The remote-work revolution has led some U.S. technology companies, from startups to Coinbase and Shopify, to seek new hires in Latin America -- where they can find qualified people in roughly the same time zone who'll work for much lower pay. From a report: It's a logical extension of the pandemic work-from-home drift away from hubs like San Francisco and New York to less expensive locations -- including across national borders. And the way currencies have shifted in the pandemic is only reinforcing the trend. Brazil, in particular, has become steadily more appealing to those with dollars to spend. The Brazilian real has lost more than a fourth of its value since the beginning of the pandemic. Other Latin American currencies including the Argentinian peso and Colombian peso are also among the big underperformers of the past two years.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2014, Google made a remarkable offer: anyone with a Google Apps for Education account in the US got unlimited storage for free. The logic was sound at the time. Three years earlier, the tech giant had launched the Chromebook -- cheap, robust and secure, the web-browser-based kit was a natural fit for education. The cloud was its primary storage, so what could be better than making that bigger than any hard disk in a Mac or Windows PC could ever swallow? The idea was that if you catch users when they are young, they're yours for life. The axiom had already been tested by both Apple and Microsoft, with creative types and workers in jobs with sensible shoes respectively. Google played on its own strengths as the first cloud-native platform for everyone. And lo, it was good. Seven years later, Google has killed the deal.

In place of all you can stash, each institution in the scheme was getting a total pool of 100TB to give to student and teacher alike. If they wanted anything more, the cash register was open. For a small primary school with a couple of hundred pupils, this was perfectly adequate. A large science-heavy university could have a single experiment using that much, however. That announcement was a year ago, and gave existing users 18 months of grace, with new users denied the unlimited package from, well, now. Those with experience of academic deadlines won't be surprised that it has taken this long for lots of people to notice.

"We are all cranks now...." argues a new article on Gawker (relaunched last July). That is, we're all just like yester-year's "obsessive writers of letters to the editor, the meticulous hoarders of correspondence, the avid collectors of fine and rare grudges...."

"I have not, since my father brought home a Compaq Presario in 1995 and plugged it into our phone line, encountered one pocket of space in all of the World Wide Web that does not, to some degree or another, crankify all who inhabit it...." [N]owadays, saying something deeply unwell about an article you don't like to thousands of people is as trivial as ordering a coffee. And if the internet in general has lowered these barriers, social media has gone a step further. People who never set out to be cranks in the first place are actively incentivized to do so. This isn't just because whenever you post you get a thrilling little tally of all the people who agree with you, it's because of how these platforms are designed to maximize engagement. The ideal poster for social media companies is one who posts often, who posts stridently, and who responds to as much stuff as possible.

So, to be on Twitter or Facebook is to sit in a room while someone holds up random pieces of stimulus and demands your appraisal of each. What do we reckon of this? Okay, how about this? And this? What's your view here? Were you to design a machine to turn otherwise normal, healthy people into cranks — a kind of crankification engine, if you like — you would probably arrive at something like these platforms.

Of course, Twitter and Facebook don't crankify their users out of malice, they do it to turn a profit, which may actually be worse. When the cranks of yore would write a tirade spanning several faxes to their local member of parliament about a hedge that was bothering them, they did this for no-one but themselves. This is not the case for the Neo-crank. When we use our finite capacity for wonder to publicly opine about fictional teens using drugs on a television show, or people reading in bars, or one American girl leaving her fake-sounding college to attend a different fake-sounding college, a company is making bank off it. To put it another way, the Silicon Valley robber-barons are getting rich off the uncompensated labor of yeoman cranks, who till the posting fields in the sweltering heat of the discourse until their brains give out.... [T]his kind of relentless churn of opinion, this unceasing urge to prosecute our case on things we hadn't even heard about an hour before, this gamification of being right — which is all the life of a crank really boils down to — is a deeply unhealthy way of interacting with the world around us.

For one thing, it robs us of our genuine curiosity. The paradox of the crank is that while they hold opinions on everything, they aren't particularly curious about anything.

To test Meta's Horizon World (their new social VR platform), BuzzFeed News created an area that was "filled with content banned from Facebook and Instagram."

"Content moderators said the world was fine — until we told Meta's PR team about it." Meta has kept secret much of how it plans to enforce its safety protocols in VR, declining to answer detailed questions about them.... Instead, Meta spokesperson Johanna Peace provided BuzzFeed News a short statement: "We're focused on giving people more control over their VR experiences through safety tools like the ability to report and block others. We're also providing developers with further tools to moderate the experiences they create, and we're still exploring the best use of AI for moderation in VR. We remain guided by our Responsible Innovation Principles to ensure privacy, security and safety are built into these experiences from the start...." We went back and asked again for Meta to consider our questions. The company declined.

So, to find out what we could on our own, we strapped on some Oculus headsets, opened Horizon Worlds, and ran a rudimentary experiment. In a matter of hours, we built a private Horizon World festooned with massive misinformation slogans.... We called the world "The Qniverse," and we gave it a soundtrack: an endless loop of Infowars founder Alex Jones calling Joe Biden a pedophile and claiming the election was rigged by reptilian overlords. We filled the skies with words and phrases that Meta has explicitly promised to remove from Facebook and Instagram... Time and time again, Meta has removed and taken action on pages and groups, even private ones, that use these phrases....

We kept the world "unpublished" — i.e., invitation only — to prevent unsuspecting users from happening upon it, and to mimic the way some Meta users seeking to share misinformation might actually do so: in private, invitation-only spaces. The purpose of our test was to assess whether the content moderation systems that operate on Facebook and Instagram also operate on Horizon.

At least in our case, it appears they did not....

Using Horizon's user reporting function, a BuzzFeed News employee with access to the world used his own name and a linked Facebook account to flag the world to Meta. After more than 48 hours and no action, the employee reported the world again, followed quickly by another report from a different BuzzFeed News user with access to the world who also used her real name, which was linked to her Facebook and Oculus profiles. Roughly four hours after the third report was filed, the employee who submitted it received a response from Meta: "Our trained safety specialist reviewed your report and determined that the content in the Qniverse doesn't violate our Content in VR Policy." Six hours after that, the original reporter received the same message....

We went to Meta's comms department, a channel not available to ordinary people. We asked about its content moderators' decisions: How could a world that shares misinformation that Meta has removed from its other platforms, under the same Community Guidelines, not violate Horizon's policies?

The following afternoon, the experimental world disappeared. The company had reversed its original ruling....
The article pinpoints the dilemma Meta is facing at this virtual crossroads. If users congregate to share harmful misinformation, "Without recording everything users say in VR, how can Meta know whether such a situation is happening? But recording everything users say and do, even in private groups, raises stark privacy questions." Yet the article also remembers what Mark Zuckerberg promised the day he'd announced the company's rebranding to Meta.

"Facebook said it would be different this time."

Mozilla engineer Martin Thomson reveals they've been collaborating with Meta (formerly Facebook) on new technology that can measure "conversions" from advertising while still preserving privacy.

The proposed new technology is called Interoperable Private Attribution, or IPA. IPA has two key privacy-preserving features. First, it uses Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to avoid allowing any single entity — websites, browser makers, or advertisers — to learn about user behavior. Mozilla has some experience with MPC systems as we've deployed Prio for privacy-preserving telemetry. Second, it is an aggregated system, which means that it produces results that cannot be linked to individual users. Together these features mean that IPA cannot be used to track or profile users.

IPA is designed to provide a lot of flexibility for advertising businesses in terms of how they use the system. Cross-device and cross-browser attribution options in IPA enable new and more robust attribution capabilities, while maintaining privacy. The IPA proposal aims to ensure that all sites benefit from these features with the match key concept, which allows smaller players to access the greater reach of entities to cross-device attribution.
"Advertising provides critical support for the Web," the blog post argues — and they've now proposed IPA to the World Wide Web Consortium's dedicated Private Advertising Technology Community Group, while calling their idea "still a work in progress."

From the New York Times: As Gita Jackson reported recently in Vice News, some Amazon customers are now explicitly asking the company's drivers to deliver a performance along with the package. They are posting signs to their front doors or tapping unusual delivery instructions into the Amazon app in the hopes of capturing a spectacle on their surveillance feeds.... [T]hese customers proceed to shamelessly post the evidence to social media. Sometimes the videos are spun into an online sleuthing opportunity, as the TikToker asks viewers to hunt for the dancing driver's identity. And they represent just a slice of the "Amazon driver approaches the door" genre of internet video... But whether the video is pitched as heartwarming or sadistic, the customer is enlisting the driver into a nonconsensual pageant that doubles as a performance review. As Jackson reported, Amazon drivers who fail to fulfill customer requests risk demerits....

Amazon encourages customers to publicize their Ring videos on its safety-minded social network, Neighbors, and makes it easy to share them more widely, too. One of Ring's marketing lines is "A lot happens at your front door," and this is meant as both a warning and an invitation — though it suggests it is too dangerous to venture outside, it also implies that a whole world of entertainment is to be found through eyeing your surveillance feed.... The official Ring YouTube channel is filled with user-generated videos that help inject its growing spy network with warmth and surprise, as the cameras catch spontaneous footage of good Samaritans, grazing cows and, of course, the company's drivers caught in kooky scenarios, like in this entry from December: "Even a Giant Bear Will Not Stop This Amazon Driver From Making His Delivery."

Amazon obsessively surveils its workers through dashcams, smartphone monitors and machine-generated report cards, and these videos implicate the customer in that exercise, making the violation of driver privacy into a kind of internet-wide contest. The caption for Amazon's bear video focuses on the heroic actions of a Ring user named Josh, who supposedly aided the delivery driver's safety by "watching his exit the whole time" on the security camera.... Its routes are often serviced by precarious gig workers, its quotas are too punishing to allow for socializing, and all potential human interactions have been replaced by one-way surveillance. In many of these TikTok videos, Amazon workers literally run in and out of the frame. If delivery drivers were once lightly teased or frequently ogled, now they are simply dehumanized, plugged into machine-run networks and expected to move product with robotic efficiency. The compulsory dance trend on TikTok suggests that customers, too, have come to see drivers as programmable....

On an even more depressing corner of Amazon TikTok, customers post videos not to backwardly celebrate drivers but just to shame them for delivering the package with less than the customer's expected level of service.

Slashdot reader joshuark writes: Beware fake Windows 11 upgrades install RedLine malware, reports Bleeping Computer.

"Threat actors have started distributing fake Windows 11 upgrade installers to users of Windows 10, tricking them into downloading and executing RedLine stealer malware." Bleeping Computer advises, "...these dangerous sites are promoted via forum and social media posts or instant messages, so don't trust anything but the official Windows upgrade system alerts."
Bleeping Computer points out that hardware incompatibilities rule out upgrades for many Windows 10 users from official distribution channels — "something that malware operators see as an excellent opportunity for finding new victims." The timing of the attacks coincides with the moment that Microsoft announced Windows 11's broad deployment phase, so the attackers were well-prepared for this move and waited for the right moment to maximize their operation's success. RedLine stealer is currently the most widely deployed password, browser cookies, credit card, and cryptocurrency wallet info grabber, so its infections can have dire consequences for the victims.

According to researchers at HP, who have spotted this campaign, the actors used the seemingly legitimate "windows-upgraded.com" domain for the malware distribution part of their campaign. The site appears like a genuine Microsoft site and, if the visitor clicked on the 'Download Now' button, they received a 1.5 MB ZIP archive named "Windows11InstallationAssistant.zip," fetched directly from a Discord CDN...

Although the distribution site is down now, nothing stops the actors from setting up a new domain and restarting their campaign. In fact, this is very likely already happening in the wild.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Army released (PDF) its climate change strategy this week, and it's a lengthy document that shows how the largest and oldest branch of the military will not only prepare for climate change but will also zero out emissions from most of its operations and activities. The Army says that the goal isn't just to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions -- though that's a key outcome -- but also to make the force more resilient by "adapting infrastructure and natural environments to climate change risks." The strategy takes a multipronged approach toward addressing the climate threat, including overhauling the Army's installations and its acquisitions and logistics practices.

On just the facilities side, the Army buys more than $740 million of electricity every year, producing over 4.1 million metric tons of carbon pollution. To bring those numbers down while also improving its ability to operate when the grid goes down, the Army says it will install microgrids at each of its more than 130 installations by 2035. Already, 25 microgrids are "scoped and planned" through 2024. Microgrids are usually connected to the wider grid, though they can be easily cut off without losing power, allowing operations to continue if the connection is severed or the grid goes down. Currently, the Army is looking into solar, wind, and batteries to power microgrids.

On bases, myriad vehicles support day-to-day operations, and the new plan calls for the nontactical vehicle fleet to be all-electric by 2035. That includes everything from light trucks like Chevrolet Tahoes and Ford F-150s to massive prime movers like the "Dragon Wagon" and the HEMTT. Light-duty vehicles like the Tahoe are scheduled to be all-electric by 2027. Tactical vehicles, though, will take a bit longer. The Army hopes to hybridize them by 2035 before moving to all-electric in 2050. The plan doesn't spell out what it considers to be tactical vehicles, though the designation likely includes things like Humvees and MRAPs. Currently, there's no concrete plan for all-electric tanks and self-propelled artillery. The Army's plan is also requiring it to "proactively train its people and prepare a force that is ready to operate in a climate-altered world," the document says.

Furthermore, a "Climate 101" course has been rolled out "to introduce fundamentals of climate science to base architects and garrison commanders, and it says it will update all of its training modules, exercises, and simulations to consider the impacts of climate change by 2028," adds Ars Technica. "The goal is to prepare the entire force for whatever conditions climate change presents, from severe weather to a thawing Arctic."

Network gear maker Cisco Systems has made a takeover offer worth more than $20 billion for software maker Splunk, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Reuters reports: The offer was made recently and the companies are not in active talks, the newspaper said, citing some of the sources. In November last year, San Francisco-based Splunk announced Doug Merritt has stepped down as its chief executive officer (CEO) and that the company's chair, Graham Smith, would be the interim CEO. Founded in 2003, the software solutions provider has a market capitalisation of $18.2 billion, according to Refinitiv Eikon data.

Playboy has plans to reboot its brand in the digital world through NFTs, digital subscriptions and a new mansion in the metaverse. CNBC reports: The company has dropped thousands of Playboy NFTs featuring bunny avatars, launched a digital social platform called Centerfold and has plans to build a new Playboy Mansion in the metaverse. These plans are unfolding while an A&E documentary focuses on the company's unflattering past. "Secrets of Playboy" is a 10-part series making headlines by featuring former employees, playmates and past girlfriends of the company's founder, Hugh Hefner, alleging Playboy had a dark side. Even before the series' debuted in late January, company leadership posted an open letter to its website noting, "today's Playboy is not Hugh Hefner's Playboy."

The futuristic moves come almost five years after Hefner's death and two years since the last legacy print magazine hit the newsstands. Staging its digital reinvention for the next wave of internet innovation, which technologists call Web3, is the next big challenge. "The magazine was one product of the company. But it was really that rabbit head that's worth billions and billions of dollars and not replicable," Playboy CEO Ben Kohn told CNBC in a recent interview. While the brand drives billions in consumer spending worldwide, much of it through licensed products sold overseas, Kohn said that business model is broken and that the company needs to make changes.

The CEO's fixes rely heavily on that not-so-secret weapon: the world famous bowtie-wearing rabbit. [...] The company is focused on trying to leverage that "inherent value" in the digital world. For example, a Playboy SEC filing last year shows the company paid $12 million to purchase a Bombardier Global Express BD-700 so Kohn could unleash that priceless bunny logo across not just the sky, but also on the internet. The plane is an homage to the black-painted DC-9, known as the Big Bunny, flown by Hugh Hefner in the '70s. The Global Express, which started off white, was gut-renovated before re-emerging five month's later with a sleek all-black body emblazoned with bunny logos and the same tail number used on its predecessor that whisked Hefner, celebrities and an entourage of Playboy bunnies around the world...

In the early 2000s, the U.S. Army released America's Army, a video game meant as a recruitment tool. "The free-to-play tactical shooter was wildly successful, reaching 20 million players," reports Fast Company. "But come May 5, the servers will be shut down -- and America's Army will surrender to the forces of time." From the report: To date, no industry has embraced games as warmly as the military, though. America's Army, for example, started with an initial budget of $7 million of your tax dollars at play -- and quickly grew from there. Recognizing that players know a quality title when they see one (and ignore and ridicule poor-quality efforts), it assembled a team of proven developers and bought a license for the Unreal Engine, which was (and remains) one of the premier game engines on the market. America's Army was only supposed to be a seven-year project, but its success encouraged the Defense Department to stay with the game, with the Pentagon spending more than $3 million a year to evolve and promote it -- a drop in the bucket compared to the overall $8 billion recruiting budget.

How well did it work? A 2008 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that "30% of all Americans ages 16 to 24 had a more positive impression of the Army because of the game and, even more amazingly, the game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined." The end of America's Army is hardly the end of the military's use of games as recruiting tools. The Army has its own Twitch channel (with more than 23,000 followers) and has an e-sports team that competes at tournaments -- with recruiters in tow.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Dan Goodin: About 500 e-commerce websites were recently found to be compromised by hackers who installed a credit card skimmer that surreptitiously stole sensitive data when visitors attempted to make a purchase. A report published on Tuesday is only the latest one involving Magecart, an umbrella term given to competing crime groups that infect e-commerce sites with skimmers. Over the past few years, thousands of sites have been hit by exploits that cause them to run malicious code. When visitors enter payment card details during purchase, the code sends that information to attacker-controlled servers.

Sansec, the security firm that discovered the latest batch of infections, said the compromised sites were all loading malicious scripts hosted at the domain naturalfreshmall[.]com. "The Natural Fresh skimmer shows a fake payment popup, defeating the security of a (PCI compliant) hosted payment form," firm researchers wrote on Twitter. "Payments are sent to https://naturalfreshmall.com/p...." The hackers then modified existing files or planted new files that provided no fewer than 19 backdoors that the hackers could use to retain control over the sites in the event the malicious script was detected and removed and the vulnerable software was updated. The only way to fully disinfect the site is to identify and remove the backdoors before updating the vulnerable CMS that allowed the site to be hacked in the first place.

Sansec worked with the admins of hacked sites to determine the common entry point used by the attackers. The researchers eventually determined that the attackers combined a SQL injection exploit with a PHP object injection attack in a Magento plugin known as Quickview. [...] It's not hard to find sites that remain infected more than a week after Sansec first reported the campaign on Twitter. At the time this post was going live, Bedexpress[.]com continued to contain this HTML attribute, which pulls JavaScript from the rogue naturalfreshmall[.]com domain. The hacked sites were running Magento 1, a version of the e-commerce platform that was retired in June 2020. The safer bet for any site still using this deprecated package is to upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Commerce. Another option is to install open source patches available for Magento 1 using either DIY software from the OpenMage project or with commercial support from Mage-One.

An anonymous reader shares a report: 2021 was a bad PR year for Big Tech. Lawmakers, advocates, and scholars filled pages of books and held hours of hearing exalting what they viewed as an industry being strangled by a handful of players using anti-competitive practices to solidify their position as kings. Ironically, those exact same tactics were vehemently opposed by the Big Tech companies themselves less than a decade ago. Like an aging punk throwing out their raggedy jean jacket for a blazer, Big Tech sold out. That's according to a new report by the Tech Oversight Project shared exclusively with Gizmodo. The report -- titled Whiplash: Inside Big Tech's Open Internet Flip-Flop -- lays out a laundry list of times where Big Tech companies have seemingly expressed support for many of the same policy goals they're currently fighting to quash. It also comes as Congress muses over several key pieces of antitrust legislation taking aim at Big Tech's alleged monopolistic business practices.

The report spotlights Google, Amazon, and Facebook's fierce defense of net neutrality in 2014 where the companies repeatedly cited an "open internet" as a critical component to innovation and economic growth. Tech's biggest players, as a New York Times article from the time states, "put their reputations and financial clout behind the challenge." These high-minded priorities for an open internet were shouted from the rooftops by Big Tech's most prominent voices at the time. "The internet has created this remarkable set of free markets, open competition, and competitive growth, and we need to keep it free and open," Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a 2007 address to the Progress and Freedom Foundation Aspen Summit.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A special set of editorials published in today's issue of the journal Science argue that social media in its current form may well be fundamentally broken for the purposes of presenting and disseminating facts and reason. The algorithms are running the show now, they argue, and the systems priorities are unfortunately backwards. In an incisive (and free to read) opinion piece by Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the basic disconnect with what scientists need and what social media platforms provide is convincingly laid out.

"Rules of scientific discourse and the systematic, objective, and transparent evaluation of evidence are fundamentally at odds with the realities of debates in most online spaces," they write. "It is debatable whether social media platforms that are designed to monetize outrage and disagreement among users are the most productive channel for convincing skeptical publics that settled science about climate change or vaccines is not up for debate." The most elementary feature of social media that reduces the effect of communication by scientists is pervasive sorting and recommendation engines. This produces what Brossard and Scheufele call "homophilic self-sorting" -- the ones who are shown this content are the ones who are already familiar with it. In other words, they're preaching to the choir.

Google+ is dead -- again! The consumer version of Google+ may have shut down in April 2019, but Google kept the service rolling as an enterprise-focused social network it rebranded "Google Currents." From a report: You need to pay for GSuite to use it, and only members of your organization can see the posts, so it is for private company announcements and discussions. In the latest Google Workspace blog post, Google says that Currents is "winding down" starting in 2023. This is no surprise, since Google+ was a completely failed consumer product. Why Google thought pushing the dead service onto business would make Currents successful is unclear. (Hey, Google Stadia, does this sound familiar?) Google never really did anything with Currents after rebranding it as a business product. After rotting for years as a dead consumer product, Currents just rotted for a few more years with new business branding. What is surprising is that Google is pitching Google Chat as a replacement.

Google's plan to phase out third-party cookies and replace them with a bundle of new standards referred to as the "Privacy Sandbox" just overcame a key regulatory hurdle. From a report: The UK's competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), has formally accepted Google's commitments about how it'll develop the new standards so they don't harm competition or unfairly benefit the search giant's own advertising business, the regulator announced today. Google's plans are still in flux, and it's not yet clear exactly what technologies Privacy Sandbox will use to replace third-party cookies. Just last month, Google abandoned one planned approach, FLoC, in favor of a new system called Topics API. Today's approval is for Google's approach, rather than any one specific technology. The regulator notes that in the next phase it will "supervise Google to ensure the Privacy Sandbox is developed in a way that benefits consumers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Use of Google Analytics has now been found to breach European Union privacy laws in France -- after a similar decision was reached in Austria last month. The French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, said today that an unnamed local website's use of Google Analytics is non-compliant with the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) -- breaching Article 44 which covers personal data transfers outside the bloc to so-called third countries which are not considered to have essentially equivalent privacy protections. The U.S. fails this critical equivalence test on account of having sweeping surveillance laws which do not provide non-U.S. citizens with any way to know whether their data is being acquired, how it's being used or to seek redress for any misuse.

France's CNIL has been investigating one of 101 complaints filed by European privacy advocacy group, noyb, back in August 2020 -- after the bloc's top court invalidated the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield agreement on data transfers. Since then (indeed, long before) the legality of transatlantic transfers of personal data have been clouded in uncertainty. While it has taken EU regulators some time to act on illegal data transfers -- despite an immediate warning from the European Data Protection Board of no grace period in the wake of the July 2020 CJEU ruling (aka 'Schrems II) -- decisions are now finally starting to flow. Including another by the European Data Protection Supervisor last month, also involving Google Analytics. In France, the CNIL has ordered the website which was the target of one of noyb's complaints to comply with the GDPR -- and "if necessary, to stop using this service under the current conditions" -- giving it a deadline of one month to comply.

"[A]lthough Google has adopted additional measures to regulate data transfers in the context of the Google Analytics functionality, these are not sufficient to exclude the accessibility of this data for U.S. intelligence services," the CNIL writes in a press release announcing the decision. "There is therefore a risk for French website users who use this service and whose data is exported." The CNIL does leave open the door to continued use of Google Analytics -- but only with substantial changes that would ensure only "anonymous statistical data" gets transferred. The French regulator is also very emphatic that under "current conditions" use of Google Analytics is non-compliant -- and may therefore need to cease in order for the site in question to comply with the GDPR. The CNIL also suggests use of an alternative analytics tool which does not involve a transfer outside the EU to end the breach. Additionally, it says it's launched an evaluation program to determine which website audience measurement and analysis services may be exempt from the need to obtain user consent (i.e. because they only produce anonymous statistical data which can be exported legally under GDPR). Which suggests the CNIL could issue guidance in future that recommends GDPR compliant alternatives to Google Analytics.

Samsung held a launch event for its new Galaxy smartphones in a metaverse this week but many people struggled to gain access as they encountered technical difficulties. CNBC reports: The South Korean tech giant hosted the event Wednesday on Decentraland, a cryptocurrency-focused virtual world that users can create, explore and trade in. Decentraland, one of many metaverse efforts, is accessed via a desktop browser. Users create an avatar which they can then navigate around the blockchain-powered virtual world using a mouse and keyboard -- something that isn't exactly intuitive for non-gamers. The event specifically took place in Samsung 837X, a virtual building that Samsung has built on Decentraland that's designed to be a replica of its flagship New York experience center. Samsung 837X is there all the time but there just happened to be an event inside the building's "Connectivity Theatre" on Wednesday. But CNBC, and many others, struggled to find the 837X building and when we did many of us were unable to gain access to it.

When an avatar is first created on Decentraland, it lands in a sort of atrium where clouds appear to be gliding across the floor. There's a round pool in the middle that has a worrying vortex in the center. Our avatar was soon surrounded by around 20 others. A chat box in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen was full of messages like "help" and "I hate this game." One user named claireinnit#87fa, boldly claimed "we're in the ----in future." On the opposite side of the intimidating pool, three large boards read "classics, events and crowd." An ad for Samsung 837X hang on the "crowd" board. Once clicked (easier said than done), you're then given the option to "jump in." After jumping in, you're transported to Samsung's little world on Decentraland and you can see the 837X building. There's a pizza store next door, but not much else.

CNBC immediately noticed a large line of people at the main entrance to the 837X building. People were struggling to get in. Some users were getting their avatars to jump on other people's heads as they clambered to the front of the queue but it didn't help. The doors wouldn't open and the chatbox was again full of pleas for help. A rumor circulated that a YouTuber had managed to find a way in, while a CNET journalist wrote on Twitter that they had managed to gain access by switching to the "ATHENA" server. It wasn't immediately obvious how to do this. "Many people were unable to actually enter Samsung 837X before the event started," wrote CNET's Russell Holly. [...] After around 30 minutes of trying to access Samsung's building in the metaverse, CNBC gave up and went back to the real world.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting this year, the federal government will begin doling out $5 billion to states over five years to build a nationwide network of fast chargers. The plan initially focuses on the Interstate Highway System, directing states to build one charging station every 50 miles. Those stations must be capable of charging at least four EVs simultaneously at 150 kW. Once states have completed the Interstate charging network, they'll be able to apply for grants to fill in gaps elsewhere. The Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, a new agency formed to help the Transportation and Energy Departments administer the program, will allow case-by-case exceptions to the 50-mile requirement if, for example, no grid connection is available nearby.

Funding for the initial Interstate portion of the program will be allocated using a formula that mimics how federal highway grants are distributed. Starting in fiscal year 2022, $615 million will be available to build charging stations, and $300 million will be allocated to set up the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. Ten percent of each year's funding will go toward filling gaps in the network. After the initial $5 billion program is launched, another $2.5 billion in discretionary grants will be available to build chargers in rural and underserved areas.

As part of their plans submitted to the federal government, states will need to ensure that the charging stations will be reliable -- at least one charger per station needs to be working more than 97 percent of the time -- and that they will limit their impact on the electric grid. States are also directed to design stations so they can be easily expanded and upgraded as demand grows and charging rates increase. The new program also encourages states to site chargers near travel centers, convenience stores, visitor centers, or restaurants. To get credit for their Interstate build-out, states will have to install chargers that use the Combined Charging System, also known as CCS. [...] The new program also prioritizes domestic production of chargers, which has already spurred some manufacturers to begin setting up operations in the US. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg says the agency is looking at how people will pay for charging. "Part of this program is going to be a shared standard. If we're going to use taxpayers' dollars to help private actors put in charging stations, then of course we need to make sure the citizen is getting good value out of it. There may be any number of network benefits through loyalty programs. That's fine," he said, "but we've got to make sure... everybody can benefit."

Google today announced the first developer release of Android 13. These very early releases, which are only meant for developers and aren't available through over-the-air updates, typically don't include too many user-facing changes. From a report: That's true this time as well, but even in this early release, the company is already showing off a few changes that will impact how you'll use your Android phone. Unlike with Android 12, Google plans to have two developer releases and then launch a beta in April, a month earlier than in 2021. The final release could come as early as August, based on Google's roadmap, whereas Android 12 launched in early October. All of this is happening while Android 12L, the Android release for large-screen devices, is still in development, too, though Google notes that it will bring some of those features to Android 13 as well. These include improved support for tablets, foldables and Android apps on Chromebooks. One of the most visible changes in Android 13 so far is that Google will bring the dynamic color feature of Material You, which by default takes its cues from your home screen image to all app icons. Developers will have to supply a monochromatic app icon for this to work, which many will hopefully do, because the current mix of themed and un-themed icons doesn't make for a great look. For now, this will only be available on Pixel devices, though, and Google says it will work with its partners to bring it to more devices. With this release, Google supports the Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 4a, Pixel 4 XL, and Pixel 4.