Innholdsfortegnelse for #561 i Techlife News

A bill designed to encourage more semiconductor companies to build chip plants in the United States passed the Senate on Wednesday as lawmakers raced to finish work on a key priority of the Biden administration. The $280 billion measure, which awaits a House vote, includes federal grants and tax breaks for companies that construct their chip facilities in the U.S. The legislation also directs Congress to significantly increase spending on high-tech research programs that lawmakers say will help the country stay economically competitive in the decades ahead. Senate passage came by a 64-33 vote. The House vote is expected later this week as lawmakers try to wrap up business before returning to their home states and districts in August. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has said she is confident there…

Best Buy, the nation’s largest consumer electronics chain, cut its annual sales and profit forecast, citing surging inflation that has dampened consumer spending on gadgets. The Minneapolis-based company echoed Walmart, which earlier this week said higher prices on basic necessities are forcing shoppers to cut back on discretionary items. Shares of Best Buy fell more than 2% in aftermarket trading after the announcement. Best Buy said it now expects this year’s sales at stores opened at least a year to be down 11%, much steeper than the 3% to 6% drop it originally forecast in May. For the company’s fiscal second quarter, it expects comparable sales to be down 13%. Still, revenue for the quarter should be roughly 7.5% higher than the second quarter of 2020, it said. In a…

Maverick’s next wingman could be a drone. In the movies, fighter pilots are depicted as highly trained military aviators with the skills and experience to defeat adversaries in thrilling aerial dogfights. New technologies, though, are set to redefine what it means to be a “Top Gun,” as algorithms, data and machines take on a bigger role in the cockpit — changes hinted at in “Top Gun: Maverick.” “A lot of people talk about, you know, the way of the future, possibly taking the pilot out of the aircraft,” said 1st Lt. Walker Gall, an F-35 pilot with the U.S. 48th Fighter Wing based at RAF Lakenheath in England. “That’s definitely not something that any of us look forward to.” “I’d like to keep my job as long as possible, but…

Candidates for state and local offices in California will soon be able to accept cryptocurrency campaign donations. The Fair Political Practices Commission voted to approve new rules allowing the donations for digital currencies such as Bitcoin. The new rules say candidates can accept cryptocurrency donations if they immediately convert the digital currency into U.S. dollars. Candidates must use a registered cryptocurrency processor to handle the transaction that will collect the name, address, occupation and employer of each contributor. Cryptocurrencies don’t rely on banks. Instead, transactions are recorded digitally through blockchain technology. California’s new rules will take effect within 60 days. California had been one of nine states that prohibited cryptocurrency contributions. Twelve states, plus Washington D.C., allow cryptocurrency contributions in some form, according to a commission staff report. Candidates running…

A California federal judge has rejected a legal push to require Uber to provide wheelchair-accessible vehicles, finding that such a mandate would be too onerous on the ride-hailing company. U.S. District Chief Judge Richard Seeborg ruled in San Francisco against Scott Crawford of Mississippi and two co-plaintiffs from New Orleans who had argued that Uber’s lack of wheelchair-accessible vehicles in New Orleans and Jackson, Mississippi, violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. But Seeborg wrote that the plaintiffs failed to present a reasonable modification of Uber’s services and didn’t provide adequate evidence that the company had violated the law. The ruling followed a bench trial that lasted nearly five years. The two New Orleans residents were the first to sue the company, alleging that the absence of wheelchair-accessible vehicles in the…

Twitter has set Sept. 13 as the date for its shareholders to vote on the company’s pending buyout by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The company said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday that it is recommending shareholders vote for the $44 billion deal to be completed. The date is ahead of the yet-to-be specified start date of the October trial in the dispute between the billionaire, who is seeking to abandon the deal, and the San Francisco company. Twitter has sued Musk in Delaware after he said wanted to walk away from the deal. “We are committed to closing the merger on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk. Your vote at the special meeting is critical to our ability to complete the merger,” Twitter said in a…

While some workers return to the office this year, many others continue to work remotely indefinitely. This seismic shift has changed where people live and work and, increasingly, how they travel. In the first quarter of 2022, nearly 25% of job postings at the 50,000 largest companies in the U.S. and Canada were for permanently remote positions, according to the job listing service Ladders. That’s up from a mere 4% before the pandemic. “It has enabled us to extend trips, leave early and work different hours,” says Kirsten Reckman, a credit risk manager based in Tampa, Florida, who works remotely. “My boss is very accommodating as long as the work gets done.” Reckmen’s experience reflects a larger trend. One in five travelers this summer plan to do work on the…

Federal regulators took legal action to block Facebook parent Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg from acquiring virtual reality company Within Unlimited and its fitness app Supernatural, asserting the deal would hurt competition and violate antitrust laws. Experts said it was the Federal Trade Commission’s first legal challenge to a Big Tech merger. The FTC filed a complaint in federal court in San Francisco against the tech giant based in Menlo Park, California, and its high-profile CEO seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against the proposed acquisition. The regulators said that Meta already is a key player “at each level of the virtual reality sector,” owning the top-selling device, a leading app store, seven of the most successful developers in the sphere and one of the best-selling apps of…

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, posted its first revenue decline in history Thursday, dragged down by a drop in ad spending as the economy falters — and as competition from rival TikTok intensifies. The results largely followed a broader decline in the digital advertising market that is dinging Meta rivals such as Google, Twitter — which also posted a revenue decline — and Snap. Google’s parent company Alphabet reported its slowest quarterly growth in two years on Tuesday. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta is slowing its pace of investments and plans to “steadily reduce” employee growth after a hiring blitz earlier this year. “This is a period that demands more intensity,” he said in a conference call with analysts. “Expect us to get more done with fewer…

South Korea’s SK Group announced plans to invest $22 billion in the United States on industries including semiconductors, green energy and bioscience, which the White House said will create tens of thousands of domestic jobs while helping ease global supply chain snarls that have persisted during the coronavirus pandemic. President Joe Biden, who continues to isolate in the White House residence after testing positive for COVID-19 last week, met virtually with SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and called it a “historic and pathbreaking announcement.” It is “proof that we’re meeting the emergency in the climate crisis with urgency and opportunity and innovation to save the planet and create good-paying jobs,” Biden said. SK Group’s investments will include $15 billion in the semiconductor industry through research and development programs, as well…

Union Pacific will spend more than $1 billion to upgrade 600 of its old diesel locomotives over the next three years and make them more efficient, but regulators still want it to do more to cut pollution from its engines. The move will accelerate the pace of upgrades UP already planned to make and help the Omaha, Nebraska-based railroad cut roughly 210,000 tons of carbon emissions each year-- the equivalent of taking 45,000 cars off the road. The railroad will go from modernizing 120 locomotives this year to modernizing 200 a year in each of the next three years. “It’s really taking the older locomotive fleet and applying the latest and greatest to get one of the most fuel efficient locomotives we can have,” said Grace Olsen, who oversees locomotive…

Microsoft on Tuesday reported fiscal fourth-quarter profit of $16.7 billion, or $2.23 per share, falling short of analyst expectations for $2.29 per share — a rare disappointment from the tech giant that has consistently beat Wall Street expectations in recent years. It posted revenue of $51.9 billion in the April-June period, up 12% from last year. Analysts had been looking for revenue of $52.94 billion, according to FactSet. The company blamed a number of “evolving macroeconomic conditions and other unforeseen items” for affecting its financial performance, including pandemic-related production shutdowns in China, a deteriorating personal computer market, lowered spending on advertisements and the war in Ukraine, which led Microsoft to scale down its operations in Russia. The company had already lowered its profit and sales estimates in early June based…

The thermostat has officially hit swelter. Whether you’re trying to play in the backyard or just chill outdoors, there’s a bunch of new ideas and gear designed to help everyone — pets included — stay cool. First, architects recommend some simple ways to make an outdoor space more heat-wave friendly. Start with surfacing: Not too dark and not too light. Ron Radziner, one of the principals of the Los Angeles design firm Marmol Radziner, says most stone, tile and concrete will be fine no matter where you live, “but you don’t want to use a dark material in a hot climate. It shouldn’t be too light either – it’ll be blinding in the sun.” Overhead protection from sun and rain, and some wet element are also important in outdoor spaces,…

Facebook is letting violent hate speech slip through its controls in Kenya as it has in other countries, according to a new report from the nonprofit groups Global Witness and Foxglove. It is the third such test of Facebook’s ability to detect hateful language — either via artificial intelligence or human moderators — that the groups have run, and that the company has failed. The ads, which the groups submitted both in English and in Swahili, spoke of beheadings, rape and bloodshed. They compared people to donkeys and goats. Some also included profanity and grammatical errors. The Swahili language ads easily made it through Facebook’s detection systems and were approved for publication. As for the English ads, some were rejected at first, but only because they contained profanities and mistakes…

An Australian judge on Thursday ordered Samsung to pay 14 million Australian dollars ($9.8 million) in penalties for misleading advertising over how water-resistant some models of smartphones are. Federal Court Justice Brendan Murphy gave Samsung Electronics Australia, a subsidiary of South Korea-based Samsung Electronics Co., 30 days to pay the fines. Samsung must also pay AU$200,000 ($140,000) toward the costs of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the consumer watchdog that initiated an investigation of the phones four years ago. Samsung admitted to making false and misleading claims in nine advertisements between 2016 and 2018 about the water resistance of seven models of Galaxy smartphones. They are the S7, S7 Edge, A5 (2017), A7 (2017), S8, S8 Plus and Note 8. Samsung and the commission also agreed to the penalties…

Our homes might be smarter than ever, but with so many platforms, manufacturers, and ecosystems vying for our attention and hard-earned cash, it can be hard to know where to start. Matter, a new smart home connectivity standard, hopes to make things a little easier. MAKING SMART HOME TECHNOLOGY SMARTER We’ve all done it: found a great piece of smart home technology and purchased it without reading whether it’s compatible with the rest of our smart home ecosystems. The chances are, it’s not, or you’ll need to download another app and connect it through a third-party tool to have a chance of it working. Simply put, the smart home space is unnecessarily complex and anti-consumer - but a new standard hopes to change things. Matter, which was previously codenamed CHIP…

In the early days of the modern electric vehicle, or EV, your choices were largely limited to a few range-compromised models or an expensive Tesla on the high end. But 2022 offers a much wider variety of excellent EVs to choose from, and many of them are versatile SUVs. Car experts have selected five of the best to help you decide which is the right one for you and your budget. Note that all the vehicles on this list, minus the Chevrolet, are eligible for a $7,500 federal tax credit. CHEVROLET BOLT EUV The Bolt EUV is the crossover version of the Bolt EV hatchback. Thanks to a big price cut for the 2023 model year — and for 2022, via a bonus cash incentive — it will be the…

T- Mobile has agreed to pay $350 million to customers affected by a class action lawsuit filed after the company disclosed last August that personal data like social security numbers had been stolen in a cyberattack. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last Friday, the mobile phone company said the funds would pay for claims by class members, the legal fees of plaintiffs’ counsel and the costs of administering the settlement. It also said it would spend $150 million next year and in 2023 to fortify its data security and other technologies. T-Mobile said the settlement contains no admission of liability, wrongdoing or responsibility by any of the defendants. The company said that it expects court approval of the terms of the settlement as early as December 2022. Nearly…

Facebook is rolling out an update that enables its 2 billion daily users to more easily view their friends’ posts in chronological order. The new feature is the company’s latest attempt to keep people coming back to its social network amid intensifying competition with its trendier rival TikTok. The changes announced will offer up two different perspectives. When Facebook users open the app, they will initially see the usual news feed featuring posts selected by an algorithm that the company says is designed to highlight topics and friends most likely to appeal to each individual’s tastes and interests. The main feed on the newly dubbed “Home” section will also include an option to look at short videos called Reels — Facebook’s clone of TikTok. But many users have expressed frustration…

Amazon is raising its Prime fees in Europe, the company told customers this week, days ahead of its second-quarter earnings report. Among other places, the price of a monthly Prime membership will tick up in the United Kingdom from 7.99 to 8.99 pounds, while the annual cost will increase from 79 to 95 pounds ($114.26), the company said in the notice sent to customers. In Spain, the monthly price will tick up one euro to 4.99 and the annual cost will go up nearly 14 euros to 49.90 ($50.54). The new charges will take effect on September 15 for those who sign-up for Prime or renew their membership. In Germany and France, annual prices will go up 30% and 42.6%, respectively, to nearly 90 and 70 euros. In Italy, it…