Dell's 32-inch 8K UP3218K display now for sale: Check your wallet Back at CES in January, Dell announced the next step in personal screen resolution advancements. The recent rise of '4K' (or more accurately, Ultra-HD at 3840x2160) monitors has shown that there is a demand for high resolution interfaces beyond a smartphone. Back when UHD monitors in a 16:9 format launched en masse, prices were high ($3500-5000+) and stocks were limited - I remember back in 2013 testing the Sharp 32-inch 4K display at a vendor in Taiwan several years ago in one of the first pieces to test 4K/UHD gaming. AnandTech

Japanese company develops a solar cell with record-breaking 26%+ efficiency Solar panels are cheaper than ever these days, but installation costs can still be considerable for homeowners. More efficient solar panels can recapture the cost of their installation more quickly, so making panels that are better at converting sunlight into electricity is a key focus of solar research and development. The silicon-based cells that make up a solar panel have a theoretical efficiency limit of 29 percent, but so far that number has proven elusive. Ars Technica (also, Interactive: Record-breaking PV cells)

The holiday is over: Amazon will collect sales taxes nationwide on April 1 Amazon, the online merchandise juggernaut, will collect sales taxes from all states with a sales tax starting April 1. Tax-free shopping will be over as of next month in Hawaii, Idaho, Maine and New Mexico, the four remaining holdouts. Since the beginning of this year, Amazon has added a number of states to its roster of jurisdictions where it collects sales taxes. CNBC (also, Amazon.com wins $1.5 billion tax dispute over IRS)

eBay asks users to downgrade security Last week, KrebsOnSecurity received an email from eBay. The company wanted me to switch from using a hardware key fob when logging into eBay to receiving a one-time code sent via text message. I found it remarkable that eBay, which at one time was well ahead of most e-commerce companies in providing more robust online authentication options, is now essentially trying to downgrade my login experience to a less-secure option. KrebsOnSecurity

A Lithuanian phisher tricked two big US tech companies into wiring him $100 million The Department of Justice today unsealed an indictment against a Lithuanian scammer who managed to trick two American tech companies into wiring him $100 million. The scammer, 48-year-old Evaldas Rimasauskas, did so by masquerading as a prominent Asian hardware manufacturer, according to court documents, and tricking employees into depositing tens of millions of dollars into bank accounts... The Verge

AMD Ryzen with 12 cores and 24 threads Another day, another Ryzen leak. Today we share the details of yet unannounced Ryzen CPU with 12 cores, which is most likely being prepared for AMD's HEDT X390 platform. I will start by saying that the machine detected with this CPU is Alienware Area-51 R3. The R2 (which looks like this) ships with Broadwell i7-6800/6850K processors. VideoCardz.com (also, AMD preps BIOS update to fix FMA3 freezes for Ryzen)

The hard way of cassette tape auto-reverse The audio cassette is an audio format that presented a variety of engineering challenges during its tenure. One of the biggest at the time was that listeners had to physically remove the cassette and flip it over to listen to the full recording. Over the years, manufacturers developed a variety of "auto-reverse" systems that allowed a cassette deck to play a full tape without user intervention. This video covers how Akai did it - the hard way. Hackaday

The art and joy of video game photography Did you know that in 2015 more people died while taking selfies than were killed in deadly shark attacks? I don't know how many people typically die in deadly shark attacks each year, and I've wasted enough of Google's time this week to bother finding out, but it makes for a snippy tabloid headline, or barstool factoid – providing nobody asks too many follow-ups. Like a furious and lonely baby boomer in a Daily Mail comments section, I'd be tempted to judge the unfortunates behind the statistic were it not for the fact that, earlier this week I fell out of a tree while trying to photograph bird eggs. Eurogamer

The end of smartphone innovation This autumn Apple will release a new iPhone design, and the fact that it postponed a new design and kept the 6 design for three years instead of two suggests it has something that will attract attention. However, it will really still 'just' be another iPhone. Meanwhile, we have some indications that Apple is working on AR glasses (of which more later) and certainly was working on a car project - but neither of these is likely to see a mass-market consumer release for a year or two at the least (cars perhaps longer). Ben Evans

LastPass: Security done wrong Disclaimer: I am the author of Easy Passwords which is also a password manager and could be considered LastPass competitor in the widest sense. Six month ago I wrote a detailed analysis of LastPass security architecture. In particular, I wrote: So much for the general architecture, it has its weak spots but all in all it is pretty solid and your passwords are unlikely to be compromised at this level. However, as described in my blog post the browser integration turned out to be a massive weakness. Palant.de

Roam free: A history of open-world gaming Open-world video games bear the impossible promise---offering compelling, enjoyable open-endedness and freedom within the constraints of what is, by necessity of the medium, an extremely limited set of possible actions. These games provide a list of (predominantly violent) verbs that's minuscule in comparison to the options you would face in identical real-life situations. Yet, we can't get enough of them. Ars Technica

Why you should care about the Supreme Court case on toner cartridges A corporate squabble over printer toner cartridges doesn't sound particularly glamorous, and the phrase "patent exhaustion" is probably already causing your eyes to glaze over. However, these otherwise boring topics are the crux of a Supreme Court case that will answer a question with far-reaching impact for all consumers: Can a company that sold you something use its patent on that product to control how you choose to use after you buy it? The Consumerist

Congress yet again ponders new 'dig once' fiber law For years we've noted how the government has considered "dig once" laws to improve broadband connectivity nationwide. Basically, these proposals usually include requirements that new fiber conduit banks be installed automatically as part of any Federal highway projects moving forward, gutting much of the cumbersome regulatory barriers in the process. It's something that gets proposed every few years, but never seems to move forward... DSL Reports

VGA in memoriam The reports of the death of the VGA connector are greatly exaggerated. Rumors of the demise of the VGA connector has been going around for a decade now, but VGA has been remarkably resiliant in the face of its impending doom; this post was written on a nine-month old laptop connected to an external monitor through the very familiar thick cable with two blue ends. VGA is a port that can still be found on the back of millions of TVs and monitors that will be shipped this year. Hackaday

Update on HTML5 video for Netflix About four years ago, we shared our plans for playing premium video in HTML5, replacing Silverlight and eliminating the extra step of installing and updating browser plug-ins. Since then, we have launched HTML5 video on Chrome OS, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, Firefox, and Edge on all supported operating systems. And though we do not officially support Linux, Chrome playback has worked on that platform since late 2014. Netflix

Senate puts ISP profits over your privacy The Senate just voted to roll back your online privacy protections. Speak up now to keep the House from doing the same thing. ISPs have been lobbying for weeks to get lawmakers to repeal the FCC's rules that stand between them and using even creepier ways to track and profit off of your every move online. EFF

Text editor performance comparison This started out as a check on some performance problems which were fixed for the latest version of JOE (version 4.3), but is interesting in its own right as a comparison between some text editors. Github