According to Business Insider, IBM has chosen Slack over rival Microsoft Teams for its more than 350,000 employees. From a report: It's a big test for Slack, but it has been one the pair has been working toward in recent years. Internal teams at IBM reportedly started using the chat app as far back as 2014, and this has grown over time. "Going wall to wall in IBM -- it's basically the maximum scale that there is, so we now know that Slack will work for literally the largest organizations in the world," says Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield in an interview with Business Insider.

While this new rollout makes IBM Slack's biggest customer to date, it has been the company's biggest customer for years according to Slack. "IBM has been Slack's largest customer for several years and has expanded its usage of Slack over that time," reveals an SEC filing from Slack, which appears to downplay the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The popular Edison email app, which is in the top 100 productivity apps on the Apple app store, scrapes users' email inboxes and sells products based off that information to clients in the finance, travel, and e-Commerce sectors. The contents of Edison users' inboxes are of particular interest to companies who can buy the data to make better investment decisions, according to a J.P. Morgan document obtained by Motherboard. On its website Edison says that it does "process" users' emails, but some users did not know that when using the Edison app the company scrapes their inbox for profit. Motherboard has also obtained documentation that provides more specifics about how two other popular apps -- Cleanfox and Slice -- sell products based on users' emails to corporate clients.

Some of the companies listed in the J.P. Morgan document sell data sourced from "personal inboxes," the document adds. A spokesperson for J.P. Morgan Research, the part of the company that created the document, told Motherboard that the research "is intended for institutional clients." That document describes Edison as providing "consumer purchase metrics including brand loyalty, wallet share, purchase preferences, etc." The document adds that the "source" of the data is the "Edison Email App." On the product section of its website, Edison offers "Edison Trends" and "Trends Direct." The company says it can provide "Detailed behavior patterns to improve your customers' experience and business results." Edison is just one of several companies that offer free email apps which then sell anonymized or pseudonymized data derived from users' inboxes. Another company that mines inboxes called Foxintelligence has data that comes from users of the Cleanfox app, which tidies up users' inboxes. Some of the "examples of clients" mentioned in a confidential Foxintelligence presentation include PayPal, consulting giants Bain & Company, and McKinsey & Company.

"A spreadsheet containing data from Rakuten's Slice, an app that scrapes a user's inbox so they can better track packages or get their money back once a product goes down in price, contains the item that an app user bought from a specific brand, what they paid, and an unique identification code for each buyer," adds Motherboard. "An email obtained by Motherboard appeared to show the price for access to Rakuten data for one product category as over $100,000."

A software flaw exposed the personal data of every eligible voter in Israel -- including full names, addresses and identity card numbers for 6.5 million people -- raising concerns about identity theft and electoral manipulation, three weeks before the country's national election. The New York Times reports: The security lapse was tied to a mobile app used by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party to communicate with voters, offering news and information about the March 2 election. Until it was fixed, the flaw made it possible, without advanced technical skills, to view and download the government's entire voter registry, though it was unclear how many people did so. How the breach occurred remains uncertain, but Israel's Privacy Protection Authority, a unit of the Justice Ministry, said it was looking into the matter -- though it stopped short of announcing a full-fledged investigation. The app's maker, in a statement, played down the potential consequences, describing the leak as a "one-off incident that was immediately dealt with" and saying it had since bolstered the site's security. "Ran Bar-Zik, the programmer who revealed the breach, explained that visitors to the Elector app's website could right-click to 'view source,' an action that reveals the code behind a web page," the report adds.

"That page of code included the user names and passwords of site administrators with access to the voter registry, and using those credentials would allow anyone to view and download the information. Mr. Bar-Zik, a software developer for Verizon Media who wrote the Sunday article in Haaretz, said he chose the name and password of the Likud party administrator and logged in."

The flaw was first reported on Sunday by the newspaper Haaretz.

Facebook Workplace co-founder John Egan is launching Kintaba, "a more holistic solution to incident response," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Code failure downtimes, server outages and hack attacks plague engineering teams. Yet the tools for waking up the right employees, assembling a team to fix the problem and doing a post-mortem to assess how to prevent it from happening again can be as chaotic as the crisis itself. Text messages, Slack channels, task managers and Google Docs aren't sufficient for actually learning from mistakes. Alerting systems like PagerDuty focus on the rapid response, but not the educational process in the aftermath. The Kintaba team experienced these pains firsthand while working at Facebook after Egan and Zac Morris' Y Combinator-backed data transfer startup Caffeinated Mind was acqui-hired in 2012. Years later, when they tried to build a blockchain startup and the whole stack was constantly in flames, they longed for a better incident alert tool. So they built one themselves and named it after the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where gold is used to fill in cracked pottery, "which teaches us to embrace the imperfect and to value the repaired," Egan says.

With today's launch, Kintaba offers a clear dashboard where everyone in the company can see what major problems have cropped up, plus who's responding and how. Kintaba's live activity log and collaboration space for responders let them debate and analyze their mitigation moves. It integrates with Slack, and lets team members subscribe to different levels of alerts or search through issues with categorized hashtags. As the fire gets contained, Kintaba provides a rich text editor connected to its dashboard for quickly constructing a post-mortem of what went wrong, why, what fixes were tried, what worked and how to safeguard systems for the future. Its automated scheduling assistant helps teams plan meetings to internalize the post-mortem.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: In May 2019, South Korea's Interior Ministry announced plans to look into switching to the Linux desktop from Windows. It must have liked what it saw. According to the Korean news site Newsis, the South Korean Ministry of Strategy and Planning has announced the government is exploring moving most of its approximately 3.3 million Windows computers to Linux. The reason for this is simple. It's to reduce software licensing costs and the government's reliance on Windows. As Choi Jang-hyuk, the head of the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, said, "We will resolve our dependency on a single company while reducing the budget by introducing an open-source operating system."

How much? South Korean officials said it would cost 780 billion won (about $655 million) to move government PCs from Windows 7 to Windows 10. [...] Windows will still have a role to play for now on South Korean government computers. As the Aju Business Daily, a South Korean business news site, explained: Government officials currently use two physical, air-gapped PCs. One is external for internet use, and the other is internal for intranet tasks. Only the external one will use a Linux-based distro. Eventually, by 2026, most civil servants will use a single Windows-powered laptop. On that system, Windows will continue to be used for internal work, while Linux will be used as a virtual desktop via a Linux-powered cloud server. This looks to eventually end up as a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) model. The report notes that the Ministry of National Defense and National Police Agency are already using the Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS-based Harmonica OS 3.0.

"Meanwhile, the Korean Postal Service division is moving to TMaxOS," reports ZDNet. "The Debian Linux-based South Korean Gooroom Cloud OS is also being used by Defense and the Ministry of Public Administration and Security."

If there were any major sites that took a web traffic pummeling in 2019 Yahoo and Tumblr would top the list. That's according to a new report from SimilarWeb. The report looks back on key web trends in 2019. Among those trends were some pretty bad news for some sites: 1. Total web traffic is on the rise, growing 8% in 2019 to 223 billion visits per month to the top 100 websites worldwide.
2. Mobile is fueling much of that growth. While desktop web traffic decreased 3.3% since 2017, mobile web traffic shot up 30.6% over the same period.
3. But with the mobile web comes shrinking attention spans. The report says that visitors are spending 49 seconds less on websites per visit than they did three years ago.
4. The top 10 sites took 167.5 billion visits per month in 2019 -- a 10.7% increase.
5. Mobile visits claim the majority of visits made to "vice" sites -- those that involve porn and gambling.
6. The U.S. leads the world when it comes to visiting the websites. In 2019, over 300 billion visits per month to sites were made from America.

Software called TextFooler can trick natural-language processing (NLP) systems into misunderstanding text just by replacing certain words in a sentence with synonyms. From a report: In tests, it was able to drop the accuracy of three state-of-the-art NLP systems dramatically. For example, Google's powerful BERT neural net was worse by a factor of five to seven at identifying whether reviews on Yelp were positive or negative. The software, developed by a team at MIT, looks for the words in a sentence that are most important to an NLP classifier and replaces them with a synonym that a human would find natural. For example, changing the sentence "The characters, cast in impossibly contrived situations, are totally estranged from reality" to "The characters, cast in impossibly engineered circumstances, are fully estranged from reality" makes no real difference to how we read it. But the tweaks made an AI interpret the sentences completely differently.

North Korea has vastly expanded its use of the internet in ways that enable its leader, Kim Jong-un, to evade a "maximum pressure" American sanctions campaign and turn to new forms of cybercrime to prop up his government, according to a new study. From a report: The study concludes that since 2017 -- the year President Trump threatened "fire and fury like the world has never seen" against the country -- the North's use of the internet has surged about 300 percent. Nearly half of that traffic now flows through a new connection in Russia, avoiding the North's longtime dependency on a single digital pipeline through China. The surge has a clear purpose, according to the report released Sunday by Recorded Future, a Cambridge, Mass., group known for its deep examinations of how nations use digital weaponry: circumventing financial pressure and sanctions by the West. Over the past three years, the study concluded, North Korea has improved its ability to both steal and "mine" cryptocurrencies, hide its footprints in gaining technology for its nuclear program and cyberoperations, and use the internet for day-to-day control of its government.

"What this tells you is that our entire concept of how to control the North's financial engagement with the world is based on an image of the North that is fixed in the past," said Priscilla Moriuchi, a former National Security Agency analyst who directed the study and has long focused on North Korea and Iran. "They have succeeded at an easy-to-replicate model of how to move large amounts of money around the world, and do it in a way our sanctions do not touch. Our sanctions system needs a radical update," she concluded. The report helps solve the mystery of why the country's economy appears to have survived, and in some sectors actually grown, as the United States and its allies have talked about their success in choking off oil supplies and cracking down on North Korea's skillful production of counterfeit American currency.

minstrelmike shares a report. From the article: The best way to get a feel for what NASA's job was like is to read some of the code, now immortalized in a GitHub repository. Choose a file at random. GROUND_TRACKING_DETERMINATION_PROGRAM.agc, for instance, has 204 lines and more than 85 of them are comments. Each of the lines consists of only one operation, unlike modern languages, which can pack dozens of operations with multiple options into one line. The simplicity becomes obvious .... The Apollo Guidance Computer had only 36k of ROM to hold the compiled version."

You didn't need security, function was the only thing that counted, and you only had to do one thing. A Go app compiled with version 1.7 that only prints "Hello World" is 1.6 megabytes alone, and the Go world was totally thrilled with this news because it was 2.3 megabytes before." And you didn't need to deal with lawyers. There are 22 thousand words in the basic Terms of Service for renting a machine in Amazon's cloud. There is also an entirely different TOS for using the website to rent the machine. Then each individual product often has its own TOS, like this one for Activate. Add them up and they're much longer than the 36 thousand instruction words in the ROM in the Lunar Lander's computer.

The "Suggested" section on the Windows 10 Start Menu used to just promote its own apps, reports MSPowerUser. But for some users (who haven't disable Microsoft's "Suggestions"), that menu is now showing a new kind of ad listing: The listing displays "Still using Firefox? Microsoft Edge is here", to all users of the former -- even with the latter already installed.

The ad provides a link to download the chromium-based browser.

Undoubtedly, the suggestions won't end here. Microsoft is reportedly planning to sprawl similar ads out to Wordpad, to encourage users to download official Office apps.
The Windows Latest blog points out that Microsoft's "Suggestions" can be "permanently disabled with a few tweaks unlike the Chrome ads in Google search results."

It all began when Sacha Baron Cohen shared a picture of Mark Zuckerberg as a Roman Emperor along with some scathing commentary, reports TechCrunch: He tweeted in frustration, "We don't let 1 person control the water for 2.5 billion people. We don't let 1 person control electricity for 2.5 billion people. Why do we let 1 man control the information seen by 2.5 billion people? Facebook needs to be regulated by governments, not ruled by an emperor!

Soon after, Tesla founder Elon Musk responded to the morning diatribe, himself tweeting "#DeleteFacebook it's lame."
Musk's response received 55,400 "Likes", as well as 6,700 retweets and another 1,200 follow-up comments.

Musk also tweeted a photo from inside a massive SpaceX hangar at Boca Chica, announced that small satellite operators using SpaceX "can now book their ride to orbit online," reported that his mother has published a book of life advice, and shared a tweet making fun of WhatsApp.

Earlier this week, searching in Windows 10 was broken, "with a black bar showing where search results should be, even for those who tried to perform a local search of their files." Microsoft issued a fix and blamed the issue on a "third-party networking fiber provider".

But unfortunately, Microsoft's fix isn't working for everyone -- and that's just the beginning. Long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R) shares Forbes' report: Second, and more worryingly, Microsoft's explanation doesn't add up and it has prompted serious questions to be asked about how the operating system works and what personal data it is sharing. Popular Microsoft pundit Woody Leonard led the charge, writing: "If you believe that yesterday's worldwide crash of Windows 10 Search was caused by a bad third-party fiber provider, I have a bridge to sell you."

In an open letter to new Windows head Panos Panay, Susan 'Patch Lady' Bradley was similarly sceptical, noting that today "we all found out that our local search boxes are somehow dependent on some service working at Microsoft." She attacked the company for a lack of transparency and gave it a maximum 'Pinocchio score' for a lack of trust... Similarly, Engadget writer Richard Lawler revealed that users were now trying to hack the Windows 10 registry to disconnect their local file searches from Microsoft servers "and I can't say I blame them after this episode. Microsoft owes users a better explanation than this and should make sure it's impossible for offline features to get taken out when the cloud is having an issue."
In fact, Forbes writes that "the aforementioned Windows 10 registry hack appears to be the only 100% fix for this issue and it also disconnects Bing and Cortana online services from Windows 10 search."

And then on Saturday the Windows Latest blog also noticed that Microsoft's release notes for Windows 10 20H1 Build 19035 reveal that Microsoft is apparently now delaying the roll-out of a widely-anticipated "Optional Updates" option. "It appears that the new Optional updates experience will come out in October/November 2020, not this spring as previously planned."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Among the techniques featured in a 2012 City Pages story on The 10 Most Corrupt Tax Loopholes was pretending to be Irish. Chris Parker wrote, "Most people associate such exhaustive money-laundering with drug cartels. But it's now standard practice at firms like Eli Lilly, Google, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Facebook. The only difference is that when drug dealers do it, the government shows up with Kevlar and automatic weapons instead of a refund check."

The WSJ reports that Facebook and the Internal Revenue Service will square off in a U.S. Tax Court case next week (alt source) that could cost the social-media giant more than $9 billion and shape the government's ability to crack down on companies' efforts to shift profits to low-tax countries, capping off a nine-year dispute over how Facebook structured its international operations. The IRS argues that more of the company's profits should have been taxed at higher rates in the U.S., rather than in the company's Irish subsidiary. Facebook contends that it deserves a refund.

"Facebook Ireland and Facebook's other foreign affiliates — not Facebook U.S. — led the high-risk, and ultimately successful, international effort to sell Facebook ads," the company wrote in its pretrial memo. "Facebook Ireland is entitled to profits from the foreign business it built." Countering that argument, the government quoted Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg as saying that Facebook had to call Ireland its international headquarters for "tax purposes." While this tidbit didn't find its way into the why-Ireland statement Sandberg offered in Facebook's official Dublin HQ press release, it does square with a statement made by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who in a 2005 moment of candor explained, "Corporate tax is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland. It would be disingenuous to say otherwise."

Stunt Pope (Slashdot reader #3,287) writes: This article takes a look at Canada's Broadband Telecom Legislation Review (BTLR) which was commissioned by the federal government in 2018 to map out how Canada's communications and internet laws should be revised.

It posed a set of sweeping recommendations (97 in all) that include imposing new taxes on streaming services, regulating content, and requiring all content creators to obtain a government license.

The article concludes with a call-to-action to sign a petition that has been introduced into the House of Commons requesting that the government categorically reject the entire framework.

"Russia's intelligence services are apparently behind a well-coordinated social media campaign to blame the U.S. for creating and unleashing the Wuhan coronavirus on the world," reports the International Business Times.

That conclusion comes from the Atlantic Council think tank (founded in 1961), which established its Digital Forensic Research Lab in 2016. Eto Buziashvili, an analyst at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, published a report detailing how Russia's state propaganda units are disseminating different versions of conspiracies alleging the coronavirus is a U.S. creation. Western intelligence sources quoted by media said posts blaming the U.S. for attacking China with 2019-nCoV first began appearing on pro-Russia social media outlets such as VK (VKontakte) and Topcor.ru. The fake news has now spread to traditional Russian news media organizations such as Pravda and Izvestia and state propaganda platforms. State-controlled outlets are accusing the U.S. of using bioweapons against China...

A Russian website called Katushya.org says the People's Liberation Army (PLA), China's armed forces, is claiming the coronavirus was artificially produced in U.S. laboratories with the goal of destroying China from within.
"So far, their efforts have gained very little traction," Eto Buziashvili wrote on January 30, while adding that it still "serves as a reminder of Russia's long history of employing anti-U.S. influence operations during public health crises."

But the progressive political magazine Mother Jones argues that pro-Kremlin websites "are just one example of the kinds of outlets trying to capitalize on coronavirus fears. Some YouTube creators have been doing their best to get views and hawk money-making products and services on the backs of coronavirus fears; high-profile right-wing conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones are doing the same. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have tried to step up their efforts to curb misinformation linked to the virus, but hoaxes and conspiracies continue to seep through."

What happened when conservative activist Tom Fitton issued an inaccurate press release last week about Iowa's voter registration rolls? After being debunked by Republican state officials -- and identified as "false" by the Associated Press -- the false claims simply remained on both Facebook and Twitter.

The Associated Press reports: Fitton, founder of Judicial Watch, tweeted a report claiming that eight Iowa counties have more people registered to vote than are actually eligible to vote. [Republican] Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate moved quickly to counter the false information... Pate tweeted a link to the secretary of state's website, for those who wanted to check the numbers. "The county population numbers you claim are way too low. Dallas County's population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is nearly 9,000+ more than you claim, and Johnson County's is nearly 7,000 higher," Pate tweeted.

But the false information circulated Sunday and throughout the day on social media.
One tweet was retweeted over 40,000 times. But according to another report, that was just the beginning... The claim was amplified on Twitter by Fox TV host Sean Hannity, a close confidant of President Donald Trump... Fitton admitted in an interview that he "used older statistics and census numbers to reach his conclusion," the Associated Press reported. Judicial Watch's posts were still on Twitter and Facebook as of Wednesday afternoon.

A Twitter spokesperson said the Judicial Watch tweet was "not in violation of our election integrity policy as it does not suppress voter turnout or mislead people about when, where, or how to vote." Twitter last year banned political advertising on its platform.

Facebook, which controversially allows politicians to lie in political ads, did not provide a response to this news organization's inquiry about the Judicial Watch post. Facebook's director of product management has said the firm does not fact-check political ads for truthfulness and that those ads should be regulated by the federal government, not social media companies.
The Republican Secretary of State said in a statement that the false claims "erode voter confidence in elections."

This week Medium's tech blog OneZero published a 4,500-word look at Google's "methodical, iterative" and massive "living experiment" on its own employees to see if they can nudge them into making healthier choices when they eat: The campaign isn't changing just the food itself, but how it's presented. Google's tactics include limiting portion sizes for meat and desserts and redesigning its premises to lead its "users" to choose water and fruit over soda and M&M's. The goal, says Michiel Bakker, Google's director of global workplace programs, is to make the healthy choice the easy choice...

[T]he small changes make big differences. The plates on the buffet line are only eight to 10 inches wide, versus a standard 12 inches, which effectively limits serving sizes. Vegetables always come first on the line, so by the time you get to the meat or the snickerdoodles and chocolate tarts, there's not much space on your plate. "Spa water," bobbing with strawberries or cucumbers or lemons, is everywhere -- and deliberately more accessible than sugary drinks or even bottled water. A burrito at Google weighed in at about 10 ounces -- 60% smaller than the whopping one-pound nine-ounce log filled with similar ingredients that I picked up at a Chipotle near my home in Washington, D.C....

"Early choice architecture focused specifically on the process," said Ravi Dhar, a professor at Yale and the director of the school's Center for Customer Insights, which partners with Google on food research. "You didn't change the set of alternatives, but you rearranged them." So, if the goal was to get people to eat more vegetables, you would make the salad bar the first thing people see in a cafeteria -- hungry people usually grab the first food they see -- and leave it at that. But it turns out that's not enough. You also have to make the vegetables more abundant and more compelling -- and do the opposite for meat.
For example, moving the snacks table 10 feet further from the coffee machine reduced the likelihood of snacking by as much as 23% for men and 17% for women. But "Since then, Google has remade its 1,450 microkitchens. The unhealthy snacks -- now limited for the most part to M&M's and gummy bears -- are well away from the coffee machine, hidden in opaque canisters or in a drawer.

"At the same time, a big bowl of fresh fruit sits alluringly in the center of the counter nearest the coffee machine..."

"I had an uneasy feeling about the Google commercial," writes Larry Magid in his column for the San Jose Mercury News. "But I couldn't put it into words until I read a blog post from tech strategic adviser Shelly Palmer."

In the post Palmer describes Google's Super Bowl ad as "a three-hanky, heart-tugging spot that has us eavesdropping on an elderly widower hoping that Google Assistant will help him remember the highlights of his life with his late wife." The ad is beautiful, poignant, thoughtful, sentimental, informative and... evil. It may be the most evil advertisement I've ever seen. What Google doesn't tell you about the service is what it will do with all of the extra data this widower has given it: how much better it will be able to target him, who they will be able to "sell" him to, etc., all without any warning. The service is "free" — not because the widower is the "product" that Google is selling, but because this man is a worker in the mines of Google.

Where is the product labeling? Where is the disclaimer that when you tell Google Assistant everything about the best parts of your life, the algorithm enriches your profile and Google becomes more profitable at your expense?

None of this would bother me if the ad had a disclaimer, or if the ad started with a younger relative adjusting the widower's privacy settings in advance of his experience. This was an ad designed to make people who have no idea what Google does for a living (or how Google works) give Google their private data.

I don't remember a non-political television commercial making me this angry — ever. Shame on you, Google, for this invidious attack on the uninitiated. They deserve better from you. We all do!
The ad has now also been viewed over 37 million times on YouTube. The San Jose Mercury News columnist calls it "another indication of the conflicting emotions I have when it comes to what tech companies know about us." I love that I can use Google to bring up important moments in my life, but I hate that this information is being stored in servers and being used to serve me ads, even though I admit that — if I have to look at ads — I prefer those that are relevant to those that I'm completely uninterested in. So, to borrow a word from this commercial, "remember" that free services like Google and Facebook aren't completely free. We pay with our information, our attention and — depending on how the information is used — our privacy.
Ironically, the columnist is CEO of a non-profit internet safety group that "receives financial support from Google, Facebook and other tech companies."

An anonymous reader quotes TechRadar: Intel's Clear Linux distribution looks like it could be the best operating system to run on cheap AMD hardware, with benchmarks showing it outperforms Windows 10 and Ubuntu on a $199 laptop with a budget AMD Ryzen 3200U processor. The Phoronix website ran a series of benchmarks on a super-cheap AMD laptop from Walmart, and found that Intel Clear Linux beat popular Linux distros Fedora and Ubuntu for 78% of the tests.

Not only is it remarkable that a relatively unknown Linux distro is so easily outperforming established operating systems, the fact that Intel is the company behind the distro is particularly ironic. As you can imagine, Clear Linux is optimized for Intel processors, but it seems like it works brilliantly on AMD hardware as well.

An anonymous reader writes: A weird bug of unknown origins has been hitting Windows 7 computers this week, according to multiple reports online. Windows 7 users have been reporting that they are receiving a popup message that reads "You don't have permission to shut down this computer" every time they attempt to shut down or reboot their systems...

Windows 7 reached official end of life (EOL) on January 14, 2020 and is not scheduled to receive new fixes. Last month, Microsoft made an exception to this rule when it provided a fix for a bug that broke wallpaper display for Windows 7 users. Seeing that rebooting or shutting down your computer is a more important OS feature than wallpaper support, Microsoft will most likely need to make a another exception and deliver a second post-EOL update pretty soon.