An anonymous reader shares a report: A funny thing happened in 2020: AMD won the gaming laptop for the first time ever. Until the Asus Zephyrus G14, we'd never seen a laptop with an AMD CPU and AMD GPU run circles around the competition. Since then, we've repeatedly seen that "AMD laptop" no longer means cheap. But now, AMD is setting its sights higher than mid-range gaming machines -- it just revealed it's building a new CPU aimed at the "pinnacle of gaming performance" with the "highest core, thread and cache ever." The new CPU line is codenamed "Dragon Range," and they'll live exclusively at 55W TDP and up -- enough power that they'll "largely exist in the space where gaming laptops are plugged in the majority of the time," says AMD director of technical marketing Robert Hallock.

NBC News is reporting that the United States has officially surpassed 1 million COVID-19 deaths -- "a once unthinkable scale of loss even for the country with the world's highest recorded toll from the virus." From the report: The number -- equivalent to the population of San Jose, California, the 10th largest city in the U.S. -- was reached at stunning speed: 27 months after the country confirmed its first case of the virus. While deaths from Covid have slowed in recent weeks, about 360 people have still been dying every day. The casualty count is far higher than what most people could have imagined in the early days of the pandemic [...].

Now, more than two years and 999,999 fatalities later, the U.S. death toll is the world's highest total by a significant margin, figures show. In a distant second is Brazil, which has recorded just over 660,000 confirmed Covid deaths.

Google is scrapping a time-consuming, twice-a-year staff performance review process in an effort to improve morale and reduce the time employees spend preparing the assessments, The Information reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the changes. From the report: CEO Sundar Pichai told staff Wednesday that the new program, which will take place only once a year, aims to give more employees a sense of accomplishment and acknowledge that "most Googlers are doing great work." The new system, which also creates an easier path to promotions, came after only 53% of Googlers said in surveys that the current system is "time well spent," Pichai said. The change makes Google the latest Silicon Valley company to switch to less-frequent reviews. Meta last year said it would conduct performance reviews once per year rather than twice. Google has for years conducted extensive performance review processes twice a year through a process that required extensive preparation from employees and managers. Now, the review process will happen once a year and staff won't have to prepare packets of information ahead of time, the company told employees. The company will still consider promotions twice a year.

The Federal Reserve intensified its fight against the worst inflation in 40 years by raising its benchmark short-term interest rate by a half-percentage point Wednesday -- its most aggressive move since 2000 -- and signaling further large rate hikes to come. From a report: The increase in the Fed's key rate raised it to a range of 0.75% to 1%, the highest point since the pandemic struck two years ago. The Fed also announced that it will start reducing its huge $9 trillion balance sheet, which consists mainly of Treasury and mortgage bonds. Those holdings more than doubled after the pandemic recession hit as the Fed bought trillions in bonds to try to hold down long-term borrowing rates. Reducing the Fed's holdings will have the effect of further raising loan costs throughout the economy. All told, the Fed's credit tightening will likely mean higher loan rates for many consumers and businesses over time, including for mortgages, credit cards and auto loans. Speaking at a news conference Wednesday, Chair Jerome Powell made clear that further large rate hikes are coming. "There is a broad sense on the committee," he said, referring to the Fed, "that additional (half-point) increases should be on the table in the next couple of meetings."

Amazon said on Wednesday that it aims to export locally produced Indian goods worth $20 billion by 2025, doubling its initial goal of $10 billion set for the same time frame as the e-commerce group attracts over 100,000 exporters in the key overseas market. From a report: It took the company -- which launched its exports program, called Amazon Global Selling, in India in 2015 -- three years to clock exports of $1 billion from the country, it said. The firm added the last $2 billion in just 17 months, it said at a virtual event Wednesday. In total, the company said it is on track to hit $5 billion in cumulative exports from India. "We are excited to build a strong foundation for MSMEs to realize their export potential, help them become globally competitive and contribute towards honorable Prime Minister's vision of making India an export powerhouse," said Amit Agarwal, SVP of India and Emerging Markets for Amazon, at the event.

The company behind the TurboTax tax-filing program will pay $141 million to customers across the United States who were deceived by misleading promises of free tax-filing services, New York's attorney general announced Wednesday. From a report: Under the terms of a settlement signed by the attorneys general of all 50 states, Mountain View, California-based Intuit Inc. will suspend TurboTax's "free, free, free" ad campaign and pay restitution to nearly 4.4 million taxpayers, New York Attorney General Letitia James said. James said her investigation into Intuit was sparked by a 2019 ProPublica report that found the company was using deceptive tactics to steer low-income tax filers away from the federally supported free services for which they qualified -- and toward its own commercial products, instead.

John Doerr, one of the most successful venture capitalists in the history of Silicon Valley, is giving $1.1 billion to Stanford University to fund a school focused on climate change and sustainability. From a report: The gift, which Mr. Doerr is making with his wife Ann, is the largest ever to a university for the establishment of a new school, and is the second largest gift to an academic institution, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Only Michael R. Bloomberg's 2018 donation of $1.8 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, ranks higher. The gift establishes the Doerrs as leading funders of climate change research and scholarship, and will place Stanford at the center of public and private efforts to wean the world off fossil fuels. "Climate and sustainability is going to be the new computer science," Mr. Doerr, who made his estimated $11.3 billion fortune investing in technology companies such as Slack, Google and Amazon, said in an interview. "This is what the young people want to work on with their lives, for all the right reasons."

The school, to be known as the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, will be a home to traditional academic departments related to topics such as planetary science, energy technology and food-and-water security. It will also feature several interdisciplinary institutes and a center focused on developing practical policy and technology solutions to the climate crisis. "The school will absolutely focus on policy issues and on asking what would it take to move the world toward more sustainable practices and better behaviors," Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the Stanford president, said in an interview. Mr. Doerr joins a growing list of ultrawealthy men donating huge sums of money to the fight against global warming.

Venture capital returns have puked this year. The next dangerous stage is investor outflows. Financial Times: Back in the halcyon days of ... early 2021, it looked like venture capital was the hottest game in town. Hedge funds were piling in. Even private equity firms were getting involved in early-stage company investing. Investors loved the combination of fat returns and the lack of volatility in private markets. But the VC cycle now looks like it has hit a sudden stop. Refinitiv's venture capital index, which uses the performance of individual VC portfolios and listed stocks to mimic the performance of the broader industry, tanked another 24.2 per cent in April, taking its 2022 loss to a comically bad 45.8 per cent (NB, the Nasdaq is "only" down 19.7 per cent YTD).

That is comfortably its worst monthly performance since worst of the dotcom bust two decades ago. Of course, a lot of venture capital funds are unlikely to be marking down their books to anywhere near these levels. Some may just be doing better than others (performance persistence is higher in VC than in any other investment industry), but the advantage of private market accounting and negotiated and infrequent funding rounds means that valuations and returns can be massaged a little. There might even be a bit of schadenfreude at the pain suffered by Tiger Global lately, which many venture capitalists saw as an annoyingly uppity interloper-dilettante in Silicon Valley. But the reality is that the bottom has dropped out of tech stock valuations lately -- both public and private -- and anyone who is not marking down their positions heavily might actually unnerve investors more than assuage them.

An anonymous reader writes: Sony struck a major blow against censorship after defying a Chinese government demand to delete the Statue Of Liberty from "Spiderman: No Way Home" ahead of its release. The bombshell rejection was revealed by "multiple sources," per a recent article by Puck. According to the piece, Chinese regulators had asked if the Japanese entertainment giant could "delete the Statue of Liberty from the ending of the film." Sony unsurprisingly declined the demand given the prominence of Lady Liberty in the climax in which the three spidermen swing around the iconic symbol of freedom while battling supervillains, Puck reported. Undaunted, China then inquired if the monument could be "minimized," according to the report. Specifically, they'd wondered "if Sony could cut a few of the more patriotic shots of [Tom] Holland standing atop the crown, or dull the lighting so that Lady Liberty's visage wasn't so front-and-center," per Puck.

Microsoft 3D Movie Maker was initially launched in 1995. The program allowed you to place 3-D objects within environments to create films. The software looks dated now, but it was a fun way to play around with 3-D effects back in the day. Now, the classic program has been open sourced by Microsoft. From a report: It appears that a 3D Movie Maker enthusiast was able to convince Microsoft's Scot Hanselman to open source the software by "nerd sniping." That term refers to when a person claims something cannot be done with the aim of someone proving them wrong. "What's the best way to get something done? Nerd-snipe an engineer and tell them it can't be done. I HATE being told something can't be done," said Microsoft's Scott Hanselman.

Would you like an NFT with your Starbucks latte? The coffee giant this week announced its plans to enter the Web3 space with the launch of its own NFT collection later this year where the individual digital collectibles also provide their owners with access to exclusive content experiences and other benefits, it said. From a report: The company touted its plans to investors on its fiscal Q2 2022 earnings call by explaining how NFTs can help Starbucks extend its brand's concept of the "third place" -- meaning a place between home and work where people can feel a sense of belonging over coffee. "Emerging technologies associated with Web3, and specifically NFTs, now enable this aspiration and allow us to extend who Starbucks has always been at our core," Starbucks Chief Marketing Officer, Brady Brewer told investors on the call. "We are creating the digital third place. To achieve this, we will broaden our framework of what it means for people to be a member of the Starbucks community, adding new concepts such as ownership and community-based membership models that we see developing in the Web3 space," he added.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The realm of physics offers the exciting possibility of "wormholes" that could let us collapse space and time. But here on Earth, most of us are subject to more mundane realities -- including that the rich and powerful usually get what they want. Dick Merryman, a 79-year-old computer engineer, got a reminder of that last month when Jump Operations -- the holding company for crypto giant Jump Trading -- put the legal screws to him to obtain wormhole.com, a domain he has owned for years and that corresponds to an email he created for he and his wife. For Merryman, the domain reflects his fondness for astrophysicist Carl Sagan, whose 1985 novel "Contact" deployed a "wormhole" to let characters skip across light years. Merryman purchased the wormhole.com domain in 1994, creating a simple placeholder website that displays a cosmic picture.

For Jump, however, "wormhole" has a very different significance. It is the name of a crypto platform that creates "bridges" between popular blockchains such as Solana and Ethereum, and in which Jump has a very significant investment. While Jump is currently using the wormholenetwork.com to host Wormhole-related content, it has coveted the shorter name owned by Merryman, and began trying to acquire it last year. In June of 2021, someone at Jump used a third-party domain broker to approach Merryman and offer $2,500 for the name. The latter rebuffed the request, saying -- perhaps in jest -- that the price was a "firm US$50000." To Merryman's surprise, Jump promptly accepted the offer -- an acceptance that Merryman proceeded to ignore. After being badgered by the broker, he made his feelings clear a few weeks later. Jump then pulled out the big guns. The company's lawyers warned Merryman he was in breach of contract and that he had to honor the message saying he would sell for $50,000.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A federal judge has ordered all Internet service providers in the United States to block three pirate streaming services operated by Doe defendants who never showed up to court and hid behind false identities. The blocking orders affect Israel.tv, Israeli-tv.com, and Sdarot.tv, as well as related domains listed in the rulings and any other domains where the copyright-infringing websites may resurface in the future. The orders came in three essentially identical rulings (see here, here, and here) issued on April 26 in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Each ruling provides a list of 96 ISPs that are expected to block the websites, including Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. But the rulings say that all ISPs must comply even if they aren't on the list: "It is further ordered that all ISPs (including without limitation those set forth in Exhibit B hereto) and any other ISPs providing services in the United States shall block access to the Website at any domain address known today (including but not limited to those set forth in Exhibit A hereto) or to be used in the future by the Defendants ('Newly Detected Websites') by any technological means available on the ISPs' systems. The domain addresses and any Newly Detected Websites shall be channeled in such a way that users will be unable to connect and/or use the Website, and will be diverted by the ISPs' DNS servers to a landing page operated and controlled by Plaintiffs (the 'Landing Page')." That landing page is available here and cites US District Judge Katherine Polk Failla's "order to block all access to this website/service due to copyright infringement." "If you were harmed in any way by the Court's decision you may file a motion to the Federal Court in the Southern District of New York in the above case," the landing page also says.

The three lawsuits were filed by Israeli TV and movie producers and providers against Doe defendants who operate the websites. Each of the three rulings awarded damages of $7.65 million. TorrentFreak pointed out the rulings in an article Monday. The orders also contain permanent injunctions against the defendants themselves and other types of companies that provided services to the defendants or could do so in the future. That includes companies like Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Google, and Namecheap. In all three cases, none of the defendants responded to the complaints and did not appear in court, the judge's rulings said. "Defendants have gone to great lengths to conceal themselves and their ill-gotten proceeds from Plaintiffs' and this Court's detection, including by using multiple false identities and addresses associated with their operations and purposely deceptive contact information for the infringing Website," the rulings say. The defendants are liable for copyright infringement and violated the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the judge wrote [...].

technology_dude shares a report from Ars Technica: As part of its Artemis program to return humans to the Moon this decade, NASA has a minimum requirement that its "human landing system" must be able to deliver 865 kg to the lunar surface. This is based on the mass of two crew members and their equipment needed for a short stay. However, in selecting SpaceX's Starship vehicle to serve as its human lander, NASA has chosen a system with a lot more capability. Starship will, in fact, be able to deliver 100 metric tons to the surface of the Moon -- more than 100 times NASA's baseline goal.

"Starship can land 100 tons on the lunar surface," said Aarti Matthews, Starship Human Landing System program manager for SpaceX. "And it's really hard to think about what that means in a tangible way. One hundred tons is four fire trucks. It's 100 Moon rovers. My favorite way to explain this to my kids is that it's the weight of more than 11 elephants." Matthews made her comments last week at the ASCENDxTexas space conference in Houston. She was responding to a question from an audience member, Jeff Michel, an engineer at Johnson Space Center. [...] "NASA specified a high-level need, but we, industry, are taking away one of your biggest constraints that you have in designing your payloads and your systems," she said. "It's significantly higher mass. It's essentially infinite volume for the purposes of this conversation. And the cost is an order of magnitude lower. I think that our NASA community, our payload community, should really think about this new capability that's coming online."

"We all need to be thinking bigger and better and really inspirationally about what we can do," Matthews said. "Anyone who has worked on hardware design for space application knows you're fighting for kilograms, and sometimes you're fighting for grams, and that takes up so much time and energy. It really limits ultimately what your system can do. That's gone away entirely." [...] "If you, as an engineer, are developing an in-situ resource utilization system, what does your system look like when you have no mass constraint?" she asked. "What about when you have no volume constraint? That would be the exciting thing that I would like to hear from NASA engineers, what they can do with this capability." "The engineer says NASA is not thinking big enough," adds Slashdot reader technology_dude. "I think it's pretty obvious what the payload should be, a nuclear powered boring machine. With flamethrower weapons just in case! Leave a comment for my resume. Maybe I'll call."