In a state where housing is expensive to build, to rent, or to buy — and not especially energy efficient — can a big blue robot make a difference?

The Boston Globe reports on Reframe Systems, one of the companies "trying robots to make construction more efficient" — in this case, "working alongside humans in an assembly line to build small houses in a factory." [Its cofounders] learned to get robots and humans to work together while at Amazon, which has built more than 750,000 bots in Massachusetts and deployed them to distribution centers around the world. Advising the company are Amy Villeneuve, former chief operating officer of that Amazon division, and Charly Mwangi, a veteran of the carmakers Nissan, Tesla, and Rivian...

Standing at one end of Reframe's factory, [cofounder Aaron] Small explained that the company's ambition is to build net-zero houses — houses that produce as much energy as they use — "twice as fast as traditional methods, twice as cheap, and with 10 times lower carbon" emissions. That means using large screws called helical piles to fix the house to the site, instead of a concrete foundation. (Concrete production generates large amounts of carbon dioxide.) The company buys recycled cellulose insulation to fill the walls. Solar panels go on the roof and triple-paned windows in the walls...

Reframe's "microfactory" can produce between 30 and 50 homes a year, [cofunder Vikas] Enti said. Eventually, the company aims to set up larger factories around the country, all within an hour's drive of big cities.
After a home is trucked to its final destination, "Electrical wires and plumbing are installed in both floors and walls as they're built," according to the article.

"Employees toting iPads can refer to digital construction drawings and get step-by-step instructions about tasks from cutting lumber to connecting pipes." One of the co-founders says, "We like to compare it to Lego instructions."

In 2019 Los Angeles film/TV producer Brian Morrison painted Blockbuster's logo onto an old newspaper box — and then filled it up with used DVDs. "The Free Blockbuster movement slowly gained traction," reports the New York Times — aided at times by social media — "and eventually more than 200 other community boxes had opened from Louisiana to Canada and even Britain."

Though it's not clear how many are still operational, a 37-year-old California opened a free "Blockbuster" library outside her home earlier this year, according to the article, "and stocks it with season-specific films, subversive books and free candy." "We are social animals; we want to go out into the world and engage with each other," said Brian Morrison, who keeps a lending library outside his home. He often refills it with DVDs and VHS tapes of TV series, horror movies and, on occasion, signed independent films, and said that it had encouraged interaction with his neighbors.

Andrew Kevin Walker, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, said he had visited secondhand stores especially to seek out films to leave in the boxes, including two sealed James Bond box sets and a copy of "Cobra," a 1986 film written by Sylvester Stallone. "It's an opportunity for people to really share their love of cinema, whether it be their favorite guilty pleasure or their favorite movie of all time," he said.

Viewers with streaming fatigue say they are tired of chasing content that moves around an ever-expanding array of platforms or even disappears altogether, and some long for the physical media that was dominant until streaming took over. "I think it's great that folks are doing this, keeping the spirit of DVDs alive, circulating film[s] in and exchanging them," said Joe Pichirallo, a film producer and professor at New York University...

Alfonso Castillo, who co-founded a Free Blockbuster on Long Island, N.Y., with his son, said the lending library sees regular turnover with people both taking and dropping off movies, including older people. "My sense is that for them, it's less of this cool novelty sort of ironic thing and more like, finally, there's a place to get DVDs again," he said.
Award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay misses the commentary tracks on DVDs (along with director's cuts).

But more importantly, they told the Times that when it comes to art, "nothing beats holding it in your hand... It is a part of the experience of consuming and experiencing art."

The Baffler says a new publishing house launched earlier this month "brings Silicon Valley-style startup disruption to the business of books."

Authors Equity has "a tiny core staff, offloading its labor to a network of freelancers," and like a handful of other publishers "is upending the way that authors get paid, eschewing advances and offering a higher percentage of profits instead." It is worth watching because its team includes several of the most important publishing people of the twenty-first century. And if it works, it will offer a model for tightening the connection between book culture and capitalism, a leap forward for the forces of efficiency and the fantasies of frictionless markets, ushering in a world where literature succeeds if and only if it sells....

Authors Equity's website presents its vision in strikingly neoliberal corporatespeak. The company has four Core Principles: Aligned Incentives; Bespoke Teams; Flexibility and Transparency; and Long-Term Collaboration. What do they mean by these MBA keywords? Aligned Incentives is explained in the language of human capital: "Our profit-share model rewards authors who want to bet on themselves." Authors, that is, take on more of the financial risk of publication. At a traditional publishing house, advances provide authors with guaranteed cash early in the process that they can use to live off while writing. With Authors Equity, nothing is guaranteed and nothing given ahead of time; an author's pay depends on their book's profits.

In an added twist, "Profit participation is also an option for key members of the book team, so we're in a position to win together." Typically, only an author's agent's income is directly tied to an author's financial success, but at Authors Equity, others could have a stake. This has huge consequences for the logic of literary production. If an editor, for example, receives a salary and not a cut of their books' profits, their incentives are less immediately about profit, offering more wiggle room for aesthetic value. The more the people working on books participate in their profits, the more, structurally, profit-seeking will shape what books look like.

"Bespoke Teams" is a euphemism for gigification. With a tiny initial staff of six, Authors Equity uses freelance workers to make books, unlike traditional publishers, which have many employees in many departments... Their fourth Core Principle — Long-Term Collaboration — addresses widespread frustration with a systemic problem in traditional publishing: the fetishization of debut authors who receive decent or better advances, fail to earn out, and then struggle to have a career. It's a real problem and one where authors' interests and capitalist rationalization are, as it were, aligned. Authors Equity sees that everyone might profit when an author can build a readership and develop their skill.
The article concludes with this prediction. "It's not impossible that we'll look back in twenty years and see its founding as auguring the beginning of the startup age in publishing."

Food for thought... Pulp-fiction mystery writer Mickey Spillane once said, "I'm a writer, not an author. The difference is, a writer makes money."

In an interview Saturday, CNN first asked Steve Wozniak about Apple's "walled garden" approach — and whether there's any disconnect between Apple's stated interest in user security and privacy, and its own self-interest?

Wozniak responded, "I think there are things you can say on all sides of it. "I'm kind of glad for the protection that I have for my privacy and for you know not getting hacked as much. Apple does a better job than the others.

And tracking you — tracking you is questionable, but my gosh, look at what we're accusing TikTok of, and then go look at Facebook and Google... That's how they make their business! I mean, Facebook was a great idea. But then they make all their money just by tracking you and advertising.

And Apple doesn't really do that as much. I consider Apple the good guy.
So then CNN directly asked Wozniak's opinion about the proposed ban on TikTok in the U.S. "Well, one, I don't understand it. I don't see why. I mean, I get a lot of entertainment out of TikTok — and I avoid the social web. But I love to watch TikTok, even if it's just for rescuing dog videos and stuff.

And so I'm thinking, well, what are we saying? We're saying 'Oh, you might be tracked by the Chinese'. Well, they learned it from us.

I mean, look, if you have a principle — a person should not be tracked without them knowing it? It's kind of a privacy principle — I was a founder of the EFF. And if you have that principle, you apply it the same to every company, or every country. You don't say, 'Here's one case where we're going to outlaw an app, but we're not going to do it in these other cases.'

So I don't like the hypocrisy. And that's always obviously common from a political realm.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Former president Donald Trump'sTruth Social, a shameless Twitter clone, is set to become a publicly traded company as soon as next week. Shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp. voted on Friday to merge with Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. The vote is a culmination of a years-long saga attempting to merge Trump Media with a publicly traded company in what's known as a SPAC deal. The company will trade under the ticker DJT once it goes public. [...] Truth Social looks nearly identical to Twitter, with some key distinctions. Instead of "tweeting," users post a "truth." A "retweet" is called a "retruth." Unlike many right-wing Twitter clones, the site functions well, has remained mostly online, and actually appears to have a somewhat active user base. But since launching in February 2022, after Trump was kicked off of mainstream platforms for inciting violence during the January 6 riot at the Capitol, the company has been mired in controversy.

Lindsay Clark reports via The Register: The UK Information Commissioner's Office has received a complaint detailing the mismanagement of personal data at the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), the regulator that oversees worker registration. Employment as a nurse or midwife depends on enrollment with the NMC in the UK. According to whistleblower evidence seen by The Register, the databases on which the personal information is held lack rudimentary technical standards and practices. The NMC said its data was secure with a high level of quality, allowing it to fulfill its regulatory role, although it was on "a journey of improvement." But without basic documentation, or the primary keys or foreign keys common in database management, the Microsoft SQL Server databases -- holding information about 800,000 registered professionals -- are difficult to query and manage, making assurances on governance nearly impossible, the whistleblower told us.

The databases have no version control systems. Important fields for identifying individuals were used inconsistently -- for example, containing junk data, test data, or null data. Although the tech team used workarounds to compensate for the lack of basic technical standards, they were ad hoc and known by only a handful of individuals, creating business continuity risks should they leave the organization, according to the whistleblower. Despite having been warned of the issues of basic technical practice internally, the NMC failed to acknowledge the problems. Only after exhausting other avenues did the whistleblower raise concern externally with the ICO and The Register. The NMC stores sensitive data on behalf of the professionals that it registers, including gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity and nationality, disability details, marital status, as well as other personal information.

The whistleblower's complaint claims the NMC falls well short of [the standards required under current UK law for data protection and the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)]. The statement alleges that the NMC's "data management and data retrieval practices were completely unacceptable." "There is not even much by way of internal structure of the databases for self-documentation, such as primary keys, foreign keys (with a few honorable exceptions), check constraints and table constraints. Even fields that should not be null are nullable. This is frankly astonishing and not the practice of a mature, professional organization," the statement says. For example, the databases contain a unique ten-digit number (or PRN) to identify individuals registered to the NMC. However, the fields for PRNs sometimes contain individuals' names, start with a letter or other invalid data, or are simply null. The whistleblower's complaint says that the PRN problem, and other database design deficiencies, meant that it was nearly impossible to produce "accurate, correct, business critical reports ... because frankly no one knows where the correct data is to be found." A spokesperson for the NMC said the register was "organized and documented" in the SQL Server database. "For clarity, the register of all our nurses, midwives and nursing practitioners is held within Dynamics 365 which is our system of record. This solution and the data held within it, is secure and well documented. It does not rely on any SQL database. The SQL database referenced by the whistleblower relates to our data warehouse which we are in the process of modernizing as previously shared."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity forced Onerep's CEO to admit that he has founded dozens of people-search networks over the years. Mozilla only began bundling Onerep in Firefox last month, when it announced the reputation service would be offered on a subscription basis as part of Mozilla Monitor Plus. Launched in 2018 under the name Firefox Monitor, Mozilla Monitor also checks data from the website Have I Been Pwned? to let users know when their email addresses or password are leaked in data breaches. On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep's Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. Onerep and Shelest did not respond to requests for comment on that story.

But on March 21, Shelest released a lengthy statement wherein he admitted to maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, a consumer data broker he founded in 2015 -- around the same time he launched Onerep. Shelest maintained that Nuwber has "zero cross-over or information-sharing with Onerep," and said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him. "I get it," Shelest wrote. "My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn't taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn't have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I'm aiming to do better in the future." The full statement is available here (PDF).

In a statement released today, a spokesperson for Mozilla said it was moving away from Onerep as a service provider in its Monitor Plus product. "Though customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep's CEO do not align with our values," Mozilla wrote. "We're working now to solidify a transition plan that will provide customers with a seamless experience and will continue to put their interests first." KrebsOnSecurity also reported that Shelest's email address was used circa 2010 by an affiliate of Spamit, a Russian-language organization that paid people to aggressively promote websites hawking male enhancement drugs and generic pharmaceuticals. As noted in the March 14 story, this connection was confirmed by research from multiple graduate students at my alma mater George Mason University.

Shelest denied ever being associated with Spamit. "Between 2010 and 2014, we put up some web pages and optimize them -- a widely used SEO practice -- and then ran AdSense banners on them," Shelest said, presumably referring to the dozens of people-search domains KrebsOnSecurity found were connected to his email addresses (dmitrcox@gmail.com and dmitrcox2@gmail.com). "As we progressed and learned more, we saw that a lot of the inquiries coming in were for people." Shelest also acknowledged that Onerep pays to run ads on "on a handful of data broker sites in very specific circumstances." "Our ad is served once someone has manually completed an opt-out form on their own," Shelest wrote. "The goal is to let them know that if they were exposed on that site, there may be others, and bring awareness to there being a more automated opt-out option, such as Onerep."

DOJ, in the court filing (PDF): Many prominent, well-financed companies have tried and failed to successfully enter the relevant markets because of these entry barriers. Past failures include Amazon (which released its Fire mobile phone in 2014 but could not profitably sustain its business and exited the following year); Microsoft (which discontinued its mobile business in 2017); HTC (which exited the market by selling its smartphone business to Google in September 2017); and LG (which exited the smartphone market in 2021). Today, only Samsung and Google remain as meaningful competitors in the U.S. performance smartphone market. Barriers are so high that Google is a distant third to Apple and Samsung despite the fact that Google controls development of the Android operating system.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Apple Thursday, accusing the company led by CEO Tim Cook of engaging in anti-competitive business practices. The allegations include claims that Apple prevents competitors from accessing certain iPhone features and that the company's actions impact the "flow of speech" through its streaming service, Apple TV+.

However, even if the DOJ proves any of the allegations, it is highly unlikely that Apple will face material changes for years, as history shows that such lawsuits often take a significant amount of time to reach the trial, let alone a resolution. The DOJ's ongoing case against Google, filed in 2020, only went to trial in 2023, with no remedies or financial implications expected for up to two more years.

This is not the first time Apple has faced legal action from the DOJ. In 2012, the agency sued Apple for conspiring with publishers to increase ebook prices, a lawsuit that was not settled until 2016. "Precedents suggest that resolution of the complaint will take three to five years, including appeals," Bernstein analysts wrote in a note.

India reversed a laptop licensing policy after behind-the-scenes lobbying by U.S. officials, who however remain concerned about New Delhi's compliance with WTO obligations and new rules it may issue, according to U.S. trade officials and government emails seen by Reuters. From the report: In August, India imposed rules requiring firms like Apple, Dell and HP to obtain licences for all shipments of imported laptops, tablets, personal computers and servers, raising fears that the process could slow down sales. But New Delhi rolled back the policy within weeks, saying it will only monitor the imports and decide on next steps a year later.

The U.S. government emails -- obtained under a U.S. open records request -- underline the level of alarm the Indian curbs caused in Washington, and how the U.S. scored a rare lobbying win by persuading Prime Minister Narendra Modi's usually inflexible government to reverse policy. U.S. officials have often been concerned about India's sudden policy changes which they say create an uncertain business environment. India maintains it announces policies in the interest of all stakeholders and encourages foreign investments, even though it often promotes local players over foreign ones.

Some of the language in the documents was blunt, despite the bonhomie often displayed by both sides in public. U.S. officials were upset India's changes to laptop imports came "out of the blue", without notice or consultation, and were "incredibly problematic" for the business climate and $500 million worth of annual U.S. exports, the documents and emails showed. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai met Indian Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal in New Delhi on Aug. 26, soon after the policy was announced. Although the USTR's public readout said Tai "raised concerns" about the policy and "noted" that stakeholders needed to be consulted, she privately told Goyal during the meeting that the U.S. wanted India to "rescind the requirement", a USTR briefing paper showed.

Motorola's 2024 Moto G Power impresses with its soft-touch back and contoured edges at a $300 price point, despite an underwhelming camera and LCD panel. Except one thing: the bloatware. The Verge: Scroll through the app drawer and you'll see a handful of automatically downloaded "folders." They are not folders; they are apps. I first encountered them on last year's Moto G Stylus 5G, and I hate them very much. There are three main offenders -- Shopping, Entertainment, and GamesHub -- and each of these apps acts as a little hub. Icons for apps that you have legitimately downloaded will appear in the corresponding "folder." You'll also find tons of other suggested apps to download -- pages and pages of them! Apps as far as the eye can see!

Dismissing the suggested apps section replaces it with a "Discover" section. In the shopping app, it invites you to "Unlock the power of shopping" with links to buy stuff like kitschy Easter decor from TJ Maxx. Mercifully, there's a toggle to hide this section. These apps are all made by a company called Swish, and you can't opt out of downloading any of them during the setup process. You can (and should!) opt out of downloading a third-party lock screen from a different service called Glance. The more I dig into the software on this phone, the more I hate it. The preinstalled weather app is festooned with ads and even more suggested apps, plus pithy insights like "Gotta love air conditioning at these high levels of humidity." If you tap the option to remove ads, a pop-up asks you to pay $4 for 1Weather Pro.

Microsoft has announced two new Surface devices, the Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business, both featuring Intel's latest Core Ultra processors, a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU), and a new Copilot key for AI-powered features in Windows 11.

The devices, which will start shipping to commercial customers on April 9th, have been designed exclusively for businesses and will not be sold directly to consumers. The Surface Pro 10 for Business, starting at $1,199, offers a choice between Core Ultra 5 135U and Core Ultra 7 165U options, with up to 64GB of RAM and a 256GB Gen4 SSD. It also features an improved 13-inch display with an antireflective coating and a 1440p front-facing camera with a 114-degree field of view.

The Surface Laptop 6 for Business, also starting at $1,199, is powered by Intel's Core Ultra H-series chips and is available with up to 64GB of RAM and a 1TB Gen4 SSD. The 15-inch model includes two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, while the 13.5-inch model features a single USB-C Thunderbolt 4 port. Both devices have an optional smart card reader and are Microsoft's most easily serviceable Surface devices to date.

Further reading: Microsoft's official blog.

An anonymous reader writes: Reddit priced its stock on Wednesday at $34 a share, the top of the anticipated range, a signal that investors are excited about the company's IPO on Thursday. The social media giant raised nearly $500 million in the offering. Excluding employee stock options, the 19-year old company's valuation will start at $5.4 billion, a far cry from its last private market value of $10 billion, set in August 2021, the top of the last tech markets boom. The stock, which is the most anticipated offering of the year so far, will debut on New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with the ticker symbol "RDDT."

Neuralink, the brain-chip startup founded by Elon Musk, showed its first patient using his mind to play online chess. Reuters reports: Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor using the Neuralink device. The implant seeks to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts. Arbaugh had received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Musk said last month.

"The surgery was super easy," Arbaugh said in the video streamed on Musk's social media platform X, referring to the implant procedure. "I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments. I had basically given up playing that game," Arbaugh said, referring to the game Civilization VI, "you all (Neuralink) gave me the ability to do that again and played for 8 hours straight."

Elaborating on his experience with the new technology, Arbaugh said that it is "not perfect" and they "have run into some issues." "I don't want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there's still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team's systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel. The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.

"When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organization moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless," Vowles told The Race. Because of the multiple states each part could be in -- ordered, backordered, inspected, returned -- humans are often left to work out the details. "And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that's exactly where we are." The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many. Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team's factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was "viciously expensive," Fry told The Race, and making up for the painful process required "humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking."

The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12-$16 million each, with resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters, and it actually makes sense, if you've ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized organization. Then again, it's not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport Formula One's Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines long -- more than three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution in 2023.

Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This leaves F1 teams "susceptible to the plague of legacy software," Anthony wrote, though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system that year. (Renault was also "a big Microsoft shop" in other areas, like email and file sharing, at the time.) One year prior to Anthony's excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go "Beyond Excel." "If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel," Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it. Banks cited Tim Worstall's 2013 contention that Excel could be "the most dangerous software on the planet." Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.

sinij shares a report from the New York Post: The Biden administration finalized its crackdown on gas cars Wednesday, with the Environmental Protection Agency announcing drastic climate regulations meant to ensure more than two-thirds of passenger cars and light trucks sold by 2032 are electric or hybrid vehicles. The EPA rule imposes strict limits on tailpipe pollution, limits the agency says can be met if 56% of new vehicles sold in the US are electric by eight years from now, along with 13% that are plug-in hybrids or other partially electric cars. That would be a huge increase over current EV sales, which rose to 7.6% of new vehicle sales last year, up from 5.8% in 2022. [...] The new rule slows implementation of stricter pollution standards from 2027 through 2029, before ramping up to near the level the EPA preferred by 2032. "Personal car ownership is about to get A LOT more expensive as it will have to carry the costs of deep discounts to entice EV sales," adds Slashdot reader sinij.

mrspoonsi shares a report from the BBC: A former takeaway worker found with Bitcoin worth more than $2.5 billion has been convicted at Southwark Crown Court of a crime linked to money laundering. Jian Wen, 42, from Hendon in north London, was involved in converting the currency into assets including multi-million-pound houses and jewelry. On Monday she was convicted of entering into or becoming concerned in a money laundering arrangement. The Met said the seizure is the largest of its kind in the UK.

Although Wen was living in a flat above a Chinese restaurant in Leeds when she became involved in the criminal activity, her new lifestyle saw her move into a six-bedroom house in north London in 2017 which was rented for more than $21,000 per month. She posed as an employee of an international jewelry business and moved her son to the UK to attend private school, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said. That same year, Wen tried to buy a string of expensive houses in London, but struggled to pass money-laundering checks and her claims she had earned millions legitimately mining Bitcoin were not believed. She later travelled abroad, buying jewelry worth tens of thousands of pounds in Zurich, and purchasing properties in Dubai in 2019.

Another suspect is thought to be behind the fraud but they remain at large. The Met said it carried out a large scale investigation as part of the case - searching several addresses, reviewing 48 electronic devices, and examining thousands of digital files including many which were translated from Mandarin. The CPS has obtained a freezing order from the High Court, while it carries out a civil recovery investigation that could lead to the forfeiture of the Bitcoin. The value of the Bitcoin was worth around $2.5 billion at the time of initial estimates -- but due to the fluctuation in the currency's value, it has since increased to around $4.3 billion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In India, a government-run agency will now monitor and undertake fact-checking for government related matters on social media even as tech giants expressed grave concerns about it last year. The Ministry of Electronics and IT on Wednesday wrote in a gazette notification that it is amending the IT Rules 2021 to cement into law the proposal to make the fact checking unit of Press Information Bureau the dedicated arbiter of truth for New Delhi matters. Tech companies as well as other firms that serve more than 5 million users in India will be required to "make reasonable efforts" to not display, store, transmit or otherwise share information that deceives or misleads users about matters pertaining to the government, the IT ministry said. India's move comes just weeks ahead of the general elections in the country. Relying on a government agency such as the Press Information Bureau as the sole source to fact-check government business without giving it a clear definition or providing clear checks and balances "may lead to misuse during implementation of the law, which will profoundly infringe on press freedom," Asia Internet Coalition, an industry group that represents Meta, Amazon, Google and Apple, cautioned last year.

Meanwhile, comedian Kunal Kamra, with support from the Editors Guild of India, cautioned that the move could create an environment that forces social media firms to welcome "a regime of self-interested censorship."

After securing billions in federal grants and loans, Reuters reports that the company is "planning a $100-billion spending spree across four U.S. states" to build and expand its chip manufacturing factories. From the report: The centerpiece of Intel's five-year spending plan is turning empty fields near Columbus, Ohio, into what CEO Pat Gelsinger described to reporters on Tuesday as "the largest AI chip manufacturing site in the world," starting as soon as 2027. Intel's plan will also involve revamping sites in New Mexico and Oregon and expanding operations in Arizona, where longtime rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co is also building a massive factory that it hopes will receive funding from President Joe Biden's push to bring advanced semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States. [...]

Gelsinger said about 30% of the $100-billion plan will be spent on construction costs such as labor, piping and concrete. The remaining will go towards buying chipmaking tools from firms such as ASML, Tokyo Electron, Applied Materials and KLA, among others. Those tools will help bring the Ohio site online by 2027 or 2028, though Gelsinger warned the timeline could slip if the chip market takes a dive. Beyond grants and loans, Intel plans to make most of the purchases from its existing cash flows.

"It will still take three to five years for Intel to become a serious player in the foundry market" for cutting-edge chips, said Kinngai Chan, an analyst at Summit Insights. However, he warned more investment would be needed before Intel could overtake TSMC, adding that the Taiwanese firm could remain the leader for "some time to come." Gelsinger has previously said a second round of U.S. funding for chip factories would likely be needed to re-establish the U.S. as a leader in semiconductor manufacturing, which he reiterated on Tuesday. "It took us three-plus decades to lose this industry. It's not going to come back in three to five years of CHIPS Act" funding, said Gelsinger, who referred to the low-interest-rate funding as "smart capital."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google closed its Fitbit acquisition in 2021. Since then, the tech behemoth has pushed numerous changes to the wearable brand, including upcoming updates announced this week. While Google reshapes its fitness tracker business, though, some long-time users are regretting their Fitbit purchases and questioning if Google's practices will force them to purchase their next fitness tracker elsewhere.

As is becoming common practice with consumer tech announcements of late, Google's latest announcements about Fitbit seemed to be trying to convince users of the wonders of generative AI and how that will change their gadgets for the better. In a blog post yesterday, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, Google's chief health officer, announced that Fitbit Premium subscribers would be able to test experimental AI features later this year (Google hasn't specified when). "You will be able to ask questions in a natural way and create charts just for you to help you understand your own data better. For example, you could dig deeper into how many active zone minutes... you get and the correlation with how restorative your sleep is," she wrote. DeSalvo's post included an example of a user asking a chatbot if there was a connection between their sleep and activity and said that the experimental AI features will only be available to "a limited number of Android users who are enrolled in the Fitbit Labs program in the Fitbit mobile app."

Fitbit is also working with the Google Research team and "health and wellness experts, doctors, and certified coaches" to develop a large language model (LLM) for upcoming Fitbit mobile app features that pull data from Fitbit and Pixel devices, DeSalvo said. In a blog post yesterday, Yossi Matias, VP of engineering and research at Google, said Google wants to use the LLM to add personalized coaching features, such as the ability to look for sleep irregularities and suggest actions "on how you might change the intensity of your workout." Google's Fitbit is building the LLM on Gemini models that are tweaked on de-identified data from unspecified "research case studies," Matias said, adding: "For example, we're testing performance using sleep medicine certification exam-like practice tests." Other recent changes to Fitbit include a name tweak from Fitbit by Google, to Google Fitbit, as spotted by 9to5Google this week. Charge 5 users are especially concerned after users noticed their devices suddenly stopped holding a charge after a December firmware update was pushed. The problem has persisted with Google offering no solution other than offer discounts or, if the device was within its warranty period, a replacement.

"This is called planned obsolescence. I'll be upgrading to a watch style tracker from a different company. I wish Fitbit hadn't sold out to Google," a forum user going by Sean77024 wrote on Fitbit's support forum yesterday. "Others, like 2MeFamilyFlyer, have also accused Fitbit of planning Charge 5 obsolescence," notes Ars. "2MeFamilyFlyer said they're seeking a Fitbit alternative."