An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: About 5,000 euros ($5,600) are set to buy your 10-year-old combustion clunker an electric makeover -- and offer a cut-price way to avoid driving bans across European cities. French startup Transition-One has developed retrofitting technology that adds an electric engine, batteries and a connected dashboard into older models of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, Volkswagen AG, Renault SA and PSA Group for about 8,500 euros, or 5,000 euros after government subsidies in France.

In the prototype Twingo, three battery packs are fitted in front and two in what used to be the gas tank. The whole pack, bought from a Tesla Inc. parts reseller, weighs 120 kilograms (265 pounds). To compare, Renault's electric Zoe has a 290 kilogram battery for a 210 kilometer driving range. Prices start at around 23,000 euros excluding battery rental battery. The transition takes less than a day, leaving the original stick shift and gear box and installing the plug behind the hatch that drivers usually pop open to refill the tank. Founder Aymeric Libeau, whose previous experiences include co-founding software company Pentalog Group, has worked on retrofitting for two years, and tested the method with a French business school. He is looking to raise 6 million euros to build a factory he says would be capable of churning out as many as 4,000 vehicles next year.

Libeau expects French and European regulator approval by the end of the year and will start pre-orders in September to test demand.

Citing threats to free speech and civil rights, the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts on Tuesday moved to prohibit local government from using facial recognition. Three other cities in the country have already instituted such bans over concerns that the technology is biased and violates basic human rights. Gizmodo reports: In December of last year, the Cambridge City Council passed the Surveillance Technology Ordinance which requires the council's approval prior to the acquisition or deployment of certain surveillance tech, which included facial recognition software. The order was passed on Tuesday by the council and will next be sent to the Public Safety Committee, Mayor Marc McGovern and Councillor Sumbul Siddiqui both confirmed to Gizmodo in an email. This marks one step closer to banning the city's use of the tech altogether.

The amendment, sponsored by Cambridge Mayor Marc McGovern and two city councilmembers, argued that, given recent reports, it's evident this tech can discriminate against women and people of color. They also argued that facial recognition technology violates a person's civil rights and civil liberties. "The use of face recognition technology can have a chilling effect on the exercise of constitutionally protected free speech, with the technology being used in China to target ethnic minorities, and in the United States, it was used by police agencies in Baltimore, Maryland, to target activists in the aftermath of Freddie Gray's death," the amendment states.

Samsung is one of the only companies still producing tablets to rival Apple's iPad. Today the company announced the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6, its latest high-end tablet, for $649. Pre-orders start August 23, and the device ships September 6. Samsung says there will be an LTE version available later. Ars Technica reports: The Samsung Tab S6 features a 10.5-inch 2560x1600 OLED display, a 2.84GHz Snapdragon 855, and a 7040mAh battery. The base version has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, with a higher tier of 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. For cameras, there's an 8MP front camera, while the rear gets a 13MP main camera and a 5MP wide-angle lens. The device is down to 5.7mm thick and weighs 420 grams. This is Samsung's first-ever tablet with an in-screen fingerprint reader. Interestingly, it's an optical reader instead of the ultrasonic tech that the Galaxy S10 uses. Somehow, on a 10-inch tablet, Samsung couldn't find room for a headphone jack. Even Apple, which ditched the headphone jack two years ago, still puts a headphone jack on iPads. Samsung is apparently declaring war on the headphone jack with this round of updates -- the Galaxy Note 10, launching next week, is expected to dump the headphone jack, too.

The S-Pen comes with the tablet but doesn't stow away inside the body; instead, a groove on the back of the tablet gives it a spot to magnetically attach to. Of course, don't expect the tablet to sit flat on a table with a big pen attached to the back. As with other newer Samsung devices, the S-Pen now comes with a battery and some Bluetooth functionality, allowing it to do things like work as a remote shutter button for the camera. A new "Air action" gesture system lets you do things like change the camera mode or scroll through pictures with a flick of the pen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Amazon's home security company Ring has garnered enormous control over the ways in which its law enforcement partners are allowed to portray its products, going as far as to review and even author statements attributed to police in the press, according to emails and documents obtained by Gizmodo. This summer, Ring even urged a Florida police department to delay announcing its partnership with the company for weeks, telling officials that it preferred to keep the spotlight on a separate initiative launched by the city, designed to incentivize the purchase of its home surveillance products.

Because there are already thousands of Ring users in major cities across the U.S., one of Ring's primary goals in its police partnerships is encouraging existing customers to download Neighbors. To ensure that police stay on message when promoting the app, or answering questions about it, Ring not only provides police departments with talking points but widely seeks to secure contracts that grant it the absolute right to approve all police statements about its services. Contracts and other documents obtained from police departments in three states show that Ring pre-writes almost all of the messages shared by police across social media, and attempts to legally obligate police to give the company final say on all statements about its products, even those shared with the press. (In exchange, police are also given the ability to approve any Ring press releases that directly reference the partnering police agency.) Ring's so-called "press packets" to partnering agencies include a "Press Release Template," "Social Media Templates," and "Key Talking Points," as well as high-resolution Ring and Neighbors App logos "to incorporate with PR materials as needed." Furthermore, according to Gizmodo, "the packets are accompanied by instructions dictating that final drafts of public remarks must be sent to Ring so that the company's PR team can 'review and sign off' before they're sent to local news outlets."

Motherboard recently reported that Ring has partnered with 200 law enforcement agencies across the U.S.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Brooke Holden had all but given up on breaking into the video game business. [...] "Professionally inexperienced but passionate team manager looking for a hobby project to help support and manage," she posted to a subreddit for assembling game dev teams. It was just a lark, yet a half dozen replies accumulated under the post. One in particular stood out, from an account with an active Reddit history on developer recruitment boards. The poster's name was "Kova," and he told Holden that his small team of three developers had recently ballooned into a 48-member operation that needed a manager "on everyone's arse." Holden was exhilarated. On June 22, 2019, she signed a contract with Kova's company Drakore Studios, accepting the position of junior production manager at $13 per hour.

There was just one problem: Drakore Studios didn't actually exist. Over the course of a month and a half, "Kova," real name Rana Mahal, convinced at least 25 people to join a game studio that was not a registered company, and develop a video game to which he did not own the rights, in exchange for no pay. Six of them came forward to tell their story to Kotaku. The story they told was one of deceit, exploitation, incompetence, and hope, and one fuelled by gamers' desperation to participate in an industry that has stoked their imagination, lifted their mood and forged friendships since childhood.

Facebook has declared it is not "our role to remove content that one side of a political debate considers to be false" in a final, positive, self-assessment of its actions in response to the death tax misinformation circulating on the platform during the May federal election. From a report: In correspondence seen by Guardian Australia, Simon Milner, the Singapore-based vice-president of the social media giant in the Asia-Pacific, tells Labor's outgoing national secretary, Noah Carroll: "I understand that your preference would be for Facebook to remove all content that you believe constitutes misinformation -- which in this instance mean all content that discussed whether or not Labor intends to introduce a death tax -- rather than demote it; however Facebook only removes content that violates our community standards. "We do not agree that is is our role to remove content that one side of a political debate considers to be false," Milner says in the letter sent a month after election day.

The data breach at Capital One may be the "tip of the iceberg" and may affect other major companies, according to security researchers. From a report: Israeli security firm CyberInt said Vodafone, Ford, Michigan State University and the Ohio Department of Transportation may have also fallen victim to the same data breach that saw over 106 million credit applications and files stolen from a cloud server run by Capital One by an alleged hacker, Paige Thompson, a Seattle resident, who was taken into FBI custody earlier this week. Reports from Forbes and security reporter Brian Krebs indicating that Capital One may not have been the only company affected, pointing to "one of the world's biggest telecom providers, an Ohio government body, and a major U.S. university," according to Slack messages sent by the alleged hacker.

Krebs posted a screenshot of a list of files purportedly stolen by the alleged hacker. The stolen data contained filenames including car maker "Ford" and Italian financial services company "Unicredit." The Justice Department said Thompson may face additional charges -- suggesting other companies may have been involved. Further reading: Capital One's Breach Was Inevitable, Because We Did Nothing After Equifax.

The Federal Trade Commission said today there's been "overwhelming" interest in a settlement agreement with Equifax, and that consumers looking for a previously announced payout of up to $125 may be disappointed. From a report: The agency said this month that it had reached a $700 million agreement with the credit reporting agency over a massive breach of private data in 2017. As part of the settlement, consumers whose data was compromised could request up to $125 or free credit monitoring services. The potential for a quick payout generated major interest, but only $31 million of the settlement was set aside for cash payouts, meaning each payout could be far smaller than $125, depending on how many people request one.

In a blog post today, the FTC tempered expectations. "A large number of claims for cash instead of credit monitoring means only one thing: each person who takes the money option will wind up only getting a small amount of money," the agency said. "Nowhere near the $125 they could have gotten if there hadn't been such an enormous number of claims filed."

The Trump administration is outlining two possible ways certain drugs that were intended for foreign markets could be imported to the U.S. -- a move that would clear the way to import some prescription drugs from Canada. From a report: "Today's announcement outlines the pathways the Administration intends to explore to allow safe importation of certain prescription drugs to lower prices and reduce out of pocket costs for American patients," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement about the plan. "This is the next important step in the Administration's work to end foreign freeloading and put American patients first." The Department of Health and Human Services outlined two "pathways" for importing the drugs to the U.S.

In one initiative, the Food and Drug Administration and HHS will rely on their rulemaking authority to use existing federal law to set up pilot projects from states or wholesalers "outlining how they would import certain drugs from Canada that are versions of FDA-approved drugs that are manufactured consistent with the FDA approval." Separately, the FDA will work on safety guidelines for drug manufacturers who want to import any drugs they sell in foreign countries to the U.S. market.

Google on Wednesday announced it's making its Titan Security Key available via the Google Store in multiple new countries: Canada, France, Japan and the United Kingdom. Google launched the second-factor security key last year, starting with availability in the US. From a report: Google touts the Titan Security Key as one of the best ways to protect Google Accounts from hacking and phishing, especially high-value accounts that are regularly probed and attacked. The key is used as part of Google's Advanced Protection Program. Based on FIDO open standards, the security key comes in both USB and Bluetooth varieties. Back in May, Google had to issue replacements for the Bluetooth keys due to a vulnerability in the pairing process.

No country on earth has benefited from President Trump's trade fight with China more than Vietnam. From a report: The country's factories have swelled with orders as American tariffs cause companies to reconsider making their products in China. Now, more big technology firms are looking to bulk up their manufacturing operations in Vietnam, lifting the ambitions of a nation already well on its way to becoming a powerhouse maker of smartphones and other high-end gadgets. First, though, Vietnam needs to get better at making the little plastic casings on your earbuds.

Vu Huu Thang's company in the northern city of Bac Ninh, Bac Viet Technology, produces small plastic parts for Canon printers, Korg musical instruments, and Samsung cellphones and phone accessories, including earbuds. He said it would be hard for his firm to compete against Chinese suppliers as long as he had to buy 70 to 100 tons of imported plastic material every month, most of it made in China. "Vietnam cannot compare with China," Mr. Thang said. "When we buy materials, it's 5, 10 percent more expensive than China already." And the Vietnamese market is too small, he said, to entice plastic producers to set up plants here.

Four major broadcast networks have filed a lawsuit against Locast, a New York-based nonprofit that streams local broadcast programming over the internet. From a report: In their lawsuit, ABC, CBS, NBC Universal and Fox allege that Locast violates their copyright by retransmitting their programming without permission, likening it to Aereo, the TV retransmission startup that shut down in 2014 as the result of a similar lawsuit. "Locast is simply Aereo 2.0, a business built on illegally using broadcaster content," the lawsuit reads in part. "While it pretends to be a public service without any commercial purpose, Locast's marketing and deep connections to AT&T and Dish make clear that it exists to serve its pay-tv patrons."

Locast responded to the lawsuit Wednesday morning with the following statement: "Locast is an independent, non-profit organization that provides a public service retransmitting free over-the-air broadcasts. Its activities are expressly permitted under the Copyright Act. The fact that no broadcasters have previously filed suit for more than a year and a half suggests that they recognize this. We look forward to defending the claims -- and the public's right to receive transmissions broadcast over the airwaves -- in the litigation." Further reading: Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love to Get Sued.

Dr. Rod Schoonover, who until recently served as a senior analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, writing for The New York Times: Ten years ago, I left my job as a tenured university professor to work as an intelligence analyst for the federal government, primarily in the State Department but with an intervening tour at the National Intelligence Council. My focus was on the impact of environmental and climate change on national security, a growing concern of the military and intelligence communities. It was important work. Two words that national security professionals abhor are uncertainty and surprise, and there's no question that the changing climate promises ample amounts of both. I always appreciated the apolitical nature of the work. Our job in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research was to generate intelligence analysis buttressed by the best information available, without regard to political considerations. And although I was uncomfortable with some policies of the Trump administration, no one had ever tried to influence my work or conclusions.

That changed last month, when the White House blocked the submission of my bureau's written testimony on the national security implications of climate change to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The stated reason was that the scientific foundation of the analysis did not comport with the administration's position on climate change. After an extended exchange between officials at the White House and the State Department, at the 11th hour I was permitted to appear at the hearing and give a five-minute summary of the 11-page testimony. However, Congress was deprived of the full analysis, including the scientific baseline from which it was drawn. Perhaps most important, this written testimony on a critical topic was never entered into the official record.

Security researchers say they can extract a user's phone number from the Bluetooth traffic coming from an iPhone smartphone during certain operations. From a report: The attack works because, when Bluetooth is enabled on an Apple device, the device sends BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) packets in all directions, broadcasting the device's position and various details. This behavior is part of the Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL), a protocol that can work either via WiFi or BLE to interconnect and allow data transfers between nearby devices. Previous academic research has revealed that AWDL BLE traffic contains device identification details such as the phone status, Wi-Fi status, OS version, buffer availability, and others. However, in new research published last week, security researchers from Hexway said that during certain operations these BLE packets can also contain a SHA256 hash of the device's phone number.

Andy Greenberg, writing for Wired: When Alex Stamos describes the challenge of studying the worst problems of mass-scale bad behavior on the internet, he compares it to astronomy. To chart the cosmos, astronomers don't build their own Hubble telescopes or Arecibo observatories. They concentrate their resources in a few well-situated places and share time on expensive hardware. But when it comes to tackling internet abuse ranging from extremism to disinformation to child exploitation, Stamos argues, Silicon Valley companies and academics are still trying to build their own telescopes. What if, instead, they shared their tools -- and more importantly, the massive data sets they've assembled?

That's the idea behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, part of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center where Stamos is a visiting professor. Founded with a $5 million donation from Craigslist creator Craig Newmark, the Internet Observatory aspires to be a central outlet for the study of all manner of internet abuse, assembling for visiting researchers the necessary machine learning tools, big data analysts, and perhaps most importantly, access to major tech platforms' user data -- a key to the project that may hinge on which tech firms cooperate and to what degree.

"Misinformation is not just a computer science problem. It's a problem that brings in political science, sociology, psychology," Stamos says. "Part of the idea of the Internet Observatory is to build a place for these people to work together, and we want to build the infrastructure necessary to allow all the different parts of the political and social sciences to study what's happening online." Stamos says the observatory is currently negotiating with tech firms -- he names Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit as examples -- that it hopes will offer access to user data via API in real time and in historical archives. The observatory will then share that access with social scientists who might have a specific research project but lack the connections or resources to grapple with the immensity of the data involved.