To get OG Black Widow in Fortnite, players must purchase the skin from the Item Shop for 1,500 V-Bucks before it leaves Fortnite on Nov. 29 at 7 p.m. ET.

Slack, the workplace chat app, has stopped working for some of it users. Users saw an array of error messages, indicating that “something went wrong”. Slack’s status page showed that the site was up as usual, and that it was not aware of any problems. But a wide array of users reported problems on Twitter, and tracking website Down Detector showed a large outage.

Australia needs to encourage new investment in natural gas production to help prevent any domestic energy crunch and

CALGARY, Alberta & WINNIPEG, Manitoba--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 26, 2023--

By Josh Ye HONG KONG Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings said that it will look for domestic source

RESTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 23, 2023--

The artificial intelligence boom continues to fuel a blockbuster year for chipmaker Nvidia.

The ocean is home to all manner of mysteries, from “alien” shape-shifters to ancient shipwrecks. And so, when Richard Branson and a team of scientists took a submersible down to the bottom of Belize’s iconic Giant Blue Hole, they were braced for some truly extraordinary sights. The Blue Hole is the largest sinkhole in the world, measuring 300m (984 feet) across and around 125m (410 feet) deep but, until Branson’s expedition in 2018 its depths had not been fully explored. The British billionaire was joined on his groundbreaking journey by Fabien Cousteau – the grandson of pioneering underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau – and oceanographer Erika Bergman. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Their mission was to create a 3D map of the hole’s interior but, when they reached the bottom, they were met by some disturbing discoveries. To be fair, they got off to a good start. The first thing they encountered as they edged down the hole was a wall of giant stalactites, which were “breathtakingly beautiful,” according to Branson. Then, at around 300 feet, they pierced a thick layer of toxic hydrogen sulphide, plunging them into darkness and cutting out the oxygen from the water around them. In an interview with CNN, Bergman explained that once you pierce that layer, which forms naturally over centuries, “you lose all of that Caribbean sunlight and it just turns completely black.” Elsewhere, Branson described it as “extremely eerie,” saying: “We didn’t expect to see any creatures below. But when we got to the bottom we could see crabs, conches and other creatures that had fallen into the hole, arrived on the bottom and then ran out of oxygen and died.” As the team continued to travel further down into the abyss, they were faced with the remains of a tragedy. In an interview with Business Insider back in July 2020, Bergman revealed that they found the bodies of two people who have “been lost in the Blue Hole”. “We found the resting place of a couple [of] folks,” she said. “And we just sort of very respectfully let the Belize government know where we found them.” She added that “everyone decided that we would just not attempt any recovery”, noting: “It's very dark and peaceful down there, [so we] just kind of let them stay.” As they reached the bottom, the team found something else unexpected, and very much unwelcome: human rubbish. It came in the form of a 2-litre Coke bottle and a lost GoPro containing some holiday snaps, according to Business Insider. “As for the mythical monsters of the deep? Well, the real monsters facing the ocean are climate change – and plastic,” Branson lamented following the discovery. “Sadly, we saw plastic bottles at the bottom of the hole, which is a real scourge of the ocean.” The business magnate said the expedition had offered “one of the starkest reminders of the danger of climate change [he had] ever seen.” He pointed out: “The Blue Hole is made of a complex system of caves that once formed on dry land. It is proof of how oceans can rise quickly and catastrophically. “Sea levels were once hundreds of feet lower. 10,000 years ago the sea level rose by about 300 feet when a lot of ice melted around the world. At 300 feet down you could see the change in the rock where it used to be land and turned into sea.” He added in his blog: “Hopefully by this trip taking place we have raised even more awareness of the need to protect the ocean and tackle climate change now – before it is too late.” He stressed that he didn’t want his grandchildren to “grow up in a world without corals, without the wonders of the ocean”. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

With less than a month before federal student loan payments restart after the years-long pandemic pause, many borrowers are having a hard time connecting with their loan servicer.

Elon Musk’s Twitter has started sending payments to some of its most most popular and controversial users. The scheme is part of what Twitter says is an ad revenue sharing programme, which will let people keep some of the money generated from showing advertising in the replies to their tweets. It is still not clear exactly how the size of the payments is decided, and some have reported receiving tens of thousands of dollars. Users must be subscribed to Twitter Blue and have at least five million impressions on their posts. The payments have gone to popular Twitter users that include some of the most controversial on the site. Andrew Tate, for instance, shared that he had received a payment of $20,000 from Twitter. Many of those who have received payouts have had their accounts boosted by Elon Musk in recent months. Mr Musk has often replied to some of the site’s users – especially those focused on politics – seemingly in an attempt to draw more attention to those accounts. Some critics of Mr Musk had suggested that he had favoured right-wing accounts in the first payouts. But the nature of the accounts may also be affected by the fact that users must pay for Twitter’s premium Blue membership – which has been embraced by many of Mr Musk’s political allies – and other non-political accounts did post that they had received payments. Mr Musk first announced the ad sharing plan in February, saying that the idea was to allow people to “create an interesting thread and get paid for it”. The payments that are being sent to the first users are based on the impressions their posts have gathered since that plan was first announced, he said in a recent tweet. In a thread, Twitter said that the scheme was intended to allow people to make a living directly on Twitter. Until now, users have had to monetise their following in other ways – usually by sending traffic to other platforms. “We’re expanding our creator monetisation offering to include ads revenue sharing for creators. This means that creators can get a share in ad revenue, starting in the replies to their posts,” the company wrote on its official account. “This is part of our effort to help people earn a living directly on Twitter. We’re rolling out the program more broadly later this month and all eligible creators will be able to apply. Go get yourself something nice!” Twitter said that it will soon launch an application process for ads revenue sharing. It is not clear how those who received early payments were chosen. After some users attempted to calculate how much money accounts were receiving per view, Mr Musk cautioned that the system includes some other controls. He said that the payouts are “not exactly per impression”, and were instead based on how many ads were shown to other verified users, which he said was done to ensure that people were not able to use bots to drive up their impressions. Mr Musk also said that he had given the money generated from his own tweets to the creator payout pool. Twitter’s announcement comes soon after Meta announced its own competitor to the site, in the form of Threads. That app has grown rapidly – and while it is still unclear how much it has affected the user base of Twitter, some away from the company have said that the site’s traffic is “tanking”.

Amazon says it will soon start using drones to drop packages into people’s gardens from the air in the UK. Customers will be able to make orders and then have Amazon load their packages into autonomous aircraft at its fulfilment centres, the company said. Those drones will then fly to their house, and drop the package into the garden from the air, doing so within 60 minutes, it said. For customers, the drones will be offered alongside the usual set of delivery options, and for no extra price. The deliveries are intended to sit alongside traditional deliveries for when people want small items such as suncream or Fire Sticks quickly, Amazon said. The drones should be launched from new locations by the end of 2024, Amazon said as part of a host of announcements for its plans for Prime Air, its drone delivery arm. It also announced a new drone, which it calls the MK30, which it says is quieter and able to operate in more diverse conditions, such as light rain. Like the existing drones, those new ones are capable of carrying one, 5lb package in a dedicated storage container built into the drone. The package is then ejected out of that container when the drone arrives at the delivery point, which will generally be in customers’ gardens. Amazon stressed that it had looked to build the drones with safety features such as the ability to spot any obstacles, seemingly in an attempt to allay concerns about the danger they may pose, especially in suburban areas. The drone includes technology that will stop deliveries if it spots a pet in the drop-off area, for instance. The drones then fly themselves back to their base, and land vertically just as they take off, on the stands from which they are launched. They can then have their batteries swapped for the next launch. Amazon has already launched drone delivery in two locations in the US, in Texas and California. It says those projects have delivered “thousands” of packages in the last 12 months since those projects launched. But it will now launch a similar scheme in the UK, as well as in Italy and at another US location, by the end of 2024. It has not said exactly where those drones will fly from, but suggested that it will do so soon. The drones will be able to fly out to about 12 kilometres from their base, which will be located in one of the UK’s fulfilment centres. The location has been chosen and will be announced in a “couple of months”, he said. The company intends to expand the rollout after that, however, with Amazon’s head of Prime Air telling The Independent that there is a “mapped-out plan” to open more facilities over time. “This is not a market test,” he said. That is part of a plan to increase deliveries from thousands now to hundreds of millions by the end of the decade. “Our vision for a successful delivery solution for our customers, who really want their packages faster, is to be able to deliver 500 million packages by the end of the decade to customers in highly-populated, dense urban areas,” Mr Carbon said. Mr Carbon said that Amazon had chosen the UK for its next expansion in recognition of its aerospace heritage, as well as Amazon’s large footprint in the country and high demand from customers. He also said that Prime Air had a “great legacy” in the country, with the first ever successful Amazon drone delivery happening in Cambridge in 2016, though its operations have been scaled back in the country since. Showing off Amazon’s work on drones to reporters in Seattle, Mr Carbon said that much of the recent work had gone into safety features, and he said the new drones were certified in the same way as traditional planes. Amazon’s current drones are twice as safe as driving to a physical store to pick up an item, he said, and the upcoming MK30 is “two orders of magnitude” safer than making that journey. He suggested that part of the reason for expanding the drone network was to reduce the number of cars making deliveries in busy cities, as well as reducing the need for panicked and potentially unsafe journeys to shops when people need ultra-fast deliveries. But he also said that there was “absolutely” a demand for such quick deliveries from customers. It was clear that customers “want stuff fast”, he said. Amazon is “committed to taking technology, finding technology, developing technology” to make the experience of deliveries better in response, he said. Amazon has not said how much the drone project has cost in the more than a decade it has been in operation. It also would not say exactly how many drones are in its fleet, or give any information the economics of the flights, such as how many deliveries would be required for it to be profitable. But he did stress that the new rollout is “not about proving that you can deliver a package by drone” and is not a pilot or a test scheme, but a real rollout of the technology with a view to making it widespread. He did say however that it would “start slow” to increase the chances of success. The UK has its own regulatory framework, and Amazon said it had been working with regulators and the government to ensure the drones are ready to launch by the end of next year. But it also comes with its own challenges, such as dense urban areas, fewer gardens and less use of the grid system that can make US neighbourhoods easier to map. Mr Carbon said that Amazon had designed the drone and the other systems that support its journeys to be able to do so in a range of different environments. The drone “has been designed to cope with where our customers are”, he said. Amazon was unable to say what restrictions it expected regulators to put on the drones’ flights, such as weather they would be allowed to cross roads and whether someone would need to have sight of it at all times. It said that it was working on technologies to give the drones more capabilities – such as the ability to autonomously spot and avoid obstacles – with the hope that those would allow for less restrictions. UK regulator the Civil Aviation Authority suggested that Amazon’s work would lead to changes such as the ability for commercial flights to operate without being watched by their pilot. “Exploring the options of how drones can be safely and successfully incorporated into more of the UK’s airspace is key,” Frederic Laugere, head of innovation advisory services at the UK Civil Aviation Authority. “It is vital that projects such as this take place to feed into the overall knowledge and experiences that will soon enable drones to be operating beyond the line of sight of their pilot on a day-to-day basis, while also still allowing safe and equitable use of the air by other users.” The new locations are just one part of a plan to bring the deliveries to “as many Amazon customers as our technology can safely enable”, Amazon said in its announcement. It plans to “soon” launch from “new cities, countries, and continents”, it said. 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Tyler 'Ninja' Blevins' competitive gaming journey started in 2009 when he ventured into the world of 'Halo 3'