Let's Encrypt, writing in a blog post: We issued our billionth certificate on February 27, 2020. We're going to use this big round number as an opportunity to reflect on what has changed for us, and for the Internet, leading up to this event. In particular, we want to talk about what has happened since the last time we talked about a big round number of certificates - one hundred million. One thing that's different now is that the Web is much more encrypted than it was. In June of 2017 approximately 58% of page loads used HTTPS globally, 64% in the United States. Today 81% of page loads use HTTPS globally, and we're at 91% in the United States! This is an incredible achievement. That's a lot more privacy and security for everybody.

Another thing that's different is that our organization has grown a bit, but not by much! In June of 2017 we were serving approximately 46M websites, and we did so with 11 full time staff and an annual budget of $2.61M. Today we serve nearly 192M websites with 13 full time staff and an annual budget of approximately $3.35M. This means we're serving more than 4x the websites with only two additional staff and a 28% increase in budget. The additional staff and budget did more than just improve our ability to scale though - we've made improvements across the board to provide even more secure and reliable service.

When Pakistan's government unveiled some of the world's most sweeping rules on internet censorship this month, global internet companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter were expected to comply or face severe penalties -- including the potential shutdown of their services. Instead, the tech giants banded together and threatened to leave the country and its 70 million internet users in digital darkness. The New York Times: Through a group called the Asia Internet Coalition, they wrote a scathing letter to Pakistan's prime minister, Imran Khan. In it, the companies warned that "the rules as currently written would make it extremely difficult for AIC Members to make their services available to Pakistani users and businesses." Their public rebellion, combined with pressure and lawsuits from local civil libertarians, forced the government to retreat. The law remains on the books, but Pakistani officials pledged this week to review the regulations and undertake an "extensive and broad-based consultation process with all relevant segments of civil society and technology companies." "Because Pakistan does not have any law of data protection, international internet firms are reluctant to comply with the rules," said Usama Khilji, director of Bolo Bhi, an internet rights organization based in Islamabad, the country's capital.

The standoff over Pakistan's digital censorship law, which would give regulators the power to demand the takedown of a wide range of content, is the latest skirmish in an escalating global battle. Facebook, Google and other big tech companies, which have long made their own rules about what is allowed on their services, are increasingly tangling with national governments seeking to curtail internet content that they consider harmful, distasteful or simply a threat to their power. India is expected to unveil new censorship guidelines any day now, including a requirement that encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp tell the government how specific messages moved within their networks. The country has also proposed a new data privacy law that would restrict the activities of tech companies while exempting the government from privacy rules.

If you thought LinkedIn had already reached peak undesirability, you were wrong: the company is now planning to add Snapchat-style Stories to its platform. From a report: Yes, the business-focused networking app that fills your inbox with recruiter and PR spam may be getting Stories. Social media users have been suffering from Stories exhaustion for years at this point. It's a feature that works great for its pioneer, Snapchat, and for Instagram... and pretty much nothing else -- I mean, have you ever watched a Facebook Story on purpose? LinkedIn Stories inevitably promise to bring well-manicured, painfully corporate video clips to your feed as a way to mix up the approach to networking. Or, as the company puts it, to "bring creativity and authenticity to the ways that members share more of their work life, so that they can build and nurture the relationships necessary to become more productive and successful."

Facebook filed today a federal lawsuit in a California court against OneAudience, a New Jersey-based data analytics firm. From a report: The social networking giant claims that OneAudience paid app developers to install its Software Development Kit (SDK) in their apps, and later used the control it had over the SDK's code to harvest data on Facebook users. According to court documents obtained by ZDNet, the SDK was embedded in shopping, gaming, and utility-type apps, some of which were made available through the official Google Play Store. "After a user installed one of these apps on their device, the malicious SDK enabled OneAudience to collect information about the user from their device and their Facebook, Google, or Twitter accounts, in instances where the user logged into the app using those accounts," the complaint reads. "With respect to Facebook, OneAudience used the malicious SDK -- without authorization from Facebook -- to access and obtain a user's name, email address, locale (i.e. the country that the user logged in from), time zone, Facebook ID, and, in limited instances, gender," Facebook said. Twitter was the first to expose OneAudience's secret data harvesting practices on November 26, last year.

Facebook has canceled the in-person portion of F8, the company's annual developer conference, due to coronavirus concerns. F8 was originally scheduled to take place on May 5th and May 6th later this year. From a report: Instead, Facebook says that it will replace the main F8 conference with "locally hosted events, videos and live-streamed content."

Nokia Oyj is exploring strategic options as fierce competition puts pressure on the Finnish network equipment maker's earnings, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The company is working with advisers to consider alternatives ranging from potential asset sales to mergers, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Other options include shifting investments and making balance-sheet adjustments, one of them said. Deliberations are ongoing, and there's no certainty they will lead to any transactions, the people said. Nokia shares have lost roughly a third of their value over the past year before news of its deliberations.

TikTok is one of the hottest social media platforms but the CEO of Reddit had some harsh words for the popular app, calling it "fundamentally parasitic" at an event this week. From a report: The comments from Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman were some of the more controversial offered up during a panel discussion with former public policy executive Elliot Schrage and former Facebook VP of Product Sam Lessin. During a brief conversation about the feature innovations of TikTok, Huffman pushed back hard on the notion that Silicon Valley startups had something to learn from the app. "Maybe I'm going to regret this, but I can't even get to that level of thinking with them," Huffman said. "Because I look at that app as so fundamentally parasitic, that it's always listening, the fingerprinting technology they use is truly terrifying, and I could not bring myself to install an app like that on my phone. I actively tell people, 'Don't install that spyware on your phone,'" he later added. Worth mentioning: Reddit is heavily backed by Chinese tech giant Tencent, which competes aggressively with TikTok's parent firm ByteDance.

ClickOnThis writes: Many of us know the old joke about BMWs and hemorrhoids. Now it seems that science can back it up. In a study perhaps deserving of an Ig Nobel, scientists found that the likelihood a driver will stop for a pedestrian is inversely proportional to the value of their vehicle. CNN reports: "A new study has found that drivers of flashy vehicles are less likely to stop and allow pedestrians to cross the road -- with the likelihood they'll slow down decreasing by 3% for every extra $1,000 that their vehicle is worth. Researchers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas speculated that the expensive car owners 'felt a sense of superiority over other road users' and were less able to empathize with lowly sidewalk-dwellers.

They came to this conclusion after asking volunteers to cross a sidewalk hundreds of times, filming and analyzing the responses by car drivers. Researchers used one white and one black man, and one white and one black woman -- also finding that cars were more likely to yield for the white and female participants. Vehicles stopped 31% of the time for both women and white participants, compared with 24% of the time for men and 25% of the time for black volunteers. But the best predictor of whether a car would stop was its cost, researchers discovered. 'Disengagement and a lower ability to interpret thoughts and feelings of others along with feelings of entitlement and narcissism may lead to a lack of empathy for pedestrians' among costly car owners, they theorized in the study." The research has been published in the Journal of Transport and Health.

The research "backed up a Finnish study published last month that found that men who own flashy vehicles are more likely to be 'argumentative, stubborn, disagreeable and unempathetic,'" adds CNN.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: An electronic device that "sniffs" breath may offer a new way to identify people with a condition that can lead to cancer of the oesophagus, researchers have revealed. According to the charity Cancer Research UK, people diagnosed with Barrett's oesophagus -- a precancerous condition in which cells lining the food pipe change and may grow abnormally -- have more than 11 times greater risk of getting a particular type of oesophageal cancer called oesophageal adenocarcinoma compared with the general population. Writing in the journal Gut, Siersema and colleagues reported how they tested their device on 402 patients who were scheduled to undergo an endoscopy. Among these patients, 129 went on to be diagnosed with Barrett's oesophagus, 141 had gastro-oesophageal reflux disease, and 132 had neither problem.

Before they underwent an endoscopy, each patient was asked to breath into an "electronic nose" -- a device that can detect different volatile molecules. In the breath, such molecules result from processes in the body, however while many of these occur in a healthy individual, some may be linked to particular diseases, either reflecting changes in cells or changes in the local community of microbes caused by a disease. As a result, a particular composition within a breath sample may act as a hallmark of a condition. The team's portable electronic nose incorporated a type of artificial intelligence to look for these patterns. [...] Overall the results reveal that the nose correctly identified patients with Barrett's oesophagus 91% of the time, while it correctly identified those without the condition 74% of the time. When the test was restricted to only those with either gastro-oesophageal reflux disease or Barrett's oesophagus, the system was still able to distinguish patients, albeit less accurately.

Bloomberg's Luka Kawa reports on the tips and tricks members of the r/wallstreetbets subreddit are using to push prices on the stock market, at least for the short term. Here's an excerpt from the report: The do-it-yourself traders of r/WSB are waging a kind of guerrilla warfare in the markets, trying to exploit what they see as weaknesses in the system to move prices where they want them. For anyone who wondered about where the small day traders who made the 1990s so wild went, meet the 2020 version. After years of indifference, individual investors seem to be finding their way back to stocks, for better or worse. They're flexing muscles in ways that can easily call to mind excesses from the dot-com era.

Members of r/WSB believe they've discovered a kind of perpetual motion machine in the interplay of stocks withÂoptions contracts, which offer a cheap way to bet on whether shares will rise or fall without buying the stock itself. It goes like this: Members make bets that rely on market makers, the professional middlemen who sell you a call (a bet on shares rising) or a put (a wager on a decline). Market makers, like good bookies, don't want to go out on a limb. When taking a bet, they lay off the risk. If someone buys a call, for instance, speculating on a rally, the dealer buys stock in the underlying company. If the stock rises, the dealer may have to pay out on the option -- but that's offset by the gain on the shares. When shares keep rising, managing the hedge entails buying more stock. That's where the Reddit set perceives a weakness. A favorite tactic on r/WSB is to swamp the market with call purchases early in the morning in an attempt to force dealers to keep buying stock. Up and up everything goes -- supposedly. As the stock price rises, so does the value of the calls, often by far more...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: YouTube is a private forum and therefore not subject to free-speech requirements under the First Amendment, a US appeals court ruled today (PDF). "Despite YouTube's ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment," the court said. PragerU, a conservative media company, sued YouTube in October 2017, claiming the Google-owned video site "unlawfully censor[ed] its educational videos and discriminat[ed] against its right to freedom of speech."

PragerU said YouTube reduced its viewership and revenue with "arbitrary and capricious use of 'restricted mode' and 'demonetization' viewer restriction filters." PragerU claimed it was targeted by YouTube because of its "political identity and viewpoint as a non-profit that espouses conservative views on current and historical events." But a US District Court judge dismissed PragerU's lawsuit against Google and YouTube, and a three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld that dismissal in a unanimous ruling today. "PragerU's claim that YouTube censored PragerU's speech faces a formidable threshold hurdle: YouTube is a private entity. The Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government -- not a private party -- from abridging speech," judges wrote.

German Facebook users would want the social media platform to pay them about $8 per month for sharing their contact information, while U.S. users would only seek $3.50, according to a study of how people in various countries value their private information. From a report: The study by U.S. based think tank the Technology Policy Institute (TPI) is the first that attempts to quantify the value of online privacy and data. It assessed how much privacy is worth in six countries by looking at the habits of people in the United States, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Argentina. It addresses growing concern about how companies from technology platforms to retailers have been collecting and monetizing personal data. U.S. regulators have imposed hefty fines on Facebook Inc and Alphabet-owned Google's YouTube unit for privacy violations. "Differences in how much people value privacy of different data types across countries suggests that people in some places may prefer weaker rules while people in other places might prefer stronger rules," Scott Wallsten, president and senior fellow at TPI told Reuters. "Quantifying the value of privacy is necessary for conducting any analysis of proposed privacy policies," he said.

A jury on Tuesday convicted a former Microsoft worker of wire fraud and other charges in what prosecutors described as a scheme to steal $10 million in digital currency. From a report: The U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle said 25-year-old Ukrainian citizen Volodymyr Kvashuk helped test Microsoft's online retail sales platform. He was accused of stealing digital currency such as gift cards that could be redeemed for Microsoft products, then reselling them on the internet and using the proceeds to buy a $160,000 Tesla vehicle and a $1.7 million lakefront home. He was fired in June 2018 after the scheme came to light. Prosecutors said that during the seven months of his activity, $2.8 million in bitcoin was transferred into his bank accounts.

Normal life has ground to a halt in the disputed Himalayan region as businesses lay off workers, hospitals struggle to care for patients, and ordinary people despair. Pranav Dixit, reporting for BuzzFeed News: Since August 5, Indian authorities have kept the people of Kashmir in a digital blackout, restricting most internet access. At 205 days and counting, it's the longest-running internet shutdown in any democracy so far, seven months in March. That means no email. No WhatsApp. No maps. And no weather.

Google is continuing to expand beyond its home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said Wednesday the company will invest more than $10 billion in offices and data centers across the US in 2020. From a report: "These investments will create thousands of jobs -- including roles within Google, construction jobs in data centers and renewable energy facilities, and opportunities in local businesses in surrounding towns and communities," Pichai said in a blog post. The search giant, which already has a presence in 26 states, said its new investments will be focused in 11 states: Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and California. This includes opening Google's new Hudson Square campus in New York City, which the company says gives it the ability to double its local workforce by 2028. Google also said its opening a new Google Operations Center in Mississippi to improve customer support for its users and partners.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Newly released and previously secret documents explain in greater detail how, and why, a section of the U.S. military decides to publicly release a steady stream of adversarial countries' malware, including hacking tools from North Korea and Russia. Cyber Command, or CYBERCOM, publishes the malware samples onto VirusTotal, a semi-public repository that researchers and defenders can then pore over to make systems more secure. The document provides more insight into how the U.S. military is engaged in an unusually public-facing campaign, and in particular highlights one of the reasons CYBERCOM wants to release other nation's hacking tools: to make it harder for enemy hackers to remain undetected.

A previously secret section of one of the CYBERCOM documents reads "Posting malware to VT [VirusTotal] and Tweeting to bring attention and awareness supports this strategy by putting pressure on malicious cyber actors, disrupting their efforts." Motherboard obtained the redacted documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to CYBERCOM. CYBERCOM started publishing malware in 2018, with one sample coming from Russian-linked hacking group APT28. It has since released malware from North Korean hackers. CYBERCOM also has a dedicated Twitter account for distributing news of the samples. Some tweets even include memes such as "DPRK MALWARE" written onto conversation candy hearts to coincide with a release on Valentines Day. When it originally announced the campaign, CYBERCOM said it "initiated an effort to share unclassified malware samples it has discovered that it believes will have the greatest impact on improving global cybersecurity." But the documents show how the effort has a more offensive slant, too. In a statement a CYBERCOM spokesperson reiterated some of the agency's earlier public comments, writing, "We plan to continue to publicly disclose malware samples, which we believe will have the greatest impact on improving global security."

You can read the documents here.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, ride-hailing trips today result in an estimated 69 percent more climate pollution on average than the trips they displace. The Verge reports: In cities, ride-hailing trips typically displace low-carbon trips, such as public transportation, biking, or walking. Uber and Lyft could reduce these emissions with a more concerted effort to electrify its fleet of vehicles or by incentivizing customers to take pooled rides, the group recommends. "However, those strategies alone will address neither the increases in vehicle miles traveled nor rising congestion concerns," the report says. "For ride-hailing to contribute to better climate and congestion outcomes, trips must be pooled and electric, displace single-occupancy car trips more often, and encourage low-emissions modes such as mass transit, biking, and walking."

It's a tall order, but both Uber and Lyft have shown a willingness to reduce their carbon footprint. So far, their methods include introducing bike- and scooter-sharing services, integrated public transportation scheduling and ticketing into their respective apps, and incentive programs to get drivers to switch to electric cars. "We want Uber to be a part of the solution to address climate change by working with cities to help create a low carbon transportation future," a spokesperson said. "To unlock the opportunities we have to reduce emissions, we will continue to invest in products and advocate for policies that reduce car ownership, promote more pooled trips and support greater adoption of bikes, scooters, green vehicles and the use of public transit."

Lyft, meanwhile, dismissed the report as "misleading." "This report, like many before it, makes misleading claims about rideshare," a spokesperson said. "Lyft encourages the use of shared rides, was the first rideshare company to put public transit information into our app, and last year, made one of the largest single deployments of electric vehicles in the nation. We are eager to continue this work in partnership with cities, to advance shared, sustainable transportation."

Antony McNeil, Singapore Airlines' global food and beverage director, is purchasing produce from AeroFarms' Newark facility, the world's largest indoor vertical farm. "The 16-year-old agtech startup has taken aeroponics to an industrial scale, growing some 800 varieties of leafy greens, tubers, root crops, vine crops, and berries all without soil, sunshine, or pesticides," reports Quartz. Thanks to this partnership, "Singapore Airlines is the first major carrier to serve produce harvested just hours before a flight." From the report: "We now have the best opportunity to serve the freshest produce, and it doesn't have to fly 2,000 miles," McNeil explains. But do classically trained chefs have qualms about lab-grown vegetables, like many do when it comes to genetically modified meat products? After all, what a strange power to calibrate the color, flavor, and texture of produce based on the whims of a cook. McNeil seems unconcerned, however. "I have no issues with it because it's unadulterated," he explains. "It's just fresh, beautiful produce."

AeroFarms customizes orders by altering the environmental growing conditions; increasing the wind speed in the farm yields a firmer kale, for instance. "This is stretching our imagination," says McNeil, who dreams of experimenting with discarded stalks of AeroFarms-grown produce to flavor his soups. Beyond the quality factor, McNeil says having data that traces where and how vegetables are grown is a time-saver -- especially for airlines, where food safety is paramount. As he notes, food served on planes has to pass 10 to 12 critical control points in transit from harvest to the time it's served. Singapore Airlines is currently serving the AeroFarms-grown produce on flights originating from Newark and JFK airports. McNeil says the plan is to expand the company's network of sustainable growers to service more routes around the world.

Slashdot readers TomGreenhaw and gollum123 are sharing the findings from a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into a fatal Tesla Model X crash that occurred in 2018 near Mountain View, California. The agency says Tesla's Autopilot system and the driver's distraction by a mobile device were two of the probable causes of the crash. The Verge reports: The safety board arrived at those probable causes after a nearly two-year investigation into the crash. NTSB investigators also named a number of contributing factors, including that the crash attenuator in front of the barrier was damaged and had not been repaired by California's transportation department, Caltrans, in a timely manner. Had the crash attenuator been replaced, NTSB investigators said Tuesday that the driver, Walter Huang, likely would have survived. The NTSB shared its findings at the end of a three-hour-long hearing on Tuesday. During the hearing, board members took issue with Tesla's approach to mitigating the misuse of Autopilot, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's lax approach to regulating partial automation technology, and Apple -- Huang's employer -- for not having a distracted driving policy. (Huang was playing the mobile game on a company-issued iPhone.) "In this crash we saw an over-reliance on technology, we saw distraction, we saw a lack of policy prohibiting cell phone use while driving, and we saw infrastructure failures, which, when combined, led to this tragic loss," NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt said at the end of the hearing on Tuesday. "We urge Tesla to continue to work on improving their Autopilot technology and for NHTSA to fulfill its oversight responsibility to ensure that corrective action is taken where necessary. It's time to stop enabling drivers in any partially automated vehicle to pretend that they have driverless cars."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: As time goes on, it is becoming increasingly clear that Microsoft is trying to make local accounts a thing of the past and push all new Windows 10 users to a Microsoft account. Since Windows 10 1903, Microsoft quietly changed the Windows Out-of-box Experience (OOBE) or setup experience so that many users are no longer able to create a local account during set up as they could previously. Recently, this change also expanded to international users in India and Germany.

For those affected, the only way to create a local account during setup is to disconnect the computer from the Internet. Yes, that's right, Microsoft now makes you disconnect the computer from the Internet to create a local account during setup! If you don't want to disconnect your network, then you need to first set up Windows with a Microsoft Account and then when done with setup go into the Windows 10 'Family & other users' settings and create a local account. Even that is a bit convoluted as you have to first start the process of creating a Microsoft account and finally on the second screen, be given the option that you wish to create a local account. Once a local account has been created, you can delete the original Microsoft account you created during setup.