"Facebook is facing a lot of pushback for Libra, its proposed cryptocurrency, but that's not stopping the social media giant from forging ahead," reports the Motley Fool: Earlier this week, it announced the 21 founding members of its digital token project at the signing of the Libra Association charter in Switzerland. The founding members include Uber, Lyft, Spotify, and PayU, among others... Despite all the odds against it, Facebook is forging ahead, pulling out all the stops to convince the world's skeptics that it is capable of controlling a digital currency that can't be regulated.

Its latest attempt: warning regulators of the impending danger from China if Libra fails. David Marcus, the Facebook executive heading up the Libra initiative, told Bloomberg that China is moving ahead with its own digital payments system, which could have global appeal. That could be a big threat to the U.S. if regulators drag their heels in approving Facebook's digital coin. He painted a picture of an environment five years hence in which a large portion of the world won't have to worry about sanctions from the U.S. because they will have a digital currency waiting in the wings.

An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: Mercedes-Benz car owners have said that the app they used to remotely locate, unlock and start their cars was displaying other people's account and vehicle information.

TechCrunch spoke to two customers who said the Mercedes-Benz' connected car app was pulling in information from other accounts and not their own, allowing them to see other car owners' names, recent activity, phone numbers, and more. The apparent security lapse happened late-Friday before the app went offline "due to site maintenance" a few hours later....

"There was a short interval [Friday] during which incorrect customer data was displayed on our MercedesMe app," said Donna Boland, a spokesperson for Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz.... "When we became aware of the issue, we took the system down, identified the issue and resolved it," she added.

8chan's current owner is still having trouble getting the site back online -- and that's due at least partly to lobbying against 8chan by the site's original founder: In early August, web security company Cloudflare stopped protecting the board, and 8chan was immediately swamped with denial of service attacks that crashed it. At first, 8chan found a new home with another security site, Bitmitigate. But in a long and complex chain of events, the new web service company turned out to be renting servers from a different infrastructure firm, Voxility, which wanted nothing to do with 8chan. They kicked Bitmitigate off its equipment, deplatforming not only 8chan, but also the neo-Nazi forum The Daily Stormer, which shared the same server.

It looked like 8chan would jump from host to host, like an unwelcome guest crashing on an endless series of digital couches. But that didn't happen. The last real attempt until earlier this month was some 8chan users trying to revive it through peer-to-peer sharing, only for it to fall apart when users began getting swamped with malware... So far, multiple attempts to get the board back up as anything other than a test version have failed -- and original 8chan creator Fredrick Brennan couldn't be happier...
Brennan has been contacting service providers urging them not to work with 8chan's current owner, Jim Watkins. And the article notes that "Because few companies own the servers that could host a site, the security software to protect it, and the infrastructure to get it out to the world, Watkins has to deal with multiple firms..."

Brennan tells their reporter that "the more [internet service providers] I get to say 'no thanks'... the more they'll have to rely on expensive 'bulletproof' providers who charge more to cover [the] costs of police raids and high powered attorneys."

An anonymous reader quotes Newsweek: Wing, an offshoot of Google parent company Alphabet, officially launched its drone delivery service Friday, delivering a FedEx package -- a birthday gift for Susie Sensmeier from her husband, Paul -- through the air from a distribution center to the couple's home in Christiansburg, Virginia, according to the company's blog.

the first company to receive Federal Aviation Authority approvalfocusing on drone delivery in dense, urban environments" according to TechCrunch, Wing decided to launch its pilot program in small-town Christiansburg. Snuggled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains with a population of 22,000, Christiansburg describes itself as a "tight-knit community." Without high-rises or other obstructions, Wing's drones can fly from their "Nest" in North Christiansburg, pick up parcels from local retailers, and deposit them at the doorsteps of qualifying homes.

Along with FedEx, Wing will also deliver packages from Walgreens and local boutique Sugar Magnolia.
"We are thrilled, honored, and humbled to be the first small business in the United States to have our products delivered by drone," said Sugar Magnolia's co-owner.

The article notes that the delivery drones "don't land at drop-off sites; instead, they hover 23 feet in the air and lower their cargo to the ground on a tether."

From a report: The owner of an electric car will be able to meet household power needs from the vehicle itself based on a technology developed by Nissan, the Japanese auto giant.

It plans to introduce the new 'Leaf' electric cars in the Indian market next year and is on the look-out for local partners for collaboration on the application of its latest 'Vehicle-to-Home' technology (V2H) in the state. The technology allows electric vehicles to not only receive power but also store it and send it back to the source. The 'Leaf' could be an alternative to a home battery system like inverter.

Household power can be supplied from the 'Leaf' lithium-ion battery (40 kWh) of the car by installing a power control system connected to the household's distribution board. The vehicles can also be charged from the household power supply at night (lean usage period).

Jack Newcombe, the Chief Operating Officer of a syndication company with 44 million daily readers, describes the strange voice he heard talking to his 18-month old son: She says we have a nice house and encourages the nanny to respond. She does not. The voice even jokes that she hopes we don't change our password. I am sick to my stomach. After about five minutes of verbal "joy riding," the voice starts to get agitated at the nanny's lack of response and then snaps, in a very threatening voice: "I'm coming for the baby if you don't answer me...." We unplug the cameras and change all passwords...

Still helpless, I started doing the only thing I could do -- Googling. I typed "Nest + camera + hacked" and found out that this happens frequently. Parent after parent relayed stories similar to mine -- threatening to steal a baby is shockingly common -- and some much worse, such as playing pornography over the microphone to a 3-year-old... What is worse is that anyone could have been watching us at any time for as long as we have had the cameras up. This person just happened to use the microphone. Countless voyeurs could have been silently watching (or worse) for months.

However, what makes this issue even more terrifying is a corporate giant's complete and utter lack of response. Nest is owned by Google, and, based on my experience and their public response, Google does not seem to care about this issue. They acknowledge it as a problem, shrug their shoulders and point their fingers at the users. Their party line is to remind people that the hardware was not hacked; it was the user's fault for using a compromised password and not implementing two-step authentication, in which users receive a special code via text to sign on. That night, on my way home from work, I called Nest support and was on hold for an hour and eight minutes. I followed all directions and have subsequently received form emails in broken English. Nobody from Google has acknowledged the incident or responded with any semblance of empathy. In every email, they remind me of two-step authentication.

They act as if I am going to continue to use Nest cameras.

"Cyber-espionage operations from Cozy Bear, a threat actor believed to work for the Russian government, continued undetected for the past years by using malware families previously unknown to security researchers," reports BleepingComputer -- citing a surprisingly detailed report: Relying on stealthy communication techniques between infected systems and the command and control servers, the group managed to keep their activity under the radar for a long time. Cyber-espionage campaigns that likely started in 2013, collectively named "Operation Ghost," have been attributed to this group, and continued through 2019...

Researchers at ESET tracking this threat actor found at least three victims of Operation Ghost, all being European Ministries of Foreign Affairs including the Washington DC embassy of a European Union country. The victim count is likely larger but identifying them is difficult because the threat actor uses unique command and control infrastructure for each target.
The report notes the group used sites like Reddit, Twitter, and Imgur to deliver the URLs for some command-and-control servers, along with information hidden in images. And another stage of its malware platform used an even more robust site for its command-and-control server: Dropbox.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Monday, the right-to-repair movement will have its best chance at advancing legislation that would make it easier to repair your gadgets. The Massachusetts state legislature is holding a three-hour hearing on the Digital Right to Repair act, a bill that would require electronics manufacturers to sell repair parts and tools, make repair guides available, and would prevent them from using software to artificially prevent repair.

So far this year, 19 other states have considered similar legislation. It hasn't passed in any of them. But Massachusetts is one of the most likely states to pass the legislation, for a few different reasons. Most notably, the legislation is modeled on a law passed unanimously in Massachusetts in 2012 that won independent auto shops the right to repair, meaning lawmakers there are familiar with the legislation and the benefits that it has had for auto repair shops not just in Massachusetts but around the country. Crucially, important legislative hurdles have already been cleared in the state: Both the House and Senate bills are identical and has broad support from both Democrats and Republicans in the legislature. The hearing is going to be held in the Gardner Auditorium, which holds 600 people, making this the largest and highest-profile hearing on the topic in any state thus far.

Twitter user Kevin Bradley discovered a Lightning port hidden in the Apple TV 4K's ethernet port. There's a number of theories for why the port exists, but one of the more logical explanations is that it's simply there for Apple to use for debugging. 9to5Mac reports: While earlier Apple TV models had Micro USB and USB-C, the Apple TV 4K dropped all outwardly-facing ports other than Ethernet and HDMI. Under the hood, however, there's a hidden Lightning port, as Bradley discovered. The Lightning port is hidden in the ethernet connector on the Apple TV 4K. Bradley teased on Twitter: "None of us looked THAT closely to the hardware of the AppleTV 4K and the magic locked in the ethernet port until fairly recently."

As for getting the Lightning port itself to work, Steven Barker said in a tweet that this is proving to be "difficult." The Lightning port is stuck at the very back of the ethernet port. Ultimately, it's not really clear what the Lightning port discovery could mean. One thing it could lead towards is the expansion of jailbreak capabilities for the Apple TV 4K, though Bradley cautions: "Just because we know it's lightning doesn't mean anything past that. Just because we find a way in doesn't mean anything will DEFINITELY be released due to what we discover. The barrier for entry might be way too high."

Five years after CBS publicized the fact that the Air Force still used eight-inch floppy disks to store data critical to operating the Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile command, the aerial and space warfare service branch decided it was time to officially retire them. Ars Technica reports: The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the contention by the Air Force at the time of the 60 Minutes report that the archaic hardware offered a cybersecurity advantage, the service has completed an upgrade to what is now known as the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), as Defense News reports. SAACS is an upgrade that swaps the floppy disk system for what Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force's 595th Strategic Communications Squadron, described as a "highly secure solid state digital storage solution." The floppy drives were fully retired in June.

But the IBM Series/1 computers remain, in part because of their reliability and security. And it's not clear whether other upgrades to "modernize" the system have been completed. Air Force officials have acknowledged network upgrades that have enhanced the speed and capacity of SACCS' communications systems, and a Government Accountability Office report in 2016 noted that the Air Force planned to "update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017." But it's not clear how much of that has been completed.

Dream McClinton from The Guardian writes about a new Netflix docuseries, called Unnatural Selection, that "explores the various forms of genetic engineering, as well as the societal and environmental implications of its research and use." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Today, we are learning the language in which God created life," said then-president Bill Clinton, alongside the British prime minister, Tony Blair, in 2000. In the grainy archival clip, scientists and dignitaries had just mapped out the human genome, dissecting the complex science of biological being to code sequences of A, C, G and T in a style similar to binary computer code. But almost 20 years later, science has surpassed this once-unimaginable feat with the discovery of technology which can alter that genetic code. This zeitgeist-y innovation is the subject of a new Netflix series, Unnatural Selection, from film-makers Joe Egender and Leeor Kaufman, and explores the various forms of genetic engineering, as well as the societal and environmental implications of its research and use.

The four-part docuseries delves into the burgeoning field of gene technology, made possible by the aforementioned human genome project and the discovery of the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats or Crispr. Co-discovered by Dr Jennifer Doudna, the gene serves a bit like "a molecular scalpel", she says, essentially removing and replacing gene material in a DNA strand. The technology makes it possible to modify genetics, giving it near unlimited biological potential, or as Salk Institute developmental biologist Professor Juan Izpuisua Belmonte puts it, "... rewriting the book of life." For Egender and Kaufman, the series had to tell the broader, more intricate story of genetic engineering, a story filled with great risk, benefits, consequences, emotions, sentiments and future, to better illuminate the field and further the discussion on the technology. "[M]any are depending on gene therapy treatment to change and possibly save lives," writes McClinton. "But, the series shows, the treatments are expensive, with some emerging drugs costing over $500,000, and patients are often at the mercy of startup genetic therapy companies who choose to weigh the 'meaning' of the treatment versus the cost for the patient, leaving many to fight their insurance companies for the cost of treatment."

Tesla has been granted approval to start manufacturing its cars in China. The BBC reports: The electric carmaker, which is run by billionaire Elon Musk, is building a $2 billion factory in the eastern city of Shanghai. Tesla plans to build at least 1,000 of its Model 3s each week in the Chinese factory, which could be up and running within weeks. The new factory will give Tesla access to China, which is the world's biggest car market. It would also help the company avoid higher import tariffs that are imposed on cars made in the US.

The new factory, known as the Gigafactory 3, is the first fully-foreign owned car plant in China. Permission to build the plant has been seen as a sign that Beijing is looking to open up its car market. Authorities in Shanghai have offered Tesla some help to speed up construction of the plant. Meanwhile, China excluded Tesla vehicles from a 10% tax on cars.

hcs_$reboot writes: Everyone in California will now receive earthquake alerts on their phones seconds before the ground begins to shake, giving residents up to 20 seconds of warning before shaking begins. Developed by seismologists at the University of California, Berkeley, the MyShake application (residents will need to download the app to receive the alerts in areas without cell phone coverage) is designed to alert the public when a magnitude 4.5 earthquake or greater has been detected and has been shown to be faster than other alert delivery methods. The wireless emergency alerts will be sent in the event of a more significant quake, magnitude 5.0 or greater. The system does not predict earthquakes. Rather, it uses numerous seismic stations to detect the start of an earthquake and light-speed communications to send the data to computers that instantly calculate location, magnitude, intensity of shaking and create alerts to be distributed to areas that will be affected. When the MyShake app was released back in 2016 it already detected over 200 earthquakes in more than ten countries.

A paper describing the early results gives a general idea of the app's success: "On a typical day about 8,000 phones provide acceleration waveform data to the MyShake archive. The on-phone app can detect and trigger on P waves and is capable of recording magnitude 2.5 and larger events. The largest number of waveforms from a single earthquake to date comes from the M5.2 Borrego Springs earthquake in Southern California, for which MyShake collected 103 useful three-component waveforms. The network continues to grow with new downloads from the Google Play store everyday and expands rapidly when public interest in earthquakes peaks such as during an earthquake sequence."

Motorola has sent out invitations to an event on Nov. 13, where the rumored foldable Razr phone could launch. CNET reports: Motorola said the evening event in downtown Los Angeles will feature the "highly anticipated unveiling of a reinvented icon." The save the date is a gif showing a device being folded and unfolded. "An original unlike any other," it reads, also displaying the numeric 11/13/19 date. According to the invitation, the event will feature special guests and musical performers, as well as "a journey through immersive experiences." "You're going to flip," Motorola's invite says. Motorola's Razr phone is rumored to have a foldable screen, but instead of opening out into a tablet, the phone could fold vertically to fit inside pockets. "It's also been reported that the phone will cost $1,500; measure 6.2 inches; run on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 processor; come in white, black and gold; and have a 2,730mAh battery, 4GB or 6GB of RAM and 64GM or 128GB of storage," reports CNET.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Yannis Assael at DeepMind and his colleagues trained a neural network, a type of AI algorithm, to guess missing words or characters from Greek inscriptions, on surfaces including stone, ceramic and metal, that were between 1500 and 2600 years old. The AI, called Pythia, learned to recognize patterns in 35,000 relics, containing more than 3 million words. The patterns it picks up on include the context in which different words appear, the grammar, and also the shape and layout of the inscriptions.

Given an inscription with missing information, Pythia provides 20 different suggestions that could plug the gap, with the idea that someone could then select the best one using their own judgement and subject knowledge. "It's all about how we can help the experts," says Assael. To test the system, the team hid nine letters of a Greek personal name from Pythia. It managed to fill in the blanks. In a head-to-head test, where the AI attempted to fill the gaps in 2949 damaged inscriptions, human experts made 30 per cent more mistakes than the AI. Whereas the experts took 2 hours to get through 50 inscriptions, Pythia gave its guesses for the entire cohort in seconds. The arXiv paper is available here.

The Kik Messenger app has officially been acquired by U.S.-based holding company MediaLab. The news comes just one day before the app was scheduled to shut down. From a report: The blog post noted that MediaLab plans to keep the app alive and also outlines ideas it has to improve the app moving forward. It is noted that the acquiring company plans to partner with Kik CEO Ted Livingston and the remaining 19 team members and is still dedicated to expanding the Kin integration.

MediaLab stated that it has a long term commitment to Kik and seeing the app succeed, but also noted the urgent need to cover expenses. The blog post stated that in the coming weeks ads will be introduced to Kik Messenger. The holding company acknowledged that some Kik users may not like this idea, but stated plans to bring in the ads in a "non-intrusive" way that "in no way takes away from what makes Kik great." "No annoying full screen video takeovers or things like that," the blog post stated. Other changes MediaLab plans to make to the app include pulling back features it said were not optimized. Kik's video chat toggle and third party bots platform will be discontinued, with MediaLab noting that it wants to eradicate spam bots and unwanted messages. It also stated it will update the app's software to make it faster, more reliable, and "less buggy." "Ted Livingston and the rest of the team at Kik have spent the last nine years building something truly special," the blog post stated. "At the risk of sounding cheesy, we are still passionate believers in what the internet promised to bring in its early days -- a connected and shared experience amongst people regardless of geography or time zone. Kik is one of those amazing places that brings us back to those early aspirations."

In a blog post published earlier this week, image-sharing site Imgur wrote that it won't display any content from Reddit's NSFW communities on its site. The Verge reports: If you search for, say, r/NSFW on Imgur, you'll hit a landing page that reads: "As of Oct 2019, Imgur will no longer display NSFW Imgur r/subsections associated with Reddit subreddits." They also helpfully link to a couple alternatives that you can use in Imgur's place. No content, however, has been deleted or moved, and any NSFW images previously uploaded to Reddit and hosted on Imgur are staying at their original URLs. You can also still upload NSFW images to Imgur as long as they're marked "hidden." The move came because, as Imgur wrote in its post, "over the years, these pages have put Imgur's user growth, mission, and business at risk." That's oddly strong language to use, and it points to Reddit's own problems with moderation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Several residential builders have stopped buying and installing Google's Nest devices after the internet giant overhauled how Nest technology works with other gadgets. The Alphabet Inc. unit bought Nest in 2014 for $3.2 billion to enter the so-called smart-home market. Nest has become one of the largest makers of internet-connected thermostats, smoke alarms and locks. The devices were popular with builders who saw a Nest gadget as a way to increase the value of properties. But earlier this year, that began to change as Google exerted more control over Nest and started changing the underlying technology. As a more independent business, Nest developed software that helped its gadgets communicate with a wide range of products from other manufacturers, through accounts set up directly by users.

As of the end of August this year, however, consumers need a Google account -- and access to the company's voice-based Google Assistant service -- to integrate new Nest products with other devices in their homes. The move may help the internet giant weave its Google Assistant deeper into people's lives. But for builders it's just a pain because Nest devices no longer work so well with the other gadgets they install in homes, such as audio and entertainment systems, and alarms and other security gear. It's also a less enticing user proposition with all the privacy permissions that Google Assistant requires. That's spurred some builders -- who collectively purchase tens of thousands of Nest devices each year -- to avoid Nest products.

China's TikTok this week launched an education program in India as the popular short-video app looks to expand its offering and assuage local authority in one of its biggest markets. From a report: This is the first time TikTok has launched a program of this kind in any market, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. TkTok, owned by the world's most valued startup Bytedance, said it's working with a number of content creators and firms in India to populate the platform with educational videos. These bite-sized clips cover a range of topics, from school-level science and math concepts to learning new languages. The social app is also featuring videos that offer tips on health and mental awareness, and motivational talks. The social platform, which is used by more than 200 million users in India every month, said its education program is aimed at "democratizing learning for the Indian digital community on the platform." (TikTok had 120 million monthly active users in April this year.) It has partnered with edtech startups Vedantu, Toppr, Made Easy and Gradeup that will produce educational content for TikTok.

A Boeing pilot working on the 737 Max said in messages from 2016 that a new automated system was making the plane difficult to control in flight simulators, more than two years before it was grounded following two deadly crashes. From a report: The pilot, Mark Forkner, complained that the system, known as MCAS, was causing him trouble. "It's running rampant in the sim," he said in a message to a colleague, referring to the simulator. "Granted, I suck at flying, but even this was egregious," he went on to say, according to a transcript of the exchange reviewed by The New York Times. The 737 Max was grounded earlier this year after crashing twice in five months, killing 346 people. In both cases, MCAS malfunctioned based on erroneous data, sending the planes into unrecoverable nose dives. Mr. Forkner, the chief technical pilot for the plane, went on to say that he had lied to the Federal Aviation Administration. "I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly)," Mr. Forkner says in the messages. The messages are from November 2016. Eight months earlier, Mr. Forkner had asked the F.A.A. if it would be O.K. to remove mention of MCAS from the pilot's manual. The F.A.A., which at the time believed the system would only activate in rare cases and wasn't particularly dangerous, approved Mr. Forkner's request.