A personalized cancer vaccine made by BioNTech, the German company that produced the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, has shown promising results against pancreatic cancer. The vaccine, which teaches patients' immune systems to attack their tumors, provoked an immune response in half of the 16 patients treated, and those patients did not experience relapses of their cancer during the study. The New York Times reports: Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, led by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, extracted patients' tumors and shipped samples of them to Germany. There, scientists at BioNTech, the company that made a highly successful COVID vaccine with Pfizer, analyzed the genetic makeup of certain proteins on the surface of the cancer cells. Using that genetic data, BioNTech scientists then produced personalized vaccines designed to teach each patient's immune system to attack the tumors. Like BioNTech's COVID shots, the cancer vaccines relied on messenger RNA. In this case, the vaccines instructed patients' cells to make some of the same proteins found on their excised tumors, potentially provoking an immune response that would come in handy against actual cancer cells.

The study was small: Only 16 patients, all of them white, were given the vaccine, part of a treatment regimen that also included chemotherapy and a drug intended to keep tumors from evading people's immune responses. And the study could not entirely rule out factors other than the vaccine having contributed to better outcomes in some patients. [...] But the simple fact that scientists could create, quality-check and deliver personalized cancer vaccines so quickly -- patients began receiving the vaccines intravenously roughly nine weeks after having their tumors removed -- was a promising sign, experts said.

In patients who did not appear to respond to the vaccine, the cancer tended to return around 13 months after surgery. Patients who did respond, though, showed no signs of relapse during the roughly 18 months they were tracked. Intriguingly, one patient showed evidence of a vaccine-activated immune response in the liver after an unusual growth developed there. The growth later disappeared in imaging tests. "It's anecdotal, but it's nice confirmatory data that the vaccine can get into these other tumor regions," said Dr. Nina Bhardwaj, who studies cancer vaccines at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This is the first demonstrable success -- and I will call it a success, despite the preliminary nature of the study -- of an mRNA vaccine in pancreatic cancer," said Dr. Anirban Maitra, a specialist in the disease at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study. "By that standard, it's a milestone."

The study has been published in the journal Nature.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Motherboard article: Now, frustrated with a lack of transparency and trust around official accounts of UFO phenomena, a team of developers has decided to take matters into their own hands with an open source citizen science project called Sky360, which aims to blanket the earth in affordable monitoring stations to watch the skies 24/7, and even plans to use AI and machine learning to spot anomalous behavior. Unlike earlier 20th century efforts such as inventors proposing "geomagnetic detectors" to discover nearby UFOs, or more recent software like the short-lived UFO ID project, Sky360 hopes that it can establish a network of autonomously operating surveillance units to gather real-time data of our skies. Citizen-led UFO research is not new. Organizations like MUFON, founded in 1969, have long investigated sightings, while amateur groups like the American Flying Saucer Investigating Committee of Columbus even ran statistical analysis on sightings in the 1960s (finding that most of them happened on Wednesdays). However, Sky360 believes that the level of interest and the technology have now both reached an inflection point, where citizen researchers can actually generate large-scale actionable data for analysis all on their own.

The Sky360 stations consist of an AllSkyCam with a wide angle fish-eye lens and a pan-tilt-focus camera, with the fish-eye camera registering all movement. Underlying software performs an initial rough analysis of these events, and decides whether to activate other sensors -- and if so, the pan-tilt-focus camera zooms in on the object, tracks it, and further analyzes it. According to developer Nikola Galiot, the software is currently based on a computer vision "background subtraction" algorithm that detects any motion in the frame compared to previous frames captured; anything that moves is then tracked as long as possible and then automatically classified. The idea is that the more data these monitoring stations acquire, the better the classification will be. There are a combination of AI models under the hood, and the system is built using the open-source TensorFlow machine learning platform so it can be deployed on almost any computer. Next, the all-volunteer team wants to create a single algorithm capable of detection, tracking and classification all in one.

All the hardware components, from the cameras to passive radar and temperature gauges, can be bought cheaply and off-the-shelf worldwide -- with the ultimate goal of finding the most effective combinations for the lowest price. Schematics, blueprints, and suggested equipment are all available on the Sky360 site and interested parties are encouraged to join the project's Discord server. There are currently 20 stations set up across the world, from the USA to Canada to more remote regions like the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic [...] Once enough of the Sky360 stations have been deployed, the next step is to work towards real-time monitoring, drawing all the data together, and analyzing it. By striving to create a huge, open, transparent network, anyone would be free to examine the data themselves.

In June of this year, Sky360, which has a team of 30 volunteer developers working on the software, hopes to release its first developer-oriented open source build. At its heart is a component called 'SimpleTracker', which receives images frame by frame from the cameras, auto-adjusting parameters to get the best picture possible. The component determines whether something in the frame is moving, and if so, another analysis is performed, where a machine learning algorithm trained on the trajectories of normal flying objects like planes, birds, or insects, attempts to classify the object based on its movement. If it seems anomalous, it's flagged for further investigation.

Elizabeth Holmes hasn't spoken to the media since 2016. Now convicted on criminal fraud charges — and counting down the days until she reports for prison — Holmes finally breaks the silence in a profile published today in the New York Times.

"I made so many mistakes," Holmes says, "and there was so much I didn't know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it's like you really internalize it in a deep way," Billy Evans, Ms. Holmes's partner and the father of their two young children, pushes a stroller with the couple's 20-month-old son, William... At one point, I tell her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She replied, almost reflectively, "They're not playing me. They're playing a character I created." So, why did she create that public persona? "I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn't have good technical ideas," said Ms. Holmes, who founded Theranos at 19. "Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn't..."

Her top lieutenant at Theranos, and much older boyfriend at the time, Ramesh Balwani, was found guilty of 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud at Theranos. He began a 13-year prison sentence last month. On Thursday, his legal team filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit... She said Mr. Balwani did not control her every interaction or statement at Theranos, but she "deferred to him in the areas he oversaw because I believed he knew better than I did," and those areas included the problematic clinical lab... Ms. Holmes's story of how she got here — to the bright, cozy house and the supportive partner and the two babies — feels a lot like the story of someone who had finally broken out of a cult and been deprogrammed. After her relationship with Mr. Balwani ended and Theranos dissolved, Ms. Holmes said, "I began my life again."

But then I remember that Ms. Holmes was running the cult...

What does she think would have happened if she hadn't garnered so much early attention as the second coming of Silicon Valley? Ms. Holmes does not blink: "We would've seen through our vision." In other words, she thinks if she'd spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company, she would have revolutionized health care by now. This kind of misguided talk is the one consistent thread in my reporting on who Ms. Holmes really is. She repeatedly says that Theranos wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme for her; she never sold her shares and didn't come out of it wealthy. Ms. Holmes's parents said they borrowed $500,000 against their Washington, D.C.-area home to post Ms. Holmes's bond...

She maintains the idealistic delusion of a 19-year-old, never mind that she's 39 with a fraud conviction, telling me she is still working on health care-related inventions and would continue to do so behind bars. "I still dream about being able to contribute in that space," Ms. Holmes said. "I still feel the same calling to it as I always did and I still think the need is there." If your head is exploding at how divorced from reality this sounds, that's kind of the point. When Ms. Holmes uses the messianic vernacular of tech, I get the sense that she truly believes that she could have — and, in fact, she still could — change the world, and she doesn't much care if we believe her or not...

It's this steadfast (or unhinged?) belief that has kept Ms. Holmes fighting, even though a guilty plea would have likely helped her chances of remaining free.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune: For eight years now, as millennials have entered their thirties and forties, also known as "homebuying age," Bank of America has surveyed over 1,000 members of the generation once a year for its Home Work series. And for 2023's edition... older millennials (age 31-41) are almost three times as likely to move into a house than an apartment, the survey found...

Migration patterns during the pandemic have clearly established that most homebuyers have wanted to flee big cities, with some "zoomtowns" such as Boise benefiting in particular. But the survey reveals something even more drastic. In a section called "suburban nation," BofA reveals that 43% to 45% of millennials — of every age — expect to buy a house in the suburbs. "We expect the ability to work from home to remain an incentive for young families to seek out more remote suburban and rural markets where housing may be more affordable," wrote the BofA team led by research analyst Elizabeth Suzuki. And remote work is still robust, they added.

Millennials are also looking toward the suburbs for wealth-building. A majority (two-thirds) of them believe that they'll buy a home in the next two years, citing a return on investment as the number one reason for purchasing. The interest is pervasive across the generation, and maybe means that the suburb is in for a new and better revival. And a 2021 study from Pew Research Center found that one in five adults preferred city life, compared to one quarter of adults in 2018...

Millennials reported to BoA that the pandemic increased their likelihood of buying a home...

Longtime Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a report from Engadget: The Biden administration wants to impose a 30 percent tax on the electricity used by cryptocurrency mining operations, and it has included the proposal in its budget for the fiscal year of 2024. In a blog post on the White House website, the administration has formally introduced the Digital Asset Mining Energy or DAME excise tax. It explained that it wants to tax cryptomining firms, because they aren't paying for the "full cost they impose on others," which include environmental pollution and high energy prices.

Crypto mining has "negative spillovers on the environment," the White House continued, and the pollution it generates "falls disproportionately on low-income neighborhoods and communities of color." It added that the operations' "often volatile power consumption " can raise electricity prices for the people around them and cause service interruptions. Further, local power companies are taking a risk if they decide to upgrade their equipment to make their service more stable, since miners can easily move away to another location, even abroad. As Yahoo News noted, there are other industries, such as steel manufacturing, that also use large amounts of electricity but aren't taxed for their energy consumption. In its post, the administration said that cryptomining "does not generate the local and national economic benefits typically associated with businesses using similar amounts of electricity."

Critics believe that the government made this proposal to go after and harm an industry it doesn't support. A Forbes report also suggested that DAME may not be the best solution for the issue, and that taxing the industry's greenhouse gas emissions might be a better alternative. That could encourage mining firms not just to minimize energy use, but also to find cleaner sources of power. It might be difficult to convince the administration to go down that route, though: In its blog post, it said that the "environmental impacts of cryptomining exist even when miners use existing clean power." Apparently, mining operations in communities with hydropower have been observed to reduce the amount of clean power available for use by others. That leads to higher prices and to even higher consumption of electricity from non-clean sources. "If the proposal ever becomes a law, the government would impose the excise tax in phases," adds Engadget. "It would start by adding a 10 percent tax on miners' electricity use in the first year, 20 percent in the second and then 30 percent from the third year onwards."

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg that it expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by AI in the coming years. Reuters reports: Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years. The reduction could include not replacing roles vacated by attrition, the PC-maker told the publication.

For Red Hat's 30th anniversary, North Carolina's News & Observer newspaper ran a special four-part series of articles.

In the first article Red Hat co-founder Bob Young remembers Red Hat's first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld's "OS of the Year" award in 1998 — at a time when Microsoft's Windows controlled 85% of the market. "How is that possible," Young said, "that one of the world's biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?" The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to learn about his upstart company, strikes at "the beauty" of open-source software.

"Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft's engineering team on Windows, and I don't really care how many people they have," Young would say. "Like they may have thousands of the smartest operating system engineers that they could scour the planet for, and we had 10,000 engineers by comparison...."

Young was a 40-year-old Canadian computer equipment salesperson with a software catalog when he noticed what Marc Ewing was doing. [Ewing was a recent college graduate bored with his two-month job at IBM, selling customized Linux as a side hustle.] It's pretty primitive, but it's going in the right direction, Young thought. He began reselling Ewing's Red Hat product. Eventually, he called Ewing, and the two met at a tech conference in New York City. "I needed a product, and Marc needed some marketing help," said Young, who was living in Connecticut at the time. "So we put our two little businesses together."

Red Hat incorporated in March 1993, with the earliest employees operating the nascent business out of Ewing's Durham apartment. Eventually, the landlord discovered what they were doing and kicked them out.
The four articles capture the highlights. ("A visual effects group used its Linux 4.1 to design parts of the 1997 film Titanic.") And it doesn't leave out Red Hat's skirmishes with Microsoft. ("Microsoft was owned by the richest person in the world. Red Hat engineers were still linking servers together with extension cords. ") "We were changing the industry and a lot of companies were mad at us," says Michael Ferris, Red Hat's VP of corporate development/strategy. Soon there were corporate partnerships with Netscape, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, and IBM — and when Red Hat finally goes public in 1999, its stock sees the eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, rising in value in days to over $7 billion and "making overnight millionaires of its earliest employees."

But there's also inspiring details like the quote painted on the wall of Red Hat's headquarters in Durham: "Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era..." It's fun to see the story told by a local newspaper, with subheadings like "It started with a student from Finland" and "Red Hat takes on the Microsoft Goliath."

Something I'd never thought of. 2001's 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center "destroyed the principal data centers of many Wall Street investment banks, which were housed in the twin towers. With their computers wiped out, financial institutions had to choose whether to rebuild with standard proprietary software or the emergent open source. Many picked the latter." And by the mid-2000s, "Red Hat was the world's largest provider of Linux...' according to part two of the series. "Soon, Red Hat was servicing more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies." By then, even the most vehement former critics were amenable to Red Hat's kind of software. Microsoft had begun to integrate open source into its core operations. "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally," Microsoft President Brad Smith later said.

In the 2010s, "open source has won" became a popular tagline among programmers. After years of fighting for legitimacy, former Red Hat executives said victory felt good. "There was never gloating," Tiemann said.

"But there was always pride."
In 2017 Red Hat's CEO answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

An anonymous reader shared this recent report from Bloomberg: Amazon continued blocking sellers from offering lower prices on rival sites, despite assuring antitrust enforcers it ended its policy that artificially inflated prices for consumers, according to newly unsealed filings in California's antitrust lawsuit against the e-commerce giant.

The Seattle-based company planned to expand penalties on sellers who presented lower prices outside Amazon, even after it claimed in 2019 that it stopped punishing third-party merchants who posted better deals on Walmart, Target, eBay, and, in some instances, their own websites, according to previously redacted portions of the suit that were made public.
The newly unsealed filings include an internal document in which Amazon states point-blank that despite "the recent removal of the price parity clause in our Business Solutions Agreement... our expectations and policies have not changed."

"Many of the complaint's allegations are inaccurate," an Amazon spokesperson told Bloomberg. "We look forward to presenting the facts to the court." California Attorney General Rob Bonta is seeking a court order blocking Amazon from continuing to engage in what he alleged is anticompetitive behavior, as well as compensation for consumers in the most populous U.S. state. A similar suit filed by Washington, D.C., was dismissed in 2021...

The 2022 suit came three years after Bloomberg reported that the company's policies were forcing sellers to charge more on competing sites like Walmart because Amazon would bury their products in search results if they offered lower prices elsewhere...

California's probe into Amazon's practices also highlighted concerns that ads on the platform are unhelpful for customers.

Amazon advertising revenue grew 19% in the fourth quarter, to $11.6 billion. The fast-growing revenue source helps prop up Amazon's otherwise low-margin online retail business that carries the high expense of operating warehouses around the country and delivering orders to shoppers' homes.
California's attorney general issued an official statement arguing that Amazon "has orchestrated the substantial market power it now enjoys through agreements at the retail and wholesale level that prevent effective price competition in the online retail marketplace." And it includes this fierce denunciation attributed directly to attorney general Bonta:

"As California families struggle to make ends meet, we're in court to stop Amazon from engaging in anticompetitive practices that keep prices artificially high and stifle competition. There is no shortage of evidence showing that the 'Everything store' is costing consumers more for just about everything. Amazon coerces merchants into agreements that keep prices artificially high, knowing full well that they can't afford to say no. With other e-commerce platforms unable to compete on price, consumers turn to Amazon as a one-stop shop for all their purchases. This perpetuates Amazon's market dominance, allowing the company to make increasingly untenable demands on its merchants and costing consumers more at checkout across California. We won't stand by while Amazon uses coercive contracting practices to dominate the market at the expense of California consumers, small business owners, and the economy."

"Once-booming demand for cloud-computing services is slowing..." reports Bloomberg. "When Microsoft and Amazon report results next week, analysts are anticipating the slowest revenue growth for their cloud-computing businesses since the firms started breaking out performance last decade." For years, demand for cloud-computing services has steadily driven growth at both Microsoft and Amazon... Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud unit, which is home to its Azure cloud-services business, accounted for 38% of its revenue and 39% of operating income in 2022. Amazon Web Services was the fastest-growing of the Seattle-based company's major businesses last year and generated $22.8 billion in operating income. The rest of Amazon's businesses combined posted a $10.6 billion operating loss.

For both companies, cracks are starting to appear. In the first three months of 2023, growth for Microsoft's Azure unit and Amazon Web Services is expected to fall to 31% and 14%, respectively, excluding currency fluctuations, according to the average of analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. A year ago, Azure sales expanded 49% and Amazon Web Services 37%.

In a shareholder letter released last week, Amazon said AWS "faces short-term head winds" related to the economic backdrop that will "soften" the growth rate. This echoed what it said in its most recent results. Microsoft also warned of a slowdown in cloud software sales last quarter. Wall Street has been getting more cautious. UBS lowered growth estimates for Azure last week, warning "customer efforts to optimize/trim their cloud spend will be deeper and last longer than most think...." Jefferies [financial services company] sees slowing cloud demand as "a key concern" for Amazon. Analyst Brent Thill said that because AWS generates so much of Amazon's operating income, "a stabilization in cloud is crucial for shares to outperform."

For Alec Young, chief investment strategist at MAPsignals, Microsoft and Amazon remain attractive despite the slowdown, which he expects to be a temporary pause before growth re-accelerates. "There's still a lot of runway ahead for cloud computing, so I don't think investors should obsess too much over the level of growth over a couple quarters," he said.

India lost 668,400 hectares of jungles on average between 2015 and 2020, a new report has said. From a report: The is only second to the scale of deforestation in Brazil, noted the report released last month by Utility Bidder, a UK-based utility costs comparison firm. Brazil lost nearly 1.7 million hectares of forest between 2015-2020, as climate change adversely affected forest growth. Utility Bidder's report analyzed deforestation trends in 98 countries over the past 30 years. "As the country with the second largest population in the world, India has had to compensate for the increase in residents -- this has come at a cost in the way of deforestation," the report stated. Since prime minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, his government has given an impetus to stalled projects approved under his predecessor, besides launching fresh ones. For this, vast areas of forestry needed to be cleared.

US bank lending contracted by the most on record in the last two weeks of March, indicating a tightening of credit conditions in the wake of several high-profile bank collapses that risks damaging the economy. From a report: Commercial bank lending dropped nearly $105 billion in the two weeks ended March 29, the most in Federal Reserve data back to 1973. The more than $45 billion decrease in the latest week was primarily due to a a drop in loans by small banks. The pullback in total lending in the last half of March was broad and included fewer real estate loans, as well as commercial and industrial loans. Friday's report also showed commercial bank deposits dropped $64.7 billion in the latest week, marking the 10th-straight decrease that mainly reflected a decline at large firms.

The slide in lending follows the collapse of several firms including Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Economists are closely monitoring the Fed's so-called H.8 report, which provides an estimated weekly aggregate balance sheet for all commercial banks in the US, to gauge credit conditions. The recent bank failures have complicated the central bank's efforts to reduce inflation without sending the economy into a recession.

VC firm Andreessen Horowitz believes the industry most affected by generative AI will be videogames. But they're not the only ones, reports the Economist: Games' interactivity requires them to be stuffed with laboriously designed content: consider the 30 square miles of landscape or 60 hours of music in "Red Dead Redemption 2", a recent cowboy adventure. Enlisting ai assistants to churn it out could drastically shrink timescales and budgets....

Making a game is already easier than it was: nearly 13,000 titles were published last year on Steam, a games platform, almost double the number in 2017. Gaming may soon resemble the music and video industries, in which most new content on Spotify or YouTube is user-generated. One games executive predicts that small firms will be the quickest to work out what new genres are made possible by AI. Last month Raja Koduri, an executive at Intel, left the chipmaker to found an AI-gaming startup.

Don't count the big studios out, though. If they can release half a dozen high-quality titles a year instead of a couple, it might chip away at the hit-driven nature of their business, says Josh Chapman of Konvoy, a gaming-focused VC firm. A world of more choice also favours those with big marketing budgets. And the giants may have better answers to the mounting copyright questions around AI. If generative models have to be trained on data to which the developer has the rights, those with big back-catalogues will be better placed than startups

. Trent Kaniuga, an artist who has worked on games like "Fortnite", said last month that several clients had updated their contracts to ban AI-generated art.

The search for life beyond Earth "follows the water," reports the Economist (since water is vital for earth's lifeforms, and the laws of chemistry are universal). "For most of the space age that insight led scientists to Mars." But... More and more, though, planetary scientists are following the water to other places — and in particular to the so-called "icy moons" that orbit Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, the solar system's quartet of giant gas planets. Many of those moons are either known or suspected to have oceans beneath their icy shells, kept liquid by gravitational squeezing from the planets they orbit.

On April 13th, if all goes well, a new spacecraft will blast off from French Guiana en route to Jupiter with the aim of investigating some of those watery moons up close. The European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (given the slightly contrived acronym "JUICE ") will slingshot once around Venus and three times around Earth before arriving at Jupiter in 2031.... JUICE will investigate three of the so-called Galilean moons — Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, all of which are thought to have subsurface oceans. (The fourth, Io, is arid, and so not of interest.)

Ganymede is the probe's primary target. Despite being a moon, it is bigger than the planet Mercury. Its subsurface ocean may contain more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. The probe's cameras will add much more detail to the existing, low-resolution maps of Ganymede's surface. An ice-penetrating radar will scan several kilometres below the ground. A magnetometer will take advantage of the fact that Ganymede, apparently uniquely among the solar system's moons, has a weak magnetic field that interacts with the much bigger field generated by Jupiter itself. The subtleties of that magnetic field were an early clue for the existence of an ocean, hinting at the presence of a large chunk of conductive fluid — such as salty water — beneath the surface. Better readings of the magnetic field will help scientists estimate just how big the ocean is....

Nor is JUICE the only probe on its way to Jupiter. Next year NASA will launch Europa Clipper, focused, as its name suggests, on Europa. Despite its later launch, it will take a quicker route to Jupiter, arriving a few months before JUICE . And, because there are limits to what can be discerned from orbit, both NASA and the Europeans are sketching plans for future landers that would descend to the surface of such moons to sample the seawater directly.

Alphabet's Google Cloud has accused Microsoft of anti-competitive cloud computing practices and criticised imminent deals with several European cloud vendors, saying these do not solve broader concerns about its licensing terms. From a report: In Google Cloud's first public comments on Microsoft and its European deals its Vice President Amit Zavery told Reuters the company has raised the issue with antitrust agencies and urged European Union antitrust regulators to take a closer look.

In response, Microsoft referred to a blogpost in May last year where its president Brad Smith said it 'has a healthy number two position when it comes to cloud services, with just over 20 percent market share of global cloud services revenues'. "We are committed to the European Cloud Community and their success," a Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters on Thursday. There is intense rivalry between the two U.S. tech giants in the fast-growing, multi-billion-dollar cloud computing business, where Google trails market leader Amazon and Microsoft.

"When we learned that a BlackBerry movie was in the works last year," writes Engadget, "we had no idea it would be something close to a comedy. But judging from the trailer, it's aiming to be a far lighter story than other recent films about tech."

Variety notes that the movie has already screened at both Berlin Film Festival and SXSW Film Festival. "The film has received favorable reviews so far, with Variety's Peter Debruge calling it "frantic, irreverent and endearingly scrappy."

That review also calls the film "surprisingly charitable to the parties involved, acknowledging that these visionaries, while making it up as they go along, still managed to change the way the world communicates.... The film, at least, feels fresh, making geek history more entertaining than it has any right to be." But there's also a message in there somewhere. Mashable calls it "a cautionary tale jolted with humor and heart," while Vulture describes it as "a very funny geek tragedy." The stories of tech founders continue to entertain and frustrate us in equal measure, and continue to give us more content to watch on the platforms and devices they created. Clearly, something about power-tripping nerds really speaks to something in our collective psyche.
Actor Jay Baruchel plays BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis — and even tells Vulture he'd kept using his own BlackBerry "until about three or four years ago..."

"I think there's something inherently tragic about these guys that are really significantly responsible, in a really significant way, for the way we all relate to each other. There's a direct line from how we all communicate now, back to what these nerds did in Waterloo in 1996."

The movie will be released on May 12.

Axios remembers that it was just nine days ago that there were "concerns" about Silicon Valley Bank at venture capital firm. And soon Founders Fund's top operations executives "were on the phone, quickly deciding to move firm capital to a number of bigger banks." Firm founder Peter Thiel was not part of the conversation. One source says that the assumption was that they'd return the money to SVB after the crisis had ended....

Founders Fund wasn't the only venture capital firm giving this sort of warning to portfolio companies, nor necessarily the first, but word of its advice spread like wildfire (it also ended up in media reports, including one from Axios). Almost immediately, the firm came under withering criticism from some other venture capitalists, accusing Founders Fund (and Thiel personally) of sparking a bank run that ultimately led to $42 billion in withdrawals. Some even speculated that it was intentional, as payback for some unknown grudge between the two groups.
Earlier this week the Washington Examiner chronicled some of that criticism: "There should be more scrutiny of Peter Thiel and [hedge fund manager] Bill Ackman for yelling fire in a crowded theater in this SVB collapse," tweeted CNBC host Sara Eisen [on Monday]. Others turned their focus to Thiel's promotion and subsequent profiting off of crypto investments after the market crashed as a reason to be suspicious of his withdrawals. "You mean the guy who was touting crypto and trashing critics while he was selling crypto? That guy? Shocker!" tweeted tech journalist Kara Swisher.
But Peter Thiel says he actually left his own money in the bank, reports Business Insider: "I had $50 million of my own money stuck in SVB," he told the Financial Times.... Thiel told the Financial Times that he did not believe the SVB would fail last week.

Other venture capital firms — including Coatue Management, Union Square Ventures, and Founder Collective — had similarly advised startup clients to transfer money from SVB after the bank revealed a $1.8 billion loss and the bank's share price collapsed. These firms have pushed back against accusations that they were spreading panic, saying that they were giving financial advice they believed would be in the best interest of their clients....

Thiel told the Financial Times that his account was frozen on Friday when regulators stepped in and took control of the bank. However, it is once again accessible after the US government stepped in earlier this week and shored up all customer deposits in SVB.

"The World Health Organization on Friday called on China to release new data linking the Covid pandemic's origins to animal samples at Wuhan Market after the country recently took down the research," reports CNBC.

The existence of the new data was revealed by the Atlantic earlier this week, in an article reporting that the newly-discovered samples showed the virus was present in creatures for sale there near the very beginning of the pandemic: A new analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019. It's some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses....

The genetic sequences were pulled out of swabs taken in and near market stalls around the pandemic's start. They represent the first bits of raw data that researchers outside of China's academic institutions and their direct collaborators have had access to. A few weeks ago, the data appeared on an open-access genomic database called GISAID, after being quietly posted by researchers affiliated with the country's Center for Disease Control and Prevention. By almost pure happenstance, scientists in Europe, North America, and Australia spotted the sequences, downloaded them, and began an analysis.

The samples were already known to be positive for the coronavirus, and had been scrutinized before by the same group of Chinese researchers who uploaded the data to GISAID. But that prior analysis, released as a preprint publication in February 2022, asserted that "no animal host of SARS-CoV-2 can be deduced...." The new analysis, led by Kristian Andersen, Edward Holmes, and Michael Worobey — three prominent researchers who have been looking into the virus's roots — shows that that may not be the case. Within about half a day of downloading the data from GISAID, the trio and their collaborators discovered that several market samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were also coming back chock-full of animal genetic material — much of which was a match for the common raccoon dog. Because of how the samples were gathered, and because viruses can't persist by themselves in the environment, the scientists think that their findings could indicate the presence of a coronavirus-infected raccoon dog in the spots where the swabs were taken....

The new analysis builds on extensive previous research that points to the market as the source of the earliest major outbreak of SARS-CoV-2: Many of the earliest known COVID-19 cases of the pandemic were clustered roughly in the market's vicinity. And the virus's genetic material was found in many samples swabbed from carts and animal-processing equipment at the venue, as well as parts of nearby infrastructure, such as storehouses, sewage wells, and water drains. Raccoon dogs, creatures commonly bred for sale in China, are also already known to be one of many mammal species that can easily catch and spread the coronavirus. All of this left one main hole in the puzzle to fill: clear-cut evidence that raccoon dogs and the virus were in the exact same spot at the market, close enough that the creatures might have been infected and, possibly, infectious.

That's what the new analysis provides. Think of it as finding the DNA of an investigation's main suspect at the scene of the crime.
The article also notes that the genetic sequences "also vanished from the database shortly after the international team of researchers notified the Chinese researchers of their preliminary findings, without explanation." And it adds that all along China has "vehemently" fought the theory that Covid-19 originated from live animals being sold at Wuhan market. Although "in June 2021, a team of researchers published a study documenting tens of thousands of mammals for sale in wet markets in Wuhan between 2017 and late 2019, including at Huanan."

"The animals were kept in largely illegal, cramped, and unhygienic settings — conditions conducive to viral transmission — and among them were more than 1,000 raccoon dogs." And there's even photos of raccoon dogs for sale at the market in December of 2019.


More coverage of the newly-discovered data is now appearing in numerous news outlets, including the New York Times, NBC News, ABC News, the Guardian, PBS, and Science.

Though Kia and Hyundai represent a tenth of U.S. auto sales, the New York Times reports that "Of the nearly 11,000 cars stolen in Memphis last year — about twice as many as in 2021 — roughly a third were late-model Kias and Hyundais, according to the police."

"It doesn't take much to rip them off: just a screwdriver, a USB cord and hot-wiring know-how found in videos proliferating on social media." Many of the culprits are teenagers or young adults stealing cars for kicks or to use them for other crimes, such as robberies, the police say. More than half of the 175 people arrested and accused of car theft this year in Memphis were teenagers, who often abandon the vehicles after a joyride.... [A]uto thefts have continued to rise, even as other forms of lawbreaking have leveled out or fallen....

[T]he surge has continued, fueled in part by social media videos that show, step by step, how to steal Kias and Hyundais that are not equipped with an engine immobilizer — an electronic security device that keeps a car from being started without a key.... [Kia and Hyundai] recently issued statements saying they had fixed the problem that makes their vehicles relatively easy to steal in their latest models, and were introducing free software upgrades for vulnerable cars — about 4.5 million Kias and 3.8 million Hyundais, the federal government estimated. At the same time, the companies have shipped steering wheel locks to police departments across the country, to be provided free of charge to car owners who drive at-risk models. And executives say they are constantly monitoring TikTok and YouTube for new videos that show how to steal their vehicles, and then alerting the social media companies so those videos can be removed....

Officials say the social media-driven rise in Kia and Hyundai thefts began about two years ago in Milwaukee, and then spread nationwide. City attorneys for Seattle and Columbus recently sued the automakers for not installing anti-theft technology, and other cities, including Cleveland, Milwaukee and St. Louis, have threatened litigation.

Fortune reports: The thousands of layoffs in Big Tech are thanks to an over-hiring spree to satisfy the "vanity" of bosses at the likes of Meta and Alphabet, according to a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia. Speaking remotely at an event hosted by banking firm Evercore, Silicon Valley VC Keith Rabois said Meta and Google had hired thousands of people to do "fake work" to hit hiring metrics out of "vanity".

Rabois, who was an executive at PayPal in the early 2000s alongside Tesla CEO Elon Musk, said the axing of droves of jobs is overdue. "All these people were extraneous, this has been true for a long time, the vanity metric of hiring employees was this false god in some ways," Rabois said, according to Insider. "There's nothing for these people to do — it's all fake work. Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings."

The DoorDash investor added Google had intentionally hired engineers and tech talent to stop them from being snapped up by competitors.

Microsoft is making Outlook for Mac free to use today. From a report: Outlook is now available free in Apple's App Store, and you no longer need a Microsoft 365 subscription or Office license to use it. It's a surprise move that coincides with Microsoft's push to make its Windows desktop Outlook email client more web-powered. Outlook for Mac includes support for Outlook.com accounts, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and any email provider that has IMAP support. Microsoft redesigned its Mac email client in 2020, with a user interface that's optimized for Apple's latest macOS design changes.