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Spurred by Brexit, London is backing companies that will build satellites and haul them into orbit. From a report: Cornwall, in England's far southwest, is known for antique fishing villages and snug, cliff-lined beaches. Soon it may be the scene of something very different: a small but growing space industry. One day in a year or two, a modified Boeing 747 is expected to lift off from the long runway at the region's airport, head out over the Atlantic Ocean and soar into the stratosphere. There, a rocket will drop from below a wing, fire its engines and ferry a load of small satellites into orbit, while the plane returns to the airport. After six years of planning and fund-raising, construction of a bare-bones spaceport, budgeted at about 22 million pounds ($28 million), is beginning this month at the airport in Newquay. The anchor tenant is expected to be Virgin Orbit, a part of Richard Branson's Virgin universe. Its selling point: Putting satellites into orbit via aircraft can be done faster and with less infrastructure than earthbound rockets. It plans to bring its 747 (called the Cosmic Girl) and other gear being tested in the Mojave Desert to Britain with the help of $9.5 million from the U.K. Space Agency. "At the beginning, people laughed at us," said Melissa Thorpe, head of engagement for Spaceport Cornwall, the developer. "It took a lot of work to convince a lot of people." Among the better arguments: The spaceport, which is owned by the local government, could eventually provide 150 good jobs in what, despite its charm, is a region dependent on low-paid, seasonal work from tourism. Britain is doubling down on the always risky space business after, some would say, years of neglect. Besides Cornwall, the government is putting money behind several other potential launch sites, including one on the remote north coast of Scotland, which is being tailored for an environmentally friendly rocket to be manufactured nearby. This is all new for a country that does not have a deep history of rocketry or launching satellites into space. The case for spaceports in Britain is far from proven. In fact, some analysts say there are already too many such facilities, including in the United States.

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Kurt Nelson, a software engineer at Uber, writes an op-ed at TechCrunch: I've been a software engineer at Uber for two years, and I've also been a ride-hail driver. I regularly drove for Lyft in college, and while my day job involves writing code for the Uber Android app, I still make deliveries for app-based companies on my bike to understand the state of the gig economy. These experiences have made me realize a crucial factor in the gig economy: Uber works because it's cheap and it's quick. The instant gratification when we book a ride and a car shows up only minutes later gives us a sense of control. It's the most convenient thing in the world to go to your friendâ(TM)s house, the grocery store or the airport at the click of a button. But it's become clear to me that this is only possible because countless drivers are spending their personal time sitting in their cars, waiting to pick up a ride, completely unpaid. Workers are subsidizing the product with their free labor. I've decided to speak out against my employer because I know what it's like to work with no benefits. Before joining Uber, I worked a range of low-wage jobs from customer service at Disneyland to delivering pizza with no benefits. Uber is one of several large companies bankrolling California's Proposition 22. They've now contributed $47.5 million dollars to the campaign. At work, management tells us that passing Prop 22 is for the best because it is critical for the company's bottom line. Yet, a corporation's bottom line will not and should not influence my vote. Uber claims Prop 22 would be good for drivers, but that depends on Uber the company treating drivers better. [...] As a software engineer, I have a very different experience working for Uber than drivers do. Being classified as an employee affords me benefits including healthcare, a retirement plan, stock vesting and the ability to take paid vacation and sick leave. Uber drivers are not afforded these benefits, since Uber misclassifies them as independent contractors. Since January 1 of this year, the law has been clear: Gig drivers should be classified as employees. Yet Uber refuses to obey the law and is now seeking to get Prop 22 passed so they can write a new set of rules for themselves. There's a misconception that all Uber drivers are part-time. Maybe they drive as a fun hobby in retirement or pick up a few hours after class in college, as I did. These drivers exist, but the drivers who are essential to Uber's business are full-time workers.

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Alphabet's Google got a mixed reception at the U.S. Supreme Court as it sought to overturn a ruling that could force the company to pay billions of dollars for improperly using Oracle's copyrighted code in the Android operating system. From a report: Holding a low-tech telephone session in one of the biggest software fights in American history, the justices on Wednesday questioned Google's contention that it had no way to replicate the code without forcing millions of software developers to learn a new programming language. Justice Neil Gorsuch told Google's lawyer that Apple and other companies have "come up with phones that work just fine without engaging in this kind of copying." But Gorsuch also raised the possibility of returning the case to a federal appeals court for another look at Google's contention that it engaged in legitimate "fair use" of Oracle's Java programming language. Oracle says it's entitled to at least $8.8 billion in damages. A jury found that Google's code copying was a legitimate fair use, but a federal appeals court reversed that finding.

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A cross-party group of MEPs has written to Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos, demanding information on the online retailer's monitoring of trade union activists and politicians in response to deleted job postings that described unions as "threats." From a report: The letter, from 37 members of the European parliament, said they were concerned Amazon deliberately targeted workers seeking to organise, and also questioned whether the company had "spied" on politicians. Trade unions last week called for a European commission investigation into whether Amazon's monitoring of workers was legal, after two job posts on the US company's website advertised "intelligence analyst" roles that referred to "labor organizing threats against the company." The advertisements, aimed at candidates with law enforcement or military experience, also mentioned the monitoring of "hostile political leaders." The posts grouped organised labour with hate groups and terrorism, two illegal activities, and listed French and Spanish language skills among the preferred qualifications, suggesting European workers could be targets. Amazon deleted the posts after Vice News first reported on them.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Slack is useful to connect with your teammates and avoid sending them emails for things that can be discussed quickly through a chat. However, to talk to a person from a client or partner organization whom you interact with regularly, you'd need to email them and maybe even schedule a meeting or call them to check a trivial detail. Now, Slack is solving that problem by introducing a new feature called Connect DMs that'll let you chat with someone from outside your organization through just a few clicks. This sounds like an email but in a chat format. In June, the company introduced Slack Connect, a way for multiple companies to have a joint slack channel. It said that over 56,000 organizations have been using this feature after the launch, and Slack Connect DM is the next step of that. The implementation is easy: you generate a link for starting Slack Connect DM and send it to your contact. Once they accept the invitation, you can chat with them directly in Slack. Plus, you will have control to revoke access at any time.

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Korean chip manufacturer SK Hynix has unveiled the world's first 64GB DDR5 RAM modules, marking a big step away from DDR4 DIMMs that have dominated PC memory since 2013. From a report: The DDR5-4800 chips support speeds between 4,800 and 5,600 Mbps with faster potential data rates than DDR4, while using less power. The technology also allows for modules of up to 256GB in size. The JEDEC standard for DDR5 RAM was officially published in July this year, but SK Hynix unveiled its first chips in 2018. Apart from the memory gains, DDR5 will have two 32-bit channels instead of a single 64-bit channel, making it easier to increase peak bandwidth. The modules themselves will also regulate voltage instead of the motherboard, allowing the DDR5 RAM manufacturer to control the all-important clock speeds. All told, it could make for some very interesting enthusiast RAM options. SK Hynix has already tested modules at 6,400 Mbps and has 8,400 Mbps speeds on the roadmap.

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The House Judiciary Committee says Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are monopolies -- but its new plan to rein in their power won't change anything overnight. Instead, Democratic lawmakers propose to rewrite American antitrust law in order to restructure the U.S.'s most successful and powerful industry over time. From a report: The report is a long pass down the field of the tech industry's unfolding conflicts. It could be game-changing -- but it also might never get completed. The report, which runs more than 450 pages, proposes broad updates to antitrust law, including: limiting companies' ability to compete unfairly against third parties on their own platforms by either requiring online marketplaces to be independently run businesses or establishing rules for how such marketplaces can be organized; blocking online platforms from giving themselves preferential treatment or playing favorites with other content providers; requiring social networks to be interoperable so that people can communicate across platforms and carry their data over from one platform to another; directing antitrust enforcers to assume that an acquisition by a dominant tech firm is anticompetitive unless proven otherwise; and allowing news publishers to team up to negotiate against tech platforms looking to carry their content. Committee investigators spent 16 months reviewing mountains of emails, memos and other evidence to reach these conclusions about the companies: Amazon: The internet retail giant achieved its dominant position in part through acquiring competitors; has a monopoly over and mistreats third-party sellers; and has created a conflict of interest through its double role as an operator of its marketplace and also a seller there. Apple: The report says Apple exerts monopoly power over software distribution to more than half the mobile devices in the U.S. It accuses the company of exploiting rivals by levying commissions and fees and copying apps, and says Apple gives preference to its own apps and services. Facebook: The social media network has monopoly power in the social networking space, the report finds, and takes a "copy, acquire, kill" approach to would-be rivals such as WhatsApp and Instagram, both of which it bought in the early 2010s. Google: The search engine has a monopoly in the general online search and search advertising markets, according to the report, maintaining its position through anticompetitive tactics such as undermining vertical search providers and acquiring rivals. "To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons," write the authors of the report. The other side: The companies all deny that they hold monopoly positions or that their practices and acquisitions violate antitrust law, and argue that the tech industry remains healthily competitive.

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Two scientists have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the tools to edit DNA. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna are the first two women to share the prize, which honours their work on the technology of genome editing. From a report: Their discovery, known as Crispr-Cas9 "genetic scissors", is a way of making specific and precise changes to the DNA contained in living cells. They will split the prize money of 10 million krona ($1,110,400). The women's technology has been transformative for basic science research and it could also be used to treat, or even cure, inherited illnesses. Prof Charpentier, from the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, said it was an emotional moment when she learned about the award. "When it happens, you're very surprised, and you think it's not real. But obviously it's real," she said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: The administration of President Donald Trump on Tuesday moved to impose major new limits on use of the controversial H-1B visa, intended for jobs requiring specialized skills and widely used by Silicon Valley technology firms. The new rules are expected to reduce the pool of skilled labor and raise costs for tech companies and other employers. Critics say that could force companies to move some operations outside the U.S. The announced changes involve new rules from both Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Labor. Homeland Security said its rule, effective 60 days after it's published in the federal register, would "combat the use of H-1B workers to serve as a low-cost replacement for otherwise qualified American workers." The Homeland Security rule would fulfill a long-running Trump administration promise to revise the definition of which "specialty occupations" are eligible for the visa, according to a draft copy released late Tuesday. Also revised would be definitions of "worksite," "third-party worksite" and "U.S. employer," as well as clarifying how the government will determine whether an "employer-employee" relationship exists. Placements of H-1B workers at third-party sites -- as staffing companies do -- would last a maximum of a year. The Labor Department's draft rule suggests visa approvals will require specific degrees for job types. If that change is made, it could lead to qualified applications being rejected, [said Sean Randolph, senior director of the Bay Area Council's Economic Institute.] While there are problems around wages paid to less-skilled H-1B holders, including those hired out to big tech firms by staffing companies, "it would be a mistake to tar and feather the entire system with that because what I've seen about how our tech companies here use the H-1Bs, they're very selective, and they're for important niche positions that otherwise a company would have a hard time filling," Randolph said.

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AmiMoJo shares a report from NBC News: Facebook said Tuesday that it is banning all QAnon accounts from its platforms, a significant escalation over its previous actions and one of the broadest rules the social media giant has put in place in its history. Facebook said the change is an update on the policy it created in August that initially only removed accounts related to the QAnon conspiracy theory that discussed violence, which resulted in the termination of 1,500 pages, groups and profiles. A company spokesperson said the enforcement, which started Tuesday, will "bring to parity what we've been doing on other pieces of policy with regard to militarized social movements," such as militia and terror groups that repeatedly call for violence. "Starting today, we will remove Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts for representing QAnon. We're starting to enforce this updated policy today and are removing content accordingly, but this work will take time and will continue in the coming days and weeks," Facebook wrote in a press release. "Our Dangerous Organizations Operations team will continue to enforce this policy and proactively detect content for removal instead of relying on user reports."

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Raisey-raison writes from a report via The New York Times: The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astrophysicists for their work on black holes, regions of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing -- no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light -- can escape. They are Roger Penrose, an Englishman, Reinhard Genzel, a German, and Andrea Ghez, an American. Dr. Penrose proved that "black holes will form whenever the conditions are right," said Brown University physicist Sylvester Gates, incoming president of the American Physical Society. "It is almost an unstoppable process. That really was an astounding result." The New York Times adds: "Working independently, Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez, and their teams, have spent the last decades tracking stars and dust clouds whizzing around the center of our galaxy with telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, trying to see if that dark dusty realm does indeed harbor a black hole." For what it's worth, Dr. Penrose was awarded half of the approximately $1.1 million prize and the second half was split between Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez. "Dr. Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, following Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018," the report notes.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: For despite having evolved facial expressions that tug on the heartstrings of owners, researchers have found that unlike humans, dogs do not have brain regions that respond specifically to faces. "It's amazing dogs do so well when it comes to reading emotions and identify from faces, despite the fact that they seem not to have a brain designed for having a focus on [them]," said Dr Attila Andics, co-author of the study from Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary. Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, Andics and colleagues report how they scanned the brains of 20 family dogs, including labradors and border collies, and 30 humans with each shown six sequences of 48 videos of either the front or the back of a human or dog head. The team found particular regions of the dog's brain showed differing activity depending on the species shown, with a greater response to dog videos. However, there was no difference in any region when dogs were shown a human or dog face compared with the back of its head. By contrast, regions of the human brain showed different activity depending whether a face or the back of a head was shown, with faces generally generating a stronger response. A small subset of these regions also showed a difference between species, in general showing a stronger response to humans. Andics said the further analysis showed the dog brain was primarily focused on whether the animal was looking at a dog or a human, whereas the human brain was mainly focused on whether there was a face.

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Amazon's Eero mesh networking company is introducing Eero for Service Providers. "This is an all-new hardware and software offering designed to help internet service providers (ISPs) meet customers' increasing demands for exceptional home Wi-Fi," writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols via ZDNet. "This is not just a bundling of a selection of Eero Wi-Fi mesh routers with your existing internet service. It also includes remote network management for your ISP and security and privacy management tools for you." From the report: The bundle starts, of course, with the routers. Besides offering Eero's existing whole-home mesh Wi-Fi systems to customers, ISPs will also get access to the all-new Eero 6 series. These come with Wi-Fi 6. This new Wi-Fi technology supports faster speeds and more simultaneously connected devices. Eero claims that this is its fastest Wi-Fi network yet. There are two models: Eero Pro 6 and Eero 6. These new devices also come with a built-in Zigbee smart home hub. This IEEE 802.15.4 personal-area network standard Internet of Things (IoT) hub lets you manage compatible IoT devices on your networks. This way you don't need a separate Zigbee hub. For ISPs, Eero Insight builds on Eero's existing Remote Network Management software. This combines monitoring user history to predict and address customer problems before they change from annoyances to real problems. It also includes network monitoring tools such as a network topology viewer, historical speed tests and bandwidth usage, RF diagnostics, alerts, audit logs, outage detection, fleet analysis, and network health. For users, all this should mean a more reliable internet connection and that's always good news.

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Facebook Chief Revenue Officer David Fischer said Tuesday that the economic models that rely on personalized advertising are "under assault" as Apple readies changes that would limit the ability of Facebook and other companies to target ads and estimate how well they work. Apple frames the change as preserving users' privacy, rather than as an attack on the advertising industry, and has been promoting its privacy features as a core reason to get an iPhone. CNBC reports: The change to Apple's identifier for advertisers, or IDFA,will give iPhone users the option to block tracking when opening an app. It was originally planned for iOS 14, the version of the iPhone operating system that was released last month. But Apple said last month it was delaying the rollout until 2021 "to give developers time to make necessary changes." Fischer, speaking at a virtual Advertising Week session Tuesday morning, spoke about the changes after being asked about Facebook's vulnerability to the companies that control mobile platforms, like Apple and Google, which runs Android. Fischer argued that though there's "angst and concern" about the risks of technology, personalized and targeted advertising has been essential to help the internet grow. "The economic model that not just we at Facebook, but so many businesses rely on, this model is worth preserving, one that makes content freely available, and the business that makes it run and hum, is via advertising," he said. "And right now, frankly, some of that is under assault, that the very tools that entrepreneurs, that businesses are relying on right now are being threatened. To me, the changes that Apple has proposed, pretty sweeping changes, are going to hurt developers and businesses the most." Fischer said the company plans to "defend" its existing model. "There are different business models out there. Apple has one that sells luxury hardware or subscription services, mainly to consumers like us who are fortunate enough to have a lot of discretionary income in some of the world's wealthiest countries," he said. "That's fine, but I don't think it's appropriate to then dictate that has to be other business models, and the one that we believe is so valuable, one that relies on advertising, in our case, personalized ads, to enable free products, enable businesses to launch and grow and thrive, we're going to defend that. And we think it really important that not just we but our industry does that."

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Cisco has been hit with a massive $1.9 billion patent-infringement bill for copying cybersecurity tech from Centripetal Networks and pushing the company out of lucrative government contracts. The Register reports: The network switch maker infringed four patents, a Virginia court decided on Monday, but since the infringement was "willful and egregious," the judge multiplied the $756 million owed by 2.5 to a total fine of $1,889,521,362.50. With interest, Cisco faces a hefty $1,903,239,287.50 bill "payable in a lump sum due on the judgment date," the court said. The four patents are: US 9,203,806, 9,560,176, 9,686,193, and 9,917,856. That's not all: the court also imposed [PDF] a royalty of ten per cent of some of Cisco's products for the next three years, and five per cent for three years after that. That royalty must be at least $168 million and no more than $300 million for the first three years, and between $84 million and $150 million for the next three, the judge said. Even though the sums are massive, they are far from ruinous, and represent about three months of profit for Cisco. The networking giant also has a massive cash pile of roughly $30 billion that the total bill will barely eat into. As for the tech itself, Centripetal Networks, based in Virginia, developed a network protection system that was in part funded by the US government. The patented parts of it deal with speed and scalability issues, and allowed for live updates and automated workflows. It outlined the technology to Cisco after the company had signed a non-disclosure agreement. But then Cisco simply stole the functionality and incorporated it into its own products in 2017. Centripetal sued [PDF] the following year. "The fact that Cisco released products with Centripetal's functionality within a year of these meetings goes beyond mere coincidence," said District Judge Henry Morgan in his judgment. He noted that Cisco had "continually gathered information from Centripetal as if it intended to buy the technology from Centripetal," but then "appropriated the information gained in these meetings to learn about Centripetal's patented functionality and embedded it into its own products."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The body tasked with oversight of the IRS announced in a letter that it will investigate the agency's use of location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on peoples' phones, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Motherboard. The move comes after Senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren demanded a formal investigation into how the IRS used the location data to track Americans without a warrant. "We are going to conduct a review of this matter, and we are in the process of contacting the CI [Criminal Investigation] division about this review," the letter, signed by J. Russell George, the Inspector General, and addressed to the Senators, reads. CI has a broad mandate to investigate abusive tax schemes, bankruptcy fraud, identity theft, and many more similar crimes. Wyden's office provided Motherboard with a copy of the letter on Tuesday. In June, officials from the IRS Criminal Investigation unit told Wyden's office that it had purchased location data from a contractor called Venntel, and that the IRS had tried to use it to identify individual criminal suspects. Venntel obtains location data from innocuous looking apps such as games, weather, or e-commerce apps, and then sells access to the data to government clients. [...] The IRS' attempts were not successful though, as the people the IRS was looking for weren't included in the particular Venntel data set, the aide added. But the IRS still obtained this data without a warrant, and the legal justification for doing so remains unclear. The aide said that the IRS received verbal approval to use the data, but stopped responding to their office's inquiries.

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In honor of legendary guitarist Eddie Van Halen, who tragically passed away today from throat cancer at the age of 65, we wanted to resurface an article Eddie wrote in 2015 for Popular Mechanics. While many know him as the guitar god, Eddie Van Halen was also an inventor and patent holder who has spent the better part of 35 years in his shop, rebuilding guitars and amps, searching for his signature sound. Here's an excerpt from the article: I've always been a tinkerer. It comes from my dad. Growing up, we lived in a house in Pasadena that had no driveway. You used an alley that ran through the middle of the block, behind all the houses, to get to your backyard or the garage. Well, the neighbor behind us had a U-Haul trailer up on car jacks and loaded with cinder block. One night my dad came home from a gig at three in the morning. He had a little heat going, he'd had a few drinks, so he says, "This thing is blocking me from getting in again." So he got out of the car and tried to move it. As soon as he lifted the trailer, the jack fell over, and it chopped his finger off. This was a problem. Besides the obvious reasons, he played clarinet and saxophone. On a sax, you don't need to seal the hole with your finger. A valve closes over it. But with a clarinet, you have to seal the hole, so he took a saxophone valve cover and adapted it to work on his clarinet. Another funny thing was later in his life, when he started losing his teeth. You need your bottom teeth to play a reed instrument. Instead of going to the dentist, he made himself a perfectly shaped prosthesis out of white Teflon that filled the gap where his teeth were missing. He slipped that in when he had to play. Watching him do that kind of stuff instilled a curiosity in me. If something doesn't do what you want it to, there's always a way to fix it... Van Halen was an inventor on three patents related to guitars: A folding prop to support a guitar in a flat position, a tension-adjusting tailpiece, and an ornamental design for a headstock. Two of the three remain today. Slashdot reader nicolaiplum shares the following news about his passing: Rock legend Eddie van Halen has died, aged 65, after a long battle with cancer. "In a band known for its instability -- due in part to a rotating cast of lead singers that most notably includes David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar -- Eddie Van Halen and his brother Alex remained constants, appearing on 12 studio albums that reached across five decades and sold tens of millions of copies," reports NPR. The New York Times adds: "His outpouring of riffs, runs and solos was hyperactive and athletic, making deeper or darker emotions feel irrelevant. The band he led was one of the most popular of all time." This story is part of a new occasional article series we're calling Slashback. We'll be covering a topic that may not be breaking news, but is interesting to us.

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A security flaw in a hi-tech chastity belt for men made it possible for hackers to remotely lock all the devices in use simultaneously. The BBC reports: Qiui's Cellmate Chastity Cage is sold online for about $190 and is marketed as a way for owners to give a partner control over access to their body. Pen Test Partners believe about 40,000 devices have been sold based on the number of IDs that have been granted by its Guangdong-based creator. The cage wirelessly connects to a smartphone via a Bluetooth signal, which is used to trigger the device's lock-and-clamp mechanism. But to achieve this, the software relies on sending commands to a computer server used by the manufacturer. The security researchers said they discovered a way to fool the server into disclosing the registered name of each device owner, among other personal details, as well as the co-ordinates of every location from where the app had been used. In addition, they said, they could reveal a unique code that had been assigned to each device. These could be used to make the server ignore app requests to unlock any of the identified chastity toys, they added, leaving wearers locked in. The sex toy's app has been fixed by its Chinese developer after a team of UK security professionals flagged the bug. They have also published a workaround. This could be useful to anyone still using the old version of the app who finds themselves locked in as a result of an attacker making use of the revelation. Any other attempt to cut through the device's plastic body poses a risk of harm.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A boy and his mother today filed a class action lawsuit against Nintendo for not doing enough to fix a hardware problem common among Nintendo Switch controllers. It is one of several legal efforts related to the issue of "Joy-Con drift" -- a phenomenon where the Switch Joy-Con controllers make in-game characters "drift" even when nobody is moving them. The complaint, filed in Northern California, was brought by a woman named Luz Sanchez and her 9- or 10-year-old son, who, as a minor, is referred to in court documents as M.S. The complaint describes how Sanchez purchased her son a Nintendo Switch in December 2018, when he was 8. Within a month, the complaint alleges, Sanchez's controllers began registering in-game movement when his hands weren't on them. Less than a year later, it says, "the Joy-Con drift became so pronounced that the controllers became inoperable for general gameplay use." Sanchez's mom obligingly purchased another set of controllers, but seven months later, the complaint alleges, they began drifting too. Joy-Con drift is pervasive among Switch devices. (Anecdotally, I've experienced it on two sets of my own controllers). Characters inch left or right as if a ghost was operating the console. Nintendo didn't acknowledge the problem much until July 2019. That month, a thread on the Nintendo Switch subreddit calling out Joy-Con drift received over 25,000 upvotes. More than a dozen Switch owners filed a potential class action lawsuit (PDF) at the time calling Joy-Cons "defective." Lawyers said Nintendo had heard users' complaints for long enough; why didn't the company disclose the issue? The 2019 lawsuit has been moved into arbitration, and the plaintiffs' lawyers recently asked Switch users to submit videos describing their experiences with Joy-Con drift to help bolster their case. Last month, a French consumer group filed a complaint, too, alleging planned obsolescence. Nintendo began fixing Joy-Cons for free, post-warranty, in July 2019, and Nintendo's president apologized for the problem in a financial meeting this summer. But Sanchez's lawyers argue that Nintendo hasn't done enough to fix the issue or warn customers about it up front.

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YouTube has apologised and deleted a tweet from its official Twitter account in which it mocked content creators for making videos that were too long. From a report: Under its own rules, adverts can be placed in the middle of videos at least eight minutes long only - shortened in July 2020 from a 10-minute minimum. This means content creators can make more money by making longer videos. YouTubers can also start monetising their videos only once they have racked up 4,000 hours of watch time. "It is like giving your daughter allowance based on hours studied, not grades, then complaining she studies too much," former Amazon Studios strategy head Matthew Ball said. In the tweet, posted on Saturday afternoon and removed within a couple of hours, YouTube mocked "creators" who "after talking for 15 minutes" would say: "'All right, let's jump straight into the video.'" In a follow-up tweet to its 72 million followers, the platform said the original had been posted in "good faith... but we missed the mark and did not reflect the spirit of the creator community."

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