Innholdsfortegnelse for #574 i Techlife News

Ford said that it is disbanding Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle company that it co-owns with Volkswagen. Executives said they don’t see a path to profitability on fully autonomous vehicles, and will now focus on partially automated driver-assist systems, which need to be monitored by humans. “We’ve looked at this every way that you can,” Chief Financial Officer John Lawler told reporters. “We just see the profitability, given the investment that’s going to be required, a long way out.” It would take billions of dollars for Ford to put self-driving robotaxis on the streets, Lawler said, yet it wasn’t clear when that would happen “in a way that would allow us to have a profitable return on that investment.” The move by Ford and VW suggests how difficult and costly…

Stephanie Terrell bought a used Nissan Leaf this fall and was excited to join the wave of drivers adopting electric vehicles to save on gas money and reduce her carbon footprint. But Terrell quickly encountered a bump in the road on her journey to clean driving: As a renter, she doesn’t have a private garage where she can power up overnight, and the public charging stations near her are often in use, with long wait times. On a recent day, the 23-year-old nearly ran out of power on the freeway because a public charging station she was counting on was busy. “It was really scary and I was really worried I wasn’t going to make it, but luckily I made it here. Now I have to wait a couple hours…

Amazon is rolling out a feature that allows shoppers to pay for items using their Venmo accounts. The option to pay with Venmo will be available for select Amazon.com customers beginning on Tuesday, the e-commerce giant said in a news release. By Black Friday — the day after Thanksgiving — it will be available nationally. Venmo is largely known for peer-to-peer transactions, but it has been expanding its offering to allow payments to businesses. Amazon’s move to offer more payment options comes as sluggish sales numbers have pushed the company to put brakes on its warehouse expansion plans. Retailers have also been more skittish about the holiday shopping season, and are offering more discounts to clear out their bloated inventories and lure in inflation-hit consumers. Earlier this month, Amazon held…

Alcohol delivery app Drizly has agreed to tighten its data security and limit data collection to resolve federal regulators’ allegations that its security failures exposed the personal information of some 2.5 million customers. The Federal Trade Commission announced the action this week against Drizly, a Boston-based subsidiary of Uber that delivers beer, wine and spirits in states where it’s legal, and partners with retailers in hundreds of cities around the US. The proposed consent agreement with the FTC also names Drizly CEO James Cory Rellas. The regulators allege that the company and Rellas were alerted to security problems two years before the 2020 breach yet failed to act to protect consumers’ data. Drizly agreed to put in a comprehensive data security program and establish security safeguards, and to limit future…

Nearly 400 school districts spanning all 50 states and Washington, D.C., along with several tribes and U.S. territories, are receiving roughly $1 billion in grants to purchase about 2,500 “clean” school buses under a new federal program. The Biden administration is making the grants available as part of a wider effort to accelerate the transition to zero-emission vehicles and reduce air pollution near schools and communities. Vice President Kamala Harris and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan are set to announce the grant awards Wednesday in Seattle. The new, mostly electric school buses will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save money and better protect children’s health, the White House said. As many as 25 million children ride familiar yellow school buses each school day and will have a “healthier future” with…

The COVID-19 pandemic spared no state or region as it caused historic learning setbacks for America’s children, erasing decades of academic progress and widening racial disparities, according to results of a national test that provide the sharpest look yet at the scale of the crisis. Across the country, math scores saw their largest decreases ever. Reading scores dropped to 1992 levels. Nearly four in 10 eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts. Not a single state saw a notable improvement in their average test scores, with some simply treading water at best. Those are the findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — known as the “nation’s report card” — which tested hundreds of thousands of fourth and eighth graders across the country this year. It was the…

Japan has stepped up its push to catch up on digitization by telling a reluctant public they have to sign up for digital IDs or possibly lose access to their public health insurance. As the naming implies, the initiative is about assigning numbers to people, similar to Social Security numbers in the U.S. Many Japanese worry the information might be misused or that their personal information might be stolen. Some view the My Number effort as a violation of their right to privacy. So the system that kicked off in 2016 has never fully caught on. Fax machines are still commonplace, and many Japanese conduct much of their business in person, with cash. Some bureaucratic procedures can be done online, but many Japanese offices still require “inkan,” or seals for…

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is making available $759 million in grants and loans to enable rural communities to access high-speed internet, part of the broader $65 billion push for high-speed connectivity from last year’s infrastructure law. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and White House senior adviser Mitch Landrieu are unveiling the grants in North Carolina on Thursday. There are 49 recipients in 24 states. One is North Carolina’s AccessOn Networks, which will receive $17.5 million to provide broadband service to 100 businesses, 76 farms and 22 educational facilities in the state’s Halifax and Warren counties. Both counties are rural and have predominantly Black populations. The announcement and visit to North Carolina, a state with an open U.S. Senate seat, come as President Joe Biden and other top Democratic officials are…

Seagate Technology said Thursday the U.S. Department of Commerce has warned it may charge the computer hard-drive maker with violating restrictions on exports of high-tech products to China. The company said in an SEC filing that it rejected the allegations. It says its hard disc-drives are not subject to U.S. Export Administration regulations, but troubles over the issue could affect its business. “Seagate believes it has complied with all relevant export control laws and regulations,” it said. Seagate said the allegation is over sales between August 2020 and September 2021 to “a customer and its affiliates.” It did not name the customer, however, Seagate is a major supplier of hard drives to telecoms equipment giant Huawei Technologies, a major target of U.S. export controls. The other major supplier, Western Digital,…

Tesla, the first high-volume EV maker, was early to promise a zero-emission pickup, but it was Rivian, an American startup, that delivered the first mass-production EV truck. With impressive range, dazzling performance and innovative features, the R1T has attracted both conventional truck shoppers and early adopters. Ford’s all-electric F-150 Lightning, was the second EV pickup to arrive this year. It achieves competitive range and power, while packaging clever features in a traditional full-size pickup body. Which truck is the better buy? Experts compared them to find out. POWERTRAINS & RANGE Rivian is currently delivering the R1T as a four-electric-motor model only. There’s a motor at each wheel to give the truck all-wheel drive as well as a staggering combined output of 835 horsepower. That’s enough for the R1T to dash…

If you’re seeing Halloween decorations at the store, you should take that as a sign the holiday travel season is just around the corner. Cue the expensive flights! If you’re relying on points and miles to cover the cost, you might want to consider whether booking award flights for the holidays is the best use of your travel rewards. In annual analysis of airline mile values, holiday flights in December often didn’t provide the highest per-mile value compared with flights booked 180 days out or 15 days out from the date of departure. With flight prices up 43% from last year, according to the latest Consumer Price Index data, you’ll likely have to use a lot of miles to pay for the flight. If you’re a points and miles maximizer,…

Summertime revenue growth at Google’s corporate parent slipped to its slowest pace since the pandemic jarred the economy more than two years ago, with advertisers clamping down on spending and bracing for a potential recession. Alphabet Inc., which owns an array of smaller technology companies in addition to Google, this week posted revenue of $69.1 billion for the July-September quarter, a 6% increase from the same time last year. It marked the first time Alphabet’s year-over-year quarterly revenue has risen by less than 10% since the April-June period of 2020. At that time, the advertisers that generate most of its revenue pulled in their reins because of the economic uncertainty during the pandemic’s early months. Google’s ad sales weakened even more dramatically than Alphabet’s overall revenue. Ad revenue totaled $54.5…

The number of Americans who do not have a bank account fell to a record low last year, as the proliferation of online-only banks and an improving economy is bringing more Americans into the traditional financial system. A new report from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. found that 4.5% of Americans — representing approximately 5.9 million households — were without a bank account in 2021. That’s the lowest level since the FDIC started tracking the data in 2009 and down from 5.4% of Americans in the 2019 survey data. The decline in unbanked households may partially be attributed to the coronavirus pandemic. States and the federal government distributed trillions of dollars in stimulus to Americans after COVID-19 shut down the U.S. economy in March 2020. The benefit programs largely needed…

A Washington state judge fined Facebook parent company Meta nearly $25 million for repeatedly and intentionally violating campaign finance disclosure law, in what is believed to be the largest campaign finance penalty in U.S. history. The penalty issued by King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North was the maximum allowed for more than 800 violations of Washington’s Fair Campaign Practices Act, passed by voters in 1972 and later strengthened by the Legislature. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson argued that the maximum was appropriate considering his office previously sued Facebook in 2018 for violating the same law. Meta, based in Menlo Park, California, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. Washington’s transparency law requires ad sellers such as Meta to keep and make public the names and addresses of…

The Republican National Committee has filed a lawsuit against tech giant Google, alleging the company has been suppressing its email solicitations ahead of November’s midterm elections — an allegation Google denies. The lawsuit, filed in the District Court for the Eastern District of California, accuses Gmail of “discriminating” against the RNC by unfairly sending the group’s emails to users’ spam folders, impacting both fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts in pivotal swing states. “Enough is enough — we are suing Google for their blatant bias against Republicans,” said RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in a statement. “For ten months in a row, Google has sent crucial end-of-month Republican GOTV and fundraising emails to spam with zero explanation. We are committed to putting an end to this clear pattern of bias.” Google, in a…

TikTok’s algorithms are very good at finding videos to keep people glued to their phone screens for hours on end. What they are not so good at, a new report has found, is detecting ads that contain blatant misinformation about U.S. elections. That’s despite TikTok having banned all political advertisements from its platform in 2019. The report raises fresh concerns about the wildly popular video-sharing app’s ability to catch election falsehoods at a time when a growing number of young people use it not just for entertainment, but also for finding information. The nonprofit Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy team at New York University published the report. Global Witness and NYU tested whether some of the most popular social platforms — Facebook, YouTube and TikTok — can detect…

Legit gross or crazy delicious? Butter boards, the polarizing stepchild of charcuterie, have taken TikTok to new food-craze heights as some horrified safety and nutrition experts look on. And now, heading into the holidays, the boards are landing on tables as quick, inexpensive alternatives to the meat- and fancy cheese-laden OG despite a winter butter shortage projected for the U.S. that could drive up prices and make it more difficult to find in supermarkets. “I wish they’d just go away. The idea of smearing something on a wood board with other food, sharing that with other people and having them all dip into it. It’s a bacteria heaven,” said Laura Cipullo, a registered dietitian in New York City. Justine Doiron, who creates food content as @justine-snacks on TikTok and Instagram,…

James Gunn, the writer-director who made the “Guardians of the Galaxy” household names for Marvel and revived “The Suicide Squad,” will soon be responsible for the future of Batman, Superman and the entire DC Universe for Warner Bros. Discovery. The studio named Gunn and veteran executive Peter Safran co-chairmen and CEOs of the newly formed DC Studios. The roles will have Gunn and Safran developing a long-term plan for the company’s DC Comics properties, in film, television and animation. Both will continue to also produce, develop and direct individual projects, the studio said. “We’re honored to be the stewards of these DC characters we’ve loved since we were children,” said Gunn and Safran in a written statement. “Our commitment to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Harley Quinn, and the rest…

South Korean computer chipmaker SK Hynix said it might be forced to sell its manufacturing operations in China if a U.S. crackdown on exports of semiconductor technology and manufacturing equipment to China intensifies. SK Hynix’s chief marketing officer, Kevin Noh, raised those concerns during a conference call after the company reported its operating profit dropped 60% in the last quarter from 2021, a decline it blamed on a deteriorating business environment. Global inflation amplified by Russia’s war on Ukraine and rising interest rates imposed by central banks to counter surging prices have slowed consumer spending on the kinds of high-tech products requiring computer chips. SK Hynix and other semiconductor makers are also navigating new U.S. restrictions on exports of advanced semiconductors and chipmaking equipment to China. Such limits were in…