Slashdot Mirror

Sergey Bratus, Research Associate Professor of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, and Anna Shubina, Post-doctoral Associate in Computer Science, Dartmouth College write: The real issue is that today's web-based email systems are electronic minefields filled with demands and enticements to click and engage in an increasingly responsive and interactive online experience. It's not just Gmail, Yahoo mail and similar services: Desktop-computer-based email programs like Outlook display messages in the same unsafe way. Simply put, safe email is plain-text email -- showing only the plain words of the message exactly as they arrived, without embedded links or images. Webmail is convenient for advertisers (and lets you write good-looking emails with images and nice fonts), but carries with it unnecessary -- and serious -- danger, because a webpage (or an email) can easily show one thing but do another. Returning email to its origins in plain text may seem radical, but it provides radically better security. Even the federal government's top cybersecurity experts have come to the startling, but important, conclusion that any person, organization or government serious about web security should return to plain-text email (PDF).

Shannon Liao reports via The Verge: If you're one of the millions affected by the Equifax breach, a chatbot can now help you sue Equifax in small claims court, potentially letting you avoid hiring a lawyer for advice. Even if you want to be part of the class action lawsuit against Equifax, you can still sue Equifax for negligence in small claims court using the DoNotPay bot and demand maximum damages. Maximum damages range between $2,500 in states like Rhode Island and Kentucky to $25,000 in Tennessee. The bot, which launched in all 50 states in July, is mainly known for helping with parking tickets. But with this new update, its creator, Joshua Browder, who was one of the 143 million affected by the breach, is tackling a much bigger target, with larger aspirations to match. He says, "I hope that my product will replace lawyers, and, with enough success, bankrupt Equifax."

Not that the bot helps you do anything you can't already do yourself, which is filling out a bunch of forms -- you still have to serve them yourself. Unfortunately, the chatbot can't show up in court a few weeks later to argue your case for you either. To add to the headache, small claims court rules differ from state to state. For instance, in California, a person needs to demand payment from Equifax or explain why they haven't demanded payment before filing the form.

Ina Fried, writing for Axios: If you want to know why virtual reality hasn't taken off, you might want to blame our addiction to smartphones. Why? While the power of VR is to be transported into an immersive experience, consumers will demand a lot out of something that makes them give up Twitter and Facebook, even for a few minutes. One perspective: "It has to be a really compelling reason to get you to give up all that," Shauna Heller, a former Oculus worker who now consults on VR projects, said Thursday at the Mobile Future Forward conference near Seattle. "There aren't just a ton of those reasons just yet."

Google announced in a blog post today that the Google Drive app for desktop will be shut down. The Verge reports: Support will be cut off on December 11th and the app will shut down completely on March 12th, 2018. Users who are still running the Drive app will start seeing notifications in October that it's "going away," and the company will steer customers towards one of two replacements depending on whether they're a consumer or business user. Google Drive the service isn't going anywhere. You can still access it from the web, smartphone apps, and either of the software options mentioned below. Google now has two fairly new software tools for backing up your data and/or accessing files in the cloud. There's Backup and Sync, the all-encompassing consumer app that replaces both the standalone Google Drive and Google Photos Uploader apps. It offers essentially the same functionality as Drive and works much the same way. And on the enterprise side, Google has rolled out Drive File Streamer, which saves space on your local drive while providing access to "all of your Google Drive files on demand, directly from your computer."

New submitter mirandakatz writes: Katie Hafner has spent the last 23 days in rehab. Not for alcoholism or gambling, but for a self-inflicted case of episodic partial attention thanks to her iPhone. On Backchannel, Hafner writes about the detrimental effect the constant stream of pings has had on her, and how her life has come to resemble a computer screen. "I sense a constant agitation when I'm doing something," she says, "as if there is something else out there, beckoning -- demanding -- my attention. And nothing needs to be deferred." "I blame electronics for my affliction," writes Hafner, who says the devices in her life "teem with squirrels." "If I pick up my iPhone to send a text, damned if I don't get knocked off task within a couple of seconds by an alert about Trump's latest tweet. And my guess is that if you have allowed your mind to be as tyrannized by the demands of your devices as I have, you too suffer to some degree from this condition."

Hafner goes on to describe her symptoms of "episodic partial attention" and provide potential fixes for it: "There are the obvious fixes. Address the electronics first: Silence the phone as well as all alerts on your computer, and you automatically banish two squirrels. But how do you shut down the micro-distractions that dangle everywhere in your physical world, their bushy gray tails twitching seductively? My therapy, of my own devising, consists of serial mono-tasking with a big dose of mindful intent, or intentional mindfulness -- which is really just good, old-fashioned paying attention. At first, I took the tiniest of steps. I celebrated the buttoning of a blouse without stopping to apply the hand cream I spotted on the dresser as if I had gotten into Harvard. Each task I took on -- however mundane -- I had to first announce, quietly, to myself. I made myself vow that I would work on that task and only that task until it was finished. Like a stroke patient relearning how to move an arm, I told myself not that I was making the entire bed (too overwhelming), but that I had a series of steps to perform: first the top sheet, then the blankets, then the comforter, then the pillows. Emptying the dishwasher became my Waterloo. Putting dishes away takes time, and it's tedious. Perhaps the greatest challenge lies in the fact that the job requires repeated kitchen crossings. There are squirrels everywhere, none more treacherous than the siren song that is my iPhone."

The American Chemical Society (ACS), a leading source of academic publications in the field of chemistry, accused Sci-Hub of mass copyright infringement and is demanding $4.8 million in piracy damages. "Sci-Hub was made aware of the legal proceedings but did not appear in court," reports Torrent Freak. "As a result, a default was entered against the site, and a few days ago ACS specified its demands, which include $4.8 million in piracy damages." The complaint comes soon after the pirate site was ordered to pay $15 million in piracy damages to academic publisher Elsevier. From the report: "Here, ACS seeks a judgment against Sci-Hub in the amount of $4,800,000 -- which is based on infringement of a representative sample of publications containing the ACS Copyrighted Works multiplied by the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each publication," they write. "Sci-Hub's unabashed flouting of U.S. Copyright laws merits a strong deterrent. This Court has awarded a copyright holder maximum statutory damages where the defendant's actions were "clearly willful' and maximum damages were necessary to 'deter similar actors in the future.'" The publisher notes that the maximum statutory damages are only requested for 32 of its 9,000 registered works. This still adds up to a significant sum of money, of course, but that is needed as a deterrent, ACS claims.

Although the deterrent effect may sound plausible in most cases, another $4.8 million in debt is unlikely to worry Sci-Hub's owner, as she can't pay it off anyway. However, there's also a broad injunction on the table that may be more of a concern. The requested injunction prohibits Sci-Hub's owner to continue her work on the site. In addition, it also bars a wide range of other service providers from assisting others to access it. Specifically, it restrains "any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, to cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Defendant Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to [ACS's works]."

Companies must tell employees in advance if their work email accounts are being monitored and such checks must not unduly infringe workers' privacy, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on Tuesday. From a report: In a judgment in the case of a man fired 10 years ago for using a work messaging account to communicate with his family, the judges found that Romanian courts failed to protect Bogdan Barbulescu's private correspondence because his employer had not given him prior notice it was monitoring his communications. Email privacy has become a hotly contested issue as more people use work addresses for personal correspondence even as employers demand the right to monitor email and computer usage to ensure staff use work email appropriately. Courts in general have sided with employers on this issue.

A jury has ruled that Nintendo must pay $10.1 million because its Wii and Wii U systems infringe a patent belonging to a Dallas medical motion-detection company. Ars Technica reports: iLife sued Nintendo (PDF) in 2013 after filing lawsuits against four other companies in 2012. The case went to a jury trial in Dallas, and yesterday the jury returned its verdict (PDF). They found that Nintendo infringed U.S. Patent No. 6,864,796, first filed in 1999, which describes "systems and methods for evaluating movement of a body relative to an environment." The patent drawings show a body-mounted motion detector that could detect falls in the elderly, which is the market that iLife was targeting, according to its now defunct website. The $10.1 million was less than 10 percent of what iLife's attorneys had been asking for. When the trial began in Dallas on August 21, Law360 reported that iLife lawyers asked the jury for a $144 million payout. That damage demand was based on a royalty of $4 per Wii unit, multiplied by 36 million systems sold in the six years before the lawsuit was filed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A South Carolina couple claims in a proposed federal class-action lawsuit (PDF) that Amazon sold defective eclipse-watching glasses that partially blinded them during the historic coast-to-coast solar eclipse on August 21. Corey Payne and fiance Kayla Harris say in their lawsuit that because of the eyewear Payne purchased from Amazon, the couple is now suffering from "blurriness, a central blind spot, increased sensitivity, changes in perception of color, and distorted vision." Amazon issued a recall of defective and perhaps counterfeit eclipse eyewear in an e-mail sent out to customers before the event. Payne said he did not receive the message. His suit seeks to represent others who were injured or may be injured from the eyewear purchased on Amazon. The alleged Tennessee-based maker of the glasses, American Paper Optics, is not named in the suit. The suit seeks funds "for medical monitoring" because "Plaintiffs and members of the proposed class have or will experience varying degrees of eye injury ranging from temporary discomfort to permanent blindness." The suit also demands unspecified monetary damages, punitive damages, and legal fees and costs.

In October, Kaspersky Labs was sued by a "do-nothing patent holder in East Texas who demanded a cash settlement before it would go away," reports Ars Technica. Today, founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky said his company has defeated five patent assertion entities, including the infamous claims from Lodsys, "a much-maligned patent holder that sent demand letters to small app developers." The patent-licensing company who sued Kaspersky Labs in October was not only defeated, but they ended up paying Kaspersky $5,000 to end the litigation. From the report: The patent-licensing company, Wetro Lan LLC, owned U.S. Patent No. 6,795,918, which essentially claimed an Internet firewall. The patent was filed in 2000 despite the fact that computer network firewalls date to the 1980s. The '918 patent was used in what the Electronic Frontier Foundation called an "outrageous trolling campaign," in which dozens of companies were sued out of Wetro Lan's "headquarters," a Plano office suite that it shared with several other firms that engage in what is pejoratively called "patent-trolling." Wetro Lan's complaints argued that a vast array of Internet routers and switches infringed its patent. Most companies sued by Wetro Lan apparently reached settlements within a short time, a likely indicator of low-value settlement demands. Not a single one of the cases even reached the claim construction phase. But Kaspersky wouldn't pay up. As claim construction approached, Kaspersky's lead lawyer Casey Kniser served discovery requests for Wetro Lan's other license agreements. He suspected the amounts were low. Wetro Lan's settlement demands kept dropping, down from its initial "amicable" demand of $60,000. Eventually, the demands reached $10,000 -- an amount that's extremely low in the world of patent litigation. Kniser tried to explain that it didn't matter how far the company dropped the demand. "Kaspersky won't pay these people even if it's a nickel," he said. Then Kniser took a new tack. "We said, actually, $10,000 is fine," said Kniser. "Why don't you pay us $10,000?" After some back-and-forth, Wetro Lan's lawyer agreed to pay Kaspersky $5,000 to end the litigation. Papers were filed Monday, and both sides have dropped their claims.

An anonymous reader writes: Starting next month, Best Buy will launch a free service where salespeople will come to your house to make recommendations about gadgets and services to try and sell you stuff. The service has been in testing in five markets and will be expanded to more cities around the U.S., according to the Associated Press. The Verge reports: "Best Buy has found that shoppers spend more money when at home than in store. CEO Hubert Joly says the in-house service is one way the company will open up 'latent' customer demand. Sales associates are responsible for promoting the service -- when customers ask about certain products, the salesperson will suggest an in-home visit. The topics discussed during the home visits usually involve recommendations for products and gadgets, and other services. Best Buy says the salespeople working in the in-home service receive hourly rates, or a salary, and not commissions. The company already operates a 'Geek Squad' facility, but that's a paid service that offers repairs and installations."

Google will comply with Europe's demands to change the way it runs its shopping search service, a rare instance of the internet giant bowing to regulatory pressure to avoid more fines. From a report: The Alphabet unit faced a Tuesday deadline to tell the European Union how it planned to follow an order to stop discriminating against rival shopping search services in the region. A Google spokeswoman said it is sharing that plan with regulators before the deadline expires, but declined to comment further. The EU fined Google a record 2.4 billion euros ($2.7 billion) in late June for breaking antitrust rules by skewing its general search results to unfairly favor its own shopping service over rival sites. The company had 60 days to propose how it would "stop its illegal content" and 90 days to make changes to how the company displays shopping results when users search for a product. Those changes need to be put in place by Sept. 28 to stave off a risk that the EU could fine the company 5 percent of daily revenue for each day it fails to comply. "The obligation to comply is fully Google's responsibility," the European Commission said in an emailed statement, without elaborating on what the company must do to comply.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Mic, a website aimed at millennials, used to employ 40 writers and editors producing articles on topics like "celebrating beauty" and "strong women." Ten were let go this month, with most in the revamped newsroom of 63 now focused on making videos for places like Facebook. Critics have called such moves "100 percent cynical" and out of sync with audience demand. Yet Americans are watching more video snippets online, either because they secretly like them or because they're getting harder to avoid. The growing audience for video, more valuable to advertisers than the space next to words, is causing websites to shift resources in what's become known across the industry as the pivot to video. Americans are expected to spend 81 minutes a day watching digital video in 2019, up from 61 minutes in 2015, according to projections by research firm eMarketer. Time spent reading a newspaper is expected to drop to 13 minutes a day from 16 minutes during that time. The question is whether those trends will sustain the growing number of outlets flooding social networks with video clips. Mic, a New York-based news site founded in 2011, was just the latest to fire writers when it announced its pivot to video this month. Dozens of writers and editors have also been laid off this summer at news outlets like Vocativ, Fox Sports, Vice and MTV News. All of the moves were tied in part to focusing more resources on making videos. Publishers are heading in this direction even though polls show consumers find video ads more irritating than TV commercials. Google and Apple are testing features that let you mute websites with auto-play videos or block them entirely. More young Americans prefer reading the news than watching it, according to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center. But many publishers have little choice.

Microsoft has said it's ready to have a "conversation" with any development team that wants to feature crossplay support on consoles and PC. From a report: Mike Ybarra, vice president of Xbox, told VG247 that it's happy to talk to the likes of Valve and Nintendo when it comes to getting multiplayer games working across multiple platforms, not just between Xbox One and Windows. "It's more about gamer choice, more about making an IP on our platform last longer. I don't care about where they play, I just want people to have fun playing games because that's just better for the industry," said Ybarra. "The demands of consumers and developers have changed," he continued. "People are like, 'we want all of our gamers in one multiplayer pool together, playing.' "We totally agree with that. If any developer wants to have that conversation... Valve is right down the street from us, Nintendo is too -- they're like a block from us. We're having these discussions as developers come up, and we're completely open to that."

An anonymous reader shares a new crowdfunding site built on open source principles to "remove the money element from project creation" so creators "don't have to take extreme actions such as quitting their jobs or compromising on their ideas because of investor demands. Because of the nature of crowdsourcer.io projects, project creators can remain as ambitious as funded projects and get all the contributors they need to make their idea a reality."

From the site: Crowdsourcer.io is an alternative crowd sourcing platform that allows developers and designers alike to create or join in on software related projects, build up their contribution and earn an income from the final product. Think of Crowdsourcer.io as something between open source software creation and Kickstarter start ups, a new crowd sourcing alternative, in its purest form"
The site's creator recently answered questions on Reddit, saying they'd spent years fine-tuning the idea, and writing that "It's really focussed on people who don't want to quit their job to form their own software company, and don't want to become embroiled in debt or other financing." A note at the bottom of the site adds that "Crowdsourcer.io is young. We want your ideas!"

As in past years, "Open source is professionalizing, and employers are seeking staff with demonstrable skills," says the executive director of the Linux Foundation, describing the results of a new study with Dice.com. An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: According to the two groups' 2017 Open Source Jobs Survey and Report, "Not only do 89 percent of hiring managers report difficulty in finding qualified talent for open source roles, but 58 percent report needing to hire more open source professionals in the next six months than in the six months prior"... Seventy percent of employers, up from 66 percent in 2016, are hunting for workers with cloud experience. Web technologies placed second, with 67 percent of hiring managers hunting for workers with JavaScript and related skills. This is up five percent from last year's 62 percent. The demand for Linux talent remains strong. Sixty-five percent of hiring managers are looking for Linux experts. That's down slightly from 2016's 71 percent.
The three most common positions that they're looking to fill are developer, DevOps engineer, and systems administrator, according to the study, and "a growing number of companies (60 percent) are looking for full-time hires, compared with 53 percent last year.

"Nearly half (47 percent) of companies will pay for employees to become open-source certified."

An anonymous reader writes: Neuralink, the startup co-founded by billionaire Elon Musk, has taken steps to sell as much as $100 million in stock to fund the development of technology that connects human brains with computers. The San Francisco-based company has already gotten $27 million in funding, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk said via Twitter on Friday that Neuralink isn't seeking outside investors. In June, Musk said Neuralink is a priority after much more demanding commitments to his automotive and rocket companies. "Boring Co. is maybe 2 percent of my time; Neuralink is 3 percent to 5 percent of my time; OpenAI is going to be a couple of percent; and then 90-plus percent is divided between SpaceX and Tesla," said Musk at the electric-car maker's annual shareholder meeting.

BrianFagioli writes: Thankfully, consumers are starting to wake up and become more aware of security and privacy, and some companies, such as Purism, are designing products to safeguard users. The company's laptops, for instance, run an open source Linux-based operating system, called "PureOS" with a focus on privacy. These machines even have hardware "kill switches" so you can physically disconnect a webcam or Wi-Fi card. Today, Purism announces that it is taking those same design philosophies and using them to build a new $599 smartphone called Librem 5. The planned phone will use the GNOME desktop environment and PureOS by default, but users can install different distros too. Sound good? Well you can help the company build it through crowdfunding. "Purism, the social purpose corporation which designs and produces popular privacy conscious hardware and software, has revealed its plans to build the world's first encrypted, open platform smartphone that will empower users to protect their digital identity in an increasingly unsafe mobile world. After 18 months of R&D to test hardware specifications and engage with one of the largest phone fabricators, Purism is opening a self-hosted crowdfunding campaign to gauge demand for the initial fabrication order and add the features most important to users," says Purism.

A large global agricultural company has joined Bill Gates and Richard Branson to invest in a nascent technology to make meat from self-producing animal cells. "Memphis Meats, which produces beef, chicken and duck directly from animal cells without raising and slaughtering livestock or poultry, raised $17 million from investors including Cargill, Gates and billionaire Richard Branson, according to a statement Tuesday on the San Francisco-based startup's website," reports Bloomberg. From the report: This is the latest move by an agricultural giant to respond to consumers, especially Millennials, who are rapidly leaving their mark on the U.S. food world. That's happening through surging demand for organic products, increasing focus on food that's considered sustainable and greater attention on animal treatment. Big poultry and livestock processors have started to take up alternatives to traditional meat. To date, Memphis Meats has raised $22 million, signaling a commitment to the "clean-meat movement," the company said.

After issuing a warrant to DreamHost for "all files" related to an anti-trump website, the Justice Department says it's scaling back a demand for information from hosting service DreamHost. The Verge reports: In a legal filing today, the Justice Department argues that the warrant was proper, but also says DreamHost has since brought up information that was previously "unknown." In light of that, it has offered to carve out information demanded in the warrant, specifically pledging to not request information like HTTP logs tied to IP addresses. The department says it is only looking for information related to criminal activity on the site, and says that "the government is focused on the use of the Website to organize, to plan, and to effect a criminal act -- that is, a riot." Peaceful protestors, the government argues, are not the targets of the warrant. The filing asks the court to proceed with the new, less burdensome request, which, apart from the carved-out sections, still requests "all records or other information, pertaining to the Account, including all files, databases, and database records stored by DreamHost in relation to that Account." It's unclear if DreamHost will continue to fight the new demand.