Slashdot Mirror

The rising cost of living in Silicon Valley is pushing startups out, the Economist reports, and re-focusing innovation in new cities around the country [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From the story: More Americans are leaving the Valley than moving to it. In 2017 several counties in the area saw their largest combined domestic outward migrations in around a decade. In a recent survey by the Bay Area Council, a think-tank, 46% of Bay Area residents said they planned to leave in "the next few years," up from 34% in 2016. This is not just a case of people of more modest means being pushed out by carpet-bagging techies. At this year's "FOO camp," a freewheeling annual gathering of hackers and others, a session called "Should I/you leave the Bay Area?" saw a strong turnout. Participants shared their gripes about the high cost of living, bad traffic and a "toxic" culture obsessed with money.

New submitter Zarhan writes: Earlier this summer, European Commission conducted a poll on whether EU citizens would like to abolish adjusting their clocks twice a year. The results are now in: 80% of the respondents want to get rid of the changes every spring and autumn. EU Commission is planning to follow through and abolish the practice. In EU, individual countries decide what timezone they belong in, but the clock adjustment is an EU-level decision. The recommendation for now is to stick to summer time year-round, although individual countries will make those decisions. More from DW. The changes are known to affect sleep patterns and causes loss in productivity and even heart attacks, especially when you lose one hour of sleep during the spring change. "I will recommend to the commission that, if you ask the citizens, then you have to do what the citizens say," said Jean-Claude Juncker, the commission's president. "We will decide on this today, and then it will be the turn of the member states and the European parliament."

Starting October 2nd, Office 365 Home users will no longer be restricted to 10 devices across five users and Personal subscribers will no longer have a limit of one computer and one tablet. The catch is that you can only stay signed in on five devices at once. Engadget reports: Meanwhile, Home users can let another person use the productivity suite through their account, with Microsoft bumping up the number of licenses per subscriber from five to six. Each user has access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote, along with 1TB of individual storage. Microsoft is also integrating Home subscriptions with its family service, so you can automatically share your Office 365 plan with people you've set up as family members. Elsewhere, you'll manage your subscription from within your Microsoft account settings from now on.

Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has made ambitious claims that the nation's petro cryptocurrency is backed by 5 billion barrels of petroleum reserves. But when reporters of Reuters conducted a months-long investigation, they found that petro is getting little to no traction in the nation or elsewhere. Reuters: Located in an isolated savanna in the center of the country, Atapirire is the only town in an area the government says is brimming with 5 billion barrels of petroleum. Venezuela has pledged those reserves as backing for a digital currency dubbed the "petro," which Maduro launched in February. This month he vowed it would be the cornerstone of a recovery plan for the crisis-stricken nation. But Atapirire residents say they have seen no efforts by the government to tap those reserves. And they have little confidence that their struggling village has a front-row seat to a revolution in finance. "There is no sign of that petro here," said homemaker Igdalia Diaz. She launched into a diatribe about her town's crumbling school, pitted roads, frequent blackouts and perpetually hungry citizens.

It turns out that Venezuela's petro is hard to spot almost anywhere. Over a period of four months, Reuters spoke with a dozen experts on cryptocurrencies and oil-field valuation, traveled to the site of the pledged oil reserves and scoured the coin's digital transaction records in an effort to learn more. The hunt turned up little evidence of a thriving petro trade. The coin is not sold on any major cryptocurrency exchange. No shops are known to accept it.

More than a dozen people who work near Waymo's office in Chandler, Arizona, have complained about the self-driving cars to The Information. "One women said that she almost hit one of the company's minivans because it suddenly stopped while trying to make a right turn, while another man said that he gets so frustrated waiting for the cars to cross the intersection that he has illegally driven around them," reports CNBC. From the report: The anecdotes highlight how challenging it can be for self-driving cars, which are programmed to drive conservatively, to master situations that human drivers can handle with relative ease -- like merging or finding a gap in traffic to make a turn. Waymo has been testing its vehicles in the Phoenix suburbs for little more than a year and is widely seen as the furthest along in the self-driving car space, but its safety drivers have to take control of the vehicles regularly, people with direct knowledge of the issues tell The Information.

A Waymo spokesperson said its cars are "continually learning" and that "safety remains its highest priority" during testing. The spokesperson also said that Waymo is using feedback from its early rider program to improve its technology, though it declined to comment specifically on the intersection complaints mentioned in The Information story. The company has previously said that it plans to launch a commercial self-driving taxi service before the end of the year, but that its service will still include a Waymo employee in each car as a "chaperone."

Facebook says it is aiming to buy renewable energy to cover 100 percent of its electricity use by the end of 2020, joining companies such as Citigroup and Ikea in setting that deadline for achieving its goal. From a report: By 2020, Facebook plans to power its global operations with 100% renewable energy, and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 75%. It's the next step in ramping up the company's work to move to renewables over the last several years. "There's the expectation that we have as a company that we think this is good for communities and this is good for the world as a whole, but it's also good business sense," says Bobby Hollis, the company's head of global energy. "We really integrate this into our entire business planning process to make sure that we go into places where renewables make sense." In 2017, the company's carbon footprint was 979,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent -- roughly as much as the emissions from more than 100,000 homes, according to an EPA calculator. The company's data centers, which were supporting the data of 2.1 billion people a month by the end of 2017, account for nearly two-thirds of that footprint (other business activities, including construction and employee commutes and travel, account for 38%).

Last week, at a tiny airport in the dusty flatlands east of San Francisco, a red-and-white helicopter lifted gently into the air, hovering a few feet over the tarmac. It looked like any other helicopter, except for the small black cube attached to its nose. From a report: Local officials spent the week testing this aircraft for a new emergency service, due for launch in January, that will respond to 911 calls via the air. But as this helicopter moves police officers and medical workers over the San Joaquin Valley, it will feed a more ambitious project. That black cube is part of a growing effort to build small passenger aircraft that can fly on their own. Today, the helicopter is flown by seasoned pilots. But the new emergency service will be operated by SkyRyse, a Silicon Valley start-up that intends to augment small helicopters and other passenger aircraft with hardware and software that allow for autonomous flight, leaning on many of the same technologies that power driverless cars. These include the 360-degree cameras and radar sensors built into the nose of the aircraft.

"There are many things that must come to fruition before autonomous aircraft start flying people," said Mark Groden, a co-founder and the chief executive of SkyRyse. "But we are developing the technology that can take us there." Sikorsky, a subsidiary of the defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and Xwing, another Silicon Valley start-up, are fashioning similar technology. Others, including Aurora, a company now owned by Boeing, are exploring autonomous flight as they build a new kind of electrical aircraft for "flying taxi services." The initial business plan for Uber's air taxi service, which it hopes to start in five to 10 years, said it would eventually remove pilots from the aircraft.

Amazon is making an even bigger play for the television advertising market with a planned launch of an ad-supported video service specifically for Fire TV device owners, according to a report today from The Information. From a report: The service, which could be called Free Dive, is said to be very close in concept to the Roku Channel, an ad-supported free video service for Roku streaming devices and smart TVs that's helped the device maker grow its platform business. These services tend to offer a random mix of older catalog content, but they're free to stream. The Information estimates Amazon has around 48 million customers who own a Fire TV device, either in the form of a HDMI stick, a more powerful and 4K-equipped HDMI dongle, and the new, Alexa-enabled Fire Cube.

More than a dozen tech NGOs and human rights groups have issued an open letter calling on Google to stop work on a censored search engine project in China. From a report: Organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now and others released the letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday, saying the tech giant's plans to release a censored version of its search engine app to users in China represent an "alarming capitulation by Google on human rights." The project, dubbed Dragonfly, was first reported by The Intercept earlier this month. According to audio of a staff meeting, obtained by the New York Times, Pichai said that "if we were to do our mission well, we are to think seriously about how to do more in China. However, he went on to say that Google was "not close to launching a search product in China."

The research arm of Y Combinator plans to begin a study on universal basic income next year in which it will give unconditional cash payments to 3,000 participants. From a report: The test is partially intended to see if receiving routine payments will quell anxieties around losing jobs to automation. As Wired reports, the study will be called "Making Ends Meet." Under the plan, a thousand people would get $1,000 per month and the other 2,000 would get $50 per month to serve as a control group. Some of the participants would receive monthly payments for three years and some would get paid every month for five years. Sam Altman, CEO of Y Combinator, a highly successful startup accelerator that helped give rise to companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit, announced the company's plans to research universal basic income -- or as he put it, "giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached" -- in a January 2016 blog post. Altman explained his belief that universal basic income will eventually be implemented across the nation as more jobs are automated and "massive new wealth gets created."

Next month, Apple plans to introduce three new phones in September -- an updated iPhone X, a bigger phone and a successor to the iPhone 8 with the iPhone X design, Bloomberg reports. The updated iPhone X could be considered as an "S upgrade" with a better system-on-a-chip and better cameras. The phone itself could look exactly the same as the iPhone X you can buy today. From the report: There'll be a new high-end iPhone, internally dubbed D33, with a display that measures about 6.5-inch diagonally, according to the people familiar with the matter. That would make it the largest iPhone by far and one of the biggest mainstream phones on the market. It will continue to have a glass back with stainless steel edges and dual cameras on the back. The big difference on the software side will be the ability to view content side-by-side in apps like Mail and Calendar. It will be Apple's second phone with a crisper organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, screen.

[...] Apple also plans an upgrade to the current iPhone X with a 5.8-inch OLED screen, which is internally dubbed D32, the people said. The main changes to the new OLED iPhones will be to processing speed and the camera, according to the people familiar with the devices. [...] Perhaps the most significant phone will be a new, cheaper device destined to replace the iPhone 8. Codenamed N84, it will look like the iPhone X, but include a larger near 6.1-inch screen, come in multiple colors, and sport aluminum edges instead of the iPhone X's stainless steel casing. It will also have a cheaper LCD screen instead of an OLED panel to keep costs down. The cheaper version's aluminum edges won't necessarily be the same color as the colored glass back, simplifying production, one person familiar with the matter said.

An anonymous reader writes: Verizon testified Friday before a California State Assembly committee about why its "throttling" of county firefighters was completely unrelated to net neutrality. Then they surprised everyone by announcing that they were lifting all data caps on public safety workers with unlimited data plans, including federal justice agencies like the FBI, CIA and Secret Service.

Verizon claimed this was completely unrelated to the fact that 13 California Congressmen are now demanding that the FTC investigate Verizon's throttling of firefighters battling California's 290,692-acre wildfire. "It is unacceptable for communications providers to deceive their customers," the Congressmen wrote, "but when the consumer in question is a government entity tasked with fire and emergency services, we can't afford to wait a moment longer."
Meanwhile, the California Professional Firefighters, which represents more than 30,000 firefighters and emergency personnel, came out in support of a strict new California law that restores net neutrality provisions, saying their group had "come to conclude that if net neutrality is not restored, the effect could be disastrous to the public's safety."

One county fire chief even testified this was the third time in eight months they've been throttled by Verizon.

SpzToid quotes Vanity Fair: The controversy involves a plan to move all of the Defense Department's data -- classified and unclassified -- on to the cloud. The information is currently strewn across some 400 centers, and the Pentagon's top brass believes that consolidating it into one cloud-based system, the way the CIA did in 2013, will make it more secure and accessible. That's why, on July 26, the Defense Department issued a request for proposals called JEDI, short for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. Whoever winds up landing the winner-take-all contract will be awarded $10 billion -- instantly becoming one of America's biggest federal contractors.

But when JEDI was issued, on the day Congress recessed for the summer, the deal appeared to be rigged in favor of a single provider: Amazon. According to insiders familiar with the 1,375-page request for proposal, the language contains a host of technical stipulations that only Amazon can meet, making it hard for other leading cloud-services providers to win -- or even apply for -- the contract. One provision, for instance, stipulates that bidders must already generate more than $2 billion a year in commercial cloud revenues -- a "bigger is better" requirement that rules out all but a few of Amazon's rivals... Much of the language of JEDI, in fact, seems specifically tailored for Jeff Bezos. "Everybody immediately knew that it was for Amazon," says a rival bidder who asked not to be named. To even make a bid, a provider must maintain a distance of at least 150 miles between its data centers and provide "32 GB of RAM" -- specifications that few providers other than Amazon can meet.
The article also cites last year's "so-called Amazon amendment, a provision buried in a defense authorization bill that will establish Amazon as the go-to portal for every online purchase the government makes -- some $53 billion every year." And it also notes that Amazon employs more than 100 lobbyists in Washington, and "has spent $67 million on lobbying since 2000 -- including more this year than Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo combined."

The article says this controversy may be "a sign of how tech giants and Silicon Valley tycoons will dominate Washington for generations to come."

Slashdot reader nolaguy quotes the New York Post: Movie subscription service MoviePass has pulled the plug on annual subscriptions, telling those subscribers that they will have to adhere to the same terms as monthly subscribers. The service made the announcement Friday in an email to those members and offered them prorated refunds if they want to cancel their annual memberships.... Until Friday's announcement, subscribers to the $89 annual plans had been able to see a movie a day.
CNET reports that MoviePass "is now forcing you onto its monthly three-movie-a-month plan -- effective immediately...and you'll receive up to a $5.00 discount on any additional movie tickets purchased." They're plannning to apply the $89 annual fees toward the $9.95 monthly fees, but.... To add insult to injury, MoviePass says you'll only have until Aug. 31 -- a week from today -- if you want to get some of your money back in the form of a prorated refund, which you can only get by canceling your plan. And just to make things more ridiculous, MoviePass is preying on your FOMO by saying that if you do take the refund, you won't be able to sign up for MoviePass again for nine months.
CNET's article ends with a link to their list of "the 11 times that MoviePass altered the deal," adding "This is getting sad. And a little shady."

Microsoft launched its new Surface Go device earlier this month with an Intel Pentium Gold processor inside. It's been one of the main focus points for discussions around performance and mobility for this 10-inch Surface, and lots of people have wondered why Microsoft didn't opt for Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors and Windows on ARM. The Verge: Paul Thurrott reports that Microsoft wanted to use an ARM processor for the Surface Go, but that Intel intervened. Intel reportedly "petitioned Microsoft heavily" to use its Pentium Gold processors instead of ARM ones. It's not clear why Microsoft didn't push ahead with its ARM plans for Surface Go, but in my own experience the latest Snapdragon chips simply don't have the performance and compatibility to match Intel on laptops just yet.

Lobby groups on behalf of Comcast and Charter are asking the FTC to preempt state and local broadband regulations. "In comments filed this week, cable industry lobby group NCTA told the FTC that 'there is plainly no reasonable basis in today's marketplace for singling out ISPs for unique regulatory burdens,'" reports Ars Technica. "The FTC should let 'market forces' prevent bad behavior and avoid specific net neutrality or privacy regulation for the broadband industry, the lobby group said." From the report: The comments were filed in an FTC proceeding titled "Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century." The FTC is planning to hold hearings on the communications industry, the FTC's enforcement processes, and other competition and consumer protection topics. "The FTC should ensure that the Internet is subject to uniform, consistent federal regulations, including by issuing guidance explicitly setting forth that inconsistent state and local requirements are preempted," the NCTA wrote.

The FTC should endorse and reinforce the FCC's ruling by issuing guidance to state attorneys general and consumer protection authorities reaffirming that they are bound by FCC and FTC precedent in this arena," NCTA argued. NCTA's filing focused mostly on potential privacy regulation, saying that the FCC should continue its "technology-neutral approach to privacy and data security." Net neutrality concerns are best addressed by existing antitrust laws, the filing said.

Vice President Mike Pence spoke at NASA's Johnson Space Center on Thursday about the agency's plans to send humans back to the moon for the first time in almost half a century and eventually on to Mars. He said: The next Americans who set foot on the Moon will start their journey by stepping through the NASA's Orion hatch. And this extraordinary spacecraft will one day bridge the gap between our planet and the next.

The International Space Station has been an unqualified success. Soon and very soon American astronauts will return to space on American rockets launched from American soil. America will not ever abandon the critical domain of space, we will open the way for innovators and development and we will lead once again in human exploration. Our administration is working tirelessly to put an American crew aboard the lunar orbital platform before the end of 2024. In a prepared statement, Pence added, "We're renewing our national commitment to discovery and exploration and write the next great chapter of our nation's journey into space. It's now the official policy of the US that we'll return to the Moon, put Americans on Mars and once again explore the farthest depths of outer space."

An anonymous reader writes: I know PHP isn't to some devs liking, but chances are you know people who work with PHP or have sites that are built with it. PHP 5.6 and 7.0 are shortly coming to the end of the support period for security patches, so what plans have you made to migrate code and sites to newer platforms? With apparently huge numbers (80%) of sites still running PHP 5.6, there appears to be little industry acknowledgement of the issue. Is there a ticking PHP Time Bomb waiting to go off?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A fire department whose data was throttled by Verizon Wireless while it was fighting California's largest-ever wildfire has rejected Verizon's claim that the throttling was just a customer service error and "has nothing to do with net neutrality." The throttling "has everything to do with net neutrality," a Santa Clara County official said. Verizon yesterday acknowledged that it shouldn't have continued throttling Santa Clara County Fire Department's "unlimited" data service while the department was battling the Mendocino Complex Fire. Verizon said the department had chosen an unlimited data plan that gets throttled to speeds of 200kbps or 600kbps after using 25GB a month but that Verizon failed to follow its policy of "remov[ing] data speed restrictions when contacted in emergency situations." "This was a customer support mistake" and not a net neutrality issue, Verizon said. "Verizon's throttling has everything to do with net neutrality -- it shows that the ISPs will act in their economic interests, even at the expense of public safety," County Counsel James Williams said on behalf of the county and fire department. "That is exactly what the Trump Administration's repeal of net neutrality allows and encourages."

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: On August 30, a startup plans to add its "smart pavement" to an intersection in an industrial corner of Denver, Colorado. The company has encased assorted electronics within four slabs of concrete and will wedge those slabs into the road between a Pepsi Co. bottling plant and two parking lots. Integrated Roadways says its product, which can deduce the speed, weight, and direction of a vehicle from the basket of sensors buried in the pavement, will face its first real-world test at that discreet Denver junction. If this trial goes well, the startup "will replace 500 meters of pavement along a dangerous curve in Highway 285, just south of Denver, with its product in early 2019," reports IEEE Spectrum. The sensors will be able to detect when a driver careens off the road's edge and alert authorities. It even has the ability to prompt officials to reconfigure lanes to relieve congestion.