Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Meta announced a new $11.99-a-month subscription service on Sunday (or $14.99-a-month for Android and iOS). For your money you mainly get the privilege of authenticating your own account with a government ID, so that it can then display the official "verified" badge. (Accounts must have a prior posting history, with account holders verified to be at least 18 years old.)

Meta promises they won't change already-verified Facebook and Instagram accounts — at least, not "as we test and learn." But they immediately follow that sentence by warning that in the longer-term they're "evolving the meaning" of verification, aiming to making everyone want to subscribe. Meta calls this "expanding access."

Paying subscribers will also get:

— Protection from account impersonation (at a higher level that's apparently not made available to non-paying members), including "proactive account monitoring".

— "Help when you need it with access to a real person for common account issues."

— Exclusive "stickers" for Facebook and Instagram Stories and Facebook Reels, plus 100 free Facebook "stars" each month "so you can show your support for other creators."


But most importantly, Meta is also promising to grant "increased visibility and reach" to paying members, promising "prominence" in parts of the service (including search, recommendations, and in comments). Although a footnote warns this may vary — depending on what you're trying to post about — and all content "will be treated according to our existing guidelines for recommendations on Instagram or Facebook and our Content Guidelines."

George Takei once calculated roughly 80% of your friends never see the things you post on Facebook. But now Facebook is deliberately evolving into a two-tiered system where some will always be relegated to less-likely-to-be-seen status, always outshined by wealthier friends with $144 a year to spend on upgrading their Facebook accounts.

The internet already has a two-tiered system for news, where the best news articles are only available to those with the funds to climb over multiple paywalls. But now even the lower tier of discourse — all that non-journalistic content floating around Facebook — will transform from a pool of burbling anger and misinformation into something worse. It's like Facebook's algorithm went from promoting just the most divisive content to promoting content from whoever most desires to foist their ideas onto other people. This may not end well.

Is it just me, or does this seem like a desperate grab for money?

— They're monetizing Meta's inability to stop account impersonators.

— Their announcement admits that "access to account support" remains a top request of their creators. Yet paying members are apparently more likely to get it than non-paying members. Maybe that can be their new marketing slogan. "Help when you need it — sold separately."

— This is happening. It becomes available for purchase this week on Instagram or Facebook in Australia and New Zealand.

Slashdot reader John Smith 2294 is an IT consultant and system administrator "who started in the days of DEC VAX/VMS," now maintaining networks for small to medium businesses and non-profits. And they're sharing a concern with Slashdot.

"I object to Windows 11 insisting on an outlook.com / Microsoft Account OS login." Sure there are workarounds, but user action or updates can undo them. So I will not be using Windows 11 for science or business any more.... I will be using Win10 refurbs for as long as they are available, and then Mac Mini refurbs and Linux. My first Linux Mint user has been working happily for two months now and I have not heard a word from them.

So, as an IT Admin responsible for business or education networks of 20 users or more, will you be using Windows 11 on your networks or, like me, is this the end of the road for Windows for you too?
I'd thought their concern would be about Windows is sending user data to third parties. But are these really big enough reasons for system adminstrators to be avoiding Windows 11 altogether?

Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments. Should production networks avoid Windows 11?

"IBM is the latest tech giant to unveil its own "AI supercomputer," this one composed of a bunch of virtual machines running within IBM Cloud," reports the Register: The system known as Vela, which the company claims has been online since May last year, is touted as IBM's first AI-optimized, cloud-native supercomputer, created with the aim of developing and training large-scale AI models. Before anyone rushes off to sign up for access, IBM stated that the platform is currently reserved for use by the IBM Research community. In fact, Vela has become the company's "go-to environment" for researchers creating advanced AI capabilities since May 2022, including work on foundation models, it said.

IBM states that it chose this architecture because it gives the company greater flexibility to scale up as required, and also the ability to deploy similar infrastructure into any IBM Cloud datacenter around the globe. But Vela is not running on any old standard IBM Cloud node hardware; each is a twin-socket system with 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable processors configured with 1.5TB of DRAM, and four 3.2TB NVMe flash drives, plus eight 80GB Nvidia A100 GPUs, the latter connected by NVLink and NVSwitch. This makes the Vela infrastructure closer to that of a high performance compute site than typical cloud infrastructure, despite IBM's insistence that it was taking a different path as "traditional supercomputers weren't designed for AI."

It is also notable that IBM chose to use x86 processors rather than its own Power 10 chips, especially as these were touted by Big Blue as being ideally suited for memory-intensive workloads such as large-model AI inferencing.
Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the story.

There may soon come a time when your car "also serves as the hub of your personal power plant," writes the Washington Post's climate columnist. And then they tell the story of a New Mexico man named Nate Graham who connected a power strip and a $150 inverter to his Chevy Bolt EV during a power outage: The Bolt's battery powered his refrigerator, lights and other crucial devices with ease. As the rest of his neighborhood outside Albuquerque languished in darkness, Graham's family life continued virtually unchanged. "It was a complete game changer making power outages a nonissue," says Graham, 35, a manager at a software company. "It lasted a day-and-a-half, but it could have gone much longer." Today, Graham primarily powers his home appliances with rooftop solar panels and, when the power goes out, his Chevy Bolt. He has cut his monthly energy bill from about $220 to $8 per month. "I'm not a rich person, but it was relatively easy," says Graham "You wind up in a magical position with no [natural] gas, no oil and no gasoline bill."

Graham is a preview of what some automakers are now promising anyone with an EV: An enormous home battery on wheels that can reverse the flow of electricity to power the entire home through the main electric panel. Beyond serving as an emissions-free backup generator, the EV has the potential of revolutionizing the car's role in American society, transforming it from an enabler of a carbon-intensive existence into a key step in the nation's transition into renewable energy.
Some crucial context from the article:

• Since 2000, the number of major outages in America's power grid "has risen from less than two dozen to more than 180 per year, based on federal data, the Wall Street Journal reports... Residential electricity prices, which have risen 21 percent since 2008, are predicted to keep climbing as utilities spend more than $1 trillion upgrading infrastructure, erecting transmission lines for renewable energy and protecting against extreme weather."

• About 8% of U.S. homeowners have installed solar panels, and "an increasing number are adding home batteries from companies such as LG, Tesla and Panasonic... capable of storing energy and discharging electricity."

• Ford's "Lightning" electrified F-150 "doubles as a generator... Instead of plugging appliances into the truck, the truck plugs into the house, replacing the grid."

• "The idea is companies like Sunrun, along with utilities, will recruit vehicles like the F-150 Lightning to form virtual power plants. These networks of thousands or millions of devices can supply electricity during critical times."

"The United States on Friday called off the search for two of the unidentified flying objects that the military shot out of the sky this month," reports the New York Times.

NBC News adds that "The end of recovery efforts could mean the country may never know what, exactly, the objects were, how they were propelled, and where they came from." The conclusion applies to airborne objects shot down by U.S. fighter jets Feb. 10 near Deadhorse, Alaska, and Feb. 12 over Lake Huron, off the coast of Michigan. "The U.S. military, federal agencies, and Canadian partners conducted systematic searches of each area using a variety of capabilities, including airborne imagery and sensors, surface sensors and inspections, and subsurface scans, and did not locate debris," the command said. Efforts in Deadhorse were hampered by Arctic conditions and sea ice instability, it said.

The recommendation does not cover the Feb. 4 takedown of what the United States has described as a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina. Military officials said recovery efforts in the Atlantic, which ended Thursday, were successful, and recovered items were taken to an FBI lab "for counterintelligence exploitation," according to the statement Friday.... One other incident involving the takedown of an airborne object took place in Canadian airspace Feb. 11 and is the purview of Canadian authorities.

The Biden administration announced Monday it was forming an interagency group to address the recent cluster and future unidentified objects.
The New York Times includes this response from National Security Council spokesman John F. Kirby: Asked if the Biden administration overreacted in shooting down the objects or had any regrets, Mr. Kirby said the craft were at altitudes that could affect civilian aircraft and could have flown over military spaces.

Scientists from China's Hebei University of Science and Technology have developed an ice-melting additive for asphalt that could remain active for years. New Atlas reports: [The researchers started] out by developing a chloride-free acetate-based salt. Such salts are considerably less environmentally harmful than chlorides, they're less corrosive to steel and other materials, plus they work at lower temperatures. The researchers proceeded to mix the salt with a surfactant, silicon dioxide, sodium bicarbonate and blast furnace slag (which has also been used in salt-proof concrete), resulting in a fine powder. Particles of that powder were then coated with a polymer solution, producing microcapsules. Finally, the scientists replaced some of the mineral filler in a conventional asphalt mixture with those capsules.

When the special asphalt was tested on the off-ramp of a highway, it was found not only to continuously melt the snow that fell upon it, but also to lower the freezing point of water from 0C (32F) down to -21C (-6F). What's more, based on lab tests, the researchers estimate that a 5-cm (2-in)-thick slab of the pavement would continue to release its salt capsules for seven to eight years, keeping the road clear that whole time. The study was recently published in the journal ACS Omega.

According to The Register, Google has been paying Apple a portion of search revenue generated by people using Google Chrome on iOS. From the report: This is one of the aspects of the relationship between the two tech goliaths that currently concerns the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Though everyone knows Google pays Apple, Samsung, and other manufacturers billions of dollars to make its web search engine the default on devices, it has not been reported until now that the CMA has been looking into Chrome on iOS and its role in a search revenue sharing deal Google has with Apple. The British competition watchdog is worried that Google's payments to Apple discourage the iPhone maker from competing with Google. Substantial payments for doing nothing incentivize more of the same, it's argued. This perhaps explains why Apple, though hugely profitable, has not launched a rival search engine or invested in the development of its Safari browser to the point that it could become a credible challenger to Chrome.

Having Google pay Apple "a significant share of revenue from Google Search traffic" passing through its own Chrome browser on iOS is difficult to explain. Apple does not provide any obvious value to people seeking to use Google Search within Google Chrome. One attempt to explain the arrangement can be found in an antitrust lawsuit filed on December 27, 2021, and subsequently amended [PDF] on March 29, 2022. The complaint, filed by the Alioto Law Firm in San Francisco, claims Apple has been paid for the profits it would have made if it had competed with Google, without the cost and challenge of doing so. "Because more than half of Google's search business was conducted through Apple devices, Apple was a major potential threat to Google, and that threat was designated by Google as 'Code Red,'" the complaint contends. "Google paid billions of dollars to Apple and agreed to share its profits with Apple to eliminate the threat and fear of Apple as a competitor."

These alleged revenue sharing arrangements -- which are known in detail only to a limited number of people and have yet to be fully disclosed -- have been noted by the UK CMA as well as the US Justice Department, which along with eleven US States, filed an antitrust complaint against Google on October 20, 2020. Reached by phone, attorney Joseph M. Alioto, who filed the private antitrust lawsuit, told The Register it would not surprise him to learn that Google has been paying Apple for search revenue derived from Chrome. He said Google's deal with Apple, which began at $1 billion per year, reached as high as $15 billion annually in 2021. "The division of the market is per se illegal under the antitrust laws," said Alioto. Apple and Google are currently trying to have the case dismissed citing lack of evidence of a horizontal agreement between the two companies, and other supposed deficiencies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Australian software giant Atlassian and Envoy, a startup that provides workplace management services, were at loggerheads on Thursday over a data breach that exposed the data of thousands of Atlassian employees. As first reported by Cyberscoop, a hacking group known as SiegedSec leaked data on Telegram this week that it claimed to have stolen from Atlassian. This data includes the names, email addresses, work departments and phone numbers of approximately 13,200 Atlassian employees, along with floor plans of Atlassian offices located in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia.

Atlassian was quick to point the finger of blame for the breach at Envoy, which the Sydney-headquartered company uses to organize its office spaces. "On February 15, 2023, we learned that data from Envoy, a third-party app that Atlassian uses to coordinate in-office resources, was compromised and published," Atlassian spokesperson Megan Sutton said in a statement shared with TechCrunch. "Atlassian product and customer data is not accessible via the Envoy app and therefore not at risk." Envoy, however, was just as quick to rebuff Atlassian's claims. Envoy spokesperson April Marks told TechCrunch that the startup is "not aware of any compromise to our systems," adding that initial research had shown that "a hacker gained access to an Atlassian employee's valid credentials to pivot and access the Atlassian employee directory and office floor plans held within Envoy's app."

Soon after the startup's denial, Atlassian changed its stance to align more closely with Envoy. Atlassian's Sutton told TechCrunch that the company's internal investigation since revealed that attackers had actually compromised Atlassian data from the Envoy app "using an Atlassian employee's credentials that had been mistakenly posted in a public repository by the employee." "As such, the hacking group had access to data visible via the employee account which included the published office floor plans and public Envoy profiles of other Atlassian employees and contractors," Sutton added. "The compromised employee's account was promptly disabled eliminating any further threat to Atlassian's Envoy data. Atlassian product and customer data is not accessible via the Envoy app and therefore not at risk." In a statement to TechCrunch, Envoy's Marks ruled out a breach on its end: "We found evidence in the logs of requests that confirms the hackers obtained valid user credentials from an Atlassian employee account and used that access to download the affected data from Envoy's app."

Crypto giant Binance is considering ending relationships with US business partners as regulators turn up the heat. From a report: The company, which operates the world's largest crypto exchange, is weighing the retreat after its relationships with a key banking partner and stablecoin issuer ran into trouble amid intense scrutiny from authorities, according to a person familiar with the issue. Binance has been probed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service.

Binance is looking at whether to sever ties with intermediary firms such as banks and services firms and is reassessing venture-capital investments in the US, according to the person, who asked not to be identified discussing details that had not yet been made public. It will consider de-listing tokens from any US-based projects, including Circle's stablecoin USD Coin, the person said. Binance isn't authorized to serve crypto customers in the US. Instead, there's Binance.US, a far smaller exchange that claims to be independent and said it has no plans to leave the US.

Researchers have discovered a clever piece of malware that stealthily exfiltrates data and executes malicious code from Windows systems by abusing a feature in Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). From a report: IIS is a general-purpose web server that runs on Windows devices. As a web server, it accepts requests from remote clients and returns the appropriate response. In July 2021, network intelligence company Netcraft said there were 51.6 million instances of IIS spread across 13.5 million unique domains. IIS offers a feature called Failed Request Event Buffering that collects metrics and other data about web requests received from remote clients. Client IP addresses and port and HTTP headers with cookies are two examples of the data that can be collected. FREB helps administrators troubleshoot failed web requests by retrieving ones meeting certain criteria from a buffer and writing them to disk. The mechanism can help determine the cause of 401 or 404 errors or isolate the cause of stalled or aborted requests.

Criminal hackers have figured out how to abuse this FREB feature to smuggle and execute malicious code into protected regions of an already compromised network. The hackers can also use FREB to exfiltrate data from the same protected regions. Because the technique blends in with legitimate eeb requests, it provides a stealthy way to further burrow into the compromised network. The post-exploit malware that makes this possible has been dubbed Frebniis by researchers from Symantec, who reported on its use on Thursday. Frebniis first ensures FREB is enabled and then hijacks its execution by injecting malicious code into the IIS process memory and causing it to run. Once the code is in place, Frebniis can inspect all HTTP requests received by the IIS server.

Google has been paying Apple a portion of search revenue generated by people using Google Chrome on iOS, The Register reported Friday, citing a source. This is one of the aspects of the relationship between the two tech goliaths that currently concerns the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the report added. From the report: Though everyone knows Google pays Apple, Samsung, and other manufacturers billions of dollars to make its web search engine the default on devices, it has not been reported until now that the CMA has been looking into Chrome on iOS and its role in a search revenue sharing deal Google has with Apple. We twice asked Apple and Google to confirm or deny what we've learned, and neither corporation would talk. We also approached the CMA, and a spokesperson for the monopoly regulator said: "The CMA cannot comment on or disclose any confidential information."

Tencent is abandoning plans to venture into virtual reality hardware, as a sobering economic outlook prompts the Chinese tech giant to cut costs and headcount at its metaverse unit, Reuters reported Friday, citing three sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The world's largest video game publisher had ambitious plans to build both virtual reality software and hardware at an "extended reality" XR unit it launched in June last year, for which it hired nearly 300 people. It had come up with a concept for a ring-like hand-held game controller, but difficulties in achieving quick profitability and the large investment needed to produce a competitive product were among factors that prompted a shift away from that strategy, two of the sources said. One of the sources said the XR project was not expected to become profitable until 2027, according to an internal forecast. The second source said the unit also had a lack of promising games and non-gaming applications.

Facebook parent Meta gave thousands of employees subpar ratings in a recently concluded round of performance reviews, a signal that more job cuts may be on the way, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The company also cut a bonus metric, the people said, one of several steps senior executives are taking after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 would be a "year of efficiency." Meta's leadership expects the ratings to lead more employees to leave in the coming weeks, the people said. The company will consider another round of layoffs if not enough depart, the people said.

About 11,000 workers, or about 13% of employees at the company, were recently laid off. Meta managers gave approximately 10% of employees ratings indicating they are underperforming, the people said. That proportion wasn't unprecedented in the years before the pandemic. But Meta's employee count nearly doubled from 2019 to 2022, to 86,400, and about half its workers had never experienced a typical performance-review cycle at the company, several people familiar with the matter said. The recently wrapped performance reviews were seen as a return to form for Mr. Zuckerberg, who before the pandemic had developed a reputation for delivering direct feedback to workers, people familiar with the process said.

New submitter kalieaire writes: Steve Trimble of Aviation week reports that a Hobby Club's missing ballon might have been inadvertently targeted as a malicious UFO and subsequently shot down. When Scientific Balloon Solutions (SBS) company founder, Ron Meadows, reached out to Gov't resources at the FBI and DoD, they were brushed off. "I'm guessing probably they were pico balloons," said Tom Medlin, a retired FedEx engineer and co-host of the Amateur Radio Roundtable show. Merlin has three pico balloons in flight in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. According to Trimble, the description of all three UFOs shot down during 2/10-12 match the description of pico balloon models which can be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type. "Launching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged only within the past decade," writes Trimble. He continues: Meadows and his son Lee discovered it was possible to calculate the amount of helium gas necessary to make a common latex balloon neutrally buoyant at altitudes above 43,000 ft. The balloons carry an 11-gram tracker on a tether, along with HF and VHF/UHF antennas to update their positions to ham radio receivers around the world. At any given moment, several dozen such balloons are aloft, with some circling the globe several times before they malfunction or fail for other reasons. The launch teams seldom recover their balloons.

The balloons can come in several forms. Some enthusiasts still use common, Mylar party balloons, with a set of published calculations to determine the amount of gas to inject. But the round-shaped Mylar balloons often are unable to ascend higher than 20,000-30,000 ft., so some pico balloonists have upgraded to different materials. [...] In fact, the pico balloons weigh less than 6 lb. and therefore are exempt from most FAA airspace restrictions, Meadows and Medlin said. Three countries -- North Korea, Yemen and the UK -- restrict transmissions from balloons in their airspace, so the community has integrated geofencing software into the tracking devices. The balloons still overfly the countries, but do not transmit their positions over their airspace. On Feb. 15, NSC spokesman John Kirby told reporters all three objects "could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose," but he did not mention the possibility of pico balloons.

Sarah Blesener writes via The New York Times: Since his arrest two months ago, Samuel Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency executive, has been physically confined to the Palo Alto home of his parents, under the force of a $250 million bail package. But he has roamed largely unfettered in the wilderness of the internet: conducting interviews, posting narratives, making calls on encrypted apps and using a virtual private network, a web tool that allows users to conceal data and visit websites without detection. Those unrestrained days may soon be over. On Thursday, a federal judge overseeing Mr. Bankman-Fried's multibillion-dollar fraud case signaled a willingness to jail him for his persistent testing of his confinement's boundaries, going beyond what prosecutors had asked. "Why am I being asked to turn him loose in this garden of electronic devices?" the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, asked prosecutors, describing the well-wired home of Mr. Bankman-Fried's parents, both professors at Stanford Law School.

No new conditions were set during Thursday's hearing, the latest of several hearings, held in federal court in Manhattan, to consider more restrictive bail terms. Judge Kaplan asked both sides to prepare concrete proposals that would limit and monitor Mr. Bankman-Fried's access to the internet without inhibiting his ability to participate in his defense. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged Mr. Bankman-Fried with orchestrating widespread fraud at FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he founded, accusing him of misappropriating billions of dollars of customers' money. Prosecutors said he used the funds to finance lavish real estate purchases, political contributions and investments in other companies. After he was charged in December, Mr. Bankman-Fried was released on bail with the requirement that he wear an ankle monitor and stay confined to his parents' house. [...]

Microsoft has outlined how users running Apple Silicon-based Macs can utilize Windows 11 in a new support document published today. The document explains how users running Mac devices with either M1 or M2 chips can use Windows 11, either via the cloud or using a local virtualization such as Parallels Desktop. From a report: Unfortunately, the document makes no mention of installing Windows 11 natively on Apple Silicon hardware. Apple's legacy Bootcamp application, which previously allowed Mac users to install Windows into its own bootable partition on a Mac, was removed when Apple transitioned to ARM processors. As of now, Microsoft points to Windows 365 as a potential solution for running Windows 11 on a Mac, using its enterprise service to stream a Windows 11 PC from the cloud. [...] For those users, Microsoft also mentions Parallels Desktop as a viable alternative. Version 18 of Parallels Desktop is now officially authorized to run Windows 11 on ARM on a Mac with M1 or M2 processors. This is the only way to officially run Windows 11 on ARM locally on a Mac with Apple Silicon.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who has led the world's largest video site for the last nine years, is stepping down from her role. She'll be replaced by Neal Mohan, her longtime lieutenant. From a report: In a letter sent to YouTube's employees, Wojcicki said she was leaving in order to "start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects I'm passionate about." During her tenure, YouTube became increasingly important to the business for Google, which bought the site in 2006, and Alphabet, the holding company that houses both of them: In 2022, YouTube generated $29.2 billion in ad sales -- more than 10 percent of Alphabet's total revenue.

The U.S. government on Thursday issued a declaration on the responsible use of artficial intelligence (AI) in the military, which would include "human accountability." From a report: "We invite all states to join us in implementing international norms, as it pertains to military development and use of AI" and autononous weapons, said Bonnie Jenkins, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control.

Coming to the campuses of Facebook parent Meta Platforms is a contraption that can block sound, shield workers from their peers and allow for heads-down, uninterrupted work. It's a cubicle. From a report: That is, a noise-canceling cubicle designed using some of the same principles found in soundproof, echo-free anechoic chambers. "The Cube," which the company is beginning to roll out to offices worldwide after months of development, absorbs sound from multiple directions, says John Tenanes, vice president of global real estate and facilities at Meta. "It's like a self-cocoon."

Meta's experiment comes as workplaces are in the midst of a shake-up. Like many other employers, Meta realized early in the pandemic that its open-plan arrangements would need to shift to accommodate a new hybrid era of work. In 2021, it asked 10 groups of architects, design firms and furniture manufacturers-- including MillerKnoll's Herman Miller, KI and others -- to build a new office set-up. They were given guiding principles to follow and eight weeks to do it. [...] The Cube began to take shape, in part, after one of Meta's furniture vendors brought in an early prototype of a movable screen. Engineers quickly gravitated to it, grabbing one or two at a time to essentially barricade themselves at their desks, Dr. Nagy says. Meta and its vendors refined the Cube, and its popularity became even more apparent during testing when workers began personalizing the spaces to effectively reserve them.

Tesla will open part of its U.S. charging network to electric vehicles (EVs) made by rivals as part of a $7.5 billion federal program to expand the use of EVs to cut carbon emissions, the Biden administration said on Wednesday. Reuters reports: Such a move could help turn Tesla into the universal "filling station" of the EV era - and risk eroding a competitive edge for vehicles made by the company, which has exclusive access to the biggest network of high-speed Superchargers in the United States. By late 2024, Tesla will open 3,500 new and existing Superchargers along highway corridors to non-Tesla customers, the Biden administration said. It will also offer 4,000 slower chargers at locations like hotels and restaurants.

A White House official said at a briefing that Tesla would be eligible for a subsidy - including retrofitting its existing fleet - as long as its chargers would allow other vehicles with a federally backed charging standard called CCS to charge. The administration said Tesla has not committed to adopting CCS as its standard, but it must comply with the requirements to qualify for federal funds.