South Korean Internet service provider SK Broadband has sued Netflix to pay for costs from increased network traffic and maintenance work because of a surge of viewers to the U.S. firm's content, an SK spokesperson said on Friday. From a report: The move comes after a Seoul court said Netflix should "reasonably" give something in return to the internet service provider for network usage, and multiple South Korean lawmakers have spoken out against content providers who do not pay for network usage despite generating explosive traffic. Netflix said it will review SK Broadband's claim, and seek dialogue and explore ways in the meantime to work with SK Broadband to ensure customers are not affected. The popularity of the hit series "Squid Game" and other offerings have underscored Netflix's status as the country's second-largest data traffic generator after Google's YouTube, but the two are the only ones to not pay network usage fees, which other content providers such as Amazon, Apple and Facebook are paying, SK said. Netflix's data traffic handled by SK jumped 24 times from May 2018 to 1.2 trillion bits of data processed per second as of September, SK said, riding on the success of several Netflix productions from Korea including "Squid Game" and "D.P."

Carmaker Opel, which is part of the Stellantis group, said on Thursday it will close one of its plants in Germany until at least the end of the year due to chip shortages. Reuters reports: Production at the Eisenach plant, which makes internal combustion engine and hybrid electric cars, should start again in 2022, although an Opel spokesperson could not specify a date. Some 1,300 workers employed at the plant will be temporarily laid off, Opel said, with a separate plant in France picking up some of the production. Stellantis has halted production at other plants, including in Europe and Canada, forecasting that it would make 1.4 million fewer vehicles this year due to the chip shortage.

New submitter thegreatnick writes: The next generation of Fairphone -- an attempt to make an ethical smartphone -- has been announced with the Fairphone 4. The base specs include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G SoC, 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage (upgradeable to 8GB and 256GB). On the front, you'll get a 6.3-inch, 2340x1080 LCD display with slimmer bezels (compared to the Fairphone 3 design) and a teardrop notch for the 25-megapixel front camera. The 3,905mAh battery is Qualcomm Quick Charge 4.1 compatible, so if you have a compatible USB-C charger (not included in the box to reduce waste) you can take the battery from 0-50% in 30 minutes. The phone ships with Android 11 and has a side-mounted fingerprint reader in the power button, a MicroSD slot, and the option for dual-SIM usage via one physical nanoSIM and an eSIM.

Continuing Fairphone's progress in making a "fair" supply chain -- both ethically-clean raw materials and paying workers a fair wage -- it also describes the 4 as "e-waste neutral." This is a neat way of summing up the idea that the company will recycle one device for every Fairphone 4 it sells. In addition, Fairphone can boast that it now uses 70% "fair" materials inside the handset, including FairTrade Gold and Silver, aluminum from ASI-certified vendors, and a backplate made from 100% post-consumer recycled polycarbonate. In an upgrade to previous models, the Fairphone 4 has dual cameras, though it loses the headphone jack. The company says this was to achieve an IP54 waterproof rating (light splashes) -- a first for the Fairphone brand. It's also been announced that it will come with an industry-leading 5-year warranty and aims to get 6 years of software updates for the phone.

TikTok, the world's most downloaded app with over 1 billion monthly active users, has lined up its own NFT drop. The company's first-ever NFT collection "leverages content from some of its top creators, including Lil Nas X, Grimes, Bella Poarch, Rudy Willingham and Gary Vaynerchuk," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The release of one-of-one and limited edition NFTs seems to be focused on generating buzz among the existing NFT community rather than exposing users inside the app to non-fungible tokens. The company is side-stepping blockchain energy concerns by placing their NFTs on a dedicated site powered by Immutable X, a Layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum which says that NFTs traded using it are "100% carbon neutral." The drop starts October 6 with a collection from Lil Nas X and will continue on through the end of the month.

Why is TikTok getting into the world of NFTs to begin with? TikTok has a fairly precise answer for that on its drop site: "Inspired by the creativity and innovation of the TikTok creator community, TikTok is exploring the world of NFTs as a new creator empowerment tool. NFTs are a new way for creators to be recognized and rewarded for their content and for fans to own culturally-significant moments on TikTok. The creation that happens on TikTok helps drive culture and start trends that impact society. TikTok will bring something unique and groundbreaking to the NFT landscape by curating some of these cultural milestones and pairing them with prominent NFT artists."

Cloudflare, which has a network of data centers in 250 locations around the world, announced its first dalliance with infrastructure services today, an upcoming cloud storage offering called R2. From a report: Company co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince says that the idea for moving into storage as a service came from the same place as other ideas the company has turned into products. It was something they needed in-house and that led to them building it for themselves, before offering it to customers too. "When we build products, the reason that we end up building them is usually because we need them ourselves," Prince told me. He said that the storage component grew out of the need to store object components like images on the company's network. Once they built it, and they looked around at the cloud storage landscape, they decided that it would make sense to offer it as a product to customers too. [...] The R2 name is a little swipe at Amazon's S3 storage product and obviously a play on the name. The difference, according to Prince, is that they have found a way to reduce storage costs by up to 10% by eliminating egress fees. Cloudflare plans to price storage at $0.015 per GB of data stored per month. That compares with S3 pricing that starts at $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB per month. Ben Thompson, writing at Stratechery: The reason that Cloudflare can pull this off is the same reason why S3's margins are so extraordinary: bandwidth is a fixed cost, not a marginal one. To take the most simplified example possible, if I were to have two computers connected by a cable, the cost of bandwidth is however much I paid for the cable; once connected I can transmit as much data I would like for free -- in either direction.

That's not quite right, of course: I am constrained by the capacity of the cable; to support more data transfer I would have to install a higher capacity cable, or more of them. What, though, if I already had built a worldwide network of cables for my initial core business of protecting websites from distributed denial-of-service attacks and offering a content delivery network, the value of which was such that ISPs everywhere gave me space in their facilities to place my servers? Well, then I would have massive amounts of bandwidth already in place, the use of which has zero marginal costs, and oh-by-the-way locations close to end users to stick a whole bunch of hard drives.

In other words, I would be Cloudflare: I would charge marginal rates for my actual marginal costs (storage, and some as-yet-undetermined-but-promised-to-be-lower-than-S3 rate for operations), and give away my zero marginal cost product for free. S3's margin is R2's opportunity.

At the SAS 2021 security conference today, analysts from security firm Kaspersky Lab published details about a new Chinese cyber-espionage group that has been targeting high-profile entities across South East Asia since at least July 2020. From a report: Named GhostEmperor, Kaspersky said the group uses highly sophisticated tools and is often focused on gaining and keeping long-term access to its victims through the use of a powerful rootkit that can even work on the latest versions of Windows 10 operating systems. "We observed that the underlying actor managed to remain under the radar for months," Kaspersky researchers explained today. The entry point for GhostEmperor's hacks were public-facing servers. Kaspersky believes the group used exploits for Apache, Oracle, and Microsoft Exchange servers to breach a target's perimeter network and then pivoted to more sensitive systems inside the victim's network.

Google called on European Union judges to cut or cancel a "staggering" 4.3 billion euro ($5 billion) antitrust fine because the search giant never intended to harm rivals. From a report: The company "could not have known its conduct was an abuse" when it struck contracts with Android mobile phone makers that required them to take its search and web-browser apps, Google lawyer Genevra Forwood told the EU's General Court in Luxembourg. The search-giant's power over mobile phones is the focus of a week-long court hearing. Google's lawyers are arguing that the European Commission blundered by demanding changes to allegedly anti-competitive contracts with suppliers of phones running its Android operating system -- the engine room for the vast majority of mobile devices in the region. At the very least the court should "dial down" the fine, an EU record, because it was wrongly based on advertising revenue from Google's home page that isn't directly linked to Android phones at the heart of the EU's decision, Forwood said. The European Commission's lawyer, Anthony Dawes, scoffed at Google's plea, saying the fine was a mere 4.5% of the company's revenue in 2017, well below a 10% cap.

TechCrunch reports: Alphabet's Loon was a stratospheric moonshot that saw the company fly high-altitude balloons to provide cellular network coverage to target areas. The project broke a lot of new ground, including developing technology that enabled balloons to navigate autonomously and stay in one area for long stretches of time, but ultimately came to an end. Now, Alphabet is divvying up the Loon assets, many of which are being either made available to others in the industry for free -- or handed over to key partners and strategic investors. SoftBank is one company that walks away with some intellectual property; the Japanese telecommunication giant gets around 200 of Loon's patents related to stratospheric communications, service, operations and aircraft, which it says it will put to use developing its own High Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS) business.

SoftBank was an erstwhile partner of Loon's, having founded the 'HAPS Alliance' to further the industry. SoftBank's own HAPS business focused on autonomous gliders, but it adapted its communications payloads to work on Loon's balloons, too. SoftBank is also an investor in Loon, having put $125 million in the Alphabet company in 2019. The other company to get a windfall of sorts out of Loon's closure is Raven, another partner and a company that focuses on the manufacture of the high altitude balloons that the Alphabet moonshot operated. It picks up patents related specifically to balloon manufacturing.

Google Maps is getting a few new features to help people better understand our burning planet. Ars Technica reports: The first is a new "fire" layer in the main map view, which will let you view the exact boundaries of a wildfire just as easily as you can look up the current traffic patterns. Google has done fire information before as part of the "crisis response" website, but with climate change making "Fire Season" a yearly occurrence in dry areas like Australia and the Western U.S., wildfires will now be a top-level Maps feature.

Google says the new fire level will bring "all of Google's wildfire information together" in an easy interface. In the US, it will also pull in data from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), and the company says it wants to expand fire detail with other government agencies, starting with Australia in "the coming months." Wildfire boundaries should be updated on an hourly basis, and Google says you'll be able to tap on a fire to see information from local governments, like "emergency websites, phone numbers for help and information, and evacuation details. When available, you can also see important details about the fire, such as its containment, how many acres have burned, and when all this information was last reported." The fire layout is rolling out to Android this week, with iOS and desktop coming in October.

Google also announced it's going to expand the Tree Canopy tool it launched in 2020. This Google Maps tool combines Google's plethora of aerial imagery with computer vision AI to generate a map that shows tree cover in cities. Today's announced expansion will increase the Tree Canopy imagery from 15 cities to 100 cities worldwide. Google wants city planners to use the Tree Canopy tool to combat the phenomena of urban heat islands, where miles of asphalt and a dearth of shade from trees can cause cities to be significantly hotter than the surrounding areas. Google says heat islands "disproportionately impact lower-income communities and contribute to a number of public health concerns -- from poor air quality to dehydration. With Tree Canopy data, local governments have free access to insights about where to plant trees to increase shade, reduce heat and mitigate these adverse effects."

Security researchers have found a massive malware operation that has infected more than 10 million Android smartphones across more than 70 countries since at least November 2020 and is making millions of dollars for its operators on a monthly basis. The Record reports: Discovered by mobile security firm Zimperium, the new GriftHorse malware has been distributed via benign-looking apps uploaded on the official Google Play Store and on third-party Android app stores. If users install any of these malicious apps, GriftHorse starts peppering users with popups and notifications that offer various prizes and special offers. Users who tap on these notifications are redirected to an online page where they are asked to confirm their phone number in order to access the offer. But, in reality, users are subscribing themselves to premium SMS services that charge over $35 per month, money that are later redirected into the GriftHorse operators' pockets.

Zimperium researchers Aazim Yaswant & Nipun Gupta, who have been tracking the GriftHorse malware for months, described it as "one of the most widespread campaigns the zLabs threat research team has witnessed in 2021." Based on what they've seen until now, the researchers estimated that the GriftHorse gang is currently making between $1.5 million to $4 million per month from their scheme.

Rivian held a three-day press event in Colorado last week where a number of journalists, including TechCrunch's Kirsten Korosec, were able to take the R1T electric truck for a spin. Today, the embargo lifted and we're able to hear about their experience." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from Korosec's report: On its first try, Rivian produced the Goldilocks of pickup trucks. The Rivian R1T electric truck is neither too big nor small. It handles rock crawling and off-camber trails with ease, can zip from zero to 60 miles per hour on a dirt road in just a few seconds without the typical back-end slippage -- although there is an option to provide that drifting effect -- and it can crank through winding mountain roads, pushing the edge of each corner without body roll. It's loaded with the kind of interior and exterior touches that put it firmly in the premium zone -- and yet the Rivian R1T is no delicate flower.

The company's designers and engineers helped the truck steer clear of pretension by combining form and function from tip to tail. Some of the added surprises -- the location of functional details like tie-downs, an air compressor and outlets -- suggest that numerous Rivian employees tested the truck in real-world conditions, including camping, mountain biking and even more mundane tasks like grocery-fetching. The result is a vehicle that feels right for all seasons and ready for anything. And, importantly, it's a joy to drive.

On a press drive over three days, a near-production-spec R1T proved to be the electric truck none of us knew we needed. That's not to say every choice landed perfectly. There are a few hardware details and elements on the software user interface side of things that could use a nip here and a tuck there. I'm looking at you, odd notch that is maybe a pen holder, but certainly the soon-to-be dust collector by the wireless charging pad. To be clear, far more time and miles are required to provide a full review. Still, as a total package, the Rivian R1T impresses. [Continue reading to hear about Korosec's thoughts on the nuts and bolts, circuit, handling and performance, user interface(s), and hardware accessories.] For a technical in-depth review of the Rivian R1T, Quinn Nelson from Snazzy Labs has produced an excellent video explaining his thoughts on the driving dynamics, vehicle functions, user interface design, and more. Fair warning: it's nearly 30 minutes long.

Further reading:
Autoblog: 2022 Rivian R1T First Drive Review: An Electric Truck Is a Better Truck
Car and Driver: The 2022 Rivian R1T Electric Pickup Embraces Duality
Business Insider: Rivian R1T: Hitting the Trails In the New Electric Pickup
Fox News: Test Drive: The 2022 Rivian R1T Electric Pickup Is a Game-Changing Truck

Rolls-Royce is the latest automaker to reveal plans to move entirely to electric vehicles within the next decade. Engadget reports: Spectre, Rolls-Royce's first EV, will arrive in the last quarter of 2023. The BMW brand plans to start testing the vehicle soon, according to Reuters. Rolls-Royce teased the EV in some images, but it literally kept the Spectre's design under wraps. Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Muller-Otvos said that by 2030, the automaker "will no longer be in the business of producing or selling any internal combustion engine products." Sibling brand Mini has made a similar pledge. Parent company BMW has not set a date for making a full switch to EVs, though it aims to move half of production to electric models by the end of this decade.

AltMachine writes: U.S. Commerce Secretary Raimondo wants the U.S. to work with Europe to slow China's innovation rate, while at the same time accusing China of ripping of western intellectual properties. "America is most effective when we work with our allies," Raimondo told CNBC's Kayla Tausche in an exclusive interview. "If we really want to slow down China's rate of innovation, we need to work with Europe. They're ripping off our IP, they are not playing by the rules. It's not a level playing field. And so we need to hold their feet to the fire to make sure that they do that." Raimondo invokes the ideological divide to justify the push. "We don't want autocratic governments like China, writing the rules of the road. We together with our allies, who care about privacy, freedom, individual rights, individual protection, we need to write the rules of the road," Raimondo said.

Similar to innovation history of the U.S. which evolved from apprehending IPs of other countries before turning into a technological innovation powerhouse, China has in recent years greatly accelerated its R&D spendings and fortified IP protections. Of the more than 1,600 cases analyzed, IP owners won more than 80% of the time and permanent injunctions were issued by the Chinese courts in more than 90% of the cases. As noted by Judge Gang Feng of the Beijing IP Court in 2016, foreign corporations had a 100% win rate before that court in 2015. "We have to work with our European allies to deny China the most advanced technology so that they can't catch up in critical areas like semiconductors," Raimondo added. "We want to work with Europe, to write the rules of the road for technology, whether it's TikTok or artificial intelligence or cyber."

Further reading: China's Growing Power Crunch Threatens More Global Supply Chain Chaos

In a new milestone for the US government's anti-robocall efforts, phone companies are now prohibited from accepting calls from providers that did not comply with a Federal Communications Commission deadline that passed this week. From a report: "Beginning today, if a voice service provider's certification and other required information does not appear in the FCC's Robocall Mitigation Database, intermediate providers and voice service providers will be prohibited from directly accepting that provider's traffic," the FCC said yesterday. Specifically, phone companies must block traffic from other "voice service providers that have neither certified to implementation of STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication standards nor filed a detailed robocall mitigation plan with the FCC." As we've written, the STIR (Secure Telephone Identity Revisited) and SHAKEN (Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs) protocols verify the accuracy of Caller ID by using digital certificates based on public-key cryptography.

STIR/SHAKEN is now widely deployed on IP networks because large phone companies were required to implement it by June 30 this year, but it isn't a cure-all. Because of technology limitations, there was no requirement to implement STIR/SHAKEN on older TDM-based networks used with copper landlines, for instance. The FCC has said that "providers using older forms of network technology [must] either upgrade their networks to IP or actively work to develop a caller ID authentication solution that is operational on non-IP networks." The FCC also gave carriers with 100,000 or fewer customers until June 30, 2023, to comply with the STIR/SHAKEN requirement, though the commission is seeking comment on a plan to make that deadline June 30, 2022, instead because "evidence demonstrates that a subset of small voice service providers appear to be originating a high number of calls relative to their subscriber base and are also generating a high and increasing share of illegal robocalls compared to larger providers."

At its Search On event today, Google introduced several new features that, taken together, are its strongest attempts yet to get people to do more than type a few words into a search box. From a report: By leveraging its new Multitask Unified Model (MUM) machine learning technology in small ways, the company hopes to kick off a virtuous cycle: it will provide more detail and context-rich answers, and in return it hopes users will ask more detailed and context-rich questions. The end result, the company hopes, will be a richer and deeper search experience. Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan oversees search alongside Assistant, ads, and other products. He likes to say -- and repeated in an interview this past Sunday -- that "search is not a solved problem." That may be true, but the problems he and his team are trying to solve now have less to do with wrangling the web and more to do with adding context to what they find there.

For its part, Google is going to begin flexing its ability to recognize constellations of related topics using machine learning and present them to you in an organized way. A coming redesign to Google search will begin showing "Things to know" boxes that send you off to different subtopics. When there's a section of a video that's relevant to the general topic -- even when the video as a whole is not -- it will send you there. Shopping results will begin to show inventory available in nearby stores, and even clothing in different styles associated with your search. For your part, Google is offering new ways to search that go beyond the text box. It's making an aggressive push to get its image recognition software Google Lens into more places. It will be built into the Google app on iOS and also the Chrome web browser on desktops. And with MUM, Google is hoping to get users to do more than just identify flowers or landmarks, but instead use Lens directly to ask questions and shop.

Russian authorities have arrested and detained Ilya Sachkov, the co-founder and chief executive of Group-IB -- one of the biggest cybersecurity companies in the country -- on charges of treason. From a report: Details about Sachkov's detention remain unclear but it was reported by Russian media as authorities searched the company's offices, reports Reuters. State news agency Tass said Sachkov, who was arrested on Tuesday, was charged with allegedly transferring classified information to an unnamed foreign government, claims that Sachkov denied, according to the report. Group-IB confirmed the arrest of its CEO, but a spokesperson for Group-IB did not comment beyond a statement on the company's website, which said the company is examining the Moscow court's decision and that it is "confident" in Sachkov's innocence. Sachkov, 35, founded Group-IB in 2003. The company, now headquartered in Singapore, helps companies and governments investigate cyberattacks and online fraud, and has customers ranging from Interpol to Russian banks and defense companies.

What's in the future for VR headsets made by Valve, which launched the pricey, bulky, and impressive Valve Index in August 2019? The best information in the wild right now seems to be coming from Valve itself: data-mining discoveries and patent applications are adding up to something that looks like a brand-new Valve VR system with some form of built-in wireless functionality. From a report: Sources familiar with matters at Valve have confirmed to Ars that information in the wild is legitimate -- at least in terms of products being made within Valve's headquarters, even if those products don't ultimately see retail launches. A new, unclear "ism" This week's information roundup comes courtesy of VR industry reporter and YouTube channel host Brad Lynch, who received a tip after tracking months of Valve patent applications. The tip came in the form of a device code-named "Deckard," which is mentioned in SteamVR's publicly available branches from as far back as January. Ars can confirm the legitimacy of "Deckard" as a code-named device worked on inside of Valve's headquarters. The information gleaned by Lynch points to multiple iterations of this new code-named headset, including an updated "proof of concept" version referenced this June, along with the ability to activate a "Valve internal menu" that brings up two new SteamVR menu options. These options, dubbed "prism" and "standalone system layer," have yet to be activated in meaningful ways, so their names and meaning remain a matter of speculation. The latter term, "standalone," implies that the hardware might work all by itself -- as opposed to, say, being plugged into a computer or tracked by Valve's unwieldy SteamVR Tracking Boxes.

The Federal Trade Commission is considering strengthening online privacy protections, including for children, in an effort to bypass legislative logjams in Congress. WSJ: The rules under consideration could impose significant new obligations on businesses across the economy related to how they handle consumer data, people familiar with the matter said. The early talks are the latest indication of the five-member commission's more aggressive posture under its new chairwoman, Lina Khan, a Democrat who has been a vocal critic of big business, particularly large technology companies. Congressional efforts to assist the FTC in tackling perceived online privacy problems will also be the focus of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing Wednesday. If the agency chooses to move forward with an initiative, any broad new rule would likely take years to implement.

In writing new privacy rules, the FTC could follow several paths, the people said: It could look to declare certain business practices unfair or deceptive, using its authority to police such conduct. It could also tap a less-used legal authority that empowers the agency to go after what it considers unfair methods of competition, perhaps by viewing certain businesses' data-collection practices as exclusionary. The agency could also address privacy protections for children by updating its rules under the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. And it could use its enforcement powers to target individual companies, as some privacy advocates urge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from War Is Boring: An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military, this time after someone revealed some US stealth technology testing going on and posted it to the Chinese government-affiliated platform. The stealthy object -possibly a component of a new drone or plane- was filmed on a tractor-trailer platform at Helendale Radar Cross Section Facility. After making their debut on a social media platform tied to America's top adversary, images of the object quickly made their way to the internet, gracing everything from 4chan to Reddit. It is unknown what project the object is tied to, though speculation has ranged from a new Boeing product to even the famed "TicTac" UFO sighted by Naval Aviators in recent years. Steve Trimble of Aviation Week wrote in a tweet: "I showed this to Gen Mark Kelly, Air Combat Command chief. His immediate reply was that he had no idea what it was. And then he took my laptop and stared at it for about 20 seconds. His expression was (WARNING: my impression) somewhere between confused and impressed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: A new script allows you to install Windows 11 on devices with incompatible hardware, such as missing TPM 2.0, incompatible CPUs, or the lack of Secure Boot. Even better, the script also works on virtual machines, allowing you to upgrade to the latest Windows Insider build. This new script was released as part of the extremely useful Universal MediaCreationTool wrapper, a batch file that allows you to create an ISO for any version of Windows 10, with Windows 11 support added last week. While the main script of this open-source project is the 'MediaCreationTool.bat' used to create Windows ISOs, it also includes a script named 'Skip_TPM_Check_on_Dynamic_Update.cmd,' which configures the device to bypass compatible hardware checks.

When Windows 11 was first announced, Microsoft released the operating system's new system requirements, which included a TPM 2.0 security processor, Secure Boot, newer CPUs, and at least 64 GB of hard drive space. As Microsoft realized that many people, especially those in the enterprise, would be testing Windows 11 preview builds on virtual machines, they exempted them from the system requirements (PDF). However, Microsoft is now requiring compatible hardware even on virtual machines and taking a firm stance on its system requirement, going as far as to say that people who install Windows 11 on incompatible hardware may not get security updates.