Meta Platforms accused the European Union's antitrust authority of acting like "a fishing super trawler" by netting vast amounts of "wholly irrelevant" documents in an attempt to build a case against the U.S. tech giant. From a report: The commission was "hoovering up the whole sea bed -- with the intention that it will later see what species of rare fish it finds within its vast nets," Daniel Jowell, a lawyer for Meta, told a five-judge panel of the EU General Court in Luxembourg on Wednesday in a clash that turns the tables on regulators who often express concerns over data-collection practices of Meta's Facebook social network.

Meta accused the commission of refusing to engage with the firm and ignoring its suggested alternatives to render the data requests more "proportionate" and limited to what is necessary. Instead, the commission "sailed obliviously onward," using a "mechanical application of its search terms despite being on notice of the vast number of irrelevant documents this was bound to give rise to," Jowell told the court.

The Dutch consumer technology firm TomTom announced on Wednesday that it is "resetting" the organization as a result of improvements in its mapmaking technology. The firm said: Engineering investments have resulted in an advanced automated mapmaking platform, which leads to a material change in mapmaking activities. [...] The improvement in our mapmaking technology will lead to material efficiency gains. Combined with a better map, this will strengthen our competitive position. Regrettably, this will have an intended impact on approximately 500 employees in our Maps unit, equivalent to around 10% of our total global headcount.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Big Brother is listening. Companies use "bossware" to listen to their employees when they're near their computers. Multiple "spyware" apps can record phone calls. And home devices such as Amazon's Echo can record everyday conversations. A new technology, called Neural Voice Camouflage, now offers a defense. It generates custom audio noise in the background as you talk, confusing the artificial intelligence (AI) that transcribes our recorded voices.

The new system uses an "adversarial attack." The strategy employs machine learning -- in which algorithms find patterns in data -- to tweak sounds in a way that causes an AI, but not people, to mistake it for something else. Essentially, you use one AI to fool another. The process isn't as easy as it sounds, however. The machine-learning AI needs to process the whole sound clip before knowing how to tweak it, which doesn't work when you want to camouflage in real time.

So in the new study, researchers taught a neural network, a machine-learning system inspired by the brain, to effectively predict the future. They trained it on many hours of recorded speech so it can constantly process 2-second clips of audio and disguise what's likely to be said next. For instance, if someone has just said "enjoy the great feast," it can't predict exactly what will be said next. But by taking into account what was just said, as well as characteristics of the speaker's voice, it produces sounds that will disrupt a range of possible phrases that could follow. That includes what actually happened next; here, the same speaker saying, "that's being cooked." To human listeners, the audio camouflage sounds like background noise, and they have no trouble understanding the spoken words. But machines stumble. The work was presented in a paper last month at the International Conference on Learning Representations, which peer reviews manuscript submissions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple's Safari web browser has more than 1 billion users, according to an estimate by Atlas VPN. Only one other browser has more than a billion users, and that's Google's Chrome. But at nearly 3.4 billion, Chrome still leaves Safari in the dust. It's important to note that these numbers include mobile users, not just desktop users. Likely, Safari's status as the default browser for both the iPhone and iPad plays a much bigger role than its usage on the Mac. Still, it's impressive given that Safari is the only major web browser not available on Android, which is the world's most popular mobile operating system, or Windows, the most popular desktop OS. "The statistics are based on the GlobalStats browser market share percentage, which was then converted into numbers using the Internet World Stats internet user metric to retrieve the exact numbers," explains Atlas VPN in a blog post.

The /e/OS-powered Murena One is the first smartphone from Murena that does its best to free you from Google without sacrificing too many core features. There are no Google apps, Google Play Services, or even the Google Assistant. It's all been replaced by open-source software alternatives with privacy-respecting features. ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports: Murena and Mandrake Linux founder Gael Duval was sick of it by 2017. He wanted his data to be his data, and he wanted open-source software. Almost five years later, Duval and his co-developers launched the Murena One X2. It's the first high-end Android phone using the open-source /e/OS Android fork to arrive on the market. The privacy heart of the Murena One is /e/OS V1. There have been many attempts to create an alternative to Google-based Android and Apple's iOS -- Ubuntu One, FirefoxOS, and Windows Mobile -- but all failed. Duval's approach isn't to reinvent the mobile operating system wheel, but to clean up Android of its squeaky Google privacy-invading features and replace them with privacy-respecting ones. To make this happen, Duval started with LineageOS -- an Android-based operating system, which is descended from the failed CyanogenMod Android fork. It also blends in features from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source-code trees.

In the /e/OS, most (but not all) Google services have been removed and replaced with MicroG services. MicroG replaces Google's libraries with purely open-source implementations without hooks to Google's services. This includes libraries and apps which provide Google Play, Maps, Geolocation, and Messaging services for Android applications. In addition, /e/OS does its best to free you from higher-level Google services. For instance, Google's default search engine has been replaced with Murena's own meta-search engine. Other internet-based services, such as Domain Name Server (DNS) and Network Time Protocol (NTP), use non-Google servers. Above the operating system, you'll find Google-free applications. This includes a web browser; an e-mail client; a messaging app; a calendar; a contact manager; and a maps app that relies on Mozilla Location Service and OpenStreetMap. While it's not here yet, Murena is also working on its own take on Google Assistant, Elivia-AI. You can also run many, but not all Android apps. You'll find these apps on the operating system's App Lounge. [...]

There's still one big problem: the App Lounge still relies on you logging in with your Google account. In short, the App Lounge is mainly a gateway to Google Store apps. Munera assures me that the Lounge anonymizes your data -- except if you use apps that require payment. Still, this is annoying for people who want to cut all their ties with Google. The fundamental problem is this: Muena does all it can to separate its operating system and applications from Google, but it can't -- yet -- replace Google's e-commerce and software store system. As for hardware specs, the $379 Murena One features a 6.5-inch IPS LCD display, eight-core MediaTek Helio P60 processor, side-mounted fingerprint scanner, three rear cameras (48MP + 8MP + 5MP) and 25MP front camera, and 4,500mAh battery. It also features a microSD card slot for expandable storage and headphone port.

Work is afoot to free up several internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) address ranges which have been unroutable as reserved, invalid or used for loopback networks since the 1980s. Reader Bismillah shares a report: Seth Schoen, who co-founded the free transport layer security digital certificate provider Let's Encrypt is working on an IPv4 clean-up project that would take address currently not routed on the public Internet, and make them generally usable. Presenting on the IPv4 Unicast Extensions Project at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT), Schoen said decisions taken during the 1980s to keep several IPv4 address ranges as "special", has led to a substantial amount of numbering resources going to waste. This "even though the reasons behind the those decisions has not been borne out," Schoen said. Taking the 240/4, 0/8, 127/8, 225/8-232/8 ranges, and making them available as ordinary unicast numbering resources for networks would add some 419 million IPv4 addresses. Due to the rapid growth of the Internet, the number of 32-bit IPv4 addresses has become scarce, with some regional registries being unable to allocate additional blocks to networks. The scarcity has caused IPv4 address hoarding, high prices for sub-allocations and even fraud to get more space.

Itochu, Mitsubishi and other companies are investing in Evering (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), a chip-embedded smart ring that can act as a wallet and a key [...]. Bloomberg reports: Evering is backed by MTG, a listed Japanese health and beauty company. MTG struck a contract with Visa last year and began selling rings in Japan, which cost about 20,000 yen ($158) apiece, including tax. As retailers around the world seek ways to make it easier for consumers to shop seamlessly without touching anything, Evering and MTG are betting that their smart ring will resonate with early adopters. Made out of zirconia, the finger-worn gadget lets people do things such as lock and unlock doors, as well as pay for drinks in stores. More than 10 investors are considering investing a total of around 1 billion yen in Evering, which may eventually seek a public listing [...]. Potential backers include Daiwa House Industry and Toppan, with an announcement due soon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The next generation of Starlink satellites are going to be larger, and more powerful, designed to provide internet access to remote parts of the world, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The space billionaire recently discussed the details of the Starlink Gen2 System on the popular YouTube show, Everyday Astronaut. In the 32 minute clip, Musk reveals that SpaceX has already produced the first Starlink 2.0 satellite. The new generation satellite is 7 meters (22 feet) long and weighs about 1.25 tons (approximately 2,755 pounds or 1,250 kilograms). Starlink 1.0, by comparison, weighs about 573 pounds (260 kilograms). The extra weight accounts for a more effective satellite, according to Musk. "Just think of it like how many useful bits of data can each satellite do," Musk said during the interview. "Starlink 2.0 in terms of useful bits of data is almost an order of magnitude better than a Starlink 1.0."

Starlink satellites are lifted to low Earth orbit on board a Falcon 9 rocket, but the rocket will not be capable of carrying Starlink 2.0. "Falcon neither has the volume nor the mass [for the] orbit capability required for Starlink 2.0," Musk said. "So even if we shrunk the Starlink satellite down, the total up mass of Falcon is not nearly enough to do Starlink 2.0." Instead, SpaceX is banking on Starship, a heavy lift launch rocket that is currently under development, but has already suffered from numerous delays. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been working on an environmental review of the Starship program for months to assess its impact, and the report is expected in mid June, although it has been repeatedly pushed forward, much to Musk's dismay. "We need Starship to work and fly frequently or Starlink will be stuck on the ground," Musk said during the interview.

The Supreme Court blocked a controversial Texas social media law from taking effect in a decision released (PDF) on Tuesday, after the tech industry and other opponents warned it could allow for hateful content to run rampant online. CNBC reports: The law, HB20, prohibits online platforms from moderating or removing content based on viewpoint. It stems from a common charge on the right that major California-based social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are biased in their moderation strategies and disproportionately quiet conservative voices. The platforms have said they apply their community guidelines evenly and it's often the case that right-leaning users rank among the highest in engagement.

In the 5-4 decision, Alito dissented from the decision to lift the stay, issuing a written explanation for his vote, which was joined by two other conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, also voted against vacating the stay. Alito's dissent opened by acknowledging the significance of the case for social media companies and for states that would regulate how those companies can control the content on their platforms. "This application concerns issues of great importance that will plainly merit this Court's review," Alito wrote. "Social media platforms have transformed the way people communicate with each other and obtain news. At issue is a ground-breaking Texas law that addresses the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day." The Supreme Court's decision has implications for other states that may consider legislation similar to that in Texas. Florida's legislature has already passed a similar social media law, but it has so far been blocked by the courts.

Germany's parliament has set summer train fares at 9 euros per month in a bid to slash pollution and curb imports of Russian oil by spurring drivers to take public transit. From a report: The initiative takes effect on June 1, with 9 euros covering the cost of all buses, trams, subways, and regional trains, effectively cutting fares by more than 90 percent in some cities. Berlin commuters will save 98 euros on their monthly travel pass, while commuters in Hamburg will save more than 105 euros, Bloomberg reported. Deutsche Bahn is adding 50 additional trains to absorb the expected increase in users. The reduced fares come with an estimated price tag of 2.5 billions euros, the cost to the German government of reimbursing transit companies for lost revenue. Critics have said the plan is too expensive and warned that a surge in travelers could overwhelm mass transit and rail lines. Some, however, have suggested that the initiative should go further.

A farmer in Missouri said he had to go to complain to the Federal Trade Commission in order to get his tractor repaired by the only John Deere dealership in his area, showing how without the right to repair farmers are bound by the whims of the corporations who have a monopoly on repair. From a report:Jared Wilson had a problem with the AC in his John Deere tractor. It wasn't running and he needed to finish planting his corn and soybeans. The tractor would run, but finishing the plant would be a miserable experience in the heat of the Missouri spring. According to an affidavit Wilson filed to the FTC, he called the local John Deere dealership and asked for an appointment. The manager told him he didn't want his business. In the FTC complaint, Wilson is asking the commission to open a consumer protection investigation. Wilson and the manager talked on April 14, according to an affidavit about the incident filed with the FTC on April 16. Wilson told Motherboard he didn't know the AC had gone out until temperatures started creeping up in April. "When it hits 70 degrees it's almost unbearable inside the cab because it's all just glass and you've got a super hot motor sitting in front of you," he said.

It's been a bumpy ride for Netflix recently, and the announcement that it will be charging for password sharing hasn't gone as smoothly as it might have hoped, a new report claims. TechCrunch: Subscribers in Peru who were opted in to new password-sharing restrictions have reported confusion over Netflix's loose definition of "household" and noted the lack of clarity around the differing charges imposed on consumers. Global tech news site Rest of World informally surveyed more than a dozen Netflix users in Peru, after Netflix's March announcement that it would be asking customers in the country -- as well as in Chile and Costa Rica -- to pay extra when sharing their account passwords outside their homes. Central and South America represent Netflix's lowest revenue per user, which helps to explain the markets' selection.

The majority of those surveyed by Rest of World in Peru said that they have still not received uniform messaging around the new charges, even though it's been over two months after the policy was first announced. Some subscribers experienced the price increase and then canceled their Netflix accounts as a result. But others who ignored the message about the new policy were able to share their accounts across households without an extra charge, they claimed.

Greece and Saudi Arabia agreed on Tuesday on the main terms to set up a joint venture to lay a fibre optic data cable that will link Europe with Asia, Greek sources said on Tuesday. From a report: The "East to Med data Corridor", an undersea and land data cable, will be developed by MENA HUB, owned by Saudi Arabia's STC and Greek telecoms and satellite applications company TTSA. Greece's power utility Public Power Company (PPC) and Cyprus' telecoms operator CYTA, will also hold a stake in the project, pending final corporate approvals, a Greek diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The final closing of the deal is expected by July, for the project to launch in autumn and be completed by the end of 2025, the diplomat said.

Researchers suspect the checkm8[dot]info service is used by criminals to launder stolen iPhones. The tool's administrator claims the service is just a response to Apple's poor right to repair policies. From a report: "Activation Lock," a message displayed across the iPhone's screen read. "This iPhone is linked to an Apple ID. Enter the Apple ID and password that were used to set up this iPhone." This lock essentially turns iPhones into very expensive paperweights until the owner enters the requested credentials. The feature is designed to stop anyone else from using the phone if it's lost, or thieves from making money by reselling a stolen device. In part, Activation Lock is intended to make iPhones less attractive to thieves because stolen devices can't be used.

Now, an underground group is offering people a way to strip that lock from certain iPhones with its pay-for-hacking service. iOS security experts suspect it is being used to remove protections from stolen iPhones. The hacking group called Checkm8[dot]info offering the service, which lifts its name from a popular free-to-use jailbreak, insists its tool cannot be used by thieves. "Our goal is the ability to repair electronics as it's the key to saving resources, tackling e-waste and environmental damage," the administrator of Checkm8[dot]info told Motherboard in an email. Motherboard has previously written about how criminals have used phishing emails to grab necessary login credentials to remove the Activation Lock. Checkm8[dot]info provides a much easier method, and appears to streamline what is ordinarily a complicated process into one that non-technical users can follow. Checkm8[dot]info is correct in that Activation Lock can be frustrating to iPhone repair professionals, electronic waste facilities, and refurbishers, and has caused many perfectly good phones obtained through legal means to be shredded or destroyed. A user of the Checkm8[dot]info site told Motherboard they used the service as part of their legal phone reselling business.

IBM must pay $1.6 billion to BMC Software for swapping in its own software while servicing their mutual client, a Houston federal judge ruled. From a report: US District Judge Gray Miller, after a seven-day non-jury trial, rejected IBM's claim that their mutual client AT&T opted to switch software products on its own and ruled that IBM's role in the decision to dump BMC "smacked of intentional wrongdoing." For more than a decade, IBM serviced AT&T's mainframe computers, which ran on rival BMC's software products. IBM and BMC have long operated under a carefully negotiated agreement that forbids IBM from encouraging mutual clients, like AT&T, to switch to IBM's competing software product line. BMC sued IBM in 2017 claiming its rival intended to breach their agreement and poach AT&T's software business when the two companies renewed their power-sharing deal in 2015. IBM countered that AT&T dumped BMC's products and jumped to IBM for its own reasons, which IBM claims is fair game under its BMC agreement.

What we have are innumerable different collections of information, each of them specific to a particular application. Technology analyst Benedict Evans writes: Technology is full of narratives, but one of the loudest and most persistent concerns artificial intelligence and something called "data." AI is the future, we are told, and it's all about data -- and data is the future, and we should own it and maybe be paid for it. And countries need data strategies and data sovereignty, too. Data is the new oil. This is mostly nonsense. There is no such thing as "data," it isn't worth anything, and it doesn't belong to you anyway. Most obviously, data is not one thing, but innumerable different collections of information, each of them specific to a particular application, that can't be used for anything else. For instance, Siemens has wind turbine telemetry and Transport for London has ticket swipes, and those aren't interchangeable. You can't use the turbine telemetry to plan a new bus route, and if you gave both sets of data to Google or Tencent, that wouldn't help them build a better image recognition system.

This might seem trivial put so bluntly, but it points to the uselessness of very common assertions on the lines of "China has more data" -- more of what data? Meituan delivers 50mn restaurant orders a day, and that lets it build a more efficient routing algorithm, but you can't use that for a missile guidance system. You can't even use it to build restaurant delivery in London. "Data" does not exist -- there are merely many sets of data. Of course, when people talk about data they mostly mean "your" data -- your information and the things that you do on the internet, some of which is sifted, aggregated and deployed by technology companies. We want more privacy controls, but we also think we should have ownership of that data, wherever it is. The trouble is, most of the meaning in "your" data is not in you but in all of the interactions with other people. What you post on Instagram means very little: the signal is in who liked your posts and what else they liked, in what you liked and who else liked it, and in who follows you, who else they follow and who follows them, and so on outwards in a mesh of interactions between millions of people.

A new high-speed rail line is coming to Egypt, with developer Siemens Mobility saying it will link 60 cities across the country. From a report: The fully-electrified lines will see trains with a top speed of 230 kilometers per hour and travel from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, among other destinations. According to Siemens Mobility, the electrification of the network will reduce carbon emissions by 70% when compared to making trips by bus or car. It added that the project would result in the world's "sixth largest high-speed rail system." Siemens Mobility -- a separately managed company of industrial giant Siemens -- signed the contract to develop the rail line with the Egyptian National Authority for Tunnels, as well as consortium partners The Arab Contractors and Orascom Construction. In a statement Saturday, Siemens Mobility said its share of the combined contract would amount to 8.1 billion euros, or around $8.7 billion.

Singapore has begun a project to investigate potential uses of asset tokenization as the city state looks to establish itself as a hub for decentralized finance after several key crypto players left. From a report: "Project Guardian," a collaboration between the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the finance industry, will test the feasibility of applications in asset tokenization and decentralized finance (DeFi) while working to manage risks to financial stability and integrity, according to a statement from Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat on Tuesday.

The project aims to develop and pilot use cases in areas including open, interoperable networks; trust anchors; and institutional-grade DeFi protocols. The first pilot in the project will explore potential DeFi applications in wholesale funding markets. The pilot, led by DBS Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Marketnode, involves the creation of a permissioned liquidity pool comprising tokenized bonds and deposits. The MAS was relatively early among regulators to look at uses of blockchain technology, and Singapore set up a licensing regime a few years ago. However, applicants have been frustrated by the slowness of approvals, and a crypto advertising ban caught the industry off guard.

After years of funneling cash into startups' grand ambitions, Silicon Valley's investors are engaging in the grim ritual of delivering survival advice to their portfolio companies. From a report: In recent online slide presentations, blog posts and social-media threads, venture-capital doyens including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Craft Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator are telling the founders that they need to take emergency action for what could be the sharpest turn in more than a decade. Their advice includes cutting costs, preserving cash and jettisoning hopes that hedge funds or other investors will swoop in with big checks.

"The boom times of the last decade are unambiguously over," Lightspeed, which has backed companies including social network Snap and crypto exchange FTX, wrote in a dispatch for startup executives that was posted on Medium, a publishing platform, this month. The investors' admonitions are a departure from the growth-above-all mantra for startups in recent years, and come as the venture market is showing signs of sputtering. Funding for global startups -- at around $58 billion in commitments midway through the second quarter -- is on pace to drop by about one-fifth in the period compared with the previous quarter, according to analytics firm CB Insights. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index is down about 25% from its all-time high in November, and SoftBank Group, which has poured more than $100 billion into investments, this month reported a $26.2 billion loss in the first quarter as valuations plummeted in its portfolio of tech companies.

Google has quietly banned deepfake projects on its Colaboratory (Colab) service, putting an end to the large-scale utilization of the platform's resources for this purpose. From a report: Colab is an online computing resource that allows researchers to run Python code directly through the browser while using free computing resources, including GPUs, to power their projects. Due to the multi-core nature of GPUs, Colab is ideal for training machine learning projects like deepfake models or for performing data analysis. Deepfakes can be trained to swap faces on video clips, adding realistic facial expressions to make the result appear genuine, although it's fake. They have been used for spreading fake news, creating revenge porn, or for fun. However, the lack of ethical limitations in their use has been the source of controversy and concern.