Online electronics retailer Newegg said it is now accepting dogecoin as a method of payment. From a report: Customers will be able to complete transactions using the dogecoin held in their BitPay wallet, according to an announcement Tuesday. Newegg first began accepting payments in bitcoin in July 2014. The company is now among the first retailers to accept dogecoin as payment. Further reading: Dogecoin Rips in Meme-Fueled Frenzy on Pot-Smoking Holiday.

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Amazon.com has opened a new hair salon in East London to showcase augmented reality and "point and learn" marketing technology that lets customers point their phones at a product to get more information. From a report: The 1,500 square-foot (139 square-meter) salon is set in London's Spitalfields neighborhood, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. Customers will be able to try out new hair colors virtually and "capture their new look in a dedicated creative area," the company said. Visitors will also be able to order products in the salon via Amazon by scanning QR codes. In recent years, Amazon has started a range of brick-and-mortar formats, including cashierless convenience stores, a supermarket chain, book shops and stores selling a potpourri of bestselling items. The company often launches experiments, learns from them and then moves on -- sometimes folding the expertise into new projects or abandoning the idea entirely. With no current plans to open additional locations, Amazon may consider the salon as one of its signature tests. London is just beginning to ease Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, with salons reopening in England on April 12. Amazon salon customers will be offered free face masks and sanitizer, temperature checks and the venue will operate at a reduced capacity.

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According to a new report by industry analysts Mark Mulligan and Keith Jopling of Midia Research, songwriters are getting drastically short-changed in the music-streaming economy. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The 35-page report, which is available here for free, lays out both the history of this dilemma and some (admittedly difficult) proposed solutions, but what may be unprecedented is the way that it lays out how skewed against songwriters the new music economy is. A handful of the many statistics from the study follow: - The global music industry revenues (recordings, publishing, live, merchandise, sponsorship) fell by 30% in 2020 due to the combined impact of COVID-19 and a recession - Streaming has created a song economy, making the song more important than ever, yet music publisher royalties are more than three times smaller than record label royalties - Streaming will bring further strong industry growth, reaching 697 million subscribers and $456 billion in retail revenues, but the royalty imbalance means that label streaming revenue will grow by 3.3 times more than publisher streaming revenue - The current royalty system assumes all songs are worth the same - they are not - and rewards poor behavior that dilutes artist and songwriter royalties - Music subscribers believe in the value of the song: twice as many (60%) state that the song matters more than the artist, than think the artist matters more (29%) - They also believe that songwriters should be remunerated properly: 71% of music subscribers consider it important that streaming services pay songwriters fairly In a section titled "The Songwriter's Paradox," it lays out the ways that the song has become more important than ever, but, paradoxically, the songwriter has less income and influence: - Big record labels have weaponized songwriting: In order to try to minimize risks, bigger record labels are turning to an ever more elite group of songwriters to create hits. - The emergence of the song economy: The audience has shift its focus from albums to songs. - Writing and production are fusing: As music production technologies have become more central to both the songwriting process and to the formation of the final recorded work, there has been a growing fusion of the role of production with writing. This has led to a growing body of superstar writer-producers. -The industrialization of songwriting: Record labels are reshaping songwriting by pulling together teams of songwriters to create "machine tooled" hits - finely crafted songs that are "optimized for streaming." While the upside for songwriters is more work, the downside is sharing an already-small streaming royalties pot with a larger team of creators and co-writers. - Decline of traditional formats: Songwriters have long relied upon performance royalties from broadcast TV and radio. However, as the audiences on these platforms migrate towards on-demand alternatives, performance royalties face a long-term decline. Similarly, the continued fall in sales means fewer mechanical royalties for songwriters. - Streaming royalties: The song is the first in line culturally but it is last in line for streaming royalties. Of total royalties paid by streaming services to rights holders, between a fifth and a quarter is paid for publishing rights to the song. Labels are paid more than three times higher than publishers on streaming. An independent label artist could earn more than three thousand dollars for a million subscriber streams, whereas a songwriter could expect to earn between $1,200 and $1,400, and even then, only if they are the sole songwriter on the track. On average, songwriters will therefore earn between a third and a half of what artists do. After proposing a series of solutions, such as implementing "fan-centric licenses" and revised streaming prices, the report concludes: "What is clear is that today's' song economy is not working as it should and that everyone across the value chain will benefit from a coordinated program of change."

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Dave Knott writes: Microsoft has announced Visual Studio 2022, the next major revision of their flagship development IDE. A public beta will be arriving this summer. The most significant change, which has long been rumored, is that the entire application suite will now be 64-bit. Other major changes include: * Performance improvements in the core debugger * Support for .NET 6, which can be used to build web, client and mobile apps by both Windows and Mac developers, as well as improved support for developing Azure apps * An update UI meant to reduce complexity and which will add integration with Accessibility Insights. Microsoft plans to update the icons and add support for Cascadia Code, a new fixed-width font for better readability * Support for C++ 20 tooling. language standardization and Intellisense * Integration of text chat into the Live Share collaboration feature * Additional support for Git and GitHub * Improved code search

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Rei writes: After a Tesla crash in The Woodlands killed two people last Saturday night, news reports were quick to jump to the conclusion that Autopilot (or even FSD) was being used and led to the strange crash, in which investigators reported nobody in the driver's seat, one victim buckled in in the front passenger seat, and the other buckled in behind them. On Twitter, however, Autopilot users were quick to question this account, noting that Autopilot can't be enabled on a road lacking lane lines; the speed and acceleration were far higher than Autopilot allows; and numerous other problems. Now Elon Musk has weighed in with the first official statement since the crash. Responding to a user questioning the reporting, Musk said: "Your research as a private individual is better than professionals @WSJ! Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled & this car did not purchase FSD. Moreover, standard Autopilot would require lane lines to turn on, which this street did not have." What actually caused the crash and why nobody was found in the driver's seat remains unclear at this point; analysis of the logs and investigation of the crash site remains ongoing.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Extreme weather has become the new normal -- whether it's precipitation, drought, wind, heat, or cold. The question of how the ever-shrinking layer of Arctic sea ice has contributed to any of these changes has prompted some lively discussion over the past few years. Researchers have proposed that a weakened jet stream driven by vanishing Arctic sea ice might play a large role in extreme winter events like the descending polar vortex that struck North America earlier this year. But the idea hasn't held up well in light of more recent evidence. But now, researchers have identified a direct link between extreme winter weather and sea ice loss. The 2018 "Beast of the East" winter storm hit Europe with record-breaking snowfall and low temperatures. And potentially as much as 88 percent of that snowfall originated from increased evaporation of the Barents Sea. The working hypothesis is that Arctic sea ice acts as a cap for Arctic waters, limiting evaporation. Less sea ice and warmer Arctic temperatures mean more evaporation, potentially explaining the increased severity of winter storms like the Beast of the East. Until now, it's been tough to measure direct evidence linking sea ice loss to extreme European winters, but recent advances in technology are making this a little less challenging.

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Researchers have developed a tool that can design complex DNA robots and nanodevices in minutes instead of days. Phys.Org reports: In a paper published today in the journal Nature Materials, researchers from The Ohio State University -- led by former engineering doctoral student Chao-Min Huang -- unveiled new software they call MagicDNA. The software helps researchers design ways to take tiny strands of DNA and combine them into complex structures with parts like rotors and hinges that can move and complete a variety of tasks, including drug delivery. One advantage is that it allows researchers to carry out the entire design truly in 3-D. Earlier design tools only allowed creation in 2-D, forcing researchers to map their creations into 3-D. That meant designers couldn't make their devices too complex. The software also allows designers to build DNA structures "bottom up" or "top down." In "bottom up" design, researchers take individual strands of DNA and decide how to organize them into the structure they want, which allows fine control over local device structure and properties. But they can also take a "top down" approach where they decide how their overall device needs to be shaped geometrically and then automate how the DNA strands are put together. Combining the two allows for increasing complexity of the overall geometry while maintaining precise control over individual component properties. Another key element of the software is that it allows simulations of how designed DNA devices would move and operate in the real world.

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Reddit unveiled its take on a Clubhouse-like social audio product on Monday, called Reddit Talk. The Verge reports: The company is billing Monday's announcement as a "sneak preview," since the feature isn't widely available yet. Moderators that want to try the feature out in their subreddit can add themselves to a waitlist for access. Based on Reddit's description and images shared by the company, Reddit Talk appears to look a lot like Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and other social audio products. Talks will "live" within subreddits, according to Reddit. During the initial tests, only subreddit moderators will be able to initiate a Talk, and Talk hosts will have the ability to invite, mute, and remove speakers. While only mods can kick off Talks in the beginning, anyone on iOS and Android can listen to one. Moderation has been an issue for Clubhouse, so it's notable that Reddit is starting small and giving access only to moderators first. At some point in the future, mods will be able to bring on trusted community members as co-hosts. The company says it is "testing ways" for hosts to customize how Talks look with emojis and different background colors, and users will be able to change their avatar, too. Earlier today, Facebook also announced that the company is working on a Clubhouse clone.

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April 20th or 4/20 is the unofficial marijuana holiday where thousands of cannabis smokers celebrate the smoking of marijuana with marijuana. But this year, it could also be the day the meme-based cryptocurrency Dogecoin shatters new record highs. According to Fortune, "advocates are hoping to see Dogecoin hit $1 on April 20 -- one week after it was valued at just 9 cents. From the report: Dogecoin has already hit some financial landmarks that didn't seem possible at the start of the year. Its market value has topped $50 billion, making it bigger than Ford or Marriott. And if it comes close to hitting its target Tuesday, it could outpace some blue-chip companies. For once (for now), Elon Musk has nothing to do with the furor surrounding Dogecoin. This time, the credit goes, in part, to... Slim Jim. Really. The packaged meat product latched on to Dogecoin-mania on its Twitter account last Wednesday (saying "RT to send Doge to the moon!!" -- the rallying cry among the r/WallStreetBets crowd for GameStop stock). The cry worked. Doge fans -- and even other brands -- jumped on the bandwagon quickly.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A small miracle happened at 3:31am ET on Monday morning. Ingenuity, a tiny NASA helicopter, became the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet, Mars. This engineering feat was done with Linux, open-source software, and a NASA-built program based on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) open-source F (pronounced F prime) framework. GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and his team and the JPL Ingenuity crew took a long hard look into the helicopter's code and found that "nearly 12,000 developers on GitHub contributed to Ingenuity's software via open source. And yet, much like the first image of a black hole, most of these developers are not even aware that they helped make the first Martian helicopter flight possible." They'll know now. Friedman wrote: "Today, we want to make the invisible visible. So, we have worked with JPL to place a new Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge on the GitHub profile of every developer who contributed to the specific versions of any open-source projects and libraries used by Ingenuity." The developer list was created by JPL providing GitHub with a comprehensive list of every version of every open source project used by Ingenuity. GitHub could then identify all the contributors who made these projects and their dependencies. Some of those honored, such as Linux's creator Linus Torvalds, are famous developers. Many others labor in obscurity -- but now their work is being recognized. Timothy Canham, a JPL embedded flight software engineer, notes Ingenuity's program is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 running at 2.2GHz, which is "far faster than the Mars Perseverance's rover processors," according to ZDNet. The reason this older chip was used is because it meets NASA's High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) radiation standards. Canham also says the flight control software on Ingenuity runs at 500Hz. The flight software "is used to control the flight hardware and read sensors 500 times per second in order to keep the helicopter stable." Canham added: "We literally ordered parts from SparkFun [Electronics]. This is commercial hardware, but we'll test it, and if it works well, we'll use it."

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Here's something to do if that TV commercial is too loud: complain to the feds, who just might do something about it. From a report: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Monday asked for public help to determine whether to update rules to prevent broadcast, cable and satellite providers from sending commercials that are louder than the programming they accompany. "In particular, we invite consumers to tell us their experiences," the agency's media bureau said in a public notice. The action follows an April 13 letter from Representative Anna Eshoo asking FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel to look into a reported increase in complaints about loud commercials. Eshoo wrote a 2010 law, known as the CALM Act, or Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, that underpins FCC rules that may be changed. The FCC has never sought to enforce the act, despite receiving thousands of complaints, Eshoo said. A recent press report said complaints to the FCC had increased "sharply," Eshoo wrote. "This worries me a great deal." Eshoo mentioned a March 31 report in Business Insider that said complaints to the FCC for the four-month period from November to February rose 140% compared to the same period a year earlier.

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Last month, Sony said that PlayStation Store access for the PS3, PS Vita, and PSP would end this summer. Today, Sony has partially reversed course, announcing on the PlayStation Blog that the PlayStation Store would remain open on the PS3 and PS Vita. CNET reports: "It's clear we made the wrong decision here," Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan wrote on the PlayStation Blog. "We see now that many of you are incredibly passionate about being able to continue purchasing classic games on PS3 and PS Vita for the foreseeable future, so I'm glad we were able to find a solution to continue operations." Commerce functionality for the PlayStation Portable will still expire on July 2, meaning that the PSP will no longer be able to buy any content on the digital storefront. Users should, however, still be able to re-download any previously purchased games or media.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: The latest addition coming to Microsoft Edge is "performance mode." Rolling out first to the Canary channel, "performance mode" in Microsoft Edge is designed to improve how the browser uses the resources available to it. In practice, Microsoft says the new mode will improve speed and responsiveness overall while "optimizing" the use of battery, CPU, and RAM. Apparently, the mode may adjust based on your browsing habits too. "Performance mode helps you optimize speed, responsiveness, memory, CPU and battery usage," says Microsoft. "Performance improvements might vary depending on your individual specifications and browser habits." One specific change Microsoft notes is that the "Sleeping Tabs" feature in Edge will be locked to five minutes when performance mode is turned on. "Sleeping Tabs" essentially freezes a tab that's left open in the background, saving resources when it's not actively being used. Performance Mode is rolling out now in version 91.0.856.0, available in the Canary channel. The toggle is available in the "System" section of the settings menu.

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NASA's first attempt to fly its "Ingenuity" helicopter on Mars was a success, marking what the space agency says is the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another world. The BBC reports: The space agency is promising more adventurous flights in the days ahead. Ingenuity will be commanded to fly higher and further as engineers seek to test the limits of the technology. The rotorcraft was carried to Mars in the belly of Nasa's Perseverance Rover, which touched down in Jezero Crater on the Red Planet in February. The demonstration saw the Mars-copter rise to just over 3m, hover, swivel 96 degrees, hover some more, and then set down. In all, it managed almost 40 seconds of flight, from take-off to landing. Getting airborne on the Red Planet is not easy. The atmosphere is very thin, just 1% of the density here at Earth. This gives the blades on a rotorcraft very little to bite into to gain lift. There's help from the lower gravity at Mars, but still -- it takes a lot of work to get up off the ground. Ingenuity was therefore made extremely light and given the power (a peak power of 350 watts) to turn those blades extremely fast - at over 2,500 revolutions per minute for this particular flight. Control was autonomous. The distance to Mars - currently just under 300 million km -- means radio signals take minutes to traverse the intervening space. Flying by joystick is simply out of the question. Ingenuity has two cameras onboard. A black-and-white camera that points down to the ground, which is used for navigation, and a high-resolution colour camera that looks out to the horizon. Sample navigation images sent back to Earth revealed the helicopter's shadow on the floor of the crater as it came back in to land. Satellites will send home more pictures of the flight over the next day. There was only sufficient bandwidth in the orbiters' first overflight to return a short snatch of video from Perseverance, which was watching and snapping away from a distance of 65m. Longer sequences should become available in due course.

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Translation tools from Google and other companies could be contributing to significant misunderstanding of legal terms with conflicting meanings such as "enjoin," according to research due to be presented at an academic workshop on Monday. From a report: Google's translation software turns an English sentence about a court enjoining violence, or banning it, into one in the Indian language of Kannada that implies the court ordered violence, according to the new study. "Enjoin" can refer to either promoting or restraining an action. Mistranslations also arise with other contronyms, or words with contradictory meanings depending on context, including "all over," "eventual" and "garnish," the paper said. Google said machine translation is "is still just a complement to specialized professional translation" and that it is "continually researching improvements, from better handling ambiguous language, to mitigating bias, to making large quality gains for under-resourced languages." The study's findings add to scrutiny of automated translations generated by artificial intelligence software. Researchers previously have found programs that learn translations by studying non-diverse text perpetuate historical gender biases, such as associating "doctor" with "he." The new paper raises concerns about a popular method companies use to broaden the vocabulary of their translation software. They translate foreign text into English and then back into the foreign language, aiming to teach the software to associate similar ways of saying the same phrase.

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AmiMoJo writes: WordPress announced over the weekend that they plan on treating Google's new FLoC tracking technology as a security concern and hence block it by default on WordPress sites. For some time, browsers have begun to increasingly block third-party browser cookies used by advertisers for interest-based advertising. In response, Google introduced a new ad tracking technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, that uses a web browser to anonymously place users into interest or behavioral buckets based on how they browse the web. After Google began testing FLoC this month in Google Chrome, there has been a consensus among privacy advocates that Google's FLoC implementation just replaces one privacy risk with another one. "WordPress powers approximately 41% of the web -- and this community can help combat racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and discrimination against those with mental illness with four lines of code," says WordPress. WordPress states that this code is planned for WordPress 5.8, scheduled for release in July 2021. As FLoC is expected to roll out sooner, WordPress is considering back-porting this code to earlier versions to "amplify the impact" on current versions of the blogging platform. Further reading: Nobody is Flying To Join Google's FLoC.

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schwit1 writes: Able to move 1,600 boxes per hour using just one arm, Dill relies on humans to keep it operating efficiently Pickle Robots says that Dill's approach to the box unloading task is unique in a couple of ways. First, it can handle messy trailers filled with a jumble of boxes of different shapes, colors, sizes, and weights. And second, from the get-go it's intended to work under human supervision, relying on people to step in and handle edge cases. We asked Meyer how much Dill costs, and to our surprise, he gave us a candid answer: Depending on the configuration, the system can cost anywhere from $50-100k to deploy and about that same amount per year to operate. Meyer points out that you can't really compare the robot to a human (or humans) simply on speed, since with the robot, you don't have to worry about injuries or improper sorting of packages or training or turnover. While Pickle is currently working on several other configurations of robots for package handling, this particular truck unloading configuration will be shipping to customers next year.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Now a second wave of Covid-19 has struck India, and the middle class dreams of tens of millions of people face even greater peril. Already, about 32 million people in India were driven into poverty by the pandemic last year, according to the Pew Research Center, accounting for a majority of the 54 million who slipped out of the middle class worldwide. The pandemic is undoing decades of progress for a country that in fits and starts has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Already, deep structural problems and the sometimes impetuous nature of many of Mr. Modi's policies had been hindering growth. A shrinking middle class would deal lasting damage. "It's very bad news in every possible way," said Jayati Ghosh, a development economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "It has set back our growth trajectory hugely and created much greater inequality." The second wave presents difficult choices for India and Mr. Modi. India on Friday reported more than 216,000 new infections, another record. Lockdowns are back in some states. With work scarce, migrant workers are packing into trains and buses home as they did last year. The country's vaccination campaign has been slow, though the government has picked up the pace. Yet Mr. Modi appears unwilling to repeat last year's draconian lockdown, which left more than 100 million Indians jobless and which many economists blame for worsening the pandemic's problems. His government has also been reluctant to increase spending substantially like the United States and some other places, instead releasing a budget that would raise spending on infrastructure and in other areas but that also emphasizes cutting debt.

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announced that the company is building audio features where users can engage in real-time conversations with others, similar to the app Clubhouse, which gained a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley circles earlier this year. From a report: Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to invest a lot in audio features and build them out over the coming years. "We think that audio is of course also going to be a first-class medium, and there are all these different products to be built across this whole spectrum," Zuckerberg told Casey Newton on Monday on the Sidechannel Discord server. The new feature is called Live Audio Rooms, and the company expects it will be available to everyone on the Facebook app and Messenger this summer, the company said in a blog post. The company will start to test Live Audio Rooms within groups on Facebook. "You already have these communities that are organized around interests, and allowing people to come together and have rooms where they can talk, I think it'll be a very useful thing," he said. The feature comes with little surprise.

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As online identity management grows in importance, Mastercard swooped in this morning and bought identity verification company Ekata for $850 million. From a report: Mastercard certainly sees the rapid digital transformation that is happening in online commerce, a move that was accelerated by COVID. It's a transformation that once started isn't likely to change back to the old ways of doing business, even when we get past the pandemic. With Ekata, the company gets a solution that can verify the online identity of a person making the transaction in real time using various signals that can indicate if this is fraudulent or true as they open an account or transact business. The company provides a score and other data that predicts the likelihood this person is who they say they are. It's not unlike a credit risk score, except for identity. That was one of the primary reasons Mastercard decided to acquire Ekata, according to Ajay Bhalla, president of cyber and intelligence solutions at the company. "With the addition of Ekata, we will advance our identity capabilities and create a safer, seamless way for consumers to prove who they say they are in the new digital economy," Bhalla said in a statement.

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