theodp writes: On its Careers page, zero-commission online broker Robinhood explains its founders "decided it was more important to build products that would provide everyone with access to the financial markets, not just the wealthy. Two years after heading to New York, they moved back to California and built Robinhood -- a company that leverages technology to encourage everyone to participate in our financial system." But on Monday, at least, the advantage went to the wealthy. Bloomberg reports that Robinhood suffered an outage that lasted the entire U.S. trading day and prevented customers from making trades as stocks surged after last week's rout (status). Just another reminder that we're all just one technology fail away from chaos.

Intuit -- the accounting, tax filing and financial planning software giant behind QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint, confirmed that it plans to acquire Credit Karma -- the fintech startup with more than 100 million registered users, which lets people check their credit scores, shop for credit cards and loans, file taxes and more. "By joining forces with Credit Karma, we can create a personalized financial assistant that will help consumers find the right financial products, put more money in their pockets and provide insights and advice," Sasan Goodarzi, Intuit's chief executive, said in a statement announcing the deal. TechCrunch reports: Intuit said it would pay $7.1 billion for Credit Karma, making this Intuit's biggest-ever acquisition to date, and one of the biggest in the category of privately-held fintech companies. Intuit also announced its quarterly earnings today in which it reported revenue growth of 13% on revenues of $1.7 billion, beating analyst estimates of $1.68 billion. However, it missed analysts' average expectations for earnings per share: it reported non-GAAP EPS of $1, while they were forecasting $1.03.

Intuit plans to keep Credit Karma -- which makes more than $1 billion in revenues annually -- as a standalone operation, run by CEO Kenneth Lin, who cofounded the startup with Ryan Graciano and Nichole Mustard. The acquisition is an obvious fit for Intuit, where it will serve two purposes. Intuit can tap Credit Karma's customer base and range of services -- it partners with some 100 financial service providers in its marketplace -- to complement those it already offers, to help upsell those users to Intuit's premium, paid services. And Intuit can use it to grow its wider business by tapping a set of consumers -- typically younger users -- that Credit Karma has possibly been more successful in capturing than Intuit has.

An anonymous reader shares a report from Agence France-Presse (AFP): France will start closing its oldest atomic power plant on Saturday after 43 years in operation, the first in a series of reactor shutdowns but hardly a signal the country will reduce its reliance on nuclear energy anytime soon. Unplugging the two reactors at Fessenheim, along the Rhine near France's eastern border with Germany and Switzerland, became a key goal of anti-nuclear campaigners after the catastrophic meltdown at Fukushima in Japan in 2011. Experts have noted that construction and safety standards at Fessenheim, brought online in 1977, fall far short of those at Fukushima, with some warning that seismic and flooding risks in the Alsace region had been underestimated. Despite a pledge by ex-president Francois Hollande just months after Fukushima to close the plant, it was not until 2018 that President Emmanuel Macron's government gave the final green light.

The first reactor will start being shut down on Saturday and the second on June 30, though it will be several months before they go cold and the used fuel can start to be removed. France will still be left with 56 pressurized water reactors at 18 nuclear power plants -- only the United States has more reactors, at 98 -- generating an unmatched 70 percent of its electricity needs. The government confirmed in January that it aims to shut down 12 more reactors nearing or exceeding their original 40-year age limit by 2035, when nuclear power should represent just 50 percent of its energy mix. But at the same time, state-owned energy giant EDF is racing to get its first next-generation reactor running at the Flamanville plant in 2022 -- 10 years behind schedule -- and more may be in the pipeline.

If there were any major sites that took a web traffic pummeling in 2019 Yahoo and Tumblr would top the list. That's according to a new report from SimilarWeb. The report looks back on key web trends in 2019. Among those trends were some pretty bad news for some sites: 1. Total web traffic is on the rise, growing 8% in 2019 to 223 billion visits per month to the top 100 websites worldwide.
2. Mobile is fueling much of that growth. While desktop web traffic decreased 3.3% since 2017, mobile web traffic shot up 30.6% over the same period.
3. But with the mobile web comes shrinking attention spans. The report says that visitors are spending 49 seconds less on websites per visit than they did three years ago.
4. The top 10 sites took 167.5 billion visits per month in 2019 -- a 10.7% increase.
5. Mobile visits claim the majority of visits made to "vice" sites -- those that involve porn and gambling.
6. The U.S. leads the world when it comes to visiting the websites. In 2019, over 300 billion visits per month to sites were made from America.

"Chinese researchers reportedly have applied for a local patent on an experimental Gilead drug that they believe could help fight the novel coronavirus outbreak -- and also significantly bolster Gilead's bottom-line going forward..." reports The Street. "If granted, Gilead will need to get Chinese patent owners on board when it wants to sell the drug for treating the novel coronavirus infection outside China."

"The move is a sign that China views Gilead's therapy as one of the most promising candidates to fight the outbreak that has now claimed almost 500 lives..." Time reports. "While Gilead's experimental drug isn't licensed or approved anywhere in the world, it is being rushed into human trials in China on coronavirus patients after showing early signs of being highly effective."

But China's move concerns Bloomberg Opinion biotech/pharma columnist Max Nisen: If the patent is granted, it will confirm long-standing drugmaker fears about China's commitment to IP protection, raising concern about the industry's future in a crucial market. It also could further erode the already weak incentives for pharma to invest in drugs to combat emerging infectious diseases... [T]he company could see any potential return on the medication curtailed if China starts manufacturing it.

China's increasingly affluent population represents a huge opportunity for drugmakers. Many are investing heavily in the region despite previous data integrity and sales scandals. Leadership has recently demonstrated a greater commitment to IP rights in its initial trade deal with the U.S., but granting this patent could erode trust in the government and scare off foreign drugmakers.

The consequences wouldn't be limited to declining corporate confidence in China, even if this is a one-time emergency event. The world dramatically under-invests in drugs to combat infectious diseases, and a move like this by the Chinese government wouldn't help. Developing such medicines isn't very profitable, compared to drugs for rare diseases and cancer. That's especially true when it comes to emerging viruses, in spite of the obvious risk. Outbreaks are more common in developing countries, which limits pricing power. By the time a company has managed to get approval for any given drug, often a years-long process, there's a good chance that the outbreak will be over.

Seizing the rights to treatments dents drugmakers' already limited incentive to invest in infectious-disease drugs, let alone spend heavily to develop and maintain the ability to respond rapidly to outbreaks and scale up manufacturing. Without the promise of some kind of return, investment is going to dry up. I'm not a rah-rah pharma guy. The industry often abuses the patent system, especially in the U.S., in order to profit for years off of old drugs to the detriment of patients and the health-care system. Its pricing practices are frequently unconscionable. This isn't one of those situations. It's arguably one of the rare cases where the ability of drugmakers to profit needs to be boosted rather than crimped.

Makers of productivity suite Basecamp have announced Hey, an email product they plan to release this spring. Basecamp founder and CEO, Jason Fried shared the vision for what they are calling a much-improved approach to email in an open letter today on the Hey website: You started getting stuff you didn't want from people you didn't know. You lost control over who could reach you. You were forced to inherit other people's bad communication habits. Then an avalanche of automated emails amplified the clutter. And Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Apple, and all the others just let it happen. Now email feels like a chore, rather than a joy. Something you fall behind on. Something you clear out, not cherish. Rather than delight in it, you deal with it. Your relationship with email changed, and you didn't have a say.

So good news, the magic's still there. It's just obscured -- buried under a mess of modern day bad habits and neglect. Some from people, some from machines, a lot from email systems. It deserves a dust off. A renovation. Modernized for the way we email today. With HEY, we've done just that. It's a redo, a rethink, a simplified, potent reintroduction of email. A fresh start, the way it should be. For web, iOS, and Android. HEY is our love letter to email, and we're sending it to you. Over 12,000 people have requested early access to Hey since yesterday, said David Heinemeier Hansson, founder of Basecamp, and creator of Ruby on Rails.

CaptainDork spotted CNN's update about best-selling author Stephen King: "I'm quitting Facebook," the author said on Twitter Friday. "Not comfortable with the flood of false information that's allowed in its political advertising, nor am I confident in its ability to protect its users' privacy...."

His Facebook profile has since been deleted. King encouraged his fans to follow him on Twitter. But meanwhile... Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Sunday slammed Twitter and Google for the rise in trolling networks and scams via fake bots on both the platforms.... "The crypto scam level on Twitter is reaching new levels. This is not cool," Musk reacted to a follower's tweet. "Report as soon as you see it. Troll/bot networks on Twitter are a *dire* problem for adversely affecting public discourse and ripping people off," he continued.

He also criticised Google for allowing scammers to flourish. "Trolls/bots just need to be deemphasized relative to probable real people who aren't being paid to push an agenda or scam. Google still shows bs/scam pages, they're just several clicks away," Musk stressed.
And elsewhere, criticisms of Facebook and Google continued: in a new interview, venture capitalist and tech critic Roger McNamee specifically singled out Facebook and Google for their roles in spreading disinformation... "[T]hey're the reason we can't fix climate change," McNamee, author of the book "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe," said this week on the [Yahoo Finance show] Final Round. "They're the reason why we have an epidemic of measles due to the anti-vaxers. They're the reason why white supremacy and gun violence are on the rise because they empower the most disaffected people in society, and they give them a disproportionate political voice....

"If we want to do something about climate change or gun violence or white supremacy or anti-vaxers, we're going to have to fix Facebook and Google."

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Tesla announced its 2019 Fourth Quarter results. "Expectations were high this quarter after Tesla destroyed earnings expectations with surprisingly high profits last quarter. Today, Tesla announced that it made $7.384 billion in revenue and it reported surprising profits of $2.14 per share (Non-GAAP) in Q4 2019 -- over expectations for both revenue and earnings. The automaker continues to improve its financial position with strong results and increased its cash position by almost $1 billion to now $6.3 billion." Stock zoomed in after hours trading and continued to rally today. The short interest tracker S3 Partners reported that shorts lost another $1.5 billion today, as the stock zoomed very quickly on open giving them very little time to cover at anything close to yesterday's prices. According to this report they had $5.6 billion YTD profit last June. They have raked up losses of almost $13 billion dollars since.

The investor conference call revealed nuggets like improved range for dual motor cars, Model Y production starting sooner than expected, the solar side has started growing again, etc. Despite all the headlines about first "profitable" year, technically the company lost money on GAAP basis.

VeriSign has released a "proposed agreement" with ICANN to amend their exclusive .com registry agreement to allow them to raise the price of dotcom registrations up to 28% every six years.

Those new terms "are now open to public comment" -- and the Register points out that ICANN's decision seems to come with a corresponding $20 million for ICANN: Operator of the dot-com registry, Verisign, has decided to pay DNS overseer ICANN $4 million a year for the next five years in order to "educate the wider ICANN community about security threats."

Even though the generous $20 million donation has nothing to do with ICANN signing off on an extension of the dot-com contract until 2024, the "binding letter of intent" [PDF] stating the exact amount of funding will be appended to the registry agreement that Verisign has with ICANN to run the dot-com registry.

That extension lifts a price freeze put in place several years ago and will allow Verisign to increase prices by seven per cent a year [in each of the last four years of each six year contract renewal]. It's an increase that we calculated was worth $993 million and which the stock market appeared to agree with when it raised the company's share price by 16 per cent when the agreement was first flagged in November 2018...

ICANN explains the $20 million this time will be used to "support ICANN's initiatives to preserve and enhance the security, stability and resiliency of the DNS, including root server system governance, mitigation of DNS security threats, promotion and/or facilitation of DNSSEC deployment, the mitigation of name collisions, and research into the operation of the DNS."

Which is all entirely above board and not at all shady.

Twitter is banning animated PNG image files (APNGs) from its platform, after an attack on the Epilepsy Foundation's Twitter account sent out similar animated images that could potentially cause seizures in photosensitive people. The Verge reports: Twitter discovered a bug that allowed users to bypass its autoplay settings, and allow several animated images in a single tweet using the APNG file format. "We want everyone to have a safe experience on Twitter," the company says in a tweet from the Twitter Accessibility handle. "APNGs were fun, but they don't respect autoplay settings, so we're removing the ability to add them to Tweets. This is for the safety of people with sensitivity to motion and flashing imagery, including those with epilepsy."

Tweets with existing APNG images won't be deleted from the platform, but only GIFs will be able to animate images moving forward. According to Yahoo, Twitter has further clarified that APNG files were not used to target the Epilepsy Foundation, but the bug meant such files could have been used to do so in the future had Twitter not moved to squash it. The attacks on the Epilepsy Foundation's Twitter handle occurred last month -- National Epilepsy Awareness Month -- with trolls using its hashtags and Twitter handle to post animated images with strobing light effects. It's not clear how many people may have been affected by the attack, but the foundation said it's cooperating with law enforcement officials and has filed criminal complaints against accounts believed to have been involved.

The Google and Yahoo vet shares a few cryptic details about her new foray into the productivity space with Lumi Labs. From a report: Mayer remains cryptic about the specific types of apps Lumi has under development, and the time frame for their launch. But she will say that Lumi stands to benefit from the kinds of AI breakthroughs that Silicon Valley researchers are making in areas such as teaching cars to drive themselves. This kind of work, she says, is immediately useful for the tools Lumi is devising to automate activities "so mundane and so time-consuming that a lot of people [choose not to] do them." For instance, the company is applying machine learning to certain photo-related tasks such as figuring out whether a particular image "is blurry, whether it's well lit, whether it's one that someone is likely to want to share based on the history of photos they shared in the past."

If Lumi's apps take off, it won't be through the company's use of AI alone. "We want our products to be thoughtful, to feel nice when they're used," explains Mayer, who was once famous for zealously guarding Google's search engine against complication and clutter. She admits that she misses the days when the products she launched reached hundreds of millions of people. But with Lumi, "the hope is to be able to have that kind of impact and scale at some point," she says. "That's certainly what we will be building for."

DevNull127 writes: A video report from NBC News profiles "Springboard to Opportunities," an advocacy group for affordable housing residents that's now also testing $1,000-a-month payments (privately-funded) for 20 women in Mississsippi chosen at random. One senior-living aid making $10.31 an hour says the grants represent "a little freedom". She's using the money to pay down debt — and to visit the father in Pennsylvania who she hasn't seen in 20 years.

Meanwhile, CBS MoneyWatch checked in on one of the 14 people picked to receive $1,000 a month for an entire year in the "Freedom Dividend Pilot Program" of U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang. "Sure, there's going to be outliers that take advantage of any situation," says Chad Dzizek. "But most people are just trying to get by. Having extra money in hand would only help move that process along. And I don't see myself slacking off anymore. If anything, I'm going to be more aggressive in tackling my goals because it's that much more available."

That article adds that Yang, a former tech entrepreneur, "sees this as a way to reduce poverty and income inequality, especially as computers increasingly replace people in the workplace." Although the program has already run into at least one hitch.

Following the program's announcement in September, the former chairman of the Federal Elections Commission told CBS News that the program appears to violate "personal use" campaign finance laws since the funds come from Yang's campaign and not his own pocket. Others, however, have argued that the program could be classified as an advertisement for the campaign. The Yang campaign declined to comment.
Business Insider also has an update on the Basic Income plan of Michael Tubbs, the 28-year-old mayor of Stockton, California, where 125 people making less than $46,000 a year are now being given $500 a month. "In October, Stockton released the first set of data about how the program was faring. Most participants, initial results showed, were using their stipends to buy groceries and pay their bills.

"Tubbs told Business Insider that these preliminary findings gave him even more confidence that basic income would benefit his city -- and could even serve as a national solution to income inequality... Stockton's basic-income experiment is designed to last for 18 months, so there are still about eight to go. If the pilot is successful, Tubbs said, the city will consider expanding the program."

Verizon is laying off 150 U.S. staffers this week across multiple teams in the organization. CNN reports: Verizon Media employs around 10,500 people [across media brands that include Yahoo, AOL, TechCrunch and HuffPost], so these cuts will amount to 1.4% of its work force. It's unclear which brands will be affected. In January, Verizon Media laid off roughly 800 employees, or about 7% of its staff at the time, as the division's revenues failed to meet expectations.

A spokesperson for Verizon Media confirmed the layoffs to CNN Business. "Our goal is to create the best experiences for our consumers and the best platforms for our customers. Today we are investing in premium content, connections and commerce experiences that connect people to their passions and continue to align our resources to opportunities where we feel we can differentiate ourselves and scale faster," the spokesperson said in a statement.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Verizon, which bought Yahoo in 2017, has suspended email addresses of archivists who are trying to preserve 20 years of content that will be deleted permanently in a few weeks. As Verizon announced in October, the company intends to wipe all content from Yahoo Groups. As of December 14, all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. The mass deletion includes files, polls, links, photos, folders, database, calendar, attachments, conversations, email updates, message digests, and message histories that was uploaded to Yahoo servers since pre-Google 1990s. Verizon planned to allow users to download their own data from the site's privacy dashboard, but apparently it has a problem with the work of The Archive Team who wants to save content to upload it to the non-profit Internet Archive, which runs the popular Wayback Machine site.

"Yahoo banned all the email addresses that the Archive Team volunteers had been using to join Yahoo Groups in order to download data," reported the Yahoo Groups Archive Team. "Verizon has also made it impossible for the Archive Team to continue using semi-automated scripts to join Yahoo Groups -- which means each group must be rejoined one by one, an impossible task (redo the work of the past four weeks over the next 10 days)."

Mark Wilson quotes BetaNews: Apple has failed in an attempt to block a class action lawsuit being brought against it by a customer who claimed the company concealed the problematic nature of the butterfly keyboard design used in MacBooks.

The proposed lawsuit not only alleges that Apple concealed the fact that MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air keyboards were prone to failure, but also that design defects left customers out of pocket because of Apple's failure to provide an effective fix.
Engadget argues that Apple "might face an uphill battle in court.

"While the company has never said the butterfly keyboard design was inherently flawed, it instituted repair programs for that keyboard design and even added the latest 13-inch MacBook Pro to the program the moment it became available. Also, the 16-inch MacBook Pro conspicuously reverted to scissor switches in what many see as a tacit acknowledgment that the earlier technology was too fragile."

Luke Skywalker wasn't going to be the only Jedi in the final Star Wars movie, reports Yahoo Entertainment: In the original version of the ninth and final installment, The Rise of Skywalker, his sister, Leia (played by Carrie Fisher), was going to emerge as a full-fledged Jedi warrior, complete with her very own lightsaber. That's according to no less an authority than Fisher's real-life brother, Todd Fisher, who filled us in on what the plan was for his sister's iconic character prior to her sudden death in December 2016. "She was going to be the big payoff in the final film," Fisher reveals exclusively to Yahoo Entertainment. "She was going to be the last Jedi, so to speak. That's cool right....? People used to say to me, 'Why is it that Carrie never gets a lightsaber and chops up some bad guys,'" Fisher says, noting that Alec Guinness was roughly the same age when Obi-Wan Kenobi battled Darth Vader in A New Hope. "Obi-Wan was in his prime when he was Carrie's age...!"

Unfortunately, a version of The Rise of Skywalker where Leia picks up her father and brother's chosen weapon can only exist in our imaginations. After Fisher's death, her alter ego's arc had to be re-conceived by returning director J.J. Abrams, who previously directed the actress in 2015's The Force Awakens. "The truth is that J.J. Abrams was great friends with Carrie... he had an extraordinary sense of love for her," her brother says. It was that love that led the filmmaker to make a bold, and creatively risky decision: take unused footage of Leia left over from The Force Awakens and make it part of The Rise of Skywalker. "They had eight minutes of footage," Fisher tells us. "They grabbed every frame and analyzed it... and then reverse-engineered it and [got] it into the story the right way. It's kind of magical."

"Microsoft's Bing search engine reportedly still served up child porn, nearly a year after the tech giant said it was addressing the issue," reports CNET: The news comes as part of a Saturday report in The New York Times that looks at what the newspaper says is a failure by tech companies to adequately address child pornography on their platforms.... [A] former Microsoft executive told the Times that it now looks as if the company is failing to use its own tools. The Times' Saturday report notes that 10 years ago, Microsoft helped create software called PhotoDNA that "can use computers to recognize photos, even altered ones, and compare them against databases of known illegal images." But, the Times said, Bing and other search engines that use Bing's results are serving up imagery that doesn't pass muster with PhotoDNA....

The Bing news is part of a larger story from the Times about how various tech companies are dealing with child porn on their platforms.
The Times criticizes a tech industry which they say is looking the other way: Amazon, whose cloud storage services handle millions of uploads and downloads every second, does not even look for the imagery. Apple does not scan its cloud storage, according to federal authorities, and encrypts its messaging app, making detection virtually impossible. Dropbox, Google and Microsoft's consumer products scan for illegal images, but only when someone shares them, not when they are uploaded. And other companies, including Snapchat and Yahoo, look for photos but not videos, even though illicit video content has been exploding for years. (When asked about its video scanning, a Dropbox spokeswoman in July said it was not a "top priority." On Thursday, the company said it had begun scanning some videos last month.)

The largest social network in the world, Facebook, thoroughly scans its platforms, accounting for over 90 percent of the imagery flagged by tech companies last year, but the company is not using all available databases to detect the material. And Facebook has announced that the main source of the imagery, Facebook Messenger, will eventually be encrypted, vastly limiting detection.

An anonymous reader quotes a Yahoo News 360 report on Americans who hate Daylight Saving Time: A push to end the semiannual clock shift, which has been shown to correlate with negative health and productivity outcomes, is gaining steam throughout the country. Most of the momentum is behind a movement to make daylight saving time permanent so the "spring forward" lasts all year long. A number of states including California, Florida, Washington and Oregon have taken legislative steps to do just that, but an act of Congress would be needed for any of those changes to go into effect.
Meanwhile, CBS News reports: Most people across the country will see their clocks roll back an hour this weekend as nearly eight months of daylight saving time come to an end. It is part of a twice-a-year ritual that most want to stop. Seven in 10 Americans prefer not to switch back and forth to mark daylight saving time, a new poll shows.
The poll also shows that 33% of Americans younger than 45 prefer the current system of switching clocks twice a year -- compared to just 24% of Americans 45 or older.

Google owner Alphabet has made an offer to acquire U.S. wearable device maker Fitbit, as it eyes a slice of the crowded market for fitness trackers and smartwatches, Reuters reported Monday, citing familiar with the matter. From the report: While Google has joined other major technology companies such as Apple and Samsung in developing smart phones, it has yet to develop any wearable offerings. There is no certainty that the negotiations between Google and Fitbit will lead to any deal, the sources said, asking not to be identified because the matter is confidential.

A user writes: When it comes to using strong username and passwords for administrative purposes let alone customer facing portals, Equifax appears to have dropped the ball. Equifax used the word "admin" as both password and username for a portal that contained sensitive information, according to a class action lawsuit filed in federal court in the Northern District of Georgia. The ongoing lawsuit, filed after the breach, went viral on Twitter Friday after Buzzfeed reporter Jane Lytvynenko came across the detail. "Equifax employed the username 'admin' and the password 'admin' to protect a portal used to manage credit disputes, a password that 'is a surefire way to get hacked,'" the lawsuit reads. The lawsuit also notes that Equifax admitted using unencrypted servers to store the sensitive personal information and had it as a public-facing website. When Equifax, one of the three largest consumer credit reporting agencies, did encrypt data, the lawsuit alleges, "it left the keys to unlocking the encryption on the same public-facing servers, making it easy to remove the encryption from the data." The class-action suit consolidated 373 previous lawsuits into one. Unlike other lawsuits against Equifax, these don't come from wronged consumers, but rather shareholders that allege the company didn't adequately disclose risks or its security practices.