Major meat supplier JBS USA was the latest victim of an organized cybersecurity attack, with servers in North American and Australian affected, the company said Sunday. From a report: Why it matters: JBS USA is the largest producer of beef in the country, The Hill notes, and also is a major supplier of poultry and pork. The disclosure of the attack comes as cyber threats have picked up over the last year. Last month, Colonial Pipeline was taken offline by its operator because of a cyberattack. In March, a cyber-espionage unit backed by the Chinese government resulted in 30,000 U.S. victims, including many small businesses and local governments. Earlier this year, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Russia was responsible for the major SolarWinds attack. Nine federal agencies and more than 100 private sector groups were compromised in the attack, per the Hill.

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The United States must pass new legislation to limit how its national security agencies access Europeans' data if Washington and Brussels are to hammer out a new deal on transferring people's digital information across the Atlantic, according to European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova. From a report: Speaking at POLITICO's AI summit on Monday, the Czech politician said the U.S. needed to create legally binding laws to provide European Union citizens' the ability to challenge bulk data collection by federal authorities in U.S. courts. The goal, she said, would be "to have legally binding rules, or rule, on the U.S. side guaranteeing this. It's of course the best and the strongest way to do that," said Jourova when asked if the Commission would accept a presidential executive order or would require new U.S. legislation to provide EU citizens with the power to sue over how U.S. national security agencies collected and used their data.

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Belarus has temporarily banned most of its citizens from leaving, including many foreign residency permit holders. From a report: There are some exceptions, such as for Belarusian civil servants on official trips and state transport staff. The State Border Committee's tightening of the rules follows international outrage over Belarus's recent diversion of a Ryanair flight and arrest of a top dissident and his girlfriend on board. Many dissidents have left Belarus since a disputed election last year. In its statement on the Telegram messaging service, the border committee says it has received "many requests to leave Belarus on the strength of residence permits [issued] by foreign countries." Only those with permanent residence in foreign countries -- not temporary -- are allowed to leave Belarus now, it says. The border committee blamed the measures on the coronavirus pandemic. President Alexander Lukashenko's harsh crackdown on opponents since his disputed 9 August election victory has sent many into exile or to jail. His main rival, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who insists that she won, moved to neighbouring Lithuania with her team. Poland also hosts many Belarusians. Her foreign affairs adviser, Valery Kovalevsky, posted an angry tweet, saying President Lukashenko had "severely limited the right of Belarusians to travel, asserting that certain grounds (residency abroad) aren't sufficient to leave Belarus."

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Instacart has an audacious plan to replace its army of gig shoppers with robots -- part of a long-term strategy to cut costs and put its relationship with supermarket chains on a sustainable footing. From a report: The plan, detailed in documents reviewed by Bloomberg, involves building automated fulfillment centers around the U.S., where hundreds of robots would fetch boxes of cereal and cans of soup while humans gather produce and deli products. Some facilities would be attached to existing grocery stores while larger standalone centers would process orders for several locations, according to the documents, which were dated July and December. Despite working on the strategy for more than a year, however, the company has yet to sign up a single supermarket chain. Instacart had planned to begin testing the fulfillment centers later this year, the documents show. But the company has fallen behind schedule, according to people familiar with the situation. And though the documents mention asking several automation providers to build the technology, Instacart hasn't settled on any, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. In February, the Financial Times reported on elements of the strategy and said Instacart in early 2020 sent out requests for proposals to five robotics companies. An Instacart spokeswoman said the company was busy buttressing its operations during the pandemic, when it signed up 300,000 new gig workers in a matter of weeks, bringing the current total to more than 500,000. But the delays in getting the automation strategy off the ground could potentially undermine plans to go public this year. Investors know robots will play a critical role in modernizing the $1.4 trillion U.S. grocery industry.

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Last fall, with the Medici Chapel in Florence operating on reduced hours because of Covid-19, scientists and restorers completed a secret experiment: They unleashed grime-eating bacteria on the artist's masterpiece marbles. From a report: As early as 1595, descriptions of stains and discoloration began to appear in accounts of a sarcophagus in the graceful chapel Michelangelo created as the final resting place of the Medicis. In the ensuing centuries, plasters used to incessantly copy the masterpieces he sculpted atop the tombs left discoloring residues. His ornate white walls dimmed. Nearly a decade of restorations removed most of the blemishes, but the grime on the tomb and other stubborn stains required special, and clandestine, attention. In the months leading up to Italy's Covid-19 epidemic and then in some of the darkest days of its second wave as the virus raged outside, restorers and scientists quietly unleashed microbes with good taste and an enormous appetite on the marbles, intentionally turning the chapel into a bacterial smorgasbord. "It was top secret," said Daniela Manna, one of the art restorers. On a recent morning, she reclined -- like Michelangelo's allegorical sculptures of Dusk and Dawn above her -- and reached into the shadowy nook between the chapel wall and the sarcophagus to point at a dirty black square, a remnant showing just how filthy the marble had become. She attributed the mess to one Medici in particular, Alessandro Medici, a ruler of Florence, whose assassinated corpse had apparently been buried in the tomb without being properly eviscerated. Over the centuries, he seeped into Michelangelo's marble, the chapel's experts said, creating deep stains, button-shaped deformations, and, more recently, providing a feast for the chapel's preferred cleaning product, a bacterium called Serratia ficaria SH7. "SH7 ate Alessandro," Monica Bietti, former director of the Medici Chapels Museum, said as she stood in front of the now gleaming tomb, surrounded by Michelangelos, dead Medicis, tourists and an all-woman team of scientists, restorers and historians. Her team used bacteria that fed on glue, oil and apparently Alessandro's phosphates as a bioweapon against centuries of stains.

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Mozilla's Firefox 89 releases to the general public today complete with the new Proton interface which simplifies the browser's menus and alters the tabs bar beyond anything we've seen from previous Firefox releases or other web browsers. From a report: This update also improves macOS integration and includes further privacy enhancements. The first thing that people will notice in this update is the Proton interface, the browser chrome and toolbar have been simplified so that redundant and less frequently used features have been removed, menus have been altered so that the most used features are prominent and visual noise has been reduced. Proton also updates prompts so they have a cleaner appearance and unnecessary alerts and messages have been removed. The attached tabs have also been supplanted by floating tabs; Mozilla says the rounded design of the active tab "signals the ability to easily move the tab as needed." While almost everyone will support cleaner menus, the new tabs are drawing the ire of some who are not pleased with the radical departure from the traditional look and feel of tabs.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Dismissed by critics and devoured by fans, "Transformers: Age of Extinction" was the top box office film in 2014, bringing in $1.1 billion, with more than three-quarters of those dollars coming from overseas. ViacomCBS's Paramount Pictures, which distributed the computer animated action-fest, saved much of that money by licensing the international rights through a complex strategy designed to avoid paying U.S. taxes, according to a study published on Tuesday by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, a nonprofit group funded in part by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is common practice for multinational corporations to take advantage of tax shelters. The report offers a rare look at how one company has pulled it off. ViacomCBS, a media giant that came into being after the 2019 merger of the sibling companies, has used the same strategy for all its entertainment properties, according to the report. Since 2002, ViacomCBS and its predecessor companies Viacom and CBS together avoided paying $3.96 billion in U.S. corporate income tax through a system that involved subsidiaries in Barbados, the Bahamas, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Britain, according to the report. Much of the $30 billion in non-U.S. royalty revenue brought in by the company's film and TV franchises, such as "SpongeBob," "Star Trek" and "Mission: Impossible," has not been subject to corporate taxes, the study determined.

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Nvidia officially announced the long-awaited GeForce RTX 3080 Ti during its Computex keynote late Monday night, and this $1,200 graphics card looks like an utter beast. The $600 GeForce RTX 3070 Ti also made its debut with faster GDDR6X memory. From a report: All eyes are on the RTX 3080 Ti, though. Nvidia dubbed it GeForce's "new gaming flagship" as the $1,500 RTX 3090 is built for work and play alike, but the new GPU is a 3090 in all but name (and memory capacity). While Nvidia didn't go into deep technical details during the keynote, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti's specifications page shows it packing a whopping 10,240 CUDA cores -- just a couple hundred less than the 3090's 10,496 count, but massively more than the 8,704 found in the vanilla 3080. Expect this card to chew through games on par with the best, especially in games that support real-time ray tracing and Nvidia's amazing DLSS feature. The memory system can handle the ride, as it's built using the RTX 3090's upgraded bones. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti comes with a comfortable 12GB of blazing-fast GDDR6X memory over a wide 384-bit bus, which is half the ludicrous 24GB capacity found in the 3090, but more than enough to handle any gaming workload you through at it. That's not true with the vanilla RTX 3080, which comes with 10GB of GDDR6X over a smaller bus, as rare titles (like Doom Eternal) can already use more than 10GB of memory when you're playing at 4K resolution with the eye candy cranked to the max. The extra two gigs make the RTX 3080 Ti feel much more future-proof.

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Companies have spent more than a decade forcing employees and customers to resolve disputes outside the traditional court system, using secretive arbitration proceedings that typically don't allow plaintiffs to team up and extract big-money payments akin to a class action. Now, Amazon is bucking that trend. From a report: With no announcement, the company recently changed its terms of service to allow customers to file lawsuits. Already, it faces at least three proposed class actions, including one brought May 18 alleging the company's Alexa-powered Echo devices recorded people without permission. The retail giant made the change after plaintiffs' lawyers flooded Amazon with more than 75,000 individual arbitration demands on behalf of Echo users. That move triggered a bill for tens of millions of dollars in filing fees, according to lawyers involved, payable by Amazon under its own policies. Amazon's decision to drop its arbitration requirement is the starkest example yet of how companies are responding to plaintiffs' lawyers pushing the arbitration system to its limits. Arbitration agreements are buried in the contracts consumers sign to do everything from buying a cellphone to using a ride-hailing app. Many employers also require arbitration for adjudicating issues like pay disputes or discrimination claims. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld and strengthened the rights of companies to mandate arbitration.

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If we were doing this right, free journalism training would be available to anyone who wants it. An investment in our way of life. The same way Covid vaccinations are free.

Two years after announcing plans to bring AMD graphics to Samsung Exynos mobile chips, it looks like the first of those chips could be ready to launch soon. From a report: During a Computex keynote, AMD's Lisa Su said that Samsung's "next flagship" mobile system-on-a-chip would feature custom graphics from AMD featuring the company's RDNA 2 graphics architecture. What does that means for mobile devices powered by the chip? The kind of graphics horsepower that had usually been associated with discrete GPUs. Su says that the upcoming Exynos chip will support features including ray tracking and variable rate shading. While that wouldn't make it the first ARM-based chip with those features (Apple's M1 processor also supports ray tracing), it could still be enough to help give Samsung an edge over rival Qualcomm.

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AmiMoJo writes: Mountain rescuers have questioned the accuracy of using a location app, citing dozens of examples where the wrong address was given to their teams. What3Words (W3W) divides the world into three-by-three metre squares, each with a three-word address. It is free and used by 85% of UK emergency services. Reasons for the errors were not given, but were likely to be things such as mispronunciation or spelling errors. W3W said human error was "a possibility with any type of tool." The mapping system was created by an algorithm which assigned three words to each square in the world. Mark Lewis, the head of ICT at Mountain Rescue England and Wales (MREW), said that the use of the W3W app had been "testing" for rescue teams. He gave the BBC a database from the last 12 months which listed 45 locations across England and Wales that rescuers received from lost or injured walkers and climbers, which turned out to be incorrect.

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There's a great scene in Bull Durham where the veteran teaches the rookie how to talk to reporters. It's all cliches. "Of course it's boring," says the pro, "that's the point."

It's a ridiculous ritual. Esp with a star as young as Naomi Osaka. She has incredible talent, but when you're so young, in her case 23, most of it is intuitive, not well-understood.

I've seen that recently in interviews with Knicks star Derrick Rose. The questions reporters ask are still insipid, but at 32, having been a huge star at 22, youngest MVP ever, then having his body break over and over, he had to learn how it works, and now his play still has a lot of the spark he had when he was young, and even better, now he can tell you how he manages it, something he probably could not have done at 22.

I find at my advanced age, in a "sport" where you body's age doesn't matter (up to a point, see this blog in the summer of 2002), I have a much better understanding of how I do what I do than when I was an ambitious star in my 20s. I can tell you a lot more how this works than I could then, when I just had an intuitive sense of how it worked. Enough of that intuition was right so that I could make it to the next stage, and the one after that, and so on.

In software, very few people stick with it through their whole career as I have. Companies still have no idea how age and tech work co-relate. But we know a lot about tennis, and basketball.

Naomi Osaka is brilliant, wonderful, a joy to behold. You can see it, read it, in everything she does and says. Her intuition says she should be allowed to be introspective while she tries to win in her sport. Her intuition is incredibly compelling. I feel of her as I do of a great movie star or maker, or software developer. In 10 or 20 years ask her how she does it, she'll have some answers. Right now it's probably not possible.

My opinion only.

My thinking was influenced by parents and grandparents who barely escaped Germany in WWII spending the rest of their lives trying to figure out WTF happened. If we live through something like that we'll learn a lot. But if their experience means anything, probably far more questions than answers.

I started watching the HBO series In Treatment. At first it's boring, but it develops as it goes along. Some of the most despicable characters become sympathetic, and vice versa. You see real love between some of the pairs, also a lot of fear. 90 percent is conversations in a therapist's office. I found it hard to imagine how that could work, but it does.