Firaxis Games's latest 4X turn-based strategy experience, Sid Meier's Civilization VI, is six years old, but even more new content is soon flowing into it. After two major expansions, a battle royale mode, and a season pass with new factions and leaders, now, yet another season pass is incoming.

Dubbed the Leader Pass, this is a paid season pass that brings new and revamped leaders to existing factions, totaling to 12 fresh faces and "six new takes on existing leaders". Watch the announcement trailer below.

Leaders in Civilization VI have their own unique bonuses that mesh with their civilization's own strengths and weaknesses. Each of the new additions will introduce a new twist on their specific faction's gameplay. "Each leader will arrive with a suite of surprising new or updated abilities alongside inventive new agendas that'll change the way you play when pursuing world domination," explained Firaxis.

Here are all the leaders included in the Leader Pass and the packs they will be arriving in:

Pack 1: Great Negotiators

• Abraham Lincoln (United States)
• Queen Mbande Nzinga (Kongo)
• Sultan Saladin (Arabia)

Pack 2: Great Commanders

• Tokugawa (Japan)
• Nader Shah (Persia)
• Suleiman the Magnificent (Ottoman Empire)

Pack 3: Rulers of China

• Yongle (China)
• Qin Shi Huang the Unifier (China)
• Wu Zetian (China)

Pack 4: Rulers of Sahara

• Ramses (Egypt)
• Ptolemaic Cleopatra (Egypt)
• King Sundiata Keita (Mali)

Pack 5: Great Builders

• Theodora (Byzantines)5
• Sejong (Korea)6
• Ludwig II (Germany)

Pack 6: Rulers of England

• Elizabeth I (England)
• Varangian Harald Hardrada (Norway)
• Victoria - Age of Steam (England)

Each group is currently slated to release in a staggered fashion from November 21, 2022, through March, 2023, with more information on individual abilities, and pricing details, coming later.

Also keep in mind that some of the leaders require purchasing of older DLC to play, such as Suleiman the Magnificent needing Gathering Storm or Sejong needing New Frontier Pass as well as the Byzantium & Gaul Pack.

The Civilization VI Leader Pass is coming to Steam, Epic Games Store, Mac App Store, and iOS, but the console versions are mysteriously missing. While the season pass is purchasable as a standalone product for the base game, Firaxis is shipping the new Leader Pass for free to owners of Civilization VI Anthology Edition, or anyone who already owns the DLC packs, on PC platforms.

Civilization VI is getting another season pass, adds 12 fresh leaders

Solar power gathered far away in space, seen here being transmitted wirelessly down to Earth to wherever it is needed. The European Space Agency plans to investigate key technologies needed to make Space-Based Solar Power a working reality through its SOLARIS initiative. One such technology – wireless power transmission – was recently demonstrated in Germany to an audience of decision-makers from business and government.

Solar power could be gathered far away in space and transmitted wirelessly down to Earth to wherever it is needed. The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to investigate key technologies needed to make Space-Based Solar Power a working reality through its SOLARIS initiative. Recently in Germany, one of these technologies, wireless power transmission, was demonstrated to an audience of decision-makers from business and government.

The demonstration took place at Airbus’ X-Works Innovation Factory in Munich. Microwave beaming was used to transmit green energy between two points representing ‘Space’ and ‘Earth’ over a distance of 36 meters.

The received power was used to light up a model city and produce green hydrogen by splitting water. It even served to produce the world’s first wirelessly cooled 0% alcohol beer in a fridge before being served to the watching audience.

For a working version of a Space-Based Solar Power system, solar power satellites in geostationary orbit would harvest sunlight on a permanent 24/7 basis and then convert it into low-power density microwaves to safely beam down to receiver stations on Earth. The physics involved means that these satellites would have to be large, on the order of several kilometers in size, to generate the equivalent power of a typical nuclear power station. The same would be true for the collecting ‘rectennas’ down on Earth’s surface.

Technical advancements in areas such as in-space manufacturing and robotic assembly, low-cost high-efficiency photovoltaics, high-power electronics, and radio frequency beamforming would be required to achieve this vision. Further research to confirm the effects of low-power microwaves on human and animal health are benign and compatibility with aircraft and satellites would also be undertaken.

ESA’s SOLARIS – being proposed to Europe’s space ministers at the Agency’s Council at Ministerial Level on November 22-23 – will research these technologies, to allow Agency Member States to make an informed choice on future implementation of Space-Based Solar Power as a new source of clean, always-on ‘baseload’ power supplementing existing renewable power sources, helping Europe to attain Net Zero by mid-century.

In addition, any breakthroughs achieved in these areas will also benefit many other spaceflight endeavors as well as terrestrial applications.

Source

Report: Apple’s mixed reality headset is just a few months away

Some Twitter users are unable to login as they are not receiving the text message code required for 2FA, reports Wired. Users are also unable to make changes to their security settings, or get their hands on their data using Twitter's access your data feature. The issue could be related to microservices being switched off on Twitter for part of the day on Monday.

For those who have opted for authenticator apps such as Microsoft Authenticator might not have to worry since such apps keep generating codes that last for a few seconds before getting recycled.

On Monday, Elon Musk fired Eric Frohnhoefer, a Twitter engineer, over a spat about its Android app. The two got in a back-and-forth in a public thread after Musk tweeted that he wanted to "apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries" and Frohnhoefer tweeted back, “I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong.”

Neither Elon Musk nor Twitter Support have confirmed whether the 2FA services were stopped as part of disabling the microservices for the Android app.

Source: Wired

Users are unable to login to Twitter as SMS 2FA glitches

The long, solder-heavy way to get root access to a Starlink terminal

The project is coming as a free upgrade for anyone who already owns the hit fantasy RPG, which amounts to over 40 million players now. While no further details of the improvements have been revealed yet, the studio has said previously that visual and technical upgrades, as well as ray tracing additions, and lowered loading times will be present in this version.

The next-gen edition was on track to release in the latter half of 2021 with fresh DLC inspired by the Netflix adaptation. However, a delay pushed the update to 2022, followed by yet another slip earlier this year that had the studio even remove any mention of a launch window. The latter delay was also when CD Projekt RED took over the project's development over from Saber Interactive.

The studio will be hosting a gameplay and feature reveal livestream next week on its Twitch channel. The exact timing of the showcase hasn't been revealed yet.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's next-gen update is coming to PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 platforms, with last-generation console edition owners getting a free upgrade. CD Projekt is also working on a remake of the original The Witcher, as well as a brand-new trilogy set in the same universe.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's next-gen update finally gets a release date

Today, right before the RTX 4080 comes out on the 16th, AMD has decided to share more details on its RX 7900 series, including performance numbers for the 7900 XT. Also, information on stuff like the cooler design, PCB design, and more, has also been provided. You can check them out in the images below (click to enlarge):

And just like on its 3rd November event, there are several digs and shots at Nvidia this time around too. AMD makes sure you know that its new cheaper cards are a simple plug-and-play solution compared to Nvidia's more expensive RTX 4080 priced at $1,199. This is because the new 7000 series cards continue to use the traditional 8-pin power connectors and the size of the cards is in the same ballpark as existing high-end GPUs.

There are more comparisons against the RTX 40-series counterpart where AMD clearly highlights its advantages in terms of display output (Display 2.1 vs 1.4a), and additional VRAM amount, even on the much cheaper $899 RX 7900 XT. AMD also compares the core specs of the RX 7900 directly with the 4080 which does not make any sense as the architectures are vastly different.

However, once again, any performance comparisons between its own cards and the RTX 4080 were missing as the 4080 is not out yet. AMD did not compare its RX 7900 series to Nvidia's flagship, the $1,599 RTX 4090 and it is because the new RDNA 3 cards probably come nowhere close to the 4090 in terms of ray tracing performance at least. And raster performance will also likely be a fair way behind.

Speaking of performance, additional performance details have been provided today over what we previously had. First up, we have the rasterization data of the RX 7900 series at 4K and 8K. This time, as mentioned above, we have the numbers for the RX 7900 XT as well. Ironically, AMD calls its 8K gaming slide "True 8K gaming" and yet it uses FSR upscaling to achieve 60+fps results.

Finally, we have the benchmark data that will likely disappoint many people as it shows the ray tracing performance, something which was rather lackluster in RDNA 2 compared to Nvidia's Ampere (RTX 3000 series) cards. While it looks like decent progress has been made on the RX 7000 series compared to the last gen, the ray tracing numbers are still nowhere close to Nvidia's RTX 4090, although to be fair to AMD, it only compares the 7900 series to the 4080 only.

In Dying Light 2, which looks like the best result for RDNA 3, the 7900 XTX manages a 2x 1x or 100% improvement in performance compared to the RX 6950 XT. In the rest of the titles, the improvement varies between 44% and 65%.

Via: Tom's Hardware

AMD finally shares performance numbers on the RX 7900 XT, takes more digs at Nvidia

Hungry for AI? New supercomputer contains 16 dinner-plate-size chips

Rochko began developing Mastodon shortly after leaving university in 2016. He was a fan of Twitter but wanted to create a platform not controlled by any single company or person, reasoning that online communication is too important to be at the whim of commercial interests or CEOs. He believed that the lack of profit motive and canny design could discourage harassment and abuse, and provide users more control.

Instead of creating a single unified platform, the Mastodon protocol allows anyone to use open-source software to boot up a server that hosts a Twitter-style community with its own rules. Together those servers form a collective of interlinked communities dubbed the “Fediverse.” People can join a server that matches their interests and community standards, but also connect with users on other servers, or block all content from a particular server completely.

Mastodon grew slowly after the first code was released in 2017, appealing mostly to free software enthusiasts. Then Elon Musk took control of Twitter for $44 billion. His promises to weaken moderation, deep staff cuts, and chaotic changes to the platform turned many dedicated Twitter users off the platform. In the past few weeks, Rochko says, some 800,000 new Mastodon accounts have been created, overwhelming popular servers and flooding existing users’ timelines with introductions, questions, and complaints from newbies. Last year, donations to the nonprofit that runs Mastodon and where Rochko is CEO totaled 55,000 euros; it spent only 23,000 euros.

Since Musk took over Twitter, Rochko has been working long hours to keep his own server, Mastodon.Social, running, while also preparing a major upgrade to Mastodon, but he took time to videochat with WIRED from his home in Germany. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Will Knight: What have the past couple of weeks been like?

Eugen Rochko: People probably want to hear that it's been great—all this growth and success—but I would prefer to be watching from the sidelines. There is more work, there are more fires to put out. It's incredibly stressful. I’m pulling 14-hour workdays, sleeping very little, and eating very little.

The whole story coincides with the process of releasing a new version of the Mastodon software. You have to put a lot of focus into that. And then suddenly, you also have to deal with responding to press inquiries and running social media accounts to take advantage of the opportunity.

Despite the challenges, is it gratifying to see that Mastodon is where people turning away from Twitter have headed?

Yeah, it was good and gratifying at an objective level. I would love to just lean back and just enjoy the fact that so many new people are using Mastodon, like Stephen Fry. Unfortunately, I don't have time to lean back and enjoy that. There has been an increase in funds due to all the new Patreon donations in the past 10 days, it’s been unprecedented.

What did you make of Elon Musk poking fun of Mastodon in a recent tweet?

Honestly, it was really a good thing for us. It's free advertising, and he's just making a fool of himself. I could barely see the screenshot because the screen was so dirty, but I think he was making fun of somebody having trouble posting after signing up. The thing is, the massive influx of new users obviously puts a lot of strain on this volunteer network. So you should not be surprised that people are struggling with the load. It is just a question of scale. With more Mastodon servers springing up than ever, there are more and more options for people to join.

Although Mastodon has a lot of new users, many are finding it doesn’t have the features they were used to on Twitter. Are you listening to the complaints?

I am listening, but I am not eager to jump on new feature requests. We have our own plans and strategies and our conception of what Mastodon is. All the new feedback is definitely flowing into our impression of what Mastodon is, what it needs, and where it's going to go. Just not necessarily in an instant way, and maybe not in exactly the same way that somebody would ask for.

Is there anything in particular that you've heard that seems like a good idea?

A lot of requests don’t make sense, because people have not yet learned about the platform. Like “Why isn’t Mastodon a single server?” We're not going to jump on the opportunity to undo all of the decentralization.

Another feature requested by users is quote tweets. It has been debated for years, and when Twitter introduced them, around the time I left the platform, I wasn’t a fan. Even if it's not always toxic, it can definitely tempt you to do what people call dunks. That being said, I don't feel as strongly about that now, as I used to back then, and I'm definitely taking into account how often people ask for this feature. It's not all set in stone.

Corporate social networks have struggled most when their communities got really large, into the hundreds of millions. Have you seen more toxicity or other problems as more people have joined Mastodon?

There’s a kind of self-selection going on where the people who join Mastodon are maybe more civil. But it should not be discounted that all the different servers, with their rules about hate speech and against harassment, are doing moderation work and acting as gatekeepers against bad actors. When you sign up on a server that has rules against, let's say, racism, or transphobia, and then somebody else signs up on the server and starts posting something transphobic, then your moderator bans the person, and you don't have to see them.

As more people join the platform, will it be more difficult for it to remain decentralized?

There are always certain centralization forces at play. It is more cost-efficient to have more users on one server. And people tend to gravitate to servers that are seen as more trustworthy. The choice of the server is often difficult for people—this is the one big difference between something like Twitter and something like Mastodon. How do people choose an email provider? They often go to Gmail because it’s the biggest one out there. But I'm not using Gmail, and I can still use email just fine. It is not an irredeemable situation. And there’s no single Mastodon server with the proportions of Gmail.

Won’t the cost go up significantly for those hosting Mastodon instances as the service gets more popular?

Yeah, the bigger a server grows, the more it costs to host, obviously. And when you are not interested in monetization or profit extraction, growing is actually, like, a negative thing. Now I'm gonna have to scale up and pay more for servers and stuff like that. But Mastodon and the Fediverse provide this ability to just spread the load over multiple different actors. I can just close registrations on my server, and the other servers and network will pick up the people who are trying to sign up right now.

What happens if someone wants to set up a Mastodon server that spews hate?

The administrator of a server can decide “no, I'm not going to receive these messages anymore” and create a block against another server. It usually happens in cases of spam or abuse or harassment.

Do you foresee managing the community becoming more difficult when you have more people joining, all with different opinions? Or is being host to a very wide range of views part of the original vision?

That's the idea. There is no consensus, there is no single idea of what to moderate and what not to moderate. Some people are going to have different expectations of what they want to see or how strict they want to be about who talks to whom. The Fediverse provides different places where you can go and experience social media the way that you want to experience it. You can have a super safe space with very strict moderation; nobody has required you to compromise on anything whatsoever.

What can people do to help Mastodon if they like your ideas?

I would say contribute to the Patreon for the server that your account is on. These people who are running servers, they're making it happen, and it's them who should be receiving people's support.

What if someone—say an impulsive billionaire—wanted to buy Mastodon or take control of it somehow?

The network is protected from something like that. The code is free, open-source software, and nobody can change the license or take it back retroactively, and all of the different servers are owned by other people. Somebody could buy Mastodon gGmbH [the German nonprofit that maintains the software] and with it the trademark and the servers we run—mastodon.social and mastodon.online—but it wouldn't affect the Fediverse in any significant way.

Source

Ads in Windows 11 and other updates

It appears that Microsoft has started testing ads (or tips, depending upon how you view them) in Windows 11 once again. Some users have spotted ads being pushed in the Start menu in order to upsell Microsoft services such as OneDrive and signing up for a Microsoft account. The silver lining here is that this is only present in Dev builds for now, so Microsoft may not decide to roll it out publicly. However, if it's annoying you, even on a Dev build, follow the guide mentioned at the end of this piece to disable these ads.

Elsewhere, we received a couple of Beta builds for Windows 11 too. Build 22623.885 brought an expanded view for Widgets and Energy Recommendations while build 22623.891 introduced search capabilities and better theme support in Task Manager, among many other things. Meanwhile, Windows 10 22H2 Insiders netted Release Preview build 19045.2301 (KB5020030) with changes to Taskbar search and lots of other bug fixes. Unfortunately, a Dev Channel build was not flighted this week, but we can expect one in the next few days.

This week also hosted the second Tuesday of the month, which meant that it was time for Patch Tuesday. You can view our dedicated coverage below to find out what's new for each supported operating system:

• Windows 7 (KB5020000) and Windows 8.1 (KB5020023)
• Windows 10 (KB5019959)
• Windows 11 21H2 (KB5019961) and Windows 11 22H2 (KB5019980)

The latest Patch Tuesday update also resolved a Spectre V2 vulnerability affecting AMD Ryzen PCs, so if you have an AMD system, you might want to install the updates as soon as possible.

As Microsoft seemingly starts to work on the "Moment 3" update for Windows 11, you should also know that if you're holding out on Windows 10 version 21H2 for whatever reason, that specific OS is running out of support in a month, so you should probably consider upgrading too.

Visual Studio goodness... and more

Developers and Windows power users received a bunch of good news this week. For starters, Visual Studio 2022 17.4 is now generally available. It is supported on 64-bit Windows PCs and Macs, and is also the first release to natively support Arm64. This should bring better performance on that architecture.

The latest release of Visual Studio also coincides with the rollout of .NET 7 which features better performance, enhancements to .NET MAUI, built-in container support for the .NET SDK, Microsoft Orleans 7.0, and observability integrations, along with updates to C# 11 and F# 7 to make them more developer-friendly. The Visual Studio update also contains a very nifty capability to roll back to a previous version of the IDE if you're encountering any issues during development.

In the same vein, the .NET 7-powered PowerShell 7.3 is now available too. It packs improved error handling, session and remoting improvements, tab completion improvements, and updated cmdlets. And if you're a regular consumer who likes to get a bit more out of their Windows installation in terms of productivity, be sure to grab the latest version of PowerToys for some bug fixes.

Finally, for individuals and organizations investing time, effort, and money in Microsoft Azure, the company has released two next-gen VMs leveraging AMD's latest 4th gen EPYC processors, along with stretched clusters for Azure VMware Solution.

Microsoft 365 updates

There are quite a few updates on the Microsoft 365 side of the fence, too. Perhaps, the highlight of this section is that Microsoft 365 is getting some significant limitations soon. After February 2, 2023, Outlook attachments will count towards your OneDrive storage - but Microsoft will give you 50GB of free storage for a year to get accustomed to the change - and from November 30, 2023, it will not be possible to associate new personalized email addresses to your Outlook account.

The Microsoft 365 Current Channel netted build 15726.20202 with tons of fixes a few days ago too, while the Office app for iPhone received an update with a "modern look", which basically improves performance through redesigned context menus and ribbons based on Fluent Design principles.

There are a few updates for Microsoft Edge too. Microsoft has started testing a new touch mode for its browser in the Canary channel. It increases the size of some UI elements so that they are easier to interact with using a finger. Meanwhile, Edge also has a new Dev build in the form of version 109. It brings a new toggle for Internet Explorer mode, the option to open Sidebar games in a new tab, and several improvements for WebView2.

On the Teams side of things, the PWA version of the app is now officially supported on Linux. And if you can't spot the Teams meeting option in the Outlook desktop app, fret not because it's a known issue and Microsoft has published a workaround for those affected.

Finally, Microsoft has also launched an early preview of the Microsoft Create website. The Redmond tech giant touts it as the "ultimate creator launchpad" for making creative videos, graphic design documents, presentations, and more. There's no word yet on when the service will graduate from its preview stage.

Git gud

On the gaming front, a new survey from Microsoft indicates that the company is exploring options for users to lower graphical output in order to save energy during gaming sessions on the Xbox and Windows PC. The company hasn't officially confirmed that it is investigating this domain, so it's possible that this initiative doesn't see the light of day.

In a similar vein, Microsoft has rolled out DirectStorage 1.1 that further optimizes loads through GPU decompression. Nvidia has also released version 526.86 of its driver to offer improved support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. On the other hand, Forza Horizon 5 now supports DLSS, FSR 2.2, and enhanced raytracing on PC.

Meanwhile, the European Commission (EC) seems to be on the warpath against Microsoft too, claiming that the Activision acquisition could harm competition in gaming. An in-depth investigation into the business deal is currently underway. Speaking of competition, Sony is seemingly readying a slimmer version of the PlayStation 5 to not only improve the current design, but also put up another SKU against the latest Xbox hardware.

In a bit of important news, Microsoft has finally acknowledged gaming performance issues with Windows 11 version 22H2 (also known as the Windows 11 2022 Update) on Nvidia GPUs. A compatibility hold has been applied in order to block the update on affected systems as the company works on a fix.

On the gaming deals side of things, you might be interested to know that Samsung is bundling three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and an Xbox Controller with select TVs. And if you'd like to grab some Xbox games on a discounted price, take a gander at the latest Xbox Free Play Days promotion with Overcooked! All You Can Eat, Just Die Already, and Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 on offer. Finally, if you're a PC gamer, don't miss out on this Weekend's PC Game Deals curated personally by our News Editor Pulasthi Ariyasinghe either.

Dev Channel

• Surface Duo 2 has received a new set of unofficial drivers with improved Windows 11 support

• iCloud Photos integration with the Photos app in Windows 11 is now rolling out

Under the spotlight

Recently, our News Reporter Taras Buria penned an editorial saying that even though he loves the concept of virtual desktops as a way to enhance productivity, he thinks their implementation in Windows 11 is pretty awful. You can view his thoughts and reasoning for this stance here.

Meanwhile, forum member Adam Bottjen published a guide explaining what to do if Windows randomly decides to become buggy and stop you from dragging and dropping apps on the Taskbar.

Next, we have two guides from News Reporter Hemant Saxena. The first is about how you can restrict Windows from automatically updating offline maps, read it here.

Meanwhile, the other guide details the process to set up FaceID lock for the Notes app on your iPhone if you're particularly conscious about security and privacy.

Finally, Neowin co-founder Steven Parker published a very handy guide explaining how you can change the size of closed captions on your smart TV if you think that they're too big or too small for comfortable viewing.

Logging off

Our most interesting news of the week relates to crypto exchange FTX filing for bankruptcy due to liquidity issues and mishandling of customer funds. Sam Bankman-Fried has stepped down as CEO, with John J. Ray III taking over his role. In terms of next steps, FTX Group's assets will be reviewed and monetized to benefit global stakeholders, which means that those with frozen assets could get some of their funds back. "Many" employees will retain their role during this transition period, but it's clear that this is a sinking ship and most will likely be looking for opportunities elsewhere.

Microsoft Weekly: Ads in the Windows 11 Start menu, Visual Studio, and Microsoft 365

Google’s rolling out a Nest Wifi Pro update to fix slow internet speeds

The new remarks followed a report this morning by The New York Times which confirmed Twitter last week had filed registration paperwork that would allow it to process payments. The report cited Twitter’s filing with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), noting that a business would need to register before it could conduct money transfers, exchange currency or cash checks.

In today’s meeting, Musk explained how paid verification, which Twitter is rolling out now with its revamped Twitter Blue subscription, as well as support for a creator ecosystem, could pave the way for a payments system on its platform.

He stressed that, initially, Twitter would need to make fundamental technology architecture changes in order to better support video. The company was recently reported to be working on a “Paywalled Video” feature that would allow creators to charge for access to their content. This suggests Twitter could be moving into a space where it may try to compete more directly with various social media video providers, like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and others. The Washington Post saw mockups of this concept where a tweet with a video could be unlocked for as little as $1.00. It said creators may be able to choose from preset prices, like $1, $2, $5 or $10 when paywalled videos were launched.

As a result, creators would end up with a cash balance as they began to monetize their content.

In addition, Musk noted that Twitter’s paid verification program would help in its plan for payments because anyone who subscribed to Twitter Blue would have already been verified by the “conventional payment system.” That is, Twitter Blue subscribers have to sign up using a credit or debit card and have their payments processed through the app stores’ in-app purchase system, which helps to combat fraud.

Musk then explained how this payments system could scale, saying that, once users gained a cash balance, Twitter could prompt them to move that money on its platform. It could even make a small donation to users’ accounts to get them started. 

“Now we can say, okay, you’ve got a balance on your account. Do you want to send money to someone else within Twitter? And maybe we pre-populate their account…and say, okay, we’re gonna give you 10 bucks. And you can send it anywhere within Twitter,” Musk said.

Later, the user could move their money out of Twitter by transferring it to an authenticated bank account, he added.

In the longer term, however, Musk appeared to be toying with the idea of establishing bank accounts on Twitter’s platform that would pay a high-interest rate to attract users. This could become a competitor, perhaps, to Apple’s recently launched Savings Account for its cardholders, various fintechs or other payment providers, like PayPal and Venmo, which encourage their users to retain cash balances within their own ecosystems.

Explained Musk, “the next step would be this offer for an extremely compelling money market account where you get an extremely high yield on your balance.” If such a system existed, he believed people would move cash to Twitter.

“And then add debit cards, checks and whatnot and…just basically make the system as useful as possible. And the more useful and entertaining it is, the more people will use it,”

he said.

Musk didn’t offer any details about plans for cryptocurrencies, though The Information reported this is also expected to be a part of its new payments system.

Of course, any such ideas spouted by Musk at this time may be later abandoned, tweaked or entirely revamped if or when they come to pass. Twitter is entering an experimental era and much of what Musk says is in the works, is just the idea du jour, and not necessarily a glimpse into Twitter’s road map.

That said, the move to enter the payments business ties to Musk’s larger plan to turn the social media platform into an “everything app” or “super app” called “X.” While that plan today is still fairly vague, the general sense is that Musk aims to combine payments, social networking, entertainment and other things into one experience, similar to China’s WeChat

Musk has experience in payments, of course, as he founded an early digital payments company X.com. It’s not surprising that he would try again, given the opportunity Twitter presents.

His ideas about Twitter payments, however, may not have been good fodder for a conversation with advertisers who are already worried about Twitter’s long-term commitment to their goals, given the company’s move into subscriptions, which signals a desire to reduce reliance on ad dollars. Musk tried to assuage these fears by saying that Twitter was thinking about protecting advertisers’ brand safety in the longer term, not just about its ability to drive short-term sales.

(Source : https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/09/elon-musk-details-his-vision-for-a-twitter-payments-system/)

From the outside, it might not look like much has changed in the repurposed 1970s office block that serves as Twitter’s European headquarters. But inside, the mood has soured.

Just like in the US, Twitter’s teams across Europe have suffered heavy layoffs. Staff in Dublin, Ireland’s 1 Cumberland Place office, which used to house around 500 Twitter employees, have been using war terminology to describe the past week’s events. People who remain employees are “survivors,” and colleagues who have been let go are “fallen,” says one person with knowledge of the matter, who asked to remain anonymous.

The first time employees in Ireland heard from the company’s new owner, Elon Musk, was on November 10, almost two weeks after his takeover.

In an email, they were told that they would be required to work from the office 40 hours per week.

There is no centralized list of who has been fired. Instead employees have been looking at their colleagues’ statuses on workplace messaging app Slack to see if they are still working. Dublin is not the only European office to be affected by layoffs. Social media posts show employees in Brussels and London have been let go too. It’s unclear if employees in Twitter’s other European hubs—Hamburg, Madrid, Utrecht, Paris, Berlin and Manchester—have also been affected.

In Europe, a major concern is the fate of Twitter’s six-to-eight person team in Brussels, which worked on European policy and was the main point of contact with regulators working on upcoming legislation that could affect the entire platform. Only two people remain, say two people with knowledge of the matter.

That means Twitter has slashed its team as the European Union introduces landmark new technology rules, says Mathias Vermeulen, director of Brussels-based consultancy AWO. “It's definitely not a good look at a time when so many obligations are going to be imposed on companies, and at a time where regulators expect meaningful relationships with people based in Brussels.” By comparison, Meta and Google employ between 20 and 30 people each in the city, he says. Twitter did not reply to WIRED’s request to comment.

Even before the takeover, the company was facing a wave of scrutiny across the bloc. Trials against Twitter are pending in France, Germany, and the Netherlands about hate speech, defamation. and privacy. There is also concern in Ireland that Twitter did not follow the country’s strict employment rules while carrying out mass layoffs. Ireland’s Tánaiste (or deputy head of the government), Leo Varadkar, has still not received a collective redundancy notification in relation to potential redundancies at Twitter as required by law, a spokesperson for Ireland’s Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment told WIRED. And there is growing uneasiness in the European Parliament about Musk’s commitment to comply with Europe’s new Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts, now that its policy team in Brussels has been reduced to a skeleton staff.

Europe has been eager to demonstrate that its rules hold weight with the world’s biggest tech platforms, Twitter included. In May, European Commissioner Thierry Breton posted a video on Twitter showing him discussing the Digital Services Act with Elon Musk. “It’s exactly aligned with my thinking,” a deferential Musk said in the clip. Yet Musk’s comments about free speech and layoffs among moderation teams have put Europeans on edge. Trust and Safety, the team responsible for content moderation, has lost 15 percent of employees worldwide, according to Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity.

“I think the prevailing feeling [in the European Parliament] is that what Musk is doing is very unprofessional and dangerous,” says member Tiemo Wölken, a German lawyer and member of the Socialists and Democrats, the second-largest group in parliament.

Wölken says that Musk’s Twitter takeover highlights the vulnerability of essential online infrastructure to the whims of whoever is in charge. “We should not rely on profit-oriented companies for online communication, and we should not rely on the goodwill and incredible commitment of individuals like [German Mastodon creator] Eugen Rochko,” he says. Instead, he suggests the European Union should create a European version of Germany’s new Sovereign Tech Fund to develop open-source social media alternatives to replace them. “We need fresh ideas,” he says.

Musk’s problems in Europe extend beyond his vision for the company. Maurice Quinlivan, chair of Ireland’s Oireachtas enterprise committee, said he was “concerned” at how the layoffs had been handled, and other politicians have asked whether to bring representatives from Twitter before the Irish Parliament to discuss layoffs.

In other countries, Musk inherits thorny issues from the previous management. Twitter is expected to appear in a court in Frankfurt, Germany, on November 24 to defend itself against charges that it has refused to take down defamatory content—which is covered by stricter rules in Germany than in the US. At a time when Musk is trying to cut costs, the lawyer bringing the case, Chan-Jo Jun, is calling for Twitter to increase human checks for defamation. “The lawyers of Twitter have replied it would be unbearable for Twitter to take the costs of making those manual checks to find out if something is legal or not,” says Jun. When Facebook tried the same defense in a similar case in Frankfurt against Jun earlier this year, it lost, he says. Facebook has appealed the court’s decision.

At the same time, Twitter is appealing a ruling in France, which ordered it to release details about how it moderates French language content. The case was brought by a series of nongovernmental groups—SOS Racism, SOS Homophobia, the Union of Jewish students, and the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism—who complained the platform was not doing enough to tackle hate speech.

And in the Netherlands, a Twitter-owned mobile ad platform called MoPub stands accused of illegally collecting personal data across tens of thousands of apps between 2013 and 2021. Although Twitter sold MoPub in January, the company is facing a claim for damages from 10 million adults and 1 million children, who are being represented by the Netherlands Data Protection Foundation. These cases are part of a wider trend to hold tech companies to account in European courts, not just through legislation, says Dutch MEP, Paul Tang.

Tang, like others in the European Parliament, is concerned by Musk’s trial-and-error approach, which makes Twitter—a platform that has a large impact on Europe’s public debate—suddenly feel unpredictable. “The fact he’s used Twitter to express support for the Republican party is not a good sign,” adds MEP Sophie in’t Veld, a member of the parliament’s third-largest group. Renew Europe, referring to Musk’s Tweet urging Americans to vote Republican in the midterms. Veld was one of two MEPs to write an open letter calling for Musk to appear before the European Parliament to share his intentions for the platform. “He will need to reassure [us] that he will fully comply with the law,” she says. “We also have something to tell him; that we will be watching very closely.”

Source

After carrying out mass layoffs last week, Twitter is also losing its chief information security officer, who decided to quit.

On Thursday, Twitter CISO Lea Kisner announced(Opens in a new window) her departure from the social media platform, which has been undergoing major changes under its new owner, Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Kisner, who first joined Twitter last year as head of privacy engineering, didn’t offer a reason for her resignation. But the decision is sparking questions about the cybersecurity around Twitter, months after a former security officer at the company, Peiter Zatko, claimed the social media platform has been trying to cover up and ignore numerous security problems.

In addition to Kisner, Twitter’s chief privacy officer, chief compliance officer, and several members of the company’s privacy and security division have also resigned, according(Opens in a new window) to The Washington Post, citing internal Slack messages from company employees.

A key reason for the departures is Twitter’s push to release products and features without effective security reviews. A Slack message from a Twitter legal staffer noted this practice was “extremely dangerous” for users and could put employees under personal legal risk of violating Twitter’s 2011 data security agreement(Opens in a new window) with the US Federal Trade Commission, according to the Post.

“Given that the FTC can (and will!) fine Twitter BILLIONS of dollars pursuant to the FTC Consent Order, extremely detrimental to Twitter’s longevity as a platform. Our users deserve so much better than this,” the Slack message reads, according(Opens in a new window) to the journalist Casey Newton. That message then ended with a link to Whistleblower Aid, a law firm that’s currently representing Zatko.

Elon has shown that his only priority with Twitter users is how to monetize them," the Slack message added.

The reported resignations are a worrisome sign for Twitter when last week’s mass layoffs already affected about half of the company’s 7,500 workforce. In his own email to staff, Musk further warned of "difficult times ahead” as he tries to turn Twitter into a profitable platform.  

Musk’s latest plan to generate revenue has involved selling access to the Twitter verified blue checkmark to users for $8 per month. However, users have been quick to exploit the system to create verified, but fake accounts, which have impersonated all kinds of celebrities including Lebron James, former President George W. Bush and even Nintendo’s Mario.

In response, Twitter has been moving fast to shut down the impersonation. But the company’s own support page(Opens in a new window) admits it won’t scrutinize the usernames registered on a profile seeking to buy access to the verified badge.

Source

After the unlaunch of the 12GB SKU, the 4080 16GB model will just be called the "RTX 4080". Meanwhile, rumor has it that the pulled RTX 4080 12GB, which was supposed to launch this month, is now being renamed as the "RTX 4070 Ti". The update comes from reputed leakster and Twitter user kopite7kimi who seemingly even jokes that this was what the card was supposed to be named before Nvidia renamed it to a 4080 12GB GPU.

Another Twitter user and leaker MEGAsizeGPU alleges that the (new) RTX 4070 Ti will be available next year on January 5th. This is right in time for the CES 2023 event and Nvidia might show off the re-modeled 4080 12GB here.

The price of the 4070 Ti is not yet suggested by anyone. The RTX 4080 12GB had an MSRP of $899 and Nvidia will likely price the 4070 Ti after looking at the performance of AMD's upcoming RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT. The latter has been priced at the same level as the now unlaunched RTX 4080 12GB.

Source: kopite7kimi (Twitter) via MEGAsizeGPU (Twitter)

Nvidia's unlaunched RTX 4080 12GB, allegedly relaunching as 4070 Ti, gets a new release date

Google refunding three years of Stadia purchases starting this week

IBM

 

Today, IBM announced the latest generation of its family of avian-themed quantum processors, the Osprey. With more than three times the qubit count of its previous-generation Eagle processor, Osprey is the first to offer more than 400 qubits, which indicates the company remains on track to release the first 1,000-qubit processor next year.

 

Despite the high qubit count, there's no need to rush out and re-encrypt all your sensitive data just yet. While the error rates of IBM's qubits have steadily improved, they've still not reached the point where all 433 qubits in Osprey can be used in a single algorithm without a very high probability of an error. For now, IBM is emphasizing that Osprey is an indication that the company can stick to its aggressive road map for quantum computing, and that the work needed to make it useful is in progress.

On the road

To understand IBM's announcement, it helps to understand the quantum computing market as a whole. There are now a lot of companies in the quantum computing market, from startups to large, established companies like IBM, Google, and Intel. They've bet on a variety of technologies, from trapped atoms to spare electrons to superconducting loops. Pretty much all of them agree that to reach quantum computing's full potential, we need to get to where qubit counts are in the tens of thousands, and error rates on each individual qubit are low enough that these can be linked together into a smaller number of error-correcting qubits.

 

There's also a general consensus that quantum computing can be useful for some specific problems much sooner. If qubit counts are sufficiently high and error rates get low enough, it's possible that re-running specific calculations enough times to avoid an error will still get answers to problems that are difficult or impossible to achieve on typical computers.

 

The question is what to do while we're working to get the error rate down. Since the probability of errors largely scales with qubit counts, adding more qubits to a calculation increases the likelihood that calculations will fail. I've had one executive at a trapped-ion qubit company tell me that it would be trivial for them to trap more ions and have a higher qubit count, but they don't see the point—the increase in errors would make it difficult to complete any calculations. Or, to put it differently, to have a good probability of getting a result from a calculation, you'd have to use fewer qubits than are available.

 

Osprey doesn't fundamentally change any of that. While the person at IBM didn't directly acknowledge it (and we asked—twice), it's unlikely that any single calculation could use all 433 qubits without encountering an error. But, as Jerry Chow, director of Infrastructure with IBM's quantum group, explained, raising qubit counts is just one branch of the company's development process. Releasing the results of that process as part of a long-term road map is important because of the signals it sends to developers and potential end-users of quantum computing.

On the map

IBM released its road map in 2020, and it called for last year's Eagle processor to be the first with more than 100 qubits, got Osprey's qubit count right, and indicated that the company would be the first to clear 1,000 qubits with next year's Condor. This year's iteration on the road map extends the timeline and provides a lot of additional details on what the company is doing beyond raising qubit counts.

 

The most notable addition is that Condor won't be the only hardware released next year; an additional processor called Heron is on the map that has a lower qubit count, but has the potential to be linked with other processors to form a multi-chip package (a step that one competitor in the space has already taken). When asked what the biggest barrier to scaling qubit count was, Chow answered that "it is size of the actual chip. Superconducting qubits are not the smallest structures—they're actually pretty visible to your eye." Fitting more of them onto a single chip creates challenges for the material structure of the chip, as well as the control and readout connections that need to be routed within it.

 

"We think that we are going to turn this crank one more time, using this basic single chip type of technology with Condor," Chow told Ars. "But honestly, it's impractical if you start to make single chips that are probably a large proportion of a wafer size." So, while Heron will start out as a side branch of the development process, all the chips beyond Condor will have the capability to form links with additional processors.

 

Initially, these connections will be via direct superconducting links between hardware on the chips. But longer term, Chow said IBM is working on meter-long links that can survive the near-absolute-zero temperatures that the chips require and allows communication between the chips to maintain quantum coherence.

 

But Chow indicated there's a lot of work that's not obviously on the road map. Some of that is related to the hardware needed to control the qubits during operations. The first processors the company experimented with needed a rack of equipment to control five qubits; with Osprey, the entire chip can be controlled with a single rack, and the company is experimenting with chips that can control the qubits while operating at the qubits' super-cold temperatures.

 

Also missing from the road map is the fact that IBM experiments with process technology for qubits on small systems with a handful of qubits, then shifts any useful developments back to the main branch in the form of interim releases. "You see this with some of our evolutions of later generations of previous birds," Chow said. "The Falcon R8 had a significant increase in coherence times from Falcon R5. And then similarly, earlier this year, we had the third revision of Eagle, Eagle Rev. Three, [that] had about a 3x increase in median coherence times from our initial Eagle that we released last year."

 

These changes allow users to perform more complicated calculations on a chip with the same qubit count, and may ultimately help users use more of the qubits on existing generations of hardware. "We have a main Osprey, and we already have trailing behind it another generation Osprey," Chow told Ars. "Maybe about 2x improvement, two and a half times."

Software too

Software is a major component on the current road map, which is a large departure from the initial map. IBM has supported the development of software called Qiskit, which allows developers to implement algorithms for quantum computers without having to worry about issuing all the discrete control commands that perform the actual manipulations of qubits. It's now modifying Qiskit to allow it to perform repeated runs of an algorithm and track where errors occur; it can then alter the algorithm's implementation so that it's less likely to run into the circumstances that triggered the error.

 

"It trades off time to learn about errors," Chow said, "By running more circuits with different types of operations, different exposures to the noise, you can learn about the actual noise that you're susceptible to." Avoiding that noise, in turn, lowers the overall error rate that an algorithm will experience. "We're actually finding that we can go to depth 10, depth 20 Quantum circuits using error mitigation techniques," he told Ars.

 

Combined, the process improvements and improved error avoidance will gradually improve the performance of Osprey, although it will take time, and IBM's already working on Osprey's replacement. So, IBM is being careful about not overpromising. "We're not talking about achieving anything like quantum advantage, or anything like that on this device," Chow said. Instead, the qubit count is about assuring people in the field that IBM can continue along its set road map.

 

"Everyone wants that 'Well, now, this enables X, Y, and Z,'" Chow said. "But ya know, it's really about the journey, right?"

IBM pushes qubit count over 400 with new processor

Elon Musk laid out more of his plans for Twitter in a publicly-broadcast meeting Wednesday, assuring advertisers he had noted their concerns about hate speech and misinformation on the site while saying the platform would continue changing rapidly and that some of its new features would fail.

Musk took questions over the course of roughly an hour from two of his executives and a representative of the advertising industry during a Twitter Spaces meeting, which was broadcast live on the site midday. Over 100,000 people listened live.

He repeated that the company hasn’t made any changes to its content moderation policies — which attempt to keep rule-breaking content off the site — but said he believes requiring more people to pay to use Twitter through a new $8 verification program would lower the amount of hate speech overall.

The billionaire said the company’s progress would be much more freewheeling than in the past, with new ideas rapidly becoming features and then being cut quickly if they didn’t work out. Mistakes will be made.

“If nothing else I am a technologist and I can make technology go fast,” Musk said. “If we do not try bold moves, how will we make great improvements?”

The Twitter Spaces event came just days after Musk — who acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal last month — threatened a “thermonuclear name & shame” campaign against advertisers that leave the site out of concern for his approach to content moderation.

Last week the new Twitter owner said the site was facing a “massive drop in revenue” as advertisers paused campaigns. A coterie of large advertisers and marketing agencies have said they will slow down or pause spending on the site out of concern that Musk laying off half the company’s workforce will hurt its ability to police hate speech and sexually explicit content, which they do not want their ads showing up next to.

Musk has been scrambling to shore up the company’s revenue streams, cut costs by laying people off and find new ways to make money as he faces the reality of having to pay around $1 billion a year in interest on the debt he accrued buying Twitter. The vast majority of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising. A potential recession and rising inflation has already deeply cut into ad budgets, making now a particularly hard time for the entire digital ad industry.

It makes sense that advertisers don’t want their ads next to sexually explicit or hateful content, Musk said on Wednesday. “I don’t think having hate speech next to an ad is great.”

Musk said on the Spaces that Twitter should honor freedom of speech, but that it didn’t need to boost everyone’s opinions through its recommendation algorithms.

“We have to be tolerant of views we don’t agree with but those views don’t need to be amplified,” he said.

He previously tweeted that the company planned to instate a content moderation council of outside advisers to make decisions regarding what users should be banned or restored to the site, something that could affect notable accounts including former president Donald Trump’s.

He said that would take a few months to assemble — and wouldn’t have the power to restrict certain types of content.

“At the end of the day I am the Chief Twit here so the responsibility is mine,” he said. “If I make decisions that people don’t like then advertisers will leave the system, users will leave the system and we will fail.”

He added: “Forgiveness is just a very important principle.”

Musk has shaken advertisers’ faith that he would maintain rules against misinformation and hate speech in the nearly two weeks he’s owned the company. The day before he closed the deal Musk tweeted a statement committing to keeping the site from becoming a “free for all hellscape.”

But soon after, he himself boosted a conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson called on businesses last week to drop their advertisements on Twitter “until actions are taken to make Twitter a safe space.” Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” accused businesses that participate in the boycott of “trying to destroy free speech in America.”

Automakers Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen have all pulled their Twitter ads, along with cereal and snack companies General Mills and Mondelez, the corporation behind Oreo cookies, Ritz crackers and Sour Patch Kids candy. International ad and consulting firm Interpublic Group, which represents American Express, Coca-Cola, Fitbit, Spotify and dozens of other major corporations, has also advised its clients to suspend Twitter ad buys for now.

“A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues,” Musk tweeted Friday as more companies began their advertising exits, threatening to unleash his rowdy online fans on businesses and executives that desert the platform.

Musk’s biggest change so far is an idea to charge people $8 per month for a blue verification check mark — opening the program that is supposed to indicate trusted sources of information to the broader public. Critics are worried the change will create havoc on a platform that already struggles with the proliferation of disinformation, bots and scammers.

Musk defended the approach Wednesday, saying it would make the site more reliable and help eliminate or demote fake accounts.

He also stopped a new rollout that started Wednesday morning giving already officially-verified accounts a new badge to denote they’ve been confirmed to be who they say they are. Musk tweeted he had “killed it” and a Twitter executive clarified later that the company was focusing on using them for “government and commercial entities” instead of individuals.

“Apart from it being an aesthetic nightmare when looking at the Twitter feed it is simply another way of creating a two class system,” he said during the Twitter Spaces. “It wasn’t addressing the core problem of there are too many entities that would be considered official or have legacy blue check marks.”

Musk also floated the idea Wednesday of incorporating banking into Twitter, though it was clear the idea was at a very early stage. He described how users might attach an authenticated bank account to their Twitter handle, move cash into Twitter and even use debit cards tied to the site. Twitter, he said, could be the site of “an extremely compelling money-market account.”

Any move into banking would likely subject Twitter to regulatory scrutiny.

At the end of the meeting Wednesday, Musk said that he will measure success in his ownership of Twitter through more users signing up and more people using Twitter. He also wants to make sure no one regrets spending their time on the platform, and that it serves “the greater good of civilization.”

Source

The new plant is said to be the expansion of Fab 21, a plant that TSMC has under the works in Arizona. Fab 21 is expected to start manufacturing of 5nm chips from early 2024.

The news comes after Washington tried to lure chip manufacturers into the country by providing them with lucrative grants. Many countries in Europe are also pushing domestic chip manufacturing after the chip supply shortage that started in 2021 revealed the bottleneck situation of the supply chain industry.

The shortage was also fueled by the high demand of consumer electronics during the pandemic, as more people shifted their classrooms and workplaces at home. Along with the lockdown of factories and ports, the supply shortage spiraled down to the worst.

TSMC invested around $12 billion for constructing its Fab 21 facility. The investment for the expansion is said to be around the same. Chip executives believe that the global sales for semiconductors will double in the next decade to over $1 trillion a year, which underpins the huge upfront investment.

The United States allocated about $39 billion as part of its grants for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The grants will be given out starting next year, in addition to tax breaks on semiconductor manufacturing equipments and more.

TSMC had also announced its investment of around $40 billion to build four new fabrication lines in Taiwan, while also considering to expand fab facilities in Japan and Singapore.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

TSMC plans another fab in Phoenix, Arizona for manufacturing 3nm chips

The big picture: The chaos Musk has uncorked is creating potential for a real shift where some other businesses wax as Twitter wanes.

•     Tech companies are rolling out Twitter-adjacent features for frustrated users.

•     Marketers are seeking more "brand-safe" spaces for their budgets, and media companies are courting them.

State of play: Many users have been vocal about fleeing the social platform because of concerns over reduced content moderation, a jump in hate speech and Musk’s professed free-speech absolutism.

•  While Musk initially attempted to mollify marketers with a promise that Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape,” his policy pronouncements and postings have led some prominent advertisers to slow or pause their ad buys.

By the numbers: Even before the sale to Musk was final, Reuters reported internal documents that showed Twitter had been losing its most active users since the pandemic began.

•  But internally, Twitter is reportedly claiming "all-time high" growth in user numbers since the advent of the Musk era, per the Verge.

• Only Twitter insiders really know the full picture, and now that the company is privately held, we're likely to have even less visibility into its metrics.

Services that offer alternatives to Twitter are seeing the moment as a unique opportunity to entice new users.

• Many Twitter refugees are finding their way to Mastodon, the open-source, decentralized microblogging platform that launched in 2016.

• According to data from Apptopia shared with Axios, daily downloads of the app increased from 3,400 to 113,400 between Oct. 27 and Nov. 6.

• And Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko said Monday that the service now has more than 1 million monthly active users, with 489,003 new users added since Musk bought Twitter.

• “I have been working very, very hard to push the idea that there is a better way to do social media than what the commercial companies like Twitter and Facebook allow,” Rochko told Time.

Other alternatives:

• Tumblr-like social media site Cohost said that its user numbers almost doubled in the last month, with about 16,000 additions in the last two weeks.

• BlueSky, a protocol for building a decentralized social network first announced by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in 2019, announced that it had 30,000 new signups for its waiting list in only two days at the end of October.

• And upstart social apps BeReal and Gas, which are captivating younger users, both remain among the top 10 of App Store downloads.

Other platforms are rolling out new features designed to tantalize disaffected Twitter customers.

• Newsletter service Substack has openly appealed to antsy Twitter users and rolled out a chat feature last week that seems aimed to bring more discussions into the platform and off of spaces like Twitter.

• Tumblr reversed its 2018 ban against nudity last week. Twitter has long been the largest social platform that allows users to post not-safe-for-work material, and Tumblr just provide an alternative for that content.

The intrigue: Twitter needs marketers way more than they need the social network: The great bulk of its revenue comes from advertisers, but they have many other options.

• Brands from General Mills, Pfizer, The North Face and multiple automobile companies have paused or slowed their Twitter ad buys. The Wall Street Journal reports that buyers were considering shifting those dollars to other tech platforms.

• When veteran marketing trade official Lou Paskalis attempted to engage Musk in further discussion about advertisers’ concerns on Twitter, Musk blocked him.

• A source told Axios that professional network LinkedIn sent a note to marketers touting the platform's advantages after Musk’s Twitter takeover.

Yes, but: Twitter’s shadow continues to looms large. The communities that users have built there over the years might be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to recreate elsewhere.

• Many users, including authors and journalists, have built whole professional networks on the platform that they can't easily rebuild from scratch.

• Twitter has also been particularly important for other communities, particularly many underrepresented groups (including the trans, LGB, and disability communities as well as the well-documented Black Twitter).

Source

Fosstodon is an online community where people chat about open source tech. They talk about VR and tech gear, but they also post pictures of changing autumn leaves and pets. It’s been a small, tight-knit community for five years ever since its founders moved from Google+ to Mastodon.

But on Monday, it went offline. The culprit was an influx of new users spurred by Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, forcing Fosstodon to migrate its data to a larger server.

Since Musk bought the bird app last month, users are looking for ways to access Mastodon, the open source microblogging platform that isn’t quite Twitter but seems to be the closest thing to it, and they’re signing up for its many servers in droves. And Fosstodon, whose usership has grown from a list of about 3,000 preapproved members to an unwieldy 40,000, is far from the only server on the network to run into trouble.

“We can’t keep up with those requests, so we just opened the floodgates,” says Mike Stone, cofounder of Fosstodon. “My concern right now is the people that are coming in don’t understand the point of Fosstodon specifically, as opposed to the greater Mastodon environment.”

The decentralized social platform, which has served a smaller niche since its founding in 2016, had 381,113 active users as of October 28. On November 7, the company’s founder Eugen Rochko “tooted” (the term for posting short messages on Mastodon) that the network had hit more than 1 million active users. That meant 1,124 new servers and 489,003 new users. Musk also says Twitter’s daily growth hit all time highs during his first week at the helm, hinting that the great Twitter migration might be much smaller than expected, but Bot Sentinel estimated that more than 1 million accounts have been deleted or deactivated in that time. The outcome could have implications for how well decentralized tech works for the masses.

As Twitter has a public meltdown, Mastodon is having a quieter one. Its decentralized nature appeals to those who hate Musk’s unilateral control over Twitter, but that key feature is also working against it—Mastodon was not prepared to host millions of people in a short span of time. Some of the most popular servers that feed users into the network are overloaded with the fury of new activity, and volunteer administrators of the more than 4,000 instances, or servers, cannot keep up with new user requests to join and the volume of posts. Plus, new users are hitting a steep learning curve.

“What the platform owners and the instance administrators need to make sure is, it’s somehow sustainable,” says Aramindh Raman, an internet measurements researcher with the telecommunications company Telefónica who has studied Mastodon.

Several of the popular instances, like mstdn.social and mastodon.social, could no longer accept new signups this week. People do not need to be in these popular servers to access the network, but finding and applying to join an alternative takes some digging. People still stuck on Twitter complained about not receiving verification emails to get their Mastodon accounts up and running.

Rochko says he was too busy this week working on Mastodon to comment about the overloaded servers, and how the massive amount of new users had affected the network. The Mastodon founder posted that he had changed parts of how people sign up for new servers, allowing new users to filter by region, sign-up speed, and type. By November 8, he said he had fixed delayed feeds on two of the bigger servers.

Downtime on the decentralized network isn’t a new issue. Raman’s research looked at downtime on Mastodon in 2019 and found servers had been inaccessible about 10 percent of the time. It’s a frustration reminiscent of Twitter’s fail whale days. But even in Twitter’s early days, Raman says, it went offline only about 1.25 percent of the time.

Some of these growing pains come from users expecting that Mastodon will work with the same ease as products funded by Big Tech companies, but the nature of a volunteer-driven network means Mastodon can’t respond to crises like they do.

“People are trained not to be patient. We expect to pop in, sign up, and we’re onboarded,” says Robert Gehl, a professor of communication and media studies at York University in Canada, who has studied Mastodon. “This is a little bit more complicated. But in the long run, for people who are interested in a more community-oriented space, I think it is very much worth it.”

Part of Mastodon’s appeal is in hosting smaller communities, where moderators have rules and can regulate hate speech better than on some larger platforms. But with larger servers overwhelmed, people are applying for and flooding smaller ones, reshaping the communities that have grown there. Still, Stone and fellow cofounder Kev Quirk say they are excited about the diversity of opinion and topics coming in the conversations.

Fosstodon has seen its traffic increase tenfold since late October, says Quirk, and managing it has become a second full-time job over the past week. It saw increased interest even in April, when news of Musk’s agreement to buy Twitter first broke. “That nearly brought us to our knees,” says Quirk. “It’s been nothing compared to this.”

Jerry Bell, who runs the security-focused instance infosec.exchange on Mastodon, says his server saw challenges over the weekend as its users jumped from around 180 active users to some 8,000. On Monday, Bell posted a toot looking for volunteers to help him with security, support, and moderation on the instance.

“This has been a really big struggle because a lot of people are doing this as a hobby,” says Bell. “The pace with which things changed forced a lot of people to figure out how to react really fast.”

But Bell says the new users have also ushered in more substantive discussions on his instance. The small community was not always the most active. Already, he’s seen that change as more people from the security world join. And, Bell says, volunteers who want to help are pouring in already.

Mastodon’s meltdown may be short-lived. But that depends largely on instance runners expanding their efforts to host more users, and on users having the patience to navigate the network. The model for decentralized social media isn’t really new—it’s more a return to the old internet. And for some, that’s a welcome change.

“What’s happening now is causing people to rethink social media,” says Gehl. Mastodon “is kind of designed to adapt, because it’s comprised of all these different servers,” he says. “It just takes a little time to shake out.”

Will Knight contributed to this report.

Source

In his channel called "Tech Aesthetics," Yan said in the video above (English subtitles available) that he and his team had a goal of building a foldable iPhone while preserving as many parts from the original devices as possible. For instance, they preserved the iPhone's original display while making it soft enough to bend and still keeping the touch functionality intact.

When it comes to the phone's hinge, they initially used a Galaxy Z Flip for its "complex and strong spring hinge." However, they found that the screen suffers from visible fatigue damage and is not strong enough to withstand large angles of bending. They eventually went with a Motorola Razr hinge for its "small" display crease.

Next, they reversed the entire internal structure of an iPhone. The bottom half housed the motherboard while the upper half contained the battery. While iOS and touch functionalities worked fine during testing, the interface was not fold-friendly, so they installed custom software instead. This made the phone capable of running two apps simultaneously. The phone's bottom half can even be used as a selfie stand, a la Galaxy Z Flip.

The team had to make some compromises to ensure that the device was functional, however. For instance, they removed one speaker and installed a smaller battery. They also discarded MagSafe and wireless charging components.

The team aims to continue improving their folding iPhone over time and also welcomes comments from viewers.

Source: Tech Aesthetics

Source

Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history. I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go. We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.

I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here. I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.

How did we get here?

At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.

In this new environment, we need to become more capital efficient. We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse. We’ve cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint. We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I’ve also made the hard decision to let people go.

How will this work?

There is no good way to do a layoff, but we hope to get all the relevant information to you as quickly as possible and then do whatever we can to support you through this.

Everyone will get an email soon letting you know what this layoff means for you. After that, every affected employee will have the opportunity to speak with someone to get their questions answered and join information sessions.

Some of the details in the US include:

• Severance. We will pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.

• PTO. We’ll pay for all remaining PTO time.

• RSU vesting. Everyone impacted will receive their November 15, 2022 vesting.

• Health insurance. We’ll cover the cost of healthcare for people and their families for six months.

• Career services. We’ll provide three months of career support with an external vendor, including early access to unpublished job leads.

• Immigration support. I know this is especially difficult if you’re here on a visa. There’s a notice period before termination and some visa grace periods, which means everyone will have time to make plans and work through their immigration status. We have dedicated immigration specialists to help guide you based on what you and your family need.

Outside the US, support will be similar, and we’ll follow up soon with separate processes that take into account local employment laws.

We made the decision to remove access to most Meta systems for people leaving today given the amount of access to sensitive information. But we’re keeping email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say farewell.

While we’re making reductions in every organization across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs, some teams will be affected more than others.

Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year. We’re also restructuring our business teams more substantially. This is not a reflection of the great work these groups have done, but what we need going forward. The leaders of each group will schedule time to discuss what this means for your team over the next couple of days.

The teammates who will be leaving us are talented and passionate, and have made an important impact on our company and community. Each of you have helped make Meta a success, and I’m grateful for it. I’m sure you’ll go on to do great work at other places.

What other changes are we making?

I view layoffs as a last resort, so we decided to rein in other sources of cost before letting teammates go. Overall, this will add up to a meaningful cultural shift in how we operate. For example, as we shrink our real estate footprint, we’re transitioning to desk sharing for people who already spend most of their time outside the office. We’ll roll out more cost-cutting changes like this in the coming months.

We’re also extending our hiring freeze through Q1 with a small number of exceptions. I’m going to watch our business performance, operational efficiency, and other macroeconomic factors to determine whether and how much we should resume hiring at that point. This will give us the ability to control our cost structure in the event of a continued economic downturn. It will also put us on a path to achieve a more efficient cost structure than we outlined to investors recently.

I’m currently in the middle of a thorough review of our infrastructure spending. As we build our AI infrastructure, we’re focused on becoming even more efficient with our capacity. Our infrastructure will continue to be an important advantage for Meta, and I believe we can achieve this while spending less.

Fundamentally, we’re making all these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to make sure we’re operating efficiently across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs.

How do we move forward?

This is a sad moment, and there’s no way around that. To those who are leaving, I want to thank you again for everything you’ve put into this place. We would not be where we are today without your hard work, and I’m grateful for your contributions.

To those who are staying, I know this is a difficult time for you too. Not only are we saying goodbye to people we’ve worked closely with, but many of you also feel uncertainty about the future. I want you to know that we’re making these decisions to make sure our future is strong.

I believe we are deeply underestimated as a company today. Billions of people use our services to connect, and our communities keep growing.

Our core business is among the most profitable ever built with huge potential ahead. And we’re leading in developing the technology to define the future of social connection and the next computing platform. We do historically important work. I’m confident that if we work efficiently, we’ll come out of this downturn stronger and more resilient than ever.

We’ll share more on how we’ll operate as a streamlined organization to achieve our priorities in the weeks ahead. For now, I’ll say one more time how thankful I am to those of you who are leaving for everything you’ve done to advance our mission.

Mark

Source

Elon Musk offloads another $3.9 billion in Tesla shares

According to people who were at Tuesday’s meeting, Mark seemed to be downcast about the news and held himself responsible for the cuts. He said that he’d been over-optimistic about growth and ended up hiring too many people. Now, given the economic conditions, the company needs to cut thousands of jobs to keep the company’s finances healthy.

To help those affected by the cuts, Meta’s head of human resources, Lori Goler, told the meeting that affected employees will receive four months of salary as severance. This should help people with their living costs as they look for a new job.

Meta will release a general internal announcement about the layoff plans at 6 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. Those affected will be informed in the hours following the general internal announcement. According to the report, people in recruiting and business teams are those most likely to be affected.

Source: The Wall Street Journal (Paywall)

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will begin laying people off on Wednesday morning