'Right to repair' law could save households £75 a year 

Check back tomorrow!

Ever-volatile video game shop GameStop's share price inched toward a record high on Wednesday before plummeting unexpectedly, losing investors more than $100 (£71) a share in a matter of minutes.

The shares were trading up to 36pc above Tuesday's close, near to GameStop's January 27 record of $347.51 per share. 

However, as the price plunged, it fell below Tuesday's closing price of $246.90. Trading was halted several times. 

Thanks to a flurry of retail traders who used social media to hype up the stock and create a short squeeze, GameStop shares are up more than 7,000pc over the past 12 months.

The price skyrocketed again this week after the struggling gaming chain announced it had hired Ryan Cohen, the founder of pet food site Chewy.com. Mr Cohen will hire a host of executives to lead its customer care and online retail operations.

Hackers  accessed the Norwegian Parliament’s computer systems and extracted data, Reuters have reported,  just six months after a previous cyber attack on politicians was discovered. 

The recent attack was more damaging than last year's, Tone Wilhelmsen Troen, head of parliament, told a news conference on Wednesday.

“This is an attack on our democracy,” she said. “The severity is underscored by the fact that this is happening in the run-up to a parliamentary election and as parliament is handling a pandemic.”

Micrososft have attributed the Exchange hack to China, however the US government has warned that multiple hacking groups may have used the vulnerability to exploit databases belonging to organisations around the world. 

Brandon Wales, the acting Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said that the attackers in the recently discovered Microsoft Exchange attack were motivated not just to conduct espionage and install ransomware but to physically damage the technology belonging to organisations around the world, Margi Murphy writes.

The perpetrators, whom Microsoft has linked to China, may have been exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange which allows them to access and control a company’s network even after the vulnerability is patched for months. 

Cybersecurity company Volexity warned Microsoft about the flaw last week, and CISA along with the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre have been advising businesses to urgently update their systems. 

Wales, speaking at the US House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday to discuss modernising cybersecurity said the attackers were motivated by "stealing information, executing ransomware attacks and physically damaging connected infrastructure". 

In damaging the servers, networks and computers which are connected to any infected computers, attackers could conduct physical damage by shutting down potentially critical systems. 

Mr Wales said the Exchange hack posed an “unacceptable risk” to the government, but added that he was not currently aware that any federal US organisations had been impacted.

Pressure is on President Joe Biden, who promised retaliatory action against hackers following the widespread SolarWinds attack in which 18,000 organisations were compromised.

WorldRemit, the British payments company, is eyeing a potential special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) deal that would see it list in the US with a valuation in excess of $1.5bn (£1bn).

The cross border payments business has held talks in recent weeks with a SPAC business about a plan to list its shares on the US market. 

It has previously been reported that WorldRemit had held talks about a standard New York float, a blow to London which has attracted recent bumper technology floats from Deliveroo and Trustpilot.

Viral video app TikTok is attempting to crack down on abuse and harmful comments through two new updates announced today.

People will now be able to filter out comments on their videos through a new tool, letting them automatically block certain words or phrases.

And the company will also prompt people to reconsider their comments if it detects their message may be abusive.

Nokia has become the latest major company to pull out of the Mobile World Congress conference that’s currently planned to be held in Barcelona in June.

Organisers are hoping to hold the 50,000-person event through the use of regular coronavirus tests and increased ventilation.

But there are concerns that the event won’t be able to proceed as planned, leading to its cancellation for a second year.

Ericsson announced on Monday that it had decided to pull out of the event.

At least 10 advanced hacking groups are seeking to take advantage of a flaw in Microsoft’s Exchange email software, cybersecurity business ESET has found.

10 government-backed hacking groups are probing organisations’ email servers around the world in an attempt to break in and steal correspondence and other files, researchers said.

The Microsoft Exchange hack could affect up to 250,000 organisations around the world, it’s feared. The hack was initially blamed on a Chinese hacking group but experts say other groups as well as cybercriminals are also piling in to the incident.

Once the hack was revealed, ESET detected hackers attempting to use it to gain access to servers in the US, UK, Germany and other European countries.

“The day after the release of the patches, we started to observe many more threat actors scanning and compromising Exchange servers en masse,” said ESET’s Matthieu Faou. “Interestingly, all of them are APT groups focused on espionage, except one outlier that seems related to a known coin-mining campaign. However, it is inevitable that more and more threat actors, including ransomware operators, will have access to the exploits sooner or later.”

CCTV footage from NHS trusts may have been left exposed online by hackers after security camera business Verkada was broken into by hackers.

Multiple NHS Trusts, including Imperial College, Worcestershire Acute, and Southend University Hospital are listed as customers of the US business.

There is no evidence any NHS was accessed by the hackers, but one attacker told the Telegraph they could have spied on “any” patient.

The cyber attackers have said they wanted to expose the extent to which surveillance and facial recognition cameras are used worldwide. 

A Verkada spokesman said:

“We have disabled all internal administrator accounts to prevent any unauthorised access. Our internal security team and external security firm are investigating the scale and scope of this issue, and we have notified law enforcement.”

Households in the UK will save up to £75 a year from a new “right to repair” that the Government is planning to introduce in the summer.

Under the new regulations, manufacturers will be legally required to make spare parts available for appliances including televisions, washing machines and fridges. 

It’s hoped that making the parts available will allow customers to repair items instead of buying entirely new appliances when repairable faults occur.

The new law, based on EU regulations, is designed to extend the lifespan of products by up to 10 years.

Kwasi Kwarteng, the business and energy secretary, said:

"Our plans to tighten product standards will ensure more electrical goods can be fixed rather than thrown on the scrap heap - putting more money back in the pockets of consumers whilst protecting the environment.

Snyk, a British-founded cybersecurity firm that is now headquartered in the US, has quadrupled in value since the beginning of last year after it closed a $300m (£216.31m) funding round.

The company, which provides software that can secure loopholes in an app’s security, is now worth $4.7bn. ASOS, Deliveroo, and Revolut are among the company’s customers in the UK.

Venture capital firms Accel and Tiger Global have led the round that will allow the company to accelerate its growth “at every level”, including an expansion into the Asia Pacific region.

Snyk has also added a number of executive hires including Jeff Yoshimura and Erica Geil, who will join as chief marketing and information officers respectively.

Existing investors including GV, formerly Google Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and a host of funds managed by BlackRock also joined the Series E round.

Peter McKay, the chief executive of Snyk, said the company’s “relentless focus” had results in its success to date.

“This latest investment allows us to accelerate our growth at every level - doubling down on our successful product led growth strategy, adding to our customer roster, recruiting talent to our team worldwide and expanding geographically,” he said.

Investing in financial markets should be as common as shopping on Amazon, the head of Robinhood has said.

Vlad Tenev, the chief executive of the retail investing app, rebuffed criticism of his company during an interview with Bloomberg.

“Investing should be as ubiquitous as shopping online,” he said. “It should just be something that people do.” Robinhood has grown in prominence in recent years but exploded in popularity during the rout on GameStop stock in January.

The company has been criticised for amplifying the gamification of stock trading and has also faced intense scrutiny from regulators in the US.

During the TV interview Mr Tenev said the controversy was “what I signed up for”.

“Any time you’re causing change in society and kind of upending the status quo, it’s probably not going to be the most comfortable process,” he said.

He also insisted his platform would come through various legal challenges as an app that has the “highest standards of integrity”.

The world’s first space hotel is set to open in 2027, with a capacity for 280 guests and 112 crew.  As my colleague Morgan Meaker reports:

The Voyager space station will be the largest man made structure in space when complete, according to the hotel’s website. 

Former pilot, John Blincow, who is CEO of the company building the hotel, Orbital Assembly,  said the project had experienced some delays due to the pandemic but construction was expected to begin in 2026 and be completed in time to welcome guests the following year. 

The complex is designed like a cruise ship and will include 24 “habitation modules”, including a restaurant, bar and an event centre. 

Read the full story here.

Facebook is launching a series of online adverts designed to fight fake news about coronavirus and vaccinations.

The ads, developed with factchecking organisation Full Fact, encourage people to discover fake news by following a three-stop process. 

“Check the source, check how it makes you feel, check the context,” the ads will encourage as they run online over the next month.

Steve Hatch, Facebook’s vice president for Northern Europe, said: “The fight against COVID-19 is at a critical stage and connecting people with accurate information is more important than ever. Improving media literacy in partnership with Full Fact is one of a number of steps we’ve taken to tackle coronavirus related misinformation.”

Apple plans to invest €1bn (£860m) into a new German research facility dedicated to designing the latest 5G and wireless chips, Matthew Field writes.

Munich is already Apple's biggest engineering hub in Europe, where it has around 1,500 staff working on technology design. In 2015, it opened its Barvarian Design Centre with 350 staff which worked on chip power management. 

The work in Germany has led to power efficiency gains of more than 70pc and custom Silicon that has been included on its new M1 chip designs. About half of Apple's power management team is now based in Germany.

Its new 30,000-square-meter facility will be based in Munich's Karlstrasse.

It is just the latest tech giant to build capacity in Germany. Tesla is building a gigafactory for its electric cars in Berlin. Germany has also said it wants to draw up plans to invest €50bn across Europe in chip manufacturing.

Russia’s internet watchdog has clarified that the slowdown of Twitter services in the country will only affect photos and videos posted to the site, not standard text posts.

The deputy head of the Roskomnadzor internet watchdog which announced the slowdown said the restrictions will continue until content is removed.

Some Russian government websites are still offline, although the Kremlin and main Russian government homepages have been restored.

Rostelecom, the largest internet service provider in Russia, has acknowledged experiencing technical problems.

Multiple Russian government websites are now failing to load, shortly after the country’s internet watchdog announced that it would slow down Twitter’s services in the country.

The main homepage for the Russian government is currently offline along with the website for Russia’s internet watchdog Roskomnadzor which announced the restrictions.

A previous attempt to block Telegram in the country caused similar disruption, causing unrelated internet services to go offline in Russia.

Fortnite developer Epic Games has expanded its legal battle against Google by filing a lawsuit against it in Australia.

It accuses Google of forcing developers to use its own in-app payments technology that gives it up to a 30pc cut of purchases.

Google also makes it “egregiously difficult” for players to find and download apps that aren’t in Google’s Play Store, the complaint alleges.

Epic Games has already begun legal action against Google in the US and the UK. It has also sued Apple in Australia, the US and Europe.

Google responded to Epic Games' US lawsuit by saying the following:

For game developers who choose to use the Play Store, we have consistent policies that are fair to developers and keep the store safe for users. While Fortnite remains available on Android, we can no longer make it available on Play because it violates our policies. However, we welcome the opportunity to continue our discussions with Epic and bring Fortnite back to Google Play.

Russia’s internet watchdog has announced that Twitter will be slowed down in the country and even threatened to ban the service entirely over allegations that the company failed to remove certain posts.

The Roskomnadzor watchdog announced on Twitter on Wednesday morning that the service will now load more slowly for anyone in Russia accessing it using a smartphone. Half of desktop computers in the country will also experience slowdowns when trying to load Twitter.

The watchdog said that it had taken measures to “protect Russian citizens from the influence of unlawful content.” It claimed to have sent 28,000 requests to the company to remove content which it said included posts about teenage suicide, pornography and drug use.

No mention was made in the announcement over social media encouragement of protests, which the Russian government has expressed concern over.

It announced lawsuits against Twitter, Google, Facebook, TikTok and Telegram yesterday, alleging that the sites have failed to remove posts encouraging children to join opposition protests that followed the jailing of Putin critic Alexei Navalny.

Anton Gorelkin, a member of the Duma's committee on information policy, information technology and communications, also warned this morning that Facebook could face slowdowns in Russia over the same issue.

Facebook has made the rare decision of publicly talking about the development of its augmented reality smart glasses long before their launch as it hopes to get customers comfortable about wearing cameras on their face all day.

Now, the company has also revealed details about how you’ll be able to control Facebook’s smart glasses. Instead of voice controls, it’s planning for a mixture of small hand movements and artificial intelligence.

To track hand movements, it’s developing a wrist-worn EMG sensor. “The signals through the wrist are so clear that EMG can detect finger motion of just a millimeter,” Facebook wrote in a blog post. “That means input can be effortless — as effortless as clicking a virtual, always-available button — and ultimately it may even be possible to sense just the intention to move a finger.”

Tiny hand movements are unlikely to get tiring, solving the problem of virtual reality where people can get exhausted of moving their arms and head around. It’s all part of Facebook’s plan to build “comfortable, all-day wearable devices.”

1) Disney boss Bob Iger tipped to be Biden's ambassador to Britain as streaming service hits 100m users After just 16 moths, Disney+ is halfway to matching Netflix, securing the legacy of Disney's departing executive chairman

2) Britain's Zego valued at more than $1bn after fresh funding The UK's latest unicorn has expanded beyond its initial focus on providing commercial motor insurance to gig economy workers

3) Nine in 10 young women edit their pictures on social media as pandemic heightens 'distress' Pressure to 'look more attractive' has seen more than 85 per cent turn to apps like FaceTune to adjust skin tone, facial contours and weight

4) Deliveroo boss Will Shu served up £65m share award on float Mr Shu will see a huge tranche of shares vest when the company goes public

5) British overseas territories 'should be used to counter China space threat' King's College professor Dr Mark Hilborne said territories such as the Falklands and Diego Garcia could house sensors to monitor other nations' satellites 

Coming up today

3pm – acting US cybersecurity  chief Brandon Wales testifies to Congress

Children's gaming company Roblox goes public via a direct listing

Enterprise software firms Oracle and Asana report latest earnings