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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Elon Musk's year of dizzying ascents hit a new apex Monday as the Tesla co-founder passed Bill Gates to become the world's second-richest person. The 49-year-old entrepreneur's net worth soared $7.2 billion to $127.9 billion, driven by yet another surge in Tesla's share price. Musk has added $100.3 billion to his net worth this year, the most of anyone on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world's 500 richest people. In January he ranked 35th. His advance up the wealth ranks has been driven largely by the electric automaker, whose market value hit $500 billion after Tesla shares rallied further on Tuesday. About three-quarters of his net worth is comprised of Tesla shares, which are valued more than four times as much as his stake in Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. Musk's milestone marks only the second time in the index's eight-year history that Microsoft Corp. co-founder Gates has ranked lower than number two. He held the top spot for years before being bumped by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos in 2017.

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Amazon announced a joint operation with the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) on Tuesday, focused on stopping counterfeit goods from entering the US. The Verge reports: The partnership will rely on intelligence gathered from Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit, logistics company DHL, and US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to proactively stop the sale of counterfeit products. "Operation Fulfilled Action" relies on Amazon's dominant positioning as both a distributor and marketplace for products. Because of the amount sold on Amazon's various storefronts, IPR Center and Amazon have shared information previously, even collaborating on a crackdown on fraud related to COVID-19. This new operation marks a more long-term partnership, however. Prior to Amazon's involvement, IPR Center's focus on "securing the global supply-chain" might be unfamiliar to the average person, but you've actually seen a bit of the Center's work before -- the government warning that plays before every DVD and Blu-ray was created by the organization. As far as counterfeit products are concerned, Amazon says it already investigated and removed potentially fraudulent offenders. A partnership with these new agencies should allow the company to go further and "stop counterfeits at the border, regardless of where bad actors were intending to offer them" said Dharmesh Mehta, vice president of customer trust and partner support at Amazon.

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According to a new study published in the journal Computers In Human Behavior, smartphone users initiate 89% of the interactions, with only 11% initiated by a notification. "This is at odds with previous academic literature and news reports which commonly claim that smartphone notifications are ruining your life, ruining productivity, and so on," reports PsychNewsDaily. From the report: "The perceived disruptiveness of smartphones is not mainly driven by external notifications," the study's authors write, "but by an urge of the user to interact with their phone that seems to occur in an almost automatic manner, just as a smoker would light a cigarette." [...] The researchers explain that many users felt compelled to check their phones even when they had switched off notifications. "Seeing this has made me realize that I don't even remember picking it up," one of the subjects said in a subsequent interview with the study's authors. The study also found that the average duration of a smartphone interaction was 64 seconds. About 50% of the interactions were 23 seconds or less. The most common activity users engaged in when using their phones was checking WhatsApp, which accounted for 22% of interactions. [...] The second most common interaction, at 17% of the total, was a "lock screen check," which means briefly unlocking the phone to check for new notifications. In third place was interacting with Instagram (16%). Facebook and Facebook messenger together accounted for 13% of the interactions, e-mail for 6%, web browsing 4%, music 3%, Snapchat 2%, and photos 2%. Phone calls -- these devices are phones, after all -- only comprised about 1% of the interactions. The participants generally considered e-mail notifications the most important. Likewise, they largely considered group chats a "source of distress," and found most group-chat messages unimportant. Smartphone interactions were longer when users were alone versus with others, and were also longer at home versus at work. Likewise, these interactions were shorter when participants received notifications, compared to when they "self-disrupt." This indicates that smartphone use is more purposeful when users receive notifications, and more "distraction-seeking" when they check their phones themselves. The researchers also found that the scrolling features on apps like Instagram and Facebook led to the longest interactions.

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Programmer Abdullah Diaa has put together a website to help determine if your favorite apps work on Apple Silicon yet. An anonymous reader shares a report from The Next Web: ... [P]lease say hello to Is Apple silicon ready? The idea behind the site is simple: it shows you if specific apps will work on laptops and desktops with Apple's in-house chip. Easy to get your head around, right? It shows you a list of software and, if they have native M1 support, they're given a green tick. Here's an image that shows you what's going on far clearer than lots of words could. As you can see, the site also shows you if the app you're after has Rosetta 2 support. Effectively, Rosetta 2 is an emulator, allowing a large number of apps designed for Intel machines to run on Apple Silicon. If this is supported, you will still be able to use that software on an M1-toting machine. Further reading: Linus Torvalds Would Like To Use An M1 Mac For Linux, But...

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Yes, Torvalds said he'd love to have one of the new M1-powered Apple laptops, but it won't run Linux and, in an exclusive interview he explains why getting Linux to run well on it isn't worth the trouble. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: Recently, on the Real World Technologies forum, Linux's creator Linus Torvalds was asked what he thought of the new M1-powered Apple laptops. Torvalds replied, "I'd absolutely love to have one if it just ran Linux." You may think, "what's the problem? Doesn't Linux run on practically every processor on the planet from 80386s to IBM s390x to the ARM family of which Apple's M1 chip is a child?" Well, yes, yes it does. But it takes more than a processor to run a computer. Torvalds would like to run Linux on these next-generation Macs. As he said, "I've been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. The new Air would be almost perfect, except for the OS. And I don't have the time to tinker with it, or the inclination to fight companies that don't want to help." Aye, there's the rub. In an exclusive interview, Torvalds expanded on why he can't see porting Linux to the M1-based Macs. "The main problem with the M1 for me is the GPU and other devices around it, because that's likely what would hold me off using it because it wouldn't have any Linux support unless Apple opens up." Still, while Torvalds knows Apple opening up their chipsets "seems unlikely, but hey, you can always hope." Even if that "wasn't an issue," Torvalds continued, "My personal hope would be more cores. Even in a laptop, I don't care about 20-hour battery life (and I wouldn't get it building kernels anyway). I'd rather plug it in a bit more often, and have 8 big cores." As for the Mac's limited RAM -- no more than 16GBs on current models -- he can live with that. "16GBs is actually ok by me because I don't tend to do things that require a lot more RAM. All I do is read email, do git and kernel compiles. And yes, I have 64GB in my desktop, but that's because I have 32 cores and 64 threads, and I do hugely parallel builds. Honestly, even then 32GB would be sufficient for my loads." That said, other developers and power users may want more from the new Macs, Torvalds thinks. "The people who really want tons of memory are the ones doing multiple VMs or huge RAW file photography and video."

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Earlier this year, Twitter started flagging disputed and potentially misleading tweets. Now, it's expanding the feature so that you'll also get a warning if you attempt to "like" a disputed tweet. Engadget reports: Tapping the heart button on a post that's been labeled as misleading will trigger a prompt with a "Find out more" button to pop up. App experimental feature researcher Jane Manchun Wong discovered the expanded function earlier this month. The tweets she tested, which were related to the elections, showed a warning that says "Official sources may not have called the race when this was tweeted." A week after election day, Twitter revealed that it labeled 300,000 tweets as misleading between October 27th and November 11th. Out of all those, 456 were blocked from being retweeted or liked and were hidden behind a warning before they could even be viewed. The company says its efforts have led to a 29 percent decrease in quoted tweets containing misleading information. In other Twitter news, the company said today that it would relaunch its verification process early next year along with brand-new guidelines for users seeking out that small, blue badge.

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The European Union could produce enough batteries by 2025 to power its fast-growing fleet of electric vehicles without relying on imported cells, European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic said on Tuesday. Reuters reports: As part of its plan to become climate neutral by 2050, the EU wants to boost local production of the building blocks for green industries -- including hydrogen fuel to make low-carbon steel and batteries to power clean vehicles. "I am confident that by 2025, the EU will be able to produce enough battery cells to meet the needs of the European automotive industry, and even to build our export capacity," Sefcovic told the online European Conference on Batteries. Today, China hosts roughly 80% of the world's lithium-ion cell production, but Europe's capacity is set to expand fast. Europe has 15 large-scale battery cell factories under construction, including Swedish company Northvolt's plants in Sweden and Germany, Chinese battery maker CATL's German facility, and South Korean firm SK Innovation's second plant in Hungary. Sefcovic said by 2025 planned European facilities would produce enough cells to power at least 6 million electric vehicles.

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James Somers, in a long essay: I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA. In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. I needed Lewis Thomas, who wrote in The Medusa and the Snail: "For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell." I wish my high school biology teacher had asked the class how an embryo could possibly differentiate -- and then paused to let us really think about it. The whole subject is in the answer to that question. A chemical gradient in the embryonic fluid is enough of a signal to slightly alter the gene expression program of some cells, not others; now the embryo knows "up" from "down"; cells at one end begin producing different proteins than cells at the other, and these, in turn, release more refined chemical signals; ...; soon, you have brain cells and foot cells. How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn't talk about that? It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs. The language alone was evocative. It suggested that the embryo -- DNA making RNA, RNA making protein, protein regulating the transcription of DNA into RNA -- was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. Could anything more interesting be imagined? [...]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A grand jury in California's Santa Clara County has indicted Thomas Moyer, Apple's head of global security, for bribery. Moyer is accused of offering 200 iPads to the Santa County Sheriff's office in exchange for concealed carry permits for four Apple employees. Moyer's attorney says that he did nothing wrong, and notably Apple is standing behind its executive. "We expect all of our employees to conduct themselves with integrity," an Apple spokesperson said in a statement. "After learning of the allegations, we conducted a thorough internal investigation and found no wrongdoing." Also indicted were two officials in the office of Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith. These officials are accused of soliciting the alleged bribe. California law gives sheriffs broad discretion to decide who gets permits to carry concealed weapons in the state. Smith has previously faced accusations that her office deliberately withheld permits to carry concealed weapons until applicants did favors for Smith. A June investigation by NBC Bay Area found that donors to Smith's re-election campaign were 14 times more likely to get concealed carry permits than those who didn't donate. A press release from Smith's office described the indictments as "a difficult time for our organization." Jeff Rosen, the Santa Clara district attorney responsible for the indictments, said that the donation of 200 iPads was scuttled at the last minute after Rosen obtained a search warrant in the case. According to LinkedIn, Moyer is responsible for "strategic management of Apple's corporate and retail security, crisis management, executive protection, investigations and new product secrecy." While two individuals in Sheriff Smith's office were indicted, no charges have been filed against Smith herself. Rosen says the investigation is ongoing. A common prosecutorial strategy is to focus on lower-ranking employees first in order to pressure them to provide evidence against their boss.

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Elon Musk made rare comments about a new Tesla vehicle to be designed in Berlin, adding that the reason behind the new vehicle program is to attract new talent from Europe: "I think there's a lot of talent, talented designers and engineers, in Europe. And a lot of the best people, they want to work somewhere where they are doing original design work. They don't want to just be doing the European version of something that was designed in California. So, I think it's important in order to attract the best talent to do original design." Electrek reports: Tesla has been putting a lot of efforts into attracting top talent and it has been successful at it in its home country. Furthermore, Musk commented on the vehicle segment that Tesla plans to address with a locally designed vehicle: "In Europe, I think it would make sense to do I guess a compact car -- perhaps a hatchback or something like that. Something that answers "what do most people want?' in a given region. In the US, cars tend to be bigger for personal taste reasons and in Europe, it tends to be smaller. If you try to park in dense urban environments, having a car that fits in tight parking spaces is important." Musk didn't offer a timeline for Tesla to design and build the new electric car in Germany, but it's not expected to hit the market for at least a few more years as Tesla focuses on bringing the European Model Y to production at Gigafactory Berlin next year. You can watch the interview where Musk makes the new comments here.

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Mayor Eric Garcetti announced last week the city's first Transportation Technology Innovation Zone, an area where innovators can test their transportation technology solutions. Archinect reports: Located in the West San Fernando Valley, the zone is the result of a partnership between Mayor Garcetti and City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, "designed to transform Warner Center into one of L.A.'s mobility innovation and workforce development hubs." "Transportation and technology each have the ability to connect communities, create jobs, and contribute to progress on sustainability, equity, and economic growth -- and Los Angeles takes pride in serving as a testing ground for dynamic and innovative mobility solutions," said Mayor Garcetti in his announcement. "The first-ever Transportation Technology Innovation Zone will unite local businesses, workers, and inventors around how to revolutionize mobility in the West Valley, and it will serve as a model for what's possible as more zones come online in areas across Los Angeles." The new initiatives is one of the flagship programs of Urban Movement Labs (UML), the transportation solutions accelerator launched by Mayor Garcetti in November 2019. "L.A. is at the forefront of the mobility revolution in our country and across the globe," said Lilly Shoup, Interim Executive Director of Urban Movement Labs in a statement. "With initiatives like the Urban Movement Labs, which accelerates transportation solutions, and the Open Mobility Foundation, which gives policymakers the digital tools they need to govern emerging mobility, Mayor Garcetti and LADOT are leading the conversation on how to embed equity, sustainability, and accessibility into our urban mobility future."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama have filed a notice to hold a unionization vote, in what could be a major labor battle against a company that has long opposed the unionization of its workforce. Employees at a newly opened Amazon facility in Bessemer, Ala., notified the National Labor Relations Board that they want to hold an election to create a bargaining unit that would cover 1,500 full-time and part-time workers. The group seeks to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). A website created by the union encourages Bessemer warehouse workers to join the organizing drive to secure not just better pay, but also improved safety standards. "We face outrageous work quotas that have left many with illnesses and lifetime injuries," the union said on the site. "With a union contract, we can form a worker safety committee, and negotiate the highest safety standards and protocols for our workplace." Amazon counters that its warehouses are safe and that it pays a minimum wage of $15 an hour, as well as offering such benefits as health care, vision and dental insurance, spokeswoman Rachael Lighty said in an emailed statement. "We don't believe this group represents the majority of our employees' views." The Bessemer warehouse is among the newer Amazon facilities. It began operating in March and is one of dozens of new logistics sites the company has opened since the pandemic began to address the surge in online buying caused by consumers' reluctance to shop in person. The notice of the workers' filing with the labor board offers few details about the effort. In addition to listing the location and number of employees that would be part of the bargaining unit, the filing notes that the union would cover "All hourly full-time and regular part-time fulfillment center employees including leads and learning ambassadors." It would exclude truck drivers, clerical, maintenance and engineering employees, and supervisors, among others. [...] Amazon can contest the size and composition of the proposed bargaining unit. And it can raise questions over the authorization cards. Givan anticipates Amazon will use all the tools at its disposal to beat back the union drive. "To file the NLRB notice, the union needed to have cards authorizing the RWDSU to represent workers in collective bargaining signed by at least 30 percent of the proposed negotiating unit," the report adds, citing Rebecca Givan, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University. "But she noted that very few unions would file for a union vote without 'a very strong majority' of cards signed, or support at the Alabama warehouse from well over 750 workers."

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turp182 writes: What started as routine wildlife assistance took an extraterrestrial turn for Utah's Department of Public Safety after officers stumbled upon a mysterious monolith in the middle of rural Utah. Officers from the Utah Department of Public Safety's Aero Bureau were flying by helicopter last Wednesday, helping the Division of Wildlife Resources count bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah, when they spotted something that seemed right out of "2001: A Space Odyssey." "One of the biologists ... spotted it, and we just happened to fly directly over the top of it," pilot Bret Hutchings told CNN affiliate KSL. "He was like, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, turn around, turn around!' And I was like, 'What.' And he's like, 'There's this thing back there -- we've got to go look at it!'" And there it was -- in the middle of the red rock was a shiny, silver metal monolith sticking out of the ground. Hutchings guessed it was "between 10 and 12 feet high." It didn't look like it was randomly dropped to the ground, he told KSL, but rather it looked like it had been planted. "We were kind of joking around that if one of us suddenly disappears, then the rest of us make a run for it," Hutchings said. Still, Hutchings said he thinks it was most likely placed there by an artist rather than an alien. "I'm assuming it's some new wave artist or something or, you know, somebody that was a big ("2001: A Space Odyssey") fan," he said, referencing a scene in the 1968 film where a black monolith appears.

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Last month, Facebook announced a crackdown: The platform would no longer permit content that "denies or distorts the Holocaust" as part of its larger policy prohibiting hate speech. From a report: While noting that successful enforcement could take time, Monika Bickert, Facebook's vice president of content policy, explained the ban in a blog post. "Our decision is supported by the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people," she wrote. But as of mid-November, The Markup has found, numerous Facebook pages for well-known Holocaust denial groups remain active -- and for users who find the pages, Facebook's algorithms continue to recommend related content, effectively creating a network for pushing anti-Semitic content. Facebook has long struggled to tamp down on quick-traveling misinformation and shape-shifting conspiracy groups, but many of the discriminatory pages The Markup found either belonged to groups with a long history of prominence within the Holocaust denial movement or directly referenced well-known anti-Semitic or white nationalist memes, making them seem like obvious targets for Facebook's crackdown. It's unclear whether Facebook considers the posts and groups The Markup found unacceptable. The company did not announce how it would define Holocaust denialism, and the company did not respond to multiple requests for comment; all the pages and posts referenced in this article were still active as of Nov. 23 at 5 p.m. ET.

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Snapchat on Monday launched Spotlight, a video tab within its app that, like TikTok, distributes videos based more on how popular they are than on who created them. Facebook in August launched its TikTok competitor, called Reels. From a report: Snapchat's news comes days after Twitter said it would be adding "Fleets," which are basically Snapchat stories for people who tweet. (Nearly every social media app has launched some version of Stories in the past few years.) Tech platforms used to focus on ways to create wildly different products to attract audiences. Today, they all have similar features, and instead differentiate themselves with their philosophies, values and use cases.

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Twitter announced today that it would relaunch its verification process early next year along with brand-new guidelines for users seeking out that small, blue badge. From a report: Twitter's announcement confirms earlier reporting in June from app researcher Jane Manchun Wong suggesting that the company was creating a new verification system. In Twitter's Tuesday blog post, the company confirmed that this new system would roll out in "early 2021." Twitter is also asking for feedback on a draft proposal for verification. If no changes to this proposal are made, the accounts that would be eligible for verification would include government accounts, companies, brands, nonprofits, news media accounts, entertainment, sports, activists, organizers, and what Twitter refers to as "other influential individuals." Each type of account must meet specific requirements, like being profiled in a media outlet, in order to receive verification. The entirety of Twitter's draft policy can be viewed here. After receiving feedback, Twitter plans to release the final policy on December 17th. Twitter also announced new draft rules explaining when a verification badge could be taken away. If a verified user changes their display name or bio to mislead people on their true identity, Twitter could pull their badge. Repeat terms of service violations could also lead to loss of verified status.

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Australia's intelligence agencies have been caught "incidentally" collecting data from the country's COVIDSafe contact tracing app during the first six months of its launch, a government watchdog has found. From a report: The report, published Monday by the Australian government's inspector general for the intelligence community, which oversees the government's spy and eavesdropping agencies, said the app data was scooped up "in the course of the lawful collection of other data." But the watchdog said that there was "no evidence" that any agency "decrypted, accessed or used any COVID app data." Incidental collection is a common term used by spies to describe the data that was not deliberately targeted but collected as part of a wider collection effort. This kind of collection isn't accidental, but more of a consequence of when spy agencies tap into fiber optic cables, for example, which carries an enormous firehose of data. An Australian government spokesperson told one outlet, which first reported the news, that incidental collection can also happen as a result of the "execution of warrants."

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Surging Tesla shares have pushed the company's market capitalization to more than $515 billion, a fivefold increase since the start of the year. From a report: The traditionally volatile stock has continued to experience price swings. But since reaching a low for the year in March, Tesla's share price has been on an upwards trajectory that accelerated in August. Tesla's share price, which rose 4.6% in morning trading to $545.62, has helped blast its CEO Elon Musk into the upper stratosphere of Bloomberg's Billionaire Index. As of Tuesday, Musk's net worth had risen $7.24 billion to more than $128 billion. Only Amazon's Jeff Bezos stands in his way to becoming the world's wealthiest person. Tesla shares have been fueled over the past week by news that it will be added to the S&P 500 index in December. Since Friday, the company has added more than $52 billion to its market cap -- the equivalent of adding nearly one and a half Ford Motor Co., to its valuation.

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India is not done banning Chinese apps. The world's second largest internet market, which has banned over 175 apps with links to the neighboring nation in recent months, said on Tuesday it was banning an additional 43 such apps. From a report: Like with the previous orders, India cited cybersecurity concerns to block these apps. "This action was taken based on the inputs regarding these apps for engaging in activities which are prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order," said India's IT Ministry in a statement. The ministry said it issued the order to block these apps "based on the comprehensive reports received from Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Center, Ministry of Home Affairs." The apps that have been banned include popular short video service Snack Video, which had surged to the top of the chart in recent months, as well as e-commerce app AliExpress, delivery app Lalamove, and shopping app Taobao Live. At this point, there doesn't appear to be any Chinese app left in the top 500 apps used in India.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Satoshi didn't leave much behind when he decided to leave the scene for good back in April, 2011. But, he did leave enough for us to conduct a thorough research into his whereabouts when he was working on Bitcoin. To conduct this research, we gathered data from the following: Satoshi's Bitcointalk account (539 available posts) His 34 emails on the cryptography and Bitcoin mailing lists His 169 commits on SourceForge The metadata from Bitcoin whitepaper versions from 2008 (PDF) and 2009 (PDF) The Genesis block Various Wayback Machine archives The data-driven part of the research focuses on timestamps from Satoshi's Bitcointalk posts, SourceForge commits, and emails, which represent a total of 742 activity instances from 206 days (not consecutive). The timestamp data starts from October 31, 2008, when he first announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, and ends on December 13, 2010, when he sent his last email that is known to be UTC timestamped. Using that data we compiled scatter charts in different suspect time zones to see when he was active and when he was not. We then used other data we gathered to further confirm the most likely location he called home. Common suspect locations are the UK (GMT), US Eastern (EST), US Pacific (PST), Japan (JST), and Australia (AEST). The last two were easy to debunk, but the first three prospects needed further examination.

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