Microsoft is about to release a big Xbox app update for iOS that includes the ability to stream Xbox One games to an iPhone. The Verge reports: A new Xbox app will arrive in the App Store soon that includes a remote play feature, which lets Xbox One console owners stream their games to an iPhone. Remote play is different to Microsoft's xCloud service, which streams games directly from servers instead of your own Xbox One console. This Xbox remote play feature will only connect to your own Xbox console, not to xCloud. It's similar to Sony's own PS4 Remote Play feature that's also available on Android and iOS.

You will be able to access an Xbox console over Wi-Fi, or even an LTE or 5G connection, too. As this app takes control of your home Xbox, you can remotely start your console outside of your home. The Xbox will start up without a sound or the Xbox light at the front, and when you disconnect, it goes back into standby after a brief period of inactivity. A new Xbox app arrived on Android recently, and this updated iPhone version includes the same new design and new features.

ZeroAvia's hydrogen fuel-cell plane that's capable of carrying six passengers completed its maiden flight this week. The aircraft has been retrofitted with a device that combines hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity. CNBC reports: ZeroAvia has said the trip, described as a "hydrogen fuel cell powered flight of a commercial-grade aircraft," is a "world first." Other examples of hydrogen-fuel cell planes that can host passengers do exist, however. Back in 2016, the HY4 aircraft, which is able to carry four people, undertook its first official journey when it flew from Stuttgart Airport in Germany. The HY4 was developed by researchers at the German Aerospace Center alongside "industry and research partners." Thursday's ZeroAvia flight was carried out at the company's research and development site at Cranfield Airport, in England -- 50 miles north of London. The airport is owned by Cranfield University.

"While some experimental aircraft have flown using hydrogen fuel cells as a power source, the size of this commercially available aircraft shows that paying passengers could be boarding a truly zero-emission flight very soon," Val Miftakhov, the CEO of ZeroAvia, said in a statement. The next step of the HyFlyer project will see ZeroAvia work toward carrying out a flight of between 250 and 300 nautical miles from the Orkney Islands, an archipelago located in waters off the north coast of mainland Scotland. The plane on this flight will use hydrogen-fuel cells. It's hoped this trip will happen before the end of 2020.

Twitter says it's working on bringing its "read the article before you retweet it" prompt to all users "soon." The Verge reports: The company began testing the prompt in June, which shows up when people go to retweet a story they haven't clicked through to actually read. Twitter says its motivation is to "help promote informed discussion." Headlines often don't tell the whole story and can even be actively misleading. Encouraging people to at least read the article they're sharing seems like a smart way to promote media literacy and stop some of the knee-jerk reactions that can make misinformation viral.

The company shared some results from its initial test of the feature, which was limited to Twitter users on Android. It says people shown the prompt opened articles 40 percent more often and that the overall proportion of people opening articles before retweeting increased by 33 percent. The company also said that "some people" (a statistically meaningless phrase!) didn't retweet the article after opening it up.

A group of high-profile Facebook critics on Friday announced the launch of what they are calling the "Real Facebook Oversight Board," an effort that aims to counter an independent board established by Facebook last year to oversee its decisions on content moderation. From a report: The opposing effort represents how political the fight between Facebook and its critics has become in the lead-up to the presidential election. The group includes leaders from the Stop Hate for Profit boycott, like Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, and Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, as well as prominent Facebook critics like Roger McNamee and some journalists and pundits. The new oversight board rival cites an "urgent threat to democracy" leading up to its launch. It criticizes the independent oversight board, funded by Facebook, for its delayed launch. The board is billing its formation as an "emergency response" to urgent issues like voter suppression, election security and misinformation. The first of its meetings -- which appear to be more like media events than deliberations on content decisions -- will be held next week, broadcast on Facebook Live, with New York Times columnist Kara Swisher hosting. The response comes just after the actual Facebook-funded appeals board announced that it would be launching earlier than expected. [...] A document obtained by Axios that appears to be a pitch deck for the project alleges that the Facebook-funded oversight board is "little more than a corporate whitewashing exercise."

Twitter is notifying developers today about a possible security incident that may have impacted their accounts. From a report: The incident was caused by incorrect instructions that the developer.twitter.com website sent to users' browsers. The developer.twitter.com website is the portal where developers manage their Twitter apps and attached API keys, but also the access token and secret key for their Twitter account. In an email sent to developers today, Twitter said that its developer.twitter.com website told browsers to create and store copies of the API keys, account access token, and account secret inside their cache, a section of the browser where data is saved to speed up the process of loading the page when the user accessed the same site again. This might not be a problem for developers using their own browsers, but Twitter is warning developers who may have used public or shared computers to access the developer.twitter.com website -- in which case, their API keys are now most likely stored in those browsers.

Facebook executives have sharply ramped up their criticism of Apple in recent months, contesting the iPhone maker's restrictions on gaming apps and ad targeting, as well as its cut of in-app purchases. Now, emboldened by Apple software changes that suggest it is starting to bend, Facebook wants something else: the option to make its Messenger app the default messaging tool on iPhones [Editor's note: the link is paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: "We feel people should be able to choose different messaging apps and the default on their phone," Stan Chudnovsky, the Facebook vice president in charge of its Messenger app, told The Information. "Generally, everything is moving this direction anyway." Chudnovksy said Facebook has asked Apple over the years to consider opening up default messaging. Apple has never agreed. Apple's Messages app is a core feature of its mobile software that encourages people to keep buying its devices, and the app's encryption of messages is also a cornerstone of the company's privacy pitch to consumers. Google's rival Android mobile operating system already lets users choose their default messaging app.

Google informed its advertisers Friday that it will broadly block election ads after polls close Nov. 3, according to an email obtained by Axios. From a report: Big Tech platforms have been under pressure to address how their ad policies will handle conflicts over the presidential election's outcome. Facebook recently said that it will no longer accept new political ads for the week leading up to Election Day, but it will not block election ads after the polls close. It will, however, reject ads from U.S. political campaigns prematurely claiming victory before results have been declared, per Fast Company. In the email, Google says that advertisers will not be able to run ads "referencing candidates, the election, or its outcome, given that an unprecedented amount of votes will be counted after election day this year." The policy, which is intended to block all ads related to the election, will apply to all ads running through Google's ad-serving platforms, including Google Ads, DV360, YouTube, and AdX Authorized Buyer.

Google plans to push harder for developers to give the company a cut of in-app purchases through its Play app store, according to people with knowledge of the move. From a report: The Alphabet unit plans to issue updated guidelines as early as next week that clarify a requirement for most apps to use Google's billing service for in-app content downloads, game upgrades and subscriptions. This system gives the company a 30% cut of purchases inside of apps on Android. While this requirement has existed for years, some major developers including Netflix, Spotify, Match Group and Epic Games, have circumvented the rule. Netflix and Spotify apps prompt consumers to pay using a credit card, rather than their Play app store account, bypassing Google's fee. Last year, Match Group's Tinder dating app launched a similar payment process. More recently, Epic Games started letting players buy in-game upgrades for its Fortnite video game via a method that paid Epic directly. In response, Google and Apple pulled Fortnite from their app stores and Epic sued both tech giants.

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Gizmodo Australia reports: On Thursday, users on 4chan posted what they claimed was the source code of Windows XP. Posting an image of a screenshot allegedly of the source code in front of Window's XP iconic Bliss background, one user wrote 'sooooo Windows XP Source code leaked'. Another Redditor helpfully has uploaded the code as a torrent, assisting in its spread. While there is no confirmation that this code is definitely Windows XP, independent researchers have begun to pick through the source code and believe it stands up to scrutiny.

The Windows XP source code is not the only code which might have leaked. A screenshot of the torrent files contains files and folders named, Xbox, Windows Research Kernel, MS DOS 6.0, Windows NT 3.5 and 4 source code, Windows Embedded and CE and many others. If true, that could spell a disaster for Microsoft because large chunks of Windows XP source code are still used in Windows 10, and as for Open Source, this leak could become a boom for Wine development because Microsoft is notorious for having a great number of internal APIs and various hacks in their APIs which make it difficult to reimplement them properly.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Facebook announced on Thursday that it has taken down three "coordinated inauthentic behavior" networks promoting disinformation that included nearly 300 Facebook and Instagram accounts along with dozens of Facebook Pages and Groups. While the efforts were seemingly run independently, and focused primarily outside of the US, each has ties to Russian intelligence -- and they collectively provide a sobering echo of the social media assault that roiled the 2016 election. The networks Facebook tackled dated back at least three years, but most had few followers at the time they were caught. They primarily promoted non-Facebook websites in an apparent effort to get around the platform's detection mechanisms, focusing on news and current events, particularly geopolitics. They targeted users in a number of countries, including Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, Japan, the UK, and Belarus, as well as the United States to a lesser extent.

Facebook attributed one of the disinformation distribution networks to "actors associated with election interference in the US in the past, including those involved in 'DC leaks' in 2016." In other words, the actors were likely tied to Fancy Bear, also known as APT 28, the group also responsible for hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Facebook attributes the second network to "individuals associated with past activity by the Russian Internet Research Agency," the so-called troll farm that wreaked havoc on Facebook in 2016. The company noted that it is unclear whether the IRA is still an active entity or what form it takes at this point. The third network had "links to individuals in Russia, including those associated with Russian intelligence services." None of the networks focused solely on the US. Instead, they engaged with a broad array of topics connected to Russian interests, including the war in Ukraine, the Syrian civil war, the election and protests in Belarus, Russia's relationship with NATO, and politics in Turkey.

A giant Gundam in Japan's Port of Yokohama is now able to "pick up its legs to walk, bend its knees, turn its head, and contort its fingers to mime hand signals," reports Popular Mechanics. The 60-foot robot is the largest in the world. From the report: Inspired by the fictional Japanese robot of the same name -- which has appeared in over 50 TV series and movies since 1979, as well as many manga comics and video games -- this Gundam features a staggering 24 degrees of freedom. People in Japan have caught and shared a few glimpses of the engineering marvel. Considering the Gundam weighs about 25 tons, it's pretty insane to watch it raise both arms in the air and pick itself back up after kneeling.

Those efficiencies are thanks to precise engineering and design work, as outlined in a series of YouTube videos from Gundam Factory Yokohama. In one installment, the engineers give a tour of where they designed, built, and assembled the Gundam. The videos are a great way to really contextualize the size of this monster; from the metal fingertip to where the wrist will connect, for example, the hand is about 6.5 feet wide.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Speaking to Congress today, the former Facebook manager first tasked with making the company make money did not mince words about his role. He told lawmakers that the company "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset" and arguing that his former employer has been hugely detrimental to society. His analogy continued: "Tobacco companies initially just sought to make nicotine more potent. But eventually that wasn't enough to grow the business as fast as they wanted. And so they added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods. At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes, which made status and reputation primary and laid the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis. Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. But that incendiary content alone wasn't enough. To continue to grow the user base and in particular, the amount of time and attention users would surrender to Facebook, they needed more."

Tim Kendall, who served as director of monetization for Facebook from 2006 through 2010, spoke to Congress today as part of a House Commerce subcommittee hearing examining how social media platforms contribute to the mainstreaming of extremist and radicalizing content. "The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding -- at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war." As director of monetization, he added, "We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible... We took a page form Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset."

Saad Bhamla, an undergraduate in Mumbai, India, has invented a do-it-yourself hearing aid made from inexpensive, easy-to-find parts. "At bulk rates, Bhamla says, it would cost just under $1 to make," reports Science Magazine. "But anyone with the freely available blueprints and a soldering iron can make their own for not much more -- maybe $15 or $20, Bhamla says." From the report: Inspired by his grandparents and a hearing-impaired colleague -- who is the first author on the new paper -- Bhamla and his team set out to develop a cheap hearing aid built with off-the-shelf parts. They soldered a microphone onto a small circuit board to capture nearby sound and added an amplifier and a frequency filter to specifically increase the volume of high-pitch sounds above 1000 hertz. Then they added a volume control, an on/off switch, and an audio jack for plugging in standard earphones, as well as a battery holder. The device, dubbed LoCHAid, is the size of a matchbox and can be worn like a necklace.

Next, Bhamla and his colleagues tested the device. They found that it boosted the volume of high-pitch sounds by 15 decibels while preserving volumes at lower pitches. It also filtered out interference and sudden, loud sounds like dog barks and car horns. Finally, tests with an artificial ear revealed that LoCHAid might improve speech recognition, by bringing conversations closer to the quality heard by healthy individuals. It complied with five out of six of the World Health Organization's preferred product recommendations for hearing aids, the researchers report today in PLOS ONE. There are some drawbacks. The device can't be fine-tuned for individual needs, and the researchers anticipate that LoCHAid's parts will wear out after about a year and a half. It's also bulky, though a smaller version is in development.

Bhamla notes that it needs to be clinically tested before his device can be sold as a "hearing aid" in the United States.

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3090, which just launched this morning, is the single most powerful graphics card money can buy currently (almost). It sits at the top of NVIDIA's product stack, and according to the company, it enables new experiences like smooth 8K gaming and seamless processing of massive content creation workloads, thanks in part to its 24GB of on-board GDDR6X memory. A graphics card like the GeForce RTX 3090 isn't for everyone, however. Though its asking price is about a $1,000 lower than its previous-gen, Turing-based Titan RTX counterpart, it is still out of reach for most gamers. That said, content creation and workstation rendering professionals can more easily justify its cost.

In performance testing fresh off the NDA lift, versus the GeForce RTX 3080 that arrived last week, the more powerful RTX 3090's gains range from about 4% to 20%. Versus the more expensive previous generation Titan RTX though, the GeForce RTX 3090's advantages increase to approximately 6% to 40%. When you factor in complex creator workloads that can leverage the GeForce RTX 3090's additional resources and memory, however, it can be many times faster than either the RTX 3080 or Titan RTX. The GeForce RTX 3090 will be available in limited quantities today but the company pledges to make more available directly and through OEM board partners as soon as possible.

Facebook has settled a class action lawsuit that claimed the company collected and stored facial templates for its users between June 7, 2011, and Aug. 19, 2020, when the settlement was approved. "Individuals could be eligible for cash payouts of $200 to $400," reports Patch. From the report: In 2015, lawsuits were filed against Facebook over its use of "face tagging" feature. Plaintiffs claimed that Facebook was collecting biometric information ("face prints") without getting proper consent required by the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. Facebook disputed the allegations. Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge James Donato gave preliminary approval to a $650 million settlement, out of which class members can claim money. Facebook has also agreed to change its practices. It's not known how much individual class members will receive, but Edelson PC predicts an individual will get $200 to $400. A household with four eligible people could receive as much as $800 to $1,600.

To participate in the settlement, a person need only have been a Facebook user located in Illinois for whom Facebook created and stored biometric information after June 7, 2011. Eligible participants must submit a claim form by Nov. 23, 2020. It takes under two minutes to fill out a claim form online or send it in. More information is forthcoming.

Amazon appears to be making good on its effort to keep tightening privacy for its Alexa-powered devices, even after the hot-button issue has cooled down this year. From a report: The most notable change is a new option to automatically delete your voice recordings immediately after they are processed by Alexa. A written transcript of these recordings will still be available for 30 days but can be deleted anytime you want. This feature, which is available starting Thursday, builds on Amazon's other auto-delete functions, which let a customer delete Alexa voice recordings on a rolling three-month or 18-month basis. Both those options were announced at Amazon's launch event last year.

Alexander Nix, the former boss of Cambridge Analytica, has been banned from serving as a company director for seven years over "potentially unethical" behavior linked to his position at the center of a global scandal. The Guardian reports: The Insolvency Service said Nix had allowed companies to offer potentially unethical services, including "bribery or honey-trap stings, voter disengagement campaigns, obtaining information to discredit political opponents and spreading information anonymously in political campaigns." Nix did not dispute that he caused or permitted Cambridge Analytica's parent company SCL Elections to offer such services, behavior "demonstrating a lack of commercial probity," according to the Insolvency Service.

The Old Etonian and former financial analyst will be disqualified from holding directorships, or from promoting, forming or managing a company, starting from October 5, the Insolvency Service said. "Following an extensive investigation, our conclusions were clear that SCL Elections had repeatedly offered shady political services to potential clients over a number of years," said the Insolvency Service chief investigator, Mark Bruce. "Company directors should act with commercial probity and this means acting honestly and correctly. Alexander Nix's actions did not meet the appropriate standard for a company director and his disqualification from managing limited companies for a significant amount of time is justified in the public interest."

Ring's latest home security camera is an autonomous drone, called the Always Home Cam, that can fly around inside your home to give you a perspective of any room you want when you're not home. "Once it's done flying, the Always Home Cam returns to its dock to charge its battery," reports The Verge. "It is expected to cost $249.99 when it starts shipping next year." From the report: Jamie Siminoff, Ring's founder and "chief inventor," says the idea behind the Always Home Cam is to provide multiple viewpoints throughout the home without requiring the use of multiple cameras. In an interview ahead of the announcement, he said the company has spent the past two years on focused development of the device, and that it is an "obvious product that is very hard to build." Thanks to advancements in drone technology, the company is able to make a product like this and have it work as desired.

The Always Home Cam is fully autonomous, but owners can tell it what path it can take and where it can go. When you first get the device, you build a map of your home for it to follow, which allows you to ask it for specific viewpoints such as the kitchen or bedroom. The drone can be commanded to fly on demand or programmed to fly when a disturbance is detected by a linked Ring Alarm system. The charging dock blocks the camera's view, and the camera only records when it is in flight. Ring says the drone makes an audible noise when flying so it is obvious when footage is being recorded. Ring also rolled out new hardware for the automotive market with three different devices focused on car owners: Ring Car Alarm, Car Cam, and Car Connect.

The company also said they've added opt-in end-to-end video encryption, as well as the option to completely disable the "Neighbors" feed, which allows users to view local crime in real time and discuss it with people nearby.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) finally acknowledged Wednesday that photos that were part of a facial recognition pilot program were hacked from a Customs and Border Control subcontractor and were leaked on the dark web last year. Among the data, which was collected by a company called Perceptics, was a trove of traveler's faces, license plates, and care information. The information made its way to the Dark Web, despite DHS claiming it hadn't. In a newly released report about the incident, the DHS Office of Inspector General admitted that 184,000 images were stolen and at least 19 of them were posted to the Dark Web.

"CBP did not adequately safeguard sensitive data on an unencrypted device used during its facial recognition technology pilot," the report found. "This incident may damage the public's trust in the Government's ability to safeguard biometric data and may result in travelers' reluctance to permit DHS to capture and use their biometrics at U.S. ports of entry." According to the new report, DHS's biometric database "contains the biometric data repository of more than 250 million people and can process more than 300,000 biometric transactions per day. It is the largest biometric repository in the Federal Government, and DHS shares this repository with the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense." "A subcontractor working on this effort, Perceptics, LLC, transferred copies of CBP's biometric data, such as traveler images, to its own company network," the report found. "The DHS OIG made several recommendations in its report that all boil down to 'tighten up security and make sure this doesn't happen again,'" the report adds.

Google is rethinking its long-term work options for employees, as most of them say they don't want to come back to the office full-time. From a report: Sixty-two percent of Google employees want to return to their offices at some point, but not every day, according to a recent survey of employee office preferences the company released this week. So Google is working on "hybrid" models, including rearranging its offices and figuring out more long-term remote work options, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with Time magazine on Wednesday. "I see the future as being more flexible," Pichai said in the interview. "We firmly believe that in-person, being together, having a sense of community is super important when you have to solve hard problems and create something new so we don't see that changing. But we do think we need to create more flexibility and more hybrid models."