An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN Business: The U.S. Department of Defense on Thursday said it wishes to re-evaluate its decision to award the Pentagon's multibillion-dollar cloud contract with Microsoft, signaling a potential victory for Amazon in its protest of the award. The department "wishes to reconsider its award decision in response to the other technical challenges presented by AWS," it said in a court filing, referring to Amazon Web Services. The agency said it does not anticipate needing to discuss the matter with either AWS or Microsoft.

The contract -- called Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI -- involves providing cloud storage of sensitive military data and technology, such as artificial intelligence, to the Department of Defense, and could result in revenue of up to $10 billion over 10 years. Amazon Web Services lost the contract to Microsoft's Azure cloud business in October, a decision that surprised many industry experts given Amazon's leadership in the industry. Amazon filed a suit with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims contesting the decision, arguing that it was politically motivated by President Donald Trump's dislike of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, which Bezos owns. "We look forward to complete, fair, and effective corrective action that fully insulates the re-evaluation from political influence and corrects the many issues affecting the initial flawed award," Amazon Web Services said in a statement.

Microsoft, meanwhile, said it supports the "decision to reconsider a small number of factors as it is likely the fastest way to resolve all issues and quickly provide the needed modern technology to people across our armed forces."

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday declared a national emergency over the fast-spreading coronavirus. In addition to providing about $50 billion in federal aid to fight the disease and temporarily suspending interest on student loans, Trump said Google is "helping to develop" a website that will help users determine if testing is needed and where the nearest testing location is.

Trump said the search engine giant has 1,700 engineers at work to build the website. "Users will be directed to fill out a questionnaire, including detailing any symptoms, and if deemed necessary they will be directed to a nearby drive-thru test site that the U.S. government is preparing to roll out across the country," reports Business Insider. It's not yet clear when this website will launch, but Trump said Google has already "made tremendous progress."

UPDATE: Despite what President Trump said, Google is not working with the U.S. government in building such a website. "Instead, a much smaller trial website made by another division of Alphabet, Google's parent company, is going up," reports The Verge. "It will only be able to direct people to testing facilities in the Bay Area."

Since it was announced the way it was, anybody will be able to visit it but the website will only be able to direct people to "pilot sites" for testing in the Bay Area, though the hope is to expand it beyond California "over time." "As for the 1,700 Google engineers Trump referenced in the press conference, that appears to be related to a call for volunteers Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai put out in a company-wide memo earlier this week," adds The Verge.

The Russian trolls are back -- and once again trying to poison the political atmosphere in the United States ahead of this year's elections. But this time they are better disguised and more targeted, harder to identify and track. And they have found an unlikely home, far from Russia itself. From a report: In 2016, much of the trolling aimed at the US election operated from an office block in St. Petersburg, Russia. A months-long CNN investigation has discovered that, in this election cycle, at least part of the campaign has been outsourced -- to trolls in the west African nations of Ghana and Nigeria. They have focused almost exclusively on racial issues in the US, promoting black empowerment and often displaying anger towards white Americans. The goal, according to experts who follow Russian disinformation campaigns, is to inflame divisions among Americans and provoke social unrest. The language and images used in the posts -- on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram -- are sometimes graphic. One of the Ghanaian trolls -- @africamustwake -- linked to a story from a left-wing conspiracy website and commented on Facebook: "America's descent into a fascist police state continues."

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said Friday that major internet providers -- including Comcast, AT&T and Verizon Communications -- have agreed to not terminate service for the next 60 days if they are unable to pay their bills due to the disruptions caused by the coronavirus. From a report: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said after calls with companies and associations the firms have also agreed to waive any late fees that any residential or small business customers incur because of their economic circumstances related to the coronavirus pandemic and open Wi-Fi hotspots to any American who needs them.

AT&T is the first major ISP to confirm that it will be suspending all broadband usage caps as millions of Americans bunker down in a bid to slow the rate of COVID-19 expansion. Consumer groups and a coalition of Senators are now pressuring other ISPs to follow suit. From a report: Telecom experts told Motherboard this morning that broadband caps and overage fees don't serve any real technical purpose, and are little more than a glorified price hike on uncompetitive markets. We in turn reached out to ten of the nation's biggest ISPs, only one of which (Mediacom) was willing to go on the record. In the wake of that report, AT&T has confirmed to Motherboard that the company will be suspending all usage caps until further notice. "Many of our AT&T Internet customers already have unlimited home internet access, and we are waiving internet data overage for the remaining customers," a company spokesperson said.

President Trump on Thursday signed into law a bill banning the use of federal funds to purchase equipment from telecom companies deemed a national security threat, such as Chinese telecom group Huawei. From a report: The Secure and Trusted Communications Act, which the Senate passed in February and the House approved last year, will also require the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to establish a $1 billion fund to help small telecom groups remove existing equipment that is deemed to be a threat. "Securing our networks from malicious foreign interference is critical to America's wireless future, especially as some communications providers rely on equipment from companies like Huawei that pose an immense threat to America's national and economic security," the bill's House sponsors, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), ranking member Greg Walden (R-Ore.), and Reps. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.) and Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), said in a statement.

On Thursday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) introduced legislation to further restrict the use of the popular viral video app TikTok on government devices. TechCrunch reports: The bill seeks to expand existing federal guidance prohibiting use of TikTok to encompass any U.S. government-issued device. The legislation is the most recent effort by U.S. lawmakers to limit Chinese-built tech software, devices and components for fear that those products have the potential to be leveraged by the Chinese government. While other Asia-based social apps have struggled to gain a global foothold, TikTok quickly amassed more than a billion users worldwide and became a household name alongside American social media stalwarts like Facebook and YouTube. The app is owned by Beijing-based tech startup ByteDance.

Growth does appear to be slowing for ByteDance, but the app's ubiquity raises alarms among China hawks like Hawley, who warns that the app could be compelled to share data with the Chinese government. In a release with the bill's text, Sen. Scott called TikTok a "risk to our networks and a threat to our national security." "As many of our federal agencies have already recognized, TikTok is a major security risk to the United States, and it has no place on government devices," Hawley said.

Tim Anderson reporting via The Register: The first thing users will see after updating to Mozilla's latest browser, Firefox 74, is a prompt to install the Facebook Container add-on. The Facebook Container add-on is not new, but has been enhanced in its latest version, 2.1.0, with the ability to add custom sites to the container so that you can "login with Facebook wherever you need to." The purpose of the Facebook Container is to let you continue to use Facebook but without having the social network site track your browsing elsewhere. "Installing this extension closes your Facebook tabs, deletes your Facebook cookies, and logs you out of Facebook," say the docs.

When you visit Facebook and log in, the cookies it plants are isolated to the container. This prevents Facebook Like buttons and embedded comments from working on other sites. There is also an issue with sites that require or offer a Facebook login, which you can now overcome by adding those sites to the container. Sites are added by clicking a fence icon and selecting "Allow site in Facebook container." The effect is like having two web browsers, one in which you are logged into Facebook and subject to potential tracking on any site which has Facebook content, and another where Facebook has no knowledge of you.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Following D-Wave's announcement of Leap 2, a new version of its quantum cloud service for building and deploying quantum computing applications, VentureBeat had the opportunity to sit down with Murray Thom, D-Wave's VP of software and cloud services. We naturally talked about Leap 2, including the improvements the company hopes it will bring for businesses and developers. But we also discussed the business applications D-Wave has already seen to date. Thom explained that D-Wave has seen success particularly with optimization and machine learning use cases. And he has the data to back it up: D-Wave's customer applications are about 50% optimization, 20% AI and ML, 10% materials science, and 20% other. Thom believes quantum computing and machine learning are "extremely well matched. The features the technology has and the needs of the field are very close."

"It's something I think is going to be a very productive use of the technology in the future because there's so many aspects of what the quantum computers can do in terms of the probabilistic sampling," Thom continued. "For optimization, the probabilistic sampling is like 'oh, I can do robust optimization with that.' But for machine learning it's essential for what you need to do. It's very hard to reproduce that with a classical computer and you get it natively from the quantum computer. So those features can't be accidental. It's just that it's going to take time for the community to find the right methods for incorporating it and then for the technology to insert into that space productively."

Microsoft today released a patch for a vulnerability in the SMBv3 protocol that accidentally leaked online earlier this week during the March 2020 Patch Tuesday preamble. From a report: The fix is available as KB4551762, an update for Windows 10, versions 1903 and 1909, and Windows Server 2019, versions 1903 and 1909. The update fixes CVE-2020-0796, a vulnerability in Server Message Block, a protocol for sharing files, printers, and other resources on local networks and the Internet. The bug allows attackers to connect to remote systems where the SMB service is enabled and run malicious code with SYSTEM privileges, allowing for remote takeovers of vulnerable systems. Earlier this week, due to what looks like a miscommunication between Microsoft and some antivirus vendors, details about this bug leaked online.

Google's G Suite, which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Hangouts, Meet and other apps, quietly passed a major milestone at the end of last year: It now has more than 2 billion monthly active users, G Suite boss Javier Soltero told Axios Wednesday. From a report: Long seen as the upstart challenger to Microsoft Office, Google's productivity suite is now one of the two incumbents, facing fresh rivals of its own. "That's a staggering number ... These products have incredible reach. Changing the way people work is something we are uniquely positioned to do," he said.

An anonymous reader writes: Women and girls face a "growing crisis" of online harms, with sexual harassment, threatening messages and discrimination making the web an unsafe place to be, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has warned. The inventor of the world wide web said the "dangerous trend" in online abuse was forcing women out of jobs, causing girls to skip school, damaging relationships and silencing female opinions, prompting him to conclude that "the web is not working for women and girls." "The world has made important progress on gender equality thanks to the unceasing drive of committed champions everywhere," Berners-Lee wrote in an open letter to mark the web's 31st birthday on Thursday. "But I am seriously concerned that online harms facing women and girls -- especially those of colour, from LGBTQ+ communities and other marginalised groups -- threaten that progress."

Reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes Apple will launch MacBook models with an all-new design in the second or third quarter of 2021, but did not indicate whether these will be Pro or Air models. As MacRumors points out, "The last significant redesign of the MacBook Pro occurred in October 2016, while the MacBook Air received a major redesign in October 2018." From the report: In a research note today, obtained by MacRumors, Kuo said Apple plans to launch MacBook models with its own custom processors in the fourth quarter of 2020 or the first quarter of 2021. Kuo did not indicate whether these will be MacBook Pro or MacBook Air models, or both, nor did he share any further details. Rumors have suggested that Apple is working on custom Arm-based processors that would allow it to transition away from its current MacBook processor supplier Intel, which has occasionally experienced delays with its chips. The company is also planning to launch new MacBooks with scissor keyboards in the second quarter of 2020.

According to 9to5Google, Google is working on a native Chrome OS app for printing and scanning documents. From the report: While there are many ways to start printing on Chrome OS, there's no real way to see what you've currently got queued to print, when not using Cloud Print [which is shutting down at the end of the year]. This is particularly frustrating if you've accidentally printed a long document as there's no way to cancel. [...] Late last month, work began on a new "Print Management app," starting with a Chrome OS specific flag in chrome://flags. Print Management is still in the early stages of development but we know that, like many Chrome OS apps, it'll be a web-based System Web App (SWA), which you can launch from the printers section of the main Settings app. Inside, you'll see a list of your recent printing attempts, including useful information like the job's name, what time it started, whether it succeeded, and which printer it was sent to.

And then, of course, on the flip side of working with paper documents is scanning, which is by no means easy to do on Chrome OS. Thankfully, Print Management will also include a UI for scanning documents and photos. The Chromium team is already working on this behind yet another flag.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Magic Leap, a mysterious maker of augmented reality glasses, is reportedly considering strategic options that include selling itself. The startup is working with an advisor to explore options such as forming a partnership or selling a stake in the company ahead of a potential listing, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing unidentified sources. Founded in 2011, Google-funded Magic Leap has spent $2.3 billion creating its AR glasses, and after years of skepticism that the startup might be building the world's best funded vaporware, it finally released its headset in the fall of 2018. The Magic Leap One glasses, which launched with a hefty price tag of $2,295, feature displays, audio and external camera sensors. However, the company reportedly sold just 6,000 virtual reality headsets in the six months after launching the product -- far behind CEO Rony Abovitz's goal of selling 100,000 Magic Leap One devices in that period.

A vulnerability in version 3.1.1 of the Server Message Block (SMB) -- the service that's used to share files, printers, and other resources on local networks and over the internet -- can allow attacks to execute code of their choice on both servers and end-user computers that use the vulnerable protocol, Microsoft said in an advisory. Ars Technica reports: The flaw, which is tracked as CVE-2020-0796, affects Windows 10, versions 1903 and 1909 and Windows Server versions 1903 and 1909, which are relatively new releases that Microsoft has invested huge amounts of resources hardening against precisely these types of attacks. Patches aren't available, and Tuesday's advisory gave no timeline for one being released. Asked if there was a timeline for releasing a fix, a Microsoft representative said, "Beyond the advisory you linked, nothing else to share from Microsoft at this time."

In the meantime, Microsoft said vulnerable servers can be protected by disabling compression to block unauthenticated attackers from exploiting the vulnerability against an SMBv3 server. Users can use the following PowerShell command to turn off compression without needing to reboot the machine: "Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters" DisableCompression -Type DWORD -Value 1 -Force." That fix won't protect vulnerable client computers or servers if they connect to a malicious SMB service, but in that scenario, the attacks aren't wormable. Microsoft also recommended users block port 445, which is used to send SMB traffic between machines.

"Motherboard built and analyzed a database of over 500 iPhones seized by law enforcement," writes Slashdot reader em1ly. "It's a deep dive into the ongoing "Going Dark" conversation." Here's an excerpt from the report: Most of all, the records compiled by Motherboard show that the capability to unlock iPhones is a fluid issue, with an ebb and flow of law enforcement sometimes being able to access devices and others not. The data solidifies that some law enforcement officials do have trouble accessing data stored on iPhones. But ultimately, our findings lead experts to circle back to the fundamental policy question: should law enforcement have guaranteed access to iPhones, with the trade-offs in iPhone security that come with that?

Out of 516 analyzed cases, 295 were marked as executed. Officials from the FBI, DEA, DHS, Homeland Security and Investigations, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were able to extract data from iPhones in investigations ranging from arson, to child exploitation, to drug trafficking. And investigators executed warrants against modern iPhones, not just older models. In some cases, investigators obtained photos, text messages, call records, browsing data, cookies, and location data from seized iPhones. Some executed search warrants explicitly mention the type of extraction performed, such as so-called "Logical" or "Advanced Logical" extraction. The latter is a term with a meaning that varies between different phone data extraction companies, but generally it relates to creating a device backup as iTunes does normally and obtaining some more data on top of that, Vladimir Katalov, the CEO of iOS forensics firm Elcomsoft, told Motherboard. Katalov said those backups can contain the sorts of pieces of data that investigators obtained, and is available to all models of iPhone.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Remember Yahoo? It's back... in phone-plan form. The Verizon-owned company is trying to get customers excited with a new "Yahoo Mobile" service that combines Verizon's 4G LTE network with Yahoo mail, for some reason. Why even put the word "Yahoo" on a re-branded Verizon data plan? Because the service comes with Yahoo Mail Pro, the ad-free version of Yahoo Mail that normally costs $3.49 a month. Yahoo Mobile also includes "24/7 Yahoo account customer service." Verizon says Yahoo Mobile has "no hidden fees" or "clingy contracts." "We're the only plan that gives you Yahoo Mail Pro for ad-free email across ALL your devices," the Yahoo Mobile website says. (Fact check: True.)

Yahoo Mobile costs $40 a month and provides "unlimited" data, with a caveat. "In times of traffic, your data may be temporarily slower than other traffic," the announcement said. With the more expensive Verizon-branded unlimited service, customers have the option of buying plans with no data slowdowns until they use 25GB, 50GB, or 75GB in a month. With Yahoo Mobile, the speed limits can be imposed any time the network is congested, regardless of how much data a customer has used. Yahoo Mobile also comes with an "unlimited mobile hotspot for use with one connected device at a time," but those hotspot speeds are capped at 5Mbps. The Yahoo plan doesn't have access to Verizon's 5G network, though that's not really a big deal yet. Aside from the Yahoo-specific aspects, Yahoo Mobile is essentially the same plan offered by Visible, a Verizon subsidiary.

Google is stepping up its measures against the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: The tech giant will recommend that its workers across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa work from home starting on Thursday March 12, Business Insider has learned. This comes a week after Google advised US workers in its Washington state and California offices to work from home, as well as those in its 8,000-strong Dublin office in Ireland. Google then widened that to all 11 of its offices in North America. Google has around 100,000 employees in total, most of whom are based in North America. Google has yet to report any confirmed cases of the virus in its US staff, but a worker in its Zurich office tested positive at the end of February. A Dublin worker also reported flu-like symptoms, but tested negative for COVID-19. The tech giant also announced last week that it was suspending in-person job interviews.

Amazon has sold millions of Fire TV streaming devices in recent years, but its efforts to expand the Fire TV platform to smart TVs and cable set-top boxes have been slow-going. That's not by accident, according to industry insiders: They say Google has long prevented consumer electronics manufacturers from doing business with Amazon, reports news outlet Protocol. From the report: At the center of Google's efforts to block Amazon's smart TV ambitions is the Android Compatibility Commitment -- a confidential set of policies formerly known as the Anti-Fragmentation Agreement -- that manufacturers of Android devices have to agree to in order to get access to Google's Play Store. Google has been developing Android as an open-source operating system, while at the same time keeping much tighter control of what device manufacturers can do if they want access to the Play Store as well as the company's suite of apps. For Android TV, Google's apps include a highly customized launcher, or home screen, optimized for big-screen environments, as well as a TV version of its Play Store.

Google policies are meant to set a baseline for compatible Android devices and guarantee that apps developed for one Android device also work on another. The company also gives developers some latitude, allowing them to build their own versions of Android based on the operating system's open source code, as long as they follow Google's compatibility requirements. However, the Android Compatibility Commitment blocks manufacturers from building devices based on forked versions of Android, such as Fire TV OS, that are not compatible with the Google-sanctioned version of Android. This even applies across device categories, according to two sources: Manufacturers that have signed on to the Android Compatibility Commitment for their mobile phone business are effectively not allowed to build Fire TV devices.