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Uber added a disclosure to its food delivery app saying menu item prices may be higher than those charged by restaurants, bowing to pressure from attorneys general. From a report: The disclaimer will only be shown to customers in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., after the attorneys general there pressed for a concession from the company. They said in a joint statement Tuesday that the change will offer customers more price transparency. Before customers finalize an order, Uber will show a message that reads, "Prices may be lower in store."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Morgan Stanley plans to ban workers from its New York headquarters if they have not received a Covid-19 vaccine. The rule will apply to non-vaccinated guests and clients as well. From a report: According to a source close to the company, Morgan Stanley said in a memo to its employees in the New York metropolitan area that all staff working in buildings with a "large employee presence" are required to confirm their vaccination status by July 1. The source added that "vaccine attestation is on an honorary basis for employees, contingent workforce, clients and visitors." The company plans to expand the vaccination mandate to employees and guests in other Morgan Stanley locations in New York City and nearby Westchester starting July 12. "Operating within a fully vaccinated environment allows us to lift restrictions like the use of face coverings and the need to maintain physical distancing, returning to more normal office conditions," the source added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kickstarter announced Tuesday that it plans to experiment with a four-day work week in an effort to offer workers more flexibility and additional time to spend on creative pursuits. From a report: Lots of tech companies are planning to offer flexibility around where employees work post-pandemic. Now some companies are also rethinking when people work. Kickstarter plans next year to test a four-day work week with some or all of its employees, though details of that remain to be figured out, including whether all workers will have the same schedule. Dating app Bumble, meanwhile, says it's giving all employees this week off to allow a much-needed break. Kickstarter CEO Aziz Hasan told Axios that he had toyed with the notion of a four-day week in the past, but was motivated by the pandemic to actually give it a try. "What we've been all living through the last 18 months, you feel this compression on your professional life, your personal life," Hasan said. The idea of a four-day work week wasn't spurred by the company's ongoing collective bargaining negotiations, Hasan said. He added that the company's newly formed union has been supportive of the idea.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A pair of South African brothers have vanished, along with Bitcoin worth $3.6 billion from their cryptocurrency investment platform. From a report: A Cape Town law firm hired by investors says they can't locate the brothers and has reported the matter to the Hawks, an elite unit of the national police force. It's also told crypto exchanges across the globe should any attempt be made to convert the digital coins. Following a surge in Bitcoin's value in the past year, the disappearance of about 69,000 coins -- worth more than $4 billion at their April peak -- would represent the biggest-ever dollar loss in a cryptocurrency scam. The incident could spur regulators' efforts to impose order on the market amid rising cases of fraud. The first signs of trouble came in April, as Bitcoin was rocketing to a record. Africrypt Chief Operating Officer Ameer Cajee, the elder brother, informed clients that the company was the victim of a hack. He asked them not to report the incident to lawyers and authorities, as it would slow down the recovery process of the missing funds. Some skeptical investors roped in the law firm, Hanekom Attorneys, and a separate group started liquidation proceedings against Africrypt. "We were immediately suspicious as the announcement implored investors not to take legal action," Hanekom Attorneys said in response to emailed questions. "Africrypt employees lost access to the back-end platforms seven days before the alleged hack." The firm's investigation found Africrypt's pooled funds were transferred from its South African accounts and client wallets, and the coins went through tumblers and mixers -- or to other large pools of bitcoin -- to make them essentially untraceable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For billions of years, Earth has been playing a cosmic game of hide-and-seek. New research published today in Nature posits that roughly 1,700 stars are in the right position to have spotted life on Earth as early as 5,000 years ago. From a report: These stars, within 100 parsecs (or about 326 light-years) of the sun, were found using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the European Space Agency's Gaia mission. And with thousands of exoplanets already found orbiting other stars in our universe, could we have already seen life on other planets come and go? Might they have seen us? "The universe is dynamic," says Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell, and lead author of the study. "Stars move, we move. First the Earth moves around the sun, but the sun moves around the center of our galaxy." About 70% of exoplanets are found using the transit method: when a planet passes between a star and an observer, the star dims enough to confirm the presence of a previously unseen celestial body. Kaltenegger and coauthor Jackie Faherty of the American Museum of Natural History compiled a list of stars that either will see or already have seen Earth transit in their lifetimes. Of these, they found seven stars with orbiting exoplanets that could potentially be habitable. Statistically, one out of four stars has a planet that exists in the "Goldilocks zone" -- not too hot, not too cold, and just far away from a star to support life. But how do we determine whether faraway exoplanets meet these criteria? When transiting exoplanets block stellar light, part of that light filters through the atmosphere. Energy and light interact with the molecules and atoms of that planet, and by the time that light reaches an astronomer's telescope, scientists can determine whether it has interacted with chemicals like oxygen or methane. A combination of those two, Kaltenegger says, is the fingerprint for life.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tim Berners-Lee has defended his decision to auction an NFT (non-fungible token) representing the source code to the web, comparing the sale to an autographed book or a speaking tour. From a report: The creator of the world wide web announced his decision to create and sell the digital asset through Sotheby's auction house last week. In the auction, which begins on Wednesday and will run for one week, collectors will have the chance to bid on a bundle of items, including the 10,000 lines of the source code to the original web browser, a digital poster created by Berners-Lee representing the code, a letter from him, and an animated video showing the code being entered. "This is totally aligned with the values of the web," Berners-Lee told the Guardian. "The questions I've got, they said:'Oh, that doesn't sound like the free and open web.' Well, wait a minute, the web is just as free and just as open as it always was. The core codes and protocols on the web are royalty free, just as they always have been. I'm not selling the web -- you won't have to start paying money to follow links. "I'm not even selling the source code. I'm selling a picture that I made, with a Python programme that I wrote myself, of what the source code would look like if it was stuck on the wall and signed by me. "If they felt that me selling an NFT of a poster is inappropriate, then what about me selling a book? I do things like that, which involve money, but the free and open web is still free and open. And we do still, every now and again, have to fight to keep it free and open, fight for net neutrality and so on."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is raising fears about letting users install applications outside the company's App Store, an issue being targeted by lawmakers and regulators that also played a prominent role in its recent trial against Epic Games. From a report: The company said Wednesday on its website that requiring apps to be downloaded from the App Store protects consumers against scams, keeps their privacy secure and provides developers payment for their work. All those benefits could disappear if apps can be downloaded from third-party app stores with lesser protections or users get an app from a website or PC and "sideload" it onto the phone. The timing of Apple's push back isn't coincidental. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee Wednesday is scheduled to discuss six proposed antitrust bills, including one sponsored by Rhode Island Democrat Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island and chairman of the antitrust subcommittee that, if passed into law, could call for Apple to open up to third-party app stores and provide all of its iPhone technologies to third-party software makers. "It shall be unlawful for a person operating a covered platform, in or affecting commerce, to restrict or impede the capacity of a business user to access or interoperate with the same platform, operating system, hardware and software features that are available to the covered platform operator's own products, services, or lines of business," according to an early copy of the bill. "Allowing sideloading would degrade the security of the iOS platform and expose users to serious security risks not only on third-party app stores, but also on the App Store," the Cupertino, California-based technology giant said on its website. "Because of the large size of the iPhone user base and the sensitive data stored on their phones -- photos, location data, health and financial information -- allowing sideloading would spur a flood of new investment into attacks on the platform."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Video game giant Electronic Arts has struck a deal with AT&T and its WarnerMedia unit to acquire Warner Bros. Games' mobile games studio Playdemic for $1.4 billion in cash. From a report: "Playdemic is a premier mobile gaming company founded in 2010 and known for its popular, award-winning game Golf Clash," EA said on Wednesday. "Golf Clash is one of the leading mobile games in the U.S. and U.K. and has more than 80 million downloads globally to date." "We have enjoyed working with the talented team at Playdemic as they have grown Golf Clash beyond all expectations into a hit mobile game with tremendous longevity," said David Haddad, president of Warner Bros. Games. "While we have great respect for the Playdemic team, our decision to divest is a part of our overall strategy to build games based on Warner Bros. storied franchises." EA said the acquisition is part of its mobile growth strategy focused on delivering new experiences for EA's network of nearly half a billion players around the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Epic Systems' algorithm for identifying signs of sepsis, an often deadly complication from infections that can lead to organ failure, doesn't work as well as advertised, according to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. The Verge reports: Epic says its alert system can correctly differentiate patients who do and don't have sepsis 76 percent of the time. The new study found it was only right 63 percent of the time. An Epic spokesperson disputed the findings in a statement to Stat News, saying that other research showed the algorithm was accurate. Sepsis is hard to spot early, but starting treatment as soon as possible can improve patients' chances of survival. The Epic system, and other automated warning tools like it, scan patient test results for signals that someone could be developing the condition. Around a quarter of US hospitals use Epic's electronic medical records, and hundreds of hospitals use its sepsis prediction tool, including the health center at the University of Michigan, where study author Karandeep Singh is an assistant professor. The study examined data from nearly 40,000 hospitalizations at Michigan Medicine in 2018 and 2019. Patients developed sepsis in 2,552 of those hospitalizations. Epic's sepsis tool missed 1,709 of those cases, around two-thirds of which were still identified and treated quickly. It only identified 7 percent of sepsis cases that were missed by a physician. The analysis also found a high rate of false positives: when an alert went off for a patient, there was only a 12 percent chance that the patient actually would develop sepsis. Part of the problem, Singh told Stat News, seemed to be in the way the Epic algorithm was developed. It defined sepsis based on when a doctor would submit a bill for treatment, not necessarily when a patient first developed symptoms. That means it's catching cases where the doctor already thinks there's an issue. "It's essentially trying to predict what physicians are already doing," Singh said. It's also not the measure of sepsis that researchers would ordinarily use.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

London Underground passengers will be able to get mobile coverage across the rail network by the end of 2024, it has been announced. MacRumors reports: In a press release, Transport for London (TfL) said the capital's Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road and Bank stations would be among the first fully connected stations by the end of the year, followed by Tottenham Court Road, Euston, and Camden Town by the end of 2022. Mobile reception was introduced on the eastern half of the Jubilee line in March last year. TfL says the additional infrastructure will support 5G as well as 4G, but that it will be the responsibility of mobile operators to offer support for the fastest network speeds. TfL is partnering with BAI Communications (BAI), a global provider of 4G and 5G connected infrastructure, to plug so-called coverage "not-spots" in the underground network. The over 1,242 miles of fibre cabling installed in London Underground tunnels will also benefit above-ground coverage for buildings and other infrastructure by allowing more mobile transmitters to be installed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony Music has obtained an injunction that requires the freely available DNS-resolver Quad9 to block a popular pirate site. The order, issued by the District Court in Hamburg, Germany, is the first of its kind. The Quad9 foundation has already announced that it will protest the judgment, which could have far-reaching consequences. TorrentFreak reports: The Hamburg court found that the DNS service is not eligible for the liability protections that other third-party intermediaries such as ISPs and domain registrars typically enjoy. And if Quad9 fails to comply with the injunction, it will have to pay a fine of 250,000 euros per 'infringing' DNS query plus potentially two years in prison. One of the arguments that Sony brought up in court was that Quad9 already blocks various problematic sites voluntarily. In fact, the DNS-resolver promotes threat blocking as a feature. "Quad9 blocks against known malicious domains, preventing your computers and IoT devices from connecting to malware or phishing sites," the company's website reads. Bill Woodcock, chairman of the Quad9 foundation, doesn't believe that the company's malware and phishing filters, which help to protect users, are on par with blocking a pirate site. He informed the German news site Heise that Quad9 will appeal to the injunction. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Quad9's General Manager, John Todd, says that the company is still reviewing the order, which it received last Friday. The non-profit foundation doesn't believe its resources should be used to benefit for-profit companies such as Sony.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, the University of Naples Federico II, the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences has found that making food from air would be far more efficient than growing crops. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their analysis and comparison of the efficiency of growing crops (soybeans) and using a food-from-air technique. [...] To make their comparisons, the researchers used a food-from-air system that uses solar energy panels to make electricity, which is combined with carbon dioxide from the air to produce food for microbes grown in a bioreactor. The protein the microbes produce is then treated to remove nucleic acids and then dried to produce a powder suitable for consumption by humans and animals. They compared the efficiency of the system with a 10-square-kilometer soybean field. Their analysis showed that growing food from air was 10 times as efficient as growing soybeans in the ground. Put another way, they suggested that a 10-square-kilometer piece of land in the Amazon used to grow soybeans could be converted to a one-square-kilometer piece of land for growing food from the air, with the other nine square kilometers turned back to wild forest growth. They also note that the protein produced using the food-from-air approach had twice the caloric value as most other crops such as corn, wheat and rice.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechSee, which describes itself as an "intelligent visual assistance" company, today announced the launch of Eve Cortex, a platform that teaches itself to recognize thousands of products, models, parts, and components by ingesting only a handful of data points. VentureBeat reports: TechSee claims that by leveraging a combination of AI and synthetic data, Cortex can train itself in a matter of hours, providing end users with step-by-step visual guidance via an augmented reality (AR) overlay. TechSee was founded in 2014 by Eitan Cohen, Amir Yoffe, and Gabby Sarusi. Cohen conceptualized the idea after struggling to walk his parents through an issue they were having with their cable service. The company's cross-platform apps employ computer vision to recognize products and issues and streamline warranty registration. Customer agents can see what customers see through their smartphone cameras and visually guide them to resolutions, using either live video or photos. Cortex builds on TechSee's existing technologies to enable enterprises to custom-build their own visual self-service flows, without coding. With Cortex, companies can design journeys for product unboxing, billing, contracting, troubleshooting, warranty claims, product registration, technical repair, and more. Cortex can walk users through the unboxing of various consumer electronics, from security cameras to thermostats, and capture information for upselling while explaining invoices by reading water, gas, and electrical meters. Insurance policyholders can use Cortex to document damage to insured property or identify items they want to insure for virtual underwriting. Moreover, Cortex can certify that an on-site field technician has made a successful repair by examining work through the technician's smartphone or tablet camera or AR glasses. One of the ways that Cortex learns to recognize products is by ingesting a company's existing contact center knowledge base. For every device, each article describing visual symptoms and issues, both from customers and field technicians, is extracted and normalized. Then, a computer vision model is trained on synthetic visual data gathered in the lab as well as other visual resources and images supplied by customers, enabling Cortex to analyze, time, and measure the success of each step of every resolution, shortening and optimizing them over time. According to Cohen, companies including Vodafone, Telus, Orange, and Hippo have already tapped Cortex to create new customer experiences. Moreover, tens of thousands of field service technicians in the U.S. are using the platform to install fiber optic boxes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Senior executives at a French spyware firm have been indicted for the company's sale of surveillance software to authoritarian regimes in Libya and Egypt that resulted in the torture and disappearance of dissidents. MIT Technology Review reports: While high-tech surveillance is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide, it is rare for companies or individuals to face legal consequences for selling such technologies -- even to notorious dictatorships or other dangerous regimes. But charges in the Paris Judicial Court against leaders at Amesys, a surveillance company that later changed its name to Nexa Technology, claim that the sales to Libya and Egypt over the last decade led to the crushing of opposition, torture of dissidents, and other human rights abuses. The former head of Amesys, Philippe Vannier, and three current and former executives at Nexa technologies were indicted for "complicity in acts of torture" for selling spy technology to the Libyan regime. French media report that Nexa president Olivier Bohbot, managing director Renaud Roques, and former president Stephane Salies face the same charges for surveillance sales to Egypt. The charges were brought by brought by the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes unit of the court, but the case began 10 years ago when Amesys sold its system for listening in on internet traffic to the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Six victims of the spying testified in France about being arrested and tortured by the regime, an experience that they say is a direct result of these spying tools. In 2014, the company sold surveillance software to Egyptian president Abdel al-Sisi shortly after he took control of the country in a military coup. The complaints, filed by the International Federation for Human Rights, or FIDH, and the French League for Human Rights, allege that the company did not have government permission to sell its technologies to Libya or Egypt because oversight was weak and at times nonexistent. The claims led to an independent judicial investigation against Amesys/Nexa, which is still ongoing. Next, the judges will decide whether to send the case to criminal court or dismiss it if there is not sufficient evidence -- but the indictment is a major step forward and points toward the prospect that the judges will view the evidence as potentially strong enough to support a criminal trial.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MojoKid writes: AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) PC graphics up-scaling technology is ready for prime-time and the company has allowed members of the press to showcase performance and visuals of the tech in action with a number of game engines. AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is vendor-agnostic and doesn't require specialized hardware to function like NVIDIA DLSS, which relies on Tensor cores on-board NVIDIA Turing or Ampere GPUs to accelerate neural network models that have been specifically trained on game engines. In contrast, AMD FSR utilizes more traditional spatial upscaling to create a super resolution image from a single input frame, not multiple frames. AMD FSR then employs a library of open-source algorithms that work on sharpening both image edge and texture detail. In game testing at HotHardware, frame rates can jump dramatically with little to no perceptible reduction in image quality, and the technology even works on many NVIDIA GPUs as well. There are currently 19 titles that are available or planned with support for AMD FSR, but with the open nature of the technology and cross-GPU compatibility, game developers theoretically should have significant incentive for adoption to breath new performance into their game titles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In a short CCTV video, a clerk at a small convenience store can be seen taking a bottle of coffee from a cooler and drinking it. When he returns to the cash register, an unseen person's voice emits from a speaker on the ceiling and interrogates him about whether he scanned and paid for the item. In another video, a cashier is standing behind the counter talking to someone just out of frame. There's a 'ding' sound, and the voice from above questions the cashier about who the other man is -- he's there to give the cashier a ride at the end of his shift -- then orders the man to stand on the other side of the counter. The videos are just a few examples that Washington-based Live Eye Surveillance uses to demonstrate its flagship product: a surveillance camera system that keeps constant watch over shops and lets a remote human operator intervene whenever they see something they deem suspicious. For enough money -- $399 per month according to one sales email Motherboard viewed -- a person in Karnal, India will watch the video feed from your business 24/7. The monitors "act as a virtual supervisor for the sites, in terms of assuring the safety of the employees located overseas and requesting them to complete assigned tasks," according to a job posting on the company's website. [...] On its website, the company claims several major corporations as customers, including 7-Eleven, Shell, Dairy Queen, and Holiday Inn. Many of those businesses are franchised, and it isn't clear from Live Eye's materials whether the corporations have purchased the surveillance systems or if they've been bought by individual franchise owners.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Zuckerberg's ongoing quest to turn every Facebook property into ad-riddled real estate hit a snag this week when the only virtual reality game that publicly offered to onboard Oculus's VR ads (rightfully) backed down. Gizmodo reports: Originally, Facebook set out to test its first iteration of VR ads in Blaston, a $10 multiplayer title for the Oculus Quest that was created by the prolific VR games publisher Resolution Games. The idea of being pummeled with VR ads in a game is bad enough, but the fact that players were going to be pummeled in a game they already paid for was enough to set some players over the edge. Pretty much immediately after Facebook announced its plans to blast Blaston's users with ads, the game's page on the Oculus store was pummeled with one-star reviews. Less than a week after these reviews started pouring in, Blaston backed down. "After listening to player feedback, we realize that Blaston isn't the best fit for this type of advertising test. Therefore, we no longer plan to implement the test," the company wrote in a Twitter thread posted Monday afternoon. About three hours later, the company added that it did have plans to roll out a "temporary test" of Oculus'sVR ads in another one of its games -- a free-to-download fishing title called Bait!.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India's antitrust watchdog has ordered an investigation into allegations that Google has abused the dominant position of Android in the country's smart TV market. From a report: The news comes hours after the European Union opened a formal antitrust investigation into allegations that Google abuses its leading role in the advertising-technology sector. In its initial review, the Competition Commission of India, which began looking into these allegations last year, said Google had breached certain anti-competitive laws.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This may sound like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, but Canon has rolled out new AI cameras that use "smile recognition" technology to ensure that only happy employees are allowed into its offices. From a report: Back in 2020, the China-based Canon subsidiary Canon Information Technology introduced an "intelligent IT solution" for corporate offices that includes 5 different functional modules, one of which is "smiley face access control. In addition, based on the corporate culture of 'moving and always being,' Canon has always advocated the concepts of 'laughing' and 'big health,' and hopes to bring happiness and health to everyone in the post-epidemic era," Canon wrote in a press release. "Therefore, in the [...] intelligent IT solution, a new experience of smile recognition is specially incorporated. It is hoped that smiles can let everyone relax and get healthy, so as to create a more pleasant working atmosphere and improve efficiency."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's market capitalization hit $2 trillion for the first time. GeekWire reports: The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant trails only Apple among the world's most valuable companies. Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach the $2 trillion mark in August. Fellow Seattle-area giant Amazon, valued Tuesday at $1.77 trillion, is also approaching the $2 trillion club. Microsoft stock was up 1.1% Tuesday and is up more than 20% this year. The company continues to see growing demand for its cloud services as the pandemic has accelerated technology adoption. It beat quarterly expectations with $41.7 billion in revenue for the March quarter, up 19% year-over-year -- its biggest revenue growth since 2018 -- and profits of $15.5 billion, up 44%. A Wedbush report last month projected more growth ahead for Microsoft, with Azure's cloud momentum "still in its early days" and the company "firmly positioned to gain more market share vs. AWS in this cloud arms race." Microsoft also continues to invest heavily in its gaming business; add new features to its Teams collaboration software; and is staying active in the M&A arena with its $19.7 billion acquisition of Nuance Communications and reported interest in Discord and Pinterest.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: While bitcoin leaves a visible trail of transactions on its underlying blockchain, the niche "privacy coin" monero was designed to obscure the sender and receiver, as well as the amount exchanged. As a result, it has become an increasingly sought-after tool for criminals such as ransomware gangs, posing new problems for law enforcement. "We've seen ransomware groups specifically shifting to monero," said Bryce Webster-Jacobsen, director of intelligence at GroupSense, a cyber security group that has helped a growing number of victims pay out ransoms in monero. "[Cyber criminals] have recognized the ability for mistakes to be made using bitcoin that allow blockchain transactions to reveal their identity." Russia-linked REvil, the notorious ransomware group believed to be behind the attack this month on meatpacker JBS, has removed the option of paying in bitcoin this year, demanding monero only, according to Brett Callow, threat analyst at Emsisoft. Meanwhile, both DarkSide, the group blamed for the Colonial Pipeline hack, and Babuk, which was behind the attack on Washington DC police this year, allow payments in either cryptocurrency but charge a 10 to 20 percent premium to victims paying in riskier bitcoin, experts say. Justin Ehrenhofer, a cryptocurrency compliance expert and member of the monero developer community, said that at the beginning of 2020, its use by ransomware gangs was "a rounding error." Today he estimates that about 10 to 20 percent of ransoms are paid in monero and that the figure will probably rise to 50 percent by the end of the year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iran alleges that the U.S. State Department seized the websites of some of the country's major news networks, hours after a message on several state-run Iranian news websites claimed they were "seized by the United States Government," the Islamic Republic of Iran News Network said in a statement on its website. From a report: The statement alleges the move was part of a larger-scale crackdown by the U.S. government on news websites linked to what Iran calls the 'Axis of Resistance,' which includes Syria, Hezbollah, some Iraqi militias and Hamas. The web domains, the English-language news network Press TV as well as Arabic-language channels, Al-Alam News and Al-Kawthar TV appear to have been affected according to the report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mrflash818 writes: The Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) -- parent organization of the better-known Let's Encrypt project -- has provided prominent developer Miguel Ojeda with a one-year contract to work on Rust in Linux and other security efforts on a full-time basis. Rust is a low-level programming language offering most of the flexibility and performance of C -- the language used for kernels in Unix and Unix-like operating systems since the 1970s -- in a safer way. Efforts to make Rust a viable language for Linux kernel development began at the 2020 Linux Plumbers conference, with acceptance for the idea coming from Linus Torvalds himself. Torvalds specifically requested Rust compiler availability in the default kernel build environment to support such efforts -- not to replace the entire source code of the Linux kernel with Rust-developed equivalents, but to make it possible for new development to work properly. Using Rust for new code in the kernel -- which might mean new hardware drivers or even replacement of GNU Coreutils -- potentially decreases the number of bugs lurking in the kernel. Rust simply won't allow a developer to leak memory or create the potential for buffer overflows -- significant sources of performance and security issues in complex C-language code.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Today's announcement from SiFive comes in two parts; this part is significant as it recognizes that Intel will be enabling SiFive's IP portfolio on its 7nm manufacturing process for upcoming foundry customers. We are expecting Intel to offer a wide variety of its own IP, such as some of the x86 cores, memory controllers, PCIe controllers, and accelerators, however the depth of its third party IP support has not been fully established at this point. SiFive's IP is the first (we believe) official confirmation of specific IP that will be supported. Announced earlier this year by Pat Gelsinger, Intel Foundry Services (or IFS) is one prong of Intel's strategy to realign itself with the current and future semiconductor market. Despite having attempted to become a foundry player in the past, whereby they build chips under contract for their customers, it hasn't really worked out that well -- however IFS is a new reinvigoration of that idea, this time with more emphasis on getting it right and expanding the scope.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brave, the maker of a popular ad blocking browser, opened on Tuesday a public beta of its privacy-focused search engine, a first step in creating a product that could compete with market titan Google. From a report: Unlike other new search engines, which generally repackage results from Google and Microsoft's Bing, Brave is building an independent index of the web. (Brave Search will rely on Bing in some areas, like images, where its own results aren't yet good enough.) Initially, Brave Search won't show ads -- the chief way that Google monetizes its search results. Later, it'll offer free, ad-supported search and a paid option with no ads.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Trade Commission will be the agency to review Amazon's proposed acquisition of Hollywood studio MGM, Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter, just as the commission gets a new chairwoman who has been critical of the online giant's expansion. From a report: Amazon last month announced its deal for MGM, which would boost its Prime Video streaming platform in a market that includes rivals such as Netflix and Walt Disney. MGM has a library of more than 4,000 films, including the James Bond franchise, and a TV catalog that includes "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Vikings." Companies doing sizable mergers have to submit their deals for government antitrust review. The FTC shares antitrust authority with the Justice Department, and the two agencies split up the work of reviewing proposed deals. The department has recently reviewed transactions involving video content, including Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox and AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner, a deal the department unsuccessfully attempted to block in court.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bumble, the dating app where women are in charge of making the first move, has temporarily closed all of its offices this week to combat workplace stress. Its 700 staff worldwide have been told to switch off and focus on themselves. From a report: One senior executive revealed on Twitter that founder Whitney Wolfe Herd had made the move "having correctly intuited our collective burnout". Bumble has had a busier year than most firms, with a stock market debut, and rapid growth in user numbers. The company announced in April "that all Bumble employees will have a paid, fully offline one-week vacation in June". A spokeswoman for Bumble said a few customer support staff will be working in case any of the app's users experience issues. These employees will then be given time off to make sure they take a whole week of leave. The spokeswoman confirmed that the majority of Bumble's staff are taking the week off. Bumble has grown in popularity during lockdown as boredom set in and swiping to find a match picked up.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet's Google plans to shut down a long-running program aimed at entry-level engineers from underrepresented backgrounds after participants said it enforced "systemic pay inequities," according to internal correspondence seen by Reuters. From the report: Google confirmed it was replacing the Engineering Residency with a new initiative, saying it is "always evaluating programs to ensure they evolve and adapt over time to meet the needs of our employees." Google last year pledged to improve retention for underrepresented employee groups. Critics have long argued that Google and its tech industry peers favor white, Asian and male workers in hiring, promotions and pay. Companies have grown more attuned to concerns about workforce diversity since the Black Lives Matter protests a year ago. The Google residency, often referred to as "Eng Res," has since 2014 given graduates from hundreds of schools a chance to work on different teams, receive training and prove themselves for a permanent job over the course of a year. It offered a cohort of peers for bonding, three former residents said. Residents were Google's "most diverse pool" of software engineers and came "primarily from underrepresented groups," according to a June 2020 presentation and an accompanying letter to management that one source said over 500 current and former residents signed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A London-based hedge fund that suffered losses betting against US retailer GameStop during the first meme stock rally in January is shutting its doors [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: White Square Capital, run by former Paulson & Co trader Florian Kronawitter, told investors that it would shut its main fund and return capital this month after a review of its business model, according to people familiar with the fund and a letter to investors. White Square, which at its peak managed about $440m in assets, had bet against GameStop, say people familiar with its positioning, and suffered double-digit per cent losses in January. The move marks one of the first closures of a hedge fund hit by the huge surges in so-called meme stocks. Retail investors, often co-ordinating their actions on online forums such as Reddit's r/WallStreetBets and in some cases deliberately targeting hedge fund short sellers, drove up the price of stocks such as GameStop and cinema chain AMC Entertainment in January and again in recent weeks. GameStop, for instance, soared from less than $20 at the start of the year to more than $480 at its January peak. That led to big losses for some funds, including US-based Melvin Capital, run by Steve Cohen protege Gabe Plotkin, and Light Street Capital, run by Glen Kacher, a former Tiger cub who worked at Julian Robertson's Tiger Management. However, the funds remain in operation, and shortly after its losses Melvin received a $2.75bn investment from Cohen's Point72 Asset Management and Ken Griffin's Citadel. "The decision to close down is related to thinking the equity long-short model is challenged," said Kronawitter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google was in the EU antitrust spotlight again on Tuesday as regulators opened an investigation into whether its digital advertising business gives the Alphabet unit an unfair advantage over rivals and advertisers. From a report: The European Union competition enforcer's move marks a new front against Google and follows more than 8 billion euros ($9.5 billion) in fines over the past decade for blocking rivals in online shopping, Android smartphones and online advertising. The European Commission said it would investigate whether Google distorts competition by restricting third party access to user data for advertising purposes on websites and apps, while reserving such data for its own use. "We are concerned that Google has made it harder for rival online advertising services to compete in the so-called ad tech stack," European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement. Google generated $147 billion in revenue from online ads last year, more than any other company in the world, with ads including search, YouTube and Gmail accounting for the bulk of its overall sales and profits.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputing: The Ragnar Locker ransomware gang have published download links for more than 700GB of archived data stolen from Taiwanese memory and storage chip maker ADATA. A set of 13 archives, allegedly containing sensitive ADATA files, have been publicly available at a cloud-based storage service, at least for some time. [...] Two of the leaked archives are quite large, weighing over 100GB, but several of them that could have been easily downloaded are less than 1.1GB large. Per the file metadata published by the threat actor, the largest archive is close to 300GB and its name gives no clue about what it might contain. Another large one is 117GB in size and its name is just as nondescript as in the case of the first one (Archive#2). Judging by the names of the archives, Ragnar Locker likely stole from ADATA documents containing financial information, non-disclosure agreements, among other type of details. The ransomware attack on ADATA happened on May 23rd, 2021, forcing them to take systems offline, the company told BleepingComputer. As the Ragnar Locker leak clearly shows, ADATA did not pay the ransom and restored the affected systems on its own. The ransomware actor claims stealing 1.5TB of sensitive files before deploying the encryption routine, saying that they took their time in the process because of the poor network defenses. The recently leaked batch of archives is the second one that Ragnar Locker ransomware publishes for ADATA. The previous one was posted earlier this month and includes four small 7-zip archives (less than 250MB together) that can still be downloaded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After six months of check-out and calibration in orbit, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite will make its first two data streams available to the public on June 22. It launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Nov. 21, 2020, and is a U.S.-European collaboration to measure sea surface height and other key ocean features, such as ocean surface wind speed and wave height. Phys.Org reports: One of the sea surface height data streams that will be released is accurate to 2.3 inches (5.8 centimeters) and will be available within hours of when the instruments aboard Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich collect it. A second stream of data, accurate to 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters), will be released two days after collection. The difference in when the products become available balances accuracy with delivery timeliness for tasks like forecasting the weather and helping to monitor the formation of hurricanes. More datasets, which will be accurate to about 1.2 inches (2.9 centimeters), are slated for distribution later this year and are intended for research activities and climate science including tracking global mean sea level rise. The satellite, named after former NASA Earth Science Division Director Michael Freilich, collects its measurements for about 90% of the world's oceans. It is one of two satellites that compose the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission. The second satellite, Sentinel-6B, is slated for launch in 2025. Together, they are the latest in a series of spacecraft starting with TOPEX/Poseidon in 1992 and continuing with the Jason series of satellites that have been gathering precise ocean height measurements for nearly 30 years. Shortly after launch, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich moved into position, trailing the current reference sea level satellite Jason-3 by 30 seconds. Scientists and engineers then spent time cross-calibrating the data collected by both satellites to ensure the continuity of measurements between the two. Once they have are assured of the data quality, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich will then become the primary sea level satellite.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last Thursday, a Canadian company backed by Jeff Bezos, called General Fusion, announced it's building a nuclear fusion facility in the UK. Insider reports: General Fusion and the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) announced the project together, which will see General Fusion build a fusion demonstration plant in the village of Culham, near Oxford. The facility will be a proof-of-concept, allowing General Fusion to demonstrate its Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) technology before going on to build its first commercial facility. According to General Fusion, construction will begin in 2022, and it is expected to be about three years before the plant is able to open. "This new plant by General Fusion is a huge boost for our plans to develop a fusion industry in the UK, and I'm thrilled that Culham will be home to such a cutting-edge and potentially transformative project," the UK science minister, Amanda Solloway, said in a statement. The BBC reports Bezos has been an investor in General Fusion for over a decade, and the company raised $100 million in its latest funding round.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: From espresso to instant, coffee is part of the daily routine for millions. Now research suggests the brew could be linked to a lower chance of developing or dying from chronic liver disease. Chronic liver disease is a major health problem around the world. According to the British Liver Trust, liver disease is the third leading cause of premature death in the UK, with deaths having risen 400% since 1970. Writing in the journal BMC Public Health, Roderick and colleagues report how they analyzed data from 494,585 participants in the UK Biobank -- a project designed to help unpick the genetic and environmental factors associated with particular conditions. All participants were aged 40 to 69 when they signed up to the project, with 384,818 saying they were coffee drinkers at the outset compared with 109,767 who did not consume the beverage. The team looked at the liver health of the participants over a median period of almost 11 years, finding 3,600 cases of chronic liver disease, with 301 deaths, and 1,839 cases of simple fatty liver disease. The analysis revealed that after taking into account factors such as body mass index, alcohol consumption, and smoking status, those who drank any amount of coffee, and of any sort, had a 20% lower risk of developing chronic liver disease or fatty liver disease (taken together) than those who did not consume the brew. The coffee drinkers also had a 49% lower risk of dying from chronic liver disease. The team said the magnitude of the effect increased with the amount of coffee consumed, up to about three to four cups a day, "beyond which further increases in consumption provided no additional benefit." A reduction in risk was also found when instant, decaffeinated and ground coffee were considered separately -- although the latter linked to the largest effect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, and leaker Jon Prosser say Apple is working on a completely new, high-end version of the MacBook Air. MacRumors reports: The high-end MacBook Air will feature two USB-C ports and a more powerful Apple silicon chip, according to Gurman. The chip will apparently be a direct successor to Apple's M1 chip, featuring the same number of computing cores, but it will run faster. It is also expected to see an increase in graphics cores from seven or eight to nine or 10. This high-end MacBook Air would sit above the current MacBook Air models with the M1 chip, but below the MacBook Pro. Prosser recently unveiled renders that purport to depict the next-generation MacBook Air based on leaked images. Prosser says that the MacBook Air will be available in a range of color options, much like the 24-inch iMac, and will feature larger function keys, a smaller trackpad, and redesigned feet on the underside of the machine. The biggest change in terms of design from the current MacBook Air seems to be the loss of its iconic tapered design. Instead, the MacBook Air will become considerably thinner as a whole, Prosser explained. Other features rumored to be coming to next-generation MacBook Air models include a mini-LED display and a MagSafe charging port. Gurman believes that the high-end MacBook Air could launch in the second half of this year at the earliest or in 2022, a timeframe that has been echoed by Prosser.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hardware engineer Zhi Hui Jun built a bicycle that avoids obstacles and self-balances. Interesting Engineering reports: The engineer, who worked on the bicycle project in his spare time over the course of four months, crafted a self-balancing bicycle using an accelerometer and gyroscope sensors that allow the bike's front wheel to compensate and quickly change direction if it's going to fall. The system generates just the right amount of angular momentum in the right direction to stop the bike from falling. Impressively, the bike's motion, as seen in Zhi Jui Jun's video is actually quite smooth, and it doesn't look like it provides the janky ride we expected on first hearing about the project -- the almost imperceptible changes made to the bike's balance make it feel like it's being ridden by a ghost. For the obstacle detection and avoidance system, Zhi Hui Jin designed an automatic control system -- that uses a customized perception and control algorithm -- that he linked to the sensors and a chip. Zhi Hui Jun used 3D printing and machine tool processing to craft some of the required parts for his bicycle. As well as the accelerometer and gyroscope, the bicycle is equipped with two brushless motors and a steering gear, as well as an RGBD depth camera, and a LiDAR sensor -- as used by driverless cars to detect their surroundings. The bicycle also uses 6S model power lithium battery, which has approximately three hours of battery life.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boston Dynamics has been purchased by Hyundai in a deal valued at $1.1 billion. According to Motherboard, the deal "sees Hyundai assume an 80 percent controlling stake in the robot company. Softbank will retain a 20 percent stake." From the report: It is hard to tell what Hyundai wants out of Boston Dynamics from the press release, which is laden with technobabble. Robots in car manufacturing are nothing new, but Hyundai says the acquisition is "another major step toward its strategic transformation into a Smart Mobility Solution Provider" such as "autonomous driving, artificial intelligence (AI), Urban Air Mobility (UAM), smart factories and robots," which seems to speak to the company's ambitions beyond car manufacturing. Hyundai says it hopes to "develop advanced technologies that enhance people's lives and promote safety, thereby realizing the progress for humanity." Apparently, the "progress of humanity" means a lot less of it. To celebrate the purchase, Hyundai released a bizarre hype video featuring a seeing-eye robot dog, a nurse robot dog with a tablet mounted on its head that allows the patient to nod at a doctor who is somewhere else, and a teen dancing with a robot in the street. In other words, Hyundai envisions a lonely future in which social cohesion between humans has broken down and robots are our only friends. That's all bad enough, but why anyone would want a seeing eye robot dog instead of a real dog is beyond comprehension.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Venus might be hell, but don't call it a dead planet. Amid surface temperatures of up to 471C and surface pressures 100 times greater than those on Earth, new research suggests the planet might still be geologically active. That's encouraging news to people who think it could once have hosted life (or that it might still be able to). From a report: Earth's lithosphere (its crust and upper mantle) is made of "plates" that move around and crash into each other, resulting in mountains, deep ocean trenches, and volcanic and seismic activity. This tectonic activity also plays an important role in the carbon cycle, the processes in which carbon is released and reabsorbed in the ecosystem; by regulating the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it has helped keep the planet cool and comfortable this whole time. Thus far, scientists have never observed anything similar on Venus. But we've never been able to rule it out, because it's hard to make scientific observations of the planet (its thick clouds obscure its surface, and any spacecraft we'd land there would most likely melt in a matter of hours). In the new findings, published in PNAS, scientists think they've finally spotted evidence of a new type of tectonic activity on Venus. The team used observations made by the Magellan probe, which orbited Venus from 1990 to 1994 and mapped the surface using radar. The features it spotted have been analyzed before, but the new study uses a new computer model that can recognize surface deformations indicating large block structures in the lithosphere. These blocks, each about the size of Alaska, seem to have been sluggishly jostling against each other like broken pack ice on a pond or lake. This is quite different from the current type of plate tectonics on Earth. But if confirmed, it would nonetheless be evidence of heat currents and molten material in Venus's interior -- something that's never before been observed. The authors think parallels with Earth's geology during the Archean Eon (2.5 to 4 billion years ago) suggest that the "pack ice" patterns could be a transition from an earlier period of plate tectonics on Venus when the planet was more Earth-like.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report : Social-media users are sharing Google Street View images featuring friends and relatives who have since died. It was sparked by a post on the Twitter account Fesshole, which asks followers to submit anonymous confessions -- many of which are explicit. The original poster said they had searched the map platform for images taken before their father had died. Launched in the US in 2007, Google Street View has since rolled out worldwide. The BBC's Neil Henderson shared an image of his late father at his front door. "I have literally hundreds of pics of my dad but the Google Street View is quite affecting, like he's still around," he wrote. Another tweeter showed an image of a couple holding hands in the street - his parents, he said, who had died several years ago. One captured a lady just outside her doorway. "My mum creeping outside for a cigarette," wrote Bernard Baker. Others said just seeing local images taken when their loved ones were still alive made them feel a connection. And some expressed regret images poignant to them had been replaced with more recent photos. There is, however, a way to look back at previous incarnations -- by tapping the clock icon on the top left-hand side of Google Maps (the feature does not appear on Google Earth), if it is there. Karim Palant used this tool to find a former image of his late grandfather Charles Palant, taken from the street in 2015 and showing him leaning out of his window from his apartment in Paris to talk to his carer below.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to ComputerBase, graphics card prices have begun to drop as much as 50% in Europe. From a report: Availability has also improved significantly, with sales of most GPU models from both AMD and Nvidia doubling month-over-month. This report comes on the heels of ASRock, a GPU maker, noting that GPU pricing is easing as demand from Chinese cryptocurrency miners wanes. More budget-oriented cards like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 and AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT are seeing the most positive results, with a near 50% drop in price compared to last month. For flagship cards like the RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT, however, prices haven't moved as much. They have dipped a respectable 10-15% which is still a very positive change considering the shortage issues plaguing the technology industry. In the United States, GPU pricing is slowly catching up to Europe, but it's still going down nonetheless.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Apple is under investigation by the German competition watchdog. The Federal Cartel Office (FCO) said the initial investigation will look at whether the company is of "paramount significance across markets." Apple said it looked forward to "having an open dialogue" with the FCO about any of its concerns. In a statement, Andreas Mundt, President of the FCO, said it would examine whether with iOS Apple had created "a digital ecosystem around its iPhone that extends across several markets." He added that a focus of the investigation would be the App Store, "as it enables Apple in many ways to influence the business activities of third parties." Depending on the outcome of its investigation, the FCO said it would look in more detail at specific practices of Apple, in a possible further proceeding. The FCO said it had received various complaints alleging anti-competitive practices, which a further probe could consider. The watchdog noted that App developers had criticized "the mandatory use of Apple's own in-app purchase system and the 30% commission rate associated with this." It had also received a complaint from the advertising and media industry about restrictions on user tracking in iOS 14.5, the watchdog said. The FCO said it would establish contact, where necessary, with the European Commission, which is currently investigating how App Store policies affect music streaming. In response, Apple said the "iOS app economy" supported more than 250,000 jobs in Germany. It added that the App Store had given "German developers of all sizes the same opportunity to share their passion and creativity with users around the world, while creating a secure and trusted place for customers to download the apps they love with the privacy protections they expect."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Neel Kashkari, took a jab at Dogecoin (DOGE) last week by referring to the memecoin as a Ponzi scheme, upping his rhetoric against cryptocurrencies. Cointelegraph reports: Kashkari's comments were in response to a LinkedIn poll by Paul Grewal, the chief legal officer and corporate secretary of Coinbase, who asked his connections about the proper way to pronounce "Doge." "The right pronunciation is pon-zi," Kashkari quipped. This isn't the first time Kashkari has taken aim at cryptocurrencies. In February 2020, he said digital assets like Bitcoin (BTC) lack the basic tenants of a stable currency and praised the Securities and Exchange Commission for "cracking down" on initial coin offerings. Kashkari is not a member of this year's Federal Open Market Committee, the group responsible for setting United States monetary policy. The Minneapolis branch of the Fed will serve as an alternate FOMC member in 2022 before rotating back onto the committee as a voting member in 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to leaker Evan Blass, OnePlus and Oppo are merging, with OnePlus becoming an Oppo sub-brand. OnePlus CEO Pete Lau made the announcement last week in a forum post, but Blass obtained a document that explains the integration in plainer terms. The Verge reports: "With the integration, OnePlus becomes a brand within Oppo, however will continue to function as an independent entity," reads the most pertinent answer. The memo also says that Lau's role as chief product officer at Oppo will make him responsible for the product strategies of both Oppo and OnePlus. [...] The memo confirms that this is essentially what's going to happen, removing any need to read between the lines. "With the merging of both the firms, we will have more resources at hand to create even better products," it says. "It will also allow us to be more efficient in our operations." OnePlus and Oppo had already merged their R&D departments around the turn of the year, so the further integration is more to do with streamlining day-to-day business operations. OnePlus customers shouldn't necessarily expect too much to change -- the shared ownership and supply chain meant that there have been similarities between Oppo and OnePlus phones for as long as OnePlus has existed. But now that OnePlus is acknowledging the relationship out loud instead of acting like it's a scrappy startup, all eyes will be on the company's next round of flagship phones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Bitcoin continued its dramatic plunge to $32,281 Monday morning, down 17.65% from a week earlier as some of China's largest bitcoin mining farms were shut down over the weekend. The bitcoin mining facilities of Sichuan Province received an order on Friday to stop doing business by Sunday, according to Chinese state media outlet the Global Times. The Sichuan Provincial Development and Reform Commission and the Sichuan Energy Bureau issued an order to all electricity companies in the region on Friday to stop supplying electricity to any known crypto mining organizations, including 26 firms that had already been publicly identified, according to the Global Times. It seems that some local miners were optimistic that Sichuan's abundant hydroelectric energy would insulate the region from a cryptocurrency crackdown by authorities, but that optimism was obviously misplaced. "We had hoped that Sichuan would be an exception during the clampdown as there is an electricity glut there in the rainy season. But Chinese regulators are now taking a uniform approach, which would overhaul and rein in the booming Bitcoin mining industry in China," Shentu Qingchun, CEO of a Shenzhen crypto company told the Global Times. Videos on social media sites purported to show miners in Sichuan turning off their mining machines and packing up their businesses. Miners in China are now looking to sell their equipment overseas, and it appears many have already found buyers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The highly contagious delta variant is the fastest and fittest coronavirus strain yet, and it will "pick off" the most vulnerable people, especially in places with low Covid-19 vaccination rates, World Health Organization officials warned Monday. From a report: Delta, first identified in India, has the potential "to be more lethal because it's more efficient in the way it transmits between humans and it will eventually find those vulnerable individuals who will become severely ill have to be hospitalized and potentially die," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO's emergencies program, said during a news conference. Ryan said world leaders and public health officials can help defend the most vulnerable through the donation and distribution of Covid vaccines. "We can protect those vulnerable people, those frontline workers," Ryan said, "and the fact that we haven't, as Director-General (Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus) has said, again and again, is a catastrophic moral failure at a global level." The WHO said Friday that delta is becoming the dominant variant of the disease worldwide. The agency declared delta a "variant of concern" last month. A variant can be labeled as "of concern" if it has been shown to be more contagious, more deadly or more resistant to current vaccines and treatments, according to the health organization.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is calling on Microsoft to face the same antitrust scrutiny as other large tech platforms in a letter to the company Monday. From a report: In the letter, Jordan asks Microsoft president Brad Smith if he believes the company would be affected by the swath of antitrust bills introduced in the House earlier this month. There are five bills in total, spanning from offering up more money for antitrust enforcers to banning large tech platforms from buying up small competitors. The antitrust package came out of a yearslong investigation into Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. The measures focus on the anticompetitive behaviors of these four companies, and it's not as clear how they would affect other large companies like Microsoft. While Microsoft meets the standard laid out under these bills to be considered a "covered platform," like meeting the over $600 billion market cap and 50 million monthly active users, the bills don't target the company's specific lines of business. "Big Tech, including Microsoft, Inc., is out to get conservatives," Jordan said in his Monday letter. "It is unclear why Microsoft has avoided significant attention from House Democrats." Assumably, Microsoft would face the same proposed standards in acquiring companies, like taking on the burden of proof, and making the data it takes from users more portable and usable on other platforms. But whereas Amazon and Apple would face more structural changes, like selling off separate lines of business, Microsoft would likely not be subject to the rules.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As ransomware attacks surge, the FBI is doubling down on its guidance to affected businesses: Don't pay the cybercriminals. But the U.S. government also offers a little-noticed incentive for those who do pay: If you pay a ransom, it may be tax deductible. From a report, shared by a Slashdot reader: The Internal Revenue Service offers no formal guidance on ransomware payments, but multiple tax experts interviewed by the Associated Press said deductions of ransomeware payments as a cost of doing business are usually allowed under law and established guidance. Some called it a 'silver lining' for ransomware victims. Those looking to discourage payments are less sanguine. They fear the IRS deduction is a potentially problematic incentive that could entice businesses to pay ransoms against the advice of law enforcement. At a minimum, they say, the deductibility sends a discordant message to businesses under duress.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon marks millions of unsold products for destruction each year in the UK, according to a new investigation by British television program ITV News. From a report: ITV found stacks of boxes marked "destroy" that were filled with electronics, jewelry, books, and other new or gently used items in one warehouse's "destruction zone." The news outlet caught the practice on camera while going undercover at the Dunfermline fulfillment center in Scotland. It says it tracked some of the goods to recycling centers and a landfill. About 124,000 items at Dunfermline were labeled "destroy" during a single week in April, according to an internal document obtained by ITV News. Just 28,000 items were set aside for donations during the same period. About half of all the stuff that's trashed are things that people returned, a former Amazon employee told ITV. While the other half are "unopened and still in their shrink wrap," the ex-employee said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The seeds of a company's downfall, it is often said in the business world, are sown when everything is going great. It is hard to argue that things aren't going great for Google. Revenue and profits are charting new highs every three months. Google's parent company, Alphabet, is worth $1.6 trillion. Google has rooted itself deeper and deeper into the lives of everyday Americans. But a restive class of Google executives worry that the company is showing cracks. The New York Times: They say Google's work force is increasingly outspoken. Personnel problems are spilling into the public. Decisive leadership and big ideas have given way to risk aversion and incrementalism. And some of those executives are leaving and letting everyone know exactly why. "I keep getting asked why did I leave now? I think the better question is why did I stay for so long?" Noam Bardin, who joined Google in 2013 when the company acquired mapping service Waze, wrote in a blog post two weeks after leaving the company in February. "The innovation challenges," he wrote, "will only get worse as the risk tolerance will go down." Many of Google's problems, current and recently departed executives said, stem from the leadership style of Sundar Pichai, the company's affable, low-key chief executive. Fifteen current and former Google executives, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering Google and Mr. Pichai, told The New York Times that Google was suffering from many of the pitfalls of a large, maturing company -- a paralyzing bureaucracy, a bias toward inaction and a fixation on public perception. The executives, some of whom regularly interacted with Mr. Pichai, said Google did not move quickly on key business and personnel moves because he chewed over decisions and delayed action. They said that Google continued to be rocked by workplace culture fights, and that Mr. Pichai's attempts to lower the temperature had the opposite effect -- allowing problems to fester while avoiding tough and sometimes unpopular positions. "Google executives proposed the idea of acquiring Shopify as a way to challenge Amazon in online commerce a few years ago. Mr. Pichai rejected the idea because he thought Shopify was too expensive, two people familiar with the discussions said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook's Clubhouse competitor, Live Audio Rooms, is making its way stateside. From a report: The company announced today that some US-based public figures, as well as certain groups, can start hosting rooms through the main Facebook iOS app. (People can join, however, from both iOS and Android.) Anyone can be invited up as a speaker with up to 50 people able to speak at once. There's no cap on the number of listeners allowed in -- a major shot at Clubhouse, which imposes room size limitations. It's also introducing other nifty features, like notifications when your friends or followers join a room, as well as live captions. There will be a "raise a hand" button to request to join the conversation, and reactions will be available to to interact throughout the chat. Twitter Spaces, Twitter's live audio feature, includes captions, but Clubhouse still does not. Within groups, admins can control who's allowed to create a room: moderators, group members, or other admins. Public group chats will be accessible both in and outside the group, but private group chats will be restricted to members. Additionally, hosts can also select a nonprofit or fundraiser to support during their conversation with a button to directly donate showing up on the chat. Again, this feels like a feature directly built to address a key Clubhouse use case and make it frictionless. (Many Clubhouse creators have hosted fundraisers on the app but have to direct people to outside links in order to facilitate donations.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.