About: blatcho

After pioneering procedurally-generated music with the soundtrack to No Man’s Sky, the band took things a step further and created an endless audio loop.

Looking for something on-brand to watch during the holiday break? These are all available to stream right now.

The fuel can be produced by adding bacteria to spent drill holes—meaning there are thousands of potential hydrogen sources worldwide.

Parikshit Mishra / CoinDesk: ConsenSys says it collects user data related to its on-chain wallet service MetaMask, following a similar announcement by decentralized exchange Uniswap  —  The firm said when using Infura as an RPC on MetaMask, a user’s IP address and wallet address information would also be collected.

Financial Times: Sources: Elon Musk disbands Twitter’s Brussels team, sparking compliance concern among EU officials after policy executives departed the small but vital office  —  Digital policy executives’ departure elicits unease over adherence to EU rules on disinformation and hate speech

Jon Porter / The Verge: Elon Musk says Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta is now available on request to anyone in North America who has paid for the $15,000 feature  —  Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” Beta, which has been gradually rolling out over the past couple of years, is now available to anyone who’s paid for the […]

From Goldfinger to No Time to Die, James Bond has long showcased the latest tech advances. Might 007’s next adventure involve protecting a low-cost, lightweight, high-capacity battery from sinister forces, asks Kathryn Harkup

Need a new Apple Watch, MacBook, or iPhone case? Now’s the time to snag one at a discount.

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of James Bond films, the company has made new Seamaster divers that mechanically animate 007’s iconic opening sequence.

Gearing up to shred the slopes or dive into the seas? These photography tools are made for danger.

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch: Mark Cuban’s interactive streaming app Fireside acquires streaming platform Stremium and plans to launch on smart TVs, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, and other devices  —  Mark Cuban-backed streaming app Fireside, which today offers podcasters and other creators a way to host interactive …

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: Microsoft says hackers used vulnerabilities in Boa web server, discontinued in 2005 but pervasive across IoT devices, to target the Indian power sector  —  Microsoft said today that security vulnerabilities found to impact a web server discontinued since 2005 have been used to target and compromise organizations in the energy sector.

Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg: Sources: Amazon plans to spend $1B+ per year to produce and release movies for theaters, starting with a few releases in 2023, and eventually 12 to 15 annually  —  Amazon.com Inc. plans to spend more than $1 billion a year to produce movies that it will release in theaters …

A robotic leg with a big toe and motors that can “change gear” like a bicycle can enable a wearer to walk up stairs and slopes

An open-source intelligence project is using GPS satellites to track intercontinental ballistic missiles, such as the one tested by North Korea last week

MIT senior Teresa Gao has been named one of the 12 winners of the George J. Mitchell Scholarship’s Class of 2024. After graduating next spring with a double major in computer science and engineering as well as brain and cognitive sciences, she will study augmented and virtual reality at Trinity College Dublin. Gao is the […]

Sponsor content from Workday.

Four strategies to motivate and inspire your team.

While overt discrimination against women may be on the decline, unconscious bias can be just as limiting.

Grasslands are being overrun by drought-resistant invaders that wreck animal habitats, suck up water supplies, and can cost landowners a fortune.

This compact, cordless vacuum is expensive—but it’s a dust-buster you’ll want to use over and over again.

Amid Twitter chaos and Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, the conservative social network is having a moment of its own.

Mark Sweney / The Guardian: The UK’s National Audit Office says a 2% digital services tax on the gross revenue of Amazon, Apple, and other US giants reaped almost £360M in its first year  —  Figure raised exceeds what most of the digital businesses have been paying in UK corporation tax

Cecilia D’Anastasio / Bloomberg: Amazon’s Twitch makes changes to address child predation concerns, including mandatory phone verification and improving account termination for users under 13  —  Twitch, the video game livestreaming site popular with teens and kids, announced changes it’s making on the platform to increase safety …

Shen Lu / Wall Street Journal: Baidu EVP Dou Shen downplays the impact of US semiconductor restrictions, after the company stockpiled parts, and says its AI business would benefit long term  —  Executive says the search-engine giant’s AI and cloud businesses don’t rely heavily on chips restricted by the U.S.

Before a machine-learning model can complete a task, such as identifying cancer in medical images, the model must be trained. Training image classification models typically involves showing the model millions of example images gathered into a massive dataset. However, using real image data can raise practical and ethical concerns: The images could run afoul of […]

Picture two teams squaring off on a football field. The players can cooperate to achieve an objective, and compete against other players with conflicting interests. That’s how the game works. Creating artificial intelligence agents that can learn to compete and cooperate as effectively as humans remains a thorny problem. A key challenge is enabling AI […]

Researchers monitoring a “firehose” of public tweets found signs of increasing toxicity—before Elon Musk reversed bans on Trump and other divisive figures.

Finding high-quality detection canines is hard enough—and the pandemic only dug a deeper hole.

The government soft-launched an entirely digital application process. Here’s what you need to know about eligibility and navigating the website.

New York Times: Interviews and messages show how SBF used PACs, nonprofits, and consulting firms to woo politicians, regulators, and others to support his crypto goals  —  In just three years, the FTX co-founder built a massive operation to woo politicians, regulators and nonprofits to support his crypto goals.

Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal: Sources: Sequoia apologized to its fund investors for the $150M it lost on FTX and told them it would improve its due diligence process on future investments  —  Venture-capital firm tells fund investors that it will improve due diligence on future investments after $150 million loss on crypto exchange

Camomile Shumba / CoinDesk: US Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Durbin, and Tina Smith ask Fidelity to reconsider its upcoming Bitcoin 401(k) offerings announced in April 2022  —  The asset management giant said in April it would offer retail investors the option to put bitcoin in their 401(k) accounts at some point this year.

An AI developed by researchers at Meta convincingly negotiated with humans while playing an online version of the board game Diplomacy. It was also ranked in the top 10 per cent of players

At the heart of nearly every galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole. But not all supermassive black holes are alike: there are many types. Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects, are one of the brightest and most active types of supermassive black holes. An international group of scientists has published new observations of the first quasar ever […]

It’s well-known that carrying one copy of the APOE4 gene variant increases one’s risk for Alzheimer’s disease threefold and two copies about tenfold, but the fundamental reasons why, and what can be done to help patients, remain largely unknown. A study published by an MIT-based team Nov. 16 in Nature provides some new answers as […]

A look at the pros and cons.

It’s in founders’ best interests to not only accept, but invite, oversight.

A conversation with Georgetown’s Christine Porath about how to improve customer-facing work in an era of incivility.

After months of meticulous planning, investigators finally move in to catch AlphaBay’s mastermind red-handed. Then the case takes a tragic turn.

Samuel Stolton / Politico: The UK’s CMA launches an investigation into Apple’s and Google’s dominance in mobile browsers and cloud gaming, following a survey that found a “stranglehold”  —  Apple and Google could be forced to loosen their grip on mobile systems after the United Kingdom’s competition watchdog launched …

David Enrich / New York Times: An investigation reveals how online US sports betting grew so big, so fast and what the consequences are likely to be for public health, taxpayers, and others  —  The New York Times examined thousands of pages of documents and interviewed lobbyists, executives, lawmakers …

John Reed / Financial Times: After criticism, India’s government releases an updated and more “balanced” data protection bill, seeking passage in April or May 2023, the fourth such draft  —  IT minister says ‘balanced’ legislation is designed to accelerate economic growth  —  India’s revamped data protection bill is …

Researchers at MIT have made significant steps toward creating robots that could practically and economically assemble nearly anything, including things much larger than themselves, from vehicles to buildings to larger robots. The new work, from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), builds on years of research, including recent studies demonstrating that objects such as […]

MIT Associate Professor Otto Cordero has always gravitated toward the most basic questions of life. How do ecosystems assemble? Why do species divide labor in nature? He believes these are some of the most central questions for understanding life. “The challenge is discovering something that applies across organisms and across environments — now we’re talking […]

Lawmakers are growing concerned about a flood of data-hungry cars from China taking over American streets.

You finally caved and bought one. These are our favorite straps, screen protectors, chargers, and cases to go with your smartwatch.

You could fill a stadium or two with all the cheap headphones out there. We tested a ton to help you pick the right pair.

Ron Amadeo / Ars Technica: Report: Amazon’s hardware group may lose $10B in 2022, as many Echo devices are sold at cost and plans to monetize Alexa have failed  —  Layoffs reportedly hit the Alexa team hard as the company’s biggest money loser.  —  Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company’s history […]

Cheyenne Ligon / CoinDesk: US DOJ says two Estonians were arrested for a $575M cryptocurrency fraud and money laundering scheme that allegedly defrauded hundreds of thousands of investors  —  According to the Department of Justice, the two men used shell companies to launder the proceeds of their fraudulent schemes and buy luxury cars and real […]