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An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: MongoDB is an open-source document NoSQL database with a problem. While very popular, cloud companies, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud, Scalegrid, and ObjectRocket has profited from it by offering it as a service while MongoDB Inc. hasn't been able to monetize it to the same degree. MongoDB's answer? Relicense the program under its new Server Side Public License (SSPL).

Open-source powerhouse Red Hat's reaction? Drop MongoDB from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Red Hat's Technical and Community Outreach Program Manager Tom Callaway explained, in a note stating MongoDB is being removed from Fedora Linux, that "It is the belief of Fedora that the SSPL is intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users." Debian Linux had already dropped MongoDB from its distribution....

The business point behind MongoDB's license change is to force cloud companies to use one of MongoDB's commercial cloud offerings. This hasn't worked either. AWS just launched DocumentDB, a database, which "is designed to be compatible with your existing MongoDB applications and tools," wrote AWS evangelist Jeff Barr.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: MongoDB is an open-source document NoSQL database with a problem. While very popular, cloud companies, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud, Scalegrid, and ObjectRocket has profited from it by offering it as a service while MongoDB Inc. hasn't been able to monetize it to the same degree. MongoDB's answer? Relicense the program under its new Server Side Public License (SSPL).

Open-source powerhouse Red Hat's reaction? Drop MongoDB from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Red Hat's Technical and Community Outreach Program Manager Tom Callaway explained, in a note stating MongoDB is being removed from Fedora Linux, that "It is the belief of Fedora that the SSPL is intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users." Debian Linux had already dropped MongoDB from its distribution....

The business point behind MongoDB's license change is to force cloud companies to use one of MongoDB's commercial cloud offerings. This hasn't worked either. AWS just launched DocumentDB, a database, which "is designed to be compatible with your existing MongoDB applications and tools," wrote AWS evangelist Jeff Barr.

Disney's Han Solo movie was the first Star Wars movie to lose money. But is there a larger problem? dryriver writes: Comic book news website Cosmic Book News reports that even though Disney put bucketloads of Star Wars out there in 2018, revenues from all things Star Wars have actually fallen, according to Disney SEC filings. Disney made more Star Wars money in 2017 -- when only Rogue One hit cinemas -- than in 2018, when Solo, Last Jedi and SW Battlefront 2 were released.

A Rian Johnson-led Star Wars trilogy appears to have been delayed or cancelled entirely. Rumored spinoff movies for Bobba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi appear to have been put on the backburner or cancelled. Disney's CEO has confirmed that the Star Wars movies are being slowed down.

A Star Wars fan named "Toos" told Newsweek he'd spent $150,000 of his own money on a fan film about Darth Vader -- and what happened next: Before the camera started rolling Toos said he contacted an employee at Lucasfilm [and] claims Lucasfilm gave him permission on two conditions: he couldn't crowdfund and he couldn't monetize the fan film on YouTube. Toos agreed to those conditions and shot for three full days in September. They ran post-production up until the release of "Vader Episode 1: Shards of the Past" on December 20. Star Wars fans, a notoriously tough group to please, had overwhelming praise for the video, which gathered more than six million views in one month and 40,000 likes.

On January 14, music group and corporate collective Warner/Chappell filed a copyright claim against the video. After filing the claim, the company (publisher for the Walt Disney Music Company) began to collect ad revenue for Toos' video by claiming that one of the songs used a rendition of "The Imperial March"... If Toos attempts to appeal and Warner/Chappell refutes his claim, he could get a copyright strike on his channel and lose complete ownership of the video...

Fan response on Reddit has been massive, with the post about Star Wars Theory and the strike reaching over 90,000 upvotes... In a new video on the StarWarsTheory channel, Toos told his fans that the claim on his video had been lifted due in part to the intervention of LucasFilm."They stepped up and told Disney or the other company that this wasn't okay, that this wasn't going to stand."
Newsweek points out that Disney doesn't own Warner/Chappell. "The music group merely licenses their music" -- and has been accused of making erroneous claims before.

They're the same group that claimed they owned the music rights on a YouTube clip from Star Wars with all the original music removed.

On Friday, a coalition of Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur, and human rights groups organized demonstrations outside Google's offices in the U.S., U.K., Canada, India, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark, protesting the company's plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China. The Intercept reports: Google designed the Chinese search engine, code-named Dragonfly, to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country's authoritarian Communist Party government. In December, The Intercept revealed that an internal dispute had forced Google to shut down a data analysis system that it was using to develop the search engine. This had "effectively ended" the project, sources said, because the company's engineers no longer had the tools they needed to build it.

But Google bosses have not publicly stated that they will cease development of Dragonfly. And the company's CEO Sundar Pichai has refused to rule out potentially launching the search engine some time in the future, though he has insisted that there are no current plans to do so. The organizers of Friday's protests -- which were timed to coincide with Internet Freedom Day -- said that they would continue to demonstrate "until Google executives confirm that Project Dragonfly has been canceled, once and for all." Google "should be connecting the world through the sharing of information, not facilitating human rights abuses by a repressive government determined to crush all forms of peaceful online dissent," said Gloria Montgomery, director at Tibet Society UK. "Google's directors must urgently take heed of calls from employees and tens of thousands of global citizens demanding that they immediately halt project Dragonfly. If they don't, Google risks irreversible damage to its reputation."

Documents released by the Department of Defense reveal some of what its infamous Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was working on. From a report: The Department of Defense funded research on wormholes, invisibility cloaking, and "the manipulation of extra dimensions" under its shadowy Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, first described in 2017 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. On Wednesday, the Defense Intelligence Agency released a list of 38 research titles pursued by the program in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy.

The list provides one of the best looks at the Pentagon's covert UFO operation or study of "anomalous aerospace threats." According to Aftergood's FOIA request, the document marked "For Official Use Only" was sent to Congress on January 2018. One such research topic, "Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy," was led by Eric W. Davis of EarthTech International Inc, which describes itself as a facility "exploring the forefront reaches of science and engineering," with an interest in theories of spacetime, studies of the quantum vacuum, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Copyright activists just scored a major victory in the ongoing fight over the European Union's new copyright rules. An upcoming summit to advance the EU's copyright directive has been canceled, as member states objected to the incoming rules as too restrictive to online creators. From a report: The EU's forthcoming copyright rules had drawn attention from activists for two measures, designated as Article 11 and Article 13, that would give publishers rights over snippets of news content shared online (the so-called "link tax") and increase platform liability for user content. [...] After today, the directive's future is much less certain. Member states were gathered to approve a new version of the directive drafted by Romania -- but eleven countries reportedly opposed the text, many of them citing familiar concerns over the two controversial articles. Crucially, Italy's new populist government takes a far more skeptical view of the strict copyright proposals. Member states have until the end of February to approve a new version of the text, although it's unclear what compromise might be reached. Further reading: EU Cancels 'Final' Negotiations On EU Copyright Directive As It Becomes Clear There Isn't Enough Support.

U.S. regulators have met to discuss imposing a record-setting fine against Facebook for violating a legally binding agreement with the government to protect the privacy of its users' personal data, The Washington Post reported Friday [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], citing three people familiar with the deliberations. From the report: The fine under consideration at the Federal Trade Commission, a privacy and security watchdog that began probing Facebook last year, would mark the first major punishment levied against Facebook in the United States since reports emerged in March that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, accessed personal information on about 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge. The penalty is expected to be much larger than the $22.5 million fine the agency imposed on Google in 2012. That fine set a record for the greatest penalty for violating an agreement with the FTC to improve its privacy practices.

U.S. regulators have met to discuss imposing a record-setting fine against Facebook for violating a legally binding agreement with the government to protect the privacy of its users' personal data, The Washington Post reported Friday [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], citing three people familiar with the deliberations. From the report: The fine under consideration at the Federal Trade Commission, a privacy and security watchdog that began probing Facebook last year, would mark the first major punishment levied against Facebook in the United States since reports emerged in March that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, accessed personal information on about 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge. The penalty is expected to be much larger than the $22.5 million fine the agency imposed on Google in 2012. That fine set a record for the greatest penalty for violating an agreement with the FTC to improve its privacy practices.

Digital license plates are now allowed in Michigan thanks to a new state law. It will join California and Arizona as one of the few states in the US that allow digital license plates, allowing drivers to register their cars electronically and eschew old-school metal plates. From a report: To be clear, digital license plates consist of displays covered in glass that are mounted onto a frame. They come with their own computer chips and wireless communication systems. Some of the benefits of using digital licenses versus old metal ones are the ability to display Amber alerts or stolen vehicle messages when needed, but they could also make it easier to digitally renew license plates over the years. That comes at a price, though. Currently, they cost $499 for a basic version, and $799 for a premium version that features a GPS navigation add-on.

On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as "a red and extremely elongated asteroid." It was the first interstellar object to be detected within our solar system; the scientists named it 'Oumuamua, the Hawaiian word for a scout or messenger. The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard's astronomy department, co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that examined 'Oumuamua's "peculiar acceleration" and suggested that the object "may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth's vicinity by an alien civilization." Loeb has long been interested in the search for extraterrestrial life, and he recently made further headlines by suggesting that we might communicate with the civilization that sent the probe.

Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker has interviewed Loeb, who was frustrated that scientists saw 'Oumuamua too late in its journey to photograph the object. "My motivation for writing the paper is to alert the community to pay a lot more attention to the next visitor," he told Chotiner. An excerpt from the interview: The New Yorker: Your explanation of why 'Oumuamua might be an interstellar probe may be hard for laypeople to understand. Why might this be the case, beyond the fact that lots of things are possible?
Loeb: There is a Scientific American article I wrote where I summarized six strange facts about 'Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn't expect this object to exist in the first place. We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of 'Oumuamua.
There is another peculiar fact about this object. When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, they move relative to the sun, the sun moves relative to them, but only one in five hundred stars in that frame is moving as slow as 'Oumuamua. You would expect that most rocks would move roughly at the speed of the star they came from. If this object came from another star, that star would have to be very special.

[...]The New Yorker: Hold on. "'Not where is the lack of evidence so that I can fit in any hypothesis that I like?' " [Bailer-Jones, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, in Heidelberg, Germany, has identified four possible home stars for 'Oumuamua, and was asked to respond to Loeb's light-sail theory by NBC.]
Loeb: Well, it's exactly the approach that I took. I approached this with a scientific mind, like I approach any other problem in astronomy or science that I work on. The point is that we follow the evidence, and the evidence in this particular case is that there are six peculiar facts. And one of these facts is that it deviated from an orbit shaped by gravity while not showing any of the telltale signs of cometary outgassing activity. So we don't see the gas around it, we don't see the cometary tail. It has an extreme shape that we have never seen before in either asteroids or comets. We know that we couldn't detect any heat from it and that it's much more shiny, by a factor of ten, than a typical asteroid or comet. All of these are facts. I am following the facts.

Last year, I wrote a paper about cosmology where there was an unusual result, which showed that perhaps the gas in the universe was much colder than we expected. And so we postulated that maybe dark matter has some property that makes the gas cooler. And nobody cares, nobody is worried about it, no one says it is not science. Everyone says that is mainstream -- to consider dark matter, a substance we have never seen. That's completely fine. It doesn't bother anyone. But when you mention the possibility that there could be equipment out there that is coming from another civilization -- which, to my mind, is much less speculative, because we have already sent things into space -- then that is regarded as unscientific. But we didn't just invent this thing out of thin air. The reason we were driven to put in that sentence was because of the evidence, because of the facts. If someone else has a better explanation, they should write a paper about it rather than just saying what you said.

On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as "a red and extremely elongated asteroid." It was the first interstellar object to be detected within our solar system; the scientists named it 'Oumuamua, the Hawaiian word for a scout or messenger. The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard's astronomy department, co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that examined 'Oumuamua's "peculiar acceleration" and suggested that the object "may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth's vicinity by an alien civilization." Loeb has long been interested in the search for extraterrestrial life, and he recently made further headlines by suggesting that we might communicate with the civilization that sent the probe.

Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker has interviewed Loeb, who was frustrated that scientists saw 'Oumuamua too late in its journey to photograph the object. "My motivation for writing the paper is to alert the community to pay a lot more attention to the next visitor," he told Chotiner. An excerpt from the interview: The New Yorker: Your explanation of why 'Oumuamua might be an interstellar probe may be hard for laypeople to understand. Why might this be the case, beyond the fact that lots of things are possible?
Loeb: There is a Scientific American article I wrote where I summarized six strange facts about 'Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn't expect this object to exist in the first place. We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of 'Oumuamua.
There is another peculiar fact about this object. When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, they move relative to the sun, the sun moves relative to them, but only one in five hundred stars in that frame is moving as slow as 'Oumuamua. You would expect that most rocks would move roughly at the speed of the star they came from. If this object came from another star, that star would have to be very special.

[...]The New Yorker: Hold on. "'Not where is the lack of evidence so that I can fit in any hypothesis that I like?' " [Bailer-Jones, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, in Heidelberg, Germany, has identified four possible home stars for 'Oumuamua, and was asked to respond to Loeb's light-sail theory by NBC.]
Loeb: Well, it's exactly the approach that I took. I approached this with a scientific mind, like I approach any other problem in astronomy or science that I work on. The point is that we follow the evidence, and the evidence in this particular case is that there are six peculiar facts. And one of these facts is that it deviated from an orbit shaped by gravity while not showing any of the telltale signs of cometary outgassing activity. So we don't see the gas around it, we don't see the cometary tail. It has an extreme shape that we have never seen before in either asteroids or comets. We know that we couldn't detect any heat from it and that it's much more shiny, by a factor of ten, than a typical asteroid or comet. All of these are facts. I am following the facts.

Last year, I wrote a paper about cosmology where there was an unusual result, which showed that perhaps the gas in the universe was much colder than we expected. And so we postulated that maybe dark matter has some property that makes the gas cooler. And nobody cares, nobody is worried about it, no one says it is not science. Everyone says that is mainstream -- to consider dark matter, a substance we have never seen. That's completely fine. It doesn't bother anyone. But when you mention the possibility that there could be equipment out there that is coming from another civilization -- which, to my mind, is much less speculative, because we have already sent things into space -- then that is regarded as unscientific. But we didn't just invent this thing out of thin air. The reason we were driven to put in that sentence was because of the evidence, because of the facts. If someone else has a better explanation, they should write a paper about it rather than just saying what you said.

Security reporter Brian Krebs writes: My inbox and Twitter messages positively lit up today with people forwarding stories from Wired and other publications about a supposedly new trove of nearly 773 million unique email addresses and 21 million unique passwords that were posted to a hacking forum. A story in The Guardian breathlessly dubbed it "the largest collection ever of breached data found." But in an interview with the apparent seller, KrebsOnSecurity learned that it is not even close to the largest gathering of stolen data, and that it is at least two to three years old.

The dump, labeled "Collection #1" and approximately 87GB in size, was first detailed earlier today by Troy Hunt, who operates the HaveIBeenPwned breach notification service. Hunt said the data cache was likely "made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources." KrebsOnSecurity sought perspective on this discovery from Alex Holden, CTO of Hold Security, a company that specializes in trawling underground spaces for intelligence about malicious actors and their stolen data dumps. Holden said the data appears to have first been posted to underground forums in October 2018, and that it is just a subset of a much larger tranche of passwords being peddled by a shadowy seller online.

Last week, Ars Technica reported that Verizon's new "spam" fee for texts sent from teachers to students might stop working on the network because of a dispute over texting fees that Verizon demanded from Remind, the company that operates the service. Now, it appears that Verizon "has backed down from its original position slightly, and ongoing negotiations could allow the free texting service to continue," reports Ars. From the report: As we reported Monday, the dispute involves Verizon and Remind, which makes a communication service used by teachers and youth sports coaches. Verizon is charging an additional fee, saying the money will be used to fund spam-blocking services. The fee would increase Remind's costs for sending texts to Verizon users from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million dollars per year, Remind said. Remind said it would absorb the cost in order to continue providing the paid version of its service. But most of Remind's 30 million users rely on the free version of the service, and Remind said it could no longer provide free text message notifications over Verizon's network unless the fee is reversed.

Verizon issued an announcement today, titled "App provider Remind threatens to eliminate a free texting service for K-12 education organizations (which will cost it nothing)." The title reflects a new offer Verizon said it made on Tuesday, which would reverse the fee for K-12 users of the free Remind service. "Verizon will not charge Remind fees as long as they don't begin charging K-12 schools, educators, parents and students using its free text message service," Verizon said. "Despite this offer, made Tuesday, Remind has not changed its position that it will stop sending free texts to Verizon customers who use the service regarding school closures, classroom activities and other critical information." The report goes on to note that simply limiting the offer to K-12 users means the fee "would still be charged for preschools, day-care centers, and youth sports coaches who use the free Remind service."

Google and watchmaker Fossil Group today announced an agreement for the search giant to acquire some of Fossil's smartwatch technology and members of the research and development division responsible for creating it. From a report: The deal is worth roughly $40 million, and under the current terms Fossil will transfer a "portion" of its R&D team, the portion directly responsible for the intellectual property being sold, over to Google. As a result, Google will now have a dedicated team with hardware experience working internally on its WearOS software platform and potentially on new smartwatch designs as well.

China may be slowing iPhone sales worldwide, but Chinese people are driving Apple's App Store business. From a report: China accounted for nearly 50 percent of all app downloads in 2018, pushing the global downloads count to reach a record 194 billion, according to research firm App Annie. China, which is the world's largest smartphone market, also accounted for nearly 40 percent of worldwide consumer spend in apps in 2018, App Annie said in its yearly "State of Mobile" report. (Note: Google Play Store is not available in China.) Global consumer spend in apps reached $101 billion last year, up 75 percent since 2016. And 74 percent of all money spent on apps last year came from games. The battle between Silicon Valley companies and Chinese tech giants generated more than half of total consumer spend in the top 300 parent companies in 2018, the report said. The top company for global consumer spend was China's Tencent, which owns stake in several startups, companies, and games -- including last year's sleeper hits PUBG and Fortnite.

Yesterday, the Key West City Commission unanimously voted to ban the sale of sunscreens that contain two ingredients -- oxybenzone and octinoxate -- that a growing body of scientific evidence says harm coral reefs. The measure must now be reviewed again by the commission before it becomes law. The second vote is scheduled for February 5th. Miami Herald reports: Environmental researchers have published studies showing how these two ingredients, which accumulate in the water from bathers or from wastewater discharges, can damage coral reefs through bleaching and harming the corals' DNA. In some instances, the corals can die. A Feburary 2016 study in the Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology examining the impact of oxybenzone in corals in Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands concluded that the sunscreen ingredient "poses a hazard to coral reef conservation and threatens the resiliency of coral reefs to climate change.''

Last year, Hawaii banned the sale or distribution of any sunscreens containing oxybenzone and octinoxate, a measure that will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2021. It was the first state in the nation to implement such a ban. In Florida, the website for the South Florida Reef Ambassador Initiative, which falls under the state's Department of Environmental Protection, tells divers to "Avoid sunscreens with Oxybenzone and Avobenzone. The benzones are compounds that are lethal to coral reproduction in very small amounts." Experts who have studied the issue say sunscreens with zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, which are minerals, also block ultraviolet rays. They create a barrier on the skin that deflect the sun's rays .

This week, Wikipedia celebrates its 18th birthday. If the massive crowdsourced encyclopedia project were human, then in most countries, it would just now be considered a legal adult. But in truth, the free online encyclopedia has long played the role of the Internet's good grown-up. From a story: Wikipedia has grown enormously since its inception: It now boasts 5.7 million articles in English and pulled in 92 billion page views last year. The site has also undergone a major reputation change. If you ask Siri, Alexa or Google Home a general-knowledge question, it will likely pull the response from Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia has been cited in more than 400 judicial opinions, according to a 2010 paper in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology.

Many professors are ditching the traditional writing assignment and instead asking students to expand or create a Wikipedia article on the topic. And YouTube Chief Executive Susan Wojcicki announced a plan last March to pair misleading conspiracy videos with links to corresponding articles from Wikipedia. Facebook has also released a feature using Wikipedia's content to provide users more information about the publication source for articles in their feed.

The iconic Motorola RAZR might be making a comeback as a $1,500 foldable screen smartphone, and it could launch as early as February, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. From a report: The price point puts the handset north of even Apple and Samsung's flagships, at $1,500. Of course, there isn't really a standardized price point for the emerging foldables category yet. The Royole FlexPai starts at around $1,300 -- not cheap, especially for a product from a relative unknown. And Samsung, the next on the list to embrace the foldable, has never been afraid to hit a premium price point. Ultimately, $1,500 could well be standard for these sorts of products. Whether or not consumers are willing to pay that, however, is another question entirely.

The iconic Motorola RAZR might be making a comeback as a $1,500 foldable screen smartphone, and it could launch as early as February, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. From a report: The price point puts the handset north of even Apple and Samsung's flagships, at $1,500. Of course, there isn't really a standardized price point for the emerging foldables category yet. The Royole FlexPai starts at around $1,300 -- not cheap, especially for a product from a relative unknown. And Samsung, the next on the list to embrace the foldable, has never been afraid to hit a premium price point. Ultimately, $1,500 could well be standard for these sorts of products. Whether or not consumers are willing to pay that, however, is another question entirely.

Facebook's $19 billion bet on WhatsApp in 2014, when the messaging app had 450 million active users, is beginning to pay off. From a report: In recent months, WhatsApp has surpassed Facebook's own marquee app in popularity, according to industry estimates. In September of last year, WhatsApp for the first time had more monthly active users worldwide on Android and iPhone platforms than the Facebook app, research firm App Annie said today in its annual State of Mobile report. App Annie did not share specific figures but told VentureBeat that WhatsApp has maintained its lead over the Facebook app since September.

Search engine DuckDuckGo now displays location information from Apple Maps in its search results. "DuckDuckGo now uses Apple Maps both for small maps in location-related search results and for larger, interactive search results that appear in a separate maps tab," reports CNET. "That replaces a combination including MapBox, OpenStreetMap and homegrown technology." From the report: The top reason DuckDuckGo argues you should try it is that it doesn't keep any personal information on you and what you searched for, unlike search leader Google. That dovetails nicely with Apple's sustained push to improve online privacy. But maintaining your privacy can be tough when you're looking for location-related information. DuckDuckGo says it's struck a balance, though. It doesn't send personally identifiable information such as your computer's Internet Protocol network address, to Apple or other third parties, DuckDuckGo said. "For local searches, where your approximate location information is sent by your browser to us, we discard it immediately after use," the company added.

Mozilla will take the next major step in disabling support for the Adobe Flash plugin later this year when it releases Firefox 69. From a report: Firefox 69 will be Mozilla's third last step to completely dropping support for the historically buggy plugin, which will reach end of life on December 31, 2020. Flash is the last remaining NPAPI plugin that Firefox supports. Mozilla flagged the change, spotted by Ghacks, in a new bug report that notes "we'll disable Flash by default in Nightly 69 and let that roll out". Firefox 69 stable will be released in early September, according to Mozilla's release calendar.

Apple's $29 battery replacement program may have seriously dinged sales of its 2018 iPhone models. From a report: The company replaced 11 million iPhone batteries under the program, John Gruber of tech-focused blog DaringFireball reported Monday, citing Apple CEO Tim Cook at an all-hands meeting. Typically, the company replaces 1 million to 2 million batteries each year, DaringFireball noted. Cook cited the program's negative impact on Apple's revenue in a Jan. 2 sales warning to investors but didn't offer specific numbers.

Apple's $29 battery replacement program may have seriously dinged sales of its 2018 iPhone models. From a report: The company replaced 11 million iPhone batteries under the program, John Gruber of tech-focused blog DaringFireball reported Monday, citing Apple CEO Tim Cook at an all-hands meeting. Typically, the company replaces 1 million to 2 million batteries each year, DaringFireball noted. Cook cited the program's negative impact on Apple's revenue in a Jan. 2 sales warning to investors but didn't offer specific numbers.

Microsoft is working on adapting Windows to work on foldable devices, The Verge reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The report further added that the company is making foldable devices and dual-screen hardware a big investment area for both Windows and Surface. From the report: This investment includes adapting Windows itself and its many built-in apps to work across foldable displays and devices with dual screens. While Microsoft has been experimenting with its own hardware with dual-screens, codenamed Andromeda, the company has also been working with Intel and other OEMs to be ready for the next few years of experimentation. PC makers famously developed a range of 2-in-1 devices for Windows 8 more than five years ago, and we're expecting to see a similar effort for dual-screen and foldable devices for Windows in the coming years. Most of this work is related to Microsoft's Composable Shell (C-Shell) and Windows Core OS, a more modular version of the existing Windows Shell that powers many parts of Windows 10 today.

Microsoft is working on adapting Windows to work on foldable devices, The Verge reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The report further added that the company is making foldable devices and dual-screen hardware a big investment area for both Windows and Surface. From the report: This investment includes adapting Windows itself and its many built-in apps to work across foldable displays and devices with dual screens. While Microsoft has been experimenting with its own hardware with dual-screens, codenamed Andromeda, the company has also been working with Intel and other OEMs to be ready for the next few years of experimentation. PC makers famously developed a range of 2-in-1 devices for Windows 8 more than five years ago, and we're expecting to see a similar effort for dual-screen and foldable devices for Windows in the coming years. Most of this work is related to Microsoft's Composable Shell (C-Shell) and Windows Core OS, a more modular version of the existing Windows Shell that powers many parts of Windows 10 today.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai refused to brief a Congressional committee Monday about mobile carriers' ability to share their subscribers' location data with third parties. From a report: House Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) asked Pai for an "emergency briefing" to explain why the FCC "has yet to end wireless carriers' unauthorized disclosure of consumers' real-time location data," and for an update on "what actions the FCC has taken to address this issue to date." Pai's FCC could take action, despite the 2017 repeal of the commission's broadband privacy rules. Phone carriers are legally required to protect "Customer Proprietary Network Information [CPNI]," and the FCC's definition of CPNI includes location data.

[...] Pai did not agree with Pallone, it turns out. "Today, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai refused to brief Energy and Commerce Committee staff on the real-time tracking of cell phone location[s]," Pallone said in a statement yesterday. "In a phone conversation today, his staff asserted that these egregious actions are not a threat to the safety of human life or property that the FCC will address during the Trump shutdown."

A small green shoot is growing on the moon after a cotton seed germinated onboard a Chinese lunar lander, scientists said. From a report: The sprout has emerged from a lattice-like structure inside a canister after the Chang'e 4 lander touched down earlier this month, according to a series of photos released by the Advanced Technology Research Institute at Chongqing University. "This is the first time humans have done biological growth experiments on the lunar surface," said Xie Gengxin, who led the design of the experiment, on Tuesday. Plants have been grown previously on the International Space Station, but this is the first time a seed has sprouted on the moon. The ability to grow plants in space is seen as crucial for long-term space missions and establishing human outposts elsewhere in the solar system, such as Mars.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A free texting service used by teachers, students, and parents may stop working on the Verizon Wireless network because of a dispute over texting fees that Verizon demanded from the company that operates the service. As a result, teachers that use the service have been expressing their displeasure with Verizon. Remind -- the company that offers the classroom communication service -- criticized Verizon for charging the new fee. Remind said its service's text message notifications will stop working on the Verizon network on January 28 unless Verizon changes course. (Notifications sent via email or via Remind's mobile apps will continue to work.) The controversy cropped up shortly after a Federal Communications Commission decision that allowed U.S. carriers' text-messaging services to remain largely unregulated. Verizon says the fee must be charged to fund spam-blocking services. Remind said in a statement: "To offer our text-messaging service free of charge, Remind has always paid for each text that users receive or send. Now, Verizon is charging Remind an additional fee intended for companies that send spam over its network. Your Remind messages aren't spam, but that hasn't helped resolve the issue with Verizon. The fee will increase our cost of supporting text messaging to at least 11 times our current cost -- forcing us to end free Remind text messaging for the more than 7 million students, parents, and educators who have Verizon Wireless as their carrier."

Volkswagen will spend $800 million to expand a U.S. factory that will produce the automaker's next generation of electric vehicles. "The factory in Chattanooga, Tenn. will be the company's North American base for manufacturing electric vehicles," reports TechCrunch. "The expansion is expected to create 1,000 jobs at the plant." From the report: VW's Chattanooga expansion is just a piece of the automaker's broader plan to move away from diesel in the wake of the emissions cheating scandal that erupted in 2015. Globally, VW Group plans to commit almost $50 billion through 2023 toward the development and production of electric vehicles and digital services. The Volkswagen brand (so not including its Audi or Porsche brands) alone has forecasted selling 150,000 EVs by 2020 worldwide, increasing that number to 1 million by 2025.

The Tennessee factory (along with the other new facilities) will produce EVs using Volkswagen's modular electric toolkit chassis, or MEB, introduced by the company in 2016. The MEB is a flexible modular system -- really a matrix of common parts -- for producing electric vehicles that VW says make it more efficient and cost-effective. Electric vehicle production at the Tennessee site will begin in 2022. However, Volkswagen of America says it will offer the first EV based on the MEB platform to customers in 2020.This EV will be a series-production version of the I.D. CROZZ SUV concept that was first shown at the North American International Auto Show last year. This vehicle will have the interior space of a midsize SUV in the footprint of a compact SUV. Volkswagen of America will also offer a multi-purpose EV based off the I.D. BUZZ concept. This EV will be a series-production version of the I.D. CROZZ SUV concept that was first shown at the North American International Auto Show last year. This vehicle will have the interior space of a midsize SUV in the footprint of a compact SUV. Volkswagen of America will also offer a multi-purpose EV based off the I.D. BUZZ concept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: High-fidelity music streaming service Tidal is under criminal investigation in Norway for allegedly inflating album streams for Beyonce's Lemonade and Kanye West's The Life of Pablo. The alleged faking of streaming numbers was exposed last year by Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv (DN), which said it had obtained a hard drive with the tampered data. Around 1.3 million accounts were supposedly used to lift the play counts of said albums by "several hundred million," with Tidal paying out higher royalty fees to the two artists and their record labels as a result.

In the wake of the report, a Norwegian songwriter's association known as Tono filed an official police complaint against Tidal. The Jay-Z-owned streaming service denied the accusations and subsequently launched an internal review to be conducted by a third-party cyber security company, which is still ongoing. Today, DN revealed that Norway's National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime (Okokrim) has begun an investigation into data manipulation at Tidal. Though still in its early stages, Okokrim says that at least four former Tidal employees (including its former head of business intelligence -- responsible for analyzing streams) have been interrogated in front of a judge as part of the investigation. The quartet have faced a total of 25 hours of questioning thus far. Three former staffers reportedly recognized signs of meddling with the albums and contacted a lawyer before notifying Tidal. "All three individuals resigned from the company in 2016 after signing what a DN source called 'the gold standard of confidentiality contracts,'" reports Engadget.

dryriver writes: Electronic Arts has mismanaged the Battlefield franchise in the past -- BF3 and BF4 were not great from a gameplay perspective -- but with Battlefield 5, Electronic Arts is facing a real disaster that has sent its stock plummeting on the stock exchanges. First came the fierce cultural internet backlash from gamers to the Battlefield 5 reveal trailer -- EA tried to inject so much 21st Century gender diversity and Hollywood action-movie style fighting into what was supposed to be a reasonably historically accurate WWII shooter trailer, that many gamers felt the game would be "a seriously inauthentic portrayal of what WW2 warfare really was like." Then the game sold very poorly after a delayed launch date -- far less than the mildly successful WW1 shooter Battlefield 1 for example -- and is currently discounted by 33% to 50% at all major game retailers to try desperately to push sales numbers up. This was also a disaster for Nvidia, as Battlefield 5 was the tentpole title supposed to entice gamers into buying expensive new realtime ray-tracing Nvidia 2080 RTX GPUs.

Electronic Arts had to revise its earnings estimates for 2019, some hedge funds sold off their EA stock, fearing low sales and stiff competition from popular Battle Royal games like Fortnite and PUBG, and EA stock is currently 45% down from its peak value in July 2018. EA had already become seriously unpopular with gamers because of annoying Battlefield franchise in-game mechanisms such as heaving to buy decent-aiming-accuracy weapons with additional cash, having to constantly pay for additional DLC content and game maps, and the very poor multiplayer gameplay of its two Star Wars: Battlefront titles (essentially Battlefield with laser blasters set in the Star Wars Universe). It seems that with Battlefield 5, EA -- not a company known for listening to its customers -- finally hit a brick wall, in the form of many Battlefield fans simply not buying or playing Battlefield 5.

Intel has been trying to fill the most prominent role in the $400-billion chip industry for more than six months. The company's board still hasn't found what it's looking for. From a report: Intel directors have ruled out some candidates for the vacant chief executive officer post, passed up obvious ones, been rejected by some and decided to go back and re-interview others, extending the search, according to people familiar with the process. Chairman Andy Bryant told some employees recently that the chipmaker may go with a "non-traditional" candidate, suggesting a CEO from outside the company is a possibility.

Whoever is chosen will take the reins at a company that's churning out record results, but is facing rising competition. The new CEO will have to convince investors that Intel's loss of manufacturing leadership -- a cornerstone of its dominance -- won't cost it market share in the lucrative semiconductor market. He or she will also have to deliver on the company's promise to maintain growth by winning orders beyond personal computer and server chips. "The new CEO will have many difficult decisions to make in a short amount of time," said Kevin Cassidy, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. "The company can perform well in the near term due to good demand for PC and servers, but longer-term decisions and strategy need a CEO soon."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo: Google has reportedly blacklisted keywords mentioning Ethereum (ETH) on its advertising platform Google Ads, smart contract auditing startup Decenter tweeted on Jan. 10. The official Google Ads account replied to the tweet stating that cryptocurrency exchanges targeting the United States and Japan can be advertised on the platform, and that targeting other countries could be the reason for the ad rejection.

When Decenter explained that they are a group of developers doing smart contract security audits and that they were seeing the error message when trying to use the "ethereum development services" and "ethereum security audits" keywords, Google Ads' official account answered: "Although we wouldn't be able to preemptively confirm if your keyword is eligible to trigger ads, we'd recommend that you refer to the 'Cryptocurrencies' section of our policy on Financial products and services." When Decenter asked the Ethereum community on Reddit in an open query about the alleged Google Ads policy changes, the team specified that: "Any of the keywords that contain "ethereum" in our campaigns are no longer showing ads as of January 9th and are now reporting the following error." Decenter said they have tested keywords for "ethereum smart contract audits" and "eos smart contract audits" and found that only the EOS-referenced keyword showed ads.

Google banned all cryptocurrency-related advertising of all types in June 2018. However, Google announced in September 2018 that it would change its ad policy in October, reallowing some crypto businesses to advertise on its platform. Namely, the changes allow cryptocurrency exchanges ads in the United States and Japan.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo: Google has reportedly blacklisted keywords mentioning Ethereum (ETH) on its advertising platform Google Ads, smart contract auditing startup Decenter tweeted on Jan. 10. The official Google Ads account replied to the tweet stating that cryptocurrency exchanges targeting the United States and Japan can be advertised on the platform, and that targeting other countries could be the reason for the ad rejection.

When Decenter explained that they are a group of developers doing smart contract security audits and that they were seeing the error message when trying to use the "ethereum development services" and "ethereum security audits" keywords, Google Ads' official account answered: "Although we wouldn't be able to preemptively confirm if your keyword is eligible to trigger ads, we'd recommend that you refer to the 'Cryptocurrencies' section of our policy on Financial products and services." When Decenter asked the Ethereum community on Reddit in an open query about the alleged Google Ads policy changes, the team specified that: "Any of the keywords that contain "ethereum" in our campaigns are no longer showing ads as of January 9th and are now reporting the following error." Decenter said they have tested keywords for "ethereum smart contract audits" and "eos smart contract audits" and found that only the EOS-referenced keyword showed ads.

Google banned all cryptocurrency-related advertising of all types in June 2018. However, Google announced in September 2018 that it would change its ad policy in October, reallowing some crypto businesses to advertise on its platform. Namely, the changes allow cryptocurrency exchanges ads in the United States and Japan.

Apple's long-delayed AirPower wireless charging mat might finally be in production. According to a tweet from ChargerLAB, a "credible source" says that Apple has begun manufacturing the long-delayed wireless charging mat. The Verge reports: If true, it could mean that the long-overdue product could finally reach the hands of consumers before too much longer. Apple announced in September 2017, that it was introducing wireless charging capabilities in with the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, and gave a preview for its own wireless charging mat that would not only charge the iPhone, but its Apple Watch and AirPods. At the time, Apple didn't announce a price -- only that it was expected to be released sometime in 2018. That obviously didn't happen...

If what ChargerLAB says is accurate, that could mean that we'll see more about them in the near future. The site's tweet says that the devices are being manufactured at Luxshare Precision, which already manufactures Apple's AirPods and some cords. MacRumors translated a screenshot of ChargerLAB's WeChat conversation, in which the site's source expects the device be released soon. But given the charger's history of delays and technical challenges, it's probably best not to get one's hopes up just yet.

Danngggg writes: Many will remember Martin Gottesfeld since he was arrested on a speedboat coming from Cuba. He volunteered at trial that he and his wife had just been denied political asylum by Castro. Gottesfeld has said he did it to defend the life of an innocent child named Justina Pelletier. On Thursday, the same judge that over saw the Aaron Swartz case sentenced the Anonymous hacktivist to 10 years in federal prison for a DDoS of Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard-affiliated hospitals, and Wayside Youth and Family. The sentence included $440,000 in restitution, 3 years supervised release, and other conditions. The week before, Gottesfeld docketed a 690-page affidavit (including exhibits) documenting the judge's conflicts of interest and why he doesn't belong anywhere near the case. That's available on the FreeMartyG website. Local news spoke to his wife after the sentencing hearing as well.

Danngggg writes: Many will remember Martin Gottesfeld since he was arrested on a speedboat coming from Cuba. He volunteered at trial that he and his wife had just been denied political asylum by Castro. Gottesfeld has said he did it to defend the life of an innocent child named Justina Pelletier. On Thursday, the same judge that over saw the Aaron Swartz case sentenced the Anonymous hacktivist to 10 years in federal prison for a DDoS of Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard-affiliated hospitals, and Wayside Youth and Family. The sentence included $440,000 in restitution, 3 years supervised release, and other conditions. The week before, Gottesfeld docketed a 690-page affidavit (including exhibits) documenting the judge's conflicts of interest and why he doesn't belong anywhere near the case. That's available on the FreeMartyG website. Local news spoke to his wife after the sentencing hearing as well.

Chinese tech giant Huawei has fired Weijing Wang, an employee recently arrested in Poland over spying allegations despite security officials saying the espionage wasn't directly tied to the company. The staffer brought the company into "disrepute," according to a statement. Police also arrested a Polish citizen in connection to the case. Engadget reports: The incident comes at a particularly bad time for Huawei. On top of general distrust sparked by Western governments and intelligence agencies, CFO Wangzhou Meng is facing extradition to the U.S. over accusations she helped avoid sanctions. People are already suspicious, and the arrest doesn't do the company any favors.

Moreover, there are already potential consequences. Polish internal affairs minister Joachim Brudzinski has asked the European Union and NATO to coordinate any potential bans on Huawei gear. While Poland is still willing to work with China, the official wanted countries to clarify their stances. There's already been talk of reviewing Huawei's involvement in Poland's 5G network, and this might exacerbate the situation.

Chinese tech giant Huawei has fired Weijing Wang, an employee recently arrested in Poland over spying allegations despite security officials saying the espionage wasn't directly tied to the company. The staffer brought the company into "disrepute," according to a statement. Police also arrested a Polish citizen in connection to the case. Engadget reports: The incident comes at a particularly bad time for Huawei. On top of general distrust sparked by Western governments and intelligence agencies, CFO Wangzhou Meng is facing extradition to the U.S. over accusations she helped avoid sanctions. People are already suspicious, and the arrest doesn't do the company any favors.

Moreover, there are already potential consequences. Polish internal affairs minister Joachim Brudzinski has asked the European Union and NATO to coordinate any potential bans on Huawei gear. While Poland is still willing to work with China, the official wanted countries to clarify their stances. There's already been talk of reviewing Huawei's involvement in Poland's 5G network, and this might exacerbate the situation.

An anonymous reader quotes Inc: It's inevitable, really. Musk's two largest companies, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, make electric cars and rockets.... Musk tweeted about a "SpaceX option package" for the next Tesla Roadster in June of last year. The upgrade was described as including about "10 small rocket thrusters arranged seamlessly around car. These rocket engines dramatically improve acceleration, top speed, braking & cornering. Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly..."

Musk then hinted even more strongly at the possibility of a flying Tesla this week when he retweeted a GIF of a flying DeLorean from "Back to the Future," saying: "The new Roadster will actually do something like this." He then went on to describe how small SpaceX air thrusters will be used to essentially turn a Tesla Roadster into a hovercraft or perhaps... something with an even higher vertical range.
Two years ago Musk insisted flying cars were noisy and annoyed the people on the ground -- although you could argue this shows he'd been thinking about the mechanics of flying cars, and when it's an appropriate time to use rocket thrusters.

Inc's headline? "Elon Musk Has Plans For a Tesla / SpaceX Flying Car (And He's Serious. Probably.)"

"How does the actual, purchaseable consumer technology available in 2019 compare to what you -- back in the 1960s, '70s, '80s or '90s -- thought consumer technology might look like around the year 2020?" asks Slashdot reader dryriver. Is today's consumer technology as advanced, inventive, groundbreaking and empowering as you imagined it would be 30, 40, 50 years ago? Or is the "technological future that has now actually arrived" different, in various ways, from how you'd hoped/imagined it might be a few decades back?

If so, what was different in your "future technologies imagination" than what is available to buy today?
Each generation received different dreams from the pop culture of their time. Back in 1969 an 18-year-old Kurt Russell starred in a Disney movie with a malfunctioning mainframe. By 1984 one TV series showed David Hasselhoff with his own talking self-driving car. But how close did your own personal predictions come, asks the original submission.

"Do today's technological gadgets manage to live up to how you imagined tech around the year 2020 would be, or do they fall short of what you hoped/imagined might exist by today?

"One of the world's foremost mathematicians, Prof Sir Michael Atiyah, has died at the age of 89," reports the BBC.

"He has been described to me by more than one professor of mathematics as the best mathematician in this country since Sir Isaac Newton," his brother tells the BBC. Slashdot reader OneHundredAndTen shared their report: Sir Michael was best known for his co-development of a branch of mathematics called topological K-theory and the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. His research also involved deep insights relating to mathematical concepts known as "vector bundles". His work in these areas has helped theoretical physicists to advance their understanding of quantum field theory and general relativity.
In September, Atiyah also claimed to have proved the 160-year-old Riemann hypothesis.

"If the hypothesis is proven to be correct," New Scientist reported, "mathematicians would be armed with a map to the location of all such prime numbers, a breakthrough with far-reaching repercussions in the field."

One study found that 66% of tweets with links were posted by "suspected bots" -- with an even higher percentage for certain kinds of content. Now a new California law will require bots to disclose that they are bots.

But does that violate the bots' freedom of speech, asks Laurent Sacharoff, a law professor at the University of Arkansas. "Even though bots are abstract entities, we might think of them as having free speech rights to the extent that they are promoting or promulgating useful information for the rest of us," Sacharoff says. "That's one theory of why a bot would have a First Amendment free speech right, almost independent of its creators." Alternatively, the bots could just be viewed as direct extensions of their human creators. In either case -- whether because of an independent right to free speech or because of a human creator's right -- Sacharoff says, "you can get to one or another nature of bots having some kind of free speech right."

In previous Bulletin coverage, the author of the new California law dismisses the idea that the law violates free speech rights. State Sen. Robert Hertzberg says anonymous marketing and electioneering bots are committing fraud. "My point is, you can say whatever the heck you want," Hertzberg says. "I don't want to control one bit of the content of what's being said. Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. All I want is for the person who has to hear the content to know it comes from a computer. To me, that's a fraud element versus a free speech element."

Sacharoff believes that the issue of bots and their potential First Amendment rights may one day have its day in court. Campaigns, he says, will find that bots are helpful and that their "usefulness derives from the fact that they don't have to disclose that they're bots. If some account is retweeting something, if they have to say, 'I'm a bot' every time, then it's less effective. So sure I can see some campaign seeking a declaratory judgment that the law is invalid," he says. "Ditto, I guess, [for] selling stuff on the commercial side."

One study found that 66% of tweets with links were posted by "suspected bots" -- with an even higher percentage for certain kinds of content. Now a new California law will require bots to disclose that they are bots.

But does that violate the bots' freedom of speech, asks Laurent Sacharoff, a law professor at the University of Arkansas. "Even though bots are abstract entities, we might think of them as having free speech rights to the extent that they are promoting or promulgating useful information for the rest of us," Sacharoff says. "That's one theory of why a bot would have a First Amendment free speech right, almost independent of its creators." Alternatively, the bots could just be viewed as direct extensions of their human creators. In either case -- whether because of an independent right to free speech or because of a human creator's right -- Sacharoff says, "you can get to one or another nature of bots having some kind of free speech right."

In previous Bulletin coverage, the author of the new California law dismisses the idea that the law violates free speech rights. State Sen. Robert Hertzberg says anonymous marketing and electioneering bots are committing fraud. "My point is, you can say whatever the heck you want," Hertzberg says. "I don't want to control one bit of the content of what's being said. Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. All I want is for the person who has to hear the content to know it comes from a computer. To me, that's a fraud element versus a free speech element."

Sacharoff believes that the issue of bots and their potential First Amendment rights may one day have its day in court. Campaigns, he says, will find that bots are helpful and that their "usefulness derives from the fact that they don't have to disclose that they're bots. If some account is retweeting something, if they have to say, 'I'm a bot' every time, then it's less effective. So sure I can see some campaign seeking a declaratory judgment that the law is invalid," he says. "Ditto, I guess, [for] selling stuff on the commercial side."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: More than 150 people who previously stayed in Marriott properties are suing the hotel chain in a federal class-action lawsuit, claiming that Marriott didn't do enough to protect them from a data breach that exposed more than 300 million guests' personal information, including names, credit card information, and passport numbers. The suit, which was filed Maryland federal district court on January 9, claims that Marriott did not adequately protect guest information before the breach and, once the breach had been discovered, "failed to provide timely, accurate, and adequate notice" to guests whose information may have been obtained by hackers.

According to the suit, Marriott's purchase of the Starwood properties [in 2016] is part of the problem. "This breach had been going on since 2014. In conducting due diligence to acquire Starwood, Marriott should have gone through and done an accounting of the cybersecurity of Starwood," Amy Keller, an attorney at DiCello Levitt & Casey who is representing the Marriott guests, told Vox. "In so doing, it should have caught -- at the very least -- that there was some suspicious activity concerning the database where a lot of consumer information was contained." Instead, Keller said, the breach continued for an additional two years after the acquisition, until Marriott caught it in September 2018. And even then, the suit claims, the company waited until November to tell guests about the breach.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Students and faculty at the University of California (UC) have been warned not to use messaging apps and social media while visiting China, for fear their communications could be used against them by the country's law enforcement agencies. The guidance from one of the biggest school networks in the U.S. is the latest concern to be raised over Western travel to China following the December 1 arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the request of U.S. authorities.

The UC guidance also appeared to reference the case of Paul Whelan, a U.S. citizen arrested in Russia last month on suspicion of espionage. "While the use of WhatsApp, WeChat and like messaging apps are legal in China, we have seen in the latest espionage charge of a U.S. citizen in Russia where the use of WhatsApp has been cited in his espionage charges," read an email seen by CNN. "Our concern here is the possibility China could use this condition similarly against western travelers to levy charges or as an excuse to deny departure. We recommend not using these messaging apps in China at this time."

A Huawei executive has been arrested in Poland on charges of spying for China, Poland's counterintelligence service said Friday. NPR reports: A government spokesman identified the suspect as Weijing W.; media reports in Poland and China say he also is known as Stanislaw Wang, Huawei's sales director in Poland. In a coordinated arrest Tuesday, authorities also detained and charged a Polish citizen named Piotr D. who works for the telecom company Orange Polska. He is a former Internal Security Agency official, according to Poland's TVP Info, which first reported the story. Police searched both of the suspects' homes Tuesday. In addition, TVP Info says, Internal Security Agency officers searched Huawei's headquarters in Poland and an Orange office where Piotr D. worked. The government has evidence that the two suspects "cooperated with the Chinese services" as they conducted espionage against Poland, according to Stanislaw Zaryn, spokesman for the special services branch, in a tweet about the case.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Thursday, AT&T announced it was stopping the sale of its customers' real-time location data to all third parties, in response to a Motherboard investigation showing how data from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint trickled down through a complex network of companies until eventually landing the hands of bounty hunters and people unauthorized to handle it. To verify the existence of this trade, Motherboard paid $300 on the black market to successfully locate a phone.

Google, whose Google Fi program offers phone, text, and data services that use T-Mobile and Sprint network infrastructure in the United States, told Motherboard that it asked those companies to not share its customers' location data with third parties. "We have never sold Fi subscribers' location information," a Google spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement late on Thursday. "Google Fi is an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) and not a carrier, but as soon as we heard about this practice, we required our network partners to shut it down as soon as possible." Google did not say when it made this a requirement.