Block has confirmed a data breach involving a former employee who downloaded reports from Cash App that contained some U.S. customer information. From a report: In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 4, Block -- formerly known as Square -- said that the reports were accessed by the insider on December 10. "While this employee had regular access to these reports as part of their past job responsibilities, in this instance these reports were accessed without permission after their employment ended," the filing reads. Block refused to answer our questions about why a former employee still had access to this data, and for how long they retained access after their employment at the company had ended. The information in the reports included users' full names and brokerage account numbers, and for some customers the accessed data also included brokerage portfolio value, brokerage portfolio holdings, and stock trading activity for one trading day.

Amazon will block and flag employee posts on a planned internal messaging app that contain keywords pertaining to labor unions, according to internal company documents reviewed by The Intercept. From the report: An automatic word monitor would also block a variety of terms that could represent potential critiques of Amazon's working conditions, like "slave labor," "prison," and "plantation," as well as "restrooms" -- presumably related to reports of Amazon employees relieving themselves in bottles to meet punishing quotas.

"Our teams are always thinking about new ways to help employees engage with each other," said Amazon spokesperson Barbara M. Agrait. "This particular program has not been approved yet and may change significantly or even never launch at all." In November 2021, Amazon convened a high-level meeting in which top executives discussed plans to create an internal social media program that would let employees recognize co-workers' performance with posts called "Shout-Outs," according to a source with direct knowledge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Wing this morning announced that it is adding Texas to its list of drone delivery markets. On April 7, the Alphabet-owned operation will be arriving in Frisco and Little Elm, a pair of towns in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. The primary partner is Walgreens, where drones will be picking up health and wellness products. Also on the list is easyvet for pet meds, Texas Health, which provides first aid kits, and Blue Bell Creameries, which is dropping off ice cream as summer looms. Upon launch, the offerings will be available to select customers via invite.

"I do want to set clear expectations: Not everyone who lives within range of our drones will be able to order on Day 1," says CEO Adam Woodworth. "We're going to invite customers in groups to make sure everyone has a good first experience with drone delivery." Frisco and Little Elm become the second U.S. market and fifth overall currently being served by Wing. They join Christiansburg, Virginia; Helsinki, Finland; and Canberra and Logan, Australia. The pilots are still fairly limited, as Wing grapples with regulations and other roadblocks, though early last month it announced that it had made its 200,000th delivery.

Ai-Da is the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot that can paint as artists have painted for centuries. The Guardian reports: Devised in Oxford by [Aidan Meller], Ai-Da was created more than two years ago by a team of programmers, roboticists, art experts and psychologists, completed in 2019, and is updated as AI technology improves. She has already demonstrated her ability to sketch and create poems. Her new painting talent was unveiled ahead of the world premier of her solo exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which opens to the public on 22 April.

Titled Leaping into the Metaverse, Ai-Da Robot's Venice exhibition will explore the interface between human experience and AI technology, from Alan Turing to the metaverse, and will draw on Dante's concepts of purgatory and hell to explore the future of humanity in a world where AI technology continues to encroach on everyday human life. Soon, with the amount of data we freely give about ourselves, and through talking to our phones, computers, cars and even kitchen appliances, AI algorithms "are going to know you better than you do," Meller warned.

We are entering a world, he said, "not understanding which is human and which is machine." "How comfortable are you with that?" "What better thing to have a technological robot artist saying: 'Hang on, are you happy with me doing this?' She is almost daring you to say are you comfortable with this. We are not here to promote robots or technology. We are deeply concerned about the nature of what this technology can do," Meller added. "The whole point of Ai-Da is to highlight what is it we are doing, unknowingly, online all the time."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Astronomers say they have witnessed a planet being born from a disk of gas and dust swirling around a young star. Such claims have been made before, but the team comes to an even more controversial conclusion: that this planet is forming from gas that is collapsing under its own gravity, a mechanism known as gravitational or disk instability. That stands in contrast to a more widely accepted theory of planet formation, in which dust and rocks stick together, slowly building up a planetary core with enough gravity to pull in gas from the disk. If true, the planetary system would be the strongest evidence to date for disk instability. "This system stands alone right now," says team leader Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.

That conclusion is already dividing theorists. "This system certainly looks like it's [undergoing] disk instability," says Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a longtime advocate of the theory. But Anders Johansen, a theorist at the University of Copenhagen who helped develop the rival theory of core accretion, is not convinced. "This could be either mechanism," he says. Although more than 5000 exoplanets have been discovered, only a few tens have been imaged directly, and none in the act of being born. Currie and colleagues were intrigued by the nearby star AB Aurigae because it was young -- somewhere between 1 million and 4 million years old -- and because its disk contains kinked, spiral features that could indicate protoplanets. But showing that some of the light from its disk was from a glowing-hot new planet rather than reflected starlight was no easy task. "We sat on this result for 5 years," Currie says. "I did not believe it was a planet until fairly recently." The team published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The largest genetic study of Alzheimer's to date has provided compelling evidence linking the disease to disruption in the brain's immune system. The study, using the genomes of 100,000 people with Alzheimer's and 600,000 healthy people, identified 75 genes linked to an increased risk of the disease, including 42 that had not previously been implicated. The findings suggest degeneration in the brains of dementia patients could be spurred on by "over-aggressive" activity in the brain's immune cells, called microglia.

The study, the largest of its kind to date, also allowed scientists to devise a genetic risk score that could predict which patients with cognitive impairment would, within three years of first showing symptoms, go on to develop Alzheimer's. The score is not intended for clinical use at the moment, but could be used when recruiting people for clinical trials of drugs aimed at treating the disease in the earliest stages. The latest work highlights different sets of genes seen in more common forms of Alzheimer's, including a role for the immune system. "If [at the outset] we'd seen the genetics of common disease, we would've said this is an immune disease," said professor Julie Williams, the director of the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University and a co-author of the study. "It's not the same disease."

Risk genes highlighted in the study include ones that affect how efficiently the brain's immune cells, microglia, clear away tissue that is distressed. In people at risk, these housekeeper cells appeared to be working too aggressively. A similar pattern was found for genes that control how readily synapses, which connect neurons, send out an "eat me" signal when in distress. The high-risk variants appeared to lower the threshold for synapses sending out distress signals, causing the brain to purge connections at a quicker rate. The findings, published in the journal Nature Genetics, fit with previous results pointing to a role for the immune system. People with diabetes, which affects the immune system, are at considerably higher risk, for instance, and once dementia has been diagnosed infections can trigger more rapid cognitive decline.

It's been a long road, but Microsoft announced on April 4 a preview of Arm support on Azure virtual machines via its work with Ampere Computing. ZDNet reports: Ampere is a startup that makes server chips. Ampere announced last year it had signed up Microsoft and Tencent Holdings as major customers. "We are now supporting Arm on Azure as well. This has been a long journey to bring up Ampere on Azure with Windows as the Root Host OS! we are also supporting Windows 11 Arm VMs in preview for developers!" tweeted Hari Pulapaka, the director of PM for Azure Host OS and the Windows OS platform. "FYI all Windows developers who have been asking for VM support in Azure, it's here now."

Azure VMs with Ampere Altra Arm-based processors will offer up to 50 percent better price-performance than comparable x86-based VMs for scale-out workloads, Microsoft officials said. These new VMs are also for Web servers, application servers, open-source databases, gaming servers, media servers, and more, they added. The preview is initially available in the West US 2, West Central US, and West Europe Azure regions. Ampere's announcement of the Azure VM preview is here.

Donald Trump's Truth Social has "been a disaster," says Joshua Tucker, director of NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics. According to the BBC, "The app launched on Presidents' Day, 21 February, but six weeks later is beset by problems. A waiting list of nearly 1.5 million are unable to use it." From the report: Truth Social might look like Twitter, but it isn't available on Android phones, web browsers or, apparently, to most people outside the US. And a Republican ally of Mr Trump's, who did not wish to be identified, said: "Nobody seems to know what's going on." On 21 February, Truth Social was one of the App Store's most downloaded apps -- but many who downloaded it were unable to use it. There was an assumption this problem would soon be resolved and Mr Trump would start posting his "truths" in the coming days -- but neither of those things happened. My attempt to register, this week, was placed at number 1,419,631 on the waiting list.

While YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook are among the 10 most downloaded apps, according to Similar Web, Truth Social is outside the top 100. Users who find their way in can find the app a little empty, as many big voices on the American right have so far stayed away. Another study found downloads have fallen by as much as 95%. And many are feeling frustrated. "Signed up for Truth Social a couple weeks ago and still on a waiting list," one Twitter user said, on Tuesday. "By the time I'm off the waiting list and on to Truth Social for real, Trump will be President again," joked another. The report says Mr Trump "has not posted a 'truth' for well over a month."

"Maybe they're holding him back," Mr Tucker said. "That's his last chance to launch it - when suddenly Trump comes in and starts being really active on it, that will get a buzz."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Book banning is not new -- in the U.S. alone the practice goes back to Puritan times, when Thomas Morton's book New English Caanan and others opposing this way of life were tossed from Massachusetts. But the American Library Association said Monday that this year there have been more challenges to books than they have seen since they started tracking it in 2000.

The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom counted 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials in 2021. It's a significant jump: Last year the group noted 156 challenges -- and in 2019, there were 377. Although the 2020 number was impacted by the pandemic, which forced schools and libraries to shut down, the ALA said they don't usually get more than 500 book challenges in any given year. And sometimes, those challenges contain more than one book title. The number of individual books challenged in 2021 totaled 1,597. In a press release, ALA President Patricia Wong said: "We support individual parents' choices concerning their child's reading and believe that parents should not have those choices dictated by others. Young people need to have access to a variety of books from which they can learn about different perspectives."

The organization is launching a nationwide initiative meant to empower readers to fight censorship.

Mercedes-Benz will put more than five thousand workers on collective vacation in two plants in Brazil due to the shortage of semiconductor chips, the company said on Monday. Reuters reports: The production stoppage will happen from April 18 to May 3 and includes 5,000 employees in the Sao Bernardo do Campo plant and 600 in the Juiz de Fora factory, located in the Brazilian states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais, respectively. Mercedes said it is adjusting its production of trucks, truck cabins, bus chassis and other auto parts due to the global semiconductor supply crisis. The company had already put about 1,200 workers on collective vacation with pay in March because of supply chain shortages, according to the metalworkers union from the Sao Bernardo do Campo region.

Hertz will buy "up to" 65,000 Polestar EVs for its rental fleet over the next five years. It follows a similar decision last year to order 100,000 Tesla vehicles by the end of 2022, which helped Tesla's market valuation surpass the $1 trillion mark. Engadget reports: The initial mix will focus on the Polestar 2 sedan, but should expand to other models over time. Vehicles will be available to rent in Europe starting this spring, and should reach both North America and Australia late this year. The team-up is a continuation of Hertz's plan to offer the biggest selection of EV rentals in North America, and "one of the largest" worldwide. The strategy includes offering EVs to rideshare drivers working for companies like Uber.

The purchase is a gradual one, and Hertz has clearly given itself wiggle room in case it wants fewer models. This is still a large order, though, and could significantly increase the chances that your next rental might be an EV. It's also a bigger deal for Polestar than it was for Tesla. Polestar sold just 29,000 cars in 2021, and 'only' expects to more than double that number in 2022 -- Hertz could play a large role in the manufacturer's near-term success.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: What's it like to spend $10,000 for Internet service and wait six months for Comcast to hook it up? Jonathan Rowny knows the answer. Rowny and his wife and child moved from Virginia to Washington state in May 2021. Rowny told Ars that before closing on the house in the city of Buckley, he checked Comcast's website to confirm that he could sign up for broadband. "I went ahead and placed my order and scheduled the install for the day after we moved in or whatever... I think it was about four days before closing [on the house] that Comcast canceled my order," he said. Rowny said that someone from Comcast called him with the message that "your house is not serviceable."

Comcast initially told Rowny that he'd have to pay over $19,000 for a line extension. After spending a couple of months investigating his options, Rowny hired a contractor to do part of the work and paid Comcast to do the rest, for a total of about $10,000. Construction took a bit longer than expected, and there was one final frustration after the line extension was completed: Comcast wouldn't send an installer to Rowny's house because the company's records incorrectly showed the work wouldn't be done until April. Rowny had to contact a senior vice president to get that issue sorted out and finally got service in mid-January.

We confirmed last week that Comcast's online ordering system was still giving false availability information on Rowny's street. At another house about 400 feet further down Rowny's street, the Xfinity.com address checker said that Internet service is available, and the website let us add an Internet plan to the cart for purchase. That was on Tuesday, and we notified Comcast of the likely error. Comcast has since corrected the address checker so that it now says the home is "out of footprint" and "Xfinity service is not available at this address." A Comcast spokesperson told Ars that this address "doesn't have service and is not currently connected to our network, and we have never had a request for service construction to that address... that is an error and our local team is looking into why it is listed on the site." If someone had ordered service for this address before it was corrected, that person would have faced the same problem Rowny encountered in May 2021. We also asked Comcast if it is evaluating the rest of the area for similar mistakes and did not get an answer.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Almost the entire global population (99%) breathes air that exceeds WHO air quality limits, and threatens their health. A record number of over 6000 cities in 117 countries are now monitoring air quality, but the people living in them are still breathing unhealthy levels of fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, with people in low and middle-income countries suffering the highest exposures. The findings have prompted the World Health Organization to highlight the importance of curbing fossil fuel use and taking other tangible steps to reduce air pollution levels.

Released in the lead-up to World Health Day, which this year celebrates the theme Our planet, our health, the 2022 update of the World Health Organization's air quality database introduces, for the first time, ground measurements of annual mean concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a common urban pollutant and precursor of particulate matter and ozone. It also includes measurements of particulate matter with diameters equal or smaller than 10 um (PM10) or 2.5 um (PM2.5). Both groups of pollutants originate mainly from human activities related to fossil fuel combustion. The new air quality database is the most extensive yet in its coverage of air pollution exposure on the ground. Some 2,000 more cities/human settlements are now recording ground monitoring data for particulate matter, PM10 and/or PM2.5, than the last update. This marks an almost 6-fold rise in reporting since the database was launched in 2011.

A letter from the National Archives and Records Administration hints at growing unease with government officials' use of some encrypted messaging apps. NBC News: In October, Laurence Brewer, the chief records officer of the National Archives and Records Administration, told officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection he was worried about how the agency was using an app called Wickr. The Amazon-owned encrypted messaging platform is known for its ability to automatically delete messages. Brewer, who is responsible for ensuring that government officials handle records correctly, wrote in a letter that he was "concerned about agencywide deployment of a messaging application that has this functionality without appropriate policies and procedures governing its use." Brewer addressed his letter to Eric Hysen, the chief information officer of the Department of Homeland Security. It was uploaded to the National Archives website, and its concerns had not been previously reported. The document offers a rare insight into Customs and Border Protection's use of Wickr, and highlights the broader worries that some officials and watchdogs have about the growing use of messaging apps at all levels of the U.S. government.

Wickr was bought by Amazon's cloud-computing division last June and has contracts with a number of government agencies. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which has been criticized by human rights activists and immigration lawyers over what they say are its secretive practices, has spent more than $1.6 million on Wickr since 2020, according to public procurement records. But little is known about how the agency has deployed the app, which is popular among security-minded people ranging from journalists to criminals. Its auto-deletion feature has made the platform a cause of concern among government record keepers, as well as external watchdogs, who worry that Wickr and other similar apps are creating ways for customs officials to sidestep government transparency requirements.