Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says its government is now on track to connect 98% of Canadians to high-speed internet by 2026. CBC.ca reports: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a handful of cabinet ministers held a news conference in Ottawa to launch the $1.75 billion universal broadband fund -- a program unveiled in the federal government's 2019 budget and highlighted on the campaign trail and in September's throne speech. Most of the money was announced in last year's budget. "We were ready to go in March with the new Universal Broadband Fund and then the pandemic hit," Rural Economic Development Minister Maryam Monsef told reporters. The prime minister said the government is now on track to connect 98 per cent of Canadians to high-speed by 2026 -- an increase over the previously promised 95 per cent benchmark -- and to link up the rest by 2030.

About $150 million from the fund will be freed up to fund projects aimed at getting communities connected by next fall. Senior officials with the department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development said applications will be reviewed on an ongoing basis until Jan. 15, 2021, with a goal of having projects completed by mid-November, 2021. Deciding who gets upgraded connectivity first will depend on the service providers applying, they said. The prime minister said the government also has reached a $600 million agreement with Telesat for satellite capacity to improve broadband service in remote areas and in the North.

The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, is finalizing a plan to become a citizen of the island of Cyprus, Recode has learned, becoming one of the highest-profile Americans to take advantage of one of the world's most controversial "passport-for-sale" programs. From the report: Schmidt, one of America's wealthiest people, and his family have won approval to become citizens of the Mediterranean nation, according to a previously unreported notice in a Cypriot publication in October. While it is not clear why exactly Schmidt has pursued this foreign citizenship, the new passport gives him the ability to travel to the European Union, along with a potentially favorable personal tax regime. The move is a window into how the world's billionaires can maximize their freedoms and finances by relying on the permissive laws of countries where they do not live.

The Cyprus program is one of about a half-dozen programs in the world where foreigners can effectively purchase citizenship rights, skirting residency requirements or lengthy lines by making a payment or an investment in the host country. They have become the latest way for billionaires around the world to go "borderless" and take advantage of foreign countries' laws, moving themselves offshore just like they might move their assets offshore, a phenomenon documented by the journalist Oliver Bullough in the recent book Moneyland. [...] The way the program works is that once a foreigner lays down between $2 million and $3 million worth of investment in Cyprus, typically through a real estate purchase, they can apply to what is technically called the "Citizenship by Investment" program. After the government reviews the applicant's background, conducts a security check, and hosts a visit from the foreigner, their application can be approved.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE: Voters in both Denver and Chicago have overwhelmingly thrown their support behind local community broadband projects, joining the hundreds of U.S. communities that have embraced home-grown alternatives to entrenched telecom monopolies. In Chicago, roughly 90 percent of voters approved a non-binding referendum question that asked: "should the city of Chicago act to ensure that all the city's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" The vote opens the door to the city treating broadband more like an essential utility, potentially in the form of community-run fiber networks.

In Denver, 83.5 percent of the city's electorate cast ballots in favor of question 2H, which asked if the city should be exempt from a 2005 law, backed by local telecom monopolies, restricting Colorado towns and cities from being able to build their own local broadband alternatives. [...] "I think the margin in Chicago and Denver is remarkable," [said Christopher Mitchell, director of community broadband networks for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.] "When we work with communities where half the residents have a cable monopoly and the other half don't have any broadband, the demand for something better is strong among both populations."

Parler, which calls itself a "viewpoint-neutral" social network and is growing popular among conservatives who feel mainstream social platforms are censoring them, is now topping the free app download charts, according to both Apple and Sensor Tower. From a report: With Twitter and other mainstream social media apps more strictly enforcing rules against election-related falsehoods, more permissive, often right-leaning platforms have seen a surge of interest. The app for Newsmax, a right-leaning news network, also began surging on the download charts after all the major networks, including Fox News, called the election for Biden. It remains to be seen if the gains are more than temporary, but the shift has certainly raised eyebrows.

Emil Protalinski, reporting for VentureBeat: For more than a decade, I've used Net Applications' NetMarketShare tool to track the desktop browser and operating system markets. The monthly reports have been critical in gauging which browsers and new versions of operating systems are gaining or losing market share. Last week, Net Applications released its final NetMarketShare report. The loss could not come at a worse time. After Chrome cemented its spot as the world's de facto browser, there hasn't been a lot of movement. But that might be about to change. Chrome's creator, Google, is facing the biggest U.S. antitrust case in a generation. Mozilla, which depends on Google for almost all its revenue, is rightly worried about becoming "collateral damage."

[...] So why is Net Applications killing off NetMarketShare? Don't act surprised when I tell you the undisputed market leader has something to do with it. In January, Google proposed deprecating the User-Agent string (used to identify which browser and operating system is being used) as part of its war on fingerprinting. Net Applications says the change will break NetMarketShare's device detection technology and "cause inaccuracies for a long period of time." Add the ongoing problem of filtering out bots to prevent skewing of the result, and Net Applications decided it was best to throw in the towel after 14 years. Net Applications provided its reports based on data captured from 100 million sessions each month over thousands of websites.

India's antitrust watchdog has opened an investigation into Google for allegedly abusing the dominant position of its app store to promote its payments service in the world's second largest internet market. From a report: In its Monday announcement about opening an antitrust case against Google, Indian watchdog Competition Commission of India (CCI) said it would review claims of whether the Android maker prominently promotes Google Pay during the setup of an Android smartphone (and whether phone vendors have a choice to avoid this); and if Play Store's billing system is designed "to the disadvantage of both i.e. apps facilitating payment through UPI, as well as users." The informant, who has not been identified, alleged that in addition to Google Play Store's billing system favoring Google Pay app, in-app purchases for apps downloaded through Play Store are also mandated to support Google Pay service "if they want to be listed on the Play Store" and they are required to pay a "high commission" for that. The informant also alleged that Google "unfairly" skews the search results on the Play Store in favor of Google Pay app over others -- though CCI is not investigating this claim citing not enough evidence to support them.

Virgin Hyperloop announced that for the first time it has conducted a test of its ultra-fast transportation system with human passengers. From a report: The test took place on Sunday afternoon at the company's DevLoop test track in the desert outside Las Vegas, Nevada. The first two passengers were Virgin Hyperloop's chief technology officer and co-founder, Josh Giegel, and head of passenger experience, Sara Luchian. After strapping into their seats in the company's gleaming white and red hyperloop pod, dubbed Pegasus, they were transferred into an airlock as the air inside the enclosed vacuum tube was removed. The pod then accelerated to a brisk 100 miles per hour (160 km/h) down the length of the track, before slowing down to a stop. It's an important achievement for Virgin Hyperloop, which was founded in 2014 on the premise of making Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's vision of a futuristic transportation system of magnetically levitating pods traveling through nearly airless tubes at speeds of up to 760 mph (1,223 km/h) a reality.

Inrupt, the startup from World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, announced an enterprise version of the Solid privacy platform today, which allows large organizations and governments to build applications that put users in control of their data . From a report: Berners-Lee has always believed that the web should be free and open, but large organizations have grown up over the last 20 years that make their money using our data. He wanted to put people back in charge of their data, and the Solid open source project, developed at MIT, was the first step in that process. Three years ago he launched Inrupt, a startup built on top of the open source project, and hired John Bruce to run the company. The two shared the same vision of shifting data ownership without changing the way websites get developed. With Solid, developers use the same standards and methods of building sites, and these applications will work in any browser. What Solid aims to do is alter the balance of data power and redirect it to the user. "Fast forward to today, and we're releasing the first significant technology as the fruits of our labor, which is an enterprise version of Solid to be deployed at scale by large organizations," Bruce explained.

The core idea behind this approach is that users control their data in online storage entities called Personal Online Data Stores or Pods for short. The enterprise version consists of Solid Server to manage the Pods, and developers can build applications using an SDK to take advantage of the Pods and access the data they need to do a particular job like pay taxes or interact with a healthcare provider. Bruce points out that the enterprise version is fully compatible with the open source Solid project specifications. The company has been working with some major organizations prior to today's release including the BBC and National Health Service in the UK and the Government of Flanders in Belgium as they have been working to bring this to market.

Remembrance Sunday is the day of commemoration for British and Commonwealth servicemen, and the head of the British Armed Forces marked the occasion with a special interview on Sky News.

And he shared a thoughtful answer when asked whether the army might try to recruit fewer soldiers. "[W]hat I'm hinting at is that we need to be thinking about how we measure effects in a different way. I mean I suspect we can have an army of 120,000 of which 30,000 might be robots, who knows. But the answer is we need to open our minds to perhaps numbers not determining what we should be doing but rather the effect that we can achieve, is really what we should be looking for."

The armed forces are playing a key role in the government's response to the pandemic, with some 2,000 personnel deployed to Liverpool to help with a mass coronavirus testing programme for the city. "I suspect if that works successfully we might find there are other areas where we need to help in a similar sort of fashion," General Carter said. He said using the military to take over the entire coronavirus testing programme was an option but added that he had confidence in the current set-up at the moment.
The Guardian focused on the robots: Thirty thousand "robot soldiers" could form an integral part of the British army in the 2030s, working alongside humans in and around the frontline, the head of the armed forces said in a television interview on Sunday...

All Britain's armed forces have been engaged in a string of research projects involving small drones or remotely powered land or underwater vehicles, some of which are armed and others for reconnaissance. The Ministry of Defence says its policy is that only humans will be able to fire weapons, although there is growing concern about the potential danger of unrestricted robot warfare, led by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.

Technology under development includes the i9 drone, which is powered by six rotors and carries two shotguns. Remotely operated, it is intended to be used to storm buildings, typically an urban warfare situation that generates some of the highest casualties.

A British software engineer came up with "a fun playful name" for his consulting business. He'd named it:

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Unfortunately, this did not amuse the official registrar of companies in the United Kingdom (known as Companies House). The Guardian reports that the U.K. agency "has forced the company to change its name after it belatedly realised it could pose a security risk." Henceforward, the software engineer's consulting business will instead be legally known as "THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD." He now says he didn't realise that Companies House was actually vulnerable to the extremely simple technique he used, known as "cross-site scripting", which allows an attacker to run code from one website on another.
Engadget adds: Companies House, meanwhile, said it had "put measures in place" to prevent a repeat. You won't be trying this yourself, at least not in the U.K.

It's more than a little amusing to see a for-the-laughs code name stir up trouble, but this also illustrates just how fragile web security can be.

"While the election may have now been called for Joe Biden, our misinformation nightmare is far from over," quips Mashable: As unsubstantiated pro-Trump conspiracies about election fraud continue to spread on the internet, Facebook is taking further action with Facebook Groups, a feature that is often weaponized by misinformation spreaders. According to Facebook, the social networking company will now put certain problematic Facebook Groups in "probation" periods. During this 60-day timeframe, all posts to these groups must be manually approved by a group's administrators or moderators.

A group will be placed in this probationary state if the company finds that many of its posts are violating its community standards policies. There will be no appeals process for the probation period. All groups, whether public or private, are subject to probation.

If policy violation problems continue to persist within these groups during the probationary period, Facebook will ban the group.
A Facebook spokesperson tells CNET these actions are being taken "temporarily...in order to protect people during this unprecedented time."

Adweek has published an article titled "What to Expect: How a Biden Administration Would Tackle Tech Policy." Some of the highlights: Industry observers have told us they don't expect a change-of-guard to upend the Google lawsuit brought by the Justice Department in concert with 11 state attorneys general over the company's search advertising hegemony. Indeed, we could see a spate of antitrust activity brought to bear on Big Tech during a Biden presidency... "Regardless of who wins the presidential election, antitrust enforcement against Big Tech will continue," said Sally Hubbard, director of enforcement strategy at liberal think tank the Open Markets Institute....

"Biden will take a...tough position on infrastructure companies like Huawei," said Alec Stapp, director of technology policy at the liberal Progressive Policy Institute, but is "less likely to come down hard on consumer apps like TikTok." He expects Biden to talk tough on China, "but with fewer unilateral tariffs and more cooperation from international allies."

One beta tester of SpaceX's new Starlink satellite internet service is a Reddit user named "wandering-coder". This week they shared their experience online, testing the equpiment in a national forest which gets no cell service from any carrier -- and using it to upload this report: Works beautifully. I did a realtime video call and some tests. My power supply is max 300w, and the drain for the whole system while active was around 116w... It didn't work well with a heavy tree canopy / trees directly in the line of sight, as expected. I would be connected only for about 5 seconds at a time. Make sure you have as clear a view of the sky as possible!
Ars Technica shares more data: As revealed last week, the Starlink beta costs $99 a month plus $499 upfront for the user terminal, mounting tripod, and router... New speed-test data collected by Ookla and published by PCMag last week found average Starlink download speeds of 79.5Mbps and average upload speeds of 13.8Mbps in October, when the service was in a more limited beta. The same data found average download speeds of 24.75Mbps for Viasat's Exede service and 19.84Mbps for HughesNet, both of which offer service from geostationary satellites. Upload speeds for Viasat and HughesNet were 3.25Mbps and 2.64Mbps, respectively. Starlink's low-Earth orbit satellites greatly outperformed the higher-orbit satellites on latency, with Starlink posting a 42ms average. Viasat and HughesNet came in at 643ms and 728ms, respectively, according to PCMag.

SpaceX's invitations to new users last week told them to expect "data speeds vary[ing] from 50Mbps to 150Mbps and latency from 20ms to 40ms over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system... For latency, we expect to achieve 16ms to 19ms by summer 2021."

One Montana resident posted a speed test result with a 174Mbps download speed, 33Mbps upload speed, and 39ms latency. "Way out in rural Montana where our alternative is to pay by the gig. Starlink will forever change the game," the beta tester wrote on Reddit yesterday. The Starlink Reddit community has several resources for tracking beta progress, such as a list of user speed tests and a list of states where at least some people received beta invitations.
Engadget points out that Friday SpaceX also won approval to sell Starlink access to Canadians.

And TechSpot shares more reactions from beta testers: According to some early speed tests done in different locations around the US, users are getting anywhere from 100 to 203 Mbps on downlink and around 15 to 33 Mbps on uplink. Meanwhile, the latency varies between 20 to 45 milliseconds, which is pretty much in line with SpaceX estimates.

Upload speeds are still lower than the expected 50 to 150 Mbps, and one user in Idaho reported that connection drops every 2 to 3 minutes in games and video calls are common. One possible explanation for this could be that Starlink's constellation currently has around 800 satellites, which is a low number compared to the target of 12,000 that SpaceX wants to build.
"Of particular interest has been performance in adverse weather," writes long-time Slashdot reader Rei: While the network is still being deployed, Pacific Northwest have been reporting rainy-weather download speeds ranging from ~95-140Mbps, upload from 9-18mbps, and ping times from 32-34ms. The upper range is surprisingly not that different from other November clear-weather data (which, while dramatically higher than September reports, is still supposed to improve over the coming year). The tolerance to adverse weather is likely due multiple satellite paths as well as phased array tuning overcoming wind buffeting. SpaceX does plan to add additional higher frequency V-band transmission to future Starlink satellites, but this should suffer more bad-weather attenuation than the current Ka/Ku-band.
He also notes that SpaceX engineers have a nickname for the hardware. "Dishy McFlatface."

Apple's search bots have been leaking Apple's internal IPs, a security researcher has discovered — and it took Apple over 9 months to fix it.

Bleeping Computer reports: "Applebot is the web crawler for Apple. Products like Siri and Spotlight Suggestions use Applebot," according to Apple's knowledgebase. Last month, Security researcher and podcast creator David Coomber found out that Applebot had been using a proxy that leaked Apple's internal IP addresses.

"Although I've seen a couple of bots that were misconfigured, I was surprised to see Apple's Podcast bot look for updates to my podcast (Deep House Mixes) using a proxy which leaked internal IPs and hostnames from the 'Via' & 'X-Forwarded-For' headers," Coomber continued in his blog post...

When asked for comment concerning these issues, Apple did not provide one to BleepingComputer.

"A victory by Joe Biden in the Nov. 3 election could usher in an abrupt change in the nation's telecommunications policy, restoring so-called net neutrality regulation," Bloomberg recently reported: Biden hasn't talked much about the FCC during the campaign, but his party's platform is specific. It calls for restoring net neutrality rules put in place under then-President Barack Obama when Biden served as vice president and taking a harder line on telecommunications mergers... If Biden wins, the FCC, which currently is at full five-member strength, could begin the new presidential term with a 2-to-1 Democratic majority, allowing it to move quickly. A Republican commissioner is leaving at the end of the current Congress and chairmen traditionally depart as a new administration arrives.

Ajit Pai hasn't indicated what he'll do. He can stay on as a commissioner but a new president could strip him of the chairmanship and its power to control what policies advance to a vote... If Pai stays after a Biden win, "he's denuded of power to do much of anything except to block things," said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a Washington telecommunications lawyer.
Bloomberg also speculates that in addition, America's FCC "may move to bar broadband providers from exempting their own entertainment or media offerings from data caps." While there had been interest in such a move four years ago, Ajit Pai "squelched an agency move toward doing so soon after taking office in 2016."

"Uber helped wage a $200 million war in California to keep drivers as contractors," notes the Washington Post — successfully funding a ballot proposition that overrides a high-stakes 2019 law which insisted drivers be considered employees.

"But now that the ballot measure has passed, the company says its work isn't done..."

The ride-hailing giant's CEO said Thursday that Uber is looking to expand the model to other states, joining an executive from rival Lyft who said something similar earlier this week... "Going forward, you'll see us more loudly advocating for...laws like Prop 22," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said, adding later: "We were the first to come forward with this [independent contractor]-plus model, the idea that drivers deserve flexibility plus benefits. We want to have a dialogue with governments [in] other states..."

Uber and Lyft's stocks have rallied this week, logging percentage gains in the double digits as investors reacted to the news that they would not have to make drivers employees.
The proposition promises independent contractors 120% of the minimum wage plus contributions to healthcare equivalent to what other employers currently provide (or half that amount for employees averaging less than 25 hours a week but more than 15). But the Post points out that "Unlike full employment, however, benefits are calculated based on a driver's active time, negating the potential hours per week they spend waiting for a fare while logged onto the apps..."

Uber's chief financial officer told the Post that the new benefits "will result in probably a 5% increase to cover the incremental [costs]," including benefits, adding "We do believe that it'll be manageable."

The Post adds that labor advocates "fiercely opposed Proposition 22, saying it was a transparent attempt to snatch newly enshrined employment rights from workers."

NBC reports that social media crackdowns on disinformation have been less consistent if the content isn't in English. One example? "Facebook and YouTube have taken steps to remove QAnon content in English from their platforms, but experts warn there is still a vast amount in Spanish." The misleading, false and conspiratorial claims that are circulating in Spanish about the outcome of the election are readily viewable on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, despite policies from all three companies prohibiting or restricting the spread of conspiracy theories and election-related misinformation. According to researchers interviewed by NBC News, the policies have been implemented with more consistency for content posted in English...

"Facebook and YouTube have taken steps to remove QAnon content in English from their platforms, but there is still a vast amount available in Spanish and it's easily accessible," said Flavia Colangelo, a researcher at GQR, a Democratic research firm that advises campaigns on Spanish-language disinformation...

Alex Joseph, a spokesperson for YouTube, said the company has policies against misinformation about how to vote but does not prohibit content that forwards false views about the outcome of the election. "Expressing views on the outcome of a current election or process of counting votes is allowed under our policy," Joseph said. "Our policies are global, and we apply them consistently across all languages and regions."

The night before America's election, Fast Company reported: On the internet, we're subject to hidden A/B tests all the time, but this one was also part of a political weapon: a multimillion-dollar tool kit built by a team of Facebook vets, data nerds, and computational social scientists determined to defeat Donald Trump. The goal is to use microtargeted ads, follow-up surveys, and an unparalleled data set to win over key electorates in a few critical states: the low-education voters who unexpectedly came out in droves or stayed home last time, the voters who could decide another monumental election. By this spring, the project, code named Barometer, appeared to be paying off. During a two-month period, the data scientists found that showing certain Facebook ads to certain possible Trump voters lowered their approval of the president by 3.6%...

"We've been able to really understand how to communicate with folks who have lower levels of political knowledge, who tend to be ignored by the political process," says James Barnes, a data and ads expert at the all-digital progressive nonprofit Acronym, who helped build Barometer. This is familiar territory: Barnes spent years on Facebook's ads team, and in 2016 was the "embed" who helped the Trump campaign take Facebook by storm. Last year, he left Facebook and resolved to use his battle-tested tactics to take down his former client. "We have found ways to find the right news to put in front of them, and we found ways to understand what works and doesn't," Barnes says. "And if you combine all those things together, you get a really effective approach, and that's what we're doing...."

By the election it promises to have spent $75 million on Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, Hulu, Roku, Viacom, Pandora, and anywhere else valuable voters might be found... Barnes had been a Republican all his life, but he did not like Trump; he says he ended up voting for Clinton. The election, and his role in it, left him unsettled, and he left Facebook's political ads team to work with the company's commercial clients... In the wake of Trump's election and its aftermath, Barnes helped Facebook develop some of its election integrity initiatives (one of Facebook's moves was to stop embedding employees like him inside campaigns) and even sat down for lengthy interviews with the Securities and Exchange Commission and with then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Last year, after some soul-searching, some of it in Peru, Barnes registered as a Democrat, left Facebook, and began working on a way to fight Trump... Acronym and a political action committee, Pacronym, were founded in 2017 by Democratic strategist Tara McGowan, in an effort to counter Trump's online spending advantage and what The New Yorker called his Facebook juggernaut...

For Barnes, Acronym's aggressive approach to Facebook, and Barometer's very existence, isn't just personal, but relates to his former employer: Facebook hasn't only failed to effectively police misinformation and disinformation, but helped accelerate it... But while Barnes is using some of the weapons that helped Trump, he's at pains to emphasize that, unlike the other side, Acronym's artillery is simply "the facts."
The PAC's donors include Laurene Powell Jobs, Steven Spielberg, venture capitalists Reid Hoffman and Michael Moritz, and (according to the Wall Street Journal) Facebook's former product officer, Chris Cox (who is also an informal adviser.)

But in addition, the group "can access an unprecedented pool of state voter files and personal information: everything from your purchasing patterns to your social media posts to your church, layered with AI-built scores that predict your traits..."

"Boeing's much-maligned 737 Max jet could be cleared to fly again in just a few weeks," reports SFGate, adding that one U.S. airline plans to carry passengers "as early as December." Although the Federal Aviation Administration has not disclosed a public timeline for the Max's return to service, approval to lift the grounding could come as early as mid-November, according to Reuters. Boeing executives said they expect to gain FAA recertification before the end of the year. The company will also need to get approval from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and Transport Canada, which are conducting their own respective reviews...

American Airlines said it plans to operate one daily Boeing 737 Max roundtrip from Dec. 29 through Jan. 4 between its Miami hub and New York's LaGuardia Airport. If it takes off, American will be the first US carrier to bring back the Max...

Other U.S. airlines operating the Max are taking a wait-and-see approach before assigning the fleet type to flights.

Panasonic has collaborated with JR East on a vacuum cleaner-style device to solve a new problem that has sprung up on recent years: a rise in people dropping wireless earbuds onto train tracks. "The device is being tested at Ikebukuro station, a major hub in northern Tokyo, and early results suggest it works much faster than the traditional grabber," reports The Verge. From the report: JR East, the part of Japan's formerly private railway group that covers the Tokyo and Tohoku regions of the country, says that there were 950 incidents of dropped earbuds across 78 Tokyo train stations in the July-September quarter, Jiji Press reports. The figure apparently accounts for a quarter of all dropped items. According to JR East, station staff normally use a grabber-style "magic hand" tool to pick up larger items that fall onto tracks, like hats or smartphones. But the gravel between the rails makes smaller objects -- like, say, a left AirPod Pro -- more difficult to retrieve, meaning staff sometimes have to wait until after the last train.