An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet's urban innovation organization, has announced the launch of Pebble, a vehicle sensor that's designed to help manage parking in cities by providing real-time parking and curb availability data. Here's how it works: Small spherical sensors are stuck to the ground on parking spaces to note the absence or presence of a vehicle. Then solar-powered gateway hardware, which can be strapped easily to street poles, uses IoT to connect the sensor to the cloud through the cellular network. The data is then viewed and analyzed by real estate developers, parking operators or municipal agencies via a dashboard. Pebble doesn't use cameras or collect identifying information about a person or vehicle, and is touting a "privacy preserving" approach.

Between 9% and 56% of traffic, and all the pollution that comes with it, is caused by people who are cruising for parking. Pebble says its real-time parking availability can be integrated into navigation apps, like Google Maps, through an API to help users spend less time circling the block. "Real-time parking information can also alert would-be drivers when spaces are limited before they even leave home, leading them to use alternative travel modes, such as park-and-ride transit or ferries," wrote Sidewalk Labs' senior creative technologist, Nick Jonas, in a blog post announcing the launch. "For example, a smart parking program at a BART park-and-ride station reduced driving by a monthly average of nearly 10 miles per person -- and even shortened commutes."

A software bug that's now been fixed allowed some Eufycam owners to stream video from strangers' homes instead of their own. The Register reports: These 1080p Wi-Fi-connected devices are made by Anker, and are designed to be used indoors and outdoors. They can record to microSD cards and/or the cloud, and viewable via a mobile app. On Monday, some users found themselves staring at feeds from other people's homes -- even those in other countries -- and feared they were being watched, too. The privacy breakdown sparked an eruption of complaints on Reddit and Anker's support forum.

A spokesperson for Anker told us just a small number of customers were affected: "Due to a software bug during our latest server upgrade at 4:50 AM EST today, a limited number (0.001 per cent) of our users were able to access video feeds from other users' cameras. Our engineering team recognized this issue at around 5:30 AM EST, and quickly got it fixed by 6:30AM EST." We're told customers in the US, New Zealand, Australia, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina were affected though not GDPR-armed Europe. "We realize that as a security company we didn't do good enough," the spokesperson added. "We are sorry we fell short here and are working on new security protocols and measures to make sure that this never happens again." Eufy recommends users unplug and then reconnect their devices, log out of the Eufy security app, and log in again to fix the issue.

Chinese telecom giant Huawei is finding plenty of government buyers for its cloud services despite growing suspicion of the company, according to new data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Reconnecting Asia Project. From a report: Middle-income countries without strong civil freedoms are the most common customers for Huawei's cloud and e-government services. By the numbers: CSIS researchers found 70 agreements in 41 countries between governments (or state-owned enterprises) and Huawei. 77% of those agreements occurred in countries that Freedom House has ranked as either "not free" or "partly free," such as Saudi Arabia and Zambia.

Apple has compromised on data security to placate Chinese authorities, the New York Times reported Monday, citing internal company documents and interviews with current and former Apple employees and security experts. An excerpt from the story: At the data center in Guiyang, which Apple hoped would be completed by next month, and another in the Inner Mongolia region, Apple has largely ceded control to the Chinese government. Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they're meant to secure.

[...] In China, Apple has ceded legal ownership of its customers' data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, or GCBD, a company owned by the government of Guizhou Province, whose capital is Guiyang. Apple recently required its Chinese customers to accept new iCloud terms and conditions that list GCBD as the service provider and Apple as "an additional party." Apple told customers the change was to "improve iCloud services in China mainland and comply with Chinese regulations."

The terms and conditions included a new provision that does not appear in other countries: "Apple and GCBD will have access to all data that you store on this service" and can share that data "between each other under applicable law." Under the new setup, Chinese authorities ask GCBD -- not Apple -- for Apple customers' data, Apple said. Apple believes that gives it a legal shield from American law, according to a person who helped create the arrangement. GCBD declined to answer questions about its Apple partnership. Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins, commented on Times' story: "Apple asked a lot of people to back them against the FBI in 2015. They used every tool in the legal arsenal to prevent the US from gaining access to their phones. Do they think anyone is going to give them the benefit of the doubt now?"

After collaborating on various projects for several years, the relationship between Microsoft and Apple is getting testier again. From a report: [...] Around the time the PC character reappeared, Microsoft began bad-mouthing Apple to regulators, saying the company's App Store was anti-competitive. The Redmond, Washington, software giant had thrown in its lot with Epic Games, which was suing Apple for booting its Fortnite title from the App Store and accusing the iPhone maker of monopolistic behavior. A Microsoft executive has since testified against Apple at the trial, now in its second week, telling the court that Apple's tight control of its App Store had hurt Microsoft's own gaming efforts. The tensions are unlikely to ease once a verdict comes down because Apple and Microsoft are both looking to dominate the next big things in tech -- from artificial intelligence and cloud computing to gaming, tablets, custom processors and mixed-reality headsets.

The renewed antipathy between Apple and Microsoft started about a year ago. Microsoft had developed a cloud gaming service for iPhones and iPads called xCloud. One app would let users pay a monthly fee to Microsoft and stream dozens of different gaming titles from the cloud. The service was supposed to do for gaming what Netflix did for video, appease gamers and turn Apple devices into a more powerful gaming platform backed by Xbox, one of the hottest names in the industry. But Microsoft never launched the service in its intended form, having failed to persuade Apple to loosen App Store rules forbidding all-in-one gaming services. Originally, Microsoft was barred from launching any cloud-based games at all. But a few months after concerns over the ban on streaming apps went public, Apple tweaked the rules.

Microsoft can now launch a cloud gaming service, but each game must be downloaded separately, defeating the purpose of an all-in-one solution. Now Microsoft is rolling out the service on Apple devices via the web, a much less optimal experience than a real app. Around the same time, Microsoft President Brad Smith began urging U.S. and European antitrust regulators to examine Apple's practices.

Politico's technology site Protocol reports that some U.S. lawmakers are getting angry about an unpopular but widespread corporate policy -- the non-compete agreement: Non-compete agreements prohibit employees who leave their jobs from taking similar positions with potential competitors for a certain period of time. In the U.S., somewhere between 27.8% and 46.5% of private-sector workers are subject to non-compete agreements, according to a 2019 Economic Policy Institute study.

Such agreements are unenforceable in California and limited in nearby Washington, but they can still have adverse effects on employees nationwide. That's why a current piece of legislation, the Workforce Mobility Act, seeks at the federal level to restrict the use of non-compete agreements in most situations. Sens. Chris Murphy and Todd Young introduced the bill, which would only allow non-competes in certain "necessary" situations... Non-compete legislation also has the support of President Joe Biden, who said during his campaign he would support such a bill. John Lettieri, president and CEO of the Economic Innovation Group, is a proponent of the Workforce Mobility Act and suggested the bill should enjoy broad support. "We believe we're in a position where it's possible for this to become law," Lettieri told Protocol.

"Whether you're a free market conservative or whether you're a pro-worker progressive, you can come from either of those ends of the spectrum and end up in the same place. And this is a special issue for that reason... Competition is generally good and for workers, competition among businesses for your labor is the most fundamental bargaining power you've got," he said. But if companies hinder that with non-compete agreements, they create "a downstream series of consequences that really are bad for the worker, they're bad for the broader labor market and it's increasingly clear they're bad for the broader economy as well...."

Companies such as Amazon and Microsoft — both headquartered in Seattle, Washington — and New York-headquartered IBM have all sued employees for breaking the terms of their non-compete agreements.

Politico writes: President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered a sweeping overhaul of the federal government's approach to cybersecurity, from the software that agencies buy to the security measures that they use to block hackers, as his administration continues grappling with vulnerabilities exposed by a massive digital espionage campaign carried out by the Russian government... Biden's order requires agencies to encrypt their data, update plans for securely using cloud hosting services and enabling multi-factor authentication...

It also creates a cyber incident review group, modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board that investigates aviation, railroad and vehicle crashes, to improve the government's response to cyberattacks. And it sets the stage for requiring federal contractors to report data breaches and meet new software security standards.

The directive, which sets deadlines for more than 50 different actions and reports, represents a wide-ranging attempt by the new Biden administration to close glaring cybersecurity gaps that it discovered upon taking office and prevent a repeat of Moscow's SolarWinds espionage operation, which breached nine federal agencies and roughly 100 companies... In addition to requiring agencies to deploy multi-factor authentication, the order requires them to install endpoint detection and response software, which generates warnings when it detects possible hacks. It also calls for agencies to redesign their networks using a philosophy known as zero-trust architecture, which assumes that hackers are inside a network and focuses on preventing them from jumping from one computer to another... Officials say current federal monitoring programs are outdated — they can only spot previously identified malware, and they can't protect increasingly pervasive cloud platforms...

Biden's executive order attempts to prevent another SolarWinds by requiring information technology service providers to meet new security requirements in order to do business with the federal government. These contractors will need to alert the government if they are hacked and share information about the intrusion.
The order "reflects a fundamental shift in our mindset from incident response to prevention, from talking about security to doing security," one senior administration official told reporters. The order notes "persistent and increasingly sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns" that "threaten the public sector, the private sector, and ultimately the American people's security and privacy," calling for "bold changes and significant investments."

But the order also argues that "In the end, the trust we place in our digital infrastructure should be proportional to how trustworthy and transparent that infrastructure is..." warning that "The development of commercial software often lacks transparency, sufficient focus on the ability of the software to resist attack, and adequate controls to prevent tampering by malicious actors." To that end, the order also requires guidelines for a "Software Bill of Materials" or "SBOM," a "formal record containing the details and supply chain relationships of various components used in building software... analogous to a list of ingredients on food packaging." [A]n SBOM allows the builder to make sure those components are up to date and to respond quickly to new vulnerabilities. Buyers can use an SBOM to perform vulnerability or license analysis, both of which can be used to evaluate risk in a product. Those who operate software can use SBOMs to quickly and easily determine whether they are at potential risk of a newly discovered vulnerability. A widely used, machine-readable SBOM format allows for greater benefits through automation and tool integration. The SBOMs gain greater value when collectively stored in a repository that can be easily queried by other applications and systems. Understanding the supply chain of software, obtaining an SBOM, and using it to analyze known vulnerabilities are crucial in managing risk.
ZDNet reports that "the Linux and open-source community are already well on their way to meeting the demands of this new security order," citing security projects in both its Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) and from the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).

Elon Musk-founded SpaceX is in the process of rolling out Starlink as a satellite internet provider around the world. As part of a new partnership, Google Cloud data centers will be home to key Starlink infrastructure in order to let enterprise users better access key services. 9to5Google reports: This partnership starts with SpaceX building Starlink ground stations inside Google data centers for "secure, low-latency, and reliable delivery of data" from existing fiber networks to space and back to end users. There are currently over 1,500 Starlink satellites in orbit, with more launching on a regular basis aboard Falcon 9 rockets. The end goal is to make cloud services, data, and applications available to businesses in rural or remote areas: "Connectivity from Starlink's constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites provides a path for these organizations to deliver data and applications to teams distributed across countries and continents, quickly and securely." The first Google Cloud and Starlink customers will be able to benefit from this partnership in the second half of 2021.

Pentagon officials are considering pulling the plug on the star-crossed JEDI cloud-computing project, which has been mired in litigation from Amazon and faces continuing criticism from lawmakers. From a report: The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract was awarded to Microsoft in 2019 over Amazon, which has contested the award in court ever since. A federal judge last month refused the Pentagon's motion to dismiss much of Amazon's case. A few days later, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said the department would review the project. "We're going to have to assess where we are with regard to the ongoing litigation around JEDI and determine what the best path forward is for the department," Ms. Hicks said at an April 30 security conference organized by the nonprofit Aspen Institute. Her comments followed a Pentagon report to Congress, released before the latest court ruling, that said another Amazon win in court could significantly draw out the timeline for the program's implementation. "The prospect of such a lengthy litigation process might bring the future of the JEDI Cloud procurement into question," the Jan. 28 report said. Ms. Hicks and other Pentagon officials say there is a pressing need to implement a cloud program that serves most of its branches and departments. The JEDI contract, valued at up to $10 billion over 10 years, aims to allow the Pentagon to consolidate its current patchwork of data systems, give defense personnel better access to real-time information and put the Defense Department on a stronger footing to develop artificial-intelligence capabilities that are seen as vital in the future.

On iOS, Apple wants all the browsers to run WebKit. Even Google Chrome is forced to use WebKit on iOS devices. Alex Russel, Google's engineer, in a blog post outlines his case: Apple's iOS browser (Safari) and engine (WebKit) are uniquely under-powered. Consistent delays in the delivery of important features ensure the web can never be a credible alternative to its proprietary tools and App Store. Alex has cited an example of this by mentioning Stadia and other cloud gaming services. Apple did not allow those services to be available on the App Store and pushed them to use the web instead, which requires Apple to allow gamepad APIs so controllers can be used with these new web apps. That is a function that other browsers have offered for a long time except on iOS. He writes: Suppose Apple had implemented WebRTC and the Gamepad API in a timely way. Who can say if the game streaming revolution now taking place might have happened sooner? It's possible that Amazon Luna, NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Google Stadia, and Microsoft xCloud could have been built years earlier. It's also possible that APIs delivered on every other platform, but not yet available on any iOS browser (because Apple), may hold the key to unlocking whole categories of experiences on the web. Blog WCCFTech adds: Alex has also talked about how iOS browsers are underpowered in several other places compared to the competition. For starters, iOS browsers lack push notifications, standardized Progressive Web App (PWA) install buttons, background sync, and numerous other tools that make it easier for developers to make fully functional web apps. Access to hardware such as Bluetooth, USB, and NFC are also not easily available. Last but not least, the royalty-free AV1 standard is also not available.

ffkom writes: Modern x86 and ARM CPUs translate opcodes into ops, which are usually stored in a cache of their own for later re-use. Researchers from the university of Virginia have found a way to exploit this for side-channel attacks, where malicious code exfiltrates information from other processes or virtual machines based on measurable characteristics of the op-cache state, which they describe in their scientific paper.. This side-channel attack evades all previous fixes for SPECTRE-like attacks, and poses yet another difficult-to-address risk to all software that runs on CPUs that are used by possibly malicious code at the same time -- like code running on other people's computers ("the cloud") or code running on CPUs that at the same time run "sandboxes" with code from some untrusted sources on the Internet.

Earlier this week, The Verge reported that Microsoft now has 145 million people using its Microsoft Teams communications app, an increase of 26 percent over last year's reported 115 million daily active users. From the report: To put the 145 million figure in perspective, at the beginning of the pandemic, Microsoft had around 32 million daily active users of Microsoft Teams. That jumped to 75 million in a matter of weeks, and these numbers have more than doubled since even the early days of the pandemic. It's an impressive amount of growth, just as Microsoft has been aggressively pushing businesses to move to the cloud and adopt Teams over the past year.

As always, it's difficult to compare to rival services. Google and Zoom don't reveal daily active users and opt for a more vague daily active participants. This means a single user could be counted multiple times if they participate in different meetings during a day. Zoom revealed it had 300 million daily active participants last year, and Google said last year it had 100 million daily active participants. Slack revealed it had 12.5 million concurrent users during the beginning of the pandemic last year, but the company has shied away from daily active user counts ever since.

Google was one of the first big companies to move its workforce out of the office in the early days of the pandemic, but now it's calling employees back. Some of them said they don't intend to return. From a report: While tech firms such as Microsoft and Twitter have announced plans to allow employees to work from home permanently, Google has resisted going fully remote, and employees said there's an increasing sense of frustration among a faction of the workforce. That frustration spilled onto social media last week: "Spoken to quite a few colleagues at Google that say they'll quit if forced to go back to the office in September," Chris Broadfoot, a Google Cloud programmer, tweeted on Thursday. Other employees joined the thread to cosign the message, with some saying they may look for another job if Google makes them go back to the office.

A half-dozen Google employees who spoke with Insider shared a similar sentiment or said they knew colleagues who had made permanent moves during the pandemic. They asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press. "A lot of my colleagues have moved away with no real intention of coming back," one of those employees said. "Especially in that 30s-40s age bracket. I would say that's predominantly where it is." That same employee told Insider they had handed in their notice after their request to work in a location outside of the Bay Area was shot down by their manager. Further reading: Google Is Saving Over $1 Billion a Year by Working From Home.

DigitalOcean has emailed customers warning of a data breach involving customers' billing data, TechCrunch has learned. Zack Whittaker reports: The cloud infrastructure giant told customers in an email on Wednesday, obtained by TechCrunch, that it has "confirmed an unauthorized exposure of details associated with the billing profile on your DigitalOcean account." The company said the person "gained access to some of your billing account details through a flaw that has been fixed" over a two-week window between April 9 and April 22. The email said customer billing names and addresses were accessed, as well as the last four digits of the payment card, its expiry date and the name of the card-issuing bank. The company said that customers' DigitalOcean accounts were "not accessed," and passwords and account tokens were "not involved" in this breach.

"To be extra careful, we have implemented additional security monitoring on your account. We are expanding our security measures to reduce the likelihood of this kind of flaw occuring [sic] in the future," the email said. DigitalOcean said it fixed the flaw and notified data protection authorities, but it's not clear what the apparent flaw was that put customer billing information at risk. In a statement, DigitalOcean's security chief Tyler Healy said 1% of billing profiles were affected by the breach, but declined to address our specific questions, including how the vulnerability was discovered and which authorities have been informed.

Epic Games is holding back Fortnite from being available on Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) service, according to a new deposition made public as part of the Epic case against Apple. From a report: The Fortnite developer views Microsoft's xCloud service as competition to its PC offerings, and the company is deliberately not offering Fortnite on xCloud as a result. Joe Kreiner, Epic's vice president of business development, was questioned over why Fortnite isn't available on xCloud, and confirmed it was a deliberate choice. "We viewed Microsoft's efforts with xCloud to be competitive with our PC offerings," says Kreiner in the deposition. The court document makes it appear like Kreiner may go on to explain why, but the next part of the questioning has been redacted.

DigitalOcean has emailed customers warning of a data breach involving customers' billing data, TechCrunch has learned. From the report: The cloud infrastructure giant told customers in an email on Wednesday, obtained by TechCrunch, that it has "confirmed an unauthorized exposure of details associated with the billing profile on your DigitalOcean account." The company said the person "gained access to some of your billing account details through a flaw that has been fixed" over a two-week window between April 9 and April 22. The email said customer billing names and addresses were accessed, as well as the last four digits of the payment card, its expiry date, and the name of the card-issuing bank. The company said that customers' DigitalOcean accounts were "not accessed," and passwords and account tokens were "not involved" in this breach. "To be extra careful, we have implemented additional security monitoring on your account. We are expanding our security measures to reduce the likelihood of this kind of flaw occuring [sic] in the future," the email said.

Private equity firm Thoma Bravo has announced plans to acquire cybersecurity company Proofpoint in a deal worth $12.3 billion. VentureBeat reports: Founded in 2002 by former Netscape CTO Eric Hahn, Proofpoint was originally known for an email security product that helped businesses identify spam, viruses, and other electric correspondence that might contravene company policies. In the subsequent years, the Sunnyvale, California-based company has expanded its scope to include an array of cloud-based security products designed to protect enterprises from targeted threats. Proofpoint went public back in 2012, with its shares initially trading at around $13 -- these have grown steadily over the past decade, hitting an all-time high of $140 earlier this year and giving it a market capitalization of more than $7 billion.

Thoma Bravo has a track record of taking publicly traded cybersecurity companies private, having done just that with network security company Barracuda in a 2017 deal worth $1.6 billion and with Sophos last year for $3.9 billion. The Proofpoint deal, which is expected to close in Q3 2021, sees Thoma Bravo paying a 34% premium on Proofpoint's closing price at the last full trading day (April 23), with shareholders set to receive $176 for each share they own. It's worth noting that the $12.3 billion price tag positions this as the biggest cybersecurity acquisition of all time, putting it ahead of the $7.68 billion Intel shelled out for McAfee 11 years ago. And by VentureBeat's calculations, the Proofpoint acquisition represents one of the biggest overall technology acquisitions ever, putting it in the top 20, alongside megadeals that include Dell's $67 billion EMC purchase, IBM's $34 billion Red Hat deal, and Salesforce's impending $27.7 billion Slack acquisition.

"Dish Network is partnering with Amazon to roll out 5G service in Las Vegas," writes Slashdot reader fermion. "They will evidently not only be the first cloud-based 5G service, but also will allow Amazon to test its network in a large telecommunication situation." CNBC reports: Dish will start operating "the first standalone, cloud-based 5G Open Radio Access Network in the United States, beginning with Las Vegas later this year," the company said in a statement Wednesday. The statement said Amazon and Dish will work together to see how organizations including Amazon and AWS use 5G or build their own networks. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

Dave Brown, vice president of AWS' core Elastic Compute Cloud service, told CNBC's "TechCheck" on Wednesday that the collaboration with Dish will "absolutely" serve as a sort of case study Amazon can take to other telecommunications providers to show that 5G networks can run in clouds, rather than in data centers with special-purpose infrastructure.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Bloomberg article, written by Joe Deaux: As David DeYoung, then a director of business technologies at Alcoa, walked into Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters in September 2015, he knew that the stakes were high. DeYoung led a group of engineers who'd spent decades pursuing the holy grail for the notoriously dirty aluminum industry: a way to smelt the metal without producing any direct carbon emissions. Apple, which Harbor Intelligence analyst Jorge Vazquez estimates uses almost 15,000 metric tons of aluminum annually for its electronics gear, had invited DeYoung to explain a potentially revolutionary carbonless manufacturing process for aluminum that his group was developing. Alcoa was on the verge of ending the DeYoung team's yearslong search. To make the tension even worse, moments before DeYoung stepped into a roundtable with Apple engineers, he received word Alcoa was splitting into two publicly traded companies -- casting another cloud on his unit's project. So Apple's interest in reducing the carbon footprint of its metal casings looked to be key to saving the funding.

But it wasn't until later in 2015 that the payoff from that meeting came, with help from an unexpected source. That's when Vincent Christ, a manufacturing information technology expert from Rio Tinto Group Plc, flew to Cupertino for a similar visit. The London-based company, one of Alcoa's biggest rivals, was also struggling to develop a way to produce aluminum through a process that would emit oxygen instead of carbon dioxide. While heading back to the airport after an hourslong confab with Apple engineers, Christ received a call. Apple had an idea: Rio Tinto and Alcoa were both close to the answer they were looking for, but neither company seemed able to do it on its own. So why not combine efforts? "We had the engine, but we didn't have the wheels, chassis, or body, and Rio brought that all to the party," says DeYoung, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT. "[Apple] said, 'You guys really ought to talk to Rio,' and we were like, 'Yeah, we have already.' But then we said we'll talk to them again, and Apple actually facilitated that second contact."

The result was the creation of Elysis, a joint venture between Alcoa and Rio Tinto with investments from Apple, the government of Canada, and the provincial government of Quebec, which is one of the biggest aluminum-producing regions in the world. The venture has developed a technology that makes so-called green aluminum, whose production doesn't emit carbon dioxide. If the partners can make the process work at commercial scale, it could be used to retrofit existing smelters, transforming them from some of the dirtiest industrial polluters into the kind of green manufacturing facilities business and government are shifting toward. "Elysis has developed a process that substitutes carbon with inert materials -- it won't say what they are -- to make the anode that conducts the electricity causing the chemical reaction," reports Bloomberg. "Elysis' operating costs are about 15% lower than those of conventional smelting, in part because the carbon anodes used in the chemical reaction must be replaced after 25 days, while Elysis' inert material lasts two years. The carbonless process also requires fewer workers, since there's no need to frequently change out the cathodes sitting in the pots of molten alumina."

The immediate hurdle for Elysis is to prove it can crank up the amperage used during carbonless smelting to industrial-strength power levels, which would allow higher daily production rates, says CRU Group analyst Greg Wittbecker. "Elysis announced on April 20 it will begin installing commercial inert anode prototype cells on a smelter in Quebec in an effort to prove it can retrofit existing smelters," adds Bloomberg. "A pivotal moment will be if or when governments implement carbon credit or carbon tax programs that would penalize low-cost aluminum made in plants in China and India that use power from coal-fired plants."

Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming service, previously known as xCloud, will begin rolling out in beta to iPhones, iPads and PCs this week. The service will be invite-only to start, Microsoft said in a blog post on Monday. From a report: Xbox Cloud Gaming was on track to launch for iPhones and iPads earlier, but Apple updated its App Store rules in September that impacted services like Xbox Gaming and Google Stadia. Apple's move forced the companies to use web browsers to redesign their services so that they could circumvent the App Store rules. Under the rules, Microsoft, Google and other companies with similar services would have had to offer each game as an individual download instead of offering a complete library the way Netflix does for movies.

Xbox Cloud Gaming is sort of like Netflix for games. People who subscribe to Microsoft's $14.99/month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate plan can access more than 100 titles. The cloud gaming aspect lets you stream the games without having to download them, provided you have a fast enough internet connection. The streaming option is already available for Android phones.