Mark Wilson writes: Since the arrival of USB drives, we have been warned that they need to be 'safely removed' using the correct method in Windows, rather than just being yanked out — but now this changes.

With Windows 10 1809, Microsoft is changing the default setting that's applied to USB drives and other removable media. The change means that the default policy applied to removable storage devices is Quick Removal rather than Better Performance — so you can now just pull it out without a second thought.

"While lawmakers debate what to do about the roboscourge, engineers have cooked up some clever ways to make bots work for us, not against us," writes the Washington Post, taking a look at apps like the $4-per-month RoboKiller -- which offers malicious "answer bots": They're voicemail messages that try to keep robots and human telemarketers on the line, listening to nonsense. Answer bot options range from Trump impersonators and extended coughing sessions to someone doing vocal exercises. Even better, RoboKiller will send you an often-hilarious recording of the interaction. (It only uses these recordings when it's very sure it's a spam call.)

Another service, called Jolly Roger, doesn't sell itself as a robocall blocker but takes this auto-generated annoyance idea a step further by actively trying to game the spammers' systems, such as when to press 1 to speak to a human. It calls this tech "artificial stupidity." It costs $11.88 per year.

It's possible you're better off not engaging with a robocall in the hopes the dialer with decide the line is dead. And it's also not clear how much these actually cost the people placing robocalls. But any time robocallers spend with your bot might be minutes they're not calling someone else, so you can think of it as community service.
I'm also not sure this does any good -- but the Post's article also includes a run-down of other robocall-blocking services available from both wireless carriers and independent companies. It recommends starting with the free YouMail app, which collates data from 10 million registered users to determine which calls to block -- and in addition, "tries to trick known robocallers into taking you off their lists by playing them the beep-beep-beep sound of a dead line."

If you live in America, you can also add your phone number to the Federal government's official "Do not call" registry. "It won't help much," writes the Post, "but it only takes 30 seconds so why not?"

schwit1 quotes Tom's Hardware: The Electronic Privacy Information Center ("EPIC"), a civil liberties group based in Washington D.C., filed an amicus brief in the United States vs. Wilson case concerning Google scanning billions of users' files for unlawful content and then sending that information to law enforcement agencies.

EPIC alleges that law enforcement is using Google, a private entity, to bypass the Fourth Amendment, which requires due process and probable cause before "searching or seizing" someone's property.

As a private entity, Google doesn't have to abide by the Fourth Amendment as the government has to, so it can do those mass searches on its behalf and then give the government the results. The U.S. government has been increasingly using this strategy to bypass Fourth Amendment protections of U.S. citizens and to expand its warrantless surveillance operations further.

Google and a few other companies have "voluntarily" agreed to use a database of image hashes from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to help the agency find exploited children.

More than that, the companies would also give any information they have on the people who owned those images, given they are users of said companies' services and have shared the images through those services.

The internet is commonly described as a cloud, writes the consumer policy expert and editor at BroadbandNow, but "In reality, it's a series of wet, fragile tubes, and Google is about to own an alarming number of them."

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: Google makes billions from its cloud platform. Now it's using those billions to buy up the internet itself -- or at least the submarine cables that make up the internet backbone. In February, the company announced its intention to move forward with the development of the Curie cable, a new undersea line stretching from California to Chile. It will be the first private intercontinental cable ever built by a major non-telecom company. And if you step back and just look at intracontinental cables, Google has fully financed a number of those already; it was one of the first companies to build a fully private submarine line.

Google isn't alone. Historically, cables have been owned by groups of private companies -- mostly telecom providers -- but 2016 saw the start of a massive submarine cable boom, and this time, the buyers are content providers. Corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon all seem to share Google's aspirations for bottom-of-the-ocean dominance... We're reaching the next stage of internet maturity; one where only large, incumbent players can truly win in media....

I've been watching this trend develop, being in the broadband space myself, and the recent movements are certainly concerning. Big tech's ownership of the internet backbone will have far-reaching, yet familiar, implications. It's the same old consumer tradeoff; more convenience for less control -- and less privacy... As we look to the future, we need to start asking ourselves what the internet is really going to look like whenever the content services that already command so much of our attention are in control of the internet backbone as well.
"Consumers will soon need to decide exactly how much faith they want to place in these companies to build out the internet of tomorrow."

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Japan's Toyota Motor Corp will offer free access to its hybrid-vehicle patents through 2030, it said on Wednesday, seeking to expand use of the lower-emission technology even as the global industry shifts toward fully electric cars. The pledge by one of the world's biggest automakers to share its closely guarded patents, the second time it has opened up a technology, is aimed at driving industry uptake of hybrids and fending off the challenge of all-battery electric vehicles (EVs).

Toyota said it would grant licenses on nearly 24,000 patents on technologies used in its Prius, the world's first mass-produced "green" car, and offer to supply competitors with components including motors, power converters and batteries used in its lower-emissions vehicles... Toyota's move to unlock its patents underlines its belief that hybrids are an effective alternative to all-battery EVs, given a fuel efficiency roughly double that of gasoline cars, lower cost and that they do not need charging infrastructure. Toyota vehicles account for more than 80 percent of the global hybrid vehicle market. "Toyota has realized that they made a mistake by protecting their hybrid technology for years. This prevented diffusion" said Janet Lewis, head of Asia transportation research at Macquarie Securities.

"Toyota on its own can't get key technology accepted, but if other companies use it, that offers the best chance of expansion," she added.
The article notes statistics from LMC Automotive that hybrid vehicles "account for around 3 percent of all vehicles sold globally, eclipsing the roughly 1.5 percent share of all-battery EVs."

Shigeki Terashi, Executive Vice President of Toyota, said, "we believe that now is the time for cooperation."

Since 2008, a $65 million program has been designing a sophisticated new "ignition interlock" system that would only allows cars to start if it detects that the driver is sober, the Washington Post reports: What's different -- perhaps even revolutionary -- is that the built-in ignition interlock would make an instantaneous and precise reading of every driver's blood alcohol content (BAC) level when the driver attempts to start the vehicle. Eventually, the device could become standard equipment, just like air bags. The device would take BAC samples in one of two ways. A breath-based system would gather a whiff of a driver's ambient breath. A touch-based system would analyze the touch of a driver's finger, perhaps from a vehicle's starter button or the steering wheel....

Officials behind the public-private effort to develop the technology -- known as the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADSS) -- say the device will be ready for commercial fleets next year. Virginia's Department of Motor Vehicles became the first state agency to use it in its fleet last year, and a private company, James River Transportation, is road-testing them in its fleet of Ford Flex crossovers.... . Advocates say that if their work is successful, such a device -- which requires understanding complexities involving the science of biology, spectroscopy, electrical engineering, consumer behavior and even politics -- could save an estimated 10,000 lives a year.
"We intend to release by the end of 2020 a breath-based device for use in fleet applications and as a dealer-installed accessory," says the president of Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety, which represents 17 automakers.

He tells the Post that the interlock devices now available are zero-tolerance -- "if any amount of alcohol is present, they will lock you out" -- and "are very difficult to use... Even people who use them regularly and are experienced in using them typically fail to provide a sufficient breath sample about 30 percent of the time... The other problem with those mouthpieces [besides some drivers seeing them as uncomfortable or intrusive] is they're plastic and you can only use them about five times... And then, the technology has to be recalibrated roughly every year, dependent upon usage. If you use it more, you have to calibrate it more frequently."

But with the new devices, "you simply sit in driver's seat and breathe normally. That's all that's required. There is no mouthpiece... We want to make a very precise very accurate measurement within a third of a second."

In what may be his final year of technology predictions, columnist Robert X. Cringely argues aerial delivery drones "are definitely coming just as fast as regulators will allow them, but I don't think they'll be implemented in the way people expect." As soon as autonomous systems can be shown to be as safe or safer than human pilots, they'll take over most drone piloting duties... Here's the problem with Pizza-to-the-Home: where does the drone land at your house that won't risk hitting a child, pet or vehicle and also won't risk losing the delivery to theft or damage? We can't economically mandate a drone landing tower for every house that's above obstacles and with a guaranteed clear approach.... But we CAN mandate such a landing platform on top of every pizza delivery vehicle.

Using GPS, the drone and car can find each other with the drone landing only when the car is stopped and the approach is clear... [F]or that driver each delivery will take five minutes or less. Pizza is delivered faster and hotter and the driver, instead of making 2-3 deliveries per hour, can make 10-12. This is what we'll shortly see proposed for drone delivery, not just for pizza but for everything else...

Now here's where Internet-style disintermediation comes into play. Such a drone delivery network still costs money to build but that money will be instantly available if the class of goods that can be delivered expands beyond food to anything weighing under, say, 10 pounds. This means prescription drugs and even Amazon Prime or walmart.com packages can arrive on the same car, delivered to that car by multiple drones and drone networks. All it requires is WAAS GPS and a standardized car rooftop landing platform, which I am sure we will shortly see.

Long-time Slashdot reader Rei writes: Friday, the results of a study by the MIT Center for Transport and Logistics on autonomous system driver attentiveness were released, and the results were conclusive: "drivers do not appear to over-trust the system to a degree that results in significant functional vigilance degradation in their supervisory role of system operation".

The study, involving 323,384 miles driven (34,8% on autopilot) and 8682 "tricky situations" identified. Of the "tricky situations", 0% of incidents involved slow driver responses or missed detections; 4,5% rapid/timely responses; 90,6% anticipatory reaction (preventing the situation from occurring); and 4,9% "other". The study suggests that this is the result of two effects: 1) drivers effectively learn the limits of the system through usage; and 2) "tricky situations" are common enough so as to prevent excess trust by the driver in the system — creating the counterintuitive result that the better the systems become, the worse the driver may become.

While the study is limited by the age of the vehicles (under a quarter were even running HW2, vs HW3 which is being released now — and due to the length of the study, most of the miles were accumulated on older software versions), it offers positive conclusions — but also a precaution — about the integration of humans and driver assist systems.

In other news, Tesla has announced an April 22 Autonomy Investor Day to showcase the capability of its development versions of the software in city driving, and has started rolling out stoplight detection, no-confirmation automated lane changes and exits, and a limited rollout of advanced summon (navigates through parking lots without a driver).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Colorado Sun: Now that Democrats are in charge, Colorado's second attempt at its own version of a net neutrality law passed the General Assembly and now heads to Gov. Jared Polis for his certain signature. Keeping internet speeds consistent regardless of whether a customer is streaming video from Comcast or Netflix wasn't the only intent of the Senate Bill 78. The bill also makes internet service providers pay back state grants to build broadband infrastructure if those companies use paid prioritization to favor some internet traffic over others, or slow down speeds for some users.

The Colorado law is similar to the former federal one in that it would prohibit ISPs from prioritizing certain content. It would also force violating ISPs that benefited from state broadband grants to refund all money received in the previous 24 months. After the governor signs the bill into law, Colorado's attorney general would by Oct. 1 create guidelines on how consumers can file complaints about net neutrality violations. "What I was really looking for in this year's bill was the appropriate nexus of action. A lot of the bills we saw getting in trouble in other states, or bills that were facing a lot of opposition, were more about sending a message of net neutrality instead of looking for a fulcrum point for state action," said Sen. Kerry Donovan, a Democrat from Vail who sponsored last year's bill and wrote this year's bill. "This bill says that if you're going to ask to be funded by the people in Colorado directly out of their paycheck then you need to adhere to these principles."

dmoberhaus writes: On Wednesday, the United Nations convened its first ever round table on floating cities. WIRED was in attendance to hear about one specific proposal -- Oceanix City -- the creation of a co-founder of Blue Frontiers, the for-profit wing of the Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute. This project, he says, is less about libertarianism and more about survival. It sounds like paradise, but many technological, economic, and political hurdles will have to be overcome before it's a reality. "Oceanix City was designed by the renowned Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, along with dozens of experts from institutions like the UN and MIT," Wired reports. "According to Ingels, who lives on a houseboat himself, residents of the floating city will use 100 percent renewable energy, eat only plant-based food, produce zero waste, and provide housing affordable to all, not just the rich."

"At the core of Oceanix City is a 4.5-acre hexagonal floating platform that is meant to host up to 300 people," the report adds. "These platforms are modular, meaning they can be linked to form larger communities as they tessellate across the surface of the ocean. Each platform will be anchored to the ocean floor using biorock, a material that is harder than concrete and can be grown using minerals found in the ocean, which could make the anchor more secure over time. These anchors might also serve as the seeds of artificial reefs to rejuvenate aquatic ecosystems around the floating city." The community's needs and city's location will determine the design of each platform. For example, some could act as barriers to limit the impact of waves; while others could be dedicated to agriculture. Wired goes on to discuss the political and technological challenges associated with these floating cities.

"The plan for the first Oceanix City is to moor it about a mile off the coast of a major city," reports Wired. "If one of these ocean-top communities were to get parked near New York City, for example, the floating community could be treated as a new borough, or a separate city under the jurisdiction of the state..."

"BBC Culture reports on DJ Denniz Pop (born Dagge Volle), who couldn't sing, play an instrument, or write a song but could mathematically craft a song from stitching together electronically programmed sounds and beats," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. "Pop was the musical brains behind acts ranging from the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Ace Of Base to Britney Spears, and trained Max Martin who wrote 22 Billbooard #1 hits for the likes of Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Katy Perry, P!nk, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande and Maroon 5 using a technique called 'Melodic Math.'" From the report: In a basement in Stockholm's suburbs, Pop brought together an elite team of eight songwriters and producers for a new venture -- Cheiron Studios -- in 1992. Over the next eight years they would go on to sell hundreds of millions of records through the likes of Ace of Base, 5ive, Robyn, Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Westlife, *NSYNC and Britney Spears. The secret of their songwriting success was to marry the melody to the beat, not work against it, and to have a big chorus. The team at Cheiron followed Pop's example, experimenting in clubs across the capital with up to a hundred different versions of each new track -- meticulously documenting the combinations of beats and melodies that made the club crowds go wild. Through these experiments, an entirely new genre of music blossomed, one that seemed tailor-made for the age of manufactured boybands and girl groups. Having grown up in socialist Sweden, Pop's approach to writing music was almost utilitarian. Like so many Swedish success stories -- IKEA, H&M, Volvo and Spotify -- the Cheiron team wanted their product to appeal to the maximum amount of people, which in a country with a population of only nine million meant focusing outside the nation's borders. Pop designed his music to reflect the lives of the people who bought more music than anyone else -- American teenagers -- at least as far as he understood them from his basement in faraway Stockholm.

Jackson Cosko, a former employee of Senator Maggie Hassan, has "admitted to breaking into Hassan's office after being fired, stealing data that included personal contact information, then posting that information online during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing," reports The Verge. The report says Cosko added several senators' private phone numbers and addresses to Wikipedia. He has pleaded guilty to computer fraud, witness tampering, obstruction of justice, and making restricted personal information public. From the report: Cosko worked as a computer system administrator for Hassan, but he was fired in May of 2018. According to a plea agreement, he retaliated by using another employee's key to break into his old workplace at least four times, installing keyloggers on computers and using stolen login credentials to download gigabytes of data. While watching the Supreme Court confirmation hearing in September, Cosko "became angry" at Republican senators questioning Kavanaugh -- so he posted contact information for Senators Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, and Orrin Hatch on Wikipedia. Cosko was interning for US Representative Sheila Jackson Lee at the time, and his changes were flagged by a bot that detects Wikipedia edits from congressional computers. The bot inadvertently helped spread the senators' information across Twitter, a process that prosecutors say Cosko aided by tweeting about his leaks.

Cosko struck again a few days later, posting information about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Rand Paul -- who had called for an investigation -- on Wikipedia. He added comments calling himself a "golden god" who had a legal right to post the information, asking readers to "send us bitcoins." When a witness spotted him in Hassan's office the next day, Cosko responded with a threatening email titled "I own EVERYTHING." Cosko claimed he would release private emails, encrypted messages, and the health data and social security numbers for senators' children. "If you tell anyone I will leak it all," he wrote. Cosko was arrested soon after. Attorneys say Cosko could serve up to 57 months in prison, and he's required to give up all the equipment used in the crimes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Google is adding a new admin policy to Chrome that will automatically uninstall browser extensions that are blacklisted by administrators. Currently, administrators can enable a policy called "Configure extension installation blacklist" to create a blacklist of Chrome extension. These blacklisted extensions are added as individual extension ids, and once added, will prevent managed users from installing the associated extensions. To do this, Windows administrators can download Chrome's policy templates and add them to the Group Policy Editor. Once added, they will be able to configure various group polices.

While this policy prevents users from installing an extension, it does not do anything for those users who have already installed the extension. Due to this, administrators have been requesting a new group policy that will cause Chrome to remove any extension that is listed under the "Configure extension installation blacklist" policy. Google agrees and have started working on a new Chrome policy called "Uninstall blacklisted extensions" that will uninstall any extensions whose IDs have been blacklisted. In addition to removing the extensions, it will remove any associated local user data as well. The new policy is expected to be released with Chrome 75, which is heading to beta in May and expected to be released to the Stable channel in June.

Slashdot reader shanen poses the question: if you had to give a TED Talk, what would you talk about? They write: Mostly based on my experiences at TEDx events, though of course I've seen a lot of TED videos. Nick Hanauer's censored TED Talk is still my all-time favorite, though you couldn't see it on the TED website. Proximate trigger for this question was actually looking at the coming TEDx events in the neighborhood... In my own case, I think you'd need to put a gun to my head as motivation, but maybe my sig would be worth a laugh or two? What would your TED Talk be about? How does this idea resonate with you? Feel free to explain in as little as one sentence...

For example: "The inequality of opportunity and how the stereotypical success is a function of where one is born."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A New Zealand family that booked an Airbnb in Ireland recently discovered an undisclosed camera in the living room, and the family says that Airbnb initially cleared the host of any wrongdoing before finally banning the offender from its platform. "Once the family had unpacked, Andrew Barker, who works in IT security, scanned the house's Wi-Fi network," CNN reported today. "The scan unearthed a camera and subsequently a live feed. From the angle of the video, the family tracked down the camera, concealed in what appeared to be a smoke alarm or carbon monoxide detector." Nealie Barker posted an image on Facebook showing the location of the camera in the living room and a shot of the family from the sneaky video feed.

Based on the photo, the video of the Barkers seems to have been taken on March 3 and was viewable on the local Wi-Fi network at 192.168.0.4/video/livemb.asp. The family relocated to a hotel and contacted both Airbnb and the property host. The host initially hung up but later called back and told them, "The camera in the living room was the only one in the house," CNN wrote. It's not clear whether the host was recording the video, whether he was capturing audio, whether he was monitoring it remotely in real time, or whether he was using it for anything more than monitoring guests. [...] Airbnb temporarily suspended the listing and promised to investigate, CNN wrote. But when Barker contacted Airbnb again two weeks later, "the company told her that the host had been 'exonerated,' and the listing reinstated." Airbnb finally banned the host after Nealie Barker posted about the disturbing incident on Facebook on Monday this week. Barker's Facebook post said that Airbnb's "investigation which didn't include any follow-up with us exonerated the host, no explanation provided," and that "the listing (with hidden camera not mentioned) is still on Airbnb." Airbnb said in a statement to Ars Technica: "Our original handling of this incident did not meet the high standards we set for ourselves, and we have apologized to the family and fully refunded their stay."

Airbnb's policy states that hosts must disclose "any type of surveillance device" in listings, "even if it's not turned on or hooked up." Cameras are allowed in certain spaces if they are disclosed, but Airbnb "prohibit[s] any surveillance devices that are in or that observe the interior of certain private spaces (such as bedrooms and bathrooms) regardless of whether they've been disclosed. [...] If a host discloses the device after booking, Airbnb will allow the guest to cancel the reservation and receive a refund. Host cancellation penalties may apply."

Bare Bones Software this week announced the return of BBEdit, a popular text, code, and markup editor, to the Mac App Store after a nearly five year hiatus. Bare Bones Software: When the Mac App Store debuted in 2011, BBEdit was one of its first products available for sale. However, due to technical and business constraints we encountered in the store, we decided to withdraw BBEdit from the Mac App Store in 2014. Following BBEdit's exit from the Mac App Store, we had many conversations with our customers, and with Apple, regarding the issues that we had encountered with the store. In the spring of 2018, Bare Bones and Apple announced that, subsequent to the release of macOS Mojave (10.14) and the accompanying refresh of the Mac App Store, BBEdit would be returning to the store.

This was made possible by changes to the OS itself which allow Mac App Store versions of BBEdit to function to their fullest extent while complying with Mac App Store rules; as well as changes to the Mac App Store business mechanics which make it possible for us to distribute our software through the Mac App Store as part of a sustainable business model. A limited features version of BBEdit is free to download and use, while the suite with all the features is priced at $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year. BBEdit remains available on a perpetual license basis for $49.99 via Bare Bones Software's online store and at participating resellers.

Further reading: The Old Guard of Mac Indy Apps Has Thrived For More Than 25 Years.

Twelve years after it was first notified of the issue, Mozilla has finally shipped a fix this week that will prevent abusive websites -- usually tech support scam sites -- from flooding users with non-stop "authentication required" login popups and prevent users from leaving or closing their browsers. From a report: The fix has been shipped in Firefox v68, the current Nightly release, and will hit the browser's stable branch sometimes in early July. According to Firefox engineer Johann Hofmann, starting with Firefox 68, web pages won't be allowed to show more than two login prompts. Starting with the third request, Firefox will intervene to suppress the authentication popup.

Mozilla previously shipped a fix for this issue, but it was incomplete, as it blocked authentication prompts that originated from subresources, such as iframes. This latest patch completes the fix by blocking all types of authentication required prompts -- including those generated by the site's main domain.

The European Union Commission today accused BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen Group (which makes VW, Audi, and Porsche vehicles) of colluding to limit emissions reduction technology in their diesel and gas vehicles. From a report: The commission accused the three manufacturers of coordinating to limit the size and refill ranges of AdBlue tanks on their diesel vehicles made between 2006 and 2014. AdBlue is a urea-based liquid that is injected into exhaust gas to reduce the amount of nitrogen oxides (NOx) that are released during diesel combustion. The commission also accused the three manufacturers of agreeing to avoid or delay the introduction of "Otto" particulate filters on gas-powered vehicles between 2009 and 2014.

After opening an investigation last September, the EU Commission today sent the three German automakers Statements of Objections, that is, a formal letter outlining the preliminary view that the manufacturers' behavior was illegal. "Such market behavior, if confirmed... would violate EU competition rules prohibiting cartel agreements to limit or control production, markets or technical development," an EU Commission press release read.

Facebook, Google and Twitter are headed back to Washington next week to testify at a congressional hearing about alleged tech censorship. From a report: Tech companies have faced accusations that they're censoring conservative speech on their platforms. The companies have denied the allegations in the past. The hearing before the Senate Judiciary's subcommittee on the Constitution is scheduled for April 10 and is titled "Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse." A Facebook spokesperson said Neil Potts, its public policy director, will be testifying. Twitter and Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. A source familiar with the Senate hearing said Twitter and Google officials will also be attending. The hearing will likely mark Potts' second congressional appearance next week. Facebook and Google officials are expected to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on April 9 to answer questions about the spread of white nationalism on their platforms.

Samsung Electronics has started mass-producing its 5G chips, the company said. From a report: Among the company's new chip offerings is the Exynos Modem 5100, which contains a 5G multi-mode chipset; it is the same chipset that is used to power the Galaxy S10 5G, which became available for sale in South Korea as of Wednesday. The model, unveiled in August, is the world's first 5G modem to be compatible with the 3GPP's 5G New Radio (5G-NR) standard. Mass production for its single-chip radio frequency transceiver, the Exynos RF 5500, and supply modulator solution, the Exynos SM 5800, have also started, Samsung said. These technologies also power Samsung's flagship 5G phone. The Exynos RF 5500 has 14 receiver paths for download, 4x4 MIMO (Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output), and a higher-order 256 QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) scheme for data transfer in 5G networks; and the Eyxnos SM5800 is 30% more power efficient than previous offerings.