An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He's never been responsible for an accident. So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor. LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a "Risk Solutions" division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl's request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page "consumer disclosure report," which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act. What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn't have is where they had driven the car. On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking. According to the report, the trip details had been provided by General Motors -- the manufacturer of the Chevy Bolt. LexisNexis analyzed that driving data to create a risk score "for insurers to use as one factor of many to create more personalized insurance coverage," according to a LexisNexis spokesman, Dean Carney. Eight insurance companies had requested information about Mr. Dahl from LexisNexis over the previous month. "It felt like a betrayal," Mr. Dahl said. "They're taking information that I didn't realize was going to be shared and screwing with our insurance." In recent years, insurance companies have offered incentives to people who install dongles in their cars or download smartphone apps that monitor their driving, including how much they drive, how fast they take corners, how hard they hit the brakes and whether they speed. But "drivers are historically reluctant to participate in these programs," as Ford Motor put it in apatent application (PDF) that describes what is happening instead: Car companies are collecting information directly from internet-connected vehicles for use by the insurance industry. Sometimes this is happening with a driver's awareness and consent. Car companies have established relationships with insurance companies, so that if drivers want to sign up for what's called usage-based insurance -- where rates are set based on monitoring of their driving habits -- it's easy to collect that data wirelessly from their cars. But in other instances, something much sneakier has happened. Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people's driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis. Automakers and data brokers that have partnered to collect detailed driving data from millions of Americans say they have drivers' permission to do so. But the existence of these partnerships is nearly invisible to drivers, whose consent is obtained in fine print and murky privacy policies that few read. Especially troubling is that some drivers with vehicles made by G.M. say they were tracked even when they did not turn on the feature -- called OnStar Smart Driver -- and that their insurance rates went up as a result.

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The openVertebrate (oVert) project is now complete, offering free online access to incredibly detailed 3D images of over 13,000 vertebrates. New Atlas reports: More than a research project, oVert was a collaboration between like-minded specialists across 25 institutions whose sole objective was to add value to museum collections by making them more widely available. Importantly, these images provide an insight that would only otherwise be obtained by destructive dissection and tissue sampling. Over the course of six years, project members took CT scans of more than half the classes, or genera, of all amphibians, reptiles, fishes, birds, and mammals, rendering models that provide an intimate look at the creatures, inside and out. [...] For a working example of the incredible detail and information contained in oVert's images, head to Sketchfab to view a sample of interactive 3D models like the olive sea snake. Or go to MorphoSource to access the full oVert repository. [...] If you have 30 minutes to spare, check out the full video produced by the Florida Museum, which showcases a collection of diverse oVert specimens. A study presenting a summary of the oVert project was published in the journal BioScience.

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Jennifer Ouellette reports via Ars Technica: Astronomers have made new measurements of the Hubble Constant, a measure of how quickly the Universe is expanding, by combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. Their results confirmed the accuracy of Hubble's earlier measurement of the constant's value, according to their recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, with implications for a long-standing discrepancy in values obtained by different observational methods known as the "Hubble tension." There was a time when scientists believed the Universe was static, but that changed with Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Alexander Friedmann published a set of equations showing that the Universe might actually be expanding in 1922, with Georges Lemaitre later making an independent derivation to arrive at that same conclusion. Edwin Hubble confirmed this expansion with observational data in 1929. Prior to this, Einstein had been trying to modify general relativity by adding a cosmological constant in order to get a static universe from his theory; after Hubble's discovery, legend has it, he referred to that effort as his biggest blunder. The article notes how scientists have employed different methods to calculate the Hubble Constant, including observing nearby celestial objects, analyzing gravitational waves from cosmic events, and examining the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). However, these approaches yield differing values, highlighting the challenge in pinning down the constant precisely. A recent effort involved making additional observations of Cepheid variable stars, correlating them with the Hubble data. The results further confirmed the accuracy of the Hubble data. "We've now spanned the whole range of what Hubble observed, and we can rule out a measurement error as the cause of the Hubble Tension with very high confidence," said co-author and team leader Adam Riess, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University. "Combining Webb and Hubble gives us the best of both worlds. We find that the Hubble measurements remain reliable as we climb farther along the cosmic distance ladder. With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility that we have misunderstood the Universe."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: Chalk up another milestone for Stratolaunch, the air-launch venture created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen: The company's mammoth airplane deployed a winged test vehicle for its first rocket-powered flight. Stratolaunch's single-use TA-1 test vehicle blazed a trail for future reusable hypersonic test vehicles that are expected to help the U.S. military catch up on one of the frontiers of aerial combat. TA-1 went supersonic, according to Zachary Krevor, Stratolaunch's president and CEO -- but based on his comments, it may not have quite hit the hypersonic standard of five times the speed of sound. "While I can't share the specific altitude and speed TA-1 reached due to proprietary agreements with our customers, we are pleased to share that in addition to meeting all primary and customer objectives of the flight, we reached high supersonic speeds approaching Mach 5 and collected a great amount of data at an incredible value to our customers," Krevor said in a news release. Today's test flight took place in the skies above California's Mojave Air and Space Port, where Stratolaunch keeps its twin-fuselage Roc airplane. Roc is the world's biggest operational aircraft, with a wingspan of 385 feet. It's designed to serve as a flying launch pad for rocket-powered vehicles like the TA-1 and its successors. The air-launch concept makes it possible for launch missions to be flown from any airport with a runway that's big enough to accommodate Roc. It's similar to the concept that was used back in 2004 to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight with financial backing from Paul Allen. [...] This flight was the 14th test mission for Roc, coming after an unpowered separation test of its TA-0 vehicle and two captive-carry test flights for TA-1. Today's test also marked the first in-flight use of Ursa Major's Hadley rocket engine. The primary test objectives included a safe release of TA-1, engine ignition, acceleration, sustained climb in altitude and a controlled splashdown into the Pacific.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The New York Times has denied claims by OpenAI that it "hacked" the company's artificial intelligence systems to create misleading evidence of copyright infringement, calling the accusation as "irrelevant as it is false." The Times in a court filing on Monday said OpenAI was "grandstanding" in its request to dismiss parts of the newspaper's lawsuit alleging its articles were misused for artificial intelligence training. The Times sued OpenAI and its largest financial backer Microsoft in December, accusing them of using millions of its articles without permission to train chatbots to provide information to users. The newspaper is among several prominent copyright owners including authors, visual artists and music publishers that have sued tech companies over the alleged misuse of their work in AI training. The Times' complaint cited several instances in which programs like OpenAI's popular chatbot ChatGPT gave users near-verbatim excerpts of its articles when prompted. OpenAI responded last month that the Times had paid an unnamed "hired gun" to manipulate its products into reproducing the newspaper's content. It asked the court to dismiss parts of the case, including claims that its AI-generated content infringes the Times' copyrights. "In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will," OpenAI said. The company also said it would eventually prove that its AI training made fair use of copyrighted content. The Times replied on Monday that it had simply used the "first few words or sentences" of its articles to prompt ChatGPT to recreate them. "OpenAI's true grievance is not about how The Times conducted its investigation, but instead what that investigation exposed: that Defendants built their products by copying The Times's content on an unprecedented scale -- a fact that OpenAI does not, and cannot, dispute," the Times said.

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Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Discord will soon allow developers to build new games and apps that can be used directly in its chat app. A selection of minigames and apps have been available to Discord users for months now, but starting March 18th, all Discord developers will get access to a new Embedded App SDK that lets them build these special embedded apps. Discord has used its Activities feature to enable apps like YouTube, promote minigames like poker, and even encourage users to play with a shared whiteboard experience. These apps all appear as an embedded iframe inside Discord, but they've been limited to select developers so far. The SDK will open up this Activities section of Discord to many more developers, so we're bound to see a lot more minigames that can be played directly inside Discord chats. [...] Discord is also experimenting with a way to allow users to add apps to their accounts so they roam across servers. Developers will be able to enable their apps for accounts, and the experiment will launch alongside the app SDK on March 18th. Discord is also bringing back its app pitches, where developers can pitch prototype app ideas and secure up to $30,000 in funding.

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After 10 years and billions of dollars spent in development, Apple abruptly canceled its ambitious car project known as "Titan," shifting its focus and resources on the company's artificial intelligence division. In a recent Q&A on Monday, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (paywalled) shared some new insights about the project and how involved the Apple Silicon team was before it was shut down. According to Gurman, Apple was planning to power the "AI brain" of the car with a custom Apple Silicon chip that would have the equivalent power of four M2 Ultra chips (the most powerful Apple has to date) combined. 9to5Mac reports: A single M2 Ultra chip consists of 134 billion transistors and features a 24-core CPU, a GPU with up to 76 cores, and a dedicated 32-core Neural Engine. M2 Ultra powers the current generation of Mac Studio and Mac Pro. Interestingly, Gurman says that the development of this new chip for the car was "nearly finished" before the project was discontinued. As some of the engineers working on the car project were reassigned to other teams at Apple, the company could reuse the engineering of this new chip for future projects.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Arkady Volozh, the billionaire cofounder of Russia's biggest internet company, was removed from the EU sanctions list today, clearing the way for his return to the world of international tech. On Tuesday a spokesperson for the European Council confirmed to WIRED that the Yandex cofounder was among three people whose sanctions were lifted this week. Volozh, 60, was initially included on the EU sanctions list in June 2023, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. "Volozh is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation," the blocsaidlast year to justify its decision. "As founder and CEO of Yandex, he is supporting, materially or financially, the Government of the Russian Federation." In response, Volozh stepped down from his position as Yandex CEO, calling the sanctions "misguided." [...] The removal of sanctions affecting one of Russian tech's most prominent figures will be especially significant if Volozh goes on to build Yandex 2.0 inside Europe. The billionaire maintains strong ties to exiled Russian tech talent, with thousands of Yandex staff leaving the country after the start of the war. "These people are now out, and in a position to start something new, continuing to drive technological innovation," Volozh said in the same 2023 statement. "They will be a tremendous asset to the countries in which they land." Yandex is widely known as "Russia's Google" because it monopolizes the Russian search market and offers many other services, including Yandex Music for streaming, Yandex Navigator for maps, and Yandex Go for hailing a ride. "Over the past 18 months, [Dutch-based Yandex NV] has been involved in complex negotiations with the Kremlin, in an attempt to sell its Russian operations while carving out four Europe-based units, which include businesses focused on self-driving cars, cloud computing, data labeling, and education tech," reports Wired. Last month, Yandex NV reached a "binding agreement" to sell its operations in the country for $5.2 billion -- a price that reflects a 50% discount that Moscow imposes on companies from "unfriendly" countries like the Netherlands as a condition of exiting business in Russia.

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According to Bloomberg (paywalled), the Pentagon has reportedly scrapped its plan to allocate $2.5 billion in grants to Intel, causing the firm's stock to slip in extended-hours trading. From a report: The decision now leaves the U.S. Commerce Department, which is responsible for doling out the funds from the U.S. CHIPs and Science Act, to make up the shortfall, the news outlet said. The Commerce Dept. was initially only supposed to cover $1B of the $3.5B that Intel is slated to receive for advanced defense and intelligence-related semiconductors. The deal is slated to position Intel as the dedicated supplier for processors used for military and intelligence applications and could result in a Secure Enclave inside Intel's chip factory, the news outlet said. With the Pentagon reportedly pulling out, it could alter how much Intel and other companies receive from the CHIPs Act, the news outlet said.

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Two top executives from the crypto exchange Binance have been arrested in Nigeria for allegedly destabilizing the national currency. Quartz reports: According to a Wall Street Journal report, Tigran Gambaryan, head of financial-crime compliance at Binance who previously worked at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and Nadeem Anjarwalla, a British-Kenyan national and Binance's regional manager for Africa, have been held against their will for the past two weeks in the country. As per reports, Nigerian government officials invited Binance executives to discuss an ongoing dispute about the world's largest crypto exchange allegedly driving down the value of their national currency. Gambaryan and Anjarwalla arrived in Nigeria on February 25th; after their meeting with government officials, both were taken to their hotels. Later, they were instructed to pack their belongings and move to a guesthouse run by Nigeria's National Security Agency, as stated by their families, per reports. The Nigerian government has accused Binance of exacerbating the country's foreign exchange challenges through rate manipulation for profit. The authorities have also accused the crypto exchange of illegal operations and have restricted access to the company's website. There are also reports that Nigeria sought a $10 billion penalty from Binance for processing around $26 billion in untraceable funds in the country. [...] The reason why and how Nigeria's economic crisis is linked with Binance is yet to be found out. Binance is hoping to resolve the matter soon, according to CoinDesk. The report notes that Nigeria is experiencing its worst economic crisis in recent years due to inflation and the devaluation of their currency, the naira.

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Bill Toulas reports via BleepingComputer: Google awarded $10 million to 632 researchers from 68 countries in 2023 for finding and responsibly reporting security flaws in the company's products and services. Though this is lower than the $12 million Google's Vulnerability Reward Program paid to researchers in 2022, the amount is still significant, showcasing a high level of community participation in Google's security efforts. The highest reward for a vulnerability report in 2023 was $113,337, while the total tally since the program's launch in 2010 has reached $59 million. For Android, the world's most popular and widely used mobile operating system, the program awarded over $3.4 million. Google also increased the maximum reward amount for critical vulnerabilities concerning Android to $15,000, driving increased community reports. During security conferences like ESCAL8 and hardwea.io, Google awarded $70,000 for 20 critical discoveries in Wear OS and Android Automotive OS and another $116,000 for 50 reports concerning issues in Nest, Fitbit, and Wearables. Google's other big software project, the Chrome browser, was the subject of 359 security bug reports that paid out a total of $2.1 million.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: Months in jail and thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees -- those are the consequences Alabamians and Arizonans could soon face for selling cell-cultured meat products that could cut into the profits of ranchers, farmers and meatpackers in each state. State legislators from Florida to Arizona are seeking to ban meat grown from animal cells in labs, citing a "war on our ranching" and a need to protect the agriculture industry from efforts to reduce the consumption of animal protein, thereby reducing the high volume of climate-warming methane emissions the sector emits. Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, according to federal data, with livestock such as cattle making up a quarter of those emissions, predominantly from their burps, which release methane -- a potent greenhouse gas that's roughly 80 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. Globally, agriculture accounts for about 37 percent of methane emissions. For years, climate activists have been calling for more scrutiny and regulation of emissions from the agricultural sector and for nations to reduce their consumption of meat and dairy products due to their climate impacts. Last year, over 150 countries pledged to voluntarily cut emissions from food and agriculture at the United Nations' annual climate summit. But the industry has avoided increased regulation and pushed back against efforts to decrease the consumption of meat, with help from local and state governments across the U.S. Bills in Alabama, Arizona, Florida and Tennessee are just the latest legislation passed in statehouses across the U.S. that have targeted cell-cultured meat, which is produced by taking a sample of an animal's muscle cells and growing them into edible products in a lab. Sixteen states -- Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming -- have passed laws addressing the use of the word "meat" in such products' packaging, according to the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas, with some prohibiting cell-cultured, plant-based or insect-based food products from being labeled as meat.

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12P/Pons-Brooks, a Halley-type comet larger than Mount Everest and with a 71.3-year orbit, is expected to become visible to the naked eye in the coming weeks as it makes its closest approach to the sun on April 21. The Guardian reports: While some reports suggest 12P/Pons-Brooks was spotted as far back as the 14th century, it is named after the French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons who discovered it in 1812 and the British-American astronomer William Robert Brooks who observed it on its next orbit in 1883. Thought to have a nucleus about 30km (20 miles) in diameter, it is classed as a cryovolcanic comet, meaning it erupts with dust, gases and ice when pressure builds inside as it is heated. One such outburst last year caused it to brighten a hundredfold and garnered it the sobriquet of "the Devil Comet" after the haze that surrounds it formed a horned shape. While the comet -- and its green tinge -- has already been spotted in the night sky, experts say it is expected to become even brighter in the coming weeks. "The comet is expected to reach a magnitude of 4.5 which means it ought to be visible from a dark location in the UK," said Dr Paul Strom, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick. "The comet moves from the constellation of Andromeda to Pisces. As it does so it passes by bright stars which will make it easier to spot on certain dates. In particular, on March 31 12P/Pons-Brooks will be only 0.5 a degree from the bright star called Hamal," he said. But Dr Robert Massey, the deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society, said even if the comet did become brighter it could still be difficult to see, adding that basic instruments such as small telescopes would greatly help. "If you have a half-decent pair of binoculars, certainly attempt to look for it with those," said Massey, adding that apps that map the sky were also useful. The best views of the comet are currently to be found in the northern hemisphere. Massey said those who wanted to catch a glimpse should venture out on a clear evening and look low in the west-north-west as twilight came to an end. "You want to avoid haze, you want to avoid moonlight, you want to avoid light pollution."

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Jason Rainbow reports via SpaceNews: SpaceX has secured conditional approval to use extremely high-frequency E-band radio waves to improve the capacity of its low Earth orbit Starlink broadband constellation. The Federal Communications Commission said March 8 it is allowing SpaceX to use E-band frequencies between second-generation Starlink satellites and gateways on the ground, alongside already approved spectrum in the Ka and Ku bands. Specifically, SpaceX is now also permitted to communicate between 71 and 76 gigahertz from space to Earth, and 81-86 GHz Earth-to-space, using the up to 7,500 Gen2 satellites SpaceX is allowed to deploy. SpaceX has plans for 30,000 Gen2 satellites, on top of the 4,400 Gen1 satellites already authorized by the FCC. However, the FCC deferred action in December 2022 on whether to allow SpaceX to deploy the other three-quarters of its Gen2 constellation, which includes spacecraft closer to Earth to improve broadband speeds. The regulator also deferred action at the time on SpaceX's plans to use E-band frequencies, citing a need to first establish ground rules for using them in space. In a March 8 regulatory filing, the FCC said it found "SpaceX's proposed operations in the E-band present no new or increased frequency conflicts with other satellite operations." But the order comes with multiple conditions, including potentially forcing SpaceX to modify operations if another satellite operator also seeks to use the radio waves.

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An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Wired article: The U.S. economy is showing remarkable health, but in the tech industry, layoffs keep coming. For those out of work, finding a new position can become a full-time job. And in tech -- a sector notoriously always looking for the next hot, new thing -- some people whose days as fresh-faced coders are long gone say that having decades of experience can feel like a disadvantage. Ageism is a longtime problem in the tech industry. Database startup RelevantDB went viral in 2021 after it posted a job listing bragging, "We hire old people," which played off industry stereotypes. In 2020, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that IBMhad engaged in age discrimination, pushing out older workers to make room for younger ones. (The company has denied engaging in "systemic age discrimination.") A recent LinkedIn ad that shows an older woman unfamiliar with tech jargon saying her son sells invisible clouds triggered a backlash from people who say it unfairly portrayed older people as out of touch. In response, Jim Habig, LinkedIn's vice president of marketing, says: "This ad didn't meet our goal to create experiences where all professionals feel welcomed and valued, and we are working to replace the spot." [...] Tech companies have laid off more than 400,000 workers over the past two years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the industry. To older workers, the purge is both a reminder of the dotcom bust, and a new frontier. The industry's generally consistent growth in recent decades as the economy has become more tech-centric means that many more senior workers -- which in tech can sometimes be considered to mean over 35 but includes people in their late forties, fifties, or sixties -- may have less experience with job hunting. For decades, tech workers could easily hop between jobs in their networks, often poached by recruiters. And as tech companies boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic's early days, increased demand for skills gave workers leverage. Now the power has shifted to the employers as companies seek to become efficient and correct that over hiring phase, and applicants are hitting walls. Workers have to network, stay active on LinkedIn, join message boards, and stand out. With four generations now clocking in to work, things can feel crowded.

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Connor Jones reports via The Register: Stanford University says the cybersecurity incident it dealt with last year was indeed ransomware, which it failed to spot for more than four months. Keen readers of El Reg may remember the story breaking toward the end of October 2023 after Akira posted Stanford to its shame site, with the university subsequently issuing a statement simply explaining that it was investigating an incident, avoiding the dreaded R word. Well, surprise, surprise, ransomware was involved, according to a data breach notice sent out to the 27,000 people affected by the attack. Akira targeted the university's Department of Public Safety (DPS) and this week's filing with the Office of the Maine Attorney General indicates that Stanford became aware of the incident on September 27, more than four months after the initial breach took place. According to Monday's filing, the data breach occurred on May 12 2023 but was only discovered on September 27 of last year, raising questions about whether the attacker(s) was inside the network the entire time and why it took so long to spot the intrusion. It's not fully clear what information was compromised, but the draft letters include placeholders for three different variables. However, the filing with Maine's AG suggests names and social security numbers are among the data types to have been stolen. All affected individuals have been offered 24 months of free credit monitoring, including access to a $1 million insurance reimbursement policy and ID theft recovery services. Akira's post dedicated to Stanford on its leak site claims it stole 430 GB worth of data, including personal information and confidential documents. It's all available to download via a torrent file and the fact it remains available for download suggests the research university didn't pay whatever ransom the attackers demanded.

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Roman Sterlingov, the founder of a $400 million crypto-mixing service called Bitcoin Fog, has been convicted of money laundering in a United State District Court on Tuesday. Other charges include money laundering conspiracy, operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business, and violations of the D.C. Money Transmitters Act. CoinTelegraph reports: Sterlingov, however, had argued throughout the trial that he was only a user of the service, and not its operator. His attorney, Tok Ekeland said in a March 12 X post that his team will appeal the verdict. According to evidence presented at the trial, Sterlingov operated Bitcoin Fog from October 2011 to April 2021, which acted as a money laundering service for "criminals seeking to hide their illicit proceeds from law enforcement." The service moved over 1.2 million Bitcoin over the decade-long operation -- worth $400 million at the time of the transactions -- with the bulk of cryptocurrency coming from darknet marketplaces tied to narcotics, computer fraud abuse and identity theft, the government said. Bitcoin Fog also served distributors of child sexual abuse material. Evidence used to convict Sterlingov found that the "vast majority" of crypto deposited to his crypto exchange accounts came from "Bitcoin clusters" associated with Bitcoin Fog. "Evidence presented at trial clearly showed that the defendant laundered hundreds of millions of illicit funds from the dark web through Bitcoin Fog in an attempt to conceal the origin of those funds," said Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Criminal Investigation Chief Jim Lee.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: We are often told that setting the bar high is key to success. After all, if you shoot for the moon and miss, at least you'll land with the stars. But Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang wants privileged Gen Z grads to lower their expectations. "People with very high expectations have very low resilience -- and unfortunately, resilience matters in success," Huang said during a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations." Indeed, as the billionaire boss pointed out, those at elite institutions like Stanford probably have higher expectations for their future than your average Joe. The university is one of the most selective in the United States -- it ranks third best in the country, according to the QS World University Rankings, and the few students who get picked to study there are charged $62,484 in tuition fees for the premium, compared to the average $26,027 per annum cost. But, unfortunately for those saddled with student debt, not even the best universities in the world can teach you resilience. "I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you," Huang added. [...] For those fortunate enough to never have personally experienced hardship growing up, Huang doesn't have any advice on how to welcome more of it into your life now. But he did have some advice on embracing tough times. "I don't know how to do it [but] for all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering," Huang said. "Greatness comes from character and character isn't formed out of smart people -- it's formed out of people who suffered."It's why despite Nvidia's success -- the company has a $2 trillion market cap -- Huang would still welcome hardship at his organization."To this day I use the phrase 'pain and suffering' inside our company with great glee," he added. "I mean that in a happy way because you want to refine the character of your company." Essentially, if you want your workforce to always be on their A game, don't let them rest on their laurels.

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According to a new study from the Institute for the Future of Work, contemporary technology often has a negative impact on workers' quality of life. The think tank surveyed over 6,000 people to learn how four categories of workplace technologies affected their wellbeing. TechSpot reports the findings: The study found that increased exposure to three of the categories tended to worsen workers' mental state and health. The three areas that negatively impact people most are wearable and remote sensing technologies, which covers CCTV cameras and wearable trackers; robotics, consisting of automated machines, self-driving vehicles, and other equipment; and, unsurprisingly, technologies relating to AI and ML, which includes everything from decision management to biometrics. Only one of the categories was found to be beneficial to employees, and it's one that has been around for decades: ICT tech such as laptops, tablets, phones, and real-time messaging tools.

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