Slashdot has been following El Salvador's pioneering adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender last week.

But by Friday Reuters was reporting that "For a fourth day in a row technical glitches have beset the Salvadoran government's bitcoin digital wallet Chivo, a setback that could discourage residents from signing up to the app promoted by President Nayib Bukele. Problems accessing the wallet, withdrawing money from ATMs, and data verification, as well as the government not depositing the $30 (€25) bonus Bukele promised all Chivo users were the most frequent issues, according to interviews with at least 10 users and user complaints posted on Twitter and Facebook.

Melvin Vasquez, a 30-year-old tattoo artist, downloaded Chivo on Tuesday, when the Bitcoin law went into effect, but has since been unable to use it... User complaints were also stacking up in Apple's App Store and Alphabet's Google Play...

[M]any of the very people sending or receiving dollars to El Salvador are mistrustful of Bitcoin. Some expressed fears of losing money, given the high volatility of the cryptocurrency.

The Covid-19 pandemic has severely set back the fight against other global scourges like H.I.V., tuberculosis and malaria, according to a sobering new report released on Tuesday. From a report: Before the pandemic, the world had been making strides against these illnesses. Overall, deaths from those diseases have dropped by about half since 2004. "The advent of a fourth pandemic, in Covid, puts these hard-fought gains in great jeopardy," said Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, a nonprofit organization promoting H.I.V. treatment worldwide. The pandemic has flooded hospitals and disrupted supply chains for tests and treatments. In many poor countries, the coronavirus crisis diverted limited public health resources away from treatment and prevention of these diseases. Many fewer people sought diagnosis or medication, because they were afraid of becoming infected with the coronavirus at clinics. And some patients were denied care because their symptoms, such as a cough or a fever, resembled those of Covid-19.

Unless comprehensive efforts to beat back the illnesses resume, "we'll continue to play emergency response and global health Whac-a-Mole," Mr. Warren said. The report was compiled by the Global Fund, an advocacy group that funds campaigns against H.I.V., malaria and tuberculosis. Before the arrival of the coronavirus, TB was the biggest infectious-disease killer worldwide, claiming more than one million lives each year. The pandemic has exacerbated the damage. In 2020, about one million fewer people were tested and treated for TB, compared with 2019 -- a drop of about 18 percent, according to the new report. The number of people treated for drug-resistant TB declined by 19 percent, and for extensively drug-resistant TB by 37 percent. Nearly 500,000 people were diagnosed with drug-resistant TB in 2019.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: It looks like a Lightning cable, it works like a Lightning cable, and I can use it to connect my keyboard to my Mac. But it is actually a malicious cable that can record everything I type, including passwords, and wirelessly send that data to a hacker who could be more than a mile away. This is the new version of a series of penetration testing tools made by the security researcher known as MG. MG previously demoed an earlier version of the cables for Motherboard at the DEF CON hacking conference in 2019. Shortly after that, MG said he had successfully moved the cables into mass production, and cybersecurity vendor Hak5 started selling the cables. But the more recent cables come in new physical variations, including Lightning to USB-C, and include more capabilities for hackers to play with.

"There were people who said that Type C cables were safe from this type of implant because there isn't enough space. So, clearly, I had to prove that wrong. :)," MG told Motherboard in an online chat. The OMG Cables, as they're called, work by creating a Wi-Fi hotspot itself that a hacker can connect to from their own device. From here, an interface in an ordinary web browser lets the hacker start recording keystrokes. The malicious implant itself takes up around half the length of the plastic shell, MG said. MG said that the new cables now have geofencing features, where a user can trigger or block the device's payloads based on the physical location of the cable. "It pairs well with the self-destruct feature if an OMG Cable leaves the scope of your engagement and you do not want your payloads leaking or being accidentally run against random computers," he said. "We tested this out in downtown Oakland and were able to trigger payloads at over 1 mile," he added. He said that the Type C cables allow the same sort of attacks to be carried out against smartphones and tablets. Various other improvements include being able to change keyboard mappings, the ability to forge the identity of specific USB devices, such as pretending to be a device that leverages a particular vulnerability on a system.

"In 2016, the International Renewable Energy Agency estimated that as much as 78 million tons of solar-panel waste will be generated by 2050," writes a Bloomberg columnist, adding that that's "almost certainly an undercount..." So what will happen to all those used solar panels?

"Across the developing world, homeowners, farmers, and businesses are turning to cheap, secondhand solar to fill power gaps left by governments and utilities," reports Bloomberg. To meet that demand, businesses ranging from individual sellers on Facebook Marketplace to specialized brokerages are getting into the trade. Earlier this month, Marubeni Corp., one of Japan's largest trading houses, announced that it's establishing a blockchain-based market for such panels. Collectively, these businesses will likely play a crucial role in bringing renewable energy to the world's emerging markets — and keeping high-tech waste out of the trash...

They may not be good enough for San Francisco homeowners and cutting-edge utilities, but they work perfectly well for anyone in a sunny climate in need of stable, off-grid power who doesn't want to pay full price. That's potentially a huge market. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of people living without electricity declined from 1.2 billion to 759 million worldwide. Some of that gap was closed by new power lines and other transmission facilities. But most of it was achieved by installing small solar systems designed to power a village, farm or even a single home. As of last year, 420 million people got their electricity from off-grid solar systems. By 2030, according to the World Bank, that number could nearly double.
A staffer at the used solar equipment exchange EnergyBin said they sometimes have 5 million pieces of photovoltaic equipment on their site.

And one broker estimated there were 10 million used solar panels on the global market, saying his own customers included Pakistani farmers pumping water for irrigation and Lebanese hoteliers seeking alternatives to an unreliable local grid.

In Facebook's "widely viewed content report" released last week, The Verge's Casey Newton noticed something arguably just as damning as the spread of COVID-19 misinformation or rise of vaccine hesitancy: almost all of the most-viewed posts on Facebook over the past quarter were effectively plagiarized from elsewhere. From the report: Facebook's report details the top 20 most widely viewed posts on the network over the past three months. One of the posts was deleted before Facebook published it. Of the remaining 19, though, only four appear to have been original. The remaining 15 had been published in at least one other place first, and were then re-uploaded to Facebook, sometimes with small changes. [...] Facebook has long been home to reappropriated content, from the freebooting scandal during 2017's pivot to video to the more recent phenomenon of Instagram's Reels being flooded with videos bearing TikTok watermarks. But this kind of dumb, cheap growth hacking should sound familiar to anyone who paid even passing attention to the 2016 election. Russia's infamous Internet Research Agency commissioned a troll army to build up big followings on innocuous-seeming Facebook pages using a wide variety of engagement bait, then gradually shifted those pages to begin sharing more divisive political memes.

That's all much harder to do now, thanks to a variety of measures Facebook has taken to make it more difficult for people to disguise their identities or countries of origin. The company now routinely removes networks of pages where the creators' identities are suspect. And it's worth saying that in the most recent election, inauthentic behavior of the 2016 variety did not play a significant role. Most importantly, Facebook now has a policy against "abusive audience building" -- switching topics and repeatedly changing a page's name for the purpose of growing a following. But it seems notable that for domestic actors, the tactics not only work, but remain the most effective way to reach a large audience five years later. Steal some questions that went viral somewhere else, spam them on your page, and presto: you're one of the most-viewed links for the entire quarter on the world's biggest social network. "The plagiarists who dominate Facebook's top 20 links are likely doing it primarily for clout and ill-gotten audience growth," Casey goes on to say. "But some of the other characters here appear to have more direct monetary incentives..."

South Korea is ending a law it announced in 2011 that blocked young gamers from accessing game websites after midnight. "South Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, as well as the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, say that they're ending the law to respect children's rights and encourage at-home education," reports Engadget. "The country aims to abolish the law by the end of the year when it revises its Youth Protection Act." From the report: The news doesn't mean underage gamers are entirely off the hook, though. Instead, excessive gaming will be managed by the country's "choice permit" system, which lets parents and guardians arrange approved play times. Still, that sounds more permissive than China's gaming curfew, which bans players under 18 from playing between 10PM and 8AM. Additionally, they're limited to 90 minutes of game time during weekdays, and three hours on weekends and holidays.

As Kotaku reports, the shutdown law was originally meant to curb PC gaming, but it also affected consoles. Sony's PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live ended up restricting their accounts to adults. That's why Minecraft is now an R-rated game in the country. "In the changing media environment, the ability of children to decide for themselves and protect themselves has become important more than anything," Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Yoo Eun-hae said, according to The Korea Times. "We will work with related ministries to systematically support media and game-use education at schools, homes, and in society so that young people can develop these abilities, and continue to make efforts to create a sound gaming environment and various leisure activities for children."

While critics allege YouTube puts profits over public safety, product head Neal Mohan insists that the Google-owned video site is working to be a better content moderator in part because it is good for business. From a report: Users spend billions of hours watching videos on YouTube, and the site's content recommendations shape how that time is spent. Facebook and Twitter tend to get more attention on content moderation, but YouTube remains an equally important information battleground. YouTube is announcing Monday that it now has two million people in its programs that enable creators to get paid. Mohan said a huge part of his focus is trying to find ways to make sure those who play by the rules are rewarded.

"99.9% of creators are looking to do the right thing," Mohan told Axios, noting that YouTube has paid out $30 billion over the last three years. In addition to the 14-year-old program that shares ad money for popular videos, YouTube has also added ways for creators to sell merchandise or be directly compensated by users. YouTube still faces challenges in making sure it is the creators "doing the right thing" who are benefiting the most, rather than spreaders of viral misinformation. It's not just those getting paid by Google who can benefit from gaming the system. Creators with a large enough following can make money indirectly even if they've been "demonetized" -- removed from YouTube's own payment programs. In the "vast, vast majority of cases that's a good thing," Mohan said, though he acknowledges that it does create opportunities for some creators to profit from borderline content that doesn't meet YouTube's bar.

Dom Hofmann, one of Vine's founders, has a new project called Supdrive. He calls it an "on-chain fantasy game console" that plays classic-style games with NFTs acting as a sort of virtual cartridge. The Verge reports: In a Discord set up for Supdrive, Hofmann wrote that the games will be NFTs, running on virtual firmware. The fact that games will be released as NFTs means that there will only be so many "editions" or copies available. Hofmann also says that each copy of a given game will be unique, with players getting different color palettes, difficulty levels, and more. Hofmann compares Supdrive to another blockchain project, Art Blocks, while describing it, which may give us an idea of what it'll actually be like. The gist of Art Blocks is that it lets creators make programs to procedurally generate art, which is then stored on the blockchain. The programs will always create the same art for a given seed, but changing the seed changes what the art ends up looking like (Minecraft players may be familiar with this sort of system). Then, people buy NFTs for an Art Block project, which will contain a seed, letting them generate that art.

This seems to fit well with what Hofmann is describing, where an on-chain console will play unique games. The details, though, like how exactly it will work, how many copies of each game will be available, and how much they'll cost, are all to be announced. Hofmann's post does say that the plan is to let the community develop games for the Supdrive, if the project ends up working out. He also plans on upgrading the console's abilities, allowing for more advanced games (the initial set of games will be "old-school arcade style"). The first game, made by Hofmann, is called Origin.

Supdrive also has a sort of meta game, with its users being split up into Pokemon-esque Red, Green, and Blue teams. Hofmann's announcement post says that which team you're on could have an effect on the game you're playing. For now, though, the different color teams are mostly memeing at each other in the Discord. In the Discord chat, Hofmann said he was aiming for an October launch for the project. He's also said that he'll be doing updates "every week or so" leading up to the launch.

For years, a mysterious figure has been stealing books before their release. Is it espionage? Revenge? Or a complete waste of time? Vulture: On the spectrum of cyberattacks, this one wasn't very complex. There was no malicious software or actual hacking involved. Some of the earliest victims used Gmail accounts for work, which were easy and free to spoof. Registering an alternate domain and setting up an email server was only slightly more involved, and the possibilities were endless: t's became f's (@wwnorfon.com), q's replaced g's (@wylieaqency.com), r's and n's cornbined to make m's (@penguinrandornhouse.com). The domains suggested someone who liked to play with words as much as code. Books became bocks, unless the company was Dutch, in which case boek was Anglicized to book.

What did seem sophisticated was the thief's knowledge of the business. The culprit wrote like someone in publishing, abbreviating to "MS" for manuscript and "WEL" for world English-language rights, while exchanging insider chatter, telling one victim that a publisher was pitching a book as a comp to Pachinko and expressing surprise to another that a novel had recently sold for a shocking amount. The thief sent messages in the wake of announcements on Publishers Marketplace, a subscription website that tracks deals, but they also asked about books that the thief's marks didn't even know existed. The mimicry wasn't always perfect -- an assistant at the talent agency WME realized her boss was being impersonated because she would never say "please" or "thank you" -- but the impression was good enough.

What's more, the thief seemed to have a strong grasp of the rarefied world of international publishing. The first emails, in the fall of 2016, traveled almost exclusively among the small group of people who handle the flow of manuscripts between countries, including a foreign-rights manager in Greece, an editor in Spain, and an agent selling international writers in the Chinese market. In the attempted "Millennium" heist, only a few dozen people in the world knew the book was being shared with foreign publishers and that Mork and Altrov Berg controlled access to it.

Medium's technology blog OneZero provides a great example of the new field of "digital humanities": Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There's something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people. It's as if Shakespeare somehow wove a tiny bit of creepiness into every single line. The literary scholar George Walton Williams described the "continuous sense of menace" and "horror" that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes. For centuries, Shakespeare fans and theater folk have wondered about this, but could never quite explain it.

Then a clever bit of data analysis in 2014 uncovered the reason... It turns out that Macbeth uncanny flavor springs from the unusual way that Shakespeare deploys one particular word, over and over again. That word?

"The...."

As Hope and Witmore note, you'd expect Macbeth to refer to "my hand" and "my eye". By writing it as "the hand" and "the eye", Shakespeare neatly evokes the way Macbeth is beginning to be tormented by his own decisions; he disassociates from his own body. In a few acts he'll be a totally unravelled mess...

[T]his is one of my favorite examples of using data analysis to ponder literature. The field of the "digital humanities" — which often involves using data analysis to study books — can get a bad rap sometimes... But what's so delightful about Hope and Witmore's work is how it's genuinely a cyborg, centaur piece of literary analysis... They started by pondering a phenomenon that has puzzled Shakespeare fans for centuries. They did some data analysis that pointed to the word "the". But to figure out why "the" was so key, they had to go back and reread the play closely, engaging in a very rich line-by-line literary analysis. The computation existed as a set of fresh alien eyes, telling the humans where to direct their attention. But it was up to the humans to find the meaning.

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.

Netflix has stepped up its efforts to ban VPN and proxy users from bypassing geographical restrictions. The streaming service is now blocking residential IP addresses too, since some unblocking tools use these to bypass restrictions. This isn't without collateral damage as many regular Internet users without a VPN now report "missing content" on Netflix. TorrentFreak reports: There is a flurry of complaints on social media from users whose VPN services were suddenly 'blocked' by Netflix. Previously, these people couldn't play any content while using a VPN. That changed last year. Now, VPN users can still see Netflix originals while other content is hidden and blocked. https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-is-less-annoying-to-vpn-users-now-but-some-titles-are-hidden-200618/

Netflix doesn't explain which IP addresses are blocked and why, but the most recent efforts are much broader than before. This issue was brought to our attention by WeVPN, which noticed that the updated geo-fencing system is blocking its residential IP addresses. These IP addresses are assigned to common consumer ISPs such as AT&T, Comcast, Verizon. While it makes sense for Netflix to put an end to these workarounds, there appears to be some collateral damage. "The collateral damage is that you have hundreds of thousands of legitimate residential Netflix subscribers blocked from accessing Netflix's local country full catalog from their home," a WeVPN spokesperson informs us. While we are unable to verify how many people are facing issues, it is clear that the measures are spilling over to regular subscribers.

While Netflix hasn't released an official comment on the situation, the company is aware of the problems. One user who complained on Twitter, got the advice to contact their ISP to see if their IP address is associated with proxy or VPN use. This is a peculiar suggestion, as the blocking is taking place on Netflix's end. WeVPN told us that the company is experimenting with a solution, which appears to function for now. CyberGhost and Private Internet Access, which were also affected by Netflix's new blockades, say they managed to route around it within a day. In an update, a Netflix spokesperson said that the company is not banning all content for VPN and proxy services. Netflix originals are still available and the streaming service is working with people who were inadvertently affected to restore access to the full library.

Instead of having AI in a self-driving car decide whether to kill its driver or pedestrians, the Washington Post reports there's a new philosophy gaining traction: Why not stop cars from getting in life-or-death situations in the first place? (Alternate URL): After all, the whole point of automated cars is to create road conditions where vehicles are more aware than humans are, and thus better at predicting and preventing accidents. That might avoid some of the rare occurrences where human life hangs in the balance of a split-second decision... The best way to kill or injure people probably isn't a decision you'd like to leave up to your car, or the company manufacturing it, anytime soon. That's the thinking now about advanced AI: It's supposed to prevent the scenarios that lead to crashes, making the choice of who's to die one that the AI should never have to face.

Humans get distracted by texting, while cars don't care what your friends have to say. Humans might miss objects obscured by their vehicle's blind spot. Lidar can pick those things up, and 360 cameras should work even if your eyes get tired. Radar can bounce around from one vehicle to the next, and might spot a car decelerating up ahead faster than a human can... [Serial entrepreneur Barry] Lunn is the founder and CEO of Provizio, an accident-prevention technology company. Provizio's secret sauce is a "five-dimensional" vision system made up of high-end radar, lidar and camera imaging. The company builds an Intel vision processor and Nvidia graphics processor directly onto its in-house radar sensor, enabling cars to run machine-learning algorithms directly on the radar sensor. The result is a stack of perception technology that sees farther and wider, and processes road data faster than traditional autonomy tech, Lunn says. Swift predictive analytics gives vehicles and drivers more time to react to other cars.

The founder has worked in vision technology for nearly a decade and has previously worked with NASA, General Motors and Boeing under the radar company Arralis, which Lunn sold in 2017. The start-up is in talks with big automakers, and its vision has a strong team of trailblazers behind it, including Scott Thayer and Jeff Mishler, developers of early versions of autonomous tech for Google's Waymo and Uber... Lunn thinks the auto industry prematurely pushed autonomy as a solution, long before it was safe or practical to remove human drivers from the equation. He says AI decision-making will play a pivotal role in the future of auto safety, but only after it has been shown to reduce the issues that lead to crashes. The goal is the get the tech inside passenger cars so that the system can learn from human drivers, and understand how they make decisions before allowing the AI to decide what happens in specified instances.

People will no longer be able to play the digital version of The New York Times daily crossword puzzle in third-party apps, according to an announcement made by the Times on Monday. The Verge reports: Starting August 10th, the crossword will be available digitally only via the NYT site or on its own crossword app. Downloadable PDFs, in addition to the physical newspaper, will still be available for people who want to print and play. Until now, crosswords were available in the Across Lite .puz file format, so anyone with a Times games subscription could download a puzzle and open it in the desktop or mobile app of their choice. The change applies not just to future puzzles but to the archive of puzzles that are currently in the .puz format.

Everdeen Mason, editorial director of games at the Times, said on Twitter that she made the decision to end .puz support in an effort to build something where editors can "edit and make games rather than adapt things for tools we can't control."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The number of people applying for admission to law school this fall surged nearly 13%, making it the largest year-over-year percentage increase since 2002, according to the latest data from the Law School Admission Council. And they were an impressive bunch. The number of people applying with LSAT scores in the highest band of 175 to 180 more than doubled from 732 last year to 1,487 this year. In total, 71,048 people applied to American Bar Association-accredited law schools this cycle, up from 62,964 at this point in 2020. That's still significantly lower than the historic high of 100,601 applicants in 2004, but it's by far the largest national applicant pool of the past decade.

Experts attribute the crush of applications to a number of factors, particularly the slowdown in the entry-level job market caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Law school and other graduate programs historically become more popular when jobs are tougher to come by in slow economies. Law school applicants shot up nearly 18% in 2002, amid the bursting of the so-called dot-com bubble. The number of people applying also climbed nearly 4% in 2009, amid the Great Recession. But current events separate from the economy also prompted more people to consider a law degree this cycle [...]. The death of George Floyd, the national reckoning over systemic racism and inequality, and the death of iconic U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg all focused attention on the rule of law and the role lawyers play in pushing for a more equitable society. Election years also tend to yield more law school applicants.

Google's updated its inappropriate content policy to ban "compensated sexual relationships" -- i.e., sugar daddy or sugar dating apps. Ryne Hager writes via Android Police: If somehow you aren't familiar with the term, a "sugar daddy" is more than a caramel candy on a stick. In the more common vernacular, a sugar daddy is a person -- usually an older man, but you could have a "sugar mommy" or maybe a gender-neutral "sugar parent?" -- that spends or gives money in what is typically a transactional relationship, often for sexual favors.

I don't judge, different people enjoy different things, and if all parties are consenting with full knowledge, I don't see how an arrangement like that really harms anyone. But, it seems Google does care, though the company is clear it's not objecting to the nature of the relationship, merely the fact that they're often sexual relationships with a perceived compensation basis, and the company has a blanket ban on sexual content -- at least partly ignoring the primary impulse for many customers behind more generalized dating apps like Tinder and Hinge, as well as many of the messages that even mainstream dating app users swap.

Toyota bet on hydrogen power, but as the world moves toward electric the company is fighting climate regulations in an apparent effort to buy time. From a report: The Toyota Prius hybrid was a milestone in the history of clean cars, attracting millions of buyers worldwide who could do their part for the environment while saving money on gasoline. But in recent months, Toyota, one of the world's largest automakers, has quietly become the industry's strongest voice opposing an all-out transition to electric vehicles -- which proponents say is critical to fighting climate change.

Last month, Chris Reynolds, a senior executive who oversees government affairs for the company, traveled to Washington for closed-door meetings with congressional staff members and outlined Toyota's opposition to an aggressive transition to all-electric cars. He argued that gas-electric hybrids like the Prius and hydrogen-powered cars should play a bigger role, according to four people familiar with the talks. Behind that position is a business quandary: Even as other automakers have embraced electric cars, Toyota bet its future on the development of hydrogen fuel cells -- a costlier technology that has fallen far behind electric batteries -- with greater use of hybrids in the near term. That means a rapid shift from gasoline to electric on the roads could be devastating for the company's market share and bottom line.

When the 150,000-member "megachurch" Hillsong opened a branch in Atlanta, its pastor Sam Collier says Facebook suggested using it to explore how churches can "go further farther on Facebook..." reports the New York Times: He is partnering with Facebook, he said, "to directly impact and help churches navigate and reach the consumer better."

"Consumer isn't the right word," he said, correcting himself. "Reach the parishioner better."
Facebook's involvement with churches has been intense: For months Facebook developers met weekly with Hillsong and explored what the church would look like on Facebook and what apps they might create for financial giving, video capability or livestreaming. When it came time for Hillsong's grand opening in June, the church issued a news release saying it was "partnering with Facebook" and began streaming its services exclusively on the platform.

Beyond that, Mr. Collier could not share many specifics — he had signed a nondisclosure agreement...

"Together we are discovering what the future of the church could be on Facebook..."

[Facebook] has been cultivating partnerships with a wide range of faith communities over the past few years, from individual congregations to large denominations, like the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ. Now, after the coronavirus pandemic pushed religious groups to explore new ways to operate, Facebook sees even greater strategic opportunity to draw highly engaged users onto its platform. The company aims to become the virtual home for religious community, and wants churches, mosques, synagogues and others to embed their religious life into its platform, from hosting worship services and socializing more casually to soliciting money. It is developing new products, including audio and prayer sharing, aimed at faith groups...

The partnerships reveal how Big Tech and religion are converging far beyond simply moving services to the internet. Facebook is shaping the future of religious experience itself, as it has done for political and social life... The collaborations raise not only practical questions, but also philosophical and moral ones... There are privacy worries too, as people share some of their most intimate life details with their spiritual communities. The potential for Facebook to gather valuable user information creates "enormous" concerns, said Sarah Lane Ritchie, a lecturer in theology and science at the University of Edinburgh...

"Corporations are not worried about moral codes," she said. "I don't think we know yet all the ways in which this marriage between Big Tech and the church will play out." Last month Facebook held a summit "which resembled a religious service," the Times reports, at which Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said churches were a natural fit for Facebook "because fundamentally both are about connection."

But the article also notes the 6-million member Church of God in Christ "received early access to several of Facebook's monetization features," testing paid subscriptions for exclusive church content, as well as real-time donations during services. But "Leaders decided against a third feature: advertisements during video streams."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GameSpot: Amazon [...] is now bricking high-end graphics cards with a beta for its MMO, New World, according to players. Amazon has now responded to downplay the incident but says it plans to implement a frame rate cap on the game's menus. According to users on Twitter and Reddit, New World has been frying extremely high-end graphics cards, namely Nvidia's RTX 3090. It's worth noting that while the RTX 3090 has an MSRP of $1,500, it's often selling for much more due to scarcity and scalpers, so players could easily be losing upwards of $2,000 if their card stops working.

Specifically, it seems that one model of the RTX 3090 is being consistently fried by New World. On Reddit, a lengthy thread of over 600 posts includes multiple users claiming that their EVGA 3090 graphics cards are now little more than expensive paperweights after playing the New World beta. The "red light of death," an indicator that something is disastrously wrong with your EVGA 3090, doesn't pop up consistently for players though. Some report their screen going black after a cutscene in the game while others have said that simply using the brightness calibration screen was enough to brick their card. Amazon Games says a patch is on the way to prevent further issues. "Hundreds of thousands of people played in the New World Closed Beta yesterday, with millions of total hours played. We've received a few reports of players using high-performance graphics cards experiencing hardware failure when playing New World," said Amazon Games in an official statement.

"New World makes standard DirectX calls as provided by the Windows API. We have seen no indication of widespread issues with 3090s, either in the beta or during our many months of alpha testing. The New World Closed Beta is safe to play. In order to further reassure players, we will implement a patch today that caps frames per second on our menu screen. We're grateful for the support New World is receiving from players around the world, and will keep listening to their feedback throughout Beta and beyond."

New World is currently set to launch for PC on August 31.

Chinese regulators are considering serious, perhaps unprecedented, penalties for Didi Global after its controversial initial public offering last month, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: Regulators see the ride-hailing giant's decision to go public despite pushback from the Cyberspace Administration of China as a challenge to Beijing's authority, the people said, asking not to be named because the matter is private. Officials from the CAC, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of State Security, the Ministry of Natural Resources, along with tax, transport and antitrust regulators, began an investigation on-site at the company's offices, the cyberspace watchdog said in a statement. Regulators are weighing a range of potential punishments, including a fine, suspension of certain operations or the introduction of a state-owned investor, the people said. Also possible is a forced delisting or withdrawal of Didi's U.S. shares, although it's unclear how such an option would play out.

Deliberations are at a preliminary phase and the outcomes are far from certain. Beijing is likely to impose harsher sanctions on Didi than on Alibaba Group Holding, which swallowed a record $2.8 billion fine after a months-long antitrust investigation and agreed to initiate measures to protect merchants and customers, the people said. "It's hard to guess what the penalty will be, but I'm sure it will be substantial," said Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California.