Tesla CEO Elon Musk seemed to rally behind GameStop's epic surge on Tuesday, tweeting out a link to the Reddit board that's largely hyped the stock. CNBC reports: Shares of GameStop, which jumped 92.7% Tuesday, were up more than 60% in after hours trading following Musk's tweet, which linked to the "wallstreetbets" Reddit chat room that has more than 2 million subscribers. The Tesla CEO tweeted "Gamestonk!!" The stock surged earlier in the day after Social Capital's Chamath Palihapitiya said in a tweet that he bought GameStop call options, betting the stock will go higher. The degenerates over at r/wallstreetbets don't appear to be very fond of CNBC's coverage of the investing forum. In an open letter to CNBC, u/RADIO02118 writes: Before you spend another day hosting your shill hedge fund buddies to come on the air and demonize r/wallstreetbets I hope you read this.

Your contempt for the retail investor (your audience) is palpable and if you donâ(TM)t get it together, youâ(TM)ll lose an entire new generation of investors.

I keep thinking about these funds that are short GME like your boys at Melvin Capital / your coverage of this subreddit and Iâ(TM)m getting madder and madder.

These funds can manipulate the market via your network and if they screw up big because they donâ(TM)t even know the basics of portfolio risk 101 and using position sizing, they just get a bailout from their billionaire friends at Citadel. Then they have the nerve to turn us into public enemy #1 just because we believe in an underdog company getting a second chance.

We donâ(TM)t have billionaires to bail us out when we mess up our portfolio risk and a position goes against us. We canâ(TM)t go on TV and make attempts to manipulate millions to take our side of the trade. If we mess up as bad as they did, weâ(TM)re wiped out, have to start from scratch and are back to giving handjobs behind the dumpster at Wendyâ(TM)s.

Seriously. Motherfuck these people. I sincerely hope they suffer. We want to see the loss porn.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Remember the app audit Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promised to carry out a little under three years ago at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Actually the tech giant is very keen that you don't. The UK's information commissioner just told a parliamentary subcommittee on online harms and disinformation that a secret arrangement between her office and Facebook prevents her from publicly answering whether or not Facebook contacted the ICO about completing a much-trumpeted 'app audit'. "I think I could answer that question with you and the committee in private," information commissioner Elizabeth Denham told questioner, Kevin Brennan, MP.

Pressed on responding, then and there, on the question of whether Facebook ever notified the regulator about completing the app audit -- with Brennan pointing out "after all it was a commitment Mark Zuckerberg gave in the public domain before a US Senate committee" -- Denham referred directly to a private arrangement with Facebook which she suggested prevented her from discussing such details in public. "It's part of an agreement that we struck with Facebook," she told the committee. "In terms of our litigation against Facebook. So there is an agreement that's not in the public domain and that's why I would prefer to discuss this in private."

SpaceX has begun launching Starlink satellites with laser links that will help provide broadband coverage in polar regions. As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter on Sunday, these satellites "have laser links between the satellites, so no ground stations are needed over the poles." From a report: The laser links are included in 10 Starlink satellites just launched into polar orbits. The launch came two weeks after SpaceX received Federal Communications Commission approval to launch the 10 satellites into polar orbits at an altitude of 560km. "All sats launched next year will have laser links," Musk wrote in another tweet yesterday, indicating that the laser systems will become standard on Starlink satellites in 2022. For now, SpaceX is only including laser links on polar satellites. "Only our polar sats have lasers this year & are v0.9," Musk wrote. Alaskan residents will benefit from the polar satellites, SpaceX told the FCC in an application to change the orbit of some of its satellites in April 2020.

Microsoft has a habit of reigniting the Mac vs. PC conflict for its Surface ads, and this time it's going after Apple's Touch Bar. In a new TV commercial, aired during Sunday night's NFL championship games, Microsoft pits Apple's MacBook Pro against the company's Surface Pro 7. It's a chance for Microsoft to mock Apple's Touch Bar in a TV commercial for the first time. From a report: "Mac gave me this little bar, but why can't they just give me a whole touchscreen?" asks a boy comparing the two laptops. That's something that some MacBook Pro users have been calling for, or just the removal of the Touch Bar altogether. Apple is now reportedly planning a redesign for the MacBook Pro later this year, with the Touch Bar rumored to be replaced by physical function keys. Elsewhere in the ad, Microsoft tries to position the Surface Pro 7 as a gaming device. "It is a much better gaming device," claims the ad, which is an unusual way to frame Microsoft's popular Surface device.

Google Play's crazy automated app review process strikes again. From a report: This time, the puritan robot overlords that run the Play Store briefly decided that listing support for common subtitle files is enough to get your app banned. The developer for Just (Video) Player wrote in the app's bug tracker, "After a tiny unrelated description update, Just Player got suspended from the Google Play Store for "Sexual Content and Profanity policy". Google finds issues with following: Full description (en_US): "* Subtitles: SRT, SSA, ASS, TTML, VTT."" Yes, just listing standard video player features like support for the "ASS" subtitle format was apparently enough to temporarily earn a suspension. The developer says they "immediately filed an appeal" and today, the app is back up with the ASS subtitle listing still in the description.

Brian Fagioli, writing at BetaNews: Today, Plex launches a retro video game streaming service that should make playing older titles even easier. Called "Plex Arcade," it currently only offers games licensed from Atari, so we are talking really old-school stuff here, folks (think Centipede and Combat). At $4.99 month ($2.99 for those with Plex Pass) it is rather affordable. Unfortunately, there is one big catch -- Linux users are being left out.

Google said today that a North Korean government hacking group has targeted members of the cyber-security community engaging in vulnerability research. From a report: The attacks have been spotted by the Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG), a Google security team specialized in hunting advanced persistent threat (APT) groups. In a report published earlier today, Google said North Korean hackers used multiple profiles on various social networks, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, Discord, and Keybase, to reach out to security researchers using fake personas. Email was also used in some instances, Google said. "After establishing initial communications, the actors would ask the targeted researcher if they wanted to collaborate on vulnerability research together, and then provide the researcher with a Visual Studio Project," said Adam Weidemann, a security researcher with Google TAG.

In Apple and Epic's ongoing court battle over App Store fees, one of the key sticking points has been Apple's insistence on maintaining a 30 percent cut as a cornerstone of the storefront. But newly revealed Apple executive emails from the case show that the App Store rules that Apple flouts as essential to the fairness of the app economy were carefully negotiated into existence over time in a way that ensured Apple wasn't "leaving money on the table." From a report: The emails date back to a 2011 discussion, which included Apple software and services leader Eddy Cue, around how Apple would handle subscription video applications on the Apple TV -- an important conversation, given the rise in popularity of streaming services. And while the discussion doesn't offer much insight on Apple's existing 30 percent fee for the App Store, it does reveal how malleable those rules were when it came to maximizing profit. The company examined a variety of options, including a 40 percent one-time cut, a 30 percent one-time cut, a 30 percent ongoing fee, or more individualized deals with services like the NBA and MLB.

A wide-range of services including Gmail, Google, business collaboration service Slack, Amazon, Twitch, Hulu, and Spotify are suffering outages, several users and readers have reported. The reports started to come in half an hour ago, but the cause of the disruption is yet to be identified.

Update: Verizon says there is a fiber cut in Brooklyn. Further reading: Verizon Fios is experiencing outages on the East Coast.

Twitter acquired the newsletter publishing company Revue for an undisclosed sum, part of an effort to expand its business and give writers who distribute their work on Twitter more features. From a report: Revue's service, which lets people manage newsletter publishing and subscriptions, will continue operating as a "standalone service" within Twitter, the company said Tuesday in a blog announcing the deal. Twitter will eliminate some of the service's fees to encourage more people to create newsletters, and will take a 5% cut on subscription revenue collected through Revue.

Part of Revue's appeal to Twitter is that it could help expand the business outside of advertising, which generates more than 85% of Twitter's annual revenue, and give some of the site's more popular users a way to make money from their followers. "You can expect audience-based monetization to be an area that we'll continue to develop new ways to support," Twitter executives wrote in the blog. Twitter has also confirmed that it's considering options for its own subscription service.

With Mozilla's release of Firefox 85 on Tuesday, Adobe's once ubiquitous Flash technology is really gone for good. The software had been widely used to expand gaming, video and animation on the web, though Adobe stopped supporting it at the end of 2020. Firefox was the last major browser to support Flash. From a report: Apple, whose late boss Steve Jobs helped sink Flash by banning it from iPhones and iPads, ditched Flash with Safari 14 in September 2020. Google Chrome, the most widely used browser, completely excised it on Jan. 19 with version 88. Microsoft's Edge 88 followed suit on Jan. 21. The schedule of removals shows just how hard it is to advance technology foundations as widely used as the web. Browser makers for years wanted to remove Flash, replacing it with more advanced standards built directly into the web. Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" letter in 2010 solidified the opposition, and Adobe started recognizing the software's doom by scrapping the Android version of Flash in 2011. It's taken years of effort to drop Flash completely. Adobe took until 2017 to announce that Flash would be completely unsupported at the end of 2020, and still some are willing to jump through lots of hoops to keep Flash around a little longer.

YouTube has paid out more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media organizations over the last three years, according to a new letter published by CEO Susan Wojcicki. From a report: In Wojcicki's first letter to creators of 2021, the CEO spent some time addressing YouTube's growth. The number of new channels that joined the company's Partner Program, which allows creators to earn advertising revenue, more than doubled in 2020. YouTube also "contributed approximately $16 billion to the U.S. GDP in 2019, supporting the equivalent of 345,000 full time jobs," according to an Oxford Economics report that Wojcicki highlights. The letter also focuses on the work YouTube's team still has in front of them. Mainly, transparency, especially where content strikes and advertising dollars are concerned. Wojcicki noted that at the "scale we operate, it's hard for creators to keep up with changing Community Guidelines." Wojcicki's letter states that YouTube wants to be better about communicating changes to avoid channel strikes. After three strikes within a 90-day period, a channel is terminated.

PepsiCo, the planetary purveyor of sugary drinks, greasy chips, and (weirdly) oatmeal, hummus, and gazpacho(?) is partnering with Beyond Meat, the publicly traded plant-based protein provider, on a poorly named joint venture to hawk new plant-based food and beverages to consumers. From a report: The PLANeT Partnership (which was clearly branded by the same genius behind the comic sans font), will combine Beyond Meat's skills with protein prestidigitation and PepsiCo's marketing and manufacturing savvy to flood the global market with new snacks and drinks, the two companies said. Neither company disclosed any financial terms and other pesky details around who, what, where, and when, except to say that the the joint venture operations will be managed through the newly created PLANeT Partnership. (If the companies put as much effort into running the business as they did with naming and branding it, Impossible Foods shouldn't have much to worry about... The capitalization and branding of this thing is an affront to the English language is all I'm saying.)

Spurred by big demand for top-of-the-line iPhones, the average selling price in the U.S. hit $873 last quarter, up from $809 a year ago, according to a report from Chicago-based Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. From a report: Apple still makes a huge chunk of its revenue and profits from iPhone sales, though services are an increasing source of both as well. "For the full quarter, the new iPhone 12 models, and in particular the most expensive ones, garnered a significant share of sales," said CIRP partner and co-founder Josh Lowitz.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Amazon is enabling a new feature today that allows Alexa to proactively complete tasks around the house, such as turning off lights, based on your habits and frequent requests. Alexa has been able to sense these habits and ask about them since 2018 -- the company calls them "hunches" -- but before this update, Alexa would ask permission before acting on something like lowering the thermostat before you went to bed. If the new proactive hunches are enabled, though, Alexa will skip asking for permission for a task and just do it.

While proactive hunches seem like they could make Alexa a lot more useful, having granular controls over what Alexa can automatically act on will be important. An Amazon support article seems to suggest you can select what types of hunches Alexa can complete on its own, but we've reached out to Amazon for more information on how much you can customize proactive hunches. In addition, Amazon is rolling out its Guard Plus security subscription service. "The service can alert you if Alexa picks up on certain types of sounds in your home and offers access to human agents who can call emergency services on your behalf, similar to ADT," reports The Verge. It'll cost $4.99 per month.

The company is also rolling out an energy dashboard via the Alexa app that can monitor and estimate how much power compatible devices connected to Alexa use if their manufacturers support it.