Nearly 21 years after release, Age of Empires 2 could well be having its best year ever. Since its HD re-release in 2013 the game has had a steady growth in average player count, but with the release of Age of Empires 2: Definitive edition last year and COVID-19 lockdowns inflating player counts across the industry, Age of Empires 2 is boasting totals that beat some very big-name games.

Since last week, when it was reported that two hornets were spotted for the first time in Washington state, the national panic has led to the needless slaughter of native wasps and bees, beneficial insects whose populations are already threatened, said Doug Yanega, senior museum scientist for the Department of Entomology at UC Riverside.

My colleagues in Japan, China and Korea are just rolling their eyes in disbelief at what kind of snowflakes we are.”

When you stand on a beach and take in a great big gulp of fresh air, you’re actually breathing bacteria, viruses, and aerosolized salts. Those are all punted into the air when whales breach or waves crash or even when bubbles rise to the surface of the sea, ejecting material that gets caught up in sea breezes and fog banks. And as much as I hate to rain on your beach day, you can now add an omnipresent pollutant to that list of debris: microplastics.

When the bubble surfaces, half of it protrudes above the water line, with the other half hidden beneath it. “On the top side out of the water, you've got a very thin layer of water, which when it bursts actually fragments, and that releases nano-sized materials,” says University of Strathclyde microplastic researcher Steve Allen, co-lead on the work.

In response to a lawsuit filed against it in Illinois accusing it of breaking that state's privacy laws with its scraping of images and personal info from a multitude of social media platforms, Clearview has announced it's cutting off some of its revenue stream.

Unproven tech may get you booted from the local mall for resembling a shoplifting suspect, but law enforcement agencies can ruin your life and take away several of your freedoms. And Clearview isn't exactly selective about who it sells to, so plenty of overtly abusive governments will still get to use untested facial recognition software to destroy lives without worrying about niceties like due process.

Elon Musk's contentious relationship with Alameda County officials reached a tipping point on Saturday, when the Tesla CEO announced plans to relocate the company's headquarters and "future programs" away from Fremont, California, to facilities in Texas and Nevada "immediately." This came as a response to the continued forced closure of Tesla's Fremont manufacturing plant as per COVID-19 stay-in-place regulations.

Tesla announced a sweeping cost-cutting plan in early April, complete with staff-wide pay cuts and furloughs, which was followed weeks later by an unexpected announcement of profit. In an April 29 call to investors, Tesla confirmed that it had successfully turned a profit for three quarters in a row and was sitting on cash reserves of $8.1 billion.

Inkscape can be seen as an alternative to commercial products such as Adobe Illustrator or Serif Affinity Designer – though unlike Inkscape, neither of those run on Linux.

Inkscape 1.0 seems polished and professional. Adobe, which sells Illustrator on a subscription basis starting at £19 (if you inhale the rest of the Creative Cloud), will likely not be worried, but apart from the cost saving there are advantages in simpler applications that are relatively lightweight and easy to learn, as well as running well on Linux.

Firefox 76 includes new Firefox Lockwise password functionality, Zoom improvements, and a handful of developer features.

Mozilla this year sped up Firefox releases to a four-week cadence (previously they arrived every six to eight weeks).

The company specifically called out Zoom, which has become a phenomenon of its own during the pandemic. In short, you now join Zoom calls in Firefox without having to download or install the Zoom client.

The web’s fragility in particular presents a big problem for the long-term sustainability of the web: we’re creating datasets that will be important for humanity 1000 years from now, but we aren’t safeguarding that data in a way that is future-proof. Link rot plagues the web today, with one study finding that over 98% of web links decay within 20 years.

Amazon VP Tim Bray, who had been with the company for more than five years, has resigned in protest of Amazon's treatment of warehouse workers and the firing of other employees who spoke out.

Firing the whistleblowers is "evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture," Bray said in a blog post explaining his departure. "I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison."

"I believe the worker testimony too. And at the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response," he added. "It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential." Only strong regulation, actively enforced, will change that, Bray said.

Browser maker Mozilla is working on a new service called Private Relay that generates unique aliases to hide a user's email address from advertisers and spam operators when filling in online forms.

"We will forward emails from the alias to your real inbox," Mozilla says on the Firefox Private Relay website.