IBM's 14th quantum computer is its most powerful so far, a model with 53 of the qubits that form the fundamental data-processing element at the heart of the system. From a report: The system, available online to quantum computing customers in October, is a big step up from the last IBM Q machine with 20 qubits and should help advance the marriage of classical computers with the crazy realm of quantum physics. Quantum computing remains a highly experimental field, limited by the difficult physics of the ultra-small and by the need to keep the machines refrigerated to within a hair's breadth of absolute zero to keep outside disturbances from ruining any calculations.

But if engineers and scientists can continue the progress, quantum computers could help solve computing problems that are, in practice, impossible on today's classical computers. That includes things like simulating the complexities of real-world molecules used in medical drugs and materials science, optimizing financial investment performance, and delivering packages with a minimum of time and fuel.

Malware that mines cryptocurrency made a comeback over the summer, with an increased number of campaigns being discovered and documented by cyber-security firms. From a report: The primary reason for this sudden resurgence is the general revival of the cryptocurrency market, which saw trading prices recover after a spectacular crash in late 2018. Monero, the cryptocurrency of choice of most crypto-mining malware operations, was one of the many cryptocurrencies that were impacted by this market slump. The currency also referred to as XMR, has gone down from an exchange rate that orbited around $300 - $400 in late 2017 to a meager $40 - $50 at the end of 2018. But as the Monero trading price recovered throughout 2018, tripling its value from $38 at the start of the year, to nearly $115 over the summer, so have malware campaigns.

These are criminal operations during which hackers infect systems with malware that's specifically designed to secretly mine Monero behind the computer owner's back. Starting with the end of May, the number of reports detailing crypto-mining campaigns published by cyber-security firms has exploded, with a new report published each week, and sometimes new campaigns being uncovered on a daily basis.

In the early days of life on Earth, biological organisms were exceedingly simple. They were microscopic unicellular creatures with little to no ability to coordinate. Yet billions of years of evolution through competition and natural selection led to the complex life forms we have today -- as well as complex human intelligence. Researchers at OpenAI, the San-Francisco-based for-profit AI research lab, are now testing a hypothesis: if you could mimic that kind of competition in a virtual world, would it also give rise to much more sophisticated artificial intelligence? From a report: The experiment builds on two existing ideas in the field: multi-agent learning, the idea of placing multiple algorithms in competition or coordination to provoke emergent behaviors, and reinforcement learning, the specific machine-learning technique that learns to achieve a goal through trial and error. In a new paper released today, OpenAI has now revealed its initial results. Through playing a simple game of hide and seek hundreds of millions of times, two opposing teams of AI agents developed complex hiding and seeking strategies that involved tool use and collaboration. The research also offers insight into OpenAI's dominant research strategy: to dramatically scale existing AI techniques to see what properties emerge.

Facebook, which last month said it stopped using humans to review and transcribe users' voice messages, will resume that practice for some audio collected from its Portal video-calling device. From a report: Facebook "paused human review of audio" around August. Bloomberg reported at the time the company hired contractors to transcribe private voice messages sent via its Messenger app. In that case, users had not been alerted to the possibility that their communications might be subject to human review. It was also unclear at the time that some of the clips Facebook had been collecting were coming from Portal.

Facebook confirmed Wednesday that it was indeed collecting audio from Portal users who make a request from the device using the command "Hey Portal." By default, those commands were recorded and stored on Facebook servers, and some of them were transcribed by contractors working with the company to improve the software algorithms used to understand the commands, according to Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's head of hardware. That practice was paused last month at the same time Messenger stopped using humans to transcribe messages.

Facebook on Tuesday announced a series of changes to limit hate speech and extremism on the social network, expanding its definition of terrorist organizations and planning to deploy artificial intelligence to better spot and block live videos of shooters. The company is also expanding a program that redirects users searching for extremism to resources intended to help them leave hate groups behind. The New York Times reports: The announcement came the day before a hearing on Capitol Hill on how Facebook, Google and Twitter handle violent content. Lawmakers are expected to ask executives how they are handling posts from extremists. In its announcement post, Facebook said the Christchurch tragedy "strongly" influenced its updates. And the company said it had recently developed an industry plan with Microsoft, Twitter, Google and Amazon to address how technology is used to spread terrorist accounts.

Facebook said that it had mostly focused on identifying organizations like separatists, Islamist militants and white supremacists. The company said that it would now consider all people and organizations that proclaim or are engaged in violence leading to real-world harm. The team leading its efforts to counter extremism on its platform has grown to 350 people, Facebook said, and includes experts in law enforcement, national security, counterterrorism and academics studying radicalization. To detect more content relating to real-world harm, Facebook said it was updating its artificial intelligence to better catch first-person shooting videos. The company said it was working with American and British law enforcement officials to obtain camera footage from their firearms training programs to help its A.I. learn what real, first-person violent events look like.

A lawsuit seeking class action status says AT&T is inflating AT&T TV Now -- previously known as DirecTV Now -- subscriber numbers by creating fake users. From a report: It's accusing the company's management of carrying out the scheme in an effort to make the service look good in the eyes of investors even though it was struggling with serious technical and financial problems. The management did so, according to the lawsuit, by encouraging employees to add DirecTV Now subscription fees to subscribers' accounts without their knowledge or consent. One of the methods employees allegedly used is tacking on up to three accounts to a single customer's phone number -- including those who just signed up for a free trial -- and running their credit card three times. In some cases, customers were reportedly charged for a subscription even though they made it clear that they didn't want it. Sales employees allegedly made and used fake email accounts in both instances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: Medical images and health data belonging to millions of Americans, including X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans, are sitting unprotected on the Internet and available to anyone with basic computer expertise. The records cover more than 5 million patients in the United States and millions more around the world. In some cases, a snoop could use free software programs -- or just a typical Web browser -- to view the images and private data, an investigation by ProPublica and the German broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk found.

We identified 187 servers -- computers that are used to store and retrieve medical data -- in the U.S. that were unprotected by passwords or basic security precautions. The computer systems, from Florida to California, are used in doctors' offices, medical-imaging centers, and mobile X-ray services. The insecure servers we uncovered add to a growing list of medical records systems that have been compromised in recent years. Unlike some of the more infamous recent security breaches, in which hackers circumvented a company's cyber defenses, these records were often stored on servers that lacked the security precautions that long ago became standard for businesses and government agencies. The exposed data varied depending on the health provider and the software they use. "For instance, the server of U.S. company MobilexUSA displayed the names of more than a million patients -- all by typing in a simple data query," reports ProPublica. "Their dates of birth, doctors, and procedures were also included."

"Another imaging system, tied to a physician in Los Angeles, allowed anyone on the Internet to see his patients' echocardiograms," the report adds. "All told, medical data from more than 16 million scans worldwide was available online, including names, birthdates, and, in some cases, Social Security numbers."

The authors of the report recommend you ask your health care provider or doctor if access to your images requires a login and password, and to ask if they conduct a regular security assessment as required by HIPAA.

Tesla is being a busy bee at the Nurburgring Nordschleife, and after multiple videos and rumors, we have our first idea of how capable its modified Model S electric sedan is. From a report: Road & Track reported Tuesday that the stripped-down Model S clocked a lap time of 7:23. Do note, that is not an official time and comes from well-placed sources hand-timing the electric car with a clear view of the track. It also happens to be 20 seconds quicker than the Porsche Taycan's lap time at the 'Ring. However, what's impressive is that this time comes during an industry-pool session.

This is when all automakers are free to make rounds around the track, which leads to traffic. At the end of the day, the time doesn't reflect the car's full potential. It's not possible to clock a flying lap during an industry-pool session. If we do get an official time this week, expect it to be even quicker than 7:23. At the same time, the magazine's sources also described the fact that this Model S is nowhere near close to the kind of electric sedan Tesla sells to buyers. It's rumored to house a new three-motor powertrain (one motor for each rear wheel) and sports plenty of variations outside. They include wider tires, reportedly Goodyear Eagle F1 Supersport RS rubber, fender flares to help cover the extra width and a massive gurney flap at the rear. Massive carbon-ceramic brakes are supposedly hiding behind the wheels, too.

Facebook is partnering with Ray-Ban parent company Luxottica to help speed up development of its top-secret augmented reality glasses that are being developed out of its Facebook Reality Labs in Redmond, Washington. The social media company is hoping the new partnership will help them complete the glasses between 2023 and 2025. CNBC reports: The glasses are internally codenamed Orion, and they are designed to replace smartphones, the people said. The glasses would allow users to take calls, show information to users in a small display and live-stream their vantage point to their social media friends and followers. Facebook is also developing an artificial intelligence voice assistant that would serve as a user input for the glasses, CNBC previously reported. In addition, the company has experimented with a ring device that would allow users to input information via motion sensor. That device is code-named Agios.

The company has hundreds of employees at its Redmond offices working on technology for the AR glasses, but thus far, Facebook has struggled to reduce the size of the device into a form factor that consumers will find appealing, a person who worked on the device told CNBC. Given the long lead time, there's no guarantee that the glasses will be completed on time or ever ship. But one person familiar with the project said that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a strong interest in the glasses, and asked hardware chief Andrew Bosworth to prioritize them.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Fedora 31 is due later this year, but first, there needs to be some beta testing. And so, today, Fedora 31 Beta is made available for download. Unfortunately, details surrounding version 31 are a bit sparse. With that said, one big change involves Fedora users with ARM 64-based single board computers, such as a Raspberry Pi. Those folks will get access to an additional desktop spin -- the lightweight Xfce. Workstation users will be treated to GNOME 3.34, but not the final version that was released recently. Don't worry -- when Fedora leaves beta status, and is officially released, you can be sure the stable GNOME 3.34 will be included. Remember, Fedora is one of the best ways to experience a vanilla GNOME desktop environment.

Mozilla announces in a blog post: We typically ship a major Firefox browser (Desktop and Android) release every 6 to 8 weeks. Building and releasing a browser is complicated and involves many players. To optimize the process, and make it more reliable for all users, over the years we've developed a phased release strategy that includes 'pre-release' channels: Firefox Nightly, Beta, and Developer Edition. With this approach, we can test and stabilize new features before delivering them to the majority of Firefox users via general release.

And today we're excited to announce that we're moving to a four-week release cycle! We're adjusting our cadence to increase our agility, and bring you new features more quickly. In recent quarters, we've had many requests to take features to market sooner. Feature teams are increasingly working in sprints that align better with shorter release cycles. Considering these factors, it is time we changed our release cadence. Starting Q1 2020, we plan to ship a major Firefox release every 4 weeks. Firefox ESR release cadence (Extended Support Release for the enterprise) will remain the same. In the years to come, we anticipate a major ESR release every 12 months with 3 months support overlap between new ESR and end-of-life of previous ESR. The next two major ESR releases will be ~June 2020 and ~June 2021.

In a historic first, more than 1,200 Amazon employees announced last week that they will walk out of their offices on September 20 over the company's carbon footprint. In the following days, tech workers at Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have announced they will also go on strike. From a report: Of the big five tech companies, this leaves Apple employees, who have yet to make any statement on the climate strikes, which will take place in 120 countries. On the day its competitors are striking, Apple will release the iPhone 11. While Apple claims that the iPhone is getting greener, it's still a product that necessarily requires exploiting the Earth, and, in some cases, labor.

Who should be responsible for maintaining and troubleshooting open-source projects? From a report: When you buy a product like Philips Hue's smart lights or an iPhone, you probably assume the people who wrote their code are being paid. While that's true for those who directly author a product's software, virtually every tech company also relies on thousands of bits of free code, made available through "open-source" projects on sites like GitHub and GitLab. Often these developers are happy to work for free. Writing open-source software allows them to sharpen their skills, gain perspectives from the community, or simply help the industry by making innovations available at no cost. According to Google, which maintains hundreds of open-source projects, open source "enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology, solving real-world problems."

But when software used by millions of people is maintained by a community of people, or a single person, all on a volunteer basis, sometimes things can go horribly wrong. The catastrophic Heartbleed bug of 2014, which compromised the security of hundreds of millions of sites, was caused by a problem in an open-source library called OpenSSL, which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code, used by millions. Other times, developers grow bored and abandon their projects, which can be breached while they aren't paying attention. It's hard to demand that programmers who are working for free troubleshoot problems or continue to maintain software that they've lost interest in for whatever reason -- though some companies certainly try. Not adequately maintaining these projects, on the other hand, makes the entire tech ecosystem weaker. So some open-source programmers are asking companies to pay, not for their code, but for their support services. Daniel Stenberg is one of those programmers. He created cURL, one of the world's most popular open-source projects.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Square has lent $5 billion to small businesses and consumers and applied for a banking license. It operates a nationwide mobile money-transfer business that serves 15 million Americans. But Square says it isn't a financial company. The San Francisco-based payments processor filed a lawsuit last week against its home city to recover $1.3 million in taxes, plus interest and attorneys' fees. Square argued that San Francisco was wrong to classify it as a financial company for tax purposes because it is a technology company that should be subject to a lower tax rate. The refund Square is seeking from San Francisco relates to excess taxes it believes it paid for 2014 and 2015, years when Square was a much smaller company. Square disclosed in its most recent securities filing that it may have to pay San Francisco additional taxes for subsequent years if it was unable to convince the city it was a tech company.

The company said in its complaint that its San Francisco operations more closely resemble a technology company than a financial-services firm. The company has roughly 2,200 employees in San Francisco. Square also said in its lawsuit that San Francisco overstates Square's gross receipts because it includes money that the company doesn't get to keep. Square takes a 2.75% cut of most credit-card payments to its small-business customers. More than half of what Square derives from those transactions must be paid out to banks and credit-card networks, the company said. San Francisco's treasurer and tax collector, Jose Cisneros, said that his office's audit of Square was "thorough and fair" and that he stands by its findings. Mr. Cisneros is also a defendant in the case.

According to Abner Li from 9to5Google, Google is working on a new "Smart Screenshots" feature that integrates Google Lens abilities into the Google app's screenshot function. From the report: The Google app has long had an "Edit & share screenshots" ability where captures made within Search would reveal cropping and annotation tools. Meanwhile, Assistant has long maintained a "What's on my screen" capability that analyzes what you're currently viewing for search suggestions. Google app 10.61 reveals work on "Smart Screenshots" that combine those two features. Like before, a toolbar -- which interestingly uses a four-color light bar -- appears after you take a screenshot. A small preview is shown at the left with a pencil button overlaid. You can open the system share sheet, but the Google app also suggests a frequently used app.

The most interesting addition is Lens. "Exploring with Lens" could be intended as a "Screen search" replacement given that Lens is increasingly taking over visual lookup throughout first-party apps, like Chrome. After taking a capture, Smart Screenshots have an easy way to invoke Lens for search, OCR, and finding visually "similar items." The existing editing tools (Annotating, Cropping, and Sharing) will remain and this new functionality appears to even use the same settings toggle to enable. It's unclear if this functionality once live will again be limited to screenshots taken within Search, or if it will expand to be systemwide and invokable anywhere. A notification from the Google app could appear after capturing a screenshot.

Multiple Slashdotters are reporting the unfortunate news that famed free software advocate and computer scientist Richard Stallman has resigned from MIT. Slashdot reader iamacat writes: Following outrage over his remarks about Jefferey Epstein's victims, Richard Stallman has resigned from his position in MIT, effective immediately. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him -- even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon. "I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT," Stallman wrote in an email, referring to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations."

Stallman also resigned as president from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as well as from the organization's board of directors, FSF announced shortly after.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The California legislature worked through the summer to finalize the text of the state's landmark data privacy law before time to make amendments ran out on Friday. In the Assembly (California's lower house), Assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin has been a key voice and vote backing motions that would weaken the law, and a new report says her reasoning may be very, very close to home. A review of state ethics documents conducted by Politico found that Ms. Irwin is married to Jon Irwin, the chief operating officer of Amazon's controversial Ring home surveillance business. That company stands to benefit if the California law is weakened in certain key ways before it can take effect.

One proposal put forth by Assemblywoman Irwin would expand what kind of data would be exempt from CCPA provisions, and this drew the ire of consumer protection groups, Politico reports. Irwin also initially proposed striking out "a provision requiring companies to disclose or delete data associated with 'households' upon request," a regulation that will likely affect companies like Ring. She also voted against an amendment that would have required smart speaker systems, like Amazon's Alexa or Google Home, to obtain user consent to sell recorded conversations, and "used store security-camera footage as an example of data that would be burdensome and risky for businesses to be required to link to consumers in response to data-deletion requests." Assemblywoman Irwin told Politico she found questions about her spouse to be offensive, given her own personal background as a systems engineer. "My role in the privacy debate in the Legislature is focused on bringing people together and solving the practical issues posed to us as policy makers and is independent of any job or role my husband may have," she said. The California Consumer Privacy Act was signed into law in June 2018 by California nGovernor Gavin Newsom. "This legislation gives California residents several protections with regard to their personal information, including the rights to know what is being collected, what is being sold, and to whom it is being sold," reports Ars Technica. "It also grants Californians the right to access their personal information, the right to delete data collected from them, and the right to opt out -- without being charged extra for services if they choose to do so."

The NHTSA is now proposing drivers be able to select an electric-car alert sound at speeds under 18.6 mph. "NHTSA wants the public's opinion 'on whether there should be a limit to the number of compliant sounds that a manufacturer can install in a vehicle and what that limit should be,'" adds CNET. From the report: As of this month, automakers are required to equip 50% of their "quiet cars," which applies to silent electric vehicles, with an alert noise at low speeds. The rules, first brought about in 2010, have been delayed for years, but come 2020, every quiet vehicle will need the alert mechanism. Regulators concluded cars make enough noise from tire and wind noise to forego the alert above 18.6 mph (that's 30 kph in case you're wondering why so precise a figure). Think of the sound as a gentle reminder when strolling through parking lots with cars backing out of spaces and crawling through the area. It's nice to hear a car approach, and something we take for granted with internal-combustion engines. NHTSA said the alert will help prevent 2,400 injuries annually.

New submitter JDShewey writes: The CentOS Project has announced that CentOS 8.0 will be available for download beginning Tuesday, September 24. This release was deferred so that work to release CentOS 7.7 could be completed, which means that CentOS 7.7 will be out shortly as well (and 7.7 it is already beginning to appear in mirrors and repos). This comes 20 weeks to the day from the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple fights the world's biggest tax case in a quiet courtroom this week, trying to rein in the European Union's powerful antitrust chief ahead of a potential new crackdown on internet giants. The iPhone maker can tell the EU General Court in Luxembourg that it's the world's biggest taxpayer. But that's not enough for EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager who said in a 2016 ruling that Apple's tax deals with Ireland allowed the company to pay far less than other businesses. The court must now weigh whether regulators were right to levy a record 13 billion-euro ($14.4 billion) tax bill.

A court ruling, likely to take months, could empower or halt Vestager's tax probes, which are now centering on fiscal deals done by Amazon.com and Alphabet. She's also been tasked with coming up with a "fair European tax" by the end of 2020 if global efforts to reform digital taxation don't make progress. Vestager showed her determination to fight the tax cases to the end by opening new probes into 39 companies' tax deals with Belgium on Monday. The move addresses criticism by the same court handling the Apple challenge. A February judgment threw out her 2016 order for them to pay back about 800 million euros. At the same time she's pushing for "fair international tax rules so that digitization doesn't allow companies to avoid paying their fair share of tax," according to a speech to German ambassadors last month. She urged them to use "our influence to build an international environment that helps us reach our goals" in talks on a new global agreement to tax technology firms. After the 2016 EU order, Apple CEO Tim Cook blasted the EU move as "total political crap." "The company's legal challenge claims the EU wrongly targeted profits that should be taxed in the U.S. and 'retroactively changed the rules' on how global authorities calculate what's owed to them," reports Bloomberg.