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The unfolding and tensioning of the sunshield took place over the course of eight days, involving 139 of Webb’s 178 release mechanisms as well as 70 hinge assemblies, eight deployment motors, 90 individual cables and roughly 400 pulleys. If that sounds daunting, consider this: the James Webb Space Telescope has 344 so-called single point failures, or individual steps that must work without incident. If any one point fails - a cable gets stuck or a release mechanism doesn’t trigger - the whole project could be in jeopardy....

Micrometeoroid strikes are a common occurrence in space, and NASA designed Webb’s mirror to withstand impacts from dust-sized particles traveling at extremely high speeds. During the construction phase, engineers pelted mirror samples with small particles and conducted simulations to get a better understanding of how to best fortify the space-bound observatory. Unfortunately, the micrometeoroid that recently tagged Webb was larger than what engineers modeled and could have tested here on Earth....

Kaspersky Lab joins Chinese telecom firms Huawei Technologies Co and ZTE Corp on the list, along with China Mobile (USA) and China Telecom (Americas), both of which were added at the same time as the Russian company. Earlier this month, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) issued a warning to Kaspersky users following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, warning that the company could “carry out offensive operations itself, be forced against its will to attack target systems, or be spied on as a victim of a cyber operation without its knowledge or as a tool for attacks against its own customers....

We used a trace of importing 68 images (434MB) to Windows Live Photo Gallery, which copies images to a Pictures library, indexes them and creates thumbnails. We stopped recording when the thumbnails appeared. The HyperX 3K was again on par with Intel’s 520 Series, 6% faster than the original HyperX, and 16% faster than the SSDNow V+200. This workload uses a trace of compiling a home video from video clips....

The components are well-placed for both of those uses. The Ryzen 7 5800H is a familiar chip that’s proved its worth in content-creation tasks and games, and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 is a capable GPU in mainstream situations. The review sample we received costs $1,599, and it pairs those core components with 16GB of DDR4 memory and a 512GB SSD. As usual, several other configurations are available: a more affordable version with an RTX 3060 costs $1,369, and an entry-level model with a Ryzen 5 5600H and RTX 3050 graphics costs just $1,149....

My review unit came with just an Intel Core i5-7200U inside, but it surprisingly held its own against faster laptops with the i7-7500U, falling just 3 percent slower in system benchmarks. The Samsung 960 Evo SSD inside was extremely fast, and I love the array of hardware options available through Lenovo’s website. Great performance is backed up with excellent battery life. The X1 Carbon topped the charts in our Wi-Fi web browsing benchmark, and performed very well in our video playback test....

The exterior lid is solid black with a speckle-style black rubber-like finish complete with the Lenovo and ThinkPad nameplates. On the right side of the notebook is a switch to enable / disable all radios, a 4-in-1 card reader (SD, MMC, SDHC and SDXC) and the hard drive port. The majority of ports are on the back of the system which include, from left to right: Network jack, what appears to be a non-functional SIM card slot, a USB 3....

Of course the PC-K56 also lacks the interior paint job of the PC-K62 leaving an undesirable finish. So rather than tell you all the same stuff again I will point out the changes and the impact they have on the case. The 3.5" drive bays no longer feature the caddies. Instead, the rubber mounts are screwed directly to the hard drives allowing them to slide into place. This has little impact on the hard drives once they are installed as the rubber mounts still act as anti-vibration barriers....

Intel Core i5 661 processor EVGA H55 motherboard Zalman CNPS8000A heatsink fan Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3 2x 2GB Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 64GB SSD StarTech USB 3.0 PCIe adapter Seasonic SS-460 X-Series Fanless 460W PSU DVD burner The fully tool-less design, lightweight aluminum construction and removable motherboard tray make the PC-V2120 a breeze to work with. The motherboard can be installed in a matter of minutes and slid right back into the chassis....

I’ve never been a huge television or movie buff although I occasionally get sucked into a good series like Breaking Bad or Dexter (before the writers drove it into the ground, of course). Most TV shows can now be found online through services such as Netflix, but what has kept me coming back to cable each year is live sports. Each Saturday from late August through the end of November, I’m locked into the college football season....

Security researchers at Sansec say that they discovered that more than 500 online stores running the Magento 1 e-commerce platform were compromised in January. The hackers used a combination of SQL injection (SQLi) and PHP Object Injection (POI) to take over the Magento platform. Then a domain called “naturalfreshmall” served the malware to the now vulnerable sites. “The Natural Fresh skimmer shows a fake payment popup, defeating the security of a (PCI compliant) hosted payment form,” Sansec tweeted....

AMD came to market with their own quad-core solution a year later, marking the release of the first Phenom X4 processors. Though in all fairness, it took them about one more year to get things going right. Today we find ourselves with very different and diversified offerings from both companies, that are not only cheaper but also significantly faster. Just take for example AMD’s Phenom II X4 945 that can be purchased for as little as $170, not to mention Intel’s most recent release, the Core i5 750, which is meant to crush its competitors offering top notch performance at the $199 price point....

On Sunday, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Federov tweeted a plea for all major crypto exchanges to block addresses of Russian users. “It’s crucial to freeze not only the addresses linked to Russian and Belarusian politicians, but also to sabotage ordinary users,” he wrote. Fedorov is also offering a “generous reward” for information on digital wallets held by Russian and Belarusian politicians. A spokesperson for Binance told CNBC, “We are not going to unilaterally freeze millions of innocent users’ accounts....

Geng starts his homemade project by welding the power bank’s 5.9-foot by 3.9-foot frame together. While that’s obviously quite far from portable in the traditional sense, he does at least add wheels for some mobility. Most of the power appears to be provided by the same type of massive, flat battery packs you would find in an electric vehicle. Geng says the 27 million mAh capacity is enough to charge around 5,000 phones with 3,000mAh batteries fully....

Mario Kart was never my game. When Super Mario Kart was released for North American Super Nintendo systems in 1992, I was already in love with another Nintendo EAD-developed racing game featuring high-tech Mode 7 graphics — the progenitor of the futuristic racing sub-genre, F-Zero. In the heart of a science fiction-loving teenager, a super-flattened Mushroom Kingdom was nothing compared to the flickering electronic cityscapes of the year 2560. So instead of playing Super Mario Kart or Mario Kart 64, I was playing MegaRace, Wipeout, Extreme-G and Jet Moto....

Mercedes a year-and-a-half ago set out to create its most efficient vehicle ever. The result is the Mercedes-Benz Vision EQXX, a concept EV boasting a range of more than 620 miles on a single charge. Energy consumption checks in at more than six miles per kWh from a battery small enough to fit into a compact vehicle. The German automaker said it achieved this feat by rethinking the fundamentals from the ground up....

Last October, leaked images allegedly showed Meta’s watch, referred to as ‘Milan’ in the code inside Facebook’s app for its Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses. Its presence in the code suggested the same app could be used to control the watch once it was released. However, it seems we won’t be seeing this particular wearable for a long time, if at all. Citing a person with knowledge of the matter, Bloomberg reports that employees working on the watch were told this week that the device is no longer on track for production....

As reported by The Register, Microsoft updated its Universal License Terms for Online Services for its range of Azure Services and Dynamic 365 Services to prohibit cryptomining without the company’s prior approval. It covers any “Microsoft-hosted service to which Customer subscribes under a Microsoft volume licensing agreement.” The updated document is mostly related to Azure and came into effect on December 1. The Acceptable Use Policy section states: “Neither Customer, nor those that access an Online Service through Customer, may use an Online Service: to mine cryptocurrency without Microsoft’s prior written approval....

A blog post addressing the matter notes that Microsoft’s investigation uncovered a single account had been compromised, which granted the attacker “limited access.” According to Microsoft, their team was already investigating the compromised account when Lapsus$ publicly disclosed the intrusion. If you recall, the group released a dump earlier this week containing around 37GB worth of Microsoft data. The haul reportedly included portions of source code for Bing, Bing Maps and Cortana....