Tech

In this articleZE594-CNVisitors walk past BYD Tang and other electric vehicles at the carmaker’s booth at the Auto Shanghai 2021 show on April 27, 2021.Qilai Shen| Bloomberg | Getty ImagesBEIJING — Chinese automaker BYD announced Monday it shipped off the first batch of vehicles for a planned delivery of 1,500 electric cars to Norway by the end of this year.The company, which is backed by U.S. billionaire Warren Buffett, said 100 units of its all-electric Tang SUV shipped Monday from Shanghai, and are set to arrive at dealerships in Norway toward the end of the summer.The cars are slated to sell for 599,900 Norwegian kroner ($72,418) each, according to BYD. The company said it is working with Scandinavian car distributor, RSA, for deliveries and customer service.A representative for RSA did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment. The distributor’s official website has a link to a page on BYD Norway.Chinese start-ups’ gateway to EuropeChinese electric car start-ups Xpeng and Nio are also making inroads into Norway, where electric vehicles have dominated new passenger car sales for the last three years, per the Norwegian Road Federation.Xpeng said it delivered more than 300 units of its G3 SUV to Norway

Amidst the houses and the car parks sits GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, in this aerial photo taken on October 10, 2005.David Goddard | Getty ImagesLONDON — A little-known U.K. company called Arqit is quietly preparing businesses and governments for what it sees as the next big threat to their cyber defenses: quantum computers.It’s still an incredibly young field of research, however some in the tech industry — including the likes of Google, Microsoft and IBM — believe quantum computing will become a reality in the next decade. And that could be worrying news for organizations’ cyber security.David Williams, co-founder and chairman of Arqit, says quantum computers will be several millions of times faster than classical computers, and would be able to break into one of the most widely-used methods of cryptography.”The legacy encryption that we all use to keep our secrets safe is called PKI,” or public-key infrastructure, Williams told CNBC in an interview. “It was invented in the 70s.””PKI was originally designed to secure the communications of two computers,” Williams added. “It wasn’t designed for a hyper-connected world where there are a billion devices all over the world communicating in a complex round of interactions.”Arqit, which is planning

In this articleTSLATesla Model S PlaidTeslaTesla has canceled the most expensive variant of its flagship sedan, the Model S Plaid Plus, according to a tweet from CEO Elon Musk on Sunday.Previously, Tesla and Musk promised fans the tri-motor, Plaid Plus version of their new Model S would give drivers 1,100 horsepower, 520 miles of range on a fully charged battery, and acceleration from 0 to 60 mph in less than two seconds.On Sunday, Musk wrote on Twitter, where he has a follower count above 50 million:”Plaid+ is canceled. No need, as Plaid is just so good.” He added, “0 to 60mph in under 2 secs. Quickest production car ever made of any kind. Has to be felt to be believed.”In March, Tesla raised the price of the Model S Plaid Plus by $10,000 bringing it to about $150,000. The option to order the Model S Plaid Plus variant was removed from Tesla’s website around the last week of May, according to a CNET report.The remaining high-end version of the Model S Plaid will cost around $119,900 and feature a 390-mile range battery, with 1,020 horsepower and acceleration from 0 to 60 miles per hour in two seconds, among other features.Musk

In this article4397.T-JPThe wife of the photographer works in home office during the coronavirus pandemic on March 01, 2021 in Berlin, Germany. German authorities have confirmed the country has entered a third wave of the pandemic due to the spread of the B117 variant of the novel coronavirus. Meanwhile the pace of vaccinations has begun accelerating and some lockdown measures have been cautiously eased.Sean Gallup | Getty Images News | Getty ImagesConnor Moore couldn’t take any more noise from his computer.He uses Slack’s team communication software at his music-production company CMoore Sound in San Francisco, and the sound of notifications from the app kept interrupting his meetings. Sometimes the sound suddenly played when another user sent a message, and sometimes he heard it in the background while talking with people on Zoom video calls.”It’s really intense,” said Moore, who has created sounds for products at Amazon, Google and Uber. He turned off the notification sound. And then he reached out to Slack. He wants to help the world sound better, he said, and he recognized an opportunity.That’s probably a good idea, because Slack’s scratch-pop-pop-pop sound is one of the noises that people have been hearing a lot more lately.

Demonstrators gather at the Lincoln Memorial during a protest against police brutality and racism on June 6, 2020 in Washington, DC.Win McNameeLast June, social media feeds became flooded with corporate statements about how companies would promote racial equity within and beyond their workforce. The commitments came after the police murder of George Floyd sparked protests around the country.One year after those initial statements, many tech companies seem to have met several of their initial goals while promising to expand their commitments to diversity and inclusion efforts and racial justice causes.Here’s how some of tech’s biggest players stacked up:Airbnb2020 commitment: Airbnb said it would donate a total of $500,000 to the NAACP and the Black Lives Matter Foundation. It also said it would match employee donations to both groups.The company also said that by the end of 2021, 20% of its board of directors and executive team collectively would be made up of people of color. By the end of 2025, Airbnb said, its goal is to have 20% of U.S. employees be underrepresented minorities and for 50% of global employees who identify in the gender binary to be women.Airbnb also said each member of its executive team would create and

Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, delivers a speech to Congress at the Legislative Assembly building in San Salvador, El Salvador, on Tuesday, June 1, 2021. Photographer: Camilo Freedman/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesBloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesMIAMI — El Salvador announced legislation Saturday that will make it the world’s first sovereign nation to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, alongside the U.S. dollar.In a video broadcast to Bitcoin 2021, a multiday conference in Miami being billed as the biggest bitcoin event in history, President Nayib Bukele announced El Salvador’s partnership with digital wallet company, Strike, to build the country’s modern financial infrastructure using bitcoin technology.Strike founder and CEO Jack Mallers said this will go down as the “shot heard ’round the world for bitcoin.””What’s transformative here is that bitcoin is both the greatest reserve asset ever created and a superior monetary network. Holding bitcoin provides a way to protect developing economies from potential shocks of fiat currency inflation,” continued Mallers.Speaking from the mainstage, Mallers said the move will help unleash the power and potential of bitcoin for everyday use cases on an open network that benefits individuals, businesses, and public sector services.El Salvador is a largely cash economy, where roughly 70% of

Cruise Origin driverless shuttleCruiseCruise, the autonomous vehicle company that’s majority owned by General Motors, may soon be giving rides in driverless test vehicles to passengers in California.The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) said on Friday that Cruise is authorized to give passengers rides in prototype robotaxis.In a public statement, the CPUC said Cruise is the first autonomous vehicle developer to obtain such a permit. In order to allow passengers to ride in their test vehicles without a driver on board, Cruise may not charge fees for the rides and will have to submit quarterly reports about its autonomous vehicles, as well as a passenger safety plan, the CPUC said.As CNBC previously reported, Cruise expects production of its Origin driverless shuttles to start in early 2023. The company’s test fleet currently includes hundreds of Chevrolet Bolt EVs, which are equipped with Cruise’s driverless technology.Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving car unit, and Cruise are both seeking permits needed to start charging for rides and deliveries using their autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, according to a Reuters report in May.Alongside Cruise, seven other companies, including Waymo, Amazon-owned Zoox and Aurora, have permits from the CPUC for driverless vehicle testing on California roads, but they aren’t yet

In this articleFBFacebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.Erin Scott | ReutersFacebook on Friday announced a major reversal to its content moderation policies, saying politicians’ posts will no longer be exempt from the company’s rules that prevent users from engaging in harmful speech.The company also said Friday that former President Donald Trump will remain suspended from the platform for two years, effective from the initial Jan. 7 suspension date.Specifically, Facebook said that it will no longer treat content that is posted by politicians as inherently of public interest or newsworthy. This means such posts will be moderated like that of any other user.Facebook will still provide a newsworthiness exemption for content posted by politicians and other users in rare cases, the company said, but it will begin publicly publishing regular updates about the instances where it applies this exemption for the sake of transparency.The announcement marks a 180-degree change for Facebook, which had previously vowed to uphold free speech and proclaimed that it should not be an arbiter of truth. Most notably in the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. election, the company made the controversial decision to allow politicians to run ads on Facebook even if they contained misinformation.When it comes

In this articleSQSPTWTRSQTwitter CEO Jack Dorsey addresses students during a town hall at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India, November 12, 2018.Anushree Fadnavis | ReutersSquare CEO Jack Dorsey said Friday the company is looking into building a hardware bitcoin wallet that would give consumers greater control over the cryptocurrency they own.Shares of Square rose about 2.7% on Dorsey’s comments, published on Twitter, where he is also CEO.Bitcoin transactions have become a booming business for Square, which allows consumers to make purchases using the Cash App and store the currency digitally. Bitcoin revenue at the company climbed to $4.75 billion last year from $516.5 million in 2019.Dorsey is proposing a new way for users to store their bitcoin so that it’s not controlled by Square or any other company. A bitcoin wallet could allow users to store the cryptocurrency in a secure gadget and let them choose to spend it later.”Square is considering making a hardware wallet for bitcoin,” Dorsey said. “If we do it, we would build it entirely in the open, from software to hardware design, and in collaboration with the community.”‘He explained how Square’s product, if built, might differ from available alternatives.”The exchange you

Facebook on Friday announced that it may allow former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts to be reinstated in January 2023.At that time, the social media company will reevaluate whether the risk to public safety of allowing Trump back onto its services has receded.”We will evaluate external factors, including instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest,” the company said in a blog post. “If we determine that there is still a serious risk to public safety, we will extend the restriction for a set period of time and continue to re-evaluate until that risk has receded.”If Trump is allowed back on the service, there will be a strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions that will be triggered if Trump further violates the company’s content moderation rules, Facebook said.This two-year suspension will prevent Trump from using Facebook or Instagram to broadcast to his followers until after the 2022 U.S. mid-term elections.Facebook suspended Trump’s accounts following the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. The decision was Facebook’s most aggressive action against Trump during his four-year term.Facebook referred the ban to its oversight board a few weeks later, saying that given the significance of the suspension, “we think it