Category Archives: Technology

Tax day: Venmo and PayPal users face more paperwork under new US rules

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Americans paid through digital payment service required to notify IRS of payments amounting to more than $600 a year, down from $20,000

It’s tax day in the US, the deadline for most individuals to file and pay tax owed. But while this year’s tax season may be closing for millions of Americans who are paid through a digital payment service such as PayPal, Venmo, Zelle and Cash App, the next tax year could come with even more complications.

Under a new law buried in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, digital payment services, or Third-Party Settlement Organizations (TPSOs), will now be required to notify federal tax collectors of payments amounting to more than $600 in total during the course of the year.

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Catalan leaders targeted using NSO spyware, say cybersecurity experts

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Victims said to include Pere Aragonès and Carles Puigdemont, but Israeli firm suggests claims are false

Dozens of pro-independence Catalan figures, including the president of the north-eastern Spanish region and three of his predecessors, have been targeted using NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, according to a report from cybersecurity experts.

The research published on Monday by Citizen Lab, considered among the world’s leading experts in detecting digital attacks, said victims of the mobile phone targeting included Pere Aragonès, who has led Catalonia since last year, as well as the former regional presidents Quim Torra, Carles Puigdemont and Artur Mas.

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Beanstalk cryptocurrency loses $182m of reserves in flash ‘attack’

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Raider gains voting rights over digital currency and uses them to transfer contents of treasury

The Beanstalk cryptocurrency has been stripped of reserves valued at more than $180m (£138m) in seconds, after an attacker used borrowed money to snap up enough voting rights to transfer the money away.

The lightning hostile takeover raises fresh questions about the unregulated nature of digital currencies and the lack of protections for investors.

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If Netflix is stumbling will Wall Street renew or cancel?

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It disrupted the market and has more than 200m subscribers. But with slower growth, some say Netflix must change its game

Twelve years ago Jeff Bewkes, then chief executive of Time Warner, compared Netflix to the Albanian army. “It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world? I don’t think so,” Bewkes told the New York Times, disparaging the streaming service’s ability to take on the established media players.

Well, the Albanian army won. Time Warner followed Netflix into streaming, NBCUniversal and Disney came after and so it carried on. In Britain, BBC and ITV invested in their streaming portals. Media was now living in Netflix’s world.

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Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for more than $40bn

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Tech entrepreneur makes offer of $54.20 a share in cash to ‘unlock potential’ of social media site

Elon Musk has launched an audacious bid to buy Twitter for more than $40bn, saying he wants to release its “extraordinary potential” to boost free speech and democracy across the world.

The Tesla chief executive and world’s richest person revealed in a regulatory filing on Thursday that he had launched a hostile takeover of Twitter. The news came just days after he bought a 9.2% stake in the social media company and was subsequently offered a seat on the board, but then refused to take up the position.

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iPhone maker Pegatron halts Shanghai production due to Covid lockdown

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Operations stopped in Chinese cities of Shanghai and Kunshan as global supply chains feel pinch of Beijing's zero-Covid measures

Key iPhone maker Pegatron has halted operations at two subsidiaries in the Chinese cities of Shanghai and Kunshan, as global supply chains feel the pinch of Beijing’s strict zero-Covid measures.

The business hub of Shanghai has become the heart of China’s biggest Covid-19 outbreak since the virus surfaced more than two years ago.

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San Francisco police stop self-driving car – and find nobody inside, video shows

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Clip prompts amusement online as car stops, then drives across an intersection, leaving police behind

A video recently posted online shows what happens when police try to apprehend an autonomous vehicle – only to find nobody inside.

Police in San Francisco stopped a vehicle operated by Cruise, an autonomous car company backed by General Motors, in a video posted on 1 April. Officers approached the car, which had been driving without headlights, only to find it was empty.

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California university sues YouTubers who allegedly filmed disruptive pranks

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A judge also granted a restraining order to the pair accused of terrorizing students who ‘provoked extreme fear and anxiety’

A pair of YouTubers are facing a lawsuit and a restraining order after allegedly filming themselves disrupting classes at the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles and uploading footage of the staged pranks online.

The University of Southern California sued Ernest Kanevsky and Yuguo Bai over the incidents, USC Annenberg Media reported last week. A judge granted a restraining order banning Kanevsky and Bai, who are not USC students, from campus after university attorneys said the pranks had terrorized “students to the point where they are running out of lecture halls for fear of their lives”.

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Elon Musk unveils vision for Twitter after joining board

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The Tesla boss, who now has a 9.2% stake in the social network, has offered suggestions and criticisms in a series of tweets

Elon Musk has set out his vision for Twitter after buying a 9.2% stake in the company, in a series of posts on the social network described by one commentator as having “chaos energy”.

Since being appointed to the Twitter board on Tuesday, Musk has posted a stream of open questions about the present and future of the site, proposing new features, highlighting areas of concern, and making jokes. Typically for the Tesla billionaire, it was not always clear which was which.

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Australian Border Force searched 822 phones in 2021 despite having no power to demand passcodes

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Greens digital rights spokesperson says officers should be required to get a warrant before going through travellers’ mobile phones

Australian Border Force officials searched 822 travellers’ mobile phones in 2021, despite admitting it has no power to force arrivals to give them the passcode to their devices.

In January, Sydney software developer James told Guardian Australia that he and his partner were stopped on their return from Fiji by border force officials who asked them to write their phone passcodes on a piece of paper before taking the codes and their phones to another room to examine for half an hour. The phones were then returned and they were allowed to leave.

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Brazil military ‘posed as NGOs on social media’ to play down deforestation

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Facebook owner Meta removes network from social media in move which could damage President Jair Bolsonaro

Facebook owner Meta Platforms has removed a network of social media accounts with ties to the Brazilian military that posed as fake non-profits to play down the dangers of deforestation.

The comments by Meta, published in a quarterly report, pose a reputational risk to Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro. The far-right former army captain is a longtime sceptic of environmentalism.

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At least 50 US gig workers murdered or killed since 2017 – study

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Activists say companies like Lyft and Uber ‘try to protect their bottom line by offloading risk’ on to workers

On a Sunday afternoon in August 2021, the Lyft driver Isabella Lewis was shot in the head by a passenger she had just picked up and left for dead as the man sped off in what appeared to be a fatal carjacking.

Lyft released a statement to the press at the time saying it was “heartbroken by this incident” – but Allyssa Lewis, Isabella’s sister, said her family had never received direct communication from the company, nor any financial compensation.

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Amazon to ban ‘union’ and other words from staff chat app

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Planned social media app would also prevent workers from using terms such as ‘fire’, ‘slave labor’, ‘diversity’ and ‘injustice’

Amazon reportedly plans to block the word “union” and other related keywords from an internal messaging app the company is developing for workers.

The list of banned words includes “union”, “fire”, “compensation”, “plantation”, “slave labor”, “diversity”, “robots”, “grievance” and “injustice”, among others, according to leaked internal messages seen by the Intercept. The news came days after Amazon workers in New York made history by voting to form a union, the first successful US organizing effort in the company’s history.

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Victim’s iPhone hacked by Pegasus spyware weeks after Apple sued NSO

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Quartet targeted by clients – thought to be Jordanian government agencies – of Israeli company even after Apple sued in November

New evidence has revealed that an Apple iPhone was successfully hacked by a government user of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in December, weeks after the technology giant sued the Israeli company in a US court and called for it to be banned from “harming individuals” using Apple products.

A report published on Tuesday by security researchers at Front Line Defenders (FLD) and Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto found that phones belonging to four Jordanian human rights defenders, lawyers and journalists were hacked by government clients of NSO – which appear to be Jordanian government agencies – from August 2019 to December 2021.

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Union chief vows to pressure Amazon after historic New York vote

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Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien says the e-commerce company has ‘total disrespect’ for its workers

The Teamsters’ new president has pledged his powerful union will step up the pressure on Amazon and mount its own efforts to unionize the company after workers in New York voted to form the company’s first US union.

In an interview with the Guardian Sean O’Brien said it was vital to organize Amazon, asserting that the e-commerce company has “total disrespect” for its workers and was putting downward pressure on standards for unionized warehouse workers and truck drivers across the US.

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Infosys to ‘urgently’ shut Moscow office as pressure grows on Rishi Sunak

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Chancellor’s wife, Akshata Murthy, has £690m stake in Indian IT firm, which is now moving staff out of Russia

Indian IT services company Infosys, in which the chancellor Rishi Sunak’s wife owns an estimated £690m stake and collects about £11.5m in annual dividends, is “urgently” closing its office in Russia.

Infosys’s decision to shut its Moscow office comes as pressure mounts on Sunak to answer accusations that his family is collecting “blood money” dividends from the firm’s continued operation in Russia despite the invasion of Ukraine.

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Amazon workers in New York close to forming historic union after key vote

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Elsewhere, a unionization vote by Alabama workers is pending as hundreds of votes were challenged

Amazon workers in New York are close to voting to form a union – a major win for labor activists who have failed in previous efforts to organize at the tech giant that is now the second largest private employer in the US.

Workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island will find out on Friday whether or not they want to form a union, Amazon’s first in the US where it now employs over one million people.

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People with type 1 diabetes in England to be given skin sensor to monitor blood sugar

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Nice says wearable tech reduces need for finger-prick testing by up to 50%

Hundreds of thousands of people with type 1 diabetes in England are to be offered a hi-tech skin sensor to monitor their blood sugar levels in seconds.

The device, the size of a £2 coin, sits on a patient’s arm and constantly checks their glucose levels. It comes with an app that tells them whethertheir blood sugar levels are at an appropriate level.

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Facebook fails to label 80% of posts promoting bioweapons conspiracy theory

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A study found that external articles shared on the bioweapons myth were not labeled as ‘false information’ or ‘missing context’

As social media companies promise to crack down on Russian disinformation about the war in Ukraine, studies show they continue to fall short, allowing disproven narratives to reach millions.

Facebook failed to label 80% of articles on its platform promoting a fast-spreading conspiracy theory that the US is funding the use of bioweapons in Ukraine, according to a study released Friday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

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Yandex helps websites pushing false news make millions in advertising

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Yandex-delivered ads found alongside misinformation and propaganda about Ukraine on Russian-language news sites

A Russian tech giant mostly owned by western investors is helping websites pushing false claims about the war in Ukraine to make thousands of dollars every day through digital advertising.

Yandex is considered Russia’s equivalent to Google, running both a search engine and an extensive digital advertising business. Its deputy CEO, Tigran Khudaverdyan, resigned this month after the European Union imposed sanctions on him.

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