A new bipartisan bill, introduced on Wednesday, could mark Congress' first step toward addressing algorithmic amplification of harmful content. The Social Media NUDGE Act, authored by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), would direct the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to study "content neutral" ways to add friction to content-sharing online. From a report: The bill instructs researchers to identify a number of ways to slow down the spread of harmful content and misinformation, whether through asking users to read an article before sharing it (as Twitter has done) or other measures. The Federal Trade Commission would then codify the recommendations and mandate that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter put them into practice. "For too long, tech companies have said 'Trust us, we've got this,'" Klobuchar said in a statement on Thursday. "But we know that social media platforms have repeatedly put profits over people, with algorithms pushing dangerous content that hooks users and spreads misinformation."

Italian luxury car maker Alfa Romeo has revealed it will be using non-fungible tokens (NFT) to track and store maintenance records on the blockchain for its new Tonale SUV. From a report: Alfa Romeo, which is owned by Stellantis (formerly Fiat Chrysler), appears to be the first carmaker to utilize NFTs in this way, seemingly in a bid to bring transparency and efficiency to a car market that often relies on third parties to track car records. "Digitalization is a key enabler of our metamorphosis," Francesco Calcara, head of marketing at Alfa Romeo, said in a media briefing. "[The NFTs] will sustain the residual values of our models as we are the first in the market to adopt this next-generation technology." The company says the car's NFT will be able to generate a certificate from records of its maintenance data, but only for service done by certified dealers.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has flown a UH-60A Black Hawk helicopter without a pilot for the first time ever. CNET reports: DARPA's Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System program was used to fly the helicopter on autopilot over Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on Saturday. The Black Hawk was kitted out with Sikorsky Matrix autonomous flying technology, and DARPA says it repeated the "uninhabited flight" on Monday. "Pilots can focus on mission management instead of the mechanics," Stuart Young, program manager in DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, said in a statement. "ALIAS ... includes the ability to operate aircraft at all times of the day or night, with and without pilots, and in a variety of difficult conditions, such as contested, congested, and degraded visual environments."

According to a recent study published by mobile marketing company URL Genius, YouTube and TikTok track users' personal data more than any other social media apps. However, while YouTube mostly collects your personal data for its own purposes to serve you more relevant ads, TikTok mostly allows third-party trackers to collect your data -- "and from there, it's hard to say what happens with it," reports CNBC. From the report: With third-party trackers, it's essentially impossible to know who's tracking your data or what information they're collecting, from which posts you interact with -- and how long you spend on each one -- to your physical location and any other personal information you share with the app. As the study noted, third-party trackers can track your activity on other sites even after you leave the app.

To conduct the study, URL Genius used the Record App Activity feature from Apple's iOS to count how many different domains track a user's activity across 10 different social media apps -- YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Messenger and Whatsapp -- over the course of one visit, before you even log into your account. YouTube and TikTok topped the other apps with 14 network contacts apiece, significantly higher than the study's average number of six network contacts per app. Those numbers are all probably higher for users who are logged into accounts on those apps, the study noted.

Ten of YouTube's trackers were first-party network contacts, meaning the platform was tracking user activity for its own purposes. Four of the contacts were from third-party domains, meaning the social platform was allowing a handful of mystery outside parties to collect information and track user activity. For TikTok, the results were even more mysterious: 13 of the 14 network contacts on the popular social media app were from third parties. The third-party tracking still happened even when users didn't opt into allowing tracking in each app's settings, according to the study. "Consumers are currently unable to see what data is shared with third-party networks, or how their data will be used," the report's authors wrote.

Nvidia is now a larger company than social media giant Meta. PC Gamer reports: In a meteoric turn of events, Nvidia has surged to become the 7th largest company in the US, despite being nowhere close only a few years ago, and helped along by Meta's recent share price collapse. Meta's fall from stock market grace this past week saw 30% of its share value wiped out, leaving it with a total value in shares, or market cap, of just $615.70B (at time of writing). That's clearly still a lot of money, but it's notably less money than it was worth at the beginning of last week -- around $260B less.

Compare that to Nvidia's market cap of $657.06B, and the green team is out on top. Perhaps not for long, but we'll see. That's still a little shy of Berkshire Hathaway in 6th place at over $720B, but it's markedly higher up than Nvidia was only a few years ago, when its share value was a small fraction of what it is today. [...] Nvidia officially terminated its attempt to buy Arm, the UK-based chip designer, for $40B, and that did see some value wiped off its share price in the following days. Though clearly that dark cloud hasn't stuck around Nvidia's Santa Clara HQ, as it's now back up to around $260. That's over 40% up on its lowest point this year, and just under 22% down on its all-time high of $334.

Google's decision to enable two-factor authentication by default has resulted in a 50 percent decrease in account breaches among those users where the feature was auto-enabled. Engadget reports: The company didn't say how rapidly it expected 2FA to spread, but promised to continue the rollout through 2022. More than 150 million people have been auto-enrolled so far, including more than 2 million YouTube creators. The company also promised more security upgrades to help mark Safer Internet Day. As of March, Google will let you opt-in to an account-level safe browsing option that keeps you from visiting known harmful sites. Google is also expanding Assistant's privacy-minded Guest Mode to nine new languages in the months ahead, and has promised to ramp up safeguards for politicians ahead of the US midterm elections.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Ukraine's Security Service said it has shut down a troll farm in the city of Lviv. "The SSU cyber specialists uncovered and dismantled two bot farms in Lviv with a total capacity of 18,000 fake accounts," an SSU press release said. "According to preliminary information, organizers from Russia supervised the administrators of the bot farms." According to the press release, three people in two different residences were involved. Two gave over their apartments to the operation while a third took care of maintaining the accounts and equipment. "The bot farms worked mostly in social networks: distributed fakes to spread panic," the press release said. "The bots also published false information about bomb threats at various facilities."

The SSU said it seized two sets of GSM gateways, 3,000 SIM cards, laptops, and accounting records. GSM gateways are equipment that allows people to use SIM cards to connect to networks outside the default network they're meant to be connected to. They're popular tools for hackers and other cyber criminals, who can use them to manage several phone numbers, and to connect to Voice Over IP, or VoIP networks. The photos of the bust show dozens of GSM gateways stuffed with blurred SIM cards.

Apple has acknowledged an iOS 15 bug that may have recorded interactions with Siri on some devices, regardless of whether the user opted out, according to a report from ZDNet. From a report: The bug automatically enabled the Improve Siri & Dictation setting that gives Apple permission to record, store, and review your conversations with Siri. Apple tells The Verge that it identified the bug shortly after the release of iOS 15, stopped reviewing any recordings inadvertently received, and is deleting info received from affected devices. After discovering the bug, the company turned off the feature for "many" users and corrected the opt-in setting when it released iOS 15.2. As ZDNet points out, this is the reason why you might get a prompt asking for your permission to enable the Improve Siri & Dictation feature once you install the new 15.4 beta or, eventually, its official release.

Drivers of certain vehicles in Seattle and other parts of Western Washington are shouting at their car radios this week. Not because of any particular song or news item that's being broadcast, but because an apparent technical glitch has caused the radios to be stuck on public radio station KUOW. From a report: The impacted drivers appear to all be owners of Mazda vehicles from between 2014 and 2017. In some cases the in-car infotainment systems have stopped working altogether, derailing the ability to listen to the radio at all or use Bluetooth phone connections, GPS, the rear camera and more. According to Mazda drivers who spoke with GeekWire, and others in a Reddit thread discussing the dilemma, everyone who has had an issue was listening to KUOW 94.9 in recent weeks when the car systems went haywire. KUOW sounded unsure of a possible cause; at least one dealership service department blamed 5G; and Mazda told GeekWire in an official statement that it identified the problem and a fix is planned.

European scientists say they have made a major breakthrough in their quest to develop practical nuclear fusion -- the energy process that powers the stars. tomhath writes: The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen. If nuclear fusion can be successfully recreated on Earth it holds out the potential of virtually unlimited supplies of low-carbon, low-radiation energy. The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power). This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997. It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France. "The JET experiments put us a step closer to fusion power," said Dr Joe Milnes, the head of operations at the reactor lab. "We've demonstrated that we can create a mini star inside of our machine and hold it there for five seconds and get high performance, which really takes us into a new realm."

Meta has frozen development of its Novi digital wallet project, Israeli media Globes reported this week, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The project was originally planned for trading in Facebook's cryptocurrency -- an activity that has been halted. Following this latest step, Facebook will disband several teams in the US and at the company's development center in Israel, new tasks are being sought for the risk management technology division, which was set up to provide services for the digital wallet. This latest step comes as Meta has begun 2022 by cleaning its desk. While suspending the Novi digital wallet project, Meta is examining the possibility of transferring more financial services to Facebook Pay -- another wallet infrastructure that the company has already opened -- thus leaving Novi as an NFT trading platform for creating digital art or animated games accessories. Due to the fact that Novi activities are at the expense of the Facebook Pay infrastructure, which is already used on platforms like Facebook Stores and Facebook Marketplace, the company is grappling with the question of if there is any point in continuing Novi's development. Despite the freezing of most of Novi's financial development activities, the project's pilot in the US and Guatemala, which began last October, will continue.

Twitter told a U.S. senator it is cutting ties with a European technology company that helped it send sensitive passcodes to its users via text message. From a report: The social media firm said in a disclosure to U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, that it is "transitioning" its service away from working with Mitto AG, according to a Wyden aide. A co-founder of Mitto operated a service that helped governments secretly surveil and track mobile phones, according to former employees and clients, as Bloomberg News and London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported in December. Twitter cited media reports as the motivating factor behind its decision, the Wyden aide said. Several other companies have allegedly already cut ties with Mitto. In recent weeks, messaging companies Kaleyra and MessageBird have both ceased commercial relationships with Mitto, according to three people familiar with the matter.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Setting up a Raspberry Pi board has always required a second computer, which is used to flash your operating system of choice to an SD card so your Pi can boot. But the Pi Foundation is working on a new version of its bootloader that could connect an OS-less Pi board directly to the Internet, allowing it to download and install the official Raspberry Pi OS to a blank SD card without requiring another computer. To test the networked booting feature, you'll need to use the Pi Imager on a separate computer to copy an updater for the bootloader over to an SD card -- Pi firmware updates are normally installed along with new OS updates rather than separately, but since this is still in testing, it requires extra steps.

Once it's installed, there are a number of conditions that have to be met for network booting to work. It only works on Pi 4 boards (and Pi 4-derived devices, like the Pi 400 computer) that have both a keyboard and an Ethernet cable connected. If you already have an SD card or USB drive with a bootable OS connected, the Pi will boot from those as it normally does so it doesn't slow down the regular boot process. And you'll be limited to the OS image selection in the official Pi imager, though this covers a wide range of popular distributions, including Ubuntu, LibreELEC, a couple of retro-gaming emulation OSes, and Homebridge. For other OSes, downloading the image on a separate PC and installing it to an SD card manually is still the best way to go. To learn more about installing the bootloader or download the Pi OS over a network, you can view the Raspberry Pi Foundation's documentation here.

jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop environment, which will also be powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck hand-held gaming console. Today, KDE Community announced release of KDE Plasma 5.24, a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates and bug fixes until the final Plasma 5 version, before transition to Plasma 6.

This new Plasma release focuses on smoothing out wrinkles, evolving the design, and improving the overall feel and usability of the environment. Highlights include: Overview effect for managing all your desktops and application windows, easy discovery of KRunner features with the help assistant, and unlocking screen and authentication using fingerprint reader. You will also notice a new Honeywave wallpaper, the ability to pick any color for accent, and critically important Plasma notifications now come with an orange strip on the side to visually distinguish them from less urgent messages.

Major rightsholders and internet companies in Russia have signed a new memorandum of cooperation designed to make pirated movies, TV shows and other content harder to find. In addition to automatically removing reported infringing links within hours, search engines have agreed to completely deindex all domains that carry 100 or more links to infringing content. TorrentFreak reports: Signed in 2018, a memorandum of cooperation signed by major rightsholders and internet companies including Yandex changed the way infringing content is handled. Following the creation of a centralized database of pirated content, the Internet companies agreed to query it every few minutes in order to remove corresponding content from their platforms within six hours. Over a period of three years, more than 40 million infringing links have now been removed from search results. Since its introduction, the memorandum has been renewed several times alongside calls for the system to be opened up to a wider range of rightsholders, such as those operating in the publishing sector. While that is yet to happen, a new memorandum has just been signed by the original signatories containing an even more powerful anti-piracy tool.

Under the current agreement (which is set to expire early September 2022), rightsholders must submit specific URLs to infringing content to the centralized database controlled by the Media Communications Union (ISS). These specific URLs are then delisted by search engines but rightsholders complain that the same content can reappear under a new URL, meaning that the process must be repeated. To deal with this type of 'pirate' countermeasure, the new memorandum requires search companies to take more stringent action. Any domain that has 100 or more 'pirate' links reported to the database will be deindexed entirely by search engines, meaning that they essentially become invisible to anyone using a search engine. This must be carried out quickly too, within 24 hours according to ISS. Given the number of links to infringing content posted to non-pirate sites, safeguards will also be introduced to protect legitimate resources from deindexing. These include media sites, government projects, search engines themselves, social networks, and official content providers. "Alongside the development of the memorandum a new law is being drafted, with the aim of enshrining its voluntary terms into local law," adds TorrentFreak. "That should allow other rightsholders that aren't current signatories to obtain similar benefits. At the time of writing, however, progress on the legal front is taking its time and might still take a few more months."

Players generate a wealth of revealing psychological data -- and some companies are soaking it up. From a report: While there are no numbers on how many video game companies are surveilling their players in-game (although, as a recent article suggests, large publishers and developers like Epic, EA, and Activision explicitly state they capture user data in their license agreements), a new industry of firms selling middleware "data analytics" tools, often used by game developers, has sprung up. These data analytics tools promise to make users more amenable to continued consumption through the use of data analysis at scale.

Such analytics, once available only to the largest video game studios -- which could hire data scientists to capture, clean, and analyze the data, and software engineers to develop in-house analytics tools -- are now commonplace across the entire industry, pitched as "accessible" tools that provide a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace by companies like Unity, GameAnalytics, or Amazon Web Services. (Although, as a recent study shows, the extent to which these tools are truly "accessible" is questionable, requiring technical expertise and time to implement.) As demand for data-driven insight has grown, so have the range of different services -- dozens of tools in the past several years alone, providing game developers with different forms of insight. One tool -- essentially Uber for playtesting -- allows companies to outsource quality assurance testing, and provides data-driven insight into the results. Another supposedly uses AI to understand player value and maximize retention (and spending, with a focus on high-spenders).

Developers might use data from these middleware companies to further refine their game (players might be getting overly frustrated and dying at a particular point, indicating the game might be too difficult) or their monetization strategies (prompting in-app purchases -- such as extra lives -- at such a point of difficulty). But our data is not just valuable to video game companies in fine-tuning design. Increasingly, video game companies exploit this data to capitalize user attention through targeted advertisements. As a 2019 eMarketer report suggests, the value of video games as a medium for advertising is not just in access to large-scale audience data (such as the Unity ad network's claim to billions of users), but through ad formats such as playable and rewarded advertisements -- that is, access to audiences more likely to pay attention to an ad.

Markus Reinisch, Vice President of Public Policy Europe at Meta, writing on company's blog: There has been reporting in the press that we are "threatening" to leave Europe because of the uncertainty over EU-US data transfers mechanisms. This is not true. Like all publicly-traded companies, we are legally required to disclose material risks to our investors. Last week, as we have done in our previous four financial quarters, we disclosed that continuing uncertainty over EU-US data transfers mechanisms poses a threat to our ability to serve European consumers and operate our business in Europe. We have absolutely no desire to withdraw from Europe; of course we don't. But the simple reality is that Meta, like many other businesses, organisations and services, relies on data transfers between the EU and the US in order to operate our global services. Further reading: We're Fine Without Facebook, German and French Ministers Say.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Imagine for a moment that the millions of computer chips inside the servers that power the largest data centers in the world had rare, almost undetectable flaws. And the only way to find the flaws was to throw those chips at giant computing problems that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. As the tiny switches in computer chips have shrunk to the width of a few atoms, the reliability of chips has become another worry for the people who run the biggest networks in the world. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and many other sites have experienced surprising outages over the last year. The outages have had several causes, like programming mistakes and congestion on the networks. But there is growing anxiety that as cloud-computing networks have become larger and more complex, they are still dependent, at the most basic level, on computer chips that are now less reliable and, in some cases, less predictable. In the past year, researchers at both Facebook and Google have published studies describing computer hardware failures whose causes have not been easy to identify. The problem, they argued, was not in the software -- it was somewhere in the computer hardware made by various companies. Google declined to comment on its study, while Facebook did not return requests for comment on its study.

"They're seeing these silent errors, essentially coming from the underlying hardware," said Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford University electrical engineer who specializes in testing computer hardware. Increasingly, Dr. Mitra said, people believe that manufacturing defects are tied to these so-called silent errors that cannot be easily caught. Researchers worry that they are finding rare defects because they are trying to solve bigger and bigger computing problems, which stresses their systems in unexpected ways. Companies that run large data centers began reporting systematic problems more than a decade ago. In 2015, in the engineering publication IEEE Spectrum, a group of computer scientists who study hardware reliability at the University of Toronto reported that each year as many as 4 percent of Google's millions of computers had encountered errors that couldn't be detected and that caused them to shut down unexpectedly. In a microprocessor that has billions of transistors -- or a computer memory board composed of trillions of the tiny switches that can each store a 1 or 0 -- even the smallest error can disrupt systems that now routinely perform billions of calculations each second.

Meta Platforms' veiled threat to quit Europe because of blocked talks over privacy rules was more like music to the ears of two top German and French politicians. From a report: "After being hacked I've lived without Facebook and Twitter for four years and life has been fantastic," German Economy Minister Robert Habeck told reporters at an event alongside French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire in Paris on Monday. "I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook," Le Maire added. "Digital giants must understand that the European continent will resist and affirm its sovereignty." The pair were responding to comments in Meta's annual report published Thursday, warning that if it couldn't rely on new or existing agreements to shift data, then it would "likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe."

Porn websites will be legally required to verify the age of users in the United Kingdom under new internet safety laws. The BBC reports: The legislation, which is part of the draft Online Safety Bill, aims to give children better protection from explicit material. The measures, to ensure users are 18 or over, could see people asked to prove they own a credit card or confirm their age via a third-party service. Sites that fail to act could be fined up to 10% of their global turnover. The Online Safety Bill is expected to be introduced to parliament over the next few months and is designed to protect users from harmful content. Children's safety groups have long been calling for age verification on porn sites, over fears it is too easy for minors to access publicly available material online.

Announcing the age verification plans, Digital Economy Minister Chris Philp said: "Parents deserve peace of mind that their children are protected online from seeing things no child should see." As well as being able to fine websites that do not follow the rules, the regulator Ofcom could block them from being accessible in the UK. The bosses of these websites could also be held criminally liable if they fail to cooperate with Ofcom. Previously, only commercial porn sites that allowed user-generated content were in the scope of the Online Safety Bill, but all commercial porn sites will now be covered. [...] It will be up to companies to decide how best to comply with the new rules, but Ofcom may recommend the use of certain age verification technologies. However, the government says firms should not process or store data that is irrelevant to the purpose of checking someone's age.