Two days before Google was set to publicly post more than 100,000 images of human chest X-rays, the tech giant got a call from the National Institutes of Health, which had provided the images: Some of them still contained details that could be used to identify the patients, a potential privacy and legal violation. From a report: Google abruptly canceled its project with NIH, according to emails reviewed by The Washington Post and an interview with a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But the 2017 incident, which has never been reported, highlights the potential pitfalls of the tech giant's incursions into the world of sensitive health data. Over the course of planning the X-ray project, Google's researchers didn't obtain any legal agreements covering the privacy of patient information, the person said, adding that the company rushed toward publicly announcing the project without properly vetting the data for privacy concerns. The emails about Google's NIH project were part of records obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request. Google's ability to uphold data privacy is under scrutiny as it increasingly inserts itself into people's medical lives. The Internet giant this week said it has partnered with health-care provider Ascension to collect and store personal data for millions of patients, including full names, dates of birth and clinical histories, in order to make smarter recommendations to physicians. But the project raised privacy concerns in part because it wasn't immediately clear whether patients had consented to have their files transferred from Ascension servers or what Google's intentions were.

Amid growing health concerns over e-cigarettes, Apple will remove all 181 vaping-related apps from its mobile App Store this morning, Axios reports. From a report: The move comes after at least 42 people have died from vaping-related lung illness, per the CDC. Most of those people had been using cartridges containing THC, though some exclusively used nicotine cartridges. The company has never allowed the sale of vape cartridges directly from apps. But there were apps that let people control the temperature and lighting of their vape pens, and others provided vaping-related news, social networks and games.

Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, writes about how and why Facebook might take inspiration from the U.S. jury system in reviewing the truth value of political ads. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the article: What we need are ways for decisions about content to be made, as they inevitably must be when platforms rank and recommend content for us to see; for those decisions yet not to be too far-reaching or stiflingly consistent, so there is play in the joints; and for the deep stakes of those decisions to be matched by the gravity and reflectiveness of the process to make them. Facebook recently announced plans for an "independent oversight board," a tribunal that would render the company's final judgment on whether a disputed posting should be taken down. But far more than its own version of the Supreme Court, Facebook needs a way to tap into the everyday common sense of regular people. Even Facebook does not trust Facebook to decide unilaterally which ads are false and misleading. So if the ads are to be weighed at all, someone else has to render judgment.

In the court system, legislators write laws, and lawyers argue cases, but juries of ordinary people are typically the finders of fact and judges of what counts as "reasonable" behavior. This is less because a group of people plucked from the phone book is the best way to ascertain truth -- after all, we don't use that kind of group for any other fact-finding. Rather, it's because, when done honorably, with duties taken seriously, deliberation by juries lends legitimacy and credibility to the machinations of the legal system.

Physicists from the University of Bonn and the University of Cologne have succeeded in cooling photons down to a Bose-Einstein condensate, causing the light to collect in optical "valleys" from which it can no longer return. The findings have been published in the journal Science. Phys.Org reports: A light beam is usually divided by being directed onto a partially reflecting mirror: Part of the light is then reflected back to create the mirror image. The rest passes through the mirror. "However, this process can be turned around if the experimental set-up is reversed," says Prof. Dr. Martin Weitz from the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Bonn. If the reflected light and the part of the light passing through the mirror are sent in the opposite direction, the original light beam can be reconstructed. The physicist investigates exotic optical quantum states of light. Together with his team and Prof. Dr. Achim Rosch from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Cologne, Weitz was looking for a new method to generate optical one-way streets by cooling the photons: As a result of the smaller energy of the photons, the light should collect in valleys and thereby be irreversibly divided. The physicists used a Bose-Einstein condensate made of photons for this purpose, which Weitz first achieved in 2010, becoming the first to create such a "super-photon."

A beam of light is thrown back and forth between two mirrors. During this process, the photons collide with dye molecules located between the reflecting surfaces. The dye molecules "swallow" the photons and then spit them out again. "The photons acquire the temperature of the dye solution," says Weitz. "In the course of this, they cool down to room temperature without getting lost." By irradiating the dye solution with a laser, the physicists increase the number of photons between the mirrors. The strong concentration of the light particles combined with simultaneous cooling causes the individual photons to fuse to form a "super-photon," also known as Bose-Einstein condensate. "Perhaps quantum computers might one day use this method to communicate with each other and form a kind of quantum Internet," says Weitz.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: On Thursday, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang put out a sweeping new tech policy proposal with a number of controversial proposals, including taxing digital ads and launching a new department to regulate algorithms on social networks. [...] In his Thursday blog post, Yang argues that his opponents' calls to break-up big tech firms like Facebook and Google fall short of protecting consumers from companies that prioritize "profits over our well-being." Yang's broad tech policy plan attacks the issues plaguing tech from four different angles: promoting a healthy relationship with tech, data ownership and privacy, fighting disinformation, and empowering the federal government with new guidelines and resources to tackle these issues.

Ever since the 2016 election, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been under fire by public advocates and lawmakers for their failures to remove disinformation from their platforms. In his tech proposal, Yang piggybacks on his digital ads VAT, suggesting that if it were implemented, there would be less false information on social media because platforms would become subscription-based and not be forced to accept advertising at all, let alone misleading political ads. There would also be significant new restrictions on how platforms like Facebook can target users with content. Any algorithms used by "platforms that allow political advertisements or the sharing of news stories" would be required to be open source or at least confidentially shared with Yang's "Department of the Attention Economy." All ads would have to be clearly labeled as such. Yang says he would amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- one of the most pivotal laws governing the internet -- but didn't specify what his amendment would look like.

He also pledges to pass a "Digital Bill of Rights, ensuring ownership of data, control over how it's used, and compensation for its use" if he is elected president. Consumers could choose to opt in to have their data collected. "But then you should receive a share of the economic value generated from your data," Yang says.

Amazon is going into battle with the Pentagon over a massive military tech contract awarded to Microsoft. Amazon cited "unmistakable bias" as it prepares to protest the selection in federal court. NPR reports: This begins a new chapter in the protracted and contentious battle over the biggest cloud-computing contract in U.S. history -- called JEDI, for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure -- worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. The Pentagon declared Microsoft the winner of JEDI on Oct. 25, after months of delays, investigations and controversy -- at first, over accusations of a cozy relationship between Amazon and the Department of Defense, and later, over President Trump's public criticism of Amazon.

In a statement on Thursday, Amazon's cloud unit argued that "numerous aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias -- and it's important that these matters be examined and rectified." The company is appealing the contract at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Amazon Web Services spokesperson said the company was "uniquely experienced and qualified" for the job, adding: "We also believe it's critical for our country that the government and its elected leaders administer procurements objectively and in a manner that is free from political influence." Amazon was stunned by its loss of the JEDI contract. Microsoft's cloud business Azure has been a distant second in size to AWS, which also previously won a cloud contract with the CIA. But a former Pentagon official familiar with the JEDI deal previously told NPR that Microsoft's bid "hit the ball out of the park."

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has launched a social network called WT:Social. It has no financial association with Wikipedia and operates on donations, not advertising. The Next Web reports: WT:Social went live last month and is currently nearing 50,000 users. The company is rolling out access slowly; when I signed up, I was approximately number 28,000 on the waitlist. Alternatively, you can pay 13 bucks a month or 100 a year to get access right away.

In comments to the Financial Times, Wales said "The business model of social media companies, of pure advertising, is problematic. It turns out the huge winner is low-quality content." You don't say. WT:Social's interface is rather sparse at the moment, featuring a simple feed comprised of news stories and comments below them. News is a big part of the network; it's a spinoff of Wales' previous project, WikiTribune, which sought to be a global news site comprised of professional journalists and citizen contributors. Both WikiTribune and WT:Social emphasize combatting fake news, highlighting evidence-based coverage over the focus on "engagement" seen on other networks. Each story posted to the network makes prominent where the article comes from, as well as sources and references.

You can also join various "SubWikis" that are essentially like Facebook groups or subreddits, which filter content to stories of a given topic. You can also add hashtags to a post or follow hashtags for more specific interests that might span more than one SubWiki. Posts are currently sorted chronologically, but the site plans to add an upvote system for users to promote quality stories.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: SpaceX has cleared a major hurdle on the way to launching manned missions with its Dragon spacecraft. The company had to push back its launch plans after the stunning explosion of a Crew Dragon capsule during testing earlier this year. Now, SpaceX has successfully tested the engines without incident, paving the way for a test flight next year. The SpaceX Dragon is one of two commercial spacecraft NASA hopes to use to launch manned missions to the International Space Station, the other being Boeing's CST-100 Starliner. SpaceX was on track to beat Boeing to launch before its April testing failure, but picking through the pieces of the demolished capsule pushed back the timetable.

After an investigation, SpaceX confirmed the craft's SuperDraco engines themselves were not at fault. These innovative launch abort engines use hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants, which mix together and ignite, but most launch abort systems use solid propellants. SpaceX went this way because it intends to do propulsive landings with the Dragon in the future, but NASA hasn't authorized that for crewed flights. Unfortunately, a leaky fuel valve in the abort propulsion system allowed nitrogen tetroxide to leak into the helium pressurization system. It was then driven back into the titanium check valve, which caused the explosion. The new and improved Dragon has a burst disk in the fuel lines that keeps propellant from leaking into the high-pressure lines before ignition. This week's test-firing demonstrates that the new system functions as intended, and SpaceX says it can now move forward with launch plans. The next step is to test the SuperDraco engines in-flight later this year. Then, once SpaceX can prove that its spacecraft can handle an in-flight abort, it'll prepare for the first crewed flight in early 2020.

MojoKid writes: AMD officially launched its latest many-core Zen 2-based processor today, a 16-core/32-thread beast known as the Ryzen 9 3950X. The Ryzen 9 3950X goes head-to-head against Intel's HEDT flagship line-up like the 18-core Core i9-9980XE but at a much more reasonable price point of $750 (versus over $2K for the Intel chip). The Ryzen 9 3950X has base and boost clocks of 3.5GHz and 4.7GHz, respectively. The CPU cores at the heart of the Ryzen 9 39050X are grouped into two, 7nm 8-core chiplets, each with dual, four-core compute complexes (CCX). Those chiplets link to an IO die that houses the memory controller, PCI Express lanes, and other off-chip IO. The new 16-core Zen 2 chips also use the same AM4 socket and are compatible with the same motherboards, memory, and coolers currently on the market for lower core-count AMD Ryzen CPUs. Throughout all of Hot Hardware's benchmark testing, the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X consistently finished at or very near the top of the charts in every heavily-threaded workload, and handily took Intel's 18-core chip to task, beating it more often than not.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission faces a legal battle against dozens of cities from across the United States, which sued the FCC to stop an order that preempts local fees and regulation of cable-broadband networks. The cities filed lawsuits in response to the FCC's August 1 vote that limits the fees municipalities can charge cable companies and prohibits cities and towns from regulating broadband services offered over cable networks. "At least 46 cities are asking federal appeals courts to undo an FCC order they argue will force them to raise taxes or cut spending on local media services, including channels that schools, governments, and the general public can use for programming," Bloomberg Law wrote Tuesday.

Various lawsuits were filed against the FCC between August and the end of October, and Bloomberg's report said that most of the suits are being consolidated into a single case in the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. An FCC motion to transfer the case to the 6th Circuit, which has decided previous cases on the same topic, is pending. The 9th Circuit case was initially filed by Eugene, Oregon, which said the FCC order was arbitrary and capricious and that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the Constitution, and the Communications Act. The cities' arguments and the FCC's defense will be fleshed out more in future briefs. Big cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco, Denver, and Boston are among those suing the FCC. Also suing are other municipalities from Maine, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington, according to a Bloomberg graphic. The state of Hawaii is also suing the FCC, and New York City is supporting the lawsuit against the FCC as an intervening party.

Google is announcing that today, a year and a half after it first unveiled RCS chat as Android's primary texting platform, it is actually making RCS chat Android's primary texting platform. That's because it is rolling out availability to any Android user in the US who wants to use it, starting today. From a report: RCS stands for "rich communication services," and it's the successor to SMS. Like other texting services, it supports read receipts, typing indicators, improved group chats, and high-quality images. Unlike several texting apps, like iMessage or Signal, it does not offer end-to-end encryption as an option. RCS is based on your phone number, so when you are texting with somebody who also has it, it should just turn on automatically in your chat. To get RCS, you simply need to use Android Messages as your default texting app on your Android phone. Many Android phones do that already by default, but Samsung users will need to head to the Google Play Store to download it and then switch to it as their default. Further reading: The Four Major Carriers Finally Agree To Replace SMS With a New RCS Standard.

The US office responsible for patents and trademarks is trying to figure out how AI might call for changes to copyright law, and it's asking the public for opinions on the topic. From a report: The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a notice in the Federal Register last month saying it's seeking comments, as spotted by TorrentFreak. The office is gathering information about the impact of artificial intelligence on copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property rights. It outlines thirteen specific questions, ranging from what happens if an AI creates a copyright-infringing work to if it's legal to feed an AI copyrighted material. It starts off by asking if output made by AI without any creative involvement from a human should qualify as a work of authorship that's protectable by US copyright law. If not, then what degree of human involvement "would or should be sufficient so that the work qualifies for copyright protection?" Other questions ask if the company that trains an AI should own the resulting work, and if it's okay to use copyrighted material to train an AI in the first place. "Should authors be recognized for this type of use of their works?" asks the office. "If so, how?"

Both Microsoft and the Linux kernel teams have added ways to disable support for Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX). From a report: TSX is the Intel technology that opens the company's CPUs to attacks via the Zombieload v2 vulnerability. Zombieload v2 is the codename of a vulnerability that allows malware or a malicious threat actor to extract information processed inside a CPU, information to which they normally shouldn't be able to access due to the security walls present inside modern-day CPUs. This new vulnerability was disclosed earlier this week. Intel said it would release microcode (CPU firmware) updates -- available on the company's Support & Downloads center. But, the reality of a real-world production environment is that performance matters. Past microcode updates for other attacks, such as Meltdown, Spectre, Foreshadow, Fallout, and Zombieload v1, have been known to introduce performance hits of up to 40%. Seeing that all the CPU attacks listed above are not only theoretical but also hard to pull off, some companies don't see this performance hit as an option.

Instagram is making Like counts private for some users everywhere. From a report: Instagram tells TechCrunch the hidden Likes test is expanding to a subset of users globally. Users will have to decide for themselves if something is worth Liking rather than judging by the herd. The change could make users more comfortable sharing what's important to them without the fear of people seeing them receive an embarrassingly small number of likes. Instagram began hiding Likes in April in Canada and then brought the test to Ireland, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand in July. Facebook started a similar experiment in Australia in September. Instagram said last week the test would expand to the US, but now it's running everywhere to a small percentage of users in each country.

Apple is considering bundling its paid internet services, including News+, Apple TV+ and Apple Music, as soon as 2020, in a bid to gain more subscribers, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: The latest sign of this strategy is a provision that Apple included in deals with publishers that lets the iPhone maker bundle the News+ subscription service with other paid digital offerings, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing private deals. Apple News+, which debuted in March, sells access to dozens of publications for $10 a month. It's often called the "Netflix of News." Apple keeps about half of the monthly subscription price, while magazines and newspapers pocket the other half.

If Apple sold Apple News+ as part of a bundle with Apple TV+ and Apple Music, publishers would get less money because the cost of the news service would likely be reduced, the people said. As the smartphone market stagnates, Apple is seeking growth by selling online subscriptions to news, music, video and other content. Bundling these offerings could attract more subscribers, as Amazon.com's Prime service has done.

ThousandEyes, a cloud analysis company, in its second annual Cloud Performance Benchmark, has succeeded in measuring a major performance factor objectively: Public cloud providers' global network performance. ZDNet reports: In this study, ThousandEyes looked at the five major public cloud providers: Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It did by analyzing over 320 million data points from 98 global metro locations over 30 days. This included measuring network performance from within the U.S. using multiple ISPs and global network measurements and by checking out speeds between availability zones (AZ)s and connectivity patterns between the cloud providers. Besides measuring raw speed, the company also looked at latency, jitter, and data loss.

First, ThousandEyes found some cloud providers rely heavily on the public internet to transport traffic instead of their backbones. This, needless to say, impacts performance predictability. During the evening Netflix internet traffic jam, if your cloud provider relies on the internet, you will see slowdowns in the evening. So, while Google Cloud and Azure rely heavily on their private backbone networks to transport their customer traffic, AWS and Alibaba Cloud rely heavily on the public internet for the majority of transport, IBM takes a hybrid approach that varies regionally.

What about AWS Global Accelerator? If you pay for this service, which puts your traffic on the AWS private backbone network, will you always see a better performance? Surprisingly, the answer's no. AWS doesn't always out-perform the internet. ThousandEyes found several cases, where the internet performs faster and more reliably than Global Accelerator -- or the results were negligible. For example, ThousandEyes discovered that from your headquarters in Seoul, you'd see a major latency improvement when accessing AWS US-East-1. That's great. But your office in San Francisco wouldn't see any improvement, while your group in Bangalore India would see a performance decrease. Generally speaking, Latin America and Asia have the highest performance variations across all clouds, whereas, in North America, cloud performance is generally comparable. You need to look at ThousandEye's detailed findings to pick out the best cloud provider on a per-region basis to ensure optimal performance. Regional performance differences can make a huge impact. Additionally, the ISP you use and whether or not you're moving traffic in or out of China also affects cloud performance.

For more on the report, see ThousandEyes' website.

After teasing it last month, Motorola has officially announced the successor to the Motorola Razr. The "razr," as it is called, "keeps the same general form factor but replaces the T9 keypad and small LCD with a 6.2-inch foldable plastic OLED panel and Android 9 Pie," reports The Verge. "It'll cost $1,499 when it arrives in January 2020." From the report: The new Razr is a fundamentally different take on the foldable phones that we've seen so far: instead of turning a modern-sized phone into a smaller tablet, it turns a conventional-sized smartphone into something much smaller and more pocketable. [...] The core of the phone is, of course, the display. It's a 6.2-inch 21:9 plastic OLED panel that folds in half along the horizontal axis. Unfolded, it's not dramatically bigger than any other modern phone, and the extra height is something that the Android interface and apps adapt to far better than a tablet-size screen. The screen does have a notch on top for a speaker and camera and a curved edge on the bottom, which takes a bit of getting used to, but after a minute or two, you barely notice it.

There's also a second, 2.7-inch glass-covered OLED display on the outside that Motorola calls the Quick View display. It can show notifications, music controls, and even a selfie camera mode to take advantage of the better main camera. Motorola is also working with Google to let apps seamlessly transition from the front display to the main one. There are some concerns about durability for the folding display, especially after Samsung's Galaxy Fold issues. But Motorola says that it has "full confidence in the durability of the Flex View display," claiming that its research shows that "it will last for the average lifespan of a smartphone." There's a proprietary coating to make the panel "scuff resistant," and it also has an internal nano-coating for splash resistance. (Don't take it swimming, though.) Motorola says that the entire display is made with a single cut, with the edges entirely enclosed by the stainless steel frame to prevent debris from getting in. Aside from the mid-range specs, like the Snapdragon 710 processor and "lackluster" 16-megapixel camera, seasoned reviewers appear to really like the nostalgic look and feel of the device. Did you own a Razr phone from the mid-2000s? How do you think the new model compares?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Researchers in Southampton have built a device that displays 3D animated objects that can talk and interact with onlookers. A demonstration of the display showed a butterfly flapping its wings, a countdown spelled out by numbers hanging in the air, and a rotating, multicolored planet Earth. Beyond interactive digital signs and animations, scientists want to use it to visualize and even feel data. While the images are similar, the device is not the sort of holographic projector that allowed a shimmering Princess Leia to enlist Obi-Wan Kenobi's help in Star Wars. Instead, it uses a 3D field of ultrasound waves to levitate a polystyrene bead and whip it around at high speed to trace shapes in the air.

The 2mm-wide bead moves so fast, at speeds approaching 20mph, that it traces out the shape of an object in less than one-tenth of a second. At such a speed, the brain doesn't see the moving bead, only the completed shape it creates. The colors are added by LEDs built into the display that shine light on the bead as it zips around. Because the images are created in 3D space, they can be viewed from any angle. And by careful control of the ultrasonic field, the scientists can make objects speak, or add sound effects and musical accompaniments to the animated images. Further manipulation of the sound field enables users to interact with the objects and even feel them in their hands. "The images are created between two horizontal plates that are studded with small ultrasonic transducers," reports The Guardian. "These create an inaudible 3D sound field that contains a tiny pocket of low pressure air that traps the polystyrene bead. Move the pocket around, by tweaking the output of the transducers, and the bead moves with it."

In the journal Nature, researchers describe how they've improved the display to produce sounds and tactile responses to people reaching out to the image.

Oculus CTO John Carmack announced Wednesday that he is stepping down from the augmented-reality company to focus his time on artificial general intelligence. The Verge reports: Carmack will remain in a "consulting CTO" position at Oculus, where he will "still have a voice" in the development work at the company, he wrote. Recent comments from Carmack suggest he may have soured on VR. Carmack was a champion of phone-based VR for years at Oculus, but in October, he delivered a "eulogy" for Oculus' phone-based Gear VR. And in a video for receiving a lifetime achievement award this week at the VR Awards, he said that "I really haven't been satisfied with the pace of progress that we've been making" in VR.

Apple has started to make its products thicker in an effort to give people what they want: functionality over form. This is a good thing. There are two recent examples: this year's iPhones and the new 16-inch MacBook Pro. Todd Haselton writes via CNBC: This is a theory, but it seems this may be that there are some design changes being made after the departure of Apple's former chief design officer Jony Ive. Ive was known for creating gorgeous products but, sometimes as we've seen with the older MacBook keyboard, perhaps at the cost of functionality. Form over function, as they say. [...] If you look back at the iPhone 8, for example, the phone measured just 7.3-mm thick, an example of Apple's seeming obsession with creating devices that were as thin as possible but often at the cost of battery life. But this year, Apple put a huge focus on battery life because it knows that's one of top things people want from their phones (along with great cameras). As a result of the larger battery, this year's iPhone 11 is slightly fatter at 8.3-mm thick. It's barely noticeable but shows that Apple knows people are willing to sacrifice on thinness for a phone that lasts all day.

Then there's the 16-inch MacBook Pro that was announced on Wednesday. It's less than 1-mm thicker than the 15-inch MacBook Pro that it replaces, and it weighs 4.3 pounds instead of 4 pounds in the prior model. It's 2% larger than the 15-inch MacBook Pro, too. All of this helps Apple include what people want in a similar but slightly bigger form factor: a keyboard with keys that you can actually tap into and that works, instead of one that's practically flat with very little key travel. The flat so-called butterfly keyboard was prone to exposure to dust and debris, which could lead to keys not registering or repeating themselves and, ultimately, lots of typos. Apple also focused on battery life in its new laptop. It lasts an hour longer than last year's model and charges fully in just 2.5 hours. That's partly because Apple was able to increase the battery size, something that likely contributed to the larger and heavier form factor.