China is preparing to hit pause on its monthslong campaign against technology companies, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter, as officials seek to arrest a rapid deterioration in the country's economic outlook. From the report: China's top internet regulator is set to meet next week with the country's embattled tech giants to discuss the regulatory campaign, according to the people, who described the meeting as a sign that officials acknowledge the toll the regulations have had on the private sector at a time when China's economic outlook is increasingly clouded due to strict COVID measures. Regulators are planning to hold off on new rules that limit the time that young people spend on mobile apps, according to one of the people, while another person said that Beijing is considering pushing some of its biggest tech companies to offer 1% equity stakes to the state and give the government a direct role in corporate decisions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: Microsoft is testing a VPN-like service for its Edge browser, adding a new layer of security and privacy to the browsing experience. A recently-discovered support page on Microsoft's website details the "Microsoft Edge Secure Network" feature, which provides data encryption and prevents online tracking, courtesy of Cloudflare. While it isn't available yet, even if you have the latest Dev channel build, the Microsoft Edge Secure Network feature appears to be similar in nature to Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 service. This is essentially a proxy or VPN service, which encrypts your browsing data so that it's safe from prying eyes, including your ISP. It also keeps your location private, so you can use it to access geo-restricted websites, or content that's blocked in your country.

Microsoft Edge's Secure Network mode will require you to be signed into your Microsoft account, and that's because the browser keeps track of how much data you've used in this mode. You get 1GB of free data per month, and that's tied to your Microsoft account. Most VPN services aren't free, so this shouldn't come as a surprise. Cloudflare itself doesn't keep any personally-identifiable user data, and any data related to browsing sessions is deleted every 25 hours. Information related to your data usage is also deleted at the end of each monthly period.

According to a survey of 501 people conducted by insurance company Progressive, most people prefer the process of buying a car online than at dealerships. Autoblog reports: Based on the 251 people who completed a transaction entirely online or through a dealer web site, and the 250 who did solely face-to-face business, there are two big takeaways. The first is that online shopping, still a small percentage of overall car sales, is growing rapidly in acceptance and actual transactions. [...] The second takeaway is that millennials are a major part of the online sales growth.

Overall, though, online shoppers expressed more joy with the process than showroom floor shoppers. Compared to 78% of buyers highly satisfied with buying a car online, only 58% of in-person shoppers registered the same pleasure. That carried through to trade-ins and financing as well. Eighty percent of online shoppers were highly satisfied with the trade-in process, versus 57% of dealership visitors; 70% of online shoppers gave the highest marks to the financing process as opposed to 53% of guests asked to "Step into the office" and wait while the salesperson conferred with the finance manager.

The European Union has joined the social network Mastodon, which has seen a staggering 30,000 new users after Elon Musk's bid for Twitter was accepted. PC Magazine reports: On Thursday, the European Commission said it had set up its own server, dubbed EU Voice, to join Mastodon's decentralized social network, also known as a "Fediverse." The effort is currently only a pilot, but it represents the EU's goal of supporting private and open-source software capable of rivaling mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. On the same day, the European Commission also launched an account for PeerTube, another decentralized platform that revolves around video sharing. "With the pilot launch of EU Voice and EU Video, we aim to offer alternative social media platforms that prioritize individuals and their rights to privacy and data protection," said European Data Protection Supervisor Wojciech Wiewiorowski.

"In concrete terms this means, for example, that EU Voice and EU Video do not rely on transfers of personal data to countries outside the European Union and the European Economic Area; there are no advertisements on the platforms; and there is no profiling of individuals that may use the platforms," he added. "These measures, amongst others, give individuals the choice on and control over how their personal data is used."

According to Breaking Defense, the head of machine learning at Lyft, Craig Martell, has been named the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer. From the report: The hiring of a Silicon Valley persona for the CDAO role is likely to be cheered by those in the defense community who have been calling for more technically-minded individuals to take leadership roles in the department. At the same time, Martell's lack of Pentagon experience -- he was a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School for over a decade studying AI for the military, but has never worked in the department's bureaucracy -- may pose challenges as he works to lead an office only months old. In an exclusive interview with Breaking Defense, Martell, who also worked as head of machine learning at Dropbox and led several AI teams at LinkedIn, acknowledged both the benefits and risks of bringing in someone with his background. [...]

As CDAO, Martell will be responsible for scaling up DoD's data, analytics and AI to enable quicker and more accurate decision-making and will also play an important role in the Pentagon's Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts to connect sensors and shooters. "If we're going to be successful in achieving the goals, if we're going to be successful in being competitive with China, we have to figure out where the best mission value can be found first and that's going to have to drive what we build, what we design, the policies we come up with," Martell said. "I just want to guard against making sure that we don't do this in a vacuum, but we do it with real mission goals, real mission objectives in mind."

His first order of business? Figuring out what needs to be done, and how to best use the $600 million in fiscal year 2023 dollars the CDAO's office was marked for in the Pentagon's most recent budget request. "So whenever I tackle a problem, whenever I go into a new organization, the first questions that I ask are: Do we have the right people? Do we have the right processes? Do we have the right tools to solve the visions [and] goals?" Martell said. To tackle that, Martell wants to identify the office's "marquee customers" and figure out what's "broken in terms of... people, platform, processes and tools" -- a process that could take anywhere from three to six months, he added. "We really want to be customer-driven here," Martell said. "We don't want to walk in and say if we build it, they'll come."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: More than 55 countries and the United States announced their commitment Thursday to defending a free and open internet, agreeing to uphold digital human rights in response to rising authoritarianism in cyberspace. The agreement (PDF), known as the Declaration for the Future of the Internet, aims to forestall an emerging "splinternet" characterized by the growing repression of internet users in closed regimes such as Russia and China -- and the divergence of those countries from the internet's founding principles of universal access and unfettered information flow. Concerns about the internet's long-term trajectory have been amplified by the war in Ukraine, according to senior Biden administration officials, as Russia has moved to block western social media services and penalized the sharing of accurate information about the conflict.

Many of the commitments outlined in the agreement reflect existing US policy initiatives, and the administration officials described the declaration as a way to organize and harmonize those efforts internationally. Under the agreement, countries have pledged not to abuse internet technologies for illegal surveillance; block content or websites in violation of so-called net neutrality principles; or use digital tools to undermine trust in elections. They agreed to support multilateral efforts against cybercrime, an issue that's grown in significance as businesses and governments alike have reeled in the face of devastating ransomware attacks. They committed to using only "trustworthy" network equipment, a nod to the spying risks the US and its allies have said are associated with Chinese vendors such as Huawei. And they joined together in reaffirming support for the decentralized, consensus-driven approach that for decades has underpinned decisions about how the internet should work.

Microsoft Edge could soon receive an integrated VPN service called the "Microsoft Edge Secure Network." The VPN (Virtual Private Network) service would work very similar to commercial VPN services, but it could be deeply integrated within the Microsoft Edge browser. From a report: The VPN service will be powered by Cloudflare. The company assures it permanently deletes the diagnostic and support data collected, every 25 hours.

Google says it's expanding the types of personal information that it'll remove from search results to cover things like your physical address, phone number, and passwords. From a report:: Before now, the feature mostly covered info that would let someone steal your identity or money -- now, you can ask Google to stop showing certain URLs that point to info that could lead someone to your house or give them access to your accounts. According to a blog post, Google's giving people the new options because "the internet is always evolving" and its search engine giving out your phone number or home address can be both jarring and dangerous. Here's a list of what kinds of info Google may remove, with the new additions in bold (h/t to the Wayback Machine for making the old list accessible): Confidential government identification (ID) numbers like U.S. Social Security Number, Argentine Single Tax Identification Number, etc, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, images of handwritten signatures, images of ID docs, highly personal, restricted, and official records, like medical records (used to read "confidential personal medical records"), personal contact info (physical addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses), and confidential login credentials.

The Snapchat founder, Evan Spiegel, has dismissed Facebook's "metaverse" ambitions as "ambiguous and hypothetical" as he announced a raft of new augmented reality features coming to phones and Snap's experimental AR Spectacles over the next year. The Guardian: Speaking ahead of the Snap Partner Summit, the company's flagship annual event, Spiegel argued Snapchat was uniquely placed to guide the next decade of technology thanks to the company's vast array of augmented reality services, such as the "lenses" that are used by millions of people every day.

[...] The updates sound like they could be the foundations of a shared virtual universe of the type that Facebook recently decided was so fundamental to its future that it even rebranded the company as Meta. But, Spiegel says, the word "metaverse" is never uttered in Snap's offices. "The reason why we don't use that word is because it's pretty ambiguous and hypothetical. Just ask a room of people how to define it, and everyone's definition is totally different."

Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare said this week that it mitigated one of the largest volumetric distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that has been recorded to date. From a report: Cloudflare said it detected and mitigated a 15.3 million request-per-second (rps) DDoS attack earlier this month -- making it one of the largest HTTPS DDoS attacks on record. Volumetric DDoS attacks differ from traditional bandwidth DDoS attacks where attackers attempt to exhaust and clog up the victim's internet connection bandwidth. Instead, attackers focus on sending as many junk HTTP requests to a victim's server in order to take up precious server CPU and RAM and prevent legitimate users from using targeted sites. Cloudflare previously announced that it stopped the largest DDoS attack on record in August 2021, when it mitigated a 17.2 million HTTP requests/second (rps) attack, a figure that the company described as almost three times larger than any previous volumetric DDoS attack that was ever reported in the public domain. Earlier this month, the company said it stopped an attack targeting a company in the cryptocurrency space.

Twitter on Thursday reported mixed first-quarter earnings, missing Wall Street expectations on revenue but adding users. It also admitted to over-counting some monetizable daily active users between Q1 2019 and Q4 2021. From a report: Analysts were expecting the tech giant to post weak results, given that its board finalized a takeover deal with Elon Musk earlier this week. This could be Twitter's last earnings report as a publicly traded company. The company brought in $1.2 billion in revenue last quarter, just shy of analyst estimates. Other ad-supported tech giants also missed Q1 revenue expectations in response to macroeconomic headwinds impacting the ad market. Twitter also said it accidentally over-counted the number of monetizable daily active users because of a feature that allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between them. It counted those two separate accounts as two users for more than three years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: For most of the world, the common practice of "rooting" or "jailbreaking" a phone allows the device's owner to install apps and software tweaks that break the restrictions of Apple's or Google's operating systems. For a growing number of North Koreans, on the other hand, the same form of hacking allows them to break out of a far more expansive system of control -- one that seeks to extend to every aspect of their lives and minds. On Wednesday, the North Korea-focused human rights organization Lumen and Martyn Williams, a researcher at the Stimson Center think tank's North Korea -- focused 38 North project, together released a report on the state of smartphones and telecommunications in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a country that restricts its citizens' access to information and the internet more tightly than any other in the world. The report details how millions of government-approved, Android-based smartphones now permeate North Korean society, though with digital restrictions that prevent their users from downloading any app or even any file not officially sanctioned by the state. But within that regime of digital repression, the report also offers a glimpse of an unlikely new group: North Korean jailbreakers capable of hacking those smartphones to secretly regain control of them and unlock a world of forbidden foreign content.

Learning anything about the details of subversive activity in North Korea -- digital or otherwise -- is notoriously difficult, given the Hermit Kingdom's nearly airtight information controls. Lumen's findings on North Korean jailbreaking are based on interviews with just two defectors from the country. But Williams says the two escapees both independently described hacking their phones and those of other North Koreans, roughly corroborating each others' telling. Other North Korea -- focused researchers who have interviewed defectors say they've heard similar stories. Both jailbreakers interviewed by Lumen and Williams said they hacked their phones -- government-approved, Chinese-made, midrange Android phones known as the Pyongyang 2423 and 2413 -- primarily so that they could use the devices to watch foreign media and install apps that weren't approved by the government. Their hacking was designed to circumvent a government-created version of Android on those phones, which has for years included a certificate system that requires any file downloaded to the device to be "signed" with a cryptographic signature from government authorities, or else it's immediately and automatically deleted. Both jailbreakers say they were able to remove that certificate authentication scheme from phones, allowing them to install forbidden apps, such as games, as well as foreign media like South Korean films, TV shows, and ebooks that North Koreans have sought to access for decades despite draconian government bans.

In another Orwellian measure, Pyongyang phones' government-created operating system takes screenshots of the device at random intervals, the two defectors say -- a surveillance feature designed to instill a sense that the user is always being monitored. The images from those screenshots are then kept in an inaccessible portion of the phone's storage, where they can't be viewed or deleted. Jailbreaking the phones also allowed the two defectors to access and wipe those surveillance screenshots, they say. The two hackers told Lumen they used their jailbreaking skills to remove restrictions from friends' phones, as well. They said they also knew of people who would jailbreak phones as a commercial service, though often for purposes that had less to do with information freedom than more mundane motives. Some users wanted to install a certain screensaver on their phone, for instance, or wipe the phone's surveillance screenshots merely to free up storage before selling the phone secondhand. As for how the jailbreaking was done, the report says both jailbreakers "described attaching phones to a Windows PC via a USB cable to install a jailbreaking tool."

"One mentioned that the Pyongyang 2423's software included a vulnerability that allowed programs to be installed in a hidden directory. The hacker says they exploited that quirk to install a jailbreaking program they'd downloaded while working abroad in China and then smuggled back into North Korea." The other hacker might've obtained his jailbreaking tool in a computer science group at Pyongyang's elite Kim Il Sung University where he attended.

"The Register reports Microsoft fixed a Point of Sale bug that delayed Windows 11 startup for 40 minutes," writes Slashdot reader ellithligraw. "So much for the express lane at check-out." From the report: A fresh Windows 11 patch slipped out overnight as an optional update, but contains an impressively long list of fixes for Microsoft's flagship operating system. One bug addressed in KB5012643 could leave Point of Sale terminals hanging for up to 40 minutes during startup. Microsoft stated, "We fixed an issue that delays OS startup by approximately 40 minutes." "Microsoft described the fixes as 'improvements' [and chose to highlight the fact that temperature would now be displayed on top of the weather icon on the taskbar]," added Slashdot reader ellithligraw. "[Y]eah, Windows 11 is great as a PoS."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Social media platform Mastodon, often seen as an alternative to Twitter, gained nearly 30,000 new users on the day that Elon Musk bought Twitter. On Tuesday a Mastodon domain became unresponsive. Eugen Rochko, Mastodon's CEO, later told Motherboard in an email that there were performance issues. "I'm sorry I couldn't have responded sooner," he wrote. "I was working all day on fixing performance issues on the Mastodon servers I operate due to the influx of new and returning users following Twitter's acquisition by Elon Musk." Rochko added that Mastodon has seen an increase of 41,287 active users, including both returning users and new users. When breaking that figure down by just new users, 28,391 new people have joined Mastodon in the past day, Rochko said.

Mastodon is a piece of open-source software that people can use as a base to create their own social networks. Although its appearance is similar to Twitter, it also differs from Twitter in the sense that Twitter is a single social network people sign up for. When it comes to the social network side of things, Mastodon holds more similarities with Discord, in that users have to find specific Mastodon instances to join. Those looking to create their own Mastodon instance also have to host it themselves, a step that may alienate many non-technical users. Donald Trump's social media site, Truth Social, is based on Mastodon and was recently called out by the company for failing to provide the source code for the site built on top of it. Two weeks later, the social media site quietly acknowledged Mastodon in a dedicated section labeled "open source."

In regard to the matter, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko said: "Compliance with our AGPLv3 license is very important to me as that is the sole basis upon which I and other developers are willing to give away years of work for free."

Twitter did confirm some fluctuations in follower counts after Musk's deal was made official, although they said they were organic in nature.

The US Army could end up wasting much as $22 billion in taxpayer cash if soldiers aren't actually interested in using, or able to use as intended, the Microsoft HoloLens headsets it said it would purchase, a government watchdog has warned. The Register reports: In 2018, the American military splashed $480 million on 100,000 prototype augmented-reality goggles from Redmond to see how they could help soldiers train for and fight in combat. The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) project was expanded when the Army decided it wanted the Windows giant to make custom, battle-ready AR headsets in a ten-year deal worth up to $22 billion. The project was delayed and is reportedly scheduled to roll out some time this year. But the US Dept of Defense's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) cast some doubt on whether it was worth it at all.

"Procuring IVAS without attaining user acceptance could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that soldiers may not want to use or use as intended," the Pentagon oversight body wrote in an audit [PDF] report this month. In other words, the Army hasn't yet fully determined if or how service members will find these HoloLens headsets valuable in the field. Although the heavily redacted report did not reveal soldiers' responses to the prototype testing, it said feedback from surveys showed "both positive and negative user acceptance." The Army plans to purchase 121,500 IVAS units from Microsoft while admitting that "if soldiers do not love IVAS and do not find it greatly enhances accomplishing the mission, then soldiers will not use it," the report disclosed.

Major technology companies have been duped into providing sensitive personal information about their customers in response to fraudulent legal requests, and the data has been used to harass and even sexually extort minors, according to four federal law enforcement officials and two industry investigators. Bloomberg: The companies that have complied with the bogus requests include Meta, Apple, Alphabet's Google, Snap, Twitter and Discord, according to three of the people. All of the people requested anonymity to speak frankly about the devious new brand of online crime that involves underage victims. The fraudulently obtained data has been used to target specific women and minors, and in some cases to pressure them into creating and sharing sexually explicit material and to retaliate against them if they refuse, according to the six people.

The tactic is considered by law enforcement and other investigators to be the newest criminal tool to obtain personally identifiable information that can be used not only for financial gain but to extort and harass innocent victims. It is particularly unsettling since the attackers are successfully impersonating law enforcement officers. The tactic is impossible for victims to protect against, as the best way to avoid it would be to not have an account on the targeted service, according to the people. It's not clear how often the fraudulent data requests have been used to sexually extort minors. Law enforcement and the technology companies are still trying to assess the scope of the problem.

Fibre-optic cable is being laid across the globe at great expense to speed up people's internet connections, but researchers claim that the copper telephone wire already in use across the country can achieve data rates three times higher than currently seen at a fraction of the price, at least over short distances. New Scientist: Their technique to boost speeds may help to ease the transition to nationwide fibre optic, and may also be of use in countries that use similar twisted-pair copper wire. Ergin Dinc at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues say that twisted pairs of copper wire, of the type used for decades as telephone lines and now repurposed for broadband internet, can support a frequency fives times higher than is currently used, which would dramatically improve data transmission rates. Above that limit, the researchers found that the wire essentially acts as an aerial and transforms any signal sent along it into radio waves that dissipate before reaching their destination. "These cables are actually very old, invented by Alexander Graham Bell, and since then no one has looked into the theoretical limits," says Dinc. He and his colleagues say that their findings may allow houses near fibre-optic cables to achieve higher speeds than they currently enjoy without the expense of running fibre all the way to their home. Fibre-optic cables carry groups of photons to represent data, and huge numbers of these groups can be sent along the line one after another without waiting for the first to arrive. Fibre connections in use today typically operate at 1 gigabit per second, but theoretical speeds could be many thousands of times higher.

This week at the 2022 NAB Show Streaming Summit, Google launched in general availability Media CDN, a platform for delivering content using the same infrastructure that powers YouTube. From a report: With a presence in over 1,300 cities across 200 countries, Google says that Media CDN is designed to -- in the company's words -- "automate all facets" of "serving content [close to users]." The pandemic led to an explosion in demand for streaming content as business closures and shelter-in-place orders forced folks to stay home.

Media CDN, which joins Google's CDN portfolio for web and API acceleration, is by no stretch of the imagination the first of its kind. There's plenty of CDNs optimized to serve media. But Google touts ostensibly unique benefits like delivery protocols tailored to individual users and network conditions and "industry-leading" offload rates. "With multiple tiers of caching, we minimize calls to origin -- even for infrequently accessed content," Google VP Shailesh Shukla wrote in a blog post yesterday. "This alleviates performance or capacity stress in the content origin and saves costs." Media CDN also features tools for ad insertion, allowing customers to dynamically inject video content with ads. Moreover, the service is "built with AI/ML" to power interactive experiences, Google says, like real-time stats during sporting events and purchase links embedded in virtual billboards.

When Sony's expanded PlayStation Plus service starts rolling out next month, it will fold in PlayStation Now, which offers access to hundreds of games from older console generations. Now, it seems the company is getting even more serious about game preservation. From a report: According to Twitter and LinkedIn posts spotted by Video Games Chronicle, Sony has hired at least one engineer (Garrett Fredley, a former build engineer for mobile developer Kabam) to work on a new preservation team. "Today is my first day as a Senior Build Engineer at @PlayStation, working as one of their initial hires for the newly created Preservation team! Game Preservation was my first career passion, so I'm ecstatic that I get to go back to those roots," Fredley wrote. "Let's go and ensure our industry's history isn't forgotten!" [...] Sony historically hasn't done an incredible job with preserving games. Aside from the original PS3 models being able to run many PS1 and PS2 games, backward compatibility seemed like an afterthought until the PS5, which supports all but a few PS4 titles.

Apple on Wednesday followed through on its plans to begin publicly releasing repair manuals for some of its products, in addition to selling parts and tools online. The goal, the company said, is to allow iPhone owners an alternative way to repair their devices. From a report: The tech giant's new program, called Self Service Repair, is starting out for US customers with Apple's iPhone 13 line of smartphones, the iPhone 12 and new iPhone SE. Apple said it designed the program to offer adventurous and capable people access to the same parts, tools and instructions it gives to its own certified technicians and partner repair shops, hopefully making it easier for people to repair devices instead of resorting to buying a new one. "We believe we have a responsibility to customers and the environment to offer convenient access to safe, reliable, and secure repairs to help customers get the most out of their devices," the company wrote in a document published Wednesday that outlines its plans. "As the doors open on this new venue, we're underwhelmed, and settling back into our usual skepticism," iFixit posted on Wednesday. The firm adds: The biggest problem? Apple is doubling down on their parts pairing strategy, enabling only very limited, serial number-authorized repairs. You cannot purchase key parts without a serial number or IMEI. If you use an aftermarket part, there's an "unable to verify" warning waiting for you. This strategy hamstrings third-party repair with feature loss and scare tactics and could dramatically limit options for recyclers and refurbishers, short-circuiting the circular economy. As of today, you can buy an official Apple iPhone 12 screen and install it yourself, on your own device, with no fuss. Until now, DIY repairs relied on keeping the Face ID speaker and sensor assembly intact, then very carefully moving it to your new screen, and finally ignoring some gentle warnings. If your assembly was damaged or defective, you were out of luck. The new program will solve that problem -- assuming you've bought an official Apple part.