A viral video making the rounds on social media shows a Tesla Model 3 smacking into the roof of an overturned truck trailer. The crash took place on Taiwan's National Highway 1 and appears to be "caused by the Tesla's Autopilot system not detecting the large rectangular object right in front of it, in broad daylight and clear weather," reports Jalopnik. From the report: There's video of the wreck, and you can see the Tesla drives right into the truck, with only what looks like a solitary attempt at braking just before impact. For any human driver paying even the slightest bit of attention, this accident is almost an impossibility, assuming the driver had the gift of sight and functional brakes.

Tesla's Autopilot system primarily uses cameras for its Autopilot system, and previous wrecks have suggested that situations like this, a light-colored large immobile object on the road on a bright day can be hard for the system to distinguish. In general, immobile objects are challenging for emergency automatic braking systems and autonomous systems, as if you use radar emitters to trigger braking for immobile objects, cars tend to have far too many false positives and unintended stops than is safe or desirable.

News reports from Taiwanese outlets, clumsily translated by machine, do seem to suggest that the driver, a 53-year-old man named Huang, had Autopilot activated: "The Fourth Highway Police Brigade said that driving Tesla was a 53-year-old man named Huang, who claimed to have turned on the vehicle assist system at the time. It was thought that the vehicle would detect an obstacle and slow down or stop, but the car still moved at a fixed speed, so when the brakes were to be applied at the last moment, it would be too late to cause a disaster." Thankfully, nobody was seriously hurt in the accident. The takeaway is that regardless of whether Autopilot was working or not the driver should always be paying attention and ready to step in, especially since no Tesla or any currently-available car is fully autonomous.

The unrest following the death of George Floyd has prompted Amazon shoppers to buy pepper spray for self-defense. According to Bloomberg, "a $9.48 canister of Sabre 'max police strength' pepper spray shot up to the top-selling rank in Amazon's sports and outdoors category Monday morning." The No. 2 spot was a neck gaiter, which can cover the nose and mouth. From the report: One Amazon shopper named "Bill" left a 5-star review for the pepper spray May 31 and said "Put the cops down when they mess with you." People are swapping recommendations for self-defense products on social-media platforms like Twitter, where users are posting links to Sabre pepper spray on Amazon. According to customer reviews, the pepper spray can be used for self-defense. Amazon became a pipeline for household essentials such as toilet paper and disinfecting wipes for shoppers hunkered down at home to avoid contracting Covid-19. The spike in pepper spray sales shows how protests around the country are influencing consumer demand. Amazon's best-seller product rankings provide a real-time gauge for sudden swings in consumer demand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A year ago, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said he was "pretty optimistic" about Google's Stadia game-streaming service. The concept of "being able to play our games on any device whatsoever around the world, and to do it with low latency, well that's very compelling if that can be delivered," he offered in May of 2019. Now, though, Zelnick has changed his tune a bit. In an interview given during the Bernstein Annual Strategic Decisions Conference late last week, Zelnick acknowledges what has been apparent to industry watchers for a while: "The launch of Stadia has been slow," he said. "I think there was some overpromising on what the technology could deliver and some consumer disappointment as a result."

While major publishers like EA and Activision stayed away from Stadia's "Founders" launch last November, Take-Two provided three of the service's highest-profile games in its early months -- Red Dead Redemption 2, NBA 2K20, and Borderlands 3. And Zelnick said such Stadia support will continue in the future "as long as the business model makes sense." (Take-Two's PGA Tour 2K21, WWE2K Battlegrounds, and the Mafia series are currently planned for future Stadia release.) That said, Zelnick was pretty bearish on how much of an impact the streaming business model will really have on Take-Two's bottom-line sales. "It's not a game changer," Zelnick said. "People who want our games now can get our games now. The fact that you could stream them and not have to have a console interface is really not that big of a deal."

Only around a third of users usually change their passwords following a data breach announcement, according to a recent study published by academics from the Carnegie Mellon University's Security and Privacy Institute (CyLab). From a report: The study, presented earlier this month at the IEEE 2020 Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection, was not based on survey data, but on actual browser traffic. Academics analyzed real-world web traffic collected with the help of the university's Security Behavior Observatory (SBO), an opt-in research group where users sign up and share their full browser history for the sole purpose of academic research. The research team's dataset included information collected from the home computers of 249 participants.

The data was collected between January 2017 and December 2018 and included not only web traffic, passwords used to log into websites and stored inside the browser. Based on their analysis of the data, academics said that of the 249 users, only 63 had accounts on breached domains that publicly announced a data breach during the collection interval. CyLab researchers said that of the 63 users, only 21 (33%) visited the breached sites to change their passwords, and that of these 21, only 15 users changed passwords within three months after the data breach announcement.

Apple has released iOS 13.5.1 today, which the company says "provides important security updates and is recommended for all users," albeit without much detail in the change log. But as noted by Twitter account Apple Software Updates, the update is meant to patch out the kernel vulnerability used by the recent Unc0ver jailbreak. The Verge reports: Apple's support page lays things out more clearly -- the update was designed to prevent an application from being able to "execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges." In other words, iOS 13.5.1 is designed to block jailbreaking. The Unc0ver jailbreak was particularly notable in the iOS jailbreaking community because it was available on the then-current iOS 13.5, allowing users of the latest Apple devices to install new software features outside of Apple's gated App Store.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: As the United States deals with widespread civil unrest across dozens of cities, "hacktivist" group Anonymous has returned from the shadows. The hacker collective was once a regular fixture in the news, targeting those it accused of injustice with cyber-attacks. After years of relative quiet, it appears to have re-emerged in the wake of violent protests in Minneapolis over the death of George Floyd, promising to expose the "many crimes" of the city's police to the world. However, it's not easy to pin down what, if anything, is genuinely the mysterious group's work.

Various forms of cyber-attack are being attributed to Anonymous in relation to the George Floyd protests. First, the Minneapolis police department website was temporarily taken offline over the weekend in a suspected Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This is an unsophisticated but effective form of cyber-attack that floods a server with data until it can't keep up and stops working -- in the same way that shopping websites can go offline when too many people flood it to snap up high-demand products. A database of email addresses and passwords claiming to be hacked from the police department's system is also in circulation, and being linked to Anonymous. However, there is no evidence that the police servers have been hacked and one researcher, Troy Hunt, says the credentials are likely to have been compiled from older data breaches.

A page on the website of a minor United Nations agency has been turned into a memorial for Mr Floyd, replacing its contents with the message "Rest in Power, George Floyd", along with an Anonymous logo. On Twitter, unverified posts have also gone viral, apparently showing police radios playing music and preventing communication. However, experts suggest it is unlikely to be a hack, and could instead be the result of a stolen piece of hardware being commandeered by protesters on the scene -- if the videos are genuine in the first place. Anonymous activists are also circulating years-old accusations against President Trump, taken from documents in a civil court case that was voluntarily dismissed by the accuser before it went to trial.

As investors' appetites sour in the midst of a pandemic, a three-and-a-half-year-old Indian firm has secured $10.3 billion in a month from Facebook and four U.S.-headquartered private equity firms. From a report: The major deals for Reliance Jio Platforms have sparked a sudden interest among analysts, executives and readers at a time when many are skeptical of similar big check sizes that some investors wrote to several young startups, many of which are today struggling to make sense of their finances. Prominent investors across the globe, including in India, have in recent weeks cautioned startups that they should be prepared for the "worst time" as new checks become elusive.

Elsewhere in India, the world's second-largest internet market and where all startups together raised a record $14.5 billion last year, firms are witnessing down rounds (where their valuations are slashed). Miten Sampat, an angel investor, said last week that startups should expect a 40%-50% haircut in their valuations if they do get an investment offer. Facebook's $5.7 billion investment valued the company at $57 billion. But U.S. private equity firms Silver Lake, Vista, General Atlantic, and KKR -- all the other deals announced in the past five weeks -- are paying a 12.5% premium for their stake in Jio Platforms, valuing it at $65 billion.

An anonymous reader shares an analysis: Since the pandemic started, there's been approximately 61,260 tech layoffs. Close to 30% of the layoffs came from public tech companies, 85% of those companies are unprofitable. No deep insights here, just the simple fact that the once growth hyper focused startups grew to be publicly traded companies without ever sorting their unit economics, and now their mediocracy has real consequences on real people. This includes household names such as Uber, Lyft, Casper, and Eventbrite which we've all used, and raises the question: why did we allow so many unprofitable companies IPO? When did losing money become acceptable and the new normal for publicly traded companies? Chamath Palihapitiya's "VC Ponzi Scheme" monologue comes to mind.

Samsung is rolling out Samsung Access, a monthly premium upgrade program in the US for users who purchase new Galaxy S20, Galaxy S20 Plus, or Galaxy S20 Ultra phones, the company announced in a blog post. From a report: Unlike its legacy upgrade program, Samsung Access provides additional benefits, including a Premium Care membership, and a premium Microsoft 365 subscription, which includes Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Skype, along with 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage. Another big difference between the new Access plan and the legacy upgrade plan: if you already have a Samsung device, you can't trade it in to join the new Access plan. The standard upgrade plan allows you to trade in an existing device and put any remaining balance toward a new one. Pricing for a minimum three-month subscription to Samsung Access will cost $37 per month for the S20, $42 per month for the S20 Plus, and $48 per month for the S20 Ultra.

Microsoft has now admitted it failed to give due credit to Canadian developer Keivan Beigi for his role in the new WinGet Windows 10 package manager. From a report: Last week, Beigi, who built the open-source AppGet package manager for Windows, accused Microsoft of copying his work for WinGet without acknowledging his product's influence. Beigi says Microsoft copied large parts of AppGet to deliver WinGet, the Windows package manager announced at Microsoft Build 2020. Last week, he detailed his discussions with a senior manager at Microsoft named Andrew who approached him in July 2019 with an invitation to meet and discuss "how we can make your life easier building AppGet".

Andrew Clinick, a group program manager on the team responsible for how apps install on Windows, has now admitted Microsoft failed to give Beigi proper credit for AppGet's influence on WinGet. "Our goal is to provide a great product to our customers and community where everyone can contribute and receive recognition," wrote Clinick. "The last thing that we want to do is alienate anyone in the process. That is why we are building it on GitHub in the open where everyone can contribute. "Over the past couple of days we've listened and learned from our community and clearly we did not live up to this goal. More specifically, we failed to live up to this with Keivan and AppGet. This was the last thing that we wanted."

Senior Facebook employees took to Twitter over the weekend to express their dismay at Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg's decision not to take action on incendiary comments posted to the social network by U.S. President Donald Trump. From a report: After the president tweeted a message with the words "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" in response to protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Twitter for the first time obscured one of his tweets, marking it with a warning that it breached service rules by glorifying violence. Facebook's response to the same content, in a post from Zuckerberg on Friday, was to say, "We think people need to know if the government is planning to deploy force." Several senior figures at Facebook expressed strong disagreement. "Mark is wrong, and I will endeavor in the loudest possible way to change his mind," said Ryan Freitas, director of product design for Facebook's News Feed. "I apologize if you were waiting for me to have some sort of external opinion. I focused on organizing 50+ likeminded folks into something that looks like internal change." "Giving a platform to incite violence and spread disinformation is unacceptable, regardless who you are or if it's newsworthy," wrote Andrew Crow, head of design for Facebook's Portal product line. Joining them with individual messages against the passive policy were Design Manager Jason Stirman, Director of Product Management Jason Toff and Product Designer Sara Zhang, who tweeted that "Internally we are voicing our concerns, so far to no avail."

Leading media outlets in Australia lost big in court when a judge ruled publishers can be sued for comments left on their Facebook pages.

They're now considering an appeal, reports the Financial Express: The court upheld an earlier ruling in the Supreme Court that the outlets were "first or primary distributors" of the comments about Dylan Voller, a former detainee at Northern Territory's Don Dale Youth Detention Centrethat were attached to news stories in December 2016 and January 2017... It said the outlets "encouraged and facilitated the making of comments by third parties which when posted on the page were made available to Facebook users generally and were therefore publishers of the comments".

The court also held that the outlets could not rely on a defence of innocent dissemination...

Justice John Basten said: "Perhaps with a degree of hyperbole, they submitted that they were more closely equivalent to the supplier of paper to a newspaper owner or the supplier of a computer to an author." He dismissed the suggestion the outlets played "no active" role in regard to the postings on their Facebook pages. "The point of distinction may be accepted; however, it does not follow that they were not publishers,'' Justice Basten said. "They facilitated the posting of comments on articles published in their newspapers and had sufficient control over the platform to be able to delete postings when they became aware that they were defamatory."

In a separate judgment, Justice Tony Meagher and Acting Justice Carolyn Simpson said that by inviting the public to comment, the outlets "accepted responsibility for the use of their Facebook facilities".

"I don't think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday.

Since then, Vice reports, "Fake news about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is being shared widely on the internet, including on his own social network..." Zuckerberg's quote is particularly confusing because Facebook does fact-check some news posts, and uses a byzantine, third-party system to do so. Nonetheless, Donald Trump later quoted Zuckerberg's favorable response in a tweet. Now, two satirical articles by websites with Australian domain names are going viral on Facebook, spreading misinformation about Zuckerberg and calling attention to his stance against fact checking by social media companies.

The first article, posted on Thursday by a site called The Chaser, is titled "'Social media should not fact check posts,' says child molester Mark Zuckerberg," which also baselessly alleges that the CEO likes black jellybeans. It has more than 200,000 interactions on Facebook, according to the Facebook-owned analytics platform Crowdtangle. This article has also gone viral on Twitter, where The Chaser's tweet has amassed more than 4,000 retweets.

Another article, also posted on Thursday from a site called The Shovel, is titled "Mark Zuckerberg — Dead at 36 — Says Social Media Should Not Fact Check Posts." This post has nearly 50,000 interactions on Facebook and is also viral on Twitter.

techtsp quotes The Windows Club: In a major breakthrough, Microsoft Edge now supports Native File System API, which will take progressive web apps and their usage to a whole new level.

An official roadmap entry points towards the new development, which only means one thing: Bridging the native app gap using modern web technologies... This is exactly where Microsoft Edge's Native File System API support comes into play, and Edge is already rolling out a native PDF editing support that uses this Native File System API. In the future, Microsoft Edge users can easily save edits made to PDF documents back to the file instead of saving a copy each time...

Starting in Google Chrome 83, a new origin trial has started for the Native File System API for all desktop platforms including Windows, Linux, and macOS. We saw it in action in the text editor demo....

Over the last few years, the web has evolved into an incredibly powerful platform in itself, and with the introduction and significant adoption of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), the cross-device software delivery became much easier. But no matter how great PWAs are, they have certain limitations that we can't possibly ignore. And these limitations prevent users from replacing native apps with progressive web apps. In short, PWAs can't do everything that native apps can do.

Long-time Slashdot reader lpq writes: I followed a link that pointed at a Microsoft security advisory about ".lnk" files. The original link, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/technet/security/advisory/2286198.mspx, produced this message:

Your request has been blocked. This may be due to several reasons. 1. You are using a proxy that is known to send automated requests to Microsoft. Check with your network administrator if there is any proxy and what User-Agent they are sending in the request header. 2. Your request pattern matches an automated process. To eliminate, reduce the volume of requests over a period of time. 3. Reference ID: 41.70790b91.4823110533.409105b4

It turns out the advisory number doesn't matter, just the extension for "Active Microsoft Server Page" (https.../.mspx) at the end. I guess there were too many security advisory lookups for MS to handle! *snort*!
The .mspx extension indicates a page using a special internal Microsoft rendering framework with a custom web handler (built in ASP.Net). But I ran some tests Saturday, and observed the exact same glitch described above using three different browsers — Firefox, Edge, and Brave. Anyone have a theory about what's going on?

Leave your thoughts in the comments. Why is Microsoft blocking its own server pages?

Digital Trends reports: Waymo is planning to relaunch its fleet of self-driving minivans into Bay Area streets on June 8, according to an email acquired by The Verge. However, instead of transporting passengers, the vehicles will instead focus on delivering packages for non-profit organizations #DrawTogether, which gives art kits to children, and Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired...

The pending return to the Bay Area follows Waymo's restart of its testing program in Phoenix, as lockdown restrictions were eased earlier this month... The autonomous vehicles will also soon also make their way back in Detroit and Los Angeles.
The Verge argues that Waymo "is the latest autonomous vehicle operator to discover that doing deliveries allows it to sidestep restrictions that would otherwise require them to keep their autonomous vehicles off the road."

"REVOKE 230!" President Trump tweeted Friday, and NPR reports that the movement to revoke its safeguards "is increasingly becoming a bipartisan consensus... But experts caution that eliminating the legal protections may have unintended consequences for Internet users that extend far beyond Facebook and Twitter." "We don't think about things like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive and all these other public goods that exist and have a public-interest component that would not exist in a world without 230," said Aaron Mackey, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties nonprofit.

Without Section 230, experts argue, sites would have less tolerance for people posting their opinions on YouTube, Reddit, Yelp, Amazon and many other corners of the Internet...

The tech industry, unsurprisingly, is fighting hard to preserve Section 230, said Jeff Kosseff, the author of a book about Section 230, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet. "The major platforms came into existence because of 230," Kosseff said. "Without 230, their operations would have to be substantially changed." In particular, Facebook, Twitter and Google would likely become aggressive about removing content and may side more often with complaining users, Kosseff said. Mackey with the Electronic Frontier Foundation agrees."It could create a prescreening of every piece of material every person posts and lead to an exceptional amount of moderation and prevention," Mackey said. "What every platform would be concerned about is: 'Do I risk anything to have this content posted to my site?'"

Another possible ripple effect of repealing, Kosseff said, is making it more difficult for whatever company is hoping to emerge as the next big social media company. "It will be harder for them because they will face more liability at the outset," Kosseff said. Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute, said rescinding Section 230 could reduce the number of online platforms that welcome open dialogue.

DevNull127 writes: Wednesday someone calling themself "Zenexer" complained on Twitter that Google "appears to be phasing out the ability to visit the original URL from an AMP page. Tapping the info icon in the top left used to provide the option to visit the real URL. Currently only an issue in Image Search."

"This is an oversight," tweeted Malte Ubl, the Google software engineer who created AMP (and a member of its Technical Steering Committee), citing a conversation he'd had with the Image Search team, who said they'd be adding back the feature soon. "Sorry about that and thanks for the report!"

When asked about a timeline for a possible fix, he responded "Sorry, no way to do it in fewer than a couple days."

Thursday Cisco disclosed a security breach that impacted a small part of its backend infrastructure and two of its commercial products also bundling the SaltStack software package as part of their firmware.

ZDNet reports: Cisco said that hackers used a vulnerability in the SaltStack software package, which Cisco bundles with some products, to gain access to six servers... The six servers provide the backend infrastructure for VIRL-PE (Internet Routing Lab Personal Edition), a Cisco service that lets users model and create virtual network architectures to test network setups before deploying equipment in real situations. "Cisco identified that the Cisco maintained salt-master servers that are servicing Cisco VIRL-PE releases 1.2 and 1.3 were compromised," the company said Thursday.

Cisco said it patched and remediated all hacked VIRL-PE servers on May 7, when it deployed updates for the SaltStack software. However, the issue isn't localized to Cisco's backend infrastructure alone. Cisco says that two of its commercial products also bundle the SaltStack software package as part of their firmware. These are the aforementioned Cisco VIRL-PE, and Cisco Modeling Labs Corporate Edition (CML), another network modeling tool. Both VIRL-PE and CML can be used in Cisco-hosted and on-premise scenarios. In case companies use the two products on location, Cisco says CML and VIRL-PE need to be patched.

Long-time Slashdot reader Tim the Gecko writes: Google's IPv6 connectivity stats topped 32% last Saturday for the first time.

But the main story has been the midweek stats. Most mobile phone networks and a good chunk of residential broadband have migrated to IPv6, but the typical corporate network where people used to spend their 9 to 5 is largely IPv4-only. There used to be a big dip in the IPv6 stats during the working week, but widespread working from home has halved that dip, with the typical midweek IPv6 connectivity for Google queries moving upwards from 26% to 29%.

Looking at this graph will be a good way of checking how fast people are returning to the office.