Technology

Customers in mid-tier band facing up to 50% higher fees... and they're delighted

HP is hiking the UK price of Instant Ink monthly plans by more than 50 per cent in some cases, although the company website is still showing the cost of the soon-to-be out-of-date bands.…

LG has announced a new offering to advertisers that promises to be able to reach the company's millions of connected devices in households across the country, pummeling TV viewers with -- you guessed it -- targeted ads. From a report: While ads playing on your connected TV might not be anything new, some of the metrics the company plans to hand over to advertisers include targeting viewers by specific demographics, for example, or being able to tie a TV ad view to someone's in-store purchase down the line. If you swap out a TV screen for a computer screen, the kind of microtargeting that LG's offering doesn't sound any different than what a company like Facebook or Google would offer. That's kind of the point. Online ad spending reached more than $490 billion by the end of last year, and those numbers are only going to keep going up as more advertisers look for more ways to track and target more people online. Traditional TV ad spend, meanwhile, has tanked since its peak around 2016. In order to lure ad dollars back, folks in the television space, like LG, are using every tool at their disposal to claw back the ad dollars the internet's taken away. And it's clearly working. While traditional TV ad spend has plummeted, there's never been more money spent on advertising across the digitally connected TVs offered by companies like LG. Roku, for example, recently announced an upcoming Shopify integration that would let retailers target TV viewers with more ads for more of their products. Amazon rolled out a new beta platform that lets networks promote apps, movies, or TV shows to people right from the device's home screen. And I don't need to remind Samsung TV owners how their devices are getting absolutely plastered with ads from every conceivable angle.

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Moderna gave its omicron-specific COVID-19 vaccine to the first participant in a clinical trial, the company announced Wednesday. The report comes a few days after Pfizer / BioNTech launched a trial of its shot targeting the fast-spreading variant. From a report: The announcement coincides with the release of data showing that the two-dose series of Moderna's original vaccine struggled to block the omicron variant of the virus, which has mutations that help it dodge those antibodies. A booster shot restored much of its ability to neutralize the virus -- and while that protection weakened over time, it still stuck around for at least six months. Still, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement that the omicron variant is enough of a threat that the company plans to move forward with the variant booster.

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While creators were stripping away annoying styling, users started to make Geminispace a bunker, says engineer

Project Gemini is a new internet protocol designed to be simpler and lighter to make it easier for people to design, run, and use their own sites.…

Wait – is this the same company that gave us Windows?

Microsoft has cancelled the latest release of Azure Sphere OS, its take on securing IoT devices, citing problems reported by a customer during evaluation.…

Spotify has removed famed singer-songwriter Neil Young's recordings from its streaming platform. From a report: On Monday, Young had briefly posted an open letter on his own website, asking his management and record label to remove his music from the streaming giant, as a protest against the platform's distribution of podcaster Joe Rogan. Rogan has been widely criticized for spreading misinformation about coronavirus vaccines on his podcast, which is now distributed exclusively on Spotify. Late Wednesday, the musician posted two lengthy statements on his website, one addressing the catalyst of his request and the other thanking his industry partners. In the first, he wrote in part: "I first learned of this problem by reading that 200-plus doctors had joined forces, taking on the dangerous life-threatening COVID falsehoods found in Spotify programming. Most of the listeners hearing the unfactual, misleading and false COVID information of Spotify are 24 years old, impressionable and easy to swing to the wrong side of the truth. These young people believe Spotify would never present grossly unfactual information. They unfortunately are wrong. I knew I had to try to point that out." As of last week, more than 1,000 doctors, scientists and health professionals had signed that open letter to Spotify. According to Rolling Stone, Young's original request on Monday, which was addressed to his manager and an executive at Warner Music Group, read in part: "I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines -- potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them ... They can have Rogan or Young. Not both." The letter was quickly removed from Young's website. Spotify's scrubbing of Young from its service was first reported on Wednesday afternoon by The Wall Street Journal. His removal from the streaming platform makes him one of the most popular musical artists not to appear on Spotify, where his songs have garnered hundreds of millions of streams.

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It's as if Bill McDermott's SAP tenure never happened

In a reminder – if ever one were needed – of the sheer brass neck of celebrity tech CEOs, Bill McDermott, head honcho at helpdesk-cum-workflow-slinger ServiceNow, has informed investors that M&As are bad for tech integration and engineers hate them.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: African clawed frogs are masters of putting themselves back together, handily regenerating lost tails and hind limbs, when they are tadpoles. But these powers dim with maturity. Wait for an adult frog to regrow a lopped-off limb and you'll see only a tapered spike, more like a talon than a leg. Now, a group of scientists have found a way to harness the adult frog's own cells to regrow an imperfect but functional limb. The researchers placed a silicone cap laden with a mixture of regenerative drugs onto an amputation wound for 24 hours. Over the next 18 months, the frogs gradually regrew what was lost, forming a new leglike structure with nerves, muscles, bones and even toelike projections. The researchers describe this approach, which builds on earlier research, in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The process could guide future research on limb regeneration in humans, but it will be challenging to replicate the results in mammals. "It was a total surprise," Nirosha Murugan, a researcher at Algoma University in Ontario, Canada, and an author of the paper, said of the complexity of the regrown limb. "I didn't think we would get the patterning that we did." "It's not a full limb that's regrown," said Kelly Tseng, a biologist studying regeneration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved with the research. "But it's certainly a robust response." "It is particularly promising that only a daylong treatment can have such a positive effect on an adult animal," Can Aztekin, a researcher studying limb regeneration at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne who was not involved with the research, wrote in an email.

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But work at US security-linked lab falls short of true ignition. 'This is physics,' researchers say

US scientists have succeeded in demonstrating self-heating plasma in a crucial step towards self-sustaining fusion energy.…

Bitter contract dispute revealed HLR lookup capability baked into agreement

Exclusive  Britain's tax collection agency asked a contractor to use the SS7 mobile phone signalling protocol that would make available location data of alleged tax defaulters, a High Court lawsuit has revealed.…

We love it when a plan comes together

It seems we're a step closer to system-on-chips containing a mix of RISC-V CPU cores and a mainstream GPU powering Linux devices and the like.…

With microcode intact so it can work with an original operator's console

Hardware guru Ken Shirriff is working on a simulator for the IBM S/360 Model 50 mainframe, launched in April 1964. His program runs the original machine's microcode so it can control and be controlled by an original front panel.…

The secret behind a record-breaking nuclear fusion experiment that spit out 10 quadrillion watts of power in a split second has been revealed: a "self-heating" -- or "burning" -- plasma of neutron-heavy hydrogen inside the fuel capsule used in the experiment, according to researchers. Live Science reports: Last year, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California announced the record release of 1.3 megajoules of energy for 100 trillionths of a second at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), Live Science reported at the time. In two new research papers, NIF scientists show the achievement was due to the precision engineering of the tiny cavity and fuel capsule at the heart of the world's most powerful laser system, where the fusion took place. Although the fuel capsule was only about a millimeter (0.04 inch) across, and the fusion reaction lasted only the briefest sliver of time, its output was equal to about 10% of all the energy from sunlight that hits Earth every instant, the researchers reported. The researchers said the reaction blasted out that much energy because the process of fusion itself heated the remaining fuel into a plasma hot enough to enable further fusion reactions. "A burning plasma is when heating from the fusion reactions becomes the dominant source of heating in the plasma, more than required to initiate or jump-start the fusion," Annie Kritcher, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), told Live Science in an email. Kritcher is the lead author of a study published Jan. 26 in Nature Physics describing how the NIF was optimized to achieve the burning plasma, and the co-author of another study published in Nature the same day that details the first burning plasma experiments at NIF in 2020 and early 2021. The two new studies describe burning plasma experiments conducted in the months before the 10 quadrillion watt reaction; those earlier experiments culminated in the production of 170 kilojoules of energy from a pellet of just 200 micrograms (0.000007 ounces) of hydrogen fuel -- around three times the energy output of any earlier experiments. It was achieved by carefully shaping both the fuel capsule -- a tiny spherical shell of polycarbonate diamond that enclosed the pellet -- and the cavity that contained it -- a small cylinder of depleted (not very radioactive) uranium lined with gold, known as a hohlraum. The new designs allowed the NIF lasers that heated the pellet to operate more efficiently within the hohlraum, and the hot shell of the capsule to rapidly expand outward while the fuel pellet "imploded" -- with the result that the fuel fused at such a high temperature that it heated other parts of the pellet into a plasma.

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Hurdle or driver for modernisation? A bit of both, apparently

For highly regulated industries, compliance is seen as a hurdle to digital transformation yet it's also viewed as one of the key drivers for modernisation efforts, at least according to an IBM study.…

'This experience has taught me that it's worth trying out looking at the sky in entirely new ways'

Astronomers have picked up something strange we've never seen before in space: bright bursts of low-frequency radio waves emitted three times an hour from a source within our Milky Way.…

Advises citizens to avoid 'Ponzi schemes'

Another week, another big economy restricting cryptocurrency. This time Indonesia has barred financial services firms from offering bit-buck-related services to their customers.…

He Who Has No Name writes: In a synopsis posted Monday, John Hewitt at Phys.org points out some fairly unsettling implications of an ugly trick by Covid-19 (more formally, SARS-CoV-2) -- it wakes up latent viruses that we are born with in our DNA. A quick version for those not familiar with virology: retroviruses are a subclass of viruses that leave copies of their RNA in the host cell's DNA as part of their replication process, the reverse of the way most viruses replicate (that's where the 'retro' part comes from). Latent, inactive sequences of retroviral DNA make up more than 1% of the human genome. We're literally born with them in our genes. Now back to Covid's latest trick. From the article: "Transposable elements, or jumping genes, are now known to be responsible for many human diseases. Keeping them repressed by methylation, RNA binding, or the attentions of the innate immune system is a full-time jump for cells. Last week, we reviewed the activation of one particular kind of transposable element, the Line-1 retrotransposons, in an ever-expanding host of neurodegenerative conditions. Retrotransposons derive from human endogenous retrovirus (HERVs) but typically have lost their signature long terminal repeat sequences at the beginning and ends of their genes. On Tuesday, a real zinger was dropped onto the medRxiv preprint server that could potentially explain many of the commonly observed pathogenic features of SARS-CoV-2. The authors provide solid evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein activates the envelope (ENV) protein encoded by HERV-W in blood cells, which is in turn directly responsible for many pathological features of the disease." While this is all analysis of preprint research, the evidence and implied results are very much in line with other long-term effects from Covid infection, especially neurocognitive symptoms, known to long haul Covid patients as "brain fog." Given that other research is showing long haul Covid cognitive symptoms are more accurately detected by the cognitive function test specifically used for HIV-Associated Neurocognitive Disorder (HAND) compared to standard function tests, the implication of retroviral elements to the puzzle of PACS (Post-Acute Covid Symptoms, the official term now in use for long haul Covid) is disturbing. The good news: only about 20-30% of people infected with Covid appear to be susceptible. This is, however, conspicuously in line with other data analysis showing that about 1 in 4 Covid victims has PACS / long-haul symptoms after the acute infection stage...

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Ah, y'know what, maybe those rebates for not using AMD chips weren't so anti-competitive after all, eh?

Intel Corporation no longer has to pay a €1.06bn ($1.2bn, £890m) fine imposed by the European Commission (EC) in 2009 for abusing its dominance of the chip market.…

Cupertino cut prices and cleaned up

Huawei's share of China's smartphone market fell by 68 per cent year over year, and Apple took advantage to become the Middle Kingdom's most ubiquitous smartphone vendor in 2021's final quarter.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Seattle Times: Amazon is shutting down its "Sold by Amazon" program after an investigation from Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson found it was anticompetitive and violated antitrust laws. The company engaged in unlawful price fixing and unreasonably restrained competition in order to maximize its own profits, according to the lawsuit and consent decree filed Wednesday in King County Superior Court. As a result of the investigation, Amazon will shut down the program nationwide and pay $2.25 million to the attorney general's office, as well as provide annual updates on its compliance with antitrust laws. The funds will go toward antitrust enforcement. The program ran from 2018 to 2020, when Amazon suspended it for reasons unrelated to the investigation, according to a spokesperson for the company. It was a small program offering another tool to businesses, the spokesperson said, and did not include all of the third-party sellers on the e-commerce platform. Through the program, third-party sellers entered into an agreement with Amazon that set a minimum payment rate for products sold on the platform, according to the lawsuit. If the sales exceeded the agreed upon minimum, Amazon would take a cut of the additional revenue. A spokesperson for Amazon said the company believes the program was legal and good for consumers. Amazon acted as the retailer and purchased products from suppliers to fill a customer order, ensuring low prices for consumers. But, Ferguson's investigation concluded, the program boosted Amazon's sales and ensured it didn't have to compete with third-party sellers. "Consumers lose when corporate giants like Amazon fix prices to increase their profits," Ferguson said Wednesday. "Today's action promotes product innovation and consumer choice, and makes the market more competitive for sellers in Washington state and across the country."

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