In the wake of COVID-19 and bearing the impact of handling the individual stimulus check rollout, the Internal Revenue Service extended the traditional April 15 tax filing deadline by three months to July 15. And yes, Americans were more than happy to take advantage of the extra time. In fact, the IRS received over 21 million fewer returns by April 15 this year than last year, representing an almost 15 percent decline from 2019....

To mitigate this, researchers have developed tools to detect artificially generated text. However, new research from MIT suggests there might be a fundamental flaw in the way these detectors work. Traditionally, these tools trace back a text’s writing style to determine if it’s written by humans or a bot. They assume text written by humans is always legitimate and the text generated by bots is always fake. That means if even if a machine can generate legitimate text for some uses cases, it is deemed fake by these models....

Back in April last year, Monzo launched its “Plus” premium package which allowed customers to buy add-ons, such as travel insurance and extra cash withdrawals while abroad, for their accounts. [Read: German fintech N26 to leave UK — because Brexit] By September the company pulled the product from its app because of poor customer feedback. Many customers criticized Monzo’s premium accounts for being a brazen money making attempt and taking key features away from its free core offering....

The universe is beautiful, cruel and utterly brilliant. Case in point — cereal. There’s absolutely zero disagreement that cereal is the perfect food. Science has even proven it (kinda). If researchers confirm it’s “inexpensive, nutrient-dense, and convenient,” who are you to say otherwise? This is SCIENCE, dudes! Yet for all its near otherworldly transcendence, cereal might be the most unportable food stuff created by man. If you’ve ever tried to eat cereal while driving…well, you’ve NEVER tried to eat cereal while driving....

The independent space agency revealed on Thursday it had awarded $967 million in deals to three US companies in relation to its Artemis project: Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos’ Blue Origin, and IT firm Dynetics. The three firms will submit competing designs for a human landing system to be used in NASA’s Artemis project, and will only be paid once meeting specific development milestones. “We are on our way,” said NASA associate administrator Douglas Loverro....

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced the filing of a civil enforcement action yesterday, charging David Gilbert Saffron of Las Vegas, and Circle Society, Corp, with “fraudulent solicitation, misappropriation, and registration violations.” The complaint says that from at least December 2017, the defendants fraudulently solicited and accepted at least $11 million worth of Bitcoin and US dollars from at least 14 people in the United States. The money was then used to exchange binary options on foreign currencies and cryptocurrency pairs, among other things....

Life on Earth emerged as the result of a bunch of chemicals swirling around in a primordial ooze until they turned into amino acids, then proteins, and eventually cells. The spark of life happened at some point and those non-living cells and clusters went through an evolutionary transition into living organisms. Here we are 3.5 billion years later and we don’t know much else about the process. We know that evolution plays a major role, but exactly what causes the evolutionary transition has eluded scientists so far....

This technique of obfuscating malicious code in plain sight — a method called steganography — was uncovered by BlackBerry’s cybersecurity subsidiary Cylance. “When played, some of the WAV files produced music that had no discernible quality issues or glitches. Others simply generated static (white noise),” the researchers noted. But in reality, the WAV files — delivered via targeted phishing emails — were a vector to distribute malicious payloads that surreptitiously abused the infected host to mine cryptocurrency Monero....

The bill updates the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. In essence, it allows law-enforcement agencies or authorities (such as the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission) to modify, add, copy or delete data when investigating serious online crimes. The Human Rights Law Centre says the bill has insufficient safeguards for free speech and press freedom. Digital Rights Watch calls it a “warrantless surveillance regime” and notes the government ignored the recommendations of a bipartisan parliamentary committee to limit the powers granted by the new law....

According to the monthly vehicle registration report from the country’s Federal Transport Authority (KBA), in January 2020, Tesla registrations increased by 168 percent over December 2019. [Read: Tesla Model 3 drives surge in UK’s battery-powered vehicle registrations] Indeed, while Tesla managed significant growth — the most of any carmaker in Germany in January — it’s far from the most popular marque in the European nation. Tesla registered 367 new vehicles in Germany in January....

Dubbed Chongseo 1.0, the software is practically an encyclopedia-like ebook packed with writings by North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il, who also ruled the country between 1994 and 2011. The software is available for multiple operating systems, including Windows and North Korea’s own Linux-based Red Star. North Korea is looking to distribute the digital book nationwide. There are also plans to develop a new and improved version – Chongseo 2....

According to a recent study published in the journal of Transportation Research, Norwegian ebike riders more than quadrupled their daily use of the bicycle for transport over six months. After buying an ebike, riders covered 9.2 km (5.7 miles) per day on average, up from 2.1 km (1.3 miles) per day before their purchase. Researchers Aslak Fyhri and Hanne Beate Sundfør, from Norway’s Institute for Transport Economics, say the mode change to ebikes as transport is “not just a novelty effect....

At TNW Towers, we smoothly circumvent these barriers by creating custom masterpieces — like these glorious pictures of Mark Zuckerberg: Sadly, not everyone is blessed with such virtuosity — including yours truly. Just check out the monstrosity I made atop this article. Thankfully, AI could soon conceal our artistic ineptitudes, by enabling photorealistic image generation. Nvidia’s new GauGAN2 demo gives a glimpse of the potential. The system can translate text into realist-looking pictures, which you can then edit to your heart’s content....

But Nvidia wants to fix this — and has just released a research paper in collaboration with Stanford University that shows a concept for an ultra-thin pair of holographic glasses for virtual reality. First off, let’s look at why today’s VR headsets are so bulky. Effectively, this is down to the magnifier principle of VR display optics. As per Nvidia’s and Stanford’s paper, regular headsets work with the “lens [enlarging] the image of a small microdisplay....

That’s why you need to keep an eye out for deals like Obior Website Building and Hosting, whose Elite Plan featuring a year of web building and hosting features is on sale now for just $19.99 from TNW Deals. With Obior, complete web novices can get an attractive, functioning website up and open in minutes. Just choose your template, follow the simple step-by-step guide to fully customize its look and feel and add your preferred extras like constantly updating social media feeds....

It may sound like the stuff of nightmares, but Mark Zuckerberg hopes to make it a reality. Yup, the 37-year-old billionaire wants to build a metaverse. “You can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it,” he told The Verge. In Zuckerberg’s vision, the metaverse will be accessible across VR, AR, PCs, mobile devices, and game consoles: Inside the metaverse, Zuckerberg imagines us jumping into 3D concerts from our phones and sitting together as holograms on couches....

I know we all need to have the occasional meeting to discuss project specifics or brainstorm new ideas — and this really isn’t an issue. The problem arises when you’re constantly being pulled into countless (and pointless) meetings, where everyone sits around talking about doing stuff but nothing of substance gets agreed or there are no real action points follow. With this in mind, I’ve put together a few pointers that should hopefully make your meetings more productive, even without your co-workers knowing....

Today, one of those apps, Otter.ai, announced that its new Chrome extension will allow users to transcribe Google Meet calls directly from the browser. That’s an extremely handy feature — so you should be incredibly excited. A lot of my interviews are scheduled over Google Meet, and till now, I had to listen to them on the laptop speaker and record them on my phone for live transcription. But this is ancient history now....

Welcome to the latest edition of Pardon The Intrusion, TNW’s bi-weekly newsletter in which we explore the wild world of security. The clock is ticking for TikTok. The popular short-form video sharing app, which is already banned in India, is facing a similar roadblock in the US, where the Trump administration has escalated its threats to ban the platform along with WeChat. Even as ByteDance and Microsoft are hammering out a possible deal, the big question is: should you delete TikTok off your phone?...

To unlock a Pixel, the operator must hold it up to their face while onboard cameras and sensors go to work scanning their mug for defining characteristics — the distance between your eyes, for example. Once the device is confident it’s you, it unlocks and allows you to access the operating system. With Google’s system, according to the BBC, the Pixel’s Face Unlock function works even if a user’s eyes are closed, a clear and security risk for anyone with a Pixel 4....