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T-Mobile and Ericsson have signed a multi-year $3.5 billion agreement to build out T-Mobile's 5G infrastructure. The telecommunications company "will deploy Ericsson's Radio System portfolio, including 5G New Radio and NR hardware and software compliant with 3GPP standards," reports ZDNet. From the report: According to the companies, the contract also encompasses Ericsson's digital services solutions, including dynamic orchestration, business support systems or BSS, and Ericsson Cloud Core. Meanwhile, T-Mobile's already installed base of Ericsson Radio System radios will be able to run 5G NR technology via remote software installation. T-Mobile and Ericsson rival Nokia also announced a $3.5 billion 5G deal back in July. Add it up and T-Mobile is investing $7 billion in 5G between the two companies. As part the Nokia agreement, T-Mobile said it would use Nokia's 5G network technology including software, services and hardware. The carrier also said Nokia would help make its "600 MHz and 28 GHz millimeter wave 5G capabilities compliant with 3GPP 5G New Radio (NR) standards" -- echoing its current plans with Ericsson. In other 5G-related news, Verizon will begin offering installation of its 5G home broadband in select markets on October 1st. "Customers [in Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Sacramento] will be able to begin ordering service once the installation is complete, with pricing set at $50 for Verizon Wireless customers and $70 for non-VZW customers," reports PhoneDog. Network speeds are expected to be around 300Mbps, with peak speeds nearing 1Gbps. There will also be no data caps.

The FCC says it needs more time to review the proposed Sprint-T-Mobile deal, the agency said in a letter to the companies Tuesday. According to CNBC, "The agency has paused an 'informal' 180-day transaction clock 'to allow for thorough staff and third-party review' of recently submitted materials." From the report: Sprint and T-Mobile have gone down a rocky road to a merger, calling off and resuming talks. The companies announced that they would merge last April in a bid to cut costs and combine forces to develop a next-generation network called 5G, which would provide faster speeds, more capacity and lower response times. But the companies could encounter hurdles to gaining regulatory approval for the tie-up. A deal between T-Mobile and Sprint, who are the third largest and fourth largest wireless carriers in the United States by subscribers, previously faced opposition from antitrust regulators under President Barack Obama's administration.

The FCC says it needs more time to review the proposed Sprint-T-Mobile deal, the agency said in a letter to the companies Tuesday. According to CNBC, "The agency has paused an 'informal' 180-day transaction clock 'to allow for thorough staff and third-party review' of recently submitted materials." From the report: Sprint and T-Mobile have gone down a rocky road to a merger, calling off and resuming talks. The companies announced that they would merge last April in a bid to cut costs and combine forces to develop a next-generation network called 5G, which would provide faster speeds, more capacity and lower response times. But the companies could encounter hurdles to gaining regulatory approval for the tie-up. A deal between T-Mobile and Sprint, who are the third largest and fourth largest wireless carriers in the United States by subscribers, previously faced opposition from antitrust regulators under President Barack Obama's administration.

Plex has informed users that it will be shutting down cloud-based media server Plex Cloud at the end of November. First launched in 2016, Plex Cloud offered users a way to easily access extra storage. Initially, users had to subscribe to Amazon Drive, which cost $59.99 a year for unlimited storage at the time and get a Plex Pass in order to use Plex Cloud. Later on, Plex added support for Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage. From a report, which looks at the rationale behind the move: "We've made the difficult decision to shut down the Plex Cloud service on November 30th, 2018," the company said in an email. "We've been actively working on ways to address various issues while keeping costs under control. We hold ourselves to a high standard, and unfortunately, after a lot of investigation and thought, we haven't found a solution capable of delivering a truly first class Plex experience to Plex Cloud users at a reasonable cost." Plex has traditionally relied on users operating their own media server to stream videos, music and more to mobile and TV-connected devices. Plex users often run their server hardware on dedicated computers or network-attached storage drives, but the reliance on such hardware has limited the appeal of the software to more casual users. [...] Behind the scenes, Plex was augmenting these storage solutions with its own cloud servers, capable of transcoding media on the fly to stream to a wide variety of devices. However, the company ran into some technical issues, which prompted it to first disable support for Amazon's cloud storage and then in February halt the creation of new cloud servers.

Designed to run on minimal hardware, Elive is very much a passion project of its leader, Samuel F Baggen. Based on Debian, the first version took a bow in 2005. The second stable version made an appearance in 2010 and it has been a long eight years for the third stable version to become available. The Register: Elive has an impressively low bar to entry, with hardware requirements for the distribution coming in at 256 MB RAM and a 500 MHz CPU, meaning that some very elderly silicon is theoretically going to be able to enjoy the highly polished Enlightenment desktop. "Theoretically" because after The Register took Elive 3.0.0 out for a spin on a relatively low-powered laptop, we'd frankly baulk at running it on anything much slower than a 533MHz Core 2 with at least 512 MB RAM. However, the Enlightenment UI is undeniably an attractive desktop, particularly if a macOS-alike dock is your thing, and runs at an impressive lick even on hardware that lacks graphics acceleration.

At its core, Elive is based on the Debian 8 distribution (aka Jessie), using the 3.16 kernel and version 0.17.6 of the Enlightenment X11 Window Manager. It comes replete with a full set of applications, including the ubiquitous LibreOffice and Gimp, along with a variety of productivity and entertainment tools, some of which are Elive's own. Unlike the previous version of Elive, 3.0.0 removes the requirement of donating to the project in order to install the thing locally (although Baggen was quick to tell The Reg that cost-free alternatives existed, but often with annoying processes).

An anonymous reader shares a report: A cyber-criminal operation known as Magecart is believed to have been behind the recent card breach announced last week by British Airways. The operation has been active since 2015 when RisqIQ and ClearSky researchers spotted the malware for the first time. The group's regular mode of operation involves hacking into online stores and hiding JavaScript code that steals payment card information entered into store checkout pages, information such as credit card numbers, names, addresses, and whatever is collected via payment forms. The group has been very active in the past three years, being blamed for injecting card skimming scripts on thousands of sites, with the most recent trove of compromised sites being discovered two weeks ago. Of all its hacks, the most notorious incident was when the group compromised a third-party chat provider and used its infrastructure to drop malicious scripts on the Ticketmaster checkout page. [...] In a report published today, researchers at RisqIQ say they found clues linking the same Magecart operation to the British Airways breach. This breach was announced last week when British Airways said that an unidentified hacker compromised its systems and stole the card details of over 380,000 users.

Google's alleged practice of recording location data about Android device owners even when they believe they have opted out of such tracking, reports The Washington Post, has sparked an investigation in Arizona, where the state's attorney general could potentially levy a hefty fine against the search giant. From the report: The probe, initiated by Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich and confirmed by a person familiar with his thinking but not authorized to speak on the record, could put pressure on other states and the federal government to follow suit, consumer advocates say -- though Google previously insisted it did not deceive consumers about the way it collects and taps data on their whereabouts. The attorney general signaled his interest in the matter in a public filing [PDF] that indicated the office had retained an outside law firm to assist in an investigation. The document, dated August 21, said the hired lawyers would help probe an unnamed tech company and its "storage of consumer location data, tracking of consumer location, and other consumer tracking through ... smartphone operating systems, even when consumers turn off 'location services' and take other steps to stop such tracking," according to the heavily redacted public notice.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill mandating that the state's utilities move to 100-percent zero-emission electricity generation by 2045. Brown also issued an executive order today requiring the state to become carbon neutral by 2045, that is, mandating that the state remove as much greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as it puts into the atmosphere. One of the most interesting aspects of the zero-emissions bill signed today is that it also specifies that California can't increase the carbon emissions of another state to get cheap electricity. It appears that buying electricity from a coal plant in Nevada is fine if that electricity had been supplied prior to the bill's passing, but seeking out new out-of-state natural gas-fired plants to buy from would not be allowed. The bill's ambitiousness is compounded by the executive order that Gov. Brown signed today. The order requires California to become carbon neutral by 2045. "The achievement of carbon neutrality will require both significant reductions in carbon pollution and removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, including sequestration in forests, soils, and other natural landscapes," Brown's executive order states (PDF).

TuballoyThunder writes: According to The Intercept, it appears that the LinkNYC free Wi-Fi might be designed to track users. This and other concerns were raised during a 2015 discussion on Slashdot. While many people are comfortable in trading their privacy for ostensibly free services, it is disheartening when municipalities collaborate with business to make it happen. "In May of this year, Charles Meyers, an undergraduate at New York City College of Technology, came across folders in LinkNYC's public library on GitHub, a platform for managing files and software, that appear to raise further questions about location tracking and the platform's protection of its users' data," reports The Intercept. "Meyers made copies of the codebases in question -- 'LinkNYC Mobile Observation' and 'RxLocation' -- and shared both folders with The Intercept."

Meyers says the "LinkNYC Mobile Observation" code collects the user's longitude and latitude, browser type, OS, device type, device identifiers, and full URL clickstreams (including data and time) and "aggregates this information into a database," the report says. Meyer's believes the company is interested in tracking the location of Wi-Fi users in real time. "If such code were run on a mobile app or kiosk, he said, the company would be able to make advertisements available in real time based on where and who someone was, and that this would constitute a potential violation of the company's privacy policy," reports The Intercept.

Following the revelations, LinkNYC said the code was never intended to be released and was part of a longer-term R&D process. "In this instance, David Mitchell, Intersection's CTO, told the Intercept in an email. "Intersection was prototyping and testing some ideas internally, using employee data only, and mistakenly made source code public on Github. This code is not in use on the LinkNYC network." [Intersection is the "key player" in CityBridge, "a chameleon-like consortium of private companies" that New York City contracted to turn the city's payphone booth network into Wi-Fi-enabled kiosks.]

Ahead of Apple's big iPhone event later this week, the company appears to be grappling with a PR problem: Third-party apps on both its desktop and mobile app stores have been caught doing shady stuff. Last week, Apple pulled a top selling app from the App Store, a month after it was alerted about it, but only hours after it started making headlines. Since then, tens of new iOS apps have been caught indulging in a similar offense -- collecting and selling users data such as GPS coordinates, WiFi network IDs and more. Amid all of this, more desktop apps, curiously all from security service provider Trend Micro -- have been caught collecting browser history and information about users' computers. Apple has pulled Trend Micro's apps from the store. Do note that Trend Micro still has some apps -- both for desktop and mobile -- listed on the store. Would be interesting to learn what sort of conversations Trend Micro and Apple have had in the recent days. BleepingComputer: The apps are Dr. Antivirus, Dr. Cleaner, and Dr. Unarchiver, all under the developer account Trend Micro, Incorporated. Until removal, all products were top-sellers, with thousands of positive reviews that averaged their ratings between 4.6 and 4.9. The first public report of a Trend Micro product in the App Store engaging in shady activities came in late 2017 when user PeterNopSled told Malwarebytes forum members that "that his Mac was taken over by Open Any Files: RAR Support," and it did not let him open Word or Excel files. Trend Micro's privacy and data collection disclosure.

Ahead of Apple's big iPhone event later this week, the company appears to be grappling with a PR problem: Third-party apps on both its desktop and mobile app stores have been caught doing shady stuff. Last week, Apple pulled a top selling app from the App Store, a month after it was alerted about it, but only hours after it started making headlines. Since then, tens of new iOS apps have been caught indulging in a similar offense -- collecting and selling users data such as GPS coordinates, WiFi network IDs and more. Amid all of this, more desktop apps, curiously all from security service provider Trend Micro -- have been caught collecting browser history and information about users' computers. Apple has pulled Trend Micro's apps from the store. Do note that Trend Micro still has some apps -- both for desktop and mobile -- listed on the store. Would be interesting to learn what sort of conversations Trend Micro and Apple have had in the recent days. BleepingComputer: The apps are Dr. Antivirus, Dr. Cleaner, and Dr. Unarchiver, all under the developer account Trend Micro, Incorporated. Until removal, all products were top-sellers, with thousands of positive reviews that averaged their ratings between 4.6 and 4.9. The first public report of a Trend Micro product in the App Store engaging in shady activities came in late 2017 when user PeterNopSled told Malwarebytes forum members that "that his Mac was taken over by Open Any Files: RAR Support," and it did not let him open Word or Excel files. Trend Micro's privacy and data collection disclosure.

Almost half of American households will have a smart speaker by next year, according to a new study from Adobe. From a report: The study, released Monday, finds that 32% of the country already owns a smart speaker and another 16% plan on getting one this holiday season. And just as importantly, people are using those speakers. "Technology trends come and go, but we think voice is here to stay," said Colin Morris, director of product management for Adobe Analytics, in a statement. "Consumers continue to embrace voice as a means to engage their devices and the Internet. It's a trend that has fundamentally changed the face of computing." A notable indicator of the growing popularity of the speakers is how comfortable people are talking to the device in front of others. And that number is on the rise: 72% of smart speaker owners say they use voice assistants in front of others. (Only 29% of people without a smart speaker are comfortable with doing so.) Further reading: Google Home Outships Amazon Echo for Second Quarter in Row.

The proliferation of affordable smartphones, dwindling data prices, and apps and services that are designed to work swiftly on such patchy infrastructure have changed how people in developing markets marred with poor literacy level such as India communicate, do business, and get their education. But it has also come at a cost. In the recent months we have learned about Facebook's struggle to contain violence in Myanmar, BuzzFeed News has a chilling story on how rumors circulated through WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook, are causing real violence in India, the world's second largest internet market. From the report: WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging service, is used by more than 200 million people in India, its largest market. It's become an inextricable part of the country's culture and social fabric, widely used by younger and older generations alike. It's one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's crown jewels, an app he acquired for $19 billion in 2014 that began as a messaging platform but is now evolving into something more, with a new payments feature already being tested in India.

Lately, however, WhatsApp has been getting Indians killed. In June, rumors about child kidnappers shared on the service inspired a mob of hundreds to lynch a 29-year-old man and his friend who were passing through a village in Karbi Anglong, a district in the eastern part of the country. In July, two weeks after the Rainpada incident, hundreds of people hurled stones at an IT worker who was visiting the South Indian village of Murki, killing him. Since May, there have been at least 16 lynchings leading to 29 deaths in India where public officials say mobs were incited by misinformation on WhatsApp. As Facebook wrangles an ongoing crisis of public confidence over its role in spreading misinformation throughout the 2016 US presidential election, the company is grappling with a different kind of problem in places like Rainpada, where its products have abetted flesh-and-blood harm. In attempting to fulfill Facebook's current mission -- to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together" -- Zuckerberg and his team of Silicon Valley-based executives failed to foresee its malignant applications: misinformation, propaganda, rumor, hate.

The proliferation of affordable smartphones, dwindling data prices, and apps and services that are designed to work swiftly on such patchy infrastructure have changed how people in developing markets marred with poor literacy level such as India communicate, do business, and get their education. But it has also come at a cost. In the recent months we have learned about Facebook's struggle to contain violence in Myanmar, BuzzFeed News has a chilling story on how rumors circulated through WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook, are causing real violence in India, the world's second largest internet market. From the report: WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging service, is used by more than 200 million people in India, its largest market. It's become an inextricable part of the country's culture and social fabric, widely used by younger and older generations alike. It's one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's crown jewels, an app he acquired for $19 billion in 2014 that began as a messaging platform but is now evolving into something more, with a new payments feature already being tested in India.

Lately, however, WhatsApp has been getting Indians killed. In June, rumors about child kidnappers shared on the service inspired a mob of hundreds to lynch a 29-year-old man and his friend who were passing through a village in Karbi Anglong, a district in the eastern part of the country. In July, two weeks after the Rainpada incident, hundreds of people hurled stones at an IT worker who was visiting the South Indian village of Murki, killing him. Since May, there have been at least 16 lynchings leading to 29 deaths in India where public officials say mobs were incited by misinformation on WhatsApp. As Facebook wrangles an ongoing crisis of public confidence over its role in spreading misinformation throughout the 2016 US presidential election, the company is grappling with a different kind of problem in places like Rainpada, where its products have abetted flesh-and-blood harm. In attempting to fulfill Facebook's current mission -- to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together" -- Zuckerberg and his team of Silicon Valley-based executives failed to foresee its malignant applications: misinformation, propaganda, rumor, hate.

The proliferation of affordable smartphones, dwindling data prices, and apps and services that are designed to work swiftly on such patchy infrastructure have changed how people in developing markets marred with poor literacy level such as India communicate, do business, and get their education. But it has also come at a cost. In the recent months we have learned about Facebook's struggle to contain violence in Myanmar, BuzzFeed News has a chilling story on how rumors circulated through WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook, are causing real violence in India, the world's second largest internet market. From the report: WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging service, is used by more than 200 million people in India, its largest market. It's become an inextricable part of the country's culture and social fabric, widely used by younger and older generations alike. It's one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's crown jewels, an app he acquired for $19 billion in 2014 that began as a messaging platform but is now evolving into something more, with a new payments feature already being tested in India.

Lately, however, WhatsApp has been getting Indians killed. In June, rumors about child kidnappers shared on the service inspired a mob of hundreds to lynch a 29-year-old man and his friend who were passing through a village in Karbi Anglong, a district in the eastern part of the country. In July, two weeks after the Rainpada incident, hundreds of people hurled stones at an IT worker who was visiting the South Indian village of Murki, killing him. Since May, there have been at least 16 lynchings leading to 29 deaths in India where public officials say mobs were incited by misinformation on WhatsApp. As Facebook wrangles an ongoing crisis of public confidence over its role in spreading misinformation throughout the 2016 US presidential election, the company is grappling with a different kind of problem in places like Rainpada, where its products have abetted flesh-and-blood harm. In attempting to fulfill Facebook's current mission -- to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together" -- Zuckerberg and his team of Silicon Valley-based executives failed to foresee its malignant applications: misinformation, propaganda, rumor, hate.

The proliferation of affordable smartphones, dwindling data prices, and apps and services that are designed to work swiftly on such patchy infrastructure have changed how people in developing markets marred with poor literacy level such as India communicate, do business, and get their education. But it has also come at a cost. In the recent months we have learned about Facebook's struggle to contain violence in Myanmar, BuzzFeed News has a chilling story on how rumors circulated through WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook, are causing real violence in India, the world's second largest internet market. From the report: WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging service, is used by more than 200 million people in India, its largest market. It's become an inextricable part of the country's culture and social fabric, widely used by younger and older generations alike. It's one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's crown jewels, an app he acquired for $19 billion in 2014 that began as a messaging platform but is now evolving into something more, with a new payments feature already being tested in India.

Lately, however, WhatsApp has been getting Indians killed. In June, rumors about child kidnappers shared on the service inspired a mob of hundreds to lynch a 29-year-old man and his friend who were passing through a village in Karbi Anglong, a district in the eastern part of the country. In July, two weeks after the Rainpada incident, hundreds of people hurled stones at an IT worker who was visiting the South Indian village of Murki, killing him. Since May, there have been at least 16 lynchings leading to 29 deaths in India where public officials say mobs were incited by misinformation on WhatsApp. As Facebook wrangles an ongoing crisis of public confidence over its role in spreading misinformation throughout the 2016 US presidential election, the company is grappling with a different kind of problem in places like Rainpada, where its products have abetted flesh-and-blood harm. In attempting to fulfill Facebook's current mission -- to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together" -- Zuckerberg and his team of Silicon Valley-based executives failed to foresee its malignant applications: misinformation, propaganda, rumor, hate.

Mark Lowenstein, writing for Techpinions: As we head toward Apple's annual device announcement-palooza, it's an interesting exercise to consider where we are in Steve Jobs' vaunted, much quoted 'Post-PC Era.' The fact of the matter is, that era never fully arrived, and it doesn't look like it will, in the near- to medium- term future. [...] Tablets have had a good run, but sales have tailed off of late. I'd say they've had greater influence on the evolution of the smartphone and the PC, rather than leading to a significantly different nomenclature for what most of us carry around today. My Techpinions colleague Ben Bajarin says that Creative Strategies surveys indicate that only about 10% of tablet users have 'replaced their PC' -- a number that has held steady for several years. And that 10% is concentrated in a handful of industries, such as real estate and construction. PC sales aren't exactly surging, but they're steady. Your average white collar professional today still carries around a smartphone and a laptop, with the tablet being an ancillary device, used primarily for media/content consumption.

Tablets have had a significant influence on the design of smartphones and PCs. They ushered in an era of smartphone screen upsizing, led primarily by Samsung, and now reinforced by the iPhone X and the expected announcement next week of a 6.5 inch iPhone model. For those who don't want to swing both a smartphone and tablet, we have 'Phablets,' most personified in the successful Galaxy Note series, and alternative-to-keyboard input devices such as the S Pen and the Apple Pencil. We've also seen the development of some hybrid tablet/PC devices, the most innovative and successful of which is Microsoft's Surface line. But that product is competing more in the tablet category than in the PC category, with the exception of a few market segments.

Mark Lowenstein, writing for Techpinions: As we head toward Apple's annual device announcement-palooza, it's an interesting exercise to consider where we are in Steve Jobs' vaunted, much quoted 'Post-PC Era.' The fact of the matter is, that era never fully arrived, and it doesn't look like it will, in the near- to medium- term future. [...] Tablets have had a good run, but sales have tailed off of late. I'd say they've had greater influence on the evolution of the smartphone and the PC, rather than leading to a significantly different nomenclature for what most of us carry around today. My Techpinions colleague Ben Bajarin says that Creative Strategies surveys indicate that only about 10% of tablet users have 'replaced their PC' -- a number that has held steady for several years. And that 10% is concentrated in a handful of industries, such as real estate and construction. PC sales aren't exactly surging, but they're steady. Your average white collar professional today still carries around a smartphone and a laptop, with the tablet being an ancillary device, used primarily for media/content consumption.

Tablets have had a significant influence on the design of smartphones and PCs. They ushered in an era of smartphone screen upsizing, led primarily by Samsung, and now reinforced by the iPhone X and the expected announcement next week of a 6.5 inch iPhone model. For those who don't want to swing both a smartphone and tablet, we have 'Phablets,' most personified in the successful Galaxy Note series, and alternative-to-keyboard input devices such as the S Pen and the Apple Pencil. We've also seen the development of some hybrid tablet/PC devices, the most innovative and successful of which is Microsoft's Surface line. But that product is competing more in the tablet category than in the PC category, with the exception of a few market segments.

An anonymous reader writes: "A team of security researchers has raised the alarm about some cryptography-related issues with the newly released WebAuthn passwordless authentication protocol," reports ZDNet. "The new WebAuthn protocol will allow users of a device -- such as a computer or a smartphone -- to authenticate on a website using a USB security key, a biometric solution, or his computer or smartphone's password." But researchers say that because WebAuthn uses weak algorithms for the operations of registering a new device, they can pull off some attacks against it.

"If converted into a practical exploit, the ECDAA attacks discussed in the article would allow attackers to steal the key from a [server's] TPM, which would allow attackers to effectively clone the user's hardware security token remotely," Arciszewski, one of the researchers, told ZDNet. "The scenarios that follow depend on how much trust was placed into the hardware security token," he added. "At minimum, I imagine it would enable 2FA bypasses and re-enable phishing attacks. However, if companies elected to use hardware security tokens to obviate passwords, it would allow direct user impersonation by attackers." Attacks aren't practical, and experts say the root cause relies in badly written documentation that may fool some implementers into supporting the old algorithms instead of newer and more solid ones. The FIDO Alliance was notified and has started work on updating its docs so it won't look like it's recommending ECDAA or RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5. "PKCS1v1.5 is bad. The exploits are almost old enough to legally drink alcohol in the United States," Arciszewski said.

hackingbear writes: President Trump acknowledged in a tweet that "Apple prices may increase because of the massive Tariffs we may be imposing on China," but suggested the issue was not with the tariffs themselves. "There is an easy solution where there would be ZERO tax, and indeed a tax incentive. Make your products in the United States instead of China. Start building new plants now," Trump wrote. The U.S. is threatening to impose 25% tariffs on all $500 billion worth of Chinese imports over issues such as intellectual property theft.

While Apple et al are still making their products in China, Trump didn't offer Apple a place to find the millions of laborers needed to make their products, given that the official unemployment rate is at a historic low of 3.9%. Manufacturers also need to compete in the labor market with garbage companies who need to find American laborers willing to recycle their own trash -- a job once imposed upon China as a condition to enter the World Trade Organization and enjoy advantageous tariff rates. China is gracefully giving back those jobs as the U.S. is complaining of unfair trades.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch about the little fallout Equifax has faced for one of the worst data breaches in U.S. history: The credit rating giant, one of the largest in the world, was trusted with some of the most sensitive data used by banks and financiers to determine who can be lent money. But the company failed to patch a web server it knew was vulnerable for months, which let hackers crash the servers and steal data on 147 million consumers. Names, addresses, Social Security numbers and more -- and millions more driver license and credit card numbers were stolen in the breach. Millions of British and Canadian nationals were also affected, sparking a global response to the breach. Yet, a year on from following the devastating hack that left the company reeling from a breach of almost every American adult, the company has faced little to no action or repercussions.

"There was a failure of the company, but also of lawmakers," said Mark Warner, a Democratic senator, in a call with TechCrunch. Warner, who serves Virginia, was one of the first lawmakers to file new legislation after the breach. Alongside his Democratic colleague, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the two senators said their bill, if passed, would hold credit agencies accountable for data breaches. "With Equifax, they knew for months before they reported, so at what point is that violating securities laws by not having that notice?," said Warner. "The message sent to the market is 'if you can endure some media blowback, you can get through this without serious long-term ramifications', and that's totally unacceptable," he said. Earlier this year, the company asked a federal judge to reject claims from dozens of banks and credit unions for costs taken to prevent fraud following the data breach. The claims, if accepted, could force Equifax to shell out tens of millions of dollars -- perhaps more. The hundreds of class action suits filed to date have yet to hit the courts, but historically even the largest class action cases have resulted in single dollar amounts for the individuals affected. And when the credit agent giant isn't fighting the courts, federal regulators have shown little interest in pursuit of legal action. Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter Thursday to the heads of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) complaining about their lack of action. "Companies like Equifax do not ask the American people before they collect their most sensitive information," said Warren. "This information can determine their ability to access credit, obtain a job, secure a home loan, purchase a car, and make dozens of other transactions that are critical to their personal financial security. The American people deserve an update on your investigations."

"[O]nly the Securities and Exchange Commission has brought charges -- not for the breach itself, but against three former staffers for allegedly insider trading," TechCrunch points out.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch about the little fallout Equifax has faced for one of the worst data breaches in U.S. history: The credit rating giant, one of the largest in the world, was trusted with some of the most sensitive data used by banks and financiers to determine who can be lent money. But the company failed to patch a web server it knew was vulnerable for months, which let hackers crash the servers and steal data on 147 million consumers. Names, addresses, Social Security numbers and more -- and millions more driver license and credit card numbers were stolen in the breach. Millions of British and Canadian nationals were also affected, sparking a global response to the breach. Yet, a year on from following the devastating hack that left the company reeling from a breach of almost every American adult, the company has faced little to no action or repercussions.

"There was a failure of the company, but also of lawmakers," said Mark Warner, a Democratic senator, in a call with TechCrunch. Warner, who serves Virginia, was one of the first lawmakers to file new legislation after the breach. Alongside his Democratic colleague, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the two senators said their bill, if passed, would hold credit agencies accountable for data breaches. "With Equifax, they knew for months before they reported, so at what point is that violating securities laws by not having that notice?," said Warner. "The message sent to the market is 'if you can endure some media blowback, you can get through this without serious long-term ramifications', and that's totally unacceptable," he said. Earlier this year, the company asked a federal judge to reject claims from dozens of banks and credit unions for costs taken to prevent fraud following the data breach. The claims, if accepted, could force Equifax to shell out tens of millions of dollars -- perhaps more. The hundreds of class action suits filed to date have yet to hit the courts, but historically even the largest class action cases have resulted in single dollar amounts for the individuals affected. And when the credit agent giant isn't fighting the courts, federal regulators have shown little interest in pursuit of legal action. Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter Thursday to the heads of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) complaining about their lack of action. "Companies like Equifax do not ask the American people before they collect their most sensitive information," said Warren. "This information can determine their ability to access credit, obtain a job, secure a home loan, purchase a car, and make dozens of other transactions that are critical to their personal financial security. The American people deserve an update on your investigations."

"[O]nly the Securities and Exchange Commission has brought charges -- not for the breach itself, but against three former staffers for allegedly insider trading," TechCrunch points out.

Reuters reports: Amazon said on Friday it plans to open its checkout-free 'Amazon Go' grocery store in New York, expanding beyond Seattle where it is headquartered. The Amazon Go store, which has no cashiers and allows shoppers to buy things with the help of a smartphone app, is widely seen as a concept that can alter brick-and-mortar retail... Customers have to scan a smartphone app to enter the store. Once inside, cameras and sensors track what they pick up from the shelves and what they put back. Amazon then bills shoppers' credit cards on file after they leave.
CNET adds: The expansion comes after two Amazon Go stores opened in Seattle. The first one debuted in January 2018 and the second opened last month... Amazon confirmed in May that it'll open Amazon Go stores in San Francisco and Chicago, but it didn't say when.

At this year's Open Source Summit, Linus Torvalds sat for a wide-ranging "keynote" interview with Dirk Hohndel, chief open source officer at VMWare, which has been partially transcribed below. And Linus explained, among other things, why the last merge window was harder than others: One of the issues we have is when we've had these hardware security issues, and they've kept happening now, the last year -- they're kept under wraps. So we knew about the issue for the last several months, but because it was secret and we weren't allowed to talk about it, we couldn't do our usual open development model. We do the best we can, and people really care deeply about getting a good product out, but when you have to do things in secret, and when you can't use all the nice infrastructure for development and for testing that we have for all the usual code, it just is way more painful than it should be. And then that just means that, especially when the information becomes public during what is otherwise a busy period anyway, it's just annoying...

I still love speculative execution. Don't get me wrong. I used to work for a CPU company. We did it in software, back when I worked there. I think a CPU has to do speculative execution. It's somewhat sad that then people didn't always think about or didn't always heed the warnings about what can go wrong when you take a few shortcuts in the name of making it slightly simpler for everybody, because you're going to throw away all that work anyway, so why bother to do it right. And that's when the security -- every single security problem we've had has been basically of that kind, where people knew that "Hey, this is speculative work. If something goes wrong we'll throw all the data away, so we don't need to be as careful as we would otherwise." I think it was a good lesson for the industry, but it was certainly not a fun lesson for us on the OS side, where we had to do a lot of extra work for problems that weren't our problems.

It feels somehow unfair. I mean, when we have a security bug that was our own fault, it's like, "Okay, it was us screwing up. It's fair that we have to do all the work to then fix our own bugs." But it feels slightly less fair when you have to fix somebody else's...
"The good news -- I mean the really good news, and I'm serious about this -- is that the bugs have become clearly more and more esoteric," Linus adds. "So it impacts fewer and fewer cases, and clearly hardware people at Intel and other places are now so aware of it that I'm hoping we're really getting to the dregs of the hardware security bugs, and going forward we'll have much fewer of them. I think we're going to the better days, when A.) we got the bugs fixed, and B.) people were thinking about them beforehand."

There's a lot more, so read on for more excerpts...
When it comes to quantum computing, Linus says he's "a huge unbeliever in that whole thing. I don't think it will ever happen. And if I'm wrong, I'm pretty sure that I'll be long dead by the time people can prove me wrong..."

"Hey, it has been known to happen that I've been wrong before, so maybe the whole quantum thing is going to be a thing. But I think if you actually look at where hardware is going today, the much more relevant part is that traditional computers are not scaling, and people really don't see a lot of realistic paths forward to go on the hardware side. And I actually think that's probably healthy for the industry, eventually, and especially for us software people who have gotten kind of complacent...

"The saying used to be that every two years performance doubles, and that has clearly not been very true lately, and it's not going to be true going forward. And I think that's good. Maybe not fun, but it means that we'll maybe go back partly to the time where you cared more about performance on the software side, and you had to be more careful, and you can't just rely on hardware getting better all the time... I do think it's pretty clear that the whole Moore's Law thing is definitely not something you should take for granted. This very much impacts the hardware people, but I'm saying it also impacts, I think, us software people and especially us system people, where it means that software itself has to take that into account...

"I'm a software person, so asking me about hardware is kind of questionable to begin with. I'm actually a huge believer in neural networks. Back way in the days when I was at University, I was studying artificial intelligence -- the traditional kind of artificial intelligence -- and always felt that that was snake oil, and that the real model of AI is to actually look at what we know works, right? And I'm really happy to see that this is clearly the direction that the industry has been going lately."

Watch a 40-minute video of Linus's remarks on the Linux Foundation's page on YouTube.

At this year's Open Source Summit, Linus Torvalds sat for a wide-ranging "keynote" interview with Dirk Hohndel, chief open source officer at VMWare, which has been partially transcribed below. And Linus explained, among other things, why the last merge window was harder than others: One of the issues we have is when we've had these hardware security issues, and they've kept happening now, the last year -- they're kept under wraps. So we knew about the issue for the last several months, but because it was secret and we weren't allowed to talk about it, we couldn't do our usual open development model. We do the best we can, and people really care deeply about getting a good product out, but when you have to do things in secret, and when you can't use all the nice infrastructure for development and for testing that we have for all the usual code, it just is way more painful than it should be. And then that just means that, especially when the information becomes public during what is otherwise a busy period anyway, it's just annoying...

I still love speculative execution. Don't get me wrong. I used to work for a CPU company. We did it in software, back when I worked there. I think a CPU has to do speculative execution. It's somewhat sad that then people didn't always think about or didn't always heed the warnings about what can go wrong when you take a few shortcuts in the name of making it slightly simpler for everybody, because you're going to throw away all that work anyway, so why bother to do it right. And that's when the security -- every single security problem we've had has been basically of that kind, where people knew that "Hey, this is speculative work. If something goes wrong we'll throw all the data away, so we don't need to be as careful as we would otherwise." I think it was a good lesson for the industry, but it was certainly not a fun lesson for us on the OS side, where we had to do a lot of extra work for problems that weren't our problems.

It feels somehow unfair. I mean, when we have a security bug that was our own fault, it's like, "Okay, it was us screwing up. It's fair that we have to do all the work to then fix our own bugs." But it feels slightly less fair when you have to fix somebody else's...
"The good news -- I mean the really good news, and I'm serious about this -- is that the bugs have become clearly more and more esoteric," Linus adds. "So it impacts fewer and fewer cases, and clearly hardware people at Intel and other places are now so aware of it that I'm hoping we're really getting to the dregs of the hardware security bugs, and going forward we'll have much fewer of them. I think we're going to the better days, when A.) we got the bugs fixed, and B.) people were thinking about them beforehand."

There's a lot more, so read on for more excerpts...
When it comes to quantum computing, Linus says he's "a huge unbeliever in that whole thing. I don't think it will ever happen. And if I'm wrong, I'm pretty sure that I'll be long dead by the time people can prove me wrong..."

"Hey, it has been known to happen that I've been wrong before, so maybe the whole quantum thing is going to be a thing. But I think if you actually look at where hardware is going today, the much more relevant part is that traditional computers are not scaling, and people really don't see a lot of realistic paths forward to go on the hardware side. And I actually think that's probably healthy for the industry, eventually, and especially for us software people who have gotten kind of complacent...

"The saying used to be that every two years performance doubles, and that has clearly not been very true lately, and it's not going to be true going forward. And I think that's good. Maybe not fun, but it means that we'll maybe go back partly to the time where you cared more about performance on the software side, and you had to be more careful, and you can't just rely on hardware getting better all the time... I do think it's pretty clear that the whole Moore's Law thing is definitely not something you should take for granted. This very much impacts the hardware people, but I'm saying it also impacts, I think, us software people and especially us system people, where it means that software itself has to take that into account...

"I'm a software person, so asking me about hardware is kind of questionable to begin with. I'm actually a huge believer in neural networks. Back way in the days when I was at University, I was studying artificial intelligence -- the traditional kind of artificial intelligence -- and always felt that that was snake oil, and that the real model of AI is to actually look at what we know works, right? And I'm really happy to see that this is clearly the direction that the industry has been going lately."

Watch a 40-minute video of Linus's remarks on the Linux Foundation's page on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes ITWire: Google's move to strip out the www in domains typed into the address bar, beginning with version 69 of its Chrome browser, has drawn an enormous amount of criticism from developers who see the move as a bid to cement the company's dominance of the Web. The criticism comes a few days after Chrome's engineering manager Adrienne Porter Felt told the American website Wired that URLs need to be got rid of altogether. The change in Chrome version 69 means that if one types in a domain such as www.itwire.com into the browser search bar, the www portion is stripped out in the address bar when the page is displayed.

When asked about this change in a long discussion thread on a mailing list, a Google staffer wrote: "www is now considered a 'trivial' subdomain, and hiding trivial subdomains can be disabled in flags (will also disable hiding the URL scheme)..." A Google staffer attempted to justify the change, writing: "The subdomains reappear when editing the URL so people type the correct one. They disappear in the steady-state display case because this isn't information that most users need to concern themselves with in most cases..." But this drew an angry response from a poster who questioned the statement "this isn't information that most users need to concern themselves with in most cases" and asked: "According to who? This is simply an opinion stated as a fact...."

This is not the first time Google has been criticised for its moves to change the fundamental structure of URLs. Its Accelerated Mobile Pages, introduced in October 2015, have been criticised for obscuring the original URL of a page and reducing the chances of a reader going back to the original website. Probably for this reason, Apple last year decided that version 11 of iOS would update its Safari browser so that AMP links would be stripped out of an URL when the story was shared... "This is Google making subdomain usage decisions for other entities outside of Google," said yet another poster. "My domains and how subdomains are assigned and delegated are not Google's business to decide."
The controversy moved Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein to write a new blog post. Its title? "Here's How to Disable Google Chrome's Confusing New URL Hiding Scheme."

UPDATE (9/15/18): Google has announced that after public outcry, they'll return the 'www' to Chrome's URL's -- but only until the next release.

An anonymous reader quotes ITWire: Google's move to strip out the www in domains typed into the address bar, beginning with version 69 of its Chrome browser, has drawn an enormous amount of criticism from developers who see the move as a bid to cement the company's dominance of the Web. The criticism comes a few days after Chrome's engineering manager Adrienne Porter Felt told the American website Wired that URLs need to be got rid of altogether. The change in Chrome version 69 means that if one types in a domain such as www.itwire.com into the browser search bar, the www portion is stripped out in the address bar when the page is displayed.

When asked about this change in a long discussion thread on a mailing list, a Google staffer wrote: "www is now considered a 'trivial' subdomain, and hiding trivial subdomains can be disabled in flags (will also disable hiding the URL scheme)..." A Google staffer attempted to justify the change, writing: "The subdomains reappear when editing the URL so people type the correct one. They disappear in the steady-state display case because this isn't information that most users need to concern themselves with in most cases..." But this drew an angry response from a poster who questioned the statement "this isn't information that most users need to concern themselves with in most cases" and asked: "According to who? This is simply an opinion stated as a fact...."

This is not the first time Google has been criticised for its moves to change the fundamental structure of URLs. Its Accelerated Mobile Pages, introduced in October 2015, have been criticised for obscuring the original URL of a page and reducing the chances of a reader going back to the original website. Probably for this reason, Apple last year decided that version 11 of iOS would update its Safari browser so that AMP links would be stripped out of an URL when the story was shared... "This is Google making subdomain usage decisions for other entities outside of Google," said yet another poster. "My domains and how subdomains are assigned and delegated are not Google's business to decide."
The controversy moved Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein to write a new blog post. Its title? "Here's How to Disable Google Chrome's Confusing New URL Hiding Scheme."

UPDATE (9/15/18): Google has announced that after public outcry, they'll return the 'www' to Chrome's URL's -- but only until the next release.

OSNews reports: Terrence Andrew Davis, sole creator and developer of TempleOS (née LoseThos), has passed away at age 48. Davis suffered from mental illness -- schizophrenia -- which had a severe impact on his life. He claimed he created his operating system after having spoken with and receiving instructions from god, and he was a controversial figure, also here on OSNews, for his incomprehensible rants and abrasive style towards OSNews readers and staff. We eventually had to ban him, but our then-editor Kroc Kamen worked with him in 2010 to publish an article about his operating system despite his ban.... I hope he found peace -- wherever he may be.
Davis spent 10 years building "an operating system to talk to God," according to a 2014 profile in Motherboard, which described its welcome screen as "a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text" resembling early DOS-based GUIs. (Wikipedia describes its interface as "a mixture of DOS and Turbo C.") To build his operating system, Terry wrote 121,176 lines of code.

An anonymous reader writes: Davis learned assembly language on a Commodore 64 before he'd graduated from high school. He eventually got a master's degree in electrical engineering from Arizona State University, and as an undergrad he worked briefly at Ticketmaster, programming operating systems. His later life included time in mental hospitals and some homelessness, as well as living at home with his parents after his schizophrenia was diagnosed and treated.

In 2014 Motherboard pieced together his lifestyle from emailed updates Terry sent from his Ubuntu desktop. They concluded he was living on disability, and spent most of his time coding, surfing the web, "or using the output from the National Institute of Standards and Technology randomness beacon to talk to God -- he posts the results on his webpage as 'Terry Davis' Rants.'" Their article describes him as "God's lonely programmer," saying Davis "offered the world a temple to a God who speaks only to him, and is still waiting for everyone else to listen."
Terry's death was confirmed by a local Oregon newspaper, and the official web site for TempleOS now also includes this death notice:

In the wake of Terry A. Davis' passing his family has requested supporters of his donate to "organizations working to ease the pain and suffering caused by mental illness" such as

• The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation
• National Alliance on Mental Illness

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple, the world's most valuable company, said proposed U.S. tariffs on $200 billion worth of products imported from China will raise prices for some of its popular consumer goods such as the Apple Watch and AirPods headphones. The Mac mini desktop computer, Apple Pencil stylus accessory for iPads, various chargers and adapters and tooling equipment used to manufacturer and design some products in the U.S. will also be affected, the Cupertino, California-based company told the Office of U.S. Trade Representative in a letter dated Sept 5.

The company said the tariffs would "show up as a tax on U.S. consumers" and "increase the cost of Apple products that our customers have come to rely on in their daily lives." Beyond the core products, Apple said accessories like the HomePod speaker, some Beats speakers, AirPort and Time Capsule internet routers, the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad, and leather cases for the iPhone, iPad, MacBook and Apple Pencil would be affected. It said some of the parts it relies on for product development, including processors and research equipment, would also be hit by the tariffs. On Friday, President Trump said he's prepared to impose tariffs on an additional $267 billion in Chinese imports, which would affect almost every category of consumer goods, according to analysts. He cites unfair trade practices as a reason for the tariffs.

Vizio is reportedly working on a way to let TV owners know when it spies on their viewing habits. According to The Verge, the company is developing a "notice program with direct notification to the class through Vizio Smart TV displays." The Hollywood Reporter first spotted the news. From the report: The news popped up in a request to extend the time needed to submit a motion for a preliminary settlement in a class action lawsuit against the company. So basically, it's possible that Vizio users will get a pop-up notification that explains what the company is doing and when. The TV company already previously settled with the Federal Trade Commission for $2.2 million in 2017, along with the agreement to get users' consent before collecting data. The company was caught in 2015 tracking users' viewing habits and demographic data, which it combined to then sell to analytics and ad companies, thereby allowing them to better target their messaging.

Vizio is reportedly working on a way to let TV owners know when it spies on their viewing habits. According to The Verge, the company is developing a "notice program with direct notification to the class through Vizio Smart TV displays." The Hollywood Reporter first spotted the news. From the report: The news popped up in a request to extend the time needed to submit a motion for a preliminary settlement in a class action lawsuit against the company. So basically, it's possible that Vizio users will get a pop-up notification that explains what the company is doing and when. The TV company already previously settled with the Federal Trade Commission for $2.2 million in 2017, along with the agreement to get users' consent before collecting data. The company was caught in 2015 tracking users' viewing habits and demographic data, which it combined to then sell to analytics and ad companies, thereby allowing them to better target their messaging.

Blair Levin and Larry Downes report via Harvard Business Review: In 2010, Google rocked the $60 billion broadband industry by announcing plans to deploy fiber-based home internet service, offering connections up to a gigabit per second -- 100 times faster than average speeds at the time. Google Fiber, as the effort was named, entered the access market intending to prove the business case for ultra-high-speed internet. After deploying to six metro areas in six years, however, company management announced in late 2016 that it was "pausing" future deployments. In the Big Bang Disruption model, where innovations take off suddenly when markets are ready for them, Google Fiber could be seen as a failed early market experiment in gigabit internet access. But what if the company's goal was never to unleash the disrupter itself so much as to encourage incumbent broadband providers to do so, helping Google's expansion in adjacent markets such as video and emerging markets including smart homes?

Seen through that lens, Google Fiber succeeded wildly. It stimulated the incumbents to accelerate their own infrastructure investments by several years. New applications and new industries emerged, including virtual reality and the Internet of Things, proving the viability of an "if you build it, they will come" strategy for gigabit services. And in the process, local governments were mobilized to rethink restrictive and inefficient approaches to overseeing network installations. The story of Google Fiber provides valuable lessons for future network transformations, notably the on-going global race to deploy next-generation 5G mobile networks. It seems, then, a good time to review the story of how the effort came into being, what it achieved, and what it teaches investors, consumers, and community leaders eager to ensure continued private spending on internet infrastructure.

AT&T is offering a new promotion for first responders and their families. Firefighters, paramedics, and police officers can opt for 25 percent off either of the unlimited plans AT&T announced back in June. But in the fine print, as The Verge points out, "AT&T admits it may throttle data speeds 'when the network is congested.'" The promotion comes soon after Verizon came under scrutiny for throttling firefighters' data as they fought wildfires in California. From the report: AT&T says that first responders looking for completely unlimited internet without data speed caps can use FirstNet, the network it recently began operating specifically for first responders. AT&T was contracted by the U.S. government to built out FirstNet, which offers features that specifically cater to first responders. The company says that it's actively promoting FirstNet, but at the same time, its promotion page doesn't make a mention of the superior plan at all. In an email, AT&T clarified that the promotional plans subject to throttling are for first responders' personal use and family plans. "We're offering first responders and their family members a discount on the consumer plans available today for their personal use," a spokesperson said. "These lines and devices are separate than the FirstNet lines purchased and issued by the first responder agencies, which do not have a data limit."

The deal allows first responders to choose between the AT&T Unlimited & More plan or the Unlimited & More Premium plan, which has more entertainment add-ons to choose from, including HBO, Showtime, and Amazon Music. With the ongoing promotion, a single line alone on Unlimited & More will cost $52.50 a month, while four lines on a plan would cost $30 a month per person. Unlimited & More Premium costs $60 a month for a single line, and $35.62 a month per person for four lines.

An anonymous reader writes: The first paid online service for Nintendo Switch, simply named Nintendo Switch Online, is set to arrive at some point later this month, and we're still waiting on a few key details. One detail about the service emerged on Friday via Nintendo's official site, and it's not a great one: there will be specific limits to the service's promised cloud-save support. Nintendo Switch Online's $20/year cost includes a promise to "save your data online for easy access" -- which, for the uninitiated, will be the only way to back up your Switch games' save data when it launches. Currently, should your Nintendo Switch be lost, stolen, or damaged, your progress in games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is toast, as you can neither move save data from one console to another nor personally back it up to a hard drive. The following current and upcoming Switch games do not support Save Data Cloud backups: Splatoon 2, Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu, Pokemon Let's Go Eevee, Dark Souls Remastered, Dead Cells, FIFA 19, NBA 2K19, and NBA Playgrounds.

U.S. President Donald Trump warned on Friday that he was ready to slap tariffs on virtually all Chinese imports into the United States, threatening duties on another $267 billion in Chinese goods on top of $200 billion in imports now primed for levies in coming days. Reuters: The moves would sharply escalate Trump's trade war with Beijing over his demands for major changes in economic, trade and technology policy. China has threatened retaliation, which could include action against U.S. companies operating there. Hours after a public comment period closed on his $200 billion China tariff list, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he was "being strong on China because I have to be."

"The $200 billion we are talking about could take place very soon depending on what happens with them. To a certain extent its going to be up to China," Trump said. "And I hate to say this, but behind that is another $267 billion ready to go on short notice if I want. That totally changes the equation." [...] The $200 billion list, which includes some consumer products such as cameras and recording devices, luggage, handbags, tires and vacuum cleaners, would be subject to tariffs of 10 percent to 25 percent. Cell phones, the biggest U.S. import from China, have so far been spared, but would be engulfed if Trump activates the $267 billion tariff list. Further reading: Apple says Trump's China tariffs are going to hurt the company.

The Pentagon's high-tech research agency laid the groundwork for the Internet, stealth aircraft and self-driving cars. Now, it's going big on artificial intelligence. From a report: At its 60th anniversary conference on Friday, DARPA announced a $2 billion investment to push the frontier of AI forward. "We think it's a good time to seed the field of AI," John Everett, the deputy director of DARPA's Information Innovation Office, told CNNMoney. "We think we can accelerate two decades of progress into five years." [...] DARPA's investment will focus on creating systems with common sense, contextual awareness and better energy efficiency. Advances could help the government automate security clearances, accredit software systems and make AI systems that explain themselves.

Elon Musk sat down with California comedian Joe Rogan on Thursday evening for a 2 1/2-hour podcast [YouTube video] that touched upon everything from flamethrowers and artificial intelligence to the end of the universe. Talking about AI, a subject Musk has long been very vocal about, he said artificial intelligence could turn out to be terrible or it could end up being great, but one thing that is certain is that it will be beyond human's control. From a report: "You kind of have to be optimistic about the future. There's no point in being pessimistic," said the head of Tesla and SpaceX. "I rather be optimistic and wrong, than pessimistic and right. [...] It's not necessarily bad, but it's going to be outside of human control. It's going to be very tempting to use AI as a weapon, said Musk. "It will be used as a weapon. The on ramp to serious AI will be more humans using it against eachother. That will be the danger."

Musk says he has tried to convince people to slow down where AI is concerned and regulate it, but nobody listened. "The way that regulation works is slow. Usually there will be some new technology that will cause damage or death, there will be an outcry, there will be an investigation," said the Tesla CEO. "Years will pass, there will be some insight committee, then rule making and oversight and eventually regulations. This all takes many years. This is the normal course of things." Musk used the example that it took ten years for seatbelts to become required, even though the number of deaths were obvious. He says this time frame doesn't work for AI. "We can't wait ten years to the point where something is dangerous to do something about AI. It will be too late," said Musk.

Elon Musk sat down with California comedian Joe Rogan on Thursday evening for a 2 1/2-hour podcast [YouTube video] that touched upon everything from flamethrowers and artificial intelligence to the end of the universe. Talking about AI, a subject Musk has long been very vocal about, he said artificial intelligence could turn out to be terrible or it could end up being great, but one thing that is certain is that it will be beyond human's control. From a report: "You kind of have to be optimistic about the future. There's no point in being pessimistic," said the head of Tesla and SpaceX. "I rather be optimistic and wrong, than pessimistic and right. [...] It's not necessarily bad, but it's going to be outside of human control. It's going to be very tempting to use AI as a weapon, said Musk. "It will be used as a weapon. The on ramp to serious AI will be more humans using it against eachother. That will be the danger."

Musk says he has tried to convince people to slow down where AI is concerned and regulate it, but nobody listened. "The way that regulation works is slow. Usually there will be some new technology that will cause damage or death, there will be an outcry, there will be an investigation," said the Tesla CEO. "Years will pass, there will be some insight committee, then rule making and oversight and eventually regulations. This all takes many years. This is the normal course of things." Musk used the example that it took ten years for seatbelts to become required, even though the number of deaths were obvious. He says this time frame doesn't work for AI. "We can't wait ten years to the point where something is dangerous to do something about AI. It will be too late," said Musk.

Since the release of Chrome 69 earlier this week, countless of users have gone on social media and Google Product Forums to complain about "blurry" or "fuzzy" text inside Chrome. ZDNet: The blurred font issue isn't only limited to text rendered inside a web page, users said, but also for the text suggestions displayed inside the address bar search drop-down, and Chrome's Developer Tools panel. [...] According to reports, the issue only manifests for Chrome 69 users on Windows. Those who rolled back to Chrome 68 stopped having problems. Users said that changing Chrome, operating system, or screen DPI settings didn't help. "Our team is investigating reports of this behavior. You can find more information in this public bug report," a Google spokesperson said last night after first user complaints started surfacing online. Some users have also expressed concerns over Chrome not showing "trivial subdomains" including www and secure lock sign in the address bar.

The Tor Browser has rolled out a new interface with the release of v8. From a report: The Tor Browser has always been based on the Firefox codebase, but it lagged behind a few releases. Mozilla rolled out a major overhaul of the Firefox codebase in November 2017, with the release of Firefox 57, the first release in the Firefox Quantum series. Firefox Quantum came with a new page rendering engine, a new add-ons API, and a new user interface called the Photon UI. Because these were major, code-breaking changes, it took the smaller Tor team some time to integrate all of them into the Tor Browser codebase and make sure everything worked as intended. The new Tor Browser 8, released yesterday, is now in sync with the most recent version of Firefox, the Quantum release, and also supports all of its features. This means the Tor Browser now uses the same modern Photon UI that current Firefox versions use, it supports the same speed-optimized page rendering engine and has also dropped support for the old XUL-based add-ons system for the new WebExtensions API system used by Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and the rest of the Chromium browsers.

An anonymous reader writes: For the first time an autonomous sailing robot has completed the Microtransat Challenge by crossing the Atlantic from Newfoundland, Canada to Ireland. The Microtransat has been running since 2010 and has seen 23 previous entries all fail to make it across. The successful boat, SB Met was built by the Norwegian company Offshore Sensing AS and is only 2 metres (6.5 ft) long. It completed the crossing on August 26th, 79 days and 5000 km (3100 miles) of sailing after departing Newfoundland on June 7th. Further reading: A Fleet of Sailing Robots Sets Out To Quantify the Oceans.

The Equifax data breach was supposed to change everything about cybersecurity regulation on Capitol Hill. A year ago, Equifax announced that 145.5 million U.S. adults had their social security numbers stolen in an easily preventable breach. If any data breach was going to be able to shock Washington into enacting sweeping privacy reforms, this should have been it. Axios: But that didn't happen: "The initial interest that was implied by congressional actions didn't pan out," said Michelle Richardson, director of the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). What was supposed to happen: After the first of several hearings involving Equifax, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Judiciary Committee, said it was "long past time" for federal standards for how companies like Equifax secure data.

Data security wasn't the only anticipated reform. Congress appeared poised to create a national breach notification law governing how and how quickly companies must notify anybody whose personal information is stolen in a breach. Currently, to the chagrin of national retailers, those laws vary state to state. Several investigations were supposed to penalize the credit bureau for lax cybersecurity, including failing to patch the vulnerability hackers exploited despite government warnings. What actually happened: The bills petered out. Mick Mulvaney took over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in November and halted the bureau's investigation.

The Equifax data breach was supposed to change everything about cybersecurity regulation on Capitol Hill. A year ago, Equifax announced that 145.5 million U.S. adults had their social security numbers stolen in an easily preventable breach. If any data breach was going to be able to shock Washington into enacting sweeping privacy reforms, this should have been it. Axios: But that didn't happen: "The initial interest that was implied by congressional actions didn't pan out," said Michelle Richardson, director of the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). What was supposed to happen: After the first of several hearings involving Equifax, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Judiciary Committee, said it was "long past time" for federal standards for how companies like Equifax secure data.

Data security wasn't the only anticipated reform. Congress appeared poised to create a national breach notification law governing how and how quickly companies must notify anybody whose personal information is stolen in a breach. Currently, to the chagrin of national retailers, those laws vary state to state. Several investigations were supposed to penalize the credit bureau for lax cybersecurity, including failing to patch the vulnerability hackers exploited despite government warnings. What actually happened: The bills petered out. Mick Mulvaney took over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in November and halted the bureau's investigation.

A new paper written by Google's user experience researchers delves into the reasons that we can't put down our phones, and starts to explore what companies can do about it. It also calls on the technology industry to reexamine the way it ties engagement to success -- noting that capturing people's attention is not necessarily the best way to measure whether they're satisfied with a product. From a report: For its study, Google focused on a small group of smartphone users and kept tabs on how they used their smartphone throughout a normal day. It also dug into 112 interviews from previous research to evaluate how people felt about their phone use. Researchers Julie Aranda and Safia Baig of Google presented the paper at mobile conference Tuesday in Barcelona. Google used the results of this study to help design its "Digital Wellbeing" tools, which are a part of the company's newest Android operating system and designed to help people curb their smartphone use. The paper provides an overall picture of the reasons people feel they have to be in constant contact with their phones -- though it stops short of evaluating the best ways to combat that.

It does, however, take aim at the basic way that Internet companies -- including Google -- have elevated engagement as the best metric to measure success, creating an economy where attention becomes the most important currency. "We feel that the technology industry's focus on engagement metrics is core to this attention crisis that users are facing," the paper says. "... It's important to consider alternative metrics to indicate success, relating to user satisfaction and quality of time spent."

A new paper written by Google's user experience researchers delves into the reasons that we can't put down our phones, and starts to explore what companies can do about it. It also calls on the technology industry to reexamine the way it ties engagement to success -- noting that capturing people's attention is not necessarily the best way to measure whether they're satisfied with a product. From a report: For its study, Google focused on a small group of smartphone users and kept tabs on how they used their smartphone throughout a normal day. It also dug into 112 interviews from previous research to evaluate how people felt about their phone use. Researchers Julie Aranda and Safia Baig of Google presented the paper at mobile conference Tuesday in Barcelona. Google used the results of this study to help design its "Digital Wellbeing" tools, which are a part of the company's newest Android operating system and designed to help people curb their smartphone use. The paper provides an overall picture of the reasons people feel they have to be in constant contact with their phones -- though it stops short of evaluating the best ways to combat that.

It does, however, take aim at the basic way that Internet companies -- including Google -- have elevated engagement as the best metric to measure success, creating an economy where attention becomes the most important currency. "We feel that the technology industry's focus on engagement metrics is core to this attention crisis that users are facing," the paper says. "... It's important to consider alternative metrics to indicate success, relating to user satisfaction and quality of time spent."

The Justice Department is planning to announce charges Thursday against North Korean nationals who U.S. authorities have accused of being behind the massive hack of Sony in 2014 and the Wannacry ransomware attack lack year. From a report: Earlier on Thursday, President Donald Trump praised North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un on Twitter. "Kim Jong Un of North Korea proclaims 'unwavering faith in President Trump.' Thank you to Chairman Kim. We will get it done together!" Trump tweeted. The Washington Post adds: Pak Jin Hyok, who conducted hacking on behalf of North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau, the military intelligence agency that controls most of the country's cyber capabilities, is charged in the attack on Sony, according to U.S. officials. He is linked to the notorious Lazarus Group, which has also been implicated in the audacious attempt to use cyber techniques to steal $1 billion from the Bangladesh Bank in 2016, and to the WannaCry computer virus that affected more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries last year.

The Justice Department is planning to announce charges Thursday against North Korean nationals who U.S. authorities have accused of being behind the massive hack of Sony in 2014 and the Wannacry ransomware attack lack year. From a report: Earlier on Thursday, President Donald Trump praised North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un on Twitter. "Kim Jong Un of North Korea proclaims 'unwavering faith in President Trump.' Thank you to Chairman Kim. We will get it done together!" Trump tweeted. The Washington Post adds: Pak Jin Hyok, who conducted hacking on behalf of North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau, the military intelligence agency that controls most of the country's cyber capabilities, is charged in the attack on Sony, according to U.S. officials. He is linked to the notorious Lazarus Group, which has also been implicated in the audacious attempt to use cyber techniques to steal $1 billion from the Bangladesh Bank in 2016, and to the WannaCry computer virus that affected more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries last year.

The Justice Department is planning to announce charges Thursday against North Korean nationals who U.S. authorities have accused of being behind the massive hack of Sony in 2014 and the Wannacry ransomware attack lack year. From a report: Earlier on Thursday, President Donald Trump praised North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un on Twitter. "Kim Jong Un of North Korea proclaims 'unwavering faith in President Trump.' Thank you to Chairman Kim. We will get it done together!" Trump tweeted. The Washington Post adds: Pak Jin Hyok, who conducted hacking on behalf of North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau, the military intelligence agency that controls most of the country's cyber capabilities, is charged in the attack on Sony, according to U.S. officials. He is linked to the notorious Lazarus Group, which has also been implicated in the audacious attempt to use cyber techniques to steal $1 billion from the Bangladesh Bank in 2016, and to the WannaCry computer virus that affected more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries last year.

The Justice Department is planning to announce charges Thursday against North Korean nationals who U.S. authorities have accused of being behind the massive hack of Sony in 2014 and the Wannacry ransomware attack lack year. From a report: Earlier on Thursday, President Donald Trump praised North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un on Twitter. "Kim Jong Un of North Korea proclaims 'unwavering faith in President Trump.' Thank you to Chairman Kim. We will get it done together!" Trump tweeted. The Washington Post adds: Pak Jin Hyok, who conducted hacking on behalf of North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau, the military intelligence agency that controls most of the country's cyber capabilities, is charged in the attack on Sony, according to U.S. officials. He is linked to the notorious Lazarus Group, which has also been implicated in the audacious attempt to use cyber techniques to steal $1 billion from the Bangladesh Bank in 2016, and to the WannaCry computer virus that affected more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries last year.

Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare announced for the first time that a man employed at the Fukushima nuclear power plant died of lung cancer linked to radiation exposure. "The man, who was in his 50s, died from lung cancer that was diagnosed in 2016," reports the BBC. "Japan's government had previously agreed that radiation caused illness in four workers but this is the first acknowledged death." From the report: The Fukushima reactor suffered meltdowns after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a tsunami in March 2011. Cooling systems were wrecked at the plant on Japan's north-east coast and radioactive material leaked out. The employee who died had worked at atomic power stations since 1980 and was in charge of measuring radiation at the Fukushima No 1 plant shortly after its meltdown. He worked there at least twice after it was damaged, and had worn a face mask and protective suit, Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare said. After hearing opinions from a panel of radiologists and other experts, the ministry ruled that the man's family should be paid compensation.