The Trump administration has proposed a rollback of Obama-era fuel efficiency and emissions standards, while simultaneously taking aim at California's unique ability to set more stringent rules. From a report: Under the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency called for the fuel economy standards for new vehicles to ratchet up over time. The increasingly strict standards were designed to combat climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. On Thursday, the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a new proposed rule that would instead freeze the standards at their 2020 levels for six years. "Cars and trucks are just part of the basic fiber of the American economy and the American experience, so we take what we're doing very, very seriously," Bill Wehrum, EPA assistant administrator, told reporters on Thursday. The agencies say that increasing fuel efficiency requirements contributes to an increase in the cost of new cars and trucks, which may discourage consumers from buying new vehicles. Because newer vehicles have advanced safety features, the administration argues, increasing fuel economy requirements therefore harms highway safety, as well as having economic effects.

The number of voice calls made on mobile phones in the UK fell for the first time ever in 2017 -- despite the fact we seem hooked on our devices. From a report: That is according to the latest report from telecoms regulator Ofcom, which charts what it describes as a decade of digital dependence. A total of 78% of all adults now own a smartphone. On average, people check them once every 12 minutes during their waking hours, the study claims. Two in five adults look at their phone within five minutes of waking, while a third check their phones just before falling asleep, according to the report. A high percentage (71%) say they never turn off their phones and 78% say they could not live without it.

Kara Swisher, writing for The New York Times: I kept pressing Mr. Zuckerberg on how he personally felt about the damage his creation had done. [Editor's note: Ms. Swisher is referring to her recent interview with Mark Zuckerberg.] Was he beginning to understand the power that he held, and that the world that he controlled was not such a rosy place? Facebook was "probably," he admitted, "too focused on just the positives and not focused enough on some of the negatives." Fair enough. But it was impossible to get him to acknowledge any personal pain as both the creator and the destroyer. "I mean, my emotion is feeling a deep sense of responsibility to try to fix the problem," said Mr. Zuckerberg. "In running a company, if you want to be innovative and advance things forward, I think you have to be willing to get some things wrong. But I don't think it is acceptable to get the same things wrong over and over again."

It was a classic Silicon Valley engineer's roll-up-your-sleeves answer, which leaves many cold when it comes to, say, the manipulation of democracy. Fending off bad actors like the Russians has been and will be increasingly expensive; it may even be impossible. But Facebook could have done much more than it did, and it certainly needs to do more than it's doing. Mr. Zuckerberg is now trying to fend off talk in Washington of regulating his company like the thing he once told me it was: a utility. He has also spent the last month meeting over dinners with a range of academic experts on free speech, propaganda and more to try to understand where to go from here. Call it the education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley, but on the world's dime. How much that has -- and will -- cost is probably immeasurable.

Apple became the first $1 trillion publicly listed U.S. company on Thursday, crowning a decade-long rise fueled by its ubiquitous iPhone that transformed it from a niche player in personal computers into a global powerhouse spanning entertainment and communications. Reuters: The tech company's stock jumped 2.8 percent, bringing its gain to about 9 percent since Tuesday when it reported June-quarter results above expectations and said it bought back $20 billion of its own shares. "Apple's $1 trillion cap is equal to about 5 percent of the total gross domestic product of the United States in 2018," David Kass, professor of finance at the University of Maryland, told The Washington Post. "That puts this company in perspective." The company's fortunes were turbocharged by the launch of personal gadgets such as the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007. Since then 18 different iPhones have been launched and more than 1.2 billion of the devices have been sold.

Brad Stone, writing for Bloomberg: As critics enjoy pointing out, the company under Cook has failed to come up with another iPhone-type hit. But that's like saying da Vinci never came up with another Mona Lisa-type painting. The release of the iPhone is up there with the founding of Standard Oil as one of the greatest business moves of all time. And while the iPhone has altered daily life so much that no one remembers life before it, Apple has also persuaded customers to embrace other inventions they never knew they wanted, such as connected watches that buzz and beep (to cure the distraction of the phone, Apple says) and wireless dongles that hang ridiculously from their ears.

Apple isn't alone on this mountaintop. Amazon.com, Alphabet, and Microsoft are likely at some point to pinwheel across the $1 trillion finish line, too, and they're almost as good as Apple at manufacturing customer desire. No one told Amazon they needed a speaker they could talk to, or Google a self-driving car, or Microsoft a ... OK, it's been a while since Microsoft has driven civilians wild with desire.

New submitter rfengineer shares a report: Welcome to IEEE Spectrum's fifth annual interactive ranking of the top programming languages. Because no one can peer over the shoulders of every coder out there, anyone attempting to measure the popularity of computer languages must rely on proxy measures of relative popularity. In our case, this means combining metrics from multiple sources to rank 47 languages. But recognizing that different programmers have different needs and domains of interest, we've chosen not to blend all those metrics up into One Ranking to Rule Them All. [...] Python has tightened its grip on the No. 1 spot. Last year it came out on top by just barely beating out C, with Python's score of 100 to C's 99.7. But this year, there's a wider gap between first and second place, with C++ coming in at 98.4 for the No. 2 slot (last year, Java had come third with a score of 99.4, while this year its fallen to 4th place with a score of 97.5). C has fallen to third place, with a score of 98.2.

In a post, Apple announced the following changes: With the launch of the new App Store on both iOS and macOS and their increased methods of app discovery, we will be removing apps from the affiliate program. Starting on October 1st, 2018, commissions for iOS and Mac apps and in-app content will be removed from the program. All other content types (music, movies, books, and TV) remain in the affiliate program. Stephen Hackett, a long time Apple blogger and podcaster, said, "This is not totally surprising after Apple cut the rate for in-app purchases last year. However, this is going to hurt a lot of people in the media ecosystem around Apple." The post includes thoughts of several developers.

Every four years, at an international gathering of mathematicians, the subject's youngest and brightest are honored with the Fields Medal, often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. The New York Times: This year's recipients, announced on Wednesday at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro, include one of the youngest ever: Peter Scholze, a professor of mathematics at the University of Bonn who is 30 years old. Two weeks ago, Peter Woit, a professor at Columbia University who blogs about mathematics and physics, was among those who anticipated that Dr. Scholze would receive the medal. Dr. Woit said Dr. Scholze was "by far the most talented arithmetic geometer of his generation." By custom, Fields medals are bestowed to mathematicians 40 years old or younger. That means Dr. Scholze would have still been eligible for another two rounds of medals. The medal, first awarded in 1936, was conceived by John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician. The youngest winner, Jean-Pierre Serre in 1954, was 27. The other Fields medalists this year are Caucher Birkar, 40, of the University of Cambridge in England; Alessio Figalli, 34, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich; and Akshay Venkatesh, 36, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Stanford University in California. Peter Scholze's award cites "the revolution that he launched in arithmetic geometry," the study of shapes that arise from the rational-number solutions to polynomial equations (like xy3 + x2 = 1 or x2 â" y3z = 3). More about him here. As a mathematician, Caucher Birkar has helped bring order to the infinite variety of polynomial equations -- those equations that consist of different variables raised to various powers. No two equations are exactly alike, but Birkar has helped reveal that many can be neatly categorized into a small number of families. [As a reader pointed out, Birkar's award was stolen within minutes of him receiving it.]

Once a classics student with no particular affinity for mathematics, Alessio Figalli has gone on to shake the venerable mathematical discipline of analysis, which concerns the properties of certain types of equations. Figalli's results have provided a refined mathematical understanding of everything from the shape of crystals to weather patterns, to the way ice melts in water. Akshay Venkatesh, a former prodigy who struggled with the genius stereotype, has won a Fields Medal for his "profound contributions to an exceptionally broad range of subjects in mathematics."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Congress is sending President Donald Trump legislation that would force technology companies to disclose if they allowed countries like China and Russia to examine the inner workings of software sold to the U.S. military. Companies would be required to address any security risks posed by the foreign source code reviews to the satisfaction of the Pentagon, or lose the contract. The legislation also creates a database, searchable by other government agencies, of which software was examined by foreign states that the Pentagon considers a cyber security risk. It makes the database available to public records requests, an unusual step for a system likely to include proprietary company secrets. The final version of the bill was approved by the Senate in a 87-10 vote on Wednesday after passing the House last week. The spending bill is expected to be signed into law by Trump.

Matt Kennedy from New Atlas reports of an all-optical Diffractive Deep Neural Network (D2NN) architecture that uses light diffracted through numerous plates instead of electrons. It was developed by Dr. Aydogan Ozcan and his team of researchers at the Chancellor's Professor of electrical and computer engineering at UCLA. From the report: The setup uses 3D-printed translucent sheets, each with thousands of raised pixels, which deflect light through each panel in order to perform set tasks. By the way, these tasks are performed without the use of any power, except for the input light beam. The UCLA team's all-optical deep neural network -- which looks like the guts of a solid gold car battery -- literally operates at the speed of light, and will find applications in image analysis, feature detection and object classification. Researchers on the team also envisage possibilities for D2NN architectures performing specialized tasks in cameras. Perhaps your next DSLR might identify your subjects on the fly and post the tagged image to your Facebook timeline. For now though, this is a proof of concept, but it shines a light on some unique opportunities for the machine learning industry. The research has been published in the journal Science.

Ancestry, 23andMe and several other top genetic testing companies pledged on Tuesday not to share users' DNA data with others without consent. "Under the new guidelines, the companies said they would obtain consumers "separate express consent" before turning over their individual genetic information to businesses and other third parties, including insurers," reports The Washington Post. "They also said they would disclose the number of law-enforcement requests they receive each year." From the report: The new commitments come roughly three months after local investigators used a DNA-comparison service to track down a man police believed to be the Golden State Killer, who allegedly raped and killed dozens of women in California in the 1970s and 1980s. Investigators identified the suspect using a decades-old DNA sample obtained from the crime scene, which they uploaded to GEDmatch, a crowdsourced database of roughly a million distinct DNA sets shared by volunteers. Investigators said they did not need a court order before using GEDmatch, sparking fresh fears that users' biological data might be too easy to access -- and could end up in the wrong hands -- without additional regulation on the fast-growing, already popular industry.

An anonymous reader quotes a report form Techdirt: In the immediate aftermath of an NSA contractor springing numerous leaks back in 2013, the NSA vowed this would never happen again. It has happened again and it hasn't just been documents. It's also been software exploits, which contributed to a worldwide plague of ransomware. The NSA was going to make sure no one could just walk out of work with thousands of sensitive documents. It laid out a plan to exercise greater control over access and fail safe procedures meant to keep free-spirited Snowdens in check. The NSA is the world's most powerful surveillance agency. It is also a sizable bureaucracy. Over the past half-decade, the NSA has talked tough about tighter internal controls. But talk is cheap -- at least labor-wise. Actual implementation takes dedication and commitment. The NSA just doesn't have that in it, according to a recent Inspector General's report: "The nation's cyber spy agency is suffering from substantial cyber vulnerabilities, according to a first-of-its-kind unclassified audit overview from the agency's inspector general released Wednesday. Those vulnerabilities include computer system security plans that are inaccurate or incomplete, removable media that aren't properly scanned for viruses, and an inadequate process for tracking the job duties of National Security Agency cyber defenders to ensure they're qualified for the highest-level work they do, according to the overview."

Lisa MacLeod, Progressive Conservative member and Children, Community and Social Services Minister of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, said Tuesday that she would end the city's basic income pilot project, calling it expensive and "clearly not the answer for Ontario families." Few details are available as to how the project will come to an end, but MacLeod said her government will end the program "ethically" for anyone who is currently enrolled. Slashdot reader kenh shares an excerpt from a CBC.ca report: Close to 4,000 people were enrolled in the basic income pilot program in Thunder Bay, Lindsay, Hamilton, Brantford and Brant County. The pilot project started in April 2017. It was originally set to last three years, and explore the effectiveness of providing a basic income to those living on low incomes -- whether they were working or not. Under the project, a single person could have received up to about $17,000 a year, minus half of any income he or she earned. "A couple could have received up to $24,000 per year." People with disabilities could have received an additional $6,000.

Thanks to gains in Model 3 output, Tesla's second-quarter revenue grew by more than $1 billion. Unfortunately, the company's net loss rose dramatically as a result. In a statement, Tesla said it achieved its target of producing 5,000 Model 3 vehicles per week and that it aims to make 6,000 per week by the end of August. It's expect to produce 50,000 to 55,000 Model 3 vehicles in the third quarter -- a sharp increase from the previous quarter.

"It took 15 years to execute on our initial goal to produce an affordable, long-range electric vehicle that can also be highly profitable," Musk and Chief Financial Officer Deepak Ahuja wrote in a letter to shareholders. "In the second half of 2018, we expect, for the first time in our history, to become both sustainably profitable and cash-flow positive." Tesla has only turned a profit in two quarters. CBS News reports: The electric vehicle company founded by billionaire Elon Musk reported an adjusted net loss of $717 million for the period on revenue of $4 billion. Tesla went through $739.6 million in cash between April and June, less than the $900 million Wall Street analysts had forecast. In another boost, the automaker said it has trimmed its capital spending by manufacturing the Model 3 on existing assembly lines, rather than building new lines. Although Tesla is burning through less cash, it continues to lose money. The company reported an adjusted net loss of $3.06 per share, more than analysts expected. The loss more than doubled from the same quarter a year ago. Slashdot reader Rei adds: After the release of Tesla's Q2 results and followed by the investor call, Tesla's stock surged around 9% in aftermarket trading today. Among the main drivers: automotive gross margins rose to 21%, Model 3 gross margins turned positive (before the start of sales of AWD and performance variants, which are making up half of all new orders), and the reiteration and reinforcement of guidance for sustainable profitability from Q3 onward. [...] While no longer using a reservation system in the U.S. for first-production orders (retaining it only for less expensive Model 3 variants and overseas orders), new North American first-production orders are making up a large portion of current orders; consequently, no changes are announced for timing of overseas orders. The average selling price is expected to remain high "for several quarters" due to "a richer mix in the initial wave of Model 3 deliveries to Europe and APAC"; the "normalization of the Model 3 average selling price" is anticipated in the second half of 2019, and is not expected to impact gross margins, due to improved production cost efficiency over time. On the conference call, Musk sounded tired and admitted to getting too little sleep. He apologized twice, but was told by an investor: "Don't let the trolls get you down, but we do like it when you tease the trolls a bit."

Amazon plans to be completely off Oracle's proprietary database software by the first quarter of 2020, reports CNBC. The plans come after the company moved most of its infrastructure internally to Amazon Web Services. From the report: Amazon began moving off Oracle about four or five years ago, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the project is confidential. Some parts of Amazon's core shopping business still rely on Oracle, the person said, and the full migration should wrap up in about 14 to 20 months. Another person said that Amazon had been considering a departure from Oracle for years before the transition began but decided at the time that it would require too much engineering work with perhaps too little payoff. The primary issue Amazon has faced on Oracle is the inability for the database technology to scale to meet Amazon's performance needs, a person familiar with the matter said. Another person, who said the move could be completed by mid-2019, added that there hasn't been any development of new technology relying on Oracle databases for quite a while.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: This year alone, at least 15 separate takedown notices ask Google to remove ThePirateBay.org from its index. Most of these are sent by the reporting agency Digimarc, on behalf of book publishers such as Penguin Random House, Kensington Publishing, and Recorded Books. This year alone, at least 15 separate takedown notices ask Google to remove ThePirateBay.org from its index. Most of these are sent by the reporting agency Digimarc, on behalf of book publishers such as Penguin Random House, Kensington Publishing, and Recorded Books. Over the years, The Pirate Bay's homepage has been targeted more than 70 times. While there's no shortage of reports, TPB's homepage is still in Google's index.

Since TPB's homepage is not infringing, Google categorically refuses to remove it from its search results. While the site itself has been downranked, due to the high number of takedown requests Google receives for it, ThePirateBay.org remains listed. Google did remove The Pirate Bay's homepage in the past, by accident, but that was swiftly corrected. "Google received a (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take-down request that erroneously listed Thepiratebay.org, and as a result, this URL was accidentally removed from the Google search index," Google said at the time. "We are now correcting the removal, and you can expect to see Thepiratebay.org back in Google search results this afternoon," the company added.