Technology

The Trump administration is now ordering hospitals to send coronavirus patient data to a database in Washington, DC as part of a new initiative that may bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to a report from The New York Times published on Tuesday. As outlined in a document posted to the website of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), hospitals are being ordered to send data directly to the administration, effective tomorrow, a move that has alarmed some within the CDC, according to The Times. The database that will collect and store the information is referred to in the document as HHS Protect, which was built in part by data mining and predictive analytics firm Palantir. The Silicon Valley company is known most for its controversial contract...

Officials in Austin have approved a total of at least $60 million in property tax rebates in an effort to bring Tesla’s next electric car factory to the Texas city. Austin is one of the two leading candidates for the factory, which is where Tesla will build the Cybertruck, along with Tulsa, Oklahoma. Travis County Commissioner’s Court, the policy-making and administrative arm of the local government, approved an agreement on Tuesday that will save Tesla around $14 million in property taxes over the next 10 years. Late last week, the Del Valle school district, which is near where the factory would be located, approved an agreement that would grant Tesla close to $50 million in tax rebates over the same time frame. The vote was preceded by some drama over whether Tesla could wait any longer ...

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have agreed to rescind a policy that would require international students to take in-person classes in order to remain in the US. The agencies have reached an agreement with Harvard and MIT, who filed a lawsuit on July 8th over the policy. The resolution came less than five minutes into a hearing for the case, federal Judge Allison D. Burroughs announced. ICE will reinstate the guidelines it applied to the Spring 2020 semester, which allowed international students with F-1 visas to take fully online course loads while retaining their visa status. That policy, announced in March, allowed hundreds of thousands of international students to remain in the US after COVID-19 drove their universities to move...

Fifteen states and Washington, DC have announced that they will follow California’s lead in switching all heavy-duty trucks, vans, and buses over to running on electricity, in what could be one of the most significant efforts to reduce harmful diesel engine pollution in the United States. It could also be a big development in the fight for environmental justice because emissions from diesel-powered commercial vehicles disproportionately harm Black, Asian, and Latinx communities. The states that signed the agreement along with Washington, DC are: California, Connecticut, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) announced in late June that all co...

On Wednesday, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden revealed a revamped climate and energy plan that raises spending, expands efforts to address racial disparities, and sets an earlier deadline for cutting greenhouse gases. Biden’s plan aims to eliminate carbon pollution from the power sector by 2035. Biden had previously committed to reaching a 100 percent “clean energy economy” by 2050. The plan comes with a $2 trillion price tag over four years, higher than his previous ten-year $1.7 trillion plan. Forty percent of clean energy investments will be earmarked for “disadvantaged communities.” “Today, he’s responded to many of those criticisms” Biden’s more ambitious climate plans reflect recommendations made by a joint task force that he assembled alongside Sen. Bernie Sand...

WhatsApp is currently down for its 2 billion users. Service issues started at around 4PM ET and are preventing WhatsApp users from sending or receiving messages on the service. The WhatsApp application will still open, but a connecting loop will be displayed while the service is experiencing issues. If you’re trying to send messages to friends and family, once WhatsApp is back online the messages will be automatically queued and sent to recipients. Facebook-owned WhatsApp rarely experiences service outages, and this is the first major outage for more than a year. WhatsApp went down alongside Instagram and Facebook last year for around two hours, before service was restored. Facebook revealed earlier this year that WhatsApp now has 2 billion users, up from 1.5 billion and 1 billion users in...

Peacock is NBCUniversal’s new streaming service and the last major entrant in the colloquial streaming wars. But Gidon Katz, the company’s president of direct to consumer, believes Peacock can win by leaning into something most of its biggest competitors won’t: offering premium entertainment, mostly for free. When Peacock launches tomorrow across the United States, people can choose between three different tiers: a completely free ad-supported version that gives people access to more than 13,000 hours of content, daily news and sports programming, and samplings of Peacock original series, but not full access. Then there’s Peacock Premium, a $4.99-a-month version that gives people more than 20,000 hours of content, including all Peacock Originals and exclusive live programming but will stil...

Microsoft has been testing deeper Gmail and Google Calendar integrations in Outlook on the web for months, and part of that is arriving for Outlook business users today. Outlook on the web users will be able to add their personal Outlook.com or Google Calendar accounts to an Outlook work account so that you see a better view of your availability when scheduling work appointments. This new feature is rolling out now to all Microsoft 365 users with a work account, but there’s no news on when Outlook.com users will be able to add Gmail and Google Calendar accounts. Microsoft has been testing this functionality for months now, with it briefly appearing in some Outlook.com accounts. Outlook’s Google Calendar integration. Alongside the Google Calendar integration, Outlook on the web is also gett...

We’re all tired. Every day runs together, an endless tangle of hours and screens and occasional bursts of daylight to recharge. Old routines take on new wrinkles: meetings via webcam, masks to maintain and wear before outings, communal activities retrofitted to be done in isolation. Maybe we’re not in a literal time loop, but it sure feels like one; a long, endless stretch of days where little changes and we’re burned out all the time. Enter Palm Springs, a movie for 2020’s burnout state of mind. At first blush, Palm Springs is another take on Groundhog Day: Nyles (Andy Samberg) is a dude with the terrible misfortune of having to relive an acquaintance’s wedding day over and over again. But what makes Palm Springs stand out is how little it’s concerned with its own premise. Of course, the ...

The best Chromebooks aren’t just laptops that run a few Android apps anymore. Chromebooks can cover a wide variety of computing needs now, and a good Chromebook can be more useful than a mediocre Windows laptop. The message that many people actually want good Chromebooks — rather than just cheap ones — has gotten through to manufacturers. Many of the best Chromebooks are around $500 or $600, though there are good options in the higher and lower ranges as well. The extra money goes a long way toward getting something you’ll be happy with. For the first time, the quality of Chromebooks in this range has been consistent. There are so many similarities between the offerings from Asus, Lenovo, Google, HP, Dell, and Samsung that a conspiracy-minded person might suggest they’re all sourcing their...

I. Last week I wrote about some of the forces putting the squeeze on TikTok — and, uncharacteristically for me when I write about TikTok, the course of events did not immediately reverse and put TikTok into a stronger position. Instead, by several measures, the situation for ByteDance’s popular video app got significantly worse. For starters, Peter Navarro, an adviser to the president, said in an interview with Fox News on Sunday that he expects President Trump will take “strong action” against TikTok and a fellow Chinese-made social app, WeChat. Worse from ByteDance’s perspective is that Navarro said the United States will not back down even if TikTok is sold to an American buyer. Here’s Bloomberg: The Trump administration is “just getting started” with the two apps, and he would not rule...

Google is turning on new security features in its Google Meet video chat service for meetings held by education subscribers, the company has announced. The changes, which are due to go into effect over the next 15 days, will mean that anonymous users won’t be able to join meetings organized by G Suite for Education or G Suite Enterprise for Education subscribers. An anonymous user is anyone not signed into a Google account, the company says. The new features appear to be designed to prevent “zoombombing,” where unauthorized users connect to meetings and disrupt them by broadcasting shock videos, or hurling insults. ZDNet notes that as school lessons have moved online due to the pandemic, some students have shared links to their classes and have asked pranksters to disrupt them in the hope ...