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In his first nonfiction book in a decade, Coates reflects on what he learned while visiting three different places: Senegal, South Carolina and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

(Image credit: Carol Lee Rose)

An annular solar eclipse will turn the sun into a dazzling ring of fire on Wednesday. Here's how to see it even if you're not in the path.

The WashG1 is a dedicated wet floor cleaner and Dyson's first attempt to prove that it doesn't just do carpets. It launched in the UK and Australia last month but has just gone on sale in the US. It's currently only available to buy direct from Dyson, and has a list price of $699.99.

Unclutch those pearls; we all knew it was going to be expensive. I do think that some Dyson products justify their eye-watering price tags, but in this case, there are things worth factoring in before you decide to gamble your child's college fund on a wet floor cleaner.

I tested one out and you can get the full low-down in my Dyson WashG1 review, but the gist is that it works fantastically well on perfectly smooth, flat floors like linoleum or polished concrete but is nowhere near as impressive on textured or uneven floors (including tiled floors with grouting gaps).

(Image credit: Future)

This is Dyson's first dedicated wet floor cleaner (I say 'dedicated' because we do have the Dyson V15s Submarine, which is a vacuum cleaner with a wet floorhead that can be swapped in). Significantly for this brand, which has built its reputation on being really good at moving air about, it doesn't use suction. Instead, it employs a combination of agitation, hydration and separation to get your floors gleaming.

Water is expelled through the cleaner head, rollers help loosen the dirt and pick up things like hair and solid particles, and then the inner mechanisms separate liquid and solid spillages. That last part is designed to make maintenance easier.

Should you buy one?

It's very good at certain things. Like today's best Dyson vacuums, it's extremely maneuverable; the floorhead can pivot any which way, and it'll get right up close to baseboards, too. The fact that it can handle liquid and solid waste is really helpful for things like dinnertime messes. I have a small niece and nephew who cannot complete a meal without coating everything in the vicinity with whatever they've been eating, and a once-over with the WashG1 is by far the least disgusting way to deal with it that I've found so far. The base will take care of some of the maintenance by running a self-clean cycle, when you dock it, too.

(Image credit: Future)

However, it's not worth the investment if you have uneven floors. The WashG1 will struggle to clean them evenly, as I discovered when I tested mine on a flagstone floor. Because the rollers don't really 'scrub', it's only really capable of tackling surface dirt.

That includes missing the grouting cracks between tiles. (Apparently, the engineers found that adding more water is a more effective way to tackle stubborn dirt than rubbing at it, and while they might have a bit of a point, I still think there are limitations to this approach.)

Those niggles aside, it still might be a good investment for some shoppers. Because it's brand new, don't expect discounts any time soon – I have my fingers crossed for a price-drop in the Black Friday sales, though.

• View the WashG1 for $699.99 at Dyson

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Don't overspend on a new pair of earbuds or headphones. Instead, take advantage of one of these deals from top brands.

Jeep is recalling more than 194,000 plug-in hybrid SUVs because they can catch fire with the ignition turned off. The automaker says the risk of fire is reduced when the battery charge is depleted.

(Image credit: Paul Sancya)

Postseason baseball kicks off on Tuesday with four, best-of-three Wild Cards series.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s one-year contract with Paragon’s US subsidiary comes amid the Biden administration’s years-long crackdown on commercial spyware vendors.

Hackers have been spotted using the Docker Engine API to target various containers with cryptojackers and other malware.

Cybersecurity researchers at Datadog, who recently observed one such campaign and reported on it in an in-depth analysis, noted the criminals first looked for internet-exposed Docker Engine APIs that are not password-protected, using different internet scanning tools.

Then, they used the Docker API to spawn an Alpine container, and mount the underlying host’s file system inside the container. The next step is to execute a shell command to pull an initialization script that effectively kickstarts the infection chain.

No evidence of abuse

The Docker Engine API is a Docker-provided interface that allows developers and systems to interact with the Docker daemon, programmatically. Via the API, users can manage and control Docker containers, networks, and images, all through HTTP requests.

The chain starts with data transfer tools which, in turn, deploy XMRig. This is a popular cryptojacker, a tool that uses the compromised device’s computing power to generate cryptocurrency tokens and send them to the attacker’s wallet address.

After that, the attackers deploy a few scripts to hide the presence of XMRig, after which they go for additional payloads that allow them to move laterally. Other Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and SSH servers are targeted, and ultimately assimilated into an actor-controlled Docker Cluster.

The cluster allows the crooks to use Docker Swarm’s orchestration features for command and control tasks.

At press time, the researchers have not yet identified the group behind this campaign. The tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) of this campaign do overlap with the ones usually used by TeamTNT, they suggested.

"This campaign demonstrates that services such as Docker and Kubernetes remain fruitful for threat actors conducting cryptojacking at scale," Datadog said, before adding that as long as these APIs remain online without proper protection, they will be considered “low-hanging fruit” to crooks.

Via The Hacker News

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Vance’s former Democratic opponent, Tim Ryan, says the Ohio senator is likely to aggressively attack Harris-Walz during the debate Tuesday night to appeal to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

(Image credit: Andrew Harnik)

The scene was relayed by a live webcam of bears on Alaska's Brooks River. “This is very difficult to watch and comprehend,” said Naomi Boak of the nonprofit Katmai Conservancy.

(Image credit: N. Boak)

At its AWS re:Invent 2023 event in November 2023, CEO Adam Selipsky unveiled the company's Graviton4 chips, built on Arm’s “Demeter” Neoverse V2 core. These new processors were claimed to offer up to 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores, and 75% more memory bandwidth than the Graviton3 processors, aimed at boosting memory-optimized and compute-heavy workloads.

Graviton4-powered R8g instances became generally available in July 2024 and when Phoronix benchmarked it, the processor came in ahead of the Intel Xeon instance by about 5% and wasn’t too far behind AMD’s EPYC.

AWS has now stepped things up by introducing new memory-optimized X8g instances.

(Image credit: AWS) Improved performance

X8g instances are available in ten virtual sizes and two bare-metal configurations, featuring up to 3 TiB of DDR5 memory and 192 vCPUs. These instances are also considered AWS's most energy-efficient EC2 offerings to date. With a 16:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio, the X8g instances are also equipped with full encryption across all high-speed hardware interfaces, and offer additional security features.

The X8g instances provide notable improvements over their predecessors, offering three times more memory and vCPUs than X2gd instances. They also double the EBS and network bandwidth, making them an attractive solution for memory-heavy workloads. Graviton4’s twice the L2 cache per core and 160% higher memory bandwidth contribute to up to 60% better compute performance.

In terms of real-world applications, AWS says X8g instances are already being used for SAP HANA and SAP Data Analytics Cloud, with performance gains of up to 40% for transactional workloads compared to Graviton3.

AWS notes the X8g instances allow users to scale up or out, providing flexibility for memory-bound applications currently running on distinct instances. The new instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt) AWS regions, supporting various pricing models such as On-Demand, Spot, and Reserved Instances.

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Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant has a sleek new look and a slew of new and enhanced features. The tech giant is clearly keen to get more people to use its AI tools and to make it as much a part of people's lives as possible. 

It's a strategy pursued by Google and Microsoft's other AI rivals as well. To stand out, Microsoft gave Copilot a makeover regarding how you engage with the AI and its capabilities when you do so. Copilot is noticeably quicker to adapt to your preferences and does so in more ways than it could before. You can test out the new Copilot experience on the web, a mobile device, or through the Windows app. 

"Copilot will be there for you, in your corner, by your side and always strongly aligned with your interests." explained Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman in a blog post. "We are not creating a static tool so much as establishing a dynamic, emergent and evolving interaction. It will provide you with unwavering support to help you show up the way you really want in your everyday life, a new means of facilitating human connections and accomplishments alike."

We've highlighted some of the most notable and intriguing changes and new features below.

Voice

The loudest upgrade is the new Copilot Voice feature that allows you to converse vocally with Copilot. It's a bit like OpenAI's new AdvancedVoice Mode in that you can speak to the AI like you would a human, even interrupting mid-word, and hear what it has to say back. 

You can select four voices for the experience, with multiple accents, though only in English for now. Copilot Voice can also be your newscaster with the Copilot Daily feature. You can get audio summaries of the latest news and weather personalized to your location and interests. The AI relies on Microsft's partners, including Reuters, Axel Springer, Hearst, and the Financial Times, to source and summarize the news. 

Vision and Visuals

Not only can Copilot now talk, it can 'see' too. The new Copilot Vision feature lets the AI look at what's on your screen, whether it's a website or a personal document. The AI can suggest ideas for related information or analysis, even bring up products that might better suit your interests and budget if you ask, simply using the vision on the screen. It won't work universally yet, but it can handle most of the more popular websites. This is an opt-in feature, so none of the data is stored or used for training unless you agree. Notably, Copilot Vision isn't limited to printed text; it can even read handwriting.

For your own visual creations, Copilot assists with enhancing both photos and other visiuals. The AI-powered Super Resolution feature in the Photos app can enhance old and low-resolution images to 4K without getting grainy or pixelated. And if you make an image in Paint, you can now use the AI-fueled Generative Fill and Generative Erase tools to add or remove bits from an image using a text prompt or brush strokes.

Personalized Companion

Microsoft's main goal for Copilot is for people to think of it as a useful helper to turn to both online and when working on a PC. The new Copilot's look is no longer the usual chatbot but now works as cards that are supposed to make you feel more involved in running the AI. There's also the new main page that adapts to your interests called Copilot Discover. Your conversations with the AI and stated preferences will change the Discover page to provide searches and suggestions that are relevant to you, encouraging long-term use.

A subtle but potentially very useful upgrade is how Copilot helps you find and do things on your PC. For instance, Click to Do is an AI feature that puts interactive commands on your screen, offering suggestions relevant to what's on the screen, such as summarizing text, changing an image, or looking something up online. If you're working on a presentation, Copilot might offer to help expand the text in one section, remove the background of an image, or even email someone if you have their address in the presentation.

There's also the new Recall tool, which helps you find things you were looking at recently on your computer, document, webpage, video, or anything else. The AI can remember and recognize what it was and pulls it back up again for you, even if you don't remember the location or file name. Windows Search on Copilot+ PCs will even find files and settings that you haven't opened yet by using a description you write in.

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UK law enforcement and international partners have released new details about the cybercriminal gang Evil Corp, including its use of the Lockbit ransomware platform and ties to Russian intelligence.

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Colin Kaepernick and Nessa Diab wrote a new children’s book inspired by affirmations they share with their daughter and scores of young people they meet through their activism.

(Image credit: Kaepernick Media)

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A musical crime saga and a black comedy series that feels like a realtors nightmare is going straight onto my Netflix watch list after the best streaming service released two new trailers for Emilia Pérez and No Good Deed. Both titles look like the next big comedies I’ve been waiting for but with very different plots.

Emilia Pérez is a genre-bending musical odyssey as it follows cartel leader Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón) who enlists lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldaña) to help fake her death so she can live authentically as herself.

Meanwhile, No Good Deed sees three families competing to buy the same house in Los Angeles, but what might be their dream home soon turns into something of a nightmare. Consider me sold!

What is Emilia Pérez about?

Release date: November 13

Directed by Jacques Audiard, Emilia Pérez looks like it is filled with bold song and dance visuals. It follows four women in Mexico pursuing their own happiness. Formidable cartel boss Emilia asks Rita, an unappreciated lawyer, to take on an unexpected case: to help fake Emilia's death so she can have sex-reassignment operations and begin a new life under a new name - Emilia Pérez.

The potential best Netflix movie is described as an "audacious fever dream" by Tudum, Emilia Pérez also serves as an opera. Saldaña revealed: “It was described to me as this film noir that didn’t really exist in any of the conventional kind of genres, but it was a musical. It was actually an opera, and based in a crime world, but there was going to be a sense of justice, and validation, and sanctification. And I was just like, ‘What?’ I had to read it more than once. And then, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

The operatic tale also stars Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, and Édgar Ramírez.

What is No Good Deed about?

Release date: December 12

From the creator of one of the best Netflix shows Dead to Me, No Good Deed is a dark comedy that centers on three very different families as they rush to purchase the same 1920s Spanish-style villa in the LA neighborhood of Los Feliz. But little do they know that the house of their dreams may not be so perfect after all.

The series is led by Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano who play married couple Lydia and Paul Morgan. They have different opinions on selling their family abode, but as they struggle to hide the dangerous secrets that live inside their home, they realize that the only way they’ll escape the past is to confront it head-on.

Dead to Me star Linda Cardellini also steps into cherry red wedges for the role of Margo, along with a star-studded cast that includes Luke Wilson, Teyonah Parris, and O-T Fagbenle.

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Meta’s first AR glasses have broken cover in the form of the game-changing Orion prototype. These glasses won’t ever be available to sale, but Meta says they’re the precursor to consumer AR Glasses. And based on what we've seen they could be the world's best AR glasses when they launch.

Those consumer AR glasses are likely a few years away, but thanks to Meta Connect 2024 and what Meta staff have said afterwards, we already have an idea of when non-prototype Meta Orion AR glasses might launch, how much they could cost, and what they’ll be capable of.

To make keeping track of all the latest Meta Orion information a breeze we’ve rounded up everything we know so far in this one article, and included a section at the end of the features we want to see at launch.

Meta Orion AR Glasses: Price

Technically Orion probably won’t ever go on sale; it’s a prototype that only select Meta staff, AR software developers, and those lucky enough to secure a demo will likely ever get to use, let alone own. Semantics aside, we already have an idea of how much the consumer version of Orion will cost when it launches. Unfortunately, it won’t be as cheap as Meta’s other XR tech and glasses.

When Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Orion, he also outlined three objectives Meta is aiming to achieve before the glasses get released to the public. One is to “make them more affordable” (via Meta) by using practices like building Orion at scale. When we heard "affordable" we hoped that meant somewhere in the region of the current Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses – which start at $299 / £299 / AU$449.

Orion won't be as cheap as the Ray-Ban smart glasses (Image credit: Meta)

Alas, this has been clarified by Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. In an Instagram AMA in he explained that the AR glasses “probably won’t get in at, like, a Quest 3S price point, or even a Quest 3 price point” – which instantly prices them over $499.99 / £469.99 / AU$1,049.99. Instead the team is aiming at the price of affordable phones and laptops – so hopefully somewhere around $700 (around £700 / AU$1,350).

This certainly makes more sense given how impressive Orion was sounding, though it does mean we might have to wait a while longer for a truly affordable model to come along. Speaking of...

Meta Orion AR Glasses: Release date

If you want to get your hands on the consumer version of Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype then you might not be waiting too long, with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth revealing that the release timeline is in the region of “a couple years, but not decades.”

Our bet is on a release in 2027, as this is the release schedule from an internal meta roadmap that The Verge leaked back in early 2023. Based on Meta’s usual hardware schedule we can hone in even more on a potential release date, at around late 2027 – specifically September to December 2027.

That said, with Orion still at the prototype stage, there’s a good chance it could get delayed – resulting in it not arriving for a few more years.

Meta Orion AR Glasses: Design and features

As a prototype, Orion’s design hasn’t yet been finalized, and it’s actually one of the aspects Meta has said it wants to optimize and make more fashionable before launch. However, that’s not to say we don’t have an idea what Orion’s final form might look like.

Firstly, Meta has said it wants to slim down the glasses and keep them light. Considering Orion is already just 100g we expect the consumer version will be equally light (or lighter), and hopefully a lot less chunky – though hopefully it can do so without sacrificing battery life, which currently sits at two to three hours.

We also expect that the glasses will take design cues from Ray-Ban glasses. Meta recently announced the continuation of its partnership with EssilorLuxottica (Ray-Ban’s parent company), and it tracks that Meta would want to adopt the fashionable classic Ray-Ban style for its AR glasses and not just its AI smart glasses.

Meta might need to avoid creating clear consumer Orions like it has with the existing Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. CTO Andrew Bosworth has a special clear pair of Orion glasses, but revealed that because their design necessitates a non-magnesium frame, the clear pair have significantly worse heat distribution properties. As a result, the clear pair “thermally tap-out” in about 30 minutes instead of lasting the full two to three hours.

(Image credit: Meta)

As for features, we know Orion boasts AR and AI tools. AR-wise we’ve seen hints of the sorts of experiences it can facilitate like giving you floating windows for virtual multitasking, the ability to have AR video chats, and we imagine there will be an AR game or two at launch (here’s hoping for a fully AR Pokemon Go).

On the AI side of things, expect to see everything currently possible on the existing Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses such as Look and Ask, as well as the new photographic memory and real-time translation tools. Plus we expect several other AI tools will launch in the coming years that Orion should also possess.

Meta Orion AR Glasses: What we want to see Transition lenses by default

(Image credit: Meta)

For glasses wearables to take off they need to work in all weather, and the only solutions to this are high-quality transition lenses or a frame design that allows you to easily swap between clear and shaded lenses manually – lenses which would have to be separate to the AR displays.

We love the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, but the smart sunglasses aren’t usable indoors or on days when it isn’t sunny. Conversely, smart glasses with only clear lenses won’t serve you well when it is a bright day and you want to protect your eyes. As a result, the only sensible smart glasses solution will give you a wearable that can work in any weather.

AI capabilities everywhere at launch

The biggest let-down of the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses is the AI features shown off at their 2023 announcement weren’t available at launch, and still aren’t available in every region they’re sold. Without these AI tools the glasses just aren’t as impressive.

When Orion’s consumer version makes it to market Meta needs to make sure that every feature it announces for the specs is available everywhere when the AR and AI glasses release (or at least within a couple of months).

Apps, Apps, Apps

AR gaming is a must for Orion (Image credit: Meta)

The main issue most XR hardware struggles with is not its specs, but its software. No matter how impressive the gadget might be technically it’s useful if it doesn’t do anything to justify those specs.

For Orion to be a success, Meta will need to ensure it’s well-stocked with AR software and features at launch – which is perhaps why Meta plans to give software makers Orion prototypes as dev kits to aid them in their AR app-making efforts.

A SIM card slot, and phone connectivity

Mark Zuckerberg might envision AR glasses as the evolution of smartphones, and so it would be neat to see them able to access a network completely independently of your smartphone – like an LTE smartwatch – but we’d like the Meta Orion glasses to play nice with phones too.

This includes piggybacking off their network if you don’t want to get a second SIM, and also being able to perform actions like streaming video and audio from your phone, for when you want to swap between watching on the screen and on a heads-up display.

The latter point might seem like an obvious inclusion, but other recent AI-powered so-called smartphone replacements have taken measures to separate themselves from smartphones, much to their detriment. Smart glasses might replace phones one day, but for now they’ll gain a heck of a lot by working with smartphones, rather than against them.

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