Twitter's board on Friday enacted a defensive measure meant to deter Elon Musk's $43 billion hostile takeover bid. From a report: The "poison pill," as it's called in corporate terms, gives Twitter's existing shareholders time to purchase additional shares at a discount, thus diluting Musk's ownership stake. Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in Twitter earlier this month. He then announced he was joining the company's board of directors and began proposing several changes to the platform, including turning the company's headquarters into a homeless shelter. [...] He later backed out of joining the board and offered to purchase the company for $54.20 a share, though he did specify how he planned to pay for it. Twitter said in a statement that "its Board of Directors has unanimously adopted a limited duration shareholder rights plan. ... The Board adopted the Rights Plan following an unsolicited, non-binding proposal to acquire Twitter."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A federal class-action lawsuit involving Maple Heights and 2,000 other U.S. communities against Netflix and Hulu took a detour Wednesday through the Ohio Supreme Court, with Maple Heights officials asking state justices to define the streaming giants as "video service providers." If the Supreme Court agrees, the streaming services would be subject to the same video service provider fees paid by cable companies. Those fees in Ohio are 5% of the companies' gross revenues they earn in the city and go directly into city coffers. The streaming companies argued they are instead "specified digital products" under state law. Therefore, they pay state sales taxes, and Ohio would lose money if the court determines they owe the local franchise fees since they would be exempt from state sales tax under Ohio law. The Ohio Supreme Court will determine whether Netflix and Hulu are video service providers, among other legal questions, in the coming months. After the Ohio Supreme Court issues an opinion, the case in federal court in Cleveland can resume. That case involves around 2,000 cities, but U.S. District Judge James Gwin directed the Ohio Supreme Court to answer legal questions first.

Privacy is one of the selling points of Apple products. But for employees who develop these products, it can be a pain. The Information: Apple doesn't collect a lot of customer data from its services, including Apple Maps, the Siri voice assistant and its paid video-streaming service, according to more than a dozen former employees. And the customer data it does collect from products like the App Store and Apple Music aren't widely accessible to employees who work on those and other products, these people said. That makes it difficult for Apple to mimic popular features developed by its competitors, which collect more data and have fewer restrictions on employee access to such information, they said.

Look at Apple TV+. The paid video-streaming service, unlike its bigger rivals, doesn't collect demographic info about customers or a history of what they have watched, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation at Apple. That means Apple TV+ employees can't analyze how customers move from one piece of content to another, making it next to impossible to recommend more videos to them based on their preferences -- a contrast to Netflix, Disney and other streaming services, which use such data to get customers to watch more videos. [...] From Apple's app recommendations to new features for Siri and the company's Goldman Sachs-backed credit card, Apple engineers and data scientists often have to find creative or costly ways to make up for the lack of access to data. In some cases, as with Apple TV+, employees simply have to accept limitations on what they can do.

Nigerian banks have been hit by an exodus of tech talent, chief executives of the nation's lenders say. From a report: "So many of our very experienced talents especially in the area of software engineering are either leaving the industry or leaving the country," Abubakar Suleiman, chief executive officer of Sterling Bank, told reporters at the end of a meeting of bank CEOs on Thursday, according to a voice recording shared by the central bank. He referred to it as a "great resignation." The meeting came as traditional lenders in Africa's largest economy face stiff competition for talent from technology startups attracting increased funding from international investors and offering better working conditions, in and outside the country. Africa-focused startups raised a record $5 billion last year, with those specializing in digital and mobile payments and lending soaking up most of the funding. Two economic contractions in the last five years have also forced some Nigerians with globally marketable skills to leave the country, with the U.S., Canada and U.K. being preferred destinations.

Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham combed through Steam Hardware & Software Survey data "to see how Windows 11 is fairing with enthusiasts." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Steam users are migrating to Windows 11 about half as quickly as they moved to Windows 10. Six months after its release, Windows 10 ran on 31 percent of all Steam computers -- nearly one in three. As of March 2022, Windows 11 runs on just under 17 percent of Steam computers -- about one in six. Three-quarters of all Steam computers in 2022 are still running Windows 10. It's easy to interpret these results as an indictment of Windows 11, which generated some controversy with its relatively stringent (and often poorly explained) security-oriented system requirements. At least some of this slow adoption is caused by those system requirements -- many of the PCs surveyed by Steam probably can't install Windows 11. That could be because users have an older unsupported CPU or have one or more of the required security features disabled; Secure Boot and the firmware TPM module were often turned off by default on new motherboards for many years. But there are other compelling explanations. Windows 11's adoption looks slow compared to Windows 10, but Windows 10's adoption was also exceptionally good.

Windows 8 and 8.1 were not well-loved, to put it mildly, and Windows 10 was framed as a response to (and a fix for) most of Windows 8's user interface changes. And people who were still on Windows 7 were missing out on some of the nice quality-of-life additions and under-the-hood improvements that Windows 8 added. You can see that pent-up demand in the jump between July 2015 and September 2015. In the first two months of Windows 10's availability, Windows 8 hemorrhaged users, falling from around 35 percent usage to 19 percent. Virtually all of those users -- and a smaller but still notable chunk of Windows 7 users -- were moving to Windows 10. Windows 11 also got a decent early adopter bump in November 2021, but its gains every other month were much smaller.

In contrast, Windows 11 was announced with little run-up, and it was replacing what users had been told was the "last version of Windows." Where Windows 10 replaced one new, unloved OS and one well-liked but aging OS, Windows 11 replaced a modern OS that nobody really complained about (Windows 10 ran on over 90 percent of all Steam computers in September 2021 -- even Windows 7 in its heyday couldn't boast that kind of adoption). It's also worth noting that Microsoft didn't try to re-create that initial burst of adoption for Windows 11. Following some turbulence after early Windows 10 servicing updates, Microsoft began rolling updates out more methodically, starting with small numbers of PCs and then expanding availability gradually as problems were discovered and ironed out. Windows 11 only entered "its final phase of availability" in February, ensuring that anyone with a compatible PC could get Windows 11 through Windows Update if they wanted it.

NASA has signed up to test SpinLaunch's extraordinary whirl 'n' hurl space launch technology, which accelerates a launch vehicle to hypersonic speeds using an electric centrifuge instead of a rocket, hurling it skyward like a space discus. New Atlas reports: The idea behind SpinLaunch is as staggering as the company's name is appropriate. The idea of winding up and throwing satellites most of the way into orbit just boggles the mind. But in initial testing, this company's kinetic launch system, which looks externally a lot like a turbocharger, has shown promise as an environmentally-friendly, and potentially cost-effective replacement for first-stage rocket launches. [T]he company says it'll be appropriate for smaller launch vehicles weighing up to about 440 lb (200 kg), carrying ultra-ruggedized satellites capable of dealing with the forces involved. The SpinLaunch system will do the first part, flinging them high into the air, where a second-stage rocket can take over and give them the final push into orbit.

And the advantages are pretty compelling. SpinLaunch says that eliminating the first-stage rocket from the launch vehicle will cut out some 70 percent of the fuel and structures needed by a traditional launch vehicle, and that it can get appropriate loads into orbit using a quarter of the fuel, and at a tenth of the price. NASA is one of many parties interested in this possibility, and it's now signed a Space Act agreement with SpinLaunch to develop and integrate a NASA payload for this kinetic launch system, which will be flung skyward from Spaceport America, New Mexico, in a test flight later this year.

This, like all SpinLaunch "regular" test flights to date, will be a slower sub-orbital launch with a speed closer to 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h, Mach 1.3) than 5,000 mph. The payload will be designed to take a range of measurements, which will be analyzed by both groups. All non-proprietary information learned from this test will be published, and SpinLaunch says it's working towards its first orbital launch in 2025. A render posted late last year by SpinLaunch shows how their system works.

Today, Reddit is updating its search feature to index comments. The Verge reports: For the first time, users will have an option to pull results from replies to posts, making it less of a hassle to find something specific outside of general Reddit posts, communities, and people. The rollout is Reddit's latest change to help users encounter content from outside their usual subreddits following the addition of a discovery tab on its mobile app in January.

Reddit says that in a user survey last year, the ability to search comments was one of the top results. During "limited initial testing," Reddit claimed 26,000 users went on to use the feature against five billion comments. Right now, the new ability is available globally for users searching on Reddit's desktop website, but not via its apps. The company "is also updating its search experience to help users find more relevant search results written by real people," adds The Verge. "For example, when searching for something, instead of showing search results with that exact wording, related results will pop up instead to make the search less restrictive."

As part of its global anti-piracy mission, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has been trying to shut down Pelisplushd.net, a massive pirate streaming site with roughly 70 million visits per month. After tracking down its operator in the remote countryside of Peru, the anti-piracy group says the site is no more. TorrentFreak reports: In a statement published Wednesday, ACE officially announced that it was behind the closure of Pelisplushd.net. The anti-piracy group labeled the platform the second-largest Spanish-language 'rogue website' in the entire Latin American region with 383.5 million visits in the past six months and nearly 75 million visits in February 2022. In Mexico alone, the site had more visitors than hbomax.com, disneyplus.com and primevideo.com, a clear problem for those platforms which are all ACE members.

"This is a huge win for the ACE team based in Latin America as we work to protect the legitimate digital ecosystem throughout the region," said Jan van Voorn, Executive Vice President and Chief of Global Content Protection for the Motion Picture Association. "The successful action against the operator of Pelisplushd.net was only made possible because of evidence that we gathered from previous operations conducted in other countries in Latin America. "This speaks volumes about ACE's ability to crack current cases utilizing years of past gathered intelligence and highlights the global, strategic approach that determines our actions around the world."

The operator of Pelisplushd is yet to be named but ACE reveals that after a positive identification, the anti-piracy group tracked him down to the "remote countryside of Peru." That took place in March and soon after, ACE says the operator agreed to turn over his domains. As far as we can tell the main domain at Pelisplushd.net is not yet completely in ACE/MPA hands but a full transfer will probably take place later.

In a Twitter thread earlier today, Meta CTO Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth teased a web version of Horizon Worlds, the company's virtual reality platform that's an integral part of their plan for creating a "metaverse." Boz was responding to criticism from MacRumors' Sami Fathi, who pointed out the hypocrisy of Meta taking an almost 50% commission on "metaverse" purchases after complaining about the 15-30% cut Apple takes from developers in the App Store.

"We're taking a different approach with our margin (heh) on Quest devices to make them available to more people," said Boz. "We're committed to help build a different ecosystem. Developers are already seeing success on the Quest Store alone -- over 120 titles are generating over $1M." He added: "We're making good on our goal to ensure that developers have a path to real financial success on our platform. It's early days, there is still a lot of work to be done and we continue to partner closely with our creators and developers to enable them to earn meaningful revenue." Boz went on to say that the Horizon World's platform fee "will only be 25%" when the web version launches -- "a much lower rate compared to other similar world-building platforms."

Independent contractors are pushed to handle customer service without compensation. From an investigation: When Samsung announced its new Galaxy S22, the biggest Android smartphone launch of the year, Jennifer Larson was ready to finally make some money. On February 9th, she logged into the Ibbu app, where she sells phones to waiting customers at Samsung.com via online chats. Typically, the yearly Galaxy Unpacked showcase is a huge sales event for Samsung and a potentially big payday for her. "They built it up like it was Christmas, I got all pumped up," Larson says. But on this product release day, Samsung's website was experiencing widespread glitches; customers couldn't complete orders, and some were getting blank screens. If they could connect to the chats at all, customers were frustrated. Larson gave up after about two hours and called it a day.

And really, why would she stay? She thought Unpacked would be a break from the increasingly grim reality of her job, which has been to field a growing number of completely unpaid customer service calls. Instead, it was more of the same -- hours of customer complaints she wasn't going to get paid for handling. Samsung's experts are commission-only, with no hourly rate. So if they don't sell anything, they don't get paid. Originally, the money was good, but a once-promising work-from-home job has deteriorated into a confusing mess of misdirected customers and inconsistent directions from superiors, Larson and her co-workers say. Meanwhile, Samsung customers looking for support may not be aware that they've been routed to someone whose only financial incentive is to sell them a new product. Larson and her colleagues are portrayed as subject matter experts there to help customers -- think Apple's Genius Bar -- but the expert's goal is really to close sales. Even if they want to help, they aren't trained in customer support.

Somnium Space is developing a way for people to talk to their loved ones even after they die. All it requires is massive amounts of personal data. From a report: Almost five years ago, Artur Sychov's father was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, which would ultimately kill him within a few years. The news of his father's illness devastated Sychov. "It kind of hit me that the time I had with him was limited," he told me last week. At the time, Sychov's children were just a few years old, and it pained him to think that they might grow up without a memory of their grandfather. In those moments, he started to wonder if there was some way in which his children might be able to have a conversation with their grandfather, even after he was gone. Sychov is the CEO and founder of Somnium Space, one of the many versions of the metaverse that have sprouted up in recent years. Unlike many of its competitors, Somnium Space is already compatible with virtual reality headsets, allowing for an immersive 3D experience.

The death of Sychov's father served as the inspiration for an idea that he would come to call "Live Forever" mode, a forthcoming feature in Somnium Space that allows people to have their movements and conversations stored as data, then duplicated as an avatar that moves, talks, and sounds just like you -- and can continue to do so long after you have died. In Sychov's dream, people will be able to talk to their dead loved one whenever they wish. [...] To Sychov, these are the sort of potential innovations that make the metaverse a new arena of human experience worth investing in. "They think that it's about selling NFTs and brands selling their stuff, but it's not about that," he told me. "It's much deeper."

Meta is throwing billions of dollars into building out the metaverse as the future of social networking but in the near term, the tech giant is looking toward the power of messaging to connect users in a more personal way. From a report: On that front, the company today introduced its plans for a significant update to its WhatsApp messaging app that will allow users to now not only connect privately with friends and family, as before, but also participate in larger discussion groups, called Communities. These groups aim to serve as a more feature-rich replacement for people's larger group chats with added support for tools like file-sharing of up to 2GB, 32-person group calls, emoji reactions, as well as admin tools and moderation controls, among other things.

The feature has been under development for some time as the next big iteration for the WhatsApp platform, meant to capitalize on the app's existing end-to-end encryption as well as users' growing desire to join private communities outside of larger social platforms, like Facebook. In particular, Communities could present a challenge to other messaging apps like Telegram -- which has recently become a prominent player in communications related to the Russia-Ukraine war -- in addition to other private messaging platforms, like iMessage or Signal, as well as apps like GroupMe, Band, Remind and others used to communicate with groups.

Billionaire Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter for about $41 billion, just days after rejecting a seat on the social media company's board. From a report: Musk's offer price of $54.20 per share, which was disclosedin a regulatory filing on Thursday, represents a 38% premium to Twitter's April 1 close, the last trading day before the Tesla CEO's more than 9% stake in the company was made public. Twitter's shares jumped 12% in premarket trading. "Since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company," Musk said in a letter to Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor. "My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder," Musk said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Another piece of space infrastructure for Ukraine is under attack, according to an NBC report. Jammers from Russian forces besieging the country are targeting global positioning system (GPS) satellite signals that are used for navigation, mapping and other purposes, the report said, quoting the U.S. Space Force. "Ukraine may not be able to use GPS because there are jammers around that prevent them from receiving any usable signal," Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force's vice chief of space operations, told NBC Nightly News Monday (April 11). "Certainly the Russians understand the value and importance of GPS and try to prevent others from using it," Thompson added. He noted that Russia has not directly attacked any satellites in orbit, but the Space Force is keeping an eye out for such possibilities.

Specifically, Russia is targeting the Navstar system of satellites used by the United States and made available openly to many countries around the world, Thompson said. (Russia has its own independent system, called GLONASS, while the Europeans have one called Galileo and China has one called Beidou.) Navstar uses 24 main satellites that each orbit the Earth every 12 hours. The system works by sending synchronized signals to users on Earth. Because the satellites move in different directions, the user receives their signals at slightly different times. When four satellites are available, GPS receivers can use their signals to calculate the user's position, often to within just a few feet. In late February shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, SpaceX's Starlink satellites were activated over the country to help restore internet services destroyed by the Russians. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk later warned that Starlink user terminals in Ukraine could be targeted by Russia and advised users to take precautions.

mspohr shares a report from the New York Times: In early March, days after Russia invaded Ukraine and began cracking down on dissent at home, Konstantin Siniushin, a venture capitalist in Riga, Latvia, helped charter two planes out of Russia to help people flee. Both planes departed from Moscow, carrying tech workers from the Russian capital as well as St. Petersburg, Perm, Ekaterinburg and other cities. Together, the planes moved about 300 software developers, entrepreneurs and other technology specialists out of the country, including 30 Russian workers from start-ups backed by Mr. Siniushin. The planes flew south past the Black Sea to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where thousands of other Russian tech workers fled in the weeks after the invasion. Thousands more flew to Georgia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and other countries that accept Russian citizens without visas.

By March 22, a Russian tech industry trade group estimated that between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers had left the country and that an additional 70,000 to 100,000 would soon follow. They are part of a much larger exodus of workers from Russia, but their departure could have an even more lasting impact on the country's economy. The long-run impact may be more significant than the short-run impact," said Barry Ickes, head of the economics department at Pennsylvania State University, who specializes in the Russian economy. "Eventually, Russia has to diversify its economy away from oil and gas, and it has to accelerate productivity growth. Tech was a natural way of doing that." Before all this started, Russia had such a strong technology base," [Artem Taganov, founder and chief executive of a Russian start-up called HintEd] said. "Now, we have a brain drain that will continue for the next five to 10 years."

The Git team has issued an update to fix a bug in Git for Windows that "affects multi-user hardware where untrusted parties have write access to the same hard disk," reports The Register. Specifically, the update is concerned with CVE-2022-24765. From the report: Arguably, if an "untrusted party" has write access to a hard disk, then all bets are off when it comes to the nooks and crannies of a PC anyway. In this case, the miscreants would only need to create the folder c:\.git, "which would be picked up by Git operations run supposedly outside a repository while searching for a Git directory," according to NIST. The result is that Git would use the config in the directory.

NIST went on to list potentially vulnerable products, which included Visual Studio. "Users of the Microsoft fork of Git are vulnerable simply by starting a Git Bash." The Git team was little blunter about the vulnerability, and warned that "Merely having a Git-aware prompt that runs 'git status' (or 'git diff') and navigating to a directory which is supposedly not a Git worktree, or opening such a directory in an editor or IDE such as VS Code or Atom, will potentially run commands defined by that other user." [...] To deal with the issue, the Git team recommends an update. Alternatively, a user could create that .git folder themselves and remove read/write access as workaround or "define or extend 'GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES' to cover the parent directory of the user profile," according to NIST.

Gergely Orosz: We are in the middle of the longest outage Atlassian has had. Close to 400 companies and anywhere from 50,000 to 400,000 users had no access to JIRA, Confluence, OpsGenie, JIRA Status page, and other Atlassian Cloud services. The outage is its 9th day, having started on Monday, 4th of April. Atlassian estimates many impacted customers will be unable to access their services for another two weeks. At the time of writing, 45% of companies have seen their access restored. For most of this outage, Atlassian has gone silent in communications across their main channels such as Twitter or the community forums. It took until Day 9 for executives at the company to acknowledge the outage.

While the company stayed silent, outage news started trending in niche communities. In these forums, people tried to guess causes of the outage, wonder why there is full radio silence, and many took to mocking the company for how it is handling the situation. Atlassian did no better with communicating with customers during this time. Impacted companies received templated emails and no answers to their questions. After I tweeted about this outage, several Atlassian customers turned to me to vent about the situation, and hope I can offer more details. Customers claimed how the company's statements made it seem they received support, which they, in fact, did not. Several customers hoped I could help get the attention of the company which had not given them any details, beyond telling them to wait weeks until their data is restored.

On Monday, Google quietly launched the Switch to Android app on the App Store in a number of global markets, including the U.S. From a report: As expected, the app promises to make the transition between mobile platforms easier to manage by helping users import their contacts, calendar, photos, and videos to their new Android phone. The app also instructs users how to turn off Apple's iMessage in order to get text messages on their new device and has them connect with iCloud to migrate their photo and video library to Android.

Mark Zuckerberg has a grandiose vision for the metaverse, and he hopes that you'll one day see the same thing, too -- quite literally, through a pair of augmented reality glasses. The Verge reports: Still, Zuckerberg has ambitious goals for when his high-tech glasses will be a reality. Employees are racing to deliver the first generation by 2024 and are already working on a lighter, more advanced design for 2026, followed by a third version in 2028.ââ The details, which together give the first comprehensive look at Meta's AR hardware ambitions, were shared with The Verge by people familiar with the roadmap who weren't authorized to speak publicly. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment for this story.

If the AR glasses and the other futuristic hardware Meta is building eventually catch on, they could cast the company, and by extension Zuckerberg, in a new light. "Zuck's ego is intertwined with [the glasses]," a former employee who worked on the project tells me. "He wants it to be an iPhone moment." Meta's CEO also sees the AR glasses, dubbed Project Nazare, as a way to get out from under the thumb of Apple and Google, which together dictate the terms that apps like Facebook have to abide by on mobile phones. The first version of Nazare is designed to work independently from a mobile phone with the assistance of a wireless, phone-shaped device that offloads parts of the computing required for the glasses to operate. A marquee feature will be the ability to communicate and interact with holograms of other people through the glasses, which Zuckerberg believes will, over time, provide people with a more immersive, compelling experience than the video calling that exists today.

Alphabet's Google said on Wednesday it plans to invest about $9.5 billion across its U.S. offices and data centers this year, up from $7 billion last year. From a report: Google said the investment will create at least 12,000 full-time jobs in 2022 and focus on data centers in several states including Nevada, Nebraska and Virginia. The company will open a new office in Atlanta this year, and expand its data center in Storey County, Nevada, it added. "It might seem counterintuitive to step up our investment in physical offices even as we embrace more flexibility in how we work. Yet we believe it's more important than ever to invest in our campuses...," Google said in a statement. Google has been trying to bring back its employees to some of its offices in the United States, the UK and Asia Pacific by mandating working from office for about three days a week, a step to end policies that let employees work remotely because of COVID-19 concerns.