Innholdsfortegnelse for #453 i Techlife News

This week, more than 500 companies officially kicked off an advertising boycott intended to pressure Facebook into taking a stronger stand against hate speech. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to meet with its organizers early next week. But whether Zuckerberg agrees to further tighten the social network’s carefully crafted rules probably boils down to a more fundamental question: Does Facebook need big brand advertisers more than the brands need Facebook? In a broad sense, the current boycott, which will last at least a month, is like nothing Facebook has experienced before. Following weeks of protests against police violence and racial injustice, major brands have for the first time joined together to protest still-prevalent hate speech on Facebook’s platforms by taking aim at the social network’s $70 billion in annual ad…

California took a big step back in reopening its economy on Wednesday as Gov. Gavin Newsom shut down bars, wineries, museums, movie theaters and inside restaurant dining across most of the state for three weeks amid troubling increases in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. The order affects Los Angeles and 18 other counties where nearly three-quarters of the state’s roughly 40 million people live. The impacted counties are those seeing the most serious uptick in infections, and include almost all of Southern California, though not San Diego, which is faring better. “The bottom line is the spread of this virus continues at a rate that is particularly concerning,” Newsom said. To encourage greater adherence to health rules, Newsom also said the state is creating “strike teams” of state regulators to more…

European police delivered a major blow to organized crime after cracking an encrypted communications network, allowing them to covertly watch “over the shoulder” of criminals in real time as they planned drug trafficking, arms sales, assassinations and torture, officers announced. The massive cross-border probe started in 2017 when French police began investigating phones using the EncroChat secure communication tool and ultimately were able to work around the encryption to gain direct access to users’ communications. “It was as though we were sitting at the table where criminals were chatting among themselves really,” said Jannine van den Berg, chief of the Dutch National Police Force. European police and judicial authorities said they expect the investigation to send shockwaves through organized crime gangs across the continent. The encrypted platform was used by…

Microsoft said it is permanently closing nearly all of its physical stores around the world. Like other retailers, the software and computing giant had to temporarily close all of its stores in late March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to its website, Microsoft has 83 stores worldwide, including 72 stores in the U.S., and several others abroad where it showcases and sells laptops and other hardware. The announcement reflects what the company calls a “strategic change” for its retail business as sales increasingly shift online. Microsoft said it would “reimagine” the physical spaces at its four high-profile Microsoft Experience Centers invv New York, London, Sydney, Australia and at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. All employees will have the opportunity to remain with the company, Microsoft said. Microsoft Corp.…

Amazon said that it is buying self-driving technology company Zoox, which is developing an autonomous vehicle for a ride-hailing service that people would request on their phones. Seattle-based Amazon did not disclose how much it is paying for Zoox, which was founded six years ago in Foster City, California. Analysts pegged the purchase price at over $1 billion. The online retailing giant said Zoox will keep running as a separate business and continue to develop its own autonomous vehicle. “We’re excited to help the talented Zoox team to bring their vision to reality in the years ahead,” said Amazon’s Jeff Wilke, who runs the company’s retail business. The deal could drive Amazon into an entirely new business: transporting people from one place to another. But some industry analysts think Amazon’s…

How risky is flying during the coronavirus pandemic? Flying can increase your risk of exposure to infection, but airlines are taking some precautions and you can too. Air travel means spending time in security lines and airport terminals, which puts you into close contact with other people. As travel slowly recovers, planes are becoming more crowded, which means you will likely sit close to other people, often for hours, which raises your risk. Once on a plane, most viruses and other germs don’t spread easily because of the way air circulates, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Airlines also say they are focusing on sanitizing the hard surfaces that passengers commonly touch. Some airlines like Alaska, Delta, JetBlue and Southwest are blocking middle seats or limiting…

AMC Theaters, the nation’s largest chain, is pushing back its plans to begin reopening theaters by two weeks following the closure because of COVID-19. The company said that it would open approximately 450 U.S. locations on July 30 and the remaining 150 the following week. The company had planned to begin opening theaters in mid-July, but last week the July theatrical release calendar was effectively wiped clean when Disney and Warner Bros. decided to delay the releases of “Mulan” and “Tenet” to August dates. AMC CEO and President Adam Aron said that its general managers across the U.S. started working full time to get their buildings ready to reopen. “We continue to devote extraordinary resources into our plan to operate our theatres with a hyper commitment to the safety and…

A 60-year-old U.K. citizen drove into a Detroit parking garage on a recent afternoon, lowered the window of her SUV to swear an oath, and left as a newly minted American. It took less than 30 minutes. Anita Rosenberger is among thousands of people around the country who have taken the final step to citizenship this month under COVID-19 social-distancing rules that have turned what has long been a patriotic rite of passage into something more like a visit to a fast-food restaurant. “It was a nice experience in spite of the fact that I was in the car by myself with a mask on,” said Rosenberger, a sales manager for an electronics component company from suburban Detroit. “And I will say that I will remember this.” Similar drive-thru ceremonies…

A federal judge has convicted a Chinese national of economic espionage, stealing trade secrets and engaging in a conspiracy for the benefit of his country’s government. U.S. District Judge Edward Davila found Hao Zhang, 41, guilty of the three counts after a four-day trial. The decision comes five years after Zhang was indicted on charges of conspiring to steal technology from two companies shortly after graduating from the University of Southern California. The trade secrets were heisted from Zhang’s former employer, Skyworks Solutions in Woburn, Massachusetts, and Avago Technlogies, a San Jose, California, company later acquired by chipmaker Broadcom. The pilfered technology is used to help filter out unwanted signals to smartphones. The conviction is part of efforts to crack down on China’s alleged theft of patented technology created in…

Tesla says it delivered more electric vehicles worldwide in the second quarter than it did in the first. The increase came even though coronavirus restrictions forced it to shut down its only U.S. factory for much of the period. The company says it delivered 90,650 vehicles from April through June as it rolled out the new Model Y SUV in the U.S. and China. That’s a 2.5% increase over the first quarter’s 88,400. But it was a 4.8% drop from the second quarter of 2019, when Tesla delivered 95,200 vehicles. Coronavirus restrictions adopted in the San Francisco Bay Area forced Tesla to close its only U.S. assembly plant in Fremont, California, for almost two months starting March 23. It didn’t reopen until May 11. The Palo Alto, California, company said…

American Airlines and four smaller carriers have reached agreement with the government for billions more in federal loans, a sign of the industry’s desperate fight to survive a downturn in air travel caused by the virus pandemic. The Treasury Department said Thursday that it had signed letters of intent for new loans to American, Spirit Airlines, Frontier Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and SkyWest Airlines. All the leading U.S. airlines had previously accepted a combination of grants and loans to help cover payroll costs through Sept. 30. These five are the first carriers to accept loans from a separate $25 billion kitty that Congress set aside under a $2.2 billion measure to help companies hurt by the pandemic. American Airlines said it signed a term sheet with Treasury for a $4.75 billion…

The world’s mountain of discarded flat-screen TVs, cellphones and other electronic goods grew to a record high last year, according to an annual report. The U.N.-backed study estimated the amount of e-waste that piled up globally in 2019 at 53.6 metric tonnes (59.1 tons) — almost 2 million metric tons more than the previous year. The authors of the study calculated the combined weight of all dumped devices with a battery or a plug last year was the equivalent of 350 cruise ships the size of the Queen Mary 2. Among all the discarded plastic and silicon were large amounts of copper, gold and other precious metals — used for example to conduct electricity on circuit boards. While about a sixth of it was recycled, the remainder of those valuable…

Refusing to let COVID-19 impact its release schedule, Apple took to its virtual WWDC stage at the end of June to show off the latest version of its iOS and iPadOS operating systems, set for release this fall. Craig Federighi introduced a bunch of new game-changing features, including a redesigned home screen, overhauled Siri, and tonnes of long-awaited UI tweaks. Let’s get hands-on with the beta version of the new software and see what’s really changed. SAY HELLO TO YOUR NEW HOME SCREEN Though perhaps not offering the customization options of rival operating systems, Apple took a leaf out of Android’s book with iOS 14, introducing a new design for the Home Screen for the first time in the history of iOS. Thanks to the introduction of new widgets and…

Back in March as the coronavirus pandemic gathered steam in the U.S., a largely unheralded video-conferencing service suddenly found itself in the spotlight. And just as quickly as Zoom became a household name for connecting work colleagues, church and school groups, friends, family, book clubs and others during stay-at-home lockdowns, it also gained a reputation for lax security as intrusive “videobombers” barged into private meetings or just spied on intimate conversations. On April 1, following a wave of lawsuits over privacy breaches, CEO Eric Yuan ordered a halt to work on new features and vowed to fix the service’s weaknesses in 90 days. That time is up, and Zoom is ready to take a bow. The work on “security and privacy is never going to be done, but it is…

At one point in “Irresistible,” Jon Stewart’s new political satire, a cable news anchor tosses a question to an absurdly overstuffed panel of 12 analysts, each in their own little “Brady Bunch” square. Immediately they start shouting at once, drowning each other out. It’s just a quick, amusing bit, but for diehard Stewart fans it may evoke a memorable moment: his 2004 appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire,” where he accused the debate show’s hosts of being “partisan hacks” who were hurting America by imposing an artificial red-blue divide on every issue. And it’s essentially that same message that the former Comedy Central host is trying to get across in 2020 with this, his second feature (after the accomplished Iran-themed “Rosewater”). Here, he takes aim not so much at the media —…

Visitation bans at nursing homes have renewed interest in legislation that would allow families to put remote cameras inside the facilities to help see how loved ones are doing. Before the pandemic, cameras were seen as a way to identify elder abuse and neglect. But now, many hope they could bring comfort after visitation bans imposed to stem the devastating tide of COVID-19 inside nursing homes left many families struggling to get information. “That visitation ban, it was really, really upsetting to people. And I think understandably, Some facilities aren’t great about sharing information about what’s going on,”said Anna Doroghazi, the associate state director for AARP in Connecticut. She has heard stories about people calling a nursing home five times before someone finally picked up the phone and families unable…

A child’s swing twists forlornly in the breeze beneath the behemoth maple tree that shades our home. It’s become a symbol of our sad coronavirus exile. A year and a half ago, we moved from what we thought was our forever home steps from Cape Cod Bay to Rhode Island, just so we could be close to our two young grandsons. They used to be an hour and 10 minutes’ drive from us. Now we’re 12 minutes away. Empty nesters now, we gladly and giddily bought a bigger house than we needed, complete with a fenced-in yard and the swing. But my wife’s immune system was trashed by a nasty bout with Lyme disease, and we realized in the first days of the pandemic that we’d have to take extra…

British regulators want new rules to foster competition in digital advertising markets and rein in the industry’s dominant players, Google and Facebook. The Competition and Markets Authority took aim at the U.S. tech giants in a report that recommends the British government adopt a new regulatory approach to governing big digital platforms making money from online ads. The authority said it was concerned that the two companies have developed “such unassailable market positions” that rivals can’t compete on equal terms, resulting in higher prices for hotels, flights, electronics, insurance and other goods and services that are heavily advertised online. Google and Facebook accounted for about 80% of the 14 billions pounds ($17 billion) earned by the U.K.‘s digital ad industry last year, the authority said. Google controls more than 90%…

California regulators have sued Cisco Systems, saying an engineer faced discrimination at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters because he is a Dalit Indian. India’s caste system long placed Dalits at the bottom of a social hierarchy, once terming them “untouchables.” Inequities and violence against Dalits have persisted for decades after India banned caste discrimination. The engineer worked on a team at Cisco’s San Jose headquarters with Indians who all immigrated to the U.S. as adults, and all of whom were of high caste, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. The “higher caste supervisors and co-workers imported the discriminatory system’s practices into their team and Cisco’s workplace,” the lawsuit says. It says Cisco’s treatment of the employee, who is not named, violated…

The U.S. trade deficit rose for the third straight month in May. Both exports and imports fell as the coronavirus outbreak continued to take a toll on world commerce. The Commerce Department said Thursday that the gap between the goods and services the United States buys and what it sells abroad rose 9.7% in May to $54.6 billion, highest since December 2018. The coronavirus pandemic has devastated world trade. U.S. exports fell 4.4% in May to $144.5 billion, lowest since November 2009. Imports slid 0.9% to $199.1 billion, lowest since July 2010. The politically sensitive deficit in the trade of goods with China rose 7.3% to $27.9 billion in May. So far this year, the overall U.S. deficit in the trade of goods and services has fallen 9.1% to $223.4…

Job hunting has always been a little stressful. OK, a lot stressful. A global pandemic certainly hasn’t remedied that. Rather, it’s changing the landscape. For one, it’s heating up competition. Millions of newly out-of-work Americans are chasing employment simultaneously. Applicant pools are also expanding geographically as remote work becomes widespread. Plus, navigating the entire hiring process from home presents its own obstacles. If you’re in a community that hasn’t fully reopened or are seeking a permanent work-from-home job, it’s likely the new reality. Here are four ways to fine-tune your at-home job hunt. BUILD YOUR SKILLS These uncertain times boast at least one advantage for job seekers: Many resources for online learning are now free or more affordable in response to impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak. So make yourself more…

Athletic apparel maker Lululemon Athletica Inc. said it’s acquiring at-home exercise startup Mirror for $500 million. The deal is part of Lululemon’s plan to expand beyond just selling yoga tights and other workout clothing. “The acquisition of Mirror is an exciting opportunity to build upon that vision, enhance our digital and interactive capabilities, and deepen our roots in the sweat life,”Lululemon CEO Calvin McDonald said in a statement. The move also comes as Americans have been forced by gym closures to work out at home during the pandemic. And even as some gyms have reopened with new safety protocols, many customers are still not willing to go back because of worries about catching the virus. Mirror, which launched in 2018, sells a $1,500 interactive mirror that streams workout classes, offers…

Foreign hackers are taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to undermine institutions and threaten critical infrastructure, a top U.S. military cyber official said. The comments from Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger of U.S. Cyber Command came a day after Defense Department officials briefed reporters on virtual war games that digital combatants from U.S. and allied militaries have been holding to sharpen their abilities to counter online threats with real-world impact. “We’ve seen increased adversary activity” since the pandemic began, Mauger said on a conference call, declining to discuss the threat in more specific detail. “We’re one part of the whole of government effort to defend our democracy in this complex cyber environment.” Last week, Cybercom offered reporters a window into what it described as its largest virtual training exercise…

The revolution is finally being televised, thank goodness. The long-awaited live-capture of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s shake-the-rafters musical “Hamilton” comes out Friday (03) on Disney+, a chance to celebrate America’s independence with some of its Founding Fathers. The timing seems ideal. Or, given all that’s shook this nation in the past few months, could it not be quite revolutionary enough? The show features the original Broadway cast — who Miranda has called “an incredible ’28 Yankees of actors” — and was filmed in the summer of 2016 at The Richard Rodgers Theatre in front of a raucous crowd. RadicalMedia, which taped the last night of “Rent,” recorded two performances of “Hamilton” and asked actors on their days off to come back and do close-ups. The show won 11 Tony Awards, including best…

A company wants to use an advanced balloon to fly customers from Earth’s surface in Alaska to the highest reaches of the planet’s atmosphere. Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune, The Anchorage Daily News reported Sunday. The balloon rides will be manned by a flight crew taking eight passengers in a pressurized capsule suspended beneath a hydrogen balloon the size of a football stadium. Each passenger could pay an estimated $125,000 for a six-hour journey. Mark Lester, CEO of Alaska Aerospace Corp., said the high-altitude rides will be available from Kodiak in a few years and will support Alaska tourism. “You will have people from around the…

Investigators searched the headquarters of German payment systems provider Wirecard and four other locations Wednesday as part of their probe of an accounting scandal that led to the arrest of the company’s longtime CEO and forced the firm to file for bankruptcy protection. Twelve prosecutors were supported by 33 police officers as well as police IT experts in Wednesday’s raids, Munich prosecutors said. Five locations were searched — three in Germany, including Wirecard’s headquarters in the Munich suburb of Aschheim, and two in neighboring Austria. Markus Braun, an Austrian who had led Wirecard since 2002, was arrested last week on suspicion of incorrect statements of data and market manipulation, and then released on bail. He had resigned as CEO days earlier, shortly after Wirecard said auditors couldn’t find accounts in…

India banned 59 apps with Chinese links, saying their activities endanger the country’s sovereignty, defense and security. India’s decision comes as its troops are involved in a tense standoff with Chinese soldiers in eastern Ladakh in the Himalayas that started last month. India lost 20 soldiers in a June 15 clash. The banned apps include TikTok, UC Browser WeChat and Bigo Live, as well as e-commerce platforms Club Factory and Shein, that are used in mobile and non-mobile devices connected to the Internet, according to a government statement. It said there have been mounting concerns about data security and safeguarding the privacy of 1.3 billion Indians. The government said such concerns also pose a threat to sovereignty and security of the country. The Ministry of Information Technology has received many…