"Bloomberg has conducted a survey of Tesla Model 3 owners," writes Slashdot reader Thelasko. "Some of the most interesting data are responses to questions about Autopilot." Here's an excerpt from the report: We asked 5,000 Model 3 owners about their experience with the electric sedan that Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk says will lead the world into a new era of driverless transportation. [...] Six drivers claimed that Autopilot actually contributed to a collision, while nine people in the Bloomberg survey went so far as to credit the system with saving their lives. Hundreds of owners recalled dangerous behaviors, such as phantom braking, veering or failing to stop for a road hazard. But even those who reported shortcomings gave Autopilot high overall ratings. More than 90% of owners said driving with Autopilot makes them safer -- including most of the respondents who simultaneously faulted the software for creating dangerous situations. Bloomberg also asked Model 3 owners about the quality and reliability of their vehicles, as well as the service and charging.

SpaceX is returning to the launch pad to send its second batch of Starlink Internet satellites into low Earth orbit. "On Tuesday, SpaceX completed a static test firing of the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage that is presently scheduled to launch on November 11 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida," reports Ars Technica. "Beyond the primary mission, this flight is going for two rocket reuse milestones." From the report: This will be the first time that SpaceX has attempted to fly the same Falcon 9 first stage four times. This particular stage flew on July 25 (Iridium 7 mission) and October 8 (SAOCOM 1-A) in 2018 as well as February 22 (Nusantara Satu and Beresheet spacecraft) this year. Additionally, SpaceX will also attempt to reuse a payload fairing for the first time. After a Falcon Heavy launch of the Arabsat-6A mission in April, SpaceX recovered both halves of the payload fairing from the Atlantic Ocean. Those fairings have since been refurbished -- it is not clear how much work needed to be done to clean them and mitigate the effects of any salt water damage -- and will now fly on the Starlink mission.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Xerox is considering making a cash-and-stock offer for HP (Source paywalled; alternative source), which has a market value of about $27 billion. From the report: There is no guarantee Xerox will follow through with an offer or that one would succeed. HP, which installed a new chief executive just last week, is more than three times the size of Xerox and any bid would be at a premium to its current stock price, the people said. Working in Xerox's favor: It expects a $2.3 billion windfall from a deal to sell stakes in joint ventures with Fujifilm Holdings Corp., which was announced Tuesday along with the dismissal of a $1 billion-plus lawsuit filed against Xerox by the Japanese technology company. Xerox has also received an informal funding commitment from a major bank, known as a "highly confident letter," the people said.

A deal would join two household names with storied pasts that have been scrambling to retool their businesses as the need for printed documents declines. Both companies are in cost-cutting mode and a union could afford new opportunities to shed expenses -- to the tune of more than $2 billion, the people said.

Uber's autonomous test vehicles were involved in 37 crashes in the 18 months before a fatal March 2018 self-driving car accident, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said on Tuesday. Reuters reports: The board said between September 2016 and March 2018, there were 37 crashes of Uber vehicles in autonomous mode at the time, including 33 that involved another vehicle striking test vehicles. In one incident, the test vehicle struck a bent bicycle lane bollard that partially occupied the test vehicle's lane of travel. In another incident, the operator took control to avoid a rapidly approaching oncoming vehicle that entered its lane of travel. The vehicle operator steered away and struck a parked car. The NTSB will hold a probable cause hearing on the crash Nov. 19. A spokeswoman for Uber's self-driving car division said the company has "adopted critical program improvements to further prioritize safety. We deeply value the thoroughness of the NTSB's investigation into the crash and look forward to reviewing their recommendations."

Bloomberg is also reporting that Uber's self-driving test car wasn't programmed to recognize and react to jawalkers. The report said "the system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians." [Elaine Herzberg, the 49-year-old pedestrian that was struck by one of Uber's self-driving cars] was crossing the road outside of a crosswalk.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Scientists at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg have figured out how to harness the energy and keep it in reserve so it can be released on demand in the form of heat -- even decades after it was captured. The innovations include an energy-trapping molecule, a storage system that promises to outperform traditional batteries, at least when it comes to heating, and an energy-storing laminate coating that can be applied to windows and textiles. The breakthroughs, from a team led by researcher Kasper Moth-Poulsen, have garnered praise within the scientific community. Now comes the real test: whether Moth-Poulsen can get investors to back his technology and take it to market.

The system starts with a liquid molecule made up of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. When hit by sunlight, the molecule draws in the sun's energy and holds it until a catalyst triggers its release as heat. The researchers spent almost a decade and $2.5 million to create a specialized storage unit, which Moth-Poulsen, a 40-year-old professor in the department of chemistry and chemical engineering, says has the stability to outlast the 5-to 10-year life span of typical lithium-ion batteries on the market today. The most advanced potential commercial use the team developed is a transparent coating that can be applied to home windows, a moving vehicle, or even clothing. The coating collects solar energy and releases heat, reducing electricity required for heating spaces and curbing carbon emissions. Moth-Poulsen is coating an entire building on campus to showcase the technology. The ideal use in the early going, he says, is in relatively small spaces. "This could be heating of electrical vehicles or in houses." Moth-Poulsen believes there's potential for the system to produce electricity, but his team is focused for now on heating.

"Moth-Poulsen plans to spin off a company that would advance the technology and says he's in talks with venture capital investors," adds Bloomberg. "The storage unit could be commercially available in as little as six years and the coating in three, pending the $5 million of additional funding he estimates will be needed to bring the coating to market."

Facebook on Tuesday said that as many as 100 software developers may have improperly accessed user data, including the names and profile pictures of people in specific groups on the social network. CNBC reports: The company recently discovered that some apps retained access to this type of user data despite making changes to its service in April 2018 to prevent this, Facebook said in a blog post. The company said it has removed this access and reached out to 100 developer partners who may have accessed the information. Facebook said that at least 11 developer partners accessed this type of data in the last 60 days.

"Although we've seen no evidence of abuse, we will ask them to delete any member data they may have retained and we will conduct audits to confirm that it has been deleted," the company said in the blog post. The company did not say how many users were affected.

Google has confirmed to The Verge that it will release "one final software update" next month for the original Google Pixel and Pixel XL. From the report: As of yesterday, it looked like the original Pixel was done getting updates, as Google released its November security update for most Pixel phones, but nothing for the Pixel or Pixel XL. Google tells The Verge that the Pixels won't get that November update, but it says December's "encapsulates a variety of updates" from the November and December updates that were issued for other Pixels.

It wasn't too surprising to see that Google's original Pixels didn't get yesterday's update. When Google announced the phones in 2016, the company said they would get two years of guaranteed Android version updates and three years of security updates, which is also reflected on Google's support page. That said, Google surprised Pixel owners earlier this year by letting them run Android 10, which is one more year of Android than Google originally promised, and now, they have one final update to look forward to as well.

Samsung's Exynos flagship processors have been a mainstay for years now, and they've mostly featured Samsung's Mongoose custom CPU cores. Unfortunately, the Korean brand is now shutting down its custom CPU division. From a report: Samsung filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining (WARN) letter in Texas, according to The Statesman, notifying the state that 290 employees will be laid off as part of its CPU unit being shut down. The layoffs reportedly go into effect from December 31. The Korean manufacturer confirmed the news to Android Authority, while also explaining the reasoning behind the decision. "Based upon a thorough assessment of our System LSI [large scale integration - ed] business and the need to stay competitive in the global market, Samsung has decided to transition part of our U.S.-based R&D teams in Austin and San Jose," the company told us in a statement, adding that it remained committed to its US workforce.

Tekla Perry writes: Michael Kratsios, the fourth U.S. Chief Technology Officer, explains administration policies at the Fall Conference of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence -- and takes some tough questions from the audience. An exchange between Kratsios and Stanford's Eileen Donahoe hit on current hot topics, starting with the tension between the U.S. and China: Donahoe: "You talk a lot about unique U.S. ecosystem. In which aspect of AI is the U.S. dominant, and where is China challenging us in dominance?
Kratsios: "They are challenging us on machine vision. They have more data to work with, given that they have surveillance data."
Donahoe: "To what extent would you say the quantity of data collected and available will be a determining factor in AI dominance?"
Kratsios: "It makes a big difference in the short term. But we do research on how we get over these data humps. There is a future where you don't need as much data, a lot of federal grants are going to [research in] how you can train models using less data."

Donahoe turned the conversation to a different tension -- that between innovation and values.

Donahoe: "A lot of conversation yesterday was about the tension between innovation and values, and how do you hold those things together and lead in both realms."
Kratsios: "We recognized that the U.S. hadn't signed on to principles around developing AI. In May, we signed [the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Principles on Artificial Intelligence], coming together with other Western democracies to say that these are values that we hold dear.
[Meanwhile,] we have adversaries around the world using AI to surveil people, to suppress human rights. That is why American leadership is so critical: We want to come out with the next great product. And we want our values to underpin the use cases."

A member of the audience pushed further:

"Maintaining U.S. leadership in AI might have costs in terms of individuals and society. What costs should individuals and society bear to maintain leadership?" Kratsios: "I don't view the world that way. Our companies big and small do not hesitate to talk about the values that underpin their technology. [That is] markedly different from the way our adversaries think. The alternatives are so dire [that we] need to push efforts to bake the values that we hold dear into this technology."

Aubrey Hruby, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Africa Center, writing at Financial Times: Africa's digital economy is still small in size compared with those of its global peers. But it has seen exponential growth over the past decade and now has the potential to redefine the continent's economies. [...] African governments and development finance institutions (DFIs) should look to India as a model and focus on critical infrastructure needs. This includes reducing the cost of data and increasing access to fixed line broadband, spurring corporate ventures in the tech ecosystem, and providing Africans with the skills they need to take part in this digital transformation. The lack of adequate access to the internet in most African countries boils down to the fact that mobile data is too expensive and fixed line broadband is too slow and not widely available. It costs Africans on average $7.04 or nearly 9 per cent of their monthly income for just 1GB of mobile data (enough to watch about three hours of low quality video on Netflix). That compares with just 3.5 per cent of monthly income in Latin American and 1.5 per cent in Asia.

There has been progress in some countries. In Nigeria, mobile data prices continue to drop following a decision by the Communications Commission in October 2015 to remove a floor on data prices, and increased competition among submarine cable companies. In India, competition among carriers played a critical role in lowering mobile data costs, which are now the cheapest in the world. Reliance Jo, a young telecom operator, is highly responsible for the shift, investing $35bn in a 4G network and offering free unlimited data trials to attract new customers. While some have criticised the company's practices and data prices may increase, the impact of private sector investment and competition has benefited average Indians. African governments should further liberalise their telecoms sectors and encourage competition to promote private investment in infrastructure that can be shared by providers. Regulators should track the cost of data as a measure of the healthiness of the industry.

Dubbed the "infinite money cheat code" by users of Reddit's WallStreetBets forum, the bug is being exploited, according to users on the forum. One trader bragged about a $1 million position funded by a $4,000 deposit. From a report: Robinhood is "aware of the isolated situations and communicating directly with customers," spokesperson Lavinia Chirico said in an email response to questions. The Menlo Park, California-based money-management software designer touts trading "free from commission fees." Robinhood Gold customers are invited to "supercharge" their investing by paying $5 a month to trade on margin, or money borrowed from the company. Here's how the trade works. Users of Robinhood Gold are selling covered calls using money borrowed from Robinhood. Nothing wrong with that. The problem arises when Robinhood incorrectly adds the value of those calls to the user's own capital. And that means that the more money a user borrows, the more money Robinhood will lend them for future trading. One trader managed to turn his $2,000 deposit into $50,000 worth of purchasing power, which he used to buy Apple puts.

Security experts don't recommend that users reboot their computers after suffering a ransomware infection, as this could help the malware in certain circumstances. From a report: Instead, experts recommend that victims power down the computer, disconnect it from their network, and reach out to a professional IT support firm. Experts are recommending against PC reboots because a recent survey of 1,180 US adults who fell victim to ransomware in the past years has shown that almost 30% of victims chose to reboot their computers as a way to deal with the infection. But while rebooting in safe mode is a good way of removing older screenlocker types of ransomware, it is not recommended when dealing with modern ransomware versions that encrypt files.

"Generally, the [ransomware] executable that actually encrypts your data is designed to crawl through attached, mapped and mounted drives to a given machine. Sometimes it trips, or is blocked by a permission issue and will stop encrypting," Bill Siegel, CEO & Co-Founder of Coveware, a company that provides ransomware data recovery services told ZDNet in an email this week. "If you reboot the machine, it will start back up and try to finish the job," Siegel said.

The German government and car industry have agreed to increase joint subsidies for the purchase of electric cars on the same day automobile giant Volkswagen began production of a new all-electric vehicle. From a report: The agreement between the government and the automobile industry was reached following a Monday evening "car summit" aimed at fostering the mass production of cleaner transportation. Under the agreement, consumer subsidies for electric cars costing less than $44,500 will increase to about $6,700 from from $4,400. Purchasers of plug-in hybrids in this price range would be given a subsidy of $5,000, up from $3,320. For electric cars over $44,500, there will be an increase in the subsidy by 25%. Industry and government will evenly split the cost of the subsidies. The subsidies will also be extended from the end of 2020 to the end of 2025. In addition to the subsidy issue, the two sides discussed ways to expand infrastructure for electric cars.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Internet freedom declined for a ninth consecutive year as governments around the world used social media to monitor citizens and manipulate elections, according to a new study that warned of creeping "digital authoritarianism." Thirty-three of the 65 countries surveyed were found to have experienced worsening internet freedom since June 2018, compared with 16 that were found to have improving conditions. The study, conducted by Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights advocacy, said domestic disinformation had grown as a threat to democracy with populist leaders and their online supporters using the internet to distort political discussions. The organization found domestic interference in 26 of the 30 countries that held elections over the past year.

The report said internet freedom in the U.S. had declined, in large part because law enforcement and immigration agencies used social media to monitor people, though the country was still deemed "free." China was dubbed the "worst abuser of internet freedom" for a fourth consecutive year as the government tightened information controls because of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and protests in Hong Kong. Noting that the biggest platforms were American, Freedom House called on the U.S. to lead in the effort to fix social media transparency and accountability. "This is the only way to stop the internet from becoming a Trojan horse for tyranny and oppression," wrote Adrian Shahbaz, one of the authors of the report.

Adobe, Twitter, and The New York Times Company have announced a new system for adding attribution to photos and other content. A tool will record who created a piece of content and whether it's been modified by someone else, then let other people and platforms check that data. The Verge reports: The overall project is called the Content Authenticity Initiative, and its participants will hold a summit on the system in the next few months. Based on what Adobe has announced, the attribution tool is a piece of metadata that can be attached to a file. Adobe doesn't describe precisely how it will keep the tag secure or prevent someone from copying the content in a way that strips it out. Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky said that some technical details will be worked out at the summit. Adobe described this system as a way to verify "authenticity" online. And The New York Times Company's research and development head, Marc Lavallee, suggested it could fight misinformation by helping people discern "trusted news" on digital media platforms.

But the most obvious uses include identifying a photo's source and making sure artists get credit for their work. Many photos and webcomics circulate anonymously on platforms like Twitter, and an attribution tag would help trace those images back to their creator. This depends entirely on how well the CAI system works, however. Tags wouldn't be very useful if they could be easily altered or removed, but if the system preserves security by tightly controlling how people can interact with the image, it could have the same downsides as other digital rights management or DRM systems.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: It is as common an occurrence on Polish Twitter as you are likely to get: a pair of conservative activists pouring scorn on the country's divided liberal opposition. "I burst out laughing!" writes Girl from oliborz, a self-described "traditionalist" commenting on a newspaper story about a former campaign adviser to Barack Obama and Emmanuel Macron coming to Warsaw to address a group of liberal activists. "The opposition has nothing to offer. That's why they use nonsense to pull the wool over people's eyes," replies Magda Rostocka, whose profile tells her almost 4,400 followers she is "left-handed with her heart on the right."

In reality, neither woman existed. Both accounts were run by the paid employees of a small marketing company based in the city of Wrocaw in southwest Poland. But what the employee pretending to be Magda Rostocka did not know is that the colleague pretending to be Girl from oliborz was an undercover reporter who had infiltrated the company, giving rare insight into the means by which fake social media accounts are being used by private firms to influence unsuspecting voters and consumers. The undercover reporter, Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz, spent six months this year working at Cat@Net, which describes itself as an "ePR agency comprising specialists who build a positive image of companies, private individuals and public institutions -- mostly in social media." "One of Pruszkiewicz's responsibilities was to operate anonymous accounts with instructions to promote content produced by TVP, Poland's state broadcaster, which is widely reviled by critics for its extreme partisanship and hate speech directed against minority groups," the report says. "'It would be great if you posted positive comments about the government's subsidy for TVP and the television license fee,' read an email from her manager."

A London-based thinktank found that Cat@Net accounts created up to 10,000 posts in defense of TVP, with a potential reach of 15 million views. The agency also helped a recently elected member of the Polish parliament for the leftwing Democratic Left Alliance party. "Cat@Net's leftwing accounts promoted the politician's candidacy to the European Parliament in elections held in May this year, with at least 90 different accounts circulating and responding to his social media posts," reports The Guardian. "The company's rightwing accounts would then oppose the leftwing accounts, generating conflict and traffic, thereby drawing attention to the candidate."

In response to the article, Cat@Net strongly denied it was a "troll farm": "The company's field of activity is the outsourcing of marketing operations to social media. We communicate accurate information, speak for our clients, and promote their products and services like any other agency of its kind."

Activists inside Google are calling on management to ditch deals with oil and gas companies, the latest flare-up inside the technology giant. Bloomberg reports: In a letter published on Monday, more than 1,100 workers asked Google Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat to release a "company-wide climate plan" that commits to cutting carbon emissions entirely. The letter also asks Google to drop contracts that "enable or accelerate the extraction of fossil fuels." Since 2017, Google's cloud-computing unit has disclosed contracts with oil-services giant Schlumberger Ltd., Chevron Corp. and French energy company Total SA. Saudi Arabia's Aramco, the world's largest oil company, announced a tentative cloud deal with Google last year, although the internet giant has never confirmed the partnership.

"If Google is going to confront its share of responsibility for the climate crisis, that means not helping oil and gas companies extract fossil fuels," Ike McCreery, an engineer in Google's cloud division, said in an email. "This is a moment in history that requires urgent and decisive action." Alphabet Inc.'s Google has touted its green credentials for years. The company announced the largest ever corporate purchase of renewable energy in September. Starting in 2017, the company has matched the electricity bill from its massive data centers with equal purchases from renewable energy sources. The Google employee letter also asks the company not to do business with U.S. immigration authorities, "arguing that more people are being forced to move across borders due to climate change," reports Bloomberg. Business Insider reports that U.S. Customs and Border Protection is testing a Google cloud service called Anthos, which lets organizations use multiple cloud providers at once.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Google patched last month an Android bug that can let hackers spread malware to a nearby phone via a little-known Android OS feature called NFC beaming. NFC beaming works via an internal Android OS service known as Android Beam. This service allows an Android device to send data such as images, files, videos, or even apps, to another nearby device using NFC (Near-Field Communication) radio waves, as an alternative to WiFi or Bluetooth. Typically, apps (APK files) sent via NFC beaming are stored on disk and a notification is shown on screen. The notification asks the device owner if he wants to allow the NFC service to install an app from an unknown source. But, in January this year, a security researcher named Y. Shafranovich discovered that apps sent via NFC beaming on Android 8 (Oreo) or later versions would not show this prompt. Instead, the notification would allow the user to install the app with one tap, without any security warning.

The CVE-2019-2114 bug resided in the fact that the Android Beam app was also whitelisted, receiving the same level of trust as the official Play Store app. Google said this wasn't meant to happen, as the Android Beam service was never meant as a way to install applications, but merely as a way to transfer data from device to device. The October 2019 Android patches removed the Android Beam service from the OS whitelist of trusted sources. However, many millions of users remain at risk. If users have the NFC service and the Android Beam service enabled, a nearby attacker could plant malware (malicious apps) on their phones. Since most newly-sold devices have the NFC feature enabled by default, you'll have to disable Android Beam and NFC or update your phone to receive the October 2019 security updates if you want to protect yourself from this bug.

Researchers in Japan and at the University of Michigan said Monday that they have found a way to take over Google Home, Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri devices from hundreds of feet away by shining laser pointers, and even flashlights, at the devices' microphones. The New York Times reports: In one case, they said, they opened a garage door by shining a laser beam at a voice assistant that was connected to it. They also climbed 140 feet to the top of a bell tower at the University of Michigan and successfully controlled a Google Home device on the fourth floor of an office building 230 feet away. And by focusing their lasers using a telephoto lens, they said, they were able to hijack a voice assistant more than 350 feet away. Opening the garage door was easy, the researchers said. With the light commands, the researchers could have hijacked any digital smart systems attached to the voice-controlled assistants.

They said they could have easily switched light switches on and off, made online purchases or opened a front door protected by a smart lock. They even could have remotely unlocked or started a car that was connected to the device. The researchers, who studied the light flaw for seven months, said they had discovered that the microphones in the devices would respond to light as if it were sound. Inside each microphone is a small plate called a diaphragm that moves when sound hits it. That movement can be replicated by focusing a laser or a flashlight at the diaphragm, which converts it into electric signals, they said. The rest of the system then responds the way it would to sound. While the researchers said they had notified several companies to the light vulnerability, most microphones would need to be redesigned to remedy the problem. And simply covering the microphone with a piece of tape wouldn't solve it.

The findings of the vulnerability can be found here.

Facebook introduced a new brand Monday as the company faces calls from politicians and consumer advocates for the government to break it up into various pieces. NBC News reports: The company announced in a blog post that the new brand, which retains the name of the social network, would have a new logo to better indicate all the various products and services it now offers, including Instagram and WhatsApp. "Today, we're updating our company branding to be clearer about the products that come from Facebook," Antonio Lucio, the company's chief marketing officer, wrote in the blog post. "We're introducing a new company logo and further distinguishing the Facebook company from the Facebook app, which will keep its own branding."

"This brand change is a way to better communicate our ownership structure to the people and businesses who use our services to connect, share, build community and grow their audiences," Lucio wrote. The new logo features Facebook in capitalized letters with "custom typography." The company said the new brand would appear on Instagram, WhatsApp and its other offerings.