Fintech giant Stripe announced on Thursday that it would let customers accept cryptocurrency payments, starting with USDC stablecoins, initially only on Solana, Ethereum and Polygon. TechCrunch reports: This will be the first time that Stripe has taken crypto payments since 2018, when it dropped support for Bitcoin due to it being too unstable. Stripe in 2022 tried its first reentry into the crypto market when it announced payouts (but not payments) in USDC, with Twitter as its marquee customer for the service. Thursday's news has no customer names attached to it.

On Wednesday the company unveiled a long list of other launches, the most significant update being that Stripe, for the very first time, would let customers integrate competing payment providers with Stripe's other financial services tooling. Thursday's nod to expanding crypto support is also part of that bigger strategy to open up its walled garden. A brief timeline of Stripe's dance with crypto underscores the tricky line that Stripe has walked over the years when it comes to cryptocurrency. True to its disruptive roots as a fintech, the company has wanted to be in the middle of the conversation around how blockchain-based technologies will affect financial services. But it runs the risk of subverting its bigger business and positioning as a stable and sensible financial powerhouse if it dabbles too deeply or for too long in periods of instability. The company processed $1 trillion in transactions last year, and it's still growing; it is currently worth $65 billion on paper.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to restore regulations that expand government oversight of broadband providersand aim to protect consumer access to the internet, a move that will reignite a long-running battle over the open internet. Known as net neutrality, the regulations were first put in place nearly a decade ago under the Obama administration and are aimed at preventing internet service providers like Verizon or Comcast from blocking or degrading the delivery of services from competitors like Netflix and YouTube. The rules were repealed under President Donald J. Trump, and have proved to be a contentious partisan issue over the years while pitting tech giants against broadband providers.

In a 3-to-2 vote along party lines, the five-member commission appointed by President Biden revived the rules that declare broadband a utility-like service regulated like phones and water. The rules also give the F.C.C. the ability to demand broadband providers report and respond to outages, as well as expand the agency's oversight of the providers' security issues. Broadband providers are expected to sue to try to overturn the reinstated rules.

The core purpose of the regulations is to prevent internet service providers from controlling the quality of consumers' experience when they visit websites and use services online. When the rules were established, Google, Netflix and other online services warned that broadband providers had the incentive to slow down or block access to their services. Consumer and free speech groups supported this view. There have been few examples of blocking or slowing of sites, which proponents of net neutrality say is largely because of fear that the companies would invite scrutiny if they did so. And opponents say the rules could lead to more and unnecessary government oversight of the industry.

TikTok owner ByteDance would prefer shutting down its loss-making app rather than sell it if the Chinese company exhausts all legal options to fight legislation to ban the platform from app stores in the U.S., Reuters reported Thursday, citing sources. From the report: The algorithms TikTok relies on for its operations are deemed core to ByteDance overall operations, which would make a sale of the app with algorithms highly unlikely, said the sources close to the parent. TikTok accounts for a small share of ByteDance's total revenues and daily active users, so the parent would rather have the app shut down in the U.S. in a worst case scenario than sell it to a potential American buyer, they said.

A shut-down would have limited impact on ByteDance's business while the company would not have to give up its core algorithm, said the sources, who declined to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media. It said late on Thursday in a statement posted on Toutiao, a media platform it owns, that it had no plan to sell TikTok, in response to an article by The Information saying ByteDance is exploring scenarios for selling TikTok's U.S. business without the algorithm that recommends videos to TikTok users.

Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a rule issued on Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). From a report: New limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired electric plants are the Biden administration's most ambitious effort yet to roll back planet-warming pollution from the power sector, the nation's second-largest contributor to the climate crisis. The rules are a key part of Joe Biden's pledge to eliminate carbon pollution from the electricity sector by 2035 and economy-wide by 2050.

The rule was among four separate measures targeting coal and natural gas plants that the EPA said would provide "regular certainty" to the power industry and encourage them to make investments to transition "to a clean energy economy." They also include requirements to reduce toxic wastewater pollutants from coal-fired plants and to safely manage so-called coal ash in unlined storage ponds. The new rules "reduce pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants, protect communities from pollution and improve public health -- all while supporting the long-term, reliable supply of the electricity needed to power America forward," the EPA administrator, Michael Regan, told reporters at a White House briefing.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Consumer Intelligence Research Partners is out with a report on how iPhone activations compare to Android in the US. The latest data shows a notable drop over the last year bringing Apple's US smartphone market share of new activations back in time six years. CIRP shared its new iPhone report on its Substack this morning. The firm notes that while it believes Apple's installed smartphone base is higher than the recent share of US smartphone activations, the latter has taken a dive.

As shown below, the metric peaked at 40% for Q1 and Q2 in 2023 with Apple seeing a decline to 33% of new smartphone activations in the US as of Q1 2024, says CIRP. That means 2 out of 3 new smartphone activations in the US are Android devices. Per CIRP's data, Apple hasn't seen numbers that low since 2017.

The Federal Communications Commission is set to vote to restore net neutrality on Thursday in the latest volley of a yearslong game of political ping-pong. From a report: The commission is expected to reclassify internet service providers (ISPs) -- e.g., broadband companies like AT&T and Comcast -- as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. That classification would open ISPs up to greater oversight by the FCC. The vote is widely expected to go in favor of reinstating net neutrality since FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, controls the agency's agenda. Rosenworcel moved forward with the measure after a fifth commissioner was sworn in, restoring a Democratic majority on the panel. Net neutrality proponents say that oversight can help ensure fair access to an open internet by upholding principles like no blocking or throttling of internet traffic. Opponents, including industry players, fear it could halt innovation and subject ISPs to onerous price regulations. Update FCC Votes To Restore Net Neutrality.

Ford's electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall. From a report: Ford, like most automakers, has announced plans to shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to EVs in coming years. But it is the only traditional automaker to break out results of its retail EV sales. And the results it reported Wednesday show another sign of the profit pressures on the EV business at Ford and other automakers.

The EV unit, which Ford calls Model e, sold 10,000 vehicles in the quarter, down 20% from the number it sold a year earlier. And its revenue plunged 84% to about $100 million, which Ford attributed mostly to price cuts for EVs across the industry. That resulted in the $1.3 billion loss before interest and taxes (EBIT), and the massive per-vehicle loss in the Model e unit. A price war among EVs for about a year and a half has made profitability very difficult said Ford CFO John Lawler. He said while Ford has removed about $5,000 in cost on each Mustang Mach-E, "revenue is dropping faster than we can take out the cost." In 2023, Ford Model e reported a full-year EBIT loss of $4.7 billion on sales of 116,000 EVs, or an average of $40,525 per vehicle, just more than a third of the first quarter loss.

Apple has rejected Spotify's new version of its iOS app with in-app pricing information for users in the European Union, the audio streaming firm said on Thursday. Reuters: The Swedish company submitted a new version of its app to Apple with basic pricing and website information, which is a minimum requirement under the European Commission's ruling in its music streaming case, it said in a post on X on Wednesday. Spotify said the Cupertino, California based-Apple rejected its update in a response directly sent to the company.

"Apple has once again defied the European Commission's decision, rejecting our update for attempting to communicate with customers about our prices unless we pay Apple a new tax. Their disregard for consumers and developers is matched only by their disdain for the law," a spokesperson for Spotify said in a statement. In March, Brussels fined Apple with 1.84 billion euros ($1.97 billion) for thwarting competition from music streaming rivals via restrictions on its App Store, marking its first ever EU antitrust penalty, following a 2019 complaint from Spotify.

The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said AI will result in "minimal" need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI's rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond. From a report: K Krithivasan, TCS chief executive, told the Financial Times that while "we have not seen any job reduction" so far, wider adoption of generative AI among multinational clients would overhaul the kind of customer help centres that have created mass employment in countries such as India and the Philippines. "In an ideal phase, if you ask me, there should be very minimal incoming call centres having incoming calls at all," he said. "We are in a situation where the technology should be able to predict a call coming and then proactively address the customer's pain point." He said chatbots would soon be able to analyse a customer's transaction history and do much of the work done by call centre agents. "That's where we are going...I don't think we are there today -- maybe a year or so down the line," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The fertility rate in the United States has been trending down for decades, and a new report shows that another drop in births in 2023 brought the rate down to the lowest it's been in more than century. There were about 3.6 million babies born in 2023, or 54.4 live births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. After a steep plunge in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fertility rate has fluctuated. But the 3% drop between 2022 and 2023 brought the rate just below the previous low from 2020, which was 56 births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age.

The birth rate fell among most age groups between 2022 and 2023, the new report shows. The teen birth rate reached another record low of 13.2 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19, which is 79% lower than it was at the most recent peak from 1991. However, the rate of decline was slower than it's been for the past decade and a half. Meanwhile, births continued to shift to older mothers. Older age groups saw smaller decreases in birth rates, and the birth rate was highest among women ages 30 to 34 -- with about 95 births for every 1,000 women in this group in 2023. Women 40 and older were the only group to see an increase in birth rate, although -- at less than 13 births for every 1,000 women -- it remained lower than any other age group.

An international team of scientists used 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species covering almost 8,000 known flowering plant genera to create the most up-to-date understanding of the flowering plant tree of life. The research has been published in the journal Nature. Phys.Org reports: The major milestone for plant science, led by [Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew] and involving 138 organizations internationally, was built on 15 times more data than any comparable studies of the flowering plant tree of life. Among the species sequenced for this study, more than 800 have never had their DNA sequenced before. The sheer amount of data unlocked by this research, which would take a single computer 18 years to process, is a huge stride towards building a tree of life for all 330,000 known species of flowering plants -- a massive undertaking by Kew's Tree of Life Initiative.

The flowering plant tree of life, much like our own family tree, enables us to understand how different species are related to each other. The tree of life is uncovered by comparing DNA sequences between different species to identify changes (mutations) that accumulate over time like a molecular fossil record. Our understanding of the tree of life is improving rapidly in tandem with advances in DNA sequencing technology. For this study, new genomic techniques were developed to magnetically capture hundreds of genes and hundreds of thousands of letters of genetic code from every sample, orders of magnitude more than earlier methods. A key advantage of the team's approach is that it enables a wide diversity of plant material, old and new, to be sequenced, even when the DNA is badly damaged. The vast treasure troves of dried plant material in the world's herbarium collections, which comprise nearly 400 million scientific specimens of plants, can now be studied genetically.

[...] Across all 9,506 species sequenced, more than 3,400 came from material sourced from 163 herbaria in 48 countries. Additional material from plant collections around the world (e.g., DNA banks, seeds, living collections) have been vital for filling key knowledge gaps to shed new light on the history of flowering plant evolution. The team also benefited from publicly available data for more than 1,900 species, highlighting value of the open science approach to future genomic research. Flowering plants alone account for about 90% of all known plant life on land and are found virtually everywhere on the planet -- from the steamiest tropics to the rocky outcrops of the Antarctic Peninsula. [...] Utilizing 200 fossils, the authors scaled their tree of life to time, revealing how flowering plants evolved across geological time. They found that early flowering plants did indeed explode in diversity, giving rise to more than 80% of the major lineages that exist today shortly after their origin. However, this trend then declined to a steadier rate for the next 100 million years until another surge in diversification about 40 million years ago, coinciding with a global decline in temperatures. These new insights would have fascinated Darwin and will surely help today's scientists grappling with the challenges of understanding how and why species diversify. A list of "remarkable species" included in the flowering plant tree of life is embedded below the article.

Looking ahead, the study's authors believe this data will aid future attempts to identify new species, refine plant classification, uncover new medicinal compounds, and conserve plants in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced new rules for the airline industry that will require airlines to automatically give cash refunds to passengers for canceled and significantly delayed flights. They will also require airlines to give cash refunds if your bags are lost and not delivered within 12 hours.

"This is a big day for America's flying public," said Buttigieg at a Wednesday morning news conference. According to Buttigieg, the new rules are the biggest expansion of passenger rights in the department's history. ABC News reports: Airlines can no longer decide how long a delay must be before a refund is issued. Under the new DOT rules, the delays covered would be more than three hours for domestic flights and more than six hours for international flights, the agency said. This includes tickets purchased directly from airlines, travel agents and third-party sites such as Expedia and Travelocity.

The refunds must be issued within seven days, according to the new DOT rules, and must be in cash unless the passenger chooses another form of compensation. Airlines can no longer issue refunds in forms of vouchers or credits when consumers are entitled to receive cash. Airlines will have six months to comply with the new rules.

The DOT said it is also working on rules related to family seating fees, enhancing rights for wheelchair-traveling passengers for safe and dignified travel and mandating compensation and amenities if flights are delayed or canceled by airlines. Buttigieg said the DOT is also protecting airline passengers from being surprised by hidden fees -- a move he estimates will have Americans billions of dollars every year. The DOT rules include that passengers will receive refunds for extra services paid for and not provided, such as Wi-Fi, seat selection or inflight entertainment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing. The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups, according to researchers at the Citizen Lab, a technology and security research lab affiliated with the University of Toronto.

These apps help users type Chinese characters more efficiently and are ubiquitous on devices used by Chinese people. The four most popular apps -- built by major internet companies like Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek -- basically account for all the typing methods that Chinese people use. Researchers also looked into the keyboard apps that come preinstalled on Android phones sold in China. What they discovered was shocking. Almost every third-party app and every Android phone with preinstalled keyboards failed to protect users by properly encrypting the content they typed. A smartphone made by Huawei was the only device where no such security vulnerability was found.

In August 2023, the same researchers found that Sogou, one of the most popular keyboard apps, did not use Transport Layer Security (TLS) when transmitting keystroke data to its cloud server for better typing predictions. Without TLS, a widely adopted international cryptographic protocol that protects users from a known encryption loophole, keystrokes can be collected and then decrypted by third parties. Even though Sogou fixed the issue after it was made public last year, some Sogou keyboards preinstalled on phones are not updated to the latest version, so they are still subject to eavesdropping. [...] After the researchers got in contact with companies that developed these keyboard apps, the majority of the loopholes were fixed. But a few companies have been unresponsive, and the vulnerability still exists in some apps and phones, including QQ Pinyin and Baidu, as well as in any keyboard app that hasn't been updated to the latest version.

Samantha Cole reports via 404 Media: A Japan-based online art platform is banning kink content for users based in the US and UK, as laws in these countries continue to tighten around sites that allow erotic content. Pixiv is an image gallery site where artists primarily share illustrations, manga, and novels. The site announced on April 22 that starting April 25, users whose account region is set to the US or UK will be subject to Pixiv's new terms of use, "Restrictions for Healthy Expression in Specific Countries and Regions."

The restrictions include several kinds of content that are illegal in the US, including sexualized depictions of minors and bestiality, as well as non-consensual depictions and deepfakes. But it also includes "content that appeals to the prurient interest, is patently offensive in light of community standards where you are located or where such content may be accessed or distributed, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, or otherwise violates any applicable obscenity laws, rules or regulations." This is an invocation of the Miller test, which determines non-constitutionally protected obscenity. "I'd never say this a few years ago, but it's my personal fear that the next step is most major internet hosting services implementing these policies on an infrastructure level," said an artist who goes by kradeelav. "My colleagues are certainly planning for it by specifically looking for kink-friendly hosts, to actually making homebrew servers themselves in worst-case scenarios."