About: blatcho

Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer: Microsoft disabled multiple fraudulent, verified Microsoft Cloud Partner Program accounts for creating malicious OAuth apps used to steal customers’ emails  —  Microsoft has disabled multiple fraudulent, verified Microsoft Partner Network accounts for creating malicious OAuth applications …

TJ Denzer / Shacknews: EA Q3: revenue up 5% YoY to $1.88B, vs. $2.5B est., net income up 209% YoY to $204M, net bookings down 9% YoY to $2.34B, and lowers FY guidance; stock drops 5%+  —  The game publishing giant reduced its full year revenue expectations by about half a billion dollars in its […]

San Francisco officials have called for a slower, more considered expansion of the use of autonomous vehicles, which have blocked traffic and hampered emergency services

A vine-like segmented robot that is attracted to heat could be used to autonomously extinguish fires without the need for costly and complex electronics

On Jan. 18, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced its 2022 fellows, those it recognizes “for significant contributions in areas including cybersecurity, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and recommender systems among many other areas.” Included in the crop of new fellows were six distinguished scientists with ties to MIT. Constantinos Daskalakis, the Armen Avanessians (1982) […]

The chemical industry is the world’s largest industrial energy consumer and the third-largest source of industrial emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. In 2019, the industrial sector as a whole was responsible for 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. And yet, as the world races to find pathways to decarbonization, the chemical industry […]

A major aspect of sustainability — a core component in many MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) courses — is considering the future effect of any given business practice or product. Sustainability was top-of-mind for Skylar Tibbits, associate professor of design research and director of MIT’s design major and minor programs, and Jeremy Carmine […]

You never know when an opportunity will arise.

BetterUp’s Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and the University of Pennsylvania’s Marty Seligman on finding new paths to good ideas.

How can platform companies, like Airbnb, reduce bias online?

A tiny Scottish village is betting its future on rocket launches. But the plan may threaten the fragile landscape—and a tenacious billionaire’s ambitions.

Michael King / Search Engine Land: An in-depth analysis of Yandex’s leaked source code shows 17,854 ranking factors, scraping Google, Bing, YouTube, and TikTok, “Vital Hosts” boosts, and more  —  Yandex isn’t Google, but there is a lot SEOs can learn about how a modern search engine is built from reviewing this codebase.

Anna Nicolaou / Financial Times: Spotify reports Q4 revenue up 18% YoY to €3.2B and a €270M loss, up from €39M YoY, as operating costs rose 44% YoY; paying subscribers were up 10M to 205M  —  Music streaming group adds subscribers but is hit by rise in operating expenses  —  Spotify’s losses ballooned …

Jay Peters / The Verge: Instagram launches Notes, its AIM-like text status feature, in Europe and Japan, delayed to comply with local laws, expanding on Asia, North America, and LatAm  —  Instagram Notes, the social network’s recently launched text status feature that reminds me of the AOL Instant Messenger away messages …

Artificial intelligences need specific training to excel at a task, but now a more generally intelligent one from DeepMind has performed as well as humans in a virtual world test

Since arriving at MIT in fall 2019, senior Sherry Nyeo has conducted groundbreaking work in multiple labs on campus, acted as a mentor to countless other students, and made a lasting mark on the Institute community. But despite her well-earned bragging rights, Nyeo isn’t one to boast. Instead, she takes every opportunity to express just […]

Students and professors can’t decide whether the AI chatbot is a research tool—or a cheating engine.

You can now use select Alexa speakers to expand the Wi-Fi coverage of your routers. Let us walk you through how.

Mary Ann Azevedo / TechCrunch: Payment card services company Marqeta agrees to acquire New York-based fintech infrastructure startup Power Finance for $223M, plus $52M subject to a milestone  —  Marqeta has agreed to acquire two-year-old fintech infrastructure startup Power Finance for $223 million in cash …

Josh Eidelson / Bloomberg: The US NLRB says comments by Apple executives and policies imposed on employees violate workers’ rights, after a 2021 complaint by former employee Ashley Gjøvik  —  Comments by Apple Inc. executives and policies imposed on employees have been deemed illegal by US National Labor Relations …

Demetri Sevastopulo / Financial Times: Sources: the US Department of Commerce told some companies it would no longer grant licenses to export US technology to Huawei, as it moves toward a total ban  —  White House moving closer to imposing total ban on sale of American tech to Chinese company  —  The Biden administration …

The polyethylene microplastic pollution commonly found in wastewater can be extracted to create electrodes for lithium-ion batteries

Every day, billions of red blood cells pass through the spleen, an organ that is responsible for filtering out old or damaged blood cells. This task is made more difficult when the blood cells are misshapen, as they are in patients with sickle cell disease, which affects millions of people throughout the world. Sickled blood […]

Imagine that you are teaching a technical subject to children in a small village. They are eager to learn, but you face a problem: There are few resources to educate them in their mother tongue. This is a common experience in India, where the quality of textbooks written in many local languages pales in comparison […]

With some careful twisting and stacking, MIT physicists have revealed a new and exotic property in “magic-angle” graphene: superconductivity that can be turned on and off with an electric pulse, much like a light switch. The discovery could lead to ultrafast, energy-efficient superconducting transistors for neuromorphic devices — electronics designed to operate in a way […]

How to be thoughtful without overthinking.

To shore up security, you need to encourage practices your employees will actually use.

Four recommendations to ensure your investment strategy drives real business value.

More than two years ago, criminals crippled the systems of London’s Hackney Council. It’s still fighting to recover.

Scientists kept the rodents’ immune T cells active four times longer than mice can live—with huge implications for cancer, vaccination, and aging research.

The cash-strapped company recently auctioned off USB dongles but has left some corporate computers in the custody of laid-off staff.

New York Times: South Korea’s K-pop industry is embracing the metaverse, expanding on commonplace virtual counterparts for artists, including by creating the virtual band Mave  —  In the world’s testing ground for tech, K-pop singers are being spun up out of pixels and doing battle in a virtual universe.

John D. McKinnon / Wall Street Journal: The US’ Berman amendments, passed during the Cold War to protect the free flow of content between the US and hostile countries, may complicate a TikTok ban  —  Decades-old measures protect free flow of content internationally, even with hostile nations  —  How TikTok Could Become a U.S. Company

Naomi Nix / Washington Post: After layoffs, Meta, which used remote work during the pandemic to advance its diversity goals, now faces an uphill battle to continue making progress with DEI  —  Brit Levy, 35, was eager to join Meta’s paid training program for aspiring human resources managers last year because she wanted …

Here’s something else chess players need to keep in check: air pollution. That’s the bottom line of a newly published study co-authored by an MIT researcher, showing that chess players perform objectively worse and make more suboptimal moves, as measured by a computerized analysis of their games, when there is more fine particulate matter in […]

Across the U.S., about three-quarters of people enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans — a form of private insurance following the rules of Medicare — receive free gym memberships. Why is this? The answer, research has shown, is that it improves insurers’ client base: The promise of free workout time does not lure existing customers from […]

Tread lightly on our planet with toys and accessories made from repurposed plastic, and many other Earth-friendly picks.

Schneider Electric’s app-controlled electricity management hardware gives you more control over your power consumption. Are the utilities savings worth it?

Whether you need a travel-friendly slate or something affordable for the kids, we tested every model to find the right one for everybody.

Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch: Analysis: US Black Web3 founders raised $60M in 2022, up from $16M in 2021; total money raised by US Web3 startups in 2022 fell to $11.9B from $16.5B in 2021  —  Startups in the space are more bullish than ever  —  Much hope remains after the crypto winter almost froze the […]

TechCrunch: Court records since 2011 show how police in some US states used digital data, like text messages, search history, and emails, in abortion-related prosecutions  —  In late April, police in Nebraska received a tip saying 17-year-old Celeste Burgess had given birth to a stillborn baby and buried the body.

Chris Metinko / Crunchbase News: Analysis: Florida startups raised $9.7B in 601 deals in 2022 vs. $7.8B in 652 deals in 2021; VC funding fell 40%+ in 2022 in California, Massachusetts, and NY  —  Last year could not top the banner year venture capital saw in 2021 — at least in most geographies.

Garmin’s latest wearable for runners and triathletes adds a new Morning Report to track your daily fitness.

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan / New Scientist: Researchers detail how ProGen, an LLM trained on 280M proteins, designed proteins with anti-microbial properties that were tested in real life and shown to work  —  An AI was tasked with creating proteins with anti-microbial properties.  Researchers then created a subset of the proteins and found some did the job

Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic: How the “enshittification” cycle, in which platforms first are good to users and business customers before abusing them, has infected TikTok, Amazon, and others  —  Today’s links  — Tiktok’s enshittification: The company manually allocates surplus to creators, and they can take it away again, too.

Sander Lutz / Decrypt: The White House publishes a roadmap for mitigating risks posed by cryptocurrencies and urges Congress to hasten efforts to create a crypto regulatory framework  —  Four senior Biden officials penned a note Friday urging lawmakers to hasten their efforts to create a regulatory framework for crypto.

From LCDs to fancy OLED models, these are our favorite televisions at every price point.

Plus: Microsoft stops selling Windows 10, Substack gets a supersecret Finsta mode, and TikTok tweaks its DMs.

Plus: Hive ransomware gang gets knocked offline, FBI confirms North Korea stole $100 million, and more.

Julia Angwin / The Markup: Q&A with Princeton CS professor Arvind Narayanan on why he calls ChatGPT a “bullshit generator”, his worries over its boom, developing his AI taxonomy, and more  —  Hello, friends,  —  If you have been reading all the hype about the latest artificial intelligence chatbot …