Firefox fights back Hundreds of Mozilla employees met a very different version of the Firefox mascot this June as they packed into a Hilton conference room in San Francisco for an all-hands meeting. Gone was the blazing-orange fox snuggling a blue globe, the image that’s represented Mozilla’s scrappy browser since 2003. Instead, Firefox Senior Vice President Mark Mayo opened the event with a drawing of a fox in menacing mecha armor, named Mark 57 — the same way ever-improving Iron Man suits are named. Cnet
A better, safer battery could be coming to a laptop near you A start-up company is trying to turbocharge a type of battery that has been a mainstay for simple devices like flashlights and toys, but until now has been ignored as an energy source for computers and electric cars. Executives at Ionic Materials, in Woburn, Mass., plan to announce on Thursday a design breakthrough that could make solid-state alkaline batteries a viable alternative to lithium-ion and other high-energy storage technologies. The NY Times
Someone turned a Wii U into a PC that emulates Wii U Today in taking the long way around: Gaming modder Banjo Kazooie stuffed a Windows 10 OS into a Wii U, and used it to emulate the Wii U. Kazooie posted the full list of build materials and specs on Sudomod, a message board for mod enthusiasts. It features a LCD screen with full touch screen support, and Intel m5 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 64GB SSD. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, battery monitoring software and light-up LED joysticks are thrown in because why the hell not. The battery lasts for about two hours. Motherboard.Vice
Retail staff reports high levels of mining performance on AMD's RX Vega A member of Overclockers UK staff, Gibbo, has reported that AMD's Vega series cards offer some insane levels of mining performance with hash rates of "between 70 and 100" per card. To put this into perspective RX 580 GPUs can achieve hashrates of around 26-29. If this is true AMD's RX Vega series GPUs are mining beasts, with the potential to offer a greater hastrate per watt than AMD's existing RX 500/400 series GPU lineup. OC3D
The Internet is built for advertisers Have you ever wondered how many successive dump trucks it would take to run over your laptop until it was ground into a fine dust? I clicked on a link last week and three different autoplay videos blared at once. I panicked and closed my computer. The internet has been awash in ads for decades, but in the past few years, a shift has taken place. The internet isn’t for people anymore. It is for advertisements. The Ringer
MegaBots is finally going to take on Japan in the world’s first giant robot duel After over two years of robot-building and excessive YouTubing of the process—and a year after MegaBots originally said they would fight—the two teams are nearly ready to engage. Two summers ago, a group of American roboticists formed a company called Megabots, and released a video challenging a Japanese collective to a giant robot fight. About a week later, the Japanese group, Suidobashi Heavy Industry, agreed to clash robots. Quartz.com
Freewheeling Valve churns out big video-game bucks despite some growing pains On Monday morning, the first two five-person teams will file into soundproof boxes, take a seat in front of custom-built computers, and test their reflexes and strategy in a quest for a cut of a $23 million prize pool. In a darkened KeyArena around that stage, thousands of mostly young fans will follow the action broadcast to the video screen above, with the fantasy-movie sounds of in-game clashes and live commentary blaring through the arena. Seattle Times
Google is working on a rival to one of Snap's main moneymaking features Google is talking to several publishers about a technology that's similar to Snapchat's Discover, according to a Friday report in The Wall Street Journal. The technology, dubbed "Stamp," could be revealed as soon as next week and contain content from Vox Media, CNN, Mic, The Washington Post and Time, the Journal reported. CNBC
Calling all speakers! A hardware button to toggle display mirroring I’ve been really frustrated that my favourite keyboard shortcut to toggle display mirroring doesn’t work on TouchBar MacBooksso I’ve made a button that can emulate it! Of course since I’ve got this working I’ve discovered there’s a weird work-around to get it working on the TouchBar, but it’s still quite a fun device, and you could use it to emulate any key (missing that Escape key, anyone?) What you need... Seb.ly
Here are over 100 games enhanced for Xbox One X Over the past few weeks we’ve seen countless lists been posted on the internet which feature Xbox One X Enhanced games. Unfortunately, the ones we’ve come across are incomplete. During E3 2017 Microsoft revealed a sizzle reel of Xbox One X Enhanced games and since then many developers have come out and stated that their games will either support Xbox One X or run at 4K on the console. MS Power User
NSA collects MS Windows error information Back in 2013, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA intercepts and collects Windows bug reports. The article talks about the (limited) value of this information with regard to specific target computers, but I have another question: how valuable would this database be for finding new zero-day Windows vulnerabilities to exploit? Schneier on Security
