Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 49

Russia has cracked down on independent media sources inside its borders following its invasion of its neighbor Ukraine.

A campaign backed by the United States government and led by the Open Technology Fund (OTF) non-profit organization is financially supporting American virtual private network (VPN) providers that offer their services to Russians for free. VPNs allow the Russian people to bypass censorship in their country to access blocked websites while protecting their data from outside observers. Their usage has skyrocketed since the invasion of Ukraine began.

"It's so very important for Russians to be connected to the whole world wide web, to keep resistance going. All kinds of initiatives are happening and to keep them alive you need the internet because you can't gather in person, or because activists are scattered around the world," said Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel at rights group Access Now, which is not involved in the OTF effort.

An HR office worker has received a paycheck 330 times his normal pay, and he has now seemingly quit the company and disappeared.

The worker has yet to be named, but the company that he worked for is called Cial, a large-scale Chilean frozen foods company that has been around for more than 50 years. According to reports, the HR worker accidentally received a whopping 165 million pesos on May 30, which is the equivalent of $176,000 USD. The employee contacted his manager regarding the unexpected transaction, and the manager informed him to go to the bank the following day to get the matter resolved.

The HR employee expected to receive his typical paycheck of 500,000 pesos, or about $500 USD. According to Cial, the worker never went to the bank the day after talking to the manager, which has resulted in the company suing the now-former employee for the stolen funds. The HR worker contacted Cial the day he was meant to go to the bank and said that he had slept in, and that he would visit the bank later. Cial had no contact with the HR worker until June 2, when he submitted a letter of resignation through a lawyer.

Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of holding a sword while speaking to employees about their duties and completion timelines.

The news comes from former Facebook coder Noah Kagan, who was the 30th employee to be hired at Facebook and is currently the CEO of AppSumo. Kagan has taken to TikTok to reveal some interesting pieces of information about the early days of Facebook, and the activities of some of the company's most prominent members.

In the above video, Kagan states that he played poker with now-billionaire Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Facebook's first outside investor. Kagan says that Thiel requested his money back after losing the poker game. Additionally, Kagan says that Zuckerberg paid for all of the employees' parking tickets, which was at the time a very appreciated perk at the company. Notably, Kagan says that Zuckerberg was "bringing around a katana sword because he didn't like the code" - referring to Facebook's current code.

Samsung has announced that it has kicked off the initial production of its next-gen 3nm process node, using Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor architecture.

This is the first time Samsung's new Multi-Bridge-Channel FET (MBCFET), their new GAA technology, "defies the performance limitations of FinFET". It defies those performance limitations of FinFET by improving power efficiency by reducing the supply voltage level, while boosting performance through increasing drive current capability.

Dr. Siyoung Choi, President and Head of Foundry Business at Samsung Electronics explains: "Samsung has grown rapidly as we continue to demonstrate leadership in applying next-generation technologies to manufacturing, such as foundry industry's first High-K Metal Gate, FinFET, as well as EUV. We seek to continue this leadership with the world's first 3nm process with the MBCFET™. We will continue active innovation in competitive technology development and build processes that help expedite achieving maturity of technology".

The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has issued a new public service announcement about deepfakes.

The IC3 has received an increased number of complaints alleging the use of stolen personally identifiable information (PII) and deepfakes to help individuals apply for positions that allow them to work remotely, typically from home. Incident reports covered positions associated with "information technology and computer programming, database, and software related job functions," and notably some with access to very sensitive data.

During online interviews, applicants reportedly used voice spoofing, potentially via deepfakes, and the video feed showed interviewees exhibiting lip movements and actions not aligning with the audio. The speech was noticeably out of sync, and in some cases, auditory actions like coughing and sneezing gave away the applicant when the video feed did not reflect the given action.

The Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley club has released the third installment of its interview with Elon Musk.

Recorded on May 30th, Musk, the CEO of Tesla, sat down with the heads of the club and others, talking about Gigafactories, the development of Full Self-Driving (FSD), and more over four hours of recording. Describing the Gigafactory located in Austin, Texas, Musk remarked it the "factory is losing insane money right now, we should be outputting a lot more cars from this factory versus a puny amount of cars."

Musk cited a few issues for the subpar production numbers, such as lacking the specific tooling necessary to create the 2170 battery cells used in Tesla's vehicles. Supply chain issues meant the tools were stuck in China, creating a bottleneck in production which has compounded with other factors to put the Gigafactory in a situation where reaching the desired production levels will take more effort than building the factory initially.

Russia test launched its RS-28 Sarmat missile, known as the Satan II, in late April 2022.

The Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was designed to replace the nation's Voyevoda ICBMs, known by NATO as the SS-18 Satan. The Satan II can carry up to 15 MIRV (Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicles) nuclear warheads while traveling at hypersonic speeds exceeding five times the speed of sound. At Mach 5, a roughly 7,800 mile (12553 kilometers) flight from Moscow to the White House in the United States would take about two hours.

Aleksy Zhuravlyov, the deputy chairman of Russia's defense committee, claimed that the Sarmat could strike the United Kingdom in only 200 seconds if launched from Kaliningrad and noted they could strike Finland from Siberia. He also claimed that "there is no existing air defence for the Sarmat missile systems, and it will probably not exist in the coming decades."

The new feature was unveiled during the Re:Mars conference held by Amazon in Las Vegas on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2022.

Amazon is currently developing the ability of Alexa to emulate a person's voice while needing less than a minute of recorded audio to do so. This will supposedly imbue Alexa with more "human attributes of empathy and affect," improving interactions with the virtual assistant. The main hurdle to developing the feature arises from having to learn how to create a "high-quality voice" with only snippets of audio, presumably collected by Alexa itself, instead of hours of studio recordings.

"These attributes have become even more important during the ongoing pandemic when so many of us have lost ones that we love. While AI can't eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last," said Rohit Prasad, the senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa, at the event.

The company behind the adult website Pornhub is facing scrutiny after allegations surfaced regarding the number of staff the company has laid off.

Reports surfaced on Tuesday when Reuters wrote that MindGeek, the owner of Pornhub, said that two top executives who ran the adult for more than 10 years had resigned but will remain shareholders. In 2021 MindGeek was hit with a lawsuit that claimed the company had broken federal sex trafficking and child pornography laws, which resulted in several payment companies such as Mastercard and Visa temporarily halting payment methods.

The recent allegations of layoffs come from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, a non-profit that focuses on exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation, who said that its "no surprise" that two top Pornhub executives have "fled" the company after it's facing several lawsuits filed on behalf of sex trafficking survivors "whose abuse has been shown on Pornhub."

Elon Musk sat down for an interview with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley to discuss gigafactory production, Full-Self Driving (FSD), and more.

The interview spans over an hour, but at the beginning, Musk is asked if anyone at Tesla is working on Car Sharing, which will allow Tesla owners to rent out their car, much like Uber. Musk replies by saying that no one at Tesla is working on that feature, and that the company is simply trying not to go bankrupt. The Tesla CEO explains that the company is focused on its making sure Tesla Gigafactory's are producing vehicles that will keep Tesla's revenue above its high cost.

Musk explains in the interview conducted on May 31, that at the moment, the Austin gigafactory and the new gigafactory in Berlin are "gigantic money furnaces", since both of the factories have only been able to manufacture a small number of vehicles due to a myriad of supply chain issues. Notably, a COVID-19 outbreak caused Shanghai to enter into a full lockdown that shut down Tesla's factory. Now Musk says the company is working hard to get all its factories up and running smoothly, so he can increase production to meet the overwhelming demand.