Month: February 2022

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It’s the weekend, which means it’s time for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best deals from around the web includes a nice price on Amazon’s newest Kindle Paperwhite, as the e-reader is currently down to $110 at various retailers. That’s $30 off Amazon’s MSRP and the second-lowest price we’ve tracked. The only time we’ve seen the device fall lower was around Black Friday, when it was available for $5 less. Amazon includes three months of its Kindle Unlimited ebook service as part of the deal, but be aware that this will be set to auto-renew by default.

We gave the latest Kindle Paperwhite a rave review when it released last year. Compared to its predecessor, it adds a more spacious display (now at 6.8 inches, up from six), a USB-C port, a better frontlight, more consistently responsive performance, and improved battery life (which Amazon rates at roughly 10 weeks per charge). Like the last model, it’s waterproof (with an IPX8 rating) and it can connect to Bluetooth headphones and speakers for playing audiobooks. And like all Kindles, it still has access to an enormous library of things to read. It’s a bit bigger than the last model, and if you just don’t want to lock yourself into Amazon’s ecosystem, Kobo’s Clara HD is a decent alternative (albeit one without waterproofing and Bluetooth) that’s also on sale as of this writing. But for most people, the Paperwhite is the e-reader with the best combination of features and value.

That said, it’s worth noting that the Kids version of the Kindle Paperwhite is also on sale for $10 more. Though this variant is marketed towards children, it has all the same features as the standard Paperwhite, plus a case, a longer warranty (two years instead of one), and, most notably, no ads on its lock screen or homepage by default. (The latter is a feature that costs an extra $20 on the standard, ad-supported model.) If you’re buying for a young kid specifically, the standard Kindle Kids e-reader is likely a better value, but older readers willing to pay a little extra might want to consider this model instead.

Enlarge / So far, this is as much detail about its first battery EV as Lincoln has teased us with. (credit: Lincoln)

Lincoln has been Ford’s luxury brand for almost exactly a century now—the Blue Oval bought the Lincoln Motor Company from Henry Leland on February 4, 1922. Now the brand is getting ready for its next century with a raft of new battery-electric SUVs due between now and 2026, according to Reuters.

Last June, Lincoln announced that it would become a fully battery-electric brand by 2030. It’s a no-brainer for the automaker, given how well electric motors—with instantaneous torque and near-silent operation—are suited to luxury vehicles.

At the time, Lincoln announced that its first fully electric model would arrive in 2022, in both rear- and all-wheel-drive configurations. Although we haven’t seen any renderings or spy shots of this first Lincoln battery EV, Occam’s razor suggests it will be built on the same platform as Ford’s Mustang Mach-E crossover.

Enlarge / The IRS detailed the winding and tangled routes the couple allegedly took to launder a portion of the nearly 120,000 bitcoins stolen from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016. (credit: William Whitehurst | Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan were arrested in New York and accused of laundering a record $4.5 billion worth of stolen cryptocurrency. In the 24 hours immediately afterward, the cybersecurity world ruthlessly mocked their operational security screwups: Lichtenstein allegedly stored many of the private keys controlling those funds in a cloud-storage wallet that made them easy to seize, and Morgan flaunted her “self-made” wealth in a series of cringe-inducing rap videos on YouTube and Forbes columns.

But those gaffes have obscured the remarkable number of multi-layered technical measures that prosecutors say the couple did use to try to dead-end the trail for anyone following their money. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is that federal agents, led by IRS Criminal Investigations, managed to defeat those alleged attempts at financial anonymity on the way to recouping $3.6 billion of stolen cryptocurrency. In doing so, they demonstrated just how advanced cryptocurrency tracing has become—potentially even for coins once believed to be practically untraceable.

Enlarge / Rim fragments of a chamber pot being excavated at a Roman villa site in Sicily. (credit: R.J.A. Wilson)

Ancient Roman archaeological sites are littered with ceramic pots, and it can be challenging to definitively determine the purpose of any given pot—for instance, if it was used for storage or as a portable toilet (chamber pot). Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of British Columbia have now analyzed the residue on one such ceramic pot and identified the eggs of intestinal parasitic worms commonly found in feces, according to a new paper published in the journal Archaeological Science Reports. That’s strong evidence that the 1,500-year-old pot in question was most likely used as a chamber pot.

“Conical pots of this type have been recognized quite widely in the Roman Empire, and in the absence of other evidence, they have often been called storage jars,” said co-author Roger Wilson of the University of British Columbia. “The discovery of many in or near public latrines had led to a suggestion that they might have been used as chamber pots, but until now, proof has been lacking.”

Archaeologists can learn a great deal by studying the remains of intestinal parasites in ancient feces. Just last month, we reported on an analysis of soil samples collected from a stone toilet found within the ruins of a swanky 7th-century BCE villa just outside Jerusalem. That analysis revealed the presence of parasitic eggs from four different species: whipworm, beef/pork tapeworm, roundworm, and pinworm. (It’s the earliest record of roundworm and pinworm in ancient Israel.)