After being caught listening to and transcribing voice recordings without informing customers, Facebook announced it will now offer to pay some users for voice recordings to help improve its speech recognition technology. The Verge reports: Facebook will let you make voice recordings as part of a new program called "Pronunciations" in its Viewpoints market research app. If you qualify to be part of the program, Facebook says you'll be able to record the phrase "Hey Portal" followed by the first name of a friend from your friends list. You'll be able to do this with the names of up to 10 friends, and you have to record each statement twice. Facebook won't be paying much for your recordings, though. If you complete one set of recordings, you get 200 points in the Viewpoints app -- and you can't cash out in the Viewpoints app until you earn at least 1,000 points. That only translates to a $5 reward via PayPal. However, Facebook says users may be offered the opportunity to make up to five sets of recordings, so there is the potential to meet that 1,000-point goal and get paid.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday questioned whether Facebook, Google and other major online platforms still need the immunity from legal liability that has prevented them from being sued over material their users post. "No longer are tech companies the underdog upstarts. They have become titans," Barr said at a public meeting held by the Justice Department to examine the future of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. "Given this changing technological landscape, valid questions have been raised about whether Section 230's broad immunity is necessary at least in its current form," he said.

Section 230 says online companies such as Facebook, Alphabet's Google and Twitter cannot be treated as the publisher or speaker of information they provide. This largely exempts them from liability involving content posted by users, although they can be held liable for content that violates criminal or intellectual property law. The increased size and power of online platforms has also left consumers with fewer options, and the lack of feasible alternatives is a relevant discussion, Barr said, adding that the Section 230 review came out of the Justice Department's broader look at potential anticompetitive practices at tech companies. Lawmakers from both major political parties have called for Congress to change Section 230 in ways that could expose tech companies to more lawsuits or significantly increase their costs. Barr said the department would not advocate a position at the meeting. But he hinted at the idea of allowing the U.S. government to take action against recalcitrant platforms, saying it was "questionable" whether Section 230 should prevent the American government from suing platforms when it is "acting to protect American citizens." The attorney general of Nebraska, Doug Peterson, noted that the law does not shield platforms from federal criminal prosecution; the immunity helps protect against civil claims or a state-level prosecution. Peterson said the exception should be widened to allow state-level action as well. Addressing the tech industry, he called it a "pretty simple solution" that would allow local officials "to clean up your industry instead of waiting for your industry to clean up itself."

Matt Schruers, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, which counts Google and Facebook among its members, said such a solution would result in tech giants having to obey 50 separate sets of laws governing user content. He suggested law enforcement's energies might be better spent pursuing the millions of tips that the tech industry sent over every year, only a small fraction of which, he noted, resulted in investigations.

A group of engineers and developers with backgrounds from the National Security Agency, Google, and Amazon Web Services are working on Gretel, an early-stage startup that aims to help developers safely share and collaborate with sensitive data in real time. TechCrunch reports: It's not as niche of a problem as you might think, said Alex Watson, one of the co-founders. Developers can face this problem at any company, he said. Often, developers don't need full access to a bank of user data -- they just need a portion or a sample to work with. In many cases, developers could suffice with data that looks like real user data. "It starts with making data safe to share," Watson said. "There's all these really cool use cases that people have been able to do with data." He said companies like GitHub, a widely used source code sharing platform, helped to make source code accessible and collaboration easy. "But there's no GitHub equivalent for data," he said.

And that's how Watson and his co-founders, John Myers, Ali Golshan and Laszlo Bock came up with Gretel. "We're building right now software that enables developers to automatically check out an anonymized version of the data set," said Watson. This so-called "synthetic data" is essentially artificial data that looks and works just like regular sensitive user data. Gretel uses machine learning to categorize the data -- like names, addresses and other customer identifiers -- and classify as many labels to the data as possible. Once that data is labeled, it can be applied access policies. Then, the platform applies differential privacy -- a technique used to anonymize vast amounts of data -- so that it's no longer tied to customer information. "It's an entirely fake data set that was generated by machine learning," said Watson. The startup has already raised $3.5 million in seed funding. "Gretel said it will charge customers based on consumption -- a similar structure to how Amazon prices access to its cloud computing services," adds TechCrunch.

Morgan Stanley is buying E-Trade in a $13 billion deal that "will give a powerful Wall Street firm control of a major presence in the world of online brokerages," reports The New York Times. The deal highlights the tech-driven change felt in many markets, from the fixed-income market to the institutional market. Matthew Leising writes via Bloomberg: A report released Thursday by Greenwich Associates found an appetite for "new and better digital products and tools" among fixed-income investors is fueling competition at banks. Kevin McPartland, head of market structure and technology research at Greenwich, said the elimination of trading commissions by many firms including Charles Schwab Corp. has freed investors to choose a brokerage based on services alone. "A lot of it is based on the tools you provide to the end-user, and I'm not sure the institutional market is much different any more," he said in an interview. "Compute power is effectively limitless at this point."

In earlier research, Greenwich asked investors how they choose a top-tier bank, and 18% of respondents said technology services like execution algorithms and analytics were a factor. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, machine learning and the ability to mine huge pools of data have radically changed investing, McPartland said. The E*Trade deal, announced Thursday, helps Morgan Stanley add clients who are less wealthy than its traditional customers, but a state-of-the-art platform for investors was another draw. Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer James Gorman cited E*Trade's "innovation in technology" as a reason for the acquisition, according to a statement.

Google's image-labeling AI tool will no longer label pictures with gender tags like "man" and "woman." From a report: In the email, Google cites its ethical rules on AI as the basis for the change. This is a progressive move by Google -- and one that will hopefully set a precedent for the rest of the AI industry. Ethics aside, Google also says it's made this change because it isn't possible to infer gender from someone's appearance. Google is correct on that count. AI's tendency toward a gender binary might be helpful in blunt categorization, but there are also many gender identities that fall on the spectrum outside of "man" and "woman." Though Google doesn't go as far as saying so in its policies, removing the gender binary from its AI actively makes the software more inclusive of transgender and non-binary people. It's a move that the rest of the tech industry would do well to emulate.

kimanaw shares a report: The Trump administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject an appeal by Alphabet's Google, boosting Oracle's bid to collect more than $8 billion in royalties for Google's use of copyrighted programming code in the Android operating system. The administration weighed in on the high-stakes case on the same day that President Donald Trump attended a re-election campaign fundraiser in California hosted by Oracle's co-founder, billionaire Larry Ellison. Ellison hosted a golf outing and photos with Trump. The event cost a minimum of $100,000 per couple to attend, with a higher ticket price of $250,000 for those who wanted to participate in a policy roundtable with the president, the Palm Springs Desert Sun reported. Google is challenging an appeals court ruling that it violated Oracle copyrights when it included some Oracle-owned Java programming code in Android. The dispute has split Silicon Valley, pitting developers of software code against companies that use the code to create programs. Google's "verbatim copying" of Oracle's code into a competing product wasn't necessary to foster innovation, the U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco said Wednesday in a filing with the court.

Twitter is experimenting with adding brightly colored labels directly beneath lies and misinformation posted by politicians and public figures, according to a leaked demo of new features sent to NBC News. From the report: Twitter confirmed that the leaked demo, which was accessible on a publicly available site, is one possible iteration of a new policy to target misinformation it plans to roll out March 5. In this version, disinformation or misleading information posted by public figures will be corrected directly beneath the tweet by fact-checkers and journalists who are verified on the platform, and possibly other users who will participate in a new "community reports" feature, which the demo claims is "like Wikipedia." "We're exploring a number of ways to address misinformation and provide more context for tweets on Twitter," a Twitter spokesperson said. "Misinformation is a critical issue and we will be testing many different ways to address it." The demo features bright red and orange badges for tweets that have been deemed "harmfully misleading," in nearly the same size as the tweet itself and prominently displayed directly below the tweet that contains the harmful misinformation.

The Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) have revealed -- in "Vulnerabilities in the Core, a preliminary report and Census II of open-source software" -- the most frequently used components and the vulnerabilities they share. From a report: This Census II analysis and report is the first major study of its kind but isn't a final analysis. It takes important first steps and lays out a methodology for understanding and addressing open-source software structural and security complexities. Specifically, it also identifies the most commonly used free and open-source software (FOSS) components in production applications and examines them for potential vulnerabilities. To create this work, CII and LISH partnered with Software Composition Analysis (SCAs) and application security companies such as Snyk and Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center. They combined private usage data with publicly available datasets for identifying over 200 of the most used open-source software projects.

These are not the programs -- Apache, MySQL, Linux -- that probably spring to your mind. For all their foundational importance, it's the small building block programs that are most widely used. They may be small, sometimes less than a hundred lines of code (LoC), but they're vital. As Frank Nagle, a professor at Harvard Business School and co-director of the Census II project, said: "FOSS was long seen as the domain of hobbyists and tinkerers. However, it has now become an integral component of the modern economy and is a fundamental building block of everyday technologies like smart phones, cars, the Internet of Things, and numerous pieces of critical infrastructure. Understanding which components are most widely used and most vulnerable will allow us to help ensure the continued health of the ecosystem and the digital economy."

penciling_in shares a report from CircleID: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has announced that its ICANN67 Public Meeting, which was to be held in Cancun, Mexico, will now be held via remote participation-only. This decision was made as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, considered a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization. The meeting, scheduled for March 7-12, 2020, marks the first time in ICANN's history that it will hold a Public Meeting solely with remote participation. "This is a decision that the ICANN Board has been considering since the outbreak was first announced and it is one that we haven't taken lightly," said Maarten Botterman, ICANN Board Chair. "We know that changing this meeting to remote participation-only will have an impact on and cause disruption to our community; however, this decision is about people. Protecting the health and safety of the ICANN community is our top priority."

mrwireless writes: Security researchers were able to get multiple Tesla cars to accelerate to 85 miles per hour on a road with a speed limit of 35. They did this by simply modifying the speed limit sign with some black tape, turning a "3" into an "8." Mobileye, the company that produces the Mobileye Eye Q3 for many of Tesla's cars, downplayed the research by suggesting that the modified sign would fool even a human into reading 85 instead of 35. "Autonomous vehicle technology will not rely on sensing alone, but will also be supported by various other technologies and data, such as crowdsourced mapping, to ensure the reliability of the information received from the camera sensors and offer more robust redundancies and safety," the Mobileye spokesperson said in a statement.

MIT Technology Review: "Tesla has since moved to proprietary cameras on newer models, and Mobileye EyeQ3 has released several new versions of its cameras that in preliminary testing were not susceptible to this exact attack."

Sources told Reuters that Google is planning to move its British users' accounts out of the control of European Union privacy regulators, placing them under U.S. jurisdiction instead. From the report: The shift, prompted by Britain's exit from the EU, will leave the sensitive personal information of tens of millions with less protection and within easier reach of British law enforcement. The change was described to Reuters by three people familiar with its plans. Google intends to require its British users to acknowledge new terms of service including the new jurisdiction.

Ireland, where Google and other U.S. tech companies have their European headquarters, is staying in the EU, which has one of the world's most aggressive data protection rules, the General Data Protection Regulation. Google has decided to move its British users out of Irish jurisdiction because it is unclear whether Britain will follow GDPR or adopt other rules that could affect the handling of user data, the people said. If British Google users have their data kept in Ireland, it would be more difficult for British authorities to recover it in criminal investigations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fox Business: Facebook is slated to begin a tax trial in a San Francisco court on Tuesday, as the Internal Revenue Service tries to convince a judge the world's largest social media company owes more than $9 billion linked to its decision to shift profits to Ireland. The trial, which Facebook expects will take three to four weeks, could see top executives including hardware chief Andrew Bosworth and Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer called to testify, according to a document the company filed in January. The witness list also includes Naomi Gleit and Javier Olivan, veterans of Facebook's aggressive growth team, and Chief Revenue Officer David Fischer.

The IRS argues that Facebook understated the value of the intellectual property it sold to an Irish subsidiary in 2010 while building out global operations, a move common among U.S. multinationals. Ireland has lower corporate tax rates than the United States, so the move reduced the company's tax bill. Under the arrangement, Facebook's subsidiaries pay royalties to the U.S.-based parent for access to its trademark, users and platform technologies. From 2010 to 2016, Facebook Ireland paid Facebook U.S. more than $14 billion in royalties and cost-sharing payments, according to the court filing. The company said the low valuation reflected the risks associated with Facebook's international expansion, which took place in 2010 before its IPO and the development of its most lucrative digital advertising products.

Larry Tesler, a computer scientist who created the terms "cut," "copy," and "paste," has passed away at the age of 74. Gizmodo reports: Born in 1945 in New York, Tesler went on to study computer science at Stanford University, and after graduation he dabbled in artificial intelligence research (long before it became a deeply concerning tool) and became involved in the anti-war and anti-corporate monopoly movements, with companies like IBM as one of his deserving targets. In 1973 Tesler took a job at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he worked until 1980. Xerox PARC is famously known for developing the mouse-driven graphical user interface we now all take for granted, and during his time at the lab Tesler worked with Tim Mott to create a word processor called Gypsy that is best known for coining the terms "cut," "copy," and "paste" when it comes to commands for removing, duplicating, or repositioning chunks of text.

Xerox PARC is also well known for not capitalizing on the groundbreaking research it did in terms of personal computing, so in 1980 Tesler transitioned to Apple Computer where he worked until 1997. Over the years he held countless positions at the company including Vice President of AppleNet (Apple's in-house local area networking system that was eventually canceled), and even served as Apple's Chief Scientist, a position that at one time was held by Steve Wozniak, before eventually leaving the company.

In addition to his contributions to some of Apple's most famous hardware, Tesler was also known for his efforts to make software and user interfaces more accessible. In addition to the now ubiquitous "cut," "copy," and "paste" terminologies, Tesler was also an advocate for an approach to UI design known as modeless computing, which is reflected in his personal website. In essence, it ensures that user actions remain consistent throughout an operating system's various functions and apps. When they've opened a word processor, for instance, users now just automatically assume that hitting any of the alphanumeric keys on their keyboard will result in that character showing up on-screen at the cursor's insertion point. But there was a time when word processors could be switched between multiple modes where typing on the keyboard would either add characters to a document or alternately allow functional commands to be entered.

An anonymous reader writes: Google today launched the first Android 11 developer preview, available for download now at developer.android.com. The preview includes a preview SDK for developers with system images for the Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL, Pixel 3a, Pixel 3a XL, Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL, and the official Android Emulator. While it's the fifth year running that Google has released the first developer preview of the next Android version in Q1, this is the earliest developer preview yet. Android N (later named Android Nougat), Android O (Android Oreo), Android P (Android Pie), and Android Q (Android 10) were all first shown off in the month of March. Last year, Google used the Android Beta Program, which lets you get early Android builds via over-the-air updates on select devices. This year, however, Google is not making the first preview available as a beta (you'll need to manually flash your device). In other words, Android 11 is not ready for early adopters to try, just developers.

Mozilla has a new virtual private network service and if you have a Chromebook, a Windows 10 computer or an Android device in the US, you can start using a beta version now. From a report: Called Firefox Private Network, the new service is designed to function as a full-device VPN and give better protection when surfing the web or when using public Wi-Fi networks. The company offers two options: a free browser-extension version, which it launched in beta last year, that provides 12 one-hour VPN passes when using the Firefox browser and a Firefox account; and a second, $4.99-a-month option that provides a more complete VPN service across your whole device. The new paid option, which runs off of servers provided by Swedish open-source VPN company Mullvad, can protect up to five devices with one account. It allows for faster browsing and streaming, and gives you the ability to tap into servers located in "30-plus countries" for masking your location data.

Malaysia's MYEG Services said on Wednesday it had developed a coronavirus risk-profiling system for visitors from China and was offering the artificial intelligence-based service to the governments of Malaysia and the Philippines. From a report: Malaysia has imposed a temporary ban on visitors from Chinese provinces placed on lockdown by the China's government, in a bid to stem the spread of the virus. Malaysia has reported 22 infections, and the Philippines has reported three confirmed cases including one death. MYEG Services Bhd said its system creates a health-risk profile using a person's historical geolocation information and other parameters. MYEG has partnered with Beijing-based travel agency Phoenix Travel Worldwide for the project. The fully-automated system analyses a "vast number of available data points, including visitors' previous known whereabouts as well as heart rate and blood pressure readings crossed-referenced against public transportation ridership and exposure to locations with incidences of infections," MYEG said in a statement to the stock exchange.

Ontario's newly-designed license plates just hit a speedbump. Call it Plate-gate. From a report: A little background: The Canadian province's new design was unveiled by the provincial government -- led by center-right Ontario Premier Doug Ford -- last year. Almost immediately, people started comparing the plate design unfavorably to a box of Q-tips. The plates also had a new slogan -- "A Place to Grow" -- which drew the ire of some critics, who preferred the previous "Yours to Discover," which the plates had sported since 1982. Then there was the palette: Observers noticed that the new plates had the same blue color scheme as Ford's Progressive Conservative Party. But the real problems began once the plates went into use this month. "Has anyone else noticed that the newly designed @ONgov license plates are totally unreadable from distance at night?" tweeted videojournalist Andrew Collins on Friday. "Could be an issue for [Toronto] police forces in the future." A Twitter user who describes himself as a police sergeant in Kingston, Ont., tweeted another photo with the same complaint the next day: "Did anyone consult with police before designing and manufacturing the new Ontario licence plates? They're virtually unreadable at night."

U.S. and Chinese firms hoping to deploy artificial intelligence and other technology in Europe will have to submit to a slew of new rules and tests, under a set of plans unveiled by the European Union to boost the bloc's digital economy. From a report: The legislative plans, outlined on Wednesday by the European Commission, the bloc's executive body, are designed to help Europe compete with the U.S. and China's technological power while still championing EU rights. The move is the latest attempt by the bloc to leverage the power of its vast, developed market to set global standards that companies around the world are forced to follow. Big U.S. companies, like Facebook and Alphabet's Google, won't get any reprieve from the Commission, which in its Digital Services Act plans to overhaul rules around legal liability for tech firms, and is also exploring legislation for 'gate-keeping' platforms that control their ecosystems. "It's not us that need to adapt to today's platforms. It's the platforms that need to adapt to Europe," European Industry Commissioner Thierry Breton said at a press conference in Brussels. If they can't find a way adapt to the bloc's standards, "then we will have to regulate and we are ready to do this in the Digital Services Act at the end of this year."

Adobe Photoshop, a synonym and often a verb for manipulated and edited images, has turned 30. After launching its app on iPad last year, the company said it's looking to expand its presence on more platforms in the near future. From a report: On this occasion, Adobe is bringing four AI-powered features to its desktop and iPad apps. On a call earlier this week, executives said they were looking to introduce more features powered by the company's Sensei engine, which was launched in 2016. On desktop, the company is bringing content-aware filling for multiple objects on one go. This feature lets you remove objects and fill the space with the present background, based on your selection. For instance, in the picture below, you can remove the leaf on the ice cream cone and fill it with pink-colored ice cream. Along with this, Adobe is also launching an improved lens-blur function that supports photos with the depth map. The new feature relies on GPU rather than the CPU for processing, and supposedly delivers a more realistic bokeh effect.

Over the weekend, tech reporter Kari Paul from The Guardian got stuck in the California boonies by the Internet of Things. Ars Technica's Jonathan M. Gitlin reports: Paul had rented a car through a local car-sharing service called GIG Car Share, which offers a fleet of hybrid Toyota Priuses and electric Chevrolet Bolt EVs in the Bay Area and Sacramento, with plans to spend the weekend in a more rural part of the state about three hours north of Oakland. But on Sunday, she was left stranded on an unpaved road when the car's telematics system lost its cell signal. Without being able to call home, the rented Prius refused to move.

Adding insult to injury, Paul's cellphone was not similarly troubled by the remote location, allowing her to express her frustration, but also to talk to GIG's customer service to try to get the car back in motion. At first, the company's plan was to send a tow truck to tow the Prius a few miles closer to civilization, but that would be too easy. It appears GIG's customer service unhelpfully suggested Paul and her companion spend the night sleeping in the car and trying to start the car again the next morning. Instead, after a six-hour wait and not one but two tow trucks -- the second of which Paul called herself -- plus 20 (!) calls to GIG, the problem was finally solved in the early hours of Monday morning.