Facebook is being investigated in Germany for linking usage of its Oculus VR headset to having a Facebook account. TechCrunch reports: Germany's Federal Cartel Office (aka, the Bundeskartellamt) said today that it's instigated abuse proceedings against Facebook to examine the linkage between Oculus VR products and its eponymous social network. In a statement, its president, Andreas Mundt, said: "In the future, the use of the new Oculus glasses requires the user to also have a Facebook account. Linking virtual reality products and the group's social network in this way could constitute a prohibited abuse of dominance by Facebook. With its social network Facebook holds a dominant position in Germany and is also already an important player in the emerging but growing VR (virtual reality) market. We intend to examine whether and to what extent this tying arrangement will affect competition in both areas of activity."

Reached for comment on the FCO Oculus proceeding, a Facebook spokesperson sent us this statement: "While Oculus devices are not currently available for sale in Germany, we will cooperate fully with the Bundeskartellamt and are confident we can demonstrate that there is no basis to the investigation."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Brave Software, maker of the Brave Web browser, is introducing a news reader that's designed to protect user privacy by preventing parties -- both internal and third party -- from tracking the sites, articles, and story topics people view. Brave Today, as the service is called, is using technology that the company says sets it apart from news services offered by Google and Facebook. It's designed to deliver personalized news feeds in a way that leaves no trail for Brave, ISPs, and third parties to track. The new service is part of Brave's strategy of differentiating its browser as more privacy-friendly than its competitors'.

Key to Brave Today is a new content delivery network the company is unveiling. Typically, news services use a single CDN to cache content and then serve it to users. This allows the CDN or the service using it to see both the IP address and news feed of each user, and over time, that data can help services build detailed profiles of a person's interests. The Brave Today CDN takes a different approach. It's designed in a way that separates a user's IP address from the content they request. One entity offers a load-balancing service that receives TLS-encrypted traffic from the user. The load balancer then passes the traffic on to the CDN that processes the request.

The load balancer knows the user's IP address but, because the request is encrypted, has no visibility into the content the user is seeking. The CDN, meanwhile, sees only the request but has no way of knowing the IP address that's making it. Responses are delivered in reverse order. To prevent the data from being combined, Brave says that it will use one provider for load balancing and a different one for content delivery. To prevent the load-balancing provider from using the size of the requests and responses to infer the contents of the encrypted data, the service will also use a technique called padding, which adds characters to the plaintext before it's encrypted. The CDN uses several other techniques to preserve the anonymity of users. Among them: stripping out various headers that could be used to identify the person making the request. Furthermore, Brave is also taking steps to shield user information from its own employees. "... [T]he company has configured its account with the load-balancing provider to restrict access to its logging resources," reports Ars. "The load-balancing provider also doesn't provide the ability for customers to use the proxy protocol to inject the requester's IP address into outgoing requests. In case that changes, however, Brave has also entered into a contract with the load balancer that restricts access to logs or use of the protocol, even if Brave asks."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Mastercard Inc said on Thursday it was ending the use of its cards on Pornhub after its investigation confirmed the presence of unlawful content on the sex videos site. Pornhub said on Tuesday it had banned video downloads and was allowing only certain partner accounts to upload content after a New York Times column reported that many videos posted on the adult website depicted sexual assault of children. The newspaper column had also described some videos on the site as recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. Pornhub has denied the allegations. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman asked Visa Inc to follow suit. UPDATE: Following Mastercard's termination, an official Visa account tweeted: "Given the allegations of illegal activity, Visa is suspending Pornhub's acceptance privileges pending the completion of our ongoing investigation. We are instructing the financial institutions who serve MindGeek to suspend processing of payments through the Visa network."

"These actions are exceptionally disappointing, as they come just two days after Pornhub instituted the most far-reaching safeguards in user-generated platform history," Pornhub said in a statement. "Unverified users are now banned from uploading content -- a policy no other platform has put in place, including Facebook, which reported 84 million instances of child sexual abuse material over the last three years. In comparison, the Internet Watch Foundation reported 118 incidents on Pornhub over the last three years. This news is crushing for the hundreds of thousands of models who rely on our platform for their livelihoods."

Apple has moved its self-driving car unit under the leadership of top artificial intelligence executive John Giannandrea, who will oversee the company's continued work on an autonomous system that could eventually be used in its own car, Bloomberg reports. From the report: The project, known as Titan, is run day-to-day by Doug Field. His team of hundreds of engineers have moved to Giannandrea's artificial intelligence and machine-learning group, according to people familiar with the change. Previously, Field reported to Bob Mansfield, Apple's former senior vice president of hardware engineering. Mansfield has now fully retired from Apple, leading to Giannandrea taking over.

Giannandrea joined Apple in 2018 as its vice president of AI Strategy and Machine Learning before being promoted to Apple's executive team as a senior vice president later that year. He ran Google's machine-learning and search teams before that. At Apple, in addition to the car project, he is in charge of Siri and machine-learning technologies across Apple's products. Mansfield initially retired from Apple in 2012, only to return for less than a year as its senior vice president in charge of chip technology. Mansfield stepped down from that role in 2013 and then remained as a part-time consultant.

Joel Hruska, writing at ExtremeTech: It's not just a question of whether top-end hardware is available, but whether midrange and last-gen hardware is selling at reasonable prices. If you want to go AMD, be aware that Ryzen 5000 CPUs are hard to find and the 6800 and 6800 XT are vanishingly rare. The upper-range Ryzen 3000 CPUs available on Amazon and Newegg are also selling for well above their prices six months ago. If you want to build an Intel system, the situation is a little different. A number of the 9th and 10th-gen chips are actually priced at MSRP and not too hard to find. The Core i7-9700K has fallen to $269, for example, and it's still one of Intel's fastest gaming CPUs. At that price, paired with a Z370 motherboard, you could build a gaming-focused system, so long as you don't actually need a new high-end GPU. The Core i7-10700K is $359, which isn't quite as competitive, but it squares off reasonably well against chips like the 3700X at $325. Amazon and Newegg both report the 3600X selling for more, at $400 and $345, respectively.

But even if these prices are appealing, the current GPU market makes building a gaming system much above lower-midrange to midrange a non-starter. Radeon 6000 GPUs and RTX 3000 GPUs are both almost impossible to find, and the older, slower, and less feature-rich cards that you can buy are almost all selling for more today than they were six months ago. Not every GPU has been kicked into the stratosphere, but between the cards you can't buy and the cards you shouldn't buy, there's a limited number of deals currently on the market. Your best bet is to set up price alerts on specific SKUs you are watching with the vendor in question. There is some limited good news, though: DRAM and SSDs are both still reasonably priced. DRAM and SSD prices are both expected to decline 10-15 percent through Q4 2020 compared with the previous quarter, and there are good deals to be had on both. [...] Power supply prices look reasonable, too, and motherboard availability looks solid. If you don't need to buy a GPU right now and you're willing to or prefer to use Intel, there's a more reasonable case to be made for building a system. But if you need a high-end GPU and/or want a high-end Ryzen chip to go with it, you may be better off shopping prebuilt systems or waiting a few more months.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than one billion people in India today have a mobile connection, thanks in part to the proliferation of low-cost Android smartphones and the world's cheapest mobile data plans in recent years. This scale was unimaginable just three decades ago, when India had fewer than 2.5 million telephones in the country. One of the earliest and most pivotal efforts that expanded the reach of telephones in the country took place in the late 1980s. That was when the Indian government backed the idea of setting up telephone booths, or public call offices, across cities and towns. No longer did people need to buy expensive telephones, or pay exorbitant fees and bills. A person could just walk to a nearby mom and pop store, place a call for a couple of cents and move on.

On Wednesday, India's cabinet approved a proposal that seeks to replicate the decades-old strategy -- and its success -- with democratizing Wi-Fi in the world's second-largest internet market. India's IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the government will launch PM WANI (Prime Minister Wi-Fi Access Network Interface) to "unleash a massive network in the country." The neighborhood stores that served as public call offices could now be public data offices, he said. To make the program a success, the government will not charge any license or registration fee, he said.

The Federal Communication Commission ordered carriers to remove network equipment that poses a security risk, taking another step aimed at China's Huawei and ZTE. From a report: The agency in a 5-0 vote also said it would establish a list of proscribed equipment, and it set up a program to reimburse carriers for replacing suspect gear that will start once Congress devotes an estimated $1.6 billion. The agency said the actions, which affect providers that take federal subsidies, implement a law Congress passed in March. The FCC, Congress and President Donald Trump's administration are confronting China on a range of issues including trade and the novel coronavirus. The FCC accuses Huawei and ZTE of posing a risk of espionage, an allegation each denies. Last year the agency said subsidies can't be used to buy gear from Huawei or ZTE.

For the past decade, the National Weather Service has been plagued by failures in disseminating critical forecast and warning information that is aimed at protecting lives and saving property. In some cases, its websites have gone down during severe weather events, unable to handle the demand. From a report: Other agency systems, including information and data streams that deliver vital weather modeling data to broadcast meteorologists and commercial users, have also suffered periodic outages. Now, during a year that featured record California wildfires and the busiest Atlantic hurricane season on record, the Weather Service says it has an Internet bandwidth problem and is seeking to throttle back the amount of data its most demanding users can access. The Weather Service, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), announced the proposed limits in a memo dated Nov. 18. "As demand for data continues to grow across NCEP websites, we are proposing to put new limits into place to safeguard our web services," the memo stated, referring to the Weather Service's National Centers for Environmental Prediction. "The frequency of how often these websites are accessed by the public has created limitations and infrastructure constraints."

Google, Dell, Intel and a handful of other major tech companies in the IT and cloud computing industries have banded together to tackle joint problems around security, remote work, and other enterprise issues that have only become more important during the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The consortium these companies have formed is called the Modern Computing Alliance, and its founding members also include Box, Cirtrix, Imprivata, Okta, RingCentral, Slack, VMWare, and Zoom. The Modern Computing Alliance will initially be focused on four areas: performance; security and identity; remote work, productivity, and collaboration; and health care. The goal is to pool knowledge and resources toward solving shared problems around how companies perform work in the cloud and the tools they use to do so. The alliance will focus on developing new standards and interoperable technologies that can be used by any company that relies on one of the partners' platforms or products. In particular, Google is engaged in the effort with its Chrome browser and Chrome OS teams, as well as the division responsible for Google Workplace. "Today, we're excited to announce Google's membership in the Modern Computing Alliance -- to address the biggest IT challenges facing companies today with integration from silicon to cloud," says John Solomon, Google's vice president of Chrome OS. "Working with a group of forward-thinking industry leaders, we're aligning standards and technologies to provide companies with the choice of high-performance, cloud-first computing solutions from the vendor of their choice who provide modern solutions for the modern era of business."

France's data protection agency, the CNIL, has slapped Google and Amazon with fines for dropping tracking cookies without consent. From a report: Google has been hit with a total of $120M for dropping cookies on Google.fr and Amazon ~$42M for doing so on the Amazon .fr domain under the penalty notices issued today. The regulator carried out investigations of the websites over the past year and found tracking cookies were automatically dropped when a user visited the domains in breach of the country's Data Protection Act. In Google's case the CNIL has found three consent violations related to dropping non-essential cookies.

Cruise Automation, the autonomous vehicle subsidiary of GM that also has backing from SoftBank Vision Fund, Honda and T. Rowe Price & Associates, has started testing what it describes as fully driverless vehicles on public roads in San Francisco, the first milestone required to secure a permit to launch a shared, commercial service that can charge for rides. TechCrunch reports: The company released Wednesday a video of its first ride -- with no human safety driver behind the wheel -- in the Sunset neighborhood in San Francisco. There was a human safety operator in the vehicle, sitting in the passenger seat, the video shows. Cruise's testing of fully autonomous vehicles is in limited geographic area and in arguably one of San Francisco's simpler environments; the video below shows the testing was conducted at night in a less congested part of San Francisco. However, it still marks progress by the company that had once aimed to launch a commercial service by the end of 2019.

For some in the industry, the caveats of having a safety operator in the passenger seat and launching in an "easier" and small geofenced area matter. Cruise says this is just the beginning and that it will eventually expand its driverless testing area, adding in more complicated environments over time, as well as removing the safety operator from the vehicle. "We recognize this is both a trust race as well as a tech race," Cruise spokesperson Milin Mehta said in an email. "Given that, during the beginning of our use of this permit, we will maintain a safety operator in the passenger seat. The safety operator has the ability to bring the vehicle to a stop in the event of an emergency, but does not have access to standard driver controls. Eventually, this safety operator will be fully removed."

The French armed forces now have permission to develop "augmented soldiers" following a report from a military ethics committee. CNN reports: The report, released to the public on Tuesday, considers medical treatments, prosthetics and implants that improve "physical, cognitive, perceptive and psychological capacities," and could allow for location tracking or connectivity with weapons systems and other soldiers. Other possible interventions considered by the armed forces ethics committee include medical treatments to prevent pain, stress and fatigue, and substances that would improve mental resilience if a soldier were taken prisoner.

The committee said that France needs to maintain "operational superiority of its armed forces in a challenging strategic context" while respecting the rules governing the military, humanitarian law and the "fundamental values of our society." As a result, it has forbidden any modification that would affect a soldier's ability to manage the use of force or affect their sense of "humanity." Further examples of banned modifications include cognitive implants that would affect the exercise of a soldier's free will, or changes that would affect their reintegration into civilian life.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It's a long time coming for Tesla's Full Self-Driving feature, and it hasn't been a cheap journey. The price for the self-driving feature has increased multiple times and is currently available for supported Teslas for $10,000.While Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta continues to expand to more Tesla owners ahead of a planned end-of-year launch, the actual settings for the system have been uncovered and published on Twitter by a well-known Tesla hacker named Green. Not only are there dozens of settings and available adjustments, but there's also a way to show a detailed vehicle view of the world while a Tesla is driving down the road.

In a Twitter thread, Green shares the status of internal states within the system while taking us on a tour of dozens of settings ranging from controls for FSD and Enhanced Summon to information about the Camera and Ultrasonics. The system also shows sliders for GPS, speed threshold, and other items that no one outside of Tesla should ever mess with. There's also an Augmented Vision area where developers can toggle what's seen on a Tesla display while driving. It includes toggles for Pretty, Developer, and Camera Image. Once Developer is enabled, it shows options for a whole host of data that can be shown on the infotainment system. This all may be information overload for the average Tesla owner, but it's a fun way to get more details on how a Tesla sees the world. Tesla being Tesla, the developer settings also have fun settings including California Stop (which generally means you don't bring the car to a halt but just slow down at a stop sign) and something called Chiropractor Adjust Skeleton, which is filed under the City Streets settings. What that means is a mystery, but both items are part of the FSD defaults in the developer controls.

Adobe has released the final scheduled update to its Flash Player plugin, weeks before Flash's official retirement. The Verge reports: As noted on Adobe's site, yesterday marked the last update for Flash outside mainland China, which has a separate version of the software. Adobe will stop supporting Flash on December 31st, 2020, and it will block Flash content from running on January 12th, 2021. Adobe offered a brief farewell in its release notes. "We want to take a moment to thank all of our customers and developers who have used and created amazing Flash Player content over the last two decades," the note says. "We are proud that Flash had a crucial role in evolving web content across animation, interactivity, audio, and video. We are excited to help lead the next era of digital experiences."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai apologized Wednesday for the company's handling of the departure of AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru and said he would investigate the events and work to restore trust, according to an internal memo sent companywide and obtained by Axios. From the report: Gebru's exit has provoked anger and consternation within Google as well as in academic circles, with thousands of people signing an open letter urging Google to reexamine its practices. In the note, Pichai acknowledged the depth of the damage done by the company's actions and said the company would look at all aspects of the situation, but stopped short of saying the company made a mistake in removing Gebru.

"I've heard the reaction to Dr. Gebru's departure loud and clear: it seeded doubts and led some in our community to question their place at Google," Pichai said in the memo. " I want to say how sorry I am for that, and I accept the responsibility of working to restore your trust." While Pichai's memo strikes a contrite tone, it's unclear how far it will go to addressing the significant upset within Google's ranks, especially among those concerned with its commitments to diversity and academic freedom.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Ron Amadeo: Google and Samsung want to work together on smart home compatibility. The two companies put out dueling press releases today, saying that Google Nest devices would work better with Samsung SmartThings, ending a war between the SmartThings community and Nest/Google/Alphabet that has been going on for years. Samsung says that "Google Nest devices, including thermostats, cameras and doorbells, will be "Works With SmartThings" (WWST) certified, allowing users to seamlessly control their smart homes through SmartThings." Nest has long been the most insular smart home company, and now it sounds like Nest devices are finally going to start playing nice with your other smart home devices.

As a user of the Google and SmartThings ecosystem, there are a few things missing from the announcement that I would like to see. SmartThings is supporting Nest and Google, but I don't see anything about Google reciprocating and supporting SmartThings better. Like I complained about in the Android 11 review (which included a Google Assistant-powered smart home control panel), Google's smart home support is exclusionary toward devices that compete with Nest products. Google supports controlling SmartThings-compatible lights (and, really, every light imaginable), because Nest doesn't make a light bulb or switch, but it doesn't work with door locks, because Nest makes a door lock (Google and Samsung both seem to have forgotten about the Yale x Nest Lock in today's announcement). Google's "Nest Hub" smart display can show camera feeds, but only Nest camera feeds. The Nest exclusivity here isn't doing Google any favors, and more open hardware support would really improve the appeal of the Nest Hub smart display.

The Federal Trade Commission today sued Facebook, alleging that the company is illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct. FTC: Following a lengthy investigation in cooperation with a coalition of attorneys general of 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam, the complaint alleges that Facebook has engaged in a systematic strategy -- including its 2012 acquisition of up-and-coming rival Instagram, its 2014 acquisition of the mobile messaging app WhatsApp, and the imposition of anticompetitive conditions on software developers -- to eliminate threats to its monopoly. This course of conduct harms competition, leaves consumers with few choices for personal social networking, and deprives advertisers of the benefits of competition. The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp; prohibit Facebook from imposing anticompetitive conditions on software developers; and require Facebook to seek prior notice and approval for future mergers and acquisitions. "Personal social networking is central to the lives of millions of Americans," said Ian Conner, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition. "Facebook's actions to entrench and maintain its monopoly deny consumers the benefits of competition. Our aim is to roll back Facebook's anticompetitive conduct and restore competition so that innovation and free competition can thrive."

YouTube is taking belated action on election misinformation: The company said it would now remove misleading videos that claim widespread fraud or other errors changed the outcome of the US presidential election. From a report: Google-owned YouTube announced that it would begin enforcing against this content on Wednesday, citing Tuesday's safe harbor deadline for the US election, which is the date after which state election results cannot effectively be challenged. YouTube said that enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. National news outlets have universally projected that Joe Biden will be the next President.

As an example of content that would be banned, YouTube said it would take down videos claiming that a presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or errors in counting votes. It will begin enforcing the policy starting Wednesday, and said it would "ramp up" efforts in the weeks to come. It will still allow videos including news coverage and commentary to remain on the platform if they have enough context. Any videos in violation of the policy that were posted prior to Wednesday, will remain up even though they now break YouTube's rules. They will feature an information panel that says election results have been certified.

Twitter's timeline is currently overrun with ads for some users, in what at first appeared to be a glitch involving the distribution of Promoted Tweets. From a report: Typically, a Promoted Tweet -- which is just a regular tweet an advertiser has paid to promote more broadly -- will appear just once at the top of a user's timeline, then scroll through the timeline like any other tweet. Now, however, Promoted Tweets are popping up with increased frequency. Some users report seeing them as often as every four to six tweets, in fact. Others are reporting seeing the same Promoted Tweet more than once. This seemed to have indicated some sort of issue with Twitter's ad system, as the company generally intends for Promoted Tweets to be targeted and relevant to the end user, without being an overly frequent part of users' timelines. As Twitter's Business website explains, "we're thoughtful in how we display Promoted Tweets, and are conservative about the number of Promoted Tweets that people see in a single day." That's obviously not the case when it seems like nearly every other tweet is now an ad -- and often, a repeated ad. Twitter says the change is not a glitch, however -- it's intentional.

Singapore is set to host the world's first electric-powered air taxi service by the end of 2023, according to Volocopter GmbH, which is developing the vertical-takeoff craft. From a report: The German manufacturer is committed to starting operations within three years once it completes flight trials, evaluation and certification in collaboration with the city-state, it said in a statement Wednesday. Tickets for a 15-minute trip costing 300 euros ($364) are already on sale. Volocopter completed a demonstration flight over Singapore's Marina Bay area in October last year, and the first commercial route is likely to fly tourists over the same district, offering spectacular views of the skyline, the company said. Later services could including cross-border journeys. Singapore is at the forefront of plans to introduce flying taxis thanks to a more welcoming regulatory regime than in some other countries. While the craft could replace helicopters and light aircraft on some routes, they'd also be small and nimble enough to fly deep within cities and land with minimal space. "Singapore is renowned for its leading role in adapting and living new technologies," Volocopter Chief Executive Officer Florian Reuter said, adding that local capabilities in battery research, material science and route validation for autonomous operations will be central to the project.