There's a new metaverse project from the creators of the "Bored Apes Yacht Club" NFTs. Last night they held a "virtual land" sale, reports Bloomberg, raising nearly a third of a billion dollars.

At about the same time, Mashable noticed something else happening: If you were trying to complete a transaction on the Ethereum network last night, you might have been taken aback by the ridiculously high gas fees you saw.

For example, one user purchased a $25 NFT on Saturday evening. Their total price? $3,325. That's $3,300 just in fees.
Every transaction on their blockchain incurs a fee (which rises based on the number of concurrent transactions), the article points out. "Ethereum transactions can fail if a user doesn't pay enough in gas fees. When this happens, not only does the transaction not go through, but the user is still charged the gas fee."

"Ethereum proved unusable for hours due to its inability to distribute the load..." reports CNET. "Someone tweeted a picture of them trying to send $100 in crypto from one wallet to another, showing it required $1,700 in gas fees....

"Over $175 million was spent on gas alone."

Mashable adds: An overwhelmed Ethereum Network....caused fees to skyrocket to astronomically high amounts.... One cryptocurrency advocate noticed that from just the Bored Ape's NFT sale, approximately $100 million were wasted during the first hour of the "land" sale in gas fees alone.

As mentioned earlier, transactions can often fail when the Ethereum network is facing unusually high traffic. And last night, many people paid thousands in gas fees for transactions that didn't even go through.

Yuga Labs says it will refund users those fees, but it's unclear just how the company plans to do that. Also, Yuga Labs will ostensibly only cover the fees from failed transactions directly involving the company. If you're a user who was attempting an unrelated transaction, you can say goodbye to those thousands in lost fees....

However, there was at least one winner from the Saturday night sale: Yuga Labs. The owner of the Bored Ape Yacht Club brand raked in $285 million from the NFT sale.
Transaction costs just to mint the Otherdeed NFTs after the launch "reached $123 million," reports Bloomberg, "with each Otherdeed requiring about $6,000, or two Ether, in transaction fees to mint, according to data from Etherscan — or more than the price of the deed itself." Yuga Labs apologised on Twitter for "turning off the light on Ethereum", and suggested the possibility of establishing an ApeCoin blockchain.

At the end of the year 2000, Noah Grey created the free and open-source blogging software Greymatter (now maintained by a community of users). Wil Wheaton's new book describes it as "the original, primordial blogging platform. Blogs look like they do... because Noah Grey did it first."

Three days ago Noah Grey created a Gofundme campaign headlined "I am losing my home in four days."

"I am deeply ashamed and afraid of having to doing this, but I have no choice." My sister and I are about to lose our house. It's being foreclosed next Tuesday (May 3rd)... unless we can pay $35,000 before then. (We could pay $23k and get to keep the house for now, but will be left to pay off the rest over an unknown amount of time....)

I don't know who among the few friends I have that will read this can contribute anything at all, and heaven knows I understand.... [T]his was sprung on us with no warning, and having the money ready to go is our only salvation....
Noah's plea was retweeted by long-time geeks who remembered his contribution, including tech entrepreneur Anil Dash as well as the founder of Harvard's Nieman Lab. And a San Antonio newspaper reported on another response from Texas: Alex Mahan, the brand director of Lockheed Martin, wrote on Twitter: "I coded my first blog in 2000 with Greymatter. If it weren't for Noah, I might not have had a career in web development. He was always helpful and patient with my beginner questions back then. Please throw down some $ if you are able."
Wil Wheaton himself apparently got involved. (Several people made donations along with the tagline #WilSentMe.)

And with an average donation size of $95.87, a total of 1,073 people ultimately donated... $102,873.

By the end of the day Friday, wearing a t-shirt that says 127.0.0.1, Noah Grey shared a tearful video on Twitter.

"This has been the craziest, most emotionally overwhelming day of — of my life.... Oh my god, thank you. It hardly even feels like enough to say the words. But thank you so much. Everybody, oh my god... It may take me time to respond to all of this, but I will — I will.... I have never felt so seen. I have never felt so — I've never felt embraced by the internet before.
"I've seen some say this feels like 'the Old Internet' in action...." Grey posted on Twitter this weekend. "But 20+ years ago I was still a struggling mentally-ill man who wanted to matter... and never dared let himself feel he *might* til now. I am shattered with gratitude."

CNN cites a local source imagining the surprise of the looters of a Ukranian farm equipment dealership who'd transported some heavy machines over 700 miles to Russia. "They realized that they could not even turn them on, because the harvesters were locked remotely."

CNN adds that "The equipment now appears to be languishing at a farm near Grozny." Over the past few weeks there's been a growing number of reports of Russian troops stealing farm equipment, grain and even building materials — beyond widespread looting of residences. But the removal of valuable agricultural equipment from a John Deere dealership in Melitopol speaks to an increasingly organized operation, one that even uses Russian military transport as part of the heist. CNN has learned that the equipment was removed from an Agrotek dealership in Melitopol, which has been occupied by Russian forces since early March. Altogether it's valued at nearly $5 million. The combine harvesters alone are worth $300,000 each....

The contact said the process began with the seizure of two combine harvesters, a tractor and a seeder. Over the next few weeks, everything else was removed: in all 27 pieces of farm machinery. One of the flat-bed trucks used, and caught on camera, had a white "Z" painted on it and appeared to be a military truck. The contact said there were rival groups of Russian troops: some would come in the morning and some in the evening.

Some of the machinery was taken to a nearby village, but some of it embarked on a long overland journey to Chechnya more than 700 miles away. The sophistication of the machinery, which are equipped with GPS, meant that its travel could be tracked....
The end result? "After a journey of more than 700 miles, the thieves were unable to use any of the equipment — because it had been locked remotely."

Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this report from an automotive blog called The Truth About Cars: A group of German automakers, chemical concerns, and battery producers have announced the joint development of a "battery passport" designed to help government regulators trace the history of the cells. The consortium is funded by the German government and is supposed to work in tandem with new battery regulations that are being prepared by the European Union.

According to the German economic ministry, officially the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, the overarching plan is for the EU to mandate traceable hardware be installed in all batteries used in the continent by 2026. Those intended for use in electric vehicles are up first, with the passport scheme also serving to chronicle everything from the vehicle's repair history to where the power cell's raw materials were sourced.
Reuters reports that batteries "could carry a QR code linking to an online database where EV owners, businesses or regulators could access information on the battery's composition." This digital tool should also make it easier to recycle raw materials inside batteries, the government statement said, which would cut dependence on foreign suppliers which control the vast majority of resources, like lithium and nickel, essential for battery production.

Long-time Slashdot reader UnderAttack writes: After Microsoft patched and went public with CVE-2022-26809, the recent Remote Procedure Call vulnerability, the SANS Internet Storm Center set up a complete Windows 10 system exposing port 445/TCP "to the world." The system is not patched for the RPC vulnerability. But so far, while it has seen thousands of attacks against SMB a day, nothing yet for the new RPC vulnerability....

But still, attackers are heavily hitting other vulnerabilities like of course still ETERNALBLUE
From the article: Should you stop rushing out the April patch? Absolutely not. I hope you are already done applying the patch. But the April Windows patch had several additional gems, not just patches for RPC. Chatter about CVE-2022-26809 has died down, but as they say: Sometimes the quiet ones are the dangerous ones, and people able to exploit this vulnerability may not broadcast what they are doing on social media.
The article is credited to Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D. , Dean of Research at the security site SANS.edu.

Interestingly, Ullrich's byline is hyperlinked to a Google+ profile which has been unavailable for nearly three years.

While Russia's "relentless digital assaults" on Ukraine might seem less damaging than anticipated, the attacks actually focused on a different goal with "chilling potential consequences," reports the Associated Press. "Data collection."

Even in an early February blog post, Microsoft said Russia's intelligence agency had tried "exfiltrating sensitive information" over the previous six months from military, government, military, judiciary and law enforcement agencies.

The AP reports: Ukrainian agencies breached on the eve of the February 24 invasion include the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which oversees the police, national guard and border patrol. A month earlier, a national database of automobile insurance policies was raided during a diversionary cyberattack that defaced Ukrainian websites. The hacks, paired with prewar data theft, likely armed Russia with extensive details on much of Ukraine's population, cybersecurity and military intelligence analysts say. It's information Russia can use to identify and locate Ukrainians most likely to resist an occupation, and potentially target them for internment or worse.

"Fantastically useful information if you're planning an occupation," Jack Watling, a military analyst at the U.K. think tank Royal United Services Institute, said of the auto insurance data, "knowing exactly which car everyone drives and where they live and all that."

As the digital age evolves, information dominance is increasingly wielded for social control, as China has shown in its repression of the Uyghur minority. It was no surprise to Ukrainian officials that a prewar priority for Russia would be compiling information on committed patriots. "The idea was to kill or imprison these people at the early stages of occupation," Victor Zhora, a senior Ukrainian cyber defense official, alleged.... There is little doubt political targeting is a goal. Ukraine says Russian forces have killed and kidnapped local leaders where they grab territory....

The Ukrainian government says the Jan. 14 auto insurance hack resulted in the pilfering of up to 80% of Ukrainian policies registered with the Motor Transport Bureau.
But the article also points out that Ukraine also "appears to have done significant data collection — quietly assisted by the U.S., the U.K., and other partners — targeting Russian soldiers, spies and police, including rich geolocation data." Serhii Demediuk [deputy secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council] said the country knows "exactly where and when a particular serviceman crossed the border with Ukraine, in which occupied settlement he stopped, in which building he spent the night, stole and committed crimes on our land."

"We know their cell phone numbers, the names of their parents, wives, children, their home addresses," who their neighbors are, where they went to school and the names of their teachers, he said.

Analysts caution that some claims about data collection from both sides of the conflict may be exaggerated. But in recordings posted online by Ukrainian Digital Transformation Minister Mikhailo Fedorov, callers are heard phoning the far-flung wives of Russian soldiers and posing as Russian state security officials to say parcels shipped to them from Belarus were looted from Ukrainian homes.

In one, a nervous-sounding woman acknowledges receiving what she calls souvenirs — a woman's bag, a keychain.

The caller tells her she shares criminal liability, that her husband "killed people in Ukraine and stole their stuff."

She hangs up.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Postal Service is facing lawsuits from 16 states and several environmental groups challenging its decision to buy tens of thousands of gasoline-powered delivery vehicles instead of electric vehicles. As previously reported, the Environmental Protection Agency says the gas-powered trucks being ordered by the USPS "are expected to achieve only 8.6 miles per gallon (mpg), barely improving over the decades-old long-life vehicles that achieve 8.2 mpg." The USPS countered that the vehicles get 14.7 mpg when air conditioning isn't being used and that the trucks' size will make it possible to deliver the same amount of mail in fewer trips. The USPS plan is to buy 50,000 to 165,000 vehicles over 10 years. Of those, at least 10 percent are slated to be battery-electric vehicles (BEV). [...]

A lawsuit filed by California and 15 other states on Thursday said the USPS failed "to follow a process mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)," continuing: "Instead, the Postal Service first chose a manufacturer with minimal experience in producing electric vehicles, signed a contract, and made a substantial down payment for new vehicles. Only then did the Postal Service publish a cursory environmental review to justify the decision to replace 90 percent of its delivery fleet with fossil-fuel-powered, internal combustion engine vehicles, despite other available, environmentally preferable alternatives. In doing so, the Postal Service failed to comply with even the most basic requirements of NEPA."

The lawsuit seeks an injunction forcing the USPS to stop the vehicle purchases "until it has complied with NEPA." It was filed against the USPS and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who was appointed by the USPS Board of Governors in 2020 under then-President Donald Trump. All 16 states involved in the lawsuit have Democratic attorneys general. They allege that the USPS "violated well-established legal precedent prohibiting 'an irreversible and irretrievable commitment of resources' before completing the NEPA process by signing contracts with a defense company (Oshkosh Defense, LLC) to procure vehicles six months before even releasing its draft environmental review and a year prior to issuing the Final Environmental Impact Statement ('Final EIS') and Record of Decision." The states also claim the USPS failed to consider and evaluate reasonable alternatives. "Specifically, the Postal Service did not properly evaluate several environmental impacts of its action, including air quality, environmental justice, and climate harms, by simply assuming that any upgrade to its vehicle fleet would have positive impacts on the environment," the complaint said. States also alleged the USPS "failed to ensure the scientific integrity of its analysis by relying on unfounded assumptions regarding the costs and performance of electric vehicles, infrastructure, and gas prices, and refusing to identify the source of the data relied upon in the Final EIS." "The Postal Service conducted a robust and thorough review and fully complied with all of our obligations under NEPA," a USPS spokesperson told Ars.

The statement continues: "The Postal Service is fully committed to the inclusion of electric vehicles as a significant part of our delivery fleet even though the investment will cost more than an internal combustion engine vehicle. That said, as we have stated repeatedly, we must make fiscally prudent decisions in the needed introduction of a new vehicle fleet. We will continue to look for opportunities to increase the electrification of our delivery fleet in a responsible manner, consistent with our operating strategy, the deployment of appropriate infrastructure, and our financial condition, which we expect to continue to improve as we pursue our plan."

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you'd told us that Bandcamp's acquisition by Epic Games would lead fairly swiftly to an argument with a tech giant, our money would have been on that giant being Apple. Nope. Epic Games is seeking a court injunction against Google, over changing rules on its Google Play Store for Android. Bandcamp CEO Ethan Diamond blogged about the dispute overnight, noting that since 2015, Bandcamp has used its own billing system to process payments made for music and merch within its Android app. "However, Google is now modifying its rules to require Bandcamp (and other apps like it) to exclusively use Google Play Billing for payments for digital goods and services, and pay a revenue share to Google," wrote Diamond. "If Google's policy changes stand, beginning on June 1st, we would have to either pass Google's fees on to consumers (making Android a less attractive platform for music fans), pass fees on to artists (which we would never do), permanently run our Android business at a loss, or turn off digital sales in the Android app." Diamond also said that the new policy could see a delay in payments for artists and labels, from the current 24-48 hours to "15 to 45 days after a sale," while Epic's filing notes that Google's system can't be used for purchases of physical items (merch and physical music), which would force it to use two separate payment systems anyway.

Haje Jan Kamps, writing for TechCrunch: A couple of weeks ago yet another of my friends was a victim of identity theft, and I got yet another deep look into how fantastically broken the U.S. can be when it comes to security. "They have my social security number," she said, and I was reminded of how a lot of systems in the U.S. are woefully poorly designed. To wit: This morning I called my bank and was asked for the last four digits of my SSN and they somehow accepted my identity because I knew those four digits.

When I moved to the U.S. a couple of years ago, my friends made sure that I knew I had to keep my Social Security number (SSN) secret and hidden. When I started opening a bank account and set up a cell phone plan, it became obvious why: All sorts of institutions that really should know better are treating this string of numbers as a password. There's a huge, glaring problem with that. I maintain that Equifax should receive the corporate equivalent of capital punishment for allowing this to happen, but 145 million social security numbers were stolen by hackers a few years ago, which means that the Social Security numbers -- yes, the same numbers that are being treated as "passwords" -- for about half the U.S. adult population are in the wind.

We've gotten used to passwords by now, but at least, in most cases, passwords can be changed when they are hacked. Your social security number? Not so much. If your SSN leaks just once, you're boned. It's not possible to change it, and that brings up the true depth of idiocy in all of this: Relying on security that depends on keeping an unchangeable piece of information secret is really bloody stupid. The corollary is this: Imagine that your email has been hacked but your email provider tells you that you can't change your password, you can't change your email provider, and you'll just have to deal with it. That's the situation we currently have with Social Security numbers.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, facing investor skepticism about his turnaround bid, said the company now expects to reach a key technological milestone sooner than planned, helping the storied chipmaker regain its edge. From a report: Under Gelsinger, Intel has been working to restore its leadership in semiconductor process technology -- an effort that requires the company to retool factories. The CEO has previously promised investors that Intel could reach that point by 2025. "Now we think late 2024," he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.

The remarks follow a weaker-than-expected forecast from Intel that sent its shares on their worst slide in months Friday. A slowdown in personal-computer sales is weighing on its outlook, but some on Wall Street also see Gelsinger's comeback plan as an uphill fight. He's spending tens of billions of dollars to get Intel back on track and expand into new markets, a push that includes new factories in the U.S. and Europe. Intel, the largest producer of computer processors, dominated the chip industry for decades and was synonymous with Silicon Valley innovation. That was based on a foundation of having the most advanced production. How chips are made is crucial to improving their ability to store and hold information, how efficient they are and how costly.

Salesforce just became the latest tech giant to commit to limiting the scope of its non-disclosure agreements, freeing workers up to talk about instances of harassment or discrimination they experience on the job. From a report: Salesforce and all California employers are already required to make these changes for workers in the state under California's Silenced No More Act. But the new policy extends those protections to all Salesforce employees across the country. "Our employees are key stakeholders, and it's critical that we offer them the support to ensure they're happy, healthy and protected," the company wrote in a blog post Friday. Salesforce plans to implement the changes by the end of 2022.

A good deal of the credit for this shift goes to the so-called Transparency in Employment Agreements Coalition, a group of advocates and investors that has been using shareholder proposals to encourage tech giants, including Salesforce, Meta, Alphabet and Apple, to extend the policies enshrined in the Silenced No More Act to all of their employees. One of the leaders of that coalition, former Pinterest employee Ifeoma Ozoma, was instrumental in pushing that law forward in California. Another version of the law also recently passed in Washington state.

China is preparing to hit pause on its monthslong campaign against technology companies, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter, as officials seek to arrest a rapid deterioration in the country's economic outlook. From the report: China's top internet regulator is set to meet next week with the country's embattled tech giants to discuss the regulatory campaign, according to the people, who described the meeting as a sign that officials acknowledge the toll the regulations have had on the private sector at a time when China's economic outlook is increasingly clouded due to strict COVID measures. Regulators are planning to hold off on new rules that limit the time that young people spend on mobile apps, according to one of the people, while another person said that Beijing is considering pushing some of its biggest tech companies to offer 1% equity stakes to the state and give the government a direct role in corporate decisions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: Microsoft is testing a VPN-like service for its Edge browser, adding a new layer of security and privacy to the browsing experience. A recently-discovered support page on Microsoft's website details the "Microsoft Edge Secure Network" feature, which provides data encryption and prevents online tracking, courtesy of Cloudflare. While it isn't available yet, even if you have the latest Dev channel build, the Microsoft Edge Secure Network feature appears to be similar in nature to Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 service. This is essentially a proxy or VPN service, which encrypts your browsing data so that it's safe from prying eyes, including your ISP. It also keeps your location private, so you can use it to access geo-restricted websites, or content that's blocked in your country.

Microsoft Edge's Secure Network mode will require you to be signed into your Microsoft account, and that's because the browser keeps track of how much data you've used in this mode. You get 1GB of free data per month, and that's tied to your Microsoft account. Most VPN services aren't free, so this shouldn't come as a surprise. Cloudflare itself doesn't keep any personally-identifiable user data, and any data related to browsing sessions is deleted every 25 hours. Information related to your data usage is also deleted at the end of each monthly period.

According to a survey of 501 people conducted by insurance company Progressive, most people prefer the process of buying a car online than at dealerships. Autoblog reports: Based on the 251 people who completed a transaction entirely online or through a dealer web site, and the 250 who did solely face-to-face business, there are two big takeaways. The first is that online shopping, still a small percentage of overall car sales, is growing rapidly in acceptance and actual transactions. [...] The second takeaway is that millennials are a major part of the online sales growth.

Overall, though, online shoppers expressed more joy with the process than showroom floor shoppers. Compared to 78% of buyers highly satisfied with buying a car online, only 58% of in-person shoppers registered the same pleasure. That carried through to trade-ins and financing as well. Eighty percent of online shoppers were highly satisfied with the trade-in process, versus 57% of dealership visitors; 70% of online shoppers gave the highest marks to the financing process as opposed to 53% of guests asked to "Step into the office" and wait while the salesperson conferred with the finance manager.

The European Union has joined the social network Mastodon, which has seen a staggering 30,000 new users after Elon Musk's bid for Twitter was accepted. PC Magazine reports: On Thursday, the European Commission said it had set up its own server, dubbed EU Voice, to join Mastodon's decentralized social network, also known as a "Fediverse." The effort is currently only a pilot, but it represents the EU's goal of supporting private and open-source software capable of rivaling mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. On the same day, the European Commission also launched an account for PeerTube, another decentralized platform that revolves around video sharing. "With the pilot launch of EU Voice and EU Video, we aim to offer alternative social media platforms that prioritize individuals and their rights to privacy and data protection," said European Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiorowski.

"In concrete terms this means, for example, that EU Voice and EU Video do not rely on transfers of personal data to countries outside the European Union and the European Economic Area; there are no advertisements on the platforms; and there is no profiling of individuals that may use the platforms," he added. "These measures, amongst others, give individuals the choice on and control over how their personal data is used."

According to Breaking Defense, the head of machine learning at Lyft, Craig Martell, has been named the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer. From the report: The hiring of a Silicon Valley persona for the CDAO role is likely to be cheered by those in the defense community who have been calling for more technically-minded individuals to take leadership roles in the department. At the same time, Martell's lack of Pentagon experience -- he was a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School for over a decade studying AI for the military, but has never worked in the department's bureaucracy -- may pose challenges as he works to lead an office only months old. In an exclusive interview with Breaking Defense, Martell, who also worked as head of machine learning at Dropbox and led several AI teams at LinkedIn, acknowledged both the benefits and risks of bringing in someone with his background. [...]

As CDAO, Martell will be responsible for scaling up DoD's data, analytics and AI to enable quicker and more accurate decision-making and will also play an important role in the Pentagon's Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts to connect sensors and shooters. "If we're going to be successful in achieving the goals, if we're going to be successful in being competitive with China, we have to figure out where the best mission value can be found first and that's going to have to drive what we build, what we design, the policies we come up with," Martell said. "I just want to guard against making sure that we don't do this in a vacuum, but we do it with real mission goals, real mission objectives in mind."

His first order of business? Figuring out what needs to be done, and how to best use the $600 million in fiscal year 2023 dollars the CDAO's office was marked for in the Pentagon's most recent budget request. "So whenever I tackle a problem, whenever I go into a new organization, the first questions that I ask are: Do we have the right people? Do we have the right processes? Do we have the right tools to solve the visions [and] goals?" Martell said. To tackle that, Martell wants to identify the office's "marquee customers" and figure out what's "broken in terms of... people, platform, processes and tools" -- a process that could take anywhere from three to six months, he added. "We really want to be customer-driven here," Martell said. "We don't want to walk in and say if we build it, they'll come."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: More than 55 countries and the United States announced their commitment Thursday to defending a free and open internet, agreeing to uphold digital human rights in response to rising authoritarianism in cyberspace. The agreement (PDF), known as the Declaration for the Future of the Internet, aims to forestall an emerging "splinternet" characterized by the growing repression of internet users in closed regimes such as Russia and China -- and the divergence of those countries from the internet's founding principles of universal access and unfettered information flow. Concerns about the internet's long-term trajectory have been amplified by the war in Ukraine, according to senior Biden administration officials, as Russia has moved to block western social media services and penalized the sharing of accurate information about the conflict.

Many of the commitments outlined in the agreement reflect existing US policy initiatives, and the administration officials described the declaration as a way to organize and harmonize those efforts internationally. Under the agreement, countries have pledged not to abuse internet technologies for illegal surveillance; block content or websites in violation of so-called net neutrality principles; or use digital tools to undermine trust in elections. They agreed to support multilateral efforts against cybercrime, an issue that's grown in significance as businesses and governments alike have reeled in the face of devastating ransomware attacks. They committed to using only "trustworthy" network equipment, a nod to the spying risks the US and its allies have said are associated with Chinese vendors such as Huawei. And they joined together in reaffirming support for the decentralized, consensus-driven approach that for decades has underpinned decisions about how the internet should work.

Microsoft Edge could soon receive an integrated VPN service called the "Microsoft Edge Secure Network." The VPN (Virtual Private Network) service would work very similar to commercial VPN services, but it could be deeply integrated within the Microsoft Edge browser. From a report: The VPN service will be powered by Cloudflare. The company assures it permanently deletes the diagnostic and support data collected, every 25 hours.

Google says it's expanding the types of personal information that it'll remove from search results to cover things like your physical address, phone number, and passwords. From a report:: Before now, the feature mostly covered info that would let someone steal your identity or money -- now, you can ask Google to stop showing certain URLs that point to info that could lead someone to your house or give them access to your accounts. According to a blog post, Google's giving people the new options because "the internet is always evolving" and its search engine giving out your phone number or home address can be both jarring and dangerous. Here's a list of what kinds of info Google may remove, with the new additions in bold (h/t to the Wayback Machine for making the old list accessible): Confidential government identification (ID) numbers like U.S. Social Security Number, Argentine Single Tax Identification Number, etc, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, images of handwritten signatures, images of ID docs, highly personal, restricted, and official records, like medical records (used to read "confidential personal medical records"), personal contact info (physical addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses), and confidential login credentials.

The Snapchat founder, Evan Spiegel, has dismissed Facebook's "metaverse" ambitions as "ambiguous and hypothetical" as he announced a raft of new augmented reality features coming to phones and Snap's experimental AR Spectacles over the next year. The Guardian: Speaking ahead of the Snap Partner Summit, the company's flagship annual event, Spiegel argued Snapchat was uniquely placed to guide the next decade of technology thanks to the company's vast array of augmented reality services, such as the "lenses" that are used by millions of people every day.

[...] The updates sound like they could be the foundations of a shared virtual universe of the type that Facebook recently decided was so fundamental to its future that it even rebranded the company as Meta. But, Spiegel says, the word "metaverse" is never uttered in Snap's offices. "The reason why we don't use that word is because it's pretty ambiguous and hypothetical. Just ask a room of people how to define it, and everyone's definition is totally different."