Bolt, the payments startup known for its founder's inflammatory Twitter threads claiming Silicon Valley is run by "mob bosses," is being sued by its most prominent customer. From a report: The complaint by Authentic Brands Group alleges that Bolt not only failed to deliver promised technology but that during Bolt's integration with Forever 21, the clothier lost out on more than $150 million in online sales. The complaint also states that Bolt raised funding at increasingly high valuations by "consistently overstating" the nature of its integration with ABG's brands to suggest it had more customers than it did and to convince investors to bankroll additional growth for the startup. Because Bolt's business relies on having a large network of consumers, the allegations create major new uncertainty for the controversial payments startup, which investors most recently valued at $11 billion. In a filing, Bolt responded to the complaint saying that ABG's claims are without merit, and are "a transparent attempt" to renegotiate the terms of the companies' agreements.

India has once again called upon Elon Musk to manufacture Tesla cars locally instead of selling China-made electric vehicles in the world's fourth-largest autos market as demand for clean transport surges. From a report: "If Elon Musk is ready to manufacture Tesla in India, then there is no problem," Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari said at an event Tuesday. But manufacturing cars in China and selling them in India is not a "good proposition."

Discussions between Tesla and the Indian government have come to a standstill over import taxes and a local factory. The U.S. automaker is seeking lower levies in India so it can test the market by selling cheaper imported EVs before committing to a manufacturing base of its own. India will consider Tesla's demand for a reduction in taxes only if it promises to buy $500 million of auto parts from local suppliers and ramp up domestic sourcing by around 10% to 15% each year, people familiar with the matter said in February.

A new breed of startups wants to formalise cattle trading. The Economist: Livestock fairs, where most animals are still bought and sold, can be expensive and chaotic. Farmers shell out entry fees to register their beasts. They must pay for labourers to load and unload the animals, as well as for transport to and from the fair. They worry about cattle thieves. Making a sales pitch to every prospective customer takes a toll in the heat. And if your cows find no buyers, you must go through the whole rigmarole again, complains Anil Renusay, another cattle farmer in Vajeghar. Then there is fraud, says Satish Birnale, who rears buffaloes in Sangli, a small western city. Some traders inject their animals with steroids. Horns are often polished "as if the cows have just been to a beauty parlour," he says. "It's like searching for a bride in an arranged marriage. We have to be careful and not go just by the looks."

Firms like Pashushala and Animall claim to have solved such problems with a system of checks, including a nod from a local veterinarian. Animall requires sellers to upload videos and pictures of their cattle, and provide details not just of breed or age, but also past pregnancies, how much milk they provide and so on. A team calls every user to verify the information. Ads with blurry photos or listings with pictures taken from the internet are swiftly removed. A close-up of the cow's udders is important. So are comments by the farmer about the animal's temperament. In one video a seller croons, "Beautiful! Oh, look at those singhs (horns)". It is not a new pitch. But it is now easier and cheaper to make.

World military spending continued to grow in 2021, reaching an all-time high of $2.1 trillion. This was the seventh consecutive year that spending increased. From a report: "Even amid the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, world military spending hit record levels," said Dr Diego Lopes da Silva, Senior Researcher with SIPRI's Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme. "There was a slowdown in the rate of real-terms growth due to inflation. In nominal terms, however, military spending grew by 6.1 per cent." As a result of a sharp economic recovery in 2021, the global military burden -- world military expenditure as a share of world gross domestic product (GDP) -- fell by 0.1 percentage points, from 2.3 per cent in 2020 to 2.2 per cent in 2021. US military spending amounted to $801 billion in 2021, a drop of 1.4 per cent from 2020. The US military burden decreased slightly from 3.7 per cent of GDP in 2020 to 3.5 per cent in 2021. US funding for military research and development rose by 24 per cent between 2012 and 2021, while arms procurement funding fell by 6.4 per cent over the same period. In 2021 spending on both decreased. However, the drop in R&D spending (-1.2 per cent) was smaller than that in arms procurement spending (-5.4 per cent).

Tesla confirmed that nearly half of all its vehicles produced last quarter are already using cobalt-free iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries. Electrek reports: Over the last few years, CEO Elon Musk has said multiple times that Tesla plans to shift more electric cars to LFP batteries in order to overcome nickel and cobalt supply concerns. Iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, which don't use nickel or cobalt, are traditionally cheaper and safer, but they offer less energy density, which means less efficient and shorter range for electric vehicles. However, they have improved enough recently that it now makes sense to use cobalt-free batteries in lower-end and shorter-range vehicles. It also frees up the production of battery cells with other, more energy-dense chemistries to produce more longer-range vehicles.

Tesla already moved its Standard Range Model 3 and Model Y produced in China to LFP cells. Last year, Tesla also announced it is "shifting to Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) battery chemistry globally" for "standard range vehicles." It confirmed that the automaker planned to switch the Model 3 Standard Range, also known as Model 3 Rear-Wheel-Drive, being produced in the Fremont factory to LFP cells, too.

Now with the release of Tesla's Q1 2022 financial results, Tesla confirmed that nearly half of all vehicles produced are now using LFP batteries: "Diversification of battery chemistries is critical for long-term capacity growth, to better optimize our products for their various use cases and expand our supplier base. This is why nearly half of Tesla vehicles produced in Q1 were equipped with a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery, containing no nickel or cobalt. Currently, LFP batteries are used in most of our standard range vehicle products, as well as commercial energy storage applications. As a result of our energy efficient motors, a Model 3 with an LFP battery pack can still achieve a 267-mile EPA range." This would mean that roughly half of Tesla's volume comes from Model 3 Rear-Wheel-Drive, the cheapest Tesla vehicle, and the Model Y Standard Range, which is only offered in China.

Two artists are illustrating bias in machine learning with data from one of the most opinionated sites on the internet: the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit. Motherboard reports: Now boasting 3.9 million users, the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit has become known as one of the leading forums where users can seek and share advice with virtual strangers. Internet artists Morry Kolman and Alex Petros trained three AI models using comments from over 60,000 posts from the popular subreddit. They filtered the comments according to the original subreddit's formal voting guidelines where users vote on whether the poster is the asshole or if ESH (Everyone Sucks Here). What results is a positive bot, a negative bot, and a neutral bot that respond to every scenario submitted. The project, funded by Digital Void, aims to illustrate how training data can bias the decision-making abilities of artificial intelligence models. Now, their bots can help you answer the age-old question: Are you the asshole?

Users can submit their own moral dilemmas -- real or not -- and get a positive, negative, and swing response that can go either way. The three AI models are trained on data derived from Reddit users passing judgment so what results is a funny microcosm of what it's like to debate on the internet now. Any topic can inspire strong, contradictory reactions from total strangers. "When reading the results of a judgment, note the way in which the AI constructs ideas from snippets of human reasoning," their website reads. "Sometimes the AI can produce stunning results, but it is fundamentally attempting to mimic the ways that humans put together arguments."

Android Central was sent images of Google's upcoming Pixel Watch after it was reportedly left at a restaurant in the U.S. It's reminiscent of when an Apple iPhone 4 was lost and found at a bar in 2010. From the report: Android Central has reviewed the images of the watch that could be announced during Google I/O next month. It's possible that the watch itself could be released alongside the Pixel 7. The source, who we have left anonymous to protect their identity, said the watch, which could be "a testing model for the Internal Pixel team," was found at a restaurant. The source requested Android Central to not publish their name or the restaurant name, including location, in order to protect their job. After the reporting of this story, the source wrote a Reddit post about the alleged watch. The source indicated that the watch was left at the restaurant "for a few weeks expecting the people that left it to return, but that never happened."

The watch in our images looks almost identical to leaks of rumored rendered images. It has a minimalist design and follows what leaks have suggested a screen with hardly any bezels. The image also confirms one of the rumored colors that the watch will come in: black. Previous rumors have suggested the watch will have a rotating crown and potentially two hidden buttons. It is a bit hard to tell from the image above, but if this is the rumored watch then there is definitely at least one button next to the crown.

[I]t seems that the watch's band is a proprietary Google band and looks very similar to the jelly-like Apple Watch sport bands. This could mean that we might see many more colors to come. It also looks like it attaches directly to the watch case. This might make swapping out watch bands difficult, especially when most of the other top Android smartwatches give you more leeway with standard watch band types. No charger was left behind with the watch, but it is possible that the watch could be charged from the back of the watch case. This is also how Fitbit's Versa 3 and Sense smartwatches (Fitbit is owned by Google) and the Apple Watch are charged. The source indicated that the bottom "looks metallic but feels like it's coated with glass." [...] The source indicated that nothing happened past the boot logo when they tried to power it up [...]. This likely means that there is no OS yet installed on the watch.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The EU has agreed on another ambitious piece of legislation to police the online world. Early Saturday morning, after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to 6 percent of their annual turnover for noncompliance.

"The DSA will upgrade the ground-rules for all online services in the EU," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a statement. "It gives practical effect to the principle that what is illegal offline, should be illegal online. The greater the size, the greater the responsibilities of online platforms." [...] Although the legislation only applies to EU citizens, the effect of these laws will certainly be felt in other parts of the world, too. Global tech companies may decide it is more cost-effective to implement a single strategy to police content and take the EU's comparatively stringent regulations as their benchmark. Lawmakers in the US keen to rein in Big Tech with their own regulations have already begun looking to the EU's rules for inspiration.

The final text of the DSA has yet to be released, but the European Parliament and European Commission have detailed a number of obligations it will contain [...]. Although the broad terms of the DSA have now been agreed upon by the member states of the EU, the legal language still needs to be finalized and the act officially voted into law. This last step is seen as a formality at this point, though. The rules will apply to all companies 15 months after the act is voted into law, or from January 1st, 2024, whichever is later. "Large online platforms like Facebook will have to make the working of their recommender algorithms (used for sorting content on the News Feed or suggesting TV shows on Netflix) transparent to users," notes The Verge. "Users should also be offered a recommender system 'not based on profiling.' In the case of Instagram, for example, this would mean a chronological feed (as it introduced recently)."

The tech giants will also be prohibited from using "dark patterns" -- confusing or deceptive UIs designed to steer users into making certain choices. A detailed list of obligations contained in the DSA can be found in the article.

Meta's campus in Burlingame, California will be home to its first physical retail space where you can check out Quest 2 and its accessories as well as the Ray-Ban Stories sunglasses and the Portal video-calling device. UploadVR reports: The store opens May 9 with interactive demos for "Beat Saber, GOLF+, Real VR Fishing or Supernatural on a large, wall-to-wall curved LED screen that displays what you're seeing in-headset," according to a blog post from the company. "If we did our job right, people should leave and tell their friends, 'You've got to go check out the Meta Store,' Martin Gilliard, Head of Meta Store, is quoted as saying. "We're not selling the metaverse in our store, but hopefully people will come in and walk out knowing a little bit more about how our products will help connect them to it."

The store is said to be 1,550 square feet and also offers the ability to do a test call with the Portal video calling device and try out different styles of the Ray-Ban Stories camera glasses. It sounds like the main attraction here, however, will be the Quest 2-powered mixed reality installation, which promises to give VR players "a 30-second mixed reality clip of your demo experience that's yours to share," with the video wall offering a live view into VR as it is being experienced.

Earlier today, Twitter announced that it has agreed to be acquired by Elon Musk for approximately $44 billion. The announcement led to speculation that former President Donald Trump may return to the social media platform after being permanently banned in January 2021 for his role in the January 6th insurrection. However, according to TechCrunch, "it looks like he's not interested and is instead planning to formally join his own Truth Social platform over the next seven days." From the report: "I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on Truth," Trump told Fox News. "I hope Elon buys Twitter because he'll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on Truth. The bottom line is, no, I am not going back to Twitter." [...] Trump's comments from today come as shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp, which announced a deal in October to acquire Trump Media & Technology Group, fell 9.5% as Twitter officially announced its deal with Musk. It's possible that Truth's shaky start could cause Trump to change his mind about rejoining Twitter down the road.

Trump's media group released its Truth Social iOS app in February, but the app remained unavailable to users for quite some time. Truth is being marketed as an alternative to social media giants like Twitter and Facebook. If Trump does end up posting on Truth regularly this week, it will mark the former president's return to social media following his ban from numerous platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. So far, he's only posted on Truth once.

As for Twitter, Musk says that "free speech" is key to Twitter's future. Twitter says the transaction, which was unanimously approved by the board, will likely close this year following shareholder and regulatory approval and "the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions."

The cryptocurrency industry is ramping up efforts to recruit more legal talent as it faces increased regulatory pressure while looking to be accepted by and become part of mainstream finance. From a report: Crypto exchanges and companies are poaching attorneys left and right, from both law firms and other crypto companies, bringing them in-house to help navigate an evolving regulatory landscape while helping to curb outside legal expenses, industry participants said. Law firms, which are sometimes losing their partners to in-house positions, are also building up their crypto practices to maintain that valuable expertise. The increased demand for lawyers also marks a turning point for crypto, whose early supporters often expressed skepticism of regulation. The industry has been expanding rapidly with hopes of attracting more mainstream investment opportunities and many are embracing the stance that they want regulatory clarity.

Twitter today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company. Press release: Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter's closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Mr. Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter.

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," said Mr. Musk. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential -- I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it." Earlier on Monday, Musk tweeted: "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means."

The global effort to protect Earth from dangerous asteroids is set to become stronger, as China has announced its intentions to test an asteroid redirect system as early as 2025. Reader InfiniteZero writes: Speaking to China Central Television on Sunday, Wu Yanhua, deputy head of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), described China's preliminary plans to embark on the planetary defense project, according to Chinese state-owned news agency Global Times. Wu's comments coincided with Space Day, an annual event that commemorates the 1970 launch of China's first satellite, Dongfanghong-1, in 1970. For the proposed test, Wu said a probe would closely survey a near-Earth object prior to smashing into it. Known as kinetic impaction, the idea is to alter the orbital trajectory of a threatening asteroid by directing a large, high-speed spacecraft into the object. NASA is currently running a similar test, known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, which seeks to deliberately crash a space probe into Dimorphos -- a tiny asteroid -- later this year.

SpaceX is starting to make deals with airlines to provide its Starlink satellite internet to sky travelers everywhere. From a report: It announced a deal on Monday with Hawaiian Airlines, and last week made a similar deal with charter carrier JSX. None of the involved parties shared the financial details of their deals, but both airlines did say they're planning to offer the in-flight Wi-Fi for free, which is both a semi-miraculous fact and a sign of hope that free Wi-Fi is becoming the industry standard. Delta meanwhile, confirmed last week that it's running "exploratory" Starlink tests. In-flight Wi-Fi has been on the minds of Team Starlink for a while. Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX's VP of Starlink and commercial sales, said last year that the company was building an aviation product, and was "in talks with several of the airlines."

As Netflix shares plunge to their lowest point in five years, the company risks losing its most valuable resource: its star employees. From a report: Working at Netflix has been one of the most desirable jobs in Hollywood, if not all of corporate America. The company ranks as one of the most beloved brands, pays well and offers a chance to work with the people that changed the way we watch TV. But a record decline in Netflix's share price, precipitated by its poor financial results, has shaken employees' confidence in the company's long-term trajectory. It has also erased the value of many employees' options. People who were sitting on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are left with nothing. More people are looking to leave Netflix right now than at any point in recent memory, current and former employees said this past week. Netflix employees also asked leadership to issue new stock grants to make them whole for the losses this past week, per The Information.

Twitter is in the final stretch of negotiations about a sale to Elon Musk, a person with knowledge of knowledge of the matter said, Bloomberg News reports. From the report: The social media company is working to hammer out terms of a transaction and could reach an agreement as soon as Monday if negotiations go smoothly, according to the person.

Streaming right now on Hulu: a three-hour live special in which two members of something called the "Red Bull Air Force" try to make aviation history, reports People: On Sunday, April 24, Aikins and Farrington will try to switch planes mid-air in a stunt at Sawtooth Airport in Eloy, Arizona, that can be seen exclusively on Hulu, according to a press release from Red Bull. The planes will be "completely empty" and facing the ground when Luke Aikins and Andy Farrington attempt the daring switch, which will air during a three-hour livestream event.

To complete the feat, Aikins and Farrington will fly a pair of Cessna 182 single-seat aircraft up to 14,000 feet before putting them into a vertical nosedive and jumping out, with the goal of skydiving into each other's planes.

The cousins will stop the planes' engines and aim them toward the ground as they complete the stunt. A custom airbrake with the ability to hold the planes in a controlled-descent terminal velocity speed of 140 mph will also be utilized to complete the trick. After catching up to the opposing stuntman's plane, Aikins and Farrington will enter the cockpits and turn the planes back on as normal, piloting them to land.

Aikins is an experienced skydiver, having completed more than 21,000 jumps throughout his career. Farrington, meanwhile, has completed 27,000 jumps.
"I call it more calculated than crazy," Aikins says in an interview with the web site Complex. "We work really hard to make sure that everything's going to be okay. We don't flip a coin and fingers crossed and hope it all works out. We mitigate the risk down to something that's acceptable and what's acceptable to me."

The governor of Michigan has announced America's first "public wireless in-road charging system," which would allow electric vehicles (EV) to charge — both while in motion and when stationary.

The GreenBiz site takes a look at this "inductive vehicle charging pilot program." There's perhaps no place more fitting for this pilot than Detroit. The city that led the nation's first wave of automobile technology is helping lead its second, as the Michigan Department of Transportation has awarded a $1.9 million contract to Electreon to install one mile of in-road EV charging in Motor City.

"Wireless is the future for this technology," said Stefan Tongur, vice president of business development for Electreon in the U.S. The wireless charging company is already building out the tech across Europe, where it has pilots in Germany, Italy and Sweden. The Michigan project is expected to be operational in 2023.

"We've always, for the past century, stopped to fuel the car, and we're thinking the same with EVs," Tongur said. But that creates many challenges when it comes to large-scale batteries and fleets especially, Tongur noted... So Electreon and others envision a network of strategic corridors with wireless, in-road charging that could gradually power vehicles along a route, rather than all at once at the destination. Fleet operators could either pay a subscription to use the chargers or integrate the costs into highway tolling, depending on the situation, Tongur said.

He described Electreon's business model as "charging as a service."
Alex Gruzen, CEO of wireless charging company WiTricity, tells the site this technology ultimately could accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. "The company's own research indicates that wireless charging can increase a consumer's intent to purchase an EV by 68%, according to Gruzen, which could help move EVs beyond the early adopter stage."

Or, as Gruzen puts it, "What we want to do is show that the EV ownership experience can be better than any experience you've ever had with a car before."

Thanks to Slashdot reader doyouwantahotpocket for submitting the story.

Someone contacted Android Central saying they'd apparently found Google's yet-to-be-released Pixel Watch — left behind at a restaurant. The images of what could be the watch seem to match many rumors that have leaked, including the minimalist design, the crown, and a potential hidden button. It looks like the watch has proprietary Google bands.... The image also confirms one of the rumored colors that the watch will come in: black....

The source indicated that the bottom "looks metallic but feels like it's coated with glass."
Engadget summarizes its features:

• "The watch features a single button next to its crown and what looks like a microphone or altimeter port."

• "On the back of the device, you can see an optical heartrate sensor."

"If you look closely, you can see the wearable's band attaches directly to its case, with a latch mechanism that looks proprietary to Google and reminiscent of the design employed by Fitbit on its Versa and Sense smartwatches (Google acquired the company in 2021)...

"According to a report leaker Jon Prosser published in January, Google will announce the Pixel Watch on May 26th. The company recently filed to trademark the Pixel Watch name."

78-year-old rancher Ed Butcher has, for 60 years, lived with a nuclear missile as his closest neighbor — an active U.S. government nuclear missile, buried just beneath his cow pasture.

"Do you think they'll ever shoot it up into the sky?" asks his wife Pam, during a visit from the Washington Post.

"I used to say, 'No way,' " Ed said. "Now it's more like, 'Please God, don't let us be here to see it.' " The missile was called a Minuteman III, and the launch site had been on their property since the Cold War, when the Air Force paid $150 for one acre of their land as it installed an arsenal of nuclear weapons across the rural West. About 400 of those missiles remain active and ready to launch at a few seconds notice in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska. They are located on bison preserves and Indian reservations. They sit across from a national forest, behind a rodeo grandstand, down the road from a one-room schoolhouse, and on dozens of private farms like the one belonging to the Butchers, who have lived for 60 years with a nuclear missile as their closest neighbor.

It's buried behind a chain-link fence and beneath a 110-ton door of concrete and steel. It's 60 feet long. It weighs 79,432 pounds. It has an explosive power at least 20 times greater than the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima. An Air Force team is stationed in an underground bunker a few miles away, ready to fire the missile at any moment if the order comes. It would tear out of the silo in about 3.4 seconds and climb above the ranch at 10,000 feet per second. It was designed to rise 70 miles above Earth, fly across the world in 25 minutes and detonate within a few hundred yards of its target. The ensuing fireball would vaporize every person and every structure within a half-mile. The blast would flatten buildings across a five-mile radius. Secondary fires and fatal doses of radiation would spread over dozens more miles, resulting in what U.S. military experts have referred to as "total nuclear annihilation."

"I bet it would fly right over our living room," Ed said. "I wonder if we'd even see it."

"We'd hear it. We'd feel it," Pam said. "The whole house would be shaking."

"And if we're shooting off missiles, you can bet some are headed back toward us," Ed said... "I guess we'd head for the storage room," Ed said.

"Make a few goodbye calls," Pam said. "Hold hands. Pray."

Ed got up to clear his plate. "Good thing it's all hypothetical. It's really only there for deterrence. It'll never actually explode."

"You're right," Pam said. "It won't happen. Almost definitely not."