Microsoft Urges Study of Tech Impact on Privacy, Ethics, News

Countdown halted. The space sector may be booming but SpaceX is shrinking a bit, laying off 10% of its workforce. The move to cut employees “is taken only due to the extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead and would not otherwise be necessary,” the company said in a statement. Speaking of outer space, the two Chinese moon rovers on the Chang’e-4 mission are snapping pictures of each other. If only they had dueling Insta accounts.

Got a lot of beef, so logically, I prey on my foes. Jay-Z’s music subscription service, Tidal, is under investigation in Norway for possibly falsely inflating the listenership of certain artists, Bloomberg reports. The Norwegian Authority for Investigation of Economic and Environmental Crime is reviewing complaints from other artists, who say they were underpaid as a result.

Pay up. Hackers have extorted almost $4 million in bitcoin by installing the ransomware program Ryuk on corporate computers. The hackers success is likely to breed more attacks, several cybersecurity firms (whose business depends on corporations’ perceived need to be protected) said.

Get the machine that goes ping. Doctors in China used a 5G wireless network to perform remote surgery on a test animal. The lag between the commands from the doctor operating the remote controls and the robotic surgeon was reported to be just 0.1 seconds.

Holding back the tide. As meat alternatives like the Impossible Burger proliferate, lawmakers in cattle-producing states are fighting back—via food labeling rules. Missouri restricted the use of the word “meat” on packaging last year, and Nebraska is now considering similar legislation, the Associated Press reports.