According to The Verge, content moderators for YouTube are being ordered to sign a document acknowledging that performing the job can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). From the report: "I understand the content I will be reviewing may be disturbing," reads the document, which is titled "Acknowledgement" and was distributed to employees using DocuSign. "It is possible that reviewing such content may impact my mental health, and it could even lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I will take full advantage of the weCare program and seek additional mental health services if needed. I will tell my supervisor/or my HR People Adviser if I believe that the work is negatively affecting my mental health."

The PTSD statement comes at the end of the two-page acknowledgment form, and it is surrounded by a thick black border to signify its importance. It may be the most explicit acknowledgment yet from a content moderation company that the job now being done by tens of thousands of people around the world can come with severe mental health consequences. "The wellbeing of our people is a top priority," an Accenture spokeswoman said in an email. "We regularly update the information we give our people to ensure that they have a clear understanding of the work they do -- and of the industry-leading wellness program and comprehensive support services we provide."

Julian Lewis MP responds to criticism over his refusal to use email for constituency correspondence, and says letters, phone calls and surgery appointments are "perfectly adequate." He writes: There is nothing "mysterious" about the fact that I do not use email for constituency correspondence: it is openly stated on the homepage of my -- very extensive -- website, and has been remarked upon in the press from time to time previously. Nor am I in the least "uncontactable," as Bridget Craig (Letters, January 23) knows perfectly well, having corresponded with me by letter without difficulty.

Letters, phone calls, and, where appropriate, surgery appointments are perfectly adequate for people who genuinely need my help, as the many letters of thanks quoted on my website fully confirm. Only mass, manipulative campaigners and obsessive individuals find this a problem -- and so they should! Much of the organized abuse which has caused many MPs to "burn out" and withdraw from public life results from their opening up themselves and their long-suffering staff to interactive online communications by email and social media. Indeed several have confided that they wish they had adopted my unshakable policy right at the outset.

Two New York state senators proposed two bills last week to ban local municipalities and other government entities from using taxpayer money for paying ransomware demands. From a report: The first bill (S7246) was proposed by Republican NY Senator Phil Boyle on January 14. The second bill (S7289) was introduced by Democrat NY Senator David Carlucci, two days later, on January 16. Both bills are under discussion in committee, and is unclear which will move forward to a vote on the Senate floor.

Both S7246 and S7289 have similar texts. The only difference between the two is that S7246 also proposes the creation of a state fund to help local municipalities improve their cyber-security posture. "The Cyber Security Enhancement Fund that will make available grants and financial assistance to villages, towns, and cities with a population of one million or less for the purpose of upgrading the cyber security of their local government," the text of the S746 bill reads.

Shift from radar to GPS should make tracking faster and more accurate, allowing more planes in the air. From a report: Since World War II, air-traffic controllers have used radar to keep track of aircraft. But as of Jan. 1, most planes and helicopters flying in the U.S. must be equipped with transponders that allow their movements to be traced with GPS coordinates. The deadline caused a flurry of upgrades last year as operators who hadn't yet complied with the mandate rushed to equip their aircraft in time. Now, more than 100,000 commercial and general aviation aircraft have the transponders, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, including nearly all commercial aircraft and an estimated 60% of general aviation aircraft that need it.

"If you're flying an antique plane in the middle of Ohio, you don't have to have it," said John Zimmerman, vice president of Sporty's Pilot Shop, an Ohio retailer and flight school. The U.S. controls 29.4 million square miles of airspace, including all of the U.S., large portions of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Gulf of Mexico. The FAA mandate primarily applies to Class A airspace, which is 18,000 feet or more above sea level; Class B airspace, the areas surrounding the nation's busiest airports; Class C airspace, the areas around smaller regional airports; and above 10,000 feet in Class E, the most common airspace. LaGuardia Airport in New York is Class B. Richmond International Airport in Virginia is Class C.

Google's latest design change to its search results received blowback from some who said it blurred the lines between search ads and regular search results. On Friday, Google responded, saying it will be experimenting with different designs, some that will not include the icons that make ads look similar to those organic search results. From a report: As part of a recent redesign to desktop search results, the company made paid links look more like the unpaid search results users see. The word "Ad" in bold text appears next to the advertisements, which typically appear as the first few results in a search and are therefore more likely to be clicked on and generate ad revenue for Google.

Brian Krebs: If you're running a business online, few things can be as disruptive or destructive to your brand as someone stealing your company's domain name and doing whatever they wish with it. Even so, most major Web site owners aren't taking full advantage of the security tools available to protect their domains from being hijacked. Here's the story of one recent victim who was doing almost everything possible to avoid such a situation and still had a key domain stolen by scammers.

Speaking of tax evasions, Kiel, in a separate story at ProPublica this week: In March 2008, as Facebook was speeding toward 100 million users and emerging as the next big tech company, it announced an important hire. Sheryl Sandberg was leaving Google to become Facebook's chief operating officer. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, then 23 years old, told The New York Times that Sandberg would take the young company "to the next level." Based on her time at Google, Sandberg soon decided that one area where Facebook was behind its peers was in its tax dodging. "My experience is that by not having a European center and running everything through the US, it is very costly in terms of taxes," she wrote other executives in an April 2008 email, which hasn't been previously reported. Facebook's head of tax agreed, replying that the company needed to find "a low taxed jurisdiction to park profits." Later that year, Facebook named Dublin as its international headquarters, just as Google had done when Sandberg was there. And just like Google, Facebook concocted an intra-company deal to "park profits" in Ireland, where it would pay a tax rate near zero.

Like its Big Tech peers, Facebook wasn't much afraid of the IRS. But, as it happened, the same year that Facebook started moving profits to Ireland, the IRS launched a team to crack down on deals like that. The effort started aggressively. As we recently reported, the IRS threw everything it had at Microsoft in the largest audit in the agency's history. But shortly after the IRS showed this new ambition, Republicans in Congress, after taking the House in 2010, began forcing cuts to the IRS' budget. Over the years, as Facebook grew into one of the world's largest companies, with 2 billion users, the IRS was shrinking. By the time the IRS finally took on Facebook over its Irish deal a few years later, the agency was in over its head. ProPublica pieced together the story of the Facebook audit from court documents filed by the two sides in their yearslong battle. The picture revealed by the documents provides a crucial window into the IRS' struggles to check large corporations' tax schemes.

theodp writes: ProPublica's Paul KIel has the remarkable tale of the IRS' 12-years-and-counting audit of Microsoft for a 2005 deal involving a Puerto Rico subsidiary (and related "Legal Entities") that was deemed worth nothing or a nominal amount on June 30th, 2005 but valued at $30.4 billion just one day later. Seen as an epic case of tax dodging by one of the largest companies in the world, the IRS opened the biggest audit by dollar amount in the history of the agency. In response to extensive written questions, Microsoft said it "follows the law and has always fully paid the taxes it owes." Kiel writes:Microsoft had shifted at least $39 billion in U.S. profits to Puerto Rico, where the company's tax consultants, KPMG, had persuaded the territory's government to give Microsoft a tax rate of nearly 0%. Microsoft had justified this transfer with a ludicrous-sounding deal: It had sold its most valuable possession -- its intellectual property -- to an 85-person factory it owned in a small Puerto Rican city. Over years of work, the IRS uncovered evidence that it believed laid the scheme bare. In one document, a Microsoft senior executive celebrated the company's "pure tax play." In another, KPMG plotted how to make the company Microsoft created to own the Puerto Rico factory -- and a portion of Microsoft's profits -- seem "real." Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez ruled Microsoft had to turn over disputed KPMG documents because the firm had been promoting a tax shelter. Martinez wrote, "the Court finds itself unable to escape the conclusion that a significant purpose, if not the sole purpose, of Microsoft's transactions was to avoid or evade federal income tax." It's an outcome that "serves the public interest," he wrote, given the difficulty of the IRS' task of discovering underreporting of corporate taxes. Barring an appeal, the ruling resolves the summons enforcement case and means the audit can now be completed by the IRS in the coming months.

pgmrdlm shares a report from ABC News: The results are finally in for the first chocolate chip cookie bake-off in space. While looking more or less normal, the best cookies required two hours of baking time last month up at the International Space Station. It takes far less time on Earth, under 20 minutes. And how do they taste? No one knows. Still sealed in individual baking pouches and packed in their spaceflight container, the cookies remain frozen in a Houston-area lab after splashing down two weeks ago in a SpaceX capsule. They were the first food baked in space from raw ingredients.

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano was the master baker in December, radioing down a description as he baked them one by one in the prototype Zero G Oven. The first cookie -- in the oven for 25 minutes at 300 degrees Fahrenheit (149 degrees Celsius) -- ended up seriously under-baked. He more than doubled the baking time for the next two, and the results were still so-so. The fourth cookie stayed in the oven for two hours, and finally success. Parmitano cranked the oven up to its maximum 325 degrees F (163 degrees C) for the fifth cookie and baked it for 130 minutes. He reported more success. As for aroma, the astronauts could smell the cookies when they removed them from the oven, except for the first.

UPDATE (1/25/2018): NASA has successfully unfrozen Curiosity, which will now live to rove another day.

But here's the original report shared by a reader detailing what the concerns were: NASA reports that Curiosity has suffered a system failure that left the robot unaware of its position and attitude on the red planet. Until it recovers, Curiosity is frozen in place. Mars is far enough away that we can't directly control Curiosity in real-time -- the rover gets batches of commands and then carries them out. That means it needs to have precise awareness of the state of all its joints, as well as environmental details like the location of nearby obstacles and the slope of the ground. This vital information ensures the rover doesn't bump anything with its arm or clip large rocks as it rolls along.

Curiosity stores all this attitude data in memory, but something went wrong during operations several days ago. As the rover was carrying out its orders, it suddenly lost track of its orientation. The attitude data didn't add up, so Curiosity froze in place to avoid damaging itself. While the rover is physically stuck in place, it's still in communication with the team here on Earth. Since everything else is working on the rover, NASA was able to develop a set of instructions that should get the rover moving again. When transmitted, the data will inform Curiosity of its attitude and confirm its current state. This should allow the rover to recover and keep performing its safety checks. However, NASA also hopes to gather data on what caused the issue in the first place. The hope is they can avoid another freeze-up in the future.

DesScorp writes: In an effort to better understand the latest threats to IT systems, antivirus and security company Trend Micro created a fake tech company, complete with AI-generated photos of fake employees, in order to build a honeypot environment that looked like an actual, working tech factory environment. "Malicious hackers are targeting factories and industrial environments with a wide variety of malware and cyberattacks including ransomware, cryptocurrency miners -- and in some cases they're actively looking to shut down or disrupt systems," reports ZDNet. "All of these incidents were spotted by researchers at cybersecurity company Trend Micro who built a honeypot that mimicked the environment of a real factory. The fake factory featured some common cybersecurity vulnerabilities to make it appealing for hackers to discover and target."

The report adds: "To help make the honeypot as convincing as possible, researchers linked the desktops, networks and servers to a false company they called MeTech and created a website detailing how the manufacturer served clients in high-tech sectors including defense and aerospace -- popular targets for hacking. The website even featured images and bios of people who supposedly worked for the false brand, with headshots generated by artificial intelligence in an effort to make the honeypot look as much like a legitimate company as possible." Trend Micro even leaked details of system vulnerabilities in things like Virtual Network Computing (VNC) access to further lure criminals in. The fake company was attacked by everyone from ransomware actors to cryptocurrency miners, to hackers that did "recon" to look for possible industrial espionage data.

Science fiction writer, journalist and longtime Slashdot reader, Cory Doctorow, a.k.a. mouthbeef, writes: My novella "Unauthorized Bread" -- originally published last year in Radicalized from Tor Books -- has just been published on Ars Technica: it's an epic tale of jailbreaking refugees versus the disobedient IoT appliances they're forced to use, and it's being turned into a TV show by The Intercept's parent company and a graphic novel by First Second with help from Jennifer Doyle. Making the story open access was in honor of the book being shortlisted for Canada Reads, Canada's national book award. The story builds on the work I've done with EFF to legalize jailbreaking, including our lawsuit to overturn parts of the DMCA. The story is part of a lineage with a long history of /. interest, starting with my 2002 Salon story 0wnz0red, and it only seemed fitting that I let you know about it!

On Tuesday, Sonos announced that come May 2020, a number of its older products will no longer receive software updates. Naturally, this frustrated many longtime customers, prompting Sonos CEO Patrick Spence to issue a statement to try to clear up the confusion. The Verge reports: "We heard you," is how Spence begins the letter to customers. "We did not get this right from the start." Spence apologizes for any confusion and reiterates that the so-called legacy products will "continue to work as they do today." "Many of you have invested heavily in your Sonos systems, and we intend to honor that investment for as long as possible."

Similarly, Spence pledges that Sonos will deliver bug fixes and security patches to legacy products "for as long as possible" -- without any hard timeline. Most interesting, he says "if we run into something core to the experience that can't be addressed, we'll work to offer an alternative solution and let you know about any changes you'll see in your experience." The letter from Sonos' CEO doesn't retract anything that the company announced earlier this week; Spence is just trying to be as clear as possible about what's happening come May. Spence again confirms that Sonos is planning a way for customers to fork any legacy devices they might own off of their main Sonos system with more modern speakers. (Sonos architected its system so that all devices share the same software. Once one product is no longer eligible for updates, the whole setup stops receiving them. This workaround is designed to avoid that problem.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission has unfairly shut New York state out of a planned $20.4 billion broadband-funding program, US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai last week. ISPs in 48 states are eligible for funding in the FCC rural-broadband program, which will distribute the money over 10 years to providers that expand their networks to new homes and businesses. The FCC said it blocked New York and Alaska from Phase I of the program "because of previously established programs to fund rural broadband in these states." (Phase I will distribute $16 billion of the $20.4 billion.)

The FCC previously established a separate funding program for Alaska with $1.5 billion over 10 years. But Schumer and Gillibrand say New York has only gotten its fair share of nationwide FCC programs, rather than something extra. Schumer and Gillibrand's letter urged Pai to reverse the decision and let New York-based ISPs participate in the fund, which is supposed to provide broadband access to up to 4 million rural homes and businesses nationwide. "The FCC is undermining New York State's due process and penalizing New York for proactively creating a program to address unserved communities across the state," their announcement said.

Atlassian today announced an update to Jira Software, its popular project and issue-tracking tool, that brings a number of major updates to the roadmapping feature it first introduced back in 2018. From a report: Back in 2018, Atlassian also launched its rebuilt version of Jira Software, which took some of its cues from Trello, and today's release builds upon this. "When we launched that new Jira experience back in October 2018, I think we had a really good idea of what we were trying to do with it and where we were taking it," said Jake Brereton, the head of marketing for Jira Software. "And I think if you fast-forward 14 months to where we are today, we just had some really strong validation in a number of areas that are over the target and that that investment we made was worth it."

With this release then, Jira Software's roadmapping tool is getting progress bars that show you the overall status of every roadmap item and that give you a lot more information about the overall state of the project at a glance. Also new here are hierarchy levels that let you unfold the roadmap item to get more in-depth information about the stories and tasks that are part of an item. You can also now map dependencies by simply dragging and dropping items, something that was missing from the first release but that was surely high on the list for many users. Atlassian is also introducing new filters and a number of UI enhancements.

India's largest and the world's highest gamma-ray telescope is set to go live later this year, aiming to provide a new window into distant stars and galaxies in the universe. From a report: The Major Atmospheric Cherenkov Experiment Telescope (MACE) in Hanle, Ladakh, is placed at an altitude of 4,300 metres above sea level. It is the world's second-largest, ground-based gamma-ray telescope with a 21-metre-diameter dish. The largest telescope of the same class is the 28-metre-diameter telescope, which is part of the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) in Namibia. "The installation of the telescope is complete and trial runs are being carried out. It will go live later this year. The first science results from this project will come in a year or two," Nilay Bhatt, a researcher at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), told ThePrint. The project is a collaboration of scientists from BARC, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, along with the Electronics Corporation of India Limited.

DirecTV is racing to move its Spaceway-1 satellite out of the geostationary arc after the 15-year-old satellite suffered a crippling battery malfunction that the company fears could cause it to explode. From a report: DirecTV told the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that it does not have time to deplete the remaining fuel on Spaceway-1 before disposing of it by boosting it 300 kilometers above the geostationary arc, a region home to most of the world's large communications satellites. Spaceway-1 is a Boeing-built High Power 702 model satellite that was designed to last 12 years. Launched in 2005 on a Sea Launch Zenit 3SL rocket, the 6,080-kilogram satellite originally provided high-definition television direct broadcasting services from its orbital slot at 102.8 degrees west longitude. More recently, Spaceway-1 was being used to backup Ka-band capacity over Alaska. In December, an unexplained anomaly caused "significant and irreversible thermal damage" to Spaceway-1's batteries, DirecTV said in a filing dated Jan. 19. Boeing, the filing says, concluded that the batteries are at high risk of bursting if recharged, since the damaged cells can't be isolated.

Facebook, Amazon and Apple spent record amounts on lobbying in 2019, with Mark Zuckerberg's social-media company leading the so-called FAANG companies in outlays aimed at influencing Washington, according to disclosures filed this week. From a report: Facebook shelled out $16.7 million last year, well above its 2018 total of $12.6 million, its disclosures show. Amazon has reported spending $16.1 million in 2019 vs. $14.4 million a year ago, and Apple said it put forth $7.4 million, topping its 2018 outlay of $6.7 million and its 2017 total of $7.2 million. The other two FAANG companies -- Netflix and Alphabet's Google business -- didn't set records with their 2019 lobbying spending. Netflix disclosed shelling out $850,000 last year, up from $800,000 in 2018 but below its 2015 total of $1.3 million. Google spent $11.8 million last year, down sharply from its 2018 total of $21.7 million as the search heavyweight reorganized its lobbying effort. The spending -- which already was on a record pace for some companies after last year's third quarter -- has come as Big Tech increasingly finds itself in lawmakers and regulators' cross hairs.

Users of Google search on desktops may have noticed a slight change over the last week and that change is affecting what they perceive as an ad. This represents a further blurring of the lines between ads and organic sources in search. From a report: Beginning Jan. 13, Google redesigned its desktop search experience to feature favicons, or preferred icons, next to every single entry, including an ad. Always shown at the top of a page of search results, ads receive the same favicon treatment: the word "Ad" appears in bold, yet small black lettering. Site owners can also choose their featured favicon. This redesign first appeared in May on Google search for mobile devices. At the time, Google said the move was prompted by a desire to help users "better understand where the information is coming from and what pages have what [they're] looking for." Bringing that same design to desktops this month adds to the consistency of the search experience, regardless of the device, according to Google. This isn't the first time Google has changed the look of ads in search. "What an ad looks like has gotten more subtle over the years," said Brooke Osmundson, associate director of paid search for NordicClick, a pay-per-click agency. "It's started to blur the lines between what users thought was an ad or wasn't."

Microsoft has published a blog post detailing exactly how it imagines dual-screen apps will run on devices like the Surface Duo and Surface Neo -- two foldable devices unveiled back on October that run Android and Windows 10X, respectively. The Verge reports: By default, an app will occupy a single screen according to Microsoft. Surface Duo or Surface Neo users can then span the app across both displays when they're in double-portrait or double-landscape layout. Microsoft envisions that app developers will experiment with different ways to utilize both screens. Some of these include simply using both screens as an extended canvas, having two pages of a document shown at once, using the second display as a companion or dual view of something, or having a master part of the app on one display and details on the second.

These are "initial app pattern ideas," according to Microsoft, and the company could well extend them based on developer feedback in the coming months. Microsoft is also releasing an Android emulator for the Surface Duo today to allow devs to test mobile apps. A Windows 10X emulator for the Surface Neo will arrive next month at around the same time that Microsoft plans to detail more of its dual-screen plans during a developer webcast. Microsoft's Android emulator will naturally support Android apps, and the Windows 10X version will include support for native Windows APIs to let developers detect hinge positions and optimize their win32 or Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps for these new devices. Microsoft is also proposing new web standards for dual-screen layouts, and is "actively incubating new capabilities that enable web content to provide a great experience on dual-screen devices."