Audi has dropped driver Daniel Abt in the all-electric racing series Formula E after he had a pro sim driver surreptitiously race for him during a virtual competition over the weekend. He has also been told to pay 10,000 euros to charity as a result. Abt said Tuesday that he thought the idea would be funny and that he had planned to release a video about the whole ruse. The Verge reports: Abt was supposed to be competing in the fifth round of Formula E's online sim racing series, which started up in April alongside virtual substitute series from Formula One, NASCAR, and IndyCar. The Formula E sim series was not only meant to give fans something to watch during the pandemic, but it was also supposed to keep the drivers and teams connected, all while raising funds for UNICEF. But Abt had tapped 18-year-old Lorenz Hoerzing, who has been competing in the sim racer section of Formula E's events, to run in his place. (Hoerzing has since been suspended from the sim racing series as a result.) Abt had someone even appear on the drivers' group Zoom call under the name "Daniel Abt" dressed in Audi red, but with a microphone blocking his face -- a noticeable departure considering Abt's lively presence on his personal streams of the previous races.

Hoerzing led most of the race in Abt's virtual car, but he came into contact with Mercedes-Benz driver Stoffel Vandoorne, allowing Nissan driver Oliver Rowland to take the win. This initially raised suspicions because Abt had previously struggled to compete in the earlier rounds of the virtual championship. The deception really started to unravel after Hoerzing finished third, meaning Abt was supposed to show up for the standard post-race interview with the top three drivers. But he didn't; Rowland and Vandoorne's Zoom feeds were instead placed next to a black box with Abt's name, and the broadcast hosts never even attempted to interview the Audi driver. During his portion of the interview, Vandoorne said was "questioning if it was really Daniel in the car." Vandoorne vented even more on his personal Twitch channel following the race and even tried to call Abt while streaming, but the Audi driver did not pick up. Organizers of the race were reportedly able to verify that Abt was not racing based on Hoerzing's IP address. "I didn't take it as seriously as I should have," Abt said after he was caught. "I'm especially sorry about this, because I know how much work has gone into this project on the part of the Formula E organization." In a later video, Abt said he "won't be racing" with the Formula E team anymore.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees Tuesday that the search giant is targeting July 6 to reopen offices for workers that want to come back to in person. The return will be gradual, starting at about 10% building capacity, he said. The company aims to ramp up to 30% capacity by September. From a report: For people who want to continue working from home, the company will allow employees to expense up to $1,000 for equipment and furniture, including things such as standing desks and monitors. Google has been more vocal about employees returning to the workplace while other tech giants have touted permanent work from home options. Pichai's remarks to staff come days after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social networking giant will allow some employees to work from home permanently. He said about half of Facebook's workforce could be remote over the next five to 10 years. Twitter made a similar announcement earlier this month. CEO Jack Dorsey also extended the policy to his other company, mobile-payments firm Square, last week.

Looking Glass is now shipping its 8K holographic display, which utilizes 33.2 million pixels and 45-element light field to provide a 3D effect. TechCrunch reports: The target markets here are medical imaging, mapping, automotive, architecture and engineering. A press release tied to the announcement features a handful of folks in these categories who are excited at what such a technology could mean, going forward. Here's Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri: "Having access to a glasses-free holographic display is a massive breakthrough, and presents an exciting prospect for teams working in immersive computer graphics, visualization and content creation. The Looking Glass holographic display provides a stunning level of realism, and we look forward to seeing the innovations that emerge with the support of Unreal Engine generated content."

The company is only offering pricing quotes by request through its site -- which means it's pretty likely to be cost prohibitive for those just looking to augment a remote working setup. As noted in the earlier piece, the company is targeting enterprise users with early applications -- organizations that generally have money to spend on state of the art hardware. More consumer-focused applications, including gaming, could be coming a ways down the road.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield claimed earlier this month that Microsoft Teams isn't a competitor to Slack. In an interview with The Verge, Butterfield has revealed that, inside Slack, the company feels that "Microsoft is perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with killing us, and Teams is the vehicle to do that." From a report: Butterfield expands on why he thinks Microsoft is "unhealthily preoccupied" with Slack and compares Teams to more of a competitor to Zoom. Slack obviously has its own voice and video calling features, but it's not the primary focus of the app, and often, businesses integrate Zoom or Cisco's WebEx instead. Microsoft has been moving businesses from Skype for Business to Teams, which traditionally focused on voice and video calling. Ultimately, Butterfield thinks Microsoft is trying to force the Teams comparison because "Microsoft benefits from the narrative that Teams is very competitive with Slack. Even though the reality is it's principally a voice and video calling service."

An anonymous reader writes: Jeff Teper, CVP for Microsoft 365, has a vision for the company's Office 365 chat-based collaboration tool that competes with Slack, Facebook's Workplace, and Google Chat. In terms of reach, Teper wants Microsoft Teams to eclipse Windows. (Windows 10 runs on over 1 billion monthly active devices.)

Our interview took place a day after Microsoft concluded its online-only Build 2020 developer conference, where the company gave business developers new tools to build Teams apps. Microsoft launched a Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extension for Teams in preview, introduced new integrations between its Power Platform and Teams, and announced a custom app submission process to help IT admins. Teper was happy to cover a range of Teams topics, including metrics, growth, competitors, consumer positioning, machine learning, and of course dealing with the increased demand during the coronavirus pandemic.

Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, reporting for Wall Street Journal: A Facebook team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company's algorithms weren't bringing people together. They were driving people apart. "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness," read a slide from a 2018 presentation. "If left unchecked," it warned, Facebook would feed users "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform." That presentation went to the heart of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding: Does its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior? The answer it found, in some cases, was yes.

Facebook had kicked off an internal effort to understand how its platform shaped user behavior and how the company might address potential harms. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg had in public and private expressed concern about "sensationalism and polarization." But in the end, Facebook's interest was fleeting. Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the basic research, according to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products. Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in vetting proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make conversations on the platform more civil were "paternalistic," said people familiar with his comments.

Twitter's policy carve-out for world leaders is facing another test with President Donald Trump's latest tweets resurrecting baseless claims that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough should be investigated for the death of his former staffer. From a report: Earlier this month, Trump tweeted questions about when an investigation would be opened into the "Cold Case" of "Psycho Joe Scarborough." The unfounded accusation refers to the death in 2001 of Lori Klausutis, who was working for Scarborough when he was a Republican congressman for Florida. At the time, the medical examiner concluded Klausutis, 28, had fainted due to an undiagnosed heart condition and hit her head on the way down, finding no evidence of foul play. Scarborough was in Washington, D.C., when Klausutis died in his district office in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Trump's tweets revived a baseless theory that Scarborough was allegedly involved in Klausutis' death. On Thursday, her widower, Timothy Klausutis, wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey requesting the company delete Trump's tweets referencing those claims. "I'm asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him -- the memory of my dead wife -- and perverted it for perceived political gain," Klausutis wrote in the letter, which was dated May 21 and published by The New York Times on Tuesday. A spokesperson for Twitter indicated that they would be updating their policies, but Trump's tweets were not removed. "We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family," the spokesperson said. "We've been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly."

China's health tracking QR codes, which have played a key part in the country's successful containment of the coronavirus, now look set to play a much broader role in daily life as local authorities dream up new uses for the technology. From a report: Embedded in the popular WeChat and Alipay smartphone apps, the codes use self-reported and automatically collected travel and medical data to give people a red, yellow or green rating indicating the likelihood of having the virus. To walk around freely, people in China must have a green rating and since February they have been asked to present their health QR codes to gain entry into restaurants, parks and other venues. The codes had so far met with little public resistance, seen as a necessary tool to get the economy back up on its feet again. Or that was the case until the eastern city of Hangzhou proposed on Friday permanently assigning each of its residents a coloured health badge and giving them a score from 0-100 based on their medical records and lifestyle habits.

Peter Chou, the man who led HTC through its most prosperous years as an Android phone maker, is returning to consumer electronics with the unveiling of a new virtual reality headset, platform and company. From a report: Called XRSpace, the project has been in the works for three years and its centerpiece is a mobile VR headset equipped with fifth-generation wireless networking and over three hours of battery life. Partnering with Deutsche Telekom and Chunghwa Telecom, XRSpace is also building the VR platform on which services, games and social activities can be accessed and experienced. Priced at $599, the XRSpace headset has a high cost of entry, but the company envisions bundling it with carriers' 5G service packages or in other forms for educational institutions. After its home market of Taiwan, it'll look to expand to the U.S. and Europe, Chou said in an interview with Bloomberg News, with the rest of Asia to follow.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Monday, Virgin Orbit attempted the first full flight of its orbital payload launch system, which includes a modified Boeing 747 called 'Cosmic Girl' that acts as a carrier aircraft for its air-launched rocket LauncherOne. While Virgin Orbit has flown Cosmic Girl and LauncherOne previously for different tests and demonstrations, this was the first end-to-end system test. Unfortunately, that test ended much earlier than planned -- just shortly after the LauncherOne rocket was released from Cosmic Girl. Cosmic Girl took off just before 12 PM PT (3 PM ET) from Mojave Air and Spaceport in California. The aircraft was piloted by Chief Test Pilot Kelly Latimer, along with her co-pilot Todd Ericson. The aircraft then flew to its target release point, where LauncherOne did manage a "clean release" from the carrier craft as planned at around 12:50 PM PT (3:50 PM ET), but Virgin noted just a few minutes later that the mission was subsequently "terminated."

Thousands of enterprise systems are believed to have been infected with a cryptocurrency-mining malware operated by a group tracked under the codename of Blue Mockingbird. From a report: Discovered earlier this month by malware analysts from cloud security firm Red Canary, the Blue Mockingbird group is believed to have been active since December 2019. Researchers say Blue Mockingbird attacks public-facing servers running ASP.NET apps that use the Telerik framework for their user interface (UI) component. Hackers exploit the CVE-2019-18935 vulnerability to plant a web shell on the attacked server. They then use a version of the Juicy Potato technique to gain admin-level access and modify server settings to obtain (re)boot persistence. Once they gain full access to a system, they download and install a version of XMRRig, a popular cryptocurrency mining app for the Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency.

Roughly 70% of all serious security bugs in the Chrome codebase are memory management and safety bugs, Google engineers said. From a report: Half of the 70% are use-after-free vulnerabilities, a type of security issue that arises from incorrect management of memory pointers (addresses), leaving doors open for attackers to attack Chrome's inner components. The percentage was compiled after Google engineers analyzed 912 security bugs fixed in the Chrome stable branch since 2015, bugs that had a "high" or "critical" severity rating. The number is identical to stats shared by Microsoft. Speaking at a security conference in February 2019, Microsoft engineers said that for the past 12 years, around 70% of all security updates for Microsoft products addressed memory safety vulnerabilities.

Spurred by the coronavirus pandemic, federal policy makers are pushing to spend billions of dollars to close gaps in America's high-speed internet network. From a report: There is one big obstacle: Government officials say they don't have a clear picture of where service gaps exist, meaning parts of the country will be left out when it is time to distribute the funds. While the Federal Communications Commission estimates more than 94% of Americans -- or about 309 million people -- have access to high-speed internet services, it acknowledges that number is based on flawed data from internet-service providers. The FCC requires these companies to report that they serve a census block if they can reach even a single home or business there. That means if one of your neighbors has a broadband connection, the FCC might count your house as having broadband, too -- even if the local internet-service provider can't reach you.

Google last week removed three apps related to the QAnon conspiracy theory from its Play Store digital marketplace. From a report: The apps -- called QMAP, Q Alerts! and Q Alerts LITE -- were taken down for violating Google's policies against "harmful information," the company said. The removal was earlier reported by Media Matters for America, a progressive not-for-profit. The QAnon conspiracy theory has become popular among a group of supporters of President Donald Trump. One claim is that celebrities are involved in child sex trafficking and pedophilia. Another tenet is that Trump is working to take down the so-called "Deep State," a secret network that manipulates and controls government policy. The theory revolves around "Q," an anonymous user who began writing about the conspiracies on imageboard site 4chan.

Thailand's largest cell network AIS has pulled a database offline that was spilling billions of real-time internet records on millions of Thai internet users. From a report: Security researcher Justin Paine said in a blog post that he found the database, containing DNS queries and Netflow data, on the internet without a password. With access to this database, Paine said that anyone could "quickly paint a picture" about what an internet user (or their household) does in real-time. Paine alerted AIS to the open database on May 13. But after not hearing back for a week, Paine reported the apparent security lapse to Thailand's national computer emergency response team, known as ThaiCERT, which contacted AIS about the open database. The database was inaccessible a short time later. AIS spokesperson Sudaporn Watcharanisakorn confirmed AIS owned the data, and apologized for the security lapse.

AmiMoJo shares a report: When visiting the eBay.com site, a script will run that performs a local port scan of your computer to detect remote support and remote access applications. Many of these ports are related to remote access/remote support tools such as the Windows Remote Desktop, VNC, TeamViewer, Ammy Admin, and more. After learning about this, BleepingComputer conducted a test and can confirm that eBay.com is indeed performing a local port scan of 14 different ports when visiting the site.

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: The National Cyber Security Agency in the UK is expected to conclude that U.S. sanctions against Huawei will make it impossible to use the Chinese company's technology as planned for 5G networks. The emergency review, announced on Sunday, is designed to pave the way for Downing Street to push for the total elimination of Huawei equipment in British phone networks by 2023 and quell a Conservative backbench revolt.

That move will amount to a hasty reversal of the policy announced by ministers in January to limit Huawei to 35% of the British 5G network supply. It also risks irritating China and adding hundreds of millions of costs to BT and other phone companies...

In early May, the U.S. said it would impose fresh sanctions against Huawei as part of a long-running campaign against the company, whose technology, the White House claims, could be exploited by China to conduct surveillance against the west. The U.S. sanctions, due to be introduced in September, would prevent Huawei from using U.S. semiconductors and software to build 5G equipment and force it to source alternatives, most likely from China. Whitehall sources said the threatened U.S. restrictions meant that any review would almost certainly say that Huawei posed a security risk. A particular concern was that Huawei would become reliant on unfamiliar and untested components, which could be exploited...

Leaks on Friday suggested that Downing Street was preparing the ground for a dramatic climbdown.

Russia "is now challenging the United States' long-standing supremacy in space and working to exploit the U.S. military's dependence on space systems for communications, navigation, intelligence, and targeting."

That's the argument made in The Bulletin by a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who writes about technology and military strategy, Cold War history, and European security affairs (in an article shared by Lasrick). Moscow is developing counter-space weapons as a part of its overall information warfare strategy. For example, Russia just tested an anti-satellite missile system designed to destroy satellites in low earth orbit. Moreover, military leaders in Russia view U.S. satellites as the key enablers of America's ability to execute rapid, agile, and global military operations; they are intent on echoing this success and modernizing their own military satellites to more effectively support Russian forces.

Since the end of the Cold War, the number of countries with space programs has markedly increased. Many of them are actively developing space weapons. China, for example, has an operational ground-launched anti-satellite system, according to the U.S. intelligence community. India successfully tested its own space weapon in 2019. France announced that it will launch a series of armed satellites. Even Iran is believed to be able to develop a rudimentary anti-satellite weapon in the near term... Space systems are essential for warfighting on Earth and the large growth in the number of countries fielding space weapons means the likelihood that outer space will be transformed into a battlefield has increased... Russia is the only country, however, that is reportedly approaching U.S. satellites in an aggressive manner...

Moscow's destabilizing behavior could prompt the United States to take a more aggressive posture in space in the future... Russia has been taking advantage of the lack of international consensus on what constitutes acceptable behavior in space... It seems clear that Russia is likely testing how the United States and its allies might react to aggressive space behaviors and is gaining important insights into American national security space capabilities...

In 2019, former Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson said that at some point, the United States needs the ability to "hit back." Russia's destabilizing actions in space could, therefore, fuel a dangerous arms race in space.

Highway patrols across America "are reporting a rise in reckless driving," writes ABC News.

Slashdot reader quonset shared their report: In Connecticut, traffic has been cut in half compared to last year, but fatal motor vehicle accidents are up by about 40%. "We're finding that with the open roads, certain individuals are taking this as an opportunity to push their vehicles to the limit," Connecticut State Police Trooper Josue Dorelus told ABC News' Transportation Correspondent Gio Benitez. Dorelus said they have seen a 90% increase in cars going over 15 miles above the speed limit during the coronavirus pandemic...

"When you're going in excess of 100 miles an hour, these crashes are inevitably going to be fatal or near fatal," Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety President Cathy Chase told ABC News. In Massachusetts, the fatality rate for car crashes is rising. In Minnesota, motor vehicle crashes and fatalities have more than doubled compared to the same time period in previous years... Pam Shadel Fischer, the Governors Highway Safety Association's senior director of external engagement, said it could be because it is harder for drivers to gauge their own speed without other drivers on the road.
I wonder if that percentage increase of fatalities appears higher in a low-population states like Connecticut (3.565 million people). The article also notes that in California (population 39.5 million), their Highway Patrol "issued nearly 2,500 citations statewide for driving over 100 miles per hour from mid-march to mid-April -- an 87% jump from the same time last year..." But another article points out that from March 19 to April 30, the overall number of crashes in California dropped 75% while the number of people killed declined by 88%, and there was a 62% decrease in injuries (plus a 42% drop in DUI arrests).

Interestingly, that same article points out that from late March 19 to May 13 there were 6,043 citations for driving over 100 miles per hour -- so it's spiked by 3,543 in the last month since "mid-April", to a number that's over 1,000 more than the month before.

The Trump administration "has discussed whether to conduct the first U.S. nuclear test explosion since 1992," reports the Washington Post, "in a move that would have far-reaching consequences for relations with other nuclear powers and reverse a decades-long moratorium on such actions, said a senior administration official and two former officials familiar with the deliberations." The matter came up at a meeting of senior officials representing the top national security agencies last Friday, following accusations from administration officials that Russia and China are conducting low-yield nuclear tests — an assertion that has not been substantiated by publicly available evidence and that both countries have denied.

A senior administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the sensitive nuclear discussions, said that demonstrating to Moscow and Beijing that the United States could "rapid test" could prove useful from a negotiating standpoint as Washington seeks a trilateral deal to regulate the arsenals of the biggest nuclear powers. The meeting did not conclude with any agreement to conduct a test, but a senior administration official said the proposal is "very much an ongoing conversation."

Another person familiar with the meeting, however, said a decision was ultimately made to take other measures in response to threats posed by Russia and China and avoid a resumption of testing... During the meeting, serious disagreements emerged over the idea, in particular from the National Nuclear Security Administration, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
The Post points out that since 1945 "at least eight countries have collectively conducted about 2,000 nuclear tests, of which more than 1,000 were carried out by the United States.

"The environmental and health-related consequences of nuclear testing moved the process underground, eventually leading to near-global moratorium on testing in this century with the exception of North Korea."