Early Monday morning, the Wikipedia pages for a slew of celebrities, writers, and political figures were replaced by full-page spreads of black and white swastikas on a bright red background. The vandalism was reversed within minutes of being noticed by users. Gizmodo reports: Wikipedia is certainly no stranger to vandalism on some of its more controversial pages, but this incident highlighted one of the lesser-known weaknesses in the platform's airtight content moderation policies. Instead of targeting the content on any particular Wikipedia page, the vandal behind this blitz targeted a particular article template used by more than 50,000 different Wikipedia pages, including those for Jennifer Lopez, Joe Biden, and Discworld author Terry Pratchett.

According to an ongoing discussion by a handful of Wikipedia admins on one of the site's public forums, the template's since been fixed and the vandal in question -- who first joined the site about ten days ago -- has been put on an indefinite ban. One admin noted that by targeting these article templates directly, the user was able to bypass the typical protections put on certain Wikipedia pages to protect them from vandals in the first place.

T-Mobile confirmed hackers gained access to the telecom giant's systems in an announcement published Monday. Joseph Cox, reporting at Motherboard: The move comes after Motherboard reported that T-Mobile was investigating a post on an underground forum offering for sale Social Security Numbers and other private data. The forum post at the time didn't name T-Mobile, but the seller told Motherboard the data came from T-Mobile servers.

We have determined that unauthorized access to some T-Mobile data occurred, however we have not yet determined that there is any personal customer data involved," T-Mobile wrote in its new announcement. "This investigation will take some time but we are working with the highest degree of urgency. Until we have completed this assessment we cannot confirm the reported number of records affected or the validity of statements made by others," the announcement added.

Mastercard, writing in a blog post: In the early age of modern credit cards, they had to write down account information for each card-carrying customer by hand. Later, they used flatbed imprinting machines to record the card information on carbon paper packets, the sound of the swiping of the handle earning them the name, zip-zap machines. (They were also dubbed "knuckle-busters" by the unfortunate clerks who skinned their fingers on the embossing plate.) And how could clerks tell whether the customer was good for the purchase? They couldn't. Credit card companies would circulate a list of bad account numbers each month, and the merchant would have to compare the customers' cards against the list.

The arrival of the magnetic stripe changed all that. An early 1960s innovation largely credited to IBM, the magnetic stripe allowed banks to encode card information onto magnetic tape laminated to the back. It paved the way for electronic payment terminals and chip cards, offering more security and real-time authorization while making it easier for businesses of all sizes to accept cards. That thin stripe has remained a fixture on billions of payment cards for decades, even as technology has evolved. But now the magnetic stripe is reaching its expiration date with Mastercard becoming the first payments network to phase it out.

The shift away from the magnetic stripe points to both consumers changing habits for payments and the development of newer technologies. Today's chip cards are powered by microprocessors that are much more capable and secure, and many are also embedded with tiny antennae that enable contactless transactions. Biometric cards, which combine fingerprints with chips to verify a cardholder's identity, offer another layer of security. Based on the decline in payments powered by magnetic stripes after chip-based payments took hold, newly-issued Mastercard credit and debit cards will not be required to have a stripe starting in 2024 in most markets. By 2033, no Mastercard credit and debit cards will have magnetic stripes, which leaves a long runway for the remaining partners who still rely on the technology to phase in chip card processing.

Chet Haase, who worked at several Silicon Valley tech companies and in 2010 joined the Android engineering team at Google and watched Android rise from the bottom of the smartphone field to where it is today, writes in a new book: The final part of the pitch (and the most important part, for the VCs they were pitching to) was how Android was going to make money. The open source platform described in the slides is essentially what the Android team eventually built and shipped. But if that was all there was, the company would not have been worth funding for VCs. Developing and giving away an open source platform sounds great from a save-the-world standpoint, but where's the payoff? Where's the upside for investors? That is, how did Android plan to make money off of a product that they planned to simply give away? Venture capitalists fund companies that they hope will make more (far more) than their investment back.

The path to revenue was clear for the other platform companies in the game. Microsoft made money by licensing its platform to Windows Phone partners; every phone sold contributed a per-device cost back to Microsoft. RIM made money both on the handsets they sold as well as the lucrative service contracts that their loyal enterprise customers signed up for. Nokia and the other Symbian adopters made money by selling the phones that they manufactured with variations of that operating system. Similarly, all of the other handset manufacturers funded their own software development through the revenue generated by the phones they sold.

So what was Android's play that would fund the development of this awesome platform that they had yet to build and which they would give away free to other manufacturers to build their own devices? Carrier services.

Carriers would provide applications, contacts, and other cloud-based data services to their customers for Android-based handsets. The carriers would pay Android for providing these services. Swetland explained: "Rather than running and hosting the services [like Danger did for its Hiptop phones], we would build the services and sell them to the carriers." (In fact, the system that the team eventually built and shipped stayed true to the vision laid out in the pitch deck, except for this part about revenue from carrier services, which went away entirely.)

Alphabet's Google and Facebook announced their participation in a new subsea cable system for 2024 set to improve internet connectivity across the Asia-Pacific region. Bloomberg: Dubbed Apricot, the infrastructure project will link Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines and Indonesia and help serve growing demand for broadband access and 5G wireless connectivity, Facebook said. In March, the company announced two new transpacific subsea cables connecting Singapore to the U.S. west coast, Bifrost and Echo, with Google participating in the latter. The Echo and Apricot cables are complementary submarine systems, Google said in a blog post, and will improve the resilience of Google Cloud and the company's other digital services. The new fiber-optic link spanning the Asia-Pacific has an initial design capacity of more than 190 terabits per second, according to Facebook.

An anonymous reader shared this report from NBC News: Facebook said Tuesday that it has removed hundreds of accounts linked to a mysterious advertising agency operating out of Russia that sought to pay social media influencers to smear Covid-19 vaccines made by Pfizer and AstraZeneca. A network of 65 Facebook accounts and 243 Instagram accounts was traced back to Fazze, an advertising and marketing firm working in Russia on behalf of an unknown client.

The network used fake accounts to spread misleading claims that disparaged the safety of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines. One claimed AstraZeneca's shot would turn a person into a chimpanzee. The fake accounts targeted audiences in India, Latin America and, to a lesser extent, the U.S., using several social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram. Russia has been actively marketing its Covid-19 vaccine, Sputnik V, abroad in what some analysts see as an effort to score geopolitical points...

The Fazze network also contacted social media influencers in several countries with offers to pay them for reposting the misleading content. That ploy backfired when influencers in Germany and France exposed the network's offer....

Facebook investigators say some influencers did post the material, but later deleted it when stories about Fazze's work began to emerge.
The article also summarizes reporting from the Associated Press about the offers received by those YouTube influencers. It "urged influencers not to mention that they were being paid, and also suggested they criticize the media's reporting on vaccines."

Lamborghini's exotic Countach sportscar was featured in the opening scene of the 1981 movie Cannonball Run. On the car's 50th anniversary, they've now introduced a 802-horsepower hybrid-electric version. Mashable reports: The reimagined Countach, unveiled in Monterey, California on Friday, is the Italian carmaker's second hybrid. Its drivetrain and performance borrows heavily from the Sián supercar, which was introduced in 2019 as the famous sports car maker's first hybrid. Lamborghini's new Countach (pronounced "coon-tash") has a V12 hybrid engine and 48 volt e-motor, as also seen in the Sián. It can accelerate up to 60 mph in 2.8 seconds and has a 220 mph top speed. Unlike some hybrids, the Countach doesn't have a pure electric mode. Instead, it's always using a blend of the electric motor and gas engine.

The air vents on the back are 3D-printed and the roof is photochromic, meaning it switches from solid to transparent at the push of a button. There are also four exhaust pipes on the backside...

There will only be 112 of Lamborghini's new hybrid Countach ever made...
TechCrunch adds that "Powering the Countach's electric motor is a supercapacitor Lamborghini claims delivers three times more power compared to a lithium-ion battery of the same weight.

"The automaker says it mounted the electric motor directly to the gearbox to preserve the feeling of power transfer you get from a V12 engine."

There's something new in the world of expensive high-performance sportscars (or "hypercars".) Italian carmaker Automobili Pininfarina "has debuted the Battista, the first pure-electric hyper GT, on the streets of California as part of Monterey Car Week," reports Newsweek. (Alternate URL here.) The debut will give U.S. clients the chance to experience the 1,900 horsepower hypercar... [In a video] the Battista, crafted at Automobili Pininfarina's manufacturing facility in Italy, glides smoothly and quickly through California roads at speeds of over 100 miles per hour. The drive shows off the agility of the polished Impulso forged aluminum alloy wheels and exposed bodywork. Pulling off the road, the scissor doors swing open, highlighting the Black Exposed Signature Carbon bodywork.

Supplying the 1,900 hp is a 120-kilowatt-hour battery that powers four electric motors, one in each wheel, that gets about 1696 pound-feet of torque. On a single charge, the car is expected to get a range of over 310 miles.

With an emphasis on the company's "Pure Sound" philosophy and drawing from music theory, the bespoke design of the car is built to have a core frequency of 54 hertz (hz). Wanting to provide an emotional experience for the driver, the organic frequency will rise in multiples of 54 hz as the speed increases.
The company's product platform director of sports cars explains on their web site that "Every driver has an emotional bond with a car and the sound of Battista will nurture this connection, not by replicating a familiar car sound, but with one that radiates the beauty of Battista's design both inside and out. This way, the Battista will not only impress with its aesthetic appeal and performance, but also on a new emotional level enhanced through the sound."

The company's web site also calls it "the most powerful road-legal Italian sports car ever produced."

Google's Pixel 6 phone will be powered by a Tensor processor which PCMag UK believes is "clearly designed to accelerate machine learning and AI." But does it have bigger implications? Tensor is a signpost, not a destination. Google has never sold huge numbers of Pixel phones and isn't signaling a change in strategy there. Rather, it's saying that it would like Android as a whole to shift toward more on-device processing for AI and ML. That could give a big boost to Google's two core businesses, advertising and data. It could also create problems for the future of 5G...

The more your phone can handle its own ML and AI, the less it needs the cloud. For example, a Tensor-enabled phone could potentially analyze your photos and share data locally with on-device advertising APIs, letting Google proclaim that its cloud services never access your raw data. That would help bridge the gap between the privacy you want and the targeted ads Google needs to survive. But a lot of consumer 5G app ideas assume your phone will offload processing or rendering onto the network.

Phones that are mostly self-sufficient aren't going to need high-bandwidth, low-latency networks or "mobile edge computing." Sure, the rise of more Tensor-like ML-focused chips would take pressure off the carriers' still-shaky 5G builds, but it'll also keep raising the question of why consumers need 5G in the first place. That could reduce carriers' willingness to keep investing in their consumer 5G networks.
Although the first sence of the article's last paragraph adds, "Maybe I'm overstating the issue here..."

Mozilla has launched an experiment where they change the Firefox browser user agent to a three-digit "Firefox/100.0" version to see if it will break websites. Bleeping Computer reports: A user agent is a string used by a web browser that includes information about the software, including its name, version, and technologies that it uses. When a new version of a browser is released, the developers also increment the version number in the user agent string. When visiting a website, the user agent strings are sent to a website so that the site knows the software capabilities of the visitor. This information allows the website to modify its response to account for different features of browsers.

As Firefox version numbers are currently two digits, Mozilla developers are investigating if anything breaks when they release Firefox Nightly version 100 in March 2022. "We would like to run an experiment to test whether a UA string with a three-digit Firefox version number will break many sites," Mozilla Staff Engineering Program Manager Chris Peterson said in a bug post first spotted by Techdows. "This new temporary general.useragent.experiment.firefoxVersion pref can override the UA string's Firefox version." When conducting the test, an enrolled Firefox user will have their user agent changed to the following string with the hopes that if anything breaks, they will report it to Mozilla: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:100.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/100.0."

Reddit is the latest social media platform to roll out a TikTok-like video feed. According to TechCrunch, the discussion-based forum is "making short-form video more pronounced on its iOS app." From the report: According to Reddit, most iOS users should have a button on their app directly to the right of the search bar -- when tapped, it will show a stream of videos in a TikTok-like configuration. When presented with a video, (which shows the poster who uploaded it and the subreddit it's from), users can upvote or downvote, comment, gift an award or share it. Like TikTok, users can swipe up to see another video, feeding content from subreddits the user is subscribed to, as well as related ones. For instance, if you're subscribed to r/printmaking, you might see content from r/pottery or r/bookbinding.

The user interface of the videos isn't new -- Reddit has been experimenting with this format over the last year. But before, this manner of watching Reddit videos was only accessible by tapping on a video while scrolling through your feed -- rather than promoting discovery of other communities, the first several videos recommended would be from the same subreddit. [...] Reddit doesn't yet have a timeline for when the feature will roll out to everyone, but confirmed that this icon first appeared for some users in late July and has continued to roll out to almost all iOS users. But by placing a broader, yet still personalized video feed on the home screen, Reddit is signaling a growing curiosity in short form video.

Researchers at AlgorithmWatch say they were forced to abandon their research project monitoring the Instagram algorithm after legal threats from Facebook. From a report: The Berlin-based project went public with the conflict in a post published Friday morning, citing the platform's recent ban of the NYU Ad Observatory. "There are probably more cases of bullying that we do not know about," the post reads. "We hope that by coming forward, more organizations will speak up about their experiences."

Launched in March 2020, AlgorithmWatch provided a browser plug-in that would allow users to collect data from their Instagram feeds, providing insight into how the platform prioritizes pictures and videos. The project published findings regularly, showing that the algorithm encouraged photos that showed bare skin and that photos showing faces are ranked higher than screenshots of text. Facebook disputed the methodology but did not otherwise take action against AlgorithmWatch for the first year of the project.

House Judiciary lawmakers on Friday introduced legislation meant to boost competition in app stores by setting rules for how companies like Google and Apple control their marketplaces. From a report: The bipartisan bill is the House companion to Senate legislation introduced earlier this week, showing the appetite from both chambers of Congress to take on the app store battle. House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee ranking member Ken Buck (R-Colo.) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) say the Open App Markets Act will allow app developers to tell consumers about lower prices and open up more competition for third-party app stores and payment services.

Sonos became a favorite with audiophiles by selling sleek, wireless speakers for streaming music long before technology titans such as Alphabet''s Google entered the market with cheaper, internet-connected models. Now Sonos is hoping a U.S. trade judge finds Friday that its partner turned foe, Google, infringed its patents for multiroom audio systems. From a report: Sonos is asking U.S. International Trade Commission Judge Charles Bullock to support its bid to block imports of Google's Home and Chromecast systems and Pixel phones and laptops, which are made in China. "Google has thrown everything at us in this case, but we believe that the evidence before the ITC demonstrates Google to be a serial infringer of Sonos' valid patents and that the ITC case represents just the tip of the iceberg," Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus said in an earnings call Wednesday.

The dispute has caught the attention of regulators and Congress who are investigating whether the big Silicon Valley tech companies have become too powerful. Sonos officials urged politicians to beef up antitrust laws and enforcement against companies like Google and Amazon.com. Sonos and Google have each accused the other of bad behavior, and suits have been filed in California, Texas, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. A federal judge last year said the legal fees being incurred in the global battle "will likely have been able to build dozens of schools, pay all the teachers, and provide hot lunches to the children." Sonos is fighting over what CEO Patrick Spence says is the "Golden Age of Audio." Buoyed by consumers who buy more audiobooks, streaming music and podcasts and are looking for "theater-like" sound while watching movies from home, the focus on home sound systems is likely to survive even after the Covid-19 pandemic and work-from-home orders end.

Graphics processor company Nvidia showcased its prowess at computer animation by sneaking a virtual replica of its CEO into a keynote speech. From a report: On Wednesday, Nvidia revealed in a blog post that its CEO Jensen Huang did not do the keynote presentation at the company's GTC conference in April. At least part of it was actually led by a virtual replica of Huang, created by digitizing Huang with a truck full of DSLR cameras, and then animating him with the help of an AI, according to the company.

Huang's kitchen, which has become Nvidia's venue for speaking to customers and investors since the beginning of the pandemic, was also entirely computer generated. It's not clear exactly which part of the keynote speech features CGI Huang (which is what makes the replica so impressive), but if you jump to this part of the presentation you can see Huang magically disappear and his kitchen explode into multiple different 3D models.

A man who viewed documents online for a controversial London property development and shared them on social media was raided by police after developers claimed there had been a break-in to their systems. The Register reports: The raid by four Metropolitan Police constables took place after Southwark campaigner Robert Hutchinson was reportedly accused of illegally entering a password-protected area of a website. "I was searching in Google and found links to board meeting minutes," he told The Register. "Board reports, none of which were marked confidential. So I have no question that it was in the public domain." The Southwark News reported that Hutchinson was arrested at 8.20am on 10 June this year at home following allegations made by Leathermarket Community Benefit Society (CBS). The society is a property development firm that wants to build flats over a children's caged ball court in the south London borough, something Hutchinson "vocally opposes," according to the local paper.

"There's a directory, which you need to enter a password and a username to get into. But documents from that area were being published on Google," explained Hutchinson. "I didn't see a page saying 'this is the directors' area' or anything like that, the documents were just available. They were just linked directly." Police said in a statement that Hutchinson was arrested on suspicion of breaking section 1 of Britain's Computer Misuse Act 1990 "between the 17th and 24th February 2021 and had published documents from the website on social media." They added: "He was taken into custody and later released under investigation. Following a review of all available evidence, it was determined no offences had been committed and no further action was taken."

Hutchinson said his identification by Leathermarket and subsequent arrest raised questions in his mind, saying police confirmed to him that the company had handed over an access log containing IP addresses: "Now, how that ended up with me being in the frame, I don't know. There's part of this that doesn't add up..." While the property business did not respond to The Register's request for comment at the time of publication, in a statement given to the Southwark News it said: "When it came to the CBS's attention that confidential information had been accessed and subsequently shared via Twitter, the CBS made a general report of the data breach to the police â" who requested a full log of visitor access to the website before deciding whether or not to progress. The police carried out their own independent investigation into who accessed the documents and how, and have now concluded their investigation." The prepared police statement did not explain whether investigators tested Leathermarket CBS's version of events before arresting the campaigner.

Google has launched an interactive and 3D periodic table of chemical elements to help students learn chemistry. Somag News reports: The new functionality is being integrated into the Google Nest Hub device to encourage chemistry students, but it can now be accessed from any desktop or mobile phone via this link. As there are a multitude of periodic table models available on the internet, Google took care to make yours different, offering some extra features. In Google's interactive periodic table, in addition to searching everything that is known about any chemical element, such as atomic mass and melting point, it will be possible to observe the number of electrons in the last layer rotating around the atomic nucleus through a 3D rendering. Also on display are some trivia like "Lithium is a metal, but it's so soft it can be cut with a knife."

The periodic table is coming in a bundle of Google Assistant updates designed to make family tasks easier, including creating reminders for the Family Bell. This feature, currently only available on smart screens and speakers, will reach the screens of all Android devices in a few weeks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T says that supply-chain shortages will delay fiber construction to about 500,000 homes that it originally planned to wire up this year and warned that shortages are likely to impact other companies that purchase fiber even more. "Up through the second quarter, we hadn't really experienced any impact from the supply-chain disruptions that are happening across the industry. But since the start of the third quarter, we are seeing dislocation across the board including in fiber supply," AT&T Senior Executive VP and CFO Pascal Desroches said yesterday at a virtual conference hosted by Oppenheimer.

AT&T previously told investors to expect "3 million homes passed [with fiber] this year," Desroches said. "We're probably going to come in a little bit light, probably around 2.5 [million]." The planned deployment of 3 million locations includes all the fiber construction AT&T has completed in the first seven months of 2021. As we've written previously, AT&T is expanding its fiber builds in about 90 metro areas, with new locations primarily consisting of homes and businesses close to AT&T's existing fiber installations.

Tuesday evening, the U.S. Senate approved an amendment proposed by Cuban-American Senator Marco Rubio for the administration of President Joe Biden to provide free Internet to Cubans on the island. The Islander News reports: On a Twitter post, Senator Rubio said "Tonight the Senate unanimously passed my amendment to provide internet access to the people of #Cuba." The amendment creates a Deficit Neutral Reserve Fund (DNRF) in the next reconciliation bill that would be used to develop and deploy existing technology for the purpose of providing internet access to the island nation. Senator Rick Scott also joined Rubio in the proposal.

The amendment was passed without a recorded vote, meaning that no one opposed the plan. New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, a prominent supporter of the US-Cuba embargo, and Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, a longtime opponent of the embargo, said they supported the Rubio and Scott amendment.

Microsoft is improving some of the built-in apps available in Windows 11. From a report: Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel can now test new updates to the Snipping Tool, Calculator, Mail, and Calendar apps. Some of the updates are minor, but all are designed to match the new visual style in Windows 11. Microsoft is replacing the classic Snipping Tool and Snip & Sketch apps in Windows 11 with a new Snipping Tool app that combines the best features of both apps. The Win + Shift + S keyboard shortcut will be the main way to take a screenshot in Windows 11, and it will activate the snipping menu with various options for selecting what content to screenshot.