An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The S&P 500 booted electric vehicle maker Tesla from its ESG Index as part of an annual update to the list. Meanwhile, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and even oil and gas multinational Exxon Mobil were still included on the list. The S&P 500 ESG Index uses environmental, social and governance data to rank and effectively recommend companies to investors. Its criteria include hundreds of data points per company that pertain to the way businesses affect the planet and treat stakeholders beyond shareholders -- including customers, employees, vendors, partners and neighbors. Changes to the index took effect on May 2, and a spokesperson for the index explained why they were made in a blog post published Wednesday.

It said that Tesla's "lack of a low-carbon strategy" and "codes of business conduct," along with racism and poor working conditions reported at Tesla's factory in Fremont, California, affected the score. Tesla's handling of an investigation by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration also weighed on its score. "While Tesla may be playing its part in taking fuel-powered cars off the road, it has fallen behind its peers when examined through a wider ESG lens," the S&P spokesperson wrote. The CNBC report cited Tesla's settlement with the EPA in February "after years of Clean Air Act violations and neglecting to track its own emissions." They also mentioned last year's Toxic 100 Air Polluters Index, where Tesla ranked 22nd -- "worse than Exxon Mobil, which came in 26th."

Tesla has notoriously scored poorly, "though it's not just about the environmental aspect but the assessments that have also criticized Tesla's company culture," notes Electrek's Fred Lambert. "ESG doesn't really take into account the fact that Tesla's entire business is about transitioning the world to sustainable energy but rather looks at strategies to decarbonize operations."

On Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said S&P Global Ratings has "lost their integrity" and has been "weaponized by phony social justice warriors."

Japanese conglomerate Sony said it is well-positioned to play a leading role in the metaverse, or immersive virtual worlds, which commentators speculate will massively disrupt industries and establish new powerhouses. From a report: "The metaverse is at the same time a social space and live network space where games, music, movies and anime intersect," Chief Executive Kenichiro Yoshida said at a strategy briefing on Wednesday, pointing to the use of free-to-play battle royale title Fortnite from Epic Games as an online social space. Sony's game, music and movie units contributed two-thirds of operating income in the year ended March, underscoring the group's transformation from consumer electronics maker into a metaverse-ready entertainment juggernaut under Yoshida and predecessor Kazuo Hirai. The firm is a gaming gatekeeper with its PlayStation 5 console, however observers point to the risk presented by the growth of cross-platform, cloud-based titles and their potential to reduce the influence of proprietary platforms. Sony has been adjusting its approach, enabling cross-play in Fortnite in 2018.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Total Commander has been around since the 90s, eventually expanding into Android after the platform launched over a decade ago. The app has more than 10 million downloads on the Play Store, still supporting OS versions as far back as Android 2.2. With a new update, developer Christian Ghisler has removed the ability to install APK files on Android, blaming Google Play policies in the patch notes for the app. It's a shocking twist for the service and, seemingly, a bad omen of things to come for other mobile file managers. A forum post from Ghisler sheds some more light on what's going on here, as Google sent him a notice warning of his app's removal from the Play Store within a week if the app went unmodified. The company's automated response pointed the developer to the "Device and Network Abuse" policy.

Napster has been acquired again, this time by two companies from the web3 sector: Hivemind and Algorand. "Dear friends, we are excited to share that we've taken Napster Group private, and to bring the iconic music brand to web3," wrote Hivemind founder Matt Zhang on LinkedIn. From a report: "Volatile market and uncertain times often bring exciting opportunities. At Hivemind, we believe in developing thesis and building enduring value. Music x Web3 is one of the most exciting spaces we've come across, and we are thrilled to work with Emmy Lovell and many talents to unlock value for the entire ecosystem and revolutionize how artists and fans enjoy music."

Lovell has been named interim CEO of Napster, with the former WMG exec stepping up from her previous role as chief strategy officer, having joined the company in April 2021 shortly after its last acquisition by music VR company MelodyVR. The newly-merged company then delisted from the AIM stock exchange in the UK as part of its plan to relaunch a hybrid music streaming / video / VR service later this year, and then go public again in the US. The new owners appear to be pivoting that strategy with a web3 focus. There will be plenty to unpack around these plans. For example, Hivemind and Algorand aren't the only companies involved: they have an 'investor consortium' that includes ATC Management, BH Digital and G20 Ventures.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Ming-Chi Kuo is one of a handful of Apple analysts whose reports always warrant a second look, regardless of how strange they might seem at first blush. We've heard plenty of reports that the company is testing its own version of a foldable device, in its customary style of being fashionably late to the party, while also being the best dressed there. It stands to reason that the company is experimenting with all sorts of takes on the form factor. While companies like Samsung and Huawei have made great strides since the first generation of foldable devices, one can certainly make the argument that no one has perfectly cracked the code just yet. The screen technology has improved a good bit in recent years -- and so, too, has E Ink technology. "Apple is testing E Ink's Electronic Paper Display (EPD) for future foldable device's cover screen and tablet-like applications," Kuo reported on Twitter earlier today. "The color EPD has the potential to become a mainstream solution for foldable devices' must-have cover/second screen thanks to its excellent power-saving."

While the US extended its leading position as the dominant location for Bitcoin mining, China has reemerged as the second-largest locale despite a government ban on the activity last year. From a report: The US accounted for 37.84% of global hashrate, a measure of computing power used to extract the digital currency, between September 2021 to January, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, in a report released on Tuesday. The hashrate, also responsible for securing the Bitcoin network, has made a strong comeback to new highs after falling last year.

Following the mining ban in China last year, the country has seen a sudden surge in activity through "covert mining operations" and has "re-emerged as a major mining hub" grabbing 21.11% of global hashrate, according to the CCAF. "This strongly suggests that significant underground mining activity has formed in the country, which empirically confirms what industry insiders have long been assuming," CCAF wrote in the report. In May (2021), Beijing intensified its efforts to curb the cryptocurrency market. It seems covert mining is still happening in China through routed through virtual private networks that make it appear the computers are operating in another country.

The Russian subsidiary of Alphabet's Google plans to file for bankruptcy, saying it had become impossible for the company to pay employees and suppliers. From a report: Google submitted a notice of intent to declare itself bankrupt, according to a message published Wednesday on Russia's Fedresurs registry. A Google spokesperson separately said an earlier move by authorities to seize its bank account made continuing operations in the country impossible. "The Russian authorities' seizure of Google Russia's bank account has made it untenable for our Russia office to function, including employing and paying Russia-based employees, paying suppliers and vendors, and meeting other financial obligations," the Google spokesperson said. The company had already paused most of its commercial operations in Russia, including all advertising, after the country's communications censor accused the company's YouTube video service of spreading misinformation and stoking protests.

FreeBSD 13.1 has been released today. Some of the new features include UEFI boot improvements for AMD64, a wide variety of hardware driver improvements, and support for freebsd-update to allow creating automated snapshots of the boot environment to try to make operating system updates foolproof. Phoronix reports: Some of the other changes with FreeBSD 13.1 include enabling Position Independent Executable (PIE) support by default on 64-bit architectures, a new "zfskeys" service script for the automatic decryption of ZFS datasets, NVMe emulation with Bhyve hypervisor, chroot now supports unprivileged operations, various POWER and RISC-V improvements, big endian support improvements, support for the HiFive Unmatched RISC-V development board, updating against OpenZFS file-system support upstream, and many other changes throughout this BSD open-source ecosystem. Downloads and the full change-log for FreeBSD 13.1 can be found here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: Human-level artificial intelligence is close to finally being achieved, according to a lead researcher at Google's DeepMind AI division. Dr Nando de Freitas said "the game is over" in the decades-long quest to realize artificial general intelligence (AGI) after DeepMind unveiled an AI system capable of completing a wide range of complex tasks, from stacking blocks to writing poetry. Described as a "generalist agent," DeepMind's new Gato AI needs to just be scaled up in order to create an AI capable of rivaling human intelligence, Dr de Freitas said.

Responding to an opinion piece written in The Next Web that claimed "humans will never achieve AGI," DeepMind's research director wrote that it was his opinion that such an outcome is an inevitability. "It's all about scale now! The Game is Over!" he wrote on Twitter. "It's all about making these models bigger, safer, compute efficient, faster at sampling, smarter memory, more modalities, innovative data, on/offline... Solving these challenges is what will deliver AGI."

When asked by machine learning researcher Alex Dimikas how far he believed the Gato AI was from passing a real Turing test -- a measure of computer intelligence that requires a human to be unable to distinguish a machine from another human -- Dr de Freitas replied: "Far still." [...] Fielding further questions from AI researchers on Twitter, Dr de Freitas said "safety is of paramount importance" when developing AGI. "It's probably the biggest challenge we face," he wrote. "Everyone should be thinking about it. Lack of enough diversity also worries me a lot." DeepMind describes Gato in a blog post: "The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens.

Russia is not planning to block Alphabet's YouTube, the minister for digital development said on Tuesday, acknowledging that such a move would likely see Russian users suffer and should therefore be avoided. From a report: Russia has blocked other foreign social media platforms, but despite months of fines and threats against YouTube for failing to delete content Moscow deems illegal and for restricting access to some Russian media, it has stopped short of delivering a killer blow to the video-hosting service.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit organization that promotes open-source software and defends the free software General Public License (GPL), recently sued major TV vendor Vizio for abusing the GPL with its Linux-based SmartCast OS. Vizio replied that the SFC had no right to ask for the source code. On May 13, however, the SFC succeeded in federal court with its motion to have its lawsuit against Vizio remanded back to Superior Court in Orange County, CA.

Doesn't sound like that big a deal? Think again. The important part of the decision by U.S. District Court Judge Josephine L. Staton stated that SFC's claim "that the [GPLv2] enforcement of 'an additional contractual promise separate and distinct from any rights provided by the copyright laws' amounts to an 'extra element,' and therefore, SFC's claims are not preempted." Karen M. Sandler, SFC's executive director, explained, "The ruling is a watershed moment in the history of copyleft licensing. This ruling shows that the GPL agreements function both as copyright licenses and as a contractual agreement." Sandler added that even in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) legal community people argue incorrectly that the GPL and other copyleft licenses only function as copyright licenses. This decision clearly states that the GPL also acts as a contract. Further, this decision makes it the first case to show individual consumers have rights to the source code as third-party beneficiaries of the GPL.

Microsoft blog: The steep rise in cryptocurrency market capitalization, not surprisingly, mirrors a marked increase in threats and attacks that target or leverage cryptocurrencies. But Microsoft researchers are observing an even more interesting trend: the evolution of related malware and their techniques, and the emergence of a threat type we're referring to as cryware. Cryware are information stealers that collect and exfiltrate data directly from non-custodial cryptocurrency wallets, also known as hot wallets. Because hot wallets, unlike custodial wallets, are stored locally on a device and provide easier access to cryptographic keys needed to perform transactions, more and more threats are targeting them.

Google announced a new initiative Tuesday aimed at securing the open-source software supply chain by curating and distributing a security-vetted collection of open-source packages to Google Cloud customers. From a report: The new service, branded Assured Open Source Software, was introduced in a blog post from the company. In the post, Andy Chang, group product manager for security and privacy at Google Cloud, pointed to some of the challenges of securing open-source software and stressed Google's commitment to open source. "There has been an increasing awareness in the developer community, enterprises, and governments of software supply chain risks," Chang wrote, citing last year's major log4j vulnerability as an example. "Google continues to be one of the largest maintainers, contributors, and users of open source and is deeply involved in helping make the open source software ecosystem more secure." Per Google's announcement, the Assured Open Source Software service will extend the benefits of Google's own extensive software auditing experience to Cloud customers. All open-source packages made available through the service are also used internally by Google, the company said, and are regularly scanned and analyzed for vulnerabilities.

Apple delayed a plan to require workers to come back to the office three days a week, citing a resurgence in Covid-19 cases, marking the latest setback in its efforts to return to normal. From a report: The company informed employees Tuesday that it's delaying the requirement, which had been slated to go into effect on May 23, according to a memo seen by Bloomberg. However, the company is still expecting workers to come to the office two days per week. The company said the requirement is being delayed for "the time being" and didn't provide a new date. Apple was set to require employees to work from the office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays beginning next week -- a policy that had been controversial among some staff. Already, employees have been coming in two days a week as part of a ramp-up effort that began in April. For now, that mandate isn't changing.

Mental health startup Cerebral will no longer prescribe most controlled substances, The Wall Street Journal reported. From a report: The embattled company is facing investigations from the US Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration over its prescribing practices, which, until this week, included offering prescriptions for stimulants like Adderall. Company co-founder Kyle Robertson wrote in an email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that it would stop prescribing most controlled substances to new customers on Friday and transition existing patients off of the drug or out of its care by October. Cerebral will still offer drugs that treat opioid-use disorder, like Suboxone. Robertson said in the email that the company only started prescribing controlled substances to customers in 2020 because people weren't able to get in-person care. It's stopping that program, he said, because of "the ability for patients to return to an in-person or hybrid care model for this treatment."

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has reined in a plan to triple its headcount this year in response to turbulent market conditions. From a report: Emilie Choi, Coinbase's president and chief operating officer, said in a blog post on Tuesday that the firm would be slowing hiring to "reprioritize our hiring needs against our highest-priority business goals." The note had been circulated among staff earlier. "Heading into this year, we planned to triple the size of the company. Given current market conditions, we feel it's prudent to slow hiring and reassess our headcount needs against our highest-priority business goals," she said. "Headcount growth is a key input to our financial model, and this is an important action to ensure we manage our business to the scenarios we planned for, specifically the potential adjusted Ebitda we are aiming to manage to."

Mastercard is launching a "controversial" biometric payments programme in stores, as the card company tries to keep pace with nimble fintechs and bigger competitors such as Amazon. From a report: Retailers that sign up to its pilot scheme can allow customers to pay in-store with a gesture such as a smile or a wave. The system, which requires customers to enrol first, could also be connected to loyalty programmes and purchase history. "Payments is a wide space, and we are trying to offer what customers want," Ajay Bhalla, Mastercard's president of cyber and intelligence, told the Financial Times. He said that Mastercard could act as the "enabler of the ecosystem," setting unified privacy and security standards for a technology that has raised the hackles of privacy and data protection campaigners. "It's important that we make sure that data is handled properly and the transaction is safe," said Bhalla. "Everything is done with consumer consent." The facial recognition software itself will come from companies including Japan's NEC, Brazil's Payface and California-based PopID. The first pilots are launching this week at five supermarkets run by the St Marche chain in Brazil. The ambition is to eventually allow consumers to use a single enrolment to pay across different stores, says Bhalla, with further pilots planned across regions including Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

All-in summit -- a conference hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg, who also operate a popular weekly podcast by the same name -- interviewed Elon Musk on Monday. In the wide-ranging interview, Musk talked about Twitter's bot problem, governments, immigration, and among other things, gave more insight into the scale and ambitions of Tesla and SpaceX.

Back in April, Google delayed when G Suite legacy free-edition users had to start paying for Workspace. The company will now let you stay on a "Free Legacy Edition of G Suite for personal use" as the "no-cost" alternative in a rather notable policy change. 9to5Google reports: This "no-cost" option is for people that aren't interested in paying for Workspace but want to retain access to their data and not just export via Google Takeout. For the past few months, people have been waiting to join a waitlist for this alternative. In a change of plans, there's no longer a waiting list, and these old users can sign-up for no-cost Legacy G Suite now. Head to your account's Google Admin Console as there are many reports of it going live this afternoon. You have until June 27 to pick a transition path.

Most notably, you can "continue using your custom domain with Gmail." [...] Besides the custom Gmail domain, you will "retain access to no-cost Google services" and "keep your purchases and data." [...] However, you must confirm to Google that your usage is for non-commercial personal use: "Google may remove business functionality from this offering and transition businesses to Google Workspace. Additionally, this option will not include support."

Tracking, marketing, and analytics firms have been exfiltrating the email addresses of internet users from web forms prior to submission and without user consent, according to security researchers. Some of these firms are said to have also inadvertently grabbed passwords from these forms. The Register reports: In a research paper scheduled to appear at the Usenix '22 security conference later this year, authors Asuman Senol (imec-COSIC, KU Leuven), Gunes Acar (Radboud University), Mathias Humbert (University of Lausanne) and Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, (Radboud University) describe how they measured data handling in web forms on the top 100,000 websites, as ranked by research site Tranco. The boffins created their own software to measure email and password data gathering from web forms -- structured web input boxes through which site visitors can enter data and submit it to a local or remote application.

Providing information through a web form by pressing the submit button generally indicates the user has consented to provide that information for a specific purpose. But web pages, because they run JavaScript code, can be programmed to respond to events prior to a user pressing a form's submit button. And many companies involved in data gathering and advertising appear to believe that they're entitled to grab the information website visitors enter into forms with scripts before the submit button has been pressed.

"Our analyses show that users' email addresses are exfiltrated to tracking, marketing and analytics domains before form submission and without giving consent on 1,844 websites in the EU crawl and 2,950 websites in the US crawl," the researchers state in their paper, noting that the addresses may be unencoded, encoded, compressed, or hashed depending on the vendor involved. Most of the email addresses grabbed were sent to known tracking domains, though the boffins say they identified 41 tracking domains that are not found on any of the popular blocklists. "Furthermore, we find incidental password collection on 52 websites by third-party session replay scripts," the researchers say.