While Russia's "relentless digital assaults" on Ukraine might seem less damaging than anticipated, the attacks actually focused on a different goal with "chilling potential consequences," reports the Associated Press. "Data collection." Even in an early February blog post, Microsoft said Russia's intelligence agency had tried "exfiltrating sensitive information" over the previous six months from military, government, military, judiciary and law enforcement agencies. The AP reports: Ukrainian agencies breached on the eve of the February 24 invasion include the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which oversees the police, national guard and border patrol. A month earlier, a national database of automobile insurance policies was raided during a diversionary cyberattack that defaced Ukrainian websites. The hacks, paired with prewar data theft, likely armed Russia with extensive details on much of Ukraine's population, cybersecurity and military intelligence analysts say. It's information Russia can use to identify and locate Ukrainians most likely to resist an occupation, and potentially target them for internment or worse. "Fantastically useful information if you're planning an occupation," Jack Watling, a military analyst at the U.K. think tank Royal United Services Institute, said of the auto insurance data, "knowing exactly which car everyone drives and where they live and all that." As the digital age evolves, information dominance is increasingly wielded for social control, as China has shown in its repression of the Uyghur minority. It was no surprise to Ukrainian officials that a prewar priority for Russia would be compiling information on committed patriots. "The idea was to kill or imprison these people at the early stages of occupation," Victor Zhora, a senior Ukrainian cyber defense official, alleged.... There is little doubt political targeting is a goal. Ukraine says Russian forces have killed and kidnapped local leaders where they grab territory.... The Ukrainian government says the Jan. 14 auto insurance hack resulted in the pilfering of up to 80% of Ukrainian policies registered with the Motor Transport Bureau. But the article also points out that Ukraine also "appears to have done significant data collection — quietly assisted by the U.S., the U.K., and other partners — targeting Russian soldiers, spies and police, including rich geolocation data." Serhii Demediuk [deputy secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council] said the country knows "exactly where and when a particular serviceman crossed the border with Ukraine, in which occupied settlement he stopped, in which building he spent the night, stole and committed crimes on our land." "We know their cell phone numbers, the names of their parents, wives, children, their home addresses," who their neighbors are, where they went to school and the names of their teachers, he said. Analysts caution that some claims about data collection from both sides of the conflict may be exaggerated. But in recordings posted online by Ukrainian Digital Transformation Minister Mikhailo Fedorov, callers are heard phoning the far-flung wives of Russian soldiers and posing as Russian state security officials to say parcels shipped to them from Belarus were looted from Ukrainian homes. In one, a nervous-sounding woman acknowledges receiving what she calls souvenirs — a woman's bag, a keychain. The caller tells her she shares criminal liability, that her husband "killed people in Ukraine and stole their stuff." She hangs up.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Alibaba Cloud has advanced its work to port Android to the RISC-V architecture. The Chinese cloud giant has spent more than a year working on a port of the Google-spawned OS and in January 2021 showed off a GUI powered by Android 10 running on silicon designed by T-Head Semiconductor -- an Alibaba subsidiary that designs its own RISC-V chip. Alibaba Cloud has now revealed it's working on Android 12, and has integrated third-party vendor modules. The result is Android on RISC-V that's capable of playing audio and video, running Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, and driving cameras. The company has also "enabled more system enhancement features such as core tool sets, third-party libraries and SoC board support package on RISC-V," which collectively make RISC-V a better target for Android. Another advance is successful trials of TensorFlow Lite models on RISC-V. That effort means Android on RISC-V should be capable running workloads like image and audio classification and Optical Character Recognition. Alibaba Cloud hasn't detailed whether its porting efforts are directed to any particular processor, but is keen to point out that its homegrown Xuantie C906 processor recently aced the MLPerf Tiny v0.7 benchmark -- a test applied to Internet of Things devices. The company has also pointed out that its home-grown RISC-V kit has already been employed in smart home appliances, automotive applications, and edge computing. [...] The Xuantie C906 uses Alibaba-designed cores that are -- as required for RISC-V users -- available on GitHub. When the firm has a complete version of Android on RISC-V, it "will be an important step towards China's goal of reducing its reliance on technology that other nations can control with restrictions such as trade bans," notes The Register. "As RISC-V is open source, preventing its flow to China is all but impossible."

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Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, is turning to cloud-seeding to increase rainfall. Interesting Engineering reports: The country initiated the first phase of its cloud-seeding operation in areas above the capital Riyadh, al-Qassim, and Hail on Tuesday, according to Arab News. The weather modification technique is being executed as part of an effort to increase the country's yearly rainfall, which does not exceed 100 millimeters a year, by 10 to 20 percent. Cloud-seeding is a technique that involves introducing chemicals to clouds, like small particles of silver iodide, to induce more rain from a cloud. This causes water droplets to congregate around them, and the water particles clash with one another, growing larger and increasing the likelihood of rainfall. Ayman Ghulam, head of the National Center of Meteorology and supervisor of the cloud-seeding program, said the program's operations room opened on Monday at the center's headquarters in Riyadh, and the first flights took place in the capital's vicinity, according to Gulf News. He stated that they met their objectives in terms of the results and timeliness of the seeding operations. The center will provide quarterly updates on developments. The program will track cloud formations across the country to find the optimal locations for seeding efforts, which would use "environmentally friendly" materials to increase precipitation in targeted areas. The cloud seeding initiative, according to Gluham, is one of the "promising ways" of preserving water balance in a safe, adaptable, and cost-effective manner.

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New pictures from the Ingenuity helicopter offer a fresh perspective of the wreckage left behind when the Perseverance rover landed on Mars last year, NASA said on Wednesday. The Verge reports: Launched in 2020, the Perseverance rover successfully landed on the Red Planet in 2021, with the mission of finding ancient signs of life on Mars. The rover carried the Ingenuity helicopter onboard -- an experimental project that scientists on Earth hoped would be able to see sights that the rover couldn't. Perseverance went through a grueling process known as the seven minutes of terror to descend onto the Martian surface. As it entered the atmosphere, a heat shield helped protect the rover from the blistering heat of reentry and slowed it down dramatically. After that, the massive parachute deployed out of the backshell (a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle), slowing it down even more. At that point, the backshell and parachute separated from Perseverance and let the descent stage take over, using rocket thrusters and a "sky crane" to gently lower the rover to a smooth landing. On April 19th, Ingenuity took photographs that captured the remains of Perseverance's parachute and the rover's protective backshell, a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle that carried the parachute and helped protect the rover on its way to the surface. Strewn around the site were debris from where the two crashed into the surface after separating from the rover. The backshell ended up hitting the ground at about 78 miles per hour, according to NASA. From the pictures, it appears that the parachute, the lines connecting the parachute to the spacecraft, and the coating on the outside of the backshell all survived the trip to the surface, NASA says, though more analysis of the pictures will happen in the coming weeks.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Postal Service is facing lawsuits from 16 states and several environmental groups challenging its decision to buy tens of thousands of gasoline-powered delivery vehicles instead of electric vehicles. As previously reported, the Environmental Protection Agency says the gas-powered trucks being ordered by the USPS "are expected to achieve only 8.6 miles per gallon (mpg), barely improving over the decades-old long-life vehicles that achieve 8.2 mpg." The USPS countered that the vehicles get 14.7 mpg when air conditioning isn't being used and that the trucks' size will make it possible to deliver the same amount of mail in fewer trips. The USPS plan is to buy 50,000 to 165,000 vehicles over 10 years. Of those, at least 10 percent are slated to be battery-electric vehicles (BEV). [...] A lawsuit filed by California and 15 other states on Thursday said the USPS failed "to follow a process mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)," continuing: "Instead, the Postal Service first chose a manufacturer with minimal experience in producing electric vehicles, signed a contract, and made a substantial down payment for new vehicles. Only then did the Postal Service publish a cursory environmental review to justify the decision to replace 90 percent of its delivery fleet with fossil-fuel-powered, internal combustion engine vehicles, despite other available, environmentally preferable alternatives. In doing so, the Postal Service failed to comply with even the most basic requirements of NEPA." The lawsuit seeks an injunction forcing the USPS to stop the vehicle purchases "until it has complied with NEPA." It was filed against the USPS and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who was appointed by the USPS Board of Governors in 2020 under then-President Donald Trump. All 16 states involved in the lawsuit have Democratic attorneys general. They allege that the USPS "violated well-established legal precedent prohibiting 'an irreversible and irretrievable commitment of resources' before completing the NEPA process by signing contracts with a defense company (Oshkosh Defense, LLC) to procure vehicles six months before even releasing its draft environmental review and a year prior to issuing the Final Environmental Impact Statement ('Final EIS') and Record of Decision." The states also claim the USPS failed to consider and evaluate reasonable alternatives. "Specifically, the Postal Service did not properly evaluate several environmental impacts of its action, including air quality, environmental justice, and climate harms, by simply assuming that any upgrade to its vehicle fleet would have positive impacts on the environment," the complaint said. States also alleged the USPS "failed to ensure the scientific integrity of its analysis by relying on unfounded assumptions regarding the costs and performance of electric vehicles, infrastructure, and gas prices, and refusing to identify the source of the data relied upon in the Final EIS." "The Postal Service conducted a robust and thorough review and fully complied with all of our obligations under NEPA," a USPS spokesperson told Ars. The statement continues: "The Postal Service is fully committed to the inclusion of electric vehicles as a significant part of our delivery fleet even though the investment will cost more than an internal combustion engine vehicle. That said, as we have stated repeatedly, we must make fiscally prudent decisions in the needed introduction of a new vehicle fleet. We will continue to look for opportunities to increase the electrification of our delivery fleet in a responsible manner, consistent with our operating strategy, the deployment of appropriate infrastructure, and our financial condition, which we expect to continue to improve as we pursue our plan."

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gordm writes: Following appeals from scientists, a Stanford and MIT study showing Diablo Canyon could save California $21 Billion, demand curtailment and a projected power supply shortfall, Gov. Gavin Newsom is now considering keeping the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant open. Diablo Canyon generated 6% of California's total electricity in 2021 and 12% of California's carbon-free electricity. Elon Musk has tweeted in support of keeping Diablo Canyon open, and in support of keeping European nuclear power plants running. According to the L.A. Times, Newsom said the state would seek out a share of $6 billion in federal funds meant to rescue nuclear reactors facing closure. The money comes from the Biden administration's recently announced effort to rescue nuclear power plants at risk of closing. "The requirement is by May 19 to submit an application, or you miss the opportunity to draw down any federal funds if you want to extend the life of that plant," Newsom said. "We would be remiss not to put that on the table as an option." A spokesperson for the governor clarified that Newsom still wants to see the facility shut down long term. "It's been six years since PG&E agreed to close the plant near San Luis Obispo, rather than invest in expensive environmental and earthquake-safety upgrades," the report notes. "But Newsom's willingness to consider a short-term reprieve reflects a shift in the politics of nuclear power after decades of public opposition fueled by high-profile disasters such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, as well as the Cold War."

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Hmmmmmm shares a report from Reuters: India will on Friday launch an open network for digital commerce (ONDC) as the government tries to end the dominance of U.S. companies Amazon.com and Walmart in the fast-growing e-commerce market, a government document showed. The launch of the platform comes after India's antitrust body on Thursday raided domestic sellers of Amazon and some of Walmart's Flipkart following accusations of competition law violations. The government's so-called ONDC platform will allow buyers and sellers to connect and transact with each other online, no matter what other application they use. It will be soft-launched on Friday before being expanded, the trade ministry told Reuters. The government document said that two large multinational players controlled more than half of the country's e-commerce trade, limiting access to the market, giving preferential treatment to some sellers and squeezing supplier margins. It did not name the companies. The document said India's ONDC plan aimed to onboard 30 million sellers and 10 million merchants online. The plan is to cover at least 100 cities and towns by August.

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New submitter Mononymous writes: Created by Graham Nelson, Inform 7 compiles a powerful object-oriented language resembling English into a working text adventure. Friendly GUIs for various platforms have been open source for many years, but the core compiler remained proprietary. Now, 16 years after its initial freeware release, Nelson has released the source code under the Artistic License 2.0 in a public GitHub repo. Inform 7 is one of the largest "literate programs" ever released.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: If you'd told us that Bandcamp's acquisition by Epic Games would lead fairly swiftly to an argument with a tech giant, our money would have been on that giant being Apple. Nope. Epic Games is seeking a court injunction against Google, over changing rules on its Google Play Store for Android. Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond blogged about the dispute overnight, noting that since 2015, Bandcamp has used its own billing system to process payments made for music and merch within its Android app. "However, Google is now modifying its rules to require Bandcamp (and other apps like it) to exclusively use Google Play Billing for payments for digital goods and services, and pay a revenue share to Google," wrote Diamond. "If Google's policy changes stand, beginning on June 1st, we would have to either pass Google's fees on to consumers (making Android a less attractive platform for music fans), pass fees on to artists (which we would never do), permanently run our Android business at a loss, or turn off digital sales in the Android app." Diamond also said that the new policy could see a delay in payments for artists and labels, from the current 24-48 hours to "15 to 45 days after a sale," while Epic's filing notes that Google's system can't be used for purchases of physical items (merch and physical music), which would force it to use two separate payment systems anyway.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In the latest effort to challenge Amazon's grueling labor practices, a new bill, that was introduced on Friday, would require New York employers to disclose and place limits on productivity quotas for warehouse workers. The New York bill, known as the Warehouse Worker Protection Act, is an expanded version of a similar first-of-its-kind law that passed in California last year aimed at Amazon that regulates warehouse worker productivity quotas. The legislation is in part a response to skyrocketing injury rates in Amazon warehouses linked to productivity expectations. Recent data shows that workers in the e-commerce warehousing industry in New York experience serious work-related injuries at three times the average rate for private industry in the state, according to OSHA data. The New York bill would require employers with at least 50 employees in a single warehouse or 500 workers statewide to share a written description of productivity quotas, how the quotas are developed, and how they can be used for disciplinary purposes with each worker. It would also ensure that production quotas do not interfere with workers' basic rights such as bathroom breaks and rest periods or health and safety laws. [...] Amazon has provided little transparency into how productivity "rates" that are designed by algorithms are formulated, but said that it creates productivity targets for workers that are based on their experience and take into consideration health and safety. [...] The bill takes California's law a few steps further by requiring employers to develop and implement an injury reduction program with worker input that identifies and addresses job hazards, such as rapid pace and heavy lifting, that can cause musculoskeletal injuries. This includes a worksite evaluation by an ergonomics consultant and worker training on how to avoid injuries. "The Warehouse Worker Protection Act will give workers in this industry -- union or not -- the ability to demand that their health and bodily integrity is accounted for, and not sacrificed for profits they do not get to share in," said Jessica Ramos, the bill's author and a New York state senator from Queens. "As the senate labor chair, I see it as my responsibility to clear the path for any worker who needs to stand up to an abusive employer."

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Without adding any hardware that actually makes contact with the wearer's face, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's Future Interfaces Group have modified an off-the-shelf virtual reality headset so that it recreates the sensation of touch in and around a user's mouth, finally fulfilling virtual reality's inevitable one true purpose. Gizmodo reports: The researchers upgraded what appears to be a Meta Quest 2 headset with an array of ultrasonic transducers that are all focused on the user's mouth, and it works without the need for additional accessories, or other hardware set up around the wearer. We've seen ultrasonic transducers used to levitate and move around tiny particles by blasting them with powerful sound waves before, but in this application, they create the feeling of touch on the user's lips, teeth, and even their tongue while their mouth is open. The transducers can do more than just simulate a gentle touch. By pulsing them in specific patterns, they can recreate the feeling of an object sliding or swiping across the lips, or persistent vibrations, such as the continuous splashing of water when leaning down to sip from a virtual drinking fountain. The researchers have come up with other custom virtual reality experiences that demonstrate how their mouth haptics hardware can introduce more realism, including a hike through a spooky forest where spider webs can be felt across the face, a race where the user can feel the wind in their face, and even virtual eating experiences where food and drinks can be felt inside the mouth. But if and when someone runs with this idea and commercializes the mouth haptics hardware, we're undoubtedly going to see the world's first virtual reality kissing booth realized, among other experiences the researchers are probably wisely tip-toeing around. The paper detailing the work can be found here.

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A report released last week contends that Amazon uses voice data from its Echo devices to serve targeted ads on its own platforms and the web. The Verge reports: he report, produced by researchers affiliated with the University of Washington, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and Northeastern University, said the ways Amazon does this is inconsistent with its privacy policies. Titled, "Your Echos are Heard: Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Amazon Smart Speaker Ecosystem," the report concludes that Amazon and third parties (including advertising and tracking services) collect data from your interactions with Alexa through Echo smart speakers and share it with as many as 41 advertising partners. That data is then used to "infer user interests" and "serve targeted ads on-platform (Echo devices) as well as off-platform (web)." It also concludes that this type of data is in hot demand, leading to "30X higher ad bids from advertisers." Amazon confirmed to The Verge that it does use voice data from Alexa interactions to inform relevant ads shown on Amazon or other sites where Amazon places ads. "Similar to what you'd experience if you made a purchase on Amazon.com or requested a song through Amazon Music, if you ask Alexa to order paper towels or to play a song on Amazon Music, the record of that purchase or song play may inform relevant ads shown on Amazon or other sites where Amazon places ads." Amazon spokesperson Lauren Raemhild said in an email. The company also confirmed there are targeted ads on its smart speakers. "Customers may receive interest-based ads when they use ad-supported premium content -- like music, radio or news streams," said Raemhild, pointing out that this is the same experience if they engaged with that content on other channels. She went on to say that Amazon does not share voice recordings with developers. "Developers get the information necessary to fulfill your requests within their skills, such as answers when you play a trivia skill, or the name of the song you want to play," she said. "We do not share our customers' personal information to third-party skills without the customer's consent." Amazon allows Alexa users to opt out of ad targeting as well (see sidebar). "Many of the conclusions in this research are based on inaccurate inferences or speculation by the authors, and do not accurately reflect how Alexa works," added Raemhild. "We are not in the business of selling our customers' personal information and we do not share Alexa requests with advertising networks."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The FBI searched emails, texts and other electronic communications of as many as 3.4 million U.S. residents without a warrant over a year, the nation's top spy chief said in a report. The "queries" were made between December 2020 and November 2021 by Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel as they looked for signs of threats and terrorists within electronic data legally collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to an annual transparency report issued Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The surge came as the FBI made a push to stop hacking attacks. The authority the FBI used in this case was under Section 702 of FISA, which is set to expire at the end of next year unless it's renewed by Congress. The report doesn't say the activity was illegal or even wrong. But the revelation could renew congressional and public debates over the power U.S. agencies have to collect and review intelligence information, especially data concerning individuals. In comparison, fewer than 1.3 million queries involving Americans' data were conducted between December 2019 and November 2020, according to the 38-page report. The report sought to provide a justification for the increase in queries during the last year. "In the first half of the year, there were a number of large batch queries related to attempts to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure by foreign cyber actors," according to the report. "These queries, which included approximately 1.9 million query terms related to potential victims -- including U.S. persons -- accounted for the vast majority of the increase in U.S. person queries conducted by FBI over the prior year." The exact number of U.S. residents who potentially had their information reviewed isn't known because there's no precise way to measure the data, according to the report. "Today's report sheds light on the extent of these unconstitutional 'backdoor searches,' and underscores the urgency of the problem," said senior staff attorney with the ACLU. "It's past time for Congress to step in to protect Americans' Fourth Amendment rights."

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Haje Jan Kamps, writing for TechCrunch: A couple of weeks ago yet another of my friends was a victim of identity theft, and I got yet another deep look into how fantastically broken the U.S. can be when it comes to security. "They have my social security number," she said, and I was reminded of how a lot of systems in the U.S. are woefully poorly designed. To wit: This morning I called my bank and was asked for the last four digits of my SSN and they somehow accepted my identity because I knew those four digits. When I moved to the U.S. a couple of years ago, my friends made sure that I knew I had to keep my Social Security number (SSN) secret and hidden. When I started opening a bank account and set up a cell phone plan, it became obvious why: All sorts of institutions that really should know better are treating this string of numbers as a password. There's a huge, glaring problem with that. I maintain that Equifax should receive the corporate equivalent of capital punishment for allowing this to happen, but 145 million social security numbers were stolen by hackers a few years ago, which means that the Social Security numbers -- yes, the same numbers that are being treated as "passwords" -- for about half the U.S. adult population are in the wind. We've gotten used to passwords by now, but at least, in most cases, passwords can be changed when they are hacked. Your social security number? Not so much. If your SSN leaks just once, you're boned. It's not possible to change it, and that brings up the true depth of idiocy in all of this: Relying on security that depends on keeping an unchangeable piece of information secret is really bloody stupid. The corollary is this: Imagine that your email has been hacked but your email provider tells you that you can't change your password, you can't change your email provider, and you'll just have to deal with it. That's the situation we currently have with Social Security numbers.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: C onstance Chioma calls her son every morning to check that he is safe while studying in northeast Nigeria, a region plagued by deadly attacks by Islamist insurgents and armed kidnappings. Earlier this month, she could not get through. She later realised her SIM card was one of about 73 million - more than a third of the 198 million in Nigeria - which have been barred from making outgoing calls because they have not been registered in the national digital identity database. [...] Nigeria is among dozens of African countries including Ghana, Egypt and Kenya with SIM registration laws that authorities say are necessary for security purposes, but digital rights experts here say increase surveillance and hurts privacy. Nigeria has been rolling out 11-digit electronic national identity cards for almost a decade, which record an individual's personal and biometric data, including fingerprints and photo. The National Identity Number (NIN) is required to open a bank account, apply for a driver's license, vote, get health insurance, and file tax returns. In 2020, Nigeria's telecommunications regulator said every active mobile phone number must be linked to the user's NIN. It repeatedly extended the deadline until March 31 this year. The government said outgoing calls were being barred from April 4 here from any mobile phone numbers that had not complied.

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From sociable labradors to aggressive pitbulls, when it comes to canine behaviour there are no end of stereotypes. But research suggests such traits may have less to do with breed than previously thought. From a report: Modern dog breeds began to emerge in the Victorian era and are often physically distinct -- for example, great danes are huge and chihuahuas tiny. But it has often been thought breed can predict behaviour, too. Now researchers say there's little sign that's the case. Dr Elinor Karlsson of the University of Massachusetts Umass Chan medical school, a co-author of the study, said research revealed a huge diversity of behaviours within each breed. "Even if the average is different, you've still got a really good chance of getting a dog that doesn't match what people say that breed is supposed to be," she said. Writing in the journal Science, the US researchers report how they analysed survey responses relating to the physical traits and behaviour of 18,385 pet dogs, almost half of which were purebred, with genetic data analysed for 2,155 of them. Analysis of the survey results for purebred dogs suggested about 9% of behavioural variation was explained by breed.

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Walter Orthmann started working at a textile company in Brazil as a teenager. Now, after turning 100 this month, he's shattered the Guinness World Record for the longest career at the same company. From a report: For 84 years and nine days, as verified in January, Orthmann has been working at what is now known as ReneauxView, according to the Guinness World Records. In those eight decades, he's collected pay in nine different currencies. Orthmann was born in Santa Catarina, Brazil -- an area that had a large German population -- on April 19, 1922, according to Guinness. As a teenager, his family hit hard times financially, and he applied to work at a weaving mill. Thanks to his proficiency in German, the young Orthmann got a job there as a shipping assistant. Soon after, he was promoted to a position in sales before becoming a sales manager. "I was given the opportunity to work as a salesperson," he said in a release. "I traveled to Sao Paulo and in less than one week I filled the production with orders equivalent of three month of work." In the 1950s, he started traveling across the country, establishing relationships with clients who became his friends. To Orthmann, having a job means a sense of "purpose, commitment and a routine," according to the release.

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Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, facing investor skepticism about his turnaround bid, said the company now expects to reach a key technological milestone sooner than planned, helping the storied chipmaker regain its edge. From a report: Under Gelsinger, Intel has been working to restore its leadership in semiconductor process technology -- an effort that requires the company to retool factories. The CEO has previously promised investors that Intel could reach that point by 2025. "Now we think late 2024," he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. The remarks follow a weaker-than-expected forecast from Intel that sent its shares on their worst slide in months Friday. A slowdown in personal-computer sales is weighing on its outlook, but some on Wall Street also see Gelsinger's comeback plan as an uphill fight. He's spending tens of billions of dollars to get Intel back on track and expand into new markets, a push that includes new factories in the U.S. and Europe. Intel, the largest producer of computer processors, dominated the chip industry for decades and was synonymous with Silicon Valley innovation. That was based on a foundation of having the most advanced production. How chips are made is crucial to improving their ability to store and hold information, how efficient they are and how costly.

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Salesforce just became the latest tech giant to commit to limiting the scope of its non-disclosure agreements, freeing workers up to talk about instances of harassment or discrimination they experience on the job. From a report: Salesforce and all California employers are already required to make these changes for workers in the state under California's Silenced No More Act. But the new policy extends those protections to all Salesforce employees across the country. "Our employees are key stakeholders, and it's critical that we offer them the support to ensure they're happy, healthy and protected," the company wrote in a blog post Friday. Salesforce plans to implement the changes by the end of 2022. A good deal of the credit for this shift goes to the so-called Transparency in Employment Agreements Coalition, a group of advocates and investors that has been using shareholder proposals to encourage tech giants, including Salesforce, Meta, Alphabet and Apple, to extend the policies enshrined in the Silenced No More Act to all of their employees. One of the leaders of that coalition, former Pinterest employee Ifeoma Ozoma, was instrumental in pushing that law forward in California. Another version of the law also recently passed in Washington state.

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Amazon shares are tumbling on Friday, with the e-commerce company seeing its biggest intraday percentage drop since October 2011, after it gave an outlook that was seen as disappointing. From a report: Shares fell as much as 13%, taking them to their lowest since June 2020. The selloff erased more than $178 billion off the company's market valuation. Amazon shares are down more than 20% for the month, their biggest one-month percentage drop since December 2018. The slump represents the latest hit to Wall Street's biggest names, which have come under heavy pressure in April amid a tumultuous earnings season and concerns over Federal Reserve policy. The Nasdaq 100 Index has dropped 11% this month, erasing $1.75 trillion off the tech-heavy index's market capitalization.

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