Apple on Wednesday followed through on its plans to begin publicly releasing repair manuals for some of its products, in addition to selling parts and tools online. The goal, the company said, is to allow iPhone owners an alternative way to repair their devices. From a report: The tech giant's new program, called Self Service Repair, is starting out for US customers with Apple's iPhone 13 line of smartphones, the iPhone 12 and new iPhone SE. Apple said it designed the program to offer adventurous and capable people access to the same parts, tools and instructions it gives to its own certified technicians and partner repair shops, hopefully making it easier for people to repair devices instead of resorting to buying a new one. "We believe we have a responsibility to customers and the environment to offer convenient access to safe, reliable, and secure repairs to help customers get the most out of their devices," the company wrote in a document published Wednesday that outlines its plans. "As the doors open on this new venue, we're underwhelmed, and settling back into our usual skepticism," iFixit posted on Wednesday. The firm adds: The biggest problem? Apple is doubling down on their parts pairing strategy, enabling only very limited, serial number-authorized repairs. You cannot purchase key parts without a serial number or IMEI. If you use an aftermarket part, there's an "unable to verify" warning waiting for you. This strategy hamstrings third-party repair with feature loss and scare tactics and could dramatically limit options for recyclers and refurbishers, short-circuiting the circular economy. As of today, you can buy an official Apple iPhone 12 screen and install it yourself, on your own device, with no fuss. Until now, DIY repairs relied on keeping the Face ID speaker and sensor assembly intact, then very carefully moving it to your new screen, and finally ignoring some gentle warnings. If your assembly was damaged or defective, you were out of luck. The new program will solve that problem -- assuming you've bought an official Apple part.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Twitter locked down its source code to prevent unauthorized changes, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. The reports say that this change was made to prevent employees from "going rogue" and sabotaging the platform after Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase of the company. Currently, a vice president must approve any changes. After the company announced it would accept Musk's offer to buy the publicly traded platform, it wasn't immediately clear to Twitter's 7,000 employees how their day-to-day would change. Even after a company all-hands, where CEO Parag Agrawal reassured the team that no layoffs were planned "at this time," employees were still left with questions about how they would fare in Musk's takeover. [...] For now, Musk's takeover bid for Twitter remains subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. But if it goes through as expected, we may witness major personnel shifts, resignations and more. A similar shake-up took place when Twitter was listed on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time. By the time the company went public, there were already 90 startups being built by former Twitter employees.

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em1ly shares a report from Motherboard: Facebook is facing what it describes internally as a "tsunami" of privacy regulations all over the world, which will force the company to dramatically change how it deals with users' personal data. And the "fundamental" problem, the company admits, is that Facebook has no idea where all of its user data goes, or what it's doing with it, according to a leaked internal document obtained by Motherboard. "We've built systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy: Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.) You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) ... and it flows ... everywhere," the document read. "How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?" (3PD means third-party data; 1PD means first-party data; SCD means sensitive categories data.) The document was written last year by Facebook privacy engineers on the Ad and Business Product team, whose mission is "to make meaningful connections between people and businesses," and which "sits at the center of our monetization strategy and is the engine that powers Facebook's growth," according to a recent job listing that describes the team. This is the team that is tasked with building and maintaining Facebook's sprawling ads system, the core of the company's business. And in this document, the team is both sounding an alarm, and making a call to change how Facebook deals with users' data to prevent the company from running into trouble with regulators in Europe, the US, India, and other countries that are pushing for more stringent privacy constraints on social media companies. "We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can't confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as 'we will not use X data for Y purpose.' And yet, this is exactly what regulators expect us to do, increasing our risk of mistakes and misrepresentation," the document read. In other words, even Facebook's own engineers admit that they are struggling to make sense and keep track of where user data goes once it's inside Facebook's systems, according to the document. This problem inside Facebook is known as "data lineage."

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vm shares a report from Space.com: SpaceX is among companies that might replace services of NASA's aging space telecoms constellation that has kept the International Space Station connected to Earth for decades. For years, NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) constellation has served as the main link between the International Space Station and Earth, providing astronauts with constant connection to ground control as well as the ability to engage with the public and stay in touch with their loved ones. The American space agency, however, plans to retire the six aging satellites in the next decade and hand over their task to commercial companies. This month, the agency announced partnerships with six commercial satellite operators including SpaceX, U.K. company Inmarsat, American Viasat and Switzerland-based SES, to demonstrate how they could take care of NASA's space communication needs in the future. "We don't plan to launch any new TDRS satellites in the future," Eli Naffah, the manager of NASA's Commercial Services Project, who oversees the partnership with the commercial companies, told Space.com. "The plan is to allow the constellation to basically [reach the end of its life]. At some point later in this decade, we are going to have some diminished capability and the plan is for the [commercial companies] to come up with a different way of providing communication services to our missions." "Back in the 1980s, when we developed TDRS, there really wasn't an ability on the commercial side to be able to provide this service," Naffah said. "But since then, the industry has far outpaced NASA's investment in this area. There's a lot of infrastructure, both on the ground and in orbit that is capable of providing these types of services to a spacecraft. [...] Hopefully, we can achieve some cost efficiencies in buying commercial services, get out of the business of operating networks, and really put more focus on science and exploration." According to Naffah, NASA will invest $278 million into the project over the next five years, with the agency's industry partners contributing a total of about $1.5 billion.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Following in the footsteps of iOS 14, Google is rolling out an app privacy section to the Play Store on Tuesday. When you look up an app on the Play Store, alongside sections like "About this app" and "ratings and reviews," there will be a new section called "Data privacy & security," where developers can explain what data they collect. Note that while the section will be appearing for users starting today, it might not be filled out by developers. Google's deadline for developers to provide privacy information is July 20. Even then, all of this privacy information is provided by the developer and is essentially working on the honor system. Here's how Google describes the process to developers: "You alone are responsible for making complete and accurate declarations in your app's store listing on Google Play. Google Play reviews apps across all policy requirements; however, we cannot make determinations on behalf of the developers of how they handle user data. Only you possess all the information required to complete the Data safety form. When Google becomes aware of a discrepancy between your app behavior and your declaration, we may take appropriate action, including enforcement action." Once the section is up and running, developers will be expected to list what data they're collecting, why they're collecting it, and who they're sharing it with. The support page features a big list of data types for elements like "location," "personal info," "financial info," "web history," "contacts," and various file types. Developers are expected to list their data security practices, including explaining if data is encrypted in transit and if users can ask for data to be deleted. There's also a spot for "Google Play's Families Policy" compliance, which is mostly just a bunch of US COPPA and EU GDPR requirements. Google says developers can also indicate if their app has "been independently validated against a global security standard."

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A record-breaking heat wave in India exposing hundreds of millions to dangerous temperatures is damaging the country's wheat harvest, which experts say could hit countries seeking to make up imports of the food staple from conflict-riven Ukraine. NBC News reports: With some states in India's breadbasket northern and central regions seeing forecasts with highs of 120 Fahrenheit this week, observers fear a range of lasting impacts, both local and international, from the hot spell. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told U.S. President Joe Biden earlier this month that India could step in to ease the shortfall created by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The two countries account for nearly a third of all global wheat exports, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that the conflict could leave an additional 8 million to 13 million people undernourished by next year. India's wheat exports hit 8.7 million tons in the fiscal year ending in March, with the government predicting record production levels -- some 122 million tons -- in 2022. But the country has just endured its hottest March since records began, according to the India Meteorological Department, and the heat wave is dragging well into harvest time. The heat wave is hitting India's main wheat-growing regions particularly hard, with temperatures this week set to hit 112 F in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh; 120 F in Chandigarh, Punjab; and 109 F in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. Devendra Singh Chauhan, a farmer from Uttar Pradesh's Etawah district, told NBC News that his wheat crop was down 60 percent compared to normal harvests.

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After Dell's new Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM) leaked out last week, several tech sites led many to believe that the company was taking a path to "lock out users upgrades." However, according to PCWorld citing both the person who designed and patented the CAMM standard, as well as the product manager of the first Dell Precision laptop to feature it, "the intent of the new memory module standard is to head-off looming bandwidth ceilings in the current SO-DIMM designs." They claim that CAMM could increase performance, improve reliability, aid user upgrades, and eventually lower costs too. From the report: Most of the internet hot takes last week, however, reacted to CAMM being proprietary, which is typically viewed as a method to lock people into buying upgrades only from one company. Dell officials, however, insist that's not the case at all. "One of the tenants of the PC industry is standards," said Dell's Tom Schnell, the Senior Distinguished Engineer who designed much of it. "We believe in that; we put standards into our products. We're not keeping it to ourselves, we hope it becomes the next industry standard." Schnell said that Dell isn't making the modules and has worked with memory companies as well as Intel on this. In the future, a person with a CAMM-equipped laptop will be able to buy RAM from any third party and install it in the laptop. Yes, initially, Dell will likely be the only place to get CAMM upgrades, but that should change as the standard scales up and is adopted by other PC makers. The new memory modules are also built using commodity DRAMs just like conventional SO-DIMMs. In fact, Dell points out, it's not even "proprietary" on its own laptops. The first Precision workstations that come with CAMM will also eventually be offered with conventional SO-DIMMs using an interposer. Mano Gialusis, product manager for Precision workstations, said the interposer option goes into the same CAMM mount, too. With CAMM now a reality, Dell's next step is to get it in front of JEDEC, the memory standards organization, to make it available to others, he said. Why not create a standard from scratch? Schnell said its far easier to get a standard minted once it's proven to work rather than trying to simply create something anew every time. The report goes on to say that Dell does hold patents on the CAMM design "and there will be royalties," but "no standard can go forward through JEDEC unless the licensing is not anti-competitive, is reasonably priced, and cannot discriminate against a company."

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Europe's Digital Markets Act -- near-finalized legislation to tame the internet's gatekeepers -- contains language squarely aimed at ending Apple's iOS browser restrictions. The Register reports: The Register has received a copy of unpublished changes in the proposed act, and among the various adjustments to the draft agreement is the explicit recognition of "web browser engines" as a service that should be protected from anti-competitive gatekeeper-imposed limitations. Apple requires that competing mobile browsers distributed through the iOS App Store use its own WebKit rendering engine, which is the basis of its Safari browser. The result is that Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on iOS are all, more or less, Safari. That requirement has been a sore spot for years among rivals like Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft. They could not compete on iOS through product differentiation because their mobile browsers had to rely on WebKit rather than their own competing engines. And Apple's browser engine requirement has vexed web developers, who have been limited to using only the web APIs implemented in WebKit for their web apps. Many believe this barrier serves to steer developers toward native iOS app development, which Apple controls. The extent to which Apple profits from the status quo has prompted regulatory scrutiny in Europe, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. [...] Now those efforts have been translated into the text of the DMA, which, alongside the Digital Services Act (DSA), defines how large technology gatekeepers will be governed in Europe. [...] In short, when the DMA takes effect in 2024, it appears that Apple will be required to allow browser competition on iOS devices. "The potential for a capable web has been all but extinguished on mobile because Apple has successfully prevented it until now," said Alex Russell, partner program manager on Microsoft Edge who worked previously as Google Chrome's first web standards tech lead. "Businesses and services will be able to avoid building 'apps' entirely when enough users have capable browsers." "There's a long road between here and there," he added. "Apple has spent enormous amounts to lobby on this, and they aren't stupid. Everyone should expect them to continue to play games along the lines of what they tried in Denmark and South Korea."

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An independent monitor of Britain's use of surveillance cameras has asked for the government to clarify its positions on buying equipment from a Chinese technology company accused of involvement in human rights abuses. From a report: Fraser Sampson, the biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner, said he raised concerns with senior Cabinet officials after Hikvision failed to answer questions about the extent of its role in China's treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in western Xinjiang province. "There are serious unanswered questions about Hikvision's involvement in appalling human rights abuses in China," Sampson said in a statement Tuesday. "The company seems unwilling or unable to provide assurances about the ethics of some of its operations and about security concerns associated with its equipment." Sampson said the company's cameras and facial recognition technology have been implicated in "systematic human rights abuses" against Uyghurs. He said widespread persecution of the minority group in Xinjiang "is known to rely heavily on surveillance technology, including facial recognition software designed to detect racial characteristics." The Telegraph newspaper reported earlier this month that the U.K. health department banned Hikvision, which is part-owned by the Chinese government, from competing for new business after a procurement report found "ethical concerns" about the company.

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Maine is closer to launching its space program after Gov. Janet Mills signed a bill to create the Maine Space Port, a law aimed at growing the state's aerospace industry. From a report: Mills signed the bill into law on April 19, creating a public-private partnership that would build launch sites, data networks and operations to send satellites into space, The Portland Press Herald reported Sunday. Most of the work accomplished at the program will be through the creation of the Maine Space Complex which will be built at the former Brunswick Naval Air Station within the next decade. The complex will oversee three entities including a computer center and satellite launch and operations sites. Terry Shehata, director of the Maine Space Grant Consortium, said the spaceport would be one of the first in the U.S. to launch satellites, conduct data analysis and provide education to students. The consortium is the NASA-funded nonprofit spearheading the spaceport complex.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Don't be fooled by the name. While 3D printers do print tangible objects (and quite well), how they do the job doesn't actually happen in 3D, but rather in regular old 2D. Working to change that is a group of former and current researchers from the Rowland Institute at Harvard. [...] The researchers present a method to help the printers live up to their names and deliver a "true" 3D form of printing. In a new paper in Nature, they describe a technique of volumetric 3D printing that goes beyond the bottom-up, layered approach. The process eliminates the need for support structures because the resin it creates is self-supporting. The key component in their novel design is turning red light into blue light by adding what's known as an upconversion process to the resin, the light reactive liquid used in 3D printers that hardens into plastic. In 3D printing, resin hardens in a flat and straight line along the path of the light. Here, the researchers use nano capsules to add chemicals so that it only reacts to a certain kind of light -- a blue light at the focal point of the laser that's created by the upconversion process. This beam is scanned in three dimensions, so it prints that way without needing to be layered onto something. The resulting resin has a greater viscosity than in the traditional method, so it can stand support-free once it's printed. "We designed the resin, we designed the system so that the red light does nothing," Congreve said. "But that little dot of blue light triggers a chemical reaction that makes the resin harden and turn into plastic. Basically, what that means is you have this laser passing all the way through the system and only at that little blue do you get the polymerization, [only there] do you get the printing happening. We just scan that blue dot around in three dimensions and anywhere that blue dot hits it polymerizes and you get your 3D printing." The researchers used their printer to produce a 3D Harvard logo, Stanford logo, and a small boat, a standard yet difficult test for 3D printers because of the boat's small size and fine details like overhanging portholes and open cabin spaces.

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The common perception that nearly everyone in America seemed to have acquired the Omicron variant last winter may not have been far from the truth. By February 2022, nearly 60 percent of the population had been infected with the coronavirus, almost double the proportion seen in December 2021, according to data released on Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The New York Times reports: "By February 2022, evidence of previous Covid-19 infections substantially increased among every age group," Dr. Kristie Clarke, the agency researcher who led the study, said at a news briefing. Infections rose most sharply during the Omicron surge among children and adolescents, perhaps because many people in those age groups were still unvaccinated. The increase was smallest among adults 65 or older, who have the highest rate of vaccination and may be the most likely to take precautions. The new research suggests that three out of four children and adolescents in the United States had been infected with the coronavirus by February 2022, compared with one-third of older adults. While some studies suggest that prior infection offers a weaker shield against the virus than vaccines do, the resulting antibodies should provide a reasonable degree of protection against severe illness, at least in the short term. "We still do not know how long infection-induced immunity will last," Dr. Clarke said. The gains in population-wide immunity may explain why the new surge that is roaring through China and many countries in Europe has been muted in the United States so far. The findings may offer some comfort to parents who have been waiting anxiously for a vaccine to be approved for the youngest children. Many of those children now seem to have acquired at least some immunity. Even so, Dr. Clarke urged parents to immunize children who qualify as soon as regulators approve a vaccine for them, regardless of any prior infection.

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Seattle startup Read just released its first study on the effectiveness of video conference calls after measuring more than 3 million virtual meeting minutes since launching in September. Overall, one in five calls had a below average meeting score, and 31% of meetings start late. GeekWire reports: Seattle startup Read just released its first study after measuring more than 3 million virtual meeting minutes since launching in September, when it announced its $10 million seed round. The company's software measures engagement and sentiment of participants on video meetings. For meetings with seven or more people, some of the findings include: - 50% of participants arrive late - 40% have below average or poor engagement - 22% of participants don't say a single word - 11% don't have video or audio on "The scale and impact of bad meetings is a massive drain on resources and morale," said David Shim, CEO of Read. Shim said with workers going remote amid the pandemic, people erred on the side of inviting more participants, and the default response of those invited was to accept. This is what introduced "Zoom Fatigue," he said. That's part of what Read is trying to address with its products.

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A group of TikTok- and Instagram-famous physicians say they have a solution for the "red tape" of the current medical system: NFTs of cartoon doctors. From a report: These NFTs, called MetaDocs, are supposed to give buyers access to real doctors, almost like a Web3 telehealth subscription. When MetaDocs launched in December, it claimed that its legion of celebrity doctors, who have a collective social media following of 70 million and have included "Dr. Pimple Popper" Sandra Lee and plastic surgeon Dr. Richard Brown of TikTok fame, would all be available via DM, group "ask me anything" sessions, or one-on-one video chats to those who buy in. MetaDocs founder Dr. Sina Joorabchi hopes it will evolve into a full-fledged virtual clinic in the so-called metaverse, where patients can put on a haptic suit and be examined remotely by a physician in virtual reality. But now, MetaDocs is facing backlash from the medical community, in part because it is not actually licensed as a telemedicine service and thus its doctors cannot legally make diagnoses, write prescriptions, or give personalized medical advice to anyone who buys a MetaDocs NFT. A further wrinkle: Doctors are almost always required to be licensed in a state in order to practice there, including through telehealth services. "At this point, we're hesitant to refer to anybody as a patient," Dr. Dustin Portela, a MetaDocs physician and practicing dermatologist, told BuzzFeed News. According to a recent white paper, the presale cost of a MetaDocs NFT will be 0.2 ETH, or about $570, though the company hasn't determined an exact price yet. But why would someone pay hundreds of dollars for a cartoon so they could "ask a doctor anything" if they are not seeking some form of medical advice?

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Peoples Dispatch: Mexico has officially nationalized its lithium industry. On April 21, the bill, proposed by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), that modified the mining law to give the state the exclusive right to explore, exploit and use the valuable metal entered into force. According to the law, published in the Official Gazette of the Federation, the executive or the president now has 90 days to create a decentralized state company that will deal with all lithium-related matters. [...] The new mining law recognizes lithium as a heritage of the nation, and reserves it for the benefit of the people of Mexico. It elevates lithium to the category of "strategic mineral," and prohibits granting concessions, licenses, contracts, permits, assignments or authorizations for its exploitation to private corporations. The president emphasized that lithium is a strategic element for the development of the nation, and its effective exploitation can contribute to economic growth. He said that his administration would work to develop necessary technology to take the best advantage of their lithium, ensuring that it does not harm the health of the population, the environment, or the rights of Indigenous people. He also took the opportunity to reiterate that his administration would review all lithium contracts. He requested that the shareholders and managers of the companies and corporations begin to establish a dialogue with their legal representatives. There is only one lithium mine in Mexico, operated by Chinese firm Ganfeng Lithium, which is slated to produce 35,000 tons of the metal per year starting in 2023. In the coming days, it will be discussed if that will be taken over by the government. Meanwhile, the right-wing opposition criticized nationalization of lithium. Some legislators from the opposition National Action Party (PAN) and Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who voted against the reform, said that it would severely affect the development in the mining of the metal, arguing that the Mexican government has no experience in mining lithium. Others criticized that it violated the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and would bring trade tensions. Nevertheless, the people of Mexico have expressed their approval of the president and his policies. A number of social organizations and trade unions have praised the president and the ruling center-left MORENA party, recalling that the nationalization of lithium in Bolivia during former president Evo Morales' rule helped the country achieve high levels of economic and social growth. "Lithium is considered an important resource due to its importance for the development of batteries used for electric cars," notes the report. "According to data from the US Geological Survey, Mexico has 1.7 million tons of lithium mining reserves."

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British group gained $7.8bn valuation in pandemic, but lay-offs and slump in secondary market trades have followed. From a report: In November 2020, with the pandemic in full force, British virtual events start-up Hopin declared that a new era of digital gatherings had begun. Virtual events were "here to stay," said founder Johnny Boufarhat, as he bragged that there were "more than 15,000 monthly events" available on Hopin's "Explore" platform. Today, there are fewer than 500 listed. Boufarhat's vision made Hopin a pandemic sensation and Europe's fastest growing start-up ever. Launched in 2019, his company rocketed to fame after Covid hit with a conferencing product that seemed tailor-made for lockdowns. The 27-year-old raised more than a billion dollars for Hopin in little over a year, reaching a $7.8bn private market valuation that made him Britain's youngest self-made billionaire on paper. As top-tier venture capital firms like IVP, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global clamoured to invest, Boufarhat sold $195mn worth of his own shares, according to a Financial Times analysis. With Covid beginning to recede and publicly traded technology stocks being dumped by investors, Boufarhat now faces a moment of truth as he tries to build a sustainable business that lives up to the lofty expectations it set during the pandemic. "The landscape will look very different going forward. People can now meet," noted one events industry executive. They dismissed the pandemic-driven online events boom as "a bit of an artificial bubble."

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Chess.com, writes in a blog post: Yesterday, Chess.com was banned by the Russian government agency Roscomnadzor, the "Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media." Roscomnadzor is responsible for censorship within Russia, a busy occupation these days. Since the start of Russia's war against Ukraine on February 24th, Roscomnadzor has banned hundreds of sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google News, BBC News, NPR, and Amnesty International. According to Roscomnadzor, their goal is to block two webpages: "On The Invasion of Ukraine" which outlines our policy and actions regarding the war on Ukraine and addresses FAQ and "Ukrainian Chess Players In Times Of War" which is a piece interviewing Ukrainian chess players on their circumstances and views during the early days of the war. Since Chess.com uses secure https webpages, Roscomnadzor is unable to ban these single pages and has banned the entire Chess.com site. Our members report that Chess.com's apps are unaffected. We happily encourage our Russian members to continue accessing our site using our apps or any of the many outstanding VPN services that are so essential in Russia.

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UnknowingFool writes: In 2020, Paragon Software announced they wanted to upstream their previously proprietary NTFS driver into Linux. After a year of review, the NTFS3 driver was added to the Linux 5.15 kernel. While Paragon pledged to maintain their driver, there have been no major updates to the driver despite a growing list of patches that have submitted. Developer Kari Argillander has raised his concerns on the mailing list that the driver is orphaned, and that the Paragon maintainer has not responded to any messages about fixes. An offer to co-maintain the driver has also been met with "radio silence".

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Computers using light rather than electric currents for processing, only years ago seen as research projects, are gaining traction and startups that have solved the engineering challenge of using photons in chips are getting big funding. From a report: In the latest example, Ayar Labs, a startup developing this technology called silicon photonics, said on Tuesday it had raised $130 million from investors including chip giant Nvidia. While the transistor-based silicon chip has increased computing power exponentially over past decades as transistors have reached the width of several atoms, shrinking them further is challenging. Not only is it hard to make something so miniscule, but as they get smaller, signals can bleed between them. So, Moore's law, which said every two years the density of the transistors on a chip would double and bring down costs, is slowing, pushing the industry to seek new solutions to handle increasingly heavy artificial intelligence computing needs. According to data firm PitchBook, last year silicon photonics startups raised over $750 million, doubling from 2020. In 2016 that was about $18 million. The challenge is that many large machine-learning algorithms can use hundreds or thousands of chips for computing, and there is a bottleneck on the speed of data transmission between chips or servers using current electrical methods.

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In a first-of-its-kind move -- and the latest sign that crypto-investing has gone mainstream -- Fidelity Investments announced Tuesday that 401(k) plan participants will soon be able to invest in Bitcoin via their retirement plan. Reader BeerFartMoron writes: The investing option should be available by mid-year, Fidelity, the nation's largest 401(k) plan provider, said in a press release. Employers will need to opt into the change, which may limit which employees actually have access to Bitcoin in their workplace retirement accounts. That could enable millions of people to invest in the digital asset without the need to set up a separate account on a cryptocurrency exchange. There are few details currently available about how exactly the account will work, but Fidelity says employees will be able to invest in Bitcoin via what the company is calling the Digital Assets Account, which will be part of the investor's 401(k). That account will also hold short-term money market investments to provide the liquidity for transactions.

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