Techlife News #550

Cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase has lost half its value in the past week, including its biggest one-day drop 5o date on Wednesday as the famously volatile crypto market weathers yet another slump. Coinbase reported a $430 million net loss in the first quarter, or $1.98 per share, on declining sales and active users. Analysts were expecting profit of 8 cents per share. Revenue was down as trading volumes fell, and active monthly users declined 19% from the fourth quarter. It’s unlikely those results surprised investors — shares Coinbase Global Inc. declined 43% in the four days leading up to their earnings release Tuesday. On Wednesday, shares fell 26%, to $53.72 per share. On the day of its initial public offering just 13 months ago, prices hit $429 per share. Patrick O’Shaughnessy, an analyst…

Erin Houchin braced for the worst when a mysterious, well-financed group started buying television ads last month in her highly competitive southern Indiana congressional race. Houchin assumed she would face a negative blitz, like the one that crushed her in 2016 when she ran for the same seat. But, in fact, the opposite happened. American Dream Federal Action, a super political action committee financed by a cryptocurrency CEO, saturated the district with ads promoting Houchin as a “Trump Tough” conservative who would “stop the socialists in Washington.”That push helped secure her victory last week in a Republican primary. “All you can do is hold your breath,” Houchin’s longtime consultant, Cam Savage, said upon learning about the ad buy. “It could help you, but the fear is it will end you.” He said Houchin…

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, small businesses have quickly adopted remote working and transitioned to new technologies, such as contactless payments and online ordering. Unfortunately, these adjustments have come with increased risks. According to a 2022 report from Barracuda, a cloud and networks security company, small businesses with fewer than 100 employees receive 350% more social engineering attacks — like phishing, scamming or email compromise — than larger businesses. Compared with larger companies, many small businesses have fewer resources to dedicate to cybersecurity, leaving them vulnerable to the ever-evolving tactics of cybercriminals. And dealing with the consequences of a cyberattack can be seriously detrimental to a business’s bottom line, costing approximately $25,000 per year. Learn how to protect your small business from cyberattacks with these four tips. 1. EVALUATE YOUR ONLINE…

For the first time, scientists have grown plants in soil from the moon collected by NASA’s Apollo astronauts. Researchers had no idea if anything would sprout in the harsh moon dirt and wanted to see if it could be used to grow food by the next generation of lunar explorers. The results stunned them. “Holy cow. Plants actually grow in lunar stuff. Are you kidding me?” said Robert Ferl of the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. Ferl and his colleagues planted thale cress in moon soil returned by Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and other moonwalkers. The good news: All of the seeds sprouted. The downside was that after the first week, the coarseness and other properties of the lunar soil stressed the small, flowering weeds so much…

Google took a big step toward pushing its Pixel product line-up down a road already paved by Apple and its array of trendsetting devices. The latest additions to its six-year-old Pixel brand will include Google’s first smartwatch that draws upon the features and expertise it has gained from last year’s $2.1 billion acquisition of fitness gadget maker Fitbit. The new watch, targeted for an autumn release, marks Google’s first major attempt to make its mark in wearable technology, a market that has been growing steadily since Apple introduced its smartwatch in 2014. Until now, Google’s presence in the smartwatch market had been limited to making a version of its mobile Android operating system for watches made by other companies. Google also used its annual I/O developers conference to tease a Pixel tablet that…

About 10 million people speak Quechua, but trying to automatically translate emails and text messages into the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in the Americas was long all but impossible. That changed this week, when Google added Quechua and a variety of other languages to its digital translation service. The internet giant says new artificial intelligence technology is enabling it to vastly expand Google Translate’s repertoire of the world’s languages. It added 24 of them this week, including Quechua and other Indigenous South American languages such as Guarani and Aymara. It is also adding a number of widely spoken African and South Asian languages that have been missing from popular tech products. “We looked at languages with very large, underserved populations,” Google research scientist Isaac Caswell told reporters. The news from the California…