Demonstrators and police clashed in Lebanon this week as thousands of people rallied against the government's handling of an economic crisis, in one of the biggest protests the country has seen in years. From a report: The government-backed down from plans, announced hours earlier, to tax voice calls made through the Facebook-owned WhatsApp messaging software as people vented their anger at the political elite in the second nationwide protests in less than a month. Protesters blocked roads across Lebanon with burning tyres and security forces fired tear gas at demonstrators in central Beirut early on Friday, Lebanese media said. Dozens of people were wounded, the Red Cross said. Lebanon's internal security forces said 60 police were wounded. "I was sitting at home and I saw the people on the move and so I came out," said Cezar Shaaya, an accountant protesting in Beirut. "I am married, I have mortgage payments due every month and I am not working. It's the state's fault."

Facebook's Portal video-chat device -- which puts a camera and a sensitive microphone in your living room -- isn't flying off the shelves, Fast Company reported Friday, citing supply-chain sources and store sales reps. From the report: The device, which launched a little over a year ago, has been plagued by the privacy concerns of would-be buyers from the start. And Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin tells Fast Company that his sources at the companies that supply parts for the Portal say that shipments of the devices are "very low." "The orders for the components were not high to begin with, and the build volumes were low," Bajarin says. "They [Facebook] never meant to build up a large inventory." Bajarin says the Portal is selling in the "hundreds of thousands" per year range, not in the millions. Rakuten, which tracks online device sales, says Portal accounts for 0.6% of units sold in the overall smart-speaker category, and 3.9% of smart speakers with screens (such as Amazon's Echo Show and Google Home). Anecdotal accounts seem to echo Bajarin's sources. A sales rep at a Best Buy store in midtown Manhattan said they'd sold "hardly any" of the Portals at all. And a rep at the main San Francisco store said the devices sold reasonably well when they launched last year but have slowed since then.

Following the beta period, one of the best and most popular Linux-based desktop operating systems reaches a major milestone -- you can now download Ubuntu 19.10! Code-named "Eoan Ermine", the distro is better and faster then ever. From a report: By default, Ubuntu 19.10 comes with one of the greatest desktop environments -- GNOME 3.34. In addition, users will be delighted by an all-new optional Yaru light theme. There is even baked-in support for the Raspberry Pi 4. The kernel is based on Linux 5.3 and comes with support for AMD Navi GPUs. There are plenty of excellent pre-installed programs too, such as LibreOffice 6.3, Firefox 69, and Thunderbird 68. While many users will be quick to install Google Chrome, I would suggest giving Firefox a try -- it has improved immensely lately. "With GNOME 3.34, Ubuntu 19.10 is the fastest release yet with significant performance improvements delivering a more responsive and smooth experience, even on older hardware. App organization is easier with the ability to drag and drop icons into categorized folders, while users can select light or dark Yaru theme variants depending on their preference or for improved viewing accessibility. Native support for ZFS on the root partition is introduced as an experimental desktop installer option. Coupled with the new zsys package, benefits include automated snapshots of file system states, allowing users to boot to a previous update and easily roll forwards and backwards in case of failure," says Canonical.

Banning staff from accessing their work emails outside office hours could do more harm than good to employee wellbeing, a study suggests. From a report: University of Sussex researchers found while a ban could help some staff switch off, it could also stop people achieving work goals, causing stress. Companies are increasingly curbing email use to tackle burnout. France has even legislated on the issue. But human resources body CIPD said it agreed with the university's findings. According to the research, strict policies on email use could be harmful to employees with "high levels of anxiety and neuroticism."

That was because such employees needed to feel free to respond to a "growing accumulation of emails", or they could end up feeling even more stressed and overloaded, the researchers said. Dr Emma Russell, a senior lecturer in management at the University of Sussex Business School, said despite the best intentions of policies limiting email use, a one-size-fits-all approach should be avoided. "[Blanket bans] would be unlikely to be welcomed by employees who prioritise work performance goals and who would prefer to attend to work outside of hours if it helps them get their tasks completed. People need to deal with email in the way that suits their personality and their goal priorities in order to feel like they are adequately managing their workload."

A widespread multifactor authentication (MFA) issue is hitting a number of Microsoft customers in North America this morning. From a report: The exact cause of the problem is not clear at the moment, but Microsoft's engineering team says it is working on it. "Customers in North America are experiencing issues with Sign-in when Multi-Factor Authentication is enabled. Engineering team is currently investigating the issue and will send out an update as soon as possible." The Microsoft 365 Status twitter account, as of 10:45 a.m. ET, said: "We're investigating issues where users may be unable to access the admin center when using MFA. We'll provide an update shortly." I've asked Microsoft for an update. No word back so far. Users are reporting they cannot sign into Office 365 or access any of their Office 365 apps and services. Office 365 uses Azure Active Directory for authentication.

Google's latest flagship smartphones -- the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL -- do not support video recording in 4K at 60 frames per second. This has disappointed -- and puzzled -- many fans especially since other smartphones that are powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 do offer this video recording functionality. (Recent generation of iPhone models also offer this functionality.) Folks over at The Verge asked Rick Osterloh, the hardware chief at Google, where the bottleneck lied. "I don't know," responded the chief.

Physicists at Stockholm University and the Max Planck Institute of Physics have proposed a novel design for an "axion radio" that employs cold plasmas (gases or liquids of charged particles) to "listen" for dark matter. Their paper has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Ars Technica reports: "Finding the axion is a bit like tuning a radio: you have to tune your antenna until you pick up the right frequency," said co-author Alexander Millar, a postdoc at Stockholm University. "Rather than music, experimentalists would be rewarded with 'hearing' the dark matter that the Earth is traveling through." [...] According to quantum mechanics, particles can exhibit wavelike behavior as well as particle characteristics. So an axion would behave more like a wave (or wave packet) than a particle, and the size of the wave packets is inversely proportional to their mass. That means these very light particles don't necessarily need to be tiny. The downside is that they interact even more weakly with regular matter than [weakly interacting massive particles], or WIMPS, so they cannot be produced in large colliders -- one current method for detecting WIMPs.

Physicists don't know what the axion's mass might be, so there's a broad parameter space in which to search, and no single instrument can cover all of it, according to co-author Matthew Lawson, also a postdoc at Stockholm University. That's why physicists have been developing all kinds of smaller experiments for detecting axions, from atomic clocks and resonating bars, to shining lasers at walls on the off-chance a bit of dark matter seeps through the other side. Yet most instruments to date are capable of detecting axions only within a very limited mass range. [...] Lawson et al. have come up with an innovative design for a tunable plasma-based haloscope. Their proposed instrument exploits the fact that axions inside a strong magnetic field will generate their own small electric field. This in turn drives oscillations in the plasma, amplifying the signal. [...] At the moment, Lawson et al.'s design is theoretical, but several experimental groups are actively working on building prototypes. "The fact that the experimental community has latched onto this idea so quickly is very exciting and promising for building a full-scale experiment," said Millar.

XXongo writes: Sometimes it seems that all the space news focuses on SpaceX, but another private rocket company, Rocket Lab, is also making history with their bargain-basement space launcher, the Electron. The Electron booster just completed its seventh launch, this time carrying a satellite to the highest orbit yet, 1000 km. The launch carried the Astro Digital "Corvus" satellite. At $5.7 million per launch, the company is the first of many space start-ups competing for the small-satellite launch business, a market too small to be of interest to the major launch companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. To lower costs further, Rocket Lab has announced its intention to make their booster reusable -- with plans to capture Electron's first stage in mid-air by helicopter.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has unveiled updated privacy legislation he says will finally bring accountability to corporations that play fast and loose with your private data. Dubbed the Mind Your Own Business Act, the bill promises consumers the ability to opt out of data collection and sale with a single click. It also demands that corporations be transparent as to how consumer data is collected, used, and who it's sold to, while imposing harsh fines and prison sentences upon corporations and executives that misuse consumer data and lie about it.

Wyden's bill authorizes the FTC to impose fines of up to 4 percent of annual revenues on companies that fail to protect consumer data. The bill also proposes 10-20 year prison sentences for senior executives who knowingly lie to the FTC. Companies whose executives are convicted will pay a tax based on the salary they paid to the officials who lied, Wyden's office told Motherboard. The Mind Your Own Business Act also mandates the creation of a national Do Not Track system that gives consumers the ability to quickly and easily opt out of the collection and sale of their private data without having to dig through confusing corporate websites. The bill also restricts companies looking to make privacy a luxury option. Wyden's proposal would also require that corporations give consumers an easy way to review all of the data a company has about them and correct inaccuracies. Giants like Facebook would also be required to analyze any algorithms that process consumer data -- to more closely examine their impact on accuracy, fairness, bias, discrimination, privacy, and security.

In addition to Daydream, Google is discontinuing its AI-powered Google Clips, a small camera designed to leverage modern technology in order to automatically capture and preserve life's most memorable moments. "The product page for the device is still featured on the Google Store website, but it now redirects users to other available devices," reports SlashGear. From the report: Put simply, Google Clips was a small square camera designed to automatically record memorable moments during your day. This ability relied on artificial intelligence, the idea being that by the time something interesting happens, it'll likely already be over by the time you pull out your phone to record it. Google Clips was unlike any other camera consumers were likely to encounter, one with the appeal of promising a hands-free experience (for the most part). Users could browse through the 7-second clips captured by the camera -- they were assembled from individually captured still images -- to see what Google's algorithm thought was interesting.

Ultimately, there were some issues with the device. For starters, the entire philosophy of the device required it to be worn or carried around frequently, otherwise it wouldn't have the opportunity to capture spontaneous moments. Many people report feeling uncomfortable interacting with others while a camera is present to watch the moment. Beyond that, many users and official reviews found that the camera didn't function quite as well as they'd hoped it would, resulting in many clips that weren't terribly interesting, ones completely devoid of audio. The utility of what was essentially a GIF-capturing device didn't appeal to many; years later, the product is officially discontinued.

Reddit-born hyperloop and engineering collective rLoop has bought the intellectual property of Arrivo, a fellow hyperloop startup that went out of business last December, The Verge has learned. rLoop co-founder Brent Lessard confirmed the sale, but he would not disclose how much the group paid. From the report: Lessard said rLoop might try to revive some of the deals that Arrivo had been working on, like a test track outside of Denver, Colorado, and that it may hire back some of Arrivo's former employees. But, Lessard said, rLoop is still only in the "final stages" of assessing the progress Arrivo's employees had made toward developing a type of hyperloop that relies on magnetic levitation (as opposed to the vacuum-based solution that was originally proposed by Elon Musk when he introduced the hyperloop idea in a 2013 white paper).

rLoop was founded in 2015 after SpaceX announced plans to hold a hyperloop competition. Lessard and other members of the SpaceX subreddit eventually pulled together some 140 engineers and designers and became the only non-university team to advance out of the design round and into the final competition where they ultimately won an "innovation award." "We've had a fairly close relationship over the years with Brogan, and we were disheartened when we heard that they were closing up shop," Lessard said. "We were in talks with [Arrivo] since that point to figure out exactly what they've been working on, what was happening with the IP, and so we ended up acquiring it earlier this year." Lessard said rLoop has had "conversations with a number of key [Arrivo] employees" and that "many of them have expressed the desire to see the concept through."

DoNotPay, a free chatbot that offers AI-powered legal counsel, is launching a new feature that will call you when it's your turn in a customer service phone queue. TechCrunch reports: The app today is launching "Skip Waiting On Hold." Just type in the company you need to talk to, and DoNotPay calls for you using tricks to get a human on the line quickly. Then it calls you back and connects you to the agent so you never have to listen to that annoying hold music. And in case the company tries to jerk you around or screw you over, the DoNotPay app lets you instantly share to social media a legal recording of the call to shame them.

Skip Waiting On Hold comes as part of the $3 per month DoNotPay suite of services designed to save people time and money by battling bureaucracy on their behalf. It can handle DMV paperwork for you, write legal letters to scare businesses out of overcharging you and it provides a credit card that automatically cancels subscriptions when your free trial ends. For Skip Waiting On Hold, DoNotPay built out a database of priority and VIP customer service numbers for tons of companies. For legality, if you opt in to recording the exchanges, the app automatically plays a message informing both parties they'll be recorded. A human voice detection system hears when a real agent picks up the phone, and then rings your phone. It's like having customer service call you.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Firefox is the only browser that received top marks in a recent audit carried out by Germany's cyber-security agency -- the German Federal Office for Information Security (or the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik -- BSI). The BSI tested Mozilla Firefox 68 (ESR), Google Chrome 76, Microsoft Internet Explorer 11, and Microsoft Edge 44. The tests did not include other browsers like Safari, Brave, Opera, or Vivaldi. The audit was carried out using rules detailed in a guideline for "modern secure browsers" that the BSI published last month, in September 2019. The BSI normally uses this guide to advise government agencies and companies from the private sector on what browsers are safe to use. The article includes a list of all the minimum requirements required for the BSI to consider a browser "secure." It also lists the areas where the other browsers failed, such as: Lack of support for a master password mechanism (Chrome, IE, Edge); No built-in update mechanism (IE), and No option to block telemetry collection (Chrome, IE, Edge).

Personal car ownership in the US has increased in the past 10 years, even in the frenzied urban places where Uber and car-share have become verbs. From a report: According to research from former New York City transportation official Bruce Schaller, the number of vehicles has grown faster than the population in some of the cities where ride-hail is most popular: Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Moreover, some services targeted to the aspirationally or actually car-free have hit the skids. Car2Go, the car-sharing company now jointly owned by Daimler and BMW, said earlier this month it would pull out of half of the North American cities where it operates. (The company, which allows users to pick up and drop off cars at regular street parking spaces, says it will focus its firepower on its remaining North American cities: New York, Montreal, Seattle, Vancouver, and Washington.) BMW-owned ReachNow, a wide-ranging experiment in ride hailing and car rental, folded in the US this summer. The scooter-share folks at Lime last month killed their experimental LimePod car-share service in Seattle. General Motors wound down its Maven car-sharing service in eight of its 17 North American cities this summer. Uber and Lyft, now public companies, are losing gobs of money, and the services' most popular times are Friday evenings, which seems to indicate less that people are ditching their personal cars than ditching their personal cars while drinking.

Current machine learning models aren't yet up to the task of distinguishing false news reports, two new papers by MIT researchers show. From a report: After different researchers showed that computers can convincingly generate made-up news stories without much human oversight, some experts hoped that the same machine-learning-based systems could be trained to detect such stories. But MIT doctoral student Tal Schuster's studies show that, while machines are great at detecting machine-generated text, they can't identify whether stories are true or false. Many automated fact-checking systems are trained using a database of true statements called Fact Extraction and Verification (FEVER). In one study, Schuster and team showed that machine learning-taught fact-checking systems struggled to handle negative statements ("Greg never said his car wasn't blue") even when they would know the positive statement was true ("Greg says his car is blue"). The problem, say the researchers, is that the database is filled with human bias. The people who created FEVER tended to write their false entries as negative statements and their true statements as positive statements -- so the computers learned to rate sentences with negative statements as false. That means the systems were solving a much easier problem than detecting fake news.

Chime, an online banking startup with more than 5 million customers, has been suffering an outage for much of past 24 hours that has left customers without access to their money. From a report: The startup blamed the disruption on an unspecified issue with a payments processor and said data was not at risk. The downtime comes as the digital bank has been growing quickly -- the number of customers has almost doubled since March, to about 5 million. Chime is also in the process of raising a new funding round that could value it at more than $5 billion. [...] San Francisco-based Chime is part of a growing digital banking sector that has seen rising interest from customers and global investors in recent years. Chime's target market, according to the company, is a younger demographic whose income ranges from $35,000 to $70,000 a year and who are frustrated by the fees charged by larger brick and mortar banks. It's a group that may be more likely to trust a startup with their money.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview he worries "about an erosion of truth" online but defended the policy that allows politicians to peddle ads containing misrepresentations and lies on his social network, a stance that has sparked an outcry during the 2020 presidential campaign. From a report: "People worry, and I worry deeply, too, about an erosion of truth," Zuckerberg told The Washington Post ahead of a speech Thursday at Georgetown University. "At the same time, I don't think people want to live in a world where you can only say things that tech companies decide are 100 percent true. And I think that those tensions are something we have to live with." Zuckerberg's approach to political speech has come under fire in recent weeks. Democrats have taken particular issue with Facebook's decision to allow an ad from President Trump's 2020 campaign that included falsehoods about former vice president Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Sen. Elizabeth Warren responded to Facebook's decision by running her own campaign ad, satirically stating that Zuckerberg supports Trump for re-election.

Zuckerberg framed the issue as part of a broader debate over free expression, warning about the dangers of social networks, including Facebook, "potentially cracking down too much." He called on the U.S. to set an example for tailored regulation in contrast to other countries, including China, that censor political speech online. And Zuckerberg stressed Facebook must stand strong against governments that seek to "pull back" on free speech in the face of heightened social and political tensions. Zuckerberg's appearance in Washington marks his most forceful attempt to articulate his vision for how governments and tech giants should approach the Web's most intractable problems. The scale of Facebook and its affiliated apps, Instagram and WhatsApp, which make up a virtual community of billions of users, poses challenges for Zuckerberg and regulators around the world as they struggle to contain hate speech, falsehoods, violent imagery and terrorist propaganda on social media.

If Chrome for Android users visit a site where they enter passwords, Chrome will isolate that site from all the other tabs in a separate Android process, keeping the user's data safe from Spectre-like attacks, Google said today. From a report: Furthermore, Site Isolation, which has been available for desktop users since July 2018, has also been expanded for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS users, which now receive protection against more attacks than the original Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Site Isolation is a Chrome security feature that Google started developing as a way to isolate each website from one another, so malicious code running on one site/tab couldn't steal data from other websites/tabs. Site Isolation was developed to act as a second layer of protection on top of Same Origin Policy (SOP), a browser feature that prevents websites from accessing each other's data. Google developed Site Isolation because browser bugs often allowed sites to jump the SOP barrier and steal user data stored in the browser, created by other sites.

Suicide and homicide rates have increased in recent years among young people in the U.S., according to a new federal report. From a report: The suicide rate among people ages 10 to 24 years old climbed 56% between 2007 and 2017, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate of homicide deaths decreased by 23% from 2007 to 2014 but then increased by 18% through 2017. Violent death, including homicide and suicide, is a major cause of premature death for the age group. Around 2010, the death rate of suicides among adolescents and young adults surpassed the rate of homicide deaths, according to the report. "The chances of a person in this age range dying by suicide is greater than homicide, when it used to be the reverse," said Sally Curtin, a statistician at the CDC and an author of the report. "When a leading cause of death among our youth is increasing, it behooves all of us to pay attention and figure out what's going on."

Some mental-health experts suggest that social-media use among teens might be fueling the increase in mental-health conditions and leading to greater suicide risk, and some early studies have linked smartphone use to anxiety, depression and sleep deprivation among adolescents. The recent visibility of suicide in the media and online might also increase suicide death rates, experts say.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Berkeley has become the third city in California and the fourth city in the United States to ban the use of face recognition technology by the government. After an outpouring of support from the community, the Berkeley City Council voted unanimously to adopt the ordinance introduced by Councilmember Kate Harrison earlier this year. Berkeley joins other Bay Area cities, including San Francisco and Oakland, which also banned government use of face recognition. In July 2019, Somerville, Massachusetts became the first city on the East Coast to ban the government's use of face recognition.

The passage of the ordinance also follows the signing of A.B. 1215, a California state law that places a three-year moratorium on police use of face recognition on body-worn cameras, beginning on January 1, 2020. As EFF's Associate Director of Community Organizing Nathan Sheard told the California Assembly, using face recognition technology "in connection with police body cameras would force Californians to decide between actively avoiding interaction and cooperation with law enforcement, or having their images collected, analyzed, and stored as perpetual candidates for suspicion."