An anonymous reader shares a report from Tom's Hardware: According to the PC Security Channel (via TechSpot), Microsoft's Windows 11 sends data not only to the Redmond, Washington-based software giant, but also to multiple third parties. To analyze DNS traffic generated by a freshly installed copy of Windows 11 on a brand-new notebook, the PC Security Channel used the Wireshark network protocol analyzer that reveals precisely what is happening on a network. The results were astounding enough for the YouTube channel to call Microsoft's Windows 11 "spyware."

As it turned out, an all-new Windows 11 PC that was never used to browse the Internet contacted not only Windows Update, MSN and Bing servers, but also Steam, McAfee, geo.prod.do, and Comscore ScorecardResearch.com. Apparently, the latest operating system from Microsoft collected and sent telemetry data to various market research companies, advertising services, and the like.
When Tom's Hardware contacted Microsoft, their spokesperson argued that flowing data is common in modern operating systems "to help them remain secure, up to date, and keep the system working as anticipated."

"We are committed to transparency and regularly publish information about the data we collect to empower customers to be more informed about their privacy."

CNN reports: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Saturday that an "unidentified object" had been shot down by a U.S. fighter jet over Canadian airspace on his orders.... "Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object," Trudeau said on Twitter....

A statement from Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said the object shot down on Saturday was first noticed over Alaska on Friday evening. Two F-22 fighter jets "monitored the object" with the help of the Alaska Air National Guard, Ryder's statement said, "tracking it closely and taking time to characterize the nature of the object."

"Monitoring continued today as the object crossed into Canadian airspace, with Canadian CF-18 and CP-140 aircraft joining the formation to further assess the object. A U.S. F-22 shot down the object in Canadian territory using an AIM 9X missile," his statement added....

It is not clear what the object is or whether it is related to the spy balloon shot down last week or the unidentified object shot down over Alaska on Friday.
"Saturday's incident follows the downing of another unidentified object on Friday over Alaska, and the shoot-down of a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4 by a US F-22 fighter jet."

Last year Redwood Materials announced a new program recycling EV batteries (including partnerships with Ford and Volvo). Now Politico reports that America's Department of Energy tentatively awarded them a $2 billion loan, "which the company says will allow it to produce enough battery materials to enable the production of more than a million electric vehicles a year." The Nevada-based company said it plans to ultimately ramp up to producing 100 gigawatt-hours annually of ultra-thin battery-grade materials from both new and recycled sources in the United States for the first time." Redwood founder CEO JB Straubel, who previously worked at Tesla, said at an event announcing the loan that he had a "front row seat" while at the Elon Musk-helmed electric vehicle maker to "some of the bigger challenges the the entire industry would face as it scales," particularly around the battery materials supply chain. "It was somewhat clear even way back then, eight years ago, that this would be a really big bottleneck for the entire industry as it scaled," Straubel said....

Redwood plans to manufacture battery anodes, containing copper and graphite, and cathodes, containing all the critical metals in a battery — like lithium, nickel, and cobalt — amounting to nearly 80 percent of the materials cost of a lithium-ion battery.
A Detroit newspaper reports Ford will also announce plans Monday to help build a $2.5 billion electric-vehicle battery plant in Michigan.

In fact, this year in America some electric cars could become "as cheap as or cheaper than cars with internal combustion engines," reports the New York Times — specifically because of "increased competition, government incentives and falling prices for lithium and other battery materials."

After Google's AI-powered chatbot Bard committed a factual error in a promotional video, Google's parent company Alphabet "lost $100 billion in market value," NPR reported Thursday morning:

"Social media users quickly pointed out that the company could've fact-checked the exoplanet claim by, well, Googling it." The ad aired just hours before Google's senior executives touted Bard as the future of the company at a launch event in Paris. By Wednesday, Alphabet shares had slid as much as 9% during trading hours, balancing out by the day's close.

Meanwhile, shares for Microsoft, Google's rival, rose by 3%....

Google did not respond to NPR's request for comment. In a Monday blog post, CEO Sundar Pichai said Bard will be available exclusively to "trusted testers" before releasing the engine publicly in the coming weeks.
NPR published its article after Alphabet's stock had fallen roughly $6.77 on Wednesday — a drop of about 6.3%. But by Friday it had dropped another 5.4%, for a three-day drop of around 11.5%.

An anonymous officer writes in an opinion piece via Military.com: It was the "reply-all" heard around the world. Around 06:30 Eastern time Feb. 2, approximately 13,000 Army inboxes pinged with an email from an unfamiliar sender. It was from a U.S. Army captain, asking to be removed from a distribution list. It initially seemed as though some unfortunate soul had inadvertently hit "reply-all" and made an embarrassing mistake. What followed can really be described only as professional anarchy, as thousands of inboxes became buried in an avalanche of email replies. Someone appears to have unwittingly edited an email distribution list, entitled "FA57 Voluntary Transfer Incentive Program," routing replies back to the entire list.

Most Army officers receive emails from human resources managers from time to time, usually sent using the blind copy (BCC) address line with replies routed to specific inboxes, preventing someone from accidentally triggering the mayhem that unfolded Feb. 2. The voluntary incentive program list, however, hadn't been so prudently designed and, in addition to 13,000 Army captains and some newly promoted majors, a single chief warrant officer, a Space Force captain and a specialist began to have their inboxes groan under the weight of inbound traffic. Within a few short hours of the initial email, predictable hilarity ensued. Hundreds of Army captains were sending emails asking to be removed from the distro list. In short order, hundreds of other captains replied, demanding that everyone stop hitting "reply-all" and berating their peers' professionalism (oblivious to the fact that they were also part of the problem). Many others found humor in the event, writing poems, sending memes and adding snarky comments to the growing dumpster fire. Before long, the ever-popular U.S. Army WTF! Moments Facebook page picked up on the mayhem and posted one of the memes that had been circulating in the email thread.

By 7 p.m. Eastern time, more than 1,000 emails had been blasted out to this massive group of Army officers. Those in different time zones (like Hawaii) came into work and were quickly overwhelmed by the deluge of emails clogging their inboxes. Some of the humorless officers resorted to typing in all caps "PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM THIS DISTRO," prompting at least two to three sarcastic replies in return. Other captains took the opportunity to blast out helpful (or not so helpful) instructions on how to properly create email sorting rules in Outlook. A few intrepid officers tried to Rickroll everyone, and one even wrote new lyrics to the tune of an Eminem song. A particularly funny officer wrote a Nigerian prince scheme email and blasted it out to the group. Eventually, someone created and shared a Microsoft Teams group to move the devolving conversation to a new forum, quickly amassing more than 1,700 members. What started off as a gloriously chaotic email chain quickly turned into one the largest and most successful professional networking opportunities most of us have ever seen. Officers from multiple branches and functional areas across the globe took to the Microsoft Teams page, sharing useful products, making professional connections, and generally raising everyone's esprit de corps. The group's creator even started a petition to promote the one specialist who was inadvertently added to the distro list.

Russ Cox, a Google software engineer steering the development of the open source Go programming language, has presented a possible plan to implement telemetry in the Go toolchain. However many in the Go community object because the plan calls for telemetry by default. The Register reports: These alarmed developers would prefer an opt-in rather than an opt-out regime, a position the Go team rejects because it would ensure low adoption and would reduce the amount of telemetry data received to the point it would be of little value. Cox's proposal summarized lengthier documentation in three blog posts.

Telemetry, as Cox describes it, involves software sending data from Go software to a server to provide information about which functions are being used and how the software is performing. He argues it is beneficial for open source projects to have that information to guide development. And the absence of telemetry data, he contends, makes it more difficult for project maintainers to understand what's important, what's working, and to prioritize changes, thereby making maintainer burnout more likely. But such is Google's reputation these days that many considering the proposal have doubts, despite the fact that the data collection contemplated involves measuring the usage of language features and language performance. The proposal isn't about the sort of sensitive personal data vacuumed up by Google's ad-focused groups. "Now you guys want to introduce telemetry into your programming language?" IT consultant Jacob Weisz said. "This is how you drive off any person who even considered giving your project a chance despite the warning signs. Please don't do this, and please issue a public apology for even proposing it. Please leave a blast radius around this idea wide enough that nobody even suggests trying to do this again."

He added: "Trust in Google's behavior is at an all time low, and moves like this are a choice to shove what's left of it off the edge of a cliff."

Meanwhile, former Google cryptographer and current open source maintainer Filippo Valsorda said in a post to Mastodon: "This is a large unconventional design, there are a lot of tradeoffs worth discussing and details to explore," he wrote. "When Russ showed it to me I made at least a dozen suggestions and many got implemented."

"Instead: all opt-out telemetry is unethical; Google is evil; this is not needed. No one even argued why publishing any of this data could be a problem."

According to CNBC, the United States is placing sanctions on six Chinese tech companies for supporting spy balloon programs that have spanned more than 40 countries. The development comes less than a week after the U.S. military used fighter jets to shoot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon along the South Carolina coast. From the report: "The Commerce Department will not hesitate to use the Entity List and our other regulatory and enforcement tools to protect U.S. national security and sovereignty," said Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves. "The Entity List is a powerful tool for identifying and cutting off actors that seek to use their access to global markets to do harm and threaten American national security. We will not hesitate to use the Entity List and our other regulatory and enforcement tools to protect U.S. national security." Earlier today, a U.S. military F-22 shot down a second "high altitude object" in American airspace over Alaska.

"We're calling this an object because that's the best description we have right now," said White House spokesman John Kirby. He also said U.S. officials did not yet know which nation or group was responsible for it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Why does Thunderbird look so old?" That's one of the most frequently asked questions about Thunderbird, according to Thunderbird Project Design Manager Alessandro Castellani (along with "Is Thunderbird dead?"). And it's one he seeks to answer definitively in a new blog post about Thunderbird's planned 2023 release, codenamed Supernova.

The Supernova release will include an overhaul of Thunderbird's user interface. Castellani didn't share screenshots, but he indicated that the new UI would be "simple and clean" and targeted mostly at new users. For "veteran users," the interface will also be "flexible and adaptable" so that people who prefer the way Thunderbird looks now can "maintain that familiarity they love." Supernova will also include several other big changes, including a redesigned calendar and support for Firefox Sync.

Generative AI models such as ChatGPT will slow down market share gains and deflate pricing for Indian IT companies in the short term, analysts at J.P.Morgan said on Friday. From a report: As generative AI is implemented more broadly, consulting firms like Accenture and Deloitte and will gain market share over Indian IT firms like Infosys and Wipro in the near term, analysts at the brokerage said in a note to clients. Generative AI can be a "deflation driver" in the near term on legacy services as they compete on pricing, necessitate staff retraining and drive loss of competitiveness, they added.

"ChatGPT is likely to deflate legacy services the most and application services the least." Artificial intelligence company OpenAI's chatbot has dazzled amateurs and industry experts with its ability to spit out haikus, debug code and answer questions while imitating human speech, helping it attract a $10 billion investment from Microsoft earlier this month.

The Pentagon downed an unidentified object over Alaska on Thursday night at the order of President Biden, according to a U.S. official. From a report: The U.S. official said it was not confirmed if the object was a balloon, but it was traveling at an altitude that made it a potential threat to civilian aircraft. Mr. Biden ordered the unidentified object downed "out of an abundance of caution," the official said. The action comes less than a week after a U.S. fighter jet shot down a Chinese spy balloon that had traversed the United States, according to three American officials. The latest breach, officials said, took place Thursday night, over Alaska. One official described it as a "fast-moving" situation that was still developing. It is not clear if the object was from an adversarial power, or a commercial or research operation that has gone astray, the official said.

A monthslong leak investigation by Meta has uncovered the source behind renders of the company's unannounced VR headsets that were published last year by a YouTuber named Brad Lynch. From a report: Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth shared the news earlier this week with employees in an internal post seen by The Verge. He said Meta has cut ties with the leaker, who I'm told was a third-party contractor and asked Lynch for revenue share from the YouTube ads running against his videos. In his post to Meta employees, Bosworth confirmed that the unnamed leaker was paid a small sum for sharing the materials with Lynch.

Creators like Lynch aren't beholden to the rules of newsrooms like The Verge, which doesn't allow its reporters to send or receive payment in exchange for information. When I asked Lynch for comment, he didn't deny that he shared money from the ads on his YouTube channel with his source. "They might have asked because I wasn't willing to give much money up front," he said. "I'm just one guy who loves VR and just enjoys talking with industry friends and reporting what I hear. And I'm definitely not getting rich from it."

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., intends to make his focus in the current Congress a legislative package aimed at protecting children online -- including by setting the age threshold to be on social media at 16. From a report: In an interview with NBC News, Hawley detailed some top lines of what his agenda will include, such as:

1. Mandating social media companies verify the age of their users.
2. Providing parents a right to demand that tech companies delete their kids' data.
3. Commissioning a wide-ranging congressional mental-health study on the impact social media has on children.

"For me, this is about protecting kids, protecting their mental health, protecting their safety," Hawley said. "There's ample evidence to this effect that big tech companies put their profits ahead of protecting kids online." Since his election to the Senate in 2018, Hawley has made scrutinizing the tech industry core to his political brand and has pushed for breaking up the tech giants and curtailing the reach of TikTok.

China has cut its participation in an internet cable project to link Asia with Europe, as tensions grow between Washington and Beijing over control of the physical infrastructure that transmits the world's online traffic. From a report: Two of China's biggest telecoms groups, China Telecom and China Mobile, withdrew their combined investment of roughly 20 per cent from the subsea cable project last year after a US company was selected to build the line over Hengtong Marine, the country's biggest provider in the sector, according to three people briefed on the decision.

Their exit from the Sea-Me-We 6 pipeline -- which is estimated to cost around $500mn to lay 19,200km of cables connecting south-east Asia to western Europe -- highlights the growing battle between China and the US over who builds and owns the infrastructure underpinning the global internet. The departure of China Mobile and China Telecom is an indication of intensifying tensions between Washington and Beijing, according to industry figures with knowledge of the project. Another member of the consortium described their involvement as "important but not critical."

Microsoft, implementing the layoff of 10,000 workers announced last month, on Thursday cut jobs in units including Surface devices, HoloLens mixed reality hardware and Xbox, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Cuts to much of the HoloLens hardware team throw into question whether the company will produce a third iteration of the goggles outside of a planned version for the US Army, said the people, who declined to be named discussing confidential matters. At the Xbox gaming unit, reductions came in marketing and the Xbox Gaming Ecosystem, one of the people said.

Xbox Chief Phil Spencer emailed employees Thursday to let them know about the cuts without detailing what parts of his business were impacted. "I encourage everyone to take the time and space necessary to process these changes and support your colleagues," Spencer wrote in the email, which was seen by Bloomberg.

Hester Peirce of the Securities and Exchange Commission publicly rebuked her agency's crypto enforcement, calling it "paternalistic and lazy" and asking if a "hostile" regulator is the best solution for the industry. From a report: Peirce, who was appointed to her post as commissioner by President Donald Trump in 2018, wrote in a statement on Thursday that she disagreed with the SEC's assertion that the shutdown of crypto exchange Kraken's staking program was a "win for investors." The SEC action against Kraken, which was settled without an admission or denial of wrongdoing, alleged that the exchange engaged in the unregistered offer and sale of securities through its crypto lending platform. Peirce said that's not the primary issue.

"Whether one agrees with that analysis or not, a more fundamental question is whether SEC registration would have been possible," Peirce wrote. "In the current climate, crypto-related offerings are not making it through the SEC's registration pipeline." Without directly mentioning SEC chair Gary Gensler, Peirce took aim at what Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong described on Wednesday night as the SEC's "regulation by enforcement." Added Peirce, "using enforcement actions to tell people what the law is in an emerging industry is not an efficient or fair way of regulating."

"Most concerning, though, is that our solution to a failure to register violation is to shut down entirely a program that has served people well," she wrote. "However, whether we need a uniform regulatory solution and if that regulatory solution is best provided by a regulator that is hostile to crypto, in the form of an enforcement action, is less clear."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Last summer, 1,704 TikTok accounts made a coordinated and covert effort to influence public discourse about the war in Ukraine, the company said on Thursday. Nearly all the accounts were part of a single network operating out of Russia that pretended to be based in Europe and aimed its posts at Germans, Italians and Britons, the company said. The accounts used software to use local languages that amplified pro-Russia propaganda, attracting more than 133,000 followers before being discovered and removed by TikTok.

TikTok disclosed the networks on Thursday in an in-depth report that examined its handling of disinformation in Europe, where it has more than 100 million users, noting that conflict in Ukraine "challenged us to confront a complex and rapidly changing environment." The social media platform compiled the findings to comply with the European Union's voluntaryCode of Practice on Disinformation, which counts Google, Meta and Twitter among its other signatories. TikTok offered the detailed look into its operations as it tried to demonstrate its openness in the face of continued regulatory scrutiny over its data security and privacy practices.

As a newer platform, TikTok is "in a unique position to innovate in the search for solutions to these longstanding industry challenges," Caroline Greer, Tiktok's director of public policy and government relations, said in a blog post on Thursday. The company did not say whether the accounts had ties to the Russian government. In its report, covering mid-June through mid-December 2022, TikTok said it took down more than 36,500 videos, with 183.4 million views, across Europe because they violated TikTok's harmful misinformation policy. The company removed nearly 865,000 fake accounts, with more than 18 million followers between them (including 2.3 million in Spain and 2.2 million in France). There were nearly 500 accounts taken down in Poland alone under TikTok's policy banning impersonation. Early in the fighting in Ukraine last year, the company said, it noticed a sharp rise in attempts to post ads related to political and combat content, even though TikTok does not allow such advertising. Some of the actions TikTok took to combat this misinformation include:

- started blocking Ukrainian and Russian advertisers from targeting European users
- hired native Russian and Ukrainian speakers to help with content moderation
- worked with Ukrainian-speaking reporters on fact-checking
- created a digital literacy program focused on information about the war
- restricted access to content from media outlets associated with the Russian government
- expanded its use of labels identifying state-sponsored material
- stopped recommending livestreamed videos coming from Russia and Ukraine to European users

"Wherever you live, you should be paying attention to Utah Senate Bill 152 and the somewhat similar House Bill 311," writes tech journalist and long-time child safety advocate Larry Magid in an op-ed via the Mercury News. "Even though it's legislation for a single state, it could set a dangerous precedent and make it harder to pass and enforce sensible federal legislation that truly would protect children and other users of connected technology." From the report: SB 152 would require parents to provide their government-issued ID and physical address in order for their child or teenager to access social media. But even if you like those provisions, this bill would require everyone -- including adults -- to submit government-issued ID to sign up for a social media account, including not just sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, but also video sharing sites like YouTube, which is commonly used by schools. The bill even bans minors from being online between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m., empowering the government to usurp the rights of parents to supervise and manage teens' screen time. Should it be illegal for teens to get up early to finish their homework (often requiring access to YouTube or other social media) or perhaps access information that would help them do early morning chores? Parents -- not the state -- should be making and enforcing their family's schedule.

I oppose these bills from my perch as a long-time child safety advocate (I wrote "Child Safety on the Information Highway" in 1994 for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and am currently CEO of ConnectSafely.org). However well-intentioned, they could increase risk and deny basic rights to children and adults. SB 152 would require companies to keep a "record of any submissions provided under the requirements," which means there would not only be databases of all social media users, but also of users under 18, which could be hacked by criminals or foreign governments seeking information on Utah children and adults. And, in case you think that's impossible, there was a breach in 2006 of a database of children that was mandated by the State of Utah to protect them from sites that displayed or promoted pornography, alcohol, tobacco and gambling. No one expects a data breach, but they happen on a regular basis. There is also the issue of privacy. Social media is both media and speech, and some social media are frequented by people who might not want employers, family members, law enforcement or the government to know what information they're consuming. Whatever their interests, people should have the right to at least anonymously consume information or express their opinions. This should apply to everyone, regardless of who they are, what they believe or what they're interested in. [...]

It's important to always look at the potential unintended consequences of legislation. I'm sure the lawmakers in Utah who are backing this bill have the best interests of children in mind. But this wouldn't be the first law designed to protect children that actually puts them at risk or violates adult rights in the name of child protection. I applaud any policymaker who wants to find ways to protect kids and hold technology companies accountable for doing their part to protect privacy and security as well as employing best-practices when it comes to the mental health and well being of children. But the legislation, whether coming from Utah, another state or Washington, D.C., must be sensible, workable, constitutional and balanced, so it at the very least, does more good than harm.

Yahoo plans to lay off more than 20% of its total workforce as part of a major restructuring of its ad tech unit, executives told Axios. The cuts will impact more than 50% of Yahoo's ad tech employees -- more than 1,600 people. Axios reports: In an interview, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone stressed that the layoffs are not attributable to financial challenges, but rather, strategic changes to the company's Yahoo for Business advertising unit, which is not profitable. These changes will be "tremendously beneficial for the profitability of Yahoo overall," he said, which will allow the company "to go on offense" and invest more in other parts of its business that are profitable. Yahoo as a whole is profitable and brings in roughly $8 billion in annual revenue, Axios has reported.

Roughly 1,000 positions will be eliminated Thursday, representing 12% of the total planned cuts at Yahoo. The remaining 8% or more of cuts will occur in the second half of this year. Lanzone said he couldn't provide the exact number of future cuts, but confirmed that the total number of layoffs would amount to more than 50% of the ad tech unit's current staff, and more than 20% of Yahoo's current staff.

As part of the changes, Yahoo will shut down a part of its advertising business called its SSP, or supply-side platform, which helps digital publishers sell automated ads against their content. It will also shut down its native advertising platform, called Gemini, and instead will leverage its newly-formed partnership with ad tech giant Taboola to sell native advertising on its own content instead. By moving to Taboola, Yahoo will be able to increase the number of advertisers competing for ad placements on Yahoo properties by 8x, Lanzone said. The company is opting to shut down the SSP business instead of selling it, in part because it didn't want to be locked into a post-sale agreement where it would be forced to use its SSP exclusively, Lanzone said. Working with many different SSPs will help Yahoo optimize its ad revenue.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon's Kuiper division can start launching satellites to offer broadband service in the US, the Federal Communications Commission said yesterday. The FCC's International Bureau approved Kuiper's orbital debris mitigation plan. This approval was needed to satisfy a condition imposed in 2020 when the Amazon subsidiary received tentative approval for a network of 3,236 satellites in low-Earth orbit. "Our action will allow Kuiper to begin deployment of its constellation in order to bring high-speed broadband connectivity to customers around the world," yesterday's FCC order said.

Amazon's biggest competitor for low-latency satellite broadband will be SpaceX's Starlink service, but Amazon's launch schedule puts it a few years behind SpaceX. The companies have fought each other in FCC proceedings, with Amazon objecting to SpaceX's satellite plans and SpaceX filing objections to Amazon's. In approving Amazon's plan yesterday, the FCC dismissed objections from other satellite providers such as SpaceX and Viasat. As the FCC order notes, SpaceX argued that the commission "should limit Kuiper to deploy only 578 satellites in its 630 kilometer orbital shell, and defer action regarding the remainder of the constellation," in order to "address Kuiper's ability to coexist with other systems in and around its 590 kilometer and 610 kilometer shells, and allow for 'continued monitoring' of deployment." A Space filing last month said, "Granting an initial 578 satellites of Amazon's 3,236-satellite system would offer Amazon a path to begin deploying for 'many months,' while providing the Commission with time and additional data to assess the serious issues raised in this proceeding." [...]

According to the FCC, SpaceX also argued "that Kuiper's satellite disposal strategy will place the Kuiper satellites in an elliptical orbit that, because of the variable effects of atmospheric drag on orbit evolution, will result in large uncertainties in the predicted trajectories of the Kuiper satellites, making it difficult for other operators to assess and mitigate risk." SpaceX contended that "the large covariances involved in the elliptical orbits may therefore pose a risk to SpaceX's satellites operating at the same altitudes during their orbit raising phase of operations." However, Kuiper responded that it "will perform orbit determination using Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements on all Kuiper satellites during the deorbiting process and share high-accuracy location information with operators on a real-time basis." The FCC accepted that plan and imposed it as a condition on the license. SpaceX and Viasat both "raised concerns that Kuiper's satellite designs are not sufficiently finalized to enable review," but Amazon said the design is complete and that it doesn't expect material changes, the FCC order said. Kuiper would have to apply for a license modification if it does make significant changes.

GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij said in a message to employees Thursday that the company is reducing headcount by 7%, or about 130 positions. From a report: "The current macroeconomic environment is tough, and as a result, companies are still spending but they are taking a more conservative approach to software investments and are taking more time to make purchasing decisions," Sijbrandij said in his message to employees. GitLab had 1,860 employees according to PitchBook data.