Athletes don’t get advance warning of drug tests. Police don’t share schedules of planned raids. Yet America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not seem convinced of the value of surprise in deterring bad behaviour [the link may be paywalled]…
California Bill Takes Aim at Amazon’s Productivity-tracking Algorithms
California is poised to pass a new bill pushing back against the productivity measurement algorithms allegedly used in Amazon fulfillment centers. From a report: The bill passed California’s lower legislative chamber in May, and the upper chamber is ex…
ProtonMail Logged IP Address of French Activist After Order By Swiss Authorities
ProtonMail, a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online servic…
Automated Hiring Software is Mistakenly Rejecting Millions of Viable Job Candidates
Automated resume-scanning software is contributing to a “broken” hiring system in the US, says a new report from Harvard Business School. Such software is used by employers to filter job applicants, but is mistakenly rejecting millions of viable candid…
Led by Tesla, EVs Drive Chip Industry’s Shift Beyond Silicon
Abundant, easily processed silicon has been the material of choice for decades in the semiconductor industry, but electric vehicles are helping chip away at its dominance in the pursuit of energy efficiency. From a report: Tesla has been a catalyst for…
China Says Government To Set Prices for After-School Classes
China said local governments should set the fees for after-school tutoring institutions that offer compulsory education subjects, another step in the country’s efforts to overhaul the private education sector. From a report: Local governments should es…
VCs Are Financing an Economy of Servants
An anonymous reader shares a post: But what’s at stake is not just employing people properly and/or paying them well — what is often called the ‘casualisation of work.’ At the core of enabling, financing and founding this servant economy is something …
The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books
Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do. From a report:Steve Potash, the bearded and bespectacled president and C.E.O. of OverDrive, spent the second week of March, 2020, on a business trip t…
Qualcomm Debuts Lossless Bluetooth Audio Streaming With aptX Lossless
Qualcomm says it’s figured out a way to deliver lossless audio over Bluetooth, yielding quality that should be indistinguishable from uncompressed sources. And it’s calling it aptX Lossless, the next generation of Qualcomm’s proprietary audio format. F…
Arctic Warming Linked To Colder Winters
A new study shows that increases in extreme winter weather in parts of the US are linked to accelerated warming of the Arctic. From a report: The scientists found that heating in the region ultimately disturbed the circular pattern of winds known as th…