An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: If you're the sort who buys domains for fun, or to inspire you to start a future project, your hobby's about to get a little pricier. ICANN is just days away from ending a consultation into the future of the .com top-level domain that'll put an end to Obama-era price freezes. If successful, it'll see the cost of a .com address rise by two bucks by the end of 2026, and potentially more thereafter. Verisign has the exclusive right to sell .com domains, and since 2012 the price of a .com has been frozen at $7.85. ICANN and Verisign are planning to reverse the freeze, allowing the company to increase its price four out of every six years, potentially in perpetuity. The other part of the deal will offer Verisign the right to operate its own registrar for other domains it offers, allowing it to compete with other DNS businesses.

Price-wise, Verisign will be able to increase the wholesale price of a .com name by up to seven percent for four of the next six years. That means that, potentially, the cost of one such domain would rise to $10.26 by the end of 2026, although existing owners will have advance notice of any change to lock in existing prices for up to 10 years at a time. The cause of this is a desire to roll back an Obama-era initiative, something that the Department of Commerce has been open about. In 2018, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the Department of Commerce pretty much said so. "In line with policy priorities of the Trump administration," it explained in a release, "the amendment repeals Obama-era price controls." The other issue is a change to the rules about vertical integration, specifically about what Verisign can and can't do with the domains it sells. ICANN wants to bring Verisign's rights broadly in line with other registrars, allowing the company to operate a TLD and act as registrar. Whereas before, the documentation said that Verisign couldn't compete at all, now the rule is to be shrunk to only apply to .com, and not .net or any other domains it offers. Richard Kirkendall, CEO of rival domain registrar Namecheap, is accusing ICANN and Verisign of a stitch-up, saying the body has a "history of making similar deals behind closed doors" -- even though the announcement has been public for nearly two years.

The Internet Commerce Association, a body representing domain registrars like GoDaddy, is also objecting the deal. "It says that, because Verisign is the only company that can offer .com names, it has 'an effective monopoly,'" reports Engadget. "And that because it costs less than $3 to actually process a DNS registration, the company could have room to operate uncompetitively."

According to The Associated Press, the U.S. Postal Service said on Tuesday that it is "experiencing significant difficulties" in dispatching letters, parcels and express mail to China, including Hong Kong and Macau, "because most of its supplier airlines have suspended their flights" to those destinations. As a consequence and "starting immediately," USPS said it can no longer accept items destined for China, Hong Kong and Macao "until sufficient transport capacity becomes available." CBS News reports: Likewise, in another, separate note seen by the AP, Singapore Post told its global counterparts that it is no longer accepting letters, parcels and express mail items destined for China, "until sufficient transport capacity becomes available." The notes were shared with postal services around the world via the Universal Postal Union, a U.N. agency headquartered in Switzerland that is a main forum for postal cooperation between its 192 member countries.

In a statement to the AP, the UPU said that the suspension of flights because of the virus "is going to impact the delivery of mail for the foreseeable future." "But it is hopefully temporary. The Universal Postal Union is carefully monitoring the operational situation, and is in constant contact with postal operators to ensure any backlog is cleared in the shortest possible time," it said. The Chinese mail service, China Post, said it is disinfecting postal offices, processing centers, and vehicles to ensure the virus doesn't travel via the mail and to protect postal staff. The virus does "not survive for long on objects. It is therefore safe to receive postal items from China," said a China Post noted transmitted via the UPU. Letters, parcels and express mail that do still make it to China will be delivered "via non-face-to-face methods," the note said.

Car and Driver tested a $1,000 aftermarket autonomous driving add-on from Comma.ai against the best factory systems currently on the market. Slashdot reader schwit1 shares the report: If the self-driving car is the promised land, then today's ever proliferating driver-assist features are the desert. Diminished claims and "it's harder than we thought" mea culpas from self-driving's loudest advocates suggest we'll be wandering here for many years to come. At least the technology is meandering in the right direction, though. Thanks to recent software updates, the most sophisticated systems -- Cadillac's Super Cruise and Tesla's Autopilot -- are more capable today than they were initially. This report on those systems includes a lesser known third player. For $998, upstart Comma.ai sells an aftermarket dash cam and wiring harness that taps into and overrides the factory-installed assistance systems in many Honda and Toyota models as well as some Chrysler, Kia, and Lexus vehicles, among others. When activated, Comma.ai's Openpilot software assumes control over the steering, brakes, and throttle, and it reduces the frequent reminders to keep your hands on the wheel. As you might imagine, automakers do not endorse this hack.

Any one of these systems could confidently track the center of a lane for hours with minimal driver input on reasonably straight highways. Although no automaker admits that infotainment is part of its system's machine learning, right after we went hands-free, Hinder's "Get Stoned" started playing through the Cadillac's speakers. We ignored that suggestion and threw the three systems at the toughest highway kinks, interchanges, and two-lane roads surrounding our Ann Arbor home base until either they or we flinched. There was some of each.

Cadillac Super Cruise
Highs: Locked-on-its-lane control, handles the difficult maneuvers with aplomb.
Lows: Works only on mapped limited-access highways, steering control not as confident at night, very little information shown to the driver.
Verdict: A capable and conservative commuting ally.

Tesla Autopilot
Highs: Best user interface, most versatile, extremely capable.
Lows: Dramatic steering inputs when it makes an occasional mistake, no more hands-free capability.
Verdict: One of the best, but can it really evolve all the way to self-driving?

Comma.ai Highs: Capable steering, brake, and throttle control.
Lows: A too-large and unadjustable gap from cars ahead, slows substantially for curves, flashes unnecessary warnings.
Verdict: If this is what's possible with a single camera, perhaps the hardware required for self-driving won't be as extensive as expected.

Nvidia's GeForce Now is a cloud gaming service that lets you play games stored on dedicated GeForce graphics-enabled PCs across a wide array of devices. While it lets you play PC games you already own, the game publisher must allow it on the service. "Today, Nvidia is revealing that Activision Blizzard is no longer playing ball, pulling down its catalog of games including Overwatch, WoW, and the Call of Duty series," reports The Verge. From the report: That means one of the service's biggest publishers, as well as its Battle.net catalog of games, will no longer be available just a week after the service's formal launch -- a launch that was already missing many games from Capcom, EA, Konami, Remedy, Rockstar and Square Enix, all of which seemed to have pulled out after Nvidia's beta period ended. Nvidia wouldn't tell us why this is happening now, but it's strange, because Nvidia previously told us it was contacting every publisher ahead of launch to make sure they were OK with their games staying available with the service. Did Activision Blizzard reneg on a deal, or did Nvidia fail to get permission? We're waiting to hear back from Nvidia; Activision Blizzard didn't respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, Nvidia says it hopes to work with Activision Blizzard to bring the games back, but the company confirmed to us that things are pretty cut-and-dried for now -- you shouldn't expect them to magically reappear after a few days (or even a few weeks) thanks to a deal. Nvidia also declined to tell us whether it'd be open to sharing a slice of its subscription fees with publishers, citing the quiet period before its earnings. It's true that Blizzard, at least, has an EULA that specifically prevents users from playing a game on cloud gaming services, but that doesn't seem to explain this move. Activision's EULA doesn't contain anything of the sort, and again, Activision Blizzard didn't seem to have any problem with it during the GeForce Now beta.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Apple Pay accounts for about 5% of global card transactions and is on pace to handle 1-in-10 such payments by 2025, according to recent trend data compiled by Bernstein, a research firm. "There are indeed plenty of reasons to worry that Apple may attempt to disrupt the payments ecosystem," Bernstein analysts, led by Harshita Rawat, wrote in a research note. As iPhone sales plateau, the Cupertino-based company is leaning into its services division, which includes Apple Pay. The unit generated $12.7 billion in revenue in the last three months of 2019, a 17% increase from a year earlier. The company's payments ambitions have the benefit of a massive cash hoard, years of experience in card transactions, and a vast customer base consisting of hundreds of millions of iPhone users.

In the U.S., contactless payments are forecast to increase to $1.5 trillion in 2024, up from $178 billion this year, according to Juniper Research. [...] Apple Pay probably won't pose a challenge to the card giants anytime soon. While the tech company could, in theory, create its own network that runs outside the card systems, Bernstein argues that Apple still needs the card networks, which are ubiquitous and trusted. Visa and MasterCard, meanwhile, are used to dealing with partners (traditionally large card-issuing banks) with the kind of scale that even Apple Pay could muster.

jrepin writes: The KDE community today announced the release of Plasma 5.18. This version of the popular desktop environment is the latest long-term supported release and brings an emoji selector, user feedback capabilities, a global edit mode, and improvements to System Settings, the Discover software manager, widgets, GTK integration and much more. The full Plasma 5.18.0 changelog is available here.

Nikola Motors on Monday unveiled a concept for a new electric pickup truck called the Badger. Engadget reports: Nikola plans to offer the Badger as both a purely battery-electric vehicle and as an electric/fuel-cell hybrid. The company claims the hybrid powertrain model will feature a maximum range of approximately 600 miles, while the battery model will be limited to 300 miles. It also claims the pickup will be able to tow up to 8,000 pounds and accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in approximately 2.9 seconds. Those capabilities, if Nikola can deliver on them, would make the Badger mostly comparable to Tesla's Cybertruck. Since hydrogen fuel stations are few and far between, Nikola says it plans to build 700 hydrogen filling stations in the near future. "The company claims it has the first locations secured, but it won't announce them until later this quarter," adds Engadget.

Nikola will fully detail the Badger at its upcoming Nikola World 2020 event in September, at which point it will start accepting limited reservations as well.

Microsoft is revealing more about its Windows 10X operating system today, which is designed for new dual-screen devices. From a report: The software giant has re-engineered this special variant of Windows 10 to install and update the operating system a lot faster. This will allow Windows 10X to download an OS update and simply switch to it at reboot, all within less than 90 seconds. That's a big difference from what we're used to with Windows 10 today, which involves the OS downloading an update and then applying it and rebooting. This takes minutes even on high-end systems currently, but Microsoft has developed a special state separation in Windows 10X to improve this radically.

Mozilla today released Firefox 73 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Firefox 73 includes a default zoom level setting, a readability backplate option, and a handful of developer features.

U.S. officials say Huawei can covertly access mobile-phone networks around the world through "back doors" designed for use by law enforcement [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; an alternative source was not immediately available.], as Washington tries to persuade allies to exclude the Chinese company from their networks. From a report: Intelligence shows Huawei has had this secret capability for more than a decade, U.S. officials said. Huawei rejected the allegations. The U.S. kept the intelligence highly classified until late last year, when American officials provided details to allies including the U.K. and Germany, according to officials from the three countries. That was a tactical turnabout by the U.S., which in the past had argued that it didn't need to produce hard evidence of the threat it says Huawei poses to nations' security. When telecom-equipment makers build and sell hardware such as switching gear, base stations and antennae to carriers -- who assemble the networks that enable mobile communication and computing -- they are required by law to build into their hardware ways for authorities to access the networks for lawful purposes. They are also required to build equipment in such a way that the manufacturer can't get access without the consent of the network operator. Only law-enforcement officials or authorized officials at each carrier are allowed into these "lawful interception interfaces," generally with the carrier's permission. Such access is governed by laws and protocols specific to each country. U.S. officials say Huawei has built equipment that secretly preserves the manufacturer's ability to access networks through these interfaces without the carriers' knowledge.

Silicon Valley has a long history of unsubtly repackaging jobs that might otherwise be titled technical support, marketing or office management. But beyond the distinctive euphemisms, the thousands of jobs posted each week by tech behemoths, well-heeled startups and those trying to bridge the valley of death in between often hint at more dramatic economic shifts underway. News outlet Protocol rounded up a half dozen of the most intriguing current job openings in tech.: 1. Facebook: People Research Scientist, Leadership.
2. Joby Aviation: Stress Engineer -- Occupant Seats.
3. Oh My Green: Overnight Happiness Ambassador.
4. DoorDash: Dasher Experience Specialist.
5. Mondelez International: Social Listening & Consumer Foresights Lead.

The new effort by the Federal Trade Commission will require all five big technology companies to provide information about the smaller players they've purchased over the past 10 years, including documents for deals that may not have been large enough to warrant deep, closer inspection by government watchdogs at the time. From a report: The records the FTC amasses could ultimately influence its thinking about Silicon Valley and its size, sparking investigations, resulting in tough punishments or prompting the commission to seek further enforcement powers from Congress once it concludes its work. "This initiative will enable the Commission to take a closer look at acquisitions in this important sector, and also to evaluate whether the federal agencies are getting adequate notice of transactions that might harm competition," FTC Chairman Joe Simons said in a statement.

The inquiry announced Tuesday differs from a traditional investigation: Using its so-called 6(b) authority, the FTC can embark on wide-ranging reviews of entire industries without necessarily bringing a law-enforcement action. The agency in the past has invoked such powers to delve deep into drug prices, alcohol ads and gas gouging, experts said, often ushering about major changes in the markets and companies it studies. With big tech, the FTC is particularly interested in the smaller startups purchased by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Such deals typically aren't large enough to require companies under law to report them to agencies like the FTC, which would then review them for competition concerns. The document demands sent to all five tech giants require them to demystify these transactions, explaining their acquisition strategies and the ways they ingested startups -- and the data they amassed -- into their own services.

Students at Lambda School say the program hasn't delivered on its promise. From the report: Bethany Surber was sleeping on friends' couches and living out of her car when she first heard about Lambda School, a buzzy coding bootcamp that promised world-class instructors and a top-tier curriculum. Best of all, it wouldn't cost a cent -- at least not up front. The school encouraged students to defer tuition until they landed a stable job, then pay back a share of their income. Surber and her boyfriend, an instructor at the local community college, quickly started making plans. She'd quit her job as a patient services representative at the hospital in Tacoma, Washington, and they'd move in together while she took classes. Then, when she got a high-paying tech gig, she'd renovate his house, maybe take herself on a vacation. Lambda offered Surber a chance at a life she'd never had -- one of job opportunities, tech money, prestige. She'd watched as companies like Amazon and Microsoft changed the fabric of the Seattle area, bringing massive new developments and six-figure salaries that sucked talent from nearby Tacoma. Now, she finally had a chance to be part of that change.

From the beginning, however, the online class wasn't what Surber or her classmates had expected. The instructors changed week to week and often seemed to have no idea what the students had already covered. The curriculum advertised on the website never fully materialized. The online portal where they were supposed to find their homework assignments rarely matched up with what they were learning. Some of the changes were things Lambda students had requested. (The school prides itself on being incredibly responsive to user feedback.) But the constant state of flux proved difficult for first-time designers. By January 2020, six months into the program, Surber's group was in revolt. The program wasn't worth the money, they wrote in a letter to Lambda's leadership. They felt like test subjects in a lab. Many asked to get out of the income-sharing agreements (ISAs) they'd signed, which stipulated that they had to hand over 17 percent of their income once they started making $50,000 or more until their $30,000 tuition was paid off.

Experts are hailing a British Airways flight as the fastest subsonic New York to London journey. From a report: The Boeing 747-436 reached speeds of 825 mph (1,327 km/h) as it rode a jet stream accelerated by Storm Ciara. The four hours and 56 minutes flight arrived at Heathrow Airport 80 minutes ahead of schedule on Sunday morning. According to Flightradar24, an online flight tracking service, it beat a previous five hours 13 minutes record held by Norwegian. The BBC has been unable to independently verify the record as no complete database of flight times was available. Aviation consultant and former BA pilot Alastair Rosenschein said the aeroplane reached a "phenomenal speed." "The pilot will have sat their aircraft in the core of the jet stream and at this time of year it's quite strong. Turbulence in those jet streams can be quite severe, but you can also find it can be a very smooth journey."

Microsoft will no longer forcibly make Bing the default search engine in Chrome for Office 365 ProPlus customers. A tech community post from Microsoft announced the change. From a report: Microsoft states that people will have the choice to opt-in to have the Microsoft Search in Bing browser extension installed. Microsoft was going to install the Microsoft Search Bing extension onto any system with Office 365 ProPlus that didn't already have Bing set as the default search engine. This would have effectively forced Bing onto Office 365 ProPlus customers. The move set off waves of backlash around the web, which caused Microsoft to change its plans.

Greg Miller, reporting for Washington Post: For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software. The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company's devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages. The decades-long arrangement, among the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, is laid bare in a classified, comprehensive CIA history of the operation obtained by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German public broadcaster, in a joint reporting project. The account identifies the CIA officers who ran the program and the company executives entrusted to execute it. It traces the origin of the venture as well as the internal conflicts that nearly derailed it. It describes how the United States and its allies exploited other nations' gullibility for years, taking their money and stealing their secrets. The operation, known first by the code name "Thesaurus" and later "Rubicon," ranks among the most audacious in CIA history.

A viral myth from 2012 is recirculating on the web right now, claiming NASA said Monday was the only day you can make brooms stand up all by themselves, because of the earth's gravitational pull. Sadly, there's a reasonable explanation for the "standing broom" trick and it has everything to do with balance. CNN reports: [T]he truth is, you can make a broom stand upright today... and tomorrow and the day after... and the day after that. It has nothing to do with the earth's gravitational pull on a certain day. It also has nothing to do with the vernal equinox (another day of the year when this "magic" supposedly happens). Instead, it has everything to do with balance. The center of gravity is low on a broom, and rests directly over the bristles. Which means, if you can get the bristles positioned like a tripod, your broom will stand upright any day of the year.

Researchers have successfully bypassed the eyes with a brain implant that allows rudimentary vision. MIT Technology Review reports: "Alli," says Bernardeta Gomez in her native Spanish, pointing to a large black line running across a white sheet of cardboard propped at arm's length in front of her. "There." It isn't exactly an impressive feat for a 57-year-old woman -- except that Gomez is blind. And she's been that way for over a decade. When she was 42, toxic optic neuropathy destroyed the bundles of nerves that connect Gomez's eyes to her brain, rendering her totally without sight. She's unable even to detect light. But after 16 years of darkness, Gomez was given a six-month window during which she could see a very low-resolution semblance of the world represented by glowing white-yellow dots and shapes. This was possible thanks to a modified pair of glasses, blacked out and fitted with a tiny camera. The contraption is hooked up to a computer that processes a live video feed, turning it into electronic signals. A cable suspended from the ceiling links the system to a port embedded in the back of Gomez's skull that is wired to a 100-electrode implant in the visual cortex in the rear of her brain.

Using this, Gomez identified ceiling lights, letters, basic shapes printed on paper, and people. She even played a simple Pac-Man-like computer game piped directly into her brain. Four days a week for the duration of the experiment, Gomez was led to a lab by her sighted husband and hooked into the system. Gomez's first moment of sight, at the end of 2018, was the culmination of decades of research by Eduardo Fernandez, director of neuroengineering at the University of Miguel Hernandez, in Elche, Spain. His goal: to return sight to as many as possible of the 36 million blind people worldwide who wish to see again. Fernandez's approach is particularly exciting because it bypasses the eye and optical nerves.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Organic solar cells (OSCs) have a few advantages over other designs. They still collect energy from sunlight, but can be made more flexible, transparent (or at least semi-transparent) and can be tuned to only absorb certain wavelengths of light. That potentially makes them perfect for greenhouse roofing -- they can let most light through for the plants, while harvesting enough to offset a decent chunk of the facility's energy needs. "Plants only use some wavelengths of light for photosynthesis, and the idea is to create greenhouses that make energy from that unused light while allowing most of the photosynthetic band of light to pass through," says Brendan O'Connor, corresponding author of the study [from North Carolina State University]. "However, until now it wasn't clear how much energy a greenhouse could capture if it was using these semitransparent, wavelength selective, organic solar cells."

To begin to answer that question, the researchers modeled how much energy would be coming in from a greenhouse with OSCs in the roof, versus the amount of energy it would normally consume. The idea was to find the point where the greenhouse becomes energy neutral -- that is, it generates enough energy from the Sun to completely power itself. For this study, the theoretical greenhouses were modeled on the energy needed to grow tomatoes in three locations with different climates -- Arizona, North Carolina and Wisconsin. As a bonus, the OSCs are effective insulators too, helping maintain the right temperature. The team found that there would be a small hit to the amount of usable light the plants inside would receive, but the benefits would be worth it. In the famously sunny Arizona, for example, a greenhouse with OSCs installed could become energy neutral while blocking just 10 percent of the light the plants need. This shouldn't negatively affect the plants, the team says. In fact, the energy output could be doubled with just a little more light blocked. In North Carolina, sunlight is a little more sparse, so a greenhouse would need to block 20 percent of the photosynthetic light to become energy neutral. Chilly Wisconsin winters would be too much to ever achieve neutrality though, but these greenhouses could still generate almost half of their energy needs. The new study was published in the journal Joule.

The Trump administration on Monday unveiled its $4.8 trillion budget proposal which, among other things, includes plans to increase federal funding for the development of AI and quantum computing. "The technologies are expected to become an important part of national security, and some worry the United States is behind China in their development," reports The New York Times. From the report: The funding [...] would direct more money for A.I. research to the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation. The administration also wants to spend $25 million on what it calls a national "quantum internet," a network of machines designed to make it much harder to intercept digital communication. For several years, technologists have urged the Trump administration to back research on artificial intelligence -- which could affect things as diverse as weapons and transportation -- and quantum computing, a new way to build super-powerful computers. China's government, in particular, has made building these machines a priority, and some national security experts worry that the United States is at risk of falling behind.

The proposed spending follows earlier administration moves. In 2018, President Trump signed a law that earmarked $1.2 billion for quantum research. The Energy Department recently began distributing its portion of that money -- about $625 million -- to research labs in industry, academia and government. [...] The new budget proposal would increase funding for artificial intelligence research at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a research arm of the Defense Department, to $249 million from $50 million, and at the National Science Foundation to $850 million from about $500 million. The administration also vowed to double funding for A.I. and quantum computing research outside the Defense Department by 2022. Big tech companies have invested heavily in A.I. research over the last decade. But many experts have worried that universities and government labs have lost much of their talent to businesses. Under the new funding plan, the National Science Foundation would apply $50 million to help train A.I. experts.