Mark Zuckerberg is fully prepared to sue the federal government if someone like Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren tries to break up Facebook into smaller companies, according to audio recordings obtained by the Verge. Warren has made breaking up Big Tech a signature promise of her presidential campaign. From a report: The audio recordings, which were not intended for public consumption, are reportedly from two meetings in July that were structured as Q&A sessions between Zuckerberg, the company's CEO, and Facebook employees. Arguably the most interesting insight from the leaked audio is that Facebook is going to use everything they've got to fight antitrust regulators and Elizabeth Warren, should she win the presidency. Zuckerberg makes it clear that the company is not going to be broken up without a messy war in Washington. From a transcript of the audio recording obtained by the Verge:

"So there might be a political movement where people are angry at the tech companies or are worried about concentration or worried about different issues and worried that they're not being handled well. That doesn't mean that, even if there's anger and that you have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies ... I mean, if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don't want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. I mean, that's not the position that you want to be in when you're, you know, I mean ... it's like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things. But look, at the end of the day, if someone's going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.

In a statement, Warren said on Tuesday, "What would really "suck" is if we don't fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: AngelFace [is] an Android app that lets users identify whether someone is a venture capitalist by capturing a quick photo of their face. According to [app developer Tosh Velaga and co-founder Igor Nefedov], "You just hold your phone up to someone's face for a second, tap a button and their profile will pop up." Velaga and Nefedov scraped photos of investors from Signal, a directory of venture capitalists in different industries, as well as Google Images. They declined to specify how many photos they have, though they said it is over 1,000.

Velaga believes the app can solve a common issue for new entrepreneurs: meeting and talking to the people who can fund their ideas. "Part of it is like if you see somebody walking down the street in Allbirds and a puffy vest, you might be like who is this? VCs are not the most sympathetic crowd and it's hard to just go up and talk to them. Now you at least know who they are," he said. Today, AngelFace is focused on venture capitalists based in the Bay Area, though Velaga hasn't ruled out the possibility of expanding to other cities. He's marketing the app cautiously because, as he says, "it's a slippery slope, this technology. We're not even sure if it's legal." If you're planning on giving the app a try, don't expect it to work very well. The Verge said they tested the app around the office and it "didn't recognize Casey Newton or Benchmark's Bill Gurley."

Japan's sole pager provider, Tokyo Telemessage Inc, will shut down radio signals for its services Tuesday, ending support for the device first introduced in the country half a century ago. Japan Today reports: In recent years, the device had been favored mainly by those working in hospitals, where cellphone use was once discouraged because of concerns over the effect of electromagnetic waves on medical devices and where cellphone reception can sometimes be poor. Beeper services in Japan began in 1968 with the predecessor of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. Users would call a specific number via a landline, causing the device to emit a beeping sound. But from the late 1980s onward, the popularity of pagers grew as they could be used to send messages combining numbers and text characters.

The number of pager users exceeded 10 million in 1996, with the device becoming one of the defining symbols of a subculture among female high school students along with "loose socks" and taking photos in puri-kura photo booths. However, beeper services declined with the introduction of mobile phones. The number of pager users further decreased as e-mailing, texting as well as taking and sending pictures by phone became standard.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: So there's a British woman who's been in the news recently for diagnosing herself with a sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation. She sleeps in a $500 EMF-blocking sack and has reportedly stayed in the sack, from time to time, for 30-hour stretches. The woman -- 70-year-old Rosi Gladwell of Totnes, Devon -- helps lead a small advocacy group on the issue of EMF-related health issues, and she even got the mayor of the Spanish village where she now lives to look into ways to limit Wi-Fi access for residents. She fears that the introduction of 5G mobile networks will kill her. Now seems like a good time to remind readers that there is no evidence to support the idea of "electromagnetic hypersensitivity." The World Health Organization calls it "idiopathic environmental intolerance with attribution to electromagnetic fields," or IEI-EMF.

Since diagnosing herself years ago, Gladwell has taken to sleeping in a sack woven with silver and copper and wraps herself in a protective sheet, according to several British news outlets. (You can find similar on Amazon.) She says that exposures to Wi-Fi and other EMF make her weak, short of breath, and give her pins-and-needle feelings in her face. She spends much of her time in a remote Spanish vacation home where her exposure to EMF is reduced. Still, Gladwell is holding firm in her thinking. Two years ago, she even reportedly got the mayor of the Spanish village Polopos to consider limiting the village's Wi-Fi access. "I am immensely impressed with our local mayor and how seriously he is taking this," Gladwell told the Olive Press at the time. "When talking about the dangers of Wi-Fi technology, he came up with the idea of limiting the hours of access in the village by putting timer switches on the routers in the school, Town Hall, and doctor's surgery." It's unclear if the town enacted the restrictions.

Volkswagen, BMW, and Daimler aren't the only companies using "cheat devices" to get around environmental legislation. According to The Independent, "global shipping companies have spent billions rigging vessels with 'cheat devices' that circumvent new environmental legislation by dumping pollution into the sea instead of the air." From the report: More than $12 billion has been spent on the devices, known as open-loop scrubbers, which extract sulphur from the exhaust fumes of ships that run on heavy fuel oil. This means the vessels meet standards demanded by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) that kick in on January 1st. However, the sulphur emitted by the ships is simply re-routed from the exhaust and expelled into the water around the ships, which not only greatly increases the volume of pollutants being pumped into the sea, but also increases carbon dioxide emissions.

A total of 3,756 ships, both in operation and under order, have already had scrubbers installed according to DNV GL, the world's largest ship classification company. Only 23 of these vessels have had closed-loop scrubbers installed, a version of the device that does not discharge into the sea and stores the extracted sulphur in tanks before discharging it at a safe disposal facility in a port. The Exhaust Gas Cleaning System Association has estimated that 4,000 ships will be operating with scrubbers by the time the legislation is enforced, up from fewer than a hundred in 2013. For every ton of fuel burned, ships using open-loop scrubbers emit approximately 45 tons of warm, acidic, contaminated washwater containing carcinogens including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a non-profit organization that provides scientific analysis to environmental regulators.

theodp writes: On Friday, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced $123 million in new Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant awards to 41 school districts, nonprofits and state educational agencies. Over $78 million of that went to 29 grantees focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education, and more than 85% of the funded STEM projects include a specific focus on computer science. The announcement was scant on details, but the awardees listed include tech-bankrolled Code.org, whose Board of Directors include Microsoft President Brad Smith, Amazon CEO of Worldwide Consumer Jeff Wilke, and Google VP of Education & University Programs Maggie Johnson. In his new book, Tools and Weapons, Smith interestingly reveals how Microsoft, Amazon, and Google each pledged to commit $50 million to K-12 computer science education to get First Daughter and Presidential Adviser Ivanka Trump to work to secure $1 billion of Federal support for K-12 STEM/CS education.

From the book: "While you would be hard-pressed to say that every student must take computer science, you could say that every student deserves the opportunity. That means getting computer science into every high school, and into earlier grades as well. The only way to train teachers at this scale is for federal funding to help fill the gap. After years of lobbying, there was a breakthrough in federal interest in 2016. In January President Obama announced a bold proposal to invest $4 billion of federal money to bring computer science to the nation's schools. While the proposal produced enthusiasm, it didn't spur Congress to appropriate any new money. Ivanka Trump had more success the following year. Even before her father had moved into the White House, she was interested in federal investments in computer science in schools. She was confident she could persuade the president to support the idea, but she also believed that the key to public money was to secure substantial private funding from major technology companies. She said she would work to secure $1 billion of federal support over five years if the tech sector would pledge $300 million during the same time. As always, there was the question of whether someone would go first. The White House was looking for a company to get things rolling by pledging $50 million over five years. Given Microsoft's long-standing involvement, financial support, and prior advocacy with the Obama White House, we were a natural choice. We agreed to make the commitment, other companies followed, and in September 2017 Mary Snapp, the head of Microsoft Philanthropies, joined Ivanka in Detroit to make the announcement."

The $300 million was apparently money well-pledged. Surrounded by children, educators, Ivanka Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, President Trump in late 2017 signed a presidential memorandum directed to DeVos calling for the expansion of K-12 computer science and STEM education in the U.S. with at least $200 million in annual grant funding.

dryriver writes: BitChute is a video-hosting website like YouTube, except that it states its mission as being "anti-censorship" and is Peer-To-Peer, WebTorrent based. "It is based on the peer-to-peer WebTorrent system, a JavaScript torrenting program that can run in a web browser," according to Wikipedia. "Users who watch a video also seed it. BitChute does not rely on advertising, and users can send payments to video creators directly. In November 2018 BitChute was banned from PayPal." So it seems that you don't need huge datacenters to build something like YouTube -- Bitchute effectively relies on its users to act as a distributed P2P datacenter. Is this the future of internet video? Will more and more people flock to P2P video-hosting sites as/when more mainstream services like YouTube fall prey to various forms of censorship?

According to a newly published support document, Apple says the new iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max will present customers with a warning if the devices are unable to verify a genuine display after a screen repair job. "If you need to replace your iPhone display, it's important for certified technicians who use genuine Apple display parts to repair it," the page reads. "Replacements not performed by Apple, authorized service providers, or certified technicians might not follow proper safety and repair procedures and could result in improper function or issues with display quality or safety." The Verge reports: Apple goes over a laundry list of problems that could arise if your display is swapped the wrong way or with a non-genuine part, such as multi-touch problems, issues with screen color accuracy and brightness, or True Tone failing to work properly. "Additionally, repairs that don't properly replace screws or cowlings might leave behind loose parts that could damage the battery, cause overheating, or result in injury." The company isn't afraid of nagging customers about this, either. Apple says that a notification will appear on the affected iPhone's lock screen for 4 days after a problem is first detected, then it'll move to the main settings menu for 15 more days. After all that, it gets pushed away to Settings -> General -> About. According to Apple, this new measure only applies to its brand new iPhones and not previous models. Even if it can't be verified as genuine, the display isn't prevented from functioning normally by iOS.

Chinese police have arrested a fugitive who'd been on the run for 17 years, after they used drones to spot his cave hideout. The BBC reports: The 63-year old, named Song Jiang by the police, had been jailed for trafficking women and children but escaped from a prison camp in 2002. He had been living in a tiny cave cut off from human interaction for years. Yongshan police received clues about Song's whereabouts in early September, they said on their WeChat account. Those clues led them to the mountains behind his hometown in Yunnan province in south-west China. After regular searches failed to find anything, authorities sent additional drones to help the officers. The drones eventually spotted a blue-colored steel tile on a steep cliff as well as traces of household rubbish nearby. According to the police, the man had been living in seclusion for so long that it was difficult for him to communicate with the officers. He has been sent back to jail.

VC fund A16z's Benedict Evans writes: We are in the middle of a wave of interesting new productivity software startups -- there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares. Instead of a flat grid of cells, a dumb list of files, and a dumb list of little text files (which is what email really is), we get some kind of richer canvas that mixes all of these together in ways that are native to the web and collaboration. Then, we have another new wave of productivity company that addresses a particular profession and bundles all of the tasks that were spread across spreadsheets, email and file shares into some new structured flow.

[...] A few years ago a consultant told me that for half of their jobs they told people using Excel to use a database, and for the other half they told people using a database to use Excel. There's clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io. But when that tool is managing a thousand people, you might want to move it into a dedicated service. After all, even Craigslist started as an actual email list and ended up moving to a database. But then, at a certain point, if that task is specific to your company and central to what you do, you might well end up unbundling Salesforce or SAP or whatever that vertical is and go back to the beginning. Of course, this is the cycle of life of enterprise software. IBM mainframes bundled the adding machines you see Jack Lemmon using below, and also bundled up filing cabinets and telephones. SAP unbundled IBM. But I'd suggest there are two specific sets of things that are happening now.

First, every application category is getting rebuilt as a web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration. As Frame.io (video!) and OnShape (3D CAD!) show, there's almost no native PC application that can't be rebuilt as a web app. In parallel, everything now has to be native to collaboration, and so the model of a binary file saved to a file share will generally go away over time (this could be done with a native PC app, but in practice generally won't be). So, we have some generational changes, and that also tends to create new companies. But second, and much more important -- everyone is online now. The reason we're looking at nursing or truck drivers or oil workers is that an entire generation now grew up after the web, and grew up with smartphones, and assumes without question that every part of their life can be done with a smartphone. In 1999 hiring 'roughnecks' in a mobile app would have sounded absurd -- now it sounds absurd if you're not. And that means that a lot of tasks will get shifted into software that were never really in software at all before.

While YouTube has publicly said that it's working on addressing problems that are making its website ever so addictive to users, a new paper from Google, which owns YouTube, seems to tell a different story. From a report: It proposes an update to the platform's algorithm that is meant to recommend even more targeted content to users in the interest of increasing engagement. Here's how YouTube's recommendation system currently works. To populate the recommended-videos sidebar, it first compiles a shortlist of several hundred videos by finding ones that match the topic and other features of the one you are watching. Then it ranks the list according to the user's preferences, which it learns by feeding all your clicks, likes, and other interactions into a machine-learning algorithm. Among the proposed updates, the researchers specifically target a problem they identify as "implicit bias." It refers to the way recommendations themselves can affect user behavior, making it hard to decipher whether you clicked on a video because you liked it or because it was highly recommended. The effect is that over time, the system can push users further and further away from the videos they actually want to watch.

To reduce this bias, the researchers suggest a tweak to the algorithm: each time a user clicks on a video, it also factors in the video's rank in the recommendation sidebar. Videos that are near the top of the sidebar are given less weight when fed into the machine-learning algorithm; videos deep down in the ranking, which require a user to scroll, are given more. When the researchers tested the changes live on YouTube, they found significantly more user engagement. Though the paper doesn't say whether the new system will be deployed permanently, Guillaume Chaslot, an ex-YouTube engineer who now runs AlgoTransparency.org, said he was "pretty confident" that it would happen relatively quickly.

Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: Last week, the Solicitor General of the White House weighed in on Google's request for the Supreme Court to overturn the Federal Circuit's ridiculously confused ruling in the Oracle/Google case concerning the copyrightability of APIs (and whether or not repurposing them is fair use). Not surprisingly, as the Solicitor General has been siding with Oracle all along, it suggests that the Supreme Court not hear the case. Of course, it does so by completely misrepresenting what's at stake in the case -- pretending that this is about whether or not software source code is copyright-eligible:

"This case concerns the copyrightability of computer code. To induce a computer to perform a function, a person must give the computer written instructions. Typically, those instructions are written in 'source code,' which consists of words, numbers, and symbols in a particular 'programming language,' which has its own syntax and semantics. The source code is then converted into binary 'object code' -- ones and zeros -- that is readable by the computer.

It is both 'firmly established' and undisputed in this case that computer code can be copyrightable as a 'literary work[].' 1 Melville B. Nimmer & David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright & 2A.10[B] (2019). Section 101 defines a 'computer program' as 'a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result.' 17 U.S.C. 101. And various Copyright Act provisions recognize that a person may own a copyright in a 'computer program.'"

Masnick adds: Except... that's not what this case is about. Even remotely. Literally no one denies that software source code is subject to copyright. The question is whether or not an Application Programming Interface -- an API -- is subject to copyright.

New submitter xack shares a report: Microsoft has annoyed some of its 900 million Windows 10 device users after apparently removing the 'Use offline account' as part of its effort to herd users towards its cloud-based Microsoft Account. The offline local account is specific to one device, while the Microsoft Account can be used to log in to multiple devices and comes with the benefit of Microsoft's recent work on passwordless authentication with Windows Hello. The local account doesn't require an internet connection or an email address -- just a username and password that are stored on the PC. But Windows 10 users are annoyed that Microsoft has hidden the local account option when setting up a new PC or reinstalling Windows 10. A user on a popular Reddit thread notes that the local account option is now invisible if the device is connected to the internet. "Either run the setup without being connected to the internet, or type in a fake phone number a few times and it will give you the prompt to create a local account," Froggyowns suggested as a solution.

The US Treasury Department announced today the third set of sanctions against the Internet Research Agency (IRA), also known as Russia's troll farm. From a report: The Treasury previously sanctioned the IRA in March and December 2018. This time, the sanctions are being imposed because of the Russian company's involvement in the 2018 US midterm elections, when it used social media campaigns in an attempt to influence the election's outcome. But this time, Treasury officials are taking a new route. Besides imposing new sanctions on the IRA and the private property of six of its employees, Treasury officials today also went after the private possessions of Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the IRA's founder and primary financier. More specifically, US officials imposed sanctions on three companies that Prigozhin uses to manage three planes and a yacht. The first is Beratex Group Limited, a company registered in the Seychelles, which the Russian oligarch uses to manage a private jet with the tail number of M-VITO, and a private yacht under the name of St. Vitamin.

Microsoft today announced that Windows Virtual Desktop has hit worldwide general availability. As a result, you can deploy and scale your Windows desktops and apps on Azure "in minutes," the company said today. From a report: Think of Windows Virtual Desktop as a tool for deploying and scaling Windows desktops and apps on Azure with built-in security and compliance. The Azure-based service provides a virtualized multi-session Windows 10 experience and Office 365 ProPlus virtual desktop on any device. The Windows Virtual Desktop client is available on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and HTML 5. Windows Virtual Desktop also supports Windows Server Remote Desktop Services (RDS) desktops and apps in a shared public cloud. Microsoft announced Windows Virtual Desktop in September 2018, but only in private preview.

Consumer VPN specialist ExpressVPN has announced a tie up with HP to have its software pre-installed on the company's consumer PCs. From a report: As part of the deal selected machines will come with ExpressVPN's Windows app pre-installed to help protect customers' privacy and security on public Wi-Fi networks. HP consumer customers will also receive an exclusive free 30-day trial of the VPN service. The Spectre x360 13 will be the first of HP's consumer PCs to have ExpressVPN pre-installed, so customers can encrypt network data and secure their internet browsing experience with a single click.

Windows ships with a full volume encryption tool called BitLocker. The feature used to trust any SSD that claimed to offer its own hardware-based encryption, but that changed in the KB4516071 update to Windows 10 released on September 24, which now assumes that connected SSDs don't actually encrypt anything. From a report: "SwiftOnSecurity" called attention to this change on September 26. The pseudonymous Twitter user then reminded everyone of a November 2018 report that revealed security flaws, such as the use of master passwords set by manufacturers, of self-encrypting drives. That meant people who purchased SSDs that were supposed to help keep their data secure might as well have purchased a drive that didn't handle its own encryption instead. Those people were actually worse off than anticipated because Microsoft set up BitLocker to leave these self-encrypting drives to their own devices. This was supposed to help with performance -- the drives could use their own hardware to encrypt their contents rather than using the CPU -- without compromising the drive's security. Now it seems the company will no longer trust SSD manufacturers to keep their customers safe by themselves. Here's the exact update Microsoft said it made in KB4516071: "Changes the default setting for BitLocker when encrypting a self-encrypting hard drive. Now, the default is to use software encryption for newly encrypted drives. For existing drives, the type of encryption will not change." People can also choose not to have BitLocker encrypt these drives, too, but the default setting assumes they don't want to take SSD manufacturers at their word.

Tesla owners who paid for "full self-driving capability" received a software update this week with a Smart Summon feature. In private parking lots, and always within line of sight, the Tesla will magically make its way to an awaiting owner. "Smart Summon can be stopped at any point by the owner removing their finger from a button on the phone app, at which point the car stops immediately..." reports Jalopnik.

But their article cites some critical tweets -- including one Twitter user who complained their Tesla "went forward and ran into the side of garage... Be forewarned... Enhanced summon isn't safe or production ready."

Jalopnik writes: Again, impressive tech, but I can get any 15 year old with a learner's permit to ram a car into the side of a garage for a lot less money. I mean, it's cool advanced AI can now drive into the side of a garage, I guess...

On the plus side, sure, it's great for impressing people and not getting wet in the rain or having to walk to your car, possibly with a bunch of heavy crap, but at the same time, when has it ever been okay to attempt to be "in control" of your car from potentially across a parking lot? There's plenty of cases where Smart Summon has worked just fine. And yes, people do stupid shit in parking lots every day. Tesla does specify that it's a Beta release, which is fine for most software, but does it make sense when that software is driving a full-sized car in a public space?

This is a tricky one. I'm pretty sure we'll see more Smart Summon issues and fender-benders because the world is messy and confusing.
The article also questions whether the Tesla will notice when it's driving the wrong way down a one-way parking lot lane -- since it appears to be doing just that in the test lot where Tesla filmed the Smart Summon introductory video.

Google's plans to implement DNS over HTTPS in Chrome are being investigated by a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, while the Justice Department has "recently received complaints" about the practice, according to the Wall Street Journal.

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: While Google says it's pushing for adoption of the technology to prevent spying and spoofing, House investigators are worried this would give the internet giant an unfair advantage by denying access to users' data. The House sent a letter on September 13th asking if Google would use data handled through the process for commercial purposes... Internet service providers are worried that they may be shut out of the data and won't know as much about their customers' traffic patterns. This could "foreclose competition in advertising and other industries," an alliance of ISPs told Congress in a September 19th letter...

Mozilla also wants to use the format to secure DNS in Firefox, and the company's Marshall Erwin told the WSJ that the antitrust gripes are "fundamentally misleading." ISPs are trying to undermine the standard simply because they want continued access to users' data, Erwin said. Unencrypted DNS helps them target ads by tracking your web habits, and it's harder to thwart DNS tracking than cookies and other typical approaches.

An anonymous reader quotes International Business Times: European aerospace giant Airbus has been hit by a series of attacks by hackers targeting its suppliers in search of commercial secrets, sources told AFP, adding they suspected a Chinese link. AFP spoke to seven security and industry sources, all of whom confirmed a spate of attacks in the past 12 months but asked for anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information they were sharing...

Many state-backed and independent hackers are known to disguise their tracks, or they may leave clues intended to confuse investigators or lead them to blame someone else. But the sources said they suspected Chinese hackers were responsible, given their record of trying to steal sensitive commercial information and the fact that Beijing has just launched a plane designed to compete with Airbus and US rival Boeing.

State-owned plane-maker Comac has already launched manufacturing of its first mid-range airliner but has struggled to get it certified. Engines and avionics are "areas in which Chinese research and development is weak," one of the sources said.