An anonymous reader shares a report: In August 22, 2001, Jerome Jacobson, director of security for a subcontracting company called Simon Marketing, was arrested along with eight co-conspirators for orchestrating a massive scheme to defraud McDonald's Monopoly promotion out of more than $24 million. Jeff Maysh of The Daily Beast tells the inside story in 8,800 words. Between 1989 and 2001, "Uncle Jerry" used his position as the head of the McDonald's Monopoly account to steal winning "pieces" worth between $10,000 and $1 million. He proceeded to gift the pieces to family members and a growing network of associates -- which included "mobsters, psychics, strip club owners, convicts, drug traffickers, and even a family of Mormons" -- in exchange for a cut of the laundered winnings. A former police officer known for his attention to detail, Jacobson was personally responsible for overseeing the printing of paper game pieces, cutting out the winning tickets, and transporting them to McDonald's packaging factories throughout the country. Read the full story here.

Kevin C. Tofel, writing for About Chromebooks: Having worked for a Google Chrome Marketing team over an 18 month period, I never saw a project that aggressively goes after Windows and Mac computers like the one that was published today [Editor's note: the video is unlisted, but accessible]. [...] As someone who has used (and often still does use) other platforms, I can't really disagree with the point of this video. For too long, computer users have had to deal with cryptic errors, updates that can take hours to install and the dreaded blue screen of death / spinning beach ball.

Granted, some of my personal experience with those issues was when I was in corporate IT for 15 years; that career ended for me (by choice) back in 2007. And clearly, all desktop / laptop platforms have improved since then. Even so, Google is highlighting the modern approach of Chromebooks with this short video and that's an important point.

Google is building official notch support into Android P, but it's laying out some ground rules first: two notches is the limit. From a report: In a blog post for developers yesterday, Android UI product manager Megan Potoski wrote that Google is working with device partners "to mandate a few requirements" for app compatibility purposes. Among those are limits on notches. The mandate says that Android P phones can't have "more than two cutouts on a device." Only one notch is allowed per side, and notches are only allowed on the top and bottom edges -- not the left and right.

Facebook is preparing to announce that it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity ahead of November's midterm elections, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing three people briefed on the matter. From the report: In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week, the company told lawmakers that it detected the influence campaign as part of its investigations into election interference. It has been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the center of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election, but company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved, according to two of the officials. Facebook is expected to announce its findings on Tuesday afternoon. The company has been working with the F.B.I. to investigate the activity. Like the Russian interference campaign in 2016, the recently detected campaign dealt with divisive social issues. Update: Facebook has confirmed the story, adding: Today we removed 32 Pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior. This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we don't want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they're doing. We're still in the very early stages of our investigation and don't have all the facts -- including who may be behind this. But we are sharing what we know today given the connection between these bad actors and protests that are planned in Washington next week. We will update this post with more details when we have them, or if the facts we have change. It's clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we've made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder.

AXS, a digital marketplace operated by Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), is the second largest presenter of live events in the world after Live Nation Entertainment (i.e. Ticketmaster). Paris Martineau of The Outline reports that the company forces customers to download a predatory app which goes on to snatch up a range of personally identifiable data and sells it to a range of companies, including Facebook and Google, without ever anonymizing or aggregating them. From the report: The company requires users to download an app to use any ticket for a concert, game, or show bought through AXS, and it doesn't come cheap. AXS uses a system called Flash Seats, which relies on a dynamically generated barcode system (read: screenshotting doesn't work) to fight off ticket scalping and reselling. [...] Here's a brief overview of all of the information that can be collected from just the mobile app alone, nearly all of which is shared with third parties without being anonymized or aggregated: first and last name, precise location (as determined by GPS, WiFi, and other means), how often the app is used, what content is viewed using the app, which ads are clicked, what purchases are made (and not made), a user's personal advertising identifier, IP address, operating system, device make and model, billing address, credit card number, security code, mailing address, phone number, and email address, among many others. [...] AXS also shares the personal data collected on its customers with event promoters and other clients, none of whom are bound even by this (extremely lax) privacy policy.

When French students return to school in September they'll have to leave one of their most prized possessions at home -- their smartphone. From a report: French lawmakers on Monday passed legislation banning students as old as 15 from bringing smartphones and tablets to school or having them turned off at least, according to the Agence France-Presse. Officials in support of the new rule described the policy as a way to shield children from addictive habits and to safeguard the sanctity of the classroom. "We know today that there is a phenomenon of screen addiction, the phenomenon of bad mobile phone use," education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer told French news channel BFMTV, according to CNN. "Our main role is to protect children and adolescents. It is a fundamental role of education, and this law allows it." The law, however, does make exceptions for educational use, extra-curricular actives and for students with disabilities, the AFP reports. French high schools can choose to impose a less stringent ban on Internet-connected devices.

As students enter college this fall, many will hunger for more than knowledge. Up to half of college students in recent published studies say they either are not getting enough to eat or are worried about it. From a report: This food insecurity is most prevalent at community colleges, but it's common at public and private four-year schools as well. Student activists and advocates in the education community have drawn attention to the problem in recent years, and the food pantries that have sprung up at hundreds of schools are perhaps the most visible sign. Some schools nationally also have instituted the Swipe Out Hunger program, which allows students to donate their unused meal plan vouchers, or "swipes," to other students to use at campus dining halls or food pantries.

That's a start, say analysts studying the problem of campus hunger, but more systemwide solutions are needed. "If I'm sending my kid to college, I want more than a food pantry," says Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia, and founder of the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice. [...] According to a survey of UC Berkeley students, 38 percent of undergraduates and 23 percent of graduate students deal with food insecurity at some point during the academic year, Ruben Canedo, a university employee who chairs the campus's basic needs committee, says.

Could Apple be planning on support for dual SIM cards with the new iPhone? It's possible. From a report: 9to5Mac was taking iOS 12 developer beta 5 out for a test drive and noticed something interesting in diagnostic report generation. There are clearly references to a "second SIM status." iPhones currently support eSIMs along with normal SIMs, so this could be nothing. But the diagnostic report also references "second SIM tray status," which signals that Apple could be planning on including support for a second physical SIM card with new iPhones.

Zorro quotes a report from The Daily Beast: After years of planning, NASA is finally launching a new effort to send astronauts back to the moon and then onward to Mars. But one important piece of technology is missing: a new space suit. Fifty-three years after astronaut Ed White stepped outside his Gemini 4 capsule on the first-ever spacewalk for an American, NASA is stuck using decades-old suits that critics say are too old, too bulky, too rigid, and too few in number for America's new era of space exploration.

Astronauts could need as many as three different kinds of space suits for a single mission. NASA has plenty of flight-suit options, but its extravehicular activity or EVA suits are old and dwindling in number. And the agency doesn't have any suits specifically for surface missions. Time is running out to make up the space suit shortfalls. NASA plans to launch Exploration Mission 1, the first test of Orion and its heavy rocket, as early as 2020. The Lunar Gateway station could be ready for use five or six years later. Despite these looming deadlines, NASA "remains years away from having a flight-ready space suit... suitable for use on future exploration missions," the agency's inspector general warned in a 2017 audit.

Logitech announced late Monday night that it is acquiring Blue Microphones for $117 million. The company known for USB condenser microphones, such as the Snowball and Yeti, will join Logitech's existing portfolio of brands. The Verge reports: Founded in 1995, Blue sells microphones that range in price from $60 to over $4,000 (for studio-grade hardware), and they're used by podcasters, musicians, and any other consumers who need higher-fidelity audio than what they get from the built-in microphones on their devices. Now, after dropping a heap of cash on the company, Logitech will do its best to make sure Blue's devices become just as essential as its own wireless keyboards and mice. "For Logitech, this is a new space," the company wrote in a blog post. "But, at the same time, it's not at all. Gamers are already using our Logitech G webcams to stream. People are video calling with friends and family thanks to Logitech every day. And in business, our audio and video know-how is apparent every time a video meeting takes place at the office. Joining up with Blue and their microphone lines is a logical adjacent opportunity with great synergies."

On Monday, Senator Mark Warner published 20 proposals on how to regulate big tech platforms. What's interesting is that none of the proposals call for breaking up the pseudo-monopolies. Instead, they aim to start a substantive debate by laying out different paths to address problems posed by the platforms. Gizmodo reports: What may be more important than the individual proposals themselves is that the document is at least trying to organize a holistic way of thinking about the issues now on the table. It breaks down the areas that need addressing into the promotion of disinformation, privacy and consumer protection, and ensuring competition in the marketplace. Just to highlight a few of the good issues on the table, the white paper blessedly brings the conversation back to privacy and data ownership -- something that seems to have been lost as the conversation has turned to content moderation. The easiest recommendation is to implement what it calls "GDPR-like" data protection legislation that would give Americans similar data rights as EU citizens gained in May. The jury is still out on the long-term consequences of those reforms, but they require greater transparency and consent for a company's terms of service, along with many more tools for keeping track of what information a company collects on you.

On the competition side of things, the proposal suggests a data-transparency bill that would give users a more granular idea of how their data is being used and how much its worth to an individual platform. One concern it addresses is that platforms expand how they monetize a person's data while the user is often unaware of how much they're actually giving up, value-wise, when they agree to hand over their data in exchange for a particular service. Another benefit would be that regulators would have a better idea of what they're evaluating in antitrust enforcement cases. The proposals relating to disinformation are a little more worrisome. A requirement that platforms "clearly and conspicuously label bots" wouldn't be so bad, but it's a daunting task and opens up the potential for false positives. Likewise, demanding networks identify a user's true identity is unrealistic, and the option of anonymity online should be protected. Axios was first to publish the list of 20 proposals compiled by Warner's staff. Is there a proposal that resonates with you? If not, how would you regulate the Big Tech platforms?

Doug Grindstaff, a five-time Emmy Award winner behind Star Trek's Tribble coos, communicator beeps, and Enterprise bridge door whooshes, has died at 87. The Hollywood Reporter looks back at Grindstaff's contributions to the Star Trek universe: [Grindstaff] received 14 Emmy nominations in all -- including one for Star Trek in 1967 -- and won for his editing on The Immortal in 1970, Medical Story in 1976, Police Story in 1978, Power in 1980 and Max Headroom in 1987. Working with Jack Finlay and Joseph Sorokin, Grindstaff created the background sounds and effects used on NBC's Star Trek. These sounds included red alert klaxons, the whoosh of Enterprise bridge doors opening/closing, heartbeats, boatswain whistles, sickbay scanners and communicator beeps and the acoustics that invoked phasers striking deflector shields and transporter materialization (and dematerialization).

In a 2016 interview for the Audible Range blog, Grindstaff noted that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry "wanted to paint the whole show [with sound] like you were painting a picture. "And he wanted sounds everywhere. One time I asked him, 'Don't you think we're getting too cartoony?' Because I felt it should be a little more dignified, but he wanted sound for everything. For example, I worked on one scene where [Dr. McCoy] is giving someone a shot. Gene says, 'Doug, I'm missing one thing. The doctor injects him and I don't hear the shot.' I said, 'You wouldn't hear a shot, Gene.' He said, 'No, no, this is Star Trek, we want a sound for it.' "So I turned around to the mixing panel and said, 'Do you guys have an air compressor?' And they did. I fired up the air compressor, squirted it for a long enough period by the mic, went upstairs, played with it a little bit and then put it in the show. And Gene loved it. So, that's how Gene was. He didn't miss nothing!" Grindstaff said he created Tribble coos by manipulating the sound of a dove.

WindBourne shares a report from Forbes: In the second quarter of 2018, Tesla produced just over 53,000 vehicles, doubling its output compared to the same quarter last year. For the first time, Model 3 production (28,578) exceeded combined Model S and X production (24,761) with deliveries to customers totaling 40,740 for the quarter. The ramp up in Model 3 production is enabling it to outsell small and midsize luxury car sales in the U.S., according to some number crunching by CleanTechnica's Zachary Shahan.

His analysis claims that the Model 3 is crushing its "competitors" in that segment with total estimated sales for July amounting to 16,000 vehicles. The closest individual model to Tesla's mass-market endeavor is the Mercedes C-Class and even then, its July sales are estimated at just 6,029 units. The Model 3 is still untouchable when sales figures from multiple vehicles produced by the same company are added together. For example, the analysis expects sales of the BMW 2, 3, 4 and 5 Series to hit 12,811 at the end of July in total while customers will get their hands on 11,835 Mercedes C, CLA, CLS and E-Class models. That all means that Tesla would have a 23% share of the small and midsize luxury car market in July, ahead of BMW's 17% and Mercedes' 17%.

Ostracus shares a report from Computerworld, written by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Microsoft is getting ready to replace Windows 10 with the Microsoft Managed Desktop. This will be a "desktop-as-a-service" (DaaS) offering. Instead of owning Windows, you'll "rent" it by the month. Microsoft Managed Desktop is a new take. It avoids the latency problem of the older Windows DaaS offerings by keeping the bulk of the operating system on your PC. But you'll no longer be in charge of your Windows PC. Instead, it will be automatically provisioned and patched for you by Microsoft. Maybe you'll be OK with that.

Microsoft has been getting away from the old-style desktop model for years now. Just look at Office. Microsoft would much rather have you rent Office via Office 365 than buy Microsoft Office and use it for years. Microsoft Managed Desktop is the first move to replacing "your" desktop with a rented desktop. By 2021, I expect the Managed Desktop to be to traditional Windows what Office 365 is to Office today: the wave of the future. Or maybe tsunami, depending on your perspective. I'm not happy with this development. I'm old enough to remember the PC revolution. We went from depending on mainframes and Unix boxes for computing power to having the real power on our desktops. It was liberating. Now Microsoft, which helped lead that revolution, is trying to return us to that old, centralized control model.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: In a forthcoming paper ("Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation"), OpenAI researchers describe a system that uses a reinforcement model, where the AI [known as Dactyl] learns through trial and error, to direct robot hands in grasping and manipulating objects with state-of-the-art precision. All the more impressive, it was trained entirely digitally, in a computer simulation, and wasn't provided any human demonstrations by which to learn. The researchers used the MuJoCo physics engine to simulate a physical environment in which a real robot might operate, and Unity to render images for training a computer vision model to recognize poses. But this approach had its limitations, the team writes -- the simulation was merely a "rough approximation" of the physical setup, which made it "unlikely" to produce systems that would translate well to the real world. Their solution was to randomize aspects of the environment, like its physics (friction, gravity, joint limits, object dimensions, and more) and visual appearance (lighting conditions, hand and object poses, materials, and textures). This both reduced the likelihood of overfitting -- a phenomenon that occurs when a neural network learns noise in training data, negatively affecting its performance -- and increased the chances of producing an algorithm that would successfully choose actions based on real-world fingertip positions and object poses.

Next, the researchers trained the model -- a recurrent neural network -- with 384 machines, each with 16 CPU cores, allowing them to generate roughly two years of simulated experience per hour. After optimizing it on an eight-GPU PC, they moved onto the next step: training a convolutional neural network that would predict the position and orientation of objects in the robot's "hand" from three simulated camera images. Once the models were trained, it was onto validation tests. The researchers used a Shadow Dexterous Hand, a robotic hand with five fingers with a total of 24 degrees of freedom, mounted on an aluminum frame to manipulate objects. Two sets of cameras, meanwhile -- motion capture cameras as well as RGB cameras -- served as the system's eyes, allowing it to track the objects' rotation and orientation. In the first of two tests, the algorithms were tasked with reorienting a block labeled with letters of the alphabet. The team chose a random goal, and each time the AI achieved it, they selected a new one until the robot (1) dropped the block, (2) spent more than a minute manipulating the block, or (3) reached 50 successful rotations. In the second test, the block was swapped with an octagonal prism. The result? The models not only exhibited "unprecedented" performance, but naturally discovered types of grasps observed in humans, such as tripod (a grip that uses the thumb, index finger, and middle finger), prismatic (a grip in which the thumb and finger oppose each other), and tip pinch grip. They also learned how to pivot and slide the robot hand's fingers, and how to use gravitational, translational, and torsional forces to slot the object into the desired position.