Coinbase Global is adding a slew of social-networking capabilities, one of which will make it easier for traders to share information about their allocations on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. From a report: The biggest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange said Friday it's adding a Share button that will let traders detail what coins they own on social networks. More ways of sharing data about trades are in the works as well, the company said in a blog. The effort is likely aimed at harnessing word of mouth about crypto investing to attract more users. Coinbase said this week that its monthly transacting users had decreased sequentially in the third quarter. At the same time, the firm boosted its recurring-user forecast for the full year.

The attorneys worry that if law firms, traditionally the defenders of workers' rights, are turning to the programs, why wouldn't every other business? From a report: Camille Anidi, an attorney on Long Island, quickly understood the flaws of the facial recognition software her employers demanded she use when working from home. The system often failed to recognize her face or mistook the Bantu knots in her hair as unauthorized recording devices, forcing her to log back in sometimes more than 25 times a day. When she complained, she said, her bosses brushed it off as a minor technical issue, though some of her lighter-skinned colleagues told her they didn't have the same problem -- a common failing for some facial recognition systems, which have been shown to perform worse for people of color. So after each logout, Anidi gritted her teeth and did what she had to do: Re-scan her face from three angles so she could get back to a job where she was often expected to review 70 documents an hour.

"I want to be able to do the work and would love the money, but it's just that strain: I can't look left for too long, I can't look down, my dog can't walk by, or I get logged out," she said. "Then the company is looking at me like I'm the one delaying!" Facial recognition systems have become an increasingly common element of the rapid rise in work-from-home surveillance during the coronavirus pandemic. Employers argue that they offer a simple and secure way to monitor a scattered workforce. But for Anidi and other lawyers, they serve as a dehumanizing reminder that every second of their workday is rigorously probed and analyzed: After verifying their identity, the software judges their level of attention or distraction and kicks them out of their work networks if the system thinks they're not focused enough.

Contract attorneys such as Anidi have become some of America's first test subjects for this enhanced monitoring, and many are reporting frustrating results, saying the glitchy systems make them feel like a disposable cog with little workday privacy. But the software has also become a flash point for broader questions about how companies treat their remote workforces, especially those, like contract attorneys, whose short-term gigs limit their ability to push for change. The attorneys also worry that it could become the new norm as more jobs are automated and analyzed: If the same kinds of law firms that have litigated worker protections and labor standards are doing it, why wouldn't everyone else?

The creator of EdgeDeflector said this week that the latest Insider build of Windows 11 now blocks all default browser workarounds. If this functionality makes its way to the finished product, it will mark a new, dark chapter for Microsoft, which told the media at the Windows 11 launch that it was aware that it had made changing app defaults pointlessly difficult, but that it had not done so maliciously and would fix it. This is the opposite of that claim. From a report: "Something changed between Windows 11 builds 22483 and 22494 (both Windows Insider Preview builds)," EdgeDeflector creator Daniel Aleksandersen writes in a new blog entry. "The build changelog ... omitted the headline news: you can no longer bypass Microsoft Edge using apps like EdgeDeflector."

Microsoft not communicating effectively? I find that hard to believe. Cough. But Microsoft moving to make Windows 11 behave even more maliciously towards its users and browser rivals? That I have a hard time with. Basically, EdgeDeflector, as well as third-party browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Brave, intercept OS-level URL requests that force you to use Microsoft Edge even when you have gone through the incredibly ponderous steps to make a non-Edge browser the default in Windows 11. But in the latest Insider Preview build, Microsoft is changing how these URL requests work. And it's no longer possible to intercept URL requests that force users to use Edge instead of their default browser. (In the Insider builds. This functionality will come to mainstream users in the coming months unless we can change Microsoft's collective mind.)

President Biden signed into law a bill that requires the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to secure telecommunications systems against potential foreign threats to national security. From a report: In recent years, lawmakers have increasingly voiced concerns about Chinese telecom giants' operations in the U.S., and possible surveillance by the Chinese government. Under the new law, the FCC is barred from considering authorization for products made by companies on its "covered list," which includes Huawei and ZTE. The designation blocks U.S. companies from using FCC funds to purchase communications equipment and services that the U.S. government considers a national security threat. The bill received near-unanimous support in Congress. It was sponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), along with House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft is taking the fight to Chromebooks in schools with the $250 Surface Laptop SE, but inexpensive hardware is only part of the equation. One reason Chromebooks have succeeded in education is because of Chrome OS, which is well-suited for lower-end hardware, easy for IT administrators to manage, and hard to break with errant apps or malware. Microsoft's answer to Chrome OS is Windows 11 SE. Unlike past efforts like Windows in S mode (which is still its own separate thing), Windows 11 SE isn't just a regular version of Windows with a cheaper license or a cut-down version that runs fewer apps. Windows 11 SE defaults to saving all files (including user profile information) to students' OneDrive accounts, and it has had some standard Windows 11 features removed to ensure a "distraction-free" learning environment that performs better on low-end devices. The operating system also gives IT administrators exclusive control over the apps and browser extensions that can be installed and run via Microsoft Intune.

If you're a school IT administrator with a fleet of PC laptops or desktops, you might wonder if you can buy and install Windows 11 SE on hardware you already have so you can benefit from its changes without buying new hardware. The answer, Microsoft tells us, is no. The only way to get Windows 11 SE is on laptops that ship with Windows 11 SE. And if you re-image a Windows 11 SE device with a different version of Windows 10 or Windows 11, it won't even be possible to reinstall Windows 11 SE after that. [...] Microsoft has published documentation (PDF) that more fully explains the differences between Windows 11 SE and the other editions of Windows (including Windows in S mode).

Google researchers caught hackers targeting users in Hong Kong exploiting what were at the time unknown vulnerabilities in Apple's Mac operating system. According to the researchers, the attacks have the hallmarks of government-backed hackers. From a report: On Thursday, Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), the company's elite team of hacker hunters, published a report detailing the hacking campaign. The researchers didn't go as far as pointing the finger at a specific hacking group or country, but they said it was "a well resourced group, likely state backed."

"We do not have enough technical evidence to provide attribution and we do not speculate about attribution," the head of TAG Shane Huntley told Motherboard in an email. "However, the nature of the activity and targeting is consistent with a government backed actor." Erye Hernandez, the Google researcher who found the hacking campaign and authored the report, wrote that TAG discovered the campaign in late August of this year. The hackers had set up a watering hole attack, meaning they hid malware within the legitimate websites of "a media outlet and a prominent pro-democracy labor and political group" in Hong Kong. Users who visited those websites would get hacked with an unknown vulnerability -- in other words, a zero-day -- and another exploit that took advantage of a previously patched vulnerability for MacOS that was used to install a backdoor on their computers, according to Hernandez.

A new version of a lawsuit accusing Subway of deceiving the public about its tuna products said lab testing shows they contain animal proteins such as chicken, pork and cattle, and not the advertised "100% tuna." From a report: Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin filed a third version of their proposed class action this week in the federal court in San Francisco, near their homes in Alameda County. Subway said in a statement it will seek to dismiss the "reckless and improper" lawsuit. The chain said the plaintiffs have "filed three meritless complaints, changing their story each time," and that its "high-quality, wild-caught, 100% tuna" was regulated strictly in the United States and around the world. Since the case began in January, Subway has run TV ads and launched a website defending its tuna. It also revamped its menu but not its tuna, saying an upgrade wasn't needed. The original complaint claimed that Subway tuna salads, sandwiches and wraps were "bereft" of tuna, while an amended complaint said they were not 100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin tuna. Further reading, from last year: Irish Court Says Subway Bread Is Too Sugary to Be Called 'Bread'.

South Korea demonstrated a system for controlling urban air mobility vehicles (UAM) on Thursday, which it hopes will serve as taxis between major airports and downtown Seoul as soon as 2025, cutting travel time by two-thirds. From a report: Last year, South Korea announced a roadmap to begin commercial urban air travel by 2025. The transport ministry estimates such services could cut travel time for distances between 30-50km (19-31 miles) from an hour by car to 20 minutes by air. "As UAM is expected to become one of the common means of transportation that citizens use in daily life, it is absolutely imperative that we test and try out UAM services in various environments," Transport Minister Noh Hyeong-ouk, who attended the demonstration on Thursday, said in a statement. A pilot flew a two-seat model made by Germany's Volocopter at Seoul's Gimpo Airport to test and demonstrate its control and coordination.

The use of whole genome sequencing could save the NHS millions of pounds, a study suggests, after it found a quarter of people with rare illnesses received a diagnosis for their condition through the technology. From a report: In some cases, the findings have provided reassurance for families that they have not passed their condition on to their children, while in others they have inspired life-changing treatments. Though individually uncommon, rare inherited diseases affect about 6% of the UK population, or roughly 3 million people. Traditionally, geneticists searched for the abnormalities underpinning such conditions by looking at the person's chromosomes through a microscope, but this is no good at spotting tiny, but often highly significant changes, such as single letter substitutions in the genetic code. Because of this, "many of the people who have a rare disease either live very long diagnostic odysseys to get an answer for why they are like they are, or they do not get an answer in their entire lifetime," said Prof Sir Mark Caulfield at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), a former chief scientist at Genomics England. In 2013, the UK government launched the 100,000 Genomes Project to investigate whether WGS -- which involves reading through the entire 3bn pairs of letters in the human genome -- could help doctors better understand the cause of patients' symptoms, and identify other family members who may be at risk. Five years later, NHS England became the first national health care system in the world to offer WGS to people with undiagnosed rare diseases and cancer as part of routine care.

Google Earth Engine has created a vast trove of open source satellite imagery and augmented it with data-analysis software that makes it relatively easy for skilled outsiders to draw up their own interactive maps. From a report: More important, its team of staff scientists (Google won't say how many) wrangles massive data sets to answer critical questions for a constellation of pro bono "clients" that includes conservation groups, city agencies, community advocates, and researchers. The 20,000 image files added to the Earth Engine team's collection each day are more than just static photos. Satellites gather, for example, detailed information on the soil composition more than a foot underground and the amount of water vapor rising from farmland. Staffers help clients distill relevant information and relay it to the field. Via radio, the nomads in Senegal learn where to find a drink for their cows; bright pink dots on interactive maps inform the indigenous Peruvians of the locations of logging activity; and a shared website targets the spots in LA where trees will likely do the most good.

"The raw data is not enough. Government officials now tell us, "We're drowning in data, but we're thirsty for insights,'" says Rebecca Moore, who runs the team. "We invented Google Earth Engine to allow scientists to easily analyze data and ask questions about how the climate is changing and answer in seconds or minutes instead of years." Other companies, including Amazon.com and Microsoft, have technical services with capabilities comparable to Earth Engine, but experts in the field say the sheer number of work-hours Moore's staff dedicates to volunteer efforts sets it apart. "It's just a remarkable level of transparency and information that wasn't available before," says Mikaela Weisse, project manager for Global Forest Watch, an open source online tool that monitors deforestation. Joe Morrison, a vice president at satellite imaging company Umbra, who writes a newsletter about the industry, calls Earth Engine the most important contribution to climate science in 50 years.

Discord founder and CEO Jason Citron sought to reassure users Wednesday that the company doesn't have impending plans to shift its business toward NFTs. From a report: In a tweet earlier this week, Citron shared an image of crypto wallet MetaMask integrated into Discord's user interface with the text "probably nothing" -- shorthand language in the NFT space for something that's about to be a big deal. He contextualized the previous tweet Wednesday evening, noting that Discord has "no current plans" to integrate crypto wallets into its app.

An anonymous reader shares the results of a new poll (PDF) from CNN, adding: "Facebook should be treated like cigarettes." From the report: Roughly three-quarters of adults believe Facebook is making American society worse, a new CNN poll (PDF) conducted by SSRS finds [...]. Americans say, 76% to 11%, that Facebook makes society worse, not better, according to the survey. Another 13% say it has no effect either way. That broadly negative appraisal holds across gender, age and racial lines. Even frequent Facebook users -- those who report using the site at least several times a week -- say 70% to 14% that the social network harms, rather than helps, US society. Although majorities across parties say Facebook is doing more harm than good, that feeling spikes among Republicans (82%).

Among the majority overall who think Facebook is worsening society, however, there's less of an overwhelming consensus on whether or not the platform itself is primarily to blame: 55% say that the way some people use Facebook is more at fault, with 45% saying it's more due to the way Facebook itself is run. Overall, about one-third of the public -- including 44% of Republicans and 27% of Democrats -- say both that Facebook is making American society worse and that Facebook itself is more at fault than its users.

Electric vehicle startup Rivian is now a publicly traded company after executing one of the biggest initial public offerings in history. The Verge reports: Rivian shares started trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange Wednesday at around $78 per share. That gave Rivian an overall valuation of nearly $80 billion and helped it net $12 billion in fresh cash, despite the fact that it only just recently started to make and ship its first electric pickup trucks. It's the sixth-largest IPO ever on a US stock exchange, according to Bloomberg, and it's hard to imagine the company picking a better time to debut. Tesla has generated an incredible amount of interest in electric vehicles and is now one of the most highly valued companies in the world. The public markets have also been on an outrageous run over the last few years -- a run that was supercharged over the last 18 months by an influx of retail traders and a boom in electric vehicle companies going public.

Rivian, which has a steady CEO and founder and relatively modest goals for the next few years, could be a good test of all that hype. It has received a little more than 55,000 preorders for its pricey electric pickup truck (the R1T) and SUV (the R1S) and has said it won't be able to deliver all of those until the end of 2023. Where other EV startups went public with big promises of near-term growth, Rivian has been very conservative in the few estimates it's offered for what the next few years look like and has instead emphasized that it will be largely focused on making vans for Amazon, which owns about 20 percent of the startup. And yet, shares of Rivian jumped to $106 as they began trading on the Nasdaq exchange Wednesday and climbed from there, lifting the company's valuation well over $100 billion -- higher than all other automakers on the planet, save for Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, and China's BYD.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The recently passed $1 trillion infrastructure package is jam-packed with initiatives but sprinkled in there alongside $17 billion in funding for road safety programs is a mandate requiring carmakers to implement monitoring systems to identify and stop drunk drivers. The mandate, first noted by the Associated Press could apply to new vehicles sold as early as 2026. Courts have ordered some drunk drivers to use breathalyzers attached to ignition interlocks to start their vehicles for years, but the technology noted in this bill would take that concept much further and would need to be capable of "passively monitor[ing] the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired."

Though the Department of Transportation has yet to put its foot down on the exact type of technology it will use for this program, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and 17 automakers have been working on something called the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADSS) since 2008. DADSS is exploring both a breath and touch-based system to detect whether or not a driver has a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) at or above 0.08%. The breath-based system aims to measure alcohol readings based on a driver's breath with the goal of distinguishing between the driver and passengers. The touch-based system meanwhile would shine an infrared light through a driver's fingertip to measure blood alcohol levels under the skin's surface. [...]

The new mandate struck a positive note with some car safety groups, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving which has advocated for more detection tech in the past. "It's monumental," Alex Otte, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving told the AP. Otte went on to describe the package as the "single most important legislation" in the group's history. At the same time though, the mandate has drawn concerns from safety experts and digital rights groups that warn driver monitoring technology could have knock-on privacy implications. In a letter sent last year by the American Highway Users Alliance, the organization urged support of the NHTSA's DADSS Research Program but expressed concerns that the technology could potentially infringe on driver's civil liberties. "The group also expressed concerns over how the collection and storage of driver data would work and who would have the rights to that data," adds Gizmodo. Others have also expressed concerns over the accuracy of driving monitoring technology and potential risks of bias.

The Justice Department said Wednesday that it was suing Uber for charging wait-time fees to passengers with physical disabilities. From a report: The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that the company violated the Americans with Disabilities Act for charging fees to passengers who, because of disability, need more time to enter a car.

YouTube today announced its decision to make the "dislike" count on videos private across its platform. The decision is likely to be controversial given the extent that it impacts the public's visibility into a video's reception. From a report: But YouTube believes the change will better protect its creators from harassment and reduce the threat of what it calls "dislike attacks" -- essentially, when a group teams up to drive up the number of dislikes a video receives. The company says that while dislike counts won't be visible to the public, it's not removing the dislike button itself. Users can still click the thumbs down button on videos to signal their dislike to creators privately. Meanwhile, creators will be able to track their dislikes in YouTube Studio alongside other analytics about their video's performance, if they choose. The change follows an experiment YouTube ran earlier this year whose goal was to determine if these sorts of changes would reduce dislike attacks and creator harassment. At the time, YouTube explained that public dislike counts can affect creators' well-being and may motivate targeted campaigns to add dislikes to videos. While that's true, dislikes can also serve as a signal to others when videos are clickbait, spam, or misleading, which can be useful.

Alphabet unit Google lost an appeal against a 2.42-billion-euro ($2.8-billion) antitrust decision on Wednesday, a major win for Europe's competition chief in the first of three court rulings central to the EU push to regulate big tech. From a report: Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager fined the world's most popular internet search engine in 2017 over the use of its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals. The shopping case was the first of three decisions that saw Google rack up 8.25 billion euros in EU antitrust fines in the last decade. The company could face defeats in appeals against the other two rulings involving its Android mobile operating system and AdSense advertising service, where the EU has stronger arguments, antitrust specialists say. The court's support for the Commission in its latest ruling could also strengthen Vestager's hand in her investigations into Amazon, Apple and Facebook.

Google launched a beta app today that people with speech impairments can use as a voice assistant while contributing to a multiyear research effort to improve Google's speech recognition. From a report: The goal is to make Google Assistant, as well as other features that use speech to text and speech to speech, more inclusive of users with neurological conditions that affect their speech. The new app is called Project Relate, and volunteers can sign up at g.co/ProjectRelate. To be eligible to participate, volunteers need to be 18 or older and "have difficulty being understood by others." They'll also need a Google account and an Android phone using OS 8 or later. For now, it's only available to English speakers in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They'll be tasked with recording 500 phrases, which should take between 30 to 90 minutes to record.

schwit1 shares a report from the Miami Herald: A metallurgist in Washington state pleaded guilty to fraud Monday after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make U.S. Navy submarines. Elaine Marie Thomas, 67, of Auburn, Washington, was the director of metallurgy at a foundry in Tacoma that supplied steel castings used by Navy contractors Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding to make submarine hulls. From 1985 through 2017, Thomas falsified the results of strength and toughness tests for at least 240 productions of steel -- about half the steel the foundry produced for the Navy, according to her plea agreement, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma. The tests were intended to show that the steel would not fail in a collision or in certain "wartime scenarios," the Justice Department said.

There was no allegation that any submarine hulls failed, but authorities said the Navy had incurred increased costs and maintenance to ensure they remain seaworthy. The government did not disclose which subs were affected. Thomas faces up to 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine when she is sentenced in February. However, the Justice Department said it would recommend a prison term at the low end of whatever the court determines is the standard sentencing range in her case. [...] Thomas' conduct came to light in 2017, when a metallurgist being groomed to replace her noticed suspicious test results and alerted their company, Kansas City-based Bradken Inc., which acquired the foundry in 2008. Bradken fired Thomas and initially disclosed its findings to the Navy, but then wrongfully suggested that the discrepancies were not the result of fraud. That hindered the Navy's investigation into the scope of the problem as well as its efforts to remediate the risks to its sailors, prosecutors said. In June 2020, the company agreed to pay $10.9 million in a deferred-prosecution agreement.

In case you missed it, Google officially ended support for its Bookmarks service on September 30, 2021. But fear not, you can still export your bookmarks if you haven't already. Long-time Slashdot reader GPS Pilot writes: Google has dropped support for yet another one of its services. If you're like me, you don't visit Google Bookmarks very often, so you're not aware that Google dropped support on September 30th, 2021. The service still had its uses -- like being able to access a collection of bookmarks across different browsers, or when you're using a strange computer. You can still export your Google bookmarks to alternative services that are "arguably better." Some Google Bookmarks alternatives include Saved, Raindrop, Pinboard, and Mozilla Pocket. Which bookmark manager is your favorite?