A huge blue light flashed brightly over over the New York City skyline late Thursday night. New Yorkers filled social media with photos and videos of the phenomenon, which appeared to be centered over the borough of Queens. In short, people freaked out.

Con Edison quickly put everyone’s alien-conspiracy theories to bed. The utility company tweeted that what New Yorkers were seeing was the effect of a brief electrical fire that broke out at a substation in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens. 

ConEd’s explanation made sense, but questions remained. For starters, why was the light so big and blue? In a phone conversation with a Con Edison spokesperson, Mashable got to the bottom of what happened, which was initially reported to be a transformer explosion.

“The failure was on a piece of equipment that monitors voltage, not a transformer explosion,” explained a Con Edison spokesman. “The failure caused a transmission dip so some people may have noticed their lights or TV flicker or go out. The grid is all interconnected. Anyone in New York City and possibly even Westchester County could have noticed an impact.”

And the bright blue light?

“There are failures of substation equipment that could result in an arc flash,” the spokesman said. “The failure results in the release of heat and light. The light is what folks saw last night.” 

An arc flash occurs when an electric current flows through the air in between conductors. This flash of light was what New Yorkers saw in the sky. Con Edison also tweeted a more accurate summary of last night’s events in a tweet on Friday.

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The Con Edison spokesman added that the light phenomenon on Thursday night lasted for approximately 10 minutes. The blue tinted light may have been intensified due to the cloud cover over the New York City sky last night, some reports postulated.

“This sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time,” said the spokesperson. “But there was one that also got considerable attention during Hurricane Sandy.”

So definitely not aliens. But “arc flash” lets you tick at least one term off your sci-fi checklist.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is reportedly moving full speed ahead when it comes to autonomous driving.  

Based on an email Electrek obtained this week, Musk is searching for Tesla employees to test out a new hardware update for the currently semi-autonomous driver assistance feature, Autopilot.

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We reached out to Tesla to confirm the authenticity of the email, but haven’t heard back.

The new self-driving program has “over 1000% more capability than [previous hardware]!” Musk exclaimed in the email. Now he needs “a few hundred more internal participants” to test out new capabilities made possible by Tesla’s neural net, which the company has called the “world’s most advanced computer for autonomous driving.” Musk also revealed in an earnings call that Tesla is developing its own AI chip instead of working with a chipmaker.

Tesla owners with Autopilot currently can rely on the car to stay in its lane, help steer, brake suddenly, and drive itself out of a driveway or parking spot. A call also went out for Tesla testers in September.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/192179726

As of June, Tesla had self-driving permits for 39 vehicles in California as long as a safety driver was present, according to DMV records. It’s unclear if the new “Full Self-Driving Test Program” will qualify as fully autonomous driving, and whether it’ll take place on public roads and highways or be restricted to Tesla property.

Back in October, Autopilot’s Full Self-Driving option (an additional $3,000 on top of the $5,000 driver assistance feature) was removed from vehicles. Since 2016, Tesla owners had the option to pay for a feature that would (ideally) be added to their cars in the future. 

Now Musk is pushing to bring fully autonomous hardware to customers in 2019. For Musk, that means cars that switch lanes, exit the freeway, self-park, and let you drive with your hands off the wheel and eyes off the road for short and long distances.

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For employees willing to test out the new driving feature, the $8,000 cost will be waived, Musk said in the email. Always the salesman, Musk added, “This is the last time the offer will be made.”

Maybe now Autopilot can live up to its misleading name.

For North Korean defectors, this is a nightmare come to life.

Hackers stole the personal information of 997 North Korean defectors living in South Korea, the South Korean government reported Friday. 

The identity of the hackers is still unknown. But experts are reportedly worried for the safety and security of defectors and their families, according to the BBC.

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Hana centers are South Korea’s resettlement agencies that work with defectors to introduce and acclimate them to life outside of the North Korean dictatorship. There are 25 centers servicing approximately 32,000 defectors. The centers keep track of defectors with digital records.

That provided hackers with a database of defectors. An employee at the North Gyeongsang resettlement center reportedly opened an email with a malicious attachment, which was able to penetrate his computer. That led to the hacker’s acquisition of the personal details of 997 defectors living in the North Gyeongsang province.

Personal details include names, birth dates, and addresses. The South Korean state said that this is the first significant hack involving defectors. 

The elephant in the room: Was this the North Korean government? 

Apparently the identity of the hacker or hackers is not yet known. But the South Korean government is aware of a North Korean hacking group that targets defectors. And North Korean hackers have been behind other high-profile breaches, notably the 2014 Sony hack.

Even without knowing with certainty the identity of the hackers, experts told the BBC that the breach may make defectors more fearful, and future defectors less willing to come forward. There is a chance that the hack may impact the families of defectors, since the identity of every defector is not known in North Korea.

Mashable has reached out to the U.S. State Department to learn whether the U.S. government is investigating the incident. We will update this story when and if we hear more.

AT&T’s Netgear Nighthawk 5G hotspot, the first consumer mobile 5G device, has been on the market for about a week now, but it’s hard to find any evidence that anyone’s using it. One post on Reddit shows a Speedtest result of 194.88Mbps down — impressive, until you see that the Redditor got 187.44Mbps on AT&T’s 4G network in the same location.

Otherwise, AT&T’s, Netgear’s, and Reddit’s forums are deathly quiet when it comes to any actual 5G users, and Ookla’s Speedtest Intelligence database doesn’t seem to show any dramatic speed upticks in AT&T’s 12 announced 5G cities. The carrier doesn’t seem to have shown the 5G device to any journalists, and there are zero hands-ons being shown on YouTube. The company declined to make a unit available to me when I asked, saying they needed to save the relatively small inventory for customers.

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That said, we haven’t found any evidence that the customers are actually out there in any noticeable number. AT&T’s 5G launch appears to mostly be a paper launch, so the company can say it “launched” in 2018.

The extremely early form of 5G the hotspot is using has lower peak speeds, at approximately 625Mbps, than the carrier’s existing 4G LTE+LAA network, which explains that Redditor’s experience. I explained more about what’s going on with 5G speeds in my story, AT&T’s 5G Will Be Slower and Faster Than LTE. In short, 5G has huge potential but it’s very, very, very, very early right now.

I’ve asked AT&T for more comment, but most of their PR people are off for the holidays.

Unfortunately for everyone, AT&T still plans to muddy the waters by putting a fake “5G” indicator onto its 4G phones. As Fierce Wireless reported, AT&T will soon start changing the “4G LTE” indicator to “5G E” in situations where AT&T offers gigabit LTE. While people who read tech blogs won’t be fooled, millions of less technical consumers will almost certainly think their phones just got a magic upgrade to 5G even though they won’t see improved performance.

The essential element of a 5G network is a new, incompatible-with-older-phones radio system called 5G NR (new radio) which requires new hardware, like the Netgear hotspot. The grain of truth in AT&T’s big lie is that 5G is also a network of networks: initially it can’t even operate without a 4G connection, and one future aspect of 5G will bond 4G and 5G NR channels together for faster speeds. But for AT&T to put a big “5G” stamp on its “5G Evolution” 4G network is to mislead customers and to turn everything on its head.

To use a food metaphor, because it’s Dec. 28, in this case think of 5G NR as a cheesecake and 4G LTE as the crust. Most cheesecakes come with a crust; they’re bonded to each other and make each other better, especially if it’s a graham cracker crust. If you were handed a plate of cheesecake without crust, though, it would still be cheesecake. But if you were just handed a plate of crust, well … that’s “5G E.”

We’re sure to see more 5G shenanigans early next year, and I’ll do my best to try to get more details out of AT&T and Netgear at the CES 2019 trade show next week.

This article originally published at PCMag
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