While Oracle's existing Java corporate licensing agreements are still in effect, "the Named User Plus Licensing (user licenses) and Processor licenses (server licensing) are no longer available for purchase," reports IT World Canada. And that's where it gets interesting: The new pricing model is based on employee count, with different price tiers for different employee counts. The implication is that everyone in the organization is counted for licensing purposes, even if they don't use Java software.

As a result, companies that use Java SE may face significant price increases. The change will primarily affect large companies with many employees, but it will also have a significant impact on medium-sized businesses. Although Oracle promises to allow legacy users to renew under their current terms and conditions, sources say the company will likely pressure users to adopt the new model over time.
The move is "likely to rile customers that have a fraction of employees who work with Java," Oracle partners told CRN, though "the added complexity is an opportunity for partners to help customers right-size their spending." Jeff Stonacek, principal architect at House of Brick Technologies, an Omaha, Neb.-based company that provides technical and licensing services to Oracle clients, and chief technical officer of House of Brick parent company OpsCompass, told CRN that the change has already affected at least one project, with his company in the middle of a license assessment for a large customer. He called the change "an obvious overstep."

"Having to license your entire employee count is not reasonable because you could have 10,000 employees, maybe only 500 of them need Java," Stonacek said. "And maybe you only have a couple of servers for a couple of applications. But if you have to license for your entire employee count, that just doesn't make sense...." Stonacek and his team have been talking to customers about migrating to Open Java Development Kit (JDK), a free and open-source version of Java Standard Edition (SE), although that was a practice started before the price change.

He estimated that about half of the customers his team talks to are able to easily move to OpenJDK. Sometimes, customers have third-party applications that are written for Java and unchangeable as opposed to custom applications that in-house engineers can just rewrite.... Ron Zapar, CEO of Naperville, Ill.-based Oracle partner Re-Quest, told CRN that even without a direct effect on partners from the Java license change, the move makes customers question whether they want to purchase Oracle Cloud offerings and other Oracle products lest they face future changing terms or lock-in.

A California startup using rocks to soak up carbon dioxide from the air has teamed up with a Canadian company to mineralize the gas in concrete, a technological tie-up that is a first and they say could provide a model for fighting climate change globally. Reuters reports: Heirloom Carbon Technologies delivered about 30 kg (66 lb) of CO2 collected from the air around its San Francisco Bay Area headquarters to neighboring Central Concrete, a Vulcan Materials' (VMC.N) subsidiary that on Wednesday incorporated the gas into new concrete. That's equivalent to tailpipe emissions of driving about 75 miles (120 km) in a car. The joint effort was the first time that carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere using such Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology had been secured in concrete, where the CO2 will stay put for centuries, several scientists said.

Heirloom heats crushed limestone to release naturally absorbed CO2, then puts the CO2-starved rock on columns of huge trays, where they act like sponges, soaking up close to half their weight in the gas over three days. The rock is then heated to release the collected ambient carbon dioxide, and the cycle repeats. Canada's CarbonCure, the concrete technology company, mixes CO2 with concrete ingredients, turning it into a mineral that strengthens the concrete, cutting the need for cement -- the part of concrete with the biggest carbon footprint.

Sports fashion retailer JD Sports has confirmed miscreants broke into a system that contained data on a whopping 10 million customers, but no payment information was among the mix. The Register reports: In a post to investors this morning, the London Stock Exchange-listed business said the intrusion related to infrastructure that housed data for online orders from sub-brands including JD, Size? Millets, Blacks, Scotts and MilletSport between November 2018 and October 2020. The data accessed consisted of customer name, billing address, delivery address, phone number, order details and the final four digits of payment cards "of approximately 10 million unique customers." The company does "not hold full payment card details" and said that it has "no reason to believe that account passwords were accessed."

As is customary in such incidents, JD Sports has contacted the relevant authorities such as the Information Commissioner's Office and says it has enlisted the help of "leading cyber security experts." The chain has stores across Europe, with some operating in North America and Canada. It also operates some footwear brands including Go Outdoors and Shoe Palace. "We want to apologize to those customers who may have been affected by this incident," said Neil Greenhalgh, chief financial officer at JD Sports. "We are advising them to be vigilant about potential scam emails, calls and texts and providing details on now to report these."

He added: "We are continuing with a full review of our cyber security in partnership with external specialists following this incident. Protecting that data of our customers is an absolute priority for JS."

Home Depot's Canadian arm was found to be sharing details from e-receipts related to in-store purchases with Facebook owner Meta Platforms without the knowledge or consent of its customers, according to Canada's privacy regulator. From a report: An investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) found that by participating in Meta's offline conversions program Home Depot shared the e-receipts that included encoded email addresses and purchase information. The regulator added that the home goods chain stopped sharing customer information with Meta in October 2022, which was among the recommendations made by OPC, until the company is able to implement measures to ensure valid consent.

Thursday Instagram launched "Quiet mode" to "help people focus, and to encourage people to set boundaries with friends and followers.... Once enabled, you won't receive any notifications, your profile's activity status will change to 'In quiet mode' and we'll automatically send an auto-reply when someone DMs you.... and once the feature is turned off, we'll show you a quick summary of notifications so you can catch up on what you missed."

A report from the Verge notes the move "comes as Instagram faces mounting criticism over its effect on the mental health of teens, especially teenage girls." Since then, the company has been making a number of changes focused on the safety of its younger users, including tightening default content settings for teens, nudging teens away from content they continuously browse through, and introducing restrictions on the ways advertisers can target teens....

Instagram will specifically prompt teen users to toggle on Quiet Mode "when they spend a specific amount of time on Instagram late at night." However, the platform doesn't state how much time teens have to spend on the app to see the prompt and also doesn't say what timeframe it considers "late at night." Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw tells The Verge the notification will appear after "several minutes."
Quiet mode launched Thursday in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand, with launches in other countries planned soon. Elsewhere the Verge reports that Meta is "putting your Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger account settings in one place." The company's rolling out a new Accounts Center that lets you manage your preferences across all your Meta accounts from a centralized hub. The revamped Accounts Center will live in the settings menu on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, which means you can adjust your account settings for Facebook from Instagram — and vice versa....

Some of the settings you can toggle include personal details, passwords, security, ad preferences, and payments as well as the permissions you've given each app. It doesn't seem like Meta will put all of your accounts in the Accounts Center by default, so you'll need to add them manually.
The feature launched Thursday and will roll out gradually to all users on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram in "the coming months."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: According to a new study, a little over 70 percent of prescription drugs advertised on television were rated as having "low therapeutic value," meaning they offer little benefit compared with drugs already on the market. The study, appearing in JAMA Open Network, aligns with longstanding skepticism that heavily promoted drugs have high therapeutic value. "One explanation might be that drugs with substantial therapeutic value are likely to be recognized and prescribed without advertising, so manufacturers have greater incentive to promote drugs of lesser value," said the authors, which include researchers at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth.

For the new study, researchers led by Aaron Kesselheim, who leads Harvard's Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL), looked at monthly lists of the top-advertised drugs on TV in the US between 2015 and 2021. They also looked up therapeutic value ratings for those drugs from independent health assessment agencies in Canada, France, and Germany. The value ratings were based on drugs' therapeutic benefit, safety profile, and strength of evidence, as compared with existing drugs. Any drug rated "moderate" or above was classified as a "high value" drug for the study. For drugs with multiple ratings, the study authors used the most favorable rating, which they note could overestimate the proportion of higher-benefit drugs.

Of the top advertised drugs, 73 had at least one value rating. Collectively, pharmaceutical companies spent $22.3 billion on advertising for those 73 drugs between 2015 and 2021. Even with the generous ratings, 53 of the 73 drugs (roughly 73 percent) were categorized as low-benefit. Collectively, these low-benefit drugs accounted for $15.9 billion of the ad spending. The top three low-benefit drugs by dollar amount were Dulaglutide (type 2 diabetes), Varenicline (smoking cessation), and Tofacitinib (rheumatoid arthritis). The outlook for change is bleak, the authors note. "Policy makers and regulators could consider limiting direct-to-consumer advertising to drugs with high therapeutic or public health value or requiring standardized disclosure of comparative effectiveness and safety data," Kesselheim and his colleagues concluded, "but policy changes would likely require industry cooperation or face constitutional challenge." The report notes that the U.S. is "one of only two countries that allows direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertisements, such as TV commercials." The other is New Zealand.

Amazon has started its biggest-ever round of jobs cuts -- a culling that will ultimately affect 18,000 workers around the globe. From a report: Amazon began notifying employees by email early Wednesday, Doug Herrington, the company's worldwide retail chief, said in a memo. He said the company aimed to communicate with all laid-off workers in the US, Canada and Costa Rica by the end of the day. Notifications in China will be sent after the Chinese New Year, and in other regions the company must consult with employee representatives before finalizing layoffs. The world's largest e-commerce company is grappling with slowing online sales growth and bracing for a possible recession that could affect the spending power of its customers. Microsoft announced it was cutting 10,000 jobs Wednesday, becoming the latest in a long line of tech companies to trim its ranks.

Herrington said Amazon's cuts were part of an effort to lower costs "so we can continue investing in the wide selection, low prices and fast shipping that our customers love." He said the company would "continue investing meaningfully" in growth areas including groceries, Amazon's business-to-business sales program, services for third-party sellers and healthcare. The eliminations started last year and initially fell hardest on Amazon's Devices and Services group, which builds the Alexa digital assistant and Echo smart speakers. The latest round will mostly affect the retail division and human resources.

Netflix is expected to report its slowest quarterly revenue growth on Thursday as its ad-supported plan struggles to attract customers in the saturating U.S. market, which could pressure the company to pull back on content spending this year. Reuters reports: The streaming pioneer has been reeling under strained consumer spending, rising costs of financing production and increased competition from Disney+ and Amazon Prime. It had pinned its hopes on the launch of the ad-supported tier, but analysts say they have not seen a burst of subscriptions.

The company is expected to have added 4.5 million subscribers in the fourth quarter - the lowest addition for the holiday period since 2014. It added 8.3 million subscribers a year ago. The $6.99 per month ad-supported plan does not have access to all titles and is not cheap enough to win over significant numbers of customers in the United States and Canada, analysts say. That is likely to draw focus on Netflix's aggressive content spending, which finance chief Spencer Neumann said in July would total about $17 billion annually for the next couple of years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A Canadian woman has been ordered by a civil tribunal to compensate her former employer for "time theft" after she was caught misrepresenting hours worked by controversial tracking software. Karlee Besse, who worked remotely as an accountant in British Columbia, initially claimed she was fired from her job without cause last year and sought $3,729 in compensation -- both in unpaid wages and severance. But the company, Reach CPA, told the tribunal Beese had logged more than 50 hours that "did not appear to have spent on work-related tasks."

Reach said it installed employee-tracking software called TimeCampon Besse's work laptop after it found her assigned files were over budget and behind schedule, a strategy companies are increasingly taking in the era of remote work. The software tracks how long a document is open, how the employee uses the document and logs the time as work. Weeks later, the company said an analysis "identified irregularities between her timesheets and the software usage logs." While Besse told the tribunal she found the program "difficult" and worried it didn't differentiate between work and personal use, the company demonstrated how TimeCamp automatically makes those distinctions, separating time logs for work from activities such as using the laptop to stream movies and television shows.

Besse said she had printed documents to work on, but did not tell Reach she was using hard copy because she "knew they wouldn't want to hear that" and she was afraid of repercussions. The company said that the software also tracks printing -- and that few documents had been logged as printed. It also said any work from the printed documents would have needed to be input into the company's software, which never happened. [...] The judge tossed out Besse's claim of wrongful termination and ordered her to pay $1,840.27, both in returned wages and as a part of previous advance she had received from the company.

Cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com will no longer facilitate transactions involving Tether in Canada and plans to delist the largest stablecoin by market capitalization for customers in the region. Decrypt reports: "Crypto.com has delisted USDT for users in Canada in accordance with instructions from the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) as part of our pre-registration undertaking for a restricted dealer license," a spokesperson for Crypto.com told Decrypt. Canadian users of the exchange were notified about the company's change in policy on Tuesday via email, as images of the delisting notice began to crop on both Reddit and Twitter.

The notice stated Crypto.com's support of Tether will end on Jan. 31, without specifically stating users in Canada would only be affected, prompting confusion on behalf of some on social media. The exchange warned users that all trading, deposits, and withdrawals will not be facilitated after the deadline. "Please take urgent action to review your USDT balance and take necessary action," the notice stated. Any remaining USDT balances would "automatically" be converted to Circle's USD Coin, another stablecoin that tracks the price of the dollar. The exchange also stated the retrieval of USDT deposits made after the deadline may not be possible or warrant some fees.

Academic researchers have discovered serious vulnerabilities in the core of Threema, an instant messenger that its Switzerland-based developer says provides a level of security and privacy "no other chat service" can offer. From a report: Despite the unusually strong claims and two independent security audits Threema has received, the researchers said the flaws completely undermine assurances of confidentiality and authentication that are the cornerstone of any program sold as providing end-to-end encryption, typically abbreviated as E2EE. Threema has more than 10 million users, which include the Swiss government, the Swiss army, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and other politicians in that country. Threema developers advertise it as a more secure alternative to Meta's WhatsApp messenger. It's among the top Android apps for a fee-based category in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Canada, and Australia. The app uses a custom-designed encryption protocol in contravention of established cryptographic norms.

Researchers from the Zurich-based ETH research university reported on Monday that they found seven vulnerabilities in Threema that seriously call into question the true level of security the app has offered over the years. Two of the vulnerabilities require no special access to a Threema server or app to cryptographically impersonate a user. Three vulnerabilities require an attacker to gain access to a Threema server. The remaining two can be exploited when an attacker gains access to an unlocked phone, such as at a border crossing. "In totality, our attacks seriously undermine Threema's security claims," the researchers wrote. "All the attacks can be mitigated, but in some cases, a major redesign is needed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Last month, a young woman went to work at Sarzamineh Shadi, or Land of Happiness, an indoor amusement park east of Iran's capital, Tehran. After a photo of her without a hijab circulated on social media, the amusement park was closed, according to multiple accounts in Iranian media. Prosecutors in Tehran have reportedly opened an investigation. Shuttering a business to force compliance with Iran's strict laws for women's dress is a familiar tactic to Shaparak Shajarizadeh. She stopped wearing a hijab in 2017 because she views it as a symbol of government suppression, and recalls restaurant owners, fearful of authorities, pressuring her to cover her head. But Shajarizadeh, who fled to Canada in 2018 after three arrests for flouting hijab law, worries that women like the amusement park worker may now be targeted with face recognition algorithms as well as by conventional police work.

After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used "to identify inappropriate and unusual movements," including "failure to observe hijab laws." Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said. Two weeks later, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Jina Mahsa Amini died after being taken into custody by Iran's morality police for not wearing a hijab tightly enough. Her death sparked historic protests against women's dress rules, resulting in an estimated 19,000 arrests and more than 500 deaths. Shajarizadeh and others monitoring the ongoing outcry have noticed that some people involved in the protests are confronted by police days after an alleged incident -- including women cited for not wearing a hijab. "Many people haven't been arrested in the streets," she says. "They were arrested at their homes one or two days later."

Although there are other ways women could have been identified, Shajarizadeh and others fear that the pattern indicates face recognition is already in use -- perhaps the first known instance of a government using face recognition to impose dress law on women based on religious belief. Mahsa Alimardani, who researches freedom of expression in Iran at the University of Oxford, has recently heard reports of women in Iran receiving citations in the mail for hijab law violations despite not having had an interaction with a law enforcement officer. Iran's government has spent years building a digital surveillance apparatus, Alimardani says. The country's national identity database, built in 2015, includes biometric data like face scans and is used for national ID cards and to identify people considered dissidents by authorities.

The number of active users on the Mastodon social network has dropped more than 30% since the peak and is continuing a slow decline, according to the latest data posted on its website. There were about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January, down from over 2.5 million in early December. The Guardian reports: Mastodon, an open-source network of largely independently hosted servers, has often been touted as an alternative to Twitter. And its growth appears connected to controversies at Twitter. But for many it doesn't fulfill the role that Twitter did and experts say it may be too complicated to really replace it. [...]

There were about 500,000 active Mastodon users before Elon Musk took control of Twitter at the end of October. By mid-November, that number climbed to almost 2 million active users. [...] The surge in new Mastodon users continued throughout November, peaking at over 130,000 new users a day. The upticks often coincided with controversial decisions made by Elon Musk. Data from Google suggests there was also a surge in searches for Mastodon in April 2022, around the time Musk announced he had become Twitter's largest shareholder.

"Twitter, in its most basic form is simple," Meg Coffey, a social media strategist, said. "You can open up an app or open up a website, type some words, and you're done. I mean, it was [a] basic SMS platform." For many, Mastodon may have proved too hard to port over their communities and was just too complicated. Some may have gone back to Twitter, while others, said Coffey, may have dropped social media entirely. "Everybody went and signed up [on Mastodon] and realized how hard it was, and then got back on Twitter and were like, 'Oh, that's, that's hard. Maybe we won't go there,'" she said. "It's like the people that said 'I'm moving to Canada' when Donald Trump was elected," Coffey added. "They never actually moved to Canada."

Half the planet's glaciers will have melted by 2100 even if humanity sticks to goals set out in the Paris climate agreement, according to research that finds the scale and impacts of glacial loss are greater than previously thought. At least half of that loss will happen in the next 30 years. From a report: Researchers found 49% of glaciers would disappear under the most optimistic scenario of 1.5C of warming. However, if global heating continued under the current scenario of 2.7C of warming, losses would be more significant, with 68% of glaciers disappearing, according to the paper, published in Science. There would be almost no glaciers left in central Europe, western Canada and the US by the end of the next century if this happened.

This will significantly contribute to sea level rise, threaten the supply of water of up to 2 billion people, and increase the risk of natural hazards such as flooding. The study looked at all glacial land ice except for Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. If temperature increases are limited to 1.5C of warming, average sea levels would increase by 90mm (3.5in) from 2015 to 2100, but with 2.7C of warming, glacial melt would lead to around 115mm of sea level rise. These scenarios are up to 23% more than previous models had estimated.

The US has approved use of the world's first vaccine for honey bees. The BBC reports: The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved a conditional license for the vaccine this week, according to the biotech firm behind its development. It was engineered to prevent fatalities from American foulbrood disease, a bacterial condition known to weaken colonies by attacking bee larvae. [...] American foulbrood disease poses a challenge for beekeepers as it is highly contagious and has no cure. The only treatment method requires burning the colony of infected bees along with the hives and equipment and treating nearby colonies with antibiotics.

The new vaccine contains an inactive version of the bacteria that causes American foulbrood disease, Paenibacillus larvae, according to Dalan Animal health. The bacteria are incorporated into royal jelly feed given by worker bees to the queen bee, which then ingests the feed and keeps some of the vaccine in her ovaries, according to the biotech firm, which specializes in insect health and immunology. It says this gives bee larvae immunity to the disease as they hatch and reduces death from the illness. [...] Dalan plans to distribute the vaccine "on a limited basis" to commercial beekeepers and said the product would probably be available for purchase in the US this year.

Qualcomm has announced that its new processors and modems will allow phones to communicate with the Iridium satellite network, letting users send and receive messages even in areas without cell coverage. The Verge reports: The feature, called Snapdragon Satellite, will be available in phones that have both Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor and its X70 Modem system, along with some additional radios. Phones that support it should be "launched in select regions starting in the second half of 2023," according to the company's press release, and there are several manufacturers working on designs, according to Francesco Grilli, a Qualcomm spokesperson who helped conduct a briefing for journalists. For now, the feature will likely only be available in flagship Android phones, as Qualcomm's only including the tech in its premium chips. Companies that want to add it to their phones will work directly with Qualcomm to figure out the software and hardware, but they shouldn't have to build new relationships with Iridium, according to Grilli. To the satellites, phones with the tech will look like any other Iridium-enabled devices. As for who will pay for the messages, "the cost of the satellite-based messaging service and dependent services will depend on OEMs and service providers and how they choose to offer the service," according to Grilli.

At first, Snapdragon Satellite will be limited to use in emergency situations, letting you contact someone for help even if you're in a remote area without cell service. According to Grilli, "Snapdragon Satellite leverages Garmin Response." When you send an SOS, "response coordinators immediately see the customer's Latitude/Longitude in their proprietary mapping and response coordination software to determine the appropriate agency to coordinate the rescue." Qualcomm says that, eventually, it'll support "premium messaging," which will likely cost extra and will have to be implemented by OEMs, cell carriers, or other over-the-top service providers. So far, this isn't something Apple offers; you can only send texts via satellite using its SOS feature.

While Qualcomm says the emergency service will be free or very cheap, it hasn't provided details yet on how much it'll cost you if you just want to be able to text your friends from remote areas, like a hiking trail, ski lift, or even a boat in the middle of the ocean. Once that service becomes available, however, Qualcomm says you'll be able to use it with your regular phone number. (That likely won't be the case for emergency use, but it matters less there.) [...] While details are sparse on what it'll be like to actually send and receive satellite messages, it sounds like the experience will be similar to Apple's in that you'll have to follow instructions on your phone to point it toward a satellite. According to Grilli, your phone will be able to predict where Iridium's satellites are months in advance thanks to the way its constellation orbits the Earth. When you go to connect to one, it'll use GPS and other measurements to determine where you need to be facing...

Parts made by more than a dozen US and Western companies were found inside a single Iranian drone downed in Ukraine last fall, according to a Ukrainian intelligence assessment obtained exclusively by CNN. From the report: The assessment, which was shared with US government officials late last year, illustrates the extent of the problem facing the Biden administration, which has vowed to shut down Iran's production of drones that Russia is launching by the hundreds into Ukraine. CNN reported last month that the White House has created an administration-wide task force to investigate how US and Western-made technology -- ranging from smaller equipment like semiconductors and GPS modules to larger parts like engines -- has ended up in Iranian drones.

Of the 52 components Ukrainians removed from the Iranian Shahed-136 drone, 40 appear to have been manufactured by 13 different American companies, according to the assessment. The remaining 12 components were manufactured by companies in Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan, and China, according to the assessment. The options for combating the issue are limited. The US has for years imposed tough export control restrictions and sanctions to prevent Iran from obtaining high-end materials. Now US officials are looking at enhanced enforcement of those sanctions, encouraging companies to better monitor their own supply chains and, perhaps most importantly, trying to identify the third-party distributors taking these products and re-selling them to bad actors.

Thanks in part to Canada's immigration policies, the tech sector in the Toronto Waterloo Corridor will soon have more workers than the San Francisco Bay area. The Record reports: During 2021, the San Francisco Bay area added 14,000 jobs, increasing total tech employment there to 378,870. During 2021, the Toronto Waterloo Corridor added 88,000 jobs, increasing total tech employment to 313,700. "We are on a tear," said Chris Albinson, the chief executive officer at Communitech. "Canada admitted 400,000 newcomers during the last 12 months, half of them with STEM degrees."

"We are growing 350 per cent faster than Silicon Valley, and sometime in early 2023 there will be more tech workers in the Waterloo Toronto corridor," said Albinson. Communitech will announce a new strategy in mid-January, backed by the federal government, that will help push the size of the tech workforce in the corridor ahead of the Silicon Valley, he added.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command is a US/Canada organization protecting the air sovereignty of the two nations.

But every year on December 24th, they also tell you where Santa is. From NORADSanta.org: The modern tradition of tracking Santa began in 1955 when a young child accidentally dialed the unlisted phone number of the Continental Air Defense Command Operations Center upon seeing an newspaper advertisement telling kids to call Santa. The Director of Operations, Colonel Harry Shoup, answered the phone and instructed his staff to check the radar for indications of Santa making his way south from the North Pole.... Each year since, NORAD has dutifully reported Santa's location on Dec. 24 to millions of children and families across the globe. NORAD receives calls from around the world on Dec. 24 asking for Santa's location. Children, families and fans also keep track of Santa's location on the NORAD Tracks Santa® website and our social media platforms.
The page lists the NORAD technologies involved in tracking Santa — including 47 radar installations and geo-synchronous satellites with infrared heat sensors. ("Rudolph's nose gives off an infrared signature similar to a missile launch...")

And this year NORAD also produced a special video highlighting the various military fleets protecting Santa. ("He may know when you're sleeping, he may know when you're awake... " it tells viewers. "But for 67 years now, when he takes flight, we'll know.")

More from NORADSanta.org: Canadian NORAD fighter pilots, flying the CF-18, take off out of Newfoundland and welcome Santa to North America. Then at numerous locations in Canada other CF-18 fighter pilots escort Santa. While in the United States, American NORAD fighter pilots in either the F-15s, F16s or F-22s get the thrill of flying with Santa and the famous Reindeer...

Q: How can Santa travel the world within 24 hours?

A: NORAD intelligence reports indicate that Santa does not experience time the way we do. His trip seems to take 24 hours to us, but to Santa it might last days, weeks or even months. Santa would not want to rush the important job of delivering presents to children and spreading joy to everyone, so the only logical conclusion is that Santa somehow functions within his own time-space continuum....

How does Santa get down chimneys?

Although NORAD has different hypotheses and theories as to how Santa actually gets down the chimneys, we don't have definitive information to explain the magical phenomenon.

Do your planes ever intercept Santa?

Over the past 65 years, our fighter jets (F-16s, F-15s, F-22s and CF-18s) have intercepted Santa many, many times. When the jets intercept Santa, they tip their wings to say, "Hello Santa! NORAD is tracking you again this year!" Santa always waves. He loves to see the pilots...!

How many people support this effort, and are they active duty military personnel?

More than 1,250 Canadian and American uniformed personnel and DOD civilians volunteer their time on December 24th to answer the thousands of phone calls and emails that flood in from around the world. In addition to the support provided by our corporate contributors to make this program possible, NORAD has two lead project officers who manage the program.

How much money is spent on this project?

The NORAD Tracks Santa program is made possible by volunteers and through the generous support of corporate licensees who bear virtually all of the costs.
Corporate contributors include Microsoft (with separate contributions from Microsoft's search engine Bing and from Microsoft Azure), AWS (and Amazon's Alexa), Verizon, and HP.

NORADSanta.org also boasts extra features like an "arcade" of online games, a jukebox of Christmas tunes, and a library of online books about Santa. And the site even provides some technical data on the weight of Santa's sleigh — although the unit of measurement used is gumdrops.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: European antitrust regulators have opened an in-depth investigation into U.S. chipmaker Broadcom's proposed $61 billion bid for cloud computing company VMware, the European Commission said on Tuesday. "The Commission is particularly concerned that the transaction would allow Broadcom to restrict competition in the market for certain hardware components which interoperate with VMware's software," the Commission said in a statement.

The Commission said its preliminary investigation indicates the transaction may allow Broadcom to restrict competition for the supply of certain components by degrading interoperability between VMware software and competitors' hardware to the benefit of its own hardware. This and other factors could lead to higher prices, lower quality and less innovation for business customers, and ultimately consumers, the Commission said. The Commission now has 90 working days, until May 11, 2023, to take a decision. Broadcom on Tuesday reiterated that it continued to expect the transaction would close in its fiscal year 2023, adding it would continuing to work with the European Commission.

It said it was making progress with regulatory filings around the world, having received legal merger clearance in Brazil, South Africa, and Canada and foreign investment control clearance in Germany, France, Austria, and Italy. "The combination of Broadcom and VMware is about enabling enterprises to accelerate innovation and expand choice by addressing their most complex technology challenges in this multi-cloud era, and we are confident that regulators will see this when they conclude their review," it said in a statement. The proposed acquisition underlines Broadcom's ambition to diversify into enterprise software, but comes as regulators worldwide ramp up scrutiny of deals by Big Tech.