Author: easyfilo

Enlarge (credit: Iberdrola Renewables)

Not for the first time, global energy markets are in turmoil. Internationally traded gas prices more than quadrupled in 2021. In their wake, many energy suppliers have gone bust and household bills across Europe are set to soar. Energy prices are driving up the cost of living and inflation, but this is also a moment to realize the old saying: “never waste a good crisis.”

Some of the causes of sky-high energy bills are unavoidable—there is little that most governments can do about the wholesale price of gas itself. Fossil fuel companies make huge investments that take years to mature, breeding periods of moderate prices followed by supply squeezes when prices rocket. Gas prices softened over the previous decade, and the arrival of the pandemic in 2020 depressed demand.

Regions without domestic gas supplies or which have depleted most of their gas reserves in recent decades get a lot of their gas by importing it. European periphery countries, including the UK and many parts of the Mediterranean, assumed they could rely on global supplies of liquefied natural gas. But tankers from the big gas producers such as Qatar can turn to Europe or Asia depending on who pays the highest price. Now there is a scramble, and Asian demand dominates.

Enlarge / The Moon is safe from Falcon 9 rockets. (credit: NASA)

About three weeks ago Ars Technica first reported that astronomers were tracking the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, and were increasingly confident that it would strike the Moon on March 4.

This story set off a firestorm of media activity. Much of this coverage criticized SpaceX for failing to properly dispose of the second stage of its Falcon 9 rocket after the launch of NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory mission, or DSCOVR, in 2015. The British tabloids, in particular, had a field day. Even the genteel European Space Agency tut-tutted, noting that it takes care to preserve enough fuel to put spent rocket stages into stable orbits around the Sun.

However, it turns out we were all wrong. A Falcon 9 rocket is not going to, in fact, strike the Moon next month. Instead, it’s probably a Chinese rocket.

Enlarge / Temuera Morrison and Ming-Na Wen (supposedly) star as Boba Fett and Fennec Shand, respectively, in The Book of Boba Fett. (credit: Disney+)

When The Book of Boba Fett was still in production, creator Jon Favreau jokingly dubbed the spinoff series “The Mandalorian season 2.5.” It turns out that wasn’t really a joke. I mean, we knew beforehand The Book of Boba Fett would take place in the same timeline. I just didn’t expect that four episodes into a seven-episode season, the focus would abruptly shift from Temuera Morrison’s iconic titular character—i.e., the supposed star of the series—and the next two episodes would be spent mostly catching up with our favorite characters from The Mandalorian.  

It was (ahem) an interesting creative choice that generated considerable Internet discussion (and more than a few mocking memes). The good news is that, on the whole, The Book of Boba Fett is still a hella entertaining Star Wars adventure. And it closed the season with an action-packed, crowd-pleasing hour-long action sequence in which Boba and his various allies took on the nefarious Pyke syndicate in a climactic battle—with a squee-worthy heartfelt reunion for good measure.

The bad news is that the series never really figured out whose story it wanted to tell, essentially squandering the promise of the first four episodes by failing to develop its supposedly main character in any meaningful way.

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.