Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

France fines Apple $1.2 billion for anti-competitive acts March 16, 2020 PARIS (AP) — French regulators fined Apple 1.1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) on Monday for striking deals to keep prices high, in the biggest-ever such sanction by France’s Competition Authority. The agency said Apple and top re-sellers agreed to align prices with Apple’s own pricing for its iPads and some other products. The deals did not concern iPhones. Calling the fine “disheartening,” Apple defended its operations in a statement saying its “investment and innovation supports over 240,000 jobs across the country.” Apple added that: “It relates to practices from over a decade ago and discards thirty years of legal precedent that all companies in France rely on with an order that will cause chaos for companies across all industries.” Two “premium” French Apple re-sellers, Tech Data and Ingram Micro, were also fined a total of 139 million euros ($155 million). The competition authority sa...

New weapon in the war on animal-borne viruses Engineered molecule could lead to treatments for viruses that cross over from animals to humans DATE:  FEBRUARY 2, 2020 As the new coronavirus pandemic spreads, a new study from the Weizmann Institute of Science may help offer an innovative solution to similar cases of animal viruses that infect humans. Another group of viruses that originate in rodents and sometimes cross over to humans—called arenaviruses—often lead to severe illness including hemorrhagic fevers and meningitis. Weizmann scientists recently devised a decoy for these viruses that may treat infected people and inhibit viruses from infecting humans. The finding, from the lab of Dr. Ron Diskin in the Department of Structural Biology and led by staff scientist Dr. Hadas Cohen-Dvashi, was published in Nature Communications. The study focused on a group of viruses within a class of arenaviruses called New World arenaviruses, which originate in South America and ...

Windows 10 Warning: Anger at Microsoft Rises With Serious New Failure Gordon Kelly Senior Contributor Consumer Tech Mar 14, 2020, 08:55am EST Windows 10 users, you’ve  had a rotten   couple of months , but now is no time to relax because Microsoft updates have struck again. This is what is happening as well as what you need to know to stay safe.  Spotted by  Windows Latest , Microsoft’s newly released KB4540673 update was meant to be a low key patch designed to improve Edge and Explorer security, but users are reporting a whole host of problems. These are the primary ones: 02/13 Update: important additional update news today (via  BleepingComputer ) with Microsoft announcing it has patched a critical Windows 10 vulnerability in Microsoft Server Message Block 3.1.1 (SMBv3). The update - KB4551762 - patches "a network communication protocol issue that provides shared access to files, printers, and serial ports." It is rolling out to Windows Upd...

Windows 10 Warning: Anger at Microsoft Rises With Serious New Failure Gordon Kelly Senior Contributor Consumer Tech Mar 14, 2020, 08:55am EST Windows 10 users, you’ve  had a rotten   couple of months , but now is no time to relax because Microsoft updates have struck again. This is what is happening as well as what you need to know to stay safe.  Spotted by  Windows Latest , Microsoft’s newly released KB4540673 update was meant to be a low key patch designed to improve Edge and Explorer security, but users are reporting a whole host of problems. These are the primary ones: 02/13 Update: important additional update news today (via  BleepingComputer ) with Microsoft announcing it has patched a critical Windows 10 vulnerability in Microsoft Server Message Block 3.1.1 (SMBv3). The update - KB4551762 - patches "a network communication protocol issue that provides shared access to files, printers, and serial ports." It is rolling out to Windows Upd...

Tech Firms Seek to Head Off Bans on Facial Recognition Microsoft, Amazon show support for some legislative measures By Ryan Tracy Updated March 8, 2020 4:32 pm ET WASHINGTON—Amid rising calls for regulation, technology companies are pushing for laws that would restrict use of facial-recognition systems—and head off the more severe prohibitions some cities and states are weighing. Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and others stand to profit as government agencies and businesses expand use of the technology, which can require large investments in machine-learning and cloud-computing capacity. That opportunity is threatened by campaigns to severely restrict its use. San Francisco and six other cities have passed laws to block government use of facial recognition. Lawmakers in New York, Massachusetts, Hawaii and Michigan are considering some form of ban or strict limitation. Pressed by advocacy groups, concert promoters LiveNation Entertainment Inc. and AEG Presents, which sta...

Minimum-Wage Blowback - Fast Food Burger-Flipping Robot Works For $3 An Hour   by  Tyler Durden Thu, 03/05/2020 - 23:45 Over the years, we've  documented  the proliferation of artificial intelligence and robots in the workplace would lead to a tidal wave of job losses through 2030.  What peaked our attention several years ago was Miso Robotics, a Pasadena tech company with the focus of developing robots for fast-food restaurants, has seen the price of its burger-flipping robot drop from $100,000 to $10,000 in four years.  "Off-the-shelf robot arms had plunged in price in recent years, from more than $100,000 in 2016, when Miso Robotics first launched, to less than $10,000 today, with cheaper models coming in the near future," according to the  Los Angeles Times . The burger-flipping robot is now more cost-effective than the average low-skilled employee, which means Miso's unveiling of a subscription plan for restaurants, of just $2,0...

Honeywell says it built the world's most powerful quantum computer It will share more details on it sometime in the next three months. Igor Bonifacic ,  @igorbonifacic March 3, 2020 When it comes to quantum computers, we tend to think of companies like  Google  and  IBM  as the big players in the field, but there could soon be more competition in the space. Honeywell  says  sometime in the next three months it will unveil a quantum computer that is at least twice as powerful as any current device. Breaking down that claim requires some context. As  Protocol  points out , most companies talk about qubits when they speak to the capabilities of their machines. For instance, Sycamore, the computer Google  claimed  last year achieved quantum supremacy, had 53 qubits. Honeywell is instead using a metric called quantum volume to talk up the capabilities of its machine. IBM coined the term, and here's how it defines it: "Quantum...