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Meta has begun cutting staff and reorganizing teams in an effort to cut costs, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. The company apparently doesn’t want to frame the changes as layoffs, but is reportedly “quietly nudging out a significant number of staffers” as it prepares for more significant cuts. It’s not clear how many Meta employees have been affected so far. According to the report. Meta has been allowing staffers to apply for new jobs within the company, but workers only have a 30-day window to do so. The result, according to The Journal, is that...

The hackers who targeted the Los Angeles Unified School District have made a ransom demand, officials confirmed Tuesday, an indication that the attackers have extracted sensitive data or believe they can bluff the district into thinking that they have. “We can confirm that there was a demand made,” L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho said. “There has been no response to the demand.” Carvalho declined to disclose the amount of the ransom demand or any further information about what information, if any, the attackers may be holding. He said that there have been “no new security breaches” and that the school...

The three AI models that comprise the solution were a laugh detector, a shared laughter predictor, and a laugh type selector. Each of these models was trained using data from a human-robot speed dating conversation database. The scientists used data from over 80 speed dating dialogues between Kyoto University male students and a remote control robot called ERICA teleoperated by one of four amateur actresses who were in a different room while communicating through the android’s speaker. ERICA is also capable of non-verbal communication such as eye gaze, gestures, and nodding the head. The participants tried to get to know...

Ethereum, the world’s second-most valuable digital currency by market capitalization, completed a long-awaited upgrade to its system on September 15. The move, known in the cryptocurrency community as “The Merge”, is expected to slash energy costs and lay the groundwork for more use of crypto technology in mainstream applications, including finance.Skip advertThe upgrade was one of the most eagerly anticipated events in crypto’s history. But the process is complicated. Here’s what to know about it.What is Ethereum?Ethereum is a blockchain – a publicly-viewable, distributed ledger that verifies and records all transactions on the network. The platform was conceived by Russian-born...

Erick Adame on the news as a meteorologist, Erick Adame 2020 Reel (Screenshot/Public/YouTube/ErickAdame2020ReelUpdate) Two-time Emmy nominee Erick Adame took to Instagram to notify fans that he was fired after his employer discovered he appeared on an adult webcam site and took part in openly gay content. “I have recently been terminated from my job as the meteorologist at Spectrum News NYI1 in NYC. I am taking this opportunity to share my truth rather than let others control the narrative of my life,” Adame wrote on his Instagram page Monday. “Despite being a public figure and being on television in the...

Reigning World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen suddenly resigned after making just a single move Monday during his widely anticipated rematch against Hans Niemann, whom Carlsen hinted may have cheated in another game between the two grandmasters earlier this month...The resignation took announcers Peter Leko and Tania Sachdev by surprise, with Sachdev noting such a move was "unprecedented" and "making a very big statement."

Only 48 hours after he arrived in Singapore to begin his first year for a master's degree in chemistry at a local university, Albert (not his real name) received a phone call from officers claiming to be from the Ministry of Health, that sent him into a panic. The 24-year-old Chinese national was told he was involved in money laundering activities and the call was subsequently transferred to scammers claiming to be police officers in China. The conmen sent him official-looking documents and even conducted video calls to convince him to transfer $70,000 to them. The money was from his...

Social media companies have weak policies on misinformation and have failed to enforce them consistently ahead of the 2022 midterms, according to a new report released Monday. The report, from New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, faults Meta, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok for not taking a proactive approach to address misinformation, including a growing trend of election denialism and false claims of fraud. They say the lack of a proactive approach threatens the approaching election. Although social media companies have pledged to tackle election misinformation, the report said the companies’ “flawed policies and inconsistent enforcement result...

The hacker group from Vietnam called TeaPea contacted BBC and shared information about the hack with the British broadcaster. "Our attack was originally planned to be a ransomware but the company’s IT team kept isolating servers before we had a chance to deploy it, so we thought to have some funny [sic]. We did a wiper attack instead,” one of the hackers said. A wiper attack is a form of cyber-attack that irreversibly destroys data, documents and files. The internal database was using Qwerty1234 as its password: TeaPea say they gained access to IHG’s internal IT network by tricking an...

Giving an entirely new meaning to the term “collaboration,” Oracle has become a paying customer of Amazon Web Services as part of Larry Ellison’s strategy to make Oracle’s databases available on as many cloud platforms as possible. Ellison opened his remarks on this week’s earnings call by describing the availability of Oracle’s MySQL HeatWave database on AWS and emphasized repeatedly the imperative of customer choice. Declaring that “the multi-cloud era has begun,” Ellison said, “Our job is to give our customers the ability to choose application and infrastructure technology from multiple cloud providers, and then have those different clouds coexist...

The solar flare, classified as M8 in the second-most energetic category of flares, departed from the sun at 5:49 a.m. EDT (0949 GMT) on Friday, disrupting shortwave radio communications in the sun-facing parts of the world. According to Spaceweather.com(opens in new tab), amateur radio operators in Africa and the Middle East could have experienced signal distortion for up to one hour after the flare. The U.K. space weather forecaster Met Office predicts there is a chance of further flares today before the sunspot AR3098 disappears behind the sun's limb (the edge of the sun's visible disk). Space weather forecasters think...

I'm just curious about the process from the point of CAD to where they have computer chips ready to sell. Thanks in advance if somebody can explain it for us non-techies.

Rising chess star Hans Niemann has admitted to cheating in online chess in the past as he rejected any suggestions he had used computer assistance in a major tournament. The American made an impassioned statement during an interview with St Louis Chess Club commentator Alejandro Ramírez after allegations swirled on social media. World champion Magnus Carlsen stunned the chess world yesterday by suddenly withdrawing from the Sinquefield Cup following his shock defeat to Niemann with the white pieces.

Billionaire real estate investor Barry Sternlicht said he believes the economy is "braking hard" and that the continuation of rate hikes is likely to cause a "major crash" in housing. “The economy is braking hard,” the chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital Group said on CNBC earlier on Thursday. “If the Fed keeps this up they are going to have a serious recession and people will lose their jobs." "You are going to have a major crash in the housing market and housing prices are going down," Sternlicht said. "You are seeing housing prices correct."

Do you remember the first time you heard about Google? If you’re younger than 35, it may feel like it’s always been a thing . . . but if you’re older, you might remember when it became THE way to search the Internet. Today, Google.com is officially 25 years old. Google itself has picked various dates to celebrate its birthday over the years, but the domain was registered on September 15th of 1997. And it really started to take off in the year 2000. Google began as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both...

If you thought cookie pop-ups were an annoying nuisance, just wait until you have to scan your face for some third party to “verify your age” after California’s new design code becomes law. On Friday, I wrote about the companies and organizations most likely to benefit from California’s AB 2273, the “Age Appropriate Design Code” bill that the California legislature seems eager to pass (and which they refer to as the “Kid’s Code” even though the details show it will impact everyone, and not just kids). The bill seemed to be getting very little attention, but after a few of...

With just a few clicks you could be saving big on everything you need to buy from Amazon. It's really that easy. With inflation rising high, odds are you're looking for the best deal on all of your purchases to help make your dollar stretch a little farther. Some of your daily purchases may be necessities while others are nice-to-haves, and while your necessities take priority that doesn't mean you need to completely cut out everything else. Amazon sells hundreds of thousands of products at all different price points, some of which are on sale and some are not. Wouldn't...

[dayglored comment] Those of us who have been forced to wait forever as Windows copies some huge file... well here's a way to make the wait more tolerable. Copying a large file from one drive to another, or over a network, can take quite a while, and there’s nothing you can do in that time, but wait. However, an enterprising developer has found a way to make the copy dialog more interesting -- he’s added a fully playable version of the arcade classic Lunar Lander to it. And this is no basic addition -- you can choose your difficulty level...

In hopes this article does not require a tin-foil hat to understand, I would like to broaden my understanding of reports of [smart] phones being confiscated during the current “Night of the Long Knives” i.e. recent raids going on across the country. With that said, I am looking for folks smarter than this author (shouldn’t be too difficult) to help explain the federals’ strategy of ‘phone snatching’ Real Americans.Allow me to explain…The conventional wisdom is that smartphones are grabbed as part of the investigation of something that happened 20+ months ago (or whatever), and the phone snatchers have the right...