For crunching numbers and analyzing data, there’s Microsoft Excel. But when it comes to navigating more complicated data that requires charts and diagrams, you must use a different tool. Fortunately, Microsoft Visio 2021 Professional for Windows is one of the best in the business and it’s on sale for just $19.97 during our version of Prime Day.
Visio is a leading tool for diagramming and presenting complex information in more digestible ways. It offers tons of templates and shapes to help you create the diagram that most makes sense for you, and gives you intuitive tools to effectively convey what you need. From flowcharts and org charts to Venn diagrams, mind maps, and much more, Visio gives you the tools to visualize practically anything.
Families who lost loved ones in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, said the Thursday arrest of former school district police chief Pete Arredondo is not a “happy moment” and are calling for more indictments.
The partial failure of Minnesota’s Rapidan Dam sheds like on the almost 4,100 dams in the U.S. that are categorized at the same risk level and condition – or worse.
Enlarge/ Preparing to install the floppy disk edition of FreeDOS 1.3 in a virtual machine. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Two big things happened in the world of text-based disk operating systems in June 1994.
The first is that Microsoft released MS-DOS version 6.22, the last version of its long-running operating system that would be sold to consumers as a standalone product. MS-DOS would continue to evolve for a few years after this, but only as an increasingly invisible loading mechanism for Windows.
The second was that a developer named Jim Hall wrote a post announcing something called “PD-DOS.” Unhappy with Windows 3.x and unexcited by the project we would come to know as Windows 95, Hall wanted to break ground on a new “public domain” version of DOS that could keep the traditional command-line interface alive as most of the world left it behind for more user-friendly but resource-intensive graphical user interfaces.
Enlarge/ An artist's conception of one of the last mammoths of Wrangel Island. (credit: Beth Zaiken)
A small group of woolly mammoths became trapped on Wrangel Island around 10,000 years ago when rising sea levels separated the island from mainland Siberia. Small, isolated populations of animals lead to inbreeding and genetic defects, and it has long been thought that the Wrangel Island mammoths ultimately succumbed to this problem about 4,000 years ago.
A paper in Cell on Thursday, however, compared 50,000 years of genomes from mainland and isolated Wrangel Island mammoths and found that this was not the case. What the authors of the paper discovered not only challenges our understanding of this isolated group of mammoths and the evolution of small populations, it also has important implications for conservation efforts today.
A severe bottleneck
It’s the culmination of years of genetic sequencing by members of the international team behind this new paper. They studied 21 mammoth genomes—13 of which were newly sequenced by lead author Marianne Dehasque; others had been sequenced years prior by co-authors Patrícia Pečnerová, Foteini Kanellidou, and Héloïse Muller. The genomes were obtained from Siberian woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), both from the mainland and the island before and after it became isolated. The oldest genome was from a female Siberian mammoth who died about 52,300 years ago. The youngest were from Wrangel Island male mammoths who perished right around the time the last of these mammoths died out (one of them died just 4,333 years ago).
Republicans have made suburban areas a recruiting ground for their army of Election Day poll monitors, with plans to deploy some into urban, Democratic epicenters that have remained the focus of conservatives’ errant claims of voter fraud.
Sha'carri Richardson and Gabby Thomas, two of America's best-known sprinters, will face off Saturday in Oregon in the highly anticipated 200-meter final of the U.S.
Cryptocurrency has always made a ripe target for theft—and not just hacking, but the old-fashioned, up-close-and-personal kind, too. Given that it can be irreversibly transferred in seconds with little more than a password, it's perhaps no surprise that thieves have occasionally sought to steal crypto in home-invasion burglaries and even kidnappings. But rarely do those thieves leave a trail of violence in their wake as disturbing as that of one recent, ruthless, and particularly prolific gang of crypto extortionists.
The United States Justice Department earlier this week announced the conviction of Remy Ra St. Felix, a 24-year-old Florida man who led a group of men behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims to hand over access to their cryptocurrency savings. That announcement and the criminal complaint laying out charges against St. Felix focused largely on a single theft of cryptocurrency from an elderly North Carolina couple, whose home St. Felix and one of his accomplices broke into before physically assaulting the two victims—both in their seventies—and forcing them to transfer more than $150,000 in bitcoin and ether to the thieves' crypto wallets.
In fact, that six-figure sum appears to have been the gang’s only confirmed haul from its physical crypto thefts—although the burglars and their associates made millions in total, mostly through more traditional crypto hacking as well as stealing other assets. A deeper look into court documents from the St. Felix case, however, reveals that the relatively small profit St. Felix’s gang made from its burglaries doesn’t capture the full scope of the harm they inflicted: In total, those court filings and DOJ officials describe how more than a dozen convicted and alleged members of the crypto-focused gang broke into the homes of 11 victims, carrying out a brutal spree of armed robberies, death threats, beatings, torture sessions, and even one kidnapping in a campaign that spanned four US states.
Peter Scarfe, a researcher at the University of Reading's School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, conducted an experiment testing the vulnerability of their examination system to AI-generated work. Using ChatGPT-4, Scarfe's team submitted over 30 AI-generated answers across multiple undergraduate psychology modules, finding that 94 percent of these submissions went undetected and nearly 84 percent received higher grades than human counterparts. The findings have been published in the journal PLOS One. Ars Technica reports: Scarfe's team submitted AI-generated work in five undergraduate modules, covering classes needed during all three years of study for a bachelor's degree in psychology. The assignments were either 200-word answers to short questions or more elaborate essays, roughly 1,500 words long. "The markers of the exams didn't know about the experiment. In a way, participants in the study didn't know they were participating in the study, but we've got necessary permissions to go ahead with that," Scarfe claims. Shorter submissions were prepared simply by copy-pasting the examination questions into ChatGPT-4 along with a prompt to keep the answer under 160 words. The essays were solicited the same way, but the required word count was increased to 2,000. Setting the limits this way, Scarfe's team could get ChatGPT-4 to produce content close enough to the required length. "The idea was to submit those answers without any editing at all, apart from the essays, where we applied minimal formatting," says Scarfe.
Overall, Scarfe and his colleagues slipped 63 AI-generated submissions into the examination system. Even with no editing or efforts to hide the AI usage, 94 percent of those went undetected, and nearly 84 percent got better grades (roughly half a grade better) than a randomly selected group of students who took the same exam. "We did a series of debriefing meetings with people marking those exams and they were quite surprised," says Scarfe. Part of the reason they were surprised was that most of those AI submissions that were detected did not end up flagged because they were too repetitive or robotic -- they got flagged because they were too good.
Out of five modules where Scarfe's team submitted AI work, there was one where it did not receive better grades than human students: the final module taken by students just before they left the university. "Large language models can emulate human critical thinking, analysis, and integration of knowledge drawn from different sources to a limited extent. In their last year at the university, students are expected to provide deeper insights and use more elaborate analytical skills. The AI isn't very good at that, which is why students fared better," Scarfe explained. All those good grades Chat GPT-4 got were in the first- and second-year exams, where the questions were easier. "But the AI is constantly improving, so it's likely going to score better in those advanced assignments in the future. And since AI is becoming part of our lives and we don't really have the means to detect AI cheating, at some point we are going to have to integrate it into our education system," argues Scarfe. He said the role of a modern university is to prepare the students for their professional careers, and the reality is they are going to use various AI tools after graduation. So, they'd be better off knowing how to do it properly.
Big projects have a way of becoming unwieldy quickly. That’s why project managers are so important to organizations, and why tools like Microsoft Project 2021 Professional are so important to project managers. During our version of Prime Day, you can simplify any project when you grab this powerful tool from Microsoft for just $19.97.
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France is on the cusp of voting in a far-right government for the first time since World War II, as the national mood appears to be souring on President Emmanuel Macron’s brand of mainstream centrism and lurching toward fiery anti-establishment populism.
The Detroit Police Department arrested three people after bad facial recognition matches, a national record. But it’s adopting new policies that even the A.C.L.U. endorses.
Robert Williams sued the city of Detroit after being wrongly identified by facial recognition technology and arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. His suit has led the police to change their practices.
Researchers in South Africa have injected radioactive material into the horns of 20 rhinos to deter poaching, aiming to leverage existing radiation detectors at borders for early detection and interception of trafficked horns. The Associated Press reports: The research, which has included the participation of veterinarians and nuclear experts, begins with the animal being tranquilized before a hole is drilled into its horn and the nuclear material carefully inserted. This week, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand's Radiation and Health Physics Unit in South Africa injected 20 live rhinos with these isotopes. They hope the process can be replicated to save other wild species vulnerable to poaching -- like elephants and pangolins. "We are doing this because it makes it significantly easier to intercept these horns as they are being trafficked over international borders, because there is a global network of radiation monitors that have been designed to prevent nuclear terrorism," said Professor James Larkin, who heads the project. "And we're piggybacking on the back of that."
According to figures by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, an international conservation body, the global rhino population stood at around 500,000 at the beginning of the 20th century. It now stands at around 27,000 due to continued demand for rhino horns on the black market. South Africa has the largest population of rhinos with an estimated 16,000, making it a hotspot with over 500 rhinos killed yearly. [...] While the idea has received support from some in the industry, the researchers have had to jump many ethical hurdles posed by critics of their methodology.
Pelham Jones, chairperson of the Private Rhino Owners Association, is among the critics of the proposed method and doubts that it would effectively deter poachers and traffickers. "(Poachers) have worked out other ways of moving rhino horn out of the country, out of the continent or off the continent, not through traditional border crossings," he said. "They bypass the border crossings because they know that is the area of the highest risk of confiscation or interception." Professor Nithaya Chetty, dean of the science faculty at Witwatersrand, said the dosage of the radioactivity is very low and its potential negative impact on the animal was tested extensively.
If you’re looking for the Wordle answer for June 29, 2024 read on. We’ll share some clues, tips, and strategies, and finally the solution. Today’s puzzle is medium difficult; I got it in four. Beware, there are spoilers below for June 29, Wordle #1,106! Keep scrolling if you want some hints (and then the answer) to today’s Wordle game.
Start by guessing a five-letter word. The letters of the word will turn green if they’re correct, yellow if you have the right letter in the wrong place, or gray if the letter isn’t in the day’s secret word at all. For more, check out our guide to playing Wordle here, and my strategy guide here for more advanced tips. (We also have more information at the bottom of this post, after the hints and answers.)
Ready for the hints? Let’s go!
Does today’s Wordle have any unusual letters?
We’ll define common letters as those that appear in the old typesetters’ phrase ETAOIN SHRDLU. (Memorize this! Pronounce it “Edwin Shirdloo,” like a name, and pretend he’s a friend of yours.)
Three of today's letters are from our mnemonic. One is fairly common, and one is uncommon.
Can you give me a hint for today’s Wordle?
Like a horse, but always black and white.
Does today’s Wordle have any double or repeated letters?
There are no repeated letters today.
How many vowels are in today’s Wordle?
There are two vowels.
What letter does today’s Wordle start with?
Today’s word starts with Z.
What letter does today’s Wordle end with?
Today’s word ends with A.
What is the solution to today’s Wordle?
Ready? Today’s word is ZEBRA.
How I solved today’s Wordle
I started with RAISE, then tried BLOND, thinking it unlikely that there were any additional vowels. There were only a few words with those four letters that didn't start with R or B—I guessed AMBER first, which left ZEBRA as the best solution.
Wordle 1,106 4/6
🟨🟨⬛⬛🟨
🟨⬛⬛⬛⬛
🟨⬛🟩🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Yesterday’s Wordle answer
Yesterday’s Wordle was harder. The hint was “as a verb, past tense; as a noun, a flock of animals” and the answer contained four common letters and one uncommon letter.
The answer to yesterday’s Wordle was DROVE.
A primer on Wordle basics
The idea of Wordle is to guess the day’s secret word. When you first open the Wordle game, you’ll see an empty grid of letters. It’s up to you to make the first move: type in any five-letter word.
Now, you can use the colors that are revealed to get clues about the word: Green means you correctly guessed a letter, and it’s in the correct position. (For example, if you guess PARTY, and the word is actually PURSE, the P and R will be green.)
Yellow means the letter is somewhere in the word, but not in the position you guessed it. (For example, if you guessed PARTY, but the word is actually ROAST, the R, A and T will all be yellow.)
Gray means the letter is not in the solution word at all. (If you guessed PARTY and everything is gray, then the solution cannot be PURSE or ROAST.)
With all that in mind, guess another word, and then another, trying to land on the correct word before you run out of chances. You get six guesses, and then it’s game over.
The best starter words for Wordle
What should you play for that first guess? The best starters tend to contain common letters, to increase the chances of getting yellow and green squares to guide your guessing. (And if you get all grays when guessing common letters, that’s still excellent information to help you rule out possibilities.) There isn’t a single “best” starting word, but the New York Times’s Wordle analysis bot has suggested starting with one of these:
CRANE
TRACE
SLANT
CRATE
CARTE
Meanwhile, an MIT analysis found that you’ll eliminate the most possibilities in the first round by starting with one of these:
SALET
REAST
TRACE
CRATE
SLATE
Other good picks might be ARISE or ROUND. Words like ADIEU and AUDIO get more vowels in play, but you could argue that it’s better to start with an emphasis on consonants, using a starter like RENTS or CLAMP. Choose your strategy, and see how it plays out.
How to win at Wordle
We have a few guides to Wordle strategy, which you might like to read over if you’re a serious student of the game. This one covers how to use consonants to your advantage, while this one focuses on a strategy that uses the most common letters. In this advanced guide, we detail a three-pronged approach for fishing for hints while maximizing your chances of winning quickly.
The biggest thing that separates Wordle winners from Wordle losers is that winners use their guesses to gather information about what letters are in the word. If you know that the word must end in -OUND, don’t waste four guesses on MOUND, ROUND, SOUND, and HOUND; combine those consonants and guess MARSH. If the H lights up in yellow, you know the solution.
One more note on strategy: the original Wordle used a list of about 2,300 solution words, but after the game was bought by the NYT, the game now has an editor who hand-picks the solutions. Sometimes they are slightly tricky words that wouldn’t have made the original list, and sometimes they are topical. For example, FEAST was the solution one Thanksgiving. So keep in mind that there may be a theme.
Wordle alternatives
If you can’t get enough of five-letter guessing games and their kin, the best Wordle alternatives, ranked by difficulty, include:
Dordle and Quordle, which ask you to play two (Dordle) or four (Quordle) puzzles at the same time, with the same guesses. There is also Octordle, with eight puzzles, and Sedecordle, with 16.
Absurdle, which changes the solution after each guess, but needs to stay consistent with its previous feedback. You have to strategically back it into a corner until there is only one possible word left; then you guess it, and win.
The ruling triggered activity in other Capitol rioters' cases to revisit the obstruction charge, but it's unlikely to derail Trump's election interference case.
Enlarge/ A European ATV cargo freighter reenters the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean in 2013.
Since the beginning of the year, landowners have discovered several pieces of space junk traced to missions supporting the International Space Station. On all of these occasions, engineers expected none of the disposable hardware would survive the scorching heat of reentry and make it to Earth's surface.
These incidents highlight an urgency for more research into what happens when a spacecraft makes an uncontrolled reentry into the atmosphere, according to engineers from the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research center based in El Segundo, California. More stuff is getting launched into space than ever before, and the trend will continue as companies deploy more satellite constellations and field heavier rockets.
"The biggest immediate need now is just to do some more work to really understand this whole process and to be in a position to be ready to accommodate new materials, new operational approaches as they happen more quickly," said Marlon Sorge, executive director of Aerospace's Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies. "Clearly, that’s the direction that spaceflight is going.”
The openSUSE project recently announced the second release candidate (RC2) of its Aeon Desktop, formerly known as MicroOS Desktop GNOME. Aside from the new coat of naming paint, Aeon breaks ground in a few other ways by dabbling with technologies not found in other openSUSE releases. The goal for Aeon is to provide automated system updates using snapshots that can be applied atomically, removing the burden of system maintenance for “lazy developers” who want to focus on their work rather than desktop administration. System-tinkerers need not apply.
The idea behind Aeon, as with other immutable (or image-based) Linux distributions, is to provide the core of the distribution as a read-only image or filesystem that is updated atomically and can be rolled back if needed. Google’s ChromeOS was the first popular Linux-based desktop operating system to follow this model. Since the release of ChromeOS a number of interesting immutable implementations have cropped up, such as Fedora Silverblue, Project Bluefin (covered here in December 2023), openSUSE’s MicroOS (covered here in March 2023), and Ubuntu Core.
With the amount of attention immutable Linux desktops are getting, and how much work and experimentation that’s going into them, I’m getting the feeling that sooner or later all of the major, popular desktop Linux distributions will be going this route. Depending on implementation details, I actually like the concept of a defined base system that’s just an image that can be replaced easily using btrfs snapshots or something like that, while all the user’s files and customisations are kept elsewhere. It makes intuitive sense.
Where the current crop of immutable Linux desktops fall flat for me is their reliance on (usually) Flatpak. You know how there’s people who hate systemd and/or Wayland just a little too much, to the point it gets a little weird and worrying? That’s me whenever I have to deal with Flatpaks. Every experience I have with Flatpaks is riddled with trouble for me.
Even though I’m a KDE user, I’m currently testing out the latest GNOME release on my workstation (the one that I used to conclude Windows is simply not ready for the desktop), using Fedora of course, and on GNOME I use the Mastodon application Tuba. While I mostly write in English, I do occasionally write in Dutch, too, and would love for the spell check feature to work in my native tongue, too, instead of just in English. However, despite having all possible Dutch dictionaries installed – hunspell, aspell – and despite those dictionaries being picked up everywhere else in GNOME, Tuba only showed me a long list of variants of English.
After digging around to find out why this was happening, it took me far longer than I care to publicly admit to realise that since the latest version of Tuba is only really available as a Flatpak on Fedora, my problem probably had something to do with that – and it turns out I was right: Flatpak applications do not use the system-wide installed spellcheck dictionaries like normal applications do.
This eventually led me to this article by Daniel Aleksandersen, where he details what you need to do in order to add spellcheck dictionaries to Flatpak applications. You need to run the following commands:
$ flatpak config languages --set "en;nl;"
$ sudo flatpak update
The list of languages uses two-letter codes only, and the first language listed will serve as the display language for Flatpak applications, while the rest will be fallback languages – which happens to include downloading and installing the Flatpak-specific copies of the spellcheck libraries. Sadly, this method is not particularly granular. Since it only accepts the two-letter codes, you can’t, say, only install “nl-nl”; you’ll be getting “nl-be” as well. In the case of a widely spoken language like English, this means a massive list of 18 different varieties of English. The resulting menus are… Not elegant.
This is just an example, but using Flatpak, you’ll run into all kinds of issues like this, that then have to be solved by hacks or obscure terminal commands – not exactly the user-friendly image Flatpak is trying to convey to the world. This particular issue might not matter to the probably overwhelming English-speaking majority of Flatpak developers, but for anyone who has to deal with multiple languages on a daily basis – which is a massive number of people, probably well over 50% of computer users1 – having to mess around with obscure terminal commands hidden in blog posts just to be able to use the languages they use every day is terrible design on a multitude of levels, and will outright make Flatpak applications unusable for large numbers of people.
Whenever I run into these Flatpak problems, it makes it clear to me that Flatpak is designed not by users, for users – but by developers, for developers. I can totally understand and see why Flatpak is appealing to developers, but as a user, they bring me nothing but grief, issues, and weird bugs that all seem to stem from being made to make developers’ lives easier, instead of users’.
If immutable Linux distributions are really hellbent on using Flatpak as the the means of application installation – and it seams like they are – it will mean a massive regression in functionality, usability, and discoverability for users, and as long as Flatpak remains as broken and badly designed as it is, I really see no reason to recommend an immutable Linux desktop to anyone but the really curious among us.
Even in a country like the United States, which we think of as an English-speaking country, there are currently 42 million Spanish-speaking people, who most likely also have to use English on a daily basis. The way multilingual features are treated as afterthoughts by the tech industry – even the open source one – is baffling.︎
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the most striking things about the explosion of renewable power that's happening in the U.S. is that much of it is going on in states governed by politicians who don't believe in the problem wind and solar are meant to address. Acceptance of the evidence for climate change tends to be lowest among Republicans, yet many of the states where renewable power has boomed -- wind in Wyoming and Iowa, solar in Texas -- are governed by Republicans. That's partly because, up until about 2020, there was a strong bipartisan consensus in favor of expanding wind and solar power, with support above 75 percent among both parties. Since then, however, support among Republicans has dropped dramatically, approaching 50 percent, according to polling data released this week. [...] One striking thing about the new polling data, gathered by the Pew Research Center, is how dramatically it skews with age. When given a choice between expanding fossil fuel production or expanding renewable power, Republicans under the age of 30 favored renewables by a 2-to-1 margin. Republicans over 30, in contrast, favored fossil fuels by margins that increased with age, topping out at a three-to-one margin in favor of fossil fuels among those in the 65-and-over age group. The decline in support occurred in those over 50 starting in 2020; support held steady among younger groups until 2024, when the 30-49 age group started moving in favor of fossil fuels.
Democrats, by contrast, break in favor of renewables by 75 points, with little difference across age groups and no indication of significant change over time. They're also twice as likely to think a solar farm will help the local economy than Republicans are. Similar differences were apparent when Pew asked about policies meant to encourage the sale of electric vehicles, with 83 percent of Republicans opposed to having half of cars sold be electric in 2032. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of Democrats favored this policy. There's also a rural/urban divide apparent (consistent with Republicans getting more support from rural voters). Forty percent of urban residents felt that a solar farm would improve the local economy; only 25 percent of rural residents agreed. Rural residents were also more likely to say solar farms made the landscape unattractive and take up too much space. (Suburban participants were consistently in between rural and urban participants.) What's behind these changes? The single biggest factor appears to be negative partisanship combined with the election of Joe Biden. Among Republicans, support for every single form of power started to change in 2020 -- fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear. Among Democrats, that's largely untrue. Their high level of support for renewable power and aversion to fossil fuels remained largely unchanged. The lone exception is nuclear power, where support rose among both Democrats and Republicans (the Biden administration has adopted a number of pro-nuclear policies).
According to a report from The Information, Apple is developing a new "electrically induced adhesive debonding" technology that would make iPhone batteries easier to replace. 9to5Mac reports: Currently, replacing an iPhone battery requires using tweezers to remove the existing battery, which is held in place by adhesive strips. Then, you must use a "specialized machine and tray" to press the new battery into place. The new process uses metal instead of foil to cover the battery, as The Information explains: "The new technology --- known as electrically induced adhesive debonding -- involves encasing the battery in metal, rather than foil as it is currently. That would allow people to dislodge the battery from the chassis by administering a small jolt of electricity to the battery, the people said. Consumers still have to pry open the iPhone themselves, which is not an easy process because of the adhesives and screws that keep the iPhone's screen sealed in place."
Even with this change, however, Apple will still recommend that iPhone users visit a professional to replace their battery. If Apple's development of this new bonding technology goes according to plan, it could debut it with at least one iPhone 16 model this year. According to the report, it would then expand to all versions of the iPhone 17 next year.
Samantha Cole reports via 404 Media: A woman is suing Microsoft and two major U.S. sex toy retailers with claims that their websites are tracking users without their consent, despite promising they wouldn't do that. In a complaint (PDF) filed on June 25 in the Northern District of California, San Francisco resident Stella Tatola claims that Babeland and Good Vibrations -- both owned by Barnaby Ltd., LLC -- allowed Microsoft to see what visitors to their websites searched for and bought.
"Unbeknownst to Plaintiff and other Barnaby website users, and constituting the ultimate violation of privacy, Barnaby allows an undisclosed third-party, Microsoft, to intercept, read, and utilize for commercial gain consumers' private information about their sexual practices and preferences, gleaned from their activity on Barnaby's websites," the complaint states. "This information includes but is not limited to product searches and purchase initiations, as well as the consumer's unique Microsoft identifier." The complaint claims that Good Vibrations and Babeland sites have installed trackers using Microsoft's Clarity software, which does "recording in real time," and tracks users' mouse movements, clicks or taps, scrolls, and site navigation. Microsoft says on the Clarity site that it "processes a massive amount of anonymous data around user behavior to gain insights and improve machine learning models that power many of our products and services."
"By allowing undisclosed third party Microsoft to eavesdrop and intercept users' PPSI in such a manner -- including their sexual orientation, preferences, and desires, among other highly sensitive, protected information -- Barnaby violates its Privacy Policies, which state it will never share such information with third parties," the complaint states. The complaint includes screenshots of code from the sexual health sites that claims to show them using Machine Unique Identifier ("MUID") cookies that "identifies unique web browsers visiting Microsoft sites," according to Microsoft, and are used for "advertising, site analytics, and other operational purposes." The complaint claims that this violates the California Invasion of Privacy Act, the Federal Wiretap Act, and Californians' reasonable expectation of privacy.
After launching in the United States earlier this year, Apple's Vision Pro is now available to buy in China, Japan, and Singapore. "The Apple Vision Pro will also roll out to Germany, France, Australia, the UK, and Canada on July 12th, with preorders for those regions available starting today at 5AM PT," notes The Verge. Apple is documenting the international launch via a recent blog post.
According to CNBC, the device starts at $4,128 (29,999 yuan) in China, compared to $3,500 in the U.S. Meanwhile, Apple is already hard at work on a more budget-friendly model. In Bloomberg's "Power On" newsletter, Apple news-breaker Mark Gurman reports today that the tech giant is "working on a cheaper headset, a second Vision Pro model and augmented-reality glasses to better compete with Meta."
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Internet Archive (IA) went before a three-judge panel Friday to defend its open library's controlled digital lending (CDL) practices after book publishers last year won a lawsuit claiming that the archive's lending violated copyright law. In the weeks ahead of IA's efforts to appeal that ruling, IA was forced to remove 500,000 books from its collection, shocking users. In an open letter to publishers, more than 30,000 readers, researchers, and authors begged for access to the books to be restored in the open library, claiming the takedowns dealt "a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others," who may not have access to a local library or feel "safe accessing the information they need in public."
During a press briefing following arguments in court Friday, IA founder Brewster Kahle said that "those voices weren't being heard." Judges appeared primarily focused on understanding how IA's digital lending potentially hurts publishers' profits in the ebook licensing market, rather than on how publishers' costly ebook licensing potentially harms readers. However, lawyers representing IA -- Joseph C. Gratz, from the law firm Morrison Foerster, and Corynne McSherry, from the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation -- confirmed that judges were highly engaged by IA's defense. Arguments that were initially scheduled to last only 20 minutes stretched on instead for an hour and a half. Ultimately, judges decided not to rule from the bench, with a decision expected in the coming months or potentially next year. McSherry said the judges' engagement showed that the judges "get it" and won't make the decision without careful consideration of both sides.
"They understand this is an important decision," McSherry said. "They understand that there are real consequences here for real people. And they are taking their job very, very seriously. And I think that's the best that we can hope for, really." On the other side, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the trade organization behind the lawsuit, provided little insight into how the day went. When reached for comment, AAP simply said, "We thought it was a strong day in court, and we look forward to the opinion." [...] "There is no deadline for them to make a decision," Gratz said, but it "probably won't happen until early fall" at the earliest. After that, whichever side loses will have an opportunity to appeal the case, which has already stretched on for four years, to the Supreme Court. Since neither side seems prepared to back down, the Supreme Court eventually weighing in seems inevitable.
According to Interpol, nearly 4,000 people around the world have been arrested for a variety of online crimes, with $257 million in assets seized. The Record reports: The operation, dubbed First Light, was conducted by police officers from 61 countries and targeted phishing, investment fraud, fake online shopping sites, romance scams, and impersonation scams, according to a statement by Interpol. In addition to arresting thousands of potential cybercriminals, the police also identified over 14,600 other possible suspects across all continents.
During the searches, law enforcement seized suspects' real estate, high-end vehicles, expensive jewelry, and many other high-value items and collections. They also froze 6,745 bank accounts used for transferring money obtained through illegal operations. In one case, the police intercepted $331,000 gleaned from a business email compromise fraud involving a Spanish victim who unknowingly transferred money to someone in Hong Kong. In another case, authorities in Australia successfully recovered $3.7 million on behalf of an impersonation scam victim after the funds were fraudulently transferred to bank accounts in Malaysia and Hong Kong.
The criminal networks identified during the operation were spread around the globe. In Namibia, for example, the police rescued 88 local youths who were forced into conducting scams as part of a sophisticated international crime network, according to Interpol. Law enforcement from Singapore, Hong Kong, and China prevented an attempted tech support scam, saving a 70-year-old victim from losing $281,200 worth of savings.
Amazon's early Prime Day deals are here, with deals on school supplies, TVs, Blink security cameras, and more leading up to Prime Day on July 16. Yet another deal has arrived, this time on an Eero router, which can help your wifi reach every area in your home. Amazon has a single router that expands your wifi up to 1,500 square feet for $39.99 (originally $69.99) or a three-pack that expands it to 4,500 sq. ft. for $99.99 (originally $214.96).
Mesh wifi is great if you can justify the cost for the extra devices. It doesn't make your internet faster per se, it just expands your same router speed to different points in your house so the whole house (ideally) is covered. Mesh wifi uses nodes or points that you can physically put around your home where the signal is weak so your devices seamlessly connect to the one with the best connection as you move around the home. It's like copying and pasting your router to different places.
The Eero router expands your reach up to 1,500 square feet, and each router works as a router or "extender." One of the Eero devices must be connected to your router physically with an ethernet cable. The other two just need to be plugged in with their power cord and be within a certain distance of the main router.
If you're more of a Google person, the three-pack Google Nest Wifi Routers are also available for $155.23 (originally $349.99). They work the same way but extend your wifi up to 5,400 square feet and each point doubles as a Google smart speaker.
President Joe Biden's aides and allies circulated talking points to Democrats, fielded phone calls from nervous donors and shoehorned new lines into the president's speech Friday.
Enlarge/ Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station on June 13. (credit: NASA)
NASA and Boeing officials pushed back Friday on headlines that the commercial Starliner crew capsule is stranded at the International Space Station but said they need more time to analyze data before formally clearing the spacecraft for undocking and reentry.
Two NASA astronauts, commander Butch Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams, will spend at least a few more weeks on the space station as engineers on the ground conduct thruster tests to better understand issues with the Starliner propulsion system in orbit. Wilmore and Williams launched June 5 aboard an Atlas V rocket and docked at the station the next day, completing the first segment of Starliner's first test flight with astronauts.
NASA managers originally planned for the Starliner spacecraft to remain docked at the space station for at least eight days, although they left open the possibility of a mission extension. The test flight is now likely to last at least a month and a half, and perhaps longer, as engineers wrestle with helium leaks and thruster glitches on Starliner's service module.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman:
With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ’90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That’s been the understanding.
This is absolute bullshit from the first word to the very last. None of this is true – not even in the slightest. Content on the web is not free for the taking by anyone, especially not to be chewed up and regurgitated verbatim by spicy autocomplete tools. There is no “social contract” to that effect. In fact, when I go to any of Microsoft’s website, documents, videos, or any other content they publish online, on the open web, and scroll to the very bottom of the page, it’s all got the little copyright symbol or similar messaging.
Once again, this underlines how entitled Silicon Valley techbros really are. If we violate even a gram of Microsoft’s copyrights, we’d have their lawyers on our ass in weeks – but when Microsoft itself needs to violate copyright and licensing on an automated, industrial scale, for massive profits, everything is suddenly peace, love, and fair use. Men in Silicon Valley just do not understand consent. At all. And they show this time and time again.
Meanwhile, the Internet Archive has to deal with crap like this:
The lawsuit is about the longstanding and widespread library practice of controlled digital lending, which is how we lend the books we own to our patrons. As a result of the publishers’ lawsuit, more than 500,000 books have been removed from our lending library.
Controlled lending without a profit motive is deemed illegal, but violating copyright and licensing on an automated, industrial scale is fair use. Make it make sense.
The Apple ][ is one of the most iconic vintage computers of all time. But since Wozniak’s monster lasted all the way until 1993 (1995 if you could the IIe card, which I won’t count until I get one), it can be easy to forget that in 1977, it was a video extravaganza. The competitors– even much bigger and established companies like Commodore and Tandy– generally only had text modes, let alone pixel-addressable graphics, and they certainly didn’t have sixteen colors. (Gray and grey are different colors, right?)
If there’s ever anything you wanted to know about how graphics work on the Apple II, this is the place to go. It’s an incredibly detailed and illustrated explanation of how the machine renders and displays graphics, and an excellent piece of writing to boot. I’m a little jealous.
Enlarge/ A Vision Pro on display at an Apple Store in Tokyo. (credit: Apple)
Apple's Vision Pro headset went on sale outside the United States for the first time today, in the first of two waves of expanded availability.
The $3,499 "spatial computing" device launched back in February in the US, but it hasn't taken the tech world by storm. Part of that has been its regional launch, with some of the biggest markets still lacking access.
Apple announced that the product would be sold internationally during its keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month.
Adult film actor Justin Heath Smith, also known as Austin Wolf, has been arrested and charged with possessing and distributing child sexual abuse material online (CSAM), the Department of Justice announced Friday.
“Since the rise of large language models like ChatGPT there have been lots of anecdotal reports about students submitting AI-generated work as their exam assignments and getting good grades. So, we stress-tested our university’s examination system against AI cheating in a controlled experiment,” says Peter Scarfe, a researcher at the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading.
His team created over 30 fake psychology student accounts and used them to submit ChatGPT-4-produced answers to examination questions. The anecdotal reports were true—the AI use went largely undetected, and, on average, ChatGPT scored better than human students.
Rules of engagement
Scarfe’s team submitted AI-generated work in five undergraduate modules, covering classes needed during all three years of study for a bachelor’s degree in psychology. The assignments were either 200-word answers to short questions or more elaborate essays, roughly 1,500 words long. “The markers of the exams didn’t know about the experiment. In a way, participants in the study didn’t know they were participating in the study, but we’ve got necessary permissions to go ahead with that”, Scarfe claims.
After weeks of reports of severe illnesses across the country, the maker of Diamond Shruumz microdosing chocolates, gummies, and candy cones has finally issued a recall. It covers all lots and all flavors of all the brand's products.
The illnesses have been marked by several severe symptoms, which notably include seizures, loss of consciousness, and the need for intubation and intensive care. To date, there have been 39 people sickened, including 23 hospitalizations across 20 states, according to the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The FDA first issued a warning on the brand's chocolate bars on June 7, when there were reports of eight cases, including six hospitalizations, in four states.
Diamond Shruumz's parent company, Prophet Premium Blends, said in the recall notice that it had received only two complaints about the products to date and, upon receiving those complaints, reviewed recent laboratory analyses (Certificates of Analysis) of its products. According to the company, those CoAs noted "higher than normal amounts of muscimol," which is one of two key compounds found in hallucinogenic Amanita mushrooms. Muscimol "could be a potential cause of symptoms consistent with those observed in persons who became ill after eating Diamond Shruumz products," the company said in the recall notice.
In the weeks ahead of IA's efforts to appeal that ruling, IA was forced to remove 500,000 books from its collection, shocking users. In an open letter to publishers, more than 30,000 readers, researchers, and authors begged for access to the books to be restored in the open library, claiming the takedowns dealt "a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others," who may not have access to a local library or feel "safe accessing the information they need in public."
During a press briefing following arguments in court Friday, IA founder Brewster Kahle said that "those voices weren't being heard." Judges appeared primarily focused on understanding how IA's digital lending potentially hurts publishers' profits in the ebook licensing market, rather than on how publishers' costly ebook licensing potentially harms readers.
Ford CEO Jim Farley joins CNBC's Julia Boorstin for a discussion on EVs, rapidly evolving vehicle technology, and how drivers' shifting priorities are reshaping what we expect in cars and trucks. NBCUniversal News Group is the media partner of Aspen Ideas Festival.
Ford CEO Jim Farley joins CNBC's Julia Boorstin for a discussion on EVs, rapidly evolving vehicle technology, and how drivers' shifting priorities are reshaping what we expect in cars and trucks. NBCUniversal News Group is the media partner of Aspen Ideas Festival.
President Joe Biden's performance in the first debate Thursday has sparked a new round of criticism from Democrats, as well as public and private musing about whether he should remain at the top of the ticket.
Parks Kugle reports via the Daily Dot: A mechanic went viral when he posted a TikTok about technicians being locked out of computer systems in a new Dodge Ram. TikTok user Shorty of Shorty's Speed Shop (@shortysspeedshop) garnered over 301,000 views when he showed viewers what mechanics had to do to be able to repair newer car models. "It has officially happened. 2024 Ram 3500, authorization denied," Shorty said as he showed viewers the computer screen. "Cannot get into anything on this except generic OBD2 Software."
Shorty went on to explain that this update made his "manufacturer software 100 percent irrelevant." Then, Shorty showed viewers the Vehicle Security Professional (VSP) Registry on the National Automaker Service Task Force (NASTF) website. According to NASTF, automakers require mechanics to become credentialed VSPs if they want to purchase key and immobilizer codes, PIN numbers, and special tool access from Automaker websites. A VSP is required to "verify proof of ownership/authority prior to performing any security operation." "It's all part of the NASTF Security Professional Registery," Shorty explained.
Shorty believes that this rule allows manufacturers to lock mechanics out of anything they "deem security sensitive." Shorty then broke down the "requirements to gain VSP access." According to him, these include a $325 fee "every two years" and a $100 fee for every subsequent two-year license renewal. He says mechanics also need "commercial liability insurance of $1 million" and a "fidelity or employee dishonesty bond of $100,000." The VSP application page on NASTF's website confirms that there is a $100 Application Fee that covers a "Two Year Renewal" and a $325 Primary Account fee that covers a "Two Year License." It also confirms his claims about the required commercial liability insurance and fidelity or employee dishonesty bond. "There's a lot of people that don't know that this is going on, and it's going to affect everybody getting their cars fixed," Shorty remarked.
You can get this refurbished iPad 7th Gen with Beats Flex wireless headphones and accessories on sale for $199.97 right now (reg. $299.99) through July 21. The iPad has a 10.2-inch Retina display, 32GB of storage, 8MP rear and 1.2MP front cameras, up to ten hours of battery life, and updates to the latest iPadOS. It's in grade "A" condition, meaning it has only light wear, no scratches on its screen, and minimum 80% battery health. The Beats Flex headphones are open-box items—excess store inventory or customer returns—verified to be in new condition. They have dual-chamber acoustic sound and up to 12 hours of listening time on a single charge. It also includes an iPad case (color varies), screen protector, stylus (color varies), and a charging block and cable.
You can get this refurbished iPad 7th Gen bundle on sale for $199.97 right now (reg. $299.99) through July 21 at 11:59 p.m. PT, though prices can change at any time.
An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed for Slate, written by Amanda Chen: In August 2009, Wired magazine ran a cover story on Craigslist founder Craig Newmark titled "Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess." The opening paragraphs excoriate almost every aspect of the online classifieds platform as "underdeveloped," a "wasteland of hyperlinks," and demands that we, the public, ought to have higher standards. The same sentiment can found across tech forums and trade publications, a missed opportunity that the average self-professed LinkedIn expert on #UX #UI #design will have you believe that they are the first to point out. But as sites like Craigslist increasingly turn into digital artifacts, more people, myself included, are starting to see the beauty that belies those same features. Without them, where else on the internet could you find such ardent professions of desire or loneliness, or the random detritus of a life so steeply discounted?
The site has changed relatively little in both functionality and appearance since Newmark launched it in 1995 as a friends and family listserv for jobs and other opportunities. Yet in spite of that, it remains a household name whose niche in the contemporary digital landscape has yet to be usurped, with an estimated 180 million visits in May 2024. Though, it's certainly not for a lack of newcomers attempting to stake their claims on the booming C2C market; in the U.S., Facebook Marketplace, launched in 2016, is its closest direct competitor, followed by platforms like Nextdoor and OfferUp. Craigslist's business model is quite simple: Users in a few categories -- apartments in select cities, jobs, vehicles for sale -- pay a small but reasonable fee to make posts. Everything else is free. Its Perl-backed tech is straightforward. The team is relatively lean, as the company considers functions like sales and marketing superfluous. This strategy has allowed Craigslist to stay extremely profitable throughout the years without implementing sophisticated recommendation algorithms or inundating the webpage with third-party advertisements. Its runaway success threatens decades-old industry gospels of growth, disruption, and innovation, and might force tech evangelists to admit they don't fully understand what people want. [...]
These days I find myself casually browsing Craigslist in lieu of Instagram. Like readers of a local paper, I use it to keep a pulse on what's happening around me, even if I'll never know who these people are. That's beside the point. Perhaps Craigslist's single greatest cultural contribution, and my favorite place to lurk, is the "missed connections." The feature has inspired countless copycats, artistic reinterpretations, human interest stories, and analyses (one in particular extrapolated that Monday evenings are the most lovelorn time across the country). There is something deeply comforting about seeing those intangible threads of yearning which permeate a city so plainly laid out, as confirmation that you're not alone in wanting to be seen by others alive in the same place and time as you. Sometimes I'll peruse random job listings or the "free" section. This leads to the ever-amusing exercise, which I'll often invite friends to participate in, of speculating about the motivations and circumstances behind an object's acquisition and imminent relinquishment. I'll even visit the clunky, dial-up era-style discussion forums, subdivided into topics labeled things like "death and dying" or "haiku hotel," where a unique penchant for whimsy and romance can be felt deeply throughout. On Craigslist, a post can be a shout into the void that may or may not be returned, an affirmation of life, but regardless, in 45 days it's gone. Positioned somewhere in between digital ephemera and archive, the site's images and language are often utilitarian, occasionally unintelligible, and just when you least expect it, absurd, poetic, and profound. "Frequently, technologists remain convinced that the market will eventually reveal a solution for all of our deep-seated societal problems, something that we can hack if only granted access to better tech," writes Chen, in closing. "From the start, the industry has advanced the idea that change is inherently good, even if only for its own sake, which can be viewed as symptomatic of the accelerating conditions of late-stage capitalism. Of course, there are many ways in which change is desperately needed in this moment, but when it comes to the particular case of Craigslist, it hardly seems necessary."
It wouldn’t be fair to say that I bought an air fryer simply to reheat french fries, but it would be disingenuous to claim that my desire to reheat french fries had nothing to do with the purchase. A few years ago—when we were young and the air was sweet—I wrote a blog claiming that waffling sad, cold fries was a first-rate way to reheat them.
Almost immediately, the comments started rolling in. “You fool, you absolute imbecile,” they said. “An air fryer is the only tool you should use to reheat french fries, and you are an idiot for suggesting otherwise.” (I am paraphrasing, but this was the feel of the comments, at least as I recall it.)
“Maybe I should get an air fryer,” I thought, before waiting another eight months to get one. (I finally got the Instant Pot Vortex Mini, because it is small and red and $50.)
The tiny, powerful convection oven—which does not technically fry anything—is quite handy. I’ve already got a whole list of stuff I plan to air fry, but I started with cold fries (and ate them for breakfast), because that’s what brought us to this point in the first place.
My friends, you (and everyone else who yelled at me) were not lying. When it comes to restoring limp, cardboard-like fries to their former crisp, golden glory, the air fryer kicks the waffle maker’s ass (though I maintain waffled leftover fries make excellent breakfast potatoes).
How to reheat cold fries in the air fryer
Beyond reheating completely cold fries, this is a great way to revive takeout fries that may have sat in a paper bag or plastic container for too long. Just five to 10 minutes in a 375-degree air fryer perks ‘em right back up. Timing will vary from air fryer to air fryer but, unlike the Instant Pot or a sous-vide circulator, it’s very easy to check on your air fried food mid-cook—just slide the little basket out. Try not to over-pack the air fryer; you want the hot air to be able to circulate around each fry. It took my air fryer a mere five minutes at 375℉ to restore cold, lifeless, fairly thick-cut breakfast fries to their former glory, which is dangerously quick, particularly in a household that is prone to over-ordering french fries.
While a little overlapping is fine, try not to crowd your fries.Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
What makes leftover fries so sad?
Leftover fries are sad and soggy due to moisture migration, and the air fryer takes care of that nonsense in short order. Once a fry starts to cool, the water inside the fluffy starch granules moves out towards the crust, rendering the insides of the fry grainy and the outsides mushy.
Why reheat fries with an air fryer?
An air fryer can’t rehydrate those starch granules, but it certainly revives a fry’s soggy outsides. The hot, circulating air drives off moisture and gets any dormant fry grease movin’ and groovin’, re-crisping the potato’s crust. And while the insides aren’t quite as tender and fluffy as they are when you first take them out of a deep fryer, they are pretty damn close. The ones I ate for breakfast this morning were almost indistinguishable from fresh fries, though it’s worth noting that they seemed to be a “fresh-cut, once cooked” kind of fry, so this may have only been their second (not third) heating.
Tips for reheating fries in the air fryer
Don't crowd the pan. Lay the french fries in a single layer and try to avoid a lot of overlapping. This will prevent any steam from getting trapped and allow your taters to crisp faster. If you have a lot of fries to reheat, it might be best to do it in batches.
Spritz 'em with oil. For a just-out-of-the-fryer crust, give your fries a light spritz with a neutral cooking oil. The fresh layer of fat conducts the heat from the air fryer that much more effectively.
Check on them mid-cook. Your air frying time will vary depending on the thickness of the french fry you're reheating (steak cut? shoestring? crinkle?), so it's important to check on your spuds once or twice. The convection air flow is so efficient, a few minutes too long and you'll go from crisp and fluffy to hard and dry.
Unlike the weather, the real estate market hasn't been as hot as usual this June, with the typical home selling for 0.3% below its asking price, according to new data from Redfin. While it's a welcome shift for homebuyers, those getting ready to put their home on the market now face a harder sell.
At the same time, you may have heard about homes in your area that sold for over the asking price, following a bidding war involving multiple parties, and wondered what they're doing right. As it turns out, there are several tactics sellers can use to improve their chances of having similar results. Here are a few realtor-approved methods for sparking a bidding war.
How to trigger a bidding war when selling your home
In theory, all you need for a bidding war is at least two people who fall in love with a home and have the money to offer more than the asking price. You could hope that you get lucky and it happens organically, but according to Dana Hall-Bradley, a realtor with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Fine Living in Celebration, Fla. and Joe Muck, a realtor at J Muck Realty, there are several ways you can make your home more appealing to buyers and increase your chances of getting multiple offers.
First, there are the tried-and-true methods: Pricing your home lower than the comps, hiring a successful realtor, making it available for private showings, hiring a professional photographer to take the listing photos, making cosmetic repairs to the interior, improving curb appeal, and making sure your home smells good during a showing or open house.
If you've done all of that and your freshly painted colonial still isn't bringing all the buyers to the yard, here are a few other tactics to try:
1. Set a deadline for offers
Instead of putting your home on the market and waiting for offers to roll in, this will help create a sense of urgency. "Offer deadlines are a good idea as long as you already have an offer your client/s like," Much says. "This can push those sitting on the fence to submit an offer and perhaps even include an escalation clause, which can move the current offer to do the same."
Once you receive more than two offers, have your realtor message the potential buyers saying something like: “We are in receipt of multiple offers. The seller has requested all buyers submit their highest and best offers no later than Tuesday at 7 p.m.” At that point, you can also add a line to the listing to that effect.
2. Respond to all offers
So, someone submitted a lowball offer for your home. Instead of getting annoyed and ignoring the message, use it as an opportunity to talk up your property and the interest it's generating. When you (politely) respond thanking them for their offer, you can also mention that you've received multiple higher offers. That way if they really are interested in your home and have the money to buy it, they'll know they have to step it up.
3. List the home around the holidays
Muck recommends this strategy for two reasons. First, there are fewer homes on the market at that time of year, so there won't be as much competition. Also, "you can display how your home 'feels' at a time of the year when that is top of mind for many buyers," he says.
4. Host an over-the-top open house
If you're having trouble getting people in the door for public and private showings, you may want to consider holding an open house that feels more like An Event.
"I would highly recommend an 'over-the-top' and themed open house or broker’s open house to spark interest to buyers," Hall-Bradley says. "[It] make[s] it a more fun and inviting space for local realtors/brokers to preview," and, in turn, make them excited to promote your home to potential buyers.
But you're going to have to get creative: Baking a few dozen cookies and putting some balloons on the mailbox isn't going to cut it. Here's what Hall-Bradley suggests:
Hold the event immediately after listing the property.
Create personalized invitations geared toward the theme.
Advertise a give-away of some sort. "In the past, I have had the local spa in our town donate spa gift certificates," she says. "The guest would leave their name or business cards, and we would have a drawing after the event."
Have a goodie bag for each guest—perhaps containing something local to your neighborhood.
Roll out a (literal) a red carpet for guests, specifically if it’s a higher-end home.
Have an open bar with themed cocktails.
Order snacks from a local chef.
Offer a photo booth where the potential buyer would need to put their phone number or email in order to get their photo sent to them.
For example, Muck once hosted an ice cream social open house during the summer—complete with an ice cream truck—that resulted in a bidding war. "[It] encouraged families to come to the open house and view the home, but also gave them a sense of what living in the house would be like for their family," he says. Muck has also threw a lakefront BBQ as an open house for a lakefront property, which also helped generate multiple offers and resulted in selling the home for more than the asking price.
"By transforming your open house into an unforgettable event, you create a buzz that attracts serious buyers and highlights the uniqueness of your property," Hall-Bradley says. "This approach can make potential buyers feel special and excited about their prospective new home."
An anonymous reader shares a report: Starting with those builds, Windows 11 will show a Game Pass recommendation / ad within the Settings app. The advertisement will appear on both Windows 11 Home and Windows 11 Pro if you actively play games on your PC. Microsoft lists this feature first under the "Highlights" section of its blog post about the update. Some users aren't pleased. "Microsoft has gone too far," news blog TechRadar wrote.
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