Samsung has announced a new prototype key-value SSD that is compatible with the first industry standard API for key-value storage devices. "Earlier this year, the Object Drives working group of Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) published version 1.0 of the Key Value Storage API Specification," reports AnandTech. "Samsung has added support for this new API to their ongoing key-value SSD project." From the report: Samsung has been working on key-value SSDs for quite a while, and they have been publicly developing open-source software to support KV SSDs for over a year, including the basic libraries and drivers needed to access KV SSDs as well as a sample benchmarking tool and a Ceph backend. The prototype drives they have previously discussed have been based on their PM983 datacenter NVMe drives with TLC NAND, using custom firmware to enable the key-value interface. Those drives support key lengths from 4 to 255 bytes and value lengths up to 2MB, and it is likely that Samsung's new prototype is based on the same hardware platform and retains similar size limits.

Samsung's Platform Development Kit software for key-value SSDs originally supported their own software API, but now additionally supports the vendor-neutral SNIA standard API. The prototype drives are currently available for companies that are interested in developing software to use KV SSDs. Samsung's KV SSDs probably will not move from prototype status to being mass production products until after the corresponding key-value command set extension to NVMe is finalized, so that KV SSDs can be supported without needing a custom NVMe driver. The SNIA standard API for key-value drives is a high-level transport-agnostic API that can support drives using NVMe, SAS or SATA interfaces, but each of those protocols needs to be extended with key-value support.

"As the promise of autonomous machines lags the underlying technology, the growing need for human robot-minders could juice the remote workforce," reports The Wall Street Journal. An anonymous reader shares excerpts from the report: Across industries, engineers are building atop work done a generation ago by designers of military drones. Whether it's terrestrial delivery robots, flying delivery drones, office-patrolling security robots, inventory-checking robots in grocery stores or remotely piloted cars and trucks, the machines that were supposed to revolutionize everything by operating autonomously turn out to require, at the very least, humans minding them from afar. Until the techno-utopian dream of full automation comes into effect -- and frankly, there's no guarantee that will ever happen -- there will be plenty of jobs for humans, just not ones their parents would recognize. Whether the humans in charge are in the same city or thousands of miles away, the proliferation of not-yet-autonomous technologies is driving a tiny but rapidly growing workforce.

Companies working with remote-controlled robots know there are risks, and try to mitigate them in a few ways. Some choose only to operate slow-moving machines in simple environments -- as in Postmates's sidewalk delivery -- so that even the worst disaster isn't all that bad. More advanced systems require 'human supervisory control,' where the robot or vehicle's onboard AI does the basic piloting but the human gives the machine navigational instructions and other feedback. Prof. Cummings says this technique is safer than actual remote operation, since safety isn't dependent on a perfect wireless connection or a perfectly alert human operator. For every company currently working on self-driving cars, almost every state mandates they must either have a safety driver present in the vehicle or be able to control it from afar. Guidelines from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest the same. Phantom Auto is betting the shift to remote operation might become an important means of employment for people who used to drive for a living. Other requirements for our remote-controlled future include "a tolerance for working for a lower wage, since remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets," the report adds.

"Another might be a youth spent gaming. When Postmates managers interview potential delivery-robot pilots like Diana Villalobos, they ask whether or not they played videogames in their youth. 'When I was a kid, my parents always said, 'Stop playing videogames!' But it came in handy,' she says."

Twitter is disabling the ability to send tweets via SMS messages after an incident last week when the company's CEO Twitter account got hacked via this feature. From a report: The social network said the move is only temporary, but did not provide a timeline for the feature's reactivation. Twitter blamed the whole issue on mobile networks and "vulnerabilities that need to be addressed by mobile carriers."

According to Avast security researchers, over 600,000 GPS trackers manufactured by a Chinese company are using the same default password of "123456. "They say that hackers can abuse this password to hijack users' accounts, from where they can spy on conversations near the GPS tracker, spoof the tracker's real location, or get the tracker's attached SIM card phone number for tracking via GSM channels," reports BleepingComputer. From the report: Avast researchers said they found these issues in T8 Mini, a GPS tracker manufactured by Shenzhen i365-Tech, a Chinese IoT device maker. However, as their research advanced, Avast said the issues also impacted over 30 other models of GPS trackers, all manufactured by the same vendor, and some even sold as white-label products, bearing the logos of other companies. All models shared the same backend infrastructure, which consisted of a cloud server to which GPS trackers reported, a web panel where customers logged in via their browsers to check the tracker's location, and a similar mobile app, which also connected to the same cloud server. But all this infrastructure was full of holes.

While Avast detailed several issues in its report, the biggest was the fact that all user accounts (either from the mobile app or web panel) relied on a user ID and a password that were easy to guess. The user IDs were based on the GPS tracker's IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) code and was sequential, while the password was the same for all devices -- 123456. This means that a hacker can launch automated attacks against Shenzhen i365-Tech's cloud server by going through all user ID's one by one, and using the same 123456 password, and take over users' accounts. While users can change the default after they log into their account for the first time, Avast said that during a scan of over four million user IDs, it found that more than 600,000 accounts were still using the default password.

The not-so-widely-used trusted face smart unlock feature has officially been removed from Android, news blog Android Police reported this week. From the report: Trusted face was added in 2014 and has been accessible to users on all Android devices until recently. Now, it's completely gone from stock and OEM devices, running Android 10 or below. The feature was accessible under Settings -> Security -> Smart Lock -> Trusted face. It didn't use any biometric data for security, instead just relying on your face to unlock your device. A photo could easily fool it. The writing was on the wall for its removal: It was broken on Android Q Beta 6 and we know Google has been working on a more secure face authentication method. But it's not only Android 10 that no longer has the Trusted face option. We've verified that the option is gone from the OnePlus 6T, Samsung Galaxy S9 and S10, Nokia 3.2, all of which are running Android Pie stable.

hackingbear writes: A team of researchers at China's Zhejiang University were able to create a gel that makes tooth enamel repair itself, they wrote in the science journal Science Advances, a development that could spell the end of fillings as an (unreliable) method to repair cavities which are one of the most prevalent chronic diseases in humans. The gel succeeded in making the enamel repair itself within only 48 hours. Though it now only manages to generate a layer of about 3 micrometres -- about 400 times thinner than undamaged enamel, the researcher says the gel could be repeatedly applied to build up this repair layer. The team is now testing the gel in mice and hopes to later test it in people.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Image and video manipulation powered by deep learning, or so-called "deepfakes," represent a strange and horrifying facet of a promising new field. If we're going to crack down on these creepy creations, we'll need to fight fire with fire; Facebook, Microsoft, and many others are banding together to help make machine learning capable of detecting deepfakes -- and they want you to help. Though the phenomenon is still new, we are nevertheless in an arms race where the methods of detection vie with the methods of creation. Ever more convincing fakes appear regularly, and though while they are frequently benign, the possibility of having your face flawlessly grafted into a compromising position is very much there -- and many a celebrity has already had it done to them.

Facebook, as part of a coalition with Microsoft, the Partnership for AI, and several universities including Oxford, Berkeley, and MIT, is working to empower the side of good with better detection techniques. "The most interesting advances in AI have happened when there's a clear benchmark on a dataset to write papers against," said Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer in a media call yesterday. The dataset for object recognition might be millions of images of ordinary objects, while the dataset for voice transcription would be hours of different kinds of speech. But there's no such set for deepfakes.

Developers have come to accept that, without warning, Apple can make their work obsolete by announcing a new app or feature that essentially copies their ideas. Some apps have simply buckled under the pressure. The Washington Post: Clue, a popular app women use to track their periods, has risen to near the top of Apple's Health and Fitness category. It could be downhill from here. Apple plans this month to incorporate some of Clue's core functionality such as fertility and period prediction into its own Health app that comes pre-installed in every iPhone and is free, unlike Clue, which earns money by selling subscriptions and services in its free app. Apple's past incorporation of functionality included in other third-party apps has often led to their demise. Clue's new threat shows how Apple plays a dual role in the app economy: provider of access to independent apps and giant competitor to them.

Developers have come to accept that, without warning, Apple can make their work obsolete by announcing a new app or feature that uses or incorporates their ideas. Some apps have simply buckled under the pressure, in some cases shutting down. They generally don't sue Apple because of the difficulty and expense in fighting the tech giant -- and the consequences they might face from being dependent on the platform. The imbalance of power between Apple and the apps on its platform could turn into a rare chink in the company's armor as regulators and lawmakers put the dominance of big technology companies under an antitrust microscope. When Apple made a flashlight part of its operating system in 2013, it rendered instantly redundant a myriad apps that offered that functionality. Everything from the iPhone's included "Measure" app to its built-in animated emoji were originally apps in the App Store.

Garabito writes: Free Software advocate Richard M. Stallman gave a talk at Microsoft Campus yesterday. Stallman was invited by Microsoft Research. Stallman's talk was related -- as most of his talks -- with Free Software, Privacy and the GPLv3. He also had a list of small requests to Microsoft: "make Github push users to better software license hygiene, make hardware manufacturers to publish their hardware specs, make it easier to workaround Secure Boot." While Microsoft has changed its attitude toward Open Source Software in the last years, this does not mean RMS has made peace with Microsoft: "If you're wondering whether Stallman's distaste for Microsoft has lessened over the years, his personal home page makes it clear that it has not".

A change Apple is making to improve privacy in an upcoming version of its iPhone operating system has alarmed an unlikely group of software makers: developers of privacy-focused encrypted messaging apps. The Information (paywalled): They warn the change, which is already available in public test versions of iOS 13, could end up undermining the privacy goals that prompted it in the first place. The Information previously reported that the technical change Apple is making to its next operating systems, iOS 13, has sparked concern at Facebook, which believes it will have to make significant modifications to encrypted messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp to comply. But a much wider group of developers of encrypted messaging apps -- including Signal, Wickr, Threema and Wire -- is scrambling to overhaul their software so that key privacy features continue to work. Apple told The Information on Wednesday in a statement that it is working with the developers to resolve their concerns. "We've heard feedback on the API changes introduced in iOS 13 to further protect user privacy and are working closely with iOS developers to help them implement their feature requests," an Apple spokesperson said.

Hackers working for the Chinese government have broken into telecoms networks to track Uighur travelers in Central and Southeast Asia, Reuters reported, citing two intelligence officials and two security consultants who investigated the attacks. From a report: The hacks are part of a wider cyber-espionage campaign targeting "high-value individuals" such as diplomats and foreign military personnel, the sources said. But China has also prioritized tracking the movements of ethnic Uighurs, a minority mostly Muslim group considered a security threat by Beijing. China is facing growing international criticism over its treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang. Members of the group have been subject to mass detentions in what China calls "vocational training" centers and widespread state surveillance. Beijing's alleged cyberspace attacks against Uighurs show how it is able to pursue those policies beyond its physical borders.

The e-commerce giant has blanketed the U.S. with warehouses and package-sorting centers, flooded the streets with vans and taken to the sky. From a report: Amazon's recent breakup with longtime shipping partner FedEx shows how far the e-commerce giant has come in creating its own delivery network. Over the years, Amazon has played down its ambitions. But as consumers flock to its site for everything from toilet paper to TVs, Amazon has quietly blanketed the nation with hundreds of sprawling suburban warehouses and neighborhood package-sorting centers, flooded the streets with tens of thousands of vans and even taken to the airways. The costly effort is enabling Amazon to control how goods reach its customers -- and increasingly turning it from a customer of delivery companies into a rival.

The 2013 holiday season was a turning point for Amazon, after orders overwhelmed carriers in the U.S. and led to late packages and upset customers. Since then, Amazon has multiplied the number of fulfillment, sorting and other delivery facilities from about 65 to roughly 400, according to an analysis of data from logistics consultant MWPVL; before 2005, it just had three fulfillment centers for the entire country, MWPVL said. Amazon has planted facilities near city centers across the country to be as close to each customer as possible. That has enabled Amazon to deliver more packages to doorsteps within a day and cater to demanding online shoppers. This year it started to shift the standard free two-day shipping option for its Prime members to one day.

WeWork's parent company is weighing a dramatic reduction in its valuation [alternative source] as it aims to go public while facing widespread skepticism over its business model and corporate governance, WSJ reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: We is considering putting a price tag on its IPO that would value it somewhere in the $20 billion range, potentially at the low end, these people said, less than half of the $47 billion mark where it last raised private capital. Adam Neumann, We's co-founder and chief executive, flew to Tokyo last week to meet one of the company's biggest investors, SoftBank Group Chief Executive Masayoshi Son, and members of his team, the people said. There, they discussed the possibility of an additional infusion of capital, multiple people briefed on the meeting said.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shares a report from The New York Times commemorating Sally Floyd, a computer scientist who recently passed away at the age of 69 from metastatic gall bladder cancer. "Dr. Floyd was best known as one of the inventors of Random Early Detection, or RED, an algorithm widely used in the internet," reports The New York Times. "Though not readily visible to internet users, it helps traffic on the network flow smoothly during periods of overload." From the report: The internet consists of a series of linked routers. When computers communicate with one another through the internet, they divide the information they intend to exchange into packets of data, which are sent to the network in a sequence. A router examines each packet it receives, then sends it on to its intended destination. But when routers receive more packets than they can handle immediately, they queue those packets in a holding area called a buffer, which can increase the delay in transmitting data. Moreover, the buffer has a limited capacity, so if the router continually receives traffic at a higher rate than it can forward, at some point it will discard incoming traffic. For all their ingenuity, the creators of the internet did not foresee some of the difficulties that arose as the network grew.

Well into the 1980s, the internet frequently experienced a period of huge degradation in performance known as a congestion collapse. Here the network's capacity was consumed by computers repeatedly transmitting packets, which routers were forced to discard because of overload. Dr. Floyd's Random Early Detection was an enhancement of work done in the 1980s byVan Jacobson, a computer scientist whose scheme for signaling computers to slow down is often credited with saving the internet from collapse in the '80s and '90s. Dr. Floyd and Dr. Jacobson developed RED together. "With RED, a router would generate a signal saying, 'I've got enough backlog that I'm going to tell senders I'm backed up,'" said Vern Paxson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who collaborated on research with Dr. Floyd. This meant that by discarding the occasional data packet earlier, routers could often avoid getting completely clogged.

BoogieChile writes: "Nuanced" in this case meaning: they don't need it. A discussion paper on Australia's Data Sharing and Release Legislative Reforms "tweaks" proposed new Data Sharing and Release legislation by removing the requirement for people to consent to the sharing of personal information. "Instead, we are placing the responsibility on Data Custodians and Accredited Users to safely and respectfully share personal information where reasonably required for a legitimate objective," it says.

The paper says that following feedback, the government has "nuanced" its position on consent. "While consent is important in certain situations, the societal outcomes of fair and unbiased government policy, research, and programs can outweigh the benefits of consent, provided privacy is protected," it says. "The Office of the National Data Commissioner will encourage the use of consent where appropriate when applying the Data Sharing Principles, although the legislation will not require it in all circumstances." According to the government, requiring consent for all data sharing will lead to biased data that delivers the wrong outcomes.

"The Data Sharing and Release legislation is about improving government policy and research by helping government and researchers use a better evidence base. If we required consent, then data would only be shared where consent was given," the paper says. "This will skew the data which is shared, leaving it unfit for many important purposes in the public benefit; it also runs the risk of leading to flawed policy and research which impacts negatively on society."

Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that he and his colleagues have created a solar-powered device that uses porous crystalline material, known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), to suck water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air and then release it as liquid water. Science Magazine reports: One recent market report predicted that sales of MOFs for applications including storing and detecting gases will balloon to $410 million annually over the next 5 years, up from $70 million this year. "Ten years ago, MOFs showed promise for a lot of applications," says Omar Farha, a MOF chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "Now, that promise has become a reality." One application is Yaghi's, which he hopes will help provide drinking water for the estimated one-third of the world's population living in water-stressed regions. Yaghi and his colleagues first developed a zirconium-based MOF in 2014 that could harvest and release water. But at $160 per kilogram, zirconium is too expensive for bulk use. So, last year, his team came up with an alternative called MOF-303, based on aluminum, which costs just $3 per kilogram. In the desert of Arizona, Yaghi and his team placed their MOF in a small, clear plastic container. They kept it open to the air at night, allowing the MOF to absorb water vapor. They then closed the container and exposed the MOF to sunlight, which drove liquid water from it -- but the harvest was only about 0.2 liters per kilogram of MOF per day.

At last week's meeting of the American Chemical Society and in the 27 August issue of ACS Central Science, Yaghi reported that his team has devised a new and far more productive water harvester. By exploiting MOF-303's ability to fill and empty its pores in just minutes, the team can make the new device complete dozens of cycles daily. Supported by a solar panel to power a fan and heater, which speed the cycles, the device produces up to 1.3 liters of water per kilogram of MOF per day from desert air. Yaghi expects further improvements to boost that number to 8 to 10 liters per day. Last year, he formed a company called Water Harvesting that this fall plans to release a microwave-size device able to provide up to 8 liters per day. The company promises a scaled-up version next year that will produce 22,500 liters per day, enough to supply a small village. "We're making water mobile," Yaghi says. "It's like taking a wired phone and making a wireless phone."

Google and its industry allies are making a late bid to water down the first major data-privacy law in the U.S., seeking to carve out exemptions for digital advertising, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg and people familiar with the negotiations. Bloomberg reports: A lobbyist for Google recently distributed new language to members of California's state legislature that would amend the California Consumer Privacy Act. As currently drafted, the law limits how Google and other companies collect and make money from user data online, threatening a business model that generates billions of dollars in ad revenue. It's due to kick in next year and there are only a few more days to amend the law. The lobbying push seeks legislative approval to continue collecting user data for targeted advertising, and in some cases, the right to do so even if users opt out, according to the documents and the people familiar with the negotiations.

It's unclear if the language circulating in the state capitol's corridors was drafted by Google, and other lobbyists are likely asking for similar changes. Industry groups, such as the California Chamber of Commerce and the Internet Association, often help write legislation and have been the face of industry during two years of debate over the CCPA. It's also common for interested parties to suggest late changes to bills. The Google representative, who distributed the revised language in recent weeks, has yet to find a lawmaker to sponsor the amendments, according to people familiar with negotiations. The proposal must be in a bill by Sept. 10 to be eligible for lawmakers to vote on it before they adjourn for the year on Sept. 13. One of the proposals would let Google and others use data collected from websites for their own analysis, and then share it with other companies that may find it useful. Currently, the CCPA prohibits the sale or distribution of user data if the user has opted out, with limited exceptions.

Another proposal would loosen the definition of "business purpose" when it comes to selling or distributing user data. The law currently defines this narrowly and has a list of specific activities, such auditing and security, that will be allowed. Google's lobbyist shared new language that significantly broadens the rule by replacing the phrase "Business purposes are" with "Business purposes include," before the list of approved activities.

England is introducing a mandatory electric car charging point for each newly built home. "This means that every brand new home, by law, will have to have a charging port for your electric vehicle -- even if you don't yet own one," reports CleanTechnica. From the report: This would make it easier on both fully electric and plug-in hybrid owners in England who use the government's home charger subsidy, which has funded the installation of almost 100,000 wall boxes, as home chargers are commonly called. In the Forward written by the Secretary of Transport, Rt Hon. Chris Grayling, he states that in the previous year the government set out a "bold and integrated Industrial Strategy" that was designed to create a "high-growth, high productivity green economy across the UK."

It would be an economy ready for the 21st century and a huge part of this is a plan for solving the problem of roadside nitrogen dioxide concentrations. The goal is to cut exposure to air pollutants, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and improve the UK's energy security. One of these polices states that they will support the development of one of the best electric vehicle infrastructure networks in the world.

After being teased and promoted for four years, Porsche has officially revealed their first electric car called the Taycan. The Verge's Sean O'Kane shares his first impressions of the $150,900 supercar: The fuller picture Porsche painted about the Taycan on Wednesday is one of an electric sports car that will hang with the fastest vehicles on the market, all without sacrificing practicality. It's an EV imbued with characteristics that were forged in the automaker's storied motorsports program, and a vehicle that marks the beginning of a new era in the company's long history. The Taycan feels like a car that can inspire people to switch to electric propulsion in a way that only Tesla has really achieved so far. It's got the kind of verve that the Audi E-Tron, Mercedes-Benz EQC, and Jaguar I-Pace completely lack.

The thing Porsche wants people to focus on more than the 2.6-second 0-60mph time (3.0 seconds for the base Taycan Turbo) is the car's ability to repeat that performance without overheating the battery pack or restricting the power output. That will likely be an advantage the Taycan holds onto for a few years, and for people who care about putting this car through the ringer, it's going to make the price tag a bit more palatable. [...] The Taycan follows in the footsteps of Tesla, which has helped inspire automakers to just design beautiful cars that happen to be electric. It has all the beautiful curves and details one expects from a modern Porsche, with a few -- like the vegan interior option -- that are less typical. One thing that surprised me about the Taycan is the interior: it felt less obnoxious than it looked in the photos Porsche released a few weeks ago. Granted, the optional passenger side screen is a bit much. But the two main screens that come standard on the car are big and clear enough to offer a lot of information at once, and they blend into the car well. The center screen especially feels well-integrated; since it's not surrounded by gauche plastic buttons, you have to hunt for the seams where it disappears into the dashboard.

In a recent interview with the Willamette Week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should face the possibility of a prison term for Facebook's privacy violations. Zuckerberg has Mark "repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy," said Wyden. "I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to -- and let me underline this -- the possibility of a prison term." Zuckerberg, Wyden said, has "hurt a lot of people." Ars Technica reports: Wyden was talking to the Willamette Week about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that gives online platforms like Facebook broad immunity for content posted by their users. Wyden was the co-author of the law and has been one of its most ardent defenders ever since. The law has come under increasing criticism as concern has grown about toxic online content. Wyden isn't ready to scrap it, but he says that he's "looking for more ways to create market pressure on the big tech companies to take moderation more seriously."

Wyden worries that more aggressive efforts to root out toxic content online would effectively "throw the First Amendment in the trash can." "I still think the basic frame of the shield -- particularly for the little guy -- is essential," Wyden said of Section 230's immunity provisions. "And I'm looking very aggressively for ways to shore up the sword, to get at the slime." Technology companies, Wyden argued, have "done practically everything wrong since the 2016 election." He said he recently told technology companies: "If you don't get serious on moderation, you're going to have a lot of people coming after you."