At Microsoft's Surface event today, the company announced its Surface Duo 2 dual-screen Android smartphone, featuring a trio of new cameras, a faster processor, larger displays, and support for 5G. The company also unveiled a successor to the Surface Book line of laptops, the Surface Laptop Studio, as well as the Surface Pro 8. From a report: The first-generation of the Duo made a splash thanks to its unique design. While the original Duo had no exterior screen at all, the Duo 2 now has a sliver of screen called the Glance Bar that peeks out from where its displays come together and provides you with the time and notifications when the Duo is closed. Microsoft has seemingly addressed a number of the original Duo's shortcomings with its Duo 2. One of the biggest issues with the first-generation version was its lack of any truly capable camera. [...] This time around, Microsoft has outfitted the Surface Duo 2 with a trio of external cameras. Like Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy line of smartphones, the Duo 2 gets a wide-angle camera, an ultra-wide angle camera, and a telephoto camera. There's also a dedicated night photography mode, 2x optical zoom with the telephoto lens, and the ability to record 4K video at 60 frames per second.

As for the occasionally sluggish performance, the Duo 2 should have that sorted out. This time around, Microsoft has dropped Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 888 processor into the Duo 2, which means the phone should run as smoothly and quickly as any of the leading smartphones on the market. What's more, the Duo 2 gets 8GB of RAM and 128GB, 256GB, or 512GB of storage. On top of that, the Surface Duo 2 gets 5G connectivity, something that was conspicuously absent from the first-generation Duo.

The Duo 2 also gets two larger displays this time around. Rather than two 5.1-inch panels, the Duo 2 gets two 5.3-inch screens that open up to an 8.3-inch display that you can use to move your apps across or as a single canvas for more expansive apps. [...] The gist of the Surface Duo 2 is that two screens are better than one. To that end, Microsoft has combined two panels with a hinge to make an Android-powered device that lets you not only use both displays at the same time, but also seamlessly move apps and content between them. That capability will cost you a pricey $1,499 when the Duo 2 hits store shelves. It's available for pre-order today.

Slashdot reader storagedude writes: With the release of LTO-9, just about every tape vendor has pushed its wares as a solution to the ransomware problem. After all, is there any backup technology that's more air-gapped?

Tape IS great for backup — just not so much for recovery. Writing for eSecurity Planet, [CTO of Seagate Government Solutions] Henry Newman notes that not only is disk about 80% cheaper than LTO tape, but even an entry-level RAID card can restore data 6 times faster than tape. "Backup is not about backing up the data, but the time it takes to restore that data to meet your business requirements," writes Newman. "Tape drives are not striped, but disks generally are put into stripe groups," he writes. "With RAID controllers and/or software RAID methods, you can easily get many 10s of GB/sec of bandwidth to restore data from a single set of SAS connections. Doing that with tape is very expensive and requires architectural planning. So the bottom line is you can surely backup to tape and it is cost effective – for backup, that is. If you actually need to restore that data quickly, you have my best wishes."

Tape may have a better bit error rate than disk, but disk can be architected in a way that removes that reliability advantage, he notes. "Tape vendors often state that the BER (bit error rate) of tape is far better than disk, which is 100% true, but you can make up for tape's advantage with RAID methods that check the reliability of your data and ensure that what you wrote is what you read. This has been the case with RAID since the early 1990s, with parity check on read to validate the data. With other ANSI standard techniques – which sadly are not used often enough – such as T10 PI/DIX you can achieve data integrity on a single device equal to or greater than tape. The net-net here is disk is far faster than tape, as there is native striping that has been in use at least since the 1980s with RAID methods, and disk can achieve equal data integrity to tape."

"The most often overlooked part of data backup is the recovery part – the longer it takes to restore your data, the more damage it can do to your business," Newman writes. He concludes: "Yes, tape can be air gapped but so can disk. Does tape provide better protection against ransomware? Likely, but is it so much slower than disk that you can turn off your system and turn on when you need to. Does having slower restoration make tape a better defense against a ransomware attack? As far as I can see, the marketing claims made by tape vendors do not hold up to a rigorous engineering analysis. If you want to use tape, that is your choice and there might be good reasons, but disk-based backups can be air gapped just like tape, for lower cost and with a much faster recovery time. Why tape vendors are making claims such as this, I will leave it to readers to speculate."
But Slashdot reader BAReFO0t takes the "tape" side of the argument. "Being slower does not equal it not working as a solution at all," they argue in a comment on the original submission — adding "Also, it's not even slower, since tape can just as easily be made into a RAID. You can flood ANY bus if you just use enough mirrors, no matter the medium."

And a follow-up comment also defended tapes. "If tape meets the service level agreement and provides a reasonable risk mitigation from ransomware, then it's still a perfectly viable solution regardless of certain performance limitations. LTO development would have likely died long ago otherwise."

But what do other Slashdot readers think? Share your own experiences and opinions in the comments. What offers a better ransomware backup solution: disk or tape?

"2021 Is the Year of Linux on the Desktop," writes PC Magazine. "No, really..." Walk into any school now, and you'll see millions of Linux machines. They're called Chromebooks. For a free project launched 30 years ago today by one man in his spare time, it's an amazing feat.... Linux found its real niche — not as a political statement about "free software," but as a practical way to enable capable, low-cost machines for millions...

Chrome OS and Android are both based on the Linux kernel. They don't have the extra GNU software that distributions like Ubuntu have, but they're descended from Linus Torvalds' original work. Chromebooks are the fastest growing segment of the traditional PC market, according to Canalys. IDC points out that Canalys' estimates of 12 million Chromebooks shipped in Q1 2021 are only a fraction of the 63 million notebooks sold that quarter, but once again, they're where the growth is. Much of that is driven by schools, where Chromebooks dominate now. Schoolkids don't generally need a million apps' worth of generic computing power. They need inexpensive, rugged ways to log into Google Classroom. Linux came to the rescue, enabling cheap, light, easy-to-manage PCs that don't have the Swiss Army Knife cruft of Windows or the premium price of Macs...

One great thing about open-source hacker projects is that they can be taken in unexpected directions. Linux isn't controlled, so it can adapt, Darwinian-style. It was a little scurrying mammal in the time of the dinosaurs, and then the mobile-computing asteroid hit. Linux could evolve. Windows couldn't. When you're building something that fits in your hand and has to sip battery, you can't just keep throwing processors and storage at it. Microsoft had a tough time adapting its monstrous megakernel OS to the new, tiny world. But *nix platforms thrive there: Android (based on Linux) and iOS.
"Android and Chrome water down the Linux philosophy," the article argues, "but they are Linux..."

Does this make any long-time geeks feel vindicated? In the original submission wiredog (Slashdot reader #43,288) looks back to 1995, remembering that "my first Linux was RedHat 2.0 in the beige box, running the 0.95(?) kernel and the F Virtual Window Manager...

"It came with 2 books, a CD, and a boot floppy disk."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InterestingEngineering: As global carbon emissions that stem from fossil fuels keep adding to our ever-growing climate change issue, energy companies have turned their focus on renewables to generate fuel. One of those companies is Synhelion from Switzerland. The company harnesses the energy of the heat of the sun and converts the collected carbon dioxide into synthetic fuels, in turn offering a green and sustainable solution. The system is quite genius. Synhelion uses a mirror field filled with heliostats to reflect the radiation of solar power. The radiation is then concentrated in the solar receiver and turned into clean, high-temperature process heat at around 2.732F (1.500C). Next, the produced heat is turned into a CO2 and H2O mixture in a thermochemical reactor. The end product, the syngas, is then turned into gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel with a gas-to-liquid technology process. What makes this sustainable is the fact that the company's thermal energy storage (TES) saves the excess heat after each process which keeps the operation going 24/7.

And how does the solar receiver work? The company says the technology is inspired by nature. To reach ultra-high temperatures, the solar receiver mimics Earth's greenhouse gas effect. The chamber is filled with greenhouse gases that are usually water vapor or water and CO2 mixtures. After solar radiation collected with heliostats enters the chamber, the black surface of the chamber absorbs the heat, thermalizes, and re-radiates it. The greenhouse gas then absorbs the thermal radiation, acting as a heat transfer fluid (HTF), which can, later on, be turned into any type of liquid fuel. And liquid fuels are easy to transport which makes them low-cost compared to their solid counterparts. When there's no sun, the HTF flows through the TES in the opposite direction to recover the previously stored thermal energy. The hot HTF from the storage drives the thermochemical processes in the reactor that keeps the operation working. "The company states that through this technology, it can provide fuels at a cheaper price with a 50 to 100 percent lower carbon footprint compared to fossil fuels," the report adds. "In addition to Synhelion's aligned motives with the Paris Agreement's CO2 reduction targets, it is supported by larger industries looking to cut their emissions -- and eventually achieve net-zero -- by 2030."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: China's campaign against the cryptocurrency industry is now targeting miners who tried to disguise themselves as data researchers and storage facilities to stay in business, according to people with knowledge of the situation. Inspections intensified this month in several Chinese provinces, targeting illegal mining activities in colleges, research institutions and data centers, said the people who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter. Concern over the country's power supplies for the upcoming winter season is one reason for the urgency, they said. The new round of scrutiny could further depress the amount of crypto mining occurring in China, which for years had been the dominant player and as recently as April had a 46% share of the global hash rate, a measure of computing power used in mining and processing, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.

Sony has released a new software update for the PlayStation 5 that will let you expand the console's internal storage and use the PS5's 3D audio effects on external speakers. CNET reports: The PS5 update will also let you view PS4 and PS5 versions of the same game separately -- particularly useful after you upgrade to a next-gen version -- plus it gives you more options for customizing the Control Center and lets you use it to write messages to other players. PlayStation Now subscribers will also get the ability to choose between 720p and 1080p streaming options, or use a streaming connection test to identify and fix connection issues. The PS4 is also getting a software update, letting you see PS5 trophies on your profile and those of other players.

An anonymous reader shares a report (paywalled): Gas made up the largest share of the UK's energy mix in 2020, at 34%; followed by wind on a quarter; nuclear at 17%; biomass at 6.5% and solar at 4.4%. Despite the progress of renewables, detractors note the problems arise when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. Until reliable battery storage for renewable energy is developed, these sources can only ever be intermittent, critics argue, and some infrastructure will continue to use oil for back-up generation. It is a case made by the nuclear industry, which says that it is uniquely placed to provide the zero-emissions baseload the grid requires. Runaway gas prices are already sparking concern across the energy sector, with fears that consumers are facing a "bill shock" this winter. Personal finance expert Martin Lewis warned his readers last week: "This autumn's signature noise will be a deep thud... the sound of jaws hitting the floor as people finally see the practical evidence of the energy bill catastrophe laid bare."

UK gas prices reached 130p per therm last week, compared to 30p a year ago. In an unusual inversion, gas prices are trading above the equivalent price of Brent, the benchmark for crude oil. Both supply and demand factors are at play. The reopening of economies after Covid lockdowns has pushed up demand for gas. Countries are also trying to cut their use of coal, and switching to less polluting gas as a result. Europe is thus competing with Asia for shipments of liquid natural gas (LNG), a more mobile form of gas that is increasingly popular. Supply is also tight: a particularly cold winter meant Europe used up more reserves than usual and these have not been replenished. A spate of outages at gas production plants in different parts of the world have compounded the problem. To make matters worse, the UK has relatively low levels of gas storage. The country has eight gas storage sites that can hold an estimated 12 days of supply. Storage capacity was drastically reduced when the Rough site under the North Sea was closed in 2017 for safety and economic reasons. Rough, a disused oil field, could hold around 70% of UK gas reserves. "The market hasn't been able to fill up storage as we move into this winter. And hence we are very exposed, especially if it is another cold winter like last year," said James Huckstepp, analyst at S&P Platts. "Consumers are starting to recognise that their energy bills are going to be much higher this winter."

IT executives see the talent shortage as the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies, according to a new Gartner survey. From a report: Across compute infrastructure and platform services, network, security, digital workplace, IT automation, and storage and database, respondents cited a lack of qualified candidates as a leading factor impeding tech deployment at their companies. "The ongoing push toward remote work and the acceleration of hiring plans in 2021 has exacerbated IT talent scarcity, especially for sourcing skills that enable cloud and edge, automation, and continuous delivery," Gartner research VP Yinuo Geng said in a press release.

"As one example, of all the IT automation technologies profiled in the survey, only 20% of them have moved ahead in the adoption cycle since 2020. The issue of talent is to blame here." The talent gaps are particularly acute for IT automation and digital workplace solutions, according to the executives surveyed -- a reflection of the demand for these technologies. According to McKinsey, nearly half of executives say their embrace of automation has accelerated, while digital and technology adoption is taking place about 25 times faster than before the pandemic. For example, Brain Corp reported that the use of robots to clean retail stores in the U.S. rose 24% in Q2 2020 year-over-year, and IBM has seen a surge in new users of its AI-driven customer service platform Watson Assistant.

A crop of companies want to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young men, as employers start to offer it as a benefit. From a report: For decades, the conversation about waning fertility has been focused largely on women. Think of Marisa Tomei stomping on the floorboards of a front porch to emulate her biological clock ticking in "My Cousin Vinny." More employers cover the cost of cryogenic egg freezing as a workplace benefit. Recently, a small group of biotech startups have hatched, dedicated to what they say is an underserved market: male fertility. Armed with recent scientific research suggesting that the quality of sperm is declining in the West, the companies are trying to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young, healthy men, one covered by health insurance and free of stigma.

"My fundamental belief is that if the product is affordable, this should be a no-brainer for every man," says Khaled Kteily, the 32-year-old founder of Legacy, one of the companies that Mr. Alam used to freeze his sperm. "I believe that in the future," he adds, "this will be something that parents will buy for their kids as a not-so-subtle gift." The push to make a case for its business is starting to catch on. The company recently struck a deal to eventually provide free sperm testing and storage to all active duty service members in the U.S. military, starting with the Navy SEALs, of which there are about 1,200 a year, and expanding next to all special operations forces. The Navy didn't respond to a request for comment. Soldiers regularly experience risky situations and time away from their partners, says Ellen Gustafson, a Navy wife and co-founder of the Military Family Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for coverage of fertility medicine for members of the armed forces.

India has approved a new COVID vaccine that uses circular strands of DNA to prime the immune system against the virus SARS-CoV-2. Researchers have welcomed news of the first DNA vaccine for people to receive approval anywhere in the world, and say many other DNA vaccines may soon be hot on its heels. From a report: ZyCoV-D, which is administered into the skin without an injection, has been found to be 67% protective against symptomatic COVID-19 in clinical trials, and will likely start to be administered in India this month. Although the efficacy is not particularly high compared to that of many other COVID-19 vaccines, the fact that it is a DNA vaccine is significant, say researchers. It is proof of the principle that DNA vaccines work and can help in controlling the pandemic, says Peter Richmond, a paediatric immunologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth. "This is a really important step forward in the fight to defeat COVID-19 globally, because it demonstrates that we have another class of vaccines that we can use."

Close to a dozen DNA vaccines against COVID-19 are in clinical trials globally, and at least as many again are in earlier stages of development. DNA vaccines are also being developed for many other diseases. "If DNA vaccines prove to be successful, this is really the future of vaccinology" because they are easy to manufacture, says Shahid Jameel, a virologist at Ashoka University in Sonipat, India. The urgency of combating COVID-19 has fast-tracked the development of vaccines that use genetic technology, such as messenger RNA and DNA vaccines, says David Weiner, director of the Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. RNA vaccines were quicker to show strong immune responses in clinical trials; they have now been delivered to hundreds of millions of people around the world. But DNA vaccines have a number of benefits, because they are easy to produce and the finished products are more stable than mRNA vaccines, which typically require storage at very low temperatures.

Docker will restrict use of the free version of its Docker Desktop utility to individuals or small businesses, and has introduced a new more expensive subscription, as it searches for a sustainable business model. The Register reports: The company has renamed its Free plan to "Personal" and now requires that businesses with 250 or more employees, or higher than $10m in annual revenue, must use a paid subscription if they require Docker Desktop. There are no changes to the command-line Docker Engine. The $5/month Pro and $7/month Teams subscriptions continue as before, but a new $21/month Business subscription adds features including centralized management, single sign-on, and enhanced security.

The Docker platform has a number of components, of which Docker Desktop is just one part. Docker images define the contents of containers. Docker containers are runnable instances of images. The Docker daemon is a background application that manages and runs Docker images and containers. The Docker client is a command-line utility that calls the API of the Docker daemon. Docker registries contain images, and the Docker Hub is a widely used public registry. Much of Docker (but not Desktop) is open source under the Apache v2 license. Docker Desktop is a GUI tool for managing various Docker components and functions, including containers, images, volumes (storage attached to containers), local Kubernetes, development environments within containers, and more. Whereas most Docker components are available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and despite the fact that most Docker containers run on Linux, Desktop is only available for Windows and Mac. Docker CEO Scott Johnston says the changes will help the company address security challenges with the software supply chain. It'll also help create a viable business model.

"We continue to see growth in the developer market. The latest stat we have is that by 2030 there's going to be 45 million global developers, up from 18-some million today... that requires us to have a business that is sustainably scalable," Johnston told The Register.

Earlier this month Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin sued NASA over a moon lander contract awarded to SpaceX.

Now Mashable reports that "America's next trip to the moon may suddenly be delayed a bit thanks to...PDFs?" A U.S. federal judge has granted the Department of Justice a week-long extension in its lawsuit with Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin. The reason? Large PDF files...

According to the DOJ, there is more than 7 GB of data related to the case. However, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims' online system allows for only files of up to 50 MB in size to be uploaded. This all amounts to "several hundred" PDFs, including other file formats that would be converted to PDFs. The DOJ says it also sought to convert multiple separate documents into individual PDF batches but explained that those larger files could cause the upload system to crash. "We have tried several different ways to create 50-megabyte files for more efficient filing, all without success thus far," the DOJ said.

Instead of using the online file system, the U.S. government will transfer the documents for the case to DVDs.
Futurism reports the situation was exacerbated "because the agency staff that could have fixed the issue were at the 36th Annual Space Symposium last week."

On Twitter, space reporter Joey Roullete notes the judge's ruling means an additional one-week stay before the awarding of SpaceX's contract..

Or, as Mashable puts it, "Space exploration is currently on hold thanks to a lawsuit and a slew of pesky PDF files."

CNET reports: A fossil discovered during a police raid in Brazil has turned out to be one of the best-preserved flying reptiles found yet, researchers say.

The remains belong to a tapejarid, a toothless pterosaur from the early Cretaceous period known for its huge cranial crest composed partly of bone and partly of soft tissue. Skulls and partial skeletons of Brazilian tapejarids have turned up before, but this fossil was found with more than 90% of its skeleton intact, along with some soft tissue in place around the bones.

"This fossil is special because it is the most complete pterosaur from Brazil and it brings new information about the anatomy and ecology of this animal," says Victor Beccari, co-author of a study on the find published Wednesday in the open-access journal PLOS One.

Brazilian federal police found the tapejarid fossil while investigating an illegal fossil trade operation in 2013. They recovered 3,000 specimens kept in storage units in the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro and transferred them to the Geosciences Institute of the University of São Paulo for study. Since 1942, Brazilian law has categorized fossils as state property, as they're considered part of the country's geological heritage and forbidden from being sold commercially.
The tapejarid had a wingspan of more than 8 feet (2.5 meters) and stood 3.2 feet (1 meter) tall. Its head crest accounted for 40% of its height.

Tesla wants to sell electricity directly to customers in Texas, according to an application filed by the company this month with the Public Utility Commission there. From a report: The application follows the start of a big battery build out by Tesla in Angleton, Texas (near Houston), where it aims to connect a 100 megawatt energy storage system to the grid. Texas Monthly first reported on the application, submitted by a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesla called Tesla Energy Ventures. Tesla has also built several utility-scale energy storage systems around the world, including one east of Los Angeles, another underway in Monterey, California, and two in Australia -- one in Geelong, Victoria, and another in Adelaide, South Australia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Reinsurance giant Swiss Re announced Wednesday that it had signed the world's first long-term agreement to take carbon directly out of the air. The contract with Climeworks AG, one of the world's leading direct air-capture startups, will net the climate technology company $10 million over 10 years. Mischa Repmann, a senior environmental management specialist with Swiss Re, said the deal would not only help his company reach its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030, it could inspire other business considering the use of carbon capture technology. "It's a call for action, and we're hoping that others will follow," he said.

Climeworks, a Switzerland-based company, is set to open a plant in Iceland in September that will filter CO from ambient air using geothermal energy. The captured CO will then be dissolved in water and pumped deep underground for permanent storage in nearby rock layers. While underground, the gas reacts naturally with its surroundings to form rock, preventing the carbon from reentering the atmosphere. The company says the facility will have the capacity to capture and store 4,000 tons of CO per year. [...] Swiss Re and Climeworks didn't specify how much carbon would be removed in fulfillment of their contract and were vague about the cost, saying only it would be several hundred dollars per ton. Climeworks says the average price will decline as its operations grow, and may be as low as $200 a ton by 2030.

Samsung smartphone owners are facing a looming deadline to rescue their photos from Samsung Cloud or risk losing backed up images. From a report: Samsung is removing the option to back up your photo gallery to Samsung Cloud, presumably in a bid to cut storage costs. Samsung Cloud will still continue to back up data such as contacts, calendar entries and notes, but photos and videos are no longer part of the package. Samsung has instead been encouraging customers to back up their photos using Microsoft's OneDrive service, but the deadline is looming for the Samsung Cloud service to be cut off, with customers warned they could lose photos if they don't have copies of them stored locally. Confusingly, Samsung has split customers into two groups, each with different cut-off deadlines. It's not easy to work out which group you're in, so it's probably safest to assume you're in Group 1, which has the earliest set of cut-off deadlines.

Scientists in Germany have developed what they say is the smallest microsupercapacitor in existence. It's smaller than a speck of dust, safe for use in the human body, and can deliver similar voltage to a AAA battery. Prior to this breakthrough, the smallest "biosupercapacitors" developed to date were 3mm^3. New Atlas reports: The construction starts with a stack of polymeric layers that are sandwiched together with a light-sensitive photo-resist material that acts as the current collector, a separator membrane, and electrodes made from an electrically conductive biocompatible polymer called PEDOT:PSS. This stack is placed on a wafer-thin surface that is subjected to high mechanical tension, which causes the various layers to detach in a highly controlled fashion and fold up origami-style into a nano-biosupercapacitor with a volume 0.001 mm^3, occupying less space than a grain of dust. These tubular biosupercapacitors are therefore 3,000 times smaller than those developed previously, but with a voltage roughly the same as an AAA battery (albeit with far lower actual current flow).

These tiny devices were then placed in saline, blood plasma and blood, where they demonstrated an ability to successfully store energy. The biosupercapacitor proved particularly effective in blood, where it retained up to 70 percent of its capacity after 16 hours of operation. Another reason blood may be a suitable home for the team's biosupercapacitor is that the device works with inherent redox enzymatic reactions and living cells in the solution to supercharge its own charge storage reactions, boosting its performance by 40 percent. The team also subjected the device to the forces it might experience in blood vessels where flow and pressure fluctuate, by placing them in microfluidic channels, kind of like wind-tunnel testing for aerodynamics, where it stood up well. They also used three of the devices chained together to successfully power a tiny pH sensor, which could be placed in the blood vessels to measure pH and detect abnormalities that could be indicative of disease, such as a tumor growth. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Playdate, the one-bit gaming system with an analog crank, will be relatively easy to fix if you ever need to replace its battery or buttons. Ars Technica reports the findings from iFixit's teardown: The most interesting findings: The Playdate's signature crank uses a Hall effect sensor rather than a spring or another kind of wear-out-able physical mechanism, so it shouldn't suffer from drift over time like some console controller joysticks do. And while there is a warranty sticker inside the Playdate, it specifically says that you'll void the system's warranty if you break anything inside it, not that you'll void it just by taking the system apart. This strikes a good balance between "don't come in here if you don't know what you're doing" and "we trust you to make your own repairs if you need to."

The teardown also gives us a few specifics on the Playdate's intentionally low-powered hardware, which includes a 216MHz ARM Cortex M7 processor, 128 megabits (or 16MB) of RAM, and 4GB of eMMC storage. The one major complaint iFixit had is that the LCD screen appears to be glued to the front of the Playdate -- replacing the screen will probably necessitate replacing the entire rest of the casing as well. But since the front of the Playdate is simple yellow plastic rather than metal and glass, this part shouldn't cost as much as it does when your phone's screen breaks.

In a 2015 video, PCMag's lead mobile analyst Sascha Segan showed off "One of the coolest phones at this year's CES."

He's now written an article titled "How I Got Suckered by an (Alleged) $10M Phone Scam. The biggest mobile-phone mystery of the 2010s is finally coming to an ignominious end, as yesterday the U.S. attorney for Utah charged Chad Sayers, founder of entirely notional mobile phone firm Saygus, with conducting a $10 million fraud scheme. Saygus "had" a series of "phones" from 2009-2016 that existed as prototypes that the company took on trade shows and to press tours. There was never any real evidence of production runs. The U.S. Attorney now claims Sayers and associated took $10 million in investor money and lived on it without ever really planning to release a product. (I learned this via David Ruddock....)

The phone kept just...not happening. Sayers' genius was that he produced just enough prototypes to show off and kept them in a constant state of pre-sale... "DEFENDANT failed to disclose that device certification with Verizon expired in 2013 and was never renewed," the Department of Justice notes. A new version of the phone then popped up again in 2015, this one supposedly covered in Kevlar with 320GB of storage. Sayers flogged that prototype until early 2016, at which point he said it was coming "next month."

The Department of Justice says: "Between April 7, 2015 and January 10, 2017, DEFENDANT made at least 26 public statements on Twitter that its phone would be shipping 'this month,' 'this week,' or was otherwise launching, when in fact, it has never launched...."

Sayers kept going on press tours and buying expensive trade-show booths with prototypes of phones that would never hit the market, drumming up enough gullible mainstream press coverage (myself included) to presumably attract a continual stream of investors with his claim of being the next big thing.

"Hackers have drained Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid of $97 million worth of Ethereum and other digital coins," reports Forbes: The company, in a tweet posted late Thursday, announced the compromise and said it is moving assets that were not affected into more secure "cold wallet" storage. The company has also suspended deposits and withdrawals... Liquid did not put a dollar figure on the amount, but blockchain analytics company Elliptic said its analysis estimates the losses at about $97 million...

Of that, $45 million were in Ethereum tokens, which are being converted into Ether, preventing the hacker from having those assets frozen. Other cryptos taken in the heist include Bitcoin, XRP, and stablecoins.