"Reuters is reporting that German public prosecutors have again raided the Wolfsburg headquarters of Volkswagen in the latest investigation into the carmaker's diesel emissions," writes Slashdot reader McGruber.

The purpose of the raid was to "confiscate documents," the article reports: Volkswagen, which admitted in 2015 to cheating U.S. emissions tests on diesel engines, said it was fully cooperating with the authorities, but viewed the investigation as unfounded.... The carmaker said it had itself disclosed the issue at the center of the new investigation -- which is targeting individual employees -- to the relevant registration authorities...

Volkswagen said the raids were linked to an investigation into diesel cars with engine type EA 288, a successor model to the EA 189 which was at the heart of the test cheating scandal... In simulations, vehicles with the EA 288 engine did not indicate a failure of the diesel filter, while still complying with emissions limits, Volkswagen said, adding the engine did not have an illegal defeat device.

"Russia's controversial intelligence ship Yantar has been operating in the Caribbean, or mid-Atlantic, since October," writes defense analyst H I Sutton this week in Forbes.

He adds that the ship "is suspected by Western navies of being involved in operations on undersea communications cables." Significantly, she appears to be avoiding broadcasting her position via AIS (Automated Identification System). I suspect that going dark on AIS is a deliberate measure to frustrate efforts to analyse her mission. She has briefly used AIS while making port calls, where it would be expected by local authorities, for example while calling at Trinidad on November 8 and again on November 28. However in both cases she disappeared from AIS tracking sites almost as soon as she left port...

Yantar has been observed conducting search patterns in the vicinity of internet cables, and there is circumstantial evidence that she has been responsible for internet outages, for example off the Syrian coast in 2016.
Yantar is "allegedly an 'oceanographic research vessel'," notes Popular Mechanics, in a mid-November article headlined "Why is Russia's spy ship near American waters?"

A study by British think tank Policy Exchange mentioned that the ship carried two submersibles capable of tapping undersea cables for information -- or outright cutting them, the Forbes article points out. "Whether Yantar's presence involves undersea cables, or some other target of interest to the Russians, it will be of particular interest to U.S. forces."

"Tens of thousands of alarms shriek, beep and buzz every day in every U.S. hospital," reports Fierce Healthcare -- even though most of them aren't urgent, disturb the patients, and won't get immediate attention anyways: The glut of noise means that the medical staff is less likely to respond. Alarms have ranked as one of the top 10 health technological hazards every year since 2007, according to the research firm ECRI Institute. That could mean staffs were too swamped with alarms to notice a patient in distress or that the alarms were misconfigured. The Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, warned the nation about the "frequent and persistent" problem of alarm safety in 2013. It now requires hospitals to create formal processes to tackle alarm system safety...

The commission has estimated that of the thousands of alarms going off throughout a hospital every day, an estimated 85% to 99% do not require clinical intervention. Staff, facing widespread "alarm fatigue" can miss critical alerts, leading to patient deaths. Patients may get anxious about fluctuations in heart rate or blood pressure that are perfectly normal, the commission said....

In the past 30 years, the number of medical devices that generate alarms has risen from about 10 to nearly 40, said Priyanka Shah, a senior project engineer at ECRI Institute. A breathing ventilator alone can emit 30 to 40 different noises, she said... Maria Cvach, an alarm expert and director of policy management and integration for Johns Hopkins Health System, found that on one step-down unit (a level below intensive care) in the hospital in 2006, an average of 350 alarms went off per patient per day -- from the cardiac monitor alone.... By customizing alarm settings and converting some audible alerts to visual displays at nurses' stations, Cvach's team at Johns Hopkins reduced the average number of alarms from each patient's cardiac monitor from 350 to about 40 per day, she said.

Hospitals are also installing sophisticated software to analyze and prioritize the constant stream of alerts before relaying the information to staff members.

Slashdot reader peterthegreat321 shared an article from Medium's technology blog OneZero revealing the "cracks, loopholes, and limitations in Facebook's systems that bad actors are busily exploiting." Facebook says it's proud of the progress it has made, though it acknowledges there's more to be done. "Multiple independent studies have found that we've cut the amount of fake news on Facebook by more than half since the 2016 election," the company said in a statement to OneZero. "That still means plenty of people see fake news, which is why we now have more visible warning labels flagging this type of content, and prominent notifications when someone tries to share it or already has...."

The most glaring shortcoming in Facebook's systems might also be the one that's hardest to fix. Even when everything goes right with its fact-checking partners, their human editorial resources pale in comparison to the scope of misinformation on the platform, and they can only vet a fraction of it... In most cases, a story only rises to the top of fact-checkers' priority list once it has already gone viral. And it continues going viral during the fact-checking process. By the time it's marked as debunked on Facebook, its reach may have already peaked.

The discouraging reality is that Facebook's fact-checking efforts, however sincere, appear to be overmatched by the dynamics of its platform. To make the News Feed a less misleading information source would require far more than belated debunkings and warning labels. It would require altering the basic structure of a network designed to rapidly disseminate the posts that generate the greatest quantity of quick-twitch reactions. It would require differentiating between more and less reliable information sources -- something Facebook has attempted in only the most halfhearted ways, and upon which Zuckerberg recently indicated he has little appetite to expand... [T]he progress the platform has made appears to be reaching its limits under a CEO who sees his platform as a bulwark of free speech more than of human rights, democracy, or truth.

Last week, Facebook's only Dutch fact-checking partner quit the program in protest of the company's refusal to fact-check politicians.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: One of the big challenges of making 100 percent renewable energy a reality is long-term storage," says Julian Hunt, an engineering scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. Hunt and his collaborators have devised a novel system to complement lithium-ion battery use for energy storage over the long run: Mountain Gravity Energy Storage, or MGES for short. Similar to hydroelectric power, MGES involves storing material at elevation to produce gravitational energy. The energy is recovered when the stored material falls and turns turbines to generate electricity. The group describes its system in a paper published November 6 in Energy.

"Instead of building a dam, we propose building a big sand or gravel reservoir," explains Hunt. The key to MGES lies in finding two mountaintop sites that have a suitable difference in elevation -- 1,000 meters is ideal. "The greater the height difference, the cheaper the technology," he says. The sites will look similar, with each comprised of a mine-like station to store the sand or gravel, and a filling station directly below it. Valves release the material into waiting vessels, which are then transported via cranes and motor-run cables to the upper site. There, the sand or gravel is stored -- for weeks, months, or even years -- until it's ready to be used. When the material is moved back down the mountain, that stored gravitational energy is released and converted into electrical energy. Not only is the system more environmentally friendly than pumped-storage hydropower and dams, but it's more flexible to meet varying energy demands.

"Hunt estimates that the annual cost of storing energy via this system will vary between $50 to $100 per megawatt hour (MWh)," the report adds. "And he says that the energy expended to transport materials to the upper sits will be offset by the amount of gravitational energy the system produces."

theodp writes: In 2003, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously faced expulsion from Harvard after launching FaceMash, a type of "hot or not" website for Harvard students that asked visitors to review pictures of female students and rate their attractiveness. So perhaps it's fitting that during next week's Hour of Code, Facebook-sponsored Code.org's signature tutorial will introduce schoolchildren aged 8 and up to Artificial Intelligence concepts by asking them to review pictures of fish and rate their "awesomeness."

"A.I. is learning which fish are 'awesome' and then sorting them based on the data provided by the student," explains Code.org in a post describing AI for Oceans: a #CSforGood activity, in which students create training data by answering the question of "Is this fish awesome?" by clicking on an "awesome" or "not awesome" button. It's a well-intentioned cautionary lesson in AI: Training Data & Bias, and one that seems to presume today's 3rd graders will know the correct answer to "Is it fair to use artificial intelligence to judge a fish by its looks?" better than certain circa-2003 Harvard students might have!

MojoKid writes: At its Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii this week, Qualcomm unveiled the new Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform, which enable next year's flagship 5G Android phones with more performance, a stronger Tensor-based AI processor and a very interesting new forthcoming feature not yet offered for any smartphone platform to date. The company announced that it will eventually start delivering driver updates for its Adreno GPU engines on board the Snapdragon 865 as downloadable packages via the Google Play Store. This is big news for smartphones, as GPU drivers are rarely updated out of band, if ever, and typically have to wait for the next major Android release. And even then, many OEMs don't bother putting in the effort to ensure that mobile GPUs are running the most current graphics drivers from Qualcomm. The process, which would have to be pre-qualified by major OEMs as well, will be akin to what the PC GPU 3D graphics driver ecosystem has been benefiting from for a long time, for maximum performance and compatibility. Unfortunately, at least currently, GPU driver update support is limited to only the Adreno 650 core on board the new Snapdragon 865, which currently supports updating drivers in this fashion. Here's hoping this program is met with success and Qualcomm will begin to enable the feature for legacy and new midrange Snapdragon platforms as well.

samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: A lineup of female celebrities stand in front of you. Their faces move, smile, and blink as you move around them. They're fully nude, hairless, waiting for you to decide what you'll do to them as you peruse a menu of sex positions. This isn't just another deepfake porn video, or the kind of interactive, 3D-generated porn Motherboard reported on last month, but a hybrid of both which gives people even more control of women's virtual bodies. This new type of nonconsensual porn uses custom 3D models that can be articulated and animated, which are then made to look exactly like specific celebrities with deepfaked faces. Until recently, deepfake porn consisted of taking the face of a person -- usually a celebrity, almost always a woman -- and swapping it on to the face of an adult performer in an existing porn video. With this method, a user can make a 3D avatar with a generic face, capture footage of it performing any kind of sexual act, then run that video through an algorithm that swaps the generic face with a real person's.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The report comes this week from researchers with the NATO Strategic Communication Centre of Excellence (StratCom). Through the four-month period between May and August of this year, the research team conducted an experiment to see just how easy it is to buy your way into a network of fake accounts and how hard it is to get social media platforms to do anything about it. The research team spent about $332 to purchase engagement on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, the report (PDF) explains. That sum bought 3,520 comments, 25,750 likes, 20,000 views, and 5,100 followers. They then used those interactions to work backward to about 19,000 inauthentic accounts that were used for social media manipulation purposes.

About a month after buying all that engagement, the research team looked at the status of all those fake accounts and found that about 80 percent were still active. So they reported a sample selection of those accounts to the platforms as fraudulent. Then came the most damning statistic: three weeks after being reported as fake, 95 percent of the fake accounts were still active. "Based on this experiment and several other studies we have conducted over the last two years, we assess that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are still failing to adequately counter inauthentic behavior on their platforms," the researchers concluded. "Self-regulation is not working."

The Federal Trade Commission said on Friday that they had found Cambridge Analytica deceived consumers about the collection of Facebook data for voter profiling and targeting. "The [FTC] also found that Cambridge Analytica engaged in deceptive practices relating to its participation in the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework -- a pact on the cross-border transfer of personal data," adds Reuters. From the report: The agency order prohibits Cambridge Analytica from misrepresenting the extent to which it protects the privacy and confidentiality of personal information. It also stops the consulting firm from participating in the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework and other similar regulatory organizations. The impact of the agency order is not immediately clear as the consulting firm is no longer in business. The order comes after Facebook agreed in July to pay a record-breaking $5 billion fine to the FTC, in order to resolve a government probe into its privacy practices. The government agency continues to pursue a separate antitrust investigation of the company.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple is taking delivery this month of the first batch of carbon-free aluminum produced by a Montreal-based venture, helping move the iPhone maker closer to its greenhouse-gas reduction goal. Elysis, a joint venture between Rio Tinto Group and Alcoa Corp. backed by Apple, uses new technology that emits pure oxygen when producing aluminum. Apple has said in an environment report that 80% of its emissions from an iPhone 8 came during the production phase. The metal is also used in iPads, Macs and Apple watches. Rio's commercial network is handling the first delivery to Apple, a Rio spokesman said in an email. The metal being shipped to Apple was produced at the Alcoa Technical Center in Pittsburgh. "This first sale is tangible evidence of our revolutionary work to transform and disrupt the conventional smelting process by making a process that is both more efficient and more sustainable," Benjamin Kahrs, an Alcoa executive vice president and Chief Innovation Officer, said in a statement.

The FBI says owners of IoT (Internet of Things) devices should isolate this equipment on a separate WiFi network, different from the one they're using for their primary devices, such as laptops, desktops, or smartphones. From a report: "Your fridge and your laptop should not be on the same network," the FBI's Portland office said in a weekly tech advice column. "Keep your most private, sensitive data on a separate system from your other IoT devices," it added. The same advice -- to keep devices on a separate WiFi network or LAN -- has been shared in the past by multiple IT and security experts. The reasoning behind it is simple. By keeping all the IoT equipment on a separate network, any compromise of a "smart" device will not grant an attacker a direct route to a user's primary devices -- where most of their data is stored. Jumping across the two networks would require considerable effort from the attacker. However, placing primary devices and IoT devices on separate networks might not sound that easy for non-technical users. The simplest way is to use two routers. Further reading: Now Even the FBI is Warning About Your Smart TV's Security.

General Motors and LG Chemical plan to make battery cells for electric-powered vehicles, unveiling a joint venture that they expect to create more than 1,100 jobs in northeast Ohio. The companies say they'll invest up to $2.3 billion in the venture. From a report: The project is centered around Lordstown, Ohio, where GM shuttered a plant last March that had produced the Chevrolet Cruze. The new plant in the Lordstown area will make battery cells for GM's upcoming all-electric vehicles, from a Cadillac sedan to a new electric truck that's slated for release in late 2021. GM recently sold its idled Cruze plant to a company called Lordstown Motors, which plans to produce electric pickup trucks at the facility, as member station WCBE reported. The new venture will pair GM's manufacturing know-how with LG Chem's battery-cell technology, says GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra. Construction on the facility will begin in the summer of 2020, the companies say.

The WebAssembly Working Group has published today the three WebAssembly specifications as W3C Recommendations, marking the arrival of a new language for the Web which allows code to run in the browser. From a report: WebAssembly Core Specification defines a low-level virtual machine which closely mimicks the functionality of many microprocessors upon which it is run. Either through Just-In-Time compilation or interpretation, the WebAssembly engine can perform at nearly the speed of code compiled for a native platform. A .wasm resource is analogous to a Java .class file in that it contains static data and code segments which operate over that static data. Unlike Java, WebAssembly is typically produced as a compilation target from other programming languages like C/C++ and Rust.

WebAssembly Web API defines a Promise-based interface for requesting and executing a .wasm resource. The structure of a .wasm resource is optimized to allow execution to begin before the entire resource has been retrieved, which further enhances responsiveness of WebAssembly applications.

WebAssembly JavaScript Interface provides a JavaScript API for invoking and passing parameters to WebAssembly functions. In Web browsers, WebAssembly's interactions with the host environment are all managed through JavaScript, which means that WebAssembly relies on JavaScript's highly-engineered security model.

On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) announced a new plan aimed at expanding broadband internet access across the country and dismantling what he referred to as "internet and cable monopolies." From a report: In his sweeping "High-Speed Internet for All" proposal, Sanders calls for broadband to be considered a public utility, much like electricity, and calls access "a basic human right." The plan would provide $150 billion in grants and technical assistance to states and communities for the purpose of building out their own "democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks." As part of the new plan, Sanders defines "broadband" as 100 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up, which is significantly higher than the Federal Communications Commission standard of 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. If elected president, Sanders said he would also work to restore net neutrality and ban internet and cable companies from instituting data caps and throttling consumer access to the internet.

From a report: Keybase started off as co-founder and developer Max Krohn's "hobby project" -- a way for people to share PGP keys with a simple username-based lookup. Then Chris Coyne (who also was cofounder of OkCupid and SparkNotes) got involved and along came $10.8 million in funding from a group of investors led by Andreesen Horowitz. And then things got increasingly more complicated. Keybase aims to make public-key encryption accessible to everyone, for everything from messaging to file sharing to throwing a few crypto-coins someone's way. But because of that level of accessibility, Keybase faces a very OkCupid kind of problem: after drawing in people interested in easy public-key crypto-based communications and then drawing in blockchain lovers with its partnership with (and funding from) Stellar.org, Keybase has also drawn in spammers and scammers. And that has brought a host of alerts and messages that have made what was once a fairly clear communications channel into one clogged with unwanted alerts, messages, and other unpleasantry -- raising a chorus of complaints in Keybase's open chat channel. It turns out there's a reason spell check keeps wanting to tell me that Keybase should be spelled "debase."

Keybase's leadership is promising to do something to fix the spam problem -- or at least make it easier to report and block abusers. In a blog post, Krohn and Coynes wrote, "To be clear, the current spam volume isn't dire, YET. Keybase still works great. But we should act quickly." But the measures promised by Keybase won't completely eliminate the issue. And Keybase execs have no interest in getting involved with additional steps that they see as censorship. "Keybase is a private company and we do retain our rights to kick people out," the co-founders said in the blog post. "That hammer will not be used because someone is mostly disliked, as long as they're playing nicely on Keybase."

At the Cascadia Rail Summit outside Seattle, a fledgling scheme to bring high-speed rail from Portland to Vancouver found an enthusiastic reception. Gregory Scruggs writes via CityLab: Only 175 miles separate Portland from Seattle. Then it's another 140 miles north to Vancouver, British Columbia. The three Pacific Northwest cities, which together form the Cascadia megaregion, are currently served by Amtrak service that tops out at 79 mph, shares track with BNSF freight trains, and runs infrequently -- just twice daily round-trip between Seattle and Vancouver. If you want to make the full 315-mile run from Portland to Vancouver on rails, it's going to take you at least 8-and-a-half hours. By bus or car, expect the journey to eat up 5 or 6 hours, with metro-area traffic an unpredictable wild card that regularly balloons travel times.

But Roger Millar, Washington State's secretary of transportation, sees a better way: a trans-national, ultra-high-speed rail line that can hit 250 mph and put the three booming cities within super-commuting range. Such a system -- common in Europe and Asia but still alien to North America -- might cost $50 billion or so. That sounds like a lot, but it could be a bargain compared to adding a lane to I-5, the current north-south corridor linking the megaregion. "[For] $108 billion we've got another lane of pavement in each direction, and it still takes you all day to get from Portland to Vancouver," Millar said earlier this month of a hypothetical lane-widening project. "Half of that invested in ultra-high speed rail and it's two hours. That's game-changing stuff."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Road to VR: Qualcomm today announced Snapdragon XR2 5G, its latest chipset platform dedicated to the needs of standalone VR and AR headsets. The new platform is aimed at high-end devices with support for 3K x 3K displays at 90Hz, along with integrated 5G, accelerated AI processing, and up to seven simultaneous camera feeds for user and environment tracking. While XR1 was made for low-end devices, XR2 5G targets high-end standalone headsets, making it a candidate for Oculus Quest 2, Magic Leap 2, and similar next-gen devices.

XR2 offers up notable improvements over Snapdragon 835 (one of the most common chipsets found in current standalone headsets, including Quest); Qualcomm claims 2x performance in CPU & GPU, 4x increase in pixel throughput for video playback, and up to 6x resolution per-eye compared to Snapdragon 835 -- supporting up to 3K x 3K displays at 90Hz. [...] Notably, XR2 supports up to seven simultaneous camera feeds (up from four in prior platforms). This is key for advanced tracking, both of the environment and the user. [...] Qualcomm also says that XR2 offers low-latency pass-through video which could improve the pass-through video experience on headsets like Quest, and potentially enable a wider range of pass-through AR use-cases. Additionally XR2 boasts significantly accelerated AI processing; 11x compared to Snapdragon 835, which could greatly benefit the sort of operations used for turning incoming video feeds into useful tracking information.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says there will be four new OLED iPhone models in 2020, followed by a new iPhone without a Lightning port in 2021. 9to5Mac reports: In 2021, Kuo is predicting a followup to the iPhone SE 2 as well as a new iPhone model without Lightning connectivity. Kuo says that this would "provide the completely wireless experience," meaning there would be no ports at all rather than a switch to USB-C from Lightning. Kuo implies that Apple only plans to remove the Lightning port from the "highest-end model" at first, rather than from the entire iPhone lineup at once. Kuo says The 2021 followup to the iPhone SE 2, which Kuo refers to as the "iPhone SE 2 Plus," will reportedly feature an all-screen design without a Home button. Kuo predicts this device will have a screen size of either 5.5-inches or 6.1-inches. Interestingly, Kuo says the iPhone SE 2 Plus still won't include Face ID authentication. Instead, Apple is reportedly planning to integrate Touch ID into the power button on the side of the device. As for the 2020 OLED iPhones, here's what Kuo had to say: Kuo predicts that Apple will introduce 5.4-inch, two 6.1-inch, and a 6.7-inch OLED iPhone models in 2020. He says that all four of these iPhones will also feature 5G connectivity. The difference between all of these models, other than screen sizes, will be camera technology. According to Kuo, the 5.4-inch OLED iPhone will feature a dual-camera setup on the back. The lower-end 6.1-inch iPhone will feature a similar dual-camera system. The higher-end 6.1-inch model and the 6.7-inch model will include triple-lens camera setups as well as time-of-flight 3D sensing technology. In terms of design for the 2020 OLED iPhone, Kuo says the form factor will be "similar to the iPhone 4."

pgmrdlm shares a report from Business Insider: A suspected terrorist in Syria was reportedly killed with a rare U.S. missile packed with swords, according to multiple reports. The weapon that shredded the car did not explode. While the driver's side was torn apart, the vehicle was actually mostly intact. The deadly precision weapon was, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal in May, designed by the U.S. to reduce civilian casualties. The Journal noted that the R9X has been used covertly, albeit rarely, against targets in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere since 2017.