This tiny electric jet startup thinks it can reinvent regional air travel Flying from San Francisco to Los Angeles can be a huge pain in the ass. You can expect to spend over $200 on your plane ticket, plus another five hours of traveling door-to-door thanks to traffic, security, and other headaches. This is the type of hassle-rich trip --- short but overly expensive and overly complicated --- that a new startup called Zunum Aero is aiming to reinvent. The Verge

Uber said to use "sophisticated" software to defraud drivers, passengers Uber has devised a "clever and sophisticated" scheme in which it manipulates navigation data used to determine "upfront" rider fare prices while secretly short-changing the driver, according to a proposed class-action lawsuit against the ride-hailing app. When a rider uses Uber's app to hail a ride, the fare the app immediately shows to the passenger is based on a slower and longer route compared to the one displayed to the driver. Ars Technica

New malware intentionally bricks IoT devices A new malware strain called BrickerBot is bricking Internet of Things (IoT) devices around the world by corrupting their storage capability and reconfiguring kernel parameters. Detected via honeypot servers maintained by cyber-security firm Radware, the first attacks started on March 20 and continued ever since, targeting only Linux BusyBox-based IoT devices. Bleeping Computer

Hacker archetypes There's a book about martial arts called On the Warrior's Path that tries to understand the differing psychologies of martial artists through the lens of half a dozen archetypes - Seeker, Ronin, Tribal Warrior, and others. I have not yet read the book, but my friend and regular A&D commenter Susan Sons reports having found it very effective for motivating young and newbie martial artists. "It gave them their first glimpse of what they were trying to become,"... So, Susan had the idea that it might be a good idea to develop a parallel gallery of hacker archetypes to help motivate newbies. Eric Raymond

Here's how playing on Wi-fi hurts your game When it comes to gaming, any serious aficionado will tell you that a wired connection is best. Let me rephrase that to be clear: you would have to pry a diehard gamers wired connection from the grasp of their cold, dead hand. Capiche? There are obvious advantages that an Ethernet connection offers to a gaming PC directly wired to the router beyond the satisfying click of plugging the CAT 5e cable into the Ethernet port, including the avoidance of wireless interference, and a high level of security. PC Gamer

The strange, timeless appeal of early 3D platformers If you were a freelance video game journalist in the mid-1990s there was one genre that you learned to both love - and massively detest. That polarising genre was the character-based 3D platformer. There were, of course, brilliant, perhaps even legendary examples. Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, Banjo-Kazooie - these games were warm, energetic and colourful, simultaneously referencing the glorious history of platform games and the wondrous new possibilities of real-time polygon rendering. Eurogamer

The four flavors of automated license plate reader technology Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) may be the most common mass surveillance technology in use by local law enforcement around the country---but they're not always used in the same way. Typically, ALPR systems are comprised of high-speed cameras connected to computers that photograph every license plate that passes. The photo is converted to letters and numbers, which are attached to a time and location stamp, then uploaded to a central server. The EFF

Italy court blocks Uber services in Italy, citing unfair competition A court blocked the use of smart phone apps for Uber cars UBER.UL in Italy on Friday, ruling that they constituted unfair competition. The court said Uber could not use its Black, Lux, Suv, X , XL, Select and Van phone applications nor could it promote or advertise its services in Italy, a court document showed. The court ruled in favour of a suit filed by Italy's major traditional taxi associations. Reuters

Samsung ditches digital camera business Samsung Electronics has recently stopped producing and selling digital cameras, hinting at the Korean tech giant's departure from the waning market, industry sources said on April 7. "We no longer produce and sell digital cameras," said a Samsung official on condition of anonymity. "But we will create a new camera product category to continue the business." The Korea Herald

File format posters It's not uncommon for hackers to have a particular delectation for unusual interior decoration. Maybe it's a Nixie tube clock, or a vacuum fluorescent display reading out the latest tweets from a favorite chatbot. If this sounds like your living room already, perhaps you'd like some of these file format posters to adorn your walls. Hackaday/Github

Marc Andreessen: "Take the Ego out of Ideas" When Marc Andreessen wants to think about deep issues like the state of the economy and technological change, he mentally spars with the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Larry Page --- the people he says are the most audacious people who have worked in Silicon Valley. "I have a little simulation of Peter Thiel. He lives on my shoulder right here. I argue with him all day long." Stanford

EpicGear's Morpha X modular gaming mouse reviewed TR gerbils may not have heard of EpicGear, a division of Golden Emperor International Limited (better known as GEiL). On top of its various memory offerings, the company sells a full range of gaming gear under that EpicGear brand, including keyboards, mice, and headsets. I've got both a keyboard and a mouse from the EG crew in the workshop right now. I'll be looking at the keyboard soon, but today we're talking about the Morpha X modular gaming mouse. The Tech Report

OS/2 2.0 at 25 Twenty-five years ago, on March 31st, 1992, IBM released OS/2 2.0, the first mass-market 32-bit PC operating system. The road to OS/2 2.0 was quite long and winding, and the OS was a proud member of the vaporware club (just like, say, Windows NT or Windows 95). OS2 Museum

Fuck you and die: An oral history of something awful 1999 was a bad time to be in the website business. The dot-com bust was hurtling toward the internet with the speed and certitude of the Chicxulub asteroid. Five trillion dollars were about to evaporate, caught in a constellation of collapsing venture capital-backed stars like Pets.com---Amazon if Amazon only sold cat food---and Broadcast.com, which was just radio on the internet. Motherboard.Vice

Google says its AI chips smoke CPUs, GPUs in performance tests Four years ago, Google was faced with a conundrum: if all its users hit its voice recognition services for three minutes a day, the company would need to double the number of data centers just to handle all of the requests to the machine learning system powering those services. PCWorld