In March the U.S. Senate passed a measure making Daylight Saving Time permanent.

Unfortunately, the U.S. House of Representatives has failed to do the same, reports the Washington Post: Key senators who backed permanent daylight saving time say they're mystified that their effort appears doomed, and frustrated that they will probably have to start over in the next Congress. At least 19 states in recent years have enacted laws or passed resolutions that would allow them to impose year-round daylight saving time — but only if Congress approves legislation to stop the nation's twice-per-year time changes, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures....

"We know that the majority of Americans do not want to keep switching the clocks back and forth," Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said in a statement to The Post, adding that she had received calls arguing in favor of both sides. Permanent standard time advocates don't want children to wait in dark winter mornings for a school bus; permanent daylight saving time proponents want to help businesses enjoy more sunshine during operating hours, she said. A congressional aide who has been working on the issue put it more bluntly: "We'd be pissing off half the country no matter what," said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal deliberations....

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and other lawmakers have said they're waiting on the Transportation Department, which helps govern enforcement of time zones, to review the effects of permanently changing the clocks. While the transportation agency in September agreed to conduct a study, the due date for that analysis — Dec. 31, 2023 — suggests that the issue may not get serious consideration in Congress again until 2024 at the earliest.

America's federal government "is planning a post-midterms push for antitrust legislation that would rein in the power of the world's largest tech companies," reports Bloomberg, "a last-ditch effort to get a stalled pair of bills through Congress before a predicted Republican takeover in January." The lame-duck period after Tuesday's U.S. election may be the last shot to pass the landmark legislation, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and Open App Markets Act. The bills, which would prevent the tech companies from using their platforms to thwart competitors, would be the most significant expansion of antitrust law in over a century.... Republicans have made it clear that they won't support the bills if they retake control of either chamber of Congress. That has supporters urging the White House to mount a push in the final weeks before a new Congress is seated early next year.

Advocates have criticized the White House for failing to prioritize the legislation, which major tech companies have spent more than $100 million to defeat. Alphabet's Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta all oppose the bill. "There is bipartisan support for antitrust bills, and no reason why Congress can't act before the end of the year," said White House spokesperson Emilie Simons. "We are planning on stepping up engagement during the lame duck on the president's agenda across the board, antitrust included." Versions of both bills have made it through committees but await action by the full House and Senate.

If Congress doesn't act before the end of the year, it will likely be years before U.S. lawmakers pass any legislation to crack down on the power of the tech giants.

Amazon will freeze hiring in its corporate workforce as the e-commerce giant deals with an "unusual macro-economic environment," a company executive said on Thursday. From a report: "We anticipate keeping this pause in place for the next few months, and will continue to monitor what we're seeing in the economy and the business to adjust as we think makes sense," Beth Galetti, senior vice-president of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, said in a blog post. The company has already paused hiring in some of its businesses in recent weeks, but intends to hire a "meaningful" number of people next year, Galetti added.

"Google is giving Apple a taste of its own medicine," reports Business Insider, arguing that the latest update to Android's messaging app "is going to make texting between iPhone and Androids even more annoying than it already is." [Alternate URL] The updates are great if you're an Android user. Google Messages' new features include the ability to reply to individual messages, star them, and set reminders on texts. But these features and some other updates to Messages are RCS-enabled, meaning they're not going to be very compatible with SMS, which is the texting standard that iMessage switches to when messaging someone without an iPhone. iPhones exchange messages using iMessage, Apple's proprietary messaging system, but revert to SMS when texting an Android.

One feature that's part of Google's payback to Apple is that now, when Messages users react to an SMS text with an emoji, iPhone users will get a text saying the other person reacted to their text with a description of whatever emoji the person used. It's similar to when iMessage users react to an SMS text, with the recipient getting a "so and so loved" message instead of seeing the heart emoji reaction.... In August, Android launched a page on its website calling Apple out for refusing "to adopt modern texting standards when people with iPhones and Android phones text each other." The page has buttons that take users to Twitter to tweet at Apple to "stop breaking my texting experience. #GetTheMessage" with a link to Android's page urging Apple to "fix texting."

"We would much prefer that everybody adopts RCS which has the capability to support proper reactions," Jan Jedrzejowicz, Google Messages product manager, said in a briefing before the Messages updates were announced. "But in the event that's not possible or hasn't happened yet, this feels like the next best thing." Recently, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he doesn't get a lot of feedback from iPhone users that Apple needs to fix messaging between iPhones and Androids. Apple doesn't have much incentive to do so, either. In legal documents from a 2021 lawsuit between Epic Games and Apple, an Apple executive said "Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us."

Disinformation has "metastasized" since experts began raising alarms about the threat, reports the New York Times.

"Despite years of efforts by the media, by academics and even by social media companies themselves to address the problem, it is arguably more pervasive and widespread today." Not long ago, the fight against disinformation focused on the major social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. When pressed, they often removed troubling content, including misinformation and intentional disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, however, there are dozens of new platforms, including some that pride themselves on not moderating — censoring, as they put it — untrue statements in the name of free speech....

The purveyors of disinformation have also become increasingly sophisticated at sidestepping the major platforms' rules, while the use of video to spread false claims on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram has made them harder for automated systems to track than text.... A report last month by NewsGuard, an organization that tracks the problem online, showed that nearly 20 percent of videos presented as search results on TikTok contained false or misleading information on topics such as school shootings and Russia's war in Ukraine. "People who do this know how to exploit the loopholes," said Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook who now leads Anchor Change, a strategic consultancy.

With the [U.S.] midterm elections only weeks away, the major platforms have all pledged to block, label or marginalize anything that violates company policies, including disinformation, hate speech or calls to violence. Still, the cottage industry of experts dedicated to countering disinformation — think tanks, universities and nongovernment organizations — say the industry is not doing enough. The Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University warned last month, for example, that the major platforms continued to amplify "election denialism" in ways that undermined trust in the democratic system.

"Over the past year, thousands of people have lost tens, if not hundreds, of millions in cryptocurrency when gangs of sophisticated scammers whisked their money out of their accounts," reports the Washington Post, noting the accounts "managed by an app from the publicly traded cryptocurrency giant Coinbase.

"Now those victims are fighting back. Nearly 100 people are trying to hold Coinbase accountable, saying the company didn't do enough to protect them." Scam victims says they notified the company, begging it to fix defects in its Coinbase Wallet software that had allowed the victims unknowingly to grant the scammers access to their accounts. The requests were to no avail, scam victims say.

"They're trying to be a financial institution without the infrastructure to back it up," said Eric Rosen, a lawyer at Roche Freedman representing some 96 victims in the arbitration demand, which is akin to a lawsuit, filed against Coinbase. "There were no procedures in place to stop these frauds," Rosen said. "Of course, scammers quickly picked up on this, and directed victims to download the Coinbase Wallet."

Many of the victims lost their life savings. The demand says that the rules requiring banks to reimburse debit-card users for unauthorized transfers also should apply to Coinbase's customers....

If the arbitration demand results in an order that Coinbase reimburse its customers, it provides the possibility of a way forward for the victims of a massive ongoing scam that The Washington Post reported in April had already caused thousands of victims more than $60 million of losses. The individuals participating in the Coinbase arbitration demand, some of whom were scammed as late as this August, say they lost more than $21 million total.

Many were forced by Coinbase Wallet's terms of service to turn to arbitration instead of challenging them through the U.S. courts. The decision of the arbitrator won't set a formal legal precedent, but will help answer one of the top questions of the b urgeoning crypto era: Do the existing rules of the financial system apply to cryptocurrency companies?
One more interesting detail from the Post's article. "Reports from ProPublica and Vice say that at least some of the front-line scammers are themselves victims of human trafficking in Southeast Asia, forced to work under threats of violence."

Last week the Los Angeles Times published a sympathetic portrait of Robbi Jade Lew, the woman facing unproven allegations of cheating in a high-stakes poker match.

This week the newspaper profiled the man making those accusations — Garrett Adelstein, known "as an affable guy who is known for taking even big losses in stride." "Garrett would have reacted normally if his opponent made a good, even heroic, call that cost him $100,000," said Jennifer Shahade, a pro poker player and chess champion. "I think the initial hand, the call and the situation would be suspicious under any circumstances, any gender."
In the profile we learn that Adelstein has 14 years of experience as a professional poker, and is "one of the game's best and most profitable high-stakes cash players, known to viewers of popular casino broadcasts for his loose-aggressive style of no-limit hold 'em and his willingness to buy in for enormous sums of money, bringing as much as $1 million to the table....

"On Sept. 29, Adelstein made the biggest bet of his life: risking his well-respected reputation, and possibly his poker career, when he accused rookie player Robbi Jade Lew of cheating in a $269,000 hand against him on Hustler Casino Live..." Adelstein, 36, hasn't played poker since. Whereas he once spent much of his time studying optimal strategy, reviewing past hands and appearing on streams from Hustler Casino in Gardena and Bicycle Casino in Bell Gardens, he is now hyper-focused on conducting his own investigation to prove his case. In a more than four-hour interview from his Manhattan Beach home on Tuesday, Adelstein said he was "extremely confident" that he was the target of a cheating ring involving not just Lew but other players and at least one member of the show's production crew. Lew, 37, denied the allegation, which she called "defamatory."

The drama has left Adelstein uncertain when he'll return to the poker table.... Adelstein says he has been cheated before. When he was 26, he was invited to a home game where he bought in for $100,000.... Adelstein said, he laid out his suspicions about the intricacies of the operation to the host and a business partner, and said he would go public with what happened. "They offered me a deal where they would refund me my money in exchange for my silence," he said. "And then they paid me in six installments, once a month, for a six-month period."

The incident, which he relayed on a poker podcast last year, showed Adelstein the darker side of poker and left him cautious.

He never played in a high-stakes home game with strangers again, choosing to exclusively play in casinos, where he reasoned cheating would be less likely. Still, "I'm always looking out for it," he said. "I'm not the world's most trusting guy when it comes to poker."
The article notes how major poker sites were busted 15 years ago for "superuser" accounts with cheating privileges — and a 2019 lawsuit in which dozens of pros sued a player and gambling hall accused of leaking info from the RFID-tagged cards uesd in their livestreams. "When it comes to stream security and these types of games, as professionals we're obviously always on the lookout so it doesn't happen again," poker player Matt Berkey said of the aftermath. "Garrett's one of the biggest players who plays on stream, so he himself is more of a potential target."

"Hustler Casino Live," the streaming show that hosted the now-infamous Sept. 29 game, also uses RFID playing cards. Since its first show aired in August 2021, it has become the world's most-watched poker stream, combining the drama of the game with huge amounts of cash, poker's top players, celebrities and other colorful personalities. "Hustler Casino Live" now has more than 1 million monthly unique viewers and 185,000 subscribers.

The show's games are streamed five days a week on a delay of one to four hours to prevent information from being passed to players live. But now its stream security has been called into question, with players saying tighter protocols need to be implemented. They've raised concerns over the number of employees who had access to the control room where hole cards were being monitored, and a few have said the stream should temporarily shut down while the investigation is ongoing....

"I thought that streamed poker was, at least by comparison to the other options, one of the last safe havens," Adelstein said. "And at this point, I have so little faith in that...."

"Live at the Bike," on which Adelstein has played several times, has been hitting him up since Sept. 29 in the hopes that he will join its stream. But he says he's not in the right headspace for it.

"There's I guess a world in the next several weeks or months where maybe I'm able to process this and want to play a poker game. But at the moment, that's not how I feel," he said.

"I'm not playing poker on a stream again unless I see tangible, noticeable, measurable differences in livestream security," he continued. "That's for my own benefit and it's for the benefit of the poker community at large."

"Mastercard has launched software that allows banks to identify and potentially block customer purchases from cryptocurrency exchanges that have been linked to fraud..." reports Barron's: "Crypto Secure" allows card issuers to assess the regulatory risk of dealing with crypto exchanges and other digital asset platforms, as well as decide which purchases to approve, Mastercard said. The solution, which taps blockchain data, allows banks to see where cardholders are buying crypto and assess their overall exposure to the digital asset space, which is rife with fraud and under continuing scrutiny from regulators.
A report on Yahoo Finance says the solutions will "infuse added security and reliability into crypto purchases made across a worldwide network of 2,400 exchanges," noting that the initiative "reinforces Mastercard's efforts to bolster its presence in the growing crypto ecosystem." Mastercard's president of cyber and intelligence business told CNBC that "The idea is that the kind of trust we provide for digital commerce transactions, we want to be able to provide the same kind of trust to digital asset transactions for consumers, banks and merchants." The Mastercard executive "declined to disclose the overall dollar value of fiat-to-crypto volumes from its network of 2,400 crypto exchanges," but did say the number of transactions per minute now runs into the "thousands."

And when CNBC asked if Mastercard was changing its strategy after a recent drop in crypto prices, he retorted that market cycles always come and go. "I think you've got to take the longer view that this is a big marketplace now and evolving and is probably going to be much, much bigger in the future."

Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels made this summer's brutal droughts across the Northern Hemisphere -- which dried up rivers, sparked unprecedented wildfires and led to widespread crop failure -- 20 times more likely, according to a new study. Yahoo News reports: Climate change is rewriting normal weather patterns in real time, said the study by World Weather Attribution, a consortium of international scientists who examine the link between rising average global temperatures and extreme weather. The droughts that affected North America, Europe and Asia this summer were so extreme that they would normally be considered a 1-in-400-year event, the study found, but due to climate change, the planet can now expect a repeat of those conditions every 20 years. Individual daily temperature records in Europe were repeatedly broken over the summer of 2022, and the extreme heat was blamed for 24,000 deaths on the continent. Higher average temperatures also dramatically increase evaporation rates, drying out soils and vegetation and leading to a heightened wildfire risk, all of which negatively impact farming.

"In Europe, drought conditions led to reduced harvests. This was particularly worrying, as it followed a climate-change-fueled heat wave in South Asia that also destroyed crops, and happened at a time when global food prices were already extremely high due to the war in Ukraine," Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at Grantham Institute in the U.K. and one of the authors of the study, said in a statement. But as the summer of 2022 showed, climate change amplifies seemingly contradictory effects, worsening drought while also dramatically increasing the risks of extreme precipitation events. In addition to drying out soil, increased evaporation rates due to higher temperatures result in higher levels of atmospheric moisture. "Our analysis shows that last summer's severe drought conditions across large parts of the Northern Hemisphere were fueled by human-induced climate change. The result also gives us an insight on what is looming ahead. With further global warming we can expect stronger and more frequent droughts in the future," Dominik Schumacher, researcher at ETH Zurich and one of the authors of the study, said in a statement.

Security researcher Brian Krebs writes: Someone has recently created a large number of fake LinkedIn profiles for Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles at some of the world's largest corporations. It's not clear who's behind this network of fake CISOs or what their intentions may be. But the fabricated LinkedIn identities are confusing search engine results for CISO roles at major companies, and they are being indexed as gospel by various downstream data-scraping sources. [...] Rich Mason, the former CISO at Fortune 500 firm Honeywell, began warning his colleagues on LinkedIn about the phony profiles earlier this week. "It's interesting the downstream sources that repeat LinkedIn bogus content as truth," Mason said. "This is dangerous, Apollo.io, Signalhire, and Cybersecurity Ventures." [...]

Again, we don't know much about who or what is behind these profiles, but in August the security firm Mandiant (recently acquired by Google) told Bloomberg that hackers working for the North Korean government have been copying resumes and profiles from leading job listing platforms LinkedIn and Indeed, as part of an elaborate scheme to land jobs at cryptocurrency firms. None of the profiles listed here responded to requests for comment (or to become a connection).

LinkedIn could take one simple step that would make it far easier for people to make informed decisions about whether to trust a given profile: Add a "created on" date for every profile. Twitter does this, and it's enormously helpful for filtering out a great deal of noise and unwanted communications. The former CISO Mason said LinkedIn also could experiment with offering something akin to Twitter's verified mark to users who chose to validate that they can respond to email at the domain associated with their stated current employer. Mason said LinkedIn also needs a more streamlined process for allowing employers to remove phony employee accounts. He recently tried to get a phony profile removed from LinkedIn for someone who falsely claimed to have worked for his company. In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, LinkedIn said its teams were actively working to take these fake accounts down. "We do have strong human and automated systems in place, and we're continually improving, as fake account activity becomes more sophisticated," the statement reads. "In our transparency report we share how our teams plus automated systems are stopping the vast majority of fraudulent activity we detect in our community -- around 96% of fake accounts and around 99.1% of spam and scam."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In a London court this week, coroner Andrew Walker had the difficult task of assessing a question that child safety advocates have been asking for years: How responsible is social media for the content algorithms feed to minors? The case before Walker involved a 14-year-old named Molly Russell, who took her life in 2017 after she viewed thousands of posts on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest promoting self-harm. At one point during the inquest, Walker described the content that Russell liked or saved in the days ahead of her death as so disturbing, the coroner said in court, that he found it "almost impossible to watch." Today, Walker concluded that Russell's death couldn't be ruled a suicide, Bloomberg reports. Instead, he described her cause of death as "an act of self-harm whilst suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content."

Bloomberg reported that Walker came to this decision based on Russell's "prolific" use of Instagram -- liking, sharing, or saving 16,300 posts in six months before her death -- and Pinterest -- 5,793 pins over the same amount of time -- combined with how the platforms catered content to contribute to Russell's depressive state. "The platforms operated in such a way using algorithms as to result, in some circumstances, of binge periods of images, video clips and text," which "romanticized acts of self-harm" and "sought to isolate and discourage discussion with those who may have been able to help," Walker said.

Following Walker's ruling, Russell's family issued a statement provided to Ars, calling it a landmark decision and saying that the court didn't even review the most disturbing content that Molly encountered. "This past fortnight has been particularly painful for our family," the Russell family's statement reads. "We're missing Molly more agonizingly than usual, but we hope that the scrutiny this case has received will help prevent similar deaths encouraged by the disturbing content that is still to this day available on social media platforms including those run by Meta." Bloomberg reports that the family's lawyer, Oliver Sanders, has requested that Walker "send instructions on how to prevent this happening again to Pinterest, Meta, the UK government, and the communications regulator." In their statement, the family pushed UK regulators to quickly pass and enforce the UK Online Safety Bill, which The New York Times reported could institute "new safeguards for younger users worldwide." Meta and Pinterest took different approaches to defend their policies. "Pinterest apologized, saying it didn't have the technology it currently has to more effectively moderate content that Molly was exposed to," reports Ars. "But Meta's head of health and well-being, Elizabeth Lagone, frustrated the family by telling the court that the content Molly viewed was considered 'safe' by Meta's standards."

"We have heard a senior Meta executive describe this deadly stream of content the platform's algorithms pushed to Molly, as 'SAFE' and not contravening the platform's policies," the Russell family wrote in their statement. "If this demented trail of life-sucking content was safe, my daughter Molly would probably still be alive." Russells' statement continued: "For the first time today, tech platforms have been formally held responsible for the death of a child. In the future, we as a family hope that any other social media companies called upon to assist an inquest follow the example of Pinterest, who have taken steps to learn lessons and have engaged sincerely and respectfully with the inquest process."

Pinterest told Ars that it is "committed to making ongoing improvements to help ensure that the platform is safe for everyone" and internally "the Coroner's report will be considered with care." Since Molly's death, Pinterest said it has taken steps to improve content moderation, including blocking more than 25,000 self-harm related search terms and, since 2019, has combined "human moderation with automated machine learning technologies to reduce policy-violating content on the platform."

Police in the UK have arrested a 17-year-old suspected hacker. Reports suggest the arrest is connected to the Rockstar Games hack that led to a major Grand Theft Auto VI leak. The individual may have been involved with an intrusion on Uber as well. From a report: According to journalist Matthew Keys' sources, the arrest is the result of an investigation involving the City of London Police, the UK's National Cyber Crime Unit and the FBI. Keys noted that the police and/or the FBI will reveal more details about the arrest later today. The City of London Police told Engadget it had "no further information to share at this stage."

The GTA VI leak is unquestionably one of the biggest in video game history. Last weekend, the hacker shared a trove of footage from a test build of the game, which is one of the most hotly anticipated titles around. Rockstar, which tends to keep a tight lid on its development process, confirmed on Monday that the leak was legitimate. It said the incident won't impact work on the game and that it will "properly introduce" fans to the next title in the blockbuster series once it's ready.

The Economist notes this business cycle is hurting ad revenue for Alphabet's Google and Meta's Facebook."Last quarter Meta reported its first-ever year-on-year decline in revenues. Snap, a smaller rival, is laying off a fifth of its workforce." But for both companies, "the cyclical problem may not be the worst of it," since they're finally facing some real competition.

"They might once have hoped to offset the digital-ad pie's slower growth by grabbing a larger slice of it. No longer." Although the two are together expected to rake in around $300bn in revenues this year, sales of their four biggest rivals in the West will amount to almost a quarter as much... What is more, as digital advertising enters a period of transformation, the challengers look well-placed to increase their gains. The noisiest newcomer to the digital-ad scene is TikTok. In the five years since its launch the short-video app has sucked ad dollars away from Facebook and Instagram, Meta's two biggest properties. So much so that the two social networks are reinventing themselves in the image of their Chinese-owned rival.... But Meta and Google may have more to worry about closer to home, where a trio of American tech firms are loading ever more ads around their main businesses.

Chief among them is Amazon, forecast to take nearly 7% of worldwide digital-ad revenue this year, up from less than 1% just six years ago. The company started reporting details of its ad business only in February, when it revealed sales in 2021 of $31bn. As Benedict Evans, a tech analyst, points out, that is roughly as much as the ad sales of the entire global newspaper industry. Amazon executives now talk of advertising as one of the company's three "engines", alongside retail and cloud computing.

Next in line is Microsoft, expected to quietly take more than 2% of global sales this year — slightly more than TikTok. Its search engine, Bing, has only a small share of the search market, but that market is a gigantic one. Microsoft's social network, LinkedIn, is unglamorous but its business-to-business ads allow it to monetise the time users spend on it at a rate roughly four times that of Facebook, estimates Andrew Lipsman of eMarketer. It generates more revenue than some medium-sized networks including Snap's Snapchat and Twitter.

The most surprising new adman is Apple. The iPhone-maker used to rail against intrusive digital advertising. Now it sells many ads of its own.... As digital ads work their way into more corners of the economy, "a new order is going to materialise", believes Mr Lipsman. He thinks Amazon will overtake Meta in total advertising revenue, possibly within five years.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Google parent Alphabet, defended the internet-search giant against claims that it is anticompetitive, citing established rivals in the digital advertising market and upstart mobile app TikTok as examples of robust competition in technology. From a report: Pichai made the remarks late Tuesday at the Code Conference in Los Angeles. He said the company is "pro-competitive" and named companies including Apple and Microsoft as competitors in the advertising business and TikTok as a rival in the video space. He said that YouTube Shorts, Google's TikTok competitor, is off to a "great start."

"Competition in tech is hyper-intense," Pichai said. The rise of TikTok "shows there is competition in the space" and "how vibrant this market is" compared to years past. The US Justice Department sued Google in 2020, alleging the company dominates the search market in violation of antitrust laws. The company is the most popular search engine and only has limited competition in that business from Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search. The DOJ is also preparing to sue Google on claims it illegally dominates the digital advertising market, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg last month. "Do I wake up and worry about all the stuff that's coming down?" Pichai said Tuesday. "Absolutely." Still, he said, "my guidance to our teams is to be respectful and engage the way we have in Europe" and "engage constructively through the process."

Sunnova is one of America's largest rooftop solar companies, according to the New York Times. But they've now applied to California's Public Utilities Commission for permission to become the state's first solar (and storage) micro-utility, initiating formal steps to qualify and "request a certificate to construct and operate microgrids," targetting new home developments that aren't yet connected to the grid.

"We see a future where communities, neighborhoods, and businesses can operate independently from the legacy grid with sustainable energy sources that provide uninterrupted power," says the company's founder and CEO. "We believe microgrids address a strong need in the market for more robust energy solutions and better connectivity...." But he's also offering touting another possible benefit: "relief that the existing transmission and distribution system will experience given that most of the power that will be consumed by these communities will be generated locally from renewable resources."

The company likes to point out that America's recently-passed climate bill included tax incentives to encourage microgrids. But the New York Times describes it as "a business model that is illegal in much of the United States." Sunnova said it would offer those residents electricity that was up to 20 percent cheaper than the rates charged by investor-owned utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison. If approved by regulators, the micro-utility model, also known as a microgrid, could undermine the growth of those larger utilities by depriving them access to new homes or forcing them to lower their rates to keep that business. Sunnova executives argue that the approach they are seeking approval for was authorized under a California law passed almost two decades ago for a resort just south of Lake Tahoe. In addition, the company says advances in solar and battery technology mean that neighborhoods can be designed to generate more than enough electricity to meet their own needs at a lower cost than relying on the grid.

"If they don't want to choose me, that should be their right; if they don't want to choose you, that should be their right, too," said John Berger, the chief executive of Sunnova.

A small number of homeowners have gone off the grid as the cost of solar panels and batteries has fallen. But doing so can be hard or impossible. Some local governments have rejected permits for off-grid homes on health and safety grounds, arguing that a connection to the grid is essential. But connecting a single home to the grid can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, which means an off-grid system may actually be cheaper — especially for properties in remote areas, or in places where the local grid is at its capacity and would require significant upgrades to serve more homes. Off-grid setups can also be appealing because once a system is paid off, the cost of operating and maintaining it is often modest and predictable, whereas utility rates can move up sharply.... The nationwide average retail electricity rate increased 11 percent in June from a year earlier, according to the Energy Information Administration.

But the kind of micro-utilities that Sunnova hopes to create have also had problems. The utopian visions of generating electricity where it is used have often run into maintenance and other problems. Many tiny utilities created under such models in the United States and Canada were later swallowed up by larger power companies.... Sunnova's microgrid approach could suffer a similar fate. But the costs of solar panels and batteries have tumbled over the last decade, making the energy that off-grid systems generate much more affordable....

Utilities have been pressing regulators to reduce the compensation homeowners receive for the excess solar energy their rooftop systems send to the grid. The companies have argued that customers with solar panels are being offered generous credits for power that they are not contributing adequately toward the cost of maintaining power lines and other grid equipment....

Building and operating microgrids could provide a steady source of income to companies like Sunnova. That could essentially transform the rooftop solar companies into the kinds of utilities that they have long fought against.
Sunnova bills itself as an "Energy as a Service" company, and they expect their microgrids to experience 30 minutes or less of outages each year, the Times points out, "compared with an average of two hours a year at California's large investor-owned utilities."

In the article, the chief executive of home-building company Lennar says they've already formed a partnership with Sunnova. "We value the current electric grid and we're intrigued by new microgrid solutions that can supplement and support the traditional utility grid and help solve reliability during extreme weather and peak demand."

It's the one-year anniversary of El Salvador's adopting Bitcoin as a legal tender, so Bloomberg follows up, finding a country where "Adoption has moved slowly, and steep declines in Bitcoin's price from those lofty levels last fall have dampened the early euphoria that swept across the nation."

"Bitcoin hasn't replaced El Salvador's hard currency, the U.S. dollar — it's not even close — but it also hasn't brought the financial ruin that some warned of either. Or not yet anyway." "No one really talks about Bitcoin here anymore. It's kind of been forgotten," said former El Salvador central bank chief Carlos Acevedo. "I don't know if you'd call that a failure, but it certainly hasn't been a success...."

As part of the rollout, Salvadorans were offered government-issued digital wallets preloaded with $30 worth of Bitcoin to help kick things off. Under the law, taxes can be paid in Bitcoin and businesses should accept it as a form of payment, unless they are technologically unable to do so. But the coin's volatility has spooked users, and cryptocurrency has seen broader acceptance in countries with poor payment networks or strict currency controls, such as Argentina, Venezuela and Cuba, Acevedo said. "In El Salvador we have a good payments network, so why transfer money with cryptocurrency?" he said.

Most Salvadorans haven't poured large amounts of money into Bitcoin, saving many from the recent bear market, Acevedo said. The same can't be said of the government itself, which started purchasing the token last year in the run-up to its launch as legal tender and has continued to add to its stockpile, conspicuously "buying the dip" during periods when Bitcoin declined. The result? It's sitting on losses. [Later the article points out "The government's 2,381 Bitcoin bought with public funds are worth $47.2 million at current prices, less than half what the administration paid for them."] A series of recent surveys found that only a relatively small minority of respondents continue to use digital wallets and few businesses have registered transactions in Bitcoin. And the central bank says only 2% of remittances have been sent via cryptocurrency wallets.

The government is still claiming victory, however. Bitcoin has attracted foreign investment and tourism and increased financial access to a largely unbanked population, according to Finance Minister Alejandro Zelaya. The government says its digital wallet, Chivo, has more than 4 million users. Tourism is on pace to surpass pre-pandemic levels this year and the central bank says 59 cryptocurrency and blockchain companies have registered offices in El Salvador.
Other observations from Bloomberg:

• While El Salvador's president remains popular, a May poll by a local university found 71.1% of respondents said the Bitcoin law didn't improve their family's finances.... "If you go to any market in El Salvador, you're more likely to receive an insult than be able to purchase something in Bitcoin," said the director of the university's public opinion institute. "It's not a part of people's daily routine."

• The IMF "has held off on approving a $1.3 billion program for the country citing risks from Bitcoin."

• Plans are still on for a Bitcoin-backed "volcano token".

The Washington Post shares a little-acknowledged downside to electric cars: recharging takes "upward of 15 to 30 minutes."

But scientists are already working on improvements: In a report released this week, government researchers said they have found a way to charge electric car batteries up to 90 percent in just 10 minutes. The method is likely five years away from making its way into the market, scientists said, but would mark a fundamental shift. "The goal is to get very, very close to [times] you would see at the gas pump," said Eric Dufek, a lead author of the study and scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory, a research center run by the Department of Energy....

At issue is the delicate balance of trying to charge an electric vehicle battery quicker, but not doing it so fast that a rapid charge does long-term damage to the battery or plays a role in causing them to explode. Charging electric batteries fast can cause damage, reducing the battery's life span and performance, scientists said. "You've had batteries when you first got it, they were great, but after a couple years or a few hundred charge cycles, they don't perform as well," said Eric D. Wachsman, director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute, an energy research organization at the University of Maryland. To try to solve this, Dufek and his team used machine learning to figure out how batteries age when charging fast. Their algorithm was trained to analyze 20,000 to 30,000 data points which indicated how well the battery was charging and whether it was aging or degrading....

Wachsman said the new research is helpful for the field. "Not too fast, not too slow," he said of Dufek's charging approach. "It's just right in that Goldilocks [zone]." But the bigger benefit, he said, would be if this method spurs car companies to make electric vehicles with smaller batteries, since they'd now have batteries that could be charged quicker and allow consumers to feel less worried about stopping periodically to get a quick recharge.

"Smaller batteries are cheaper cars," he said.

"At the onset of the outbreak, scientists thought they knew when and how the monkeypox virus was spread, what the disease looked like and who was most vulnerable," remembers the New York Times.

"The 47,000 cases identified worldwide have upended many of those expectations." Some had headaches or depression, confusion and seizures. Others had severe eye infections or inflammation of the heart muscle. At least three of the six deaths reported so far were linked to encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. "We really are seeing a very, very wide range of presentation," said Dr. Boghuma Titanji, an infectious disease physician at a clinic in Atlanta that serves people living with H.I.V. Scientists now know that the monkeypox virus lurks in saliva, semen and other bodily fluids, sometimes for weeks after recovery. The virus has always been known to spread through close contact, but many researchers suspect the infection may also be transmitted through sex itself....

"It's no longer correct to say it can't be transmitted asymptomatically," said Dr. Chloe Orkin, an infectious disease physician at Queen Mary University of London. "I think that it means that our working model of how it's spread is incorrect."

Early in the outbreak, [America's Centers for Disease Control] said that "people who do not have monkeypox symptoms cannot spread the virus to others." The agency changed that phrasing on July 29 to say that "scientists are still researching" the possibility of asymptomatic transmission. In a statement to The New York Times, an agency spokeswoman acknowledged recent evidence that asymptomatic cases were possible but said that it was still uncertain whether people without symptoms could spread the virus and that more research was needed.

"The nurse said to send photos so the doctor could review them in advance," the New York Times reports, decribing how an ordeal began in February of 2021 for a software engineer named Mark who had a sick son: Mark's wife grabbed her husband's phone and texted a few high-quality close-ups of their son's groin area to her iPhone so she could upload them to the health care provider's messaging system. In one, Mark's hand was visible, helping to better display the swelling. Mark and his wife gave no thought to the tech giants that made this quick capture and exchange of digital data possible, or what those giants might think of the images. With help from the photos, the doctor diagnosed the issue and prescribed antibiotics, which quickly cleared it up....

Two days after taking the photos of his son, Mark's phone made a blooping notification noise: His account had been disabled because of "harmful content" that was "a severe violation of Google's policies and might be illegal." A "learn more" link led to a list of possible reasons, including "child sexual abuse & exploitation...." He filled out a form requesting a review of Google's decision, explaining his son's infection. At the same time, he discovered the domino effect of Google's rejection. Not only did he lose emails, contact information for friends and former colleagues, and documentation of his son's first years of life, his Google Fi account shut down, meaning he had to get a new phone number with another carrier. Without access to his old phone number and email address, he couldn't get the security codes he needed to sign in to other internet accounts, locking him out of much of his digital life....

A few days after Mark filed the appeal, Google responded that it would not reinstate the account, with no further explanation. Mark didn't know it, but Google's review team had also flagged a video he made and the San Francisco Police Department had already started to investigate him.... In December 2021, Mark received a manila envelope in the mail from the San Francisco Police Department. It contained a letter informing him that he had been investigated as well as copies of the search warrants served on Google and his internet service provider. An investigator, whose contact information was provided, had asked for everything in Mark's Google account: his internet searches, his location history, his messages and any document, photo and video he'd stored with the company. The search, related to "child exploitation videos," had taken place in February, within a week of his taking the photos of his son.

Mark called the investigator, Nicholas Hillard, who said the case was closed. Mr. Hillard had tried to get in touch with Mark but his phone number and email address hadn't worked....

Mark appealed his case to Google again, providing the police report, but to no avail.... A Google spokeswoman said the company stands by its decisions...
"The day after Mark's troubles started, the same scenario was playing out in Texas," the Times notes, quoting a technologist at the EFF who speculates other people experiencing the same thing may not want to publicize it. "There could be tens, hundreds, thousands more of these."

Reached for a comment on the incident, Google told the newspaper that "Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we're committed to preventing the spread of it on our platforms."

A local news report called it "a futuristic dream, now a reality in Las Vegas: self-driving vehicles moving customers up and down the Las Vegas strip." Lyft's ride-hailing service now lets customers book Motional's all-electric (and autonomous driving) IONIQ 5.

Not everyone's sold. "Love technology — love it, promote it — but we don't need to replace every human," said one person interviewed on the street. But "the digital wave continues to sweep Las Vegas," the newscast points out, with the car company's director of commercial fleet operations insisting it will ultimately make transportation more affordable, sustainable, and reliable. "We look at this as an opportunity to really show that robotaxis are the best way for people to get around," he says, noting Vegas drivers have to contend with lots of night-time driving, bright lights, unusually wide lanes and big intersections.

The city once adopted the slogan "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," and some passengers might appreciate the extra privacy of a truly driverless vehicle. Passengers "for the time being, will be accompanied by two safety drivers in the event of an error," according to news reports, but that's expected to change soon: "Motional and Lyft have a clear path to widespread commercialization of Level 4 autonomous vehicles," said Karl Iagnemma, Motional's president and CEO. "We've led the industry in commercial operations for years, and today's launch signals we're on track to deliver a fully driverless service next year...."

Upon arrival, riders who order the IONIQ 5 can unlock the doors to the vehicle using the Lyft mobile app. Once inside the vehicle, customers can start the ride or contact customer support by using the new in-car Lyft AV app [on a touchscreen for passengers]. By making these new features available now, despite the presence of the two safety drivers, Lyft hopes to solicit customer feedback and refine the new tools before the service goes fully driverless in 2023.

Lyft and Motional have been piloting autonomous rides in other vehicles in Las Vegas since 2018, with more than 100,000 autonomous rides provided thus far, over 95% of which have received five-star ratings, according to the companies. Feedback gathered on the new IONIQ 5 autonomous vehicle over the coming months will help to inform Lyft's launch of fully driverless e-hail trips in Las Vegas sometime next year.

After that, the company plans to expand the driverless, e-hail service to various other markets throughout the country.