An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: An artery that temporarily runs down the center of our forearms while we're still in the womb isn't vanishing as often as it used to, according to researchers from Flinders University and the University of Adelaide in Australia. That means there are more adults than ever with what amounts to be an extra channel of vascular tissue flowing under their wrist. "Since the 18th century, anatomists have been studying the prevalence of this artery in adults and our study shows it's clearly increasing," Flinders University anatomist Teghan Lucas said in 2020. "The prevalence was around 10 percent in people born in the mid-1880s compared to 30 percent in those born in the late 20th century, so that's a significant increase in a fairly short period of time, when it comes to evolution."

To compare the prevalence of this persistent blood channel, Lucas and colleagues Maciej Henneberg and Jaliya Kumaratilake from the University of Adelaide examined 80 limbs from cadavers, all donated by Australians of European descent. The donors raged from 51 to 101 on passing, which means they were nearly all born in the first half of the 20th century. Noting down how often they found a chunky median artery capable of carrying a good supply of blood, the research team compared the figures with records dug out of a literature search, taking into account tallies that could over-represent the vessel's appearance. Their results were published in 2020 in the Journal of Anatomy. The fact the artery seems to be three times as common in adults today as it was more than a century ago is a startling find that suggests natural selection is favoring those who hold onto this extra bit of bloody supply.

Facebook has been ordered to pay $5.5 million for creating and storing facial recognition templates of 200,000 local users without proper consent between April 2018 and September 2019, according to South Korea's government data protection watchdog, the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC). Netflix and Google also received reprimands or fines for insufficient privacy protections and violating laws. The Register reports: Another [$22,000] penalty was issued for illegally collecting social security numbers, not issuing notifications regarding personal information management changes, and other missteps. Facebook has been ordered to destroy facial information collected without consent or obtain consent, and was prohibited from processing identity numbers without legal basis. It was also ordered to destroy collected data and disclose contents related to foreign migration of personal information. Zuck's brainchild was then told to make it easier for users to check legal notices regarding personal information. The fine is the second-largest ever issued by the organization, the largest ever also going to Facebook. In November 2020 the Social Network was fined [$5.7 million] for passing on personal data to other operators without user permission.

Netflix's fine was a paltry [$188,000], with that sum imposed for collecting data from five million people without their consent, plus another [$2,700] for not disclosing international transfer of the data. Google got off the easiest, with just a "recommendation" to improve its personal data handling processes and make legal notices more precise. The PPIC said it is not done investigating methods of collecting personal information from overseas businesses and will continue with a legal review.

Alphabet's drone company Wing delivered 10,000 cups of coffee, 1,700 snack packs and 1,200 roast chickens to customers in Logan, Australia, over the last year, the company said Wednesday in a blog post outlining its progress. CNBC reports: Wing was launched in 2019 in Australia, following a series of drone tests that began in 2014. The service, which was initially part of Alphabet's experimental research division, allows users to order items such as food through a mobile app and is fast approaching 100,000 deliveries since its launch. Wing hopes to one day deliver products to people all over the world without having to rely on drivers or delivery trucks like other companies.

The company works with more than 30 partners globally, including local coffee shops and national brands such as Walgreens, according to a February blog post. Local businesses can also reach out directly to the company to get involved. In 2020, Wing partnered with a Virginia school district to deliver library books during the pandemic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech, written by Joel Hruska: According to a report from Chinese tech site Expreview, the WD SN550 Blue -- which is currently one of the best-reviewed budget SSDs on the market -- has undergone a NAND lobotomy. While the new SSD variant performs on-par with the old drive that WD actually sampled for review, once you exhaust the SLC NAND cache, performance craters from 610MB/s to 390MB/s. The new drive offers just 64 percent of the performance of the old drive.

This is unacceptable. It is unethical for any company to sample and launch a product to strong reviews only to turn around and sell an inferior version of that hardware at a later date without changing the product SKU or telling customers that they're buying garbage. I do not use the term "garbage" lightly, but let me be clear: If you silently change the hardware components you use in a way that makes your product lose performance, and you do not disclose that information prominently to the customer (ideally through a separate SKU), you are selling garbage. There's nothing wrong with selling a slower SSD at a good price, and there's nothing right about abusing the goodwill of reviewers and enthusiasts to kick bad hardware out the door.

As a reviewer of some twenty years, I do not care at all about the fact that SLC cache performance is identical. While I didn't realize it at the time I wrote up the Crucial bait-and-switch on August 16, I've actually been affected by this problem personally. The 2TB Crucial SSD I purchased for my own video editing work is one of the bait-and-switched units, and it's always had a massive performance problem -- as soon as it empties the SLC cache, it falls to what I'd charitably call hard drive-level performance. Performance can drop as low as 60MB/s via USB3.2 (and ~150MB/s when directly connected via NVMe) and it stays there until the copy task is done. The video upscaling projects I work on regularly generate between 300-500GB of image data per episode, per encode. Achieving ideal results can require weaving the output of 3-5 models together. That means I generate up to 1.5TB of data to create a single episode. God help you if you need to copy that much information to or from one of these broken SSDs. It's not literally as bad as a spinning disk from circa 2003, but it's nowhere near acceptable performance.

YouTube has issued a cease-and-desist order against the creator of Groovy, who has agreed to shut down the widely-popular music bot on August 30th. PC Gamer reports: Effectively a tool for adding background tunes to a chat room, Groovy worked by pulling audio directly from YouTube videos, joining voice calls, and playing music queued up by users [...]. It was ridiculously popular, reportedly installed on over 16 million servers. But it seems Google wasn't so hot on the bot, with a spokesperson for the company told The Verge that Groovy violated YouTube's terms of service for "modifying the service and using it for commercial purposes."

In that same report, Groovy creator Nik Ammerlaan (who made the bot because "my friend's bot sucked and I thought I could make a better one") admitted that this was likely a long-time coming. Groovy circumvents YouTube's front-end and advertising entirely. "I'm not sure why they decided to send it [a cease and desist] now," said Ammerlaan. "They probably just didn't know about it, to be honest. It was just a matter of seeing when it would happen."

Since Theranos began to unravel in 2016, the blood-testing company's founder, Elizabeth Holmes, has sought to tell her side of the story, even pursuing the possibility of a lucrative book deal. Now, at her coming criminal fraud trial, Ms. Holmes finally will get her best shot to tell it. From a report: After Theranos began imploding five years ago -- with federal investigators building cases against her for allegedly misleading investors and patients about the company's technology -- Ms. Holmes remained convinced she had done nothing wrong, people close to her at the time recalled, and wanted a venue to profess her innocence. In 2016, months after Theranos received its first criminal subpoena, Ms. Holmes pitched a book idea to Bob Barnett, a lawyer and book agent known for landing six-figure-plus advances for the political elite, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting, at Theranos's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters, was brokered by the company's then-general counsel, they said.

Mr. Barnett told Ms. Holmes that there could be a market for her book -- but only if she could emerge successfully from the federal investigations, one of the people said. He told her his Washington law firm, Williams & Connolly LLP, could help with her legal troubles, too, the people recall. The book deal didn't happen. Ms. Holmes was indicted in June 2018 on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud; and Theranos, a startup once valued at more than $9 billion, dissolved three months later. Her criminal trial in San Jose, Calif., is set to begin Tuesday. Four of Mr. Barnett's partners will be defending her.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the person behind T-Mobile's recent security breach that affected more than 50 million customers is a 21-year-old named John Binns. " Binns said he broke through the T-mobile defenses after discovering an unprotected router exposed on the internet, after scanning the carrier's internet addresses for weak spots using a publicly available tool," reports Axios. From the report: "I was panicking because I had access to something big," he wrote in Telegram messages to the Journal. "Their security is awful." "Generating noise was one goal," Binns said. He declined to say whether he sold any of the information he stole, or whether he was paid for the hack.

Some of the information exposed in the breach included names, dates of birth, social security numbers and personal ID information. The breach is being investigated Seattle's FBI office, according to the Journal.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Steven Adair hunts hackers for a living. Back in January, in a corner-of-his-eye, peripheral kind of way, he thought he saw one in his customer's networks -- a shadowy presence downloading emails. Adair is the founder of a cybersecurity company called Volexity, and he runs traps to corner intruders all the time. So he took a quick look at a server his client was using to run Microsoft Exchange and was stunned to "see requests that we're not expecting," he said. There were requests for access to specific email accounts, requests for confidential files. He followed all this requested information to a virtual server off-site. "The hair is almost rising on my arms right now when I think about it," Adair told NPR later. "This feeling of like, oh, crap this is not what should be going on." What Adair discovered was a massive hack into Microsoft Exchange -- one of the most popular email software programs in the world. For nearly three months, intruders helped themselves to everything from emails to calendars to contacts. Then they went wild and launched a second wave of attacks to sweep Exchange data from tens of thousands of unsuspecting victims. They hit mom-and-pop shops, dentist offices, school districts, local governments -- all in a brazen attempt to vacuum up information.

Both the White House and Microsoft have said unequivocally that Chinese government-backed hackers are to blame. NPR's months-long examination of the attack -- based on interviews with dozens of players from company officials to cyber forensics experts to U.S. intelligence officials -- found that stealing emails and intellectual property may only have been the beginning. Officials believe that the breach was in the service of something bigger: China's artificial intelligence ambitions. The Beijing leadership aims to lead the world in a technology that allows computers to perform tasks that traditionally required human intelligence -- such as finding patterns and recognizing speech or faces. "There is a long-term project underway," said Kiersten Todt, who was the executive director of the Obama administration's bipartisan commission on cybersecurity and now runs the Cyber Readiness Institute. "We don't know what the Chinese are building, but what we do know is that diversity of data, quality of data aggregation, accumulation of data is going to be critical to its success."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Law enforcement agencies and government organizations from 24 countries outside the United States used a controversial facial recognition technology called Clearview AI, according to internal company data reviewed by BuzzFeed News. That data, which runs up until February 2020, shows that police departments, prosecutors' offices, universities, and interior ministries from around the world ran nearly 14,000 searches with Clearview AI's software. At many law enforcement agencies from Canada to Finland, officers used the software without their higher-ups' knowledge or permission. After receiving questions from BuzzFeed News, some organizations admitted that the technology had been used without leadership oversight.

In March, a BuzzFeed News investigation based on Clearview AI's own internal data showed how the New York -- based startup distributed its facial recognition tool, by marketing free trials for its mobile app or desktop software, to thousands of officers and employees at more than 1,800 US taxpayer-funded entities. Clearview claims its software is more accurate than other facial recognition technologies because it is trained on a database of more than 3 billion images scraped from websites and social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Law enforcement officers using Clearview can take a photo of a suspect or person of interest, run it through the software, and receive possible matches for that individual within seconds. Clearview has claimed that its app is 100% accurate in documents provided to law enforcement officials, but BuzzFeed News has seen the software misidentify people, highlighting a larger concern with facial recognition technologies.

Based on new reporting and data reviewed by BuzzFeed News, Clearview AI took its controversial US marketing playbook around the world, offering free trials to employees at law enforcement agencies in countries including Australia, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. To accompany this story, BuzzFeed News has created a searchable table of 88 international government-affiliated and taxpayer-funded agencies and organizations listed in Clearview's data as having employees who used or tested the company's facial recognition service before February 2020, according to Clearview's data. Some of those entities were in countries where the use of Clearview has since been deemed "unlawful." Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That insists the company's key market is the U.S., saying: "While there has been tremendous demand for our service from around the world, Clearview AI is primarily focused on providing our service to law enforcement and government agencies in the United States. Other countries have expressed a dire need for our technology because they know it can help investigate crimes, such as, money laundering, financial fraud, romance scams, human trafficking, and crimes against children, which know no borders."

Ton-That alleged there are "inaccuracies contained in BuzzFeed's assertions," but declined to explain what those might be and didn't answer any follow-up questions.

Samsung smartphone owners are facing a looming deadline to rescue their photos from Samsung Cloud or risk losing backed up images. From a report: Samsung is removing the option to back up your photo gallery to Samsung Cloud, presumably in a bid to cut storage costs. Samsung Cloud will still continue to back up data such as contacts, calendar entries and notes, but photos and videos are no longer part of the package. Samsung has instead been encouraging customers to back up their photos using Microsoft's OneDrive service, but the deadline is looming for the Samsung Cloud service to be cut off, with customers warned they could lose photos if they don't have copies of them stored locally. Confusingly, Samsung has split customers into two groups, each with different cut-off deadlines. It's not easy to work out which group you're in, so it's probably safest to assume you're in Group 1, which has the earliest set of cut-off deadlines.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some of the most popular subreddits are protesting the proliferation of COVID-19 disinformation and conspiracy theories on the platform. Moderators from several high profile subreddits, including r/awww, r/showerthoughts, and r/pics, are now calling on the site to do a better job of curbing the spread of disinformation. "It is clear that even after promising to tackle the problem of misinformation on this site, nothing of substance has been done aside from quarantining a medium sized subreddit, which barely reduces traffic and does little to stop misinformation," user N8theGr8 posted said in a post announcing the protests, which lists dozens of subreddits who had signed on in solidarity.

Reddit pushed back 8 hours later with a post from CEO Steve Huffman in r/announcements. It didn't mention the thread specifically, but there's little doubt it was a response to calls to ban subreddits that spread disinformation. Huffman began by saying the CDC was the best source of up to date information about the pandemic and urged people to get vaccinated. "We appreciate that not everyone agrees with the current approach to getting us all through the pandemic, and some are still wary of vaccinations," Huffman said. "Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy. Reddit is a place for open and authentic discussion and debate. This includes conversations that question or disagree with popular consensus. This includes conversations that criticize those that disagree with the majority opinion. This includes protests that criticize or object to our decisions on which communities to ban from the platform."

Contract chipmaking giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing told has told that it plans to raise prices on products by as much as 20%, in what would be the company's steepest single increase. From a report: The price increases and the time frames for the hikes differ depending on the client, according to reports by Taiwan's Liberty Times newspaper and other media outlets. For some companies that received TSMC's notice, the hikes took effect immediately. TSMC and other Taiwanese semiconductor companies raised chip prices by more than 10% between last fall and this spring. But with strong demand continuing to outstrip supply, TSMC decided to sharply increase prices again. The increased costs tied to ramping up production are being passed downstream, with the company enjoying better bargaining power amid the global chip crunch as well. This move likely will impact the sticker prices of end products. A TSMC spokesperson declined to comment to Nikkei about the higher chip prices. Concerns over lower profitability are another reason behind the price hikes. The company has said it will make $100 billion in capital investments over three years through 2023. That commitment has fueled qualms about a potential decline in profits as TSMC prepares to boost its overseas expansion.

Netflix is testing out its first stab at mobile gaming within its own app at no extra cost, bringing two pre-existing Stranger Things games to its Android app -- but only in Poland. From a report: The two games available in Poland -- Stranger Things: 1984 and Stranger Things 3 -- have been available for years off Netflix's app, having been released through a licensing partnership in 2017 and 2019 to coincide with the second and third seasons of the hit retro-supernatural show. Last month, Netflix confirmed it plans to expand into video games, starting with ad-free games for mobile devices like phones and tablets available on its existing service at no added cost to subscribers. With broad ambitions to ultimately widen even to console games for Xbox and PlayStation, it represents its biggest expansion into a new kind of entertainment since Netflix started streaming in 2007 and released its first original show in 2012.

Speaking of Google killing a product, ArsTechnica has a rundown on the company's 16 years long effort to dominate the messaging space to no success. From the report: Google Talk, Google's first-ever instant messaging platform, launched on August 24, 2005. This company has been in the messaging business for 16 years, meaning Google has been making messaging clients for longer than some of its rivals have existed. But thanks to a decade and a half of nearly constant strategy changes, competing product launches, and internal sabotage, you can't say Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today. Google's 16 years of messenger wheel-spinning has allowed products from more focused companies to pass it by. Embarrassingly, nearly all of these products are much younger than Google's messaging efforts. Consider competitors like WhatsApp (12 years old), Facebook Messenger (nine years old), iMessage (nine years old), and Slack (eight years old) -- Google Talk even had video chat four years before Zoom was a thing.

Currently, you would probably rank Google's offerings behind every other big-tech competitor. A lack of any kind of top-down messaging leadership at Google has led to a decade and a half of messaging purgatory, with Google both unable to leave the space altogether and unable to commit to a single product. While companies like Facebook and Salesforce invest tens of billions of dollars into a lone messaging app, Google seems content only to spin up an innumerable number of under-funded, unstable side projects led by job-hopping project managers. There have been periods when Google briefly produced a good messaging solution, but the constant shutdowns, focus-shifting, and sabotage of established products have stopped Google from carrying much of these user bases -- or user goodwill -- forward into the present day. Because no single company has ever failed at something this badly, for this long, with this many different products (and because it has barely been a month since the rollout of Google Chat), the time has come to outline the history of Google messaging. [...]