An anonymous reader quotes a report from Eater NY: Two weeks after Grubhub rolled out a disastrous, citywide free lunch promo that overloaded NYC restaurants with delivery orders, some businesses are still waiting for the company to refund them for undelivered food orders. The New York Post reports that salad chain Fresh & Co. lost about $4,000 on the promotion stemming from orders that were never picked up, according to the company's CEO. Upper West Side restaurateur Jeremy Wladis tells the Post that he's down $1,500 from the promotion. Grubhub has promised to reach out to restaurants that are requesting refunds over the snafu starting this week, according to the Post. A sales representative told the paper that "all orders from the Free Lunch Promo will be refunded." At the height of the hours-long promotional frenzy, the app was recording 6,000 orders per minute, according to Grubhub.

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A small NYC-led cancer trial has achieved a result reportedly never before seen - the total remission of cancer in all of its patients. From a report: To be sure, the trial -- led by doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering and backed by drug maker GlaxoSmithKline -- has only completed treatment of 12 patients, with a specific cancer in its early stages and with a rare mutation as well. But the results, reported Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine and the New York Times, were still striking enough to prompt multiple physicians to tell the paper they were believed to be unprecedented. One cancer specialist told the Times it was an "unheard-of" result. According to the NEJM paper and the Times report, all 12 patients had rectal cancer that had not spread beyond the local area, and their tumors all exhibited a mutation affecting the ability of cells to repair damage to DNA.

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The UK government says it is not "currently considering" copying European Union plans for a common charging cable. From a report: The EU has provisionally agreed all new portable electronic devices must, by autumn 2024, use a USB Type-C charger, a move it says will benefit consumers. Critics say it will stifle innovation. Under the current post-Brexit arrangements, the regulation would apply to Northern Ireland, according to EU and UK officials. According to the a December 2021 parliamentary report, the "new requirements may also apply to devices sold in Northern Ireland under the terms of the Northern Ireland protocol in the Brexit agreement, potentially triggering divergence of product standards with the rest of the UK." The treaty works by keeping Northern Ireland inside the EU's single market for goods, while the rest of the UK is outside it. A row between the UK and EU about how to reform the Northern Ireland protocol remains unresolved. A UK government spokesperson said "we are not currently considering replicating this requirement."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: At Roku, a video-streaming platform operator that's suffered a punishing stock plunge, employees are buzzing about the possibility of an acquisition -- and their talk and hopes are pinned on Netflix. Employees at Roku have been discussing the possibility of a Netflix acquisition in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. The chatter comes as Roku's stock has dropped about 80% since late July on weaker demand for video streaming and lower set-top-box sales. Roku competes with Apple, Amazon, Google, and Samsung in the market for streaming devices, and some of those industry titans are battling with the smaller company for lucrative video-ad dollars. The collapse in Roku's stock made it hard to compete with its larger tech rivals on pay in a tight labor market. The result has been a staggering increase in equity grants to employees, leaving Roku well underwater on stock-based compensation. Roku has been seen as an acquisition target before -- including last year, when, according to The Wall Street Journal, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts considered purchasing the company. In January, the departure of a top Roku executive stoked questions about the company's future.

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The European Union is working on a possible ban on the provision of cloud services to Russia as part of new sanctions against the Kremlin for the invasion of Ukraine, an EU official told Reuters on Wednesday, noting the measure was technically complex. From a report: If introduced, it is unclear how the EU ban would affect Russia, because top cloud providers in Europe are U.S. companies, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The European Union last week adopted a new package of sanctions against Russia and Belarus which included an oil embargo, restrictive measures on Russian banks and a ban on the provision of consultancy services to Moscow.

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U.S. law enforcement have announced the takedown of SSNDOB, a notorious marketplace used for trading the personal information -- including Social Security numbers, or SSNs -- of millions of Americans. From a report: The operation was conducted by the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Department of Justice (DOJ), with help from the Cyprus Police, to seize four domains hosting the SSNDOB marketplace -- ssndob[dot]ws, ssndob[dot]vip, ssndob[dot]club, and blackjob[dot]biz. SSNDOB listed the personal information for approximately 24 million individuals in the United States, including names, dates of birth, SSNs, and credit card numbers, and generated more than $19 million in revenue, according to the DOJ. Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis company, reports separately that the marketplace has received nearly $22 million worth of Bitcoin across over 100,000 transactions since April 2015, though the marketplace is believed to have been active since at least 2013. These figures suggest that some users were buying personally identifiable information from the service in bulk, according to Chainalysis, which also uncovered a connection between SSNDOB and Joker's Stash, a large dark net market focused on stolen credit card information that shut down in January 2021.

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Microsoft is substantially reducing its business in Russia, joining the list of prominent technology firms cutting back or exiting the country altogether after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. From a report: "As a result of the changes to the economic outlook and the impact on our business in Russia, we have made the decision to significantly scale down our operations in Russia," the company said in an emailed statement. "We will continue to fulfill our existing contractual obligations with Russian customers while the suspension of new sales remains in effect." More than 400 employees will be affected, a company spokesperson said. "We are working closely with impacted employees to ensure they are treated with respect and have our full support during this difficult time," Microsoft said in the statement.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Who knows whether it's FOMO or actual customer demand for such a thing, but Salesforce announced today that it's launching a pilot of NFT Cloud, a new platform for buying and selling these crypto assets. It's a turn to the future, according to the company, one it insists comes from customer curiosity. "Salesforce is seeing interest from CMOs and CDOs who are asking for help entering web3, and we are enthusiastic about bringing new innovations, products and offerings to our customers in a way that allows them to build and maintain meaningful relationships with their customers," Adam Caplan, SVP of Emerging Technology at Salesforce told TechCrunch. The company's goal with this product is to make NFT selling more accessible. "NFT Cloud is all about helping our customers mint, manage and sell NFTs, and of course it's all no code. So it's super easy on our platform, abstracting all the complicated technology in this [new] web3 world," he said. He says he's seeing interest across a variety of verticals including retail, media, fashion and consumer goods, among others. "It's really about driving engagement and communities, and we're seeing super passionate communities in the NFT space..." Caplan explained. He sees it as a way to market to customers with something of potential value to them. "It's really about utility. And what we mean by utility is as an NFT holder, I receive certain benefits. It could be something in a digital world, or it could be something in the physical world," he said.

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