A version of this article was published in TIME's newsletter Into the Metaverse. You can find past issues of the newsletter here. When Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has been asked lately about his favorite projects being built on the blockchain, he often names Proof of Humanity. Created by the non-profit Democracy Earth Foundation, Proof of Humanity looks something like an online phonebook, on which people can sign up and add their citizenship, degrees or skills. But while the concept is very simple on its surface, Buterin hopes that the system will be an onramp to all sorts of more advanced benefits, including better and fairer voting processes, universal basic income and social media networks that aren't overrun with bots and misinformation.

With his 2,141 SoundCloud followers, veteran U.K. psychedelic-music producer Darren Sangita didn't exactly wound Spotify when he pulled his music from the streaming service last month. "I'm a zed-list music celebrity," he says. But he couldn't support a company whose founder, Daniel Ek, invested more than $114 million in Helsing, a European security startup that manufactures artificial-intelligence software to "keep liberal democracies from harm." "The circumstantial evidence points to a massive investment in military/AI tech," says Sangita, who runs indie label Sangita Sounds. "I was just enormously disappointed. Are there not any other alternatives that Mr. Ek could have possibly thought about investing in to make the world a more beautiful and perhaps a safer place to live?"

We look at how companies need to transform their businesses to cater for the digital generation and the tech that comes with them. Click here to listen to'Digital transformation for the digital generations' podcast now. Millennials and Generation Z have either grown up with a lot of technology changes. These generations no longer see technology as a simple tool but as a given window to the world. Many companies have considered this when it comes to selling products.

On Monday, ID.me released a statement from CEO and founder Blake Hall about what the vendor said is its commitment to federal guidelines for facial recognition technology. Hall said the vendor uses one-to-one face match technology and not one-to-many facial recognition. One-to-one face match is a simple application of the technology that is comparable to using one's face to unlock a smartphone or be verified at an airport, Hall said in an interview with TechTarget. "It's something that Americans do broadly all across the country when they're proving their identity in person," Hall said. "What it specifically is not is like taking one person's photo and then taking like a city's worth of images and trying to like match that person's face."

ARK Invest solely invests in disruptive innovations. ARK's thematic investment strategies span market capitalizations, sectors, and geographies to focus on public companies that we expect to be the leaders, enablers, and beneficiaries of disruptive innovation. ARK's strategies aim to deliver long-term growth with low correlation to traditional investment strategies. ARK Invest defines "disruptive innovation" as the introduction of a technologically enabled new product or service that potentially changes the way the world works. ARK focuses solely on offering investment solutions to capture disruptive innovation in the public equity markets.

Tinder is changing the way it handles reports of sexual violence and harassment with the aim of providing better support for survivors. The dating app worked with U.S. anti-sexual assault organisation RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) to develop the redesign of this trauma-informed reporting process, which aims to give survivors "more agency over what step they want to take next," per a press release from the company. The new changes include significant improvements to the reporting process, improved access to survivor resources, and education for internal teams at Tinder. A new screen has been introduced in the reporting process asking "are you or the person involved in a safe place?" and recommends contacting local authorities if required. It's now easier to report someone you've unmatched from.

Tinder is charging people over 30 up to 48 per cent more for its premium service, an investigation has revealed. Which? said its findings suggest possible discrimination and a potential breach of UK law by the popular dating app. The consumer group also initially accused Tinder of hiking prices for young gay and lesbian users aged 18-29, but has since backtracked on this. A statement from Which? said: 'Having initially chosen not to provide further information, Tinder has since revealed that it offers discounts to users aged 28 and under in the UK.' It added that the dating app'claimed that by including 29-year-olds in our analysis of the relationship between price with age and sexual orientation, "the results would be skewed to make it appear that LGBTQAI members paid more based upon orientation, when in fact, it was based upon age".' Which? said that in light of the new information, it has'no evidence that sexual orientation impacts pricing for young Tinder users'. Tinder had previously said it was'categorically untrue' that its pricing structure discriminates by sexual preference.

How you interact with a crowd may help you stick out from it, at least to artificial intelligence. When fed information about a target individual's mobile phone interactions, as well as their contacts' interactions, AI can correctly pick the target out of more than 40,000 anonymous mobile phone service subscribers more than half the time, researchers report January 25 in Nature Communications. The findings suggest humans socialize in ways that could be used to pick them out of datasets that are supposedly anonymized. It's no surprise that people tend to remain within established social circles and that these regular interactions form a stable pattern over time, says Jaideep Srivastava, a computer scientist from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis who was not involved in the study. "But the fact that you can use that pattern to identify the individual, that part is surprising."

Everybody in the tech world is talking about 5G. Many say that this new technology will change the way we use the internet and turbocharge the development of new connected technologies. But what are these technologies, exactly? How is 5G technology benefiting us? First, let's look at what 5G delivers today and what it can provide in the future. This cellular network can allow speeds up to 20 times faster than the previous 4G LTE technology it's replacing.

Microsoft beat market expectations Tuesday with strong quarterly performance in cloud computing and software, still benefitting from the pandemic's online shifting of work, play, shopping and learning. The US tech colossus, which announced last week a blockbuster deal to buy gaming giant Activision Blizzard, said profit jumped to $18.8 billion in the final three months of last year. "Digital technology is the most malleable resource at the world's disposal to overcome constraints and reimagine everyday work and life," CEO Satya Nadella said, in announcing revenue of $51.7 billion. Microsoft investments include pouring money into the booming video game market and by extension the metaverse, the virtual reality vision for the internet's future. On an earnings call, Nadella pointed to the tens of millions of people playing games such as Forza, Halo and Minecraft, many investing in "avatar" proxies for online worlds, saying that the metaverse is a natural extension.