Kalakshar US

Twitter has restored the account of Andrew Anglin, one of America’s most notorious neo-Nazis. The creator of the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer had been banned from the social media platform for nearly a decade. His return would appear to be part of Elon Musk’s offer of “general amnesty” to users who had “not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” Anglin, it should be noted, is currently in hiding while attempting to avoid a 2019 court order to pay $14 million for leading a harassment campaign against Jewish residents in Montana.

Shortly after regaining control of his account, Anglin tweeted a defense of Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. “Saying you love Hitler is not even a big deal,” Anglin said, referencing Ye’s recent InfoWars interview. “No one cares about that. The man died 80 years ago.” Ye’s now-infamous interview with Alex Jones saw the rapper declare his “love” for Adolf Hitler and deny that the Holocaust had ever happened. Anglin later tweeted an endorsement of Ye’s 2024 presidential campaign.

The reinstatement comes in the same week Twitter suspended Ye for tweeting a photo of the Star of David merged with a swastika. Anglin is only one of a few prominent white nationalists to return to Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. One estimate by software engineer Travis Brown suggests Twitter has restored as many as 12,000 accounts since October 27th, including those belonging to Richard Spencer and Patrick Casey.

The return of even just one avowed neo-Nazi is likely to reinforce fears from civil rights groups, advertisers and governments over Elon Musk’s handling of the platform. On November 26th, the billionaire claimed hate speech impressions had recently decreased compared to October last year. However, findings from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that study online platforms suggest that there’s been a dramatic increase in the prevalence of hate speech on Twitter since Musk’s takeover.

 

More than four years after her arrest, the drawn-out legal saga of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou came to a formal end this week. On Friday, US District Judge Ann Donnelly dismissed an indictment against Meng, according to Reuters. On behalf of the US, Canadian authorities arrested Meng in 2018 for allegedly violating American sanctions against Iran. Meng, who is also the daughter of Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, spent the next three years fighting attempts to extradite her to the US, where she faced up to 30 years in prison for bank and wire fraud charges. Donnelly dismissed the indictment “with prejudice,” meaning the Justice Department can’t bring the same charges against Meng again.

Before entering into an agreement with US prosecutors last year, Meng spent three years under house arrest. The detainment strained relationships between the United States and China and led to an international incident. China apprehended two Canadians, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, within days of Meng’s arrest. They were later released after Meng entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department. As part of the agreement, she acknowledged having made false statements about Huawei’s business in Iran. Meng flew home to China the day Donnelly approved the pact.

Huawei and its subsidiaries are still facing charges in the US. Most notably, the Justice Department recently announced charges against two Chinese spies who had allegedly tried to interfere in a criminal investigation into the company. Earlier this week, the FCC also banned telecom and video surveillance equipment from Huawei, among a handful of other Chinese companies. Meng currently serves as the company’s rotating chairperson and deputy chairwoman, as well as CFO. 

 

The US military has unveiled the B-21 Raider, its first new stealth bomber in 30 years. Northrop Grumman, which developed the aircraft, first showed us a silhouette of the plane covered by a shroud way back in 2015. Now, the Pentagon has officially presented the B-21 at an event at Northrop Grumman’s plant in Palmdale, California, but most of its details still remain a secret. Prior to the event, though, the company called it the “world’s first sixth-generation aircraft,” which means it’s a lot more technologically advanced than the military jets in service today.

According to ABC News, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said during the event that “no other long range bomber can match [the B-21’s] efficiency.” Austin also said that “fifty years of advances in low observable technology” have gone into the aircraft and that even the most sophisticated air defense systems will have a hard time detecting a B-21 in the sky. 

The aircraft was designed using next-generation stealth technology so that it can remain undetectable even to advanced radars and air defense systems, Northrop Grumman said in a previous announcement. A Northrop Grumman official also said that the B-21 can fly in full stealth mode every day, according to Air and Space Forces Magazine, unlike the current model that needs hundreds of hours of maintenance between missions. The aircraft will use a cloud-based digital infrastructure that’s cheaper and easier maintain, and the military can also roll out rapid upgrades for separate components so that it’s always protected against evolving threats. 

Northrop Grumman is currently working on six B-21 units, which are in various stages of production, but the Air Force is expected to order at least 100 of them. The military will start testing the stealth bomber in California sometime next year before the first units go into service by mid-2020s.

 

The dirty road to clean energy: How China’s electric vehicle boom is ravaging the environment

Antonia Timmerman, Rest of World

The rise of electric vehicles in China is causing devastating environmental impacts in nearby Indonesia, including rising ocean temperatures as a byproduct of coal plants. Upper respiratory infections are also one of the main health issues for people who live near nickel-processing factories and the main water sources for some areas are increasingly polluted and prone to flooding.

The future of parking is in New York — and it costs at least $300,000 per space

Ray Parisi, CNBC

Some of the priciest condos in NYC are housed in buildings with futuristic parking systems. Robotic technology is deployed to park and retrieve vehicles. The catch? The apartments cost millions and reserving a self-parking spot will cost you at least $300,000 more.

We’re in denial about the true cost of a Twitter implosion

Eve Fairbanks, Wired

“The amount of reputational and social wealth that stands to be lost if Twitter collapses is astounding,” Fairbanks explains. “Twitter currently functions as perhaps the world’s biggest status bank, and the investments stored in it are terrifyingly unsecured.” 

 

A group of anonymous plaintiffs who filed their taxes online in 2020 using H&R Block has sued Meta, accusing the company of violating users’ trust and privacy. If you’ll recall, a recent Markup investigation revealed that H&R Block, along with other popular tax-filing websites like TaxAct and TaxSlayer, have been sending users’ sensitive financial information to Meta through its Pixel tracking tool. 

Pixel is a piece of code companies can embed on their websites so they can track visitors’ activities and identify Facebook and Instagram users to target with ads. Apparently, the aforementioned tax prep websites had been transmitting personal information, such as income data, filing statuses, refund amounts and dependents’ tuition grants, to Meta through that code. The tax-filing services had already changed their Pixel settings to stop sending information or had been reevaluating how they used Pixel by the time Markup’s report came out. 

In a statement sent to Engadget when the news first came out, Meta said that advertisers are prohibited from sharing personal information and that it uses an automated system that can filter out sensitive content sent through Pixel. The plaintiffs acknowledged in their complaint (PDF, courtesy of The Markup) that Meta does require businesses that use Pixel to “have lawful rights to collect, use and share” user data before providing the company with any information. However, the plaintiffs argue that Meta makes no effort to enforce that rule and instead relies on a “broken honor-system” that has resulted in “repeated, documented violations.”

According to The Markup, the lawsuit is seeking class action status for people who used the tax prep services mentioned in the publication’s report. The services themselves, however, were not named as defendants in the case. 

 

Some Florida residents may be keeping a close eye on their finances after a security incident. Researcher Kamran Mohsin tellsTechCrunch that Florida’s Department of Revenue website had a flaw that exposed hundreds of filers’ bank account and Social Security numbers. Anyone who logged in to the state business tax registration site could see, modify and even delete personal data just by modifying the web address pointing to a taxpayer’s application number — you just needed to change the digits in the link.

There were over 713,000 applications in the Department’s pipeline at the time of the discovery, Mohsin said. Mohsin warned the Department about the flaw on October 27th.

Department representative Bethany Wester said in a statement that the government fixed the flaw within four days of the report, and that two unnamed firms have deemed the site secure. She added there was “no sign” attackers abused the flaw, but didn’t say how officials might have spotted any misuse. The agency contacted every affected taxpayers by phone or writing within four days of learning about the issue, and has offered a year of free credit monitoring.

Bugs like these, known as insecure direct object references, are relatively easy to fix. The damage might also be limited compared to other tax-related breaches, such as a Healthcare.gov intrusion that compromised about 75,000 people in 2018. However, the incident underscores the potential harm from weak security — even a small-scale exposure like this could be used to commit tax fraud and steal refunds.

 

More Activision Blizzard workers have voted to unionize. Quality assurance testers at Blizzard Albany have voted 14-0 in favor of unionization. The team at the Diablo-focused office will join the Communication Workers of America (CWA), the representative of the existing Raven Software union.

The game publisher tried to prevent the vote in October, arguing that 88 developers should be included to prevent a “fractured” office. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) denied that bid in late November, noting that the game testers shared a “community of interest” for their cause. Expansions like this are sometimes used in union-busting efforts to reduce the chances of a successful vote. The company also tried to impound three votes that arrived late due to mail delays, although those wouldn’t have affected the outcome.

Activision Blizzard told Engadget in a statement that it was “considering all options.” It maintained that all Albany workers should have voted in the name of “fundamental fairness and rights” for the entire branch, not just the QA unit.

The CWA said in its own statement that this was a vote against “burn out culture,” while Blizzard Albany associate test analyst Amanda Deep said the group was “advocating for ourselves” out of care for the work and the games. Workers at Raven and Blizzard Albany have complained about long hours, pay rates and other labor issues. Unionization theoretically gives staff more clout in demanding better conditions.

It may not be so simple, however. While Activision Blizzard responded to initial unionization efforts by converting 1,100 testers to full-time jobs and raising their base pay, the NLRB also found that it unfairly withheld raises from Raven QA workers who had voted to join a union. Activision Blizzard claimed that it had pass on those pay raises due to “legal obligations” around a pending election, but the NLRB attributed this to the unionization. Improved conditions might come, but they aren’t guaranteed to come quickly.

 

John Wick creator Derek Kolstad is working on yet another videogame adaptation. Fresh off the news that he’s writing and producing a Streets of Rage film, it emerged that Kolstad is taking on the same duties for a live-action movie based on Sifu.

Kolstad and his partners at media company Story Kitchen have teamed up with Sifu developer and publisher Sloclap, as Deadline reports. The beat-’em-up proved a hit when it was released in February, as it sold a million copies in three weeks — despite Elden Ring and Horizon Forbidden West arriving at around the same time. What makes Sifu stand out from the pact is that every time the protagonist dies in their quest for vengeance, they get older but their enemies stay the same age.

That hook alone gives a screenwriter a lot of intriguing possibilities. The one vs. many aspect of Sifu seems right up Kolstad’s alley as well, given his experience with the John Wick franchise and Nobody. As if all that wasn’t enough, Kolstad is also behind Netflix’s Splinter Cell, an upcoming animated series based on Ubisoft’s games.

 

Google is starting to test end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in Messages for RCS group chats on Android. Some users who are enrolled in the Messages open beta program will gain access in the coming weeks ahead of a broader rollout. The company said during its I/O 2022 developer conference that an E2EE beta for group chats would be available by the end of this year.

The move comes 18 months after Google Messages started offering E2EE for one-on-one conversations to shield chats from prying eyes. It started testing E2EE in Messages in November 2020, so it may be several months before the privacy feature is enabled for all group chats.

Many carriers and phone manufacturers have gotten on board with RCS over the last several years to offer features such as high-quality photos and videos, read receipts and E2EE. The 30-year-old SMS format doesn’t support any of those. Still, there’s one company that’s continuing to turn its nose up at RCS — Apple, which is staying cozy inside the walled garden of iMessage.

Google has been publicly pleading with Apple to adopt RCS but so far those efforts haven’t proven fruitful. In September, Apple CEO Tim Cook jokingly suggested that iOS users who are having trouble sending videos to a loved one with an Android device should just buy them an iPhone.

Nevertheless, Google has been trying to improve iOS and Android messaging interoperability, and it made another attempt to get Apple onboard with RCS in a blog post. “Today, all of the major mobile carriers and manufacturers have adopted RCS as the standard — except for Apple,” Messages group product manager Neena Budhiraja wrote. “Apple refuses to adopt RCS and continues to rely on SMS when people with iPhones message people with Android phones, which means their texting is stuck in the 1990s.”

Still, there are companies that are working on ways to make iMessage accessible on other devices. Just this week, the developers of an app called Sunbird claim to have gotten iMessage to work on Android.

 

A game that is easy to learn, but difficult to master. This was the concept Atari founder Nolan Bushnell instilled into Allan Alcorn, a then-24-year-old engineer, prior to the development of one of the most recognizable games of all time, Pong, just over 50 years ago.

Pong, a video game in which a square is bounced between two rectangles controlled by players, was released on November 29th of 1972 by Atari, only a few days more than 50 years ago. Atari sold more than 8,000 Pong arcade cabinets, and a few years later, the home version would become an instant success, selling about 150,000 units of a console that played nothing but Pong. However, despite how much time has passed, and the massive changes the gaming industry has endured, Pong‘s — and Atari’s — influence on the world of video games remains prevalent today. Watch the video below for the full story.