Google Maps has a new look on iOS and Android today to celebrate turning 15 on February 8. The app icon is all-new -- a less playful icon with a multi-colored location pin, set on a white background -- and many features that were previously hidden within the hamburger menu have moved into front-and-center tabs along the bottom. From a report: There are also several new features that integrate shopping, reservations, and Google Lens, and Google Translate. Google says the Maps app redesign makes it more useful -- to help people better plan their trips -- but as I was briefly walked through each of the new features, I couldn't shake the fact that the app is still doing too much. Instead of trimming the fat, Google is doubling down with more features. Maybe it's time Maps went on a diet. Google has always been stronger at rolling out useful features than making software good-looking. But too many features at the expense of functional design is a big loss for users who have no choice but to accept a poorer experience. I'm not saying the new Google Maps app is bad, I'm just saying it still feels bloated because Google has integrated so many of its other services into it and may never return back to a simple maps app. Simplicity is arguably better. Fun trivia: Google Maps wasn't supposed to be unveiled the day it did, and even then it was going to be in beta -- but a reader guessed the URL correctly and posted it on Slashdot.

Two smartphone makers canceled events at the world's biggest mobile technology showcase in response to the coronavirus outbreak, and organizers reinforced hygiene protocol for people still planning to attend. From a report: Delegates were warned to avoid handshakes and microphones will be changed for different conference speakers in an effort to avoid infections at MWC Barcelona, an annual event that's set to draw around 100,000 people from around the world to the Spanish city from Feb. 24 to 27. This year's conference is supposed to be a launch pad for a renewed push on 5G devices. However, South Korea's LG Electronics said it's withdrawing from exhibiting at the conference because most health experts advised against "needlessly" exposing hundreds of employees to international travel. Shenzhen, China-based ZTE, which makes smartphones and wireless networking equipment, cited difficulties in traveling out of China while virus-containment restrictions are in place, and so it's canceling its MWC press conference, though it will still send a delegation.

samleecole shares a report: On May 1, 2016, in the middle of final exams, a young woman got a text message that would change her life forever. It included a screenshot of a pornographic video posted online, featuring her. Panicking, she quickly tried to justify what she had done. "They said it would only be in Australia," she told her friend, according to court documents. "I only did it for money." The video spread like wildfire. Jane Doe 11 -- one of 22 women who sued porn production company Girls Do Porn in 2016 for coercing them to have sex on video and lying to them about how the videos would be distributed -- learned from the student council president that "everyone was watching it in the library, so much so that the internet essentially crashed."

In October 2019, after Michael Pratt was charged with federal sex trafficking crimes, Pornhub removed Girls Do Porn's official Pornhub channel, as well as pages promoting Girls Do Porn as "top shelf" content and a reason to pay Pornhub a subscription fee. In January, after the ruling in the civil case found Girls Do Porn owed 22 women a total of $13 million, the official GirlsDoPorn.com site was taken offline. But even with the official site shut down and its owners in jail or on the run, the ruling has done little to stop the spread of the videos online. Pornhub claims that victims of nonconsensual porn -- as many of the Girls Do Porn videos are -- can easily request to remove videos from the site, and that those videos can be "fingerprinted." Broadly speaking, video fingerprinting is a method for software to identify, extract, and then summarize characteristic components or metadata of a video, allowing that video to be uniquely identified by its "fingerprint." According to Pornhub, this would automatically prevent future attempts to upload a video that was flagged.

But a Motherboard investigation found that this system can be easily and quickly circumvented with minor editing. Pornhub's current method for removing Girls Do Porn videos and other forms of non-consensual porn not only puts the onus of finding and flagging videos almost entirely on potentially-traumatized victims -- those victims can't even rely on the system to work.

Google, YouTube and Venmo have sent cease-and-desist letters to Clearview AI, a facial recognition app that scrapes images from websites and social media platforms, CBS News has learned. The tech companies join Twitter, which sent a similar letter in January, in trying to block the app from taking pictures from their platforms. From the report: Clearview AI can identify a person by comparing their picture to its database of three billion images from the internet, and the results are 99.6% accurate, CEO Hoan Ton-That told CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett. The app is only available to law enforcement to be used to identify criminals, Ton-That said. "You have to remember that this is only used for investigations after the fact. This is not a 24/7 surveillance system," he said. But YouTube, which is owned by Google, as well as Venmo and Twitter say the company is violating its policies. [...] In addition to demanding that Clearview AI stop scraping content from Twitter, the social media platform demanded that the app delete all data already collected from Twitter, according to an excerpt of the cease-and-desist letter given to CBS News. Update: LinkedIn is joining the party.

Academics from Israel have detailed and demoed a new method for stealing data from air-gapped computers. From a report: The method relies on making small tweaks to an LCD screen's brightness settings. The tweaks are imperceptible to the human eye, but can be detected and extracted from video feeds using algorithmical methods. This article describes this innovative new method of stealing data, but readers should be aware from the start that this attack is not something that regular users should worry about, and are highly unlikely to ever encounter it. Named BRIGHTNESS, the attack was designed for air-gapped setups -- where computers are kept on a separate network with no internet access. Air-gapped computers are often found in government systems that store top-secret documents or enterprise networks dedicated to storing non-public proprietary information.

Netflix announced today that it's beginning to stream video using AV1 on Android. This high-performance, royalty-free codec provides 20% improved compression efficiency over VP9. 9to5Google reports: Developed by the Alliance for Open Media, founding members include Google, Netflix, and Amazon -- all large video providers. Netflix says its "goal is to roll out AV1 on all of our platforms." In starting on mobile, the service cites how "cellular networks can be unreliable" and "limited data plans." That is particularly the case for subscribers abroad, a key growth market. This results in an overall "good fit for AV1's compression efficiency."

At launch, the "Save Data" option -- More tab > App Settings > Cellular Data Usage -- must be set in the Android client. Netflix only specifies "selected titles" as being available to stream over AV1. Moving forward, Netflix's AV1 usage will expand to more use cases as "codec performance improves over time." The service is already working with "device and chipset partners to extend this into hardware."

Motherboard has chosen to publish the app used to tabulate early voting results in Iowa's Democratic Presidential primary. According to editor-in-chief Jason Koebler, "Trust and transparency are core to the U.S. electoral process," and "that's why Motherboard is publishing the app that malfunctioned in Iowa. From the report: The app, called IowaReporter, ultimately won't affect the vote totals of the Iowa caucuses, which are being recounted with paper ballots and other hard documentation. But the app's failure -- and the widespread attention this failure has received -- spurred chaos on election night, followed by speculation, conspiracy theories, and political jockeying. To try to combat that misinformation, it's necessary to offer complete transparency on what the app is, what it can and cannot do, and why it failed.

Motherboard obtained a copy of the app. By decompiling and analyzing it, it's possible to learn more about how the app was built and what might have gone wrong during the Iowa caucus. We reached out to several security researchers and asked them to analyze it for us, and have published an article about their findings. Motherboard waited to publish the app until Shadow, which controls the app's back-end servers and accounts, confirmed that it had been taken offline. [Shadow Inc. CEO Gerard Niemira] stressed that no voter data could be accessed from the app or from any of the databases it used. What we are publishing is an inert app that is no longer being used for an election, that the DNC has stated will not be used in future elections, and that is no longer connected to backend servers or services. You can download the Android .apk file here.

UPDATE 2/6/20: A security firm consulted by ProPublica found that the "IowaReporter" app was also vulnerable to hacking. "The IowaReporterApp was so insecure that vote totals, passwords and other sensitive information could have been intercepted or even changed," reports ProPublica. "Because of a lack of safeguards, transmissions to and from the phone were left largely unprotected."

In Google's recent end-of-the-year 2019 financial report, the company for the first time disclosed the revenues for YouTube and its Google Cloud unit. However, as Tom Foremski writes via ZDNet, "Google removed key metrics that have been included for more than 15 years: How much money it makes per click (Cost-per-Click (CPC)) and the growth of paid clicks." From the report: These monetization metrics are typically found on the second page of every quarterly earnings release from Google -- which underscores their importance in a 10-page document. Yet they are missing from the latest Google 2019 Q4 report with no explanation. Clicks are at the heart of Google's business, so why are these metrics no longer viable? And why hasn't this change been noticed widely? Why didn't the Wall Street analysts ask about these missing numbers in the financial call the same day as the report was released? What is Google hiding?

Google has a rapidly deflating advertising product, sometimes 29% less revenue per click, every quarter, year-on-year, year after year. Take a look at this chart: As long as Google can keep growing the blue line -- growth of paid clicks faster than the red line its ad click deflation -- then it is golden. Every three months Google has to find faster ways of expanding the total number of paid clicks by as much as 66%. How is this a sustainable business model? There is an upper limit to how much more expansion in paid links can be found especially with the shift to mobile platforms and the constraints of the display. And what does this say about the effectiveness of Google's ads? They aren't very good and their value is declining at an astounding and unstoppable pace.

Microsoft's built-in Windows search went down for more than three hours today due to access and latency issues "with multiple Microsoft 365 services." While the issues have since been resolved, it comes just days after Microsoft's Teams service experienced a widespread outage after the company forgot to renew a SSL certificate. The Verge reports: Windows search is built into Microsoft's latest Windows 10 operating system, and it started presenting blank search results for apps or any other search queries at around 8AM ET today. Windows search uses the Bing backend to search for results across the web, and it appears that this was the source of the issue. Microsoft blames a "third-party networking fiber provider" for experiencing a network disruption resulting in multiple Microsoft 365 services issues. "This issue has been resolved for most users and in some cases you may need to reboot your machine," says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge.

Jigsaw, a technology incubator at Google, has released an experimental platform called Assembler to help journalists and front-line fact-checkers quickly verify images. MIT Technology Review reports: Assembler combines several existing techniques in academia for detecting common manipulation techniques, including changing image brightness and pasting copied pixels elsewhere to cover up something while retaining the same visual texture. It also includes a detector that spots deepfakes of the type created using StyleGAN, an algorithm that can generate realistic imaginary faces. These detection techniques feed into a master model that tells users how likely it is that an image has been manipulated. "Assembler is a good step in fighting manipulated media -- but it doesn't cover many other existing manipulation techniques, including those used for video, which the team will need to add and update as the ecosystem keeps evolving," the report notes. "It also still exists as a separate platform from the channels where doctored images are usually distributed. Experts have recommended that tech giants like Facebook and Google incorporate these types of detection features directly into their platforms. That way such checks can be performed in close to real time as photos and videos are uploaded and shared."

Nearly two years after one of Uber's self-driving cars was involved in a fatal crash in Arizona, the ride-hailing firm has been allowed to test its autonomous vehicles on public roads in California. "Receiving a permit in California -- which has granted permits to 65 other transport firms -- is the latest step in Uber's revival of the program," reports the BBC. From the report: California allows companies to test self-driving technology with a backup driver in the car. Before the fatal crash, Uber's self-driving cars were being tested in four locations in the United States -- Phoenix, Toronto, Pittsburgh and San Francisco. Uber said it is considering using San Francisco, where the company is based, again. It did not give a timeline for when it will resume testing. California has granted permits to 66 companies in total to test autonomous vehicles, but Uber is the only one that has been involved in a fatal crash.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With no fanfare or public announcement, Apple has launched a mobile version of its Web-based interface for accessing iCloud services like Notes, Reminders, and Photos. Located at icloud.com just like the desktop version, this mobile site works on the default browsers for both iOS and Android devices (with some caveats for the latter) and has a more limited scope than users already saw on the desktop Web. That smaller scope starts with the Web apps that are available: the mobile version only offers Photos, Notes, Find iPhone, and Reminders. By contrast, the desktop version also offers Mail, Contacts, Calendar, iCloud Drive, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and Find Friends. It's possible Apple will add more apps to mobile Web over time.

The first couple of months of each year, Microsoft typically reorgs something. This time around, it's the Experiences and Devices unit under Executive Vice President Rajesh Jha where a lot of the changes are happening. From a report: The biggest and boldest move in the February 5 reorg being announced internally today involves the Windows Experience (client) and the hardware teams. Microsoft is going to roll up these two businesses into a single team, known as Windows + Devices -- reporting to Chief Product Officer Panos Panay, I've confirmed with a person familiar with the changes who asked not to be named. The move takes effect on February 25. Corporate Vice President Joe Belfiore, who currently heads the Windows Experience business under Jha, is going to move over to the Office side of the house. Belfiore and Ales Holecek will be leading the Office Experience Group (OXO) team as a product/engineering team. Belfiore will continue to lead EPIC (Essential Products Inclusive Community), which includes the mobile apps on Android and iOS and Microsoft News.

An anonymous reader writes: Google today announced that Chrome's ad blocker is expanding to video on August 5, 2020. As with previous ad blocker rollouts, the date is likely not tied to a specific Chrome version -- Google will be expanding the scope of its browser's ad blocker server-side. YouTube and other websites with video content will have to review their ads to make sure they are compliant. The Coalition for Better Ads today announced a new set of standards for ads that show during video content, based on research from 45,000 consumers worldwide. There are many different types of ads that can run before, during, or after a video, but the Coalition is banning just three for videos less than 8 minutes long: mid-roll ads, pre-roll ads, and large display ads.

Scientists are rapidly posting findings about the new coronavirus outbreak online, accelerating the speed of scientific discoveries -- and of misinformation. From a report: Last Friday morning, after a week in which the coronavirus outbreak had been declared a global public health emergency, a group of scientists from India posted a paper online. A handful of genetic sequences in the new coronavirus matched those found in HIV, they reported, suggesting that this "uncanny similarity" meant the two diseases were linked. A scientist in India blasted out the provocative finding to his more than 200,000 Twitter followers: "They hint at the possibility that this Chinese virus was designed ['not fortuitous']. Scary if true." A Harvard researcher with tens of thousands of followers called it "very intriguing." The official-looking, highly technical paper whipped dozens of onlookers into a frenzy, declaring on Twitter and at least one blog that it showed the virus was "man-made" and "not natural" and "prob. not random." But that day and throughout the weekend, an army of scientists also tore apart its claims and pointed out there was no proof the matches were anything but a meaningless coincidence.

For the second time in as many weeks, a segment of social media was tfreaking out over a coronavirus study that hadn't been reviewed by experts or published in a journal. It was a "preprint," or a preliminary draft, published on BioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive"), a free repository that hosts thousands of unvetted papers about the biological sciences. Preprint servers bypass the long, arduous timelines of traditional, peer-reviewed scientific publishing, and can lead to lightning-speed information sharing during outbreaks like this one. But the coronavirus is also bringing to light the pitfalls of this new system for the first time, as everyone from bad actors to naive ones grasp for new information in a panic-driven climate. The "uncanny" paper was withdrawn by its authors on Sunday, putting an end to an undeniably messy situation that spread misinformation about a little-understood virus that has so far sickened upward of 20,600 people and killed more than 420, the vast majority near the outbreak's epicenter in Wuhan, China.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: New research led by Wen-Sung Chung and Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland is shedding new light on the complexity of squid brains. Using MRI scanning to examine the brain of the of the reef squid Sepioteuthis lessoniana, the researchers have produced a new map of neural connections that improves our understanding of their behavior. The cephalopods are widely recognized as the most intelligent of mollusks, but how do they rate when they are competing against something other than clams? Cephalopods show all sorts of complex behavior, like being able to recognize patterns, solve problems, communicate through signals, and camouflage themselves in different textures and colors, despite being colorblind.

But just how complex are these neural circuits? The answer may lie in the maps made by the new MRI scans. "This the first time modern technology has been used to explore the brain of this amazing animal, and we proposed 145 new connections and pathways, more than 60 percent of which are linked to the vision and motor systems," says Chung. "The modern cephalopods, a group including octopus, cuttlefish, and squid, have famously complex brains, approaching that of a dog and surpassing mice and rats, at least in neuronal number. For example, some cephalopods have more than 500 million neurons, compared to 200 million for a rat and 20,000 for a normal mollusk." "Chung says that this complexity may be an example of convergent evolution, where very distantly related animals, like dogs and squids, evolve similar solutions," the report adds. "It's why the eye of the squid is remarkably similar to that of the human eye, even though the two parted ways in evolutionary terms about 560 million years ago."

The research was published in the journal iScience.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: The University of Rochester research lab that recently used lasers to create unsinkable metallic structures has now demonstrated how the same technology could be used to create highly efficient solar power generators. In a paper published in Light: Science & Applications, the lab of Chunlei Guo, professor of optics also affiliated with Physics and the Material Sciences Program, describes using powerful femto-second laser pulses to etch metal surfaces with nanoscale structures that selectively absorb light only at the solar wavelengths, but not elsewhere.

A regular metal surface is shiny and highly reflective. Years ago, the Guo lab developed a black metal technology that turned shiny metals pitch black. "But to make a perfect solar absorber," Guo says, "We need more than a black metal and the result is this selective absorber." This surface not only enhances the energy absorption from sunlight, but also reduces heat dissipation at other wavelengths, in effect, "making a perfect metallic solar absorber for the first time," Guo says. "We also demonstrate solar energy harnessing with a thermal electric generator device." "This will be useful for any thermal solar energy absorber or harvesting device," particularly in places with abundant sunlight, he adds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 80 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. The release includes autoupgrading mixed content to HTTPS, SameSite cookie changes, quieter permission UI for notifications, and more developer features. This release thus beefs up security for the world's most popular browser and begins cracking down on cross-site cookies. You can update to the latest version now using Chrome's built-in updater or download it directly from google.com/chrome. With over 1 billion users, Chrome is both a browser and a major platform that web developers must consider. In fact, with Chrome's regular additions and changes, developers often have to stay on top of everything available -- as well as what has been deprecated or removed. Among other things, Chrome 80 has started deprecating FTP support by disabling it by default for non-enterprise clients.

On Tuesday, Twitter announced changes to its synthetic and manipulated media policy, which it defines as any photo, audio, or video that's been "significantly altered or fabricated" to mislead people or change the original meaning of the content. Under the new rules, Twitter will remove this kind of media if the company finds it likely to cause serious harm -- such as content that threatens people's physical safety or could cause "widespread civil unrest." If Twitter doesn't think manipulated media posts are likely to cause harm, it may still label the tweets as containing manipulated media, warn users who try to share them, and deprioritize the content in users' feeds. The changes will go into effect on March 5. Recode reports: Twitter is the latest social media company, along with Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit, to restrict increasingly controversial "deepfakes" and other kinds of manipulated media in recent months on their platforms. [...] One of the most famous examples so far is from May, when a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went viral on social media platforms, including Twitter, that slowed down her speech to make her seem inebriated. Similarly, a clip of former Vice President Joe Biden went viral online that was misleadingly edited to make it falsely appear he was making racist remarks.

Under the new rules, Twitter says in the future, it would at minimum label the videos like the ones of Pelosi and Biden as manipulated, since their speech was deceptively altered. Beyond the Pelosi example, political deepfakes have become a concern for US lawmakers and other government officials, who warn that they could be used by malicious actors to undermine US democracy and influence elections. Twitter and other companies' increasingly tougher rules on the topic are in part a response to these fears, particularly ahead of the 2020 presidential elections.

Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has opened two separate GDPR investigations into Google and Tinder. Engadget reports: In the case of [Tinder], the agency says it will examine how the dating app handles people's data and whether it's been transparent about the process. The DPC says it will also look into whether Tinder has been properly meeting data requests from users. Under GDPR, Europeans have several options when it comes to how companies handle their data. They can, for instance, ask an app or service to delete their data. The law also allows people to request copies of their personal information. The investigation into Tinder comes after the Norwegian Consumer Council published a report that accused Tinder, alongside several other dating apps, for irresponsibly spreading sensitive user data. Notably, the DPC says it's opening its investigation into Tinder after it received complaints from people in both Ireland and other parts of the European Union.

As for Google, the DPC will investigate how the search giant handles and processes location data. Numerous European consumer rights groups started asking the agency to investigate Google shortly after the EU enacted GDPR. Both Tinder and Google have said they'll cooperate with the probes. CNET notes Google and Tinder could face fines of up to four percent of their total annual revenue in the previous year, if the two companies haven't been fully compliant with GDPR.