Google has made a deal for access to patient records from HCA, which which operates 181 hospitals and more than 2,000 healthcare sites in 21 states, so the tech company can develop healthcare algorithms, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Verge: Google will store anonymized data from patient health records and internet-connected medical devices. That data will be used to build programs that could inform medical decisions made by doctors. The deal is described as "multiyear" by the WSJ, without specifying how many years. As health records moved online over the past few years, hospitals and tech companies jumped at opportunities to take advantage of the glut of digitized medical information collected at each doctor's visit.

Microsoft and Amazon also have deals with hospitals to analyze their patient information. Google previously partnered with healthcare system Ascension to gather patient records in a secretive project called "Project Nightingale." The company was criticized for starting in on the project without disclosing the work to patients and doctors. HCA is a major win for Google, since its facilities handle 5 percent of the hospital services provided in the US -- around 30 million patient interactions each year.

Russia is increasingly pressuring Google, Twitter and Facebook to fall in line with Kremlin internet crackdown orders or risk restrictions inside the country, as more governments around the world challenge the companies' principles on online freedom. From a report: Russia's internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, recently ramped up its demands for the Silicon Valley companies to remove online content that it deems illegal or restore pro-Kremlin material that had been blocked. The warnings have come at least weekly since services from Facebook, Twitter and Google were used as tools for anti-Kremlin protests in January. If the companies do not comply, the regulator has said, they face fines or access to their products may be throttled.

The latest clashes flared up this week, when Roskomnadzor told Google on Monday to block thousands of unspecified pieces of illegal content or it would slow access to the company's services. On Tuesday, a Russian court fined Google 6 million rubles, or about $81,000, for not taking down another piece of content. On Wednesday, the government ordered Facebook and Twitter to store all data on Russian users within the country by July 1 or face fines. In March, the authorities had made it harder for people to see and send posts on Twitter after the company did not take down content that the government considered illegal. Twitter has since removed roughly 6,000 posts to comply with the orders, according to Roskomnadzor. The regulator has threatened similar penalties against Facebook.

AmiMoJo writes: The USB-C standard will let you plug in power-hungry devices like gaming laptops, docking stations, 4K monitors and printers with an upgrade that accommodates up to 240 watts starting this year. The jump in maximum power is more than double today's 100-watt top capacity. The USB Implementers Forum, the industry group that develops the technology, revealed the new power levels in the version 2.1 update to its USB Type-C specification on Tuesday. The new 240-watt option is called Extended Power Range, or EPR. "We expect devices supporting higher wattages in the second half of 2021," USB-IF said in a statement.

USB began as a useful but limited port for plugging keyboards, mice and printers into PCs. It later swept aside Firewire and other ports as faster speeds let it tackle more demanding tasks. It proved useful for charging phones as the mobile revolution began, paving the way for its use delivering power, not just data. The 240W Extended Power Range option means USB likely will expand its turf yet again. Cables supporting 240 watts will have additional requirements to accommodate the new levels. And USB-IF will require the cables to bear specific icons "so that end users will be able to confirm visually that the cable supports up to...240W," USB-IF said in the specification document.

WhatsApp has sued the Indian government challenging the second largest internet market's new regulations that could allow authorities to make people's private messages "traceable," and conduct mass surveillance. From a report: The Facebook-owned instant messaging service, which identifies India as its biggest market by users, said it filed the lawsuit in the High Court of Delhi on Wednesday. It said New Delhi's "traceability" requirement -- which would require WhatsApp to help New Delhi identify the originator of a particular message -- violated citizens' constitutional right to privacy.

"Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that a requirement to 'trace' private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse. WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people's personal messages and we will continue to do all we can within the laws of India to do so," WhatsApp said in a statement. India first proposed WhatsApp to make software changes to make the originator of a message traceable in 2018. The suggestion came at a time when WhatsApp was grappling with containing spread of false information in India, where circulation of such information had resulted in multiple real-life casualties. But its suggestion didn't become the law until this year. Traceability requirement is part of New Delhi's sweeping IT rules that also require social media firms to appoint several officers in India to address on-ground concerns, and also gives authorities greater power over taking down posts it deems offensive. Further reading: India says WhatsApp's lawsuit over new regulations a clear act of defiance.

Under the hollow pretense of concern for the environment, Starlink satellite internet competitor ViaSat has asked the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to force SpaceX to stop Starlink launches and threatened to take the matter to court if it doesn't get its way. Teslarati reports: A long-time satellite internet provider notorious for offering expensive, mediocre service with strict bandwidth restrictions, ViaSat has also been engaged in a years-long attempt to disrupt, slow down, and even kill SpaceX's Starlink constellation by any means necessary. That includes fabricating nonsensical protests, petitioning the FCC dozens of times, and -- most recently -- threatening to sue the agency and federal government as the company becomes increasingly desperate. The reason is simple: even compared to SpaceX's finicky, often-unreliable Starlink Beta service, ViaSat's satellite internet is almost insultingly bad. With a focus on serving the underserved and unserved, SpaceX's Starlink beta users -- many of which were already relying on ViaSat or HughesNet internet -- have overwhelmingly described the differences as night and day.

In simple terms, if given the option, it's extraordinarily unlikely that a single public ViaSat subscriber would choose the company's internet over SpaceX's Starlink. While Starlink currently requires subscribers to pay a substantial upfront cost -- ~$500 -- for the dish used to access the satellite network, ViaSat internet costs at least as much per month. Currently, new subscribers would pay a bare minimum of ~$113 per month for speeds up to 12 Mbps (akin to DSL) and an insultingly small 40GB data cap. For a 60GB cap and 25 Mbps, subscribers will pay more than $160 per month after a three-month promotion. With a fixed cost of $99 per month, truly unlimited data, and uncapped speeds that vary from 50 to 200+ Mbps, any ViaSat "silver" subscriber would receive far better service by switching to Starlink and save enough money to pay off the $500 dish in less than a year.

What ViaSat actually wants is for the FCC to catastrophically hamstring Starlink, thus saving the profit-focused company from having to actually work to compete with an internet service provider that is all but guaranteed to capture most of its subscribers on an even playing field. Incredibly, ViaSat actually removes its greenwashing mask in the very same FCC request [PDF], stating that it "will suffer competitive injury" if Starlink is allowed to "compete directly with Viasat in the market for satellite broadband services."

Russian authorities on Tuesday fined Google 6 million rubles, or just under $82,000, after the company failed to comply with Moscow's demands to delete prohibited online content. Engadget reports: On Monday, Russia's internet watchdog, Roskomnadzor, gave Google 24 hours to delete more than 26,000 instances of online media considered to be illegal in the country. If their demands weren't met, authorities threatened to slow down Google's services in Russia and levy fines of up to 10 percent of the company's annual revenue. Today, Roskomnadzor fined Google in three batches at 2 million rubles apiece, alleging administrative offenses in each case, according to Reuters. Much of the prohibited content involves calls for social action following the detention of high-profile Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny in January.

MojoKid writes: Mountain View, CA silicon design tools heavyweight Synopsys is claiming a breakthrough in chip design automation that it claims will usher in a new level of semiconductor innovation that will take the industry above and beyond the limits of Moore's Law (Gordon Moore's observation that the number of transistors in chips double roughly every two years), which is now considered by many to be plateauing. Synopsys' tool called DSO.ai is the world's first autonomous AI tool set for chip design. Synopsys claims its DSO.ai tool can dramatically accelerate, enhance, and reduce the costs involved with something called place-and-route. Just as it sounds, place-and-route (sometimes called floor planning) referrers to the placement of logic and IP blocks, and the routing of the traces and various interconnects in a chip designed to join them all together. Synopsys' DSO.ai optimizes and streamlines this process using the iterative nature of artificial intelligence and machine learning, such that what used to take dozens of engineers weeks or potentially months, now will take a junior engineer just days to complete. DSO.ai iterates on the floorplan and layout of a chip, and learns from each iteration, fine tuning and optimizing the chip within its design parameters and targets along the way. The old semiconductor paradigms are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Today, it's about the best transistors, architectures, and accelerators for the job, and the human-constrained physical design engineering effort no longer has to be a gating factor.

A group of Redditors came together in a bid to archive over 85 million scientific papers from the website Sci-Hub and make an open-source library that cannot be taken down. Interesting Engineering reports: Over the last decade or so, Sci-Hub, often referred to as "The Pirate Bay of Science," has been giving free access to a huge database of scientific papers that would otherwise be locked behind a paywall. Unsurprisingly, the website has been the target of multiple lawsuits, as well as an investigation from the United States Department of Justice. The site's Twitter account was also recently suspended under Twitter's counterfeit policy, and its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, reported that the FBI gained access to her Apple accounts.

Now, Redditors from a subreddit called DataHoarder, which is aimed at archiving knowledge in the digital space, have come together to try to save the numerous papers available on the website. In a post on May 13, the moderators of r/DataHoarder, stated that "it's time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science. We are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many." This will be no easy task. Sci-Hub is home to over 85 million papers, totaling a staggering 77TB of data. The group of Redditors is currently recruiting for its archiving efforts and its stated goal is to have approximately 8,500 individuals torrenting the papers in order to download the entire library. Once that task is complete, the Redditors aim to release all of the downloaded data via a new "uncensorable" open-source website.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at the company's developer conference today: Across all the opportunities I've highlighted today, Windows is implicit. It's never been more important. Windows 10 is used by more than 1.3 billion people to work, learn, connect and play. And it all starts with Windows as a dev box. Windows brings together all developer and collaboration tools in one place. It lets you choose the hardware you want, works with Linux and Windows as one, and has a modern terminal.

And soon we will share one of the most significant updates to Windows of the past decade to unlock greater economic opportunity for developers and creators. I've been selfhosting it over the past several months, and I'm incredibly excited about the next generation of Windows. Our promise to you is this: we will create more opportunity for every Windows developer today and welcome every creator who is looking for the most innovative, new, open platform to build and distribute and monetize applications. We look forward to sharing more very soon.

Microsoft is making the promised support for Linux graphical user interface (GUI) apps on Windows 10 available to customers as of the next Windows 10 release, officials said on May 25. Microsoft officials made the announcement on Day 1 of its virtual Build 2021 developers conference. From a report: During his Day 1 keynote, CEO Satya Nadella basically acknowledged there will be another event "soon" about the next Windows. He said: ""And soon we will share one of the most significant updates of Windows of the past decade." He said he has been self-hosting it over the past several months and called it "the next generation of Windows."

Microsoft released a preview of Linux GUI apps on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in April, 2021. This capability is meant to allow developers to run their preferred Linux tools, utilities and apps directly on Windows 10. With GUI app support, users can now run GUI apps for testing, development and daily use without having to set up a virtual machine.

Big under-the-hood changes are coming to Google's original Nest Hub, even if most users won't ever be aware of what's happening. From a report: Starting today, the open-source Fuchsia OS will start rolling out to first-gen Nest Hub displays, according to 9to5Google. In the works since 2016, Fuchsia will land first on Nest Hub devices enrolled in Google's Preview Program, before arriving more widely on non-Preview Program displays. Don't expect the user experience to change much, though. 9to5Google notes that the look and feel of Fuchsia OS-powered Nest Hubs will be "essentially identical" to what it was before.

OK, so what's the big deal about Fuchsia, then? It's a new, open-source OS that's decidedly not based on the Linux kernel, as Android and Chrome OS are. Instead, Fuchsia is based on Magneta, which (as we described it back in 2016) is "combination microkernel and set of user-space services and hardware drivers" with a "physics based renderer" that can power graphical user interfaces. Because it's an open-source project, Fuchsia's existence has been well publicized over the years, although its purpose has been harder to fathom; "out in the open" yet "shrouded in mystery" is how we aptly put it. With its arrival on the original Nest Hub, Fuchsia is taking its first tentative steps out of the lab and into the hands of actual users, even if those users aren't aware of the new OS.

Google's market power and control over users' data faces intense scrutiny in Germany as the nation's antitrust watchdog added it to the list of U.S. tech giants targeted by expanded new rules. From a report: Germany's Federal Cartel Office said Tuesday it's started two investigations under antitrust measures that allow regulators to target large digital companies that may dominate several markets. The authority will conduct an in-depth analysis of Google's data processing terms, saying the Alphabet unit enjoys a "strategic advantage" from the information it collects. Regulators also questioned whether users "have sufficient choice as to how Google will use their data."

To detect wildfires earlier on, some researchers are proposing a novel solution that harnesses a network of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and a fleet of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). IEEE Spectrum reports: The researchers tested their approach through simulations, described in a study published May 5 in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, finding that it can detect fires that are just 2.5 km2 (just under one square mile) in size with near perfect accuracy. "In the last few years, the number, frequency, and severity of wildfires have increased dramatically worldwide, significantly impacting countries' economies, ecosystems, and communities. Wildfire management presents a significant challenge in which early fire detection is key," emphasizes Osama Bushnaq, a senior researcher at the Autonomous Robotics Research Center of the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi, who was involved in the study.

The approach that Bushnaq and his colleagues are proposing involves a network of IoT sensors scattered throughout regions of concern, such as a national park or forests situated near communities. If a fire ignites, IoT devices deployed in the area will detect it and wait until a patrolling UAV is within transmission range to report their measurements. If a UAV receives multiple positive detections by the IoT devices, it will notify the nearby firefighting department that a wildfire has been verified.

The researchers evaluated a number of different UAVs and IoT sensors based on cost and features to determine the optimal combinations. Next, they tested their UAV-IoT approach through simulations, whereby 420 IoT sensors were deployed and 18 UAVs patrolled per square kilometer of simulated forest. The system could detect fires covering 2.5 km2 with greater than 99 percent accuracy. For smaller fires covering 0.5 km2 the approach yielded 69 percent accuracy. These results suggest that, if an optimal number of UAVs and IoT devices are present, wildfires can be detected in much shorter time than with the satellite imaging.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A team of scientists announced Monday that they had partially restored the sight of a blind man by building light-catching proteins in one of his eyes. Their report, which appeared in the journal Nature Medicine, is the first published study to describe the successful use of this treatment. The procedure is a far cry from full vision. The volunteer, a 58-year-old man who lives in France, had to wear special goggles that gave him the ghostly perception of objects in a narrow field of view. But the authors of the report say that the trial -- the result of 13 years of work -- is a proof of concept for more effective treatments to come.

The scientists are taking advantage of proteins derived from algae and other microbes that can make any nerve cell sensitive to light. In the early 2000s, neuroscientists figured out how to install some of these proteins into the brain cells of mice and other lab animals by injecting viruses carrying their genes. The viruses infected certain types of brain cells, which then used the new gene to build light-sensitive channels. Originally, researchers developed this technique, called optogenetics, as a way to probe the workings of the brain. By inserting a tiny light into the animal's brain, they could switch a certain type of brain cell on or off with the flick of a switch. The method has enabled them to discover the circuitry underlying many kinds of behavior.

German lawmakers greenlit a bill that would allow for some autonomous vehicles to hit public roads as early as next year. Deutsche Welle reports: The bill, passed by Bundestag lawmakers in a late-night session on Thursday, changes traffic regulations to allow for autonomous vehicles to be put into regular use across Germany. The bill specifically concerns vehicles with fully autonomous systems that fall under the "Level 4" classification -- where a computer is in complete control of the car and no human driver is needed to control or monitor it. Once approved, it would be the world's first legal framework for integrating autonomous vehicles in regular traffic. According to the Transportation Ministry, the bill was written to be as flexible as possible, with the new regulations not requiring a human driver to be on standby.

Starting in 2022, the German government says the bill would allow for driverless shuttle busses to be put into use, as well as autonomous public transportation busses that would drive on set routes. Autonomous vehicles would also be permitted to transport goods, and "dual-mode vehicles" could be used for automated valet parking. Self-driving cars for the general public would also be permitted in regular traffic, although experts estimate it will take years before the vehicles become established in the market, public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk reported.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: According to a tweet from Executable Fix, a well-known leaker, AMD will finally move away from PGA to LGA with the shift to AM5, the new socket set to replace AM4. They say the new socket design will be LGA-1718 -- the number representing the number of pins required for the package. They also note that a coming generation of AMD chip will support DDR5 and PCIe 4.0 with a 600-series chipset.

When we talk about PGA, we're most often discussing processors with pins sticking out the underside of a chip that slot into a motherboard with a compatible socket. An LGA design will instead see a flat array of connection points on the processor, which will align with pins within the motherboard's socket. Either way you look at it, you're getting some very bendable, if not breakable, pins. But in my opinion it's much easier to bend those pins on the CPU. While a shift to LGA may seem somewhat trivial, the change will mark a major shakeup in AMD's desktop lineup.

A man has been jailed for 13 years after his fingerprints were analysed from a photo of a block of cheese. Sky News reports: Carl Stewart shared the M&S Stilton picture -- but made the mistake of showing his fingers and palm. He may have thought he was safe because he was using an EncroChat phone, a highly encrypted device used by criminals. However, police cracked the system last year -- leading to the arrest of hundreds of people in the UK suspected of murder, gun smuggling and serious drug trafficking. Sixty-thousand users -- about 10,000 of them in the UK -- have been identified globally as part of Operation Venetic. Stewart, 39, of Gem Street, Liverpool, received a sentence of 13-and-a-half years at Liverpool Crown Court on Friday. [...] Detective Inspector Lee Wilkinson said Stewart had been "caught out by his love of Stilton cheese." "His palm and fingerprints were analysed from this picture and it was established they belonged to [him]," the officer said. Stewart had used the name Toffeeforce to conduct his EncroChat deals.

Florida on Monday became the first state to regulate how companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter moderate speech online, by imposing fines on social media companies that permanently bar political candidates in the state. From a report: The law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is a direct response to Facebook's and Twitter's bans of former President Donald J. Trump in January. In addition to the fines for barring candidates, it makes it illegal to prevent some news outlets from posting to their platforms in response to the contents of their stories. Mr. DeSantis said signing the bill meant that Floridians would be "guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites."

"If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable," he said in a statement. The bill is part of a broader push among conservative state legislatures to crack down on the ability of tech companies to manage posts on their platforms. The political efforts took off after Mr. Trump was barred after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Lawmakers around the country have echoed Mr. Trump's accusations that the companies are biased against conservative personalities and publications, even though those accounts often thrive online. More than a hundred bills targeting the companies' moderation practices have been filed nationwide this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many of the bills have died, but a proposal is still being debated in Texas.

Apple refused a request from Facebook to remove negative reviews in the App store after pro-Palestinian protesters coordinated an effort to tank ratings because of censorship of Palestinian content, NBC News reported. From a report: On Saturday, the Facebook app had a 2.3 out of five-star rating in the App store compared to a more than four-star rating last week. The largest category of ratings is one-star reviews, with many comments saying their rating is due to Facebook censoring hashtags like #FreePalestine or #GazaUnderAttack.

"User trust is dropping considerably with the recent escalations between Israel and Palestine," said one senior software engineer in a post on Facebook's internal message board, NBC reported. "Our users are upset with our handling of the situation. Users are feeling that they are being censored, getting limited distribution, and ultimately silenced. As a result, our users have started protesting by leaving 1 star reviews." An internal message reviewed by NBC showed that the company was very concerned about the coordinated effort to tank ratings, categorizing the issue as an SEV1, which stands for "severity 1."

Last year author Sonia Shah predicted that after pandemic-induced lockdowns finally ended, "The hype around online education will be abandoned, as a generation of young people forced into seclusion will reshape the culture around a contrarian appreciation for communal life."

This week the Atlantic's technology staff writer is now suggesting that "As the stress of the pandemic is beginning to recede, our relationship with the internet might be renegotiated..." As vaccination rates tick up, and IRL social life resumes, it's getting easier to imagine that we're on the brink of something big: a coordinated withdrawal from swiping and streaming, a new consensus that staying home to watch Netflix is no longer a chill Friday-night plan, but an affront. Could this be real? Are we about to start the summer of a Great Offlining...?

A few signs that this movement could be upon us: Netflix reported its worst first quarter in eight years, after seeing historic growth in 2020. Tinder conceded that more than half of its Gen Z users have no intention of using its videochat features ever again. Clubhouse downloads dropped significantly in April, prompting worry that the app was always just "a temporary salve to being stuck inside."

On The Cut, Safy-Hallan Farah has predicted a post-pandemic future in which our culture prioritizes, among other things, "earnestness," "communism," and "being extremely offline." The writer Luke Winkie forecasts a 10-week period of everyone abandoning the internet, adding that "offline is going to hit like a drug." Discourse's Patrick Redford put it best, writing that "the idea of further screen-only interaction with my friends and loved ones after a year overstuffed with them makes me want to toss my phone into the Pacific Ocean...."

[B]ut it's hard to imagine that a Great Offlining is really in the cards. Instead, we could be heading for a Great Rebalancing, where we reconfigure how we do our work and how we organize our time on the internet. We've grown more aware of how we rely on one another — online as well as off — and of the tools we have or could build for responding to a crisis. The biggest tech companies' accrual of power remains one of the most serious problems of my lifetime, but I no longer talk about the internet itself as if it were an external and malignant force, now that I've lived in such intimate contact with it for so long.