Google has officially taken the wraps off of the $699 Pixel 5, its latest Android flagship. From a report: Compared to last year's Pixel 4, Google is focusing less on dramatic new technology -- like the much-hyped Motion Sense gestures on last year's model -- and emphasizing instead the unique features that already help set the Pixel apart, like its stand-out camera software. The Pixel 5 will feature a Snapdragon 765G processor -- notably not the top-tier Snapdragon 865 or 865 Plus -- complete with Qualcomm's integrated X52 modem for 5G support (a benefit of the slightly less powerful chipset.) It's a break from the usual Pixel strategy, which has sought to offer comparable flagship specs to other top Android devices from companies like Samsung or OnePlus -- but it also means that Google can offer the new phone at a lower price. Google is calling out a few things that separate out the Pixel 5 from the newly announced Pixel 4A, including IPX8 water-resistance, reverse wireless charging, more RAM, and a stronger Corning Gorilla Glass 6 panel. Notably, it lacks a 3.5mm headphone jack, though, something that its cheaper siblings offer. The display is a 6-inch 2340 x 1080 OLED panel in a 19.5:9 aspect ratio with a 90Hz refresh rate, which features a hole-punch selfie camera. Thanks to the removal of the Motion Sense camera -- and the hefty top bezel it required for its radar array -- there's now a full edge-to-edge display this time, with no notch or bezels.

Some employers are giving their Zoomed-out workers a break. From a report: From tech startups to sprawling hospitals, businesses say they are trying to dial back time employees spend in remote meetings after realizing that hours spent on video calls every day have taken a toll. Still, some employees have a hard time breaking the Zoom habit, even with their bosses telling them to stop. Executives making the switch say meeting schedules ballooned in the pandemic's early days, largely due to the perceived ease of video calls and a desire to maintain workday normalcy as much of the country sheltered in place. "Zoom fatigue is real," said Abby Payne, chief people officer at SailPoint Technologies. The Austin, Texas, company has instituted a ban on meetings from 10 a.m. to noon every Tuesday and Thursday. Employee comments about sitting down at their computers at 7 a.m. and not getting up for 12 hours helped prompt the move, Ms. Payne said. "This is really a way for the organization as a whole to address both the fatigue of staring into a computer and also the reality that half of us have little ones," she added. The 1,000-person company enacted the restriction on meetings in August when it realized many employees would be juggling work while also raising children who would be attending school remotely in the fall.

Microsoft is officially revealing it's working on x64 app emulation support for Windows on ARM today. From a report: Currently, Windows on ARM devices like the Surface Pro X can only run native 32- and 64-bit ARM apps, alongside 32-bit x86 apps. The vast majority of desktop apps, including Adobe's Creative Suite, have moved to 64-bit x86 and many have stopped supporting their 32-bit variants. This has left devices like the Surface Pro X unable to access certain apps, but Microsoft's new emulation support will mean any and all Windows apps will now work on Windows on ARM. The new x64 emulation support will start rolling out to Windows Insider testers in November and should arrive in a broader operating system update next year.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong sent his employees a letter telling them to get in line with a new company "culture shift," offering those unwilling to do so a "generous separation package." Armstrong sent the letter, which CoinDesk obtained, to Coinbase employees on Wednesday, stating the time has come to have a "difficult conversation" over his recent clarification of Coinbase's mission. Armstrong wrote that Coinbase had "an apolitical culture" in an open letter published Sunday that said the exchange would not engage in "broader societal issues" or entertain employee discussions about these issues. Those employees unhappy with the new direction have been informed they can take up a separation package because "life is too short to work at a company that you are not excited about." The packages includes four months' severance for employees who have been at the exchange less than three years or six months for longer-term employees. Coinbase will also offer six months of health insurance through the U.S. government's COBRA program.

China is preparing to launch an antitrust probe into Google, looking into allegations it has leveraged the dominance of its Android mobile operating system to stifle competition, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing two people familiar with the matter. From the report: The case was proposed by telecommunications equipment giant Huawei last year and has been submitted by the country's top market regulator to the State Council's antitrust committee for review, they added. A decision on whether to proceed with a formal investigation may come as soon as October and could be affected by the state of China's relationship with the United States, one of the people said. The potential investigation follows a raft of actions by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration to hobble Chinese tech companies, citing national security risks. This has included putting Huawei on its trade blacklist, threatening similar action for Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp and ordering TikTok owner ByteDance to divest the short-form video app.

Big tech firms could be banned from preferencing their own services in search rankings or exclusively pre-installing their own applications on devices, under new regulations planned by the European Union. From a report: As part of the EU's Digital Services Act, platforms with power to control could also have to share customer data with business rivals, according to internal draft documents obtained by Bloomberg. Due to be unveiled in December by the European Commission, the bloc's executive body, the legislation will seek to modernize rules governing the internet to give platforms greater responsibility for what users post on their sites as well as propose regulation aimed at curbing the power of large platforms. The initiative comes as big giants such as Apple and Google offer services across a widening array of sectors and as competitors increasingly rely on their platforms to offer their own services. Apple has faced heat over policies with its app store, which companies like Spotify complain give an unfair advantage to the iPhone maker's rival music service.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Shibu Philip admits he knows what it's like to "maybe waste a bit of time at work." Shibu is the founder of Transcend -- a small London-based firm that buys beauty products wholesale and re-sells them online. For the last year and a half he has used Hubstaff software to track his workers' hours, keystrokes, mouse movements and websites visited. With seven employees based in India, he says the software ensures "there is some level of accountability" and helps plug the time difference. "I know myself. [You can] take an extra 10-minute break here or there. It's good to have an automatic way of monitoring what [my employees] are up to," says Shibu. "By looking at screenshots and how much time everyone is taking on certain tasks, I know if they're following procedures. "And, if they're doing better than I expected, I also study the photos and ask them to share that knowledge with the rest of the team so we can all improve," he says.

US-based Hubstaff says its number of UK customers is up four times year-on-year since February. Another company called Sneek offers technology that takes photos of workers through their laptop and uploads them for colleagues to see. Photos can be taken as often as every minute, although it describes itself as a communication platform. Its co-founder, Del Currie, told the BBC that it had seen a five-fold increase in its number of users during lockdown, taking the firm to almost 20,000 in total.

Last year at its Accelerate 2019 event in Orlando, Lenovo teased "the world's first foldable PC." They didn't unveil the name, price tag, or ship date -- just that it would be part of Lenovo's flagship ThinkPad X1 line and that it would arrive in 2020. Today, the company formally unveiled the device it's calling the ThinkPad X1 Fold, which is available for preorder now, starting at $2,499. The Verge reports: The idea is that you can use the Fold like a large tablet when it's fully unfolded (or divide the screen into two adjacent displays). You can prop the Fold up horizontally to use it like a full 13-inch notebook, with an optional detachable keyboard and easel stand. You can fold the thing up 90 degrees, turn it vertically, and use it like a miniature laptop (a touchscreen keyboard pops up on the bottom half). You can turn it horizontally and use it like a book, with an optional stylus. Or you can fold the whole thing up, and easily carry it around without it taking up much space in your bag. In terms of other specs, the production Fold comes with Intel's Lakefield processors, two USB-C ports and a SIM-card slot, 8GB of RAM, up to 1TB of storage, and a 50Wh battery. It weighs 2.2 pounds and can come with 5G support. Lenovo also announced a bunch of Linux ThinkPads and ThinkStation PCs.

Amsterdam and Helsinki this week launched AI registries to detail how each city government uses algorithms to deliver services, some of the first major cities in the world to do so. From a report: An AI Register for each city was introduced in beta today as part of the Next Generation Internet Policy Summit, organized in part by the European Commission and the city of Amsterdam. The Amsterdam registry currently features a handful of algorithms, but it will be extended to include all algorithms following the collection of feedback at the virtual conference to lay out a European vision of the future of the internet, according to a city official. Each algorithm cited in the registry lists datasets used to train a model, a description of how an algorithm is used, how humans utilize the prediction, and how algorithms were assessed for potential bias or risks. The registry also provides citizens a way to give feedback on algorithms their local government uses and the name, city department, and contact information for the person responsible for the responsible deployment of a particular algorithm. A complete algorithmic registry can empower citizens and give them a way to evaluate, examine, or question governments' applications of AI.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: With today's news that French shipping giant CMA CGM has been hit by a ransomware attack, this now means that all of the four biggest maritime shipping companies in the world have been hit by cyber-attacks in the past four years, since 2017. Previous incidents included: 1.) APM-Maersk -- taken down for weeks by the NotPetya ransomware/wiper in 2017. 2.) Mediterranean Shipping Company -- hit in April 2020 by an unnamed malware strain that brought down its data center for days. 3.) COSCO -- brought down for weeks by ransomware in July 2018.

On top of these, we also have CMA CGM, which today took down its worldwide shipping container booking system after its Chinese branches in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou were hit by the Ragnar Locker ransomware. This marks for a unique case study, as there is no other industry sector where the Big Four have suffered major cyber-attacks one after the other like this. But while all these incidents are different, they show a preferential targeting of the maritime shipping industry.

After five years and an investment of around $2.5 billion, Uber's effort to build a self-driving car has produced this: a car that can't drive more than half a mile without encountering a problem [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: "The car doesn't drive well" and "struggles with simple routes and simple maneuvers," said a manager in the unit, in a 1,500-word email sent three weeks ago to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, warning of the issues. The self-drivingâ"car unit "has simply failed to evolve and produce meaningful progress in so long that something has to be said before a disaster befalls us," said the manager in the email, which The Information has seen. The manager -- whose identity The Information confirmed -- reflects a common belief across Uber that the unit, known as the Advanced Technologies Group, is destined to lose the high-stakes race to its rivals, which have demonstrated a lot more headway, comparatively speaking.

The manager is one of a growing number of voices, both insiders and former employees, raising concerns about the unit's effectiveness and questioning Khosrowshahi's ability to hold anyone accountable for its failures. Thuan Pham, Uber's longtime chief technology officer, who quit earlier this year, is one of those critics. "Over the past two years I have periodically raised concerns with Dara on whether meaningful self-driving progress is being made at ATG and specifically urged him to ask specific questions in this area in order to assess this for himself," said Pham in an interview. "I just don't understand why, from all observable measures, the thing isn't making progress. How come there hasn't been accountability or transparency?"

The Starlink satellite internet network that SpaceX is developing has been used in the field by Washington state emergency responders in recent weeks, the first early application of the company's service to be disclosed. CNBC reports: Washington's state military, which includes its emergency response division, began employing Starlink user terminals in early August to bring internet service to areas devastated by wildfires. User terminals are the small devices on the ground that connect to the satellites. The emergency division has seven Starlink user terminals, which it is deploying with early success. "I have never set up any tactical satellite equipment that has been as quick to set up, and anywhere near as reliable" as Starlink, Richard Hall, the emergency telecommunications leader of the Washington State Military Department's IT division, told CNBC in an interview Monday.

Hall, whose division has used other satellite broadband services, said "there's really no comparison" between Starlink and traditional networks, where the satellites are farther away from the Earth in Geosynchronous or medium earth orbits. "Starlink easily doubles the bandwidth" in comparison, Hall said, noting that he's seen more than 150% decreases in latency. "I've seen lower than 30 millisecond latency consistently," he said. Hall said that, with other traditional services, it typically takes between 30 minutes to an hour to set up a satellite connection, "with a lot less speed and bandwidth and a lot higher latency in a much larger package."

By comparison, Hall emphasized that it took him between five and 10 minutes to set up and connect a Starlink terminal. And a single person can set up one of the devices: "It doesn't require a truck and a trailer and a whole lot of other additional equipment," Hall said. "I have spent the better part of four or five hours with some satellite equipment trying to get a good [connection]. So, to me, it's amazing," Hall added.

The Xen Project has ported its hypervisor to the 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4. The Register reports: The idea to do an official port bubbled up from the Xen community and then reached the desk of George Dunlap, chairman of the Xen Project's Advisory Board. Dunlap mentioned the idea to an acquaintance who works at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and was told that around 40 percent of Pis are sold to business users rather than hobbyists. With more than 30 million Arm-based Pis sold as of December 2019, and sales running at a brisk 600,000-plus a month in April 2020, according to Pi guy Eben Upton, Dunlap saw an opportunity to continue Xen's drive towards embedded and industrial applications.

Stefano Stabellini, who by day works at FPGA outfit Xilinx, and past Apache Foundation director Roman Shaposhnik took on the task of the port. The pair clocked that the RPi 4's system-on-chip used a regular GIC-400 interrupt controller, which Xen supports out of the box, and thought this was a sign this would, overall, be an easy enough job. That, the duo admitted, was dangerous optimism. Forget the IRQs, there was a whole world of physical and virtual memory addresses to navigate. The pair were "utterly oblivious that we were about to embark on an adventure deep in the belly of the Xen memory allocator and Linux address translation layers," we're told. [The article goes on to explain the hurdles that were ahead of them.]

"Once Linux 5.9 is out, we will have Xen working on RPi4 out of the box," the pair said. [...] Stefano Stabellini told The Register that an official Xen-on-RPi port will make a difference in the Internet-of-Things community, because other Arm development boards are more costly than the Pi, and programmers will gravitate towards a cheaper alternative for prototyping. He also outlined scenarios, such as a single edge device running both a real-time operating system alongside another OS, each dedicated to different tasks but inhabiting the same hardware and enjoying the splendid isolation of a virtual machine rather than sharing an OS as containers. George Dunlap also thinks that an official Xen-on-RPi port could also be of use to home lab builders, or perhaps just give developers a more suitable environment for their side projects than a virtual machine or container on their main machines. Stay tuned to Project EVE's Github page for more details about how to build your own Xen-for-RPi. Hacks to get it up and running should also appear on the Xen project blog.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Cloudflare is launching a privacy-friendly rival to Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free toolkit that's used by website administrators across the globe to help them track the behavior of the people visiting those sites -- how they find them, what they do there, the devices they're using, and so on. However, the service -- the most popular of its kind -- also helps Google track websites' visitors, so it can better profile them for advertising purposes. This privacy-invasive aspect makes many people squeamish. And that's where Cloudflare would now like to step in.

Around its birthday every year, the decade-old company -- which went public last year -- announces a move intended to "give back" to the wider Internet community. These moves are often related to privacy. On Tuesday, it unveiled Cloudflare Web Analytics, a free-to-use toolkit that largely replicates what Google Analytics offers -- minus the invasive tracking, and thus the ability to assess the performance of targeted ads carried on websites. Cloudflare Web Analytics is immediately available to the company's paid customers, but any website owner will be able to use it from some point in the coming months. Cloudflare's scale is crucial here [...] because it takes substantial resources to run a free analytics platform, and Cloudflare already has a giant network that can support the load. Cloudflare Web Analytics isn't the company's only big announcement this week. "On Monday, Cloudflare launched a beta testing program for a cloud technology called Durable Objects," the report adds. "You can read the technical explanation here, but in essence this is a tool that allows developers of online services to make those services comply with the increasing number of data-localization and data-protection laws that limit where users' data is supposed to go."

"With Durable Objects, Cloudflare says, it is possible to specify where particular data will reside on Cloudflare's network, so -- for example -- a German user's data does not have to leave Germany. Or, with an eye to other current news, a service such as TikTok could ensure that U.S. users' data never leaves the U.S., without having to create a separate version of its service for that country."

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: For many years, the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report has been the gold standard in terms of providing a yearly overview of all the major events and trends in the cyber-security and threat intelligence landscape. While Microsoft unceremoniously retired the old SIR reports back in 2018, the OS maker appears to have realized its mistake, and has brought it back today, rebranded as the new Microsoft Digital Defense Report. Just like the previous SIR reports, Microsoft has yet again delivered. Taking advantage of its vantage points over vast swaths of the desktop, server, enterprise, and cloud ecosystems, Microsoft has summarized the biggest threats companies deal with today in the face of cybercrime and nation-state attackers. The report is 88 pages long, includes data from July 2019 and June 2020, and some users might not have the time to go through it in its entirety. Below is a summary of the main talking points, Microsoft's main findings, and general threat landscape trends.

[...] But, by far, the most disruptive cybercrime threat of the past year have been ransomware gangs. Microsoft said that ransomware infections had been the most common reason behind the company's incident response (IR) engagements from October 2019 through July 2020. And of all ransomware gangs, it's the groups known as "big game hunters" and "human-operated ransomware" that have given Microsoft the most headaches. These are groups that specifically target select networks belonging to large corporations or government organizations, knowing they stand to receive larger ransom payments. Most of these groups operate either by using malware infrastructure provided by other cybercrime groups or by mass-scanning the internet for newly-disclosed vulnerabilities. In most cases, groups gain access to a system and maintain a foothold until they're ready to launch their attacks. However, Microsoft says that this year, these ransomware gangs have been particularly active and have reduced the time they need to launch attacks, and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. "Attackers have exploited the COVID-19 crisis to reduce their dwell time within a victim's system â" compromising, exfiltrating data and, in some cases, ransoming quickly â" apparently believing that there would be an increased willingness to pay as a result of the outbreak," Microsoft said today. "In some instances, cybercriminals went from initial entry to ransoming the entire network in under 45 minutes."

On the eve of the first presidential debate, the Biden campaign is pressing Facebook to remove posts by President Trump -- and slamming the social media company as "the nation's foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process." From a report: By publicly escalating the conflict, the campaign is pressing Facebook to enforce its policies against misinformation more aggressively. "Rather than seeing progress, we have seen regression," campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a three-page letter obtained by Axios. "Facebook's continued promise of future action is serving as nothing more than an excuse for inaction," the letter says. "We will be calling out those failures as they occur over the coming 36 days."

D-Wave today launched its next-generation quantum computing platform available via its Leap quantum cloud service. The company calls Advantage "the first quantum computer built for business." In that vein, D-Wave today also debuted Launch, a jump-start program for businesses that want to begin building hybrid quantum applications. From a report: "The Advantage quantum computer is the first quantum computer designed and developed from the ground up to support business applications," D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz told VentureBeat. "We engineered it to be able to deal with large, complex commercial applications and to be able to support the running of those applications in production environments. There is no other quantum computer anywhere in the world that can solve problems at the scale and complexity that this quantum computer can solve problems. It really is the only one that you can run real business applications on. The other quantum computers are primarily prototypes. You can do experimentation, run small proofs of concept, but none of them can support applications at the scale that we can." Quantum computing leverages qubits (unlike bits that can only be in a state of 0 or 1, qubits can also be in a superposition of the two) to perform computations that would be much more difficult, or simply not feasible, for a classical computer. Based in Burnaby, Canada, D-Wave was the first company to sell commercial quantum computers, which are built to use quantum annealing. But D-Wave doesn't sell quantum computers anymore. Advantage and its over 5,000 qubits (up from 2,000 in the company's 2000Q system) are only available via the cloud. (That means through Leap or a partner like Amazon Braket.)

Amazon accounts for nearly 40 percent of e-commerce sales in the US today, and it takes a cut of even more online shopping by selling payments services and other technologies to external shopping sites. Now, the online retail giant is making a play to grab a piece of brick-and-mortar shopping, too -- and it wants customers to literally lend a hand to do it. From a report: Amazon on Tuesday is unveiling a new biometric technology called Amazon One that allows shoppers to pay at stores by placing their palm over a scanning device when they walk in the door or when they check out. The first time they register to use this tech, a customer will scan their palm and insert their payment card at a terminal; after that, they can simply pay with their hand. The hand-scanning tech isn't just for Amazon's own stores -- the company hopes to sell it to other retailers, including competitors, too.

The technology will be available at the entrance of two of the company's Amazon Go cashierless convenience stores in Seattle, Washington, starting Tuesday, and will roll out to the rest of the chain's 20-plus stores in the future, Amazon Vice President Dilip Kumar told Recode in an interview Monday. Recode reported in December that Amazon had filed a patent application for such a hand-payment technology. The technology could also show up in Whole Foods stores, with Amazon hinting in a press release that it will introduce palm payments in the coming months at its other stores beyondtAmazon Go locations. Kumar wouldn't comment on a potential Whole Foods implementation, though the New York Post reported a year ago that such a plan was in the works.

Google has recently removed 17 Android applications from the official Play Store because they were infected with the Joker (aka Bread) malware. ZDNet reports: "This spyware is designed to steal SMS messages, contact lists, and device information, along with silently signing up the victim for premium wireless application protocol (WAP) services," Zscaler security researcher Viral Gandhi said this week. The 17 malicious apps were uploaded on the Play Store this month and didn't get a chance to gain a following, having been downloaded more than 120,000 times before being detected.

Following its internal procedures, Google removed the apps from the Play Store, used the Play Protect service to disable the apps on infected devices, but users still need to manually intervene and remove the apps from their devices. But this recent takedown also marks the third such action from Google's security team against a batch of Joker-infected apps over the past few months. [...] The way these infected apps usually manage to sneak their way past Google's defenses and reach the Play Store is through a technique called "droppers," where the victim's device is infected in a multi-stage process. Malware authors begin by cloning the functionality of a legitimate app and uploading it on the Play Store. This app is fully functional, requests access to dangerous permissions, but also doesn't perform any malicious actions when it's first run.

Because the malicious actions are usually delayed by hours or days, Google's security scans don't pick up the malicious code, and Google usually allows the app to be listed on the Play Store. But once on a user's device, the app eventually downloads and "drops" (hence the name droppers, or loaders) other components or apps on the device that contain the Joker malware or other malware strains.

In a study the Pew Research Center released today, 26% of U.S. adults said they now get their news from YouTube. That includes 23% via videos posted by news organizations and 23% from independent YouTube channels. Researchers surveyed 12,638 U.S. adults for the report. VentureBeat reports: "The study finds a news landscape on YouTube in which established news organizations and independent news creators thrive side by side -- and consequently, one where established news organizations no longer have full control over the news Americans watch," the authors wrote. The report defines "external news organizations" as both traditional media like the New York Times and digital-native outlets like BuzzFeed. Independent channels can include celebrities like John Oliver alongside "YouTubers," the 30% who have built their following almost entirely on the platform.

While the report paints a picture of a thriving news ecosystem, it also notes some disturbing differences between traditional and independent sources. Independent channels, for instance, tend to be built around personalities, rather than a broader news organization. And those independent channels are far more likely to focus on conspiracy theories around subjects like anti-vaccine topics or Jeffrey Epstein's death. The report analyzed 3,000 videos posted from the 100 top YouTube news channels in November and December 2019 and found that 4% involved conspiracy theories of some kind. But among independent channels, 14% of videos were primarily dedicated to conspiracy theories, and up to 21% made some mention of them. Only 2% of videos by traditional news organizations mentioned conspiracy theories. In addition, 37% of videos from independent channels tended to view their subjects through a negative lens, versus just 17% from news organizations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that negativity seemed to drive more views, which has made this subset of independent channels particularly problematic for YouTube.