New Zealand will ban TikTok on devices with access to the parliamentary network because of cybersecurity concerns, a government official said on Friday. CNBC reports: TikTok will be banned on all devices with access to New Zealand's parliamentary network by the end of March, said Parliamentary Service Chief Executive Rafael Gonzalez-Montero. Gonzalez-Montero, in an email to Reuters, said the decision was taken after advice from cybersecurity experts and discussions within government and with other countries.

"Based on this information the Service has determined that the risks are not acceptable in the current New Zealand Parliamentary environment," he said. Special arrangements can be made for those who require the app to do their jobs, he added.

The influential social media app TikTok is flooding the nation's capital with influencers next week as part of an 11th hour lobbying blitz to stave off the forced sale of the company. From a report: The efforts come as the Biden administration urges TikTok's Chinese owners to sell the app to a new owner or face a potential ban in the United States. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the interagency board that issued the call, has spent years reviewing the potential national security risks posed by TikTok, and the Chinese company that owns it: ByteDance.

Dozens of TikTok creators will descend on Washington for three days next week, according to a person familiar with the plans, who revealed details on condition of anonymity. The creators will hold a press conference on Wednesday on Capitol Hill, the person added. Another person familiar with the plans noted that TikTok was paying for the cost of sending influencers to D.C. It was not clear which influencers would be making the trip.

Almost 1,400 employees at Google parent Alphabet have signed a petition calling for better treatment of staff during the layoff process, after the company announced it was cutting 12,000 jobs. From a report: In an open letter addressed to Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai, employees made a series of demands of the company, including freezing new hires, seeking voluntary redundancies before compulsory ones, giving priority to laid off workers for job vacancies and letting workers finish scheduled periods of paid time off, such as parental and bereavement leave.

The workers also called on Alphabet to avoid terminating employees from countries with active conflicts or humanitarian crises, such as Ukraine, and provide extra support to those at risk of losing their visa-linked residency along with their jobs. "The impacts of Alphabet's decision to reduce its workforce are global," the letter said. "Nowhere have workers' voices adequately been considered, and we know that as workers we are stronger together than alone." Further reading: Google nixes paying out remainder of maternity and medical leave for laid-off employees.

Meta on Friday launched its subscription service in the U.S., which would allow Facebook and Instagram users pay for verification in the same vein as Elon Musk-owned Twitter. From a report: The Meta Verified service will give users a blue badge after they verify their accounts using a government ID and will cost $11.99 per month on the web or $14.99 a month on Apple's iOS system and Google-owned Android, Meta said in a statement. The service, which Meta said it was testing in February, follows in the footsteps of Snapchat as well as messaging app Telegram and marks the latest effort by a social media company to diversify its revenue away from advertising.

Google's security research unit is sounding the alarm on a set of vulnerabilities it found in certain Samsung chips included in dozens of Android models, wearables and vehicles, fearing the flaws could be soon discovered and exploited. From a report: Google's Project Zero head Tim Willis said the in-house security researchers found and reported 18 zero-day vulnerabilities in Exynos modems produced by Samsung over the past few months, including four top-severity flaws that could compromise affected devices "silently and remotely" over the cellular network.

"Tests conducted by Project Zero confirm that those four vulnerabilities allow an attacker to remotely compromise a phone at the baseband level with no user interaction, and require only that the attacker know the victim's phone number," Willis said. By gaining the ability to remotely run code at a device's baseband level -- essentially the Exynos modems that convert cell signals to digital data -- an attacker would be able to gain near-unfettered access to the data flowing in and out of an affected device, including cellular calls, text messages, and cell data, without alerting the victim. The list of affected devices includes (but is not limited to): Samsung mobile devices, including the S22, M and A series handsets; Vivo mobile devices, including those in the S16, S15, S6, X70, X60 and X30 series; Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 series; and connected vehicles that use the Exynos Auto T5123 chipset.

The FCC has officially proposed, and voted unanimously to move forward with, a framework under which satellites can communicate directly with smartphones in a structured and useful way. From a report: The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, circulated earlier this month and formally voted on today, is essentially a complete first public draft of what the FCC hopes to accomplish by establishing rules and guidelines around this emerging area of communication. Apple already made the news with a dramatic rescue made possible by its new emergency satellite feature, and companies like Lynk and AST SpaceMobile are working on providing universally accessible two-way data anywhere in the world.

Qualcomm and Iridium are integrating the capability at the chipset level. T-Mobile and SpaceX have said they plan to test their own Starlink-based system this year, and plenty of others are looking to enter the fray. There's still the matter of how this space-based connectivity would integrate with existing systems. Our mobile networks run on very carefully defined frequencies so that phones and towers don't interfere with one another, including satellites, which have totally different frequencies and signal powers.

Wemo, Belkin's smart home company, has paused development of Matter smart home devices. The Verge reports: In an email exchange, Jen Wei, Vice President of Global Communications and Corporate Development at Belkin, confirmed that, while the company remains convinced that "Matter will have a significantly positive impact on the smart home industry," it has decided to "take a big step back, regroup, and rethink'' its approach to the smart home. Wei went on to write that Wemo will bring new Matter products to market when it can find a way to differentiate them. It seems like Wemo might be concerned its smart home gear is becoming commoditized.

During CES 2022, Wemo announced it would bring Thread-compatible, Matter-compliant products to market when that new standard officially arrived. At the time, it was expected that the new connectivity standard, which promised to once and for all tear down the walls that have sequestered ecosystems away from one another, would launch in the middle of 2022 after two years of frustrating delays -- but Matter was again pushed back. As the year wore on, Wemo indeed updated a product to use Thread, the primary wireless protocol beneath the Matter standard that enables Wi-Fi-free local control of smart devices, and released a new Thread-compatible smart dimmer. Curiously, none of the new products -- a light switch, dimmer switch, plug, and a stick-on-the-wall three-button scene controller -- are slated for future Matter support. With the news, Wemo is tapping the brakes on Matter. And we probably won't get those updated versions it announced last year, either.

While the existing Thread devices from Wemo come with many of the important benefits of Matter -- exclusively local control with no direct access to your home network, fast operation, and easy setup that cuts out your Wi-Fi router as the middleman -- they lack the most crucial feature, the central problem Matter is to solve: near-universal smart home platform compatibility. These Thread devices only work with Apple HomeKit. But it's pretty hard for companies like Wemo to stand out in a field full of cheap IoT junk that costs half the price to do the same thing, as far as most normal people are concerned. Sure, maybe they're less secure, but many people willingly put an internet-connected microphone in their home, too. They probably don't care about the possible security issues with their light switch.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The UK government is to invest 900 million pounds in a cutting-edge supercomputer as part of an artificial intelligence strategy that includes ensuring the country can build its own "BritGPT". The treasury outlined plans to spend around 900 million pounds on building an exascale computer, which would be several times more powerful than the UK's biggest computers, and establishing a new AI research body. An exascale computer can be used for training complex AI models, but also have other uses across science, industry and defense, including modeling weather forecasts and climate projections. The Treasury said the investment will "allow researchers to better understand climate change, power the discovery of new drugs and maximize our potential in AI.".

An exascale computer is one that can carry out more than one billion billion simple calculations a second, a metric known as an "exaflops". Only one such machine is known to exist, Frontier, which is housed at America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and used for scientific research -- although supercomputers have such important military applications that it may be the case that others already exist but are not acknowledged by their owners. Frontier, which cost about 500 million pounds to produce and came online in 2022, is more than twice as powerful as the next fastest machine.

The Treasury said it would award a 1 million-pound prize every year for the next 10 years to the most groundbreaking AI research. The award will be called the Manchester Prize, in memory of the so-called Manchester Baby, a forerunner of the modern computer built at the University of Manchester in 1948. The government will also invest 2.5 billion pounds over the next decade in quantum technologies. Quantum computing is based on quantum physics -- which looks at how the subatomic particles that make up the universe work -- and quantum computers are capable of computing their way through vast numbers of different outcomes.

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is resigning, effective immediately, he announced in a blog post on Thursday. The Verge reports: Shear has been at Twitch since before it was Twitch. He was a co-founder of Justin.tv, the platform where Justin Kan streamed his life 24/7. That became Twitch in 2011 to focus on popular gaming livestreams, and just three years later, the platform was acquired by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars.

"With my first child just born, I've been reflecting on my future with Twitch," Shear wrote. "Twitch often feels to me like a child I've been raising as well. And while I will always want to be there if Twitch needs me, at 16 years old it feels to me Twitch is ready to move out of the house and venture alone."

Shear will be replaced by Dan Clancy, who has been at Twitch for more than three years and was serving as the company's president. Clancy was originally hired in 2019 as the company's executive VP of creator and community experience, according to Variety. Shear will continue at the company in an advisory role. "I've never had more confidence in Twitch's leadership, in all our people, and in our product, than I do today," he wrote. "For many years I truly felt Twitch might die without my guidance and input, but I no longer feel that is true."

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms has created a tool to predict the structure of hundreds of millions of proteins using artificial intelligence. Researchers say it promises to deepen scientists' understanding of biology, and perhaps speed the discovery of new drugs. From a report: Meta's research arm, Meta AI, used the new AI-based computer program known as ESMFold to create a public database of 617 million predicted proteins. Proteins are the building blocks of life and of many medicines, required for the function of tissues, organs and cells. Drugs based on proteins are used to treat heart disease, certain cancers and HIV, among other illnesses, and many pharmaceutical companies have begun to pursue new drugs with artificial intelligence. Using AI to predict protein structures is expected to not only boost the effectiveness of existing drugs and drug candidates but also help discover molecules that could treat diseases whose cures have remained elusive.

With ESMFold, Meta is squaring off against another protein-prediction computer model known as AlphaFold from DeepMind Technologies, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet. AlphaFold said last year that its database has 214 million predicted proteins that could help accelerate drug discovery. Meta says ESMFold is 60 times faster than AlphaFold, but less accurate. The ESMFold database is larger because it made predictions from genetic sequences that hadn't been studied previously. Predicting a protein's structure can help scientists understand its biological function, according to Alexander Rives, co-author of a study published Thursday in the journal Science and a research scientist at Meta AI. Meta had previously released the paper describing ESMFold in November 2022 on a preprint server. Further reading: What metaverse? Meta says its single largest investment is now in 'advancing AI.'

The French government is planning to ask cabinet ministers to avoid using TikTok and similar apps on their personal phones, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. From the report: The government is mulling the guidelines in part over concerns about security with the Chinese-owned social media app, according to one of the people. They requested anonymity in order to discuss private deliberations. Social media apps such as TikTok are already banned from their professional phones. The UK banned TikTok from government phones on Thursday, citing security fears. The US Congress restricted the app on government devices last year and European Commission employees were told to delete it by March 15.

Google has announced today that it will no longer be selling its Glass Enterprise Edition 2 headsets, with support set to be discontinued later this year. 9to5Google reports: After the commercial failure of its original Google Glass headsets, the company segued the AR product into a solution for businesses and industrial customers, intended to allow workers to stay connected in a hands-free way. This lineup, dubbed Glass Enterprise Edition, received a second-generation update in 2019, which was built on the Snapdragon XR1 hardware platform.

Google has updated many of the pages related to the Google Glass Enterprise Edition to announce that sales of the headset have been discontinued as of March 15. For existing Glass Enterprise Edition customers, Google will continue to support the headset until September 15, 2023, though the company has said that "no software updates from Google are planned." Instead, "support" here means that customers will be able to receive replacement devices under the existing programs until that deadline.

After the deprecation date, all existing headsets will continue to work as normal, and third-party developers will still be able to update their applications, which are usually responsible for any business-specific tasks. One caveat, though, is that Google says the "Meet on Glass" app that launched less than a year ago is only guaranteed to work until the September 15 deadline, after which the app has the potential to break.

Today, DreamWorks published the open-source code for MoonRay, their production renderer used for films like The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and other animation films. "OpenMoonRay is available via DreamWorks Animation's GitHub," reports Phoronix. "This professional-grade renderer is available under an Apache 2.0 license."

From the README: "MoonRay was developed at DreamWorks and is in continuous active development and includes an extensive library of production-tested, physically based materials, a USD Hydra render delegate, multi-machine and cloud rendering via the Arras distributed computation framework."

More details can be found via OpenMoonRay.org.

Logistics startup Zipline unveiled its next-generation delivery drone, dubbed the Platform 2 or P2 Zip. According to CNBC, the new drone is "capable of carrying up to eight pounds worth of cargo within a ten-mile radius, and can land a package on a space as small as a table or doorstep." That number is important because the vast majority of packages shipped in the U.S. "weigh five pounds or less," says Zipline CEO and co-founder Keller Rinaudo Cliffton. From the report: The P2 Zip can travel ten miles in ten minutes, and the company can make a delivery approximately seven times faster than any typical service you may order from today, the CEO said. Rapid deliveries by drone may put an end to "porch pirates," Rinaudo Cliffton said, referring to the theft of packages left on a doorstep while the customer is away from home. While Zipline's original drone, the P1 Zip, features a fixed wing or glider-like design, the P2 employs both lift and cruise propellers and a fixed wing. These help it maneuver precisely and quietly, even in rainy or windy weather.

To deliver cargo to a customer's door, the P2 Zip hovers around 300 feet above ground level and dispatches a kind of mini-aircraft and container called the "droid." The droid descends on a long thin tether, and maneuvers quietly into place with fan-like thrusters before setting down for package retrieval. Zipline's original P1 drones will remain in production and in wide use, says Rinaudo Cliffton. The P1 Zip can fly a longer distance, delivering up to five pounds of cargo within a 60-mile radius, but it requires a larger space for take off, landings and "the drop."

The P1 Zip lets cargo down with a parachute attached, so its payload lands within a space about the size of two car parking spots. After a P1 Zip returns to base, an employee needs to disassemble it, then set up a new one, dropping in a freshly charged battery for the next flight. Zipline's new P2 Zip can dock and power up autonomously at a charging station that looks something like a street lamp with an arm and a large disc attached to that arm. Zipline docks can be installed in a single parking spot or alongside a building depending on zoning and permits.

Samsung Electronics said Wednesday it expects to invest 300 trillion won ($230 billion) over the next 20 years as part of an ambitious South Korean national project to build the world's largest semiconductor manufacturing base near the capital, Seoul. From a report: The chip-making "mega cluster," which will be established in Gyeonggi Province by 2042, will be anchored by five new semiconductor plants built by Samsung. It will aim to attract 150 other companies producing materials and components or designing high-tech chips, according to South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.

Samsung's new plants will be located near its existing domestic factories and will produce both computer memory chips used for storing data and higher-margin logic chips designed to perform a broader range of functions, the company said. A giant in the global memory business, Samsung is trying to expand its presence in advanced chips, anticipating that demand will soar in coming years with the adoption of new technologies such as 5G wireless networks, artificial intelligence and self-driving cars.

A Dutch court hearing a class action lawsuit on Wednesday found that a European subsidiary of Meta, Facebook Ireland, improperly used personal data of Dutch citizens between 2010 and 2020, saying the company had "violated the law." From a report: "Personal information was processed for the purposes of advertising when in this case that is not allowed," a summary of the Amsterdam court ruling said. "Personal information was given to third parties without Facebook users being informed and without there being a legal basis to do so." The decision was directed at Facebook Ireland because it is the part of the company that oversees the processing of Dutch user data. The case has not yet progressed to the phase where any damages could be claimed.

Tech giants Google, Amazon and Apple are likely to get a reprieve in Congress this year from efforts to rein in some of the companies' most controversial and allegedly anti-competitive business practices -- even though the legislation has typically enjoyed broad bipartisan support. From a report: The new Republican leadership in the U.S. House doesn't appear to have the appetite to impose tougher antitrust rules on the tech giants to ensure they don't abuse their dominant position in the market to block smaller rivals, Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., the former the top Republican on the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust issues, said in an interview. The GOP also doesn't want to give the Biden administration more power and resources, House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told CNBC in a separate interview.

"I don't think Speaker McCarthy, Chairman Jordan or Chairman Massie are advocates for the antitrust, pro-competition solution to the Big Tech problem," Buck said, referring to Jordan, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Thomas Massie, who chairs the Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. Although Buck was next in line to chair the panel as ranking Republican in the previous Congress, Jordan, R-Ohio, selected Massie, R-Ky., to lead the subcommittee this Congress instead. Buck, who has been a vocal critic of the tech giants for years, says tighter antitrust regulations would help create a fairer marketplace for smaller tech firms competing against Amazon, Google, Facebook and other Big Tech companies, which have been accused of using their platforms to promote their own proprietary products or services above competitors. When asked whether his campaign to rein in the tech giants through antitrust and his co-sponsoring of bills with Democrats may be what cost him the chairmanship of the antitrust panel, Buck said, "Nobody ever said that to me but I think it's a fair conclusion to draw."

Mozilla called on entrepreneurs to create trustworthy AI applications as it announced a "Responsible AI" challenge Tuesday at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. From a report: At a festival where companies could not be more eager to share their plans, half-baked and otherwise, for the explosive field of generative AI, Mozilla offered an opportunity to do so with a little more foresight. "If anything, the last few months have shown that AI is no longer our future. It's our present," Imo Udom, senior vice president of Innovations Ecosystems at Mozilla, who announced the initiative on stage during a panel discussion with Axios, said. "We believe in AI's power, commercial opportunity, and potential to solve challenging problems," Udom said. "While decades of effort have gone into reaching this point with AI, the time has come to establish the future we want with AI." Applications for the challenge will open on March 30 and winners are eligible for $50,000 prizes and a $25,000 top prize, along with mentorship and resources for "responsible AI" projects.

Amazon.com plans to launch its first internet satellites to space in the first half of 2024 and offer initial commercial tests shortly after, the company said Tuesday, as it prepares to vie with Elon Musk's SpaceX and others to provide broadband internet globally. Reuters reports: Amazon's satellite internet unit, Project Kuiper, will begin mass-producing the satellites later this year, the company said. Those will be the first of over 3,000 satellites the technology giant plans to launch in low-Earth orbit in the next few years. "We'll definitely be beta testing with commercial customers in 2024," Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon devices, said at a conference in Washington.

The 2024 deployment target would keep Amazon on track to fulfill a regulatory mandate to launch half its entire Kuiper network of 3,236 satellites by 2026. Limp, who oversees Amazon's consumer devices powerhouse, said the company plans to make "three to five" satellites a day to reach that goal. With plans to pump more than $10 billion into the Kuiper network, Amazon sees its experience producing millions of devices from its consumer electronics powerhouse as an edge over rival SpaceX, the Musk-owned space company whose Starlink network already has roughly 4,000 satellites in space.

Amazon plans to launch a pair of prototype satellites early this year aboard a new rocket from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance. The 2024 launch, carrying the initial production satellites, is expected to be the first of many more in a swift deployment campaign using rockets Amazon procured in 2021 and 2022. The company on Tuesday also revealed a slate of three different terminals, or antennas, that will connect customers with its Kuiper satellites in orbit. In a blog post on Tuesday, Amazon detailed its new terminals with photos and pricing.

Standard Customer Terminal: "Project Kuiper's standard customer terminal measures less than 11 inches square and 1 inch thick. It weighs less than five pounds without its mounting bracket. Despite this modest footprint, the device will be one of the most powerful commercially available customer terminals of its size, delivering speeds up to 400 megabits per second (Mbps). Amazon expects to produce these terminals for less than $400 each."

"Most Affordable" Terminal: "A 7-inch square design will be Project Kuiper's smallest and most affordable customer terminal. Weighing just 1 pound and offering speeds up to 100 Mbps, its portability and affordability will create opportunities to serve even more customers around the world. This design will connect residential customers who need an even lower-cost model, as well as government and enterprise customers pursuing applications like ground mobility and internet of things (IoT)."

"Most Capable" Antenna Model: "Project Kuiper's largest, most capable model is designed for enterprise, government, and telecommunications applications that require even more bandwidth. The device measures 19 inches by 30 inches, and will deliver speeds up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps)."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, the federal government's Joint Office of Energy and Transportation opened up applications for a $2.5 billion program to expand electric vehicle charging infrastructure in underserved communities. The Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program was authorized along with the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. For starters, the Joint Office is making $700 million available for EV chargers -- but also other alternative fuels including hydrogen and natural gas.

The CFI program actually encompasses two discrete $1.25 billion grant programs. The first is for community charging and fueling grants in both urban and rural areas, particularly in underserved and disadvantaged communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods as well as neighborhoods with a low ratio of private parking. The other half of the money is for the alternative fuel corridor grants, which will fund the deployment of EV chargers and other alternative fuel infrastructure along designated alternative fuel corridors. "It's critical that we build a national charging network that provides EV drivers with the right type of charging in the right location -- whether that's high-powered charging on highway corridors and in urban hubs or Level 2 charging where EV drivers or riders live, work, and play," said Joint Office Executive Director Gabe Klein. "By working with cities and communities through the CFI Program to get this mix right, we can ensure that everyone has convenient and affordable access to riding and driving electric."