Four years after announcing a 9% tax on streaming entertainment services, the city has collected $2 million in sales tax from Sony and two online ticketing services, making it the first major city to collect such a tax successfully. CBS News reports: The city collected $1.2 million from Sony in January, on services including PlayStation Video live events and purchases of music and video, according to Bloomberg. It also collected nearly $800,000 from Eventbrite and $70,000 from Fandango, the outlet said. The levy has been dubbed the "Netflix tax" because it targets streaming video services in addition to gaming and other digital entertainment.

While Chicago seems to be the first city to successfully tax streaming services, it probably won't be the last. Rhode Island's governor proposed a budget this year that includes new sales taxes on digital videos, books and music. Pennsylvania enacted a similar tax in 2016 and is set to start enforcing it this summer. Chicago's expanded digital entertainment and services tax could raise up to $12 million per year, according to estimates issued at the time it passed in 2015. A lawsuit filed by a libertarian group on behalf of Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime customers is currently in the appeal stage.

Microsoft today announced the launch of a preview or canary build of its Microsoft Edge browser designed for the macOS operating system. Microsoft Edge for macOS can be installed from the Microsoft Edge Insider site on compatible Macs. MacRumors reports: Microsoft says that the initial build available today includes several interface changes to meld the Microsoft design language with the design language of macOS: "Examples of this include a number of tweaks to match macOS conventions for fonts, menus, keyboard shortcuts, title casing, and other areas. You will continue to see the look and feel of the browser evolve in future releases as we continue to experiment, iterate and listen to customer feedback. We encourage you to share your feedback with us using the 'Send feedback' smiley."

Exclusive user experiences for macOS are also coming in the future, such as "useful and contextual actions" for the Touch Bar on Touch Bar-compatible Macs. Trackpad gestures will also be supported. To use the new macOS version of Microsoft Edge, a Mac running macOS 10.12 or later is required.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: A UN chief is concerned that a Cold War-era nuclear 'coffin' could be leaking radioactive material into the Pacific. According to Phys.org, the structure in question is on Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands -- where the U.S. conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests between 1946 and 1958. The tests included the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb, which was reportedly about 1,000 times bigger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In the late 70s, waste from those tests was dumped into a crater and capped with a concrete dome 18 inches thick. That was intended to be a temporary solution, so the bottom of the crater was never lined.

Now, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine fear nuclear waste could be leaking from the pit. They're also concerned about cracks in the concrete, which they worry could break apart if hit by a tropical cyclone. Guterres says the Pacific's nuclear history needs to be addressed. Further reading: The Washington Post

Taking a page from the Marvel playbook, Sony Interactive Entertainment is reportedly launching its own studio to take its video games to the movie and TV screen. From a report: PlayStation Productions is a new division of Sony Interactive Entertainment with the task of adapting PlayStation games into films and TV shows, The Hollywood Reporter reported Monday. Heading up the new studio will be Asad Qizilbash, who was vice president of marketing for Sony Interactive Entertainment of America, according to the report. Overseeing the studio will be Shawn Layden, chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios, The Hollywood Reporter said. [...] The new PlayStation Productions will reportedly work with Sony Pictures for distribution of the new batch of movies and TV shows.

Uneasiness and pessimism abound among the majority of the world's population. From a report: Deloitte has released its Global Millennial Survey of 13,416 Millennials (born between 1983 and 1994) spread across 42 countries and 3,009 Gen Z respondents (born between 1995 and 2002) from 10 countries. The firm has conducted the survey for the past eight years. The percentage of respondents who think that businesses are making a positive impact dropped six points from 61% in 2018 to 55%. "I would say that for businesses, the most important takeaway is the continuously diminishing trust of Millennials and Gen Zs," says Deloitte Global Chief Talent Officer Michele Parmelee.

While the two generations have strikingly similar views of the world, Parmelee said survey data shows that their points of view differ in a few significant areas, such as life priorities and their perception of society and work. Generally, only about half of both groups aspire to purchase a home, and even fewer desire to start a family. "Instead, travel and seeing the world was at the top of the list (57%) of aspirations," the report said. Only 52% of the Millennials surveyed responded that earning a high salary was a top priority while 56% of their Gen Z peers did so. And 39% of the Millennials saw starting a family as very important, while 45% of the younger cohort agreed.

New submitter Nico Schottelius writes: It's 2019 -- who has switched to systemd, who hasn't and what can I use if I don't like systemd? Here's the answer in short.From the blog post: If you are reading this post you're very much likely not a fan of systemd already. So we won't preach on why systemd is bad, but today we'll focus more on what are the alternatives out there. Our approach is obviously not for settling for less but for changing things for the better. We have started the world after systemd project some time ago and the search isn't over. So what are the non-systemd distros out there? The author makes a case for why you should consider the suggested distros, but here's the list: Devuan, Alpine Linux, Artixlinux, Void, Slackware, Gentoo, and GNU GUIX.

A massive database containing contact information of millions of Instagram influencers, celebrities and brand accounts has been found online. From a report: The database, hosted by Amazon Web Services, was left exposed and without a password allowing anyone to look inside. At the time of writing, the database had over 49 million records -- but was growing by the hour. From a brief review of the data, each record contained public data scraped from influencer Instagram accounts, including their bio, profile picture, the number of followers they have, if they're verified and their location by city and country, but also contained their private contact information, such as the Instagram account owner's email address and phone number.

Security researcher Anurag Sen discovered the database and alerted TechCrunch in an effort to find the owner and get the database secured. We traced the database back to Mumbai-based social media marketing firm Chtrbox, which pays influencers to post sponsored content on their accounts. Each record in the database contained a record that calculated the worth of each account, based off the number of followers, engagement, reach, likes and shares they had. This was used as a metric to determine how much the company could pay an Instagram celebrity or influencer to post an ad.

A confidential Facebook document reviewed by The Intercept shows that Facebook courts carriers, along with phone makers -- some 100 different companies in 50 countries -- by offering the use of even more surveillance data, pulled straight from your smartphone by Facebook itself. From the report: Offered to select Facebook partners, the data includes not just technical information about Facebook members' devices and use of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, but also their past locations, interests, and even their social groups. This data is sourced not just from the company's main iOS and Android apps, but from Instagram and Messenger as well. The data has been used by Facebook partners to assess their standing against competitors, including customers lost to and won from them, but also for more controversial uses like racially targeted ads.

Some experts are particularly alarmed that Facebook has marketed the use of the information -- and appears to have helped directly facilitate its use, along with other Facebook data -- for the purpose of screening customers on the basis of likely creditworthiness. Such use could potentially run afoul of federal law, which tightly governs credit assessments. Facebook said it does not provide creditworthiness services and that the data it provides to cellphone carriers and makers does not go beyond what it was already collecting for other uses.

For over a century, the kilogram was defined by a metal cylinder in a French vault. Now, this key unit of mass is defined using the Planck constant, a fundamental figure in physics. From a report: On Monday -- World Metrology Day -- Le Grand K lost its special status as the international prototype kilogram (IPK) and it will no longer represent this base unit of mass to the world. From now on, the kilogram -- along with the ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela -- will be defined by fundamental physical and atomic properties instead of tangible human-made objects. "The Metric System was envisioned to be 'for all people for all time,'" said Barry Inglis, president of the International Committee for Weights and Measures, in a statement. "From its outset it sought to ensure long-term stability by defining the units in terms of an internationally agreed 'constants of nature' instead of an arbitrary reference."

To that end, the "arbitrary" Le Grand K has been deposed by the Planck constant, a fundamental quantity related to the energy of photons, the elementary particles that make up light. Defined as 6.626 x 10-34 joule-seconds, the constant fixes the kilogram to the speed of light and a temporal unit of measurement -- the second. The kilogram is now equal to the weight of 1.4755214 x 1040 photons with frequencies matching a cesium atomic clock. It may sound like a less relatable system of measurement, but what the change loses in familiarity it makes up for in precision. Even though Le Grand K is one of the most carefully protected objects on the planet, it is not immune from physical interactions that can alter its weight.

When Sony unveiled a cloud gaming pact with archrival Microsoft, it surprised the industry. From a report: Perhaps no one was more shocked than employees of Sony's PlayStation division, who have spent almost two decades fighting the U.S. software giant in the $38 billion video game console market. Last week, the companies announced a strategic partnership to co-develop game streaming technology and host some of PlayStation's online services on the Redmond-based company's Azure cloud platform. It comes after PlayStation spent seven years developing its own cloud gaming offering, with limited success. Negotiations with Microsoft began last year and were handled directly by Sony's senior management in Tokyo, largely without the involvement of the PlayStation unit, according to people familiar with the matter. Staff at the gaming division were caught off-guard by the news. Managers had to calm workers and assure them that plans for the company's next-generation console weren't affected, said the people, asking not to be identified discussing private matters.

Ford is cutting 7,000 white-collar jobs, or about 10% of its salaried staff worldwide, as part of a cost-cutting effort it says will save the company about $600 million a year. From a report: Ford says workers will begin to be notified of cuts starting Tuesday, and the terminations will be completed by the end of August. About 2,400 of the jobs cuts are in North America, and 1,500 of the positions will be eliminated through a voluntary buyout offer. The move is an effort to cut bureaucracy within the company and flatten the management structure in addition to its desire to cut costs, according to a letter CEO Jim Hackett sent to employees Monday morning. Ford's layoffs are similar to white-collar job cuts rival General Motors announced in November, but GM's cuts were deeper. GM eliminated about 8,000 non-union jobs, or 15% of its salaried and contract workers. It also closed five North American factories as part of that announcement.

T-Mobile and Sprint submitted a new plan for their proposed $26 billion merger to the FCC -- including enhanced 5G buildout commitments and an agreement to spin off Sprint's Boost Mobile -- which got the nod from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. From a report: T-Mobile and Sprint first announced their plans to merge in April 2018, looking to combine forces to take on the two industry leaders -- AT&T and Verizon. To clear regulatory hurdles, the companies have been forced to make additional guarantees. Those include a commitment to deploying a 5G network that would cover 97% of the U.S. population within three years of the closing of the merger and 99% within six years. In addition, the revised T-Mobile/Sprint plan guarantees that their 5G network would reach deep into rural areas, with 85% of rural Americans covered within three years and 90% covered within six years. T-Mobile and Sprint also have promised that 90% of Americans would have access to mobile broadband service at speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and 99% would have access to speeds of at least 50 Mbps.

Huawei has finally gone on the record about a ban on its use of Android, but the company's long-term strategy on mobile still remains unclear. From a report: In an effort to appease its worried customer base, the embattled Chinese company said today that it will continue to provide security updates and after-sales support to its existing lineup of smartphones, but it's what the company didn't say that will spark concerns. Huawei was unable to make guarantees about whether existing customers will continue to receive Android software updates, while its statement is bereft of any mention of whether future phones will ship with the current flavor of Android or something else.

[...] Huawei's lukewarm response isn't unexpected. Earlier, Google issued a similarly non-committal statement that indicated that owners of Huawei phones will continue to be able to access the Google Play Store and Google Play Protect, but -- like the Chinese firm -- it made no mention of the future, and that really is the key question. Further reading: Qualcomm and Intel reportedly stop dealing with Huawei.

CNBC reports: Tesla shares fell almost 8% on Friday to their lowest close since December 2016, after the National Transportation Safety Board said the company's Autopilot driver assistance system was engaged during a fatal crash in March... The accident was at least the third of its kind in the U.S. and raises concerns about Tesla's Autopilot technology.
Thursday Elon Musk also told Tesla's employees that he and their CFO will now personally review all expenses going forward in a new "hardcore" attempt to control expenses, calling it "the only way for Tesla to become financially sustainable and succeed in our goal of helping make the world environmentally sustainable."

And then there's the fires, reports CNBC: Recent reports of Tesla vehicles spontaneously catching fire could make potential customers wary at a time when virtually every automaker is getting ready to roll out battery-based vehicles, industry executives and analysts worry... Three of Tesla's sedans went up in flames without warning in recent months, one in Shanghai, another in Hong Kong, a third in San Francisco. Tesla has experienced at least 14 known battery fires in recent years...

Of the 14 known fires involving Tesla vehicles, the majority occurred after a collision, but there have been a growing number of blazes in which its products appear to spontaneously ignite. That appeared to be the case when, on April 21, a security camera in a Shanghai garage captured images of a Model S sedan smoldering before suddenly bursting into flames. Another fire engulfed a Tesla sedan that appears to have been hooked up to one of the company's Superchargers in Hong Kong. Then, two weeks ago, firefighters in San Francisco tweeted that they had been called to a garage where another Tesla Model S was on fire.

In an initial response, the automaker said it did not think the sedan itself was responsible for the California blaze. But it is investigating the two Chinese incidents, it said in a statement, and "out of an abundance of caution, we are revising charge and thermal management settings on Model S and Model X vehicles via an over-the-air software update that will begin rolling out today, to help further protect the battery and improve battery longevity..."
"As the face of the emerging battery-car market, Tesla's troubles have been widely reported, but it is by no means the only manufacturer to have experienced unexpected fires..." reports CNBC.

"Fires have been reported with Chevrolet Volts, Fisker Karmas, Mitsubishi iMiEVs and other electric vehicles."

'The global internet is disintegrating," argues BBC Future, calling Russia "one of a growing number of countries that has had enough of the Western-built, Western-controlled internet backbone...aided as much by advances in technology as by growing global misgivings about whether the open internet was ever such a good idea to start with."

"The new methods raise the possibility not only of countries pulling up their own drawbridges, but of alliances between like-minded countries building on these architectures to establish a parallel internet..." It's DNS that Russia has been setting its sights on... The plan -- which was met with skepticism from much of the engineering community, if not dismissed outright -- was to create a Russia-only copy of the DNS servers (the internet's address book, currently headquartered in California) so that citizens' traffic would be exclusively directed to Russian sites, or Russian versions of external sites. It would send Russian internet users to Yandex if they typed in Google, or the social network VK instead of Facebook. To lay the groundwork for this, Russia spent years enacting laws that force international companies to store all Russian citizens' data inside the country -- leading some companies such as LinkedIn to be blocked when they refused to comply...

According to estimates from the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, China is now engaged in some 80 telecommunications projects around the world -- from laying cables to building core networks in other countries, contributing to a significant and growing Chinese-owned global network... One possibility is a scenario where enough countries join Russia and China to develop a similar infrastructure to a point where they could sustain each other economically without doing business with the rest of the world, meaning they could shut themselves off the Western internet. Smaller countries might prefer an internet built around a non-Western standard, and an economic infrastructure built around China might be the "third way" that allows countries to participate in a semi-global economy while being able to control certain aspects of their populations' internet experience.
Maria Farrell of the Open Rights Group (an internet freedom organisation) tells BBC Future that "Nations like Zimbabwe and Djibouti, and Uganda, they don't want to join an internet that's just a gateway for Google and Facebook" to colonise their digital spaces. And there's also fears about western espionage.

"Along with every other expert interviewed for this article, Farrell reiterated how unwise it would be underestimate the ongoing reverberations of the Snowden revelations..."

The commercial rollout of Waymo's driver-less taxi service in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix with a population of 260,000 people, has more than a thousand customers already signed up -- including the mayor, reports Forbes: Each of the several hundred Waymo One vans in Chandler arrives with a safety driver at the wheel. But that may be more about public relations than technical necessity. During a recent trip, the human in the driver's seat didn't take her hands off her lap during a trip from the library to a shopping mall a few miles away in light, late morning traffic. "Part of it's just education and getting people really comfortable right out of the gate," a Waymo spokeswoman said. There's another piece of the Arizona program that's closer to Waymo's long-term plans of full autonomy. A few hundred people are getting rides in Pacificas with no safety driver through its Early Rider program, an earlier test rollout. Unlike Waymo One users, Early Riders have to sign nondisclosure agreements and aren't allowed to discuss the program.

Early Riders are also a way for the company to observe how people adapt to a robotic service and the options they want. Recently Waymo integrated Google Play music into the Waymo One app to let riders automatically listen to their preferred songs and artists. Video streaming, games and other in-vehicle options that leverage Google's many services are likely additions, though Waymo won't verify that... "Beyond the initial shock of not seeing a person in the vehicle, which we're getting used to, protocols are being established," says Chandler Police Chief Sean Duggan. "As a police officer, one of the first questions that gets asked is 'who gets the ticket? How do you contact whomever?'" There have been a "half a dozen" collisions involving a Waymo vehicle, Duggan says, but not ones where the Waymo vehicle was at fault. In fact, the department hasn't issued any citations to Waymo in the past couple of years...

Ahead of the commercial launch, there were reports that the vans irritate local commuters because they take too long to make left turns and of assaults on Waymo vans including rock throwing, a slashed tire and even an individual who aimed a gun at one. "People tend to be frustrated when a vehicle is actually obeying the law" by stopping completely at intersections and making turns cautiously, Dugan said. "That happens regardless of if it's self-driving or a person."
Forbes describes Waymo's presence in Chandler as "a test case for the entire industry," citing an interesting perspective from Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AgeLab. "The view for companies like Waymo is 'we have to be able to show functional safety. Otherwise, we can't protect our decisions in a court of law, where this will all end up long term.'"

"Elon is working mostly on the deep neural net side where a good chunk of it is a black box. Documenting, defending that in court is going to be tough."

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Alphabet Inc's Google has suspended business with Huawei that requires the transfer of hardware and software products except those covered by open source licenses, a source close to the matter told Reuters on Sunday, in a blow to the Chinese technology company that the U.S. government has sought to blacklist around the world.

Huawei Technologies Co Ltd will immediately lose access to updates to the Android operating system, and the next version of its smartphones outside of China will also lose access to popular applications and services including the Google Play Store and Gmail app... Huawei will continue to have access to the version of the Android operating system available through the open source license that is freely open to anyone who wishes to use it. But Google will stop providing any technical support and collaboration for Android and Google services to Huawei going forward, the source said.

Google employees "want a say in and control over the products they build," reports Fortune, in an article headlined "Inside Google's Civil War": As the so-called techlash has cast a pall over the entire sector, organized employee pushback is slowly becoming part of the landscape: Amazon workers are demanding more action from the company on battling climate change; at Microsoft, employees say they don't want to build technology for warfare; at Salesforce, a group has lobbied management to end its work with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency... But nowhere has the furor been as loud, as public, and as insistent as it has been at Google. That's no surprise to Silicon Valley insiders, who say Google was purpose-built to amplify employee voices.

With its "Don't be evil" mantra, Google was a central player in creating the rosy optimism of the tech boom. "It has very consciously cultivated this image," says Terry Winograd, a professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford who was Google cofounder Larry Page's grad school adviser and would go on to serve on the company's technical advisory board. "It makes them much more prone to this kind of uprising." Page, now 46, and cofounder Sergey Brin, 45, intentionally created a culture that encouraged the questioning of authority and the status quo, famously writing in their 2004 IPO letter that Google was not a conventional company and did not intend to become one... Now Google finds itself in the awkward position of trying to temper the radical culture that it spent the past 20 years stoking.

Boasting more than 100,000 employees between Google and its parent company, Alphabet, executives acknowledge that the company is struggling to balance its size with maintenance of the principles, like employee voice, that were so foundational... The walkout was an inflection point, a sign that the company is now poised to disrupt something even more foundational to our economic system: the relationship between labor and capital. It's a shift that could perhaps begin only in Silicon Valley, a place that has long believed itself above such traditional business concerns -- and, more to the point, only at this company, one that hired and retained employees on the premise of do no evil. Now employees seem determined to view that manifesto through their own lens and apply it without compromise, even at the cost of the company's growth.

wiredmikey writes: European Digital Rights (EDRi), together with 45 NGOs, academics and companies across 15 countries, has sent an open letter to European policymakers and regulators, warning about widespread and potentially growing use of deep packet inspection (DPI) by internet service providers (ISPs). DPI is far more than is required by the ISP to perform its basic purpose, and by its nature privacy invasive, and not strictly legal within the EU. Nevertheless, many are concerned that its practice and use within Europe is growing, and that "some telecom regulators appear to be pushing for the legalization of DPI technology."

One of the drivers appears to be the growing use of 'zero-rating' by mobile operators. "A mapping of zero-rating offers in Europe conducted by EDRi member Epicenter.works identified 186 telecom services which potentially make use of DPI technology," writes EDRi. [PDF here]

Jason Koebler shares Vice's analysis of demoparties -- "gatherings where programmers showcase artistic audiovisual works, known as demos, after a day- or days-long coding marathon that is part bacchanal and part competition" -- starting with a visit to New York's Synchrony. I had arrived just in time to catch the end of a set by the electronic musician Melody Loveless, who was at a folding table near the front of the room writing code that generated the music. These sorts of live coding performances have been a staple of demoparties -- gatherings organized by and for the creative computing underground -- for decades... Demos are often made by teams of programmers and are almost always rendered in real time (as opposed to, say, an animated movie, which is a pre-rendered recording). Demoparty competitions, or compos, are generally divided into categories where demo submissions must adhere to certain restrictions. For example, some compos only allow demos that were made on a Commodore 64 computer or demos that were created using under 4,000 bytes of data. In every case, however, the point of the competition is to push computing hardware to its limits in the service of digital art...

Given the abundance of digital art institutions in New York -- Eyebeam, Rhizome, LiveCode.NYC, and the School for Poetic Computation -- the lack of demoparties is conspicuous and in stark contrast to the European demoscene, which boasts dozens of annual demoparties, some of which attract thousands of participants. With this discrepancy in mind, I tagged along with the Synchrony crew this year in pursuit of an answer to a deceptively simple question -- who killed the American demoscene...?
The article traces the demo scene back to the "cracktros" which introduced pirated Commodore 64 video games (and their associated "copyparties") on floppy disks in the 1980s. Eventually this even led to police raids, but "The crackdown on software piracy was not evenly spread throughout Europe, however. Countries like the Netherlands, Greece, Finland, Sweden, and Norway didn't have strict software piracy laws, if they had any at all, which allowed the warez scene to flourish there." And by the early 1990s games "became a taboo when the community started defining its borders and aggressively distancing itself from other communities occupying the same computer hobbyist domain," wrote Markku Reunanen, a lecturer at Aalto University, in 2014.

Vice adds that "Although the demoscene has many elements in common with the warez scene from which it emerged, it differentiated itself by emphasizing technically challenging aesthetics. Whereas software cracking was largely pragmatic and gaming was about entertainment, the demoscene was about creating computer art that was difficult to produce at the level of the code, but also visually and aurally pleasing to consume. It was, in short, a competitive form of digital art.... Today, the fundamental aspects of the demoscene are the same. Demoparties are still organized around a competition and remain an almost exclusively European phenomenon. Demosceners still police the boundaries of their discipline vis-a-vis gaming and some sceners continue to work exclusively with retro machines like the C64 and Amiga."