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"TOKYO/GUANGZHOU -- From shopping to banking to boarding airplanes, an economy based on facial recognition is taking root in Japan, enabling consumers to live a cashless, bag-free life. "

"Elon Musk wants Tesla to be seen as "much more than an electric car company." On Thursday's Tesla AI Day, the CEO described Tesla as a company with "deep AI activity in hardware on the inference level and on the training level" that can be used down the line for applications beyond self-driving cars, including a humanoid robot that Tesla is apparently building."

"Although a few companies (tech firms, largely) have decided that work from home is a long-term solution, others are realizing that simply won't work for them. JPMorgan says its internal data show workers are not as productive from home. The result is a decision to make the investments to bring people back as safely as possible in this new normal. "

"Apple Inc. captured headlines last week for declaring it would be carbon neutral by 2030. "

"This is the dark, flamboyant humour beloved of the "stan" culture of pop superfans, and in this case, quite funny. But another attack on Jillian Mapes, Pitchfork's reviewer, was very serious: "Contact info both old and current was leaked, down to a photo of my home," she wrote on Twitter. "I've gotten too many emails saying some version of, 'you are an ugly fat bitch who is clearly jealous of Taylor, plz die' … It sucks to be scared of every person milling about outside or feel like you can't answer the phone." Her overwhelmingly positive review nevertheless tarnished the numerical perfection conferred by Metacritic, hence the attack."

"But now Silicon Valley seems to be under a little-noticed threat. Amid Covid-19, the deep recession, and renewed antitrust pressure from Congress and regulators, the Valley faces a very different challenge - the disruption of its very essence, the serendipitous encounter. The culprit is a rush by many of the Valley's leading companies to permanently lock in the coronavirus-led shift to remote work."

"Twitter suffered a major security breach on Wednesday that saw hackers take control of the accounts of major public figures and corporations, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Apple. The company confirmed the breach Wednesday evening, more than six hours after the hack began, and attributed it to a "coordinated social engineering attack" on its own employees that enabled the hackers to access "internal systems and tools"."

"Before Covid-19, many of us thought remote working sounded blissful. Now, employees across the world long for chats by the coffee machine and the whirr of printers"

"Employers argue they make considerable savings on real estate when workers shift from office to home work. However, these savings result from passing costs on to workers. Unless employees are fully compensated, this could become a variant of what urban theorist Andy Merrifield calls parasitic capitalism, whereby corporate profits increasingly rely on extracting value from the public - and now personal - realm, rather than on generating new value."

" To be clear, workers are regularly replaced by automation, but the speed and impact of robots taking jobs is routinely overstated in public discourse; very unlikely to accelerate during a recession; and is one of many other factors that affect or change the nature of work."

"Zoom has admitted it suspended the accounts of human rights activists at the behest of the Chinese government and suggested it will block any further meetings that Beijing complains are illegal."

"MEETINGS ON ZOOM, the increasingly popular video conferencing service, are encrypted using an algorithm with serious, well-known weaknesses, and sometimes using keys issued by servers in China, even when meeting participants are all in North America, according to researchers at the University of Toronto."

"Tech workers are in demand: companies find it easier to raise cash than to hire engineers; this gives workers enormous bargaining power, and they're using it. From the Google uprisings over a Pentagon babykiller project and a Chinese surveillance project to the Microsoft uprising over ICE contracts, tech workers are emerging as part of the solution -- while their secretive, shareholder-haunted bosses are more and more the problem."

"A new proposal could see the country reduce the amount of tax benefits for companies that invest in automated machinery."

"More and more independent thinkers are realizing that when being an employee is the equivalent to putting all your money into one stock - a better strategy is to diversify your portfolio. So you're seeing a lot more people looking to diversify their career." Faith Popcorn, a futurist, echoes the idea that we will all have to become as agile as possible and "have many forms of talent and work that you can provide the economy".

"However, there is some concern about how accurate these new procedures will be. Apparently the facial recognition technology doesn't recognize all people will the same accuracy. White women and black people aren't as easily recognized as white men, meaning there could be some mismatching of identities. Some are also concerned that this is crossing the line in terms of passenger privacy."

"Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a model for traffic without ownership. You pay a monthly fee for it, like with Spotify, tell the app where you are going and get instant access to taxis, Ubers, buses, and so on. Everything is available on-demand and ownership is no longer needed."