Hundreds of Salesforce employees globally are rebelling against plans by the U.S. enterprise software giant to enter the non-fungible token (NFT) market, according to internal documents seen by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. From a report: Salesforce told employees earlier this month it was exploring a series of NFT initiatives, including an "NFT Cloud" which could help companies around the world create and sell NFTs -- a kind of digital asset often linked to an image or piece of artwork, which is usually bought with cryptocurrencies. More than 400 employees have signed on to an open letter which was penned after the company's announcement, and is being shared in internal messaging channels. It is addressed to Salesforce's co-CEOs, and raises concerns about the environmental and economic impact of NFTs, calling them "unregulated, highly speculative financial assets."

An anonymous reader shares a report: When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn't expect to discover an entirely new social behaviour rarely seen in birds. Our goal was to learn more about the movement and social dynamics of these highly intelligent birds, and to test these new, durable and reusable devices. Instead, the birds outsmarted us. As our new research paper explains, the magpies began showing evidence of cooperative "rescue" behaviour to help each other remove the tracker. While we're familiar with magpies being intelligent and social creatures, this was the first instance we knew of that showed this type of seemingly altruistic behaviour: helping another member of the group without getting an immediate, tangible reward. As academic scientists, we're accustomed to experiments going awry in one way or another. Expired substances, failing equipment, contaminated samples, an unplanned power outage -- these can all set back months (or even years) of carefully planned research. For those of us who study animals, and especially behaviour, unpredictability is part of the job description. This is the reason we often require pilot studies.

Manchester City have begun building the world's first football stadium inside the metaverse with the help of virtual reality experts at Sony. From a report: Using image analysis and skeletal-tracking technologies created by Hawk-Eye, a subsidiary of the tech and entertainment giant, the club's stadium will become the central hub of City in a virtual reality world. Club officials working on the project envisage a time when City can fill a virtual Eithad Stadium several times over, allowing supporters who may never go to Manchester to watch live games from the comfort of their own homes anywhere in the world. The Premier League's digital pioneers have signed a three-year deal with Sony and, though work is still in its infancy, teams of the company's experts have already visited the Etihad to map it digitally and recreate it in virtual reality.

A new claim that Microsoft and Google are gaming the online advertising market to the detriment of smaller rivals threatens to set up a new antitrust clash in Europe, according to previously unseen data. Politico: The two U.S. giants appear to be flooding smaller search engine partners with spam ads and keeping some of the most valuable ads for themselves, according to data reviewed by POLITICO, in a move that draws parallels with the infamous $2.7 billion Google Shopping case. While EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager's 2015 offensive against Google's abuses in the search market got the backing of the EU General Court in November, there are some who say that blind spots in the case have allowed for certain violations to continue -- illustrated by Swedish price-comparison site PriceRunner's decision earlier this month to sue Google for $2.4 billion in damages. And now, according to the same data, both Google and its closest rival in the search engine space, Microsoft, are siphoning off so-called spam ads to smaller search engines that use their search results, as well as limiting the quantity of higher-value ads that appear on these partner search engines.

AndroidPolice reports: Google has confirmed to us that the Pixel 3 series has received its last update, marking the end of a three-year promise. But revisiting the 2018-era flagship, I still can't help but be disappointed that Google didn't try harder to keep it supported longer. Google may have met its marketing requirements, but as I've said before, it's hypocritical for a company committed to sustainability and customer security to leave old smartphones behind so quickly. Revisiting it for the last few days, the Pixel 3 is still a perfectly good phone that could have years of life left in it. And, according to everyone I've spoken to, there aren't any good technical reasons for it being left behind. Google just doesn't care.

Industry analysts and former Mozilla employees are concerned about Firefox's future, reports Ars Technica, warning that the ultimate fate of Firefox "has larger implications for the web as a whole." Since its release in 2008, [Google's] Chrome has become synonymous with the web: it's used by around 65 percent of everyone online and has a huge influence on how people experience the Internet. When Google launched its AMP publishing standard, websites jumped to implement it. Similar plans to replace third-party cookies in Chrome — a move that will impact millions of marketers and publishers — are shaped in Google's image.

"Chrome has won the desktop browser war," says one former Firefox staff member, who worked on browser development at Mozilla but does not want to be named, as they still work in the industry. Their hopes for a Firefox revival are not high. "It's not super reasonable for Firefox to expect to win back even any browser share at this point." Another former Mozilla employee, who also asked not to be named for fear of career repercussions, says: "They're just going to have to accept the reality that Firefox is not going to come back from the ashes...."

Mozilla's financial declarations from 2020 said that despite the layoffs it is in a healthy place, and it expects its financial results for 2021 to show revenue growth. However, Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money. These efforts have ramped up since 2019. The company owns read-it-later service Pocket, which includes a paid premium subscription service. It has also launched two similar VPN-style products that people can subscribe to. And the company is pushing more into advertising as well, placing ads on new tabs that are opened in the Firefox browser.... Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox, says Firefox is likely to continue looking for ways to keep personalizing people's online browsing. "I'm not sure that what's going to come out of that is going to be what people traditionally expect from a browser, but the intention will always be to put people first," she says. Just this week, Firefox announced a partnership with Disney — linked to a new Pixar film — that involves changing the color of the browser and ads to win subscriptions to Disney+. The deal speaks both to Firefox's personalization push and the strange roads its search for revenue streams can lead down.

Deckelmann adds that Firefox doesn't need to be as big as Chrome or Apple's Safari, the second largest browser, to succeed. "All we really want is to be a viable choice," Deckelmann says. "Because we think that this makes a better Internet for everybody to have these different options."
Interesting stats from the article:

• "Mozilla's own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022."

• Mozilla's figures now also show around 215 million Firefox Desktop clients active in the past 28 days — a number which has stayed stable.

• Yet In 2008, a full 20% of the 1.5 billion people online were using Firefox to surf the web — including more than half the web surfers in Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia.

• "Across all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market," writes Ars Technica. "On mobile it's a measly half a percent..."

• Next year, Firefox's "lucrative search deal with Google — responsible for the vast majority of its revenue" — is set to expire.

Slashdot reader McGruber shares a scathing column from New York magazine arguing that "There has never been a self-immolation quite like Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's social-media company has lost more than half a trillion dollars in market value since its August peak — about half of that vaporized in a single day, the biggest drop ever — as it starts to weaken from the constant siege of competitors and dissenters without and within.

"The fallout is so bad that Meta, once the sixth-largest company in the world by market capitalization, has fallen out of the top ten, replaced by two computer-chip makers, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, and the Chinese e-commerce company Tencent..."

They're calling it "an ignominious fall from a rarefied group of world-dominating companies." Facebook's once unbeatable ad-tracking system — the engine that made it a more than $1 trillion company — has effectively been neutralized by the likes of Apple, which allows users to block the company's trackers. (Google is set to start phasing in similar protections to its users over the next two years.) Facebook's user base has started to shrink after revelations by whistleblowers and leaks that showed how harmful social media could be to teen users, who are flocking to less toxic competitors like TikTok anyway. And Zuckerberg — clearly bored with the company he founded 18 years ago — has shifted his vision into an immersive version of the internet, complete with headsets and digital avatars, that he calls the metaverse, an ambition that sets up Facebook's competition not with another Silicon Valley company but with reality itself....

Apple and Google have decided they're going to allow their users to disable code that tracks people across the internet, which happens to be good for their business model. According to The Wall Street Journal, the fallout has been so severe that advertisers are shifting their entire ad budgets to Google since Facebook is no longer profitable.
The article's final point is that in the middle of all this, Zuckerberg has committed the company to a "metaverse" future — even though Wall Street investors seem almost unanimously unconvinced.

"Clearly, Zuckerberg has plenty of money to burn on his ambitions, but what's less clear is if he'll be able to bring back the armies of people who once believed in his ability to conquer the world."

It's the 25th anniversary of Slate.com, and writer William Saletan reflects on the last quarter century. "Print magazines that scorned internet journalism collapsed or faded (it's hard to believe now, but in the '90s, people thought your article wasn't real if it wasn't on paper), while new websites popped up to challenge us. In the struggle for survival, many outlets withered and died. But Slate adapted and grew..."

But he also shares what worries him now about the online world we're living in: I don't see people learning from, or even recognizing, their mistakes. I see them caricaturing and gloating over the mistakes of others. In the old days, there was a lot of hope that the information age would make us smarter. It didn't. Instead, high-speed communication, combined with algorithms that discern our biases and feed us what we want, helped us sort ourselves into echo chambers. On Twitter, Facebook, Slack, and other platforms, we've formed like-minded battalions that quickly spot the other side's sins and falsehoods but are largely blind to our own.

I don't mean to suggest that tribalism is new or that it's always political. In the late '90s, when Microsoft was on trial for antitrust violations, Slate's top editors — all of whom drew Microsoft paychecks and had Microsoft stock options — were almost comically unanimous in their motivated reasoning. Their politics ranged from progressive to neoliberal to libertarian, but their behavior was essentially identical: They summoned all of their intellectual power, which was prodigious, and used it to poke holes in the antitrust case — in effect, to defend Microsoft.
Saletan argues that while the internet makes it easy to venture out from a "bubble" of viewpoints, too many idealists "insulated themselves from engagement with fundamentally opposing views...."

"So that's what I've learned in my time here: seek out other perspectives, study your failures, and try to become wiser every day."

In NFL news, an American football team — the Denver Broncos — "are up for sale," reports CNBC, "and a group of crypto enthusiasts is aiming to raise more than $4 billion using a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, to make it their own...." This group includes an eclectic mix of attorneys, accountants, software developers, pro athletes, and at least one mathematician. One of the people spearheading the cause is Sean O'Brien, who spent over a decade in Cisco's legal department, before leaving the corporate world to run a few small businesses with his wife. "We know it sounds a bit crazy, but it's also a bit badass," said O'Brien. "The purpose essentially is to establish an infrastructure so that fans from all walks of life can be owners of the Denver Broncos."

The pro football team is valued at just under $4 billion, and it is expected to garner the biggest price tag in North American sports history, according to ESPN....

DAOs take coordination of resources on the internet to a new level, according to Auston Bunsen, co-founder of QuikNode, which provides blockchain infrastructure to developers and companies. "They represent a new kind of organization moving at hyper speed," said Bunsen. Investor Cooper Turley, who has helped build several popular DAOs, says they're like an "internet community with a shared bank account."

"Basically, a small group of people come together to form a chat group, and then they decide to pull capital together, [typically] using an Ethereum wallet," Turley previously told CNBC....

Though the group will still fundraise in cryptocurrency, the idea is to give people partial ownership, in which they will participate in deciding how the team is run... The BuyTheBroncos group also has a pretty solid plan B. Organizers tell CNBC the more realistic goal is to raise around 25% of the money needed to place the winning bid, and from there, join forces with a consortium of more traditional buyers to make up the difference.
The group's Twitter account had less than 50 followers before CNBC's article — but 390 followers after the article ran. And O'Brien tells CBNC his ultimate goal is "to essentially open up peoples' eyes to what a DAO can do in the real world and make a tangible connection between this web3 life and the real world.

"Our thought is that it accelerates DAO adoption for solving real-world problems such as food scarcity or unhoused peoples."

The Washington Post reports: Google announced it will begin the process of getting rid of long-standing ad trackers on its Android operating system, upending how advertising and data-collection work on phones and tablets used by more than 2.5 billion people around the world.

Right now, Google assigns special IDs to each Android device, allowing advertisers to build profiles of what people do on their phones and serve them highly targeted ads. Google will begin testing alternatives to those IDs this year and eventually remove them completely, the company said in a Wednesday blog post. Google said the changes will improve privacy for Android users, limiting the massive amounts of data that app developers collect from people using the platform.

But the move also could give Google even more power over digital advertising, and is likely to deepen concerns regulators have already expressed about the company's competitive practices... It made $61 billion in advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021 alone....

The announcement comes over a year after Apple began blocking trackers on its own operating system, which runs on its iPhones, giving customers more tools to limit the data they share with app developers.... Google contrasted its plan with Apple's, saying it would make the changes over the next two years, working closely with app developers and the advertising industry to craft new ways of targeting ads and measuring their effectiveness before making any drastic changes.

"We realize that other platforms have taken a different approach to ads privacy, bluntly restricting existing technologies used by developers and advertisers," said Anthony Chavez, vice president of product management for Android security and privacy, in the blog post. "We believe that without first providing a privacy-preserving alternative path such approaches can be ineffective and lead to worse outcomes for user privacy and developer businesses."
The Post also includes this quote from the chief security office of Mozilla (which began restricting ad tracking in Firefox several years ago). "Google's two year plan is too long. People deserve better privacy now."

Protocol reports that Google "plans to reduce the equity packages for Durham, North Carolina; Des Moines, Iowa; and Houston, Texas, in January 2022, according to an Alphabet Workers Union petition circulating today that demands a reversion to pay and equity cuts." The Washington Post notes that "For some employees, that means their stock grants could be 25 percent lower than if they worked at other Google offices, like in Atlanta, the workers said in the letter."

With over 800 members the Alphabet Workers Union is part of a larger effort to organize workers at tech companies. Protocol writes: The Research Triangle area, where the Durham, North Carolina, office is located, was also moved from the "National" pay band to a "Discount" pay band in late 2020, according to the Amazon Workers Union petition. The union said it would affect 300 workers there, but that Google plans to expand to 1,000 employees in the coming years....

Many workers relocated there before the changes in pay and equity were made, the union wrote.

Since being rolled out to users in the U.S. and Canada, Meta's social VR platform for the Quest headset, Horizon Worlds, has grown its monthly user base by a factor of 10x to 300,000 people. "Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne confirmed the stat and said it included users of Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues, a separate app for attending live events in VR that uses the same avatars and basic mechanics," reports The Verge. "The number doesn't include Horizon Workrooms, a VR conferencing experience that relies on an invite system." From the report: Before its December rollout, Horizon Worlds was in a private beta for creators to test its world-building tools. Similarly to how the gaming platform Roblox or Microsoft's Minecraft works, Horizon Worlds lets people build custom environments to hang out and play games in as legless avatars. Meta announced this week that 10,000 separate worlds have been built in Horizon Worlds to date, and its private Facebook group for creators now numbers over 20,000 members.

Meta still hasn't disclosed how many Quest headsets it has sold to date, which makes it hard to gauge Horizon's success relative to the underlying hardware platform it runs on. But several third-party estimates peg sales at over 10 million for the Quest. Zuckerberg recently said that Meta would release a version of Horizon for mobile phones later this year to "bring early metaverse experiences to more surfaces beyond VR."

"So while the deepest and most immersive experiences are going to be in virtual reality, you're also going to be able to access the worlds from your Facebook or Instagram apps as well, and probably more over time," the CEO said on Meta's last earnings call. Bringing Horizon to mobile would position it as even more of a competitor to Rec Room, a well-funded, social gaming app with 37 million monthly users across gaming consoles, mobile phones, and VR.

Google Search is now testing a row of widgets on desktop web for an experience that's similar to Discover. 9to5Google reports: These cards appear at the very bottom of google.com. There's a "Hide content" toggle in the bottom-right corner, while Google notes your zip code/city and explains that the information offered is "Based on your past activity." When the window is fully expanded, six cards are offered and they all expand on hover:

- Weather: Condition (with) icon + temperature. Three-day forecast on hover
- Trending: Cover image with search count
- What to Watch: Shows and movies with cover art
- Stocks/markets: Day graph on hover
- Local Events: With date
- COVID News

Tapping opens the full web result with the usual Knowledge Panel card and/or related Google Search experience. The number of cards that appear depends on the size of your screen with no way to scroll and see more without physically expanding the window. We're only seeing this rolled out on two Google Accounts, albeit across several signed-in devices, today. As such, this is very likely a test to determine whether a full rollout is warranted.

Microsoft last month received a US patent covering modifications to a data-encoding technique called rANS, one of several variants in the Asymmetric Numeral System (ANS) family that support data compression schemes used by leading technology companies and open source projects. The Register reports: The creator of ANS, Jaroslaw Duda, assistant professor at Institute of Computer Science at Jagiellonian University in Poland, has been trying for years to keep ANS patent-free and available for public use. Back in 2018, Duda's lobbying helped convince Google to abandon its ANS-related patent claim in the US and Europe. And he raised the alarm last year when he learned Microsoft had applied for an rANS (range asymmetric number system) patent.

Now that Microsoft's patent application has been granted, he fears the utility of ANS will be diminished, as software developers try to steer clear of a potential infringement claim. "I don't know what to do with it -- [Microsoft's patent] looks like just the description of the standard algorithm," he told The Register in an email. The algorithm is used in JPEG XL and CRAM, as well as open source projects run by Facebook (Meta), Nvidia, and others. "This rANS variant is [for example] used in JPEG XL, which is practically finished (frozen bitstream) and [is] gaining support," Duda told The Register last year. "It provides ~3x better compression than JPEG at similar computational cost, compatibility with JPEG, progressive decoding, missing features like HDR, alpha, lossless, animations. "There is a large team, mostly from Google, behind it. After nearly 30 years, it should finally replace the 1992 JPEG for photos and images, starting with Chrome, Android."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has confirmed to TechCrunch that Jeren A. Miles, who had been a manager of global community development, is no longer employed by the company after a video went viral on YouTube, which was then reposted on Reddit and other sites, featuring him in a sting operation conducted by amateurs with the intent of catching paedophiles.

The two-hour video, posted by an amateur group called PCI Predator Catchers Indianapolis on its YouTube page, does not depict Miles caught in any sex act, nor admitting to any specific sex act, nor admitting to intending to carry out any sex act. And it is not clear what the legal ramifications of this will be, if any. But it does feature two people questioning Miles, who in the course of the interrogation admits to having graphic and inappropriate communications with a 13-year-old boy. It's a damning enough exchange that Miles has subsequently deleted his social profiles on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and -- whether he was fired or resigned voluntarily -- Miles has left his role at Facebook over the matter. "The seriousness of these allegations cannot be overstated. The individual is no longer employed with the company. We are actively investigating this situation and cannot provide further comment at this time," said a statement from a Meta spokesperson.

With people more wary than ever about clicking on suspicious links in emails and text messages, zero-click hacks are being used more frequently by government agencies to spy on activists, journalists and others, according to more than a dozen surveillance company employees, security researchers and hackers interviewed by Bloomberg News. From a report: Once the preserve of a few intelligence agencies, the technology needed for zero-click hacks is now being sold to governments by a small number of companies, the most prominent of which is Israel's NSO Group. Bloomberg News has learned that at least three other Israeli companies -- Paragon, Candiru and Cognyte Software -- have developed zero-click hacking tools or offered them to clients, according to former employees and partners of those companies, demonstrating that the technology is becoming more widespread in the surveillance industry.

There are certain steps that a potential victim can take that might reduce the chances of a successful zero-click attack, including keeping a device updated. But some of the more effective methods -- including uninstalling certain messaging apps that hackers can use as gateways to breach a device -- aren't practical because people rely on them for communication, said Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that focuses on abuses of surveillance technology.

In a desperate bid to get his children offline, some guy in France apparently blitzed his entire town's internet connection -- by accident, that is. He now faces up to six months in prison for the outage. From a report: A report from the outlet France Bleu says the unnamed dad tried to use a multi-wave band jammer to temporarily cut off the internet connection at his residence in the town of Messanges. Jammers, which are illegal in France (and also in the U.S.), work by interfering with telecommunication signals, thus stifling connections. Despite their illegality, people still get arrested for using them, pretty much all the time. In this case, the dad in question deployed the device in the hopes of prying his social-media-addicted children away from the grips of their devices.

When later questioned by a government official, the man apparently admitted that he only wanted to cut off the connectivity to his house at night, between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m. -- probably so his kids would put the phones down and just go to bed already. Unfortunately for the padre, the jamming device was powerful enough to cut connectivity not just to his own residence but, unbeknownst to him, to those of many, many others in the surrounding area. His neighbors eventually started reporting their outages, after which the government was forced to investigate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Now that Windows 11's first major post-release update has been issued, Microsoft has started testing a huge collection of new features, UI changes, and redesigned apps in the latest Windows Insider preview for Dev channel users. By and large, the changes are significant and useful -- there's an overhauled Task Manager, folders for pinned apps in the Start menu, the renewed ability to drag items into the Taskbar (as you could in Windows 10), improvements to the Do Not Disturb and Focus modes, new touchscreen gestures, and a long list of other fixes and enhancements.

But tucked away toward the bottom of the changelog is one unwelcome addition: like the Home edition of Windows 11, the Pro version will now require an Internet connection and a Microsoft account during setup. In the current version of Windows 11, you could still create a local user account during setup by not connecting your PC to the Internet -- something that also worked in the Home version of Windows 10 but was removed in 11. That workaround will no longer be available in either edition going forward, barring a change in Microsoft's plans. While most devices do require a sign-in to fully enable app stores, cloud storage, and cross-device sharing and syncing, Windows 11 will soon stand alone as the only major consumer OS that requires account sign-in to enable even basic functionality.

Roku, the leading supplier of smart TV OS in North America, is looking at possibly building its own TV sets. Nexttv reports: According to Business Insider, Roku convened a focus group earlier this month in which participants were shown "different models, feature sets and names, sizes, price points," of smart TVs, according to an individual "familiar" with the event. This unnamed person told the news site that the moderator made it clear that Roku is exploring the possibility of "going it alone" with its own "manufacturing operation," and not merely attaching its brand to an existing smart TV manufacturer's product line.

Hackers backed by the Russian government have breached the networks of multiple US defense contractors in a sustained campaign that has revealed sensitive information about US weapons-development communications infrastructure, the federal government said on Wednesday. Wired reports: The campaign began no later than January 2020 and has continued through this month, according to a joint advisory by the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The hackers have been targeting and successfully hacking cleared defense contractors, or CDCs, which support contracts for the US Department of Defense and intelligence community. "During this two-year period, these actors have maintained persistent access to multiple CDC networks, in some cases for at least six months," officials wrote in the advisory. "In instances when the actors have successfully obtained access, the FBI, NSA, and CISA have noted regular and recurring exfiltration of emails and data. For example, during a compromise in 2021, threat actors exfiltrated hundreds of documents related to the company's products, relationships with other countries, and internal personnel and legal matters."

The exfiltrated documents included unclassified CDC-proprietary and export-controlled information. This information gives the Russian government "significant insight" into US weapons-platforms development and deployment timelines, plans for communications infrastructure, and specific technologies being used by the US government and military. The documents also include unclassified emails among employees and their government customers discussing proprietary details about technological and scientific research.

The hackers have used a variety of methods to breach their targets. The methods include harvesting network passwords through spear phishing, data breaches, cracking techniques, and exploitation of unpatched software vulnerabilities. After gaining a toehold in a targeted network, the threat actors escalate their system rights by mapping the Active Directory and connecting to domain controllers. From there, they're able to exfiltrate credentials for all other accounts and create new accounts. The hackers make use of virtual private servers to encrypt their communications and hide their identities, the advisory added. They also use "small office and home office (SOHO) devices, as operational nodes to evade detection."