All new vehicles purchased in New York will need to be zero-emission models beginning in 2035, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) announced on Thursday. From a report: "We're really putting our foot down on the accelerator and revving up our efforts to make sure we have this transition -- not someday in the future, but on a specific date, a specific year -- by the year 2035," Hochul said at a press conference in White Plains, N.Y. After careening into the Chester-Maple Parking Lot in a white Chevy Bolt, Hochul announced a series of new electric vehicle (EV) initiatives for the state, beginning with the zero-emission requirement for 2035. To reach this target, she said that 35 percent of new cars will need to be zero-emission by 2026 and 68 percent by 2030.

All new school buses purchased will have to be zero-emission by 2027, with the entire fleet meeting these standards by 2035, according to the governor. "We actually have benchmarks to achieve, to show we're on the path to get there," Hochul said, stressing that the changes would not occur suddenly. New York is following in the footsteps of California in mandating zero-emissions vehicles by the year 2035. "We had to wait for California to take a step because there's some federal requirements that California had to go first -- that's the only time we're letting them go first," the governor said.

Google is shutting down Stadia, its cloud gaming service. From a report: The service will remain live for players until January 18th, 2023. Google will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store as well as all the games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store. Google expects those refunds will be completed in mid-January. "A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia," Stadia vice president and GM Phil Harrison said in a blog post. "And while Stadia's approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected so we've made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service." Employees on the Stadia team will be distributed to other parts of the company. Harrison says Google sees opportunities to apply Stadia's technology to other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play, and its AR efforts, and the company also plans to "make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed," he wrote.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Questions about what's going on with Microsoft's support of the predictive SwifKey keyboard app for iOS have been bubbling up over the past few weeks. A Reddit thread from a month ago highlighted the lack of updates to the app for more than a year. When a reader asked recently for an update on the situation, I asked Microsoft. The official word is in. On September 28, a spokesperson emailed the following statement, attributable to Chris Wolfe, Director Product Management at SwiftKey: "As of October 5, support for SwiftKey iOS will end and it will be delisted from the Apple App Store. Microsoft will continue support for SwiftKey Android as well as the underlying technology that powers the Windows touch keyboard. For those customers who have SwiftKey installed on iOS, it will continue to work until it is manually uninstalled or a user gets a new device. Please visit Support.SwiftKey.com for more information." I asked for the official reason why Microsoft had made this decision and was told officials had nothing more to say.

A third-party Instagram app, called "The OG App," which promised an ad-free feed more like the original Instagram experience, has been pulled from Apple's App Store just one day after it officially launched. It's not clear if Apple pulled the app at the request of Meta, but the social network confirmed it had taken "enforcement actions" against the service. From a report: "This app violates our policies and we're taking all appropriate enforcement actions," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. The spokesperson declined to elaborate on what those actions were, or if it had been in contact with Apple, but pointed to a blog post outlining Meta's policies barring clone sites. "A clone site is a third-party site that duplicates, in whole or in part, the content of an existing site," Meta explains. On Twitter, the developers of The OG App said their entire team had been permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram as a result of their ties to the service.

Google is making it easier to find search results from Reddit and other forum sites. Engadget reports: The search engine is adding a new module that will surface discussions happening on forums across the web for queries that may benefit from crowd-sourced answers. The "discussions and forums" module will surface relevant posts from sites like Reddit and Quora alongside more traditional search results. It's not clear exactly how Google is determining what types of searches are best suited to forum posts. The company says the new "forum" results will "appear when you search for something that might benefit from the diverse personal experiences found in online discussions."

Google is also adding a new feature to news-related searches that will make it easier to browse international headlines that are published in languages other than English. With the change, news-related searches will also turn up relevant local coverage translated by Google. In other Google Search-related news, the company announced that starting today people in the U.S. will be able to use their new "Results About You" feature, "which aims to provide a simpler way for people to get their sensitive personal information out of the company's search results," reports Gizmodo. "Next year, Results About You will become proactive and allow users to opt in to alerts when new personal information related to them appears in search results, enabling users to request removal more quickly."

A prototype all-electric passenger plane took off for the first time yesterday in a test flight that marks a significant milestone for carbon pollution-free aviation. The Verge reports: The nine-passenger commuter aircraft called Alice took off at 7:10AM yesterday from Washington state's Grant County International Airport. Alice is ahead of much of the pack when it comes to all-electric aircraft under development. It could become the "first all-new, all-electric commercial airplane" if the Federal Aviation Administration certifies it to carry passengers, The Seattle Times reports.

Alice's maker, Washington state-based company Eviation, is targeting commuter and cargo flights between 150 and 250 miles. That's like flying from New York City to Boston or from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Yesterday's test flight lasted just eight minutes, though, with the aircraft reaching an altitude of 3,500 feet. The purpose of the flight was to gather data to improve the design of the plane, which still has a long way to go before it can take off with passengers on board. Alice will eventually come in three configurations: a nine-passenger commuter plane, a six-passenger luxury plane, and an e-cargo version. The limited size has to do with battery capacity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google Fiber is touting a test that delivered 20Gbps download speeds to a house in Kansas City, calling it a milestone on the path to offering 100Gbps symmetrical Internet. The company said it will also offer new multi-gigabit tiers in the near future. "We used to get asked, 'who needs a gig?' Today it's no longer a question," Google Fiber CEO Dinni Jain wrote in a blog post yesterday. "Every major provider in the US seems to have now gotten the gigabit memo, and it's only going up from there -- some providers are already offering 2, 5, 8, even 10 Gig products."

The Alphabet division recently began selling 2Gbps download speeds with 1Gbps uploads for $100, alongside its longstanding offer of symmetrical 1Gbps speeds for $70 a month. "In the coming months, we'll have announcements to dramatically expand our multi-gigabit tiers. These will be critical milestones on our journey to 100 Gig symmetrical Internet," Jain wrote. Google Fiber is "closer than you might think" to that goal, Jain wrote. "This month, we took our testing out of the lab and into the home, starting with our first trusted tester, Nick Saporito, the Head of Commercial Strategy for GFiber." Jain provided a screenshot from a test at Saporito's home in Kansas City showing 20.2Gbps download speeds. [...] The screenshot doesn't show upload speeds. The municipal broadband provider EPB in Chattanooga, Tennessee, recently launched a symmetrical 25Gbps service, notes Ars, but its costs "$1,500 per month for residential customers and $12,500 a month for business customers."

Trading volumes in nonfungible tokens -- digital art and collectibles recorded on blockchains -- have tumbled 97% from a record high in January this year. From a report: They slid to just $466 million in September from $17 billion at the start of 2022, according to data from Dune Analytics. The fading NFT mania is part of a wider, $2 trillion wipeout in the crypto sector as rapidly tightening monetary policy starves speculative assets of investment flows.

US regulators reached settlements with a dozen banks in a sprawling probe into how global financial firms failed to monitor employees' communications on unauthorized messaging apps, bringing total penalties in the matter to more than $2 billion. From a report: The Securities and Exchange Commission announced $1.1 billion in fines and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission disclosed $710 million in penalties in separate statements Tuesday. Those levies -- against firms including Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs Group -- combined with JPMorgan Chase's $200 million in fines from December, bring the total to $2.01 billion, making them the biggest penalties ever against US banks for record-keeping lapses.

"Finance, ultimately, depends on trust. By failing to honor their record-keeping and books-and-records obligations, the market participants we have charged today have failed to maintain that trust," SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in the agency's statement. "As technology changes, it's even more important that registrants appropriately conduct their communications about business matters within only official channels, and they must maintain and preserve those communications."

The head of WhatsApp has warned UK ministers that moves to undermine encryption in a relaunched online safety bill would threaten the security of the government's own communications and embolden authoritarian regimes. From a report: In an interview with the Financial Times, Will Cathcart, who runs the Meta-owned messaging app, insisted that alternative techniques were available to protect children using WhatsApp, without having to abandon the underlying security technology that safeguards its more than 2bn users. The UK's bill, which the government argues will make the internet safer, has become a focus of global debate over whether companies such as Google, Meta and Twitter should be forced to proactively scan and remove harmful content on their networks.

Tech companies claim it is not technically possible for encrypted messaging apps to scan for material such as child pornography without undermining the security of the entire network, which prevents anyone -- including platform operators -- from reading users' messages. Cathcart said the UK's ultimate position on the issue would have a global impact. "If the UK decides that it is OK for a government to get rid of encryption, there are governments all around the world that will do exactly the same thing, where liberal democracy is not as strong, where there are different concerns that really implicate deep-seated human rights," he said, citing Hong Kong as a potential example.

Ahead of its Connect conference in October, Cloudflare this week announced an ambitious new project called Turnstile, which seeks to do away with the CAPTCHAs used throughout the web to verify people are who they say they are. From a report: Available to site owners at no charge, Cloudflare customers or no, Turnstile chooses from a rotating suite of "browser challenges" to check that visitors to a webpage aren't, in fact, bots. CAPTCHAs, the challenge-response tests most of us have encountered when filling out forms, have been around for decades, and they've been relatively successfully at keeping bot traffic at bay. But the rise of cheap labor, bugs in various CAPTCHA flavors and automated solvers have begun to poke holes in the system. Several websites offer human- and AI-backed CAPTCHA-solving services for as low as $0.50 per thousand solved CAPTCHAs, and some researchers claim AI-based attacks can successfully solve CAPTCHAs used by the world's most popular websites.

Cloudflare itself was once a CAPTCHA user. But according to CTO John Graham-Cumming, the company was never quite satisfied with it -- if Cloudflare's public rallying cries hadn't made that clear. In a conversation with TechCrunch, Graham-Cumming listed what he sees as the many downsides of CAPTCHA technology, including poor accessibility (visual disabilities can make it impossible to solve a CAPTCHA), cultural bias (CAPTCHAs assume familiarity with objects like U.S. taxis) and the strains that CAPTCHAs place on mobile data plans. [...] Turnstile automatically chooses a browser challenge based on "telemetry and client behavior exhibited during a session," Cloudflare says, rather than factors like login cookies. After running non-interactive JavaScript challenges to gather signals about the visitor and browser environment and using AI models to detect features and visitors who've passed a challenge before, Turnstile fine-tunes the difficulty of the challenge to the specific request -- avoiding having users solve a puzzle.

An anonymous reader shares a report:Since the research lab OpenAI debuted the latest version of DALL-E in April, the AI has dazzled the public, attracting digital artists, graphic designers, early adopters, and anyone in search of online distraction. The ability to create original, sometimes accurate, and occasionally inspired images from any spur-of-the-moment phrase, like a conversational Photoshop, has startled even jaded internet users with how quickly AI has progressed. Five months later, 1.5 million users are generating 2 million images a day. On Wednesday, OpenAI said it will remove its waitlist for DALL-E, giving anyone immediate access.

The introduction of DALL-E has triggered an explosion of text-to-image generators. Google and Meta quickly revealed that they had each been developing similar systems, but said their models weren't ready for the public. Rival start-ups soon went public, including Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, which created the image that sparked controversy in August when it won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair.

Apple has removed the iOS apps belonging to VK, the technology conglomerate behind Russia's version of Facebook called VKontakte, from its App Store globally. From a report: In a translated statement on its website, VK said that its apps "are blocked by Apple" but that it will "continue to develop and support iOS applications." In response to an inquiry by The Verge, Apple spokesperson Adam Dema confirmed that VK's apps have been removed and its developer accounts shut down.

"These apps are being distributed by developers majority-owned or majority-controlled by one or more parties sanctioned by the UK government," Dema said in a statement. "In order to comply with these sanctions, Apple terminated the developer accounts associated with these apps, and the apps cannot be downloaded from any App Store, regardless of location. Users who have already downloaded these apps may continue to use them."

The U.S. Transportation Department on Tuesday said it approved electric vehicle charging station plans for all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico covering roughly 75,000 miles of highways. CNBC reports: Earlier this year, the Biden administration allocated $5 billion to states to fund EV chargers over five years along interstate highways as part of the bipartisan infrastructure package. Under the plan, entitled the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, states provided their EV infrastructure deployment proposals to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. States are now approved to construct a network of EV charging stations along designated alternative fuel corridors on the national highway system and have access to more than $1.5 billion to help build the chargers.

It's unclear how many charging stations the funds will support, and states have not yet shared specific charger locations. Transportation Department officials have said that states should install stations every 50 miles and ensure each station is located within one mile of an interstate highway. "We have approved plans for all 50 States, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia to help ensure that Americans in every part of the country -- from the largest cities to the most rural communities -- can be positioned to unlock the savings and benefits of electric vehicles," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Apple chief executive Tim Cook says there are still "not enough women at the table" at the world's tech firms -- including his own. He said there were "no good excuses" for the lack of women in the sector. Apple has just launched its founders' development program for female founders and app creators in the UK. "I think the the essence of technology and its effect on humanity depends upon women being at the table," Mr Cook says. "Technology's a great thing that will accomplish many things, but unless you have diverse views at the table that are working on it, you don't wind up with great solutions."

Apple had 35% female staff in the US in 2021, according to its own diversity figures. It launched its original Apple Health Kit in 2014 without a period tracker -- which led to accusations that this was an oversight due to male bias among its developers. One challenge facing the sector is the lack of girls choosing to pursue science, tech, engineering and maths subjects at school. "Businesses can't cop out and say 'there's not enough women taking computer science -- therefore I can't hire enough,'" says Mr Cook. "We have to fundamentally change the number of people that are taking computer science and programming." His view is that everybody should be required to take some sort of coding course by the time they finish school, in order to have a "working knowledge" of how coding works and how apps are created. According to Deloitte Global, large global tech firms will reach nearly 33% overall female representation in their workforces in 2022 on average -- with 25% occupying technical roles.

In the interview with the BBC, Cook also commented on the future of augmented reality, saying: "in the future, people will wonder how we lived without AR." He added: "we're investing a ton in that space." Earlier this year, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said Apple could announced its long-rumored mixed-reality headset as soon as January 2023.

Apple is bringing Stage Manager, a new multitasking system exclusive to iPads with the M1 chip, to a number of older devices. Engadget reports: Probably the biggest change Apple announced with iPadOS 16 earlier this year is Stage Manager, a totally new multitasking system that adds overlapping, resizable windows to the iPad. That feature also works on an external display, the first time that iPads could do anything besides mirror their screen on a monitor. Unfortunately, the feature was limited to iPads with the M1 chip -- that includes the 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pro released in May of 2021 as well as the M1-powered iPad Air which Apple released earlier this year. All other older iPads were left out.

That changes with the latest iPadOS 16 developer beta, which was just released. Now, Apple is making Stage Manager work with a number of older devices: it'll work on the 11-inch iPad Pro (first generation and later) and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro (third generation and later). Specifically, it'll be available on the 2018 and 2020 models that use the A12X and A12Z chips rather than just the M1. However, there is one notable missing feature for the older iPad Pro models -- Stage Manager will only work on the iPad's build-in display. You won't be able to extend your display to an external monitor. Apple also says that developer beta 5 of iPadOS 16. is removing external display support for Stage Manager on M1 iPads, something that has been present since the first iPadOS 16 beta was released a few months ago. It'll be re-introduced in a software update coming later this year.

Robinhood is finally rolling out a beta version of its non-custodial crypto wallet to 10,000 customers on its waitlist after announcing the product in May, its CTO and general manager of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, told TechCrunch. The product is called Robinhood Wallet and will be the company's first internationally-available app, Kerbrat said. From a report: The company revealed new details about the offering in conjunction with the beta launch, most notably that it will launch exclusively with Polygon, a popular layer-two blockchain that plugs into Ethereum and makes the network faster and cheaper to use. This means beta users will be able to purchase the Polygon MATIC token on Robinhood's main exchange app and transfer it to their Robinhood Wallet. They will also be able to access dApps directly on the Polygon network, including DeFi apps such as Uniswap, Balancer and Kyberswap, and metaverse games such as Decentraland, a spokesperson for Polygon said in an email to TechCrunch. Over time, the Robinhood team plans to build out multi-chain support for the wallet beyond the Polygon ecosystem, Robinhood crypto product manager Seong Seog Lee told TechCrunch.

Intel has announced an intriguing new app called Unison, which aims to "seamlessly" connect Intel-powered computers to smartphones -- not just Android phones but iOS devices as well. From a report: Following what Intel says is a "simple pairing process," the Unison app will allow PCs to replicate four key features of the connected phone. They can answer and make calls; they can share photos and files (pictures taken with the phone will show up in a specific Unison gallery on the PC); they can send and receive texts; and they can receive (and, in some cases, respond to) notifications that the phone receives -- though if Unison is closed, they'll go to the Windows notification center. "The advantage we can bring to a PC user that's got a well-designed Windows PC is not having to choose their device based on the PC they have. They have an iPhone, they have an Android phone, any device they want to use will be able to connect with this capability," Josh Newman, Intel's VP of mobile innovation, told The Verge. "When you're ... on your laptop, and you get notifications or texts on your phone, you can keep it in your bag and get right back into the flow of your work."

A group of more than a dozen companies launched an organization to advocate for less-restrictive software licensing rules, targeting cloud providers like Microsoft, whose contract policies have been under fire from rivals, customers and lawmakers. From a report: The Coalition for Fair Software Licensing argues that software agreements need to be more flexible and predictable for customers, including allowing the use of cloud services and programs from different providers. "Cloud customers around the world have long been subjected to repeated financial harm as a result of legacy providers' restrictive software licensing practices," said Ryan Triplette, executive director of the new association, which was announced on Tuesday. The group's member companies, coming from industries including health care, financial services and technology, are remaining anonymous for now due to fear of retaliation, she said in an interview. Microsoft, Oracle and other software giants have been criticized by competitors and clients for limiting the interoperability of products and services, sometimes making it more expensive to use them with rival offerings or prohibiting it entirely.

Alex Mashinsky -- chief executive and cofounder of bankrupt cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network -- is stepping down. From a report: Mr. Mashinsky submitted his letter of resignation to the Special Committee of the Board of Directors on Tuesday, according to Mr. Mashinsky's law firm "I regret that my continued role as CEO has become an increasing distraction, and I am very sorry about the difficult financial circumstances members of our community are facing," Mr. Mashinsky said in his resignation letter.

Mr. Mashinsky launched Celsius in 2017 with two partners, often pitching it as a safer and better alternative than traditional banks. Celsius had the same basic model as a consumer bank -- such as taking deposits and making loans -- though it paid far more on deposits than a federally regulated bank. In less than five years, Celsius grew into one of the biggest crypto lenders, with more than $20 billion in assets at its peak, the company said last year. That all changed when cryptocurrency started plunging this year. In June, Celsius paused all withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy in July, saying that it owed customers nearly $4.7 billion in crypto.