"Firefox will prevent websites from forcing users to directly save PDFs without opening them in the web browser window," reports The Windows Club.

"Mozilla is rolling out this feature to the masses with the stable release of Firefox 78." Right now, Mozilla has added this feature to Firefox 78 in the Nightly channel.

The issue was first raised in 2011, and it took Mozilla 9 years to fix it. Many websites host and offer PDF documents with the following HTTP header:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="whatever.pdf."

This is an indication to the web browser that the PDF file should be saved with the specified name rather than try opening it in the web browser window. But since Firefox has a built-in PDF viewer, it should be for users to decide whether they want to view or save PDF documents.

Nvidia recently taught its AI system to recreate the game Pac-Man just by watching it being played. Hypebeast reports: No coding or pre-rendered images were used for the software to base the recreation on. The AI model was simply fed visual data of the game being played alongside controller inputs. From there, the AI recreated what it saw frame by frame, resulting in a playable version of Bandai Namco's most recognizable title. Although it's not a perfect recreation of the title and all its assets, all the mechanics and gameplay goals are the same. NVIDIA even believes this is how AI will be applied to game creation in the future. [Rev Lebaredian, Nvidia's vice president of simulation technology] notes the experiment was done in collaboration with Bandai Namco as it celebrates the 40th anniversary of the classic arcade game.

The artificial intelligence program is called GameGAN, with GAN standing for "generative adversarial network," which is a common architecture used in machine learning. GAN works by attempting to replicate input data while also comparing its work to the original source. If the two don't match, the data is rejected and the program looks for improvements and tries again. Although AI programs have generated virtual gaming spaces before, GameGAN is able to use a "memory module" that allows the program to store an internal map of the digital space it's trying to recreate, leading to a more consistent copy. The AI was trained on over 50,000 episodes and almost never died, the company says. Nvidia will be releasing the recreated game online in the near future.

Researchers based out of Australia's Monash, Swinburne, and RMIT universities say they've set a new internet speed record of 44.2 Tbps, according to a paper published in the open-access journal Nature Communications. That's theoretically enough speed to download the contents of more than 50 100GB Ultra HD Blu-ray discs in a single second. The Verge reports: What's interesting about the research is that it was achieved over 75km of standard optical fiber using a single integrated chip source, meaning it has the potential to one day benefit existing fiber infrastructure. The test fiber connection ran between RMIT's Melbourne City campus and Monash University's Clayton campus, and the researchers say it mirrors infrastructure used by Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). The findings represent a "world-record for bandwidth," according to Swinburne University Professor David Moss, one of the team members responsible.

Those speeds were achieved, thanks to a piece of technology called a micro-comb, which offers a more efficient and compact way to transmit data. This micro-comb was placed within the cable's fibers in what the researchers say is the first time the technology has been used in a field trial. Now, the researchers say the challenge is to turn the technology into something that can be used with existing infrastructure. "Long-term, we hope to create integrated photonic chips that could enable this sort of data rate to be achieved across existing optical fiber links with minimal cost," RMIT's Professor Arnan Mitchell says.

Michael Andor Brodeur, writing for The Washington Post: As covid-19 forces more and more classical musicians and organizations to shift operations to the Internet, they're having to contend with an entirely different but equally faceless adversary: copyright bots. Or, more accurately, content identification algorithms dispatched across social media to scan content and detect illegal use of copyrighted recordings. You've encountered these bots in the wild if you've ever had a workout video or living room lip-sync blocked or muted for ambient inclusion or flagrant use of Britney or Bruce. But who owns Brahms? These oft-overzealous algorithms are particularly fine-tuned for the job of sniffing out the sonic idiosyncrasies of pop music, having been trained on massive troves of "reference" audio files submitted by record companies and performing rights societies. But classical musicians are discovering en masse that the perceptivity of automated copyright systems falls critically short when it comes to classical music, which presents unique challenges both in terms of content and context. After all, classical music exists as a vast, endlessly revisited and repeated repertoire of public-domain works distinguishable only through nuanced variations in performance. Put simply, bots aren't great listeners.

These systems aren't just disrupting the relationships between classical organizations and their audiences; they're also impacting individual musicians trying to stay musically present -- and financially afloat -- during the crisis. Michael Sheppard, a Baltimore-based pianist, composer and teacher, was recently giving a Facebook Live performance of a Beethoven sonata (No. 3, Op. 2, in C) when Facebook blocked the stream, citing the detection of "2:28 of music owned by Naxos of America" -- specifically a passage recorded by the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whom Sheppard is not. [...] And this wasn't Sheppard's first run-in with Facebook, which has blocked or muted past performances of Faure, Chopin and Bach for being too digitally reminiscent of other performances of Faure, Chopin and Bach.

Microsoft is finally bringing cloud support to Outlook for Windows email signatures. The Verge reports: Microsoft originally acknowledged that it was planning some type of sync support for Outlook signatures back in September, and the company says it will now roll this out in a June update. Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscribers will get access to cloud signature support in Outlook for Windows, allowing users to have a consistent signature across devices. Many companies have had to turn to custom solutions to implement Outlook for Windows signatures that roam across devices, so official support from Microsoft will be welcome. Microsoft is also planning to roll out a new text prediction feature for Outlook that's similar to Gmail's Smart Compose soon. The text predictions will allow Outlook.com and Outlook on the web to write emails for people using predictive tech that offers up suggestions while you type.

Expedia Group's new CEO isn't mincing words about one of the company's biggest challenges: Google's dual role as a rival in online travel, and a key source of customers through search traffic and paid advertising. From a report: "I think Google's a problem -- it's a problem for everyone who sells something online, and we all have to struggle with that," Peter Kern said during an appearance on CNBC on Friday morning, following his first earnings report as the CEO of the Seattle-based online travel giant. His comments come amid reports that U.S. antitrust regulators are preparing a case against the search giant, focusing on its dominance of digital ads. This Google conundrum is a recurring topic for Expedia Group, but Kern appears to be taking a different approach than his predecessor Mark Okerstrom did before he was ousted from the role last fall. Appearing on CNBC this morning, Kern says Expedia needs to learn to rely less on performance marketing, a form of advertising in which the cost is based on a specific outcome such as a click or sales lead.

Security researchers and hackers have had access to a leaked early version of iOS 14, the iPhone's next operating system, since at least February, Motherboard reported Friday. From the report: That's almost eight months before the expected official release of iOS 14, given that Apple usually publishes the new iOS in September along with the announcement of new phones. Sometimes, screenshots and descriptions of new features leak before the official reveal. This time, however, an entire version of the operating system has leaked and is being widely circulated among hackers and security researchers. Motherboard has not been able to independently verify exactly how it leaked, but five sources in the jailbreaking community familiar with the leak told us they think that someone obtained a development iPhone 11 running a version of iOS 14 dated December 2019, which was made to be used only by Apple developers. According to those sources, someone purchased it from vendors in China for thousands of dollars, and then extracted the iOS 14 internal build and distributed it in the iPhone jailbreaking and hacking community.

IBM cut an unspecified number of jobs across the U.S., eliminating employees in at least five states. The company declined to comment on the total number, but the workforce reductions appear far-reaching. From a report: "IBM's work in a highly competitive marketplace requires flexibility to constantly add high-value skills to our workforce. While we always consider the current environment, IBM's workforce decisions are in the interest of the long-term health of our business," company spokesman Ed Barbini said Thursday in a statement. "Recognizing the unique and difficult situation this business decision may create for some of our employees, IBM is offering subsidized medical coverage to all affected U.S. employees through June 2021." Based on a review of IBM internal communications on the Slack corporate messaging service, the number of affected employees is likely to be in the thousands, said a North Carolina-based worker who lost his job along with his entire team of 12. "This was far ranging -- and historical employment ratings, age and seniority did not seem to matter," he said. The person asked not to be identified on concern that speaking publicly may impact his severance package.

The GNOME Foundation has settled a US lawsuit brought against it by Rothschild Patent Imaging, complete with an undertaking by the patent assertion entity that it will not sue GNOME for IP infringement again. From a report: In a so-called "walk away" settlement, Rothschild Patent Imaging (RPI) and the open-source body are discontinuing their legal battle that began in October last year. RPI sued for alleged IP infringement of one of its patents by the GNOME photo-organising tool Shotwell, marking the first time a free software project had been targeted in that way. In a statement at the time, the GNOME Foundation said RPI "offered to let us settle for a high five-figure amount, for which they would drop the case", something it said would be "wrong" to do. The open-sourcers thus countersued RPI, aided by lawyers from New York law firm Shearman Sterling who agreed to work on the case for free. Neil McGovern, exec director of the foundation, said in a canned statement today: "I'm exceptionally pleased that we have concluded this case. This will allow us to refocus our attention on creating a free software desktop, and will ensure certainty for all free and open source software in future." GNOME Foundation executive director Neil McGovern has told The Register: "For those asking about payment, I can confirm we paid RPI and Leigh Rothschild a grand total of $0.00 for the settlement."

According to a new study from Carnegie Mellon University, researchers have found that bots may account for between 45 and 60% of Twitter accounts discussing covid-19. The normal level of bot involvement for U.S. and foreign elections, natural disasters, and other politicized events is usually between 10 and 20%. MIT Technology Review reports: Many of those accounts were created in February and have since been spreading and amplifying misinformation, including false medical advice, conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, and pushes to end stay-at-home orders and reopen America. They follow well-worn patterns of coordinated influence campaigns, and their strategy is already working: since the beginning of the crisis, the researchers have observed a greater polarization in Twitter discourse around the topic.

A number of factors could account for this surge. The global nature of the pandemic means a larger swath of actors are motivated to capitalize on the crisis as a way to meet their political agendas. Disinformation is also now more coordinated in general, with more firms available for hire to create such influence campaigns. But it's not just the volume of accounts that worries [Kathleen M. Carley, the director of the University's Center for Informed Democracy & Social Cybersecurity]. Their patterns of behavior have grown more sophisticated, too. Bots are now often more deeply networked with other accounts, making it easier for them to disseminate their messages widely. They also engage in more strategies to target at-risk groups like immigrants and minorities and help real accounts engaged in hate speech to form online groups. "Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this problem," the report concludes. "Banning or removing accounts won't work, as more can be spun up for every one that is deleted. Banning accounts that spread inaccurate facts also won't solve anything"

"Carley says researchers, corporations, and the government need to coordinate better to come up with effective policies and practices for tamping this down."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A woman must delete photographs of her grandchildren that she posted on Facebook and Pinterest without their parents' permission, a court in the Netherlands has ruled. It ended up in court after a falling-out between the woman and her daughter. The judge ruled the matter was within the scope of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). One expert said the ruling reflected the "position that the European Court has taken over many years." The case went to court after the woman refused to delete photographs of her grandchildren which she had posted on social media. The mother of the children had asked several times for the pictures to be deleted.

The GDPR does not apply to the "purely personal" or "household" processing of data. However, that exemption did not apply because posting photographs on social media made them available to a wider audience, the ruling said. "With Facebook, it cannot be ruled out that placed photos may be distributed and may end up in the hands of third parties," it said. The woman must remove the photos or pay a fine of 50 euros for every day that she fails to comply with the order, up to a maximum fine of 1,000 euros. If she posts more images of the children in the future, she will be fined an extra 50 euros a day.

T-Mobile has launched a new initiative called "Connecting Heroes" that gives free wireless service to first responders for 10 years, which T-Mobile estimates could save $7.7 billion if all first responder agencies sign up. PhoneDog reports: Connecting Heroes will give unlimited talk, text, and smartphone data to first responders. That includes 5G access at no extra charge as well as 1GB of 4G LTE mobile hotspot data plus 3G speeds after that. Streaming video at 480p is included, as is Mobile Without Borders which offers unlimited calling and texting between the US, Canada, and Mexico. First responders can choose to upgrade their plan for $15 per month and get 20GB of mobile hotspot usage, unlimited texting and up to 256Kbps data in 210+ countries and destinations, plus free texting and in-flight Wi-Fi through Gogo. T-Mobile's Connecting Heroes initiative is open to every public and non-profit, state and local police, fire, and EMS first responders. If you feel that you qualify, you can learn more and begin the signup process right here.

The process to get unlicensed versions of movies, music and other content taken off the internet isn't working as intended and should be updated, the Copyright Office said in an expansive report Thursday. From a report: Updating that system would require an act of Congress, which can now look to the Copyright Office's conclusions as it considers legislating on the matter. In its report, the office found the system for notice and takedown of infringing materials is unbalanced and out of sync with Congress' intent when it established the process in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA includes liability protection for online companies whose users illegally upload copyrighted material if the online companies take down the material when they are notified by the rights-holder. Copyright holders have complained that this process doesn't proactively protect their intellectual property against online infringement, and the report appears to agree, concluding "Congress' original intended balance has been tilted askew."

In a move that illustrates how swiftly the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the global economy, Facebook said today that it would begin allowing most of its employees to request a permanent change in their jobs to let them work remotely. From a report: The company will begin today by making most of its US job openings eligible for remote hires and begin taking applications for permanent remote work among its workforce later this year. "We're going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Verge. "We need to do this in a way that's thoughtful and responsible, so we're going to do this in a measured way. But I think that it's possible that over the next five to 10 years -- maybe closer to 10 than five, but somewhere in that range -- I think we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently." Facebook, which has more than 48,000 employees working in 70 offices worldwide, is the largest company yet to move aggressively into remote work in the wake of the pandemic.

Technology company ScreenHits is launching ScreenHits TV, a streaming video aggregator app that lets consumers bundle different services together in a single interface. From a report: The service creates a one-stop electronic programming guide where users can search the libraries of both free and subscription streaming platforms, as well as live online TV without jumping from platform to platform and without having to repeatedly sign up for new services. Subscribers of SVOD platforms such as Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, MUBI and other streaming services, including BBC iPlayer, can integrate their existing services within the app, which is set to go live across multiple territories, including the U.S. and the U.K., by the end of this month. Entry-level subscriptions to ScreenHits will start at $1.99 per month and will initially be available on Samsung Smart TVs, Amazon Fire Stick, Apple Store, Google Chrome, Android and for the desktop.

Amazon is joining India's online food delivery market just as top local players Swiggy and Zomato reduce their workforce to steer through the coronavirus pandemic and months after Uber Eats' exit from the nation. From a report: The e-commerce giant, which has invested more than $6.5 billion in India, today launched its food delivery service, called Amazon Food, in select parts of Bangalore. The company had originally planned to launch the service in India last year, which it then moved to March but pushed it further amid the nationwide stay-at-home order the Indian government issued in late March. In the run up to the launch, the e-commerce giant began testing the food delivery service with select restaurant partners in Bangalore with employees earlier this year, TechCrunch reported in late February. "Customers have been telling us for some time that they would like to order prepared meals on Amazon in addition to shopping for all other essentials. This is particularly relevant in present times as they stay home safe," an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Google today announced a new seven-figure contract with DoD's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). "While the company would not get specific about the number, the new contract involves using Anthos, the tool the company announced last year to secure DIU's multi-cloud environment," reports TechCrunch. From the report: In spite of the JEDI contract involving a single vendor, the DoD has always used solutions from all three major cloud vendors -- Amazon, Microsoft and Google -- and this solution will provide a way to monitor security across all three environments, according to the company. "Multi-cloud is the future. The majority of commercial businesses run multi-cloud environments securely and seamlessly, and this is now coming to the federal government as well," Mike Daniels, VP of Global Public Sector at Google Cloud told TechCrunch.

The idea is to manage security across three environments with help from cloud security vendor Netskope, which is also part of the deal. "The multi-cloud solution will be built on Anthos, allowing DIU to run web services and applications across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure -- while being centrally managed from the Google Cloud Console," the company wrote in a statement. Daniels says that while this is a deal with DIU, he could see it expanding to other parts of DoD. "This is a contract with the DIU, but our expectation is that the DoD will look at the project as a model for how to implement their own security posture."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957, the United States responded with its own spy satellites. The espionage program, known as Corona, sought to locate Soviet missile sites, but its Google Earth-like photography captured something unintended: snapshots of animals and their habitats frozen in time. Now, by comparing these images with modern data, scientists have found a way to track the decline of biodiversity in regions that lack historic records.

The researchers tested the approach on bobak marmot (Marmota bobak) populations in the grassland region of northern Kazakhstan. There, Soviets converted millions of hectares of natural habitat into cropland in the 1960s. The scientists searched the satellites' black and white film images on a U.S. Geological Survey database for signs of the squirrel-like animal's burrows. They identified more than 5,000 historic marmot homes and compared them with contemporary digital images of the region, mapping more than 12,000 marmot burrows in all. About eight generations of marmots occupied the same burrows in the study area over more than 50 years, even when their habitats underwent major changes, the team reports in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Overall, the researchers estimate the number of marmot burrows dropped by 14% since the '60s. But the number of burrows in some of the oldest fields -- those persistently disturbed by humans plowing grassland to plant wheat -- plunged by much more -- about 60%.

Apple and Google announced today that they have rolled out a COVID-19 exposure notification system, "essentially a unified programming interface that will allow public health departments to create their own contact tracing applications," reports ABC News. "Apple and Google are not building contact tracing apps." From the report: "Starting today, our Exposure Notifications technology is available to public health agencies on both iOS and Android," Apple and Google said in a statement. "Today, this technology is in the hands of public health agencies across the world who will take the lead and we will continue to support their efforts."

After an individual downloads and enables a contact tracing application on his phone, he would subsequently receive an alert if he is exposed to anyone who is diagnosed with or likely to have COVID-19. Of course, that assumes that the COVID-19-positive individual also has the application enabled on his phone. The companies said that digital contact tracing is meant to argument traditional human-to-human tracing, not replace it. Digital contact tracing is faster than traditional tracing, requires fewer resources and since it doesn't rely on human memory, can make it easier to track exposure in crowded spaces, or contact with strangers. On the other hand, for such applications to be effective, they require users to download and enable the applications on their phones, and it's not yet clear that Americans will be willing to do so en masse. "Once they download the app, users will have to consent to make their information available to the health authorities and can turn it on and off when they choose to," the report adds. "Data collection will be kept private and only used by health authorities for COVID-19 exposure, not stored in a central database."

The companies said that they will not monetize the data that comes out of the system.

MojoKid writes: A couple of weeks back, Intel announced its 10th Gen Core desktop processors but today the embargo has been lifted on performance data. Intel's new 10th Gen Core series desktop chips are still based on the same architecture and leverage the same 14nm++ manufacturing process as their 9th Gen predecessors, but the company made numerous changes with Comet Lake-S in an attempt to deliver even more performance, efficiency, and value. A review of the new chips at HotHardware details features and performance of a couple of the stand-outs in Intel's initial 10th Gen Core series line-up -- the flagship Core i9-10900K and mid-range Core i5-10600K.

The Core i9-10900K features a monolithic, 10-core (20-thread) die that boosts to 5.3GHz, while the Core i5-10600K offers 6 cores / 12-threads at a 4.8GHz boost clock. Although the architecture is the same as the previous-gen, Intel has tuned its 10th Gen's frequency and voltage curves to boost performance and optimize power. The Core i9-10900K ends up being a significant upgrade over its predecessor, but more-so for multi-threaded tasks. The Core i5-10600K, however, is a decent upgrade over the previous-gen Core i5-9600K, in terms of both single- and multi-threaded performance. Both CPUs deliver competitive performance versus similarly-priced Ryzen 3000 series chips from AMD, though Intel retains an edge in gaming, while AMD delivers better overall multithreaded performance.