About: blatcho

Reuters: Court transcript from plea hearing: Caroline Ellison said she and Sam Bankman-Fried knowingly misled lenders about how much Alameda was borrowing from FTX  —  Sam Bankman-Fried and other FTX executives received billions of dollars in secret loans from the crypto mogul’s Alameda Research …

Naomi Jagoda / Bloomberg: After pushback, the IRS delays a requirement for e-commerce platforms, including Venmo and PayPal, to send tax forms to small businesses with $600+ transactions  —  The Internal Revenue Service is delaying a requirement for e-commerce platforms, including Venmo, PayPal, Cash App and Etsy …

In 2022, MIT returned to a bit of normalcy after the challenge of Covid-19 began to subside. The Institute prepared to bid farewell to its president and later announced his successor; announced five flagship projects in a new competition aimed at tackling climate’s greatest challenges; made new commitments toward ensuring support for diverse voices; and […]

Why your money is worth less than it used to be.

Shift from asking, “What makes us money?” to “Who makes us money?”

With effective leadership, friction between generations can spark creative opportunities.

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Twitter will now let Blue subscribers upload 60-minute, 1080p videos up to 2GB on the web; iOS and Android users are still limited to 10-minute, 512MB videos  —  After taking over Twitter, Elon Musk had long promised that the company is working toward making the platform more appealing to video creators.

Nate Raymond / Reuters: Filing: Meta agrees to pay $725M to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of letting third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, access user data  —  Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) has agreed to pay $725 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit accusing …

Financial Times: Sources: TSMC is in advanced talks with key suppliers about setting up its first European plant in Dresden, Germany; construction could begin in early 2024  —  Company to send senior executives to Dresden early next year to discuss potential factory project in Germany

A rise in the jamming of satellite navigation within Russia follows attacks by drones on Russian airbases and may be designed to deter further strikes

If you’ve been at MIT long enough, you’ve probably heard grumblings about peer-reviewed journals that are slow or uncooperative. But those problems are trivial compared to the challenges faced by researchers in other parts of the world. Researchers in developing countries have to sift through lists of less familiar international journals that each have wildly […]

Amid final exams and year-end research crunches, this is also the time of year when many in the MIT community take time to have some fun and express gratitude for the people that make their work possible. Each year across the Institute, community members gather for holiday parties and socializing in a more relaxed environment […]

These infrared imaging devices will show you how hot or cold the objects in the photo are.

This wearable heats up, vibrates, and soothes sore eyes and temples. I don’t want to take it off.

Tired of plain drinks and pour-overs? Turn your kitchen into a café with these barista-worthy machines.

Joanna Ossinger / Bloomberg: Crypto exchange Bullish, backed by Peter Thiel, and Far Peak, a SPAC led by ex-NYSE President Thomas Farley, call off their planned $9B merger announced in 2021  —  Cryptocurrency exchange Bullish and special-purpose acquisition company Far Peak Acquisition Corp. have called off their planned merger.

Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch: LastPass says a threat actor stole a backup copy of its customers’ encrypted vault data using cloud storage keys stolen from a LastPass employee in August 2022  —  Password manager giant LastPass has confirmed that cybercriminals stole its customers’ encrypted password vaults …

Alfred Ng / Politico: The Privacy Act, passed in 1974, prevents sharing citizens’ data between US agencies, forcing the government to use data brokers and pay them millions per year  —  How an old privacy law and new security demands force Washington to rely on an industry in the crosshairs.

Manufacturing had a big summer. The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law in August, represents a massive investment in U.S. domestic manufacturing. The act aims to drastically expand the U.S. semiconductor industry, strengthen supply chains, and invest in R&D for new technological breakthroughs. According to John Hart, professor of mechanical engineering and director of […]

Cognitive scientists have long sought to understand what makes some sentences more difficult to comprehend than others. Any account of language comprehension, researchers believe, would benefit from understanding difficulties in comprehension. In recent years researchers successfully developed two models explaining two significant types of difficulty in understanding and producing sentences. While these models successfully predict […]

From the announcement that President L. Rafael Reif would be stepping down and the news that Duke University Provost Sally Kornbluth had been named MIT’s 18th president to the Institute’s first Climate Grand Challenges and the opening of the new MIT Museum in Kendall Square, MIT faculty, researchers, students, and staff made headlines in 2022. […]

Applying lessons from the Black feminist tradition.

Online ad platforms make it easy to obtain data-backed insights.

Strategies to help you get the support you need to do your best work.

To take out invasives, the US relies on crews wielding hatchets, chainsaws, and herbicide. It’s a messy, fun job—but it may not be enough to stop the spread.

Chris Stokel-Walker / Nature: How Twitter played a major role in research and science communication, especially during the pandemic, as researchers and scientists leave the service  —  Chris Stokel-Walker is a freelance journalist in Newcastle, UK.  —  You can also search for this author in  —  PubMed Google Scholar

Alex W. Palmer / New York Times: How ByteDance and TikTok, which owe their existence to intermingled Western and Chinese ideas, capital, and people, became entangled in the US-China rift  —  A Chinese app conquered the planet — and now the U.S. is threatening to shut it down.  Can the world’s biggest virality machine survive?

Jean Eaglesham / Wall Street Journal: The SEC’s Paul Munter says the regulator is increasing scrutiny of audit firms working with crypto companies, warning investors to be “very wary” of some claims  —  Regulator concerned about cryptocurrency companies overstating audit firms’ narrow reports

It started with a childhood memory. Or maybe it was a dream. MIT Senior Lecturer Ken Urban couldn’t get the image of a face in a window out of his head. Eventually he developed the vision into a rough idea for a plot. Last year, he shared an early treatment with Jay Scheib, MIT’s Class […]

How accurate are over-the-counter swabs? Does your insurance cover them? We have answers.

Before there was SBF, there was another “ethical crusader” who learned the same hard truths about the technology of trust.

These accessories might not cure your anxiety or insomnia, but they can feel like a hug when you really need one.

Ian King / Bloomberg: Micron reports Q1 revenue down ~47% YoY to $4.09B and plans to reduce its workforce by ~10% over the next year; Micron had 48,000 employees in September 2022  —  Micron Technology Inc., the largest US maker of memory chips, gave a lackluster revenue outlook for the current period …

Wall Street Journal: Sources detail steps Netflix may take to reduce US password sharing, like charging account owners an extra sharing fee at just below the $6.99 ad-supported tier  —  Putting a stop to the practice without alienating customers will be a challenge  —  The end of password sharing is coming to Netflix soon …

Tonya Riley / CyberScoop: The FCC proposes a record-breaking ~$300M fine against an auto warranty scam robocall campaign that made 5.1B+ calls to 550M+ US phone numbers in Q1 2021  —  The Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday proposed a record-breaking $300 million fine against an auto warranty robocall campaign …

A hydrogel mesh made from vinegar, baking soda, glycerol and alcohol sucks up water three times as well as products made from paper or cloth

“We have barely scratched the surface of the moiré quantum matter universe,” said Pablo Jarillo-Herrero at the 2022 Mildred S. Dresselhaus Lecture. The Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT, Jarillo-Herrero is at the forefront of the scientific exploration into moiré quantum systems, where correlated physics, superconductivity, and other phases of matter can […]

Nestled in the foothills of Bogotá, the University of the Andes (Uniandes) draws students across Colombia who are looking to study engineering. Today, those graduates are better equipped than ever, thanks to a comprehensive redesign of the university’s undergraduate engineering curriculum, inspired in part by its relationship with MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab […]

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow throughout the brain, has been used over the past couple of decades for a variety of applications, including “functional anatomy” — a way of determining which brain areas are switched on when a person carries out a particular task. fMRI has been used to […]

Sponsor content from ALIBABA.

The story of how a product was discovered can change the level of consumers’ interest.

The question is not whether to engage, but how to do so.

In Cyclettes, author and designer Tree Abraham takes readers on an illustrated ride through her life.

High costs stopped commercial fleets from embracing EVs. But now that the numbers finally add up, it makes sense to switch.

Sidelined for too long, research into this vital aspect of health for people with ovaries will pick up pace in 2023—and it could see some big breakthroughs.

Hannah Murphy / Financial Times: In a Twitter Space, Elon Musk says he expects Twitter to “be okay” next year after cost cutting, claiming the company was on course to spend ~$5B in 2023  —  Social network’s owner offers snapshot of dire finances to explain huge lay-offs since $44bn takeover

Juli Clover / MacRumors: Kuo: Apple plans to cancel or postpone iPhone SE 4 mass production, set for 2024, due to lower than expected shipments of its middle- and lower-tier iPhones  —  Apple will cancel or postpone mass production for the planned 2024 iPhone SE 4, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said today in a series […]

Jay Peters / The Verge: George Hotz, aka geohot, who joined Twitter on November 18 after Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” pledge, resigned, saying he could not make “any real impact”  —  George Hotz, known for being the first person to carrier-unlock an iPhone and jailbreaking the PS3 …

Videos sent in Twitter direct messages can theoretically be viewed by anyone, a weakness that could be leveraged by hackers, but the company isn’t planning on fixing this flaw

Luqiao Liu was the kind of kid who would rather take his toys apart to see how they worked than play with them the way they were intended. Curiosity has been a driving force throughout his life, and it led him to MIT, where Liu is a newly tenured associate professor in the Department of […]