An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Last year, Google launched the beta of Currents, which was essentially a rebrand of Google+ for G Suite users, since Google+ for consumers went to meet its maker in April 2019. While Google+ was meant to be an all-purpose social network, the idea behind Currents is more akin to what Microsoft is doing with Yammer or Facebook with Workplace. It's meant to give employees a forum for internal discussions and announcements. To complicate matters, Google kept Google+ around, even after the launch of Currents, but in an email to G Suite admins, it has now announced that Google+ for G Suite will close its doors on July 6, after which there will be no way to opt out of Currents or revert back to Google+. And with that, Google has driven the final nail into Google+'s coffin. The Google+ mobile apps will be automatically updated to Currents. All existing links to Google+ will redirect to Currents.

New submitter IBMResearch shares a report from ZDNet: IBM's new toolkit aims to give developers easier access to fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a nascent technology with significant promise for a number of security use cases. "Today, files are often encrypted in transit and at rest but decrypted while in use, creating a security vulnerability," reports ZDNet. "This often compels organizations to make trade-offs and go through long vetting processes in order to ensure they can keep their valuable data protected while still gaining some value out of it. FHE aims to resolve that issue."

"While the technology holds great potential, it does require a significant shift in the security paradigm," the report adds. "Typically, inside the business logic of an application, data remains decrypted, [Flavio Bergamaschi, FHE pioneer and IBM Researcher] explained. But with the implementation of FHE, that's no longer the case -- meaning some functions and operations will change."

The toolkit is available today in GitHub for MacOS and iOS, and it will soon be available for Linux and Android.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The state attorneys general investigating Google for potential antitrust violations are leaning towards pushing for a breakup of its ad technology business as part of an expected suit, people familiar with the situation told CNBC. Fifty attorneys general have been probing Google's business practices for months, alongside a similar probe being led by the U.S. Department of Justice. Both the states and the DOJ are looking to file a suit against the internet giant as soon as within the next few months, people familiar with the situation told CNBC.

The states and the Justice Department have not yet officially decided whether to combine their expected suits, the people said, though they have been collaborating closely. Both have been investigating Google's search, ad technology and android business. The attorneys general investigating Google, which is owned by Alphabet, haven't yet definitively ruled out pushing for alternatives for its ad technology business, like imposing restrictions on how it runs its business, one of the sources said. A suit may also include a push for both that option and breaking up the ad tech business. "Critics have said that Google bundles its ad tools so that rivals can't afford to match its offerings and that its operation of search results, YouTube, Gmail and other services to hinder ad competition," reports CNBC. "They also say that Google owns all sides of the 'auction exchange' through which ads are sold and bought, giving it an unfair advantage."

Google's two main deals that provided it the crucial foothold into advertising technology, DoubleClick in 2007 and AdMob in 2009, were years ago. Because of this, it may be difficult for Google to push for a break up of the business.

Benedict Evans: I suspect part of the answer to this is actually that a lot of physical events will come back in some form as we emerge from lockdown. But this also makes me think that there will be new tools with much more radically new approaches, and some new behaviours and habits. Hence, it's often struck me that networking events are pretty inefficient and random. If you're going to spend an hour or two in a room with 50 or 500 people, then you could take that as a purely social occasion and enjoy yourself. But if your purpose is to have professionally useful conversations, then what proportion of the people in the room can you talk to in an hour and how likely is it that they'll be the right ones? Who's there? I sometimes suggest it would be helpful if we all wore banners, as in the image at the top, so that you could look across the room and see who to talk to. (First Tuesday did something like this in 1999, with different coloured badges.)

This might just be that I'm an introvert asking for a machine to manage human connections for me (and I am), but there is also clearly an opportunity to scale the networking that happens around events in ways that don't rely on random chance and alcohol tolerance. A long time ago Twitter took some of that role, and the explosion of online dating also shows how changing the way you think about pools and sample sets changes outcomes. In 2017, 40% of new relationships in the USA started online. Next, before lockdown, you would often have planned to schedule a non-urgent meeting with a partner or client or connection 'when we're in the same city.' That might be at some specific event, but it might also just be for some ad hoc trip -- 'next time I'm in the Bay Area' or 'next time you're in New York.' In January most people would never actually have thought of making a video call, but today every meeting is a video call, so all of those meetings can be a video call too, and can happen this week rather than 'next time I fly to that city' -- or 'at CES/NAB/MIPCOM.' In the last few months video calls have broke through that habit. I wonder what happens if we accelerate all of those meetings in that way. To argue against some of this, James Turrell has said that part of the value of Roden Crater's remoteness is that you have to really care to go there. Getting a plane and a hotel and a ticket, and taking days of time, has some of the same effect for a conference -- it gives a selection filter for people who care. There is value in aggregating people around a professional interest graph, and in doing that in a focused way, perhaps even around a particular time. (There are also, of course, exclusionary effects to this.)

Reddit Co-founder Alexis Ohanian on Friday announced his resignation from the company's board, saying he was stepping down and urging the company to replace him with a black candidate. From a report: "I'm writing this as a father who needs to be able to answer his black daughter when she asks: "What did you do?'" Ohanian wrote in a blog post. Ohanian, who is married to professional tennis player Serena Williams, also committed to using future gains from his Reddit stock to serve the black community and focus on curbing racial hate. To start, Ohanian said he would donate $1 million to former NFL player and activist Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp. "I believe resignation can actually be an act of leadership from people in power right now. To everyone fighting to fix our broken nation: do not stop," Ohanian said.

Maddie Stone, writing for OneZero: For the past eight years, I've been working mainly on a late 2012 iMac. I'm no Luddite, but the computer has held up well over the years, and I've never felt the need to replace it. Recently, though, my iMac developed its first serious tic: The fan has started to power on loudly every time the computer goes to sleep. While the computer is long past warranty, I decided to call up Apple to see if the company could offer any help. When I did, I learned my iMac is considered "vintage" and was told Apple won't touch it. [...] According to Apple, "vintage" devices are those that the company discontinued selling more than five and less than seven years ago. Once Apple hasn't sold a product for seven years, it's considered "obsolete," meaning the company won't offer any repair services. But vintage products exist in a liminal space: Despite what I learned when I called Apple Support, Apple Stores as well as AASPs (Apple Authorized Service Provide) can, in theory, repair them for you "subject to availability of inventory, or as required by law," according to Apple.

In practice, people in the repair community told me Apple isn't particularly interested in fixing vintage tech. "The AASPs I've spoken to in the past have told me they don't bother with customers looking to repair older devices," said Rob Link, a right-to-repair advocate who owns a company that sells repair parts for older devices including iPhones, iPods, and iPads. In the past, Link said, he would call up AASPs to see if they had older parts to sell "but I would stop when no one did." "If you're taking in a vintage piece of equipment [to an AASP], outside of them still having something sitting on the shelf from years before, you're not going to be able to get service," said Adrian Avery-Johnson, the owner of Bridgetown Electronics Repair, an independent repair shop located in Portland, Oregon.

In a preprint paper, Uber researchers describe MultiNet, a system that detects and predicts the motions of obstacles from autonomous vehicle lidar data. From a report: They say that unlike existing models, MultiNet reasons about the uncertainty of the behavior and movement of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists using a model that infers detections and predictions and then refines those to generate potential trajectories. Anticipating the future states of obstacles is a challenging task, but it's key to preventing accidents on the road. Within the context of a self-driving vehicle, a perception system has to capture a range of trajectories other actors might take rather than a single likely trajectory. For example, an opposing vehicle approaching an intersection might continue driving straight or turn in front of an autonomous vehicle; in order to ensure safety, the self-driving vehicle needs to reason about these possibilities and adjust its behavior accordingly.

MultiNet takes as input lidar sensor data and high-definition maps of streets and jointly learns obstacle trajectories and trajectory uncertainties. For vehicles (but not pedestrians or cyclists), it then refines these by discarding the first-stage trajectory predictions and taking the inferred center of objects and objects' headings before normalizing them and feeding them through an algorithm to make final future trajectory and uncertainty predictions. To test MultiNet's performance, the researchers trained the system for a day on ATG4D, a data set containing sensor readings from 5,500 scenarios collected by Uber's autonomous vehicles across cities in North America using a roof-mounted lidar sensor. They report that MultiNet outperformed several baselines by a significant margin on all three obstacle types (vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists) in terms of prediction accuracies. Concretely, modeling uncertainty led to improvements of 9% to 13%, and it allowed for reasoning about the inherent noise of future traffic movement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Instagram does not provide users of its embedding API a copyright license to display embedded images on other websites, the company said in a Thursday email to Ars Technica. The announcement could come as an unwelcome surprise to users who believed that embedding images, rather than hosting them directly, provides insulation against copyright claims. "While our terms allow us to grant a sub-license, we do not grant one for our embeds API," a Facebook company spokesperson told Ars in a Thursday email. "Our platform policies require third parties to have the necessary rights from applicable rights holders. This includes ensuring they have a license to share this content, if a license is required by law."

In plain English, before you embed someone's Instagram post on your website, you may need to ask the poster for a separate license to the images in the post. If you don't, you could be subject to a copyright lawsuit. Professional photographers are likely to cheer the decision, since it will strengthen their hand in negotiations with publishers. But it could also significantly change the culture of the Web. Until now, people have generally felt free to embed Instagram posts on their own sites without worrying about copyright concerns. That might be about to change. Instagram's announcement follows a recent court ruling where photographer Elliot McGucken sued Newsweek for copyright infringement for embedding his post on their site without permission. "Newsweek countered that it didn't need McGucken's permission because it could get rights indirectly via Instagram," reports Ars Technica. "Instagram's terms of service require anyone uploading photos to provide a copyright license to Instagram -- including the right to sublicense the same rights to other users. Newsweek argued that that license extends to users of Instagram's embedding technology, like Newsweek."

"But in a surprise ruling (PDF) on Monday, Judge Katherine Failla refused to dismiss McGucken's lawsuit at a preliminary stage," the report adds. "She held that there wasn't enough evidence in the record to decide whether Instagram's terms of service provided a copyright license for embedded photos."

The report goes on to note that courts have previously "ruled against plaintiffs in embedding cases based on the 'server test,' which holds that liability goes to whomever runs the server that actually delivers infringing content to the user -- in this case, Instagram." It adds: "Instagram's decision to throw users of its embedding API under the bus makes the server test crucial for cases like this."

Through the first quarter of this year, the Tesla Model 3 was California's best selling vehicle. CNET reports: Data from the California New Car Dealers Association released last week shows the Model 3 sold 18,856 units through March 31 of this year. The figure is greater than any rival car, and even trumps mass-market cars and crossovers. The car to come closest was the Honda Civic with 18,001 units sold in the same time period. The Toyota Camry (17,871 units), RAV4 (17,261) and Corolla (15,575) round out the top five cars through Q1 in California. The CNCDA categorizes the Model 3 in the "near luxury" category, which has it compete with cars like the BMW 3 Series and Mercedes-Benz C-Class. In its respective segment, the electric car blew rivals away. The 3 Series sits in second place with 3,437 units sold to the Model 3's 18,856. The Lexus ES (2,703 units), C-Class (2,199) and Audi A4 (1,099 units) fill in the final results, and it's clear, Californians dig their Teslas.

An anonymous reader writes: Antietam Broadband, which serves Washington County in Maryland, announced Friday that it "has permanently removed broadband data usage caps for all customers," retroactive to mid-March when the company first temporarily suspended data-cap overage fees. The decision to permanently drop the cap was made partly because of "learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic as more people worked and learned remotely," Antietam explained. "During this period customers moved into broadband packages that more accurately reflected their broadband needs." Like most other ISPs, Antietam charges different prices based on speed tiers as measured in bits per second, with Antietam's advertised download speeds ranging up to 1Gbps.

"These are uncertain times. We felt a need to give customers as much certainty over their bill as possible," Antietam President Brian Lynch said in the press release. "Eliminating data usage caps means that customers will know the exact amount of their broadband bill every month." U.S. residents have been using more Internet data at home since mid-March, when the pandemic caused the closure of offices and schools. "Since the pandemic began, we have seen as much increase in broadband usage as we generally would see over the course of a year," Lynch said. Antietam said it has responded to the growing usage "by adding backhaul, server capacity and local nodes." "Antietam imposed its data cap in 2015, charging a $10 overage fee for each additional block of 50GB," the report adds. "The monthly data caps ranged from 500GB to 1.5TB per month, except for a gigabit fiber plan that already included unlimited data."

Rockstar Games, 2K games, and their parent company Take-Two Interactive announced on Thursday that they will shut down the servers for games such as Grand Theft Auto Online, Red Dead Online, and NBA 2K for two hours on Thursday afternoon "to honor the legacy of George Floyd." Polygon reports: "Black Lives Matter," said Rockstar Games on its official Twitter account. "To honor the legacy of George Floyd, today, 6/4/20, from 2:00-4:00 p.m. ET, we will be shutting down access to our online games, Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Online." "Following the memorial," Rockstar added in a follow-up tweet, "we hope you will join us in further honoring the many victims of America's racial injustices by supporting their families, black-owned businesses, those marching on the streets, and coalitions." Rockstar ended its thread with a link to Charity Navigator, a nonprofit organization that maintains a vetted list of civil rights-focused charities.

In addition to Rockstar's titles, additional games from 2K Games and Social Point will go offline as well from 2-4 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Take-Two Interactive said in a statement to Polygon. The list includes NBA 2K, Dragon City, and Monster Legend. Private Division, whose portfolio includes The Outer Worlds and Kerbal Space Program, will also "suspend" its activities during the window. "George Floyd's memory will serve as a reminder that racism and the violence it incites cannot be tolerated," Take-Two Interactive said. "We are committed to supporting efforts to eradicate racial injustice and stand in solidarity with the Black community against this systemic issue that causes conflict and division in our society."

Facebook said Thursday it will begin blocking state-controlled media outlets from buying advertising in the U.S. this summer. It's also rolling out a new set of labels to provide users with transparency around ads and posts from state-controlled outlets. Outlets that feel wrongly labeled can appeal the process. Axios reports: Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of security policy, says the company hasn't seen many examples yet of foreign governments using advertising to promote manipulative content to U.S. users, but that the platform is taking this action out of an abundance of caution ahead of the 2020 election. Beginning Thursday, the types of state-backed media that U.S. users will see labels on include outlets like Russia's Sputnik, China's People's Daily, Iran's Tasnim News Agency and others. [...]

The purpose of labeling these outlets is to give users transparency about any kind of potential bias a state-backed entity may have when providing information to U.S. users. Gleicher says it's labeling these outlets, not removing them altogether, because in many places around the world, state-backed media is the only form of local news. Facebook considers an outlet to be state-backed not just if it takes state funding, but also based on the organization's structure (whether a government official helps them make editorial decisions) and whether there are clear indications that the entity has editorial independence (like a law or charter granting them that independence).

U.S. federal and state authorities are asking detailed questions about how to limit Google's power in the online search market as part of their antitrust investigations into the tech giant, according to rival DuckDuckGo. From a report: Gabriel Weinberg, chief executive officer of the privacy-focused search engine, said he has spoken with state regulators, and talked with the U.S. Justice Department as recently as a few weeks ago. Justice Department officials and state attorneys general asked the CEO about requiring Google to give consumers alternatives to its search engine on Android devices and in Google's Chrome web browser, Weinberg said in an interview. "We've been talking to all of them about search and all of them have asked us detailed search questions," he added. Weinberg's comments shine a light into how the inquiry is examining Google's core business -- online search.

Speaking of Germany it will oblige all petrol stations to offer electric car charging to help remove refueling concerns and boost consumer demand for the vehicles as part of its 130 billion euro ($146 billion) economic recovery plan. From a report: The move could provide a significant boost to electric vehicle demand along with the broader stimulus plan which included taxes to penalize ownership of large polluting combustion-engined sports utility vehicles and a 6,000 euro subsidy towards the cost of an electric vehicle. Germany's announcement follows a French plan to boost electric car sales announced last week by President Macron.

General Motors is developing an electric van aimed at business users, joining a growing list of carmakers planning EVs for the same segment which includes customers such as Amazon.com and United Parcel Service, Reuters reported Thursday. From the report: That multibillion-dollar strategy could enable GM, Ford Motor and at least two EV startups to build and deliver more electric vehicles at a time when consumer demand for battery-powered models is still a small fraction of overall industry sales, while targeting a potentially lucrative market segment that Tesla Inc has yet to address. GM's plan to develop an electric van has not previously been reported. The No. 1 U.S. automaker did not confirm the van, but has said it plans to introduce at least 20 new all-electric vehicles by 2023, in a variety of body styles including sedans, trucks and crossovers. Suppliers familiar with such plans at GM and Ford told Reuters the Detroit automakers, which count trucks and commercial vehicles among their most profitable businesses, "don't want to leave the door open for Tesla" as they did in consumer passenger cars.

Google security researchers say they've identified efforts by at least two nation state-backed hackers against the Trump and Biden presidential campaigns. From a report: Shane Huntley, director for Google's Threat Analysis Group, said in a tweet that hackers backed by China and Iran recently targeted the campaigns using malicious phishing emails. But, Huntley said, there are "no signs of compromise" and that the campaigns were both alerted to the attempts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Cyber-attacks against anti-racism organizations shot up in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a leading provider of protection services says. Cloudflare, which blocks attacks designed to knock websites offline, says advocacy groups in general saw attacks increase 1,120-fold. Mr Floyd's death, in police custody, has sparked nationwide civil unrest in the US. Government and military websites also saw a notable increase in attacks. Cloudflare says that after Mr Floyd's death and the ensuing violent clashes between police and protesters, it saw a noticeable jump in the amount of requests it blocked -- an extra 19 billion (17%) from the corresponding weekend the previous month. That equates to an extra 110,000 blocked requests every second, it said.

The problem was particularly acute for certain types of organizations. One single website belonging to an unnamed advocacy group dealt with 20,000 requests a second. Anti-racism groups which belong to Cloudflare's free program for at-risk organizations saw a large surge in the past week, from near-zero to more than 120 million blocked requests. Attacks on government and military websites were also up — by 1.8 and 3.8 times respectively.

Hot on the heels of Uber scrapping thousands of e-bikes and e-scooters, Bird is taking similar action. The micromobility company is reportedly disposing of thousands of e-scooters in the Middle East and shutting down its operations in the majority of the region as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. CNBC reports: The e-scooters being scrapped belong to Circ, which was acquired by Bird for an undisclosed sum in January. There are between 8,000 and 10,000 Circ scooters across cities in Qatar, Bahrain and United Arab Emirates, according to one former employee and one company source who asked to be kept anonymous as they've signed a confidentiality agreement. Bird is paying around $300,000 to have all of Circ's scooters in the Middle East scrapped, the former employee told CNBC.

Bird said it has "temporarily paused operations" in the Middle East because of the hot weather, adding that it is using the break to "recycle" some vehicles. Bird will continue to operate its own scooters in Tel Aviv. "During this pause, we are taking the opportunity to responsibly recycle parts of the old Circ fleet that were previously used in the region," a Bird spokesperson said. "Following extreme wear and tear, the Circ vehicles no longer met our rigorous quality standards. Selling or re-use of these vehicles would potentially result in safety and reliability issues, which would not have been fair or ethical to the purchasers or potential riders. We look forward to resuming our service throughout more parts of the region later this year."

Germany will outlaw the morphing of passport photos, in which pictures of two people are digitally combined, making it possible to assign multiple identities to a single document. Reuters reports: Morphing can trick artificial intelligence used at passport control into recognizing different individuals. The government on Wednesday backed a law requiring people to either have their photo taken at a passport office or, if they use a photographer, have it submitted in digital form over a secure connection, spokesman Steffen Seibert said. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics have found that it is possible to morph photos of the faces of different people who are not even related. A certain degree of similarity is sufficient, such as the eyes being aligned. Such manipulation of photos is typically invisible to the human eye, the researchers found.

Dyson has revealed new photos and information about their failed electric SUV, which the company canceled last October due to high costs. The Verge reports: In a new blog post on his company's website, Dyson shows off some of the first images and videos of the real prototype it made before the project was killed last October, as well as a few more computer renderings. He describes the SUV as "a radical car which was loaded with technology," and says his company "solved lots of problems that are traditionally associated with electric vehicles," though the project was ultimately abandoned for not being "commercially viable." Missing from the post is any substantive explanation of what those problems were, though, or how the company was going to solve them. Dyson touts a "spoke, integrated and highly efficient Electric Drive Unit (EDU) comprising Dyson digital electric motor, single speed transmission and state of the art power inverter," though there's no explanation about what sets those technologies apart from the ones developed by other companies in the electric vehicle space.

Other listed design benefits (like a flexible battery pack design, improved interior space, longer wheelbase) and features (like a heads-up display or handle-free doors) are also far from unique. And while Autocar reports that the SUV was supposed to offer somewhere around 600 miles of range using a 150kWh battery, Dyson never got close enough to put that claim to the test. One of the few standout parts of the SUV is the steering wheel, which looks more like a video game controller than anything.