Meta Platforms' veiled threat to quit Europe because of blocked talks over privacy rules was more like music to the ears of two top German and French politicians. From a report: "After being hacked I've lived without Facebook and Twitter for four years and life has been fantastic," German Economy Minister Robert Habeck told reporters at an event alongside French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire in Paris on Monday. "I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook," Le Maire added. "Digital giants must understand that the European continent will resist and affirm its sovereignty." The pair were responding to comments in Meta's annual report published Thursday, warning that if it couldn't rely on new or existing agreements to shift data, then it would "likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: RISC-V International, the global open hardware standards organization has announced that Intel has joined RISC-V at the Premier membership level. Let that sink in for a minute. Intel, which has made billions from its closed-source, complex instruction set computer (CISC) x86 processors, is joining forces with RISC-V, the open-source reduced instruction set computer (RISC) CPU group. What next? Dogs and cats living together!? Dr. David Patterson, co-creator of RISC-V helped create it to be an open lingua franca for computer chips, a set of instructions that would be used by all chipmakers and owned by none. Today, Patterson said, "I'm delighted that Intel, the company that pioneered the microprocessor 50 years ago, is now a member of RISC-V International." Why? Because Intel sees a future in which ARM, x86, and RISC-V all play major roles. In particular, Intel has already seen strong demand for more RISC-V intellectual property (IP) and chip offerings. Intel's not just giving this idea lip service. Intel also announced a new $1 billion fund to support early-stage foundry startups. Together Intel Capital and Intel Foundry Services (IFS) will prioritize investments in chip IP, software tools, innovative chip architectures, and advanced packaging technologies. Randhir Thakur, IFS President, said this new program will focus on two key strategic industry points: Enabling modular products with an open chiplet platform and supporting design approaches that leverage multiple instruction set architectures including and spanning x86, Arm, and RISC-V. As part of these initiatives, IFS will sponsor an open-source software development platform. This will provide IP for all three of the leading ISAs chip architectures. RISC-V has always been about providing open modular building blocks. Together Intel and RISC-V will expand the RISC-V ecosystem and help drive its commercialization. [...] Intel is already offering RISC-V chips: It's Nios V processors based on RISC-V. Moving ahead Intel hopes its new RISC-V investment will speed up RISC-V's development. Calista Redmond, RISC-V International's CEO, sees these moves as recognizing that "massive investment in open source has the power to change the course of history." Redmond went on to say that open collaboration with RISC-V has "ignited a profound shift in the semiconductor industry, and this partnership will accelerate innovation in open computing. RISC-V welcomes Intel and looks forward to our collective expansion and the commercial adoption of RISC-V across compute workloads and industries, growing RISC-V everywhere."

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Samsung Electronics this week announced plans to give plastic waste a second life as a new material for use in its electronic devices -- starting with the latest Galaxy gadgets, set to be revealed on Wednesday. PC Magazine reports: "These devices will reflect our ongoing effort to eliminate single-use plastics and expand the use of other eco-conscious materials, such as recycled post-consumer material (PCM) and recycled paper," Samsung said in a news release. "With this transformation, the future of Galaxy technology will bring leading product design and deliver better environmental impact." Water bottles and grocery bags usually spring to mind when people hear "ocean-bound plastic," but they're not the only things littering the world's waterways. According to Samsung, a "more hidden threat" is the 640,000 tons of fishing nets abandoned and discarded every year. The so-called "ghost nets" are responsible for trapping and entangling marine life, damaging coral reefs and natural habitats, and eventually ending up in our food and water sources. "Collecting and repurposing these nets are vital first steps in keeping our oceans clean," Samsung said, "as well as preserving the planet and our collective future." It's unclear exactly what part the repurposed plastics play in the upcoming handsets. We'll have to wait until this week's virtual Unpacked event, where Samsung is expected to unveil the Galaxy S22 series and Tab S8. Watch the event online at Samsung.com from 10 a.m. ET on Feb. 9. The news comes just weeks after Samsung stopped a 106-day toxic spill in Austin, Texas, that resulted in the release of as much as 736,000 gallons of sulfuric acid waste into a Northeast Austin creek.

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Porn websites will be legally required to verify the age of users in the United Kingdom under new internet safety laws. The BBC reports: The legislation, which is part of the draft Online Safety Bill, aims to give children better protection from explicit material. The measures, to ensure users are 18 or over, could see people asked to prove they own a credit card or confirm their age via a third-party service. Sites that fail to act could be fined up to 10% of their global turnover. The Online Safety Bill is expected to be introduced to parliament over the next few months and is designed to protect users from harmful content. Children's safety groups have long been calling for age verification on porn sites, over fears it is too easy for minors to access publicly available material online. Announcing the age verification plans, Digital Economy Minister Chris Philp said: "Parents deserve peace of mind that their children are protected online from seeing things no child should see." As well as being able to fine websites that do not follow the rules, the regulator Ofcom could block them from being accessible in the UK. The bosses of these websites could also be held criminally liable if they fail to cooperate with Ofcom. Previously, only commercial porn sites that allowed user-generated content were in the scope of the Online Safety Bill, but all commercial porn sites will now be covered. [...] It will be up to companies to decide how best to comply with the new rules, but Ofcom may recommend the use of certain age verification technologies. However, the government says firms should not process or store data that is irrelevant to the purpose of checking someone's age.

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According to Reuters, SoftBank's sale of ARM to U.S. chipmaker Nvidia has collapsed. Instead, SoftBank is planning to proceed with an initial public offering (IPO) with ARM CEO Simon Segars expected to resign, handing the job to president Rene Haas. From the report: The deal, announced in 2020, had faced several regulatory hurdles. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued to block it in December, arguing that competition in the nascent markets for chips in self-driving cars and a new category of networking chips could be hurt if Nvidia carried out the purchase. The buyout is also under the scrutiny of British and EU regulators amid concerns that it could push up prices and reduce choice and innovation. The sale would have marked an early exit from Arm for Softbank, which acquired it for $32 billion. Chief Executive Masayoshi Son has lauded the potential of Arm, but is slashing his stakes in major assets to raise cash. The Financial Times was the first to report that Softbank's Arm-Nvidia deal had collapsed. The Japanese investment giant would receive a break-up fee of up to $1.25 billion, FT quoted one of the people as saying.

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sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Three men paralyzed in motorcycle accidents have become the first success stories for a new spinal stimulation device that could enable faster and easier recoveries than its predecessors. The men, who had no sensation or control over their legs, were able to take supported steps within 1 day of turning on the electrical stimulation, and could stroll outside with a walker after a few months, researchers report today. The nerve-stimulating device doesn't cure spinal cord injury, and it likely won't eliminate wheelchair use, but it raises hopes that the assistive technology is practical enough for widespread use. For now, sending commands to the device is cumbersome. Users must select their desired movement on a tablet, which sends Bluetooth commands to a transmitter worn around the waist. That device must be positioned next to a 'pulse generator' implanted in the abdomen, which then activates electrodes along the spine. Setting up to use the stimulation takes 5 to 10 minutes. But the next generation of devices should allow users to activate the pulse generator by giving voice commands to a smartwatch. The company behind the technology plans to test this newer mobility system in a multisite clinical trial of 70 to 100 participants that the team hopes will lead to U.S. regulatory approval. The researchers reported their findings in the journal Nature Medicine.

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Meta has introduced a new "personal boundary" feature within its VR social spaces, starting with Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues. Hypebeast reports: By enacting a personal boundary, a user will by default have a nearly 4-foot (1.2 m) distance between their avatar and others. Via an invisible barrier, the system will halt the forward movement of other avatars as they reach the boundary. Meta says that the feature will make it easier for users to avoid unwanted interactions such as harassment. Users can still walk past other avatars with personal boundaries enabled and can even give them a high-five or fist bump. The feature will be rolled out as always-on, by default, which Meta says will "help to set behavioral norms" in the VR space. In the future, the company will consider adding new controls, such as allowing users to customize the size of their personal boundaries. In a statement to Ars Technica, a Meta spokesperson said: "Personal Boundary builds upon our existing harassment measures that were already in place - for example, where an avatar's hands would disappear if they encroached upon someone's personal space. When we launched Horizon Worlds as an invite-only beta in 2020 we knew this was just the beginning and over time we would be iterating and improving based on community feedback. We're constantly shipping new features based on people's feedback, including this one."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: The electric vehicle (EV) market is soaring, with 130,000 cars sold globally each week, roughly equivalent to sales for the entire year in 2012. Sales of EVs more than doubled in 2021, even with supply chain snarls and pandemic-related shrinking of demand for gas-powered cars. New data, from the influential intergovernmental International Energy Agency (IEA), revealed that 6.6 million electric cars were sold last year -- twice the number of 2020 -- making up 9 per cent of the global car market. IEA says the growth is "particularly impressive" over the last three years. The number has about tripled from 201 when 2.2 million electric cars were sold. "We estimate there are now around 16 million electric cars on the road worldwide, consuming roughly 30 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year, the equivalent of all the electricity generated in Ireland," the IEA reported last week. More than half of all electric cars are being sold in China (3.4 million), but the market is steadily growing in Europe and the United States. In the US, electric car sales more than doubled in 2021. More than 500,000 new EVs hit the highways, accounting for 4.5 per cent of the market. Tesla is still the strongest player, accounting for more than half of all electric car sales. A "generous" tax-credit system for EVs in the US may be influencing new car buyers (although it doesn't apply to Tesla and General Motor vehicles, IEA notes). In Europe, 2.3 million electric cars were sold in 2021, about half of which were plug-in hybrids, against a backdrop of tightened carbon emissions standards and more subsidies being rolled out by countries in the bloc. Germany made up the largest share of the European market last year where more than one in three cars sold was an electric model.

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Europe's ambitious plans to quadruple processor production are facing problems securing the required $48 billion without disrupting state aid and other existing projects. Apple Insider reports: Following the US Senate's allocating of $52 billion to boost domestic semiconductor production, the European Union is aiming to make similar investment. However, under EU laws, funding is chiefly already committed to projects until 2027. Nonetheless, according to Bloomberg, EU internal market commissioner Thierry Breton, has said that the plans will be "commensurate" with the US. At the same time, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the total investment would be $48 billion. Plans for the EU Chips Act are due to be published on February 8, 2022, but it is already known that it requires investment from both public and private resources. Bloomberg says that $30 billion has been earmarked from public sources, and the remainder will include at least $12 billion from private companies. It's not clear where the rest of the shortfall will come from, but reportedly according to documents seen by Bloomberg, the larger question is over the bulk of the public funding. The investment allegedly depends on EU countries with already over-stretched budgets. It's also possible that previously allocated funds may be changed, plus there are concerns about the loosening of state aid rules in order to finance the plan. EU plans reportedly say that state aid, "must be necessary, appropriate and proportionate." They go on to say that the EU will monitor state aid use to ensure it doesn't "adversely affect trading conditions."

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Amazon is more than doubling its maximum base pay for corporate and tech workers to $350,000 from $160,000. Axios reports: The move is intended to bring Amazon in line with competitors like Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, and to help ensure the company retains employees and recruits top talent. "This past year has seen a particularly competitive labor market and in doing a thorough analysis of various options, weighing the economics of our business and the need to remain competitive for attracting and retaining top talent, we decided to make meaningfully bigger increases to our compensation levels than we do in a typical year," Amazon wrote in an internal memo to employees obtained by Geekwire. The company said it plans to increase "overall compensation ranges for most jobs globally, and the increases are much more considerable than we've done in the past." The company said changes to base pay caps and compensation ranges will "affect every employee differently."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: The Washington State Department of Licensing said the personal information of potentially millions of licensed professionals may have been exposed after it detected suspicious activity on its online licensing system. The agency licenses about 40 categories of businesses and professionals, from auctioneers to real estate agents, and it shut down its online platform temporarily after learning of the activity in January, agency spokesperson Christine Anthony said Friday. Data stored on the system, which is called POLARIS, could include Social Security numbers, birth dates and driver's licenses. The agency doesn't yet know whether such data was actually accessed or how many individuals may have been affected, Anthony said. Anthony said the agency has been working with the state Office of Cybersecurity, the state Attorney General's Office and a third-party cybersecurity firm to understand the scope of the incident, The Seattle Times reported Friday. In the meantime, the shutdown of the POLARIS system is causing problems for some professionals and firms that need to apply for, renew or modify their licensing. The size of the breach remains unclear. Data from 23 professions and business types licensed by the state is processed via POLARIS, Anthony said. Within those 23 categories, which also include bail bonds agents, funeral directors, home inspectors and notaries, the agency has around 257,000 active licenses in its system, Anthony said, adding that "there are likely more records that may be identified while conducting our investigation."

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New submitter Beerismydad writes: The IRS said Monday it will suspend the use of facial recognition technology to authenticate people who create online accounts after the practice was criticized by privacy advocates and lawmakers. The agency said it would no longer use a third-party service, called ID.me, for facial recognition. Critics of the software said the database could become a target for cyberthreats. They also expressed concern about how the information could be used by other government agencies, among other concerns. Earlier Monday, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., called on the agency to end its use of the ID.me software. After the IRS announced the practice would be suspended, Wyden said "the Treasury Department has made the smart decision to direct the IRS to transition away from using the controversial ID.me verification service. No one should be forced to submit to facial recognition to access critical government services."

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In one of the most impactful changes made in recent years, Microsoft has announced today that it will block by default the execution of VBA macro scripts inside five Office applications. From a report: Starting with early April 2022, Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and Word users will not be able to enable macro scripts inside untrusted documents that they downloaded from the internet. The change, which security researchers have been requesting for years, is expected to put a serious roadblock for malware gangs, which have relied on tricking users into enabling the execution of a macro script as a way to install malware on their systems. In these attacks, users typically receive a document via email or which they are instructed to download from an internet website. When they open the file, the attacker typically leaves a message instructing the user to enable the execution of the macro script. While users with some technical and cybersecurity knowledge may be able to recognize this as a lure to get infected with malware, many day-to-day Office users are still unaware of this technique and end up following the provided instructions, effectively infecting themselves with malware.

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A group of major cryptocurrency firms including Coinbase, Circle, Anchorage Digital and Huobi Global are forming a new coalition aimed at cracking down on market manipulation in an effort to instill trust in the burgeoning digital asset industry. From a report: The Crypto Market Integrity Coalition, which was convened by risk-monitoring software company Solidus Labs, is also urging digital currency companies to sign a market integrity pledge that acknowledges the potential for fraud in the cryptocurrency space and the need for the industry to protect investors. "It really is about recognizing that you need entities that are focused on a fair and orderly system here, and really trying to prevent the abuses that can happen if you're not paying attention," said Kathy Kraninger, vice president of regulatory affairs at Solidus Labs and former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The new alliance and pledge comes as regulators remain concerned the new market is safe for investors, despite its surge in popularity. The Securities and Exchange Commission has cited the potential for market manipulation as one of the primary reasons for rejecting several applications for spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds.

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Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: Over a decade ago, we wrote about how Google had to edit out the Australian Aboriginal flag from a logo because of copyright concerns. An 11-year-old girl had won a contest to design a Google logo for Australia Day, and her logo included a simple drawing of the popular Aboriginal flag. Harold Thomas created a (fairly simple) flag design "as a symbol of unity and national identity" for the Aboriginal people in Australia. The flag became quite popular... and then Thomas basically became a copyright landlord, demanding payment for pretty much any usage. In 2019, Thomas did a big licensing deal with a clothing company and proceeded to send out a bunch of cease-and-desist letters to others. It got so bad that the Australian Senate sought to have the government figure out a way to make sure the public could use the flag. Apparently it took over two years, but the "deal" has been worked out -- and it involves the Australian government paying over $20 million to basically buy out the copyright and the former licensing deals, but that still doesn't mean the flag is truly in the public domain: "Mr Thomas will retain moral rights over the flag, but has agreed to give up copyright in return for all future royalties the Commonwealth receives from commercial flag sales to be put towards the ongoing work of NAIDOC. A commercial company will keep its exclusive licence to be able to manufacture Aboriginal flags for commercial use, but the government said the company would not stop people from making their own flags for personal use."

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magzteel shares a report: For almost five years, an international consortium of scientists was chasing clouds, determined to solve a problem that bedeviled climate-change forecasts for a generation: How do these wisps of water vapor affect global warming? They reworked 2.1 million lines of supercomputer code used to explore the future of climate change, adding more-intricate equations for clouds and hundreds of other improvements. They tested the equations, debugged them and tested again. The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can't model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region. When they ran the updated simulation in 2018, the conclusion jolted them: Earth's atmosphere was much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than decades of previous models had predicted, and future temperatures could be much higher than feared -- perhaps even beyond hope of practical remedy. "We thought this was really strange," said Gokhan Danabasoglu, chief scientist for the climate-model project at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR. "If that number was correct, that was really bad news." At least 20 older, simpler global-climate models disagreed with the new one at NCAR, an open-source model called the Community Earth System Model 2, or CESM2, funded mainly by the U.S. National Science Foundation and arguably the worldâ(TM)s most influential climate program. Then, one by one, a dozen climate-modeling groups around the world produced similar forecasts. "It was not just us," Dr. Danabasoglu said. The scientists soon concluded their new calculations had been thrown off kilter by the physics of clouds in a warming world, which may amplify or damp climate change. "The old way is just wrong, we know that," said Andrew Gettelman, a physicist at NCAR who specializes in clouds and helped develop the CESM2 model. "I think our higher sensitivity is wrong too. It's probably a consequence of other things we did by making clouds better and more realistic. You solve one problem and create another." Since then the CESM2 scientists have been reworking their climate-change algorithms using a deluge of new information about the effects of rising temperatures to better understand the physics at work. They have abandoned their most extreme calculations of climate sensitivity, but their more recent projections of future global warming are still dire -- and still in flux. As world leaders consider how to limit greenhouse gases, they depend heavily on what computer climate models predict. But as algorithms and the computer they run on become more powerful -- able to crunch far more data and do better simulations -- that very complexity has left climate scientists grappling with mismatches among competing computer models.

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Nintendo's latest financial report to investors, issued as an overview of its fiscal year's third quarter, came with a momentous announcement for the veteran video game and console producer: Switch has joined the 100 million-worldwide-sales club. From a report: What's more, Switch's current tally of 103.5 million means the device has leapfrogged over both the PlayStation 1 and Nintendo Wii in terms of sales. The count makes the Switch Nintendo's highest-selling home console of all time. While Sony's PS4 and PS2 console families continue to hold higher sales counts, neither got to the 100 million mark as quickly as Switch, which only needed 57 months to do so (March 2017 to December 2021). The only console family to get to the 100 million-global-sales mark faster is Nintendo's own portable DS platform, which needed only 51 months. The DS, which came out in 2004, launched at a lower $149 price point and went lower from there, while Switch has never sold for less than $199. In a statement to investors, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa affirmed that the Switch console, as it nears its fifth anniversary, is "in the middle of its lifecycle." Furukawa said nearly the exact same thing a few months earlier when Switch crossed the 90 million-sales mark.

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Google has launched today a new security feature for Google Cloud tenants that is meant to detect and block cryptomining operations that may be taking place behind the owners' backs. From a report: Named Virtual Machine Threat Detection (VMTD), Google said this new feature is an agentless system that continually scans the memory of virtual machines deployed in Google Cloud environments for tell-tale signs of increased CPU or GPU usage -- specific to cryptomining operations. To avoid false-positive detections, the feature has been left disabled by default; however, any customer can enable it for their GCP VMs. They can do this by going to the Settings page of their Security Command Center and looking under the Manage Settings section. Google said the feature will only work with non-sensitive memory, and VMTD will not process memory from nodes marked as "Confidential." VMTD has begun rolling out today for public preview, so tenants are recommended to enable it for smaller portions of their nodes and keep a close eye on its impact on performance.

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Israel will investigate allegations that police illicitly used homegrown spyware that's gained notoriety abroad against its own citizens. From a report: The government will form a committee to look into a series of reports by Calcalist, a Hebrew business daily, that law enforcement officials used NSO Group's Pegasus software without a court order to tap into the phones of citizens both prominent and obscure, including a key prosecution witness in former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial. Others allegedly targeted include an anti-Netanyahu protester, the former Israeli leader's son, high-ranking officials, and the heads of some of the country's biggest companies. Israeli officials, including the minister in charge of police, initially denied any impropriety. But the police later backtracked, citing "additional findings," and on Monday, Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev ordered the investigation. "The reports about Pegasus, if they are true, are very serious," Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in a statement on Monday. "This tool (Pegasus) and similar tools, are important tools in the fight against terrorism and severe crime, but they were not intended to be used in phishing campaigns targeting the Israeli public or officials -- which is why we need to understand exactly what happened."

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