Last year Redwood Materials announced a new program recycling EV batteries (including partnerships with Ford and Volvo). Now Politico reports that America's Department of Energy tentatively awarded them a $2 billion loan, "which the company says will allow it to produce enough battery materials to enable the production of more than a million electric vehicles a year." The Nevada-based company said it plans to ultimately ramp up to producing 100 gigawatt-hours annually of ultra-thin battery-grade materials from both new and recycled sources in the United States for the first time." Redwood founder CEO JB Straubel, who previously worked at Tesla, said at an event announcing the loan that he had a "front row seat" while at the Elon Musk-helmed electric vehicle maker to "some of the bigger challenges the the entire industry would face as it scales," particularly around the battery materials supply chain. "It was somewhat clear even way back then, eight years ago, that this would be a really big bottleneck for the entire industry as it scaled," Straubel said....

Redwood plans to manufacture battery anodes, containing copper and graphite, and cathodes, containing all the critical metals in a battery — like lithium, nickel, and cobalt — amounting to nearly 80 percent of the materials cost of a lithium-ion battery.
A Detroit newspaper reports Ford will also announce plans Monday to help build a $2.5 billion electric-vehicle battery plant in Michigan.

In fact, this year in America some electric cars could become "as cheap as or cheaper than cars with internal combustion engines," reports the New York Times — specifically because of "increased competition, government incentives and falling prices for lithium and other battery materials."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Meta has routinely fought data scrapers, but it also participated in that practice itself -- if not necessarily for the same reasons. Bloomberg has obtained legal documents from a Meta lawsuit against a former contractor, Bright Data, indicating that the Facebook owner paid its partner to scrape other websites. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed the relationship in a discussion with Bloomberg, but said his company used Bright Data to build brand profiles, spot "harmful" sites and catch phishing campaigns, not to target competitors.

Stone added that data scraping could serve "legitimate integrity and commercial purposes" so long as it was done legally and honored sites' terms of service. Meta terminated its arrangement with Bright Data after the contractor allegedly violated company terms when gathering and selling data from Facebook and Instagram. Neither Bright Data nor Meta is saying which sites they scraped. Bright Data is countersuing Meta in a bid to keep scraping Facebook and Instagram, arguing that it only collects publicly available information and respects both European Union and US regulations.

HPE and Oracle have settled their long-running legal case over alleged copyright infringement regarding Solaris software updates for HPE customers, but it looks like the nature of the settlement is going to remain under wraps. The Register reports: The pair this week informed [PDF] the judge overseeing the case that they'd reached a mutual settlement and asked for the case to be dismissed "with prejudice" -- ie, permanently. The settlement agreement is confidential, and its terms won't be made public. The case goes back to at least 2016, when Oracle filed a lawsuit against HPE over the rights to support the Solaris operating system. HPE and a third company, software support outfit Terix, were accused of offering Solaris support for customers while the latter was not an authorized Oracle partner.

Big Red's complaint claimed HPE had falsely represented to customers that it and Terix could lawfully provide Solaris Updates and other support services at a lower cost than Oracle, and that the two had worked together to provide customers with access to such updates. The suit against HPE was thrown out of court in 2019, but revived in 2021 when a judge denied HPE's motion for a summary judgement in the case. Terix settled its case in 2015 for roughly $58 million. Last year, the case went to court and in June a jury found HPE guilty of providing customers with Solaris software updates without Oracle's permission, awarding the latter $30 million for copyright infringement.

But that wasn't the end of the matter, because HPE was back a couple of months later to appeal the verdict, claiming the complaint by Oracle that it had directly infringed copyrights with regard to Solaris were not backed by sufficient evidence. This hinged on HPE claiming that Oracle had failed to prove that any of the patches and updates in question were actually protected by copyright, but also that Oracle could not prove HPE had any control over Terix in its purported infringement activities. Oracle for its part filed a motion asking the court for a permanent injunction against HPE to prevent it copying or distributing the Solaris software, firmware or support materials, except as allowed by Oracle. Now it appears that the two companies have come to some mutually acceptable out-of-court arrangement, as often happens in acrimonious and long-running legal disputes.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday asked the Biden administration to weigh in on song-lyric website Genius' attempt to revive a lawsuit over Google's alleged theft of its work. From a report: The justices are considering whether to hear ML Genius Holdings LLC's bid to overturn a U.S. appeals court's ruling that its case against Google LLC was preempted by federal copyright law. The Supreme Court often asks for the solicitor general's input on cases in which the U.S. government may have an interest.

Genius, formerly known as Rap Genius, keeps a database of song lyrics and annotations maintained by volunteers. It sued Google and its partner LyricFind in New York state court in 2019 for allegedly posting its lyric transcriptions at the top of Google search results without permission. Genius argued Google violated its terms of service by stealing its work and reposting it on Google webpages, decreasing traffic to Genius' site. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in March affirmed a decision to dismiss the case, finding Genius' breach-of-contract claims were based on copyright concerns and should have been brought under copyright law.

U.S. telecom providers, under a new FCC order, will have to take "all necessary steps" to block calls from a shady communication company engaged in a mass robocall scam preying on people seeking student loan forgiveness. From a report: The scammer company, called Urth Access, LLC, would reportedly spam users with calls urging them to forfeit their personal information or pay a fee in order to receive up to around $10,000 in student loan debt relief. Many of the scams reportedly referred to the Biden Administration's student loan forgiveness plan to give the messages a semblance of credibility. Though numerous fraudsters took part in the scam, an investigation conducted by the FCC and its private partner YouMail said Urth Access stood apart as the largest, accounting for around 40% of the robocalls in October.

"Scam robocalls try to pull from the headlines to confuse consumers," FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. "Trying to take advantage of people who want help paying off their student loans. Today we're cutting these scammers off so they can't use efforts to provide student loan debt relief as cover for fraud." The new order asks telecommunications companies to cease accepting phone calls coming from Urath Access, or report efforts they are making to limit Urath's reach in an effort to shut down the scams.

The newly elected government in Pacific island nation of Vanuatu encountered a serious problem from the very first day of its term on Nov. 6 -- no one could use their government email accounts. But then the situation got worse. Much worse. From a report: Officials could not use any government computer services, from renewing a drivers' license to paying taxes or accessing medical and emergency information. They were forced to turn to 20th century technology -- pen and paper. That's a major problem in a nation where the population of around 320,000 people is distributed across dozens of islands north of New Zealand. "Imagine if in the U.S. or the U.K. or Australia, a new government has started and there's a whole changeover ... you can't even allocate email addresses to your new staff, you can't coordinate what's happening between ministers," Glen Craig, managing partner of the consulting firm Pacific Advisory, told NPR in a phone interview.

"We're the first country in the world that this has happened to. ... It's not a good time in Vanuatu, I can assure you," continued Craig, who also serves as chairman of the Vanuatu Business Resilience Council. After more than three weeks of working on the problem, Prime Minister Alatoi Ishmael Kalsakau told local news outlets Wednesday that services were 70 percent restored. However, the disruption continues. Vanuatu's government officials first discovered suspicious activity on their networks, many of which are centrally connected, on Nov. 6. They revealed the breach to local media several days later, but have so far been fairly tight lipped about the extent of the damage, the possible culprits, and what's being done to recover service. Some sources have suggested the attack was ransomware, in which cybercriminals break in and take data hostage in exchange for payment, though the government has not officially confirmed whether that's the case or addressed whether a ransom payment was made.

Elon Musk's SpaceX is expanding its Starlink satellite technology into military applications with a new business line called Starshield. CNBC reports: "While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use," the company wrote on its website. Few details are available about the intended scope and capabilities of Starshield. The company hasn't previously announced tests or work on Starshield technology.

On its website, SpaceX said the system will have "an initial focus" on three areas: Imagery, communications and "hosted payloads" -- the third of which effectively offers government customers the company's satellite bus (the body of the spacecraft) as a flexible platform. The company also markets Starshield as the center of an "end-to-end" offering for national security: SpaceX would build everything from the ground antennas to the satellites, launch the latter with its rockets, and operate the network in space.

SpaceX notes that Starshield uses "additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely," building upon the data encryption it uses with its Starlink system. Another key feature: the "inter-satellite laser communications" links, which the company currently has connecting its Starlink spacecraft. It notes that the terminals can be added to "partner satellites," so as to connect other companies' government systems "into the Starshield network."

Britain's Rolls-Royce said it has successfully run an aircraft engine on hydrogen, a world aviation first that marks a major step towards proving the gas could be key to decarbonizing air travel. Reuters reports: The ground test, using a converted Rolls-Royce AE 2100-A regional aircraft engine, used green hydrogen created by wind and tidal power, the British company said on Monday. Rolls and its testing program partner easyJet are seeking to prove that hydrogen can safely and efficiently deliver power for civil aero engines. They said they were already planning a second set of tests, with a longer-term ambition to carry out flight tests. Hydrogen is one of a number of competing technologies that could help the aviation industry achieve its goal of becoming net zero by 2050.

Somewhere in Silicon Valley is a man "standing up to internet giants Comcast and AT&T," reports the Mercury News. (Alternate URL here.)

"Comcast told him it would cost $17,000 to speed up his internet. He rallied 41 South Bay neighbors to build their own lightning-fast fiber-optic network instead " Tech-rich but internet-poor, residents of the Silicon Valley neighborhood were fed up with sluggish broadband speeds of less than 25 Megabits-per-second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload — the federal definition of a home unserved by adequate internet. Frustrated by the take-it-or-leave-it attitude of internet providers, they created their own solution — and now this tony enclave has one of the fastest residential speeds in the nation.

Scott Vanderlip, a software engineer, said Comcast gave him a $17,000 estimate to connect his home to the faster internet service at a neighbor's home. "You got to be kidding me — I can see it on the pole from my driveway," Vanderlip said, remembering his reaction to Comcast's quote.

So the self-described "town rebel" jumped at the chance to partner with a startup internet service provider called Next Level Networks. If Vanderlip could rally a few neighbors willing to invest a couple thousand dollars, Next Level would get them very fast internet. That was in 2017. Now, Vanderlip is president of the Los Altos Hills Community Fiber Association, which provides super-fast speeds — up to 10 Gigabits-per-second upload and download — to its over 40 association members, letting them transfer huge files and load webpages in the click of a computer mouse, Vanderlip said.

That's 125 times faster than the median download speed in Santa Clara County.
It helped that his home "also happened to sit near a local school with a spare fiber optic internet connection," the article points out.

But a startup internet service provider called Next Level Networks also handled "the infrastructure procurement, contracts, logistics and retail — essentially providing the residents a turnkey fiber optic internet service — while Vanderlip and two of his neighbors, who joined with an investment of $5,000 each, bought the fiber optic infrastructure, crowdsourced new members and mapped out an initial fiber route to their houses."

Thanks to Slashdot reader k6mfw for sharing the story!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company's history right now, with a plan to eliminate some 10,000 jobs. One of the areas hit hardest is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-commerce giant. That's according to a report from Business Insider, which details "the swift downfall of the voice assistant and Amazon's larger hardware division." Alexa has been around for 10 years and has been a trailblazing voice assistant that was copied quite a bit by Google and Apple. Alexa never managed to create an ongoing revenue stream, though, so Alexa doesn't really make any money. The Alexa division is part of the "Worldwide Digital" group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with "the vast majority" of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year. It sounds like Amazon is tired of burning through all that cash.

The BI report spoke with "a dozen current and former employees on the company's hardware team," who described "a division in crisis." Just about every plan to monetize Alexa has failed, with one former employee calling Alexa "a colossal failure of imagination," and "a wasted opportunity." This month's layoffs are the end result of years of trying to turn things around. Alexa was given a huge runway at the company, back when it was reportedly the "pet project" of former CEO Jeff Bezos. An all-hands crisis meeting took place in 2019 to try to turn the monetization problem around, but that was fruitless. By late 2019, Alexa saw a hiring freeze, and Bezos started to lose interest in the project around 2020. Of course, Amazon now has an entirely new CEO, Andy Jassy, who apparently isn't as interested in protecting Alexa. The report says that while Alexa's Echo line is among the "best-selling items on Amazon, most of the devices sold at cost." One internal document described the business model by saying, "We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices."

That plan never really materialized, though. It's not like Alexa plays ad breaks after you use it, so the hope was that people would buy things on Amazon via their voice. Not many people want to trust an AI with spending their money or buying an item without seeing a picture or reading reviews. The report says that by year four of the Alexa experiment, "Alexa was getting a billion interactions a week, but most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Those questions aren't monetizable. Amazon also tried to partner with companies for Alexa skills, so a voice command could buy a Domino's pizza or call an Uber, and Amazon could get a kickback. The report says: "By 2020, the team stopped posting sales targets because of the lack of use." The team also tried to paint Alexa as a halo product with users who are more likely to spend at Amazon, even if they aren't shopping by voice, but studies of that theory found that the "financial contribution" of those users "often fell short of expectations."

In a public note to employees, Jassy said the company still has "conviction in pursuing" Alexa, but that's after making huge cuts to the Alexa team. One employee told Business Insider that currently, "There's no clear directive for devices" in the future, and that since the hardware isn't profitable, there's no clear incentive to keep iterating on popular products. That lack of direction led to the internally controversial $1,000 Astro robot, which is basically an Amazon Alexa on wheels. Business Insider's tracking now puts Alexa in third place in the US voice-assistant wars, with the Google Assistant at 81.5 million users, Apple's Siri at 77.6 million, and Alexa at 71.6 million.

Gemini Trust, the cryptocurrency platform run by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, said redemptions by customers for its Earn program are being delayed after its partner in the product, Genesis Global, paused withdrawals on its borrowing platform amid a liquidity crunch. From a report: Genesis is one of the main borrowers of Gemini Earn, a product used to generate yields for its customers, according to Gemini Earn's website. Gemini is working with Genesis to allow users to redeem funds as 'quickly as possible.' The delay doesn't impact any other Gemini products and services, the New York-based firm said in a statement.

"The past week has been an incredibly challenging and stressful time for our industry. We are disappointed that the Earn program SLA will not be met, but we are encouraged by Genesis' and its parent company Digital Currency Group's commitment to doing everything in their power to fulfill their obligations to customers under the Earn program," the statement said. Genesis suspended lending withdrawals, as the spectacular collapse of crypto exchange FTX shocked the digital-asset industry. The firm said it has hired advisers to explore all possible options, including new funding, and will deliver a plan for its lending business next week. Genesis' lending business had previously been affected by its exposure to bankrupt crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. Trading and other services at Genesis remain operational.

In the real world, the construction of the World Cup infrastructure in Qatar has been marred by extreme temperatures and migrant worker deaths. In the metaverse, however, a digital replica of Lusail Stadium in Doha has none of that baggage -- and the virtual property can be raffled off as a prize for a lucky soccer fan. From a report: FIFA's virtual universe is part of the soccer organization's penchant for embracing the latest tech buzzword. In 2010, some matches were broadcast in 3-D. In 2018, it offered a virtual-reality experience. Now it's the metaverse.

While some superfans may fly to Qatar and shell out for a ticket to cheer alongside 80,000 other people during a game, metaverse-inclined fans can head to a virtual airport, wait several hours while they "fly" to Doha, visit a digital version of the stadium and enter nearby shops in the FIFA World Cup-branded village to buy digital merchandise such as scarves and flags, which they can later use to adorn their virtual houses to express their team spirit. That digital journey is thanks to Upland, a metaverse platform based in Mountain View, California, which is partnering with FIFA to provide a blockchain-based metaverse experience during the tournament. Upland isn't FIFA's only partner to provide immersive soccer-themed digital environments tied to the World Cup, which begins Nov. 20 and is the most-watched athletic event across the globe. Roblox has also built out a technicolor world where fans can play a game that's a mix of soccer and bowling.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Remember that time Google showed off its artificial intelligence prowess by demoing conversations with Pluto and a paper airplane? That was powered by LaMDA, one of Google's latest-generation conversational AI models. Now, Google's using LaMDA to build Wordcraft, a prototype writing tool that can help creative writers craft new stories. AI-powered writing tools aren't new. Chances are you've heard of Grammarly or copywriting tools like Jasper. What makes Wordcraft a bit different is that it's framed as a means to help create fictional work. Google describes it as a sort of "text editor with purpose" built into a web-based word processor. Users can prompt Wordcraft to rewrite phrases or direct it to make a sentence funnier. It can also describe objects if asked or generate prompts. In a nutshell, it's sort of like wrapping an editor and writing partner into a single AI tool.

To test Wordcraft, Google created a workshop with 13 professional writers to see how well the prototype worked. While the writers seemed to appreciate Wordcraft as a way to spark new ideas, they unanimously agreed the tool wasn't going to replace authors anytime soon. For starters, the tool wasn't great at sticking to a narrative style and produced average or cliched writing. It also stuck to tried-and-true tropes while also steering clear of "mean" characters. "One clear finding was that using LaMDA to write full stories is a dead end. It's a much more effective tool when it's used to add spice," Douglas Eck, senior research director at Google Research, said at the AI@ event. Obviously, any prototype has kinks to work out. It's also hard to fully grasp what using an AI-powered creative writing tool is like. So I was curious to see a demo of it firsthand at Google's AI@ event.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: As the US escalates its campaign to undermine the Chinese semiconductor industry, Europe is trying -- with some success -- to avoid becoming collateral damage. At the center of the maneuvering is ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of chipmaking equipment and Europe's most valuable tech company. It's one of the very few producers of the sophisticated lithography machines needed to make midgrade semiconductors, and the only manufacturer of the equipment needed to make the most cutting-edge chips. That puts ASML in the spotlight for policymakers. ASML has never sold its extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, or EUVs, to Chinese clients. The Biden administration, as part of its attempt to keep China from developing the capability to make advanced semiconductors, has been trying to push the Dutch government to withhold ASML's older machines called immersion deep ultraviolet lithography machines, or DUVs, that can be used in combination with other technology to make advanced chips.

The European Commission, as well as the Dutch and German governments, have undertaken a coordinated lobbying campaign to oppose restrictions on a critical European company while US competitors continue to do business with Chinese companies, according to officials who spoke under the condition of anonymity because the talks are sensitive. They've argued in part that such restrictions are now pointless given that ASML, which generated 15% of its revenue in China last year, has already sold many of these machines to Chinese companies. When the US did push ahead in early October with more severe restrictions against doing business in China, its specific policies came as a relief to ASML and its political supporters. ASML wasn't hit directly by the new restrictions, which did make it harder for its US peers, such as Applied Materials and Lam Research, to sell advanced chip gear to China. Both companies warned investors that the new restrictions would significantly affect their financial performance.

The US Department of Commerce, which is responsible for the majority of rulemaking and enforcement, won't comment directly on specific companies or its negotiations with other governments. ASML is not an American company, limiting the US's power over its operations. But it commonly uses parts from the US, which gives Washington a degree of leverage. In the past, export controls have applied to products when at least 25% of their components are sourced from the US. But senior US officials now say products that contain any US components or intellectual property could be subjected to Washington's export approval process. Such a broad interpretation of the rules would be difficult for a company like ASML to work around. "Europeans feared the new US policy would include provisions affecting immersion DUVs," adds Bloomberg. According to SML's chief executive officer, Peter Wennink, the company's initial assessment is that the new restrictions don't apply to ASML's products shipped out of the Netherlands. Roger Dassen, the chief financial officer, also said the direct impact is fairly limited, thanks to "the fact that we are a European company with limited US technology in it." However, Bloomberg notes ASML's shares "dropped as much as 19% in the days after the Oct. 7 announcement, although they partially recovered after it posted strong earnings."

"The US runs the risk of setting off a confrontation with Europe if it chooses to go ahead with new restrictions on immersion DUV machines," concludes the report. "It's unclear what chance officials have to convince their Dutch counterparts to impose additional restrictions on DUV sales, but there's little doubt the two allies aren't yet on the same page. China is the Netherlands's third-biggest trading partner after Germany and Belgium."

Communications to Shetland, the Scottish archipelago that lies across the sea from Norway and more than 100 miles north of mainland Britain, have been severely disrupted after a subsea cable was damaged. From a report: Police have declared a major incident after the south subsea cable between the islands and the mainland was cut. The force said some landlines and mobiles were not usable and that officers were patrolling to try to reassure residents. Repairs to another cable connecting Shetland and Faroe are ongoing after it was damaged last week. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it was an emergency situation for the island. The Scottish government's resilience committee had met and was working with partner agencies to ensure support was provided, she added. She said the assumption was the damage was accidental, adding: "There is nothing to suggest otherwise, but work is continuing to assess exactly what the cause of the problem has been." MP for Orkney and Shetlands Alastair Carmichael told the BBC he had raised the issue with the UK government, but understood it could be days before communications were restored. He said the priority was fixing the issue but that resilience would also need to be looked at in future.

A new report from The Information details more changes Google CEO Sundar Pichai's budget cuts are having across the company, with some divisions surviving and others getting ominous resource cuts. From a report: First, we have news that the hardware division, other than losing laptops, seems mostly safe. Google's biggest Android partner, Samsung, is in decline in many established markets, and Apple is hitting an all-time high in US market share last quarter. The report says Google views Apple as more of a problem than it has in the past, thanks to worries that regulators might shut down the usual multi-billion-dollar Google/Apple agreement to put Google Search on iPhones. If iPhones stop showing Google ads, the rise of Apple and fall of Samsung is one of the few things that could actually be a major problem for Google's revenue.

According to the report, Google views itself as the solution to this problem. As a hedge against what the report calls the "further decline" of Samsung, Google is "doubling down" on its investment in Pixel hardware. Google is apparently doing this by "moving product development and software engineering staff working on features for non-Google hardware to work on Google-branded devices." The goal here is to not spend more money, so Google is apparently sacrificing partner devices to focus on the Pixel division. So what projects are seeing cuts? Google TV is one, with the report saying: "Executives also have discussed moving some product managers working on Google TV software for television sets" to Wear OS and the Pixel Tablet. This is the only OS called out as specifically receiving less OS development. A lot of this report seems to focus on cuts to Google Assistant's support for specific form factors, which is strange since Google Assistant is more or less the same on every platform. The whole point of the Assistant is one reliable, predictable voice assistant that lives everywhere, and it's not clear what platform-specific support needs to be done other than whipping up an app that can receive audio and read back results.

During Meta Connect today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company is partnering with Meta to bring its biggest services -- Teams, Office, Windows, and even Xbox Cloud Gaming -- to Meta's Quest VR headsets. The Verge reports: It's a surprise partnership that will see Microsoft and Meta combine their strengths. Microsoft sees an opportunity to bring Teams and its other productivity experiences to a capable VR headset, and Meta gets a key partner in its grand metaverse plan. [...] The Teams experience the new Quest Pro and Quest 2 headsets will even include Microsoft adapting Meta's avatar system for Teams and Teams getting support within Meta's own Horizon Workrooms. "People will be able to join a Teams meeting directly from Workrooms," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the event. "We think that this cross-device, cross-screen experience will be the foundation of the virtual office of the future."

This virtual office of the future won't just be about meetings. Microsoft is bringing Windows 365 to Quest, the company's platform for streaming full versions of Windows to devices. "With Windows 365 coming to Quest, you'll have a new way to securely stream the entire Windows experience, including all the personalized apps, content, and settings to your VR device with the full power of Windows and Windows applications," Nadella said.

Microsoft is also bringing 2D versions of its Office apps to Quest through its Progressive Web Apps (PWA) technology. These won't be full-blown 3D versions of Office designed for VR, but if there's an appetite for VR in the enterprise, then it's easy to imagine Microsoft adapting them in the future. Xbox Cloud Gaming will even make its way to Meta's Quest VR headsets, allowing Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers to stream games. It's not going to be as immersive as a native VR experience for Xbox games, but you'll be able to pick up an Xbox controller and play them on a giant screen projected inside a Quest headset. Earlier today, Meta announced the Meta Quest Pro: a $1,499 virtual reality headset it's been teasing for the past year. They also announced a big addition to their updated higher-detail avatars: legs.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Yuga Labs over whether its Bored Ape Yacht Club Ethereum NFTs and the ApeCoin token are unregistered securities, according to Bloomberg. From a report: The report, which cites an unnamed source, claims that the agency is exploring whether the crypto startup broke federal law by issuing NFTs that act like stocks, as well as exploring the distribution of the Ethereum-based ApeCoin token that launched earlier this year. Yuga Labs has not yet been accused of any wrongdoing and the investigation may not necessarily lead to charges, per the report. "It's well-known that policymakers and regulators have sought to learn more about the novel world of Web3. We hope to partner with the rest of the industry and regulators to define and shape the burgeoning ecosystem," Yuga Labs told Bloomberg in a statement. "As a leader in the space, Yuga is committed to fully cooperating with any inquiries along the way." The Bored Ape Yacht Club is one of the most successful NFT projects to date, with the main collection of 10,000 NFTs initially selling to the public at $190 worth of Ethereum apiece. That sale yielded Yuga roughly $1.9 million. Follow-up and spinoff projects, the Mutant Ape Yacht Club and the Otherside metaverse game, then raked in $96 million and $319 million, respectively.

Lynk, a competitor to the much larger SpaceX, plans to offer an experimental 5G cellular base station aboard a mission in December, working alongside an undisclosed cellular partner. Space.com reports: The experimental payload will launch on Lynk's second commercial satellite, company officials said. "This test will demonstrate the ability to send a 5G signal from space to standard mobile devices on Earth," Lynk officials wrote in late September. The test is a shot across the bow to SpaceX, which has already signed a deal with T-Mobile for cellular service but, unlike Lynk, does not yet have Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval. Lynk received the prized FCC thumbs-up just a few weeks ago.

Lynk and SpaceX are jostling for market access to people living in rural areas who lack access to standard internet service. Lynk already tested a satellite-to-phone service link last year, according to Via Satellite, and is ramping up service fast in a bid to keep ahead of the competition. "We are actively testing satellite-direct-to-phone-services in 12 countries on five continents," Dan Dooley, chief commercial officer of Lynk, said in the same company statement. The company's patent allows the orbiting cell tower to link up with standard 5G devices in 55 countries, Lynk says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: A New York City man is suing an Atlantic City casino, its parent company and its online betting partner, alleging he was repeatedly disconnected while gambling online, and was given payments to prevent him from reporting the malfunctions to New Jersey gambling regulators during a nine-month span in which he wagered over $29 million. Sam Antar says he is a compulsive gambler -- a fact he says was well-known to defendants in the case including the Borgata casino, MGM Resorts International, and its online partner Entain. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in state Superior Court in Middlesex County, Antar accuses the defendants of fraud, racketeering and other transgressions. His lawsuit asserts that he experienced thousands of disconnections from the online platforms, often when he had a winning hand that was then wiped out.

His lawyer, Christopher Gramiccioni, said Antar experienced a disconnection rate approaching 50% during the nine months covered by the lawsuit. He added Antar, 46, had lost "easily hundreds of thousands of dollars" during that time. "It's one thing if you have technical issues intermittently," said Gramiccioni, a former Monmouth County prosecutor. "It is quite another when you have them 50% of the time. The casino did not take corrective action as required. They kept doubling down and giving him $30,000 a month, feeding him extra money to try to avoid scrutiny by the regulatory agencies."

In his lawsuit, Antar claims he alerted numerous employees and officials with the gambling companies to the fact that there was a serious, recurring problem with disconnections, but that they knowingly kept malfunctioning games available to the public because they were too profitable to take down. He says his complaints were made to local supervisors and VIP hosts, an online complaint portal, and even to the president of the casino and the CEO of its parent company. He also claims the companies paid him near-daily bonuses totaling $30,000 a month to keep him playing and to entice him not to report problems with the games to the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement. [...] Antar said employees acknowledged problems with the system were affecting other customers as well. In a July 17, 2019 text and email conversation, Antar quotes one as telling him "other players are not getting anywhere near what you are getting" in terms of compensation for being kicked offline while gambling. "In 2013, Sam Antar was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for taking $225,000 in a fraudulent investment scheme" to feed his compulsive gambling habit, notes the report.