Two million truckers move 70% of America's goods. But hundreds of thousands of their jobs could be disrupted away, reports Jon Wertheim on the CBS news show 60 Minutes, in "a high-stakes, high-speed race pitting the usual suspects — Google and Tesla and other global tech firms — against small start-ups smelling opportunity."

One of those startups is TuSimple, and their company's chief product officer points out that an AI driving system never gets distracted or falls asleep at the wheel: Chuck Price has unshakable confidence in the reliability of the technology; as do some of the biggest names in shipping: UPS, Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service ship freight with TuSimple trucks. All in, each unit costs more than a quarter million dollars. Not a great expense, considering it's designed to eliminate the annual salary of a driver; currently around $45,000. Another savings: the driverless truck can get coast-to-coast in two days, not four, stopping only to refuel — though a human still has to do that...

Jon Wertheim: How far are we from being able to pick up the specific cars that are passing us? "Oh, that's Joe from New Jersey with six points on his license.

Chuck Price: We can read license plates. So if there was an accessible database for something like that, we could...

Test Driver Maureen Fitzgerald: This truck is scanning mirrors, looking 1,000 meters out. It's processing all the things that my brain could never do and it can react 15 times faster than I could.

Most of her two million fellow truckers are less enthusiastic. Automated trucking threatens to jack-knife an entire $800 billion industry. Trucking is among the most common jobs for American's without a college education.... Sam Loesche represents 600,000 truckers for the teamsters. He's concerned that federal, state and local governments have only limited access to the driverless technology.

Sam Loesche: A lot of this information, understandably, is proprietary. Tech companies wanna keep, you know, their algorithms and their safety data — secret until they can kinda get it right. The problem is that, in the meantime, they're testing this technology on public roads. They're testing it next to you as you drive down the road...

ZDNet reports: In an effort to detect whether a network will hijack DNS queries, Google's Chrome browser and its Chromium-based brethren randomly conjures up three domain names between 7 and 15 characters to test, and if the response of two domains returns the same IP, the browser believes the network is capturing and redirecting nonexistent domain requests. This test is completed on startup, and whenever a device's IP or DNS settings change.

Due to the way DNS servers will pass locally unknown domain queries up to more authoritative name servers, the random domains used by Chrome find their way up to the root DNS servers, and according to Verisign principal engineer at CSO applied research division Matthew Thomas, those queries make up half of all queries to the root servers. Data presented by Thomas showed that as Chrome's market share increased after the feature was introduced in 2010, queries matching the pattern used by Chrome similarly increased.

"In the 10-plus years since the feature was added, we now find that half of the DNS root server traffic is very likely due to Chromium's probes," Thomas said in an APNIC blog post. "That equates to about 60 billion queries to the root server system on a typical day."

Thomas added that half the DNS traffic of the root servers is being used to support a single browser function, and with DNS interception being "certainly the exception rather than the norm", the traffic would be a distributed denial of service attack in any other scenario.

Facebook spent more money on lobbying than any single company in the first half of 2020, That's according to figures cited by the Wall Street Journal from the Center for Responsive Politics.

But that's not all they did. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also began personally delivering a message last fall that TikTok "doesn't share Facebook's commitment to freedom of expression, and represents a risk to American values and technological supremacy." That was a message Zuckerberg hammered behind the scenes in meetings with officials and lawmakers during the October trip and a separate visit to Washington weeks earlier, according to people familiar with the matter. In a private dinner at the White House in late October, Zuckerberg made the case to President Donald Trump that the rise of Chinese internet companies threatens American business, and should be a bigger concern than reining in Facebook, some of the people said.

Zuckerberg discussed TikTok specifically in meetings with several senators, according to people familiar with the meetings. In late October, Sen. Tom Cotton, R- Ark. — who met with Zuckerberg in September — and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote a letter to intelligence officials demanding an inquiry into TikTok. The government began a national-security review of the company soon after, and by the spring, Trump began threatening to ban the app entirely. This month he signed an executive order demanding that TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance Ltd., divest itself of its U.S. operations.

Few tech companies have as much to gain as Facebook from TikTok's travails, and the social-media giant has taken an active role in raising concerns about the popular app and its Chinese owners.

BlenderArtists.org writes: To build and model the universe from the Planck scale to galactic scales requires an incredible number of mathematical computations to simulate particles and their interactions, yet the framework of nature and the physics of these interactions should be simple. Blender's physics engine provides a good base to begin this project, but it will take work from the community to accurately model subatomic particles.
That's where "Quantum Microscope" comes in. It's a newly open sourced add-on for Blender that simulates subatomic particles and the formation of matter using classical physics. "It provides a microscopic look at molecules, atoms, atomic nuclei, particles and spacetime, using the theoretical model from Energy Wave Theory," explains its web page, linking to a video summarizing some of its features.

And that's just the beginning, writes Slashdot reader atomicphysics: A contest begins September 1, 2020 for developers to enhance the add-on, or create a new simulator meeting project requirements to use classical physics for the quantum realm, with at least $15,000 in prizes being awarded over the next year.

Engadget reports: You might not want to rush into installing an unofficial performance boost for your Tesla. Users on Reddit (via Electrek) have discovered that the latest software for Tesla's Model 3 thwarts an Ingenext mod that unlocks features like an extra 50HP and Drive Mode...

These features typically cost thousands of dollars to unlock through Tesla (such as a $2,000 Acceleration Boost), so there's a strong incentive for buyers willing to take the risk... [T]his suggests would-be performance hackers could be in for a challenge if they want to maximize the potential of Tesla's EVs without the company's blessing — they might not have more than a small window of time before Tesla clamps down again.
Electrek reports on the warnings their drivers receive: Tesla says that it detected "incompatible vehicle modification" and that it could result in a "potential risk of damage or shutdown." The notification apparently stays stuck on the screen like that, but the vehicle remains drivable.... That was kind of expected. It is basically a cat and mouse game between hacking the inverter and Tesla patching the hack...

I get why some people would want to do the hack since the capacity is already in the cars that they bought and Tesla claiming that it could result in damages is weird since they are basically using the same code as their own acceleration boost. But at the same time, you are also running third-party software.

Again, at your risk.

Xwing envisions a fleet of retrofitted Cessna cargo planes flying without a human onboard, performing automated takeoffs and landing while being controlled by pilots on the ground (who might even be juggling a few aircraft at a time). They've logged "dozens" of hours of flight time — though because of FAA guidelines the future "ground" pilot has always been esconced on-board the plane. Long-time Slashdot reader PuceBaboon shares this report from Wired (alternate URL here): The conditions are not ideal for our landing. A hard wind is blowing over the low hills east of San Francisco, and at just the wrong angle — straight across the runway where we're set to touch down. But as we ease into our final approach, our two-winged shadow clipping the suburban homes below, the veteran pilot sitting beside me makes a gentle suggestion. "I like to do it hands up. Like a roller coaster," he says.

He removes his hands from the wheel of our aircraft, a 27-year-old Cessna Caravan that once shuttled United Nations dignitaries in southern Africa. It's nothing especially fancy, with aspects that feel more go-kart than airliner. The cockpit is filled with manual toggles and analog dials; pulleys connect the pedal directly to the rudder at the tail. But recently, this plane underwent some modifications. As we descend past 500 feet, the 15-knot gusts hitting our side and the pilot's hands still hovering, the wheel and pedals begin to jostle, compensating for the wind with inhuman precision. The descent remains smooth — serene, even, as we touch down.

"It will be very uneventful, almost boring," Maxime Gariel, the chief technology officer of Xwing, had assured me shortly before our fully autonomous takeoff, flight, and landing. "That's what we're aiming for."

To address the possibility of drone-flying near airports, America's Federal Aviation Administration "will be testing at least 10 technologies and systems," reports Engadget, "developed not just to detect unmanned aerial systems, but also to mitigate the potential safety risks they pose." The first tests will be conducted at FAA's William J. Hughes Technical Center, which is right next to the Atlantic City International Airport in New Jersey. After that, the agency expects to expand its tests to four additional airports in the U.S. It has yet to choose those airports, and it may also still be finalizing the list of technologies it's testing: The FAA is asking interested companies working on drone detection systems to respond to its announcement within 45 days.

"Imagine being able to download every single movie and TV show on Netflix in less than a second," writes Gizmodo: Researchers at University College London have the ability to do that with a new world record they set for fastest internet — 178 terabits a second, or 178,000 Gbps. Lecturer and Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow Dr. Lidia Galdino and team collaborated with Xtera and KDDI Research on the project. According to UCL's announcement, that speed is "double the capacity of any system currently deployed in the world."

To get that insanely fast speed, UCL researchers used a greater range of wavelengths than what's typically used in fiber-optic cables and different amplifier technologies to boost the signal. Fiber-optic cables tend to absorb signals (well, the photons that are transmitted through the cable to make the signal) after a few miles because of the material the cables are made out of. Repeaters, which are like a wifi extender, are needed to re-transmit those signals so they can travel for a longer distance. So what the researchers managed to do is not only extend the signal, but also massively amplify it... 5G on the high-band or millimeter wave spectrum operates on 24 GHz and above and can transmit data up to at rate of 1 to 3 Gbps. But the internet speed Dr. Galdino and team achieved uses a 16.8THz bandwidth to get 178,000Gbps. Makes 5G seem rather slow when you put those numbers side by side.

This kind of system would be cheap to integrate with our existing internet infrastructure, too. According to UCL, upgrading amplifiers at certain intervals would be a fraction of what it would cost to install new optical fiber cables, roughly $21,100 every 25-62 miles (40-100 km) versus $594,000 every 0.62 miles (1 km), based on today's conversation rate of £1 to $1.32). This sounds like it could be a worthwhile solution to help shrink the digital divide, something that the current pandemic has further illustrated the seriousness of.

Though Mozilla laid off 250 people last week, the Rust Core Team wrote a blog post Tuesday reminding the world that "the Rust project as a whole is very resilient to such events..." it is a common misconception that all of the Mozilla employees who participated in Rust leadership did so as a part of their employment. In fact, many Mozilla employees in Rust leadership contributed to Rust in their personal time, not as a part of their job. Finally, we would like to emphasize that membership in Rust teams is given to individuals and is not connected to one's employer. Mozilla employees who are also members of the Rust teams continue to be members today, even if they were affected by the layoffs...
But they've still got some news: We've developed legal and financial needs that our current organization lacks the capacity to fulfill. While we were able to be successful with Mozilla's assistance for quite a while, we've reached a point where it's difficult to operate without a legal name, address, and bank account. "How does the Rust project sign a contract?" has become a question we can no longer put off....

The Rust Core Team and Mozilla are happy to announce plans to create a Rust foundation. The Rust Core Team's goal is to have the first iteration of the foundation up and running by the end of the year... The various trademarks and domain names associated with Rust, Cargo, and crates.io will move into the foundation, which will also take financial responsibility for the costs they incur.... As an immediate step the Core Team has selected members to form a project group driving the efforts to form the foundation. Expect to see follow-up blog posts from the group with more details about the process and opportunities to give feedback...

We're excited to start the next chapter of the project by forming a foundation. We would like to thank everyone we shared this journey with so far: Mozilla for incubating the project and for their support in creating a foundation, our team of leaders and contributors for constantly improving the community and the language, and everyone using Rust for creating the powerful ecosystem that drives so many people to the project. We can't wait to see what our vibrant community does next.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: A recent update to Windows 10 took away the ability for consumers to permanently disable Defender, the built-in antivirus software, no matter what the reason. However, Defender should voluntarily step aside if it detects the installation of a third-party AV program (emphasis on should). Before the update, if a user wanted to disable Defender on a permanent basis, they could edit a registry key called DisableAntiSpyware. That is no longer the case.

"DisableAntiSpyware is intended to be used by OEMs and IT Pros to disable Microsoft Defender Antivirus and deploy another antivirus product during deployment. This is a legacy setting that is no longer necessary as Microsoft Defender antivirus automatically turns itself off when it detects another antivirus program. This setting is not intended for consumer devices, and we've decided to remove this registry key," Microsoft explains in a support document.

Movie companies and their anti-piracy partners are pressing ahead with their legal action to track down The Pirate Bay. The site reportedly used VPN provider OVPN, which carries no logs, but a security expert -- one that regularly penetration tests several major VPN providers -- believes that information about the notorious site could still be obtained. TorrentFreak reports: After a period of what seemed like calm, this year it became clear that the site's old enemies, Swedish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, were again working to get closer to the site and its operators. We've covered the back story in detail but in summary, the site is alleged to have used Swedish VPN provider OVPN to hide its true location and Rights Alliance is now engaged in legal action to get its hands on whatever information the VPN provider may hold. The most recent move, playing out this week, is that Rights Alliance has provided testimony from an expert witness, one that has masses of experience in the VPN field.

The name 'Cure53' may not sound familiar to regular Internet users but the cyber-security company is well known for its first-class abilities in penetration testing. So much so, in fact, that the company has audited some of the most popular VPN providers in the world, including Mullvad, Surfshark, and TunnelBear. Given its experience in the field, it's no surprise that Rights Alliance has also sought the expert opinion of someone involved in Cure 53 to assess this VPN-related matter. Importantly, there doesn't appear to be any conflict of interest here, since the conclusions drawn are purely technical in nature and rely on experience and general facts, something we will touch on later. The expert opinion, which appeared in court documents reviewed by TorrentFreak this week, is from Jesper Larsson, who works at security company Ox4a but is involved with Cure 53 where he "regularly" performs penetration tests against the "ten largest VPN Providers in the world." His testimony reveals that he has been commissioned by Sara Lindback of Rights Alliance to comment on how a VPN service works and specifically, what information might potentially be stored at OVPN in relation to The Pirate Bay.

"It is clear on OVPN's website that it strives to protect its users; privacy by storing as little user data as possible in their databases," the testimony filed with the court and obtained by TorrentFreak reads. "Although [OVPN] strive to store as little data as possible, there must be data connecting users and identities to make the VPN service work. In this case, a user has paid for a VPN account with the ability to connect a public static address to OVPN which the user has then chosen to link to the file sharing site 'the piratebay,' i.e the user has configured his VPN account to point to the given domain." [...] "For this type of configuration to be possible, data about the configuration must be stored at OVPN at least during the time when the account is active," Larsson continues. "It should be considered extremely likely that the user or identity associated with the above configuration is stored in a user database where a given user can be connected to the VPN configuration, configuration regarding where the static IP address should be pointed to, and payment information that should describe how long a given account is active and which payment method the user has used. OVPN should thus be able to search its VPN servers for the given IP address, or alternatively search in their user databases or in backups of these to locate a given user or identity," the security expert adds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Palantir, a Silicon Valley company with strong links to the defense and intelligence communities, is poised to be the latest in a string of tech companies to offer shares on Wall Street well before turning a profit. The company sent financial documents to its investors on Thursday night, ahead of its planned debut on the public markets this year. The documents, obtained by The New York Times, offer the first full look into the company's financials and operations and show growing operating expenses as well as deep losses.

Palantir's revenue in 2019 was $742.5 million, nearly 25 percent more than the year before. Its net loss of $580 million was about the same as 2018. And expenses were up 2 percent in 2019 to a little more than $1 billion. The company, which has raised more than $3 billion in funding and is valued by private market investors at $20 billion, has not turned a profit since it was founded in 2003. As early as 2014, Palantir hadfanned expectations that it would soon hit $1 billion in revenue. Six years later, it appears to be closing in on that goal. In the first six months of this year, Palantir's revenue was $481 million. According to the documents, first reported by TechCrunch, Palantir plans to go public via a direct listing, "in which no new shares are issued and no new funds are raised," the report says. "In most direct listings, shareholders are not bound by a traditional lockup period before they can sell their stock. But Palantir has imposed a 180-day lockup period. It will allow shareholders to sell 20 percent of their common stock immediately, but they must wait for the lockup to expire to sell more."

"Palantir has arranged a structure to ensure that its founders retain power. They have a special class of shares, Class F, that will have a variable number of votes to ensure the founders control 49.999999 percent of the company's voting power, even if they sell some of their shares. The company argued to its investors that this structure would allow it to stay 'Founder-led' after it went public."

Electric trucks have the potential to displace enough oil to make a "significant dent" in transportation sector CO2 emissions, per a Rhodium Group analysis. Axios reports: There's lots of buzz -- and a lot of money -- around electric trucks these days. It estimates the long-term effects of a recent 15-state nonbinding pact (PDF) to bolster the use of zero-emissions heavy trucks and other medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. California, one of the states, also recently approved mandatory regulations on greatly increasing zero-emissions truck sales between 2024 and 2045. The study also explores the impact if these state efforts were transformed into a nationwide mandate, which would mean more than half the U.S. medium- and heavy-duty fleet would be electric by 2045.

"If the [15-state] MOU were expanded nationally, the impact would increase six-fold. By 2035, cumulative oil demand would fall by 806 to 843 million barrels, expanding to 4.6 to 4.9 billion barrels by 2045," Rhodium finds. "The long-term effect of expanding California's approach nationally would reduce oil consumption in 2045 by 16 to 17%," the Aug. 13 analysis notes.

WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg is accusing Apple of cutting off the ability to update its iOS app -- until or unless he adds in-app purchases so Apple can extract its 30 percent cut of the money. The Verge reports: Here's the thing: the WordPress app on iOS doesn't sell anything. I just checked, and so did Stratechery's Ben Thompson. The app simply lets you make a website for free. There isn't even an option to buy a unique dot-com or even dot-blog domain name from the iPhone and iPad app -- it simply assigns you a free WordPress domain name and 3GB of space. Is Apple seriously asking for WordPress owner Automattic to share a cut of all its domain name revenue? How would it even know which customers used the app? Or was this all a mistake? Apple, Automattic, and Mullenweg didn't immediately reply to requests for comment. As the article points out, all of this is happening in the shadow of Epic Games' gigantic fight against Apple, one that Apple responded to this very afternoon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: Every day, like clockwork, to-do lists for those protesting against Belarus' authoritarian leader appear in the popular Telegram messaging app. They lay out goals, give times and locations of rallies with business-like precision, and offer spirited encouragement. The app has become an indispensable tool in coordinating the unprecedented mass protests that have rocked Belarus since Aug. 9, when election officials announced that President Alexander Lukashenko -- whom some call "Europe's last dictator" -- had won a landslide victory to extend his 26-year rule in a vote widely seen as rigged.

Peaceful protesters who poured onto the streets of the capital, Minsk, and other cities were met with stun grenades, rubber bullets and beatings from police. The opposition candidate, schoolteacher Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, left for Lithuania -- under duress, her campaign said -- and authorities shut off the internet, leaving Belarusians with almost no access to independent online news outlets or social media and protesters seemingly without a leader. That's where Telegram -- which often remains available despite internet outages, touts the security of messages shared in the app and has been used in other protest movements -- came in. Some of its channels helped unconnected, scattered rallies mature into well-coordinated action.

The people who run the channels, which used to offer political news, now post updates, videos and photos of the turmoil sent in from users, locations of heavy police presence, contacts of human rights activists and calls for new demonstrations -- something Belarusian opposition leaders have refrained from doing publicly themselves. Tens of thousands of people all across the country have responded to those calls. In a matter of days, the channels -- NEXTA, NEXTA Live and Belarus of the Brain are the most popular -- have become the main method for facilitating the protests, said Franak Viacorka, a Belarusian analyst and nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. "The fate of the country has never depended so much on one [piece] of technology," Viacorka said.

Ann Syrdal, a psychologist and computer science researcher who helped develop synthetic voices that sounded like women, laying the groundwork for such modern digital assistants as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, died on July 24 at her home in San Jose, Calif. She was 74. From a report: Her daughter Kristen Lasky said the cause was cancer. As a researcher at AT&T, Dr. Syrdal was part of a small community of scientists who began developing synthetic speech systems in the mid-1980s. It was not an entirely new phenomenon; AT&T had unveiled one of the first synthetic voices, developed at its Bell Labs, at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. But more than 40 years later, despite increasingly powerful computers, speech synthesis was still relatively primitive. "It just sounded robotic," said Tom Gruber, who worked on synthetic speech systems in the early '80s and went on to create the digital assistant that became Siri when Apple acquired it in 2010.

An anonymous reader writes: The FBI and local police have made tens of arrests across the tri-state area this week as part of a crackdown against multiple criminal gangs who exploited a glitch in the software of Santander ATMs to cash-out more money than was stored on cards. According to reports in local media, the bulk of the arrests took place in Hamilton (20 suspects), across towns in Morris County (19), and Sayreville (11). Smaller groups of suspects were also detained in Bloomfield, Robbinsville, and Holmdel, while reports of suspicious cash-outs were also recorded in Woodbridge, towns across the Middlesex County, Booton, Randolph, Montville, South Windsor, Hoboken, Newark, and even in New York City itself, in Brooklyn. Based on information ZDNet received from a Santander spokesperson, sources in the threat intelligence community, and details released by police departments in the affected towns, criminal gangs appear to have found a bug in the software of Santander ATMs.

schwit1 shares a report from Inc: Google recently made a huge announcement that could change the future of work and higher education: It's launching a selection of professional courses that teach candidates how to perform in-demand jobs. These courses, which the company is calling Google Career Certificates, teach foundational skills that can help job-seekers immediately find employment. However, instead of taking years to finish like a traditional university degree, these courses are designed to be completed in about six months.

Google didn't say exactly how much the new courses would cost. But a similar program Google offers on online learning platform Coursera, the Google IT Support Professional Certificate, costs $49 for each month a student is enrolled. (At that price, a six-month course would cost just under $300 -- less than many university students spend on textbooks in one semester alone.) Additionally, Google said it would fund 100,000 needs-based scholarships in support of the new programs. "College degrees are out of reach for many Americans, and you shouldn't need a college diploma to have economic security," writes Kent Walker, senior vice president of global affairs at Google. "We need new, accessible job-training solutions--from enhanced vocational programs to online education -- to help America recover and rebuild."

"In our own hiring, we will now treat these new career certificates as the equivalent of a four-year degree for related roles," adds Walker in a tweet. "The new Google Career Certificates build on our existing programs to create pathways into IT support careers for people without college degrees," Walker explains. "Launched in 2018, the Google IT Certificate program has become the single most popular certificate on Coursera, and thousands of people have found new jobs and increased their earnings after completing the course."

The Open Technology Fund (OTF) is suing the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) over roughly $20 million in congressionally appropriated funds it says the government is refusing to provide, Axios has learned. From the report: There's bipartisan uproar from Congress over the funding that OTF says is being withheld. The USAGM, whose new CEO is seeking to replace OTF leaders with Trump loyalists, is required by law to provide the funding via federal grants, but it has given shifting rationales for why the money has been held up. The OTF is a government-supported nonprofit focused on advancing internet freedom. Without funds, it can't support work by activist journalists in places like Hong Kong and Belarus, where authorities are increasingly cracking down on internet freedom. The lawsuit, set to be filed Thursday in federal claims court, alleges the USAGM breached its contracts with the OTF in three ways:
It withheld about $9.4 million in funding that it owes under OTF's 2020 grant agreement.
It withheld an additional $9.8 million in prior OTF program grants held by Radio Free Asia, OTF's former parent organization.
A USAGM senior adviser "engaged in transparently pretextual efforts to force OTF into breaching its grant agreement."

A group of news publishers sent a letter to Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook seeking similar deal terms in its App Store that Amazon.com gets for its video-streaming service. From a report: Apple takes 30% of the revenue from most subscriptions in its App Store, then 15% after the first year. But in late July, a congressional antitrust panel disclosed internal emails showing a more-favorable deal struck between Apple services chief Eddy Cue and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. They agreed to a 15% revenue share for Amazon Prime Video customers who signed up through the iPhone app and no revenue share for users who already subscribed via Amazon or elsewhere, the emails showed. "We would like to know what conditions our members -- high quality digital content companies -- would need to meet in order to qualify for the arrangement Amazon is receiving for its Amazon Prime Video app in the Apple App Store," Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, wrote in the letter to Cook. Apple didn't respond to a request for comment. Digital Content Next represents several news outlets that rely on subscriptions for much of their revenue, including The New York Times, News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. The group also represents Bloomberg LP, owner of Bloomberg News.