"Facebook's efforts to undermine the testimony of whistleblower Frances Haugen began before she even left the Senate Commerce Committee hearing room Tuesday," reports Protocol.com: "Just pointing out the fact that @FrancesHaugen did not work on child safety or Instagram or research these issues and has no direct knowledge of the topic from her work at Facebook," spokesperson Andy Stone said in a tweet that ended up being read aloud by Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, during the hearing. Another statement from Policy Communications Director Lena Pietsch referred to Haugen dismissively as someone who "worked for the company for less than two years, had no direct reports" and "never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives."

For Nu Wexler, a former Facebook policy communications staffer, the anti-Haugen spin was overkill. "The statement they put out about Frances Haugen was beyond the pale," said Wexler, who also worked in policy communications at Google and Twitter. "As a former employee, I disagreed with what they said, and as a communications professional, I think it was really bad PR." The counterattack strategy has differed dramatically from the regretful responses Facebook has offered in past episodes, like the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In those cases, the company often responded with an apology and a plan. This time around, from Mark Zuckerberg on down, the company has been decidedly less apologetic, with Haugen as a case study for the new approach.

For some former Facebook employees watching from home, the experiment in public aggression is backfiring. From Wexler's point of view, Haugen demonstrated clear facility of the facts and familiarity with the industry. "They're going to have a hard time convincing people that she doesn't know what she's talking about," he said. Katie Harbath, a public policy director at Facebook for 10 years who left the company in March, said, "All these folks, whether they had direct reports or not, they all have perspective and expertise that should be heard...." Another former Facebook communications staffer called the company's response "a mistake." "It's not about her. The whole dialogue that's happening is not about whether she's a credible messenger or not," the former staffer said, before adding, "She is a pretty credible messenger...."

The remarks from Stone and Pietsch have also prompted former employees, some of whom held more senior roles during their time at Facebook, to publicly rally to Haugen's defense. "Well I was there for over 6 years, had numerous direct reports, and led many decision meetings with C-level execs, and I find the perspectives shared on the need for algorithmic regulation, research transparency, and independent oversight to be entirely valid for debate," tweeted Samidh Chakrabarti, who founded the civic integrity team Haugen worked on, and whose breakup she noted in her Senate testimony....

Facebook didn't respond to a question about why it's taking such an unapologetic approach toward Haugen's disclosures.

Harbath has a theory: "The other one wasn't working."

The best part of Windows 11 is Linux, argues Ars Technica: For years now, Windows 10's Windows Subsystem for Linux has been making life easier for developers, sysadmins, and hobbyists who have one foot in the Windows world and one foot in the Linux world. But WSL, handy as it is, has been hobbled by several things it could not do. Installing WSL has never been as easy as it should be — and getting graphical apps to work has historically been possible but also a pain in the butt that required some fairly obscure third-party software. Windows 11 finally fixes both of those problems. The Windows Subsystem for Linux isn't perfect on Windows 11, but it's a huge improvement over what came before.

Microsoft has traditionally made installing WSL more of a hassle than it should be, but the company finally got the process right in Windows 10 build 2004. Just open an elevated Command prompt (start --> type cmd --> click Run as Administrator), type wsl --install at the prompt, and you're good to go. Windows 11, thankfully, carries this process forward unchanged. A simple wsl --install with no further arguments gets you Hyper-V and the other underpinnings of WSL, along with the current version of Ubuntu. If you aren't an Ubuntu fan, you can see what other easily installable distributions are available with the command wsl --list --online. If you decide you'd prefer a different distro, you can install it instead with — for example — wsl --install -d openSUSE-42. If you're not sure which distribution you prefer, don't fret. You can install as many as you like, simply by repeating wsl --list --online to enumerate your options and wsl --install -d distroname to install whichever you like. Installing a second distribution doesn't uninstall the first; it creates a separate environment, independent of any others. You can run as many of these installed environments as you like simultaneously, without fear of one messing up another.

In addition to easy installation, WSL on Windows 11 brings support for both graphics and audio in WSL apps. This isn't exactly a first — Microsoft debuted WSLg in April, with Windows 10 Insider Build 21364. But Windows 11 is the first production Windows build with WSLg support. If this is your first time hearing of WSLg, the short version is simple: you can install GUI apps — for example, Firefox — from your Ubuntu (or other distro) command line, and they'll work as expected, including sound. When I installed WSLg on Windows 11 on the Framework laptop, running firefox from the Ubuntu terminal popped up the iconic browser automatically. Heading to YouTube in it worked perfectly, too, with neither frame drops in the video nor glitches in the audio....

[T]here is one obvious "killer app" for WSLg that has us excited — and that's virt-manager, the RedHat-originated virtualization management tool. virt-manager is a simple tool that streamlines the creation, management, and operation of virtual machines using the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine... virt-manager never got a Windows port and seems unlikely to. But it runs under WSLg like a champ.
They reported a few problems, like when running GNOME's Software Center app (and the GNOME shell desktop environment).

But "If you're already a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) user, Windows 11 offers an enormously improved experience compared to what you're accustomed to from Windows 10. It installs more easily, makes more functionality available, and offers better desktop integration than older workarounds such as running MobaXTerm's X11 server."

When automakers were forced to make fewer vehicles with the chips they had available, Business Insider reports that "Naturally, they chose to prioritize those models that had the highest demand and made them the most money.

"At the same time, the reduction in the supply from all brands meant that dealers could make a sale without the traditional haggling over the vehicle's sticker price. The result has been a boon for automakers." Mark Wakefield, a consultant with AlixPartners in Detroit, told Bloomberg that US car companies were now making $3,000 more per car than average, as well as up to $10,000 more on certain pickups and SUVs.

One dealer who sells upgraded pickups in Ohio told Morning Brew that his dealership recently closed a deal in 52 minutes that would have taken four hours before the chip shortage. "The surprising part is the average selling price on those trucks is close to $100,000, and the consumer demand has still been sky-high," the dealer said.

Jim Farley, Ford's CEO, said in June that this new pricing power was "breathtaking" and indicated that the company wouldn't be returning to the days of guessing over how many cars it should produce and then marking them down until they sell. Mary Barra, GM's CEO, has also said that customer orders will play a larger role in her company's production strategy. Kevin Tynan, an auto analyst for Bloomberg, told Insider earlier this year that the industry has been trying to get off the incentives and discounting model for decades. "They don't totally hate this," he said, referring to the shortages. "Moving forward you're probably going to get an industry more like what we're seeing now, where supply is a little bit more managed, and incentives are not as aggressive as they've been."
The article summarizes the prediction of the Bloomberg auto analyst: "Good news for automakers and investors, but that also means consumers can expect to continue to see fewer options, higher prices, and a tighter used-vehicle market going forward."

IEEE Spectrum reports that air traffic controllers for America's Federal Aviation Administration "were confused and frustrated by an increase in military tests that interfered with GPS signals for civilian aircraft, public records show."

The incidents happened for controllers supervising flights over Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, according to their report (shared by Slashdot reader schwit1): In March and April this year, flight controllers at the Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center filed reports on NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), a forum where aviation professionals can anonymously share near misses and safety tips. The complaints accused the FAA of denying controllers permission to ask the military to cut short GPS tests adversely affecting commercial and private aircraft. These so-called "stop buzzer" (or "cease buzzer") requests are supposed to be made by pilots only when a safety-of-flight issue is encountered. "Aircraft are greatly affected by the GPS jamming and it's not taken seriously by management," reads one report. "We've been told we can't ask to stop jamming, and to just put everyone on headings."

In a second report, a private jet made a wrong turn into restricted airspace over the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico after being jammed. On that occasion, the air traffic controller called a stop buzzer. "[The] facility manager on duty later informed me we can't ask them to 'stop buzzer' and to just keep putting aircraft on headings," their ASRS report reads. Putting an aircraft on headings requires giving pilots precise bearings to follow, rather than letting them perform their own navigation using GPS or other technologies. This adds work for controllers, who are already very busy at certain times of day...

The Pentagon uses its more remote military bases, many in the American West, to test how its forces operate under GPS denial. A Spectrum investigation earlier this year discovered that such jamming tests are far more prevalent than had previously been thought, possibly affecting thousands of civilian flights each year.

"October 5 marks the official release of Windows 11, a new version of the operating system that doesn't do anything at all to counteract Windows' long history of depriving users of freedom and digital autonomy," writes Free Software Foundation campaigns manager Greg Farough.

"While we might have been encouraged by Microsoft's vague, aspirational slogans about community and togetherness, Windows 11 takes important steps in the wrong direction when it comes to user freedom." Microsoft claims that "life's better together" in their advertising for this latest Windows version, but when it comes to technology, there is no surer way of keeping users divided and powerless than nonfree softwarechoosing to create an unjust power structure, in which a developer knowingly keeps users powerless and dependent by withholding information. Increasingly, this involves not only withholding the source code itself, but even basic information on how the software works: what it's really doing, what it's collecting, and how often it's snitching on users. "Snitching" may sound dramatic, but Windows 11 will now require a Microsoft account to be connected to every user account, granting them the ability to correlate user behavior with one's personal identity. Even those who think they have nothing to hide should be wary of sharing potentially all of their computing activity with any company, much less one with a track record of abuse like Microsoft...

We expect Microsoft to use its tighter control on cryptography that happens in Windows as a way to impose more severe Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) onto media and applications, and as a way to ensure that no application can run in Windows without Microsoft's approval. In cases like these, it's no longer appropriate to call a machine running Windows a "personal" computer, as it obeys Microsoft more than it does its user. Indeed, it's bitterly ironic that Microsoft is calling the program that verifies a system's compatibility with Windows 11 a "PC Health Check." We counter that a healthy PC is one that respects its user's wishes, runs free software, and doesn't purposefully restrict them through treacherous computing. It would also never send the user's encryption keys back to its corporate overlords. Intrepid users will likely find a way around this requirement, yet it doesn't change the fact that the majority of Windows users will be forced into a treacherous computing scheme...

Sometimes, Microsoft realizes that it can't be quite so overtly antisocial. We've commented many times before on the hypocrisy involved in saying that Microsoft "loves open source" and "loves Linux," two ways of mentioning free software without reference to freedom. At the same time, Microsoft employees do make contributions to free software, contributions which benefit many others. Yet they do not extend this philosophy to their operating system, and in the last few years, they've made an attempt to impair the ways free software makes "life better together" further by making critical functions of Microsoft GitHub rely on nonfree JavaScript and directing users toward Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) platforms. By attacking user freedom through Windows, and the free software community directly by means of nonfree JavaScript, Microsoft proves that it has no plans to loosen its grip on users.

No program that you're forbidden to copy, modify, or share can truly bring people "together" in the way that Microsoft claims.

Thankfully, and right outside the window, there's a true community of users you and your loved ones can join...

Let's stop falling for the trap of chasing short-term, superficial improvements in proprietary software that may seem to make life better, and instead opt for free software, the only software that can support the best versions of ourselves.
The post urges readers to sign (or renew!) their pledge not to use Windows and to help a friend install GNU/Linux, "sending Microsoft the strong message that software that subjugates its users has no place in Windows.... If you don't feel ready to take the plunge and switch entirely, you can use our resources like the Free Software Directory to find programs you can use as starting points for your free software journey."

The post also has harsh words for TPM, warning that "when it's deployed by a proprietary software company, its relationship to the user isn't one based on trust, but based on treachery. When fully controlled by the user, TPM can be a useful way to strengthen encryption and user privacy, but when it's in the hands of Microsoft, we're not optimistic."

And when it comes to Microsoft teams, "it seems that no Windows user can avoid it any longer.... we hope Teams' unpopularity and its newfound, unwanted place in Windows will encourage users to seek out conferencing programs that they themselves can control."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from How-To Geek: Firefox now sends more data than you might think to Mozilla. To power Firefox Suggest, Firefox sends the keystrokes you type into your address bar, your location information, and more to Mozilla's servers. Here's exactly what Firefox is sharing and how to control it. This change was made as part of the introduction of Firefox Suggest in Firefox 93, released on October 5, 2021. As part of Firefox Suggest, Firefox is getting ads in your search bar -- but that's not the only thing that will be news to longtime Firefox users. According to Mozilla, "Firefox Suggest acts as a trustworthy guide to the better web, surfacing relevant information and sites to help people accomplish their goals." In reality, what that means is, when you start typing in your address bar, you won't just see the standard search suggestions from Google or your current search default engine. You'll also see "Firefox Suggest" results pointing to web pages. Some of them are sponsored ads, but you can disable the ads.

Firefox Suggest is on by default. Mozilla's blog post on the subject says Firefox Suggest is an "opt-in experience," which was the case in September 2021 -- but it's now enabled by default in Firefox 93. However, as of Firefox 93's release in October 2021, Firefox Suggest is only enabled in the USA -- for now. It's worth noting that, for many years, Firefox and other web browsers have had search suggestions in their address bar. So, when you start typing "win" in your address bar, you may see suggestions for "Windows 11" and "Window repair." This is accomplished by sending keystrokes to your default search engine as you type in the search bar, as Mozilla's support site explains. Mozilla is also providing contextual suggestions, for which it needs more data, including the city you're located in and whether you're clicking its suggestions.

You can disable Firefox's suggested results, if you like. This will stop Mozilla from collecting the data you type in your search bar, and it will also disable the suggested results and ads. To do so, open Firefox and click menu [and then] Settings. Select "Privacy [and] Security" in the left pane, and scroll down to "Address Bar -- Firefox Suggest." Disable "Contextual suggestions" and "Include occasional sponsored suggestions" to stop Firefox from sending data to Mozilla.

Google has warned about 14,000 of its users about being targeted in a state-sponsored phishing campaign from APT28, a threat group that has been linked to Russia. BleepingComputer reports: Shane Huntley, who is at the helm of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) that responds to government-backed hacking, notes that the higher-than-usual number of alerts this month comes from "from a small number of widely targeted campaigns which were blocked." The campaign from APT28, also known as Fancy Bear, lead to a larger number of warnings for Gmail users across various industries. In a statement sent by a Google spokesperson, Huntley says that Fancy Bear's phishing campaign accounts for 86% of all the batch warnings delivered this month. He explains that these notifications indicate targeting of the recipient, not a compromise of their Gmail account: "So why do we do these government warnings then? The warning really mostly tells people you are a potential target for the next attack so, now may be a good time to take some security actions."

Huntley says that these warnings are normal for individuals such as activists, journalists, government officials, or people that work national security structures because that's who government-backed entities are targeting. All the phishing emails from the Fancy Bear campaign were blocked by Gmail and did not land in the users' inboxes as they were automatically classified as spam. "As we've previously explained, we intentionally send these notices in batches, rather than at the moment we detect the threat itself, so that attackers cannot track some of our defense strategies," Huntley said.

The next time you see a movie or TV show that was dubbed from a foreign language, the voices you hear may not belong to actors who rerecorded dialogue in a sound booth. In fact, they may not belong to actors at all. From a report: Highly sophisticated digital voice manufacturing is coming, and entertainment executives say it could bring a revolution in sound as industry-changing as computer graphics were for visuals. New companies are using artificial intelligence to create humanlike voices from samples of a living actor's voice -- models that not only can sound like specific performers, but can speak any language, cry, scream, laugh, even talk with their mouths full. At the same time, companies are refining the visual technology so actors look like they are really speaking.

As streaming services export American fare globally and foreign markets send their hits to the U.S., dubbing is a bigger business than ever. But the uses of synthetic voices extend well beyond localizing foreign films. AI models can provide youthful voices for aging actors. The technology can resurrect audio from celebrities who have died or lost the ability to speak. And it can tweak dialogue in postproduction without the need for actors. All the tinkering raises thorny ethical questions. Where is the line between creating an engrossing screen experience and fabricating an effect that leaves audiences feeling duped?

The technology is set to hit a new target in the coming months, when foreign-language dubbed versions of the 2019 indie horror movie "Every Time I Die" are released in South America. Those versions mark one of the first times entire dubbed movies use computerized voice clones based on the voices of the original English-speaking cast. So when the film comes out abroad, audiences will hear the original actors "speaking" Spanish or Portuguese. Deepdub created the replicas based on 5-minute recordings of each actor speaking English.

Instagram has been experiencing issues for many of us here at The Verge, but it turns out that the problem might be broader than that, according to a statement from Facebook. From a report: "We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products," Facebook said in a tweet. "We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and we apologize for any inconvenience."

A developer who made a tool that let people automatically unfollow friends and groups on Facebook says he's been banned permanently from the social networking site. From a report: Louis Barclay was the creator of "Unfollow Everything," a browser extension that allowed Facebook users to essentially delete their News Feed by unfollowing all their connections at once. Facebook allows users to individually unfollow friends, groups, and pages, which removes their content from the News Feed, the algorithmically-controlled heart of Facebook. Barclay's tool automated this process, instantly wiping users' News Feed.

[...] In response, Facebook sent Barclay a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year, saying he'd violated the site's terms of service by creating software that automated user interactions. Barclay says the company then "permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts" and "demanded that I agree to never again create tools that interact with Facebook or its other services."

Google has said it will provide 10,000 "high-risk" users with free hardware security keys, days after the company warned thousands of Gmail users that they were targeted by state-sponsored hackers. From a report: The warning, sent by Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), alerted more than 14,000 Gmail users that they had been targeted in a state-sponsored phishing campaign from APT28, also known as Fancy Bear, said to be made up of operatives of Russia's GRU intelligence agency. Fancy Bear has been active for more than a decade but it's widely known for hacking into the Democratic National Committee and its disinformation and election influencing campaign in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. "These warnings indicate targeting not compromise. If we are warning you there's a very high chance we blocked," Google's TAG director Shane Huntley wrote in a Twitter thread on Thursday. "The increased numbers this month come from a small number of widely targeted campaigns which were blocked."

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, whose high-profile antitrust lawsuit against Apple is now under appeal, is today calling out the iPhone maker for giving itself access to an advertising slot its competitors don't have: the iPhone's Settings screen. From a report: Some iOS 15 users noticed Apple is now advertising its own services at the top of their Settings, just below their Apple ID. The services being suggested are personalized to the device owner, based on which ones they already subscribe to, it appears. For example, those without an Apple Music subscription may see an ad offering a free six-month trial. However, current Apple Music subscribers may instead see a prompt to add on a service they don't yet have, like AppleCare coverage for their devices.

Sweeney suggests this sort of first-party advertising is an anticompetitive risk for Apple, as some of the services it's pushing here are those that directly compete with third-party apps published on its App Store. But those third-party apps can't gain access to the iPhone's Settings screen, of course --- they can only bid for ad slots within the App Store itself. Writes Sweeney: "New from the guys who banned Fortnite: settings-screen ads for their own music service, which come before the actual settings, and which aren't available to other advertisers like Spotify or Sound Cloud."

Microsoft just promised it's going to make it easier for its customers to repair the products it sells in the near future. As first reported by Grist, the company will study the environmental impact of right-to-repair and act on its findings by the end of the next year. From a report: The initiative is a reaction to a shareholder resolution filed in June 2021 that demanded the company seriously consider the environmental impact of making its products easier to repair, which itself was fueled by the broader right to repair movement, which has been gaining steam and momentum for years. The shareholders partnered with As You Sow, a non-profit specializing in shareholder advocacy, to help them put pressure on Microsoft. It seems to have worked.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A gang of car thieves used a handheld device disguised as a Nintendo Game Boy to steal vehicles worth $245,000. Dylan Armer, Christopher Bowes and Thomas Poulson stole five Mitsubishi Outlanders by using the gadget to bypass the cars' security systems. West Yorkshire Police said the device, worth $27,000 could unlock and start a car "in a matter of seconds." The trio, all from Yorkshire, were jailed at Leeds Crown Court after pleading guilty to conspiracy to steal. CCTV footage of the theft showed them unplug the car from its charging point before using the device to unlock and start it. When officers stopped the three men they found the Game Boy-style gadget hidden in a secret compartment of their car. Police said footage recovered from Poulson's phone showed him demonstrating "how quickly and easily the gadget gave them full access to the vehicles, accompanied by a commentary in mocking tones." The force added that the "significant investment required to buy one of the sophisticated devices suggested the thefts were planned and orchestrated crimes."

Google will no longer allow advertisers, publishers, and YouTube creators to monetize content that denies the existence of climate change. The Verge reports: The company detailed the changes in a support document on Thursday. "Today, we're announcing a new monetization policy for Google advertisers, publishers and YouTube creators that will prohibit ads for, and monetization of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change," the Google Ads team said in the document. "This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change."

Google says it will use a mix of automated tools and human reviews to enforce the policy. "When evaluating content against this new policy, we'll look carefully at the context in which claims are made, differentiating between content that states a false claim as fact, versus content that reports on or discusses that claim," Google said. Ads will still be allowed on climate topics like public debates on climate policy, research, and more, according to Google.

It's been 10 years since the death of Steve Jobs. Michael Dell talks about his memories of the tech icon, including when Jobs tried to convince Dell to license Mac software to run on Intel-based PCs. CNET reports: Fast forward to 1993. Jobs, ousted from Apple after a fallout with the company's board in 1985, had started a new company, called Next, and created a beautiful (but expensive) workstation, with its own operating system, as well as software called WebObjects for building web-based applications. Dell says Jobs came to his house in Texas several times that year, trying to convince him to use the Next operating system on Dell PCs, by arguing that it was better than Microsoft's Windows software and could undermine the Unix workstation market being touted by Sun Microsystems. The problem, Dell says he told Jobs, was that there were no applications for it and zero customer interest. Still, Dell's company worked a little bit with Next and used WebObjects to build its first online store in the mid-'90s.

In 1997, Jobs rejoined a struggling Apple after it acquired Next for $429 million, and he pitched Dell on another business proposal (as Jobs was evaluating Apple's Mac clone licensing project, which he ultimately shut down). Jobs and his team had ported the Mac software, based on Next's Mach operating system, and had it running on the Intel x86 chips that powered Dell PCs. Jobs offered to license the Mac OS to Dell, telling him he could give PC buyers a choice of Apple's software or Microsoft's Windows OS installed on their machine. "He said, look at this -- we've got this Dell desktop and it's running Mac OS," Dell tells me. "Why don't you license the Mac OS?" Dell thought it was a great idea and told Jobs he'd pay a licensing fee for every PC sold with the Mac OS. But Jobs had a counteroffer: He was worried that licensing scheme might undermine Apple's own Mac computer sales because Dell computers were less costly. Instead, Dell says, Jobs suggested he just load the Mac OS alongside Windows on every Dell PC and let customers decide which software to use -- and then pay Apple for every Dell PC sold.

Dell smiles when he tells the story. "The royalty he was talking about would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, and the math just didn't work, because most of our customers, especially larger business customers, didn't really want the Mac operating system," he writes. "Steve's proposal would have been interesting if it was just us saying, "OK, we'll pay you every time we use the Mac OS" -- but to pay him for every time we didn't use it ... well, nice try, Steve!" Another problem: Jobs wouldn't guarantee access to the Mac OS three, four or five years later "even on the same bad terms." That could leave customers who were using Mac OS out of luck as the software evolved, leaving Dell Inc. no way to ensure it could support those users. Still, Dell acknowledges the deal was a what-could-have-been moment in history. [...] That different direction led to Jobs continuing to evolve the Next-inspired Mac OS and retooling the Mac product line, including adding the candy-colored iMac in mid-1998.

An anonymous reader writes: Cloudflare is not liable for the copyright infringement of websites that use its content-delivery and security services, a federal judge ruled yesterday. Cloudflare was sued in November 2018 by Mon Cheri Bridals and Maggie Sottero Designs, two wedding dress manufacturers and sellers that alleged Cloudflare was guilty of contributory copyright infringement because it didn't terminate services for websites that infringed on the dressmakers' copyrighted designs. The companies sought a jury trial, but Judge Vince Chhabria yesterday granted Cloudflare's motion for summary judgment in a ruling (PDF) in US District Court for the Northern District of California. Chhabria noted that the dressmakers have been harmed "by the proliferation of counterfeit retailers that sell knock-off dresses using the plaintiffs' copyrighted images," and that they have "gone after the infringers in a range of actions, but to no avail -- every time a website is successfully shut down, a new one takes its place." [...] While the ruling resolves the lawsuit's central question in Cloudflare's favor, the judge scheduled a case management conference for October 27 "to discuss what's left of the case."

A defendant is liable for contributory copyright infringement if it has knowledge of another's infringement and materially contributes to or induces that infringement, the judge noted in his ruling against the dressmakers. "Simply providing services to a copyright infringer does not qualify as a 'material contribution,'" he wrote. "Rather, liability in the Internet context follows where a party 'facilitate[s] access' to infringing websites in such a way that 'significantly magnif[ies]' the underlying infringement." Although a defendant can be found to materially contribute to copyright infringement if it acts as "an essential step in the infringement process," this should not be interpreted too broadly, the judge wrote. "As the Ninth Circuit has recognized, the language used in these tests is 'quite broad' and could encompass much innocuous activity if considered out of context. An analysis of contributory copyright infringement must therefore be cognizant of the facts in the key cases in which liability has been found," Chhabria wrote.

Mon Cheri Bridals and Maggie Sottero Designs alleged that Cloudflare contributes to copyright infringement by providing performance-improvement services, including its content-distribution network and caching capabilities that improve the quality of webpages and make them load faster, Chhabria wrote. But the "plaintiffs have not presented evidence from which a jury could conclude that Cloudflare's performance-improvement services materially contribute to copyright infringement. The plaintiffs' only evidence of the effects of these services is promotional material from Cloudflare's website touting the benefits of its services. These general statements do not speak to the effects of Cloudflare on the direct infringement at issue here." The plaintiffs did not prove that the faster website-load times enabled by Cloudflare "would be likely to lead to significantly more infringement." Additionally, Cloudflare removing infringing material from its cache would not prevent users from seeing the copyrighted images. "[R]emoving material from a cache without removing it from the hosting server would not prevent the direct infringement from occurring," Chhabria wrote.

Taiwan chipmaker TSMC will not leak any sensitive company information as part of a White House request for details on the ongoing semiconductor crisis that has forced cuts to U.S. auto production, the company's general counsel said. From a report: The White House made the request to automakers, chip companies and others last month. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said a voluntary request for information within 45 days on the chips crisis would boost supply chain transparency and that if companies did not answer the voluntary request "then we have other tools in our tool box that require them to give us data." The issue has caused concern in Taiwan that companies like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world's largest contract chipmaker and a major Apple supplier, would have to hand over sensitive data. "Don't worry. We definitely will not leak our company's sensitive information, especially that related to customers," TSMC's general counsel Sylvia Fang said on Wednesday, in comments provided by the company on Thursday. "Customer trust is one of the key elements to our company's success," she added. "If this is to resolve supply chain issues, we will see how best we can do to help them. We have done so many things. For the part of auto chips, we've tried to increase output and prioritize auto chips to a certain degree."

waspleg writes: Mozilla is now showing ads in the form of sponsored Firefox contextual suggestions when U.S. users type in the URL address bar. Mozilla says the feature was introduced with Firefox 92 in September to fund development and optimization. Mozilla describes Firefox Suggest contextual suggestions as opt-in, in BleepingComputer's tests and from what users have reported, the feature is on by default.

Furthermore, Firefox doesn't tag the ads displayed via Firefox Suggest. There is no clear way to identify what a sponsored suggestion and what a regular unsponsored suggestion should look like.

The only way Firefox users will know whether a sponsored suggestion is an ad would be by looking at the URL, but, in many cases, the URL is not clearly visible.

New submitter myinnerbanjo writes: With plastics in oceans becoming more and more of a global disaster, Microsoft uses recycled ocean plastic to create a new computer mouse:

"We wanted to do something that's different," said Corinne Holmes, director of environmental compliance, Windows & Devices. "I don't want the clean stuff. We wanted to push the bar. This plastic wasn't from a collection bin sitting on the beach. It was recovered out of a river. It's dirty. It was sitting there for six months, not three weeks."