The Federal Aviation Administration has given SpaceX final regulatory approval to carry out Starship’s first orbital flight test. Per Ars Technica, the FAA on late Friday afternoon issued the company a license to launch its next-generation rocket from South Texas. “After a comprehensive license evaluation process, the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy, payload, airspace integration and financial responsibility requirements,” the agency said in a statement. “The license is valid for five years.”

As of Friday, SpaceX said it would attempt to carry out the long-awaited test on Monday morning, with the launch window opening at 7AM local time. Per Ars Technica’s Eric Berger, the forecast for the Monday launch attempt looks ideal, with moderate winds and clear skies expected. If SpaceX calls the test off, the company has backup opportunities available on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

Getting to this point has been a long road for SpaceX. In addition to all the technical hurdles it has had to overcome, the FAA put the company’s Boca Chica facility through a comprehensive environmental assessment. Located near the Gulf of Mexico, the launch site is surrounded by wetlands that are home to hundreds of thousands of shorebirds. Last June, the FAA gave SpaceX a list of 75 actions it had to complete to protect the local wildlife around the facility. With those out of the way, now all the company needs to worry about are any remaining technical issues affecting Starship. 

Apple’s forthcoming 15-inch MacBook Air will feature a processor “on par” with the company’s current M2 chip. According to Bloomberg, Apple recently began testing the laptop to ensure its compatibility with third-party App Store apps, something the company does in the lead-up to the release of a new device.

Developer logs shared with the outlet show the machine was configured with a chipset that featured an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU, along with 8GB of RAM. Those specs suggest the 15-inch MacBook Air, referred to as “Mac 15,3” in the logs, will ship with an M2 chipset, not Apple’s next-generation chip, as some past reports had suggested. “Bigger changes to the Mac will come later with the release of an M3 chip,” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman notes. The new machine was spotted running macOS 14, which Apple is expected to announce at WWDC 2023

About the most interesting detail revealed by the logs is that the 15-inch MacBook Air features a display resolution “equal” to that of the 14-inch MacBook Pro. That means the new MacBook Air features a less dense display. It’s unclear when Apple plans to release the new laptop. The company announced the M2 MacBook Air at WWDC 2022. Gurman previously reported the 15-inch MacBook Air would arrive sometime between late spring and this summer.

WhatsApp has begun rolling out a handful of new security features. The most notable sees the company doing more to protect users against SIM jacking and other social engineering attacks that could compromise your account. The next time you download WhatsApp on a new device, you may be asked to use your old device to confirm you want to move your account to a new phone.

If you’re worried about the potential of being locked out of your account, a WhatsApp spokesperson told Engadget Account Protect will only activate if the company detects a suspicious registration attempt. Moreover, if you don’t have access to your old device, you can request the company send you a second one-time passcode.

Whether or not you decide to switch devices anytime soon, your WhatsApp account will be safer, thanks to the new introduction of new background checks. You won’t need to directly interact with the verification features WhatsApp is adding. Nonetheless, the company says they will help secure your account against malware, and better protect you if your WhatsApp is ever compromised.

Separately, WhatsApp is also making it easier for users to verify their connection with someone is encrypted. Right now, verifying your connection with someone involves either scanning a QR code or comparing a 60-digit number, both of which you can find by tapping the Encryption tab under a contact’s info sheet. Moving forward, tapping the tab will automatically verify whether your connection is secure.

The new features will roll out to all WhatsApp users in the coming months. In the meantime, if you want to do the most you can to secure your account, WhatsApp parent company Meta recommends you enable two-factor authentication and encrypted backups.

Nearly two years after Jeff Bezos said Amazon would spend $300 million to improve workplace safety, a coalition of labor unions claims the company was responsible for 53 percent of all serious warehouse injuries recorded in the US last year. In a report released on Wednesday (PDF link), the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) said data collected by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) shows Amazon warehouse workers continue to suffer injuries more frequently than their non-Amazon counterparts. It also claims those injuries were often more severe.

In 2022, Amazon reported a total of 38,609 recordable injuries. Per the SOC, those are incidents that require a worker to either take time off from their regular job or seek medical treatment beyond first aid. Of those injuries, 95 percent were those the organization considers serious either because Amazon had to temporarily reassign the worker to a less strenuous role or give them time off to recover.

After crunching the data, the SOC found Amazon’s total injury rate in 2022 was 6.9 injuries per 100 workers. Comparatively, that’s a better rate than the 7.9 injuries per 100 workers the company recorded last year, and the staggering nine injuries per 100 workers the SOC says Amazon managed in 2019, but the organization contends the data shows Amazon “failed to make meaningful progress on worker safety.” Specifically, the SOC points to the rate at which Amazon workers suffered “serious” injuries. At 6.6 per 100 workers, the organization says Amazon’s 2022 serious injury rate is 12 percent higher than the one the company recorded in 2020 and more than double the rate seen at non-Amazon warehouses last year.

Put another way, the SOC claims more than half of all serious US warehouse injuries in 2022 occured at Amazon, despite the company only employing 36 percent of all US warehouse workers last year. “For a corporation that prides itself on moving quickly and decisively informed by sophisticated data analysis, Amazon’s ongoing failure to provide safe working conditions raises major questions about whether the company’s management is serious about becoming ‘earth’s safest place to work,’ or whether it continues to put profits before the safety of the very people responsible for its success,” the report states.

Amazon disputes the Strategic Organizing Center’s interpretation of the data it shared with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Specifically, it takes issue with SOC’s use of “serious injury rate,” noting it’s not an official OSHA metric. The agency does track when a workplace injury requires a worker to either change roles or take time off. However, Amazon contends that metric – known as DART or “days away, restricted, or transferred rates” – is not shorthand for a serious injury. It claims DART metrics often incorporate “relatively minor” injuries. Instead, the company says critics should look at its recordable injuries and how long workers have taken off to recover from workplace incidents. When you look at those numbers, Amazon says the data shows it has made significant progress in recent years.

“The safety and health of our employees is, and always will be, our top priority, and any claim otherwise is inaccurate. It’s unsurprising that a self-interested group like this would work to twist the facts to paint an inaccurate picture. While we know we have more work to do, the truth is clearly outlined in our safety report and we encourage anyone to both tour our facilities and read our safety report,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Natel told Engadget. “That report shows that since 2019, the recordable injury rate across our network has dropped more than 23 percent and the lost time injury rate has dropped more than 53 percent. We’re proud the progress made by our team and we’ll continue working hard together to keep getting better every day.”

Intel and ARM, arguably two of the most important players in modern chipmaking, are joining forces. On Wednesday, the companies announced a “multigeneration” agreement to optimize Intel’s upcoming 18A fabrication process for use with ARM designs and intellectual property. The deal won’t see Intel’s Foundry Services division produce chipsets for ARM. Instead, it will make it easier for ARM licensees, including the likes of Qualcomm and MediaTek, to hire Intel to make chips in the future.

To start, the firms plan to focus on optimizing Intel 18A for mobile system-on-a-chip designs. In the future, Intel and ARM say their partnership could extend to silicon designed for use in cars, Internet of Things devices and data centers. Additionally, the support Intel will offer ARM licensees will extend beyond wafer production to include “packaging, software and chiplets,” suggesting Intel envisions itself acting as a one-stop shop for companies that want it to produce their ARM designs.

Naturally, Intel is also quick to allude to the geopolitical ramifications of the agreement. “This collaboration will enable a more balanced global supply chain for foundry customers working in mobile SoC design on Arm-based CPU cores,” the company said. According to an estimate Counterpoint Research published last July, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) produces nearly 70 percent of all the chipsets that are critical to modern smartphones. On Monday, China concluded a three-day military exercise that involved the encirclement of Taiwan. The drills heightened fears of an impending war on the island. 

More than a month after hiring a couple of former DeepMind researchers, Twitter is reportedly moving forward with an in-house artificial intelligence project. According to Business Insider, Elon Musk recently bought 100,000 GPUs for use at one of the company’s two remaining data centers. A source told the outlet the purchase shows Musk is “committed” to the effort, particularly given the fact there would be little reason for Twitter to spend so much money on datacenter-grade GPUs if it didn’t plan to use them for AI work.

The project reportedly involves the creation of a generative AI that the company would train on its own massive trove of data. It’s unclear how Twitter would utilize the technology. Insider suggests a generative AI could augment the platform’s search functionality or assist the company in rebuilding its advertising business. In any case, the report colors Musk’s recent decision to sign an open letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development.

Musk has been a vocal critic of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research organization he co-founded in 2015. “I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” Musk said in one of his recent Twitter missives against the lab’s for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Limited Partnership.

However, a recent report from Semafor suggests his feud with OpenAI is more personal. In 2018, Musk reportedly told Sam Altman, one his fellow co-founders at OpenAI, the lab was falling too far behind Google. Musk then suggested that he should be the one to run the firm, a proposal Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected.

The power struggle led to Musk’s departure from OpenAI, though publicly both parties maintain Musk left due to a conflict of interest involving Tesla. At the time, OpenAI said the billionaire would continue to fund its research. However, according to Semafor, Musk’s payments stopped after his departure – despite a promise to provide the firm with roughly $1 billion. The sudden shortfall left OpenAI scrambling to raise cash. In 2019, the organization announced it was creating a for-profit subsidiary to secure the capital it needed to fund its work. That same year, the firm announced a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. When OpenAI opened ChatGPT to the public in November and the chatbot began to dominate headlines, Musk was reportedly “furious.” One month later, he cut OpenAI’s access to Twitter’s “firehose” of data. And now it would appear he wants to compete against his old organization head-on.

After a day-long absence, Lofi Girl has returned. If you missed yesterday’s news, she went missing as part of an elaborate marketing campaign that saw the Lofi Girl team promise a “surprise” that would take the channel to “new heights.” In the end, that surprise turned out to be a new 24-hour livestream dedicated to synthwave music, a subgenre of electronic music that seeks to emulate the sound and feel of classic sci-fi and horror soundtracks from the '80s. 

Naturally, the new channel has its own mascot, a character the community has taken to calling Lofi Boy. As far as we know, he doesn’t have a name, but like any good synth-loving fan, he has a mechanical keyboard, a retro beige PC with CRT monitor and what looks like a Sony Walkman for the rare moments when he gets to leave his room.

As with the original Lofi Girl YouTube channel, you can find playlists featuring tracks from the Synthwave Radio station on Spotify and other music streaming platforms.

Twitter faces yet another lawsuit over unpaid bills. As first reported by The New York Times, three former executives sued the company on Monday. In a complaint filed with the Delaware Chancery Court, former CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal and former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde allege Twitter owes them more than $1 million in unreimbursed legal fees.

Elon Musk fired all three execs after taking control of the company last fall. The former executives allege Twitter spent months ignoring letters they sent asking it to honor a reimbursement agreement they had in place before their termination. According to the complaint, Twitter finally acknowledged the letters last month but did little else. As of Monday, the trio was still waiting on the company to repay the fees.

The former execs say they incurred the legal fees responding to shareholder lawsuits and several government investigations, including one involving the US Department of Justice. The complaint states federal officials began sending requests to Agrawal and Segal last July. Then, late last year, the Justice Department contacted Agrawal and Segal’s lawyers to discuss multiple investigations into Twitter. As CNN notes, the Justice Department has not previously disclosed an investigation into Twitter.

The lawsuit highlights Twitter’s ongoing financial challenges. At the end of last year, the owner of the building that houses Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters sued the company for failing to pay rent. Musk has eliminated more than 75 percent of the approximately 7,500-person workforce Twitter employed under Agrawal. Last month, Musk said Twitter saw a 50 percent decline in ad revenue.

Since 2017, Jade – aka the face of the Lofi Girl YouTube channel – has been a near-constant companion for fans of quiet, contemplative music. Now, she is missing. At approximately 1PM ET, Jade and her ginger tabby simply disappeared, and not since a false copyright claim took down the YouTube channel for a few days last year has the Lofi Girl fandom been this abuzz.

In her absence, the stream began to slowly zoom in on a window found on one of the buildings opposite Jade’s home. A blinking blue light produced a morse code that fans found points to www.lofiworld.com. As of the writing of this article, there’s not much to see. Clicking the “Launch” button redirects you to a second Lofi Girl stream that’s playing ambient music. The stream features a clock that’s counting down to April 11th at 1PM ET. Outside of that, there’s not much to go on. The room is bathed in blue light and filled with early aughts memorabilia, including a Gunpla model from Mobile Suit Gundam Wing and a Nintendo GameCube. What it all points to, no one knows yet other than an elaborate marketing campaign.

Earlier in the day, Team AMW, the marketing agency that represents the Lofi Girl channel, published a press release promising a “surprise” on April 11th that would take the channel’s “immersive experience to new heights.” As Polygon notes, there’s already official Lofi Girl merch you can buy, so there’s probably something more involved on the horizon. Either way, we’ll find out how this mystery ends tomorrow.

For the first time, the US Federal Trade Commission has fined an organization for “review hijacking.” In February, the agency accused The Bountiful Company, maker of the Nature’s Bounty brand of vitamins, of deceiving consumers. Between 2020 and 2021, Bountiful abused a feature of Amazon to make it seem like some of its newer supplements had higher product reviews and ratings than they did in reality.

If you have ever bought something on Amazon, you’ve almost certainly interacted with the feature Bountiful attempted to game. Some listings include a set of icons that highlight different “variations” of that same product. For example, if you visit the page for Sony’s popular WH-1000XM5, the feature will highlight that the headphones are available in three different colors. By design, Amazon designed this feature to be narrow. Sellers are supposed to use it to showcase that a product they offer is available in a different color, size, quantity or flavor.

That’s not what The Bountiful Company did. According to the FTC, Bountiful used the feature to give newer products a boost from older, more well-established ones with different formulations. In one internal email the agency obtained, Bountiful lamented that “people did not love” one of its new vitamins but noted sales “spiked the second we variated the pages and they continue to grow.”

On Monday, the FTC said it voted unanimously to approve a consent order that carries a $600,000 fine for Bountiful and bars the company from employing such tactics in the future. “Boosting your products by hijacking another product’s ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic, but is still plain old false advertising,” said Samuel Levine, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

“There’s no place for fraud in Amazon’s store. We have proactive measures in place to prevent listing abuse and we continuously monitor our store,” an Amazon spokesperson told Engadget. “Our policies prohibit reviews abuse including offering incentives like gift cards to write positive reviews. We suspend, ban, and take legal action against those who violate these policies and remove inauthentic reviews.”

According to Amazon, “more than 99 percent” of the products people view on its marketplace “contain only authentic reviews.” If you find what you think is a fake review, the company recommends tapping the “Report” button so it can investigate and take action. The spokesperson added Amazon would continue working with FTC and other enforcement agencies to combat fraudsters.