PayPal is exploring a possible stock-trading platform, after rolling out the ability to trade cryptocurrencies last year. CNBC reports: The San Jose, California-based company recently hired brokerage industry veteran Rich Hagen as part of the move, according to one of the sources. After leaving Ally Invest, Hagen is now the CEO of a previously unreported division of PayPal called Invest at PayPal, according to his LinkedIn page. Hagen was the co-founder of online brokerage TradeKing, which was bought by Ally Invest. His current job description outlines PayPal's efforts to "explore opportunities" in the consumer investment business. When reached for comment, PayPal pointed CNBC to CEO Dan Schulman's comments at the company's investor day in February, when he spoke about the long-term vision for the company and how it may include many more financial services, including "investment capabilities." In order to offer stock trading to customers, it's possible PayPal will partner with or buy an existing broker-dealer. According to one source, PayPal has held already discussions with potential industry partners. Still, one source familiar with the idea said it was unlikely that the trading service would roll out this year. If PayPal did look to get full approval as a brokerage firm alone, it would need to complete a new membership process through the industry's main regulator, FINRA. That process could take more than eight months. PayPal has more than 400 million accounts worldwide.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden government speaks to us as adults, journalism translates it into Trump talk.

The war in Afghanistan is now over.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Seattle Times, written by Katherine Anne Long: Amazon systematically attempts to channel 6% of its office employees out of the company each year, using processes embedded in proprietary software to help meet a target for turnover among low-ranked office workers, a metric Amazon calls "unregretted attrition," according to internal company documents seen by The Seattle Times. The documents underscore the extent to which Amazon's processes closely resemble the controversial management practice of stack ranking -- in which employees are graded by comparison with each other rather than against a job description or performance goals -- despite Amazon's insistence that it does not engage in stack ranking. The documents also highlight how much of Amazon's human resources processes are reliant on apps and algorithms, even among the company's office workforce. And they provide the most detailed picture yet of how Amazon uses performance improvement plans to funnel low-ranked employees out of the company. The company expects more than one-third of employees on performance improvement plans to fail, documents show. Amazon has previously said that its performance improvement plans aren't meant to punish employees. The policies described in the documents reviewed by The Seattle Times apply to the company's office workforce, who comprise a minority of Amazon's roughly 950,000 U.S. employees. Amazon's warehouses replace workers much more frequently, The New York Times has reported: Before the pandemic, annual turnover rates at Amazon warehouses reached 150%. Amazon said some of the documentation reviewed by The Seattle Times was not created by the company's central human resources team and contains outdated terminology. But it did not dispute that the documents describe Amazon's internal policies. An Amazon spokesperson also said characterizing its performance management system as stack ranking is inaccurate. "We do not, nor have we ever, stack ranked our employees. This is not a practice that Amazon uses," said spokesperson Jaci Anderson, in an email. She said the goal of the company's performance review process is to "give employees more information and insights to continue to grow in their careers at Amazon." Experts familiar with Amazon's processes disagreed with the company's stance that it does not stack-rank employees. Previous reporting by Business Insider has also found that Amazon grades employees on a curve. Amazon's performance-review system "forces [the company] to find the flaws in people as opposed to looking at their strengths," said longtime tech industry recruiter Chris Bloomquist, co-founder of Seattle's The Talent Mine. "If I have 10 brilliant people, but the least-brilliant person is fireable? That's stupid." The company's insistence that it does not practice stack ranking is "a bold-faced lie," Bloomquist said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

General Motors is halting production of the Chevy Bolt EV after a number of battery fires prompted a massive recall that has already cost the company nearly $2 billion. From a report: The automaker won't resume making the 2022 Bolt and Bolt EUV until at least mid-September. It had initially stopped production last week because of the global chip shortage. The recall repair process is also on hold, as GM is still waiting to get new battery modules from its supplier, South Korean conglomerate LG, that it is confident are free of defects. "We will not resume repairs or restart production until we are confident LG is producing defect free products for us," GM spokesman Daniel Flores said in a statement to The Verge.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Popular instant messaging app Telegram has joined the elite club of apps that have been downloaded over 1 billion times globally, according to Sensor Tower. From a report: The Dubai-headquartered app, which was launched in late 2013, surpassed the milestone on Friday, the mobile insight firm told TechCrunch. As is the case with the app's chief rival, WhatsApp, India is the largest market for Telegram. The world's second largest internet market represents approximately 22% of its lifetime installs, Sensor Tower said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With Apple's latest iPhone just around the corner, reports suggest that it will include support for satellite communications, which consumers could use when terrestrial-based 4G and 5G are not available. The one getting most of the glory: Globalstar, the once-embattled satellite company. From a report: Globalstar shares shot up more than 40% at one point today. Shares in satellite companies Iridium and AST SpaceMobile also rose, more than 9% and 4%, respectively. One report tracks to TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who, as MacRumors explained, discussed how the iPhone 13 lineup will feature hardware that is able to connect to low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, which could allow iPhone 13 users to make calls and send messages. The MacRumors report notes that the upcoming iPhone 13 supposedly features a customized Qualcomm X60 baseband chip that supports satellite communications; other smartphone brands reportedly are waiting until 2022 for the X65 baseband chip for turning on satellite communications functionality. While there are ample ways to support LEO connectivity in handsets, the bottom line is: The "simplest scenario" for providing LEO communications to users is if network operators work with Globalstar, according to the Kuo-based report. That raised some eyebrows, rightly so.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter TomGreenhaw writes: This should be very concerning for tech companies that operate in the Chinese market. 'It is not clear how much pressure was put on SoftBank to form the merger, but this looks like one of the most blatant examples of IP theft that we've seen. The Chinese arm of a company has gone rogue and refused to obey the ruling of its own board. The head of that company is essentially treating it as a personal fiefdom, and Chinese authorities do not appear to have taken meaningful action to reign in Mr. Wu.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China kicked off a two-month campaign to crack down on commercial platforms and social media accounts that post finance-related information that's deemed harmful to its economy. From a report: The initiative will focus on rectifying violations including those that "maliciously" bad-mouth China's financial markets and falsely interpret domestic policies and economic data, the Cyberspace Administration of China said in a statement late Friday. Those who republish foreign media reports or commentaries that falsely interpret domestic financial topics "without taking a stance or making a judgment" will also be targeted, it added. The move is aimed at cultivating a "benign" online environment for public opinion that can facilitate "sustainable and healthy development" of China's economy and its society, according to the statement. It followed a draft proposal issued earlier Friday by the cyberspace regulator to regulate algorithms that technology firms use to recommend videos and other content. Commercial websites and platforms will be ordered to clean up financial information posts and shut accounts deemed in violation, under the supervision of authorities including the cyberspace administrator, the finance ministry, central bank as well as securities, banking and insurance regulators.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tens of millions of older Americans who cannot afford dental care -- with severe consequences for their overall health, what they eat and even when they smile -- may soon get help as Democrats maneuver to add dental benefits to Medicare for the first time in its history. From a report: The proposal, part of the large budget bill moving through Congress, would be among the largest changes to Medicare since its creation in 1965 but would require overcoming resistance from dentists themselves, who are worried that it would pay them too little.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet's Google generated $11.2 billion in revenue from its mobile app store in 2019, according to a court filing unsealed on Saturday, offering a clear view into the service's financial results for the first time. From a report: Attorneys general for Utah and 36 other U.S. states or districts suing Google over alleged antitrust violations with the app store also said in the newly unredacted filing that the business in 2019 had $8.5 billion in gross profit and $7 billion in operating income, for an operating margin of over 62%. The figures include sales of apps, in-app purchase and app store ads. Google told Reuters the data "are being used to mischaracterize our business in a meritless lawsuit." The company and its accusers said in a separate filing on Saturday a trial in late 2022 is possible over whether Google abuses its alleged monopoly in app sales for Android devices. In its quarterly financial disclosures, Google groups Play app revenue with that of other services and accounts for the store's ad revenue as part of another broader category. Attorneys general, as well as mobile app developer Epic Games and others separately suing Google, have contended that it generates huge profits through the Play Store by taking 30% of the fee for every digital good sold inside an app. The plaintiffs say Google's cut is arbitrarily high, siphoning app developers' profits.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday I posted an item that about collaboration in the news industry to help disseminate critical information.

• An idea for the news industry to collaborate on. Sometimes a news org takes down the paywall on a story because it's important that everyone see it. Make an RSS feed that combines all such stories across all pubs. Make spreading the news even more efficient.

A simple idea, really -- not much tech, and news orgs are already doing it. The post got a lot of traction on Twitter, and favorable notice from a fair number of people inside news orgs, people who would be critical to making this idea a reality.

So what's needed, technically, beyond what's already there? Probably just this -- a way to tell, in an RSS feed, that an item is outside the paywall.

How to do that? Create a namespace, anyone can do that. Call it (say) the urgentNews namespace. You could have its url point to this post if you like.

To begin with the namespace has one element, isOutsidePaywall.

This is what an item might look like for such a news item.

• <item>
• <title>Sed do eiusmod tempor</title>
• <description>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam.</decription>
• <link>https://anytownnews.com/2021/923883.html
• <urgentNews:isOutsidePaywall>true</urgentNews:isOutsidePaywall>
• </item>

Last week, media reported how Microsoft's Windows 11 won't technically leave millions of PCs behind -- the company told the press that it won't actually block you from installing Windows 11 on a PC with an older CPU, so long as you download and manually install an ISO file all by yourself. But it turns out even that technicality has a technicality. The Verge: Microsoft is now threatening to withhold Windows Updates from your copy of Windows 11 -- potentially even security updates -- if you take that route. We're not sure why the company didn't mention it in our original briefing, but Microsoft has since told The Verge that unsupported PCs won't be entitled to receive Windows Updates, and that even security and driver updates may be withheld.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Debuggers aren't only for debugging, they're also programmer's MRI. It's how you can watch the organism doing its work, if you forget how it works because you wrote it a long time ago, or if someone else wrote it. If you aren't using a debugger in all aspects of your programming work you're limiting the amount of complexity you can deal with in your code. Actually it's better than an MRI, because you can kill the patient and see what happens. In medicine that's frowned on.

Although Apple is making some changes to its App Store policies and setting up a $100 million fund for small developers, critics say that the terms of a class-action settlement don't meaningfully loosen the company's grip on its digital marketplace. From a report: Spotify Chief Legal Officer Horacio Gutierrez: "Apple's proposed concessions fail to address the most basic aspects of their anticompetitive and unfair App Store practices. They are attempting to distract policymakers and regulators and slow down the momentum that's building around the world to address their behavior." Match Group: "This is a raw demonstration of their monopolistic power: making capricious changes designed to spur good PR for their benefit right as legislation, regulatory scrutiny and developer complaints are closing in on them. We hope everyone sees this for what it is -- a sham." Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-NY): "This new action by Apple is a good first step towards addressing some of these competition concerns, but more must be done to ensure an open, competitive mobile app marketplace, including commonsense legislation to set rules of the road for dominant app stores."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.