The same technology that powers Google Duplex to call businesses and make appointments for you is being used to help you automatically change your password to a website that's been compromised in a security breach. TechCrunch reports: This new feature will start to roll out slowly to Chrome users on Android in the U.S. soon (with other countries following later), assuming they use Chrome's password-syncing feature. It's worth noting that this won't work for every site just yet. As a Google spokesperson told us, "the feature will initially work on a small number of apps and websites, including Twitter, but will expand to additional sites in the future."

Today, Google and Samsung announced that they are merging Wear OS and Tizen in an effort to better compete against Apple's watchOS. "The resulting platform is currently being referred to simply as 'Wear,' though that might not be the final name," notes The Verge. From the report: Benefits of the joint effort include significant improvements to battery life, 30 percent faster loading times for apps, and smoother animations. It also simplifies life for developers and will create one central smartwatch OS for the Android platform. Google is also promising a greater selection of apps and watch faces than ever before. "All device makers will be able to add a customized user experience on top of the platform, and developers will be able to use the Android tools they already know and love to build for one platform and ecosystem," Google's Bjorn Kilburn wrote in a blog post.

Wired has more details on what's to come, including the tidbit that Samsung will stick with its popular rotating bezel on future devices -- but it's finished making Tizen-only smartwatches. There will also be a version of Google Maps that works standalone (meaning without your phone nearby) and a YouTube Music app that supports offline downloads. Oh, and Spotify will support offline downloads on Wear smartwatches, as well. Samsung confirmed that its next Galaxy Watch will run on this unified platform. And future "premium" Fitbit devices will also run the software.

An anonymous reader writes: NBN Co has been forced to replace 10,000 faulty broadband devices in homes across the Blue Mountains west of Sydney after residents reported the technology was frequently struck by lightning and in one instance led to blue sparks flying out of a modem in a family's home. About 20,000 of the more than 32,000 homes in the Blue Mountains and Emu Plains have been connected to the national broadband network via fibre-to-the-curb (FttC) technology, which was set up under the Coalition government's multi-technology mixed model. That means fibre runs all the way to the edge of the property and connects to the home via the existing copper wire lead-ins from the curb.

Electrical storms in the Blue Mountains have wreaked havoc on the boxes that link the fibre to the copper. When lightning strikes the distribution boxes outside the house, sparks are sent flying up the copper lines, in turn frying the modems in people's homes. Guardian Australia understands the company has replaced 10,000 -- or half -- of devices inside the home that the company has identified as being prone to be affected by lightning. A spokesman for NBN Co confirmed that the company had found issues with the devices in areas of hard ground like sandstone. Sandstone is more resistant to electrical conduction than other soft earths. He said the devices fail in a safe way but the company nevertheless is issuing replacement devices people can install themselves. "We are now deploying a strengthened [device] that is much less likely to fail in these conditions.

During a visit to Ford's Rouge factory in Dearborn, Michigan on Tuesday, President Joe Biden got a chance to test drive Ford's all-electric new Lightning pickup truck. CNET reports: What was the presidential verdict after taking the Lightning for a spin? "This sucker's quick!" he exclaimed, adding that he'd buy one. A reporter asked how quick it was, and Biden said it did 0-60 mph in 4.3 or 4.4 seconds, looking to a Ford employee for clarification, who quickly declined to comment. The president then did a hard launch from a stop right in front of the press pool, accelerating to 80 mph. The Ford F-150 Lightning is officially set to debut on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. PT (9:30 p.m. ET).

At Google I/O 2021 today, Google confirmed that Android 12 is getting a huge new design. Ars Technica reports: Google calls the new design "Material You," and just like in the leaks, it's a UI that changes colors like a chameleon. For now, this design will only show up in Google Pixels, but Google says it will roll out across the ecosystem to the web, Chrome OS, smart displays, cars, watches, tablets, and every other Google form factor. The new interface is powered by a "color extraction" API that can pull the colors out of your wallpaper and apply them to the UI. This sounds exactly like the Palette API that was introduced in Android 5.0 (along with the original introduction of Material Design), but it's apparently a second swing at the color extraction idea, and Google is heavily using it in the UI now. The demo interfaces featured customized highlight colors, clock faces, widget backgrounds, and more, all matching the color of your wallpaper. Besides new colors, there are also tons of layout changes to the quick settings and notification panel. The first public beta of Android is now available. Google Pixel smartphones as far back as the Pixel 3 are eligible, as well as several devices from device-maker partners, including ASUS and OnePlus.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: DarkSide, the hacker group behind the recent Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, received a total of $90 million in bitcoin ransom payments before shutting down last week, according to new research. Colonial Pipeline was hit with a devastating cyberattack earlier this month that forced the company to shut down approximately 5,500 miles of pipeline in the United States, crippling gas delivery systems in Southeastern states. The FBI blamed the attack on DarkSide, a cybercriminal gang believed to be based in Eastern Europe, and Colonial reportedly paid a $5 million ransom to the group.

On Friday, London-based blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said it had identified the bitcoin wallet used by DarkSide to collect ransom payments from its victims. The same day, security researchers Intel 471 said DarkSide had closed down after losing access to its servers and as its cryptocurrency wallets were emptied. DarkSide also blamed "pressure from the U.S.," according to a note obtained by Intel 471. In a blog post Tuesday, Elliptic said DarkSide and its affiliates bagged at least $90 million in bitcoin ransom payments over the past nine months from 47 victims. The average payment from organizations was likely $1.9 million, Elliptic said. "To our knowledge, this analysis includes all payments made to DarkSide, however further transactions may yet be uncovered, and the figures here should be considered a lower bound," said Tom Robinson Elliptic's co-founder and chief scientist.

According to Elliptic, $15.5 million of the $90 million total haul went to DarkSide's developer while $74.7 million went to its affiliates. The majority of the funds are being sent to crypto exchanges, where they can be converted into fiat money, Elliptic added.

Ever wish you could delete the last thing you searched for on Google? Now Google will let you. From a report: Google announced the new feature Tuesday during its I/O software conference, part of a package of privacy controls the Alphabet company is pushing out to appease consumers and regulators. Users now can tap on a tab inside their Google accounts to remove the last fifteen minutes of search history. The company has offered a feature to clear search histories, but people have found that data useful for tools like Maps or been unaware of the ability to delete it. The new ways to give people more privacy controls come after years of scrutiny on the search giant's behavior. "We never sell your personal information to anyone," Jen Fitzpatrick, a Google senior vice president, said at the virtual event. "It's simply off limits."

Microsoft today acknowledged that the company isn't going to release its Windows 10X operating system variant, as reported more than a week ago. Mary Jo Foley, writing at ZDNet: Don't be surprised if you missed the acknowledgement, as Microsoft buried it in its blog post about the rollout of the Windows 10 21H1 feature update -- which it published at the start of the Google I/O keynote. Toward the end of the post, under the "Our customer first focus" subheading, officials said Windows 10X wouldn't be coming to market in 2021, after all. Instead, Microsoft will be integrating some of the 10X "foundational" technologies into other parts of Windows and other products. Windows 10X was supposed to be Microsoft's answer to Chrome OS -- a simpler Windows 10 variant that was slated to debut first on PCs for education and the first line-worker market.

Google on Tuesday unveiled a prototype machine for face-to-face meetings named Project Starline. From a report: The phrase "video booth" really is the simplest way to describe Starline in its current form: It's a large booth, like the kind you'd find in a diner, just way more technologically complex. I had the chance to test-drive it in early May. After an initial conversation with Bavor outside of Google's campus in Mountain View, California, I was led inside the almost empty building and escorted to a private office. There was the Starline booth, part wood-paneled and partly encased in gray fabric, with a built-in bench on one side and a 65-inch display on the other. I was instructed to sit opposite the display. There were lights, cameras, and not a whole lot of action until a product manager sat down across from me. From a very specific angle, he looked as though he was sitting across from me. But he was on a different floor of the building, piping into our meeting through Starline.

This is Google's idea for the future of videoconferencing, a giddy vision that only a small group of Googlers have had access to, and one that has apparently gotten a thumbs-up from chief executive Sundar Pichai. You couldn't be blamed for thinking that Starline must have been developed during the pandemic, while desk workers were umm-ing and muting and unmuting their way through an endless stream of Meets and Zooms. But Clay Bavor, Googler who heads up the company's augmented- and virtual-reality efforts, says there wasn't really any aha moment that led to Project Starline. In fact, it's been in the works for over five years. [...] The imagery is remarkable, and the visuals are complemented by spatial audio. What I'm actually looking at is a 65-inch light field display. The Project Starline booths are equipped with more than a dozen different depth sensors and cameras. (Google is cagey when I ask for specifics on the equipment.) These sensors capture photorealistic, three-dimensional imagery; the system then compresses and transmits the data to each light field display, on both ends of the video conversation, with seemingly little latency. Google applies some of its own special effects, adjusting lighting and shadows. The result is hyper-real representations of your colleagues on video calls.

There are over 3 billion active Android devices in the wild now. Sameer Samat, VP of product management at Google, announced the news at Google I/O 2021 today. From a report: Google added over 500 million active Android devices since its last developer's conference in 2019 and 1 billion devices since 2017. (That was when it hit the 2 billion mark.) The number is taken from the Google Play Store, which doesn't take into account devices based on Android but that use alternative stores, including Amazon Fire devices and the myriad of Chinese Android-based devices that avoid using Google's apps altogether. That means the number of active Android devices is likely much higher than what Samat announced on the live stream.

Google announced a new feature for its Chrome browser today that alerts you when one of your passwords has been compromised and then helps you automatically change your password with the help of... wait for it ... Google's Duplex technology. From a report: This new feature will start to roll out slowly to Chrome users on Android in the U.S. soon (with other countries following later), assuming they use Chrome's password-syncing feature. It's worth noting that this won't work for every site just yet. As a Google spokesperson told us, "the feature will initially work on a small number of apps and websites, including Twitter, but will expand to additional sites in the future."

Now you may remember Duplex as the somewhat controversial service that can call businesses for you to make hairdresser appointments or check opening times. Google introduced Duplex at its 2018 I/O developer conference and launched it to a wider audience in 2019. Since then, the team has chipped away at bringing Duplex to more tasks and brought it the web, too. Now it's coming to Chrome to change your compromised passwords for you.

Parler, a social media app popular with U.S. conservatives, returned to Apple's App Store on Monday, after the iPhone maker dropped it following the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. From a report: Parler also named George Farmer, the company's chief operating officer since March, as its new chief executive and said interim CEO Mark Meckler would be leaving. Apple said last month it would readmit Parler into its iOS App Store, after Parler proposed updates to its app and content moderation policies. read more "The entire Parler team has worked hard to address Apple's concerns without compromising our core mission," said Meckler in an emailed statement.

"Anything allowed on the Parler network but not in the iOS app will remain accessible through our web-based and Android versions. This is a win-win for Parler, its users, and free speech." The Washington Post said Parler's Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff likened the iOS version of the app to a "Parler Lite or Parler PG." Parler is still pushing Apple to allow users to see hate speech behind a warning label, the newspaper reported. Several tech companies cut ties with Parler after the Capitol riot, accusing the app backed by prominent Republican Party donor Rebekah Mercer of failing to police violent content on its service.

A tech columnist for Inc. noticed that on June 8th Amazon will finally power up its massive "Sidewalk" mesh network (which uses Bluetooth and 900MHz radio signals to communicate between devices). And millions and millions of Amazon customers are all already "opted in" by default: The idea behind it is actually really smart — make it possible for smart home devices to serve as a sort of bridge between your WiFi connection and one another. That way, if your Ring doorbell, for example, isn't located close to your WiFi router, but it happens to be near an Echo Dot, it can use Sidewalk to stay connected.

The same is true if your internet connection is down. Your smart devices can connect to other smart devices, even if they aren't in your home. The big news on this front is that Tile is joining the Sidewalk network on June 14. That means that if you lose a Tile tracker, it can connect to any of the millions of Echo or Ring devices in your neighborhood and send its location back to you.

That's definitely a nice benefit, but it's also where things get a little murky from a privacy standpoint. That's because other people's devices, like your neighbor's, can also connect to your network. Amazon is pretty clear that Sidewalk uses three layers of encryption so that no data is shared between say, someone's Tile tracker and your network. The signal from the Tile is encrypted all the way back to the Tile app on your iPhone or Android smartphone... [But] whether or not you want your device connecting to other devices, or want your neighbors connecting to your WiFi, Amazon went ahead and made Sidewalk opt-out.
Opt out (for all your devices) using Alexa app's More tab (at the bottom): Settings > Account Settings > Amazon Sidewalk > Enabled.

"Chinese technology provider Huawei was recently accused of being able to monitor all calls made using Dutch mobile operator KPN," writes the Conversation. Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares their report: The revelations are from a secret 2010 report made by consultancy firm Capgemini, which KPN commissioned to evaluate the risks of working with Huawei infrastructure. While the full report on the issue has not been made public, journalists reporting on the story have outlined specific concerns that Huawei personnel in the Netherlands and China had access to security-essential parts of KPN's network - including the call data of millions of Dutch citizens - and that a lack of records meant KPN couldn't establish how often this happened... KPN essentially granted Huawei "administrator rights" to its mobile network by outsourcing work to the Chinese firm.

Legislation is only now catching up to prevent similar vulnerabilities in telecoms security...

Lower revenues force operators to carefully manage costs. This means that operators have been keen to outsource parts of their businesses to third parties, especially since the late 2000s. Large numbers of highly skilled engineers are an expensive liability to have on the balance sheet, and can often appear underused when things are running smoothly... , outsourcing by mobile operators is widespread. And firms in the UK and across Europe have often turned to Huawei to provide IT services and to help build core networks.

In 2010, Huawei was managing security-critical functions of KPN's core network.

Long-time Slashdot reader jhylkema writes: Just 12 people account for the lion's share of anti-vaccination propaganda posted to three of the leading social media outlets, according to a study from a London-based group opposed to online hate and disinformation. A study (PDF file) conducted by the Centre for the Countering of Digital Hate identified the "Disinformation Dozen" people, including RFK Jr., Joseph Mercola, and Sherri Tenpenny... In its study, the group blasts the social media companies for allowing their platforms to be abused and calls for them to be de-platformed.

"Living in full view of the public on the internet are a small group of individuals who... are abusing social media platforms to misrepresent the threat of Covid and spread misinformation about the safety of vaccines," the study said in its introduction. "Facebook, Google and Twitter have put policies into place to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation; yet to date, all have failed to satisfactorily enforce those policies."
Some misinformation spreaders complain they're being censored, NPR reports, adding that "After this story published on Thursday, Facebook said it had taken down more of the accounts run by these 12 individuals."

But the study concludes anti-vaccine misinformation has already spread to an audience of 59 million followers. And yet "Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen...

"Analysis of anti-vaccine content posted to Facebook over 689,000 times in the last two months shows that up to 73 percent of that content originates with members of the Disinformation Dozen of leading online anti-vaxxers."

The New York Times reports on misinformation that's further inflaming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: In a 28-second video, which was posted to Twitter this week by a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip appeared to launch rocket attacks at Israelis from densely populated civilian areas.

At least that is what Mr. Netanyahu's spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, said the video portrayed. But his tweet with the footage, which was shared hundreds of times as the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis escalated, was not from Gaza. It was not even from this week. Instead, the video that he shared, which can be found on many YouTube channels and other video-hosting sites, was from 2018. And according to captions on older versions of the video, it showed militants firing rockets not from Gaza but from Syria or Libya.

The video was just one piece of misinformation that has circulated on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media this week about the rising violence between Israelis and Palestinians, as Israeli military ground forces attacked Gaza early on Friday. The false information has included videos, photos and clips of text purported to be from government officials in the region, with posts baselessly claiming early this week that Israeli soldiers had invaded Gaza, or that Palestinian mobs were about to rampage through sleepy Israeli suburbs. The lies have been amplified as they have been shared thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook, spreading to WhatsApp and Telegram groups that have thousands of members, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

The effect of the misinformation is potentially deadly, disinformation experts said, inflaming tensions between Israelis and Palestinians when suspicions and distrust have already run high.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Cloudflare is testing out the possibility of security keys replacing one of the most irritating aspects of web browsing: the CAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs are used to catch out bots that are trawling websites and are often implemented to prevent online services from being abused. "CAPTCHAs are effectively businesses putting friction in front of their users, and as anyone who has managed a high-performing online business will tell you, it's not something you want to do unless you have no choice," Cloudflare says.

To highlight the amount of time lost to these tests, Cloudflare said that based on calculations of an average of 32 seconds to complete a CAPTCHA, one test being performed every 10 days, and 4.6 billion internet users worldwide, roughly "500 human years [are] wasted every single day -- just for us to prove our humanity." On Thursday, Cloudflare research engineer Thibault Meunier said in a blog post that the company was "launching an experiment to end this madness" and get rid of CAPTCHAs completely. The means to do so? Using security keys as a way to prove we are human.

According to Meunier, Cloudflare is going to start with trusted security keys -- such as the YubiKey range, HyperFIDO keys, and Thetis FIDO U2F keys -- and use these physical authentication devices as a "cryptographic attestation of personhood." This is how it works: A user is challenged on a website, the user clicks a button along the lines of "I am human," and is then prompted to use a security device to prove themselves. A hardware security key is then plugged into their PC or tapped on a mobile device to provide a signature -- using wireless NFC in the latter example -- and a cryptographic attestation is then sent to the challenging website. Cloudflare says the test takes no more than three clicks and an average of five seconds -- potentially a vast improvement on the CAPTCHA's average of 32 seconds. You can access cloudflarechallenge.com to try out the system.

sandbagger shares a report from The Register: FingerprintJS, maker of a browser-fingerprinting library for fraud prevention, on Thursday said it has identified a more dubious fingerprinting technique capable of generating a consistent identifier across different desktop browsers, including the Tor Browser. Konstantin Darutkin, senior software engineer at FingerprintJS, said in a blog post that the company has dubbed the privacy vulnerability "scheme flooding." The name refers to abusing custom URL schemes, which make web links like "skype://" or "slack://" prompt the browser to open the associated application. "The scheme flooding vulnerability allows an attacker to determine which applications you have installed," explains Darutkin. "In order to generate a 32-bit cross-browser device identifier, a website can test a list of 32 popular applications and check if each is installed or not."

Visiting the schemeflood.com site using a desktop (not mobile) browser and clicking on the demo will generate a flood of custom URL scheme requests using a pre-populated list of likely apps. A browser user would typically see a pop-up permission modal window that says something like, "Open Slack.app? A website wants to open this application. [canel] [Open Slack.app]." But in this case, the demo script just cancels if the app is present or reads the error as confirmation of the app's absence. It then displays the icon of the requested app if found, and moves on to its next query. The script uses each app result as a bit to calculate the identifier. The fact that the identifier remains consistent across different browsers means that cross-browser tracking is possible, which violates privacy expectations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: In 1998 a couple of Stanford graduate students published a paper describing a new kind of search engine: "In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems." The key innovation was an algorithm called PageRank, which ranked search results by calculating how relevant they were to a user's query on the basis of their links to other pages on the web. On the back of PageRank, Google became the gateway to the internet, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page built one of the biggest companies in the world. Now a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model, such as BERT or GPT-3 -- or a future version of them. The idea is that instead of searching for information in a vast list of web pages, users would ask questions and have a language model trained on those pages answer them directly. The approach could change not only how search engines work, but what they do -- and how we interact with them.

[Donald Metzler and his colleagues at Google Research] are interested in a search engine that behaves like a human expert. It should produce answers in natural language, synthesized from more than one document, and back up its answers with references to supporting evidence, as Wikipedia articles aim to do. Large language models get us part of the way there. Trained on most of the web and hundreds of books, GPT-3 draws information from multiple sources to answer questions in natural language. The problem is that it does not keep track of those sources and cannot provide evidence for its answers. There's no way to tell if GPT-3 is parroting trustworthy information or disinformation -- or simply spewing nonsense of its own making.

Metzler and his colleagues call language models dilettantes -- "They are perceived to know a lot but their knowledge is skin deep." The solution, they claim, is to build and train future BERTs and GPT-3s to retain records of where their words come from. No such models are yet able to do this, but it is possible in principle, and there is early work in that direction. There have been decades of progress on different areas of search, from answering queries to summarizing documents to structuring information, says Ziqi Zhang at the University of Sheffield, UK, who studies information retrieval on the web. But none of these technologies overhauled search because they each address specific problems and are not generalizable. The exciting premise of this paper is that large language models are able to do all these things at the same time, he says.

Facebook lost a court fight over an initial order from a European Union privacy watchdog threatening its transfers of users' data across the Atlantic. From a report: An Irish court on Friday rejected the social network's challenge, saying it didn't establish "any basis" for calling into question the Irish Data Protection Commission's decision. The dispute is part of the fallout from July's shock decision at the EU's Court of Justice, which toppled the so-called Privacy Shield, an EU-approved trans-Atlantic transfer tool, over fears citizens' data isn't safe once shipped to the U.S. That EU court ruling was quickly followed by a preliminary order from the Irish authority telling Facebook it could no longer use an alternative tool, known as standard contractual clauses, to satisfy privacy rules when shipping data to the U.S.