Looms

EV start-up Lordstown (RIDE) just hit another major hurdle in its journey to bring the Endurance electric pickup to market. According to an SEC filing on Monday, Lordstown may be facing bankruptcy after Foxconn, which has been a lifeline for the company thus far, signaled an end to their investment agreement. Lordstown has faced an uphill battle in bringing its first electric model, the Endurance pickup, to the market since its founding in 2018. After going public on the US NASDAQ exchange…

US tech companies are pushing to narrow the scope of legislation that could ban TikTok in the US, creating new obstacles as the Biden administration seeks to confront China's influence.The Information Technology Industry Council, which represents companies including International Business Machines Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc., is among groups lobbying to narrow the legislation, according to people familiar with those conversations who asked not to be named discussing the politically sensitive issue. Companies…

Fox Corp.’s decision to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation dispute with Dominion Voting Systems gave voting-machine company Smartmatic USA Corp. a potential blueprint for its own case against the conservative media empire, legal experts say.  Just like Dominion, Smartmatic is accusing Fox’s news networks of airing defamatory comments about its products in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, including that the voting-machine company helped rig the outcome in favor of Joe Biden. The…

Fifteen years after Hollywood writers walked out, another possible strike is on the horizon.Back then, the Writers Guild of America’s fight to secure residual payments for shows distributed online forced a standoff that shut down Hollywood for 100 days. In retrospect, that contest over digital pay and home video residuals appears quaint. This time, tensions have reached a boiling point over the way streaming has steamrolled the industry.The WGA recently asked members for a strike authorization as negotiations…

The IRS-authorized tax preparation software service eFile.com recently suffered a JavaScript malware attack in the middle of tax season, according to BleepingComputer. The nefarious JavaScript file has been identified as popper.js and has been observed by eFile.com users as well as by security researchers. The malware is believed to have surfaced on the service around mid-March and has interacted with “almost every page of eFile.com, at least up until April 1st,” the publication added. Encountering this…

Apple CEO Tim Cook has spoken at length about his views on augmented reality and its associated hardware in a new cover feature for GQ magazine. And it represents a relative reversal of sentiment towards the product category for the Apple boss.The headlining subject of GQ’s Global Creativity Awards 2023 cover feature (opens in new tab), Cook discussed why Apple could eventually be interested in working on an augmented reality device.“If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side…

Elon Musk on Friday defended his controversial pay model for Twitter, claiming that any social media platform that didn't follow suit would fail because they would be swarmed by bots.Musk made his prediction on the eve of Twitter's April 1 ultimatum that verified accounts with the cherished blue tick that had not forked over cash would lose it. "The fundamental challenge here is that it's (easy) to create literally 10,000 or 100,000 fake Twitter accounts using just one computer at home and with modern AI (artificial…

Elon Musk on Friday defended his controversial pay model for Twitter, claiming that any social media platform that didn't follow suit would fail because they would be swarmed by bots.Musk made his prediction on the eve of Twitter's April 1 ultimatum that verified accounts with the cherished blue tick that had not forked over cash would lose it."The fundamental challenge here is that it's (easy) to create literally 10,000 or 100,000 fake Twitter accounts using just one computer at home and with modern AI (artificial…

A terrifying X-class solar flare has erupted on the Sun in the early hours today, March 29. The solar flare eruption occurred on the Earth-facing sunspot AR3256 and has caused strong shortwave radio blackouts in large regions of Australia, southeast Asia and New Zealand. This came after it was reported yesterday that as many as 9 sunspot groups have appeared on the Earth-facing side of the Sun. Forecasters had claimed that the sunspots seemed to be stable, but one of them unexpectedly exploded.The incident was reported…

Superstar Pride was in his bed at 2 a.m. one morning, writing the words to what would become the Mississippi rapper’s breakthrough hit, “Painting Pictures.” He knew it was special by the time it left his pen, and quickly uploaded it to YouTube and Audiomack to watch the song spread.He was happy with its initial surge, but it wasn’t until he uploaded the track universally through United Masters that he was able to start posting it on the short-form video app TikTok, which raised its reach exponentially.“TikTok was the…