Google Offers Employees Free Electric Scooters To Get Them Back To the Office

Google is preparing to bring its employees back to the office this week, and as an added bonus, it’ll be offering them free electric scooters to help ease the transition. The Verge reports: The tech giant is teaming up with e-scooter maker Unagi to launch a new program called “Ride Scoot,” in which most of Google’s US-based workers can get reimbursed for the full cost of a monthly subscription to Unagi’s stylish Model One scooter. The Model One, which retails for $990, is a lightweight dual-motor scooter with a top speed of 20mph and a range of 15.5 miles. Unagi founder and CEO David Hyman said the idea was to help Google employees get to work — or even just to the closest bus stop. (Google famously provides free shuttle bus service to its employees in Silicon Valley.) “They know there’s apprehension amongst employees,” Hyman said. “People got really accustomed to working from home. And they’re just trying to do everything they can to improve the experience of coming back.”

Unagi won’t just be handing out free scooters to every Google employee, though. Unagi plans on setting up booths at various Google offices to sign up employees for a monthly scooter subscription at the discounted rate of $44.10 per month, plus the $50 enrollment fee — the total of which will be fully reimbursable by Google. Scooter subscriptions will also be added as a transportation option to Google’s internal employee portal. And Google and Unagi will host demo days for employees to try out the Model One at various office locations.

Employees must also use the scooter for at least nine commutes per month to get fully reimbursed for their monthly subscription. (Google plans on using the honor system and won’t be tracking employees’ scooter usage.) In addition to Google’s main headquarters in Mountain View, other eligible locations include Seattle, Kirkland, Irvine, Sunnyvale, Playa Vista, Austin, and New York City.

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Google Cloud Security Exec: Government Reliance on Microsoft Is a Security Vulnerability

“Google is taking aim at Microsoft’s dominance in government technology and security,” reports NBC News:

Jeanette Manfra, director of risk and compliance for Google’s cloud services and a former top U.S. cybersecurity official, said Thursday that the government’s reliance on Microsoft — one of Google’s top business rivals — is an ongoing security threat.

Manfra also said in a blog post published Thursday that a survey commissioned by Google found that a majority of federal employees believe that the government’s reliance on Microsoft products is a cybersecurity vulnerability. “Overreliance on any single vendor is usually not a great idea,” Manfra said in a phone interview. “You have an attack on one product that the majority of the government is depending on to do their job, you have a significant risk in how the government can continue to function.”

Microsoft pushed back strongly against the claim, calling it “unhelpful.” The study comes as Google is positioning itself to challenge Microsoft’s dominance in federal government offices, where Windows and Office programs are commonly used….

The blog post comes as hackers continue to discover critical software vulnerabilities at an increasing pace across major tech products, but especially in Microsoft programs. Last year, researchers discovered 21 “zero-days” — an industry term for a critical vulnerability that a company doesn’t have a ready solution for — actively in use against Microsoft products, compared to 16 against Google and 12 against Apple. he most prominent zero-day was used against Microsoft’s Exchange email program, which cybersecurity experts say was first employed by Chinese cyberspies and then quickly adopted by criminal hackers, leading to hundreds of companies becoming compromised.

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Paramount+ Releases Trailer for Its 6th Star Trek Series, ‘Strange New Worlds’

The Paramount+ streaming service already has five ongoing Star Trek series (including Discovery and Picard).

But they’ve just released a trailer for another one — and it’s now derived directly from the original 1960s TV show, even including some of its original characters. The upcoming show’s title?

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Ars Technica reports:

As we’ve reported previously, one of the highlights of Star Trek: Discovery’s second season was the appearance of classic original series (TOS) characters Capt. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn), and Spock (Ethan Peck). All three reprise their roles for Strange New Worlds….

“If you want to seek out new life, go where the aliens are,” Pike tells us. But that alien life might not be receptive to first contact, as Pike and the Enterprise find themselves under fire by aliens who consider their presence to be “blasphemy.” And romance blooms for both Pike and Spock (separately, not with each other).

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds debuts on Paramount+ on May 5, 2022. The streaming platform has already greenlighted a second season, with Paul Wesley (Vampire Diaries ) joining the cast as future Enterprise Capt. James T. Kirk.
Ars Technica reports the cast as:

Babs Olusanmokun playing Dr. M’BengaCelia Rose Gooding filling Nichelle Nichols’ shoes as Cadet Nyota UhuraJess Bush playing Nurse Christine ChapelMelissa Navai playing Lt. Erica OrtegasBruce Orak playing an Aenar named Hemmer.Christina Chong playing La’An Noonien-Singh (a relation of the classic revenge-obsessed Star Trek villain Khan).
And on an unrelated note…

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Intel Beats AMD and Nvidia with Arc GPU’s Full AV1 Support

Neowin notes growing support for the “very efficient, potent, royalty-free video codec” AV1, including Microsoft’s adding of support for hardware acceleration of AV1 on Windows.

But AV1 even turned up in Intel’s announcement this week of the Arc A-series, a new line of discrete GPUs, Neowin reports:

Intel has been quick to respond and the company has become the first such GPU hardware vendor to have full AV1 support on its newly launched Arc GPUs. While AMD and Nvidia both offer AV1 decoding with their newest GPUs, neither have support for AV1 encoding.

Intel says that hardware encoding of AV1 on its new Arc GPUs is 50 times faster than those based on software-only solutions. It also adds that the efficiency of AV1 encode with Arc is 20% better compared to HEVC. With this feature, Intel hopes to potentially capture at least some of the streaming and video editing market that’s based on users who are looking for a more robust AV1 encoding solution compared to CPU-based software approaches.

From Intel’s announcement:
Intel Arc A-Series GPUs are the first in the industry to offer full AV1 hardware acceleration, including both encode and decode, delivering faster video encode and higher quality streaming while consuming the same internet bandwidth. We’ve worked with industry partners to ensure that AV1 support is available today in many of the most popular media applications, with broader adoption expected this year. The AV1 codec will be a game changer for the future of video encoding and streaming.

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Bitcoin Reaches Milestone: 19 Millionth Bitcoin Mined

Bitcoin hit a milestone Friday “that gets the world ever closer to the moment when the final new bitcoin will enter the world,” reports Axios. “The supply of coins broke 19 million…”

“Bitcoin is hard-coded so that it has both a predictable emission schedule and a hard cap of 21 million bitcoin.”

Bitcoin was created to be money “with a fixed supply that no one can change,” the article points out. But it’ll be a long time before the price of bitcoin actually feels any effect:

The next network-level event likely to impact price is the next time the block reward drops in half, which will happen in a little over two years…. The 18 millionth bitcoin was mined in 2019, but the 21 millionth won’t be mined until roughly 2140, provided the network sticks to the plan. That’s because every four years the emission schedule drops in half.

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Turmoil at Metals Exchange Trading Nickel Used in Lithium-Ion Batteries and EVs

Early last month on the London Metals Exchange, a Chinese metals producer named Tsingshan Holding Group “wagered a massive bet that the price of nickel would fall,” reports CNN Business. At the peak Tsingshan’s position “was equivalent to about an eighth of all of the outstanding contracts in the market.”

But between Friday, March 4 and Tuesday March 8, the metal soared in value from about $29,000 to $100,000 per ton. “If prices had stood at $100,000 the company would have owed the London Metals Exchange $15 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.”
The spike generated margin calls higher than the London Metals Exchange [the LME] had ever seen — and if paid, they would force multiple defaults that would ripple through the exchange and destabilize the global market. Exchange executives scrambled to respond, ultimately throwing a lifeline to the brokers representing Tsingshan and other producers. In an unprecedented move, they halted trading and retroactively canceled all 9,000 trades that occurred on Tuesday, worth about $4 billion in total. The market would remain dark for a week, unleashing a tidal wave of chaos and a mob of angry investors onto the exchange. In its wake, threats of lawsuits abound and trust has eroded. [The day it re-opened, CNN also reported the exchange “had to suspend the electronic trading of nickel shortly after it resumed due to a technical problem.”]

Now, the 145 year-old British giant is teetering on a nickel. Over the past century-and-a-half the LME, known for its ring of red couches and barking brokers, has successfully trudged its way through world wars, meltdowns and defaults. But nickel, the metal used in stainless steel and the lithium-ion battery cells in most electric vehicles, might be what finally brings the world’s largest market for base metals contracts to its knees.”The world’s pricing mechanism for nickel is failing,” said Daniel Ghali, the director of commodities strategy at TD Securities. “The question is, will it continue to fail?” Others weren’t as diplomatic. “The LME is now very likely going to die a slow self-inflicted death through the loss of confidence in it and its products,” tweeted Mark Thompson, executive vice-chairman at Tungsten West, a mining development company….

Until 2012, the LME was owned by its members, the same people who traded on the exchange — but then it was sold to Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) for $2.2 billion….

The LME’s lack of transparency allows two or three big names to throw around vast sums of money and “hijack” a relatively illiquid market, said Adrian Gardner, principal analyst of nickel markets at Wood Mackenzie…. Sitting on the other side of the short were hedge funds, who had bet that nickel supply would decrease because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Russia provides about 20% of all top-grade nickel). When the LME decided to retroactively cancel those $4 billion in gains on March 8, it was hedge funds who lost giant sums of money. Global investment management firm AQR, which has $124 billion in assets under management, was among those that lost money when trades were canceled. “The winners were commodity producers and their banks, and the losers are the various clients that AQR and other large asset managers represent: firefighters, municipal workers, and university endowments,” said Jordan Brooks, principal at AQR Capital Management. AQR is considering legal action against the exchange. Investors, said Brooks, “acted in good faith and provided liquidity, but the LME just decided to shift their trading gains to commodities producers and their banks….”

Volume in trading has yet to recover, raising questions about the LME’s ability to accurately benchmark the price of the metal. Fewer than 210 contracts were traded in the first hour after the market opened on Tuesday. That’s down about 60% from the 90-day average before the trading halt. Other metals on the LME, like copper and aluminum, have also seen a decrease in trade volume….

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange doesn’t currently trade nickel, but perhaps it soon will. “[The LME] did something that was egregious and a betrayal of trust,” said Brooks. “I’d be shocked if the strategic plans of other exchanges haven’t changed in the past three weeks.”

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Two More Successful Rocket Launches from Satellite Launch-Service Providers

SpaceNews reports:
The launch was the latest in a series of Electron launches of BlackSky satellites arranged by Spaceflight. That deal included launches of pairs of BlackSky satellites in November and December 2021 as well as a failed Electron launch in May 2021….

Rocket Lab did not attempt to recover the first stage of the Electron after this launch. The company said in November that, after three launches where it recovered Electron boosters after splashing down in the ocean, it was ready to attempt a midair recovery of a booster by catching it with a helicopter, the final step before reusing those boosters. The company has not announced when that recovery will take place, but hinted it would take place soon….

Lars Hoffman, senior vice president of global launch services at Rocket Lab, during a panel session at the Satellite 2022 conference March 22…added that the company has a “full manifest” of Electron launches this year, including the first from Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Island, Virginia, with a goal of launching on average once per month. “We’re keeping pace with the market. We’re trying not to get too far ahead.”

Meanwhile, in mid-March Space.com reported that the launch-service provider Astra “bounced back from last month’s launch failure with a groundbreaking success, deploying satellites in Earth orbit for the first time ever” with its low-cost two-stage launch vehicle, LV0009. (Watch video of the launch here.)
It was a huge moment for Astra, which suffered a failure last month during its first-ever launch with operational payloads onboard…. Astra aims to break into the small-satellite launch market in a big way with its line of cost-effective, easily transported and ever-evolving rockets.

The company had conducted five orbital flights before today, four of them test missions from Kodiak. Astra reached orbit successfully on the most recent of those four test flights, a November 2021 mission that carried a non-deployable dummy payload for the U.S. Department of Defense. But the company stumbled on its next mission, its first with operational payloads onboard…

Astra investigators soon got to the bottom of both problems, tracing the fairing issue to an erroneous wiring diagram and the tumble to a software snafu. The company instituted fixes, clearing LV0009’s path to the pad… LV0009 rose into the Alaska sky smoothly and ticked off its early milestones as planned. Stage separation and fairing deploy went well, and the rocket’s second stage cruised to the desired orbit with no apparent issues. LV0009 deployed its payloads successfully about nine minutes after liftoff….

One of the known payloads is OreSat0, a tiny cubesat built by students at Portland State University in Oregon that is designed to serve as a testbed for future cubesats that will study Earth’s climate and provide STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) outreach opportunities.

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Writing Google Reviews About Patients Is Actually a HIPAA Violation

“According to The Verge, health providers writing Google reviews about patients with identifiable information is a HIPAA violation,” writes Slashdot reader August Oleman. From the report: In the past few years, the phrase ‘HIPAA violation’ has been thrown around a lot, often incorrectly. People have cited the law, which protects patient health information, as a reason they can’t be asked if they’re vaccinated or get a doctor’s note for an employer. But asking someone if they’re vaccinated isn’t actually a HIPAA violation. That’s a fine and not-illegal thing for one non-doctor to ask another non-doctor. What is a HIPAA violation is what U. Phillip Igbinadolor, a dentist in North Carolina, did in September 2015, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. After a patient left an anonymous, negative Google review, he logged on and responded with his own post on the Google page, saying that the patient missed scheduled appointments. […]

In the post, he used the patient’s full name and described, in detail, the specific dental problem he was in for: “excruciating pain” from the lower left quadrant, which resulted in a referral for a root canal. That’s what a HIPAA violation actually looks like. The law says that healthcare providers and insurance companies can’t share identifiable, personal information without a patient’s consent. In this case, the dentist (a healthcare provider) publicly shared a patient’s name, medical condition, and medical history (personal information). As a result, the office was fined $50,000 (PDF).

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Face Scanner Clearview AI Aims To Branch Out Beyond Police

A controversial facial recognition company that’s built a massive photographic dossier of the world’s people for use by police, national governments and — most recently — the Ukrainian military is now planning to offer its technology to banks and other private businesses. The Washington Post reports: Clearview AI co-founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That disclosed the plans Friday to The Associated Press in order to clarify a recent federal court filing that suggested the company was up for sale. “We don’t have any plans to sell the company,” he said. Instead, he said the New York startup is looking to launch a new business venture to compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft in verifying people’s identity using facial recognition.

The new “consent-based” product would use Clearview’s algorithms to verify a person’s face, but would not involve its ever-growing trove of some 20 billion images, which Ton-That said is reserved for law enforcement use. Such ID checks that can be used to validate bank transactions or for other commercial purposes are the “least controversial use case” of facial recognition, he said. That’s in contrast to the business practice for which Clearview is best known: collecting a huge trove of images posted on Facebook, YouTube and just about anywhere else on the publicly-accessible internet.

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