Slashdot Mirror

Slashdot reader Actually, I do RTFA remains wary of a new "blockchain-powered mobile voting app" being used by the state of West Virginia to collect ballots from overseas absentee voters.

But meanwhile, Slashdot reader chicksdaddy notes an election hacking exercise conducted with city employees and local FBI officers in Boston focused on attempts to disrupt a hypothetical election in "Nolandia" by simply clogging highways and sowing chaos. From Security Ledger: The day started with snarled traffic and a suspicious outage of the 9-1-1 emergency call center that has put the public and first responders on edge. Already, the city's police force was taxed keeping tabs on protests tied to a meeting of the International Monetary Fund. By afternoon, the federal Emergency Alert System (EAS) was warning Nolandia residents of massive natural gas leaks in neighborhoods in the north and west part of the city, prompting officials to order evacuations of the affected areas.

Later, bomb threats called in to local television stations shut down a bridge linking the northern and southern halves of the city -- a major artery for vehicles. The EAS warning turns out to have been false -- no gas leaks are detected, nor is any bomb found on the bridge. Later in the day, cyber attack s on a smart traffic light deployment in Nolandia snarl traffic further and sow chaos during the evening commute... This is election hacking 2018 style: a highly successful operation in which no voting machines or voting infrastructure were compromised, attacked or even targeted.
The cybersecurity company that created the exercise said they "wanted to expand that scope and demonstrate that the threat landscape is actually much broader...."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: California Governor Jerry Brown has signed a cybersecurity law covering "smart" devices, making California the first state with such a law. The bill, SB-327, was introduced last year and passed the state senate in late August. Starting on January 1st, 2020, any manufacturer of a device that connects "directly or indirectly" to the internet must equip it with "reasonable" security features, designed to prevent unauthorized access, modification, or information disclosure. If it can be accessed outside a local area network with a password, it needs to either come with a unique password for each device, or force users to set their own password the first time they connect. That means no more generic default credentials for a hacker to guess.

A new report from Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall suggests that Apple may be demanding $9 billion from Google to have its search engine as the default in Safari on iOS. This is a steep increase to last year's estimated $3 billion licensing costs and $1 billion licensing costs in 2014. Hall suggests that Apple may even increase the costs to $12 billion in 2019. Neowin reports: It's unclear if Google's supplanting Microsoft as the default search provider for Siri and Spotlight last year is responsible for the purported price hike from Apple, though it may, at least partially, explain the sudden jump. The other explanation could be that previous estimates of the value of the agreement between the two tech giants were undervalued, given that apart from the $1 billion figure from 2014, we don't really have any hard evidence pertaining to the actual sum of these payments. Hall does indicate that "Apple is one of the biggest channels of traffic acquisition for Google' and despite the high cost, it is quite likely that Google will agree to pay the increased sum."

Sources have shared some new details with CNBC relating to the recent SEC charges against Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Yesterday, U.S. securities regulators sued Musk for allegedly making false statements related to his abandoned efforts to take Tesla Motors private. Now, according to CNBC, Tesla and the SEC were close to a no-guilt settlement but Elon Musk pulled out at the last minute. From the report: Under the deal, Musk and Tesla would have had to pay a nominal fine, and the CEO would not have had to admit any guilt, the sources said. However, the settlement would have barred Musk as chairman for two years and would require Tesla to appoint two new independent directors, CNBC's David Faber, citing sources. Musk refused to sign the deal because he felt that by settling he would not be truthful to himself, and he wouldn't have been able to live with the idea that he agreed to accept a settlement and any blemish associated with that, the sources said. Musk called the SEC's allegations "unjustified" and that he acted in the best interests of investors. "Tesla and the board of directors are fully confident in Elon, his integrity, and his leadership of the company, which has resulted in the most successful U.S. auto company in over a century. Our focus remains on the continued ramp of Model 3 production and delivering for our customers, shareholders and employees," said Tesla's board of directors in a statement.

Follow the revelations this morning that a hacker exploited a security flaw in a popular feature of Facebook to steal account credentials of as many as 50 million users, a class-action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of one California resident, Carla Echavarria, and one Virginia resident, Derick Walker. "Both allege that Facebook's lack of proper security has exposed them and additional potential class members to a significantly increased chance of identity theft as a result of the breach," reports The Verge. From the report: The lawsuit was filed today in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint alleges Facebook is guilty of unlawful business practices, deceit by concealment, negligence, and violations of California's Customer Records Act. The plaintiffs want statutory damages and penalties awarded to them and other class members, as well as the providing of credit monitoring services, punitive damages, and the coverage of attorneys' fees and expenses. Although Facebook says it has fixed the issue that resulted in the breach, it still has little to no information to provide on who is behind the attack or when the attack even occurred.

As it stands, in addition to this new lawsuit, Facebook is facing pressure from the New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood, who announced on Twitter this afternoon that, "We're looking into Facebook's massive data breach. New Yorkers deserve to know that their information will be protected." Federal Trade Commissioner Rohit Chopra had a terse public reaction, releasing a simple three-line tweet reading, "I want answers." In addition to Underwood and Chopra, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA) released a statement describing the hack is "deeply concerning" and calling for a full investigation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: U.S. government investigators have lost a case to force Facebook to wiretap calls made over its Messenger app. A joint federal and state law enforcement effort investigating the MS-13 gang had pushed a district court to hold the social networking giant in contempt of court for refusing to permit real-time listening in on voice calls. According to sources speaking to Reuters, the judge later ruled in Facebook's favor -- although, because the case remains under seal, it's not known for what reason. The case, filed in a Fresno, Calif. district court, centers on alleged gang members accused of murder and other crimes. The government had been pushing to prosecute 16 suspected gang members, but are said to have leaned on Facebook to obtain further evidence.

Iridium Communications is partnering with Amazon Web Services to develop a satellite-based network called CloudConnect for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. "We're really covering the whole planet [...] with terrestrial networks today it's still only 10 percent or 20 percent" of the Earth, Iridium CEO Matt Desch told CNBC. "Everybody today can connect pretty easily with very little effort. Now that Amazon has put our language into the cloud platform, they can extend their applications to the satellite realm." From the report: CloudConnect, which the company expects to launch in 2019, makes Iridium "the first, and only, satellite provider now connected to" Amazon Web Services, Desch said. The CloudConnect network will focus on "where cellular technologies aren't," Desch said, bringing the rest of the world within reach of AWS. The company is nearly finished putting its Iridium NEXT constellation of 75 satellites into orbit. SpaceX is launching the $3 billion satellite network for Iridium, with the eighth and final launch happening later this year.

Once online, Iridium NEXT will offer services such as higher broadband communications speeds and global airplane tracking. Iridium describes the IoT aspect of the network as a "catalyst for strong subscriber growth." Desch said the network hosts "about half a million" active devices, growing at a rate of about 20 percent per year for the last three years. With AWS onboard, Desch gave a very bullish estimates for his IoT services: "Easily this could expand to tens of millions of devices."

During a talk at the Oculus Connect conference today, Oculus' CTO, John Carmack, compared the company's newly announced Oculus Quest headset to the Xbox 360 and PS3 in terms of power. Ars Technica reports: That doesn't mean the Quest, which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, can generate VR scenes comparable to those seen in Xbox 360 or PS3 games, though. As Carmack pointed out, most games of that generation targeted a 1280x720 resolution at 30 frames per second. On Quest, the display target involves two 1280x1280 images per frame at 72fps. That's 8.5 times as many pixels per second, with additional high-end anti-aliasing effects needed for VR as well. "It is not possible to take a game that was done at a high-quality level [on the Xbox 360 or PS3] and expect it to look good in VR," Carmack said. Expecting Rift-level performance from a self-contained mobile headset like the quest isn't realistic, Carmack said, partly for simple electrical reasons. While a high-end gaming PC often draw up to 500 watts of power, Carmack said the Quest only uses about 5W, a tidbit that should be of benefit to the Quest's still unconfirmed battery-life statistics.

That relative lack of hardware power is going to require some developers to adopt "a different programming style that's been necessary on the PC," Carmack warned. "With a modern PC, you have so much extra power, you don't need to be a hotshot programmer to make a game people love. You don't really have that convenience on any mobile platform, really, but especially not on our platform." That's not an insurmountable problem, Carmack suggested, as long as developers focus on the dozen or so things that players really need to concentrate on in an average game, rather than "thousands" of pieces of graphical fluff. He suggested developers look back to the lessons of platforms like the original PlayStation and Nintendo DS to see how developers crafted memorable experiences on much less-powerful hardware. Carmack went on to say that "realistically, we're going to end up competing with the Nintendo Switch... they'll pick up Quest as [a] mobile device, just like Switch."

One of the most appealing new features of the Apple Watch Series 4 is its electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor that measures the electrical activity of your heartbeat, providing you with a heart rhythm classification that can be shared with your doctor. While the feature will be available later this year in the United States, 9to5Mac reports that it could take years for it to be approved in the United Kingdom. From a report: The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) explains that the process starts by examining Apple's documentation surrounding the ECG feature and performing an audit of the quality assurance system. While this step doesn't appear to be lengthy, the proceeding steps could make the process longer. MHRA says it would require Apple to perform a new clinical investigation to judge the effectiveness of the ECG on Apple Watch, but Apple would likely not be able to use any of the data from the studies it's already completed because MHRA requires companies to notify the regulator in advance of a study.

Once the study is submitted, MHRA has 60 days to approve it (which may become longer if the regulators have further inquiries for Apple), and then Apple can begin the study. These last few steps are what the MHRA say "could potentially add years" onto the debut of the ECG in the UK. Despite the potential for years-long approval, Apple may find ways to expedite this process. While the United Kingdom remains part of the European Union, it's possible that Apple could receive approval from a broader regulatory body and sidestep the MHRA's processes.

After pulling its recommendation in August, Consumer Reports announced that it is once again recommending Microsoft's Surface laptops. "Microsoft's reliability is now on-par with most other laptop brands," says Martin Lachter, a senior research associate at Consumer Reports. The Verge reports: Consumer Reports originally revoked its recommendations after a survey of 90,000 laptop and tablet owners found that 25 percent of Surface users reported having problems by the end of their second year owning the device. Its latest survey concluded that that's no longer the case (although the recommendation site didn't disclose the exact numbers for this year's polling). The newly re-gained recommendation applies to most of Microsoft's Surface lineup, including the Surface Pro, Surface Laptop, and Surface Book 2. Notably missing is the recently released 10-inch Surface Go, although that isn't getting the recommendation badge due to poor performance in Consumer Reports' lab testing, not reliability concerns.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg, the head of Panasonic's Automotive Division said that the company was on track to complete an additional three battery-cell production lines at Tesla's Nevada Gigafactory before the end of this year. That puts the expansion ahead of schedule for completion. Panasonic is a joint owner of the Gigafactory. The company provides the "2170" battery cells that go into a Model 3 battery pack. Tesla packages those cells to complete the pack. In the interview, Panasonic automotive executive Yoshio Ito told Bloomberg that "the bottleneck for Model 3 production has been our batteries." Ito added, "they just want us to make as many as possible."

In short, more battery cells rolling off more lines at the Gigafactory are good for Model 3 production only if the manufacturing process gets smoother. There's evidence that this is happening, as the company was able to sell more than 28,000 Model 3s in the second quarter of 2018, albeit at the slight expense of Model S and Model X production. The three new Panasonic lines will bring the number of cell-producing lines up to 13, Bloomberg wrote. Ito told the news service that Tesla is currently using all of its Gigafactory capacity to produce vehicle batteries, despite initially planning to reserve 30 percent of its capacity to build stationary storage batteries like Powerwalls and Powerpacks. That has played out in long-delayed Powerwall installations.

U.S. securities regulators have sued Elon Musk for allegedly making false statements related to his abandoned efforts to take Tesla Motors private. Bloomberg News broke the news Thursday, citing docket entry in Manhattan federal court. Last month, Musk had expressed his intentions to take Tesla private, and that he had secured the funding. Taking Tesla private, which would have helped the company avoid making short-term commitments and goals, would be the "best path forward," Musk had said at the time. Even as investors had shown agreement to Musk's move, a few days later, he announced that after further discussions, everyone believes that Tesla should remain public. Amid all of this, some argued that Musk made the "false" claim just to hurt short-sellers. From the lawsuit: This case involves a series of false and misleading statements made by Elon Musk, the Chief Executive Officer of Tesla, Inc. ("Tesla"), on August 7, 2018, regarding taking Tesla, a publicly traded company, private. Musk's statements, disseminated via Twitter, falsely indicated that, should he so choose, it was virtually certain that he could take Tesla private at a purchase price that reflected a substantial premium over Tesla stock's then-current share price, that funding for this multi-billion dollar transaction had been secured, and that the only contingency was a shareholder vote. In truth and in fact, Musk had not even discussed, much less confirmed, key deal terms, including price, with any potential funding source. During a press conference, Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SEC's division of enforcement, said: A chairman and CEO of a public company has important responsibilities to shareholders. Those responsibilities include the need to be scrupulous and careful about the truth and accuracy of statements made to the investing public, whether those statements are made in traditional forms such as a press release or an earnings call or through less formal methods such as Twitter or other social media. Neither celebrity status nor reputation as a technological innovator provide an exemption from the federal securities laws. In a statement to CNBC, Musk said, "This unjustified action by the SEC leaves me deeply saddened and disappointed. I have always taken action in the best interests of truth, transparency and investors. Integrity is the most important value in my life and the facts will show I never compromised this in any way."

U.S. securities regulators have sued Elon Musk for allegedly making false statements related to his abandoned efforts to take Tesla Motors private. Bloomberg News broke the news Thursday, citing docket entry in Manhattan federal court. Last month, Musk had expressed his intentions to take Tesla private, and that he had secured the funding. Taking Tesla private, which would have helped the company avoid making short-term commitments and goals, would be the "best path forward," Musk had said at the time. Even as investors had shown agreement to Musk's move, a few days later, he announced that after further discussions, everyone believes that Tesla should remain public. Amid all of this, some argued that Musk made the "false" claim just to hurt short-sellers. From the lawsuit: This case involves a series of false and misleading statements made by Elon Musk, the Chief Executive Officer of Tesla, Inc. ("Tesla"), on August 7, 2018, regarding taking Tesla, a publicly traded company, private. Musk's statements, disseminated via Twitter, falsely indicated that, should he so choose, it was virtually certain that he could take Tesla private at a purchase price that reflected a substantial premium over Tesla stock's then-current share price, that funding for this multi-billion dollar transaction had been secured, and that the only contingency was a shareholder vote. In truth and in fact, Musk had not even discussed, much less confirmed, key deal terms, including price, with any potential funding source. During a press conference, Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SEC's division of enforcement, said: A chairman and CEO of a public company has important responsibilities to shareholders. Those responsibilities include the need to be scrupulous and careful about the truth and accuracy of statements made to the investing public, whether those statements are made in traditional forms such as a press release or an earnings call or through less formal methods such as Twitter or other social media. Neither celebrity status nor reputation as a technological innovator provide an exemption from the federal securities laws. In a statement to CNBC, Musk said, "This unjustified action by the SEC leaves me deeply saddened and disappointed. I have always taken action in the best interests of truth, transparency and investors. Integrity is the most important value in my life and the facts will show I never compromised this in any way."

Linus Torvalds oversees every line of code added to the Linux kernel, but in recent years the male-dominated community has become increasingly divided, reports BBC. Rows about sexism and rudeness led to the creation of a Code of Conflict (CoC) in 2015 which was short -- simply recommending people "be excellent to each other." That has now been replaced by a more detailed Code of Conduct -- which retains the acronym, but attempts to be more inclusive and eliminate insulting and derogatory comments and behaviour. Reader sinij writes: Recently Linux Community adopted a new controversial Code of Conduct authored by Contributor Covenant also known for authoring the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto. In an exclusive email interview with the BBC, Mr Torvalds shared his thoughts on his decision to temporarily step aside, the controversy behind the CoC, and the defects of the community he set up. His thoughts on CoC: The advantage of concentrating on technology is that you can have some mostly objective measures, and some basis for agreement, and you can have a very nice and healthy community around it all. I really am motivated by the technology, but the community around Linux has been a big positive too. But there are very tangible and immediate common goals in any technical project like Linux, and while there is occasionally disagreement about how to solve some particular issue, there is a very real cohesive force in that common goal of improving the project. And even when there are disagreements, people in the end often have fairly clear and objective measures of what is better. Code that is faster, simpler, or handles more cases naturally is just objectively 'better', without people really having to argue too much about it.

In contrast, the arguments about behaviour never seem to end up having a common goal. Except, in some sense, the argument itself. Have you read the Twitter feeds and other things by the people who seem to care more about the non-technical side? I think your 'hyped stories' is about as polite as you can put it. It's a morass of nastiness. Instead of a 'common goal', you end up with horrible fighting between different 'in-groups'. It's very polarising, and both sides love egging the other side on. It's not even a 'discussion', it's just people shouting at each other. That's actually the reason I for the longest time did not want to be involved with the whole CoC discussion in the first place. That whole subject seems to very easily just devolve and become unproductive. And I found a lot of the people who pushed for a CoC and criticised me for cursing to be hypocritical and pointless. I could easily point you to various tweet storms by people who criticise my 'white cis male' behaviour, while at the same time cursing more than I ever do.

So that's my excuse for dismissing a lot of the politically correct concerns for years. I felt it wasn't worth it. Anybody who uses the words 'white cis male privilege' was simply not worth my time even talking to, I felt. "And I'm still not apologising for my gender or the colour of my skin, or the fact that I happen to have the common sexual orientation. What changed? Maybe it was me, but I was also made very aware of some of the behaviour of the 'other' side in the discussion. Because I may have my reservations about excessive political correctness, but honestly, I absolutely do not want to be seen as being in the same camp as the low-life scum on the internet that think it's OK to be a white nationalist Nazi, and have some truly nasty misogynistic, homophobic or transphobic behaviour. And those people were complaining about too much political correctness too, and in the process just making my public stance look bad. And don't get me wrong, please -- I'm not making excuses for some of my own rather strong language. But I do claim that it never ever was any of that kind of nastiness. I got upset with bad code, and people who made excuses for it, and used some pretty strong language in the process. Not good behaviour, but not the racist/etc claptrap some people spout. So in the end, my 'I really don't want to be too PC' stance simply became untenable. Partly because you definitely can find some emails from me that were simply completely unacceptable, and I need to fix that going forward. But to a large degree also because I don't want to be associated with a lot of the people who complain about excessive political correctness.

Linus Torvalds oversees every line of code added to the Linux kernel, but in recent years the male-dominated community has become increasingly divided, reports BBC. Rows about sexism and rudeness led to the creation of a Code of Conflict (CoC) in 2015 which was short -- simply recommending people "be excellent to each other." That has now been replaced by a more detailed Code of Conduct -- which retains the acronym, but attempts to be more inclusive and eliminate insulting and derogatory comments and behaviour. Reader sinij writes: Recently Linux Community adopted a new controversial Code of Conduct authored by Contributor Covenant also known for authoring the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto. In an exclusive email interview with the BBC, Mr Torvalds shared his thoughts on his decision to temporarily step aside, the controversy behind the CoC, and the defects of the community he set up. His thoughts on CoC: The advantage of concentrating on technology is that you can have some mostly objective measures, and some basis for agreement, and you can have a very nice and healthy community around it all. I really am motivated by the technology, but the community around Linux has been a big positive too. But there are very tangible and immediate common goals in any technical project like Linux, and while there is occasionally disagreement about how to solve some particular issue, there is a very real cohesive force in that common goal of improving the project. And even when there are disagreements, people in the end often have fairly clear and objective measures of what is better. Code that is faster, simpler, or handles more cases naturally is just objectively 'better', without people really having to argue too much about it.

In contrast, the arguments about behaviour never seem to end up having a common goal. Except, in some sense, the argument itself. Have you read the Twitter feeds and other things by the people who seem to care more about the non-technical side? I think your 'hyped stories' is about as polite as you can put it. It's a morass of nastiness. Instead of a 'common goal', you end up with horrible fighting between different 'in-groups'. It's very polarising, and both sides love egging the other side on. It's not even a 'discussion', it's just people shouting at each other. That's actually the reason I for the longest time did not want to be involved with the whole CoC discussion in the first place. That whole subject seems to very easily just devolve and become unproductive. And I found a lot of the people who pushed for a CoC and criticised me for cursing to be hypocritical and pointless. I could easily point you to various tweet storms by people who criticise my 'white cis male' behaviour, while at the same time cursing more than I ever do.

So that's my excuse for dismissing a lot of the politically correct concerns for years. I felt it wasn't worth it. Anybody who uses the words 'white cis male privilege' was simply not worth my time even talking to, I felt. "And I'm still not apologising for my gender or the colour of my skin, or the fact that I happen to have the common sexual orientation. What changed? Maybe it was me, but I was also made very aware of some of the behaviour of the 'other' side in the discussion. Because I may have my reservations about excessive political correctness, but honestly, I absolutely do not want to be seen as being in the same camp as the low-life scum on the internet that think it's OK to be a white nationalist Nazi, and have some truly nasty misogynistic, homophobic or transphobic behaviour. And those people were complaining about too much political correctness too, and in the process just making my public stance look bad. And don't get me wrong, please -- I'm not making excuses for some of my own rather strong language. But I do claim that it never ever was any of that kind of nastiness. I got upset with bad code, and people who made excuses for it, and used some pretty strong language in the process. Not good behaviour, but not the racist/etc claptrap some people spout. So in the end, my 'I really don't want to be too PC' stance simply became untenable. Partly because you definitely can find some emails from me that were simply completely unacceptable, and I need to fix that going forward. But to a large degree also because I don't want to be associated with a lot of the people who complain about excessive political correctness.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The U.S. airline grounded all domestic flights Tuesday to deal with a technology issue that affected some of its systems. About an hour later, Delta said it had restored all its systems, allowing the services to resume. While the carrier said there were no disruptions or safety issues with any flight, the systems failure was the third in as many years that forced Delta to shut its operations. In January last year, a 2 1/2-hour computer breakdown grounded domestic flights. Delta's worldwide computer systems failed in August 2016, causing massive cancellations. This time, international flights weren't affected, and the grounding was relatively short. Still, with limited updates on flight schedules, irate customers took to social media.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The U.S. airline grounded all domestic flights Tuesday to deal with a technology issue that affected some of its systems. About an hour later, Delta said it had restored all its systems, allowing the services to resume. While the carrier said there were no disruptions or safety issues with any flight, the systems failure was the third in as many years that forced Delta to shut its operations. In January last year, a 2 1/2-hour computer breakdown grounded domestic flights. Delta's worldwide computer systems failed in August 2016, causing massive cancellations. This time, international flights weren't affected, and the grounding was relatively short. Still, with limited updates on flight schedules, irate customers took to social media.

At its Ignite 2018 conference, Microsoft said that Windows 10 has been installed on over 700 million active devices. Neowin reports of the confusion around this estimate, noting that "the last milestone was 600 million active devices" announced on November 29, 2017, nearly 10 months ago. From the report: If you follow Windows 10 news, this might not even seem like a major development. That's because the firm's communication around this has been wildly inconsistent. It started off when Windows and Devices chief Terry Myerson announced that he's leaving Microsoft, and he wrote in a farewell letter that Windows 10 is installed on nearly 700 million active devices. That was almost six months ago. At the firm's Build conference in May and at the Insider Dev Tour in July, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 is installed on over 700 million devices, only to retract those statements later on and say they were mistakes. But today after almost six months of "nearly 700 million", Windows 10 is officially installed on over 700 million devices.

Amazon is opening a new store in New York City that sells items from its website rated 4 stars or above. The company appears to be making a bigger push into brick-and-mortar retail following its acquisition of Whole Foods and the gradual rollout of its cashier-less convenience stores. CNBC reports: The store is set to open this Thursday in New York's SoHo neighborhood, on 72 Spring Street. The company said Amazon Prime members will pay "the Amazon.com price" when they shop there. An Amazon spokeswoman said the store is permanent, not a pop-up location, as some of its shops -- including one that sold Calvin Klein merchandise in SoHo last year -- have been before.

Amazon said customers will find items like a mini skillet, card games and many of the company's own electronic devices including the Echo Spot and Fire TV Stick, in the new store, called Amazon 4-star. It said it will also include some "Trending Around NYC" items there, which Amazon is able to track on its website. Amazon said digital price tags in the new store will show how much Prime members are saving, the average star rating and how many ratings a product has received, similar to what shoppers can see on the website today.

Amazon is opening a new store in New York City that sells items from its website rated 4 stars or above. The company appears to be making a bigger push into brick-and-mortar retail following its acquisition of Whole Foods and the gradual rollout of its cashier-less convenience stores. CNBC reports: The store is set to open this Thursday in New York's SoHo neighborhood, on 72 Spring Street. The company said Amazon Prime members will pay "the Amazon.com price" when they shop there. An Amazon spokeswoman said the store is permanent, not a pop-up location, as some of its shops -- including one that sold Calvin Klein merchandise in SoHo last year -- have been before.

Amazon said customers will find items like a mini skillet, card games and many of the company's own electronic devices including the Echo Spot and Fire TV Stick, in the new store, called Amazon 4-star. It said it will also include some "Trending Around NYC" items there, which Amazon is able to track on its website. Amazon said digital price tags in the new store will show how much Prime members are saving, the average star rating and how many ratings a product has received, similar to what shoppers can see on the website today.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Uber will pay $148 million to settle a nationwide investigation into a 2016 data breach (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), in which a hacker managed to gain access to information belonging to 57 million riders and drivers. The breach included names and driver's license numbers for 600,000 drivers. Rather than disclosing the breach when it occurred, Uber paid the hacker $100,000 through its bug bounty program. [...] The ride-hailing company persuaded him to delete the data and stay quiet about it with a nondisclosure agreement. The incident became public a year later when Uber's chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, announced it as a "failure" and fired the two employees who had signed off on the payment.

Tony West, Uber's chief legal officer, said the settlement was part of a larger effort inside Uber to remake the company's image. He said the company had recently hired a chief privacy officer and a chief trust and security officer. The $148 million settlement announced Wednesday will be divided among all 50 states and the District of Columbia. "Companies in California and throughout the nation are entrusted with customers' valuable private information," Xavier Becerra, California's attorney general, said. "This settlement broadcasts to all of them that we will hold them accountable to protect that data."

A former Google employee has warned of the firm's "disturbing" plans in China, in a letter to US lawmakers. BBC: Jack Poulson, who had been a senior researcher at the company until resigning in August, wrote that he was fearful of Google's ambitions. His letter alleges Google's work on a Chinese product -- codenamed Dragonfly -- would aid Beijing's efforts to censor and monitor its citizens online. Google has said its work in China to date has been "exploratory." Ben Gomes, Google's head of search, told the BBC earlier this week: "Right now all we've done is some exploration, but since we don't have any plans to launch something there's nothing much I can say about it."

A report by news site The Intercept last week alleged Google had demanded employees delete an internal memo that discussed the plans. Google has not commented on the staff row, but said: "We've been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools." It added: "We are not close to launching a search product in China." Mr Poulson's letter details several aspects of Google's work that had been reported in the press but never officially confirmed by the company. It was submitted to the Senate Commerce Committee, which held a hearing on Wednesday in Washington DC. Google's chief privacy officer, Keith Enright, faced questions from Senator Ted Cruz about the company's intentions to launch a new search engine in China. He confirmed the existence of the project.

A former Google employee has warned of the firm's "disturbing" plans in China, in a letter to US lawmakers. BBC: Jack Poulson, who had been a senior researcher at the company until resigning in August, wrote that he was fearful of Google's ambitions. His letter alleges Google's work on a Chinese product -- codenamed Dragonfly -- would aid Beijing's efforts to censor and monitor its citizens online. Google has said its work in China to date has been "exploratory." Ben Gomes, Google's head of search, told the BBC earlier this week: "Right now all we've done is some exploration, but since we don't have any plans to launch something there's nothing much I can say about it."

A report by news site The Intercept last week alleged Google had demanded employees delete an internal memo that discussed the plans. Google has not commented on the staff row, but said: "We've been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools." It added: "We are not close to launching a search product in China." Mr Poulson's letter details several aspects of Google's work that had been reported in the press but never officially confirmed by the company. It was submitted to the Senate Commerce Committee, which held a hearing on Wednesday in Washington DC. Google's chief privacy officer, Keith Enright, faced questions from Senator Ted Cruz about the company's intentions to launch a new search engine in China. He confirmed the existence of the project.

Kashmir Hill, reporting for Gizmodo: Last week, I ran an ad on Facebook targeted at a computer science professor named Alan Mislove. Mislove studies how privacy works on social networks and had a theory that Facebook is letting advertisers reach users with contact information collected in surprising ways. I was helping him test the theory by targeting him in a way Facebook had previously told me wouldn't work. I directed the ad to display to a Facebook account connected to the landline number for Alan Mislove's office, a number Mislove has never provided to Facebook. He saw the ad within hours.

One of the many ways that ads get in front of your eyeballs on Facebook and Instagram is that the social networking giant lets an advertiser upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses it has on file; it will then put an ad in front of accounts associated with that contact information. A clothing retailer can put an ad for a dress in the Instagram feeds of women who have purchased from them before, a politician can place Facebook ads in front of anyone on his mailing list, or a casino can offer deals to the email addresses of people suspected of having a gambling addiction. Facebook calls this a "custom audience." You might assume that you could go to your Facebook profile and look at your "contact and basic info" page to see what email addresses and phone numbers are associated with your account, and thus what advertisers can use to target you. But as is so often the case with this highly efficient data-miner posing as a way to keep in contact with your friends, it's going about it in a less transparent and more invasive way.

[...] Giridhari Venkatadri, Piotr Sapiezynski, and Alan Mislove of Northeastern University, along with Elena Lucherini of Princeton University, did a series of tests that involved handing contact information over to Facebook for a group of test accounts in different ways and then seeing whether that information could be used by an advertiser. They came up with a novel way to detect whether that information became available to advertisers by looking at the stats provided by Facebook about the size of an audience after contact information is uploaded. They go into this in greater length and technical detail in their paper [PDF]. They found that when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user's account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks. Officially, Facebook denies the existence of shadow profiles. In a hearing with the House Energy & Commerce Committee earlier this year, when New Mexico Representative Ben Lujan asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg if he was aware of the so-called practice of building "shadow profiles", Zuckerberg denied knowledge of it.

Facebook's David Marcus, who until recently ran the Facebook Messenger before starting the blockchain group earlier this year, is defending the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg after a WhatsApp founder spoke critically of his experience at the company. Marcus: [...] On the business model. I was present in a lot of these meetings. Again, Mark protected WhatsApp for a very long period of time. And you have to put this in the context of a large organization with businesses knocking on our door to have the ability to engage and communicate with their customers on WhatsApp the same way they were doing it on Messenger. During this time, it became pretty clear that while advocating for business messaging, and being given the opportunity to build and deliver on that promise, Brian actively slow-played the execution, and never truly went for it. In my view, if you're passionate about a certain path -- in this case, letting businesses message people and charging for it -- and if you have internal questions about it, then work hard to prove that your approach has legs and demonstrate the value. Don't be passive-aggressive about it. And by the way the paid messaging that WhatsApp is rolling out now sounds pretty similar to metered messaging from my point of view...

Lastly -- call me old fashioned. But I find attacking the people and company that made you a billionaire, and went to an unprecedented extent to shield and accommodate you for years, low-class. It's actually a whole new standard of low-class. I'll close by saying that as far as I'm concerned, and as a former lifelong entrepreneur and founder, there's no other large company I'd work at, and no other leader I'd work for. I want to work on hard problems that positively impact the lives of billions of people around the world. And Facebook is truly the only company that's singularly about people.

Facebook's David Marcus, who until recently ran the Facebook Messenger before starting the blockchain group earlier this year, is defending the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg after a WhatsApp founder spoke critically of his experience at the company. Marcus: [...] On the business model. I was present in a lot of these meetings. Again, Mark protected WhatsApp for a very long period of time. And you have to put this in the context of a large organization with businesses knocking on our door to have the ability to engage and communicate with their customers on WhatsApp the same way they were doing it on Messenger. During this time, it became pretty clear that while advocating for business messaging, and being given the opportunity to build and deliver on that promise, Brian actively slow-played the execution, and never truly went for it. In my view, if you're passionate about a certain path -- in this case, letting businesses message people and charging for it -- and if you have internal questions about it, then work hard to prove that your approach has legs and demonstrate the value. Don't be passive-aggressive about it. And by the way the paid messaging that WhatsApp is rolling out now sounds pretty similar to metered messaging from my point of view...

Lastly -- call me old fashioned. But I find attacking the people and company that made you a billionaire, and went to an unprecedented extent to shield and accommodate you for years, low-class. It's actually a whole new standard of low-class. I'll close by saying that as far as I'm concerned, and as a former lifelong entrepreneur and founder, there's no other large company I'd work at, and no other leader I'd work for. I want to work on hard problems that positively impact the lives of billions of people around the world. And Facebook is truly the only company that's singularly about people.

India's top court refused to scrap Aadhaar, the world's largest biometric database, in a ruling announced Wednesday, upholding the validity of the sprawling digital-identity program but also imposing some restrictions on its use and proliferation. Huffington Post reports: The majority judgement of the court read down Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act of 2016, holding that private companies cannot insist on Aadhaar numbers from citizens to provide services. The court upheld the validity of linking aadhaar to PAN cards, suggesting that -- should the government wish it -- anyone who pays income tax will have to an aadhaar number anyway. However, the court held the linking of aadhaar numbers to bank accounts, as mandated by an amendment to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act of 2002, was unconstitutional. The court also held that educational institutions and bodies like the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) and University Grants Commission (UGC), and schools and colleges, cannot ask for Aadhaar details of potential candidates.

Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, and Justices AK Sikri and AM Khanwilkar delivered a concurrent majority judgement, while Justices DY Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan delivered separate opinions. The majority judgement, read out in a packed courthouse by Justice Sikri, relied heavily on the court's landmark 2017 Privacy judgement. "Today the Supreme Court has passed a historic judgement on Aadhaar," said Supreme Court Advocate Prashant Bhushan. "They have held several parts of the Aadhaar act to be unconstitutional." The court's decision restricting private companies from demanding Aadhaar numbers, Bhushan said, would come as a relief. The ruling could come as a blow for local companies -- like Jio and Paytm -- that rely heavily (or even exclusively) on technologies such as Aadhaar's eKYC (an Aadhaar-enabled Know Your Customer service) to grow their customer base, analysts say.

Google, on the defensive from concerns raised about how Chrome tracks its users, has promised changes to its web browser. From a report: Two complaints in recent days involve how Google stores data about browsing activity in files called cookies and how it syncs personal data across different devices. Google representatives said Monday and Tuesday there's nothing to be worried about but that they'll be changing Chrome nevertheless. "We've heard -- and appreciate -- your feedback from the last few days, and we'll be making some product changes," tweeted Parisa Tabriz, a security team leader at Google. Google added in a blog post Tuesday evening that it will add new options and explanations for its interface and reverse one Chrome cookie-hoarding policy that undermined people's attempts to clear those cookies.

Brian Acton, a founder of WhatsApp, which he (along with the other founder) sold to Facebook for $19 billion four years ago, has grown tired of the social juggernaut. He left the company a year ago, and earlier this year, he surprised many when he tweeted "#DeleteFacebook", offering his support to what many described as a movement. He had started despising working at Facebook so much, that he left the company abruptly, leaving a cool $850M in unvested stock. He has also invested $50 million in encrypted chat app Signal. In an interview with Forbes, published Wednesday, Acton talked about his rationale behind leaving the company and what he thinks of Facebook now. From the story: Under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to monetize WhatsApp, he pushed back as Facebook questioned the encryption he'd helped build and laid the groundwork to show targeted ads and facilitate commercial messaging. Acton also walked away from Facebook a year before his final tranche of stock grants vested. "It was like, okay, well, you want to do these things I don't want to do," Acton says. "It's better if I get out of your way. And I did." It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history. Acton took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door -- the decision cost him $850 million.

He's following a similar moral code now. He clearly doesn't relish the spotlight this story will bring and is quick to underscore that Facebook "isn't the bad guy." ("I think of them as just very good businesspeople.") But he paid dearly for the right to speak his mind. "As part of a proposed settlement at the end, [Facebook management] tried to put a nondisclosure agreement in place," Acton says. "That was part of the reason that I got sort of cold feet in terms of trying to settle with these guys."

It's also a story any idealistic entrepreneur can identify with: What happens when you build something incredible and then sell it to someone with far different plans for your baby? "At the end of the day, I sold my company," Acton says. "I sold my users' privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day."

Facebook, Acton says, had decided to pursue two ways of making money from WhatsApp. First, by showing targeted ads in WhatsApp's new Status feature, which Acton felt broke a social compact with its users. "Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy," he says. His motto at WhatsApp had been "No ads, no games, no gimmicks" -- a direct contrast with a parent company that derived 98% of its revenue from advertising. Another motto had been "Take the time to get it right," a stark contrast to "Move fast and break things." Elsewhere in the story, Acton has also suggested he was used by Facebook to help get its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp past EU regulators that had been concerned it might be able to link accounts -- as it subsequently did.

Update: Facebook Executive Hits Back at WhatsApp Co-founder Brian Acton: 'A Whole New Standard of Low-Class'.

Brian Acton, a founder of WhatsApp, which he (along with the other founder) sold to Facebook for $19 billion four years ago, has grown tired of the social juggernaut. He left the company a year ago, and earlier this year, he surprised many when he tweeted "#DeleteFacebook", offering his support to what many described as a movement. He had started despising working at Facebook so much, that he left the company abruptly, leaving a cool $850M in unvested stock. He has also invested $50 million in encrypted chat app Signal. In an interview with Forbes, published Wednesday, Acton talked about his rationale behind leaving the company and what he thinks of Facebook now. From the story: Under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to monetize WhatsApp, he pushed back as Facebook questioned the encryption he'd helped build and laid the groundwork to show targeted ads and facilitate commercial messaging. Acton also walked away from Facebook a year before his final tranche of stock grants vested. "It was like, okay, well, you want to do these things I don't want to do," Acton says. "It's better if I get out of your way. And I did." It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history. Acton took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door -- the decision cost him $850 million.

He's following a similar moral code now. He clearly doesn't relish the spotlight this story will bring and is quick to underscore that Facebook "isn't the bad guy." ("I think of them as just very good businesspeople.") But he paid dearly for the right to speak his mind. "As part of a proposed settlement at the end, [Facebook management] tried to put a nondisclosure agreement in place," Acton says. "That was part of the reason that I got sort of cold feet in terms of trying to settle with these guys."

It's also a story any idealistic entrepreneur can identify with: What happens when you build something incredible and then sell it to someone with far different plans for your baby? "At the end of the day, I sold my company," Acton says. "I sold my users' privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day."

Facebook, Acton says, had decided to pursue two ways of making money from WhatsApp. First, by showing targeted ads in WhatsApp's new Status feature, which Acton felt broke a social compact with its users. "Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy," he says. His motto at WhatsApp had been "No ads, no games, no gimmicks" -- a direct contrast with a parent company that derived 98% of its revenue from advertising. Another motto had been "Take the time to get it right," a stark contrast to "Move fast and break things." Elsewhere in the story, Acton has also suggested he was used by Facebook to help get its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp past EU regulators that had been concerned it might be able to link accounts -- as it subsequently did.

Update: Facebook Executive Hits Back at WhatsApp Co-founder Brian Acton: 'A Whole New Standard of Low-Class'.

Brian Acton, a founder of WhatsApp, which he (along with the other founder) sold to Facebook for $19 billion four years ago, has grown tired of the social juggernaut. He left the company a year ago, and earlier this year, he surprised many when he tweeted "#DeleteFacebook", offering his support to what many described as a movement. He had started despising working at Facebook so much, that he left the company abruptly, leaving a cool $850M in unvested stock. He has also invested $50 million in encrypted chat app Signal. In an interview with Forbes, published Wednesday, Acton talked about his rationale behind leaving the company and what he thinks of Facebook now. From the story: Under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to monetize WhatsApp, he pushed back as Facebook questioned the encryption he'd helped build and laid the groundwork to show targeted ads and facilitate commercial messaging. Acton also walked away from Facebook a year before his final tranche of stock grants vested. "It was like, okay, well, you want to do these things I don't want to do," Acton says. "It's better if I get out of your way. And I did." It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history. Acton took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door -- the decision cost him $850 million.

He's following a similar moral code now. He clearly doesn't relish the spotlight this story will bring and is quick to underscore that Facebook "isn't the bad guy." ("I think of them as just very good businesspeople.") But he paid dearly for the right to speak his mind. "As part of a proposed settlement at the end, [Facebook management] tried to put a nondisclosure agreement in place," Acton says. "That was part of the reason that I got sort of cold feet in terms of trying to settle with these guys."

It's also a story any idealistic entrepreneur can identify with: What happens when you build something incredible and then sell it to someone with far different plans for your baby? "At the end of the day, I sold my company," Acton says. "I sold my users' privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day."

Facebook, Acton says, had decided to pursue two ways of making money from WhatsApp. First, by showing targeted ads in WhatsApp's new Status feature, which Acton felt broke a social compact with its users. "Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy," he says. His motto at WhatsApp had been "No ads, no games, no gimmicks" -- a direct contrast with a parent company that derived 98% of its revenue from advertising. Another motto had been "Take the time to get it right," a stark contrast to "Move fast and break things." Elsewhere in the story, Acton has also suggested he was used by Facebook to help get its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp past EU regulators that had been concerned it might be able to link accounts -- as it subsequently did.

Update: Facebook Executive Hits Back at WhatsApp Co-founder Brian Acton: 'A Whole New Standard of Low-Class'.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: A new study [published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin posit that glyphosate -- the active ingredient in the herbicide -- destroys specialized gut bacteria in bees, leaving them more susceptible to infection and death from harmful bacteria. Researchers Nancy Moran, Erick Motta and Kasie Raymann suggest their findings are evidence that glyphosate might be contributing to colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon that has been wreaking havoc on honey bees and native bees for more than a decade. They hope their results will convince farmers, landscapers and homeowners to stop spraying glyphosate-based herbicides on flowering plants that are likely to be pollinated by bees.

"No large-scale study has ever found a link between glyphosate and honey bee health issues," Bayer said in a statement, adding that the new study "does not change that." Bayer noted the study relied on a small sample of individual bees and that it does not meet regulatory research criteria on pesticides stipulated by international guidelines developed by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development and other international organizations. Additionally, the company suggested it is "questionable whether the concentrations of the substance tested could at all be absorbed by bee populations in the open over a relevant period of time." According to the report in the journal, the researchers focused on honey bees and used "hundreds of adult worker bees from a single hive" and treated them with varying levels of glyphosate. Editor's note: In June, Germany's pharmaceutical giant Bayer purchased Monsanto, the company that developed Roundup.

Former NSA employee Nghia Hoang Pho, 64, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for taking top secret U.S. defense files to his home. Pho pleaded guilty in December to willful retention of national defense information, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement. The maximum sentence for this crime is 10 years, but prosecutors were recommending a sentence of eight years. CNET reports: Pho, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Vietnam, worked in the NSA's Tailored Access Group, the agency's team that focuses on tools that can directly hack surveillance targets. Between 2010 and March 2015, Pho took home paper and digital copies of U.S. government documents and writings that contained national defense information on them, the Justice Department said. Pho reportedly had antivirus software from Kaspersky Lab on his home computer network and the software scooped up the top secret information as part of its virus scanning process. Kaspersky has acknowledged that its software lifted hacking tools from a home computer in 2014 but said it wasn't part of an intentional effort to steal information from the NSA. Pho said in court he took the materials home so he could put in more work to earn a promotion, according to CBS Baltimore.

Vivaldi announced Wednesday it has released a major update to its namesake desktop web browser, remaining as one of the rare companies that is still attempting to fight Google's monopoly in the space. Major features in Vivaldi 2.0 include: Syncing browsers across computers:Version 2.0 allows users to sync data, including bookmarks, passwords, autofill information, and history. Vivaldi uses its own servers to store the data, which is all encrypted end-to-end.
Panels: These are expandable, multi-tasking dashboards that can be opened in the sidebar.
Tab management: Additional features are included that allow for better searching through tabs, stacking them, and even renaming them.
History: Offers new ways to track your usage, including generating statistics and a visual history feature. Vivaldi was founded by Jon von Tetzchner, who also co-founded Opera and served as its chief executive for a number of years. Jon has been vocal about what many find unfair tactics employed by Google and Microsoft to aggressively expand the user bases of their respective browsers. Slashdot had a chance to speak with Jon recently: Slashdot: One of the biggest complaints that people have about browsers today is just how much memory they consume. Is it a lost-cause? What is Vivaldi doing to address this?
Jon: This is very true. Browsers can use a lot of memory. We have worked hard to reduce that load. The most important thing we have done there is the lazy loading of tabs. When you have a lot of tabs, you use a lot of memory, but with Vivaldi, we will only load the tabs once you need them. We also have the ability to hibernate background tabs, by right clicking the tab bar, which will free up a lot of memory. Besides this we are always looking at how to make the browser use less memory and be faster. There is a lot of details there, but with the feedback from our users, we continue to improve every single part of the browser.

Slashdot: You are offering a browser, and a web email client and service provider. Is Vivaldi attempting to offer a catalog of services? And if so, what more could we expect from the company in the long-term?
Jon: The focus for us is the browser, but we believe the browser should be able to do more than it does today, so we will continue to expand on the features we offer in the browser. We have been open about the fact that we aim to provide an email client in the browser, but that will come in the future, but we are, as you pointed out, providing the free email service. This is in addition to our free blog, forums and sync service. We feel there is a need for these services, free from ads and free from building of super profiles. Our free webmail service is thus without ads and we do not scan mails, except for spam and viruses. We will continue to add services to support the browser or where we feel a service supplements the browser in a good way.

Slashdot: You have been vocal about some of the tactics Google and Microsoft use to promote their own browsers. Following the news cycle, we don't think things have changed much. What's your view on it?
Jon: No, sadly things have not changed much. Microsoft continues to push their browser in their operating system, at times taking over the default browser as well. They also block competing browsers on their Windows 10S. Google sadly blocks some competing browsers from using their services, even browsers such as Vivaldi, that is based on Chromium. We need to change our identity when visiting many Google services. I guess my feeling is that those large companies should not and should not need to behave this way.

Slashdot: Chrome continues to be a market leader. Firefox, despite some of its recent changes, has lost some of the market. How hard is it for a browser company to survive these days? And why is it important that someone continues to fight back?
Jon: We all know that browser choice is a good thing, even more so than for most other products. The browser is your view into the Internet and we all spend a lot of time there. Healthy competition means product innovation and lower prices (this is not only about the price of the product, but also what you have to give up in other ways, such as your private information). Monopolies tend slow down innovation and also there is a tendency for them to use their position in one market to attack another.
It is not trivial to compete with these large corporations, but it is something we enjoy. We fight for our users and for the future of the Internet. That is definitely something worth fighting for.

Slashdot: Are you folks still working on a mobile browser?
Jon: Indeed we are. We aim to get it out there as soon as we can. We are ramping up the team after then 2.0 release to move faster. Further reading: The Next Web, and VentureBeat.

Vivaldi announced Wednesday it has released a major update to its namesake desktop web browser, remaining as one of the rare companies that is still attempting to fight Google's monopoly in the space. Major features in Vivaldi 2.0 include: Syncing browsers across computers:Version 2.0 allows users to sync data, including bookmarks, passwords, autofill information, and history. Vivaldi uses its own servers to store the data, which is all encrypted end-to-end.
Panels: These are expandable, multi-tasking dashboards that can be opened in the sidebar.
Tab management: Additional features are included that allow for better searching through tabs, stacking them, and even renaming them.
History: Offers new ways to track your usage, including generating statistics and a visual history feature. Vivaldi was founded by Jon von Tetzchner, who also co-founded Opera and served as its chief executive for a number of years. Jon has been vocal about what many find unfair tactics employed by Google and Microsoft to aggressively expand the user bases of their respective browsers. Slashdot had a chance to speak with Jon recently: Slashdot: One of the biggest complaints that people have about browsers today is just how much memory they consume. Is it a lost-cause? What is Vivaldi doing to address this?
Jon: This is very true. Browsers can use a lot of memory. We have worked hard to reduce that load. The most important thing we have done there is the lazy loading of tabs. When you have a lot of tabs, you use a lot of memory, but with Vivaldi, we will only load the tabs once you need them. We also have the ability to hibernate background tabs, by right clicking the tab bar, which will free up a lot of memory. Besides this we are always looking at how to make the browser use less memory and be faster. There is a lot of details there, but with the feedback from our users, we continue to improve every single part of the browser.

Slashdot: You are offering a browser, and a web email client and service provider. Is Vivaldi attempting to offer a catalog of services? And if so, what more could we expect from the company in the long-term?
Jon: The focus for us is the browser, but we believe the browser should be able to do more than it does today, so we will continue to expand on the features we offer in the browser. We have been open about the fact that we aim to provide an email client in the browser, but that will come in the future, but we are, as you pointed out, providing the free email service. This is in addition to our free blog, forums and sync service. We feel there is a need for these services, free from ads and free from building of super profiles. Our free webmail service is thus without ads and we do not scan mails, except for spam and viruses. We will continue to add services to support the browser or where we feel a service supplements the browser in a good way.

Slashdot: You have been vocal about some of the tactics Google and Microsoft use to promote their own browsers. Following the news cycle, we don't think things have changed much. What's your view on it?
Jon: No, sadly things have not changed much. Microsoft continues to push their browser in their operating system, at times taking over the default browser as well. They also block competing browsers on their Windows 10S. Google sadly blocks some competing browsers from using their services, even browsers such as Vivaldi, that is based on Chromium. We need to change our identity when visiting many Google services. I guess my feeling is that those large companies should not and should not need to behave this way.

Slashdot: Chrome continues to be a market leader. Firefox, despite some of its recent changes, has lost some of the market. How hard is it for a browser company to survive these days? And why is it important that someone continues to fight back?
Jon: We all know that browser choice is a good thing, even more so than for most other products. The browser is your view into the Internet and we all spend a lot of time there. Healthy competition means product innovation and lower prices (this is not only about the price of the product, but also what you have to give up in other ways, such as your private information). Monopolies tend slow down innovation and also there is a tendency for them to use their position in one market to attack another.
It is not trivial to compete with these large corporations, but it is something we enjoy. We fight for our users and for the future of the Internet. That is definitely something worth fighting for.

Slashdot: Are you folks still working on a mobile browser?
Jon: Indeed we are. We aim to get it out there as soon as we can. We are ramping up the team after then 2.0 release to move faster. Further reading: The Next Web, and VentureBeat.

Vivaldi announced Wednesday it has released a major update to its namesake desktop web browser, remaining as one of the rare companies that is still attempting to fight Google's monopoly in the space. Major features in Vivaldi 2.0 include: Syncing browsers across computers:Version 2.0 allows users to sync data, including bookmarks, passwords, autofill information, and history. Vivaldi uses its own servers to store the data, which is all encrypted end-to-end.
Panels: These are expandable, multi-tasking dashboards that can be opened in the sidebar.
Tab management: Additional features are included that allow for better searching through tabs, stacking them, and even renaming them.
History: Offers new ways to track your usage, including generating statistics and a visual history feature. Vivaldi was founded by Jon von Tetzchner, who also co-founded Opera and served as its chief executive for a number of years. Jon has been vocal about what many find unfair tactics employed by Google and Microsoft to aggressively expand the user bases of their respective browsers. Slashdot had a chance to speak with Jon recently: Slashdot: One of the biggest complaints that people have about browsers today is just how much memory they consume. Is it a lost-cause? What is Vivaldi doing to address this?
Jon: This is very true. Browsers can use a lot of memory. We have worked hard to reduce that load. The most important thing we have done there is the lazy loading of tabs. When you have a lot of tabs, you use a lot of memory, but with Vivaldi, we will only load the tabs once you need them. We also have the ability to hibernate background tabs, by right clicking the tab bar, which will free up a lot of memory. Besides this we are always looking at how to make the browser use less memory and be faster. There is a lot of details there, but with the feedback from our users, we continue to improve every single part of the browser.

Slashdot: You are offering a browser, and a web email client and service provider. Is Vivaldi attempting to offer a catalog of services? And if so, what more could we expect from the company in the long-term?
Jon: The focus for us is the browser, but we believe the browser should be able to do more than it does today, so we will continue to expand on the features we offer in the browser. We have been open about the fact that we aim to provide an email client in the browser, but that will come in the future, but we are, as you pointed out, providing the free email service. This is in addition to our free blog, forums and sync service. We feel there is a need for these services, free from ads and free from building of super profiles. Our free webmail service is thus without ads and we do not scan mails, except for spam and viruses. We will continue to add services to support the browser or where we feel a service supplements the browser in a good way.

Slashdot: You have been vocal about some of the tactics Google and Microsoft use to promote their own browsers. Following the news cycle, we don't think things have changed much. What's your view on it?
Jon: No, sadly things have not changed much. Microsoft continues to push their browser in their operating system, at times taking over the default browser as well. They also block competing browsers on their Windows 10S. Google sadly blocks some competing browsers from using their services, even browsers such as Vivaldi, that is based on Chromium. We need to change our identity when visiting many Google services. I guess my feeling is that those large companies should not and should not need to behave this way.

Slashdot: Chrome continues to be a market leader. Firefox, despite some of its recent changes, has lost some of the market. How hard is it for a browser company to survive these days? And why is it important that someone continues to fight back?
Jon: We all know that browser choice is a good thing, even more so than for most other products. The browser is your view into the Internet and we all spend a lot of time there. Healthy competition means product innovation and lower prices (this is not only about the price of the product, but also what you have to give up in other ways, such as your private information). Monopolies tend slow down innovation and also there is a tendency for them to use their position in one market to attack another.
It is not trivial to compete with these large corporations, but it is something we enjoy. We fight for our users and for the future of the Internet. That is definitely something worth fighting for.

Slashdot: Are you folks still working on a mobile browser?
Jon: Indeed we are. We aim to get it out there as soon as we can. We are ramping up the team after then 2.0 release to move faster. Further reading: The Next Web, and VentureBeat.

Earlier this year, Google updated its financial services-ad policies to ban any advertising about cryptocurrency-related content, including initial coin offerings (ICOs), wallets, and trading advice. Google appears to be reversing course with a new policy starting in October that will allow regulated cryptocurrency exchanges to buy ads in the U.S. and Japan. Advertising about ICOs, wallets and trading advice are reportedly still not allowed. CNBC reports: Google's updated policy applies to advertisers all over the world, though the ads can only run in the U.S. and Japan, and interested parties will need to apply for certification to serve ads in each country individually. Google's move follows Facebook, which started allowing pre-approved cryptocurrency advertisers in June. Google parent company Alphabet gets roughly 86 percent of its total revenue from advertising. The company booked more than $54 billion in ad revenue in the first half of 2018.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Apple's Safari, one of the internet's most popular web browsers, has been surfacing debunked conspiracies, shock videos, and false information via its "Siri Suggested Websites" feature. Such results raise questions about the company's ability to monitor for low-quality information, and provide another example of the problems platforms run into when relying on algorithms to police the internet. As of yesterday, if you typed "Pizzagate" into Apple's Safari, the browser's "Siri Suggested Website" prominently offered users a link to a YouTube video with the title "PIZZAGATE, BIGGEST SCANDAL EVER!!!" by conspiracy theorist David Seaman (the video doesn't play, since Seaman's channel was taken down for violating YouTube's terms of service). The search results appeared on multiple versions of Safari. Apple removed all examples of the questionable Siri Suggested sites provided to it by BuzzFeed News.

[W]hen BuzzFeed News entered incomplete search terms that might suggest contentious or conspiratorial topics (as shown below), the search algorithms directed us toward low-quality websites, message boards, or YouTube conspiracy videos rather than reliable information or debunks about those topics. Meanwhile, Google does not feature such unreliable pages in its top search results. Those suggested results matter since Safari is one of the internet's most popular web browsers -- some estimates suggest it has captured over 10% of the browser market share. The poor suggestions may be a result of a "data void," which is "what happens when a term doesn't have 'natural informative results' and manipulators seize upon it," reports BuzzFeed. "Many of the sites surfaced by the Siri Suggested feature came from conspiracy or junk sites hastily assembled to fill that void."

In a statement, Apple said: "Siri Suggested Websites come from content on the web and we provide curation to help avoid inappropriate sites. We also remove any inappropriate suggestions whenever we become aware of them, as we have with these. We will continue to work to provide high-quality results and users can email results they feel are inappropriate to applebot@apple.com."

Earlier this year, Mozilla announced Firefox Monitor, a service that will inform you if your online accounts were hacked in a recent data breach. It's now available to general public. A report adds: For the new security-focused tool, Mozilla partnered with Troy Hunt, the renowned security expert behind Have I Been Pwned? (HIBP), which is a database of data breaches that allows anyone to discover whether one of their online accounts has been compromised. The first iteration of Firefox Monitor is, for all intents and purposes, a clone of HIBP. After you enter your email address and hit the scan button, you're told which online services have leaked your personal details (if any). You can also sign up to be notified of any future data breaches involving one or more of your email addresses.

harrymcc writes: On September 24, 1993, Myst debuted as a CD-ROM game for the Mac. The mysterious, puzzle-laden adventure went on to become the best-selling game title of its era, inspiring a devoted following and multiple sequels. But for all the people who loved Myst, it was disrespected by many in the gaming industry, who found it less engaging than previous adventures and even blamed it for killing of the earlier genre of more action-packed adventuring. Over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards provides an appreciation of Myst but also talks to game designers about the game's still-complex legacy.

Despite its advanced age, Cobol is still the most prevalent programming language in the financial-services industry world-wide. Software programmed in Cobol powers millions of banking transactions every day and underpins critical computer mainframes. WSJ: And Cobol isn't going away anytime soon. Banks and other companies have come to the uncomfortable realization that ripping out old mainframes is pricey and complicated. Transitioning to new systems is likely to take years, and besides, a lot of the older tech works just fine. The problem is that Cobol isn't popular with new programmers. So, with a generation of Cobol specialists retiring, there is a continuing hunt to find a new generation of programmers to service this technology. In Texas, Mr. Hinshaw's (an anecdote in the story) company, the Cobol Cowboys, a group of mostly older programmers, is training U.S. military veterans in the programming language. Accenture is coaching hundreds of Cobol programmers every year in India and the Philippines to work at banks. In Malaysia, one consultancy that provides engineers versed in Cobol for its clients, iTAc MSC Outsourcing, has adopted the slogan "Keeping the Dinosaurs Alive." A host of companies offer online courses in Cobol in places like South Africa, India and Bangladesh. Developing economies are key technology-outsourcing centers for banks. Further reading: Major Banks and Parts of Federal Gov't Still Rely On COBOL, Now Scrambling To Find IT 'Cowboys' To Keep Things Afloat.

Mark Wilson writes: Chip-maker Qualcomm has today accused Apple of stealing trade secrets and sharing them with Intel. The company alleges that Apple wanted Intel to be able to improve its own chips so it could move away from using Qualcomm's. Qualcomm and Apple are already engaged in a legal battle, and with its latest accusations, the chip-maker wants the court to amend its existing lawsuit against the company. Apple stands accused of engaging in a 'multi-year campaign of sloppy, inappropriate and deceitful conduct'. In the new filings, Qualcomm says that upon Apple's request it allowed the iPhone maker deep access to its software and tools, but with strict limits on how those products could be used. It said, "Indeed, it is now apparent Apple engaged in a years-long campaign of false promises, stealth and subterfuge designed to steal Qualcomm's confidential information and trade secrets for the purpose of improving the performance of lower-quality modem chipsets, with the ultimate goal of eliminating Qualcomm's Apple-based business."

Jon Russell, writing for TechCrunch: Mark Zuckerberg was quick to realize that Facebook, the largest social network in the world, doesn't have a monopoly on all users nor can it bank on holding its position as top dog forever. Thus he instituted a policy of buying up promising rivals and integrating them into the Facebook 'group' in a strategy designed to be a win-win for all. But by leaving Facebook in abrupt fashion this week, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger -- the founders of Instagram -- have shown that the social network's vision of letting acquired businesses operate independently simply isn't feasible. [...] The original idea is a best-of-both-worlds approach: a company's finances are infinitely secured and it can grow as needed inside the Facebook 'family,' with access to resources like engineering, marketing, admin, etc. That was also the plan for WhatsApp, but founding pair Jan Koum and Brian Acton managed four and three and a half years, respectively, at Facebook following their $19 billion acquisition in 2014. VR firm Oculus, another billion-dollar purchase, lost co-founders Palmer Lucky (political scandal) and Brendan Iribe (reshuffled) three years after its deal.

Jon Russell, writing for TechCrunch: Mark Zuckerberg was quick to realize that Facebook, the largest social network in the world, doesn't have a monopoly on all users nor can it bank on holding its position as top dog forever. Thus he instituted a policy of buying up promising rivals and integrating them into the Facebook 'group' in a strategy designed to be a win-win for all. But by leaving Facebook in abrupt fashion this week, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger -- the founders of Instagram -- have shown that the social network's vision of letting acquired businesses operate independently simply isn't feasible. [...] The original idea is a best-of-both-worlds approach: a company's finances are infinitely secured and it can grow as needed inside the Facebook 'family,' with access to resources like engineering, marketing, admin, etc. That was also the plan for WhatsApp, but founding pair Jan Koum and Brian Acton managed four and three and a half years, respectively, at Facebook following their $19 billion acquisition in 2014. VR firm Oculus, another billion-dollar purchase, lost co-founders Palmer Lucky (political scandal) and Brendan Iribe (reshuffled) three years after its deal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be present at a private meeting with top Republican lawmakers this Friday to discuss the company's controversial plans to relaunch a search product in China and perceived liberal bias of search results, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. According to the WSJ, Attorney General Jeff Sessions plans to meet with state attorneys general on Tuesday to discuss Google's alleged censorship of conservatives. Tech firms have denied the existence of liberal bias in products, and Google has pushed back against key Trump inaccuracies, but it sounds as if Pichai will be forced to answer questions nonetheless. The meeting is being organized by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Late last week, Pichai sent an email to employees, which was obtained by The New York Times, in which he stated outright that Google has never influenced search results for political purposes and has no plans to do so in the future.

Pichai also plans to attend a public hearing later this year held by the House Judiciary Committee following the November midterm elections, after Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page notably declined to show up to a Senate Intel Committee hearing on election interference earlier this month. In addition to mending relationships over Page's absence, Pichai will also be addressing Google's plans to relaunch a search product for the Chinese market, a move that has resulted in widespread criticism given the likelihood such a product would be heavily censored and would aid in China's use of information control to maintain social and political order.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be present at a private meeting with top Republican lawmakers this Friday to discuss the company's controversial plans to relaunch a search product in China and perceived liberal bias of search results, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. According to the WSJ, Attorney General Jeff Sessions plans to meet with state attorneys general on Tuesday to discuss Google's alleged censorship of conservatives. Tech firms have denied the existence of liberal bias in products, and Google has pushed back against key Trump inaccuracies, but it sounds as if Pichai will be forced to answer questions nonetheless. The meeting is being organized by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Late last week, Pichai sent an email to employees, which was obtained by The New York Times, in which he stated outright that Google has never influenced search results for political purposes and has no plans to do so in the future.

Pichai also plans to attend a public hearing later this year held by the House Judiciary Committee following the November midterm elections, after Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page notably declined to show up to a Senate Intel Committee hearing on election interference earlier this month. In addition to mending relationships over Page's absence, Pichai will also be addressing Google's plans to relaunch a search product for the Chinese market, a move that has resulted in widespread criticism given the likelihood such a product would be heavily censored and would aid in China's use of information control to maintain social and political order.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be present at a private meeting with top Republican lawmakers this Friday to discuss the company's controversial plans to relaunch a search product in China and perceived liberal bias of search results, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. According to the WSJ, Attorney General Jeff Sessions plans to meet with state attorneys general on Tuesday to discuss Google's alleged censorship of conservatives. Tech firms have denied the existence of liberal bias in products, and Google has pushed back against key Trump inaccuracies, but it sounds as if Pichai will be forced to answer questions nonetheless. The meeting is being organized by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Late last week, Pichai sent an email to employees, which was obtained by The New York Times, in which he stated outright that Google has never influenced search results for political purposes and has no plans to do so in the future.

Pichai also plans to attend a public hearing later this year held by the House Judiciary Committee following the November midterm elections, after Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page notably declined to show up to a Senate Intel Committee hearing on election interference earlier this month. In addition to mending relationships over Page's absence, Pichai will also be addressing Google's plans to relaunch a search product for the Chinese market, a move that has resulted in widespread criticism given the likelihood such a product would be heavily censored and would aid in China's use of information control to maintain social and political order.

Apple has successfully completed its $400 million acquisition of Shazam, and the company announced it will be removing all ads from the app "soon." The Verge reports: The acquisition was temporarily held up because of an investigation by the European Union, which scrutinized the deal over potential antitrust concerns. But regulators gave it the thumbs up earlier this month. Shazam has been downloaded over 1 billion times around the world and is used over 20 million times every day, according to Apple's press release. The app has been around since the beginnings of the App Store and was one of the coolest early demos of what a mobile app could do. You'd hold up your phone, let it listen to a song playing nearby for a few seconds, and the track and artist information would just pop up on screen like magic. All these years later, it's now a feature that's available on many platforms and one we take for granted.

Apple has successfully completed its $400 million acquisition of Shazam, and the company announced it will be removing all ads from the app "soon." The Verge reports: The acquisition was temporarily held up because of an investigation by the European Union, which scrutinized the deal over potential antitrust concerns. But regulators gave it the thumbs up earlier this month. Shazam has been downloaded over 1 billion times around the world and is used over 20 million times every day, according to Apple's press release. The app has been around since the beginnings of the App Store and was one of the coolest early demos of what a mobile app could do. You'd hold up your phone, let it listen to a song playing nearby for a few seconds, and the track and artist information would just pop up on screen like magic. All these years later, it's now a feature that's available on many platforms and one we take for granted.

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: Starting with Chrome 69, whenever a Chrome user would access a Google-owned site, the browser would take that user's Google identity and log the user into the Chrome in-browser account system -- also known as Sync. This system, Sync, allows users to log in with their Google accounts inside Chrome and optionally upload and synchronize local browser data (history, passwords, bookmarks, and other) to Google's servers. Sync has been present in Chrome for years, but until now, the system worked independently from the logged-in state of Google accounts. This allowed users to surf the web while logged into a Google account but not upload any Chrome browsing data to Google's servers, data that may be tied to their accounts.

Now, with the revelations of this new auto-login mechanism, a large number of users are angry that this sneaky modification would allow Google to link that person's traffic to a specific browser and device with a higher degree of accuracy. That criticism proved to be wrong, as Google engineers have clarified on Twitter that this auto-login operation does not start the process of synchronizing local data to Google's servers, which will require a user click. Furthermore, they also revealed that the reason why this mechanism was added was for privacy reasons in the first place. Chrome engineers said the auto-login mechanism was added in the browser because of shared computers/browsers. Well-respected cryptographer Matthew Green was disappointed by the move. In a post, he wrote: [...] In the rest of this post, I'm going to talk about why this matters. From my perspective, this comes down to basically four points:
1. Nobody on the Chrome development team can provide a clear rationale for why this change was necessary, and the explanations they've given don't make any sense.
2. This change has enormous implications for user privacy and trust, and Google seems unable to grapple with this.
3. The change makes a hash out of Google's own privacy policies for Chrome.
4. Google needs to stop treating customer trust like it's a renewable resource, because they're screwing up badly.