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Zoox, the self-driving startup owned by Amazon.com, unveiled a fully autonomous electric vehicle with no steering wheel that can drive day and night on a single charge. From a report: The vehicle, which Zoox describes as a driverless carriage or robotaxi, can carry as many as four passengers. With a motor at each end, it travels in either direction and maxes out at 75 miles per hour. Two battery packs, one under each row of seats, generate enough juice for 16 hours of run time before recharging, the company said. To commercialize the technology, Zoox plans to launch an app-based ride-hailing service in cities like San Francisco and Las Vegas. "This is really about re-imagining transportation," Zoox Chief Executive Officer Aicha Evans said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. "Not only do we have the capital required, we have the long-term vision." The company also plans to launch ride-hailing services in other countries, Evans said. Executives didn't say how much rides would cost but that they would be "affordable" and competitive with services operated by Uber Technologies and Lyft. Nor did they say when the service would launch but confirmed it wouldn't happen in 2021.

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The Federal Trade Commission will announce Monday that it's launching a new inquiry into the privacy and data collection practices of major tech firms including Amazon, TikTok owner ByteDance, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook as well as its subsidiary WhatsApp, Axios reported Monday. From the report: The move comes amid broader scrutiny for the industry and appears to be a wide-reaching inquiry into everything major tech companies know about their users and what they do with that data, as well as their broader business plans. The FTC is asking for a large trove of information and documents from the above platforms, plus Discord, Reddit and Snap. The agency wants much of the usage and engagement data the platforms collect on their users, the metrics they use for measuring such things and short- and long-term business strategies, among many other areas of inquiry. In launching the study, the FTC is using its authority to do wide-ranging studies for no specific law enforcement purpose.

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Amazon today rolled out Live Translation, a new Alexa feature that aims to assist with conversations between people who speak two different languages by leveraging speech recognition and machine translation technology. Amazon says that Live Translation can interpret between a number of dialects in real time, including English and French, Spanish, Hindi, Brazilian Portuguese, German, or Italian. From a report: The pandemic appears to have supercharged voice app usage, which was already on an upswing. According to a study by NPR and Edison Research, the percentage of voice-enabled device owners who use commands at least once a day rose between the beginning of 2020 and the start of April. Just over a third of smart speaker owners say they listen to more music, entertainment, and news from their devices than they did before, and owners report requesting an average of 10.8 tasks per week from their assistant this year compared with 9.4 different tasks in 2019. And according to a new report from Juniper Research, consumers will interact with voice assistants on 8.4 billion devices by 2024. Launching Live Translation requires asking Alexa on an Amazon Echo device to translate one of the supported languages. The command "Alexa, translate French" will translate between English and French, for example, while "Alexa, stop" will end the translation session. The Echo will beep during the session to indicate when to speak in the other language, and Echo devices with a screen like the Echo Show will display a transcription of the conversation. Users can take pauses between sentences, and Alexa will automatically detect the language in which they're speaking and translate each side of the conversation.

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Cyberpunk 2077 is here in all its glory and pain. On some machines, it's a visual spectacle pushing the limits of current technology and delivering on the promise of Deus Ex, but open world. On other machines, including last-gen consoles, it's a unoptimized and barely playable nightmare. Developer CD Projekt Red has said it's working to improve the game, but fans already have a number of fixes, particularly if you're using an AMD CPU. From a report: Fans aren't waiting for the developer however and over the weekend AMD CPU users discovered that a few small tweaks could improve performance on their PCs. Some players reported performance gains of as much as 60 percent. Cyberpunk 2077 seems to be a CPU intensive game and, at release, it isn't properly optimized for AMD chips. "If you run the game on an AMD CPU and check your usage in task manager, it seems to utilise 4 (logical, 2 physical) cores in frequent bursts up to 100% usage, whereas the rest of the physical cores sit around 40-60%, and their logical counterparts remain idle," Redditor BramblexD explained in a post on the /r/AMD subreddit. Basically, Cyberpunk 2077 is only utilizing a portion of any AMD chips power. Digital Foundry, a YouTube channel that does in-depth technical analysis of video games, noticed the AMD issue as well. "It really looks like Cyberpunk is not properly using the hyperthreads on Ryzen CPUs," Digital Foundry said in a recent video. To fix this issue, the community has developed three separate solutions. One involves altering the game's executable with a hex editor, the other involves editing a config file, and a third is an unofficial patch built by the community. All three do the same thing -- unleash the power of AMDs processors. "Holy shit are you a wizard or something? The game is finally playable now!" One redditor said of the hex editing technique. "With this tweak my CPU usage went from 50% to ~75% and my frametime is so much more stable now."

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With the pandemic still in full swing and the first doses of a coronavirus vaccine just starting to ship in the United States, Google has pushed back the planned return to the office by a few months, to September 2021. From a report: But even as it extends the remote work period for most of its staff, Google is laying out a series of proposed changes that may substantially alter how its employees and people at other technology companies will work. In an email to the staff on Sunday night, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google's parent company, Alphabet, said the company was testing the idea of a "flexible workweek" once it is safe to return to the office. Under the pilot plan, employees would be expected to work at least three days a week in the office for "collaboration days" while working from home the other days. "We are testing a hypothesis that a flexible work model will lead to greater productivity, collaboration, and well-being," Mr. Pichai wrote in an email obtained by The New York Times. "No company at our scale has ever created a fully hybrid work force model -- though a few are starting to test it -- so it will be interesting to try."

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A "new variant" of coronavirus has been identified in the UK, which is believed to be causing the faster spread in the South East, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said. From a report: More than 1,000 cases of the new variant have been found, "predominantly in the south of England", Mr Hancock told the House of Commons this afternoon. It is spreading faster than the existing strain of coronavirus and believed to be fuelling the "very sharp, exponential rises" in cases across the South East, he said. So far it has been found in 60 local authority areas and is thought to be similar to the mutation discovered in other countries in recent months. It was first identified in Kent last week during routine surveillance by Public Health England (PHE), with ministers told about it on Friday. The health secretary said that there is currently no evidence that the new variant will not respond to the COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out across the country.

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An anonymous reader writes: Pornhub is removing all videos on its site that weren't uploaded by official content partners or members of its model program, a fundamental shift in the way one of the largest porn sites in the world operates. This means a significant portion of its videos will disappear. On Sunday evening, before the content purge, Pornhub hosted around 13.5 million videos according to the number displayed on the site's search bar, a large number of them from unverified accounts. On Monday morning, that number was down to 3 million, meaning Pornhub removed most of the videos on its site. "As part of our policy to ban unverified uploaders, we have now also suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or members of the Model Program," according to Pornhub's announcement. "This means every piece of Pornhub content is from verified uploaders, a requirement that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute." Pornhub made the policy change last week to ban all unverified users from uploading or downloading content to the site, and said it would expand its moderation efforts. But by Thursday, Mastercard and Visa announced that they'd both stop processing payments with the site altogether. Visa's announcement specifically stated it would drop all of the Mindgeek network, which includes a number of adult sites, including Redtube, Youporn, XTube, and Brazzers.

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Tech giants deemed to be gatekeepers could face fines as high as 10% of annual revenue if they don't comply with new European Union rules on data usage to be unveiled Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported Monday, citing a draft. From the report: Companies that could include Google, Amazon, and Apple will be banned from using any data from business users to compete with them or from treating their own services more favorably in rankings, among other obligations. Nasdaq futures pared gains. A company that "systemically infringes" the obligations could face orders by the European Commission to make behavioral and structural changes, such as divesting businesses. Companies will be considered to be in systematic non-compliance if the EU has issued at least three fines within a period of five years. The new Digital Markets Act will target "gatekeeper" firms, defined by the European Commission by a number of criteria, including the number of users in the millions and overall revenue in the billions of dollars, as well as their significant impact on the single market, the document said. The designations will be updated by the commission every two years, according to the document.

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Services from Alphabet's Google experienced widespread outages around the world, preventing people from accessing Gmail, YouTube and other services. From a report: Errors ranged from "something went wrong" on YouTube, to "there was an error. Please try again later," when attempting to log into the company's mail product from about 6:30 a.m. in New York. Google tools were failing to load for users in the U.S., the U.K. and across Europe, but began functioning again for many people after about an hour. Google confirmed there was an outage for the majority of its services according to a Workspace Status Dashboard, which monitors the health of its products, but just before 8:00 a.m. it said functionality was restored to the "vast majority" of users. "We will continue to work toward restoring service for the remaining affected users," it wrote in a post on its service status page. It hasn't said what caused the problems.

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"This terrible year has claimed a literary giant and a humanitarian spirit," tweeted novelist Stephen King, adding later that "The Little Drummer Girl was one of the best novels I've ever read." Margaret Atwood tweeted "His Smiley novels are key to understanding the mid-20th century." And the Associated Press tells the story of how spy-novel writer John le Carré was "drawn to espionage by an upbringing that was superficially conventional but secretly tumultuous." Born David John Moore Cornwell in Poole, southwest England on Oct. 19, 1931, he appeared to have a standard upper-middle-class education: the private Sherborne School, a year studying German literature at the University of Bern, compulsory military service in Austria — where he interrogated Eastern Bloc defectors — and a degree in modern languages at Oxford University. But his ostensibly ordinary upbringing was an illusion. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was a con man who was an associate of gangsters and spent time in jail for insurance fraud. His mother left the family when David was 5; he didn't meet her again until he was 21. It was a childhood of uncertainty and extremes: one minute limousines and champagne, the next eviction from the family's latest accommodation. It bred insecurity, an acute awareness of the gap between surface and reality — and a familiarity with secrecy that would serve him well in his future profession. "These were very early experiences, actually, of clandestine survival," le Carré said in 1996. "The whole world was enemy territory." After university, which was interrupted by his father's bankruptcy, he taught at the prestigious boarding school Eton before joining the foreign service. Officially a diplomat, he was in fact a "lowly" operative with the domestic intelligence service MI5 — he'd started as a student at Oxford — and then its overseas counterpart MI6, serving in Germany, on the Cold War front line, under the cover of second secretary at the British Embassy. His first three novels were written while he was a spy, and his employers required him to publish under a pseudonym. He remained "le Carré" for his entire career. He said he chose the name — square in French — simply because he liked the vaguely mysterious, European sound of it... Le Carré said in 1990 that the fall of the Berlin Wall had come as a relief. "For me, it was absolutely wonderful. I was sick of writing about the Cold War." His 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold "was immediately hailed as a classic and allowed him to quit the intelligence service to become a full-time writer," the AP writes, adding that he ultimately won a critical respect that "eluded" James Bond's creator Ian Fleming. And they note that le Carré ultimately described himself as a not-particularly-optimistic believer in humanity. "If only we could see it expressed in our institutional forms, we would have hope then," he told the AP. "I think the humanity will always be there. I think it will always be defeated."

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The New York Times reports: As coronavirus deaths soar across the country, deaths in communities that are home to colleges have risen faster than the rest of the nation, a New York Times analysis of 203 counties where students compose at least 10 percent of the population has found... [S]ince the end of August, deaths from the coronavirus have doubled in counties with a large college population, compared with a 58 percent increase in the rest of the nation. Few of the victims were college students, but rather older people and others living and working in the community. Health officials and family members of some people who died in such counties described large surges of cases involving students followed by subsequent infections and deaths in the wider community. "When the rate of transmission in the surrounding community is high and increasing," said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "you are going to see more deaths...." [I]n September and October, when deaths were well below earlier peaks and fairly steady, they were already rising in many college communities. That trend highlighted a central fear of health officials — that young adults with limited symptoms may unwittingly transmit the virus, increasing the possibility it would ultimately spread to someone more vulnerable... "All it really takes is one cavalier interaction," said Tali Elfassy, an epidemiologist at the University of Miami.

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Sunday Reuters reported that "a sophisticated hacking group" backed by "a foreign government" has stolen information from America's Treasury Department, and also from "a U.S. agency responsible for deciding policy around the internet and telecommunications." The Washington Post has since attributed the breach to "Russian government hackers," and discovered it's "part of a global espionage campaign that stretches back months, according to people familiar with the matter." Officials were scrambling over the weekend to assess the extent of the intrusions and implement effective countermeasures, but initial signs suggested the breach was long-running and significant, the people familiar with the matter said. The Russian hackers, known by the nicknames APT29 or Cozy Bear, are part of that nation's foreign intelligence service and breached email systems in some cases, said the people familiar with the intrusions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The same Russian group hacked the State Department and the White House email servers during the Obama administration... [The Washington Post has also reported this is the group responsible for the FireEye breach. -Ed] All of the organizations were breached through the update server of a network management system called SolarWinds, according to four people familiar with the matter. The company said Sunday in a statement that monitoring products it released in March and June of this year may have been surreptitiously weaponized with in a "highly-sophisticated, targeted...attack by a nation state." The scale of the Russian espionage operation is potentially vast and appears to be large, said several individuals familiar with the matter. "This is looking very, very bad," said one person. SolarWinds products are used by more than 300,000 organizations across the world. They include all five branches of the U.S. military, the Pentagon, State Department, Justice Department, NASA, the Executive Office of the President and the National Security Agency, the world's top electronic spy agency, according to the firm's website. SolarWinds is also used by the top 10 U.S. telecommunications companies... APT29 compromised the SolarWinds server that sends updates so that any time a customer checks in to request an update, the Russians could hitch a ride on that update to get into a victim's system, according to a person familiar with the matter. "Monday may be a bad day for lots of security teams," tweeted Dmitri Alperovitch, a cybersecurity expert and founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank. Reuters described the breach as "so serious it led to a National Security Council meeting at the White House."

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Pig Hogger (Slashdot reader #10,379) writes: Everywhere, every day, thousands of phones are plugged-into forensic tools that will pull out everything a phone has to offer an investigator. The thing is, investigators are not always working for police departments, but for school districts, who have been increasinly buying various phone hacking tools. Gizmodo writes: Public documents reviewed by Gizmodo indicate that school districts have been quietly purchasing these surveillance tools of their own for years... Known as mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), this type of tech is able to siphon text messages, photos, and application data from student's devices. Together, the districts encompass hundreds of schools, potentially exposing hundreds of thousands of students to invasive cell phone searches. While companies like Cellebrite have partnered with federal and local police for years, that the controversial equipment is also available for school district employees to search students' personal devices has gone relatively unnoticed — and serves as a frightening reminder of how technology originally developed for use by the military or intelligence services, ranging from blast-armored trucks designed for use in war zones to invasive surveillance tools, keeps trickling down to domestic police and even the institutions where our kids go to learn. "Cellebrites and Stingrays started out in the provenance of the U.S. military or federal law enforcement, and then made their way into state and local law enforcement, and also eventually make their way into the hands of criminals or petty tyrants like school administrators," Cooper Quentin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a video interview. "This is the inevitable trajectory of any sort of surveillance technology or any sort of weapon...." Gizmodo analyzed a random sample of 5,000 public school or school district websites across the United States and found that eight district websites mention Cellebrite or another MDFT technology. Because our sample is a relatively small portion of the total number of high schools in the United States — and the ones that stood out did so because they published the purchases as line items in public budget reports — many other school districts may have access to this technology. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the country with over 630,000 students enrolled in over 1,000 institutions in the 2018-2019 school year, has a Cellebrite device it says is used by a team that investigates complaints of employee misconduct against students... Ultimately, Gizmodo's investigation turned up more questions than answers about why school districts have sought these devices and how they use them. Who is subject to these searches, and who is carrying them out? How many students have had their devices searched and what were the circumstances? Were students or their parents ever asked to give any kind of meaningful consent, or even notified of the phone searches in the first place? What is done with the data afterward? Can officials retain it for use in future investigations? Most of the school districts did not respond to our inquiries.

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Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from ABC News: What if your electric vehicle could be refueled in less than 5 minutes? No plug, no outlet required. The range anxiety that's stymied sales of EVs? Forget about it. Three EVs can meet these demands and allay concerns about owning an emissions-free vehicle. There's just one drawback. You can only find them in California. Welcome to the world of hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs). A tiny market that includes Toyota's Mirai, Hyundai's Nexo and Honda Motor's Clarity Fuel Cell, these "plug-less" EVs are the alternative to their battery electric cousins. Drivers can refuel FCEVs at a traditional gasoline station in less than 5 minutes. The 2021 Mirai gets an EPA estimated 402 miles of range on the XLE trim with the Nexo close behind at 380 miles. Neither cold weather nor heated seats deplete the range, another added bonus. "Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are superior driving machines compared to traditional vehicles," Jackie Birdsall, senior engineer on Toyota's fuel cell team, told ABC News... "When people hear electric they only think battery electric," Birdsall said. "The battery electric vehicle market is pretty saturated. If we want to have sustainability and longevity we need to be diverse...." Birdsall said 2021 Mirai owners will receive $15,000 in free hydrogen, or enough money to cover the first 67,000 miles. It costs about $90 to fill up the car's 5.6 kilogram tank. These giveaways could help change consumers' minds — at least in California — to try an FCEV.

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The Wall Street Journal looks back to the days when Windows was "a loser in the world of computer games." But to change that, Eric Engstrom and his cohorts "secretly hired programmers to get the work done, and they had to do an end run around partners like Intel," remembers VentureBeat. Long-time Slashdot reader whh3 shares The Wall Street Journal's report: Windows inserted itself between game programs and the computer hardware in a way that slowed down graphics and animation. Game developers vastly preferred the DOS operating system, which didn't gum up their special effects. That created an opportunity for three Microsoft misfits — Eric Engstrom, Alex St. John and Craig Eisler. Mr. Engstrom, who died Dec. 1 at the age of 55, and his pals formed one of several factions within Microsoft trying to solve the game problem. Openly contemptuous of colleagues who didn't share their ideas, they were so obnoxious that Brad Silverberg, who ran the Windows business, dubbed them the Beastie Boys. He had to fend off frequent demands for their dismissal. Yet the solution they developed, DirectX, beat anything else on offer inside Microsoft. DirectX software recognized games and allowed them direct access to the computer's graphical capabilities, allowing a richer game experience than DOS could. "It was brilliant," Mr. Silverberg said. Launched in 1995, DirectX wowed game developers and led to a flood of new games for computers loaded with Windows. That success emboldened Microsoft to plunge deeper into the lucrative gaming market by developing the Xbox console. Microsoft's game business produced $11.6 billion of revenue in the year ended June 30... "He thought things were possible that nobody else on the planet thought would be possible," said Ben G. Wolff, a friend who runs a robotics company, "and sometimes he'd be right." "DirectX remains the foundation for many games on Windows 10 and the Xbox Series X," writes Engadget, "and it's likely to remain relevant for years to come." And VentureBeat shared this remark from Alex St. John at a memorial service for Engstrom. "He had huge dreams and huge fantasies, and he always took us all with him."

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The international news agency AFP reports on "a violent rampage at a Taiwanese-run iPhone factory in southern India" leading to over 100 arrests. About 2,000 workers were involved in the protest, reports the Verge, citing the Indian Express newspaper. The workers are protesting over allegations of unpaid wages and exploitation, according to AFP. "Local media reported workers saying they had not been paid for up to four months and were being forced to do extra shifts..." Workers at the Taiwanese-run Wistron Infocomm Manufacturing near Bangalore smashed glass panels with rods and flipped cars on their side... CCTV cameras, fans and lights were torn down, while a car was set on fire, footage shared on social media showed... A local trade union leader alleged that there was "brutal exploitation" of factory workers in sweatshop conditions at the iPhone manufacturing plant. "The state government has allowed the company to flout the basic rights," Satyanand, who uses one name, told The Hindu newspaper... Labour unrest is not uncommon in India, with workers paid poorly and given few or no social security benefits.

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The annual Game Awards ceremony awarded this year's "Best Direction" award to Naughty Dog studio's The Last of Us Part II — provoking a strong reaction from Kotaku's staff writer. "I think it's pretty obvious that no game that required its developers to crunch, like The Last of Us Part II did, should be given a Best Direction award." It's no secret that Naughty Dog subjected its workers to unbelievable levels of crunch to get The Last of Us Part II out the door, but that's hardly an innovation when it comes to Naughty Dog or game development in general. Over the years, the studio has seen constant employee turnover as developers crunch on games like The Last of Us and Uncharted, burn out, and throw in the towel. Relentless overtime, missed weekends, long stretches of time without seeing your family — these things take a toll on even the most passionate artist. "This can't be something that's continuing over and over for each game, because it is unsustainable," one The Last of Us Part II developer told Kotaku earlier this year. "At a certain point you realize, 'I can't keep doing this. I'm getting older. I can't stay and work all night.'" Let's be clear: the existence of crunch indicates a failure in leadership. It's up to game directors and producers to ensure workloads are being managed properly and goals are being met. If workers are being forced to crunch, explicitly or otherwise, it means the managers themselves have fallen short somewhere, either in straining the limits of their existing staff, fostering an environment where overtime is an implied (if unspoken) requirement, or both. And as ambitious as The Last of Us Part II director Neil Druckmann and his projects may be, "questionable experiments in the realm of pushing human limits" are not required to make a great game... I feel like the industry, now more than ever, is willing to discuss the dangers of crunch culture and solutions to eradicate it. But lavishing praise on the way The Last of Us Part II was directed feels like a tacit endorsement of crunch and only serves to push that conversation to the backburner again. A popular online statement, first coined by Fanbyte podcast producer Jordan Mallory, says, "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding." The message from all those who share it is clear: No game, not even industry darling The Last of Us Part II, is worth destroying lives to create.

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Reuters reports that "a sophisticated hacking group" backed by "a foreign government" has stolen information from America's Treasury Department, and also from "a U.S. agency responsible for deciding policy around the internet and telecommunications." There is concern within the U.S. intelligence community that the hackers who targeted the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration used a similar tool to break into other government agencies, according to three people briefed on the matter. The hack is so serious it led to a National Security Council meeting at the White House on Saturday, said one of the people familiar with the matter.

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Remote work "is here to stay," argues a new article in Silicon Valley's newspaper The Mercury News (also re-published in the East Bay Times). But they've also asked industry professionals around Silicon Valley whether this will hurt our ability to innovate. Software engineer/entrepreneur Joyce Park (who's worked in Silicon Valley over 20 years): "Fast feedback is what we're all about in this town. That's what's gone away... If you have a dumb idea or people hate your idea then you don't have to spend more time fleshing it out, and that means you don't have to spend more time defending it. When you're trying to do really innovative work, it takes so many meetings. Zoom meetings are different than normal meetings because they're much more performative. Most engineers aren't really in the putting-on-a-show business... Pretty is the death of innovation." Park also worries about young tech workers, who represent the future of innovation and aren't in offices absorbing knowledge. "Who's going to mentor them, who's going to make them successful? A lot of the craft is just seeing problems and seeing how they were successfully or unsuccessfully solved." Tarun Wadhwa, who's taught new innovation methods at Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley outpost, most recently this spring: "The sparks wouldn't fly," Wadhwa said. "The students were just as brilliant as they've always been but the class wasn't as able to help them advance that brilliance as it once was." What was missing, Wadhwa suspects, was the free-flowing, back-and-forth-and-sideways exchange of ideas that happens in person, especially during extra-curricular gatherings such as when students from different teams and different backgrounds go out for coffee together after class... Another perspective from a long-time Silicon Valley veteran: Mike Strasser, whose mechanical engineering career and current employment as general manager of Campbell med-tech startup Imperative Care straddle the hardware and software worlds, believes a reduced ability to develop a rapport with colleagues when working apart poses problems across both sectors. However, the problem is worse in hardware, where teams can't pass a prototype around a table, and easier in software, especially with collaboration apps supplementing video meetings. The move to remote work has forced technologists to find new solutions, Strasser noted, such as relatively inexpensive 3D printers that can make prototypes at home. Bay Area venture capitalist Peter Rojas, a partner at Betaworks Ventures: "We have this historic opportunity to reorganize working life and to rethink where people live and where they work...." Successful companies will be those that can nurture talent and build a strong culture while taking advantage of the opportunities remote work presents, he said. "This idea that you can only get a sense of a person in person, I think we're really getting away from that now," Rojas said. He said his firm has money in more than 100 companies — including one that makes video-conferencing collaboration software — and none appear hurt by the shift to remote. "Everybody adjusted," he said, "and figured out how to get their stuff done."

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Nathan Myhrvold is a former CTO of Microsoft, co-founder of the equity company Intellectual Ventures, and the founder of "food innovation lab" Modernist Cuisine (which among other things resulted in book of remarkable food photography). But he's now photographing the intricate designs of snowflakes, reports Fast Company: Over the span of 18 months, Myhrvold built a camera with a microscopic lens and then shot in the freezing locales of Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. All to capture individual snowflakes — millimeters across — in sparkling, high-res detail. Myhrvold captured his snowflake specimens by setting out black foam core when snow was falling. He then used a tiny watercolor brush to grab individual snowflakes and place them on a "cooling stage" under the camera. Cold is key — even the camera itself and the plate he places the snowflake on must be left outside and chilled in order to photograph the snowflake before it melts. But that's not the only element to keep those snowflakes cool: He also uses special, high-speed LED lights that don't generate as much heat. The cold is also important to a snowflake's shape, says Myhrvold, who shot his specimens at temperatures between -15 and -20 degrees F. You might call this the snowflake sweet spot: They form into the "best," most complex designs between these temperatures. The results are simply dazzling... "Sometimes to see nature's beauty you have to travel to the Grand Canyon or get up late at night to see the stars," Myhrvold says. But with snow, all you have to do is pause and look down at your mitten. "It's a beautiful thing."

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