A Linux Foundation subsidiary has developed a free and open-source 3D game engine distributed under the Apache license. And last week the Open 3D Foundation announced "a big step forward, showcasing the power of open-source technologies in giving gamers around the globe unforgettable gaming experiences."

"We are proud to unveil MadWorld as the first mobile title powered by O3DE," said Joe Bryant, Executive Director of the Open 3D Foundation, "demonstrating the large potential of open-source technologies in game development."

And then this week Los Angeles Business Journal reported that El Segundo-based gaming studio Carbonated Inc. "has raised $11 million of series A funding to finance the development and release of its debut game title... Prior to its most recent round, Carbonated closed an $8.5 million seed funding round in 2020, which also included participation from Andreessen and Bitkraft." Since its founding [in 2015], the company has been focusing on research and development for its upcoming first title, called "MadWorld." The third-person, multiplayer shooter game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features both player-versus-player and player-versus-environment features. Players of the game will battle for land control in a dystopian setting. Using a combination of open-source mapping tools and Carbonated's proprietary custom operations technology, called Carbyne, the game's world is designed around real-life cities and locations. Players are initially dropped into the game's version of their own real-time location.

The game allows players to optionally engage using blockchain technology with a digital asset-ownership layer powered by a blockchain network called XPLA.
Earlier this month Madworld "opened up for Early Access registration," reports the egamers web site, arguing that the game "is set to redefine the gaming landscape and will make its public debut later this year." After a catastrophic event named "The Collapse," MadWorld takes place in a desolate Earth where players engage in a battle for survival, highlighting the game's unique setting and immersive experience. The game's world is intricately designed with 250,000 land plots mapped out on a hexagonal grid, each presenting unique resources and strategic benefits. This innovative approach to game design enhances the gameplay experience and introduces a new layer of strategy and competition.

MadWorld's gameplay is centered around integrating Web3 technologies, which allows for the ownership, enhancement, and trading of tokenized representations of real-world locations. This feature encourages players to create clans and work together or compete for essential resources that are spread across the vast game world. Clans can acquire these resources by paying tributes to NFT landowners using "Rounds," the in-game currency. This mechanism not only fosters a sense of community and teamwork but also creates unique economic opportunities within the game by blending traditional gaming elements with the emerging field of digital assets.
"With its use of O3DE, Carbonated can enhance the game's visual fidelity, performance, and scalability," according to the Linux Foundation's announcement, "in order to deliver a fast-paced adventure on mobile platforms." O3DE is an open-source game engine developed by a collaborative community of industry experts. It includes state-of-the-art rendering capabilities, dynamic lighting, and realistic physics simulation. These features have enabled Carbonated to build realistic dystopian environments and create action-packed gameplay in MadWorld.
According to its official site, MadWorld "is set to be released to the public sometime in 2024 and is currently being tested on iOS and Android operating systems."

Carbonated's CEO Travis Boatman made this prediction to the site Decrypt. "We think mobile is where the breakout will happen for Web3."

In November of 2021 America passed a "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law" which included $7.5 billion for up to 20,000 EV charging spots, or around 5,000 stations, notes the Washington Post (citing an analysis from the EV policy analyst group Atlas Public Policy).

And new stations are now already open in Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, "and under construction in four other states. Twelve additional states have awarded contracts for constructing the charging stations." A White House spokesperson said America should reach its goal of 500,000 charging stations by 2026.

So why is it that right now — more than two years after the bill's passage — why does the Federal Highway System say the program has so far only delivered seven open charging stations with a total of 38 charging spots? Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, said that some of the delays are to be expected. "State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money," he said. "Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted." Nigro says that the process — states have to submit plans to the Biden administration for approval, solicit bids on the work, and then award funds — has taken much of the first two years since the funding was approved. "I expect it to go much faster in 2024," he added.

"We are building a national EV charging network from scratch, and we want to get it right," a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration said in an email. "After developing program guidance and partnering with states to guide implementation plans, we are hitting our stride as states move quickly to bring National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure stations online...."

Part of the slow rollout is that the new chargers are expected to be held to much higher standards than previous generations of fast chargers. The United States currently has close to 10,000 "fast" charging stations in the country, of which over 2,000 are Tesla Superchargers, according to the Department of Energy. Tesla Superchargers — some of which have been opened to drivers of other vehicles — are the most reliable fast-charging systems in the country. But many non-Tesla fast chargers have a reputation for poor performance and sketchy reliability. EV advocates have criticized Electrify America, the company created by Volkswagen after the company's "Dieselgate" emissions scandal, for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on chargers that don't work well. The company has said they are working to improve reliability. The data analytics company J.D. Power has estimated that only 80 percent of all charging attempts in the country are successful.

Biden administration guidance requires the new publicly funded chargers to be operational 97% of the time, provide 150kW of power at each charger, and be no more than one mile from the interstate, among many other requirements.EV policy experts say those requirements are critical to building a good nationwide charging program — but also slow down the build-out of the chargers. "This funding comes with dozens of rules and requirements," Laska said. "That is the nature of what we're trying to accomplish....

"States are just not operating with the same urgency that some of the rest of us are."
The article notes that private companies are also building charging stations — but the publicly-funded spots would increase America's car-charging capacity by around 50 percent, "a crucial step to alleviating 'range anxiety' and helping Americans shift into battery electric cars.

"States just have to build them first."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NYC's "MyCity" ChatBot was rolled out as a "pilot" program last October. The announcement touted the ChatBot as a way for business owners to "save ... time and money by instantly providing them with actionable and trusted information from more than 2,000 NYC Business web pages and articles on topics such as compliance with codes and regulations, available business incentives, and best practices to avoid violations and fines." But a new report from The Markup and local nonprofit news site The City found the MyCity chatbot giving dangerously wrong information about some pretty basic city policies. To cite just one example, the bot said that NYC buildings "are not required to accept Section 8 vouchers," when an NYC government info page says clearly that Section 8 housing subsidies are one of many lawful sources of income that landlords are required to accept without discrimination. The Markup also received incorrect information in response to chatbot queries regarding worker pay and work hour regulations, as well as industry-specific information like funeral home pricing. Further testing from BlueSky user Kathryn Tewson shows the MyCity chatbot giving some dangerously wrong answers regarding treatment of workplace whistleblowers, as well as some hilariously bad answers regarding the need to pay rent.

MyCity's Microsoft Azure-powered chatbot uses a complex process of statistical associations across millions of tokens to essentially guess at the most likely next word in any given sequence, without any real understanding of the underlying information being conveyed. That can cause problems when a single factual answer to a question might not be reflected precisely in the training data. In fact, The Markup said that at least one of its tests resulted in the correct answer on the same query about accepting Section 8 housing vouchers (even as "ten separate Markup staffers" got the incorrect answer when repeating the same question). The MyCity Chatbot -- which is prominently labeled as a "Beta" product -- does tell users who bother to read the warnings that it "may occasionally produce incorrect, harmful or biased content" and that users should "not rely on its responses as a substitute for professional advice." But the page also states front and center that it is "trained to provide you official NYC Business information" and is being sold as a way "to help business owners navigate government." NYC Office of Technology and Innovation Spokesperson Leslie Brown told The Markup that the bot "has already provided thousands of people with timely, accurate answers" and that "we will continue to focus on upgrading this tool so that we can better support small businesses across the city."

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. and U.K. are investigating more than $20 billion worth of USDT transactions that have passed through Garantex, a Russia-based crypto exchange. Milk Road reports: If confirmed, the $20 billion in transactions would represent one of the most significant breaches of the sanctions imposed on Russia since the conflict began. However, the sources cautioned that the inquiries are ongoing and that it is too early to draw conclusions given the complexity of crypto transactions. They also noted that there was no immediate suggestion of wrongdoing by Tether.

Key points:

- The transactions under scrutiny were conducted using Tether (USDT).
- The US and UK sanctioned Garantex on suspicion of facilitating financial crimes and illicit transactions in Russia.
- The $20 billion USDT transactions would represent one of the biggest breaches of sanctions imposed on Russia since the start of the war.
- Tether froze assets of entities on the U.S. sanctions list.

Crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years [non-paywalled link] in prison for a massive fraud that unraveled with the collapse of FTX, once one of the world's most popular platforms for exchanging digital currency. From a report: Bankman-Fried, 32, was convicted in November of fraud and conspiracy -- a dramatic fall from a crest of success. U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan imposed the sentence in the same Manhattan courtroom where, four months ago, Bankman-Fried testified that his intention had been to revolutionize the emerging cryptocurrency market with his innovative and altruistic ideas, not to steal.

Kaplan said the sentence reflected "that there is a risk that this man will be in position to do something very bad in the future. And it's not a trivial risk at all." He added that it was "for the purpose of disabling him to the extent that can appropriately be done for a significant period of time." Prior to sentencing, Bankman-Fried had said, "My useful life is probably over. It's been over for a while now, from before my arrest."

Poland has fined Amazon close to $8 million for misleading consumers about the conclusion of sales contracts on its online marketplace. The sanction "also calls out the e-commerce giant for deceptive design elements which may inject a false sense of urgency into the purchasing process and mislead shoppers about elements like product availability and delivery dates," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The country's consumer and competition watchdog, the UOKiK, has been looking into complaints about Amazon's sales practices since September 2021, following complaints from shoppers, including some who did not receive their purchases. The authority opened a formal investigation into Amazon's practices in February 2023. Wednesday's sanction is the conclusion of that probe. The UOKiK found consumers who ordered products on Amazon could have their purchases subsequently cancelled by the tech giant as it does not treat the moment of purchase as the conclusion of a sales contract, despite sending consumers confirmation of their order -- even after consumers have paid for the product. For Amazon, the conclusion of a sales contract only occurs once it has sent information about the actual shipment. [...]

Its enforcement also calls out Amazon for using deceptive design to encourage shoppers to click buy by presenting misleading information about product availability and delivery windows -- such as by listing how many items were in stock to be purchased and providing a countdown clock to order an item in order to get it on a particular delivery date. Its investigation found Amazon does not always meet these deadlines for orders, nor ship products immediately as they may be out of stock despite claims to the contrary shown to consumers. "Amazon treats the data it provides on availability and shipping date as indicative but the way it is presented does not indicate this," the UOKiK noted, adding: "Consumers can only find out about this in the terms of sale on the platform."

While Amazon does offer a delivery guarantee -- offering a refund if items do not ship within the stated time -- the authority found it failed to provide consumers with information about the rules of this service before placing an order. It only offers details at the order summary stage. And then only "if the consumer decides to read the subsequent links specifying delivery details." Shoppers who did not follow the link to read more may not have been aware of their right to apply for and receive a refund from Amazon if there is a delay in shipment. It also found the e-commerce giant failed to provide information about the "Delivery Guarantee" in the purchase confirmation sent to shoppers. Amazon said it will appeal the fine. The company also writes: "Fast and reliable delivery across a wide selection of products is a top priority for us, and Amazon.pl has millions of items available with fast and free Prime delivery. Since launching Amazon.pl in 2021, we have continuously invested and worked hard to provide customers with a clear, reliable delivery promise at check out, and while the vast majority of our deliveries arrive on time, customers can contact us in the rare event that they experience a delay or order cancellation, and we will make it right.

Over the last year, we have collaborated with the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK), and proposed multiple voluntary amendments to continue to improve the customer experience on Amazon.pl. We strictly follow legal standards in all countries where we operate and we strongly disagree with the assessment and penalty issued by the UOKiK. We will appeal this decision."

Two of the world's largest credit card networks, Visa and Mastercard, as well as the banks that issue cards with them, have agreed to settle a decadeslong antitrust case brought upon by merchants. From a report: The settlement is set to lower swipe fees merchants pay when customers make purchases using their Visa or Mastercard by $30 billion over five years, according to a press release announcing the settlement Tuesday morning. The settlement, which only applies to US merchants, is the result of a lawsuit filed in 2005. However, nothing is considered finalized until it receives approval from the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Even then, the case can also be appealed in what could be a lengthy battle.

Typically, swipe fees cost merchants 2% of the total transaction a customer makes -- but can be as much as 4% for some premium rewards cards, according to the National Retail Federation. The settlement would lower those fees by at least 0.04 percentage point for a minimum of three years. Additionally, the settlement would require Visa and Mastercard to maintain the swipe fee rates that existed as of December 31, 2023 for five years.

The chief of Emirates, one of Boeing's largest clients, has said the crisis-stricken US aircraft maker should ensure its new chief executive has engineering experience to restore safety standards (non-paywalled link). From a report: A day after Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun announced he would step down, Sir Tim Clark also said he backed efforts by the US group's largest labour union to win a seat on the board. "To fix Boeing's issues the company needs a strong engineering lead as its head coupled to a governance model which prioritises safety and quality," Clark told the Financial Times on Tuesday.

"Some serious lateral thinking" was needed, the airline boss added. Boeing on Monday unveiled a wide-ranging reshuffle of its leadership in a bid to get to grips with an escalating reputational crisis after a 737 Max door panel blew off mid-flight in January. Calhoun, 66, is to leave at the end of the year, while board chair Larry Kellner said he would depart in May. Stan Deal, head of the commercial planes division since 2019, was immediately replaced by chief operating officer Stephanie Pope.

People bought 43 million vinyl records last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). From a report: That's 6 million more than the number of CDs sold in 2023, marking the second time since 1987 that's happened and reflecting the steady 17-year-running growth of vinyl sales. Vinyl, which tends to be pricier than the newer format, also far outstripped CDs in actual money made, raking in $1.4 billion compared to $537 million from CDs. The RIAA's report shows that CD revenue was up, too, but in terms of physical products sold, people actually bought about 700,000 fewer CDs in 2023 than the year before. (If you're curious, nearly half a million cassettes sold last year, too, according to Billboard.)

The Register: Cloudflare has revealed a little about how it maintains the millions of boxes it operates around the world -- including the concept of an "error budget" that enacts "empathy embedded in automation." In a Tuesday post titled "Autonomous hardware diagnostics and recovery at scale," the internet-taming biz explains that it built fault-tolerant infrastructure that can continue operating with "little to no impact" on its services. But as explained by infrastructure engineering tech lead Jet Marsical and systems engineers Aakash Shah and Yilin Xiong, when servers did break the Data Center Operations team relied on manual processes to identify dead boxes. And those processes could take "hours for a single server alone, and [could] easily consume an engineer's entire day."

Which does not work at hyperscale. Worse, dead servers would sometimes remain powered on, costing Cloudflare money without producing anything of value. Enter Phoenix -- a tool Cloudflare created to detect broken servers and automatically initiate workflows to get them fixed. Phoenix makes a "discovery run" every thirty minutes, during which it probes up to two datacenters known to house broken boxen. That pace of discovery means Phoenix can find dead machines across Cloudflare's network in no more than three days. If it spots machines already listed for repairs, it "takes care of ensuring that the Recovery phase is executed immediately."

A top executive from the crypto exchange Binance has escaped custody in Nigeria after being arrested for allegedly destabilizing the country's national currency. The Associated Press reports: Nadeem Anjarwalla, the regional manager for Binance in Africa, "fled Nigeria using a smuggled passport," the office of Nigeria's National Security Adviser said in a statement, calling for "whatever information that can assist law enforcement agencies to apprehend the suspect." Anjarwalla, who holds dual British and Kenyan citizenship, had been detained in Nigeria along with another colleague since Feb. 26 when they arrived in the country following a crackdown on the crypto platform. Tigran Gambaryan, the colleague who is an American citizen, remains in captivity.

Nigeria is Africa's largest crypto economy in terms of trade volume with many citizens using crypto to hedge their finances against surging inflation and the declining local currency. Binance stopped all trading with the Nigerian naira currency on its platform in early March after authorities accused it of being used for money laundering and terrorism financing -- without providing evidence publicly. It was not clear how Anjarwalla fled custody. The Abuja-based Premium Times newspaper, which broke the news of his escape, reported that he fled from a guest house in the capital city after guards led him to a nearby mosque for prayers. "The personnel responsible for the custody of the suspect have been arrested, and a thorough investigation is ongoing to unravel the circumstances that led to his escape from lawful detention," Zakari Mijinyawa, spokesman for the office of Nigeria's National Security Adviser said in a statement.

In a state where housing is expensive to build, to rent, or to buy — and not especially energy efficient — can a big blue robot make a difference?

The Boston Globe reports on Reframe Systems, one of the companies "trying robots to make construction more efficient" — in this case, "working alongside humans in an assembly line to build small houses in a factory." [Its cofounders] learned to get robots and humans to work together while at Amazon, which has built more than 750,000 bots in Massachusetts and deployed them to distribution centers around the world. Advising the company are Amy Villeneuve, former chief operating officer of that Amazon division, and Charly Mwangi, a veteran of the carmakers Nissan, Tesla, and Rivian...

Standing at one end of Reframe's factory, [cofounder Aaron] Small explained that the company's ambition is to build net-zero houses — houses that produce as much energy as they use — "twice as fast as traditional methods, twice as cheap, and with 10 times lower carbon" emissions. That means using large screws called helical piles to fix the house to the site, instead of a concrete foundation. (Concrete production generates large amounts of carbon dioxide.) The company buys recycled cellulose insulation to fill the walls. Solar panels go on the roof and triple-paned windows in the walls...

Reframe's "microfactory" can produce between 30 and 50 homes a year, [cofunder Vikas] Enti said. Eventually, the company aims to set up larger factories around the country, all within an hour's drive of big cities.
After a home is trucked to its final destination, "Electrical wires and plumbing are installed in both floors and walls as they're built," according to the article.

"Employees toting iPads can refer to digital construction drawings and get step-by-step instructions about tasks from cutting lumber to connecting pipes." One of the co-founders says, "We like to compare it to Lego instructions."

The Baffler says a new publishing house launched earlier this month "brings Silicon Valley-style startup disruption to the business of books."

Authors Equity has "a tiny core staff, offloading its labor to a network of freelancers," and like a handful of other publishers "is upending the way that authors get paid, eschewing advances and offering a higher percentage of profits instead." It is worth watching because its team includes several of the most important publishing people of the twenty-first century. And if it works, it will offer a model for tightening the connection between book culture and capitalism, a leap forward for the forces of efficiency and the fantasies of frictionless markets, ushering in a world where literature succeeds if and only if it sells....

Authors Equity's website presents its vision in strikingly neoliberal corporatespeak. The company has four Core Principles: Aligned Incentives; Bespoke Teams; Flexibility and Transparency; and Long-Term Collaboration. What do they mean by these MBA keywords? Aligned Incentives is explained in the language of human capital: "Our profit-share model rewards authors who want to bet on themselves." Authors, that is, take on more of the financial risk of publication. At a traditional publishing house, advances provide authors with guaranteed cash early in the process that they can use to live off while writing. With Authors Equity, nothing is guaranteed and nothing given ahead of time; an author's pay depends on their book's profits.

In an added twist, "Profit participation is also an option for key members of the book team, so we're in a position to win together." Typically, only an author's agent's income is directly tied to an author's financial success, but at Authors Equity, others could have a stake. This has huge consequences for the logic of literary production. If an editor, for example, receives a salary and not a cut of their books' profits, their incentives are less immediately about profit, offering more wiggle room for aesthetic value. The more the people working on books participate in their profits, the more, structurally, profit-seeking will shape what books look like.

"Bespoke Teams" is a euphemism for gigification. With a tiny initial staff of six, Authors Equity uses freelance workers to make books, unlike traditional publishers, which have many employees in many departments... Their fourth Core Principle — Long-Term Collaboration — addresses widespread frustration with a systemic problem in traditional publishing: the fetishization of debut authors who receive decent or better advances, fail to earn out, and then struggle to have a career. It's a real problem and one where authors' interests and capitalist rationalization are, as it were, aligned. Authors Equity sees that everyone might profit when an author can build a readership and develop their skill.
The article concludes with this prediction. "It's not impossible that we'll look back in twenty years and see its founding as auguring the beginning of the startup age in publishing."

Food for thought... Pulp-fiction mystery writer Mickey Spillane once said, "I'm a writer, not an author. The difference is, a writer makes money."

In an interview Saturday, CNN first asked Steve Wozniak about Apple's "walled garden" approach — and whether there's any disconnect between Apple's stated interest in user security and privacy, and its own self-interest?

Wozniak responded, "I think there are things you can say on all sides of it. "I'm kind of glad for the protection that I have for my privacy and for you know not getting hacked as much. Apple does a better job than the others.

And tracking you — tracking you is questionable, but my gosh, look at what we're accusing TikTok of, and then go look at Facebook and Google... That's how they make their business! I mean, Facebook was a great idea. But then they make all their money just by tracking you and advertising.

And Apple doesn't really do that as much. I consider Apple the good guy.
So then CNN directly asked Wozniak's opinion about the proposed ban on TikTok in the U.S. "Well, one, I don't understand it. I don't see why. I mean, I get a lot of entertainment out of TikTok — and I avoid the social web. But I love to watch TikTok, even if it's just for rescuing dog videos and stuff.

And so I'm thinking, well, what are we saying? We're saying 'Oh, you might be tracked by the Chinese'. Well, they learned it from us.

I mean, look, if you have a principle — a person should not be tracked without them knowing it? It's kind of a privacy principle — I was a founder of the EFF. And if you have that principle, you apply it the same to every company, or every country. You don't say, 'Here's one case where we're going to outlaw an app, but we're not going to do it in these other cases.'

So I don't like the hypocrisy. And that's always obviously common from a political realm.

"Hollywood is bracing for another actors strike, this time against the videogame industry," according to MarketWatch: "We're currently in bargaining with all the major game studios, and the major sticking point is AI," SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said Thursday. "Actors at all levels are at risk of digital replication. We have strike authorization on that contract and it is, at this point — we could end up going on strike...."

The union, which navigated its way to a new film and TV contract after a 118-day strike against the Hollywood studios last year, is again focusing on regulating artificial intelligence and its impact on wages and jobs. "It will be a recurring issue with each successive contract" every three years, Crabtree-Ireland said.
Some studios are already using AI-generated voices to save money, the article points out. "Actors and actresses should be very much afraid," Chris Mattmann, an adjunct research professor at the University of Southern California's Computer Science Department, says in the article. "Within three seconds, gen AI can effectively clone a voice."

The strike could affect Microsoft's Activision Publishing and Disney, as well as other major game publishers including Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Warner Bros.

There's actually "a global trend toward increased air safety," notes a Wall Street Journal columnist.

And even in the case of the two fatal Boeing crashes five years ago, he stresses that they were "were two different crashes," with the second happening only "after Boeing and the FAA issued emergency directives instructing pilots how to compensate for Boeing's poorly designed flight control software.

"The story should have ended after the first crash except the second set of pilots behaved in unexpected, unpredictable ways, flying a flyable Ethiopian Airlines jet into the ground." Boeing is guilty of designing a fallible system and placing an undue burden on pilots. The evidence strongly suggests, however, that the Ethiopian crew was never required to master the simple remedy despite the global furor occasioned by the first crash. To boot, they committed an additional error by overspeeding the aircraft in defiance of aural, visual and stick-shaker warnings against doing so. It got almost no coverage, but on the same day the Ethiopian government issued its final findings on the accident in late 2022, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, in what it called an "unusual step," issued its own "comment" rebuking the Ethiopian report for "inaccurate" statements, for ignoring the crew's role, for ignoring how readily the accident should have been avoided.
So the Wall Street Journal columnist challenges whether profit incentives played any role in Boeing's troubles: In reality, the global industry was reorganized largely along competitive profit-and-loss lines after the 1970s, and yet this coincided with enormous increases in safety, notwithstanding the sausage factory elements occasionally on display (witness the little-reported parking of hundreds of Airbus planes over a faulty new engine).

The point here isn't blame but to note that 100,000 repetitions likely wouldn't reproduce the flukish second MAX crash and everything that followed from it. Rather than surfacing Boeing's deeply hidden problems, it seems the second crash gave birth to them. The subsequent 20-month grounding and production shutdown, combined with Covid, cost Boeing thousands of skilled workers. The pressure of its duopoly competition with Airbus plus customers clamoring for their backordered planes made management unwisely desperate to restart production. January's nonfatal door-plug blowout of an Alaska Airlines 737 appears to have been a one-off when Boeing workers failed to reinstall the plug properly after removing it to fix faulty fuselage rivets. Not a one-off, apparently, are faulty rivets as Boeing has strained to hire new staff and resume production of half-finished planes.

Boeing will sort out its troubles eventually by applying the oldest of manufacturing insights: Training, repetition, standardization and careful documentation are the way to error-free complex manufacturing.
As he sees it, "The second MAX crash caught Boeing up in a disorienting global media and political storm that it didn't know how to handle and, indeed, has handled fairly badly."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: UnitedHealth Group said Monday that it's paid out more than $2 billion to help health-care providers who have been affected by the cyberattack on subsidiary Change Healthcare. "We continue to make significant progress in restoring the services impacted by this cyberattack," UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty said in a press release. "We know this has been an enormous challenge for health care providers and we encourage any in need to contact us."

UnitedHealth disclosed nearly a month ago that a cyber threat actor breached part of Change Healthcare's information technology network. The fallout has wreaked havoc across the U.S. health-care system. Change Healthcare offers e-prescription software and tools for payment management, so the interruptions left many providers temporarily unable to fill medications or get reimbursed for their services by insurers. UnitedHealth, which provides care for 152 million people, said on Monday that it began releasing medical claims preparation software, which will be available to thousands of customers in the next several days. The company called it "an important step in the resumption of services."

On Friday, UnitedHealth said it restored Change Healthcare's electronic payments platform, after rebooting 99% of its pharmacy network services earlier this month. It also introduced a temporary funding assistance program to help health-care providers experiencing cash flow trouble because of the attack. UnitedHealth said the advances will not need to be repaid until claims flows return to normal. Federal agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have introduced additional options to ensure that states and other stakeholders can make interim payments to providers, according to a release.

theodp writes: "Last year," Ian Bogost writes in Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem, "18 percent of Stanford University seniors graduated with a degree in computer science, more than double the proportion of just a decade earlier. Over the same period at MIT, that rate went up from 23 percent to 42 percent. These increases are common everywhere: The average number of undergraduate CS majors at universities in the U.S. and Canada tripled in the decade after 2005, and it keeps growing. Students' interest in CS is intellectual -- culture moves through computation these days -- but it is also professional. Young people hope to access the wealth, power, and influence of the technology sector. That ambition has created both enormous administrative strain and a competition for prestige."

"Another approach has gained in popularity," Bogost notes. "Universities are consolidating the formal study of CS into a new administrative structure: the college of computing. [...] When they elevate computing to the status of a college, with departments and a budget, they are declaring it a higher-order domain of knowledge and practice, akin to law or engineering. That decision will inform a fundamental question: whether computing ought to be seen as a superfield that lords over all others, or just a servant of other domains, subordinated to their interests and control. This is, by no happenstance, also the basic question about computing in our society writ large."

Bogost concludes: "I used to think computing education might be stuck in a nesting-doll version of the engineer's fallacy, in which CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.

mrspoonsi shares a report from the BBC: A former takeaway worker found with Bitcoin worth more than $2.5 billion has been convicted at Southwark Crown Court of a crime linked to money laundering. Jian Wen, 42, from Hendon in north London, was involved in converting the currency into assets including multi-million-pound houses and jewelry. On Monday she was convicted of entering into or becoming concerned in a money laundering arrangement. The Met said the seizure is the largest of its kind in the UK.

Although Wen was living in a flat above a Chinese restaurant in Leeds when she became involved in the criminal activity, her new lifestyle saw her move into a six-bedroom house in north London in 2017 which was rented for more than $21,000 per month. She posed as an employee of an international jewelry business and moved her son to the UK to attend private school, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said. That same year, Wen tried to buy a string of expensive houses in London, but struggled to pass money-laundering checks and her claims she had earned millions legitimately mining Bitcoin were not believed. She later travelled abroad, buying jewelry worth tens of thousands of pounds in Zurich, and purchasing properties in Dubai in 2019.

Another suspect is thought to be behind the fraud but they remain at large. The Met said it carried out a large scale investigation as part of the case - searching several addresses, reviewing 48 electronic devices, and examining thousands of digital files including many which were translated from Mandarin. The CPS has obtained a freezing order from the High Court, while it carries out a civil recovery investigation that could lead to the forfeiture of the Bitcoin. The value of the Bitcoin was worth around $2.5 billion at the time of initial estimates -- but due to the fluctuation in the currency's value, it has since increased to around $4.3 billion.

The abstract of a new paper published on Journal of Financial Economics: We study aggregate lapsation risk in the life insurance sector. We construct two lapsation risk factors that explain a large fraction of the common variation in lapse rates of the 30 largest life insurance companies. The first is a cyclical factor that is positively correlated with credit spreads and unemployment, while the second factor is a trend factor that correlates with the level of interest rates. Using a novel policy-level database from a large life insurer, we examine the heterogeneity in risk factor exposures based on policy and policyholder characteristics.

Young policyholders with higher health risk in low-income areas are more likely to lapse their policies during economic downturns. We explore the implications for hedging and valuation of life insurance contracts. Ignoring aggregate lapsation risk results in mispricing of life insurance policies. The calibrated model points to overpricing on average. In the cross-section, young, low-income, and high-health risk households face higher effective mark-ups than the old, high-income, and healthy.