 Popular Podcasts App Pocket Casts Is Up For Sale: Where Did It Go Wrong?
James Cridland, editor of podcast newsletter PodNews: Podcast app Pocket Casts is looking for a buyer. NPR, which owns 34.6% of the company, reports their share of the company's loss was $812,000: which could put the company's net loss at more than $2m, though the company denies this.
I've used Pocket Casts for a long time. To me, it has two unbeatable features:
1. A really, really good audio player - the skip-silence and the voice-boost is light-years ahead of anything that anyone else has pr
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Apple Pulls the Plug on User-Found Method To Sideload iOS Apps on Mac
Apple has plugged a hole that allowed users to sideload iOS and iPad applications to M1 Macs that were never intended to run on desktop. The server-side change ensures that only applications that app developers have flagged as optimized for Mac will run. From a report: Late last year, Apple launched its first Macs running on its own ARM-based custom CPU called the M1, as opposed to the Intel chips that have been used in Macs for several years. These new machines included the entry-level 13-inch
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Behind a Secret Deal Between Google and Facebook
Facebook was going to compete with Google for some advertising sales but backed away from the plan after the companies cut a preferential deal, according to court documents. From a report: In 2017, Facebook said it was testing a new way of selling online advertising that would threaten Google's control of the digital ad market. But less than two years later, Facebook did an about-face and said it was joining an alliance of companies backing a similar effort by Google. Facebook never said why it
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Hungary Mulls Sanctions Against Social Media Giants
Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga on Monday raised the prospect of sanctioning social media firms over what she called "systematic abuses" of free speech. From a report: The minister said she would meet the Hungarian competition watchdog this week to discuss possible penalties for what she described as unfair commercial practices as well as convening a meeting of the country's digital freedom committee. In a growing wave of criticism, some government officials are complaining about what the
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Safari 14 Added WebExtensions Support. So Where Are the Extensions?
At WWDC last year, Apple announced it was going to support Chrome-style browser extensions (the WebExtensions API) in Safari. Months after Safari 14's release, are developers bothering with Safari? Jason Snell: The answer seems to be largely no -- at least, not yet. The Mac App Store's Safari extensions library seems to be largely populated with the same stuff that was there before Safari 14 was released, though there are some exceptions. [...] So in the end, what was the net effect of Apple's a
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'I Looked at All the Ways Microsoft Teams Tracks Users and My Head is Spinning'
An anonymous reader shares a report: As far back as June, Microsoft explained in somewhat legalistic terms that it's happily recording so much Teams activity for the benefit of employers and it's up to them what they do with it. Sample wording from Redmond's fine lawyers: "Our customers are controllers for the data provided to Microsoft, as set forth in the Online Services Terms, and they determine legal bases of processing." From what I could see, Teams hoovers up all your chats, voicemails, sh
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Samsung Heir Lee Jae-yong Sentenced To 30 Months in Prison in Bribery Case
A South Korean court sentenced Samsung Electronics heir Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong, otherwise known as Jay Y. Lee, to two-and-a-half years in prison on a bribery charge on Monday, a ruling which is likely to have ramifications for his leadership of the tech giant as well as South Korea's views toward big business. From a report: With this, Lee will be sidelined for the time being from major decision making at the company as it strives to overtake competitors. He will also be unable to oversee the
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SoftBank-Backed WhatsApp Rival Hike Goes Off the Air in India
Hike, the messaging app backed by SoftBank Group that aimed to compete against WhatsApp in the world's second-most populous country, shut down and vanished from app stores Monday. From a report: The startup valued at $1.4 billion in a 2016 funding round announced its app was going off the air earlier this month without explanation. The app started by billionaire-family scion Kavin Bharti Mittal has failed over several years to displace Facebook's rival app as India's go-to venue for social media
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DuckDuckGo Surpasses 100 Million Daily Search Queries For the First Time
Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo reached a major milestone in its 12-year-old history last week when it recorded on Monday its first-ever day with more than 100 million user search queries. From a report: The achievement comes after a period of sustained growth the company has been seeing for the past two years, and especially since August 2020, when the search engine began seeing more than 2 billion search queries a month on a regular basis. The numbers are small in comparison to Google
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GitHub Admits 'Significant Mistakes Were Made' in Firing of Jewish Employee
GitHub is admitting that a Jewish employee was fired in error and is offering him his job back. The news comes after the company hired an independent law firm to investigate the termination, and found that "significant mistakes were made." The company's head of HR, Carrie Olesen, is also resigning. From a report: "Yesterday evening, the investigation reached the conclusion that significant mistakes were made that are not consistent with our internal practices or the judgement we expect from our
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Venice, Italy Plans to Watch Every Move of Its 30 Million Tourists
Here's some news from CNN for the 30 million tourists visiting Venice, Italy each year:
They're watching you, wherever you walk. They know exactly where you pause, when you slow down and speed up, and they count you in and out of the city. What's more, they're tracking your phone, so they can tell exactly how many people from your country or region are in which area, at which time.
And they're doing it in a bid to change tourism for the better. Welcome to Venice in a post-Covid world....
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Ask Slashdot: How Should User-Generated Content Be Moderated?
"I increasingly suspect that the days of large-scale public distribution of unmoderated user generated content on the Internet may shortly begin drawing to a close in significant ways..." writes long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein.
And then he shares "a bit of history":
Back in 1985 when I launched my "Stargate" experiment to broadcast Usenet Netnews over the broadcast television vertical blanking interval of national "Superstation WTBS," I decided that the project would only carry m
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7% of Americans Have Had Covid-19
CNN reports:
According to Johns Hopkins University's tally of cases in the United States, there have been at least 23,754,315 cases of coronavirus in the U.S., and at least 395,785 deaths. On Saturday, Johns Hopkins reported 198,218 new cases and 3,286 new deaths...
On Friday, the CDC said new more contagious variants of the coronavirus will likely accelerate the spread of the virus and that means the US must double down on efforts to protect people.
The U.S. Census Bureau calculates
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Virgin Orbit Just Successfully Launched a 70-Foot Rocket From Its 747
CNN reports:
A 70-foot rocket, riding beneath the wing of a retrofitted Boeing 747 aircraft, detached from the plane and fired itself into Earth's orbit on Sunday — marking the first successful launch for the California-based rocket startup Virgin Orbit.
Virgin Orbit's 747, nicknamed Cosmic Girl, took off from California around 10:30 am PT with the rocket, called LauncherOne, nestled beneath the plane's left wing. The aircraft flew out over the Pacific Ocean before the rocket was re
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Amazon Begins Removing QAnon Goods For Sale
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Washington Post:
Amazon said it will remove merchandise related to QAnon, a discredited conspiracy theory that the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat, just a day after the e-commerce giant suspended the pro-Trump social media site Parler from using its cloud computing technology.
Amazon is beginning to remove QAnon products from its site, a process that could take a few days, spokeswoman Cecilia Fan said Monday afternoo
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Twitter Temporarily Suspends Account of US Representative
CNN reports:
Twitter on Sunday temporarily suspended the account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for repeated violations of new rules the social media platform put in place following the violent U.S. Capitol riot earlier this month, a company spokesperson told CNN.
"The account referenced has been temporarily locked out for multiple violations of our civic integrity policy," the spokesperson said. As a result, the congresswoman will be locked out of her account for 12 hours.
CNN also not
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Report: US Halts Huawei's Suppliers, Including Intel, in Last Blow to China's 5G
"The Trump administration notified Huawei suppliers, including chipmaker Intel, that it is revoking certain licenses to sell to the Chinese company and intends to reject dozens of other applications," Reuters reports, citing sources familiar with the matter:
One of the sources said eight licenses were yanked from four companies. Japanese flash memory chip maker Kioxia Corp had at least one license revoked, two of the sources said. The company, formerly known as Toshiba Memory Corp, could not
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Florida's Whistleblower Covid-19 Data Manager Arrested Today
The state of Florida's former Covid-19 data manager was apparently arrested today.
After her firing in May of 2020, Rebekah Jones had become a critic of the state's publicly-available information, even setting up her own online dashboard of Covid-19 case data. The state suspected her of being the person who'd illegally accessed the state's emergency alert health system in December to urge Health Department employees to speak up about the coronavirus, and state police obtained a warrant for a
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Is There a Tech Worker 'Exodus' From the San Francisco Bay Area?
The New York Times reports on an "exodus" of tech workers from the San Francisco Bay Area, where "Rent was astronomical. Taxes were high. Your neighbors didn't like you" — and your commute could be over an hour.
The biggest tech companies aren't going anywhere, and tech stocks are still soaring... But the migration from the Bay Area appears real. Residential rents in San Francisco are down 27% from a year ago, and the office vacancy rate has spiked to 16.7%, a number not seen in a decad
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Anti-Mask Protesters Proudly Filmed Their Confrontation With a Grocery Store's Manager
Nine days ago America set a record: nearly 290,000 new Covid-19 cases within 24 hours. according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
Four days later, anti-mask protesters in Oregon filmed their confrontation with employees at a Trader Joe's grocery store who wouldn't let them enter the store unless they were wearing a mask. Their 8-minute video has since been viewed over 325,000 times. The Oregonian newspaper reports:
As other masked customers enter the store, the manager repeats th
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Darkened SpaceX Satellites Can Still Disrupt Astronomy, New Research Suggests
"SpaceX's attempt to reduce the reflectivity of Starlink satellites is working, but not to the degree required by astronomers," reports Gizmodo:
Starlink satellites with an anti-reflective coating are half as bright as the standard version, according to research published in The Astrophysical Journal. It's an improvement, but still not good enough, according to the team, led by astronomer Takashi Horiuchi from the National Astronomical Observatory in Japan. These "DarkSats," as they're called,
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Signal Back After 24 Hours of Outages Caused by Surging Traffic
"After experiencing technical difficulties Friday, the Signal messaging app appears to be back up and running," reports the Verge:
The company tweeted Saturday night that it was "back," although added that some users may still see error messages in their chats. The company didn't explain what caused the outage.
For users still seeing error messages in their chats — which the company said was a "side effect" of the outage that began around 11:30AM ET Friday — Signal tweeted t
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Estimated Cost of Poor Software Quality in the U.S. in 2020: $2.1 Trillion
TechRepublic shares a remarkable calculation by the not-for-profit IT leadership group the Consortium for Information and Software Security:
CISQ's 2020 report, The Cost of Poor Software Quality in the U.S., looked at the financial impact of software projects that went awry or otherwise ended up leaving companies with a larger bill by creating additional headaches for them. According to the consortium, unsuccessful IT projects alone cost U.S. companies $260 billion in 2020, while software pro
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Online Misinformation Dropped Dramatically After Twitter Banned Trump
The Washington Post reports:
Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent after several social media sites suspended President Trump and key allies last week, research firm Zignal Labs has found, underscoring the power of tech companies to limit the falsehoods poisoning public debate when they act aggressively.
The new research by the San Francisco-based analytics firm reported that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions a
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Are Tech Companies Ducking Responsibility For The Need to De-Platform?
Long-time technology reporter/commentator Kara Swisher weighs in on the de-platforming of U.S. president Trump, arguing Trump "was only following the rules set for him and it was entirely the fault of the tech companies for giving him the kind of latitude that allowed him to go that far."
Like a parent who gives a child endless bowls of sugar and then wonders why their kid is batshit crazy, tech has pretended to be obtuse to the consequences of their products and the choices that have been ma
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A 'Debilitating' Shortage of Computer Chips is Closing Auto Factories Worldwide
"American automakers are asking the U.S. government to help solve a debilitating shortage of computer chips that is closing auto factories worldwide and could restrict production until the fall," reports Bloomberg:
The American Automotive Policy Council — a lobbying organization for General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and the U.S. operations of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV — is agitating with the U.S. Commerce Department and the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden
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Jamie Zawinski Calls Cinnamon Screensaver Lock-Bypass Bug 'Unconscionable'
Legendary programmer Jamie Zawinski has worked on everything from the earliest releases of the Netscape Navigator browser to XEmacs, Mozilla, and, of course, the XScreenSaver project.
Now Slashdot reader e432776 writes:
JWZ continues to track issues with screensavers on Linux (since 2004!), and discusses a new bug in cinnamon-screensaver. Long-standing topics like X11, developer interaction, and code licensing all feature. Solutions to these long-standing issues remain elusive.
Jamie
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41% of IT Leaders Believe AI Will Take Their Jobs By 2030
Dallas, TX-based cloud security firm Trend Micro interviewed 500 IT directors and managers, CIOs and CTOs — and discovered that over two-fifths of them believe they'll be replaced by AI by 2030.
ZDNet reports:
Only 9% of respondents were confident that AI would definitely not replace their job within the next decade. In fact, nearly a third (32%) said they thought the technology would eventually work to completely automate all cybersecurity, with little need for human intervention.
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How Tim Berners-Lee Will Fix the Internet
"Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who was knighted for inventing the internet navigation system known as the World Wide Web, wants to re-make cyberspace once again," reports Reuters:
With a new startup called Inrupt, Berners-Lee aims to fix some of the problems that have handicapped the so-called open web in an age of huge, closed platforms such as Facebook. Building on ideas developed by an open-source software project called Solid, Inrupt promises a web where people can u
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After 2 Years on Mars, NASA's Digger Declared Dead
"NASA declared the Mars digger dead Thursday after failing to burrow deep into the red planet to take its temperature," reports the Associated Press:
Scientists in Germany spent two years trying to get their heat probe, dubbed the mole, to drill into the Martian crust. But the 16-inch-long (40-centimeter) device that is part of NASA's InSight lander couldn't gain enough friction in the red dirt. It was supposed to bury 16 feet (5 meters) into Mars, but only drilled down a couple of feet (abou
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'Major Component Malfunction' Ends SLS Rocket Test Early. NASA Considers New Timeline
"NASA's rocket charged with taking the agency back to the moon fired its four main engines Saturday afternoon, but the test in Mississippi was cut short after a malfunction caused an automatic abort," reports Florida Today...
"We did get an MCF on engine four," a control room member said less than a minute into the test fire, using an initialism that stands for "major component malfunction...." The engines fired for 12 more seconds after the exchange before an automatic shutdown was called.
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Robert Cringley Predicted 'The Death of IT' in 2020. Was He Right?
Yesterday long-time tech pundit Robert Cringley reviewed the predictions he'd made at the beginning of last year. "Having done this for over 20 years, historically I'm correct abut 70 percent of the time, but this year could be a disappointment given that I'm pretty sure I didn't predict 370,000 deaths and an economy in free-fall.
"We'll just have to see whether I was vague enough to get a couple right."
Here's some of the highlights:
I predicted that IBM would dump a big division and
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Online Far-Right Movements Fracture, as 'Gullible' QAnon Supporters Criticized
"Online far-right movements are splintering," argues NBC News:
Users on forums that openly helped coordinate the Jan. 6 riot and called for insurrection...have become increasingly agitated with QAnon supporters, who are largely still in denial that President Donald Trump will no longer be in the Oval Office after Jan. 20... [QAnon adherents] have identified Inauguration Day as a last stand, and falsely think he will force a 10-day, countrywide blackout that ends in the mass execution of his
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Apple Suspended Social Media Platform Wimkin From Its App Store
Apple "suspended" the social media platform Wimkin from its App Store, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, "part of a widening crackdown by tech companies on potentially dangerous content during the presidential transition."
Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace shares their report:
Mr. Sheppard said the takedowns on the platform, which has 300,000 users and mimics some of the functions of Facebook, pales in comparison to content removals by much larger competitors. "I can't faul
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Thousands of Users Unknowingly Joined Signal Because of a 12-Year-Old's App
"At least 10,000 Signal users can be attributed to a 12-year-old kid in India who created a somewhat popular clone of the encrypted chat app," reports Motherboard:
Dev Sharma, a Signal user from Melbourne, Australia, found the Signal clone when he encountered an unusual thing: Signal displayed a pop-up showing that their friend had just joined the app. Sharma messaged their friend, but the friend had never even heard of Signal, despite apparently using the app. The friend had downloaded a dif
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Google Employees Try Baking Recipes Created by AI
"Behold the cakie: It has the crispiness of a cookie and the, well, 'cakiness' of a cake."
So says a triumphant blog post by Google Cloud's developer advocate and an applied AI Engineer for Google's Cloud AI. "We also made breakies, which were more like fluffy cookies, almost the consistency of a muffin" (or bread).
Food and Wine explains the project (in an article shared by Slashdot reader John Trumpian):
Inspired by the pandemic-spawned spike in searches for baking, the team at Google
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Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes IEEE Spectrum:
Computers use a staggering amount of energy today. According to one recent estimate, data centers alone consume two percent of the world's electricity, a figure that's expected to climb to eight percent by the end of the decade. To buck that trend, though, perhaps the microprocessor, at the center of the computer universe, could be streamlined in entirely new ways.
One group of researchers in Japan have taken this idea to the limit,
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Joe Biden Promotes 'Science Advisor' to US Cabinet-Level Position
"President-elect Joe Biden announced Friday that he has chosen a pioneer in mapping the human genome — the so-called 'book of life' — to be his chief science adviser," reports the Associated Press, "and is elevating the top science job to a Cabinet position."
Biden nominated Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who was the lead author of the first paper announcing the details of the human genome, as director of Office of Science and Technology
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US President-Elect Biden Starts New Twitter Account, Criticizes Policy on POTUS Account
"This will be the account for my official duties as President," tweeted U.S. president-elect Joe Biden on Thursday — but from a new account at @PresElectBiden (which will transition to @POTUS after Wednesday's inauguration).
But Bloomberg reports Biden is still "clashing with the social media company over its decision to deny the incoming administration millions of existing White House followers."
Biden's transition opened @PresElectBiden in order to start building a following for one
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EFF, Cory Doctorow Warn About the Dangers of De-Platforming and Censorship
Last week Cory Doctorow shared his own answer for what Apple and Google should've done about Parler:
They should remove it, and tell users, "We removed Parler because we think it is a politically odious attempt to foment violence. Our judgment is subjective and may be wielded against others in future. If you don't like our judgment, you shouldn't use our app store."
I'm 100% OK with that: first, because it is honest; and second, because it invites the question, "How do we switch app store
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Quixotic Californian Crusade To Officially Recognize the Hellabyte
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: In 2010, Austin Sendek, then a physics student at UC Davis, created a petition seeking recognition for prefix "hella-" as an official International System of Units (SI) measurement representing 10^27. "Northern California is home to many influential research institutions, including the University of California, Davis, the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Labora
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FAA Approves Fully Automated Commercial Drone Flights
A Massachusetts company has been granted approval to operate commercial drone flights without a person directing the machine and keeping it in sight. It's the first time that the Federal Aviation Administration has allowed fully automated commercial drone flights. ABC News reports: American Robotics Inc. touted the advantage of its machines as being able to operate continuously without "expensive human labor." The Marlborough, Massachusetts, company said Friday it has tested fully automated dron
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Seagrass 'Neptune Balls' Sieve Millions of Plastic Particles From Water, Study Finds
Underwater seagrass in coastal areas appear to trap plastic pollution in natural bundles of fiber known as "Neptune balls," researchers have found. The Guardian reports: With no help from humans, the swaying plants -- anchored to shallow seabeds -- may collect nearly 900 million plastic items in the Mediterranean alone every year, a study reported in the journal Scientific Reports said. "We show that plastic debris in the seafloor can be trapped in seagrass remains, eventually leaving the marine
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MacOS Malware Used Run-Only AppleScripts To Avoid Detection For Five Years
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: For more than five years, macOS users have been the targets of a sneaky malware operation that used a clever trick to avoid detection and hijacked the hardware resources of infected users to mine cryptocurrency behind their backs. Named OSAMiner, the malware has been distributed in the wild since at least 2015 disguised in pirated (cracked) games and software such as League of Legends and Microsoft Office for Mac, security firm SentinelOne said in
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Facebook Uses AI To Predict If COVID-19 Patients Will Need More Care
Facebook is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to help doctors predict whether they will need more resources, such as extra oxygen to care for COVID-19 patients in hospitals. CNET reports: The social network said Friday it developed two AI models, one based on a single chest X-ray, and another from a series X-rays, that could help forecast if a patient infected by the coronavirus is likely to get worse. A third model predicts the amount of extra oxygen a COVID-19 patient might need.
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Amazon.com and 'Big Five' Publishers Accused of eBook Price-Fixing
Amazon.com and the "Big Five" publishers -- Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster -- have been accused of colluding to fix ebook prices, in a class action filed by the law firm that successfully sued Apple and the Big Five on the same charge 10 years ago. The Guardian reports: The lawsuit, filed in district court in New York on Thursday by Seattle firm Hagens Berman, on behalf of consumers in several US states, names the retail giant as the sole defend
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Apple Plans First iMac Desktop Redesign In Nearly a Decade
In addition to upgraded MacBook Pros, Bloomberg reports that Apple is also "planning the first redesign of its iMac all-in-one desktop computer since 2012," as it shifts away from Intel to its own silicon. From the report: The new models will slim down the thick black borders around the screen and do away with the sizable metal chin area in favor of a design similar to Apple's Pro Display XDR monitor. These iMacs will have a flat back, moving away from the curved rear of the current iMac. Apple
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Xbox's 'Instant On' Feature Could Consume 4 Billion kWh By 2025
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The "instant on" feature that's activated by default on new Xbox Series S/X consoles could suck up a total of 4 billion kWh -- the equivalent of a year's operation for a large power plant -- from US owners alone through 2025. That's according to a preliminary report released this week from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmentally focused nonprofit advocacy group. As the name implies, the "instant on" feature of the Series S/
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Calculations Show It'll Be Impossible To Control a Super-Intelligent AI
schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: [S]cientists have just delivered their verdict on whether we'd be able to control a high-level computer super-intelligence. The answer? Almost definitely not. The catch is that controlling a super-intelligence far beyond human comprehension would require a simulation of that super-intelligence which we can analyze. But if we're unable to comprehend it, it's impossible to create such a simulation. Rules such as "cause no harm to humans" can't be set if w
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University of Florida Asks Students To Use App To Report Professors Who Don't Teach In Person
jyosim writes: Professors at the University of Florida are outraged that the university essentially put a "tattle" button on a campus safety app that lets students report if professors aren't teaching in person. Apparently more than 100 professors there have asked to teach online for health reasons but have been denied, and administrators worry that they'll just teach online anyway. Professors feel the app is akin to a "police state." "The university spokesperson said that administrators had hea
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Amazon Warehouse Workers To Decide Whether To Form Company's First US Union
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Some 6,000 workers at Amazon's warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., will begin voting next month on a groundbreaking possibility: the first union in the company's U.S. history. The National Labor Relations Board on Friday scheduled the vote by mail because of coronavirus concerns. It will begin Feb. 8 and continue through March 29. Workers at one of Amazon's newest facilities are deciding whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Frid
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Google Removing Inadvertent Ability for Chromium Browsers To Access Chrome Bookmarks, Sync
Besides the intended differences, web browsers based on Chromium offer an underlying experience that's mostly identical to Chrome. Google recently discovered that users of third-party Chromium browsers have inadvertently been able to access data and other sync features reserved for Chrome. From a report: "Some" Chromium browsers today can leverage features and APIs that are "only intended for Google's use." This includes Click to Call and, notably, Chrome Sync. The latter is responsible for sync
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Apple Fails To Overturn VirnetX Patent Verdict, Could Owe Over $1.1 Billion
A federal judge denied Apple's bid to set aside or reduce a $502.8 million patent infringement verdict favoring VirnetX, and awarded interest and royalties that could boost Apple's total payout in two lawsuits above $1.1 billion. From a report: In a decision issued on Friday, U.S. District Judge Robert Schroeder in Tyler, Texas rejected Apple's request for a new trial and several other claims. These included that VirnetX's award should not exceed $113.7 million, and that jurors should have been
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WhatsApp Delays Enforcement of Privacy Terms by 3 Months, Following Backlash
WhatsApp said on Friday that it won't enforce the planned update to its data-sharing policy until May 15, weeks after news about the new terms created confusion among its users, exposed the Facebook-app to a potential lawsuit, triggered a nationwide investigation, and drove tens of millions of its loyal fans to explore alternative messaging apps. From a report: "We're now moving back the date on which people will be asked to review and accept the terms. No one will have their account suspended o
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NSA Warns Against Using DoH Inside Enterprise Networks
The US National Security Agency has published this week a guide on the benefits and risks of encrypted DNS protocols, such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), which have become widely used over the past two years. From a report: The US cybersecurity agency warns that while technologies like DoH can encrypt and hide user DNS queries from network observers, they also have downsides when used inside corporate networks. "DoH is not a panacea," the NSA said in a security advisory [PDF] published today, claiming
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Apple Plans Podcasting Subscription Service in Threat To Spotify
Apple -- long considered the sleeping giant in the podcast space -- is waking up. The company, which runs the most widely used podcasting app in the industry, is discussing launching a new subscription service [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] that would charge people to listen to podcasts, The Information according to people familiar with the matter. From a report: Such a service could pose a threat to Spotify, SiriusXM, Amazon and other big companies that have in t
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Intel Has To Be Better Than 'Lifestyle Company' Apple at Making CPUs, Says New CEO
Intel's new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, doesn't start his new role until February, but he's already prepping the company to take on Apple's M1 chips. From a report: The Oregonian, a local newspaper in Oregon where Intel maintains a large presence, reports that the chip maker held an all-hands company meeting yesterday, and Gelsinger attended. "We have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than any possible thing that a lifestyle company in Cupertino" makes, Gelsinger reportedly told Intel emplo
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Apple Plans Upgraded MacBook Pros With Return of Magnetic Charging
Apple is planning upgraded MacBook Pro laptops this year with much faster processors, updated displays and the return of its magnetic charger, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing a person with knowledge of the plans. From the report: The new laptops are planned to come in two screen sizes, a 14-inch model codenamed J314 and a 16-inch version internally dubbed J316. Both will use next-generation versions of Apple's in-house Mac processors, upgraded with more cores and enhanced graphics, the person
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Ford Halts Focus Car Plant for Full Month Due To Chip Shortage
Ford Motor is halting production of its most popular car model in Europe for a full month because of the shortage of semiconductors disrupting the worldâ(TM)s biggest automakers. From a report: The automaker's Focus factory in Saarlouis, Germany, will idle from Jan. 18 through Feb. 19, according to a spokesman, who said lower consumer demand also is playing a factor. The plant is Ford's lone manufacturing facility for the Focus and employs about 5,000 workers. The facility is the latest to
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Why Cancer Cells Waste So Much Energy
MIT News: In the 1920s, German chemist Otto Warburg discovered that cancer cells don't metabolize sugar the same way that healthy cells usually do. Since then, scientists have tried to figure out why cancer cells use this alternative pathway, which is much less efficient. MIT biologists have now found a possible answer to this longstanding question. In a study appearing in Molecular Cell, they showed that this metabolic pathway, known as fermentation, helps cells to regenerate large quantities o
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Apple Testing Vapor Chamber Thermal Tech For Next-Gen iPhone, Kuo Says
Noted TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in a report on Friday said recent industry surveys indicate Apple is "aggressively" testing vapor chamber thermal systems for use in iPhone, suggesting the technology will make its way to the flagship handset in the near future. From a report: Kuo believes Apple is highly likely to incorporate vapor chamber tech into an upcoming iPhone model, though it is not clear if the system will be ready in time for 2021. Generally speaking, vapor chamb
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US Blacklists Xiaomi in Widening Assault on China Tech
Xiaomi plunged a record 10% after the Trump administration blacklisted China's No. 2 smartphone maker and 10 other companies, broadening efforts to undercut the expansion of the country's technology sector. From a report, shared by dxxt: The U.S. has targeted scores of Chinese companies for the stated purpose of protecting national security, but going after Xiaomi was unexpected. The Beijing-based company has been viewed as China's answer to Apple, producing sleek smartphones that draw loyal fan
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Amazon Will Let Companies Build Voice Assistants on Alexa
Amazon.com is offering other companies the ability to use the building blocks of the Alexa digital assistant for their own automated versions, the latest effort to embed the company's voice software into other devices. From a report: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV will be the first to use Alexa Custom Assistant, relying on Amazon-built speech recognition and other software to power the automaker's in-car tools, Amazon said Friday in a statement. The retail and technology giant also invited other c
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Tech Coalition Working To Create Digital COVID-19 Vaccination Passport
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A coalition of health and technology organizations are working to develop a digital COVID-19 vaccination passport to allow businesses, airlines and countries to check if people have received the vaccine. The Vaccination Credential Initiative, announced on Thursday, is formulating technology to confirm vaccinations in the likelihood that some governments will mandate people provide proof of their shots in order to enter the nation. The organizati
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Gemini Is Launching a Credit Card With Bitcoin Rewards
Later this year, cryptocurrency exchange company Gemini is planning to launch a credit card that earns bitcoin rewards based on your purchases. It's based on the work done by Blockrize, a fintech startup which Gemini has acquired for an undisclosed sum. TechCrunch reports: The credit card will work like any other credit card and will be available in the U.S. Customers will earn up to 3% in bitcoin rewards (again, up to 3%). You'll be able to earn other crypto assets as well. Those rewards will b
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'Magic Mushrooms' Grow In Man's Blood After Injection With Shroom Tea
John Trumpian shares a report from Live Science: A man brewed a tea from "magic mushrooms" and injected the concoction into his veins; several days later, he ended up at the emergency department with the fungus growing in his blood. The man spent 22 days in the hospital, with eight of those days in the intensive care unit (ICU), where he received treatment for multisystem organ failure. Now released, he is still being treated with a long-term regimen of antibiotic and antifungal drugs, according
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2020 Was Second-Hottest Year On Record, NOAA Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Data released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, showed that 2020 now ranks as the second-hottest year, with average temperatures hitting 58.77 degrees Fahrenheit -- a mere 0.04 degrees cooler than 2016, which holds the record. The Northern Hemisphere experienced its hottest year on record, surpassing the 20th century average by 2.3 degrees, according to NOAA. Oceans were also "exceptionally warm" last year
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Facial Recognition Reveals Political Party In Troubling New Research
Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person's political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. TechCrunch reports: The study, which appeared this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, was conducted by Stanford University's Michal Kosinski. Kosinski made headlines in 2017 with work that found that a person's sexual preference could be predicted from facial data. [...] The algorithm itself is not some hyper-advanced technol
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MIT Professor Charged With Hiding Work For China
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor was charged Thursday with hiding work he did for the Chinese government while he was also collecting U.S. dollars for his nanotechnology research. The Associate Press reports: Gang Chen, 56, was arrested by federal agents at his home in Cambridge on charges including wire fraud, officials said. While working for MIT, Chen entered into undisclosed contracts and held appointments with Chinese entities, including acting as an "overseas expert" for t
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Windows 10 Bug Corrupts Your Hard Drive On Seeing This File's Icon
An unpatched zero-day in Microsoft Windows 10 allows attackers to corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive with a one-line command. Bleeping Computer reports: In August 2020, October 2020, and finally this week, infosec researcher Jonas L drew attention to an NTFS vulnerability impacting Windows 10 that has not been fixed. When exploited, this vulnerability can be triggered by a single-line command to instantly corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive, with Windows prompting the user to restart their co
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Andrew Yang Kicks Off NYC Mayoral Run With Basic Income Promise
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Aljazeera: Tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, a former presidential contender, officially declared his run for New York City mayor. In a campaign video released late Wednesday on Twitter, Yang put forth an agenda that included a guaranteed minimum income, bringing universal high-speed Internet, starting a "people's bank" and reopening New York City "intelligently" from the pandemic. "I moved to New York City 25 years ago," he said in the video. "I came of age
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Medical Study Suggests iPhone 12 With MagSafe Can Deactivate Pacemakers
AmiMoJo shares a report from 9to5Mac: When Apple revived MagSafe with the iPhone 12 lineup, one question brought up was how these latest devices with more magnets would interact with medical devices like pacemakers. Apple's official word was that iPhone 12/MagSafe wouldn't interfere more than previous iPhones. Now one of the first medical studies has been published by the Heart Rhythm Journal that saw a Medtronic pacemaker deactivated by holding an iPhone 12 near it (via MacMagazine. It doesn't
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Google Closes the Fitbit Acquisition, Pledges To Not Use Data For Ads
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today Google's senior VP of Hardware, Rick Osterloh, announced Google has closed its acquisition of Fitbit. The $2.1 billion deal was announced back in November 2019, which kicked off a regulatory review process from governments around the world concerned about Google's influence over the Internet and the data it can collect on users. Normally, Osterloh announcing "Google has completed its acquisition of Fitbit, and I want to personally welc
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Jack Dorsey Defends Twitter's Trump Ban, Then Enthuses About Bitcoin
After Twitter banned President Trump's account last week, the site and its executives, including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, were largely silent in justifying their decision. That changed last night when Dorsey, in a series of tweets, explained that he felt banning Trump's account was the right move for the social network. The Verge reports: "Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all," he wrote. Dorsey blamed Twitter's failu
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The Richer You are, The More Likely You'll Social Distance, Study Finds
The higher a person's income, the more likely they were to protect themselves at the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, Johns Hopkins University economists find. From a report: When it comes to adopting behaviors including social distancing and mask wearing, the team detected a striking link to their financial well-being. People who made around $230,000 a year were as much as 54% more likely to increase these types of self-protective behaviors compared to people making a
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Is Letterboxd Becoming a Blockbuster?
Early last decade, Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, web designers based in Auckland, New Zealand, were seeking a passion project. Their business, a boutique web design studio called Cactuslab, developed apps and websites for various clients, but they wanted a project of their own that their team could plug away at when there wasn't much else to do. From a report: Buchanan had an idea for a social media site about movies. At the time, he reflected, he used Flickr to share photos and Last.fm
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Amazon Makes It Too Hard To Cancel Prime, Groups Tell Regulators
A coalition of public interest advocates is asking U.S. regulators to investigate whether Amazon.com violates consumer protection laws with its process for canceling Prime subscriptions. From a report: In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday, a group led by Public Citizen said the steps required to cancel Prime "are designed to unfairly and deceptively undermine the will of the consumer," and may violate both FTC rules as well as other consumer protection laws. The letter draws o
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The Fractured Tech Lobby's Uphill Battles
Silicon Valley's leading lobby, the Internet Association, is struggling to manage the competing interests of the companies it represents just as the industry faces a tide of bipartisan anger. From a report: Tech will fight policy battles around antitrust, content moderation and privacy without a unified industry voice. Major tech firms have drawn attention in recent days for pressing pause on political donations in the wake of last week's deadly attack on the Capitol. But lobbying, the other maj
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Blue Origin Successfully Launches and Lands Key Crew Capsule Test in First Mission of 2021
Blue Origin launched its first mission of 2021, flying its New Shepard rocket in West Texas to a medium height of just over 350,000 feet. From a report: This is the first flight for this particular booster, and for the capsule it carried, which was equipped with a range of new passenger safety, control and comfort systems that Blue Origin was testing during flight for the first time. Also on board was a life-sized test dummy called 'Mannequin Skywalker' that recorded information during the fligh
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Samsung Inadvertently Used iPhone To Tweet Galaxy S21 and S21+ Promo
Samsung committed a tech faux earlier this week when it issued a promotional tweet from an iPhone, the flagship handset made by a smartphone market arch rival. "With #SamsungUnpacked drawing closer, we're working hard to bring you some exciting news. Which field of innovation and advancement are you hoping to see us reveal?" Samsung asks in the tweet.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Windows 10X for Single Screens Leaks
Just ahead of its launch for commercial PC-like devices, an install image of Windows 10X for single screens has leaked, giving us an early peek at Microsoft's new OS. And yes, it's just like Chrome OS. From a report: Let's just get that out of the way. Microsoft has been working for years on a Chromebook competitor, but it has been largely unsuccessful. Windows 10 S, which was originally called Windows 10 Cloud, was Terry Myerson's approach, and that, of course, crashed and burned, in part becau
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Amazon's Ring Neighbors App Exposed Users' Precise Locations and Home Addresses
A security flaw in Ring's Neighbors app was exposing the precise locations and home addresses of users who had posted to the app. From a report: Ring, the video doorbell and home security startup acquired by Amazon for $1 billion, launched Neighbors in 2018 as a breakaway feature in its own standalone app. Neighbors is one of several neighborhood watch apps, like Nextdoor and Citizen, that lets users anonymously alert nearby residents to crime and public-safety issues. While users' posts are pub
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Google Reveals Sophisticated Windows and Android Hacking Operation
Google published a six-part report this week detailing a sophisticated hacking operation that the company detected in early 2020 and which targeted owners of both Android and Windows devices. From a report: The attacks were carried out via two exploit servers delivering different exploit chains via watering hole attacks, Google said. "One server targeted Windows users, the other targeted Android," Project Zero, one of Google's security teams, said in the first of six blog posts. Google said that
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The Galaxy S21 and S21+ Are Samsung's New, More Affordable Flagships
An anonymous reader shares a report: 2020 was the year Samsung was forced to rethink its smartphone strategy. A pandemic-fueled global decline in sales and a frosty reception to its S20 lineup and the Galaxy Note 20, left Samsung looking up to another company for the first time in years. However, out of that moment came its most practical phone in recent memory, the Galaxy S20 Fan Edition. Where devices like the S20 Ultra and Note 20 Ultra showed Samsung at its most indulgent, the S20 FE proved
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Poland Plans To Make Censoring of Social Media Accounts Illegal
Polish government officials have denounced the deactivation of Donald Trump's social media accounts, and said a draft law being readied in Poland will make it illegal for tech companies to take similar actions there. From a report: "Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not," wrote the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, on Facebook earlier this week, without directly mentioning Trump. "There can be no consent to censorship." Morawieck
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Apple Removes Feature That Allowed Its Apps To Bypass macOS Firewalls and VPNs
Apple has removed a controversial feature from the macOS operating system that allowed 53 of Apple's own apps to bypass third-party firewalls, security tools, and VPN apps installed by users for their protection. From a report: Known as the ContentFilterExclusionList, the list was included in macOS 11, also known as Big Sur. The exclusion list included some of Apple's biggest apps, like the App Store, Maps, and iCloud, and was physically located on disk at:
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US Asks Tesla To Recall 158,000 Vehicles For Touchscreen Failures
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Wednesday asked Tesla to recall 158,000 Model S and Model X vehicles over media control unit (MCU) failures that could pose safety risks by leading to touchscreen displays not working. The auto safety agency made the unusual request in a formal letter to Tesla after upgrading a safety probe in November, saying it had tentatively concluded the 2012-2018 Model S and 2016-2018 Model X veh
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Qualcomm To Acquire NUVIA: A CPU Magnitude Shift
Today, Qualcomm has announced they will be acquiring NUVIA for $1.4 billion -- acquiring the start-up company consisting of industry veterans which originally were behind the creation of Apple's high-performance CPU cores. AnandTech reports: NUVIA was originally founded in February 2019 and coming out of stealth-mode in November of that year. The start-up was founded by industry veterans Gerard Williams III, John Bruno and Manu Gulati, having extensive industry experience at Google, Apple, Arm,
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EU Must 'Move At Speed' On Space Broadband Network
The European Commission says it wants its newly proposed satellite mega-constellation to be offering some sort of initial service in 2024. The BBC reports: The first priority is to fill in gaps in broadband coverage where ground infrastructure cannot reach, but later it will power services such as self-driving cars. The project will in some ways mirror America's Starlink and the UK-Indian OneWeb networks. Its scope has yet to be fully defined. A consortium of aerospace and telecoms companies is
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Google Trained a Trillion-Parameter AI Language Model
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google researchers developed and benchmarked techniques they claim enabled them to train a language model containing more than a trillion parameters. They say their 1.6-trillion-parameter model, which appears to be the largest of its size to date, achieved an up to 4 times speedup over the previously largest Google-developed language model (T5-XXL). As the researchers note in a paper detailing their work, large-scale training is an effective
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AT&T Kills Off the Failed TV Service Formerly Known As DirecTV Now
AT&T is killing off the online-video service formerly known as DirecTV Now and introducing a no-contract option for the newer online service that replaced it. Ars Technica reports: AT&T unveiled DirecTV Now late in 2016, the year after AT&T bought the DirecTV satellite company. Prices originally started at $35 a month for the live-TV online service, and it had signed up 1.86 million subscribers by Q3 2018. But customers quickly fled as AT&T repeatedly raised prices and cut down o
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The Linux Foundation Now Offers a Suite of Open-Source Management Classes
The Linux Foundation has new courses to help you manage open-source projects and technical staff within your organization. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: Previously, if you want to know how to run open-source well in your company, you had to work with OASIS Open or the TODO Group. Both are non-profit organizations supporting best open source and open standards practices. But, to work with either group, effectively, you already had to know a lot about open source. [...] This 7-module
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FTC Settlement With Ever Orders Data and AIs Deleted After Facial Recognition Pivot
The maker of a defunct cloud photo storage app that pivoted to selling facial recognition services has been ordered to delete user data and any algorithms trained on it, under the terms of an FTC settlement. TechCrunch reports: The regulator investigated complaints the Ever app -- which gained earlier notoriety for using dark patterns to spam users' contacts -- had applied facial recognition to users' photographs without properly informing them what it was doing with their selfies. Under the pro
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ECB's Christine Lagarde Blasts Bitcoin's Role In Facilitating Money Laundering
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde took aim at Bitcoin's role in facilitating criminal activity, saying the cryptocurrency has been enabling "funny business." "For those who had assumed that it might turn into a currency -- terribly sorry, but this is an asset and it's a highly speculative asset which has conducted some funny business and some interesting and totally reprehensible money-laundering activity," Lagarde said in an on
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TikTok: All Under-16s' Accounts Made Private
TikTok users aged under 16 will have their accounts automatically set to private, as the app introduces a series of measures to improve child safety. The BBC reports: Approved followers only can comment on videos from these accounts. Users will also be prevented from downloading any videos created by under-16s. TikTok said it hoped the changes would encourage young users to "actively engage in their online privacy journey." "We hope to inspire them to take an active role and make informed decisi
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Pirate Bay Founder Thinks Parler's Inability To Stay Online Is 'Embarrassing'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: As one of the original co-founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi knows a little something about keeping controversial services online. Kolmisoppi and his colleagues spent decades battling a global coalition of corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies intent on wiping the file sharing website from the face of the internet. Unsuccessfully. Kolmisoppi took to Twitter this week to share some thoughts on Parler's recent
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House Votes To Impeach President Trump a Historic Second Time
A House majority, including several Republicans, on Wednesday voted to impeach President Trump for "incitement of insurrection." The New York Times reports: The House had enough votes on Wednesday to impeach President Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the United States government, as more than a half-dozen members of the president's party joined Democrats to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors for an unprecedented second time. Reconvening under the threat of continued vi
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UK Nuclear Spacecraft Could Halve Time of Journey To Mars
British spacecraft could travel to Mars in half the time it now takes by using nuclear propulsion engines built by Rolls-Royce under a new deal with the UK Space Agency. From a report: The aerospace company hopes nuclear-powered engines could help astronauts make it to Mars in three to four months, twice as fast as the most powerful chemical engines, and unlock deeper space exploration in the decades to come. The partnership between Rolls-Royce and the UK Space Agency will bring together planeta
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BeagleV is a $150 RISC-V Computer Designed To Run Linux
New submitter shoor writes: Seeed Studios -- the makers of the Odyssey mini-PC -- have teamed up with well-known SBC vendor BeagleBoard to produce an affordable RISC-V system designed to run Linux. The new BeagleV (pronounced "Beagle Five") system features a dual-core, 1GHz RISC-V CPU made by StarFive -- one of a network of RISC-V startups created by better-known RISC-V vendor SiFive. The CPU is based on two of SiFive's U74 Standard Cores -- and unlike simpler microcontroller-only designs, it fe
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Airbnb Blocks DC Reservations Around Inauguration
Airbnb said Wednesday it is canceling existing reservations and blocking new ones in the Washington, D.C., area during inauguration week as federal officials remain on alert for potential violence. Axios reports: Airbnb says the move is in response to requests from local, state and federal officials asking people not to travel to D.C. for President-elect Biden's inauguration. Guests whose reservations are canceled will receive refunds and Airbnb says it will reimburse hosts' lost earnings.
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