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The White House on Friday will unveil a new 5G push to position the US ahead of global rivals in the race to deploy the next-generation wireless technology. President Donald Trump and Federal Communications Chairman Ajit Pai will announce new airwaves auctions and plans to spend $20.4 billion over 10 years on rural broadband. From a report: The FCC will auction off three segments of millimeter-wave spectrum -- which can offer insane data speeds but has limited range -- for commercial use. The auction is scheduled for December, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said on a conference call with reporters ahead of the White House event. He said the FCC plans to auction off 3,400 MHz of spectrum in three different high-frequency bands. "This will be the largest spectrum auction in American history," he said. Pai went onto say that this auction, along with others planned for the future, are putting the US on a good path. "The US is well-positioned to take a lead in 5G," he said.

The FCC is also announcing the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. The agency plans to reallocate $20.4 billion from its Universal Service Fund over the next 10 years to subsidize eligible companies to build out broadband infrastructure in underserved areas. The money will be allocated to internet service providers that can provide a minimum of 25 megabit per second downloads in areas that are currently in need of connectivity, Pai said. He added that the new infrastructure will also help bring 5G to these rural areas. "There are a number of startups that are working on millimeter wave technology to bring 5G to rural America," he said on the call.

Andrew Yang, the presidential candidate who supports Universal Basic Income and has attracted a devoted online following, is planning to use a 3D hologram on the campaign trail. "On Wednesday he gave the #YangGang, which is what his supporters call themselves, their first look at it," reports New York Magazine. From the report: The hologram's debut came on TMZ Live, which showed a video of Yang's hologram performing a duet alongside a hologram of his "hero," Tupac. "I was doing a demo of what a hologram would consist of in order to send the hologram of me to campaign in Iowa or other battleground states," he said.

Last month, Yang spoke about his hologram plans with Iowa newspaper, The Carroll Daily Times Herald. "We are exploring rolling a truck out that would enable someone to see a hologram of me that is three-dimensional give my stump speech," Yang told the paper. "And, also, if I were in a studio, which we could set up very easily, I could beam in and take questions live." Yang also told the paper that he plans to use hologram technology to remind voters that "it is 2019, and soon it will be 2020, and things are changing."

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket has successfully launched its first-ever mission for a paying customer. It was also the first time the aerospace company managed to land all three rocket boosters after launch. CNN reports: The rocket took off Thursday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida just after 6 pm ET. It delivered a pricey communications satellite into orbit for Saudi Arabia-based firm Arabsat. For the first time ever, all three Falcon Heavy rocket boosters returned to Earth after launch: The two side-boosters landed simultaneously on ground pads in Florida, while the center core landed on a remote-controlled platform in the ocean a short time later. Reusable hardware is part of Falcon Heavy's appeal. The boosters are guided back to Earth so they can be refurbished and used again. SpaceX says it can drastically reduce the cost of spaceflight.

The Arabsat mission is evidence that some satellite operators will opt for a larger rocket anyway: Arabsat 6A was small enough to fit onto a Falcon 9 rocket. But using the larger rocket allows the company to put the satellite deeper into space, which means the satellite won't need to waste as much of its own precious fuel maneuvering to its intended position. Arabsat 6A will update satellite coverage for Arabsat, which is based in Riyadh and delivers hundreds of television channels and radio stations to homes across the Middle East, Europe and North Africa. Lockheed Martin built the satellite, along with a second one, for Arabsat as part of a batch of contracts worth $650 million. When Arabsat announced the contracts in 2015, it said at the time that it planned to launch the Arabsat 6A satellite aboard Falcon Heavy. In related news, SpaceX has won a contract to launch the first-ever experiment in 2022 to deflect an asteroid through a high-speed spacecraft collision. "NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, will ride on a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at a cost of $69 million," reports Florida Today. "It's expected to launch in June of that year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A small spacecraft that has captured the imagination and excitement of people in Israel and around the world appears to have crashed on the moon (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). "We had a failure in the spacecraft," said Opher Doron, the general manager of Israel Aerospace Industries' space division, which collaborated on building the spacecraft. "We unfortunately have not managed to land successfully."

If it had succeeded, the robotic lander, named Beresheet, which means "Genesis" or "in the beginning" in Hebrew, would have been the first on the moon built by a private organization, and it would have added Israel to just three nations -- the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China -- to have accomplished that feat. Beresheet reached the launchpad and was headed to space aboard a SpaceX rocket in February. It orbited the moon, by itself a major accomplishment. That has only been done by five nations -- the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, Japan and India -- and the European Space Agency. But the landing was the riskiest part of the mission. The start of the automated landing sequence went as planned. The spacecraft even took a picture of itself at an altitude of 13 miles with the moon in the background. Then, still high above the surface, the engine cut out. The appointed landing time -- 10:25 p.m. in Israel, or 3:25 p.m. Eastern time -- came and passed, and the SpaceIL team realized the mission was over. "Well we didn't make it, but we definitely tried," said Morris Kahn, an Israeli telecommunications entrepreneur and president of SpaceIL, the nonprofit that undertook the mission. "And I think the achievement of getting to where we got is really tremendous. I think we can be proud."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said, "If at first you don't succeed, you try again."

YouTube is changing the way it measures success on the world's biggest video site following a series of scandals. There's just one problem: The company is still deciding how this new approach works, Bloomberg reports. From the report: The Google division introduced two new internal metrics in the past two years for gauging how well videos are performing, according to people familiar with the company's plans. One tracks the total time people spend on YouTube, including comments they post and read (not just the clips they watch). The other is a measurement called "quality watch time," a squishier statistic with a noble goal: To spot content that achieves something more constructive than just keeping users glued to their phones.

The changes are supposed to reward videos that are more palatable to advertisers and the broader public, and help YouTube ward off criticism that its service is addictive and socially corrosive. Creating the right metric for success could help marginalize videos that are inappropriate, or popular among small but active communities with extreme views. It could also help YouTube make up for previous failures in curbing the spread of toxic content. YouTube, like other parts of Alphabet's Google, uses these corporate metrics as goal posts for most business and technical decisions -- how it pays staff and creates critical software like its recommendation system. But the company has yet to settle on how the "quality watch time" metric works, or communicate how the new measure will impact millions of "creators" who upload videos to the site.

Ford CEO Jim Hackett scaled back hopes about the company's plans for self-driving cars this week, admitting that the first vehicles will have limits. From a report: "We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles," said Hackett, who once headed the company's autonomous vehicle division, at a Detroit Economic Club event on Tuesday. While Ford still plans on launching its self-driving car fleet in 2021, Hackett added that "its applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex." Hackett's announcement comes nearly six months after its CEO of autonomous vehicles, Sherif Markaby, detailed plans for the company's self-driving car service in a Medium post. The company has invested over $4 billion in the technology's development through 2023, including over $1 billion in Argo AI, an artificial intelligence company that is creating a virtual driver system. Ford is currently testing its self-driving vehicles in Miami, Washington, D.C. and Detroit.

Bowing to growing pressure from opponents who say that cashless stores leave out low-income Americans, Amazon plans to take cash at its 10 cashierless "Go" stores. From a report: Amazon Go stores, located in San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle, use AI and cameras to check out customers. Amazon reportedly is considering opening up to to 3,000 by 2021. "We are working to accept cash," a spokesperson for Amazon said Wednesday. "Paying cash at Amazon Go will work as you would expect: you'll check out, pay with cash, and then get your change." Amazon did not say when Go stores will begin accepting cash. Amazon also said its bookstores will start taking cash, but did not share any details.

Steve Kessel, Amazon's senior vice president of physical stores, told employees last month that Go stores would add "additional payment mechanisms," CNBC reported earlier on Wednesday. Kessel was responding to a question about how Amazon plans to address "discrimination and elitism" at cashierless stores, according to the report. Further reading: As More Retailers Ban Paper Money, It's Making Things Awkward For Customers Without Plastic.

An anonymous reader writes: Google wants to block some file downloads carried out via HTTP on websites that use HTTPS. The plan is to block EXE, DMG, CRX, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP, TAR, RAR, and 7Z file downloads when the download is initiated via HTTP but the website URL shows HTTPS.

Google said it's currently not thinking of blocking all downloads started from HTTP sites, since the browser already warns users about a site's poor security via the "Not Secure" indicator in the URL bar. The idea is to block insecure downloads on sites that appear to be secure (loaded via HTTPS) but where the downloads take place via plain ol' HTTP.

Udacity, the $1 billion online education startup, has laid off about 20 percent of its workforce and is restructuring its operations as the company's co-founder Sebastian Thrun seeks to bring costs in line with revenue without curbing growth, TechCrunch has learned. From the report: The objective is to do more than simply keep the company afloat, Thrun told TechCrunch in a phone interview. Instead, Thrun says these measures will allow Udacity from a money-losing operation to a "break-even or profitable company by next quarter and then moving forward." The 75 employees, including a handful of people in leadership positions, were laid off earlier today as part of a broader plan to restructure operations at Udacity. The startup now employs 300 full-time equivalent employees. It also employs about 60 contractors.

Udacity, which specializes in "nanodegrees" on a range of technical subjects that include AI, deep learning, digital marketing, VR and computer vision, has been struggling for months now, due in part to runaway costs and other inefficiencies. The company grew in 2017, with revenue increasing 100 percent year-over-year thanks to some popular programs like its self-driving car and deep learning nanodegrees, and the culmination of a previous turnaround plan architected by former CMO Shernaz Daver. New programming was added in 2018, but the volume slowed. Those degrees that were added lacked the popularity of some of its other degrees. Meanwhile, costs expanded and their employee ranks swelled.

Alphabet's Wing drone delivery company is launching its first public drone delivery service in Canberra, Australia, after the country's aviation authority granted it regulatory approval. "Around 100 homes in the suburbs of Crace, Palmerston, and Franklin will initially have access to the service, but in the coming months the company plans to expand it to homes in Harrison and Gungahlin," reports The Verge. From the report: The service works by partnering with local businesses including coffee shops and pharmacies to deliver their products "in minutes." Wing's regulatory approval comes with restrictions. Drones will not be allowed to fly over main roads, they will only be allowed to fly between 7am and 8pm on Monday to Friday (or between 8am and 8pm on Sundays), and they will be restricted from flying too close to people. Customers in eligible homes will also be given a safety briefing about interacting with the drones. Wing predicts that drone deliveries could be worth as much as AU$30 to AU$40 million to businesses in the area, and says drones could deliver as many as one in four takeaway orders by 2030.

China's state planner wants to eliminate bitcoin mining in the country, according to a draft list of industrial activities the agency is seeking to stop in a sign of growing government pressure on the cryptocurrency sector. From a report: China is the world's largest market for computer hardware designed to mine bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, even though such activities previously fell under a regulatory grey area. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said on Monday it was seeking public opinions on a revised list of industries it wants to encourage, restrict or eliminate. The list was first published in 2011. The draft for a revised list added cryptocurrency mining, including that of bitcoin, to more than 450 activities the NDRC said should be phased out as they did not adhere to relevant laws and regulations, were unsafe, wasted resources or polluted the environment. It did not stipulate a target date or plan for how to eliminate bitcoin mining, meaning that such activities should be phased out immediately, the document said. The public has until May 7 to comment on the draft.

A total of 14 HTC apps have been removed from the Play Store in the last three months. "Looking at the latest HTC Corporation activity in App Brain, we can see that the Sense Home launcher and contacts app People were unpublished just this month," reports Android Police. "12 more apps, including Calendar, Dot View, and Speak suffered a similar fate in February, while the Mail app that went and then returned is once again conspicuous by its absence." From the report: A few of the unpublished apps hadn't been updated in months, so it's likely they simply weren't being used or supported any longer and therefore had no reason to still be on the Play Store. However, apps like Mail, Contacts, and People are supposedly key alternative apps that come preinstalled on HTC devices, so it's a little strange to see those removed.

It's not clear exactly why this is happening, but there are a few possible reasons. HTC's smartphone business hasn't been doing all that well in recent years, and supporting a bunch of apps that few people are using doesn't make much sense. That said, there are still plenty more apps from the Taiwanese company still live on the Play Store. Perhaps the new phones HTC plans to launch in 2019 will ship with Android One, thus eliminating the need for its own stock apps altogether.

Viber, the chat and messaging app acquired by Japanese ecommerce titan Rakuten for $900 million five years ago, is introducing a new subscription service that lets users pay to have a local phone number that anyone can call. From a report: Founded in 2010, Viber has grown to claim more than 1 billion "registered users" globally, though the company doesn't reveal how many of those are active on the platform. As with similar messaging apps such as WhatsApp, users sign up to Viber using their own mobile phone number, which allows them to easily connect with other friends and contacts who have joined Viber. With Viber Local Number, which has been in closed beta until now, users can pay $4.99 per month to access a local telephone number for anyone outside of Viber to call or text (SMS).

For the caller, it costs whatever their network rates are for calling a local number, while the Viber user doesn't pay anything extra beyond their monthly subscription. There are caveats with the service for now, though: Viber users can't call out using their local number, and they can't respond to text messages using their local number. So if someone messages you on your special Viber number asking a question, you won't be able to respond. The company told VentureBeat that it plans to make the number function bidirectionally in the future.

Citing "significant" new corporate investments in AI technology, futurist Gary Grossman argues that AI "may be the fastest paradigm shift in the history of technology -- and warns there's a counter-argument to the theory that AI will create as many jobs as its displaces. "The other view is that this time is different, that we are not just automating labor but also cognition and many fewer people will be needed by industry." KPMG claims more than half of business executives plan to implement some form of AI within the next 12 months... The disruption is already beginning, with fully 75% of the organizations KPMG surveyed expecting intelligent automation to significantly impact 10 to 50% of their employees in the next two years. A Citigroup executive told Bloomberg that better AI could reduce headcount at the bank by 30%. In the face of all this change, many companies publicly state that AI will eliminate some dull and repetitive jobs and make it possible for people to do higher-order work. However, as a prominent venture capitalist relayed to me recently on this topic: "most displaced call center workers don't become Java programmers." It is not only low-skilled jobs that are at risk. Gartner analysts recently reported that AI will eliminate 80% of project management tasks....

A New York Times article noted that while many company executives pay public lip service to "human-centered AI" and the need to provide a safety net for those who lose their jobs, they privately talk about racing to automate their workforces "to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers." The article also cites a Deloitte survey from 2017 that found 53% of companies had already started to use machines to perform tasks previously done by humans. The figure is expected to climb to 72% by next year.... The net of this dynamic is that workers are not a major factor in the economic calculus of the business drive to adopt AI, despite so many public statements to the contrary.

So perhaps it's not a surprise when the Edelman 2019 AI survey shows a widely held view that AI will lead to short-term job losses with the potential for societal disruption and that AI will benefit the rich and hurt the poor.
He also shares a sobering quote from historian, philosopher, and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari on why Silicon Valley supports Universal Basic Incomes.

"The message is: 'We don't need you. But we are nice, so we'll take care of you.'"

"Snapchat pioneered Stories, the popular feature where users create and share ephemeral posts that disappear within 24 hours," reports Business Insider. "And now, it's taking them everywhere." Users are now able to share their Stories on third-party partner apps like Tinder -- and Snap is also sharing its Bitmoji's with Venmo and Fitbit.

TechCrunch reports: For 2.5 years, Snapchat foolishly tried to take the high road versus Facebook, with Evan Spiegel claiming "Our values are hard to copy". That inaction allowed Zuckerberg to accrue over 1 billion daily Stories users across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook compared to Snapchat's 186 million total daily users. Meanwhile, the whole tech industry scrambled to build knock-offs of Snap's vision of an ephemeral, visual future.

But Snapchat's new strategy is a rallying call for the rest of the social web that's scared of being squashed beneath Facebook's boot. It rearranges the adage of "if you can't beat them, join them" into "to beat them, join us". As a unified front, Snap's partners get the infrastructure they need to focus on what differentiates them, while Snapchat gains the reach and entrenchment necessary to weather the war. Snapchat's plan is to let other apps embed the best parts of it rather than building their own half-rate copies. Why reinvent the wheel of Stories, Bitmoji, and ads when you can reuse the original?

A high-ranking Snap executive told me on background that this is indeed the strategy. If it's going to invent these products, and others want something similar, it's smarter to enable and partly control the Snapchatification than to try to ignore it. Otherwise, Facebook might be the one to platform-tize what Snap inspired everyone to want.
The article concludes that Snap "needs all the help it can get if the underdog is going to carve out a substantial and sustainable piece of social networking."

x_t0ken_407 quotes BleepingComputer: A HTML standard called hyperlink auditing that allows sites to track link clicks is enabled by default on Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Microsoft Edge, but will soon have no way to disable it. As it is considered a privacy risk, browsers previously allowed you to disable this feature. Now they are going in the opposite direction.

Hyperlink auditing is an HTML standard that allows the creation of special links that ping back to a specified URL when they are clicked on. These pings are done in the form of a POST request to the specified web page that can then examine the request headers to see what page the link was clicked on.
The article concludes that "Firefox and Brave win the award" for people who want this click-tracking capability disabled -- since "only Brave and Firefox currently disable it by default, and do not appear to have any plans on enabling it in the future."

After their Instagram accounts were hijacked, two different users say they contacted Instagram ten times -- and even proved their identity by submitting selfies -- but received no response.

And one Silicon Valley newspaper points out that If your account is hijacked at Instagram, Google, Facebook, or Twitter, "there's nobody to call... your options are limited to submitting an automated online form and hoping an actual human being gets back to you." In his book "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe," longtime Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee criticized tech companies' approach to user service: "The customer service department is reserved for advertisers. Users are the product, at best, so there is no one for them to call." That's by design at most companies that offer free online services. In "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59," a 2011 book by Douglas Edwards, he wrote that as Google was beginning to grow, co-founder Sergey Brin asked, "Why do we need to answer user email anyway?"

Problems have multiplied as the companies' user bases have skyrocketed. Instagram cited its scale (1 billion users, a spokeswoman pointed out) as one reason all user questions are routed first to an automated system. Facebook, Twitter and Google said they use a combination of humans and automation -- but mostly automation, and in Google's case, forums made up of other users -- to respond to users' concerns. A Google spokesman said the company focuses on making sure user accounts don't get hacked in the first place...
One woman discovered her Instagram account had been hijacked and was now posting pornography. "My grandma and cousins are going to block me..." she complained in a tweet, adding "Thanks for nothing!" And the article also cites another woman in California who says she lost access to more than 600 photos she'd posted on Instagram -- only half of which were backed up. Her response? She created a new Instagram account, this one with two-factor authentication, "and plans to change her password more often."

James Plouffe, a lead security architect at a Silicon Valley security software company, also suggests that if you ever do regain access to a hijacked account, "check the account recovery procedures to make sure they're yours, not your attacker's!"

This week the BBC reported on teenaged "hackers dragged from a world of crime to fight for the other side" at "a fairly ordinary looking cyber-security company" in southwest England. Bruce66423 shared their report: Bluescreen employs hackers the authorities have deemed worthy of a second chance, who pit their wits against some of the anonymous online criminals they used to see as brothers in arms... Bluescreen IT has a direct link with the police to find hackers in need of direction. These are young men who have been accused of serious crimes, but instead of being taken through the criminal justice system, they've been given a second chance. About 15 people work in the Security Operations Centre, a handful of whom have been referred to the company as hackers who aren't malicious in nature and are deemed capable of reform...

There's a relaxed atmosphere when you walk into the Security Operations Centre, but it's serious work. Three monitors on the wall detail which of Bluescreen's clients are being attacked, and how serious the threat is. The clients, mostly smaller and medium-sized businesses from around the South West, are given codenames like "Black Mamba" or "Green Starfish" -- usually a colour and an animal... Bluescreen sees itself as a place to develop young people, give them a second chance, and be a haven for those with nowhere else to go. "It makes me really proud when they achieve industry-recognised qualifications," said the company's chief operating officer, Richard Cashmore.
A 16-year-old named Jack stole personal information from about 1,000 people. Years later, when he was 19, "the police sent five squad cars, a tech team and a riot van to his home.... Another employee, Cameron, was arrested on his way to school when he was just 14 years old. "Officers from the National Crime Agency had planned the sting so that Cameron would be out of the house, and unable to destroy his hard drives in the event he heard them coming."

As "apprentices" they start at £650 a month, reports the BBC, but "after five years of experience they could easily be earning close to £50,000 a year."

An anonymous reader quotes Variety: The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching a consumer law investigation into video game companies Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo over some of their business practices, it announced on Friday.

The CMA is concerned about whether or not some of the companies' practices are legal, including their use of auto-renewals for subscription services like Xbox Live, PlayStation Plus, and Nintendo Switch Online. It's also looking into their cancellation and refund policies and their terms and conditions. It said it's written to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft requesting information on their online gaming contracts and it's calling on people who use these services to tell the CMA about their experiences.

Long-time Slashdot reader frank249 brings some news from Diana Dragomir, a Hubble Fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research: Diana Dragomir tweeted that the MOST Telescope "can no longer be powered up. It's had a long life, overshooting its planned one-year lifespan by a factor of 15!"

The MOST Space Telescope (which stands for Microvariability and Oscillation of Stars) was launched into space in 2003. It was the first Canadian scientific satellite in orbit in 33 years, and it is the first space telescope to be entirely designed and built in Canada. About the size and shape of a large suitcase, the satellite weighs only 54 kilograms and is equipped with an ultra high precision telescope that measures only 15 centimetres in diameter (thus the nickname "humble space telescope").

Despite its diminutive size, it is [was?] ten times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope in detecting the minuscule variations in a star's luminosity caused by vibrations that shake its surface.
Interestingly, when the Most telescope first launched back in 2003 -- it was the same long-time Slashdot reader frank249 who submitted the story.