Category: Uncategorized

Innovative approaches that your company may not have considered.

Cupertino puts privacy first in a lot of its products. But the company still gathers a bunch of your information.

By reinstating banned accounts and selling blue checks, Musk has supercharged “the most dangerous” Covid disinformation.

To succeed in home settings, domestic mechanical assistants will need humanoid attributes.

Ezra Reguerra / Cointelegraph: After North Korea’s Lazarus Group moved ~41K ETH, worth ~$63.5M, stolen from the Harmony bridge hack, Binance and Huobi freeze 124 BTC linked to the hackers  —  In a recent tweet, on-chain crypto detective ZachXBT said that the hackers have been moving $64 million in the last weekend.  —  75 Total […]

Bloomberg: Taiwanese government data: integrated circuit chip exports rose 18.4% YoY in 2022, down from 27.1% YoY growth in 2021 and 22% YoY growth in 2020  —  Taiwan’s exports of integrated circuit chips rose in 2022 for a seventh consecutive year, further solidifying the economy’s leadership status …

Shaurya Malwa / CoinDesk: Shiba Inu developers plan to launch Shibarium, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, in the coming weeks, focusing on the metaverse and gaming applications  —  Ecosystem tokens shiba inu, leash and bone will serve as the the upcoming Ethereum-based blockchain.  —  Upcoming layer 2 network Shibarium …

Add some color to your life, find accent lighting to match your mood, and transform the feel of your home with these decorative devices.

Get help, even if you’re off the grid.

Hana Kiros / MIT Technology Review: A look at VR support groups and communities helping members process cancer diagnoses and death, question their marriages, turn over childhood traumas, and more  —  Welcome to “Death Q&A,” a space with a unique combination of anonymity and togetherness, where avatars discuss what weighs on them most heavily.

Morgan Meaker / Wired: Europe’s rapid delivery market has consolidated down to three companies: Getir, the largest player that operates in seven European countries, Flink, and Gopuff  —  Rapid grocery delivery apps are leaving the continent, putting the Turkish startup on top.  But, its reign is anything but stable.

In his senior year of high school, Daniel Larsen proved a key theorem about Carmichael numbers—strange entities that mimic the primes.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Touchscreen Macs will help Apple further unify its software and services, keep up with a touch-first generation, and pick up a bigger piece of the PC market  —  Apple’s upcoming move to Macs with touch screens is about the future of its user base.  Also: The company kicks its in-house technology […]

Billy Perrigo / TIME: A profile of, and interview with, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on AGI, “not moving fast and breaking things”, launching the Sparrow chatbot in 2023, and more  —  Demis Hassabis stands halfway up a spiral staircase, surveying the cathedral he built.

Coco Feng / South China Morning Post: China’s central bank says Ant Group and 13 other firms “have basically completed business rectification” under financial regulators’ guidance and supervision  —  Chinese financial technology giant Ant Group and 13 other platform companies “have basically completed business rectification” …

Financial Times: TikTok, Instagram, and other social media platforms expect age verification measures in the UK’s Online Safety Bill to reduce user numbers, hitting ad revenue  —  UK’s Online Safety Bill requires stronger age verification measures for platforms including TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat

Plus: Joe Biden’s classified-documents scandal, the end of security support for Windows 7, and more.

It’s the indispensable multi-tool of the kitchen. We sliced and diced our way through meats and veggies to find today’s best blades.

Plus: Samsung sets a date for the next Galaxy Unpacked, Xbox gets a power-saving mode, and the right-to-repair fight rages on.

Wall Street Journal: SIA says chip companies proposed 40+ projects across the US worth ~$200B since 2020, as the US realizes that chips are now as central to modern economies as oil  —  Recent shortages and fears of China’s ambitions to dominate the industry have led to a frenetic effort to rev up U.S. production

Erin Woo / The Information: Internal messages: Twitter intentionally suspended access to third-party clients last Thursday; staff questioned when an explanation will be provided publicly  —  The mysterious outage of Tweetbot and other third-party Twitter clients that began Thursday night was an intentional suspension …

Washington Post: How Elon Musk’s Twitter moderation cuts boosted hate speech outside the US and Canada, where 75%+ of the service’s 280M DAUs live, including in Japan and India  —  With 75 percent of its audience outside the U.S. and Canada, the impact of Elon Musk’s moderation cuts has been great elsewhere

These great discounts will help you start the year right.

Machine learning has already proven useful, but its real-world applications are just beginning.

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica: Hackers are exploiting a critical remote code execution vulnerability in unpatched versions of the Control Web Panel, a widely used interface for web hosting  —  A patch was released in October, but not all servers have installed it.  —  Malicious hackers have begun exploiting …

Nitish Pahwa / Slate: How All-In, a podcast moderated by Jason Calacanis and his billionaire pals that often tops tech-podcast charts, gives an insight into Twitter under Elon Musk  —  On Nov. 7, about a week after Elon Musk took over Twitter and laid off half the staff, a company vice president offered a group […]

Adam Popescu / MIT Technology Review: A look at Congo’s Virunga National Park, which is running a Bitcoin mine that uses power from a hydro plant to pay salaries and build infrastructure projects  —  In an attempt to protect its forests and famous wildlife, Virunga has become the first national park to run a Bitcoin […]

The state is ping-ponging between severe drought and catastrophic flooding. The solution to both? Making the landscape spongier.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: DOJ cleared its antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter to oversee probes involving Google; Google had sought his recusal, citing his work with Yelp and others  —  Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter’s involvement had been paused and the Alphabet unit sought his recusal

Far from ushering in the death of cinema, AI can help film the “unfilmable” and make cinema more collaborative.

Writer Warren Lapine’s latest project is a collection of letters Roger Zelazny wrote to his friend Carl Yoke.

David Pan / Bloomberg: With the value of next-gen Bitcoin mining rigs down an estimated 85%, some crypto lenders flooded with repossessed rigs are keeping them running for the income  —  Crypto lenders have repossessed so many Bitcoin mining rigs they’re resorting to plugging them in and extracting tokens themselves.

Victoria Song / The Verge: Strava users say the rollout of its first price hike in over a decade has been unnecessarily convoluted and confusing  —  No one likes price hikes, but Strava’s messy rollout has left many customers wondering what’s happening to their subscription.  Here’s what’s actually happening …

Levels of respiratory illness are rising in the Boston area and elsewhere. Here, MIT Medical Director Cecilia Stuopis provides recommendations for keeping yourself and others healthy during the winter months. Q: Rates of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses are back on the rise. Should I be concerned? A: While everyone should take additional precautions, people […]

Small tweaks can make a big impact.

A framework to help funders understand who they are and what kind of impact they aspire to have.

A program paid workers $10,000 to relocate to Tulsa. And two recent studies suggest the investment was worth it.

Activision-Blizzard’s ambitious, much-hyped initiative has stalled. Recent upheavals reveal the instability of esports—and a murky future for the league.

Police in the Indian state of Telangana have found a novel way to help people avoid getting swindled online: grassroots education.

The loquacious bot has Microsoft ready to sink a reported $10 billion into OpenAI. It’s unclear what products can be built on the technology.

Reuters: Sources: Chinese authorities plan to allow Didi’s ride-hailing and other apps back on app stores as soon as next week, another sign of the loosening crackdown  —  Chinese authorities are set to allow Didi Global’s ride-hailing and other apps back on domestic app stores as soon as next week …

Ben Schoon / 9to5Google: Twitter users say Tweetbot, Twitterrific, and other third-party apps are broken, possibly due to Twitter’s API being down; Twitter has offered no explanation  —  The past several weeks since Elon Musk’s takeover have seen Twitter in turmoil as rapid changes hit the platform …

Josh Ye / Reuters: A look at Tencent’s short-video service WeChat Channels, called “the hope of the company” by founder Pony Ma, as the tech giant tries to build its own TikTok  —  On a hot summer’s day last year, the 90’s boy band Backstreet Boys clambered on to a stage in Pennsylvania and belted […]

In the future, the energy needed to run the powerful computers on board a global fleet of autonomous vehicles could generate as many greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centers in the world today. That is one key finding of a new study from MIT researchers that explored the potential energy consumption and related […]

Losing your internet for a few hours? Here’s how to keep watching media from the likes of YouTube, Netflix, and Prime to pass the time.

Last year was one of the warmest measured, say NASA and NOAA. It would have been even more sweltering if not for La Niña, which will soon fade away.

US politicians are battling over banning the appliance. Around the globe, gas stoves are emitting chemicals that harm the environment and people’s health.

Bloomberg: Sources: Google and Nvidia told the FTC that the Activision Blizzard deal could give Microsoft an unfair advantage in cloud, subscription, and mobile gaming  —  Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Nvidia Corp. have expressed concerns to the Federal Trade Commission about Microsoft Corp.’s acquisition …

Sarah Wynn / The Block: The SEC charges Genesis and Gemini with the unregistered offering and sale of securities to retail investors through a Gemini crypto lending program  —  – The SEC charged both Gemini and Genesis with unregistered offering and sale of securities to retail investors, some of who were in the U.S.

The Guardian: Meta sues to ban Voyager Labs from using Facebook and Instagram, alleging the investigative software firm created 38K+ fake accounts to scrape 600K+ users’ data  —  The social media giant launched an investigation into Voyager’s use of fake accounts after a Guardian investigation