An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T and other mobile carriers are trying to hide detailed 5G maps from the public despite constantly touting the supposed pace and breadth of their 5G rollouts. With the Federal Communications Commission planning to require carriers to submit more accurate data about broadband deployment, AT&T and the mobile industry's top lobby group are urging the FCC to exclude 5G from the upgraded data collection. "There is broad agreement that it is not yet time to require reporting on 5G coverage," AT&T told the FCC in a filing this week.

As evidence of that "broad agreement," AT&T cited comments by CTIA -- the mobile industry lobby group that represents AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint. "[A]s CTIA points out, service standards for 5G are still emerging, precluding reporting of service-level coverage for 5G networks (other than the 5G-NR submissions already required)," AT&T wrote. That's a reference to 5G New Radio, the global standard for 5G. CTIA told the FCC in September that it doesn't object to the 5G-NR requirement because "the 5G-NR standards are technical ones; they do not establish what service level consumers should be able to expect when using 5G." But CTIA said requiring more than that would be "premature" because "industry consensus is still emerging around how best to measure the deployment of this still-nascent technology." Verizon also told the FCC in September that "adoption of standardized parameters is premature" for 5G. "Calling 5G a 'still-nascent technology' that can't properly be measured yet raises the question of why carriers have been telling the FCC and public that 5G is guaranteed to revolutionize modern life and that carriers need regulatory favors to speed its rollout," adds Ars Technica. "The mobile industry didn't think it was 'premature' for the U.S. government to preempt local regulation of 5G deployments, an action FCC Chairman Ajit Pai took more than a year ago."

The New York Times published findings from an analysis of new data released through Boston University's Database of Road Transportation Emissions. The map embedded in the report shows a year's worth of CO2 from passenger and freight traffic on every road in the United States. From the report: The database provides the most detailed estimates available of local on-road CO2 over the past three decades. Even as the United States has reduced carbon dioxide emissions from its electric grid, largely by switching from coal power to less-polluting natural gas, emissions from transportation have remained stubbornly high. The bulk of those emissions, nearly 60 percent, come from the country's 250 million passenger cars, S.U.V.s and pickup trucks, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Freight trucks contribute an additional 23 percent.

Reducing emissions from driving has been a big challenge, said Conor Gately, who led the project mapping CO2 on America's roads as a postdoctoral researcher at Boston University. Emissions dipped during the recession of the late 2000s, but have been ticking back up since 2013. National fuel economy standards put in place under the Obama administration have helped temper the rise in automotive emissions because the rules require cars and trucks to use less gasoline per mile traveled. But even as vehicles have become more efficient, Americans, buoyed by a strong economy and low gas prices, have been driving more miles and buying more S.U.V.s and pickup trucks, which have lower gas mileage. Freight trucking is also on the rise. Boston University's emissions database, first published in 2015 and updated this week with an additional five years of data, reveals that much of the increase in driving-related CO2 has occurred in and around cities. The report goes on to say that in nearly every metro area, total emissions have increased since 1990. "The New York area, home to 20 million Americans, accounted for the largest share of driving-related CO2," reports The New York Times. "After years of increase, emissions ebbed during the late-2000s recession but rebounded by 2017. In more car-dependent areas, like Dallas-Fort Worth, emissions from driving barely dipped during the recession and have increased rapidly in recent years. But, adjusted for population, these cities flip: Residents in the denser, more transit-friendly New York area contribute far less CO2 from driving on average than their counterparts in Dallas."

As for how the database was created, "Boston University researchers used federal traffic data to calculate the number of miles travelled on local segments of each road in the United States and converted those miles to carbon dioxide emissions by estimating how much fuel is consumed by different types of vehicles using those roads."

Researchers at MIT have proven that Leonardo da Vinci knew what he was doing when he came up with a novel bridge design that would connect Istanbul with its neighbor city Galata. At the time, it would've been the world's longest bridge, with an unprecedented single span of 790 feet -- constructed without wood planks or even mortar joints. But, unfortunately, it was only recently put to the test since the design was rejected by Sultan Bayezid II in 1502 A.D. CNET reports: "It was time-consuming, but 3D printing allowed us to accurately recreate this very complex geometry," MIT graduate student Karly Bast said in a release on Thursday. Bast worked with a team of engineering academics to finally bring to life a faithful 1-to-500 scale model of da Vinci's famously rejected bridge design, putting the Renaissance man's long-questioned geometry to the test by slicing the complex shapes into 126 individual blocks, then assembling them with only the force of gravity. The group, which presented its work this week in Barcelona, relied on the sketches and descriptions found in da Vinci's letter bidding for the job, along with their own analysis of the era's construction methods.

The structure is held together only by compression -- the MIT team wanted to show that the forces were all being transferred within the structure, said Bast. "When we put it in, we had to squeeze it in." Bast said she had her doubts, but when she put the keystone in, she realized it was going to work. When the group took the scaffolding out, the bridge stayed up. "It's the power of geometry," she said.

Rwanda's Mara Group just released two smartphones, earning the company the title of the first smartphone manufacturer in Africa. Their grand ambitions are to help turn Rwanda into a regional tech hub. Fast Company reports: Rwanda President Paul Kagame has announced Africa's "first high tech smartphone factory," CNN reported. While smartphones are assembled in other African nations (Egypt, Algeria, and South Africa all have assembly plants), according to Reuters, those companies all import the components. But at Mara, they manufacture the phones from the motherboards to the packaging, which is all done in the new factory. Kagame made the announcement in a press conference on Monday in the capital of Kigali. The phones, called Mara X and Mara Z, are the first "Made in Africa" models. Both run on Google's Android operating system. While the company admits they are a little more expensive than other options, like the popular Tecno brand phones made by a Chinese-owned company, they hope customers are willing to pay a bit more for quality and Made in Africa pride.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inverse: Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University describe a superconducting material, B-Bi2Pd, that naturally exists in a quantum state without the additional influence of magnetic fields usually needed for such an effect. The authors write that the low-maintenance, stability of this material makes it a perfect candidate for designing quantum systems. The research will be published Friday in the journal Science by physicists from Johns Hopkins University. "We've found that a certain superconducting material contains special properties that could be the building blocks for technology of the future," the paper's first author, Yufan Li, said in a press release. "A ring of B-Bi2Pd already exists in the ideal state and doesn't require any additional modifications to work. This could be a game changer."

What makes this superconducting material special is the unique state it occupies as its ground state, or when no other forces are being exerted on it. While other superconducting materials can be forced to maintain a quantum state using external magnetic fields or energy-sustaining "quantum spin liquid," the researchers found that this material naturally exists in a quantum superposition, in which current can simultaneously flow clockwise and counter-clockwise in a ring of the material. This discovery is the realization of a prediction made by physicists in the 80s. The authors write that this property makes it an ideal candidate for quantum systems. But that doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet when it comes to our halting approach to universal quantum computing.

On Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook defended the company's decision to remove a mapping app in Hong Kong, saying that the company received "credible information" from authorities indicating the software was being used "maliciously" to attack police. Bloomberg reports: Apple pulled HKmap.live from its App Store on Wednesday after flip-flopping between rejecting it and approving it earlier this month. Apple made the decision after consulting with local authorities, because it could endanger law enforcement and city residents. Cook echoed that sentiment in an email to Apple employees. "Over the past several days we received credible information, from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present," Cook wrote in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by Bloomberg News. He also said the app violates local laws.

The company has been criticized for the move, and Cook addressed that. "These decisions are never easy, and it is harder still to discuss these topics during moments of furious public debate," the CEO wrote. "National and international debates will outlive us all, and, while important, they do not govern the facts. In this case, we thoroughly reviewed them, and we believe this decision best protects our users." Apple's reversal came after the Chinese Communist Party's flagship newspaper criticized Apple for letting the app into its store.

JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from Boing Boing: Early versions of the free/open Unix variant BSD came with password files that included hashed passwords for such Unix luminaries as Dennis Ritchie, Stephen R. Bourne, Eric Schmidt, Brian W. Kernighan and Stuart Feldman. Leah Neukirchen recovered an BSD version 3 source tree and revealed that she was able to crack many of the weak passwords used by the equally weak hashing algorithm from those bygone days.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie's was "dmac," Bourne's was "bourne," Schmidt's was "wendy!!!" (his wife's name), Feldman's was "axlotl," and Kernighan's was "/.,/.,." Four more passwords were cracked by Arthur Krewat: Ozalp Babaolu's was "12ucdort," Howard Katseff's was "graduat;," Tom London's was "..pnn521," Bob Fabry's was "561cml.." and Ken Thompson's was "p/q2-q4!" (chess notation for a common opening move). BSD 3 used Descrypt for password hashing, which limited passwords to eight characters, salted with 12 bits of entropy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a notice on Wednesday that is is seeking public and industry input on whether to allow so-called camera monitoring systems to replace rear- and side-view mirrors mandated by a longstanding U.S. auto safety standard. Tesla Inc. and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in 2014 petitioned the agency to allow cameras to be used in lieu of traditional mirrors, citing improved fuel economy through reduced aerodynamic drag as the primary benefit. Cameras feeding one or more displays inside the car could also improve rear and side visibility, the Auto Alliance has said.

A five-year agency study of the technology on heavy-duty vehicles found display screens were too bright, making it harder for drivers to see objects on the road ahead. NHTSA's 2017 tests of a prototype camera monitoring system found it was "generally usable" in most situations, and produced better-quality images than mirrors at dusk and dawn. It also found potential flaws, including displays that were too bright at night, distorted images and camera lenses that would become obscured by raindrops. NHTSA said in a notice in the online Federal Register is seeking outside research and data about the potential safety impacts of replacing mirrors with cameras to inform a possible proposal to alter the mirror requirement in the future.

System76, the Denver-based Linux PC manufacturer and developer of Pop OS, has some stellar news for those who prefer their laptops a little more open. Later this month the company will begin shipping two of their laptop models with its Coreboot-powered open source firmware. From a report: Beginning today, System76 will start taking pre-orders for both the Galago Pro and Darter Pro laptops. The systems will ship out later in October, and include the company's Coreboot-based open source firmware which was previously teased at the 2019 Open Source Firmware Conference. (Coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS, is a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware found in most computers with a lightweight firmware designed to perform only the minimum number of tasks necessary to load and run a modern 32-bit or 64-bit operating system.) What's so great about ripping out the proprietary firmware included in machines like this and replacing it with an open alternative? To begin with, it's leaner. System76 claims that users can boot from power off to the desktop 29% faster with its Coreboot-based firmware.

[...] Both of these laptops can be kitted out with 10th-Generation Intel CPUs (specifically the i5-10210U and the i7-10510U), and both have glare-resistant matte 1080p IPS displays. Beginning at $949, the Galago Pro features an all-aluminum chassis, a wealth of connectivity options including HDMI, DisplayPort to USB-C and Thunderbolt, and can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM and up to 6TB of storage space. The Darter Pro, meanwhile, can be built out with 32GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage, and features up to 10 hours of battery life.

Dyson has abandoned its attempts to break into the automotive industry and will wind down its electric vehicle project, ending a venture that founder James Dyson claimed would redefine his business [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: The company failed to find a buyer for its designs, and said its plans to build a car from scratch in Singapore were no longer commercially viable. Dyson's ambitions faced a mounting challenge from established carmakers, while electric vehicle makers such as Tesla have raised large sums on the stock and bond markets. Many new entrants such as China's Nio have struggled with the cost of competing against deep-pocketed incumbents. Sir James's decision represents a humbling U-turn for a man who is one of Britain's most celebrated living inventors. The billionaire businessman had hoped to harness his privately owned group's expertise in battery systems, aerodynamics and high-tech manufacturing to break into a fiercely competitive industry. "Though we have tried very hard throughout the development process, we simply can no longer see a way to make it commercially viable," Sir James wrote in an email to staff on Thursday. "We have been through a serious process to find a buyer for the project which has, unfortunately, been unsuccessful so far." The failed automotive gamble was part of a $3.1 bn investment push into a range of new technologies, including artificial intelligence and robotics and batteries.

Pinterest says it's using machine learning techniques to identify and hide content that displays, rationalizes, or encourages self-injury. The company says it has achieved an 88% reduction in reports of self-harm content by users and that it's now able to remove such content 3 times faster. From a report: Additionally, over 4,600 search terms and phrases related to self-harm have been removed from the platform, Pinterest says, and links to free and confidential support from expert resources are now more prominently displayed to members who search for those keywords. People showing signs of distress now see the resources directly in their boards (i.e., home screens), an approach Pinterest says was developed with guidance from outside emotional health experts at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, Vibrant Emotional Health, and Samaritans. Elsewhere, Pinterest this morning broadened the rollout of the emotional well-being interactive practices and exercises it introduced in the U.S. through its iOS app earlier this year.

Deep learning is good at finding patterns in reams of data, but can't explain how they're connected. Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio wants to change that. From a report: In March, Yoshua Bengio received a share of the Turing Award, the highest accolade in computer science, for contributions to the development of deep learning -- the technique that triggered a renaissance in artificial intelligence, leading to advances in self-driving cars, real-time speech translation, and facial recognition. Now, Bengio says deep learning needs to be fixed. He believes it won't realize its full potential, and won't deliver a true AI revolution, until it can go beyond pattern recognition and learn more about cause and effect. In other words, he says, deep learning needs to start asking why things happen. The 55-year-old professor at the University of Montreal, who sports bushy gray hair and eyebrows, says deep learning works well in idealized situations but won't come close to replicating human intelligence without being able to reason about causal relationships. "It's a big thing to integrate [causality] into AI," Bengio says. "Current approaches to machine learning assume that the trained AI system will be applied on the same kind of data as the training data. In real life it is often not the case."

"The United States is walking in the same direction as China, we're just allowing private companies to monetize left, right and center," Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie told CNBC on Wednesday. "Just because it's not the state doesn't mean that there isn't harmful impacts that could come if you have one or two large companies monitoring or tracking everything you do," he said. CNBC reports: Wylie, whose memoir came out this week, has become outspoken about the influence of social media companies due to the large amounts of data they collect. In March 2018, he exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal that brought down his former employer and resulted in the Federal Trade Commission fining Facebook, 15 months later, $5 billion for mishandling. While Cambridge Analytica has since shut down, Wylie said the tactics it used could be deployed elsewhere, and that is why data privacy regulation needs to be dramatically enhanced.

"Even if the company has dissolved, the capabilities of the company haven't," he said. "My real concern is what happens if China becomes the next Cambridge Analytica, what happens if North Korea becomes the next Cambridge Analytica?" Wylie also said he believes that social media companies should, at a minimum, face regulation similar to water utilities or electrical companies -- "certain industries that have become so important because of their vital importance to business and people's lives and the nature of their scale." In those cases, "we put in place rules that put consumers first," he added. "You can still make a profit. You can still make money. But you have to consider the rights and safety of people."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Waymo, the autonomous vehicle business under Alphabet, sent an email to customers of its ride-hailing app that their next trip might not have a human safety driver behind the wheel, according to a copy of the email that was posted on Reddit. The email entitled "Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way" was sent to customers that use its ride-hailing app in the suburbs of Phoenix.

Both the early rider program and Waymo One service use self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans to shuttle Phoenix residents in a geofenced area that covers several suburbs including Chandler and Tempe. All of these "self-driving rides" have a human safety driver behind the wheel. A driverless ride is what it sounds like. No safety driver behind the wheel, although a Waymo employee would likely be present in the vehicle initially.

Camera bumps on smartphones may soon go away thanks to a team of researchers at the University of Utah who've developed a radically thin camera lens. Gizmodo reports: For comparison, the lens elements used in today's smartphone cameras, which gather and focus light onto a tiny sensor, are a few millimeters thick. It might not sound like much, but the best smartphone cameras use multiple elements, which quickly add up, resulting in a thin phone simply not having enough room to house all of them: hence the camera bump trend. But a team of electrical and computer engineering researchers at the University of Utah have succeeded in creating a new type of optical lens that measures just a few microns thick, or about a thousand times thinner and one hundred times lighter than what you'll find in smartphones today.

The lens the researchers created is actually made up of innumerable tiny microstructures, imperceptible to the human eye, and strategically positioned so that each one bends and redirects light towards a camera's sensor. When they're all working together, they produce the same results as a single curved element does. Manufacturing the lenses also required the team to develop a new fabrication process, a new polymer, and custom algorithms to calculate the shape and position of each microstructure. But the resulting lens can be completely flat, and made of lightweight plastic. If you've ever spent a day carrying around a camera with a big lens hanging off the front, you'll appreciate that benefit alone. The study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Yesterday, Opera announced the launch of version 68 of its flagship desktop browser, bringing a tracker blocker that will make it harder for advertisers and others to track you while you browse the web. The company says it also has the additional benefit of speeding up page loads by up to 23%. TechCrunch reports: The new tracking protection feature is off by default (as is the existing ad blocker). The tracking feature uses the EasyPrivacy Tracking Protection List, which has been around for quite a few years now. In addition to the new tracking protection, which is increasingly becoming standard among browser vendors (and which is surely putting some additional pressure on Google and its Chrome browser), Opera is also introducing a new screenshotting feature with this update. That's not an unusual feature, but it's a pretty full-featured implementation, with the ability to blur parts of a page and draw on the screenshots.

According to The Wall Street Journal, AT&T has agreed to sell its Puerto Rican and U.S. Virgin Islands businesses to Liberty Latin America for $1.95 billion in cash (Warning: source paywalled, alternative source), "allowing the telecommunications giant to shave its debt load and move closer to repurchasing shares." From the report: AT&T's operation in Puerto Rico provides cellular, landline and internet connections. It had 1.1 million wireless subscribers. As part of the deal, about 1,300 AT&T employees will be transferred to Liberty Latin America. The two companies said they expect the deal to close within six to nine months. Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands account for a small sliver of AT&T's domestic operations, but shedding the unit will help it work down a large debt load accumulated through its $80 billion-plus acquisition of Time Warner last year. The deal signals progress on AT&T's goal of selling noncore assets, something activist investor Elliott Management Corp., which recently disclosed a stake in the company, is also pushing. AT&T has also sold its stake in streaming service Hulu.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast's data-usage meter gave thousands of customers inaccurate readings for two months because of a software bug, causing the broadband provider to incorrectly charge about 2,000 users for exceeding their monthly data caps. Comcast has admitted the error and told Ars it is giving refunds and additional credits of $50 each to customers who paid data overage fees that shouldn't have been assessed.

Comcast engineers found that the problem began after the company started rolling out a new billing system in early August. The data meter was apparently still collecting accurate data, but the numbers were being reported in the new billing system incorrectly. Comcast said it's still trying to figure out if the bug is in the meter software, the billing software, or in the interaction between the two. What Comcast knows for certain, the spokesperson said, is that the problem was fixed when it rolled back to the previous version of its billing software on October 2. Comcast's statement to Ars said: "While updating our data usage meter to a new system, a software error occurred resulting in a small number of our customers being billed incorrectly. We're very sorry for inconveniencing our customers and here's what we're doing to address it: We fixed the technical issue, we're proactively crediting the accounts affected, and we're giving those customers an additional $50 credit to make it right."

itwbennett shares a report from CSO: iTerm2 users: It's time to upgrade. A security audit sponsored by the Mozilla Open Source Support Program uncovered a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the popular open-source terminal app for macOS. ITerm2 is an open-source alternative to the built-in macOS Terminal app, which allows users to interact with the command-line shell. Terminal apps are commonly used by system administrators, developers and IT staff in general, including security teams, for a variety of tasks and day-to-day operations.

The iTerm2 app is a popular choice on macOS because it has features and allows customizations that the built-in Terminal doesn't, which is why the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) decided to sponsor a code audit for it. The MOSS was created in the wake of the critical and wide-impact Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL with the goal of sponsoring security audits for widely used open-source technologies. The flaw, which is now tracked as CVE-2019-9535, has existed in iTerm2 for the past seven years and is located in the tmux integration. Tmux is a terminal multiplexer that allows running multiple sessions in the same terminal window by splitting the terminal screen. The flaw was fixed in iTerm2 version 3.3.6, which was released today.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple's decision to greenlight an app called HKmaps, which is being used by pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong to crowdsource information about street closures and police presence, is attracting the ire of the Chinese government. An article in Chinese state mouthpiece, China Daily, attacks the iPhone maker for reversing an earlier decision not to allow the app to be listed on the iOS App Store -- claiming the app is "allowing the rioters in Hong Kong to go on violent acts." HKmaps uses emoji to denote live police and protest activity around Hong Kong, as reported by users.

The app's developer denies the map enables illegal activity, saying its function is "for info" purposes only -- to allow residents to move freely around the city by being able to avoid protest flash-points. But the Chinese government is branding it "toxic." "Business is business, and politics is politics. Nobody wants to drag Apple into the lingering unrest in Hong Kong. But people have reason to assume that Apple is mixing business with politics, and even illegal acts. Apple has to think about the consequences of its unwise and reckless decision," the China Daily writer warns in a not-so-veiled threat about continued access to the Chinese market. "Providing a gateway for 'toxic apps' is hurting the feelings of the Chinese people, twisting the facts of Hong Kong affairs, and against the views and principles of the Chinese people," it goes on. "Apple and other corporations should be able to discern right from wrong. They also need to know that only the prosperity of China and China's Hong Kong will bring them a broader and more sustainable market."

The article also claims Apple reinstated a song which advocates for independence for Hong Kong and had previously been removed from its music store.