WhatsApp said on Friday that it won't enforce the planned update to its data-sharing policy until May 15, weeks after news about the new terms created confusion among its users, exposed the Facebook-app to a potential lawsuit, triggered a nationwide investigation, and drove tens of millions of its loyal fans to explore alternative messaging apps. From a report: "We're now moving back the date on which people will be asked to review and accept the terms. No one will have their account suspended or deleted on February 8. We're also going to do a lot more to clear up the misinformation around how privacy and security works on WhatsApp. We'll then go to people gradually to review the policy at their own pace before new business options are available on May 15," the firm said in a blog post. The messaging app, which serves more than two billion users, said it was delaying the enforcement of the new terms, which it first unveiled last year, over confusion it has created worldwide. The delay of the planned privacy update is aimed at providing users with more time to review the terms, the company said.

The US National Security Agency has published this week a guide on the benefits and risks of encrypted DNS protocols, such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), which have become widely used over the past two years. From a report: The US cybersecurity agency warns that while technologies like DoH can encrypt and hide user DNS queries from network observers, they also have downsides when used inside corporate networks. "DoH is not a panacea," the NSA said in a security advisory [PDF] published today, claiming that the use of the protocol gives companies a false sense of security, echoing many of the arguments presented in a ZDNet feature on DoH in October 2019. The NSA said that DoH does not fully prevent threat actors from seeing a user's traffic and that when deployed inside networks, it can be used to bypass many security tools that rely on sniffing classic (plaintext) DNS traffic to detect threats. Furthermore, the NSA argues that many of today's DoH-capable DNS resolver servers are also externally hosted, outside of the company's control and ability to audit.

Ford Motor is halting production of its most popular car model in Europe for a full month because of the shortage of semiconductors disrupting the world's biggest automakers. From a report: The automaker's Focus factory in Saarlouis, Germany, will idle from Jan. 18 through Feb. 19, according to a spokesman, who said lower consumer demand also is playing a factor. The plant is Ford's lone manufacturing facility for the Focus and employs about 5,000 workers. The facility is the latest to fall victim to a supply issue that's disrupting carmakers around the globe. Ford already was forced to idle a sport utility vehicle plant in Kentucky this week, joining Volkswagen AG, Daimler AG, Toyota Motor Corp. and others in scaling back output because of the bottleneck of chips that play a function in everything from brakes to windshield wipers.

Amazon.com is offering other companies the ability to use the building blocks of the Alexa digital assistant for their own automated versions, the latest effort to embed the company's voice software into other devices. From a report: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV will be the first to use Alexa Custom Assistant, relying on Amazon-built speech recognition and other software to power the automaker's in-car tools, Amazon said Friday in a statement. The retail and technology giant also invited other companies to customize the underlying Alexa system with their own wake word, voice and unique capabilities. Alexa is most closely associated with Echo smart speakers, but Amazon has been working to extend the software's reach, and fend off rivals like Apple and Alphabet's Google, by adding utility for tasks like home automation and the potentially lucrative and fiercely contested market for in-car software. Amazon, which lacks the massive base of captive smartphone users of its main rivals, has suggested voice assistants should be able to talk to one another. The company, like competitors, already offers for rent elements of the technology that powers its digital assistant, but Alexa Custom Assistant represents a more complete set of tools, Amazon said.

An unpatched zero-day in Microsoft Windows 10 allows attackers to corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive with a one-line command. Bleeping Computer reports: In August 2020, October 2020, and finally this week, infosec researcher Jonas L drew attention to an NTFS vulnerability impacting Windows 10 that has not been fixed. When exploited, this vulnerability can be triggered by a single-line command to instantly corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive, with Windows prompting the user to restart their computer to repair the corrupted disk records. The researcher told BleepingComputer that the flaw became exploitable starting around Windows 10 build 1803, the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, and continues to work in the latest version. What's worse is, the vulnerability can be triggered by standard and low privileged user accounts on Windows 10 systems. [...] It is unclear why accessing this attribute corrupts the drive, and Jonas told BleepingComputer that a Registry key that would help diagnose the issue doesn't work.

One striking finding shared by Jonas with us was that a crafted Windows shortcut file (.url) that had its icon location set to C:\:$i30:$bitmap would trigger the vulnerability even if the user never opened the file! As observed by BleepingComputer, as soon as this shortcut file is downloaded on a Windows 10 PC, and the user views the folder it is present in, Windows Explorer will attempt to display the file's icon. To do this, Windows Explorer would attempt to access the crafted icon path inside the file in the background, thereby corrupting the NTFS hard drive in the process. Next, "restart to repair hard drive" notifications start popping up on the Windows PC -- all this without the user even having opened or double-clicked on the shortcut file.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Aljazeera: Tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, a former presidential contender, officially declared his run for New York City mayor. In a campaign video released late Wednesday on Twitter, Yang put forth an agenda that included a guaranteed minimum income, bringing universal high-speed Internet, starting a "people's bank" and reopening New York City "intelligently" from the pandemic. "I moved to New York City 25 years ago," he said in the video. "I came of age, fell in love, and became a father here. Seeing our city in so much pain breaks my heart." His agenda includes a focus on New York City's nightlife. On his campaign website, Yang pledges to make permanent outdoor dining, "to-go cocktails" and other temporary measures put in place during the pandemic. He also says he wants to attract so-called TikTok hype houses, where social-media influencers live together in big mansions and shoot videos together.

Yang's basic income program would start by providing $2,000 a year to half a million New Yorkers in extreme poverty. Participants would receive the cash through monthly transfers to a bank account opened in their name at a newly-created "People's Bank." His most detailed policy focuses on reviving the city's small businesses. He pledged to open 15,000 small businesses by 2022 and also offered a bevy of unconventional ideas, including buying heaters in bulk and then selling them to restaurants that are serving customers in the frigid outdoors as indoor dining remains shut. He also suggested the city make an investment in Cinch Market, a Brooklyn startup that brings together small businesses on one online platform, whose tagline is "Shop Brooklyn Not Bezo$." Yang, 46, whose two kids attend public school in the city, also said he wanted to subsidize broadband for schools, expand the city's universal preschool program, and reform the school system's admissions process. "There will be no recovery without schools being open and teaching children safely every day," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today Google's senior VP of Hardware, Rick Osterloh, announced Google has closed its acquisition of Fitbit. The $2.1 billion deal was announced back in November 2019, which kicked off a regulatory review process from governments around the world concerned about Google's influence over the Internet and the data it can collect on users. Normally, Osterloh announcing "Google has completed its acquisition of Fitbit, and I want to personally welcome this talented team to Google" would mean Google has cleared its worldwide regulatory gauntlet. Google's announcement today is highly unusual since the DOJ has not yet cleared the deal. As the US Department of Justice told New York Times reporter Cecilia Kang, "The Antitrust Division's investigation of Google's acquisition of Fitbit remains ongoing." Australian regulators also haven't announced a final decision on the merger. It also seems particularly provocative for Google to do something like this while it is also dealing with a DOJ antitrust investigation.

Fitbit's CEO, president, and co-founder, James Park, also has a blog post today, saying "many of the things you know and love about Fitbit will remain the same. We'll stay committed to doing what's right, to putting your health and wellness at the center of everything we do, and to offering a no-one-size-fits-all approach with choices that work across both Android and iOS." [...] Google's side of the story is laid out in the blog post, with Osterloh saying "This deal has always been about devices, not data, and we've been clear since the beginning that we will protect Fitbit users' privacy... Fitbit users' health and wellness data won't be used for Google ads and this data will be separated from other Google ads data." Google also says it won't do anything crazy with Android, like lock all Android phones exclusively to Fitbit wearables, which apparently was something the EU was worried about.

After Twitter banned President Trump's account last week, the site and its executives, including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, were largely silent in justifying their decision. That changed last night when Dorsey, in a series of tweets, explained that he felt banning Trump's account was the right move for the social network. The Verge reports: "Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all," he wrote. Dorsey blamed Twitter's failure "to promote healthy conversation," acknowledged that Twitter needs to "look critically at inconsistencies of our policy and enforcement," and said that social platforms needed more transparency around moderation. Then, Dorsey plugged an effort to build a decentralized standard for social media he began in 2019 when he sought to hire five engineers to work on it. That's how, eight tweets into a thread on why his company banned Donald Trump, the CEO of Twitter managed to change the subject to his passion for bitcoin.

Banning the RealDonaldTrump Twitter account had "real and significant ramifications," Dorsey wrote. Dorsey said that the widespread suspension of the president by many platforms challenged the notion that if people didn't like Twitter's rules, they could simply go somewhere else. And though the president can issue a press release or call a press conference whenever he wishes -- or simply go on television -- Dorsey expressed concern that the enforcement actions might "erode a free and open global internet."

And that was when bitcoin came up. Dorsey is also CEO of Square, an internet payment company, that bought $50 million of bitcoin as part of a bet on cryptocurrency. Square has accepted bitcoin since 2014. According to Dorsey, bitcoin provides a model for a decentralized model for social media. Dorsey did not elaborate on how such a network might address Twitter's failures in moderation, creating healthy conversations, or provide for more consistent policy enforcment. "It's important that we acknowledge this is a time of great uncertainty and struggle for so many around the world," Dorsey wrote on Twitter. "Our goal in this moment is to disarm as much as we can, and ensure we are all building towards a greater common understanding, and a more peaceful existence on earth. I believe the internet and global public conversation is our best and most relevant method of achieving this."

Early last decade, Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, web designers based in Auckland, New Zealand, were seeking a passion project. Their business, a boutique web design studio called Cactuslab, developed apps and websites for various clients, but they wanted a project of their own that their team could plug away at when there wasn't much else to do. From a report: Buchanan had an idea for a social media site about movies. At the time, he reflected, he used Flickr to share photos and Last.fm to share his taste in music. IMDb was a database; it wasn't, in essence, social. That left a gap in the field. The result was an app and social media network called Letterboxd, which its website describes, aptly, as "Goodreads for film." After it was introduced at the web conference Brooklyn Beta in the fall of 2011, Letterboxd steadily developed a modest but passionate following of film fans eager to track their movie-watching habits, create lists of favorites, and write and publish reviews. In 2020, however, the site's growth was explosive. Letterboxd has seen its user base nearly double since the beginning of the pandemic: They now have more than 3 million member accounts, according to the company, up from 1.7 million at this time last year.

The pandemic has ravaged the movie industry, as theaters have remained mostly shuttered and high-profile would-be blockbusters like "Tenet" have drastically underperformed. But for Letterboxd, all that time at home has been a boon. "We love talking about movies," said Gemma Gracewood, Letterboxd's editor in chief. "And we're talking even more about what we love lately because we're all stuck indoors." In the beginning, Letterboxd mainly attracted film obsessives: hard-core cinephiles, stats fanatics and professional critics looking to house their published work under one roof. Mike D'Angelo, a longtime contributor to Entertainment Weekly and Esquire, used Letterboxd to retroactively log every movie he has seen, by date, since January 1992. In addition to uploading his old reviews to the platform, he uses the site as a kind of diary for more off-the-cuff musings.

Silicon Valley's leading lobby, the Internet Association, is struggling to manage the competing interests of the companies it represents just as the industry faces a tide of bipartisan anger. From a report: Tech will fight policy battles around antitrust, content moderation and privacy without a unified industry voice. Major tech firms have drawn attention in recent days for pressing pause on political donations in the wake of last week's deadly attack on the Capitol. But lobbying, the other major path for currying favor in Washington, hasn't been working for tech for a while.

Too many firms working at cross purposes. The Internet Association was founded almost a decade ago to be Silicon Valley's voice in Washington. But now its biggest members -- companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon -- increasingly bump heads as they each seek to channel policymakers' fury away from themselves, and they can have wildly different goals from smaller members. Facebook, for instance, has signaled that it's open to new federal laws introducing privacy regulations and modest updates to Section 230, tech's liability shield. Smaller companies worry giants could handle the burden of complying while they'd struggle to survive.

Just ahead of its launch for commercial PC-like devices, an install image of Windows 10X for single screens has leaked, giving us an early peek at Microsoft's new OS. And yes, it's just like Chrome OS. From a report: Let's just get that out of the way. Microsoft has been working for years on a Chromebook competitor, but it has been largely unsuccessful. Windows 10 S, which was originally called Windows 10 Cloud, was Terry Myerson's approach, and that, of course, crashed and burned, in part because it looked identical to Windows 10 but couldn't run downloaded Windows 10 desktop applications. And now we have Windows 10X. Microsoft tried to hide its true intent with this product by pretending last year that it was aimed at a new generation of dual-display PCs, but the software giant really created 10X to compete with Chrome OS on inexpensive single-display PCs. So after failing to get its container-based Windows desktop application compatibility solution to work, Microsoft scaled back and repositioned Windows 10X as was originally intended: It will now ship only on new traditional PCs aimed at education and other commercial markets.

Google published a six-part report this week detailing a sophisticated hacking operation that the company detected in early 2020 and which targeted owners of both Android and Windows devices. From a report: The attacks were carried out via two exploit servers delivering different exploit chains via watering hole attacks, Google said. "One server targeted Windows users, the other targeted Android," Project Zero, one of Google's security teams, said in the first of six blog posts. Google said that both exploit servers used Google Chrome vulnerabilities to gain an initial foothold on victim devices. Once an initial entry point was established in the user's browsers, attackers deployed an OS-level exploit to gain more control of the victim's devices. The exploit chains included a combination of both zero-day and n-day vulnerabilities, where zero-day refers to bugs unknown to the software makers, and n-day refers to bugs that have been patched but are still being exploited in the wild.

Polish government officials have denounced the deactivation of Donald Trump's social media accounts, and said a draft law being readied in Poland will make it illegal for tech companies to take similar actions there. From a report: "Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not," wrote the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, on Facebook earlier this week, without directly mentioning Trump. "There can be no consent to censorship." Morawiecki indirectly compared social media companies taking decisions to remove accounts with Poland's experience during the communist era. "Censorship of free speech, which is the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now returning in the form of a new, commercial mechanism to combat those who think differently," he wrote. Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which is ideologically aligned with Trump on many issues, has itself been accused of trying to limit freedom of speech in recent years.

Apple has removed a controversial feature from the macOS operating system that allowed 53 of Apple's own apps to bypass third-party firewalls, security tools, and VPN apps installed by users for their protection. From a report: Known as the ContentFilterExclusionList, the list was included in macOS 11, also known as Big Sur. The exclusion list included some of Apple's biggest apps, like the App Store, Maps, and iCloud, and was physically located on disk at: /System/Library/Frameworks/NetworkExtension.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/Info.plist.

Its presence was discovered last October by several security researchers and app makers who realized that their security tools weren't able to filter or inspect traffic for some of Apple's applications. Security researchers such as Patrick Wardle, and others, were quick to point out at the time that this exclusion risk was a security nightmare waiting to happen. They argued that malware could latch on to legitimate Apple apps included on the list and then bypass firewalls and security software.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Wednesday asked Tesla to recall 158,000 Model S and Model X vehicles over media control unit (MCU) failures that could pose safety risks by leading to touchscreen displays not working. The auto safety agency made the unusual request in a formal letter to Tesla after upgrading a safety probe in November, saying it had tentatively concluded the 2012-2018 Model S and 2016-2018 Model X vehicles "contain a defect related to motor vehicle safety."

The Tesla vehicles that lose touchscreen use may see driver assistance Autopilot system and turn signal functionality impacted due to potential loss of audible chimes, driver sensing, and alerts associated with these vehicle functions, NHTSA said. It added that loss of alerts tied to systems like Autopilot "increases the risk of a crash occurring because drivers may be unaware of system malfunctions." Touchscreen failures result in drivers being unable to use windshield defogging and defrosting systems that "may decrease the driver's visibility in inclement weather, increasing the risk of crash." NHTSA noted that "Tesla has implemented several over-the-air updates in an attempt to mitigate some of the issues ... but tentatively believes these updates are procedurally and substantively insufficient." It noted that under law "vehicle manufacturers are required to conduct recalls to remedy safety-related defects." NHTSA said in November it reviewed 12,523 claims and complaints about the issue, which would impact roughly 8% of the vehicles under investigation.

The European Commission says it wants its newly proposed satellite mega-constellation to be offering some sort of initial service in 2024. The BBC reports: The first priority is to fill in gaps in broadband coverage where ground infrastructure cannot reach, but later it will power services such as self-driving cars. The project will in some ways mirror America's Starlink and the UK-Indian OneWeb networks. Its scope has yet to be fully defined. A consortium of aerospace and telecoms companies is doing that right now.

But EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said he wanted to get going on the idea as soon as possible. "My objective is to go fast. And therefore it would be appropriate that the Commission puts forward this year a proposal to the European Parliament and the Council so we can move concretely," he told the 13th European Space Conference on Tuesday. "To be ready, we launched a few weeks ago a study on a secure space-based connectivity system. The selected consortium consisting of European satellite manufacturers, operators and service providers, telco operators and launch service providers will study the possible design and development of this project. This will provide insights on the technical dimension, but also the governance structure, the financing, the missions, the exact scope. I expect their first feedback in April this year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google researchers developed and benchmarked techniques they claim enabled them to train a language model containing more than a trillion parameters. They say their 1.6-trillion-parameter model, which appears to be the largest of its size to date, achieved an up to 4 times speedup over the previously largest Google-developed language model (T5-XXL). As the researchers note in a paper detailing their work, large-scale training is an effective path toward powerful models. Simple architectures, backed by large datasets and parameter counts, surpass far more complicated algorithms. But effective, large-scale training is extremely computationally intensive. That's why the researchers pursued what they call the Switch Transformer, a "sparsely activated" technique that uses only a subset of a model's weights, or the parameters that transform input data within the model.

In an experiment, the researchers pretrained several different Switch Transformer models using 32 TPU cores on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus, a 750GB-sized dataset of text scraped from Reddit, Wikipedia, and other web sources. They tasked the models with predicting missing words in passages where 15% of the words had been masked out, as well as other challenges, like retrieving text to answer a list of increasingly difficult questions. The researchers claim their 1.6-trillion-parameter model with 2,048 experts (Switch-C) exhibited "no training instability at all," in contrast to a smaller model (Switch-XXL) containing 395 billion parameters and 64 experts. However, on one benchmark -- the Sanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) -- Switch-C scored lower (87.7) versus Switch-XXL (89.6), which the researchers attribute to the opaque relationship between fine-tuning quality, computational requirements, and the number of parameters.

This being the case, the Switch Transformer led to gains in a number of downstream tasks. For example, it enabled an over 7 times pretraining speedup while using the same amount of computational resources, according to the researchers, who demonstrated that the large sparse models could be used to create smaller, dense models fine-tuned on tasks with 30% of the quality gains of the larger model. In one test where a Switch Transformer model was trained to translate between over 100 different languages, the researchers observed "a universal improvement" across 101 languages, with 91% of the languages benefitting from an over 4 times speedup compared with a baseline model. "Though this work has focused on extremely large models, we also find that models with as few as two experts improve performance while easily fitting within memory constraints of commonly available GPUs or TPUs," the researchers wrote in the paper. "We cannot fully preserve the model quality, but compression rates of 10 to 100 times are achievable by distilling our sparse models into dense models while achieving ~30% of the quality gain of the expert model."

TikTok users aged under 16 will have their accounts automatically set to private, as the app introduces a series of measures to improve child safety. The BBC reports: Approved followers only can comment on videos from these accounts. Users will also be prevented from downloading any videos created by under-16s. TikTok said it hoped the changes would encourage young users to "actively engage in their online privacy journey." "We hope to inspire them to take an active role and make informed decisions," head of privacy Elaine Fox said. Those aged between 13 and 15 will be able to approve "friends" for comments and choose whether to make videos public. But those accounts will also not be "suggested" to other users on the app.

The accounts of 16- and 17-year-olds will prevent others downloading their videos - but the youngsters will have the ability to turn off this restriction. In addition, TikTok is changing this age group's default settings to allow only their chosen friends to "duet" alongside them - the name given to a facility that allows a user to record themselves in a clip then played adjacent to an earlier recording, so they can be watched simultaneously. Users will not be allowed to duet with clips made by under-16s.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: As one of the original co-founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi knows a little something about keeping controversial services online. Kolmisoppi and his colleagues spent decades battling a global coalition of corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies intent on wiping the file sharing website from the face of the internet. Unsuccessfully. Kolmisoppi took to Twitter this week to share some thoughts on Parler's recent deplatforming for failing to seriously police death threats and illegal content before and after the fatal Capitol riots.

"The Pirate Bay, the most censored website in the world, started by kids, run by people with problems with alcohol, drugs and money, still is up after almost two decades," Kolmisoppi said. "Parlor and gab etc have all the money around but no skills or mindset. Embarrassing." [...] Platforming white supremacy and hate speech is a tougher proposition than serving users pirated copies of the Prince discography. But Kolmisoppi was quick to laugh at the fact that despite being backed by billionaires and parts of the US government, Parler didn't seem remotely prepared for the justified firestorm it found itself at the center of. "The most ironic thing is that The Pirate Bay's enemies include not just the US government but also many European and the Russian one," he said. "Compared to gab/parlor which is supported by the current president of the US and probably liked by the Russian one too."

"In all honesty, the reason we did The Pirate Bay was to bring freedom and take back control from a centralised system," Kolmisoppi said. "The reason that Gab et al will fail is because they're just whining bitches that have only one ideology: egotism. Sharing is caring y'all." In more recent years, Kolmoisoppi has moved on to fund Njalla, a privacy-centric domain name registration service. One he says was already asked to host Parler, and refused. "Of course we wouldn't," Kolmisoppi said. "We're pro human rights, which includes the right to not be killed by extreme right wing terrorists."

Apple on Wednesday said it was putting $60 million into a fresh round of projects aimed at challenging systemic racism, including its first foray into venture capital funding to back entrepreneurs of color. From a report: Apple said it would invest $10 million in a fund with Harlem Capital, a New York-based early-stage venture firm, with the goal of helping fund 1,000 companies over 20 years. Apple will invest $25 million in Siebert Williams Shank's Clear Vision Impact Fund, which provides financing to small- and mid-sized businesses, with an emphasis on minority-owned firms. Apple will become a limited partner in funds at both.