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X can be ‘immediately’ unblocked in Brazil after it pays a $1.9 million fine

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X can be 'immediately' unblocked in Brazil after it pays a $1.9 million fine

X only has to pay one last fine in Brazil to get its services reinstated, according to Bloomberg and CNBC. Supreme Court R has ordered the company to pay 10 million Reais, or around $1.9 million, for its non-compliance with Brazil’s court order for two days. Moraes added that the company’s return “depends solely on the full compliance with Brazilian legislation and the absolute observance of the court orders in respect of national sovereignty.” Specifically, Moraes fined X on September 19 for restoring its services in the country for some people despite a ban on the website. The judge also fined the company after X disregarded the ban for a second time on September 23 through Starlink.

X’s owner, Elon Musk, previously resisted Moraes’ order to take down and freeze several accounts that were allegedly spreading disinformation on the platform. Musk saw it as censorship and opted to close its operations in the country instead of complying. In response, Moraes ordered the nation’s internet providers to block the social media platform and to issue a new rule that anybody found to be accessing X through a VPN could face a daily fine of 50,000 Reais ($8,900). The court froze the Brazilian bank account of SpaceX’s Starlink internet service provider, as well. It ultimately withdrew 18.35 million Reais ($3.4 million) from Starlink’s and X’s account to settle previous penalties the Supreme Court had imposed on the social network.

A few days ago, however, X’s lawyers reportedly filed a document in court naming the company’s legal representative in Brazil, as Moraes had demanded. The website also removed the accounts the judge named in its initial directives and which he had identified as a threat to democracy, showing that it’s now willing to comply with the court’s orders. The New York Times reported back then that X had failed to submit all the necessary paperwork to get Brazil to lift its ban. Moraes’ statement that the company can “immediately return to its activities” after it pays this fine suggests that X got that squared away, and Brazilian users may be able to access the website soon.

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VCs expect a surge in startups offering lower rate mortgages, other loans now that the Feds cut rates

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VCs expect a surge in startups offering lower rate mortgages, other loans now that the Feds cut rates

When the U.S. Feds cut interest rates by half a percentage point last week, it was a dash of good news for venture capitalists backing one particularly beleaguered class of startups: fintechs, especially those that rely on loans for cash flow to operate their businesses. 

These companies include corporate credit card providers like Ramp or Coast, which gives cards to fleet owners. The card companies make money on interchange rates, or transaction fees charged to the merchants. “But they have to front the money by getting a loan,” said Sheel Mohnot, co-founder and general partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures, a fintech-focused firm.

“The terms of that loan just got better.” 

Affirm, a buy now, pay later (BNPL) company founded by famed PayPal mafia member Max Levchin, is a good case study. While Affirm is no longer a startup — having gone public in 2021 — when interest expenses rose, its stock price tanked, dropping from around $162 in October to hovering at under $50 a share since February 2022. 

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BNPLs pay merchants the full amount up front; then they allow that customer to pay for the item over a couple of payments, often interest-free. Many BNPLs generate revenue primarily by charging merchants a fee for each transaction processed on their platform, not interest on the purchase. Their business model didn’t allow them to pass on the dramatically higher costs they incurred.

“BNPLs were making money hand over fist when interest rates were zero,” Mohnot said. 

Affirm competes with a host of BNPL startups. Klarna, for instance, is a player that’s been expected to IPO for years but still isn’t ready in 2024, its CEO told CNBC last month. Some BNPL startups didn’t survive at all, like ZestMoney, which shut down in December. Meanwhile, other lending fintechs also shuttered because of high interest rates like business-building credit card Fundid.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, lower rates are also good for fintechs that offer loans. Car loan refinancing company Caribou, for instance, falls into this bucket, predicts Chuckie Reddy, partner and head of growth investments at QED Investors. Caribou offers one- to two-year loans. 

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“Their whole business is predicated on being able to take you from a higher rate to a lower rate,” he said. Now that Caribou’s funding costs are lower, they should be able to reduce what they charge borrowers.

GoodLeap, a provider of solar panel loans, and Kiavi, a lender specializing in loans for “fix-and-flip” home investors, are other short-term lenders expected to benefit. Just like Caribou, they can potentially pass on some of their interest savings to customers, leading to a surge in loan origination volume, said Rudy Yang, fintech analyst at PitchBook.

And no sector should be helped by lower interest rates as much as fintech startups taking on the mortgage loan industry. However, it could be some time before this recently beat-up space sees a resurgence. While the cut the Feds made was a biggie, interest rates are still high compared to the long ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) era that preceded it, when Fed rates were at near zero. The new Fed rates are in the 4.5% to 5% range now. So the loans available to consumers will still be a few percentage points higher than the base Fed rate.

Should the Feds continue to cut rates, as many investors hope they will, then a lot of people who bought homes during the high-rate time will be looking for better deals.

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“The refinancing wave is going to be massive, but not tomorrow or over the next few months,” said Kamran Ansari, a venture partner at VC firm Headline. “It may not be worth it to refinance for half a percent, but if rates decrease by a percent or one and a half percent, then you will start to see a flood of refinances from everybody who was forced to bite the bullet on a mortgage at the higher rates over the last couple of years.” 

Ansari anticipates a significant rebound for mortgage fintechs like Rocket Mortage and Better.com, following a sluggish performance in recent years.

After that, VC investor dollars will almost certainly flow. Ansari also predicted a surge in new mortgage tech startups if interest rates become more appealing. 

“Anytime you see a space that’s gone dormant for four or five years, there are probably opportunities for reinvention and updated algorithms, and now you can do AI-centric underwriting,” he said.

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Trailers of the week: Thunderbolts, Rumors, and Disclaimer

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Trailers of the week: Thunderbolts, Rumors, and Disclaimer

This week, I’ve been slowly catching up on Dark Matter; I’m about 20 hours into Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on the Switch; and I’m still trying to work a trip to the movie theater into my schedule to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

I’m behind, in other words! And this week’s trailers shoveled so much more onto my need-to-watch pile, from the next Marvel MCU film, Thunderbolts, to the amusingly bizarre black comedy Rumours, to Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuarón’s new Apple TV Plus series. That’s to say nothing of all the game trailers from Sony’s State of Play event this week.

Check out some of my favorite trailers from this week below.

Thunderbolts

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Marvel hasn’t said much about Thunderbolts, which sees David Harbour’s Red Guardian and his daughter, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) in a new outing that concludes the MCU’s phase 5 in May next year.

Joining them are Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and John Walker (Wyatt Russell), with Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) as their apparent ring leader. There’s also a mystery character named Bob (Lewis Pullman) who, as The Verge’s Charles Pulliam-Moore hinted earlier this week — and Polygon went at head-on — is probably Sentry, a Marvel version of Superm—er, a flying bulletproof guy with superhuman strength, speed, and agility.

Rumours

I’m trying to think of the best thing to compare Rumours to. The big, sans-serif, drop-shadowed fonts scream 1970s-era exploitation films, as do its backlit fog and sometimes pinkish tint, which makes it look a bit like a well-aged film print.

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The trailer has notes of Wes Anderson’s deliberate blocking and framing, mixed with the absurdism of Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber. There’s a gigantic brain? And some zombies. And leaders of the G7 nations, trapped in the woods with all of that. Whatever it is, Rumours, a black comedy from co-directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson looks like it’ll be a hoot when it hits theaters on October 18th.

Sinners

Sinners sees one of director Ryan Coogler’s mainstay actors, Michael B. Jordan, playing 1930s twin brothers who go back to their hometown to start over, only to be confronted by some unknown horror. 

The name and trailer point to a religious theme. (“You keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home.”) But shadowy figures outside a juke joint and a young boy walking into a church with fresh claw marks on his face hint at more. Maybe it’s a murderous cult, maybe the town is beset by actual demons. What’s really going on is a total mystery, and hopefully, it’ll stay that way until its March 7th theatrical release.

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Alfonso Cuarón’s new Apple TV series, Disclaimer, is a seven-part psychological thriller that starts streaming on October 11th. Cate Blanchett stars as a journalist named Catherine Ravenscroft, whose dark secrets are revealed in an anonymously written novel that is sent to her. 

The secrets are apparently bad enough to threaten her relationship with her husband, Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), and her son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). The series also stars Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, Louis Partridge, Leila George, and Hoyeon, and it’s narrated by Indira Varma. 

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01 # Fundamentals of Server Hardware v2

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01 # Fundamentals of Server Hardware v2



This video is to demonstrate the Server Hardware + knowledge and this is the first video in series of learning the Cloud Computing or Virtualization. follow Networking Basics Video to continue the learning path .

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Lenovo launches two new notebooks in the ThinkBook series with Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 and AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 365 processor

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Lenovo launches two new notebooks in the ThinkBook series with Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 and AMD's Ryzen AI 9 365 processor

Lenovo has unveiled two new ThinkBook models as it looks to exert its dominace on the business laptops landscape.

The ThinkBook 16 Gen 7 and the ThinkBook 16 Gen 7+ bring major upgrades over their predecessors, offering cutting-edge hardware designed for demanding users, but catering to slightly different needs, especially in terms of performance, display, and other key features.

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Dell PowerEdge R740 Rack Server – Overview, Specifications, Benefits & Uses

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Dell PowerEdge R740 Rack Server - Overview, Specifications, Benefits & Uses



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CPU Capacity:

– Supports 2 Processors
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– Single CPU: 28 Cores Max
– Quad CPU: 56 Cores Max
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– Inbuilt 24 DIMM Slots
– 128 GB Max Memory Per DIMM Slot
– 3 TB Maximum Memory Capacity
– Supported Technology: DDR4 Memory

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Storage Capacity:

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Max potential Storage: 96 TB

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Riser options with up to 8 PCIe Gen 3 slots, maximum of 4 x 16 slots

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The best science fiction books of 2024 so far, from Adrian Tchaikovsky to Peng Shepherd

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Woman walking in fantasy forest. 3D generated image.
Woman walking in fantasy forest. 3D generated image.

Explore books dealing with multiverses and alternate worlds

Gremlin/Getty Images

Since I became science fiction columnist for New Scientist, I have had to think a lot about what qualifies as sci-fi. Very often, a book could actually be classified as fantasy, which is outside my remit. More and more, I find myself agreeing with the writer Damon Knight when he said: “Science fiction is what I point to [when I say] ‘That’s science fiction’.”

Anyway, for this holiday reading special, I present my list of some of the year’s best sci-fi so far. All that binds these incredibly diverse books…

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