Olympus, once one of the world's biggest camera brands, is selling off that part of its business after 84 years. The firm said that despite its best efforts, the "extremely severe digital camera market" was no longer profitable. From a report: The arrival of smartphones, which had shrunk the market for separate cameras, was one major factor, it said. It had recorded losses for the last three years. The Japanese company made its first camera in 1936 after years of microscope manufacture. The Semi-Olympus I featured an accordion-like fold-out camera bellows, and cost more than a month's wages in Japan. The company continued to develop the camera business over the decades, becoming one of the top companies by market share. "There's a huge amount of affection for Olympus, going right back," says Nigel Atherton, editor of Amateur Photographer magazine. The 1970s was a high point, with their cameras advertised on television by celebrity photographers such as David Bailey and Lord Lichfield. "Those cameras were revolutionary - they were very small, very light, they were beautifully designed, had really nice quality lenses," adds Atherton.

Brazil, the second largest market for WhatsApp, has suspended the instant messaging app's mobile payments service in the country a week after its rollout in what is the latest setback for Facebook. From a report: In a statement, Brazil's central bank said it was taking the decision to "preserve an adequate competitive environment" in the mobile payments space and to ensure "functioning of a payment system that's interchangeable, fast, secure, transparent, open and cheap." Banks in the nation have asked Mastercard and Visa, who are among the payments partners for WhatsApp in Brazil, to suspend money transfer on WhatsApp app. Failure to comply with the order would subject the payments companies to fines and administrative sanctions. In its statement, Brazil's central bank suggested it hadn't had the opportunity to analyze WhatsApp's payment service prior to its rollout.

India's antitrust regulator approved Facebook's purchase of a 9.99% stake in the digital services unit controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, giving the social media giant another foothold in one of the world's fastest-growing online markets. From a report: The U.S.-based company will invest $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms through Jaadhu Holdings LLC, an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Facebook, according to a filing on the Competition Commission of India website. The clearance paves the way for a slew of smaller deals that take Jio's parent -- Reliance Industries Ltd. -- closer to its goal of becoming net debt free by March 2021 while using its roughly 400 million wireless phone subscribers as the cornerstone of an e-commerce and digital services business. Ambani's $65 billion digital unit has sold more than 20% in stakes to buyers including Facebook and U.S. private equity firms KKR, Silver Lake Partners and General Atlantic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft is moving forward with its promise to extend enterprise security protections to non-Windows platforms with the general release of a Linux version and a preview of one for Android. The software maker is also beefing up Windows security protections to scan for malicious firmware. The Linux and Android moves -- detailed in posts published on Tuesday here, here, and here -- follow a move last year to ship antivirus protections to macOS. Microsoft disclosed the firmware feature last week. All the new protections are available to users of Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection and require Windows 10 Enterprise Edition. Public pricing from Microsoft is either non-existent or difficult to find, but according to this site, costs range from $30 to $72 per machine per year to enterprise customers. "We are just at the beginning of our Linux journey and we are not stopping here!" Tuesday's post announcing the Linux general availability said. "We are committed to continuous expansion of our capabilities for Linux and will be bringing you enhancements in the coming months."

The Android preview, meanwhile, provides several protections, including:

- The blocking of phishing sites and other high-risk domains and URLs accessed through SMS/text, WhatsApp, email, browsers, and other apps. The features use the same Microsoft Defender
- SmartScreen services that are already available for Windows so that decisions to block suspicious sites will apply across all devices on a network.
- Proactive scanning for malicious or potentially unwanted applications and files that may be downloaded to a mobile device.
- Measures to block access to network resources when devices show signs of being compromised with malicious apps or malware.
- Integration to the same Microsoft Defender Security Center that's already available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. As for the new firmware protections, Microsoft's new offering via Microsoft Defender "scans Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, which is the successor to the traditional BIOS that most computers used during the boot process to locate and enumerate hardware installed," adds Ars. "The firmware scanner uses a new component added to virus protection already built into Defender."

Oculus is ending sales of its budget Oculus Go virtual reality headset and opening its Quest headset to a wider range of software. The Verge reports: The company will maintain Oculus Go firmware through 2022 and accept new apps through December 2020, but it will stop selling Go hardware after the current stock runs out. Meanwhile, it will add a new Quest app distribution channel without the current strict approval process, encouraging more developers to work with the headset. In a blog post, Facebook-owned Oculus says it's retiring the Go after positive response to the Quest -- which features the same all-in-one format but tracks full spatial (or 6DoF) motion, not just head orientation. "You've told us loud and clear that 6DoF feels like the future of VR. That's why we're going all-in, and we won't be shipping any more 3DoF VR products," the post says. Oculus already listed the $149 Go as out of stock before its cancelation, and it dropped the Go from its business VR platform in January, saying the Quest was the "best solution" for most users.

Oculus launched the Quest with a highly curated app selection aimed at giving new VR users a consistent experience. Now, with Go developers getting nudged toward the Quest, it's apparently developing an alternative option for early 2021. This system will let developers "share their apps to anyone with a Quest" as long as they meet Oculus' content standards. They won't get the visibility of an Oculus Store page, but users won't have to manually sideload the apps onto their headsets, making it easier to deploy software that's in testing or built for a limited audience.

Analyst Benedict Evans writes: There will be video in everything, just as there is voice in everything, and there will be a great deal of proliferation into industry verticals on one hand and into unbundling pieces of the tech stack on the other. On one hand video in healthcare, education or insurance is about the workflow, the data model and the route to market, and lots more interesting companies will be created, and on the other hand Slack is deploying video on top of Amazon's building blocks, and lots of interesting companies will be created here as well.

There's lots of bundling and unbundling coming, as always. Everything will be 'video' and then it will disappear inside. An important part of this is that there seem to be few real network effects in a video call per se. You don't necessarily need an account to join a call, and you generally don't need an application either, especially on the desktop -- you just click on a link in your calendar and the call opens in the browser. Indeed, the calendar is often the aggregation layer -- you don't need to know what service the next call uses, just when it is. Skype needed both an account and an app, so had a network effect (and lost even so). WhatsApp uses the telephone numbering system as an address and so piggybacked on your phone's contact list- effectively it used the PSTN as the social graph rather than having to build its own. But a group video call is a URL and a calendar invitation -- it has no graph of its own.

Incidentally, one of the ways that this all feels very 1.0 is the rather artificial distinction between calls that are based on a 'room', where the addressing system is a URL and anyone can join without an account, and calls that are based on 'people', where everyone joining needs their own address, whether it's a phone number, an account or something else. Hence Google has both Meet (URLs) and Duo (people) -- Apple's FaceTime is only people (no URLs). Taking this one step further, a big part of the friction that Zoom removed was that you don't need an account, an app or a social graph to use it: Zoom made network effects irrelevant. But, that means Zoom doesn't have those network effects either. It grew by removing defensibility.

Some Firefox users have discovered that the new default Windows 10 browser, which is shipped to their devices via Windows Update, sometimes imports the data from Mozilla's application even if they don't give their permission. Softpedia reports: Some of these Firefox users decided to kill the initial setup process of Microsoft Edge, only to discover that despite the wizard shutting down prematurely, the browser still copied data stored by Mozilla's browser. Several users confirmed on reddit that this behavior happened on their computers too. Microsoft has remained tight-lipped on this, so for the time being, it's still not known why Edge imports Firefox data despite the initial wizard actually killed off manually by the user. Users who don't want to be offered the new Edge on Windows Update can turn to the dedicated toolkit that Microsoft released earlier this year, while removing the browser is possible by just uninstalling the update from the device.

Twitter added a warning to one of Trump's tweets today threatening protesters seeking to establish an "autonomous zone" in Washington, D.C. The social media company is labeling it as a "threat of harm." The Hill reports: "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about abusive behavior. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public's interest for the Tweet to remain accessible," reads the advisory added to Trump's tweet. The president had tweeted Tuesday morning that any attempt to establish an "autonomous zone" in the nation's capital "will be met with serious force." Twitter added a notice roughly six hours later stating the tweet violated its policies.

"We've placed a public interest notice on this Tweet for violating our policy against abusive behavior, specifically, the presence of a threat of harm against an identifiable group," the platform said. "Per our policies, this Tweet will remain on the service given its relevance to ongoing public conversation," Twitter added. Users can no longer like or reply to Trump's tweet, but they can retweet it with comment, according to the platform.

Starting today, customers of Microsoft's commercial antivirus product -- Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) -- can install a first version of the product's Android port. From a report: The product, named "Microsoft Defender ATP for Android," was announced at the RSA security conference in February this year, and has reached a first public preview today. Companies that have contracted Microsoft Defender ATP protection have a new option in their dashboard where they can enable the feature and deploy an Android app to employees' devices.

This new Android app will work like a classic mobile antivirus product that can scan the phone for malicious apps and other malware, detect malicious and phishing sites while the user is browsing the web, and block users from accessing certain sites based on a predefined block-list. Microsoft says the Defender ATP for Android app also comes with hidden features, courtesy of its integration into the larger and more complex Defender ATP, Intune, and Configuration Manager platforms.

Smartphone apps meant to track where people have traveled or whom they have been near are mostly buggy, little-used or not ready for major rollouts, raising concerns as restrictions lift and infections rise. From a report: Local officials in Teton County, Wyo., home to Yellowstone National Park and resort town Jackson Hole, want to prevent a new wave of coronavirus cases as the area reopens. They decided to lean on technology. The county signed up for a location-tracking app developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help accelerate contact tracing, the process of notifying and isolating people who might have been exposed to the virus. But as tourists stream into Yellowstone -- rangers spotted license plates from 41 states the day it reopened in mid-May -- the app isn't ready. It can't accurately track location, it's missing key features and its developers have struggled to protect sensitive user data. U.S. states and counties are placing great faith in contact tracing, in tandem with aggressive testing, as they reopen their economies. Pressure has increased as coronavirus infections rise in many states, including Arizona, Texas and Florida.

The quick spread of the coronavirus makes it hard for human contact tracers to keep up, so authorities are turning to smartphone technologies to help track where people have traveled or whom they have been near. What is emerging across the country so far, however, is a patchwork of buggy or little-used apps, made by partners ranging from startups on shoestring budgets to academics to consulting firms. Some are working with location-tracking firms that have been under fire from privacy advocates. None appears ready for a major rollout, even as more local governments ease restrictions. Utah signed a deal worth more than $6 million with a firm backed by the family of billionaire Nelson Peltz and other investors. Rhode Island hired Indian software company Infosys to build its app free. North Dakota's governor turned to an old friend who had built an app for a college football team in 2013. Apple and Alphabet's Google deployed technology that at least five U.S. states agreed to adopt, but integrating it into smartphone apps takes time and comes with significant trade-offs. Some local health departments aren't keen on privacy restrictions in the Apple-Google protocol that limit information they can collect. Others had already sunk money into Covid apps before the tech giants arrived on the scene.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: In a decision that could further embolden European governments to take on large tech platforms, Germany's top court ruled on Tuesday that Facebook had abused its dominance in social media to illegally harvest data about its users. The ruling by the Federal Court of Justice, upholding a decision by Germany's antitrust watchdog, is a major victory for proponents of tougher regulation of the world's largest technology companies. The case had been closely watched after German regulators used a novel interpretation of competition law to rule against the social media giant last year. The authorities said Facebook broke competition laws by combining data it collected about users across its different platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as from outside websites and third-party apps. In Germany, Facebook now must alter how it processes data about its users. It was ordered to allow people to block the company from combining their Facebook data with information about their activities on other apps and websites.

The decision is a direct shot at Facebook's business model, which relies on collecting reams of data about people in order to offer more targeted advertising. The authorities argued that Facebook unfairly used its dominance to collect data about millions of users of third-party sites that used tools like Facebook's "like" and "share" buttons, and an analytics service called Facebook Pixel. Regulators concluded that consumers faced a false choice: Agree to hand over vast amounts of personal data or not use Facebook's ubiquitous social media services at all. [...] The decision may not be the last word. A lower court still must issue a ruling on the matter, a process some antitrust attorneys view as a formality given the high court's strong-worded ruling. In theory, the lower court could rule in Facebook's favor, setting up another appeal to the federal high court. Another wild card: German officials could send the matter to the European Court of Justice, the European Union high court that resolves many thorny legal questions from member states, said Rupprecht Podszun, a professor of competition law at the University of Dusseldorf.

It's the end of an unusual era in transportation. From a report: Fast Company has learned that the Segway brand will stop producing the Segway PT (Personal Transporter) at its Bedford, New Hampshire plant, where most production has taken place, on July 15th. The move will result in 25 people being laid off, and reflects the long-term struggles of a product that was supposed to revolutionize transportation, but never really took off. Inventor Dean Kamen launched the Segway PT in December 2001 with promises that it would revolutionize city transport -- the self-balancing two-wheeler was supposed to cover the middle ground between walking and driving in a way that bikes couldn't. However, it never sold in huge numbers, managing just 140,000 units in nearly 20 years. It ultimately found the most use among security teams (immortalized by Paul Blart: Mall Cop) and tourists. Kamen sold the company in 2009, and Chinese mobility firm Ninebot acquired it in 2015.

A Japanese supercomputer has taken the top spot in the biannual Top500 supercomputer speed ranking. Fugaku, a computer in Kobe co-developed by Riken and Fujitsu, makes use of Fujitsu's 48-core A64FX system-on-chip. It's the first time a computer based on ARM processors has topped the list. From a report: Fugaku turned in a Top500 HPL result of 415.5 petaflops, 2.8 times as fast as IBM's Summit, the nearest competitor. Fugaku also attained top spots in other rankings that test computers on different workloads, including Graph 500, HPL-AI, and HPCG. No previous supercomputer has ever led all four rankings at once. While fastest supercomputer rankings normally bounce between American- and Chinese-made systems, this is Japan's first system to rank first on the Top500 in nine years since Fugaku's predecessor, Riken's K computer. Overall there are 226 Chinese supercomputers on the list, 114 from America, and 30 from Japan. US-based systems contribute the most aggregate performance with 644 petaflops.

Optimism about the internet's role in politics peaked around the time of the Arab Spring, then steadily collapsed into alarm and despair until this weekend, when it ticked up again after President Donald Trump held a disappointing campaign rally. From a report: There are various ways to interpret the lower-than-expected turnout at the Tulsa, Oklahoma event, but among the most intriguing was the claim from a group of Korean pop fans that they'd undercut the campaign by coordinating to reserve thousands of tickets, then not showing up. They are likely giving themselves too much credit. Still, the narrative took hold for online observers as an example of a rare bright spot in the social media hellscape. The surge in activism from young Korean pop music enthusiasts has been one of the stranger plot lines of a uniquely unsettled time in American politics. Working together, they've rendered Twitter hashtags like #WhiteLivesMatter useless by filling them with music video clips, and they crashed a mobile app established by the Dallas Police Department to collect evidence of illegal activity at protests by overwhelming it with data.

This has gripped the imagination of some internet commentators, who noted how young people have reconstituted their "lightning-fast coordination and prodigious spamming abilities" for what the fans believe are righteous political causes. But spamming has historically been seen as a bad thing. When right-wing trolls coordinate to do things like pollute hashtags, pile onto people they dislike or disrupt the process of government it's regularly described as a serious threat to democracy. The tactics are remarkably similar, though the end goals are different.

Apple's Find My tracking feature in iOS 14 will allow users to find third-party devices. Engadget reports: A draft specification for hardware makers is available now, although you'll clearly have to wait until both the general release of iOS 14 and finished implementations for those gadgets. A completed spec should be available by the end of 2020. This could be a boon for many hardware manufacturers, not to mention anyone who has a habit of leaving devices behind. However, it could be particularly useful for item trackers that, until now, have had to rely on third-party apps with limited iOS integration.

Apple today announced two major changes to how it handles App Store disputes with third-party developers. The first is that Apple will now allow developers to appeal a specific violation of an App Store guideline, and that there will also be a separate process for challenging the guideline itself. Additionally, Apple says it will no longer delay app updates intended to fix bugs and other core functions over App Store disputes. The Verge reports: The changes come in the wake of Apple's high-profile showdown with Hey, a new email service from software developer Basecamp. The service launched last week as an invite-only website and a companion iOS app, with a full launch slated for July. But after initially approving the app, Apple later rejected Basecamp's subsequent updates and kicked off what became a very public feud between the company and Basecamp's co-founders, CEO Jason Fried and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, over whether Hey could exist in the App Store in its current form at all. The feud, inconveniently for Apple, coincided with the announcement of two antitrust probes from the European Union last week that were spurred in part from complaints from longtime Apple rivals like Spotify.

The central dispute in this case was whether Hey qualified for an exemption to rules around in-app purchases, which Basecamp decided not to include because the company does not want to give Apple its standard App Store revenue cut. Apple said Hey did not and claimed Basecamp's iOS app violated three App Store guidelines by not allowing you to sign up or purchase access to Hey from mobile. Fried and Heinemeier Hansson claimed that the decision was evidence of inconsistency and greed on Apple's part given the numerous apps, like Netflix and business software, that do qualify for such exemptions and have existed in the App Store without in-app purchase options for years. Apple last week tried to head off any future escalation of the feud by outlining its reasoning in a letter signed from the App Review Board, which it disseminated to Basecamp and media organizations. Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller also conducted interviews with members of the press. [...] On Monday, ahead of the keynote, Apple capitulated, allowing Hey's updates to go through only after a compromise from Basecamp in which the company now lets you sign up for a burner account that expires after two weeks.

At the WWDC 2020 keynote today, Apple unveiled WatchOS 7, adding sleep tracking features, shareable watch faces, a hand washing timer, and much more. CNET reports: WatchOS 7 adds much-anticipated sleep tracking features, including a Wind Down mode to help you get to bed on time. When you wake up, you'll see a visualization of your previous night's sleep, including periods of wake and sleep, and a chart showing weekly sleep trends. While the watch lacks a watch face store, the new software adds the ability to share customized watch faces and complications. If a shared watch face uses apps you don't have, you'll be able to download them easily. You can also easily share a face you've created yourself with a contact, or across social media.

In terms of health and fitness, WatchOS 7's Workout app adds support for four new workouts: core training, dance, functional strength training and cool down. The Activity app where you track your workouts will now be called Fitness, and will include a new Summary tab that gives you an easy way to see your activity history, workouts and trends, all in one view. With WatchOS 7, you'll be able to use Siri to translate several languages directly from your wrist. Like on iOS 14, in the Apple Maps app on WatchOS 7, you'll be able to see cycling-specific directions on your watch in some cities. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, WatchOS will use machine learning to determine when you start washing your hands, and sets a timer so you know you're getting the recommended 20-second wash.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hackers are abusing Google Analytics so that they can more covertly siphon stolen credit card data out of infected ecommerce sites, researchers reported on Monday. Payment card skimming used to refer solely to the practice of infecting point-of-sale machines in brick-and-mortar stores. The malware would extract credit card numbers and other data. Attackers would then use or sell the stolen information so it could be used in payment card fraud. One challenge in pulling off the hack is bypassing website security policies or concealing the exfiltration of massive amounts of sensitive data from endpoint security applications installed on the infected network. Researchers from Kaspersky Lab on Monday said that they have recently observed about two dozen infected sites that found a novel way to achieve this. Instead of sending it to attacker-controlled servers, the attackers send it to Google Analytics accounts they control. Since the Google service is so widely used, ecommerce site security policies generally fully trust it to receive data.

"Google Analytics is an extremely popular service (used on more than 29 million sites, according to BuiltWith) and is blindly trusted by users," Kaspersky Lab researcher Victoria Vlasova wrote here. "Administrators write *.google-analytics.com into the Content-Security-Policy header (used for listing resources from which third-party code can be downloaded), allowing the service to collect data. What's more, the attack can be implemented without downloading code from external sources." The researcher added: "To harvest data about visitors using Google Analytics, the site owner must configure the tracking parameters in their account on analytics.google.com, get the tracking ID (trackingId, a string like this: UA-XXXX-Y), and insert it into the web pages together with the tracking code (a special snippet of code). Several tracking codes can rub shoulders on one site, sending data about visitors to different Analytics accounts." The "UA-XXXX-Y" refers to the tracking ID that Google Analytics uses to tell one account from another. As demonstrated in the following screenshot, showing malicious code on an infected site, the IDs (underlined) can easily blend in with legitimate code.

One of the new features available in iOS 14 is the ability to switch default app preferences for the first time. 9to5Mac reports: Details are scarce currently, but one of the slides in the WWDC presentation featured a block that announced users will be able to change their default browser and default email app. This is a long-requested feature, as iOS 13 and prior versions of the operating system will always direct taps on links to Safari, and new emails start in Apple Mail. Default apps will be available with iOS 14 for iPhone and iPadOS 14 for iPad users. Other iOS 14 features include home screen widgets, a new Translate app, contextual Siri and much more.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft is closing its Mixer service on July 22nd and plans to move existing partners over to Facebook Gaming. The surprise announcement means Mixer partners and streamers will be transitioned to Facebook Gaming starting today, and Microsoft will no longer operate Mixer as a service in a month's time. Microsoft is partnering with Facebook to transition existing Mixer viewers and streamers over to Facebook Gaming in the coming weeks. On July 22nd, all Mixer sites and apps will automatically redirect to Facebook Gaming. Existing Mixer Partners will be granted partner status with Facebook Gaming, and any streamers using the Mixer monetization program will be granted eligibility for Facebook's Level Up program. Mixer viewers with outstanding Ember balances, channel subscriptions, or Mixer Pro subscriptions will receive Xbox gift card credit.

Microsoft's choice to partner with Facebook is clearly a strategic one that's also related to broadening the appeal of its upcoming xCloud game streaming service and its overall gaming efforts. Microsoft will work closely with Facebook to bring xCloud to Facebook Gaming, allowing viewers to click and immediately play games that people are streaming. It's a vision that's very similar to Google's ambitions with Stadia, but Mixer has lacked the scale and viewership to truly deliver this more broadly. Microsoft recruited exclusive streamers like Ninja and Shroud with big deals, but they haven't been enough to get more people using the service over rivals. Ninja, Shroud, and other top streamers are now free to rejoin Twitch or stream on Facebook Gaming.