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‘Silicon Six’ tech giants accused of inflating tax payments by almost $100bn

‘Silicon Six’ tech giants accused of inflating tax payments by almost $100bn

The Guardian reports: The giant US tech firms known as the “Silicon Six” have been accused of inflating their stated tax payments by almost $100bn (£70bn) over the past decade. As Chancellor Rishi Sunak called on world leaders to back a new tech tax ahead of next week’s G7 summit in the UK, a report by the campaign group Fair Tax Foundation singled out Amazon, Facebook, Google’s owner, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft. It said they paid $96bn less in…

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In big tech’s dystopia, cat videos earn millions while real artists beg for tips

In big tech’s dystopia, cat videos earn millions while real artists beg for tips

John Harris writes: Online tipping is now spreading fast – and beyond music services. With a view to familiarising people with spending money inside their domains, most of the big internet companies are joining in. Twitter has just launched a feature called Tip Jar, aimed at channelling donations to “creators, journalists, experts, and non-profits”. YouTube is expanding a feature called Applause that does the same for its influencers and video-makers; the new audio app Clubhouse, recently valued at $1bn, has…

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Solar storms are back, threatening chaos around the world

Solar storms are back, threatening chaos around the world

The Associated Press reports: A few days ago, millions of tons of super-heated gas shot off from the surface of the sun and hurtled 90 million miles toward Earth. The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, wasn’t particularly powerful on the space-weather scale, but when it hit the Earth’s magnetic field it triggered the strongest geomagnetic storm seen for years. There wasn’t much disruption this time — few people probably even knew it happened — but it served as a…

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Bitcoin mining is giving new life to old fossil-fuel power plants

Bitcoin mining is giving new life to old fossil-fuel power plants

The Wall Street Journal reports: Across America, older fossil-fuel power plants are shutting down in favor of renewable energy. But some are getting a new lease on life—to mine bitcoin. In upstate New York, an idled coal plant has been restarted, fueled by natural gas, to mine cryptocurrency. A once-struggling Montana coal plant is now scaling up to do the same. The lofty price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has investors pouring money into power generation—and risking a backlash. Elon…

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Ford and Biden hope to catch lightning with electric pickup

Ford and Biden hope to catch lightning with electric pickup

Politico reports: When Ford Motor Co. surveyed American truck owners last year, the automaker received a clear message: “Keep your hands off my truck.” Only 40 percent said they’d be “excited” about an electric pickup. That truck, like it or not, is here. Now the question is whether consumers — and Congress — will join Ford and other automakers for the ride. The Ford F-150, an iconic American brand with a seven-decade history, will go electric in 2022. President Joe…

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China works for Apple as Apple works for China

China works for Apple as Apple works for China

The New York Times reports: On the outskirts of this city in a poor, mountainous province in southwestern China, men in hard hats recently put the finishing touches on a white building a quarter-mile long with few windows and a tall surrounding wall. There was little sign of its purpose, apart from the flags of Apple and China flying out front, side by side. Inside, Apple was preparing to store the personal data of its Chinese customers on computer servers…

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The Colonial Pipeline attack is a dark omen

The Colonial Pipeline attack is a dark omen

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Our software infrastructure is not built with security in mind. That’s partly because a lot of it depends on older layers, and also because there has been little incentive to prioritize security. More operating systems could have been built from the start with features such as “sandboxing,” in which a program can play only in a defined, walled-off area called a “sandbox” that is unreachable by anything else. If that program is malicious, it can do damage…

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DarkSide hackers say the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack was only about the money — not politics

DarkSide hackers say the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack was only about the money — not politics

Reuters reports: The ransomware gang accused of crippling the leading US fuel pipeline operator has said it never meant to create havoc, an unusual statement that experts said was a sign the cyber criminals’ scheme had gone awry. Colonial says services will be “substantially” restored by the end of the week The FBI accused the group calling itself DarkSide of a digital extortion attempt that prompted Colonial Pipeline to shut down its network, potentially causing extraordinary disruption as gasoline deliveries…

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To be more tech-savvy, borrow these strategies from the Amish

To be more tech-savvy, borrow these strategies from the Amish

Alex Mayyasi writes: Despite growing up within driving distance of Amish Country, I never expected to see the Amish as a source of tech-savvy guidance. A decentralised religious group with roots in Germany and Switzerland, the Amish immigrated to the US in the 1700s – mainly to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where they remain a regular sight, sporting simple outfits, working on family farms, and driving horse-drawn buggies. Many Americans think of them as Luddites who make nice wooden furniture. For…

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Colonial hackers stole data Thursday ahead of shutdown

Colonial hackers stole data Thursday ahead of shutdown

Bloomberg reports: The hackers who caused Colonial Pipeline to shut down the biggest U.S. gasoline pipeline on Friday began their blitz against the company a day earlier, stealing a large amount of data before locking computers with ransomware and demanding payment, according to people familiar with the matter. The intruders, who are part of a cybercrime gang called DarkSide, took nearly 100 gigabytes of data out of the Alpharetta, Georgia-based company’s network in just two hours on Thursday, two people…

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Ransomware cyberattack forces shutdown of largest fuel pipeline in the U.S.

Ransomware cyberattack forces shutdown of largest fuel pipeline in the U.S.

CNBC reports: The operator of the country’s largest fuel pipeline, Colonial Pipeline, fell victim to a cybersecurity attack on Friday that involved ransomware, forcing it to temporarily shut down all pipeline operations, the company said in a statement on Saturday. The firm has hired a third-party cybersecurity firm to launch a probe into the incident and has contacted law enforcement and other federal agencies. The cyberattack has affected some of its IT systems too. Colonial Pipeline, which transports nearly half…

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Artificial intelligence is misreading human emotion

Artificial intelligence is misreading human emotion

Kate Crawford writes: At a remote outpost in the mountainous highlands of Papua New Guinea, a young American psychologist named Paul Ekman arrived with a collection of flash cards and a new theory. It was 1967, and Ekman had heard that the Fore people of Okapa were so isolated from the wider world that they would be his ideal test subjects. Like Western researchers before him, Ekman had come to Papua New Guinea to extract data from the indigenous community….

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America’s corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

America’s corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

Becca Dzombak reports: Seth Watkins has been farming his family’s land in southern Iowa for decades, growing pasture for his cows as well as corn and other row crops. His great-grandfather founded the farm in 1848. “He came in with one of John Deere’s steel plows and pierced the prairie,” Watkins recounted. With its rolling hills and neat lines of corn stretching to the horizon, broken by clumps of trees, it’s a picturesque scene. But centuries of farming those hills…

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Amazon lives off America’s failure

Amazon lives off America’s failure

Sarah Jones writes: Bill Bodani liked his old job. He cleaned slag out at the Sparrows Point steel mill in Maryland, cleared the flues and the broken brick out of the blast furnace. He loved it despite the asbestosis it gave him, writes Alec MacGillis in his new book, Fulfillment. “I enjoyed the people,” Bodani told MacGillis. “They made it enjoyable. The Black, the white. It was a family thing. I don’t care if you knew them for five minutes,…

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First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

First GMO mosquitoes to be released in the Florida Keys

By Taylor White This spring, the biotechnology company Oxitec plans to release genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. Oxitec says its technology will combat dengue fever, a potentially life-threatening disease, and other mosquito-borne viruses — such as Zika — mainly transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. While there have been more than 7,300 dengue cases reported in the United States between 2010 and 2020, a majority are contracted in Asia and the Caribbean, according to the U.S. Centers…

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Five ways fungi could change the world, from cleaning water to breaking down plastics

Five ways fungi could change the world, from cleaning water to breaking down plastics

Shutterstock By Mitchell P. Jones, Vienna University of Technology Fungi — a scientific goldmine? Well, that’s what a review published today in the journal Trends in Biotechnology indicates. You may think mushrooms are a long chalk from the caped crusaders of sustainability. But think again. Many of us have heard of fungi’s role in creating more sustainable leather substitutes. Amadou vegan leather crafted from fungal-fruiting bodies has been around for some 5,000 years. More recently, mycelium leather substitutes have taken…

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