Under a new decree, all web traffic will be routed through a government portal. Rights groups say a crackdown on digital expression is about to get worse. From a report: The day Kea Sokun was arrested in Cambodia, four men in plainclothes showed up at his photography shop near Angkor Wat and carted him off to the police station. Mr. Kea Sokun, who is also a popular rapper, had released two songs on YouTube, and the men said they needed to know why he'd written them. "They kept asking me: âWho is behind you? What party do you vote for?'" Mr. Kea Sokun said. "I told them, 'I have never even voted, and no one controls me.'" The 23-year-old artist, who says his songs are about everyday struggles in Cambodia, was sentenced to 18 months in an overcrowded prison after a judge found him guilty of inciting social unrest with his lyrics. His case is part of a crackdown in which dozens have been sent to jail for posting jokes, poems, pictures, private messages and songs on the internet.

The ramped-up scrutiny reflects an increasingly restrictive digital environment in Cambodia, where a new law will allow the authorities to monitor all web traffic in the country. Critics say that the decree puts Cambodia on a growing list of countries that have embraced China's authoritarian model of internet surveillance, from Vietnam to Turkey, and that it will deepen the clash over the future of the web. Cambodia's National Internet Gateway, set to begin operating on Feb. 16, will send all internet traffic -- including from abroad -- through a government-run portal. The gateway, which is mandatory for all service providers, gives state regulators the means to "prevent and disconnect all network connections that affect national income, security, social order, morality, culture, traditions and customs." Government surveillance is already high in Cambodia. Each ministry has a team that monitors the internet. Offending content is reported to an internet crime unit in the Ministry of Interior, the center of the country's robust security apparatus. Those responsible can be charged with incitement and sent to prison.

To say that Big Tech controls the internet might seem like an exaggeration. Increasingly, in at least one sense, it's literally true. From a report: The internet can seem intangible, a post-physical environment where things like viral posts, virtual goods and metaverse concerts just sort of happen. But creating that illusion requires a truly gargantuan -- and quickly-growing -- web of physical connections. Fiber-optic cable, which carries 95% of the world's international internet traffic, links up pretty much all of the world's data centers, those vast server warehouses where the computing happens that transforms all those 1s and 0s into our experience of the internet. Where those fiber-optic connections link up countries across the oceans, they consist almost entirely of cables running underwater -- some 1.3 million kilometers (or more than 800,000 miles) of bundled glass threads that make up the actual, physical international internet. And until recently, the overwhelming majority of the undersea fiber-optic cable being installed was controlled and used by telecommunications companies and governments. Today, that's no longer the case.

In less than a decade, four tech giants -- Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Meta (formerly Facebook ) and Amazon -- have become by far the dominant users of undersea-cable capacity. Before 2012, the share of the world's undersea fiber-optic capacity being used by those companies was less than 10%. Today, that figure is about 66%. And these four are just getting started, say analysts, submarine cable engineers and the companies themselves. In the next three years, they are on track to become primary financiers and owners of the web of undersea internet cables connecting the richest and most bandwidth-hungry countries on the shores of both the Atlantic and the Pacific, according to subsea cable analysis firm TeleGeography. By 2024, the four are projected to collectively have an ownership stake in more than 30 long-distance undersea cables, each up to thousands of miles long, connecting every continent on the globe save Antarctica. In 2010, these companies had an ownership stake in only one such cable -- the Unity cable partly owned by Google, connecting Japan and the U.S.

Last year, amateur investors took financial markets by storm. This year, Wall Street professionals are watching them closely. From a report: Fund managers who might have once derided small-time day traders as "dumb money" are scouring social-media posts for clues about where the herd might veer next. Some 85% of hedge funds and 42% of asset managers are now tracking retail-trading message boards, according to a survey by Bloomberg Intelligence. JPMorgan Chase in September introduced a new data product that includes information on which securities individual investors are likely buying and selling, as well as which sectors and stocks are being talked about on social media. About 50 clients, including some of the largest asset and quant managers, are testing the product, the bank says. JPMorgan equity traders are also using it to help manage their own risk. "The flow from retail is not something you can ignore if you are a professional investor," says Chris Berthe, JPMorgan's global co-head of cash equities trading. "It's a whole new investor class that has emerged, and it's an investor class that's actually getting themes right."

The shift illustrates just how much the rookies have changed the investing landscape. A year ago, market observers were questioning if the retail revolution would continue. Now many are asking what it will look like this year. After shying away from active investing for much of the past decade, millions of Americans, hunkered down at home because of Covid-19, became day traders in 2020. Enticed by volatile markets and phone apps that made it free to trade stocks, they flocked to social media for investing ideas. That year, they piled into stocks like Hertz Global Holdings. (and ultimately were rewarded when the car-rental company exited bankruptcy). It is estimated that more than 10 million individual investors opened new brokerage accounts in 2020, according to Devin Ryan, director of financial-technology research at JMP Securities. Last year the trends from 2020 accelerated. JMP Securities estimates that a further 15 million Americans signed up for brokerage accounts in 2021. Social-media forums became increasingly used for trading. Some individual investors used their growing numbers to send stocks including GameStop and AMC Entertainment flying. Many newbies relished in inflicting steep losses on some hedge funds and demonstrating that traditional playbooks aren't the only way to win.

What happened after a New Hampshire state representative proposed legislation either encouraging or requiring free software in much of the state government? The Concord Monitor writes, "It's been three decades since Linux launched the modern world of free, open-source software, but you'd hardly have known that at a state legislative hearing Tuesday. One bill (HB 1273) from Eric Gallager, a Concord Democrat, is a sweeping effort that not only establishes a committee to study "replacing all proprietary software used by state agencies with free software" but also does such things as limit non-compete clauses that conflict with open-source development and forbid Javascript in state government websites. The other bill (HB 1581) from Lex Berezhny, a Grafton Republican, would reinstate a requirement that state agencies must use open-source software when it is "the most effective software solution." That requirement existed in state law from 2012 to 2018, he said.

Gallager said the two bills were developed separately. "The fact that you've got people in both parties thinking about this issue independently shows there is a wide range of support for it," he said.

The Executive Department and Administration committee sent both bills to subcommittee.
But what's interesting is the arguments that were made — both for and against: Tuesday's hearing drew the state's most prominent free software advocate, Jon Hall, a programmer whose legacy in the field dates back three decades... Among his arguments, Hall said that studies have shown that free and open-source software is cheaper in the long run than software from Microsoft or other vendors because you don't have to buy regular licenses or be forced into software upgrades or have to ditch equipment like printers because they are no longer supported. Even when free and open-source software has higher costs due to training, he said, those costs have benefits. "Where does the money that you spend go? You can send millions of dollars to Redmond (Washington, home of Microsoft) or Silicon Valley, or pay local software developers," Hall argued.

On the other hand, Denis Goulet, commissioner of the Department of Information Technology, said Gallager's bill would put large and hard-to-quantify costs onto the state. "It would take a year, two years, to figure out what it would cost" due to training on new systems, he told the committee. "It wouldn't be small." Goulet, who opposed Gallager's bill and did not speak on Berezhny's, said the state already uses open-source systems as appropriate, pointing to its web content management system.

"I estimate 85 percent of systems contained one or more open-source libraries," he said.
The lead developer and founder of Libreboot tweeted video of the hearing, where you can also hear the first opponent of the legislation — state representative Stephen Pearson.

Click here to read some of the highlights from Tuesday's hearing:

"In recent months, at least half a dozen game studios have revealed plans to add NFTs to their games or said they were considering doing so," reports the New York Times.

Then they were confronted by gamers like 18-year-old Christian Lantz, who for years has played GSC Game World's first-person shooter game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Mr. Lantz was incensed. He joined thousands of fans on Twitter and Reddit who raged against NFTs in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s sequel. The game maker, they said, was simply looking to squeeze more money out of its players. The backlash was so intense that GSC quickly reversed itself and abandoned its NFT plan.

"The studio was abusing its popularity," Mr. Lantz, who lives in Ontario, said. "It's so obviously being done for profit instead of just creating a beautiful game...."

[C]lashes over crypto have increasingly erupted between users and major game studios like Ubisoft, Square Enix and Zynga. In many of the encounters, the gamers have prevailed — at least for now.... Players said they see the moves as a blatant cash grab. "I just hate that they keep finding ways to nickel-and-dime us in whatever way they can," said Matt Kee, 22, a gamer who took to Twitter in anger this month after Square Enix, which produces one of his favorite games, Kingdom Hearts, said it was pushing into NFTs. "I don't see anywhere mentioning how that benefits the gamer, how that improves gameplay. It's always about, 'How can I make money off this?'"

Much of their resentment is rooted in the encroachment of micro transactions in video games. Over the years, game makers have found more ways to profit from users by making them pay to upgrade characters or enhance their level of play inside the games. Even if people had already paid $60 or more for a game upfront, they were asked to fork over more money for digital items like clothing or weapons for characters.... Merritt K, a game streamer and editor at Fanbyte, a games industry site, said gamers' antagonism toward the companies has built up over the last decade partly because of the growing number of micro transactions. So when game makers introduced NFTs as an additional element to buy and sell, she said, players were "primed to call this stuff out. We've been here before."

That has led to bursts of gamer outrage, which have rattled the game companies. In December, Sega Sammy, the maker of the Sonic the Hedgehog game, expressed reservations about its NFT and crypto plans after "negative reactions" from users. Ubisoft, which makes titles like Assassin's Creed, said that it had misjudged how unhappy its customers would be after announcing an NFT program last month. A YouTube video about the move was disliked by more than 90 percent of viewers. "Maybe we under-evaluated how strong the backlash could have been," said Nicolas Pouard, a Ubisoft vice president who heads the French company's new blockchain initiative.

Game companies said their NFT plans were not motivated by profit. Instead, they said, NFTs give fans something fun to collect and a new way for them to make money by selling the assets. "It really is all about community," said Matt Wolf, an executive at the mobile game maker Zynga, who is leading a foray into blockchain games. "We believe in giving people the opportunity to play to earn."
The article also rounds up examples of game companies it says have "come out against crypto."

• "Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft's Xbox, told Axios in November that some games centered on earning money through NFTs appeared 'exploitative' and he would avoid putting them in the Xbox store."

• "Valve, which owns the online game store Steam, also updated its rules last fall to prohibit blockchain games that allow cryptocurrencies or NFTs to be exchanged...."

• "Tim Sweeney, the chief executive of Epic Games, the maker of the game Fortnite, said his company would steer clear of NFTs in its own games because the industry is riddled with 'an intractable mix of scams.' (Epic will still allow developers to sell blockchain games in its online store.)"

• The blowback has affected more than just game studios. Discord, the messaging platform popular with gamers, backtracked in November after users threatened to cancel their paid subscriptions over a crypto initiative."

Xbox players are growing increasingly frustrated at being forced to play against PC gamers. While crossplay was initially a popular request from Xbox and PC players that Microsoft has backed strongly for years, those playing first-person shooters on Xbox are struggling to opt out of the experience to avoid PC cheaters. From a report: Games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Halo Infinite force Xbox players to match against PC gamers in a variety of playlists. You don't have to look very far to see why people are angry about it. "Now that cheating in Halo is confirmed on PC, can we have to option to opt out of cross-play?" asked one Reddit post in November, just weeks after the multiplayer version of Halo Infinite launched. "Forced crossplay is a scam by Microsoft," reads another post in Microsoft's Halo Waypoint forums. "Forced crossplay is a mistake," says another Redditor, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

Halo Infinite and Call of Duty: Warzone are both suffering from an influx of cheating, largely because they're free-to-play titles so it's easy for hackers to create a new account following a ban. While there's an option to disable crossplay in Warzone, if you try to load into a playlist on Xbox it will ask you to re-enable it. Whereas on PlayStation you can simply dismiss the prompt and continue to the playlist with crossplay still disabled. Warzone players on Xbox have been complaining about this forced crossplay for more than a year, with various forum posts and YouTube videos highlighting how irritating it is to be forced into crossplay. Most of the issues are related to PC cheaters, who have plagued Warzone for years before Activision finally added a new anti-cheat system in October with a kernel-level driver to catch PC cheaters. Now that cheaters are already ruining Halo Infinite multiplayer games, the call to remove forced crossplay is certainly growing louder.

Brussels Airlines has operated 3,000 flights without passengers this winter to avoid losing take-off and landing slots. From a report: The airline's parent company, Lufthansa Group, confirmed that 18,000 flights had been flown empty, including 3,000 Brussels Airlines services, reports The Bulletin. EU rules require that airlines operate a certain percentage of scheduled flights to keep their slots at major airports. Under these "use it or lose it" regulations, prior to the pandemic carriers had to utilise at least 80 per cent of their scheduled take-off and landing slots. This was revised to 50 per cent as coronavirus saw travel become increasingly difficult -- but airlines are still struggling to hit this target. As a result of Lufthansa Group's latest figures, the Belgian federal government has written to the European Commission, calling for a change to the rules on maintaining slots. It follows the news that European airlines are slashing their winter schedules amid a dampening of demand due to Omicron travel restrictions. Lufthansa Group, which owns the carriers Lufthansa, Swiss International Airlines, Austrian Airlines, and Eurowings in addition to Brussels Airlines, has already axed 33,000 flights in January and February.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On the eve of the new year, tragedy struck in Manhattan: Chelsea art gallery owner Todd Kramer had 615 ETH (about $2.3 million) worth of NFTs, primarily Bored Apes and Mutant Apes, stolen by scammers and listed on the peer-to-peer NFT marketplace OpenSea. Kramer quickly took to Twitter and begged for help from OpenSea and the NFT community for help regaining his NFTs. Unsurprisingly, he was ripped to shreds by others in the community for not storing his valuable JPEGs in an offline wallet; however, OpenSea froze trading of the stolen NFTs on its platform. More than a few commentators pointed out that OpenSea's intervention here -- and especially Kramer's pleas for a centralized response -- seemed to go against a key tenet of the industry that often bumps up against usability: the idea that "code is law," and once your tokens are in someone else's digital wallet, that's the end of the game. While OpenSea did not actually reverse the transaction on the blockchain, it did block the stolen NFT's sale on its own platform, which is the most popular marketplace for NFTs.

"We take theft seriously and have policies in place to meet our obligations to the community and deter theft on our platform. We do not have the power to freeze or delist NFTs that exist on these blockchains, however we do disable the ability to use OpenSea to buy or sell stolen items. We've prioritized building security tools and processes to combat theft on OpenSea, and we are actively expanding our efforts across customer support, trust and safety, and site integrity so we can move faster to protect and empower our users." OpenSea did not answer, however, why it had frozen the trading of these NFTs and not others stolen just weeks ago that were announced on Twitter by Bored Ape Yacht Club and Jungle Freak NFT owners.

OpenSea's interventions, when they do happen, leave some users in the lurch. For example, another Twitter user recounted in a viral post how they unwittingly purchased a stolen NFT on OpenSea for 1.5 ETH (around $5000) only to have it frozen. OpenSea wasn't quick to help them out, they said -- although, it's unclear what the company could really do at that point -- and the NFT project Alien Frens reimbursed them 1 ETH. In these and other cases, "self-sovereignty" is offered up as an attempt to reframe what actually happened. Yes, the victims are ridiculed for falling prey to a hack or scam, expected to learn from their mistake by using cold storage, and in the best scenario able to buy the NFTs back at a discount because they're not sold on major marketplaces. But at least there was no centralized intervention. Kramer himself was able to buy at least two of his NFTs back with the help of users who had unwittingly bought them from the scammer. OpenSea's interventions in the cases of stolen NFTs show how centralized intermediaries often have an important role wherever the decentralized world of the blockchain meets the real world. It's also not the first time that similar moves have happened elsewhere in crypto, even though they break from the core dogma of immutability and self-sovereignty. "Scams have always been a part of the cryptocurrency industry, and so has the uncomfortable question of centralized interventions," writes Motherboard's Edward Ongweso Jr in closing. "It increasingly feels like the inconsistent application of rules in this space more often results in protecting wealth transfer schemes than protecting all users equally, and obscuring the deep centralization already present: less than one percent of users (institutional investors) account for 64 percent of Coinbase's trading volume (PDF), and 10 percent of traders account for 85 percent of NFT transactions and trade 97 percent of all NFTs at least once."

"It's not clear how this contradiction will be resolved. Uncritically believing decentralization is a salve that immediately transforms something's politics endangers not only users but crypto's fever dream of disruption..."

The New York Times: After a year of fertility treatments, Yael Geller was thrilled when she found out she was pregnant in November 2020. Following a normal ultrasound, she was confident enough to tell her 3-year-old son his "brother or sister" was in her belly. But a few weeks later, as she was driving her son home from school, her doctor's office called. A prenatal blood test indicated her fetus might be missing part of a chromosome, which could lead to serious ailments and mental illness. Sitting on the couch that evening with her husband, she cried as she explained they might be facing a decision on terminating the pregnancy. He sat quietly with the news. "How is this happening to me?" Ms. Geller, 32, recalled thinking. The next day, doctors used a long, painful needle to retrieve a small piece of her placenta. It was tested and showed the initial result was wrong. She now has a 6-month-old, Emmanuel, who shows no signs of the condition he screened positive for. Ms. Geller had been misled by a wondrous promise that Silicon Valley has made to expectant mothers: that a few vials of their blood, drawn in the first trimester, can allow companies to detect serious developmental problems in the DNA of the fetus with remarkable accuracy.

In just over a decade, the tests have gone from laboratory experiments to an industry that serves more than a third of the pregnant women in America, luring major companies like Labcorp and Quest Diagnostics into the business, alongside many start-ups. The tests initially looked for Down syndrome and worked very well. But as manufacturers tried to outsell each other, they began offering additional screenings for increasingly rare conditions. The grave predictions made by those newer tests are usually wrong, an examination by The New York Times has found. That includes the screening that came back positive for Ms. Geller, which looks for Prader-Willi syndrome, a condition that offers little chance of living independently as an adult. Studies have found its positive results are incorrect more than 90 percent of the time. Nonetheless, on product brochures and test result sheets, companies describe the tests to pregnant women and their doctors as near certain. They advertise their findings as "reliable" and "highly accurate," offering "total confidence" and "peace of mind" for patients who want to know as much as possible.

Some of the companies offer tests without publishing any data on how well they perform, or point to numbers for their best screenings while leaving out weaker ones. Others base their claims on studies in which only one or two pregnancies actually had the condition in question. These aren't the first Silicon Valley firms to try to build a business around blood tests. Years before the first prenatal testing company opened, another start-up, Theranos, made claims that it could run more than a thousand tests on a tiny blood sample, before it collapsed amid allegations of fraud. In contrast with Theranos, the science behind these companies' ability to test blood for common disorders is not in question. Experts say it has revolutionized Down syndrome screening, significantly reducing the need for riskier tests. However, the same technology -- known as noninvasive prenatal testing, or NIPT -- performs much worse when it looks for less common conditions. Most are caused by small missing pieces of chromosomes called microdeletions. Others stem from missing or extra copies of entire chromosomes. They can have a wide range of symptoms, including intellectual disability, heart defects, a shortened life span or a high infant mortality rate.

Hungarian-born billionaire Thomas Peterffy, chairman of Interactive Brokers Group, says the online brokerage is now expanding the cryptocurrencies it offers its customers after sensing "urgency" from their clients to get in.

He still hasn't decided whether cryptocurrencies are a good investment — "I think it can go to zero, and I think it can go to a million dollars," he tells Bloomberg. "I have no idea." But he's invested a small amount just as a hedge against possible problems with fiat currency. His approach highlights the shifting attitude toward crypto by investors who once scorned or were wary of digital tokens but realized, especially in 2021, that they can't bear to miss out on the potential for big gains....

[American billionaire] Ray Dalio recently revealed he was holding at least some Bitcoin and Ethereum in his portfolio only months after questioning crypto's utility as a store of wealth. The Bridgewater Associates founder views the investments as an alternative money in a world where "cash is trash'' and inflation erodes buying power. [American billionaire hedge fund manager] Paul Tudor Jones disclosed he's invested as a hedge against inflation, and almost half the family offices Goldman Sachs Group Inc. does business with were interested in adding digital currencies to their portfolios, according to a recent bank survey.

Crypto moved increasingly into the mainstream of finance, albeit with mixed success. ProShares launched the first U.S. Bitcoin futures ETF, which attracted more than $1 billion in two days, before inflows sputtered and the price slumped since its October debut. Crypto enthusiasts are still hoping U.S. regulators approve an ETF that actually holds Bitcoin in 2022. Faring better, Coinbase Global Inc. went public and now has a $54 billion market valuation. It's founder, Brian Armstrong, is worth $9.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index...

There's still plenty of skepticism from Wall Street and the ultra-wealthy, but also pragmatism. [Multinational hedge fund] Citadel's Ken Griffin recently described the rush to embrace cryptocurrencies as a "jihadist call" against the U.S. dollar. But Griffin said his own firm would trade crypto if there were more regulation. JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin "worthless" in October, but that came even as the New York-based banking giant was bulking up hiring to help its clients trade digital currencies.

The bank's clients are "adults," Dimon has said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Canon revealed the EOS-1D X Mark III in January 2020, we proclaimed that the DSLR "still isn't dead," but that camera will mark the end of the line for a flagship model that some pro photographers still swear by to capture everything from sporting events to wild animals. CanonRumors points out an interview Canon's chairman and CEO Fujio Mitarai gave this week to the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun (via Y.M. Cinema Magazine). The piece highlight how high-end mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras have taken market share digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras previously dominated. In it, the CEO is quoted (in Japanese, which we've translated to English) saying "market needs are rapidly moving toward mirrorless cameras. So accordingly, we're increasingly moving people in that direction." The article states that the Mark III is "in fact" the last model in Canon's flagship EOS-1 series and that in a few years Canon will stop developing and producing its flagship DSLR cameras in favor of mirrorless cameras.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: As new year approaches, crowds around the world may be expecting whizzes and bangs to light up the sky. But the appeal of fireworks could fizzle out with the growing use of drones for light shows. One notable example was the opening ceremony of this year's Tokyo Olympics, while the Over the Top NYE event at Reunion Tower in Dallas is among those planning to combine fireworks and drones to welcome 2022. They are also being embraced at a local level: more than 1,000 people watched a drone display at Mercia Marina in Derbyshire to celebrate Bonfire Night this year.

Ollie Howitt, the creative coordinator at SkyMagic, which used a fleet of 300 drones to create a display for the mayor of London's new year celebration last year, said demand had increased substantially, something the pandemic has helped accelerate. She added that drones were increasingly able to fly in greater density and for longer. "We do think it's going to be something that's ever evolving, as opposed to it being a short-lived sort of fad that people have suddenly got interested in," she said.

Robert Neff, a partner and general manager at Mercia Marina, also believes drone displays will become more common. "There's a big movement against fireworks," he said. Neff said the decision to use a drone display at the marina was down to a number of factors, including the impact of fireworks on animals -- from wildlife and waterfowl to the cats and dogs of boat owners. "They've often commented on how much distress is caused to their pets by the fireworks," he said. Howitt said there were benefits to drones: "They're no emission, they're reusable, there's no fallout or any debris or that kind of thing. So in that sense they are a very good, sustainable option." "Suggestions are that drones have less of an impact on the environment, but we have grave concerns about electrical demand and use of lithium batteries which are known not to be all that 'green,'" said a spokesperson from the British Fireworks Association. "Firework use impact on the environment has been shown to be minor and very short-lived and recent studies have suggested that there is likely to be more pollution from a couple of cars driving to an event than caused by fireworks at an event."

Others suggest the use of fireworks and drones are not mutually exclusive. "We find fireworks work really well in tandem with drones. But we don't really see it as a one replacing the other at all. We sort of feel as if it's just another tool in the chest for how you sort of animate the sky and what you want to do with the show that you're putting on," said Howitt, noting that while fireworks give a loud, emotive, big performance, drones offer the chance to tell stories in the sky by using a series of images.

According to a new report from The Information, Apple has increased its reliance on Chinese partners, both as a way of cutting costs as well as to "curry favor with Beijing." 9to5Mac reports: Today's report from The Information comes on the heels of a separate report from the publication earlier this month in which it described a so-called secret deal between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Chinese government officials. Through this deal, Apple reportedly committed to investing more than $275 billion in China over five years.

The report details that Foxconn, which is headquartered in Taiwan, is on the verge of being unseated as Apple's top supplier by Luxshare, which is headquartered in China: "Luxshare has the potential to unseat Foxconn as Apple's top supplier. The Chinese company already exceeds Foxconn's main publicly listed unit in terms of market capitalization, though Foxconn generated roughly $105 billion from Apple in 2020 -- more than 10 times Luxshare's haul. But in terms of valuation, Luxshare has also eclipsed major Apple contractors such as Quanta Computer, Pegatron and Wistron, all of which are headquartered in Taiwan. Foxconn has become increasingly concerned about Luxshare's meteoric rise, including its significantly higher net profit margin, going so far as to form a task force to study the company, Reuters previously reported."

The report explains that Apple's move to shift more of its business to Chinese companies is part of Tim Cook fulfilling his $275 billion pledge to the Chinese government: "In shifting more business to Chinese companies, Cook, the architect of Apple's supply chain in China, is fulfilling his pledge to Beijing to expand its domestic tech industry, which will help the country reduce its reliance on companies based outside the mainland, including Taiwan -- a country China considers a renegade region. A year after Cook signed the economic agreement with China, Luxshare became the first Chinese company to secure a final assembly contract for a major Apple product, the AirPods, ending the dominance of Taiwanese firms. Apple's moves also might win over more Chinese consumers, which at times have shunned Apple in favor of local brands like Huawei based on nationalism. Apple generates nearly 20% of its revenue from the country." The report goes on to mention that Apple helped Luxshare manufature AirPods in 2017. "The AirPods were Luxshare's first major assembly contract for Apple, catapulting the company into the upper echelons of Apple suppliers that handle, pack and ship finished goods," reports The Information.

"If you've visited a crypto company's website recently, you've probably visited a URL ending in .xyz instead of its cheugier counterpart, .com," writes Anita Ramaswamy via TechCrunch. "From fintech Block, formerly known as Square, to venture firm Paradigm, to blockchain startups like Mirror, .xyz has become the go-to URL ending for many web3 companies. But what does it mean, and why has it caught on in the web3 space?" An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: .xyz, released to the public in 2014, first surged in popularity one year later when Google parent Alphabet decided to use it for their rebranded website. The internet behemoth had run into an increasingly widespread problem -- the .com URLs for their brand were already taken, with BMW's fleet management division using alphabet.com and American Broadcasting Corporation at abc.com. So Alphabet decided to open up shop at abc.xyz, which presented an "unlimited branding opportunity" for its "futuristic company," Daniel Negari, .xyz's 36-year-old founder and CEO, told TechCrunch in an email. Now, .xyz may be one of the top five top-level domains (TLDs) in the world by traffic, according to the company's own DNS data.

.xyz was created to "provide users around the world competition and choice when it comes to their domain name," and is "the first truly generic domain extension with no inherent meaning," according to Negari. While .com was meant for commercial use, .net for networks and .org for organizations, Negari envisioned .xyz as the TLD choice for users who felt they did not fit neatly into one of these categories or wanted to stand out. "I firmly believe the market has adopted our mantra of 'for every website everywhere,'" Negari said. "Our mantra of openness and inclusion for everyone and everything has bled through into a community of creative thinkers that has embraced .xyz as their domain." Negari is an active crypto investor with "numerous" investments in the space, including Gemini, MoonPay and BlockFi, he said. Because of his interest in crypto, he reached out to Ethereum Name Service (ENS) creator Nick Johnson to pitch him a collaboration. "That historic collaboration allowed early adopters to use a .xyz domain as their wallet address," Negari said.

ENS allows users to create a universal nickname for all their crypto addresses, providing a searchable database to make crypto wallets and transactions, which otherwise reside on a variety of different platforms, more easily accessible. Users can now create profiles to share their social media handles or other personal information in ENS using its native .eth domain or on a .xyz domain. .xyz has continued to find ways to collaborate with ENS and work with the crypto community. It announced this week that it launched its "eth.xyz" service, allowing users to search individual ENS profiles simply by adding ".xyz" to the end of their .eth name rather than having to go to the ENS database to look them up, Negari said. By allowing cryptocurrency holders to buy domains in their preferred names using Ethereum, ENS has creatively monetized users' desire to leverage the internet as an identity-building tool. Although .xyz domains are managed by ICANN, "several parties are now working to develop a decentralized alternative to this system to underpin web3," the report adds. ".xyz's strategy to align itself proactively with web3 companies could present a host of new monetization opportunities based on identity and ownership in a decentralized web as this generation of internet users stakes new claims on domains."

It's also worth noting that these .xyz domains "tend to be more affordable compared to their alternatives."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Growing tensions between Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Apple lie behind the death of the Internet Association (IA), the nine-year-old lobby group that was Big Tech's voice in Washington, according to insiders and industry observers. The Washington-based group, which dubbed itself the "unified" voice of the internet industry, will shut at the end of the year after both Microsoft and Uber, among others, pulled their financial support, leaving an insurmountable funding gap. "Our industry has undergone tremendous growth and change," it said in a statement, adding that its closure was "in line with this evolution." The closure is a sign of the increasingly different policy objectives of its Big Tech members, said observers, with Microsoft in particular looking to distance itself from its Silicon Valley peers.

"Microsoft has realized that it doesn't want to be associated with Google, Facebook and Amazon," said Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly campaign group. "It's really, really simple." A number of smaller tech companies had also become frustrated that their priorities were at odds with Big Tech's agenda. "This org could've saved itself years ago by kicking out everyone with a market cap greater than $500 billion," tweeted Luther Lowe, Yelp's head of public policy. Yelp left the association in 2019. "I made this suggestion to the leadership a few years ago, but it was shot down, so we quit."

Despite being the second most valuable US technology group, Microsoft has been able to dodge the latest focus on antitrust in Congress. Unlike the CEOs of Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon, Microsoft's Satya Nadella was left out of the blockbuster congressional hearing in July 2020 that saw the others summoned for a lengthy grilling. Microsoft has also not yet been the focus of any action announced by President Joe Biden's reinvigorated Federal Trade Commission. The company, which went through lengthy antitrust scrutiny in the early 2000s that led it to the brink of being broken up, now boasts about a more collaborative approach with regulators. Lynn said Microsoft was keen to distance itself from its rivals because "they've been through the wringer. They don't want to have their emails read, they don't want to have to go through discovery."

Customer support has become a crowded battlefield in enterprise technology as software vendors from Microsoft to Salesforce rush to arm organizations with tools to create one-stop service centers. From a report: The attention is revitalizing the call center, a once-backwater unit that has long suffered from high turnover rates and minimal corporate investment. Salesforce, ServiceNow, Twilio and Genesys Cloud Services are among the companies that see the call center as a critical part of efforts to transform the consumer base from a sea of faceless pocketbooks to potentially millions of unique personas. It's viewed as a way to improve customer service and bolster brand loyalty at a time when businesses are increasingly worried about churn.

Zoom Video Communications was prepared to fork over $14.7 billion in stock to buy Five9 to gain a foothold in the contact center industry. But Five9 shareholders ultimately thought the price was too low and turned down the deal, a testament to just how much the sector is expected to grow in the coming years. "Instead of being a cost center, it's a lifetime value driver," said Vasili Triant, chief operating officer at UJET, a closely held San Francisco-based call center cloud software provider. As a result, "this space has drawn a lot of attention. Companies need to improve experience. Because of that, a lot of money has flown into it. When money flows into it, people see a huge opportunity."

Historically, customer support software was viewed as a money pit -- systems that were necessary to help field consumer complaints or inquiries but produced little return on investment. Many businesses simply wanted to pick a product, deploy it and forget about it. As a result, the market was fragmented between just a handful of top vendors, including Genesys, Cisco Systems and Avaya. But as more companies move those systems to the internet, that mindset is undergoing a seismic shift. For the last several years, the focus has been on helping call center agents provide better customer support and cut down on service times. That has meant taking steps like consolidating different applications onto a single desktop interface, alleviating the need for agents to toggle between different tabs to view customer data stored in various places.

Politico reports: When Ford announced that starting in 2023 its cars and trucks would come with Google Maps, Assistant and Play Store preinstalled, CEO Jim Farley called the partnership between his iconic U.S. automaker and the search giant a chance to "reinvent" the automobile — making it an office-on-wheels, with more connectivity than any phone or laptop. "We were spending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions every year, keeping up with basically a generic experience that was not competitive to your cellphone," Farley crowed on CNBC, announcing the six-year deal with the tech giant.... But many tech-industry watchdogs looked at the Ford-Google car of the future with different eyes. They fear that tech companies will soon be doing to cars what they did to phones: Tying their exclusive operating systems to specific products to force out competitors and dominate a huge swath of the global economy.

Indeed, the smartphone wars are over, and Google and Apple won. Now they — and Amazon — are battling to control how you operate within your car. All three see autos as the next great opportunity to reach American consumers, who spend more time in the driver's seat than anywhere outside their home or workplace. And automakers, after years of floundering to incorporate cutting-edge technologies into cars on their own, are increasingly eager for Silicon Valley's help — hoping to adopt both its tech and its lucrative business models where consumers pay monthly for ongoing services instead of shelling out for a product just once. Now, having missed the boat as the tech giants cornered the market on smartphones, some policymakers and regulators believe the battle over connected cars represents a chance to block potential monopolies before they form.

State attorneys general who sued Google in 2020 for monopolizing online search highlighted concerns about the company's move into autonomous cars in their federal antitrust complaint. Meanwhile, in Europe, the EU's competition authority has opened a probe into Google's contracts related to connected cars... While Silicon Valley and automakers are thrilled about the future of connected and autonomous cars, regulators and privacy advocates are less so. "These companies have an amount of data on us that they shouldn't have, and they have a history of not using it in responsible ways," said Katharine Trendacosta of the digital civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "They have a history of going back on promises they have made about that data."

She cited Google's pledge during the DoubleClick acquisition in 2008 — which it later reneged on — not to combine data from its consumer products with that from its advertising services.
The article quotes Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III, who last December complained that "When smartphones took off, Google made sure they controlled search on Apple's iPhone. They are doing the same thing on voice and connected cars. It's a similar playbook." And an executive at an automotive supplier that competes with Google tells Politico that Google is already "corralling everything through their system and controls what information is released downstream."

And Jim Heffner, a vice president at Cox Automotive Mobility, adds that "The ride is no longer the point. Data is the cornerstone. ... Apple and Google and others want to be at the epicenter of that."

Some American colleges and universities are cutting entire departments. But the Baffler magazine wonders if something else is going on: The ostensible reason provided for these cuts and terminations is "prioritization," a term used by university administrators to rank which programs deserve funding and attention. One such "prioritization" committee at St. Joseph's College in New York described it as a ranking of "centrality and essentiality," "demand and opportunity," and "productivity, revenue, and resources." If the terms sound like university administrator gobbledygook, that's because they are, cleverly disguising administrative judgments as some sort of due process. Around the country it is terms just like these that have been thrown at social science and liberal arts departments. Suddenly, faculty in these departments are expected to justify why they exist and why anyone would need a degree in English.

The two examples from Indiana, from Marian University and Purdue, also reveal how terms like "prioritization" are being used to disguise politically motivated excisions. Prioritization routinely argues that engineering departments need to be the ones getting more money and resources from the administration. Unlike English or political science, which are seen as useless and pointless majors, engineering and computer science carry an implicit promise of a job. Who needs to have read Shakespeare or know about how our political system works when you can rush off to be one among the armies of coders who make our digiverse possible?

That is the dream. In reality, "prioritization" debates, particularly in deep red states, are excellent cover for changing the political demographics of American colleges and universities. The Marian University case is instructive in this sense; the ostensible championing of STEM fields maps neatly onto the project of eliminating the most left-leaning professor, inevitably in departments that teach English or history or political science. If you have a right-leaning board of trustees in a red state like Indiana, professors like Johnny Goldfinger are unwanted, even threatening to those who would like student voters to know less rather than more about the processes of democracy. In a country where everything is riven and divided around political lines, this could well be a covert attack against the otherwise enduring liberal-ness of the college campus....

Despite what current debates about liberal arts would have you believe, not all employers are looking for software developers. A long-range perspective proscribes a rounded education, geared not just for the moment we are in. It is very likely that coding and other functions that administrators believe are the ones that deserve the most priority will be carried out via artificial intelligence processes that can do the painstaking work with far greater accuracy and speed than a human ever can. A liberal arts education is essential to surviving in our polarized world. In educating students in how to respect differences and create dialogue over disagreement, a liberal arts education provides skills essential to maintaining a healthy and functioning democracy.

Creating arbitrary epistemological rankings, where one kind of knowledge is given precedence over others, is failing to attend to the needs of the whole student capable of earning a wage but also of leading a good life....

It only makes sense if the actual purpose of slicing off departments and professors is part of a larger political project that has nothing at all to do with providing the best education.

'Exhausted' network defenders say technological dependency creates new vulnerabilities. From a report: Cyberattacks on major technology providers and the interconnected world of software and hardware that power the global economy continued at a relentless pace in 2021, according to U.S. officials and security experts. Instead of one company being victimized at a time like in a traditional data breach, thousands were often exposed simultaneously. Businesses, hospitals and schools also worked to defend themselves against an onslaught of ransomware attacks, which increasingly reap $10 million or more in extortion payments. The annus horribilis culminated this month with discovery of a flaw in an obscure but widely used internet code known as Log4j, which one senior Biden administration official said was the worst she had seen in her career. The latest vulnerability comes as U.S. officials warn corporate leaders of a potential surge of cyberattacks while businesses slow their operations during the holiday season.

The string of incidents highlights how decades of digital transformation have linked business and government computer systems in opaque and sometimes surprising ways that will create new vulnerabilities. Major disruptions are certain to continue, cybersecurity officials said. "Network defenders are exhausted," said Joe Slowik, threat-intelligence lead at the security firm Gigamon. New attention and investment in cybersecurity hasn't improved the status quo, he said. "Money is flowing into the field, but largely on technical solutions while the core need -- more capable people -- remains hard to address."

Game makers are increasingly selling virtual weapons and gear as NFTs, extending the trendy digital deeds' reach but rankling some players. From a report: More videogame makers are selling virtual guns, helmets and other gear in the form of NFTs, a move that is increasingly pushing the trendy digital deeds into the average household. Players have been paying for virtual goods in games like "Grand Theft Auto Online" and "World of Warcraft" for years, but turning those items into nonfungible tokens would let gamers trade and resell them, making them into potentially valuable assets. The change also could mean that players who buy an NFT in one game could use it later in other games, on social media and in other corners of the internet -- an important step in developing an economy for the so-called metaverse. "FarmVille" maker Zynga and "Assassin's Creed" creator Ubisoft Entertainment are among the first big, publicly traded gaming companies to say they are experimenting with the strategy. Electronic Arts, Playtika and others are also looking into NFTs' potential use for engaging players.

"We're doing this because this may be part of the future of gaming," said Matt Wolf, Zynga's new vice president of blockchain gaming. "This is all about community building." Nonfungible tokens are essentially digital deeds that verify the authenticity of the items they represent as unique. They are the latest internet-based collecting craze, and so far they have come in forms ranging from digital artwork and trading cards to virtual real estate and sneakers, as well as concert tickets and even sports highlights. The tokens are stored on a blockchain, a digital ledger that shows when they were purchased and for how much, and ensures NFTs can't be duplicated or changed. Amid all that activity, NFTs' advent in videogames holds particular significance because gamers spend so much time in virtual worlds. That makes them potential early adopters in the metaverse -- a virtual realm where proponents say people will work, play and shop and where technology experts say the ability to buy and sell NFTs will be key.