If people turn their back on you because they don't like your ideas, then they weren't really friends in the first place, were they? It's not love if it's conditional on hiding who you are. Remember that, young folk. Be you because that's all you can do! ❤️

Along with a string of new features across several areas of Android, Google is at last turning on end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for everyone in the Messages app. Beta testers have been able to use E2EE messaging since November. From a report: E2EE in Messages is only available in one-on-one conversations for the time being, not group chats. Both participants need to have RCS chat features enabled to use it. You'll know if a message you're about to send will be encrypted if you see a lock icon on the send button.

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Sony will allow "Cyberpunk 2077" to be sold on its online PlayStation store starting June 21, the game's creators at CD Projekt Red said today. From a report: Sales of the buggy would-be blockbuster have been hit hard since Sony delisted the game shortly after its launch. Many fans had high hopes that the game would meet the level of quality of CDPR's last adventure, "The Witcher 3." A reappearance may signal the game is in a viable condition to play.

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My friend Jeremy Zilar turns off the router at his family house at 5PM. At first my mind rebelled. I remember growing up in a world with no internet at all. I was part of the bootstrap that we now live in with internet 24 by 7. Internet-connected everything. But then I realized if say President Biden ordered that the internet be turned off in everyone’s home every night at 9PM, for even just one hour, it might be enough to wake us from our collective stupor.

The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden's nominee to the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, the young progressive who helped launch a reckoning amongst antitrust scholars and enforcers, in a 69-28 vote. From a report: At 32, Khan will become the youngest commissioner ever confirmed to the agency. Her confirmation also signals a bipartisan desire to impose more regulations on Big Tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet and Apple. Khan received the support of several Republicans, including Commerce Committee Ranking Member Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who participated in her confirmation hearing. Still, others like Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, opposed her confirmation. Lee has tended to be cautious about certain types of regulation despite concerns about tech companies' influence and previously expressed apprehension about Khan's experience. Khan became a well-known figure in antitrust circles after writing "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" for the Yale Law Review in 2017, while a student at the university. The paper made the case for using a different framework for evaluating competitive harm than the popular consumer welfare standard. That standard essentially says that antitrust law violations can be determined based on harm to consumers, which is often measured based on prices. But Khan argued that standard could miss significant competitive harm in the modern economy, such as predatory pricing that lowers consumer prices in the short term but allows a company that can afford it to quickly gain market share. She also argued that both owning and selling on a marketplace, like Amazon does, could allow a business to exploit information across their ecosystem to undercut the competition.

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Executives at some of the world's largest technology firms are leaving prime jobs to join startups that build communications and collaboration tools, a market expected to skyrocket as more businesses settle into hybrid work arrangements. From a report: Raymond Endres, Facebook's former top engineer for its Messenger app, left the company last month to oversee technology at Airtable, which makes cloud-based spreadsheet collaboration software. His initial focus will be on prepping the San Francisco-based startup to meet an expected surge in enterprise demand. That means ramping up investing in new product features and infrastructure in the year ahead, while tripling the size of his engineering team to roughly 300 workers, he said. [...] Sarah Cannon, a partner at Index Ventures, said she knows of at least a dozen recent communication and collaboration startups founded or led by former top people at big tech firms. Many high-level developers and engineers have been building these kinds of apps inside large companies for years, she said, and Covid-19's impact on conventional workplaces is now prompting them to strike out on their own. On the funding side, she said, investors have grown less skeptical of productivity, communications and collaboration tools, which many companies in the past were reluctant to adopt at scale. Spending in the global collaboration and enterprise social software market is forecast to reach $4.5 billion this year, a 17.1% increase from 2020, according to the latest forecast by information-technology research and consulting firm Gartner Inc. It expects to see double-digit gains into 2022. As the pandemic wanes, an estimated 60% of global companies are developing a permanent hybrid workplace model, Gartner has said, where most employees come into the office no more than three days a week. Gartner estimates that more than 1.1 billion workers around the world worked remotely last year, up from 350 million in 2019.

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The sighting of the Egyptian vulture, if confirmed to be wild, would be the first for 153 years.

Screenshots of Microsoft's upcoming Windows 11 operating system have appeared online today. Originally published at Chinese site Baidu, the screenshots show off the new Windows 11 user interface and Start menu. The UI changes look very similar to what was originally found in Windows 10X before Microsoft canceled that project in favor of Windows 11. From a report: App icons are now centered on the taskbar, with a new Start button and menu. The Start menu is a simplified version of what currently exists in Windows 10, without Live Tiles. It includes pinned apps and the ability to quickly shut down or restart Windows 11 devices. The operating system is identified as Windows 11 Pro in screenshots, and we can confirm they are genuine. Microsoft has been dropping hints that it's ready to launch Windows 11. The software giant is holding a special Windows event to reveal its next OS on June 24th. The event starts at 11AM ET, and the event invite includes a window that creates a shadow with an outline that looks like the number 11.

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Google and Apple face a sweeping probe into the "duopoly" power of their mobile ecosystems, in the U.K. antitrust watchdog's latest attack on Silicon Valley. From a report: The increasingly tech-focused Competition and Markets Authority opened a 12-month market study into broad aspects of the iOS and Android systems, saying it feared the companies' dominance is stifling competition. The investigation adds to the regulator's separate investigations into both tech giants. "Our ongoing work into big tech has already uncovered some worrying trends and we know consumers and businesses could be harmed if they go unchecked," CMA Chief Executive Officer Andrea Coscelli said in a statement. The CMA uses market studies to gather information before upgrading investigations. The mobile review comes as the U.K. watchdog seeks to move to the forefront of tech regulation after emerging from the shadow of European Union regulators at the end of the Brexit transition. The authority is preparing to set up a tech-focused unit and has warned that the largest companies will face extra scrutiny of everything from mergers to monopoly behavior.

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Suppose you get into a car accident and there was a question of how fast you were going. Your insurance company knows, if you've given their app on your phone permission to access your location. Your car has computers that know how fast you're going, and if your car has a satellite connection as mine does, they can save it on their server. All this might not come as a surprise, except if you drove in the days before mobile phones, GPS and cars that are computers. as I did.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is auctioning his original source code for the web in the form of a "non-fungible token," as digital collectibles continue to fetch millions of dollars despite the recent sell-off in cryptocurrencies. From a report: The auction at Sotheby's will be the first time that Berners-Lee has been able to raise money directly from one of the greatest inventions of the modern era, with the proceeds benefiting initiatives that he and his wife Rosemary support. "The idea is somebody might like a digitally signed version of the code, a bit like plenty of people have asked for physically autographed copies of the book," Berners-Lee said. Auctioneers hope that the one-of-a-kind digital artefact will ignite interest in NFTs beyond their mainstay of artworks, games and sports memorabilia. Investment in NFTs has waned since March's record-breaking $69.3m sale of Beeple's "Everydays: The First 5000 Days." In an interview with the Financial Times, Berners-Lee, 66, said the auction was an "opportunity to look backâ...â30 years on from the initial code, which was very, very simple, to the state [of the web] now, which has some wonderfully simple aspects to it but also has a lot of issues of various sorts." Unlike the founders of Google, Facebook and Amazon, who gained enormous riches through the web, Berners-Lee is no billionaire. The source code behind the world wide web and its first browser, which were conceived and coded by Berners-Lee between 1989 and 1991, was never patented. Instead, it was released for free into the public domain by Cern, the particle physics laboratory in Switzerland where the British scientist worked at the time. The move enabled widespread uptake of a technology now used by more than 4bn people every day. But for potential archivists and collectors, it also complicated the idea of authenticating Berners-Lee's original work.

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Allied members have agreed to "significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from military activities".

The tipping point for irreversible global warming may have already been triggered, the scientist who led the biggest expedition to the Arctic warned Tuesday. AFP: "The disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is one of the first landmines in this minefield, one of the tipping points that we set off first when we push warming too far," said Dr Markus Rex. "And one can essentially ask if we haven't already stepped on this mine and already set off the beginning of the explosion." Dr Rex led the world's biggest mission to the North Pole, an expedition involving 300 scientists from 20 countries. The expedition returned to Germany in October after 389 days drifting through the North Pole, bringing home devastating proof of a dying Arctic Ocean and warnings of ice-free summers in just decades. The $170 million expedition also brought back 150 terabytes of data and more than 1,000 ice samples.

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Sales of plexiglass tripled to roughly $750 million in the U.S. after the pandemic hit, as offices, schools, restaurants and retail stores sought protection from the droplets that health authorities suspected were spreading the coronavirus. There was just one hitch. Not a single study has shown that the clear plastic barriers actually control the virus, said Joseph Allen of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. From a report: "We spent a lot of time and money focused on hygiene theater," said Allen, an indoor-air researcher. "The danger is that we didn't deploy the resources to address the real threat, which was airborne transmission -- both real dollars, but also time and attention. The tide has turned," he said. "The problem is, it took a year." For the first months of Covid-19, top health authorities pointed to larger droplets as the key transmission culprits, despite a chorus of protests from researchers like Allen. Tinier floating droplets can also spread the virus, they warned, meaning plastic shields can't stop them. Not until last month did the World Health Organization and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fully affirm airborne transmission. That meant plastic shielding had created "a false sense of security," said building scientist Marwa Zaatari, a pandemic task force member of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

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