An anonymous reader shares a report: Jonathan Kay, co-author of the new book Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life, has largely given up on movies and TV, and has instead made tabletop gaming his primary mode of recreation. "It has a social function in my life, and an intellectual function," Kay says in Episode 392 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I've now written a book about it, so I guess it has a professional, editorial function. It's a huge part of my life." Kay wrote the book together with Joan Moriarty, who works full-time at the Snakes & Lattes board game cafe in Toronto. The concept of a board game cafe may be unfamiliar to many, but Kay believes that Snakes & Lattes is an important institution.

"I'm not sure if it's still the biggest board game cafe in North America, but I think it might be the oldest single-purpose urban board game cafe," he says. "And the Snakes & Lattes business model became a model for people creating board game cafes in other cities." The rise of such cafes is a testament to the growing popularity of board games. Sales quadrupled between 2013 and 2016, and the annual Gen Con convention now attracts over 70,000 attendees, Kay among them. He enjoys the laid back atmosphere among the mostly quiet, bookish gamers. "Introverts are actually usually very careful about their social interactions, because they know that if there's conflict that emerges, they won't know how to manage it," he says. "So as a result there's a heightened sense of politeness and consideration at these places."

Russia has temporarily shut off many of its citizens' access to the global internet today in a test of its controversial RuNet program, according to an internal government document. From a report: RuNet aims to boost the government's ability to better control internal digital traffic, launch cyber and information attacks against other nations, and track and censor dissidents. The test will evaluate "the possibility of intercepting subscriber traffic and revealing information about the subscriber, blocking communication services," according to a Dec. 5 document produced by Russia's Ministry of Digital Development, Communications, and Mass Media. The document said the test was originally slated to take place on Dec. 19 but had been rescheduled for Dec. 23.

A popular messaging app billed as a secure way to chat with friends and family is actually a spying tool used by the United Arab Emirates to track the activities of those who download it, The New York Times reported Sunday. From a report: The app, which debuted only a few months ago, has been downloaded millions of times around the world. The app is a mass surveillance tool, The Times reported, capable of monitoring every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound and image of its users. The majority of the app's users are in the Emirates but recently surged in popularity in the US. An analysis and interviews with computer security experts suggest the company behind ToTok, Breej Holding, is a front for DarkMatter, an Abu Dhabi-based cyberintelligence and hacking firm that employs Emirati intelligence officials, former National Security Agency employees and former Israeli military intelligence operatives, The Times reported. The app was recently removed from the Apple and Google app stores, but it's still functional until users delete it from their device.

"Retired Lt. Gen. Steven L. Kwast says fantastic technology exists that could transport a human anywhere on earth within an hour," reports The Drive, in an article shared by schwit1: As has been common as of late, Lt. Gen Kwast cites rapidly growing Chinese military and technological advances as the reason why the United States must invest heavily in new space-based technologies. "We can say today we are dominant in space but the trend lines are what you have to look at and they will pass us in the next few years if we do not do something. They will win this race and then they will put roadblocks up to space," Kwast argues, "because once you get the high ground, that strategic high ground, it's curtains for anybody trying to get to that high ground behind them." Kwast claims China is already building a "Navy in space" complete with the space-based equivalents of "battleships and destroyers" which are "able to maneuver and kill and communicate with dominance, and we [the United States] are not." Kwast's speech centers on the thesis that the United States needs a Space Force in order to counter Chinese advances and win the competition over the economy of the future and, as an extension, who sets the values of the future...

Around the 12:00 mark in the speech, Kwast makes the somewhat bizarre claim that the U.S. currently possesses revolutionary technologies that could render current aerospace capabilities obsolete... "[T]echnology can be built today with technology that is not developmental to deliver any human being from any place on planet Earth to any other place in less than an hour...."

Kwast's comment is only one of several curious comments made by military leadership lately and they do seem to claim that we could be on the precipice of a great leap in transportation technology. We also don't know exactly where he is coming from on all this as it is not necessarily the direct wheelhouse of someone who was running the Air Force's training portfolio, although it does have overlaps...

Is all this setting the stage for a new space race that will benefit mankind by furthering scientific and technological development, or is it ushering in the conditions for the first great space war?

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Advanced driver assistance systems are becoming on the norm even on midlevel cars. For safety advocates that seems like good news: Systems designed to prevent crashes should, after all, result in fewer crashes. But what if that thinking is flawed? A new report from AAA suggests that might be the case and that our increasing use of driver assistance systems may actually be resulting in higher rates of distracted driving.

"This study drives home that engaged drivers are the key to staying safe," says Stefan Heck, CEO of Nauto, which makes driver monitoring technology... "Distracted driving is surging as the next major health epidemic, the top cause of fatal and injury collisions. It's imperative that automakers embed technology that doesn't lull drivers into a false sense of security -- -and instead keeps them focused on the road no matter what...."

Data from one of these studies indicates that the simultaneous use of advanced driver assistance systems was associated with a 50% increase in the odds of engaging in any form of secondary task and an 80% increase in the odds of engaging in visual and/or manual secondary tasks, compared to the same drivers who were not using the automated system. In the other study, speeding related errors were present 19% of the time when driver assistance systems were in use, a higher rate than when driver assistance was available but turned off. In the same study, drowsy driving was present more often when driver assistance systems were active (5.4% of the time versus 3.4% when no system was active), indicating a possible detrimental effect of automation use associated with driver alertness.

Long-time Slashdot reader UnderAttack writes: DNS over HTTPS has been hailed as part of a "poor mans VPN". Its use of HTTPS to send DNS queries makes it much more difficult to detect and block the use of the protocol.

But there are some kinks in the armor. Current clients, and most current DoH services, do not implement the optional passing option, which is necessary to obscure the length of the requested hostname. The length of the hostname can also be used to restrict which site a user may have access [to].

The Internet Storm Center is offering some data to show how this can be done.
Their article is by Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D. and Dean of Research at the SANS Technology Institute.

It notes that Firefox "seems to be the most solid DoH implementation. Firefox DoH queries look like any other Firefox HTTP2 connection except for the packet size I observed." And an open Firefox bug already notes that "With the availability of encrypted DNS transports in Firefox traffic analysis mitigations like padding are becoming relevant."

"We're at a turning point for driving surveillance," reports the Washington Post (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader davidwr ). "In the 2020 model year, most new cars sold in the United States will come with built-in Internet connections, including 100 percent of Fords, GMs and BMWs and all but one model Toyota and Volkswagen."

Often included for free (or sold as an add-on), these connections mean "Cars are becoming smartphones on wheels," collecting and sending data "pretty much wherever their makers want. Some brands even reserve the right to use the data to track you down if you don't pay your bills...." On a recent drive, a 2017 Chevrolet collected my precise location. It stored my phone's ID and the people I called. It judged my acceleration and braking style, beaming back reports to its maker General Motors over an always-on Internet connection... Modern vehicles don't just have one computer. There are multiple, interconnected brains that can generate up to 25 gigabytes of data per hour from sensors all over the car... Most hide what they're collecting and sharing behind privacy policies written in the kind of language only a lawyer's mother could love...

The Tesla Model 3 can collect video snippets from the car's many cameras. Coming next: face data, used to personalize the vehicle and track driver attention... Coming 5G cellular networks promise to link cars to the Internet with ultra-fast, ultra-high-capacity connections. As wireless connections get cheaper and data becomes more valuable, anything the car knows about you is fair game. GM's view, echoed by many other automakers, is that we gave them permission for all of this...

Five years ago, 20 automakers signed on to volunteer privacy standards, pledging to "provide customers with clear, meaningful information about the types of information collected and how it is used," as well as "ways for customers to manage their data." But when I called eight of the largest automakers, not even one offered a dashboard for customers to look at, download and control their data.... GM's privacy policy, which the company says it will update before the end of 2019, says it may "use anonymized information or share it with third parties for any legitimate business purpose." Such as whom? "The details of those third-party relationships are confidential," said GM spokesman David Caldwell.

There are more questions. GM's privacy policy says it will comply with legal data demands. How often does it share our data with the government? GM doesn't offer a transparency report like tech companies do....
GM said "much" of their data can't be linked to a specific person, though the Post adds that "there were clues to what more GM knows on its website and app. It offers a Smart Driver score -- a measure of good driving -- based on how hard you brake and turn, and how often you drive late at night."

Meanwhile, the Post also reports that OnStar's privacy policy lets them keep the data they collect "pretty much forever... At least smartphone apps like Google Maps let you turn off and delete location history."

Car and Driver noted that the Post's reporter even found photos of his phone's contacts, concluding "Your car is collecting and transmitting a lot more data than you think." In 2017, the U.S. Government Accountability Office looked at automakers and their data privacy policies and found that the 13 car companies it looked at are not exactly using best practices. For example, while the automakers say they obtain "explicit consumer consent before collecting data," the GAO says they "offered few options besides opting out of all connected vehicle services to consumers who did not want to share their data."

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Earlier this week the United States Navy banned the social media app TikTok from government-issued mobile devices, saying the popular short video app represented a "cybersecurity threat."

A bulletin issued by the Navy on Tuesday showed up on a Facebook page serving military members, saying users of government issued mobile devices who had TikTok and did not remove the app would be blocked from the Navy Marine Corps Intranet.

The Navy would not describe in detail what dangers the app presents, but Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Uriah Orland said in a statement the order was part of an effort to "address existing and emerging threats...." The U.S. government has opened a national security review of the app's owner Beijing ByteDance Technology Co's $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly, Reuters first reported last month. Last month, U.S army cadets were instructed not to use TikTok, after Senator Chuck Schumer raised security concerns about the army using TikTok in their recruiting.

b-dayyy shared this article from Linux Security: The United States government's respect for and acceptance of open-source development has steadily grown stronger over the past decade, and the U.S. government is increasingly using open-source software as a way to roll out advanced, highly secure technology in an economical manner. On August 8, 2016, the White House CIO released a Federal Source Code Policy that calls for new software to be built, shared, and adapted using open-source methods to capitalize on code that is "secure, reliable, and effective in furthering our national objectives."

The United States Department of Defense recognizes the key benefits associated with open-source development and trusts Linux as its operating system. In fact, the U.S. Army is the single largest installed base for Red Hat Linux and the U.S. Navy nuclear submarine fleet runs on Linux, including their sonar systems. Moreover, the Department of Defense just recently enlisted Red Hat, Inc., the world's largest provider of open-source solutions, to help improve squadron operations and flight training.
In a comment on the original submission, long-time Slashdot reader bobs666 remembers setting up Minix 30 years ago "for running email for a part of the U.S. Army. It's too bad the stupid people made me stop working on the project."

But the world may be changing. The article notes that Linux has now already been certified to meet the three different security certifications required by the United States Department of Defense.

jmcbain writes: In a blog post last week, Dan Amman, the CEO of Cruise Automation (General Motors' electric self-driving car division), laments the pollution, waste of space, accidents, and cost of cars as we know them today. He says "here we are, living in a state of cognitive dissonance with exactly this — the human-driven, gasoline-powered, single-occupant car — as our primary mode of transportation." He notes that public transportation is still useful but ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are only contributing to the problem. He says the only way moving forward is self-driving cars.
Amman argues in our current system, "Most of the time, the equipment will sit unused, occupying prime real estate and driving up housing costs." And in addition,"If you're young, old, or living with a disability, then you can't use it."

He also points out that traffic accidents are still the leading cause of death for 5- to 29-year olds, and concludes that ultimately "the status quo of transportation is broken."

The BBC reports: President Donald Trump has officially funded a Pentagon force focused on warfare in space -- the U.S. Space Force.

The new military service, the first in more than 70 years, falls under the U.S. Air Force.

The funding allocation was confirmed on Friday when the president signed the $738bn (£567bn) annual U.S. military budget. The launch of the Space Force will be funded by an initial $40m for its first year.
Those figures indicate that Space Force will now receive $1 out of every $18,450 in the U.S. military budget -- or .0054 percent. Here's what that looks like as a pie chart.

Newsweek's report includes the president's remarks at the signing ceremony: "That is something really incredible. It's a big moment. That's a big moment, and we're all here for it. Space. Going to be a lot of things happening in space."

The president added: "Because space is the world's newest warfighting domain. Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital. And we're leading, but we're not leading by enough. But very shortly, we'll be leading by a lot."

As noted by the BBC, the department's mission is not intended to blast troops into space, but will focus on protecting American assets like satellites from hostile attacks. The creation of the Space Force comes as China and Russia are increasingly focusing on the skies above, it noted. The Space Force website says responsibilities include "developing military space professionals, acquiring military space systems, maturing the military doctrine for space power."
In response to the news, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted "Starfleet begins."

harrymcc writes: Atari's first home computers, the 400 and 800, were announced at Winter CES in January 1980. But they didn't ship until late in the year -- so over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards has marked their 40th anniversary with a look at their rise and fall. Though Atari ultimately had trouble competing with Apple and other entrenched PC makers, it produced machines with dazzling graphics and sound and the best games of their era, making its computers landmarks from both a technological and cultural standpoint.

Twitter announced Friday that has removed nearly 6,000 accounts for being part of a state-backed information operation originating in Saudi Arabia. Reuters reports: In a public blog post, Twitter said it had removed about 5,929 accounts, which targeted discussions about Saudi Arabia, for violating its "platform manipulation policies." It had also published data about these accounts, it added. Twitter said these accounts represented "the core portion of a larger network of more than 88,000 accounts engaged in spammy behavior across a wide range of topics." Twitter said it had suspended all of these accounts. "Primarily, accounts were amplifying messages favorable to Saudi authorities, mainly through inauthentic engagement tactics such as aggressive liking, retweeting and replying," it said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: [S]cientists at IBM Research have developed a new battery whose unique ingredients can be extracted from seawater instead of mining. The problems with the design of current battery technologies like lithium-ion are well known, we just tend to turn a blind eye when it means our smartphones can run for a full day without a charge. In addition to lithium, they require heavy metals like cobalt, manganese, and nickel which come from giant mines that present hazards to the environment, and often to those doing the actual mining. These metals are also a finite resource, and as more and more devices and vehicles switch to battery power, their availability is going to decrease at a staggering pace.

As a potential solution, scientists at IBM Research's Battery Lab came up with a new design that replaces the need for cobalt and nickel in the cathode, and also uses a new liquid electrolyte (the material in a battery that helps ions move from one end to the other) with a high flash point. The combination of the new cathode and the electrolyte materials was also found to limit the creation of lithium dendrites which are spiky structures that often develop in lithium-ion batteries that can lead to short circuits. So not only would this new battery have less of an impact on the environment to manufacture, but it would also be considerably safer to use, with a drastically reduced risk of fire or explosions. The researchers believe the new battery would have a larger capacity than existing lithium-ion batteries, could potentially charge to about 80 percent of its full capacity in just five minutes, would be more energy-efficient, and, on top of it all, it would be cheaper to manufacture which in turn means they could help reduce the cost of gadgets and electric vehicles. As IEEE Spectrum notes, the group has revealed precious little technical information about their battery's chemistry, configuration, or design -- so those in the field are unsure if IBM has created something truly remarkable, or if they're exaggerating their claims.

The town of Brookline, Massachusetts, became the fifth municipality in the nation to ban its government agencies from using face surveillance. The passage of Article 25 comes as a new study from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that many of the world's top facial recognition algorithms are biased along lines of age, race, and ethnicity. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports: Brookline joins nearby Somerville as the two Massachusetts municipalities to have banned face surveillance. The two Metro-Boston area municipalities have chosen to protect their residents now, rather than wait for the passage of state-level protections. Massachusetts is poised to become the first state in the nation to enact a state-level moratorium on all use of the technology.

Brookline's State Senator Cynthia Stone Creem sponsored a bill (S.1385) that would impose a moratorium on government use of the technology throughout the commonwealth. That moratorium would remain in place until state lawmakers enact an authorizing statute that clearly outlines what agencies are permitted to use the technology, requires audits, protects civil liberties, and establishes minimum accuracy rates to prevent disparate impact against women, people with darker skin, and young people. Polling from the ACLU of Massachusetts has indicated high levels of support for the statewide moratorium, with 79 percent of likely Massachusetts voters voting in favor.

Motorola is slightly delaying its reimagined foldable Razr flip phone, citing an unexpectedly high demand. Android Police reports: Pre-orders were originally slated to begin on December 26th, ahead of the launch on January 9th, but it looks like we'll have to wait a little bit for our fancy blasts from the past. Motorola has stated that it doesn't foresee "a significant shift" from the original launch window, so hopefully the delay won't be too long. With the announcement of the delay coming at the eleventh hour, it might put a damper on some tech enthusiasts' holiday, but at least we'll avoid the mad rush that comes with under-supplying.

Socguy shares a report from Electrek: Germany's Manager Magazine reports today that Volkswagen is struggling with software problems for its ID3 all-electric car. According to the report, the ID3 will be built for months with an incomplete software architecture that could affect up to 20,000 electric cars. These units, intended for sales in Europe and not the U.S., will require a manual software update.

The nature of the software problem -- how it affects vehicles or the sales timeline -- was not disclosed. The magazine reported the issue as "massive." And unfortunately, the fix is cumbersome. Thousands of ID3 cars will be parked in dedicated rented spaces until the spring when service teams will be deployed with mobile computer stations. New software will be manually installed in this manner for the first 10,000 or so ID3s. A total of 20,000 ID3 vehicles will need to be reworked until the second wave of production begins in May. At that time, further software updates can be deployed over-the-air.

On Friday, Facebook and Twitter shut down a network of fake accounts that pushed pro-Trump messages all while "masquerading" as Americans with AI-generated faces as profile photos. The Verge reports: In a blog post, Facebook said that it connected the accounts to a US-based media company called The BL that, it claims, has ties to Epoch Media Group. In August, NBC News first reported that Epoch Media Group was pushing messages in support of President Donald Trump across social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Epoch has extensive connections to Falun Gong, an eccentric Chinese spiritual community that has faced significant persecution from the country's central government. In a statement provided to The Verge, the Epoch Times denied any connection to The BL.

Facebook noted that many of the fake accounts used in the latest campaign employed false profile photos that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence. Those accounts would post BL content in other Facebook groups while pretending to be Americans. Pro-Trump messages were often posted "at very high frequencies" and linked to off-platform sites belonging to the BL and The Epoch Times. The accounts and pages were managed by individuals in the US and Vietnam. Facebook said that it removed 610 accounts, 89 Facebook pages, 156 groups, and 72 Instagram accounts that were connected to the organization. Around 55 million accounts followed one of these Facebook pages and 92,000 followed at least one of the Instagram accounts. The organization spent nearly $9.5 million in advertisements, according to Facebook.

Kyle Wiggers, writing for VentureBeat: AI and machine learning algorithms are quite skilled at generating works of art -- and highly realistic images of apartments, people, and pets to boot. But relatively few have been tuned to singing synthesis, or the task of cloning musicians' voices. Researchers from Amazon and Cambridge put their collective minds to the challenge in a recent paper in which they propose an AI system that requires "considerably" less modeling than previous work of features like vibratos and note durations. It taps a Google-designed algorithm -- WaveNet -- to synthesize the mel-spectrograms, or representations of the power spectrum of sounds, which another model produces using a combination of speech and signing data.

The system comprises three parts, the first of which is a frontend that takes a musical score as input and produces note embeddings (i.e., numerical representations of notes) to be sent to an encoder. The second is a model that is modified to accept the aforementioned embeddings, whose decoder produces mel-specrograms. As for the third and final component -- the WaveNet vocoder, which mimics things like stress and intonation in speech -- it synthesizes the spectrograms into song. The frontend performs linguistic analysis on the score lyrics, allowing for three possible vowel levels of stress and ignoring punctuation. In time, it discovers which phonemes (perceptually distinct units of sound) correspond to each note of the score using syllabification information specified in the score itself. It also computes the expected duration in seconds of each note, as well as the tempo and time signature of the score, which it combines into embeddings.

At its developer conference in June this year, Apple introduced Project Catalyst that aims to help developers swiftly bring their iOS apps to Macs. Developers have had more than half a year to play with Catalyst. Here's where things stand currently: The crux of the issue in my mind is that iOS and Mac OS are so fundamentally different that the whole notion of getting a cohesive experience through porting apps with minimal effort becomes absurd. The problem goes beyond touch vs pointer UX into how apps exist and interact within their wider OSes. While both Mac OS and iOS are easy to use, their ease stem from very different conventions. The more complicated Mac builds ease almost entirely through cohesion. Wherever possible, Mac applications are expected to share the same shortcuts, controls, windowing behavior, etc... so users can immediately find their bearings regardless of the application. This also means that several applications existing in the same space largely share the same visual and UX language. Having Finder, Safari, BBEdit and Transmit open on the same desktop looks and feels natural.

By comparison, the bulk of iOS's simplicity stems from a single app paradigm. Tap an icon on the home screen to enter an app that takes over the entire user experience until exited. Cohesion exists and is still important, but its surface area is much smaller because most iOS users only ever see and use a single app at a time. For better and worse, the single app paradigm allows for more diverse conventions within apps. Having different conventions for doing the same thing across multiple full screen apps is not an issue because users only have to ever deal with one of those conventions at a given time. That innocuous diversity becomes incongruous once those same apps have to live side-by-side. Columnist John Gruber of DaringFireball adds: I think part of the problem is Catalyst itself -- it just doesn't feel like nearly a full-fledged framework for creating proper Mac apps yet. But I think another problem is the culture of doing a lot of nonstandard custom UI on iOS. As Wellborn points out, that flies on iOS -- we UI curmudgeons may not like it, but it flies -- because you're only ever using one app at a time on iOS. It cracks a bit with split-screen multitasking on iPadOS, but I've found that a lot of the iPad apps with the least-standard UIs don't even support split-screen multitasking on iPadOS, so the incongruities -- or incoherences, to borrow Wellborn's well-chosen word -- don't matter as much. But try moving these apps to the Mac and the nonstandard UIs stick out like a sore thumb, and whatever work the Catalyst frameworks do to support Mac conventions automatically doesn't kick in if the apps aren't even using the standard UIKit controls to start with. E.g. scrolling a view with Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End. Further reading: Apple's Merged iPad, Mac Apps Leave Developers Uneasy, Users Paying Twice (October 2019).