Monday, February 14, 2022

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VR-related claims increased by 31 percent in 2021, says UK insurance firm

Posted: 13 Feb 2022 01:57 PM PST

Meta's Reality Labs VR division has yet to disclose how many Quest 2 headsets it has sold to date. What we do know is that it recently became more popular than ever. On Christmas Day 2021, the Oculus app hit the top of Apple's App Store charts for the first time. The software achieved that milestone thanks to everyone who bought a Quest 2 headset to gift to their friends and loved ones.

In another more amusing sign of just how popular VR headsets are becoming, insurer Aviva said last year it saw a 31 percent increase in home contents claims involving VR headsets and a 68 percent overall increase since 2016. In 2021, the average claim for VR-related accidental damages was about £650 or $880, and most incidents involved cracked TVs screens.

"As new games and gadgets become popular, we often see this playing through in the claims made by our customers," Kelly Whittington, Aviva's UK property claims director, told The Guardian. "In the past, we've seen similar trends involving consoles with handsets, fitness games and even the likes of rogue fidget spinners."

Less than a month and a half into 2022, Aviva has already had to process a number of VR-related claims and the company expects more to come in throughout the year. That still doesn't tell us how many VR headsets are out there. As far as the Quest 2 is concerned, the closest we have to a solid number is a third-party estimate Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon shared in November 2021. At the time, he said Meta had shipped approximately 10 million units of its latest VR headset. 

Don't blame SpaceX for that rocket on a collision course with the Moon

Posted: 13 Feb 2022 11:57 AM PST

This past January, astronomer Bill Gray said that the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket would collide with the Moon sometime in early March. As you might expect, the prediction set off a flurry of media coverage, much of it critical of Elon Musk and his private space firm. After all, the event would be a rare misstep for SpaceX.

But it turns out Elon and company are not about to lose face. Instead, it's more likely that fate will befall China. That's because Gray now says he made a mistake in his initial identification of a piece of space debris he and other astronomers dubbed WE0913A in 2015.

When Gray and his colleagues first spotted the object, several clues led them to believe it was the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket that carried the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's DSCOVR satellite into deep orbit that same year. The object's identification would have probably gone unreported in mainstream media if astronomers didn't subsequently discover it was about to collide with the Moon.

"Back in 2015, I (mis)identified this object as 2015-007B, the second stage of the DSCOVR spacecraft," Gray said in a blog post he published on Saturday that was spotted Ars Technica. "I had pretty good circumstantial evidence for the identification, but nothing conclusive," Gray added. "That was not at all unusual. Identifications of high-flying space junk often require a bit of detective work, and sometimes, we never do figure out the ID for a bit of space junk."

We may have never known the actual identity of the debris if not for NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer Jon Giorgini. He contacted Gray on Saturday to ask about the identification. According to Giorgini, NASA's Horizons system, a database that can estimate the location and orbit of almost half a million celestial bodies in our solar system, showed that the DSCOVR spacecraft's trajectory didn't take it close to the Moon. As such, it would be unusual if its second stage were to stray off course then and hit the satellite. Giorgini's email prompted Gray to reexamine the data he used to make the initial identification.

Gray now says he's reasonably certain the rocket that's about to collide with the moon belongs to China. In October 2014, the country's space agency launched its Chang'e 5-T1 mission on a Long March 3C rocket. After reconstructing the probable trajectory of that mission, he found that the Long March 3C is the best fit for the mystery object that's about to hit Earth's natural satellite. "Running the orbit back to launch for the Chinese spacecraft makes ample sense," he told The Verge. "It winds up with an orbit that goes past the Moon at the right time after launch."

Gray went on to tell The Verge that episodes like this underline the need for more information on rockets boosters that travel into deep space. "The only folks that I know of who pay attention to these old rocket boosters are the asteroid tracking community," he told the outlet. "This sort of thing would be considerably easier if the folks who launch spacecraft — if there was some regulatory environment where they had to report something."

Valve releases Steam Deck CAD files allowing anyone to 3D-print custom shells

Posted: 13 Feb 2022 09:59 AM PST

With two weeks to go before its February 25th release date, Valve has published CAD files for Steam Deck's exterior shell to GitHub. Making them available under a Creative Commons license, the company noted the release is "good news" for DIY enthusiasts, modders and most notably, accessory manufacturers. All three groups can use the provided technical drawings and schematics to 3D-print custom shells for the handheld.

As Eurogamer notes, Valve's decision here is an interesting one. It suggests the company will allow case makers to freely make aftermarket shells for Steam Deck. In fact, Valve said it was "looking forward to seeing what the community creates!" Contrast that to the approach Sony has taken with the PlayStation 5. When Sony's latest console first shipped and only came in one color, an entire cottage industry of companies sprang up to produce colored plates for the PS5. However, Sony quickly moved to shut down those projects before it went on to announce a set of first-party covers for people to purchase.

Advocacy group sues Nigerian government over failure to publish Twitter agreement

Posted: 13 Feb 2022 08:52 AM PST

A legal rights group has sued Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari to force his government to publish the agreement that allowed Twitter to return to the West African country last month following a seven-month ban. In June 2021, Nigeria suspended Twitter after the company removed a tweet from President Buhari that threatened punishment for local dissidents. At the time, Twitter said it was "deeply concerned" by the country's actions, noting it considered an open internet as "an essential human right in modern society."

On January 13th, Nigeria lifted the ban after the company agreed, among other conditions, to open a local office and work with the government to co-develop a code of conduct. On Sunday, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) filed a lawsuit with the country's High Court to compel President Buhari and Information Minister Lai Mohammed to publish a copy of that agreement.

"Publishing the agreement with Twitter would promote transparency, accountability, and help to mitigate threats to Nigerians' rights online, as well as any interference with online privacy and freedom of expression," SERAP said. "Any agreement with social media companies must meet the constitutional requirements of legality, necessity, proportionality and legitimacy."

SERAP said it had attempted to obtain a copy of the agreement through a freedom of information request. It's suing partly because the government came back with an "unsatisfactory" response to that request. Minister Mohammed allegedly told the group details on the arrangement were already "in the public space," and did not forward a copy of its terms.

We've reached out to Twitter for comment.

As Reuters notes, SERAP was among several groups that went to court to fight Nigeria's ban of Twitter. The Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States is scheduled to decide whether to rule on that case this week.

You can help two lovelorn hamsters reunite with Google's Valentine's Day doodle

Posted: 13 Feb 2022 03:00 AM PST

Google's tradition of dropping little interactive games for holidays and special occasions shows no signs of stopping for Valentine's Day 2022. The doodle for Valentine's Day this year features two hamsters whose love knows no bounds – that is, except for the treacherous maze separating them that is in the shape of Google's logo.

Your mission is to help these two crazy kids reunite by pulling a series of levers and switches until Google's logo is complete. Is this game as difficult as today's Wordle? Not even close. Will it take you roughly 30 seconds to complete, maybe even a minute if you're half-paying attention because you're watching the Super Bowl? Most likely. But the good news is, it's a cute distraction that will get you into the Valentine's Day spirit and is appropriate for kids.

If you want more, be sure to check out Google's other doodle games. There's a particularly fun one involving pizza, Pac-Man, one where you try to draw something before Google's neural network outsmarts you and one where you assist a cat with a magic wand take down some nocturnal spirits. Incredible.

You can play Google's Valentine's Day doodle by visiting its homepage on February 14th, and you can see all of Google's past doodles here.

Correction, 2/13/22 12:30PM ET: This story and its headline originally said that Google's Valentine's Day doodle went live today, February 13th. It won't be available until February 14th. We apologize for the error.

NFT marketplace halts most transactions due to proliferation of fake and plagiarized tokens

Posted: 12 Feb 2022 03:21 PM PST

Cent, the company that last year helped Jack Dorsey auction an NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million, is temporarily halting most transactions to address "rampant" sales of fake and plagiarized tokens. In an interview published on Friday, Cameron Hejazi, the CEO and co-founder of the company, told Reuters Cent stopped allowing users to buy and sell most NFTs on February 6th. It continues to operate its Valuables marketplace, the place where people can purchase non-fungible tokens of tweets, but that's about it.

"There's a spectrum of activity that is happening that basically shouldn't be happening - like, legally" Hejazi told Reuters. He said Cent has tried to ban bad actors but compared the effort to a game of whack-a-mole. "Every time we would ban one, another one would come up, or three more would come up," Hejazi said.

Last month, OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces on the internet, said more than 80 percent of the tokens recently created through its free minting tool involved plagiarized work, fake collections and spam. The admission came after the company had tried to limit the number of NFTs users could mint for free. After reversing the decision, the company said it was working on several solutions to deter bad actors. Before January's announcement, artists and photographers had complained for months that the company hadn't done enough to address the issue of plagiarism.

"I think this is a pretty fundamental problem with Web3," Hejazi told Reuters. In the immediate future, he said Cent may introduce centralized controls to facilitate a reopening of its marketplace. The company could then later explore more decentralized solutions to the problem.

Facebook removed anti-vaccine trucker protest groups run by overseas actors

Posted: 12 Feb 2022 01:59 PM PST

As anti-vaccine groups in the US attempt to stage their own version of Canada's disruptive "Freedom Convoy," foreign content mills have worked to bolster those efforts for their own gains. This week, Facebook parent company Meta told Reuters and NBC News it recently removed several "trucker convoy" groups and pages run by scammers in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Romania and other countries.

The company said many of those groups had recently changed their names to adopt ones that involved terms like "trucker," "freedom," and "convoy" in hopes of taking advantage of the sudden interest in the rallies occurring across the border. Many of those same pages included links to websites that sold pro-Trump and anti-vaccine merchandise. At the same time, most of the accounts that took part in those groups were tied to real people. And so you have a situation where foreign players are trying to monetize radicalized individuals.

"Voicing opposition to government mandates is not against Meta's policies," a Meta spokesperson told the network. "However, we have removed multiple groups and Pages for repeatedly violating our policies prohibiting QAnon content and those run by spammers in different countries around the world."

The company said it would monitor the situation. "We continue to see scammers latch onto any hot-button issue that draws people's attention, including the ongoing protests," a spokesperson for Meta told Engadget. "Over the past week, we've removed groups and pages run by spammers from different countries around the world who used abusive tactics to mislead people about the origin and popularity of their content to drive them to off-platform websites to monetize ad clicks."

In the more than two weeks since the "Freedom Convoy" descended on Ottawa, Ontario, Canada's capital has been paralyzed by anti-vaccine protestors who have used their trucks and cars to block entry into the city's downtown core. The protest has attracted a motley crew of far-right individuals and groups, including Canada's QAnon "Queen." In Toronto and other cities throughout the country, police have warned healthcare workers not to wear their scrubs in public while the rallies continue. Those same protests have also clogged up critical border crossings between the US and Canada, prompting the Biden administration to push the federal government to take action.

According to NBC News, anti-vaccine groups in the US plan to stage similar protests in cities across the country. On Facebook, Telegram and voice chat app Zello, those groups have called on their members to travel to Washington DC and Los Angeles on March 5th. The involvement of foreign actors attempting to bolster those efforts mirrors in some ways what happened in 2016 when Russia meddled with the presidential election.

Lamborghini wants to continue manufacturing gas-powered cars into the 2030s

Posted: 12 Feb 2022 11:34 AM PST

Lamborghini hopes it can continue producing cars with internal combustion engines into the next decade, CEO Stephan Winkelmann told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag this week. "After hybridization, we will wait to see whether it will be possible to offer vehicles with an internal combustion engine beyond 2030," he said in an interview with the outlet. "One possibility would be to keep combustion engine vehicles alive via synthetic fuels."

If Lamborghini actually continues making ICE cars into the 2030s, it would put the Volkswagen-owned automaker at odds with much of the industry. Consider Dodge, for instance. The Stellantis-owned brand plans to debut its first all-electric muscle car in 2024. That same year, it also plans to stop producing some of its most popular gasoline-powered models, including the Challenger and Charger. By contrast, Lamborgini won't offer a fully electric car before the end of the decade.

Practically speaking, even if Lamborghini continues producing ICE cars into the 2030s, it may not be able to sell those vehicles in many places. In the US and other parts of the world, governments have moved to ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars by mid-decade. Countries like Germany have made carveouts for vehicles powered by synthetic fuels, but no company is producing the gasoline alternative at scale yet and may not for many years to come. 

Uncharted’s Nathan Drake heads to ‘Fortnite’ on February 17th

Posted: 12 Feb 2022 09:57 AM PST

Uncharted series protagonist Nathan Drake is about to make his way to Fortnite. Epic Games has yet to formally announce the crossover, but an unlisted video posted to the battle royale's official YouTube channel provides all the critical details. On February 17th, one day before the Uncharted film premieres in US theatres, Nathan Drake and Chloe Frazer outfits will debut in Fortnite's Item Shop.

Those skins will allow you to play as either the film versions of those characters or their Uncharted 4: A Thief's End counterparts. As usual, Epic will also sell a variety of items you can use to customize your character. For those keeping track, that means Tom Holland is about to make a second appearance in Fortnite after Epic added skins from Spider-Man: No Way Home last year.

Apple reportedly increases pay for many US retail employees

Posted: 12 Feb 2022 08:50 AM PST

Apple is reportedly handing out raises to many of its retail employees in the US. According to Bloomberg, the company has increased the pay of some of its retail workers, including sales staff, Genius Bar support personnel and senior hourly workers, by as much as 10 percent. The exact number depends on the store where each employee works and their specific role. According to the outlet, the hikes don't apply to all employees, and some have only seen their compensation increase by about two percent.

The pay hikes come in the same week Apple reportedly expanded benefits for all of its US retail employees. Per Bloomberg, the company will offer both full-time and part-time staff at all of its 270 stores nationwide increased sick days, paid parental leave and more starting April 4th. The moves are a response to a tight labor market. Like many other businesses, Apple has struggled to recruit and retain hourly workers during the pandemic. Staffing shortages due to COVID-19 exposures and infections have led to multiple store closures in recent months. Retail staff have also complained of poor working conditions that involve low pay and stressful workloads. Over the same time period, Apple has recorded multiple record-breaking fiscal quarters.

Hitting the Books: How crop diversity became a symbol of Mexican national sovereignty

Posted: 12 Feb 2022 08:30 AM PST

Beginning in the 1940s, Mexico's Green Revolution saw the country's agriculture industrialized on a national scale, helping propel a massive, decades-long economic boom in what has become known as the Mexican Miracle. Though the modernization of Mexico's food production helped spur unparalleled market growth, these changes also opened the industry's doors to powerful transnational seed companies, eroding national control over the genetic diversity of its domestic crops and endangering the livelihoods of Mexico's poorest farmers. 

In the excerpt below from her new book Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction, author and Peter Lipton Lecturer in History of Modern Science and Technology at Cambridge University, Helen Anne Curry, examines the country's efforts to maintain its cultural and genetic independence in the face of globalized agribusiness.

Endangered Maize
UC Press

Excerpted from Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction by Helen Anne Curry. Published by University of California Press. Copyright © 2021 by Helen Anne Curry. All rights reserved.

Amid the clatter and hum generated by several hundred delegates and observers to the 1981 Conference of FAO, a member of the Mexican delegation took the floor. Participants from 145 member nations had already reviewed the state of global agricultural production, assessed and commended ongoing FAO programs, agreed on budget appropriations, and wrestled over the wording of numerous conference resolutions. The Mexican representative opened discussion on yet another draft resolution, this one proposing "The Establishment of an International Plant Germplasm Bank." Two interlocked elements lie at the resolution's heart: a collection of duplicate samples of all the world's major seed collections under the control of the United Nations and a legally binding international agreement that recognized "plant genetic resources" as the "patrimony of humanity." Together, the bank and agreement would ensure the "availability, utilization and non-discriminatory benefit to all nations" of plant varieties in storage and in cultivation across the globe.

Today, international treaties are integral to the conservation and use of crop genetic diversity. The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity aims to ensure the sustainable and just use of the world's biodiversity, which includes plant genetic resources. Meanwhile, the 2001 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, also called the Seed Treaty, establishes protocols specific to crop diversity. Although it draws much of its power from the Convention on Biological Diversity, the roots of the Seed Treaty reach further back, to the 1981 resolution of the Mexican delegation and beyond.

Mexico's resolution, like today's Seed Treaty, offered conservation as a principal motivation. It told a story of farmers' varieties displaced by breeders' products, the attrition of genetic diversity, and the looming "extinction of material of incalculable value." Earlier calls for conservation had sketched the same picture. Yet those who prepared and promoted the Mexican proposal mobilized this narrative to different ends. They may well have wanted to protect crop diversity. Far more important, however, was the guarantee of access to this diversity, once conserved. They insisted that a seed bank governed by the United Nations and an international treaty were needed to prevent the "monopolization" of plant genetic materials. This monopolization came in the form of control by national governments, the ultimate decision makers for most existing seed banks. It also resulted from possession by transnational corporations. By exercising intellectual property protections in crop varieties, seed companies could take ownership of these varieties, even if they were derived from seeds sourced abroad. In other words, the survival of a seed sample in a base collection, or its duplicate, did not mean this sample was available to breeders, let alone farmers, in its own place of origin. Binding international agreements were necessary to ensure access.

Mexico's intervention at the 1981 FAO Conference was just one volley in what would later be called the seed wars, a decades-long conflict over the granting of property rights in plant varieties and the physical control of seed banks. Allusions to endangered crop diversity have been mostly rhetorical flourishes in this debate, deployed in defense of other things considered threatened by agricultural change—namely, peoples and governments across Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the later twentieth century. Seed treaties were meant to protect not seeds, but sovereignty.

Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, in the midst of this struggle over seeds, consensus fractured about the loss of crop diversity—or, more specifically, about the meaning of this loss. When experts had gathered at FAO in the 1960s to discuss genetic erosion, most saw this as an inevitable consequence of a beneficial transition. Wherever farmers opted for breeders' lines over their own seeds, the value of these so-called improved lines was confirmed, and agricultural productivity inched forward. In the 1970s genetic erosion featured centrally in a very different narrative. It was offered as evidence of the misguided ideas and practices driving agricultural development, especially the Green Revolution, and of the dangers posed by powerful transnational seed companies. Corporate greed emerged as a new driver of crop diversity loss. The willingness of wealthy countries to sustain this greed through friendly regulations meant both were complicit in undermining the capacities of developing countries to feed themselves. The extinction of farmers' varieties and landraces was no longer an accepted byproduct of agricultural modernization. It was an argument against this development.

This shift pitted scientists committed to saving crop diversity against activists ostensibly interested in the same thing. It brought competing visions of what agriculture could and should be head to head. Invocations of the imminent loss of crop diversity, the one element everyone seemed able to agree on, reached a fever pitch during the seed wars. This rhetorical barrage often obscured on-the-ground realities. While FAO delegates, government officials, NGO activists, and prominent scientists waged a war of words in meeting rooms and magazines, plant breeders and agronomists tended experimental plots, tested genetic combinations, and presented farmers with varieties they hoped would be improvements. In 1970s Mexico some of these researchers were newly resolved to use Mexican seeds and methods to address the needs of the country's poorest farmers. Keeping these individuals, their methods, and their corn collections in view grounds the seed wars in actual seeds. If the Mexican delegation's invocation of crop diversity at FAO in 1981 was a rhetorical flourish in a bid to defend national sovereignty, the concurrent use of crop diversity by some Mexican breeders was a practical strategy for getting Mexican agriculture out from under the thumb of the United States and transnational agribusinesses. On the ground, seeds were not ornaments in oratory but the very stuff of sovereignty.

Inroads for Agribusiness

While scientists in Mexico searched for novel solutions to the country's rural crises, critical assessments of agricultural aid bolstered the case for these alternatives. By the mid-1970s studies by economists, sociologists, and other development experts indicated that the much-vaunted Green Revolution had done more harm than help, thanks especially to the input- and capital-intensive model of farming it espoused.

The first critiques of the Green Revolution followed close on the heels of its initial celebration. In 1973 the Oxford economist Keith Griffin joined a growing chorus when he cataloged the harms introduced with "high-yielding varieties," a phrase used to describe types bred to flourish with synthetic fertilizers. Their introduction had neither increased income per capita nor solved the problems of hunger and malnutrition, according to Griffin. They had produced effects, however: "The new technology... has accelerated the development of a market oriented, capitalist agriculture. It has hastened the demise of subsistence oriented, peasant farming... It has increased the power of landowners, especially the larger ones, and this in turn has been associated with a greater polarization of classes and intensified conflict." In 1973 Griffin thought that the ultimate outcome depended on how governments responded to these changes. Five years later he had come to a final determination. "The story of the green revolution is a story of a revolution that failed," he declared.

Griffin was a researcher on the project "Social and Economic Implications of the Large-Scale Introduction of High-Yielding Varieties of Foodgrain." Carried out under the auspices of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, this project enlisted social scientists to document the uptake of new agricultural technologies — chiefly new crop varieties — and their social and economic effects across Asia and North Africa. Mexico was also included among the project's case studies, since organizers pinpointed it as the historical site of the "first experiments in high-yielding seeds for modernizing nations." An attempt to synthesize a single account from the case studies in the 1970s highlighted the problems arising from the integration of farmers into national and international markets. New varieties, chemical fertilizers, and mechanical equipment demanded that cultivators "become businessmen competent in market operations and small-scale financing and receptive to science-generated information." This was thought to be in marked contrast to their having once been "'artisan' cultivators' who drew on 'tradition and locally valid practices'" to sustain their families. The fact that only a minority of better-off farmers could make such a transition meant that development programs benefited a few at the expense of the many. Drawing on her case study of Mexico, project contributor Cynthia Hewitt de Alcántara extended this observation about market integration into a reflection on the flow of economic resources around, and out of, the country — from laborers to landowners, from farms to industries, from national programs to foreign businesses. The reconfiguration of agriculture as what she labeled a "capitalist enterprise" had not brought more money to the countryside but instead robbed peasants of what little they had.

This apparent contradiction in Mexico's agricultural development invited scrutiny from many besides Hewitt. The preceding three decades had been characterized by steady economic growth, thanks to increased international trade during World War II, government policies that encouraged national industry, and investments in infrastructure and education. This period of the so-called Mexican Miracle had also seen a transition from food dependency — needing to import grain to feed the nation — to self-sufficiency. At this level of abstraction, Mexico's prospects for sustaining adequate food and nutrition looked rosy. When sociologists and economists delved into specifics, however, the miracle revealed itself a mirage. Investments in agriculture had focused on supplying food to urban workers and developing new products for export. State food-aid programs, too, had been oriented to urban labor, with set prices that kept food affordable for consumers in the city but made its cultivation unprofitable for farmers in the countryside. While well-off cultivators in the north of the country benefited from state-funded irrigation programs and guaranteed prices, poor farmers working small plots without access to state grain purchasers found that they could not sustain their families by selling surplus corn. Hewitt estimated that in 1969–70, one-third of the Mexican population experienced calorie deficiency. A 1974 national survey came to similar conclusions, calculating that 18.4 million Mexicans, over a quarter of the population, suffered from malnutrition.

The persistence of poverty in Mexico, in spite of the country's celebrated economic growth, could be traced to the model of development embraced by national leaders since the 1940s. Politicians and policy makers had assumed that subsistence farmers could be made irrelevant, with their surplus labor absorbed into the growing industrial economy. Yet industry had not acted the sponge, with the result that this "irrelevant" segment of the population had grown while continuing to be neglected by the state. The economist David Barkin linked faulty Mexican policies to a more fundamental problem of emulating the market capitalism of its northern neighbor. The apparently flourishing Mexican economy had invited the interest of foreign investors, in particular US corporations. Despite protectionist policies, these companies had moved in, and national industries had been sold off, leaving Mexicans vulnerable to the whims of private capital.

Agriculture offered a prime example of this pattern. By the 1970s US firms dominated across the sector, from farm machinery (John Deere, International Harvester) to chemicals (Monsanto, DuPont, American Cyanamid) to production and processing (United Brands, Corn Products) to animal feed (Ralston Purina). Observing this trend, another economist pinpointed Mexican agriculture as the place of origin of a "new, world-wide modernization strategy." He traced a path from the interventions of the Rockefeller Foundation to the stimulus these gave to the importation of costly agricultural inputs to the management of Mexican farms by foreign firms. Foreign control and deepening ties to international markets affected food self-sufficiency. It made sense, from the perspective of increasing individual profits, for large and well-financed producers in Mexico to focus on the crops that would bring the best prices. These were more likely to be fruits and vegetables for US supermarkets or sorghum to feed cattle than corn or wheat to feed Mexican workers. Thanks to these patterns, it was possible to see much of Mexican agriculture as an extension of US agribusiness, operating chiefly "to exploit Mexican rural labor, Mexican land and water resources, and Mexican private and public capital for the principal benefit of US entrepreneurs." The ultimate outcome of technical assistance to enhance agricultural production, ostensibly undertaken for the betterment of Mexican farmers and the Mexican economy, was the dominance of transnational companies in that very task, for their own aggrandizement. This portended ill for Mexico and especially for the poorest Mexicans.

Zoom releases fix for Mac bug that keeps mics active after calls

Posted: 12 Feb 2022 07:06 AM PST

Zoom has rolled out an update for its Mac app to fix a bug that could potentially cause privacy issues for users. As noticed by 9to5Mac, a company representative has responded to a post on the Zoom community forums made by a user who noticed that their mic indicator was on even when they were not in a meeting — they simply had their Zoom client open at the time. Upon accessing Control Center, they discovered that Zoom was accessing their microphone. 

The original poster wasn't the only one who aired their complaint on the forum, and a lot of commenters said they had noticed the same thing. In the company's response, the representative said Zoom for Mac version 5.9.3 solves an issue wherein "the orange indicator light [could] continue to appear after having left a meeting, call or webinar." The rep is advising users to update their app to patch the bug and to switch on automatic updates to get future releases as soon as they're out. 

Zoom has had some serious privacy issues in the past, including telling users that their meetings were protected with end-to-end encryption since 2016. In reality, it only started rolling out the feature in 2020, and the company had to settle with the FTC over its privacy practices. In 2021, it also agreed to pay $85 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the video chat giant of violating privacy and allowing trolls to drop into people's chats in a practice called "zoombombing."

All the ways to watch Super Bowl 2022

Posted: 12 Feb 2022 07:00 AM PST

Super Bowl 56 will occur this Sunday between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Rams. NFL's biggest event of the year is a television phenomenon that goes beyond just sports, be it million-dollar-commercials, the half-time concert or just an excuse to chow down on chicken wings. It used to be that the only way to watch was to either have a cable or satellite subscription, or venture out to your local sports bar. Fortunately, you now have a plethora of viewing options, including ways to stream.

Where and when?

Super Bowl 2022 will take place at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California on February 13th. The kick-off time is set for 6:30pm ET / 3:30pm PT. It'll be televised on NBC as well as Telemundo in Spanish.

How to watch with cable or satellite TV

Obviously, if you subscribe to either cable or satellite, you'll have no problem watching the Super Bowl this Sunday on your TV. This is good news if you'd rather not bother with signing up for a service online, or if you have a spotty internet connection.

How to stream the Super Bowl

Cord-cutters have plenty of ways to watch the big game this Sunday. One of them is through a live TV streaming service, as long as it carries NBC. Thankfully, a lot of them do. YouTube TV ($65/month), Hulu with Live TV ($65/month), DirecTV Stream ($70-plus/month), Sling TV ($35-plus/month) and Fubo TV ($65-plus/month) all include NBC. If you don't currently subscribe to any of these services and want to watch the game for free, you can sign up to one for a seven-day free trial period just to watch the game, and then cancel afterward. The exception is DirecTV Stream, which doesn't offer free trials.

Alternatively, you can also watch the game through Peacock's Premium ($5/month) or Premium Plus tier ($10/month). You can also catch it on the NBC Sports app and NBCSports.com, but only if you're already a subscriber through other means. The aforementioned services and apps are available through your phone or streaming devices such as Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV or Google TV.

If you don't have pay-TV or a streaming service

What if you don't want to sign up for pay TV or a streaming service? Your options are unfortunately limited. You can either watch the game through the NFL Mobile app or the Yahoo Sports app. Of course, you could also use an indoor antenna with your TV to simply watch the free over-the-air broadcast.

International viewers can use NFL's international game pass streaming service, which has a seven-day free trial. If you'd rather not go through that, however, check out this guide from the NFL to see if your country has a local Super Bowl broadcast partner.

What about 4K?

In 2020, Fox made history by broadcasting the Super Bowl in 4K and HDR for the first time (it was still shot in 1080p and HDR, but was upscaled to 4K in the broadcast). However, that is not an option this year. A spokesperson for NBC said that "The game will not be in 4K." It did not give an official reason why.
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