An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this week, I bought a month of Starz for a fraction of its typical asking price. Instead of paying $9 per month, I paid $3.24. Then I added a subscription to Spotify for $3.49, and a Disney Plus subscription for just $3. All told, my bill comes to about $10 per month for $28 worth of services. Those cut-rate subscriptions come courtesy of Together Price, a service that lets people rent out access to a share of their digital subscriptions. In exchange for a cut of each transaction, Together Price essentially serves as a marketplace for organized password sharing. The service, which started five years ago in Europe and has 80,000 paying customers, just launched in the U.S. last week.

While Together Price isn't the first service to make password sharing easier, it's definitely the most brazen. Still, CEO Marco Taddei insists that the service is legal and that it technically honors each subscription's terms of use. He also believes the service is helping companies retain users that they'd otherwise lose. "We are targeting the very specific audience that needs to share," he says. "If [subscription providers] are not going to allow them do so so, they are going to drop the subscriptions." After signing up for Together Price, you can browse a "network" of users offering to share their subscriptions. Most major streaming video and music services are available, including Netflix, Spotify, Disney Plus, HBO Max, and Hulu, but sharing isn't limited to media. Some users are also peddling subscriptions to software tools such as Canva Pro and Surfshark VPN, and the site lets you set up custom subscriptions for pretty much anything by listing the service name, price, and sharing rules. For each service, you send a request to the subscription owner and submit credit card information to Together Price. Once the owner accepts the request, Together Price processes the payment, and you're allowed into a group where you can view login details and chat with the other members.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: [Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata] along with those at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur decided to focus on developing something that is harder than conventional self-healing material, as reported by The Telegraph India. The researchers used a piezoelectric organic material, which converts mechanical energy to electrical energy and vice versa, to make needle-shaped crystals that aren't more than 2 mm long or 0.2 mm wide, according to the experimental results which were published in the journal Science. Due to their molecular arrangement in the specially designed crystals, a strong attractive force developed between two surfaces. Every time a fracture occurred, the attractive forces joined the pieces back again, without needing an external stimulus such as heat or others that most self-healing materials would need.

"Our self-healing material is 10 times harder than others, and it has a well-ordered internal crystalline structure, that is favored in most electronics and optical applications," lead researcher Professor Chilla Malla Reddy of IISER said. "I can imagine applications for an everyday device," said Bhanu Bhushan Khatua, a member of the team from IIT Kharagpur." Such materials could be used for mobile phone screens that will repair themselves if they fall and develop cracks."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: iFixit co-founder and CEO Kyle Wiens has exposed how companies including Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft manipulate the design of their products and the supply chain to prevent consumers and third-party repairers from accessing necessary tools and parts to repair products such as smartphones and laptops. Speaking during the Productivity Commission's virtual right to repair public hearing on Monday, Weins took the opportunity to draw on specific examples of how some of the largest tech companies are obstructing consumers from a right to repair.

"We've seen manufacturers restrict our ability to buy parts. There's a German battery manufacturer named Varta that sells batteries to a wide variety of companies. Samsung happens to use these batteries in their Galaxy earbuds ... but when we go to Varta and say can we buy that part as a repair part, they'll say 'No, our contract with Samsung will not allow us to sell that.' We're seeing that increasingly," he said. "Apple is notorious for doing this with the chips in their computers. There's a particular charging chip on the MacBook Pro ... there is a standard version of the part and then there's the Apple version of the part that sits very slightly tweaked, but it's tweaked enough that it's only required to work in this computer, and that company again is under contractual requirement with Apple."

He continued, highlighting that a California-based recycler was contracted by Apple to recycle spare parts that were still in new condition. "California Apple stops providing service after seven years, so this was at seven years and Apple have warehouses full of spare parts, and rather than selling that out in the marketplace -- so someone like me who eagerly would've bought them -- they were paying the recycler to destroy them," Wiens said. Weins also pointed to an example involving a Microsoft Surface laptop. "[iFixit] rated it on our repairability score, we normally rate products from one to 10; the Surface laptop got a zero. It had a glued-in battery ... we had to actually cut our way into the product and destroyed it in the process of trying to get inside," he said.

A new study argues crappy U.S. broadband is an active policy choice -- and a direct result of pathetically weak U.S. lobbying and corporate finance laws. From a report: Over the last few years big internet service providers have killed net neutrality, eliminated most FCC oversight of broadband providers, derailed efforts to pass meaningful privacy rules, and thwarted a wide variety of proposals designed to deliver faster, cheaper fiber broadband competition. A new joint study by Common Cause and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union found that the telecom industry spent $234 million on lobbying during the 116th Congress alone, or nearly $230,000 a day. Comcast was the biggest spender at more than $43 million, with AT&T not far behind at $36 million. "The powerful ISP lobby will seemingly spend whatever it takes to keep politicians beholden to them and maintain a status quo that leaves too many Americans on the wrong side of the digital divide," the groups said.

It's a game that encourages people to 'get a life' -- build a house, make a Sim and fulfil their dreams. So why are so many players intent on murder? From a report: The Sims has far evolved from its humble beginnings in 2000, where you created characters and tended to their needs, like a slightly more demanding Tamagotchi. As the games became more advanced, The Sims provided opportunities for the lives of your characters to more closely mirror reality: they now have lifetime goals and desires, can feel disappointment and joy, and now even do their own laundry. But whether they live a rich and fulfilling life, or an existence defined by endless suffering, the Sims' destiny is entirely in your hands. Of course many players choose not to be benevolent Gods in the Sims world -- and instead aim to kill and torture as many Sims as possible. Death has hugely evolved over 21 years of gameplay; we're no longer just sticking Sims in a swimming pool and selling a ladder to watch them drown. Instead, we're watching them explode in rocket ships, choke on pufferfish or even be eaten by the 'Cowplant' -- a mutant Venus flytrap with a cow head for a face.

"The Sims see you controlling a little society, but that doesn't mean you're making it better. It reminds me of Bruce Almighty, where the role of God is handed over but that doesn't necessarily mean that's strictly a good thing. It's rather therapeutic just killing Sims, and being quite an irresponsible God," 26-year-old Dubliner RTGame (real name Daniel), who has 2.6 million subscribers on YouTube says. "I feel like a kid with a magnifying glass on the small ants. It sounds quite twisted but it's quite fun to do things like that in games like The Sims to see what happens. But yes, I do have a lot of Sims blood on my hands." He's far from alone. While many in the Sims streaming community focus their content on cutesy legacy-style playthroughs or intricate design challenges, there's an increasing interest in more boundary-pushing content. RTGame credits the popularity of his bizarre Sims series for helping him jump into streaming as a full-time career, while other YouTubers such as CallMeKevin and Plumbella count speed runs where they kill entire neighbourhoods among some of their most viewed content.

OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team after years of research into machines that can learn to perform tasks like solving a Rubik's Cube. Company cofounder Wojciech Zaremba quietly revealed on a podcast hosted by startup Weights & Biases that OpenAI has shifted its focus to other domains, where data is more readily available. From a report: "So it turns out that we can make a gigantic progress whenever we have access to data. And I kept all of our machinery unsupervised, [using] reinforcement learning -- [it] work[s] extremely well. There [are] actually plenty of domains that are very, very rich with data. And ultimately that was holding us back in terms of robotics," Zaremba said. "The decision [to disband the robotics team] was quite hard for me. But I got the realization some time ago that actually, that's for the best from the perspective of the company."

In a statement, an OpenAI spokesperson told VentureBeat: "After advancing the state of the art in reinforcement learning through our Rubik's Cube project and other initiatives, last October we decided not to pursue further robotics research and instead refocus the team on other projects. Because of the rapid progress in AI and its capabilities, we've found that other approaches, such as reinforcement learning with human feedback, lead to faster progress in our reinforcement learning research."

President Joe Biden walked back some of his criticism of Facebook, saying Monday he meant to accuse a dozen users, but not the social media platform itself, of spreading deadly lies about Covid vaccines. From a report: "Facebook isn't killing people," Biden said. Biden added that he hopes Facebook will do more to fight "the outrageous misinformation" about coronavirus vaccines being spread on its platform "instead of taking it personally that somehow I'm saying Facebook is killing people." Last week, Biden appeared to say just that: Asked outside the White House what his message was to platforms like Facebook regarding Covid disinformation, Biden said, "They're killing people. I mean they really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that's -- they're killing people," Biden said Friday.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has shut down infrastructure and accounts linked to Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group, Amazon said in a statement. From a report: The move comes as a group of media outlets and activist organizations published new research into NSO's malware and phone numbers potentially selected for targeting by NSO's government clients. "When we learned of this activity, we acted quickly to shut down the relevant infrastructure and accounts," an AWS spokesperson told Motherboard in an email.

Earlier this year, Rockstar's parent company Take-Two Interactive played takedown whack-a-mole with reverse-engineered versions of Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City. The publisher has apparently gone further in the last week or so, issuing DMCA takedown notices for GTA 5 map mods like Vice City Overhaul, as well as multiple popular mods for earlier games in the series. From a report: GTA: Liberty City was a total conversion that brought the setting of GTA 3 into Vice City's engine, and was first released in 2005. It's no longer available on ModDB. Vice Cry, which replaced Vice City's textures and models with higher-resolution versions, is also gone. So is GTA: Underground, which combined the maps of not just GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas, but those of other Rockstar games Bully, Manhunt, and Manhunt 2, then added gang warfare. So are the mods converting San Andreas into ports of console-exclusives Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories. And that's not all.

A thread on GTAForums has been cataloguing the removals, as well as noting that Rockstar's statement on singleplayer mods, initially made during the back-and-forth over modding tool OpenIV in 2017, and which many modders have been assuming would protect their work, was quietly updated in 2019. It now notes that it does not apply to either the "use or importation of other IP (including other Rockstar IP) in the project" or "making new games, stories, missions, or maps". Neither of those clauses was in the original version of Rockstar's statement, which has been excluded from the Wayback Machine, but can still be read in our news story from the time.

Cellphones "can be transformed into surveillance devices," writes the Guardian, reporting startling new details about which innocent people are still being surveilled (as part of a collaborative reporting project with 16 other media outlets led by the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories).

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen shared the newspaper's critique of a "privatised government surveillance industry" that's made NSO a billion-dollar company, thanks to its phone-penetrating spy software Pegaus: [NSO] insists only carefully vetted government intelligence and law enforcement agencies can use Pegasus, and only to penetrate the phones of "legitimate criminal or terror group targets". Yet in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a massive leak of data... The presence of their names on this list indicates the lengths to which governments may go to spy on critics, rivals and opponents.

First we reveal how journalists across the world were selected as potential targets by these clients prior to a possible hack using NSO surveillance tools. Over the coming week we will be revealing the identities of more people whose phone numbers appear in the leak. They include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state. Our reporting is rooted in the public interest. We believe the public should know that NSO's technology is being abused by the governments who license and operate its spyware.

But we also believe it is in the public interest to reveal how governments look to spy on their citizens and how seemingly benign processes such as HLR lookups [which track the general locations of cellphone users] can be exploited in this environment.

It is not possible to know without forensic analysis whether the phone of someone whose number appears in the data was actually targeted by a government or whether it was successfully hacked with NSO's spyware. But when our technical partner, Amnesty International's Security Lab, conducted forensic analysis on dozens of iPhones that belonged to potential targets at the time they were selected, they found evidence of Pegasus activity in more than half.
The investigators say that potential targets included nearly 200 journalists around the world, including numerous reporters from CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde in France, and even the editor of the Financial Times.

In addition, the investigators say they found evidence the Pegasus software had been installed on the phone of the fiancée of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. NSO denies this to the Washington Post. But they also insist that they're simply licensing their software to clients, and their company "has no insight" into those clients' specific intelligence activities.

The Washington Post reports that Amnesty's Security Lab found evidence of Pegasus attacks on 37 of 67 smartphones from the list which they tested. But beyond that "for the remaining 30, the tests were inconclusive, in several cases because the phones had been replaced. Fifteen of the phones were Android devices, none of which showed evidence of successful infection. However, unlike iPhones, Androids do not log the kinds of information required for Amnesty's detective work."

Familiar privacy measures like strong passwords and encryption offer little help against Pegasus, which can attack phones without any warning to users. It can read anything on a device that a user can, while also stealing photos, recordings, location records, communications, passwords, call logs and social media posts. Spyware also can activate cameras and microphones for real-time surveillance.

"A new production problem has surfaced with Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, further delaying deliveries of the popular wide-body jets..." writes the Wall Street Journal.

Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace shares their report: Boeing halted handing over Dreamliners to airlines in late May, after federal air-safety regulators declined to approve the plane maker's proposed method of inspecting the jets for previously disclosed production defects. It was the second such pause in the past year...

The Federal Aviation Administration said the newly discovered quality issue posed no immediate safety threat. While the agency will determine whether to require modifications to 787s already in service, the FAA said: "Boeing has committed to fix these airplanes before resuming deliveries..."

The new problem surfaced on part of the aircraft known as the forward pressure bulkhead at the front of the plane, people familiar with the matter said. It involves the skin of the aircraft and is similar to a previously disclosed Dreamliner issue found elsewhere on the planes, one of these people said. It surfaced as part of the FAA's review of Boeing's quality checks on newly produced undelivered planes, this person said. The delivery pause has been another setback for the aerospace giant, which has been grappling with various problems in its commercial, defense and space programs in recent years. It is also choking off a key source of cash as Boeing tries to overcome twin crises that resulted from two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX aircraft in late 2018 and early 2019, and the Covid-19 pandemic's hit to aircraft demand.

The new problem hasn't raised any immediate safety concerns, but engineers at Boeing and the FAA are trying to understand the defect's potential to cause premature fatigue on a key part of the aircraft's structure, people familiar with the matter said.

"Cuban officials rallied tens of thousands of supporters in the streets on Saturday — nearly a week after they were stunned by the most widespread protests in decades," the Associated Press reports.

President Miguel Díaz-Canel — accompanied by 90-year-old former President Raul Castro — "made an impassioned speech blaming unrest on the U.S. and its economic embargo, 'the blockade, aggression and terror... The enemy has returned to throw all it has at destroying the sacred unity and tranquility of the citizens.'" "I think the government is just trying to signal to people that it understands their desperation and that it's going to try to alleviate some of the misery that they're experiencing. The problem is that the government just doesn't have much in the way of resources that it can devote to doing that," said William LeoGrande, an expert on Cuba at the American University in the United States.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports: Psiphon Inc's freely available internet censorship circumvention tool has helped nearly 1.4 million Cubans this week gain access to websites, the company said on Friday, after Cuba's government curbed access to popular social media and messaging platforms... Thousands of Cubans joined nationwide protests over shortages of basic goods, limits on civil liberties and the government's handling of a surge in COVID-19 infections on Sunday, the most significant unrest in decades in the communist-run country.

Psiphon said 1.389 million users accessed the open web from Cuba through its network on Thursday, as well as 1.238 million as noon EDT (1600 GMT) on Friday.

"Internet is ON; circumvention tools ARE working," Psiphon said in a statement.

Psiphon said the roughly 1.4 million represents about 20% of Cuban internet users. Its open source circumvention tool can be downloaded from app stores like Google Play or Apple to "maximize your chances of bypassing censorship," according to the company. Canadian university researchers developed the software in 2007 to let users evade governmental internet firewalls.
The censorship-circumvention tool — which combines VPN, SSH, and HTTP Proxy tools — has also been used in Iran, China, Belarus, Myanmar, according to recent news reports. Bloomberg notes that the Toronto-based nonprofit Psiphon "has received funding from the Open Technology Fund, a U.S. government nonprofit that aims to support global internet freedom technologies...

"On Thursday, President Biden said the U.S. is examining whether it's able to restore internet access shut down by the Cuban government."

America detonated the world's first nuclear device in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

On its 76th anniversary, U.S. president Biden issued a proclamation: Many brave men and women have risked their lives in service to our Nation, but few know the story of our "Atomic Veterans" — American military service members who participated in nuclear tests between 1945 and 1962, served with United States military forces in or around Hiroshima and Nagasaki through mid-1946, or were held as prisoners of war in or near Hiroshima or Nagasaki. These veterans served at testing sites like the Bikini Atoll and witnessed the destructive power of nuclear weapons firsthand.

On National Atomic Veterans Day, we recognize and honor the contributions of America's Atomic Veterans for their sacrifice and dedication to our Nation's security, and recommit to supporting our Atomic Veterans and educating ourselves on the role these patriots played in our national story.

Atomic Veterans served our Nation with distinction, but their service came at a great cost. Many developed health conditions due to radiation exposure, yet because they were not able to discuss the nature of their service, they were unable to seek medical care or disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs for their illnesses. Decades later in 1996, the United States Congress repealed the Nuclear Radiation and Secrecy Agreements Act, allowing Atomic Veterans to tell their stories and file for benefits. By then, thousands of Atomic Veterans had died without their families knowing the true extent of their service.

Our Nation has one truly sacred obligation: to properly prepare and equip our troops when we send them into harm's way, and to care for them and their families when they return from service. As Commander in Chief, I am committed to fulfilling our obligation to the Atomic Veterans and their families, and ensuring that all of our Nation's veterans have timely access to needed services, medical care, and benefits. On this National Atomic Veterans Day, our country remembers the service and sacrifices of Atomic Veterans. Their heroism and patriotism will never be forgotten and we always honor their bravery and devotion to duty.
July 16, 2021 was named "National Atomic Veterans Day."

The proclamation ended with a call on all Americans "to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities that honor our Nation's Atomic Veterans whose brave service and sacrifice played an important role in the defense of our Nation."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The White House escalated its fight against vaccine misinformation on Friday, with President Biden directly criticizing Facebook and other platforms for allowing vaccine misinformation to spread -- and consequently raising the ongoing death toll from the deadly pandemic. Asked for a message to platforms like Facebook, Biden replied, "They're killing people ... the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and they're killing people." The White House did not immediately respond to a request for clarification of the president's comments. The full exchange is embedded [here]. "We will not be distracted by accusations which aren't supported by the facts," said a Facebook spokesperson. "The fact is that more than 2 billion people have viewed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines on Facebook, which is more than any other place on the internet. More than 3.3 million Americans have also used our vaccine finder tool to find out where and how to get a vaccine."

"The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives," the spokesperson continued. "Period."

Virginia will use $700 million in American Rescue Plan funding to expedite broadband buildouts in underserved communities throughout the state, Governor Ralph Northam announced on Friday. Virginia is only one of the states across the country that plans to use that money to build faster internet infrastructure. Engadget reports: With the investment, Virginia says it's on track to become one of the first states in the US to achieve universal broadband access. An estimated 233,500 homes and businesses throughout the Commonwealth fall under what the Federal Communications Commission would consider an underserved location. They don't have an internet connection that can achieve download speeds of 25Mbps down. The state estimates the additional funding will allow it to connect those places to faster internet by the end of 2024, instead of 2028, as previously planned. What's more, the "majority" of those connections will be completed within the next 18 months.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Physicists at Google have taken an important step toward protecting delicate information in their nascent quantum computer from errors that can obliterate it. The researchers can't yet compensate for all types of errors -- a necessary step toward building a full-fledged quantum computer -- but others say they're poised to achieve that goal. Working with chains of up to 11 data qubits, Google researchers have now been able to preserve a logical qubit for a time that increases exponentially with the number of physical qubits, they report today in Nature. By spreading a single qubit's state over up to 11 data qubits, they reduced the chances of an error after 50 microseconds from 40% to 0.2%. Other groups have demonstrated similar error corrections schemes, but the new work is the first to demonstrate the exponential suppression of errors, says Julian Kelly, a physicist at Google and senior author on the paper. Such exponential suppression suggests developers may eventually be able to maintain a logical qubit indefinitely by spreading it over about 1000 physical qubits.

Hikers looking to summit Scotland's highest mountain and other peaks in the area are being sent up "potentially fatal" routes by Google Maps, the region's mountaineering organizations have warned. CNN reports: The John Muir Trust said Thursday that growing numbers of people using Google Maps to navigate up Ben Nevis risk being directed via a route that is "highly dangerous, even for experienced climbers." Ben Nevis, a popular tourist destination, is the highest mountain in the British Isles, standing at 1,345 meters (4,413 feet). Although thousands summit it annually, climbing the peak is not without risks and deaths have been recorded on the mountain as recently as this year. "The problem is that Google Maps directs some visitors to the Upper Falls car park, presumably because it is the closest car park to the summit," John Muir Trust's Nevis Conservation Officer Nathan Berrie said in a statement. "But this is NOT the correct route and we often come across groups of inexperienced walkers heading towards Steall Falls or up the south slopes of Ben Nevis believing it is the route to the summit," Berrie added. Mountaineering Scotland also warned that a route suggested by Google Maps was "potentially fatal."

"For those new to hill walking, it would seem perfectly logical to check out Google Maps for information on how to get to your chosen mountain," Heather Morning, Mountaineering Scotland's mountain safety adviser explained in a statement. "But when you input Ben Nevis and click on the 'car' icon, up pops a map of your route, taking you to the car park at the head of Glen Nevis, followed by a dotted line appearing to show a route to the summit." Morning said that "even the most experienced mountaineer would have difficulty following this route. The line goes through very steep, rocky, and pathless terrain where even in good visibility it would be challenging to find a safe line. Add in low cloud and rain and the suggested Google line is potentially fatal." She also added that Google Maps suggested other routes which would direct users towards "life threatening terrain" when they sought to navigate the country's other high peaks, including the 1,062-meter An Teallach. "For An Teallach in the northwest, a 'walking' route was input into the search engine and the line offered would take people over a cliff," she warned. A spokesperson for Google said the company was looking into the complaints. "We built Google Maps with safety and reliability in mind, and are working quickly to investigate the routing issue on Ben Nevis and surrounding areas," the spokesperson said in an email. "In addition to using authoritative data and high definition imagery to update the map, we encourage local organizations to provide geographic information about roads and routes through our Geo Data Upload tool."

UPDATE (7/11): The BBC reports Google has in fact changed their Ben Nevis route "after fears that walkers may mistakenly attempt a 'potentially fatal' route..." The firm insisted its walking directions on Google Maps did not direct people to dangerous routes. However, its driving directions took people to a car park where a dotted line showing distance to the summit could be misinterpreted by users.

In future the maps will direct drivers to a visitor centre instead.

We're in for an information revolution.Engineers in Japan just shattered the world record for the fastest internet speed, achieving a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s), according to a paper presented at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications in June. From a report: The new record was made on a line of fibers more than 1,864 miles (3,000 km) long. And, crucially, it is compatible with modern-day cable infrastructure. This could literally change everything.

Note well: we can't stress enough how fast this transmission speed is. It's nearly double the previous record of 178 Tb/s, which was set in 2020. And it's seven times the speed of the earlier record of 44.2 Tb/s, set with an experimental photonic chip. NASA itself uses a comparatively primitive speed of 400 Gb/s, and the new record soars impossibly high above what ordinary consumers can use (the fastest of which maxes out at 10 Gb/s for home internet connections).

Areyoukiddingme shares a report from The Drive: Atotal of 46 F-35 stealth fighters are currently without functioning engines due to an ongoing problem with the heat-protective coating on their turbine rotor blades becoming worn out faster than was expected. With the engine maintenance center now facing a backlog on repair work, frontline F-35 fleets have been hit, with the U.S. Air Force's fleet facing the most significant availability shortfall. At a hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Armed Services' Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces yesterday, Air Force Lieutenant General Eric T. Fick, director of the F-35 Joint Program Office, confirmed that 41 U.S. Air Force F-35s, as well as one Joint Strike Fighter belonging to the U.S. Marine Corps, another from the U.S. Navy, and three that had been delivered to foreign air forces were grounded without engines. Those figures were as of July 8. The exact breakdown of how many of each F-35 variant lack engines is unclear. The Air Force and the Navy only fly the F-35A and F-35C, respectively, but the Marines operate both F-35Bs and F-35Cs and various models are in service with other military forces around the world. With regards to the Air Force specifically, as of May 8 this year, the service had received 283 F-35As, which means that around a little under 15 percent of the service's Joint Strike Fighters can't be flown due to this engine shortage.

A Facebook engineer abused employee access to user data to track down a woman who had left him after they fought, a new book said. Business Insider reports: Between January 2014 and August 2015, the company fired 52 employees over exploiting user data for personal means, said an advance copy of "An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination" that Insider obtained. The engineer, who is unnamed, tapped into the data to "confront" a woman with whom he had been vacationing in Europe after she left the hotel room they had been sharing, the book said. He was able to figure out her location at a different hotel.

Another Facebook engineer used his employee access to dig up information on a woman with whom he had gone on a date after she stopped responding to his messages. In the company's systems, he had access to "years of private conversations with friends over Facebook messenger, events attended, photographs uploaded (including those she had deleted), and posts she had commented or clicked on," the book said. Through the Facebook app the woman had installed on her phone, the book said, the engineer was also able to see her location in real time. Facebook employees were granted user data access in order to "cut away the red tape that slowed down engineers," the book said.

"There was nothing but the goodwill of the employees themselves to stop them from abusing their access to users' private information," wrote Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, the book's authors. They added that most of the employees who abused their employee privileges to access user data only looked up information, although a few didn't stop there. Most of the engineers who took advantage of access to user data were "men who looked up the Facebook profiles of women they were interested in," the book said. Facebook told Insider it fired employees found to have accessed user data for nonbusiness purposes.