AI startup Perplexity demonstrated strong performance in real-time during Tuesday election coverage, while rivals failed by predicting wrong outcomes before polls closed, marking the first major test of AI systems in U.S. election reporting, TechCrunch reports.

Perplexity launched an election hub featuring live maps powered by Associated Press and Democracy Works data, contrasting with major competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, which declined to provide election information. Despite some minor data display issues and occasional inaccuracies in state-level analysis, Perplexity's coverage largely matched traditional media outlets, potentially intensifying its ongoing legal battle with Dow Jones over audience competition.

Last December, Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation company pursuing Elon Musk's dream of tube-based, airplane-speed travel, announced its shutdown. However, the concept itself has found a new lease on life in a scaled-down version overseas. According to The Verge's Andrew J. Hawkins, "The hyperloop, in fact, lives on -- as a 1/12th scale model in Switzerland." From the report: Sure, this isn't exactly the full realization of Musk's 2013 white paper, in which he theorized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a nearly airless tube at speeds of up to 760mph. These tubes, either raised on pylons or sunk beneath the earth, could be built either within or between cities. Musk called it a "fifth mode of transportation" and argued it could help change the way we live, work, trade, and travel. The idea is being put to the test in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a 120-meter circular test track is being operated by a team that includes the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD), and Swisspod Technologies. This week, the group announced that it had conducted "the longest" hyperloop test of its kind: traveling 11.8 km (7.3 miles) at a speed of 40.7km/h (25.3mph).

The circular test track has a circumference of 125.6 meters (412 feet) and a diameter of 40 centimeters (15.7 inches). It sounds modest, but the group claims that in a full-scale system, their test "directly translates" to a journey of 141.6 km (88 miles), which is about the distance between Geneva and Bern, or San Francisco to Sacramento, and speeds of up to 488.2 km/h (303.4mph). The project is called LIMITLESS, which stands for Linear Induction Motor Drive for Traction and Levitation in Sustainable Hyperloop Systems. During the test, the team "monitored the performance of vital subsystems," including propulsion, communication infrastructure, power electronics, and thermal management. They assessed "energy consumption, thrust variations, [linear induction motor] response, and control during acceleration, cruising, coasting, and braking scenarios."

Of course, a 1/12th-scale circular test track is hardly a sign that the hyperloop is alive and well. Most of the startups and companies pursuing a full-scale hyperloop have shut down, victims of financial mismanagement, as well as infrastructure and regulatory hurdles. Critics said that while the hyperloop may be technically feasible, it still only amounts to vaporware. It's been called a "utopian vision" that would be financially impossible to achieve. But the Swiss team is undeterred, promising to conduct a battery of future tests to further validate the system. Swisspod CEO Denis Tudor said the group plans to test its first freight product soon, and is currently building a larger test track in the US. "This is a key step toward making hyperloop for passengers a reality and changing how we connect, work, and live," he said.

SpaceX has launched the world's first wood-paneled satellite into space "to test the suitability of timber as a renewable building material in future exploration of destinations like the Moon and Mars," reports the BBC. From the report: Made by researchers in Japan, the tiny satellite weighing just 900g is heading for the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission. It will then be released into orbit above the Earth. Named LignoSat, after the Latin word for wood, its panels have been built from a type of magnolia tree, using a traditional technique without screws or glue. Researchers at Kyoto University who developed it hope it may be possible in the future to replace some metals used in space exploration with wood.

"Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there's no water or oxygen that would rot or inflame it," Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata told Reuters news agency. "Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood," Prof Murata said. "A wooden satellite should be feasible, too." If trees could one day be planted on the Moon or Mars, wood might also provide material for colonies in space in the future, the researchers hope. Along with its wood panels, LignoSat also incorporates traditional aluminium structures and electronic components. It has sensors on board to monitor how its wood reacts to the extreme environment of space during the six months it will orbit the Earth. You can watch the launch on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, Perplexity launched an election information hub that relies on data from The Associated Press and Democracy Works to provide live updates and information about the 2024 US general election, which takes place on Tuesday, November 5. "Starting Tuesday, we'll be offering live updates on elections using data from The Associated Press so you can stay informed on presidential, senate, and house races at both a state and national level," Perplexity wrote in a blog post. The site will pull data from special data sources (called APIs) hosted by the two organizations. As of Monday, Perplexity's hub currently provides interactive information on voting requirements, poll times, and summaries about ballot measures, candidates, policy positions, and endorsements. Users can ask questions about the information similar to using a chatbot like ChatGPT.

Perplexity's embrace of providing election information is an exception in the AI field. Wary about accidentally providing misinformation, competitor AI assistants from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic currently direct users elsewhere or decline to answer election questions. OpenAI's ChatGPT Search directs election result queries to The Associated Press and Reuters. Perplexity describes its new elections hub as "an entry point for understanding key issues." But like other AI models, Perplexity can produce confabulations (plausible incorrect information) when generating responses. That could present an accuracy problem because the site's Voter Guide service uses AI language models to summarize and interpret information pulled from the web. Here's what Ars Technica advises: "Take what you see on Perplexity's site with a huge grain of salt -- do not rely on it without verifying the information with a trustworthy external source."

The Atlantic complains that our chaos of different plug types "was supposed to end, with USB-C as our savior." But part of the problem is what they call "the second circle of our cable hell: My USB-C may not be the same as yours. And the USB-C you bought two years ago may not be the same as the one you got today. And that means it might not do what you now assume it can." A lack of standardization is not the problem here. The industry has designed, named, and rolled out a parade of standards that pertain to USB and all its cousins. Some of those standards live inside other standards. For example, USB 3.2 Gen 1 is also known as USB 3.0, even though it's numbered 3.2. (What? Yes.) And both of these might be applied to cables with USB-A connectors, or USB-B, or USB-Micro B, or — why not? — USB-C. The variations stretch on and on toward the horizon.

Hope persists that someday, eventually, this hell can be escaped — and that, given sufficient standardization, regulatory intervention, and consumer demand, a winner will emerge in the battle of the plugs. But the dream of having a universal cable is always and forever doomed, because cables, like humankind itself, are subject to the curse of time, the most brutal standard of them all. At any given moment, people use devices they bought last week alongside those they've owned for years; they use the old plugs in rental cars or airport-gate-lounge seats; they buy new gadgets with even better capabilities that demand new and different (if similar-looking) cables. Even if Apple puts a USB-C port in every new device, and so does every other manufacturer, that doesn't mean that they will do everything you will expect cables to do in the future. Inevitably, you will find yourself needing new ones.

Back in 1998, the New York Times told me, "If you make your move to U.S.B. now, you can be sure that your new devices will have a port to plug into." I was ready! I'm still ready. But alas, a port to plug into has never been enough.
Obligatory XKCD.

Millions of U.S. cellphone users could be vulnerable to Chinese government surveillance, warns a Washington Post columnist, "on the networks of at least three major U.S. carriers."

They cite six current or former senior U.S. officials, all of whom were briefed about the attack by the U.S. intelligence community. The Chinese hackers, who the United States believes are linked to Beijing's Ministry of State Security, have burrowed inside the private wiretapping and surveillance system that American telecom companies built for the exclusive use of U.S. federal law enforcement agencies — and the U.S. government believes they likely continue to have access to the system.... The U.S. government and the telecom companies that are dealing with the breach have said very little publicly about it since it was first detected in August, leaving the public to rely on details trickling out through leaks...

The so-called lawful-access system breached by the Salt Typhoon hackers was established by telecom carriers after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to allow federal law enforcement officials to execute legal warrants for records of Americans' phone activity or to wiretap them in real time, depending on the warrant. Many of these cases are authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is used to investigate foreign spying that involves contact with U.S. citizens. The system is also used for legal wiretaps related to domestic crimes.

It is unknown whether hackers were able to access records about classified wiretapping operations, which could compromise federal criminal investigations and U.S. intelligence operations around the world, multiple officials told me. But they confirmed the previous reporting that hackers were able to both listen in on phone calls and monitor text messages. "Right now, China has the ability to listen to any phone call in the United States, whether you are the president or a regular Joe, it makes no difference," one of the hack victims briefed by the FBI told me. "This has compromised the entire telecommunications infrastructure of this country."

The Wall Street Journal first reported on Oct. 5 that China-based hackers had penetrated the networks of U.S. telecom providers and might have penetrated the system that telecom companies operate to allow lawful access to wiretapping capabilities by federal agencies... [After releasing a short statement], the FBI notified 40 victims of Salt Typhoon, according to multiple officials. The FBI informed one person who had been compromised that the initial group of identified targets included six affiliated with the Trump campaign, this person said, and that the hackers had been monitoring them as recently as last week... "They had live audio from the president, from JD, from Jared," the person told me. "There were no device compromises, these were all real-time interceptions...." [T]he duration of the surveillance is believed to date back to last year.
Several officials told the columnist that the cyberattack also targetted senior U.S. government officials and top business leaders — and that even more compromised targets are being discovered. At this point, "Multiple officials briefed by the investigators told me the U.S. government does not know how many people were targeted, how many were actively surveilled, how long the Chinese hackers have been in the system, or how to get them out."

But the article does include this quote from U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Mark Warner. "It is much more serious and much worse than even what you all presume at this point."

One U.S. representative suggested Americans rely more on encrypted apps. The U.S. is already investigating — but while researching the article, the columnist writes, "The National Security Council declined to comment, and the FBI did not respond to a request for comment..." They end with this recommendation.

"If millions of Americans are vulnerable to Chinese surveillance, they have a right to know now."

"It's that time again," writes USA Today, noting that Sunday morning millions of Americans (along with millions more in Canada, Europe, parts of Australia, and Chile) "will set their clocks back an hour, and many will renew their twice-yearly calls to put an end to the practice altogether..." Experts say the time changes are detrimental to health and safety, but agree that the answer isn't permanent DST. "The medical and scientific communities are unified ... that permanent standard time is better for human health," said Erik Herzog, a professor of biology and neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis and the former president of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms...

Springing forward an hour in March is harder on us than falling back in November. The shift in spring is associated with an increase in heart attacks, and car accident rates also go up for a few days after, he said. But the answer isn't permanent daylight saving time, according to Herzog, who said that could be even worse for human health than the twice-yearly changes. By looking at studies of people who live at the easternmost edge of time zones (whose experience is closest to standard time) and people who live at the westernmost edge (more like daylight saving time), scientists can tell that health impacts of earlier sunrises and sunsets are much better. Waking up naturally with the sun is far better for our bodies than having to rely on alarm clocks to wake up in the dark, he said.

Herzog said Florida, where [Senator Marco] Rubio has championed the Sunlight Protection Act, is much less impacted by the negative impacts of daylight saving time because it's as far east and south as you can get in the U.S., while people in a state like Minnesota would have much more time in the dark in the morning.
The article also reminds U.S. readers that "No state can adopt permanent daylight saving time unless U.S. Congress passes a law to authorize it first." Nevertheless... Oklahoma became the most recent state to pass a measure authorizing permanent daylight saving time, pending Congressional approval, in April. Nineteen other states have passed laws or resolutions to move toward daylight saving time year-round, if Congress were ever to allow it, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures...

Only two states and some territories never have to set their clocks forward or backward... [Hawaii and Arizona, except for the Navajo Nation.]

Starlink has launched home Internet service to 99.5% of residents in the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) after a multi-year collaboration with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to minimize interference with radio telescopes. "The vast majority of people within the areas of Virginia and West Virginia collectively known as the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) can now receive high speed satellite Internet service," the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Green Bank Observatory announced said. "The newly available service is the result of a nearly three-year collaborative engineering effort between the US National Science Foundation (NSF), SpaceX, and the NSF National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO), which operates the NSF Green Bank Observatory (NSF GBO) in West Virginia within the NRQZ." Ars Technica reports: There's a controversy over the 0.5 percent of residents who aren't included and are said to be newly blocked from using the Starlink Roam service. Starlink markets Roam as a service for people to use while traveling, not as a fixed home Internet service. The Pendleton County Office of Emergency Management last week issued a press release (PDF) saying that "customers with the RV/Roam packages had been using Starlink for approximately two years throughout 100% of the NRQZ. Now, the 0.5% have lost coverage after having it for two years. This means that a large section of southeastern Pendleton County and an even larger section of northern Pocahontas will NOT be able to utilize Starlink."

PCMag wrote that "Starlink is now live in 42 of the 46 cell areas around the Green Bank Observatory's telescopes." Pendleton County Emergency Services Coordinator Rick Gillespie told Ars today that Roam coverage was cut off in the remaining four cell areas. "After the agreement, we all lost effective use within the four cells," Gillespie told Ars in an email. Gillespie's press release said that, "in many cases, Starlink was the only Internet provider option residents and emergency responders had. This is unacceptable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new global inventory has catalogued air pollution from space activities from 2020 to 2022. The inventory includes time, position and pollution from 446 launchers as they ascended and the tracks of re-entries as objects are heated to extreme temperatures and break up or burn up in the upper atmosphere. It catalogues the pollution from 63,000 tons of rocket propellants used in 2022 and from 3,622 objects, including rocket parts and satellites, that re-entered the atmosphere between 2020 and 2023, amounting to about 12,000 tons. [...]

Types of launch pollutants depend on the propellent but can include particles of soot and aluminum oxides as well as nitrogen oxides, chlorine and water vapour and carbon dioxide. Extreme heat on re-entry causes atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen to combine to form more nitrogen oxides and also produces tiny metal-oxide particles as the objects break and burn up. Soot emitted high in the atmosphere can persist for several years, with a resulting climate warming impact that is up to 500 times greater than the same amount of soot from aviation or ground-level sources. Aluminum oxide particles, nitrogen oxides and chloride can consume the ozone in the stratosphere that protects us from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. These can remain in the atmosphere for decades. Dr Connor Barker, of the UCL team, said: "Many rocket manufacturers and space agencies keep this information tightly controlled. We had to be creative about the different sources we consulted, from launch live streams on YouTube to online databases maintained by space enthusiasts in their spare time."

An anonymous reader writes: Firewalk Studios, whom Sony Interactive Entertainment bought from Probably Monsters, has been shut down after disastrous Concord game launch. Kotaku adds: The team was responsible for Concord, the company's sci-fi hero shooter that bombed so badly it was taken offline just weeks after its launch earlier this year. The news comes less than two years after the PlayStation 5 maker first acquired Firewalk Studios as part of its ambitious plans for live service gaming.

Firewalk Studios was formed in 2018 as a few ex-Bungie developers working on a new multiplayer shooter under the umbrella of the gaming studio startup Probably Monsters, formed by ex-Bungie CEO Harold Ryan. Concord was in development for years and picked up by Sony early on as a promising prospect for its portfolio of planned live service games.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: LinkedIn, the social platform used by professionals to connect with others in their field, hunt for jobs, and develop skills, is taking the wraps off its latest effort to build artificial intelligence tools for users. Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to take on a wide array of recruitment tasks, from ingesting scrappy notes and thoughts to turn into longer job descriptions, through to sourcing candidates and engaging with them. LinkedIn is describing Hiring Assistant as a milestone in its AI trajectory: it is, per the Microsoft-owned company, its first "AI agent" And one that happens to be targeting one of LinkedIn's most lucrative categories of users (recruiters).

LinkedIn said the AI assistant is now live with a "select group" of customers (large enterprises such as AMD, Canva, Siemens and Zurich Insurance among them). It's slated to be rolling out more widely in the coming months. [...] "It's designed to take on a recruiter's most repetitive task so they can spend more time on the most impactful part of their jobs," Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn's VP of product, said in an interview -- "a big statement," he admitted. The product includes the ability to upload full job descriptions, or just note what you want it to have, along with job postings that you like the look of from other companies or roles. In turn, that becomes a list of qualifications you're looking for, as well as an initial pipeline of candidates that you can interact with -- to look for more potential hires that are similar to some, or less like others -- with algorithms designed to search based on skills rather than other indicators (such as where a person lives or went to school), per Srinivasan.

The AI assistant also integrates with third-party application tracking systems, although ultimately, the whole system is trained on LinkedIn data, which spans 1 billion users, 68 million companies and 41,000 skills. LinkedIn said Hiring Assistant is due to get more features soon, such as messaging and scheduling support for interviews, as well as handle follow-ups when candidates have questions before or after interviews. Basically the aim is for it to cover a lot of (time-consuming) admin-style tasks, plus take on some of the thinking, that recruiters have to do daily. Second, unlike many of the other AI features that LinkedIn has released, Hiring Assistant is very squarely aimed at LinkedIn's B2B business, the products it sells to the recruitment industry. "We're really focused on making Hiring Assistant great," said Erran Berger, VP of engineering, in an interview. "This is all bleeding edge, and I mean everything from the experience and how our users are going to interact with it, to the technology that backs it. And so we're really focused on nailing that a lot of the technology we've built is applicable to problems that we're trying to solve for our members and customers. But right now, you know, we really just want to nail this, and then we can figure out where we go from there."

AmiMoJo shares a report from Live Science: Scientists have demonstrated a new humanoid robot that can run at a top speed of just over 8 miles per hour (mph) -- or 3.6 meters per second (m/s) to be exact. This makes it the speediest machine of its kind built so far, albeit these speeds were only achieved with the help of added footwear. STAR1 is a bipedal robot built by the Chinese company Robot Era that's 5 feet 7 inches (171 centimeters) tall and weighs 143 pounds (65 kilograms).

Powered by high-torque motors and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, the footwear-donning STAR1 navigated different types of terrain, including grassland and gravel, while jogging on paved roads and earth, and sustained its top speed for 34 minutes. A top speed of 8 mph means it beat Unitree's H1 robot -- which set the previous speed record for a bipedal robot at 7.4 mph (3.3 m/s) in March 2024. Although STAR1 had the help of footwear, H1 was not technically jogging or running as its feet did not both leave the ground at once during transit. You can watch STAR1 racing through the Gobi Desert here.

Living in a pollution-free environment is a fundamental right, India's Supreme Court said on Wednesday as it urged authorities to address deteriorating air quality in the north of the country. From a report: India's capital Delhi recorded a "very poor" air quality index of 364 on Wednesday, according to the Central Pollution Control Board, which considers readings below 50 to be good. Swiss group IQAir rated Delhi the world's most polluted city in its live rankings. The city battles toxic air every winter and authorities say much of the smoke comes from farmers illegally burning paddy stubble to clear their fields in the neighbouring breadbasket states of Punjab and Haryana. The Supreme Court pulled up the governments of both states for taking "selective action" against stubble burning, saying penal provisions were not being properly implemented.

More than 10,500 artists and creators -- including ABBA's Bjorn Ulvaeus, actress Julianne Moore, actors Kevin Bacon and F. Murray Abraham, as well as former Saturday Night Live star Kate McKinnon, author James Patterson and Radiohead's Thom Yorke -- signed a statement condemning AI companies' unauthorized use of creative works for training their models. The initiative, led by former AI executive Ed Newton-Rex, demands an end to unlicensed training data collection amid mounting legal challenges against tech firms. "The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted," reads the statement.

The protest comes as major artists and publishers battle AI developers in court. Authors John Grisham and George R.R. Martin are suing OpenAI, while record labels Universal, Sony and Warner have filed lawsuits against AI music creators Suno and Udio. The signatories reject proposed "opt-out" schemes for content scraping, calling instead for explicit creator consent.

That massive geothermal energy project in Utah gets a closer look from the Washington Post, which calls it "a significant advance for a climate-friendly technology that is gaining momentum in the United States." Once fully operational, the project could generate up to 2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power more than 2 million homes. In addition, the BLM proposed Thursday to speed up the permitting process for geothermal projects on public lands across the country. Earlier this month, the agency also hosted the biggest lease sale for geothermal developers in more than 15 years...

White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said in an interview Thursday, "Enhanced geothermal technology has the opportunity to deliver something in the range of 65 million homes' worth of clean power — power that can be generated without putting any pollution in the sky. So we see it as a really meaningful contributor to our technology tool kit...."

The developments Thursday come as tech companies race to find new sources of zero-emission power for data centers that can use as much energy as entire cities. With major backing from Google parent Alphabet, Fervo recently got its first project up and running in the northern Nevada desert... The advanced geothermal technology that Fervo is trying to scale up is an attractive option for tech firms. Enhanced geothermal plants do not pose all the safety concerns that come with nuclear power, but they have the potential to provide the round-the-clock energy that data centers need. The challenge Fervo faces is whether it can bring this technology online quickly enough.
Fervo (a seven-year-old start-up) was co-founded by Tim Latimer, who previously worked as a drilling engineer, according to the article. But "Early in my career I got passionate about climate change. I started looking at where could a drilling engineer from the oil and gas industry make a difference," Latimer said during a Washington Post Live event in September. "And I realized that geothermal had been so overlooked ... even though the primary technical challenge to making geothermal work is dropping drilling costs."

A California oil refinery that produces 8% of the state's gasoline is shutting down late next year — a decision the Los Angeles Times says is "driven by climate change, the transition to electric vehicles and demands for cleaner air."

"There's no question we are going to lose refineries over time, because demand is going to go down as we transition to electric vehicles, but I did not expect to see any of them exiting this quickly," said Severin Borenstein, faculty director of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. California "over the medium term" will have to rely more on imports, he said. "I think part of the response the state's going to need to consider is how to make sure that we can import sufficient gasoline to meet our needs...."

David Hackett, chairman of Stillwater Associates, an Irvine oil consultancy, said he was contacted by Phillips just before the announcement, and was told the closure was a business decision. He said that although the timing was somewhat surprising, the closure wasn't, given the age of the refineries, their relatively small size and the inefficient layout that connects them by a pipeline. "That plant has been for sale for years. It hasn't found any buyers and I think that this has been an economic decision on their part. They looked at the profitability of the place and compared it with the other businesses that they have, and it didn't make the cut," he said.
"The closure is likely to increase California's already high prices at the gas pump, given that much of the replacement gasoline will be shipped in by ocean vessel, analysts say..." according to another article from the Los Angeles Times.

"Environmentalists and community activists cheered the news, however, saying it will mean cleaner air for the thousands who live in the area and that the state must continue the transition away from its dependence on fossil fuels."

"Biden forgives more student loans," read Thursday's headline at CNBC.

While this time it was $4.5 billion in student debt for over 60,000 public service workers, "The Biden-Harris Administration has approved $175 billion in student debt relief for nearly 5 million borrowers through various actions," according to an announcement from the White House on Thursday. (So the average amount received by each of the 5 million students is $35,000.) CNN calculates this eliminates roughly 11% of all outstanding U.S. federal student loan debt.

This latest round of forgiveness fixed a loophole in a bipartisan program (passed during the Bush administration in 2007) called Public Service Loan Forgiveness: "For too long, the government failed to live up to its commitments, and only 7,000 people had ever received forgiveness under Public Service Loan Forgiveness before Vice President (Kamala) Harris and I took office," Biden said in a statement. "We vowed to fix that," he added... Thursday's announcement impacts about 60,000 borrowers who are now approved for approximately $4.5 billion in student debt relief under PSLF.
CNN points out the total $175 billion in forgiven student debt is more than under any other president — though it's still "less than half of the $430 billion that would've been canceled under the president's one-time forgiveness plan, which was struck down by the Supreme Court last year." The Biden administration has made it easier for about 572,000 permanently disabled borrowers to receive the debt relief to which they are entitled. It also has granted student loan forgiveness to more than 1.6 million borrowers who were defrauded by their college... The Biden administration is conducting a one-time recount of borrowers' past payments and making adjustments if they had been counted incorrectly, bringing many people closer to debt relief.

An anonymous reader shares a report: At the end of September, Kaspersky forcibly uninstalled and replaced itself with a new antivirus called UltraAV on the computers of around a million Americans, many of whom were surprised and aghast that they were not asked to give their consent for the change. The move was the end result of the U.S. government ban on all sales of Kaspersky software in the country and -- at least in theory -- marked the end of Kaspersky in America.

But not everyone in the U.S. has given up on the Russian-made antivirus. Some Americans have found ways to get around the ban and are still using Kaspersky's antivirus, TechCrunch has learned. Several people who live in the U.S. said in posts on Reddit that they are holding out as Kaspersky customers. When TechCrunch asked them about their motivations, their reasons range from being skeptical of the reasons behind the ban, or having paid for the product already, to simply preferring the product over its rivals.

The blockchain-based identity verification company founded by Sam Altman is now called "World." It also unveiled a new version of the "Orb" biometric devices the company uses to scan users' eyes. CoinTelegraph reports: World, as it's now known, also revealed a slew of other updates including a new version of its Orb biometric scanning devices, new options for identity verification and partnership integrations with popular apps including FaceTime, WhatsApp, and Zoom. [...] The new Orb, powered by Nvidia hardware, will be more efficient and "five times" more powerful than its predecessor with a smaller footprint and fewer parts. The company also said the new Orb would eventually be available in self-service kiosks in some markets.

World also announced that users will soon be able to verify their identity through methods other than the firm's Orb hardware. Through a program called World ID Credentials, the company says users with NFC-enabled government issued passports will allow them to verify their identity on the World app. Another major announcement came in the form of World ID Deep Face, a service the company claims has "solved deepfakes." According to the company, its software can be implemented into just about any app where video can be uploaded or streamed to determine whether videos featuring verified persons are real or have been faked using AI. Finally, the company also announced that so far 15 million users have signed up for its World app service; among them, seven million are verified.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Robinhood launched its long-awaited desktop platform and added futures and index options trading features to its mobile app on Wednesday, as the fintech firm aims to take market share from traditional brokerages. The 11-year-old commission-free trading app, which became synonymous with mom-and-pop investors in 2021, is now seeking to mature into a full-fledged financial services provider and compete with established brokerages that serve institutional investors. The Menlo Park, California-based company said its desktop trading platform, dubbed "Robinhood Legend," will focus on active traders.

The platform, available at no additional cost, will offer advanced trading tools, real-time data, as well as custom and preset layouts. Meanwhile, the app will allow users to trade futures on the benchmark S&P 500 index, oil and bitcoin, among others. Customers can also trade index options. [...] Subscribers to Robinhood's premium Gold tier will be able to trade futures for as low as 50 cents per contract, while non-Gold users will need to pay a commission of 75 cents. You can tune in to the company's live product announcement on YouTube.