Reuters reports that a group of "prominent internet pioneers" now has a plan to block the $1.1 billion sale of the .org internet domain registry to Ethos Capital.

The group has created their own nonprofit cooperative to offer an alternative: "There needs to be a place on the internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites, and organizations like Wikipedia can provide a broader public benefit," said Katherine Maher, the CEO of Wikipedia parent Wikimedia Foundation, who signed on to be a director of the new nonprofit.

The crowd-sourced research tool Wikipedia is the most visited of the 10 million .org sites registered worldwide...

Hundreds of nonprofits have already objected to the transaction, worried that Ethos will raise registration and renewal prices, cut back on infrastructure and security spending, or make deals to sell sensitive data or allow censorship or surveillance... "What offended me about the Ethos Capital deal and the way it unfolded is that it seems to have completely betrayed this concept of stewardship," said Andrew McLaughlin, who oversaw the transfer of internet governance from the U.S. Commerce Department to ICANN, completed in 2016.

Maher and others said the idea of the new cooperative is not to offer a competing financial bid for .org, which brings in roughly $100 million in revenue from domain sales. Instead, they hope that the unusual new entity, formally a California Consumer Cooperative Corporation, can manage the domain for security and stability and make sure it does not become a tool for censorship. The advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which previously organized a protest over the .org sale that drew in organizations including the YMCA of the United States, Greenpeace, and Consumer Reports, is also supporting the cooperative.

"It's highly inappropriate for it to be turned over to a commercial venture at all, much less one that's going to need to recover $1 billion," said EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn.

Charter Comunications' Spectrum cable service includes a home security service, and -- whoops. No it doesn't.

"Spectrum customers who are also users of the company's home security service are about a month away from being left with a pile of useless equipment that in many cases cost them hundreds of dollars," reports Gizmodo: On February 5, Spectrum will no longer support customers who've purchased its Spectrum Home Security equipment. None of the devices -- the cameras, motion sensors, smart thermostats, and in-home touchscreens -- can be paired with other existing services. In a few weeks, it'll all be worthless junk.

While some of the devices may continue to function on their own, customers will soon no longer be able to access them using their mobile devices, which is sort of the whole point of owning a smart device... Spectrum is hoping to smooth things over with "exclusive offers" from other home security companies, including Ring, which is owned by Amazon...

Spectrum apparently believes it can afford to aggravate these customers, some if not most of whom will have no choice but to continue paying Spectrum for internet service.
Spectrum "inherited" the business after acquiring Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016, Gizmodo reports.

"It's not offering refunds, though... The firmware on the devices doesn't allow switching to other services, either."

Slashdot reader Tekla Perry found some interesting quotes in IEEE Spectrum's "View From the Valley" blog: Apple, Facebook, and Proctor & Gamble executives faced some tough questions about privacy during a CES panel, and pushback from U.S. FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.

In one exchanged, Facebook's representative argued that Apple's model of adding noise to data to keep it anonymous and avoiding sending too much data to the cloud wouldn't work for Facebook. "If you come to Facebook, you want to share," she said, continuing: "I take issue with the idea that the advertising we serve involves surveilling people.

"We don't do surveillance capitalism, that by definition is surreptitious; we work hard to be transparent."
The Facebook representative argued later that "we provide real value to people in terms of the advertising we deliver and we do it in a privacy protected way."

But Apple's senior director of global privacy had already said "I don't think we can ever say we are doing enough." Despite the fact that Apple has "teams" of privacy lawyers as well as privacy engineers who consider every product, "We always have to be pushing the envelope, and figure out how to put the consumer in control of their data."

"Everything that she said about Apple holds for Facebook," replied the Facebook representative. "But the question is what do people expect..."

And at one point, Proctor & Gamble's representative even said "We collect the data to serve people."

"On the surface, who could disagree with quashing the idea of supposed killer robots?" writes Slashdot reader Lasrick.

"Dr. Larry Lewis, who spearheaded the first data-based approach to protecting civilians in conflict, wants us to look a bit closer."

From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: The proponents of a UN ban are in some respects raising a false alarm. I should know. As a senior advisor for the State Department on civilian protection in the Obama administration, I was a member of the US delegation in the UN deliberations on lethal autonomous weapons systems... Country representatives have met every year since 2014 to discuss the future possibility of autonomous systems that could use lethal force. And talk of killer robots aside, several nations have mentioned their interest in using artificial intelligence in weapons to better protect civilians. A so-called smart weapon -- say a ground-launched, sensor-fused munition -- could more precisely and efficiently target enemy fighters and deactivate itself if it does not detect the intended target, thereby reducing the risks inherent in more intensive attacks like a traditional air bombardment.

I've worked for over a decade to help reduce civilian casualties in conflict, an effort sorely needed given the fact that most of those killed in war are civilians. I've looked, in great detail, at the possibility that automation in weapons systems could in fact protect civilians. Analyzing over 1,000 real-world incidents in which civilians were killed, I found that humans make mistakes (no surprise there) and that there are specific ways that AI could be used to help avoid them. There were two general kinds of mistakes: either military personnel missed indicators that civilians were present, or civilians were mistaken as combatants and attacked in that belief. Based on these patterns of harm from real world incidents, artificial intelligence could be used to help avert these mistakes...

Artificial intelligence may make weapons systems and the future of war relatively less risky for civilians than it is today. It is time to talk about that possibility.

In 2018 an associate technology editor at Fast Company's Co.Design wrote an article titled "Why I'm switching from Chrome to Firefox and you should too."

Today shanen shared a similar article from Digital Trends. Their writer announces that after years of experimenting with both browsers, they've also finally switched from Chrome to Mozilla Firefox -- "and you should too." The biggest draw for me was, of course, the fact that Mozilla Firefox can finally go toe-to-toe with Google Chrome on the performance front, and often manages to edge it out as well... Today, in addition to being fast, Firefox is resource-efficient, unlike most of its peers. I don't have to think twice before firing up yet another tab. It's rare that I'm forced to close an existing tab to make room for a new one. On Firefox, my 2015 MacBook Pro's fans don't blast past my noise-canceling headphones, which happened fairly regularly on Chrome as it pushed my laptop's fans to their helicopter-like limits to keep things running. This rare balance of efficiency and performance is the result of the countless under-the-hood upgrades Firefox has rolled out in the last couple of years...

Its Enhanced Tracking Protection framework keeps your identity safe by blocking trackers and cookies that otherwise follow you around the internet and collect sensitive information you probably didn't even know you were giving up. On top of that, Firefox can warn if a website is covertly mining cryptocurrency in the background. Most of these protections kick in by default and you have an exhaustive set of options to customize them the way you want. Firefox also lets you look into just how invasive a website is. It actively updates your personal privacy report so you can check how many trackers it has shut overall and for a specific website...

What really clinched the switch to Mozilla Firefox was the fact that it's the only cross-platform browser that's not running Google's open-source Chromium platform. Microsoft's Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi -- each of these browsers run on Chromium, accelerating Google's dominance over the web even when you're not directly using a Chrome user. Firefox, on the other hand, is powered by Mozilla's in-house Gecko engine that's not dependent on Chromium in any way. It may not seem like as vital of a trait as I make it sound, but it truly is, even though Chromium is open-source. Google oversees a huge chunk of the web, including ads, browser, and search, and this supremacy has allowed the company to pretty much run a monopoly and set its own rules for the open internet...

Mozilla as a company has, despite a rocky journey, often taken bold stances in complex situations. In the Cambridge Analytica aftermath, Mozilla announced it would no longer run Facebook advertisements, cutting off direct marketing to over 2 billion users. In a world of tech companies taking frail, facile shots at protecting user privacy and barely delivering on their commitments, Mozilla is a breath of fresh air and you no longer have to live with any compromises to support it.

The social media team for a Minnesota football team playing against San Francisco's 49ers just incorporated "big tech" into its online trash talk, reports the San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate site. They call the resulting video "incredibly weird." The video in question depicts a time-lapse of [San Francisco's] Levi's stadium with two cartoon characters in the foreground that are basically team helmets with arms and legs. The 49ers character says "Welcome... to Silicon Valley" and we're then suddenly in the Matrix (?). The 49ers character pulls out a space gun that says "Big Tech" on it and starts shooting tech company logos at the Vikings character.

After slow-motion dodging Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google Chrome, Instagram, What's App, and Uber logos a la Neo, the Viking character jump kicks the 49ers character.

The whole thing is as odd as it sounds, and even users on Reddit struggled to understand it.
The Reddit post attracted over 2,100 upvotes and 253 comments (including "Unsportsmanlike conduct, kicking opponent in the head. 15 yards penalty.")

The video has now been viewed 117,162 times over the last 18 hours -- and attracted 27,827 likes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Facebook Pages give public figures, businesses, and other entities a presence on Facebook that isn't tied to an individual profile. The accounts behind those pages are anonymous unless a Page owner opts to make the admins public. You can't see, for example, the names of the people who post to Facebook on WIRED's behalf. But a bug that was live from Thursday evening until Friday morning allowed anyone to easily reveal the accounts running a Page, essentially doxing anyone who posted to one. All software has flaws, and Facebook quickly pushed a fix for this one -- but not before word got around on message boards like 4chan, where people posted screenshots that doxed the accounts behind prominent pages. All it took to exploit the bug was opening a target page and checking the edit history of a post. Facebook mistakenly displayed the account or accounts that made edits to each post, rather than just the edits themselves.

Facebook says the bug was the result of a code update that it pushed Thursday evening. Facebook points out that no information beyond a name and public profile link were available, but that information isn't supposed to appear in the edit history at all. And for people, say, running anti-regime Pages under a repressive government, making even that much information public is plenty alarming.

Insecure storage systems being used by hundreds of hospitals, medical offices and imaging centers are exposing over 1 billion medical images of patients across the world. "Yet despite warnings from security researchers who have spent weeks alerting hospitals and doctors' offices to the problem, many have ignored their warnings and continue to expose their patients' private health information," writes Zack Whittaker from TechCrunch. From the report: "It seems to get worse every day," said Dirk Schrader, who led the research at Germany-based security firm Greenbone Networks, which has been monitoring the number of exposed servers for the past year. The problem is well-documented. Greenbone found 24 million patient exams storing more than 720 million medical images in September, which first unearthed the scale of the problem as reported by ProPublica. Two months later, the number of exposed servers had increased by more than half, to 35 million patient exams, exposing 1.19 billion scans and representing a considerable violation of patient privacy.

A decades-old file format and industry standard known as DICOM was designed to make it easier for medical practitioners to store medical images in a single file and share them with other medical practices. DICOM images can be viewed using any of the free-to-use apps, as would any radiologist. DICOM images are typically stored in a picture archiving and communications system, known as a PACS server, allowing for easy storage and sharing. But many doctors' offices disregard security best practices and connect their PACS server directly to the internet without a password. These unprotected servers not only expose medical imaging but also patient personal health information. Many patient scans include cover sheets baked into the DICOM file, including the patient's name, date of birth and sensitive information about their diagnoses. In some cases, hospitals use a patient's Social Security number to identify patients in these systems.

The source code for acclaimed 2D puzzle platformer VVVVVV has been released by creator Terry Cavanagh to celebrate the title's 10th anniversary. Gamasutra reports: Breaking to news in a blog post, Cavanagh explained the code fro both the desktop and mobile versions of the game can now be grabbed over on Github, and confessed that "even by the standard of self taught indie devs, it's kind of a mess." The desktop code is the version that was ported to C++ by Simon Roth back in 2011 and later updated and maintained by Ethan Lee, while the mobile code is written in Actionscript for Adobe AIR and is based on the original v1.0 flash version of the game.

Microsoft announced that the upcoming Xbox Series X won't launch with exclusive games for at least a year. Instead, any new title playable on the Series X will also be playable on older Xbox One consoles. IGN reports: "As our content comes out over the next year, two years, all of our games, sort of like PC, will play up and down that family of devices," said Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty in a recent interview with MCV. "We want to make sure that if someone invests in Xbox between now and [Series X] that they feel that they made a good investment and that we're committed to them with content."

What this means is that Xbox will still have console exclusives on Xbox and PC, but they won't be limited to just the Series X. Upcoming games for the next-gen Microsoft console will also be playable on the Xbox One, Xbox One S, and Xbox One X. This is somewhat of a departure for next-gen hardware. While there are cross-gen games that are usually released within the first two years of a console launch, there are also next-gene exclusive games that are released to incentivize the early adoption of new hardware. But Microsoft seems to be avoiding that strategy with the Series X.

The New York Times is reporting that Alphabet's chief legal officer, David Drummond, is leaving the internet giant amid an investigation into his relationships with women who worked at the company. From the report: In an email sent to employees at Google and Alphabet, Mr. Drummond, who joined Google in 2002, said he planned to leave Alphabet at the end of the month. He said that it was the "right time for me to make way for the next generation of leaders" in light of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's founders, stepping back from day-to-day roles at the company. His resignation comes more than a year after 20,000 Google employees protested the company's handling of sexual harassment and inappropriate workplace relationships. The protests were a public reckoning for a permissive work culture that had existed since the company's early days -- exemplified by generous exit packages for senior executives even after they were accused of sexual misconduct.

In recent months, Mr. Drummond had come to symbolize how -- despite the company's assertions that it would no longer tolerate such actions -- some powerful men in the technology world accused of inappropriate behavior often weathered the storm, landing new jobs or keeping their old ones. Some employees inside Google were dismayed that Mr. Drummond was not forced to leave after the details of an extramarital relationship he had with a woman who worked for him became public. The concerns about Mr. Drummond's workplace romances took on new life when he recently married another woman from Google's legal department.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Hackers are now getting telecom employees to run software that lets the hackers directly reach into the internal systems of U.S. telecom companies to take over customer cell phone numbers, Motherboard has learned. Multiple sources in and familiar with the SIM swapping community as well as screenshots shared with Motherboard suggest at least AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint have been impacted. The technique uses Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) software. RDP lets a user control a computer over the internet rather than being physically in front of it. It's commonly used for legitimate purposes such as customer support. But scammers also make heavy use of RDP. In an age-old scam, a fraudster will phone an ordinary consumer and tell them their computer is infected with malware. To fix the issue, the victim needs to enable RDP and let the fake customer support representative into their machine. From here, the scammer could do all sorts of things, such as logging into online bank accounts and stealing funds.

This use of RDP is essentially what SIM swappers are now doing. But instead of targeting consumers, they're tricking telecom employees to install or activate RDP software, and then remotely reaching into the company's systems to SIM swap individuals. The process starts with convincing an employee in a telecom company's customer support center to run or install RDP software. The active SIM swapper said they provide an employee with something akin to an employee ID, "and they believe it." Hackers may also convince employees to provide credentials to a RDP service if they already use it. Once RDP is enabled, "They RDP into the store or call center [computer] [...] and mess around on the employees' computers including using tools," said Nicholas Ceraolo, an independent security researcher who first flagged the issue to Motherboard. Motherboard then verified Ceraolo's findings with the active SIM swapper.

U.S. trade regulators said on Friday they will investigate wearable monitoring devices, including those made by Fitbit and Garmin, following allegations of patent violations by rival Koninklijke Philips and its North America unit. Reuters reports: The U.S. International Trade Commission, in a statement, said the probe would also look at devices by made by California-based Ingram Micro as well as China-based Maintek Computer and Inventec Appliances. Netherlands-based Philips and Philips North America LLC, in their complaint, are calling for tariffs or an import ban and allege the other companies have infringed on Philips' patents or otherwise misappropriated its intellectual property. Although the USITC agreed to launch an investigation, it said it "has not yet made any decision on the merits of the case" and would make its determination "at the earliest practicable time." "We believe these claims are without merit and a result of Philips' failure to succeed in the wearables market," Fitbit said in a statement.

In a statement to The Verge, Philips said that the company had attempted to negotiate licensing agreements with Fitbit and Garmin for three years, but talks ultimately broke down. "Philips expects third parties to respect Philips' intellectual property in the same way as Philips respects the intellectual property rights of third parties," a spokesperson said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Indian region of Kashmir has had most Internet service blacked out since August. The government of Narendra Modi says the online blackout is a necessary security measure in the face of growing unrest in the region triggered by a change in Kashmir's status under the Indian constitution. (Kashmir's status within India has been a topic of controversy for decades.) But on Friday, India's highest court rejected the government's rationale, arguing that the blackout violated Indian telecommunications laws. "Freedom of Internet access is a fundamental right," justice N. V. Ramana said. "The Supreme Court ruling won't lead to an immediate restoration of Internet access in Kashmir, however," the report adds. "Instead, India's highest court has given the government a week to revise its policies. The court also required the government to be more transparent about its Internet shutdown orders."

Further reading: Reuters

Dan Rockmore, writing for New Yorker: There are more resonances between programming and poetry than you might think. Computer science is an art form of words and punctuation, thoughtfully placed and goal-oriented, even if not necessarily deployed to evoke surprise or longing. Laid out on a page, every program uses indentations, stanzas, and a distinctive visual hierarchy to convey meaning. In the best cases, a close-reader of code will be rewarded with a sense of awe for the way ideas have been captured in words. Programming has its own sense of minimalist aesthetics, born of the imperative to create software that doesn't take up much space and doesn't take long to execute. Coders seek to express their intentions in the fewest number of commands; William Carlos Williams, with his sparse style and simple, iconic images, would appreciate that. One poet's "road not taken" is one programmer's "if-then-else" statement. Generations of coders have taken their first steps by finding different ways to say "Hello, World." Arguably, you could say the same for poets.

Many programmers have links to poetry -- Ada Lovelace, the acknowledged first programmer ever, was Lord Byron's daughter -- but it's a challenge to fully bridge the gap. Sonnets occupy something of a sweet spot: they're a rich art form (good for poets) with clear rules (good for machines). Ranjit Bhatnagar, an artist and programmer, appreciates both sides. In 2012, he invented Pentametron, an art project that mines the Twittersphere for tweets in iambic pentameter. First, using a pronouncing dictionary created at Carnegie Mellon, he built a program to count syllables and recognize meter. Then, with a separate piece of code to identify rhymes, he started to assemble sonnets. For the first National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo), in 2013, Bhatnagar submitted "I got a alligator for a pet!," a collection of five hundred and four sonnets created with Pentametron. Bhatnagar's code required that each line be an entire tweet, or essentially one complete thought (or at least what counts as a thought on Twitter). It also did its best to abide by strict rules of meter and rhyme.

An anonymous reader shares a report: "When I put in the earpieces and goggles the first time it was crazy - it feels so believable," says Anna Taylor, 32, of her visit to a virtual reality (VR) arcade. "The whole experience of being immersed in a compelling virtual world is incredible." Anna has since visited the east London arcade many times, at first alone and then with others. But despite her enthusiasm for gaming, she won't be buying her own virtual reality headset. "I wouldn't invest in buying virtual reality applications for home," she explains. "It's fine to play more of a basic game when you are playing with other people, [and] because it's brand new there are more layers of excitement. But when you're [playing] on your own, you want the quality you are used to." As a keen gamer, Anna should be part of the core audience for at-home VR entertainment. But her lack of interest is pretty common, and it means that virtual reality headsets have yet to take off.

Many big name adopters have abandoned their VR projects. Google recently halted sales of Daydream, its VR headset, admitting that "there just hasn't been the broad consumer or developer adoption we had hoped." Meanwhile, the BBC has announced it is ending the funding for its VR hub, less than two years after it was founded. VR received very little attention at CES, the annual trade show for consumer electronics, which got underway this week. However, PlayStation did announce it has sold five million VR headsets since launch in 2016.

Uber informed its California customers this week that it would switch to providing estimates as opposed to fixed prices for its rides in response to a new law that makes it harder to qualify its drivers as contractors. From a report: In an email sent out to riders and seen by Reuters the company said the final price would now be calculated at the end of a trip, "based on the actual time and distance traveled." "Due to a new state law, we are making some changes to help ensure that Uber remains a dependable source of flexible work for California drivers," the company said in the email. The change applies to all private rides, while upfront prices will continue to be provided for shared, or pooled rides. The email included a picture displaying an example of a ride request on the Uber app. It showed a $27 to $36 range for an UberX ride, the company's most popular private ride option.

In an open letter published yesterday, more than 50 organizations have asked Google to take action against Android smartphone vendors who ship devices with unremovable pre-installed apps, also known as bloatware. From a report: The letter, signed by 53 organizations, was addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Signees say Android bloatware has a detrimental effect on user privacy. They say many bloatware apps cannot be deleted and leave users exposed to having their data collected by unscrupulous phone vendors and app makers without their knowledge or consent. "These pre-installed apps can have privileged custom permissions that let them operate outside the Android security model," the open letter reads. "This means permissions can be defined by the app - including access to the microphone, camera and location - without triggering the standard Android security prompts. Users are therefore completely in the dark about these serious intrusions." The signees cite research from March 2018 that found that the Android ecosystem of pre-installed apps is a privacy and security mess. According to the research, 91% of all tested pre-installed apps weren't available on the official Google Play Store.

Mozilla has warned Firefox users to update their browser to the latest version after security researchers found a vulnerability that hackers were actively exploiting in "targeted attacks" against users. From a report: The vulnerability, found by Chinese security company Qihoo 360, was found in Firefox's just-in-time compiler. The compiler is tasked with speeding up performance of JavaScript to make websites load faster. But researchers found that the bug could allow malicious JavaScript to run outside of the browser on the host computer. In practical terms, that means an attacker can quietly break into a victim's computer by tricking the victim into accessing a website running malicious JavaScript code. But Qihoo did not say precisely how the bug was exploited, who the attackers were, or who was targeted.

A Microsoft program to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with "no security measures," according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands of potentially sensitive recordings on his personal laptop from his home in Beijing over the two years he worked for the company. From a report: The recordings, both deliberate and accidentally invoked activations of the voice assistant, as well as some Skype phone calls, were simply accessed by Microsoft workers through a web app running in Google's Chrome browser, on their personal laptops, over the Chinese internet, according to the contractor. Workers had no cybersecurity help to protect the data from criminal or state interference, and were even instructed to do the work using new Microsoft accounts all with the same password, for ease of management, the former contractor said. Employee vetting was practically nonexistent, he added.

"There were no security measures, I don't even remember them doing proper KYC [know your customer] on me. I think they just took my Chinese bank account details," he told the Guardian. While the grader began by working in an office, he said the contractor that employed him "after a while allowed me to do it from home in Beijing. I judged British English (because I'm British), so I listened to people who had their Microsoft device set to British English, and I had access to all of this from my home laptop with a simple username and password login." Both username and password were emailed to new contractors in plaintext, he said, with the former following a simple schema and the latter being the same for every employee who joined in any given year.