For a sector historically known for its fast-forward pace of innovation, consumer technology sure did a lot of backpedaling this year. From a report: The Nasdaq CTA Internet Index is in the red this year compared with a return of more than 27% for the S&P 500. Cathie Wood's famed ARK Innovation ETF, more than 30% of which was invested in information technology as of Sept. 30, has seen its net asset value decline 21% this year, underperforming the S&P by nearly 49 percentage points. She isn't alone. If you invested in enough tech stocks this year, you probably got burned by a few of them.

Select lowlights include fitness-equipment company Peloton Interactive, down nearly 75% this year; social-commerce company Poshmark, down almost 82%; and education-tech company Chegg, down 66%. At certain points, the number of names blowing up simultaneously was dizzying: Chegg, Peloton, Zillow Group and Vimeo all took nosedives around their most-recent earnings reports, collectively erasing some $26.3 billion in market value in a single week last month. A big part of the problem was the huge run logged in stay-at-home stocks in the latter half of last year. Many of tech's 2020 darlings became duds simply by virtue of the fact that they appreciated too much too quickly. In the end, the numbers couldn't keep pace.

Ms. Wood, at least, is sticking with the strategy that failed her this year. She said in a Bloomberg interview earlier this month that she expects it to yield "a compound annual rate of return of roughly 40% over the next five years," emphasizing, "That's a quadrupling." But investors shouldn't expect all of this year's dips to lead to easy dunks next year. Zillow, for example, is down over 50% in the year to date, and while its future without iBuying looks to be a much more steadily profitable business, the online real-estate company is still worth more than twice as much today as it was in early 2019, when it went big into the automated home-flipping business. If the tech sector has to earn its gains next year, many of its stocks still face an uphill battle.

Powerful CEOs worry about their job security as much as the rest of us do -- in fact, maybe even more. From a report: An eye-popping 72% of CEOs are worried about losing their jobs due to the disruptions facing their industries, according to a new report out today from the global consulting firm AlixPartners. That figure jumped 20 percentage points compared to just a year ago, when 52% of CEOs told AlixPartners they were anxious about job security.

The frenetic pace of change in businesses and the world has accelerated since the onset of the pandemic -- leading to a spike in CEO anxiety. 94% of executives say their business models need to change within the next three years -- but 57% fear their company isn't adapting fast enough.

Baidu Chief Executive Robin Li said Jidu Auto would start mass production of its first "robot" electric vehicles (EV) in 2023. From a report: Jidu, an electric vehicle venture between China's tech giant Baidu and Chinese automaker Geely, would make EVs that are of the autonomous Level-four, which needs no human intervention, Li said at Baidu's annual developers' conference on Monday.

Edward O. Wilson, a U.S. naturalist dubbed the "modern-day Darwin" died on Sunday at the age of 92 in Massachusetts, his foundation said in a statement. From a report: Alongside British naturalist David Attenborough, Wilson was considered one of the world's leading authorities on natural history and conservation. Wilson's Half-Earth Project calls for protecting half the planet's land and sea so there are enough diverse and well-connected ecosystems to reverse the course of species extinction, which is happening at a rate not seen in 10 million years. The United Nations has urged countries to commit to conserving 30% of their land and water -- almost double the area now under some form of protection - by 2030, a target known as "30 by 30" and inspired in part by Wilson.

Born in the southern U.S. state of Alabama, Wilson's trajectory as an entomologist, someone who studies insects, was set at the age of 10, when he spent hours in the woods collecting bugs and butterflies. He went on to spend 70 years as a scientist at Harvard University, putting in time as a professor and curator in entomology. Through his career, Wilson discovered more than 400 species of ants. He said one of his greatest achievements was working out how ants communicate danger and food trails, for example, by emitting chemicals.

Politico reports: When Ford announced that starting in 2023 its cars and trucks would come with Google Maps, Assistant and Play Store preinstalled, CEO Jim Farley called the partnership between his iconic U.S. automaker and the search giant a chance to "reinvent" the automobile — making it an office-on-wheels, with more connectivity than any phone or laptop. "We were spending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions every year, keeping up with basically a generic experience that was not competitive to your cellphone," Farley crowed on CNBC, announcing the six-year deal with the tech giant.... But many tech-industry watchdogs looked at the Ford-Google car of the future with different eyes. They fear that tech companies will soon be doing to cars what they did to phones: Tying their exclusive operating systems to specific products to force out competitors and dominate a huge swath of the global economy.

Indeed, the smartphone wars are over, and Google and Apple won. Now they — and Amazon — are battling to control how you operate within your car. All three see autos as the next great opportunity to reach American consumers, who spend more time in the driver's seat than anywhere outside their home or workplace. And automakers, after years of floundering to incorporate cutting-edge technologies into cars on their own, are increasingly eager for Silicon Valley's help — hoping to adopt both its tech and its lucrative business models where consumers pay monthly for ongoing services instead of shelling out for a product just once. Now, having missed the boat as the tech giants cornered the market on smartphones, some policymakers and regulators believe the battle over connected cars represents a chance to block potential monopolies before they form.

State attorneys general who sued Google in 2020 for monopolizing online search highlighted concerns about the company's move into autonomous cars in their federal antitrust complaint. Meanwhile, in Europe, the EU's competition authority has opened a probe into Google's contracts related to connected cars... While Silicon Valley and automakers are thrilled about the future of connected and autonomous cars, regulators and privacy advocates are less so. "These companies have an amount of data on us that they shouldn't have, and they have a history of not using it in responsible ways," said Katharine Trendacosta of the digital civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "They have a history of going back on promises they have made about that data."

She cited Google's pledge during the DoubleClick acquisition in 2008 — which it later reneged on — not to combine data from its consumer products with that from its advertising services.
The article quotes Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III, who last December complained that "When smartphones took off, Google made sure they controlled search on Apple's iPhone. They are doing the same thing on voice and connected cars. It's a similar playbook." And an executive at an automotive supplier that competes with Google tells Politico that Google is already "corralling everything through their system and controls what information is released downstream."

And Jim Heffner, a vice president at Cox Automotive Mobility, adds that "The ride is no longer the point. Data is the cornerstone. ... Apple and Google and others want to be at the epicenter of that."

A Forbes associate editor covering privacy, cybercrime, and security/surveillance reports on a recently-revealed search warrant.

Instead of investigating a photo, it asked Google to provide information on a suspect who allegedly owned graphic illegal cartoons involving children: That kind of content is potentially illegal to own under U.S. law and can be detected by Google's anti-child sexual material (CSAM) systems, a fact not previously discussed in the public domain, the warrant reveals.... Google also uses machine learning tools to look at files and analyze them for any sign they're of abused children....

As per its legal requirements, Google handed information on what it found, as well as the IP addresses used to access the images, to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which then passed on the findings to the DHS Homeland Security Investigations unit. Investigators used the IP addresses provided by Google to identify the suspect as the alleged owner of the cartoons, and searched his Google account, receiving back information on emails to and from the defendant. It appears the suspect may actually be a known artist. As no charges have been filed, Forbes isn't publishing his name, but the man identified in the warrant had won several small Midwest art competitions, and one artwork from the 1990s had been mentioned in a major West Coast newspaper...

Google, meanwhile, has in recent years released transparency reports showing how many times it reports issues to NCMEC. The figures reveal a disturbing trend. In the first six months of 2021, it found more than 3.4 million pieces of potentially illegal content in 410,000 separate reports. That was up from 2.9 million in 365,000 reports in the last six months of 2020, and well over double that from January to June 2020, when 1.5 million pieces of CSAM material were discovered and reported to NCMEC in 180,000 reports...

As Google doesn't end-to-end encrypt its communications tools like Gmail or its file storage tech like Drive, it's still possible for the tech company to scan for illegal content. And as it has no plans to introduce those features, law enforcement can still rely on Google to warn NCMEC when abuse happens on its servers. Whether the majority of users will want Google to scan people's accounts so it can help find child abusers, or have improved privacy with end-to-end encryption instead, the Mountain View, California-based business will have to struggle with that balance in perpetuity. The same goes for any one of its rivals.

"Almost 5,000 flights were canceled across the world over Christmas weekend," reports NBC News, "as holiday travel plans were brought to a halt amid the rapidly spreading omicron variant of Covid-19." About 2,800 global flights were canceled on Christmas Day alone, according to flight tracker FlightAware, with some airline companies citing the spread of the new variant as the cause for the disruption...

Several major airlines, including United, Delta and Alaska, said they had been forced to cancel hundreds of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day flights after the omicron variant infected employees and crew members. United said some of its 210 cancellations Saturday were also a result of close contact situations.

With some time on their hands, long-time Slashdot reader shanen began exploring the question: How many files does my Windows 10 computer have?

But then they realized "It would also be interesting to compare the weirdness on other OSes..." Here are the two data points in front of me:

(1) Using the right click on properties for all of the top-level folders on the drive (including the so-called hidden folders), it quickly determined that there are a few hundred thousand files in those folders (and a few hundred thousand subfolders). That's already ridiculous, but the expected par these days. The largest project I have on the machine only has about 3,000 files, and that one goes back many years... (My largest database only has about 5,000 records, but it's just a few files.)

(2) However, I also decided to take a look with Microsoft's malicious software removal tool and got a completely different answer. For twisted grins, I had invoked the full scan. It's still running a day later and has already passed 10 million files. Really? The progress bar indicates about 80% finished? WTF?

Obviously there is some kind of disagreement about the nature of "file" here. I could only think of one crazy explanation, but my router answered "No, the computer is not checking all of the files on the Internet." So I've already asked the specific question in three-letter form, but the broader question is about the explosive, perhaps even cancerous, "population growth" of files these days.
Maybe we can all solve this mystery together. So use the comments to share your own answers and insights.

How many files are on your computer?

Slashdot reader Tesseractic comes bearing gifts — specifically, news of "a new image format that is lossless, gives much faster encodes, faster decodes and roughly comparable compression compared to what's in use today."

Quite OK Image format (or QOI) is the brainchild of developer Dominic Szablewski, who complains current image formats like PNG, JPEG, MPEG, MOV and MP4 "burst with complexity at the seams," the Register reports: "Every tiny aspect screams 'design by consortium'," he added, going on to lament the fact that most common codecs are old, closed, and "require huge libraries, are compute hungry and difficult to work with." Szablewski thought he could do better and appears to have achieved that objective by cooking up some code, floating it on GitHub, and paying attention to the 500-plus comments it generated.

While Szablewski admits that QOI will not compress images as well as an optimized PNG encoder, he claims it "losslessy compresses images to a similar size of PNG, while offering 20x-50x faster encoding and 3x-4x faster decoding." Most importantly, to Szablewski, the reference en-/decoder fits in about 300 lines of C and the file format spec requires is just one page long.

"In the last few weeks QOI implementations for lot of different languages and libraries popped up," Szablewski wrote on his blog, with Zig, Rust,Go, TypeScript, Haskell, Ä, Python, C#, Elixir, Swift, Java, and Pascal among the options.

Nasa's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) has successfully extended its 4-metre boom arm to assume its operational configuration. From a report: Launched on 9 December atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, IXPE is a space observatory designed to study X-rays from black holes, neutron stars and other exotic celestial objects. To bring X-rays into focus requires a long telescope because mirrors cannot bend the highly energetic rays by large amounts. Instead they have to be coaxed into focus with a device called a grazing incidence telescope. IXPE has three of these. Each sits on the end of the boom arm and directs light into the instruments in the body of the spacecraft. By measuring the polarisation of the X-rays, IXPE will reveal information about the magnetic environment of their targets. At launch the spacecraft was roughly cubic, about 1-metre long on each side, with the 4-metre-long boom arm folded into a canister 0.3 metres in length. This allowed the IXPE to fit into the nose cone of the rocket. On 15 December, the spacecraft extended the boom. Mission personnel are now working to commission the telescope, ready for science observations to begin in the new year.

Vaclav Smil, writing at IEEE Spectrum: There is a fundamental difference between what can be designed and built and what makes sense. History provides a lesson in the shape of record-setting behemoths that have never since been equaled. The Egyptian pyramids started small, and in just a few generations, some 4,500 years ago, there came Khufu's enormous pyramid, which nobody has ever tried to surpass. Shipbuilders in ancient Greece kept on expanding the size of their oared vessels until they built, during the third century BCE, a tessarakonteres, with 4,000 oarsmen. That vessel was too heavy, too ponderous, and therefore a naval failure. And architect Filippo Brunelleschi's vast cupola for Florence's Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, built without scaffolding and finished in 1436, was never replicated.

The modern era has no shortage of such obvious overshoots. The boom in oil consumption following the Second World War led to ever-larger oil tankers, with sizes rising from 50,000 to 100,000 and 250,000 deadweight tonnes (dwt). Seven tankers exceeded 500,000 dwt, but their lives were short, and nobody has built a million-dwt tanker. Technically, it would have been possible, but such a ship would not fit through the Suez or Panama canals, and its draft would limit its operation to just a few ports. The economy-class-only configuration of the Airbus A380 airliner was certified to carry up to 853 passengers, but it has not been a success. In 2021, just 16 years after it entered service, the last plane was delivered, a very truncated lifespan. Compare it with the hardly puny Boeing 747, which will see its final delivery in 2022, 53 years after the plane's first flight, an almost human longevity. Clearly, the 747 was the right-sized record-breaker. [...] Depending on where you stand you might see all of this either as an admirable quest for new horizons (a quintessential human striving) or irrational and wasteful overreach (a quintessential human hubris).

A Russian court fined Alphabet's Google 7.2 billion rubles ($98 million) and Meta Platforms 2 billion rubles Friday for failing to remove banned content, the largest such penalties yet, as the authorities escalate a crackdown on foreign technology companies. From a report: The fines were due to the companies' repeated failure to comply with orders to take down content and based on a percentage of their annual earnings in Russia, the federal communications watchdog said in a statement. Google and Meta could face more fines if they don't remove the material, it said.

Google is studying the ruling and then will determine its next steps, the company's press service in Moscow said in a statement. Russia has stepped up its confrontation with foreign social media and internet companies this year in what the government calls a campaign to uphold its digital sovereignty. Regulators have levied fines and slowed content in a bid to force companies including Google and Twitter to delete posts encouraging unauthorized protests and other material deemed illegal.

Supply is low, demand is high -- but that alone cannot explain the weird indignity of renting a vehicle. From a report: The present situation is "the most challenging in the history of car rental," says Chris Brown, the digital editor of the industry trade publication Auto Rental News. "Last year ... it was a disaster." Nobody could have planned for such a catastrophic revenue loss, he told me, and while the airline industry received a government bailout, the rental-car industry did not. "Hertz had 3,000 cars burned to the ground because someone lit a match, and they just burned in a field," he added. (Something like this did happen in Florida, though only around 1,000 of the 4,500 cars destroyed in the fire belonged to Hertz, and investigators blamed the episode on a hot exhaust pipe and dry grass.) Given the context, some negative customer experiences were to be expected, Brown argued. "But I think it's really impressive how car-rental [companies have] been able to pull themselves out of this very difficult time managing as well as they are."

Well, I'm not trying to be unfair to any companies, but many car-rental businesses did receive funds from the Paycheck Protection Program. And many of their negative customer experiences have nothing to do with a car shortage or a pandemic. Why is that car-rental employee typing for so long? We'll never know. Why are the printers so old and loud and broken? Who could say! Will you ever get a straight answer as to how much insurance to buy, or whether to prepay for gas, or why it's forbidden for you to drive this rental car out of the state of Florida? What does the pandemic have to do with Avis allegedly repossessing a rental car from someone's driveway in the middle of the night in Teaneck, New Jersey, and then allegedly claiming to know absolutely nothing about it, in one of the oddest stories I have ever read? And what does the pandemic have to do with the stream of complaints about rental-car companies on the Better Business Bureau website, a surprising number of which come from people who insist that they do not smoke yet they have been charged as much as $450 for allegedly smoking in a car?

I reached out with questions of this kind to the three largest rental-car companies, which control the large majority of the rental-car business in the United States. Enterprise Holdings did not respond. Avis Budget declined to comment about either the state of the industry or the alleged incident in Teaneck. A Hertz spokesperson said, in part, "Hertz is working closely with our automotive partners to add new vehicles to our fleet as quickly as possible amid the microchip shortage that continues to impact the car rental industry. We're also purchasing low-mileage, pre-owned vehicles, and moving vehicles to the areas with highest demand." The financial structure of these companies is as inscrutable as a contract printed on a dot-matrix printer and signed in a dim underground parking garage. Some of them have gone bankrupt; at least one has done so multiple times. Take Hertz for instance: Private-equity firms acquired the company from Ford in 2005, then made a profit of $1 billion with an IPO while the company itself remained deeply in debt. The company is also on its sixth CEO since 2014 and has been deemed a "Frankenstein of financial engineering" by Axios. Most of the cars that Hertz rents out are owned by "special-purpose" subsidiaries of Hertz, from which Hertz then leases them. When Hertz was sliding into bankruptcy in spring 2020, it was because the company had missed lease payments -- to put it crudely -- to itself. I can barely understand this, yet I will walk into a rental-car office and suffer for it.

The Justice Department is still months away from deciding whether to sue Apple or file a new suit against Google over antitrust concerns, POLITICO reported Thursday, citing two people familiar with the discussions -- a question facing new financial complications after the collapse of President Joe Biden's social spending bill. From a report: DOJ antitrust prosecutors had earlier aimed to wrap up their probes of the two tech giants by Dec. 31, culminating years of scrutiny by the department into Apple's App Store and Google's command of the online ad market. But now the decision on going to court is likely to come in March or later because of continued discussions about where to file and who will make the call, the two people told POLITICO. They spoke anonymously to discuss internal DOJ deliberations. Another major concern for the department is the likely expense of a court battle with the two companies, each of which has a market value exceeding $1 trillion. That issue became more fraught this week when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) torpedoed Democrats' Build Back Better package, which would have given DOJ a $500 million boost for antitrust enforcement.

Through public records requests, The Markup found more than 20 public agencies using the sometimes-controversial software. From the report: In 2020, the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) faced a daunting task: It needed to fill more than 900 job vacancies -- and fast. The center, which does things like inspect pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities, was in the process of modernizing the FDA's New Drugs Regulatory Program just as the pandemic started. It faced "a surge in work," along with new constraints that have affected everyone during the pandemic, including travel limitations and lockdowns. So they decided to turn to an artificial intelligence tool to speed up the hiring, according to records obtained by The Markup. The center, along with the Office of Management and the Division of Management Services, the background section of a statement of work said, were developing a "recruitment plan to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to assist in the time to hire process."

The agency ultimately chose to use HireVue, an online platform that allows employers to review asynchronously recorded video interviews and have recruits play video games as part of their application process. Over the years the platform has also offered a variety of AI features to automatically score candidates. HireVue, controversially, used to offer facial analysis to predict whether an applicant would be a good fit for an open job. In recent years, research has shown that facial recognition software is racially biased. In 2019, the company's continued use of the technique led one member of its scientific advisory board to resign. It has since stopped using facial recognition. The Markup used GovSpend, a database of procurement records for U.S. agencies at the state, local, and federal levels, to identify agencies that use HireVue. We also searched for agencies using Teramind and ActivTrak, both another kind of controversial software that allows employers to remotely monitor their workers' browsing activities through screenshots and logs. The Markup contacted and filed public records requests with those 24 agencies to understand how they were using the software. Eleven public agencies, including the FDA, replied to The Markup with documents or confirmations that they had bought HireVue at some point since 2017. Of the six public agencies that replied to The Markup's questions confirming that they actually used the software, all but one -- Lake Travis Independent School District in Texas -- confirmed they did not make use of the AI scoring features of the software. Documents and responses from 13 agencies confirmed that they purchased Teramind or ActivTrak at some point during the same time frame.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, we broke a story about Toyota locking its key fob remote start function behind a monthly subscription. If owners of certain models aren't actively enrolled in a larger Toyota connected services plan, the proximity remote start function on the fob -- that is, when you press the lock button three times to start the car while outside of it -- will not work even though it sends the signal directly to the car. Obviously, this sent people into a frenzy whether they own a Toyota or not, because it was seen as a dark harbinger of the perils of fully-connected cars. Automakers now have the ability to nickel and dime people to death by charging ongoing subscription fees for functions that used to be a one-and-done purchase, and it looked like Toyota was hopping on the bandwagon.

At the time, Toyota declined to give us a detailed answer on why it chose to take a feature that doesn't need an internet connection to function and moved it behind a paywall. Today, we've got answers. Toyota now claims it never intended to market the key fob remote start as a real feature, and it also says the subscription requirement was an inadvertent result of a relatively small technical decision related to the way its new vehicles are architectured. Finally, Toyota has heard the outrage over the last week -- a spokesperson told us the company was caught off guard by the blowback -- and its executive team is currently examining whether it's possible to reverse course and drop the subscription requirement for key fob remote start.

Game makers are increasingly selling virtual weapons and gear as NFTs, extending the trendy digital deeds' reach but rankling some players. From a report: More videogame makers are selling virtual guns, helmets and other gear in the form of NFTs, a move that is increasingly pushing the trendy digital deeds into the average household. Players have been paying for virtual goods in games like "Grand Theft Auto Online" and "World of Warcraft" for years, but turning those items into nonfungible tokens would let gamers trade and resell them, making them into potentially valuable assets. The change also could mean that players who buy an NFT in one game could use it later in other games, on social media and in other corners of the internet -- an important step in developing an economy for the so-called metaverse. "FarmVille" maker Zynga and "Assassin's Creed" creator Ubisoft Entertainment are among the first big, publicly traded gaming companies to say they are experimenting with the strategy. Electronic Arts, Playtika and others are also looking into NFTs' potential use for engaging players.

"We're doing this because this may be part of the future of gaming," said Matt Wolf, Zynga's new vice president of blockchain gaming. "This is all about community building." Nonfungible tokens are essentially digital deeds that verify the authenticity of the items they represent as unique. They are the latest internet-based collecting craze, and so far they have come in forms ranging from digital artwork and trading cards to virtual real estate and sneakers, as well as concert tickets and even sports highlights. The tokens are stored on a blockchain, a digital ledger that shows when they were purchased and for how much, and ensures NFTs can't be duplicated or changed. Amid all that activity, NFTs' advent in videogames holds particular significance because gamers spend so much time in virtual worlds. That makes them potential early adopters in the metaverse -- a virtual realm where proponents say people will work, play and shop and where technology experts say the ability to buy and sell NFTs will be key.

An anonymous reader shares a report : Ms. Carter is part of a wave of executives and engineers leaving cushy jobs at Google, Amazon, Apple and other large tech companies -- some of which pay millions of dollars in annual compensation -- to chase what they see as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. That next big thing is crypto, they said, a catchall designation that includes digital currencies like Bitcoin and products like nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, that rely on the blockchain. Silicon Valley is now awash with stories of people riding seemingly ridiculous crypto investments like Dogecoin, a digital coin based on a dog meme, to life-changing wealth. Bitcoin has soared around 60 percent this year, while Ether, the cryptocurrency tied to the Ethereum blockchain, has increased more than fivefold in value.

But beyond that speculative mania, a growing contingent of the tech industry's best and brightest sees a transformational moment that comes along once every few decades and rewards those who spot the seismic shift before the rest of the world. With crypto, they see historical parallels to how the personal computer and the internet were once ridiculed, only to upend the status quo and mint a new generation of billionaires. Investors, too, have flooded in. They have poured more than $28 billion into global crypto and blockchain start-ups this year, four times the total in 2020, according to PitchBook, a firm that tracks private investments. More than $3 billion has gone into NFT companies alone. "There is a giant sucking sound coming from crypto," said Sridhar Ramaswamy, chief executive of search engine start-up Neeva and a former Google executive, who competes with crypto companies for talent. "It feels a bit like the 1990s and the birth of the internet all over again. It's that early, that chaotic and that much full of opportunity."

[...] The growing ranks of true believers say crypto can change the world by creating a more decentralized internet that is not controlled by a handful of companies. While such possibilities have existed since Bitcoin emerged in 2009, crypto products such as NFTs broke through to the mainstream only this year. That has accelerated the exodus from Big Tech companies into the crypto world. This month, Brian Roberts, the chief financial officer of Lyft, left the ride-hailing company to join OpenSea, a popular crypto start-up."I've seen enough cycles and paradigm shifts to be cognizant when something this big is just emerging," he said in an email. "We are Day 1 in terms of NFTs and their impact."

Bloomberg Businessweek: Each holiday season since 2015, Amazon.com has counted on selling a lot of its Alexa voice-controlled smart speakers. For almost as long, it's known that the devices have had trouble holding customers' attention even into January. According to internal data, there have been years when 15% to 25% of new Alexa users were no longer active in their second week with the device. Concern about user retention and engagement comes up repeatedly in internal planning documents that Bloomberg Businessweek viewed. The documents, which covered 2018 to 2021, detail Amazon's continued ambitions for Alexa, including plans to add more cameras and sensors that would allow devices to recognize different voices or determine which rooms users are in during each interaction. They also reveal the roadblocks the company sees to realizing these goals. Last year, Amazon's internal analysis of the smart speaker market determined it had "passed its growth phase" and estimated it would expand only 1.2% annually for the next several years.

In the moments before a 6.2-magnitude earthquake struck the northern California coast on Monday, roughly half a million phones began to buzz. From a report: An early-alert system managed by the US Geological Survey sent warnings out before the ground started to shake, giving residents in the sparsely populated area vital time to take cover. The earthquake brought significant shaking but minimal damage in Humboldt county, about 210 miles north-west of San Francisco, and officials said it was an excellent test of the alert-system. It was the largest magnitude quake that's occurred since the system, known as ShakeAlert, was officially rolled out across the west coast. "We got some reports from folks that they got up to 10 seconds' warning before they felt shaking. That's pretty darn good," said Robert de Groot, a ShakeAlert coordinator with the USGS.

ShakeAlert issues warnings through a series of agencies and apps including the MyShakeApp, public wireless emergency alert systems, and the Android operating system, powered by Google. A data package is created from information provided by USGS sensors and -- within seconds -- shows up on phones. Some apps that provide alerts are available to download but even some who didn't have an app on their phone were notified. Affected individuals are instructed to drop, cover, and hold on. Having extra seconds to do so can save lives. This event provided an opportunity for the scientists and system operators to test and improve ShakeAlert so it will be even better when the next big earthquake strikes. "We can run as many simulations and tests as possible but we are really going to learn the most from real earthquakes," de Groot said. "It's giving us the chance to use the system and learn how to do a better job of alerting people."