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The UK plans to increase the number of electric vehicle charging stations to 300,000 by 2030. That would increase the current number of charge points in the country by tenfold. The government has committed £1.6 billion ($2.1 billion) to the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Strategy.

The effort to upgrade the charging network includes a focus on fast-charging stations for longer journeys and making EVs more viable for people without access to off-street parking. A previously announced Rapid Charging Fund has put £950 million ($1.25 billion) toward establishing a network of more than 6,000 fast-charging stations along England’s motorways by 2035. Under the strategy, £500 million ($658 million) has been earmarked for setting up charging stations in communities, including on-street locations.

New rules will mean that EV drivers can use contactless payments for charging, compare pricing and use apps to find stations. The UK will ban the sale of new fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2030, so a more expansive charging network will be vital to ease the transition to EVs.

Along with the environmental benefits of EVs, the government touted the plan as a way to create jobs and reduce the UK’s dependency on foreign sources of energy and oil. As is the case elsewhere, prices of gas and home energy have increased dramatically in the UK since Russia invaded Ukraine last month. Access to Russian oil and energy suppliers has been nixed in the wake of sanctions against the country.

With an improved camera, boosted performance and excellent battery life, Apple's 2021 256GB 10.2-inch iPad is already a solid deal at the regular $479 price. However, you can now pick one up at Amazon in silver or space gray for $429, an all-time low and a full $20 less than the lowest price we've seen so far. 

Sure, the 2021 iPad has rocked the same design for quite some time now, but that also means Apple has had a long time to polish and refine it. At the same time, there are some significant improvements. The wide-angle front camera works better for video calls, performance gets a big boost thanks to the A13 Bionic chip, and it delivers a solid 10-plus hours of battery life. It even has a headphone jack, and best of all, it's relatively cheap compared to other iPad models. 

The drawbacks are the lack of a USB-C port, a rather stodgy design (those thick bezels) and no second-gen Pencil support — for that, you'll need an iPad Air, mini, or Pro. But most of us use an iPad for browsing the web, reading and watching video content. The 256GB model is a better choice than the 64GB version for things like that, so the $50 discount makes it an easy choice. 

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

The world never run out of bad 'B' movies to mock, apparently, because Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) is back for a 13th season, Variety has reported. Thanks to a Kickstarter campaign last year that raised $6.52 million, a full 13-episode season of the series will arrive on a dedicated streaming platform called Gizmoplex starting on May 6th.

As usual, some ordinary humans have been kidnapped by mad scientists (played by Felicia Day, Patton Oswalt and Mary Jo Pehl) and are forced to watch some terrible B-movies. To survive the process, they create companion robots to help provide a continuous stream of taunting and jokes throughout the entire running length of the films. 

This year there will be three hosts: Jonah Heston, Emily Connor, and original host Joel Robinson. They'll "be forced to endure some of the cheesiest movies ever to appear on MST3K, including our first-ever Halloween special, our first-ever 3D movie, and a holiday special finale so big it’ll take all three hosts to riff it," according to the team. The B-movies on the slate include Robot Wars, Santo in the Treasure of Dracula and The Million Eyes of Sumuru. 

The show was created by Joel Hodgson and debuted in 1988. It ran for 10 seasons on Comedy Central and the Sci-Fi Channel until 1999, and was later revived by Netflix in 2017 for two seasons, following another Kickstarter campaign. However, Netflix declined to pick it up for a third season. 

The latest revival will thus air independently on a dedicated MST3K platform called Gizmoplex, which offers a website and apps (iOS, Android, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, and Amazon FireTV). It'll premiere on May 6th with three episodes released daily from Friday to Sunday. After that, new episodes and one of 12 shorts will arrive every two weeks. The platform will also offer classic MST3K episodes from season 1-10, and for a limited time, they'll be free and ad-free.

If you want the new episodes, though, you'll have to sign up (unless you pledged support on Kickstarter). Individual episodes will cost $10, a three-month pass is $50, and a full season from May 22 to February 23 is $135. The latter includes a digital download of season 13. 

Reddit is looking into the possibility of introducing some video features reminiscent of TikTok's, according to TechCrunch. While the project is still in its very early stages and hasn't even entered the testing phase yet, TechCrunch says it could include TikTok-like video editing tools that make it easy for you to "react" to another person's post or to incorporate it into your content.

On TikTok, you can use a feature called Duet to put your video side by side with another user's to create remixes, parodies and the like. In 2020, the service also introduced Stitch, which lets you integrate scenes from another video into your own. It enabled the quick creation of funny responses to viral videos and even responses that fact check wrong information going around on the platform. Reddit does allow you to post videos on its website, but it doesn't have features like Duet and Stitch yet.

You probably wouldn't think of Reddit if you're made to list social networks with a focus on video. And the goal of this project isn't to create a TikTok competitor, but rather to provide its users another way to engage in discussions, especially if the original post is also a video. Reddit did purchase TikTok rival Dubsmash back in 2020, but it shut down the service in February this year and incorporated video features from the defunct video-sharing platform. This particular project will also use video technology from Dubsmash. 

A spokesperson told TechCrunch that Reddit is now reaching out to individual communities to see if they're interested in the new video features. It will only take steps to begin initial testing after they receive (most likely positive) feedback from the communities:

"In line with our work to help people engage in the topics that matter to them through social audio, video, text, memes, and more, we're in the process of reaching out to a few Reddit communities to see if a new video feature we’re working on is something they find useful and fun. After getting feedback from Redditors, we’ll explore an initial test for this new capability."

The European Union has reached an agreement to adopt the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a sweeping antitrust law meant to rein in Apple, Google, Meta and other tech giants. Lawmakers reached a “provisional” agreement on the law Thursday, following hours of negotiations, the European Parliament wrote in a statement.

The law could have far-reaching implications, some of which could extend beyond Europe. Most notably, one of the primary provisions of the DMA is that messaging providers would need to make their services interoperable with other services, “EU lawmakers agreed that the largest messaging services (such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage) will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request,” the EU Parliament said following the agreement.

It’s unclear for now if this requirement would also apply to interoperability between the large messaging platforms themselves. Parliament wrote that the interoperability provisions for social networks “will be assessed in the future.”

In a statement, an Apple spokesperson said the company was "concerned" about some aspects of the law. "We remain concerned that some provisions of the DMA will create unnecessary privacy and security vulnerabilities for our users while others will prohibit us from charging for intellectual property in which we invest a great deal," the spokesperson said. "We believe deeply in competition and in creating thriving competitive markets around the world, and we will continue to work with stakeholders throughout Europe in the hopes of mitigating these vulnerabilities.”

Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The DMA also prohibits companies from “combining personal data for targeted advertising” without explicit consent, a move that could limit Meta and others’ ability to serve targeted ads to users. As The New York Times points out, there are still many questions about how European lawmakers will enforce these new rules and the companies in question are likely to raise legal challenges.

Earlier proposals of the law also included provisions that would change how Apple and Google ran their app stores. Under the proposed rules, Apple would have to allow users to install apps from other stores, and both Apple and Google would be required to allow developers to bypass their companies; storefronts and use their own billing. It’s unclear if those provisions were included in the latest agreement. The European Parliament will hold a press conference Friday, when they are expected to share more details.

Two former TikTok moderators filed a federal lawsuit seeking class-action status today against the platform and parent company Bytedance, reportedNPR. The plaintiffs, Ashley Velez and Reece Young, worked for the social video platform last year as contractors. To fulfill their role as moderators, they witnessed “many acts of extreme and graphic violence”, including murder, bestiality, necrophilia and other disturbing images. The lawsuit accuses TikTok of negligence and violating labor laws in California, the state where the platform's US operations is based.

Both plaintiffs said they were tasked with viewing hours of disturbing footage, often working 12-hour days. They both paid for counseling out-of-pocket in order to deal with the psychological toll of the job. The lawsuit accuses TikTok of imposing high “productivity standards” on moderators, which forced them to watch large volumes of disturbing content without a break. Both employees were also forced to sign non-disclosure agreements as a condition of their employment.

"We would see death and graphic, graphic pornography. I would see nude underage children every day," Velez told NPR. "I would see people get shot in the face, and another video of a kid getting beaten made me cry for two hours straight."

Moderators at Facebook and other platforms have spoken out in the past about the severe psychological toll of their jobs. Employees have alleged they're given a short period of time, usually only seconds, to determine whether a video violates the platform’s policies. The job has often been called “the worst job in technology," and workers regularly suffer from depression, PTSD-like symptoms and suicidal ideation. In a 2020 settlement,Facebook paid over $52 million to a group of former moderators who said they developed PTSD from the job.

This is not the first lawsuit of this type for TikTok, which currently has a base of 10,000 content moderators worldwide. Last December another content moderator for TikTok also sued the platform for negligence and violating workplace safety standards. According to NPR, the lawsuit was dropped last month after the plaintiff was fired.

The US Justice Department today announced indictments against four Russian government employees, who it alleges attempted a hacking campaign of the global energy sector that spanned six years and devices in roughly 135 countries. The two indictments were filed under seal last summer, and are finally being disclosed to the public.

The DOJ’s decision to release the documents may be a way to raise public awareness of the increased threat these kinds of hacks pose to US critical infrastructure in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. State-sponsored hackers have targeted energy, nuclear, water and critical manufacturing companies for years, aiming to steal information on their control systems. Cybersecurity officials noticed a spike in Russian hacking activity in the US in recent weeks.

“Russian state-sponsored hackers pose a serious and persistent threat to critical infrastructure both in the United States and around the world,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco in a statement. “Although the criminal charges unsealed today reflect past activity, they make crystal clear the urgent ongoing need for American businesses to harden their defenses and remain vigilant.

The indictments allege that two separate campaigns occurred between 2012 and 2018. The first one, filed in June 2021, involves Evgeny Viktorovich Gladkikh, a computer programmer at the Russian Ministry of Defense. It alleges that Gladkik and a team of co-conspirators were members of the Triton malware hacking group, which launched a failed campaign to bomb a Saudi petrochemical plant in 2017. As TechCrunchnoted, the Saudi plant would have been completely decimated if not for a bug in the code. In 2018, the same group attempted to hack US power plants but failed.

The second indictment charges three hackers who work for Russia’s intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), as being the members of the hacking group Dragonfly, which coordinated multiple attacks on nuclear power plants, energy companies, and other critical infrastructure. It alleges that the three men, Pavel Aleksandrovich Akulov, Mikhail Mikhailovich Gavrilov and Marat Valeryevich Tyukov engaged in multiple computer intrusions between 2012 and 2017. The DOJ estimates that the three hackers were able to install malware on more than 17,000 unique devices in the US and abroad.

A second phase known as Dragonfly 2.0, which occurred between 2014 and 2017, targeted more than 3,300 users across 500 different energy companies in the US and abroad. According to the DOJ, the conspirators were looking to access the software and hardware in power plants that would allow the Russian government to trigger a shutdown.

The US government is still looking for the three FSB hackers. The State Department today announced a $10 million award for any information on their whereabouts. However, as the Washington Postnotes, the US and Russia do not have an extradition treaty, so the likeliness of any of the alleged hackers being brought to trial by these indictments is slim.

Spontaneously generating reality is a messy affair.

Our Big Bang, for example, unleashed a universe’s worth of energy and matter in an instant, then flung it omnidirectionally away at the speed of light as temperatures throughout the growing cosmos exceeded 1,000 trillion degrees Celsius in the first few nanoseconds of time’s existence. The following couple hundred million years, during which time the universe cooled to the point that particles beyond quarks and photons could exist — when actual atoms like hydrogen and helium came into being — are known as the dark ages, on account of stars not yet existing to provide light.

Eventually however, vast clouds of elemental gasses compressed themselves enough to ignite, bringing illumination to a formerly dark cosmos and driving the process of cosmic reionization, which is why the universe isn’t still just a whole bunch of hydrogen and helium atoms. The actual process of how the light from those new stars interacted with surrounding gas clouds to create the ionized plasma that spawned heavier elements is not fully understood but a team of researchers at MIT have just announced that their mathematical model of this turbulent epoch is the largest and most detailed devised to date.

The Thesan simulation, named in honor of the Etruscan goddess of dawn, simulates the period of cosmic reionization looking at the interactions between gasses, gravity, and radiation in a 100 million cubic light year space. Researchers can scrub through a synthetic timeline extending from 400,000 years to 1 billion years after the Big Bang to see how changing different variables within the model impacts the generated outcomes.

“Thesan acts as a bridge to the early universe,” Aaron Smith, NASA Einstein Fellow in the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, told MIT News. “It is intended to serve as an ideal simulation counterpart for upcoming observational facilities, which are poised to fundamentally alter our understanding of the cosmos.”

It boasts higher detail at a larger volume than any previous simulation thanks to a novel algorithm tracking light’s interaction with gas that dovetails with separate galaxy formation and cosmic dust behavior models.

“Thesan follows how the light from these first galaxies interacts with the gas over the first billion years and transforms the universe from neutral to ionized,” Rahul Kannan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which partnered with MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics on this project, told MIT News. “This way, we automatically follow the reionization process as it unfolds.”

Powering this simulation is the SuperMUC-NG supercomputer in Garching, Germany. Its 60,000 computing cores run the equivalent of 30 million CPU hours in parallel to crunch the numbers needed by Thesan. The team has already seen surprising results from the experiment as well.

“Thesan found that light doesn’t travel large distances early in the universe,” Kannan said. “In fact, this distance is very small, and only becomes large at the very end of reionization, increasing by a factor of 10 over just a few hundred million years.” 

That is, light at the end of the reionization period traveled further than researchers had previously figured. They have also noticed that the type and mass of a galaxy may influence the reionization process, though the Thesan team was quick to point out that corroborating real-world observations will be needed before that hypothesis is confirmed.

Grimes’ connections to hacking extend beyond a Cyberpunk 2077 cameo, apparently. Cybersecurity expert Jackie Singh and Pitchfork report the electropop star (aka Claire Boucher) confessed to hacking the culture blog Hipster Runoff in a Vanity Fairinterview. She said she coordinated a distributed denial of service attack against the site in 2012 after its anonymous author Carles posted an allegedly “mean” story including a photo of her kissing a friend at a party.

At the time, Carles told Motherboard there was evidence of “foul play” on the server, including a disk crash and sabotaged backups. Grimes said she and her fellow, still-anonymous perpetrator (from the games industry) “basically blackmail[ed]” Carles into removing the story before they would let him restore Hipster Runoff.

The admission might be more than just an interesting anecdote. As Pitchfork explains, DDoS attacks have long been illegal in both the US and Grimes' home country of Canada — both nations can sentence culprits to as many as 10 years in prison. Blackmail, of course, has been illegal for longer. Law enforcement could theoretically charge Boucher and her accomplice based on the interview. Current Hipster Runoff owner Trevor McFedries has asked Twitter followers if anyone has a backup of the site under Carles, so the story might not be over yet.