Month: February 2022

Enlarge / Screencap from a tweet by @OSINT_Ukraine reporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and incursion into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. (credit: @OSINT_Ukraine)

Twitter said it had mistakenly suspended the accounts of open source intelligence reporters posting about Russia’s military build-up around Ukraine, leading to many of them accusing the Russian state of launching a “bot” campaign against them.

Based on publicly available satellite imagery, open source reporters have used social media to supply a steady commentary on the activities of Russian forces near the Ukrainian border, providing a valuable alternative source of information to Western intelligence reports.

The people behind the suspended accounts said they believed they had been the target of an attack by Russian bots—computers that mimic the activity of human users—that had mass-reported their content as being suspicious. This led their content to be removed automatically by Twitter’s moderation technology.

Enlarge / Honda’s forward collision warning system has always been sensitive. Now the NHTSA is investigating some Hondas for false-positive automatic emergency brake activations. (credit: Honda)

Last week, we reported that Tesla is the subject of a new investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration due to the company’s cars’ propensity to inappropriately activate their emergency braking function. This week, it’s Honda’s turn in the spotlight.

The NHTSA opened a preliminary investigation into the problem on February 21 after receiving 278 complaints about Hondas that suddenly decelerated despite nothing in their path.

The problem affects approximately 1.7 million cars in total, split between model year 2017-2019 CR-V crossovers and 2018-2019 Accord sedans. (It’s worth noting that when we reviewed the 2018 Honda Accord, we specifically called out the sensitivity of its forward-collision warning system, although we did not experience any automatic emergency brake activations.)

Enlarge / Intel’s NUC 12 Extreme kit. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Intel’s NUC Extreme mini PC kits have always been hard to recommend. It’s true that they’re considerably smaller than even the smallest mini ITX PC cases; it’s impossible to fit this much performance into less space if you’re using general-purpose PC components. But they’re also expensive, they haven’t been as fast as standard desktop PCs, and their upgradability has been limited. Those three things essentially defeat the purpose of building a beefy desktop gaming PC or workstation.

Codenamed “Dragon Canyon,” the newest version of the NUC Extreme Kit helps to fix the latter two problems by switching to actual socketed desktop processors rather than soldered-in laptop versions. It’s still an expensive box—you’ll pay about $1,150 for a Core i7 version with no RAM, SSD, GPU, or operating system and $1,450 for the Core i9 version we tested—but its performance now comes much closer to that of a typical desktop.

The NUC Extreme still isn’t for everyone, but if money is no object and you want the smallest desktop you can get, the 12th-gen NUC Extreme is less of a compromise than the previous versions were.

Enlarge / The back of the iPhone 13 mini. (credit: Samuel Axon)

There are already four American-accented English voices for Siri, but Apple will add a fifth in iOS 15.4. The new voice aims to provide a gender-neutral option for the first time, as reported by Axios.

The voice is labeled “Voice 5” in the Settings panel in the current beta release, though developer Steve Moser noted on Twitter that the voice is named “Quinn” under the hood. Apple confirmed to Axios that the voice is built from recordings by a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Moser also tweeted an example of what the new voice sounds like:

iOS 15.4 Beta 4 changes 🧵: Apple adds a 5th American Siri voice with filename ‘Quinn’ pic.twitter.com/HFQZV1oF0I
— Steve Moser (@SteveMoser) February 22, 2022

For most of the time since Siri first became a core iPhone feature back in 2011, a female voice was the default. That changed last year when Apple changed the iPhone setup to prompt the user to pick a male or female voice when first starting the iPhone, with no default choice selected.

Enlarge / The burial mask of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen recovered from the boy king’s tomb. (credit: Hannes Magerstaedt/Getty Images)

Among the many items recovered from King Tut’s tomb was a dagger made of iron, which is a material that was rarely used during Egypt’s 18th dynasty. That iron likely came from a meteorite, and a recent paper published in the journal Meteorites and Planetary Science sheds further light on precisely how that iron dagger was forged, as well as how it came into Tut’s possession.

Tutankhamen was the son of Akhenaten and ascended to the throne when he was just 8 or 9 years old. He wasn’t considered an especially important pharaoh in the grand scheme of things, but the treasures that were recovered from his tomb in the 1920s are what led to his fame. Those treasures included the famous gold burial mask (pictured above), a solid gold coffin, thrones, archery bows, trumpets, a lotus chalice, and various pieces of furniture.

These became part of a global touring exhibition, which received worldwide press coverage during the 1960s and 1970s in particular. The mummy even inspired a couple of songs: Steve Martin’s hit “King Tut” (which debuted on Saturday Night Live in 1978) and the lesser-known “Dead Egyptian Blues,” by the late folk rock singer Michael Peter Smith (which contains the immortal line, “Your sarcophagus is glowing, but your esophagus is showing”).