Users of digital wallets and e-commerce platforms must start reporting small transactions, sowing fears among small-business owners. From a report: A tweak to the tax code enacted last year was intended to ensure that those who use services such as Venmo, CashApp, Etsy, StubHub and Airbnb to collect money are reporting all their income to the I.R.S. The change was part of the Biden administration's efforts to narrow the $7 trillion "tax gap" between revenue that is owed but not collected. But for millions of Americans, the new requirement means they will be faced with additional tax forms, potentially higher tax bills and a lot of confusion. That is stirring anxiety among some of the middle-class taxpayers and independent business owners President Biden promised would spared from greater tax scrutiny.

The new tax policy was tucked into the stimulus package known as the American Rescue Plan that Democrats passed in 2021. It has gone largely unnoticed because it applies to income earned this year and affects taxes that most Americans will pay in 2023. It is projected to raise about $8 billion in additional tax revenue over a decade. But as the impact of the rule and the prospect of surprise tax bills becomes clear, it is drawing pushback from business groups, lawmakers and others, prompting a scramble within the Biden administration to come up with a solution to avoid another chaotic tax season next year.

People with low incomes can get free Internet service through Comcast and a government program, but signing up is sometimes harder than it should be because of confusion within Comcast's customer service department. From a report: Massachusetts resident Tonia Williams qualified for the US government's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provides $30 monthly discounts, and for Comcast's Internet Essentials Plus, a $30 monthly service for low-income people that is essentially free when combined with the ACP discount. But when she tried to use the ACP discount with Comcast's low-income service, Comcast incorrectly told her she wasn't eligible because she was already a Comcast customer.

Williams, a certified nursing assistant who was not working when she spoke to Ars, was eventually able to get free home Internet service for her family. But she faced several hassles and said she would have given up if it hadn't been for David Isenberg, a Falmouth resident who's been helping low-income people in his town navigate the process. Isenberg knew Williams because she was previously a home health aide taking care of Isenberg's wife's uncle. "I would have given up if it wasn't for David pushing me," Williams told Ars in a phone interview in November. "It's such a run-around, and you have to sit and wait on hold. A lot of people don't have time to sit on the phone for that long and then be told, 'Well, you don't qualify.' If you don't really know what the service is or how to get it, I would have just believed them, that I didn't qualify."

schwit1 shares a report from PC Magazine with the caption, "More Russian vaporware?" From the report: A Russian arms manufacturer claims it can help the country's military detect and bombard Starlink satellite dishes, which have been crucial to the defense effort in Ukraine. Earlier this month, a mysterious company called Sestroretsk Arms Factory published a website that debuted the "Borshchevik" or "hogweed" system, which is designed to locate Starlink dishes at a distance of up to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). The technology can supposedly pinpoint a Starlink dish within 5 to 60 meters (16 to 196 feet) of its actual location. In addition, it can be fitted on top of a moving vehicle, allowing it to detect Starlink activity across the front lines on a battlefield.

However, it's unclear how the Borshchevik system actually works or if it's even effective. News of the technology was posted on a Telegram channel called "Reverse Side of the Medal," which seems to be closely associated with the Russian military, including the paramilitary Wagner Group. The user behind the Reverse Side of the Medal channel said they plan on testing the Borshchevik system on the frontlines in Russia's ongoing war with Ukraine.

Les Pounder writes via Tom's Hardware: Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton announced via a recent blog post that 100,000 units would be making their way into the supply chain, and that the in the latter-half of 2023 we can expect stock levels to return to pre-pandemic normality. That said, the supply chain shortage has impacted the normal cadence of Raspberry Pi releases, and according to Upton in an interview with Christopher Barnatt from Explaining Computers it means we sadly won't be seeing a Raspberry Pi 5 in 2023.

In the interview, Explaining Computers host Barnatt asks Upton about the future of the Raspberry Pi and if there are new models on the horizon. Upton then talks about how the past couple of years have been "weird" (pandemic and global chip shortage) and it has disrupted the cadence of Raspberry Pi development and release. Upton states that "the platform [Raspberry Pi 4] has been around longer than any Raspberry Pi platform has been around before, I think." At 29 minutes and 30 seconds Upton breaks the bad news, "Don't expect a Pi 5 next year [2023]" Upton then expands and explains that 2023 is a "recovery year". The recovery year is there to help Raspberry Pi and the technology industry recover from the double-punch of a pandemic and a global chip shortage which has caused a slowdown across the world.

Upton explains "What would really be a disaster would be if we tried to introduce some kind of Raspberry Pi 5 product" Upton provides a scenario akin to that of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, launched midway through the pandemic. It has been relatively unobtainium since release. Upton said he is very concerned about the consequences "if we introduced a Raspberry Pi 5 product and it couldn't ramp properly because of constraints, or if we introduced some Raspberry Pi 5 product and it somehow cannibalized some supply chain element." Upton then explains how cannibalization could impact the recovery of Raspberry Pi 4 and the 3 / 3+ and that Raspberry Pi has to be "ginger" as they move forward with its recovery. "The good news is the second half of next year, 2024 onwards, some of those things start to abate. And that's the point where we can start to think about what might be a sensible Raspberry Pi 5 platform," Upton said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Audi is preparing to convert its entire network of global production factories to manufacture electric vehicles as it gears up to compete in the auto industry's future. ;...] Audi announced last year that its last combustion car would roll off the line in 2033 (if they are still around then), launching only electric vehicles from 2026. To better compete in the new EV era and ease the transition, Audi will convert all exiting existing production factories to build electric vehicles by 2029. Audi board member for production and logistics Gerd Walker said, "Step by step, we are bringing all our sites into the future" as the automaker prepares to go all in on electric vehicles.

In a press release Tuesday, Audi presented the "plan for the production of the future," including converting its network of global factories to produce purely electric vehicles. Walker added: "The path Audi is taking conserves resources and accelerates our transformation to a provider of sustainable premium mobility. Rather than building new facilities like some competitors, Audi will work to incorporate the flexibility these new state-of-the-art plants provide into its existing operations."

A primary focal point of Audi's production plan is to cut annual factory costs in half by 2033, aligning with when it plans to phase out combustion models. To do so, the company will continue to digitalize and streamline its manufacturing processes with solutions like Edge Cloud 4 Production. According to Audi, less expensive industrial PCs will result in lower IT costs with software updates and OS changes. To have the ability to respond to fluctuating consumer demand, Walker says: "We want to structure both product and production so we get the optimum benefit for our customers." He adds an example of building the new Audi Q6 e-tron on the same line as the A4 and A5 as it phases out its gas models.

Amazon Web Services has secured a five-year contract with the US Navy for cloud services, just weeks after scoring its share of a major US Department of Defense deal for cloud computing. From a report: The cloud division of online marketplace Amazon has been awarded a contract worth $723.9 million by the Department of the Navy as a single-award fixed-price enterprise software license blanket purchase agreement. The details were disclosed in a contract notice posted on the Department of Defense website. According to the notice, the agreement is for AWS to provide the Department of the Navy with access to its commercial cloud environment, Professional Services, and AWS training and certification courses. The Department of the Navy indicated that the purchase agreement will not obligate funds at the time of award, but instead these will be committed as task orders are issued using a variety of Navy funding types, including operation and maintenance and working capital funds.

Facebook parent Meta does not expect to seal its acquisition deal with Within Unlimited, maker of the popular fitness app "Supernatural", before Jan. 31, according to a court filing from Tuesday. From a report: Meta has agreed to push back the closing by one month or until the first day after the court rules on U.S. Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) preliminary injunction trial, according to the filing with the United States District Court for the Northern District Of California. In August, Meta had agreed not to close the deal until 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31. The FTC had filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the deal in July, calling Facebook a "global technology behemoth," noting its ownership of popular apps including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, and said its "campaign to conquer VR (virtual reality)" began in 2014 when it acquired Oculus, a VR headset manufacturer.

The United States Postal Service said it expects to buy more than 66,000 electric vehicles by the end of 2028 in a significant change from previous plans. From a report: In February, the USPS said it would purchase 5,000 fully electric versions of the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, with gas-powered trucks accounting for the remaining 45,000 of the initial order. After pushback from the Biden administration and resistance to that from the USPS, the agency has gradually increased the proportion of EVs in the order.

Now, the postal service aims to buy at least 60,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles by 2028, at least 75 percent of which will be electric models. Starting in 2026, the USPS expects that all NGDV acquisitions will be electric versions. The NGDVs are expected to start operating on delivery routes late next year. In addition, the agency plans to buy another 21,000 off-the-shelf EVs through 2028. Overall, the USPS plans to buy 106,000 delivery vehicles by the end of 2028 to start replacing its aging, inefficient and not-as-safe fleet of more than 220,000 vehicles. That means the agency still expects to buy around 40,000 gas-powered models over the next six years. The USPS said in a statement that the feasibility of fully electrifying the fleet "will continue to be explored." However, it believes there will be more EV availability in the future, which will certainly help.

Mark Zuckerberg considered saying in a 2017 speech that Facebook was looking into "organizations like Cambridge Analytica," according to details from a deposition of him by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. From a report: But he decided to remove reference to the political consultancy which harvested data on millions of Facebook users ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a previously unreported move that could add fuel to shareholder allegations that Zuckerberg and other executives hid information from the public about one of its biggest privacy scandals. When Meta executives learned of issues related to Cambridge Analytica, and how they responded, is central to lawsuits in California and Delaware in which shareholders allege the executives breached fiduciary duties and consumers allege mishandling of their private information.

Tech platforms spent millions opposing sweeping antitrust reforms, and their lobbyists may soon be able to breathe a giant sigh of relief -- at least for the next few years. From a report: Early Tuesday morning, the House Committee on Appropriations released a more than 4,000-page bill stacked with congressional priorities. But notably, a pair of antitrust bills that received broad bipartisan support was not included in the final measure. The bills were approved out of the Senate Judiciary Committee nearly a year ago, but they haven't yet been brought up for a floor vote. As part of a last-ditch effort to approve the bills, lawmakers tried to attach them to the must-pass spending bill, but the effort did not receive the backing necessary from congressional leadership.

For more than three years, lawmakers have held dozens of hearings and introduced a number of bipartisan bills to reform the tech industry. But the Open App Markets Act (OAMA) and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO) saw the most support, despite expensive lobbying campaigns from tech companies opposing them. Sen. Richard Blumenthal's (D-CT) timely OAMA would ban tech giants like Google and Apple from strong-arming third-party developers to enter into anticompetitive agreements to be hosted on their company app stores. The AICO, spearheaded by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), would have stopped Big Tech companies from providing preferential treatment to their own products and services across their platforms.

Taiwan's government has opened a probe into Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok on suspicion of illegally operating a subsidiary on the island, though the company's owner denied the accusation. From a report: TikTok, which is not widely used in Taiwan, has come under pressure mostly in the United States on concerns about China getting access to users' personal data, which the company denies. In a statement late on Sunday, Taiwan's China-policy making Mainland Affairs Council said that on Dec. 9 a working group under the Cabinet had discovered that TikTok was suspected of "illegal commercial operations" in Taiwan.

Taiwan's Liberty Times newspaper reported that TikTok's owner, ByteDance, had set up a subsidiary on the island to tout for business, contravening Taiwanese law that Chinese social media platforms are not allowed commercial operations on the island. The Mainland Affairs Council, responding to that report, said the Cabinet's working group had discovered that there was indeed a suspected breach of the law, and legal authorities were investigating.

Tumblr is adding support for livestreaming via the video platform Livebox. The Verge reports: Tumblr has supported streaming in the past, but it did so by letting people share streams from other services like YouNow and YouTube. The new option is described as a native Tumblr streaming service powered by Livebox. (Livebox is operated by the Meet Group, a subsidiary of the dating app company ParshipMeet Group.) Livebox allows users to tip streamers, and by the same token, Tumblr will let you pay creators in a virtual currency called "Diamonds." Livebox provides AI- and human-powered moderation for streams, according to a press release; the service also lets streamers designate trusted viewers as moderators. The streaming service is so far only supported for people's primary Tumblr blog, not any side blogs under the same account.

The feature is being rolled out to US users on iOS and Android now, and a release for global users and the desktop site is planned for the future. More details are outlined in a blog post, which dubs the service Tumblr Live.

Google Workspace is rolling out a new security update on Gmail, adding end-to-end encryption that aims to provide an added layer of security when sending emails and attachments on the web. From a report: The update is still in the beta stages, but eligible Workspace customers with Enterprise Plus, Education Standard, and Education Plus accounts can fill out an application to test the program through Google's support center. Once the encryption update has been completed, Gmail Workspace customers will find that any sensitive information or data delivered cannot be decrypted by Google's servers.

According to the support center, the application window will be open until January 20, 2023, and once users have accessed the feature, they will be able to choose to turn on the additional encryption by selecting the padlock button when drafting their email. But once activated, some features will be disabled, including emojis, signatures, and Smart Compose. The encryption feature will be monitored and managed by users' administrators and comes after Google started working to add more encryption features to Gmail. The report notes that client-side encryption, or CSE, "is already available for Google Drive, including in apps like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. It's also in Google Meet, and is in the beta stage for Google Calendar."

IEEE Spectrum: In 2000, at a trade fair in Germany, an obscure Singapore company called Trek 2000 unveiled a solid-state memory chip encased in plastic and attached to a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector. The gadget, roughly the size of a pack of chewing gum, held 8 megabytes of data and required no external power source, drawing power directly from a computer when connected. It was called the ThumbDrive. That device, now known by a variety of names -- including memory stick, USB stick, flash drive, as well as thumb drive -- changed the way computer files are stored and transferred. Today it is familiar worldwide. The thumb drive was an instant hit, garnering hundreds of orders for samples within hours. Later that year, Trek went public on the Singapore stock exchange, and in four months -- from April through July 2000 -- it manufactured and sold more than 100,000 ThumbDrives under its own label.

Before the invention of the thumb drive, computer users stored and transported their files using floppy disks. Developed by IBM in the 1960s, first 8-inch and later 5 1/4-inch and 3 1/2-inch floppy disks replaced cassette tapes as the most practical portable storage media. Floppy disks were limited by their relatively small storage capacity -- even double-sided, double-density disks could store only 1.44 MB of data. During the 1990s, as the size of files and software increased, computer companies searched for alternatives. Personal computers in the late 1980s began incorporating CD-ROM drives, but initially these could read only from prerecorded disks and could not store user-generated data. The Iomega Zip Drive, called a "superfloppy" drive and introduced in 1994, could store up to 750 MB of data and was writable, but it never gained widespread popularity, partly due to competition from cheaper and higher-capacity hard drives.

Computer users badly needed a cheap, high-capacity, reliable, portable storage device. The thumb drive was all that -- and more. It was small enough to slip in a front pocket or hang from a keychain, and durable enough to be rattled around in a drawer or tote without damage. With all these advantages, it effectively ended the era of the floppy disk. But Trek 2000 hardly became a household name. And the inventor of the thumb drive and Trek's CEO, Henn Tan, did not become as famous as other hardware pioneers like Robert Noyce, Douglas Engelbart, or Steve Jobs. Even in his home of Singapore, few people know of Tan or Trek. Why aren't they more famous? After all, mainstream companies including IBM, TEAC, Toshiba, and, ultimately, Verbatim licensed Trek's technology for their own memory stick devices. And a host of other companies just copied Tan without permission or acknowledgment.

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms will continue to devote about 20% of its overall costs and expenses to Reality Labs in 2023, despite questions about the business division focused on augmented and virtual reality and the so-called metaverse. From a report: The projection, given by CTO Andrew Bosworth in a blog post Monday, is little changed from the 18% of spending Meta devoted to Reality Labs in the third quarter. Meta stock is down nearly 65% this year, and some have questioned Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's expensive bet on the metaverse which comes as the company has cut other costs, including widespread layoffs. Reality Labs reported a loss from operations of $9.4 billion through the first nine months of the year; Meta's family of apps, by comparison, brought in roughly $32 billion in profit during that same period. A 20% investment in futuristic technologies is a "level of investment we believe makes sense for a company committed to staying at the leading edge of one of the most competitive and innovative industries on earth," Bosworth said. Alternative, non-paywalled source: Axios.

Confidential data of about 112,000 taxpayers inadvertently published by the IRS over the summer was mistakenly republished in late November and remained online until early December, the IRS disclosed last week. From a report: Form 990-T data that was supposed to stay private had been taken offline but made its way back to the IRS site when a contractor uploaded an old file that still included most of the private information, a letter sent Thursday to congressional leaders said. The agency is required to make Form 990-Ts filed by nonprofit groups available online but is supposed to keep the form filed by individuals private; in both cases, the agency made that information available too.

An internal programming error caused the September release of private forms along with the ones filed by nonprofit groups, the letter said. This time, the contractor tasked with managing the database reuploaded the older file with the original data instead of a new file that filtered out the forms that needed to be kept private. The IRS shared corrected data with the contractor on Nov. 23, but the old files had not been purged from their system. A third-party researcher alerted the IRS the files were back online on Dec. 1, and the IRS ordered the contractor to take them down immediately. Roughly 104,000 of the 106,000 forms disclosed in September were redisclosed this time. The agency is reconsidering its relationship with the contractor Accenture on this project, the report added, citing a person familiar with the matter.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Since Februrary, Amazon has been playing Santa Claus to Ukraine, delivering planeloads of goods, including blankets, hygiene kits, diapers, food and toys, for the war-torn nation and refugees in Poland and other parts of Europe. But long term, what's more important to Ukrainians than the gifts coming in is what's going out: massive amounts of government, tax, banking and property data vulnerable to destruction and abuse should Russian invaders get their hands on it. Since the day Russia launched its invasion Feb. 24, Amazon has been working closely with the Ukrainian government to download essential data and ferry it out of the country in suitcase-sized solid-state computer storage units called Snowball Edge, then funneling the data into Amazon's cloud computing system.

"This is the most technologically advanced war in human history," said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's 31-year-old vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, referring not just to weapons but data too. Amazon Web Services' "leadership made a decision that saved the Ukrainian government and economy." Amazon has invested $75 million so far in its Ukraine effort, which includes the data transfer via the Snowballs. Fedorov, speaking at a tech conference in Las Vegas this month, called it "priceless." The data, 10 million gigabytes so far, represent "critical information infrastructure. This is core for operation of the economy, of the tax system, of banks, and the government overall," he said. The data also include property records whose safekeeping can help prevent theft of Ukrainian homes, businesses and land.

Through history, invaders have "come in and staged fake referendum and parceled out the land to their chums," said Liam Maxwell, head of government transformation at Amazon Web Services, the company's highly profitable cloud computing arm. "That kind of thing has been happening since William the Conquerer." The Odessa Journal newspaper reported in June that residents of the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol whose homes had been destroyed were being moved into the homes of citizens who had fled the area, and were being forced to find those who left and pressure them to cooperate in some fashion with the Russians. Maxwell, who's based in London, had already been working with Ukraine for years when it became clear by January that Russia planned to attack the country.

Keylogger-like behavior has some Corsair K100 keyboard customers concerned. Several users have reported their peripheral randomly entering text into their computer that they previously typed days or weeks ago. However, Corsair told Ars Technica that the behavior is a bug, not keylogging, and it's possibly related to the keyboard's macro recording feature. From a report: A reader tipped us off to an ongoing thread on Corsair's support forum that a user started in August. The user claimed that their K100 started typing on its own while they use it with a MacBook Pro, gaming computer, and KVM switch. "Every couple of days, the keyboard has started randomly typing on its own while I am working on the MacBook. It usually seems to type messages that I previously typed on the gaming PC and it won't stop until I unplug the keyboard and plug it back in," the user, "brendenguy," wrote.

Ten users seemingly responded to the thread (we can't verify the validity of each claim or account, but Corsair confirmed this is a known issue), reporting similar experiences. [...] Corsair confirmed to Ars that it's received "several" reports of the K100 acting like this but affirmed that "there's no hardware function on the keyboard that operates as a key logger." The company didn't immediately respond to follow-up questions about how many keyboards were affected. "Corsair keyboards unequivocally do not log user input in any way and do not have the ability to log individual keystrokes," Corsair's rep told Ars Technica.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A large number of doctors write medicine prescriptions in haste, making it nearly impossible for their patients to understand what they scribbled. This problem has been around for decades and many tech firms have attempted to solve it with little to no success. Now Google is having a go at translating those unfathomable texts.

The search giant announced at its annual conference in India Monday that it is working with pharmacists to work out the handwriting of doctors. The feature, which will be rolled out on Google Lens, will allow users to either take a picture of the prescription or upload one from the photo library. Once the image is processed, the app detects and highlights the medicines mentioned in the note, a Google executive demonstrated.

Meta Platforms was hit with a formal complaint from European Union antitrust watchdogs for allegedly squeezing out classified ad rivals by tying the Facebook Marketplace to its own social network. From a report: The European Commission said Monday it issued a so-called statement of objections to Meta, paving the way for potential fines or changes to the firm's business model. "With its Facebook social network, Meta reaches globally billions of monthly users and millions active advertisers," EU Antitrust Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in an email announcing the escalation of the case. "Our preliminary concern is that Meta ties its dominant social network Facebook to its online classified ad services called Facebook Marketplace," meaning "Facebook users have no choice but to have access to Facebook Marketplace."

The EU watchdog said it's also concerned that Meta imposes unfair trading conditions which allow it to use data on competing online classified ad services. The case is the latest in a long-running Europe-wide crackdown on the market power of tech firms such as Google, Apple and Amazon that's led to multiple probes, fines and beefed-up laws. The EU previously fined Facebook for failing to provide correct information in the merger review of the WhatsApp takeover. Meta is also the subject of investigations in the UK and Germany.