Ubisoft announced on Monday that it will give away Watch Dogs 2 for free after a giveaway glitch made it harder for fans to get copies than they initially intended. Uproxx reports: Sunday's Ubisoft Forward event was a chance for the video game company to show off what's in the pipeline this fall, highlighted by a first (official) look at Far Cry 6. The event also gave us a look at Watch Dogs Legion and its combat system, featuring gameplay where any NPC is playable. To celebrate the new release, Ubisoft had teased free copies of Watch Dogs 2 if fans tuned into the event and logged into their Ubisoft accounts to claim the game. But according to a number of fans online, they struggled to get logged in and had password troubles.

On Monday, Ubisoft's support account updated fans to say the game will be available for fans -- whether they tuned in or not -- until July 15. They included a link to register and log in to snag the code, and hopefully not encounter any problems along the way. It's a nice gesture from a company hoping fans are ready for a lot more Watch Dogs this fall, and getting back into the ecosystem for free is as good a way as any to start.

Google today announced three new online certificate programs in data analytics, project management and user experience design. From a report: The certificates are created and taught by Google employees, do not require a college degree, can be completed in three to six months and are offered through the online learning platform Coursera. Google says it will consider all of its certificates as the equivalent of a four-year college degree for related roles at the company. "This is not revenue-generating for Google," says Google vice president, Lisa Gevelber, who leads Grow with Google and Google for Startups and serves as the company's Americas chief marketing officer. "There's a small cost from the Coursera platform itself -- the current pricing is $49 a month -- but we want to ensure that anyone who wants to have this opportunity, can have it." The tech giant has committed to funding 100,000 need-based scholarships for individuals enrolled in any of these career certificate programs and will be awarding over $10 million in grants to YWCA, NPower and JFF -- three nonprofits that partner with Google to provide workforce development to women, veterans and underrepresented Americans. Gevelber says Google chose the specific fields of data analytics, project management and user experience because they can lead to "high-growth, high-paying careers."

Researchers at Zhejiang University and Microsoft claim they've developed an AI system -- DeepSinger -- that can generate singing voices in multiple languages by training on data from music websites. From a report: In a paper published on the preprint Arxiv.org, they describe the novel approach, which leverages a specially-designed component to capture the timbre of singers from noisy singing data. The work -- like OpenAI's music-generating Jukebox AI -- has obvious commercial implications. Music artists are often pulled in for pick-up sessions to address mistakes, changes, or additions after a recording finishes. AI-assisted voice synthesis could eliminate the need for these, saving time and money on the part of the singers' employers.

But there's a darker side: It could also be used to create deepfakes that stand in for musicians, making it seem as though they sang lyrics they never did (or put them out of work). In what could be a sign of legal battles to come, Jay-Z's Roc Nation label recently filed copyright notices against videos that used AI to make him rap Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire." As the researchers explain, singing voices have more complicated patterns and rhythms than normal speaking voices. Synthesizing them requires information to control the duration and the pitch, which makes the task challenging. Plus, there aren't many publicly available singing training data sets, and songs used in training must be manually analyzed at the lyrics and audio level.

Type a query into the Google search bar on a smartphone and there's a good chance the results will be dominated by advertising. From a report: That stems from a decision in 2015 to test a fourth ad, rather than three, at the top of search results. Some employees opposed the move at the time, saying it could reduce the quality of Google's responses, according to people familiar with the deliberations. But the company brushed aside those concerns because it was under pressure to meet Wall Street growth expectations, one of the people said. By 2016, the extra marketing slot was a regular feature. It's one of the many ways the search leader has altered how it presents results since its early days. Another example is the pre-packaged information Google often displays in a box at the top of a page, rather than sending users to other websites.

Phased in gradually over years, changes like these have gone largely unnoticed by legions of consumers who regularly turn to Google to call up information and hunt for bargains. The company says these changes support its mission to organize the world's information and make it useful and accessible to everyone. But to many web publishers and other businesses that have historically relied on the internet giant to send users to their sites, Google's subtle tweaks have siphoned off vital traffic and made it harder -- and costlier -- to reach customers online.

The Democratic and Republican national committees have warned their staffs about using the Chinese-owned app TikTok. From a report: The Democratic National Committee warned Democratic campaigns, committees and state parties Friday to take additional security precautions when using TikTok. In the email, the DNC security team wrote, "We continue to advise campaign staff to refrain from using TikTok on personal devices. If you are using TikTok for campaign work, we recommend using a separate phone and account." Republican National Committee national press secretary Mandi Merritt said Saturday the RNC had longstanding guidance on TikTok. "The RNC has advised employees and stakeholders to not download the TikTok app on their personal devices," she said, citing "security concerns." The DNC had suggested to campaigns in a memo in December not to use TikTok, citing concerns about the app's "Chinese ties and potentially sending data back to the Chinese government."

Microsoft has been collaborating with Google to ensure that their tools interoperate and can help developers get their Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) into the Play Store. From a report: "We're glad to announce a new collaboration between Microsoft and Google for the benefit of the web developer community," Microsoft's Judah Gabriel Himango announced. "Microsoft's PWABuilder and Google's Bubblewrap are now working together to help developers publish PWAs in the Google Play Store." As Himango explains, PWABuilder is a Microsoft tool that helps developers build PWAs from existing websites and publish them in app stores, while Bubblewrap is a Google tool and library used to generate and sign Google Play Store packages from PWAs. After months of collaboration, the two firms have made some interesting progress towards integrating the tools. Now, PWABuilder utilizes Bubblewrap "under the hood," as Himango puts it, allowing developers to package PWAs for the Play Store with PWABuilder that support the new web shortcuts standard. (On Windows 10, web shortcuts appear as jump lists.)

Public health officials in Houston are struggling to keep up with one of the nation's largest coronavirus outbreaks. They are desperate to trace cases and quarantine patients before they spread the virus to others. But first, they must negotiate with the office fax machine. From a report: The machine at the Harris County Public Health department in Houston recently became overwhelmed when one laboratory sent a large batch of test results, spraying hundreds of pages all over the floor. "Picture the image of hundreds of faxes coming through, and the machine just shooting out paper," said Dr. Umair Shah, executive director of the department. The county has so far recorded more than 40,000 coronavirus cases. Some doctors fax coronavirus tests to Dr. Shah's personal number, too. Those papers are put in an envelope marked "confidential" and walked to the epidemiology department. As hard as the United States works to control coronavirus, it keeps running into problems caused by its fragmented health system, a jumble of old and new technology, and data standards that don't meet epidemiologists' needs. Public health officials and private laboratories have managed to expand testing to more than half a million performed daily, but they do not have a system that can smoothly handle that avalanche of results.

Google said today it'll invest about $10 billion in India over the next five to seven years. The company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that money will be divided into investment equity investments, partnerships, and operational, infrastructure, and ecosystem investments. Investments will focus on four main areas: Information access in Indian languages.
Building products for the Indian market.
Empowering local businesses.
Leveraging AI for good in areas such as agriculture and education.

The world's fastest computer is now part of "a vast supercomputer-powered search for new findings pertaining to the novel coronavirus' spread" and "how to effectively treat and mitigate it," according to an emerging tech journalist at Nextgov.

It's part of a consortium currently facilitating over 65 active research projects, for which "Dozens of national and international members are volunteering free compute time...providing at least 485 petaflops of capacity and steadily growing, to more rapidly generate new solutions against COVID-19."

"What started as a simple concept has grown to span three continents with over 40 supercomputer providers," Dario Gil, director of IBM Research and consortium co-chair, told Nextgov last week. "In the face of a global pandemic like COVID-19, hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime event, the speed at which researchers can drive discovery is a critical factor in the search for a cure and it is essential that we combine forces...."

[I]ts resources have been used to sort through billions of molecules to identify promising compounds that can be manufactured quickly and tested for potency to target the novel coronavirus, produce large data sets to study variations in patient responses, perform airflow simulations on a new device that will allow doctors to use one ventilator to support multiple patients — and more. The complex systems are powering calculations, simulations and results in a matter of days that several scientists have noted would take a matter of months on traditional computers.
The Undersecretary for Science at America's Energy Department said "What's really interesting about this from an organizational point of view is that it's basically a volunteer organization."

The article identifies some of the notable participants:

• IBM was part of the joint launch with America's Office of Science and Technology Policy and its Energy Department.
• The chief of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing says they're "making the full reserve portion of NASA supercomputing resources available to researchers working on the COVID-19 response, along with providing our expertise and support to port and run their applications on NASA systems."
• Amazon Web Services "saw a clear opportunity to bring the benefits of cloud... to bear in the race for treatments and a vaccine," according to a company executive.
• Japan's Fugaku — "which surpassed leading U.S. machines on the Top 500 list of global supercomputers in late June" — also joined the consortium in June.

Other consortium members:

• Google Cloud
• Microsoft
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• The National Science Foundation
• Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia National laboratories.
• National Center for Atmospheric Research's Wyoming Supercomputing Center
• AMD
• NVIDIA
• Dell Technologies. ("The company is now donating cycles from the Zenith supercomputer and other resources.")

"One of the main reasons we're not all driving electric vehicles is the price," argues a transportation writer in Forbes — explaining how Tesla hopes to finally change that: The company is placing a huge bet on rechargeable battery technology that doesn't use cobalt. This is one of the main elements making lithium ion batteries so expensive. It's also fraught with political issues, since the mining can be in conflict areas like the Congo, and its production is considered quite polluting of the environment. But cobalt is used because it enables the energy density required in batteries intended to last for hundreds of miles per charge. A couple of months ago, it was revealed that Tesla was working with CATL on lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, and these could be the real gamechanger. LFP batteries don't use cobalt and have a roadmap to push well past the magical $100 per kWh (wholesale) that is considered the threshold for EVs being cheaper than Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles...

Tesla has also recently patented technology for cathodes that significantly improves the number of charge cycles... The new Tesla technology, patented by the company's battery team led by Jeff Dahn, can increase charge cycles to nearly 4,000, which would be more like 75 years if charged once a week — hence the talk of million-mile batteries. More recently, the Tesla team headed by Jeff Dahn patented some new technology for lithium metal/anode free batteries, which could drastically improve energy density and thereby considerably reduce costs. These technologies, if they become commercially viable, could revolutionize battery durability and price, and there's another technology called all-polymer batteries on the horizon that is being developed by a former Nissan senior researcher, which he claims could cut 90% off the current price.

But these are improvements for the future that may not happen, and cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate batteries are here now. Tesla will be using LFP for the batteries in its Chinese Model 3, after receiving government approval to do so. It is estimated that using LFP batteries will allow a 15-20% reduction in manufacturing cost. Taking calculations regarding how much of a car's cost is batteries into account, this could make EVs a mere 10% more expensive than ICE instead of 30%, which will be easy to regain in cheaper running costs over a year or two of ownership. It will also give EVs an even greater lead over fuel-cell technology, making it even less likely that hydrogen will be the future of electric cars.

The time is fast approaching when EVs are not just more ecological and cheaper to run than ICE cars, but cheaper to buy too, and batteries free of cobalt are a key step in that direction. That's why Tesla's shift to LFP is so significant — it could be the final nail in the coffin for fossil fuel vehicles.

The author of an opinion piece in the New York Times describes what happened after sharing their cancer diagnosis on Facebook: Since then, my Facebook feed has featured ads for "alternative cancer care." The ads, which were new to my timeline, promote everything from cumin seeds to colloidal silver as cancer treatments. Some ads promise luxury clinics — or even "nontoxic cancer therapies" on a beach in Mexico.

There's a reason I'll never fall for these ads: I'm an advocate against pseudoscience. As a consultant for the watchdog group Bad Science Watch and the founder of the Campaign Against Phony Autism Cures, I've learned to recognize the hallmarks of pseudoscience marketing: unproven and sometimes dangerous treatments, promising simplistic solutions and support. Things like "bleach cures" that promise to treat everything from Covid-19 to autism.

When I saw the ads, I knew that Facebook had probably tagged me to receive them. Interestingly, I haven't seen any legitimate cancer care ads in my newsfeed, just pseudoscience. This may be because pseudoscience companies rely on social media in a way that other forms of health care don't. Pseudoscience companies leverage Facebook's social and supportive environment to connect their products with identities and to build communities around their products. They use influencers and patient testimonials. Some companies also recruit members through Facebook "support groups" to sell their products in pyramid schemes...

It was only last April that Facebook removed "pseudoscience" as a keyword from its categories for targeted advertising, and only after the tech publication The Markup reported that 78 million users were listed in Facebook's ad portal as having an "interest" in the category... Facebook pledged that it would add a warning label to Covid-19-related ads and would remove pseudoscience ads that were reported by its users. The problem, which even Facebook acknowledged, is that pseudoscience content can run for months before being flagged by readers. Facebook's main ad-screening system is automated. While we wait for its artificial intelligence system to catch up with the discernment abilities of human reviewers, a steady flow of pseudoscience advertising has already slipped through on a platform with billions of users.

Could it be that Facebook has gotten too big to adequately regulate its content?
The article also suggests one way that individuals can join a movement to pressure Facebook to change: "suspend, delete or even just spend less time on Facebook (and on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook)."

"My retreat from Facebook may mean fewer online connections, perhaps at a time when I need them the most. But I'd rather leave than see what another friend with cancer calls the 'slap in the face' ads."

The Wall Street Journal's senior personal tech columnist just published an article urging readers to "quit Chrome. Safari and Edge are just better browsers." It begins with the reporter pretending to break up with Chrome, adding "I'd say I'll remember the good times — your speed, your superb handling of Gmail — but your RAM hoovering, battery draining and privacy disregarding make it easy to not look back.

"This is the year, people. It's the year I challenge you to pack up your bookmarks and wave bye-bye to Google's browser..."

And the article is even accompanied by a video titled "Four ways to stop Chrome from slowing down your computer," where tip #1 is just: "Stop using Chrome..." "Sure, Chrome has far more browser market share [than Firefox, Safari, and Edge]. But all of them have actually gotten quite good over the last number of years. Heck, the new Microsoft Edge browser even uses Chromium, the same underlying technology as Chrome, and the performance is much improved, across Windows PCs, and Macs. Yes, Microsoft's browser is available for Mac, and it's good.

"In my weeks of testing, Edge used 5% less resources than Chrome on Windows. Safari used up to 10% less in some of my tests on my Mac. That meant up to 2 extra hours of battery life in their respective operating systems. Firefox, unfortunately, took up just as much power as Chrome. Google says it's working on some resource-saving improvements that will come in the next few months.

If you can switch to just one of those, go for it, even if just for their better privacy tools."
The video opens with a cartoon depiction of "Chrome-y," who lives inside your computer and eats your RAM and other resouces. "But don't worry. You can put him on a diet and take back your computer with some of these tips." The other tips including uninstalling extensions, and using Chrome's Task Manager to "spot and kill the RAM gobblers."

But throughout the video, "Chrome-y" continues chomping on your RAM...

The New York Times ran a detailed piece (with some neat interactive graphics) arguing "cities need to plan for a future of fewer cars, a future in which owning an automobile, even an electric one, is neither the only way nor the best way to get around town..."

It asks us to imagine a world where there's suddenly more room for two-way bike lanes, wider sidewalks, and car-free bus lanes. But it also looks at our current conundrum: Automobiles are not just dangerous and bad for the environment; they are also profoundly wasteful of the land around us, taking up way too much physical space to transport too few people... And cars take up space even while they're not in use. They need to be parked, which consumes yet more space on the sides of streets or in garages. Cars take up a lot of space even when they're just looking for parking... New York's drivers are essentially being given enormous tracts of land for their own pleasure and convenience. To add to the overall misery of the situation, though, even the drivers are not especially happy about the whole deal, because despite all the roadway they've been given, they're still stuck in gridlock...

"The one thing we know for sure, because we understand geometry, is that if everyone drives, nobody moves," Brent Toderian, the former chief planner for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, told me. Even if you're a committed daily driver, "it's in your best interest for walking, biking and public transit to be as attractive as possible for everyone else — because that means you're going to be able to drive easier..." Instead of fighting a war on cars, Toderian told me, urbanists should fight a war on car dependency — on cities that leave residents with few choices other than cars. Alleviating car dependency can improve commutes for everyone in a city...

At the moment, many of the most intractable challenges faced by America's urban centers stem from the same cause — a lack of accessible physical space. We live in a time of epidemic homelessness. There's a national housing affordability crisis caused by an extreme shortage of places to live. And now there's a contagion that thrives on indoor overcrowding.

Given these threats, how can American cities continue to justify wasting such enormous tracts of land on death machines?

Today I learned that Microsoft "has been providing support for the development and building of the PHP programming language on Windows," according to Bleeping Computer. "This support includes developing security patches for PHP and creating native Windows builds."

But that's going to change: Microsoft has announced that it will not offer support in 'any capacity' for PHP for Windows 8.0 when it is released... To add some clarity to Microsoft PHP Windows Lead Dale Hirt's post, PHP Release Manager Sara Golemon posted to Reddit explaining that this does not mean PHP 8.0 will not be supported in Windows. It just means that Microsoft will not be the one building and supporting it. "For some possibly missing context, Microsoft runs https://windows.php.net and produces all the official builds of PHP for Windows... This message means Microsoft aren't going to produce official builds for PHP 8 onwards. This message does NOT mean that nobody will."

Microsoft has not stated why they will no longer support PHP 8.0, but it could be due to the extensive PHP support already existing in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Microsoft has been actively developing WSL, which allows users to install various Linux distributions that run directly in Windows 10.

As these distributions already support PHP 7.4 and will support PHP 8.0 when released, Microsoft may see it as unnecessary to continue supporting a native PHP build in Windows.

AmiMoJo quotes TechCrunch: TikTok announced that it would pull out of Hong Kong, which is facing an unprecedented wave of control from the Beijing government after the promulgation of the national security law. "In light of recent events, we've decided to stop operations of the TikTok app in Hong Kong," said a TikTok spokesperson. The company declined further comment on the decision...

ByteDance, founded by Chinese serial entrepreneur Zhang Yiming, has been working to disassociate TikTok from its Chinese ownership and Beijing censorship. Efforts have ranged from keeping an overseas data center for TikTok that's supposedly out of reach by the Chinese authority, giving outside experts a glimpse into its moderation process, through to hiringDisney's Kevin Mayer as the app's new global face.

"The next combat aircraft to enter the U.S. Air Force inventory will not be a manned sixth-generation fighter or even the Northrop Grumman B-21," reports Aviation Week.

"By fiscal 2023, the Air Force expects to deliver the first operational versions of a new unmanned aircraft system (UAS) called Skyborg, a provocative portmanteau blending the medium of flight with the contraction for a cybernetic organism." The Skyborg family of aircraft is expected to fill an emerging "attritable" category for combat aircraft that blurs the line between a reusable unmanned aircraft system and a single-use cruise missile. As the aircraft are developed, Skyborg also will serve as the test case of a radical change in acquisition philosophy, with ecosystems of collaborative software coders and aircraft manufacturers replacing the traditional approach with a supply chain defined by a single prime contractor...

At the core of the Skyborg program is the software; specifically, the military aviation equivalent of the algorithm-fed convolutional neural networks that help driverless cars navigate on city streets... The autonomy mission system core — as integrated by Leidos from a combination of industry and government sources — will be inserted into multiple low-cost UAS designed by different companies, with each configured to perform a different mission or set of missions...

"Even though we call Skyborg an attritable aircraft, I think we'll think of them more like reusable weapons," says Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics.... "I expect that the pilots, depending on the mission, [will] decide: Does the Skyborg return and land with them and then go to fight another day, or is it the end of its life and it's going to go on a one-way mission?" Roper explains. In some cases, the pilot may decide a target is important enough that it is worth the loss of a Skyborg, even if its service life has not been used up, he adds.
"The Air Force's goal is to build up a large fleet of armed, sort-of disposable jets that don't need conventional runways to take off and land," reports Popular Mechanics: Skyborg will be available with both subsonic and supersonic engines, indicating both attack and fighter jet versions. The basic design (or designs) will likely be stealthy, carrying guided bombs, air defense suppression missiles, and air-to-air missiles inside internal weapons bays. Interesting, according to AvWeek, the Air Force is considering Skyborg as a replacement not only for the MQ-9 Reaper attack drone but early versions of the F-16 manned fighter....

Unmanned jets like Skyborg promise to remake the U.S. Air Force and other air forces. Manned aircraft have become increasingly large, difficult to develop, and expensive. This in turn means the Pentagon can afford fewer jets, ultimately leading to a smaller Air Force. Unmanned jets, on the other hand, are smaller, easier to develop, and cheap — allowing the Air Force to buy lots of them... The drone will grow the fighting arm of the U.S. Air Force, move air power away from air fields, fly alongside fighter jets, and escort traditionally undefended assets like the E-3 Sentry.

And it promises to do it all affordably. If the Air Force really can get Skyborg into the game by 2023 it will dramatically change the shape of aerial warfare.

Last week leaked audio surfaced of investors arguing that journalists have too much power.

But the Verge's Silicon Valley editor asks, "What if you take the whole discussion of "tech versus journalism" and reframe it as 'managers versus employees'? Then, I think, you get closer to the truth of what's going on." After all, this conflict started with employees. They were the people who initially described their working conditions under Steph Korey at Away, leading her to step aside as CEO. (She later returned, only for the company to say she would step aside later this year after her comments about the media on Instagram.) The employees made their comments at a time of increasing activism inside workplaces. Since the Google walkout in 2018, employees of venture-backed startups and public companies have become increasingly comfortable in speaking out — often using social media platforms to call out their employers. This trend has only accelerated since the Black Lives Matters protests swept the nation last month — which, among other things, led to the first-ever virtual Facebook walkout a few weeks later.

Workers still face significant obstacles as they lobby to create more fair and equitable workplaces. But Twitter in particular has given them a place where not only can they be heard, but — crucially — employers can't really fight back... [T]weets have given workers an asymmetric advantage in the unrest — a one-sided argument is easy to win — and we're seeing it play out in new ways all the time. This dynamic, which is tilted heavily against bosses, goes a long way in explaining the disdain that the managerial class has for what they call "hit pieces." A "hit piece," in angry Twitter parlance, is typically a piece of journalism in which one or more employees are granted anonymity to talk about their working conditions. Journalists, myself included, would simply call that reporting. But it's the kind of reporting that tilts the balance away from managers and toward their employees — and in ways that are difficult to fight back against...

And so it shouldn't be surprising, when a prominent reporter like Taylor Lorenz calls attention to posts like Korey's, the managerial class rises to Korey's defense. When CEOs can be held accountable not just for their working conditions but for social media defenses of their work, that represents a threat to the entire managerial tribe. And that explains how venture capitalists, who have millions of dollars at their disposal and could comfortably retire without ever participating in a single Twitter fight, have nonetheless come to see themselves as the underdogs in this situation. They got where they are in part because they've been good at winning arguments, and now they find themselves living in a world where they get punished for arguing...

[T]he next time you see journalists and tech overlords going a few rounds online, ask yourself whether what you're looking at isn't, on some level, a labor issue...

Workers are justifiably outraged about the state of affairs in this country, and some of that outrage is being captured by journalists.
David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and the founder of Basecamp, called the piece "a wonderful framing of the issue" in a series of tweets. "While I decry this website as the bane of modern living half the time, the other half it has probably done more to move my own position on many issues than anything else online.

"Which is why I'm not actually sure that VC Twitter should be so eager to cheer on 'citizen journalism'. The number of citizens that count themselves in the worker class vs. manager class are far more plentiful. And their unfiltered stories really do add up to paint the picture."

theodp writes: From the Home Office in Cupertino: "Apple today announced a new set of tools to help educators teach coding to students from grade school to college. In addition to significant enhancements to the Develop in Swift and Everyone Can Code curricula, Apple is also starting a new professional learning course for Develop in Swift, available to educators at no cost. The course is designed to supplement the need for computer science educators in the US, and helps instructors of all skill levels build foundational knowledge to teach app development with Swift. In addition, with many institutions operating remotely, Apple is adding resources for educators and parents to help ensure they have the tools they need to help students learn and grow from anywhere. [...] To support parents with kids learning to code at home, Apple is adding a new guide to its set of remote learning resources. 'A Quick Start to Code' is now available and features 10 coding challenges designed for learners ages 10 and up, on iPad or Mac. [...] In 2016, Apple launched Everyone Can Code, a comprehensive program and curriculum to help students of all abilities, from kindergarten to college, learn coding to solve problems and prepare them for the workforce. Develop in Swift was released in 2019, and today more than 9,000 K-12 and higher education institutions worldwide are using the Everyone Can Code and Develop in Swift curricula from Apple."

Back in 2018, Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed that most students shunned programming before Apple introduced Swift "because coding languages were 'too geeky.'" As Apple introduced Swift in 2016, Cook called for requiring all children to start coding in 4th grade (9-10 years old), which Cook reiterated to President Trump in a 2017 White House meeting with tech titans.

The U.S. Secret Service announced the creation of the Cyber Fraud Task Force (CFTF) after the merger of its Financial Crimes Task Forces (FCTFs) and Electronic Crimes Task Forces (ECTFs) into a single unified network. Bleeping Computer reports: CFTF's main goal is to investigate and defend American individuals and businesses from a wide range of cyber-enabled financial crimes, from business email compromise (BEC) scams and ransomware attacks to data breaches and the illegal sale of stolen personal information and credit cards on the Internet and the dark web. Consolidating the two task forces into CFTF will allow the Secret Service to boost its agents' ability to prevent, detect, and mitigate financially-motivated cybercrime by improving coordination, sharing of resources and expertise, and best practices dissemination.

"The creation of the new Cyber Fraud Task Force (CFTF), will offer a specialized cadre of agents and analysts, trained in the latest analytical techniques and equipped with the most cutting-edge technologies," said Michael D'Ambrosio, U.S. Secret Service Assistant Director. At the moment, the Secret Service has already operationalized CFTFs in 42 domestic offices and in 2 international locations (London and Rome). The Department of Homeland Security federal law enforcement agency also plans to increase the number of CFTF locations through its network of more than 160 offices across the U.S. and around the globe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Leveraging close ties to Twitter, controversial artificial intelligence startup Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor the protests that swept the country following the killing of George Floyd, tipping off police to social media posts with the latest whereabouts and actions of demonstrators, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept and a source with direct knowledge of the matter. The monitoring seems at odds with claims from both Twitter and Dataminr that neither company would engage in or facilitate domestic surveillance following a string of 2016 controversies. Twitter, up until recently a longtime investor in Dataminr alongside the CIA, provides the company with full access to a content stream known as the "firehose" -- a rare privilege among tech firms and one that lets Dataminr, recently valued at over $1.8 billion, scan every public tweet as soon as its author hits send. Both companies denied that the protest monitoring meets the definition of surveillance.

Dataminr's Black Lives Matter protest surveillance included persistent monitoring of social media to tip off police to the locations and activities of protests, developments within specific rallies, as well as instances of alleged "looting" and other property damage. According to the source with direct knowledge of Dataminr's protest monitoring, the company and Twitter's past claims that they don't condone or enable surveillance are "bullshit," relying on a deliberately narrowed definition. "It's true Dataminr doesn't specifically track protesters and activists individually, but at the request of the police they are tracking protests, and therefore protesters," this source explained. According to internal materials reviewed by The Intercept, Dataminr meticulously tracked not only ongoing protests, but kept comprehensive records of upcoming anti-police violence rallies in cities across the country to help its staff organize their monitoring efforts, including events' expected time and starting location within those cities. A protest schedule seen by The Intercept shows Dataminr was explicitly surveilling dozens of protests big and small, from Detroit and Brooklyn to York, Pennsylvania, and Hampton Roads, Virginia.

Company documents also show the firm instructed members of its staff to look for instances of "lethal force used against protesters by police or vice-versa," "property damage," "widespread arson or looting against government or commercial infrastructure," "new instances of officer-involved shootings or death with potential interpretation of racial bias," and occasions when a "violent protests spreads to new major American city." Staff were also specifically monitoring social media for posts about "Officers involved in Floyd's death" -- all of which would be forwarded to Dataminr's governmental customers through a service named "First Alert." [...] First Alert also scans other popular platforms like Snapchat and Facebook, the latter being particularly useful for protest organizers trying to rapidly mobilize their communities. On at least one occasion, according to MPD records, Dataminr was able to point police to a protest's Facebook event page before it had begun.