An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Things keep going downhill for aspiring hydrogen truck-maker Nikola. Nikola's stock plunged on Monday morning as the company announced that a previously announced deal with General Motors was not going to close. Instead, the two companies signed a "non-binding memorandum of understanding" related to the use of GM's hydrogen fuel cell technology in Nikola's future semi trucks. GM will not take a stake in Nikola as originally planned. Nikola's stock is down 26 percent as I write this on Monday morning. The stock is down 58 percent since September 8, the day Nikola originally announced the GM deal. The news means that Nikola is canceling the Badger, a planned pickup truck that critics have long derided as vaporware. Under Nikola's September deal with GM, GM was supposed to design and build the Badger on a cost-plus basis. The deal would have enabled Nikola to sell a pickup truck it didn't otherwise have the capacity to manufacture. But it was hard to see how Nikola was going to make a profit selling what would have essentially been a re-badged GM product. Moreover, it wasn't clear that Nikola had enough cash to finance the development of the Badger alongside the company's semi trucks and a planned network of hydrogen fueling stations. With the hype around Nikola cooling, Nikola may not be able to raise the necessary cash from Wall Street.

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Worldwide smartphone sales to end-users totaled 366 million units in the third quarter of 2020, down 5.7% from the third quarter of 2019, according to Gartner. Overall global mobile phone sales to end users totaled 401 million units, a decline of 8.7% year-over-year. From the report: After two consecutive quarters of a decline of 20%, quarterly smartphone sales have started to show signs of recovery sequentially. However, smartphone sales continued to remain weaker compared to the same time period in in 2019, even with vendors introducing multiple 5G smartphones and governments relaxing shelter-in-place instructions in some geographies. "Consumers are limiting their discretionary spend even as some lockdown conditions have started to improve," said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner. "Global smartphone sales experienced moderate growth from the second quarter of 2020 to the third quarter. This was due to pent-up demand from previous quarters." Economic uncertainties and continued fear of the next wave of the pandemic continue to put pressure on nonessential spending through the end of 2020. The delay in 5G network upgrades has also limited the opportunity for smartphone vendors. Among the top five smartphone manufacturers, Samsung held the No. 1 position with 22% market share. Xiaomi moved ahead of Apple into the No. 3 position for the first time ever with sales of 44.4 million units compared to Apple's sales of 40.5 million units in the third quarter of 2020.

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Destruction of the rainforest increased by 9.5% compared to the previous 12 months, new data shows.

Governments across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are moving to impose more taxes on digital companies, stirring unease among multinational internet businesses that have boomed amid the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: From Thailand to Indonesia, new levies have kicked in or are being introduced. They threaten to chip away at the earnings of technology companies that are reaping benefits from the rise of digitalization among the region's 650 million people. The measures are part of global moves by governments to try to bring more of the borderless digital economy into the tax net, responding to scrutiny of whether often footloose tech companies are paying appropriate dues on their earnings. Tech companies have already been the target of digital service tax nets that have progressively tightened in several European countries. Authorities in France this week started sending payment requests to U.S. technology groups for a new digital services tax, the Financial Times reported. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is trying to address the issue at a multilateral level with efforts to reform international taxation rules, governing how multinational businesses pay taxes in the countries where their consumers or users are. Tax experts say corporate income tax liability is normally assessed where a company has its physical presence but not in overseas markets. That has led to a perception of an uneven playing field, with local providers of digital services being taxed by their governments while foreign competitors escape the net. While the OECD works to hammer out an international digital taxation framework through negotiations with over 130 countries, several in Asia have moved ahead to implement their own rules.

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Governments across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are moving to impose more taxes on digital companies, stirring unease among multinational internet businesses that have boomed amid the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: From Thailand to Indonesia, new levies have kicked in or are being introduced. They threaten to chip away at the earnings of technology companies that are reaping benefits from the rise of digitalization among the region's 650 million people. The measures are part of global moves by governments to try to bring more of the borderless digital economy into the tax net, responding to scrutiny of whether often footloose tech companies are paying appropriate dues on their earnings. Tech companies have already been the target of digital service tax nets that have progressively tightened in several European countries. Authorities in France this week started sending payment requests to U.S. technology groups for a new digital services tax, the Financial Times reported. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is trying to address the issue at a multilateral level with efforts to reform international taxation rules, governing how multinational businesses pay taxes in the countries where their consumers or users are. Tax experts say corporate income tax liability is normally assessed where a company has its physical presence but not in overseas markets. That has led to a perception of an uneven playing field, with local providers of digital services being taxed by their governments while foreign competitors escape the net. While the OECD works to hammer out an international digital taxation framework through negotiations with over 130 countries, several in Asia have moved ahead to implement their own rules.

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Trump never tried to get re-elected. He threatened so many Americans' sense of what's right, of what America is, it's remarkable he didn't lose by more. It's similar imho to the approach of journalism. They have no responsibility for their declining business. They insist, over many years, that the tech industry owes them money. Somehow it never occurred to them that what tech provides is what people want. They don't listen so how could they know? And they don't bend or they would have provided something better than Google, Facebook et al. Now they're doing what Trump is doing. Asking someone to undo their loss. Like Trump they could study their predicament and learn what they need to do differently. Unlike Trump they are still in business.

That's how you know the virus isn't too bad.

Long-time research analyst Wes Miller, who previously worked at Microsoft, believes that Windows-powered PCs are now stuck in the same rut that American cars grappled with in 1973 to 1983. He writes: I've said before that Windows has never escaped x86. I'm still not sure if it ever can. So the challenges then come down to three things: 1. Can Intel succeed where they've failed for the last 5+ years, at building hybrid processors? The next year to two years should answer this question. 2. Can Microsoft succeed at finally getting application developers to write platform-optimized, energy-respectful, halo applications for the PC? I've been writing about the Windows Store for a long, long time. A long time. And I'm still not sure how Microsoft can light a fire under Windows application developers when they've lost that mindshare. 3. Can Microsoft begin pushing the Surface platform forward again? This one's completely up to Microsoft. I've seen the rumors of the next Surface Pro... and it's more of the same -- evolutionary, not revolutionary. I guess we will see in the next 3-5 years whether Intel can cross this chasm; if they can't, then the future likely belongs to ARM, and that future will likely mean less and less to Microsoft, outside of running classic Win32 applications on x64/x86 Windows.

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We know that time and money spent on video games is surging due to the pandemic. Now, industry-tracking firm The NPD Group is providing detail on where that growth is coming from. From a report: And it turns out that people across all age demographics are playing more games more often. That's big for mobile games, but it also includes Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox. In its "2020 Evolution of Entertainment" report, NPD found that 4-out-of-5 consumers in the U.S. played a game in the last six months. More important for the industry, those consumers are spending 26% more time and 33% more money on games than the same period in the previous year. But this isn't just coming from young people. Older demographics are turning to games more often as they find themselves with money they can no longer spend on dining out or attending live events. Spending on video games for Americans 45 years old-to-54 years old increased 76%. People age 55-to-64 increased their spending 29%.

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Researchers have made a major breakthrough using artificial intelligence that could revolutionize the hunt for new medicines. The scientists have created A.I. software that uses a protein's DNA sequence to predict its three-dimensional structure to within an atomâ(TM)s width of accuracy. weiserfireman shares a report: The achievement, which solves a 50-year-old challenge in molecular biology, was accomplished by a team from DeepMind, the London-based artificial intelligence company that is part of Google parent Alphabet. Until now, DeepMind was best known for creating A.I. that could beat the best human players at the strategy game Go, a major milestone in computer science. DeepMind achieved the protein shape breakthrough in a biennial competition for algorithms that can be used to predict protein structures. The competition asks participants to take a protein's DNA sequence and then use it to determine the protein's three-dimensional shape. Across more than 100 proteins, DeepMind's A.I. software, which it called AlphaFold 2, was able to predict the structure to within about an atom's width of accuracy in two-thirds of cases and was highly accurate in most of the remaining one-third of cases, according to John Moult, a molecular biologist at the University of Maryland who is director of the competition, called the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, or CASP. It was far better than any other method in the competition, he said.

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Bitcoin is back. Again. From a report: Nearly three years after it went on a hair-bending rise and hit a peak of $19,783, the price of a single Bitcoin rose above that for the first time on Monday, according to the data and news provider CoinDesk. The cryptocurrency has soared since March, after sinking below $4,000 at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. Bitcoin's latest climb is different from its last spike in 2017, which was driven largely by investors in Asia who had just learned about cryptocurrencies. Back then, the digital token soon lost momentum as people questioned what it could do other than allow for easy online speculating and drug and ransom payments. While those questions remain, Bitcoin is now being fueled by a less speculative fever. Buyers -- led by American investors, including companies and other traditional investors -- are treating Bitcoin as an alternative asset, somewhat like gold, according to an analysis from the data firm Chainalysis. Rather than quickly trading in and out of it, more investors are using Bitcoin as a place to park part of their investment portfolios outside the influence of governments and the traditional financial system, Chainalysis and other industry firms said. "It's a very different set of people who are buying Bitcoin recently," said Philip Gradwell, the chief economist at Chainalysis, which analyzes the movement of cryptocurrencies. "They are doing it in steadier amounts over sustained periods of time, and they are taking it off exchanges and holding it as an investment."

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Facebook has acquired Kustomer, a New York-based software company that helps businesses manage customer conversations from multiple services on one dashboard. From a report: The social media giant made the deal to bolster its nascent messaging business, which is expanding to include customer-service products that help companies interact with people via chat apps, like WhatsApp and Messenger. "Any business knows that when the phone rings, they need to answer it. Increasingly, texts and messages have become just as important as that phone call -- and businesses need to adapt," Facebook executives wrote in a blog post. Kustomer also offers automated tools so companies can handle easier customer requests using bots. The deal values Kustomer at a little over $1 billion, WSJ reported.

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British Lithium is prospecting in the county to find economically viable seams of the element.

Big Tech's legal woes are expected to worsen in the coming weeks as federal and state antitrust authorities prepare to file new lawsuits against Facebook and Alphabet's Google, WSJ reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The authorities are readying as many as four more cases targeting Google or Facebook by the end of January, these people said, following the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Google last month. Federal and state officials are probing whether the tech giants abused their power in the internet economy-- Google to dominate search and advertising, and Facebook to dominate social media. Google and Facebook have denied doing so, saying they operate in highly competitive markets and that their services, which are mostly free, benefit consumers. If Facebook were to be sued, it would mark the first government antitrust action against the social-media titan in the U.S. Facebook has come under particular criticism from Republicans and Democrats in Congress as well as President-elect Joe Biden over its content-moderation policies. Democrats generally contend the company has been too lax in policing misleading speech, while Republicans say Facebook has sometimes suppressed conservatives. Facebook has said it aims to support free speech while limiting hate speech and other harmful content.

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Today's song: Words of Love.