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 Ex IBM Sales Manager, Fired After Battling Discrimination Against Subordinates, Wins $11 Million Lawsuit
On Thursday, a federal jury in Seattle, Washington, found that former IBM sales manager Scott Kingston had been unlawfully fired by the company and denied sales commission after challenging the treatment of subordinates as racially biased. And it awarded him $11.1 million. The Register reports: The case dates back to 2017 when two IBM sales people within months of each other closed similarly large software sales deals that led to vastly different commission payments. Nick Donato, who is White, r
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AI-Driven Audio Cloning Startup Gives Voice To Einstein Chatbot
Aflorithmic, an AI-driven audio cloning startup, has created a digital version of Albert Einstein using AI voice cloning technology drawing on audio records of the famous scientist's actual voice. TechCrunch reports: Alforithmic says the "digital Einstein" is intended as a showcase for what will soon be possible with conversational social commerce. Which is a fancy way of saying deepfakes that make like historical figures will probably be trying to sell you pizza soon enough, as industry watcher
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Dogecoin Has Risen 400 Percent In the Last Week Because Why Not
Dogecoin has seen its price rise by a factor of five over the last week. Yesterday, it was trading at $0.13. Today, it's one of the world's 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies, with a market capitalization of $45 billion. Ars Technica's Timothy B. Lee writes: Dogecoin's price tripled over the next 36 hours. My editor suggested that I write about whether Dogecoin's rise is a sign of an overheated crypto market, but for a coin like Dogecoin, I'm not sure that's even a meaningful concept. Dogecoin is
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Whitest-Ever Paint Could Help Cool Heating Earth, Study Shows
AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: The whitest-ever paint has been produced by academic researchers, with the aim of boosting the cooling of buildings and tackling the climate crisis. The new paint reflects 98% of sunlight as well as radiating infrared heat through the atmosphere into space. In tests, it cooled surfaces by 4.5C below the ambient temperature, even in strong sunlight. The researchers said the paint could be on the market in one or two years. Currently available reflective
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Codecov Bash Uploader Compromised In Supply Chain Hack
wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Security response professionals are scrambling to measure the fallout from a software supply chain compromise of Codecov Bash Uploader that went undetected since January and exposed sensitive secrets like tokens, keys and credentials from organizations around the world. The hack occurred four months ago but was only discovered in the wild by a Codecov customer on the morning of April 1, 2021, the company said. Codecov is considered the vendor of choi
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Mercedes-Benz Unveils New Flagship EQS Electric Sedan To Take On Tesla
Mercedes-Benz's parent company Daimler AG unveiled Thursday its newest battery-powered sedan that challenges Tesla in the high-end electric car space. CNBC reports: The 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS, unveiled Thursday, marks a new era for the German automaker as it pivots to EVs. The car will be part of its large S-Class car family when it arrives in U.S. showrooms in the fall. Most notably, the interior of the vehicle looks like a cockpit out of a futuristic spacecraft more than a car. It has screens
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US House Committee Approves Blueprint For Big Tech Crackdown
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee formally approved a report accusing Big Tech companies of buying or crushing smaller firms, Representative David Cicilline's office said in a statement on Thursday. With the approval during a marathon, partisan hearing, the more than 400-page staff report will become an official committee report, and the blueprint for legislation to rein in the market power of the likes of Alphabe
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Apple's App Store Hosted Kiddie Games With Secret Gambling Dens Inside
According to app developer Kosta Eleftheriou, Apple's App Store hosted a kid's game that's actually a front for gambling websites. "The secret password isn't one you'd be likely to guess: you have to be in the right country -- or pretend to be in the right country using a VPN," writes Sean Hollister via The Verge. "But then, instead of launching an ugly monkey-flipping endless runner game filled with typos and bugs, the very same app launches a casino experience." From the report: The app, "Jung
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Facebook Reaches 100% Renewable-Energy Milestone
Facebook has reached a key environmental goal early: The social media company now purchases enough renewable energy to run all of its operations around the world, it announced this week. CBS News reports: Facebook joins a handful of tech companies that have committed to ambitious green energy goals, including Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Over the past few years, Facebook has cut its greenhouse gas emissions significantly. Since 2017, carbon emissions from the comp
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A Tesla Helped Police Track Down a Hate Crime Suspect
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Throughout December, someone was setting fires at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Presbyterian Church, a "predominately Black" congregation located in Springfield, Massachusetts. An FBI affidavit claims that the last of these fires, set on Dec. 28, "essentially destroyed" the building -- burning away large parts of the interior. During this period, the same person is suspected of having carried out a "series of tire-slashings" targeted at ve
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Google's Project Zero Updates Vulnerability Disclosure Rules To Add Patch Cushion
The Google Project Zero security team has updated its vulnerability disclosure guidelines to add a cushion of 30 days to some security bug disclosures, so end-users have enough time to patch software and prevent attackers from weaponizing bugs. From a report: This week's changes are of particular importance because a large part of the cybersecurity community has adopted Project Zero's rules as the unofficial methodology for disclosing a security bug to software vendors and then to the general pu
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The Quality of Your Coffee May Soon Be Determined by a Robot
The days of experts gathering in a sealed-off room to sip coffee and grade beans on their color, aroma and taste may be numbered. From a report: An Israeli company has developed a handheld device that is able to scan beans to determine their quality. The machine, powered by artificial intelligence, will need a human to input the quality parameters first, but after that, it will be able to classify coffee before it's even roasted. The company has completed a pilot program with Carcafe, the Colomb
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Missing California Hiker Found After Mystery Photo Reveals Location
A mystery photo and a geography enthusiast helped locate a missing California hiker who is now safely back home. From a report: Rene Compean of Palmdale was on a hike Monday near Mount Waterman, a popular ski destination in the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California. While the 45-year-old was on his outdoor adventure, he snapped a picture. Compean texted the shot to a friend. And then, he went off the map. He was reported missing at 6 p.m. by a friend, who received one last text from Compe
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 Daily Crunch: Squarespace files to go public
Squarespace is going public, Apple shares some music payment details and Twitter bans the founder of the right-wing media organization Project Veritas. This is your Daily Crunch for April 16, 2021. The big story: Squarespace files to go public Squarespace has filed to go public via direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange, under […]
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Apple Music streaming revenue detailed in letter to artists
Streaming revenue has been a longtime concern for musicians, especially those scraping by in the wake of an industry-wide implosion of record labels. Of course, a year that has made touring an impossibility has only brought those issues into starker relief as the primary revenue source for many has completely dried up. Apple is hoping […]
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Elon Musk's SpaceX Wins Contract To Develop Spacecraft To Land Astronauts on the Moon
NASA on Friday selected SpaceX to build spacecraft that would land astronauts on the moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission, according to a source selection document obtained by The Washington Post. From the report: The contract marks another major victory for the hard-charging company that vaults it to the top tier of the nation's aerospace companies and solidifies it as one of the space agency's most trusted partners. In winning the $2.9 billion contract, SpaceX beat out Jeff Be
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Cuomo Signs New York Bill Requiring Low-Cost Broadband Access
Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill on Friday requiring all Internet service providers in New York to offer affordable high-speed access for low-income families. From a report: The providers can charge those families no more than $15 a month, Cuomo said during a briefing Friday at the Northland Workforce Training Center in Buffalo. He was joined by Eric Schmidt, former chief executive officer of Alphabet, who chairs a 15-member state commission focusing on using technology to help the state reop
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2.5 Billion T. Rex Inhabited the Planet, Researchers Say
For the first time, scientists have estimated how many Tyrannosaurus rex, the so-called king of dinosaurs, once roamed the Earth. From a report: The number is staggering: 2.5 billion Tyrannosaurus rex lived and died during the roughly 2.4 million years the species survived on the planet, according to a new study set to be published in the journal Science on Friday. The study may help contextualize the fossil record and the rarity of finding certain fossilized prehistoric organisms, according to
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Nobody is Flying To Join Google's FLoC
Google is all alone with its proposed advertising technology -- FLoC-- to replace third-party cookies. Every major browser that uses the open source Chromium project has declined to use it, and it's unclear what that will mean for the future of advertising on the web. Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, and Brave have said they are not implementing Google's FLoC into their browsers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google Backs New Security Standard for Smartphone VPN Apps
The Internet of Secure Things Alliance, an IoT security certification body (a.k.a. ioXt), has launched a new security certification for mobile apps and VPNs. From a report: The new ioXt compliance program includes a 'mobile application profile' -- a set of security-related criteria against which apps can be certified. The profile or mobile app assessment includes additional requirements for virtual private network (VPN) applications. Google and Amazon had a hand in shaping the criteria, along wi
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Apple Music Reveals How Much It Pays When You Stream a Song
Apple Music told artists it pays a penny per stream in a letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. From a report: The disclosure, made in a letter to artists delivered Friday via the service's artist dashboard and sent to labels and publishers, is part of a growing effort by music-streaming services to show they are artist-friendly. For Apple, it can be seen as a riposte to Spotify Technology, which last month shared some details of how it pays the music industry for streams on its service. Ap
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Pentagon Confirms Video of Pyramid Shaped UFO Is Real, Taken By US Navy Pilot
alaskana98 writes: The Defense Department has confirmed that leaked photos and video of "unidentified aerial phenomena" taken in 2019 are indeed legitimate images of unexplained objects. Photos and videos of triangle-shaped objects blinking and moving through the clouds were taken by Navy personnel, Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough said in a statement to CNN. She also confirmed that photos of three unidentified flying objects -- one "sphere" shaped, another "acorn" shaped and one characterized as
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Australia Finds Google Misled Users Over Data Collection
Australia's federal court found that Google misled users about personal location data collected through Android mobile devices between 2017 and 2018, the country's competition regulator said Friday. From a report: The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) -- which launched legal proceedings against Google in 2019 -- said the ruling was an "important victory for consumers" with regard to the protection of online privacy. Google misled Android users into thinking the search giant c
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AI-driven audio cloning startup gives voice to Einstein chatbot
You’ll need to prick up your ears for this slice of deepfakery emerging from the wacky world of synthesized media: A digital version of Albert Einstein — with a synthesized voice that’s been (re)created using AI voice cloning technology drawing on audio recordings of the famous scientist’s actual voice. The startup behind the “uncanny valley” […]
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Pfizer CEO Says Third Covid Vaccine Dose Likely Needed Within 12 Months
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said people will "likely" need a booster dose of a Covid-19 vaccine within 12 months of getting fully vaccinated. His comments were made public Thursday but were taped April 1. From a report: Bourla said it's possible people will need to get vaccinated against the coronavirus annually. "A likely scenario is that there will be likely a need for a third dose, somewhere between six and 12 months and then from there, there will be an annual revaccination, but all of that nee
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Level raises $27M from Khosla, Lightspeed 'to rebuild insurance from the ground up'
Level, a startup that aims to give companies a more flexible way to offer benefits to employees, has raised $27 million in a Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Operator Collective and leading angels also participated in the financing, along with previous backers First Round Capital and Homebrew. The […]
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99.992% of Fully Vaccinated People Have Dodged COVID, CDC Data Shows
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cases of COVID-19 are extremely rare among people who are fully vaccinated, according to a new data analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among more than 75 million fully vaccinated people in the US, just around 5,800 people reported a "breakthrough" infection, in which they became infected with the pandemic coronavirus despite being fully vaccinated. The numbers suggest that breakthroughs occur at the teeny rate of les
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Tesla owners can now see how much solar or coal is powering their EVs
Tesla owners can now see exactly what kind of energy is powering their electric vehicles. TezLab, a free app that’s like a Fitbit for a Tesla vehicle, pushed out a new feature this week that shows the energy mix — breaking down the exact types and percentages of fossil fuels and renewable energy — coming […]
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BrandProject expands beyond the studio model with a new $43M fund
BrandProject — a firm that’s backed successful direct-to-consumer commerce startups like Freshly (acquired by Nestle), Persona (also acquired by Nestle) and Chef’s Plate (acquired by Hello Fresh) — is announcing that it has raised $43 million for what it says is its first traditional venture fund. Founded by Andrew Black, who previously co-founded Virgin Mobile […]
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Amazon Tried To Coerce Ecobee Into Collecting Private User Data, the WSJ Reports
Amazon tried to use its power to coerce Ecobee into using its smart home products to collect user data by threatening Ecobee's ability to sell its products on Amazon, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The Verge reports: As of now, Ecobee's products can still be purchased on Amazon, but the WSJ claims that negotiations between Ecobee and Amazon are ongoing. According to the WSJ, the online retail giant asked Ecobee to share data from its Alexa-enabled smart thermostats, even whe
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Facebook faces 'mass action' lawsuit in Europe over 2019 breach
Facebook is to be sued in Europe over the major leak of user data that dates back to 2019 but which only came to light recently after information on more than 533 million accounts was found posted for free download on a hacker forum. Today Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) announced it’s commencing a “mass action” […]
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Google misled consumers over location data settings, Australia court finds
Google’s historical collection of location data has got it into hot water in Australia where a case brought by the country’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has led to a federal court ruling that the tech giant misled consumers by operating a confusing dual-layer of location settings in what the regulator describes as a “world-first […]
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