PC Maker Acer Is Building a Fancy Electric Bike With Built-In AI

Computer component maker Acer built a lightweight electric bike called the Acer ebii. Electrek reports: This lightweight 35 lb. (16 kg) e-bike features a number of gadgets and gizmos we have yet to spot in the industry, such as built-in AI designed to predictively control the transmission and make use of collision detection sensors for a safer ride. There’s also proximity unlocking feature that the company says “automatically locks your bike when you leave and unlocks it again when you’re nearby.” My Gogoro electric scooter has a similar function, though that’s a highway-capable vehicle.

Tracking capabilities are built into the ebii to help keep tabs on it 24/7. If the bike is ever stolen, it can be locked remotely and tracked using its built-in GPS locator. But don’t think that you won’t find typical bike parts here either, as the Acer ebii still features high-end components like a belt drive instead of a chain drive, 160mm hydraulic disc brakes, and 360-degree LED lighting. Airless tires are designed to remove the chance of flats, and a lefty-style fork does double duty as a conversation piece and a fancy weight saver.

There’s also a 460 Wh electric bicycle battery that is said to offer a range of up to 68 miles (110 km) per charge. A top speed of 15 mph (25 km/h) and a 250W rear hub motor look to keep the bike within European and Asian power and speed limits. There’s no hand throttle, which means riders will have to rely on pedal assist that is activated when the rider spins the pedals. It appears that there’s some confusion about the 2.5-hour charger included with the bike, as some in the industry seem to think it can be used to charge phones and batteries as well. In fact, it’s actually the e-bike’s removable battery itself that can function as a portable power station to charge up your mobile devices. Pricing and availability are not yet available. But there is a launch video to build up excitement.

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The Fed Had Already Spotted Big Problems at SVB Before Its Collapse

And starting in 2021 — long before the run on Silicon Valley Bank — the Federal Reserve had “repeatedly warned the bank that it had problems,” reports the New York Times:

In 2021, a Fed review of the growing bank found serious weaknesses in how it was handling key risks. Supervisors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which oversaw Silicon Valley Bank, issued six citations. Those warnings, known as “matters requiring attention” and “matters requiring immediate attention,” flagged that the firm was doing a bad job of ensuring that it would have enough easy-to-tap cash on hand in the event of trouble.
But the bank did not fix its vulnerabilities. By July 2022, Silicon Valley Bank was in a full supervisory review — getting a more careful look — and was ultimately rated deficient for governance and controls. It was placed under a set of restrictions that prevented it from growing through acquisitions. Last autumn, staff members from the San Francisco Fed met with senior leaders at the firm to talk about their ability to gain access to enough cash in a crisis and possible exposure to losses as interest rates rose.

It became clear to the Fed that the firm was using bad models to determine how its business would fare as the central bank raised rates: Its leaders were assuming that higher interest revenue would substantially help their financial situation as rates went up, but that was out of step with reality. y early 2023, Silicon Valley Bank was in what the Fed calls a “horizontal review,” an assessment meant to gauge the strength of risk management. That checkup identified additional deficiencies — but at that point, the bank’s days were numbered. In early March, it faced a run and failed within a matter of days….

The picture that is emerging is one of a bank whose leaders failed to plan for a realistic future and neglected looming financial and operational problems, even as they were raised by Fed supervisors. For instance, according to a person familiar with the matter, executives at the firm were told of cybersecurity problems both by internal employees and by the Fed — but ignored the concerns.
The Federal Reserve Bank system has 12 distircts, and the one overseeing California had a board of directors which included SVB’s CEO Greg Becker, the article points out. “While board members do not play a role in bank supervision, the optics of the situation are bad.”

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System76 Meerkat Mini-Linux PC – Now with Up to Intel Core i7-1260P

Liliputing.com has an update about the System76 Meerkat, which they describe as “a compact desktop computer with support for up to 64GB of RAM, up to two storage devices (for as much as 16TB of total storage), and up to an Intel Core i7 mobile processor. It’s basically a rebranded Intel NUC.” (Escept that System76 offers a choice of Pop!_OS or Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.)

“Previously available with a choice of 10th or 11th-gen Intel Core processor options, the Meerkat now also supports 12th-gen Intel chips.”

That means there are a total of 9 different processor options available. Prices start at $499 for an entry-level model with a Core i3-10110U processor, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. The prices rises by $50 if you want to go with a Core i3-1135G4 model, while prices start at $599 for a Meerkat mini PC with a 12th-gen Intel Core processor….

But the biggest difference is that Intel’s 12th-gen processors introduce a hybrid architecture that pairs Performance and Efficiency cores, leading to much higher core counts for better multi-core performance.

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Mysterious Streaks of Light Seen in the Sky Friday in California

“Mysterious streaks of light were seen in the sky in the Sacramento area Friday night,” reports the Associated Press.

The lights lasted about 40 seconds, remembered one witness who filmed the lights while enjoying a local brewery. The brewery then asked on Instagram if anyone could solve the mystery, the report continues:

Jonathan McDowell says he can. McDowell is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press that he’s 99.9% confident the streaks of light were from burning space debris.

McDowell said that a Japanese communications package that relayed information from the International Space Station to a communications satellite and then back to Earth became obsolete in 2017 when the satellite was retired. The equipment, weighing 310 kilograms (683 pounds), was jettisoned from the space station in 2020 because it was taking up valuable space and would burn up completely upon reentry, McDowell added….

He estimated the debris was about 40 miles high, going thousands of miles per hour. The U.S. Space Force confirmed the re-entry path over California for the Inter-Orbit Communication System, and the timing is consistent with what people saw in the sky, he added.

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400,000 Gallons of Radioactive Water Leaked from a Nuclear Plant in Minnesota

“Minnesota regulators said Thursday they’re monitoring the cleanup of a leak of 400,000 gallons of radioactive water from Xcel Energy’s Monticello nuclear power plant,” reports the Associated Press, “and the company said there’s no danger to the public.”

“Xcel Energy took swift action to contain the leak to the plant site, which poses no health and safety risk to the local community or the environment,” the Minneapolis-based utility said in a statement. While Xcel reported the leak of water containing tritium to state and federal authorities in late November, the spill had not been made public before Thursday.

State officials said they waited to get more information before going public with it…. “Now that we have all the information about where the leak occurred, how much was released into groundwater, and that contaminated groundwater had moved beyond the original location, we are sharing this information,” said Minnesota Pollution Control Agency spokesman Michael Rafferty, adding the water remains contained on Xcel’s property and poses no immediate public health risk.

The company said it notified the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the state on Nov. 22, the day after it confirmed the leak, which came from a pipe between two buildings. Since then, it has been pumping groundwater, storing and processing the contaminated water, which contains tritium levels below federal thresholds. “Ongoing monitoring from over two dozen on-site monitoring wells confirms that the leaked water is fully contained on-site and has not been detected beyond the facility or in any local drinking water,” the Xcel Energy statement said.

When asked why Xcel Energy didn’t notify the public earlier, the company said: “We understand the importance of quickly informing the communities we serve if a situation poses an immediate threat to health and safety. In this case, there was no such threat.”

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Something Pretty Right: a History of Visual Basic

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic, Retool’s Ryan Lucas has a nice round-up of how Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.

Visual Basic (or VB) burst onto the scene at a magical, transitional moment, presenting a radically simpler alternative for Windows 3.0 development. Bill Gates’ genuine enthusiasm for VB is evident in an accompanying 1991 video in which BillG personally and playfully demonstrates Visual Basic 1.0 at its launch event, as well as in a 1994 video in which Gates thanks Alan Cooper, the
“Father of Visual Basic,” with the Windows Pioneer Award.

For Gates, VB was love at first sight. “It blew his mind, he had never seen anything like it,” recalls Cooper of Gates’s reaction to his 1988 demo of a prototype. “At one point he turned to his retinue and asked ‘Why can’t we do stuff like this?'” Gates even came up with the idea of taking Cooper’s visual programming frontend and replacing its small custom internal language with BASIC.

After seeing what Microsoft had done to his baby, Cooper reportedly sat frustrated in the front row at the launch event. But it’s hard to argue with success, and Cooper eventually came to appreciate VB’s impact. “Had Ruby [Cooper’s creation] gone to the market as a shell construction set,” Cooper said, “it would have made millions of people happier, but then Visual Basic made hundreds of millions of people happier. I was not right, or rather, I was right enough, had a modicum of rightness. Same for Bill Gates, but the two of us together did something pretty right.”

At its peak, Visual Basic had nearly 3.5 million developers worldwide. Many of the innovations that Alan Cooper and Scott Ferguson’s teams introduced 30 years ago with VB are nowhere to be found in modern development, fueling a nostalgic fondness for the ease and magic VB delivered that we have yet to rekindle.

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Programming Pioneer Grady Booch on Functional Programming, Web3, and Conscious Machines

InfoWorld interviews Grady Booch, chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research (who is also a pioneer in design patterns, agile methods, and one of the creators of UML).

Here’s some of the highlights:

Q: Let me begin by asking something “of the moment.” There has been an almost cultural war between object-oriented programming and functional programming. What is your take on this?

Booch: I had the opportunity to conduct an oral history with John Backus — one of the pioneers of functional programming — in 2006 on behalf of the Computer History Museum. I asked John why functional programming didn’t enter the mainstream, and his answer was perfect: “Functional programming makes it easy to do hard things” he said, “but functional programming makes it very difficult to do easy things….”

Q: Would you talk a bit about cryptography and Web3?

Booch: Web3 is a flaming pile of feces orbiting a giant dripping hairball. Cryptocurrencies — ones not backed by the full faith and credit of stable nation states — have only a few meaningful use cases, particularly if you are a corrupt dictator of a nation with a broken economic system, or a fraud and scammer who wants to grow their wealth at the expense of greater fools. I was one of the original signatories of a letter to Congress in 2022 for a very good reason: these technologies are inherently dangerous, they are architecturally flawed, and they introduce an attack surface that threatens economies….

Q: What do you make of transhumanism?

Booch: It’s a nice word that has little utility for me other than as something people use to sell books and to write clickbait articles….

Q: Do you think we’ll ever see conscious machines? Or, perhaps, something that compels us to accept them as such?

Booch: My experience tells me that the mind is computable. Hence, yes, I have reason to believe that we will see synthetic minds. But not in my lifetime; or yours; or your children; or your children’s children. Remember, also, that this will likely happen incrementally, not with a bang, and as such, we will co-evolve with these new species.

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Godot Arrives In the Epic Games Store

The open-source, cross-platform Godot Engine has arrived in the Epic Games store. “Starting today, you can choose to use EGS to download the engine and keep it up to date with every release,” writes the company in a blog post. From the release: Epic Games is a long-time supporter of Godot, and thanks to their contributions we have been able to improve our rendering pipeline as well as our built-in scripting language, GDScript — the fruits of that work are now visible in the newly released Godot 4.0!

The Godot build you can download from EGS is the exact same open source release as on other platforms. Being present on more storefronts opens a new convenient avenue for more users to find the engine and begin their game development journey. You can of course still download Godot Engine from other platforms, or clone its source code from the Git repository and build it yourself. And if you do, you are more than welcome to contribute to Godot’s development too!

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Microsoft Is Testing a Built-In Cryptocurrency Wallet For the Edge Browser

Microsoft appears to be testing a built-in cryptocurrency wallet for Edge, according to screenshots pulled from a beta build of the browser. Ars Technica reports: The feature, which the screenshots say is strictly for internal testing, was unearthed by Twitter user @thebookisclosed, who has a history of digging up present-but-disabled features in everything from new Windows 11 builds to ancient Windows Vista betas. According to the screenshots, the crypto wallet is “embedded in Edge, making it easy to use without installing any extension,” and it can handle multiple types of cryptocurrency. It will also record transactions and the value of your individual currencies as they fluctuate. An “explore” tab offers news stories relevant to cryptocurrency, and an “assets” tab will let you stare lovingly at your NFTs. The wallet is “non-custodial” (also called “self-custodial”), meaning that you have sole ownership of and responsibility for the passwords and recovery keys that allow access to your funds. Microsoft won’t be able to let you back in if you lose your credentials.

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AI Fools Voice Recognition Used To Verify Identity By Australian Tax Office

A voiceprint program used by millions of Australians to access data held by government agencies can be fooled by an AI-generated voice, reports the Guardian. From the report: Centrelink and the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) both give people the option of using a “voiceprint”, along with other information, to verify their identity over the phone, allowing them to then access sensitive information from their accounts. Using just four minutes of audio, a Guardian Australia journalist was able to generate a clone of their own voice and was then able to use this, combined with their customer reference number, to gain access to their own Centrelink self-service account.

Anyone trying to use voiceprint also needs to know the account-holder’s customer reference number, which is not normally publicly available, but the number is not treated as securely as a password and is included in correspondence from Centrelink and other service providers, such as childcare centers. The self-service phone system allows people to access sensitive material such as information on their payment of benefits and to request documents to be sent by mail, including replacement concession or healthcare cards. Services Australia declined to say if the voiceprint technology would be changed or removed from Centrelink.

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