EU makes USB-C the standard, in a blow to Apple; new glitches in Infosys-developed tax portal

European Union countries and EU lawmakers on Tuesday have reached a ‘provisional agreement’ on a single mobile charging standard for devices in 15 different categories including mobile phones, laptops, tablets and cameras, TechCrunch reports. This will make the USB-C charger the EU standard, and equipment makers will have to comply by 2024. And Infosys has been asked, again, to fix new glitches in the income tax portal it made for India. Notes: European Union lawmakers on Tuesday have reached a ‘provisional agreement’ on a single mobile charging standard for devices in 15 different categories including mobile phones, laptops, tablets and cameras, TechCrunch reports. This will make the USB-C charger the EU standard, and equipment makers will have to comply by 2024. The legislation is designed to cut waste and make life easier for consumers who would be able to use one charger for multiple devices. This will likely have a huge impact on Apple, as the company still uses its own Lightning connector to charge iPhones, while it has recently equipped iPads and MacBooks with USB-C ports. “The common charging solution will not only affect Apple. It will affect a lot of brands producing some of these 15 different types of products when it will come into force in two years,” the parliament’s lead negotiator on the file, Alex Agius Saliba, said in a press conference. He called the provisional agreement “historic” and a “great achievement.” With the provisional agreement in place, a formal vote is expected to follow in the next few months. Tata Digital, which launched its all-in-one app in April, Tata Neu, is aiming to clock gross sales of around $2-$2.5 billion in the first year, Economic Times reports. In its first month of operations since launching the app, Tata Neu has clocked gross sales in the range of $120-$150 million. Tata Digital had an internal target of $200 million in gross merchandise value per month, according to ET. Infosys has been asked to fix more glitches in the income tax portal that the IT services company developed for the central government. It got off to a rough start last year with numerous complaints from users, leading even to the country’s finance minister summoning the company’s CEO multiple times to fix the problems. The Income Tax Department tweeted on Tuesday that it had asked Infosys to fix the new glitches after complaints from users. This time the problems were related to the search function, according to the tweet. Some 20 amino acids have been found in the dust that Japan's Hayabusa2 probe returned to Earth from asteroid Ryugu, The Register reports, citing Japanese media. Amino acids help to build proteins, act as neurotransmitters in the brain, and are ubiquitous and essential to life on Earth, the tech news and analysis site points out. Discovering amino acids in space on comets or asteroids, for example, may help scientists get closer to figuring out why life happened on Earth. Theme music courtesy Free Music & Sounds: https://soundcloud.com/freemusicandsounds