Since it was founded in March 2006, there has been only one type of post possible on Twitter: a tweet. But starting today, the 280-character post is being joined by an ephemeral South American cousin: the fleet. That's what Twitter is calling these new, more fleeting tweets -- posts that appear in a separate timeline above the main timeline for 24 hours before disappearing. From a report: In other words, yes, Twitter is finally doing Snapchat Stories, and the implementation looks nearly identical to Instagram's version of the feature. "Twitter is for having conversations about what you care about," Mo Aladham, a Twitter group product manager, said in a blog post. "But, some of you tell us that you're uncomfortable to tweet because tweets are public, feel permanent, and have public counts (retweets and likes). We want to make it possible for you to have conversations in new ways with less pressure and more control, beyond tweets and direct messages. That's why starting today in Brazil, we're testing fleets, a new way to start conversations from your fleeting thoughts."

An anonymous reader shares a report: After years of avoiding social media, drug companies are growing bolder about advertising on Facebook and other social networks, according to interviews with advertising executives, marketers, health-care privacy researchers and patient advocates. That is exposing loopholes around the way data can be used to show consumers relevant ads about their personal health, even as both social networks and pharmaceutical manufacturers disavow targeting ads to people based on their medical conditions. Ads promoting prescription drugs are popping up on Facebook for depression, HIV and cancer. Spending on Facebook mobile ads alone by pharmaceutical and health-care brands reached nearly a billion dollars in 2019, nearly tripling over two years, according to Pathmatics, an advertising analytics company. Facebook offers tools to help drug companies stay compliant with rules about disclosing safety information or reporting side effects.

But seeing an ad for a drug designed to treat a person's particular health condition in the relatively intimate setting of a social media feed -- amid pictures of friends and links to news articles -- can feel more intrusive than elsewhere online. The same opaque Facebook systems that help place an ad for a political campaign or a new shoe in a user's feed also can be used by pharmaceutical companies, allowing them to target consumers who match certain characteristics or had visited a particular website in the past. The ability of drug companies to reach people likely to have specific health conditions -- a far cry from a magazine or TV ad -- underscores how the nation's health privacy law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), has not kept up with the times. HIPAA, which safeguards personal health records, typically does not cover drug companies or social media networks.

Microsoft is bringing the original Halo campaign to Windows PCs today. The Verge reports: Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary has been remastered with 4K support for PC, and it arrives 18 years after the game debuted as a launch title for the original Xbox. Microsoft is also including 60fps support, variable frame rates, and even native keyboard and mouse support. You'll also be able to use the classic audio in multiplayer and customize Spartans further. Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary is part of Microsoft's ongoing effort to bring all of the Halo: The Master Chief Collection to PC.

rufey writes: The free SSL certificate provider Let's Encrypt is going to revoke 2.6% of the SSL certs issued by them that are currently active, due to a bug in boulder, the Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) software Let's Encrypt uses. Ars Technica reports: "Let's Encrypt uses Certificate Authority software called Boulder. Typically, a Web server that services many separate domain names and uses Let's Encrypt to secure them receives a single LE certificate that covers all domain names used by the server rather than a separate cert for each individual domain. The bug LE discovered is that, rather than checking each domain name separately for valid CAA records authorizing that domain to be renewed by that server, Boulder would check a single one of the domains on that server n times (where n is the number of LE-serviced domains on that server). Let's Encrypt typically considers domain validation results good for 30 days from the time of validation -- but CAA records specifically must be checked no more than eight hours prior to certificate issuance. The upshot is that a 30-day window is presented in which certificates might be issued to a particular Web server by Let's Encrypt despite the presence of CAA records in DNS that would prohibit that issuance.

Since Let's Encrypt finds itself in the unenviable position of possibly having issued certificates that it should not have, it is revoking all current certificates that might not have had proper CAA record checking on Wednesday, March 4. Users whose certificates are scheduled to be revoked will need to manually force-renewal before then. If an admin does not perform this manual renewal step, browsers reaching their websites will show TLS security warnings due to the revoked certificates. Let's Encrypt certificates are issued for 90-day intervals, and Certbot automatically renews them only when 30 days or less are left on the cert -- so this could mean roughly two months of browser errors if the manual forced renewal isn't performed."

The CAB Forum, which oversees the public CAA space, has a ticket for this specific issue. According to a community post on Let's Encrypt's website, 3,048,289 of the ~116 million overall active Let's Encrypt certificates are affected.

A new lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Bronx Defenders alleges that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses a rigged algorithm to detain virtually everyone ICE's New York Field Office brings in, even when the government itself believes they present a minimal threat to public safety. The Intercept reports: The suit, which asks that ICE's "Risk Classification Assessment" tool be ruled illegal and the affected detainees reassessed by humans, includes damning new data obtained by the NYCLU through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The data illuminates the extent to which the so-called algorithm has been perverted. Between 2013 and 2017, the FOIA data shows, the algorithm recommended detention without bond for "low risk" individuals 53 percent of the time, according an analysis by the NYCLU and Bronx Defenders. But from June 2017 -- shortly after President Donald Trump took office -- to September 2019, that number exploded to 97 percent.

"This dramatic drop in the release rate comes at a time when exponentially more people are being arrested in the New York City area and immigration officials have expanded arrests of those not convicted of criminal offenses," says the groups' lawsuit. "The federal government's sweeping detention dragnet means that people who pose no flight or safety risk are being jailed as a matter of course -- in an unlawful trend that is getting worse." Individuals detained under what the lawsuit calls a "no-release policy" will remain jailed until they can be seen by an immigration judge. People arrested by ICE had no access to information about how they were classified by the algorithm -- that's why the FOIAs were necessary -- and most don't have access to lawyers at the time of their detention, Thomas Scott-Railton, a fellow at the Bronx Defenders told The Intercept. "The result," he said, "is that people are detained for weeks, even months, without having been given the actual justification for their detention and without a real chance to challenge it."

The lawsuit alleges that this algorithmic rubber stamp violates both the constitutional guarantee to due process and federal immigration law that calls for "individualized determinations" about release, rather than blanket denials with a computerized imprimatur. Reached by email, ICE New York spokesperson Rachael Yong Yow told The Intercept, "I am not familiar with the lawsuit you reference, but I am not inclined to comment on pending litigation." The risk assessment algorithm is supposed to provide a recommendation to ICE officers who are then meant to make the final decision, but the agency's New York Field Office diverged from the algorithm's ruling less than 1 percent of the time since 2017. When detainees are finally seen by a human, non-algorithmic immigration judge, the lawsuit says, "approximately 40% of people detained by ICE are granted release on bond."

The latest "feature drop" for Google's Pixel line of Android phones includes the ability to "firmly press" on the screen "to get more help from your apps more quickly." If that sounds familiar, it's because it's a lot like iPhone's 3D Touch, which Apple stopped supporting in all of its 2019 iPhones. The Verge reports: "Firmly press" sets off alarm bells because it sounds a lot like the iPhone's 3D Touch, which enables different actions depending on how hard you press on the touchscreen. It was a beloved feature for some people because it gave faster access to the cursor mode on the iPhone's keyboard (I think long-pressing the space bar works fine for that, but I get that people love it). It's also gone on the latest versions of the iPhone -- Apple has seemingly abandoned it because the hardware to support it was too expensive/thick/complex/finicky/whatever. But now, it seems that Google has done the same thing for the touchscreen that it does with the camera: use its software algorithms to make commodity parts do something special. That is a very Googley thing to do, but not quite as Googley as the fact that there was virtually no information about this feature to be found anywhere on the internet beyond a speculative note over at XDA Developers.

After a few hours of back and forth, I finally got more details from Google. Here's what this feature does, according to Google: "Long Press currently works in a select set of apps and system user interfaces such as the app Launcher, Photos, and Drive. This update accelerates the press to bring up more options faster. We also plan to expand its applications to more first party apps in the near future." Essentially, this new feature lets you press harder to bring up long-press menus faster. In fact, Google's documentation for Android's Deep Press API explicitly says it should never do a new thing, it should only be a faster way to execute a long press. The answer to why it only works in certain apps is that a lot of Android developers aren't using standard APIs for long press actions. Because Android. Okay, but how does it work? It turns out my hunch was correct: Google has figured out how to use machine learning algorithms to detect a firm press, something Apple had to use hardware for.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Networking giant Cisco is getting into the coronavirus monitoring and mitigation game with its Webex remote meeting property. The company notes that in the wake of mandates issued to employees to halt travel plans and/or work from home, traffic across its Webex backbone has increased significantly. Webex meeting traffic connecting Chinese users to global workplaces has increased by a factor of 22 since the outbreak began; traffic in other Asian countries is up by 400 percent or more, and free signup rates in impacted countries have increased 700 percent or more. In response, Cisco is offering temporarily unlimited usage (with no time restrictions) in all countries where the service is available (full list here), not just the ones worst hit by coronavirus. The company is also offering free 90-day licenses to businesses that are not currently Webex customers and offering free upgrades to customers whose current plan is insufficient to accommodate increased traffic due to the outbreak.

In the worst affected countries, telepresence and remote work software like Webex is currently the only alternative to a complete shutdown of activities. In its press release, Cisco highlights the Nesbitt Center, an organization working with disabled young adults in Hong Kong. All Hong Kong schools, including the Nesbitt Center, have been required to suspend day programs during the outbreak. Webex videoconferencing has allowed the Nesbitt Center to continue delivering educational sessions despite the lockdown. Ars Technica also recommends Jitsi, a "free and open source software, offering video call and screen sharing capabilities." There's also Jitsi Meet for people "who just need to get something done on-the-fly with no setup at all."

Do you have a favorite remote work software?

Google has announced that it will not host an in-person I/O 2020 over coronavirus concerns. The company is looking into an alternative format. 9to5Google reports: Google I/O 2020 was announced in January, with the ticket application and drawing process taking place late last month. Hosted at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, it's right across the street from the Googleplex headquarters. "Due to concerns around the coronavirus (COVID-19), and in accordance with health guidance from the CDC, WHO, and other health authorities, we have decided to cancel the physical Google I/O event at Shoreline Amphitheatre," reads a statement on the Google I/O website.

Those that purchased tickets will be fully refunded by March 13, while registered guests this year will automatically be able to purchase I/O 2021 passes. Looking forward, the company is going to "explore other ways to evolve Google I/O to best connect with our developer community." At this time, Google does not look to be committing to the original May 12-14 timeframe. Meanwhile, Google will be providing $1 million to local Mountain View organizations to help with the lack of I/O and its over 7,000 attendees. This is specifically aimed at helping raise awareness about the coronavirus, as well as aiding small businesses, increasing STEM education, and supporting organizations working with unhoused neighbors.

"The best-kept secret in quantum computing." That's what Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) CEO Ilyas Khan called Honeywell's efforts in building the world's most powerful quantum computer. In a race where most of the major players are vying for attention, Honeywell has quietly worked on its efforts for the last few years (and under strict NDA's, it seems). But today, the company announced a major breakthrough that it claims will allow it to launch the world's most powerful quantum computer within the next three months. From a report: In addition, Honeywell also today announced that it has made strategic investments in CQC and Zapata Computing, both of which focus on the software side of quantum computing. The company has also partnered with JPMorgan Chase to develop quantum algorithms using Honeywell's quantum computer. The company also recently announced a partnership with Microsoft. Honeywell has long built the kind of complex control systems that power many of the world's largest industrial sites. It's that kind of experience that has now allowed it to build an advanced ion trap that is at the core of its efforts. This ion trap, the company claims in a paper that accompanies today's announcement, has allowed the team to achieve decoherence times that are significantly longer than those of its competitors.

There are robots on the prowl at Facebook's server farms. The social networking giant has quietly built a fleet of mobile robots to patrol its data centers, and now has a team dedicated to automating its vast network of facilities around the globe, Business Insider reported Tuesday. From the report: The high-tech initiative could boost the firm's profits and help revolutionize the data center industry -- and potentially prompt job losses around the country. As Facebook has grown, it has built out a sprawling network of data centers around the globe dedicated to hosting users' content and supporting its apps and services. Its locations now stretch from Oregon to Sweden to Singapore -- but maintaining the vast facilities requires human data center operators and engineers to manage the systems, replace malfunctioning drives, and so on.

Twitter is "strongly encouraging" its almost 5,000 global employees to work from home due to concerns over the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus, the company said Monday. From a report: The social media company made the suggestion as part of a blog update one day after it suspended all non-critical travel for workers, including pulling out of the South by Southwest conference scheduled for later this month in Austin, Texas. Twitter says it's mandatory for employees in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea to work from home, but that other offices will remain open for those who choose or need to come in. "We are working to make sure internal meetings, all hands, and other important tasks are optimized for remote participation," the company wrote on its blog. Twitter's policy on working from home is a step beyond what most companies in the U.S. are doing as the virus spreads.

Robinhood on Tuesday reported technical issues for a second day following an outage that kept clients from trading on a historic market rally. From a report: As U.S. stocks traded actively again in wake of a surprise Fed rate cut, Robinhood reported a "major outage" for trading across its platform. Earlier updates on the site said that all trading was "operational," but Twitter users posted screenshots of error messages as U.S. markets opened Tuesday. "We are experiencing a system-wide outage," a message on Robinhood's website read. Technical issues began Monday morning and lasted throughout the trading day, leaving users with their hands tied as the Dow Jones Industrial Average's biggest one-day point gain in history. In a volatile session Tuesday, stocks surged off their lows after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in an effort to stem slower economic growth from the coronavirus outbreak.

J. Fergus, writing for Input: Someone finally did it. We can now follow who we want on our own terms and get that information chronologically. Fraidycat is an app and browser extension that allows just that. Though it launched in November 2019, Fraidycat recently got a massive update, widening its compatibility and adding a dark mode. The open-source tool, brought to you by Kicks Condor, is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows in addition to Mozilla Firefox and Chrome as an extension. Fraidycat definitely pulls from RSS feeds more easily, but it also works on Twitter, Instagram, and SoundCloud. You drop the link to the account you'd like to follow -- from Medium bloggers to Twitch streamers to vision board Pinterest-ers -- and set how frequently you'd like to see their posts. Label it, hit save, and posts will appear as often as you'd like. The recent update notably folds Kickstarter into the mix and collapses Twitter threads for readability.

Nvidia has announced it has shifted its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) to be online-only due to concerns from the coronavirus outbreak. People who had registered for the event, which was originally set to be held in San Jose, California, from March 22nd to March 26th, will get a full refund. The Verge reports: "This decision to move the event online instead of at the San Jose Convention Center reflects our top priority: the health and safety of our employees, our partners and our customers," the company said in a statement. Nvidia says company founder and CEO Jensen Huang will still deliver a keynote, and that it's working with speakers to begin publishing talks online. The online version of the event will still take place from March 22nd to March 26th. Other tech events cancelled due to the coronavirus include Mobile World Congress, Facebook's F8 developer conference, and the Game Developers Conference.

AmiMoJo writes: Freedb, the community-generated database of music CD metadata, is shutting down on March 31, 2020. The service was set up as a free alternative to CDDB. Many CD-ripping applications pull metadata from Freedb to save the user having to type it in manually, but the service has some major limitations and has now been superseded by MusicBrainz. This wouldn't be the first time Freedb shut down. In 2006, the site shut down due to a disagreement among its developers, only to be brought back to life a few months later.

It's unclear why Freedb is shutting down after all these years.

According to a report from The Information, Apple plans to introduce a trackpad-equipped keyboard attachment for the iPad Pro alongside its new iPad Pro models sometime this year. Ars Technica reports: This would make Apple's iPad Pro compete more directly with Microsoft's Surface lineup, with 2-in-1 convertible laptops, and with various Chrome OS devices. Apple's iPad has sold well in the marketplace, but power users often complain that its interface is not always suitable for heavy duty work. According to The Information's source, the new keyboards would be made by Foxconn, a major manufacturing partner to Apple that operates primarily in China. The report did not provide much insight on how the spread of the coronavirus might affect this product's launch, though there have been other reports of supply-line problems with Foxconn and other Apple partners in China that may impact the launches of Apple products planned for 2020.

Numerous rumors previously suggested that the iPad Pro refresh was due in the next couple of months, but the coronavirus-related supply struggles have led to uncertainty about Apple's plans. The refreshed tablet is surely still coming, but the timeline is unclear. But if this report is true, it looks like this update could be about more than just nicer cameras and faster processors.

Troy Hunt, the owner and founder of the well-known and respected data breach notification website "Have I Been Pwned," announced in a blog post today that his website is no longer being sold and will continue running independently. The news comes several months after Hunt announced he was actively looking for a buyer.

Last June, Hunt wrote: "To date, every line of code, every configuration and every breached record has been handled by me alone. There is no 'HIBP team,' there's one guy keeping the whole thing afloat. It's time for HIBP to grow up. It's time to go from that one guy doing what he can in his available time to a better-resourced and better-funded structure that's able to do way more than what I ever could on my own."

Now, according to Hunt, "unexpected changes" with the business model of the party believed to be the purchaser of the service "made the deal infeasible." "It wasn't something I could have seen coming nor was it anything to do with HIBP itself, but it introduced a range of new and insurmountable barriers," writes Hunt in today's blog post. Hunt goes on to explain what's been happening since April 2019 and how the service will operate in the future.

After years of development and hype, Google's long-rumored push into video games arrived last November, with the launch of Google Stadia. Google Stadia isn't a game console, nor is it a game platform, really -- it's a digital storefront run by Google where you can buy individual games. It's a hugely ambitious new platform, and it aimed to be the Netflix of gaming. What makes Stadia so ambitious? Rather than downloading games or playing them off a Blu-ray disc, Stadia streams games to you wherever you are, like Netflix streams movies and TV shows. However, four months after Stadia's launch, the service is still extremely light on games: Just 28 titles are available as of this week. From a report: We spoke with game developers and publishers who said there are two main reasons their games aren't on Stadia: Google didn't offer them enough money, and they don't trust the mercurial company to stick with gaming in the long term. "We were approached by the Stadia team," one prominent indie developer told me. "Usually with that kind of thing, they lead with some kind of offer that would give you an incentive to go with them." But the incentive "was kind of non-existent," they said. "That's the short of it." It's a statement we heard echoed by several prominent indie developers and two publishing executives we spoke with for this piece. "It's that there isn't enough money there," one of the publishing executives we spoke with said. The offer was apparently "so low that it wasn't even part of the conversation." The "incentive" isn't solely financial, but it's the main part of the equation. "When we're looking at these types of deals," another prominent indie developer said, "We're looking at 'Is this enough money where we have the resources to make what we want, or is this an exclusivity deal that gives us security?'" they said.

Gordon Moore's 1965 forecast that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year until it reached an astonishing 65,000 by 1975 is the greatest technological prediction of the last half-century. When it proved correct in 1975, he revised what has become known as Moore's Law to a doubling of transistors on a chip every two years. Since then, his prediction has defined the trajectory of technology and, in many ways, of progress itself. Moore's argument was an economic one. It was a beautiful bargain -- in theory, the more transistors you added to an integrated circuit, the cheaper each one got. Moore also saw that there was plenty of room for engineering advances to increase the number of transistors you could affordably and reliably put on a chip.

Almost every technology we care about, from smartphones to cheap laptops to GPS, is a direct reflection of Moore's prediction. It has also fueled today's breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and genetic medicine, by giving machine-learning techniques the ability to chew through massive amounts of data to find answers. But what happens when Moore's Law inevitably ends? Or what if, as some suspect, it has already died, and we are already running on the fumes of the greatest technology engine of our time?

To make its iPhone messaging app run better -- especially on older phones -- Facebook rewrote it from the ground up. The new version is going live now. From a report: In August 2011, Facebook introduced Messenger, an iPhone and Android app that spun off the social network's chat feature into a stand-alone experience. [...] Messenger hit one billion monthly active users in 2016 and was the world's most-downloaded app in 2019, according to App Annie. Along the way, it supplemented its original text-based conversations with everything from voice and video calls to games to payments to bots to Snapchat-style stories. As its user base and ambitions grew, so did its size. What had been a wafer-thin 8.5MB download in 2012 expanded to take up 130MB of space on users' iPhones. That's about twice the size of WhatsApp, another Facebook messaging app that offers many similar features.

But now Facebook has put the iOS version of Messenger on an extreme weight-reduction plan. By rewriting it from scratch, it's shrunk Messenger's footprint on your iPhone down to an eminently manageable 30MB, less than a quarter of its peak size. According to the company, the new version loads twice as fast as the one it's replacing. The update is so compact that Facebook was able to quietly build it into the existing version and test it by exposing it to a subset of users. As a giant piece of programming, the downsizing is even more dramatic. Messenger is going from 1.7 million lines of code to 360,000, for an 84% reduction.