An anonymous reader shares a column: Back when there were rumors of Google building an operating system, I thought "Lol." Then I watched then-PM Sundar Pichai announce Chrome OS. My heart raced. It was perfect. I got my email through Gmail, I wrote documents on Docs, I listened to Pandora, I viewed photos on TheFacebook. Why did I need all of Windows Vista? In 2010, I predicted that by 2020 Chrome OS would be the most popular desktop OS in the world. It was fast, lightweight, and $0. "Every Windows and OS X app will be re-built for the browser!" I thought. Outlook > Gmail. Excel > Sheets. Finder > Dropbox. Photoshop > Figma. Terminal > Repl.it. All of your files would be accessible by whoever you wanted, wherever you wanted, all the time. It was obvious. Revolutionary. I haven't installed MSFT Office on a machine since 2009. Sheets and Docs have been good enough for me. The theoretical unlimited computing power and collaboration features meant Google Docs was better than Office (and free!). Then something happened at Google. I'm not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software.

Docs and Sheets haven't changed in a decade. Google Drive remains impossible to navigate. Sharing is complicated. Sheets freezes up. I can't easily interact with a Sheets API (I've tried!). Docs still shows page breaks by default! WTF! Even though I have an iPhone and a MacBook, I've been married to Google services. I browse Chrome. I use Gmail. I get directions and lookup restaurants on Maps. I'm a YouTube addict. Yet I've been ungluing myself from Google so far this year. Not because of Google-is-reading-my-emails-and-tracking-every-keystroke reasons, but because I like other software so much more that it's worth switching. At WWDC, Apple shared Safari stats for macOS Big Sur. It reminded me how much Chrome makes my machine go WHURRRRRR. [...] I've given up on Google Docs. I can never find the documents Andy shares with me. The formatting is tired and stuck in the you-might-print-this-out paradigm. Notion is a much better place to write and brainstorm with people. The mobile Google results page is so cluttered that I switched my iPhone's default search to DuckDuckGo. The results are a tad worse, but I'm never doing heavy-duty searches on the go. And now I don't have to scroll past 6 ads to get the first result. DuckDuckGo's privacy is an added bonus.

Spokesperson of Tatmadaw, Myanmar's official military, said the leaking of sensitive information about military operations and positions was one of the primary reasons for an internet ban in parts of Arakan State that entered its second year over the weekend. From a report: The secretary of the Tatmadaw True News Information Team, Brigadier-General Zaw Min Tun, was speaking at a news conference in Nay Pyi Taw on June 23. "Military information such as which military column is moving from what location to which area is uploaded on social media," he explained. "And there is some information that makes people in the country and abroad misunderstand the Tatmadaw. So, we have to shut down the internet in the region for security reasons." Zaw Min Tun described the internet embargo as also intended to put a stop to the dissemination of extremist rhetoric, hate speech and misleading information, saying the Tatmadaw had no plan as yet to recommend a lifting of the ban to the government. June 21 marked the one-year anniversary of the internet blackout, imposed in seven Arakan State townships and Chin State's Paletwa Township.

Microsoft is removing the ability for business users to defer manually Windows 10 feature updates using Windows Update settings starting with the Windows 10 2004/May Update. Microsoft seemingly made this change public with a change in its Windows 10 2004 for IT Pros documentation on June 23. From a report: Microsoft officials say this change is happening in the name of reducing confusion. Here's the explanation from the Microsoft page (which I saw thanks to WindowsTimes.com), and which I had heard about from a reader last week. (Last week, I assumed this was a bug, but now it seems like it's actually a "feature.") "Last year, we changed update installation policies for Windows 10 to only target devices running a feature update version that is nearing the end of service. As a result, many devices are only updating once a year. To enable all devices to make the most of this policy change, and to prevent confusion, we have removed deferrals from the Windows Update settings Advanced Options page starting on Windows 10, version 2004."

Founded by Instagram and finance alums, Karat wants to be the black card in every influencer's wallet. From a report: Spencer Donnelly, who goes by TheRussianBadger on YouTube, has cultivated an audience of nearly 2.7 million subscribers for his gaming videos. For years, business has been rosy. YouTube shares a percentage of the ad revenue on each of his videos, and the money is good enough that playing videogames on camera has become a full-time job. A few years ago, he even incorporated The Russian Badger, legitimizing his YouTubing business. The only problem: No bank would give him a serious credit card. "Imagine that you're making $2 or $3 million a year and they're capping you at $20,000 a month," says Donnelly, which was the best he could get from a traditional bank. Donnelly, like many of the creators who make their living on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch, has long felt shunned by institutions that don't understand that his lifestyle is also his business. That makes him the target market for Karat, a new startup offering financial services to the influencer set.

Karat's first product is the Karat Black Card, designed specifically for influencers, with credit lines starting at $50,000. Its perks can be customized (gamers get cash back on streaming services; beauty influencers get perks for product purchases), and the credit limits are determined by an influencer's social metrics, revenue streams, and cash in hand. To issue the cards, Karat has partnered with the payments company Stripe, which launched its own corporate card late last year. For now, Karat wants to be the flashy card in every influencer's wallet. But eventually, the startup could become a one-stop shop for a creator's business needs. Before its official launch, Karat piloted the black card with a small group of successful creators like Donnelly, many with similar stories of financial frustration.

In response to the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data (LAED) Act proposed by three Republican senators, Big Tech companies have registered their opposition through their Reform Government Surveillance coalition. From a report: They said that building encryption backdoors would jeopardize the sensitive data of billions of users and "leave all Americans, businesses, and government agencies dangerously exposed to cyber threats from criminals and foreign adversaries." They also pointed out that as the pandemic has forced everyone to rely on the internet "in critical ways," digital security is paramount and strong encryption is the way forward. The coalition's members are Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snap, Verizon Media, Dropbox, and Microsoft-owned LinkedIn. The coalition was established in December 2013, a few months after documents about the United States' PRISM data collection program were leaked.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Sens. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., introduced legislation Thursday that seeks to ban the use of facial recognition and other biometric surveillance technology by federal law enforcement agencies. The legislation would also make federal funding for state and local law enforcement contingent on the enactment of similar bans. The Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, is supported by Reps. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. It comes at a time of intense scrutiny of policing and surveillance tools, and widespread protests after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody in late May.

The bill would make it unlawful for any federal agency or official to "acquire, possess, access or use" biometric surveillance technology in the United States. It would also prohibit the use of federal funds to purchase such technology. The bill states that this type of surveillance technology could only be used if there was a federal law with a long list of provisions to ensure it was used with extreme caution. Any such federal law would need to stipulate standards for the use, access and retention of the data collected from biometric surveillance systems; standards for accuracy rates by gender, skin color and age; rigorous protections for due process, privacy, free speech, and racial, gender and religious equity; and mechanisms to ensure compliance with the act. It also stipulates that local or state governments would not be eligible to receive federal financial assistance under the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program, which funds police training, equipment and supplies, without complying with a similar law or policy.

Comcast has joined Cloudflare and NextDNS in partnering with Mozilla's Trusted Recursive Resolver program, which aims to make DNS more trusted and secure. Neowin reports: Commenting on the move, Firefox CTO Eric Rescorla, said: "Comcast has moved quickly to adopt DNS encryption technology and we're excited to have them join the TRR program. Bringing ISPs into the TRR program helps us protect user privacy online without disrupting existing user experiences. We hope this sets a precedent for further cooperation between browsers and ISPs."

With its TRR program, Mozilla said that encrypting DNS data with DoH is just the first step in securing DNS. It said that the second step requires companies handling the data to have appropriate rules in place for handling it. Mozilla believes these rules include limiting data collection and retention, ensuring transparency about any retained data, and limiting the use of the resolver to block access or modify content. Ars Technica notes that joining Mozilla's program means that Comcast agreed that it won't "retain, sell, or transfer to any third party (except as may be required by law) any personal information, IP addresses, or other user identifiers, or user query patterns from the DNS queries sent from the Firefox browser," along with other requirements.

When the change happens, it'll be automatic for users unless they've chosen a different DoH provider or disabled DoH altogether. Comcast told Ars yesterday that "Firefox users on Xfinity should automatically default to Xfinity resolvers under Mozilla's Trusted Recursive Resolver program, unless they have manually chosen a different resolver, or if DoH is disabled. The precise mechanism is still being tested and the companies plan to document it soon in an IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] Draft."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Rebuffing strong opposition from industry, California is expected to adopt a landmark rule on Thursday that requires more than half of all trucks sold in the state to be zero-emissions by 2035, a move that is set to improve local air quality, rein in greenhouse gas emissions and sharply curtail the state's dependence on oil. The rule, the first in the United States, represents a victory for communities that have long suffered from truck emissions -- particularly pollution from the diesel trucks that feed the sprawling hubs that serve the state's booming e-commerce industry.

The new rule, which would set sales requirements for zero-emissions versions of everything from big rigs to box trucks and delivery vans starting in 2024, has clear benefits. Under the rule, the percentage of zero-emissions trucks that must be sold gradually increases each year, with a goal that 100 percent of trucks be zero-emissions vehicles by 2045. Transportation makes up 40 percent of California's greenhouse gas emissions, and is a major contributor to smog-causing nitrogen oxides and diesel particulate matter pollution, which are linked to health problems including respiratory conditions. Of those transportation sector emissions, as much as 70 percent of smog-causing pollution and 80 percent of particulate matter are from diesel trucks, even though they make up just 7 percent of the 30 million vehicles registered in California. By removing diesel trucks from the roads, California estimates it will eliminate 60,000 tons of hazardous nitrogen oxides, preventing more than 900 premature deaths and delivering at least $9 billion in public health benefits. California also estimates that the rule will lower the state's carbon dioxide emissions by 17 million metric tons, roughly the same amount as pollution from burning almost 100,000 rail cars' worth of coal, and save truck operators $6 billion in fuel costs.

AMD has exceeded its goal to improve the energy efficiency of its mobile processors by 25 times by 2020. According to Thurrott, " The new AMD Ryzen 7 4800H mobile processor improves on the energy efficiency of the 2014 baseline measurement by 31.7 times, the firm says, while offering 'leadership performance' for portable PCs." From the report: "We have always focused on energy efficiency in our processors, but in 2014 we decided to put even greater emphasis on this capability," AMD CTO Mark Papermaster says in a prepared statement. "Our engineering team rallied around the challenge and charted a path to reach our stretch goal of 25 times greater energy efficiency by 2020. We were able to far surpass our objective, achieving 31.7 times improvement leading to gaming and ultrathin laptops with unmatched performance, graphics and long battery life. I could not be prouder of our engineering and business teams."

As AMD notes, greater energy efficiency leads to significant real-world benefits, including improved battery life, better performance, lower energy costs, and reduced environmental impact from computing. And with the focus in mobile computing hardware switching to performance-per-watt these days, AMD is trying to position itself as the traditional PC chipmaker that can rise to the ARM challenge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: House Democrats yesterday unveiled a $100 billion broadband plan that's gaining quick support from consumer advocates. "The House has a universal fiber broadband plan we should get behind," Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Legislative Counsel Ernesto Falcon wrote in a blog post. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC.) announced the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, saying it has more than 30 co-sponsors and "invests $100 billion to build high-speed broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved communities and ensure that the resulting Internet service is affordable." The bill text is available here.

In addition to federal funding for broadband networks with speeds of at least 100Mbps downstream and upstream, the bill would eliminate state laws that prevent the growth of municipal broadband. There are currently 19 states with such laws. The Clyburn legislation targets those states with this provision: "No State statute, regulation, or other State legal requirement may prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting any public provider, public-private partnership provider, or cooperatively organized provider from providing, to any person or any public or private entity, advanced telecommunications capability or any service that utilizes the advanced telecommunications capability provided by such provider." The bill also has a Dig Once requirement that says fiber or fiber conduit must be installed "as part of any covered highway construction project" in states that receive federal highway funding. Similar Dig Once mandates have been proposed repeatedly over the years and gotten close to becoming US law, but never quite made it past the finish line.

Apple has confirmed that switching to its own, ARM-based Apple silicon will signal the end of Boot Camp support. From a report: Apple will start switching its Macs to its own ARM-based processors later this year, but you won't be able to run Windows in Boot Camp mode on them. Microsoft only licenses Windows 10 on ARM to PC makers to preinstall on new hardware, and the company hasn't made copies of the operating system available for anyone to license or freely install. On John Gruber's WWDC Talk Show, Craig Federighi confirmed that Apple would not support Boot Camp on ARM Macs: "We're not direct booting an alternate operating system. Purely virtualization is the route. These hypervisors can be very efficient, so the need to direct boot shouldn't really be the concern."

Facebook announced Thursday that it would introduce a notification screen warning users if they try to share content that's more than 90 days old. From a report: They'll be given the choice to "go back" or to click through if they'd still like to share the story knowing that it isn't fresh. Facebook acknowledged that old stories shared out of their original context play a role in spreading misinformation, a fact that the social media company said "news publishers in particular" have expressed concern about old stories being recirculated as though they're breaking news. "Over the past several months, our internal research found that the timeliness of an article is an important piece of context that helps people decide what to read, trust and share," Facebook Vice President of Feed and Stories John Hegeman wrote on the company's blog.

Last week, Washington strongly objected to a new project from Facebook and Google. It's too risky and offers "unprecedented opportunities" for Chinese government espionage, the Justice Department declared. The project, however, wasn't about online speech or contact tracing, but concerned an issue that would seem far less politically charged: building an undersea internet cable from the United States to Hong Kong. From a report: On June 17, Team Telecom -- the executive branch group charged with reviewing foreign telecoms for security risks (and recently in the news for escalating and apparently insufficient inspections) -- recommended the Federal Communications Commission stop the Hong Kong connection. It may seem odd for American officials to fret over undersea cable networks; rarely does your chosen crime show's protagonist kick a door in because someone is laying telecommunications fiber.

But geopolitical influence-projection on the internet isn't just about hacking other countries' intelligence databases. While not nearly as flashy, the development and maintenance of undersea cables, the landing points anchoring them above ground, and other physical internet infrastructure are a growing arm of cyber statecraft and source of security risk. This cable is just one element in a broader geopolitical contest. Facebook and Google joined the project, dubbed the Pacific Light Cable Network, back in 2016. Teaming up with New Jersey-based telecom TE SubCom and Pacific Light Data Communication Company, a Hong Kong subsidiary of the Chinese firm Dr. Peng Telecom & Media Group, the US giants jumped on a project already months underway: building a massive undersea internet cable -- the submarine-depth metal tubes hauling internet traffic from one land mass to another -- connecting the US, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

To the US government, the Taiwan and Philippines part was up to scratch. Undersea cables have visible benefits, such as bolstering digital connections between regions and facilitating all forms of communication that follow. And for this 8,000-mile-long fiber-optic snake, connecting dispersed areas of the world was exactly the point. The stakeholders wrote as much in a December 2017 filing to the US government, noting this would be the first undersea cable moving internet traffic directly between Hong Kong and the United States, at speeds of 120 terabytes per second. But the government had security worries about the Chinese-owned Hong Kong subsidiary behind the effort, as well as the proposed line to Hong Kong itself. Google, Facebook, and their partners had already laid thousands of miles of cable and spent millions of dollars last August when word broke of the Justice Department's opposition to the project. Officials thought Beijing could physically access the cable for espionage -- in this case by capturing internet traffic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Trump administration has determined that top Chinese firms, including telecoms equipment giant Huawei Technologies and video surveillance company Hikvision, are owned or controlled by the Chinese military, laying the groundwork for new U.S. financial sanctions, according to a document seen by Reuters on Wednesday. The list of 20 companies that Washington alleges are backed by the People's Liberation Army also includes China Mobile Communications Group and China Telecommunications Corp as well as aircraft manufacturer Aviation Industry Corp of China.

The designations were drawn up by the Defense Department, which was mandated by a 1999 law to compile a list of firms "owned or controlled" by the People's Liberation Army that provide commercial services, manufacture, produce or export. The Pentagon's designations do not trigger sanctions, but the law says the president may declare a national emergency which would allow him to penalize any companies on the list that operate in the United States.

Amazon has announced that it's launching a new Counterfeit Crimes Unit as the latest effort by the online retailer to fight counterfeit products on its website. The Verge reports: The new team is said to be made up of "former federal prosecutors, experienced investigators, and data analysts," who will work to proactively "go on the offensive" against counterfeiters, instead of just reacting by trying to identify and block bad listings. According to Amazon, the new Counterfeit Crimes Unit will make it easier for the company to file civil lawsuits, aid brands in their own investigations, and work with law enforcement officials in fighting counterfeiters. Earlier this month, 3M sued merchants who used Amazon to sell 3M and counterfeit masks for more than 18 times their standard price. The Trump administration also took aim at Amazon by recently including the company's foreign websites in Canada, the U.K., Germany, France and India in its annual report on "notorious markets" for counterfeit foreign goods.

mschaffer writes: Some older Teslas (Model S) are experiencing problems due to a worn-out flash eMMC chip. The loss of touchscreen functionality prevents operators from being able to use the backup camera. This may potentially impact 63,000 cars. The agency also acknowledges that the same chip was used in the 2012 to 2018 versions of the Model S and the 2016 and 2018 version of the Model X, accounting for around 159,000 vehicles.

"The agency currently has two other such investigations open into Tesla," adds The Verge. "One, opened last October, is about an over-the-air software update Tesla issued that was meant to limit a possible fire risk in the battery packs of the company's cars. The other, opened in January, is looking into claims of Tesla's vehicles undergoing 'sudden unintended acceleration.'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs plans to spin out some of its smart city ideas into separate companies, CEO Daniel Doctoroff said today at Collision from Home conference. Doctoroff listed three potential companies: mass timber construction, affordable electrification sans fossil fuels, and planning tools optimized with machine learning and computation design. Last month, Sidewalk Labs killed its Toronto smart city project, which envisioned raincoats designed for buildings, heated pavement, and object-classifying cameras. Privacy advocates celebrated that the Google sister company would not be getting invasive power to surveil residents. But as I argued in my column that week, the story was far from over. Sidewalk Labs was using the COVID-19 pandemic as a scapegoat for the Toronto project, but the company wouldn't stay idle. Here's how Doctoroff describes the plans for the urban innovation company: "There's two different avenues that our work can take, leading out of the work we did in Toronto. The first is the creation of companies based on a lot of those ideas. As an example, we are huge believers in the potential of mass timber. Lower construction costs, lower construction times, both of which could have a big role in helping to address the affordability issue. There are also massive sustainability benefits and aesthetic benefits as well. We are in the process of creating a company to in effect commercialize the construction of mass timber. Out of our efforts in Toronto we've developed a very different approach to dramatically reducing carbon emissions. One of those pieces of that approach is what we call affordable electrification, which is basically to use all electricity, in whether it's a building or in a district, without using fossil fuels. We think that there is a very important company that potentially could be created out of that. The planning tools that we developed, which we think can help to optimize using machine learning and computational design -- we think that'd be a separate company.

Separately, we will also be engaging with developers using some of those innovations that were described in our plan for Toronto, some of which we ourselves will be building into companies that help developers achieve these sorts of quality of life improvements. In some cases, we will be a capital partner as well. So we expect to play a role in the building out of the places, and just do it in a more diversified way then would have been in Toronto. We were always going to employ that strategy, this just accelerates it in some way."

Google said Wednesday it was changing the defaults on its services in an effort to store less browser history and location data on its servers. NBC News reports: Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post that the first time a person turns on location history, the default option would be for the data to be stored for 18 months. Activity from the web and from apps would also default to 18 months for new accounts, he said. "This means your activity data will be automatically and continuously deleted after 18 months, rather than kept until you choose to delete it," Pichai said. There will be no automatic change for existing accounts and people who already have location history turned on in their Google settings, but the company plans to inform existing users of the option to set up auto-delete after three to 18 months, he said. People also have the option to turn the setting off.

Safari 14, scheduled to be released later this fall with iOS 14 and macOS 11, is a release that is packed choke-full with features. From a report: The biggest and most important of the new additions is support for WebExtensions, a technology for creating browser extensions. What this means for Safari users is that starting this fall, they'll see a huge influx of new Safari extensions as add-on developers are expected to port their existing Chrome and Firefox extensions to work on Apple's browser as well. Apple said that, for now, WebExtensions will only be available for Safari on macOS.

Safari 14 is also an end of an era, as this will be the first version of Safari that won't support Adobe Flash Player content. But while old stuff is being removed, new stuff is also being added. One of the new technologies added to Safari is support for HTTP/3, a new web standard that will make loading websites faster and safer. Another important addition in Safari is support for WebP, a lightweight image format that has been gaining widespread adoption across the internet. The format, created by Google, serves as an alternative to the older JPEG format, and Safari has been the last browser to add support for it. [...] But Safari hasn't been lagging behind other browsers just in terms of HTTP/3 and WebP support. Apple has also added support for another cool feature, namely breach alerts, already present in both Chrome and Firefox. Starting this fall, Apple says that Safari 14 will scan a user's locally-stored passwords and show a prompt if one or more of the user's credentials are present in publicly available lists of breached accounts.

Facebook is "aiding and abetting the spread of climate misinformation," said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Drexel University. "They have become the vehicle for climate misinformation, and thus should be held partially responsible for a lack of action on climate change." From a report: Brulle was reacting to Facebook's recent decision, made at the request of climate science deniers, to create a giant loophole in its fact-checking program. Last year, Facebook partnered with an organization, Science Feedback, that would bring in teams of Ph.D. climate scientists to evaluate the accuracy of viral content. It was an important expansion of the company's third-party fact-checking program. But now Facebook has reportedly decided to allow its staffers to overrule the climate scientists and make any climate disinformation ineligible for fact-checking by deeming it "opinion."

The organization that requested the change, the CO2 Coalition, is celebrating, E&E news reported on Monday. The group, which has close ties to the fossil fuel industry, says its views on climate change are increasingly ignored by the mainstream media. Now it plans to use Facebook to aggressively push climate misinformation on the public -- without having to worry about fact checks from climate scientists. A column published in the Washington Examiner in August 2019 claimed that "climate models" were a "failure" that predicted exponentially more warming of the earth than has occurred. The piece, co-authored by notorious climate science denier Pat Michaels, was quickly shared more than 2,000 times on Facebook. There was just one issue: It wasn't true. This is exactly the kind of mess that Facebook's network of independent fact-checkers is supposed to solve.