An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: MIT's CSAIL department this week showcased "LaserFactory," a new project that attempts to develop robotics, drones and other machines than can be fabricated as part of a "one-stop shop." The system is comprised of a software kit and hardware platform designed to create structures and assemble circuitry and sensors for the machine.

A more fully realized version of the project will be showcased at an event in May, but the team is pulling back the curtain a bit to show what the concept looks like in practice. Here's a breakdown from CSAIL's page: "Let's say a user has aspirations to create their own drone. They'd first design their device by placing components on it from a parts library, and then draw on circuit traces, which are the copper or aluminum lines on a printed circuit board that allow electricity to flow between electronic components. They'd then finalize the drone's geometry in the 2D editor. In this case, they'd use propellers and batteries on the canvas, wire them up to make electrical connections, and draw the perimeter to define the quadcopter's shape." For more information, CSAIL has released an accompanying video showing the machine in action. A technical paper is available here.

Newly Google-owned Fitbit has introduced blood sugar tracking to its mobile app, helping you manage diabetes or any other health issue related to your glucose levels. Android Authority reports: The feature isn't available from Fitbit's current wearables, unfortunately. You'll have to either import or manually log blood sugar data in the Fitbit app yourself. When you do, though, you can set custom target ranges and check trends both throughout the day and over the long run. You can see if a change in diet is having an effect, for instance. Standard blood sugar tracking is free, although Fitbit Premium subscribers will "gradually" get the option to track levels over 30-day periods, with correlations and trends. Members will also get to share their levels through Health Coaching and the Wellness Report.

New submitter Pibroch(CiH) writes: Andrew Spinks, the creator of Terraria and lead developer for Re-Logic, has been trying to find out why his Google account (which encompasses YouTube, Gmail, and many other important services) was suddenly banned and locked with no warning.

According to Ars Technica: "Spinks says his entire Google account has been down for three weeks now, and Google has 'done nothing but given me the runaround.' You can view the quality of Google's support on Twitter for yourself. After the tweet from the official Terrarria account, YouTube support declined Re-logic's request to try to solve the problem privately, choosing instead to publicly offer irrelevant suggestions to the game developer with over 30 million customers. First, YouTube asked if Re-Logic could access its banned email account, which the developer already explained was banned. Then, YouTube suggested trying Google's account recovery system, which is only for users who have forgotten their Google password. Finally, YouTube shared instructions for how to recover a voluntarily deleted Google account, which is in no way relevant to an account ban."

Spinks has moved to cancel the release of the popular game Terraria on Google's Stadia game streaming platform.

Facebook said on Monday that it plans to remove posts with erroneous claims about vaccines from across its platform, including taking down assertions that vaccines cause autism or that it is safer for people to contract Covid-19 than to receive the vaccinations. From a report: The social network has increasingly changed its content policies over the past year as the coronavirus has surged. In October, the social network prohibited people and companies from purchasing advertising that included false or misleading information about vaccines. In December, Facebook said it would remove posts with claims that had been debunked by the World Health Organization or government agencies. Monday's move goes further by targeting unpaid posts to the site and particularly Facebook pages and groups. Instead of targeting only misinformation around Covid vaccines, the update encompasses false claims around all vaccines. Facebook said it consulted with the World Health Organization and other leading health institutes to determine a list of false or misleading claims around Covid and vaccines in general. In the past, Facebook had said it would only "downrank," or push lower down in people's News Feeds, misleading or false claims about vaccines, making it more difficult to find such groups or posts. Now posts, pages and groups containing such falsehoods will be removed from the platform entirely. "Building trust and confidence in these vaccines is critical, so we're launching the largest worldwide campaign to help public health organizations share accurate information about Covid-19 vaccines and encourage people to get vaccinated as vaccines become available to them," Kang-Xing Jin, head of health at Facebook, said in a company blog post.

Microsoft is working on adding a new security alert to the dashboard of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (formerly Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection) that will notify companies when their employees are being targeted by nation-state threat actors. From a report: The feature was added on Saturday to the Microsoft 365 roadmap website. The idea behind the feature is not new. Since 2016, Microsoft began tracking nation-state hacking groups and the attacks they orchestrate against Microsoft email accounts. If a user is targeted or compromised in one of these attacks, Microsoft sends them an email about the attack, along with basic advice they need to take to re-secure their inbox and devices. Microsoft said in 2019 that it usually notifies around 10,000 users per year of nation-state attacks. But the problem with this notification procedure is that it relies on users reading their email and taking action, which doesn't always happen. Users don't read their emails daily, or it might sometimes take hours before the user reaches the notification in crowded inboxes, a time during which attackers could use to steal sensitive documents. For organizations who are customers of Microsoft's Office 365 service, the OS maker now plans to add these notifications inside the dashboard of Microsoft Defender for Office 365, the cloud-based security platform that scans a company's Office 365 accounts for threats.

Mark Cuban is getting in on the audio and podcasting hype. From a report: Alongside co-founder Falon Fatemi, he's planning to launch Fireside, a "next-gen podcast platform" that facilitates live conversation, according to an email sent to possible creator partners seen by The Verge. The app idea is similar to the buzzy live audio startup Clubhouse, except with the ability to natively record conversations. A source close to Fireside says the app plans to launch publicly this year. Fatemi, who co-founded and sold the AI customer relations service Node, promises a platform where creators will be able to broadcast, record, and monetize conversations while using Fireside's built-in analytics tools to figure out what content performs best. The app, according to a now-expired engineer job posting, has raised a "multi-million dollar" seed round to get started. The source close to the company says creators will be offered various deals and ways to monetize, and the app won't let just anyone speak publicly. It'll be a highly curated experience.

All the content at TheDonald.win has now been replaced with a single post, explaining that the mod team had been struggling to deal with a flood of content from "a small group of extremists."

The Washington Post tells the story of the 41-year-old Army veteran who owned the domain — and ended up hosting the entire community that had been banned from Reddit's TheDonald forum.

"You might be happy being some ethno-nationalist, but I'm not," said Williams, recalling his exchanges with a handful of particularly hardcore moderators. "I don't want anything to do with this...."

Williams finally took decisive action on Jan. 21, two weeks after the Capitol assault, after waking to news that a group of other moderators had started their own site and used it to attack him. Soon, Williams used his power as the Web address owner to knock TheDonald offline. Then he defended himself publicly against his former compatriots, who had criticized him as a "rogue" and a selfish coward. Williams, who lives in Texas and has three young children, also endured death threats, online harassment and FBI questioning, he said...

The November election, followed by Trump's baseless claims of widespread electoral fraud, further intensified the viciousness on TheDonald. Williams said he'd become increasingly aware of what he believed were intentional efforts by nefarious actors to push the site's boundaries...

[E]ven as a Trump loyalist, scenes of Trump's supporters — some of whom almost certainly met and organized themselves on TheDonald — overrunning the Capitol depressed Williams, he said. The site soon featured in critical news reports, criminal investigations and articles of impeachment for Trump. The domain registrar, Epik, warned that the site would get kicked offline after a flood of complaints about hateful, threatening content. Incoming queries from the FBI, Epik and journalists writing about TheDonald's role in the Capitol attack inundated Williams, for whom moderating the site already had become something of a full-time job. Williams also knew that members of TheDonald community had indeed used the site to instigate the assault. "People definitely used the site to communicate and coordinate," he said, echoing the conclusions of independent researchers...

He now is spending his time caring for family and trying to get a new site, America.win, up and running. Unlike TheDonald, it will not offer unfettered discussion. It will be, he said, more of an aggregator of what Williams considers important content about free markets, individual liberty and other "common patriotic causes."

He has a parting message for those who might still be caught up in the roiling forums of the sort he once joined, then moderated, then killed off: Things often are not as they seem. QAnon is not real. What may look online like a magical, mystical voice of secret wisdom may just be a guy hiding behind the Internet's veil, trying to keep it all going, hoping it doesn't spin out of control.

The New York Times reports: Late on Wednesday, a moderator of the popular Reddit message board WallStreetBets posted several screenshots on the chat app Discord. They showed that other moderators had quietly started talking among themselves about landing a movie deal.

"What's our cut?" one of the moderators had asked in a Discord chat, according to the screenshots.

By Thursday morning, that quest for Hollywood riches had exploded into an ugly battle, giving a glimpse into the unruly nature of a suddenly famous Reddit community. That was when the WallStreetBets moderators who were considering the film deal began booting out other moderators who had questioned them for secretly trying to profit from the forum's success. Eventually, employees at Reddit weighed in to try to quell the unrest....

One moderator said he was in touch with Ben Mezrich, an author of the book that became the movie "The Social Network," who last week secured deals to write a book and help with a movie about the GameStop saga, according to screenshots from the forum shared with The Times. "Oof we gotta go fast i think," another moderator wrote back. "While the studios are competing...."

The conversation heated up after WallStreetBets founder Jaime Rogozinski announced that he had sold the rights to his own story to a movie studio this week. Mr. Rogozinski did not respond to requests for comment... Some began criticizing the top moderators for moves they had made to raise their profile, like creating a Twitter account and hiring a public relations representative. Some also made death threats. Late Wednesday and early Thursday, the top moderators began removing lower-ranking moderators who were asking questions....

On Thursday afternoon, Reddit stepped in to remove the top WallStreetBets moderators.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wants commuting to work replaced with VR/AR telecommuting. Zuckerberg made the suggestion on a talkshow on Clubhouse, reports The International Business Times: "One of the things that [VR] will unlock is the ability to live anywhere you want and be present in another place and really feel like you are there," the Facebook CEO said."It is going to unlock a lot of economic opportunity because people will be able to live where they want and increasingly work where they want and kind of teleport into place. I am also pretty optimistic about the impact on climate, in reducing the amount of commuting that people have to do. I think the advance in electric cars in reducing emissions is great and exciting, but I tell my team that it is easier to move bits of atoms around so we should be teleporting, not driving...."

Zuckerberg suggested a combination of both VR and AR technologies to achieve the dream of teleportation... Zuckerberg said the progress is steady at his labs on foundational technologies that will revolutionize the future of travel with the help of both VR and AR. "There is getting all the graphics and visual systems to really feel like you are immersed in the space. There's a long path of technology that needs to get done to kind of get that to be as realistic as you would want on VR," he said.
Business Insider notes the three-week-old talkshow — the same one visited by Elon Musk — is hosted by a Facebook employee and her VC husband, and is "focused on optimism... Guests on the show talk about future innovations without skepticism... Unlike traditional interviewers, Krishnan and Ramamurthy, as well as their guests, do not appear to push back against the ideas discussed, instead letting them flow freely."

CNET notes the appearance drew a skeptical response on Twitter from Ellen Pao, former CEO of social media company Reddit. "FB execs going on Clubhouse shows CH is all about tight control over messaging and avoiding hard questions and accountability."

Zuckerberg summarized his position with seven words. "We should be teleporting, not transporting, ourselves."

"The U.S. app Clubhouse erupted among Chinese social-media users over the weekend," reports Bloomberg, "with thousands joining discussions on contentious subjects...undisturbed by Beijing's censors." On the invite-only, audio-based social app where users host informal conversations, Chinese-speaking communities from around the world gathered to discuss China-Taiwan relations and the prospects of unification, and to share their knowledge and experience of Beijing's crackdown on Muslim Uighurs in the far west region of Xinjiang. Open discussion of such topics is off limits in China, where heavy government censorship is the norm...

On Friday night, a room attracted more than 4,000 people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait to share their stories and views on a range of topics including uniting the two sides. In another room on Saturday, several members of the Uighur ethnic community now living overseas shared their experience of events in Xinjiang, where China has rolled out a widely criticized re-education program that saw an estimated 1 million people or more put into camps...

"Thanks to Clubhouse I have the freedom and the audience to express my opinion," a Finland-based doctor and activist who goes by Halmurat Harri Uyghur told Bloomberg News.
Bloomberg spoke to Michael Norris, a research/strategy manager at a Shanghai-based consultancy, who said most Chinese Clubhouse users he'd spoken to are part of the tech/investment/marketing world. "Those who do engage in political discussion on Clubhouse take on a degree of personal risk," he said. "While most are aware Clubhouse records real names, phone numbers and voice, they are broadly unaware about recent cases in China involving interrogation and jail for errant posts on Twitter." Since Clubhouse so far is only accessible on Apple Inc.'s iPhone and users must have a non-Chinese Apple account, the app has only gained traction among a small cohort of educated citizens, according to Fang Kecheng, a communications professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "I don't think it can really reach the general public in China," he said. "If so, it will surely get blocked."
Reuters highlights the significance of the event: "I don't know how long this environment can last", said one user in a popular Weibo post that was liked over 65,000 times. "But I will definitely remember this moment in Internet history."

"A pro-China network of fake and impostor accounts found a global audience on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to mock the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic," reports the Associated Press, "as well as the deadly riot in Washington that left five dead, new research published Thursday found."

Slashdot reader schwit1 shared their report: Messages posted by the network, which also praised China, reached the social media feeds of government officials, including some in China and Venezuela who retweeted posts from the fake accounts to millions of their followers. The international reach marked new territory for a pro-China social media network that has been operating for years, said Ben Nimmo, head of investigations for Graphika, the social media analysis firm that monitored the activity. "For the very first time, it started to get a little bit of audience interaction," Nimmo said...

The posts appear to target social media users outside of the United States, gaining traction in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Venezuela — places where Chinese and U.S. diplomatic or financial interests have increasingly come into conflict. "The overall message is: America is doing very badly. China is doing very well," Nimmo said. "Who do you want to be like?" The network used photos of Chinese celebrities on the accounts and, in one case, hijacked the verified Twitter account of a Latin American soap opera show to post messages, according to Graphika's report... "There's this cherry-picking of narratives and events that make the U.S. look really bad," Nimmo said.

Last month, YouTube announced that it had removed more than 3,000 YouTube channels in December that were identified as part of Graphika's investigation into influence campaigns linked to China. Other Facebook and Twitter accounts identified in Graphika's report were also removed.

The more educated people are, the more likely they are to believe claims made by QAnon, according to a tracking poll by polling firm Morning Consult. From Politico: Twenty-seven percent of people with a postgraduate degree responded that QAnon claims are either very accurate or somewhat accurate. That compared to 20% of those with a bachelor's degree and 14% of those with less than a college degree. The numbers were similar in Morning Consult's October poll.
But a new survey from the same pollsters also shows fewer Americans believing in QAnon's conspiracy theories. Newsweek writes: While eight percent of Americans still believe the radical conspiracy theory is "very accurate" and a further 10 percent consider its claims "somewhat accurate," this 18 percent figure is a six-point drop from a similar poll in October... Trust in the widely debunked conspiracy listed as a domestic terrorist threat by the FBI is also dropping among Republicans. According to the survey, 24 percent of GOP voters who have heard of QAnon say its claims are at least somewhat accurate — a 14-point drop from October...
And 51% of the adults surveyed also believe social media's spread of conspiracy theories is a "major problem."

Friday the U.S. military released 400 other names it considered for Space Force's soliders (before settling on the word "guardians.")

Politico writes that the names were "crowdsourced" from the U.S. military's space workforce, and "Troops clearly had fun with their submissions, which included Space Cadet, Spacies, Anti-Gravity Gang, Homo Spaciens and Spacefolk." But the Space Force had more science fiction-inspired names it could have picked. Fleet Officer, Stormtrooper and Trekkies were both among the suggested names...

Many in the public still confuse NASA's civil space mission with the Space Force's national security focus, and a name like Ground-Based Astronauts or Apollonauts, harkening back to the space agency's moon landing program, would not help... One suggestion was Skywalker, though members of the Space Force at least in the short-term will be Earth-bound to operate the nation's GPS constellation and provide early missile warning.

Though the Space Force's workforce is expected to be highly-skilled in technical fields, its members may not have taken kindly to one suggestion: Geek...

Others perhaps took the suggestion process too literally, with one suggestion just saying "nothing because you wouldn't hear it in space anyway."
The UPI reminds readers that the U.S. Space Force "is now a full military branch that was allocated $15.4 billion in the 2021 budget and enlisted 16,000 active duty and civilian personnel who were all reassigned from the defunct Air Force Space Command."

White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed Wednesday that the Biden administration will keep Space Force... "They absolutely have the full support of the Biden administration. And we are not revisiting the decision to establish the Space Force," Psaki said Wednesday at a White House news briefing...

Many experts were not surprised that President Joe Biden will keep Space Force as its own branch of the military because it would take an act of Congress to abolish it when it now has bipartisan support as a valuable tool in future military efforts....
The UPI also got this comment from a research associate with the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The name is funny; it sounds like something that Trump just dreamed up," said Young. "But it's been talked about in national security circles for over a decade now. It's something that's just going to be important to have going forward."

And a co-director of the Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution tells them bluntly that "The Space Force is a serious attempt to deal with a serious problem, and that problem is the deployment of anti-satellite weapons by countries like Russia and China."

AlmaLinux describes itself as "an open-source, community-driven project that intends to fill the gap left by the demise of the CentOS stable release." And now AlmaLinux "has announced their beta release of their CentOS/RHEL 8 fork," writes Slashdot reader juniorkindergarten.

AlmaLinux will be getting $1 million a year in development funding from CloudLinux (the company behind CloudLinux OS, a CentOS clone with over 200,000 active server instances). Their CEO stresses that AlmaLinux "is built with CloudLinux expertise but will be owned and governed by the community. We intend to deliver this forever-free Linux distribution this quarter." And they've committed to supporting it through 2029.

Their press release touts AlmaLinux as "a 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8, with an effortless migration path from CentOS to AlmaLinux. Future RHEL releases will also be forked into a new AlmaLinux release."

From the AlmaLinux blog: We've collected community feedback and built our new beta release around what you would expect from an enterprise-level Linux distribution...inspired by the community and built by the engineers and talent behind CloudLinux. Visit https://almalinux.org to download the Beta images.

With the Beta release deployed, we'd like to ask the community to be involved and provide feedback. We aim to build a Linux distribution entirely from community contributions and feedback. During AlmaLinux Beta, we ask for assistance in testing, documentation, support and future direction for the operating system. Together, we can build a Linux distribution that fills the gap left by the now unsupported CentOS distribution.
On Wednesday they'll be hosting a live QA webinar with the AlmaLinux team. And there's also a small AlmaLinux forum on Reddit.

Slashdot reader GatorSnake shares "Another take of the implications of Section 230... One person poisoned the online personas of multiple people who had 'wronged' her, with it being nearly impossible to have the false accusations removed from the sites or from Google's search results."

The New York Times reports: Mr. Babcock, a software engineer, got off the phone and Googled himself. The results were full of posts on strange sites accusing him of being a thief, a fraudster and a pedophile. The posts listed Mr. Babcock's contact details and employer. The images were the worst: photos taken from his LinkedIn and Facebook pages that had "pedophile" written across them in red type. Someone had posted the doctored images on Pinterest, and Google's algorithms apparently liked things from Pinterest, and so the pictures were positioned at the very top of the Google results for "Guy Babcock."

Mr. Babcock, 59, was not a thief, a fraudster or a pedophile. "I remember being in complete shock," he said. "Why would someone do this? Who could it possibly be? Who would be so angry?" Then he Googled his brother's name. The results were just as bad. He tried his wife. His sister. His brother-in-law. His teenage nephew. His cousin. His aunt. They had all been hit. The men were branded as child molesters and pedophiles, the women as thieves and scammers...

Ripoff Report offered "arbitration services," which cost up to $2,000, to get rid of "substantially false" information. That sounded like extortion; Mr. Babcock wasn't about to pay to have lies removed... Ripoff Report is one of hundreds of "complaint sites" — others include She's a Homewrecker, Cheaterbot and Deadbeats Exposed — that let people anonymously expose an unreliable handyman, a cheating ex, a sexual predator. But there is no fact-checking. The sites often charge money to take down posts, even defamatory ones. And there is limited accountability. Ripoff Report, like the others, notes on its site that, thanks to Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, it isn't responsible for what its users post.

"If someone posts false information about you on the Ripoff Report, the CDA prohibits you from holding us liable for the statements which others have written. You can always sue the author if you want, but you can't sue Ripoff Report just because we provide a forum for speech...."
The Times found over 100 so-called "complaint" sites with more defamatory posts — Babcock's brother-in-law calculates there've been 12,000 made by the same person. The Times ultimately attributes the posts to a disgruntled employee fired by Mr. Babcock's father — in the year 1993 — who was now using a computer in a public library at the University of Toronto.

"Under U.S. law, a foreign court generally can't force an American website to remove content..." the Times notes, leaving few options for the victims they'd interviewed. "Victims spent years begging Google, Pinterest and WordPress to take down the slanderous posts or at least make them harder to find. The companies rarely did so, until I contacted them to request comment for this article. Pinterest then removed photos... Automattic, which owns WordPress, deleted her blogs."

But not Google Images.

A new quantum sensor can analyze the full spectrum of radio frequency and real-world signals, unleashing new potentials for soldier communications, spectrum awareness and electronic warfare. Phys.Org reports: Army researchers built the quantum sensor, which can sample the radio-frequency spectrum -- from zero frequency up to 20 GHz -- and detect AM and FM radio, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other communication signals. The Rydberg sensor uses laser beams to create highly-excited Rydberg atoms directly above a microwave circuit, to boost and hone in on the portion of the spectrum being measured. The Rydberg atoms are sensitive to the circuit's voltage, enabling the device to be used as a sensitive probe for the wide range of signals in the RF spectrum.

The Rydberg spectrum analyzer has the potential to surpass fundamental limitations of traditional electronics in sensitivity, bandwidth and frequency range. Because of this, the lab's Rydberg spectrum analyzer and other quantum sensors have the potential to unlock a new frontier of Army sensors for spectrum awareness, electronic warfare, sensing and communications -- part of the Army's modernization strategy. The peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Applied published the researchers' findings, Waveguide-coupled Rydberg spectrum analyzer from 0 to 20 GigaHerz, co-authored by Army researchers Drs. David Meyer, Paul Kunz, and Kevin Cox.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Homebrew now supports Apple Silicon natively, albeit not with every package. The volunteer Homebrew team made the announcement on the Homebrew blog alongside today's release. While the native support is not yet comprehensive, it bridges the gap significantly, and users can still run Terminal via Rosetta 2 to do what they can't yet while running natively on Apple Silicon. The Homebrew blog post says "we welcome your help" in providing bottles for all packages moving forward.

Here's the full bullet point on Apple Silicon in the Homebrew 3.0.0 release notes: "Apple Silicon is now officially supported for installations in /opt/homebrew. formulae.brew.sh formula pages indicate for which platforms bottles (binary packages) are provided and therefore whether they are supported by Homebrew. Homebrew doesn't (yet) provide bottles for all packages on Apple Silicon that we do on Intel x86_64 but we welcome your help in doing so. Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon still provides support for Intel x86_64 in /usr/local."

Nissan has unveiled a concept vehicle that features a retractable office for remote workers and digital nomads. CNN reports: Dubbed Office Pod Concept, the mobile workspace comes with a modified Cosm chair by US furniture-maker Herman Miller, and desk space big enough for a large computer monitor. Those seeking privacy can set up inside the pod with the doors closed. Ambient lighting gives the office a futuristic feel, while electric shades help deter prying eyes.

But, with the tap of an app, the pod extends out the back in a matter of seconds (as shown in a promotional video), and the trunk door becomes a cover for your al-fresco office. The vehicle's rooftop also doubles up as a space to relax under a parasol. The concept vehicle is a modified version of Nissan's NV350 Caravan, which hit the market in 2012 and currently retails in Japan from 2.3 million to 4 million yen ($22,000 to $38,000). While Nissan has no plans to sell the design on the mass market, the carmaker said it is considering making some of the individual modified parts available to customers.

Global sales of cellular-enabled mobile PCs reached more than 10 million units for the first time in 2020 as home workers sought improved connectivity in response to the closure of office facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research firm Strategy Analytics: According to the latest analysis from Strategy Analytics' Connected Computing Devices program, global shipments increased by 70% to 10.1 million, the highest ever annual total. North America accounted for nearly half of 3G-, 4G- and 5G-enabled PC shipments, while Europe and Asia-Pacific accounted for 45%. The report, Notebook PC Cellular Connectivity Shipment and Installed Base Forecast, estimates that more than 26 million cellular-enabled PCs are now in use worldwide, an increase of 25% in twelve months.

While 4G/LTE standards dominated the market in 2020, accounting for 97% of cellular-enabled PC shipments, 5G notebook launches in 2021 are showing a greater diversity in price points, form factors, and vendor participation, and Strategy Analytics expects 5G to build its share towards 69% by 2025. The report indicates that this growth will depend on improvements in customer education by vendors, carriers and retailers.

Myanmar's new military government has ordered local telecom operators, internet gateways, and other internet service providers to block Twitter and Instagram in the South Asian country days after imposing a similar blackout on Facebook to ensure "stability" in the Southeast Asian nation. From a report: Norwegian telecom giant Telenor, which is one of the largest telecos in Myanmar, said the government has ordered ISPs to block Twitter and Instagram "until further notice." The directive has "legal basis in Myanmar's telecommunications law," Telenor said, but it is challenging the "necessity and proportionality of the directive in its response to Myanmar Ministry of Transport and Communications, and highlighted the directive's contradiction with international human rights law."

[...] In a statement, a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch: "We're deeply concerned about the order to block Internet services in Myanmar. It undermines the public conversation and the rights of people to make their voices heard. The Open Internet is increasingly under threat around the world. We will continue to advocate to end destructive government-led shutdowns. We understand some people across the Asia-Pacific region may also be having trouble accessing Twitter, and we're working to fix it."