An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: According to a new U.S. Army report, Americans could face a horrifically grim future from climate change involving blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war. The study found that the U.S. military itself might also collapse. This could all happen over the next two decades, the report notes. The senior U.S. government officials who wrote the report are from several key agencies including the Army, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NASA. The study called on the Pentagon to urgently prepare for the possibility that domestic power, water, and food systems might collapse due to the impacts of climate change as we near mid-century. The report was commissioned by General Mark Milley, Trump's new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making him the highest-ranking military officer in the country (the report also puts him at odds with Trump, who does not take climate change seriously.)

The report, titled Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army, was launched by the U.S. Army War College in partnership with NASA in May at the Wilson Center in Washington DC. The report was commissioned by Gen. Milley during his previous role as the Army's Chief of Staff. It was made publicly available in August via the Center for Climate and Security, but didn't get a lot of attention at the time. The two most prominent scenarios in the report focus on the risk of a collapse of the power grid within "the next 20 years," and the danger of disease epidemics. Both could be triggered by climate change in the near-term, it notes. The report also warns that the U.S. military should prepare for new foreign interventions in Syria-style conflicts, triggered due to climate-related impacts. Bangladesh in particular is highlighted as the most vulnerable country to climate collapse in the world. The report recommends the U.S. military should take advantage of the Arctic's hydrocarbon resources and new transit routes to repel Russian encroachment.

"But without urgent reforms, the report warns that the U.S. military itself could end up effectively collapsing as it tries to respond to climate collapse," adds Motherboard. "It could lose capacity to contain threats in the U.S. and could wilt into 'mission failure' abroad due to inadequate water supplies."

sandbagger writes: The BBC has made its international news website available via the Tor network, in a bid to thwart censorship attempts. The browser can obscure who is using it and what data is being accessed, which can help people avoid government surveillance and censorship. Countries including China, Iran and Vietnam are among those who have tried to block access to the BBC News website or programs. Instead of visiting bbc.co.uk/news or bbc.com/news, users of the Tor browser can visit the new bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion web address. Clicking this web address will not work in a regular web browser.

pgmrdlm shares a report from CBS News: Automatic emergency braking will be standard in most cars in 2022. The technology is expected to cut the number of rear-end crashes in half, but hundreds of drivers say sometimes the system slams on the brakes -- apparently for no reason. CBS News found reports of several accidents and injuries that drivers blamed on false activations of emergency automatic braking systems. Safety advocates and carmakers say in the vast majority of cases it works, but it is not perfect.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) said autobraking is making driving safer, estimating the technology could cut rear end collisions in half, preventing 28,000 crashes and 12,000 injuries by 2025. "These autonomous emergency braking systems, they are effective. They are working in the real world. But there is definitely room for improvement," said David Aylor, IIHS' manager of active safety testing. Since 2015 there have been seven recalls for auto-braking issues, affecting nearly 180,000 vehicles. There are more than half a million Nissan Rogues subject to the NHTSA investigation. The regulator has also received hundreds of complaints about so-called "phantom braking" in vehicles from a number of automakers. Automakers insist the technology will save lives and continues to improve. But there is no federal standard, so each system is a little different. Carmakers have at least 49 different names for the technology. For those interested, CBS News has included statements in their report from several automakers who have had complaints of phantom autobraking reported to the NHTSA.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Google launches its Stadia streaming service on November 19 (for some pre-orderers, at least), it will only include titles that are also available on standard PCs and consoles. Going forward, though, the company says it's going to focus on first-party exclusives "that wouldn't be possible on any other platform." That's how Google head of Stadia Games and Entertainment Jade Raymond (well-known as one of the creators of Assassin's Creed) summarized the company's plans in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz. Google announced today that its first first-party game development studio would be located in Montreal, and Raymond told GI that studio will be focused on trying things that other dedicated game platforms can't do.

Part of that promise, Raymond says, is the ability to use Google's distributed data center hardware to perform real-time calculations that can't be done on even the most powerful home hardware. "A fully physics-simulated game is one of the Holy Grails of game creation since Trespasser was being imagined 20-something years ago, and now we finally have a platform where we'll be able to deliver some of those experiences," Raymond said, making reference to the overly ambitious failure of 1998's Jurassic Park: Trespasser. That distributed server technology could also aid in the performance and scale of MMOs, Raymond said, because "everyone [on Stadia] is essentially playing in one big LAN party as far as the tech is concerned. There is no difference or constraints from an architecture perspective of how far the users are, or worrying about replication and all the other things that typically limit the number of people you can have in a game." Raymond went on to say that she foresees story-based Stadia games with characters that have "believable human interactions" rather than canned lines of repeated language. "She also talked up the potential to watch a YouTube documentary that includes footage of a classic game, then jump into a Stadia-powered gameplay session with that game directly," reports Ars Technica.

Two senior members of Congress, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), asked U.S. intelligence officials late Wednesday to determine whether the Chinese-owned social-networking app TikTok poses "national security risks." From a report: In a letter to Joseph Maguire, the director of national intelligence, the lawmakers questioned TikTok's data-collection practices and whether the app adheres to censorship rules directed by the Chinese government that could limit what U.S. users see. TikTok, which provides users a feed of short videos, has become wildly popular among teenagers worldwide. "With over 110 million downloads in the U.S. alone, TikTok is a potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore," wrote Schumer and Cotton, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "Given these concerns, we ask that the Intelligence Community conduct an assessment of the national security risks posed by TikTok and other China-based content platforms operating in the U.S. and brief Congress on these findings."

Twitter says it has achieved a major milestone in its attempts to improve the "health" of its platform. From a report: According to the company's most recent earnings report, 50 percent of abusive tweets removed this past quarter were pulled before a user even flagged the content. That's up from 38 percent in Q1. Twitter adds that it achieved the milestone on the back of improvements it made to its machine learning-based moderation algorithms, which in turn forward more tweets to the company's employees to scrutinize.

Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, writes: You can learn anything on the internet, so why do I so often learn things I don't want to know? When I'm surfing the web I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe's political history or the nature of quasars, but I end up reading trivia like a menu from Alcatraz prison. Why am I not curious about the things I want to be curious about? Curiosity feels like it's outside your control, and trying to direct it sounds as ill conceived as forcing yourself to find a joke funny. But if you understand what prompts curiosity, you may be able to channel it a little better. Across evolutionary time, curious animals were more likely to survive because they learned about their environments; a forager that occasionally skipped a reliable feeding ground to explore might find an even better place to eat.

Humans, too, will forgo a known payoff to investigate the unknown. In one experiment, subjects were asked to choose one of four photos, each carrying some chance of paying a cash prize. Photos repeated, so subjects learned to pick the best-paying, but when a novel photo popped up, they chose it more often than the odds dictated they should. This preference for novelty is, of course, the reason manufacturers periodically tweak product packaging and advertising. But it's good to know about your environment even if it doesn't promise a reward right now; knowledge may be useless today, but vital next week. Therefore, evolution has left us with a brain that can reward itself; satisfying curiosity feels pleasurable, so you explore the environment even when you don't expect any concrete payoff. Infants prefer to look at novel pictures compared with familiar ones. Preschoolers play longer with a mechanical toy if it's difficult to deduce how it works.

In a new report, Penn State political scientists say that it's not the recommendation engine, but the communities that form around right-wing content. From a report: YouTube is the biggest social media platform in the country, and, perhaps, the most misunderstood. Over the past few years, the Google-owned platform has become a media powerhouse where political discussion is dominated by right-wing channels offering an ideological alternative to established news outlets. And, according to new research from Penn State University, these channels are far from fringe -- they're the new mainstream, and recently surpassed the big three US cable news networks in terms of viewership. The paper, written by Penn State political scientists Kevin Munger and Joseph Phillips, tracks the explosive growth of alternative political content on YouTube, and calls into question many of the field's established narratives. It challenges the popular school of thought that YouTube's recommendation algorithm is the central factor responsible for radicalizing users and pushing them into a far-right rabbit hole.

The authors say that thesis largely grew out of media reports, and hasn't been rigorously analyzed. The best prior studies, they say, haven't been able to prove that YouTube's algorithm has any noticeable effect. "We think this theory is incomplete, and potentially misleading," Munger and Phillips argue in the paper. "And we think that it has rapidly gained a place in the center of the study of media and politics on YouTube because it implies an obvious policy solution -- one which is flattering to the journalists and academics studying the phenomenon." Instead, the paper suggests that radicalization on YouTube stems from the same factors that persuade people to change their minds in real life -- injecting new information -- but at scale. The authors say the quantity and popularity of alternative (mostly right-wing) political media on YouTube is driven by both supply and demand. The supply has grown because YouTube appeals to right-wing content creators, with its low barrier to entry, easy way to make money, and reliance on video, which is easier to create and more impactful than text.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Do a search on Google's Play Store in Europe and you'll find the company's own Gboard app has an age rating of PEGI 3 -- aka the pan-European game information labelling system which signifies content is suitable for all age groups. PEGI 3 means it may still contain a little cartoon violence. Say, for example, an emoji fist or middle finger. Now do a search on Play for the rival Fleksy keyboard app and you'll find it has a PEGI 12 age rating. This label signifies the rated content can contain slightly more graphic fantasy violence and mild bad language.

The discrepancy in labelling suggests there's a material difference between Gboard and Fleksy -- in terms of the content you might encounter. Yet both are pretty similar keyboard apps -- with features like predictive emoji and baked in GIFs. Gboard also lets you create custom emoji. While Fleksy puts mini apps at your fingertips. A more major difference is that Gboard is made by Play Store owner and platform controller, Google. Whereas Fleksy is an indie keyboard that since 2017 has been developed by ThingThing, a startup based out of Spain. Fleksy's keyboard didn't used to carry a 12+ age rating -- this is a new development. Not based on its content changing but based on Google enforcing its Play Store policies differently. The Fleksy app, which has been on the Play Store for around eight years at this point -- and per Play Store install stats has had more than 5M downloads to date -- was PEGI 3 rating until earlier this month. But then Google stepped in and forced the team to up the rating to 12. Which means the Play Store description for Fleksy in Europe now rates it PEGI 12 and specifies it contains "Mild Swearing." According to Google, the reason for the rating is because Fleksy's latest app update contains the middle finger emoji... even though Google's own Gboard app also contains the middle finger emoji.

"That's not the end of the saga, though," writes Natasha Lomas via TechCrunch. "Google's Play Store team is still not happy with the regional age rating for Fleksy -- and wants to push the rating even higher -- claiming, in a subsequent email, that 'your app contains mature content (e.g. emoji) and should have higher rating.'" When the Fleksy team pointed out to Google that the middle finger emoji can be found in both keyboard apps -- and asked them to drop Fleksy's rating back to PEGI 3 like Gboard -- the Play team didn't respond.

IEEE Spectrum describes how the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) partnered with Pivot Technology Services to help them relocate their massive radio-frequency emulation testbed, called "Colosseum." The testbed was built for the agency's Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) -- a three-year competition to demonstrate the validity of using AI to work together in order to use wireless spectrum more efficiently than operating on pre-allocated bands. Slashdot reader Wave723 shares an excerpt from the report: Colosseum was originally built and housed at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. That changed at the beginning of October, when the testbed was dismantled and later trucked to Los Angeles for the competition's finale, scheduled to begin at 3:30pm PDT today at MWC Los Angeles. [...] There may have been some molehills during the checks, but moving Colosseum definitely qualifies as a mountain. The testbed uses 3 Peta-Ops per second of computing power and 52 terabytes per second of data to emulate 65,000 channel operations between 256 wireless devices. It can draw up to 92 kilowatts of power and requires 200 gallons of water per minute to cycle through its cooling system to keep it from overheating.

Colosseum is housed within a space twice of the size of a cargo container -- in fact, its housing is literally built from two converted cargo containers put side by side. The halves arrived at the Los Angeles Convention Center during the set-up for MWC Los Angeles, and were hauled into the building and onto the convention floor by two 18-wheelers. We're going to move right past the crazy fact that DARPA and its hired logistics companies drove two semi-trucks into the Los Angeles Convention Center, because it gets better. To actually lower Colosseum's halves onto the ground, the next step involved something that both Tilghman and Gabel referred to as a "forklift ballet." As it turned out, the convention center didn't have a forklift strong enough to lift either half, so everyone improvised and used four smaller forklifts simultaneously by carefully arranging them around each half of Colosseum. It worked, but Gabel, in showing me a video of the forklift ballet, pointed out a moment where one of the forklift's rear wheels lifted off the ground as the machine and its operator grappled with Colosseum's weight...

Rei writes: After two profitable quarters last year, Tesla was hit by a perfect storm of filled U.S. backlog, S/X cannibalization by Model 3, a botched international launch, and price cuts due to U.S. tax credit phaseouts, leading to a very poor Q1 showing. While cashflow went positive in Q2, profits remained elusive, and -- relying on lower-cost Model 3 variants with minimal U.S. tax credits -- expectations for Q3 weren't much better.

Instead, Tesla posted a blowout quarter: $5.3 billion record cash on hand, profits ($143M GAAP, $342M non-GAAP), margins rising from 18.9% to 22.8%, and sizeable growth in both solar and storage. Across the board, the company ran ahead of schedule: volume production of Model Y is pulled forward to next summer; Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai is producing cars and awaiting final sales certification after being built up from a muddy field in 10 months at a third the capital cost per vehicle; Semi (previously suggested as slipping to 2021) is back to 2020 production; and the production version of the solar roof tiles will be launching at an event on Thursday. The new, shipping crate-format Megapack energy storage products start being installed this quarter. As for vehicles, the company continues to be production constrained, with significant wait times on new orders in all markets; annual production and sales guidance of 360-400k was reiterated. Model S/X production is being raised to make up for new demand for the "Raven" update. On the self-driving front, while the company launched Smart Summon at the end of Q3, only $30 million of revenue was recognized because of it; half a billion dollars of unrecognized Full Self Driving (FSD) revenue remains on the books for future quarters. The company reiterated guidance of FSD being "feature complete" (handling all driving from driveway to destination, with supervision) by the end of this year at least as a limited prerelease, and capability for unsupervised driving by the end of next year, limited by the rate of regulatory approvals. Also announced as upcoming in the next few weeks: OTA upgrades for range on new Model S/X vehicles, a 3% OTA performance improvement to S/X, and a 5% performance improvement for Model 3.

During the earnings call, Musk credited the surge in progress in Tesla's non-core divisions to being able to dedicate more engineering and financial resources to them after stabilizing Model 3 production rates and costs. Tesla's stock surged 20% in aftermarket trading, equivalent to the company's second-highest percentage gain ever, and its highest in absolute terms. Electrek, The Financial Times, and CNBC are reporting Tesla's third-quarter earnings.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: By harnessing the power of imagination, researchers have nearly doubled the speed at which completely paralyzed patients may be able to communicate with the outside world. In the new experiments, a volunteer paralyzed from the neck down instead imagined moving his arm to write each letter of the alphabet. That brain activity helped train a computer model known as a neural network to interpret the commands, tracing the intended trajectory of his imagined pen tip to create letters. Eventually, the computer could read out the volunteer's imagined sentences with roughly 95% accuracy at a speed of about 66 characters per minute -- twice the previous record.

An open database exposing records containing the sensitive data of hotel customers as well as US military personnel and officials has been disclosed by researchers. ZDNet reports: On Monday, vpnMentor's cybersecurity team, led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, said the database belonged to Autoclerk, a service owned by Best Western Hotels and Resorts group. Autoclerk is a reservations management system used by resorts to manage web bookings, revenue, loyalty programs, guest profiles, and payment processing.

In a report shared with ZDNet, the researchers said the open Elasticsearch database was discovered through vpnMentor's web mapping project. It was possible to access the database, given it had no encryption or security barriers whatsoever, and perform searches to examine the records contained within. The team says that "thousands" of individuals were impacted, although due to ethical reasons it was not possible to examine every record in the leaking database to come up with a specific number. Hundreds of thousands of booking reservations for guests were available to view and data including full names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, dates and travel costs, some check-in times and room numbers, and masked credit card details were also exposed. Some of the records were logs for U.S. Army generals visiting Russia and Israel, the report says. In total, the AWS-hosted database contained over 179GB of data.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Google employees are accusing the company's leadership of developing an internal surveillance tool that they believe will be used to monitor workers' attempts to organize protests and discuss labor rights. Earlier this month, employees said they discovered that a team within the company was creating the new tool for the custom Google Chrome browser installed on all workers' computers and used to search internal systems. The concerns were outlined in a memo written by a Google employee and reviewed by Bloomberg News and by three Google employees who requested anonymity because they aren't authorized to talk to the press.

The tool would automatically report staffers who create a calendar event with more than 10 rooms or 100 participants, according to the employee memo. The most likely explanation, the memo alleged, "is that this is an attempt of leadership to immediately learn about any workers organization attempts." A representative for Alphabet Inc.'s Google said, "These claims about the operation and purpose of this extension are categorically false. This is a pop-up reminder that asks people to be mindful before auto-adding a meeting to the calendars of large numbers of employees." The extension was prompted by an increase in spam around calendars and events, according to Google. It doesn't collect personally identifiable information, nor does it stop the use of calendars but rather adds a speed bump when employees are reaching out to a large group, the company said.

A small number of prolific U.S. Twitter users create the majority of tweets, and that extends to Twitter discussions around politics, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center out today. Building on an earlier study, which discovered that 10% of users created 80% of tweets from U.S. adults, the organization today says that just 6% of U.S. adults on Twitter account for 73% of tweets about national politics. TechCrunch reports: Though your experience on Twitter may differ, based on who you follow, the majority of Twitter users don't mention politics in their tweets. In fact, Pew found that 69% never tweeted about politics or tweeted about the topic just once. Meanwhile, across all tweets from U.S. adults, only 13% of tweets were focused on national politics. The study was based on 1.1 million public tweets from June 2018 to June 2019, Pew says (2,427 users participated).

Only 22% of U.S. adults even have a Twitter account, and of those, only 31% are defined as "political tweeters" -- that is, they've posted at least five tweets and have posted at least twice about politics during the study period. Within this broader group of political tweeters, just 6% are defined as "prolific" -- meaning they've posted at least 10 tweets and at least 25% of their tweets mention national politics. This small subset then goes on to create 73% of all tweets from U.S. adults on the subject of national politics. What's concerning about the data is that it's those who are either far to the left or far to the right who are the ones dominating the political conversation on Twitter's platform. A majority of the prolific political tweeters (55%) say they identify as either "very liberal" or "every conservative." Among the non-political tweeting crowd, only 28% chose a more polarized label for themselves. The report goes on to say that the polarized subgroup heavily leans left. "For example, those who strongly approve of President Trump generated 25% of all tweets mentioning national politics. But those who strongly disapprove of Trump generated 72% of all tweets mentioning national politics. (They're also responsible for 80% of all tweets from U.S. adults on the platform.)"

Reddit users have discovered that the Pixel 4's 90Hz refresh rate drops to 60Hz when the display brightness falls below 75 percent. This means that you're only getting the full 90Hz display rate when the brightness level is high. The Verge reports: It's not clear why Google has chosen the 75 percent mark, but droidlife has discovered you can head into the developer settings and force the 90Hz setting to always be enabled regardless of brightness levels. This will likely impact the battery life, which is something you'll want to consider before forcing the 90Hz display to always-on. Other 90Hz OLED Android phones like the OnePlus 7T keep the display running at its max 90Hz all of the time, but Google has stated it will automatically switch the display refresh rate on the Pixel 4 "for some content." Google issued a statement explaining its decision to limit the refresh rate, adding that it will issue an update in the coming weeks that will allow 90Hz in more brightness conditions.

Here's the full statement: "We designed Smooth Display so that users could enjoy the benefits of 90Hz for improved UI interactions and content consumption, while also preserving battery when higher refresh rates are not critical by lowering back down to 60Hz. In some conditions or situations, however, we set the refresh rate to 60Hz. Some of these situations include: when the user turns on battery saver, certain content such as video (as it's largely shot at 24 or 30fps), and even various brightness or ambient conditions. We constantly assess whether these parameters lead to the best overall user experience. We have previously planned updates that we'll roll out in the coming weeks that include enabling 90hz in more brightness conditions."

As for whether or not 90Hz has a serious impact on battery life, YouTube Tech Reviewer Matthew Moniz reports only a marginal difference.

The Fortnite Chapter 2 update that rolled out to gamers worldwide last week has shattered traffic records at Akamai, one of the multiple content delivery networks (CDNs) Epic Games was using to get the game update to its players. From a report: Traffic numbers during the update's rollout peaked at 106 Tbps on Akamai's network, surpassing the 100 Tbps threshold for the first time in the company's history. While exact numbers were not released, the Fortnite update is believed to have accounted for more than half of the peak traffic. Adam Karon, Executive Vice President and GM, Media and Carrier, at Akamai, said the company is regularly reaching peaks of 50 Tbps every day, usually compromised of live streaming video (including live sports), music, e-commerce transactions, financial services, banking, software patches, healthcare information, automobile software updates, and others. "It was just 2008 when we marveled that peak traffic on Akamai crossed the 1 Tbps mark. Now, hardly a decade later, we're talking about a peak two orders of magnitude greater," Karon said.

Google today shared that in August 2019, Android Pie had 22.6% adoption. From a report: That means the second-latest version of Android was running on a fifth of devices after some 12 months. Google did not share adoption numbers for any other Android version, including Android 10, the latest version that started rolling out last month. Meanwhile, iOS 13 passed 50% adoption in less than a month. With over 2.5 billion active Android devices out there, Android's distribution is useful information for anyone who makes decisions regarding Google's mobile operating system.

Google's Play Store labeled the keyboard app Fleksy as being appropriate only for ages 12 and up because of a middle finger emoji, while Google's own Gboard app is rated suitable for all ages, despite containing the same emoji. From a report: The Fleksy keyboard app has been available in the European Play Store for about eight years and had a rating of PEGI 3 (the equivalent to "E for Everyone" in the US) up until earlier this month, TechCrunch reported Wednesday. At that point, Google reportedly made the team change the rating to PEGI 12, with the specification of "Mild Swearing." Google told the company behind the app that Fleksy contained content that wasn't appropriate for all ages, and included a screenshot of the middle finger emoji, according to emails provided to TechCrunch by Olivier Plante, CEO of Fleksy developer ThingThing. Google also apparently told ThingThing that it wants to push the rating higher.

Waymo executives think people have taken its promises of self-driving cars too seriously. From a report: The Alphabet subsidiary "went through a lot of hype that was sort of unmanageable," said Tekedra N. Mawakana, Waymo's chief external officer. "Sometimes a lot of hype is so mismatched to what's happening in the real world." Mawakana said the reporting has become a bit more "grounded" today, but he went on to say that the hype had caused people to develop mistaken ideas like they would no longer be able to drive their own cars once self-driving cars became ubiquitous. "We want the ride to be amazingly boring," Mawakana continued. "We don't want the ride to be exciting."

The company has dialed back its enthusiastic tone as it falls behind its original timeline for getting full self-driving cars on the road. The company said in 2017 that it wouldn't need to wait until 2020 -- when analysts expected self-driving cars to go fully autonomous -- but that it would give riders the ability within "months." Morgan Stanley cut its valuation on Waymo by 40% last month from $175 billion to $105 billion, concluding that the industry is moving toward commercialization slower than expected and that Waymo still relies on human safety drivers, which CNBC reported in August. But no company has been more instrumental in driving the hype around self-driving than Google. Consumer and media expectations arose based on what Waymo had told the press and public, dating back as far as 2012, when it was still known as Google's self-driving car project.