Alphabet's Loon, the company focused on creating new networking capabilities using stratosphere-based infrastructure, has set a new world record for a continuous stratospheric flight. One of Loon's ultra high-altitude balloons flew for 312 days straight, beating the existing record of 223 days by a considerable margin, and nearly racking up a full year of sustained time aloft. From a report: The balloon in question took off from Puerto Rico in May 2019, and then made its way to Peru, where it took part in a service test for three months. It then headed south over the Pacific Ocean, and finally ended up in Baja, Mexico for a landing in March this year. Loon's CTO Sal Candido said in a blog post that the record-setting flight is the result of the company's continued work on advancing its technology and pushing both hardware and software forward in new and innovative ways. Part of that means learning as much as possible from balloons that break records like this one, and Candido points out that Loon has a unique advantage over more traditional high-altitude balloons designed for weather observation because it recovers just about all of them, and can study the best performers in extreme detail. That allows it to replicate and improve on what's going right when balloons are staying aloft for long periods.

Brian Krebs: In March 2020, KrebsOnSecurity alerted Swedish security giant Gunnebo Group that hackers had broken into its network and sold the access to a criminal group which specializes in deploying ransomware. In August, Gunnebo said it had successfully thwarted a ransomware attack, but this week it emerged that the intruders stole and published online tens of thousands of sensitive documents -- including schematics of client bank vaults and surveillance systems. The Gunnebo Group is a Swedish multinational company that provides physical security to a variety of customers globally, including banks, government agencies, airports, casinos, jewelry stores, tax agencies and even nuclear power plants. The company has operations in 25 countries, more than 4,000 employees, and billions in revenue annually.

Acting on a tip from Milwaukee, Wis.-based cyber intelligence firm Hold Security, KrebsOnSecurity in March told Gunnebo about a financial transaction between a malicious hacker and a cybercriminal group which specializes in deploying ransomware. That transaction included credentials to a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) account apparently set up by a Gunnebo Group employee who wished to access the company's internal network remotely. Five months later, Gunnebo disclosed it had suffered a cyber attack targeting its IT systems that forced the shutdown of internal servers. Nevertheless, the company said its quick reaction prevented the intruders from spreading the ransomware throughout its systems, and that the overall lasting impact from the incident was minimal.

Windows Central reports: Microsoft is preparing a major OS update for Windows 10 in 2021 that sources say will bring with it a significant design refresh to the Windows UI. I'm told that Microsoft is planning to update many top-level user interfaces such as the Start menu, Action Center, and even File Explorer, with refreshed modern designs, better animations, and new features. This UI project is codenamed "Sun Valley" internally and is expected to ship as part of the Windows 10 "Cobalt" release scheduled for the holiday 2021 season. Internal documentation describes the project as "reinvigorating" and modernizing the Windows desktop experience to keep up with customer expectation in a world driven by other modern and lightweight platforms.

Windows 10 has remained much the same these last few years, with little to no changes in its design or feature set. Many other platforms on the market have gone through entire redesigns or UI refreshes in the last five years, and while Windows 10 has gone through minor design iterations with the introduction of Fluent Design, we've not seen a significant refresh or rethinking of its UI. The Sun Valley project appears to be spearheaded by the Windows Devices and Experiences team, lead by Chief Product Officer Panos Panay, who took charge of said division back in February. Microsoft announced in May that the company would be "reinvesting" in Windows 10 in the 2021 timeframe, and my sources say that Sun Valley is the result of that reinvestment.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has announced that it is ending the ability to cross-sign drivers, effective 1 July 2021. This will effectively make it impossible to release new or updated drivers for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 systems, including Server 2012 R2. This is not an exaggeration. The only option that will remain available to devs who want to release drivers for versions of Windows other than Windows 10 will be to have those drivers pass HLK/WHQL testing. Unfortunately, not all drivers are even eligible for HLK/WHQL testing, and even for those that are eligible, getting some drivers to pass the HLK/WHQL tests is effectively impossible. [...]

Apple is stepping up efforts to develop its own search technology as US antitrust authorities threaten multibillion-dollar payments that Google makes to secure prime placement of its engine on the iPhone, Financial Times reported Wednesday [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From the report: In a little-noticed change to the latest version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 14, Apple has begun to show its own search results and link directly to websites when users type queries from its home screen. That web search capability marks an important advance in Apple's in-house development and could form the foundation of a fuller attack on Google, according to several people in the industry. The Silicon Valley company is notoriously secretive about its internal projects, but the move adds to growing evidence that it is working to build a rival to Google's search engine. Two and a half years ago, Apple poached Google's head of search, John Giannandrea. The hire was ostensibly to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities and its Siri virtual assistant, but also brought eight years of experience running the world's most popular search engine. The company's growing in-house search capability gives it an alternative if regulators block its lucrative partnership with Google. When the US Department of Justice launched a case last week, over payments that Google makes to Apple to be the iPhone's default search tool, urgency was added to the initiative.

About half of Americans on both sides of the aisle back the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Google, while fewer than a third oppose it, according to a new poll from progressive groups Demand Progress and Data for Progress shared exclusively with Axios. From a report: There's a growing pile of evidence that regulatory action against Big Tech has bipartisan support, as state and federal antitrust action circles companies like Google and Facebook. While there are many party-line splits on tech policy issues like content moderation, privacy and misinformation, more policymakers and average Americans than ever agree tech is too big and powerful. Winning antitrust suits represents a massive lift for the government and passing new antitrust legislation is hard. In an online survey of 979 likely voters polled by Demand Progress and the Demand Progress Education Fund from October 24-25 (with a margin of error of +-3.1 percentage points), 48% said they strongly or somewhat support the DOJ's lawsuit. 32% strongly or somewhat oppose it. The numbers were fairly consistent across both parties, with 52% of Republicans supporting the suit, compared to 49% of Democrats. 26% of Republicans polled opposed it, while 32% of Democrats did.

Judd Legum, reporting at Popular Information: In September, Facebook announced that it would stop accepting new political ads starting October 27. From October 27 through Election Day on November 3, political groups are permitted to run, subject to limitations, Facebook ads approved and running before October 27. In October, Facebook announced that after the polls close, it would ban all political ads indefinitely. The purpose of that policy is to prevent a campaign from declaring victory prematurely. Both policies were part of a high-profile effort to convince the public that the company was taking election integrity seriously. But on the first day of the moratorium, Facebook approved numerous Trump ads that appeared to violate its pre-election policies. At the same time, Facebook rejected scores of ads, many from groups aligned with Democrats, that do not violate its rules. Popular Information contacted Facebook regarding Trump's ads early Tuesday afternoon. Several hours later, Facebook told Popular Information that some of the ads did violate its policies and hundreds of Trump's ads were taken down.

The Trump campaign produced a number of ads that said "Election Day is Today." These ads violate Facebook's policies. Why? In order to comply with the moratorium, the ads need to begin delivering impressions prior to October 27. The Trump campaign spent a small amount of money delivering these ads to Facebook users in Ohio and elsewhere. But, while early voting has started in many states, it is not Election Day anywhere. These ads should not have been approved because they violate Faceboo's policy against misrepresenting the date of the election.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Microsoft Teams is continuing to ride the remote work and learning wave kicked off by the coronavirus pandemic. During Microsoft's Q1 2021 earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella shared that Microsoft Teams has passed 115 million daily active users. That's up 53% from the 75 million daily active users in April. Some 15 months ago, Microsoft Teams had just 13 million daily active users.

"Teams now has more than 115 million daily active users," Nadella said. "We are seeing increased usage and intensity as people communicate, collaborate, and coauthor content across work, life, and learning. Microsoft 365 users generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day this quarter." On the call, Nadella highlighted how quickly features are being added to Teams. "We are accelerating our innovation for both first-line as well as knowledge workers, with over 100 new capabilities in the last six months," he said. "Including breakout rooms, meeting recaps, shift scheduling, and large scale digital events, up to 20,000 participants. To help people transcend both time and distance, employee health and wellbeing is a top concern for every CEO. We are innovating with new experiences to help people prioritize wellbeing in the flow of work. New insights in Teams provides personalized recommended actions, making it easier for employees to create healthy work habits and for leaders to build high performing teams."

Rei writes: According to an email sent out to the Starlink mailing list, Starlink is now moving from a private, free, invite-only beta to a much larger, subscription-based public beta. Bandwidth estimates have risen to 50-150Mbps, while latency remains similar, at 20-40ms. This is expected to decrease to 16-19ms by summer of 2021. As it is a beta, the email cautions that "There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all" as they enhance the system. Pricing involves an antenna purchase ($500) and a $99/mo subscription rate. There is no data cap. The beta currently only appears to be for the northern U.S. and Canada, but SpaceX expects to quickly move further south; "near global coverage" is targeted at summer of 2021.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Network World: The Folding@home project has shared new results of its efforts to simulate proteins from the SARS-CoV-2 virus to better understand how they function and how to stop them. Folding@home is a distributed computing effort that uses small clients to run simulations for biomedical research when users' PCs are idle. The clients operate independently of each other to perform their own unique simulation and send in the results to the F@h servers. In its SARS-CoV-2 simulations, F@h first targeted the spike, the cone-shaped appendages on the surface of the virus consisting of three proteins. The spike must open to attach itself to a human cell to infiltrate and replicate. F@h's mission was to simulate this opening process to gain unique insight into what the open state looks like and find a way to inhibit the connection between the spike and human cells.

And it did so. In a newly published paper, the Folding@home team said it was able to simulate an "unprecedented" 0.1 seconds of the viral proteome. They captured dramatic opening of the spike complex, as well as shape-shifting in other proteins that revealed more than 50 "cryptic" pockets that expand targeting options for the design of antivirals. [...] The model derived from the F@h simulations shows that the spike opens up and exposes buried surfaces. These surfaces are necessary for infecting a human cell and can also be targeted with antibodies or antivirals that bind to the surface to neutralize the virus and prevent it from infecting someone. "And the tech sector played a big role in helping the find," adds the anonymous Slashdot reader. "Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, AWS, Oracle, and Cisco all helped with hardware and cloud services. Pure Storage donated a one petabyte all-flash storage array. Linus Tech Tips, a hobbyist YouTube channel for home system builders with 12 million followers, set up a 100TB server to take the load off."

President Trump's campaign website was briefly and partially hacked Tuesday afternoon as unknown adversaries took over the "About" page and replaced it with what appeared to be a scam to collect cryptocurrency. TechCrunch reports: There is no indication, despite the hackers' claims, that "full access to trump and relatives" was achieved or "most internal and secret conversations strictly classified information" were exposed. The hack seemingly took place shortly after 4 PM Pacific time. The culprits likely gained access to the donaldjtrump.com web server backend and replaced the "About" page with a long stretch of obfuscated javascript producing a parody of the FBI "this site has been seized" message.

"the world has had enough of the fake-news spreaded daily by president donald j trump," the new site read. "it is time to allow the world to know truth." Claiming to have inside information on the "origin of the corona virus" and other information discrediting Trump, the hackers provided two Monero addresses. Monero is a cryptocurrency that's easy to send but quite difficult to track. For this reason it has become associated with unsavory operations such as this hack. One address was for people that wanted the "strictly classified information" released, the other for those who would prefer to keep it secret. After an unspecified deadline the totals of cryptocurrency would be compared and the higher total would determine what was done with the data. "The website was reverted to its original content within a few minutes of the hack taking place," the report adds. "There is no evidence to suggest that any sensitive data, such as donator information, was accessed, but until the site administrators investigate the event thoroughly it is a remote possibility."

couchslug shares a report from The Register: Facebook has ordered the end to an academic monitoring project that has repeatedly exposed failures by the internet giant to clearly label political advertising on its platform. The social media goliath informed New York University (NYU) that research by its Tandon School of Engineering's Online Transparency Project's Ad Observatory violates Facebook's terms of service on bulk data collection and demanded it end the program immediately. The project recruited 6,500 volunteers to install its AdObserver browser extension that collects data on the ads that Facebook shows them personally. It sends the information to the American university, allowing it to perform a real-time check that Facebook is living up its promise to clearly disclose not only who paid for political ads shown on the platform but also how much and when the adverts would be shown.

The Facebook Ad Library is a public collection of all adverts running on Facebook, and any not suitably labeled are flagged up by the university project using data obtained via the AdObserver extension. Facebook didn't like this one bit, and responded with a warning letter on October 16, the Wall Street Journal first reported. The Silicon Valley titan wants the academic project shut down and all data deleted by November 30. It seems the researchers aren't backing down. On October 22, they published the latest research showing 12 political ads that had slipped under the radar as non-political on Facebook, some of which are still running.

German authorities are trying to force internet service providers to block major porn sites that don't implement age verification systems. Gizmodo reports: Currently, German law requires porn sites to restrict access to individuals 18 or older. What's changed is that German authorities, like the British before them, have now dubbed it a good use of their time to actually pursue porn sites they think aren't doing enough to prevent under-18 browsing, and are trying to compel them to introduce more stringent age verification systems. That in turn comes with all the complications and privacy issues that thwarted a similar effort in the UK, such as the technical difficulty enforcing the rules, censorship, and -- depending on how sites choose to comply -- the possibility third-party age verification services would build databases of who's watching what and when.

Per Motherboard, German regulators -- in an effort spearheaded by the director of the State Media Authority (LMA) of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Tobias Schmid -- are in the process of forcing telecoms like Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom to impose Domain Name System (DNS) blocks against sites like Pornhub and YouPorn. The DNS system is essentially the phonebook of the internet, translating domain names into IP addresses so users can navigate the web. DNS blocking Pornhub would prevent German internet users from typing "pornhub.com" into a stock web browser and immediately arriving at the page. The logic, apparently, is that faced with the threat of a losing the majority of their web traffic from Germany, major porn sites will cave to regulators and enforce the rules.

But it's not exactly foolproof (or teenproof). It would be trivial for German youth to evade these blocks by using an alternate DNS provider or simply downloading a browser plugin. They could also use a virtual private network, which creates an encrypted bridge from a user's device to a server somewhere else, to visit a porn site from another country. Or, they could simply drop the IP address into their browser and arrive at any site without needing to go through DNS. (Pornhub's happens to be 66.254.114.41. You're welcome, Germans of the future.) According to Motherboard, German regulators are also only targeting a handful of the largest sites on the web, meaning anyone could simply navigate to a lesser-known porn site and watch uninhibited.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: In August, Facebook announced that consumers who use its Oculus virtual reality headsets would be required to log in with their Facebook accounts in order to play games. The transition went into effect earlier this month, and it comes with a catch. If at any point you decide to delete your Facebook account, you immediately forfeit your access to any games or VR experiences you purchased through the Oculus store. The gotcha was spotted last week, and began to surface first on Twitter, only to be confirmed Friday by the team at UploadVR.

According to Facebook, those who create a new Oculus account will be required to use their Facebook credentials. Those who previously used a separate username and password to access the Oculus store have two years before the transition will be forced upon them. Once users flip the switch, they're bound by a new end-user license agreement that formally entangles their VR purchases and their Facebook account. "Deleting your Facebook account will also delete your Oculus information," warns Facebook in the Deactivation and Deletion section of its iOS app. "This includes your app purchases and your achievements. You will no longer be able to return any apps and will lose any existing store credits."

An anonymous reader shares a column: In the distant past, there was a proverbial "digital divide" that bifurcated workers into those who knew how to use computers and those who didn't. Young Gen Xers and their later millennial companions grew up with Power Macs and Wintel boxes, and that experience made them native users on how to make these technologies do productive work. Older generations were going to be wiped out by younger workers who were more adaptable to the needs of the modern digital economy, upending our routine notion that professional experience equals value. Of course, that was just a narrative. Facility with using computers was determined by the ability to turn it on and log in, a bar so low that it can be shocking to the modern reader to think that a "divide" existed at all. Software engineering, computer science and statistics remained quite unpopular compared to other academic programs, even in universities, let alone in primary through secondary schools. Most Gen Xers and millennials never learned to code, or frankly, even to make a pivot table or calculate basic statistical averages.

There's a sociological change underway though, and it's going to make the first divide look quaint in hindsight. Over the past two or so years, we have seen the rise of a whole class of software that has been broadly (and quite inaccurately) dubbed "no-code platforms." These tools are designed to make it much easier for users to harness the power of computing in their daily work. That could be everything from calculating the most successful digital ad campaigns given some sort of objective function, or perhaps integrating a computer vision library into a workflow that calculates the number of people entering or exiting a building. The success and notoriety of these tools comes from the feeling that they grant superpowers to their users. Projects that once took a team of engineers some hours to build can now be stitched together in a couple of clicks through a user interface. That's why young startups like Retool can raise at nearly a $1 billion valuation and Airtable at $2.6 billion, while others like Bildr, Shogun, Bubble, Stacker and dozens more are getting traction among users.

The UK's mobile networks are to be forbidden from selling phones locked to their services from December 2021. From a report: Regulator Ofcom said unlocking handsets could often be a complicated process, and this was discouraging owners from switching providers at the end of their contracts. The networks have previously suggested that locking devices helps deter theft and fraud. But the watchdog noted some companies had already abandoned the practice. Among those companies affected are: BT and its EE mobile division, Vodafone, Tesco Mobile, O2, Sky, Three and Virgin already only sell unlocked handsets. "[It] will save people time, money and effort -- and help them unlock better deals," said Ofcom's connectivity director Selina Chadha. Vodafone has already responded: "We stand ready to implement these changes when they come into force." EE added: "We'll work with Ofcom to comply with its guidelines."

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 on Tuesday to maintain its 2017 repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules, even after a federal court directed a review of some provisions of the repeal. From a report: The 2015 net neutrality rules barred internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or slowing internet content or offering paid "fast lanes." Under President Donald Trump, the 2017 FCC order granted ISPs sweeping powers to recast how Americans use the internet, as long as they disclose changes. A federal appeals court in October 2019 largely upheld the FCC's repeal of the rules, but ordered the agency to reconsider the repeal's impact on public safety; regulations on attachments to utility poles; and the FCC's ability to provide subsidies for broadband service. The FCC majority opted to leave the order unchanged.

AmiMoJo writes: Link previews are a ubiquitous feature found in just about every chat and messaging app, and with good reason. They make online conversations easier by providing images and text associated with the file that's being linked. Unfortunately, they can also leak our sensitive data, consume our limited bandwidth, drain our batteries, and, in one case, expose links in chats that are supposed to be end-to-end encrypted. Among the worst offenders, according to research published on Monday, were messengers from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Line. [...] Facebook Messenger and Instagram both downloaded a 2.6GB test file, as well as executing arbitrary Javascript code on their servers. When informed of this Facebook (which owns Instagram) said that was the intended behaviour, even though it could be used to e.g. hijack their servers for cryptocurrency mining. The three best messaging platforms were Signal, WhatsApp, Threema and iMessage, at least in terms of properly protecting your personal data.

A group of search engines from around the world are banding together to demand European Union regulators address Google's dominance in the online search market. They are also urging the EU to take a closer look at Google's controversial auction process. From a report: The news comes hot on the heels of the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) antitrust case, which formally launched last week. The suit alleges that Google violates anti-competition laws by crowding out rivals in the internet search and advertising markets. DuckDuckGo (U.S.), Ecosia (Germany), Lilo and Qwant (France), and Seznam (Czech Republic) have penned an open letter to European Commission executive VP Margrethe Vestager asking her to take a "renewed look" at the policing of Google's search market dominance. As an initial step, the companies are calling for a trilateral meeting between themselves, the European Commission (EC), and Google to look at the issue of search engine competition in Europe and elsewhere. More specifically, Google's smaller rivals want to establish a more "effective preference menu," giving Android users an easier way to choose a default search engine when setting up their device for the first time.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google knows that many people will be using YouTube to keep up with the US election on November 3rd. Many politicians use the platform to communicate with voters, and some news organizations will likely livestream round-the-clock coverage. Keeping up with Election Day can be difficult, though, so YouTube is preparing a small but useful information panel that will appear at the top of search results and election-centric videos. It will remind users that "results may not be final" and, using a massive 'SHOW ME' button, point them toward a Google-run election hub. It's not the first time that YouTube has used this feature. Back in March 2019, the Google-owned operation added an alert that appeared alongside controversial search queries. If someone had typed 'virus in paracetamol,' for instance, YouTube would throw up a small card that details the hoax and, more importantly, a trustworthy assessment from a fact-checking partner such as The Quint. It was launched in India but has since expanded to other countries including the US. Last month, YouTube also introduced some panels that appear alongside election-related queries -- such as how to vote, and how to register to vote in your state -- and link to information by authoritative sources such as the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank.