An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Global sales of electric cars accelerated fast in 2020, rising by 43% to more than 3 million, despite overall car sales slumping by a fifth during the coronavirus pandemic. Tesla was the brand selling the most electric cars, delivering almost 500,000, followed by Volkswagen. Sales of electric cars more than doubled in Europe, pushing the region past China as the world's biggest market for them, according to data published on Tuesday by EV-volumes.com, a Sweden-based consultancy.

Sales of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) made up 4.2% of the global car market, up from 2.5% in 2019. The rising sales are being driven by government policies to reduce carbon emissions, but a key factor is that electric cars are simply a better technology, said Viktor Irle, sales and marketing analyst at EV-volumes.com. Sales of electric cars did fall below 2019's levels from March to June, at the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns, but recovered strongly after that and by December were at double the level in December 2019.

There are about 150 new BEV and PHEV models expected on the market in 2021. This indicates that 2021 will see continued growth, said Irle, who estimates sales of about 4.6m electric cars by the end of the year. The EV-volumes.com data showed the five highest national sales were in China (1.3m), Germany (0.4m), the US (0.3m), France and the UK (both 0.2m). However, growth in the US was only 4% in 2020, due to few new models being available.

In an interview with The Verge's Decoder podcast, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, says he's "not yet happy" with the platform's TikTok competitor Reels. The Verge reports: "I'm not yet happy with it," he says. "We're growing both in terms of how much people are sharing and how much people are consuming, but we have a long way to go. And we have to be honest that TikTok is ahead." He went on to say the team is mostly focused on "table stakes" right now, and not honed in on how to differentiate itself. Specifically, he calls out TikTok's innovative creative tools, like filters and effects that spur new video meme formats as something Instagram isn't making on its own yet but needs to eventually do.

"I think we have to get better at building more powerful and creative tools that aren't necessarily a meme or a sort of moment in a package, but give people who are more creative than us and make content for a living the ability to make something that's going to pop," he says. Instagram is also seeing a conflict between its many different video formats. Mosseri says "most people" likely don't know the difference between videos posted to Instagram and IGTV, the app's format for longer videos that's existed since 2018. "That's probably too nuanced a distinction to resonate with anybody, so we're looking about how we can -- not just with IGTV, but across all of Instagram -- simplify and consolidate ideas, because last year we placed a lot of new bets," he says. "I think this year we have to go back to our focus on simplicity and craft."

Los Angeles-based social media network MeWe, touted to be the ad-free future of social networking, is currently the No. 1 downloaded social app in the Google Play Store, and the No. 3 downloaded app out of all apps in the store. The privacy-first "anti-Facebook" platform added 2.5 million new members in the last week. ZDNet reports: Since launching in 2016, it surged to nine million users in October 2020, doubling its membership during each of the last three years. The platform is currently sitting at 15.5 million members -- 50% of whom are outside of North America. MeWe is now translated into 20 languages and is currently the No. 1 social app in Hong Kong. The company says that its membership spikes frequently -- as people worldwide seek a social network that respects them as customers to be delighted, not with "data to share, target, or sell."

MeWe claims to be the new mainstream social network with the features people love and no ads, no targeting, and no newsfeed manipulation. MeWe is the most downloaded social app and No. 3 in the list of most downloaded apps as of Jan. 15, 2021. It was knocked off the top slot by WhatsApp alternatives Signal and Telegram, which are benefitting from the brouhaha over WhatsApp's data privacy changes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Just after 1 A.M. on January 12, a prolific Wikiepdian edited the entry for the album Death Breathing. The small edit was the addition of a hyperlink and it was the billionth edit done to the English language Wikipedia. "The article on the album Death Breathing was amended by Wikipedian Ser Amantio di Nicolao, one of over 3.9 million edits done by the Wikipedian with the highest edit count other than bots," said a note in Wikimedia-l, a listserv that documents various Wikimedia matters. Wikipedia relies on volunteers who constantly assess, edit, and argue over the specifics of the information in its vast online encyclopedia. Every edit is catalogued, tagged, and assigned a unique URL when it's pushed through. The Death Breathing edit secured the billionth. "Pedants may be aware that this is only the thousand million since the move to MediaWiki software and not all of the hundreds of thousands of previous edits have since been reloaded," the notice said. "So if we could work out the true counts since edit one it probably came one, maybe two days earlier."

"I don't have the exact numbers but there were definitely many edits made that aren't recorded in the current system," Wikiepdian "The Cunctator" told Motherboard in an email. "Many of the UseModWiki edits were reintegrated with the history but there is a lacuna that covers my peak of editing in about August 2001 to February 2002 (I was the primary editor of September 11 related content). I don't know if the edit count reflects deleted edits or edits on deleted pages. One point that isn't made enough when discussing Wikipedia is how much of Google's wealth is built on its abuse of Wikipedia copyleft. But Death Breathing got the edit with the thousand million counter."

Cybersecurity firm FireEye has released today a report detailing the techniques used by the SolarWinds hackers inside the networks of companies they breached. From a report: Together with the report, FireEye researchers have also released a free tool on GitHub named Azure AD Investigator that they say can help companies determine if the SolarWinds hackers (also known as UNC2452) used any of these techniques inside their networks. Today's FireEye report comes as the security firm has spearheaded investigations into the SolarWinds supply chain compromise, together with Microsoft and CrowdStrike. The SolarWinds hack came to light on December 13, 2020, when FireEye and Microsoft confirmed that a threat actor broke into the network of IT software provider SolarWinds and poisoned updates for the Orion app with malware.

With the release of Brave 1.19 today, Brave has become the first major browser maker to support IPFS, a peer-to-peer protocol meant for accessing decentralized or censored content. From a report: Released in 2015, IPFS stands for InterPlanetary File System. It is a classic peer-to-peer protocol similar to BitTorrent and designed to work as a decentralized storage system. IPFS allows users to host content distributed across hundreds or thousands of systems, which can be public IPFS gateways or private IPFS nodes. Users who want to access any of this content must enter an URL in the form of ipfs://{content_hash_ID}. Under normal circumstances, users would download this content from the nearest nodes or gateways rather than a central server. However, this only works if users have installed an IPFS desktop app or a browser extension.

Brave says that with version 1.19, users will be able to access URLs that start with ipfs://, directly from the browser, with no extension needed, and that Brave will natively support ipfs:// links going forward. Since some major websites like Wikipedia have IPFS versions, users in oppressive countries can now use Brave's new IPFS support to go around national firewalls and access content that might be blocked inside their country for political reasons and is available via IPFS.

Facebook has no plan in place to lift the indefinite suspension on President Donald Trump's Facebook account following his departure from the White House on Wednesday, NBC News reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the company's plans said. From the report: The ban on Trump's account remains indefinite, the sources said, and there is no current plan in place to lift it. The social media giant said on Jan. 7 that it would "indefinitely" ban the president's account due to his role in inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol a day earlier. The company said the ban would last at least through the end of his term. Facebook's suspension stopped short of the permanent ban that other social media companies like Twitter and Snapchat lated placed on Trump's accounts.
UPDATE: CNBC reported two days later that Facebook had announced "it will refer its decision to indefinitely suspend the account of former President Donald Trump to its newly instituted Oversight Board," and it would be that Board which would ultimately make the final determination.

In a blog post, Facebook still that "we hope, given the clear justification for our actions on January 7, that it will uphold the choices we made..."

The data regulator for the German state of Lower Saxony has fined a local laptop retailer a whopping $12.6 million for keeping its employees under constant video surveillance at all times for the past two years without a legal basis. From a report: The penalty represents one of the largest fines imposed under the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) not only in Germany but across Europe as well. The recipient is notebooksbilliger.de AG (doing business as NBB), an online e-commerce portal and retail chain dedicated to selling laptops and other IT supplies. The State Commissioner for Data Protection (LfD) for the state of Lower Saxony said that the company installed two years ago a video monitoring system inside its warehouses, salesrooms, and common workspaces for the purpose of preventing and investigating thefts and tracking product movements. Officials said the video surveillance system was active at all times, and recordings were saved for as much as 60 days in the company's database.

Qualcomm has announced a new mobile phone processor: the Qualcomm Snapdragon 870, a successor to last year's Snapdragon 865 and 865 Plus models. To be clear, the 870 isn't a new next-gen design -- that title goes to the Snapdragon 888, which makes far more substantial improvements in performance and new features. From a report: The 870, on the other hand, is virtually identical to the 865 and 865 Plus, with the same design right down to the Kryo 585 CPU and Adreno 650 GPU cores. The 870 is clocked at 3.2GHz, however, making it about 10 percent faster than the original 865's 2.84GHz and about 3 percent faster than the 865 Plus (which offered 3.1GHz speeds). Think of it almost like a Snapdragon 865 Plus-plus. Qualcomm says that the reason for the new chip is in response to manufacturer and market demands. The 870 is designed for companies that want to offer a top-tier processor but don't need the absolute best features that the flagship Snapdragon 888 offers and the higher price tag that it demands. Instead, the company says that it expects that Snapdragon 870 phones should hit a sub-$800 price tag (although, confusingly, we've already seen Snapdragon 888 phones like the $799 Galaxy S21 start to bleed into that range).

Microsoft is joining GM, Honda and others in a $2 billion investment round in Cruise to help commercialize its self-driving cars. The deal bumps Cruise's valuation to $30 billion, from $19 billion last year. From a report: The investment is part of a broader commitment by GM and Cruise to use Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing platform across their companies, especially as they roll out increasingly complex vehicles that rely on digital technologies. Self-driving vehicles devour massive amounts of data to operate safely. They collect and process data from cameras, radar and lidar sensors for perception, location mapping and decision-making. Commercialization requires even more data to optimize routes and to create consumer-facing apps and websites. "Microsoft, as the gold standard in the trustworthy democratization of technology, will be a force multiplier for us as we commercialize our fleet of self-driving, all-electric, shared vehicles," said Cruise CEO Dan Ammann.

Ankara has imposed advertising bans on Twitter, Periscope and Pinterest after they failed to appoint local representatives in Turkey under a new social media law, according to decisions published on Tuesday. From a report: Under the law, which critics say stifles dissent, social media companies that do not appoint such representatives are liable for a series of penalties, including the latest move by the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK). The law allows authorities to remove content from platforms, rather than blocking access as they did in the past. It has caused concern as people turn more to online platforms after Ankara tightened its grip on mainstream media. The latest decisions in the country's Official Gazette said the advertising bans went into effect from Tuesday. Twitter, its live-streaming app Periscope, and image sharing app Pinterest were not immediately available to comment.

Wine 6.0 has been released today and contains over 8,300 changes, according to its full release notes. Windows Central reports: The new release of version 6.0 has thousands of changes, but Wine's website highlights some of the biggest improvements: Core modules in PE format; Vulkan backend for WineD3D; DirectShow and Media Foundation support; and Text console redesign. The full release notes for Wine 6.0 explain that the core DLLs, which include NTDLL, KERNEL32, GDI32, and USER32 are now built in the Portable Executable (PE) format. As a result, people should see improvements for certain copy protection schemes.

The update also includes a new mechanism to associate a Unix library with the PE module. This change makes it so systems can call Unix libraries from PE when trying to perform a function that can't be handled by Win32 APIs. Wine 6.0 also includes an experimental Vulkan rendered that translates Direct3D shaders to SPIR-V shaders. In another change related to Direct3D, the Direct3D graphics card database now recognizes more graphics cards and includes updated driver versions.

Charlotte Web shares a report from CNN: Apple, along with Amazon and Google, effectively kicked Parler off the internet in the wake of the January 6 US Capitol siege. Despite criticism that Big Tech wields too much power over speech, Apple CEO Tim Cook defended his decision. "We looked at the incitement to violence that was on there," Apple CEO Tim Cook said on Sunday. "We don't consider that free speech and incitement to violence has an intersection..."

Cook disputed that it's Apple's job to host every service, regardless of its content. He noted that Apple has terms of service for the 2 million apps its hosts, and apps that refuse to play by the rules aren't allowed to access Apple's massive audience. "We obviously don't control what's on the internet, but we've never viewed that our platform should be a simple replication of what's on the internet," Cook said.Apple will welcome back Parler -- provided Parler finds a new cloud provider to host the social network -- if the app effectively moderates users' speech, said the Apple CEO. "We've only suspended them," Cook noted. "If they get their moderation together they would be back on there." With regard to the Capitol siege, Cook said: "It was one of the saddest moments of my life -- seeing an attack on our Capitol and an attack on our democracy. I felt like I was in some sort of alternate reality, to be honest with you. This could not be happening."

According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple's upcoming iPhone 13 could feature vapor chamber cooling, as well as an in-screen fingerprint sensor. It may also completely ditch the Lightning port in favor of wireless charging. Apple Insider reports: Kuo believes Apple is highly likely to incorporate vapor chamber tech into an upcoming iPhone model, though it is not clear if the system will be ready in time for 2021. Generally speaking, vapor chamber (VC) technology involves evaporation of a liquid (typically water) within a specialized heat pipe or heat retention structure that snakes its way through a device chassis. Heat from processors and other high load electronic components causes the liquid to evaporate into a vapor that spreads thermal energy through the evaporation chamber as it travels to areas of lower pressure. Fins or other condenser bodies remove heat from the vapor, which returns to a liquid state and is carried back to areas of high pressure through capillary action.

"The iPhone's critical reason not to adopt VC is because of its reliability test results that cannot meet Apple's high requirements," Kuo writes. "Still, we are optimistic about the VC reliability improvement schedule and expect that at least high-end iPhone models would be equipped with VC in the near future." Kuo believes iPhone will need VC to keep up with rapid adoption of 5G and ever-increasing CPU thermal loads. In a separate report, Bloomberg reports that Apple is testing another key feature for its 2021 iPhone(s): an in-screen fingerprint reader. "This would add a new method for users to unlock their iPhone, going beyond a passcode and Face ID facial recognition," reports Bloomberg. "Apple won't remove its facial recognition scanner though as it's still useful for augmented reality and camera features."

The report also mentions that Apple is discussing removing the Lightning port on at least some of the 2021 iPhone models, instead relying entirely on wireless charging or USB-C.

Right-wing social media platform Parler, which has been offline since Amazon Web Services dropped it like a hot potato last week, has reappeared on the Web with a promise to return as a fully functional service "soon." Ars Technica reports: Although the platform's Android and iOS apps are still defunct, this weekend its URL once again began to resolve to an actual website, instead of an error notice. The site at the moment consists solely of the homepage, which has a message from company CEO John Matze. "Now seems like the right time to remind you all -- both lovers and haters -- why we started this platform," the message reads. "We believe privacy is paramount and free speech essential, especially on social media. Our aim has always been to provide a nonpartisan public square where individuals can enjoy and exercise their rights to both. We will resolve any challenge before us and plan to welcome all of you back soon. We will not let civil discourse perish!"

Parler, however, was deplatformed in the first place explicitly because the content it allowed to flourish was anything but "civil," and as multiple reports have made clear, the service backend was designed with basically no thought given to privacy. Meanwhile, the path Parler appears to be taking to rejoin the Internet is a shady one paved for it by other explicitly extremist, white nationalist platforms that lost access to more mainstream services after being tied to terrorism. [...] Parler has apparently secured hosting from Epik to bring itself back online. Epik is best known for helping far-right extremist platform Gab to come back online a short time after a Gab user committed a mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; it has also provided services to other white nationalist, anti-Semitic, and neo-Nazi platforms including 8chan (now known as 8kun) and The Daily Stormer. Multiple security researchers have also pointed out that Parler appears to have secured the services of DDos-Guard, a cloud services company based in Russia. UPDATE: According to Krebs On Security, "DDoS-Guard is about to be relieved of more than two-thirds of the Internet address space the company leases to clients -- including the Internet addresses currently occupied by Parler."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The idea for Capsule started with a tweet about reinventing social media. A day later cryptography researcher, Nadim Kobeissi -- best known for authoring the open-source E2E-encrypted desktop chat app Cryptocat (now discontinued) -- had pulled in a pre-seed investment of $100,000 for his lightweight mesh-networked microservices concept, with support coming from angel investor and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, William J. Pulte and Wamda Capital.

The nascent startup has a post-money valuation on paper of $10 million, according to Kobeissi, who is working on the prototype -- hoping to launch an MVP of Capsule in March (as a web app), after which he intends to raise a seed round (targeting $1 million-$1.5 million) to build out a team and start developing mobile apps. For now there's nothing to see beyond Capsule's landing page and a pitch deck (which he shared with TechCrunch for review). But Kobeissi says he was startled by the level of interest in the concept.

"I posted that tweet and the expectation that I had was that basically 60 people max would retweet it and then maybe I'll set up a Kickstarter," he tells us. Instead the tweet "just completely exploded" and he found himself raising $100,000 "in a single day" -- with $50,000 paid in there and then. "I'm not a startup guy. I've been running a business based on consulting and based on academic R&D services," he continues. "But by the end of the day -- last Sunday, eight days ago -- I was running a Delaware corporation valued at $10 million with $100,000 in pre-seed funding, which is insane. Completely insane."

Smartwatches and other wearable devices that continuously measure users' heart rates, skin temperature and other physiological markers can help spot coronavirus infections days before an individual is diagnosed. From a report: Devices like the Apple Watch, Garmin and Fitbit watches can predict whether an individual is positive for COVID-19 even before they are symptomatic or the virus is detectable by tests, according to studies from leading medical and academic institutions, including Mount Sinai Health System in New York and Stanford University in California. Experts say wearable technology could play a vital role in stemming the pandemic and other communicable diseases. Researchers at Mount Sinai found that the Apple Watch can detect subtle changes in an individual's heartbeat, which can signal that an individual has the coronavirus, up to seven days before they feel sick or infection is detected through testing. "Our goal was to use tools to identify infections at time of infection or before people knew they were sick," said Rob Hirten, assistant professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and author of the Warrior Watch study. Specifically, the study analyzed a metric called heart rate variability -- the variation in time between each heartbeat -- which is also a measure of how well a person's immune system is working.

Apple has plugged a hole that allowed users to sideload iOS and iPad applications to M1 Macs that were never intended to run on desktop. The server-side change ensures that only applications that app developers have flagged as optimized for Mac will run. From a report: Late last year, Apple launched its first Macs running on its own ARM-based custom CPU called the M1, as opposed to the Intel chips that have been used in Macs for several years. These new machines included the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro, the MacBook Air, and the low-end Mac mini. Since those machines now share an architecture with iPhones and iPads, which also have closely related ARM-based chips, it became possible to run iOS and iPadOS apps natively on Macs that were equipped with the M1 chip. Apple supported this by listing iPhone and iPad apps that passed an automated test on the Mac App Store, provided developers did not opt out of having the app listed. However, many developers did opt out for any number of reasons: because they did not feel the app provided a good user experience on laptops or desktops; because they offer preferred alternative ways to access services or content on Macs; because they don't have the time to support an additional platform; or any number of other reasons.

Facebook was going to compete with Google for some advertising sales but backed away from the plan after the companies cut a preferential deal, according to court documents. From a report: In 2017, Facebook said it was testing a new way of selling online advertising that would threaten Google's control of the digital ad market. But less than two years later, Facebook did an about-face and said it was joining an alliance of companies backing a similar effort by Google. Facebook never said why it pulled back from its project, but evidence presented in an antitrust lawsuit filed by 10 state attorneys general last month indicates that Google had extended to Facebook, its closest rival for digital advertising dollars, a sweetheart deal to be a partner. Details of the agreement, based on documents the Texas attorney general's office said it had uncovered as part of the multistate suit, were redacted in the complaint filed in federal court in Texas last month. But they were not hidden in a draft version of the complaint reviewed by The New York Times. Executives at six of the more than 20 partners in the alliance told The Times that their agreements with Google did not include many of the same generous terms that Facebook received and that the search giant had handed Facebook a significant advantage over the rest of them.

The executives, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their business relationships with Google, also said they had not known that Google had afforded such advantages to Facebook. The clear disparity in how their companies were treated by Google when compared to Facebook has not been previously reported. The disclosure of the deal between the tech giants has renewed concerns about how the biggest technology companies band together to close off competition. The deals are often consequential, defining the winners and losers in various markets for technology services and products. They are agreed upon in private with the crucial deal terms hidden through confidentiality clauses. Google and Facebook said that such deals were common in the digital advertising industry and that they were not thwarting competition. Julie Tarallo McAlister, a Google spokeswoman, said the complaint "misrepresents this agreement, as it does many other aspects of our ad tech business." She added that Facebook is one of many companies that participate in the Google-led program and that Facebook is a partner in similar alliances with other companies.

Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga on Monday raised the prospect of sanctioning social media firms over what she called "systematic abuses" of free speech. From a report: The minister said she would meet the Hungarian competition watchdog this week to discuss possible penalties for what she described as unfair commercial practices as well as convening a meeting of the country's digital freedom committee. In a growing wave of criticism, some government officials are complaining about what they have described as efforts by social media companies, including Facebook, to limit conservative views on their platforms. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has turned Hungary's public media into an obedient mouthpiece and allies control large parts of the private media, allowing his agenda to be aired prominently. But the right-wing premier faces the toughest challenge to his decade-long rule at a parliamentary election next year, as he tackles a protracted recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and a united opposition, with polls showing a neck-and-neck race.