The world stocked up on laptop and desktop computers in 2020 at a level not seen since the iPhone debuted in 2007, and manufacturers still are months away from fulfilling outstanding orders, hardware industry executives and analysts said. Reuters reports: Remote learning and working has upturned the computer market during the coronavirus pandemic, zapping sales of smartphones while boosting interest in bigger devices, which had become afterthoughts to iPhones and Androids over the last decade. "The whole supply chain has been strained like never before," said Gregg Prendergast, Pan-America president at hardware maker Acer Inc.

Annual global shipments of PCs, the industry's collective term for laptops and desktops, topped out at about 300 million in 2008 and recently were sinking toward 250 million. Few expected a resurgence. But some analysts now expect 2020 will close at about 300 million shipments, up roughly 15% from a year ago. Tablets are experiencing even faster growth. By the end of 2021, installed PCs and tablets will reach 1.77 billion, up from 1.64 billion in 2019, according to research company Canalys. The virus pressed families into expanding from one PC for the house to one for each student, video gamer or homebound worker. Earlier this month, Sam Burd, president at Dell, said the industry "renaissance" would soon bring devices with AI software to simplify tasks like logging on and switching off cameras. Compared to last year, Dell's online orders from consumers surged 62% in the third quarter.

Visa said on Wednesday it would allow usage of its cards on Pornhub-owner MindGeek's platforms that host professionally produced adult studio content, but would continue to decline processing payments coming from Pornhub itself. Reuters reports: Visa said its ban remains in effect for those websites that host user-generated content, the most popular being Pornhub, until an ongoing investigation was completed. "Following a thorough review, Visa will reinstate acceptance privileges for MindGeek sites that offer professionally produced adult studio content," a Visa spokesperson said.

Visa, like rival Mastercard, had suspended processing payments on Pornhub earlier this month after a New York Times report found unlawful content on its website. Pornhub had denied the allegations, calling the two-biggest payment processing networks' decision "disappointing." Days after the Times report Pornhub said it had pulled content uploaded by unverified users from its platform and would only allow certain partner accounts to upload content.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Facebook is currently waging a PR campaign purporting to show that Apple is seriously injuring American small businesses through its iOS privacy features. But at the same time, according to allegations in recently unsealed court documents, Facebook has been selling them ad targeting that is unreliable to the point of being fraudulent. The documents feature internal Facebook communications in which managers appear to admit to major flaws in ad targeting capabilities, including that ads reached the intended audience less than half of the time they were shown and that data behind a targeting criterion was "all crap." Facebook says the material is presented out of context.

They emerged from a suit currently seeking class-action certification in federal court. The suit was filed by the owner of Investor Village, a small business that operates a message board on financial topics. Investor Village said in court filings that it decided to buy narrowly targeted Facebook ads because it hoped to reach "highly compensated and educated investors" but "had limited resources to spend on advertising." But nearly 40 percent of the people who saw Investor Village's ad either lacked a college degree, did not make $250,000 per year, or both, the company claims. In fact, not a single Facebook user it surveyed met all the targeting criteria it had set for Facebook ads, it says. The complaint features Facebook documents indicating that the company knew its advertising capabilities were overhyped and underperformed. A "February 2016 internal memorandum" sent from an unnamed Facebook manager to Andrew Bosworth, a Zuckerberg confidant and powerful company executive who oversaw ad efforts at the time, reads, "[I]nterest precision in the US is only 41% -- that means that more than half the time we're showing ads to someone other than the advertisers' intended audience. And it is even worse internationally. We don't feel we're meeting advertisers' interest accuracy expectations today." The lawsuit goes on to quote unnamed "employees on Facebook's ad team" discussing their targeting capabilities circa June 2016.

"Interest" and "behavior" are two key facets of the data dossiers Facebook compiles on us for advertisers; according to the company, the former includes things you like, "from organic food to action movies," while the latter consists of "behaviors such as prior purchases and device usage." The complaint also cites unspecified internal communications in which "[p]rivately, Facebook managers described important targeting data as 'crap' and admitted accuracy was 'abysmal.'" Facebook has said in its court filings that these quotes are presented out of context.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, more than 1,000 educators and students at City University of New York institutions petitioned their board of trustees to not renew its contract with the anti-plagiarism software company Turnitin. The board ultimately voted unanimously, with the student senate representative abstaining, to renew Turnitin's five-year contract for nearly $2 million. Five months earlier, CUNY had laid off nearly 3,000 adjunct faculty and part-time employees as a result of budget shortfalls. (The college system's chancellor has pushed back against that characterization). The protest against Turnitin is the latest high-profile effort in what has become a nationwide backlash in higher education against educational technology vendors. As schools moved online during the pandemic and confronted slimming budgets, they increasingly turned to a wide array of software companies for solutions. The ed tech industry has boomed, and the school experience has been transformed in ways that are sure to outlive the pandemic -- not necessarily for the better, many experts say.

Volkswagen AG Chief Executive Officer Herbert Diess said cash-rich technology giants invading the auto industry pose a much bigger challenge for the German manufacturer than traditional rivals like Toyota Motor. From a report: "We look forward to new competitors who will certainly accelerate the change in our industry and bring in new skills," Diess said in a LinkedIn post when asked about reports that Apple is developing a self-driving car. "The unbelievable valuation and the practically unlimited access to resources instill a lot of respect in us." [...] Diess mapped out a plan during an internal meeting last week to pit VW's huge Wolfsburg plant against Tesla's factory that's under construction outside Berlin. The electric-car maker's new site in Gruenheide is bound to stoke competition for engineers, workers and customers on VW's home turf. "I've said it before: the most valuable company in the world will again be a mobility company," Diess said. "It could be Tesla, Apple or Volkswagen." Further reading: Elon Musk Says He Once Considered Selling Tesla To Apple, Tim Cook Didn't Want To Take a Meeting

Voat, an "anti-censorship" alternative social network that's been described as the "alt-right Reddit," is scheduled to shut down on December 25th. From a report: Voat co-founder Justin Chastain announced the pending closure this week, saying the site had run out of money after an investor defaulted on their contract in March. "I personally decided to keep Voat up until after the US election of 2020. I've been paying the costs out of pocket but now I'm out of money," Chastain wrote. Voat was founded in 2014 and hosted Reddit-like forums with minimal moderation. It grew rapidly after Reddit added an anti-harassment policy and banned five subreddits that it said violated the rules, including its infamous r/fatpeoplehate forum.

BMW has told Motoring Research its targeted billboard warranty adverts -- which are claimed to use number plate registration technology to tailor public adverts to BMW drivers -- do not actually draw upon vehicle warranty status. From a report: Rather, only publically available information is used. "There is no personalisation visible on the advert and no vehicle or customer data is stored or retained." The new initiative was originally claimed to focus on BMW drivers with an expired new or Approved Used warranty. Owners will receive personalised messages on electronic roadside billboards highlighting the fact they no longer have a valid warranty. They will be warned their vehicle is not covered for the cost of repairs, and invited to 'consider purchasing a BMW Insured warranty online.' The electronic billboards use Vehicle Detection Technology to pick out BMW owners with expired warranties.

The California Bar released data last week confirming that during its use of ExamSoft for the October Bar exam, over one-third of the nearly nine-thousand online examinees were flagged by the software. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is concerned that the exam proctoring software is incorrectly flagging students for cheating "due either to the software's technical failures or to its requirements that students have relatively new computers and access to near-broadband speeds." From the report: This is outrageous. It goes without saying that of the 3,190 applicants flagged by the software, the vast majority were not cheating. Far more likely is that, as EFF and others have said before, remote proctoring software is surveillance snake oil -- you simply can't replicate a classroom environment online, and attempting to do so via algorithms and video monitoring only causes harm. In this case, the harm is not only to the students who are rightfully upset about the implications and the lack of proper channels for redress, but to the institution of the Bar itself. While examinees have been searching for help from other examinees as well as hiring legal counsel in their attempt to defend themselves from potentially baseless claims of cheating, the California Committee of Bar Examiners has said "everything is going well" and called these results "a good thing to see" (13:30 into the video of the Committee meeting).

That is not how we see it. These flags have triggered concern for hundreds, if not thousands, of test takers, most of whom had no idea that they were flagged until recently. Many only learned about the flag after receiving an official "Chapter 6 Notice" from the Bar, which is sent when an applicant is observed (supposedly) violating exam conduct rules or seen or heard with prohibited items, like a cell phone, during the exam. In a depressingly ironic introduction to the legal system, the Bar has requested that students respond to the notices within 10 days, but it would appear that none of them have been given enough information to do so, as Chapter 6 Notices contain only a short summary of the violation. These summaries are decidedly vague: "Facial view of your eyes was not within view of the camera for a prolonged period of time"; "No audible sound was detected"; "Leaving the view of the webcam outside of scheduled breaks during a remote-proctored exam." Examinees do not currently have access to the flagged videos themselves, and are not expected to receive access to them, or any other evidence against them, before they are required to submit a response. The report goes on to say that some of these flags are technical issues with ExamSoft. For example, Lenovo laptops appear to have been flagged en masse for an issue with the software's inability to access the internal microphone.

Other flags are likely due to the inability of the software to correctly recognize the variability of examinees' demeanors and expressions. "We implore the California Bar to rethink its plans for remotely-proctored future exams, and to work carefully to offer clearer paths for examinees who have been flagged by these inadequate surveillance tools," the EFF says in closing. "Until then, the Bar must provide examinees who have been flagged with a fair appeals process, including sharing the videos and any other information necessary for them to defend themselves before requiring a written response."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Hours after announcing that it acquired self-driving truck startup Ike, Nuro revealed it's the first company to receive permission from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to charge a fee and receive compensation for its driverless delivery service. Unlike the autonomous testing licenses the California DMV previously granted to Nuro and others, which limited the compensation self-driving vehicle companies could receive, the deployment permit enables Nuro to make its technology commercially available. The California DMV permit allows Nuro to use a fleet of light-duty driverless vehicles for a delivery service on surface streets within designated parts of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, including the cities of Atherton, East Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, Los Altos, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, and Woodside. The vehicles have a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour and are only approved to operate in fair weather conditions on streets with a speed limit of no more than 35 miles per hour.

"This permit will allow our vehicles to operate commercially on California roads in two counties near our [Mountain View, California] headquarters in the Bay Area. Soon we will announce our first deployment in California with an established partner. The service will start with our fleet of Prius vehicles in fully autonomous mode, followed by our custom-designed electric R2 vehicles," Nuro chief legal and policy officer David Estrada wrote in a blog post. "We have extensively tested our self-driving technology and built a track record of safe operations over the past four years, including two successful commercial deployments in other states and driverless testing with R2 in the Bay Area communities where we plan to deploy."

AmiMoJo shares a report from The Verge: President Biden is going to need some Twitter followers. Twitter plans to wipe out all followers from the @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts once Biden is sworn in on January 20th, rather than transferring the accounts' existing followers over to the new administration, according to Rob Flaherty, Biden's digital director. The accounts for @VP, @FLOTUS, @PressSec, @Cabinet, and @LaCasaBlanca will also have their followers wiped, Twitter said. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today that there was contention between the Biden camp and Twitter over whether followers would transfer over. This is a reversal from what Twitter did in 2017 when the Trump administration took over accounts from the Obama administration. Back then, Twitter essentially duplicated the existing accounts, creating an archive of Obama-era tweets and followers and building a new set of accounts for the incoming administration that retained all of those followers without any of the tweets.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Lawmakers in China are considering new legislation that would impose fines against anyone who creates videos where people eat large quantities of food or binge drinks, according to a new report from Chinese state media outlet China News. The proposed media rule, part of broader legislation to discourage food waste, would also allow restaurants in China to charge extra for customers who don't finish their meals. The Chinese government under President Xi Jinping started a campaign called the Clean Plate Campaign earlier this year in an effort to waste less food domestically. Xi said over the summer that the goal was to create a social order where "waste is shameful and thriftiness is applaudable." Fines for breaking the new law would range from 10,000 yuan to 100,000 yuan, or roughly $1,530 to $15,300 in U.S. currency.

The draft legislation, first reported in English by Sixth Tone, was submitted to China's Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on Tuesday, and covers "radio stations, television stations, and online audio and video service providers." An audio-only version of mukbang sounds kind of gross, but who are we to judge? Traditionally, it's very polite in China to serve guests large portions of food, a way to show generosity that would be familiar to many Americans. But that generosity is creating a culture of waste, where an estimated 17 million pounds of food in China gets thrown out every year. That much food could feed an additional 30 million people each year at the very least -- roughly the entire population of Texas -- according to a recent study from the Chinese Academy of Science and the World Wildlife Fund.

Russian lawmakers have approved a range of new measures that could further stifle dissent and allow tighter restrictions on online content -- including blocking websites like YouTube and Twitter. NPR reports: One bill would allow for the blocking of foreign websites that it says "discriminate" against Russian media. A second law would allow it to levy large fines against companies that don't take down content banned in the country. A third law would establish jail terms for those convicted of making slanderous comments online or in the media. A person found guilty of slander could face up to two years in jail and be fined up to 1 million rubles (about $13,300), Reuters reports. The bills were passed by Russia's lower house, the State Duma. If they become law, as expected, they would mean that Russia could block websites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter that label content produced by Russian state media outlets as being just that. Under the legislation, Russian authorities will be able to block or slow down such sites.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: With great fanfare last week, 44 attorneys general hit Google with two antitrust complaints, following a landmark lawsuit the Justice Department and 11 states lodged against the Alphabet Inc. unit in October. What's less known is that Oracle Corp. spent years working behind the scenes to convince regulators and law enforcement agencies in Washington, more than 30 states, the European Union, Australia and at least three other countries to rein in Google's huge search-and-advertising business. Those efforts are paying off.

Officials in more than a dozen of the states that sued Google received what has been called Oracle's "black box" presentation showing how Google tracks users' personal information, said Ken Glueck, Oracle's top Washington lobbyist and the architect of the company's antitrust campaign against Google. Glueck outlined for Bloomberg the presentation, which often entails putting an Android phone inside a black briefcase to show how Google collects users' location details -- even when the phones aren't in use -- and confirmed the contours of the pressure campaign. "I couldn't be happier," said Glueck about the barrage of lawsuits. "As far as I can tell, there are more states suing Google than there are states." Oracle has fallen behind the tech giants in the marketplace, yet is notching one legal and regulatory win after another against them, Google especially. In response, Google spokesman Jose Castaneda denounced Oracle's "cloak-and-dagger lobbying campaign," saying "while Oracle describes itself as the biggest data broker on the planet, we're focused on keeping consumers' information safe and secure."

Signal, in a blog post: Yesterday, the BBC ran a story with the factually untrue headline, "Cellebrite claimed to have cracked chat app's encryption." This is false. Not only can Cellebrite not break Signal encryption, but Cellebrite never even claimed to be able to. Since we weren't actually given the opportunity to comment in that story, we're posting this to help to clarify things for anyone who may have seen the headline. Last week, Cellebrite posted a pretty embarrassing (for them) technical article to their blog documenting the "advanced techniques" they use to parse Signal on an Android device they physically have with the screen unlocked. This is a situation where someone is holding an unlocked phone in their hands and could simply open the app to look at the messages in it. Their post was about doing the same thing programmatically (which is equally simple), but they wrote an entire article about the "challenges" they overcame, and concluded that "...it required extensive research on many different fronts to create new capabilities from scratch."

[...] What really happened: If you have your device, Cellebrite is not your concern. It is important to understand that any story about Cellebrite Physical Analyzer starts with someone other than you physically holding your device, with the screen unlocked, in their hands. Cellebrite does not even try to intercept messages, voice/video, or live communication, much less "break the encryption" of that communication. They don't do live surveillance of any kind.

Cellebrite is not magic. Imagine that someone is physically holding your device, with the screen unlocked, in their hands. If they wanted to create a record of what's on your device right then, they could simply open each app on your device and take screenshots of what's there. This is what Cellebrite Physical Analyser does. It automates the process of creating that record. However, because it's automated, it has to know how each app is structured, so it's actually less reliable than if someone were to simply open the apps and manually take the screenshots. It is not magic, it is mediocre enterprise software. Cellebrite did not "accidentally reveal" their secrets. This article, and others, were written based on a poor interpretation of a Cellebrite blog post about adding Signal support to Cellebrite Physical Analyzer. Cellebrite posted something with a lot of detail, then quickly took it down and replaced it with something that has no detail. This is not because they "revealed" anything about some super advanced technique they have developed (remember, this is a situation where someone could just open the app and look at the messages). They took it down for the exact opposite reason: it made them look bad.

Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, shares in a series of tweets: My students Max and Tushar Jois spent most of the summer going through every piece of public documentation, forensics report, and legal document we could find to figure out how police were "breaking phone encryption." This was prompted by a claim from someone knowledgeable, who claimed that forensics companies no longer had the ability to break the Apple Secure Enclave Processor, which would make it very hard to crack the password of a locked, recent iPhone. We wrote an enormous report -- a draft of which you can read here (PDF) about what we found, which we'll release after the holidays. The TL;DR is kind of depressing: Authorities don't need to break phone encryption in most cases, because modern phone encryption sort of sucks.

I'll focus on Apple here but Android is very similar. The top-level is that, to break encryption on an Apple phone you need to get the encryption keys. Since these are derived from the user's passcode, you either need to guess that -- or you need the user to have entered it. Guessing the password is hard on recent iPhones because there's (at most) a 10-guess limit enforced by the Secure Enclave Processor (SEP). There's good evidence that at one point in 2018 a company called GrayKey had a SEP exploit that did this for the X. See photo. There is really no solid evidence that this exploit still works on recent-model iPhones, after 2018. If anything, the evidence is against it. So if they can't crack the passcode, how is law enforcement still breaking into iPhones (because they definitely are)? The boring answer very likely is that police aren't guessing suspects' passcodes. They're relying on the fact that the owner probably typed it in. Not after the phone is seized, in most cases. Beforehand. The full thread on Twitter here.

DeepMind's latest AI program can attain "superhuman performance" in tasks without needing to be given the rules. From a report: Like the research hub's earlier artificial intelligence agents, MuZero achieved mastery in dozens of old Atari video games, chess, and the Asian board games of Go and Shogi. But unlike its predecessors, it had to work out their rules for itself. It is already being put to practical use to find a new way to encode videos, which could slash YouTube's costs. [...] MuZero could soon be put to practical use too. Dr Silver said DeepMind was already using it to try to invent a new kind of video compression. "If you look at data traffic on the internet, the majority of it is video, so if you can compress video more effectively you can make massive savings," he explained.

"And initial experiments with MuZero show you can actually make quite significant gains, which we're quite excited about." He declined to be drawn on when or how Google might put this to use beyond saying more details would be released in the new year. However, as Google owns the world's biggest video-sharing platform -- YouTube -- it has the potential to be a big money-saver. DeepMind is not the first to try and create an agent that both models the dynamics of the environment it is placed in and carries out tree searches -- deciding how to proceed by looking several steps ahead to determine the best outcome. However, previous attempts have struggled to deal with the complexity of "visually rich" challenges, such as those posed by old video games like Ms Pac-Man.

Google chief Sundar Pichai has warned that "regulation can get it wrong" as his firm is increasingly targeted by antitrust moves. From a report: Last week, the European Commission set out new regulation to curb the power of big tech. The Digital Services Act hopes to increase transparency and competition for tech firms. The legislation will force firms, such as Google, to publish the algorithms used for rankings, as well as to police their own content. Big firms could be fined between six per cent and 10 per cent of global annual turnover if they fail to comply. In the interview with the FT, Pichai gave a guarded welcome to the regulation. He said: "I think it's an important regulation to think through and get right." However, he warns that "Governments need to think through these important principles. Sometimes we can design very open ecosystems, they can have security implications." He added that the failure of GDPR to break down the monopoly of big tech "shows that for a lot of these things, the answers are nuanced, and regulation can get it wrong."

Last Tuesday, Facebook launched what it portrayed as a full-throated defense of small businesses. But while the $750 billion company's public relations effort has presented a united front with small businesses, some Facebook employees complained about what they called a self-serving campaign that bordered on hypocrisy, according to internal comments and audio of a presentation to workers that were obtained by BuzzFeed News. From a report: A change in Apple's iOS 14 mobile operating system -- which requires iPhone owners to opt in to allow companies to track them across other apps and websites -- hurts Facebook, some employees argued on the company's private message boards, and their employer was just using small businesses as a shield. "It feels like we are trying to justify doing a bad thing by hiding behind people with a sympathetic message," one engineer wrote in response to an internal post about the campaign from Dan Levy, Facebook's vice president for ads.

"Aren't we worried that our stance protecting [small- and medium-sized businesses] will backfire as people see it as 'FB protecting their own business' instead?" read one top-voted question. "People want 'privacy,'" read another. "FB objecting here will be viewed with cynicism. Did we know this would be bad PR, and decide to publish anyway?" "How do we pick a message that looks less self serving?" one employee asked.

The Federal Communications Commission's ongoing sale of wireless licenses has fetched more than $66.4 billion after three weeks of bidding, a record sum that could alter cellphone carriers' prospects for the next decade. From a report: The auction proceeds have already topped the $44.9 billion raised in 2015 by an earlier sale of midrange cellular licenses, which U.S. cellphone carriers used at the time to enhance their 4G service. Those companies are now investing billions of dollars in the next wave of fifth-generation coverage. The 5G standard promises to speed the flow of data to phones and other wireless devices like personal computers, cars and industrial machinery. The recent bids have blown past Wall Street's highest forecasts, suggesting that several companies are fighting over the most valuable wireless rights. The 5G auction kicked off Dec. 8 and will pause for the holidays until Jan. 4, when total bids could move even higher. Each bid is swathed in secrecy until the auction process ends. Analysts expect big names like AT&T and Verizon Communications to walk away with a large share of the licenses to match assets that rival T-Mobile captured with its February takeover of Sprint.

Alphabet's Google this year moved to tighten control over its scientists' papers by launching a "sensitive topics" review, and in at least three cases requested authors refrain from casting its technology in a negative light, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing internal communications and interviews with researchers involved in the work. From a report: Google's new review procedure asks that researchers consult with legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy. "Advances in technology and the growing complexity of our external environment are increasingly leading to situations where seemingly inoffensive projects raise ethical, reputational, regulatory or legal issues," one of the pages for research staff stated. Reuters could not determine the date of the post, though three current employees said the policy began in June. The "sensitive topics" process adds a round of scrutiny to Google's standard review of papers for pitfalls such as disclosing of trade secrets, eight current and former employees said. For some projects, Google officials have intervened in later stages. A senior Google manager reviewing a study on content recommendation technology shortly before publication this summer told authors to "take great care to strike a positive tone," according to internal correspondence read to Reuters.