With the Flash Player officially reaching the end of life tomorrow, Adobe has started to display alerts on Windows computers recommending that users uninstall Flash Player. From a report: When Flash Player is installed, it creates a scheduled task named 'Adobe Flash Player PPAPI Notifier' that executes the following command: "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\FlashUtil32_32_0_0_465_pepper.exe" -update pepperplugin. When this command is executed, it is now displaying an alert thanking users for using Adobe Flash Player and then recommending that they uninstall the program due to its looming end of life. Further reading: Adobe Flash is about to die, but classic Flash games will live on.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In an average year, Spotify Wrapped is a sharing-optimized novelty hinging on nostalgia for a time that's barely passed. But in 2020, this data mirror instead presented many users with unexpected empirical evidence of their pandemic coping mechanisms: a strange hit parade of ambient music, background noise and calming sound effects that soothed them through an unusually anxious and sleepless time. While thousands of users posted in disbelief about their stress-inflected results, the situation made sense to Liz Pelly, a cultural critic who has written extensively about how Spotify and its competitors work to shape our listening habits. "It says a lot about the ways that corporate streaming services have ingrained themselves into our lives and facilitated music listening becoming more of a background experience," she said.

[...] The findings of some forthcoming research about pandemic coping mechanisms suggest ambient listening may be part of a larger pattern. Pablo Ripolles, a professor at New York University who studies music and the brain, was part of an international team of researchers that surveyed lockdown habits in Italy, Spain and the United States. Of 43 activities mentioned in a survey the team conducted, like cooking, prayer, exercise and sex, listening to or playing music had one of the biggest increases in engagement during lockdown, as well as the highest number of respondents who said it was the activity that helped them the most.

Ticketmaster will pay a $10 million criminal fine to avoid prosecution on U.S. charges it repeatedly accessed the computer systems of a rival whose assets its parent Live Nation Entertainment Inc later purchased. From a report: The fine is part of a three-year deferred prosecution agreement between Ticketmaster and the U.S. Department of Justice, which was disclosed at a Wednesday hearing before U.S. District Judge Margo Brodie in Brooklyn federal court. Ticketmaster's agreement resolves five criminal counts including wire fraud, conspiracy and computer intrusion. It also requires the Beverly Hills, California-based company to maintain compliance and ethics procedures designed to detect and prevent computer-related theft. Ticketmaster primarily sells and distributes tickets to concerts and other events. Prosecutors said that from August 2013 to December 2015, Ticketmaster employees used stolen passwords to repeatedly access computers belonging to its rival to obtain confidential business information. The rival, Songkick, specialized in artist presales, in which some tickets -- often around 8% -- are set aside for fans before general ticket sales begin, in part to foil scalpers.

SpaceX will try a significantly different approach to landing its future reusable rocket boosters, according to CEO and founder Elon Musk. It will attempt to 'catch' the heavy booster, which is currently in development, using the launch tower arm used to stabilize the vehicle during its pre-takeoff preparations. From a report: Current Falcon 9 boosters return to Earth and land propulsively on their own built-in legs -- but the goal with Super Heavy is for the larger rocket not to have legs at all, says Musk. The Super Heavy launch process will still involve use of its engines to control the velocity of its descent, but it will involve using the grid fins that are included on its main body to help control its orientation during flight to 'catch' the booster -- essentially hooking it using the launch tower arm before it touches the ground at all. The main benefits of this method, which will obviously involve a lot of precision maneuvering, is that it means SpaceX can save both cost and weight by omitting landing legs from the Super Heavy design altogether. Another potential benefit raised by Musk is that it could allow SpaceX to essentially recycle the Super Heavy booster immediately back on the launch mount it returns to -- possibly enabling it to be ready to fly again with a new payload and upper stage (consisting of Starship, the other spacecraft SpaceX is currently developing and testing) in "under an hour." The goal for Starship and Super Heavy is to create a launch vehicle that's even more reusable than SpaceX's current Falcon 9 (and Falcon Heavy) system.

Spotify has joined the ranks of streaming services like SoundCloud and YouTube as a hub for bootlegs of popular songs. From a report: With obscured titles like "Jocelyn Flores but you're in the bathroom at a party" by eraylandin, a new take on XXXTentacion's popular "Jocelyn Flores," and "Dead To Me -- Kali Uchis (slowed + bass boosted)" by user Unreal sounds, a rework of Uchis' popular track from her 2018 album "Isolation," these underground remixers have chosen to upload their creations as podcast episodes, hoping to circumvent copyright infringement detection by the platform. Using simple keywords and terms like "chopped and screwed," "slowed and reverbed," "remix," and "mashup" in Spotify's search bar, users can track down bootlegged reworks of songs by many top artists which live on Spotify's podcast hub. Late rapper Juice WRLD, who still commands a cult following, has a full 'podcast series' dedicated to revealing his unreleased songs, like user No Si's podcast titled, "Instagram @xricardol.tx." The podcast contains 'episodes' like "Sugarfish (Leaked)," a song Juice WRLD wrote with The Chainsmokers that was never officially released, despite online rumors that the collaboration would become available in December 2019. These podcasts, like "Instagram @xricardol.tx," only contain the audio of specific songs and almost always list the tracks as individual episodes. There is nothing that resembles the typical characteristics of a podcast.

Eric Bangeman, writing for ArsTechnica: Despite over 82 million cases and over 1.75 million deaths due to COVID-19, many people are bound and determined to carry on with normal life. For some, that includes attending Saturday night ragers, just like they did in the Before Times. Reports of yet another secret party being broken up by law enforcement have become distressingly common. Getting guests for these secret parties is at least slightly more difficult now that Apple has pulled Vybe Together -- an app with a tagline that invited users to "get their party on" -- from the App Store. The Verge pointed out that the app had largely been flying under the radar until a tweet from Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times brought some unwelcome, but much-needed scrutiny to the app. One of Lorenz's tweets highlighted Vybe Together's TikTok account, which had posted videos of unmasked people partying indoors while advertising New Years Eve parties. According to Business Insider, TikTok has since removed Vybe Together's account for violating community guidelines.

The Moynihan Train Hall, with glass skylights and 92-foot-high ceilings, will open Jan. 1 as an area for Amtrak and Long Island Railroad riders. The New York Times: For more than half a century, New Yorkers have trudged through the crammed platforms, dark hallways and oppressively low ceilings of Pennsylvania Station, the busiest and perhaps most miserable train hub in North America. Entombed beneath Madison Square Garden, the station served 650,000 riders each weekday before the pandemic, or three times the number it was built to handle. But as more commuters return to Penn Station next year, they will be welcomed by a new, $1.6 billion train hall complete with over an acre of glass skylights, art installations and 92-foot-high ceilings that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who championed the project, has likened to the majestic Grand Central Terminal. After nearly three years of construction, the new Moynihan Train Hall, in the James A. Farley Post Office building across Eighth Avenue from Penn Station, will open to the public on Jan. 1 as a waiting room for Amtrak and Long Island Rail Road passengers.

For decades, the huge undertaking was considered an absolution of sorts for one of the city's greatest sins: the demolition in the 1960s of the original Penn Station building, an awe-inspiring structure that was a stately gateway to the country's economic powerhouse. The destruction of the station was a turning point in New York's civic life. It prompted a fierce backlash among defenders of the city's architectural heritage, the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission and renewed efforts to protect Grand Central Terminal. That the project has been completed during a period when the city was brought to a standstill is a hopeful reminder that the bustle of Midtown Manhattan will return, Mr. Cuomo said. The train hall "sends a clear message to the world that while we suffered greatly as a result of this once-in-a-century health crisis, the pandemic did not stop us from dreaming big and building for the future," he added. The project has its detractors, who fault state officials for not going far enough in reimagining Penn Station. These critics note that the Moynihan Train Hall will serve only some of the passengers who use Penn Station, ignoring the needs of subway riders.

Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Head Scientist of Alexa at Amazon, writes: While Turing's original vision continues to be inspiring, interpreting his test as the ultimate mark of AI's progress is limited by the era when it was introduced. For one, the Turing Test all but discounts AI's machine-like attributes of fast computation and information lookup, features that are some of modern AI's most effective. The emphasis on tricking humans means that for an AI to pass Turing's test, it has to inject pauses in responses to questions like, "do you know what is the cube root of 3434756?" or, "how far is Seattle from Boston?" In reality, AI knows these answers instantaneously, and pausing to make its answers sound more human isn't the best use of its skills. Moreover, the Turing Test doesn't take into account AI's increasing ability to use sensors to hear, see, and feel the outside world. Instead, it's limited simply to text.

To make AI more useful today, these systems need to accomplish our everyday tasks efficiently. If you're asking your AI assistant to turn off your garage lights, you aren't looking to have a dialogue. Instead, you'd want it to fulfill that request and notify you with a simple acknowledgment, "ok" or "done." Even when you engage in an extensive dialogue with an AI assistant on a trending topic or have a story read to your child, you'd still like to know it is an AI and not a human. In fact, "fooling" users by pretending to be human poses a real risk. Imagine the dystopian possibilities, as we've already begun to see with bots seeding misinformation and the emergence of deep fakes. Instead of obsessing about making AIs indistinguishable from humans, our ambition should be building AIs that augment human intelligence and improve our daily lives in a way that is equitable and inclusive. A worthy underlying goal is for AIs to exhibit human-like attributes of intelligence -- including common sense, self-supervision, and language proficiency -- and combine machine-like efficiency such as fast searches, memory recall, and accomplishing tasks on your behalf. The end result is learning and completing a variety of tasks and adapting to novel situations, far beyond what a regular person can do.

Amazon announced Wednesday that it's acquiring podcasting company Wondery, expanding its catalog of original audio content. From a report: As part of the deal, Wondery will join Amazon Music, the e-commerce giant's music streaming business. Amazon Music in September added podcasts to its platform, looking to carve out a share of the increasingly competitive podcasting market, in which Spotify, Apple and others have gained ground. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Wondery, founded in 2016, has produced some of the most popular podcasts in recent years, including true crime series like "Dirty John," "Dr. Death" and "Over My Dead Body." The podcast producer and network says it counts more than 10 million unique listeners each month. WSJ reported earlier this month that Amazon was valuing Wondery at over $300 million in advanced stages of talks before the acquisition.

Some sellers on Amazon are tricking the ecommerce platform into displaying thousands of reviews for unrelated products to boost their ranking and mislead customers, ArsTechnica writer Timothy Lee reports. Lee discovered the issue, which has been documented by the media in recent years, after he went to check the review of a drone he had purchased for his children. The product page of drone had glowing reviews for honey. Lee reached out to Amazon, which confirmed that this practice is in violation of its terms and conditions and quickly took down thousands of bogus reviews. He writes: Whatever action Amazon ultimately takes against these particular vendors Amazon's broader efforts leave a lot to be desired. A company shouldn't be able to secure a top slot in search results with such obvious subterfuge.

The top-reviewed drones in Amazon's search results came from brands with names that seemed to be chosen at random. My drone was made by "HONGXUNJIE." Other highly-rated drones on Amazon are made by "SHWD," "Taktoppy," "SimileLine," "Hffeeque," "Mafix," "MINOSNEO," and so forth. Clicking on the names of these "brands" takes you to a search result with no additional information on who made these products. Amazon could easily require sellers to provide some basic transparency about these listings -- disclosing where these manufacturers are located, how long they've been in business, and which other brands they own. This might make it easier for Amazon to punish companies that try to mislead customers with fake reviews.

Spyware maker NSO Group used real phone location data on thousands of unsuspecting people when it demonstrated its new COVID-19 contact-tracing system to governments and journalists, researchers have concluded. From a report: NSO, a private intelligence company best known for developing and selling governments access to its Pegasus spyware, went on the charm offensive earlier this year to pitch its contact-tracing system, dubbed Fleming, aimed at helping governments track the spread of COVID-19. Fleming is designed to allow governments to feed location data from cell phone companies to visualize and track the spread of the virus. NSO gave several news outlets each a demo of Fleming, which NSO says helps governments make public health decisions "without compromising individual privacy." But in May, a security researcher told TechCrunch that he found an exposed database storing thousands of location data points used by NSO to demonstrate how Fleming works -- the same demo seen by reporters weeks earlier. TechCrunch reported the apparent security lapse to NSO, which quickly secured the database, but said that the location data was "not based on real and genuine data." NSO's claim that the location data wasn't real differed from reports in Israeli media, which said NSO had used phone location data obtained from advertising platforms, known as data brokers, to "train" the system. Academic and privacy expert Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, who was also given a demo of Fleming, said NSO told her that the data was obtained from data brokers, which sell access to vast troves of aggregate location data collected from the apps installed on millions of phones.

Ed Bott, writing at ZDNet: With a heartfelt nod to Monty Python, Windows 7 would like you all to know that it's not dead yet. A year after Microsoft officially ended support for its long-running OS, a small but determined population of PC users would rather fight than switch. How many? No one knows for sure, but that number has shrunk substantially in the past year. On the eve of Microsoft's Windows 7 end-of-support milestone, I consulted some analytics experts and calculated that the owners of roughly 200 million PCs worldwide would ignore that deadline and continue running their preferred OS. That was, admittedly, a rough estimate. During the holiday lull at the end of 2020, I decided to go back and run the latest version of those analytics reports. They tell a consistent story.

Let's start with the United States Government Digital Analytics Program, which reports a running, unfiltered total of visitors to U.S. websites over the previous 90 days. One of the datasets includes a report of visits from all PCs running any version of Windows, which makes it an ideal proxy for this question. At the end of December 2019, 75.8% of those PCs were running Windows 10, 18.9% were still on Windows 7, and a mere 4.6% were sticking with the unloved Windows 8.x. A year later, as December 2020 draws to a close, the proportion of PCs running Windows 10 has gone up 12%, to 87.8%; the Windows 7 count has dropped by more than 10 points, to 8.5%, and the population of Windows 8.x holdouts has shrunk even further, to a minuscule 3.4%. (The onetime champion of PC operating systems, Windows XP, is now nearly invisible, with its device count adding up to a fraction of a rounding error.)

A new report by Sensor Tower reveals that 2020 has been a record-setting year for worldwide spending on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, which collectively passed $100 billion in a single year for the first time ever in November. From a report: The trend of increased spending continued over Christmas, when consumers around the world spent an estimated $407.6 million across Apple's App Store and Google Play. This represents a 34.5 percent year-on-year growth from approximately $303 million in 2019. At the same time in 2019, spending only increased by 17.1 percent year-on-year. Spending on Christmas day constituted 4.5 percent of December's total spending so far, which reached nine billion dollars globally on December 27. The majority of holiday spending was on mobile games, which climbed by 27 percent from $232.4 million at the same time last year to $295.6 million. Tencent's "Honor of Kings" was the leading game with approximately $10.7 million in consumer spending, which is a 205.7 percent increase from Christmas 2019. TikTok was the top app for spending outside of games, generating $4.7 million globally. Following previous years, Apple's App Store captured the majority of spending between the App Store and the Google Play Store, with 68.4 percent of spending, up 35.2 percent year-on-year. The Google Play Store saw $129 million in revenue compared to the App Store's $278.6 million.

Detente is ending in the global fight over tech taxes. Earlier this year, France agreed to suspend collection of a tax on digital revenue from large technology companies such as Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet's Google. Meanwhile, the U.S. delayed the application of tariffs it was putting on French goods in retaliation for the tax. But now France has resumed collecting what is known as its digital-services tax, a French official said. Other countries, including Italy and the U.K., whose similar taxes went into effect this year, are also set to begin collection in coming months. From a report: The U.S., meanwhile, is set on Jan. 6 to impose tariffs on $1.3 billion of French imports, including cosmetics and handbags. Washington also has pending investigations that could lead to similar tariffs on 10 other countries, including the U.K., Italy, India and Spain. At issue in the dispute is how to tax an increasingly digital economy. For decades, tax treaties have generally allocated corporate profit based on where value is created. But modern multinationals -- particularly ones with digital offerings -- can sell their products across borders in ways that leave little taxable profit in a country where those products are consumed.

France and some other big European countries say tech companies should pay more taxes in the countries where their users and clients are located, something that could boost their tax revenues. But in long-running multilateral talks on how to update the tax system, the U.S. has opposed any solution that is too targeted at tech companies -- slowing progress. "These taxes are a reaction to dissatisfaction with how long it has taken to get a global multilateral solution," said Manal Corwin, who served as deputy assistant secretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department in the Obama administration, and now works at accounting firm KPMG. "You may need some trade battles back and forth before there's a strong incentive to say, 'OK, enough.'"

On Tuesday night, McConnell introduced a new bill tying increased stimulus payments to a full repeal of Section 230. From a report: The bill comes amid new momentum for direct $2000 stimulus payments, and increasing pressure on party leaders to appease President Trump's escalating demands. Democratic party leaders criticized the inclusion of Section 230 repeal as an effort to scuttle stimulus talks. "Senator McConnell knows how to make $2,000 survival checks reality and he knows how to kill them," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement Tuesday. "Will Senate Republicans go along with Sen. McConnell's cynical gambit or will they push him to give a vote on the standalone [bill]?"

McConnell's bid for a full repeal of Section 230 comes amid increasingly chaotic negotiating over the level of direct payments to be included as part of stimulus efforts. On Sunday, President Trump signed into law Congress' $900 billion COVID-19 relief and government spending package that would provide $600 in stimulus payments to most Americans. In a public statement after signing the bill, Trump urged congressional leaders to hold a standalone vote on increasing direct payments to $2,000.