An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In April of this year, Intel cancelled its 5G-modem building plans. This week, it's announcing that they're back on the table -- but this time, with system-on-chip vendor MediaTek building the hardware. The partnership has Intel setting the 5G specifications, MediaTek developing the modem to match, and Intel optimizing and validating it afterwards. Intel will also lend its marketing and integration muscle to convince OEMs to use the new hardware and help them make sure it works well in final products. This also means Intel will be writing operating-system-level drivers for the modems.

The partnership looks like a sensible one for both parties: Intel has been struggling to get its own 10nm hardware out the door on time, so getting this hardware design task off its plate may relieve some pressure there, while still keeping the company in an emerging market. MediaTek, on the other hand, can definitely benefit from Intel's software development expertise and deep integration with OEM vendors in the PC space. Specifically, the companies will be adapting MediaTek's existing Helio M70 5G modem for use in PC hardware. The M70 modem is already being built into MediaTek's Dimensity family of ARM System-on-Chip (SoC) designs; the new partnership gives MediaTek a whole new platform to market to and gives Intel a foot back into the door in 5G. It also may represent a way for Intel to push back against ARM-based Windows hardware like Samsung's Galaxy Book S, built on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx platform. We can expect to see the resulting hardware shipping some time in 2021, the report adds.

Amazon announced today that developers can now have Alexa respond to questions from U.S. users with a "happy/excited" or a "disappointed/empathetic" tone. The Verge reports: Amazon suggests the happy/excited tone could be used when you answer a trivia question correctly, for example, and that the disappointed/empathetic tone could be used when you ask for a sports score and your favorite team has lost. (One day, I'm sure she'll express disappointment at some dumb question that I ask, and I'll deserve it.) If you want to hear the different voices for yourself, Amazon shared six examples, three for each emotion at increasing levels of excitement or disappointment: Disappointed (Low Intensity), Disappointed (Medium Intensity), Disappointed (High Intensity), Excited (Low Intensity), Excited (Medium Intensity), and Excited (High Intensity).

mspohr quotes a report from The Guardian: Top Democrats on Tuesday proposed tough new privacy laws to rein in the U.S.'s tech companies after a series of scandals that have shaken confidence in the companies and exposed the personal data of millions of consumers. The effort, led by Senator Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Senate commerce, science and transportation committee, aims to "provide consumers with foundational data privacy rights, create strong oversight mechanisms, and establish meaningful enforcement." The Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act (Copra) comes after a series of failed attempts to rein in the tech giants in the U.S.

The act resembles Europe's sweeping General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation, passed in 2016. It would force tech companies to disclose the personal information they have collected, delete or correct inaccurate or incomplete information and allow consumers to block the sale of their information. The bill's sponsors are all Democrats and include presidential candidate Senator Amy Klobuchar. "Companies continue to profit off of the personal data they collect from Americans, but they leave consumers completely in the dark about how their personal information is being used," she said. "It's time for Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A master player of the Chinese strategy game Go has decided to retire, due to the rise of artificial intelligence that "cannot be defeated." Lee Se-dol is the only human to ever beat the AlphaGo software developed by Google's sister company Deepmind. In 2016, he took part in a five-match showdown against AlphaGo, losing four times but beating the computer once. The South Korean said he had decided to retire after realizing: "I'm not at the top even if I become the number one." "There is an entity that cannot be defeated," the 18-time world Go champion told South Korea's Yonhap news agency. Lee Se-dol is considered to be one of the greatest Go players of the modern era. "On behalf of the whole AlphaGo team at DeepMind, I'd like to congratulate Lee Se-dol for his legendary decade at the top of the game, and wish him the very best for the future," said Demis Hassabis, chief executive and co-founder of Deepmind. "During the AlphaGo matches, he demonstrated true warrior spirit and kept us on the edges of our seats to the very end."

What if you could manipulate the facial features of a historical figure, a politician, or a CEO realistically and convincingly using nothing but a webcam and an illustrated or photographic still image? From a report: A tool called MarioNETte that was recently developed by researchers at Seoul-based Hyperconnect accomplishes this, thanks in part to cutting-edge machine learning techniques. The researchers claim it outperforms all baselines even where there's "significant" mismatch between the face to be manipulated and the person doing the manipulating. MarioNETte is technically a face reenactment tool, in that it aims to synthesize a reenacted face animated by the movement of a person (a "driver") while preserving the face's (target's) appearance. It's not a new idea, but previous approaches either (1) required a few minutes of training data and could only reenact predefined targets, or (2) would distort the target's features when dealing with large poses.

MarioNETte advances the state of the art by incorporating three novel components: an image attention block, a target feature alignment, and a landmark transformer. The attention block allows the model to attend to relevant positions of mapped physical features, while the target feature alignment mitigates artifacts, warping, and distortion. As for the landmark transformer bit, it adapts the geometry of the driver's poses to that of the target without the need for labeled data, in contrast to approaches that require human-annotated examples. The researchers trained and tested MarioNETte using VoxCeleb1 and CelebV, two open source corpora of celebrity photos and videos.

Researchers at Australia's Deakin University say they've managed to use common industrial polymers to create solid electrolytes, opening the door to double-density solid state lithium batteries that won't explode or catch fire if they overheat. Tangential writes: Dr. Fangfang Chen and Dr. Xiaoen Wang from Deakin's Institute for Frontier Materials claim to have made a breakthrough with "the first clear and useful example of liquid-free and efficient transportation of lithium-ion in the scientific community." The new technology uses a solid polymer material, weakly bonded to the lithium-ion, to replace the volatile liquid solvents typically used as electrolytes in current battery cells. The liquid electrolyte is the part of the system that becomes flammable during the kinds of infamous battery fires Samsung would rather forget. "If industry implements our findings I see a future where battery reliant devices can be safely packed in airplane baggage, for example, or where electric cars don't pose a fire risk for occupants or emergency services like they currently do," Dr Chen said in a press release. In addition to making batteries safer, the team believes this solid polymer electrolyte will finally allow batteries to work with a lithium metal anode. That would be big news in the battery world, where the lithium anode has been recently described in Trends in Chemistry as "critical to break the energy-density bottleneck of current Li-ion chemistry" -- the bottleneck that's stopping electric vehicles, aircraft and portable electronics from developing at the pace they should be.

Owners of Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones are still trying to get the company to either fix or roll back a firmware update that removed noise-cancelling functions from their over-ear gear. From a report: The problems date back to July and some owners seem to have managed to get Bose to exchange their cans for the company's shiny new 700 headphones. We were contacted by a reader who was first given a set of version II headphones when his V1 set were borked. When the updated firmware borked them as well, he declined the offer of a replacement set and was given a pair of 700s. Firmware version 4.5.2 was fingered as the main culprit. Like all Bose gear, the cans don't come cheap -- they'll set you back $335 to be precise, or $450 for a pair of limited edition white 700s. Pissed-off punters have filled a deafening 182 pages of Bose's support forums with complaints. One has even set up a Change.org petition to beg for a pause on firmware updates until a fix is found.

Awareness of 5G is relatively high in the US market but significant confusion exists. From a report: Overcoming the confusion among flagship buyers that believe they already have 5G is an industry created problem that needs to be addressed. A new report from the User Experience Strategies group at Strategy Analytics has assessed consumer awareness, expectations, and potential adoption of 5G and found that smartphone price was overwhelmingly the biggest factor for not buying 5G. Surveying consumers in the US via web-survey, key report findings include: Nearly two thirds of consumers surveyed claimed 'Basic Familiarity' or to be 'Very Familiar' with 5G, but of this nearly one fifth of consumers already thought they had 5G. While one in four consumers in the US listed 5G as an important feature, one in five didn't yet see a need for 5G, or wanted to wait until the benefits of 5G were proven before purchasing this technology. Apple fans in the US believe they are 5G leaders despite market reality. But when asked which brand they would buy for 5G capabilities, overall consumers ranked Samsung neck and neck with Apple as the most preferred.

Last week, Apple responded to a series of questions that the US House Judiciary Committee sent to it back in September as part of a broader antitrust probe. Apple answered a series of questions about its hardware repair programs. It emphasized that it doesn't restrict repairs or refuse to repair gadgets that might have been fixed previously by unauthorized technicians. For right-to-repair advocates, though, Apple's answers weren't good enough. From a report: Proponents of a more open source approach to repairing gadgets say that Apple's on-the-record responses are examples of "expert question-dodging," or in some cases "downright false." Apple's responses have even raised questions about the definition of a "repair" -- a kind of consumer tech version of what the meaning of the word "is" is. That's according to iFixit, a business built on DIY electronics repairs and one of the more consistently vocal groups in the world of product repairs and sustainability. Now the right-to-repair arm of the US Public Interest Research Group is also weighing in, saying Apple is trying to "weave around key criticisms." The group is lobbying for Congress to take a harder look at Apple's claims. "The fact is that Apple, and many other manufacturers, take all manner of actions that restrict repair, which result in higher costs for consumers and a faster rate of obsolescence," says Nathan Proctor, director of the US PIRG's Right to Repair campaign. Proctor also argues that when Apple offers replacement products instead of repairing a device, it is effectively refusing to repair.

Twitter will begin deleting accounts that have been inactive for more than six months, unless they log in before an 11 December deadline. From a report: The cull will include users who stopped posting to the site because they died -- unless someone with that person's account details is able to log-in. It is the first time Twitter has removed inactive accounts on such a large scale. The site said it was because users who do not log-in were unable to agree to its updated privacy policies. A spokeswoman also said it would improve credibility by removing dormant accounts from people's follower counts, something which may give a user an undue sense of importance. The first batch of deleted accounts will involve those registered outside of the US. The firm bases inactivity on whether or not a person has logged in at least once in the past six months. Twitter said the effort is not, as had been suggested by some users on the network, an attempt to free up usernames.

That said, previously unavailable usernames will start coming up for grabs after the 11 December cut-off -- though Twitter said it would be a gradual process, beginning with users outside of the US. In future, the firm said it would also look at accounts where people have logged in but don't "do anything" on the platform. A spokeswoman would not elaborate, other to say that the firm uses many signals to determine genuine human users -- not just whether they interact with, or post, tweets. Further reading: You can take my Dad's tweets over my dead body.

UPDATE (11/29/2019): "Twitter said Wednesday it is putting the brakes, for now, on a plan to start deleting inactive accounts that was set to begin next month," reports SiliconValley.com.

"Twitter said it would hold back on the plan to clear out accounts that had been inactive for at least six months after hearing from multiple users about whether or not they would be able to access the accounts of deceased family members after the Dec. 11 deadline Twitter had established...."

A year ago, Microsoft seemed to be pushing full steam-ahead with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Since then, the company's PWA momentum -- at least publicly -- seemed to have waned. However, this week, a couple of different teams at Microsoft have started talking about their PWA plans. From a report: Google has been the main champion of PWAs, which are basically web sites and/or apps that behave like native apps. But other vendors have jumped on the PWA bandwagon, as well, in recent years. Microsoft has been working to make PWA support part of its overall Windows 10 and Edge browser stories. Microsoft is turning its Outlook.com and Outlook on the Web applications into PWAs, as noted by Thurrott.com. Thurrott.com's Paul Thurrott noted that Outlook on the Web is displaying a PWA "Install" button in the Brave browser address bar. That same Install option is visible to some using the Canary version of the Chromium-based Edge browser, he reported on November 25. Outlook.com also now has an Install prompt available in the Brave address bar, he reported today, November 26, which means Outlook.com also is on its way to becoming a PWA.

Brian Krebs: Many readers probably believe they can trust links and emails coming from U.S. federal government domain names, or else assume there are at least more stringent verification requirements involved in obtaining a .gov domain versus a commercial one ending in .com or .org. But a recent experience suggests this trust may be severely misplaced, and that it is relatively straightforward for anyone to obtain their very own .gov domain. Earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity received an email from a researcher who said he got a .gov domain simply by filling out and emailing an online form, grabbing some letterhead off the homepage of a small U.S. town that only has a ".us" domain name, and impersonating the town's mayor in the application.

"I used a fake Google Voice number and fake Gmail address," said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for this story but who said he did it mainly as a thought experiment. "The only thing that was real was the mayor's name." The email from this source was sent from exeterri[.]gov, a domain registered on Nov. 14 that at the time displayed the same content as the .us domain it was impersonating -- town.exeter.ri.us -- which belongs to the town of Exeter, Rhode Island (the impostor domain is no longer resolving). "I had to [fill out] 'an official authorization form,' which basically just lists your admin, tech guy, and billing guy," the source continued. "Also, it needs to be printed on 'official letterhead,' which of course can be easily forged just by Googling a document from said municipality. Then you either mail or fax it in. After that, they send account creation links to all the contacts."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Audi plans to eliminate roughly 15% of its German workforce to lift earnings by $6.6 billion as Volkswagen AG's largest profit maker pushes ahead with a restructuring plan to help adapt to the costly transition to electric cars. The turnaround is aimed at regaining ground lost to luxury-car leaders Mercedes-Benz and BMWand counter pressure from Tesla. Volkswagen has been scrambling to revive Audi's fortunes after turmoil sparked by the aftermath of the 2015 diesel-cheating scandal. By 2025, Audi plans to cut as many as 9,500 jobs in Germany and streamline operations at its two main factories in its home country. The positions will be reduced through attrition and voluntary measures including early retirement, Audi said in a statement Tuesday after reaching an agreement with employee representatives. The approximately 50,000 remaining employees in Germany will have job guarantees through 2029, and Audi will create 2,000 new jobs to strengthen its engineering muscle for electric cars and digital offerings.

Facebook is the mystery "Party A" revealed in an SEC filing that bid several times to acquire health wearables maker Fitbit, including a best and final offer of $7.30 per share, according CNBC citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Google announced its intentions to acquire Fitbit on Nov. 1 for about $2.1 billion in cash, or $7.35 per share. Facebook views the sale process as complete and doesn't plan to bid again now that Google has agreed to the purchase, one of the people said.

According to the filing, Fitbit CEO James Park had dinner with "the chief executive officer of Party A" on June 11, 2019, to discuss the wearables technology landscape. That person would be Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, sources said. Park and other members of Fitbit's senior management had dinner with Zuckerberg again on July 2, the filing said. Zuckerberg and Park met once more in September, according to the filing. In October, Facebook bid several times to acquire Fitbit, the filing said, but ultimately said $7.30 per share was the company's best and final offer.

On Tuesday, lawyers representing current and former employees of Israeli surveillance contractor NSO Group took legal action against Facebook to try and get their accounts reinstated after being banned by the social media giant. Motherboard reports: Last month, Facebook itself sued NSO in California for leveraging a vulnerability in the WhatsApp chat program that NSO Group clients used to hack targets. As part of that, Facebook also banned the personal Facebook and Instagram accounts of multiple current and former NSO employees. The new lawsuit argues that Facebook violated its own terms of service by blocking the NSO employees, and it used personal information they shared with Facebook in order to identify them, in violation of an Israeli privacy law. As relief, the lawyers ask the court to make Facebook lift the ban on the accounts. The lawsuit was first reported in Israeli media.

"It appears that Facebook used the [NSO employees'] personal data...in order to identify them as NSO employees (or former employees), in service of imposing 'collective punishment' on them, in the form of blocking their personal accounts," the lawsuit reads in Hebrew. The lawsuit argues that the personal data used to identify them as NSO employees belonged to the individuals, and not Facebook. The legal action says that the NSO employees were banned without warning even though they are "private people, who make private use of the social networks, whose only 'sin' was any association with NSO, as employees or former employees." The lawsuit includes a screenshot of an email Facebook allegedly sent to someone who had their account suspended. Facebook told Motherboard in a statement on Tuesday, "In October we filed a legal complaint which attributed a sophisticated cyber attack to the NSO Group and its employees that was directed at WhatsApp and its users in violation of our terms of service and U.S. law. Such actions warranted disabling relevant accounts and continue to be necessary for security reasons, including preventing additional attacks."

Sadly, it's looking like the Ford F-150 versus Tesla Cybertruck tow battle probably won't happen. TechCrunch reports: Tesla CEO Elon Musk poked the figurative Dearborn, Michigan bear in the middle of the company's Cybertruck unveiling when he played a video of the futuristic electric truck pulling an F-150 in what was pitched as a head-to-head contest. Many were quick to question whether it was a fair fight, including astrophysicist and author Neil deGrasse Tyson. But what really got Musk's attention was a tweet from Sundeep Madra, VP of Ford X, the automaker's venture incubator.

Madra tweeted to Musk challenging the CEO to send Ford a Cybertruck to do an "apples to apples" test. Musk, who is well versed in the Twitter troll, responded with a "bring it on." It seems Madra's tweet wasn't meant to be a serious challenge, but a "tongue in cheek" troll, according to Ford. "Sunny's tweet was tongue in cheek to point out the absurdity of Tesla's video, nothing more," a Ford spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch. "With America's best-selling truck for 42 years, we've always focused on serving our truck customers regardless of what others say or do. We look forward to our all-new F-150 hybrid coming next year and all-electric F-150 in a few years."

Freshly Exhumed shares a report from AeroTime: In a growing line of whistleblowers and skeptics voicing their concerns before the expected re-certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, another rogue agent has emerged. In an email sent to regulators in the U.S., Europe and Brazil, a Transport Canada safety official called for the entire removal of the MCAS system from the 737 MAX. The official believes that the U.S. plane maker should remove the software, largely blamed for the two deadly 737 MAX 8 crashes, before the aircraft is cleared to fly again.

"The only way I see moving forward at this point is that the MCAS has to go," Jim Marko, manager of Aircraft Integration and Safety Assessment at Canada's aviation regulator -- Transport Canada -- wrote in the email, according to The New York Times, which first reported the news. In the email, sent to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and Brazil's National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) on November 19, 2019, Marko expressed his "uneasiness" about Boeing's attempts to fix the MCAS software. "Judging from the number and degree of open issues that we have, I am feeling that final decisions on acceptance will not be technically based," he was quoted as saying by Canada's National Post. "This leaves me with a level of uneasiness that I cannot sit idly by and watch it pass by..." Marko continues to say that, according to him, the only feasible option at this point is to remove the MCAS software altogether, with all the compliance issues that such move would entail, if regulators and the public were to regain confidence in the sign-off on the 737 MAX.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Ring, Amazon's crimefighting surveillance camera division, has crafted plans to use facial recognition software and its ever-expanding network of home security cameras to create AI-enabled neighborhood "watch lists," according to internal documents reviewed by The Intercept. The planning materials envision a seamless system whereby a Ring owner would be automatically alerted when an individual deemed "suspicious" was captured in their camera's frame, something described as a "suspicious activity prompt."

It's unclear who would have access to these neighborhood watch lists, if implemented, or how exactly they would be compiled, but the documents refer repeatedly to law enforcement, and Ring has forged partnerships with police departments throughout the U.S., raising the possibility that the lists could be used to aid local authorities. The documents indicate that the lists would be available in Ring's Neighbors app, through which Ring camera owners discuss potential porch and garage security threats with others nearby. [...] Mohammad Tajsar, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, expressed concern over Ring's willingness to plan the use of facial recognition watch lists, fearing that "giving police departments and consumers access to 'watch listing' capabilities on Ring devices encourages the creation of a digital redline in local neighborhoods, where cops in tandem with skeptical homeowners let machines create lists of undesirables unworthy of entrance into well-to-do areas." When reached for comment, Ring spokesperson Yassi Shahmiri said that "the features described are not in development or in use and Ring does not use facial recognition technology."

Amazon also told Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey earlier this month that facial recognition has been a "contemplated but unreleased feature" for Ring, but would only be added with "thoughtful design including privacy, security and user control."

dryriver writes: When you run a real-time video processing algorithm on a GPU, you notice that some math functions execute very quickly on the GPU and some math functions take up a lot more processing time or cycles, slowing down the algorithm. If you were to implement that exact GPU algorithm as a dedicated ASIC hardware chip or perhaps on a beefy FPGA, what kind of speedup -- if any -- could you expect over a midrange GPU like a GTX 1070? Would hardwiring the same math operations as ASIC circuitry lead to a massive execution time speedup as some people claim -- e.g. 5x or 10x faster than a general purpose Nvidia GPU -- or are GPUs and ASICs close to each other in execution speed?

Bonus question: Is there a way to calculate the speed of an algorithm implemented as an ASIC chip without having an actual physical ASIC chip produced? Could you port the algorithm to, say, Verilog or similar languages and then use a software tool to calculate or predict how fast it would run if implemented as an ASIC with certain properties (clock speed, core count, manufacturing process... )?

Moscow-area farmers are strapping modified VR headsets to cows to try and improve their milk production. Engadget reports: The project subjected cattle to a simulated summer field with colors tuned for the animals' eyes, giving them a decidedly more pleasing landscape than a plain, confining farm. And yes, the headsets were adapted to the "structural features" of cows' heads so that they could see properly. It appears to have worked, at least on a basic level. The first test reduced the cows' anxiety and boosted their overall sentiment. While it's not certain how well this affects the quality or volume of milk, there are plans for a more "comprehensive" study to answer that question. Further reading: The Moscow Times, Interfax