Ars Technica quotes the CEO of a fraudulent-review tracking company who says that fake reviews online have now reached 'epidemic proportions". But two U.S. regulators say that's just the beginning: Commissioners Rohit Chopra and Rebecca Slaughter of the Federal Trade Commission say it's about to get a lot worse, and they know who to blame: their own agency. The FTC this week brought its first case against a company for enlisting its employees in a coordinated fake-review campaign to boost sales. Chopra and Slaughter say the decision reached by their fellow commissioners could usher in even more review fraud. The settlement did not require the company to admit fault, notify customers of the fraud, or turn over any ill-gotten gains.

"Dishonest firms may come to conclude that posting fake reviews is a viable strategy, given the proposed outcome here," Chopra said in a statement dissenting from the FTC's decision, joined by Slaughter. "Honest firms, who are the biggest victims of this fraud, may be wondering if they are losing out by following the law. Consumers may come to lack confidence that reviews are truthful...." [T]he FTC voted 3â"2 to allow Sunday Riley to settle the charges by agreeing not to post future fake reviews, without admitting fault. Chopra and Slaughter say the settlement will ultimately do more harm than good and that it tells companies there's little risk in engaging in online review fraud; even if regulators find the fake reviews, the company won't face a meaningful punishment, the dissenters say.
FTC staffers told Ars Technica that it's extraordinarily rare for the FTC to get a fake-review case "as straightforward, prosecutable, and evidence-rich" as this one. The FTC's investigation began when an inside whistle-blower shared a company email on Reddit in which employees "were given step-by-step directions on how to post fake reviews" -- and on how to avoid detection.

Russian scientists tracking migrating eagles ran out of money after some of the birds flew to Iran and Pakistan and their SMS transmitters drew huge data roaming charges. The BBC reports: After learning of the team's dilemma, Russian mobile phone operator Megafon offered to cancel the debt and put the project on a special, cheaper tariff. The team had started crowdfunding on social media to pay off the bills. The birds left from southern Russia and Kazakhstan. The journey of one steppe eagle, called Min, was particularly expensive, as it flew to Iran from Kazakhstan. Min accumulated SMS messages to send during the summer in Kazakhstan, but it was out of range of the mobile network. Unexpectedly the eagle flew straight to Iran, where it sent the huge backlog of messages.

The price per SMS in Kazakhstan was about 15 roubles (18p; 30 US cents), but each SMS from Iran cost 49 roubles. Min used up the entire tracking budget meant for all the eagles. Megafon's offer to bail out the team, reported by RIA Novosti news, means they can continue monitoring the eagles' routes, collecting vital data to help their survival.

Earlier this week, Australian weather forecast service Weatherzone captured satellite images of atmospheric gravity waves pulsing through clouds over the ocean. CNN reports: The images show the waves spreading out from the coast of Western Australia, sending ripples through clouds over the Indian Ocean. The gravity waves were triggered by thunderstorms, with cold air flowing out from the squalls resulting in a disturbance in the atmosphere.

"The atmosphere is a big body of gas that acts like a fluid," said Ben Domensino, a meteorologist at Weatherzone. "It is exactly the mechanism as when a rock is thrown into the water, then the wave travels out from that source." The invisible waves are quite common in the atmosphere, he added. They are typically invisible unless they cause motion in clouds that can be detected by satellites. "Thunderstorms, air flowing over mountains and contrasting wind directions -- when you've got wind from two directions interacting with each other -- can also cause gravity waves," Domensino said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Growing demand for SUVs was the second largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions from 2010 to 2018, an analysis has found. In that period, SUVs doubled their global market share from 17% to 39% and their annual emissions rose to more than 700 megatons of CO2, more than the yearly total emissions of the UK and the Netherlands combined. No energy sector except power drove a larger increase in carbon emissions, putting SUVs ahead of heavy industry (including iron, steel, cement and aluminum), aviation and shipping.

The recent dramatic shift towards heavier SUVs has offset both efficiency improvements in smaller cars and carbon savings from electric vehicles. As the global fleet of SUVs has grown, emissions from the vehicles have increased more than fourfold in eight years. If SUV drivers were a nation, they would rank seventh in the world for carbon emissions. T&E figures show the average mass of new cars rose 10% between 2000 and 2016, which the group suggested could be down to a trend towards SUVs, heavier automatic and dual-clutch gearboxes and the inclusion of other equipment including cameras and sensors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The U.S. government has awarded a giant $10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft, the Department of Defense has confirmed. Known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), the contract will provide the Pentagon with cloud services for basic storage and power all the way up to artificial intelligence processing, machine learning, and the ability to process mission-critical workloads. It's a key contract for Microsoft as the company battles Amazon for cloud dominance, and for a while it was up in the air as to whether Microsoft or Amazon would win this particular one. IBM and Oracle were both eliminated for the bidding back in April, leaving just Microsoft and Amazon as the only companies that could meet the requirements. The contract has been controversial throughout the bidding process, and Oracle lost a legal challenge after it claimed the contract has conflicts of interest. The contract will last for 10 years and is likely to be resisted by employees, who have in the past have called on the company to drop its HoloLens U.S. Army contract and stop its work with ICE.

A hacker group going by the name of Shadow Kill Hackers has infected the city of Johannesburg's internal network with ransomware and is holding South Africa's largest city for ransom. From a report: The hackers are demanding 4 bitcoins to be paid by next Monday, October 28, 5 pm, local time, or they claim they'll upload the city's data on the internet. "Your servers and data have been hacked," the ransom note reads, according to reports from local media [1, 2, 3, 4] and a screenshot posted on Twitter. "We have dozens of back doors inside your city. We have control of everything in your city. We also compromised all passwords and sensitive data such as finance and personal population information," the note said. Authorities responded by shutting down all the IT infrastructure, such as websites, payment portals, and other e-services. A breach was later confirmed via the city's official Twitter account. This is the second time in the past four months that the city's network was hit by ransomware. In July, hackers installed ransomware on the city power provider's network, leaving some residents without electricity for days.

New submitter arkamax writes: A security researcher based in Russia discovered that her research (article in Russian, Google Translate) into API for a new automatic pet feeder manufactured by Xiaomi resulted in obtaining full control of approximately 10,950 of similar devices across the world. She found ways to access logs of those pet feeders, change their settings, invoke manual feeding or completely delete all feeding schedules. She mentioned that the feeder is based on a widely known ESP8266 embedded board, adding that "apparently one could send a remote request to the feeder to download a firmware update. An evil person could use that to reboot those devices and brick them afterwards. The only way to fix it would involve mechanical disassembly and a manual firmware update that requires connecting directly to the board. Explain THAT to poor kitties and puppies who eagerly wait for their owners to come back from a two-week vacation." She then added that the "whole architecture is one epic fail and it's hard to imagine a speedy fix." The researcher chose to stick to the responsible disclosure guidelines and declined to disclose any details until the issues are fixed. Since then, the manufacturer was reported to have fixed a few critical issues but the bulk of the vulnerability still remains. Looks like S in "IoT" remains to stand for Security.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook's news section, which was previously reported to be imminent, is here: The company is rolling out Facebook News in a limited test in the U.S. as a home screen tab and bookmark in the main Facebook app. In a blog post, Facebook's Campbell Brown (vice president of global news partnerships) and Mona Sarantakos (product manager, news) said that news articles will continue to appear in the main News Feed. However, they said that creating a specific tab focused on journalism "gives people more control over the stories they see, and the ability to explore a wider range of their news interests, directly within the Facebook app." It sounds like Facebook News will use both human editors and algorithms to determine which stories you see -- an unusual move for a company that's been hesitant to police the content posted by users and advertisers. Specifically, there will be a section called Today's Stories, curated by a team of journalists to highlight the biggest national news stories of the day.

At the same time, Facebook will also provide algorithmic story suggestions based on your interests and activity. You'll be able to hide articles, topics and publishers you don't want to see, and browse sections devoted to business, entertainment, health, science and technology, and sports -- topics where Facebook users apparently felt underserved. "Regarding personalization, publishers worry that machine learning has limits and they're right," Brown and Sarantakos wrote. "We have progress to make before we can rely on technology alone to provide a quality news destination." Nonetheless, they suggested that algorithms will be "driving the majority of Facebook News," and that they'll be working to ensure that those algorithms are also surfacing "new forms of journalism in the digital age, including individual, independent journalism."

US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) proposed a plan that would provide car owners with "large discounts" if they trade in their polluting, gas-powered vehicles for "clean" electric ones. From a report: In an op-ed published in The New York Times, Schumer said the goal of his "cash-for-clunkers"-style plan is to ensure that every vehicle on the road is zero-emission by 2040. Schumer didn't reveal the exact amount of each per-person discount -- the legislation has yet to be written -- though he did note that lower-income Americans should get "an even bigger discount on a new vehicle or a discount on a used electric vehicle." Schumer estimates that his proposal would result in 63 million fewer gas-powered cars on the road by 2030. There are two other prongs to Schumer's Green New Deal-style plan: grants to states and cities to build out a robust EV charging network, and grants to businesses to retool manufacturing facilities to support the production of EVs and batteries. Schumer would deploy $45 billion in grants to upgrade the nation's charging infrastructure and $17 billion to encourage manufacturers to retrofit their facilities for EV production. Schumer estimates the entire proposal would cost $454 billion over 10 years.

Ever wondered what would manifest if you mixed 1990s nostalgia with a clever name and some futuristic hacking tech? The answer is the Pwnagotchi: a DIY, open source gadget for hacking Wi-Fi that gets smarter the more networks it gets exposed to using machine learning. From a report: It also has an adorable interface that reflects different "moods" depending on what it's doing, and echoes the Tamagotchi digital pets of the 90s. The idea is for its user to take it around the city and "feed" it with Wi-Fi handshakes, the process that allows phones or laptops to communicate with other wireless devices like a router or a smart TV. In theory, these handshakes can then be cracked to reveal the Wi-Fi network's password, which would be useful if the Pwnagotchi user wanted to hack into the Wi-Fi network at a later time. Hackers, of course, love it. The software for the Pwnagotchi was publicly released on September 19. Barely a month later, and with little promotion other than on Twitter, there's already an enthusiastic community of hundreds of security researchers and hackers all over the world who are playing with it, modding it, writing plugins to improve it, and helping each other out on a Slack channel.

Streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, and Spotify might be required to issue emergency alerts from the government if U.S. lawmakers have their way. From a report: TV and radio stations operating in the U.S. are required by law to issue emergency warnings, like the infamous fake missile alert for Hawaii issued in early 2018, but lawmakers want to bring those alerts to more platforms, as viewers use more and more internet-based services. The legislation, dubbed the Reliable Emergency Alert Distribution Improvement (READI) Act, has bipartisan support and is being introduced in the Senate by Democrat Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Republican John Thune of South Dakota. A bipartisan group of Representatives in the House have a similar bill that has already been introduced.

The legislation would also make it illegal for consumers to opt out of federal emergency alerts on their phones and would require alerts by the U.S. president and FEMA to be repeated. TV and radio stations are currently only required to issue an alert once. "When a missile alert went out across Hawai'i last year, some people never got the message on their phones, while others missed it on their TVs and radios. Even though it was a false alarm, the missile alert exposed real flaws in the way people receive emergency alerts," Senator Schatz said in a statement posted to his website.

ARM will keep supplying Huawei with its chip designs at least through the next generation, the company said today. From a report: That's a reversal from earlier this year, when ARM had reportedly notified personnel to halt all dealings with the Chinese company. "ARM can provide support to HiSilicon for the Armv8-A architecture, as well as the next generation of that architecture, following a comprehensive review of both architectures, which have been determined to be of non-U.S. origin," the company told Engadget in a statement. ARM, purchased by Japan's Softbank for $32 billion back in 2016, was forced to halt its business with Huawei after the US effectively forbade US companies from dealing with it. Last month, Huawei was forced to release the Mate 30 Pro without Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube and other key Google services. However, it was able to find alternative suppliers for other components and makes its own Kirin 990 mobile processor for the Mate 30 using ARM's design architecture.

Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey called out his counterpart at Facebook, saying Mark Zuckerberg has a "major gap and flaw" in his argument for free speech on social media. From a report: "We talk a lot about speech and expression and we don't talk about reach enough, and we don't talk about amplification," Dorsey said at the Twitter News Summit in New York. "And reach and amplification was not represented in that speech." Zuckerberg gave a lengthy address at Georgetown University last week in which he explained that Facebook's approach to content -- which favors letting people say whatever they want -- is part of an American tradition of free speech in the marketplace of ideas. He evoked the civil rights movement and other grassroots campaigns that were allowed to spread because of free speech.

Like Twitter, Facebook's algorithm for sorting posts in a person's social media feed gives heavier weight to those that users share and comment on. Often that means the most incendiary or surprising messages find their way to the biggest audience. Other than addressing his algorithm, Zuckerberg didn't talk about the difference between content that naturally goes viral and promoted posts that people pay to send to a bigger audience. "It was a major gap and flaw in the substance he was getting across," Dorsey said.

For Google's namesake search engine, delivering the right results is about understanding what people are asking for. And understanding that involves zeroing in on the meaningful keywords in a search query and ignoring the rest. Words like "a" and "the," for instance, can generally be safely ignored. From a report: The problem is that there are lots of searches where it's difficult for even a search engine as smart as Google to know how the words relate to each other and which ones matter. One example the company provides: If a user searches for "can you get medicine for someone pharmacy," the "someone" is absolutely critical, since it's shorthand for "someone other than myself." A person would likely infer that that; a traditional search algorithm, not so much. But now Google is rolling out an update to its English-language search engine designed to give it a deeper understanding of such subtle queries, which will let it deliver more relevant results. For the above search, results are now topped with a "featured snippet" involving the specific issue of picking up another person's prescription. (Previously, the snippet involved prescriptions but failed to address the specific gist of the query.) I attended a press preview at Google headquarters earlier this week, where some of company's search executives showed examples of the new algorithm's improved results and explained the new technology that went into them. And they set the bar high for expectations; VP of search Pandu Nayak called them "the single biggest change we've had in the last five years and perhaps one of the biggest since the beginning of the company."

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla said today that "no money is being exchanged to route DNS requests to Cloudflare" as part of the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) feature that is currently being gradually enabled for Firefox users in the US. The browser maker has been coming under heavy criticism lately for its partnership with Cloudflare. Many detractors say that by using Cloudflare as the default DoH resolver for Firefox, Mozilla will help centralize a large chunk of DNS traffic on Cloudflare's service. Critics of this decision include regular users, but also ISP-backed lobby groups, according to a recent report citing leaked documents. But according to Mozilla, they're not getting paid for this, and are only doing it for Firefox user privacy.

All four major U.S. carriers -- AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint -- have each issued the same press release announcing that they are forming "a joint venture" called the "Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative" (CCMI). It is designed to ensure that they move forward together to replace SMS with a next-generation messaging standard -- including a promise to launch a new texting app for Android phones that supports it in 2020. Dieter Bohn writes via The Verge: First and foremost, CCMI intends to ship a new Android app next year that will likely be the new default messaging app for Android phones sold by those carriers. It will support all the usual RCS features like typing indicators, higher-resolution attachments, and better group chat. It should also be compatible with the global "Universal Profile" standard for RCS that has been adopted by other carriers around the world. Doug Garland, general manager for the CCMI, says that the CCMI will also work with other companies interested in RCS to make sure their clients are interoperable as well -- notably Samsung and Google. That should mean that people who prefer Android Messages will be able to use that instead, but it sounds like there may be technical details to work out to make that happen.

In a paper published on Arxiv, researchers from the Google Brain Team explain how they're training AI to recognize smells. Engadget reports: The researchers created a data set of nearly 5,000 molecules identified by perfumers, who labeled the molecules with descriptions ranging from "buttery" to "tropical" and "weedy." The team used about two-thirds of the data set to train its AI (a graph neural network or GNN) to associate molecules with the descriptors they often receive. The researchers then used the remaining scents to test the AI -- and it passed. The algorithms were able to predict molecules' smells based on their structures.

As Wired points out, there are a few caveats, and they are what make the science of smell so tricky. For starters, two people might describe the same scent differently, for instance "woody" or "earthy." Sometimes molecules have the same atoms and bonds, but they're arranged as mirror images and have completely different smells. Those are called chiral pairs; caraway and spearmint are just one example. Things get even more complicated when you start combining scents. Still, the Google researchers believe that training AI to associate specific molecules with their scents is an important first step. It could have an impact on chemistry, our understanding of human nutrition, sensory neuroscience and how we manufacture synthetic fragrance.

Scott K. Johnson from Ars Technica reports on how Flagstaff, Arizona, switched to energy-efficient LEDs without giving astronomers a headache from the harsh blue-rich light they produce. An anonymous reader shares several excerpts from the report: Flagstaff became the first city to earn a designation from the International Dark Sky Association in 2001. That came as a result of its long history of hosting astronomy research at local Lowell Observatory, as well as facilities operated by the U.S. Navy. The city has an official ordinance governing the use of outdoor lighting -- public and private. A few years ago, though, a problem arose. The type of dark-sky-friendly streetlight that the city had been using was going extinct, largely as a casualty of low demand. In fact, as of this summer, there are none left to buy. Meanwhile, the age of the LED streetlight has arrived with a catch: limited night-sky-friendly LED options. The problem with LEDs boils down to blue light. Older streetlights are high-pressure sodium bulbs, which produce a warm yellow glow around a color temperature of 2,000 K. The bulbs Flagstaff relied on for most of its streetlights were low-pressure sodium -- a variant that only emits light at a single wavelength (589 nanometers) near that yellow color, producing something resembling candlelight. Many of the LED streetlights on the market have much cooler color temperatures of 3,000 or even 4,000 K.

[...] Narrow-band amber (NBA) LEDs [...] actually use a type of LED that only emits warmer colors from the start. In this way, they actually compare pretty well to the low-pressure sodium streetlights that recently went extinct. The range of wavelengths emitted is a little broader, but the practical effect is about the same. Separately from all this wavelength wrangling, though, LEDs do have a strong natural advantage -- they're highly directional. That is, LED streetlights do a much better job of only lighting the street (rather than the adjacent homes). That means that fewer lumens coming out of the fixture can give the same result you had before. Flagstaff's plan is generally to swap in NBA LEDs for all the low-pressure sodium lights, and PCA LEDs [lights known as phosphor-converted amber (PCA) shift all the light out of the blue and into the yellow part of the spectrum at the cost of some efficiency] for the high-pressure sodium lights that are used along the busier streets (as they're a little brighter). The better directionality of LEDs -- combined with resident requests for slightly dimmer lighting on residential streets -- actually means that the total output of the city's streetlights is going to drop from about 29 million lumens to about 19 million lumens. That's not unusual. In closing, Johnson says Flagstaff's hope is to produce the first dark-sky ordinance updated to deal with LEDs that could give other cities an example to follow.

Facebook is planning to launch its news section on Friday, "which will give users a way to scan headlines and read some news stories -- and which will give some publishers, like News Corp, millions of dollars a year for making their journalism available to Facebook," reports Recode. From the report: News Corp CEO Robert Thomson and his boss, News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch, have been insisting that Facebook and other tech platforms should pay them for access to their work. Now Zuckerberg is giving them what they want. It's a remarkable turnaround for Zuckerberg, who as recently as May 2018 said he had no interest in paying publishers for the right to show their stories.

Facebook will roll out its news section Friday as an "alpha" launch, available to a couple hundred thousand U.S. users; it won't get a wider release for a few months. Facebook users who do get it will see a new icon at the bottom of their mobile app alongside other initiatives like its Marketplace classified sales section and its Facebook Watch video section. Users who click on the icon will see headlines for a handful of top stories, selected by Facebook editors -- from partners like the Wall Street Journal (which is owned by News Corp), Business Insider, and BuzzFeed -- and a personalized selection of headlines selected by Facebook's algorithmic software. Clicking on those headlines will send users to the publishers' own sites, where Facebook users can read the entire story for free. And while sites with subscription-based business models will have to let Facebook users see individual articles without paying, they'll be able to keep their paywalls mostly intact: If you click on a Wall Street Journal article via Facebook's news section, you'll be able to read that one story, but if you click on a subsequent WSJ piece, you'll be asked to pay up. Some deals have yet to be finalized, such as deals with the Washington Post and the New York Times, for instance, but sources say Facebook expects to have them by the time the program rolls out widely.

"Facebook will pay some of its news partners as much as $3 million a year for three-year deals but doesn't intend to pay all of the publishers in the program," reports Recode. "Publishers who don't get paid will have to be content having Facebook send them traffic and potential subscribers."

Black patients were less likely than white patients to get extra medical help, despite being sicker, when an algorithm used by a large hospital chose who got the additional attention, according to a new study underscoring the risks as technology gains a foothold in medicine. The Wall Street Journal reports: Hospitals use the algorithm -- from Optum, UnitedHealth Group's health-services arm -- to find patients with diabetes, heart disease and other chronic ailments who could benefit from having health-care workers monitor their overall health, manage their prescriptions and juggle doctor visits, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science. Yet the algorithm gave healthier white patients the same ranking as black patients who had one more chronic illness as well as poorer laboratory results and vital signs. The reason? The algorithm used cost to rank patients, and researchers found health-care spending for black patients was less than for white patients with similar medical conditions.

For the study, data-science researchers looked at the assessments made by one hospital's use of the algorithm. The study didn't name the hospital. The researchers focused on the algorithm's rankings of 6,079 patients who identified themselves as black in the hospital's records, and 43,539 who identified as white and didn't identify themselves as any other race or ethnicity. Then the researchers assessed the health needs of the same set of patients using their medical records, laboratory results and vital signs, and developed a different algorithm. Using that data, the researchers found that black patients were sicker than white patients who had a similar predicted cost. Among those rated the highest priority by the hospital's algorithm, black patients had 4.8 chronic diseases compared with 3.8 of the conditions among white patients. The researchers found the number of black patients eligible for fast-track enrollment in the program more than doubled by prioritizing patients based on their number of chronic conditions, rather than ranking them based on cost.