Ford CEO Jim Farley announced that the automaker is planning to produce 600,000 electric vehicles per year by the end of 2023, "which will double the number of EVs it originally intended to manufacture," notes Engadget. From the report: According to Automotive News, production will be spread across the Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning and E-Transit. Ford's current EV lineup is wildly popular, Farley said, and the demand is "so much higher" than the company expected. The Mustang Mach-E is selling on three continents, while the Ford F-150 Lightning has been popular from the time it was announced. Ford received 100,000 reservations within three weeks after it was unveiled, and that number's now up to 160,000 -- all placed with a $100 refundable deposit. Due to the high demand for the F-150, Ford previously decided to invest $250 million to boost its production, creating 450 new jobs to help it make 80,000 trucks a year. It's unclear how much that target would change now that the company is doubling its manufacturing goal.

The company announced today that its Everyday Robots Project -- a team within its experimental X labs dedicated to creating "a general-purpose learning robot" -- has moved some of its prototype machines out of the lab and into Google's Bay Area campuses to carry out some light custodial tasks. The Verge reports: "We are now operating a fleet of more than 100 robot prototypes that are autonomously performing a range of useful tasks around our offices," said Everyday Robot's chief robot officer Hans Peter Brondmo in a blog post. "The same robot that sorts trash can now be equipped with a squeegee to wipe tables and use the same gripper that grasps cups can learn to open doors."

These robots in question are essentially arms on wheels, with a multipurpose gripper on the end of a flexible arm attached to a central tower. There's a "head" on top of the tower with cameras and sensors for machine vision and what looks like a spinning lidar unit on the side, presumably for navigation. As Brondmo indicates, these bots were first seen sorting out recycling when Alphabet debuted the Everyday Robot team in 2019. The big promise that's being made by the company (as well as by many other startups and rivals) is that machine learning will finally enable robots to operate in "unstructured" environments like homes and offices.

Facebook has written to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), demanding that it stop setting up fake profiles to conduct surveillance on users. From a report: This comes after the Guardian revealed that the US police department had been working with a tech firm, analysing user data to help solve crimes. Facebook expressly prohibits the creation and use of fake accounts. The intent, it said, was to "create a safe environment where people can trust and hold one another accountable". "Not only do LAPD instructional documents use Facebook as an explicit example in advising officers to set up fake social media accounts, but documents also indicate that LAPD policies simply allow officers to create fake accounts for 'online investigative activity'," wrote Facebook's vice president and deputy general counsel for civil rights Roy Austin in a letter outlining Facebook's policies. "While the legitimacy of such policies may be up to the LAPD, officers must abide by Facebook's policies when creating accounts on our services. The Police Department should cease all activities on Facebook that involve the use of fake accounts, impersonation of others, and collection of data for surveillance purposes."

The U.S. General Services Administration said Friday that the Defense Department has solicited bids from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle for cloud contracts. From a report: The outreach comes after the Pentagon set aside a highly contested $10 billion contract that Microsoft had won and Amazon had challenged. The value of the new contracts is not known, but the Defense Department estimates it could run into the multiple billions of dollars. The new effort, known as Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, or JWCC, appears like it will bolster the top global cloud infrastructure providers, Amazon and Microsoft, although it could also provide more credibility to two smaller entities.

"The Government anticipates awarding two IDIQ contracts -- one to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and one to Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) -- but intends to award to all Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) that demonstrate the capability to meet DoD's requirements," the GSA said in its announcement. An indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity, or IDIQ, contract includes an indefinite amount of services for a specific period of time.

Many local governments see a silver lining in the shortage of semiconductor chips that has contributed to a slowdown in the global economy. From a report: The shortage of computer chips has zapped energy from the global economy, punishing industries as varied as automakers and medical device manufacturers and contributing to fears about high inflation. But many states and cities in America are starting to see a silver lining: the possibility that efforts to sharply increase chip production in the United States will lead to a busy chip factory in their backyard. And they are racing to get a piece of the potential boom. One of those towns is Taylor, a Texas city of about 17,000 about a 40-minute drive northeast of Austin. Leaders here are pulling out all the stops to get a $17 billion Samsung plant that the company plans to build in the United States starting early next year.

The city, its school district and the county plan to offer Samsung hundreds of millions of dollars in financial incentives, including tax rebates. The community also has arranged for water to be piped in from an adjacent county to be used by the plant. But Taylor is not alone. Officials in Arizona and in Genesee County in upstate New York are also trying to woo the company. So, too, are politicians in nearby Travis County, home to Austin, where Samsung already has a plant. Locations in all three states "offered robust property tax abatement" and funds to build out infrastructure for the plant, Samsung said in a filing. Congress is considering whether to offer its own subsidies to chip makers that build in the United States.

Where Samsung's plant will land remains anyone's guess. The company says it is still weighing where to put it. A decision is expected to be announced any day. The federal government has urged companies like Samsung, one of the world's largest makers of the high-tech components, to build new plants in the United States, calling it an economic and national security imperative. Intel broke ground on two plants in Arizona in September and could announce the location for a planned manufacturing campus by the end of the year. This could just be a warm-up act. The Senate passed a bill to provide chip makers $52 billion in subsidies this year, a plan supported by the Biden administration that would be Washington's biggest investment in industrial policy in decades. The House has yet to consider it. Nine governors said in a letter to congressional leaders that the funding would "provide a new, powerful tool in our states' economic development toolboxes."

In the "smart nation," robot dogs enforce social distancing and flying taxis are just over the horizon. The reality is very different. From a report: Singapore is often rendered as an aspiring techno-utopia. In World Economic Forum videos, in-flight magazines and its own pliant state-backed media, it offers a soft-focus science fiction backdrop where driverless buses ply routes between beach clubs and tech hubs, where robot dogs enforce social distancing and flying taxis flit between glass-fronted public housing overflowing with lush "sky gardens." It's a place where pilot projects hint at a future -- just over the horizon -- where the intractable problems of today are automated out of existence. Where vertical farms and "NEWater" made from treated sewage cut the island's reliance on neighbouring Malaysia for food and water. Where robots care for the elderly and drones service freighters. Where warehouses and construction sites are staffed by machines, obviating the need for the migrant workers who make Singapore function, but make Singaporeans uncomfortable. Technology keeps them safe, fed and independent; secure in a scary world, but connected to it through telecoms and air travel.

That safety requires constant vigilance. The city must be watched. The smart cameras that are being trialled in Changi are just a part of a nationwide thrust towards treating surveillance as part of everyday life. Ninety-thousand police cameras watch the streets, and by the end of the decade, there will be 200,000. Sensors, including facial recognition cameras and crowd analytics systems, are being positioned across the city. The technology alone isn't unique -- it's used in many countries. But Singapore's ruling party sees dangers everywhere, and seems increasingly willing to peer individually and en masse into people's lives. "What [technology] will do for people is make our lives a hell of a lot easier, more convenient, more easily able to plug into the good life," Monamie Bhadra Haines, an assistant professor at the Technical University of Denmark, who studies the intersection between technology and society. "But ... the surveillance is what is here, now."

The Tor Project said this week that it has seen a drop in the number of Tor relays and bridge servers and is now offering various rewards to users who help bring the number back up. From a report: Rewards include the likes of hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers and are meant to provide some sort of meaningful gift to those who help keep the Tor anonymity network alive and resilient to censorship. More specifically, the rewards will be provided to those who run "Tor bridges," which serve as entry points into the Tor network for users located in countries that block access to Tor servers. "We currently have approximately 1,200 bridges, 900 of which support the obfs4 obfuscation protocol," said Gustavo Gus, Community Team Lead for the Tor Project. "Unfortunately, these numbers have been decreasing since the beginning of this year. It's not enough to have many bridges: eventually, all of them could find themselves in block lists. We therefore need a constant trickle of new bridges that aren't blocked anywhere yet," the Tor Project member said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Winamp is getting closer to release with a redesigned website, logo, and a new beta signup allowing users to soon test the upcoming version of the media player. Before we streamed our music, users would rip their albums or download MP3s to listen on their computer using media players. One of the most popular media players to play MP3s was Winamp, with its retro skins and animated visualizers that moved along with the music you were playing. However, Winamp had not seen any further development after its version 5.5 release in 2007.

In October 2018, after Winamp 5.8 was leaked online, the developers decided to publish the leaked version on their website Winamp.com to allow everyone to use it in all its nostalgic glory. Unfortunately, while Radionomy, the owners of Winamp, said they had big plans for Winamp, no further versions have been released since then. The only new Winamp development we have seen has been by the Winamp Community Update Project (WACUP) who released Preview version 1.0.20.7236 with bug fixes and improvements. You can sign up for a Winamp beta test here.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's startup Privateer aims to help humanity get the goods on space junk before it's too late. Space.com reports: The Hawaii-based company, whose existence Wozniak and co-founder Alex Fielding announced in September, wants to characterize the ever-expanding space debris population like never before. Privateer will do this by incorporating a variety of data, including crowdsourced information and observations made by its own sizable satellite fleet. "I think we're looking at several hundred satellites," Privateer Chief Scientific Adviser Moriba Jah told Space.com. "We won't launch all several hundred at once; we'll just slowly build it up."

Orbital debris is already tracked by a number of organizations, including the U.S. military and private companies such as LeoLabs. Privateer wants to contribute to these efforts and help ramp them up, eventually creating the "Google Maps of space," as Fielding told TechCrunch last month. To make this happen, Privateer, which is still in "stealth mode" at the moment, plans to build and analyze a huge debris dataset that incorporates information from a variety of sources. "We want to basically be a company that's focused on decision intelligence by aggregating massive quantities of disparate and heterogeneous information, because there's something to be gained in the numbers," said Jah, a space debris expert who's also an associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Privateer will purchase some of this information, crowdsource some of it and gather still more using its own satellites, Jah said. The first of those satellites is on track to launch this coming February, he added. This information will lead to much more than a census of space junk, if all goes according to plan. The company intends also to characterize debris objects, nailing down their size, shape and spin rate, among other features. "The catalogs of objects out there all treat things like they're spheres," Jah said. "We're going to take it beyond the sphere, to what the thing more realistically looks like and is." Such information will allow satellite operators and others in the space community to better gauge the threat posed by debris objects and improve their predictions about how long pieces of junk will stay aloft, he added. Privateer will make some of its analyses and data freely available for the public good and sell others to customers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: YouTube's decision to hide dislike counts on videos has sparked anger and derision. One inventive programmer has attempted to restore the feature in a browser extension. The plugin currently uses the Google API to generate the dislike count. However, this functionality will be removed from December 13. "I'll try to scrape as much data as possible until then," the extension's creator said on Reddit. "After that -- total dislikes will be estimated using extension users as a sample."

The alpha version isn't perfect. It currently only works on videos for which the Youtube API returns a valid dislike count. The calculations could also be skewed by the userbase, which is unlikely to represent the average YouTube viewer. The developer said they're exploring ways to mitigate this, such as comparing the downvotes collected through the public of extension users to a cache of real downvotes. The results should also improve as uptake grows. The plugin could provide a useful service, but its greatest value may be as a potent symbol of protest. You can try it out here -- but proceed at your own risk. If you want to check out the code, it's been published on GitHub. Further reading: YouTube Co-Founder Predicts 'Decline' of the Platform Following Removal of Dislikes

The US government has seized $56 million worth of cryptocurrency from an admitted participant in the BitConnect scam and intends to sell the coins and use the proceeds to reimburse victims. The Department of Justice says that it's the largest recovery of cryptocurrency to date -- and that it was willingly given up by Los Angeles resident Glenn Arcaro, who has called himself BitConnect's "number one promoter." From a report: According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), BitConnect convinced people to invest a total of $2 billion by telling them that it had a bot capable of generating incredibly high rates of return from crypto trading. In other words, BitConnect sold itself as a way for people to easily invest in cryptocurrency and to make a lot of money doing so, at a time when people were hearing a lot about crypto but didn't know much about it (around 2016 through 2018). In reality, the DOJ says it was all a scam -- BitConnect used money from new investors to pay old ones (otherwise known as a Ponzi scheme), and its advocates built pyramid schemes where they would get a cut for convincing others to invest by promising them the same deal. In September, Arcaro pleaded guilty to participating in both parts of the scam while allegedly posting videos online to make fun of BitConnect doubters. He said that he had earned what was then valued at $24 million by his participation.

A bipartisan coalition of U.S. state attorneys general said on Thursday it has opened a probe into Facebook, now known as Meta Platforms, for promoting its subsidiary Instagram to children despite potential harms. From a report: The investigation, which involves at least eight states, comes at a time when Facebook is under scrutiny over its approach to children and young adults. The attorneys general are investigating whether the company violated consumer protection laws and put young people at risk, they said in emailed statements.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you are noticing less traffic to your website's AMP pages coming from Twitter, turns out there is a reason for that: Twitter has subtly updated its AMP guidelines page on its Developer site to say support for AMP will be phased out by the fourth quarter. Previously, if a mobile user clicked on a link to your site, Twitter would redirect them to the AMP version of that page if an AMP version was available. Now, that won't happen and users will just load the native mobile/responsive version of your content. We've heard anecdotally that publishers have been seeing AMP traffic fall, especially since Google started putting non-AMP pages in its Top Stories section. But it was David Esteve, audience development specialist and product manager at Marfeel, and technical SEO consultant Christian Oliveira who spotted the update in Twitter's documentation.

Apple is pushing to accelerate development of its electric car and is refocusing the project around full self-driving capabilities, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter, aiming to solve a technical challenge that has bedeviled the auto industry. From the report: For the past several years, Apple's car team had explored two simultaneous paths: creating a model with limited self-driving capabilities focused on steering and acceleration -- similar to many current cars -- or a version with full self-driving ability that doesn't require human intervention. Under the effort's new leader -- Apple Watch software executive Kevin Lynch -- engineers are now concentrating on the second option. Lynch is pushing for a car with a full self-driving system in the first version, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private.

It's just the latest shift for the car effort, known as the Special Projects Group or "Project Titan," which has endured strategy changes and executive turnover since starting around 2014. In September, the former head of the team, Doug Field, left for a job at Ford Motor after three years in charge. In picking Lynch as his replacement, Apple went with an internal executive who isn't a car veteran. In trying to master self-driving cars, Apple is chasing a holy grail within the industry. Tech and auto giants have spent years on autonomous vehicles, but the capabilities have remained elusive.

The artificial intelligence research company OpenAI will eliminate the waiting list for access to the API of its natural language processing program (NLP) GPT-3. From a report: The move will accelerate access to the world's best-known reading and writing AI model, and is a sign that OpenAI believes the program is safe enough -- and can be monitored sufficiently -- to be disseminated more widely. Developers from supported countries will be able to sign up to access GPT-3's API and begin experimenting immediately, OpenAI said in an announcement Thursday morning. Previously developers had to sit on a waiting list as OpenAI reviewed them before they could even get experimental access. "We've added a lot of improvements across our API and added a number of safety features," says Peter Welinder, VP of products and partnerships at OpenAI. "We think a lot of value can come from getting more developers to build solutions to problems that they see in their environments."

The battle between the appetites of European Union Member States' governments to retain their citizens' data -- for fuzzy, catch-all 'security' purposes -- and the region's top court, the CJEU, which continues to defend fundamental rights by reiterating that indiscriminate mass surveillance is incompatible with general principles of EU law (such as proportionality and respect for privacy) -- has led to another pointed legal critique of national law on bulk data retention. From a report: This time it's a German data retention law that's earned the slap-down -- via a CJEU referral which joins a couple of cases, involving ISPs SpaceNet and Telekom Deutschland which are challenging the obligation to store their customers' telecommunications traffic data. The court's judgement is still pending but an influential opinion put out today by an advisor to the CJEU takes the view that general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data can only be permitted exceptionally -- in relation to a threat to national security -- and nor can data be retained permanently. In a press release announcing the opinion of advocate general Manuel Campos Sanchez-Bordona, the court writes that the AG "considers that the answers to all the questions referred are already in the Court's case-law or can be inferred from them without difficulty"; going on to set out his view that the German law's "general and indiscriminate storage obligation" -- which covers "a very wide range of traffic and location data" -- cannot be reconciled with EU law by a time limit imposed on storage as data is being sucked up in bulk, not in a targeted fashion (i.e. for a specific national security purpose).

Facebook advertisers promoted false and misleading claims about climate change on the platform in recent weeks, just as the COP26 conference was getting under way. From a report: Days after Facebook's vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, touted the company's efforts to combat climate misinformation in a blog as the Glasgow summit began, conservative media network Newsmax ran an ad on Facebook (FB.O) that called man-made global warming a "hoax." The ad, which had multiple versions, garnered more than 200,000 views.

In another, conservative commentator Candace Owens said, "apparently we're just supposed to trust our new authoritarian government" on climate science, while a U.S. libertarian think-tank ran an ad on how "modern doomsayers" had been wrongly predicting climate crises for decades. Newsmax, Owens and the Daily Wire, which paid for the ad from Owens's page, did not respond to requests for comment. Facebook, which recently changed its name to Meta, does not have a specific policy on climate misinformation in ads or unpaid posts. Alphabet's Google said last month it would no longer allow ads that contradict scientific consensus on climate change on YouTube and its other services, though it would allow content that discusses false claims.

According to a report from Nikkei Asia (paywalled), "The Japanese-made Fugaku captured its fourth consecutive title as the world's fastest supercomputer on Tuesday, although a rival from the U.S. or China is poised to steal the crown as soon as next year." From a report: But while Fugaku is the world's most powerful public supercomputer, at 442 petaflops, China is believed to secretly operate two exascale (1,000 petaflops) supercomputers, which were launched earlier this year. The top 10 list did not change much since the last report six months ago, with only one new addition -- a Microsoft Azure system called Voyager-EUS2. Voyager, featuring AMD Epyc CPUs and Nvidia A100 GPUs, achieved 30.05 petaflops, making it the tenth most powerful supercomputer in the world.

The other systems remained in the same position - after Japan's Arm-based Fugaku comes the US Summit system, an IBM Power and Nvidia GPU supercomputer capable of 148 petaflops. The similarly-architected 94 petaflops US Sierra system is next. Then comes what is officially China's most powerful supercomputer, the 93 petaflops Sunway TaihuLight, which features Sunway chips. The Biden administration sanctioned the company earlier this year. You can read a summary of the systems in the Top10 here.

Last week, YouTube announced a controversial decision to make the "dislike" count on videos private across its platform. Not only did the move upset many Slashdotters, but it upset the third co-founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, too. According to The Verge, Karim suggests that the move "will lead to YouTube's decline." From the report: "Why would YouTube make this universally disliked change? There is a reason, but it's not a good one, and not one that will be publicly disclosed," writes Karim. "The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform. Why? Because not all user-generated content is good."

Karim has been getting his own message out in an unusual way: by editing the description to the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, a banal clip titled "Me at the zoo" which stars the 25-year-old Karim himself. Karim originally edited the description of the video a few days ago to read: "When every YouTuber agrees that removing dislikes is a stupid idea, it probably is. Try again, YouTube [face palm emoji]." But this morning he changed this description once again to give a more detailed condemnation: "The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform," writes Karim. "Why? Because not all user-generated content is good. It can't be. In fact, most of it is not good. And that's OK. [...] The process works, and there's a name for it: the wisdom of the crowds. The process breaks when the platform interferes with it. Then, the platform invariably declines. Does YouTube want to become a place where everything is mediocre?"

In his statement today, Karim compares the video in which Matt Koval, YouTube's "creator liason," announced the removal of dislikes to infamous footage of US soldier Jeremiah Denton, who was captured during the Vietnam War. In 1966, Denton was forced to give a television interview by his captors, during which he blinked in Morse code to spell out the word "torture." You can read Karim's full statement in the description of this video.

Discord has been quietly building its own app platform based on bots over the past few years. More than 30 percent of Discord servers now use bots, and 430,000 of them are used every week across Discord by its 150 million monthly active users. Now that bots are an important part of Discord, the company is embracing them even further with the ability to search and browse for bots on Discord. From a report: A new app discovery feature will start showing up in Discord in spring 2022. Verified apps and bots (which total around 12,000 right now) will be discoverable through this feature. Developers will be able to opt into discoverability, once they're fully prepared for a new influx of users that can easily find their bots. Bots are powerful on Discord, offering a range of customizations for servers. Discord server owners install bots on servers to help moderate them or offer mini-games or features to their communities. There are popular bots that will spit out memes on a daily basis, bots that help you even create your own bot, or music bots that let Discord users listen to tunes together.