Elon Musk to offer $100 million prize for 'best' carbon capture tech

Found on Reuters on Saturday, 23 January 2021
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Tesla Inc chief and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Thursday took to Twitter to promise a $100 million prize for development of the “best” technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions.

“Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology,” Musk wrote in a tweet, followed by a second tweet that promised “Details next week.”

Now while this is a great offer, someone who comes up with such a technology can easily make billions from it.

Instacart to Cut 1,900 Jobs, Including Its Only Union Roles

Found on Bloomberg on Friday, 22 January 2021
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Instacart Inc. is cutting about 1,900 employees’ jobs, including 10 workers who recently formed a union, as the company seeks to boost its ranks of contract workers.

“What we found is that our shoppers require training and supervision, which is how you improve the quality of the picking,” Instacart Chief Executive Officer Apoorva Mehta said at the time. “You can’t do that when they are independent contractors.”

Sure, you need a lot of intensive and personal training to go through a shopping list and put the items into your cart. Sorry, but this is no rocket science, and untrained people manage to successfully shop for themselves even.

Pirate Bay co-founder criticises Parler for its lack of resilience

Found on The Register on Thursday, 14 January 2021
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Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi took to Twitter to offer his opinions.

The most ironic thing is that TPBs enemies include not just the US government but also many European and the Russian one. Compared to gab/parlor which is supported by the current president of the US and probably liked by the Russian one too.

It's one thing to run a few webservers that only list magnet links, and a full featured messaging platform.

Chinese web firms 'bullying' customers with data, algorithms - consumer watchdog

Found on Reuters on Friday, 08 January 2021
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“Consumers are being squeezed by data algorithms and becoming the targets of technical bullying,” the association said.

China also warned its internet giants to brace for increased scrutiny, as it slapped fines and announced investigations into deals involving Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings.

Chinese state media have become increasingly vocal about infringement of consumer rights by tech companies.

Some articles you have to read twice to believe that China steps up for rights of the people.

SolarWinds’ shares drop 22 per cent. But what’s this? $286m in stock sales just before?

Found on The Register on Saturday, 26 December 2020
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The two firms owned 70 per cent of SolarWinds, which produces networking monitoring software that was backdoored by what is thought to be state-sponsored Russian spies. This tainted code was installed by thousands of SolarWinds customers including key departments of the US government that were subsequently hacked via the hidden remote access hole.

Infosec giant FireEye announced on Tuesday, December 8 that its systems had been hacked and its penetration tools exfiltrated. On Friday, December 11, as part of an investigation into that intrusion, FireEye started letting it be known that SolarWinds' updates had been tampered with.

Inside information has always meant extra money is about to be made.

It's official: Harrison Ford will return in a fifth 'Indiana Jones' movie

Found on CNN News on Wednesday, 16 December 2020
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Harrison Ford will be grabbing his whip and ramming on his hat for a fifth "Indiana Jones" movie, Disney has confirmed -- a mere 41 years after the first installment, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," was released.

"I was not an overnight success. I spent 15 years before I had any real, noticeable success," Ford told Parade in an interview earlier this year. "Persistence is certainly something I think I can credit myself for having."

Hopefully it will be as great as the old movies and not one of these bad Disney productions.

Encrypted messaging puts children at risk, commissioner warns

Found on BBC News on Saturday, 12 December 2020
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Encryption of online messages could make it harder to police child abuse and grooming online, the children's commissioner for England has warned.

Ms Longfield said the report "shows how vigilant parents need to be, but also how the tech giants are failing to regulate themselves and so are failing to keep children safe".

It's always the same old song: "think of the children". It is not the primary job of everybody to raise someone's children. That's the job of the parents. They need to educate their children, to teach them and to keep an eye on them until they are old enough to deal with problems correctly.

TikTok star Charli D'Amelio first to hit 100m followers

Found on BBC News on Friday, 11 December 2020
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In the first episode of her family's reality series, Dinner with the D'Amelios, fans claimed the star acted disrespectfully toward the personal chef who prepared them dinner.

Her profile both on TikTok and outside the platform, has rocketed in the last year. She became the first person to hit 50 million subscribers in April.

In other news, a sack of rice toppled over in China.

Your Computer Isn't Yours

Found on Sneak Berlin on Thursday, 19 November 2020
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It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it.

This data amounts to a tremendous trove of data about your life and habits, and allows someone possessing all of it to identify your movement and activity patterns. For some people, this can even pose a physical danger to them.

New rules in macOS 11 even hobble VPNs so that Apple apps will simply bypass them.

@patrickwardle lets us know that trustd, the daemon responsible for these requests, is in the new ContentFilterExclusionList in macOS 11, which means it can’t be blocked by any user-controlled firewall or VPN.

Probably all that is only for "user experience" too.

Roblox game-makers must pay to die with an 'oof'

Found on BBC News on Friday, 13 November 2020
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The "oof" sound that famously accompanies the death of characters will temporarily be removed, following a copyright dispute.

When it is reinstated, game-makers will have to buy it, paying around around $1 (£0.76) or 100 in-game currency Robux.

Only players who build their own games for the platform will have to pay for the sound - for those just playing there will be no charge.

That's just ridiculous.