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Submission + - Lyft Says San Francisco Overcharged It $100 Million In Taxes (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Lyft is suing the city of San Francisco, claiming the city unfairly charged the ride-hailing company over $100 million in taxes, Bloomberg reports. The lawsuit alleges that, over the course of five years, San Francisco unfairly labeled money earned by Lyft drivers as company revenue. In the complaint, Lyft maintains that its drivers are its customers, not employees. “Accordingly, Lyft recognizes revenue from rideshare as being comprised of fees paid to Lyft by drivers, not charges paid by riders to drivers,” the complaint reads.

Submission + - Sam Altman's "Universal Basic Income" Study Sparks Debate on Ai, Work Economics (techspot.com) 1

Submitted by jjslash
jjslash writes: Universal Basic Income (UBI) is often proposed as a potential solution to job losses caused by AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman supported a three-year study to evaluate its feasibility. According to the lead researcher, UBI offers some advantages but is not a definitive solution. The study cost $60 million, with Altman personally contributing $14 million and OpenAI providing $10 million.

The impact generative AI is having on the jobs market is well documented. Altman, boss of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, said that in 2016, he started realizing the effects that advanced AI could have on society, especially jobs, and conducted an experiment aimed at showing that UBI could negate some of these issues. That program gave 1,000 people $1,000 per month, while a 2,000-person control group was given $50 per month.

Submission + - Valve makes more money per employee than Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix combined (techspot.com)

Submitted by jjslash
jjslash writes: "Valve is one of the most important and influential companies in the PC gaming market. It's also one of the most unique due to its private nature and unusually small workforce relative to its impact and competitors." TechSpot reports:

A Valve employee shared an estimate with PC Gamer showing that Valve earns more per employee than many of the world’s largest companies. While the data, drawn from 2018, is somewhat outdated and excludes recent tech trends, it still indicates that Valve likely maintains its top ranking in this metric, surpassing major players like Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Exact income figures remain undisclosed.

Submission + - Behind Closed Doors: The Spy-World Scientists Who Argued Covid Was a Lab Leak (wsj.com) 1

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

FBI experts argued that a thesis by Yu Ping, a young scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, indicated that the type of coronavirus that was responsible for the pandemic was indigenous to the mountainous Yunnan province in western China and wasn’t found in Hubei province where the city of Wuhan is located. If Covid-19 had spread naturally from a bat to a host animal and then a human, as proponents of the zoonotic theory argued, early cases should have also been detected in the vast area between Yunnan and Wuhan, a distance of more than 1,500 kilometers. That region, which has a population of hundreds of millions of people, contains thousands of live animal markets.

It might take a while, but more and more information will come out.

Submission + - DOGE has its first scalp. 'Global Engagement Center' shuts its doors (foxnews.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "The Global Engagement Center will terminate by operation of law [by the end of the day] on December 23, 2024," a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. "The Department of State has consulted with Congress regarding next steps."

Lawmakers had originally included funding for the GEC in its continuing resolution (CR), or bill to fund the government beyond a Friday deadline. But conservatives balked at that iteration of the funding bill, and it was rewritten without money for the GEC and other funding riders.

The agency had a budget of around $61 million and 120 people on staff.

The GEC, according to reporter Matt Taibbi, "funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious — and idiotic — new form of blacklisting" during the pandemic.

Submission + - Brazil shuts BYD factory site over 'slavery' conditions (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Brazilian authorities have halted the construction of a factory for Chinese electric vehicle (EV) giant BYD, saying workers lived in conditions comparable to "slavery".

More than 160 workers have been rescued in Brazil's northeastern state of Bahia, according to a statement from the Public Labour Prosecutor's Office (MPT).

They were allegedly put in a "degrading" environment and had their passports and salaries withheld by a building company.

BYD said in a statement that it had cut ties with the firm involved and remained committed to a "full compliance with Brazilian legislation".

The factory was scheduled to be operational by March 2025, and was set to be BYD's first EV plant outside of Asia.

The workers, hired by Jinjiang Construction Brazil, lived in four facilities in Camaçari city.

At one such facility, workers were made to sleep on beds without mattresses, according to prosecutors.

Each bathroom was also shared among 31 workers, forcing them to get up extremely early in order to be ready for work.

"The conditions found in the lodgings revealed an alarming picture of precariousness and degradation," the MPT said.

"Slavery-like conditions", as defined by Brazilian law, include debt bondage and work that violates human dignity.

The MPT added that the situation also constitutes "forced labour", as many workers had their wages withheld and faced excessive costs for terminating their contracts.

Submission + - In Maine, Remote Work Gives Prisoners a Lifeline (bostonglobe.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Every weekday morning at 8:30, Preston Thorpe makes himself a cup of instant coffee and opens his laptopto find the coding tasks awaiting his seven-person team at Unlocked Labs. Like many remote workers, Thorpe, the nonprofit’s principal engineer, works out in the middle of the day and often stays at his computer late into the night. But outside Thorpe’s window, there’s a soaring chain-link fence topped with coiled barbed wire. And at noon and 4 p.m. every day, a prison guard peers into his room to make sure he’s where he’s supposed to be at the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine, where he’s serving his 12th year for two drug-related convictions in New Hampshire, including intent to distribute synthetic opioids.

Remote work has spread far and wide since the pandemic spurred a work-from-home revolution of sorts, but perhaps no place more unexpectedly than behind prison walls. Thorpe is one of more than 40 people incarcerated in Maine’s state prison system who have landed internships and jobs with outside companies over the past two years — some of whom work full time from their cellsand earn more than the correctional officers who guard them. A handful of other states have also started allowing remote work in recent years, but none have gone as far as Maine, according to the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, the nonprofit leading the effort.

Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds. Like inmates in work-release programs who have jobs out in the community, 10 percent of remote workers’ wages go to the state to offset the cost of room and board. All Maine DOC residents get re-entry support for housing and job searches before they’re released, and remote workers leave with even more: up-to-date resumes, a nest egg — and the hope that they’re less likely to need food or housing assistance, or resort to crime to get by.

Submission + - South Korea Mulls Creating 'KSMC' Contract Chipmaker To Compete With TSMC (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Although Samsung Foundry is a major chip contract manufacturer, the South Korean government mulls creating a government-funded contract chipmaker tentatively called Korea Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, KSMC, reports The Korea Biz Wire. Industry experts and academics have proposed the initiative.

The Semiconductor Industry Association's Ahn Ki-hyun called for a long-term government investment. Experts project that an investment of KRW 20 trillion ($13.9 billion) in KSMC could result in economic gains of KRW 300 trillion ($208.7 billion) by 2045. However, the big question is whether $13.9 billion is enough to establish a chipmaker. Another concern about publicly funded corporations like KSMC is whether they could develop advanced manufacturing technologies and land enough orders from clients to be profitable. It turns out that in addition to semiconductor makers, Korea needs more fabless software developers.

The proposal was introduced during a seminar hosted by the National Academy of Engineering of Korea (NAEK). The plan aims to address structural weaknesses in the industry, such as an over-reliance on Samsung's advanced nodes under 10nm amid the lack of mature process technologies. Smaller system semiconductor firms struggle to thrive as Korea lacks manufacturing diversity, as seen in Taiwan, where companies like UMC and PSMC that focus on mature and specialty nodes complement TSMC's advanced process technologies.

Submission + - More Than 140 Kenya Facebook Moderators Diagnosed With Severe PTSD (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism. The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi. The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.

The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege. The case is shedding light on the human cost of the boom in social media use in recent years that has required more and more moderation, often in some of the poorest parts of the world, to protect users from the worst material that some people post.

Submission + - Cloudflare Must Block 'Piracy Shield' Domains and IP Addresses Across its Servic (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a landmark ruling, the Court of Milan has ordered (PDF) Cloudflare to block pirate streaming services that offer Serie A football matches. The court found that Cloudflare's services are instrumental in facilitating access to live pirate streams, undermining Italy's 'Piracy Shield' legislation. The order, which applies in Italy, affects Cloudflare's CDN, DNS resolver, WARP and proxy services. It also includes a broad data disclosure section.

The Court of Milan’s decision prohibits Cloudflare from resolving domain names and routing internet traffic to IP addresses of all services present on the “Piracy Shield” system. This also applies to future domains and aliases used by these pirate services. The order applies to Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN), DNS services, and reverse proxy services. The order also mentions Cloudflare’s free VPN among the targets, likely referring to the WARP service. If any of the targeted pirate streaming providers use Cloudflare’s services to infringe on Serie A’s copyrights, the company Cloudflare must stop providing CDN, authoritative DNS, and reverse proxy services to these customers. (Note: This is an Italian court order and Cloudflare previously used geotargeting to block sites only in Italy. It may respond similarly here, but terminating customer accounts only in Italy might be more complicated. )

Finally, the order further includes a data disclosure component, under which Cloudflare must identify customers who use Cloudflare’s services to offer pirated streams. This should help Serie A to track down those responsible. The data disclosure section also covers information related to the ‘VPN’ and alternative public DNS services, where these relate to the IPTV platforms identified in the case. That covers traffic volume and connection logs, including IP-addresses and timestamps. In theory, that could also cover data on people who accessed these services using Cloudflare’s VPN and DNS resolver. [...] The court ordered Cloudflare to cover the costs of the proceeding and if it doesn’t implement the blocking requirements in time, an additional fine of €10,000 per day will apply.

Submission + - LEAP71 hot fires advanced Aerospike rocket engine designed by computational AI (leap71.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Dubai-based startup LEAP71, focused on using AI software to quickly develop rocket engine designs it can then 3D print, has successfully test fired a prototype aerospike engine on December 18, 2024 during a static fire test campaign conducted in the United Kingdom.

Aerospikes are more compact and significantly more efficient across various atmospheric pressures, including the vacuum of space. They forego the conventional bell-shaped nozzle by placing a spike in the center of a toroidal combustion chamber [as shown in the photo to the right]. Since it is surrounded by 3,500C hot exhaust gas, cooling the spike is an enormous challenge.

Josefine Lissner, CEO and Co-Founder of LEAP71, stated: “We were able to extend Noyron’s physics to deal with the unique complexity of this engine type. The spike is cooled by intricate cooling channels flooded by cryogenic oxygen, whereas the outside of the chamber is cooled by the kerosene fuel. I am very encouraged by the results of this test, as virtually everything on the engine was novel and untested. It’s a great validation of our physics-driven approach to computational AI.”

Submission + - Walmart Sued Over Illegally Opening Bank Accounts For Delivery Drivers (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is suing Walmart and payroll service provider Branch Messenger for alleged illegal payment practices for gig workers. The bureau says Walmart was opening direct deposit accounts using Spark delivery drivers’ social security numbers without their consent. The accounts also can come with intense fees that, according to the complaint, would add either 2 percent or $2.99 per transaction, whichever is higher. It also says Walmart repeatedly promised to provide drivers with same-day payments through the platform starting in July 2021 but never delivered on that.

The Bureau alleges that for approximately two years starting around June 2021, defendants engaged in unfair, abusive, and deceptive practices in violation of the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010, including by requiring Spark Drivers to receive their compensation in Branch Accounts, opening Branch Accounts for Spark Drivers without their informed consent or, in many instances, on an unauthorized basis, and making deceptive statements about Branch to Spark Drivers. Spark delivery workers have been complaining about Walmart’s Branch Messenger account requirements for years, which forced workers to use these accounts with no option to direct deposit to a preferred credit union or local bank. Walmart allegedly told workers they’d be terminated if they didn’t accept the Branch accounts.

Submission + - Space Station keeps dodging debris from China's 2007 satellite weapon test (msn.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: The International Space Station had to fire thrusters from a docked spacecraft last month to avoid a piece of debris that has been circling the globe for the nearly 18 years since the Chinese government blasted apart one of its own satellites in a weapons test.

The evasive maneuver was the second in just six days for the space station, which has four NASA astronauts and three Russian cosmonauts aboard. That is the shortest interval ever between such actions, illustrating the slowly worsening problem of space junk in orbit. Debris is an increasingly vexing issue not only for NASA, but also for companies such as SpaceX and OneWeb seeking to protect the thousands of small satellites they send into space to provide high-speed internet.

Submission + - Health Care Giant Ascension Says 5.6 Million Patients Affected In Cyberattack (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Health care company Ascension lost sensitive data for nearly 5.6 million individuals in a cyberattack that was attributed to a notorious ransomware gang, according to documents filed with the attorney general of Maine. Ascension owns 140 hospitals and scores of assisted living facilities. In May, the organization was hit with an attack that caused mass disruptions as staff was forced to move to manual processes that caused errors, delayed or lost lab results, and diversions of ambulances to other hospitals. Ascension managed to restore most services by mid-June. At the time, the company said the attackers had stolen protected health information and personally identifiable information for an undisclosed number of people.

A filing Ascension made earlier in December revealed that nearly 5.6 million people were affected by the breach. Data stolen depended on the particular person but included individuals' names and medical information (e.g., medical record numbers, dates of service, types of lab tests, or procedure codes), payment information (e.g., credit card information or bank account numbers), insurance information (e.g., Medicaid/Medicare ID, policy number, or insurance claim), government identification (e.g., Social Security numbers, tax identification numbers, driver’s license numbers, or passport numbers), and other personal information (such as date of birth or address). Ascension is now in the process of notifying affected individuals. The organization is also offering two years of credit and fraud monitoring, a $1 million insurance reimbursement policy, and managed ID theft recovery services. The services became effective last Thursday.

Submission + - Of Mice and Men removed from GCSE course over racial slurs (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Welsh exam board picks removes John Steinbeck’s novella following concerns of ‘psychological and emotional’ harm

John Steinbeck’s classic novella Of Mice and Men will no longer be studied in Wales at GCSE level because of the book’s racial slurs.

WJEC, the Cardiff-based Welsh exam board, said it has instead selected “a wide range” of “appropriate and inclusive texts” for students.

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