Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is shutting its two main car factories temporarily due to a shortage of computer chips. From a report: The difficulties at Britain's biggest carmaker echo similar problems at other manufacturers, including Ford, who have been hit by a global shortage of chips. JLR said there would be a "limited period" of closure at its Halewood and Castle Bromwich sites from Monday. A mixture of strong demand and Covid shutdowns at chipmakers has also hit phone, TV and video games companies. Tata-owned JLR said in a statement: "We have adjusted production schedules for certain vehicles which means that our Castle Bromwich and Halewood manufacturing plants will be operating a limited period of non-production from Monday 26th April. We are working closely with affected suppliers to resolve the issues and minimise the impact on customer orders wherever possible." Production at a third factory, at Solihull, will continue. The Castle Bromwich factory makes the Jaguar XE, XF and F-Type models, and employs about 1,900 people. Halewood makes the Range Rover, Evoque and the Land Rover Discovery Sport, and has about 4,000 workers.

Alphabet's Wing Aviation is asking U.S. regulators to allow it to expand drone operations as a way to make more efficient deliveries controlled from a central command post. From a report: Wing wants to control its drone flights at a "central hub" from which the remote pilots can oversee operations without being in the aircraft's operating area, the Federal Aviation Administration said Friday in a filing in the Federal Register. The company also wants to launch drones from multiple locations within an operating area, and get FAA permission to receive less frequent checks from the regulator, the filing said. The agency posted the requests without saying whether it will approve them.

Chris Poole, who founded controversial online community 4chan before joining Google in 2016, has left the search giant after jumping among several groups within the company, CNBC has learned. From the report: Poole's last official day at Google was April 13th, according to an internal repository viewed by CNBC, which described his last role as a product manager. Oftentimes, employee shares attached to hiring vest at the five-year mark, though it's unclear if that's a reason for Poole's departure now. Poole, who goes by the moniker "Moot," founded 4chan in 2003 at age 15. It grew into one of the most influential and controversial online communities to date. Rolling Stone famously called him a boy-genius and the "Mark Zuckerberg of the online underground." [...]

Poole revealed in 2016 that he'd joined Google as a continuation of his work, and in a now-removed post, stated he'd use his "experience from a dozen years of building online communities" and "grow in ways one simply cannot on their own." He joined as product manager in the photos and streams unit, which oversaw social networking efforts under VP Bradley Horowitz at the time. That sparked speculation that the company hired him to help it revamp its social media ambitions, some of which aimed to compete with Facebook. Poole jumped between several different roles during his five years. At one point, he reportedly became a partner at Google's in-house start-up incubator, Area 120, which was just getting off the ground in 2016. He then became a product manager in Google's Maps division, according to Crunchbase.

Rei_is_a_dumbass shares a report from Ars Technica: Last Saturday, two men died when a Tesla Model S crashed into a tree in a residential neighborhood. Authorities said they found no one in the driver's seat -- one man was in the front passenger seat, while the other was in the back. That led to speculation that the car might have been under the control of Tesla's Autopilot driver-assistance system at the time of the crash. Elon Musk has tweeted that "data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled." Tesla defenders also insisted that Autopilot couldn't have been active because the technology doesn't operate unless someone is in the driver's seat. Consumer Reports decided to test this latter claim by seeing if it could get Autopilot to activate without anyone in the driver's seat. It turned out not to be very difficult.

Sitting in the driver's seat, Consumer Reports' Jake Fisher enabled Autopilot and then used the speed dial on the steering wheel to bring the car to a stop. He then placed a weighted chain on the steering wheel (to simulate pressure from a driver's hands) and hopped into the passenger seat. From there, he could reach over and increase the speed using the speed dial. Autopilot won't function unless the driver's seatbelt is buckled, but it was also easy to defeat this check by threading the seatbelt behind the driver. "In our evaluation, the system not only failed to make sure the driver was paying attention, but it also couldn't tell if there was a driver there at all," Fisher wrote in a post on the Consumer Reports website.

chicksdaddy shares a report from The Security Ledger: Websites for customers of agricultural equipment maker John Deere contained vulnerabilities that could have allowed a remote attacker to harvest sensitive information on the company's customers including their names, physical addresses and information on the Deere equipment they own and operate, The Security Ledger reported. The researcher known as "Sick Codes" published two advisories on Thursday warning about the flaws in the myjohndeere.com website and the John Deere Operations Center website and mobile applications. In a conversation with Security Ledger, the researcher said that a he was able to use VINs (vehicle identification numbers) taken from a farm equipment auction site to identify the name and physical address of the owner. Furthermore, a flaw in the myjohndeere.com website could allow an unauthenticated user to carry out automated attacks against the site, possibly revealing all the user accounts for that site.

Sick Codes disclosed both flaws to John Deere and also to the U.S. Government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which monitors food and agriculture as a critical infrastructure sector. The information obtained from the John Deere websites, including customer names and addresses, could put the company afoul of data security laws like California's CCPA or the Personal Information Protection Act in Deere's home state of Illinois. However, the national security consequences of the company's leaky website could be far greater. Details on what model combines and other equipment is in use on what farm could be of very high value to an attacker, including nation-states interested in disrupting U.S. agricultural production at key junctures, such as during planting or harvest time.

The consolidated nature of U.S. farming means that an attacker with knowledge of specific, Internet connected machinery in use by a small number of large-scale farming operations in the midwestern United States could launch targeted attacks on that equipment that could disrupt the entire U.S. food supply chain, researchers warn. The Agriculture sector and firms that supply it, like Deere, lag other industries in cyber security preparedness and resilience. A 2019 report (PDF) released by Department of Homeland Security concluded that the "adoption of advanced precision agriculture technology and farm information management systems in the crop and livestock sectors is introducing new vulnerabilities" (and that) "potential threats to precision agriculture were often not fully understood or were not being treated seriously enough by the front-line agriculture producers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Today, with the expansion of its Galaxy Upcycling at Home service (which is still in beta), users in the U.S., U.K., and South Korea will get access to an experimental feature in the SmartThings app designed to give an old Galaxy handset new life as a useful smart home accessory. By using the app to reconfigure the device's battery usage and optimization, Samsung says even older devices will still be able to deliver good longevity, while the phone's usual assortment of wireless connectivity features makes it easy to pair the phone with other devices in your home.

In the SmartThings app, Samsung provides a range of functions that an old smartphone can perform, including serving as a light sensor that can automatically turn on your smart lights or even your TV when it gets dark. Alternatively, you can also convert an old Galaxy phone into a sound sensor, with the phone using AI to detect common household noises like a barking dog, crying baby, or a knock on the door. In this way, you can also repurpose an old Samsung phone as a baby monitor of sorts [...]. And of course, even without much fiddling, upcycled Samsung phones can also be used as universal remotes, providing an easy way to control your streaming video box, play music on your smart speakers, control your lights, and more.

Still smarting from last month's dump of phone numbers belonging to 500 million Facebook users, the social media giant has a new privacy crisis to contend with: a tool that, on a massive scale, links Facebook accounts with their associated email addresses, even when users choose settings to keep them from being public. Wired reports: A video circulating on Tuesday showed a researcher demonstrating a tool named Facebook Email Search v1.0, which he said could link Facebook accounts to as many as 5 million email addresses per day. The researcher -- who said he went public after Facebook said it didn't think the weakness he found was "important" enough to be fixed -- fed the tool a list of 65,000 email addresses and watched what happened next. "As you can see from the output log here, I'm getting a significant amount of results from them," the researcher said as the video showed the tool crunching the address list. "I've spent maybe $10 to buy 200-odd Facebook accounts. And within three minutes, I have managed to do this for 6,000 [email] accounts."

The researcher [...] said that Facebook Email Search exploited a front-end vulnerability that he reported to Facebook recently but that "they [Facebook] do not consider to be important enough to be patched." Earlier this year, Facebook had a similar vulnerability that was ultimately fixed. "This is essentially the exact same vulnerability," the researcher says. "And for some reason, despite me demonstrating this to Facebook and making them aware of it, they have told me directly that they will not be taking action against it."

In a statement, Facebook said: "It appears that we erroneously closed out this bug bounty report before routing to the appropriate team. We appreciate the researcher sharing the information and are taking initial actions to mitigate this issue while we follow up to better understand their findings." A Facebook representative didn't respond to a question asking if the company told the researcher it didn't consider the vulnerability important enough to warrant a fix. The representative said Facebook engineers believe they have mitigated the leak by disabling the technique shown in the video.

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Over the past ten years, Firefox market share has decreased substantially and the web browser has lost its appeal and coolness. Seeing that, someone at Mozilla probably decided that the best way to entice people back is by changing its UI, thus Firefox has already seen quite a huge number of changes despite other major web browsers staying relatively the same in terms of their visuals; i.e. Google Chrome and Apple Safari look almost the same as they did a decade ago. The most substantial redesign, which is being prepared for the next release, called Proton, promises to drive most power users away because it's broken on a number of levels and makes using the browser a very unpleasant experience.

So, what has changed:
- The compact density option for the address bar is now gone, and not only that, the title bar is now a lot taller than before. Overall, vertically, the title bar and address bar now take almost a dozen pixels more than previous Firefox releases, which steals very precious vertical space.
- The floating tabs. The active tab is now totally disconnected from the active web page and it looks out of place.
- The inactive tabs now completely lack a delimiter between them; and in the case of websites lacking a favicon, all inactive tabs look like one, which makes understanding what's open and what to click very difficult and time consuming.
- Mozilla has removed icons from menus, which makes navigating them slower and more difficult. Human beings can easily recognize and memorize icons, and now instead you have to read 20 menu items and try to understand what you actually need to click. Just to illustrate it, check how Firefox 88 looks and what is up and coming.

It surely looks like whatever UX studies Mozilla has done were either not run properly, or the data being collected was not properly understood. Mozilla has disabled feedback for Firefox, they've made it abundantly clear that you cannot leave comments in their Bugzilla, and considering they want to deprecate userChrome.css, it makes it impossible to restore the semblance of a good web browser experience. The Slashdot crowd loves free and open-source web browsers, so the question is, how can we make the company stop maiming and destroying their most important product?

jonesy16 writes: While users have long been able to run Linux GUI apps on Windows by installing a separate X Server, this marks the first time that native support is available through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Audio support and hardware acceleration are also provided, seemingly enabling a limitless set of use cases for those wishing to live the dual OS life. The change is identified in the recent preview build release along with a more in-depth discussion of the graphical subsystem now called WSLg.

After Google forgot to renew its Argentina domain, a user beat the firm into buying it for about $3.85. A report adds: However, minutes later after the manoeuvre, it was confirmed that Google has already recovered the domain. Users complained about the failure of the website for at least three hours, but when everyone suspected that the server had crashed, as is often the case, Kurona's (the protagonist in the story) posting on Twitter revealed the truth.

In a follow-up to a story previously reported, Slashdot reader Turkinolith shares a report from Teslarati: In the latest trials and tribulations of a SpaceX Starlink competitor that went bankrupt after spending $3 billion to launch just 74 small internet satellites, it appears that OneWeb knowingly misled both media and US regulators over a claimed 'near-miss' with a Starlink satellite. Back on April 9th, OneWeb went public with claims that SpaceX had mishandled its response to a routine satellite collision avoidance warning from the US military, which monitors the location of satellites and space debris. According to OneWeb government affairs chief Chris McLaughlin, SpaceX disabled an automated system designed to detect and automatically command Starlink satellite collision avoidance maneuvers to let OneWeb move its satellite instead. McLaughlin also stated that "Coordination is the issue -- it is not sufficient to say 'I've got an automated system.'" He also recently criticized the maneuverability of Starlink satellites, claiming that "Starlink's engineers said they couldn't do anything to avoid a collision and switched off the collision avoidance system so OneWeb could maneuver around the Starlink satellite without interference." As it turns out, OneWeb's "near-miss" appears to have been a farce and the company scrambled to promise to retract those statements in an April 20th meeting with the FCC and SpaceX.

In an apparent attempt to capitalize on vague fears of "space debris" and satellite collisions, OneWeb -- or perhaps just McLaughlin -- took it upon itself to consciously misconstrue a routine, professional process of collision-avoidance coordination between OneWeb and SpaceX. McLaughlin ran a gauntlet of media outlets to drag SpaceX through the mud and criticize both the company's technology and response, ultimately claiming that SpaceX's Starlink satellite was incapable of maneuvering out of the way. Instead, according to a precise, evidenced timeline of events presented by SpaceX to the FCC, the coordination was routine, uneventful, and entirely successful. OneWeb itself explicitly asked SpaceX to disable its autonomous collision avoidance software and allow the company to maneuver its own satellite out of the way after SpaceX made it clear that the Starlink spacecraft could also manage the task. The event was neither "urgent" or a "close call," as OneWeb and media outlets later claimed. SpaceX says it has been coordinating similar avoidance maneuvers with OneWeb since March 2020.

Most damningly, SpaceX says that immediately after OneWeb disseminated misleading quotes about the event to the media, "OneWeb met with [FCC] staff and Commissioners [to demand that] unilateral conditions [be] placed on SpaceX's operations." Those conditions could have actually made coordination harder, "demonstrating more of a concern with limiting [OneWeb's] competitors than with a genuine concern for space safety." Crucially, despite lobbying to restrict its competitors, "OneWeb [has] argued forcefully that [it] should be exempt from Commission rules for orbital debris mitigation due to their status as non-U.S. operators." In simple terms, OneWeb is trying to exploit the FCC to suppress its competition while letting it roam free of the exact same regulations.

In what may be the largest interspecies communication effort in history, scientists plan to use machine learning to try to decode what Sperm whales say to one another. National Geographic reports: [Sperm whales "speak" in clicks, which they make in rhythmic series called codas. Shane Gero, a Canadian biologist, had been tracking sperm whales off the Caribbean island nation of Dominica for over thirteen years, using underwater recorders to capture codas from hundreds of whales.] On Monday, a team of scientists announced that they have embarked on a five-year odyssey to build on Gero's work with a cutting-edge research project to try to decipher what sperm whales are saying to one another. Such an attempt would have seemed folly even just a few years ago. But this effort won't rely solely on Gero. The team includes experts in linguistics, robotics, machine learning, and camera engineering. They will lean heavily on advances in artificial intelligence, which can now translate one human language to another without help from a Rosetta Stone, or key. The quest, dubbed Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), is likely the largest interspecies communication effort in history.

Already, these scientists have been at work building specialized video and audio recording devices. They aim to capture millions of whale codas and analyze them. The hope is to expose the underlying architecture of whale chatter: What units make up whale communication? Is there grammar, syntax, or anything analogous to words and sentences? These experts will track how whales behave when making, or hearing, clicks. And using breakthroughs in natural language processing -- the branch of artificial intelligence that helps Alexa and Siri respond to voice commands -- researchers will attempt to interpret this information. Nothing like this has ever been attempted. [T]he goal isn't to get whales to understand humans. It's to understand what sperm whales say to one another as they go about their lives in the wild.

TikTok is facing a legal challenge from former children's commissioner for England Anne Longfield over how it collects and uses children's data. The BBC reports: The claim is being filed on behalf of millions of children in the UK and EU who have used the hugely popular video-sharing app. If successful, the children affected could each be owed thousands of pounds. TikTok said the case was without merit and it would fight it.

Lawyers will allege that TikTok takes children's personal information, including phone numbers, videos, exact location and biometric data, without sufficient warning, transparency or the necessary consent required by law, and without children or parents knowing what is being done with that information. The claim is being launched on behalf of all children who have used TikTok since 25 May 2018, regardless of whether they have an account or their privacy settings. Children not wishing to be represented can opt out. "TikTok is a hugely popular social media platform that has helped children keep in touch with their friends during an incredibly difficult year," says Ms. Longfield. "However, behind the fun songs, dance challenges and lip-sync trends lies something far more sinister."

She alleges the firm is "a data collection service that is thinly veiled as a social network" which has "deliberately and successfully deceived parents." She added that those parents have a "right to know" what private information is being collected via TikTok's "shadowy data collection practices."

In response, TikTok said: "Privacy and safety are top priorities for TikTok and we have robust policies, processes and technologies in place to help protect all users, and our teenage users in particular. We believe the claims lack merit and intend to vigorously defend the action."

The owner of the Daily Mail newspaper and MailOnline website is suing Google over allegations the search engine manipulates search results. The BBC reports: Associated Newspapers accuses Google of having too much control over online advertising and of downgrading links to its stories, favoring other outlets. It alleges Google "punishes" publishers in its rankings if they don't sell enough advertising space in its marketplace. Google called the claims "meritless."

Associated Newspapers' concerns stem from its assessment that its coverage of the Royal Family in 2021 has been downplayed in search results. For example, it claims that British users searching for broadcaster Piers Morgan's comments on the Duchess of Sussex following an interview with Oprah Winfrey were more likely to see articles about Morgan produced by smaller, regional outlets. That is despite the Daily Mail writing multiple stories a day about his comments around that time and employing him as a columnist. In response, a Google spokesperson said: "The Daily Mail's claims are completely inaccurate. The use of our ad tech tools has no bearing on how a publisher's website ranks in Google search. More generally, we compete in a crowded and competitive ad tech space where publishers have and exercise multiple options. The Daily Mail itself authorizes dozens of ad tech companies to sell and manage their ad space, including Amazon, Verizon and more. We will defend ourselves against these meritless claims."

FlatEric521 shares a report: Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the popular encrypted chat app Signal claims to have hacked devices made by the infamous phone unlocking company Cellebrite, which has famously worked with cops to circumvent encryption such as Signal's. In a blog post Wednesday, Marlinspike not only published details about the new exploits for Cellebrite devices but seemed to suggest that Signal's code could be theoretically altered to hack Cellebrite devices en masse. "We were surprised to find that very little care seems to have been given to Cellebrite's own software security. Industry-standard exploit mitigation defenses are missing, and many opportunities for exploitation are present," Marlinspike wrote in the post. "Any app could contain such a file, and until Cellebrite is able to accurately repair all vulnerabilities in its software with extremely high confidence, the only remedy a Cellebrite user has is to not scan devices."

Marlinspike claims (whether you believe this portion of the post or not is up to you) that while he was on a walk he happened to find a Cellebrite phone unlocking device: "By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me. As I got closer, the dull enterprise typeface slowly came into focus: Cellebrite. Inside, we found the latest versions of the Cellebrite software, a hardware dongle designed to prevent piracy (tells you something about their customers I guess!), and a bizarrely large number of cable adapters." Along with his colleagues, Marlinspike analyzed the device and found that it included several vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to include an "otherwise innocuous file in an app" that when it gets scanned by a Cellebrite device exploits it and tampers with the device and the data it can access.

The CEOs of Uber and Just Eat Takeaway on Wednesday became engaged in a public spat after Uber announced it is planning to launch in Germany -- a market that is currently dominated by Just Eat Takeaway. From a report: Uber Eats will launch in Berlin in the next few weeks and potentially expand into other German cities in the coming months. The news was first reported by The Financial Times and confirmed to CNBC. Just Eat Takeaway CEO Jitse Groen accused Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi of trying to "depress" his firm's share price on Twitter on Wednesday. Shares of Just Eat Takeaway closed down almost 3%. Khosrowshahi responded: "Advice: pay a little less attention to your short term stock price and more attention to your Tech and Ops." Shortly thereafter, Groen replied: "If I may ... start paying taxes, minimum wage and social security premiums before giving a founder advice on how he should run his business."

Greg Kroah-Hartman, who is one of the head honchos of the Linux kernel development and maintenance team, has banned the University of Minnesota (UMN) from further contributing to the Linux Kernel. The University had apparently introduced questionable patches into the kernel of Linux. From a report: The UMN had worked on a research paper dubbed "On the Feasibility of Stealthily Introducing Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Software via Hypocrite Commits". Obviously, the "Open-Source Software" (OSS) here is indicating the Linux kernel and the University had stealthily introduced Use-After-Free (UAF) vulnerability to test the susceptibility of Linux. So far so good perhaps as one can see it as ethical experimenting. However, the UMN apparently sent another round of "obviously-incorrect patches" into the kernel in the form of "a new static analyzer" causing distaste to Greg Kroah-Hartman who has now decided to ban the University from making any further contributions.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Google late Tuesday shipped another urgent security patch for its dominant Chrome browser and warned that attackers are exploiting one of the zero-days in active attacks. This is the fourth in-the-wild Chrome zero-day discovered so far in 2021 and the continued absence of IOC data or any meaningful information about the attacks continue to raise eyebrows among security experts.

The newest Chrome update -- 90.0.4430.85 -- is available for Windows, Mac and Linux users and is being rolled out via the browser's automatic update mechanism. The vulnerability being exploited is identified as CVE-2021-21224 and simply described as a "type confusion" in the V8 Chrome rendering engine. Google credited the Jose Martinez (tr0y4) from VerSprite Inc. for reporting the vulnerability. "Google is aware of reports that exploits for CVE-2021-21224 exist in the wild," the company said, with no additional details.

Audi has revealed its all-electric A6 E-tron concept, a luxury sedan that will come packed with tech including the ability to project video games on to a wall. Tom's Guide reports: The A6 E-tron, which was unveiled at Auto Shanghai 2021 today, is built on the new Premium Platform Electric (PPE) chassis architecture that Audi is developing in collaboration with Porsche. And though a production version of the car isn't likely to be available until later in 2022, its development is well under way; the car you see here shouldn't be miles away from the final version.

The A6 E-tron Concept boasts almost 435 miles of range and comes armed with a 100 kWh battery, which can be replenished from 5 to 80% in under 25 minutes as well as being able to accept fast 270kW charging. Featuring a motor on each axle, with a combined power output of 469 bhp and 590lb ft of torque, the Audi A6 E-tron should be quick, too, with a 0-62 mph time of under 4 seconds. However, Audi also plans PPE-based models with a single motor mounted on the rear axle to keep energy efficiency and prices in check.

Standout cosmetic touches include digital matrix LED headlights, which have the party trick of being able to project images. Audi suggests that owners can park facing a wall during recharging and pass the time playing a video game using the technology, or watch a movie. Audi has even developed a game, which is playable via a smartphone, to show how the concept works. Four more LED projectors are housed in the corners of the car to shine animated turn signals on the road. OLED technology in the taillights promises more electrical trickery and there are additional projectors that switch on when the doors are opened. These, suggest Audi, can be used to issue greetings to passengers or warnings to passing cyclists when the doors are opening.

According to the United Kingdom's Security Service, known as MI5, hostile states are creating fake LinkedIn profiles to trick users into spilling secrets. The BBC reports: At least 10,000 UK nationals have been approached by fake profiles linked to hostile states, on the professional social network LinkedIn, over the past five years, according to MI5. "Malicious profiles" are being used on "an industrial scale," the security agency's chief, Ken McCallum, said. A campaign has been launched to educate government workers about the threat. The effort -- Think Before You Link -- warns foreign spies are targeting those with access to sensitive information. One concern is the victims' colleagues, in turn, become more willing to accept follow-up requests - because it looks as if they share a mutual acquaintance.

MI5 did not specifically name LinkedIn but BBC News has learned the Microsoft-owned service is indeed the platform involved. The 10,000-plus figure includes staff in virtually every government departments as well as key industries, who might be offered speaking or business and travel opportunities that could lead to attempts to recruit them to provide confidential information. And it is thought a large number of those approached engaged initially with the profiles that contacted them online.