Mastercard will expand its cryptocurrency payment card programme by seeking more partnerships with crypto firms, the company's head of crypto and blockchain said, even as the sector comes under closer scrutiny from regulators and banks grow wary. From a report: Mastercard has already partnered with crypto exchanges including Binance, Nexo and Gemini to offer crypto-linked payment cards in some countries. The Binance cards allow users to make payments in traditional currencies, funded by their cryptocurrency holdings on the exchange. "We have dozens of partners around the world who offer crypto card programmes and they continue to expand," Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard's head of crypto and blockchain, told Reuters on Thursday.

"Providing access to crypto in a safe way is also part of our value proposition and we're continuing to do that." Banks have become wary of crypto clients after a number of big crypto firms collapsed last year, including the bankruptcy of major exchange FTX. Meanwhile, U.S. regulators are increasingly cracking down on what they say is a lack of compliance in the market.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hacker News: Google on Wednesday said it obtained a temporary court order in the U.S. to disrupt the distribution of a Windows-based information-stealing malware called CryptBot and "decelerate" its growth. The tech giant's Mike Trinh and Pierre-Marc Bureau said the efforts are part of steps it takes to "not only hold criminal operators of malware accountable, but also those who profit from its distribution." CryptBot is estimated to have infected over 670,000 computers in 2022 with the goal of stealing sensitive data such as authentication credentials, social media account logins, and cryptocurrency wallets from users of Google Chrome. The harvested data is then exfiltrated to the threat actors, who then sell the data to other attackers for use in data breach campaigns. CryptBot was first discovered in the wild in December 2019.

The malware has been traditionally delivered via maliciously modified versions of legitimate and popular software packages such as Google Earth Pro and Google Chrome that are hosted on fake websites. [...] The major distributors of CryptBot, per Google, are suspected to be operating a "worldwide criminal enterprise" based out of Pakistan. Google said it intends to use the court order, granted by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, to "take down current and future domains that are tied to the distribution of CryptBot," thereby kneecapping the spread of new infections.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Palantir, the company of billionaire Peter Thiel, is launching Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), software meant to run large language models like GPT-4 and alternatives on private networks. In one of its pitch videos, Palantir demos how a military might use AIP to fight a war. In the video, the operator uses a ChatGPT-style chatbot to order drone reconnaissance, generate several plans of attack, and organize the jamming of enemy communications. In Palantir's scenario, a "military operator responsible for monitoring activity within eastern Europe" receives an alert from AIP that an enemy is amassing military equipment near friendly forces. The operator then asks the chatbot to show them more details, gets a little more information, and then asks the AI to guess what the units might be.

"They ask what enemy units are in the region and leverage AI to build out a likely unit formation," the video said. After getting the AI's best guess as to what's going on, the operator then asks the AI to take better pictures. It launches a Reaper MQ-9 drone to take photos and the operator discovers that there's a T-80 tank, a Soviet-era Russia vehicle, near friendly forces. Then the operator asks the robots what to do about it. "The operator uses AIP to generate three possible courses of action to target this enemy equipment," the video said. "Next they use AIP to automatically send these options up the chain of command." The options include attacking the tank with an F-16, long range artillery, or Javelin missiles. According to the video, the AI will even let everyone know if nearby troops have enough Javelins to conduct the mission and automate the jamming systems. [...]

What Palantir is offering is the illusion of safety and control for the Pentagon as it begins to adopt AI. "LLMs and algorithms must be controlled in this highly regulated and sensitive context to ensure that they are used in a legal and ethical way," the pitch said. According to Palantir, this control involves three pillars. The first claim is that AIP will be able to deploy these systems into classified networks and "devices on the tactical edge." It claims it will be able to parse both classified and real-time data in a responsible, legal, and ethical way. According to the video, users will then have control over what every LLM and AI in the Palantir-backed system can do. "AIP's security features what LLMs and AI can and cannot see and what they can and cannot do," the video said. "As operators take action, AIP generates a secure digital record of operations. These capabilities are crucial for mitigating significant legal, regulatory, and ethical risks in sensitive and classified settings.

After security researchers criticized Google for not including end-to-end encryption with Authenticator's account-syncing update, the company announced "plans to offer E2EE" in the future. "Right now, we believe that our current product strikes the right balance for most users and provides significant benefits over offline use," writes Google product manager Christiaan Brand on Twitter. "However, the option to use the app offline will remain an alternative for those who prefer to manage their backup strategy themselves." The Verge reports: Earlier this week, Google Authenticator finally started giving users the option to sync two-factor authentication codes with their Google accounts, making it much easier to sign into accounts on new devices. While this is a welcome change, it also poses some security concerns, as hackers who break into someone's Google account could potentially gain access to a trove of other accounts as a result. If the feature supported E2EE, hackers and other third parties, including Google, wouldn't be able to see this information.

Security researchers Mysk highlighted some of these risks in a post on Twitter, noting that "if there's ever a data breach or if someone obtains access to your Google Account, all of your 2FA secrets would be compromised." They added that Google could potentially use the information linked to your accounts to serve personalized ads and also advised users not to use the syncing feature until it supports E2EE. Brand pushed back against the criticism, stating that while Google encrypts "data in transit, and at rest, across our products, including in Google Authenticator," applying E2EE comes at the "cost of enabling users to get locked out of their own data without recovery."

Crypto exchange Coinbase offered a fiery response on Thursday to last month's Wells notice from the SEC, telling the federal regulator that an enforcement action against the crypto exchange would pose "major programmatic risks" to the SEC that would "fail on the merits." From a report: "Coinbase does not list, clear, or effect trading in securities," the company's response said. The analysis SEC did staffers to justify an enforcement action "appears to rest on superficial and incorrect analogies to products and services offered by others," Coinbase wrote in a blog post from chief legal officer Paul Grewal. Separately, Grewal told CNBC, "At the time when we went public we had detailed discussions with the SEC about the very aspects of our business that are now -- two years later -- the subject of the Wells notice. Nothing has changed."

The SEC indicated to Coinbase in a March wells notice that its spot trading, staking, custody and institutional trading businesses were at risk. The SEC's warning to Coinbase noted that the regulator would allege Coinbase was offering and selling unregistered securities, in violation of federal law. The SEC has used unregistered offering and sale violations to force other crypto exchanges to close services in the U.S., including the crypto exchange Kraken's staking-as-a-service product.

A new set of patches have been released for the Intel Linux graphics driver that "can provide 10-15% better performance when operating in the tuned mode," reports Phoronix. From the report: The set of Intel i915 Linux kernel graphics driver patches are about exposing the Intel RPS (Requested Power State) up/down thresholds. Right now the Intel Linux kernel driver has static values set for the up/down thresholds between power states while these patches would make them dynamically configurable by user-space. Google engineer Syed Faaiz Hussain raised the issue that they experimented with the Intel RPS tuning and were able to manage up to 15% better performance. With Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with OpenGL was a 14.5% boost, CS:GO with Vulkan was 12.9% faster, and Civilization VI with OpenGL was 11% faster while Strange Brigade was unchanged. No other game numbers were provided.

But as this is about changing the threshold for how aggressively the Intel graphics hardware switches power states, the proposed patches leave it up to user-space to adjust the thresholds as they wish. Google engineers are interested in hooking this into Feral's GameMode so that the values could be automatically tuned when launching games and then returning to their former state when done gaming, in order to maximize battery life / power efficiency. The only downside with these current patches are that they work only for non-GuC based platforms... So the latest Alder/Raptor Lake notebooks as well as Intel DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics currently aren't able to make use of this tuning option.

The low-profile firm that has become crucial to a half-trillion-dollar global industry. From a report: In 1984, Martin van den Brink, a young Dutch engineer, joined a newly created venture in a quiet corner of the Netherlands. Little did he know then that about 40 years on the company would be so crucial to the $580 billion semiconductor industry that it would be the epicenter of a US-China chip war. ASML Holding NV, where Van den Brink is now the chief technology officer, practically owns the market for a critical piece of equipment needed to produce the brains of everything that makes modern life possible -- from cars and smartphones to computers, microwaves and airplanes. With the company's high-end machines churning out chips that can also go into state-of-the-art weapons and artificial intelligence devices, ASML is effectively being treated as critical infrastructure for US national security and has become a target of industrial espionage for China. "I never expected to be where we are today," said Van den Brink.

Over his nearly four decades at the company, ASML has gone from a bit player competing with the likes of Nikon, Canon and Ultratech to the world's only maker of very high-end semiconductor lithography equipment. Its ascent has made it Europe's most valuable technology company, with a market capitalization of over $247 billion -- more than twice that of its customer Intel. In an industry where devices typically cost $10 million, ASML commands about $180 million for its current top-end machine. And although the chip market has softened recently, ASML is still growing and its long-term outlook seems intact, thanks to the insatiable demand for computing power.

"This is a company that the world can't exist without," said Jon Bathgate, a fund manager at NZS Capital in Denver, which has about $2 billion under management, with ASML as one of its biggest holdings. "They've got a 20-year head start... Investors have clearly realized how important ASML is as a company and how difficult it would be to replicate. It's a natural monopoly with secular growth winds. That's unique." As chips become for geopolitics in the 21st century what oil was in the last one, ASML's singular success has thrust it squarely in the crosshairs of the intensifying tensions between the US and China. With the US focused on the strategic importance of semiconductors, Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden have done everything to ensure that China is a couple of generations behind in chips. No company is more critical to that effort than ASML.

Microsoft will no longer manufacture mice, keyboards, and webcams that are Microsoft-branded. Instead, Microsoft is now focusing on its Surface-branded PC accessories, which include mice, keyboards, pens, and more. From a report: It brings an end to the legacy of Microsoft-branded PC hardware after the company first launched its first mouse in 1983 and bundled it with Microsoft Word and Notepad. "Going forward, we are focusing on our Windows PC accessories portfolio under the Surface brand," says Dan Laycock, senior communications manager at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. "We will continue to offer a range of Surface branded PC Accessories -- including mice, keyboards, pens, docks, adaptive accessories, and more. Existing Microsoft branded PC accessories like mice, keyboards, and webcams will continue to be sold in existing markets at existing sell-in prices while supplies last."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Imgur, a popular photo-uploading service that has been informally tied to Reddit since its 2009 founding, will remove two types of content from its platform starting next month: explicit or pornographic imagery, and images uploaded anonymously -- the latter with a lean on unused images, according to the company. While technically banned from Imgur for years through its community rules, adult content hasn't been actively removed (and is incredibly popular). Until now.

The move is also going to be disastrous for the continuity of the internet. Like Photobucket before it, Imgur has been widely used to host millions of photos that are linked to, embedded, or used elsewhere, and lots of these photos were uploaded by people who didn't bother to sign up for accounts. Imgur is especially popular as a host for Reddit, meaning the content of those old posts could suddenly disappear off the internet. The move will likely also break embeds in various forum posts and blog posts all over the internet, creating an unpleasant form of link rot. (The Archive Team, generally a harbinger of shuttering sites, is working on backing up this material, according to an announcement on Reddit.)

Intellectual property laws cannot handle possibility artificial intelligence could invent things on its own. From a report: When members of the US supreme court refused this week to hear a groundbreaking case that sought to have an artificial intelligence system named as the inventor on a patent, it appeared to lay to rest a controversial idea that could have transformed the intellectual property field. The justices' decision, in the case of Thaler vs Vidal, leaves in place two lower court rulings that only "natural persons" can be awarded patents. The decision dealt a blow to claims that intelligent machines are already matching human creativity in important areas of the economy and deserve similar protections for their ideas. But while the court's decision blocked a potentially radical extension of patent rights, it has done nothing to calm growing worries that AI is threatening to upend other aspects of intellectual property law.

The US Patent and Trademark Office opened hearings on the issue this week, drawing warnings that AI-fuelled inventions might stretch existing understandings of how the patent system works and lead to a barrage of litigation. The flurry of concern has been prompted by the rapid rise of generative AI. Though known mainly from OpenAI's ChatGPT, the same technology is already being used to design semiconductors and suggest ideas for new molecules that might form the basis of useful drugs. For now, such uses of AI do not appear to pose a serious challenge to the patent system since the technology is being used as a tool to help humans shape ideas rather than operating independently, said Chris Morgan, an IP partner at law firm Reed Smith. However, referring to the possibility that AI systems might one day come up with inventions on their own, she added: "Our laws are not equipped, the way they're written right now, to handle that scenario."

Brave browser: Every Web search result seen in Brave Search is now served by our own index. We've removed all search API calls to Bing, which previously represented about 7% of query results.

Meta sees "an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful," CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors Wednesday. From a report: While he was vague about how exactly Meta will add generative AI to its apps, Zuckerberg gave the most detailed preview yet during the company's earnings call for the first quarter of this year, when it reported $28.6 billion in revenue and a record 2 billion daily users of the Facebook app, beating Wall Street's estimates. Meta's profit for the quarter was $5.7 billion, a 24 percent decrease from the same time last year. "We're exploring chat experiences in WhatsApp and Messenger, visual creation tools for posts in Facebook and Instagram and ads, and over time video and multi-modal experiences as well," Zuckerberg said on the earnings call. "I expect that these tools will be valuable for everyone from regular people to creators to businesses. For example, I expect that a lot of interest in AI agents for business messaging and customer support will come once we nail that experience. Over time, this will extend to our work on the metaverse, too, where people will much more easily be able to create avatars, objects, worlds, and code to tie all of them together."

The European Commission proposed rules on Thursday to govern patents increasingly in demand for technologies used in smart devices such as drones, connected cars and mobile phones, to try to reduce litigation. From a report: The Commission said the system for what are known as standard-essential patents (SEPs), was fragmented, lacked transparency, led to lengthy disputes and that self-regulation had not worked. SEPs protect technology such as for 5G, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth that is needed by equipment producers to comply with international standards.

According to a recent Twitter post from Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, the robotaxi service is now operating all day in San Francisco. The post says we will soon see Cruise "open up full operations in other cities," which may soon include Dallas, Texas, according to a recent job listing. From the report: According to a recent LinkedIn post from Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, the robotaxi network is now running 24/7 rides across San Francisco, beginning with employees. As The Kilowatts points out on Twitter, nonemployees in the San Francisco area are still limited to about one-third of the city between f 10:00 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. In his post, Vogt said that in accordance with safety policies, around-the-clock public rides will roll out "very soon."

Cruise is a robotaxi startup founded in the San Francisco Bay area in 2013. In the last decade, the company (along with plenty of support from GM) has made tremendous progress in its home state of California, where it continues to try and expand. Services that began in San Francisco have since grown to Phoenix, Arizona, and, most recently, Austin, Texas. In February, the Cruise president, CEO, and cofounder, Kyle Vogt, shared that the company had surpassed one million miles driven without anyone behind the wheel. In many ways, the city by the bay has become a proving ground for Cruise's electric robotaxis, and its hilly, congested terrain will act as a testing site for yet another major milestone -- around-the-clock robotaxi operations.

According to The Verge, Amazon is shuttering its health-focused Halo division. All three Halo products will be discontinued and portions of the Halo team will be laid off. From the report: "We have made the difficult decision to wind down the Halo program, which will result in role reductions," Melissa Cha, Amazon's VP of smart home and health, told staffers in an email obtained by The Verge. "More recently, Halo has faced significant headwinds, including an increasingly crowded segment and an uncertain economic environment. Although our customers love many aspects of Halo, we must prioritize resources and maximize benefits to customers and the long-term health of the business."

"We continually evaluate the progress and potential of our products to deliver customer value, and we regularly make adjustments based on those assessments," Amazon spokesperson Kristy Schmidt told The Verge in an email. "We recently made the difficult decision to stop supporting Amazon Halo effective July 31, 2023. We are incredibly proud of the invention and hard work that went into building Halo on behalf of our customers, and our priorities are taking care of our customers and supporting our employees." The company says it will refund customers who bought a Halo devices or accessory band in the last 12 months. "All unused prepaid Halo subscription fees will be refunded, and users will no longer be charged," adds The Verge. Early adopters, like myself, are out of luck.

In related news, Amazon kicked off another round of layoffs today, impacting its cloud computing and human resources divisions.

In its first-quarter earnings report today, Meta said its virtual reality and augmented reality unit, Reality Labs, recorded a $3.99 billion operating loss. The unit generated just $339 million in revenue. CNBC reports: The numbers show a slowdown from last quarter, when Reality Labs lost $4.28 billion on $727 million of revenue. For all of last year, Reality Labs recorded an operating loss of $13.72 billion on $2.16 billion in sales, underscoring how VR and AR technologies have yet to reach the mainstream. Despite Reality Labs' operating loss, Meta posted first-quarter net earnings of $5.71 billion, or $2.20 a share, with revenue up less than 3% to $28.65 billion from $27.91 billion a year ago. This sent its stock soaring more than 10% in extended trading Wednesday.

"Facebook had 2.04 billion daily active users, up 5% from a year ago, and the 'family' of Meta apps -- which includes Instagram -- reported daily active users of 3.02 billion, up 4%," adds MarketWatch.

Corrections systems are using simulators to provide incarcerated individuals with more lifelike instruction. But is it working? From a report: Atorrus Rainer, 41, is standing in the center of a stuffy room wearing a virtual-reality headset. Every so often, he extends his arm, using the VR controller to pick up garbage bags, a toothbrush, and toilet paper during a simulated trip to the supermarket. The self-checkout station overwhelms him: those didn't exist in 2001, when Rainer, then a teenager, was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison. His first experience with one is this virtual interaction taking place inside Fremont Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison about two hours south of Denver. Rainer is practicing in the hopes of stepping into a real store in the near future through an initiative launched in Colorado in 2017 in response to US Supreme Court rulings that deemed juvenile life without parole sentences unconstitutional. People who meet certain requirements -- for example, if they were under 21 when they committed felony crimes and have been incarcerated for a minimum of 20 to 30 years -- can apply to work through the three-year Juveniles and Young Adults Convicted as Adults Program (JYACAP) in an effort to earn early parole.

The premise of JYACAP is that learning the basic skills they missed the chance to acquire while incarcerated will provide these juvenile lifers with their best chances for success upon release. That's a formidable challenge. Because of safety concerns, they have had limited access to the internet. Though they're now adults, many have never used, or even seen, a smartphone or a laptop. Or had a credit card. "We had to figure out a way of giving them these opportunities in a restricted environment," says Melissa Smith, interim director of prisons for the Colorado Department of Corrections. Though its use is not yet widespread, a handful of state corrections departments, from Ohio to New Mexico, have turned to virtual reality as an answer. The goals vary from helping reduce aggressive behavior to facilitating empathy with victims to, as in Colorado's case, reducing recidivism. Though the state's prison budget sits close to $1 billion, Colorado has one of the worst return-to-prison rates in the country, at around 50%. Nationally, as many as two-thirds of the 600,000 people released from state and federal prisons each year will be rearrested within three years.

Brazilian court has ordered the nationwide suspension of the Telegram messaging app due to its parent company's failure to provide data on neo-Nazis operating on the platform, imposing a daily fine of approximately $198,000 until compliance is met. The action was taken as part of an investigation into neo-Nazi activity on social networks.

Agence France-Presse first reported the news.

SpaceX and Rogers Communications struck a deal for satellite phone service in Canada -- a bid to bring emergency service to remote areas of the vast country that can't be reached through conventional wireless networks. From a report: The companies will use SpaceX's Starlink low-earth orbit satellites and begin with text service before adding voice and data coverage later, Rogers said in a statement. It didn't give a launch date for the new service. "In the future, these investments will deliver wireless connectivity, including access to 911, to even the most remote areas," Rogers Chief Executive Officer Tony Staffieri said in a statement. Staffieri was due to speak about the arrangement during his speech at the company's annual meeting on Wednesday.

5G technology has brought faster connections, better gadgets -- and a measure of disappointment from people with expectations of something closer to world-changing technology. But just wait, mobile companies are saying: The next upgrade will gin up enthusiasm for advances still to come. From a report: This next iteration of 5G, which the mobile companies are calling "5G Advanced" or "5.5G," is expected to be rolled out by around 2025. For consumers, the upgrades may bring faster connection speeds -- something that many parts of the world need. But everyday users may not see many more applications than that, say experts and industry officials. The real advance is that the technology will finally help facilitate more of the far-fetched business applications that 5G initially promised, like self-driving cars, autonomous drones and self-operating factories.

The forthcoming upgrades underscore a reality for many 5G users so far: Beyond faster connection speeds, it hasn't made a huge difference in their day-to-day lives. 5.5G may not either. With 5.5G, "for you or me using their phone, you won't necessarily notice a huge difference," says Patrick Filkins, a research manager at International Data Corp. who tracks the internet-of-things and telecommunications-infrastructure markets.