The Tesla Cybertruck isn’t bulletproof

Last week Elon Musk unveiled the wildly dystopian-future bakkie called the Cybertruck. And sometimes these big unveils don’t always go to plan. The Tesla CEO took the stage in Los Angeles last week to show off the company’s first electric bakkie, but it didn’t exactly go to plan. As Musk tends to do, he wanted the bakkie to be basically bulletproof, which includes the windows. So he thought it would be a great idea to show off the durability of the new invention by throwing metal balls at the windows. Makes sense, right? In their defence, this stunt was tested before the show and the windows didn’t budge — but maybe it weakened the structure. Because, while on stage, Musk brought out the company’s lead designer, Franz von Holzhausen, who walked onto the stage holding an orange sledgehammer. “Don’t hold back,” Musk told Franz. Musk then asked Franz to fling some metal balls at the windows of the Cybertruck. “You sure?” Franz responded. He knew this wasn’t gonna end well. The windows shattered onstage. So… we’ll make the informed decision that the Cybertruck’s windows are by no means bulletproof. Musk still wants the final vehicle to be bulletproof when it ships, though.

Source: Twitter

Cool Ideas were DDoSed again this weekend

If you had some intermittent connection issues on your fibre line this weekend, no doubt Cool Ideas is your ISP. It is the third massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack the provider has encountered in the past few months. The attack ran from Saturday morning into the late hours of Sunday evening, while technicians tried to mitigate the effects. This caused widespread connection issues on international servers. Which means that customers couldn’t access many international services and websites. As the attack progressed, local bandwidth also became affected and customers were left without much connection at all. “Due to the issues that we are currently experiencing, please be aware that only Cool Ideas DNS, Google DNS, and Cloudflare DNS will be accessible,” it said in a statement on its website. We don’t know who Cool Ideas pissed off, but this is one of the most aggressive DDoS attacks in recent history on the ISP.

Source: Cool Ideas

It’s not Half-Life 3, but Valve’s planning Half-Life: Alyx in VR

Valve has officially revealed the next instalment in its Half-Life series. Although it’s not the highly anticipated Half-Life 3, it’s something. But fans across the internet are divided as to how close this is to a real third-instalment. The new game is monikered Half-Life: Alyx, and is Valve’s new “flagship VR” game set in the Half-Life universe. It’s a prequel to Half-Life 2, and will be released in March 2020 (not that far off, eh?). According to reports, the hgame will work with any Steam VR-compatible headsets, including Valve’s Index, Oculus, HTC Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality. According to the Alyx website, the game will be compatible with a variety of inputs and playing environments — so you can sit at your desk and play, or remove all the furniture from your mom’s living room to play. Whether you’re in the ‘excited’ or ‘meh’ categories, make sure to pre-order the game now, because we reckon it’s gonna be dope. You can pre-order it now on Steam. You’ll also get the game free if you own a Valve Index headset, buuuut you cannot find them locally yet. We’ll have to wait and see come March 2020. Check out the trailer here.

Source: Alyx website

You can now authenticate Twitter without a phone number (yay!)

Twitter has finally ditched the old-school phone number authentication schmick (the Stuff Office had to fight with them last week due to this). Now, it’ll allow users to enrol for its two-factor authentication (2FA) program without a phone number. Because who doe that anymore anyway? It’ll also give users the option to disable SMS-based 2FA, completely. So if you’re a business, and don’t want one single person’s phone number connected to the account (and then that person leaves for the States and you’re stuck…), you can switch it off. The SMS-based authentication is also not very secure, so it’s better to set up a different verification process. Twitter’s authentication will now make use of third-party authenticator apps (like you’d find with Facebook authentication). To set up your Twitter account for 2FA, all you need to do is download an authenticator app, we like Authenticator by Google. The app will generate randomised six-digit one-time passwords to authenticate your identity when signing in. Do it.