Suppression lapses as the man had more prison time added to his sentence for separate offending dating back nearly two decades. Read...

Pump-and-dumps and other fraud schemes have become synonymous with cryptocurrency, with everyone from political leaders to YouTube influencers accused of using crypto FOMO to make a quick buck at the expense of their followers. But one Washington pastor decided his own church flock was an appropriate place to start fleecing, according to the US Department of Justice. The DoJ has charged Francier Obando Pinillo, the former pastor of a church in Pasco, Washington state, with 26 counts of fraud. So says an official press release issued last week and spotted by Bleeping Computer. According to the assistant district attorneys charging Pinillo, he sold his “Solano Fi” cryptocurrency to his parishioners both in person and on social media from 2021 to 2023, promising them a 34.9 percent return on investment with “no risk whatsoever.” Pinillo allegedly claimed that the idea for the cryptocurrency “had come to him in a dream,” but funneled the investments into his own accounts and those of his co-conspirators, while showing his victims fake balances and returns via a mobile investment app. The DoJ alleges that victims were told to share the investment scam with others, and when suspicions of foul play were raised, Pinillo offered to “repair” the technical systems with more money or buy out their positions by replacing them with another investor. Pinillo is charged with defrauding over a thousand victims both inside his own church and elsewhere of 5.9 million dollars. If convicted he could serve up to 20 years in prison. The insane rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, creating legitimate wealth for a small number of early investors, has made cryptocurrency an appealing and easy avenue for scammers. It’s all the easier if you’re seen as a figure of trust and authority, ditto if your audience isn’t fully versed in either financial investment, the realities of the crypto market, or the technology behind it. While many are now wary of get-rich-quick crypto investments, pump-and-dumps are still easy to find on social media. Investors in the $HAWK meme coin, based on viral influencer Hailey “Hawk Tuah girl” Welch, sued its creators just last month. “Pig butchering” scams, wherein victims are targetted with fake dating profiles and lured to invest money by their romantic interests, have become a market worth billions of dollars. These are particularly concerning, as the “scammers” themselves are often victims of human trafficking and forced labor at the hands of organized crime gangs. Read...

What is probably the world`s oldest ice, dating back 1.2m years ago, has been dug out from deep within Antarctica. Read...

It’s fashionable these days to complain about the state of streaming, and for understandable reasons. Over the past year, many streaming services have raised prices or introduced commercials, and some are trying to stop folks from sharing passwords, even among close family members. Streaming devices have stagnated as well, with device makers focusing less on innovative ideas and more on finding new spots for advertising. But it’s tradition around here to find things to celebrate each year, and we can still make it work in 2024. Here are the best streaming devices, most useful streaming services, and otherwise notable happenings that made the past year in cord-cutting memorable: Best new streaming device: Walmart Onn Google TV 4K Pro Walmart keeps putting out surprisingly great streaming boxes under its Onn brand, and the Onn Google TV 4K Pro is its best one yet. For $50, you get a speedy streaming box with Dolby Vision HDR, Dolby Atmos audio, and a generous 32GB of storage. The remote control shines as well, with backlit keys, a remote-finder function, and loads of useful shortcuts. No other streaming player offers this much for this little. Read our full Walmart Onn Google TV 4K Pro review Best streaming device overall: Apple TV 4K (3rd-generation, model A2737) Best Prices Today: Retailer Price $123.49 View Deal $124.50 View Deal $129 View Deal $139.49 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket $123.49 at Best Buy$124.50 at Adorama$129 at Apple$139.49 at Amazon Apple didn’t release a new streaming device this year—or last year, for that matter—but the late 2022 Apple TV 4K is still the best example of what a high-end streaming box should be. While other platforms keep sticking obnoxious banner ads in more places, Apple’s tvOS interface remains refreshingly clean and useful (especially if you follow my setup advice), and it’s still the most responsive streaming box around. Apple also introduced some thoughtful updates this year, including machine learning-powered dialogue enhancement and a separate home screen row for shows you’ve bookmarked for later. If cost isn’t an issue, this $129 box is still the one to get. Read our full Apple TV 4K (3rd-generation, 2022) (64GB, model A2737) review Best streaming service that didn`t raise prices in 2024: Netflix For all the talk of streaming TV price hikes, Netflix’s Standard tier has held at $15.49 per month for nearly three years now, with the last hike dating back to January 2022. Of course, the company found other ways to boost revenue since then, including an ad-supported tier ($6.99 per month), stricter rules around password sharing, and the elimination of its single-stream Basic tier. But none of those moves detract from the value of a regular Netflix plan, whose steady price deserves credit in an increasingly expensive world. Best free streaming service: Philo Lots of streaming services offer free, ad-supported content now, but Philo is the rare one that actually lets you skip the ads. Philo’s free tier, which landed earlier this year, includes a 30-day DVR that can record an unlimited number of shows, and once you’ve made a recording, you can fast-forward through the commercial breaks. (Philo’s paid version, which includes a bundle of sports-free cable channels, costs $28 per month.) The only other free streaming service with DVR is Sling TV’s Freestream, but it has a much stricter 10-hour recording limit. Read our full Philo review Best new use of streaming: The Olympics on Peacock Best Prices Today: Retailer Price Peacock $7.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket $7.99 at Peacock Peacock’s coverage of the 2024 Paris Olympics was the perfect example of what streaming can do. Instead of offering the bare minimum, Peacock turned the games into an interactive affair, with multiview feeds that let you zoom into individual matches or highlight them to hear the corresponding audio. Combine that with whip-around “Gold Zone” coverage, a slew of alternate live feeds, and a vast replay library, and the whole affair felt like a choose-your-own Olympics adventure, one that every sports streamer ought to replicate. Unholiest streaming alliance: Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery To fund their forays into streaming, TV programmers blew up the cable bundle model, forcing ever-higher prices for increasingly hollowed-out channels and driving valuable customers away in the process. Unfortunately for them, the streaming subscribers they traded for are more fickle, and have learned to cancel services they no longer need. All of which helps explain the unlikely alliance that emerged this year between Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery. The two companies are now offering all of their streaming services—Disney+, Hulu, and Max—in one big bundle starting at $17 per month, in hopes that customers will be less likely to drop any one of them individually. Bundles like this won’t be worthwhile for everyone, but they’re an easy way to save money if you were subscribing to everything already. Unexpected slayer of bloated bundles: DirecTV Standing up to Disney isn’t easy given that ESPN carries some of the most sought-after sports on television, but that’s what DirecTV did when it was time to negotiate a new carriage agreement this year. The satellite provider refused to accept another bloated channel lineup at higher prices, and demanded that Disney accommodate more smaller, more flexible packages. And it worked. After a two-week blackout, DirecTV and Disney emerged with a new agreement that will split the latter’s channels into three packages around sports, entertainment, and family programming. Those options are not yet available, and it’s unclear exactly what they’ll look like, but they could forever transform the pay TV bundle as we know it. In memoriam: Google Chromecast Chromecast helped usher in the streaming age in 2013, offering a cheap way to play videos on your TV using a phone as the remote. But 11 years later, Google has retired the Chromecast brand and discontinued the last of its Chromecast dongles. Casting still lives on as a standard feature of Google TV devices, but it goes by “Google Cast” now, and Google has pulled out of the cheap streaming dongle business in favor of the pricier Google TV Streamer box. Even if little has changed on a practical level, it still feels like the end of an era. Cord-cutting MVP: The U.S. government No, seriously. Every year we cap off these awards by honoring an entity that’s helped make cord-cutting easier or better. In 2024, it’s hard to think of better recipients than the current FCC and FTC. The FCC’s Broadband Facts mandate, for instance, requires internet providers to prominently disclose their regular, non-promotional rates along with expected speeds, data caps, and equipment fees. The FCC also approved “all-in” price disclosure rules for cable and satellite TV providers, effectively killing the “broadcast TV” fee that cable providers love to omit from their advertised prices. Both rules will help cord cutters comparison shop for internet and TV service. Meanwhile, the FTC has approved “click-to-cancel” rules, which say that if you sign up for a subscription online, you should be able to cancel it online just as easily. That means no more drawn-out customer-service calls from your cable company, full of upsells for unrelated services. A Republican-led FCC and FTC could always unwind these rules, which both commissions’ Republican members opposed. But for now, let’s just enjoy this little moment, in which cable companies have been forced, kicking and screaming, into doing the right thing. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV insights. Read...

Home exchanges give travellers the chance to experience someone else`s way of life abroad. Read...

According to a University of Bristol press release, a team of scientists and engineers have made a significant breakthrough, successfully creating the world’s first carbon-14 diamond battery. Based on the same radioactive isotope used in carbon dating, the new battery technology harnesses the radioactive decay of carbon-14, which emits a low level of energy for an extremely long time. It works like solar panels (which convert light into electricity) except instead of capturing photons (light particles), the diamond battery captures fast-moving electrons from the diamond’s structure. Sarah Clark, director of tritium fuel cycle at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), says “diamond batteries offer a safe and sustainable solution for continuous microwave power. The battery is made from an artificial diamond that safely encloses small amounts of carbon-14.” Diamond batteries could have a range of potential applications, including medical technology (to power devices like pacemakers, hearing implants, and prosthetic eyes without the need for battery changes), in extreme environments (like space and the deep sea, where it’s impractical to change batteries), and for tags to track cargo or spacecraft. This new tech is unlikely to apply to phones, laptops, smart homes, electric vehicles — you know, all the usual stuff that we look to for long-lasting batteries and infinite recharge cycles. But it’s impressive and fascinating. Who knows what else could come of it? Further reading: Researchers discover a simple way to make rechargeable lithium-ion batteries last much longer Read...

OPINION: Don’t look at me like that. Like I just suggested hanging around the docks at 1am and seeing who you can pick up in the portaloos. Read...

The film star opens up to the BBC about nearly dying, online dating, and being branded a sex symbol. Read...

The ACT leader has revealed a new partner, who he’s been dating for some time. Read...

Volcanic rock, dating back billions of years, has been detected in the first samples collected from the mysterious `dark side`. Read...