The valuation of Elon Musk's SpaceX crossed $100 billion following a share sale by existing investors announced this week. CNBC reports: SpaceX has an agreement with new and existing investors to sell up to $755 million in stock from insiders at $560 a share, according to multiple people familiar with the deal -- increasing the company's valuation to $100.3 billion. The company did not raise new capital at this time, sources said, with the purchase offer representing a secondary sale of existing shares. The new share price is an increase of 33% from SpaceX's last valuation of $74 billion at $419.99 a share in February, when the company raised nearly $1.2 billion. The company had a similar secondary transaction in February, with a deal for insiders to sell up to $750 million at the time. SpaceX's new valuation makes it one of the rare private "centicorn" or "hectocorn" companies in the world -- a $1 billion unicorn 100 times over. Musk's SpaceX is now the second-most valuable private company in the world, according to CB Insights, behind only China's Bytedance and jumping past fintech firm Stripe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Valve has posted an official teardown of its upcoming handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck. Before diving into the teardown, though, the company spends about a minute to strongly caution against taking one apart unless you're sure you know what you're doing. "Even though it's your PC -- or it will be once you've received your Steam Deck -- and you have every right to open it up and do what you want, we at Valve really don't recommend that you ever open it up," a Valve representative said in the video. "The Steam Deck is a very tightly designed system, and the parts are chosen carefully for this product with its specific construction, so they aren't really designed to be user-swappable." Despite its warnings, however, the company likely understands that people are going to take the Steam Deck apart anyway, so this video could be a handy resource for people who are considering doing so.

In the video, Valve shows how to swap out two parts of the system. First, Valve shows how to replace the thumbsticks. The company cautions that they are completely custom, but says that it will offer a source for "replacement parts, thumbsticks, SSDs, and possibly more" in the coming months. After that, Valve shows how to swap out the SSD, which could be helpful for people who may have reserved the cheapest version of the device with an eMMC hard drive with the intention of upgrading it themselves. Be aware that all versions of the Steam Deck use an m.2 connector, including the version with the eMMC drive, so if you plan to make a swap, you're going to have to reinstall the OS and bring over any games you might have had loaded on your other drive.

Apple says that as of January 31st, 2022, all applications will need to offer people a method of deleting their accounts. This applies to all iOS, iPadOS and macOS apps. Engadget reports: The company announced this requirement alongside other App Store guideline changes at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June as part of a push to give users more control over their data. As The Verge notes, Apple is only requiring developers to let people "initiate deletion of their account from within the app," so apps might send you to a website or even a chat with an agent before you can actually close your account.

On Tuesday, D-Wave released its roadmap for upcoming processors and software for its quantum annealers. The company is also announcing that it's going to be developing its own gate-based hardware, which it will offer in parallel with the quantum annealer. Ars Technica's John Timmer talked with company CEO Alan Baratz to understand all the announcements. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The simplest part of the announcement to understand is what's happening with D-Wave's quantum-annealing processor. The current processor, called Advantage, has 5,000 qubits and 40,000 connections among them. These connections play a major role in the chip's performance as, if a direct connection between two qubits can't be established, others have to be used to act as a bridge, resulting in a lower effective qubit count. Starting this week, users of D-Wave's cloud service will have access to an updated version of Advantage. The qubit and connection stats will remain the same, but the device will be less influenced by noise in the system (in technical terms, its qubits will maintain their coherence longer). [...] Further out in the future is the follow-on system, Advantage 2, which is expected late next year or the year after. This will see another boost to the qubit count, going up to somewhere above 7,000. But the connectivity would go up considerably as well, with D-Wave targeting 20 connections per qubit.

D-Wave provides a set of developer tools it calls Ocean. In previous iterations, Ocean has allowed people to step back from directly controlling the hardware; instead, if a problem could be expressed as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO), Ocean could produce the commands needed to handle all the hardware configuration and run the problem on the optimizer. D-Wave referred to this as a hybrid problem solver, since Ocean would use classical computing to optimize the QUBO prior to execution. The only problem is that not everyone who might be interested in trying D-Wave hardware knows how to express their problem as a QUBO. So, the new version of Ocean will allow an additional layer of abstraction by allowing problems to be sent to the system in the format typically used by people who tend to solve these sorts of problems. "You will now be able to specify problems in the language that data scientists and data analysts understand," Baratz promised.

The biggest part of today's announcement, however, may be that D-Wave intends to also build gate-based hardware. Baratz explained that he thinks that optimization is likely to remain a valid approach, pointing to a draft publication that shows that structuring some optimization problems for gate-based hardware may be so computationally expensive that it would offset any gains the quantum hardware could provide. But it's also clear that gate-based hardware can solve an array of problems that a quantum annealer can't. He also argued that D-Wave has solved a number of problems that are currently limiting advances in gate-based hardware that uses electronic qubits called transmons. These include the amount and size of the hardware that's needed to send control signals to the qubits and the ability to pack qubits in densely enough so that they're easy to connect but not close enough that they start to interfere with each other. One of the problems D-Wave faces, however, is that the qubits it uses for its annealer aren't useful for gate-based systems. While they're based on the same bit of hardware (the Josephson junction), the annealer's qubits can only be set as up or down. A gate-based qubit needs to allow manipulations in three dimensions. So, the company is going to try building flux qubits, which also rely on Josephson junctions but use them in a different way. So, at least some of the company's engineering expertise should still apply.

A New York Times science/global health reporter reminds us that "Newer variants of the coronavirus like Alpha and Delta are highly contagious, infecting far more people than the original virus."

But then they add that "Two new studies offer a possible explanation: The virus is evolving to spread more efficiently through air." Most researchers now agree that the coronavirus is mostly transmitted through large droplets that quickly sink to the floor and through much smaller ones, called aerosols, that can float over longer distances indoors and settle directly into the lungs, where the virus is most harmful. The new studies don't fundamentally change that view. But the findings signal the need for better masks in some situations, and indicate that the virus is changing in ways that make it more formidable.

"This is not an Armageddon scenario," said Vincent Munster, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who led one of the new studies. "It is like a modification of the virus to more efficient transmission, which is something I think we all kind of expected, and we now see it happening in real time." Dr. Munster's team showed that small aerosols traveled much longer distances than larger droplets and the Alpha variant was much more likely to cause new infections via aerosol transmission. The second study found that people infected with Alpha exhaled about 43 times more virus into tiny aerosols than those infected with older variants.

The studies compared the Alpha variant with the original virus or other older variants. But the results may also explain why the Delta variant is so contagious — and why it displaced all other versions of the virus...

At least in some crowded spaces, people may want to consider switching to more protective masks, said Don Milton, an aerosol expert at the University of Maryland who led the research. "Given that it seems to be evolving towards generating aerosols better, then we need better containment and better personal protection," Dr. Milton said of the virus. "We are recommending people move to tighter-fitting masks."

Google is abandoning plans to pitch bank accounts to its users, marking a retreat from an effort to make the tech giant a bigger name in finance. The Wall Street Journal: The Alphabet unit announced almost two years ago that users of its Google Pay digital wallet would be able to sign up for enhanced checking accounts and debit cards at a handful of financial institutions large and small, including Citigroup and Stanford Federal Credit Union. The new offerings, called Plex accounts, would sync with Google Pay, carry both Google and bank branding and provide a digital dashboard of where and how users spent and saved. Plex was billed as a new way to bank, with an emphasis on simplicity and financial wellness and without monthly or overdraft fees.

The project was initially expected to debut in 2020. A series of missed deadlines, along with the April departure of the Google Pay executive who championed the project, prompted Google to pull the plug on Plex, people familiar with the matter said. A Google spokeswoman said the company would now focus primarily on "delivering digital enablement for banks and other financial services providers rather than us serving as the provider of these services."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Identical twins are living proof of how genetics shapes our looks and traits. Now, researchers have found they carry a molecular signature on their DNA that no one else has -- one that becomes fixed in their cells early in development and stays with them into adulthood. This signature doesn't seem to influence a twin's health, but it could offer insights into how identical twinning happens. "It is a starting point" for solving "what is really an enigma," says Jenny van Dongen, a twin genetics researcher at Free University (VU), Amsterdam. The signature could also be used to test whether a person had a "vanishing twin," an identical twin that died in the womb.

An international team led by van Dongen and VU twin genetics researcher Dorret Boomsma looked for clues in what's known as the epigenome. Patterns of chemical tags called methyl groups glom onto genes, turning them on or off. (Such epigenetic changes are responsible for everything from enabling Peruvians to live at high altitudes to helping the placenta develop.) Using blood and cheek cell samples, the researchers scanned the epigenomes of more than 3000 identical twins, as well as a comparable number of fraternal twins and some twins' parents. They looked at 400,000 different places on each person's genome. About 800 locations had differences in methylation that set identical twins apart from everyone else, the team reports today in Nature Communications. "It's likely something established very early on that is propagated to subsequent cells," van Dongen says.

Some of the methylated or unmethylated spots made sense, such as tags on genes involved in cell adhesion that might influence how easily a fertilized egg splits into two embryos. But changes in other locations, such as the ends of chromosomes, don't have an obvious explanation. These regions have been associated with aging, yet identical twins' life spans are similar to other people's. An epigenetic test might also be useful to determine whether a person once had an identical twin that vanished in the uterus, perhaps because it didn't have enough room or nutrients to grow. Sometimes a twin fetus appears in an ultrasound before vanishing, but other times it may be absorbed without leaving a trace. As many as 12% of pregnancies start out as multiples (including fraternal twins), according to some estimates, but only 2% of twin pairs survive. Using a separate data set, the epigenetic signature could predict whether someone was an identical twin in 70% to 80% of cases, van Dongen says. With data from a large enough group of people, the test would get even better, she says, and it could also help "predict the exact rate" of vanishing twins. That figure would be useful not only for researchers, but also "of broad interest" to twins themselves and to families who are mourning the loss of an identical twin, Boomsma says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Facebook has come under increasing fire in recent days for its effect on young users and its efforts to create products for them. Inside the company, teams of employees have for years been laying plans to attract preteens that go beyond what is publicly known, spurred by fear that Facebook could lose a new generation of users critical to its future. Internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show the company formed a team to study preteens, set a three-year goal to create more products for them and commissioned strategy papers about the long-term business opportunities presented by these potential users. In one presentation, it contemplated whether there might be a way to engage children during play dates. "Why do we care about tweens?" said one document from 2020. "They are a valuable but untapped audience."

The Facebook documents show that competition from rivals, in particular Snap Inc.'s Snapchat and TikTok, is a motivating factor behind its work. [...] Over the past five years, Facebook has made what it called "big bets" on designing products that would appeal to preteens across its services, according to a document from earlier this year. In more than a dozen studies over that period, the documents show, Facebook has tried to understand which products might resonate with children and "tweens" (ages 10 through 12), how these young people view competitors' apps and what concerns their parents. "With the ubiquity of tablets and phones, kids are getting on the internet as young as six years old. We can't ignore this and we have a responsibility to figure it out," said a 2018 document labeled confidential. "Imagine a Facebook experience designed for youth."

Earlier this year, a senior researcher at Facebook presented to colleagues a new approach to how the company should think about designing products for children. It provided a blueprint for how to introduce the company's products to younger children. Rather than offer just two types of products -- those for users 13 and older, and a messenger app for kids -- Facebook should tailor its features to six age brackets, said a slide titled "where we've been, and where we're going." The age brackets included: adults, late teens ages 16 to maturity, teens ages 13 to 15, tweens ages 10 to 12, children ages 5 to 9 and young kids ages zero to four. [...] "Our ultimate goal is messaging primacy with U.S. tweens, which may also lead to winning with teens," one of the documents said. Yesterday, Facebook paused its plans to develop a version of Instagram for kids under 13 after facing pressure from lawmakers.

After weeks of internal strife at the Food and Drug Administration, the agency on Wednesday authorized people over 65 who had received Pfizer-BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine to get a booster shot at least six months after their second injection. The New York Times reports: The F.D.A. also authorized booster shots for adult Pfizer-BioNTech recipients who are at high risk of becoming severely ill with Covid-19 or are at risk of serious complications from the disease due to frequent exposure to the coronavirus at their jobs. The authorization sets up what is likely to be a staggered campaign to deliver the shots, starting with the most vulnerable Americans. It opens the way for possibly tens of millions of vaccinated people to receive boosters at pharmacies, health clinics, doctors' offices and elsewhere. Roughly 22 million Americans are at least six months past their second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About half of them are 65 and older. Millions of Americans who received the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are still waiting to learn whether they, too, can get boosters.

The F.D.A.'s decision will be followed as soon as Thursday by a recommendation from the C.D.C., which issues guidance on vaccine policy for clinicians and public health officials throughout the United States. An advisory committee of the C.D.C. is now in the midst of a two-day meeting on the issue. But even if the C.D.C. takes a different stance, health care providers are now authorized to offer third shots to Pfizer-BioNTech recipients who meet the F.D.A.'s eligibility criteria. The ruling followed weeks of internal disagreement at the F.D.A., where some vaccine regulators openly challenged the idea of offering booster shots to the general population. Public health experts and state officials have criticized what they said were confusing public messages from the Biden administration about who should be eligible for a booster shot and when.

This week the Wall Street Journal reported that a 2018 algorithm change at Facebook "rewarded outrage," according to Facebook's own internal memos. But the Journal says the memos showed "that CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted proposed fixes," and that the memos "offer an unparalleled look at how much Facebook knows about the flaws in its platform and how it often lacks the will or the ability to address them." In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, chief executive of online publisher BuzzFeed, emailed a top official at Facebook Inc. The most divisive content that publishers produced was going viral on the platform, he said, creating an incentive to produce more of it... Mr. Peretti blamed a major overhaul Facebook had given to its News Feed algorithm earlier that year to boost "meaningful social interactions," or MSI, between friends and family, according to internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that quote the email...

Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said the aim of the algorithm change was to strengthen bonds between users and to improve their well-being. Facebook would encourage people to interact more with friends and family and spend less time passively consuming professionally produced content, which research suggested was harmful to their mental health. Within the company, though, staffers warned the change was having the opposite effect, the documents show. It was making Facebook's platform an angrier place. Company researchers discovered that publishers and political parties were reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism. That tactic produced high levels of comments and reactions that translated into success on Facebook. "Our approach has had unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content, such as politics and news," wrote a team of data scientists, flagging Mr. Peretti's complaints, in a memo reviewed by the Journal... They concluded that the new algorithm's heavy weighting of reshared material in its News Feed made the angry voices louder. "Misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares," researchers noted in internal memos.

Some political parties in Europe told Facebook the algorithm had made them shift their policy positions so they resonated more on the platform, according to the documents. "Many parties, including those that have shifted to the negative, worry about the long term effects on democracy," read one internal Facebook report, which didn't name specific parties...

Mr. Zuckerberg resisted some of the proposed fixes, the documents show, because he was worried they might hurt the company's other objective — making users engage more with Facebook.

"A new study finds that Microsoft's companywide shift to remote work has hurt communication and collaboration among different business groups inside the company, threatening employee productivity and long-term innovation," reports GeekWire: That's one of the key findings in a peer-reviewed study of more than 61,000 Microsoft employees, published Thursday morning by Microsoft researchers in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.... The researchers call it a warning sign for other companies, as well. "Without intervention, the effects we discovered have the potential to impact workers' ability to acquire and share new information across groups, and as a result, affect productivity and innovation," they write in an accompanying blog post. "In light of these findings, companies should be thoughtful about if and how they choose to adopt long-term work-from-home policies."

The Microsoft study says remote work has also changed the way employees communicate, causing them to rely more frequently than before on asynchronous communication, such as email and instant messages, and less frequently than before on synchronous communication, such as audio and video calls. "Based on previous research, we believe that the shift to less 'rich' communication media may have made it more difficult for workers to convey and process complex information," the Microsoft researchers write. The study is based on an analysis of anonymized data about emails, calls, meetings, and other work activities by Microsoft employees.
At about the same time, Microsoft published a blog post summarizing the results of its own surveys of Microsoft employees — an opt-in survey of a random sample of 2,500. Some highlights: - In a year when we sent 160,000 people home to work and remotely onboarded 25,000 new employees, the share of people who report feeling included at Microsoft is at an all-time high of 90%. According to surveys, employee confidence and support from our managers is also at an all-time high...

- Our ongoing research shows employees crave more in-person time with their team but wish to keep the flexibility of remote work...
And Microsoft's LinkedIn also surveyed more than 500 C-level executives in the U.S. and U.K., "to better understand how employers are thinking about navigating this new world of work." Top of mind for executives is the same thing on the minds of employees — flexibility. With 87% of people saying they would prefer to stay remote at least half the time, a majority of employers are adapting: 81% of leaders are changing their workplace policies to offer greater flexibility. Despite all the change, leaders feel like there are opportunities ahead — more than half (58%) are optimistic that flexibility will be good for both people and the business.

Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do. From a report:Steve Potash, the bearded and bespectacled president and C.E.O. of OverDrive, spent the second week of March, 2020, on a business trip to New York City. OverDrive distributes e-books and audiobooks -- i.e., "digital content." In New York, Potash met with two clients: the New York Public Library and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. By then, Potash had already heard what he described to me recently as "heart-wrenching stories" from colleagues in China, about neighborhoods that were shut down owing to the coronavirus. He had an inkling that his business might be in for big changes when, toward the end of the week, on March 13th, the N.Y.P.L. closed down and issued a statement: "The responsible thing to do -- and the best way to serve our patrons right now -- is to help minimize the spread of COVID-19." The library added, "We will continue to offer access to e-books."

The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries -- they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books "a lot more expensive, in general, than print books," Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver's public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.

Waymo is going to start shuttling a wider group of passengers around in its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, California -- though they'll have to sign nondisclosure agreements, and there still will be a human safety driver behind the wheel. The Verge reports: It's the second city where the company has expanded its nascent autonomous vehicle offering, as the Google sibling has been performing fully driverless rides without a safety driver in parts of Phoenix, Arizona for more than a year now. Waymo is one of a handful of companies trying to get a commercial service off the ground built around autonomous vehicles, like Argo AI (which is backed by Ford and Volkswagen) and Cruise (which is backed by General Motors).

Waymo has been testing self-driving cars in San Francisco for a decade, dating back to when it was still just a quirky-looking project inside Google. And it has let some Waymo employees ride in the early version of the commercial AV program in San Francisco. But now people can apply through the Waymo One smartphone app to take part in what it's calling the "Trusted Tester" program, which is basically a rebranding of the "Early Rider" program it ran in Phoenix. (Waymo says the Early Rider program in Phoenix will also take on the new name.) People who are accepted into the program will be able to take rides in Waymo's autonomous Jaguar I-Pace SUVs for free but will have to offer feedback in exchange, and they won't be able to publicly share what the experience is like. There will be vehicles that are wheelchair-accessible, too. This is how the company started out the service in Phoenix, though now anyone can hop into one of its vehicles there and even film and share the experience -- warts and all. "From using the Waymo One app, to pickup and drop-offs, to the ride itself, we receive valuable feedback from our riders that allows us to refine our product offering as we advance our service" in San Francisco, the company wrote in a blog post. "We kicked off this program last week with a select few and are now expanding the program to all interested San Franciscans. We'll begin with an initial group and welcome more riders in the weeks to come."

A fugitive who Justice Department officials say had scammed more than 20 people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars was sentenced to four years in prison on Friday, after being on the run for almost 15 years. From a report: Austrian authorities were able to identify Randy Levine, 54, of Boca Raton, Florida, due to a facial recognition system according to the DOJ, after he tried to use an alias to open a bank account, leading to his arrest in June 2020. Levine fled the US in 2005, after authorities seized his passport as part of an investigation into an alleged scam he had been running, the DOJ said in a release. According to Levine's plea agreement, which he signed in May, he would offer to set up gambling accounts for people if they sent him money. To help sell the idea that he really could help people make bets, Levine reportedly played a recording of casino sounds while he was on calls with victims (which he made using a Las Vegas phone number). Levine came under investigation by the FBI, but was able to get a replacement for the passport that law enforcement officials seized, by claiming the passport had simply been lost. He eventually ended up in Poland, where he was arrested in 2008. There was, however, a legal battle over whether he could be extradited to the US, which continued until late 2011. By the time Polish courts had decided that he could be extradited, Levine had already slipped away.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Facebook's mission is to "bring the world closer together." Increasingly, that's about not just connecting friends and family to share messages, but also serving as a platform for people's financial lives. Some $100 billion in payments have been enabled by Facebook over the past year, said David Marcus, who runs the company's financial services unit. But that's just the start of the social network's ambitions in the finance industry, Mr. Marcus writes in a new memo about the country's "broken" payments system, reported in the DealBook newsletter.

At the center of Facebook's push into payments is Novi, a digital wallet intended for users to move money around the world quickly and cheaply (free, in many cases). The company had a plan to pair it with a "stablecoin" cryptocurrency called Libra, but that was shelved amid regulatory scrutiny, and now the scaled-back project, known as Diem, is overseen by an outside nonprofit group seeking the necessary government approvals. In recounting some of Facebook's setbacks in trying to break into the crypto payments industry, Mr. Marcus describes the tech giant, the subject of antitrust inquiries around the world, as an underdog. Facebook faces unfair resistance in the financial industry, he wrote. "I've heard multiple conversations about how this proposal would be so great if only Facebook wasn't involved," he said. "I understand and accept the need for extra scrutiny due to our scale." But Mr. Marcus describes Facebook as a "challenger in the payments industry," with no specific plan yet to monetize use of the Novi wallet, which won't charge for person-to-person payments, even across borders.

He added that allowing users to pay with dollars, euros and other fiat currencies via the Novi wallet would bring a lot of value. "So why not just do that and call it a day?" he wrote. "Well, we might." But before deciding on that, he doesn't want to "waste our shot" at incorporating stablecoins into an "open, interoperable protocol" for online payments. "To have the maximum impact, building a closed system using fiat only wasn't going to cut it," he said in the memo. Mr. Marcus believes that a well-designed stablecoin pegged to a fiat currency, backed one to one in cash reserves, could offer strong consumer protections. It would also provide quicker access to funds than traditional bank accounts. "We will continue to persevere and demonstrate we can be a trusted player in this industry," he wrote, adding that the Novi wallet has licenses or approvals in nearly every U.S. state and that the Diem stablecoin project "has addressed every legitimate concern." Facebook's digital wallet is ready to come to market, Mr. Marcus said, and "we deserve a fair shot." To judge by Facebook's difficulties getting to this point, regulators remain to be convinced.

There is a corner of LinkedIn free from humble brags, self-promotion, thought leadership and strict decorum. You just need to connect with a zoomer. Although LinkedIn is not a popular online hangout for Generation Z, some of their most viral posts are parodies of LinkedIn itself. From a report: Shiv Sharma graduated from the University of Southern California last year, according to his LinkedIn. A few months ago, he updated his profile listing himself as the assistant chef at the fictional restaurant from Sponge Bob Square Pants. "I have accepted an offer to work for The Krusty Krab Restaurant as part of their Entry Level Chef Program in Bikini Bottom," he wrote. The post garnered more than 5,000 reactions and dozens of comments. Harry Tong is a software development intern at a tech company. But, according to a popular post on his profile: "I am officially the CEO of a BILLION dollar company," he wrote. "For my series Z, my mom invested $10 for 0.000001% of my company, giving it a $1 billion valuation."

This subculture of subversion on LinkedIn has inspired countless TikTok videos, a Twitter account called @LinkedinFlex and a devoted Reddit community called LinkedInLunatics. The memes reflect the weariness people feel toward the site -- "primarily a place for bragging," said Jake Zhang, a Toronto-based college student. "People tell stories about how their entire lives have built up to this one moment of getting a job or a promotion, or experts claim they'll change your life with a piece of advice," Tong said. "And I'm just here to poke at the facade a little bit." Most young people treat LinkedIn as a "purely transactional job hunting tool" to be used sparingly, said AJ Wilcox, founder of B2Linked, an advertising agency that specializes in the Microsoft Corp.-owned professional networking site. Maintaining a profile is a "necessary evil," Zhang said. "Everyone I know creates an account due to school or peer pressure," Zhang said. "We use it because there's no alternative for job hunting. But with all the toxic content and bragging, no one I know really likes it." Which is what makes the parodies on LinkedIn so interesting. Most people wouldn't put a joke on their resume. The posts are a byproduct of a generation that lives fearlessly on the internet, eager to entertain and call out any whiff of inauthenticity.

Audi's latest concept car, the skysphere, will be able to drive itself, the company claims. But the real hook is that, as it changes from human driving to self-driving, the body of the skysphere expands by 10 inches from end-to-end. CNN reports: The concept car's long hood extends forward and the steering wheel and pedals fold away. The driver's side of the dashboard, really a glass display panel, and the gear selector also pull away, creating a more comfortable space for the driver to relax. All this is possible because the skysphere is an electric car powered by a motor that's mounted behind the seats. That means there's not much under the hood to get in the way as the front end moves forward and backward.

In its self-driving mode, the skysphere acts like a touring car, an elegant two seater designed for fast comfortable long distance travel. A longer wheelbase -- the distance between the front and back wheels -- is good for road trips because it can give the car a more stable feel on the highway. And without a steering wheel or pedals, the driver can stretch out, relax and enjoy the scenery. In regular human driving mode, it's more like a sports car. The much shorter wheelbase can give the car a quicker, more responsive driving feel. The car also lowers on its suspension almost a half inch closer to the ground. When put in its sports car mode, a steering wheel unfolds from underneath the dashboard and a set of pedals moves into position in the driver's footwell.

This shape-shifting is Audi's attempt to answer a conundrum facing automotive designers. Their advocates say self-driving vehicles can, theoretically, be safer than human drivers, and offer opportunities to rethink what a car can and should be. But among the challenges they face is consumer adoption from people who actually enjoy driving. And Audi, which boasts about the power and performance of its cars, considers those people to be among its core customers. So this car offers them a comforting compromise.

When the pandemic freed employees from having to report to the office, some saw an opportunity to double their salary on the sly. From a report: They were bored. Or worried about layoffs. Or tired of working hard for a meager raise every year. They got another job offer. Now they have a secret. A small, dedicated group of white-collar workers, in industries from tech to banking to insurance, say they have found a way to double their pay: Work two full-time remote jobs, don't tell anyone and, for the most part, don't do too much work, either. Alone in their home offices, they toggle between two laptops. They play "Tetris" with their calendars, trying to dodge endless meetings. Sometimes they log on to two meetings at once. They use paid time off -- in some cases, unlimited -- to juggle the occasional big project or ramp up at a new gig. Many say they don't work more than 40 hours a week for both jobs combined. They don't apologize for taking advantage of a system they feel has taken advantage of them.

[...] Gig work and outsourcing have been on the rise for years. Inflation is now ticking up, chipping away at spending power. Some employees in white-collar fields wonder why they should bother spending time building a career. "The harder that you work, it seems like the less you get," one of the workers with two jobs says. "People depend on you more. My paycheck is the same." Overemployed says it has a solution. "There's no implied lifetime employment anymore, not even at IBM," writes one of the website's co-founders, a 38-year-old who works for two tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. The site serves up tips on setting low expectations with bosses, staying visible at meetings and keeping LinkedIn profiles free of red flags. (A "social-media cleanse" is a solid excuse for an outdated LinkedIn profile, it says.) In a chat on the messaging platform Discord, people from around the world swap advice about employment checks and downtime at various brand-name companies.

Your inbox is now a shopping mall. From a column: Email is one of the few ways companies can reach their customers directly. In fact, people overwhelmingly say that the way they want to hear from brands is by email, Chad S. White, the head of research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, told me. That's why the mailbox software started suppressing messages -- to protect people from companies' temptation to send too many emails. In response, email marketers obsess over "deliverability," or how the content and frequency of their emails might help those messages actually hit your inbox in the first place. But that process has created new and weird feedback loops, in which some companies and certain messages might be able to reach your inbox more readily than before, while others get junked -- condemned to spam, deleted, or the like -- before you see them.

As a result, your personal inbox gradually has become less like a mailbox and more like a wormhole into every business relationship you maintain: your bank; your utility provider; your supermarket; your favorite boutiques, restaurants, housewares providers, and all the rest. It's your own digital commercial district: Opening up email is akin to visiting a little mall in your browser or on your phone, where every shop is right next to every other. A few years ago, Gmail made that metaphor concrete by introducing the promotions folder, recasting spam as marketing. When you're in the mood to shop, just drop into promotions and see what's on offer (or search for a favorite brand to see the latest wares).

Scammers are abusing Instagram's protections against suicide, self-harm, and impersonation to purposefully target and ban Instagram accounts at will, with some people even advertising professionalized ban-as-a-service offerings so anyone can harass or censor others, according to screenshots, interviews, and other material reviewed by Motherboard. From the report: It appears that in some cases, the same scammers who offer ban-as-a-service also offer or are at least connected to services to restore accounts for users who were unfairly banned from Instagram, sometimes for thousands of dollars. "Me (and my friend's) currently have the best ban service on-site/in the world," one advertisement for a ban service on the underground forum OG Users reads. "We have been professionally banning since 2020 and have top-tier experience. We may not have the cheapest prices, but trust me you are getting what you are paying for."

War, the pseudonymous user offering the ban service, told Motherboard in a Telegram message that banning "is pretty much a full time job lol." They claimed to have made over five-figures from selling Instagram bans in under a month. War charges $60 per ban, according to their listing. Another banner on a different underground forum offers the service for between 5 euros and 30 euros per account, depending on the number of followers. That listing advertised bans for accounts up to 5,000 followers, but claimed that higher follower accounts are also possible to ban. The first listing said it can impact accounts with up to 99,000 followers. War said they didn't know why particular customers may use their service, but added "obviously individuals who have money to throw around." Both listings say that a target account must have a human in the profile photo. In War's case, they said they ban users by filing a fraudulent impersonation complaint to Instagram.

For banned accounts, victims generally have to provide Instagram with several pieces of information such as their name, phone number, and linked email address [...]. [P]reviously, once an account was banned, the owner could try to restore it themselves straight away. Recently, Instagram introduced a 24 hour buffer window where a user has to wait before trying to restore the account, they said. But it appears that in other cases some of the people offering restore services are connected to those banning the accounts in the first place. [S]ome victims receive a message offering account restoration immediately after being banned, and that in their own case, the two accounts that launched the ban attack and the one offering the restore service follow each other on Instagram.