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Submission + - US launches inquiry into French plan to tax tech giants (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: US President Donald Trump has ordered an investigation into France's planned tax on tech giants — a move that could result in retaliatory tariffs. His trade representative said the US was "very concerned" that the tax "unfairly targets American companies". On Thursday the French parliament is due to approve a 3% levy on revenue made by such companies as Google and Facebook inside the country. France argues that these firms currently exploit global tax loopholes.

Submission + - Banned Chinese Security Cameras Are Almost Impossible To Remove (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. federal agencies have five weeks to rip out Chinese-made surveillance cameras in order to comply with a ban imposed by Congress last year in an effort to thwart the threat of spying from Beijing. But thousands of the devices are still in place and chances are most won’t be removed before the Aug. 13 deadline. A complex web of supply chain logistics and licensing agreements make it almost impossible to know whether a security camera is actually made in China or contains components that would violate U.S. rules. The National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, which outlines the budget and spending for the Defense Department each year, included an amendment for fiscal 2019 that would ensure federal agencies do not purchase Chinese-made surveillance cameras. The amendment singles out Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co. and Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., both of which have raised security concerns with the U.S. government and surveillance industry.

Despite the looming deadline to satisfy the NDAA, at least 1,700 Hikvision and Dahua cameras are still operating in places where they’ve been banned, according to San Jose, California-based Forescout Technologies, which has been hired by some federal agencies to determine what systems are running on their networks. The actual number is likely much higher, said Katherine Gronberg, vice president of government affairs at Forescout, because only a small percentage of government offices actually know what cameras they’re operating. The agencies that use software to track devices connected to their networks should be able to comply with the law and remove the cameras in time, Gronberg said. “The real issue is for organizations that don’t have the tools in place to detect the banned devices,” she added.

Submission + - Minimum wage bill could eliminate 1.3 million jobs, CBO says (politico.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes:

CBO’s finding that a $15 hourly minimum would result in 1.3 million jobs lost was a median estimate. CBO's upper estimate of 3.7 million jobs lost poses another test for Democratic centrists, many of whom were skeptical about the impact on local businesses.

Price meet demand.

Time to invest in the fast-food robot industry.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Is Modern Technology Moving Us Towards A Utopia Or A Dystopia? (youtube.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: On Slashdot, many news stories center around technologies that are problematic or outright dangerous — internet services ruining your privacy and the confidentiality of your private data for example, or new computer hardware that deliberately takes fine-grained control over itself away from you, the purchaser, owner and user of the technology. Long before Slashdot was created, in 1958, writer Aldous Huxley of Brave New World fame gave this Television interview ( https://youtu.be/alasBxZsb40?t... ) warning that abuse of then relatively new technologies like Radio and Television could push the world into "an unfree future", and also that even the United States is not necessarily immune to deliberate abuse of these and other technologies. Where do you see technology, and those who decide what technologies are created and used in what way, taking the world? Will the world 10 to 15 years from now be closer to a Utopia or closer to a Dystopia? If you answer "Dystopia" to this question, is there anything that can be done to prevent such an "undesirable future"?

Submission + - John McAfee Hides in Cuba, Offers Cryptocurrency for Asylum, Runs for President (reuters.com)

Submitted by Aighearach
Aighearach writes: John McAfee is back in the news after having fled the Bahamas. Now he's on his yacht in Havana trying to trade snake oil for protection. He insists that "it would be trivial to get around the U.S. government’s embargo through the use of a clever system of currency." Clever and trivial at the same time, who better than John McAfee to solve that one?

"You can’t just create a coin and expect it to fly. You have to base it on the proper blockchain, have it structured such that it meets the specific needs of a country or economic situation. There are probably less than 10 people in the world who know how to do that and I’m certainly one of them."

He's also running for President. Of the US, not Cuba.

Submission + - Barbie maker Mattel 'is insolvent' and can't be 'salvaged' (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: MGA Entertainment founder and CEO Isaac Larian told said “The message to Mattel is very clear — they are in big, big trouble. Frankly why I gave up on the merger talks — we were considering a hostile takeover — because after further research Mattel is in such a situation right now I don’t think they can be salvaged,” Larian, the creator of Bratz and LOL dolls, said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “There is too much water under the bridge and unfortunately, they are going to go the same way as Toys R Us.”

“Mattel is insolvent,” added Larian.

Weird, you would have thought "Hijab Barbie" would have saved them.

Submission + - Microsoft puts Slack on internal list of 'prohibited and discouraged' software (geekwire.com)

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: No Slack for you!

As Slack makes its stock market debut, there’s a major company that won’t be allowing its employees to use the business collaboration and chat app as part of their daily work. It’s Microsoft, and it’s not just because the Redmond giant is Slack’s biggest competitor through its own Microsoft Teams collaboration app. At least, that’s not the primary stated reason. And it turns out Slack is far from the only piece of popular technology to earn this distinction.

GeekWire obtained an internal Microsoft list of prohibited and discouraged technology — software and online services that the company doesn’t want its employees using as part of their day-to-day work. We first picked up on rumblings of the prohibition from Microsoft employees who were surprised that they couldn’t use Slack at work, before tracking down the list and verifying its authenticity.

Slack is on the “prohibited” category of the internal Microsoft list, along with tools such as the Grammarly grammar checker and Kaspersky security software. Services in the “discouraged” category include Amazon Web Services, Google Docs, PagerDuty and even the cloud version of GitHub, the popular software development hub and community acquired by Microsoft last year for $7.5 billion.

Since taking the reins five years ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has espoused a “learn it all” philosophy that encourages employees to understand and adapt to new viewpoints and information. Under his leadership, the company has struck a series of partnerships with longtime rivals. Of course, Microsoft still competes energetically. In the competition with Slack, Microsoft has the benefit of decades of experience in enterprise software. It touts the security and compliance features of Microsoft Teams as a selling point for its big business customers. Slack launched its Enterprise Grid version in 2017 as a way of catering to many of these same customers.

Submission + - Prisons Are Banning Books That Teach Prisoners How To Code (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Oregon Department of Corrections has banned prisoners from reading a number of books related to technology and programming, citing concerns about security. According to public records obtained by the Salem Reporter, the Oregon Department of Corrections has banned dozens of books related to programming and technology as they come through the mail room, ensuring that they don’t get to the hands of prisoners. At least in official department code, there is no blanket ban on technology-related books. Instead, each book is individually evaluated to assess potential threats. Many programming-related books are cited as “material that threatens,” often including the subject matter (“computer programming”) as justification.

Submission + - Facebook usage has collapsed since scandals, data shows

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Facebook usage has plummeted over the last year, according to data seen by the Guardian, though the company says usage by other measures continues to grow.
Since April 2018, the first full month after news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in the Observer, actions on Facebook such as likes, shares and posts have dropped by almost 20%, according to the business analytics firm Mixpanel. The decline coincided with a series of data, privacy and hate speech scandals. In September the company discovered a breach affecting 50m accounts, in November it admitted that an executive hired a PR firm to attack the philanthropist George Soros, and it has been repeatedly criticised for allowing its platform to be used to fuel ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. “On top of that, Facebook has continued to lose younger users, who are spreading their time and attention across other social platforms and digital activities,” eMarketer said.

Submission + - Lawsuits Claim Amazon's Alexa Voice Assistant Illegally Records Children (seattletimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A lawsuit filed in Seattle alleges Amazon is recording children who use its Alexa devices without their consent, in violation of laws governing recordings in at least eight states, including Washington. “Alexa routinely records and voiceprints millions of children without their consent or the consent of their parents,” according to a complaint filed on behalf of a 10-year-old Massachusetts girl on Tuesday in federal court in Seattle. Another nearly identical suit was filed the same day in California Superior Court in Los Angeles, on behalf of an 8-year-old boy. The federal complaint, which seeks class-action status, describes Amazon’s practice of saving “a permanent recording of the user’s voice” and contrasts that with other makers of voice-controlled computing devices that delete recordings after storing them for a short time or not at all.

The complaint notes that Alexa devices record and transmit any speech captured after a “wake word” activates the device, regardless of the speaker and whether that person purchased the device or installed the associated app. It says the Alexa system is capable of identifying individual speakers based on their voices and Amazon could choose to inform users who had not previously consented that they were being recorded and ask for consent. It could also deactivate permanent recording for users who had not consented. “But Alexa does not do this,” the lawsuit claims. “At no point does Amazon warn unregistered users that it is creating persistent voice recordings of their Alexa interactions, let alone obtain their consent to do so.”

Submission + - Obama Admins Deleted 190 Speeches on Immigration Hours Before Trump Took Office 1

Submitted by RoccamOccam
RoccamOccam writes: As reported by The Sunlight Foundation, in the dying minutes of the Obama administration’s final term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removed from its website a collection of almost 200 speeches and testimonies delivered by agency leadership dating back to 2004. Access to a federal government web resource containing 12 years of primary source materials on ICE’s history has been lost.

The transcripts were of speeches and testimony delivered between 2004 and 2017 by high-ranking ICE officials, including the director of the agency and directors of ICE sub-units. Most contained prepared remarks submitted to congressional committees, often on controversial topics like the standard of medical treatment for detainees, treatment of unaccompanied children, sanctuary cities, drug trafficking, and E-Verify.

In one removed transcript — a February 2016 statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the “Unaccompanied Children Crisis” — then-Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Homan detailed how ICE contracted out to “effectuate” the transportation of “UC” and enumerated the “important steps” that the administration had taken to “deter illegal immigration.”

The collection is difficult to recreate. The URL for each of the 190 removed transcripts either returns a “file not found” notice or redirects to a search page with no results. The collection has not been moved to the archive section of ICE’s website and not all of the transcripts were captured by the Wayback Machine, the independent nonprofit web archiving service run by Internet Archive.

Submission + - Smartphones still lack IR capabilities. Why? 3

Submitted by yanestra
yanestra writes: The smartphone era slowly ends and smartphones have conquered nearly every possible application, all but one: Smartphones have not replaced traditional infrared remote controls for TVs and such alike. The question is: Why?

Submission + - Ars Technica Writer On Microsoft And Gaming Beats Arrested On Child Sex Charges (archive.is) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ars Technica writer Peter Bright has been arrested and charged for attempting to have sex with minor children. The veteran reporter responed to an FBI Agent's advertisement seeking to pimp out her 7 year old daughter and 11 year old son. Bright is being held without bail.

Submission + - The Lost History of Sodium Wiring

Submitted by Rei
Rei writes: On the face of it, sodium seems like about the worst thing you could make a wire out of — it oxidizes rapidly in air, releases hot hydrogen gas in water, melts at 97,8C, and has virtually no tensile strength. Yet, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Nacon Corporation did just that — producing thousands of kilometers of high-gauge sodium wiring for electrical utilities — and it worked surprisingly well.

While sodium has three times the (volumetric) resistivity of copper and nearly double that of alumium, its incredibly low density gives it a gravimetric resistivity less than a third of copper and half of alumium. Priced similar to alumium per unit resistivity (and much cheaper than copper), limitless, and with almost no environmental impact apart from its production energy consumption, sodium wiring proved to be much more flexible without the fatigue or installation damage risks of alumium. The polyethylene insulation proved to offer sufficient tensile strength on its own to safely pull the wire through conduits, while matching its thermal expansion coefficient. The wiring proved to have tamer responses to both over-current (no insulation burnoff) and over-voltage (high corona inception voltage) scenarios than alumium as well. Meanwhile, "accidental cutting" tests, such as with a backhoe, showed that such events posed no greater danger than cutting copper or alumium cabling. Reliability results in operation were mixed — while few reliability problems were reported with the cables themselves, the low-voltage variety of Nacon cables appeared to have unreliable end connectors, causing some of the cabling to need to be repaired during 13 years of utility-scale testing.

Ultimately, it was economics, not technical factors, that doomed sodium wiring. Lifecycle costs, at 1970s pricing, showed that using sodium wiring was similar to or slightly more expensive for utilities than using alumium. Without an unambiguous and significant economic case to justify taking on the risks of going larger scale, there was a lack of utility interest, and Nacon ceased production.

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As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein

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