T-Mobile may be joining rivals Verizon and AT&T by introducing an $35 charge for all new postpaid activations and upgrades, according to The T-Mo Report and some Redditors. Engadget: According to T-Mobile internal documents, it's introducing a "Device Connection Charge" for "all activations and upgrades for mobile, Beyond the Smartphone and broadband devices." Before, the Uncarrier charged activation fees only if you received in-store customer support for new activations, with online orders exempt. Now, all new postpaid activations are charged, whether or not you were assisted. This includes updating to a new device, adding a Bring-Your-Own-Device line, or ordering a Home Internet line, according to The T-Mo Report. T-Mobile has always tried to separate itself from regular telecoms, but charging customers for essentially nothing doesn't sound very Uncarrier-like, if the reports are accurate. And you can't take your business to Sprint, as it no longer exists thanks to its merger with T-Mobile. When that deal was finalized, T-Mobile said things would be "better for customers," but constant activation charges would definitely not be better.

Much of the Windows world has yet to adopt Microsoft's latest desktop operating system more than a year after it launched, according to figures for October collated by Statcounter. From a report: Just 15.44 percent of PCs across the globe have installed Windows 11, meaning it gained 1.83 percentage points in a month. This compares to the 71.29 percent running Windows 10, which fell marginally from 71.88 percent in September. Windows 7 is still hanging on with a tenuous grip, in third place with 9.61 percent, Windows 8.1 in fourth with 2.45 percent, plain old Windows 8 with 0.69 percent, and bless its heart, Windows XP with 0.39 percent because of your extended family. In total, Windows has almost 76 percent of the global desktop OS market followed by OS X with 15.7 percent and Linux with 2.6 percent. Android comprised 42.37 percent of total operating system market share, with Windows trailing on 30.11 percent, iOS on 17.6 percent, OS X on 6.24 percent, and Linux on 1.04 percent.

States are shoring up expertise in high-speed internet networks by creating or expanding broadband offices to prepare for an influx of infrastructure cash. Ensuring that more than $40 billion in new funding connects every American to high-speed internet service is a job that's falling to the states -- and they need help. From a report: Of all the job openings posted for states' burgeoning broadband offices, the "director" position is the most common vacancy, according to data The Pew Charitable Trusts shared with Axios. Directors are often responsible for crafting state broadband plans and overseeing hundreds of millions in funding from multiple state and federal programs. The Pew tracker found 15 director-level positions posted, out of about 68 total positions since September 2021. Washington, Colorado, and Maine had the most job postings. The Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program (BEAD), funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law, will provide $42.45 billion to expand high-speed internet access by funding planning, infrastructure deployment and adoption programs in all 50 states, D.C., Puerto Rico and U.S. territories.

Faraday Future burned through cash and board seats while its founder fought for control. From a report: The image arrived in Susan Swenson's inbox on a Wednesday evening. Her corporate headshot had been crudely crossed out in digital red ink, and the word "Kill" was written in the bottom left corner. In the hours that followed, some of her colleagues received similar threats, including messages that referenced the recent assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. The menacing emails marked the apex of a months-long fight for control over Faraday Future Intelligent Electric, a Los Angeles, California-based publicly traded electric vehicle startup that once billed itself as the next Tesla. In September, after the death threats, persistent pressure from Faraday's largest shareholders, and a surprising cameo from property giant China Evergrande, Swenson, the executive chair, and three others agreed to leave Faraday's board of directors in a sweeping restructuring.

While it's not known who sent the death threats -- the company has referred them to the FBI -- some leaders inside Faraday believe they were inspired by the boardroom fight recently waged by its largest shareholders, including a group that is partially managed by the startup's founder, exiled Chinese tycoon Jia Yueting. Seven months ago, Faraday's board sidelined Jia, who goes by YT, following an internal probe that examined his influence over day-to-day operations, as well as a series of loans employees made to the startup over the years. Now, he stands to benefit greatly from the impending board shakeup, which will be completed when Faraday holds its delayed annual meeting. He has been named an adviser to the board, and FF Global will have input on all six new members. As Faraday put it in a recent SEC filing, "YT Jia and FF Global have strengthened their already significant influence over the Company." But as YT reclaims power, it is over a company that's under investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in relation to the findings of the internal probe -- information the Department of Justice has inquired about, too, according to Faraday. The startup also needs money, fast. After burning through more than $3 billion since it launched eight years ago, Faraday reported just $27 million in cash on Oct. 25th, and says it needs millions more if it hopes to finally ship its elusive SUV.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Google is preparing to shut down the dedicated Street View app on Android, keeping the feature in Google Maps. Google's Street View is an easy way to get a 360-degree look at almost any given street on the planet, perfect for getting a sense of your next travel destination or simply exploring the world from the comfort of home. While the Google Maps app has long offered an easy way to hop into Street View, there has also been a dedicated Street View app on Android and iOS.

This standalone app served two distinct groups of people -- those who wanted to deeply browse Street View and those who wanted to contribute their own 360 imagery. Considering the more popular Google Maps app has Street View support and Google offers a "Street View Studio" web app for contributors, it should be no surprise to learn that the company is now preparing to shut down the Street View app.

In the latest update, version 2.0.0.484371618, Google has prepared a handful of deprecation/shutdown notices for the Street View app. These notices are not yet visible in the app today, but our team managed to enable them. In the notice, Google confirms that the Street View app is set to shut down on March 31, 2023, encouraging users to switch to either Google Maps or Street View Studio. However, one feature that is being fully shut down with the Street View app's demise is that of "Photo Paths." First launched last year, Photo Paths were intended as a way to let nearly anyone with a smartphone contribute simple 2D photos of a road or path that had not yet been documented by Street View. Unlike every other feature of the Street View app, there is no replacement for Photo Paths on the web app or Google Maps app.

The Chinese Navy could finally use lithium technology to replace the lead-acid batteries that are now used in its fleet of conventional submarines. Interesting Engineering reports: Since lithium batteries had a higher risk of catching fire or exploding, the navy was hesitant to replace the submarine fleet's current batteries with them. But, "after solving these problems, the replacement of lead-acid batteries with lithium batteries in conventional submarines is just around the corner," said Wang Feng, study lead and a submarine designer. The study claims that technical answers have been discovered through significant testing and development in China's electric car sector, and lithium batteries have been demonstrated to operate safely under difficult circumstances. The modifications could considerably improve a submarine's capacity for survival and battle, according to research that was released on October 15 in the peer-reviewed Chinese journal Marine Electric and Electronic Engineering.

For more than a decade, the Chinese military has planned to replace the lead-acid batteries in its fleet of conventional submarines with lithium technology. The lead-acid batteries on these submarines, which have not seen significant development since World War II, have proved problematic due to their poor energy storage capacity, delayed charging, limited power output, short lifespan, and harmful gas leaks, according to the paper. Nickel and cobalt, which are added to batteries to increase performance, were a contributing factor to mishaps; however, some Chinese battery manufacturers have begun using iron and phosphate in their place recently.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Darin Fisher has built a lot of web browsers. A lot of web browsers. He was a software engineer at Netscape early in his career, working on Navigator and then helping turn that app into Firefox with Mozilla. Then, he went to Google and spent 16 years building Chrome and ChromeOS into massively successful products. Last year, he left Google for Neeva, where he worked on ways to build a browser around the startup's search engine. And now, he's leaving Neeva to join The Browser Company and work on Arc, one of the hottest new browsers on the market. Arc, which has been in an invite-only beta for more than a year, is trying to rethink the whole browser UI. It has a sidebar instead of a row of tabs, offers a lot of personalization options, and is meant for people who live their computing life in a browser (which is increasingly most people). CEO Josh Miller often talks about building "the internet computer," too, and using the browser as a way to make the internet more useful.

Fisher has been an advisor to The Browser Company for a while, but Monday is his first official day at the company as a software engineer. Ahead of his new gig, Fisher and I got on a call to talk about why he thinks browsers are due for a reinvention -- and why he thinks a startup is the best place to do it. The answer starts with the browser's defining feature: tabs. Fisher doesn't hate tabs -- in fact, he helped popularize them. But he hates that using a modern browser involves opening a million of them, not being able to find them again, and eventually just giving up and starting all over again. "I remember when tabbed browsing was novel," Fisher says, "and helped people feel less cluttered because you don't have as many windows." But now, "even when I use Chrome," Fisher says, "I get a bunch of clutter. At some point, I just say, 'Forget it, I'm not even going to bother trying to sort through all these tabs. If it's important, I'll open it again.'" Browsers need better systems for helping you manage tabs, not just open more of them.

The best way to improve the browser, Fisher ultimately decided, is to just start from scratch. Arc is full of new ideas about how web browsers can work: it combines bookmarks and tabs into one app switcher-like concept; it makes it easy to search among your open tabs; it has built-in tools for taking notes and making shareable mini websites. The experience can be jarring because it's so different, but Fisher says that's part of what he's excited about. "This is not stuff people haven't talked about before," he says, "but actually putting it together and focusing on it and thinking about the small steps that go a long way, I think that's where there's so much opportunity." Fisher likes to compare a browser to an operating system, which matches with The Browser Company's idea that Arc isn't just a browser but rather an iOS-like system for the open web. "It has task management UI, it has UI for creating and starting a journey, but there's so much more in between," he says. What the iPhone did for native apps, Arc hopes to do for web apps. Fisher says he's interested in improving the way files move around the internet, for instance, finding a better way than the constant downloading and uploading we all do all day. He likes that Arc has a picture-in-picture mode that works by default, pulling your YouTube video out when you switch tabs. All these make the web feel more connected and cohesive rather than just a bunch of tabs in a horizontal line. The Browser Company also plans to reinvent the internet browser for mobile, too. On mobile, in particular, he says, "there are so many opportunities because the starting point is so archaic."

"He's vague on the details of his plans -- and The Browser Company hasn't really started working on a mobile browser yet anyway -- but says that's a big focus for him going forward," adds The Verge.

Tumblr has made an update it hinted at in September, changing its rules to allow nudity -- but not sexually explicit images -- on the platform. The Verge reports: The company updated its community guidelines earlier today, laying out a set of rules that stops short of its earlier permissive attitude toward sexuality but that formally allows a wider range of imagery. "We now welcome a broader range of expression, creativity, and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form (yes, that includes the naked human form). So, even if your creations contain nudity, mature subject matter, or sexual themes, you can now share them on Tumblr using the appropriate Community Label," the post says. "Visual depictions of sexually explicit acts remain off-limits on Tumblr."

A help center post and the community guidelines offer a little more detail. They say that "text, images, and videos that contain nudity, offensive language, sexual themes, or mature subject matter" is allowed on Tumblr, but "visual depictions of sexually explicit acts (or content with an overt focus on genitalia)" aren't. There's an exception for "historically significant art that you may find in a mainstream museum and which depicts sex acts -- such as from India's Sunga Empire," although it must be labeled with a mature content or "sexual themes" tag so that users can filter it from their dashboards.

"Nudity and other kinds of adult material are generally welcome. We're not here to judge your art, we just ask that you add a Community Label to your mature content so that people can choose to filter it out of their Dashboard if they prefer," say the community guidelines. However, users can't post links or ads to "adult-oriented affiliate networks," they can't advertise "escort or erotic services," and they can't post content that "promotes pedophilia," including "sexually suggestive" content with images of children. On December 17th, 2018, Tumblr permanently banned adult content from its platform. The site was owned by Verizon at the time and later sold to WordPress.com owner Automattic, which largely maintained the ban "in large part because internet infrastructure services -- like payment processors and Apple's iOS App Store -- typically frown on explicit adult content," reports The Verge.

Charter is raising prices on Spectrum home Internet service by $5 a month starting today, a company spokesperson confirmed to Ars. Standalone broadband prices are rising to $79.99 a month for 300Mbps download speeds, $99.99 a month for 500Mbps, and $119.99 a month for 1Gbps. 300Mbps is the advertised download speed for Charter's entry-level tier. From a report: The price increase takes effect today in most of Charter's 41-state territory, the company said. It affects broadband-only customers and broadband users who also subscribe to a Spectrum streaming TV package, but not cable TV customers. "The price for Spectrum Internet reflects the cost of delivering the best value in broadband for your family: 300Mbps starting speeds with no modem fees, data caps or contracts," the company said. Charter also said this is its first price increase on standalone broadband since December 2020. Customers currently on a promotional rate will keep paying that rate until the promotion expires. They'll pay the new, higher regular rate after that.

US financial institutions spent nearly $1.2 billion on likely ransomware-related payments last year, most commonly in response to breaches originating with Russian criminal groups, according to the Treasury Department. From a report: The payments more than doubled from 2020, underscoring the pernicious damage that ransomware continues to wreak on the private sector. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, said its analysis "indicates that ransomware continues to pose a significant threat to U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, businesses and the public." Financial institutions filed 1,489 incidents related to ransomware in 2021, up from 487 the year before, according to data collected under the Bank Secrecy Act. FinCEN's analysis included extortion amounts, attempted transactions and payments that were unpaid. FinCEN said the top five highest-grossing ransomware variants from the second half of 2021 are connected to Russian cybercriminals. The damage from Russian-related ransomware during that period totaled more than $219 million, according to the data.

The Council on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) should take action to ban TikTok, Brendan Carr, one of five commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission, told Axios in an interview. From the report: "I don't believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban," Carr said, citing recent revelations about how TikTok and ByteDance handle U.S. user data. Carr highlighted concerns about U.S. data flowing back to China and the risk of a state actor using TikTok to covertly influence political processes in the United States. There simply isn't "a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it's not finding its way back into the hands of the [Chinese Communist Party]," Carr said. Carr sent letters to Apple and Google in June asking the companies to remove the apps from their stores due to concerns about data flowing back to China.

Google Hangouts is scheduled for death today. The phone app has been individually booting people off the service since July, but the last vestiges of Hangouts, the web app, will be shut down today. From a report: For a brief period, Hangouts was Google's best, most ambitious, most popular messaging effort, but 5 billion downloads later, Google is moving on. Hangout's next of kin, Google Chat, should have all of your messages and contacts automatically imported by now, but the new service is a mere shadow of the original plan for Hangouts. The closing of Hangouts is the latest chapter in the mess that is Google's messaging history. Google Talk launched 17 years ago, and Google still doesn't have a competitive message platform. Part of the reason we're on Google's umpteenth messaging app is that there is no solid, stable home for messaging inside Google.

Google's rolling out a handful of new shopping features that should make it easier to find good deals directly from search. When you search for a product, Google will now surface results with coupon codes that you can copy and paste during checkout. From a report: Any products with a coupon available will have a new "Special Offer" badge in the top-left corner of their thumbnail. Google previously only labeled products when they were on sale or when their price dropped, but this new badge makes it more obvious when coupons are available. The search giant's launching this feature on desktop and mobile within the "coming weeks."

In addition to adding clippable coupons to Google search, Google's introducing a way to compare deals side by side on mobile starting later this month. Instead of showing you a mishmash of products when you search for an item, it'll start grouping any products on sale in a "deals" category that you can expand and browse directly in your search results. It's also bringing price insights, which Google already offers in its Shopping tab, to search. This means you'll start seeing relevant information about a product's price history, such as when it was at its lowest and where, when browsing through results.

A study published last week in the scientific journal Nature Energy studied the effects of traffic and travel time in a city when micromobility options like electric scooters and e-bikes are banned. The results documented exactly how much traffic increased as a result of people switching back to personal cars instead of smaller, more urban-appropriate vehicles. Electrek reports: The study, titled "Impacts of micromobility on car displacement with evidence from a natural experiment and geofencing policy," was performed using data collected in Atlanta. The study was made possible due to the city's sudden ban on shared micromobility devices at night. That ban provided a unique opportunity to compare traffic levels and travel times before and after the policy change. The ban occurred on August 9, 2019, and restricted use of shared e-bikes and e-scooters in the city between the hours of 9 p.m. and 4 a.m. The study's authors used high-resolution data from June 25, 2019, to September 22, 2019, from Uber Movement to measure changes in evening travel times before and after the policy implementation. That created a window of analysis of 45 days with and without shared e-bike and e-scooter use at night.

The study found that on average, travel times for car trips in Atlanta during evening hours increased between 9.9-10.7% immediately following the ban on shared micromobility. For an average commuter in Atlanta, that translated to an extra 2-5 minutes per evening trip. The authors also concluded that the impact on commute times would likely be higher in other cities across the country. According the study, "based on the estimated US average commute time of 27.6 minutes in 2019, the results from our natural experiment imply a 17.4% increase in travel time nationally."

The study went on to consider the economic impact of that added congestion and increased travel time. [...] The economic impact on the city of Atlanta was calculated at US $4.9 million. The study estimated this impact on the national level could be in the range of US $408M to $573 million. Interestingly, the entirety of the study's data comes from before the COVID-19 pandemic, which played a major role in promoting the use of shared micromobility. A similar study performed today could find an even greater impact on congestion, travel times, and economic impact on cities.

Following yesterday's article about Google Chrome preparing to deprecate the JPEG-XL image format, a Google engineer has now provided their reasons for dropping this next-generation image format. Phoronix reports: As noted yesterday, a patch is pending for the Google Chrome/Chromium browser to deprecate the still-experimental (behind a feature flag) JPEG-XL image format support from their web browser. The patch marks Chrome 110 and later as deprecating JPEG-XL image support. No reasoning was provided for this deprecation, which is odd considering JPEG-XL is still very young in its lifecycle and has been receiving growing industry interest and support.

Now this evening is a comment from a Google engineer on the Chromium JPEG-XL issue tracker with their expressed reasons: "Thank you everyone for your comments and feedback regarding JPEG XL. We will be removing the JPEG XL code and flag from Chromium for the following reasons:

- Experimental flags and code should not remain indefinitely
- There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL
- The new image format does not bring sufficient incremental benefits over existing formats to warrant enabling it by default
- By removing the flag and the code in M110, it reduces the maintenance burden and allows us to focus on improving existing formats in Chrome"

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an article written by The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf: Thinking of my earliest trips to restaurants, in the 1980s, I faintly remember waiters taking my grandfather's credit card and using a manual flatbed imprinter to make an impression of its raised numbers. My nephew, born early in the coronavirus pandemic, may come of age with similar memories of physical menus as a childhood relic. Recalling them dimly when a dining scene in an old movie jogs his memory, he might ask, "Why did they stop using those?" If that happens, I'll recount the pestilence that raged as he entered the world; the shutdown of bars and restaurants; the push to reopen in the summer of 2020; the persistent if mistaken belief that high-touch surfaces, like restaurant menus, would be a meaningful vector of infection; the counsel of the CDC that July. "Avoid using or sharing items that are reusable, such as menus," the federal agency advised (PDF). "Use disposable or digital menus."

The QR-code menu -- which you access by scanning a black-and-white square with your smartphone -- has taken off ever since. It may dominate going forward. But I hope not, because I detest those digital menus. Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I'll be for heaven if I'm lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist. In that better future, where old-school menus endure, I'll go to my urn happy that coming generations will still begin meals meeting one another's eyes across a table instead of staring at a screen. QR-code menus are not really an advance. Even when everything goes just right -- when everyone's phone battery is charged, when the Wi-Fi is strong enough to connect, when the link works -- they force a distraction that lingers through dessert and digestifs. "You may just be checking to see what you want your next drink to be," Jaya Saxena observed in Eater late last year, "but from there it's easy to start checking texts and emails." And wasn't it already too easy? Friedersdorf cites the 2018 study "Smartphone Use Undermines Enjoyment of Face-to-Face Social Interactions," where social-psychology researcher Ryan Dwyer and his colleagues randomly assigned some people to keep their phone out when dining with friends and others to put it away. What they found was that groups assigned to use their phones "enjoyed the experience less than groups that did not use their phones, primarily due to the fact that participants with phones were more distracted."

He also notes the privacy concerns related to QR-code menus. Many of the codes "are actually generated by a different company that collects, uses, and then often shares your personal information, " the ACLU has warned. "In fact, companies that provide QR codes to restaurants like to brag about all the personal information you are sharing along with that food order: your location, your demographics such as gender and age group, and other information about you and your behavior."

In closing, Friedersdorf writes: "[...] I hope that, rather than remembering the pandemic as a tipping point in the digitization of restaurants and bars, we instead look back on its aftermath as the moment when an ever more atomized society better understood the high costs of social isolation, felt new urgency to counteract it, and settled on analog mealtime norms as an especially vital place to focus."

"What if three times every day society was oriented toward replenishing what is growing more absent from the rest of our waking hours: undistracted human interactions unmediated by technology?"

The social media platform Discord recently published its quarterly safety report which notes that some 55,573,411 accounts and 68,379 servers were "disabled" between January and June, 2022. From a report: According to the company, the vast majority of these were taken offline for "spam or spam-related offenses." The number of accounts that were disabled for reasons other than spam definitely pales in comparison, amounting to a mere 1,821,721. The bans in this category were mostly handed out for issues relating to "child safety" or "exploitative and unsolicited content." Discord seems to be justified in disabling these accounts and closing the affected servers, at least broadly speaking. Successful appeals came to only two percent in the first quarter and less than one percent in the second quarter of this year, meaning that of the 235,945 users who called for a second opinion about their ban, only 3,098 of them were reinstated on the platform.

TuSimple, a self-driving trucking company, said Monday it had fired its chief executive and co-founder, Xiaodi Hou. From a report: The San Diego-based company said in a news release and securities filing that its board of directors on Sunday had ousted Mr. Hou, who was also the board chairman and chief technology officer. Mr. Hou was fired in connection with a continuing investigation by members of the board, the release said. That review "led the board to conclude that a change of Chief Executive Officer was necessary," the company said in the release.

The securities filing said that the board's investigation found that TuSimple this year shared confidential information with Hydron, a trucking startup with operations mostly in China and funded by Chinese investors. The filing also said that TuSimple's decision to share the confidential information hadn't been disclosed to the board before TuSimple entered into a business deal with Hydron. TuSimple said it didn't know whether Hydron shared, or publicly disclosed, the confidential information, the securities filing said. WSJ, reporting on Sunday: TuSimple faces federal investigations into whether it improperly financed and transferred technology to a Chinese startup, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The people said the concurrent probes by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Securities and Exchange Commission and Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., known as Cfius, are examining TuSimple's relationship with Hydron, a startup that says it is developing autonomous hydrogen-powered trucks and is led by one of TuSimple's co-founders.

Investigators at the FBI and SEC are looking at whether TuSimple and its executives -- principally Chief Executive Xiaodi Hou -- breached fiduciary duties and securities laws by failing to properly disclose the relationship, the people familiar with the matter said. They are also probing whether TuSimple shared with Hydron intellectual property developed in the U.S. and whether that action defrauded TuSimple investors by sending valuable technology to an overseas adversary, the people said.

A new art exhibition in San Francisco showcases some of the unique ways that artists have begun to incorporate Dall-E 2, GPT-3 and other AI systems into their work -- efforts that go well beyond just typing some text and seeing what pops out. From a report: The exhibit, "Artificial Imagination," comes amid a broad debate over the legal and artistic merits of AI-created art, as well as concerns that more powerful computers could take jobs away from humans. "Artificial Imagination" includes a range of work, from videos to still images and sculpture. While many of the pieces used Dall-E 2 to help generate images, others took a different approach. Alexander Reben, for example, used text generated by GPT-3 and then built his interpretation of the computer's description. The artists and curators said the exhibition, believed to be the first of its kind, is an important recognition that AI art is indeed art.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will launch the pilot for a central-bank-backed digital rupee for the wholesale segment on Nov. 1, it said on Monday, identifying nine banks, including top lender State Bank of India, to participate in the project. From a report: The pilot's use case will be to settle secondary market transactions in government securities, with the e-rupee expected to make the interbank market more efficient, the RBI said in a statement. Settlements in central bank digital currency would reduce transaction costs, the RBI added. Besides SBI, the pilot will include Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, IDFC First Bank and HSBC, the RBI said.