Google employees based in the same office before the pandemic could see different changes in pay if they switch to working from home permanently, with long commuters hit harder, according to a company pay calculator seen by Reuters. From a report: It is an experiment taking place across Silicon Valley, which often sets trends for other large employers. Facebook and Twitter also cut pay for remote employees who move to less expensive areas, while smaller companies including Reddit and Zillow have shifted to location-agnostic pay models, citing advantages when it comes to hiring, retention and diversity. Alphabet's Google stands out in offering employees a calculator that allows them to see the effects of a move. But in practice, some remote employees, especially those who commute from long distances, could experience pay cuts without changing their address. "Our compensation packages have always been determined by location, and we always pay at the top of the local market based on where an employee works from," a Google spokesperson said, adding that pay will differ from city to city and state to state. One Google employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, typically commutes to the Seattle office from a nearby county and would likely see their pay cut by about 10% by working from home full-time, according estimates by the company's Work Location Tool launched in June.

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Samsung Electronics unveiled its latest high-end foldable smartphones on Wednesday with lower prices than last year's offerings in a push to expand foldable demand beyond niche devices. From a report: The tech giant priced its 5G-enabled Galaxy Z Fold3 with 7.6-inch main screen to start at $1,799.99 in the United States, and clamshell Galaxy Z Flip3 at $999.99 - down from the launch prices of last year's models at $1,999 and $1,380, respectively. The Galaxy Z Fold3 and Z Flip3 will launch on August 27 starting in markets such as the United States and Europe. "There's definitely demand for bigger screens as people consume more media content, and foldables are the only form that makes big screens very portable... the price hurdle is the issue," said Park Sung-soon, an analyst at Cape Investment & Securities. Foldable phones, with about 8.6 million units expected to be shipped this year, are expected to account for just 0.6% of estimated 1.447 billion smartphones to be shipped. However, that is more than double the 3 million foldables shipped in 2020, and Samsung will lead the market with over 88% market share, according to Counterpoint Research. Besides price drops that analysts said could help capture more demand in the United States and perhaps China, Samsung's foldable unveiled on Wednesday touted lighter, thinner and improved design, durability, and compatibility with a stylus, which could absorb users of Samsung's Galaxy Note phablets whose key feature is the "S Pen".

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You may not have heard of "Corporate Memphis," but you've almost certainly seen it. From a report: The illustration style can be found in the trendiest direct-to-consumer subway ads, within the app you use to split restaurant tabs or on the 404 page that attempts to counter your frustration with cutesiness. In fact, Corporate Memphis has become so synonymous with tech marketing that some illustrators simply know it as the "tech aesthetic." But Corporate Memphis has also become a victim of its own success. The once-whimsical, fresh style now feels safe and antiseptic. More conspicuous iterations of it get roasted online, if they get noticed at all; one popular tweet asks, "Why does every website landing page look like this now?" Illustrators are just as often tired of Corporate Memphis, but tech companies continue to commission it. So why can't tech wean itself off of Corporate Memphis? Part of it has to do with the practical aesthetic considerations that gave rise to the style. But Corporate Memphis has primarily stuck around because tech executives continue to overlook the value of illustration, according to several of the illustrators interviewed for this story. Illustration work is increasingly awarded to the lowest bidder on gig platforms, using tools designed to standardize output. For the few companies that recognize the value of illustration, however, investing in creative talent has paid considerable dividends -- just not in ways that are easily measured.

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Though you might assume children are the most tech-savvy generation out there, it turns out there's an area where they're just as behind as adults: passwords. From a report: National Institute of Standards and Technology released research on Wednesday showing that even though kids are taught best practices for creating passwords, they're not following them. NIST surveyed more than 1,500 children, ages 8 to 18, and found that, for example, 87% of high schoolers use the same password for everything. Depending on age group (45% of high schoolers versus 23% of elementary school kids), many share passwords with friends. Researchers suggested that those surveyed don't see password sharing as risky behavior, but rather a matter of building friendships and trust. "The end goal of this research is to better support children and provide recommendations that can be used to provide guidance to them, parents and educators," NIST researcher Yee-Yin Choong said in a statement.

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Tim Bray, formerly at Amazon and Google, argues that too many popular consumer app have unexpectedly gotten worse in recent years. In an essay, where he has cited Apple's Photos and Movie apps, Economist app, and MLB as examples, he offers an explanation for why the quality of apps is getting worse: It's obvious. Every high-tech company has people called "Product Managers" (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said "This seems to be working pretty well, let's leave it the way it is." Because that's not bold. That's not visionary. That doesn't get you promoted. It is the dream of every PM to come up with a bold UX innovation that gets praise, and many believe the gospel that the software is better at figuring out what the customer wants than the customer is. And you get extra points these days for using ML. Also, any time you make any change to a popular product, you've imposed a retraining cost on its users. Unfortunately, in their evaluations, PMs consider the cost of customer retraining time to be zero.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: After spending years battling over the Defense Department's $10 billion JEDI cloud services contract, Microsoft and Amazon are fighting over another government deal. Now it's the National Security Agency offering a contract that could pay up to $10 billion as it shifts away from on-premises servers to a commercial provider. However, as Washington Technology reported first, this time around, Amazon Web Services won the $10 billion contest, and it's Microsoft's turn to file a protest with the Government Accountability Office. Washington Technology reports that Microsoft's claim is the NSA didn't conduct a proper evaluation while considering a provider for its new project, code-named WildandStormy. In a statement to NextGov, an NSA spokesperson confirmed the award and protests, saying, "The Agency will respond to the protest in accordance with appropriate federal regulations." The NSA is pursuing a "Hybrid Compute Initiative" to meet its processing and analytical requirements while also holding onto intelligence data (although it might not need as much storage as it used to). AWS already holds many government cloud contracts, but the JEDI process revealed Microsoft as a formidable competitor.

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The National Institutes of Health is giving a booster dose to 200 kidney transplant patients who did not have an immune response to the COVID-19 vaccine in a new trial that launched yesterday. From a report: Many transplant patients, who have to take immunosuppressant drugs to keep their bodies from rejecting a new organ, don't produce enough antibodies -- or don't produce antibodies at all -- after getting the COVID-19 vaccine. The study will check to see if a third shot of an mRNA vaccine, given on top of the normal two-shot regimen, will generate antibodies closer to the levels seen in healthy people. There are some indications that a third dose might help some people. In France, health officials started recommending in April that immunosuppressed patients get a third shot of the COVID-19 vaccine. Half of the patients who did not respond to two shots produced antibodies after the third, according to an analysis of 159 kidney transplant patients. The other half, though, still had no response. In Germany, one study of 48 transplant patients found that 40 percent who didn't respond to two doses had a response after the third. Two other trials looking at kidney transplant patients are also kicking off in Israel and Switzerland.

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One of the reasons I prefer to blog here rather than on Facebook is that if I get an Aha! idea about a feature, over here I can implement it. On Facebook I'm just a user. That was/is one of the great things about the web. Anyone can develop features for it. On Facebook, just their employees can. No wonder it never moves.#

When a company dominates an activity, they tend to invest elsewhere. Seems kind of perverse, but that's why markets don't always evolve to fill every niche. Open platforms are more favorable. If you want to perform a new style of music in Central Park, you can. If you want to do it in Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center, you need to get the approval of a lot of rich people

I've been looking for this piece forever. It was part of my blog that was wiped out in the transition in May 2017 from 1999.io to Electric Outliner and Old School. I finally had the thought to look in my previous editing system and there it was. I said this: I want my old blog back. I decided that all the crazy michegas in trying to make Twitter, Medium, Facebook, the defunct Google Reader that still limited what we could do with blogs, from its grave, to make all those work with my writing -- it wasn't worth it. All these limits amounted to there was nothing I could write that would make even a small subset of them happy. And no links, titles, bold, italic, or podcasts. Fuck you Facebook. What a bad netizen they are. And Twitter, although I love it, it's fucked up too. They support every damn type, video, audio, gifs, whatever -- except HTML text. What the fuck Jack. I'm out of patience with Twitter too. So in May 2017 I broke free of all that bullshit. And now four-plus years later, I'm getting ready to do more.

Hackers have returned nearly half of the $600 million they stole in what's likely to be one of the biggest cryptocurrency thefts ever. From a report: The cybercriminals exploited a vulnerability in Poly Network, a platform that looks to connect different blockchains so that they can work together. Poly Network disclosed the attack Tuesday and asked to establish communication with the hackers, urging them to "return the hacked assets." A blockchain is a ledger of activities upon which various cryptocurrencies are based. Each digital coin has its own blockchain and they're different from each other. Poly Network claims to be able to make these various blockchains work with each other. Poly Network is a decentralized finance platform. DeFi is a broad term encompassing financial applications based on blockchain technology that looks to cut out intermediaries -- such as brokerages and exchanges. Hence, it's dubbed decentralized. Proponents say this can make financial applications such as lending or borrowing more efficient and cheaper. "The amount of money you hacked is the biggest in defi history," Poly Network said in a tweet. In a strange turn of events Wednesday, the hackers began returning some of the funds they stole. They sent a message to Poly Network embedded in a cryptocurrency transaction saying they were "ready to return" the funds. The DeFi platform responded requesting the money be sent to three crypto addresses. As of 7 a.m. London time, more than $4.8 million had been returned to the Poly Network addresses. By 11 a.m. ET, about $258 million had been sent back.

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I've been writing and writing, docs for Drummer. Not much time to write here. Still diggin!

China signaled its push to regulate sweeping parts of the economy, which has jolted markets, will be deep and sustained over the next five years. From a report: In a statement late Wednesday published by the State Council, China said it will "actively" work on legislation in areas including national security, technological innovation as well as anti-monopoly, in order to improve the legal framework "much-needed for governing the country." Law enforcement will be strengthened in sectors ranging from food and drugs to education tutoring where people's immediate interests are at stake, the council said.

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WhatsApp users will finally be able to move their entire chat history between mobile operating systems -- something that's been one of users' biggest requests to date. From a report: The company today introduced a feature that will soon become available to users of both iOS and Android devices, allowing them to move their WhatsApp voice notes, photos, and conversations securely between devices when they switch between mobile operating systems. The feature WhatsApp introduced today works with Samsung devices and Samsung's own transfer tool, known as Smart Switch. Today, Smart Switch helps users transfer contacts, photos, music, messages, notes, calendars, and more to Samsung Galaxy devices. Now, it will transfer WhatsApp chat history, too. WhatsApp showed off the new tool at Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event, and announced Samsung's newest Galaxy foldable devices would get the feature first in the weeks to come. The feature will later roll out to Android more broadly. WhatsApp didn't say when iOS users would gain access.

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AmiMoJo writes: Reaching herd immunity is "not a possibility" with the current Delta variant, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group has said. Giving evidence to MPs on Tuesday, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard said the fact that vaccines did not stop the spread of Covid meant reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population was "mythical." "The problem with this virus is [it is] not measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population," he told the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on coronavirus. "The Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated. And that does mean that anyone who's still unvaccinated at some point will meet the virus ... and we don't have anything that will [completely] stop that transmission." Although the existing vaccines are very effective at preventing serious Covid illness and death, they do not stop a fully vaccinated person from being infected by the virus that causes Covid-19. The concept of herd or population immunity relies on a large majority of a population gaining immunity -- either through vaccination or previous infection -- which, in turn, provides indirect protection from an infectious disease for the unvaccinated and those who have never been previously infected. Data from a recent React study conducted by Imperial College London suggests that fully vaccinated people aged 18 to 64 have about a 49% lower risk of being infected compared with unvaccinated people. The findings also indicated that fully vaccinated people were about half as likely to test positive after coming into contact with someone who had Covid (3.84%, down from 7.23%).

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Scientists say that rapid cuts in methane could be a key tactic in the battle against climate change.