An anonymous reader writes: A Razer Synapse zero-day vulnerability has been disclosed that allows you to gain Windows admin privileges simply by plugging in a Razer mouse or keyboard.

Ethiopia has begun developing its own social media platform to rival Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, though it does not plan to block the global services, the state communications security agency said on Monday. From a report: Ethiopia has been engulfed since last year in an armed conflict pitting the federal government against the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which controls the Tigray region in the country's north. Supporters of both sides have waged a parallel war of words on social media.

The government wants its local platform to "replace" Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and Zoom, the director general of the Information Network Security Agency (INSA), Shumete Gizaw, said. Shumete accused Facebook of deleting posts and user accounts which he said were "disseminating the true reality about Ethiopia." International human rights groups have criticized the Ethiopian government for unexplained shutdowns to social media services including Facebook and WhatsApp in the past year. The government has not commented on those shutdowns.

An excerpt from Slate's interview with law professor Michael Heller, who has co-written a book called 'Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives': Heller: Just to give you a concrete example, there's a guy named James Beach who was flying from Boston to Denver, and he had actually a little plastic clamp called a Knee Defender, which you can buy online. It's really very effective. You stick it on the seat in front of you, on the little tray table, and it keeps the seat in front of you from leaning back. On this particular flight, the woman in front of him tried to lean back. She couldn't; she realized what was wrong. She asked him to take them off. He didn't comply. She turned around and threw her water at him. The pilot did an emergency landing right away. They were taken off the flight. The plane went on to Denver an hour and 38 minutes late.

But those little Knee Defenders turn out to reveal a tremendous amount about the ownership conflicts that are all through our lives. The woman in front is saying, "That space behind my seat, it's mine, because the little button reclines the seat." And the guy behind, like the kids in the playground, he's saying, "No, it was mine. I had it first, for my laptop," or "I possessed it first with my knees." So that wedge of space is an ownership battle, it turns out, between attachment and possession and first-in-time.

When I talk to audiences about that conflict, I always poll them, and it's amazing to me that invariably half say the person in front is in the right, and half say the person in back is in the right. What's most amazing is how each side is just amazed that anybody else could have a different view. It feels and looks and seems so obvious, what's mine, the same way it is to toddlers on a playground. But that little conflict on the airplane seat is not just an accident, it turns out. It's deliberately engineered by the airlines so they can sell that same space twice. Most of us are just polite; we try to work it out, and that's true in all of the ownership conflicts we go through throughout our day, throughout our lives, in the Starbucks line, to line up at Disney World.

Anywhere that we're trying to make something mine, our experience is being engineered and designed by some owner to shape our behavior. And on the airplane seat, the design is to get us to fight with each other instead of being mad at the airlines, to not realize that they're selling that same space twice. And what they're using is one of the most advanced tools of ownership design that Jim and I have uncovered in doing this work, which is what we call strategic ambiguity. Ownership is ambiguous a lot more often than people realize. And that ambiguity is really valuable, in this case to the airlines.

Nearly half of the U.S. (47.5%) has migrated to IPv6, ranking the U.S. sixth in percentage of users who have migrated to the latest version of the Internet Protocol. That estimate is based on an analysis of data about Google users — which also finds that India leads the world, with a 61.67% adoption rate. Inside.com's developer newsletter reports: The figures come from the latest Google IPv6 Statistics data organized and ranked by BBC Radio and Music's Lead Technical Architect for his blog. Malaysia and French Guiana came in second and third, respectively...

IPv6 is considered far more secure, faster, and powerful than its predecessor, IPv4, while offering more IP addresses. Test your IPv6 connectivity here.
After third place there's a close three-way race, where the U.S. has dropped from the #4 position earlier this week. As of today the U.S. is now in 6th place...

Fourth is France (48.38%) and Fifth is Taiwan (48.0%).

Canada ranks #20 (36.59%) and the UK ranks #24 (33.27%).

"Transparency is an important part of everything we do at Facebook," reads the first line of a first-quarter Content Transparency Report which Facebook later decided not to share with the public.

They've now changed their mind, and released that report. The Hill summarizes its findings: Facebook said that an article about a doctor who passed away two weeks after getting a coronavirus vaccine was the [#1] top-performing link on the social media platform in the U.S. from January to March, according to a report released Saturday... [The Washington Post adds that this article "was promoted on Facebook by several anti-vaccine groups".] According to Facebook's report, the article was viewed over 53 million times...

In addition, a website pushing coronavirus misinformation was one of the top 20 most visited sites on the platform, according to The Washington Post.
Specifically, the Post calls that top-20 site "a right-wing anti-China publication that has promoted the violent QAnon conspiracy theories and misleading claims of voter fraud related to the 2020 election."

Facebook had considered sharing the 100 most popular items in their newsfeed, the Post adds, but "The problem was that they feared what they might find..." The disclosure reflects the challenge of being open with the public at a time when the social network is being attacked by the White House as well as experts for fomenting the spread of health misinformation. Previously, the company had only shared how much covid-related misinformation it has removed, and has been careful not to acknowledge up to this point what role they've played in disseminating material that mislead the public about the virus and the vaccine. For months, executives have debated releasing both this report and other information, according to a person familiar with the company's thinking. In those debates, the conversations revolved around whether releasing certain data points were likely to help or hurt the company's already-battered public image. In numerous instances, the company held back on investigating information that appeared negative, the person said...

Facebook's leadership has long felt that skepticism about any subject, including vaccines, should not be censored in a society that allows robust public debate... The challenge is that certain factual stories that might cast doubt on vaccines are often promoted and skewed by people and groups that are opposed to them. The result is that factual information can become part of an ideological campaign. Facebook has been slow to remove or block some of the leading anti-vaccine figures that spread such ideas.
Some observations about Facebook's report:

• It only covers public content in a News Feed — so presumably it's failing to account for any misinformation that's shared only with a group's members.

• The report acknowledges that nearly 20% of posts in a News Feed come from a Group the user has joined.

• More than 1 in every 17 content views in the News Feed are recommended by Facebook's algorithms.

"There is no simple answer to this question," argues an article at EE Times. At least, not yet...

Slashdot reader dkatana shares their report: For most industrial IoT applications, the question remains: Do I need 5G for my IoT connections? It depends on the connectivity, the devices, and many other factors. First, does the project need cellular connectivity? There are several wireless low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) using different radios that can be used without incurring the cost of cellular connections. Other wireless technologies such as LoRaWAN and Sigfox offer massive IoT connectivity for local and wide-area applications with low power consumption. For example, connecting hundreds or thousands of sensors in agriculture can be achieved over an existing Sigfox or LoRaWAN network. Those sensors usually do not require the bandwidth or enhanced security of cellular networks. Additionally, most cellular connections use licensed spectrum, which is additional cost carriers need to transfer to customers.

One reason to invest in 5G connectivity for IoT is that operators are shutting down legacy 2G and 3G networks worldwide. In the past 30 years, hundreds of thousands of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) devices have been deployed using 2G networks. Those are utility meters, alarm systems, and basic sensors that use SMS and GPRS/EDGE for communication. In 2017, AT&T announced that they will start shutting down 2G networks to free up the spectrum for LTE and the upcoming 5G radios. Additionally, Verizon Wireless phased out its 2G CDMA network in the US at the end of 2020; Sprint sunsetted its 2G CDMA network in December of 2021; and T-Mobile plans to sunset its 2G network in December of 2022.

The existing connections are now living on borrowed time.

Like 2G, many carriers are eager to sunset older 3G networks so that they can repurpose that spectrum to support 4G LTE and 5G.

"What seemed like a small update has, for some, turned into a huge headache," reports ZDNet: Over on Apple's support forum, there are several threads from users complaining that iOS 14.7.1 broke their iPhones, causing a "no service" problem where users are unable to connect to cell service. Ther">e are similar threads on Apple's developer forums as well.

While there doesn't seem to be a pattern to which phones are affected, I've seen reports of everything from the iPhone 6 to iPhone 12 affected, and the cause is clear — upgrading to iOS 14.7.1.
"Users are saying that restarting the phone, removing the SIM, and even resetting network settings didn't help," according to 9to5Mac (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader antdude).

Forbes reports the bug appears to happen when you lose your cellular connection and switch to WiFi calling, "so those living in areas with good reception may never see it. Of course, this scenario also helps to mask the scale of iPhones which might be affected." If you haven't upgraded to iOS 14.7.1 yet, this potentially crippling flaw could (understandably) put you off upgrading. The problem is that the release also contains a critical fix for a new zero-day security flaw...

In November GM recalled 69,000 of its "Bolt" electric cars after five reported fires and two minor injuries. Last month they issued a second recall "after at least two of the electric vehicles that were repaired for a previous problem erupted into flames," CNBC reported.

And then Friday the company expanded that recall "due to potential fire risk." The recall expansion is expected to cost the automaker an additional $1 billion, bringing the total to $1.8 billion to replace potentially defective battery modules in the vehicles. GM said about 73,000 vehicles in the U.S. and Canada are being added to the recall from the 2019-2022 model years, including a recently launched larger version of the car called the Bolt EUV...

The expanded recall now includes all Bolt EV models ever produced, casting a shadow over GM's first mainstream electric vehicle, as it attempts to transition to exclusively sell EVs by 2035...

The expansion follows the companies finding that the batteries for these vehicles may have two manufacturing defects — a torn anode tab and folded separator — present in the same battery cell, which increases the risk of fire. GM has confirmed one fire in the new population of recalled vehicles. That's in addition to at least nine previous confirmed fires in the first round of vehicles that were recalled.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: On Wednesday, Facebook released a report about what content was most viewed by people in the US last quarter. It was the first time it had released such a report. But according to The New York Times, Facebook was working on a similar report for the first quarter of 2021 that it opted not to share because it might have reflected poorly on the company. The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the report, says that the most-viewed link in the first quarter had a headline that could promote COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, which has been an issue on the social media platform. The headline read, "A 'healthy' doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine; CDC is investigating why." The article was published by The South Florida Sun Sentinel and republished by The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times says.

Facebook was working on releasing this report, but executives, including Alex Schultz, Facebook's CMO and VP of analytics, apparently "debated whether it would cause a public relations problem, according to the internal emails" and ultimately decided not to publish it, The New York Times reported. "We considered making the report public earlier but since we knew the attention it would garner, exactly as we saw this week, there were fixes to the system we wanted to make," Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement. Stone also clarified Schultz's opinion on if Facebook should release the report, saying that Schultz "advocated for putting out the report."
UPDATE: Later Saturday Facebook relented and released the report online.

For the first time, Google has published the number of geofence warrants it's historically received from U.S. authorities, providing a rare glimpse into how frequently these controversial warrants are issued. ZDNet's Zack Whittaker reports: The figures, published Thursday, reveal that Google has received thousands of geofence warrants each quarter since 2018, and at times accounted for about one-quarter of all U.S. warrants that Google receives. The data shows that the vast majority of geofence warrants are obtained by local and state authorities, with federal law enforcement accounting for just 4% of all geofence warrants served on the technology giant. According to the data, Google received 982 geofence warrants in 2018, 8,396 in 2019 and 11,554 in 2020. But the figures only provide a small glimpse into the volume of warrants received and did not break down how often it pushes back on overly broad requests.

Geofence warrants are also known as "reverse-location" warrants, since they seek to identify people of interest who were in the near vicinity at the time a crime was committed. Police do this by asking a court to order Google, which stores vast amounts of location data to drive its advertising business, to turn over details of who was in a geographic area, such as a radius of a few hundred feet at a certain point in time, to help identify potential suspects. Google has long shied away from providing these figures, in part because geofence warrants are largely thought to be unique to Google. Law enforcement has long known that Google stores vast troves of location data on its users in a database called Sensorvault, first revealed by The New York Times in 2019. Google spokesperson Alex Krasov said in a statement: "We vigorously protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement. We developed a process specifically for these requests that is designed to honor our legal obligations while narrowing the scope of data disclosed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Google's ambitions in the car led to Android Auto being redesigned a couple of years ago, mostly to positive feedback. However, the version of Android Auto on phone screens was meant to shut down at the time and has been on life support ever since. Now, that version has stopped working for some users. The aptly named "Android Auto for Phone Screens" was launched in 2019 as Google was forced to delay Google Assistant Driving Mode. That feature, which finally started rolling out in 2020, continued into earlier this year, and has expanded since, was supposed to replace the experience on phone screens. At the time, Google called this app a "stopgap" for users who needed an in-car experience but lacked a vehicle compatible with Android Auto.

In speaking with Google, we are able to confirm that Android Auto for Phone Screens is, indeed, shutting down with the release of Android 12. The experience will not be available for users on Android 12, but still on older versions of the OS. Google says that Assistant Driving Mode will be "the built-in mobile driving experience" on Android 12. Google's full statement follows: "Google Assistant driving mode is our next evolution of the mobile driving experience. For the people who use Android Auto in supported vehicles, that experience isn't going away. For those who use the on phone experience (Android Auto mobile app), they will be transitioned to Google Assistant driving mode. Starting with Android 12, Google Assistant driving mode will be the built-in mobile driving experience. We have no further details to share at this time."

RoccamOccam writes: After many months of development, the memfd_secret() system call was finally merged for the upcoming 5.14 release of Linux. There have been many changes during this feature's development, but its core purpose remains the same: allow a user-space process to create a range of memory that is inaccessible to anybody else -- kernel included. That memory can be used to store cryptographic keys or any other data that must not be exposed to others. Reportedly, it is even safe from processor vulnerabilities like Spectre because secret memory is uncached mapped.

Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare disclosed today that it mitigated the largest volumetric distributed denial of service attack that was recorded to date. From a report: The attack, which took place last month, targeted one of Cloudflare's customers in the financial industry. Cloudflare said that a threat actor used a botnet of more than 20,000 infected devices to flung HTTP requests at the customer's network in order to consume and crash server resources.

Called a volumetric DDoS, these are different from classic bandwidth DDoS attacks where threat actors try to exhaust and clog up the victim's internet connection bandwidth. Instead, attackers focus on sending as many junk HTTP requests to a victim's server in order to take up precious server CPU and RAM and prevent legitimate users from using targeted sites. Cloudflare said this attack peaked at 17.2 million HTTP requests/second (rps), a figure that the company described as almost three times larger than any previous volumetric DDoS attack that was ever reported in the public domain.

Google is adding an option to its Calendar service to let you show where you're working on any given day of the week, the company has announced. From a report: The feature will start rolling out from August 30th for users on select Google Workspace plans, and will be accessible via Calendar's settings menu alongside its existing working hours options, as well as on the weekly calendar view below where it shows each day's dates. Available work locations include "Office," "Home," "Unspecified," or "Somewhere else."

According to Google, the option is being added so it's "easier to plan in-person collaboration or set expectations in a hybrid workplace." It follows a surge in the popularity of home and hybrid working due to the pandemic. This has meant employees increasingly have to keep track not just of people's working hours, but also their location, when planning in-person meetings and other events. Google Calendar's new feature should help here.

Nvidia's planned $40 billion takeover of chipmaker Arm should get a longer antitrust probe, British regulators warned after rejecting potential concessions. From a report: In the first reaction on the deal from a major antitrust watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority said in a statement that it was concerned the deal would give Nvidia too much control over semiconductors used in data center services, smart devices and gaming consoles. Lengthy regulatory reviews can add risk to closing a deal that looks set to overshoot Nvidia's initial target to close in March 2022. Nvidia hasn't yet filed for European Union approval, where an extended review takes at least five months.

Nvidia's move to buy Arm from Japan's SoftBank Group Corp. initially raised antitrust concerns from rivals and customers such as Qualcomm and Alphabet's Google over how Nvidia might control Arm's licenses for essential chip technology. U.K. Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden must still decide whether the CMA should open an in-depth probe. Dowden is also separately weighing whether the deal should be blocked over potential risks to national security. The U.K. is leaning toward a veto, according to a person familiar with the matter earlier this month.

A newly unredacted sections of Epic's antitrust complaint against Google reveal new details on the lengths to which Google went to undermine third-party app stores on the Android platform. From a report: According to the new text, starting in 2019, Google ran a "Premier Device Program" that gave Android phone makers a greater share of search revenue than they would normally receive. In exchange, the OEMs agreed to ship their devices without any third-party app stores preinstalled. Specifically, they followed a rule that prohibited "apps with APK install privileges" without Google's approval, leaving the Play Store as the only built-in digital marketplace for software.

As noted by Leah Nylen, products that qualified as a Premier Device would receive a 12 percent share of Google search revenue compared to the 8 percent they'd normally earn. Google sweetened the deal further for companies like LG and Motorola, offering them between 3 and 6 percent of what customers spent in the Google Play Store on their devices. "Google's Premier Device Program was not publicly known, and was not known to Epic, before Google recently began producing relevant documents in this litigation," Epic's lawyers wrote in the complaint. "Google has sought to conceal its most restrictive anticompetitive conduct by, among other things, including in the agreements themselves a provision restricting signatories from making 'any public statement regarding [the] Agreement without the other party's prior written approval.'"

On Twitter, Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay shared a teaser video for "the beautifully redesigned Paint app," with the promise that Windows Insider Program members would be able to start testing the app for themselves in the near future. PCMag reports: The video is light on details -- which isn't all that surprising given that eight seconds of its 18-second runtime are devoted to the intro and outro -- but it does show off a new user interface with dark mode support that matches other Windows 11 apps. Windows Central also noticed something missing from Paint's new interface: An option to edit the current file in Paint 3D. Could this mean that Paint has emerged victorious from the 4-year-long battle that's raged between the competing apps?

The conflict began when Microsoft released Paint 3D alongside the Windows 10 Creators Update in 2017, then announced just a few months later that it was planning to deprecate the original Paint with the Fall Creators Update. Many feared that would be the end of Paint, but Microsoft later clarified that it was simply moving the app to the Windows Store instead of bundling it with Windows 10. It then decided to continue shipping it with the operating system anyway. It seemed like Paint and Paint 3D would coexist indefinitely. That changed again in March when Microsoft stopped bundling Paint 3D with Windows 10 and moved it to the Microsoft Store instead. The tables had finally turned.

Three of every five voters in Oregon and Washington support a regional, high-speed rail line, according to a poll released by proponents of a proposed high-speed rail system to carry passengers from Eugene, Ore., to Vancouver, B.C. GeekWire reports: The survey, conducted by California-based FM3 and released by rail-advocacy coalition Fast Forward Cascadia, shows that 43% of voters surveyed from the two states strongly support high-speed rail and another 19% somewhat support it. Conversely, a total of 27% either strongly oppose or somewhat oppose a new high-speed rail project. Rachel Smith, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce president and CEO, said the polling indicates the necessary political support for additional modes of mass transportation in the Pacific Northwest. Broady, Northwest voters appear highly concerned about traffic, transportation infrastructure, and climate. And they see high-speed rail as a partial solution to those issues, the data indicates.

In 2019, Microsoft gave $223,667 to study the possibility of building a high-speed rail line connecting Vancouver, B.C., Seattle, and Portland, bringing the company's total donation to study the feasibility of the idea to $573,667. If completed, trains would hit speeds of 250 mph and carry up to 3.3 million passengers annually in the Pacific Northwest, according to one initial study. A study completed in 2018 estimated the project cost would range from $24 billion to $42 billion.

Rachel Smith said with the federal government currently willing to pour billions of dollars into Washington's infrastructure with the new legislation approved by the U.S. Senate, the time to push a project along is now. "There are significant resources becoming available," she said. "The (decisions) we make now we wish we could have made 20 years ago." Smith said the backers of the Cascadia line have closely analyzed mistakes made by the other projects and have a good accounting of the potential pitfalls. "We have confidence we can deliver on this project," she said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: In a new blog post for the International Monetary Fund, four researchers presented their findings from a working paper that examines the current relationship between finance and tech as well as its potential future. Gazing into their crystal ball, the researchers see the possibility of using the data from your browsing, search, and purchase history to create a more accurate mechanism for determining the credit rating of an individual or business. They believe that this approach could result in greater lending to borrowers who would potentially be denied by traditional financial institutions. At its heart, the paper is trying to wrestle with the dawning notion that the institutional banking system is facing a serious threat from tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. The researchers identify two key areas in which this is true: Tech companies have greater access to soft-information, and messaging platforms can take the place of the physical locations that banks rely on for meeting with customers.

The concept of using your web history to inform credit ratings is framed around the notion that lenders rely on hard-data that might obscure the worthiness of a borrower or paint an unnecessarily dire picture during hard times. Citing soft-data points like "the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases" that could be incorporated into evaluating a borrower, the researchers believe that when a lender has a more intimate relationship with the potential client's history, they might be more willing to cut them some slack. [...] But how would all this data be incorporated into credit ratings? Machine learning, of course. It's black boxes all the way down. The researchers acknowledge that there will be privacy and policy concerns related to incorporating this kind of soft-data into credit analysis. And they do little to explain how this might work in practice.

Toyota is to slash worldwide vehicle production by 40% in September because of the global microchip shortage. The BBC reports: The world's biggest carmaker had planned to make almost 900,000 cars next month, but has now reduced that to 540,000 vehicles. Volkswagen, the world's second-biggest car producer, has warned it may also be forced to cut output further. Toyota's other rivals, including General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Daimler, BMW and Renault, have already scaled back production in the face of the global chip shortage. Until now, Toyota had managed to avoid doing the same, with the exception of extending summer shutdowns by a week in France the Czech Republic and Turkey.

New cars often include dozens of microchips but Toyota benefited from having built a larger stockpile of chips - also called semiconductors - as part of a revamp to its business continuity plan, developed in the wake of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami a decade ago. The decision to reduce output now has been precipitated by the resurgence of coronavirus cases across Asia hitting supplies. The company will make some cuts in August at its plants in Japan and elsewhere. The bulk of the cuts -- 360,000 -- will come in September and affect factories in Asia and the US. The aim for Toyota as a whole is to make up for any lost volume by the end of 2021.