Nissan is pulling the plug on its internal combustion engine development, except for the United States. Ars Technica reports: According to Nikkei Asia, the Japanese automaker has looked at the likely next set of European emissions rules and has decided it would be too expensive to design a new generation of engines that comply. Nissan is also not planning on any new internal combustion engines for Japan or China, although it will apparently keep refining existing engines and continue to work on hybrid powertrains. However, this new policy isn't a global one -- it doesn't apply to the US. That's because here, the automaker expects continuing demand for internal combustion engines, particularly in pickup trucks. If Nikkei Asia's reporting is correct, Nissan is just making explicit the fact that electrification of light passenger vehicles is going to be much more rapid in regions where governments create strong policy incentives.

Meta has introduced a new "personal boundary" feature within its VR social spaces, starting with Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues. Hypebeast reports: By enacting a personal boundary, a user will by default have a nearly 4-foot (1.2 m) distance between their avatar and others. Via an invisible barrier, the system will halt the forward movement of other avatars as they reach the boundary. Meta says that the feature will make it easier for users to avoid unwanted interactions such as harassment.

Users can still walk past other avatars with personal boundaries enabled and can even give them a high-five or fist bump. The feature will be rolled out as always-on, by default, which Meta says will "help to set behavioral norms" in the VR space. In the future, the company will consider adding new controls, such as allowing users to customize the size of their personal boundaries. In a statement to Ars Technica, a Meta spokesperson said: "Personal Boundary builds upon our existing harassment measures that were already in place - for example, where an avatar's hands would disappear if they encroached upon someone's personal space. When we launched Horizon Worlds as an invite-only beta in 2020 we knew this was just the beginning and over time we would be iterating and improving based on community feedback. We're constantly shipping new features based on people's feedback, including this one."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Independent: The electric vehicle (EV) market is soaring, with 130,000 cars sold globally each week, roughly equivalent to sales for the entire year in 2012. Sales of EVs more than doubled in 2021, even with supply chain snarls and pandemic-related shrinking of demand for gas-powered cars. New data, from the influential intergovernmental International Energy Agency (IEA), revealed that 6.6 million electric cars were sold last year -- twice the number of 2020 -- making up 9 per cent of the global car market. IEA says the growth is "particularly impressive" over the last three years. The number has about tripled from 201 when 2.2 million electric cars were sold. "We estimate there are now around 16 million electric cars on the road worldwide, consuming roughly 30 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year, the equivalent of all the electricity generated in Ireland," the IEA reported last week.

More than half of all electric cars are being sold in China (3.4 million), but the market is steadily growing in Europe and the United States. In the US, electric car sales more than doubled in 2021. More than 500,000 new EVs hit the highways, accounting for 4.5 per cent of the market. Tesla is still the strongest player, accounting for more than half of all electric car sales. A "generous" tax-credit system for EVs in the US may be influencing new car buyers (although it doesn't apply to Tesla and General Motor vehicles, IEA notes). In Europe, 2.3 million electric cars were sold in 2021, about half of which were plug-in hybrids, against a backdrop of tightened carbon emissions standards and more subsidies being rolled out by countries in the bloc. Germany made up the largest share of the European market last year where more than one in three cars sold was an electric model.

New submitter Beerismydad writes: The IRS said Monday it will suspend the use of facial recognition technology to authenticate people who create online accounts after the practice was criticized by privacy advocates and lawmakers. The agency said it would no longer use a third-party service, called ID.me, for facial recognition. Critics of the software said the database could become a target for cyberthreats. They also expressed concern about how the information could be used by other government agencies, among other concerns. Earlier Monday, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., called on the agency to end its use of the ID.me software. After the IRS announced the practice would be suspended, Wyden said "the Treasury Department has made the smart decision to direct the IRS to transition away from using the controversial ID.me verification service. No one should be forced to submit to facial recognition to access critical government services."

A group of major cryptocurrency firms including Coinbase, Circle, Anchorage Digital and Huobi Global are forming a new coalition aimed at cracking down on market manipulation in an effort to instill trust in the burgeoning digital asset industry. From a report: The Crypto Market Integrity Coalition, which was convened by risk-monitoring software company Solidus Labs, is also urging digital currency companies to sign a market integrity pledge that acknowledges the potential for fraud in the cryptocurrency space and the need for the industry to protect investors. "It really is about recognizing that you need entities that are focused on a fair and orderly system here, and really trying to prevent the abuses that can happen if you're not paying attention," said Kathy Kraninger, vice president of regulatory affairs at Solidus Labs and former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The new alliance and pledge comes as regulators remain concerned the new market is safe for investors, despite its surge in popularity. The Securities and Exchange Commission has cited the potential for market manipulation as one of the primary reasons for rejecting several applications for spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds.

magzteel shares a report: For almost five years, an international consortium of scientists was chasing clouds, determined to solve a problem that bedeviled climate-change forecasts for a generation: How do these wisps of water vapor affect global warming? They reworked 2.1 million lines of supercomputer code used to explore the future of climate change, adding more-intricate equations for clouds and hundreds of other improvements. They tested the equations, debugged them and tested again. The scientists would find that even the best tools at hand can't model climates with the sureness the world needs as rising temperatures impact almost every region. When they ran the updated simulation in 2018, the conclusion jolted them: Earth's atmosphere was much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than decades of previous models had predicted, and future temperatures could be much higher than feared -- perhaps even beyond hope of practical remedy. "We thought this was really strange," said Gokhan Danabasoglu, chief scientist for the climate-model project at the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR. "If that number was correct, that was really bad news." At least 20 older, simpler global-climate models disagreed with the new one at NCAR, an open-source model called the Community Earth System Model 2, or CESM2, funded mainly by the U.S. National Science Foundation and arguably the world's most influential climate program. Then, one by one, a dozen climate-modeling groups around the world produced similar forecasts. "It was not just us," Dr. Danabasoglu said.

The scientists soon concluded their new calculations had been thrown off kilter by the physics of clouds in a warming world, which may amplify or damp climate change. "The old way is just wrong, we know that," said Andrew Gettelman, a physicist at NCAR who specializes in clouds and helped develop the CESM2 model. "I think our higher sensitivity is wrong too. It's probably a consequence of other things we did by making clouds better and more realistic. You solve one problem and create another." Since then the CESM2 scientists have been reworking their climate-change algorithms using a deluge of new information about the effects of rising temperatures to better understand the physics at work. They have abandoned their most extreme calculations of climate sensitivity, but their more recent projections of future global warming are still dire -- and still in flux. As world leaders consider how to limit greenhouse gases, they depend heavily on what computer climate models predict. But as algorithms and the computer they run on become more powerful -- able to crunch far more data and do better simulations -- that very complexity has left climate scientists grappling with mismatches among competing computer models.

Google has launched today a new security feature for Google Cloud tenants that is meant to detect and block cryptomining operations that may be taking place behind the owners' backs. From a report: Named Virtual Machine Threat Detection (VMTD), Google said this new feature is an agentless system that continually scans the memory of virtual machines deployed in Google Cloud environments for tell-tale signs of increased CPU or GPU usage -- specific to cryptomining operations. To avoid false-positive detections, the feature has been left disabled by default; however, any customer can enable it for their GCP VMs. They can do this by going to the Settings page of their Security Command Center and looking under the Manage Settings section. Google said the feature will only work with non-sensitive memory, and VMTD will not process memory from nodes marked as "Confidential." VMTD has begun rolling out today for public preview, so tenants are recommended to enable it for smaller portions of their nodes and keep a close eye on its impact on performance.

Israel will investigate allegations that police illicitly used homegrown spyware that's gained notoriety abroad against its own citizens. From a report: The government will form a committee to look into a series of reports by Calcalist, a Hebrew business daily, that law enforcement officials used NSO Group's Pegasus software without a court order to tap into the phones of citizens both prominent and obscure, including a key prosecution witness in former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial. Others allegedly targeted include an anti-Netanyahu protester, the former Israeli leader's son, high-ranking officials, and the heads of some of the country's biggest companies. Israeli officials, including the minister in charge of police, initially denied any impropriety. But the police later backtracked, citing "additional findings," and on Monday, Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev ordered the investigation. "The reports about Pegasus, if they are true, are very serious," Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in a statement on Monday. "This tool (Pegasus) and similar tools, are important tools in the fight against terrorism and severe crime, but they were not intended to be used in phishing campaigns targeting the Israeli public or officials -- which is why we need to understand exactly what happened."

Google is being sued in Europe on competition grounds by price comparison service PriceRunner which is seeking at least ~$2.4 billion in damages. From a report: The lawsuit accuses Google of continuing to breach a 2017 European Commission antitrust enforcement order against Google Shopping. As well as fining Google what was -- at the time -- a record-breaking antitrust penalty (2.42 billion euro), the EU's competition division ordered the search giant to cease illegal behaviors, after finding it Google giving prominent placement to its own shopping comparison service while simultaneously demoting rivals in organic search results. Immediately following the order, Google made some initial tweaks to how its product search service works -- doubling down on an auction model. But complainants were instantly critical of the changes, arguing they neither remedied the unfairness nor complied with the EU's requirement for equal treatment of price comparison services. The following year, an investigation by Sky News also accused Google of trying to circumvent the EU antitrust ruling by offering incentives to ad agencies to create faux comparison sites filled with ads for their clients' products which Google could display in the Google Shopping box to present the impression of a thriving marketplace for price comparison services.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If Meta is not given the option to transfer, store and process data from its European users on US-based servers, Facebook and Instagram may be shut down across Europe, the social media giants' owner reportedly warned in its annual report. The key issue for Meta is transatlantic data transfers, regulated via the so-called Privacy Shield and other model agreements that Meta uses or used to store data from European users on American servers. The current agreements to enable data transfers are currently under heavy scrutiny in the EU. In its annual report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Meta warns that if a new framework is not adopted and the company is no longer allowed to use the current model agreements "or alternatives," the company will "probably" no longer be able to offer many of its "most significant products and services," including Facebook and Instagram, in the EU, according to various media reports, including in iTWire, The Guardian newspaper and Side Line Magazine.

Sharing data between countries and regions is crucial for the provision of its services and targeted advertising, Meta stressed. Therefore, it previously used the transatlantic data transfer framework called Privacy Shield as the legal basis to carry out those data transfers. However, this treaty was annulled by the European Court of Justice in July 2020, because of data protection violations. Since then, the EU and the US did stress they are working on a new or updated version of the treaty.

"Subaru and Kia dealers in Massachusetts have disabled systems that allow remote starts and send maintenance alerts..." reports Wired.

Subaru buyers in Massachusetts also lose access to the telematics system's app, so "no emergency assistance; no automated messages when the tire pressure was low or the oil needed changing." Subaru disabled the telematics system and associated features on new cars registered in Massachusetts last year as part of a spat over a right-to-repair ballot measure approved, overwhelmingly, by the state's voters in 2020. The measure, which has been held up in the courts, required automakers to give car owners and independent mechanics more access to data about the car's internal systems. But the "open data platform" envisioned by the law doesn't exist yet, and automakers have filed suit to prevent the initiative from taking effect. So first Subaru and then Kia turned off their telematics systems on their newest cars in Massachusetts.... "This was not to comply with the law — compliance with the law at this time is impossible — but rather to avoid violating it," Dominick Infante, a spokesperson for Subaru, wrote in a statement. Kia did not respond to a request for comment.

The dispute is the latest chapter in long-running disagreements between the state and automakers over the right to repair, or consumers' ability to fix their own cars or control who does it for them.... [N]ew vehicles are now computers on wheels, gathering an estimated 25 gigabytes per hour of driving data — the equivalent of five HD movies. Automakers say that lots of this information isn't useful to them and is discarded. But some — a vehicle's location, how specific components are operating at a given moment — is anonymized and sent to the manufacturers.... These days, much of the data is transmitted wirelessly. So independent mechanics and right-to-repair proponents worry that automakers will stop sending vital repair information to the diagnostic ports. That would hamper the independents and lock customers into relationships with dealerships....

Automakers say opening the car's mechanical data to anyone would be dangerous — and a violation of federal law. In November 2020, just after voters approved the ballot measure, a trade group that represents most major automakers sued Massachusetts in federal court. The group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, argued that the federal government, not states, should control who gets access to cars' telematics systems. The group also said that it would be irresponsible and dangerous to create the open data platform that the law required, especially by 2022....

Dealerships are caught in the middle. It's an especially unfortunate time to be there, given the chip shortage that has curtailed vehicle production — and sales.
One dealer reportedly even asked a potential car buyer, "Don't you have any friends in Rhode Island whose address you can use?"

"Facebook is threatening it will simply pull out of Europe altogether if it is no longer able to share data about European users with its U.S. operations, applications, and data centres," reports ITWire.

It's customary for regulatory filings to preemptively declare a wide variety of possible future hazards, and in that spirit a recently-filed Meta financial statement cites a ruling by the EU's Court of Justice (in July of 2020) voiding a U.S. law called the Privacy Shield (which Meta calls one legal basis for its current dara-transferring practices). Though courts are now determining the ruling's ramifications, ITWire notes that "with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) well in force, the U.S. Privacy Shield principles were found non-compliant and consequently invalid." So while that ruling affects every American company, including cloud companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, it's Facebook/Meta that "says stopping transatlantic data transfers will have a devastating impact on its targeted online advertisements capabilities."

Read it yourself, in Meta's own words:

"If a new transatlantic data transfer framework is not adopted and we are unable to continue to rely on Standard Contractual Clauses [now also subject to new judical scrutiny] or rely upon other alternative means of data transfers from Europe to the United States, we will likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe, which would materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations."

Of course, the filing also cites other hazards like the possibility of new legislation restricting Facebook's ability to collect data about minors, complaining that such legislation "may also result in limitations on our advertising services or our ability to offer products and services to minors in certain jurisdictions."

And in addition, "We are, and expect to continue to be, the subject of investigations, inquiries, data requests, requests for information, actions, and audits by government authorities and regulators in the United States, Europe, and around the world, particularly in the areas of privacy, data protection, law enforcement, consumer protection, civil rights, content moderation, and competition..."

"Orders issued by, or inquiries or enforcement actions initiated by, government or regulatory authorities could cause us to incur substantial costs, expose us to unanticipated civil and criminal liability or penalties (including substantial monetary remedies), interrupt or require us to change our business practices in a manner materially adverse to our business, result in negative publicity and reputational harm, divert resources and the time and attention of management from our business, or subject us to other structural or behavioral remedies that adversely affect our business."

(Thanks to Slashdot reader juul_advocate for sharing the story!)

Apple's privacy push could cost Meta $10 billion in lost 2022 advertising revenue — and that news alone erased $250 billion in Meta's value, notes long-time Slashdot reader theodp.

But this leads them to a thought experiment: What would happen to Meta's and Google's business models if the privacy invasion behind the companies' lucrative advertising model were actually criminalized? While there would likely still be the same massive demand for the free services provided by Meta and Google, being unable to target customers of interest to advertisers based on snooped behaviors and demographics seems likely to throw the duopoly's lucrative cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) advertising model that powers these free services into disarray.

So what might the end game look like for Facebook and Google in a Web world where privacy was enforced by law? One imagines the pair could try to incur the additional cost of delivering many times more untargeted impressions in an effort to reach the same number of behavior and demographic-targeted impressions desired by advertisers, assuming they could get that to work and gain advertisers' trust in the new model. But one wonders if advertisers might start diverting more ad dollars away from Meta and Google to other sources such as media providers, whose varied content naturally segments audiences and could deliver greater assurance to advertisers that more relevant viewers are being reached. Might Meta and Google pivot to become syndicators of media content and be forced to share more of the advertising loot?

And what about the Metaverse — could Meta-sponsored events and interest groups hosted there provide Meta with opportunities to naturally segment its massive user base into areas that could facilitate targeting audiences relevant to advertisers even without privacy invasion?

Finally — if worse comes to worst — would users actually pay to use Meta's and Google's services if the new advertising model failed to deliver sufficient revenue to keep services free?

"A pre-pandemic policy on airport usage is pressuring airlines to keep 'ghost flights' in the air," Wired reported this week — adding "The climate impact is massive." Lufthansa, Germany's national airline, which is based in Frankfurt, has admitted to running 21,000 empty flights this winter, using its own planes and those of its Belgian subsidiary, Brussels Airlines, in an attempt to keep hold of airport slots. Although anti-air travel campaigners believe ghost flights are a widespread issue that airlines don't publicly disclose, Lufthansa is so far the only airline to go public about its own figures.... Lufthansa's own chief executive, Carsten Spohr [said] the journeys were "empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights." But the company argues that it can't change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports.

A Greenpeace analysis indicates that if Lufthansa's practice of operating no-passenger flights were replicated equally across the European aviation sector, it would mean that more than 100,000 "ghost flights" were operating in Europe this year, spitting out carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to 1.4 million gas-guzzling cars. "We're in a climate crisis, and the transport sector has the fastest-growing emissions in the EU," says Greenpeace spokesperson Herwig Schuster. "Pointless, polluting 'ghost flights' are just the tip of the iceberg."

Aviation analysts are split on the scale of the ghost flight problem. Some believe the issue has been overhyped and is likely not more prevalent than the few airlines that have admitted to operating them. Others say there are likely tens of thousands of such flights operating — with their carriers declining to say anything because of the PR blowback.

Meta's stock plunged 26% Thursday — its biggest one-day drop ever, lowering its marketing valuation by more than $230 billion. And then on Friday it dropped just a little bit more.

A New York Times technology correspondent offers six reasons Meta is in trouble: User growth has hit a ceiling. The salad days of Facebook's wild user growth are over. Even though the company on Wednesday recorded modest gains in new users across its so-called family of apps — which includes Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp — its core Facebook social networking app lost about half a million users over the fourth quarter from the previous quarter.

That's the first such decline for the company in its 18-year history, during which time it had practically been defined by its ability to bring in more new users. The dip signaled that the core app may have reached its peak. Meta's quarterly user growth rate was also the slowest it has been in at least three years. Meta's executives have pointed to other growth opportunities, like turning on the money faucet at WhatsApp, the messaging service that has yet to generate substantial revenue. But those efforts are nascent. Investors are likely to next scrutinize whether Meta's other apps, such as Instagram, might begin to hit their top on user growth....

Apple's changes are limiting Meta and Google is stealing online advertising share. Last spring, Apple introduced an "App Tracking Transparency" update to its mobile operating system, essentially giving iPhone owners the choice as to whether they would let apps like Facebook monitor their online activities. Those privacy moves have now hurt Meta's business and are likely to continue doing so...

On Wednesday, David Wehner, Meta's chief financial officer, noted that as Apple's changes have given advertisers less visibility into user behaviors, many have started shifting their ad budgets to other platforms. Namely Google. In Google's earnings call this week, the company reported record sales, particularly in its e-commerce search advertising. That was the very same category that tripped up Meta in the last three months of 2021. Unlike Meta, Google is not heavily dependent on Apple for user data. Mr. Wehner said it was likely that Google had "far more third-party data for measurement and optimization purposes" than Meta's ad platform. Mr. Wehner also pointed to Google's deal with Apple to be the default search engine for Apple's Safari browser. That means Google's search ads tend to appear in more places, taking in more data that can be useful for advertisers. That's a huge problem for Meta in the long term, especially if more advertisers switch to Google search ads.
Meta's other problems include competition from TikTok (and the problems with monetizing "Reels," Meta's own TikTok clone on Instagram), as well as pending antitrust investigations (and the way it hampers future social media acquisitions). But with Meta expected to continue spending more than $10 billion a year on virtual reality, "still the province of niche hobbyists [that] has yet to really break into the mainstream," the article also suggests its final reason for why Meta is in trouble: that "Spending on the metaverse is bonkers."

Engineers from the University of Delaware developed a method for effectively capturing 99 percent of carbon dioxide from the air using an electrochemical system powered by hydrogen, a press statement reveals. Interesting Engineering reports: The new system, outlined in a new paper in the journal Nature Energy, was actually born out of a setback in another research project. The team behind the new technology was originally working on hydroxide exchange membrane (HEM) fuel cells, a more affordable and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional acid-based fuel cells. While working on that technology, the team was faced with a serious obstacle. HEM fuel cells, they found, are very sensitive to carbon dioxide in the air, making it hard for the batteries to function properly.

Fast forward a few years later, and the researchers that once tried to combat the effects of carbon dioxide on HEM fuel cells are now using it to our advantage. "Once we dug into the mechanism, we realized the fuel cells were capturing just about every bit of carbon dioxide that came into them, and they were really good at separating it to the other side," said Brian Setzler, a co-author on the paper. The team leveraged the built-in "self-purging" process seen in HEM fuel cells to create a carbon dioxide separator that could be placed upstream from their fuel cell stacks. "It turns out our approach is very effective. We can capture 99 percent of the carbon dioxide out of the air in one pass if we have the right design and right configuration," said study lead and UD Professor Yushan Yan.

Today, the team has a more compact system that is capable of filtering greater quantities of air. According to the researchers, their soda can-sized early prototype device is capable of filtering roughly 10 liters of air per minute and of removing about 98 percent of CO2. What's more, they found that a smaller electrochemical cell measuring 2 inches by 2 inches could be used to continuously remove roughly 99 percent of CO2 found in the air flowing at a rate of approximately two liters per minute. The team's prototype is designed to scrub CO2 out of a vehicle's exhaust, though it could also be used for a number of other applications, including aircraft, spacecraft, and submarines.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: About a tenth of the global oil and gas industry's methane emissions have been found to come from a group of "ultra-emitter" sites located mostly in Turkmenistan, Russia and the US. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that governments recently agreed to slash by 2030. While huge plumes of methane leaking from gas pipelines have been detected by satellites at individual sites, such as a gas well in Ohio and several pipelines in central Turkmenistan, little has been know about their extent globally.

Now, images captured by an instrument aboard a satellite have been run through an algorithm to automatically detect the biggest plumes of methane streaming from oil and gas facilities worldwide. These ultra-emitters were spotted pumping out more than 25 tons of methane an hour. That's "a heck of a lot," says Steve Hamburg at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a US non-profit organization. Collectively, these contribute about 8 million tons of methane a year, about a tenth of the oil and gas industry's total annual emissions for 2019-20. Turkmenistan was the biggest ultra-emitter, releasing more than a million tons of methane between 2019 and 2020. Russia was second at just under a million tons, followed by the US, Iran, Algeria and Kazakhstan. The US count is probably low because it excluded a major oil and gas region, the Permian basin, due to monitoring difficulties. By contrast to these countries, other major oil producing countries, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, had very few ultra-emitters. "The study also found that ultra-emitting sites are releasing so much methane, which could be sold, that it should be cost effective to solve," reports New Scientist. "For the six worst countries, tackling those plumes should cost up to $300 less per ton than it would typically cost to reduce methane from oil and gas facilities in those nations."

The report also notes that these findings "are based on a snapshot and some ultraemitters may have gone undetected."

The findings have been published in the journal Science.

slack_justyb writes: "Quietly making its v1.0 debut yesterday was system76-scheduler as a Rust-written daemon aiming to improve Linux desktop responsiveness and catering to their Pop!_OS distribution," reports Phoronix.

The daemon will work with the kernel's CFS scheduler to give priority to components that System76 deems important for its distro. Out of the box, the scheduler will assign priority to the X.Org Server and desktop window managers/compositors, while pushing compilers and other background tasks lower. However, the scheduler will be configurable via Rusty Object Notation (RON) files found in /etc/system76-scheduler/assignments/ and /usr/share/system76-scheduler/assignments/.

Over on the GitHub page for the project, the team indicates that they are indeed making a trade-off from the default CFS to benefit Desktop configurations over the typical load a server might see.

Google is trying to salvage its failing Stadia game service with a new focus on striking deals with Peloton, Bungie, and others under the brand "Google Stream." Business Insider reports: When Google announced last year that it was shutting down its internal gaming studios, it was seen as a blow to the company's big bet on video games. Google, whose Stadia cloud service was barely more than a year old, said it would instead focus on publishing games from existing developers on the platform and explore other ways to bring Stadia's technology to partners. Since then, the company has shifted the focus of its Stadia division largely to securing white-label deals with partners that include Peloton, Capcom, and Bungie, according to people familiar with the plans.

Google is trying to salvage the underlying technology, which is capable of broadcasting high-definition games over the cloud with low latency, shopping the technology to partners under a new name: Google Stream. (Stadia was known in development as "Project Stream.") The Stadia consumer platform, meanwhile, has been deprioritized within Google, insiders said, with a reduced interest in negotiating blockbuster third-party titles. The focus of leadership is now on securing business deals for Stream, people involved in those conversations said. The changes demonstrate a strategic shift in how Google, which has invested heavily in cloud services, sees its gaming ambitions.

Google has continued to prop up the Stadia consumer platform with a steady stream of titles. After Google closed Stadia's internal game studios, known as Stadia Games & Entertainment, insiders said the directive was to build out what was internally dubbed a "content flywheel" -- a steady flow of independent titles and content from existing publishing deals that would be much more affordable than securing AAA blockbusters, two former employees familiar with the conversations said. "The key thing was that they would not be spending the millions on the big titles," one said. "And exclusives would be out of the question." Executives and employees for the Stadia product have also shifted roles. Phil Harrison, the former PlayStation executive Google tapped to run its gaming operations, now reports to the company's head of subscriptions. Patrick Seybold, a Google spokesperson, told Insider in a statement: "We announced our intentions of helping publishers and partners deliver games directly to gamers last year, and have been working toward that. The first manifestation has been our partnership with AT&T who is offering Batman: Arkham Knight available to their customers for free. While we won't be commenting on any rumors or speculation regarding other industry partners, we are still focused on bringing great games to Stadia in 2022. With 200+ titles currently available, we expect to have another 100+ games added to the platform this year, and currently have 50 games available to claim in Stadia Pro."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Clearview AI, the shady face recognition firm which claims to have landed contracts with federal, state, and local cops across the country, has landed a roughly $50,000 deal with the U.S. military for augmented reality glasses. First flagged by Tech Inquiry's Jack Poulson, Air Force procurement documents show that it awarded a $49,847 contract to Clearview AI for the purposes of "protecting airfields with augmented reality facial recognition; glasses." The contract is designated as part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, meaning that Clearview's contract is to determine for the Air Force whether such applications are feasible.

Bryan Ripple, a media lead at the Air Force Research Laboratory Public Affairs, told Gizmodo via email that Clearview will conduct a three-month study under which "no glasses or units are being delivered under contract," nor are any prototypes. Clearview, he wrote, stipulated "that security personnel are vulnerable while their hands are occupied with scanners and ID cards" and AR goggles would allow them to "remain hands-free and ready during this timeframe." "Clearview AI's Augmented Reality (AR) Glasses perform facial recognition scanning to vet backgrounds and restrict unauthorized individuals from entering bases and flightlines," Ripple wrote. "This 100% hands-free identity verification wearable device allows Defenders to keep their weapons at the ready, increase standoff and social distance, and confirm authorized base access using rapid and accurate facial biometrics while keeping threats distant. The results are improved safety at entry control points and for bases, faster identity verification without manual ID card checks, and cost savings by replacing the need for large permanent camera installations."

In a promotional document shared by the Air Force, Clearview argued that in the time it takes to scan an ID card at the entry point to a military facility, "A criminal or terrorist can pull a gun, knife, or weapon during this brief but critical moment, kill the Defender, and access the base." They argued the AR glasses would increase "standoff distance," save guards time while vetting high volumes of traffic and allow them to maintain distance from anyone contagious with diseases.