Category Archives: Blog

TL;DR: As of August 20, you can get one year of Norton 360 Standard on two devices and LifeLock Identity Advisor on sale for $24.99 (reg. $109.99) — a savings of 77%.

While you probably don’t need a personal bodyguard like the Kardashians, your computer, tablet, or smartphone might. And we aren’t talking about protection from a drop to the ground — we’re talking about the safety of your online activities and personal information. 

Get your first year of Norton 360 Standard on two devices and LifeLock Identity Advisor for only $24.99, normally $109.

While no one can prevent all cybercrime or detect all threats, Norton actively works to keep you safe. After the quick install and setup on two of your devices, you can enjoy perks like:

• Real-time protection against existing and emerging threats, like ransomware, spyware, viruses, phishing, and more.

• A secure VPN that encrypts information like passwords and bank details, even while joining public networks.

• 10GB PC cloud backup allows you to store and protect important files in case anything ever happens to your device.

• A password manager helps you create strong passwords and store sensitive information securely and safely.

Along with Norton 360 Standard, you will receive protection from LifeLock Identity Advisor. Anyone who posts, banks, or shops online is at risk of having their information stolen. Still, LifeLock Identity Advisor monitors corners of the dark web* and notifies you if your information is ever found.

Hopefully, this service won’t find anything, but if it does, take advantage of LifeLock’s U.S.-based identity restoration specialists that help you work with external services to resolve your claim. 

Start taking your online privacy seriously.

This exclusive bundle includes one year of Norton 360 Standard on two devices and LifeLock Identity Advisor for only $24.99 (reg. $109).

Prices subject to change. *Dark Web Monitoring: Defaults to monitor your email address only. Log in to your account to enter more info for monitoring.

The Southern California coastline is, generally speaking, among the most peaceful and predictable in the world — with flooding and storm surge very rare due to the region’s Mediterranean climate. As of this writing, live camera views of the coastline looked like any summer weekend for some of America’s favorite beaches. That won’t be true for much longer.

The National Hurricane Center issued something called a “Tropical Storm Watch” for Southern California on Friday, saying Hurricane Hilary has “the potential for rare and dangerous flooding impacts from heavy rainfall across portions of the Southwestern U.S. this weekend.” The significance can’t be understated: Since the Center was established in 1956, the west coast has never been issued a Tropical Storm Watch until now.

Mashable has a detailed explanation of the potential risks, and if you’re in Southern California, you should make sure you’re ready for historic rainfall, and stocked up on emergency supplies. If you’re watching from afar, however, you might want some camera views that can help you understand the impact this storm is having. 

Along the coast, storm surge is expected, and that means the real potential for saltwater to rise to perilous heights, testing the area’s storm barriers and seawalls on the beaches and coastal neighborhoods in San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, and Ventura Counties.

Hurricane Hilary livecams in the San Diego area

Here’s a view of San Diego’s Mission Bay, used as a spot for launching kayaks and rowboat. This sport is normally shielded from hard surf by the Mission Beach peninsula to its west.

La Jolla Shores Beach is normally another nice place to launch kayaks, and generally just a popular spot for summer fun.

A livecam on Catalina Island, off the coast of California

Isla de Santa Catalina, or just Catalina Island, is 22 miles to the west of the California coast. This live view normally gives viewers a peek at a bald eagle’s nest.

A live view of Huntington Beach

Huntington Beach is in Orange County. The U.S. Open of Surfing, arguably the most important surfing competition in the world, happens here annually.

Hurricane Hilary’s impact on Venice Beach

This is a live view of the Venice Boardwalk. The Venice Beach area (actually a neighborhood in Los Angeles proper) is exceptionally at-risk for flooding because it’s so low-lying, and due to its inland waterways.

Live camera view of Santa Monica during Hurricane Hilary

The pier at Santa Monica beach is an iconic part of mid-20th century Americana, because it was the western terminus of the famous Route 66. Today, it remains a playground for locals and tourists alike.

Live views of inland areas impacted by Hurricane Hilary

Hilary is not expected to come ashore in the U.S. from the west and inland, but instead to roll south-to-north over Southern California. This means some of the expected impacts will be in the Inland Empire and high desert, where rain in August — let alone tropical storms — is very rare.

Palm Springs is in danger of flash flooding.

This view of a YouTube user’s home garden in the Mojave Desert normally shows a bird bath popular among local birds.

How is Hurricane Hilary related to climate change?

Climate change is impacting hurricanes. Some of these impacts are clear, particularly more serious rainfall and historic flooding, along with higher storm surges. Other impacts, like how the relentless warming oceans are affecting how strong these storms grow, are an intensive and ongoing area of research.

If Quordle is a little too challenging today, you’ve come to the right place for hints. There aren’t just hints here, but the whole Quordle solution. Scroll to the bottom of this page, and there it is. But are you sure you need all four answers? Maybe you just need a strategy guide. Either way, scroll down, and you’ll get what you need.

What is Quordle?

Quordle is a five-letter word guessing game similar to Wordle, except each guess applies letters to four words at the same time. You get nine guesses instead of six to correctly guess all four words. It looks like playing four Wordle games at the same time, and that is essentially what it is. But it’s not nearly as intimidating as it sounds.

Is Quordle harder than Wordle?

Yes, though not diabolically so.

Where did Quordle come from?

Amid the Wordle boom of late 2021 and early 2022, when everyone was learning to love free, in-browser, once-a-day word guessing games, creator Freddie Meyer says he took inspiration from one of the first big Wordle variations, Dordle — the one where you essentially play two Wordles at once. He took things up a notch, and released Quordle on January 30. Meyer’s creation was covered in The Guardian six days later, and now, according to Meyer, it attracts millions of daily users. Today, Meyer earns modest revenue from Patreon, where dedicated Quordle fans can donate to keep their favorite puzzle game running. 

How is Quordle pronounced?

“Kwordle.” It should rhyme with “Wordle,” and definitely should not be pronounced exactly like “curdle.”

Is Quordle strategy different from Wordle?

Yes and no.

Your starting strategy should be the same as with Wordle. In fact, if you have a favorite Wordle opening word, there’s no reason to change that here. We suggest something rich in vowels, featuring common letters like C, R, and N. But you do you.

After your first guess, however, you’ll notice things getting out of control if you play Quordle exactly like Wordle.

What should I do in Quordle that I don’t do in Wordle?

Solving a Wordle puzzle can famously come down to a series of single letter-change variations. If you’ve narrowed it down to “-IGHT,” you could guess “MIGHT” “NIGHT” “LIGHT” and “SIGHT” and one of those will probably be the solution — though this is also a famous way to end up losing in Wordle, particularly if you play on “hard mode.” In Quordle, however, this sort of single-letter winnowing is a deadly trap, and it hints at the important strategic difference between Wordle and Quordle: In Quordle, you can’t afford to waste guesses unless you’re eliminating as many letters as possible at all times. 

Guessing a completely random word that you already know isn’t the solution, just to eliminate three or four possible letters you haven’t tried yet, is thought of as a desperate, latch-ditch move in Wordle. In Quordle, however, it’s a normal part of the player’s strategic toolset.

Is there a way to get the answer faster?

In my experience Quordle can be a slow game, sometimes dragging out longer than it would take to play Wordle four times. But a sort of blunt-force guessing approach can speed things up. The following strategy also works with Wordle if you only want the solution, and don’t care about having the fewest possible guesses:

Try starting with a series of words that puts all the vowels (including Y) on the board, along with some other common letters. We’ve had good luck with the three words: “NOTES,” “ACRID,” and “LUMPY.” YouTuber DougMansLand suggests four words: “CANOE,” “SKIRT,” “PLUMB,” and “FUDGY.”

Most of the alphabet is now eliminated, and you’ll only have the ability to make one or two wrong guesses if you use this strategy. But in most cases you’ll have all the information you need to guess the remaining words without any wrong guesses.

If strategy isn’t helping, and you’re still stumped, here are some hints:

Are there any double or triple letters in today’s Quordle words?

No.

Are any rare letters being used in today’s Quordle like Q or Z?

No.

What do today’s Quordle words start with?

W, P, F, and S.

What are the answers for today’s Quordle?

Are you sure you want to know?

There’s still time to turn back.

OK, you asked for it. The answers are:

1. WIMPY 

2. PLUNK

3. FORAY

4. SHAKE

There has been a debate raging over whether or not work created by generative artificial intelligence can be copyrighted. Some judges have ruled no, of course not, that would be absurd; others have argued the opposite. On Friday, the computers took another L.

A federal judge ruled to uphold a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that states that pieces of art that are created by AI are not protected by copyright law. As the Hollywood Reporter found, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who delivered the ruling, said copyright law hasn’t ever protected “works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand.”

Stephen Thaler, the chief executive of the neural network firm Imagination Engines, has been leading the charge in hopes of copywriting AI works, according to the Hollywood Reporter. In his lawsuit, he argued that AI should be acknowledged “as an author where it otherwise meets authorship criteria” and that works generated completely and solely by artificial intelligence should be protected by copyright law.

“In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No,” Howell wrote, adding that copyright law “protects only works of human creation.”

But it’s all still a bit convoluted. In March, the U.S. Copyright Office itself published guidance saying it is open to granting protection and ownership to AI-generated work on a “case-by-case” basis. Basically, if something is created completely by AI, then it is not copyrightable; if it is created by a human with the support of AI, then it could potentially be copyrightable.

“The Office will consider whether the AI contributions are the result of ‘mechanical reproduction’ or instead of an author’s ‘own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form,'” Shira Perlmutter, the director of the Copyright Office, said at the time.

All the while, this is a particularly sticky situation for artists, people who work with artists, and anyone who enjoys any kind of art. Writers and actors in the WAG/SAG-AFTRA union have been on strike for more than 100 days, partially because of the fear that studios might use generative AI to write scripts and act in films, rendering some jobs useless and most TV bad.

A self-driving car and a fire truck crashed in San Francisco Thursday night. Now, the California Department of Motor Vehicles wants the tech company to decrease the number of self-driving cars on the road.

Tweet may have been deleted

On August 17, according to a statement emailed to Mashable from Cruise, a subsidiary of GM, a self-driving car with one person in the vehicle “entered the intersection on a green light and was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene.” The person in the self-driving car was treated on scene and transported via ambulance “for what we believe are non-severe injuries.”

“Our primary concern is the rider and their welfare, and we have reached out to offer support,” Cruise said in a statement. “We are also deeply mindful of the well-being of the first responders and any individuals affected by this incident. We are investigating to better understand our AVs performance, and will be in touch with the City of San Francisco about the event.”

The California DMV asked Cruise to reduce its robotaxi fleet (a real thing, I’m told) by 50 percent while the state agency investigates “recent concerning incidents,” including the Thursday crash with the fire truck. In a statement email to Mashable, the agency said it is requesting Cruise does not increase the fleet until it “takes appropriate corrective actions to improve road safety.” Cruse agreed to the reduction and will have “no more than 50 driverless vehicles in operation during the day and 150 driverless vehicles in operation at night,” the California DMV statement read.

“Safety of the traveling public is the California DMV’s top priority,” a California DMV representative said in the statement. “The primary focus of the DMV’s regulations is the safe operation of autonomous vehicles and safety of the public who share the road with these vehicles.”

Following the investigation, the California DMV can suspect or fully revoke Cruise’s deployment permits if the investigation proves the self-driving cars are “an unreasonable risk to public safety.”

In its statement emailed to Mashable regarding the DMVs decision, a Cruise spokesperson pointed out that over 100 people die every day on American roadways, which feels like a pretty rough way to start this whole thing out. “We believe it’s clear that Cruise positively impacts overall road safety, and look forward to working with the CA DMV to make any improvements and provide any data they need to reinforce the safety and efficiency of our fleet,” the spokesperson said.

“We will continue to work in partnership with regulators and city departments on EMV interactions to reduce the likelihood of incidents like these happening again,” Cruise said in a public blog post.

Flying on Mars presents a major challenge.

The Martian surface air density is only about one percent of Earth’s, making it difficult for craft to produce the lift necessary to fly. Yet NASA’s experimental Ingenuity helicopter was designed to create lift with its rotors under such unique conditions. Using a four-foot wingspan, the robot has now flown over 50 times — though the space agency only expected it to last for five flights.

NASA’s car-sized Perseverance rover recently captured footage of the helicopter’s entire 54th flight in early August. After Ingenuity experienced a flight anomaly, causing it to promptly land, NASA ran this aerial test to make sure the navigation system still worked properly — which it does.

On the far bottom of the video, at about 5 seconds in, Ingenuity fires up its rotors. At 15 seconds in, the robot takes off. It hovers 16 feet in the Martian air before touching down. All 46 seconds can be watched below:

Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS

Perseverance captured this clear shot from 180 feet away. Along with its trusty sidekick, Ingenuity, the rover is scouring rocks and soil for biosignatures — “an object, substance, and/or pattern whose origin specifically requires a biological agent,” the space agency explained.

“A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life,” NASA wrote.

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There remains zero evidence that life ever existed on Mars. But primitive life may have existed in Martian caverns or perhaps much deeper in the soil. And beyond Mars, in the oceans of Enceladus and Europa out in deeper space, planetary scientists suspect conditions might be suitable for life to evolve, if not flourish.

As Earth’s natural satellite, the moon is our planet’s closest space neighbor and companion, joining us for the over 365-day journey around the sun.

But “close” is a relative term in the expanding universe. The moon is about 238,855 miles away, meaning you could fit 30 Earth-size planets in between it and the blue marble, according to NASA.

The distance is always changing, though, because the moon’s orbit around Earth is not a perfect circle — it’s an oval. At its farthest point, the moon is 252,088 miles away from Earth. When the two are closest together, they’re 225,623 miles apart.

And, an interesting piece of trivia if you want to impress friends — or strangers — at a party: The moon is slowly moving away from Earth, getting about an inch farther each year.

Tweet may have been deleted

The difficult journey to the moon is back at the forefront of space exploration now that NASA, other spacefaring nations, and even commercial players are interested in whether water ice is buried within the dark craters of the moon’s south pole. If the ice could be mined, the water could be used for drinking and making rocket fuel. The latter could turn the moon into something akin to a space gas station.

How long does it take to get to the moon?

How long it takes to get to the moon is an entirely different question, and the answer varies depending on different factors, such as the speed of the spacecraft and its route. Modern rockets and propulsion systems can get to the moon between two-and-a-half and four days.

Some spaceflights to the moon take a more scenic route to save on fuel costs. The Hakuto-R mission, a robotic commercial flight by Japanese company ispace, launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Dec. 11, 2022. It didn’t reach lunar orbit until March 21, 2023, three months later — the flight was successful, but it failed its ultimate goal of landing on the surface.

NASA’s Moonkam snaps pictures of craters on the far side of the moon in 2012.
Credit: NASA / Caltech-JPL / MIT / SRS

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Many crewless, robotic spacecraft have flown to the moon, but only 24 people have made the trip, with just half of them walking its surface. The last human to land on the moon was in 1972. That may change soon, as NASA prepares to send astronauts to the lunar south pole through its new Artemis campaign.

NASA selected Christina Hammock Koch, Reid Wiseman, and Victor Glover, and the Canadian Space Agency tapped Jeremy Hansen, for the Artemis II mission, making them the first people to travel into deep space since the final Apollo mission. The flight is scheduled to launch as early as 2024.

The Artemis II mission will take four astronauts on a 10-day voyage around the moon.
Credit: NASA

They won’t actually land. Instead, the four crew members will journey 6,400 miles beyond the far side of the moon to test the Orion spacecraft’s life-support systems. Only after the ship has been thoroughly vetted will the U.S. space agency feel confident about using it to send astronauts back for a moonwalk.

If all goes according to plan, NASA will put the first woman and person of color on the moon during the Artemis III mission in 2025 or later.

Mars, a world that once gushed with water, is today 1,000 times drier than Earth’s driest desert. Yet some ice still flows, slowly, on the Martian ground.

NASA’s Mars-orbiting satellite, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, carries a powerful camera called the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) that captures rich imagery of the Red Planet’s surface (it’s the “most powerful camera ever sent to another planet,” the HiRISE team explains). Recently, planetary scientists used HiRISE to snap an image of a glacier-like “icy flow,” taken from 184 miles above Mars’ surface. Frozen ice doesn’t only exist in the frigid Martian poles.

“The surface of Mars is littered with examples of glacier-like landforms,” Mike Mellon, a Mars geologist and co–investigator of the HiRISE project, explained online. “While surface ice deposits are mostly limited to the polar caps, patterns of slow, viscous flow abound in many non-polar regions of Mars.”

The image below was taken at 37 latitude, a “temperate” region of Mars.

The HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a detailed image of an ice flow on Mars.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UArizona

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Ice flow on Mars

This ice is moving slowly. It tends to form on rocky debris inside valleys and craters.

“As ice flows downhill, rock and soil are plucked from the surrounding landscape and ferried along the flowing ice surface and within the icy subsurface,” Mellon explained. “While this process is gradual, taking perhaps thousands of years or longer, it creates a network of linear patterns that reveal the history of ice flow.”

Even when the ice melts or evaporates away, the rock flows remain, leaving telltale signs of Mars’ diminished, but still active, geologic activity.

Still, this ice is a far cry from Mars’ days as a water world, when lakes sprawled over the land and streams ran through river deltas. Today, NASA’s Perseverance rover is scouring the river delta in Mars’ Jezero Crater for possible hints of past, primitive life — should any have ever existed.

A significant chunk of Elon Musk’s more than 153 million followers on X appear to be fake, or at the very least inactive on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Mashable just published a detailed analysis of Musk’s followers, based on data collected by third-party researcher Travis Brown.

Musk’s over 153 million followers make up more than a quarter of the 540 million “monthly users” that Musk claimed are now on X as of late July. And, if you question the legitimacy of Musk’s numbers, his followers make up more than half of the “monthly active users” that Twitter said it had in the months before Musk acquired the platform.

While the scope of this report was limited to Musk’s followers, it’s impossible not to use that data to look at the platform as a whole through the lens of Musk’s account. As we previously stated, Musk’s high follower count basically means that Musk’s account is a microcosm of the entire platform.

Monthly users vs. monthly active users

A quick summary of some of Musk’s follower data for those who haven’t read the more detailed report: Just over 42 percent of Musk’s more than 153 million followers have 0 followers. More than 40 percent have zero tweets posted on their account. Around 40 percent of Musk’s followers also follow less than 10 users. This points to a few things. Many of these accounts can be fake accounts or bots. Also, many of these accounts can simply belong to inactive users or people who set up an account and rarely if ever return.

If Musk’s follower count can be extrapolated to represent X as a whole, then that paints a very bleak picture for the platform and how many real, active users it actually has.

Monthly and daily active user counts are the industry standard for measuring the size of an online platform. Keyword: active. Brands and ad campaign managers routinely gauge the value of digital ad buys by just how many potential eyeballs will see their ads. (And, of course, conversion rates based on those views are factored in too.) Since Musk took over, X’s ad revenue struggles have been frequently reported on. The platform lost half of its largest advertisers as a result of how Musk has run the platform. While some have returned, ad revenue is still significantly down. And, just this week, a few more advertisers jumped ship after their ads appeared aside neo-Nazi content. 

Regardless, if the potential customer base is still on the platform, some advertisers will obviously look beyond the issues and try to reach them. So those user numbers are important. But, are they accurately describing active users? It’s unclear, especially after looking at the accounts following Musk. But it has been noticeable, at least on our end, that Musk has dropped that keyword “active” when reporting X’s user counts.

Musk’s X user base claims aren’t adding up

X has been around for nearly two decades now (under the name Twitter for most of that time), yet Musk’s most recent “monthly users” claim is more than double the “monthly active users” number that the company reported right before Musk’s takeover. If more than 250 million users joined X in the 10 months that Musk has been in charge, as opposed to anytime over the prior 17 years, it stands to reason that Musk was an important factor in their decision to join, and that a significant number of them would be following Musk. According to our report on Musk’s followers, more than 25 percent — or 38.9 million — of Musk’s followers joined the platform after he acquired the company in October. That’s a large chunk of Musk’s followers. Yet, that 38.9 million represents less than 14 percent of the new users that Musk is claiming X has. Something isn’t adding up.

When Musk acquired the company, X’s new owner made a big deal about removing fake accounts and bots on the platform. Musk himself suspected that Twitter had drastically underreported the number of fake accounts when he agreed to buy the company. It’s literally the reason he cited when he tried to back out but was later forced to go through with the acquisition. 

One of Musk’s first moves after the acquisition was to completely rebuild the platform’s verification system in his vision, removing legacy verified users, and turning the feature into a paid subscription. All the while, Musk claimed that these moves were part of his core strategic decisions to facilitate a platform with only real active users. However, another recent report by Mashable on X Premium, Musk’s paid subscription service formerly known as Twitter Blue, found that there are just around 830,000 subscribers.

Now, clearly there are more than 830,000 real users on X. Just how many more, though, is anyone’s guess. Musk’s “monthly user” claims certainly seem inflated. And his followers, or really the millions of inactive accounts following him, are telling a whole different story.

TL;DR: As of August 19, get a lifetime subscription to podcast app Podurama’s Premium Plan for just $39.99 — that’s 60% off.

There are a lot of podcasts. For podcast lovers, that’s good news and bad news. With so many out there, it can take time to find quality things to listen to that update consistently. You might have a few go-to favorites, but it can be hard to wade through if you want to find more. 

Podurama is a podcast platform with a massive selection and the tools to actually make it easy to navigate, including AI that was designed to help you find new podcasts. And you don’t even have to pay by the month. A Podurama Premium Lifetime Subscription is only $39.99. 

Searching for a good podcast is harder than it sounds. There are more than five million podcasts globally with more than 70 million episodes, and the sheer volume out there might make it more difficult to find something you want to dive into. 

Podurama doesn’t just give you access to a vast library of podcasts. It also helps you manage the ones you’ve already found and discover new content related to your interests. Like other podcast platforms, Podurama lets you organize playlists and folders. 

What’s unique to Podurama is that you can set up smart playlists that can automatically detect when one of your favorite podcasts posts a new episode and add it to your playlist. Sync your account across web and desktop apps to seamlessly go from the car to your desk while listening.

Want to find something completely new to listen to? You could check the sidebar and explore categories like Arts, Comedy, Education, Fiction, and True Crime. Or you could just ask. Podurama has an AI chatbot which you can ask for recommendations, even based on your niche interest. Pop on your headphones and listen to a deep dive into historical noodles or the music of Dolly Parton. 

Listen to something new and exciting that you may not have found without AI’s help. 

Get a Lifetime Premium Subscription to Podurama for $39.99 (reg. $99). 

Prices subject to change.