Money is tight these days. Holiday shopping, ballooning inflation, and a looming recession have forced people to more carefully consider their finances. Those factors might help explain the explosion of “buy now, pay later” services. BNPL plans offered by companies like Affirm, AfterPay, and Klarna let you spread the cost of a purchase—anything from a Peloton bike to a basket of groceries—over multiple installments, without the fees or interest rates of most credit cards. Of course, free money always comes with a catch.
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This week on Gadget Lab, we dig into the buy now, pay later phenomenon and what it means for the future of shopping.
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From all the web browsers to choose from these days, Chrome is still the most popular for some reason. Practially everyone uses it, and as such, everyone knows it’s a battery hog—and the more tabs you open and the more extensions you use, the worse the energy drain becomes. While we’ve tried to help you out in the past with workarounds to limit Chrome’s energy use, they’re no longer necessary. Google finally has implemented an official “low power mode” solution you can enable in one step.
As reported by How-To Geek, Google dropped the new “Energy Saver” feature alongside the release of Chrome 108. When you enable the option, Chrome will preserve your battery by minimizing background activity, visuals, and frame rates. You will likely notice a change in performance when browsing with those three components limited. Animations and scrolling may feel choppy, and Chrome’s overall speediness may be diminished. But I’ll take it if it means I can actually get a full day’s work done without staying tethered to my charger.
That said, at this point it’s unclear how much battery Energy Saver will actually preserve, since the feature is so new. Still, it seems worth trying, even to squeeze an extra few minutes of juice from my MacBook.
How to enable Low-Power Mode in Chrome 108
The first step is to update Chrome to at least version 108. If it hasn’t updated automatically, you can force an update ton Windows, Mac, or Linux by clicking the three dots in the top-right corner, choosing Help > About Google Chrome. Hit “Relaunch” once Chrome loads the update.
Enter a new reality This bundle packs in the Meta Quest VR headset itself, two controllers, Beat Saber, and Resident Evil 4 as well, which is everything you need to have a good time.
Then you’ll have to do a little digging, because Google hasn’t (yet) made the new option user-facing—there’s no obvious battery-saver setting; instead, the feature is hidden behind a feature flag. (Google launches experimental new features as flags it doesn’t consider ready for the general public, but which are good enough for tinkerers to try out. The company warns that enabling flags can mess with your browser and its data, but Energy Saver seems like a relatively safe one to try.)
If you want tinker with Energy Saver, type chrome://flags into the address bar, then hit enter. Here, click the “Search flags” field and type “battery” to pull up “Enable the battery saver mode feature in the settings” (it’s identifying flag is “#battery-saver-mode-available”). Click “Default,” change the setting to “Enabled,” then hit “Relaunch” to reboot the app. Once Chrome opens back up, head to Settings, then click on the new “Performance” tab to see “Energy Saver.”
From here, you have two options. You can either have Energy Saver kick on when your laptop hits 20% battery, or you can choose to keep the feature on anytime your laptop is unplugged. I didn’t bring my charger to work today, so I know which option I’m picking.
How do you hack a car? Through its infotainment system, apparently.
Newly revealed research shows that a number of major car brands, including Honda, Nissan, Infiniti, and Acura, were affected by a previously undisclosed security bug that would have allowed a savvy hacker to hijack vehicles and steal user data. According to researchers, the bug was in the car’s Sirius XM telematics infrastructure and would have allowed a hacker to remotely locate a vehicle, unlock and start it, flash the lights, honk the horn, pop the trunk, and access sensitive customer info like the owner’s name, phone number, address, and vehicle details.
A group of security researchers discovered the bug while hunting for issues involving major car manufacturers. One of the researchers, 22-year-old cyber professional Sam Curry, said that he and his friends were curious about the kinds of problems that might crop up if they investigated providers of what are known as “telematic services” for carmakers.
Even if you don’t own a Tesla, most modern vehicles are basically web-connected computers on wheels. Inflows and outflows of vehicle data—what is known as telematics—make cars more convenient and customizable than ever before, but they also make them more vulnerable to cyberattacks and remote hijacking. The telematics industry is also a giant privacy hazard, because car manufacturers have been known to sell vehicle data to surveillance vendors, who then do creepy stuff like sell it to government agencies.
After poking around in code related to various car apps, Curry and his colleagues discovered an authentication loophole inside infrastructure provided by radio giant Sirius XM. Sirius is found inside most cars’ infotainment systems and provides related telematic services to most car manufacturers. The way Curry explains it, most cars have SiriusXM “bundled with the [vehicle’s] infotainment system which has the capability to perform actions on the vehicle (lock/unlock, etc) and communicates via satellite to the internet to the SiriusXM API.” This means that data and commands are being sent to and from Sirius by individual vehicles and that information can be hijacked, under the right circumstances.
“It’s as if you had a cell phone connected to your vehicle and could receive and send text messages from the car telling it what to do or sharing the state of the car back to the sender,” Curry said. “In this case, they built infrastructure around the sending/receiving of this data and allowed customers to authenticate to it using some form of mobile app (whether it’s the Nissan Connected mobile app or the MyHonda app). Once the customer was logged into their account and their account had their VIN number associated to it, they could access that pipeline where they can run commands and receive data (e.g. location, speed, etc) from their vehicle.”
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By exploiting an authentication flaw in Sirius XM’s system, a cybercriminal could have hijacked the car, as well as the associated customer account information, Curry explained.
“We continued to escalate this and found the HTTP request to run vehicle commands,” Curry said, explaining how deep the hack went. “We could execute commands on vehicles and fetch user information from the accounts by only knowing the victim’s VIN number, something that was on the windshield.”
When reached for comment, Sirius XM acknowledged the issue and provided Gizmodo with the following comment:
“A security researcher submitted a [bug bounty] report to Sirius XM’s Connected Vehicle Services on an authorization flaw impacting a specific telematics program. The issue was resolved within 24 hours after the report was submitted. At no point was any subscriber or other data compromised nor was any unauthorized account modified using this method.”
Gizmodo also reached out to the affected car manufacturers for comment and will update this story if they respond.
Suffice it to say, these days it might be safer to pal around in a beat-up junker than your souped up electric vehicle. At least your 1979 Ford Pinto didn’t have hijack-able computer systems that could run you off the road.
Tesla is planning to deliver its first all-electric semi-trucks to client PepsiCo this evening—about three years after the vehicle maker first indicated the big rigs would be available. The company announced in a tweet that it will stream the delivery live via Twitter at 5 p.m. PT (8 p.m. ET) on Thursday, in a mysterious “event”—seemingly making good on an October promise to get the trucks to its first clients on Dec. 1.
Elon Musk rolled up to a Tesla press event in an electric semi-truck all the way back in 2017. That vehicle is/was equipped with Tesla’s autonomous driver assistance technology, could go from 0 to 60 mph in five seconds, had a 500-mile total range, and could get to 400 miles of range with just 30 minutes of charging, according to Musk’s claims at the time—some of which he recently repeated in an Oct. 6 tweet. “500 mile range & super fun to drive,” the billionaire recently wrote.
Though the five second 0-60 claim seems to have been tempered since. The website for Semi (the vehicle’s official model name) says such acceleration takes 20 seconds.
And speaking of bunk claims— in 2017, Musk also said “If you order the truck now…you’ll get it in two years.” Immediately following the truck reveal five years ago, pre-orders began rolling in from at least 16 different companies. Each would-be buyer paid Tesla a deposit of between $5,000 and $20,000 per reserved vehicle, according to a report from Electrek. And obviously, Tesla did not deliver as initially planned.
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Now, half a decade post-reveal and 3-years late, we’ll presumably finally find out how those avowed specs hold up under actual use. Tesla began low-level production of its Semis at the company’s Nevada Gigafactory about two months ago. And PepsiCo expects to receive the Tesla trucks today at two of its plants in California, the soda maker previously told Gizmodo. “We are looking forward to this next step in our PepsiCo Positive journey and will provide more details once we have taken delivery,” the beverage behemoth wrote in an October email.
During Tesla’s last earnings call, CEO Musk said the company was planning to manufacture 50,000 semi-trucks for North America by 2024. Though, as we’ve already gone over, the world’s richest person is not very good at meeting his own deadlines. But if all those Tesla Semis do materialize, they’ll be tapping into a market ripe for electrification. Freight shipping is a notoriously polluting and carbon intensive industry—it makes up nearly 10% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, by some estimates.
Companies like Amazon and Walmart have already begun to electrify their delivery fleets with smaller, EV vans. Even the U.S. Postal Service has been facing legal pressure to shift away from gas guzzling vehicles. And Penske and Daimler Truck have been collaborating on their own electric 18-wheelers.
Epic Games released RealityScan for iOS today. The free app, previously available in a closed beta, lets anyone scan real-world objects with their phone and turn them into high-fidelity 3D models.
The app is the fruit of Epic’s purchase of Capturing Reality, a company specializing in photogrammetry software. Like the company’s desktop software, RealityScan combines 2D images to make seamless 3D assets for games and other virtual environments. The idea is to enable game developers and other creatives to scan real-world objects at any time and any place for their projects. (If the metaverse ever takes off, you can imagine tools like this becoming essential.)
The scanning process begins with signing into your Epic Games account and taking at least 20 photos of an object from all sides. As you move your phone around, a real-time quality map shows how well you’ve covered it: green denotes well-covered areas, yellow could use more attention and red needs the most additional photos. It visualizes the places from which you’ve snapped each picture as something akin to little Polaroids floating around your item.
Epic Games
The app uploads and automatically aligns the images in the cloud as you take the photos. You can preview the model through the camera view and switch between the quality map and an in-progress, full-color render. When you want to crop it, it pops up 3D handles for you to drag around, ensuring it captures only the item, not the floor beneath it or background objects.
The process works best with simple items captured in even, indirect lighting (reflective or wet surfaces won’t capture well). It also appears to work best with larger objects, as my attempt to capture a small Mr. T action figure resulted in something that looks more like a pointillistic painting than a usable model.
Once you’re happy with the capture, you can export it to Sketchfab (a 3D asset platform Epic bought last year), where you can use it for 3D, virtual reality and augmented reality projects. Optionally, if you’ve captured something unique, you could try to sell your 3D model. Game developers needing a specific item for a virtual environment are the most logical audience here.
RealityScan is available today as a free download for iOS and iPadOS on the App Store. Earlier this year, Epic said an Android version would arrive later in the year, although the company is running short on time to meet that deadline.
Disney researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that seemingly makes it far easier to make an actor appear younger or older in a scene. While artists will still be able to make manual adjustments to make sure the effect looks as realistic as possible, the AI tool could take care of most of the heavy lifting. It’s said to take the AI just five seconds to apply the aging effects to a single frame.
Re-aging an actor is typically an expensive and laborious process that requires artists to go through a scene frame-by-frame to manually change the character’s appearance. Attempts have been made in the past to automate the process with neural networks and machine learning. Disney’s researchers note that, while they might work well for still images, other systems "typically suffer from facial identity loss, poor resolution and unstable results across subsequent video frames." They claim their solution offers "the first practical, fully-automatic and production-ready method for re-aging faces in video images."
The team wrote in a paper that it would be impossible to train the FRAN (face re-aging network) neural network on a dataset of real people. That would require pairs of images showing a subject with the same facial expression, pose, lighting and background at two different and known ages. Instead, the researchers created a database of several thousand randomly generated faces. They re-aged those synthetic faces using existing machine learning aging tools, then fed the results of that process into FRAN.
The neural network can analyze a headshot and predict which parts of a face would be affected by aging and then it applies effects like wrinkles or skin smoothing as a layer on top of the original face. As Gizmodonotes, the researchers claim this approach allows FRAN to re-age the performer with their identity and appearance intact, even when their head or face is moving around or the lighting changes in a shot. Unlike with other methods, FRAN doesn’t require an extra face alignment step either.
There are many good reasons why Disney would want to develop such a tool. It could lessen visual effects artists’ workloads and speed up the process, for one thing. In addition to helping productions without blockbuster budgets age their actors up or down, it might help keep ballooning budgets in check. A significant chunk of The Irishman‘s budget, which reports suggest was as much as $200 million, went toward making Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci look younger.
Disney has been de-aging performers in its own projects, notably with Mark Hamill in Star Wars. When Harrison Ford returns as Indiana Jones next summer, he’ll also look a little younger than you’re used to seeing him — at least for the opening sequence. Disney’s new re-aging tool should make it faster for effects artists to take years off such performers’ faces in the future.
WASHINGTON — U.S. passenger railroad Amtrak said ridership jumped by more than 10 million riders in the year ending Sept. 30 and has nearly returned to pre-COVID-19 levels.
Amtrak said ridership rose 89% over 2021 levels to 22.9 million riders — up 10.8 million passengers over the prior year. Overall ridership hit about 85% of pre-COVID levels in the last six months of the 2022 budget year, Amtrak said, adding it expects ridership and revenue to rise above 90% of pre-COVID levels by September 2023.
Amtrak traffic on the busy Northeast Corridor connecting Boston and Washington more than doubled in the 12-month period to 9.2 million passengers.
Amtrak reported an adjusted operating loss of $884.9 million, which was an 18.2% improvement over the 2021 budget year.
Amtrak wants to expand dramatically across the United States and add up to 39 corridor routes and up to 166 cities by 2035.
“We worked hard to restore service and grow ridership in the face of lingering impacts from the pandemic,” said Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner.
Congress in November 2021 approved $22 billion for Amtrak as part of a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. In March, the Biden administration asked Congress for $3 billion in annual funding for Amtrak for 2023, up from $2.33 billion in prior annual funding.
Amtrak said the system’s jump in passenger traffic is “bucking the trend of continued lower ridership seen on most commuter railroads and public transit systems.”
