Zillow is looking to sell about 7,000 homes as it seeks to recover from a fumble in its high-tech home-flipping business. Bloomberg reports: The company is seeking roughly $2.8 billion for the houses, which are being pitched to institutional investors, according to people familiar with the matter. Zillow will likely sell the properties to a multitude of buyers rather than packaging them in a single transaction, said the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private. The move to offload homes comes as Zillow seeks to recover from an operational stumble that saw it buy too many houses, with many now being listed for less than it paid. The company typically offers smaller numbers of homes to single-family landlords, but the current sales effort is much larger than normal. If successful, the sale would make a dramatic dent in Zillow's inventory. The company acquired roughly 8,000 homes in the third quarter, according to an estimate by real estate tech strategist Mike DelPrete.

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According to Nikkei Asian Review, "Nintendo will only be able to produce about 24 million units of its popular Switch game console in the fiscal year through March, 20% below an original plan." From the report: Its production has been held up by shortages of semiconductors and other electronic parts amid strong demand for Switch, including for its latest version released on Oct. 8. Nintendo's trouble is a reminder of the far-reaching impact of the global supply crunch that has affected a wide range of industries from autos to electronics to machinery. The Kyoto-based company originally planned on producing a record 30 million Switch units on the back of rising demand for computer games triggered by the COVID pandemic, which has forced people to spend more time at home. However, production bottlenecks quickly emerged around springtime for key components including microcomputers. The company concluded it would have to revise down production targets as it was not able to secure enough supplies. Nintendo's suppliers have already been notified about the production cuts.

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During the first three months of 2021, the United States installed its 100,000th EV charger. Ars Technica reports on the important electric vehicle milestone: Of course, the actual composition of those chargers is important. It's no good having half a million places to plug in if they're all level 1 (120 V AC) chargers that take days to top up a battery EV. But a new report (PDF) from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has dug into the data, looking at trends to see whether the nation is on track to meet its goals. At first glance, the news is positive. We added 4,566 new chargers during Q1 2021 for a total of 100,709. That means the US is already 20 percent of the way to Biden's 2030 goal. Most of those were level 2 (240 V AC) chargers, which saw 5.4-percent growth. The number of level 1 chargers actually decreased by 2.4 percent, mostly as ChargePoint decommissioned them in favor of level 2 devices. Because a level 2 charger usually takes 8-10 hours to fully recharge a 250-300 mile BEV, drivers (particularly those who have yet to convert to an electric car) are probably more interested in the number of the faster level 3 (usually known as DC fast) chargers. Depending upon the car and the power output of the DC fast charger, these can charge a battery to 80 percent in 20-50 minutes. There was essentially no growth in DC fast chargers between Q4 2020 and Q1 2021. After multiple quarters of rapid expansion, the number of public DC fast charging ports grew by just 0.4 percent. The NREL attributes this to the integration between ChargePoint's and Greenlots' APIs [...]. Level 2 chargers can recharge any electric car, but not all BEVs can plug in to all DC fast chargers. All US Teslas use a proprietary charging plug, and 56.7 percent of all public DC fast chargers in the US are part of the Tesla Supercharger network. The various charging network APIs don't all report exactly the same information in exactly the same way, so the NREL was only able to determine the charging power for a limited number (6,821) of DC fast chargers. That led to a rather scary-looking pie chart on the Department of Energy's website showing that 40 percent of DC fast chargers were only able to supply 50 kW or less. However, the chart is based on only 6,821 chargers and excludes almost the entire Tesla Supercharger network from its data set.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard, written by Janus Rose: During a tech demo in 2016, CEO Mark Zuckerberg described VR as "the next major computing platform" -- a space where all our social interactions will play out with new levels of physical presence thanks to headsets and motion-controllers. As I wrote at the time, this could only mean one thing: Zuckerberg wants to build virtual environments where all human behavior can be recorded, predicted, and monetized. At the time, the company told me it had "no current plans" to use physical motion data like head and eye movements as a means of predicting behavior and serving ads. Since then, it has made logging into Facebook a mandatory requirement for users of its Oculus headset -- a requirement it was recently pressured to remove. And earlier this year, the company announced its inevitable entry into VR-based advertising, inspiring enough backlash to cause one Oculus developer to abandon its plans for VR ads altogether. While the bait-and-switch is a familiar and unsurprising move for The Company Formerly Known As Facebook, the announcement of Meta proves that there is no stopping Zuckerberg's plans to mine every human interaction in the world for data that can then be monetized. The brand shift notably comes at a time when the company is under intense scrutiny for its role in spreading disinformation and violence around the world, reinvigorated by revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugin. With Meta, it's safe to assume the predictive algorithms at work will be functionally the same as its predecessor. Data is collected about human behavior, which is then used to build profiles on users and automatically prioritize content they are more likely to interact with. Facebook itself proved the effectiveness of this manipulation with an "emotional contagion" experiment it secretly conducted on users in 2012, which showed that changing a user's feed to show positive or negative content altered the types of content they were likely to post. This type of algorithmic manipulation forms the core business model of Facebook and countless other apps and social platforms. [...] Researchers have found that this algorithmic "nudging" is possible in embodied virtual spaces too, where the collection of intimate data about physical body movements provides new ways to influence human behavior on a large scale. Companies like RealEyes and Affectiva have marketed AI that they say can predict human emotions by analyzing body language and facial expressions -- a claim that is fiercely contested by AI experts but being widely deployed anyway. In one notable study, researchers determined that AI-controlled digital avatars can be used in virtual spaces to push people into accepting certain political views. In other words, Meta represents a massive investment into the very kind of algorithmic manipulation for which Facebook has been repeatedly maligned.

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The National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) has suffered what two sources have described to The Record as a "destructive" cyberattack. From a report: The incident, which took place on the night between Friday and Saturday, impacted the bank's backend systems and affected servers used to interlink the bank's branches, the backend infrastructure controlling the bank's ATM network, and the bank's mobile apps. While the attack crippled some of these systems, no funds were reported missing, according to the bank and people familiar with the attack and the current investigation. "Immediate steps were taken to isolate the affected systems," the bank said in a statement on Saturday. Recovery efforts were in full swing over the weekend, and by Monday, NBP reported that more than 1,000 branches opened and catered to customers as normal and that all ATMs nationwide had been fully restored.

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Climate change is revealing long-frozen artifacts and animals to archaeologists. But the window for study is slender and shrinking. From a report: Glacial archaeology is a relatively new discipline. The ice was literally broken during the summer of 1991 when German hikers in the Otztal Alps spotted a tea-colored corpse half-embedded on the Italian side of the border with Austria. Initially mistaken for a modern-day mountaineer killed in a climbing accident, Otzi the Iceman, as he came to be called, was shown through carbon-dating to have died about 5,300 years ago. A short, comprehensively tattooed man in his mid-40s, Otzi wore a bearskin cap, several layers of clothing made of goat and deer hides, and bearskin-soled shoes stuffed with grass to keep his feet warm. The Iceman's survival gear included a longbow of yew, a quiver of arrows, a copper ax and a kind of crude first-aid kit full of plants with powerful pharmacological properties. A chest X-ray and a CT scan showed a flint arrowhead buried deep in Otzi's left shoulder, suggesting that he may have bled to death. His killing is humankind's oldest unsolved cold case. Six years later, in the Yukon's snow fields, hunting tools dating back thousands of years appeared from the melting ice. Soon, similar finds were reported in Western Canada, the Rockies and the Swiss Alps. In 2006, a long, hot autumn in Norway resulted in an explosion of discoveries in the snowbound Jotunheimen mountains, home to the JÃtnar, the rock and frost giants of Norse mythology. Of all the dislodged detritus, the most intriguing was a 3,400-year-old proto-Oxford most likely fashioned out of reindeer hide. The discovery of the Bronze Age shoe signified the beginning of glacial surveying in the peaks of Innlandet County, where the state-funded Glacier Archaeology Program was started in 2011. Outside of the Yukon, it is the only permanent rescue project for discoveries in ice. Glacial archaeology differs from its lowland cousin in critical ways. G.A.P. researchers usually conduct fieldwork only within a short time frame from mid-August to mid-September, between the thaw of old snow and the arrival of new.

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Dropbox is adding a feature that will let you add automation to folders so new files are automatically renamed, grouped into subfolders, or more. The Verge reports: The feature is called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Automated Folders, and Dropbox says it can help you (and any co-workers you share files with) stay organized with standardized names and tags. The automation you add to folders can be configured with various rules, so you can tell the system to rename any files you add to the folder following a certain pattern or to sort them into subfolders based on the date the file was uploaded to Dropbox. The rules are currently predefined, but Dropbox says it's working to make the system more customizable. Dropbox has also added a new tagging system, letting you add words to files and folders (either manually or automatically) that you can search for later. In addition to the automatic actions, Dropbox is also adding what it calls Naming Conventions and Multi-file organize actions. Naming Conventions will let you batch renamed files in a folder following a pattern that you choose -- for example, you could rename photos to have the date the picture was taken in the file name itself. The Multi-file organize feature will let you have Dropbox sort files into subfolders based on how often people make changes to them, the date they were created, and more. Dropbox says you'll be able to preview the changes before they're made, so you don't end up with files placed somewhere you won't be able to find them. According to Dropbox, there's also a dashboard to help you manage automated folders, which could be handy if you can't remember everything that happens in your system. File automation, along with Naming Conventions and Multi-file organization, is coming first to Dropbox for Teams users starting today and will be available for people with individual or family plans "soon," according to the company.

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Citing the Korean automaker's "striking designs, interesting battery tech, and robust product pipeline," John Voelcker from The Drive makes the case for why Hyundai "could emerge among the companies that transition fastest to EVs." From the report: Its battery-electrics will come fast, entering the mass market on pace with those from GM and Ford. Hyundai's smart enough not to try to compete in full-size electric pickup trucks, still the last stronghold for the Detroit 2.5, not least because they're largely unsellable outside North America. The lackluster results for Nissan and Toyota after 20 years of building U.S.-style full-size pickups provide an object lesson. But Hyundai has aggressive plans for the rest of the light truck and passenger vehicle market. Of course, every automaker worth its salt these days has a bold plan to launch a flotilla of electric vehicles over the next 5-10 years and is pouring billions of dollars into making it happen. What's slightly different here is that Hyundai has shown over the past decade it can notably improve its cars with each generation and break new ground as fast as any other maker, all while keeping prices relatively close to Earth. It was late to SUVs, but now it has a full lineup that leads its sales and offers good value for the money. With the playing field mostly leveled by a tectonic technological shift, expect Hyundai to do the same with electric vehicles, even as the global patchwork of emissions regulations and cultural divides means different markets will move at different speeds. When the company launched vehicles with plugs in the U.S. in 2014, it didn't limit them to two vehicles (as GM did), but released half a dozen of them. They were BEVs with ranges from 100 to 230 miles, various plug-in hybrid models of sedan and now SUV, and more are coming. Hyundai also wants to play in the world of hydrogen vehicles, though it is wisely focusing on freight movement rather than personal-use vehicles. But that's a different story altogether. What matters now is understanding how Hyundai became a force to be reckoned with in this all-important, high-stakes battle.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Nike is seeking to trademark its brands for various virtual goods in the U.S., including shoes and clothing, as digital products become more popular. The Beaverton, Oregon-based sportswear giant filed seven requests with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in late October to protect its marks in categories including "downloadable virtual goods" and related services for retail stores and entertainment. Digital items listed in the filings include headwear, eyewear, bags, backpacks and sports equipment under both the Nike and Jordan brands, with their logos the Swoosh and the Jumpman and the "Just Do It" tagline. The applications are on an intent-to-use basis, and won't be finalized until they're in commercial use.

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The eNaira is supposed to live within a mobile wallet, have the same value and be interchangeable with the physical naira for everyday transactions. Nigerians believe the eNaira, which is governed by a centralized blockchain, is part of the central bank's drive to discourage cryptocurrencies' popularity among Nigeria's youth, just like China's effort with the digital yuan. From a report: And so last week, Nigeria's central bank made two types of eNaira wallets available on Google and Apple stores: one for individuals, and another for merchants. But some users say parts of the wallet for individuals have not worked properly. Fisayo Fosudo, a Nigerian YouTuber who reviews gadgets and apps, said he and three friends initially got error messages that the eNaira app could not match their emails to their bank verification numbers. He would later register successfully but found broken links that did not lead to helpful support pages on the central bank's website. "Was really looking forward to reviewing the eNaira app but it's been hard to get it to work seamlessly. We wait," Fosudo said. After many users left poor reviews for the Android version of the eNaira app for individuals, it was taken down. It had been downloaded 100,000 times before that. The Apple Store version remained available at press time.

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After months of negotiations, President Joe Biden's Build Back Better agenda advanced into its last phase of debate this week. The bipartisan infrastructure bill contains billions to expand high-speed broadband across the country, aiming to close the digital divide over the next 10 years. From a report: But the administration's $65 billion down payment on broadband can only help connect families who can afford a computer. So Biden's latest version of the Build Back Better program goes further, allocating new funds to bring federally funded desktops, laptops, and tablets to poor Americans. Last week, the White House released its latest version of the Build Back Better plan, outlining a $1.75 trillion budget proposal to tackle climate change and invest in other social services like Medicare. Deep within the over 1,600 pages of the bill is a new initiative -- the Connected Device Grant Program -- that would help provide free or discounted desktops, laptops, or tablets to low-income households. To accomplish that goal, the Commerce Department would receive $475 million to award community groups that want to distribute these devices locally.

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theodp writes: Chicago Public School (CPS) teachers were 'blindsided' after access to popular classroom software was yanked due to CPS's interpretation of Illinois' Student Online Personal Protection Act (SOPPA), the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Sneha Dey writes, "Among the software products that violate the law, CPS now says, are programs like Code.org, which is widely used in computer science classes, and Adobe applications used for artistic design and newspaper page layouts. That left has many high school newspapers unable to produce their print editions. Also off limits is Scratch, software to create interactive stores, animations and games. CPS had partnered with the Scratch Foundation to hold family coding nights, among other events." The Blueprint's Karen Buecking has more on how the new student data protection law has upended the computer science curriculum at CPS, noting that CPS teachers received an email from tech-backed Code.org explaining the situation: "We've already signed student data protection agreements with over 150 districts across the state to comply with the new law," said the Code.org representative. "The bad news is CPS's agreement and application process contains onerous requirements unrelated to student privacy that make it prohibitive for organizations like Code.org to agree to CPS's requirements as written."

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Netflix, the video-streaming giant, began its expected foray into video games with the introduction of five mobile games to its users worldwide, playable initially on Android devices. From a report: The titles are included in a Netflix subscription, and there'll be no advertising or additional purchases required, Mike Verdu, Netflix's vice president of game development, said Tuesday. The streaming company has targeted video games as its next big thing -- it's an industry that's larger than the movie and TV businesses. Players logging in will see a dedicated games row and tab where they can choose which titles to play. Games for Apple's iPhone are also planned. The initial offering includes titles linked to Netflix shows, such as Stranger Things: 1984 and Stranger Things 3: The Game. Also included are Shooting Hoops, Card Blast and Teeter Up.

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Facebook plans to shut down its decade-old facial recognition system this month, deleting the face scan data of more than one billion users and effectively eliminating a feature that has fueled privacy concerns, government investigations, a class-action lawsuit and regulatory woes. From a report: Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, Facebook's newly named parent company, said in a blog post on Tuesday that the social network was making the change because of "many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society." He added that the company still saw the software as a powerful tool, but "every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance." The decision shutters a feature that was introduced in December 2010 so that Facebook users could save time. The facial-recognition software automatically identified people who appeared in users' digital photo albums and suggested users "tag" them all with a click, linking their accounts to the images. Facebook now has built one of the largest repositories of digital photos in the world, partly thanks to this software. Facial-recognition technology, which has advanced in accuracy and power in recent years, has increasingly been the focus of debate because of how it can be misused by governments, law enforcement and companies. In China, authorities use the capabilities to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. In the United States, law enforcement has turned to the software to aid policing, leading to fears of overreach and mistaken arrests. Some cities and states have banned or limited the technology to prevent potential abuse.

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A year after releasing the first preview build of its Chromium-based Edge browser for Linux, Microsoft is announcing its general availability. From a report: The new release supports a variety of Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE. Microsoft announced Linux on Edge's availability milestone during the first day of its Ignite IT Pro conference. As of the release of Edge for Linux to the "stable" (mainstream user) channel, Edge is now available on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Linux. As it did when introducing the new Edge on macOS, Microsoft has been positioning Edge on Linux as more of an offering for IT pros and developers who want to test web sites than as a browser for "normal" users on those platforms. However, any user on any supported platform can use the new Edge.

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Microsoft is bringing back Google Wave, the doomed real-time messaging and collaboration platform Google launched in 2009 and prematurely shuttered in 2010. From a report: Maybe we should've seen this coming. Back in 2019, Microsoft announced the Fluid Framework (not to be confused with the Fluent design system). The idea here was nothing short of trying to re-invent the nature of business documents and how developers build real-time applications. Last year, the company open-sourced Fluid and started building it into a few of its own Office applications. Today, at its Ignite conference, it's launching a whole new product built on top of Fluid: Microsoft Wave Loop. Loop is a new app -- and concept -- that takes the Fluid framework, which provides developers with flexible components to mix and match in order to create real-time editing-based applications, to create a new experience for users to collaborate on documents. In many ways, that was also the promise of Google Wave -- real-time collaboration plus a developer framework and protocol to bring Wave everywhere.

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If you're worried the metaverse will be all fun and games, fear not: Microsoft is taking its own stab at the idea, and it will have PowerPoint and Excel. From a report: The company is adapting its signature software products to create a more corporate version of the metaverse -- a concept promoted by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg that promises to let users live, work and play within interconnected virtual worlds. The first offering, a version of Microsoft's Teams chat and conferencing program that features digital avatars, is in testing now and will be available in the first half of 2022. Customers will be able to share Office files and features, like PowerPoint decks, in the virtual world. "This pandemic has made the commercial use cases much more mainstream, even though sometimes the consumer stuff feels like science fiction," Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. Nadella himself has used the technology to visit a Covid-19 ward in a U.K. hospital, a Toyota manufacturing plant and even the international space station, he said. Microsoft also has plans for gaming and entertainment. "You can absolutely expect us to do things in gaming," says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in an interview with Bloomberg. "If you take Halo as a game, it is a metaverse. Minecraft is a metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In some sense, they're 2D today, and the question is can you now take that to a full 3D world, and we absolutely plan to do so."

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Yahoo has officially exited China, shutting down all of its services in the communist country as of Monday, Nov. 1. From a report: "In recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China, Yahoo's suite of services will no longer be accessible from mainland China as of November 1," a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "Yahoo remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open internet. We thank our users for their support," the rep added. Yahoo's exit from China coincided with the enactment of the country's Personal Information Protection Law, a privacy law that went into effect Nov. 1 that imposes new data-collection restrictions on tech companies, the Wall Street Journal reported.

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Zoom is piloting showing ads to users on its free "Basic" tier, the company has announced in a blog post. From a report: Ads will appear on the browser page shown to users at the end of a call. Zoom says ads are being rolled out to free users in "certain countries," though its blog post doesn't detail exactly which these are. Users on the service's Basic tier will only see ads if they join a meeting hosted by another Basic tier user. Although ads won't be shown during meetings themselves, it's still a potentially big shift for the videoconferencing service. Zoom has typically imposed only minor restrictions on its free tier, which helped the service explode in popularity last year as people around the world adapted to working and socializing from home. Even its end-to-end encryption, which Zoom initially said would be limited to paid users, ended up coming to free users after all.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: The Japanese video game company Sega announced Monday that it plans to "explore a strategic alliance" with Microsoft, which will see Sega build new games and overhaul its development process via Microsoft's Azure platform. The new alliance is part of a forward-focused initiative at Sega called "Super Game." According to a news release, Microsoft's Azure provides Sega with a "next-generation development platform" that Sega can customize to account for different styles of work and infrastructural changes. "SEGA has played such an iconic role in the gaming industry and has been a tremendous partner over the years," Microsoft CVP Sarah Bond said in a statement. "We look forward to working together as they explore new ways to create unique gaming experiences for the future using Microsoft cloud technologies. Together we will reimagine how games get built, hosted, and operated, with a goal of adding more value to players and Sega alike." According to Sega, the key focuses behind Super Game are the keywords "Global," "Online," "Community," and "IP utilization." With 5G on its way to supercharge cloud gaming in many parts of the world, Sega is explicitly using Microsoft Azure in an attempt to anticipate and serve whatever the next trend might be. The name of the initiative follows up on information spotted in Sega's March 2021 financial presentation, where the company stated that its strategy included the creation of a Super Game within the next five years, defined as a title that "can be expanded globally." With IP utilization as one of the Super Game's hallmarks, it suggests that Sega plans to turn one of its tentpole franchises -- the same financial report mentioned Phantasy Star Online, Sonic the Hedgehog, Persona, Yakuza, and Total War as potential candidates -- to be made into a big-ticket service game. Whatever that ends up being, its development process will be powered by Microsoft Azure.

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