Almost three years after launching its desktop version, cross-platform browser Vivaldi has finally released its mobile app today. From a report: The brainchild of Opera's co-founder Jon von Tetzchner published an Android beta version today that brings swipe gesture for navigation, built-in note-taking functionality, and privacy controls including a no-tracking option. While the browser is in beta, I've been using it for a few days, and I haven't faced any major hiccups. Here are some of the features I enjoyed in the new mobile version: Easy bookmark management, easy navigation, plenty of option for tab management, and dark mode, screen capture, notes, and no-tracking features.

Last week, Apple published a statement in which it disputed Google's Project Zero team's findings about the worst iOS attack in history. Alex Stamos, adjunct professor at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and former CSO at Facebook, writes on Twitter: Apple's response to the worst known iOS attack in history should be graded somewhere between "disappointing" and "disgusting". First off, disputing Google's correct use of "indiscriminate" when describing a watering hole attack smacks of "it's ok, it didn't hit white people." The use of multiple exploits against an oppressed minority in an authoritarian state makes the likely outcomes *worse* than the Huffington Post example a former Apple engineer posited. It is possible that this data contributed to real people being "reeducated" or even executed. Even if we accept Apple's framing that exploiting Uyghurs isn't as big a deal as Google makes it out to be, they have no idea whether these exploits were used by the PRC in more targeted situations. Dismissing such a possibility out of hand is extremely risky.

Second, the word "China" is conspicuously absent, once again demonstrating the value the PRC gets from their leverage over the world's most valuable public company. To be fair, Google's post also didn't mention China. Their employees likely leaked attribution on background. Third, the pivot to Apple's arrogant marketing is not only tone-deaf but really rings hollow to the security community when Google did all the heavy lifting here. I'm guessing we won't hear Tim talk about how they are going to do better on stage next week. Dear Apple employees: I have worked for companies that took too long to publicly address their responsibilities. This is not a path you want to take. Apple does some incredible security work, but this kind of legal/comms driven response can undermine that work. Demand better. Michael Tsai raises further questions about the way Apple framed its statement: "A blog," rather than "a blog post"? I love how Apple is subtly trying to discredit Project Zero by implying that it's a mere blog. And let's be sure everyone knows it's affiliated with Google, the privacy bad guys, even though it's a responsible, technically focused group. Apple says: "First, the sophisticated attack was narrowly focused, not a broad-based exploit of iPhones 'en masse' as described."
Project Zero literally referred to "a small collection of hacked websites" that received "receive thousands of visitors per week." And it does seem like a particular subpopulation was targeted "en masse." The sites in question were on the public Internet; it wasn't links being sent to target particular individuals. Apple is blaming the messenger for things it didn't even say.

Apple adds: "The attack affected fewer than a dozen websites that focus on content related to the Uighur community."
Oh, I get it. Most people would consider "fewer than a dozen" to be "a small collection." But in Apple-speak, there were "a small number" of corrupt App Store binaries causing crashes, and "a small number" of MacBook Pro users experiencing butterfly keyboard problems, not to be confused with the "very small number" of iPhones that unexpectedly shut down. So, yeah, I can see why Apple wants people to know that this "small collection" doesn't mean "millions." Although there are apparently 10 million Uigurs in China. Apple adds: "Google's post, issued six months after iOS patches were released[...] It's great that Project Zero reported this in a responsible way, because now we can downplay it as old news.

With a population of over 87,000, Lower Duck Pond is the largest, friendliest, and oddest city that's not on the map. The Outline: Located somewhere on a plane of nonexistence, the rapidly growing town of Lower Duck Pond rests, isolated, without even an official city map. Its locals don't get lost, though. They know their way around quite well and discuss their comings and goings through postings on the subreddit r/HaveWeMet. The community's 87,000-plus "residents" share constant chatter about which buildings in the area need repairs, which sandwich shops have been changing up their menu, and which streets need repaving. It's not unusual for newcomers to feel confused by the whirlwind of information and every resident's seemingly picture-perfect memory of their surroundings. It helps to remember that they're all pretending.

Strange, new places do take some getting used to and it might take you a few minutes to get the hang of subreddit r/HaveWeMet's premise, where users roleplay as longtime neighbors in a non-existent town called "Lower Duck Pond." The joke's attracted over 87,000 users since the community started two years ago, making it the fastest-growing open-source fictional town on Earth. While the residents, streets, and buildings are fake, the absurdity, purity, and sense of community for its daily users has become very real. Reddit user u/Devuluh, who's really a sophomore computer science major named David (he declined to share his last name), started r/HaveWeMet in early 2017 when he was still in high school. The idea was to create an online space where everyone pretends to know each other. "The original idea for r/HaveWeMet was not a sub mimicking a fake town, but rather simply just people pretending to know each other, and later it evolved into much more than that," David told me. "If you want to have a deep involvement in r/HaveWeMet, it's almost necessary you get to know people's characters. Some even go as far as getting to know the members behind their characters, too. It's like one big universe created collaboratively, just through peoples' interactions with each other."

Top spots in App Store search results are some of the most fought over real estate in the online economy. The store generated more than $50 billion in sales last year, and the company said two-thirds of app downloads started with a search. But as Apple has become one of the largest competitors on a platform that it controls, suspicions that the company has been tipping the scales in its own favor are at the heart of antitrust complaints in the United States, Europe and Russia. From a report: Apple's apps have ranked first recently for at least 700 search terms in the store, according to a New York Times analysis of six years of search results compiled by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. Some searches produced as many as 14 Apple apps before showing results from rivals, the analysis showed. (Though competitors could pay Apple to place ads above the Apple results.) Presented with the results of the analysis, two senior Apple executives acknowledged in a recent interview that, for more than a year, the top results of many common searches in the iPhone App Store were packed with the company's own apps. That was the case even when the Apple apps were less relevant and less popular than ones from its competitors. The executives said the company had since adjusted the algorithm so that fewer of its own apps appeared at the top of search results.

The Times's analysis of App Store data -- which included rankings of more than 1,800 specific apps across 13 keywords since 2013 -- illustrated the influence as well as the opacity of the algorithms that underpin tech companies' platforms. Those algorithms can help decide which apps are installed, which articles are read and which products are bought. But Apple and other tech giants like Facebook and Google will not explain in detail how such algorithms work -- even when they blame the algorithm for problems. [...] On Aug. 21, Apple apps ranked first in 735 of roughly 60,000 search terms tracked by Sensor Tower. Most of the tracked searches were obscure, but Apple's apps ranked first for many of the popular queries. For instance, for most of June and July, Apple apps were the top result for these search terms: books, music, news, magazines, podcasts, video, TV, movies, sports, card, gift, money, credit, debit, fitness, people, friends, time, notes, docs, files, cloud, storage, message, home, store, mail, maps, traffic, stocks and weather. In July this year, the company pushed some changes to its app store algorithm to handicap its apps to help other developers, it told The New York Times.

"Biohackers took one small but important step toward the science fiction dystopia depicted in William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic," reports The Parallax, in an article shared by a Slashdot reader: The Four Thieves Vinegar biohacking collective has not figured out how to precisely mimic the memory data transfer scenario Gibson conjured, but it has built a device to enable people to store and transfer data wirelessly in their bodies. Using off-the-shelf parts and focused efforts, the biohacking group has designed and built a networked hard drive, coated in a biosafe resin, to be subcutaneously implanted in the human body. It's powered by an external battery that connects to the device via an induction coil, and its storage capacity is limited only by the size of the microSD card it contains. Michael Laufer, who founded Four Thieves Vinegar, calls it the Pegleg.

In the small hours of August 8, in an operating room within the small house, two patients received the second version of the Pegleg implant, which Laufer says is the world's first subcutaneous networked drive... To make Pegleg v2, Laufer and his team removed from the Raspberry Pi both Micro USB connectors (one for power, one for data), the Mini HDMI connector, and the camera connector. They then soldered on a second Wi-Fi chip to enable it to transfer data to another Pegleg and allow other devices to connect to it, as well as an induction coil to enable it to be powered by a wireless battery resting in a contiguous sports armband or pants pocket. They enabled Bluetooth for future functionality, inserted a 512GB microSD card for storage, and updated the firmware. Finally, they coated the hacked device in a biocompatible acrylic resin to prevent it from interacting with the recipient's body and to diffuse the heat it emanates.

At 11:44 a.m. on the same day, Laufer -- an implant newbie who has three small tattoos but no piercings -- took a seat in the surgical room... During the procedure, Laufer passed out for a few seconds and vomited a little bit. But 32 minutes later, he had a functional "Pegleg" implant.

An anonymous reader quotes MS Poweruser: Microsoft's latest Cumulative Update KB4512941 for Windows 10 May 2019 Update(1903) may be Microsoft's buggiest yet, with the update already known for being plagued with high CPU usage bugs* and crippled search.

Now reports of a new bug are filtering in, with users reporting that their screenshots all have an orange tint, no matter which method or app they use to take them.

The issue appears to be related to older video drivers, as updating drivers (or uninstalling KB4512941) appears to fix this problem.
* Microsoft has told Forbes that the spike in CPU usage "only occurs on devices that have disabled searching the web using Windows Desktop Search" -- and that they're planning to release a fix for this update-related bug in mid-September.

An anonymous reader quotes 9to5Google: Like it or not, Chromebooks do have something of an expiration date when you purchase them, namely that one day they'll stop receiving updates. Thankfully, that date is typically over five years after the Chromebook's original release. For some, however, Chrome OS has been wrongly indicating this week that their Chromebook has received its "final update" many years too early.

Just like the Chrome browser on desktop and Android, Chrome OS has four different update "channels" -- Stable, Beta, Dev, and Canary. Each one of these after Stable trades a level of stability for more rapid updates, with Canary receiving highly unstable updates almost every day. People who are bold enough to put their Chromebook on Dev or Canary have been facing an interesting new issue for the past few days. Upon restarting their device, Chrome OS immediately displays a notification warning that "this is the last automatic software and security update for this Chromebook." Of course, if you're seeing this message this week, there's a decent chance that this is not actually the case.

Instead, these final update warnings are caused by a bug in the most recent versions of Chrome OS.

A SaaS "price transparency" site at Capiche.com writes that "It's not just you: software has gotten far more expensive," citing their survey of 100 business applications. Software prices went up 62% on average over the past decade -- over three times faster than inflation, outpacing even rent and healthcare. Today's iPhone XR, by comparison, costs 25% more than 2009's iPhone 3GS (or 67% more if comparing the iPhone XS). Some apps went up far more drastically, though even if you removed the ones whose price went up more than 200%, software still on average went up 42% -- or over double the average inflation rate... [I]f you paid $9.99 a month for business software in 2009, there's a good chance you pay $16.18 for it today -- if not $19.78.

Of the hundred business apps we surveyed, sixty-seven raised their prices an average of 98% in the decade between 2009 and 2019. Fourteen lowered their prices an average of 28%, and nineteen apps kept their prices the same... Notably, if the apps you used raised their prices, odds are their prices nearly doubled over the past decade. That's perhaps even more noticeable than if all of your apps went up a few percent...

in an industry where we were long accustomed to getting more for less -- an industry where that still holds for most physical products -- software has gone up in price three times faster than inflation. That's hard to ignore.
All of their data is available in a public spreadsheet on Google Sheets, and they ultimately argue that today free "most often a strategy, a means not an end. Apple gives away software to sell devices; Google gives away storage to get you to store more so you'll upgrade."

Long-time Slashdot reader ClarkMills writes: Not just anybody but [lithium-ion battery pioneer] Jeff Dahn [et al.] released a paper detailing cells that "should be able to power an electric vehicle for over 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) and last at least two decades in grid energy storage."
The new lithium-ion battery cell has a next-generation "single crystal" NMC cathode and a new advanced electrolyte, according to the site Electrotek. "We are talking about battery cells that last two to three times longer than Tesla's current battery cells."

This month Firefox will make DNS over encrypted HTTPS the default for the U.S., with a gradual roll-out starting in late September, reports Engadget: Your online habits should be that much more private and secure, with fewer chances for DNS hijacking and activity monitoring.

Not every request will use HTTPS. Mozilla is relying on a "fallback" method that will revert to your operating system's default DNS if there's either a specific need for them (such as some parental controls and enterprise configurations) or an outright lookup failure. This should respect the choices of users and IT managers who need the feature turned off, Mozilla said. The team is watching out for potential abuses, though, and will "revisit" its approach if attackers use a canary domain to disable the technology.
Users will be given the option to opt-out, explains Mozilla's official announcement. "After many experiments, we've demonstrated that we have a reliable service whose performance is good, that we can detect and mitigate key deployment problems, and that most of our users will benefit from the greater protections of encrypted DNS traffic."

"We feel confident that enabling DNS-over-HTTPS by default is the right next step."

The B4UFLY app from America's Federal Aviation Administration tells you where you can and can't fly your drone. But a senior writer for IEEE Spectrum reports that in fact the app "ignores both local and national regulations," and concludes after some field-testing in Oregon that it's "in many situations, worse than useless." Buried in a PDF FAQ (now offline) about the app is this:

"Additionally, there may be local laws or ordinances about flying unmanned aircraft affecting your intended flight that are not reflected in this app. It is the responsibility of the operator to know the rules and fly safely at all times."

And oh boy is that a huge responsibility that the app itself doesn't even mention, and that enormous loophole means that the B4UFLY app's "good to go" indicator is not just meaningless but in fact giving you the wrong idea entirely.... You could argue that this is worse than no app at all, because the app is actively giving you bad information. You are not, in fact, good to go, and if you're already going, you should stop immediately...

When the FAA itself presents the B4UFLY app as a tool that can be used so that "recreational flyers know whether it is safe to fly their drone," that's exactly what it should do. Instead, the app provides only one very limited kind of information about recreational drone safety, without telling the user that it's on them to somehow dig up all the rest of the information that may or may not affect their flight... At the absolute minimum, the B4UFLY app should not tell users that they're "good to go" unless they are flying from an area where drone use is explicitly permitted, like national forests. Anywhere else, users should be instructed to verify that their local laws allow drone use. Is that going to be a huge annoyance that drives users away from the app? Of course. But it's the truth, and if the FAA doesn't like that, they should work with local governments to put the necessary information into the app instead.
This article inspired a suggestion from long-time Slashdot reader gurps_npc. "What should be done is that every park that is not too close to an airport or other forbidden zone should set aside a location and a time where they allow and encourage people to use drones."

dryriver writes: Growing up in the 1980s/90s I don't remember being embroiled in many "heated arguments" with youths my own age. There were small differences of opinion on various things -- whether a band is a great or not, whether a book is worth reading or whatever -- but nothing anywhere near the heated opinion battles that can be seen in every corner of the Internet today. It doesn't matter what the topic is -- music, games, films, religion, tech, history, science, politics -- people are battling each other on the internet.

And today's youth don't live in little "go to school, then go back home to your parents" cocoons anymore. You can watch them bashing each other over the head on the Internet in every computer games, software, pop culture, gaming hardware or other forum on the Internet. So the question is, when these kids grow into adults someday, will the Internet have given them the intellectual tools to understand others, and respect differences of opinions with others? Or are we looking at adults in the year 2040 or so who are very much still in "Internet combat mode" in their real world interactions?

To pose the question more bluntly: Will the Internet generation growing up today become "Generation Tolerance" or "Generation Fight", and how will the world change if the latter comes true?

schwit1 shares a Forbes article by Joe Toscano, a former experience design consultant for Google who in 2017 "decided to step away from my role consulting with Google, due to ethical concerns."

This summer he got a big surprise when he looked in Chrome's "addresses" panel at chrome://settings/addresses It turns out Google has info connecting me to my grandma (on my dad's side) who's alive and well but has never had the internet, and my grandpa (on my mom's side), who recently passed away in March 2019 and also never had the internet. This was disturbing for several reasons, the biggest of which being that neither of them had ever logged onto the internet in their lives. Neither even had the internet in their homes their entire lives! Beyond that, Google knew their exact addresses and their middle initials. I couldn't even have told you those things about my grandparents...

[T]he data wasn't manually entered by me or anyone using my account, but yet the data is associated with my account? How did that happen? The only thing I can think of is that at one point in history my grandpa gave his information to someone or some company in real life and his information was sold to Google at one point or another... But then that led me to another question: How did his data get associated with my Google account...?

Other questions I have: What other information does Google have about me/my family/others that I don't know about...?
He's now asking readers if they have any idea how Google connected him to his dead grandpa -- and whether Google is somehow creating an ancestry database.

Toscano also discovered Chrome has been creating a list of "Never Saved" passwords at chrome://settings/passwords?search=credentials even though "At no point did I tell Google to create and store a list of websites I had logged into that they didn't get access to but would like access to at some point in the future. Maybe in the Terms of Service/Privacy Policy I agreed to this, but who knows? Not the majority of us, and it's just creepy."

And in an update Toscano writes that he hopes the article will "provoke thought" about "why we willingly allow this to happen": Why is it okay that the internet is designed to be a surveillance machine? Why isn't it designed to be private by design? Is this how we want to carry on? Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's right. What would you like to see done? How would you like to see things changed?

"If you're at all concerned about the privacy of your data, you don't want to leave the default settings in place on your devices -- and that includes anything that runs Windows 10," warns a new article in Wired, listing out the "controls and options you can modify to lock down the use of your data, from the information you share with Microsoft to the access that individual apps have to your location, camera, and microphone."

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen calls the the article "a rough estimate of the degree to which my privacy can be intruded upon," adding some particularly pessimistic additional thoughts: Not just Microsoft, of course. It's safe to conclude that there are similar capabilities embedded in the software from Apple, the google, Amazon, and Facebook (and others...)

[T]here is no real boundary between the software that does the privacy intrusions, the software that controls the intrusions, and the software that tells me the state of the intrusions. Have I actually disabled that particular abuse of my privacy? Or is the software still doing it and lying to me and claiming it isn't doing it...

Or maybe it's the NSA, GRU, FBI, FSB, DHS, MSS, CIA, or any other governmental agency with a secret legal power to compel intrusions that you can't be told about...

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes VentureBeat: Google, which has already paid security researchers over $15 million since launching its bug bounty program in 2010, today increased the scope of its Google Play Security Reward Program (GPSRP). Security researchers will now be rewarded for finding bugs across all apps in Google Play with 100 million or more installs. At the same time, the company launched the Developer Data Protection Reward Program (DDPRP) in collaboration with [bug bounty platform] HackerOne. That program is for data abuses in Android apps, OAuth projects, and Chrome extensions....

Google also uses this vulnerability data to create automated checks that scan all Google Play apps for similar vulnerabilities. Affected app developers are notified via the Play Console. The App Security Improvement (ASI) program provides them with information on the vulnerability and how to fix it. In February, Google revealed that ASI has helped over 300,000 developers fix over 1,000,000 apps on Google Play.
The article also notes that Android apps and Chrome extensions found to be abusing data "will be removed from Google Play and the Chrome Web Store."

The South African government has been conducting mass surveillance on all communications in the country, reports Reclaim the Net:, citing a report from Privacy International as well as recently-revealed affidavits and other documents from former State Security Agency (SSA) director-general Arthur Fraser: Interestingly, the mass surveillance has been happening since 2008... The surveillance was supposedly designed to cover information about organized crime and acts of terrorism. It even involves surveillance on food security, water security, and even illegal financial flows.

The report also revealed that the South African government has done bulk interception of Internet traffic by way of tapping into fiber-optic cables under the sea. What is not clear though is whether the surveillance covers all Internet traffic or limited only to some of the fiber cables. The SSA said that the automated collection of data was specifically geared for foreign communications that pose threats to state security only. However, even the SSA admits to the fact that it will require human intervention to determine whether any communications that pass through the fiber cables are foreign or not. Hence, it would be difficult to distinguish between foreign and local communications.
The iAfrikan site interviewed a digital rights researcher at South Africa's amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism, whose legal filings helped bring this information to light. "We had details of the state's mass surveillance activities at least as early as 2006...." he tells the site, adding later that "The government has been quite upfront that it's collecting data from a vast number of people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing... Essentially, the State Security Agency is collecting as much haystack as it can, just in case it needs to look for a needle."

Privacy International reports that the U.K. government has also recently acknowledged their "bulk interception of internet traffic by tapping undersea fibre optic cables." The site describes the work of the two countries as "some of the most pervasive surveillance programmes in human history."

On Tuesday the University of Texas at Texas launched the fastest supercomputer at any academic facility in the world.

The computer -- named "Frontera" -- is also the fifth most-powerful supercomputer on earth. Slashdot reader aarondubrow quotes their announcement: The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas is also home to Stampede2, the second fastest supercomputer at any American university. The launch of Frontera solidifies UT Austin among the world's academic leaders in this realm...

Joined by representatives from the National Science Foundation (NSF) -- which funded the system with a $60 million award -- UT Austin, and technology partners Dell Technologies, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, DataDirect Networks, NVIDIA, IBM, CoolIT and Green Revolution Cooling, TACC inaugurated a new era of academic supercomputing with a resource that will help the nation's top researchers explore science at the largest scale and make the next generation of discoveries.

"Scientific challenges demand computing and data at the largest and most complex scales possible. That's what Frontera is all about," said Jim Kurose, assistant director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at NSF. "Frontera's leadership-class computing capability will support the most computationally challenging science applications that U.S. scientists are working on today."

Frontera has been supporting science applications since June and has already enabled more than three dozen teams to conduct research on a range of topics from black hole physics to climate modeling to drug design, employing simulation, data analysis, and artificial intelligence at a scale not previously possible.
Here's more technical details from the announcement about just how fast this supercomputer really is.

Facebook is "bringing" facial recognition to all users, the company announced Tuesday. But the EFF's surveillance litigation director and a senior staff attorney warn that despite media reports, Facebook's announcement "definitely does not say that face recognition is now opt-in for all users." Throughout Facebook's deliberately vague announcement, it takes great pains to note that the change applies only to new Facebook users and people who currently have the "tag suggestions" setting. However, Facebook migrated many, if not most, existing users from "tag suggestions" to "face recognition" in December 2017... That means this safeguard does not apply to the billions of current Facebook users who have already been moved...

Facebook should not subject any of its users to face surveillance, absent their informed opt-in consent. And Facebook should clear up the uncertainties in in its announcement before it gets any more credit than it's due for this change.
Facebook's announcement didn't even include links to the "Settings" menu where users can opt out of Facebook's facial recognition, so the EFF's article helpfully provides both mobile and desktop links. According to Facebook's own help pages, the left-side menu should include a "Face Recognition" choice where users can turn off Facebook's face recognition features.

But three different Facebook users I know have also reported that that menu choice just isn't there...

An anonymous reader quotes the website of Ireland's national public service broadcasting: Popular online reference website Wikipedia went down in several countries after the website was targeted by what it described as a "malicious attack". The server of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the site, suffered a "massive" Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the organisation's German account said in a tweet last night.

In a separate statement the Wikimedia Foundation said that the attack on the encyclopedia - one of the world's most popular websites - was "ongoing" and teams were working to restore access... Wikimedia condemned the breach of its server, saying it threatened "everyone's fundamental rights to freely access and share information."

An IKEA hide-and-seek game with 3,000 people was scheduled to take place in Glasglow, Scotland on Saturday, August 31, but police managed to put a stop to it before it even got started. From a report: The one-stop shop for everything home-related and also the ideal place for a 3,000-person hide-and-seek game. After all, the average store is about 300,000 square feet, while the world's largest IKEA is 700,000 square feet, and honestly, it's easy to imagine endless hiding spots. But unfortunately for one Facebook group, their planned trip to an IKEA in Glasgow, Scotland was cancelled after word got out about their Saturday event. Five police officers were called to the Braehead branch and remained at the store until the evening.

"People are stopping everyone who 'looks like they are here for a game of hide and seek,'" one person wrote on Facebook after stopping by the store, The Scotsman reported. The IKEA itself also had its own security personnel, and no incidents were reported. The report says that IKEA management initially allowed hide-and-seek events -- a trend that began in Belgium in 2014 -- but were eventually forced to ban the events after they began getting out of hand.

"The safety of our customers and co-workers is always our highest priority," said Rob Cooper, IKEA Glasgow Store Manager in a statement. "We were aware of an unofficial Hide and Seek Facebook event being organized to take place at our store today and have been working with the local police for support. While we appreciate playing games in one of our stores may be appealing to some, we do not allow this kind of activity to take place to ensure we are offering a safe environment and relaxed shopping experience for our customers."