Slashdot Mirror

A new bill sent to Singapore's parliament on Monday will require social media to carry warnings on posts it deems false and remove comments against "public interest." "The move came two days after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said governments should play a more active role in regulating the online platform," reports Reuters. From the report: Singapore, which has been run by the same political party since independence from Britain more than 50 years ago, says it is vulnerable to fake news because of its position as a global financial hub, its mixed ethnic and religious population and widespread internet access. The new bill proposes that the government get online platforms to publish warnings or "corrections alongside posts carrying false information, without removing them.

This would be the "primary response" to counter falsehoods online, the Law Ministry said. "That way, in a sense, people can read whatever they want and make up their minds. That is our preference," Law Minister K. Shanmugam told reporters on Monday. "This legislation deals with false statements of facts. It doesn't deal with opinions, it doesn't deal with viewpoints. You can have whatever viewpoints however reasonable or unreasonable." Under the proposals, which must be approved by parliament, criminal sanctions will only be imposed if the falsehoods are spread by "malicious actors" who "undermine society," the ministry said, without elaborating. It added that it would cut off an online site's "ability to profit," without shutting it down, if the site had published three falsehoods that were "against the public interest" over the previous six months. It did not say how it would block a site's profit streams.

Several major ISPs in Australia temporarily blocked access to 8chan, along with "dozens" of web sites that hosted video of last week's mass shooting in Christchurch New Zealand, Ars Technica reports -- noting that the ISPs acted on their own in response to "community expectations."

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan (who "cut ties" with the site in December) is now criticizing 8chan moderators for their slowness in removing posts inciting violence, including last week's post from the Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant: Their reluctance to do so, along with the proliferation of posts on 8chan praising Tarrant's actions, have persuaded Brennan that the toxic, white-supremacist culture that lives on parts of the site could someday be linked to another mass shooting....

Brennan, 25 years old, expressed regret that the site had consumed so much of his life. "I didn't spend enough time making friends in real life," he said. High-school events and classes in upstate New York didn't matter to him at all. What mattered was the community of like-minded provocateurs, trolls, libertarians and conservative thinkers he discovered online as a boy and that formed his identity as a young man. "I just feel like I wasted too much time on this stuff," he said.
Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell (in a Post video) argues that 8chan "has grown from this central place for tech libertarians, trolls, just people looking to get a rise out of other people online, and it's really radicalized into this place of overt neo-Nazi, white supremacist, racist, sexist, anti-everything discourse...

"We haven't really reckoned with how to deal with the negative parts of easy and free and anonymous connectivity around the world, and there's no real good mechanism for solving a problem like that."

In its fourth-quarter 2018 earnings report, Netflix disclosed some of its viewership numbers for hits such as "Bird Box." "Overall, Netflix said it serves about 100 million hours of video per day, earning an estimated 10 percent of all time spent in front of the TV in the U.S.," reports CNBC. The company also said "Bird Box" reached 80 million member households in its first four weeks on the streaming service. Unfortunately, it still didn't show exactly how many people have viewed the content. From the report: By way of comparison, during the week of Jan. 7, the top TV show was an NFL playoff game between the New Orleans Saints and Dallas Cowboys on Sunday, Jan. 13, which drew 33 million viewers, according to Nielsen. The top scripted show, "The Big Bang Theory," drew over 13 million. But Netflix does not view TV as its only competition. In its earnings note, it also said games such as Fortnite compete for attention. Fortnite reportedly draws 200 million players per week.

The company also highlighted several of its international projects. Netflix said its original from Spain, "Elite," was watched by over 20 million member households worldwide in the first four weeks. "Bodyguard," co-produced with BBC One; "Baby," an original series from Italy, and "Protector," an original series from Turkey, all reached more than 10 million member households in their first four weeks, the company said. There was still one notable hit that Netflix didn't disclose numbers for: "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch." Instead, the company discussed in its earnings letter that the technology used to create the movie, its first interactive choose-your-own-adventure-style flick, will be used for interactive projects in the future.

Thelasko shares a report from MarketWatch: You can thank Thomas Edison for the light bulb casting light in your home, Henry Ford for your affordable, mass-produced car, and Apple's Steve Jobs for the astonishing computer in your pocket. And Jack Bogle, who died Wednesday [at the age of 89]. The low-cost mutual funds he helped pioneer at Vanguard aren't as sexy or dramatic as other inventions. And you can't really touch or see them. But their effect on everyday lives has been enormous. Bogle's low-cost index funds, and the imitators they have inspired, may have saved ordinary Main Street Americans a staggering $250 billion, or more, in mutual fund fees over the last forty years. According to the Investment Company Institute (ICI), there are now about 450 index mutual funds with around $3.4 trillion in assets. There are also 1,800 exchange-traded funds, also with around $3.4 trillion in assets.

Although the economy saw new peaks in 2018, not all Americans report reaping the benefits. An anonymous reader shares a report: The majority of workers say they saw no salary increases this year, according to a new survey. More than 60% of Americans said they didn't get a pay raise at their current job or get a better-paying job in the last 12 months, according to a survey released Wednesday from finance site Bankrate.com. Meanwhile, executives have seen a surge in compensation, according to an August study from the Economic Policy Institute. The average chief executive officer at the 350 largest firms in the U.S. received $18.9 million in compensation in 2017, the study showed, a 17.6% increase over 2016. Despite those disparities, 91% of Americans say they have the same or greater confidence in the job market than they did one year ago, according to Bankrate.com.

Cryptocurrency prices "fell sharply on Friday, as another bout of selling took digital currencies to fresh lows," reports MarketWatch, adding that Friday the price of Bitcoin "crashed through support at $3,500, falling more than 10% to a 15-month low at $3,230 on the Kraken exchange."

"What a difference a year makes," CNN Business quipped Friday, in an article headlined "Bitcoin's Epic Plunge Continues": In December 2017, bitcoin prices hit a record high of just under $20,000... Bitcoin is at a 15-month low. But prices have really gotten whacked this week, falling nearly 20% in just the past five days alone. Bitcoin isn't the only cryptocurrency getting hit either. Ripple/XRP, ethereum, stellar, litecoin and numerous other cryptocurrencies have plunged in the past week.

Little tangible news can explain or justify the current crypto carnage. One possible reason is that a pro-crypto member of the Securities and Exchange Commission warned at a conference this week that she's fighting an uphill battle trying to convince the rest of the SEC to approve more bitcoin exchange traded funds.... Nearly two-thirds of money managers surveyed by asset management firm Natixis still thought that cryptocurrencies were a bubble, the firm reported this week.
"In my opinion, bitcoin is dead," wrote the CEO of one wealth management firm with more than $32 billion in assets. It won't go quietly, but the recent precipitous drop may be the beginning of its inevitable and inexorable death spiral. Or there could be a dead cat bounce. Either way, I see bitcoin as a dead man walking. Future generations may read about bitcoin in a finance textbook as a curiosity and wonder what all the fuss was about. There are still some die-hard adherents espousing the virtues of bitcoin, desperate to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Unfortunately for them, the end may not be pretty when it comes.

Proponents of bitcoin tend to focus on the impact of the blockchain technology that drives it, and make no mistake, blockchain is the real deal. Blockchain is fundamentally changing the way industries do business, from traditional banking to supply chain management. But just because blockchain technology is creating a new paradigm doesn't mean that bitcoin shares that same distinction.... Most cryptocurrency transactions are purely speculative. There are no real fundamentals to evaluate; bitcoin doesn't produce any products or services, hire any employees or pay any dividends. The only way profits are generated is when the owner is lucky enough to find someone else who will pay more for the thing...

The minute bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency appears to have even the slightest chance of disrupting national monetary supply, I expect regulation to be swift and decisive. The SEC has already issued guidance around cryptocurrencies that has created roadblocks to gaining the same legitimacy as traditional marketable securities... If you enjoy the thrill of making bets, I suggest you visit your favorite sports book or table game in Vegas where your odds of success are much higher.

Spending too much time on "social media" sites like Facebook is making people more than just miserable. It may also be making them depressed. From a report: A new study conducted by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania has shown -- for the first time -- a causal link between time spent on social media and depression and loneliness, the researchers said. It concluded that those who drastically cut back their use of sites like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat often saw a marked improvement in their mood and in how they felt about their lives.

"It was striking," says Melissa Hunt, psychology professor at University of Pennsylvania, who led the study. "What we found over the course of three weeks was that rates of depression and loneliness went down significantly for people who limited their (social media) use." Many of those who began the study with moderate clinical depression finished just a few weeks later with very mild symptoms, she says.

The study, "No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression," was conducted by Melissa Hunt, Rachel Marx, Courtney Lipson and Jordyn Young, is being published by the peer-reviewed Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. For the study, Hunt and her team studied 143 undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania over a number of weeks. They tested their mood and sense of well-being using seven different established scales.

China has violated an accord it signed with the U.S. three years ago pledging not to engage in hacking for the purpose of economic espionage, a senior U.S. intelligence official said this week. From a report: The 2015 bilateral agreement had significantly reduced the amount of Chinese cybertheft targeting American companies, but Beijing's commitment to the deal has eroded, said Rob Joyce, senior adviser for cybersecurity strategy at the National Security Agency. "It is clear they are well beyond the bounds of the agreement today that was forged between our two countries," Joyce said during a panel conversation at the Aspen Cyber Summit.

Joyce's comments were the latest sign of Washington's rising frustration over China's alleged violation of the pact signed between then-President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Last week, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions also said China wasn't adhering to the deal, in which the U.S. and China agreed not to conduct cyber operations against each other to steal intellectual property or other forms of economic intelligence.

If a multimillion dollar class-action settlement basically doesn't pay a single consumer, is it fair? That's not the start of a lawyer joke; it's the crux of a case being argued Wednesday in the U.S. Supreme Court that, advocates say, has serious implications for the ways consumers benefit from duels with businesses in large-scale litigation. From a report (paywalled): "This is potentially billions of dollars going from everyday consumers to lawyers' slush funds," said Ted Frank, the litigation director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who's disputing the $8.5 million settlement between Google and 129 million class members before the Supreme Court. The case, Frank v. Gaos, focuses on the question of whether it's fair and reasonable to ever have class action settlements that give money to outside groups instead of the class members themselves. A decision for Frank -- who also happens to be a class member in the Google case and is a longtime gadfly questioning class action settlements -- could require the money go directly to consumers and upend a class action pay out method that's been around for decades.

The underlying case has to do with Google's 2013 agreement to pay $8.5 million to settle a case claiming widespread privacy rights violations. When any web surfer looked up topics on Google, the search engine beamed the search terms -- like "depression" and "medical leave" -- in the URL string to the third-party websites. The search term revelations broke various state and federal laws, plaintiffs said. After about three years of litigation, the parties settled. Google added more online disclosures and opened its wallet without admitting liability. The settlement's payouts included a $5,000 award for each of the three named plaintiffs and $2.12 million for the legal fees of the plaintiffs' lawyers. The remaining $5.3 million was divvied up among six universities and organizations pledging to put the money towards improving internet privacy. Lawyers for both Google and the class members say Frank's objections to the settlement are unfounded.

The November issue of Popular Mechanics includes a message from its editors that Elon Musk is "under attack," arguing that while some criticisms have merit, "much of it is myopic and small-brained, from sideline observers gleefully salivating at the opportunity to take him down a peg." But what have these stock analysts and pontificators done for humanity? Elon Musk is an engineer at heart, a tinkerer, a problem-solver -- the kind of person Popular Mechanics has always championed -- and the problems he's trying to solve are hard. Really hard. He could find better ways to spend his money, that's for sure. And yet there he is, trying to build gasless cars and build reusable rockets and build tunnels that make traffic go away. For all his faults and unpredictability, we need him out there doing that. We need people who have ideas. We need people who take risks.

We need people who try.
The magazine includes statements from 12 high-profile supporters, including investor Mark Cuban, who writes "When you invest in a company run by an entrepreneur like Elon, you are investing in the mindset and approach that an entrepreneur brings to the table as much as you are valuing the net present value of future cash flows. That is not typical for public companies that are overwhelmingly run by hired CEOs. My advice for Elon is simple: Be yourself. Be true to your mission. Respect your investors. Ignore your critics."

Meanwhile, in a Friday post on Twitter, Musk jokingly claimed that he'd purchased and then deleted the game of Fortnite, posting a doctored Marketwatch article quoting him as saying "I had to save these kids from eternal virginity."

"Had to been done," tweeted Musk, adding "ur welcome".

Tesla's model 3 is now one of the five top-selling sedans in America (while sales of the Mercedes-Benz C-Class are down 28 percent through September), Bloomberg reports. Elon Musk tweeted out a link to their article on Thursday -- but it was his other tweet, a satirical criticism of the SEC, that made headlines. MarketWatch reports: Tesla shares ended 7% lower on Friday as Wall Street reacted to Musk's tweet seemingly out of nowhere late Thursday about the "Shortseller Enrichment Commission." Musk also tweeted that day that short sellers were "value destroyers" and should be illegal. Friday's losses for Tesla "produced more than half a billion in paper profit for the shorts," S3 Partners LLC, which tracks real-time short interest data, said in a note. Since news of the Musk's settlement with the SEC, shorts are up $941 million, S3 Partners said. "Clearly short positions are building in the wake of strong selling by longs, as Musk demonstrates a refusal to keep away from controversy," the note said.
The article notes that last Saturday the SEC settled charges that Musk misled investors with a tweet about taking Tesla private. "Terms of the settlement included requiring Tesla to rein in Musk's social-media communications, but it was unclear when Tesla intends to implement that.... The settlement has yet to be court-approved."

On Friday Musk was back on point, tweeting out the news that Tesla owners "can refer someone to buy a Tesla & get any image they want laser etched in glass & sent to deep space for millions of years."

"Imagine an artificial-intelligence-driven military drone capable of autonomously patrolling the perimeter of a country or region and deciding who lives and who dies, without a human operator. Now do the same with tanks, helicopters and biped/quadruped robots." A United Nations conference recently decided not to ban these weapons systems outright, but to revisit the topic in November.

So a MarketWatch columnist looked at how these weapons systems could go bad -- and argues the risks are greater than simply fooling the AI into malfunctioning. What about hijacking...? In warfare, AI units can function autonomously, but in the end they need a way to communicate with one another and to transfer data to a command center. This makes them vulnerable to hacking and hijacking. What would happen if one of these drones or robots was hijacked by an opposite faction and started firing on civilians? A hacker would laugh. Why? Because he wouldn't hijack just one. He would design a self-propagating virus that would spread throughout the AI network and infect all units in the vicinity, as well as those communicating with them. In a split second, an entire squad of lethal autonomous weapons systems would be under enemy control... Every machine can be overridden, tricked, hijacked and manipulated with an efficiency that's unheard of in the realm of human-operated traditional weaponry.

However, the U.S. government remains oblivious. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has already announced a $2 billion development campaign for the next wave of technologically advanced AI (dubbed "AI Next"). One of the goals is to have the machines "acquire human-like communication and reasoning capabilities, with the ability to recognize new situations and environments and adapt to them." I may be overreaching here, but the UN meeting on one end and this announcement on the other, make me think that the U.S. government isn't just pro-robotic -- it may already have a lethal autonomous weapons ace up its sleeve.
The article ends with a question: What do you think about killer robots replacing human combatants?

And what would happen if killer robots got hijacked?

The IRS recently ruled that under some circumstances employers can link their 401(k) matching contributions to the amount of an employee's student loan repayments -- making it easier for recent graduates to take advantage of this employer benefit. But that's one spot of good news in a sea of bad, according to one anonymous Slashdot reader: Two new articles criticize America's student loan policies (under both the Obama and Trump administrations). CNBC cites reports that within six years, more than 15% of student borrowers had officially defaulted, while 10% more had stopped making payments and another 4.8% were at least 90 days late. And for-profit colleges fared even worse, where nearly 25% of graduates defaulted, and a total of 44% faced "some form of loan distress."

These trends were masked by Department of Education reports which stopped tracking repayment rates after just three years (reporting defaults rates of just 10%), according to Ben Miller, senior director for post-secondary education at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "Official statistics present a relatively rosy picture of student debt. But looking at outcomes over more time and in greater detail shows that hundreds of thousands more borrowers from each cohort face troubles repaying."

Netflix is testing a way for users to register and pay for the streaming service while bypassing Apple's app store and hefty commission fees. MarketWatch reports: Netflix is looking into a new sign-up approach where users in some countries are no longer able to register for streaming service. They are being redirected to the mobile web version of the app and asked to enter payment details with Netflix directly. The test is running in 33 countries, not including the U.S., through the month of September, according to TechCrunch. This comes just months after Netflix in May made billing through Google Pay unavailable to new customers, though current subscribers that pay via Google Play can continue to do so until they cancel their accounts.

An anonymous reader quotes CryptoCoinsNews: Over the past 24 hours, the crypto market has recorded a loss of $18 billion, as major cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ether, EOS, and Bitcoin Cash dropped by 4 to 13 percent. While Bitcoin ended the day with a 4 percent decline in its value, Ether, the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum, plummeted by 13 percent against the US dollar, becoming one of the worst performing major cryptocurrencies alongside NEO. Tokens recorded the steepest drop in their value on August 11, as most Ethereum-based tokens such as Theta Token, Aion, Pundi X, Aelf, DigixDAO, WanChain, and VeChain recorded a drop of around 14 to 18 percent

For the first time in 2018, Bitcoin, the most dominant cryptocurrency in the global market, has obtained 50 percent of the market share, securing its year-to-date (YTD) high on the dominance index. The sudden increase in the dominance index of Bitcoin which coincided with the spike in the volume of Tether have demonstrated that investors have become reluctant towards taking high-risk and high-return trades, mostly due to the lack of confidence in the short-term trend of the market. Over the past few weeks, tokens have lost over 50 percent of their value against Bitcoin, which has also fallen by more than 20 percent since late July.
"During this 13-day stretch, the total market cap for all cryptocurrencies has fallen $70 billion," reports MarketPlace, in an article headlined "Bitcoin looks 'very sick' and the pain is not over, says analyst."

"Facebook executives said on Wednesday its profit margins would plummet for several years due to the cost of improving privacy safeguards and slowing usage in its top advertising markets," reports Reuters, adding that the news "wiped over $120 billion off the company's share price." One millennial options trader lost $180,000 overnight.

And meanwhile CNBC reports that Facebook insiders "sold more stock than usual in the second quarter," the vast majority sold by Mark Zuckerberg, leaving some experts with mixed opinions. To be clear, insiders sold in compliance with what's known as Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 10b5-1, a preapproved selling mechanism that is completely legal. And there is no evidence to suggest they were acting on inside information about the disastrous quarter that sent Facebook's stock down nearly 20 percent Thursday. However, their timing happened to be pretty good....

"You have something that's an outlier here," said James Cox, professor at Duke University School of Law. "It happened to be a very bad quarter that they had -- it doesn't wear well."
Friday Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg were sued "in what could be the first of many lawsuits over a disappointing earnings announcement by the social media company that wiped out about $120 billion of shareholder wealth." The complaint filed by shareholder James Kacouris in Manhattan federal court accused Facebook, Zuckerberg and Chief Financial Officer David Wehner of making misleading statements about or failing to disclose slowing revenue growth, falling operating margins, and declines in active users.

Kacouris said the marketplace was "shocked" when "the truth" began to emerge on Wednesday from the Menlo Park, California-based company. He said the 19 percent plunge in Facebook shares the next day stemmed from federal securities law violations by the defendants. The lawsuit seeks class-action status and unspecified damages. A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment.

Twitter shares fell 21% on Friday as the company reported that user growth had turned negative, even as its quarterly results beat Wall Street expectations. The decline was even greater than Facebook's almost 19 percent plunge in shares after the social media giant reported disappointing results. MarketWatch reports: Twitter posted a profit for the third consecutive quarter, with its $134 million in net income equating to 13 cents a share. Adjusted per-share earnings came to 17 cents. The FactSet consensus estimate had been 16 cents. Twitter's revenue climbed 24% to $710.5 million to beat the FactSet consensus estimate by about $2 million. Even as executives talked about Twitter's bright future on the earnings calls, investors appeared to react to Twitter's slowing user growth, as its monthly user count went south, falling by 1 million to 355 million, as compared with the year's first quarter. The decline was expected after recent reports had the company purging about a million fake accounts a day.

"Russian hackers [...] broke into supposedly secure, "air-gapped" or isolated networks owned by utilities (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) with relative easy by first penetrating the networks of key vendors who had trusted relationships with the power companies," reports The Wall Street Journal, citing officials at the Department of Homeland Security. "They got to the point where they could have thrown switches" and disrupted power flows, said Jonathan Homer, chief of industrial-control-system analysis for DHS. The hacking campaign started last year and likely is continuing. From the report: DHS has been warning utility executives with security clearances about the Russian group's threat to critical infrastructure since 2014. But the briefing on Monday was the first time that DHS has given out information in an unclassified setting with as much detail. It continues to withhold the names of victims but now says there were hundreds of victims, not a few dozen as had been said previously. It also said some companies still may not know they have been compromised, because the attacks used credentials of actual employees to get inside utility networks, potentially making the intrusions more difficult to detect.

The attackers began by using conventional tools -- spear-phishing emails and watering-hole attacks, which trick victims into entering their passwords on spoofed websites -- to compromise the corporate networks of suppliers, many of whom were smaller companies without big budgets for cybersecurity. Once inside the vendor networks, they pivoted to their real focus: the utilities. It was a relatively easy process, in many cases, for them to steal credentials from vendors and gain direct access to utility networks. Then they began stealing confidential information. For example, the hackers vacuumed up information showing how utility networks were configured, what equipment was in use and how it was controlled. They also familiarized themselves with how the facilities were supposed to work, because attackers "have to learn how to take the normal and make it abnormal" to cause disruptions, said Mr. Homer. Their goal, he said: to disguise themselves as "the people who touch these systems on a daily basis."

Ryan Shrout, reporting for MarketWatch: Intel CEO Brian Krzanich disclosed during an analyst event last week that it will have its first discrete graphics chips available in 2020. This will mark the beginning of the chip giant's journey toward a portfolio of high-performance graphics products for various markets including gaming, data center and artificial intelligence (AI). Some previous rumors suggested a launch at CES 2019 this coming January might be where Intel makes its graphics reveal, but that timeline was never adopted by the company. It would have been overly aggressive and in no way reasonable with the development process of a new silicon design. In November 2017 Intel brought on board Raja Koduri to lead the graphics and compute initiatives inside the company. Koduri was previously in charge of the graphics division at AMD helping to develop and grow the Radeon brand, and his departure to Intel was thought to have significant impact on the industry.

The so-called gig economy is actually slightly smaller than it used to be, according to a new Labor Department report released Thursday that chronicles the jobs market in the age of Uber. From a report: In May 2017, the Labor Department counted 5.9 million people, or 3.8% of workers, in what it calls contingent jobs, which are those that the workers don't expect to last or that workers call temporary. In 2005, the last time the government looked into the issue, there were 4.1% of workers who classified themselves this way. "Taken at face value, the results indicate that the role of non-traditional work arrangements in the U.S. economy has remained largely unchanged during the past 20 years, even as excitement and media coverage of the growth of the 'gig economy' has increased," said Brian Schaitkin, senior economist for The Conference Board.

According to MarketWatch's Leslie Albrecht, people are using the peer-to-peer payment app Venmo to find out if their spouse is cheating. Some are even saying the app is more effective than Facebook at this sort of investigation. "What you're seeing on Instagram or Facebook is what they want you to see," said Abby Faber, a 19-year-old freshman at Indiana University. "They're edited pictures that they put up. But with Venmo, it's very normal casual interactions. It's what they were doing and spending money on." From the report: Some users seem to forget that their transactions are public by default, and their payment activity provides an unfiltered paper trail of what's really happening in their lives. In [Faber's] case, she checked up on her ex-boyfriend and saw he was spending money on pizza and the popular video game Fortnite -- and making regular payments to one girl, who Faber guessed is his new hook-up.

Venmo has had a social component since it launched in 2009. Users see a feed of both their own friends' payments and total strangers' activity every time they open the app, and it's easy to look up users. Exact amounts aren't listed, but you can see who's paying who and which words or emoji they use to describe the payment. The social feed is Venmo's "secret sauce," said Erin Mackey, a spokeswoman for Venmo and its parent company PayPal. In fact, it's usually the reason people are logging on. "Our most active users check Venmo daily and the average user checks Venmo two to three times per week -- and it's not for payments, but to see what their friends and family are doing." The report mentions a settlement Venmo reached with the FTC last year over its public-by-default social component. The FTC accused (PDF) Venmo of "misleading" users about the fact that they needed to change two separate privacy settings to make their transactions completely private. "Venmo reached a settlement with the FTC, and a company spokesperson noted that users now have three options for controlling who can see their payments," reports MarketWatch.

According to MarketWatch's Leslie Albrecht, people are using the peer-to-peer payment app Venmo to find out if their spouse is cheating. Some are even saying the app is more effective than Facebook at this sort of investigation. "What you're seeing on Instagram or Facebook is what they want you to see," said Abby Faber, a 19-year-old freshman at Indiana University. "They're edited pictures that they put up. But with Venmo, it's very normal casual interactions. It's what they were doing and spending money on." From the report: Some users seem to forget that their transactions are public by default, and their payment activity provides an unfiltered paper trail of what's really happening in their lives. In [Faber's] case, she checked up on her ex-boyfriend and saw he was spending money on pizza and the popular video game Fortnite -- and making regular payments to one girl, who Faber guessed is his new hook-up.

Venmo has had a social component since it launched in 2009. Users see a feed of both their own friends' payments and total strangers' activity every time they open the app, and it's easy to look up users. Exact amounts aren't listed, but you can see who's paying who and which words or emoji they use to describe the payment. The social feed is Venmo's "secret sauce," said Erin Mackey, a spokeswoman for Venmo and its parent company PayPal. In fact, it's usually the reason people are logging on. "Our most active users check Venmo daily and the average user checks Venmo two to three times per week -- and it's not for payments, but to see what their friends and family are doing." The report mentions a settlement Venmo reached with the FTC last year over its public-by-default social component. The FTC accused (PDF) Venmo of "misleading" users about the fact that they needed to change two separate privacy settings to make their transactions completely private. "Venmo reached a settlement with the FTC, and a company spokesperson noted that users now have three options for controlling who can see their payments," reports MarketWatch.

An anonymous reader quotes the Wall Street Journal: Apple and Goldman Sachs are preparing to launch a new joint credit card, a move that would deepen the technology giant's push into its customers' wallets and mark the Wall Street firm's first foray into plastic. The planned card would carry the Apple Pay brand and could launch early next year, people familiar with the matter said...

As new iPhone sales growth slows, Apple is focusing on services such as mobile payments, streaming-music subscriptions, and App Store sales. Apple Pay, which generates revenue on each transaction, is a key contributor, but adoption has been slower than executives hoped... Apple could take a larger cut of mobile payments from the card if it is used for purchases, the person said. Currently, when a consumer pays for a purchase using the digital wallet on the iPhone -- regardless of what credit card the customer charges -- Apple receives 0.15% per transaction. Apple could more than double that under the agreement with Goldman, one of the people said.
The deal also reportedly includes having Goldman Sachs offer loans to customers at the Apple Store.

An anonymous reader writes: Pandora's stock had its best day ever on Wall Street, rising more than 25% after reporting their subscription and other revenue had surged 61.3 percent to $104.7 million. Previous users have apparently been lured back with targeted marketing touting a new service that lets users briefly play their favorite songs on demand if they'll watch a short ad. "Pandora said it ended the quarter with 5.63 million subscribers to its Pandora Plus and Pandora Platinum paid services, which was 19 percent higher than the same period a year ago," reports one Silicon Valley newspaper. March saw more former users returning than in the same month a year ago -- for the first time in 18 months.

And an important factor was switching from brand-based marketing to data-based marketing -- that is, "using the information that Pandora has on users' listening preferences." Pandora's Chief Executive brags to MarketWatch that "We really have world-class data-science capabilities. We just never used them in our own marketing."
Engadget reports: Revenue for the quarter rose to $319.2 million, up 12 percent over the first quarter of 2017... But Pandora is still losing money. The company posted a net loss of $131.7 million, a slight improvement on the $132.3 million loss in Q1 2017. Overall engagement is down year-over-year, with active listeners dropping 4 percent to 72.3 million. Listener hours dipped from 5.21 billion to 4.96 billion.

An anonymous reader writes: Pandora's stock had its best day ever on Wall Street, rising more than 25% after reporting their subscription and other revenue had surged 61.3 percent to $104.7 million. Previous users have apparently been lured back with targeted marketing touting a new service that lets users briefly play their favorite songs on demand if they'll watch a short ad. "Pandora said it ended the quarter with 5.63 million subscribers to its Pandora Plus and Pandora Platinum paid services, which was 19 percent higher than the same period a year ago," reports one Silicon Valley newspaper. March saw more former users returning than in the same month a year ago -- for the first time in 18 months.

And an important factor was switching from brand-based marketing to data-based marketing -- that is, "using the information that Pandora has on users' listening preferences." Pandora's Chief Executive brags to MarketWatch that "We really have world-class data-science capabilities. We just never used them in our own marketing."
Engadget reports: Revenue for the quarter rose to $319.2 million, up 12 percent over the first quarter of 2017... But Pandora is still losing money. The company posted a net loss of $131.7 million, a slight improvement on the $132.3 million loss in Q1 2017. Overall engagement is down year-over-year, with active listeners dropping 4 percent to 72.3 million. Listener hours dipped from 5.21 billion to 4.96 billion.

An anonymous reader quotes Investor's Business Daily: Shares in Charter Communications plunged after the cable TV firm reported first quarter earnings and lost more video subscribers than expected, also sparking a sell-off in Comcast and Altice USA... Charter said it lost 122,000 video subscribers, nearly triple analyst predictions for a fall of 43,000. Comcast on Wednesday said it lost 96,000 video subscribers, exceeding estimates for a drop of 75,000.... With Friday's sell-off, Comcast stock is down 20% in 2018, with Charter falling more than 24%...

Cable TV firms aren't the only losers. AT&T this week said it lost 187,000 pay-TV customers, including satellite TV subscribers and its U-verse landline business. AT&T's DirecTV Now internet streaming service added 312,000 customers. But AT&T garners much lower profit margins from video streaming.
Cable companies are now raising prices on broadband services to compensate, according to the article.

MarketWatch notes that Charter also lost 100,000 customers in the same three-month period in 2017, calling the ongoing trend "a fundamental shift in consumer behavior."

Facebook earned $4.99 billion in the first three months of 2018 (on sales of $11.97 billion). But their quarterly report included some new warnings, according to the Bay Area Newsgroup: In its 141-page filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday, Facebook -- like all public companies -- warned of risk factors, the official version of what might keep CEO Mark Zuckerberg up at night. Chief among them is the possibility of other Cambridge Analyticas. "We anticipate that our ongoing investments in safety, security, and content review will identify additional instances of misuse of user data or other undesirable activity by third parties on our platform," Facebook said in its 10-Q filing. It is a point that Zuckerberg made again and again during his Congressional testimony earlier this month.

What's more, Facebook knows it won't catch everything, even though the company is investigating and auditing away after revelations that political data consulting firm Cambridge Analytica accessed the information of up to 87 million Facebook users without permission... "We may also be notified of such incidents or activity via the media or other third parties."

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed today that the company has over 100 million Prime members, "marking the first time in the 13-year history of Amazon offering its Prime membership that the company has ever revealed its number of subscribers," reports The Verge. From the report: According to Bezos, Amazon Prime also saw its best year ever in 2017, with the company shipping over five billion products with Prime and signing up more new members than in any previous year. Also revealed today, Whole Foods Market will discontinue its rewards program on May 2 and fold it into Amazon Prime. "Stay tuned for additional announcements for Amazon Prime members," reads the Whole Foods FAQ page focused on digital coupons, rewards and online accounts. "Any account benefits, including membership and/or unused rewards, will not roll into any future programs."

A few months ago, Theranos laid off almost half of its workforce as it struggled to recover from the backlash generated when the company failed to provide accurate results to patients using its proprietary blood test technology. Now, according to people familiar with the matter, the company is laying off most of its remaining workforce in a last-ditch effort to preserve cash and avert or at least delay bankruptcy for a few more months. MarketWatch reports: Tuesday's layoffs take the company's head count from about 125 employees to two dozen or fewer, according to people familiar with the matter. As recently as late 2015, Theranos had about 800 employees. Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley firm's founder and chief executive officer, announced the layoffs at an all-employee meeting at Theranos's offices in Newark, Calif. on Tuesday, less than a month after settling civil fraud charges with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Under the SEC settlement, Holmes was forced to relinquish her voting control over the company she founded 15 years ago as a 19-year-old Stanford dropout, give back a big chunk of her stock, and pay a $500,000 penalty. She also agreed to be barred from being an officer or director in a public company for 10 years.

Long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein argues that fixing Facebook may be impossible because "Facebook's entire ecosystem is predicated on encouraging the manipulation of its users by third parties who posses the skills and financial resources to leverage Facebook's model. These are not aberrations at Facebook -- they are exactly how Facebook was designed to operate." Meanwhile one fund manager is already predicting that sooner or later every social media platform "is going to become MySpace," adding that "Nobody young uses Facebook," and that the backlash over Cambridge Analytica "quickens the demise."

But Slashdot reader silvergeek asks, "is there a safe, secure, and ethical alternative?" to which tepples suggests "the so-called IndieWeb stack using the h-entry microformat." He also suggests Diaspora, with an anonymous Diaspora user adding that "My family uses a server I put up to trade photos and posts... Ultimately more people need to start hosting family servers to help us get off the cloud craze... NethServer is a pretty decent CentOS based option."

Meanwhile Slashdot user Locke2005 shared a Washington Post profile of Mastodon, "a Twitter-like social network that has had a massive spike in sign-ups this week." Mastodon's code is open-source, meaning anybody can inspect its design. It's distributed, meaning that it doesn't run in some data center controlled by corporate executives but instead is run by its own users who set up independent servers. And its development costs are paid for by online donations, rather than through the marketing of users' personal information... Rooted in the idea that it doesn't benefit consumers to depend on centralized commercial platforms sucking up users' personal information, these entrepreneurs believe they can restore a bit of the magic from the Internet's earlier days -- back when everything was open and interoperable, not siloed and commercialized.
The article also interviews the founders of Blockstack, a blockchain-based marketplace for apps where all user data remains local and encrypted. "There's no company in the middle that's hosting all the data," they tell the Post. "We're going back to the world where it's like the old-school Microsoft Word -- where your interactions are yours, they're local and nobody's tracking them." On Medium, Mastodon founder Eugene Rochko also acknowledges Scuttlebutt and Hubzilla, ending his post with a message to all social media users: "To make an impact, we must act."

Lauren Weinstein believes Google has already created an alternative to Facebook's "sick ecosystem": Google Plus. "There are no ads on Google+. Nobody can buy their way into your feed or pay Google for priority. Google doesn't micromanage what you see. Google doesn't sell your personal information to any third parties..." And most importantly, "There's much less of an emphasis on hanging around with those high school nitwits whom you despised anyway, and much more a focus on meeting new persons from around the world for intelligent discussions... G+ posts more typically are about 'us' -- and tend to be far more interesting as a result." (Even Linus Torvalds is already reviewing gadgets there.)

Wired has also compiled their own list of alternatives to every Facebook service. But what are Slashdot's readers doing for their social media fix? Leave your own thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

Is there a good alternative to Facebook?

"As the web celebrated its 29th birthday last week, Berners-Lee expressed disappointment with how his invention has turned out," reports MarketWatch. "He criticized Facebook and other tech heavyweights last week, saying they have 'made it possible to weaponize the web at scale.'

"But on Monday, the British computer scientist essentially told Zuck to buck up. 'I would say to him: You can fix it,' Berners-Lee tweeted. 'It won't be easy, but if companies work with governments, activists, academics and web users, we can make sure platforms serve humanity.'"

Tim Berners-Lee writes: This is a serious moment for the web's future. But I want us to remain hopeful. The problems we see today are bugs in the system. Bugs can cause damage, but bugs are created by people, and can be fixed by people.... My message to all web users today is this: I may have invented the web, but you make it what it is. And it's up to all of us to build a web that reflects our hopes & fulfils our dreams more than it magnifies our fears & deepens our divisions... Get involved. Care about your data. It belongs to you.

If we each take a little of the time we spend using the web to fight for the web, I think we'll be ok. Tell companies and your government representatives that your data and the web matter.

"As the web celebrated its 29th birthday last week, Berners-Lee expressed disappointment with how his invention has turned out," reports MarketWatch. "He criticized Facebook and other tech heavyweights last week, saying they have 'made it possible to weaponize the web at scale.'

"But on Monday, the British computer scientist essentially told Zuck to buck up. 'I would say to him: You can fix it,' Berners-Lee tweeted. 'It won't be easy, but if companies work with governments, activists, academics and web users, we can make sure platforms serve humanity.'"

Tim Berners-Lee writes: This is a serious moment for the web's future. But I want us to remain hopeful. The problems we see today are bugs in the system. Bugs can cause damage, but bugs are created by people, and can be fixed by people.... My message to all web users today is this: I may have invented the web, but you make it what it is. And it's up to all of us to build a web that reflects our hopes & fulfils our dreams more than it magnifies our fears & deepens our divisions... Get involved. Care about your data. It belongs to you.

If we each take a little of the time we spend using the web to fight for the web, I think we'll be ok. Tell companies and your government representatives that your data and the web matter.

The CEO of Wireline -- a cloud application marketplace and serverless architecture platform -- is pushing for an open source development fund to help sustain projects, funded by an initial coin offering. "Developers like me know that there are a lot of weak spots in the modern internet," he writes on MarketWatch, suggesting more Equifax-sized data breaches may wait in our future. In fact, many companies are not fully aware of all of the software components they are using from the open-source community. And vulnerabilities can be left open for years, giving hackers opportunities to do their worst. Take, for instance, the Heartbleed bug of 2014... Among the known hacks: 4.5 million health-care records were compromised, 900 Canadians' social insurance numbers were stolen. It was deemed "catastrophic." And yet many servers today -- two years later! -- still carry the vulnerability, leaving whole caches of personal data exposed...

[T]hose of us who are on the back end, stitching away, often feel a sense of dread. For instance, did you know that much of the software that underpins the entire cloud ecosystem is written by developers who are essentially volunteers? And that the open-source software that underpins 70% of corporate America is vastly underfunded? The Heartbleed bug, for instance, was created by an error in some code submitted in 2011 to a core developer on the team that maintained OpenSSL at the time. The team was made up of only one full-time developer and three other part-timers. Many of us are less surprised that a bug had gotten through than that it doesn't happen more often.
The article argues that "the most successful open-source initiatives have corporate sponsors or an umbrella foundation (such as the Apache and Linux foundations). Yet we still have a lot of very deeply underfunded open-source projects creating a lot of the underpinnings of the enterprise cloud."

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: Call it a Christmas miracle -- albeit of a rather perverse sort. Theranos, the digraced medical-technology startup that infamously inflated the capabilities of its devices, has secured $100 million in new funding in the form of a loan. The loan, reported by the Wall Street Journal, will come from Fortress Investment Group. Fortress, whose other underdog bets include a private passenger rail line under construction in Florida, is set to be acquired by Japan's SoftBank. Theranos was reportedly on the verge of bankrutpcy...

By the end of 2016, the company reportedly still had $200 million in cash on hand, but had sharply limited prospects for attracting more capital. It has since settled a major lawsuit with Walgreens, a former client, for an undisclosed but likely substantial sum. According to the Journal, the Fortress loan is expected to keep Theranos solvent through 2018. That will give the company more time for its ongoing effort to reboot as a medical device manufacturer, rather than a testing service.
The loan is conditional on "achieving certain product and operational milestones," notes Fortune, adding "It's unclear whether those might include positive outcomes for the multiple investigations and lawsuits still facing the company."

Long-time Slashdot reader gollum123 quotes MarketWatch: Are you doing better than the previous generation? The Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., asked nearly 43,000 people in 38 countries around the globe that question this past spring. Residents in 20 countries said people like them were better off than they were 50 years ago. In Vietnam, 88% felt better off, followed by India (69%), South Korea (68%), Japan (65%), Germany (65%), Turkey (65%), the Netherlands (64%), Sweden (64%), Poland (62%) and Spain (60%)...

The U.S. was among the other 18 countries in which people said they were actually worse off than half a century ago. In Senegal, 45% felt this way, followed by Nigeria (54%), Kenya (53%), the U.S. (41%), Ghana (47%), Brazil (49%), France (46%), Hungary (39%), Lebanon (54%) and Peru (46%).
55% of Canadians feel they're better off, while just 45% of people in the U.K. feel the same way, according to the article.

"Venezuela, which has suffered from political unrest and economic turbulence in recent years, was last on the list. Some 72% people there said they felt worse off than 50 years ago."

According to a report from the Korea news outlet ETNews, Tesla's solution to fixing a manufacturing bottleneck responsible for a $619 million loss last quarter could be causing a global battery shortage. Panasonic reportedly gave most of its cache of batteries in Japan to Tesla so that the automaker and Gigafactory 1 energy-storage company could keep up with its ambitious production schedule. Gizmodo reports: In early October, Tesla struggled with a "production bottleneck," but by the end of the month, Panasonic stated it would increase battery output at the Gigafactory, now that it understood the issues that led to the bottleneck and could automate some of the processes that had been done by hand. But this likely did not help Tesla fix any immediate shortage issues. ETNews claims that Panasonic is coping with the shortage by shipping batteries in from Japan. And many Japanese companies in need of cylinder batteries have turned to other suppliers like LG, Murata, and Samsung -- but those companies have not been able to meet the demands. Reportedly, companies that had contracts before 2017 aren't affected by the shortage, but several other manufacturers have not been able to place orders for batteries, and won't be able to order more batteries until the middle of next year.

An anonymous reader quotes MarketWatch: A group of global activists stormed and occupied several Apple Stores in France on Saturday in a move aimed at pressuring the company to pay up on a €13 billion ($15.5 billion) tax bill to the European Union. In a press release, the France unit of the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Citizen's Action organization (Attac), said 100 of its members occupied the Opera Apple Store in Paris, demanding the company pay its taxes... Attac said dozens of protests were organized at other Apple store locations throughout France on Saturday. In the Paris store, activists were seen via videos circulating on Twitter, pushing past security and hanging a banner that said "We will stop when Apple pays." Security in Paris reportedly evacuated Apple workers from the building as those protests began.
After three hours they left the store -- leaving behind protest messages on the iPads on display. The group claims that Apple has stashed $230 billion in tax havens around the world, but also hopes to raise awareness about other issues.

"Attac said the action was part of the #PhoneRevolt movement aimed at highlighting unfair practices by Apple, that are not just about taxes, but also pollution via extraction of metals for its phones, worker exploitation and driving a global consumption binge."

phalse phace writes: About 1 month ago, Redbox started selling through their kiosks slips of paper with codes on them that lets the buyer download a digital copy of a Disney movie.But Disney says that's a no-no and this week it sued Redbox in an attempt to stop the code sales. According to Marketwatch: "Walt Disney sued Redbox on Thursday in an attempt to stop the DVD rental company from selling digital copies of its movies. Privately held Redbox last month began offering consumers codes they can use to download a digital copy of a Disney movie. Redbox charges between $7.99 and $14.99 for slips of paper with the codes to download Disney films such as "Cars 3" and "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." That is less than those movies cost to buy and download from Apple's iTunes Store. Redbox is only offering digital copies of Disney movies because it doesn't have a distribution arrangement with the studio and buys retail copies of its discs to rent to customers. Those retail DVDs come with digital download codes."

An anonymous reader quotes a local NBC news report: Stories are starting to pour in about those impacted by last month's massive Equifax data breach, which compromised the private information of more than 140 million people. Katie Van Fleet of Seattle says she's spent months trying to regain her stolen identity, and says it has been stolen more than a dozen times. "I kept receiving letters from Kohl's, from Macy's, from Home Depot, from Old Navy saying 'thank you for your application,'" she said to CNN affiliate KCPQ. But she says she's never applied for credit from any of those places. Instead, Van Fleet and her attorney Catherine Fleming say they believe her personal data was stolen during the massive Equifax security breach... Fleming has filed a class-action lawsuit against Equifax, saying they were negligent in losing private information on more than 140 million Americans... "Countless people, I mean, I've really, truly lost count, and the stories that like Katie's, the stories I hear are heart-wrenching," Fleming said.
But are things about to get worse? Marketwatch reports: It will become harder for consumers to sue their banks or companies like Equifax... The Senate voted Tuesday night to overturn a rule the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau worked on for more than five years. The final version of the rule banned companies from putting "mandatory arbitration clauses" in their contracts, language that prohibits consumers from bringing class-action lawsuits against them. It applies to institutions that sell financial products, including bank accounts and credit cards. Consumer advocates say it's good news for companies like Wells Fargo or Equifax, which have both had class-action lawsuits filed against them, and bad news for their customers... Lisa Gilbert, the vice president of legislative affairs at Public Citizen, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., said the Senate vote shouldn't impact cases that are already ongoing. However, there will "certainly" be more forced arbitration clauses in contracts in the future, and fewer cases brought against companies, she said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Entrepreneur Elon Musk's announcement late last month accelerating plans for manned flights to Mars ratchets up political and public relations pressure on NASA's efforts to reach the same goal. With Musk publicly laying out a much faster schedule than NASA -- while contending his vision is less expensive and could be financed primarily with private funds -- a debate unlike any before is shaping up over the direction of U.S. space policy. Industry officials and space experts consider the proposal by Musk's Space Exploration to land people on the red planet around the middle of the next decade extremely optimistic. Some supporters concede the deadline appears ambitious even for reaching the moon, while Musk himself acknowledged some of his projected dates are merely "aspirational." But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration doesn't envision getting astronauts to Mars until at least a decade later, a timeline NASA is finding increasingly hard to defend in the face of criticism that it is too slow.

An anonymous reader shares a report: To stay up to date in the battle against hackers, some companies are turning to a 1950s technology. Storing data on tape seems impossibly inconvenient in an age of easy-access cloud computing. But that is the big security advantage of this vintage technology, since hackers have no way to get at the information. The federal government, financial-services firms, health insurers and other regulated industries still keep tape as a backup to digital records. Now a range of other companies are returning to tape as hackers get smarter about penetrating defenses -- and do much more damage when they do get in. Rob Pritchard, founder of the Cyber Security Expert consulting firm and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, has noticed the steady resurgence of tape as part of best-practice backup strategies. "Companies of all sizes must be able to restore data quickly if needed," he says, "but also have a robust, slower-time, recovery mechanism should the worst happen." Mr. Pritchard, who works with a range of organizations to improve corporate cybersecurity practices, says: "A good backup strategy will have multiple layers. Cloud and online services have their place, but can be compromised."

phalse phace quotes MarketWatch: Following on the heels of a story that revealed that Equifax hired a music major with no education related to technology or security as its Chief Security Officer, Equifax announced on Friday afternoon that Chief Security Officer Susan Mauldin has quit the company along with Chief Information Officer David Webb.

Chief Information Officer David Webb and Chief Security Officer Susan Mauldin retired immediately, Equifax said in a news release that did not mention either of those executives by name. Mark Rohrwasser, who had been leading Equifax's international information-technology operations since 2016, will replace Webb and Russ Ayres, a member of Equifax's IT operation, will replace Mauldin.
The company revealed Thursday that the attackers exploited Apache Struts bug CVE-2017-5638 -- "identified and disclosed by U.S. CERT in early March 2017" -- and that they believed the unauthorized access happened from May 13 through July 30, 2017.

Thus, MarketWatch reports, Equifax "admitted that the security hole that attackers used was known in March, about two months before the company believes the breach began." And even then, Equifax didn't notice (and remove the affected web applications) until July 30.

Susan Mauldin, the person in charge of the Equifax's data security, has a bachelor's degree and a master of fine arts degree in music composition from the University of Georgia, according to her LinkedIn profile. Mauldin's LinkedIn profile lists no education related to technology or security. If that wasn't enough, news outlet MarketWatch reported on Friday that Susan Mauldin's LinkedIn page was made private and her last name was replaced with "M", in a move that appears to keep her education background secret.

Earlier this month Equifax, which is one of the three major consumer credit reporting agencies, said that hackers had gained access to company data that potentially compromised sensitive information for 143 million American consumers, including Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers. On Friday, the UK arm of the organisation said files containing information on "fewer than 400,000" UK consumers was accessed in the breach.

UPDATE (9/16/2017): CSO Susan Mauldin has abruptly 'retired' from Equifax.

Yoko Kubota, Tripp Mickle, and Takashi Mochizuki, reporting for WSJ: Apple's new iPhone, which is expected to be unveiled Tuesday, was plagued by production glitches early in the manufacturing process this summer, according to people familiar with the situation, which could result in extended supply shortfalls and shipping delays when customers start ordering the device later this month (alternative source). New iPhones are typically in short supply when first released. But if shortfalls of the new phone extend beyond the initial sales period, which is expected to begin September 22, they could weaken analysts' and investors' projections for sales in the crucial holiday period. The production glitches led to a setback of about a month in the manufacturing timetable. Foxconn, the Apple contractor that assembles iPhones, has been ramping up production at its manufacturing complex in Zhengzhou, China. The company is paying bonuses to employees who can help bring new hires on board at its Zhengzhou plant, which Foxconn said in June employs about 250,000 people.

Facebook claims its ads have the potential to reach more people than recent U.S. census data shows exist, and that's troublesome for one analyst, who thinks third-party measurement services stand to benefit. From a report: Recently, Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser was intrigued by a trade publication study in Australia that said Facebook was claiming to reach 1.7 million more 16- to 39-year olds than actually existed in the country, according to Australian census data. In reproducing the study for the U.S., Wieser said Facebook's Ads Manager claims it can potentially reach 41 million 18- to 24-year-olds, 60 million 25- to 34-year-olds, and 61 million 35- to 49-year-olds. The problem arises when Wieser pulls up U.S. Census data from a year ago, showing 31 million 18- to 24-year-olds, 45 million 25- to 34-year-olds, and 61 million 35- to 49-year-olds. The upshot: Where is Facebook getting the extra 25 million 18- to 34-year-olds that the U.S. census did not count? "Conversations with agency executives on this topic indicate to us that the gap between Facebook and census figures is not widely known," Wieser said. "While Facebook's measurement issues won't necessarily deter advertisers from spending money with Facebook, they will help traditional TV sellers justify existing budget shares and could restrain Facebook's growth in video ad sales on the margins."

From a report: Facebook's push toward original video content will take a big step forward Thursday with the launch of a new section, dubbed Watch. The new tab, which Facebook FB, said late Wednesday will launch for a limited number of U.S. users for now, will feature about 40 original series, with plans to eventually scale up to hundreds of shows. Facebook said it will become available to more users in the coming weeks. The Mountain View, Calif., social network is hoping to tap into lucrative TV advertising revenue to boost its ever-expanding bottom line. If successful, Watch could stem the ad-load slowdown for the rest of the year that Chief Financial Officer David Wehner warned about last month when Facebook filed its quarterly earnings. Facebook also hopes the Watch tab will open up a new method of advertising that doesn't clutter users' News Feeds, and keep its 2 billion users on its site longer. Company's founder Mark Zuckerberg is understandably very excited about the move. He says the company believes "it's possible to rethink a lot of experiences through the lens of building community -- including watching video. Watching a show doesn't have to be passive. It can be a chance to share an experience and bring people together who care about the same things." If that pitch sounds familiar to you, it's because TV has been doing it for more than 75 years.

There's nothing quite like filming a movie on film, according to the director Christopher Nolan. His new WWII film, Dunkirk, was shot entirely on epic 65mm, as opposed to digital. And it's receiving the widest release of that film format in recent history. But Nolan's views on doing things the way "they're meant to be done," isn't limited to just making a film. He also wants you watch the movie in the theatre, and not on streaming service Netflix, which he says he rarely uses. From a report: "Dunkirk," director Christopher Nolan's big budget war epic, is a filmmaker's film and a movie buff's dream with its wide, high-resolution 70mm format. It's like an expressionist painting, said ComScore media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. The Hollywood Reporter even said "Dunkirk" could launch a 70mm film renaissance. "I would always prefer and really recommend that everyone see it on Imax 70mm," Dergarabedian said. "People talk about 'they don't make movies like that anymore.' Well, this is that movie." Dunkirk, which opens across the U.S. this weekend, is a film that everyone will tell you has to be seen on the big screen. And that has rekindled the debate about the pros and cons of films opening in a theater versus being streamed by Netflix. In an interview with Indiewire ahead of the film's premiere, Nolan criticized Netflix for its "bizarre aversion to supporting theatrical films." Netflix, despite doubling down on its film business and looking to make inroads in the industry, has continued its controversial stance against Hollywood's theatrical window model. To the film industry's dismay, Netflix is still adopting a day and date release model -- dropping a movie on the streaming service the same day it hits theaters. Hollywood relies on the money moviegoers spend at the box office, and the industry is reluctant to give up the exclusive window of time that films are only in theaters, fearing it would cripple that income stream. "Dunkirk" is an impressive $150 million argument on behalf of cinema.
In an interview, Nolan said he will not work with Netflix because their film strategy is "pointless." He said, "They have this mindless policy of everything having to be simultaneously streamed and released, which is obviously an untenable model for theatrical presentation. So they're not even getting in the game, and I think they're missing a huge opportunity. [...] You can see that Amazon is very clearly happy to not make that same mistake," he said. "The theaters have a 90-day window. It's a perfectly usable model. It's terrific."

Critics have found Dunkirk one of the best movies -- and perhaps the best war movie -- ever made. The Guardian said it's the best Nolan movie, while the New York Times found it "both sweeping and intimate."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: Fresh off its biggest Prime Day yet, the Whole Foods Market bid, and a slew of announcements including Amazon Wardrobe, Amazon.com Inc. was the subject of two investor calls Thursday that raised concerns that it is getting too big. In one case, hedge-fund manager Douglas Kass said government intervention could be imminent. "I am shorting Amazon today because I have learned that there are currently early discussions and due diligence being considered in the legislative chambers in Washington DC with regard to possible antitrust opposition to Amazon's business practices, pricing strategy and expansion announcements already made (as well as being aimed at expansion strategies being considered in the future," wrote Kass, head of Seabreeze Partners Management. "My understanding is that certain Democrats in the Senate have instituted the very recent and preliminary investigation of Amazon's possible adverse impact on competition," he said. "But, in the Trump administration we also have a foe against Jeff Bezos, who not only runs Amazon but happens to own an editorially unfriendly (to President Trump) newspaper, The Washington Post."

Kass said he thinks the government "discussions may have just begun and may never result in any serious effort to limit Amazon's growth plans." But he has been writing a series of columns about whether we've reached "peak Amazon," and said in an earlier column that the Whole Foods deal puts "Amazon's vast power under the microscope." "Is Amazon a productive change agent and force for the good of the consumer by virtue of a reduction in product prices? Or is Amazon's disruption of the general retail business a destroyer of jobs, moving previously productively employed workers into the unemployment line?" he asked.

A giant iceberg about the size of Delaware that had been under scientists' watch has broken off from an ice shelf on the Antarctica Peninsula and is now adrift in the Weddell Sea. From a report: The 2,200 square-mile, trillion metric-ton section of the Larsen C ice shelf "calved" off sometime between Monday and Wednesday, a team of researchers at Swansea University's Project MIDAS has reported, citing imaging from NASA's Aqua MODIS satellite instrument. Scientists have tracked the crack for more than a decade and they warned in June that the section was "hanging by a thread." Its break, from Antarctica's fourth-largest ice shelf, changes the border shape of the peninsula forever even though the remaining ice shelf will continue to grow. "The iceberg is one of the largest recorded and its future progress is difficult to predict," said professor Adrian Luckman of Swansea University, lead investigator of the MIDAS project. "It may remain in one piece but is more likely to break into fragments. Some of the ice may remain in the area for decades, while parts of the iceberg may drift north into warmer waters."

Google is braced for a fine of potentially more than 1bn euro ($1.18 billion) as Brussels prepares to make the first of three antitrust decisions on the search group's practices, the first sanction by a leading competition regulator on the way it operates. From a report: The penalty, expected to be announced in the coming weeks, could exceed the record 1.1 billion euro bill slapped on Intel, in 2009 for anti-competitive behavior in the computer-chip market, the two people told The Times. The European Commission's antitrust body declined to comment to MarketWatch on the FT report, but referred to the latest steps taken in the case against Google. In July last year, the commission reiterated its conclusion that the search giant had "abused its dominant position by systematically favoring its comparison shopping service in its search result pages." Google and its parent company Alphabet were then given 10 weeks to respond to the findings. Reuters reported last month that Google had attempted to settle the dispute with the EU three times in the last six years, but the sides had failed to reach a compromise.