Starting in 2021, Walmart will use fully autonomous box trucks to make deliveries in Arkansas without any safety drivers in the vehicles. The Verge reports: The big-box retailer has been working with a startup called Gatik on a delivery pilot for 18 months. Gatik, which is based in Palo Alto and Toronto, outfitted several multitemperature box trucks with sensors and software to enable autonomous driving. Since last year, those trucks have been operating on a two-mile route between a "dark store" (a store that stocks items for fulfillment but isn't open to the public) and a nearby Neighborhood Market in Bentonville, Arkansas. Since then, the vehicles have racked up 70,000 miles in autonomous mode with a safety driver.

Next year, the companies intend to start incorporating fully autonomous trucks into those deliveries. And they plan on expanding to a second location in Louisiana, where trucks with safety drivers will begin delivering items from a "live" Walmart Supercenter to a designated pickup location where customers can retrieve their orders. Those routes, which will begin next year, will be longer than the Arkansas operation -- 20-miles between New Orleans and Metairie, Louisiana.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Republican US senator from West Virginia has asked the government to block broadband funding earmarked for Frontier Communications, saying that the ISP is not capable of delivering gigabit-speed Internet service to all required locations. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) outlined her concerns in a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai last week. Capito told Pai that Frontier has mismanaged previous government funding and seems to lack both the technological capabilities and financial ability to deliver on its new obligations.

Frontier, which filed for bankruptcy in April, is one of 180 ISPs that won funding in the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) reverse-auction results announced last week. Frontier is due to receive $370.9 million over 10 years to bring broadband to 127,188 homes and businesses in eight states. Frontier's biggest payout is in West Virginia, where it is due to receive $247.6 million over 10 years to expand its broadband network to 79,391 locations. Frontier won over two-thirds of the funding that the FCC allocated to West Virginia despite failing to hit FCC deadlines for a previous round of subsidized broadband deployment in West Virginia and other states. Under the previous funding allocated in 2015 via the FCC's Connect America Fund, Frontier was originally required to meet the build deadlines by the end of 2020. Frontier told Ars today that it will now meet that deadline "by the end of 2021."

Capito urged Pai to block Frontier's new funding by rejecting the ISP's long-form application, which must be completed by winning bidders in order to receive the allocated money. "The stakes are simply too high to provide nearly $250 million to a company that does not have the capability to deliver on the commitments made to the FCC," she wrote. Under FCC rules, winning bidders must deploy broadband to 40 percent of required locations in each state within three calendar years, to 60 percent within four years, 80 percent within five years, and 100 percent within six years. Because Frontier won funding in the gigabit tier, it is required to offer download speeds of 1Gbps and upload speeds of 500Mbps along with monthly usage allowances of at least 2TB.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Microsoft and a coalition of tech companies have intervened today to seize and sinkhole a domain that played a central role in the SolarWinds hack, ZDNet has learned from sources familiar with the matter. The domain in question is avsvmcloud[.]com, which served as command and control (C&C) server for malware delivered to around 18,000 SolarWinds customers via a trojanized update for the company's Orion app. SolarWinds Orion updates versions 2019.4 through 2020.2.1, released between March 2020 and June 2020, contained a strain of malware named SUNBURST (also known as Solorigate). Once installed on a computer, the malware would sit dormant for 12 to 14 days and then ping a subdomain of avsvmcloud[.]com.

According to analysis from security firm FireEye, the C&C domain would reply with a DNS response that contained a CNAME field with information on another domain from where the SUNBURST malware would obtain further instructions and additional payloads to execute on an infected company's network. Earlier today, a coalition of tech companies seized and sinkholed avsvmcloud[.]com, transferring the domain into Microsoft's possession. Sources familiar with today's actions described the takedown as "protective work" done to prevent the threat actor behind the SolarWinds hack from delivering new orders to infected computers.

Microsoft is rolling out an update today that brings native support for Apple's M1 chip to the Windows productivity suite. "The apps getting the updates are Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote," reports The Verge. "Notably absent, however, is Teams." From the report: The updates are making the apps universal ones -- meaning these versions will run on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, so any upcoming updates or features will be coming at the same time for both platforms. [...] Office users who have automatic updates turned on should have the new versions sometime today, and anyone else can update it through the Mac App Store or Microsoft's AutoUpdate software (depending on if you downloaded Office through the App Store or directly from Microsoft). Outlook users will get not only native Apple Silicon support, but support for iCloud accounts as well, allowing them to sync their email, contacts, and calendars to the app if they use Apple's service to store them. Teams isn't included in today's rollout of updates, but Microsoft says they're working on it. No timeline is available, though.

When large companies like Netflix or Amazon want to test the resilience of their systems, they use chaos engineering tools designed to help them simulate worst-case scenarios and find potential issues before they even happen. Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels introduced the company's Chaos Engineering as a Service offering called AWS Fault Injection Simulator. From a report: The name may lack a certain marketing panache, but Vogels said that the service is designed to help bring this capability to all companies. "We believe that chaos engineering is for everyone, not just shops running at Amazon or Netflix scale. And that's why today I'm excited to pre-announce a new service built to simplify the process of running chaos experiments in the cloud," Vogels said. As he explained, the goal of chaos engineering is to understand how your application responds to issues by injecting failures into your application, usually running these experiments against production systems. AWS Fault Injection Simulator offers a fully managed service to run these experiments on applications running on AWS hardware.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On an earnings call two months ago, SolarWinds Chief Executive Kevin Thompson touted how far the company had gone during his 11 years at the helm. There was not a database or an IT deployment model out there to which his Austin, Texas-based company did not provide some level of monitoring or management, he told analysts on the Oct. 27 call. "We don't think anyone else in the market is really even close in terms of the breadth of coverage we have," he said. "We manage everyone's network gear." Now that dominance has become a liability -- an example of how the workhorse software that helps glue organizations together can turn toxic when it is subverted by sophisticated hackers. On Monday, SolarWinds confirmed that Orion -- its flagship network management software -- had served as the unwitting conduit for a sprawling international cyberespionage operation. The hackers inserted malicious code into Orion software updates pushed out to nearly 18,000 customers.

[...] Cybersecurity experts across government and private industry are still struggling to understand the scope of the damage, which some are already calling one of the most consequential breaches in recent memory. [...] Experts are reviewing their notes to find old examples of substandard security at the company. Security researcher Vinoth Kumar told Reuters that, last year, he alerted the company that anyone could access SolarWinds' update server by using the password "solarwinds123" "This could have been done by any attacker, easily," Kumar said. Others -- including Kyle Hanslovan, the cofounder of Maryland-based cybersecurity company Huntress -- noticed that, even days after SolarWinds realized their software had been compromised, the malicious updates were still available for download.

High-frequency traders are using an experimental type of cable to speed up their systems by billionths of a second, the latest move in a technological arms race to execute stock trades as quickly as possible. From a report: The cable, called hollow-core fiber, is a next-generation version of the fiber-optic cable used to deliver broadband internet to homes and businesses. Made of glass, such cables carry data encoded as beams of light. But instead of being solid, hollow-core fiber is empty inside, with dozens of parallel, air-filled channels narrower than a human hair. Because light travels nearly 50% faster through air than glass, it takes about one-third less time to send data through hollow-core fiber than through the same length of standard fiber. The difference is often just a minuscule fraction of a second. But in high-frequency trading, that can make the difference between profits and losses. HFT firms use sophisticated algorithms and ultrafast data networks to execute rapid-fire trades in stocks, options and futures. Many are secretive about their trading strategies and technology.

Hollow-core fiber is the latest in a series of advances that fast traders have used to try to outrace their competition. A decade ago, a company called Spread Networks spent about $300 million to lay fiber-optic cable in a straight line from Chicago to New York, so traders could send data back and forth along the route in just 13 milliseconds, or thousandths of a second. Within a few years the link was superseded by microwave networks that reduced transmission times along the route to less than nine milliseconds. HFT firms have also used lasers to zip data between the data centers of the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, and they have embedded their algorithms in superfast computer chips. Now, faced with the limits of physics and technology, traders are left fighting over nanoseconds. "The time increments of these improvements have gotten markedly smaller," said Michael Persico, chief executive of Anova Financial Networks, a technology provider that runs communications networks used by HFT firms. High-frequency trading is controversial, with critics saying that some ultrafast strategies amount to an invisible tax on investors. Industry representatives say such criticism is unfounded.

Facebook will shift all its users in the United Kingdom into user agreements with the corporate headquarters in California, moving them out of their current relationship with Facebook's Irish unit and out of reach of Europe's privacy laws. From a report: The change takes effect next year and follows a similar move announced in February by Google here. Those companies and others have European head offices in Dublin, and the UK's exit from the EU will change its legal relationship with Ireland, which remains in the Union. Initially, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters about the move. Facebook later confirmed it. "Like other companies, Facebook has had to make changes to respond to Brexit and will be transferring legal responsibilities and obligations for UK users from Facebook Ireland to Facebook. There will be no change to the privacy controls or the services Facebook offers to people in the UK," the company's UK arm said.

Daniel Miessler, a widely respected infosec professional in San Francisco, writes about design and user experience choices Google has made across its services in recent years: I've been writing for probably a decade about how bad Google's GUI is for Google Analytics, Google Apps, and countless of their other properties -- not to mention their multiple social media network attempts, like Google+ and Wave. Back then it was super annoying, but kind of ok. They're a hardcore engineering group, and their backend services are without equal. But lately it's just becoming too much.

1. Even Gmail is a cesspool at this point. Nobody would ever design a webmail interface like that, starting from scratch.
2. What happened to Google Docs? Why does it not look and behave more like Notion, or Quip, or any of the other alternatives that made progress in the last 5-10 years?
3. What college course do I take to manage a Google Analytics property?
4. Google just rolled out Google Analytics 4 -- I think -- and the internet is full of people asking the same question I am. "Is this a real rollout?"

[...] My questions are simple:
1. How the hell is this possible? I get it 10 years ago. But then they came out with the new design language. Materialize, or whatever it was. Cool story, and cool visuals. But it's not about the graphics, it's about the experience.
2. How can you be sitting on billions of dollars and be unable to hire product managers that can create usable interfaces?
3. How can you run Gmail on an interface that's tangibly worse than anything else out there?
4. How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?

I've heard people say that Google has become the new Microsoft, or the new Oracle, but damn -- at least Microsoft is innovating. At least Oracle has a sailing team, or whatever else they do. I'm being emotional at this point.

Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces. Focus on the experience. Focus on simplicity. And use navigation language that's similar across your various properties, so that I'll know what to do whether I'm managing my Apps account, or my domains, or my Analytics. You guys are awesome at so many things. Make the commitment to fix how we interact with them.

The European Union Tuesday unveiled sweeping new proposals to control tech industry giants as "gatekeepers" who could be fined up to 10% of their revenue for breaking EU rules on competition. From a report: In the EU, "proposals," once introduced, are likely to become law in some form, even if details change dramatically through a slow feedback process. The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) would set standards for treating large online platforms as "gatekeepers," based chiefly on how many users they have. Gatekeepers would be barred from favoring their own products over those of rivals -- think Google steering users to its own restaurant reviews over Yelp's, for instance -- or from using data in an exclusionary way that they've collected to develop their own products. They'd either have to avoid using such data or make it available to competitors to tap as well.

Gatekeepers that break the rules could be subject to fines as high as 10% of annual global revenue. The Digital Services Act (DSA) is aimed at making big platforms more accountable for user posts that break EU member nations' laws around illicit materials, such as Germany's prohibition on speech that glorifies Nazism. Large platforms that don't remove illegal posts following a government order could face fines of up to 6% of annual revenue.

Germany's biggest air-ambulance operator has ordered two electric air taxis to evaluate their potential in a pioneering role speeding doctors to patients. From a report: ADAC Luftrettung, part of the country's leading motoring association, will begin testing the 18-rotor Volocopter GmbH aircraft from 2023 after the simulation of 26,000 emergency responses in two cities indicated that it could fulfill a rapid-transport role currently performed by a costlier helicopter fleet. The joint announcement Tuesday provides further evidence of the commercial potential of vertical takeoff air taxis, coming less than a week after Singapore said it plans to launch the world's first such service. Germany may need more than 250 bases for the craft, according to ADAC, which plans to operate them alongside its choppers. Though the VoloCity model has no room for a third person in its cabin with the pilot and medic, only 25% of helicopter missions today require a casualty to be evacuated by air, it said.

Reddit said in a statement on Sunday that it has acquired TikTok rival Dubsmash. It did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. CNN reports: Dubsmash allows users to create and share video content, and it's especially popular with young, diverse audiences. About 25% of Black teens in the United States use the app. Women make up 70% of Dubsmash users, and roughly 30% of users log in every day, according to Reddit. The New York-based platform enables more than 1 billion video views per month, Reddit added.

Dubsmash's three co-founders, Suchit Dash, Jonas Druppel, and Tim Specht, will be joining Reddit with immediate effect. While Dubsmash will maintain its own platform and brand, its video creation tools will be integrated into Reddit, which is best known for its freewheeling message boards. Reddit has allowed users to upload and share their own videos since 2017, and the segment has grown quickly. The number of videos posted to the platform has doubled in 2020, according to the company.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: [O]ver the past decade, much of Europe's night train network has been cut. 2013 and 2014 saw the culling of lines from Paris to Madrid, Rome and Barcelona; Amsterdam to Prague and Warsaw; and Berlin to Paris and Kiev. For many, it seemed the end of the line was nigh. But recently there has been a resurgence of night trains across Europe. And on December 8, four national rail providers teamed up to announce new routes between 13 European cities. Spearheaded by Austria's OBB, in conjunction with Germany's Deutsche Bahn, France's SNCF and Swiss Federal Railways, the collaboration will see four new "Nightjet" routes over the next four years. By December 2021, Vienna-Munich-Paris and Zurich-Cologne-Amsterdam will be up and running. Two years later, a Vienna/Berlin to Brussels/Paris will launch. And in December 2024, sleeper trains will start running between Zurich and Barcelona.

While countries like Germany and France quietly phased out their routes, OBB saw a future, and swept in to pick up many of the abandoned Deutsche Bahn routes, including Munich to Rome, and Berlin to Hamburg. Both [Nicolas Forien, part of Back On Track, a European network arguing for cross-border sleeper trains] and [Mark Smith of train website The Man in Seat 61] put the resurgence of the services down to the Austrian rail network. "There are high costs, but a lot is down to attitude, willingness and management focus," says Smith, who praises OBB CEO Andreas Mattha, who took over in 2016, for "making night trains wash their faces commercially." On Austrian railways, "Nightjet" sleeper trains now make up almost 20% of long-distance rail traffic, he says -- a far cry from the 5% in Germany, before Deutsche Bahn let them slide. "Finding passengers isn't a problem -- and it's becoming easier as people become fed up with the airline experience, and want to cut their carbon footprint," he says.

Apple is officially launching its so-called "nutrition label" privacy disclosures for all iOS device owners running the latest version of iOS 14. The Verge reports: Apple says the new labels will be required for apps on all of its platforms -- that includes iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS -- and they will have to be up to date and accurate every time a developer submits a new update. Apple is also holding itself to the same standard, something the company clarified last week when Facebook-owned WhatsApp criticized the company for an apparent inconsistency in its requirements, before Apple said it, too, will provide labels for all its own software. The company's own first-party apps will all have the same disclosures on their App Store product pages. In the event an app doesn't have an App Store product page because it cannot be removed, like the Messages app, Apple says it will be providing privacy label information on the web. Every piece of software on the App Store will also have its privacy label viewable on the web, too.

As for how the labels are structured, Apple has broken down data collection into three categories: "data used to track you," "data linked to you," and "data not linked to you." Tracking in this context means the app developer is linking data from the app -- like personal information, or data collected from your device, such as location data -- with other data from other companies' apps or websites for the purpose of targeted advertising or some other ad-related metric. Apple says it's also using the term tracking here to mean sharing user or device information with companies that sell it, like data brokers.

The "data linked to you" portion of the label is any data that can be used to identify you. That means data gleaned from using the app or having an account with the service or platform, and any data pulled from the device itself that could be used to create a profile for advertising purposes. "Data not linked to you" is the portion of the privacy label that clarifies when certain data types, like location data or browsing history, are not being linked to you in any identifiable fashion. Apple has specific, developer-focused information on the new labels at its developer portal page, with more general information available on the consumer-facing page.

T-Mobile last week introduced the market's newest 5G moniker: "Ultra Capacity." The label, writes blog LightReading, will stew alongside "5G Ultra Wideband," "Extended Range 5G," "5G+," "5Ge," "5GTF," "5G Nationwide" and plain-old "5G" in the US wireless industry, ensuring that if American mobile customers aren't confused yet, it's only a matter of time before they're hopelessly bewildered by operators' thesaurus-toting marketing executives. So here's that 5G lexicon everyone is apparently going to need, the blog reports:
5G Ultra Capacity: This is the new brand that T-Mobile is applying to its 5G network running in the midband 2.5GHz spectrum it acquired from Sprint, as well as its highband, millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum. The operator said customers with "5G Ultra Capacity" phones and coverage can expect speeds around 300 Mbit/s up to peaks of 1 Gbit/s.
5G Ultra Wideband: This is the label Verizon has applied to its 5G network running in its own mmWave spectrum. Due to the physics of signal propagation in such spectrum, mmWave transmitters can't reach receivers that are more than a few thousand feet away.
5G+: This is the label AT&T has applied to its own mmWave network. However, the operator appears to be focusing its energies on 5G in other spectrum bands.
Extended Range 5G: This is the label T-Mobile has given to its 5G network in its lowband 600MHz spectrum, which supports slower speeds than mmWave or midband networks. As you can imagine, given the name, signals in Extended Range 5G go much, much further than signals in mmWave spectrum, again due to the physics of signal propagation in lowband spectrum like 600MHz. Verizon and AT&T also operate extensive lowband 5G networks.
5G Nationwide: This is the label Verizon has applied to its lowband 5G network. It's similar to T-Mobile's "Extended Range 5G," although T-Mobile has dedicated some 600MHz spectrum to 5G while Verizon is using a technology called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) to put both 4G and 5G signals in its lowband spectrum.
5Ge: This is the moniker AT&T gave to its 4G LTE network in 2018, sparking plenty of controversy. The action allowed AT&T to quickly offer 5G icons to most of its customers without actually having to deploy a 5G network that adheres to the 3GPP's official 5G technology standard.
5GTF: This is the technology label that Verizon tacitly applied to its initial 5G Home fixed wireless service running in its mmWave spectrum. The network initially did not work on the official 3GPP 5G technology standard and instead worked on a derivation developed by Verizon and its vendors. However, Verizon has since shifted its 5G Home service to the official 3GPP 5G standard.
5G: This is the catch-all label that operators are applying to whatever their marketing teams haven't gotten their fingers on yet. T-Mobile used "5G" for a while until it introduced "Ultra Capacity," and AT&T still uses "5G" for its lowband 5G network.

Zoox, the self-driving startup owned by Amazon.com, unveiled a fully autonomous electric vehicle with no steering wheel that can drive day and night on a single charge. From a report: The vehicle, which Zoox describes as a driverless carriage or robotaxi, can carry as many as four passengers. With a motor at each end, it travels in either direction and maxes out at 75 miles per hour. Two battery packs, one under each row of seats, generate enough juice for 16 hours of run time before recharging, the company said. To commercialize the technology, Zoox plans to launch an app-based ride-hailing service in cities like San Francisco and Las Vegas. "This is really about re-imagining transportation," Zoox Chief Executive Officer Aicha Evans said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. "Not only do we have the capital required, we have the long-term vision." The company also plans to launch ride-hailing services in other countries, Evans said. Executives didn't say how much rides would cost but that they would be "affordable" and competitive with services operated by Uber Technologies and Lyft. Nor did they say when the service would launch but confirmed it wouldn't happen in 2021.

The Federal Trade Commission will announce Monday that it's launching a new inquiry into the privacy and data collection practices of major tech firms including Amazon, TikTok owner ByteDance, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook as well as its subsidiary WhatsApp, Axios reported Monday. From the report: The move comes amid broader scrutiny for the industry and appears to be a wide-reaching inquiry into everything major tech companies know about their users and what they do with that data, as well as their broader business plans. The FTC is asking for a large trove of information and documents from the above platforms, plus Discord, Reddit and Snap. The agency wants much of the usage and engagement data the platforms collect on their users, the metrics they use for measuring such things and short- and long-term business strategies, among many other areas of inquiry. In launching the study, the FTC is using its authority to do wide-ranging studies for no specific law enforcement purpose.

With the pandemic still in full swing and the first doses of a coronavirus vaccine just starting to ship in the United States, Google has pushed back the planned return to the office by a few months, to September 2021. From a report: But even as it extends the remote work period for most of its staff, Google is laying out a series of proposed changes that may substantially alter how its employees and people at other technology companies will work. In an email to the staff on Sunday night, Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google's parent company, Alphabet, said the company was testing the idea of a "flexible workweek" once it is safe to return to the office. Under the pilot plan, employees would be expected to work at least three days a week in the office for "collaboration days" while working from home the other days. "We are testing a hypothesis that a flexible work model will lead to greater productivity, collaboration, and well-being," Mr. Pichai wrote in an email obtained by The New York Times. "No company at our scale has ever created a fully hybrid work force model -- though a few are starting to test it -- so it will be interesting to try."

An anonymous reader writes: Pornhub is removing all videos on its site that weren't uploaded by official content partners or members of its model program, a fundamental shift in the way one of the largest porn sites in the world operates. This means a significant portion of its videos will disappear. On Sunday evening, before the content purge, Pornhub hosted around 13.5 million videos according to the number displayed on the site's search bar, a large number of them from unverified accounts. On Monday morning, that number was down to 3 million, meaning Pornhub removed most of the videos on its site. "As part of our policy to ban unverified uploaders, we have now also suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or members of the Model Program," according to Pornhub's announcement. "This means every piece of Pornhub content is from verified uploaders, a requirement that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute." Pornhub made the policy change last week to ban all unverified users from uploading or downloading content to the site, and said it would expand its moderation efforts. But by Thursday, Mastercard and Visa announced that they'd both stop processing payments with the site altogether. Visa's announcement specifically stated it would drop all of the Mindgeek network, which includes a number of adult sites, including Redtube, Youporn, XTube, and Brazzers.

Tech giants deemed to be gatekeepers could face fines as high as 10% of annual revenue if they don't comply with new European Union rules on data usage to be unveiled Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported Monday, citing a draft. From the report: Companies that could include Google, Amazon, and Apple will be banned from using any data from business users to compete with them or from treating their own services more favorably in rankings, among other obligations. Nasdaq futures pared gains. A company that "systemically infringes" the obligations could face orders by the European Commission to make behavioral and structural changes, such as divesting businesses. Companies will be considered to be in systematic non-compliance if the EU has issued at least three fines within a period of five years. The new Digital Markets Act will target "gatekeeper" firms, defined by the European Commission by a number of criteria, including the number of users in the millions and overall revenue in the billions of dollars, as well as their significant impact on the single market, the document said. The designations will be updated by the commission every two years, according to the document.