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Meta is throwing billions of dollars into building out the metaverse as the future of social networking but in the near term, the tech giant is looking toward the power of messaging to connect users in a more personal way. From a report: On that front, the company today introduced its plans for a significant update to its WhatsApp messaging app that will allow users to now not only connect privately with friends and family, as before, but also participate in larger discussion groups, called Communities. These groups aim to serve as a more feature-rich replacement for people's larger group chats with added support for tools like file-sharing of up to 2GB, 32-person group calls, emoji reactions, as well as admin tools and moderation controls, among other things. The feature has been under development for some time as the next big iteration for the WhatsApp platform, meant to capitalize on the app's existing end-to-end encryption as well as users' growing desire to join private communities outside of larger social platforms, like Facebook. In particular, Communities could present a challenge to other messaging apps like Telegram -- which has recently become a prominent player in communications related to the Russia-Ukraine war -- in addition to other private messaging platforms, like iMessage or Signal, as well as apps like GroupMe, Band, Remind and others used to communicate with groups.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has responded to Meta's plan to take a nearly 50% commission for digital asset purchases made inside the metaverse after complaining about fees in the App Store, calling the decision hypocritical. From a report: Yesterday, it was revealed that Meta, more commonly known as Facebook, plans to take a steep 47.5% commission for digital asset purchases made inside the so-called "metaverse." The 47.5% cut includes a 30% hardware fee on top of a 17.5% platform fee. Responding to the plan, Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz told MarketWatch that Facebook is simply being hypocritical and that while it complains about Apple's own platform fees, it wants to charge creators even more. "Meta has repeatedly taken aim at Apple for charging developers a 30% commission for in-app purchases in the App Store -- and have used small businesses and creators as a scapegoat at every turn," Apple spokesman Fred Sainz stated in an email to MarketWatch. "Now -- Meta seeks to charge those same creators significantly more than any other platform. [Meta's] announcement lays bare Meta's hypocrisy. It goes to show that while they seek to use Apple's platform for free, they happily take from the creators and small businesses that use their own."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Billionaire Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter for about $41 billion, just days after rejecting a seat on the social media company's board. From a report: Musk's offer price of $54.20 per share, which was disclosedin a regulatory filing on Thursday, represents a 38% premium to Twitter's April 1 close, the last trading day before the Tesla CEO's more than 9% stake in the company was made public. Twitter's shares jumped 12% in premarket trading. "Since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company," Musk said in a letter to Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor. "My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder," Musk said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Another piece of space infrastructure for Ukraine is under attack, according to an NBC report. Jammers from Russian forces besieging the country are targeting global positioning system (GPS) satellite signals that are used for navigation, mapping and other purposes, the report said, quoting the U.S. Space Force. "Ukraine may not be able to use GPS because there are jammers around that prevent them from receiving any usable signal," Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force's vice chief of space operations, told NBC Nightly News Monday (April 11). "Certainly the Russians understand the value and importance of GPS and try to prevent others from using it," Thompson added. He noted that Russia has not directly attacked any satellites in orbit, but the Space Force is keeping an eye out for such possibilities. Specifically, Russia is targeting the Navstar system of satellites used by the United States and made available openly to many countries around the world, Thompson said. (Russia has its own independent system, called GLONASS, while the Europeans have one called Galileo and China has one called Beidou.) Navstar uses 24 main satellites that each orbit the Earth every 12 hours. The system works by sending synchronized signals to users on Earth. Because the satellites move in different directions, the user receives their signals at slightly different times. When four satellites are available, GPS receivers can use their signals to calculate the user's position, often to within just a few feet. In late February shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, SpaceX's Starlink satellites were activated over the country to help restore internet services destroyed by the Russians. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk later warned that Starlink user terminals in Ukraine could be targeted by Russia and advised users to take precautions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most simulations of our climate's future may be overly sensitive to Arctic ice melt as a cause of abrupt changes in ocean circulation, according to new research led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Phys.Org reports: Climate scientists count the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (or AMOC) among the biggest tipping points on the way to a planetary climate disaster. The Atlantic Ocean current acts like a conveyor belt carrying warm tropical surface water north and cooler, heavier deeper water south. [...] In a study published [...] in the journal Nature Climate Change, He and Oregon State University paleoclimatologist Peter Clark describe a new model simulation that matches the warmth of the last 10,000 years. And they did it by doing away with the trigger most scientists believe stalls or shuts down the AMOC. Warming temperatures on Earth's surface cause sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and the Greenland Ice Sheet to melt, releasing fresh water into the ocean. Scientists widely believed that the freshwater influx disrupts the density differences in the North Atlantic that make the AMOC's north-bound water sink and turn back south. "The problem," says He, "is with the geological climate data." Though the climate record shows an abundance of freshwater that came from the final melting of the ice sheets over North America and Europe, the AMOC barely changed. So, He removed the assumption of a freshwater deluge from his model. "Without the freshwater coming in making the AMOC slow down in the model, we get a simulation with much better, lasting agreement with the temperature data from the climate record," He says. "The important result is that the AMOC appears to be less sensitive to freshwater forcing than has long been thought, according to both the data and model." [...] The widespread consequences of a drastic weakening of the AMOC include rapid sea-level rise on the eastern coast of North America, cooling over Europe that could disrupt agriculture, a parched Amazon rainforest and disruption of Asian monsoons. The new modeling study anticipates a much smaller reduction in AMOC strength, but that doesn't rule out abrupt change.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: How do you bottle renewable energy for when the Sun doesn't shine and the wind won't blow? That's one of the most vexing questions standing in the way of a greener electrical grid. Massive battery banks are one answer. But they're expensive and best at storing energy for a few hours, not for days long stretches of cloudy weather or calm. Another strategy is to use surplus energy to heat a large mass of material to ultrahigh temperatures, then tap the energy as needed. This week, researchers report a major improvement in a key part of that scheme: a device for turning the stored heat back into electricity. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory achieved a nearly 30% jump in the efficiency of a thermophotovoltaic (TPV), a semiconductor structure that converts photons emitted from a heat source to electricity, just as a solar cell transforms sunlight into power. "This is very exciting stuff," says Andrej Lenert, a materials engineer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "This is the first time [TPVs have] gotten into really promising efficiency ranges, which is ultimately what matters for a lot of applications." Together with related advances, he and others say, the new work gives a major boost to efforts to roll out thermal batteries on a large scale, as cheap backup for renewable power systems. The idea is to feed surplus wind or solar electricity to a heating element, which boosts the temperature of a liquid metal bath or a graphite block to several thousand degrees. The heat can be turned back into electricity by making steam that drives a turbine, but there are trade-offs. High temperatures raise the conversion efficiency, but turbine materials begin to break down at about 1500C. TPVs offer an alternative: Funnel the stored heat to a metal film or filament, setting it aglow like the tungsten wire in an incandescent light bulb, then use TPVs to absorb the emitted light and turn it to electricity. For the new device, Asegun Henry, an MIT mechanical engineer, tinkered with both the emitter and the TPV itself. Previous TPV setups heated the emitters to about 1400C, which maximized their brightness in the wavelength range for which TPVs were optimized. Henry aimed to push the temperature 1000C higher, where tungsten emits more photons at higher energies, which could improve the energy conversion. But that meant reworking the TPVs as well. With researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Henry's team laid down more than two dozen thin layers of different semiconductors to create two separate cells stacked one on top of another. The top cell absorbs mostly visible and ultraviolet photons, whereas the lower cell absorbs mostly infrared. A thin gold sheet under the bottom cell reflects low-energy photons the TPVs couldn't harvest. The tungsten reabsorbs that energy, preventing it from being lost. The result, the group reports today in Nature, is a TPV tandem that converts 41.1% of the energy emitted from a 2400C tungsten filament to electricity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Putin said Russia is working on a "next-generation transport ship," as well as a nuclear-powered space tug. And, according to Russian media reports, Putin added, "We will resume the lunar program." The next-generation ship presumably refers to the "Orel," or Eagle, spacecraft that would be capable of launching cosmonauts into low Earth orbit as well as to the Moon. The problem with this is that Orel, under various guises and names, has been in development for nearly two decades and is likely years away from flying -- if it ever does. And the nuclear-powered space tug is a concept that is years or more likely decades-to-never away from launching. That leaves the lunar program Putin mentioned. He is referring to a series of three robotic missions planned for launch to the Moon, Luna 25, Luna 26, and Luna 27. These missions, too, have been in the planning stages for a long, long time. Luna 25 was originally scheduled to launch on a Soyuz rocket a decade ago, and its current launch date is now August 2022. There is reason to be skeptical about all of the above happening, because even before the war in Ukraine, Putin significantly slashed Roscosmos' budget. Now, more resources than ever will likely be devoted to the war effort. Hours after Putin made his announcements, the European Space Agency (ESA) Council agreed to discontinue cooperative activities with Russia on the three Luna missions. "The Russian aggression against Ukraine and the resulting sanctions put in place represent a fundamental change of circumstances and make it impossible for ESA to implement the planned lunar cooperation," the space agency said in a statement. Instead, the council said it would now work with NASA and its commercial partners.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Club Penguin Rewritten," a popular remake of Club Penguin enjoyed by thousands of gamers, has been seized by the City of London Police, with three people in connection with the site's shuttering reportedly arrested for allegedly distributing copyrighted material. "Over 140,000 users were members of a Discord server for the game until today, when every message on the Discord disappeared," reports TechCrunch. From the report: In 2007, Disney purchased Club Penguin -- the children's RPG that served as my first introduction to online fandom -- for a whopping $700 million. Even then, as a child with little context about tech industry acquisitions, the purchase seemed foreboding (at least my friends thought so on the Miniclip forums, where I fraudulently claimed to be 13). But eventually, those of us who were dedicated fans of virtual sledding games and dance parties grew out of it, and after once boasting 200 million users, the game was shut down due to lack of interest in 2017. Disney tried to shuttle remaining players to a new mobile game called Club Penguin Island, but it only lasted for a year. But ever since the end of Club Penguin -- when the iceberg finally tipped in a strangely emotional moment -- there have always been remakes out there for nostalgic adults to relive their days of collecting puffles, dancing in the pizza shop and speed-running bans. Only one message on the Discord remains, posted early this morning by an admin: "CPRewritten is shutting down effective immediately due to a full request by Disney," the admin said. "We have voluntarily given control over the website to the police for them to continue their copyright investigation." TechCrunch reached out to the City of London Police and Disney to verify these claims but did not hear back before publication. In 2020, Disney shut down "Club Penguin Online," another copy of the game that acquired over a million new players during the pandemic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Assembly member Cristina Garcia has cosponsored a bill to make the state's official workweek 32 hours for companies with 500 or more employees. CBS News reports: Any work done past that cutoff would come with a hefty raise: Employers would be required to pay time-and-a-half to workers whose hours run over 32 a week. And work stretching past 12 hours a day or into seven days a week would be paid at double the normal wage. Employers subject to the law, which would apply to 20% of California's workforce, also would be barred from reducing people's pay if they work less than their standard workweek, Garcia told CBS News. The bill would not apply to workers who are represented by a union and covered by a collective bargaining agreement. The proposed law would cover about 2,600 companies in California, according to the Employment Development Department (PDF). The California Chamber of Commerce called it a "job killer," saying it would make hiring more expensive and lead to a drop in jobs in California. "Labor costs are often one of the highest costs a business faces," Ashley Hoffman, policy advocate with the Chamber, wrote to bill cosponsor Evan Low last week. "[B]usinesses often operate on thin profit margins and... the number of employees you have does not dictate financial success," she wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mspohr shares a report from the New York Times: In early March, days after Russia invaded Ukraine and began cracking down on dissent at home, Konstantin Siniushin, a venture capitalist in Riga, Latvia, helped charter two planes out of Russia to help people flee. Both planes departed from Moscow, carrying tech workers from the Russian capital as well as St. Petersburg, Perm, Ekaterinburg and other cities. Together, the planes moved about 300 software developers, entrepreneurs and other technology specialists out of the country, including 30 Russian workers from start-ups backed by Mr. Siniushin. The planes flew south past the Black Sea to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where thousands of other Russian tech workers fled in the weeks after the invasion. Thousands more flew to Georgia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and other countries that accept Russian citizens without visas. By March 22, a Russian tech industry trade group estimated that between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers had left the country and that an additional 70,000 to 100,000 would soon follow. They are part of a much larger exodus of workers from Russia, but their departure could have an even more lasting impact on the country's economy. The long-run impact may be more significant than the short-run impact," said Barry Ickes, head of the economics department at Pennsylvania State University, who specializes in the Russian economy. "Eventually, Russia has to diversify its economy away from oil and gas, and it has to accelerate productivity growth. Tech was a natural way of doing that." Before all this started, Russia had such a strong technology base," [Artem Taganov, founder and chief executive of a Russian start-up called HintEd] said. "Now, we have a brain drain that will continue for the next five to 10 years."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: The parent company of Dungeons & Dragons developer Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, announced Wednesday it is acquiring D&D Beyond, one of the franchise's most popular officially licensed digital toolsets and online storefronts. Wizards said on its official website it has "no plans to stop supporting D&D Beyond," and all purchases made by consumers will be honored going forward. D&D Beyond is the creation of Curse, and launched in 2017. The platform is, at its core, a web application and mobile app that provides players and Dungeon Masters (DMs) with the tools they need to play D&D in person or online. Features include a character builder, a character sheet, and a digital dice-rolling function. For DMs, it allows users to purchase official campaign books and other materials digitally for use inside the app. Prices for D&D books are traditionally more or less the same on D&D Beyond as they are on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and at your local game store. D&D Beyond was purchased by Fandom in 2018 and, according to Hasbro, the relationship has been very lucrative since that time. "Over the last three years, the royalty paid to Hasbro by D&D Beyond has represented a significant contribution to the fastest growing source of revenue for Dungeons & Dragons," Hasbro said. That is undoubtedly true, as financial disclosures show that Wizards -- and its attached digital properties, including Magic: The Gathering Arena -- earned more than $1 billion for the first time in 2021. [...] Wizards' new president, Cynthia Williams, has bigger goals in mind. "The strategic acquisition of D&D Beyond will deliver a direct relationship with fans, providing valuable, data-driven insights to unlock opportunities for growth in new product development, live services and tools, and regional expansions," Williams said in a news release. "As part of Wizards, the brand's leadership will soon be able to drive a unified, player-centric vision of the world's greatest role-playing game on all platforms."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Git team has issued an update to fix a bug in Git for Windows that "affects multi-user hardware where untrusted parties have write access to the same hard disk," reports The Register. Specifically, the update is concerned with CVE-2022-24765. From the report: Arguably, if an "untrusted party" has write access to a hard disk, then all bets are off when it comes to the nooks and crannies of a PC anyway. In this case, the miscreants would only need to create the folder c:\.git, "which would be picked up by Git operations run supposedly outside a repository while searching for a Git directory," according to NIST. The result is that Git would use the config in the directory. NIST went on to list potentially vulnerable products, which included Visual Studio. "Users of the Microsoft fork of Git are vulnerable simply by starting a Git Bash." The Git team was little blunter about the vulnerability, and warned that "Merely having a Git-aware prompt that runs 'git status' (or 'git diff') and navigating to a directory which is supposedly not a Git worktree, or opening such a directory in an editor or IDE such as VS Code or Atom, will potentially run commands defined by that other user." [...] To deal with the issue, the Git team recommends an update. Alternatively, a user could create that .git folder themselves and remove read/write access as workaround or "define or extend 'GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES' to cover the parent directory of the user profile," according to NIST.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon said Wednesday it plans to add a fuel and inflation surcharge of roughly 5% to existing fees it collects from U.S. third-party sellers who use the company's fulfillment services. CNBC reports: The fee will go into effect in about two weeks, and is "subject to change," the company said in a notice to sellers that was viewed by CNBC. "The surcharge will apply to all product types, such as non-apparel, apparel, dangerous goods, and Small and Light items," the notice stated. "The surcharge will apply to all units shipped from fulfillment centers starting April 28." Some 89% of Amazon's 2 million-plus sellers used FBA in 2021, according to a report from Jungle Scout, which creates product research software for Amazon sellers. "In 2022, we expected a return to normalcy as COVID-19 restrictions around the world eased, but fuel and inflation have presented further challenges," an Amazon spokesperson said in an email to CNBC. "It is still unclear if these inflationary costs will go up or down, or for how long they will persist, so rather than a permanent fee change, we will be employing a fuel and inflation surcharge for the first time -- a mechanism broadly used across supply chain providers." Yesterday, the Labor Department said that its consumer price index jumped 8.5% in March from 12 months earlier, the sharpest year-over-year increase since 1981.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: A non-fungible token (NFT) of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first ever tweet could sell for just under $280. The current owner of the NFT listed it for $48 million last week. Iranian-born crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi purchased the NFT for $2.9 million in March 2021. Last Thursday, he announced on Twitter that he wished to sell the NFT, and pledged 50% of its proceeds (which he thought would exceed $25 million) to charity. The auction closed Wednesday, with just seven total offers ranging from 0.09 ETH ($277 at current prices) to 0.0019 ETH (almost $6). "The deadline I set was over, but if I get a good offer, I might accept it, I might never sell it," Estavi told CoinDesk via a WhatsApp message on Wednesday. Estavi has two days to accept the bid, or it will expire.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wiredmikey writes: The U.S government is sounding a loud alarm after discovering new custom tools capable of full system compromise and disruption of ICS/SCADA devices and servers. A joint advisory from the Department of Energy, CISA, NSA and the FBI warned that unidentified APT actors have created specialized tools capable of causing major damage to PLCs from Schneider Electric and OMRON Corp. and servers from open-source OPC Foundation. Privately owned ICS security firm Dragos issued a separate notice documenting what is now the seventh known industrial control system (ICS)-specific malware. "[This] is a modular ICS attack framework that an adversary could leverage to cause disruption, degradation, and possibly even destruction depending on targets and the environment," the company said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

waspleg writes: More than 200 long-time Wikipedia editors have requested that the Wikimedia Foundation stop accepting cryptocurrency donations. The foundation received crypto donations worth about $130,000 in the most recent fiscal year -- less than 0.1 percent of the foundation's revenue, which topped $150 million last year. In her proposal for the Wikimedia Foundation, GorillaWarfare added that 'Bitcoin and Ethereum are the two most highly used cryptocurrencies, and are both proof-of-work, using an enormous amount of energy.' According to one widely cited estimate, the bitcoin network consumes around 200 TWh of energy per year. That's about as much energy as is consumed by 70 million people in Thailand. And it works out to around 2,000 kWh per bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin defenders countered that bitcoin's energy usage is driven by its mining process, which consumes about the same amount of energy regardless of the number of transactions. So accepting any given bitcoin donation won't necessarily lead to more carbon emissions. But cryptocurrency critics argued that Wikimedia's de facto endorsement of cryptocurrencies may help to push up their price. And the more expensive bitcoin is, the more energy miners will devote to creating new ones. If the foundation complies with the community's request, it wouldn't be the first organization to stop using cryptocurrencies due to environmental concerns. Earlier this month, the Mozilla Foundation announced it would stop accepting cryptocurrencies that use the energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus process. These include bitcoin and ether -- though the latter is expected to convert to a proof-of-stake model in the future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By combining two processors into one, the company has squeezed a surprising amount of performance out of silicon. From a report: "UltraFusion gave us the tools we needed to be able to fill up that box with as much compute as we could," Tim Millet, vice president of hardware technologies at Apple, says of the Mac Studio. Benchmarking of the M1 Ultra has shown it to be competitive with the fastest high-end computer chips and graphics processor on the market. Millet says some of the chip's capabilities, such as its potential for running AI applications, will become apparent over time, as developers port over the necessary software libraries. The M1 Ultra is part of a broader industry shift toward more modular chips. Intel is developing a technology that allows different pieces of silicon, dubbed "chiplets," to be stacked on top of one another to create custom designs that do not need to be redesigned from scratch. The company's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has identified this "advanced packaging" as one pillar of a grand turnaround plan. Intel's competitor AMD is already using a 3D stacking technology from TSMC to build some server and high-end PC chips. This month, Intel, AMD, Samsung, TSMC, and ARM announced a consortium to work on a new standard for chiplet designs. In a more radical approach, the M1 Ultra uses the chiplet concept to connect entire chips together. Apple's new chip is all about increasing overall processing power. "Depending on how you define Moore's law, this approach allows you to create systems that engage many more transistors than what fits on one chip," says Jesus del Alamo, a professor at MIT who researches new chip components. He adds that it is significant that TSMC, at the cutting edge of chipmaking, is looking for new ways to keep performance rising. "Clearly, the chip industry sees that progress in the future is going to come not only from Moore's law but also from creating systems that could be fabricated by different technologies yet to be brought together," he says. "Others are doing similar things, and we certainly see a trend towards more of these chiplet designs," adds Linley Gwennap, author of the Microprocessor Report, an industry newsletter. The rise of modular chipmaking might help boost the performance of future devices, but it could also change the economics of chipmaking. Without Moore's law, a chip with twice the transistors may cost twice as much. "With chiplets, I can still sell you the base chip for, say, $300, the double chip for $600, and the uber-double chip for $1,200," says Todd Austin, an electrical engineer at the University of Michigan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the first time the world is in a position to limit global heating to under 2C, according to the first in-depth analysis of the net zero pledges made by nations at the UN Cop26 climate summit in December. From a report: Before these pledges it was more than likely that at the peak of the climate crisis there would be a temperature rise above 2C, bringing more severe impacts for billions of people. Now it is more likely that the peak temperature rise will be about 1.9C. However, the researchers said this depended on all nations implementing their pledges on time and in full, and warned that the policies to do so were not in place. The pledges also include those that developing countries have said will not happen without more financial and technical support. Achieving the pledges needed for the 2C limit was a "historic milestone," and good news, the scientists said. However, they said the bad news was that the cuts in global emissions currently planned by 2030 were way off track to keep the peak below 1.5C. That is the global goal, but currently there is less than a 10% chance of hitting that target.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gergely Orosz: We are in the middle of the longest outage Atlassian has had. Close to 400 companies and anywhere from 50,000 to 400,000 users had no access to JIRA, Confluence, OpsGenie, JIRA Status page, and other Atlassian Cloud services. The outage is its 9th day, having started on Monday, 4th of April. Atlassian estimates many impacted customers will be unable to access their services for another two weeks. At the time of writing, 45% of companies have seen their access restored. For most of this outage, Atlassian has gone silent in communications across their main channels such as Twitter or the community forums. It took until Day 9 for executives at the company to acknowledge the outage. While the company stayed silent, outage news started trending in niche communities. In these forums, people tried to guess causes of the outage, wonder why there is full radio silence, and many took to mocking the company for how it is handling the situation. Atlassian did no better with communicating with customers during this time. Impacted companies received templated emails and no answers to their questions. After I tweeted about this outage, several Atlassian customers turned to me to vent about the situation, and hope I can offer more details. Customers claimed how the company's statements made it seem they received support, which they, in fact, did not. Several customers hoped I could help get the attention of the company which had not given them any details, beyond telling them to wait weeks until their data is restored.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After launching as "IMDb Freedive" back in 2019, IMDb TV quickly faded into the background of the ongoing streaming wars that parent company Amazon had already established a respectable foothold in. While that initial rebrand never quite managed to put the fledgling platform and its content on the map, Amazon's just announced its plan to reintroduce the streamer yet again under new branding ahead of a massive content push. From a report: Going forward, IMDb TV will be known as "Amazon Freevee," a name meant to emphasize that the ad-supported platform is free to viewers. In a press release detailing its vision for Freevee's future, director Ashraf Alkarmi framed the service as a supplemental platform meant to appeal to consumers interested in watching "premium" series and films with significantly fewer commercial interruptions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Monday, Google quietly launched the Switch to Android app on the App Store in a number of global markets, including the U.S. From a report: As expected, the app promises to make the transition between mobile platforms easier to manage by helping users import their contacts, calendar, photos, and videos to their new Android phone. The app also instructs users how to turn off Apple's iMessage in order to get text messages on their new device and has them connect with iCloud to migrate their photo and video library to Android.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The crypto payments startup Circle Internet Financial said it's closer to submitting an application to operate as a bank in the U.S., pushing forward with a months-old plan even as regulators make it more difficult for crypto companies to secure this kind of license. From a report: Circle, the issuer of the second-largest stablecoin, disclosed its intention to become a crypto bank in August and has held ongoing discussions with regulators since then, Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Allaire said in an interview. He declined to say when the company would submit the application, saying only that it would be "hopefully in the near future." The company, which issues USD Coin, is deeply funded. On Tuesday, Circle said it raised $400 million from BlackRock, Fidelity Management and Research and others. The startup plans to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company in a deal valued at $9 billion. The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees bank charters, has discussed a variety of topics with Circle management in regards to the company's banking ambitions. Those include interoperability between blockchains and how to assess the operational risks of a specific blockchain, according to Allaire. A representative for the OCC declined to comment on the conversations with Circle. The risk of connecting different blockchains was laid bare recently. Hacks involving crypto bridges totaled more than $1 billion in a little over a year, including a $600 million attack involving the crypto video game Axie Infinity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Zuckerberg has a grandiose vision for the metaverse, and he hopes that you'll one day see the same thing, too -- quite literally, through a pair of augmented reality glasses. The Verge reports: Still, Zuckerberg has ambitious goals for when his high-tech glasses will be a reality. Employees are racing to deliver the first generation by 2024 and are already working on a lighter, more advanced design for 2026, followed by a third version in 2028.ââ The details, which together give the first comprehensive look at Meta's AR hardware ambitions, were shared with The Verge by people familiar with the roadmap who weren't authorized to speak publicly. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment for this story. If the AR glasses and the other futuristic hardware Meta is building eventually catch on, they could cast the company, and by extension Zuckerberg, in a new light. "Zuck's ego is intertwined with [the glasses]," a former employee who worked on the project tells me. "He wants it to be an iPhone moment." Meta's CEO also sees the AR glasses, dubbed Project Nazare, as a way to get out from under the thumb of Apple and Google, which together dictate the terms that apps like Facebook have to abide by on mobile phones. The first version of Nazare is designed to work independently from a mobile phone with the assistance of a wireless, phone-shaped device that offloads parts of the computing required for the glasses to operate. A marquee feature will be the ability to communicate and interact with holograms of other people through the glasses, which Zuckerberg believes will, over time, provide people with a more immersive, compelling experience than the video calling that exists today.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Celsius will stop offering its crypto interest accounts to US users at the end of this week. From a report: Per an April 11 announcement, the crypto lender will transition new deposits from US users to custody accounts. Critically, those accounts will not pay interest, unless their owners are accredited investors. Existing deposits will, however, continue to pay normal interest. As of today, those interest rates on offer go as high as 18%, with stablecoins paying over 7% returns. The move happens as Celsius, as well as competitors like BlockFi and Nexo, have faced increasing scrutiny from US securities regulators. The New York Attorney General sent letters to firms offering crypto interest accounts in October. Nexo, which is not based in the United States, cut off new US accounts from earning interest back in February.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet's Google said on Wednesday it plans to invest about $9.5 billion across its U.S. offices and data centers this year, up from $7 billion last year. From a report: Google said the investment will create at least 12,000 full-time jobs in 2022 and focus on data centers in several states including Nevada, Nebraska and Virginia. The company will open a new office in Atlanta this year, and expand its data center in Storey County, Nevada, it added. "It might seem counterintuitive to step up our investment in physical offices even as we embrace more flexibility in how we work. Yet we believe it's more important than ever to invest in our campuses...," Google said in a statement. Google has been trying to bring back its employees to some of its offices in the United States, the UK and Asia Pacific by mandating working from office for about three days a week, a step to end policies that let employees work remotely because of COVID-19 concerns.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WeWork is trying to strengthen its technology credentials with a new software product it hopes to sell to employers. From a report: The co-working company will partner with the real estate software maker Yardi Systems to develop WeWork Workplace, a tool that will let companies manage their employees and their office space the same way WeWork does. The software, which can be used for tasks such as booking conference rooms, coordinating flexible desk usage with hybrid workers and analyzing which spaces are used the most, is set to debut this summer, the company plans to announce Wednesday. Yardi's existing tools help landlords and asset managers oversee their property operations and finances. WeWork's core business is renting out desks and offices, but the company has also worked to expand beyond that in recent years -- though not as far afield as the bewildering choices of its co-founder and former chief executive officer, Adam Neumann, who oversaw WeWork's expansion into an elementary school and residential co-living.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: Google will start highlighting reputable developers and publishers with a special badge. Google wrote in an email to Chrome Web Store developers on Friday, "we're happy to announce two new extension badges to help us deliver on that goal: the Featured badge and the Established publisher badge. Both of these badges will appear in the store in the next few weeks. Developers who earn these badges may receive higher rankings in search and filtering, and may also see their extensions appear in special promotions both on and off Chrome Web Store." "Developers who earn these badges may receive higher rankings in search and filtering" The first is a Featured badge, which "will be granted to extensions that follow our technical best practices and meet a high standard of user experience and design." This badge is given to extensions manually by the Chrome Web Store team, so there isn't a full (public) list of guidelines, but the email mentioned a clear store listing page and following best practices as some of the criteria. The Established publisher badge will be granted automatically to developers and publisher accounts that have been verified and "established a consistent positive track record with Google services and compliance with the Developer Program Policy." In other words, most developers that haven't broke Chrome Web Store rules will probably get the badge at some point. Google says publishers will not be able to pay money for either badge, but the company is working on ways for developers to request consideration. Starting on April 20, developers will be able to nominate their own extensions for a Featured badge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mike Bouma writes: I just bought the A500 Mini here in the Netherlands. The first reviews are now available. The Guardian gives the device a 4 out of 5 score in their review: "The A500 is a robust piece of tech nostalgia that will give veteran fans many hours of nostalgic pleasure while also providing an accessible means of introducing younger family members to the Amiga scene. The colorful sprites, pounding techno soundtracks and sardonic wit of the beloved Sensible Software, Team 17 and Bitmap Brothers games retain their appeal and it has been fascinating to rediscover how much the modern independent gaming scene owes to this 35-year-old home computer." Nintendo Life has reviewed the device, giving it an 8 out of 10 score: "As such, this is an intriguing device for anyone who is even remotely interested in tracking the development of the games industry -- and while its 120-pound price tag makes it more expensive than many of its micro-console rivals, the ability to side-load games is very welcome indeed." Express.co.uk gives the device a 3.5 out of 5 score in their review: "Overall, the Amiga 500 Mini is a strong addition to the crowded classic console market that will appeal mostly to those that have a lot of nostalgia for this iconic PC gaming machine. And the ability to add extra games is a great little bonus which will add plenty of extra life to the system." Furthermore, various YouTubers have reviewed the A500 Mini, including Retro Recipes, which gives the device a perfect 5 out of 5 score while stating it beats expectations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After announcing earlier this week that creators can sell digital items in Horizon Worlds for real money, Meta has offered details about how many fees creators will have to pay on earnings made through the platform. According to Road to VR, "Meta explained that anything sold in Horizon Worlds would be subject to the same 30% fee the company charges developers selling apps through its VR platform and then an additional 25% fee on top of the remaining amount." From the report: The company provided the following example: "...if a creator sells an item for $1.00, then the Meta Quest Store fee would be $0.30 and the Horizon Platform fee would be $0.17, leaving $0.53 for the Creator before any applicable taxes." That's an effective rate of 47.5% of anything sold on Horizon Worlds to Meta, leaving 52.5% to the creator. That's a pretty hefty take, but not entirely out of line with contemporaries. Roblox, for instance, takes between 30% and 70% of the revenue generated by creators depending upon whether the creator sold the item directly to customers or if the item was sold on the Roblox marketplace or by another party. These are big fees, no doubt, but creators are getting something in return. Horizon Worlds, for instance, offers up its self-contained collaborative building tools, access to an audience, and handles all hosting and networking costs associated with the things creators build. Whether that's worth 47.5% of what someone manages to sell on the platform is going to be up to the creator.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: More than half a decade has passed since the notorious Russian hackers known as Sandworm targeted an electrical transmission station north of Kyiv a week before Christmas in 2016, using a unique, automated piece of code to interact directly with the station's circuit breakers and turn off the lights to a fraction of Ukraine's capital. That unprecedented specimen of industrial control system malware has never been seen again -- until now: In the midst of Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine, Sandworm appears to be pulling out its old tricks. On Tuesday, the Ukrainian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) and the Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET issued advisories that the Sandworm hacker group, confirmed to be Unit 74455 of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency, had targeted high-voltage electrical substations in Ukraine using a variation on a piece of malware known as Industroyer or Crash Override. The new malware, dubbed Industroyer2, can interact directly with equipment in electrical utilities to send commands to substation devices that control the flow of power, just like that earlier sample. It signals that Russia's most aggressive cyberattack team attempted a third blackout in Ukraine, years after its historic cyberattacks on the Ukrainian power grid in 2015 and 2016, still the only confirmed blackouts known to have been caused by hackers. ESET and CERT-UA say the malware was planted on target systems within a regional Ukrainian energy firm on Friday. CERT-UA says that the attack was successfully detected in progress and stopped before any actual blackout could be triggered. But an earlier, private advisory from CERT-UA last week, first reported by MIT Technology Review today, stated that power had been temporarily switched off to nine electrical substations. Both CERT-UA and ESET declined to name the affected utility. But more than 2 million people live in the area it serves, according to Farid Safarov, Ukraine's deputy minister of energy. [...] The revelation of Sandworm's attempted blackout attack provides more evidence that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by a new wave of cyberattacks on the country's networks and critical infrastructure, though with only mixed success.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, researchers from Harvard and MIT detail work they've done on a "living cellular therapeutic device" that promises to protect humans from the harmful side effects antibiotics can have on our guts. Engadget reports: Per Science Daily, they modified a strain of bacteria that is frequently used in cheese production to deliver an enzyme that can break down beta-lactam antibiotics. Many of the most commonly prescribed antibiotics in the US, including penicillin, fall under that family. Using gene editing, they further modified how their bacterium synthesizes the enzyme to prevent it from transferring that capability to other bacteria. The result is a treatment that reduces the harmful effects of antibiotics while still allowing those drugs to do their work. In a study involving mice, the researchers found their bacteria "significantly" reduced the damage ampicillin did to the test subject's gut microbes and allowed those communities to recover fully after just three days. By contrast, in mice that only received the antibiotic, the researchers saw a much greater loss of microbial diversity. "We are now focusing on getting these living therapies to patients and are finalizing the design of an effective, short, and inexpensive clinical trial," said Andres Cubillos-Ruiz, the lead author of the study.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A police officer in Santa Ana, California, admitted to blaring Disney favorites from a squad car PA system in an attempt to keep citizens' videos of their actions off of YouTube. Jalopnik reports: It just so happens they woke up a sleeping city council member, who took police to task for their annoying and suspicious tactic. Using copyright infringement against those who record police actions hasn't really work so far, which may be why this officer decided to really blare Disney tunes during an investigation of a car theft. At the moment, the video posted by Santa Ana Audits is still up after being posted six days ago, so it's safe to say this officer woke up an entire community for nothing. Santa Ana PD release a statement on Twitter acknowledging the video. Santa Ana PD told Vice that using squad car audio system is not department policy. YouTube won't always remove a video for copyright infringement. Sometimes the site will place an ad on the video, with proceeds going to the copyright holder.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon workers only make up a third of US warehouse employees, but in 2021, they suffered 49 percent of the injuries for the entire warehouse industry, according to a report by advocacy group Strategic Organizing Center (or SOC). The Verge reports: After analyzing data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the union coalition found that Amazon workers are twice as likely to be seriously injured than people who work in warehouses for other companies. The report considers "serious injuries" to be ones where workers either have to take time off to recover or have their workloads reduced, following OSHA's report classification (pdf) of "cases with days away from work" and "cases with job transfer or restriction." The data shows that, over time, the company has been shifting more toward putting people on light duty, rather than having them take time off. The report authors also note that Amazon workers take longer to recover from injuries than employees at other companies: around 62 days on average, versus 44 across the industry. Amazon employees have said it's not the work itself that's particularly dangerous but rather the grueling pace the company's automated systems demand. Amazon actually had workers go slower in 2020 to help combat COVID-19, which accounts for the notably lower injury rates that year. But, as the report notes, the injuries increased by around 20 percent between 2020 and 2021 as the company resumed its usual pace -- though the injury rates for 2021 were still lower than they were in 2019. [...] Unfortunately, this study's results tell the same story we've been hearing for years. Even with its reduced injury rates in 2020, Amazon workers were still hurt twice as often as other warehouse workers, according to SOC. Further reading: Amazon Workers At 100 More Facilities Want To Unionize (Yahoo Finance)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: [R]esearchers are now finding vulnerabilities in newer hospital technologies that weren't as ubiquitous a decade ago. Enter autonomous hospital robots, the supposed-to-be-friendly self-controlled digital workhorses that can transport medications, bed linens, food, medications and laboratory specimens across a hospital campus. These robots, such as the ones built by robot maker Aethon, are equipped with the space to transport critical goods and security access to enter restricted parts of the hospital and ride elevators, all while cutting labor costs. But researchers at Cynerio, a cybersecurity startup focused on securing hospital and healthcare systems, discovered a set of five never-before-seen vulnerabilities in Aethon robots, which they say allowed malicious hackers to remotely hijack and control these autonomous robots -- and in some cases over the internet. The five vulnerabilities, which Cynerio collectively call JekyllBot:5, aren't with the robots themselves but with the base servers that are used to communicate with and control the robots that traverse the hallways of the hospitals and hotels. The bugs range from allowing hackers to create new users with high-level access in order to then log in and remotely control the robots and access restricted areas, snoop on patients or guests using the robot's in-built cameras, or otherwise cause mayhem. Asher Brass, the lead researcher on the Aethon vulnerabilities, warned that the flaws required a "very low skill set for exploitation." Cynerio said the base servers have a web interface that could be accessed from inside the hospital's network, allowing "guest" users to view real-time robot camera feeds and their upcoming schedules and tasks for the day without needing a password. But although the robots' functionality were protected by an "admin" account, the researchers said the vulnerabilities in the web interface could have allowed a hacker to interact with the robots without needing an admin password to log in. One of the five bugs, the researchers said, exposed robots to remote control using a joystick-style controller in the web interface, while exploiting another one of the bugs to interact with door locks, call and ride elevators, and open and close medication drawers. "The bugs were fixed in a batch of software and firmware updates released by Aethon, after Cynerio alerted the company to the issues," notes TechCrunch. "Aethon is said to have restricted internet-exposed servers to isolate the robots from potential remote attacks, and fixed other web-related vulnerabilities that affected the base station."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Video-sharing app TikTok's advertisement revenue is likely to triple in 2022 to more than $11 billion, exceeding the combined sales of its rivals Twitter and Snap, according to research firm Insider Intelligence. Reuters reports: TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is one of the world's most popular social media apps, with more than 1 billion active users. "TikTok's user base has exploded in the past couple of years, and the amount of time users spend on the app is extraordinary," said Debra Aho Williamson, analyst at Insider Intelligence. Twitter and Snapchat are expected to generate $5.58 billion and $4.86 billion, respectively, in advertising revenue for 2022, with the combined value still less than the $11 billion projected for TikTok. Nearly $6 billion, or more than half, of this year's ad revenue is expected to come from the United States, despite regulatory concerns over user data from U.S being passed on to China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dell employees in the Netherlands will be able to work four days a week from this month, a director of Dell Technologies Netherlands has confirmed to The Register. From the report: The news comes just weeks before what is touted to be the biggest ever 4-day working week trial begins in the UK. Isabel Moll, newly appointed vice president and general manager at Dell Netherlands, told us the part-time pilot has already been rolled out by the Dutch and Argentinian operations. "On April 1 we welcomed our first starter, and we're currently in the late phases of the interviewing process with [another]. We're hoping to welcome many other candidates in the near future, once the word spreads more and more." She noted that the scheme was also open to existing employees, with pay corresponding to hours worked. Speaking to local financial news daily Financieele Dagblad, Dell GM Moll described the April Argentinian and Dutch pilot as addressing both the issues of scarcity in the labor market and a way to bring in a more diverse group, including women and younger people, who are no longer interested in working until "they drop" or have other obligations. She said such people often end up leaving the sector, to its detriment, or use their technical skills in other sectors which have less intensive hours, telling the paper: "Working harder won't pay off, because the pond is empty..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last year, T-Mobile confirmed it was breached after hackers offered to sell the personal data of 30 million of its customers for 6 bitcoin worth around $270,000 at the time. According to court documents unsealed today and reviewed by Motherboard, a third-party hired by T-Mobile tried to pay the hackers for exclusive access to that data and limit it from leaking more widely. The plan ultimately failed, and the criminals continued to sell the data despite the third-party giving them a total of $200,000. But the news unearths some of the controversial tactics that might be used by companies as they respond to data breaches, either to mitigate the leak of stolen information or in an attempt to identify who has breached their networks. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Diogo Santos Coelho, who it alleges is the administrator of a popular hacking site called RaidForums. Law enforcement also uploaded a banner to the RaidForums site announcing they had taken over its domain. Coelho was arrested in the United Kingdom in March. Included in the affidavit in support of request for his extradition to the United States is a section describing a particular set of data that was advertised on RaidForums in August. [...] The document does not name the victim company, instead referring to it as Company 3, but says another post confirmed that the data belonging to "a major telecommunications company and wireless network operator that provides services in the United States. The document goes on to say that this company "hired a third-party to purchase exclusive access to the database to prevent it being sold to criminals." An employee of this third-party posed as a potential buyer and used the RaidForums' administrator's middleman service to buy a sample of the data for $50,000 in Bitcoin, the document reads. That employee then purchased the entire database for around $150,000, with the caveat that SubVirt would delete their copy of the data, it adds. The purpose of the deletion would be that this undercover customer would be the only one with a copy of the stolen information, greatly limiting the chance of it leaking out further. That's not what happened. The document says that "it appears the co-conspirators continued to attempt to sell the databases after the third-party's purchase." Company 3, the unnamed telecommunications firm that hired this third-party, was T-Mobile, according to Motherboard's review of the timeline and information included in the court records. The third-party that paid cybercriminals $200,000 may have been Mandiant, though the security company has yet to confirm with Motherboard. In March, Mandiant announced it was being acquired by Google.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The long decline in the price of Axie Infinity's Smooth Love Potion (SLP) token illustrates the challenge of play-to-earn (P2E) gaming: players need more than a way to earn some random token, the token needs mechanics that enable it to hold value. From a report: P2E worked great, particularly with one game, Axie Infinity (whose treasury clocked $1.3 billion in revenue last year), until profits took a dive in early December that it has never recovered from, as Token Terminal shows. The "Smooth Love Potion" (SLP) token is the fuel that Axie Infinity runs on. To access the game, players need once valuable NFTs called Axies. Axie owners can breed more Axies with their Axies, but they need to spend SLP to do so. Users spend SLP in the game and it gets destroyed, decreasing the supply. That's supposed to help maintain the price, but there's been too much earning and not enough burning. The token has been in a long fall since the peak of its strength last July, because too few players are using SLP to make more Axies, analytics firm Naavik contends.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How much energy does it take to have a good and healthy life? A new Stanford University study has found that the answer is far less than the average American is using. From a report: Comparing energy use and quality of life across 140 countries, researchers found that the magic number is 75 gigajoules a year, or less. For context, one gigajoule of energy is equal to about 8 gallons of gasoline. Americans use 284 gigajoules a year per capita, nearly four times that much energy, according to the new research. "That suggests to me that we could nudge energy use downwards in a bunch of hyper-consuming countries and not just make a more equitable world, but perhaps make ourselves healthier and happier," said lead author and professor of earth system science Rob Jackson. The link between more energy and better quality of life is established. Globally, around 759 million people lived without electricity and 2.6 billion without clean cooking fuel in 2019, according to the World Bank.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian military hackers tried and failed to attack Ukraine's energy infrastructure last week, the country's government and a major cybersecurity company said Tuesday. From a report: The attack was designed to infiltrate computers connected to multiple substations, then delete all files, which would shut that infrastructure down, according to Ukraine's summary of the incident. ESET, a Slovakia-based cybersecurity company working to help secure Ukrainian infrastructure, said in a summary of the attack that it was conducted by the same arm of Russia's military intelligence agency, GRU, that had previously successfully executed similar attacks in 2014 and 2015. In both of those incidents, some residents of Kyiv temporarily lost power. This attack had been planned for at least two weeks, ESET said. Since Russia began its invasion in February, Ukraine hasn't been hit by any attacks as visibly destructive as those previous hacks of Kyiv energy companies. But Ukraine has faced multiple so-called "wiper" attacks, including ones that have targeted computers in Ukraine's government, financial institutions and internet service providers. Those attacks also look to mass-delete files from hacked computers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As climate crisis allows new maritime routes to be used, sooty shipping emissions accelerates ice melt and risk to ecosystems. From a report: In February last year, a Russian gas tanker, Christophe de Margerie, made history by navigating the icy waters of the northern sea route in mid-winter. The pioneering voyage, from Jiangsu in China to a remote Arctic port in Siberia, was heralded as the start of a new era that could reshape global shipping routes -- cutting travel times between Europe and Asia by more than a third. It has been made possible by the climate crisis. Shrinking polar ice has allowed shipping traffic in the Arctic to rise 25% between 2013 and 2019 and the growth is expected to continue. But Arctic shipping is not only made possible by the climate crisis, it is adding to it too. More ships mean a rise in exhaust fumes, which is accelerating ice melt in this sensitive region due to a complex phenomenon involving "black carbon," an air pollutant formed by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. When black carbon, or soot, lands on snow and ice, it dramatically speeds up melting. Dark snow and ice, by absorbing more energy, melts far faster than heat-reflecting white snow, creating a vicious circle of faster warming. Environmentalists warn that the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the global average, has seen an 85% rise in black carbon from ships between 2015 and 2019, mainly because of the increase in oil tankers and bulk carriers. The particles, which exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular illness in towns, are short-term but potent climate agents: they represent more than 20% of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions from ships, according to one estimate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is launching a big recruiting push aimed at teens who are about to graduate high school, in the e-commerce giant's latest effort to keep its sprawling network of warehouses staffed up in a tight labor market. The Information: In a hiring drive set to kick off next month, Amazon will attend events at schools across the U.S. and Canada, a person briefed on the matter said. The effort will involve recruiters going to hundreds of high school career days to talk up college tuition benefits and other perks of working at Amazon, the person said. Not having enough workers has already eaten into the company's bottom line. Amazon said operational disruptions from not being able to staff up its facilities during the 2021 holiday rush, along with inflationary pressures pushing up labor and transportation expenses, cost the company $4 billion in the fourth quarter. Further reading: Amazon workers made up almost half of all warehouse injuries last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. and European authorities said on Tuesday they had seized RaidForums, a popular website used by hackers to buy and sell stolen data, and the United States also unsealed charges against the website's founder and chief administrator Diego Santos Coelho. From a report: Coelho, 21, of Portugal, was arrested in the United Kingdom on Jan. 31, and remains in custody while the United States seeks his extradition to stand trial in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the U.S. Justice Department said. The department said it had obtained court approval to seize three different domain names that hosted the RaidForums website: raidforums.com, Rf.ws and Raid.lol. Among the types of data that were available for sale on the site included stolen bank routing and account numbers, credit card information, log-in credentials and social security numbers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DuckDuckGo's privacy-focused browsing app is available in beta on Mac, but you'll have to join a private waitlist to gain access. From a report: Just like the mobile browsing app, DuckDuckGo on Mac uses the DuckDuckGo search engine by default, automatically blocks web trackers, and comes with the famous "Fire" button that burns up your browsing history and tabs in a single click. The browsing app also comes with a new feature that's supposed to help block those pesky cookie consent pop-ups that appear when you first open a website. DuckDuckGo says it will clear them on 50 percent of sites, while automatically selecting the option that blocks or minimizes the cookies that track you. Allison Goodman, the senior communications manager at DuckDuckGo, told The Verge that the company plans on increasing this coverage "significantly" as the beta progresses. You'll also gain access to a privacy feed that appears on DuckDuckGo's homepage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said that proposed app store regulations in the U.S. and European Union would put iPhone users' privacy at risk. From a report: "If we are forced to let unvetted apps onto iPhones, the unintended consequences will be profound," Cook said during a keynote address at the Global Privacy Summit on Tuesday in Washington. "Data-hungry companies would be able to avoid our privacy rules and once again track our users against their will." Apple is under global scrutiny over app store policies. The EU is working on legislation that would force the company to allow apps to be installed from outside the Apple App Store, threatening Apple's grip on its platform and potentially limiting its ability to collect a commission from developers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The current tide of antitrust scrutiny and regulations focused on big technology companies has conspicuously omitted one company: Microsoft, the software and cloud-computing behemoth that was the notorious target of a landmark U.S. government lawsuit in the 1990s. Microsoft, the thinking goes, was already humbled by years of intense government oversight, and since it largely caters to other companies, instead of consumers, it doesn't belong in the same category as Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple. But now some Microsoft customers, and some of its fiercest rivals, are making a bold claim: The software giant is again using its sway over one market to thwart competition in another. Microsoft three years ago overhauled the way it licenses some of its most ubiquitous software programs, including Windows and Office, in ways that increase the cost of running those programs on rival cloud-computing systems like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. In some cases, the revamped agreements outright forbid using some products on competing cloud services. AWS and Google say they have complained to Microsoft on behalf of multiple customers. French cloud provider OVH, along with other unidentified companies, filed a complaint last year with European regulators about the practice, saying it's also being hurt by Microsoft's policies. Major business software customers, some of which are only now starting to see the impact as they renew deals or replace aging programs, are also incensed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's plan to add a highly anticipated blood-pressure monitor to its smartwatch has hit some snags and the technology isn't expected to be ready until 2024 at the earliest, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The company has teams working on an updated sensor and software for the Apple Watch that would determine if a user has high blood pressure, but accuracy has been a challenge during testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The feature has been planned for at least four years, but it's probably two years away from hitting the market and may slip until 2025, they said. Apple's shares were up about 1% at 9:41 a.m. in New York. Blood-pressure features may become a key selling point for smartwatches in coming years, but the technology hasn't been easy to master. Though Apple rivals such as Samsung have launched watches with the capability, they require monthly calibration with a traditional monitor. Last year, Alphabet-owned Fitbit launched a public study to test wrist-based blood-pressure measurement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NBC News reports: Multiple people were shot in a New York City subway station during rush hour on Tuesday, and several undetonated devices were found, officials said. At least 13 people were injured during the mayhem that unfolded at a station in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood, the FDNY said, though it was not immediately clear how many of those victims were shot. A man, possibly wearing clothes that resembled MTA attire, was spotted throwing a device in the subway station before opening fire, law enforcement sources told NBC New York. The NYPD, though, said no "active explosive devices" were immediately found at the scene. Police were looking for a man, believed to be about 5-foot-5, 180 pounds and wearing a gas mask, who shot at least five people, sources said. Live coverage: CNN.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Senior officials at the European Commission were targeted last year with spy software designed by an Israeli surveillance firm, according to two EU officials and documentation reviewed by Reuters. From the report: Among them was Didier Reynders, a senior Belgian statesman who has served as the European Justice Commissioner since 2019, according to one of the documents. At least four other commission staffers were also targeted, according to the document and another person familiar with the matter. The two EU officials confirmed that staffers at the commission had been targeted but did not provide details. The commission became aware of the targeting following messages issued by Apple to thousands of iPhone owners in November telling them they were "targeted by state-sponsored attackers," the two EU officials said. It was the first time Apple had sent a mass alert to users that they were in government hackers' crosshairs. The warnings triggered immediate concern at the commission, the two officials said. In a Nov. 26 email reviewed by Reuters, a senior tech staffer sent a message to colleagues with background about Israeli hacking tools and a request to be on the lookout for additional warnings from Apple.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple faces an additional EU antitrust charge in the coming weeks in an investigation triggered by a complaint from Spotify, Reuters reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter said, a sign that EU enforcers are strengthening their case against the U.S. company. From a report: The European Commission last year accused the iPhone maker of distorting competition in the music streaming market via restrictive rules for its App Store that force developers to use its own in-app payment system and prevent them from informing users of other purchasing options. Such requirements have also come under scrutiny in countries including the United States and Britain. Extra charges set out in a so-called supplementary statement of objections are usually issued to companies when the EU competition enforcer has gathered new evidence or has modified some elements to boost its case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.