Twitter held talks in recent months to acquire Clubhouse, the buzzy audio-based social network, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The companies discussed a potential valuation of roughly $4 billion for Clubhouse, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. Discussions are no longer ongoing, and it's unclear why they stalled, the people added. [...] Clubhouse is barely a year old but has drawn appearances from some of the biggest names in business and Hollywood. Established social media companies have quickly gone to work on their own versions of Clubhouse, including Twitter. Facebook is exploring one, too, and Microsoft's LinkedIn and Slack have also said they're working on similar features for their networks.

Uber and Lyft said U.S. drivers on their ride-hail platforms were earning significantly more than before the pandemic as trip demand outstrips driver supply, prompting the companies to offer extra incentives. From a report: Uber on Wednesday said it would invest an additional $250 million to boost driver earnings and offer payment guarantees in an effort to incentivize new and existing drivers. Uber's Vice President of U.S. & Canada Mobility, Dennis Cinelli, in a blog post told drivers to take advantage of higher earnings before pay returns to pre-COVID-19 levels as more drivers return to the platform. Lyft on Tuesday said drivers in the company's top-25 markets were earning an average of $36 per hour compared to $20 per hour pre-pandemic. Those numbers include tips, but Lyft did not disclose the share of tips in earnings. Lyft is also offering additional incentives and promotions in select markets. Further reading: Uber and Lyft have a driver shortage problem, and it's costing them a lot of money

T-Mobile made a series of announcements Wednesday as part of its latest 'Un-carrier' initiative, including the official launch of its new home internet service, 5G phone offerings, and new investment in rural areas. From a report: T-Mobile Home Internet: After piloting a home internet service powered by its wireless network, T-Mobile Home Internet is now available to more than 30 million U.S. households. It costs $60 per month -- $10 more per month than the pilot program -- with average expected speeds of 100 Mbps for most customers and an included 4G/5G gateway device.

T-Mobile Hometown: The Bellevue, Wash.-based company will build hundreds of new retail stores and create 5,000 jobs in small U.S. towns. It is also adding "Hometown Experts" to towns where it can't build a store, and committing $25 million over five years to fund community development projects in rural areas.

5G phones: T-Mobile said it will let postpaid customers trade in any old phone in working condition for a new Samsung Galaxy A32 5G smartphone for free after 24 monthly bill credits.

A database containing the phone numbers of more than half a billion Facebook users is being freely traded online, and Facebook is trying to pin the blame on everyone but themselves. From a report: A blog post titled "The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data," published Tuesday evening, is designed to silence the growing criticism the company is facing for failing to protect the phone numbers and other personal information of 533 million users after a database containing that information was shared for free in low level hacking forums over the weekend, as first reported by Business Insider. Facebook initially dismissed the reports as irrelevant, claiming the data was leaked years ago and so the fact it had all been collected into one uber database containing one in every 15 people on the planet -- and was now being given away for free -- didn't really matter.

So instead of apologizing for failing to keep users' data secure, Facebook's product management director Mike Clark began his blog post by making a semantic point about how the data was leaked. "It is important to understand that malicious actors obtained this data not through hacking our systems but by scraping it from our platform prior to September 2019," Clark wrote. This is the identical excuse given in 2018, when it was revealed that Facebook had given Cambridge Analytica the data of 87 million users without their permission, for use in political ads. Clark goes on to explain that the people who collected this data -- sorry, "scraped" this data -- did so by using a feature designed to help new users find their friends on the platform.

Software developer Stephen Diehl on Signal's move to introduce support for cryptocurrency: Many technologists viscerally felt yesterday's announcement as a punch to the gut when we heard that the Signal messaging app was bundling an embedded cryptocurrency. This news really cut to heart of what many technologists have felt before when we as loyal users have been exploited and betrayed by corporations, but this time it felt much deeper because it introduced a conflict of interest from our fellow technologists that we truly believed were advancing a cause many of us also believed in. So many of us have spent significant time and social capital moving our friends and family away from the exploitative data siphon platforms that Facebook et al offer, and on to Signal in the hopes of breaking the cycle of commercial exploitation of our online relationships. And some of us feel used. Signal users are overwhelmingly tech savvy consumers and we're not idiots. Do they think we don't see through the thinly veiled pump and dump scheme that's proposed? It's an old scam with a new face.

Allegedly the controlling entity prints 250 million units of some artificially scarce trashcoin called MOB (coincidence?) of which the issuing organization controls 85% of the supply. This token then floats on a shady offshore cryptocurrency exchange hiding in the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas, where users can buy and exchange the token. The token is wash traded back and forth by insiders and the exchange itself to artificially pump up the price before it's dumped on users in the UK to buy to allegedly use as "payments." All of this while insiders are free to silently use information asymmetry to cash out on the influx of pumped hype-driven buys before the token crashes in value. Did I mention that the exchange that floats the token is the primary investor in the company itself, does anyone else see a major conflict of interest here? Let it be said that everything here is probably entirely legal or there simply is no precedent yet. The question everyone is asking before these projects launch now though is: should it be?

I think I speak for many technologists when I say that any bolted-on cryptocurrency monetization scheme smells like a giant pile of rubbish and feels enormously user-exploitative. We've seen this before, after all Telegram tried the same thing in an ICO that imploded when SEC shut them down, and Facebook famously tried and failed to monetize WhatsApp through their decentralized-but-not-really digital money market fund project. The whole Libra/Diem token (or whatever they're calling its remains this week) was a failed Facebook initiative exploiting the gaping regulatory loophole where if you simply call yourself a cryptocurrency platform (regardless of any technology) you can effectively function as a shadow bank and money transmistter with no license, all while performing roughly the same function as a bank but with magic monopoly money that you can print with no oversight while your customers assume full counterparty risk. If that sounds like a terrible idea, it's because it is. But we fully expect that level of evil behavior from Facebookers because that's kind of their thing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is preparing to propose stricter emissions standards for vehicles by the end of July, EPA Administrator Michael Regan said Tuesday. Regan told Bloomberg News in an interview that the new standards would be sufficient to meet "the urgency of the climate crisis." "We need to go as far as we can to meet the demands of the day," Regan added. "The science indicates we have a short window in time to reverse the path that we're on and mitigate against certain climate impacts."

An EPA spokesperson told The Hill that the timeline was dictated by an executive order from President Biden that requires the administration to review the former Trump administration's rule that relaxed the emissions limits by July. The spokesperson confirmed that the EPA is on track to meet that timeline. That rule also loosened the requirement for fuel economy standards, which dictate how much gasoline per mile that the U.S. fleet can consume, which the Biden administration could also tighten.

The executive order also requires a review this month of the decision to revoke California's ability to set its own tailpipe emissions standards, which have been stricter than the federal government's standards and adopted by a number of other states. Regan told Bloomberg that he is "a firm believer in the state's statutory authority to lead." According to the news outlet, he also did not rule out the possibility for additional regulations in the future that would essentially ban new conventional gas-powered cars.

Khari Johnson writes via VentureBeat: In April 2020, news broke that Banjo CEO Damien Patton, once the subject of profiles by business journalists, was previously convicted of crimes committed with a white supremacist group. According to OneZero's analysis of grand jury testimony and hate crime prosecution documents, Patton pled guilty to involvement in a 1990 shooting attack on a synagogue in Tennessee. Amid growing public awareness about algorithmic bias, the state of Utah halted a $20.7 million contract with Banjo, and the Utah attorney general's office opened an investigation into matters of privacy, algorithmic bias, and discrimination. But in a surprise twist, an audit and report released last week found no bias in the algorithm because there was no algorithm to assess in the first place.

"Banjo expressly represented to the Commission that Banjo does not use techniques that meet the industry definition of artificial Intelligence. Banjo indicated they had an agreement to gather data from Twitter, but there was no evidence of any Twitter data incorporated into Live Time," reads a letter Utah State Auditor John Dougall released last week. The incident, which VentureBeat previously referred to as part of a "fight for the soul of machine learning," demonstrates why government officials must evaluate claims made by companies vying for contracts and how failure to do so can cost taxpayers millions of dollars. As the incident underlines, companies selling surveillance software can make false claims about their technologies' capabilities or turn out to be charlatans or white supremacists -- constituting a public nuisance or worse. The audit result also suggests a lack of scrutiny can undermine public trust in AI and the governments that deploy them.

Starlink opened up pre-orders for its service in February for a $99 deposit, but it doesn't appear that the company plans to offer any kind of tiered plan to folks who were hoping for some options. Gizmodo reports: SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, speaking during a Satellite 2021 LEO Digital Forum panel on Tuesday, said that she doesn't "think we're going to do tiered pricing to consumers" for Starlink's satellite internet service. Shotwell added that the company was "going to try to keep it as simple as possible and transparent as possible, so right now there are no plans to tier for consumers."

That could be a make-or-break for potential subscribers who were hoping for a discounted -- or for that matter, even more premium -- version of the service than the one it's currently offering. The $99 refundable security deposit offering that rolled in February does not cover the total cost for the service. The Starlink installation kit costs $499 and includes a power supply, a wifi router, and a mountable dish antenna. Shipping and handling will add at least another $50 to that price. And then there's the service itself, which costs $99 per month.

Google research manager Samy Bengio, who oversaw the company's AI ethics group until a controversy led to the ouster of two female leaders, resigned on Tuesday to pursue other opportunities. Bloomberg reports: Bengio, who managed hundreds of researchers in the Google Brain team, announced his departure in an email to staff that was obtained by Bloomberg. His last day will be April 28. An expert in a type of AI known as machine learning, Bengio joined Google in 2007. Ousted Ethical AI co-leads Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell had reported to Bengio and considered him an ally. In February, Google reorganized the research unit, placing the remaining Ethical AI group members under Marian Croak, cutting Bengio's responsibilities.

"While I am looking forward to my next challenge, there's no doubt that leaving this wonderful team is really difficult," Bengio wrote in the email. "I learned so much with all of you, in terms of machine learning research of course, but also on how difficult yet important it is to organize a large team of researchers so as to promote long term ambitious research, exploration, rigor, diversity and inclusion," Bengio wrote in his email. He did not refer to Gebru, Mitchell or the disagreements that led to their departures. [...]

Georgia is waiving vehicle emissions checks because a cyberware attack has halted all emission testing across Georgia and seven other states. Slashdot reader McGruber shares a report from WSB-TV, an ABC-affiliated television station licensed to Atlanta: The CEO of Applus Technologies, whose software runs the system, apologized during the emergency meeting Monday. The outages are delivering a huge blow to small business owners. "All of the sudden, we were doing emissions testing just like normal and the system just kind of shut down," said James Baxter, who owns BP Car Care Tire Pros. "We haven't been able to do emissions since." Baxter said before the cyberattack, his full service automobile shop conducted more than 100 vehicle emissions tests per day. "Emissions is $25. You can imagine the revenue loss. We have employees that are out of work because of this," he said. Last week, Georgia's Department of Revenue issued a press release that omitted mention of the attack.

The Georgia Department of Revenue said its automated systems have been offline since March 31. According to the report, officials aren't sure when the system will go back online. It's also unclear if the hackers were able to access any personal information.

General Motors confirmed it's making an all-electric version of the Chevy Silverado pickup truck with around 400 miles of range on a full charge. The Verge reports: The company did not immediately say when the electric Silverado will go on sale, but GM president Mark Reuss said at an event on Tuesday that the company will also make commercial fleet-focused versions of the truck. The electric Silverado will be made at "Factory Zero," the recently rebranded Detroit-Hamtramck plant dedicated to EVs and AVs that GM is currently retooling at a cost of more than $2 billion. It's the same plant where GM will build the all-electric Hummer SUV and Hummer pickup.

The Silverado EV will undoubtedly be a flagship vehicle of the custom electric vehicle platform GM announced last year, called Ultium. Designed to be modular, the Ultium platform is what will power most of GM's forthcoming electric vehicles. The company has promised the platform will be able to provide as much as 400 miles of range in the biggest configurations, and that the trucks built on Ultium will feature 800-volt architecture that allows for really fast charging.

Google today open-sourced Lyra in beta, an audio codec that uses machine learning to produce high-quality voice calls. VentureBeat reports: The code and demo, which are available on GitHub, compress raw audio down to 3 kilobits per second for "quality that compares favorably to other codecs," Google says. Lyra's architecture is separated into two pieces, an encoder and decoder. When someone talks into their phone, the encoder captures distinctive attributes, called features, from their speech. Lyra extracts these features in 40-millisecond chunks and then compresses and sends them over the network. It's the decoder's job to convert the features back into an audio waveform that can be played out over the listener's phone.

According to Google, Lyra's architecture is similar to traditional audio codecs, which form the backbone of internet communication. But while these traditional codecs are based on digital signal processing techniques, the key advantage for Lyra comes from the ability of its decoder to reconstruct a high-quality signal. Google believes there are a number of applications Lyra might be uniquely suited to, from archiving large amounts of speech and saving battery to alleviating network congestion in emergency situations.

For the past few years, Google has been encouraging developers to write Android apps with Kotlin. The underlying OS still uses C and C++, though Google today announced Android Open Source Project (AOSP) support for Rust. From a report: This is part of Google's work to address memory safety bugs in the operating system: "We invest a great deal of effort and resources into detecting, fixing, and mitigating this class of bugs, and these efforts are effective in preventing a large number of bugs from making it into Android releases. Yet in spite of these efforts, memory safety bugs continue to be a top contributor of stability issues, and consistently represent ~70% of Android's high severity security vulnerabilities."

The company believes that memory-safe languages, like Rust, are the "most cost-effective means for preventing memory bugs" in the bootloader, fastboot, kernel, and other low-level parts of the OS. Unlike C and C++, where developers manage memory lifetime, Rust "provides memory safety guarantees by using a combination of compile-time checks to enforce object lifetime/ownership and runtime checks to ensure that memory accesses are valid." Google has been working to add this support to AOSP for the past 18 months. Performance is equivalent to the existing languages, while increasing the effectiveness of current sandboxing and reducing the overall need for it. This allows for "new features that are both safer and lighter on resources." Other improvements include data concurrency, a more expressive type system, and safer integer handling.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Dave Levy and Nikos Kanelopoulos are trying to beat the algorithm. The two DoorDash drivers -- Dashers, as the company calls them -- are trying to persuade their peers to turn down the lowest-paying deliveries so the automated system for matching jobs with drivers will respond by raising pay rates. "Every app-based on-demand company's objective is to constantly shift profits from the driver back to the company," Levy says. "Our objective is the reverse of that." Their main tool is #DeclineNow, a 40,000-person online forum that provides a view into a type of labor activism tailored for the gig economy. While there's no reliable way to quantify its impact, #DeclineNow's members say they've already increased pay for workers across the country, including in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, where Levy and Kanelopoulos live. But the effort raises difficult questions about the nature of collective action, and there are reasons to doubt whether using a company's own software systems against it is a strategy that can prove effective for a sustained period of time.

In October 2019 they launched the #DeclineNow Facebook group. They urge members to reject any delivery that doesn't pay at least $7, more than double the current floor of $3. [...] On #DeclineNow, low acceptance rates are a badge of honor. Levy rejects about 99% of the jobs he's offered, rapidly declining low-paying jobs to find enough lucrative ones to keep him busy. #DeclineNow's strategy of selectively declining orders is well-known among DoorDash workers -- and not universally accepted. Some question the strict minimum fee rule, citing regional price differences. Others find #DeclineNow to be mean-spirited and toxic, a place where people try to ridicule and bully others into going along with their plan. [...] #DeclineNow has little patience for such naysayers. Users who question the $7 minimum rule are punished with suspension from the group or, as the group's moderators like to put it, "a trip to the dungeon." In a statement, DoorDash said drivers are always free to reject orders but added that coordinated declining slows down the delivery process. The company encourages workers to accept at least 70% of deliveries offered, which awards them with "Top Dasher" status.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A year ago, Uber let its California drivers see ride destinations before picking up passengers and let them set pricing in an effort to prove that the drivers were truly independent contractors. It was part of the company's strategy to block drivers from being reclassified as employees under AB5, California's gig-work law. Now, Uber is acknowledging that the move has hurt business and is considering axing its visible destinations and price-naming policies, The Chronicle has learned. The see-saw may disappoint drivers who appreciated that extra control over their work.

Too many drivers cherry-pick lucrative rides and decline other requests, making the service unreliable, the San Francisco company said on Monday. Uber no longer has to worry about proving that drivers are independent contractors, because Prop 22 -- the November ballot measure that Uber and fellow gig companies spent $220 million to pass -- enshrines their non-employee status.

A right-to-repair bill died in the Colorado state legislature on March 25, 2021. After almost three hours of testimony from business leaders, disabled advocates, and a 9-year-old activist, legislators said there were too many unanswered questions and that the proposed law was too broad. Motherboard reports: Colorado's proposed right-to-repair law was simple and clear. At 11 pages, the legislation spent most of its word count defining terms, but the gist was simple: It would let people fix their own stuff without needing to resort to the manufacturer and force said manufacturer to support people who want to fix stuff. "For the purpose of providing services for digital electronic equipment sold or used in this state, an original equipment manufacturer shall, with fair and reasonable terms and cost, make available to an independent repair provider or owner of the manufacturer's equipment any documentation, parts, embedded software, firmware, or tools that are intended for use with the digital electronic equipment, including updates to documentation, information, or embedded software," the proposed bill said.

The Colorado House Business Affairs & Labor committee met to consider the law on March 25. Twelve legislators voted to indefinitely postpone considering the bill. Only one voted for it. "I still have a lot of questions. I still have a lot of concerns," Rep. Monica Duran (D) said at the end of the committee hearing. She voted no on the bill. It was a stunning statement given just how many people testified on behalf of the right-to-repair legislation and how few questions the committee asked them. [...] In their own comments, the legislators repeated lines Apple and other companies often use to defend their repair monopolies. Shannon Bird (D), for example, said that manufacturers have the right to dictate how a customer uses its product. She stressed that Apple can sell licenses to whatever it wants. "Apple Music is different than purchasing a CD," she said. "I have a hard time believing that we would call it Apple having a monopoly on its own product."

Many of the legislators on the committee conflated the repair market with the phone market itself. Others said that a right-to-repair bill would increase the cost of phones for everyone. Rep. Steven Woodrow (D), a sponsor of the bill, explained why this didn't make any sense. "We're not talking about the market for phones. We're talking about the market for repairs, it's a secondary market," he said. "By restricting competition in that market they're engaged in manipulation. The cost should go down. By allowing for repairs you're increasing the supply. Basic econ says that as the supply increases the price decreases."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Prices of NFTs, the digital certificates that have taken the art and collectibles world by storm this year, have plunged about 70% from their high point in February. The average price for an NFT on April 5 was about $1,256 -- down from more than $4.000 in late February, according to market research site NonFungible.com. Data from The Block, another crypto research firm, shows a similarly large decline for both prices and NFT sales as well.

[T]he sharp, sudden rise in the value of NFTs and more recent pullback is reminding some of other similar historic market bubbles, such as tulip mania in the 1600s, the dot com/tech crash of 2000 and bank stocks and housing prices in 2008. NFTs may be here to stay, but they just may not be worth the staggering sums of money that some people have shelled out for them in the past few weeks.

A data leak involving personal details of hundreds of millions of Facebook users is being reviewed by Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC). The BBC reports: The database is believed to contain a mix of Facebook profile names, phone numbers, locations and other facts about more than 530 million people. Facebook says the data is "old," from a previously-reported leak in 2019. But the Irish DPC said it will work with Facebook, to make sure that is the case.

Ireland's regulator is critical to such investigations, as Facebook's European headquarters is in Dublin, making it an important regulator for the EU. The most recent data dump appears to contain the entire compromised database from the previous leak, which Facebook said it found and fixed more than a year and a half ago. But the dataset has now been published for free in a hacking forum, making it much more widely available. It covers 533 million people in 106 countries, according to researchers who have viewed the data. That includes 11 million Facebook users in the UK and more than 30 million Americans. The DPC's deputy commissioner Graham Doyle said the recent data dump "appears to be" from the previous leak -- and that the data-scraping behind it had happened before the EU's GDPR privacy legislation was in effect.

"However, following this weekend's media reporting we are examining the matter to establish whether the dataset referred to is indeed the same as that reported in 2019," he added.

The developers behind Niagara Launcher, a popular third-party home screen replacement app, have found new evidence in the Android 12 preview documentation, which suggests that Google is adding a new device search API in Android 12 that will let third-party launchers offer a similar universal search feature. XDA Developers reports: [T]he feature will give third-party launchers "access to the centralized AppSearch index maintained by the system." It further highlights that the AppSearch index is a search library for managing structured data featuring: A fully offline on-device solution; A set of APIs for applications to index documents and retrieve them via full-text search; APIs for applications to allow the System to display their content on the system UI surfaces; and Similarly, APIs for applications to allow the System to share their content with other specified applications. This feature will essentially provide a native alternative to universal search apps like Sesame, giving users the option to search for almost anything on their device in an instant.

Last year, NetMarketShare showed that Edge's 7.59% desktop market share pushed it past Firefox in March last year. Now, StatCounter reports that Edge has been adding users over the last few months as Firefox's userbase shrinks. TechSpot reports: While the data doesn't prove Firefox users have been leaving for Edge, we see that Microsoft's browser has seen its market share jump from 7.81% to 8.03% this year, while Mozilla's product declined from 8.1% to 7.95%. That's an all-time high for Edge, according to StatCounter. Edge's gain in users hasn't secured it the second position. That honor goes to Safari, which now has a 10.11% share, though its numbers have been falling since December, so Edge could overtake it soon enough.

Like Windows 7, it seems some people are having trouble letting go of the now-discontinued Internet Explorer. It has a 1.7% share that is declining very slowly. The data is only for the desktop market. Looking at all platforms -- desktop, tablet, and mobile -- iPhones and iPads make Safari's second spot more secure with a 19.03% share, while Firefox moves ahead of Edge, albeit by just 0.23%.