3-year-old boy shot, killed in northeast Las Vegas – Las Vegas Review-Journal

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A 3-year-old boy was fatally shot in northeast Las Vegas on Wednesday evening.

Officers were called at 7:06 p.m. to the Pacific Legends Apartments after a woman called to report the toddler had been shot, according to Metropolitan Police Department Lt. David Valenta.

Investigators believe a group of adults, including the childs father, were standing in the parking lot of the apartment complex, and one of the men was manipulating a firearm when it went off, Valenta said.

We go on too many of these each year, he said. People need to take much better care of their firearms.

The boy was taken to Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center where he died. No one has been arrested in connection with the childs death yet, but officers were still investigating as of 11 p.m., Valenta said.

Any shooting is tragic but to look in the face of a 3-year-old as I just did, it doesnt get much worse than that, he said.

Contact Sabrina Schnur at sschnur@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0278. Follow @sabrina_schnur on Twitter.

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3-year-old boy shot, killed in northeast Las Vegas - Las Vegas Review-Journal

Here’s why Las Vegas McDonald’s restaurants are putting cameras in their dumpsters – FOX5 Las Vegas

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Jason Gates spends a lot of his time thinking about trash, and how we can generate less of it.

Since 2013 his San Francisco-based startup, Compology, has used cameras and artificial intelligence to monitor what's thrown into dumpsters and trash containers at businesses such as McDonald's restaurants and Nordstrom department stores. The point is to make sure dumpsters are actually full before they're emptied and to stop recyclable materials like cardboard from being contaminated by other junk so it, too, doesn't become waste.

"We've found that most businesses and people have the right intentions about recycling, but oftentimes they just don't know what the proper way to recycle is," Gates, CEO of Compology, told CNN Business' Rachel Crane.

To help them do it correctly, Compology puts trash-monitoring cameras and sensors inside industrial waste containers. The cameras take photos several times each day and when the container is lifted for dumping. An accelerometer helps trigger the camera on garbage day.

AI software analyzes the images to figure out how full the container is and can also let a customer know when something is where it shouldn't be, such as a bag of trash tossed into a dumpster filled with cardboard boxes for recycling. Gates said the company's cameras can cut the amount of non-recyclable materials thrown in waste containers by as much as 80%.

With McDonald's dumpsters in Las Vegas, for instance, Compology's cameras and sensors showed the company was generally doing a good job recycling cardboard packaging. But occasionally garbage bags were thrown in there, too, Gates said.

"Once we saw the bags of trash go inside the cardboard containers, we sent a notification to the people on site via text message, letting them know that they should remove it before the truck comes the next morning and telling them that putting trash in the recycling container is a form of contamination, which they should not do in the future," he said.

Brent Bohn, who owns and operates dozens of McDonald's restaurants in the Las Vegas and Phoenix areas, uses Compology at restaurants in Las Vegas to help ensure restaurant workers are recycling properly.

"The cameras have really streamlined that for us and provided accountability for us, but also for our suppliers and the haulers that we work with," he said.

Compology trained its system to sort trash with tens of millions of images, Gates said, and it uses pictures taken from within dumpsters that are now in use to get better at determining fullness and what's inside. So far, it has processed over 80 million images from the 162,000 cameras it has installed.

"The more images we get of the inside of dumpsters, the more accurate we can be," he said.

Part of why Gates sees Compology's work as vital is because the United States, which used to send much of its scrap and waste to China, is no longer doing so. China began banning the imports of recycling materials in 2017, citing environmental concerns from mixed-in contaminants, and expanded its ban in 2018.

Since then, the US has struggled to determine what to do with its recyclables, with some cities simply halting recycling programs. Cleaning up materials stateside could make it easier for the country to recycle on its own (and, in fact, it's one of the US Environmental Protection Agency's goals to raise the domestic recycling rate to 50% by 2030; it currently hovers around 32%).

Compology's service costs businesses between $10 and $20 per month per dumpster. It's saving them generally thousands of dollars per dumpster per year on waste-hauling costs, Gates said, as it can also use AI to predict what the service schedule for each dumpster should be, so it will only be picked up when it's likely to be full.

Over time, Gates hopes Compology can help standardize how waste is measured and reported something that isn't currently consistent in the US.

"You've been able to measure how much electricity, water, gas you've used for decades," Gates said. "What we're doing is being able to meter how much waste you produce."

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Vue Cambridge: All the films coming to the cinema including Wonder Woman 1984 and Superintelligence – Cambridgeshire Live

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Film lovers in Cambridge can look forward to a host of hotly-anticipated releases this month, as new blockbusters arrive at Vue cinema in the city.

Football fans are also being catered for, as Vue broadcasts BT Sports live Premier League coverage on the big screen.

A selection of classic Christmas content is also available, so that everyone has something to look forward to.

Read below to see what is coming to the cinema soon.

The long-awaited cinema release of Wonder Woman 1984 is finally here.

Starring Gal Gadot once again in the title role, the DC Comics epic sees Wonder Woman face off against Maxwell Lord and Cheetah, a villain possessing superhuman strength.

In Superintelligence , starring Melissa McCarthy as Carol Peters, is a former corporate executive who has her humble life turned upside down when she is selected for observation by an artificial intelligence that may or may not take over the world.

Dreamland is a thriller about a young farm boy who helps a seductive fugitive hiding in his small town during the Great Depression.

Vue Cambridge also broadcasts BT Sports live Premier League coverage.

On Saturday 19 December, fans can watch Crystal Palace vs Liverpool on the big screen from 12:30.

Alan Carter, General Manager at Vue Cambridge, said: Were thrilled to have top quality new content amongst our selection of shows this month. Our customers have been waiting for the return of huge releases like Wonder Woman 1984 to the big screen and we hope they will be as excited as we are and look forward to returning to the cinema.

We also continue to have a fantastic selection of classic Christmas content available for festive film-lovers. With all thats going on, we hope theres something for everyone to escape to.

Tickets are available now at myvue.com. For more information on the safety measures being implemented, customers can visit myvue.com/stay-safe.

For more information on Big Screen Sports at Vue, customers can visit: myvue.com/big-screen-events/sports.

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Vue Cambridge: All the films coming to the cinema including Wonder Woman 1984 and Superintelligence - Cambridgeshire Live

"I should be the main character". The plot twist that led to Melissa McCarthy’s new role. – Mamamia

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"Originally it was written for a malelead and Melissa was going to be the voice," Ben, 47, told Mamamia. "Then she kept reading the script and started saying 'I think I should be the main character' because she just fell in love with the story.

"I was so taken with the story that I just kept worming my way into it," Melissa, 50, agreed. "I just kept nudging him by saying 'Well... Im not doing anything.' I wanted to throw my name in the hat and see what could happen there.

"I loved the idea of this character. She is trying so hard but it's not perfect, because nothing is. We wanted to tell a story where the audience would be really rooting for somebody because things are scary but also hopeful. I wanted to insert myself into that story.

"So I asked Ben (she says, gesturing wildly at her husband) and he didnt say no. I havent been fired yet."

"And then it turned out great," Ben added. "Then we thought of Bobby immediately for the part of Carol's love interest George. Which is a wonderful way to put a movie together because you just call a friend and say, 'Do you want to do it?'"

The couple's humourous relationship dynamic spilled onto the set and soon they were improvising new scenes and slices of dialogue that found their way into the movie.

In Superintelligence,Ben once again plays a small role alongside his wifeby taking on the character of NSA Agent Charles Kuiper (although, I don't think it's destined to be quiteas iconic as his Bridesmaids cameo as Air Marshal Jon), and they both name those shared scenes as their favourites to film.

"I did love the scene where you guys threw me in a van and took me to a warehouse," Melissa said, turning to Ben and laughing. "Just that whole Law and Ordertype moment. Its where the plot of the movie really shifts and you start thinking, 'Something really dangerous is going on.'"

She continued: "And just watching Ben play an FBI agent was so funny. We just improvised so much stuff. Most of whats in that part of themovie is improvisation. It was so hard for me to stay in character and looked like I was frightened because he was doing and saying the most insane things.

"Its a good day at the office when you can barely keep it together."

At this point in the interview, Bobby Cannavale turns to Ben, confused, and says, "Are you sure youre in the movie? When do you show up?"

"Did you read it?" Melissa asks, feigning shock.

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"I should be the main character". The plot twist that led to Melissa McCarthy's new role. - Mamamia

Nomadland: Why this Frances McDormand-starrer is the perfect film for 2020 – Stuff.co.nz

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Nomadland (M, 108 mins) Directed by Chloe Zhao ****

Sometime in late 2021 perhaps Chloe Zhao will become known as the director of Eternals, which is an upcoming Marvel studios behemoth starring Angelina Jolie and many others, no doubt prancing around the galaxy in spandex in the hopes of saving the earth from the clutches of some evil wizard. Or so I imagine.

But until then, Zhao has been free to work in relative anonymity and turn out three disparate, but quietly beautiful films. Her Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider were both set in Indigenous communities, far away from any vision of North America that usually makes it to our screens. Both featured non-actors in leading roles, portraying people based closely on themselves.

After a screening of The Rider, Zhao met Frances McDormand. McDormand had already optioned Jessica Bruder's non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century and so a perfect creative collision of the right director being in charge of the right material occurred.

READ MORE:* The Dry: A worthy cinematic adaptation of Jane Harper's award-winning novel* Superintelligence: Melissa McCarthy's new comedy offers heart and decent laughs* The Midnight Sky: George Clooney's Netflix drama assembled from familiar parts* The Mystery of DB Cooper: A fun, enthralling look at an American legend

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Frances McDormand plays Fern in Nomadland.

Nomadland, as with Zhao's previous films, is fictional, but only just. It is based on true stories of the road, of people who were cast out of work and security in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and who chose never to return. They are modern nomads, living a life John Steinbeck would recognise, travelling across the continent to where the seasonal work is, independent, but still a part of a mutable community of like-minded travellers.

McDormand is here as Fern. Her company-town life in Nevada has ceased to exist and her husband died years before. With enough money to kit out a van, but nothing like enough to buy even a cheap house, Fern hits the road, eventually meeting the people she needs to, to become a part of the community who call themselves Nomadland.

Many of these people are on-screen as themselves. Among the few professional actors, David Strathairn is wonderful as a potential partner for Fern.

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Nomadland is a paean to all people who have re-examined their lives, shifted their priorities and rediscovered the profound magic of empathy and quiet resilience during the past year.

Zhao's film is a slow-cooked triumph of detail and watchfulness over spectacle and drama. And yet, in these tiny, perfectly observed human stories, there is more being said about the broken state of America and its systems and values today, than in a dozen noisier, more attention seeking dramas.

With award season on its way, it's probably, deservedly, inevitable that Nomadland will be getting all the publicity it needs.

Personally, I found it to be pretty much the perfect film for 2020; a paean to all people who have re-examined their lives, shifted their priorities and rediscovered the profound magic of empathy and quiet resilience. You'll quite probably love it too.

Nomandland begins screening in select New Zealand cinemas on Boxing Day.

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Nomadland: Why this Frances McDormand-starrer is the perfect film for 2020 - Stuff.co.nz

Finally! HBO Max comes to Roku (and PS5) – here’s how to set it up – Komando

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If you havent seen Game of Thrones or The Sopranos (where have you been?) and you own a Roku streaming device, we have some good news for you! HBO Max is finally available on Roku, and you can download the app right now. Tap or click here to see the top streaming devices compared.

By simply logging in to your account, you will be able to watch the new Wonder Woman 1984 on Christmas Day, as well as The Matrix 4, Dune and The Suicide Squad next year.

Launched seven months ago, Roku is one of the last streaming devices to add HBO Max. Lets go over how to add the popular streaming service to your device.

The channel can be downloaded in two different ways: either from the Roku website; or from the channel store on the device.

RELATED: 8 Roku pro tips you need to try right now

If you are an existing subscriber on Roku, you dont have to do anything. The HBO channel will automatically update to HBO Max.

With Wonder Woman 1984 available for streaming on Christmas Day, you might be wondering what else is available to watch.

Included with all original HBO shows, you also get access to all Warner Bros. films set for release next year, DC and Adult Swim content. The brand-new Space Jam: A New Legacy will also be made available for viewing.

RELATED: Is your TV watching everything you do?

For wintery binge-watching days, complete seasons of Friends, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and The Big Bang Theory are all available.

A subscription to HBO Max also affords you access to Lovecraft Country, The Undoing, The Flight Attendant, Superintelligence and Search Party.

In total, there are more than 10,000 hours of viewable content for you to enjoy.

HBO Max has also been made available for Sonys latest console, the PlayStation 5. Out of all the major streaming services, HBO was the only one that wasnt previously available for PS5.

X

Learn the tech tips and tricks only the pros know.

If you already subscribe to HBO Now or HBO through a participating provider, you dont have to pay extra to upgrade to HBO Max. New subscribers can pick up the full package at $14.99 per month. In addition to Roku and PS5 systems, the service is also available on Comcasts Xfinity X1 and Xfinity Flex, Amazons Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices and Apple TV.

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Finally! HBO Max comes to Roku (and PS5) - here's how to set it up - Komando

Welcome to Texas, Elon Musk. You Dont Have to Move to Austin. – Texas Monthly

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Electric vehicle pioneer, aspiring Mars colonist, and part-time Twitter troll Elon Musk announced this month that hes moving to Texas, and many in the tech world were shocked. Not us. Tesla CEO Musk is his generations eccentric billionaire par excellence. Texas has long been a spiritual homeland for vainglorious oddballs of great wealth, from King of the Wildcatters Glenn McCarthy, the inspiration for Giant and Dallas, to self-funding presidential candidate H. Ross Perot. Musk, 49, may have been born in South Africa and made most of his roughly $140 billion personal fortune in California, but he belongs in Texas. Welcome home, Elon.

So far, he hasnt publicly revealed which Texas metropolitan region hes chosen for his next chapter. As part of his house-hunting process, hed be well-advised to review the relative merits of our Lone Star tech hubs. Texas has become a powerful magnet for U.S. tech industry jobs, talent, and capital at the expense of Californias Bay Area, particularly in the past three astonishing weeks. This month, as Musk revealed that he was packing his electric buggy for Texas, the more than $180 billion Oracle Corporation announced that its relocating its headquarters to Austin, and $15 billion-plus Hewlett Packard Enterprise unveiled a move to Houston. After much slow cooking, like a good chopped brisket, Texass statewide tech community is on a roll.

Should Musk follow in the footsteps of one of those two new arrivals or beat his own path to a different Texas city? Here are a few of his best options:

Musk has been closely linked to Austin in recent months, enough that some headline writers have already leapt to the conclusion that his move to Texas could only mean relocation to the states capital. To be fair, the signs are convincing. Last summer, Tesla revealed that its newest automobile factory will be built just east of Austin, in Del Valle. In November, Musks transit-oriented underground tunneling project, the Boring Company, announced that it is expanding to Austin. And just before telling the press about his own move to Texas, Musk relocated his charitable concern, the Musk Foundation, to Austin. Even if hes not personally headed for the City of the Violet Crown, Musk will have a major footprint there for the foreseeable future.

Austin, ranked number one in the Computing Technology Industry Associations Tech Town Index of opportunity and quality of life for IT workers, gets the most hype of all the tech communities in Texas. Musk, whose companies tend to depend on venture capital and government subsidies to survive, thrives on hype. In that sense, he and Austin make a perfect match. He also has a potential friend and near financial peer in personal computing mogul Michael Dell, who put Austin on the tech map in the eighties and whose Dell Computers was the biggest tech firm headquartered in the state until Oracle rolled in a week or so ago. Austin also boasts several other major local firms, like Silicon Labs and Resideo Technologies, and plenty of start-ups and secondary campuses for giant tech companies headquartered elsewhere. Apple has a billion-dollar campus, its second in the city, under construction now that will make it the largest private employer in the area once its open.

That said, in Austin, Musk would be a very big fish in what is still a mid-sized pond. One wonders if the citys traditional slacker ethos would wear on him. Musks persona on Twitter and in the press is that of a relentlessly driven man of action, not one to noodle away his fifties in his little pocket of the Velvet Rut. In Austin, hed also be choosing a city with a potent tech backlash brewing, as real estate prices soar thanks to constant new arrivals. Does Musk really want to become the go-to embodiment of Austins favorite bogeyman, the Californian who shows up and ruins everything cool and authentic?

Musk should also consider the feelings of his girlfriend, Canadian singer Grimes, in that he has been romantically linked in the past to prominent Austinite Ty Haney, founder of Outdoor Voices. If Grimes can get over that, however, Austin could be a welcome landing spot for the baby boy she and Musk welcomed into the world in April. Many scoffed when the couple revealed their babys inscrutable name: X A-XII. In most parts of Texas, a kid with a name like that would be in for serious bullying, if not just downright confusion among his peers. In Austin, it might not even be the strangest name in his Montessori class.

With all the recent focus on Austins tech scene as a result of the Oracle relocation news, its easy to forget that Dallas and its suburbs still constitute the biggest and most storied technology sector in the state. According to the Computing Technology Industry Association, Dallas leads the state in net tech jobs over the last year, ranking eighth nationally. (Houston, for comparison, ranks number twelve in net tech jobs, and Austin comes in at eighteen.) The granddaddy of Lone Star tech firms, Texas Instruments, is still going strong in North Texas, and, though not strictly a tech company in the modern parlance, Dallas-based telecom behemoth AT&T is a crucial part of American information technology history.

Mark Cuban, another potential billionaire friend for Musk in Texas, boosted his citys tech prospects this month as news came in about Musk, Oracle, and HPE:

Cubans advice may entice Musk insofar as the latter is presumably interested in moving to a better city, though not necessarily a cheaper one, as $141 billion goes a long way anywhere. A hard-working proletariat may attract Musk too. After all, hes the mega-billionaire who recently asked employees at Tesla to work as volunteers for the company while on unpaid furlough. Really, though, its the more entertaining aspect of Dallas that is most likely to persuade Musk. Its lonely at the top, and a city like Austin would offer precious few billionaire friends and activities for a man with his bankroll. The DallasFort Worth metro, on the other hand, leads Texas in billionaires, with 27. (Houston comes in second with 15, while Austins 8 could barely fill a high-stakes poker table.) From restaurants to art, professional sports, and beyond, North Texas knows how to keep a billionaire busy and satisfied. Cuban should know.

Another point for Dallas: 2020 has revealed that Musk fancies himself adept at seeing through deep-state lies and faades. In early March, he tweeted that the coronavirus panic is dumb. In April, he came out against social distancing and tweeted FREE AMERICA NOW! More recently, he has insinuated that rapid antigen tests for COVID-19 are a hoax of sorts. By moving to Dallas, Musk could indulge his passion for conspiracy theory full-time. As a professional engineer and amateur dot-connector, Musk could bring his considerable talents and trust-no-one sensibility to finally solving the ballistics question of whether John F. Kennedy was indeed killed by Lee Harvey Oswald or by a second shooter from the Grassy Knoll.

With HPE moving to town, things are looking up for Houstons tech community, but the Bayou City is less defined by tech than either Austin or Dallas. Thats not a bad thingon the contrary, its because Houston is already busy leading the world in other fields, like energy and medicine. Still, Musk would find in Houston a city well positioned to help him reach his biggest and most ambitious goals.

Among U.S. cities, Houston trails only Silicon Valley in engineers per capita, but, whereas Silicon Valley engineers tend to work in software, Houston engineers are often engaged in challenges like mining and deep-water construction. This may appeal to Musk, who is more focused on the physical process of actually making things than most tech baronsbuilding cars, tunnels, batteries, and rocket ships.

This brings us to Houstons biggest asset, so far as Musk is concerned: the Johnson Space Center. Followers of Musks Twitter account know that much of his attention lately is focused on his spacecraft company, SpaceX, and its long-term goal of sending humans to Mars and establishing a self-governing colony there. The company has already achieved extraordinary things, including the first-ever spaceflight on a commercially developed craft, a trip to the International Space Station piloted by NASA astronauts this May. Still, its a long way from the ISS to Mars. To develop such a mission, Musk will have to work closely with NASA and specifically with its human spaceflight hub, the Johnson Space Center. Why not move in next to the astronauts and get it done?

In terms of tech hype, Houston isnt Austin, but it does check an awful lot of boxes for Musk. Also, if he spends much time on Twitterand we know he doesMusk might be aware that there is a robust argument among Texans on the platform about whether Austin has jumped the shark and been supplanted by Houston for the title of coolest city in Texas.

Okay, okay. We know it sounds crazy. The off-the-beaten-track Rio Grande Valley doesnt even have a direct flight to the San Francisco Bay Area, let alone a tech industry to rival any of the three bigger Texas metros mentioned above. So what does it have going for it? Just the fact that Musk has been spending much of his time there in recent months.

Boca Chica, just outside Brownsville at the mouth of the Rio Grande, is the site of Space Xs South Texas launch siteland acquired by Musk with the vision of building toward a Mars launch. During the recent pandemic months, both reporting and his own tweets attest to the fact that Musk has been largely based in or near Boca Chica, working on SpaceXs next-generation launch system and sharing gorgeous photos of rockets against the backdrop of the coastal wetlands.

Musk is 49 and has spoken of building a Mars colony by 2040, when hell be pushing 70. Perhaps the pandemic has helped him refocus on his priorities to such an extent that hes decided to leave the distracting hubbub of the Bay Area for the utter non-hub of Brownsville, where he can directly oversee mankinds next giant leap in rocketry. Stranger things have happened.

And hey, perhaps by 2040, Musk will have also perfected his Hyperloop, a proposed high-speed vacuum train technology that Musk claims could carry passengers 350 miles in about 35 minutes. Thats about the distance from Brownsville to either Houston or Austin, an easy commute. If so, Musk wont even really have to pick which city in Texas he wants to base himself in. He could have breakfast tacos in Austin, a power lunch in Dallas, and dinner at JSC in Houston and be home in Brownsville to check his Martian colony by telescope before bedtimeprovided he can make just a few more of his techno-utopian dreams come true.

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Welcome to Texas, Elon Musk. You Dont Have to Move to Austin. - Texas Monthly

Commentary: Elon Musk’s recent trial spacecraft may have exploded, but we are one step closer to Mars – CNA

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CAMBRIDGE: Private company SpaceX launched SN8, a prototype of its Starship spacecraft, designed to go to the Moon and Mars, on Dec 10. Its short flight attracted a great deal of attention for its final few seconds before landing when it exploded.

But consider the near perfect totality of its six-and-a-half-minute flight. Look at the groundbreaking technology and manoeuvres involved. It is reasonable to view this as a hugely successful test.

Ordinary spacecraft return to Earth by using the aerodynamic drag in the atmosphere to slow their re-entry. Decelerating from 20,000 miles per hour dissipates a lot of heat which is why they carry heat shields, and the final touchdown is controlled by parachutes.

The actual rocket engines dont make a safe landing they burn up and crash into the sea.

This is a real waste of resources. SpaceXs founder and CEO Elon Musk is instead trying to reuse as much of the spacecraft as possible.

If your ultimate destination is the Moon and onward to Mars, this makes a lot of sense because you can much more easily refuel at judicious locations along the way than build a new rocket.

A FULLY REUSABLE ROCKET

Starship is a fully reusable rocket system designed to carry 100 tonnes of cargo into Earth orbit and beyond.

It has a booster first stage which propels it into orbit and separates. The booster stage is designed to land safely and to be reused.

SpaceX figured out how to do this with the Falcon rocket, but thats only two thirds of the system. With Starship, the third of the system that helps propel the spacecraft further than Earth orbit is never ejected.

Landing the first stage booster is easy because it is ejected two minutes after launch and therefore returns to Earth from a relatively low altitude never reaching super high speeds.

NASA defines high hypersonic speed as a Mach number from 10 to 25. The booster only reaches about Mach 6.

Starship itself will be returning from orbit, reaching Mach 25. At this speed, the heat of reentry will melt the engines off.

You therefore need a substantial heat shield which dissipates 99 per cent of the energy protecting the cargo and those all-important rockets that you need for landing.

NASAs partially reusable Space Shuttle had huge wings used to glide the vehicle onto a runway. But wings are heavy and they reduce the potential payload capacity.

Also, they wont work on Mars or the Moon because theres a lack of atmosphere and runways.

BELLY-FLOP DYNAMICS

The ingenuity of Starship is that it just belly-flops all the way down a type of free fall in which the atmosphere gradually slows down its speed.

As it nears the ground, it should be slow enough for a short flip-and-landing burn to touch down softly on the pad.

No other vehicle flies like this on purpose. Planes are designed to keep the air flow attached to the wings to provide lift. If you lose that air flow, you fall out of the sky a condition called stall.

Starship enters the atmosphere at a 90 degree angle. That means it is fully stalled. Just as a leaf flutters to the ground this is an inherently unstable configuration and the aerodynamics are impossible to predict.

This is where active control comes in. Starship has four flaps and theyre used just as a skydiver uses their four arms to control free fall.

With the SN8 test flight, Space X has shown that its possible to control a belly-flop. The drop from 12.5km gave SpaceX the conditions of the last half of a return back from orbit.

SpaceX will have gathered flight data that allows it to know how the aerodynamics of a belly-flop work. In particular, it will know how well the flaps work and how precisely to keep the craft stable and land it on target.

We can see on the videos released by SpaceX that the flaps are under good control. This looks like great news for SpaceX.

ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF FUEL NEEDED FOR LANDING

Being fully reusable, Starship should work out far cheaper than conventional single use craft. But its a tricky business to work out exactly how much fuel you need to carry.

Conventional aircraft always take off with a bit of fuel to spare, but they can always make an emergency landing if they miscalculate.

Rockets need to launch with an enormous amount of fuel just to be sure you have enough for the landing. Its like going on a 14-day camping trip and spending 13 days carrying the water for your last day.

Its likely that the tank for SN8 was almost completely empty when it came in to land.

The amount of fuel you need is given by the rocket equation. This shows that if you want to launch 100 tonnes of payload to the Moon at a speed of 12,000 metres per second you need a staggering 2,000 tonnes of fuel.

When it comes to the type of fuel, its interesting that kerosene and hydrogen (as used by Apollo 11) are still the most popular rocket fuels around. The laws of physics and chemistry havent changed very much in fifty years.

But Starship is actually pioneering the use of methane as a fuel. Despite being harder to work with, it gives a bit more thrust.

And perhaps more importantly theres plenty of methane on Mars, which is obviously the ultimate destination for SpaceX.

So why did SN8 crash?

You can see in the video some green flashes just before landing. The engines are made with copper, which burns with a characteristic green flame.

SpaceX says there was a problem with fuel pressure just at the last moment, meaning the rocket couldnt slow down. The resulting excess oxygen started burning up the engines themselves.

If it werent for the last few seconds then the landing could have been perfect. Engineers will now be looking to fix that problem for SN9.

Hugh Hunt is Reader in Engineering Dynamics and Vibration at the University of Cambridge. This commentary first appeared on The Conversation.

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Commentary: Elon Musk's recent trial spacecraft may have exploded, but we are one step closer to Mars - CNA

Tech Giants Form Alliance For IT Tools & Transformation. How Does That Matter? – Analytics India Magazine

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In recent news, tech giants such as Google, Intel and Dell, among others in the IT and cloud computing space, have joined hands to form a consortium. Named as the Modern Computing Alliance, this consortium will tackle problems related to security, remote working environments, and other enterprise issues.

Speaking of its participation in the alliance, Google Chrome Vice President John Solomon wrote in a blog post, Our collective mission is to drive silicon-to-cloud innovation for the benefit of enterprise customers, fueling a differentiated modern computing platform and providing additional choice for integrated business solutions.

As per the alliance, the initial focus areas will include performance, security and identity, remote work and productivity, and health care. The end goal would be to pool knowledge and resources to identify shared problems across enterprises and how cloud solutions can be leveraged to ease the whole new normal in working environments. The alliance also looks at establishing new standards and technologies from the partner companies that can be used by anyone.

Solomon also mentioned in the blog that the alliance would look at employing faster and more responsive enterprise progressive web applications (PWAs). It also aims at introducing cloud-first cultures and devices that will provide ease of management and insights on the fully integrated stack. Modern Computing Alliance is committed to developing an integrated roadmap that makes the best use of our collective experience, insights and expertise while giving us a clear path forward to improve customer choice and the enterprise computing market, he added.

The alliance, which also has companies such as Box, VMWare, Zoom, Slack, RingCentral, Citrix, Okta as its founding partners, has developed a roadmap to deal with the most pressing challenges in end-user computing. Some of the solutions suggested by the alliance include

The founding stones for this alliance were laid even before the coronavirus pandemic. In an interview, Solomon said that the initial discussion for forming such a consortium was conducted during the Consumer Electronics Show in 2019 at Las Vegas with limited partners. However, with the onset of the pandemic, the companies decided on expanding their scope further and include partners like Slack and Zoom, which has gained massive prominence in how corporates were operating now.

The group is also inviting as many IT professionals as it can to build a council of experts who would identify and resolve major problems. To further attract the best talent, the alliance has also listed benefits of joining the council. They include:

Cross company collaboration and alliance as this one is not rare. The earlier examples of similar collaborations include the 1991s Advanced Computing Environment consisting of Compaq, Microsoft, MIPS Computer Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation, and the Santa Cruz Operation, and the AIM Alliance consisting of Apple, IBM, and Motorola.

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The main product from Advanced Computing Environment was the introduction of the Advanced RISC Computing specification, just before the alliance finally dissolved due to infighting.

The AIM Alliance was slightly more successful, and it developed the PowerPC CPU family, the Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) hardware platform standard, and also laid the foundation for Apples Power Macintosh computer line.

It seems that the new Modern Computer Alliance is led by Google as of now and it would be interesting to see what comes off this collaboration.

I am a journalist with a postgraduate degree in computer network engineering. When not reading or writing, one can find me doodling away to my hearts content.

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Tech Giants Form Alliance For IT Tools & Transformation. How Does That Matter? - Analytics India Magazine

Amazon, Apple and Google: Which tech giant won the smart home in 2020? – CNET

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Between COVID-19, a contentious presidential election and any number of other world events, 2020 was a wild year. Despite the craziness, the smart home industry has continued to chug along, churning out dozens of interesting new devices, from spherical smart speakers to selfie-snapping bird feeders. Leading the way into the future of the home: Amazon, Google and more recently Apple.

Which of these tech giants won 2020 in the smart home, as much as that's possible? Has Amazon's aggressive development of Alexa finally closed the gap with the smarter Google Assistant? Will Apple's $99 Homepod Mini earn it a larger share of the Amazon- and Google-dominated smart speaker market?

We're David Priest and Molly Price, CNET's writers covering Amazon, Apple and Google in the smart home, and we're finishing 2020 with a critical conversation about what the exact state of play is among these Silicon Valley behemoths.

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David: I want to start this conversation with Apple, because for years they've been kind of the tortoise to Google's and especially Amazon's hares. Until the end of 2020, the only smart speaker Apple sold was the expensive Homepod, which peaked at a 5% share of the total smart speaker market in the US. Meanwhile, Amazon launched half a dozen smart speakers and displays in 2019 alone, and Google followed not far behind, in large part thanks to its popular Nest Mini.

But now everything's changed, because Apple introduced a budget speaker to compete with well, it's unclear exactly what it competes with, because it's roughly the size of the Echo Dot and Nest Mini, but it's the price of the much stronger Echo and Nest Audio speakers. Quibbles aside, though, the Homepod Mini is really putting Apple into much closer competition with its rivals.

Apple's Homepod Mini is shaking up the Amazon- and Google-dominated smart speaker market.

Molly, you reviewed the Homepod Mini. Can you speak to how much it will or won't shake up the smart speaker race for our countertops?

Molly: Apple certainly jumped back into the game this year when it comes to smart speakers. The HomePod Mini debuted at $99. That's about as cheap as any standalone Apple product comes these days. It sounds great, looks Apple-y and does everything you'd expect it to do as a smart home starting point. The only thing it's missing is the broad selection of compatible third-party devices Amazon and Google offer. I was convinced Apple didn't care about the smart home anymore, but the HomePod Mini felt like more than just an afterthought.

D: Agreed. Meanwhile, Amazon and Google have continued to add steadily to their existing product lines. Amazon's new full-size Echo and Dot smart speakers are popular and are both selling at the time of this conversation for $70 and $30, respectively. Those prices are pretty crazy, especially considering the quality of the products -- in particular the full-size Echo.

Amazon's newest Echo is one of the best smart speakers we've ever tested.

The other thing to keep in mind for Amazon is that, although it's the one smart speaker developer without a suite of other phone-centric services to key into (Apple's speakers cooperate better with iOS and Google's speakers cooperate better with Android), it is owned by the world's largest online distributor. That means Amazon can work to sell its smart home devices more effectively than pretty much any competitor.

So who is winning the race for our countertops?

Winner: Amazon

Notable improvement: Apple

D: OK, market penetration is one conversation, but let's talk about the real quality of the devices -- that's the most important thing for potential customers anyway, right? While the full-size Echo smart speaker was one of my favorite smart home devices of the year -- between its reasonable price tag and its excellent sound quality -- I will admit I was a little disappointed that Amazon's new Echo Show 10 smart display, which follows you around the room with its screen and camera, won't launch this year. More than any year in recent memory, 2020 seems like it would've been a perfect opportunity for these companies to make a compelling case for smart displays -- and that opportunity went largely missed.

Of course, no one else launched a great smart display this year either, so I can't knock Amazon too much.

Molly, what's your read on the voice assistance race? Google Assistant has traditionally been CNET's favorite, but are Alexa and Siri catching up?

Google Assistant remains the most naturalistic voice assistant in 2020.

M: Alexa is catching up. Amazon recently announced live translation for Echo Show devices, predictive smart home actions for all Alexa devices and Amazon Sidewalk, a feature that slices off a small part of your Wi-Fi bandwidth to enable long-range transmissions with things outside the home, like smart lawn lights and Tile trackers. It's these seemingly smaller innovations that can add up to big advantages over other brands.

Siri? Not so much. As a voice assistant, Siri can accomplish the basics -- but it doesn't sound as naturalistic as Alexa or Google Assistant, and its answers to questions often miss the mark. There are definitely a few cool tricks up Apple's sleeve when it comes to HomePod and smart home integration (and I'm betting we'll see more thanks to their new U1 chip), but Siri otherwise stayed largely the same.

Google released a series of updates for smart displays this year with a focus on, you guessed it, staying connected and online learning (though it warrants a note that only the $230 Nest Hub Max display includes a camera for video chatting). All the incremental updates I saw this year still didn't add up to anything that felt significantly innovative. Honestly, it doesn't surprise me that smart assistants feel like they're plateauing five-ish years in.

D: Yeah, I totally agree here. At this point, aside from Siri's obvious lack of polish compared to its competitors, we kind of know what voice assistants can do, and that likely won't change much other than through slow iteration.

Google remains the most naturalistic voice assistant, but Amazon's ambitious innovations are putting Alexa and Alexa-driven devices in close contention with Google's counterparts. Meanwhile, despite the HomePod Mini, Apple fans are still left with a subpar voice assistant and smart speakers that don't earn their premium price tag. And, correct me if I'm wrong, Molly, but the same pattern sort of holds true with smart home platforms: Amazon and Google Assistant both boast thousands of partnerships, whereas Apple's HomeKit lags behind a bit, right?

A smart home isn't just about speakers and displays: There are dozens of other devices, from connected lights and cameras to flood and motion sensors.

M: Right. When it comes to smart home integration, consumers have so many more hardware options on Amazon and Google's platforms. For nearly every device category, you can find a cheap "works with Google/Alexa" version online. That isn't true for HomeKit. This could be the biggest thing holding Apple back from really taking over the smart home space the way it did with phones, watches and tablets.

Not every device compatible with Google or Alexa is a good one from a quality standpoint. That puts the onus on consumers to decide what's worthy of space in their home. Apple is certainly more selective and leans toward higher-end, better-established brands for the smart home.

Winner: Tie between Amazon/Google

Needs improvement: Apple

D: I've written a fair amount about privacy and security, and to my mind, this is where Apple has a clear edge over competitors. With security in particular, Apple has maintained high standards for partner devices -- and the company, aside from saving some Siri recordings (which Google and Amazon both do, too), has largely avoided privacy scandals.

Google's security seems to be a little tighter in 2020, thanks in part to 2019's (admittedly messy) shift from the Works with Nest ecosystem to the Works with Google Assistant one. Essentially, that change limited the control third-party devices could exert (and information they could extract) from core Google devices in your smart home network. Meanwhile, from a privacy standpoint, Google doesn't have a sterling record, but it didn't see problems at the scale of 2019's.

Privacy has as much to do with when you're being recorded as what companies are doing with those recordings.

Amazon, more than either of its competitors, has had an incredible year from a business perspective. The pandemic and ensuing quarantines boosted Amazon's sales by massive numbers, the new Amazon Echo is one of the best smart speakers we've tested and Alexa has seen serious growth as a voice assistant.

But Amazon routinely skirts the edge with its privacy policies. The tech giant recently automatically opted users into Amazon Sidewalk, whether they wanted to use the feature or not. Its home security subsidiary Ring continues to push privacy-defining boundaries in the name of progress. And it remains the sole voice assistant for which users need to opt out of voice recordings being shared with human listeners.

After all that, who do you think had the best 2020 in terms of being responsible with customer data, Molly?

M: This is the toughest and perhaps the most important question to answer when you think about bringing an assistant and an entire platform onto your home network. Apple certainly put forth the most public effort (at least in advertising) when it comes to hyping up how secure their stuff is.

That's not an empty boast, either. Apple sacrificed having a big bucket of compatible devices in order to have a smaller, more curated pool of devices that met tougher security standards. While that can make for a limiting smart home setup, it's an impressive show of restraint by Tim Cook & Co.

Apple HomeKit mostly works with higher-end, well-established brands, like home security developer Arlo.

If you keep up with your passwords and app updates, actively manage what data is collected by each app and opt out of whatever Amazon might be sending into the ether automatically, you'll probably be just fine. That's a lot to ask of a busy consumer who likely just wants to plug and play without worrying about what's on the other side of their device.

Apple wins here in my opinion as well. Add that to the HomePod Mini debut, and Apple suddenly has more points on the board than I expected.

D: Yep. If I remember correctly, last year's data responsibility section just ended with everyone losing, and I don't know that much has changed in that regard, particularly for Amazon and Google users. But Apple's approach to the smart home is heartening to me, not least because it prioritizes privacy and security in its messaging to consumers -- a trend that I hope catches on, to remind people that their privacy is in fact valuable, and we shouldn't be giving it away for momentary conveniences. In addition, the focus really puts Apple's reputation on the line, because after all their talk, privacy breaches could be much more damaging to their brand in the smart home than to that of their competitors.

Winner: Apple

Losers: Amazon and Google

Google has stayed surprisingly quiet this year, with its one major hardware offering -- the Nest Audio, a middle-tier smart speaker to compete with the fourth-gen Echo -- landing a tepid review from us. Google Assistant has stayed strong, but hasn't improved as much as Alexa. Overall, while we wouldn't go so far as to say Google has lost ground in 2020, it certainly hasn't gained any.

Apple, by contrast, entered the smart home race in earnest this year, thanks to the HomePod Mini. In addition, it's helping shift the smart home conversation toward privacy and security, while Amazon and Google seem content to do only what's necessary to keep users on their platforms. While Siri and HomeKit certainly have room to grow, the Cupertino kid is poised for great things in the coming years (if it doesn't take another multiple-year break from serious smart home investment).

But even Apple's impressive strides couldn't help it overtake Amazon, a commerce giant that continues to dominate the market, thanks to its aggressive development of Alexa, its consistent production of boundary-pushing devices and a perhaps slightly underdeveloped conscience.

Smart home winner of 2020: Amazon (for better or worse)

Runner-up: Apple

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Amazon, Apple and Google: Which tech giant won the smart home in 2020? - CNET

Chip Giants Intel and Nvidia Face New Threats From Amazon to Google to Apple – The Wall Street Journal

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The worlds largest semiconductor companies face a growing competitive threat: their biggest customers making their own chips tailored to the supercharged areas of cloud-computing and artificial intelligence.

Chip making has long been ruled by big manufacturers and design houses such as Intel Corp. , Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and graphics-chip maker Nvidia Corp. Now Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google are getting into the game in the hunt for improved performance and lower costs, shifting the balance of power in the industry and pushing traditional chip makers to respond by building more specialized chips for major customers.

Amazon this month unveiled a new chip that, it says, promises to speed up how algorithms that use artificial intelligence learn from data. The company has already designed other processors for its cloud-computing arm, called Amazon Web Services, including the brains of computers known as central processing units.

The pandemic has accelerated the rise of cloud-computing as companies broadly have embraced the kind of digital tools using those remote servers. Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others have enjoyed strong growth in the cloud during the remote-work period.

Business customers also are showing an increased appetite for analyzing the data they gather on their products and customers, fueling demand for artificial intelligence tools to make sense of all that information.

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Chip Giants Intel and Nvidia Face New Threats From Amazon to Google to Apple - The Wall Street Journal

To win post-pandemic, edtech needs to start thinking big – TechCrunch

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The edtech market raked in more than $10 billion in venture capital investment globally in 2020, but for students, parents and teachers, the year was defined more by its scramble than its surge.

Nandini Talwar, a student and teachers assistant at Columbia University, wants to hold more efficient office hours so students dont have to wait on a Zoom call. TraLiza King, a director at PWC and single mother, needs a Zoom alternative for her 4-year-old, who is too young to understand how to mute and unmute. Brian Kinglsey, chief academic officer at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, is looking for ways to reengage remote students that dont require socially distant home visits.

Naturally, any company that shifts overnight from being a tool to a necessity will have growing pains, and edtech as a sector is no exception. Startups with the long-term ambitions of solving educations inequities had to come up with quick fixes that would serve millions of learners. A sector that was notoriously undercapitalized had to reach venture scale while adapting to the realities of a remote work landscape like never before. As schools seesawed between hybrid and remote, education technology companies had to be nimble as well. The ubiquity of remote learning surely brought a boom to new users, but may have in fact limited the sectors ability to innovate in lieu of fast, easy scale.

For edtech in 2020, flexible and scrappy was a survival tactic that led to profits, growth and most of all, aha moments that technology was needed in the way we learn. Now, as we enter the rest of the decade, the sector will have to shake off its short-term-fix mentality to evolve from tunnel vision to wide-pan ambition.

If nothing else is clear after a tumultuous remote learning experience, its that the world needs effective and accessible technology that allows education to scale with learning for all in mind. In fact, the comeback story and surges of massive open online course providers (MOOCS) shows how in-demand digital curricula truly are.

However, usage is not a replacement for effectiveness. In reality, most people dont have the drive, motivation or comprehension capabilities to learn from a one-hour lecture even if they technically show up.

The mad rush to track engagement is underway. In the past few months, Zovio launched Signalz, a tool that helps universities track student engagement and see who is most at risk for dropping out of courses. Piazza also launched a tool focused on college and high school student participation that allows instructors to send personalized messages and measure activity on their assignments. Theres also Rhithm, an app that allows educators to check in daily with students for emotional-learning insights, and Edsights, a chatbot for undergraduate students.

Still, instead of bringing the classroom experience online and trying to track the heck out of it, what if you completely upend it? The answer might begin with flashcards.

Quizlet, which started off as a flashcard app, has spent the past three years building out its artificial-intelligence-powered tutoring arm. CEO Matthew Glotzbach says the feature is now the most-used Quizlet offering, signaling how students want a more in-depth solution than flashcards.

The most recent example I saw of innovation was Sketchy, a startup that teaches medical concepts through illustrations. It allows students to skip notecards and textbooks and comprehend through animated videos; think of a countryside kingdom scene about coronavirus or a salmon dinner about salmonella.

While the technology itself isnt from Mars, Sketchys strategy does what many edtech solutions dont: learning theory. The company uses the memory-palace technique to help students replace textbooks with videos and actually retain information. Plus, after seven years as a bootstrapped company, Sketchy just raised $30 million dollars in venture capital. The round was led by TCG with involvement from Reach Capital.

Zach Sims, the founder of Codecademy, told me that the startups that will win the next wave are the ones that are using interactivity and technology to create an educational experience you just couldnt have in the classroom.

To retain recent gains, edtech companies need to replicate Sketchys strategy: Replace outdated systems and methods with new, tech-powered solutions. No more of the endless bundling and unbundling of the school experience. As we evolve into a world of life-long learning and cohort-based learning platforms, founders will need to be especially innovative with the way they deliver content. Dont simply put engaging content on a screen, but innovate on what that screen looks like, tracks and offers. Is it rooted in true learning principles, or is it just a repacked lecture?

In other words, if 2020 showed us how hard Zoom school really is, then 2021 should not be about creating more versions of Zoom schools. It should be about playing an entirely different universe.

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

The biggest elephant in the room for edtech is the one that every human in the world cant wait for: the end of the coronavirus pandemic. And with promising vaccine news, the light at the end of the tunnel certainly feels within reach for those who dare to dream.

When the world recovers, startups that have based their entire business around remote learning and remote work will likely see a drop in usage. The surge will slow, and everyone in edtech is wondering how to extract post-pandemic value.

This in mind, Ashley Bittner, co-founding partner of Firework Ventures, a new future of work fund, thinks that the next generation of edtech founders should continue to make moonshot bets, but be realistic about what will work for the decades ahead.

Anyone can pitch an idea about how we should do math curriculum, she said. But theres a reason behind why we teach kids to do it this way. I dont think theres enough respect for the experience learning science behind products.

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To win post-pandemic, edtech needs to start thinking big - TechCrunch

Experts warn willingness to give away private info gives tech giants free reign to profile billions of users – The Irish Sun

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OUR willingness to give away private info online has given tech giants free reign to profile billions of users which will soon have "scary consequences, experts warn.

Obsession with social media is allowing major companies to figure out what we want before we know ourselves.

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Election fraud, online scams, and a plummeting sense of self-worth is all part of the vicious cycle weve signed up to.

Stephen Burke, from Dublin-based Cyber Risk Aware, told the Irish Sun: When we sign up to a social media account, we either want to share what we are doing, or to see what others are doing.

We knowingly make a decision to sacrifice our privacy.

It cant come as a big surprise when companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Whats-App or Instagram share this information with others in order to analyse people, their behaviours, thoughts, interests, likes and dislikes and monetize it. People have become the product.

The flip side, however, is we are being profiled and the data is then shared with other third parties whom we know nothing about and that is where the problems begin. Cambridge Analytica brought this to light spectacularly in the 2016 US Presidential election.

Elections being manipulated, leading to people running countries which can impact the world, owing to people being influenced by content presented to them whilst online.

This is not a science fiction movie. I call it social engineering. People being engineered to do things they otherwise would not do.

More than 3.6billion people worldwide use social media, with major companies making vast fortunes with our data.

Data sharing expert Magnus Boyd a partner at law firm Schillings, explained: What are we giving away? The simple answer is everything.

Its not just the data the big tech companies are sharing with each other, but the businesses looking to trade via Facebook share their customers activities with Facebook.

Thats how Facebook learn what items I searched for, how long I spent on a page, what went into my shopping cart, whether I made a charitable donation somewhere.

There are some very powerful facts you can draw out about a person that they are not aware of. You could gauge someones aspirations, history, health, socioeconomic class.

The question of the age is, Does it matter? Some say the more of this you can provide, the richer your online experience.

It matters when people start to form judgments about you based on this info you have no control over. It doesnt matter if theyre working out I like jazz, but what if theyre forming other judgments? Increasingly, companies are aggregating data, like your Uber rating.

Theres an inherent judgment in that, if Im having a bad day and am annoyed and slam the Uber car door my rating goes down.

That on its own means nothing, but if all of that starts to get aggregated its a form of profiling. Suddenly youre a trouble maker!

Were seeing it in China, everybody has a digital passport, there are judgments in that and an ability to be marked down.

If you get too many bad credit ratings or customer service ratings, suddenly youre being denied things without any ability to know why or for redress. Thats pretty scary.

Paul Bischoff, privacy advocate at Comparitech.com, explains how sharing data results in bubbles where we only get fed our own viewpoints.

He said: In the case of Facebook, you give up your browsing history. When you visit the social networks site or app, a cookie is placed on your device.

That cookie is then used to track you on external sites that have a Facebook element, such as a Like button or comments section. Usually this information, after it is collected, is de-identified and used for content recommendations and sold to third-party advertisers.

But often the non-identifying information in your profile can be so specific that it could only belong to a single person.

Gardai warned of a rise in online scams during the Covid-19 pandemic, with well organised gangs using fraudulent means to trick people into sharing personal details.

Mr Burke said: My advice is think before we post messages, sharing personal information about ourselves that you wouldnt want strangers to know. You wouldnt stop and speak to a complete stranger in the shops and tell them intimate details of your life, yet people do this online.

Chris Hauk, consumer privacy champion at Pixel Privacy, explains why passwords are often so easy to guess for hackers.

He said: When you sign up for a social network, you begin sharing your location, information about your activities, photos, information about you and your friends and family, and so much more.

Facebook is especially intrusive. In addition to your Facebook activities, Facebook also tracks your browsing activity on the rest of the internet. Facebook uses this info for advertising purposes.

The information you post and share on social networks is also exposed to other users.

"Malicious users could use this info, including the answers to What is your favourite pets name? quizzes, to use social engineering to hack your accounts.

According to a survey by the EUs official statistical office, Eurostat, almost 90 per cent of Europeans aged between 16 and 24 are on social media.

The average teenager in Ireland now checks in at least 60 times a day, which has effects on the developing adolescent brain.

Unsah Malik, social media and influence expert, says we join because we want to feel connected in real life, and to feel good.

She explained: Social interaction is a basic human need and social media has essentially capitalised on that.

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Psychologically, when we engage in a conversation with strangers or post content and see a pool of people responding to us, dopamine signals in our brain increases for a little happy high.

She warned how this can become an addiction, adding: The damage social media addiction has on a person ranges from low self-esteem to anxiety, lack of performance and efforts in real life relationships and activities, and a distorted view on what the real world looks like.

"Its alarming, hence why its up to us as adults - or parents and teachers to children - to monitor our activity levels.

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Experts warn willingness to give away private info gives tech giants free reign to profile billions of users - The Irish Sun

China party meeting vows to block monopolies, with eye on tech giants – Nikkei Asia

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BEIJING -- Chinese officials proposed tougher antitrust restrictions at a key economic planning meeting on Friday, as President Xi Jinping's government targets the growing power of the country's technology groups.

Efforts will be made to intensify anti-monopoly supervision and prevent disorderly capital expansion next year, according to a statement released following the Central Economic Work Conference held from Wednesday to Friday.

The statement appears aimed at online service providers that have extended their reach during the coronavirus pandemic.

China supports tech platform companies' innovation and international competitiveness, but antitrust and fair-competition rules "are the inherent requirements for improving the socialist market economic system," according to the statement.

Laws and regulations will be "optimized" to identify platform monopolies, Xinhua reports.

The work conference is held each December to chart China's economic direction for the following year. With the Chinese economy expected to roar back to life in 2021, Xi looks to protect small businesses and households while preventing overheating in the real estate market and other sectors.

Alibaba Group Holding and its peers use aggressive discounts to expand their customer bases, which Beijing believes is placing excessive pressure on manufacturers and mom-and-pop shops.

China's planners are drafting new legislation on data use and consumer protections as well.

Financial technology also appears likely for greater scrutiny. China has seen an influx of newcomers into the financial sector from other industries, notably Alibaba's digital payments unit Ant Group.

"Financial innovation must be advanced under prudent supervision," the statement said.

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China party meeting vows to block monopolies, with eye on tech giants - Nikkei Asia

Tech giants are lowering the cost of their gadgets. Here’s the catch. – Sydney Morning Herald

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What's the catch? Google's business model revolves around keeping tabs on you so it can serve you relevant advertising. With few exceptions, you're generating data to feed its empire any time you're signed into your Google account. Sometimes even when you're not. The company also attracted ire this year when it announced plans to limit the free online storage option for Google Photos, showing how cheap, convenient, indespensible services can become expensive down the line.

While the iPhone-maker still produces some of the priciest gadgets in a number of categories, 2020 also saw it lean further than ever into services. To that end we saw a new budget smartphone in the iPhone SE, which starts at $679, and last year's iPhone 11 was dragged down to $999. Even the brand new iPhone 12 saw a smaller, comparatively less expensive variant in the $1200 iPhone 12 Mini, and we got an entry-level smartwatch with the $429 Apple Watch SE.

Apple One bundles provide access to multiple Apple services at a lower cost.

As for the services themselves, this year Apple rolled out a tiered subscription bundle called Apple One, which delivers some significant savings if you and your family switch to getting more of your entertainment via Cupertino. For $20 per month an entire family can get music, TV, games and cloud storage from Apple's various offerings, or for $30 you also get news and fitness. Note that you'll all need access to Apple-made devices to make the most of the services.

What's the catch? For the SE models you're obviously getting a stripped-back device. On iPhone that means a smaller, low-resolution screen, only one camera and none of the latest accessories. For Watch, it means no always-on display or blood oxygen readings. The big catch with Apple One is that it discourages using rival services. For example if your family's already cool with Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade, going with Spotify for music will be significantly more expensive than Apple Music.

Microsoft's gaming division has pivoted in recent years towards making video games as accessible as possible, envisioning a future where rather than buying expensive systems and games occassionally, you pay little bits frequently for a constant bombardment of content. Its Game Pass service has grown into a phenomenal value this year, with $11 per month getting your household access to hundreds of games old and new. The $16 per month Ultimate subscription gets you even more.

The Xbox Series S, right, plays the same games as the more expensive Xbox Series X.

In addition to the brawny Xbox Series X launched last month, the Xbox Series S offers a signicantly less expensive (and less powerful) path to next-gen gaming at $499. And Telstra customers can bundle a new console together with Game Pass Ultimate for a monthly charge of $33 (for Series S) or $46 (for Series X) over 24 months. Finally, Game Pass games can be streamed to phones and screens with no need to buy a gaming machine at all (this is in beta in Australia, with full launch next year).

What's the catch? Paying $33 per month for a brand new console, all the first party games and hundreds of others would have seemed impossible a few years ago. Game Pass is a great deal and will result in you playing more games than you could have otherwise, but you'll also likely spend more over time. Plus, games not published by Microsoft that you get through Game Pass may eventually leave the service, so you'll have to buy them at that point to continue playing.

Last year's Oculus Quest was a watershed moment for consumer VR; a high-quality dedicated headset that didn't need to be attached to a PC, console or smartphone, didn't require separate cameras or setup and could be used virtually anywhere. This year's Quest 2 offers several upgrades, including sharper and smoother visuals and more powerful internals, and yet somehow it comes in even cheaper than the original at $479.

The Oculus Quest 2 is a technical improvement over the original, and costs less.

What's the catch? Oculus is owned by Facebook, and the company has made that very clear with how it's approached its latest headset. Valid Facebook accounts are required for the device to function, meaning you also have to agree to let the social media giant collect data from your use of the headset. And if anything should happen to your Facebook account say if you deactivated it or were banned for any reason your headset could be rendered inoperative.

The top technology stories, gadget releases and gaming reviews delivered every Friday. Sign up here.

Tim is the editor of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald technology sections.

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Tech giants are lowering the cost of their gadgets. Here's the catch. - Sydney Morning Herald

Twitters POTUS account will reportedly be reset to zero followers when Biden takes over – TechCrunch

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In this country, we have a longstanding peaceful transfer of power for the executive office, even in the wake of the hardest-fought elections. Certain circumstances have led many to question whether the tradition will continue come January 20. Despite his very vocal protestations, however, the current president has agreed to step aside, should all of his legal maneuvers fall short (something that seems all but a certainty at this point).

There is, of course, nothing in the Constitution that offers guidance the peaceful transition of passwords strangely, the forefathers of this country didnt possess the foresight to predict Twitter . The service has already outlined what happens to Trumps account when he leaves office. Namely, he loses the protections that come with being a political figure.

CEO Jack Dorsey noted this at last months congressional hearings, stating, If an account suddenly is not a world leader anymore, that particular policy goes away. But what of the incoming president? What will the transition look like for Biden? And what happens if Trump doesnt willingly give up the official @Potus account as has also been suggested?

He hasnt exactly been eager to accept the results of this election and hes not the sort to willingly give up a platform particularly one with 33 million followers (admittedly a fraction of Trumps main account).

Nick Pacilio, of Twitters Communications, Government & News team, offered TechCrunch the following statement, on the matter: Twitter has been in ongoing discussions with the Biden transition team on a number of aspects related to White House account transfers.

The company, perhaps understandably, didnt answer the question directly, but working with the incoming team is a simple enough way to circumvent any issues transferring more than one dozen accounts, as The Wall Street Journal notes. As has been reported, existing tweets will be deleted and the incoming administration will start from scratch a net positive for the Biden team, given thepolarizing nature of the previous presidents feed.

According to Bidens digital director, the POTUS and White House accounts will also reset to zero followers, marking a change over the Obama to Trump transition. Donald Trumps personal Twitter account has already lost one prominent follower. Earlier this week, CEO Jack Dorsey unfollowed the president, along with other prominent politicians, including Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

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Twitters POTUS account will reportedly be reset to zero followers when Biden takes over - TechCrunch

Nintendo Switch games have been successfully emulated on M1 Macs – 9to5Mac

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Developer @daeken on Twitter has gotten Nintendo Switch games to run on Apple Silicon Macs. The implementation is not quite perfect yet due to the technical limitations of the MoltenVK runtime library, which maps Vulkan to Apples Metal graphics framework. Even with these limitations, the emulation looks very promising.

In the video posted on Twitter you can see Super Mario Odyssey running on macOS. As the game begins, though, you can start to see those technical limitations. The developer has also installed The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on macOS and is sure to test more titles.

The 8 Bit notes the likely reason that emulating Nintendo Switch games on M1 Macs is even possible and how an emulator could come to iOS and iPadOS.

Apparently, emulating a Switch CPU on Apple Silicon seems to be easy, given that the Switch itself runs on an ARM processor.

Speaking about the possibility of a similar port to iOS, apart from macOS, the developer notes in a reply that if Hypervisor.framework is ever made available on iOS, porting it would be pretty painless I imagine. The Hypervisor.framework is the same framework that initially enabled a developer tosuccessfully virtualize Windows ARM on Apple Silicon, as perThe 8-Bitsreporting.

Developers have been experimenting with M1 Macs ever since they were released, and its incredibly impressive to see the pace at which this kind of work is being done. Its important to note however that Nintendo takes a very anti-emulation stance when it comes to playing their games on other platforms and can get very litigious when it comes to developers creating or distributing their software and ROMs. Regardless, this is still an incredibly cool tech demo that highlights the increased flexibility that comes with the new ARM architecture that Apple Silicon is built upon.

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Nintendo Switch games have been successfully emulated on M1 Macs - 9to5Mac

Orchid VPN review: It uses the tech behind Bitcoin to improve privacy – CNET

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Orchid

If I wanted to tell you why Orchid VPN is poised to be not only the next evolution of virtual private networks but also a futuristic answer to global online privacy threats, I could tell you its cryptocurrency-fueled decentralized bandwidth market makes it a blockchain-supported VPN-Tor hybrid ready to upend even the fastest, most secure VPN on the market.

And that's what I've beensaying since March, but for most people (myself included) it still sounds like I'm speaking cyberpunk marketing gibberish. So, instead, I want to tell you about bootleg whiskey and outrunning the law. Hop in.

Now, if you were going to do any respectable amount of moonshining in the 1920s, you were going to need more than just a bubbling still and a handshake with the sheriff -- you'd need a car. And not just any car. What you'd need is an unquestionably reliable machine with massive trunk space and hidden compartments. One that looked as unassuming as a church lady with a basket of biscuits, but one whose engine could -- at the toe-tap of a pedal -- roar to life with the fury of seven hells and leave cops wondering how to charge you with breaking the laws of physics.

Read more:The best VPN service of 2020

That's how stock car racing was born. It's also what the world of commercial VPNs looks like right now. VPN innovations are spurred by a competition to be fastest over long distances, to best hide your product (your data) and to offer the biggest bang per buck. Likewise, VPN companies can be aggressive in their hype-making -- their businesses live and die by whether they've ever been caught selling you out to a G-man and you'll find some of them bolster their reputations by swearing their competitors are all patsies.

The toughest part for you in all this, dear moonshiner, is that no matter how good a VPN might seem, you're still confronted with the core vulnerability shared by every VPN: Since you can't inspect the routes these VPNs travel and the servers through which your data passes, you've ultimately got to risk trusting one. For some of you, that trust is low-risk -- you're just looking for better online gaming or a wider streaming media library. For a slice of you, though, the stakes couldn't be higher -- evading censorship and government snooping in countries where VPNs are illegal can be a matter of life and death if you're caught.

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While I can inspect the nuts and bolts of all these VPNs for you and dig up dirt on the people associated with them, even I can't see the routes nor track all the shell companies behind their owners. Caveat emptor.

So imagine my face when this latest hot shot VPN rolls into my shop and I pop the hood to find not just an engine but a fractal of engines. Imagine my jaw dropping when I realize this thing isn't just one souped-up privacy vehicle but a fleet of its competitor cars, each of which is autonomous and paid per mile in anonymized currency to carry a tiny piece of your product in a hyper-coordinated yet seemingly chaotic convoy.

That's Orchid VPN. It's changing the nature of VPNs as we know them and resisting all attempts at categorization using my normal testing and review process. No, it's not ready for the mass market quite yet: It's not as fast as our top-tier VPN speedsters and it isn't as easy to handle for new users as some of our trusted standbys. And no, I can't even give you a specific monthly cost.

But this is what the future of VPN tech looks like. And you gotta see it.

This is normally the part where I give you a slate of speed test scores about a VPN and compare it to its nearest competitor. But it's hard to get a lock on average speeds for Orchid because it doesn't test the same. Orchid's service is unique in that its speed, its security and its cost are all inseparable and interdependent.

My normal speed testing routine includes extended multiplatform speed score averaging across at least five countries and a few oceans. Orchid's normal client, however, isn't yet fully available for Windows, so any attempt to average the scores would start out slanted. Also, Orchid doesn't allow you to connect to a specific country the way other VPNs do. Instead, you've got to manually add a "hop" to another VPN server by pasting that server's configuration file into a screen on your Orchid app. That VPN server can be selected from either from Orchid's global pool of service providers or from your own current, non-Orchid VPN provider.

The structure looks a lot like Tor's network, which obscures your traffic by letting you hop between user-run nodes. And while a multihop feature is a security boon in any VPN, it's not going to give us an accurate baseline speed comparison.

We put the Orchid mascot's speed to the test.

What's more, anyone can set up an Orchid node on the company's bandwidth marketplace, meaning the speed of each node you connect to will vary based on what kind of connection its operator is working with. The person running the node also gets to set their node's bandwidth price.

So I threw my framework out the window and decided to see how much this thing could handle.

Aiming to find the lowest likely base speeds, I loaded Orchid onto an Android device with less processing power than my normal MacOS testing device, connected to Wi-Fi and clocked a non-VPN speed of 372.47 megabits per second. Connecting to Orchid via a single US VPN hop, I pulled 45.5 Mbps. Not as fast as I'd hoped, but a perfectly usable connection speed for nearly any streaming media that yielded zero performance issues (for context, our Editor's Choice ExpressVPN pulled an average US speed of 66 Mbps, during our last tests). Then I went beyond the default VPN connection and added another cross-country Orchid hop to California, pulling 28.9 Mbps and still streaming video.

A key feature of Orchid is that you can add a server of your choice to your list of in-app hops. So I manually configured an additional OpenVPN protocol hop which would double-ricochet my traffic from California to an OpenVPN server in London for a total of three hops. For any VPN with a multihop feature (especially one sending your traffic overseas and back), three hops should be enough to throw pretty much anything off your trail, but it will slow you down. Sure enough, I was stalled to a sputtering 2.9 Mbps.

Using 5G mobile data, I saw comparable speeds. I measured a non-VPN speed of 212.6 Mbps. With one US Orchid hop, I saw 13.84 Mbps. At two US Orchid hops, I saw 9.82 Mbps. Replicating the same trio of hops described above, I still pulled 1.83 Mbps.

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While you might be able to get some streaming services to work on the slower of those speeds, you shouldn't count on it. I managed to get HBO Max playing on the slower of the two-hop connections, but it took a few tries. That may have been related to Orchid's sluggish pace at making that first connection. There's more lag than you normally find in a VPN app. Two-hop connections were even more touch-and-go about video calls, though voice calls and music apps held steady compared to what you'd see with other multihop VPNs, and I was able to play Netflix.

I was impressed. So, naturally, I tried to kill it.

Working on mobile data only, I took an elevator underground until I was directly beneath 290 feet of continuous-pour reinforced concrete framing enclosed by an aluminum curtain-wall system (in a very chic shade of 1960s turquoise blue), straining my connection until non-VPN test speeds were repeatedly under 60 Mbps. From this location, I kicked on Orchid, opened every data-sucking app I had, loaded media-intensive sites across multiple tabs in all the browsers and ran some tests.

No IP leaks. No DNS leaks. This version of the app may have its glitches, but even when I dragged Orchid all the way down to 0.7 Mbps and taunted it with intermittent signal disruptions, it never exposed my identity and I could still listen to Spotify before the VPN finally guttered out. Never mind speed. That's performance.

One reason I was able to get streaming content on a multihop connection is Orchid's own home-brewed protocol. While the backbone of its encryption is in the blockchain, Orchid's protocol is specifically designed to travel on the back of WebRTC -- the same technology your browser uses to facilitate high-quality video and audio calls. Not only does this give Orchid an advantage in streaming media content that you'd never be able to get using Tor, but it also makes your traffic look like just another video call.

Some privacy advocates will tell you that, given how opaque VPN corporate ownership is, you might as well just write off consumer VPNs altogether and stick to using Tor. They're not entirely wrong. Decades have passed without government entities fully cracking Tor's core technology and exposing users at will.

Tor has its limits, though. Tor traffic makes you stick out like a sore thumb to your ISP and network administrators. Sites can see it too and are often quick to block in-bound Tor traffic. Likewise, the CIA, NSA and FBI have all been known to camp out in Tor exit nodes or set up their own. If that weren't enough, you can't transport nearly as much data via Tor as you would a VPN, making voice and video calls nearly impossible over Tor's network of volunteer-run nodes.

On the VPN side of security, the encryption we normally test with (and which we consider the minimum security you should expect of a VPN) is OpenVPN protocol. It's generally considered by privacy gurus to be a healthy mixture of speed and security, and its popularity among consumer VPNs makes it a great control variable in testing. But OpenVPN is also getting up there in Internet Years, and has a history of being somewhat vulnerable if not deployed carefully.

Orchid's protocol is similar to OpenVPN but based on blockchain and, as a decentralized network, Orchid is built to adapt to different types of protocols. Normally, I wouldn't recommend any US-based VPN company, but decentralized blockchain encryption changes that altogether. Decentralized VPNs, in general, are the next step in end-user privacy tools because their nature prevents any single, central company from being able to keep logs of all of your activity.

And Orchid isn't the only one out there. Mysterium, Kelvpn, Tachyon, BitVPN and Lethean are all decentralized, peer-to-peer style VPNs aimed at resisting censorship efforts by creating a nearly subpoena-proof network of bandwidth providers over which your traffic is scattered. Orchid is ahead of the field here in several notable ways, among them its contracts with other VPN companies, which allows users to travel on its partner VPNs' networks.

If you really want to understand why decentralized blockchain is the next step for VPNs and why Orchid is brilliant, you'll need to know what blockchain and cryptocurrency actually are. Despite the hype, it's not that complicated.

A blockchain is basically just an encrypted, tamper-proof ledger for transactions. Everyone gets a copy of the ledger and everyone's copy automatically changes when someone adds a transaction to their own. You build computer networks on blockchain tech when you need a trustworthy record of information that a lot of people are working with at once -- financial trading, digital copies of paper documents, movements in food supply chains and global shipping, or art brokering.

The "block" is a block of data that is added to the ledger when a transaction occurs. The "chain" is the metaphorical ledger itself. Simple.

Orchid is built on blockchain, the technology that underpins Bitcoin cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrencies work on blockchain. Just like paper money has its anti-counterfeiting designs, each unit of cryptocurrency has its verifiable blockchain. When a transaction occurs and a block is about to get added to the chain, a whole network of computers working with that chain jumps in to verify the transaction is legit by checking its math. The first computer to prove the block's math gets paid.

That's called mining. It's how Bitcoin works. It's also a process that takes too long -- imagine standing at a grocery store register for 10 minutes while your cashier calls the bank -- and sucks up way too much computing power. But there are thousands of types of cryptocurrencies. One of those is Ethereum. It's faster because its verification process is different. Using Ethereum, Orchid developed its own cryptocurrency, called OXT.

In a 2018 explainer, CNET's Stephen Shankland offers one of the clearest and simplest explanations of blockchain I've read. I've cribbed from him liberally here, but that same explainer was remarkably prescient.

"There's lots of work to free blockchain from the problems of transaction speed and energy consumption, though," he wrote. "One idea, 'proof of stake,' uses no significant computing power and looks to be the future for the Ethereum Project, which is responsible for the ether cryptocurrency."

Proof of stake is how Orchid works. And Orchid's currency, OXT, is based on Ethereum.

As Shankland explained, "ether has popularized a newer idea called smart contracts. These are programs that run on the Ethereum network and take automated if-this-then-that actions. For example, a smart contract could look for the highest bid in an auction at a certain time and automatically transfer ownership rights to the auction winner."

That bidding system is also how Orchid works and bandwidth sellers are working in that automated, auction-like environment.

This is normally where I compare costs between VPNs in the same league as the one I'm reviewing. I'd love to do that here. But Orchid again defies simple explanation. There's no set monthly price and no one is in its league.

Instead, you pay for the bandwidth that you use in OXT and Ethereum, or ETH. The downside is that you're subject to market changes, so it can be difficult to estimate long-term cost and you've got to figure out how it works. On the plus side, you're only paying for what you use, you're more anonymous than you would be paying by cash or card and even a heavy data user will find it pretty affordable.

Mercifully, Orchid made the process easier when it obliterated an enormous barrier to entry in July. It now lets you buy your cryptocurrency within the app in semidisposable accounts (think: burner phones but for cryptocurrency wallets) instead of jumping through hoops to set up and connect an outside cryptocurrency account.

To get started, you need at least $4 worth of OXT and $1 in ETH. At current exchange rates, that'll get you around 60 gigs of VPN service. Not bad.

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I plan to keep fiddling with this service until I know it inside-out, but Orchid has some work to do before I can recommend it as everyone's daily driver VPN. Privacy hounds should absolutely give this a whirl and get a look at the future of VPNs. But for most of us, the onboarding is a little too complicated, the pricing too much guesswork and the learning curve still steep enough to be a major hurdle to adoption.

By itself, a crypto-financed hybrid VPN based on a bandwidth-trading market is already a hard pitch to make to the average person. This novelty of the underlying tech and its payment method mean the app's designers are under even greater pressure to create a welcoming, intuitive interface.

The app launches smoothly and its interface is simple and attractively designed. The home screen has one button for connecting and another to manage your hops, while other functions are hidden in a three-bar menu in the top-left corner. While this simplicity aims to create an intuitive experience, I found it too minimalistic where I needed more information and too complicated in places where I needed clarity. The experience left me unsure if I'd done it right, tapping around the app searching for confirmation of some kind that I hadn't missed a step or misconfigured a connection somehow.

The central button of the app is labelled with a universally familiar power icon that says "connect" when the app is opened, says "connecting" as it works and, when connected, changes to "disconnect." Once connected, the Orchid icon and its connection status appear at the top of your phone's home screen.

This would normally be fine design, but the option to stop or start Orchid from the device's main screen rarely works as intended, the app sometimes freezes while attempting to connect, and sometimes it says it's connected when it's not.

To check for data flow, you can access the Traffic Monitor feature in the three-bar menu, but if terms like "TLSv1.2" and "UDP" don't ring any bells for you, then that screen might not be useful. Glitchiness aside, if you're new to cryptocurrency, you might also struggle trying to figure out how much currency you have within the app, how much you're burning at any given time, how the unfamiliar in-app "tickets" work and how to gauge bandwidth value. We're going to need a little more hand-holding here from Orchid to get us neophytes all onboard.

Likewise, as VPNs are loosely understood to be technology that takes us from one location to another, Orchid could help visually signal that we've used the app correctly and that our connection is active by telling us what city we're now connected to on its main screen, and perhaps for how long we've been connected.

It's not fair that the app interface has so much heavy lifting to do on behalf of the technology, but it's Orchid's best vector for removing adoption obstacles and getting more of us where we all need to be for our own good -- on a decentralized VPN, leaving trust in the dust and outrunning the all-seeing eye of government surveillance.

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Orchid VPN review: It uses the tech behind Bitcoin to improve privacy - CNET

Remembering the startups we lost in 2020 – TechCrunch

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Even in a non-hell year, running a successful startup is a tremendous lift. After the events of 2020, however, no doubt many already lean businesses are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. For every company that saw increased interest in their offerings during the pandemic, there were several that simply couldnt make it through the finish line.

Weve put this list together for several years now. Its not a fun task, but it seems worthwhile to commemorate the startups that have closed up shop over the past 12 months. (Some of them were acquired by larger companies before shutting down, but all of them began their life as startups, and it still felt worthwhile to mark the end of their stories.) It also offers an opportunity to examine those issues from a bit of distance to see if there are any broader takeaways for the community at large.

This years list is among the most diverse weve done, ranging from standard smaller-name closures to big blockbuster crashes like Quibi and Essential . For some, the pandemic was the final nail in the coffin, but in many cases, cracks in business models were already starting to surface well before COVID-19 ground the global economy to a screeching halt.

Atrium (2017-2020)

Total Raised: $75 million

Atrium, a 100-person legal tech startup founded by Justin Kan, shut down in March after failing to find an efficient way to replace the arduous systems of law firms. The startup even returned some of its $75.5 million in funding to its investors, including Andreessen Horowitz.

The shutdown comes after the platform had pivoted just months earlier, laying off in-house lawyers and turning into a clearer SaaS play. Ultimately, Atriums failure shows how difficult and unprofitable it could be to disrupt a traditional and complicated system.

The closure came just three years after it launched with the goal to build software for startups to navigate fundraising, hiring, acquisition deals and collaboration with their legal team.

Essential (2017-2020)

Total Raised: $330 million

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

Big plans, big names and a boatload of money should have been enough to buy Essential a lengthy runway. Sure, Essential was entering a mature and oversaturated market, but the Playground-backed startup was doing so with $330 million in funding, a team of top industry executives and some genuinely innovative ideas.

When I spoke to the company at launch, an executive outlined a 10-year plan to become a major player in both the mobile and smart home categories. Ultimately, the company was able to eke out just under three years of life after coming out of stealth. And while it did give the world a promising handset, its connected home hub never arrived.

Timing, broader marketing issues and troubling allegations of sexual misconduct were all contributing factors that stopped Essentials big plans dead in their tracks.

HubHaus (2016-2020)

Total Raised: $11.4 million

Image Credits: HubHaus

HubHaus, founded by Shruti Merchant, was a long-term housing rental platform rooted in the belief that adult dormitories would take off. The startup targeted working professionals in cities, and raised only around $11 million in known venture capital. When it came to raising a Series B, Merchant says the company struggled to close and lost investor interest due to WeWorks failed IPO.

After then pivoting to a self-funded company, HubHaus was just finding footing when the coronavirus pandemic arrived in the United States, drastically hurting the rental market (as shown by Airbnbs public struggles, as well). The housing company eventually decided to close down in September, leaving landlords, members and vendors in limbo and bringing on a fresh sweep of critique and controversy.

Affordable housing continues to be an issue in the Bay Area, and HubHauss departure from the scene underscores this truth.

Hipmunk (2010-2020)

Total Raised: $55 million

Image Credits: Hipmunk

Hipmunk, founded by Adam J. Goldstein and Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, was one of the first travel aggregation platforms on the market. The company put together information on flights, hotels and car rental all into one place so consumers could compare and contrast prices with ease.

The focus was enough for the platform to get acquired by Concur, but now after four years, the travel startup shut down. Notably, the travel startups closure wasnt necessarily tied to the coronavirus pandemic. The site officially went dark on January 23, months before lockdowns came to the United States.

IfOnly (2012-2020)

Total Raised: $51.4 million

Photo: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

IfOnly had created a marketplaces of exclusive events such as goat yoga a business that faced obvious challenges during the pandemic. The startup was actually acquired by one of its investors, Mastercard, late last year, but the acquisition wasnt announced until IfOnly revealed over the summer that it was shutting down.

Mastercard also said IfOnlys team and technology are still part of its Priceless experience marketplace: The IfOnly platform will continue to help advance our Priceless strategy and our combined team will be even better positioned and equipped to deliver exclusive experiences for cardholders globally.

Mixer/Beam Interactive (2014-2020)

Total Raised: $520,000

Image Credits: Microsoft

Microsoft shut down its Twitch competitor Mixer this year, handing off its partnerships to Facebook Gaming. The service had its roots in the software giants acquisition of Beam Interactive shortly after the startup won TechCrunchs Startup Battlefield in 2016.

Before giving up, Microsoft made some big investments in Mixers success, most notably signing streaming superstars Ninja and Shroud to exclusive deals. (They became free agents after the shutdown.) However, Microsofts gaming chief Phil Spencer said the company suffered from starting out pretty far behind the biggest players in the streaming market.

The Outline (2016-2020)

Total Raised: $10.2 million

Image Credits: The Outline

Despite a busy year of innovation and venture for news media platforms, The Outline, which branded itself as the next generation version of the New Yorker was shut down. The media site was started by Josh Topolsky and had an explicit focus on serving millennials with a digital-first news media brand.

The shutdown was part of a broader layoffs at Bustle Digital Group, which acquired the publication in 2019. Pre-acquisition, The Outline had already scaled back its editorial staff and refocused on freelance articles. (Input a tech site that Topolsky founded for BDG continues to publish.)

Periscope (2015-2020)

Periscope went out with more of a whimper than a bang. The startup was acquired by Twitter before it had even launched a product. With Meerkat bursting on the scene that year at SXSW, Twitter went on the offensive, buying the startup to build out its own live video offering.

Periscopes run was decent as far as these things go, and its technology will live on as part of Twitters video offerings, even after the app is officially discontinued next March. But in the end, Periscope was a shell of its former self. In fact, this is a rare instance where the pandemic may have actually delayed its shutdown.

The company notes, We probably would have made this decision sooner if it werent for all of the projects we reprioritized due to the events of 2020.

PicoBrew (2010-2020)

Total Raised: $15.1 million

Image Credits: PicoBrew

The company made beer-brewing machines that used coffee pod-style PicoPaks, then expanded into other categories like coffee and tea, but never quite attracted enough customers to make the business viable. It sold its assets earlier this year to PB Funding Group a group of lenders recruited by then-CEO Bill Mitchell in 2018 to keep it afloat.

Its possible that PicoBrew will live on in some form, as PB Funding Group says its seeking buyers for the companys patents and other intellectual property, and that it will keep the website running in the short term so that the machines dont stop working.

Quibi (2018-2020)

Total Raised: $1.75 billion

Quibi CEO Meg Whitman speaks about the short-form video streaming service for mobile Quibi during a keynote address January 8, 2020 at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)

More so than any tech company in recent memory (with the possible exception of Theranos), Quibis existence feels like a fever dream. $1.75 billion in funding later and what do we have to show for it? Fierce Queens, a nature documentary about female animals. The HGTV-style program, Murder House Flip. And, of course, The Shape of Pasta. A show about pasta.

Early reports of the services demise seemed premature if only because there was seemingly no way a company could burn through that much capital that quickly. By late-October, however, it was over. All that is left now is to offer a profound apology for disappointing you and, ultimately, for letting you down, founders Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman wrote in an open letter.

Sometimes startup failures are bad timing. Sometimes its just plain bad luck. With Quibi, the diagnoses of what went wrong can be summed up in one word: everything.

Rubica (2016-2020)

Total Raised: $15 million

Image Credits: Rubica

Rubica spun out of security company Concentric Advisors with the aim of offering tools that were more advanced than antivirus software, while still remaining accessible to individuals and small businesses. CEO and co-founder Frances Dewing said that when customers cut back on spending during the pandemic, the company tried to shift its focus to larger enterprise, but it failed to convince investors there was a business there.

We were all really surprised given how relevant and needed this is right now, she said. Investors didnt agree with that or see it in the same way.

ScaleFactor (2014-2020)

Total Raised: $104 million

Businessmans hands with calculator and cost at the office and Financial data analyzing counting on wood desk. Image Credits:Sarinya Pinngam/EyeEm / Getty Images

ScaleFactor was a startup claiming to offer artificial intelligence tools that could replace accountants for small businesses; it blamed the pandemic for cutting its revenue in half and forcing the company to shut down.However, former employees and customers told Forbes a different story that ScaleFactor actually relied on human accountants (including an outsourced team in the Philippines) to do the work.

While its hardly unprecedented for a startup to fudge the truth about their level of automation versus human labor, this reportedly resulted in error-filled accounting for ScaleFactor clients. (Responding to a fact-checking email, former CEO Kurt Rathmann said the email was filled with numerous factual inaccuracies and misrepresentation and declined to comment further.)

Starsky Robotics (2015-2020)

Total Raised: $20 million

Self-driving trucks startup Starksy Robotics began with this first, and problematic truck. Image Credits:Starsky Robotics

In 2019, our truck became the first fully-unmanned truck to drive on a live highway, Starsky Robotics co-founder and CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher wrote in a Medium post in March. And in 2020, were shutting down. After five years and $20 million in funding, the autonomous trucking company shut its doors that month. It wasnt for lack of ambition or demand it seems safe to assume theres still a bright future for self-driving trucks.

Ultimately, however, Starsky wont be along for that ride a fact Seltz-Axmacher blames largely on timing. A crowded market is certainly at play, as well, with countless companies currently pushing to bring autonomous technology to the road.

Stockwell/Bodega (2018-2020)

Total Raised: $10 million

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Founded in 2018 by ex-Googlers, Stockwell AI shut down after being unable to find business for its in-building smart vending machines that stocked everything from condoms to La Croix. The company blamed the current landscape (also known as the global pandemic we are experiencing) for its closure.

Stockwell AI, formerly known as Bodega, was well-funded and well-known, with more than $45 million in funding from investors that included NEA, GV, DCM Ventures, Forerunner, First Round and Homebrew. Still, even venture capital couldnt make vending machines work well enough.

Trover (2011-2020)

Total Raised: $2.5 million

Image Credits: Trover

Another travel-focused startup bites the dust as the coronavirus limits the chance to safely explore the world (let alone your neighborhood). Trover, a photo-sharing hub for travelers acquired by Expedia, shut down in August. The startup was founded by Rich Barton and Jason Karas and was meant to connect people travelling to the same places. The startup had quite the life: it began out of the remains of TravelPost, a travel review site, and got scooped up by its parent company when it only had $2.5 million in funding. Unfortunately, its nine-year journey is over for now.

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Remembering the startups we lost in 2020 - TechCrunch

Stocks making the biggest moves midday: Peloton, Apple, IAC, CarMax and more – CNBC

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A monitor displays Peloton Interactive Inc. signage during the company's initial public offering (IPO) across from the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, U.S., on Thursday, Sept. 26, 2019.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Check out the companies making headlines in midday trading.

Peloton The exercise equipment stock jumped more than 11.7% and hit an all-time high after Peloton announced that it planned to buy equipment manufacture Precor for $420 million. The deal could help Peloton ramp up production to meet strong demand.

IAC Shares of IAC jumped more than 14.1% on Tuesday after announcing it is spinning off its full stake in video software company Vimeo. Vimeo will become an independent publicly traded company after the deal closes, expected in the second quarter of 2021.

Apple A gain of 2.9% helped Apple offset losses in the major indexes given the iPhone maker's $2.2 trillion market cap. Investors accredited the equity's strength to reports that Apple is advancing plans to manufacture self-driving cars by 2024, a massive undertaking the tech company has dubbed Project Titan.

CarMax The auto retailer reported quarterly per-share earnings of $1.42, topping the consensus estimate of $1.14 a share. Revenue also came in above Wall Street forecasts. But CarMax shares fell more than 8% after the company reported that comparable used-vehicle sales dropped 0.8% compared to a FactSet consensus estimate of a 1% increase.

Carnival, Norwegian Cruise Line, MGM Resorts Travel-related stocks came under pressure amid lingering concerns about the new coronavirus strain from the U.K.Carnival lost 5.9%, Norwegian Cruise Line fell 6.9% and Royal Caribbean dipped 3%. MGM Resorts fell 0.5%. Delta Air Lines, American Airlines and United Airlines all slipped more than 2.5%.

Sportsman's Warehouse Shares of the retailer surged 39.6% after the company said it agreed to be bought by Great American Outdoors Group. The parent company of Cabela's will pay $18 in cash per share of Sportsman's Warehouse, above the stock's Monday closing price of $12.65 per share.

RealReal Shares of the luxury clothing company popped 10.3% after Baird initiated coverage of RealReal with an outperform rating. The Wall Street firm called RealReal a "compelling open-ended growth story."

Rent-A-Center Shares of the furniture and electronics rental company added 1.2% after Loop Capital upgraded Rent-A-Center to buy from hold. The investment firm said in a note that the company's acquisition of Acima was a "game changer."

Illumina Illumina shares advanced 2.3% after Piper Sandler upgraded the maker of gene sequencing technology to an overweight rating. "llumina is well-positioned as the leader in NGS [next-generation sequencings], and we believe it can maintain and grow its position by continuing to lower sequencing costs and taking advantage of datascienceadvancestoimproveshort-readperformance," the firm said in a note to clients.

with reporting from CNBC's Jesse Pound, Pippa Stevens and Tom Franck.

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Stocks making the biggest moves midday: Peloton, Apple, IAC, CarMax and more - CNBC