An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company, written by Mark Sullivan: On Monday the Biden administration announced a new program, called the U.S. Digital Corps, designed to attract young tech talent to roles in the government. The Corps offers early-career technologies a chance to get engaged in government via a two-year fellowship focused on major Biden administration priorities, including coronavirus response, economic recovery, cybersecurity, and streamlining government services. The program will begin by recruiting 30 people with skill sets in software engineering, data science, design, cybersecurity, and other critical technology fields this fall. It'll place them in one of five agencies -- the General Services Administration (GSA), Veterans Affairs, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- where they'll start work in 2022.

Only 3% of the government's workforce is under 30 years old, says the GSA, which will handle the recruiting. And only a quarter of the current workforce are women. The GSA says it'll hire a diversity of people for the Corps to help even out those ratios. The program will recruit from "leading undergraduate programs," as well as from "alternative training pathways" such as apprenticeships, bootcamps, and certificate programs. [...] The U.S. Digital Corps is a collaboration between GSA, the White House Office of Management and Budget, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. It's the "first and only government-wide, technology-specific recruitment program for early-career Americans," says the GSA in a press release.

Mr.Fork shares a report from Live Science: Russian cosmonauts discovered cracks on the Zarya module of the International Space Station (ISS) and are concerned that the fissures could spread over time, a senior space official reported on Monday. "Superficial fissures have been found in some places on the Zarya module," Vladimir Solovyov, chief engineer of rocket and space corporation Energia, told RIA news agency, according to Reuters. "This is bad and suggests that the fissures will begin to spread over time." The Zarya module, also called the Functional Cargo Block, was the first component of the ISS ever launched, having blasted into orbit on Nov. 20, 1998, according to NASA. Solovyov recently stated that the ISS is beginning to show its age and warned that there could potentially be an "avalanche" of broken equipment after 2025, according to Reuters.

Today, Apple announced that it has acquired Primephonic, a service that specializes in streaming the classical genre, and will incorporate the app's functionality and playlists into Apple Music. The result will be "a significantly improved classical music experience," Apple said in a press release. There will also be a standalone Apple Music classical app coming sometime in 2022. The Verge reports: Effective immediately, Primephonic is no longer accepting new customers, and the service as it exists today will shut down on September 7th. Apple says Primephonic's playlists and "exclusive audio content" will be first to be integrated into Apple Music. Down the line, it'll add "the best features of Primephonic, including better browsing and search capabilities by composer and by repertoire, detailed displays of classical music metadata, plus new features and benefits." In a show of how serious Apple is about appealing to classical fans, the company says "a dedicated classical music app" will launch next year that will use Primephonic's "classical user interface that fans have grown to love."

Michael Zhang writes via PetaPixel: In a post titled "High Fidelity Image Generation Using Diffusion Models" published on the Google AI Blog (and spotted by DPR), Google researchers in the company's Brain Team share about new breakthroughs they've made in image super-resolution. [...] The first approach is called SR3, or Super-Resolution via Repeated Refinement. Here's the technical explanation: "SR3 is a super-resolution diffusion model that takes as input a low-resolution image, and builds a corresponding high resolution image from pure noise," Google writes. "The model is trained on an image corruption process in which noise is progressively added to a high-resolution image until only pure noise remains." "It then learns to reverse this process, beginning from pure noise and progressively removing noise to reach a target distribution through the guidance of the input low-resolution image." SR3 has been found to work well on upscaling portraits and natural images. When used to do 8x upscaling on faces, it has a "confusion rate" of nearly 50% while existing methods only go up to 34%, suggesting that the results are indeed photo-realistic.

Once Google saw how effective SR3 was in upscaling photos, the company went a step further with a second approach called CDM, a class-conditional diffusion model. "CDM is a class-conditional diffusion model trained on ImageNet data to generate high-resolution natural images," Google writes. "Since ImageNet is a difficult, high-entropy dataset, we built CDM as a cascade of multiple diffusion models. This cascade approach involves chaining together multiple generative models over several spatial resolutions: one diffusion model that generates data at a low resolution, followed by a sequence of SR3 super-resolution diffusion models that gradually increase the resolution of the generated image to the highest resolution." "With SR3 and CDM, we have pushed the performance of diffusion models to state-of-the-art on super-resolution and class-conditional ImageNet generation benchmarks," Google researchers write. "We are excited to further test the limits of diffusion models for a wide variety of generative modeling problems."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record, written by Catalin Cimpanu: Hackers are estimated to have stolen more than $29 million in cryptocurrency assets from Cream Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that allows users to loan and speculate on cryptocurrency price variations. The company confirmed the hack earlier today, half an hour after blockchain security firm PeckShield noticed signs of an ongoing attack. Cream Finance said the hacker used a "reentrancy attack" in its "flash loan" feature to steal 418,311,571 in AMP tokens (estimated at around $25.1 million at the time of the hack) and 1,308.09 in ETH coins (estimated at around $4.15 million). The term "flash loan" refers to a contract (script) that runs on the Etherium blockchain that allows Cream Finance users to take quick loans from the company's funds and then return them at a later date.

Reentrancy attacks take place when a bug in these contracts allows an attacker to withdraw funds repeatedly, in a loop, before the original transaction is approved or declined or the funds need to be returned. PeckShield and Tal Be'ery, the founder of cryptocurrency wallet app ZenGo, confirmed that the Cream Finance hacker exploited a bug in the ERC777 token contract interface that's used by Cream Finance to interact with the underlying Etherium blockchain. Be'ery told The Record today that ERC777 has enabled several reentrancy attacks on DeFi online services, which keep relying on the feature despite its history of bad implementations, bugs, and hacks. The ZenGo founder also told The Record that DeFi services need to develop or implement a firewall-like system for their platforms in order to filter malicious requests to their underlying contracts, which are the backbone of their services and the targets of most of these hacks.

According to a study from Finbold, consumers spent an estimated $41.5 billion on apps from the Apple App Store during the first six months of 2021, which is almost double compared to $23.4 billion spent by Android consumers. 9to5Mac reports: The Apple App Store spendings in H1 21 represents a growth of 22.05% from a similar period in 2020. Cumulatively, spending on the two platforms recorded a growth of 24.8%, year-over-year hitting a total of $64.9 billion: "Mobile app spending grew in 2021 mainly due to consumer behavior resulting from the containment measures around the coronavirus pandemic. From the H1 spending, the outstanding assumption is that consumers' demand might not be slowing down, considering that most global jurisdictions have eased the pandemic control measures with the vaccine rollout."

The report shows that although the App Store spending has remained significant, Google Play appears to be catching up by recording the highest growth rate between H1 2020 and H1 2021: 30% YoY. So even with the App Store doing way better, "Android flourished as the pandemic remained persistent in countries with an Android-dense population." The Finbold survey shows that to keep on the top, Apple's are countering with the Small Business Program, which reduces the App Store commission from 30% to 15% for developers grossing less than $1 million a year. Although the report shows that the spending on the App Store and Google Play Store were mainly dominated by the gaming sector, in which consumers globally spend $10.32 billion on mobile games in the first half of 2021, the survey highlights that the top three grossing mobile apps worldwide for H1 2021 are TikTok, YouTube, and Tinder.

PayPal is exploring a possible stock-trading platform, after rolling out the ability to trade cryptocurrencies last year. CNBC reports: The San Jose, California-based company recently hired brokerage industry veteran Rich Hagen as part of the move, according to one of the sources. After leaving Ally Invest, Hagen is now the CEO of a previously unreported division of PayPal called Invest at PayPal, according to his LinkedIn page. Hagen was the co-founder of online brokerage TradeKing, which was bought by Ally Invest. His current job description outlines PayPal's efforts to "explore opportunities" in the consumer investment business. When reached for comment, PayPal pointed CNBC to CEO Dan Schulman's comments at the company's investor day in February, when he spoke about the long-term vision for the company and how it may include many more financial services, including "investment capabilities."

In order to offer stock trading to customers, it's possible PayPal will partner with or buy an existing broker-dealer. According to one source, PayPal has held already discussions with potential industry partners. Still, one source familiar with the idea said it was unlikely that the trading service would roll out this year. If PayPal did look to get full approval as a brokerage firm alone, it would need to complete a new membership process through the industry's main regulator, FINRA. That process could take more than eight months. PayPal has more than 400 million accounts worldwide.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Seattle Times, written by Katherine Anne Long: Amazon systematically attempts to channel 6% of its office employees out of the company each year, using processes embedded in proprietary software to help meet a target for turnover among low-ranked office workers, a metric Amazon calls "unregretted attrition," according to internal company documents seen by The Seattle Times. The documents underscore the extent to which Amazon's processes closely resemble the controversial management practice of stack ranking -- in which employees are graded by comparison with each other rather than against a job description or performance goals -- despite Amazon's insistence that it does not engage in stack ranking. The documents also highlight how much of Amazon's human resources processes are reliant on apps and algorithms, even among the company's office workforce. And they provide the most detailed picture yet of how Amazon uses performance improvement plans to funnel low-ranked employees out of the company. The company expects more than one-third of employees on performance improvement plans to fail, documents show. Amazon has previously said that its performance improvement plans aren't meant to punish employees.

The policies described in the documents reviewed by The Seattle Times apply to the company's office workforce, who comprise a minority of Amazon's roughly 950,000 U.S. employees. Amazon's warehouses replace workers much more frequently, The New York Times has reported: Before the pandemic, annual turnover rates at Amazon warehouses reached 150%. Amazon said some of the documentation reviewed by The Seattle Times was not created by the company's central human resources team and contains outdated terminology. But it did not dispute that the documents describe Amazon's internal policies. An Amazon spokesperson also said characterizing its performance management system as stack ranking is inaccurate. "We do not, nor have we ever, stack ranked our employees. This is not a practice that Amazon uses," said spokesperson Jaci Anderson, in an email. She said the goal of the company's performance review process is to "give employees more information and insights to continue to grow in their careers at Amazon."

Experts familiar with Amazon's processes disagreed with the company's stance that it does not stack-rank employees. Previous reporting by Business Insider has also found that Amazon grades employees on a curve. Amazon's performance-review system "forces [the company] to find the flaws in people as opposed to looking at their strengths," said longtime tech industry recruiter Chris Bloomquist, co-founder of Seattle's The Talent Mine. "If I have 10 brilliant people, but the least-brilliant person is fireable? That's stupid." The company's insistence that it does not practice stack ranking is "a bold-faced lie," Bloomquist said.

General Motors is halting production of the Chevy Bolt EV after a number of battery fires prompted a massive recall that has already cost the company nearly $2 billion. From a report: The automaker won't resume making the 2022 Bolt and Bolt EUV until at least mid-September. It had initially stopped production last week because of the global chip shortage. The recall repair process is also on hold, as GM is still waiting to get new battery modules from its supplier, South Korean conglomerate LG, that it is confident are free of defects. "We will not resume repairs or restart production until we are confident LG is producing defect free products for us," GM spokesman Daniel Flores said in a statement to The Verge.

Popular instant messaging app Telegram has joined the elite club of apps that have been downloaded over 1 billion times globally, according to Sensor Tower. From a report: The Dubai-headquartered app, which was launched in late 2013, surpassed the milestone on Friday, the mobile insight firm told TechCrunch. As is the case with the app's chief rival, WhatsApp, India is the largest market for Telegram. The world's second largest internet market represents approximately 22% of its lifetime installs, Sensor Tower said.

With Apple's latest iPhone just around the corner, reports suggest that it will include support for satellite communications, which consumers could use when terrestrial-based 4G and 5G are not available. The one getting most of the glory: Globalstar, the once-embattled satellite company. From a report: Globalstar shares shot up more than 40% at one point today. Shares in satellite companies Iridium and AST SpaceMobile also rose, more than 9% and 4%, respectively. One report tracks to TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who, as MacRumors explained, discussed how the iPhone 13 lineup will feature hardware that is able to connect to low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, which could allow iPhone 13 users to make calls and send messages. The MacRumors report notes that the upcoming iPhone 13 supposedly features a customized Qualcomm X60 baseband chip that supports satellite communications; other smartphone brands reportedly are waiting until 2022 for the X65 baseband chip for turning on satellite communications functionality. While there are ample ways to support LEO connectivity in handsets, the bottom line is: The "simplest scenario" for providing LEO communications to users is if network operators work with Globalstar, according to the Kuo-based report. That raised some eyebrows, rightly so.

New submitter TomGreenhaw writes: This should be very concerning for tech companies that operate in the Chinese market. 'It is not clear how much pressure was put on SoftBank to form the merger, but this looks like one of the most blatant examples of IP theft that we've seen. The Chinese arm of a company has gone rogue and refused to obey the ruling of its own board. The head of that company is essentially treating it as a personal fiefdom, and Chinese authorities do not appear to have taken meaningful action to reign in Mr. Wu.'

China kicked off a two-month campaign to crack down on commercial platforms and social media accounts that post finance-related information that's deemed harmful to its economy. From a report: The initiative will focus on rectifying violations including those that "maliciously" bad-mouth China's financial markets and falsely interpret domestic policies and economic data, the Cyberspace Administration of China said in a statement late Friday. Those who republish foreign media reports or commentaries that falsely interpret domestic financial topics "without taking a stance or making a judgment" will also be targeted, it added. The move is aimed at cultivating a "benign" online environment for public opinion that can facilitate "sustainable and healthy development" of China's economy and its society, according to the statement. It followed a draft proposal issued earlier Friday by the cyberspace regulator to regulate algorithms that technology firms use to recommend videos and other content. Commercial websites and platforms will be ordered to clean up financial information posts and shut accounts deemed in violation, under the supervision of authorities including the cyberspace administrator, the finance ministry, central bank as well as securities, banking and insurance regulators.

Tens of millions of older Americans who cannot afford dental care -- with severe consequences for their overall health, what they eat and even when they smile -- may soon get help as Democrats maneuver to add dental benefits to Medicare for the first time in its history. From a report: The proposal, part of the large budget bill moving through Congress, would be among the largest changes to Medicare since its creation in 1965 but would require overcoming resistance from dentists themselves, who are worried that it would pay them too little.

Alphabet's Google generated $11.2 billion in revenue from its mobile app store in 2019, according to a court filing unsealed on Saturday, offering a clear view into the service's financial results for the first time. From a report: Attorneys general for Utah and 36 other U.S. states or districts suing Google over alleged antitrust violations with the app store also said in the newly unredacted filing that the business in 2019 had $8.5 billion in gross profit and $7 billion in operating income, for an operating margin of over 62%. The figures include sales of apps, in-app purchase and app store ads. Google told Reuters the data "are being used to mischaracterize our business in a meritless lawsuit."

The company and its accusers said in a separate filing on Saturday a trial in late 2022 is possible over whether Google abuses its alleged monopoly in app sales for Android devices. In its quarterly financial disclosures, Google groups Play app revenue with that of other services and accounts for the store's ad revenue as part of another broader category. Attorneys general, as well as mobile app developer Epic Games and others separately suing Google, have contended that it generates huge profits through the Play Store by taking 30% of the fee for every digital good sold inside an app. The plaintiffs say Google's cut is arbitrarily high, siphoning app developers' profits.

Last week, media reported how Microsoft's Windows 11 won't technically leave millions of PCs behind -- the company told the press that it won't actually block you from installing Windows 11 on a PC with an older CPU, so long as you download and manually install an ISO file all by yourself. But it turns out even that technicality has a technicality. The Verge: Microsoft is now threatening to withhold Windows Updates from your copy of Windows 11 -- potentially even security updates -- if you take that route. We're not sure why the company didn't mention it in our original briefing, but Microsoft has since told The Verge that unsupported PCs won't be entitled to receive Windows Updates, and that even security and driver updates may be withheld.

Although Apple is making some changes to its App Store policies and setting up a $100 million fund for small developers, critics say that the terms of a class-action settlement don't meaningfully loosen the company's grip on its digital marketplace. From a report: Spotify Chief Legal Officer Horacio Gutierrez: "Apple's proposed concessions fail to address the most basic aspects of their anticompetitive and unfair App Store practices. They are attempting to distract policymakers and regulators and slow down the momentum that's building around the world to address their behavior."

Match Group: "This is a raw demonstration of their monopolistic power: making capricious changes designed to spur good PR for their benefit right as legislation, regulatory scrutiny and developer complaints are closing in on them. We hope everyone sees this for what it is -- a sham."

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-NY): "This new action by Apple is a good first step towards addressing some of these competition concerns, but more must be done to ensure an open, competitive mobile app marketplace, including commonsense legislation to set rules of the road for dominant app stores."

China will forbid minors from gaming more than three hours most weeks of the year, imposing their strictest controls yet over entertainment for youths in a blow to the world's largest mobile gaming arena. From a report: Gaming platforms from Tencent to NetEase can henceforth only offer online gaming to minors from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Fridays, weekends and public holidays, state news agency Xinhua reported, citing a notice by the National Press and Publication Administration. The new rules, which limit teen playing time to three hours most weeks of the year, is a major step-up from a previous restriction set in 2019 of 1.5 hours per day, most days.

The escalating restrictions on Tencent's biggest business are likely to spook investors that had cautiously returned to Chinese stocks in recent days, exploring bargains after a raft of regulatory probes into areas from online commerce to data security and ride-hailing ignited a trillion-dollar selloff in past weeks. "Three hours per week is too tight. Such a policy will have negative impact on Tencent too," Steven Leung, an executive director at UOB Kay Hian (Hong Kong) said. "I thought regulatory measures would take a break gradually but it's not stopping at all. It will hurt the nascent tech rebound for sure."

"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.

A new article at ZDNet argues that "The 1990s had a word for being trapped inside a manipulative notion of human contact: AOL."

"Facebook and its ilk are the rebirth of that limited vision." Once upon a time, roughly thirty years ago, there was a computer network called America Online... There was already an Internet, but most people didn't know how to use it or even that it existed. AOL, and a couple of competitors, Compuserve and Prodigy, offered people online things they could do, such as chat with other people... The services had only one drawback, which was that they were limited. People couldn't do just whatever they wanted, they could only pick from a small menu of functions, such as chat, that the services provided... As it grew and grew, the World Wide Web became an amazing place in contrast to AOL... People were so excited by the World Wide Web, they never wanted to go back to AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy. The three services withered...

People got excited about Facebook because it was a place where they could find real people they knew, just like MySpace, but also because it had some features like AOL, like the game Farmville. Business people were even more excited because Facebook started to generate a lot of advertising revenue. Advertisers liked Facebook because it not only knew who was talking to whom, it also knew a little bit about the hobbies and interests of people. Advertisers liked that because they could use the information to "target" their ads like never before. Smart people said that Facebook had what are known as "network effects." It became more powerful the more people joined it...

There were just a couple problems with Facebook. Facebook was a lot like AOL. It limited people by telling them with whom they could communicate.... One of the bad things was that people no longer had control. They had given so much information about themselves to Facebook and its competitors that it was like those companies owned people when they were in Cyberspace. The services didn't seem to do a great job of handling people's information, either.
What's interesting about this article is it even tells you how the story ends: Then one day, someone smart built a new technology that didn't require people to sign away their information. Now, people could meet anyone they wanted and talk about whatever they wanted, not just what Facebook or its competitors said was okay. People felt more relaxed, too, because even though there were ads, people could meet up in Cyberspace without every single action they took being used to fuel an advertising machine.

People got excited again, like the first time they found the Web and gave up on AOL.

But there our story ends, because that chapter has not yet been written.