatures. The ability to keep an eye on how a brisket is doing or tweak temperature from inside the house are useful additions for a pellet smoker. A gas grill, with its far less finicky burners, seems like a less natural fit.
All that said, the Weber Connect additions do seem fun. Wi-Fi-connected temperature probes are a helpful tool for grilling, especially for newer chefs or when working with larger steaks or roasts. The app also promises step-by-step grilling guides and recipes, complete with countdown timers, instructions on setting the grill’s temperature for each stage of cooking, and even notifications for things like flipping burgers.
Perhaps most usefully, the propane models of the smart grills can monitor how much gas is left in the tank and notify you through the app when it’s getting low.
You’ll still have to do the actual grilling, though: despite Weber’s boasts about how its new Smart Series grills bring “70 years of Weber know-how, technique, and expertise right to a griller’s fingertips through the Weber Connect cook programs and artificial intelligence,” the algorithms aren’t cooking a steak for you.
The new Weber Connect grills are split across the company’s Genesis lineup with the Genesis EX-315 ($1,029), EX-335 ($1,239), and SX-335 ($1,349) models, which offer more premium features like a warming rack and integrated LED lights for grilling at night. The company is also offering a smaller smart grill with the $849 Spirit SX-315, at the high end of its entry-level Spirit line, which cuts down on the grilling space (but at a lower price). You are paying a premium for those integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth smarts, though: the “regular” version of the Spirit SX-315, for example, costs $599.
The new Weber Connect smart grill lineup is set to launch later this spring.
SpaceX started accepting preorders for its Starlink satellite internet service late on Monday, as the company broadens its beta program to “a limited number of users per coverage area.” Members of the public can now enter their home address and put down $99 for an antenna-router bundle that Starlink’s website says will ship “on a first-come, first-served basis,” depending on location.
The $99 deposits are fully refundable and “may take 6 months or more to fulfill,” the website says. Some locations entered on the website return a notice saying coverage won’t be available until “mid to late 2021,” while some say 2022. The full Starlink kit costs $499 and includes a mountable pizza-sized dish antenna, Wi-Fi router, and power supply.
The expansion comes as SpaceX reports a user base of roughly 10,000 from the invite-only “Better Than Nothing” beta period it started last year and a mix of ongoing pilot partnerships with local governments around the United States. SpaceX also has regulatory approval to operate in Canada and the UK, with plans to expand globally. The company has launched over 1,000 satellites into low-Earth orbit and is racing to make Starlink a profitable consumer-focused business line, and its revenue would help fund SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Mars rocket Starship.
The Starlink deposit idea follows a familiar model from Musk’s Tesla playbook: the electric car company has invited potential customers to preorder cars that aren’t fully available yet, collecting cash from modest, refundable down payments to help shore up the company’s balance sheet. The fine print on Starlink’s website says placing a deposit “does not guarantee that the Starlink Kit and Services will be available to you.” It books potential customers a priority spot for whenever Starlink becomes available in their region.
SpaceX needs to pass through a deep chasm of negative cash flow over the next year or so to make Starlink financially viable. Every new satellite constellation in history has gone bankrupt. We hope to be the first that does not.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2021
As the preorder update went live on Monday, Musk tweeted, “once we can predict cash flow reasonably well, Starlink will IPO” — floating the same prospect of splitting off and going public that SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell told a crowd of investors last year.
“SpaceX needs to pass through a deep chasm of negative cash flow over the next year or so to make Starlink financially viable,” Musk tweeted Monday, responding to a Twitter user questioning Starlink’s price. “Every new satellite constellation in history has gone bankrupt. We hope to be the first that does not.”
SpaceX’s Starlink deployment is far ahead of rival networks planned by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Kuiper project and Canadian telecoms operator Telesat. Telesat’s Lightspeed constellation will launch in 2023, with plans to offer broadband internet to a key government and corporate customer base. Bezos’ Kuiper constellation, a proposed network of over 3,000 satellites that have yet to reach space, is expected to compete with SpaceX for both consumer and government customers.
Both Musk and Bezos have pledged to invest $10 billion into their respective satellite constellations, cementing a head-to-head competition for a slice of the lucrative telecoms market. Officials with Starlink, Kuiper, and other networks have been sparring for months in regulatory filings over spectrum rights and orbital safety issues, with Musk’s ire at Bezos’ network spilling out in the open last month.
Musk hasn’t shied away from admitting his Starlink business faces steep challenges ahead. In 2020, after Shotwell first floated the IPO plans, Musk pushed back on questions about the timing of a public filing, saying SpaceX is “thinking about that zero,” and “we need to make the thing work.” On Monday, Musk tweeted that “Starlink is a staggeringly difficult technical & economic endeavor.”
“However, if we don’t fail, the cost to end users will improve every year,” he said.
Google launched a VPN for its Google Fi cell service in beta back in November 2018, allowing Fi subscribers to route their phone’s internet traffic through an encrypted connection to help protect security and privacy. Until now, though, it has only been available for Android users, but that will change soon. Google plans to roll out the Fi VPN to Fi subscribers on iPhones beginning this spring, the company announced on Tuesday.
In addition, Google says it’s starting to roll out a new privacy and security hub for Fi users on Android. “The hub makes it easy for you to learn more about privacy and security features on Fi, and manage them with just one tap,” according to Google. “This includes the Fi VPN and other tools that protect your personal information and put you in control of who can reach you.”
What are we actually looking at here? A rock? An enemy? Does it even matter compared to the glory of running Horizon Zero Dawn at the eye-watering resolution of 128 pixels wide by 72 pixels tall? Yes, a YouTuber has managed to play Horizon Zero Dawn at 72p, and that’s not a typo.
The YouTuber in question is Kryzzp, who also goes by zWORMz Gaming, and he ran the game at this absurd resolution to test the performance of an Nvidia GT 710, an ultra-budget video card that barely cost $40 brand-new back in 2016. Incredibly, he manages to fend off one of the robotic enemies, though it’s impossible to tell how much ammo he had left after doing so.
To put that 128×72 resolution in context, it’s actually less than a modern color graphing calculator like the TI-84 Plus CE, whose 320×240 screen has far more pixels. You might imagine the game looking like this on a Game Boy Advance, but you’d still be missing the mark: that 2001 portable had a screen resolution of 240×160. The older TI-8E graphing calculators had a resolution of 96 x 64, though.
While watching someone struggle to play a game at a resolution that would’ve been considered bad 10 years ago may be funny, it’s also intriguing — what other games can you run like this? There’s probably some fun to be had posting ultra-low resolution screenshots to the internet and having people guess what what game they’re looking at. “Is it Grand Theft Auto or Forza? I can really only make out a car.”
I think it’s safe to say that this almost loops around to be aesthetically pleasing again. It’s like looking at a game from an alternate reality where Amiga-style graphics stayed in vogue forever, even after the switch to 3D. It’s beautiful in its own way.
If you want to try running it like this for yourself, you’ll need some low-powered hardware, as what resolutions are available seems to depend on which graphics card you have. My ThinkPad’s Intel HD 620 integrated graphics are technically more powerful than the Nvidia GT 710, so the lowest resolution I was able to run the game at was 160×100 (after adjusting the in-game resolution scaling to 50 percent). Not that I was able to actually run, like the mission asked me to — I couldn’t read the button prompt on the screen.
I’m really appreciating the game’s stunning visuals.
SpeedTest’s iOS app can now benchmark your internet’s video streaming quality, Ookla announced today. While the service typically checks general connection metrics like maximum download and upload speeds and latency, the new test is focused specifically on video. It attempts to stream at a variety of resolutions, and then measures load times and buffering.
Ookla explains that it added the new test because of how much of our time spent on the internet involves streaming video. While its standard speed tests give a general idea of your overall network bandwidth, Ookla points out that internet service providers often “prioritize video traffic differently than other traffic.” This means the best way to benchmark video streaming performance is ultimately just to stream video samples, since it “cannot be simulated across a network.”
The test works by literally streaming video, a process Ookla says can’t be simulated.Image: Ookla
The video streaming test is only available in the service’s iOS app for now, though Ookla says it’s coming to more platforms soon. During the test, the app streams a video at a variety of resolutions, before listing details like your internet connection’s maximum resolution, and video streaming load time. If you’re still unable to stream video despite your internet speeds being fast enough to support it, then Ookla says the app will link to DownDetector to check if a service is experiencing issues.
SpeedTest’s video streaming benchmark is available with the service’s latest iOS update, alongside a slightly redesigned interface.
Over this past week, Ethereum has skyrocketed to nearly $1700 in value (at the time of writing), making Ethereum very profitable to mine once again. But due to the shortage in graphics card supplies right now, desperate Chinese miners are apparently turning to RTX 30 series laptops as a new way to mine the cryptocurrency, as shown in a series of images that depict a laptop mining farm.
It’s unclear from the images and description if the miner purchased the laptops specifically for mining ethereum or is just repurposing laptops from a company or school, like an internet cafe, while they would otherwise be idle.
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(Image credit: Weibo)
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(Image credit: Weibo)
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(Image credit: Weibo)
In another demonstration of how valuable Ethereum has become, a vlogger posted on Bilibili that she went to a local Starbucks in China with an RTX 3060 laptop (TDP unknown), and showcased showed her payout from mining Ethereum for just two hours. She claims that her RTX 3060 mobile with a hefty memory overclock of +1000MHz managed an average hashing rate of 46MH/s. After two hours, she claims she made $0.9 USD. That might not sound like much, but it was enough for her to buy a coffee at Starbucks.
Now stack dozens or even hundreds of these laptops together and have them mining 24/7, and you can get an idea of why Chinese miners are so eager to push any Ampere laptop they can find into mining service.
Unfortunately, if prices for cryptocurrencies like Ethereum continue to climb, miners will be back in full swing and ordering as much compute power as they can. Now that getting graphics cards is nearly impossible for your average gamer or miner, it leaves miners no choice but to look for alternative methods to mine coins.
Home security camera systems have exploded in popularity while decreasing in price over the past few years. For example, you could purchase a Ring Indoor Security Camera for around $60, but there are some drawbacks: first, vendors like Ring often charge a monthly fee to store your data and second, you might not want video and photos from inside your home being shared with a third party (in Ring’s case, Amazon) where strangers could potentially see them.
MotionEyeOS, a free open-source application, allows you to turn a Raspberry Pi with a camera into a home video monitoring system, where the photos and videos can either stay on your device (and home network) or, if you choose, be uploaded automatically to a cloud-storage service such as Google Drive or Dropbox.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up a Raspberry Pi security camera with MotionEyeOS. This software works with almost any Raspberry Pi (connected to the internet) and almost any webcam or Pi camera. There’s no fancy coding to be done in this project; it just works.
Here are a few of the cameras I’ve successfully used with MotionEye.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
This Raspberry Pi security camera can be used to record porch pirates, monitor children or pets or to watch out for burglars.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Disclaimer: This article is provided with the intent for personal use. We expect our users to fully disclose and notify when they collect, use, and/or share data. We expect our users to fully comply with all national, state, and municipal laws applicable.
What You’ll Need
Raspberry Pi 4 or Raspberry Pi 3B+, or Raspberry Pi Zero W
8 GB (or larger) microSD card
Raspberry Pi Cam, HQ Camera, Infrared Camera, or webcam
Monitor/Power supply/Monitor/HDMI Cable (for your Raspberry Pi)
Your Windows or Mac computer.
Install MotionEyeOS
In this section, we will download MotionEyeOS, flash to a microSD card for our Raspberry Pi security camera, and set our WPA credentials.
1. Download the latest version of MotionEyeOS corresponding to the specific model of Raspberry Pi you are using from https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos/releases
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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
2. Insert your microSD card into your computer to be read as a storage device.
3. Launch Raspberry Pi Imager. You can download the imager here if you don’t already have it installed on your computer.
4. Select “Use custom” for the Operating System.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
5. Select the motioneyeos version that you just downloaded. This should be a .img.xz file.
6. Select your microSD card under “SD Card.” Note that all data on your microSD card will be erased in the next step.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
7. Click “Write” in the Raspberry Pi imager. The ‘write’ process could take 1 to 2 minutes.
8. When the process completes, physically remove and then reinsert your microSD card. We do this because the software automatically ejects the microSD card when the process completes, but we need to add one file before the next step.
9. Create a new file named wpa_supplicant.conf with the following text, replacing “YOUR_NETWORK_NAME” and “YOUR_NETWORK_PASSWORD” with your information. A source code editor such as Atom works great for this purpose. WordPad and Notepad are not recommended to create this file as extra characters are added in the formatting process.
10. Save wpa_supplicant.conf to your microSD card. Eject your microSD card.
11. Insert your microSD card into your Raspberry Pi.
12. Connect your camera, monitor and power supply to your Raspberry Pi. Power up your Pi.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
13. Find your internal IP address on the Pi screen. In most cases your internal IP address will start with 192.168.x.x or 10.0.0.x. Alternatively, if you do not have access to a monitor, you can download Angry IP Scanner and find your IP address for your Motioneye Raspberry Pi. Look for “MEYE” to identify your MotionEye Pi.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
14. Enter your internal IP address into a browser window of your Windows or Mac computer. Alternatively, you could use a Chromebook or a tablet. At this point your Motioneye should start streaming.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
In most cases, the system will automatically stream from the attached camera. If no image comes up, the camera may be incompatible with the Raspberry Pi. For example, an HD webcam may be incompatible with the Raspberry Pi Zero, but will work with a Raspberry Pi 3. There may be some trial and error in this step. Interestingly, most older webcams (manufactured before the Pi) will work with Motioneye. Here’s an old Logitech Pro 9000 connected to a Pi Zero W with a 3D printed stand.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Configuring MotionEye for Raspberry Pi Security Camera
In this section, we will perform a basic configuration of Motioneye and view our Raspberry Pi security camera video stream.
1. Click on the Profile icon near the top left within your browser menu to pull up the Login screen.
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2. Log in using the default credentials. The username is admin, and the password field should be blank.
3. Select your Time Zone from the dropdown menu in “Time Zone.” Click Apply. Motioneye will reboot which will take a few minutes. This step is important as each photo and video is timestamped.
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4. Motioneye detects motion when _% of frames change. The intent is to set your % low enough to pick up the movement you are tracking, but high enough to avoid recording a passing cloud. In most cases, this is achieved through trial and error. Start with your default 4% Frame Change Threshold and then move up until you reach your optimal setting.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
5. Click the down arrow to the right of “Still Images” to reveal the corresponding settings. Do the same for “Movies.” Set Capture Mode and Recording Mode to “Motion Triggered” and length of time to “Preserve Pictures” and “Movies.”
I have chosen “For One Week” since I’m only working with an 8GB microSD card. The photos saved locally will serve as a backup. You’ll save all of the photos to Google in a later step. Click Apply to save your changes.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
6. Set your Camera Name, Video Resolution, Frame Rate and other options in the “Video Device” section. Click Apply to save your changes.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Viewing Raspberry Pi Security Camera Images / Video Locally
If you don’t wish to upload images to a third-party service such as Google Drive, you can view the images and/or videos) captured locally on your Raspberry Pi security camera. If you choose this method, the images will never leave your local network.
1. Click on the live camera feed and new icons will appear.
2. Click on the image icon to view images.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
3. Or Click on the “Play”button icon to view movies.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Automatic Uploading to Google Drive (Optional)
In this step, we will configure our Raspberry Pi security camera to automatically upload all of the photos (and videos) taken to Google Drive. This method (with a couple of nuances) also works with Dropbox. Of course, you have to be comfortable with having your images in the cloud.
Most users create a separate Gmail account specifically for this purpose, to maximize free storage space from Google. Additionally, this will come in handy if you decide to enable email notifications in the next step.
1. Click the down arrow corresponding to “File Storage” in the main admin menu.
2. Toggle “Upload Media Files” to ON. This should automatically toggle “Upload Pictures” and “Upload Movies” to ON, but if not, hit ON.
3. Select Google Drive from the “Upload Service” dropdown menu.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
4. In your Google Drive, create a new folder for storing your photos and videos. I chose “PorchCam” for the name of my folder.
5. Enter “/” followed by your folder name for ‘Location.’
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6. Click “Obtain Key” and accept associated permissions by clicking “Allow.”
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7. Copy and paste the authorization code into your “Authorization Key” in Motioneye.
8. Click the “Test Service” button. If you don’t get an error message in Motioneye, then it was a success.
9. Go to your Google Drive folder and test your setup by pointing the camera at yourself and waving to the camera.
In this optional step, we will configure our MotionEye to automatically send us emails with attachments containing the photos our Raspberry Pi security camera has taken. It is highly recommended that you create a separate Gmail account specifically for this purpose. These instructions are specific to Gmail only.
1. Enable “Less Secure Apps” in your Gmail account.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
2. Expand “Motion Notifications” in Motioneye.
3. Toggle ON “Send An Email”
4. Enter your Email address, password.
SMTP Server = smtp.gmail.com
SMTP Port = 587
Use TLS – Toggle to On
Enter a value for “Attached Pictures Time Span”
5. Click the “Test Email” button.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
The first email is a text only email. Subsequent emails will contain attachments.
(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Mobile App Access to Raspberry Pi Security Camera
MotionEye also features a mobile app for iOS and Android / Google Play stores. Keep in mind that the app will only work while you are on the same network as your Raspberry Pi (unless you enable port forwarding, which is not encouraged for security reasons).
Look I know this pandemic has been a long, depressing slog, and even if you’ve masked up, done the social distancing, and have managed to stay virus-free, we’re all good and frazzled at this point. So it’s understandable that now that we have vaccines available, everyone’s impatient to get one.
But when you finally get the jab, resist the urge to post a humblebrag on Instagram or any other social media platform, because identity thieves may be watching. And, you don’t want to be the newly-vaccinated person whose selfie provides scammers with a template to make fake vaccination record cards (because if you think isn’t already happening, you would be mistaken).
“Some of you are celebrating your second COVID-19 vaccination with the giddy enthusiasm that’s usually reserved for weddings, new babies, and other life events,” the Federal Trade Commission wrote in a blog post on Friday. “You’re posting a photo of your vaccination card on social media. Please — don’t do that! You could be inviting identity theft.”
Not only does the card have the vaccinated person’s name and birth date on it, it also includes when and where you got the shot. Unless all your social media accounts are set to private, you’re handing out a lot of free data about yourself you may not want randos on the internet to know.
The New York Times talked to some privacy experts who said a savvy scam artist could pretend to be a healthcare official to trick people who have received the first dose of the vaccine into thinking they need to pay for the second dose, and get the victims’ credit card information. And, someone could use the photo of your vaccination card to recreate the cards and possibly sell counterfeit versions— something that’s apparently already happening in the UK.
As part of its Vaccinate with Confidence campaign, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a plan for states to hand out stickers to the newly-vaccinated, an excellent visual to share on social media instead of your vaccination card.
So if you have been vaccinated against the coronavirus, please accept my congratulations! We’re all happy for you. But we don’t need to see your vital information all over our social feeds.
Not long after it blocked Facebook, Myanmar has now ordered mobile networks and internet service providers to block Twitter and Facebook-owned Instagram in the country as well. The southeast Asian country’s military seized power in a coup earlier this week, detaining its civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi along with other government officials.
Facebook users had reportedly been using the social media platform to protest the coup, sharing photos of themselves giving the three-finger salute that’s become associated with resistance in the area.
“All mobile operators, international gateways and internet service providers in Myanmar received a directive on 5 February 2021 from the Myanmar Ministry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) to, until further notice, block the social media platforms Twitter and Instagram,” Norwegian telecom company Telenor said in a statement late Friday. The company provides mobile services in Myanmar.
Myanmar’s Ministry of Information issued an ominous statement on Tuesday, a day after the military seized power, instructing people not to spread rumors on social media, CNN reported. “Some media and public are spreading rumors on social media conducting gatherings to incite rowdiness and issuing statements which can cause unrest. We would like to urge the public not to carry out these acts and would like to notify the public to cooperate with the government in accordance with the existing laws,” the statement read.
Rafael Frankel, Facebook’s director of public policy, APAC emerging countries, said in a statement to The Verge that the company was “extremely concerned” by the shutdown orders, and urged authorities to unblock access immediately. “At this critical time, the people of Myanmar need access to important information and to be able to communicate with their loved ones,” Frankel said.
A Twitter spokesperson echoed that concern, saying in an email to The Verge that the order “undermines the public conversation and the rights of people to make their voices heard. The Open Internet is increasingly under threat around the world. We will continue to advocate to end destructive government-led shutdowns.”
Update February 6th, 11:13AM ET: Adds statements from Facebook and Twitter
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