Innholdsfortegnelse for #507 i Techlife News

U.S. factory output slid last month as a shortage of computer chips disrupted auto production. Manufacturing production dipped 0.1% in June — third drop in five months, the Federal Reserve reported Thursday. Overall, industrial prdouction — including output at factories, mines and utilities — rose 0.4% last month after increasing 0.7% in May. Industrial output is up 9.8% from a year earlier. The chip shortage pushed production of cars, trucks and auto parts down 6.6% in June. Excluding autos, industrial production rose 0.4% last month. “The manufacturing sector continues to be hobbled by supply constraints,”said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities. “The highest profile example is the struggle by automakers to manage through a chip shortage.” Utility output climbed 2.7% in June as Americans cranked up the air…

Safety regulators are suing Amazon to force it to recall hazardous products sold on its site, including flammable children’s pajamas, faulty carbon monoxide detectors and hair dryers that don’t protect users from getting electrocuted. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which filed the complaint this week, said the online shopping giant stopped selling some of the faulty products. Amazon said in a statement that it was “unclear” why the safety commission filed a complaint when the company already removed the “vast majority” of the hazardous products, notified customers, gave refunds and asked shoppers to get rid of the products themselves. The safety commission said Amazon’s actions were “insufficient” and it wants the company to do more, including issue recalls with the commission and destroy any of the goods sent back…

Toyota plans to hire more people and invest heavily in its subsidiary Woven Planet to work on mobility technology so the Japanese automaker stays competitive amid the global shift to using artificial intelligence and robotics in everyday driving. “Toyota’s traditional strength in hardware is something we never want to lose. To make safe mobility we need both, great hardware and great software,”Woven Planet Holdings Chief Executive James Kuffner said. “The world is changing. The automotive industry is going through this once-in-a-hundred-year revolution. And so how do we remain relevant?” Woven Planet, fully owned by Toyota Motor Corp., announced Thursday it had acquired CARMERA Inc., based in Seattle and New York. The value of the deal was not disclosed. CARMERA specializes in sophisticated road mapping updates made cheaper and faster by…

Electrify America, an electric vehicle charging network funded with money paid by Volkswagen as punishment for its emissions cheating scandal, says it plans to more than double its number of charging stations throughout the United States and Canada. The expansion will include 1,800 fast-charging stations and 10,000 individual chargers to be installed by 2025 and is part of Electrify America’s previous commitment to invest $2 billion over 10 years on EV infrastructure, education and access in the U.S. Automakers have ramped up production of electric vehicles that can go farther and charge faster, but are concerned that consumers interested in EVs may wait to buy until there’s better, faster charging infrastructure. The latest generation of EVs, many with ranges around 300 miles (480 kilometers) per charge, can accept electricity at…

Swashbuckling billionaire Richard Branson hurtled into space aboard his own winged rocket ship last Sunday, bringing astro-tourism a step closer to reality and beating out his exceedingly richer rival Jeff Bezos. The nearly 71-year-old Branson and five crewmates from his Virgin Galactic space-tourism company reached an altitude of 53.5 miles (86 kilometers) over the New Mexico desert — enough to experience three to four minutes of weightlessness and witness the curvature of the Earth — and then glided back home to a runway landing. “The whole thing, it was just magical,” a jubilant Branson said on his return aboard the gleaming white space plane, named Unity. The brief, up-and-down flight — the space plane’s portion took only about 15 minutes, or about as long as Alan Shepard’s first U.S. spaceflight…

Tesla founder Elon Musk took to a witness stand to defend his company’s 2016 acquisition of a troubled company called SolarCity against a lawsuit that claims he’s to blame for a deal that was rife with conflicts of interest and never delivered the profits he’d promised. And to the surprise of no one, the famously colorful billionaire did so in the most personally combative terms. “I think you are a bad human being,” Musk told Randall Baron, a lawyer for shareholders who was pressing Musk to acknowledge his mistakes in helping engineer the acquisition of SolarCity, a manufacturer of solar panels. “I have great respect for the court,” Musk later added, “but not for you, sir.” The long-running shareholder lawsuit asserts that Musk, who was SolarCity’s largest stakeholder and its…

Batman’s secret cave, Harry Potter’s cupboard under the stairs and the apartment from “Friends” are major centerpieces to the huge Warner Bros. studio lot expansion. Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood recently reopened more than a year after doors were shuttered because of the coronavirus pandemic. Now, attendees will have a chance to explore the studio’s nearly 100 years of television and filmmaking history, highlighting the DC Universe and “Harry Potter.” A firsthand look took place a couple of days before the tour opened in late June at the Southern California studio, which now welcomes families with children ages 5 and older. Warner Bros. officials said the expansion — that includes a new building — took five years to develop in Burbank. Officials say the studio tour will follow all city,…

The World Health Organization issued new recommendations on human genome editing, calling for a global registry to track “any form of genetic manipulation” and proposing a whistle-blowing mechanism to raise concerns about unethical or unsafe research. The U.N. health agency commissioned an expert group in late 2018 following a dramatic announcement from Chinese scientist He Jiankui that he had created the world’s first gene-edited babies. In two reports, WHO’s expert group said all studies involving human genome editing should be made public, although the committee noted that wouldn’t necessarily stop unprincipled scientists. “In the field of stem cell research, unscrupulous entrepreneurs and clinics have deliberately misused clinical trial registries by registering procedures they plan to undertake as if they were properly sanctioned clinical trials,” the group said, calling for WHO…

Facebook’s WhatsApp faces a complaint from European Union consumer groups who say the chat service has been unfairly pressuring users to accept a new privacy update in what it calls a breach of the bloc’s regulations. The European Consumer Organisation, or BEUC, filed a complaint this week over the way WhatsApp has brought in changes to its terms of service and privacy policy, saying they aren’t transparent or easily understood by users. Many WhatsApp users switched to other chat apps like Signal and Telegram because of privacy concerns when the update was rolled out earlier this year because of concerns the changes would give Facebook access to more information on users. “WhatsApp has been bombarding users for months with aggressive and persistent pop-up messages to force them to accept its…

In a medical first, researchers harnessed the brain waves of a paralyzed man unable to speak — and turned what he intended to say into sentences on a computer screen. It will take years of additional research but the study, reported this week, marks an important step toward one day restoring more natural communication for people who can’t talk because of injury or illness. “Most of us take for granted how easily we communicate through speech,” said Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the work. “It’s exciting to think we’re at the very beginning of a new chapter, a new field” to ease the devastation of patients who lost that ability. Today, people who can’t speak or write because of paralysis have…

Twitter is disappearing its disappearing tweets, called fleets, after they didn’t catch on. The company began testing tweets that vanish after 24 hours last March in Brazil. Fleets were designed to allay the concerns of new users who might be turned off by the public and permanent nature of normal tweets. “However, we haven’t seen an increase in the amount of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped,” Twitter said in a statement this week. “So as of August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.” Kayvon Beykpour, head of consumer product at Twitter, stressed that this is part of how the company works. “(Big) bets are risky and speculative, so by definition a number of them won’t work,” he tweeted. “If we’re not having…

The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits has reached its lowest level since the pandemic struck last year, further evidence that the U.S. economy and job market are quickly rebounding from the pandemic recession. Thursday’s report from the Labor Department showed that jobless claims fell by 26,000 last week to 360,000. The weekly tally, a proxy for layoffs, has fallen more or less steadily since topping 900,000 in early January. The U.S. recovery from the recession is proceeding so quickly that many forecasters have predicted that the economy will expand this year by roughly 7%. That would be the most robust calendar-year growth since 1984. The rollout of COVID-19 vaccines has sharply reduced new viral cases — from a seven-day average of around 250,000 in early January to roughly…

With Apple reportedly expressing an interest in streaming rights for the National Football League’s “Sunday Ticket” package, there’s never been a better time to sign up for Apple’s streaming service. With a raft of award-winning TV shows and movies, and perhaps soon live sporting events available to stream from your iPhone, Apple TV+ is coming into its own. A TURBULENT START FOR APPLE TV+ Whether you’re an Apple die-hard with shares in the company or you’re a casual fan of the firm and its hardware, there’s no denying that the Cupertino company’s foray into services has been challenging at best. Although Tim Cook and Co have found great success in some services like Apple Music (which recently launched its new lossless streaming feature, much to the concern of Spotify) and…

Jeff Bezos’ rocket company has gotten government approval to launch people into space, himself included. The Amazon founder will climb atop his New Shepard rocket next Tuesday in West Texas, joined by his brother, an 82-year-old female aviation pioneer and a $28 million auction winner. It will be the first launch with passengers for Blue Origin, which like Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic plans to start flying paying customers in the months ahead. The Federal Aviation Administration issued its OK. The license is good through August. On Sunday, Virgin Galactic’s billionaire founder Richard Branson rode his own rocket plane to space, accompanied by five company employees. A specially designed aircraft carried the winged ship aloft over New Mexico. The space plane dropped away, fired its rocket motor and soared to 53.5…

Top finance officials representing most of the world’s economy have backed a sweeping revision of international taxation that includes a 15% global minimum corporate levy to deter big companies from resorting to low-rate tax havens. Finance ministers from the Group of 20 countries endorsed the plan at a meeting last weekend in Venice. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the proposal would end a “self-defeating international tax competition” in which countries have for years lowered their rates to attract companies. She said that had been “a race that nobody has won. What it has done instead is to deprive us of the resources we need to invest in our people, our workforces, our infrastructure.” The next steps include more work on key details at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation…

Skeptical of the four-year college degree? It’s still your best bet to make money. Backlash against college as a common stop on the road to adulthood has mounted over the past decade. Critics say four-year degree programs saddle most students with five-digit debt without a clear path from classroom to career. Nearly half (46%) of all families surveyed in November and December 2020 by Gallup for the Carnegie Corporation of New York said they would prefer their children attend alternatives to four-year institutions — even when there were no financial barriers. But when you compare the value of a four-year degree with other credentials — a high school diploma, certificate programs and associate degrees — it still puts workers at an advantage in the labor market and leads to higher…

The European Central Bank said it is launching a two-year investigation on whether to introduce a digital version of the euro that would complement cash, taking a cautious step toward introduction as central bankers around the world eye digital currencies and their potential impact on policy and the financial system. The ECB said in a statement that the digital euro must be able to meet consumers’ needs while helping prevent illegal activity such as money laundering and must not have an adverse impact on financial stability and monetary policy. Digitalization “is reaching all areas of our lives,” Fabio Panetta, a member of the ECB’s executive board, wrote in a blog post. “The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has shown just how fast such change can happen. And this is affecting the way…

Cubans facing the country’s worst economic crisis in decades took to the streets over the weekend. In turn, authorities blocked social media sites in an apparent effort to stop the flow of information into, out of and within the beleaguered nation. Restricting internet access has become a tried-and-true method of stifling dissent by authoritarian regimes around the world, alongside government-supported disinformation campaigns and propaganda. On the extreme side, regimes like China and North Korea exert tight control over what regular citizens can access online. Elsewhere, service blockages are more limited, often cutting off common social platforms around elections and times of mass protests. There was no formal organizer of protests; people found out about the rallying points over social media, mostly on Twitter and Facebook, the platforms most used by…

General Motors is telling owners of some older Chevrolet Bolts to park them outdoors and not to charge them overnight because two of the electric cars caught fire after recall repairs were made. The company said that the request covers 2017 through 2019 Bolts that were part of a group that was recalled earlier due to fires in the batteries. The latest request comes after two Bolts that had gotten recall repairs caught fire, one in Vermont and the other in New Jersey, GM spokesman Kevin Kelly said. Owners should take the steps “out of an abundance of caution,” he said. The steps should be continued until GM engineers investigate and develop a repair, he said. The cars should be parked outdoors after charging is complete, GM said in a…

TSMC, the biggest contract manufacturer of processor chips for Apple Inc. and other global brands, said Thursday its latest quarterly profit rose 11.2% over a year earlier to $4.8 billion as demand for smartphones and consumer electronics increased. Sales in the three months ending June 30 rose 19.8% to $13.3 billion, said the company, headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Inc. has said it expects faster growth as next-generation telecoms and computing generates demand for chips. A shift to working remotely in response to the coronavirus pandemic helped propel demand for communications technology. The company, whose customers also include Qualcomm Inc., said in April it plans to invest $100 billion over the next three years to expand manufacturing and research and development. Most semiconductors used in smartphones, medical equipment,…

“The Crown” tied with “The Mandalorian” for the most Emmy nominations Tuesday with 24 apiece, but the Marvel universe also got bragging rights with runner-up “WandaVision.” The nominations reinforced the rapid rise of streaming, with most of the top-nominated scripted shows on services that emerged in the past two years. In the top three categories — drama, comedy and limited series — broadcast networks scored only two nominations, for the NBC drama “This Is Us” and the ABC xcomedy “black-ish.” During an oppressive pandemic in which housebound Americans relied more than ever on television for distraction, TV academy voters recognized a varied mix of storytelling and a diverse group of actors and creators. One example: Mj Rodriguez of “Pose” is the first trans woman to be nominated in a lead…

Federal regulators said they now can better track rocket launches and space vehicles returning to Earth, which could cut the amount of time that airplanes must be routed around space operations. The Federal Aviation Administration said a new tool automates the near-instantaneous delivery of data about a space vehicle’s flight path to the nation’s air traffic control system. The tool, called the Space Data Integrator, will replace a system in which much of the work of giving telemetry data about space vehicles to air traffic control managers is done manually. Elon Musk’s SpaceX was the first company to share flight telemetry data with the FAA, and others including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have since joined the program, according to the FAA. The FAA said the new technology was first used…

For 21 years, the software company Kaseya labored in relative obscurity — at least until cybercriminals exploited it in early July for a massive ransomware attack that snarled businesses around the world and escalated U.S.-Russia diplomatic tensions. But it turns out that the recent hack wasn’t the first major cybersecurity problem to hit the Miami-based company and its core product, which IT teams use to remotely monitor and administer workplace computer systems and other devices. “It feels a little like déjà vu,” said Allie Mellen, a security analyst at Forrester Research. In 2018, for instance, hackers managed to infiltrate Kaseya’s tool in 2018 to run a “cryptojacking” operation, which channels the power of afflicted computers to mine cryptocurrency — often without its victims noticing. It was a less harmful breach…

The dystopian action-horror “Purge” franchise has previously made stops in New York City, Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Now it’s time to pull on cowboy boots and get ready for a little twangy Purge. “The Forever Purge” is set along the U.S.-Mexican border and it’s perhaps the most overtly political of the series, portraying a ragtag group of Americans trying to flee the anarchy and white supremacy of Texas for the safety of Mexico as the annual U.S. bloodlust event turns into an everyday abomination. The film jettisons its horror roots for an aggressive — some may call it ham-fisted — social critique of modern America. But watching video of real insurrectionists on Jan. 6 try to violently take over the U.S. Capitol makes portions of “The Forever Purge” seem…

So you want to travel on a budget. Who doesn’t? Yet it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the cheap travel tips, hacks and strategies out there that promise unbelievable deals on airfare and hotels. In reality, there’s only one important tactic for traveling cheaply: being flexible with your travel dates, destination and plans. It might sound simple — or even simplistic — but you would be surprised how few travelers are willing to take this piece of advice to heart. To be fair, this flexibility-first mindset requires a paradigm shift for many in terms of how they start planning vacations. It requires moving from this type of planning: “I want to go to Amsterdam from Sept. 5th through 13th.” To this: “I want to go somewhere fun in September.”…

France’s competition regulator fined Google 500 million euros ($592 million) this week for failing to negotiate in good faith with French publishers in a dispute over payments for their news. The agency threatened fines of another 900,000 euros (around $1 million) per day if Google doesn’t come up with proposals within two months on how it will compensate publishers and news agencies for their content. Google France said in a statement it was “very disappointed” by the decision, and that the fine “doesn’t reflect the efforts put in place or the reality of the use of news content on our platform.” It said it is negotiating in good faith toward a solution, and that it’s on the verge of reaching an agreement with some publishers. The dispute is part of…

As the world increasingly focuses attention on climate change, Roland Busch, the CEO of Siemens AG, says his company is well-positioned to help manage the challenges. Munich-based Siemens specializes in making buildings, factories and railroads more efficient through digitalization and automation. And its medical unit includes technology that could lead to faster treatments for stroke patients. Siemens has predicted 5% to 7% annual revenue growth for the next three to five years, based largely on its expectation that demand for its products involved in energy efficiency will steadily increase. Siemens’ stock is up roughly 14% this year. And 13 of 21 industry analysts who follow it give the company a buy rating, according to FactSet. Busch, who became CEO in February, has been with Siemens for more than a quarter-century.…