CERN has taken a major step towards building a 100-kilometre circular super-collider to push the frontier of high-energy physics. From a report: The decision was unanimously endorsed by the CERN Council on 19 June, following the plan's approval by an independent panel in March. Europe's preeminent particle-physics organization will need global help to fund the project, which is expected to cost at least $23.5 billion and would be a follow-up to the lab's famed Large Hadron Collider. The new machine would collide electrons with their antimatter partners, positrons, by the middle of the century. The design -- to be built in an underground tunnel near CERN's location in Geneva, Switzerland -- will enable physicists to study the properties of the Higgs boson and, later, to host an even more powerful machine that will collide protons and last well into the second half of the century. The approval is not yet a final go-ahead. But it means CERN can now put substantial effort into designing a collider and researching its feasibility, while pushing to the backburner research and development efforts for alternative designs for LHC follow-ups, such as a linear eletron-positron collider or one that would accelerate muons. "I think it's a historic day for CERN and particle physics, in Europe and beyond," CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti told the council after the vote.

A new feature in Windows 10 might allow Google to streamline Chrome, and we know it works because Microsoft is already using it. From a report: According to Microsoft, its recent update implemented a new memory management feature in Edge known as SegmentHeap. In the latest version of Windows, developers can opt into SegmentHeap to lower the RAM usage of a program. Microsoft says it already added support to the new Edge browser, and it has seen a 27 percent drop in the browser's memory footprint.

The global coronavirus pandemic is accelerating, with Thursday's 150,000 new cases the highest in a single day, World Health Organization (WHO) director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. From a report: "Almost half of the cases reported were from the Americas," he told a virtual briefing. "The world is in a new and dangerous phase ... the virus is still spreading fast, it is still deadly, and most people are still susceptible."

Sridhar Ramaswamy once ran Google's $115 billion advertising arm. But he grew disillusioned and worried that growth was too much of a priority. From a report: Nearly two years after he left Google, he is testing his newfound conviction by mounting a challenge against his former employer. His new company, Neeva, is a search engine that looks for information on the web as well as personal files like emails and other documents. It will not show any advertisements and it will not collect or profit from user data, he said. It plans to make money on subscriptions from users paying for the service. As evidenced by the antitrust investigations into Google's businesses, challenging the company is no easy task. Google accounts for roughly 90 percent of all searches globally and competitors have tried unsuccessfully for years to make inroads. Neeva faces the additional hurdle of getting people to pay for something that many have come to expect as free. While there is a growing awareness that free services from Google and Facebook come at the expense of personal data, many consumers -- even those who express a concern about their privacy -- are often unwilling to pay for an alternative.

Neeva recalls a notion raised, ironically, by the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a 1998 research paper when they were doctoral students at Stanford University. They wrote, at the time, that "advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results." Search advertising has become much more sophisticated since the 1990s, but much of the same "conflicts of interest" remains, according to Mr. Ramaswamy. Companies are often torn between serving the interests of advertisers or the interests of users. He pointed to how Google has devoted more space to ads at the top of search results with the results users are seeking pushed down the page -- an issue more pronounced on smaller smartphone screens. "It's a slow drift away from what is the best answer for the user and how do we surface it," he said. "As a consumer product, the more pressure there is to show ads, the less useful in the long term the product becomes."

From a report: Have you ever wondered why online ads appear for things that you were just thinking about? There's no big conspiracy. Ad tech can be creepily accurate. Tech giant Oracle is one of a few companies in Silicon Valley that has near-perfected the art of tracking people across the internet. The company has spent a decade and billions of dollars buying startups to build its very own panopticon of users' web browsing data. One of those startups, BlueKai, which Oracle bought for a little over $400 million in 2014, is barely known outside marketing circles, but it amassed one of the largest banks of web tracking data outside of the federal government. BlueKai uses website cookies and other tracking tech to follow you around the web. By knowing which websites you visit and which emails you open, marketers can use this vast amount of tracking data to infer as much about you as possible -- your income, education, political views, and interests to name a few -- in order to target you with ads that should match your apparent tastes. If you click, the advertisers make money.

But for a time, that web tracking data was spilling out onto the open internet because a server was left unsecured and without a password, exposing billions of records for anyone to find. Security researcher Anurag Sen found the database and reported his finding to Oracle through an intermediary -- Roi Carthy, chief executive at cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock and former TechCrunch reporter.

New York City Council this week voted 44-6 in favor of the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, a bill that requires the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to disclose their use of surveillance technologies. From a report: The POST Act also mandates that the NYPD develop policies on how it deploys those tools, as well as establish oversight of the department's surveillance programs to ensure they remain compliant. The passage of the POST Act, a three-year-old piece of legislation written with input from local activist organization Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), comes as cities around the country reexamine law enforcement policies following widespread demonstrations against abuse. Residents and activists on Tuesday urged the Detroit City Council to reject a contract that would extend the city police's use of facial recognition technology. On Wednesday, racial justice and civil liberties groups called on members of the U.S. Congress to end funding for surveillance technology law enforcement is using to spy on demonstrators.

A sophisticated, state-sponsored cyber attack is targeting Australian government, business, education and political organisations [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], the prime minister has warned. From a report: Scott Morrison did not reveal the identity of the state actor that was responsible for the attacks, which he said had been launched over many months. But the scale and sophistication of the malicious activity prompted cyber-security experts to speculate that China was the most likely culprit. "Based on advice provided to me by our cyber experts, Australian organisations are currently being targeted by a sophisticated state-based cyber actor," Mr Morrison said on Friday. "This act is targeting Australian organisations across a range of sectors including all levels of government, industry, political organisations, education, health, essential service providers and operators of other critical infrastructure."

Wirecard CEO Markus Braun has stepped down amid a deepening accounting scandal that has rocked the company's share price. From a report: The German payments firm said in a brief statement Friday that Braun had resigned "with immediate effect" and that James Freis would take his place as interim CEO. It comes just one day after Wirecard admitted that auditors at EY couldn't find 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) of cash on its balance sheet. The firm was forced to postpone its 2019 annual report -- the fourth time it has done so this year. It also warned on Thursday that, if it did not provide consolidated financials by Friday, approximately 2 billion in loans could be called in. There are fears the company could go insolvent by the weekend. Shares of the firm have collapsed in recent days. On Thursday, Wirecard stock plummeted more than 60%, while on Friday they fell as much as 45%. Wirecard shares pared some of their losses shortly after Braun's resignation was confirmed, but remained over 34% lower for the session.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Mozilla has announced today that its highly anticipated VPN (virtual private network) service will launch later this summer, "in the next few weeks." The product has also been renamed from its original name of Firefox Private Network to its new brand of the "Mozilla VPN." The name change came after Mozilla expanded the VPN product from the initial Firefox extension to a full-device VPN, capable of routing traffic for the entire OS, including other browsers. Currently, the Mozilla VPN offers clients for Windows 10, Chromebooks, Android, and iOS devices. Mozilla said beta testers also requested a Mac client, which they plan to provide, along with a Linux app.

sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: With their ability to soak up carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, the world's great forests are often referred to as the planet's lungs. But Anastassia Makarieva, a theorist at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Russia, says they are its beating heart, too. They recycle vast amounts of moisture into the air and, in the process, also whip up winds that pump that water around the world. The first part of that idea -- forests as rainmakers -- originated with other scientists and is increasingly appreciated by water resource managers in a world of rampant deforestation. But the second part, a theory Makarieva calls the biotic pump, is far more controversial.

Twitter has flagged a tweet from President Trump as containing "manipulated media" after the president tweeted a clip of a black toddler and a white toddler edited to include a CNN chyron reading "terrified todler[sic] runs from racist baby." The Hill reports: The initial video, which was widely circulated online long before the tweet, shows the two children running towards each other and embracing. It has been edited to include ominous background music and the fictitious CNN headline. The video reverts to the original clip midway through, cutting to a title reading "America is not the problem. Fake news is."

"This tweet has been labeled per our synthetic and manipulated media policy to give people more context," a Twitter spokesperson told The Hill. The tweet marks the third time the social media platform has flagged a tweet by the president.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: In a major U-turn, the UK is ditching the way its current coronavirus-tracing app works and shifting to a model based on technology provided by Apple and Google. The Apple-Google design has been promoted as being more privacy-focused. However, it means epidemiologists will have access to less data. The government now intends to launch an app in the autumn, however it says the product may not involve contact tracing at that point. Instead the software may be limited to enabling users to report their symptoms and order a test.

Baroness Dido Harding -- who heads up the wider Test and Trace program -- will only give the green light to actually deploying the Apple-Google technology if she judges it to be fit for purpose, which she does not believe is the case at present. It is possible this may never happen. Germany, Italy and Denmark are among other countries to have switched from a so-called "centralized" approach to a "decentralized" one. The centralized version trialled on the Isle of Wight worked well at assessing the distance between two users, but was poor at recognizing Apple's iPhones. Specifically, the software registered about 75% of nearby Android handsets but only 4% of iPhones. By contrast, the Apple-Google model logged 99% of both Android mobiles and iPhones.

AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: Construction is beginning on the world's largest liquid air battery, which will store renewable electricity and reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants. The project near Manchester, UK, will use spare green energy to compress air into a liquid and store it. When demand is higher, the liquid air is released back into a gas, powering a turbine that puts the green energy back into the grid. The new liquid air battery, being developed by Highview Power, is due to be operational in 2022 and will be able to power up to 200,000 homes for five hours, and store power for many weeks. The Highview battery will store 250MWh of energy, almost double the amount stored by the biggest chemical battery, built by Tesla in South Australia. The new project is sited at the Trafford Energy Park, also home to the Carrington gas-powered energy plant and a closed coal power station. The plant's lifetime is expected to be 30-40 years.

After Motherboard discovered multiple servers on Discord containing pirated porn, the chat platform removed them and banned the owners of each. From a report: "Discord prohibits the sale, dissemination, and promotion of cracked accounts," a spokesperson told Motherboard. "We ban users and shut down servers that are responsible for this behavior. In cases of copyrighted material, we respond promptly to DMCA takedown requests and take the appropriate action." The bans are permanent, and the owners can no longer access their accounts for any purpose. Former members of those servers can no longer access those servers, either.

During Motherboard's reporting, Google removed an OnlyFans scraping Chrome extension when approached for comment. Stolen content is a problem that has plagued the adult industry for as long as porn has existed on the internet. Several owners of premium platforms similar to OnlyFans urged the industry to do better in how it safeguards content, by protecting models from theft using more advanced fingerprinting, watermarking, copyright takedown support, and technology that could prevent scrapers from using these tools to begin with.

Tesla is acquiring $5 million worth of land outside of Austin, Texas to build its new factory. CEO Elon Musk refers to it as "Cybertruck Gigafactory" because it will be where Tesla produces its new electric pickup truck. Electrek reports: Last month, Electrek exclusively reported that Tesla's next factory is going to be in Austin. After our report, Tesla leaked that Tulsa, Oklahoma, was still in the running, but we were able to confirm that Tesla was already set to build in Austin, and it plans to move fast with hope to have a general assembly line for Model Y in Texas by the end of the year. Now we've learned that Tesla is buying a 2,100-acre piece of land (pictured above) just outside Austin to build the factory.

The land is currently occupied by a sand and gravel mining site, but Tesla is buying the location for just over $5 million which was revealed in an application with the Texas Comptroller's office. Electrek has learned that they have already started that process of relocation and Tesla's construction team is already getting ready to build on at this location, which is near the Austin airport. Yet, the purchase is not completely official until they secure approval from all the local authorities. The construction of the new Tesla factory is set to commence in Q3 of 2020 pending all approvals. Tesla is seeking approval from the local school district to forgive up to $68 million on its property tax bill over 10 years. It would be part of a wider incentive package with Travis County and the state.