A team at Clemson University has come up with a new design that overcomes some of the problems with incorporating silicon into lithium-ion batteries, "enabling them to demonstrate a lightweight and multipurpose device that could be used to power satellites and spacesuits," reports New Atlas. From the report: Scientists have been investigating the potential of silicon in lithium-ion batteries for a long time, and with good reason. Using the material for the anode component instead of the graphite used today could increase the storage capacity of these devices by as much as 10 times, but there are a few kinks to iron out first. Silicon doesn't exhibit the same durability as graphite in these scenarios, tending to expand, contract and break apart into small pieces as the battery is charged and discharged. This causes the deterioration of the anode and failure of the battery, but we have seen a number of potential solutions to this over the years, including fashioning the silicon into sponge-like nanofibers or tiny nanospheres before integrating them into the device.

The new research out of Clemson University looks to shore up the dependability of silicon with the help of carbon nanotube sheets called Buckypaper, which we've also seen used in the development of next-generation heat shields for aircraft. These sheets were paired with tiny, nanosized silicon particles in what the team says is an arrangement much like a deck of cards, with the silicon particles sandwiched in between each layer. "The freestanding sheets of carbon nanotubes keep the silicon nanoparticles electrically connected with each other," says Shailendra Chiluwal, first author on the study. "These nanotubes form a quasi-three-dimensional structure, hold silicon nanoparticles together even after 500 cycles, and mitigate electrical resistance arising from the breaking of nanoparticles." The beauty of this approach, according to the team, is that even if the charging and discharging of the battery causes the silicon particles to break apart, they remain locked inside the sandwich and able to perform their function. This means that, theoretically, this functioning but experimental battery has a much higher capacity, which means the energy can be stored in much lighter cells, reducing the overall weight of the device. As a bonus, the use of the nanotubes creates a buffer mechanism that enables the batteries to be charged at four times the speed of current iterations, according to the scientists. The research was published in the journal Applied Materials and Interfaces.

Oakland's nonprofit "Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment" housed 40,000 historic pieces of videogame memorabilia — including 11,000 playable games. In 2017 they were the ones urging America's copyright office to allow museums and libraries to circumvent DRM to preserve abandoned online games like FIFA World Cup, Nascar and The Sims. The museum's sponsors include GitHub, Google, PlayStation, and Dolby Digital.

But now the MADE is "set to close its doors, with uncertainty ahead about whether it'll ever be able to reopen," reports GamesIndustry.biz: Founder and director Alex Handy said in an interview with GamesBeat that the group managing the museum couldn't reach an agreement on rent for the place during the COVID-19 crisis... 80% of its budget comes from admissions, its website says, and since it's been closed since March due to the pandemic, it's now forced to shut down and move its collections to storage.

Storage will be paid for thanks to donations — still open on this page and will also go towards eventually finding a new space for the museum. "The current plan is to stay in storage for two years while we raise the funds and make plans to create our dream video game museum," the museum's website reads. "When we're ready, we will be back and better than ever, mark our words."

A nuclear energy venture founded by Bill Gates said Thursday it hopes to build small advanced nuclear power stations that can store electricity to supplement grids increasingly supplied by intermittent sources like solar and wind power. Reuters reports: The effort is part of the billionaire philanthropist's push to help fight climate change, and is targeted at helping utilities slash their emissions of planet-warming gases without undermining grid reliability. TerraPower LLC, which Gates founded 14 years ago, and its partner GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, plan to commercialize stations called Natrium in the United States later this decade, TerraPower's President and Chief Executive Chris Levesque said.

Levesque said the companies are seeking additional funding from private partners and the U.S. Energy Department, and that the project has the support of PacifiCorp, owned by billionaire Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, along with Energy Northwest and Duke Energy. If successful, the plan is to build the plants in the United States and abroad, Levesque said. By 2050 "we would see hundreds of these reactors around the world, solving multiple different energy needs," Levesque said. The 345-megawatt plants would be cooled by liquid sodium and cost about $1 billion each.

The new plants [...] are designed to complement a renewable power because they will store the reactor power in tanks of molten salt during days when the grid is well supplied. The nuclear power could be used later when solar and wind power are low due to weather conditions. Molten salt power storage has been used at thermal solar plants in the past, but leaks have plagued some of the projects. Levesque said the Natrium design would provide more consistent temperatures than a solar plant, resulting in less wear and tear.

It took five decades, but the Democratic Party has finally changed its stance on nuclear energy. In its recently released party platform, the Democrats say they favor a "technology-neutral" approach that includes "all zero-carbon technologies, including hydroelectric power, geothermal, existing and advanced nuclear, and carbon capture and storage." Robert Bryce writes via Forbes: That statement marks the first time since 1972 that the Democratic Party has said anything positive in its platform about nuclear energy. The change in policy is good -- and long overdue -- news for the American nuclear-energy sector and for everyone concerned about climate change. The Democrats' new position means that for the first time since Richard Nixon was in the White House, both the Republican and Democratic parties are officially on record in support of nuclear energy. That's the good news.

About a decade ago, a high-ranking official at the Department of Energy told me that a big problem with nuclear energy is that it needs bipartisan support in Congress. That wasn't happening, he said, because "Democrats are pro-government and anti-nuclear. Republicans are pro-nuclear and anti-government." That partisan divide is apparent in the polling data. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 65 percent of Republicans strongly favored nuclear energy but only 42 percent of Democrats did so. The last time the Democratic Party's platform contained a positive statement about nuclear energy was in 1972, when the party said it supported "greater research and development" into "unconventional energy sources" including solar, geothermal, and "a variety of nuclear power possibilities to design clean breeder fission and fusion techniques."

Since then, the Democratic Party has either ignored or professed outright opposition to nuclear energy. In 2016, the party's platform said climate change "poses a real and urgent threat to our economy, our national security, and our children's health and futures." The platform contained 31 uses of the word "nuclear" including "nuclear proliferation," "nuclear weapon," and "nuclear annihilation." It did not contain a single mention of "nuclear energy." That stance reflected the orthodoxy of the climate activists and environmental groups who have dominated the Democratic Party's discussion on energy for decades. What changed the Democrats' stance on nuclear? I cannot claim any special knowledge about the drafting of the platform, but it appears that science and basic math finally won out. While vying for their party's nomination, two prominent Democratic presidential hopefuls -- Cory Booker and Andrew Yang -- both endorsed nuclear energy. In addition, Joe Biden's energy plan included a shout-out to nuclear.

41-year-old Rudy Ferretti "was known in the male-dominated retro gaming community as a champion gamer — and as a raging misogynist who ferociously harassed women," writes blogger David Futrelle. "He once made a homebrew game in which the goal was to kill women.

"Last week, he allegedly gunned down his former girlfriend Amy Molter before turning his gun on himself."

Wired reports: Longtime members of the retro and arcade gaming scene say they warned community leaders and even police about Ferretti's threatening behavior for years. For close to a decade, they say, Ferretti had harassed, stalked, and threatened gamers, particularly women, pushing some out of the niche gaming scene entirely... Arcade game collector and researcher Catherine DeSpira and video game historian and storage auction buyer Patrick Scott Patterson — two of Ferretti's most public targets — say they collectively contacted police in different states a half-dozen times to report Ferretti's threats against themselves and others. They say those attempts ultimately had no effect.

All the while, clusters of retro gamers across the country egged Ferretti on in private messages and on forums, leveraging his apparent instability and misogynist inclinations against women they didn't want in the scene... "They were emboldening it, pushing him, giving him a support system," says Patterson.... The rise of the GamerGate campaign in 2014 gave Ferretti new fodder to fuel his idea that women — specifically "radical feminists," as he wrote in multiple blog posts and said in YouTube videos — were out to destroy the purity of the arcade gaming scene... Ferretti believed that his gaming acumen justified his stewardship of the community. "I can be an asshole. You know why? Because I'm a world champion. I'm a gamer," he once said in a video. As recently as April 2020, Ferretti described himself in a YouTube video as "the savior of the community..."

[I]t was a network of institutional failures — from forums to expos to law enforcement — that allowed Ferretti to continue his campaigns for over a decade. "I was trying to tell people this guy Rudy was dangerous and capable of doing exactly what he ended up doing," says Patrick Scott Patterson.

Microsoft is signing deals with foreign governments to offer cloud-infrastructure packages similar to the bundle it assembled for the U.S. Defense Department, according to CNBC, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, cloud offering for the Defense Department provides cloud-based computing and storage resources at all government security classification levels, as well as devices that can work offline until they sync back with cloud infrastructure. The Pentagon awarded the JEDI contract to Microsoft in October. The contract is worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. Outside the U.S., Microsoft has seen interest in the type of relationship that it has formed with the Pentagon, said one of the people. Specifically, Microsoft has committed to staffing the Pentagon initiative with people who hold sufficient government security clearances, and to delivering a group of existing products and services, as opposed to specially built technologies, at a customized price.

Microsoft employees began work on cloud contracts for foreign governments after it became clear that the JEDI work would be put on hold because of a legal challenge from Amazon, Microsoft's main rival in cloud computing, this person said. The company plans to announce the effort later this year, one person said, adding that intelligence agencies and militaries outside the U.S. might use it. Another person briefed on the work said Microsoft already has foreign cloud government contracts, despite that it has not announced the new strategy yet. It's not clear which countries Microsoft is most focused on. "We've worked with governments around the world on a longstanding and reliable basis for four decades," a spokesperson told CNBC in an email. "We have government customers using our products to enhance their services with the latest in commercial innovations, deeply engage and connect with citizens in powerful ways, and empower government employees with the modern tools they need to be more efficient and effective, and to give them time back to focus on their agency mission."

Synology today added a new NAS to its lineup: "DiskStation DS1520+," with five bays. It also has two NVMe PCIe SSD slots for cache. From a report: "Featuring the Intel Celeron Processor J4125, DS1520+ provides a performance boost that sees a 126 percent increase in website responsiveness and a 19.8 percent increase in compute-tasks. The DS1520+ provides dual M.2 2280 NVMe SSD cache slots, along with four 1GbE network ports. DS1520+ comes equipped with five bays that support HDDs and SSDs of up to 16TB. If the need for storage grows, users can expand their DS1520+ using Synology expansion units (purchased separately), giving users a maximum raw capacity of 240TB," says Synology. It's priced at $700, but BetaNews, which has listed the full specs and other details, says Amazon is already selling it at $650.

KindMind shares a report from The Register: Toyota has expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services in ways that will see many of its models upload performance data into the Amazonian cloud to expand the services the auto-maker offers to drivers and fleet owners. [...] Toyota reckons the data could turn into "new contextual services such as car share, rideshare, full-service lease, and new corporate and consumer services such as proactive vehicle maintenance notifications and driving behavior-based insurance."

The two companies say their joint efforts "will help build a foundation for streamlined and secure data sharing throughout the company and accelerate its move toward CASE (Connected, Autonomous/Automated, Shared and Electric) mobility technologies." Neither party has specified just which bits of the AWS cloud Toyota will take for a spin but it seems sensible to suggest the auto-maker is going to need lots of storage and analytics capabilities, making AWS S3 and Kinesis likely candidates for a test drive. Whatever Toyota uses, prepare for privacy ponderings because while cheaper car insurance sounds lovely, having an insurer source driving data from a manufacturer has plenty of potential pitfalls.

A review at the Android Police site calls Pine64's new Linux-based PinePhone "the most interesting smartphone I've tried in years," with 17 different operating systems available (including Fedora, Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS, openSUSE, and Arch Linux ARM): There's a replaceable battery, which is compatible with batteries designed for older Samsung Galaxy J7 phones. It's good to know that even if PinePhone vanished overnight, you could still purchase new batteries for around $10-15...

There's a microSD card slot above the SIM tray, which supports cards up to 2TB in size. While it can be used as extra storage, just like the SD slots in Android phones and tablets, it can also function as a bootable drive. If you write an operating system image to the SD card and put it in the PinePhone, the phone will boot from the SD card. This means you can move between operating systems on the PinePhone by simply swapping microSD cards, which is amazing for trying out new Linux distributions without wiping data. How great would it be if Android phones could do that?

Finally, the inside of the PinePhone has six hardware killswitches that can be manipulated with a screwdriver. You can use them to turn off the modem, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, microphone, rear camera, front camera, and headphone jack. No need to put a sticker over the selfie camera if you're worried about malicious software — just flip the switch and never worry about it again.... For a $150 phone produced in limited batches by a company with no previous experience in the smartphone industry, I'm impressed it's built as well as it is...

I look forward to seeing what the community around the PinePhone can accomplish.
A Pine64 blog post this weekend touts "a boat-load of cool and innovative things" being attempted by the PinePhone community, including users working on things like a fingerprint scanner or a thermal camera, plus a community that's 3D-printing their own custom PinePhone cases. And Pine64 has now identified three candidates for a future keyboard option (each of which can be configured as either a slide-out or clamshell keyboard): I feel like we have finally gotten into a good production rhythm; it was only last month we announced the postmarketOS Community Edition of the PinePhone, and this month I am here to tell you that the factory will deliver the phones to us at the end of this month... I don't know about you, but I think that this is a rather good production pace. At the time of writing, and based on current sale rates, the postmarketOS production-run will sell out in a matter of days...

While I have no further announcements at this time, what I will say is that we have no intention of slowing down the pace now until February 2021 (when Chinese New Year begins)...

"During the Cold War, the CIA considered building a bird-sized drone designed to spy on the communist bloc," reports Popular Mechanics. "The drone would carry 'black box' spy packages into Russia and China, as well as take secret photographs — all while hiding in plain sight disguised as a bird..." The project envisioned a fleet of 12 bird-shaped drones, powered by nuclear energy, that could stay aloft for up to a month. The drone, which was supposed to act as a robotic spy plane and courier for secret payloads, was never completed... "Aquiline" was a small drone, meant to be kept as close to bird-like size as possible — five feet long, 7.5 feet wide, and a takeoff weight of 83 pounds — under the constraints of the technology of the time. A silent 3.5-horsepower, four-cycle engine would give the drone a speed of 47 to 80 knots and an endurance of 50 hours and 1,200 miles. Aquiline's maximum altitude was estimated at 20,000 feet.

Nuclear power promised to give Aquiline even greater range. The CIA proposed to install a radioisotope propulsion system on the flying drone, one that would convert waste heat from decaying isotopes (like plutonium) into electricity. Such an engine, developed primarily for deep space probes, would boost the drone's endurance to an astonishing 30 days or 36,000 miles.

Aquiline was designed to carry both photographic and intelligence payloads. It could take overhead photographs of sensitive sites while flying much lower than the U-2 spy plane, and would scoop up electronic signals of radios, radar, and other devices for later analysis. Unlike manned planes, Aquiline could fly much closer to its targets, producing high resolution photographs and recording stronger electromagnetic signals. The drone could also secretly drop off payloads of specially developed sensors near sites the CIA wanted to closely monitor...

Radars and human sentries at sensitive sites would mistake Aquiline for a bird and pay little attention to it.
The drone was to have been designed by McDonnell Douglas — and developed Area 51, according to the article.

And since data storage at the time was limited to cumbersome things like punch cards and tapes, the drone would instead beam all of its data to a nearby reconnaissance plane.

Slashdot reader Tekla Perry is also senior editor at IEEE Spectrum, and brings a story about San Diego's 3,300 "smart streetlights," each one equipped with "an Intel Atom processor, half a terabyte of storage, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios, two 1080p video cameras, two acoustical sensors, and environmental sensors that monitor temperature, pressure, humidity, vibration, and magnetic fields."

San Diego's smart streetlights were supposed to save money and inspire entrepreneurs to use streetlight sensor data to develop apps that would make the city a better place. The money savings didn't add up and the apps never emerged. Instead, the San Diego police realized the video data, intended to be processed at the edge by AI algorithms [and deleted after 5 days], could be tapped directly for law enforcement. Now consumer groups are looking to the city to pass legislation governing the use of data, and other cities are opting to avoid such issues by leaving cameras out of future intelligent lighting systems.
The first video accessed by police exonerated a person they'd arrested for murder in August of 2018. But over the next 10 months they'd accessed 99 more videos to investigate what they called "serious" crimes, a number climbing to up to 175 videos by early 2020. "The list included murders, sexual assaults, and kidnappings — but it also included vandalism and illegal dumping, which caused activists to question the city's definition of 'serious'..." according to IEEE Spectrum. "To date, San Diego police have tapped streetlight video data nearly 400 times, including this past June, during investigations of incidents of felony vandalism and looting during Black Lives Matter protests."

Morgan Currie, a lecturer in data and society at the University of Edinburgh, tells the site it's "a classic example of how data collection systems are easily retooled as surveillance systems, of how the capacities of the smart city to do good things can also increase state and police control."

Apple is readying a series of bundles that will let customers subscribe to several of the company's digital services at a lower monthly price, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing people with knowledge of the effort. From the report: The bundles, dubbed "Apple One" inside the Cupertino, California-based technology giant, are planned to launch as early as October alongside the next iPhone line, the people said. The bundles are designed to encourage customers to subscribe to more Apple services, which will generate more recurring revenue. There will be different tiers, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private plans. A basic package will include Apple Music and Apple TV+, while a more expensive variation will have those two services and the Apple Arcade gaming service. The next tier will add Apple News+, followed by a pricier bundle with extra iCloud storage for files and photos. Apple's plans, and the structure of the bundles, may change. But the goal is to offer groups of services at lower prices than would be charged if consumers subscribed to each offering individually.

Dropbox is officially launching a handful of new consumer features out of beta today, along with some new tools for businesses. From a report: The cloud storage giant first introduced its password manager -- replete with a standalone mobile app for Android and iOS -- back in June. Similar to other password management apps on the market, Dropbox Passwords stores and encrypts users' online passwords and syncs them across all devices (desktop and mobile) so users don't have to remember multiple login credentials. Dropbox Passwords can also suggest strong, randomly generated, individual passwords for your online services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and Dropbox itself.

Dropbox Passwords is the result of last year's acquisition of Massachusetts-based Valt, which swiftly shuttered its own apps ahead of integration with Dropbox. Dropbox Passwords is available to everyone on a Dropbox Plus or Professional subscription from today. The San Francisco-based company is also launching its previously announced computer backup feature in general availability today. The tool, which is available for Dropbox Basic, Plus, and Professional users, automatically creates a cloud-based backup of any folder stored on a PC or Mac and is continuously synced.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will sign and issue new rules this week that will get rid of certain methane gas emission requirements for oil and gas producers, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. Unidentified administration officials told the newspaper that the new rules will include getting rid of requirements for producers to have systems and processes to find methane leaks. They will also end EPA oversight of smog and emissions from pipelines and storage sites and lessen monitoring and reporting requirements for certain pollutants, the Journal reported. The new rules have most of the major elements of proposals from 2018 and 2019, according to the newspaper.

In 2019, the agency proposed eliminating requirements for oil and gas companies to install technology for monitoring methane emissions from pipelines, wells and facilities. In 2018, it proposed reducing the frequency of monitoring methane emissions of oil and gas wells to every two years and compressor stations that help transport natural gas to just once a year. However, the Journal reported Monday that the administration would forgo the measures that would have reduced the inspection frequency due to difficulty in justifying them legally.

Amazon is making it easier for Prime subscribers to play games, the latest effort to extend the appeal of a loyalty program designed to keep shoppers engaged. From a report: The world's largest e-commerce company on Monday gave its more than 150 million Prime members access to free video-game content, eliminating a step that required them to link their Amazon account with one on Twitch, the company's live-streaming subsidiary. The service, once known as Prime Twitch, is now called Prime Gaming and offers special in-game perks and free downloadable PC games. Prime, which now costs $119 a year in the U.S., began as an unlimited free-shipping program designed to entice customers. Amazon has since tacked on a suite of digital perks, such as video streaming, music and photo storage. Members spend far more on the retail site than non-members, surveys show.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to ban dealings with ByteDance, owner of video-sharing sensation TikTok, appears to codify what his administration has already been warning. A second edict targeting messaging app WeChat and its parent, Tencent, seems weirdly overdue. The executive orders issued by the White House go beyond stopping average Americans from becoming unwitting spies for the Communist Party through their postings and data. The implications could hurt not only the Chinese targets, but the U.S. companies they work with, including Apple and Alphabet's Google.

Though TikTok and WeChat have been getting all the recent attention, the orders state that American companies cannot work with ByteDance or Tencent (though an unnamed U.S. official later stated that Tencent transactions were still OK). That clarification notwithstanding, the wording of the orders does imply that regardless of intention such bans could extend further, to include Americans advertising on dozens of products offered by either Chinese company, or to selling them cloud-storage services, or perhaps the most nuclear option: distributing their apps, even within China. [...] Even though Chinese smartphone brands dominate their domestic market, iOS and Android remain the dominant platforms and Apple and Google cover almost the entire global ecosystem with their respective app stores. If they can't do business with ByteDance, for example, even after a TikTok spin off, then the Beijing company might be unable to distribute its own apps, even within China.

FallOutBoyTonto writes: In June we saw an update to the NVMe standard. The update defines a software interface to assist in actually reading and writing to the drives in a way to which SSDs and NAND flash actually works. Instead of emulating the traditional block device model that SSDs inherited from hard drives and earlier storage technologies, the new NVMe Zoned Namespaces optional feature allows SSDs to implement a different storage abstraction over flash memory. This is quite similar to the extensions SAS and SATA have added to accommodate Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) hard drives, with a few extras for SSDs. 'Zoned' SSDs with this new feature can offer better performance than regular SSDs, with less overprovisioning and less DRAM. The downside is that applications and operating systems have to be updated to support zoned storage, but that work is well underway.

The NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) specification has been ratified and published as a Technical Proposal. It builds on top of the current NVMe 1.4a specification, in preparation for NVMe 2.0. The upcoming NVMe 2.0 specification will incorporate all the approved Technical Proposals, but also reorganize that same functionality into multiple smaller component documents: a base specification (one for each command set of block, zoned, key-value, and potentially more in the future), and separate specifications for each transport protocol (PCIe, RDMA, TCP). The standardization of Zoned Namespaces clears the way for broader commercialization and adoption of this technology, which so far has been held back by vendor-specific zoned storage interfaces and very limited hardware choices. [...]

Canon has suffered a ransomware attack that impacts numerous services, including Canon's email, Microsoft Teams, USA website, and other internal applications. From a report: BleepingComputer has been tracking a suspicious outage on Canon's image.canon cloud photo and video storage service resulting in the loss of data for users of their free 10GB storage feature. The image.canon site suffered an outage on July 30th, 2020, and over six days, the site would show status updates until it went back in service yesterday, August 4th. However, the final status update was strange as it mentions that while data was lost, "there was no leak of image data." This led BleepingComputer to believe there was more to the story and that they suffered a cyberattack. [...] Today, a source contacted BleepingComputer and shared an image of a company-wide notification titled "Message from IT Service Center" that was sent at approximately 6 AM this morning from Canon's IT department.

Google today unveiled two Pixel smartphones. First is the $349 Pixel 4A, which is available for preorder now and will ship on August 20th. And second, there's the Pixel 4A 5G, which will cost $499 and also ship sometime this fall. From a blog post: With the same incredible camera experiences from Pixel 4 and a redesigned hole-punch design, Pixel 4a brings the same features that have helped millions of Pixel owners take great shots. HDR+ with dual exposure controls, Portrait Mode, Top Shot, Night Sight with astrophotography capabilities and fused video stabilization -- they're all there. The Pixel 4a comes in Just Black with a 5.8-inch OLED display. It has a matte finish that feels secure and comfortable in your hand and includes Pixel's signature color pop power button in mint. Check out the custom wallpapers that have some fun with the punch-hole camera. In addition to features like Recorder, which now connects with Google Docs to seamlessly save and share transcriptions and recordings (English only), Pixel 4a will include helpful experiences like the Personal Safety app for real-time emergency notifications and car crash detection.

Pixel 4a also has Live Caption, which provides real-time captioning (English only) for your video and audio content. New with the Pixel 4a launch -- and also rolling out for Pixel 2, 3, 3a and 4 phones -- Live Caption will now automatically caption your voice and video calls. The Pixel 4a has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G Mobile Platform, Titan M security module for on-device security, 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage with an even bigger battery that lasts all day1. [...] This fall, we'll have two more devices to talk about: the Pixel 4a (5G), starting at $499, and Pixel 5, both with 5G2 to make streaming videos, downloading content and playing games on Stadia or other platforms faster and smoother than ever. Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 will be available in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan and Australia. In the coming months, we'll share more about these devices and our approach to 5G.

Google One, Google's subscription program for buying additional storage and live support, is getting an update today that will bring free phone backups for Android and iOS devices to anybody who installs the app -- even if they don't have a paid membership. From a report: The catch: While the feature is free, the backups count against your free Google storage allowance of 15GB. If you need more you need -- you guessed it -- a Google One membership to buy more storage or delete data you no longer need. Paid memberships start at $1.99/month for 100GB. Last year, paid members already got access to this feature on Android, which stores your texts, contacts, apps, photos and videos in Google's cloud. The "free" backups are now available to Android users. iOS users will get access to it once the Google One app rolls out on iOS in the near future.