Month: April 2022

Enlarge / By the end of the year Hertz customers will be able to rent EVs from Polestar as well as Tesla. (credit: Polestar)

Car rental company Hertz is significantly expanding its electric vehicle fleet. On Monday it announced a new partnership with Polestar, the Swedish performance EV startup. If all goes to plan, Hertz will buy 65,000 Polestar EVs over the next five years to be deployed in Europe, North America, and Australia.

This is not the first big EV buy from Hertz. After filing for bankruptcy during the first few months of the pandemic, it’s back and well-capitalized and on a mission to electrify.

In 2021, Hertz announced that Teslas would make up more than a fifth of its US rental fleet by the end of this year, in a mix of Model 3 sedans and Model Y crossovers.

Enlarge / AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nearly a year and a half after the launch of the first Ryzen 5000 processors, the Zen 3 CPU architecture is finally coming to cheaper chips.

AMD’s Ryzen 5 5500 and 5600 CPUs (which go on sale today for $159 and $199, respectively) are both six-core 12-thread processors aimed squarely at mid-range, price-conscious PCs used for gaming and photo and video editing. The new Ryzens significantly undercut the original $299 asking price of the Ryzen 5 5600X (the 5600X was, for many months, the cheapest way to get Zen 3). And the CPUs finally provide a replacement for the last-gen $199 Ryzen 5 3600.

But the new chips have stiff competition in Intel’s Core i5-12400 processor ($210-ish with an integrated GPU, $180-ish without one). Intel’s desktop CPUs were saddled with the aging Skylake architecture and/or the aging 14nm manufacturing process for years, but a modern architecture and the Intel 7 process make the 12400 Intel’s most appealing mid-range CPU option in a long time. The Ryzen 5 5600X has also seen price cuts recently, falling down to around $230 to make more room for the $300 eight-core Ryzen 7 5700X.

Enlarge (credit: Kirill Kudryavtsev | Getty Images)

Russian Twitter users noticed something strange when they tried to access the service on March 4: They couldn’t. For the previous six days, anyone trying to access Twitter from within Russia saw their Internet speed slow to a crawl, no matter how fast their connection. Then came the blackout.

Twitter going offline showed how seriously the Russian state took social media’s role in amplifying dissent about the country’s invasion of Ukraine. And it demonstrated Russia’s progress in creating a “splInternet,” a move that would effectively detach the country from the rest of the world’s Internet infrastructure. Such a move would allow Russia to control conversations more tightly and tamp down dissent—and it’s getting closer by the day.

The gold standard of digital walled gardens is China, which has managed to separate itself from the rest of the digital world with much success—although people still find their way around the Great Firewall. “I think they would aspire to [mimic China],” Doug Madory of Kentik, a San Francisco-based Internet monitoring company, says of Russia. “But it wasn’t easy for the Chinese.” China tasked huge numbers of tech experts to create its version of the Internet, and it spent huge amounts of money. By 2001, the International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development estimated, China spent $20 billion on censorious telecom equipment every year. The famed Great Firewall is just that: a firewall that inspects every bit of traffic entering Chinese cyberspace and checks it against a block list. Most Internet traffic into China passes through three choke points, which block any untoward content. Copying the Chinese approach in Russia is something Madory believes may be beyond Russian president Vladimir Putin’s reach. “I don’t think Russia has invested that kind of energy in engineering resources to replicate it,” Madory says. “There are quite a few countries that would love to have what China’s got, but they just can’t. They haven’t got the people to do it. There’s a ways to go before Russia becomes like China.”