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.

The Wi-Fi Alliance, the organization that oversees implementation of the Wi-Fi standard, is launching its official Wi-Fi 6 certification program. "That might sound boring, but it means the Wi-Fi 6 standard is truly ready to go, and tech companies will soon be able to advertise their products -- mostly brand new ones -- as certified to properly support Wi-Fi 6," reports The Verge. From the report: So the point of Wi-Fi 6 is to boost speeds within a crowded network. The theoretical maximum speed for Wi-Fi is increasing, too -- to 9.6 Gbps from 3.5 Gbps -- but those numbers don't really matter since you'll never get them at home. What matters is that Wi-Fi 6 has a bunch of tools allowing it to operate faster and deliver more data at once, so the speeds you actually get will be higher than before. Those gains will be most noticeable on crowded networks, where the efficiency improvements will make up for the higher Wi-Fi demands. (Wi-Fi 6 also mandates a major security improvement.)

Really, though, today's launch is largely a formality. The Wi-Fi certification program -- while important, and very much marking the beginning of the Wi-Fi 6 era -- isn't required, and companies have been rolling out Wi-Fi 6 devices for months that likely work just fine. But the Wi-Fi Alliance is made up of members of the tech industry big and small, and its actions represent what wireless features and technologies they're interested in delivering, so this is a clear sign that Wi-Fi 6 has arrived. All that said, this week's biggest news for Wi-Fi 6 has no immediate connection to the Alliance: it's that the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro go on sale, and both support Wi-Fi 6. That's going to quickly put millions of Wi-Fi 6 devices into people's hands, meaning adoption of the new tech will very suddenly be well underway.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: Advertisers on Facebook are able to completely rewrite the displayed headline for news stories, CBC News has learned, opening the door for potential disinformation to spread on the platform while using news media branding as cover. When placing an ad on the platform, one option is to include a link to a website, including links to news stories. The news story's real headline is auto-filled into the ad copy, but advertisers have the option to rewrite the headline. However, the article's website address still appears in the ad, giving the impression that the headline is the one written by the article's author. This policy raises the possibility that it could be abused by political parties or third-party advertisers during the federal election campaign. The article provides an example where the UK's Conservative Party ran an ad containing a BBC article whose headline was, "14 billion pound cash boost for schools." However, the actual BBC story is headlined "School spending: Multi-billion pound cash boost announced," and instead put the number at 7.1 billion pounds, criticizing the government's use of 14 billion pound figure as not the usual way of calculating spending.

Facebook is aware of the issue and said it is planning changes. "We have a system that gives publishers control over how their links appear on Facebook. We're working to put additional safeguards in place by the end of this year to make sure advertisers don't misuse this tool," said a Facebook spokesperson in an email to CBC News.

FastCompany magazine editor and Slashdot reader harrymcc writes: On the night of October 26, 1960, CBS aired a special -- coproduced with MIT -- about an emerging field of technology called 'artificial intelligence.' It featured demos -- like a checkers-playing computer and one that wrote scripts for TV westerns -- along with sound bits from leading scientists on the question of whether machines would ever think. It was well reviewed at the time and then mostly forgotten. But it's available on YouTube, and surprisingly relevant to today's AI challenges, 59 years later.

Amazon.com has adjusted its product-search system to more prominently feature listings that are more profitable for the company, WSJ reported Monday citing people who worked on the project, a move, contested internally, that could favor Amazon's own brands. From the report: Late last year, these people said, Amazon optimized the secret algorithm that ranks listings so that instead of showing customers mainly the most-relevant and best-selling listings when they search -- as it had for more than a decade -- the site also gives a boost to items that are more profitable for the company. The adjustment, which the world's biggest online retailer hasn't publicized, followed a yearslong battle between executives who run Amazon's retail businesses in Seattle and the company's search team, dubbed A9, in Palo Alto, Calif., which opposed the move, the people said.

Any tweak to Amazon's search system has broad implications because the giant's rankings can make or break a product. The site's search bar is the most common way for U.S. shoppers to find items online, and most purchases stem from the first page of search results, according to marketing analytics firm Jumpshot. The issue is particularly sensitive because the U.S. and the European Union are examining Amazon's dual role -- as marketplace operator and seller of its own branded products. An algorithm skewed toward profitability could steer customers toward thousands of Amazon's in-house products that deliver higher profit margins than competing listings on the site. Further reading: Amazon Falls After Report That the Company Prioritized Profit in Its Search Listings.

The personal records of most of Ecuador's population, including children, has been left exposed online due to a misconfigured database, ZDNet reported Monday. From the report: The database, an Elasticsearch searver, was discovered two weeks ago by vpnMentor security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, who shared their findings exclusively with ZDNet. Together, we worked to analyze the leaking data, verify its authenticity, and contact the server owner. The leaky server is one of the, if not the biggest, data breaches in Ecuador's history, a small South American country with a population of 16.6 million citizens. The Elasticsearch server contained a total of approximately 20.8 million user records, a number larger than the country's total population count. The bigger number comes from duplicate records or older entries, containing the data of deceased persons.

Password manager LastPass has released an update last week to fix a security bug that exposes credentials entered on a previously visited site. From a report: The bug was discovered last month by Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher with Project Zero, Google's elite security and bug-hunting team. LastPass, believed to be the most popular password manager app today, fixed the reported issue in version 4.33.0, released last week, on September 12. If users have not enabled an auto-update mechanism for their LastPass browser extensions or mobile apps, they're advised to perform a manual update as soon as possible. This is because yesterday, Ormandy published details about the security flaw he found. The security researcher's bug report walks an attacker through the steps necessary to reproduce the bug.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Funding online content with small consumer payments rather than intrusive and privacy-compromising ads has for years been a goal for many internet theorists and publishers. "We're at a point where it's clear there's kinds of negative side effects for people and even for democracy of the data-driven ad economy that funds the internet," says Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. Now, Mozilla, Creative Commons, and a new micropayment startup have announced a $100 million grant program to finally bring that dream to fruition.

The program, called Grant for the Web, will give roughly $20 million per year for five years to content sites, open source infrastructure developers, and others building around Web Monetization, a proposed browser standard for micropayments. "When we started Coil, Coil was essentially the first Web Monetization provider," says founder and CEO Stefan Thomas. Coil users pay a fixed monthly fee that's distributed among sites they visit that have Web Monetization enabled, such as the web development site CSS-Tricks, based on how long they visit the sites. The underlying technology supports other providers routing user funding as well.

Zach Dorfman, Jenna McLaughlin, and Sean D. Naylor, reporting for Yahoo News: On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government. As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack their bags, the Kremlin protested the treatment of its diplomats, and denied that those compounds -- sometimes known as the "dachas" -- were anything more than vacation spots for their personnel. The Obama administration's public rationale for the expulsions and closures -- the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia in several decades -- was to retaliate for Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But there was another critical, and secret, reason why those locations and diplomats were targeted.

Both compounds, and at least some of the expelled diplomats, played key roles in a brazen Russian counterintelligence operation that stretched from the Bay Area to the heart of the nation's capital , according to former U.S. officials. The operation, which targeted FBI communications, hampered the bureau's ability to track Russian spies on U.S. soil at a time of increasing tension with Moscow, forced the FBI and CIA to cease contact with some of their Russian assets, and prompted tighter security procedures at key U.S. national security facilities in the Washington area and elsewhere, according to former U.S. officials. It even raised concerns among some U.S. officials about a Russian mole within the U.S. intelligence community. "It was a very broad effort to try and penetrate our most sensitive operations," said a former senior CIA official.

American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications and had successfully tracked devices used by elite FBI surveillance teams. Officials also feared that the Russians may have devised other ways to monitor U.S. intelligence communications, including hacking into computers not connected to the internet. Senior FBI and CIA officials briefed congressional leaders on these issues as part of a wide-ranging examination on Capitol Hill of U.S. counterintelligence vulnerabilities.

A man named Roger was surprised to hear from an old college friend after all these years, reports the Philippine Daily Inquirer -- and even more surprised to find out why. What she wanted to know was why he gave her number to an online lending company that was hounding him at that time. The company told her that he was in debt and needed to pay up. Roger took out a loan using the company's app back in May, after seeing an ad on Facebook. His payment had been overdue for a week when the company contacted his college friend. But in fact he didn't give the company her number. The company tapped his contact list, then messaged his college friend to get him to make good on his debt. The company also called his wife and threatened to report him to his boss so he would lose his job. Roger, 26, has since paid back the loan. And he vowed to never use the app again...

Roger is not alone. The National Privacy Commission (NPC) has reported receiving 921 formal complaints since July 2018 about online lending companies who publicly shame borrowers to get them to pay up... Three companies are facing cases filed by the NPC for violating the Data Privacy Act of 2012... Privacy Commissioner Raymund Enriquez Liboro earlier released copies of the investigators' fact-finding reports, which recommended criminal prosecution of the board members of the three companies. "The investigation determined that their business practice specifically targets the privacy of persons, practically making a profit out of people's fear of losing face and dignity. These unethical practices simply have no place in a civilized society and must stop," Liboro then said...

In an affidavit sent to the NPC, one complainant said Fast Cash threatened to post her selfies on Facebook. Another said the CashLending app changed her profile picture on Facebook to an obscene picture... None of these would have happened unless the users gave permission to these apps. But many users backed into a corner by circumstance didn't have a choice. Roger, for one, said he could not use the app unless he agreed that the company could access his contacts... [T]he NPC argued that although the users gave their approval, the lack of easily understandable and clear information, among other factors, meant that it was not a "valid" consent... Among the charges filed against the companies are noncompliance with the legal requirements of processing personal data, as well as malicious and unauthorized disclosure. Their operators may face imprisonment of up to seven years and fines of not more than P5 million [about $97,000 U.S. dollars] under the Data Privacy Act of 2012.
One person who filed a formal complaint with the government later received a discouraging text message from the company in question. "Before you sue us, we already [sent] a text blast to all of your contacts. We know your home address, your office and even your ugly face. Good luck with your privacy law."

In the future Google will promote news articles that feature original reporting in its search results, the Hill reports. "While we typically show the latest and most comprehensive version of a story in news results, we've made changes to our products globally to highlight articles that we identify as significant original reporting," Richard Gingras, Google's vice president of news, said in a blog post. "Such articles may stay in a highly visible position longer. This prominence allows users to view the original reporting while also looking at more recent articles alongside it." On top of the change for individual articles, Google's search raters will also begin identifying outlets that have a track record of original reporting in order to boost their content in search results...

For Google, the shift will mostly come in a change in guidelines for the 10,000 employees at the company who operate its search algorithms. The guidelines will now emphasize promoting an article that "provides information that would not otherwise have been known had the article not revealed it." And it will push raters to boost outlets with strong journalistic reputations. "Prestigious awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize award, or a history of high quality original reporting are strong evidence of positive reputation," the new guidelines read.

H&âOEouml;vding spent four years developing their next-generation bicycle helmet, the Metro reports: Easier to use, adjustable and enabled with Bluetooth technology, the helmet, according to H&âOEouml;vding 's CEO Frederik Carling, is the world's safest. Donning advanced airbag tech and functions such as the ability to contact next-of-kin in the event of an accident, Frederik and the team spent years surveying people to make the kit as bespoke, safe and desirable as possible. Fredrik says: "Our surveys of cyclists in seven major European cities show that 70% would cycle more if they felt safer. We have focused on this and want to contribute to greater safety."

New features include the new patented airbag, along with an upgraded battery that can last for up to 15 hours. An iOS and Android compatible app allows the company to gather data relating to where urban cyclists experience the most accidents. The result? Data that can be used to argue for more cycling infrastructure and, of course, tech that saves more lives...

When the design-savvy headgear is activated, it registers movements 200 times a second and in the event of an accident, is inflated in 0.1 seconds to enclose the head and hold the cyclist's neck in place. 185,000 cyclists currently use it, with over 4,000 saying that it had made a significant difference during close calls.

In addition to all its safety features, Carling hopes that his helmet can be used to help the environment in the long run. "Cycling may be the answer to many of the challenges relating to the environment, congestion in cities and health, and we want to take cyclist protection to the next level," he says.

Google's previewing something new in the SDK for their Dart programming language: machine learning-powered automatic code completion.

ZDNet reports: ML Complete works with the editor to offer developers completions as they type their code. It's also meant to help developers quickly explore lists of completions that are likely to be what they want next, rather than having to sort through options alphabetically. "With code completions, developers can both avoid misspellings and explore APIs by typing the beginning of expected symbols and choosing from the offered completions," explains Google project manager Michael Thomsen in his article, 'Announcing Dart 2.5: Supercharged development'.

Google's take on AI-powered code completion for Dart relies on a model trained on a large body of Dart code on GitHub. The model is powered by Google's TensorFlow Lite deep-learning framework and can predict what developers will type next as they're editing code.
ML Complete is built into the Dart analyzer, meaning the preview is available in "Dart-enabled editors" including Android Studio, IntelliJ, and VS Code.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Facebook's plan to revolutionize the global economy with its version of bitcoin hit another snag this week when the French finance minister said the country would block the Libra cryptocurrency if it launches as planned in 2020. Libra, which is scheduled to launch in the second half of next year, is designed to be a fast and easy way for people to transfer money around the world, using the company's Messenger and WhatsApp services. Bruno Le Maire, speaking at a cryptocurrency conference organized by the Organization for Economic Development (OECD) on Thursday, didn't mince words when it came to the threat posed by Libra to the stability of the French economy by undermining the influence of the euro.

"The monetary sovereignty of countries is at stake [from] possible privatization of money by a sole actor with more than 2 billion users on the planet," he said. Le Maire said that during times of economic crisis, citizens may abandon national currencies in favor of Libra, making it very difficult for governments to manage the economy. "All these concerns around Libra are serious. So I want to say this with a lot of clarity: In these conditions, we cannot authorize the development of Libra on European soil," Le Maire added.

DevNull127 shares some of the key findings from The New Stack's second annual "Open Source Programs in the Enterprise" survey, co-sponsored by VMware and in partnership with The Linux Foundation's TODO Group: Companies with initiatives to promote open source overwhelmingly say these efforts are improving their companies' software practices. The results [of the survey] show that proponents of free and open-source software (FOSS) have moved to the next phases of open source adoption, widening its usage within the enterprise while keeping alive the spirit and ethos of non-commercial software communities.

69% are at least sometimes using open-source code in commercial products, with that figure jumping to 83% among technology companies -- within three percentage points of the same survey's results last year. And most (79%) Internet-scale technology companies with more than 10,000 employees already have an open-source management program, which is a slight increase compared to last year. That stability shows that the next big changes in enterprise open source will instead involve its scope and how much enterprises emphasize giving back to the community.

Increased innovation rose to become the most cited benefit of open-source programs. Participants said development speed, technology flexibility, and total cost of ownership are the top three. Lower support costs were also seen as a likely benefit. But open-source programs are also improving how software development is handled. In response to one of our new questions, 81% of respondents say their program has had a positive impact on their company's software practices. In an open-ended follow-up question, code reviews and license-compliance processes were repeatedly cited as specific practices that were improved as a direct result of the program. Furthermore, code quality and reduced costs were often cited as specific benefits coming from improved software practices. While "quality" is often hard to define, many respondents say newly-instituted code reviews have been a specific positive impact on their company's software practices. The full dataset can be found here.

Hot power cables snake through tunnels and channel under cities all around the world. All it takes is a fan/air coil to capture that heat for buildings. Researchers and a power company in the UK calculate that the essentially free heat could warm thousands of London homes. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Underneath London's bustling streets lie several kilometers of 2.5-meter-wide concrete tunnels lined with power distribution cables that can reach blistering temperatures. To cool the tunnels, vertical shafts spaced out every kilometer or two supply fresh air and eject hot air out into the open. Researchers at London South Bank University (LSBU) want to put that waste heat to use. A typical 1.8-km tunnel stretch between ventilation shafts produces 400 kilowatts of heat, enough to heat 100 homes or a small commercial office, they have found in a preliminary analysis done with the city's electricity network operator UK Power Networks.

This heat recovery scheme would have a third of the carbon emissions of a gas boiler delivering the same amount of heat. The researchers presented this work at the International Congress of Refrigeration in August. [...] A heat exchanger installed at the supply shaft reduced cable and tunnel air temperatures by 8 degrees Celsius, but the amount of heat recovered varied from about 100 kilowatts in colder months to 460 kW in high heat. Installed at the exhaust shaft, the system produced around 400 kW during all six months.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: VW Group is now consolidating its software all under one new internal group, similar to the way that financial services or the ride-hailing Moia exist alongside individual vehicle brands. And that means in the future, a single unified automotive OS will run on everything from a VW Polo to an Audi A8. With thoughts of existing infotainment operating systems like Android, Automotive Grade Linux, or QNX, I asked Christian Senger, who is responsible for VW Group's Digital Car and Services division, to clarify. "What is an operating system in the automotive world? Today we have an extremely different setup if it's infotainment, if it's the chassis, the powertrain," Senger explained, and that has led to some odd critical dependencies in some cars. For instance, some models simply won't run if the infotainment system is broken; the navigation GPS provides the vehicle's master time counter, and without that, the powertrain won't function. "Whenever we exchange something, we have an impact on everything. What we are now doing with these so-called enabling functions is taking them out of customer functions, putting it in a middleware software layer. And this is what we call an operating system," he explained.

Eventually, that's going to mean a single software stack common across VW Group's vehicles -- everything from the instrument displays and the infotainment to powertrain and chassis management (think traction and stability control or advanced driver assistance systems), plus a common connected car infrastructure and cloud. However, each brand will still get to develop its own UX in the same way that Porsche and Audi can build very different-looking vehicles from the same MLB Evo toolbox. Senger also revealed that VW Group will be using Android for future versions of the MIB infotainment platform, in large part because of the robust third-party app ecosystem with that OS versus Linux. However, it will be a while yet before the full effects of this strategy are felt. Senger says that the as-yet unnamed organization should be fully staffed -- somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 employees -- by 2025.

The University of Alabama is taking an extraordinary, Orwellian step to reward students who attend games -- and stay until the fourth quarter -- by using location-tracking technology from students' phones to see who skips out and who stays. If students stay until the fourth quarter, they will be rewarded with improved access to tickets to the SEC championship game and to the College Football Playoff semifinals and championship game, which Alabama is trying to reach for the fifth consecutive season. The New York Times reports: Greg Byrne, Alabama's athletic director, said privacy concerns rarely came up when the program was being discussed with other departments and student groups. Students who download the Tide Loyalty Points app will be tracked only inside the stadium, he said, and they can close the app -- or delete it -- once they leave the stadium. "If anybody has a phone, unless you're in airplane mode or have it off, the cellular companies know where you are," he said.

The creator of the app, FanMaker, runs apps for 40 colleges, including Clemson, Louisiana State and Southern California, which typically reward fans with gifts like T-shirts. The app it created for Alabama is the only one that tracks the locations of its students. That Alabama would want it is an example of how even a powerhouse program like the Crimson Tide is not sheltered from college football's decline in attendance, which sank to a 22-year low last season. The Tide Loyalty Points program works like this: Students, who typically pay about $10 for home tickets, download the app and earn 100 points for attending a home game and an additional 250 for staying until the fourth quarter. Those points augment ones they garner mostly from progress they have made toward their degrees -- 100 points per credit hour. (A regular load would be 15 credits per semester, or 1,500 points.) Adam Schwartz, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog, said it was "very alarming" that a public university -- an arm of the government -- was tracking its students' whereabouts.

"Why should packing the stadium in the fourth quarter be the last time the government wants to know where students are?" Schwartz said, adding that it was "inappropriate" to offer an incentive for students to give up their privacy. "A public university is a teacher, telling students what is proper in a democratic society."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Huawei's chief executive has proposed selling its current 5G know-how to a Western firm as a way to address security concerns voiced by the U.S. and others about its business. Ren Zhengfei said the buyer would be free to "change the software code." That would allow any flaws or supposed backdoors to be addressed without Huawei's involvement. Huawei has repeatedly denied claims that it would help the Chinese government spy on or disrupt other countries' telecoms systems, and says it is a private enterprise owned by its workers.

Huawei's founder Ren Zhengfei made the proposal in interviews with the Economist and the New York Times. It would include ongoing access to the firm's existing 5G patents, licenses, code, technical blueprints and production engineering knowledge. "[Huawei is] open to sharing our 5G technologies and techniques with U.S. companies, so that they can build up their own 5G industry," the NYT quoted Ren as saying. "This would create a balanced situation between China, the U.S. and Europe." Speaking to the Economist he added: "A balanced distribution of interests is conducive to Huawei's survival." A spokesman for Huawei has confirmed the quotes are accurate and the idea represents a "genuine proposal." South Korea's Samsung and China's ZTE are other alternatives. "Huawei misunderstands the underlying problem," Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, from the European Centre for International Political Economy, told the BBC. "The issue is not the trustworthiness of Huawei as a vendor but the legal obligations that the Chinese government imposes on it.

"China's National Intelligence Law requires Chinese businesses and citizens to surrender any data or 'communication tools' they may have access to, under strict punitive sanctions," said Lee-Makiyama. "Any equipment or software that Huawei licenses to an U.S. entity would still fall under this obligation, and there is no way that the licensing entity or the intelligence agencies could scrutinize millions of lines of code for potential backdoors."

Newer Guy writes: Entercom Communications, one of the USA's largest radio broadcasting companies, has been hit with a ransomware-like incident. It apparently came in from a computer in the programming department and has taken out the company's email system and servers. All their radio stations across the country have been affected. The ransomware people demanded half a million dollars to restore things; Entercom refused to pay.