During his lifetime, Einstein resisted the attempts to commercialise his identity. Now someone makes more than $12 million a year on image licensing. Even the law that allows this profiteering is contentious. Can an heir inherit rights that did not yet exist during the originator's lifetime? More on this on a long read from The Guardian.

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Japanese conglomerate Sony said it is well-positioned to play a leading role in the metaverse, or immersive virtual worlds, which commentators speculate will massively disrupt industries and establish new powerhouses. From a report: "The metaverse is at the same time a social space and live network space where games, music, movies and anime intersect," Chief Executive Kenichiro Yoshida said at a strategy briefing on Wednesday, pointing to the use of free-to-play battle royale title Fortnite from Epic Games as an online social space. Sony's game, music and movie units contributed two-thirds of operating income in the year ended March, underscoring the group's transformation from consumer electronics maker into a metaverse-ready entertainment juggernaut under Yoshida and predecessor Kazuo Hirai. The firm is a gaming gatekeeper with its PlayStation 5 console, however observers point to the risk presented by the growth of cross-platform, cloud-based titles and their potential to reduce the influence of proprietary platforms. Sony has been adjusting its approach, enabling cross-play in Fortnite in 2018.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Total Commander has been around since the 90s, eventually expanding into Android after the platform launched over a decade ago. The app has more than 10 million downloads on the Play Store, still supporting OS versions as far back as Android 2.2. With a new update, developer Christian Ghisler has removed the ability to install APK files on Android, blaming Google Play policies in the patch notes for the app. It's a shocking twist for the service and, seemingly, a bad omen of things to come for other mobile file managers. A forum post from Ghisler sheds some more light on what's going on here, as Google sent him a notice warning of his app's removal from the Play Store within a week if the app went unmodified. The company's automated response pointed the developer to the "Device and Network Abuse" policy.

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Some of more tech-savvy Democrats in the U.S. Senate are asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate identity-proofing company ID.me for "deceptive statements" the company and its founder allegedly made over how they handle facial recognition data collected on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service, which until recently required anyone seeking a new IRS account online to provide a live video selfie to ID.me. From a report: In a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan, the Senators charge that ID.me's CEO Blake Hall has offered conflicting statements about how his company uses the facial scan data it collects on behalf of the federal government and many states that use the ID proofing technology to screen applicants for unemployment insurance. The lawmakers say that in public statements and blog posts, ID.me has frequently emphasized the difference between two types of facial recognition: One-to-one, and one-to-many. In the one-to-one approach, a live video selfie is compared to the image on a driver's license, for example. One-to-many facial recognition involves comparing a face against a database of other faces to find any potential matches.

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Napster has been acquired again, this time by two companies from the web3 sector: Hivemind and Algorand. "Dear friends, we are excited to share that we've taken Napster Group private, and to bring the iconic music brand to web3," wrote Hivemind founder Matt Zhang on LinkedIn. From a report: "Volatile market and uncertain times often bring exciting opportunities. At Hivemind, we believe in developing thesis and building enduring value. Music x Web3 is one of the most exciting spaces we've come across, and we are thrilled to work with Emmy Lovell and many talents to unlock value for the entire ecosystem and revolutionize how artists and fans enjoy music." Lovell has been named interim CEO of Napster, with the former WMG exec stepping up from her previous role as chief strategy officer, having joined the company in April 2021 shortly after its last acquisition by music VR company MelodyVR. The newly-merged company then delisted from the AIM stock exchange in the UK as part of its plan to relaunch a hybrid music streaming / video / VR service later this year, and then go public again in the US. The new owners appear to be pivoting that strategy with a web3 focus. There will be plenty to unpack around these plans. For example, Hivemind and Algorand aren't the only companies involved: they have an 'investor consortium' that includes ATC Management, BH Digital and G20 Ventures.

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Zambia's central bank said it refused to pay ransom to a group known as Hive that was behind a cybersecurity breach that caused minimal damage to its systems. From a report: "All of our core systems are still up and running," Greg Nsofu, information and communications technology director at the Bank of Zambia, told reporters in Lusaka, the capital. "Not much sensitive data has actually been shipped out." Only some test data may have been leaked, he said. "Knowing that we had protected our core systems, it wasn't really necessary for us to even engage" in a ransom conversation, Nsofu said. "So we pretty much told them where to get off." The central bank said May 13 that it had suffered a suspected cyberattack, which disrupted some information technology applications on May 9, including its website and bureau de change monitoring system.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Ming-Chi Kuo is one of a handful of Apple analysts whose reports always warrant a second look, regardless of how strange they might seem at first blush. We've heard plenty of reports that the company is testing its own version of a foldable device, in its customary style of being fashionably late to the party, while also being the best dressed there. It stands to reason that the company is experimenting with all sorts of takes on the form factor. While companies like Samsung and Huawei have made great strides since the first generation of foldable devices, one can certainly make the argument that no one has perfectly cracked the code just yet. The screen technology has improved a good bit in recent years -- and so, too, has E Ink technology. "Apple is testing E Ink's Electronic Paper Display (EPD) for future foldable device's cover screen and tablet-like applications," Kuo reported on Twitter earlier today. "The color EPD has the potential to become a mainstream solution for foldable devices' must-have cover/second screen thanks to its excellent power-saving."

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While the US extended its leading position as the dominant location for Bitcoin mining, China has reemerged as the second-largest locale despite a government ban on the activity last year. From a report: The US accounted for 37.84% of global hashrate, a measure of computing power used to extract the digital currency, between September 2021 to January, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, in a report released on Tuesday. The hashrate, also responsible for securing the Bitcoin network, has made a strong comeback to new highs after falling last year. Following the mining ban in China last year, the country has seen a sudden surge in activity through "covert mining operations" and has "re-emerged as a major mining hub" grabbing 21.11% of global hashrate, according to the CCAF. "This strongly suggests that significant underground mining activity has formed in the country, which empirically confirms what industry insiders have long been assuming," CCAF wrote in the report. In May (2021), Beijing intensified its efforts to curb the cryptocurrency market. It seems covert mining is still happening in China through routed through virtual private networks that make it appear the computers are operating in another country.

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The Russian subsidiary of Alphabet's Google plans to file for bankruptcy, saying it had become impossible for the company to pay employees and suppliers. From a report: Google submitted a notice of intent to declare itself bankrupt, according to a message published Wednesday on Russia's Fedresurs registry. A Google spokesperson separately said an earlier move by authorities to seize its bank account made continuing operations in the country impossible. "The Russian authorities' seizure of Google Russia's bank account has made it untenable for our Russia office to function, including employing and paying Russia-based employees, paying suppliers and vendors, and meeting other financial obligations," the Google spokesperson said. The company had already paused most of its commercial operations in Russia, including all advertising, after the country's communications censor accused the company's YouTube video service of spreading misinformation and stoking protests.

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India is pushing ahead with its new cybersecurity rules that will require cloud service providers and VPN operators to maintain names of their customers and their IP addresses and suggested firms unwilling to comply to pull out of the world's second largest internet market. From a report: The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team clarified (PDF) on Wednesday that "virtual private server (VPS) providers, cloud service providers, VPN service providers, virtual asset service providers, virtual asset exchange providers, custodian wallet providers and government organisations" shall follow the directive, called Cyber Security Directions, that requires them to store customers' names, email addresses, IP addresses, know your customer records, financial transactions for a period of five years. The new rules, which were unveiled late last month and go into effect late June, won't be applicable to corporate and enterprise VPNs, the government agency clarified. Several VPN providers have expressed worries about India's new cybersecurity rules. NordVPN, one of the most popular VPN operators, said earlier that it may remove its services from India if "no other options are left." Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the junior IT minister of India, said that VPN providers who wish to conceal who uses their services "will have to pull out."

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A delivery app marketing campaign offering a "free lunch" -- aka a $15 promo code valid for three hours -- sent customers and restaurant workers alike into a spiral on Tuesday as thousands of orders jammed the system and disgruntled New Yorkers tweeted through their hunger pains. BuzzFeed News reports: GrubHub's New York City campaign on May 17 touted the physical and mental benefits of eating lunch, but yielded dozens of complaints, cancelled orders and service workers telling BuzzFeed News they were "exhausted" trying to keep up. GrubHub told BuzzFeed News that at times during the promotion that ran from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. the app was averaging 6,000 orders per minute. "It got overwhelming," said Brandon Ching, who was working the counter at Greenberg's Bagels, a popular sandwich spot in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. "We were short-staffed today so it really added extra stress to my day." And customers were frustrated at the delays. Ebenezer Ackon told BuzzFeed News he was in 3,630th place in line to talk to GrubHub's customer service when he gave up, after waiting more than an hour for food, and went to get something from across the street from his apartment. Blake, who didn't want to use his last name, said the small Brooklyn cafe he ordered from received 200 orders in five minutes as soon as the promo began, so they reluctantly had to cancel orders -- including his. [...] Customers may be frustrated about not getting a product they wanted, but for service industry workers it was a day of non-stop stress. A spokesperson from GrubHub sent BuzzFeed News a statement following the fiasco: "It's clear, New Yorkers were hungry for lunch! While we knew 72% of New York workers call lunch the most important meal of the day, our free lunch promotion exceeded all expectations." Tuesday's campaign received six times more orders than a similar promo last year, they said. The company's statement mentioned that "initial demand temporarily overwhelmed" the app and served customers an error message that was "rectified so New Yorkers could enjoy their much-deserved lunch."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Researchers in China revealed they have developed a contact lens that can sense an increase in pressure within the eye and release an anti-glaucoma drug should the pressure exceed a certain level. Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team describe how they created the device using an upper and lower lens, with a snowflake-shaped pressure sensor and wireless power transfer device sandwiched between them around the rim of the lenses. The arrangement appears to give the effect of the wearer having golden irises. However, the team say the design allows the necessary components to be included in the device without blocking the wearer's view or irritating the eye. When the pressure inside the eye increases, the gap between the upper and lower lenses decreases. This is detected by the pressure sensor by means of a cantilever. The sensor then sends a signal to the wireless system which subsequently triggers the release of an anti-glaucoma drug, from a hydrogel attached to an electrode, and enables it to cross the cornea of the eye. The drug, brimonidine, acts to reduce the pressure within the eye. The study reveals that the contact lenses have so far been tested on pigs' eyes and on the eyes of living rabbits -- albeit with smaller-sized lenses -- although trials have yet to be carried out in humans. The researchers note the lenses are not only soft and minimally invasive but are also battery-free, adding that the approach could be expanded to help tackle other eye diseases. "We can now imagine that a glaucoma sufferer wearing these contact lenses will not only receive real-time information about the pressures within the eye, since the contact lens has built-in wireless capacity and can easily communicate with an app on your smartphone, but also receive, for example, pressure-relieving drugs when needed," said Prof Zubair Ahmed from the Institute of Inflammation and Aging at the University of Birmingham. "The materials required to create such contact lenses are inexpensive and soon could be mass-produced," he added.

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After scandals in which doctors let unsupervised assistants operate on patients, South Korea is becoming one of the first to require cameras in operating rooms. The New York Times reports: Ethicists and medical officials, including those at the American College of Surgeons, have cautioned that surveilling surgeons to deter malpractice may undermine trust in doctors, hurt morale, violate patient privacy and discourage physicians from taking risks to save lives. The Korea Medical Association, which is opposed to the new mandate, has lobbied to limit its impact. But supporters of the law said the move would help protect patients, build the public's trust in doctors and provide victims of medical malpractice with evidence to use in court. "People are dying in operating rooms," said An Gi-jong, an advocate for patients. "We can't rely on doctors to solve problems on their own anymore." About five patients have died from ghost surgeries in the past eight years, he said. They include Kwon Dae-hee, a college student in Seoul who died of a hemorrhage in 2016 after jawline surgery. His mother, Lee Na-geum, who obtained footage of his operation and reviewed it hundreds of times, found evidence that the operation had been botched because parts of it had been conducted by an unsupervised nursing assistant. Ms. Lee, 62, who has held a public vigil denouncing ghost surgeries since her son's death, said in an interview: "Once the cameras are installed, your lies will be exposed if you're a ghost doctor. Cameras reveal truth." [...] Under the new law, hospitals performing surgeries on unconscious patients must install video cameras in their operating rooms. If a patient or a relative requests that a surgery be filmed, the hospital must comply. Doctors can refuse for certain reasons, such as if a delay in the operation would put the patient's life at risk, or if the filming would significantly impede residents' training. The recorded footage can be viewed for criminal investigations, prosecutions, trials, medical disputes or mediation.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Curbed: The fever isn't breaking. There are now bidding wars for one in every five Manhattan rental apartments (and one in three luxury units), according to the most recent Douglas Elliman report. Inventory in all of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and northwest Queens has been hovering well below 10,000 units -- as of April, the number was just 7,669. Which is several thousand less than the number of entire-apartment and entire-home Airbnb rentals available in New York City right now: 10,572, according to AirDNA, a third-party site that tracks short-term rentals. Inside Airbnb, another site that scrapes Airbnb for listings data, puts the number even higher, at 20,397. Ever since Airbnb came on the scene in 2008, there have been concerns that the short-term-rental company would deplete the housing stock by sucking up available rooms, causing prices to rise in cities like New York and San Francisco, where there were already severe housing shortages. The absolute number of available apartments and houses on the site peaked before the pandemic and has since dropped back, according to both Inside Airbnb and AirDNA. But there's a difference now: There are just so few apartments to be had that Airbnbs make up the majority of the city's available rentals. The company doesn't release listings or bookings data and wouldn't comment on the data collected by AirDNA and Inside Airbnb. They did however confirm that its NYC listing inventory has fallen since the start of the pandemic, citing factors that may have contributed to the housing shortage but weren't related to Airbnb. "Over the past two years, our entire space listing supply citywide has decreased, and it now represents a fraction of a percent of the city's rental units -- and all while rent prices have trended upward and city-issued permits for new-unit development remain down by a double-digit percentage," a spokesperson for the company wrote. Curbed notes that this number is "somewhat gamed," adding: "Airbnb is comparing its inventory to the total number of rental units in New York, not just the available ones, which as of 2017 was 2.18 million. But, of course, only a tiny fraction of those are open in any given year, let alone any given month."

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Hong Kong is planning a ban on the Telegram messaging service, which is widely used by pro-democracy activists. International Business Times reports: Local media reported that the ban on Telegram was being considered as a means to crack down on rampant doxing, under which pro-democracy campaigners are exposing online sensitive personal data of government officials and citizens. Hong Kong's privacy commissioner for personal data might decide in favor of blocking or restricting access to Telegram in the first such move, the Sing Tao Daily reported, according to Bloomberg. The execution of such a ban would mean that the former British colony has taken a step closer to China-style smothering of personal and civil liberties.

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Eric Migicovsky, founder of smartwatch company Pebble and lover of small Android phones, decided to take matters into his own hands and "rally other fans of small phones together" to put pressure on phone manufacturers to consider making a small Android phone -- complete with all the premium features one could expect to find in a larger device. Essentially, what he wants is an iPhone Mini-sized phone running Android. Is that too much to ask? Here's an excerpt from his manifesto (via smallandroidphone.com): My Dream Small Android phone Optimizes for only 3 things: - Sub 6" display, matching size and design of iPhone 13 Mini - Great cameras - Stock Android OS If you can hit these three bullets, you've built the perfect phone. Currently there are ZERO premium Android phones with less than 6" displays. No amount of money can buy one right now. Focus on these three bullets, all other specs are flexible. Price: $700-800 (again, we have no alternatives so we should be willing to pay a bit more!) In a call-to-action, Migicovsky asks readers who agree with him to sign up on this page to help "convince a manufacturer to build us our dream phone." He adds: "If no one else makes one I guess I will be forced to make it myself, but I really really don't want it to come to that!"

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FreeBSD 13.1 has been released today. Some of the new features include UEFI boot improvements for AMD64, a wide variety of hardware driver improvements, and support for freebsd-update to allow creating automated snapshots of the boot environment to try to make operating system updates foolproof. Phoronix reports: Some of the other changes with FreeBSD 13.1 include enabling Position Independent Executable (PIE) support by default on 64-bit architectures, a new "zfskeys" service script for the automatic decryption of ZFS datasets, NVMe emulation with Bhyve hypervisor, chroot now supports unprivileged operations, various POWER and RISC-V improvements, big endian support improvements, support for the HiFive Unmatched RISC-V development board, updating against OpenZFS file-system support upstream, and many other changes throughout this BSD open-source ecosystem. Downloads and the full change-log for FreeBSD 13.1 can be found here.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Human-level artificial intelligence is close to finally being achieved, according to a lead researcher at Google's DeepMind AI division. Dr Nando de Freitas said "the game is over" in the decades-long quest to realize artificial general intelligence (AGI) after DeepMind unveiled an AI system capable of completing a wide range of complex tasks, from stacking blocks to writing poetry. Described as a "generalist agent," DeepMind's new Gato AI needs to just be scaled up in order to create an AI capable of rivaling human intelligence, Dr de Freitas said. Responding to an opinion piece written in The Next Web that claimed "humans will never achieve AGI," DeepMind's research director wrote that it was his opinion that such an outcome is an inevitability. "It's all about scale now! The Game is Over!" he wrote on Twitter. "It's all about making these models bigger, safer, compute efficient, faster at sampling, smarter memory, more modalities, innovative data, on/offline... Solving these challenges is what will deliver AGI." When asked by machine learning researcher Alex Dimikas how far he believed the Gato AI was from passing a real Turing test -- a measure of computer intelligence that requires a human to be unable to distinguish a machine from another human -- Dr de Freitas replied: "Far still." [...] Fielding further questions from AI researchers on Twitter, Dr de Freitas said "safety is of paramount importance" when developing AGI. "It's probably the biggest challenge we face," he wrote. "Everyone should be thinking about it. Lack of enough diversity also worries me a lot." DeepMind describes Gato in a blog post: "The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens.

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Top Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. says demand for mobile phones, personal computers and home appliances has dropped "like a rock" and shows no signs of recovering. From a report: Speaking to investors on Friday, CEO Zhao Haijun said the Russia-Ukraine war and China's COVID lockdowns have massively dented demand for consumer electronics and home appliances, which in turn has led to a "serious" adjustment in chip orders for those segments. "Many smartphone, PC and home appliance companies had exposure in Russia and Ukraine, and their revenues [from those markets] are now gone. Sales in their home market [of China] have also fallen due to the COVID situation domestically," Zhao said. "We cannot yet see an end to the downtrends in these segments," Zhao added. "There are at least 200 million units of smartphones that will disappear suddenly this year and the majority of them are from our domestic Chinese phone makers." Demand for consumer electronics "dropped like a rock, very seriously," the executive said. "Some of our customers are holding more than five months of that type of inventory." However, Zhao said SMIC's factories are still running at 100% capacity, as the company has been allocating resources to products that are still in great shortage, such as power management chips and microcontrollers used in green energy, electric vehicles and industrial applications.

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Apple today informed developers that it is implementing a new subscription feature that will allow customers to be charged automatically when an app's subscription price goes up, which is not the way that subscriptions work at the current time. MacRumors reports: Right now, customers must explicitly agree to a pricing change when the cost of a subscription increases through an "Agree to New Price" interface. If a customer does not tap on agree when the warning comes up, their subscription is automatically canceled, but that's changing. Going forward, developers will be able to increase the price of a subscription and have it auto renew, with customers simply being informed rather than needing to outright agree. Apple says that "under specific conditions and with advance user notice" developers can offer an auto-renewable subscription price increase without the user needing to take action and without their subscription being impacted. There are specific limits that Apple is placing on developers to make sure this functionality is not abused. A pricing increase cannot occur more than once per year, and it cannot exceed $5 and 50 percent of the subscription price, or $50 and 50 percent for an annual subscription price. Apple says that it will always notify users of the pricing increase in advance, via email, push notification, and a message within the app. Apple will also provide instructions on how to view, manage, and cancel subscriptions. [...] In situations where prices increase more often than once a year or exceed Apple's thresholds, subscribers will need to opt in as usual before the pricing increase is applied. Apple says that this will also happen in territories where the law requires it.

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