Mozilla today launched Firefox 72 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Firefox 72 includes fingerprinting scripts blocked by default, less annoying notifications, and Picture-in-Picture video on macOS and Linux. There isn't too much else here, as Mozilla has now transitioned Firefox releases to a four-week cadence (from six to eight weeks).

SpaceX launched its third batch of internet-beaming satellites Monday evening, kicking off what is expected to be a remarkably busy year for the company as it readies its new broadband business. From a report: About 60 small satellites were fired into orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff occurred at 9:19 pm ET from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. This batch of satellites will join more than 100 others that SpaceX deployed last year. And -- if all goes as planned -- there will be 23 more launches by the end of this year, growing SpaceX's Starlink constellation to more than 1,500 satellites. Starlink is already the largest telecom satellite constellation in existence, and SpaceX has regulatory approval to launch a total of more than 10,000 satellites. The company is also seeking approval to deploy another 30,000 on top of that. The goal is to offer affordable internet service to parts of the United States and Canada by mid-2020, and eventually to beam cheap high-speed broadband across the globe. When Starlink service launches, SpaceX says it plans to go directly to market. That means the space-based internet service will compete directly with ground-based providers that dominate the industry with services like U-Verse, Fios and others.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Futurism: To protect its hosts, Airbnb is now using an AI-powered tool to scan the internet for clues that a guest might not be a reliable customer. According to patent documents reviewed by the Evening Standard, the tool takes into account everything from a user's criminal record to their social media posts to rate their likelihood of exhibiting "untrustworthy" traits -- including narcissism, Machiavellianism, and even psychopathy. The background check tool is the work of Trooly, a startup Airbnb acquired in 2017. When the Evening Standard asked Airbnb to comment on the extent to which it uses Trooly's tool, it declined. However, Airbnb's website does note the company's use of AI to rate potential guests: "Every Airbnb reservation is scored for risk before it's confirmed. We use predictive analytics and machine learning to instantly evaluate hundreds of signals that help us flag and investigate suspicious activity before it happens."

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Only in the past five years has it become possible to raise thousands of healthy fish so far from the shoreline without contaminating millions of gallons of fresh water. A technology called recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) now allows indoor aquaculture farms to recycle up to 99 percent of the water they use. And the newest generation of these systems will help one biotech company bring its unusual fish to U.S. customers for the first time this year.

For AquaBounty Technologies [...] this technology couldn't have come at a better time. The company has for decades tried to introduce a transgenic salmon it sells under the brand name AquAdvantage to the U.S. market. In this quest, AquaBounty has lost between $100 million and $115 million (so far). In the final months of 2020, the company will harvest its first salmon raised in the United States and intended for sale there. Thanks to modifications that involved splicing genetic material into its salmon from two other species of fish, these salmon grow twice as fast and need 25 percent less food to reach the same weight as salmon raised on other fish farms. The report says Costco, Target, Trader Joe's, Walmart, Whole Foods, and roughly 80 other North American grocery store chains don't plan to carry it, but that could certainly change. "As of December, AquaBounty was unable to name any restaurants or stores where customers would be able to buy its salmon," the report adds.

sciencehabit writes: Millions of years from now, advanced humans -- or perhaps visiting aliens -- may dig up the remnants of today's civilizations. What are they likely to find, and how will they interpret our relationship with the creatures around us? A new study reveals that archaeologists will need to rely on bones, not any of our former technology. "If you read a lot of postapocalyptic science fiction, one of the things that disappears in almost all cases is written records, computer records, things like that," says one of the scientists. "There are computer records and code from decades ago that modern computers can't recognize because it's so far out of alignment. So imagine two million years from now... So what are we left with? It's whatever is buried in the ground."

And what will that be? Well, lots of humans, cows, and chickens. And, of course, tons of cats and dogs. "Of all the animals, dogs and cats are more likely to be buried in a manner similar to people," says another scientist. "There are pet cemeteries that are set up similar to human memorial parks. So if anything like that is stumbled upon, that's going to say something different than a pit that people threw a bunch of pigs into randomly. I think it's going to be obvious that we felt differently about dogs and cats versus pigs and cows and chickens."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: At CES 2020, Facebook plans to show off an innovative new concept for the company: privacy. It will have a booth at the tech show for giving demos on its updated Privacy Checkup tool, which it announced Monday morning. This is the first significant update to Facebook's Privacy Checkup tool since it was created in 2014, four years before its major Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal broke. Following the scandal, in which an app harvested data from up to 87 million people without their knowledge, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress on how the social network planned to protect people's privacy.

Since then, Facebook has made a public push on privacy, opening pop-up booths in cities around the world to teach people about their privacy settings on the social network. At CES, Facebook will be bringing that experience to Las Vegas. The update to Privacy Checkup expands its categories from three to eight different groups, and four topics: Who can see what you share; How to keep your account secure; How people can find you on Facebook; and Your data settings on Facebook. The new tool gives people one central tab where they can change settings such as reviewing who can see your profile and send you friend requests, enabling two-factor authentication and reviewing permissions settings for third-party apps. Facebook said it introduced these categories based on issues that its users were most concerned about. The Data Settings category, for example, provides a convenient location where people can revoke permissions and access for apps and websites for which they've used Facebook to log in. But these updates don't address data privacy issues that lawmakers have been raising about Facebook for years. "The core of lawmakers' privacy frustrations about Facebook aren't about who can send you friend requests; they're about data brokers and advertisers who can target entire groups of people using the social network," the report adds. "Many of the privacy concerns surrounding Facebook are about privacy from the social network, not on it, which is what the Privacy Checkup tool is mainly addressing."

"We need to educate the public more on the different types of privacy concerns," said Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who studies social media. "There's user interface issues, like how I'm being tagged, and greater privacy concerns that only regulators can get insight to, like how your profile is used to algorithmically shift what you see in your newsfeed."

YouTube said Monday it is rolling out new protections for children viewing videos on its site (source may be paywalled; alternative source), an effort to satisfy federal regulators who last year fined the company tens of millions of dollars over alleged privacy violations. The Washington Post reports: The changes, which include limitations on data collection and advertising, are a step toward addressing concerns from advocacy groups who have complained the Google-owned company has run afoul of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which forbids tracking and targeting users 12 and under. As part of those changes, YouTube said it will seek to better distinguish which content is intended primarily for children, relying on a combination of self-identification from creators and software. That content cannot run with personalized advertisements, under the new rules that YouTube said it is instituting globally starting Monday.

YouTube said it will assume any viewer of child-friendly content is underage, treating that data as subject to COPPA rules. It has been limiting other features too, such as comments on children's videos and live chats. [...] Some YouTube content creators, however, said the changes were likely to crater their advertising business, because personalized ads tend to sell for more than contextual ads. Eyal Baumel, CEO of management company Yoola, said he is encouraging clients with more child-friendly videos to find new sources of revenue to cope with any dip in sales. "The concern is that a majority of revenue will disappear," he said. "Creators need to start thinking about selling books, selling merchandise." "A lot of creators are telling me they may quit if it's as bad as they fear," said Baumel. "There's just a lot of confusion about how this will play out, particularly among the smallest channels."

Lucas123 writes: There is a growing movement among fintech companies, banks, healthcare services, universities and others toward disintermediating the control of online user identities in favor of supporting end-user controlled decentralized digital wallets based on P2P blockchain. Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is a term used to describe the digital movement that recognizes an individual should own and control their identity without intervening administrative authorities. The wallets would carry encryption keys provided by third parties and could be used to digitally sign transactions or provide access to verifying information, everything from bank-issued credit lines to diplomas -- all of which are controlled by the user through public key infrastructure (PKI). The blockchain ledger and PKI technology is hidden behind user-friendly mobile applications. Currently, there are more proof-of-concept projects than production systems involving a small number of organizations. The pilots, being trialed in government, financial services, insurance, healthcare, energy and manufacturing, don't yet amount to an entire ecosystem, but they will grow over the next few years, according to Gartner.

On January 6, 2001, Bill Gates and The Rock debuted the original Xbox, calling it "the most electrifying" games console on the market. GameRevolution reports: The surreal image of The Rock standing alongside Gates, telling the billionaire "it doesn't matter what you think, Bill," was certainly a unique way to debut the console. We're glad Microsoft opted for this unusual route, though, because if it hadn't we wouldn't have video footage of The Rock discussing symmetric multiprocessing.

The original Xbox released on November 15, 2001. [It debuted with a 32-bit 733 MHz, custom Intel Pentium III Coppermine-based processor, 133 MHz 64-bit GTL+ front-side bus (FSB) with a 1.06 GB/s bandwidth, and 64 MB unified DDR SDRAM, with a 6.4 GB/s bandwidth, of which 1.06 GB/s is used by the CPU and 5.34 GB/s is shared by the rest of the system, according to Wikipedia.] Its high manufacturing cost would wind up costing Microsoft a lot of money, with the company losing $4 billion on the console. It would also fall short of its predicted 50 million sales, with Microsoft only shifting 24 million units by the end of its life cycle. For comparison, the Xbox One X, which debuted on November 7, 2017, featured a SoC which incorporates a 2.3 GHz octa-core CPU, and Radeon GPU with 40 Compute Units clocked at 1172 MHz, generating 6 teraflops of graphical computing performance. It also includes 12GB of GDDR5 RAM with 9 GB allocated to games. Microsoft's next-generation Series X console is expected to deliver "four times the processing power of Xbox One X," although technical specs have yet to be announced.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from StarTribune: Kris Folland grows corn, wheat and soybeans and raises cattle on 2,000 acres near Halma in the northwest corner of Minnesota, so his operation is far from small. But when he last bought a new tractor, he opted for an old one -- a 1979 John Deere 4440. He retrofitted it with automatic steering guided by satellite, and he and his kids can use the tractor to feed cows, plant fields and run a grain auger. The best thing? The tractor cost $18,000, compared to upward of $150,000 for a new tractor. And Folland doesn't need a computer to repair it.

Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days -- and it's not because they're antiques. Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren't as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software. "It's a trend that's been building. It's been interesting in the last couple years, which have been difficult for ag, to see the trend accelerate," said Greg Peterson, the founder of Machinery Pete, a farm equipment data company in Rochester. [...] There are some good things about the software in newer machines, said Peterson. The dealer will get a warning if something is about to break and can contact the farmer ahead of time to nip the problem in the bud. But if something does break, the farmer is powerless, stuck in the field waiting for a service truck from the dealership to come out to their farm and charge up to $150 per hour for labor.

At CES on Monday, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda said the Japanese auto giant will transform a 175-acre site of a former car factory into a "prototype city of the future" where it can test autonomous vehicles, innovative street design, smart home technology, robotics, and new mobility products on real people who would live there full-time. The Verge reports: The site, which is located at the base of Mount Fuji, will be designed by famed Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. It will house up to 2,000 people, including Toyota employees and their families, and it will be powered by the company's hydrogen fuel cell technology. [Toyoda said] that the company expects to break ground at the end of 2021.

Toyota is calling the site "Woven City," a reference to weaving together three different types of streets or pathways, each for a specific type of user. One street would be for faster vehicles only. The second would be a mix of lower-speed personal mobility vehicles, like bikes and scooters, as well as pedestrians. And the third would be a park-like promenade for pedestrians only. "These three street types weave together to form an organic grid pattern to help accelerate the testing of autonomy," the company says. "This is my personal 'Field of Dream,'" Toyoda added. "'If you build it, they will come.'" The plan is reminiscent of Sidewalk Labs' efforts to build a digital city on Toronto's Eastern waterfront. However, it's almost certainly going to face less pushback from the local government, as Toyota is a Japanese company and collects considerably less data than Sidewalk Labs' parent company Alphabet, which has been caught in a battle over information privacy.

UPDATE 1/6/20: The story has been updated with additional information.

At CES 2020, Samsung debuted "The Sero" (translates to vertical in Korean) -- a 4K TV that automatically rotates on its stand so you can more easily watch vertical content that's been recorded on phones or uploaded to apps like TikTok or Instagram. Pocket-lint reports: The new TV is a relatively modest 43-inches in size, but it's not aimed at those who might have the space and money to go and grab a 65-incher (yes, you've guessed it, it's aimed at the "mobile generation" according to Samsung). As well as being 4K, while there are 60W speakers for bouncy audio. The Sero is going to launch this year although it's already available in South Korea.

Content casts from your Samsung Galaxy device but it'll work with other phones and tablets, too and will have Apple's AirPlay so you can use it with iOS. The TV flips on demand depending on the orientation of your phone. Samsung also says it'll be available on wheels so you can move it from room-to-room. Variety reports that Sero will launch in several global markets. Samsung didn't announce pricing, but in Korea, the Sero TV has sold for around $1,600.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On the heels of the killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani by a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper strike on January 2, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned of potential cyberattacks against critical infrastructure by Iran. That warning probably didn't apply to the website of the Federal Deposit Library Program, operated by the U.S. Government Printing Office -- which was defaced on January 4 with a pro-Iranian message and an image of a bloodied President Donald Trump being punched by an Iranian fist.

The FDLP website is no stranger to defacement attacks. As a brief analysis of the attack by a security researcher with the Twitter username @sshell_ noted, the site has been defaced twice in the last 10 years -- most recently in 2014, when it was replaced with an electronic dance music video featuring a dancing cat. Based on a fingerprint of the site's files, the site -- based on the Joomla content management system -- had not had its code updated since 2012. And the site had modules that used a version of Joomla's RSForm that had been flagged 11 months ago as being vulnerable to a SQL Injection attack. While the image depicting Trump had no metadata attached to it, another image with text had Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) data indicating it had been created with Adobe Photoshop CS 6 for Windows in 2015. As sshell_ noted, the image was used in a defacement reported to the "cybercrime archive" Zone-H by a user identifying themselves as IRAN-CYBER on December 2, 2015. A DHS spokesperson for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said that "there is no confirmation that this was the action of Iranian state-sponsored actors."

An anonymous reader writes: NextMind is developing a brain-computer interface that translates signals from the visual cortex into digital commands. VentureBeat tried NextMind's device, which lets you input commands into computers and AR/VR headsets with your visual attention. Eventually, the Paris-based startup wants to let you do the same with your visual imagination. The outlet spoke with NextMind CEO Sid Kouider ahead of CES 2020, where his company is unveiling a dev kit shipping to select developers and partners this month for $399. After the early access period, a second limited run (waitlist) of dev kits will begin shipping in Q2 2020.

Speaking of Chromebooks, David Ruddock, opines at AndroidPolice: Chrome OS' problems really became apparent to me when Android app compatibility was introduced, around five years ago. Getting Android apps to run on Chrome OS was simultaneously one of the Chrome team's greatest achievements and one of its worst mistakes. In 2019, two things are more obvious than ever about the Android app situation on Chrome. The first is that the "build it and they will come" mantra never panned out. Developers never created an appreciable number of Android app experiences designed for Chrome (just as they never did for Android tablets). The second is that, quite frankly, Android apps are very bad on Chrome OS. Performance is highly variable, and interface bugs are basically unending because most of those apps were never designed for a point-and-click operating system. Sure, they crash less often than they did in the early days, but anyone saying that Android apps on Chrome OS are a good experience is delusional.

Those apps are also a crutch that Chrome leans on to this day. Chrome OS doesn't have a robust photo editor? Don't worry, you can download an app! Chrome doesn't have native integration with cloud file services like Box, Dropbox, or OneDrive? Just download the app! Chrome doesn't have Microsoft Office? App! But this "solution" has basically become an insult to Chrome's users, forcing them to live inside a half-baked Android environment using apps that were almost exclusively designed for 6" touchscreens, and which exist in a containerized state that effectively firewalls them from much of the Chrome operating system. As a result, file handling is a nightmare, with only a very limited number of folders accessible to those applications, and the task of finding them from inside those apps a labyrinthine exercise no one should have to endure in 2019. This isn't a tenable state of affairs -- it's computing barbarism as far as I'm concerned. And yet, I've seen zero evidence that the Chrome team intends to fix it. It's just how it is. But Android apps, so far as I can tell, are basically the plan for Chrome. Certainly, Linux environment support is great for enthusiasts and developers, but there are very few commonly-used commercial applications available on Linux, with no sign that will change in the near future. It's another dead end. And if you want an even more depressing picture of Chrome's content ecosystem, just look at the pitiable situation with web apps.

The once-king-of-the-hill smartphone vendor, which had a terrible 2018, continued to bleed last year, according to financial disclosures it made on Monday. From a report: HTC reported revenue of 10,015 million TWD ($333 million) in 2019, down 57.8% from 23,741 million TWD ($789 million) it posted the year before, and whopping 87% below over $2 billion it grossed in 2017. As Bloomberg columnist Tim Culpan pointed out, Apple now generates more from selling AirPods in a fortnight than HTC clocks from selling each of its offering in a year. The drop in revenue comes as the Taiwanese firm scales back its smartphone business -- a sizable portion of which it sold to Google two years ago -- and focuses on virtual reality headsets and accessories. HTC has yet to disclose how much money it lost in the quarter that ended in December, but in the other three quarters last year, it lost 7.05 billion TWD ($234.4 million).

It took Amazon four years to populate the world with 100 million Alexa-powered devices. It took the company just one more year to more than double that number. From a report: The e-commerce titan announced Monday that there are now "hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices" in customers' hands worldwide, a massive increase from the 100 million it announced last January. Both figures include Amazon's own lines of Echo speakers, Fire tablets and Fire TV streamers, as well as third-party devices like lightbulbs, sprinkler systems and motorcycle helmets, showing how much Alexa's world has broadened. Smart-home engagement with Alexa nearly doubled, too, with people using the voice assistant for smart home controls hundreds of millions of times every week. The company revealed these new milestones at the start of CES, the biggest tech show in the world, where it will present a slew of new partnerships in cars, TVs and connected homes to keep up Alexa's breakneck growth.

Folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new machine learning-based tool that will tell you how fast a code can run on various chips. This will help developers tune their applications for specific processor architectures. From a report: Traditionally, developers used the performance model of compilers through a simulation to run basic blocks -- fundamental computer instruction at the machine level -- of code in order to gauge the performance of a chip. However, these performance models are not often validated through real-life processor performance. MIT researchers developed an AI model called Ithmel by training it to predict how fast a chip can run unknown basic blocks. Later, it was supported by a database called BHive with 300,000 basic blocks from specialized fields such as machine learning, cryptography, and graphics. The team of researchers presented a paper [PDF] at the NeuralIPS conference in December to describe a new technique to measure code performance on various processors. The paper also describes Vemal, a new automatically generating algorithm that can be used to generate compiler optimizations.

When Facebook decided it wanted to move 6,000 workers into Hudson Yards in New York, "existing tenants were told to move," reports the New York Times, as "part of a rush by the West Coast technology giants to expand in New York City." The growth in New York is occurring largely without major economic incentives from the city and state governments. Officials are mindful of the outcry last year over at least $3 billion in public subsidies that Amazon was offered to build a corporate campus in Queens... Amazon's announcement last month that it would lease space in Midtown for 1,500 workers renewed a debate over whether incentives should be used to woo huge tech companies to New York...

At Google's New York office, highly skilled workers now outnumber their colleagues in sales and marketing. Of the nearly 800 job openings that Amazon has in the city, more than half are for developers, engineers and data scientists. "Every line of business and every platform is represented quite healthfully," said William Floyd, Google's head of external affairs in New York, the company's largest office except for its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. "Not everyone wants to be in California.'' Oren Michels, a tech adviser and investor who sold Mashery, a company based in San Francisco, to Intel in 2013, said that New York City had become a refuge for tech workers who did not want to be surrounded solely by those working in the same industry. "You have younger engineers and those sorts of people who frankly want to live in New York City because it's a more interesting and fun place to live," he said. "San Francisco is turning into a company town and the company is tech, both professionally and personally...."

Since 2016, the number of job openings in the city's tech sector has jumped 38 percent, an analysis for The Times by the jobs website Glassdoor found. In November, New York had the third-highest number of tech openings among United States cities, 26,843, behind just San Francisco and Seattle. It is not only the biggest tech firms that are growing in New York. From 2018 through the third quarter of 2019, investors pumped more than $27 billion into start-ups in the New York City region, the second most in that time for any area outside San Francisco, according to the MoneyTree Report by PwC-CB Insights. (Nearly $100 billion was invested in start-ups in the Silicon Valley area in that period....)

The major tech firms are expected to grow to the point that they are among the largest private tenants in New York in the coming years, rivaling longtime leaders like JPMorgan Chase.

The Verge has been investigating Samsung's "artificial human" project Neon, which seems to be about creating realistic human avatars: A tweet from the project's lead and some leaked videos pretty much confirm this -- although they don't give us nearly enough information to judge how impressive Neon is. The lead of Neon, computer-human interaction researcher Paranav Mistry, tweeted this image, apparently showing one of the project's avatars. Mistry says the company's "Core R3" technology can now "autonomously create new expressions, new movements, new dialog (even in Hindi), completely different from the original captured data...."

In a recent interview, Mistry made clear he thinks "digital humans" will be a major technology in the 2020s... "While films may disrupt our sense of reality, 'virtual humans' or 'digital humans' will be reality. A digital human could extend its role to become a part of our everyday lives: a virtual news anchor, virtual receptionist, or even an AI-generated film star."
Reddit users also found the URLs for videos in the source code on Neon's home page -- and though the videos have since been removed, some of the footage has been archived and analyzed on YouTube.