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Google employees based in the same office before the pandemic could see different changes in pay if they switch to working from home permanently, with long commuters hit harder, according to a company pay calculator seen by Reuters. From a report: It is an experiment taking place across Silicon Valley, which often sets trends for other large employers. Facebook and Twitter also cut pay for remote employees who move to less expensive areas, while smaller companies including Reddit and Zillow have shifted to location-agnostic pay models, citing advantages when it comes to hiring, retention and diversity. Alphabet's Google stands out in offering employees a calculator that allows them to see the effects of a move. But in practice, some remote employees, especially those who commute from long distances, could experience pay cuts without changing their address. "Our compensation packages have always been determined by location, and we always pay at the top of the local market based on where an employee works from," a Google spokesperson said, adding that pay will differ from city to city and state to state. One Google employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, typically commutes to the Seattle office from a nearby county and would likely see their pay cut by about 10% by working from home full-time, according estimates by the company's Work Location Tool launched in June.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung Electronics unveiled its latest high-end foldable smartphones on Wednesday with lower prices than last year's offerings in a push to expand foldable demand beyond niche devices. From a report: The tech giant priced its 5G-enabled Galaxy Z Fold3 with 7.6-inch main screen to start at $1,799.99 in the United States, and clamshell Galaxy Z Flip3 at $999.99 - down from the launch prices of last year's models at $1,999 and $1,380, respectively. The Galaxy Z Fold3 and Z Flip3 will launch on August 27 starting in markets such as the United States and Europe. "There's definitely demand for bigger screens as people consume more media content, and foldables are the only form that makes big screens very portable... the price hurdle is the issue," said Park Sung-soon, an analyst at Cape Investment & Securities. Foldable phones, with about 8.6 million units expected to be shipped this year, are expected to account for just 0.6% of estimated 1.447 billion smartphones to be shipped. However, that is more than double the 3 million foldables shipped in 2020, and Samsung will lead the market with over 88% market share, according to Counterpoint Research. Besides price drops that analysts said could help capture more demand in the United States and perhaps China, Samsung's foldable unveiled on Wednesday touted lighter, thinner and improved design, durability, and compatibility with a stylus, which could absorb users of Samsung's Galaxy Note phablets whose key feature is the "S Pen".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You may not have heard of "Corporate Memphis," but you've almost certainly seen it. From a report: The illustration style can be found in the trendiest direct-to-consumer subway ads, within the app you use to split restaurant tabs or on the 404 page that attempts to counter your frustration with cutesiness. In fact, Corporate Memphis has become so synonymous with tech marketing that some illustrators simply know it as the "tech aesthetic." But Corporate Memphis has also become a victim of its own success. The once-whimsical, fresh style now feels safe and antiseptic. More conspicuous iterations of it get roasted online, if they get noticed at all; one popular tweet asks, "Why does every website landing page look like this now?" Illustrators are just as often tired of Corporate Memphis, but tech companies continue to commission it. So why can't tech wean itself off of Corporate Memphis? Part of it has to do with the practical aesthetic considerations that gave rise to the style. But Corporate Memphis has primarily stuck around because tech executives continue to overlook the value of illustration, according to several of the illustrators interviewed for this story. Illustration work is increasingly awarded to the lowest bidder on gig platforms, using tools designed to standardize output. For the few companies that recognize the value of illustration, however, investing in creative talent has paid considerable dividends -- just not in ways that are easily measured.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Though you might assume children are the most tech-savvy generation out there, it turns out there's an area where they're just as behind as adults: passwords. From a report: National Institute of Standards and Technology released research on Wednesday showing that even though kids are taught best practices for creating passwords, they're not following them. NIST surveyed more than 1,500 children, ages 8 to 18, and found that, for example, 87% of high schoolers use the same password for everything. Depending on age group (45% of high schoolers versus 23% of elementary school kids), many share passwords with friends. Researchers suggested that those surveyed don't see password sharing as risky behavior, but rather a matter of building friendships and trust. "The end goal of this research is to better support children and provide recommendations that can be used to provide guidance to them, parents and educators," NIST researcher Yee-Yin Choong said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tim Bray, formerly at Amazon and Google, argues that too many popular consumer app have unexpectedly gotten worse in recent years. In an essay, where he has cited Apple's Photos and Movie apps, Economist app, and MLB as examples, he offers an explanation for why the quality of apps is getting worse: It's obvious. Every high-tech company has people called "Product Managers" (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said "This seems to be working pretty well, let's leave it the way it is." Because that's not bold. That's not visionary. That doesn't get you promoted. It is the dream of every PM to come up with a bold UX innovation that gets praise, and many believe the gospel that the software is better at figuring out what the customer wants than the customer is. And you get extra points these days for using ML. Also, any time you make any change to a popular product, you've imposed a retraining cost on its users. Unfortunately, in their evaluations, PMs consider the cost of customer retraining time to be zero.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After spending years battling over the Defense Department's $10 billion JEDI cloud services contract, Microsoft and Amazon are fighting over another government deal. Now it's the National Security Agency offering a contract that could pay up to $10 billion as it shifts away from on-premises servers to a commercial provider. However, as Washington Technology reported first, this time around, Amazon Web Services won the $10 billion contest, and it's Microsoft's turn to file a protest with the Government Accountability Office. Washington Technology reports that Microsoft's claim is the NSA didn't conduct a proper evaluation while considering a provider for its new project, code-named WildandStormy. In a statement to NextGov, an NSA spokesperson confirmed the award and protests, saying, "The Agency will respond to the protest in accordance with appropriate federal regulations." The NSA is pursuing a "Hybrid Compute Initiative" to meet its processing and analytical requirements while also holding onto intelligence data (although it might not need as much storage as it used to). AWS already holds many government cloud contracts, but the JEDI process revealed Microsoft as a formidable competitor.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The National Institutes of Health is giving a booster dose to 200 kidney transplant patients who did not have an immune response to the COVID-19 vaccine in a new trial that launched yesterday. From a report: Many transplant patients, who have to take immunosuppressant drugs to keep their bodies from rejecting a new organ, don't produce enough antibodies -- or don't produce antibodies at all -- after getting the COVID-19 vaccine. The study will check to see if a third shot of an mRNA vaccine, given on top of the normal two-shot regimen, will generate antibodies closer to the levels seen in healthy people. There are some indications that a third dose might help some people. In France, health officials started recommending in April that immunosuppressed patients get a third shot of the COVID-19 vaccine. Half of the patients who did not respond to two shots produced antibodies after the third, according to an analysis of 159 kidney transplant patients. The other half, though, still had no response. In Germany, one study of 48 transplant patients found that 40 percent who didn't respond to two doses had a response after the third. Two other trials looking at kidney transplant patients are also kicking off in Israel and Switzerland.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers have returned nearly half of the $600 million they stole in what's likely to be one of the biggest cryptocurrency thefts ever. From a report: The cybercriminals exploited a vulnerability in Poly Network, a platform that looks to connect different blockchains so that they can work together. Poly Network disclosed the attack Tuesday and asked to establish communication with the hackers, urging them to "return the hacked assets." A blockchain is a ledger of activities upon which various cryptocurrencies are based. Each digital coin has its own blockchain and they're different from each other. Poly Network claims to be able to make these various blockchains work with each other. Poly Network is a decentralized finance platform. DeFi is a broad term encompassing financial applications based on blockchain technology that looks to cut out intermediaries -- such as brokerages and exchanges. Hence, it's dubbed decentralized. Proponents say this can make financial applications such as lending or borrowing more efficient and cheaper. "The amount of money you hacked is the biggest in defi history," Poly Network said in a tweet. In a strange turn of events Wednesday, the hackers began returning some of the funds they stole. They sent a message to Poly Network embedded in a cryptocurrency transaction saying they were "ready to return" the funds. The DeFi platform responded requesting the money be sent to three crypto addresses. As of 7 a.m. London time, more than $4.8 million had been returned to the Poly Network addresses. By 11 a.m. ET, about $258 million had been sent back.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China signaled its push to regulate sweeping parts of the economy, which has jolted markets, will be deep and sustained over the next five years. From a report: In a statement late Wednesday published by the State Council, China said it will "actively" work on legislation in areas including national security, technological innovation as well as anti-monopoly, in order to improve the legal framework "much-needed for governing the country." Law enforcement will be strengthened in sectors ranging from food and drugs to education tutoring where people's immediate interests are at stake, the council said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WhatsApp users will finally be able to move their entire chat history between mobile operating systems -- something that's been one of users' biggest requests to date. From a report: The company today introduced a feature that will soon become available to users of both iOS and Android devices, allowing them to move their WhatsApp voice notes, photos, and conversations securely between devices when they switch between mobile operating systems. The feature WhatsApp introduced today works with Samsung devices and Samsung's own transfer tool, known as Smart Switch. Today, Smart Switch helps users transfer contacts, photos, music, messages, notes, calendars, and more to Samsung Galaxy devices. Now, it will transfer WhatsApp chat history, too. WhatsApp showed off the new tool at Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event, and announced Samsung's newest Galaxy foldable devices would get the feature first in the weeks to come. The feature will later roll out to Android more broadly. WhatsApp didn't say when iOS users would gain access.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo writes: Reaching herd immunity is "not a possibility" with the current Delta variant, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group has said. Giving evidence to MPs on Tuesday, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard said the fact that vaccines did not stop the spread of Covid meant reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population was "mythical." "The problem with this virus is [it is] not measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population," he told the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on coronavirus. "The Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated. And that does mean that anyone who's still unvaccinated at some point will meet the virus ... and we don't have anything that will [completely] stop that transmission." Although the existing vaccines are very effective at preventing serious Covid illness and death, they do not stop a fully vaccinated person from being infected by the virus that causes Covid-19. The concept of herd or population immunity relies on a large majority of a population gaining immunity -- either through vaccination or previous infection -- which, in turn, provides indirect protection from an infectious disease for the unvaccinated and those who have never been previously infected. Data from a recent React study conducted by Imperial College London suggests that fully vaccinated people aged 18 to 64 have about a 49% lower risk of being infected compared with unvaccinated people. The findings also indicated that fully vaccinated people were about half as likely to test positive after coming into contact with someone who had Covid (3.84%, down from 7.23%).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ron Miller, writing for TechCrunch: Most people probably don't realize just how much our devices are time driven, whether it's your phone, your laptop or a network server. For the most part, time keeping has been an esoteric chore, taken care of by a limited number of hardware manufacturers. While these devices served their purpose, a couple of Facebook engineers decided there had to be a better way. So they built a new more accurate time keeping device that fits on a PCI Express (PCIe) card, and contributed it to the Open Compute Project as an open source project. At a basic level, says Olag Obleukhov, a production engineer at Facebook, it's simply pinging this time-keeping server to make sure each device is reporting the same time. "Almost every single electronic device today uses NTP -- Network Time Synchronization Protocol -- which you have on your phone, on your watch, on your laptop, everywhere, and they all connect to these NTP servers where they just go and say, 'what time is it's and the NTP server provides the time," he explained. Before Facebook developed a new way of doing this, there were basically two ways to check the time. If you were a developer, you probably used something like Facebook.com as a time checking mechanism, but a company like Facebook, working at massive scale, needed something that worked even when there wasn't an internet connection. Companies running data centers have a hardware device called Stratum One, which is a big box that sits in the data center, and has no other job than acting as the time keeper. Because these time-keeping boxes were built by a handful of companies over years, they were solid and worked, but it was hard to get new features. What's more, companies like Facebook couldn't control the boxes because of their proprietary nature. Obleukhov and his colleague research scientist, Ahmad Byagowi began to attack the problem by looking for a way to create these devices by building a PCIe card with off-the-shelf parts that you could stick into any PC with an open slot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Researchers have demonstrated a method to create "master faces," computer generated faces that act like master keys for facial recognition systems, and can impersonate several identities with what the researchers claim is a high probability of success. In their paper (PDF), researchers at the Blavatnik School of Computer Science and the School of Electrical Engineering in Tel Aviv detail how they successfully created nine "master key" faces that are able to impersonate almost half the faces in a dataset of three leading face recognition systems. The researchers say their results show these master faces can successfully impersonate over 40 percent of the population in these systems without any additional information or data of the person they are identifying. The researchers tested their methods against three deep face recognition systems -- Dlib, FaceNet, and SphereFace. Lead author Ron Shmelkin told Motherboard that they used these systems because they are capable of recognizing "high-level semantic features" of the faces that are more sophisticated than just skin color or lighting effects. The researchers used a StyleGAN to generate the faces and then used an evolutionary algorithm and neural network to optimize and predict their success. The evolutionary strategy then creates iterations, or generations, of candidates of varying success rates. The researchers then used the algorithm to train a neural network, to classify the best candidates as the most promising ones. This is what teaches it to predict candidates' success and, in turn, direct the algorithm to generate better candidates with a higher probability of passing. The researchers even predict that their master faces could be animated using deepfake technology to bypass liveness detection, which is used to determine whether a biometric sample is real or fake.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

labloke11 shares a report from Science News: Windbreaks may sound like a counterintuitive idea for boosting the performance of a wind turbine. But physicists report that low walls that block wind could actually help wind farms produce more power. Scientists already knew that the output of a single wind turbine could be improved with a windbreak. While windbreaks slow wind speed close to the ground, above the height of the windbreak, wind speeds actually increase as air rushes over the top. But for large wind farms, there's a drawback. A windbreak's wake slows the flow of air as it travels farther through the rows of turbines. That could suggest that windbreaks would be a wash for wind farms with many turbines. But by striking a balance between these competing effects, windbreaks placed in front of each turbine can increase power output, new computer simulations suggest. It comes down to the windbreaks' dimensions. Squat, wide barriers are the way to go, according to a simulated wind farm with six rows of turbines. To optimize performance, windbreaks should be a tenth the height of the turbine and at least five times the width of the blades, physicists report July 30 in Physical Review Fluids. Such an arrangement could increase the total power by about 10 percent, the researchers found. That's the equivalent of adding an additional turbine, on average, for every 10 in a wind farm. In the simulations, the wind always came from the same direction, suggesting the technique might be useful in locations where wind tends to blow one way, such as coastal regions. Future studies could investigate how this technique might apply in places where wind direction varies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

omfglearntoplay shares a report from ScienceAlert: According to theory, if you smash two photons together hard enough, you can generate matter: an electron-positron pair, the conversion of light to mass as per Einstein's theory of special relativity. It's called the Breit-Wheeler process, first laid out by Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler in 1934, and we have very good reason to believe it would work. But direct observation of the pure phenomenon involving just two photons has remained elusive, mainly because the photons need to be extremely energetic (i.e. gamma rays) and we don't have the technology yet to build a gamma-ray laser. Now, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory say they've found a way around this stumbling block using the facility's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- resulting in a direct observation of the Breit-Wheeler process in action. The research has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is cooking up the first major Wear OS release since 2018, and Samsung is abandoning Tizen for smartwatches and going all-in on Wear OS with the Galaxy Watch 4. Last night, Samsung took the wraps off the main SoC for the Galaxy Watch 4, and compared to what Wear OS usually gets, Samsung is shipping a beast of an SoC. The "Samsung Exynos W920" will be a multi-generational leap in performance for Wear OS. Samsung says this is a 5 nm chip with two ARM Cortex A55 cores and an ARM Mali-G68 GPU. For the always-on display mode, there's an additional Cortex M55 CPU, which can keep the watch face ticking along while using minimal power. There's also an integrated LTE modem for on-the-go connectivity. Compared to Samsung's previous smartwatch chip, the Tizen-only Exynos 9110 (10 nm, 2x Cortex A53), the company is promising "around 20 percent" better CPU performance and "ten times better graphics performance." Remember that the Exynos 9110 is from 2018, so those comparative numbers are inflated, but at 5 nm, this is a more modern chip than Wear OS has ever seen. Wear OS has suffered for years at the hands of Qualcomm, which has been starving the ecosystem of quality SoCs for wearables. Most people's last experience with Wear OS is the Snapdragon Wear 2100 or 3100 SoCs, both of which were ancient Cortex A7 CPUs built on a 28 nm process. Qualcomm introduced a slightly more modern chip, the Wear 4100 in 2020 (a Cortex A53-based, 12 nm chip), but almost no manufacturers actually shipped that chip a year later, and we're still getting Wear 3100 launches today. Qualcomm's answer to Samsung's chip will be the Wear 5100, which isn't due until 2022. We should know more about Wear OS 3.0 tomorrow when Samsung holds its Aug. 11 "Unpacked" event. Not only are they expected to reveal the Galaxy Watch 4 and the big Wear OS revamp, but they're planning to launch at least two new foldable smartphones -- the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A key House of Representatives panel has pressed for a report to study the use of artificial intelligence to analyze prisoners' phone calls. "But prisoners' advocates and inmates' families say relying on AI to interpret communications opens up the system to mistakes, misunderstandings and racial bias," reports Reuters. From the report: The call for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to further explore the technology, to help prevent violent crime and suicide, accompanies an $81 billion-plus spending bill to fund the DOJ and other federal agencies in 2022 that the Appropriations Committee passed last month. The technology can automatically transcribe inmates' phone calls, analyzing their patterns of communication and flagging certain words or phrases, including slang, that officials pre-program into the system. A House Democratic aide said in an emailed statement they were encouraging the DOJ "to engage with stakeholders in the course of examining the feasibility of utilizing such a system." Several state and local facilities across the country have already started using the tech, including in Alabama, Georgia and New York. The House panel wants the DOJ to look into potentially leveraging the technology for federal use and to identify gaps or shortcomings in the information it produces. Privacy groups say the technology could amplify racial bias in the justice system and unfairly subject prisoners to unaccountable artificial intelligence. Proponents dispute such criticisms, saying the tech is a vital time-saving tool for law enforcement and does not target specific groups.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The National Security Agency has awarded a cloud computing contract worth up to $10 billion to Amazon, Nextgov reported Tuesday. The Hill reports: The contract, named "WildandStormy" according to protest filings obtained by the outlet, appears to be part of the NSA's attempts to modernize its repository for classified data. The award is being challenged by Microsoft, according to Government Accountability Office records. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that it is filing the protest "based on the decision." "We are exercising our legal rights and will do so carefully and responsibly," they added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MojoKid writes: AMD officially unveiled the Radeon RX 6600 XT in late July but the cards have officially launched today, aimed at 1080p gaming. In a review at HotHardware, PowerColor is offering both a high-end Radeon RX 6600 XT Red Devil and its somewhat more mainstream "Fighter" branded counterpart, for example. Whereas AMD's reference Radeon RX 6600 XT offers a Game clock up to 2359MHz and a Boost clock of 25895MHz, the PowerColor Red Devil peaks at 2428MHz (Game) and 2607MHz (Boost). Those higher GPU clocks result in higher compute performance and fillrate, etc., but the memory configuration and frequency are the same -- so in memory bandwidth constrained situations, performance won't be all that much different. Performance-wise, with most game titles that use traditional rasterization, the Radeon RX 6600 XT is clearly faster than the GeForce RTX 3060 and previous-gen cards like the Radeon RX 5700 XT or GeForce RTX 2060 Super. However, when you factor ray tracing into the equation, NVIDIA has a distinct and significant advantage still. The Radeon RX 6600 XT Fighter should sell for at or close to its $379 MSRP. PowerColor says that they should be readily available for gamers to purchase today.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A Twitter image-cropping algorithm prefers to show faces that are slimmer, younger and with lighter skin, a researcher has found. Bogdan Kulynyc won $3,500 in a Twitter-organized contest to find biases in its cropping algorithm. Earlier this year, Twitter's own research found the algorithm had a bias towards cropping out black faces. The "saliency algorithm" decided how images would be cropped in Twitter previews, before being clicked on to open at full size. But when two faces were in the same image, users discovered, the preview crop appeared to favor white faces, hiding the black faces until users clicked through. As a result the company revised how images were handled, saying cropping was best done by people. The "algorithmic-bias bounty competition" was launched in July -- a reference to the widespread practice of companies offering "bug bounties" for researchers who find flaws in code -- with the aim of uncovering other harmful biases. And Mr Kulynyc, a graduate student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne's Security and Privacy Engineering Laboratory, discovered the "saliency" of a face in an image could be increased -- making it less likely to be hidden by the cropping algorithm -- by "making the person's skin lighter or warmer and smoother; and quite often changing the appearance to that of a younger, more slim, and more stereotypically feminine person". Awarding him first prize, Twitter said his discovery showed beauty filters could be used to game the algorithm and "how algorithmic models amplify real-world biases and societal expectations of beauty." Second prize went to Halt AI, a female-founded University of Toronto start-up Twitter said showed the algorithm could perpetuate marginalization in the way images were cropped. For example, "images of the elderly and disabled were further marginalized", the company said. Taraaz Research founder Roya Pakzad won third prize for an entry that showed the algorithm was more likely to crop out Arabic text than English in memes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A lawsuit between the company that makes McFlurry machines and a company that manufactures a third-party diagnostic tool for them is part of a broader 'right to repair' battle," writes Slashdot reader ttyler. Gizmodo reports: If you've been to a McDonald's at any point in the last century, you're likely familiar with the harrowing experience of being denied the frosty treat that you crave because the McFlurry machine is broken yet again. As it turns out, being broken is sort of a hallmark of McFlurry machines: Not only are they inherently fragile -- needing to withstand both cold ice cream temperatures and the heating cycles that blast them during the cleaning process -- but they're also powered by janky software and "flawed code that caused the machines to malfunction," according to a lawsuit filed against the company that produces the machines in May. That company, Taylor, is a particularly egregious purveyor that serves as a perfect example of the exact business model right-to-repair advocates are trying to abolish: sell businesses a persnickety machine that's likely to break down, prevent them from understanding exactly where the malfunction is occurring, and then help yourself to a healthy cut of the distributors' profit from the resultant repairs. It's a racket that's so widely understood, it prompted the creation of a new company, Kytch, which manufactures a diagnostic tool specifically designed to help McDonald's franchise owners fix their own McFlurry machines. In a recent legal victory, a judge awarded a temporary restraining order against Taylor after Kytch had alleged in a complaint that the McFlurry machine manufacturer had gotten its hands on a Kytch Solution Devices with the express intention of learning its trade secrets. The complaint also alleged that Taylor had told McDonald's and its franchisees to stop using Kytch machines on the grounds that they were dangerous, and that the company had begun development on its own version of the Kytch system at the same time. As a result of the court order, Taylor now has 24 hours to turn over all its Kytch Solution Devices. "Defendants must not use, copy, disclose, or otherwise make available in any way information, including formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process obtained by any of them," the court document said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a new deal with mega-cinema chain AMC Theatres, Warner Bros. has agreed to return to an exclusive, 45-day theatrical window in 2022. From a report: AMC CEO Adam Aron unveiled the pact Monday during an earnings call. "We're especially pleased Warner Bros. has decided to move away from day-and-date," Aron said. "We are in active dialogue with every major studio." WarnerMedia enraged cinema operators when deciding to open its 2021 slate simultaneously on HBO Max and in theaters. The company has since said that the move was in response to the ongoing pandemic, and not permanent. Insiders add that the AMC arrangement was agreed to in March. The audacious Aron said it was "no secret" that AMC was "not at all happy" when WarnerMedia made its move after launching HBO Max. "An exclusive window is an important way to build big and successful franchises." Before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the traditional theatrical window was as long as 90 days. Studios had tried for years to collapse that period, but faced boycotts if doing so.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has announced a new policy to pay customers directly for claims of property damage or personal injury under $1,000 caused by defective products. The new policy begins on September 1st and will apply to all products sold on Amazon.com regardless of who sells them. From a report: Previously, if you wanted to file a similar type of claim, you had to work with the seller -- which has raised questions of who's really at fault for defective problems sold on the platform. But when this policy kicks in, Amazon customer service will help facilitate claims between a customer, the seller, and the seller's insurance provider. The $1,000 figure accounts for "more than 80 percent of cases," according to Amazon. The company won't ask sellers for reimbursement for these payouts, though Amazon says it will keep sellers "informed at every step." And in some situations, the company could pay more; Amazon "may step in to pay claims for higher amounts if the seller is unresponsive or rejects a claim we believe to be valid," it says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new study, China's video-sharing app TikTok is now the most downloaded app in the world. Nikkei Asia reports: ByteDance launched the international version of TikTok in 2017, and has since overtaken Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger -- all of which are Facebook owned -- in downloads, even in the U.S. Some believe that personal information shared with TikTok is not secure. In 2020, former President Donald Trump called on the company to sell off its U.S. operations or be banned. The app's popularity nevertheless grew during the pandemic, when it became the leading download in Europe, South America and the U.S. Joe Biden, Trump's successor, withdrew the presidential executive order, but uncertainties remain elsewhere. While The Financial Times reported on Sunday that ByteDance has revived plans to go public in the coming months, a spokesperson told Nikkei Asia on Monday that the article was "inaccurate," insisting the company has no current plans for a stock market listing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Oregon Live: For the next five years, an Oregon high school diploma will be no guarantee that the student who earned it can read, write or do math at a high school level. Gov. Kate Brown had demurred earlier this summer regarding whether she supported the plan passed by the Legislature to drop the requirement that students demonstrate they have achieved those essential skills. But on July 14, the governor signed Senate Bill 744 into law. Through a spokesperson, the governor declined again Friday to comment on the law and why she supported suspending the proficiency requirements. Charles Boyle, the governor's deputy communications director, said the governor's staff notified legislative staff the same day the governor signed the bill. Boyle said in an emailed statement that suspending the reading, writing and math proficiency requirements while the state develops new graduation standards will benefit "Oregon's Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color." "Leaders from those communities have advocated time and again for equitable graduation standards, along with expanded learning opportunities and supports," Boyle wrote. The requirement that students demonstrate freshman- to sophomore-level skills in reading, writing and, particularly, math led many high schools to create workshop-style courses to help students strengthen their skills and create evidence of mastery. Most of those courses have been discontinued since the skills requirement was paused during the pandemic before lawmakers killed it entirely. The state's four-year graduation rate is 82.6%, up more than 10 points from six years ago. However, it still lags behind the national graduation rate averages, which is 85 percent. Oregon's graduation rates currently rank nearly last in the country. But it's complicated because states use different methodologies to calculate their graduation rates, making some states appear better than others.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has released today a security update that will change the default behavior of the "Point and Print" feature to mitigate a severe security issue disclosed last month. From a report: First added in Windows 2000, the Point and Print feature works by connecting to a print server to download and install necessary print drivers every time a user creates a connection to a remote printer without providing installation media. Earlier this year, Jacob Baines, a reverse engineer for Dark Wolf Solutions, found that threat actors inside a company's network could abuse the Point and Print feature to run a malicious print server and force Windows systems to download and install malicious drivers. Since Point and Print ran with SYSTEM privileges, the feature effectively provided threat actors with an easy way to gain admin rights inside any large corporate or government network. Microsoft initially tried to patch the issue -- tracked as CVE-2021-34481 -- last month, but the patches were deemed incomplete. Today, the company took another approach. Since the vulnerability is exploiting a design flaw, Microsoft chose today to change the default behavior of the Point and Print feature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter has suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's account for one week following another violation of the platform's rules, the company said Tuesday. From a report: Greene tweeted on Monday that the Food and Drug Administration "should not approve the covid vaccines." She also claimed the vaccines were "failing" and that they were ineffective at reducing the virus's spread. In response, Twitter labeled the tweet as misleading and prevented Greene from tweeting for one week. The tweet, a company spokesperson said, "was labeled in line with our COVID-19 misleading information policy. The account will be in read-only mode for a week due to repeated violations of the Twitter Rules."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new AI system can read written instructions in conversational language and transform it into working computer code. From a report: The model is the latest example of progress in natural language processing (NLP), the ability of AIs to read and write text. But it also points towards a future where coders will be able to offload some of their work to AIs, and where ordinary people may be able to code without actually learning how to code. Today OpenAI is releasing an improved version of its Codex AI model and releasing it for developers for private developers through its API. Codex is a descendant of OpenAI's massive text-generating model GPT-3, which was released last summer. But while GPT-3 was trained on a huge quantity of language data taken from the internet -- enabling it to read and then complete text prompts submitted by a human user -- Codex was trained on both language and billions of lines of publicly available computer code.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Poly Network was attacked on Tuesday, with the alleged hacker draining roughly $600 million in crypto. From a report: Poly Network, a protocol launched by the founder of Chinese blockchain project Neo, operates on the Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. Tuesday's attack struck each chain consecutively, with the Poly team identifying three addresses where stolen assets were transferred. At the time that Poly tweeted news of the attack, the three addresses collectively held more than $600 million in different cryptocurrencies, including USDC, wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), wrapped ether (WETH) and shiba inu (SHIB), blockchain scanning platforms show. "We call on miners of affected blockchain and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the above addresses," the Poly team tweeted. The $600 million figure would place the Poly Network hack among the largest in crypto history. Tether froze approximately $33 million in relation to the hack, Tether CTO Paul Adroino tweeted. About one hour after Poly announced the hack on Twitter, the hacker tried to move assets including USDT through the Ethereum address into liquidity pool Curve.fi, records show. The transaction was rejected.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HP is announcing two new Chrome OS computers for its consumer-focused lineup. From a report: The first is the Chromebase AiO, an all-in-one desktop computer with a screen that can rotate from landscape to portrait. The second is the Chromebook x2 11, a lightweight detachable that can easily shift from laptop to tablet modes. The company is also announcing a new Works With Chromebook-certified 24-inch USB-C monitor. All three new products are designed for students, families, and general consumers. The Chromebase AiO will be available at HP, Amazon, and Best Buy this month, while the Chromebook x2 11 will be available from Best Buy this month and from HP's website in October. Both computers start at $599.99 for base configurations. The M24fd USB-C monitor will be available in October from HP directly for $249.99.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WIth the release of Firefox 91 on Tuesday, Mozilla has introduced a bigger hammer for smashing the cookies that websites, advertisers and tracking companies can use to record your online behavior. From a report: The new feature, called enhanced cookie clearing, is designed to block tracking not just from a website, but also from third parties whose code appears on the site. The technology is designed to let you clear cookies for a particular website but also the more aggressive "supercookies" designed to evade lesser privacy protections. The feature is an option if you enable Firefox's strict mode for cookie handling, which partitions website data into separate storage containers. "You can easily recognize and remove all data a website has stored on your computer, without having to worry about leftover data from third parties embedded in that website," Mozilla said in a blog post.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter is now complying with India's new IT rules, New Delhi told a court Tuesday, in a move that is expected to ease months-long tension between the American social media network and the government of the key overseas market. From a report: A lawyer representing the Indian government told the Delhi High Court that Twitter's recent steps -- appointment of chief compliance officer, nodal contact person and resident grievance officer in the country -- have made the social network "prima facie" compliant with the new law. India's new IT rules, which were unveiled in February this year, mandates significant social media firms, among other things, to appoint officials to address on-ground concerns in the country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMC Entertainment said Monday it will start accepting bitcoin as payment for movie tickets and concessions if purchased online at all of its U.S. theaters. From a report: CEO Adam Aron said during an earnings call Monday that the movie theater chain will have the IT systems in place to take the cryptocurrency as payment by the end of 2021. The move marks a marriage of two highly speculative assets -- bitcoin, known for its wild volatility, and AMC, which became a meme stock star favored by retail traders on Reddit's infamous WallStreetBets forum. The price of bitcoin swung drastically in recent weeks, last trading around $46,000 after falling below $30,000 last month. The recent rebound came amid optimism that a cryptocurrency compromise will be included as part of the bipartisan infrastructure package. The Senate ultimately failed to advance the deal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Salesforce is the latest tech giant to venture into video streaming with the launch of a new service aimed at business professionals called Salesforce+, the company's chief marketing officer Sarah Franklin tells Axios. From the report: The service is part of a greater effort to transition Salesforce's marketing approach from paid customer acquisition to owned and operated media. Franklin says the hope is that the content will help people refine their skills, while also creating an emotional connection to Salesforce, driving users to "want to use our products and want to engage more with us." Salesforce+, which will debut globally during Salesforce's annual mega-conference Dreamforce in September, is a free service that will feature original programming from Salesforce and eventually, content created by its clients. The content will be available on-demand 24/7, but it will also feature live event programming, starting with Dreamforce.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's next iPhone lineup will get at least three major new camera and video-recording features, which the company is betting will be key enticements to upgrade from earlier models. From a report: The new handsets will include a video version of the phone's Portrait mode feature, the ability to record video in a higher-quality format called ProRes, and a new filters-like system that improves the look and colors of photos, according to people familiar with the matter. Beyond the camera enhancements, the new iPhones will get relatively modest upgrades. Last year, Apple revamped the iPhone design, added 5G wireless networking and updated the camera hardware. For this year, the company will retain the same 5.4-inch and 6.1-inch regular sizes and 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch Pro screen dimensions, as well as their designs. The new phones will include a faster A15 chip and a smaller notch, also known as the display cutout, in addition to new screen technology that could enable a faster refresh rate for smoother scrolling.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The government has launched a [4 million pound] fund to back projects trialling running fiber optic broadband cables through water pipes to help connect hard-to-reach homes without digging up roads. The money will also be used to test out monitors in pipes that can help water companies identify and repair leaks more quickly. About a fifth of water put into public supply every day is lost via leaks and it is hoped that sensors could help deliver water companies' commitment to reduce water loss by half. Infrastructure works, in particular installing new ducts and poles, can make up as much as four-fifths of the costs to industry of building new gigabit-capable broadband networks, the government said. The project is designed to help cut those costs, and is part of a plan to improve broadband and mobile signals in rural areas. The digital infrastructure minister, Matt Warman, said: "The cost of digging up roads and land is the biggest obstacle telecoms companies face when connecting hard-to-reach areas to better broadband, but beneath our feet there is a vast network of pipes reaching virtually every building in the country. So we are calling on Britain's brilliant innovators to help us use this infrastructure to serve a dual purpose of serving up not just fresh and clean water but also lightning-fast digital connectivity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A pretty little white flower that grows near urban centers of the Pacific Northwest turns out to be a killer. NPR reports: The bog-dwelling western false asphodel, Triantha occidentalis, was first described in the scientific literature in 1879. But until now, no one realized that this sweet looking plant used its sticky stem to catch and digest insects, according to researchers who note in their study published Monday that it's the first new carnivorous plant to be discovered in about 20 years. "We had no idea it was carnivorous," says Sean Graham, a botanist with the University of British Columbia. "This was not found in some exotic tropical location, but really right on our doorstep in Vancouver. You could literally walk out from Vancouver to this field site." Fewer than a thousand plant species are carnivorous, and these plants tend to live in places with abundant sun and water, but nutrient-poor soil. Graham's team was doing an unrelated project on plant genetics and noticed that the western false asphodel had a genetic deletion that's sometimes seen in carnivorous plants. The researchers started to think about the fact that this flower grew in the kind of environment that's home to various other insect-eating plants. "And then they have these sticky stems," says Graham. "So, you know, it was kind of like, hmm, I wonder if this could be a sign that this might be carnivorous." To see if the plants could actually take in nutrients from insects, researcher Qianshi Lin, now at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, fed fruit flies nitrogen-15 isotopes, so that this nitrogen could be used as a tracker. He then stuck these flies to stems of this plant. Later, an analysis showed that nitrogen from the dead insects was indeed getting into the plants. In fact, Triantha was getting more than half of its nitrogen from prey. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published online Monday, Lin and his colleagues say that this is comparable to what's seen in other carnivorous plants. What's more, the researchers showed that the sticky hairs on the flower stalk produce a digestive enzyme that's known to be used by many carnivorous plants. And when the research team looked at specimens of this plant preserved in herbariums, they found small dead insects stuck to the stems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX is acquiring satellite data start-up Swarm Technologies, in a rare deal by Elon Musk's space company that expands the team -- and possibly the technological capabilities -- of its growing Starlink internet service. CNBC reports: Swarm, which has 120 of its tiny SpaceBEE satellites in orbit, reached an agreement with SpaceX on July 16 to merge, according to an Aug. 6 filing with the Federal Communications Commission. The company will become "a direct wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX upon consummation of the Proposed Transaction," Swarm wrote in the filing. Terms and financial details about the deal were not disclosed. Swarm last completed a fundraising round in January 2019 at a $85 million valuation, according to Pitchbook. The deal marks an uncommon acquisition for SpaceX, which tends to design and build systems in-house. But FCC licenses can be difficult and time-consuming to get approved, and Swarm will transfer control of of its satellite and ground station licenses to SpaceX as part of the deal, according to the filing. "Swarm's services will benefit from the better capitalization and access to resources available to SpaceX, as well as the synergies associated with acquisition by a provider of satellite design, manufacture, and launch services," the filing said. The company noted that the acquisition benefits SpaceX by bringing "access to the intellectual property and expertise developed by the Swarm team."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Coal needs to be consigned to history to limit global warming, says PM Boris Johnson, describing a UN report on climate change as "sobering." He said the world must shift to clean energy and provide finance to help countries at risk from changing climates. The landmark study found it was "unequivocal" that human activity was responsible for global warming. Green campaigners said the UK must halt planned new fossil fuel projects. Despite the call to end the use of coal, the UK is considering plans for a new coking coal mine in Cumbria, as well as proposals to tap a new oil field near Shetland. Mr Johnson said: "Today's report makes for sobering reading, and it is clear that the next decade is going to be pivotal to securing the future of our planet. We know what must be done to limit global warming -- consign coal to history and shift to clean energy sources, protect nature and provide climate finance for countries on the frontline." The UK government, which has adopted a 2035 deadline for a 78% emissions cut, is due to publish its strategy on cutting UK emissions to zero overall by 2050 this autumn. Net zero means cutting carbon emissions as far as possible then balancing out any remaining releases, for example by tree planting. "The UK is leading the way, decarbonizing our economy faster than any country in the G20 over the last two decades," the prime minister said. "I hope today's IPCC report will be a wake-up call for the world to take action now, before we meet in Glasgow in November for the critical COP26 summit." "The UK has already drastically reduced the use of coal, with consumption falling from 61 million tons in 2013 to eight million tonnes last year," notes the BBC. "But the country remains dependent on other fossil fuels such as natural gas, which provides most home heating and about 40% of electricity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from The Independent: Scientists in China have developed the hardest and strongest glassy material known so far that can scratch diamond crystals with ease. The researchers, including those from Yanshan University in China, noted that the new material -- tentatively named AM-III -- has "outstanding" mechanical and electronic properties, and could find applications in solar cells due to its "ultra-high" strength and wear resistance. Analysis of the material, published in the journal National Science Review, revealed that its hardness reached 113 gigapascals (GPa) while natural diamond stone usually scores 50 to 70 on the same test. According to the scientists, AM-III has tunable energy absorption properties comparable to semiconductors commonly used in solar cells such as hydrogenated amorphous silicon films. While in diamond crystals, the organized internal structure of its atoms and molecules contribute to their immense strength and hardness, in AM-III the researchers found that a combination of order and disorder of its molecules give rise to its strange properties. Using fullerenes, which are materials made of hollow football-like arrangements of carbon atoms, the researchers produced different types of glassy materials with varying molecular organization among which AM-III had the highest order of atoms and molecules. Increasing the order further, the scientists observed, could potentially kill the semiconductivity and other properties that required the atoms and molecules to be chaotic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

chicksdaddy shares a report from The Security Ledger: A lot has changed in the agriculture sector in the last decade. And farm country's cybersecurity bill has come due in a big way. A (virtual) presentation at the annual DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas on Sunday described a host of serious, remotely exploitable holes in software and services by U.S. agricultural equipment giants John Deere and Case IH, The Security Ledger reports. Together, the security flaws and misconfigurations could have given nation-state hackers access to Deere's global product infrastructure, sensitive customer and third-party data and, potentially, the ability to remotely access critical farm equipment like planters and harvesters that are the lynchpin of the U.S. food chain. The talk is the most detailed presentation, to date, of a range of flaws in Deere software and services that were first identified and disclosed to the company in April. The disclosure of two of those flaws in the company's public-facing web applications set off a scramble by Deere and other agricultural equipment makers to patch the flaws, unveil a bug bounty program and to hire cyber security and embedded device security talent. In addition to a slew of common web flaws like Cross Site Scripting- and account enumeration bugs linked to Deere's web site and public APIs, the researchers discovered a vulnerability (CVE-2021-27653) in third-party software by Pega Systems, a maker of customer relationship management (CRM) software that Deere uses. A misconfiguration of that software gave the researchers administrative access to the remote, back end Pegasystems server. With wide ranging, administrative access to the production backend Pega server, the researchers were able to obtain other administrative Pegasystems credentials including passwords, security audit logs, as well as John Deere's OKTA signing certificate for the Pegasystems server, according to the presentation. In an email statement to The Security Ledger, a John Deere spokesperson said that "none of the claims -- including those identified at DEF CON -- have enabled access to customer accounts, agronomic data, dealer accounts, or sensitive personal information," though data included in the presentation as well as prior public disclosures make clear that sensitive data on Deere employees, equipment, customers and suppliers was exposed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Clive Thompson: I hate doing Google's CAPTCHAs. Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects -- traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses -- just so I can finish a web search. I also don't like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems.But a while ago, while numbly clicking on grainy images of fire hydrants, I was struck by another reason: The images are deeply, overwhelmingly depressing. CAPTCHA images are never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigor. No, they're blurry, anonymous landscapes that possess a positively Soviet anomie. I think I've figured it out, and so now I present -- The Six Reasons CAPTCHA Pictures Make You Feel Like Crap: 1. They're devoid of humans.2. The angles are all wrong. 3. They're voyeuristic. 4. They look like crime-scene footage.5. The grids on the photos are an alien's-eye view of the world.6. There's very little nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Your inbox is now a shopping mall. From a column: Email is one of the few ways companies can reach their customers directly. In fact, people overwhelmingly say that the way they want to hear from brands is by email, Chad S. White, the head of research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, told me. That's why the mailbox software started suppressing messages -- to protect people from companies' temptation to send too many emails. In response, email marketers obsess over "deliverability," or how the content and frequency of their emails might help those messages actually hit your inbox in the first place. But that process has created new and weird feedback loops, in which some companies and certain messages might be able to reach your inbox more readily than before, while others get junked -- condemned to spam, deleted, or the like -- before you see them. As a result, your personal inbox gradually has become less like a mailbox and more like a wormhole into every business relationship you maintain: your bank; your utility provider; your supermarket; your favorite boutiques, restaurants, housewares providers, and all the rest. It's your own digital commercial district: Opening up email is akin to visiting a little mall in your browser or on your phone, where every shop is right next to every other. A few years ago, Gmail made that metaphor concrete by introducing the promotions folder, recasting spam as marketing. When you're in the mood to shop, just drop into promotions and see what's on offer (or search for a favorite brand to see the latest wares).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As of its latest beta release, Valve's SteamVR software can add floating desktop windows inside VR games, letting you keep an eye on other apps without leaving VR. The Verge reports: It's a helpful addition, allowing players to keep an eye on anything from Discord, to a Twitch chat, or Netflix during a lower-intensity game. Road to VR suggests you could even watch YouTube during longer flights in Elite Dangerous. The ability to interact with the rest of your desktop from within SteamVR's dashboard is not a new feature, but recently Valve has been making the system more flexible. Earlier this year it added the option to view individual application windows in the dashboard, and to be virtually attached to VR controllers ingame. This made apps viewable at a glance, but until now it lacked the ability to float windows persistently ingame. With the latest release, you can still opt to have a window attached to your controller, or pull it off to have it float in virtual space. The windows are view-only while you're actually playing a game, but you can open up the SteamVR menu to interact with them using a VR controller as a mouse pointer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Neural networks can correctly guess a person's race just by looking at their bodily x-rays and researchers have no idea how it can tell. There are biological features that can give clues to a person's ethnicity, like the color of their eyes or skin. But beneath all that, it's difficult for humans to tell. That's not the case for AI algorithms, according to a study that's not yet been peer reviewed. A team of researchers trained five different models on x-rays of different parts of the body, including chest and hands and then labelled each image according to the patient's race. The machine learning systems were then tested on how well they could predict someone's race given just their medical scans. They were surprisingly accurate. The worst performing was able to predict the right answer 80 percent of the time, and the best was able to do this 99 per cent, according to the paper. "We demonstrate that medical AI systems can easily learn to recognize racial identity in medical images, and that this capability is extremely difficult to isolate or mitigate," the team warns [PDF]. "We strongly recommend that all developers, regulators, and users who are involved with medical image analysis consider the use of deep learning models with extreme caution. In the setting of x-ray and CT imaging data, patient racial identity is readily learnable from the image data alone, generalizes to new settings, and may provide a direct mechanism to perpetuate or even worsen the racial disparities that exist in current medical practice."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung vice chairman Jay Y. Lee, in jail after convictions for bribery, embezzlement and other charges, has qualified for parole and is expected to leave prison this Friday, South Korea's justice ministry said. Reuters reports: "The decision to grant Samsung Electronics vice chairman Jay Y. Lee parole was the result of a comprehensive review of various factors such as public sentiment and good behavior during detention," the ministry said in a statement on Monday.Convicted of bribing a friend of former President Park Geun-hye, Lee, 53, has served 18 months of a revised 30 month sentence. He initially served one year of a five-year sentence from August 2017 which was later suspended. That court decision was then overturned and while the sentence was shortened, he was sent back to jail in January this year. Lee still needs the Justice Minister to approve his return to work as the law bars persons with certain convictions from working for companies related to those convictions for five years. He is likely to get that, legal experts say, due to circumstances such as the amount deemed embezzled having been repaid. The Federation of Korean Industries, a big business lobby, welcomed the decision, adding: "If the investment clock, currently at standstill, is not wound up quickly, we could lag behind global companies such as Intel and TSMC and lose the Korean economy's bread and butter at a moment's notice."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is discontinuing the Bluetooth Titan Security Key to focus on security keys with Near Field Communication (NFC) functionality. As part of this move, Google has also announced a new Titan Security Key with USB-C and NFC to go along with the previously available USB-A + NFC security key. Bleeping Computer reports: Google's Titan Security Keys were introduced in 2018 and are designed to help users prevent Google account takeover attempts using credentials stolen in data breaches or following phishing attacks. They work with the most popular devices, browsers, and an increasing number of apps that come with FIDO standard support. "Since NFC functionality is now supported by a wide range of Android phones and iPhones, we are discontinuing the Bluetooth Titan Security Key and focusing on the easier and more widely available NFC capability," said Christiaan Brand, Google Cloud Product Manager. "However, for existing users with our Bluetooth Titan Security Keys, these will continue to work with Bluetooth and will continue to work as an NFC key on most modern mobile devices." The company will also continue to service existing Bluetooth Titan Security Keys until they are out of warranty.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Teleperformance, one of the world's largest call center companies, is reportedly requiring some employees to consent to video monitoring in their homes. Employees in Colombia told NBC News that their new contract granted the company the right to use AI-powered cameras to observe and record their workspaces. The contract also requires employees to share biometric data like fingerprints and photos of themselves, and workers have to agree to share data and images that may include children under 18. Teleperformance employs over 380,000 people in 83 countries to provide call center services for a range of companies, including Amazon, Apple, and Uber. A company spokesperson told NBC that it is "constantly looking for ways to enhance the Teleperformance Colombia experience for both our employees and our customers, with privacy and respect as key factors in everything we do." Amazon and Apple said that they did not ask Teleperformance for this extra monitoring, and an Apple spokesperson said the company forbids video monitoring of employees by suppliers. A recent Apple audit reportedly found Teleperformance in compliance with this requirement. But Uber apparently requested the ability to monitor some workers. Uber said it wouldn't observe the entire workforce, but the company did not specify which employees would be subject to the new policies. The ride sharing company asked for the monitoring of Teleperformance's remote employees because call center staff have access to customers credit cards and trip details, an Uber spokesperson told NBC News.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple defended its new system to scan iCloud for illegal child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) on Monday during an ongoing controversy over whether the system reduces Apple user privacy and could be used by governments to surveil citizens. From a report: Last week, Apple announced it has started testing a system that uses sophisticated cryptography to identify when users upload collections of known child pornography to its cloud storage service. It says it can do this without learning about the contents of a user's photos stored on its servers. Apple reiterated on Monday that its system is more private than those used by companies like Google and Microsoft because its system uses both its servers and software running on iPhones. Privacy advocates and technology commentators are worried Apple's new system, which includes software that will be installed on people's iPhones through an iOS update, could be expanded in some countries through new laws to check for other types of images, like photos with political content, instead of just child pornography. Apple said in a document posted to its website on Sunday governments cannot force it to add non-CSAM images to a hash list, or the file of numbers that correspond to known child abuse images Apple will distribute to iPhones to enable the system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Antitrust officials at the U.S. Justice Department said they have "grave concerns" about plans by T-Mobile US to shut down the wireless network used by millions of Boost Mobile customers. From a report: The department's worries were disclosed Monday in a regulatory filing by Dish Network, which bought Boost as part of an antitrust settlement approved by the Justice Department that cleared the way for T-Mobile's takeover of Sprint last year. T-Mobile operates the 3G network known as CDMA that's used by Boost. "The Division is left with grave concerns about the potential for a nationwide CDMA shutdown to leave a substantial proportion of Boost's customers without service," the acting head of the department's antitrust division, Richard Powers, wrote to Dish and T-Mobile in a July 9 letter. The dispute over the network, which T-Mobile plans to decommission on Jan. 1, is threatening the elaborate antitrust deal brokered by the Trump administration's Justice Department, which allowed T-Mobile to buy Sprint even though the deal consolidated the mobile phone market to three national players. The Justice Department had long said four players were needed to ensure the market is competitive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.