A new report (PDF) from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) finds that installing rooftop solar panels and community solar systems to serve the equivalent of 30 million American homes would create 1.77 millions jobs and $69 billion electricity bill savings over the next five years. CleanTechnica reports: In addition to creating 1.77 million new solar jobs and reducing energy bills by $69 billion, the report found that enacting the 30 Million Solar Homes policies would over five years: Eliminate global warming air pollution equivalent to closing 48 coal-burning power plants or taking 42 million cars off the road for a year; Increase new solar capacity nationally by 151 GW; and Power the equivalent of 20 million households in marginalized communities with local solar.

In the report, these economic and environmental benefits are broken down by state and congressional district. An interactive map further illustrates the local impacts of the 30 Million Solar Homes proposal and gives viewers an opportunity to share the report with their elected officials.

Tencent has announced plans to buy British video game company Sumo Group for $1.27 billion. The Verge reports: The Chinese tech giant already has an 8.75-percent stake in the developer, as Gamesindustry.biz reports, and the offer represents a 43-percent premium on Sumo's current valuation. Based in Sheffield, England, Sumo's well-regarded core studio Sumo Digital has carried out contract work for many of the biggest names in gaming. It developed Sony's PlayStation 5 launch title Sackboy: A Big Adventure and was the primary studio behind Microsoft's Crackdown 3 for Xbox consoles and PC. In 2017 Sumo released Snake Pass for multiple platforms, its first foray into original IP.

"The three founders of Sumo, who work in the business, Paul Porter, Darren Mills and I are passionate about what we do and are fully committed to continuing in our roles," says Sumo CEO Carl Cavers in a statement. "The opportunity to work with Tencent is one we just couldn't miss. It would bring another dimension to Sumo, presenting opportunities for us to truly stamp our mark on this amazing industry, in ways which have previously been out-of-reach." Cavers says Tencent has "demonstrated its commitment to backingâ Sumo's client work, as well as its own original IP, so things are unlikely to change too quickly. The buyout does, however, give Tencent yet another foothold in the international gaming industry, following prominent investments in companies like Epic, Riot, Activision, and Ubisoft. "Tencent intends to bring its expertise and resources to accelerate the growth of Sumo both in the UK and abroad, supporting Sumo in the market for top-notch creative talent, and the UK as a hub for game innovation," says Tencent's chief strategy officer James Mitchell. "We believe the proposed transaction benefits all stakeholders, delivers compelling value for Sumo shareholders, while enhancing the Sumo business for the future."

Governments must impose a global moratorium on the international spyware trade or face a world in which no mobile phone is safe from state-sponsored hackers, Edward Snowden has warned in the wake of revelations about the clients of NSO Group. The Guardian reports: Snowden, who in 2013 blew the whistle on the secret mass surveillance programs of the US National Security Agency, described for-profit malware developers as "an industry that should not exist." He made the comments in an interview with the Guardian after the first revelations from the Pegasus project, a journalistic investigation by a consortium of international media organizations into the NSO Group and its clients. [...] Snowden said the consortium's findings illustrated how commercial malware had made it possible for repressive regimes to place vastly more people under the most invasive types of surveillance. For traditional police operations to plant bugs or wiretap a suspect's phone, law enforcement would need to "break into somebody's house, or go to their car, or go to their office, and we'd like to think they'll probably get a warrant," he said. But commercial spyware made it cost-efficient for targeted surveillance against vastly more people. "If they can do the same thing from a distance, with little cost and no risk, they begin to do it all the time, against everyone who's even marginally of interest," he said. "If you don't do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it's not just going to be 50,000 targets. It's going to be 50 million targets, and it's going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect."

Part of the problem arose from the fact that different people's mobile phones were functionally identical to one another, he said. "When we're talking about something like an iPhone, they're all running the same software around the world. So if they find a way to hack one iPhone, they've found a way to hack all of them." He compared companies commercializing vulnerabilities in widely used mobile phone models to an industry of "infectioneers" deliberately trying to develop new strains of disease. "It's like an industry where the only thing they did was create custom variants of Covid to dodge vaccines," he said. "Their only products are infection vectors. They're not security products. They're not providing any kind of protection, any kind of prophylactic. They don't make vaccines -- the only thing they sell is the virus."

Snowden said commercial malware such as Pegasus was so powerful that ordinary people could in effect do nothing to stop it. Asked how people could protect themselves, he said: "What can people do to protect themselves from nuclear weapons? "There are certain industries, certain sectors, from which there is no protection, and that's why we try to limit the proliferation of these technologies. We don't allow a commercial market in nuclear weapons." He said the only viable solution to the threat of commercial malware was an international moratorium on its sale. "What the Pegasus project reveals is the NSO Group is really representative of a new malware market, where this is a for-profit business," he said. "The only reason NSO is doing this is not to save the world, it's to make money." He said a global ban on the trade in infection vectors would prevent commercial abuse of vulnerabilities in mobile phones, while still allowing researchers to identify and fix them. "The solution here for ordinary people is to work collectively. This is not a problem that we want to try and solve individually, because it's you versus a billion dollar company," he said. "If you want to protect yourself you have to change the game, and the way we do that is by ending this trade."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: China's tech tycoons are discovering their charitable side as they come under mounting regulatory scrutiny from Beijing. In the latest example, Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun handed over $2.2 billion of shares in the smartphone maker to two foundations, according to filings to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. That came after Meituan's Wang Xing and ByteDance's Zhang Yiming gave away parts of their fortune to charitable causes last month. The moves come as a crackdown on technology companies has intensified since November, when Jack Ma's Ant Group was forced to pull its giant initial public offering. It's a new era for the country's billionaires as China tightens regulations in areas from financial services and internet platforms to data security and overseas listings.

At the same time, the Chinese public is becoming increasingly concerned about inequality. In a speech in October, President Xi Jinping said the country's development was "unbalanced" and "common prosperity" should be the ultimate goal. "It's likely much more than coincidence that China's tech billionaires have begun to evince a strong charitable urge," said Brock Silvers, chief investment officer at Hong Kong-based private equity firm Kaiyuan Capital. "It could stem from deep patriotic feelings or Buddhist inclinations, but it appears to be strongly correlated to Beijing's recent regulatory crackdowns."

In June, Meituan founder Wang donated a $2.3 billion stake in the food delivery giant to his own philanthropic foundation. That came after China's antitrust watchdog announced an investigation into the company, and the billionaire posted a classical poem online that some saw as a veiled criticism of Beijing. That same month, ByteDance founder Zhang, China's fourth-richest person with a net worth of $44.5 billion, gave about $77 million of his own wealth to an education fund in his hometown. And in April, Tencent's Pony Ma, the second-richest with $56.7 billion, pledged to set aside $7.7 billion of the company's money toward curing societal ills and lifting China's countryside out of poverty.

The man behind last month's scraping of LinkedIn data, which exposed the location, phone numbers, and inferred salaries of 700 million users, says that he did it "for fun" -- though he is also selling the data. 9to5Mac reports: BBC News spoke with the man who took the data, under the name Tom Liner: "How would you feel if all your information was catalogued by a hacker and put into a monster spreadsheet with millions of entries, to be sold online to the highest paying cyber-criminal? That's what a hacker calling himself Tom Liner did last month 'for fun' when he compiled a database of 700 million LinkedIn users from all over the world, which he is selling for around $5,000 [...]. In the case of Mr Liner, his latest exploit was announced at 08:57 BST in a post on a notorious hacking forum [...] 'Hi, I have 700 million 2021 LinkedIn records,' he wrote. Included in the post was a link to a sample of a million records and an invite for other hackers to contact him privately and make him offers for his database."

Liner says he was also behind the scraping of 533 million Facebook profiles back in April (you can check whether your data was grabbed): "Tom told me he created the 700 million LinkedIn database using 'almost the exact same technique' that he used to create the Facebook list. He said: 'It took me several months to do. It was very complex. I had to hack the API of LinkedIn. If you do too many requests for user data in one time then the system will permanently ban you.'"

Malaysian authorities seized 1,069 bitcoin mining rigs, laid them out in a parking lot at police headquarters, and used a steamroller to crush them, as part of a joint operation between law enforcement in the city of Miri and electric utility Sarawak Energy. CNBC reports: Assistant Commissioner of Police Hakemal Hawari told CNBC the crackdown came after miners allegedly stole $2 million worth of electricity siphoned from Sarawak Energy power lines. A video of the event posted last week by local Sarawak news outlet Dayak Daily has since gone viral on social media.

Acting on a tip, authorities on the island of Borneo confiscated the rigs in six separate raids between February and April. In total, police destroyed about $1.26 million of mining equipment. Police opted to crush the mining gear rather than sell it, in accordance with a court order. Other countries, like China, have taken a different route, reportedly auctioning off seized rigs. Hawari said that electricity theft by bitcoin miners led to three houses burning down in the city. The Miri police chief told CNBC that there are no other active mining operations underway currently. The report notes that crypto mining is not illegal in Malaysia, although "there are stringent laws around power use."

"The Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance estimates that Malaysia accounts for 3.44% of all the world's bitcoin miners, placing it in the top ten mining destinations on the planet."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: iFixit co-founder and CEO Kyle Wiens has exposed how companies including Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft manipulate the design of their products and the supply chain to prevent consumers and third-party repairers from accessing necessary tools and parts to repair products such as smartphones and laptops. Speaking during the Productivity Commission's virtual right to repair public hearing on Monday, Weins took the opportunity to draw on specific examples of how some of the largest tech companies are obstructing consumers from a right to repair.

"We've seen manufacturers restrict our ability to buy parts. There's a German battery manufacturer named Varta that sells batteries to a wide variety of companies. Samsung happens to use these batteries in their Galaxy earbuds ... but when we go to Varta and say can we buy that part as a repair part, they'll say 'No, our contract with Samsung will not allow us to sell that.' We're seeing that increasingly," he said. "Apple is notorious for doing this with the chips in their computers. There's a particular charging chip on the MacBook Pro ... there is a standard version of the part and then there's the Apple version of the part that sits very slightly tweaked, but it's tweaked enough that it's only required to work in this computer, and that company again is under contractual requirement with Apple."

He continued, highlighting that a California-based recycler was contracted by Apple to recycle spare parts that were still in new condition. "California Apple stops providing service after seven years, so this was at seven years and Apple have warehouses full of spare parts, and rather than selling that out in the marketplace -- so someone like me who eagerly would've bought them -- they were paying the recycler to destroy them," Wiens said. Weins also pointed to an example involving a Microsoft Surface laptop. "[iFixit] rated it on our repairability score, we normally rate products from one to 10; the Surface laptop got a zero. It had a glued-in battery ... we had to actually cut our way into the product and destroyed it in the process of trying to get inside," he said.

A new study argues crappy U.S. broadband is an active policy choice -- and a direct result of pathetically weak U.S. lobbying and corporate finance laws. From a report: Over the last few years big internet service providers have killed net neutrality, eliminated most FCC oversight of broadband providers, derailed efforts to pass meaningful privacy rules, and thwarted a wide variety of proposals designed to deliver faster, cheaper fiber broadband competition. A new joint study by Common Cause and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union found that the telecom industry spent $234 million on lobbying during the 116th Congress alone, or nearly $230,000 a day. Comcast was the biggest spender at more than $43 million, with AT&T not far behind at $36 million. "The powerful ISP lobby will seemingly spend whatever it takes to keep politicians beholden to them and maintain a status quo that leaves too many Americans on the wrong side of the digital divide," the groups said.

It's a game that encourages people to 'get a life' -- build a house, make a Sim and fulfil their dreams. So why are so many players intent on murder? From a report: The Sims has far evolved from its humble beginnings in 2000, where you created characters and tended to their needs, like a slightly more demanding Tamagotchi. As the games became more advanced, The Sims provided opportunities for the lives of your characters to more closely mirror reality: they now have lifetime goals and desires, can feel disappointment and joy, and now even do their own laundry. But whether they live a rich and fulfilling life, or an existence defined by endless suffering, the Sims' destiny is entirely in your hands. Of course many players choose not to be benevolent Gods in the Sims world -- and instead aim to kill and torture as many Sims as possible. Death has hugely evolved over 21 years of gameplay; we're no longer just sticking Sims in a swimming pool and selling a ladder to watch them drown. Instead, we're watching them explode in rocket ships, choke on pufferfish or even be eaten by the 'Cowplant' -- a mutant Venus flytrap with a cow head for a face.

"The Sims see you controlling a little society, but that doesn't mean you're making it better. It reminds me of Bruce Almighty, where the role of God is handed over but that doesn't necessarily mean that's strictly a good thing. It's rather therapeutic just killing Sims, and being quite an irresponsible God," 26-year-old Dubliner RTGame (real name Daniel), who has 2.6 million subscribers on YouTube says. "I feel like a kid with a magnifying glass on the small ants. It sounds quite twisted but it's quite fun to do things like that in games like The Sims to see what happens. But yes, I do have a lot of Sims blood on my hands." He's far from alone. While many in the Sims streaming community focus their content on cutesy legacy-style playthroughs or intricate design challenges, there's an increasing interest in more boundary-pushing content. RTGame credits the popularity of his bizarre Sims series for helping him jump into streaming as a full-time career, while other YouTubers such as CallMeKevin and Plumbella count speed runs where they kill entire neighbourhoods among some of their most viewed content.

Nvidia's Shield TVs are some of the best streaming video boxes on the market, but following a recent update to Android TV, Shield TV users are starting to see ads on their home screen and they aren't happy about it. From a report: The latest update to Android TV on Shield TV devices began rolling out earlier this month and featured a small UI redesign that added large banner images to Android TV's home screen, similar to what you get when using Google TV devices like the Chromecast with Google TV. Now technically, Google calls these banner images "recommendations," as they are regularly updated and rotated to help users find new streaming content Google thinks they might enjoy. However, a number of Shield TV users consider these images to be advertisements (especially when they recommend shows on services users aren't even subscribed to), and as such, have taken to showing their displeasure with the recent update by review bombing the listing for the Android TV Home app, which now has a one-star rating across more than 800 reviews.

Zoom, the video-conferencing platform that became hugely popular during the Covid-19 pandemic, is spending a whopping $14.7 billion on cloud-based software company Five9 to boost its appeal with business clients. From a report: Zoom announced the acquisition Sunday night. In a statement, it said the move will "help enhance Zoom's presence with enterprise customers and allow it to accelerate its long-term growth opportunity." Five9 provides software to customer service centers for over 2,000 clients around the globe. Eric Yuan, Zoom's billionaire CEO and founder, said the addition of Five9 was a natural fit. "Enterprises communicate with their customers primarily through the contact center, and we believe this acquisition creates a leading customer engagement platform that will help redefine how companies of all sizes connect with their customers," he said in a statement.

OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team after years of research into machines that can learn to perform tasks like solving a Rubik's Cube. Company cofounder Wojciech Zaremba quietly revealed on a podcast hosted by startup Weights & Biases that OpenAI has shifted its focus to other domains, where data is more readily available. From a report: "So it turns out that we can make a gigantic progress whenever we have access to data. And I kept all of our machinery unsupervised, [using] reinforcement learning -- [it] work[s] extremely well. There [are] actually plenty of domains that are very, very rich with data. And ultimately that was holding us back in terms of robotics," Zaremba said. "The decision [to disband the robotics team] was quite hard for me. But I got the realization some time ago that actually, that's for the best from the perspective of the company."

In a statement, an OpenAI spokesperson told VentureBeat: "After advancing the state of the art in reinforcement learning through our Rubik's Cube project and other initiatives, last October we decided not to pursue further robotics research and instead refocus the team on other projects. Because of the rapid progress in AI and its capabilities, we've found that other approaches, such as reinforcement learning with human feedback, lead to faster progress in our reinforcement learning research."

Apple has removed Fakespot, a well-known app for detecting fake product reviews, from its App Store after Amazon complained the app provided misleading information and potential security risks. From a report: Fakespot's app works by analyzing the credibility of an Amazon listing's reviews and gives it a grade of A through F. It then provides shoppers with recommendations for products with high customer satisfaction. Amazon said it reported Fakespot to Apple for investigation after it grew concerned that a redesigned version of the app confused consumers by displaying Amazon's website in the app with Fakespot code and content overlaid on top of it. Amazon said it doesn't allow applications to do this. An Amazon spokesperson claimed, "The app in question provides customers with misleading information about our sellers and their products, harms our sellers' businesses, and creates potential security risks." By Friday afternoon, following a review from Apple, the app was no longer available on the App Store.

President Joe Biden walked back some of his criticism of Facebook, saying Monday he meant to accuse a dozen users, but not the social media platform itself, of spreading deadly lies about Covid vaccines. From a report: "Facebook isn't killing people," Biden said. Biden added that he hopes Facebook will do more to fight "the outrageous misinformation" about coronavirus vaccines being spread on its platform "instead of taking it personally that somehow I'm saying Facebook is killing people." Last week, Biden appeared to say just that: Asked outside the White House what his message was to platforms like Facebook regarding Covid disinformation, Biden said, "They're killing people. I mean they really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that's -- they're killing people," Biden said Friday.

The U.S. and a coalition of allies on Monday formally attributed the sweeping campaign against Microsoft Exchange email servers to hackers affiliated with China's Ministry of State Security. From a report: The group assessed with "high confidence" that Beijing-linked digital operators carried out the attack that ensnared hundreds of thousands of systems worldwide, a senior Biden administration official told reporters on Sunday. In addition, the partners alleged the ministry -- which oversees the civilian arm of Beijing's intelligence gathering operations -- has utilized contract hackers to conduct other malicious cyber activities around the globe, including a ransomware attack on an American company, and other pursuits to line the pockets of MSS officials.

The use of such hired muscle "was really eye-opening and surprising for us," said the official, who was only authorized to speak anonymously. The coalition includes the U.S., the so-called "Five Eye" nations, Japan, the European Union and NATO. Monday's announcement marks the first time the transatlantic alliance has condemned Chinese digital activities, the official said. The massive Exchange hack was first disclosed in March -- at the same time the Biden administration was dealing with the SolarWinds breach that has since been formally attributed to Russia's foreign intelligence service.