Google today released Chrome 79 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and iOS users. This release comes with security and bug fixes, but also with new features such as built-in support for the Password Checkup tool, real-time blacklisting of malicious sites via the Safe Browsing API, general availability of Predictive Phishing protections, a ban on loading HTTPS "mixed content," support for tab freezing, a new UI for the Chrome Sync profile section, and support for a back-forward caching mechanism. ZDNet has outlined each new feature in-depth.

Google today announced that Android 10 is arriving on Android TV, and it's about as bland of an update as they come. From a report: Primarily, it's just the performance and security benefits of Android 10, without a single new user-facing feature. But at the bottom of Google's blog post, the company hints at why: Google's busy prepping for the "next-generation of Android TV," starting with the miniature box above. Google says this new ADT-3 dongle is a full-fledged Android TV platform, with a quad-core ARM Cortex A53 CPU, 2GB of DDR3 memory, and the ability to output 4K HDR content at 60 frames per second over its HDMI 2.1 port. Before you get too excited, know that it's a developer device. Like its predecessor, the ADT-2, it's possible you'll never see one officially available for purchase.

Facebook said it would not weaken end-to-end encryption across its messaging apps, despite pressure from world governments, in a letter to US Attorney General Bill Barr and UK and Australian leaders. From a report: The letter, sent Monday, came in response to an October open letter from Barr, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, Australian Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton, and then-acting US homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan, which raised concerns that Facebook's continued implementation of end-to-end encryption on its WhatsApp and Messenger apps would prevent law enforcement agencies from finding illegal activity such as child sexual exploitation, terrorism, and election meddling. The US, UK, and Australian governments asked the social networking company to design a backdoor in its encryption protocols, or a separate way for law enforcement to gain access to user content. "It is simply impossible to create such a backdoor for one purpose and not expect others to try and open it," wrote WhatsApp head Will Cathcart and Messenger head Stan Chudnovsky in Facebook's response. "People's private messages would be less secure and the real winners would be anyone seeking to take advantage of that weakened security. That is not something we are prepared to do."

An investigation by Gizmodo has revealed that it's possible to obtain the locations of Ring doorbell cameras from post on Amazon's Neighbors app. An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has continuously deflected criticism and claimed it is dedicated to user privacy. The company insisted Ring users have a "choice in what information, if any, they share with law enforcement." It turns not only can law enforcement access the exact location of users, but anyone, anywhere can find out where users live. Gizmodo was able to locate geographic coordinates for more than 20,000 camera. Some of the coordinates placed you directly in front of the Ring device, while other coordinates were a couple hundred feet yet identifiers from posted videos made it easy to locate the user's home. "People have been misled into buying these devices because Amazon tells them it will keep their family safe. But it's a lie. Amazon's surveillance network puts us all in danger," said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future. "Any bystander caught by a Ring device could be located using the geographic coordinates found. People can be tracked going into buildings, like clinics, for private appointments. Children captured on video could be located by people with malicious intentions. The possibilities are endless. Amazon has failed to put any protections in place. Now, we're all vulnerable to the consequences of their dragnet. We need Congress to investigate, and hold Amazon accountable for these dangers."

A social media influencer was sentenced to 14 years in prison for plotting to hijack a website at gunpoint during a home invasion. From a report: Rossi Lorathio Adams II, 27, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, received the sentence Monday after he was found guilty of one count of conspiracy to interfere with commerce by force, threats and violence, according to a statement from the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Iowa. Adams, also known as "Polo," founded a social media company called "State Snaps" in 2015 while he was enrolled as a student at Iowa State University. His social media accounts on platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter had over a million followers at one point, the statement said. The site's content included video and photos of "young adults engaged in crude behavior, drunkenness, and nudity," according to the statement. Followers of State Snaps used the slogan "Do It For State," and Adams wanted to purchase the internet domain doitforstate.com to expand his company, the statement said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Just five metropolitan areas -- Boston; San Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; and San Jose, Calif. -- accounted for 90% of all U.S. high-tech job growth between 2005 to 2017 (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), according to the research (PDF) by think-tank scholars Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution and Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The nation's 377 other metro areas accounted for 10% of the 256,063 jobs created during that period in 13 high-tech industries such as software publishing, pharmaceutical manufacturing and semiconductor production. Among the smaller cities that gained tech jobs were Madison, Wis.; Albany, N.Y.; Provo, Utah; and Pittsburgh. Some prominent cities -- including New York and Austin -- lagged in tech job creation, according to the study.

The result is increased concentration of high-tech resources in just a few places and a strengthening of economic forces that are dividing the nation. Tech industries find they are most productive when they have resources clustered in few places. Such clustering -- which economists call "agglomeration" -- allows for the fast spread of new ideas and a concentrated talent pool from which businesses recruit. The forces of agglomeration, economists say, run counter to the idea that technology might allow people to work from anywhere, even in remote places. The trend is creating problems for the cities that have these concentrations of workers and for those places that don't. High-tech cities like San Francisco and Boston are becoming increasingly unaffordable as home prices soar, while cities outside of these high-tech hubs are missing out on the dynamism that technology creates.

For the first time in nearly three decades, Apple is officially returning to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next year. The company is planning to discuss its stance on consumer privacy, "rather than pitch a new hardware product," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The company's senior director of privacy Jane Horvath will be speaking on a "Chief Privacy Officer Roundtable" on Jan. 7, according to the CES agenda. Horvath, along with executives from Facebook Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., and a commissioner from the Federal Trade Commission, will discuss how companies build privacy at scale, regulation and consumer demands. Apple's last major official appearance at CES was in 1992 when then Chief Executive Officer John Sculley gave a presentation at a Chicago version of the summit to introduce the failed Newton device.

Two years ago, Apple launched an aggressive battle against ads that track users across the web. Today executives in the online publishing and advertising industries say that effort has been stunningly effective -- posing a problem for advertisers looking to reach affluent consumers. The Information reports: Since Apple introduced what it calls its Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature in September 2017, and with subsequent updates last year, advertisers have largely lost the ability to target people on Safari based on their browsing habits with cookies, the most commonly used technology for tracking. One result: The cost of reaching Safari users has fallen over 60% in the past two years, according to data from ad tech firm Rubicon Project. Meanwhile ad prices on Google's Chrome browser have risen slightly.

That reflects the fact that advertisers pay more money for ads that can be targeted at people with specific demographics and interests. "The allure of a Safari user in an auction has plummeted," said Rubicon Project CEO Michael Barrett. "There's no easy ability to ID a user." This shift is significant because iPhone owners tend to be more affluent and therefore more attractive to advertisers. Moreover, Safari makes up 53% of the mobile browser market in the U.S., according to web analytics service Statscounter. Only about 9% of Safari users on an iPhone allow outside companies to track where they go on the web, according to Nativo, which sells software for online ad selling. It's a similar story on desktop, although Safari has only about 13% of the desktop browser market. In comparison, 79% of people who use Google's Chrome browser allow advertisers to track their browsing habits on mobile devices through cookies. (Nativo doesn't have historical data so couldn't say what these percentages were in the past.)

The city of Pensacola, Florida, has been dealing with a cyberattack since late Friday when a Saudi Air Force trainee killed three sailors at Pensacola Naval Air Station. Officials for the city are unsure whether the incidents are related. CNN reports: The city of Pensacola, Florida, said it has experienced a cyber "incident" and has disconnected several city services until the issue can be resolved. Mayor Grover Robinson told CNN affiliate WEAR the city has been dealing with a cyberattack since late Friday. The city said the issue has impacted city emails and phones, 311 customer service and online payments, including Pensacola Energy and Pensacola Sanitation Services. However, 911 and emergency services are not impacted. As for whether the cyberattack is related to the Friday shooting, Kaycee Lagarde, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said: "It's really too early to say one way or another. We are still assessing this. We understand that it's on people's mind but we just don't know at this point."

Lagarde said the incident was reported to the FBI and Homeland Security as a precaution.

Electric scooter start-up Unicorn is shutting down after spending too much money on Facebook ads. The BBC reports: Customers received an email from founder Nick Evans, saying he was "very sorry" and was trying to sell Unicorn's assets to offer partial refunds. The Texas-based company sold just 350 of its $699 commuter scooters, according to The Verge. They have a top speed of 15mph and a range of 15 miles. And start-up tracker Crunchbase said Unicorn had raised just $150,000.

"It saddens me to write this letter but we have run out of funding and are shutting down operations immediately," the email says. "We unfortunately do not have the resources to deliver your Unicorns nor are we able to provide refunds, as we are completely out of funding." The cost of "Facebook and Google ads, payments for loans, and other expenses" ate through the company's funding quicker than Mr Evans anticipated. "A large proportion of the revenue went toward paying for Facebook ads to bring traffic to the site," the email says. "Unfortunately the cost of the ads were just too expensive to build a sustainable business."

The Oculus Quest VR headset is about to receive an update that adds support for native hand tracking. "VR users will be able to put down their controllers and use their fingers to manipulate VR worlds, as tracked by Quest's array of built-in cameras," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The feature received a tease at October's Oculus Connect 6 conference and got an "early 2020" launch window from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But someone on the Oculus engineering team clearly ignored Lord Zuck in getting this feature out the door a bit early, and it will land in an "experimental" tab in Quest's settings menus as a free update by week's end. Today's news comes with two important asterisks. First, there's no fully fledged VR software available for the feature yet. At launch, the experimental feature will only work within Oculus Quest's root menu, which at least includes photo and multimedia viewing tabs. Within "a week" of the toggle going live, a Software Development Kit (SDK) for Quest hand tracking will go live for Oculus developers, which will allow them to tap into Oculus' hand-tracking system and potentially implement it in various games and apps. And second, Oculus is limiting its hand-tracking framework to the Quest ecosystem. This update isn't coming to the PC-centric Rift or Rift S headsets, and it won't work if you use Oculus Link to connect a Quest to your favorite PC VR games.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The U.S. National Labor Relations Board has started a new investigation into Google's labor practices. An agency spokesperson confirmed to CNBC Monday that the probe, which will include whether Google violated labor laws when it recently fired four employees, has officially commenced. It will also look at whether Google discouraged employees from engaging in union activity. The investigation is expected to take roughly three months and be conducted by its regional staff based in Oakland.

The latest investigation comes after four Google employees filed a federal complaint with the NLRB on Dec. 5, alleging unfair labor practices, which would violate a settlement made by Google. Google now faces another federal investigation into its labor practice just months after a separate settlement with the NLRB. [...] The latest investigation stems from employee uproar over the interrogation and subsequent firing of employees Rebecca Rivers and Laurence Berland, who had been placed on sudden and indefinite administrative leave in November for allegedly sharing sensitive information. After that, Berland and Rivers held a rally in San Francisco that drew in roughly 200 Google workers, demanding the company reinstate the two employees and stating they were placed on leave in retaliation for their activism against the company's handling of hate policies and immigration issues. The week of Thanksgiving, Google fired four employees, including Berland and Rivers, claiming they shared confidential documents and breached security. In an internal memo, the company's security and investigations team called it a "rare" case.

The e-waste industry is booming in Southeast Asia, frightening residents worried for their health. Despite a ban on imports, Thailand is a center of the business. From a report: Crouched on the ground in a dimly lit factory, the women picked through the discarded innards of the modern world: batteries, circuit boards and bundles of wires. They broke down the scrap -- known as e-waste -- with hammers and raw hands. Men, some with faces wrapped in rags to repel the fumes, shoveled the refuse into a clanking machine that salvages usable metal. As they toiled, smoke spewed over nearby villages and farms. Residents have no idea what is in the smoke: plastic, metal, who knows? All they know is that it stinks and they feel sick.

The factory, New Sky Metal, is part of a thriving e-waste industry across Southeast Asia, born of China's decision to stop accepting the world's electronic refuse, which was poisoning its land and people. Thailand in particular has become a center of the industry even as activists push back and its government wrestles to balance competing interests of public safety with the profits to be made from the lucrative trade. Last year, Thailand banned the import of foreign e-waste. Yet new factories are opening across the country, and tons of e-waste are being processed, environmental monitors and industry experts say. "E-waste has to go somewhere," said Jim Puckett, the executive director of the Basel Action Network, which campaigns against trash dumping in poor countries, "and the Chinese are simply moving their entire operations to Southeast Asia."

The first thing that visitors to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg see is a wall of identity cards-- the pieces of paper that determined where people could live and work and whom they could love. From the outset, the apartheid regime's ability to discriminate against "nie-blankes" (non-whites) depended on having a robust system of identifying people. The opposite problem confronts most other countries in Africa today. Governments have little idea who their citizens are [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: African countries struggle for several reasons. One is racial discrimination. Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone explicitly withhold nationality from children of certain races and ethnicities. Other countries do so informally by refusing to issue papers. Another reason is a failure by governments to explain to their citizens how they might benefit. Consider birth registration, the most basic form of official identity. South Asia more than doubled its rate of birth registration to 71% between 2000 and 2014. In sub-Saharan Africa the rate dropped by one point, to 41%, over the same period. For poor villagers, going to a government office to register a birth is time-consuming and expensive, especially when officials demand bribes. Some countries charge a fee, which is a disincentive. Others penalize late registrations.

One way to encourage people is to link birth registration to benefits such as child-support grants -- something South Africa did with great success. But that approach may also have the perverse consequence of denying payments to the very poorest. Money is another reason many African countries have fallen behind their peers. Extending the state's reach to remote areas can be expensive. So, too, is paying for skilled labour of the sort required to fill in forms accurately and to operate biometric machines. The technology itself is costly, especially for small countries that do not have much buying power.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Verizon, which bought Yahoo in 2017, has suspended email addresses of archivists who are trying to preserve 20 years of content that will be deleted permanently in a few weeks. As Verizon announced in October, the company intends to wipe all content from Yahoo Groups. As of December 14, all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. The mass deletion includes files, polls, links, photos, folders, database, calendar, attachments, conversations, email updates, message digests, and message histories that was uploaded to Yahoo servers since pre-Google 1990s. Verizon planned to allow users to download their own data from the site's privacy dashboard, but apparently it has a problem with the work of The Archive Team who wants to save content to upload it to the non-profit Internet Archive, which runs the popular Wayback Machine site.

"Yahoo banned all the email addresses that the Archive Team volunteers had been using to join Yahoo Groups in order to download data," reported the Yahoo Groups Archive Team. "Verizon has also made it impossible for the Archive Team to continue using semi-automated scripts to join Yahoo Groups -- which means each group must be rejoined one by one, an impossible task (redo the work of the past four weeks over the next 10 days)."

China has ordered that all foreign computer equipment and software be removed from government offices and public institutions within three years, the Financial Times reports. hackingbear writes: The government directive is likely to be a blow to US multinational companies like HP, Dell and Microsoft and mirrors attempts by Washington to limit the use of Chinese technology, as the trade war between the countries turns into a tech cold war. The Trump administration banned US companies from doing business with Chinese Chinese telecommunications company Huawei earlier this year and in May, Google, Intel and Qualcomm announced they would freeze cooperation with Huawei. By excluding China from western know-how, the Trump administration has made it clear that the real battle is about which of the two economic superpowers has the technological edge for the next two decades. This is the first known public directive from Beijing setting specific targets limiting China's use of foreign technology, though it is part a wider move within China to increase its reliance on domestic technology.

"At least 20 web hosting providers have hastily notified customers today, Saturday, December 7, that they plan to shut down on Monday, giving their clients two days to download data from their accounts before servers are shut down and wiped clean," reports ZDNet.

And no refunds are being provided: All the services offer cheap low-end virtual private servers [and] all the websites feature a similar page structure, share large chunks of text, use the same CAPTCHA technology, and have notified customers using the same email template. All clues point to the fact that all 20 websites are part of an affiliate scheme or a multi-brand business ran by the same entity...

As several users have pointed out, the VPS providers don't list physical addresses, don't list proper business registration information, and have no references to their ownership... A source in the web hosting industry who wanted to remain anonymous told ZDNet that what happened this weekend is often referred to as "deadpooling" -- namely, the practice of setting up a small web hosting company, providing ultra-cheap VPS servers for a few dollars a month, and then shutting down a few months later, without refunding customers.

"This is a systemic issue within the low-end market, we call it deadpooling," the source told us. "It doesn't happen often at this scale, however."
ZDNet provided this alphabetical list of the 20 companies: ArkaHosting, Bigfoot Servers, DCNHost, HostBRZ, HostedSimply, Hosting73, KudoHosting, LQHosting, MegaZoneHosting, n3Servers, ServerStrong, SnowVPS, SparkVPS, StrongHosting, SuperbVPS, SupremeVPS, TCNHosting, UMaxHosting, WelcomeHosting, X4Servers.

However, "A user who was impacted by his VPS provider's shutdown also told ZDNet that the number of VPS providers going down is most likely higher than 20, as not all customers might have shared the email notification online, with others."

Tesla "may be keen on replacing the humble windshield wiper with lasers," reports CNET. In a patent application filed this past May and published with the United States Patent and Trademark Office on Nov. 21, Tesla describes a "pulsed laser cleaning" for "debris accumulated" on glass, specifically for automotive application.

It also mentions this could be used for "photo-voltaic" applications. That's fancy-speak for solar panels...

According to the patent, Tesla imagines the system would work with a beam optics assembly to produce a laser that hunts down debris. A detection circuitry would be responsible for telling the system where to fire and remove dirt, grime and droppings. This same system would also take into account the laser's exposure level with pulses to ensure it didn't cut through the glass or harm occupants inside. Specifically, a calibration would "limit penetration of the laser beam to a depth that is less than a thickness of the glass article."

Such a system could do without chemicals and sprayers to take care of cleaning the windshield. Ditto for camera lenses and solar panels installed on a vehicle or structure.

"Uber's stock market value fell by $1.4 billion Friday, on the heels of the company's release of a safety report revealing that 3,000 incidents of sexual assaults took place during its U.S. rides in 2018," reports the Bay Area News Group: On Thursday evening, Uber released its long-awaited safety study, which revealed that the company received 3,045 reports of sexual assaults in its rides in 2018, and 2,936 such incidents in 2017. Those figures included 235 reports of rape in 2018, up from 229 in 2017, and thousands of other assaults ranging from unwanted touching, kissing or attempted rape. Between 2017 and 2018, the company said it averaged about 3.1 million rides in the U.S. each day.

Uber is not the only ride-hailing company grappling with safety issues, though. Earlier Thursday, its top rival, Lyft, was sued by 20 women alleging they were raped or sexually assaulted by Lyft drivers.

In a statement on Twitter following the safety report's release Thursday, Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi pledged to take further measures to protect the safety of both passengers and drivers.
The editorial boards of two Silicon Valley newspapers said the report seems to be an attempt "to confront legitimate problems head-on and transparently," asking how the figures compare to those for taxicabs and applauding Uber for instituting tighter background checks on drivers and adding more safety features to Uber's app.

"But it also must acknowledge that these safety issues should have been anticipated. Entrepreneurs aren't doing themselves -- or their industry -- any favors when they fail to anticipate problems and only act on consumer issues after the fact."

"The prospect of Russian interference in Britain's election flared anew Saturday after the social media platform Reddit concluded that people from Russia leaked confidential British government documents on Brexit trade talks just days before the general U.K. vote," reports the Associated Press: Reddit said in a statement that it has banned 61 accounts suspected of violating policies against vote manipulation. It said the suspect accounts shared the same pattern of activity as a Russian interference operation dubbed "Secondary Infektion" that was uncovered earlier this year.

Reddit investigated the leak after the documents became public during the campaign for Thursday's election, which will determine the country's future relationship with the European Union. All 650 seats in the House of Commons are up for grabs. Reddit said it believed the documents were leaked as "part of a campaign that has been reported as originating from Russia."

"We were able to confirm that they did indeed show a pattern of coordination," Reddit said...

Culture Secretary Nicky Morgan told the BBC that the government is "looking for and monitoring" anything that might suggest interference in the British election. "From what was being put on that (Reddit) website, those who seem to know about these things say that it seems to have all the hallmarks of some form of interference,"" Morgan said.

"And if that is the case, that obviously is extremely serious."