The U.S. Supreme Court turned away a lingering appeal by Oracle stemming from its challenge to the now-scrapped $10 billion cloud-computing contract the Pentagon awarded to Microsoft in 2019. From a report: The rejection was a formality given the Defen…
Company That Routes Billions of Text Messages Quietly Discloses It Was Hacked
A company that is a critical part of the global telecommunications infrastructure used by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and several others around the world such as Vodafone and China Mobile, quietly disclosed that hackers were inside its systems for year…
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus Have Been Suffering Global Outage For More Than 3 Hours Now
Facebook — and all the major services that Facebook owns — are down today. ArsTechnica: We first noticed the problem at about 11:30 am Eastern time, when some Facebook links stopped working. Investigating a bit further showed major DNS failures at Fa…
McKinsey Never Told the FDA It Was Working for Opioid Makers While Also Working for the Agency
Ian MacDougall, reporting for ProPublica: Since 2008, McKinsey & Company has regularly advised the Food and Drug Administration’s drug-regulation division, according to agency records. The consulting giant has had its hand in a range of important F…
The World Wants Greenland’s Minerals, but Greenlanders Are Wary
The island has rare elements needed for electric cars and wind turbines. But protesters are blocking one project, signaling that mining companies must tread carefully. From a report: This huge, remote and barely habited island is known for frozen lands…
Clearview AI Has New Tools To Identify People in Photos
Clearview AI has stoked controversy by scraping the web for photos and applying facial recognition to give police and others an unprecedented ability to peer into our lives. Now the company’s CEO wants to use artificial intelligence to make Clearview’s…
Chinese AI Gets Ethical Guidelines For the First Time, Aligning With Beijing’s Goal of Reining in Big Tech
China has revealed its first set of ethical guidelines governing artificial intelligence, placing emphasis on protecting user rights and preventing risks in ways that align with Beijing’s goals of reining in Big Tech’s influence and becoming the global…
A Three-Day Work Week? One Startup Experiments To Draw Talent
A shortage of technology talent has Indian companies offering sweeteners like more vacation time and gender-neutral parental leave as they compete for graduates and professionals. One Bangalore startup is trying a more dramatic solution: a three-day wo…
The Surprising Downsides To Planting Trillions of Trees
Large tree-planting initiatives often fail — and some have even fueled deforestation. From a report: On November 11, 2019, volunteers planted 11 million trees in Turkey as part of a government-backed initiative called Breath for the Future. In one nor…
The Medicine Nobel Prize Honors the Discovery of Temperature and Touch Receptors
The Nobel Prize in the field of physiology or medicine has been awarded to U.S.-based scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian. From a report: They were cited for their discovery of receptors for temperature and touch. The winners were announced M…