AI is likely to change how every job is performed, eliminating work related to repetitive tasks but increasing the need for creative thinkers, according to a new study. From a report: These findings are contained in a report released this week by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab called "The Future of Work: How New Technologies Are Transforming Tasks." The study found signs that AI is beginning to slowly redefine the nature of tasks performed in certain jobs as automation gains ground. "As new technologies continue to scale within businesses and across industries, it is our responsibility as innovators to understand not only the business process implications, but also the societal impact," said Martin Fleming, vice president and chief economist of IBM, in a statement. "To that end, this empirical research from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab sheds new light on how tasks are reorganizing between people and machines as a result of AI and new technologies."

With the rise of AI and automation, there has been growing debate and anxiety about how these trends will disrupt current job markets. While some have argued AI and automation will be job killers, others have said the emerging technology will be a net creator of new jobs. The IBM-MIT study offers a bit of nuance to that discussion. The researchers used machine learning to analyze 170 million U.S. job postings between 2010 and 2017. They found that out of 18,500 possible tasks employees might be asked to do on average, the number had fallen by 3.7 over seven years. A drop, though hardly radical.

Google is facing a backlash over an internal tool for the company's Chrome browser that some employees worry is intended for spying on workers organizing protests and discussing workplace issues. From a report: To get around using the tool, some employees have turned to third-party browsers. That's prompted at least one security engineer at Google to voice concern over the possible vulnerabilities that using outside software could bring. The tool is a software extension for Google's Chrome browser, which is installed on all employee computers. It's designed to activate when workers create calendar events that include more than 100 people or use more than 10 rooms. Google said the tool is a pop-up reminder that asks people to "be mindful" before setting up large meetings. But some employees have accused Google management of trying to keep tabs on big gatherings. Google has called those claims "categorically false" and said the purpose of the tool is to cut down on calendar spam. To avoid the extension, employees are encouraging each other to use browsers other than Chrome, a Google security engineer wrote in an internal forum, screenshots of which were reviewed by CNET. Those browsers include Chromium, the open-source browser foundation on which Google Chrome is built, the engineer wrote, adding that people shifting to other browsers "has an impact on overall security of this fleet."

A former Juul executive is alleging in a lawsuit that the fast-growing startup shipped out 1 million contaminated e-cigarette pods earlier this year -- but did not tell customers or issue a recall. From a report: The lawsuit was filed Tuesday by Siddharth Breja, a former senior vice president of global finance who worked at the San Francisco-based company from May 2018 to March 2019. In the lawsuit -- filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California on the same day that Juul confirmed its plans to lay off about 500 people -- Breja claims he was retaliated against for raising concerns about the contaminated shipment. In another instance, Breja says he was worried when the company, in February 2019, wanted to resell pods that were at that point almost one year old. He protested their resale and urged the company to at least include an expiration or "best by" date, or a date of manufacture, on the packaging. The lawsuit claims that then-CEO Kevin Burns shot down that idea, saying, "Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods."

Google's Pixel smartphones have always been defined by iPhone-beating cameras, backed by the know-how of its software coders. With the release of the Pixel 4, however, the company has lost its lead -- through a combination of Apple's iPhone 11 camera improvements and its own lack of progress. From a report: Alphabet's Google is selling the Pixel 4 through all four major U.S. wireless carriers for the first time. And it's priced like a premium device: the 5.7-inch Pixel 4 starts at $799 and the 6.3-inch Pixel 4 XL costs $899. That's at least $100 more than the iPhone 11 but without software like iMessage that many Apple users consider a social imperative in the U.S.

With the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro, Apple closed the photography gap with better low-light image quality. Its camera software also makes those photos easier to take by automatically enabling night mode when required. Apple remains way ahead of any other phone maker when it comes to video quality. Deprived of its signature advantage, the Pixel 4 struggles to stand out in a crowded smartphone market. The design -- including materials, proportions and screen bezels -- is utilitarian. When compared with more polished handsets from Apple and Samsung, the Pixel 4 is unremarkable. With a single-digit slice of the smartphone market, Google also lacks the user loyalty and inertia to keep selling without a killer feature.

Facebook has agreed to pay a $640,000 fine imposed by the UK's data protection watchdog for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. From a report: It had originally appealed the penalty, causing the Information Commissioner's Office to pursue its own counter-appeal. As part of the agreement, Facebook has made no admission of liability. The US firm said it "wished it had done more to investigate Cambridge Analytica" earlier. James Dipple-Johnstone, deputy commissioner of the ICO said: "The ICO's main concern was that UK citizen data was exposed to a serious risk of harm. Protection of personal information and personal privacy is of fundamental importance, not only for the rights of individuals, but also as we now know, for the preservation of a strong democracy."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A huge cyber-attack has knocked out more than 2,000 websites -- as well as the national TV station -- in the country of Georgia. Court websites containing case materials and personal data have also been attacked. In many cases, website home pages were replaced with an image of former President Mikheil Saakashvili, and the caption "I'll be back." The origin of the attack is not yet known. BBC Caucasus correspondent Rayhan Demytrie said people on social media were speculating that Russia might be behind it. She added that she had been told by cyber-security experts that Georgian government websites were "poorly protected and vulnerable to attack." More than 15,000 pages were affected, including the presidential website, non-government organizations and private companies.

Microbial health company Seed is launching a campaign to collect 100,000 fecal photos to build what developers say is the world's first poop image database. The campaign dares you to "give a shit" for science by uploading photos of your feces so that scientists can use it to train an AI platform launched out of MIT. Developers say that your photos could potentially help the approximately 1 in 5 people in the U.S. who have chronic gut conditions like irritable bowel syndrome. The Verge reports: Here's how citizen scientists can contribute to the cause. To participate, go to seed.com/poop on your phone (because taking your laptop to the loo is weird, and the page doesn't allow you to submit a photo unless you're using your phone). Click on the big purple button that says "#GIVEaSHIT." You'll be prompted to enter your email address and whether you're on a morning, afternoon, or evening poop schedule. Then, if you've already dropped a deuce, you can take or upload your photo or you can ask for an email reminder to be sent to you according to the time you indicated. After you've submitted your stool for posterity, the image is separated from the metadata (your email address and other potentially identifying information) so that your donation can remain anonymous and HIPAA compliant.

A team of doctors will diligently look through every image received. (Yes, that is a real job for seven gastroenterologists who take notes on what they see in the pictures.) Poop can fall into seven categories identified along the Bristol stool scale, which can tell you and your doctor whether you're constipated, lacking fiber, have a serious case of the runs, or somewhere in between. The doctors' insights into your poop will help train artificial intelligence models to understand the same things the doctors see in the image. Similar training systems are used to teach self-driving cars how to identify a tree or a cat in the road, according to David Hachuel, a co-founder of the startup Auggi, which is building the platform.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Riding a bicycle in New York City is often a harrowing journey across a patchwork of bike lanes that leave cyclists vulnerable to cars. The dangers came into focus this year after 25 cyclists were killed on city streets -- the highest toll in two decades. Now Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council have agreed on a $1.7 billion plan that would sharply expand the number of protected bike lanes as part of a sweeping effort to transform the city's streetscape and make it less perilous for bikers. Its chief proponent, Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, calls it nothing less than an effort to "break the car culture.'' Such ambitions show how far New York has come since around 2007 when the city, under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, started aggressively taking away space for cars by rolling out bike lanes and pedestrian plazas.

Under pressure from the City Council, the city would be required to build 250 miles of protected bike lanes in the coming years, along with a dizzying list of other street upgrades that safety advocates have long called for. The city now has about 1,250 miles of bike lanes, including 126 miles on city streets that are protected, meaning that a barrier separates the lanes from vehicles. The bill calls for the Transportation Department to release a plan every five years to make streets safer and to prioritize public transit, starting in December 2021. The city must hit targets every year, including building 150 miles of bus lanes that are physically separated from other traffic lanes or monitored by cameras over five years.

Researchers from MIT have developed a system that could help cars prevent collisions by, essentially, looking around corners. They call it ShadowCam. ExtremeTech reports: ShadowCam uses a sequence of four video frames from a camera pointed at the region just ahead of the car. The AI maps changes in light intensity over time, and specific changes can indicate another vehicle is approaching from an unseen area. This is known as Direct Sparse Odometry, a way to estimate motion by analyzing the geometry of a sequential image -- it's the same technique NASA uses on Mars rovers. The system classifies each image as stationary or dynamic (moving). If it thinks the shadow points to a moving object, the AI driving the car can make changes to its path or reduce speed.

The researchers tested this system with a specially rigged "autonomous wheelchair" that navigated hallways. ShadowCam was able to detect when a person was about to walk out in front of the wheelchair with about 70 percent accuracy. With a self-driving car in a parking garage, the researchers were able to tune ShadowCam to detect approaching vehicles 0.72 seconds sooner than lidar with an accuracy of about 86 percent. However, the system has been calibrated specifically for the lighting in those situations. The next step is to enable ShadowCam in varying light and situations.

A New Jersey district court has issued a devastating order against Strike 3 Holdings, the most active filer of piracy lawsuits in the US. In four separate cases, the court denied a request to obtain identities of alleged BitTorrent pirates. The court argues that the underlying complaints are futile. Even if they held up, other issues such as the privacy of the accused and Strike 3's failure to use other enforcement tools, would warrant a denial. TorrentFreak reports: Last week, New Jersey District Court Magistrate Judge Joel Schneider denied Strike 3 expedited discovery in four cases. This means that it's not allowed to subpoena ISPs for the personal details of account holders whose IP-addresses were used to share pirated videos via BitTorrent. In a very detailed 47-page opinion, the Judge takes apart various aspects of Strike 3's enforcement efforts. He makes it clear that these cases should not be allowed to go forward, as the complaints are futile. "The most fundamental basis of the Court's decision is its conclusion that, as pleaded, Strike 3's complaints are futile. The Court denies Strike 3 the right to bootstrap discovery based on a complaint that does not pass muster," Judge Schneider writes.

The futility lies in the fact that the complaints themselves include very few facts. The only thing that the company really knows is that an IP address is associated with downloading copyrighted works. Strike 3 doesn't know whether the subscriber is involved in the actual infringements. Courts have previously ruled both in favor and against allowing discovery to expose the account holders in these situations, but the New Jersey Court clearly sides with the latter. "The Court sided with the cases that hold it is not sufficient to merely allege in a pleading that the defendant is a subscriber of an IP address traced to infringing activity. Consequently, the Court will not authorize Strike 3 to take discovery premised on a futile John Doe complaint." The decision is partly based on the aforementioned "Cobbler" ruling of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. However, the Court makes it clear that even if there was a properly pleaded infringement claim, the requests for expedited discovery would still be denied. In the opinion, Judge Schneider sums up the other issues as follows:

(1) Strike 3 bases its complaints on unequivocal affirmative representations of alleged facts that it does not know to be true.
(2) Strike 3's subpoenas are misleading and create too great of an opportunity for misidentification.
(3) The linchpin of Strike 3's good cause argument, that expedited discovery is the only way to stop infringement of its works, is wrong.
(4) Strike 3 has other available means to stop infringement besides suing
individual subscribers in thousands of John Doe complaints.
(5) The deterrent effect of Strike 3's lawsuits is questionable.
(6) Substantial prejudice may inure to subscribers who are misidentified.
(7) Strike 3 underestimates the substantial interest subscribers have in the constitutionally protected privacy of their subscription information.

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA is expanding its GeForce GTX family of GPUs today with a pair of new Turing-based graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 1660 Super and GeForce GTX 1650 Super. As their mode numbers suggest, these new cards reside above their "non-Super" branded counterparts in NVIDIA's line-up, but a notch below GeForce GTX Ti variants. The GeForce GTX 1660 Super is somewhat of a cross between standard GTX 1660 and a 1660 Ti. The GeForce GTX 1660 Super has a similar number of CUDA cores and texture units to the vanilla GTX 1660, but with faster 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory. The GeForce GTX 1660 Super has higher GPU and memory clocks than a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, however. In its price range, the GeForce GTX 1660 Super appears to be a solid value. Its gaming performance is strong, especially at 1080p resolution and generally faster than AMD's Radeon RX 590. The cards are also power-efficient, cool and quiet, and the GPUs are significantly overclockable as well. GeForce GTX 1660 Super cards should be available at retail today for around $230, with GTX 1650 Super on its way late next month.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Over the past six months, a new Android malware strain has made a name for itself after popping up on the radar of several antivirus companies, and annoying users thanks to a self-reinstall mechanism that has made it near impossible to remove. Named xHelper, this malware was first spotted back in March but slowly expanded to infect more than 32,000 devices by August (per Malwarebytes), eventually reaching a total of 45,000 infections this month (per Symantec). The malware is on a clear upward trajectory. Symantec says the xHelper crew is making on average 131 new victims per day and around 2,400 new victims per month. Most of these infections have been spotted in India, the U.S., and Russia.

According to Malwarebytes, the source of these infections is "web redirects" that send users to web pages hosting Android apps. These sites instruct users on how to side-load unofficial Android apps from outside the Play Store. Code hidden in these apps downloads the xHelper trojan. The good news is that the trojan doesn't carry out destructive operations. According to both Malwarebytes and Symantec, for most of its operational lifespan, the trojan has shown intrusive popup ads and notification spam. The ads and notifications redirect users to the Play Store, where victims are asked to install other apps -- a means through which the xHelper gang is making money from pay-per-install commissions. What's interesting about xHelper is that it gains access to an Android device via an initial app and installs itself as a separate self-standing service. Furthermore, you can't remove the app, as the trojan reinstalls itself every time, even after users perform a factory reset.

Facebook on Tuesday sued Israeli cyber surveillance firm NSO Group, alleging it hacked users of its messaging platform WhatsApp earlier this year. From a report: The hacking spree targeted journalists, diplomats, human rights activists, political dissidents, senior government officials and others, Facebook said in its lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement that it believed the attack "targeted at least 100 members of civil society, which is an unmistakable pattern of abuse." Facebook is seeking to have NSO barred from accessing or attempting to access WhatsApp and Facebook's services and is seeking unspecified damages. NSO's alleged use of a flaw in WhatsApp to hijack phones caused international consternation when it was made public in May of this year. NSO at the time said in a statement that it would investigate any "credible allegations of misuse" of its technology. WhatsApp said the attack exploited its video calling system in order to send malware to the mobile devices of a number of users. Further reading: Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp, elaborates why WhatsApp is pushing back on NSO Group hacking.

A year ago, Google rolled out ".new" links that worked like shortcuts to instantly create new Google documents. For example, you could type "doc.new" (without the quotes) to create a new Google Doc or "sheet.new" to create a new spreadsheet. Today, Google announced it's bringing the .new shortcuts to the rest of the web. From a report: Now, any company or organization can register their own .new domain to generate a .new shortcut that works with their own web app. Several have already done so, including Microsoft, which now has "word.new" to start a new word document, or Spotify, which has "playlist.new" to start adding songs to a new playlist on its streaming app. The domains are designed to get users straight to the action. That is, instead of having to visit a service, sign in, then find the right menu or function, they could just start creating. However, some of today's new domains aren't quite as seamless as Google's own.

Google has announced that it will stop indexing Flash content in Search as the internet prepares to bid a (not so fond) farewell to the multimedia software platform next year. From a report: "In web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content," said Google engineering manager Dong-Hwi Lee in a blog post. "Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files." It is no secret that Adobe Flash is well and truly on its way out -- two years ago, a consortium of internet companies (including Adobe itself) committed to killing Flash by 2020. Preceding that, Steve Jobs' famous Thoughts on Flash letter from 2010 helped set the wheels in motion for the proprietary software's eventual demise, with the Apple cofounder citing numerous reasons why his company's hardware would not support Flash, including performance on mobile and poor security.

Google is providing a $5.3 million loan to The Kelsey, a two-year-old nonprofit that's seeking to develop affordable housing for people with disabilities. From a report: The financing will help jump-start a development in San Jose, the first specific project that the tech giant has backed since announcing a $250 million fund dedicated to addressing the San Francisco Bay Area's affordable housing shortage. As Google and other tech titans look to alleviate a situation that they're often blamed for exacerbating, many of the details of their initiatives are still being ironed out. While the low-interest loan to The Kelsey is relatively small, Google said the investment is a model for its future work. Google is also lending its name to an organization with fresh ideas on housing, according to Chris Taylor, Google's finance lead for affordable housing investing. "We're a big entity and people assume we did a lot of due diligence -- which we did -- and, hopefully, that's a feather in their cap," he said. Google said earlier this year that it was committing $1 billion to easing a regional housing crisis.

harrymcc writes: On October 29, 1969, a graduate student in a UCLA computer science lab logged into a computer hundreds of miles away at the Stanford Research Institute. It was the first connection via ARPANET, which -- after 20 years as a government and academic network -- evolved into the modern internet. Over at Fast Company, Mark Sullivan marked the anniversary by visiting the room where the historic login took place and talking to three of the people who made it happen.

Only 1 percent of Uber customers always tip, while nearly 60 percent never do, according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). From a report: The average tip is 50 cents a ride, but for those who do tip, the average is more like $3. Men are more likely to tip than women, but female drivers get tipped more than male ones. Tipping has long been a source of fierce debate, especially as it relates to ride-hailing companies like Uber. For years, the company rejected efforts to add a tipping option to its app, arguing it would overly complicate the seamlessness of the experience. But Uber eventually caved and now drivers earn hundreds of millions of dollars in tips every year. The NBER study on tipping with Uber is sure to throw more fuel on the fire.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: Motorola Solutions (not to be confused with Motorola Mobility, which makes the smartphones you know), the biggest global player in these LMR walkies, is releasing what appears to be the most advanced walkie-talkie ever. Called the APX Next, it's a chunky black brick with a thick antenna and a giant push-to-talk button on its side. Much like an iPhone, it also features a touchscreen on its front -- but don't be distracted by that. Its real innovation was born from 2,000 hours of interviews and testing with more than 50 emergency service agencies, including SWAT teams and detectives. It's a voice-recognition system that can operate in extremely loud environments, with artificial intelligence software that can look up 95 of the most common things a police officer or firefighter would call into dispatch -- like a driver's license, or license plate -- without any human operator on the other end of the line. But its ultimate promise is simply to free up the user's hands as much as possible, ensuring that someone is as safe and capable as possible during an emergency.

APX Next is a walkie-talkie and a cellphone combined. It has both the high-powered radio chip for land communications and a low-powered 4G/LTE chip for cell-tower data. These two chips can work at the same time, which is an engineering challenge, especially because the walkie-radio has 25 times the wattage of the 4G chip. The core buttons, including the large talk button, are all designed as you'd expect, to ensure they can be used without looking, and purely by muscle memory in stressful situations. Four separate microphones capture your voice, with programming designed specifically to cancel out exceptionally loud noises. But it isn't always listening for a wake word like the Echo or Google Home. You need to hit a button to cue the assistant. The company says it's using unnamed third parties to handle the natural language processing in the cloud. "What Motorola did was train the model specifically to handle things like ten-codes and even regionally specific dialects across the U.S," the report says.

"Once a question is sent to the cloud, the AI is able to scour a city or force's database for the same private information a dispatcher would be looking up." What's also neat is that the AI won't automatically read sensitive information out loud. Instead, the radio will beep when it has an answer, and the user can get to a private place, if they wish, before hitting a button to hear the results.

During his Open Source Summit Europe keynote speech, Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable Linux kernel maintainer, said Intel CPU's security problems "are going to be with us for a very long time" and are "not going away." He added: "They're all CPU bugs, in some ways they're all the same problem," but each has to be solved in its own way. "MDS, RDDL, Fallout, Zombieland: They're all variants of the same basic problem." ZDNet reports: And they're all potentially deadly for your security: "RIDL and Zombieload, for example, can steal data across applications, virtual machines, even secure enclaves. The last is really funny, because [Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX)] is what supposed to be secure inside Intel ships" [but, it turns out it's] really porous. You can see right through this thing." To fix each problem as it pops up, you must patch both your Linux kernel and your CPU's BIOS and microcode. This is not a Linux problem; any operating system faces the same problem.

OpenBSD, a BSD Unix devoted to security first and foremost, Kroah-Hartman freely admits was the first to come up with what's currently the best answer for this class of security holes: Turn Intel's simultaneous multithreading (SMT) off and deal with the performance hit. Linux has adopted this method. But it's not enough. You must secure the operating system as each new way to exploit hyper-threading appears. For Linux, that means flushing the CPU buffers every time there's a context switch (e.g. when the CPU stops running one VM and starts another). You can probably guess what the trouble is. Each buffer flush takes a lot of time, and the more VMs, containers, whatever, you're running, the more time you lose. "The bad part of this is that you now must choose: Performance or security. And that is not a good option," Kroah-Hartman said. He added: "If you are not using a supported Linux distribution kernel or a stable/long term kernel, you have an insecure system."