House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee listed the Save the Internet Act, a bill that would restore net neutrality rules, among their accomplishments in 2019. The Daily Dot reports: Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) said in a statement that the Save the Internet Act and other bills passed by the committee "worked to put consumers first and strengthen our economy." The Save the Internet Act would codify the 2015 Open Internet Order, an order by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that brought about net neutrality rules, which was repealed by the now-Republican controlled agency in 2017. Pallone and Doyle called that decision "disastrous" in their statement.

The bill passed through the House by a 232-190 vote in April. Since then, the Senate has yet to take up a vote on it. Around the time of the House vote, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the Save the Internet Act "dead on arrival" in the upper chamber. The White House has also threatened a veto if it were to pass in the Senate. [...] Pallone and Doyle also listed bills that aim to "stop the onslaught of annoying robocalls," improve the country's broadband maps, and holding two oversight hearings for the FCC as its other accomplishments.

Tesla is rolling out a new software update to its Model S and Model X vehicles in Europe that will reduce the capacity of its Autopilot features in order to comply with regulations. Electrek reports: Tesla has to adapt its driver-assist system to different regulations in different markets. It results in a much more limited Autopilot in Europe compared to what Tesla is making available in its vehicles in North America. The automaker already reduced the capability of the Model 3 in Europe, but now it started warning Model S and Model X owners that they are also going to be affected after a new update.

We are talking about fairly significant changes including a requirement to apply pressure to the steering wheel every 15 seconds when using Autopilot. [Here is a list of changes coming to Autopilot, as noted in an email sent from Tesla:]

- Auto Lane Change will be restricted for use on divided roads with two or more lanes of traffic in either direction.
- Once Auto Lane Change is activated and the indicator is turned on, your car will wait a minimum of one and a half seconds before starting the lane change and will wait up to five seconds before cancelling if the lane change has not been able to start.
- The limit of how far the steering wheel can turn while using Autosteer is reduced and can affect your car's ability to maneuver curves or stay within the lane, requiring you to take action.
- Summon will require that you be within six meters of your car's location to operate.
You'll receive a reminder to hold steering wheel if it does not detect your hands on the wheel for 15 seconds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Facebook and Instagram will no longer allow influencers to promote vaping, tobacco products or weapons on its platforms using "branded content." Instagram announced Wednesday it would no longer allow "branded content" that promotes those goods on either platform. In June, Instagram introduced a change that would let advertisers promote posts from influencers, or users who work with brands to promote services or products. Users see a "paid partnership with" tag on a post when viewing that branded content on Instagram.

This change closes a loophole in Facebook's advertising policies. Even though Facebook's ad policies have banned the advertising of vaping, tobacco and weapons, private users can post about them, and until now advertisers could theoretically put paid promotion behind those posts. The company said it would begin enforcement of the new rule "in the coming weeks." An Instagram spokesperson said this is the first time it's implementing restrictions around the type of items that can be promoted for branded content. The company also said branded content that promotes goods such as alcohol or diet supplements will require "special restrictions" once new policies go into effect next year.

Lawmakers aren't convinced that Facebook needs to track users' locations at all times -- even when their tracking services are turned off. CNBC reports: Facebook was responding to an inquiry from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who asked Facebook last month to "respect" users' decisions to keep their locations private. In a letter dated December 12 that was released Tuesday, Facebook explained how it is able to estimate users' locations used to target ads even when they've chosen to reject location tracking through their smartphone's operating system.

Facebook said that even when location tracking is turned off, it can deduce users' general locations from context clues like locations they tag in photos as well as their devices' IP addresses. While this data is not as precise as Facebook would collect with location tracking enabled, the company said it uses the information for several purposes, including alerting users when their accounts have been accessed in an unusual place and clamping down on the spread of false information. Facebook acknowledged it also targets ads based on the limited location information it receives when users turn off or limit tracking. Facebook doesn't allow users to turn off location-based ads, although it does allow users to block Facebook from collecting their precise location, the company wrote. Republican Senator Josh Hawley says the letter showed Facebook "admits it. Turn off 'location services' and they'll STILL track your location to make money (by sending you ads). There is no opting out. No control over your personal information. That's Big Tech. And that's why Congress needs to take action."

"I appreciate Facebook's attempts to inform users about their privacy choices. However, I am concerned that these efforts are insufficient and even misleading in light of how Facebook is actually treating user data," said Democratic Senator Chris Coons.

The UK government will create a technology regulator next year to police companies such as Facebook and Google after Brexit, Financial Times reported Wednesday [may be paywalled], citing several people who were involved in the process. From the report: The regulator will be given powers to implement a range of new rules, including an enforceable code of conduct for the biggest groups and greater data accessibility for consumers. The decision follows widespread calls for a curb on big tech's power, including a report published on Wednesday by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority that outlined a new regulatory regime for the digital sector.

Facebook's growth at any cost mentality has birthed innumerable scandals over the past decade -- election meddling, political discord, privacy invasion. Yet today, after repeated apologies and promises to do better, that mentality remains largely unchanged. From a report: BuzzFeed News has learned the company continues to evaluate and compensate product managers based mostly on their ability to grow its products, with little regard to the impact of those products on the world. In fact, for Facebook, the very word "impact" is often defined by internal growth rather than external consequences and it uses growth metrics as key criteria for evaluating performance and determining compensation changes. This emphasis on growth, particularly as it's tied to performance evaluation, encourages Facebook's employees to focus on growth above all else, sources close to the company told BuzzFeed News. "Working at Facebook made me aware of how you can reprogram humans," one exâ"product manager who recently left the company said. "It's hard to believe that you could get humans to override all of their values that they came in with. But with a system like this, you can. I found that a bit terrifying."

Google, Amazon, Apple, and other technology companies have teamed up to develop a smart home connectivity standard that makes it easier for software and devices to play ball across the smart home ecosystem. From a report: Connected Home Over IP, as the new working group is called, will be spearheaded by the Zigbee Alliance, a group of companies that develop and maintain the ZigBee standard, which enables close-proximity devices (e.g light switches, smart speakers, locks) to talk to each other in the home. Smart home devices can use any number of protocols, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Wireless USB, Z-Wave, and ZigBee. Google also develops two open source protocols -- called Weave and Thread. All of these various protocols have inherent benefits and may appeal to equipment manufacturers and IoT system makers for different reasons, but manufacturers have to invest considerable resources to ensure their devices will work with all the others. So the working group is setting out to achieve a common standard for the smart home, based on internet protocol (IP).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober is at it again with the Glitter Bomb 2.0 designed to give porch pirates some stinky karmic justice. After experiencing a package theft last year, Rober decided to exact revenge by creating the original glitter bomb. It looked like a real delivery and was designed to go off when opened by thieves, covering them with glitter and emitting a fart smell, while recording the whole thing. He made another one this year with an even nastier stench, and got an assist from the man who inspired the idea: Home Alone's Macaulay Culkin.

Rober said he spent six months retooling the bomb, which combines GPS trackers, smartphones with wide-angle cameras, fart spray and glitter. This time, the design was more streamlined, had much more powerful fart spray ("that's like proper poo," said one test subject), and featured sound effects like a countdown and police radio chatter. The whole thing was sponsored by Bose and the product box featured fake Bose "Buzz" headphones named after a Home Alone character. Rober distributed the packages to 10 volunteers around the U.S., who placed them on their porches as bait. One would-be theft kenned to the scheme after glitter spilled out, as he was apparently aware of the original video (which currently has 77 million views). Another volunteer just took the package himself, so Rober sent him a Scientology subscription and cringey postcards to his neighbors. After the first Glitter Bomb video was posted last year, Rober had to re-post it after discovering that several of the "victims" were actually friends of a volunteer who agreed to place the packages on his porch.

Starting today, you can now stream more than 100 local PBS stations on YouTube TV by way of dedicated live channels for both PBS and PBS Kids, as well though on-demand programming. More stations are expected to be added in 2020, PBS notes. TechCrunch reports: PBS service is available to 75% of U.S. households via YouTube TV, significantly broadening PBS' reach among cord-cutters. Before today, PBS programming has been available through the PBS.org and PBSKids.org websites, as well as the PBS Video app and PBS Kids app for iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung TV and Chromecast. Some of its programming has also been available on-demand via channels offered by Amazon and Apple, as well as through popular on-demand streaming services like Netflix. And of course, U.S. households can also pick up their local PBS station's signal for free via their digital antenna, or subscribe to cable or satellite TV to access PBS channels. But YouTube TV is the first live TV service to offer PBS stations directly in its app.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission is giving $87.1 million in rural-broadband funding to satellite operator Viasat to help the company lower prices and raise data caps. The FCC's Connect America Fund generally pays ISPs to expand their networks into rural areas that lack decent home Internet access. Viasat's satellite service already provides coverage of 98 percent of the US population in 50 states, so it doesn't need government funding to expand its network the same way that wireline operators do. But Viasat will use the money to offer Internet service "at lower cost to consumers, while also permitting higher usage allowances, than it typically provides in areas where it is not receiving Connect America Fund support," the FCC said in its announcement yesterday.

Viasat's $87.1 million is to be used over the next 10 years "to offer service to more than 121,700 remote and rural homes and businesses in 17 states." Viasat must provide speeds of at least 25Mbps for downloads and 3Mbps for uploads. While the funding for Viasat could certainly improve access for some people, the project helps illustrate how dire the broadband shortage is in rural parts of many states. Viasat's service is generally a last-ditch option for people in areas where there's no fiber or cable and where DSL isn't good enough to provide a reasonably fast and stable connection. Viasat customers have to pay high prices for slow speeds and onerous data limits. A Viasat spokesperson wouldn't comment on what prices and data caps will be applied to the company's FCC-subsidized plans. Viasat said it will provide the required 25Mbps service "along with an evolving usage allowance, and at FCC-defined prices, to certain areas, where we will be subject to a new range of federal and state regulations."

New submitter RG-man writes: DNA obtained from birch pitch used as a type of ancient chewing gum has revealed significant insights into the life of a young girl who lived 5,700 years ago. CNN reports: "...[Lola] chewed on birch pitch, a material that functioned a bit like an ancient chewing gum. A study of that birch pitch has uncovered the girl's entire genome and oral microbiome, marking the first time human genetic material has successfully been extracted from something besides human bones. The study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

By extracting DNA from the birch pitch, the researchers learned that it had been chewed by a female genetically closely related to hunter-gatherers from the European mainland, rather than those in central Scandinavia. Specific genes told them about her hair, skin and eye color, similar to that of other European hunter-gatherers. 'What is more, we also retrieved DNA from oral microbes and several important human pathogens, which makes this a very valuable source of ancient DNA, especially for time periods where we have no human remains,' said Hannes Schroeder, study author and associate professor from the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Plant and animal DNA trapped in the pitch also revealed that she had eaten hazelnuts and duck, likely staples of her diet."

Guillaume Lample and Francois Charton, at Facebook AI Research in Paris, say they have developed an algorithm that can calculate integrals and solve differential equations. MIT Technology Review reports: Neural networks have become hugely accomplished at pattern-recognition tasks such as face and object recognition, certain kinds of natural language processing, and even playing games like chess, Go, and Space Invaders. But despite much effort, nobody has been able to train them to do symbolic reasoning tasks such as those involved in mathematics. The best that neural networks have achieved is the addition and multiplication of whole numbers. For neural networks and humans alike, one of the difficulties with advanced mathematical expressions is the shorthand they rely on. For example, the expression x^3 is a shorthand way of writing x multiplied by x multiplied by x. In this example, "multiplication" is shorthand for repeated addition, which is itself shorthand for the total value of two quantities combined.

Enter Lample and Charton, who have come up with an elegant way to unpack mathematical shorthand into its fundamental units. They then teach a neural network to recognize the patterns of mathematical manipulation that are equivalent to integration and differentiation. Finally, they let the neural network loose on expressions it has never seen and compare the results with the answers derived by conventional solvers like Mathematica and Matlab. The first part of this process is to break down mathematical expressions into their component parts. Lample and Charton do this by representing expressions as tree-like structures. The leaves on these trees are numbers, constants, and variables like x; the internal nodes are operators like addition, multiplication, differentiate-with-respect-to, and so on. [...] Trees are equal when they are mathematically equivalent. For example, 2 + 3 = 5 = 12 - 7 = 1 x 5 are all equivalent; therefore their trees are equivalent too. These trees can also be written as sequences, taking each node consecutively. In this form, they are ripe for processing by a neural network approach called seq2seq.

The next stage is the training process, and this requires a huge database of examples to learn from. Lample and Charton create this database by randomly assembling mathematical expressions from a library of binary operators such as addition, multiplication, and so on; unary operators such as cos, sin, and exp; and a set of variables, integers, and constants, such as [pi] and e. They also limit the number of internal nodes to keep the equations from becoming too big. [...] Finally, Lample and Charton put their neural network through its paces by feeding it 5,000 expressions it has never seen before and comparing the results it produces in 500 cases with those from commercially available solvers, such as Maple, Matlab, and Mathematica. The comparisons between these and the neural-network approach are revealing. "On all tasks, we observe that our model significantly outperforms Mathematica," say the researchers. "On function integration, our model obtains close to 100% accuracy, while Mathematica barely reaches 85%." And the Maple and Matlab packages perform less well than Mathematica on average. The paper, called "Deep Learning For Symbolic Mathematics," can be found on arXiv.

As spotted by MSPoweruser, Microsoft has started showing non-removable banner ads in the Windows 10 Mail and Calendar apps. From the report: We last saw these ads in November last year, when Microsoft said they were an experiment. Then the ads only showed for those who were not Office 365 subscribers, but on this occasion, they are present for everyone and appear non-removable. The ads are not fixed -- when you read your Gmail if offers to let you read your Gmail on mobile, and for Outlook.com accounts it offers the Outlook app for mobile. Most annoyingly, the ads are still present, even if you use the Outlook app on mobile, and take up considerable vertical space in the menu. Microsoft said in a statement: "The ads within the app itself will be displayed regardless of which email address you use it with. It is not removable, but you can submit it as a suggestion within the Feedback Hub on Windows 10 here: https://msft.it/6012TVPXG."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Another former employee has accused Google of violating federal labor law by firing her for activities related to labor organizing. In a Tuesday blog post, Kathryn Spiers says Google terminated her after she created a browser tool to notify employees of their organizing rights. Spiers says she worked on a Google security team that was focused on how Google employees used Chrome within the company. Part of her job was to "write browser notifications so that my coworkers can be automatically notified of employee guidelines and company policies while they surf the Web."

So when Google hired a consulting company known for its anti-union work, Spiers wrote a notification that would appear whenever Google employees visited the firm's website. The notification stated that "Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities." That's a legal term of art for worker organizing efforts. It also included a link to the worker rights notification mandated by the NLRB settlement. Google responded swiftly and harshly, according to Spiers. She was suspended from her job pending an investigation. Spiers writes that Google officials "dragged me into three separate interrogations with very little warning each time. I was interrogated about separate other organizing activities, and asked (eight times) if I had an intention to disrupt the workplace." She says she wasn't allowed to consult with a lawyer. Two weeks later, on December 13, Spiers was fired. She was told that she had violated Google's policies but couldn't get more details about which policies she had violated. In an email shared with several media outlets, Google executive Royal Hansen said: "[Spiers] misused a security and privacy tool to create a pop-up that was neither about security nor privacy. She did that without authorization from her team or the Security and Privacy Policy Notifier team, and without a business justification. And she used an emergency rapid push to do it."

Hansen argued that the firing had nothing to do with the content of the message. "The decision would have been the same had the pop-up message been on any other subject," he argued.

davidwr writes: If you were going to buy a desktop or laptop computer, how important is it to be able to upgrade memory and storage after your purchase? Is not being able to upgrade an "automatic no-buy," assuming you can get a computer that meets your needs that is upgradeable? If not, would you be willing to pay a little more for upgradeability? A lot more?

Personally, I like to keep computers 4-6 years, which means I prefer to buy an upgradeable machine then upgrade it after 2 or 3 years using then-much-cheaper or not-available-at-all-today parts. What are your thoughts?

According to a new study published in Current Biology, the "night mode" on your phone could actually be worse for your sleep pattern. Scientists say the blue light, which is significantly reduced when night mode is enabled, could be telling our brain that it's night time because it resembles the colors of twilight. From the report: According to the study, brightness levels are more important than color when it comes to stimulating the body clock. However, when the light is equally dim, blue is more relaxing than yellow. This makes basic sense: daylight is yellow, twilight is blue, and sunrise and sunset are pretty reliable ways to tell your body clock what time it is. Of course, at this point, we only know it works on mice -- and mice don't have phones. "We think there is good reason to believe it's also true in humans," says Dr Brown, lead author of the study.

There is perhaps a more obvious truth to be drawn -- if your phone is telling you to switch to night mode, it is time to put down your phone. It is not the color of the screen that is keeping you awake; it is all the stuff your phone offers as an alternative to sleep at 2am. There is only one real night-mode switch: the off button.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: LogMeIn announced this morning that it has agreed to be sold for $4.3 billion to affiliates of Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation, the private equity affiliate of Elliott Management Corporation. The purchase price comes out to $86.05 per share in an all-cash deal. The company had a 52-week high of $96.87 per share and a low of $62.02. The purchase price represents a 25% premium on the closing share price on September 18th, which the company reports was the day media reports began to leak that the company was up for sale.

Bill Wagner, president and CEO at LogMeIn said in a statement that the price reflects the high value of the company and will give stockholders a meaningful return. As you would expect, he was also was optimistic that the partnership with Francisco and Evergreen will help the company going forward. As for the private equity firms, they are getting a broad portfolio of products including unified communications and collaboration (UCC). LogMeIn bought Jive Communications for $357 million in 2018 to give it deeper penetration in the unified communications market. It's most well known product is probably GoToMeeting, which has had to compete with the likes of Zoom, WebEx, BlueJean, Google Hangouts and others in a crowded video conferencing space. The company bought GoToMeeting from Citrix in 2016 for $1.8 billion Unless it can find a buyer who will offer a higher price, the deal is expected to close in mid 2020 after standard regulatory scrutiny.

In early 2018, top executives at Alphabet debated whether the company should leave the public cloud business, but eventually set a goal of becoming a top-two player by 2023, according to a report from The Information on Tuesday. From a report: If the company fails to achieve this goal, some staffers reportedly believe that Alphabet could withdraw from the market completely. While Alphabet subsidiary Google is dominant in web search and advertising, the company is still a small player in cloud computing, which involves renting out computing and storage resources to other companies, schools and governments. In 2018 the company lagged Amazon, Microsoft and Alibaba in that market, according to industry research firm Gartner.

Mozilla has announced that NextDNS would be joining Cloudflare as the second DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) provider inside Firefox. From a report: The browser maker says NextDNS passed the conditions imposed by its Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR) program, and can now be added as a second option for DoH inside Firefox. These conditions include (1) limiting the data NextDNS collects from the DoH server used by Firefox users; (2) being transparent about the data they collect; and (3) promising not to censor, filter, or block DNS traffic unless specifically requested by law enforcement.

DNS-over-HTTPS, or DoH, is a new feature that was added to Firefox last year. When enabled, it encrypts DNS traffic coming in and out of the browser. DNS traffic is not only encrypted but also moved from port 53 (for DNS traffic) to port 443 (for HTTPS traffic), effectively hiding DNS queries and replies inside the browser's normal stream of HTTPS content. This encrypted DNS traffic reaches a so-called DoH resolver. Here, the DoH traffic is decrypted and the DoH resolver makes the DNS query on the user's behalf, receives the result, encrypts it, and sends it back to the user's browser -- also disguised inside encrypted HTTPS content.

The UK's communications regulator is proposing a rule to ban carriers from selling phones that are tied to their networks. From a report: O2, Sky, Three, Virgin Mobile and some smaller carriers already offer unlocked phones, but Ofcom wants the likes of BT Mobile/EE, Tesco Mobile and Vodafone to do the same. It's also seeking better clarity for customers about whether their handset is locked. While O2, Virgin and Three previously sold locked devices, they switched to unlocked phones in recent years. BT Mobile, on the other hand, sold unlocked devices until February 2018, at which point it switched to a locked device policy, akin to sibling network EE.