Business, Financial & Legal - Page 70

Apart of the government's response to the coronavirus pandemic was to inject $1,200 checks into American's pockets that were eligible. Another aspect of the response by the government was to increase unemployment assistance.

All of this response by the government came under the CARES Act that Congress pushed through in March. Apart of the CARES Act was the increase in unemployment benefits, which saw a $600/week boost in unemployment insurance. At the end of next month (July 31) this benefit is set to expire, but by then, we can expect a second stimulus check to be rolled out, find out more on that here.

In the meantime, it should be noted that if you haven't claimed the $600-per-week unemployment benefit for the weeks between March 28 and July 31, you might be able to do so as back pay. According to The Penny Hoarder, "Individuals that qualify for the (Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation) $600 payment for weeks they are eligible ... can be paid, even if not approved prior to the (July 31) deadline".

The US Department of Justice have served WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with a new federal indictment on Wednesday, accusing the WikiLeaks founder of conspiring with hackers from Anonymous and LulzSec.

The DOJ explained in a press release: "Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks. Since the early days of WikiLeaks, Assange has spoken at hacking conferences to tout his own history as a 'famous teenage hacker in Australia' and to encourage others to hack to obtain information for WikiLeaks".

Back in 2010, Assange hacked into a NATO country's government system, and then two years later allegedly "communicated dfirectly" with the leader of LulzSec. At the time, the LulzSec leader was working with the FBI and "provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack".

Several leaks have surfaced in the last few weeks and months that have to do with Apple's all-digital WWDC 2020 going on today. Past rumors suggested that there would be new hardware unveiled at the show, including the potential for new ARM-based Mac computers and redesigned iMac all-in-ones. New rumors have surfaced from two known leakers that claim no new hardware will be unveiled at the event today.

One of the new leaks comes from Jon Prosser, who claims that plans to launch new hardware were scrapped. Prosser says that he could be wrong, but indications are there will be no new hardware. Another known leaker named Max Weinbach has also stated that there will be no hardware unveiled today.

Weinbach says that two different sources told him there would be no hardware released at WWDC 2020. He says that the sources of the leaks aren't on WWDC related teams. His sources heard through the grapevine that there would be no hardware released today at the event. Both Prosser and Weinbach note that they are taking the rumors with a grain of salt.

GitHub is standing behind the Black Lives Matter movement, with the Microsoft-owned company removing coding terms such as "master" and "slave".

If you didn't know, the term "master" and "slave" reference the versions of a software project. In physical terms in computers, IDE HDDs ran on a "master" and "slave" configuration -- one was the first, and the other was the second. Hence, master and slave.

GitHub CEO Nat Friedman replied to a tweet a few days ago to Una Kravets who is the director of product design at Bustle Digital Group. Kravets tweeted: "For what it's worth, I'm *super* happy to rename the default branch structure of "master" to "main" and I hope we can all do this together as a community with @github leading the charge by implementing in their product moving forward".

You might not know the name Jim Keller like you would Bill Gates or Jensen Huang or Lisa Su -- but the man is very important. He was the brain child behind AMD's kick ass Zen CPU architecture, and before that he was instrumental in the K7 and K8 architectures.

He left AMD for Samsung in 2015, and then left Samsung for Tesla to work on their custom self-driving car silicon, before leaving Elon Musk's company to join Intel back in 2018. Well, Keller has just left Intel after two years for "personal reasons" but will stay with Team Blue as a consultant for 6 months in a transitional period.

There is some movement in the company in Keller's departure:

I would only have just gotten home last week from Computex 2020 if it had gone ahead, which was postponed over the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.

Now the organization that runs Computex, TAITRA (Taiwan External Trade Development Council) have announced that Computex 2020 has officially been cancelled and that they look forward to seeing everyone at Computex 2021 which will run between June 1-5, 2021.

The next big IT trade show is CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) which we'll see in just over 6 months time in January 2021 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

As the world begins to come to terms with the coronavirus, the effects of the outbreak are still yet to be fully felt.

One of the coronavirus effects is the distribution of food throughout the globe, and now the United Nations (UN) has warned that "food systems are failing". According to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who announced last Tuesday that nearly 50 million people are expected to enter what has been called "extreme poverty".

More specifically, more than 20 million people across the Horn of Africa are currently struggling to get food distributed to them, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The food distribution issue isn't just in Africa, as problems are also occuring in the United States with the US meat industries reporting that due to the coronavirus outbreak 10 million pigs, chickens and cows could be culled. This is mainly due to over 800 slaughterhouses being forced to close due to the pandemic.

Tesla Motors share prices have enjoyed a new record high, breaching the $1000 barrier and sitting at $1025 at the time of writing providing the company with a huge $190 billion market cap.

The company is ramping up production of its Semi commercial truck, with a recent tweet from Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk teasing that "volume production" was indeed happening. This helped boost Tesla stock prices past $1000, on top of a new call from Wedbush Securities that has boosted its target price to $1000 and said the EV giant could have "more room to run".

Tesla is hosting its Battery Day soon, where it is expected to unveil a "game-changing" battery technology announcement that could drive Tesla stock past $1500 -- and far past its main competitor in Toyota for the title of the world's most valuable car company.

We all know about the on-going protests across the United States (and now the world) over George Floyd, with a new photo going around social media showing armed gamers protecting a GameStop store.

The picture sees armed Americans which have been dubbed "rooftop gamers" with rifles, standing there to protect a GameStop store from being looted. The photo seems to have been taken in Pennsylvania, with the tweet reading: "If you're in the area of Aramingo and Butler: armed men on top of the Game Stop. STEER CLEAR. Photo was at 1430 or thereabouts".

Why "rooftop gamers" you ask? That goes back to the Korean business owners who pushed race rioters away from their stores with guns during the infamous LA riots of 1992.

As expected, President Trump's move to encourage regulators to investigate content removal on social media platforms has been met with a legal challenge.

This controversy started after President Trump Tweeted out several comments in regards to mail-in votes. These tweets were then flagged by Twitter and were 'fact-checked', which then resulted in Trump signing an Executive Order that asks regulators to chip away at legal protections that stop social media companies from being held liable for the content being posted on their platforms. Now, the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology has filed a suit against Trump for the Executive Order claiming that Trump's stance on the issue "plainly retaliatory".

According to the lawsuit, Trump's order allegedly violates the First Amendment and is designed to "curtail and chill" protected speech. Twitter also voiced its opinion on the lawsuit and, of course, supported the claims from the Center for Democracy and Technology, saying the order from Trump was a "reactionary and politicized approach to a landmark law" that could "threaten the future of online speech". Above is the full statement published on the Twitter Public Policy Twitter account.

Google has just had a $5 billion lawsuit slapped on its desk, with the class action lawsuit accusing the search giant of illegally invading the privacy of millions of people by tracking their internet use -- even when users were using "private" mode on their browser.

The complaint was filed in the federal court of San Jose, California, which claims Google takes data from users' browsers even if they're using Chrome's private "Incognito" mode. The complaint adds that Google scoops up all sorts of data through Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager, other applications and website plug-ins -- no matter if you don't click an ad or not.

So even if you were searching for something weird online in Incognito mode, thinking you were safe from the prying all-seeing eye of Google, you were never safe. Google learns all about you, and everything you search for -- no matter if its private it seems according to this $5 billion lawsuit.

We all know Zoom use has exploded over the last 6 months, but now we have some official numbers.

Zoom has reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2020, where compared to the same period of 2019, Zoom customers that have over 10 employees working for them increased by 354% to 265,400. Not just that, but normal Zoom use exploded as well.

Zoom executives explain: "We peaked at over 300 million daily participants, free and paid, joining Zoom meetings in April 2020, up from 10 million in December 2019". But get this: in January 2020 the company had 100 billion meeting minutes, which by the end of April went crazy and jumped through the stratosphere to 2 trillion.

Elon Musk has had a gigantic year so far (he's had a baby, had Tesla stock skyrocket, and sent two NASA astronauts to the ISS with SpaceX) and we're barely half way through it, but the SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO has just announced he is stepping away from Twitter "for a while".

In a tweet on June 2, 2020 -- Musk said: "Off Twitter for a while" and that was it -- a mic drop moment. It was just 48 hours prior that Musk's own SpaceX sent two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) which was a historic moment for the United States.

Musk's tweet has 283,000 likes at the time of writing, with the top tweet being from Anonymous which ominously says "We'll take over from here". Anonymous has been in the news recently, with the hacking collective threatening the Minneapolis Police over the George Floyd protests. Read more on that here.

Unless you've been living under a rock you would've heard about the George Floyd protests across teh United States, with multiple cities laying down curfew orders to keep people off the streets between certain times.

These curfews have forced ride-sharing companies as well as food delivery platforms to temporarily suspend operations in some cities, with Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash all temporarily suspending operations in some US cities. Uber said in a statement: "Some cities have requested that we suspend operations completely while others want to ensure Uber is available for essential services," the company said in a statement".

The ride-sharing giant continued: "We're also using the Uber app to educate riders and drivers about city curfews and remind them Uber should be used for emergency purposes only during this time".

A new report is going around that Apple is investing $330 million in a new factory in Taiwan where it will build MicroLED displays for future MacBook laptops. The report also says that screens for future iPhones, iPads, and other devices will be built in the same facility. Apple's partners in the new factory will be Epistar and LCD maker AU Optronics.

Epistar is the top LED producer in Taiwan. The factory located at the Longtan branch of the Hsinchu Science Park. The report indicates that Apple has sent a development team to Taiwan to work on the project. There are some distinct advantages for laptops that use MicroLED displays compared to standard LCD or OLED displays.

Those advantages include higher brightness, higher dynamic range, and a fuller color gamut. MicroLED tech also supports a faster update rate, wider viewing angles, and lower power consumption. Devices using the new screen tech can also be made thinner, making them more portable.

President Trump has just bought the gauntlet down on the World Health Organization, where in a press conference hours ago at the White House, he announced the US government is "terminating our relationship" with the WHO.

President Trump said that the WHO is completely controlled by China, explaining: "China has total control over the World Health Organization despite only paying $40 million per year, compared to what the United States has been paying, which is approximately $450 million a year".

It was only a month ago that Trump stopped funding the WHO, sending the organization a more threatening letter on May 18 that said: "If the World Health Organisation does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organisation permanent and reconsider our membership in the organisation".

You may hate his tweets. You may hate his memes. You might hate his weed and 420 jokes. You might hate that he blazed up with Joe Rogan on JRE -- but you can't deny that Elon Musk is kicking ass and firing on all cylinders when it comes to Tesla Motors and SpaceX.

Musk is about to get a hefty $800 million payday thanks to the Tesla board certifying a new financial milestone that unlocks the first grouping, or tranche of close to 1.7 million shares at a huge discount. Right now, Tesla shares are steady at $805 -- with a value of $775 million or so -- Musk gets the option of taking those shares at $350 per share.

Why is Musk getting this money? It's part of a compensation plan that was approved by shareholders back in 2018, where it splits up 20.3 million stock option awards into 12 tranches of 1.69 million shares each.

SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO and founder Elon Musk and his partner Grimes welcomed a baby boy into the world of May 5, shocking the world by naming their son "X Æ A-12". But in the words of Hillary Duff, that is so yesterday.

Grimes was recently asked on her Instagram if she and Elon had changed their sons names because of California laws, with a fan asking: "What is the baby's new name". Grimes replied: "X Æ A-Xii".

Why did Grimes and Musk change their son's name? Because California law dictates that official names can only be spelled using the 26 letters available in the English alphabet, hyphens, and apostrophes. Grimes replied to another comment, saying: "Roman numerals. Looks better tbh".

Wang Yi, China's foreign minister, has said to reporters this past Sunday that the United States has been infected by a "political virus".

BBC reports that tensions between the United States' Washington and China's Beijing have become more escalated as the virus has continued to ravage the country. On top of that, President Donald Trump has laid the blame of the virus at the feet of the Chinese government, escalating tensions even further. Now, China's top diplomat has said that the United States needs to "stop wasting time and stop wasting precious lives" in its response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Mr. Wang spoke at an annual news conference during China's parliamentary session and said, "some political forces in the US are taking China-US relations hostage" and that they are trying to "push our two countries to the brink of a new Cold War". Mr. Wang went to the defense of China, saying, "Aside from the devastation caused by the novel coronavirus, there is also a political virus spreading through the US. This political virus is the use of every opportunity to attack and smear China. Some politicians completely disregard basic facts and have fabricated too many lies targeting China, and plotted too many conspiracies."

Monday, May 25 is Memorial Day in the United States, and to celebrate, Origin PC has special Memorial Day savings that anyone needing a new gaming laptop or desktop might want to take advantage of. The company is offering hundreds of dollars in rebates in the form of discounts or reward cards on certain machines, free shipping, and bonus digital games.

Origin PC is offering its EVO16-S and NT-16 laptops with $200 discounts and free shipping. The same discounts are available on the EVO17-S and NT-17. Buyers who opt for an Eon15-X or an NS-15 will get $100 off, three months of free Xbox Game Pass for PC, and free ground shipping.

Shoppers who opt for any Origin PC gaming laptop will get free US ground shipping. Some desktop gaming computers are available with $100 Visa reward cards, free US ground shipping, bonus digital games, and more. The bonus digital games include Red Dead Redemption 2, among others.