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New Glenn landing scuppered by engine problems

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is closing its investigations into both the SpaceX Starship Flight 7 explosion and Blue Origin New Glenn-1 landing failure.…

Credit card interest rates, which averaged 23% in 2023, are significantly higher than any other major loan product primarily due to non-diversifiable default risk and banks' market power, according to research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The comprehensive study, which analyzed 330 million monthly credit card accounts, found that while high default losses contribute to elevated rates, they explain only part of the picture. Even high-FICO borrowers pay spreads exceeding 7% above the federal funds rate. Researchers determined that credit card banks have substantial pricing power, achieved through exceptionally high operating expenses -- about 4-5% of dollar balances annually -- with marketing costs ten times higher than those at other banks. "Credit card charge-off rates are highly correlated with default rates on banks' other loans as well as on corporate bonds," the researchers said, noting that default risk cannot be diversified away across lending markets, particularly during economic downturns. The study estimated that exposure to aggregate default risk carries a premium of 5.3% per year, which fully explains the relationship between return on assets and credit scores. Credit cards are ubiquitous in American finance, with 74% of adults owning at least one card, and the payment method accounting for 70% of retail spending. According to the research, 60% of accounts carry balances month-to-month.

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Copilot told us that half a century is 25 years. It feels much longer

Microsoft will officially hit the half-century mark on Friday as the Windows giant turns 50 years old. What do you consider the highs and lows of the company's journey to dominance?…

London's mayor has axed a cyber crime helpline for the victims of online abuse, triggering a backlash from campaigners who argue that women and girls will be left struggling to access vital support. From a report: The service, which was shut down on Tuesday, assisted victims of fraud, revenge porn and cyberstalking to protect their digital identity. During its 18-months of operation it led to 2,060 cases being opened. The helpline was launched in 2023 as a one-year pilot scheme with $220,000 in funding from the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac), and was later extended by six months. Conservative London Assembly member Emma Best said an informal evaluation showed the helpline "was working" and was going to be extended for another year. However, Sadiq Khan said that the scheme would be closed. "It was a pilot and pilots are what they say on the tinâ... we will receive an end of project report, we have collected the data and the results of that report will inform our future work," he said, speaking at Mayor's Question Time.

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Google is rolling out a new encryption model for Gmail that allows enterprise users to send encrypted messages without requiring recipients to use custom software or exchange encryption certificates. The feature, launching in beta today, initially supports encrypted emails within the same organization, with plans to expand to all Gmail inboxes "in the coming weeks" and third-party email providers "later this year." Unlike Gmail's current S/MIME-based encryption, the new system lets users simply toggle "additional encryption" in the email draft window. Non-Gmail recipients will receive a link to access messages through a guest Google Workspace account, while Gmail users will see automatically decrypted emails in their inbox.

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'There needs to be a better economic as well as copyright framework', Thomson Reuters CPO tells us

Interview Thomson Reuters, based in Canada, recently scored a partial summary judgment against Ross Intelligence, after a US court ruled the AI outfit's use of the newswire giant's copyrighted Westlaw content didn't qualify as fair use.…

Economic models have systematically underestimated how global heating will affect people's wealth, according to a new study that finds 4C warming will make the average person 40% poorer -- an almost four-fold increase on some estimates. The Guardian: The study by Australian scientists suggests average per person GDP across the globe will be reduced by 16% even if warming is kept to 2C above pre-industrial levels. This is a much greater reduction than previous estimates, which found the reduction would be 1.4%. Scientists now estimate global temperatures will rise by 2.1C even if countries hit short-term and long-term climate targets. Criticisms have mounted in recent years that a set of economic tools known as integrated assessment models (IAM) -- used to guide how much governments should invest in cutting greenhouse gas emissions -- have failed to capture major risks from climate change, particularly extreme weather events. The new study, in the journal Environmental Research Letters, took one of the most popular economic models and enhanced it with climate change forecasts to capture the impacts of extreme weather events across global supply chains.

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Commerce chief threatens to pull grants so firms double down on US spending

More doubt is being cast over the US CHIPS Act program with the Trump administration threatening to halt payments unless companies in line to receive funding commit to substantially expand their own investments.…

The UK government must be thrilled

Google will soon offer end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) email for all users, even those who do not use Google Workspace, and says it'll do so without imposing any undue stress on IT admins.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: China's Xiaomi said on Tuesday that it was actively cooperating with police after a fatal accident involving a SU7 electric vehicle on March 29 and that it had handed over driving and system data. The incident marks the first major accident involving the SU7 sedan, which Xiaomi launched in March last year and since December has outsold Tesla's Model 3 on a monthly basis. Xiaomi's shares, which had risen by 34.8% year to date, closed down 5.5% on Wednesday, underperforming a 0.2% gain in the Hang Seng Tech index. Xiaomi did not disclose the number of casualties but said initial information showed the car was in the Navigate on Autopilot intelligent-assisted driving mode before the accident and was moving at 116 kph (72 mph). A driver inside the car took over and tried to slow it down but then collided with a cement pole at a speed of 97 kph, Xiaomi said. The accident in Tongling in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui killed the driver and two passengers, Chinese financial publication Caixin reported on Tuesday citing friends of the victims. In a rundown of the data submitted to local police posted on a Weibo account of the company, Xiaomi said NOA issued a risk warning of obstacles ahead and its subsequent immediate takeover only happened seconds before the collision. Local media reported that the car caught fire after the collision. Xiaomi did not mention the fire in the statement. The report notes that the car was a "so-called standard version of the SU7, which has the less-advanced smart driving technology without LiDAR."

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Fulcrum is region's latest challenge to the hyperscalers

An alliance of cloud service providers in Europe is investing €1 million into the Fulcrum Project, an open source cloud federation tech that gives an alternative to local customers anxious about using US hypercalers.…

Tech secretary reveals landmark legislation's full details for first time

The UK's technology secretary revealed the full breadth of the government's Cyber Security and Resilience (CSR) Bill for the first time this morning, pledging £100,000 ($129,000) daily fines for failing to act against specific threats under consideration.…

What counts as failure in New Space?

Comment Yet another rocket exploded over the weekend and – you guessed it – its CEO called the test flight "a great success." This raises the question: what even counts as failure anymore in the world of so-called "New Space" – the VC-fueled and risk-friendly private rocket sector?…

Britain's flagship AI agency will slash the number of projects it backs and prioritize work on defense, environment and health as it seeks to respond to technological advances and criticism of its record. From a report: The Alan Turing Institute -- named after the pioneering British computer scientist -- will shut or offload almost a quarter of its 101 current initiatives and is considering job cuts as part of a change programme that led scores of staff to write a letter expressing their loss of confidence in the leadership in December. Jean Innes, appointed chief executive in July 2023, argued that huge advances in AI meant the Turing needed to modernise after being founded as a national data science institute by David Cameron's government a decade ago this month. "The Turing has chalked up some really great achievements," Innes said in an interview. "[But we need] a big strategic shift to a much more focused agenda on a small number of problems that have an impact in the real world." A review last year by UK Research and Innovation, the government funding body, found "a clear need for the governance and leadership structure of the Institute to evolve." It called for a move away from the dominance of universities to a structure more representative of AI in UK.

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Modern 64-bit-only chips are leaving the original Arm operating system behind

A new funding effort from RISC OS Open seeks to modernize the operating system for future Arm hardware.…

Lenders told of £175 million project top-up for 2025, four years after buyout

The UK's third-largest supermarket has seen the expected costs of its tech divorce from former US owner Walmart rise to nearly £1 billion ($1.3 billion) after news broke that the project is now expected to run into calendar Q3 of year four, overshooting its original three-year timeline.…

Not exactly Snowden levels of skill

A student at Britain's top eavesdropping government agency has pleaded guilty to taking sensitive information home on the first day of his trial.…

Optimistic much?

Arm expects to see its architecture account for half of the datacenter CPU market by the end of this year, up from 15 percent in 2024, all thanks to the AI boom.…

Blame the 23andMe implosion, rise in far-right govt

OpenSNP, a fourteen-year-old open source repository for genetic records, will shut down and delete all its data at the end of April.…

How about making sure Windows crashes less, and stops hassling us to use Edge? That would improve productivity, too

Microsoft has quietly revealed it’s redesigning the Blue Screen of Death, the notification that Windows presents after it crashes so badly a reboot is the only way out.…