Two years into its ban from the US Government and, in turn, access to the Play Store on its Android-powered devices, Huawei is unveiling HarmonyOS. The platform is an alternative to Android that powers TVs, smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches. 9to5Google reports: Announced at an event today, Huawei is positioning HarmonyOS as an operating system that can handle just about everything, from the smartphone in your pocket to IoT devices such as "power sockets and lamps." The company says the goal of the platform is to have one set of code that can be used across virtually any device, saying that it is not aware of "any other operating system in the world" that can cover such a wide range of devices. Leaning into this ability, Huawei developed a "Control Panel," which gives users the ability to connect multiple devices together, with the example of using the "music widget" to throw audio playback to nearby speakers or TVs. A "Super Device" widget shows icons for other nearby devices and enables a quick and easy pairing mode.

On smartphones, the HarmonyOS homescreen can use a swipe-up gesture on apps developed for the platform to see a widget pulling information from that app. Those widgets, apparently, can also be used across devices because of the shared codebase Huawei says HarmonyOS offers. The homescreen can also intelligently add apps to a folder based on the category. Interestingly, Huawei says HarmonyOS devices will also be able to move running apps from one device to another, which is really neat and unique. Moving apps between devices apparently also works between watches and TVs, with a workout app being used on both simultaneously given as an example. A video calling app was also shown moving between devices. Huawei says that performance of HarmonyOS is "superior" to Android with EMUI, specifically calling out long-term use.

While there are certainly new elements in HarmonyOS, it appears to be a "fork" of Android. The Verge spent time with the HarmonyOS-powered MatePad Pro and described the act of installing Android APKs as "though I was using an Android device." Visually, there are also a tremendous number of similarities between HarmonyOS and Android, though there are some distinct elements of Apple's iPad OS in the platform's tablet-optimized homescreen, seen below as Evan Blass posted to Twitter. Android Authority further described HarmonyOS as "ultimately a spin on Android 10" with a "slight rebrand." TechRadar said the software was "clearly" based on Android. These findings from the media appear to back up a previous report from ArsTechnica, which showed the developer preview as basically a clone of EMUI-skinned Android.

New terms of use for eBay have come into effect which mean the online auction house will now pay sellers directly rather than through PayPal. The BBC reports: PayPal was acquired by eBay in its early days in 2002, and the two firms have worked in partnership ever since. The changes mean that while eBay buyers can still pay with PayPal, sellers will be paid straight into their bank accounts. But some sellers have threatened to stop using the service over the move.

EBay's forums have several posts from sellers who say they are reluctant to use the new system and give eBay direct debit access to their personal bank accounts. But the new terms, effective from 1 June, say the new "managed payments" system is compulsory, and the company has the power to limit or remove listings from sellers who refuse to use it. The company says the new system is simpler, convenient, and gives buyers more payment options - and the rollout will be gradual. It marks a significant change in an almost two-decade partnership with PayPal, which split from eBay in 2015.

The United States must pass new legislation to limit how its national security agencies access Europeans' data if Washington and Brussels are to hammer out a new deal on transferring people's digital information across the Atlantic, according to European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova. From a report: Speaking at POLITICO's AI summit on Monday, the Czech politician said the U.S. needed to create legally binding laws to provide European Union citizens' the ability to challenge bulk data collection by federal authorities in U.S. courts. The goal, she said, would be "to have legally binding rules, or rule, on the U.S. side guaranteeing this. It's of course the best and the strongest way to do that," said Jourova when asked if the Commission would accept a presidential executive order or would require new U.S. legislation to provide EU citizens with the power to sue over how U.S. national security agencies collected and used their data.

The American Forces Network is a U.S. government TV and radio broadcast service provided by the military for overseas personnel. But there's an interesting quirk. As an official Department of Defense product, it's not allowed to run ads or even mention commercial products, according to Stars and Stripes. "Instead, it lets commanders put out messages about force protection, weather, current events and base services."

And that's where things get creative...

Killer vending machines, security-conscious hamsters and a roommate who devolves into a caveman. These are some of the memorable features of Garry Terrell's vast collection of military-grade videos from the American Forces Network and its predecessor, the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. The son of a former U.S. soldier, Terrell is trying to preserve "all things AFN/AFRTS," and boasts over 3,600 videos on the YouTube channel AFRTSfan. He began his collection nearly three decades ago, after learning that little had been done to save the many AFN spots that serve as a touchstone for troops and military families who've lived overseas.

The military-made productions fill what would normally be ad time in broadcasts back home... Because they're broadcast across various theaters, the ads served as "kind of like this bonding thing" for kids' friend groups frequently reshaped by duty station changes, said Sabine Brown, an airman's daughter who grew up in Germany in the 80s and 90s. For Terrell, whose mother is German, "it was just my local TV and radio provider" growing up on the bases where his father served as a career U.S. soldier in the 70s and 80s. He took it for granted until the early 90s Base Realignment and Closure process threatened to shutter bases he'd grown up on.

"Fearing that AFN might also go away, I decided to try and collect some AFN radio and TV items to add to my ever-growing memory book of Germany," he said in an email. "I felt like I was in a race against time."

He began contacting and befriending AFN staff and alumni, growing his collection through contributions from his expanding network of AFN insiders and "superfans." He started sharing this burgeoning library on YouTube over a decade ago, creating something of a time capsule, with spots that run the gamut from cringe-inducing, silly or lame to fun, brilliant and truly memorable.
The article notes that the videos once were even affectionately lampooned in a duet by two folk-singing Air Force pilots — which apparently remembers, among other things, the AFN ad illustrating the importance of the power-of-attorney by re-dubbing an old Hercules movie.

Natural gas "creates less carbon emissions than the coal it replaces, but we have to find ways to minimize the leakage of methane."

That's the opinion of Vaclav Smil, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, writing in IEEE's Spectrum (in an article shared by Slashdot reader schwit1): Natural gas is abundant, low-cost, convenient, and reliably transported, with low emissions and high combustion efficiency. Natural-gas-fired heating furnaces have maximum efficiencies of 95 to 97 percent, and combined-cycle gas turbines now achieve overall efficiency slightly in excess of 60 percent. Of course, burning gas generates carbon dioxide, but the ratio of energy to carbon is excellent: Burning a gigajoule of natural gas produces 56 kilograms of carbon dioxide, about 40 percent less than the 95 kg emitted by bituminous coal.

This makes gas the obvious replacement for coal. In the United States, this transition has been unfolding for two decades. Gas-fueled capacity increased by 192 gigawatts from 2000 to 2005 and by an additional 69 GW from 2006 through the end of 2020. Meanwhile, the 82 GW of coal-fired capacity that U.S. utilities removed from 2012 to 2020 is projected to be augmented by another 34 GW by 2030, totaling 116 GW — more than a third of the former peak rating.

So far, so green. But methane is itself a very potent greenhouse gas, packing from 84 to 87 times as much global warming potential as an equal quantity of carbon dioxide when measured over 20 years (and 28 to 36 times as much over 100 years). And some of it leaks out. In 2018, a study of the U.S. oil and natural-gas supply chain found that those emissions were about 60 percent higher than the Environmental Protection Agency had estimated. Such fugitive emissions, as they are called, are thought to be equivalent to 2.3 percent of gross U.S. gas production...

Without doubt, methane leakages during extraction, processing, and transportation do diminish the overall beneficial impact of using more natural gas, but they do not erase it, and they can be substantially reduced.

The South China Morning Post reports that China "has reached another milestone in its quest for a fusion reactor, with one of its 'artificial suns' sustaining extreme temperatures for several times longer that its previous benchmark, according to state media." State news agency Xinhua reported that the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak in a facility in the eastern city of Hefei registered a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds on Friday. It also maintained a temperature of 160 million degrees Celsius for 20 seconds, the report said...

The facilities are part of China's quest for fusion reactors, which hold out hope of unlimited clean energy. But there are many challenges to overcome in what has already been a decades-long quest for the world's scientists. Similar endeavours are under way in the United States, Europe, Russia, South Korea. China is also among 35 countries involved in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) megaproject in France...

Despite the progress made, fusion reactors are still a long way from reality. Song Yuntao, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the latest results were a major achievement for physics and engineering in China. "The experiment's success lays the foundation for China to build its own nuclear fusion energy station," Song was quoted as saying.
NASA notes that the core of the Sun is only about 15 million degrees Celsius.

So for many seconds China's fusion reactor was more than 10 times hotter than the sun.

"For the first time, artificial intelligence was a key component and power multiplier in fighting the enemy," says a senior officer in the intelligence corps of the Israeli military, describing the technology's use in 11 days of fighting in the Gaza Strip.

They're quoted in a Jerusalem Post article on "the world's first AI war": Soldiers in Unit 8200, an Intelligence Corps elite unit, pioneered algorithms and code that led to several new programs called "Alchemist," "Gospel" and "Depth of Wisdom," which were developed and used during the fighting. Collecting data using signal intelligence, visual intelligence, human intelligence , geographical intelligence, and more, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has mountains of raw data that must be combed through to find the key pieces necessary to carry out a strike. "Gospel" used AI to generate recommendations for troops in the research division of Military Intelligence, which used them to produce quality targets and then passed them on to the IAF to strike...

While the IDF had gathered thousands of targets in the densely populated coastal enclave over the past two years, hundreds were gathered in real time, including missile launchers that were aimed at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The military believes using AI helped shorten the length of the fighting, having been effective and quick in gathering targets using super-cognition. The IDF carried out hundreds of strikes against Hamas and PIJ, including rocket launchers, rocket manufacturing, production and storage sites, military intelligence offices, drones, commanders' residences and Hamas's naval commando unit. Israel has destroyed most of the naval commando unit's infrastructure and weaponry, including several autonomous GPS-guided submarines that can carry 30 kg. of explosives.

IDF Unit 9900's satellites have gathered geographical intelligence over the years. They were able to automatically detect changes in terrain in real time so that during the operation, the military was able to detect launching positions and hit them after firing. For example, Unit 9900 troops using satellite imagery were able to detect 14 rocket launchers that were located next to a school... One strike, against senior Hamas operative Bassem Issa, was carried out with no civilian casualties despite being in a tunnel under a high-rise building surrounded by six schools and a medical clinic... Hamas's underground "Metro" tunnel network was also heavily damaged over the course of several nights of airstrikes. Military sources said they were able to map the network, consisting of hundreds of kilometers under residential areas, to a degree where they knew almost everything about them.

The mapping of Hamas's underground network was done by a massive intelligence-gathering process that was helped by the technological developments and use of Big Data to fuse all the intelligence.

Decrypt reports on the world's first "intelligent NFT" (or iNFT), being auctioned off in June as part of a collection of digital artworks at Sotheby's.

Her name is Alice: The brainchild of artist Ben Gentilli's Robert Alice studio and software developers Alethea AI, Alice is a non-fungible token (NFT), a blockchain-based token that can be used to prove ownership of a digital or physical asset. In this case, the asset in question is a machine-learning bot that uses a generative language model based on the OpenAI GPT-3 engine.

That means she's able to hold (somewhat stilted) conversations about life, the universe and everything... Since Alice "learns" from each audience interaction, drifting further from the original seed text, it becomes a decentralized manifesto. "It's fairly loose, because the audience can take it anywhere," Gentilli says. Alice has strong views on NFTs, as you might expect. "Non-fungible tokens are a way to liberate artists and give them the power of the blockchain," she tells me. But she's a little hazy on the details. Asked how, exactly, that would work, all she can come up with is, "I don't know. I am not an artist..."

So, is there an appetite for NFTs that talk back? Alethea CEO Arif Khan thinks so. "We're actually building a protocol that will allow you to take any NFT, put it into the smart contract infrastructure that we've built, and make it intelligent and interactive," he says. Your Beeple art piece or CryptoPunk could start talking back to you, he suggests. Or you could take your grandparent's diaries and use them as the seed text for a generative language bot. But do you want your CryptoPunk to talk to you? Chatbots already exist, and it's not clear why you'd need that bot to be attached to an NFT.

On the other hand, art can be a way to explore the implications of new technologies, Gentilli argues: "When you think about the whole trajectory of synthetic media, artists have been the people probably most known for experimenting with it at its rawest edge."

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares Science magazine's look at efforts to transform zinc batteries "from small, throwaway cells often used in hearing aids into rechargeable behemoths that could be attached to the power grid, storing solar or wind power for nighttime or when the wind is calm." With startups proliferating and lab studies coming thick and fast, "Zinc batteries are a very hot field," says Chunsheng Wang, a battery expert at the University of Maryland, College Park. Lithium-ion batteries — giant versions of those found in electric vehicles — are the current front-runners for storing renewable energy, but their components can be expensive. Zinc batteries are easier on the wallet and the planet — and lab experiments are now pointing to ways around their primary drawback: They can't be recharged over and over for decades.

For power storage, "Lithium-ion is the 800-pound gorilla," says Michael Burz, CEO of EnZinc, a zinc battery startup. But lithium, a relatively rare metal that's only mined in a handful of countries, is too scarce and expensive to back up the world's utility grids. (It's also in demand from automakers for electric vehicles.) Lithium-ion batteries also typically use a flammable liquid electrolyte. That means megawatt-scale batteries must have pricey cooling and fire-suppression technology. "We need an alternative to lithium," says Debra Rolison, who heads advanced electrochemical materials research at the Naval Research Laboratory. Enter zinc, a silvery, nontoxic, cheap, abundant metal. Nonrechargeable zinc batteries have been on the market for decades. More recently, some zinc rechargeables have also been commercialized, but they tend to have limited energy storage capacity. Another technology — zinc flow cell batteries — is also making strides. But it requires more complex valves, pumps, and tanks to operate. So, researchers are now working to improve another variety, zinc-air cells...

Advances are injecting new hope that rechargeable zinc-air batteries will one day be able to take on lithium. Because of the low cost of their materials, grid-scale zinc-air batteries could cost $100 per kilowatt-hour, less than half the cost of today's cheapest lithium-ion versions. "There is a lot of promise here," Burz says. But researchers still need to scale up their production from small button cells and cellphone-size pouches to shipping container-size systems, all while maintaining their performance, a process that will likely take years.

The New York Times reports that for years, Uber and other ride-hailing companies "offered the promise of entrepreneurship to drivers" to drivers eager to set their own schedules. "But some drivers never received the control and independence they had expected." They struggled with the costs of vehicle maintenance, loans and insurance, and they questioned whether Uber and Lyft paid a fair wage. Legislative efforts to grant them employment benefits were thwarted.

Now, dissatisfied drivers and labor advocates are forming worker-owned cooperatives in an attempt to take back some of the money — and power — in the gig economy.

The Drivers Cooperative, which opened for business in New York this week, is the most recent attempt. The group, founded by a former Uber employee, a labor organizer and a black-car driver, began issuing ownership shares to drivers in early May and will start offering rides through its app on Sunday. The cooperative has recruited around 2,500 drivers so far and intends to take a smaller commission than Uber or Lyft and charge riders a lower fare.

It is an ambitious plan to challenge the ride-hailing giants, and it faces the same hurdles that tend to block other emerging players in the industry: Few have the technical prowess, the venture capital dollars or the supply of readily available drivers to subvert an established company like Uber. Still, drivers who joined the effort said even a small cooperative could make a big difference in their work, allowing them to earn more money and have a say in the way the company was run. The Drivers Cooperative said it planned to pay 10 percent above the wage minimums set by the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission, and return profits to drivers in the form of dividends.
One of the labor organizers who founded the Drivers Cooperative tells the Times that "I've never seen this hunger for change that exists with drivers."

Iran banned bitcoin mining this week, after four months of continuous blackouts partially due to what officials say is a huge energy suck from illegal mining. Gizmodo reports: President Hassan Rouhani said at a cabinet meeting Wednesday that a drought in the region was responsible for crippling the country's supply of hydroelectric power. But, he said, the huge amount of illegal bitcoin mining that happens in Iran was tapping a staggering 2 gigawatts of power each day from the already-stressed grid. (Legal operations, meanwhile, used somewhere between 200 and 300 megawatts.)

Rouhani said around 85% of this 2-gigawatt power suck was from unlicensed operations. Iran has become a hotspot for illegal mining after many miners began to decamp there to take advantage of the country's heavily subsidized energy (partially due to the fact that Iran can't sell its oil due to international sanctions). Around 4.5% of the world's total bitcoin mining now takes place in Iran, making it one of the top 10 bitcoin-producing countries in the world. The crackdown by the government may knock it off the chart, but miners will surely sniff out another cheap source of electricity somewhere else in the world and set up shop there. [...] The ban in Iran will take effect immediately and be in place until at least September, officials say, and will include legal as well as illegal operations.
UPDATE: NBC News has additional converage — including these two interesting details:

• "Tehran allows cryptocurrencies mined in Iran to pay for imports of goods, which can help it get around the wide-ranging U.S. sanctions that had been imposed on the country..."
• "Around 4.5 percent of all bitcoin mining globally took place in Iran between January and April of this year, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. That put it among the top 10 in the world, while China came in first place at nearly 70 percent."

A navigation timing error sent Nasa's Mars helicopter on a lurching ride, its first major problem since it took to the Martian skies last month. The Associated Press reports: The experimental helicopter, named Ingenuity, managed to land safely after the problem occurred, officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on Thursday. The trouble cropped up about a minute into the helicopter's sixth test flight on Saturday at an altitude of 10 meters (33ft). One of the numerous pictures taken by an onboard navigation camera did not register in the system, confusing the craft about its location. Ingenuity began tilting back and forth by as much as 20 degrees and suffered power consumption spikes, according to Havard Grip, the helicopter's chief pilot.

A built-in system to provide extra margin for stability "came to the rescue," he wrote in an online status update. The helicopter landed within five meters (16ft) of its intended touchdown site. Grip wrote: "Ingenuity muscled through the situation, and while the flight uncovered a timing vulnerability that will now have to be addressed, it also confirmed the robustness of the system in multiple ways. While we did not intentionally plan such a stressful flight, Nasa now has flight data probing the outer reaches of the helicopter's performance envelope."

theodp writes: Video of Microsoft's Annual Shareholder Meeting in Dec. 2019, at which the company's Board of Directors dismissed the idea that employee Board representation was necessary to combat issues -- including sexual harassment -- takes on new significance in light of the company's response to a recent WSJ report that Bill Gates left the Microsoft Board in March 2020 amid a probe launched in late 2019 into a prior relationship with a staffer that was deemed inappropriate. "Microsoft received a concern in the latter half of 2019 that Bill Gates sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in the year 2000," a Microsoft spokesman said in response to the WSJ story. "A committee of the Board reviewed the concern, aided by an outside law firm to conduct a thorough investigation."

At the 2019 Annual Meeting, Microsoft Board Chair John Thompson kicked things off by thanking shareholders for their trust before introducing the nominees for the board of directors who were in attendance, starting with "Bill Gates, our cofounder." Attention then turned to "a shareholder proposal requesting a report on Employee Representation on the Board of Directors," which shareholder advocate Mari Schwartzer argued was called for in light of "alleged gender discrimination and sexual harassment within our company." Unswayed by that argument, Microsoft Corporate Secretary Dev Stahlkopf responded that the Board had decided to nix the proposal as unnecessary, explaining that "the Board is already deeply engaged on providing oversight of workplace culture," which she noted included "receiving direct feedback from employees through anonymous polls."

Schwartzer made the same proposal -- which again fell on deaf Board ears -- the next year at Microsoft's Dec. 2020 Annual Meeting. Gates was no longer on the Board at that time -- he resigned in Mar. 2020 just three months after his re-election for what Microsoft billed to the SEC as a chance to devote himself more fully to philanthropy, repeating the same reasons Gates provided in a self-published LinkedIn post (no connection was made between his departure and the Board's investigation, and a recent statement from a Gates spokesperson insisted, "Bill's decision to transition off the board was in no way related to this matter"). However, the Microsoft Board of Directors made sure shareholders were aware of Bill's continuing influence at Microsoft in a letter included in Microsoft's 2020 SEC proxy filing. The Board wrote, "This year, Co-Founder and Technology Advisor Bill Gates stepped down from the Company's Board of Directors to dedicate more time to his philanthropic priorities. He continues to serve as Technology Advisor to CEO Satya Nadella and other leaders in the Company. The Board has benefited from Bill's leadership and vision in innumerable ways over the years, and we are grateful for his contributions and insights."

In an interview on CNBC last Friday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was pressed to address the issue of Bill Gates' acknowledged 2000 affair with a Microsoft employee. "The power dynamic in the workplace is not something that can be abused in any form," Nadella replied, "and the most important thing is for us to make sure that everybody is comfortable in being able to raise any issues they see, and for us to be able to fully investigate it." So, with all of the revelations and bad press, will Microsoft's Board reject the idea of Employee Board Representation for a third year straight while keeping mum on Gates later this year at the 2021 Annual Shareholders Meeting?

phalse phace shares a report from the BBC: A suspected Bitcoin "mining" operation illegally stealing electricity has been found by police who were searching for a cannabis farm. Officers had been tipped off about the site on the Great Bridge Industrial Estate, Sandwell, and raided it on May 18, West Midlands Police said. Instead of cannabis plants they found a bank of about 100 computer units. The force said the cryptocurrency "mine" had effectively stolen thousands of pounds of electricity. Inquiries with network operator Western Power Distribution found an illegal connection to the electricity supply.

Detectives said they were tipped off about lots of people visiting the unit throughout the day and a police drone picked up a lot of heat coming from the building. Sgt Jennifer Griffin said, given the signs, they had expected to find a cannabis farm. "It had all the hallmarks of a cannabis cultivation set-up and I believe it is only the second such crypto mine we have encountered in the West Midlands," she said. The computer equipment has been seized but no arrests have been made, the force said.

Alphabet's Google is nearing a settlement of an antitrust case in France alleging the company has abused its power in online advertising, and is likely to pay a fine and make operational changes, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter said. From the report: The French case is one of the most advanced in the world looking at Google's dominance as a provider of tools for buying and selling ads across the web. As part of the case, France's Competition Authority alleged that the company's advertising server -- historically known as DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and used by most large online publishers to sell ad space -- gave Google's online ad auction house, AdX, an advantage against other auction operators, the people said.

The authority also alleged other forms of self-preferencing between Google's advertising technology tools, they added. To settle the French charges, Google has offered to improve the interoperability of AdX with advertising servers run by other companies, as well as to remove some other obstacles faced by competitors, some of the people said. The settlement still must be approved by the authority's board, which could reject the deal, the people said. If approved, the settlement could be announced in coming weeks, they said.

A coalition of internet accountability groups is warning the Biden administration against including liability protections for tech companies in future trade agreements, saying that could hamstring efforts to hold platforms responsible for user content. From a report: In a letter sent to President Joe Biden on Thursday, the organizations said including a legal shield in trade deals like the 2018 U.S.-Mexico-Canada accord "reflects a broad effort by the big tech platforms to use 'trade negotiations' to limit domestic policy options."

The letter was signed by 16 public interest groups focused on issues such as civil rights, democracy and the market power of tech platforms, including Public Citizen, Color of Change and the Center for Digital Democracy. The coalition came together as the advocates observed how a ratified trade deal could bake in -- and export -- increasingly controversial legal protections for internet companies, said Morgan Harper, a policy director at the American Economic Liberties Project, which also signed the letter. The groups are "sounding the alarm about this tactic by Big Tech to undermine the inevitability of domestic regulation that's coming their way," Harper said. "We expect that this will be a priority for the Biden administration."

Facebook rejected two proposals intended to diminish Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg's control over the company, an expected though disappointing outcome for those worried about the CEO's power. From a report: The board Wednesday turned down a proposal to replace Zuckerberg as chairman with an independent representative. Zuckerberg, who has served as chairman since 2012, controls about 58% of the voting shares, according to a regulatory filing. During Facebook's annual meeting, the board also rejected a proposal to eliminate the special class of super-voting shares that gives Zuckerberg a controlling stake in the company. Under the plan, investors would have been awarded one vote per share. The Zuckerberg-controlled board has rejected similar motions in years past. While not surprising, the votes are likely to frustrate shareholders who argue Zuckerberg has too much power at a time Facebook needs more independent oversight to address its regulatory threats, privacy scandals and public controversies.

The EU is said to be on the brink of opening a formal antitrust investigation into Facebook following complaints from rivals about the platform's classified ads business. From a report: Regulators have already sent questions to Facebook and its competitors asking whether the social media site distorted the classified ads market by promoting its Marketplace services for free to its 2bn users. Facebook Marketplace, which launched in 2016, allows users to buy and sell goods to each other without fees. It is used by 800m Facebook users in 70 countries. The European Commission first started looking at the platform in 2019, asking companies whether they considered Marketplace as a close rival and how many visits to their sites came from ads placed on Facebook's platform. Classified ads rivals are said to have complained that Facebook used its market power to gain an advantage.

AmiMoJo writes: The USB-C standard will let you plug in power-hungry devices like gaming laptops, docking stations, 4K monitors and printers with an upgrade that accommodates up to 240 watts starting this year. The jump in maximum power is more than double today's 100-watt top capacity. The USB Implementers Forum, the industry group that develops the technology, revealed the new power levels in the version 2.1 update to its USB Type-C specification on Tuesday. The new 240-watt option is called Extended Power Range, or EPR. "We expect devices supporting higher wattages in the second half of 2021," USB-IF said in a statement.

USB began as a useful but limited port for plugging keyboards, mice and printers into PCs. It later swept aside Firewire and other ports as faster speeds let it tackle more demanding tasks. It proved useful for charging phones as the mobile revolution began, paving the way for its use delivering power, not just data. The 240W Extended Power Range option means USB likely will expand its turf yet again. Cables supporting 240 watts will have additional requirements to accommodate the new levels. And USB-IF will require the cables to bear specific icons "so that end users will be able to confirm visually that the cable supports up to...240W," USB-IF said in the specification document.

WhatsApp has sued the Indian government challenging the second largest internet market's new regulations that could allow authorities to make people's private messages "traceable," and conduct mass surveillance. From a report: The Facebook-owned instant messaging service, which identifies India as its biggest market by users, said it filed the lawsuit in the High Court of Delhi on Wednesday. It said New Delhi's "traceability" requirement -- which would require WhatsApp to help New Delhi identify the originator of a particular message -- violated citizens' constitutional right to privacy.

"Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that a requirement to 'trace' private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse. WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people's personal messages and we will continue to do all we can within the laws of India to do so," WhatsApp said in a statement. India first proposed WhatsApp to make software changes to make the originator of a message traceable in 2018. The suggestion came at a time when WhatsApp was grappling with containing spread of false information in India, where circulation of such information had resulted in multiple real-life casualties. But its suggestion didn't become the law until this year. Traceability requirement is part of New Delhi's sweeping IT rules that also require social media firms to appoint several officers in India to address on-ground concerns, and also gives authorities greater power over taking down posts it deems offensive. Further reading: India says WhatsApp's lawsuit over new regulations a clear act of defiance.