Alphabet' Google has shut down a service it provided to wireless carriers globally that showed them weak spots in their network coverage, Reuters reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter, because of Google's concerns that sharing data from users of its Android phone system might attract the scrutiny of users and regulators. From the report: The withdrawal of the service, which has not been previously reported, has disappointed wireless carriers that used the data as part of their decision-making process on where to extend or upgrade their coverage. Even though the data were anonymous and the sharing of it has become commonplace, Google's move illustrates how concerned the company has become about drawing attention amid a heightened focus in much of the world on data privacy. Google's Mobile Network Insights service, which had launched in March 2017, was essentially a map showing carriers signal strengths and connection speeds they were delivering in each area. The service was provided free to carriers and vendors that helped them manage operations. The data came from devices running Google's Android operating system, which is on about 75% of the world's smartphones, making it a valuable resource for the industry. [...] Nevertheless, Google shut down the service in April due to concerns about data privacy, four people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Some of them said secondary reasons likely included challenges ensuring data quality and connectivity upgrades among carriers being slow to materialize.

"The U.S. Army, as part of a broad counter-unmanned aerial systems strategy, is pushing forward with the U.S. Air Force to develop a high-powered microwave weapon," reports Popular Mechanics: Microwave radiation can disrupt or destroy electronic equipment exposed to them, "cooking" internal circuits much in the same way a fork or other metal objects placed in a microwave oven will cause the oven's electronics to melt down. Here's 2018 footage of a Raytheon HPM system tested at Fort Sill in 2018.

The Pentagon has researched high powered microwave weapons for years, but the threat of drone swarms may have presented it with the perfect threat. The military is preparing for the eventuality of facing swarms of suicide drones on the battlefield, each carrying an explosive payloads or prepared to make a suicide attack. Current anti-drone weapons include jammers, shotguns, nets, and even birds, but many of these weapons are only effective against one or a small number of drones at once, and not the dozens or more drones envisioned in the worst drone swarm scenarios....

Microwave radiation doesn't care about rain and other inclement weather, it doesn't rely on individual shots of ammunition, and as long as the electrical generator powering is powered on, it will continue to "fire"... The weapon's broad firing arc means it could take out many drones at once, defeating enemy drone swarms.
The joint Army/Air Force microwave weapon prototype "should be operational by 2022."

"Earlier this year I gave a talk at FullStack conference in London about making iFrames cool again," writes a lead engineer at PayPal. In a nutshell: iframes let you build user experiences into embeddable 'cross-domain components', which let users interact with other sites without being redirected. There are a metric ton of awesome uses for that other than tracking and advertizing. Nothing else comes close for this purpose; and as a result, I feel we're not using iframes to their full potential.

There are big problems, though... My talk went into how at PayPal, we built Zoid to solve some of the major problems with iframes and popups:

- Pre-render to avoid the perception of slow rendering

- Automatically resize frames to fit child content

- Automatically resize frames to fit child content

- Pass down any kind of data and functions/callbacks as props (just like React), and avoid the nightmare of cross-domain messaging between windows.

- Make iframes and popups feel like first class (cross-domain) components.

Zoid goes a long way. But there are certain problems a mere javascript library can not solve. This is my bucket list for browser vendors, to make iframes more of a first class citizen on the web... Because fundamentally: the idea of cross-domain embeddable components is actually pretty useful once you start talking about shareable user experiences, rather than just user-tracking and advertizing which are obviously pills nobody enjoys swallowing.
He acknowledges that he "really likes" the work that's been done on Google Chrome's Portals (which he earlier described as "like iframes, but better, and worse.")

"I just hope iframes don't get left behind."

"As someone who studies cybersecurity and information warfare, I'm concerned that a cyberattack with widespread impact, an intrusion in one area that spreads to others or a combination of lots of smaller attacks, could cause significant damage, including mass injury and death rivaling the death toll of a nuclear weapon," warns an assistant Professor of Computer Science, North Dakota State University: Unlike a nuclear weapon, which would vaporize people within 100 feet and kill almost everyone within a half-mile, the death toll from most cyberattacks would be slower. People might die from a lack of food, power or gas for heat or from car crashes resulting from a corrupted traffic light system. This could happen over a wide area, resulting in mass injury and even deaths... The FBI has even warned that hackers are targeting nuclear facilities. A compromised nuclear facility could result in the discharge of radioactive material, chemicals or even possibly a reactor meltdown.

A cyberattack could cause an event similar to the incident in Chernobyl. That explosion, caused by inadvertent error, resulted in 50 deaths and evacuation of 120,000 and has left parts of the region uninhabitable for thousands of years into the future. My concern is not intended to downplay the devastating and immediate effects of a nuclear attack. Rather, it's to point out that some of the international protections against nuclear conflicts don't exist for cyberattacks...

Critical systems, like those at public utilities, transportation companies and firms that use hazardous chemicals, need to be much more secure... But all those systems can't be protected without skilled cybersecurity staffs to handle the work. At present, nearly a quarter of all cybersecurity jobs in the US are vacant, with more positions opening up than there are people to fill them. One recruiter has expressed concern that even some of the jobs that are filled are held by people who aren't qualified to do them. The solution is more training and education, to teach people the skills they need to do cybersecurity work, and to keep existing workers up to date on the latest threats and defense strategies.

Google has made a proposal to the unofficial cert industry group that "would cut lifespan of SSL certificates from 825 days to 397 days," reports ZDNet. No vote was held on the proposal; however, most browser vendors expressed their support for the new SSL certificate lifespan. On the other side, certificate authorities were not too happy, to say the least. In the last decade and a half, browser makers have chipped away at the lifespan of SSL certificates, cutting it down from eight years to five, then to three, and then to two. The last change occured in March 2018, when browser makers tried to reduce SSL certificate lifespans from three years to one, but compromised for two years after pushback from certificate authorities. Now, barely two years later after the last change, certificate authorities feel bullied by browser makers into accepting their original plan, regardless of the 2018 vote...

This fight between CAs and browser makers has been happening in the shadows for years. As HashedOut, a blog dedicated to HTTPS-related news, points out, this proposal is much more about proving who controls the HTTPS landscape than everything. "If the CAs vote this measure down, there's a chance the browsers could act unilaterally and just force the change anyway," HashedOut said. "That's not without precendent, but it's also never happened on an issue that is traditionally as collegial as this. "If it does, it becomes fair to ask what the point of the CA/B Forum even is. Because at that point the browsers would basically be ruling by decree and the entire exercise would just be a farce."
Security researcher Scott Helme "claims that this process is broken and that bad SSL certificates continue to live on for years after being mississued and revoked -- hence the reason he argued way back in early 2018 that a shorter lifespan for SSL certificates would fix this problem because bad SSL certs would be phased out faster."

But the article also notes that Timothy Hollebeek, DigiCert's representative at the CA/B Forum argues that the proposed change "has absolutely no effect on malicious websites, which operate for very short time periods, from a few days to a week or two at most. After that, the domain has been added to various blacklists, and the attacker moves on to a new domain and acquires new certificates."

Friday Google open-sourced "the speech engine that powers its Android speech recognition transcription tool Live Transcribe," reports Venture Beat: The company hopes doing so will let any developer deliver captions for long-form conversations. The source code is available now on GitHub.

Google released Live Transcribe in February. The tool uses machine learning algorithms to turn audio into real-time captions. Unlike Android's upcoming Live Caption feature, Live Transcribe is a full-screen experience, uses your smartphone's microphone (or an external microphone), and relies on the Google Cloud Speech API. Live Transcribe can caption real-time spoken words in over 70 languages and dialects. You can also type back into it — Live Transcribe is really a communication tool. The other main difference: Live Transcribe is available on 1.8 billion Android devices. (When Live Caption arrives later this year, it will only work on select Android Q devices.)

An anonymous reader quotes Neowin: Both WordPad and the classic Paint app can now be found in the list of optional features for Windows 10, joining the ranks of other hallmarks of the Windows of yore, such as Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer. This means that both these apps will be uninstallable in a future release of Windows, likely 20H1, as build 18963 is a preview of that branch of Windows 10's development...

Of course, optional features can always be reinstalled so Paint won't really be disappearing anytime soon. Indeed, the company was planning to keep the app alive through the Microsoft Store anyway. Just don't hold out any hope for the app receiving new features anytime soon, what with Microsoft putting its weight behind the newer, sexier and higher dimensional Paint 3D.

An anonymous reader quotes MSPoweruser: Google Chrome always had a bit of a love-hate relationship when it comes to managing FTP links. The web browser usually downloads instead of rendering it like other web browsers. However, if you're using FTP then you might have to look elsewhere soon as Google is planning to remove FTP support altogether.

In a post (via Techdows), Google, today announced its intention to deprecate FTP support starting with Chrome v80. The main issue with FTP right now is security and the protocol doesn't support encryption which makes it vulnerable and Google has decided it's no longer feasible to support it.

A user and schwit1 both submitted the same story. That 1-km ( .62-mile) "solar road" paved with photovoltaic panels in France is "too noisy, falling apart, and doesn't even collect enough solar energy," reports Popular Mechanics: Le Monde describes the road as "pale with its ragged joints," with "solar panels that peel off the road and the many splinters [from] that enamel resin protecting photovoltaic cells." It's a poor sign for a project the French government invested in to the tune of €5 million, or $5,546,750. The noise and poor upkeep aren't the only problems facing the Wattway. Through shoddy engineering, the Wattway isn't even generating the electricity it promised to deliver...

Normandy is not historically known as a sunny area. At the time, the region's capital city of Caen only got 44 days of strong sunshine a year, and not much has changed since. Storms have wrecked havoc with the systems, blowing circuits. But even if the weather was in order, it appears the panels weren't built to capture them efficiently... Solar panels are most efficient when pointed toward the sun. Because the project needed to be a road as well as a solar generator, however, all of its solar panels are flat. So even within the limited sun of the region, the Wattway was further limiting itself.
The problem-plagued road is producing just half the solar energy expected -- although that's more energy than you'd get from an asphalt road. But Marc Jedliczka, vice president of the Network for Energetic Transition (CLER), which promotes renewable energy, offered this suggestion in the Eurasia Times. "If they really want this to work, they should first stop cars driving on it."

He later told Le Monde that the sorry state of the project "confirms the total absurdity of going all-out for innovation to the detriment of solutions that already exist and are more profitable, such as solar panels on roofs."

But Futurism adds that the idea of having roadways generate solar power "is far from dead, according to Business Insider. In the Netherlands, a solar bike lane has fared much better, exceeding the expected energy production. A solar panel road is also being tested near Amsterdam's Schiphol airport."

Sunday the New York Times reported that YouTube "radicalized" Brazil -- by "systematically" diverting users to conspiracy videos. Yet conventional wisdom in Brazil still puts the blame on WhatsApp, the Times reported in a follow-up story on Thursday shared by Slashdot reader AmiMoJo.

"Everything began to click into place when we met Luciana Brito, a soft-spoken clinical psychologist who works with families affected by the Zika virus." Her work had put her on the front lines of the struggle against conspiracy theories, threats and hatred swirling on both platforms. And it allowed her to see what we -- like so many observers -- had missed: that WhatsApp and YouTube had come to form a powerful, and at times dangerous, feedback loop of extremism and misinformation. Either platform had plenty of weaknesses on its own. But, together, they had formed a pipeline of misinformation, spreading conspiracy theories, campaign material and political propaganda throughout Brazil.

The first breakthrough came when we spoke to Yasodara Cordova, who at the time was a researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Illiteracy remains widespread in some parts of Brazil, she said, ruling out text-based social media or news sources for many people. And TV networks can be low-quality, which has helped drive YouTube's stunning growth in many parts of Brazil, particularly on mobile. But YouTube has had less success in poorer regions of Brazil for one simple reason: Users cannot afford the cellphone data. "The internet in Brazil is really expensive," Ms. Cordova said. "I think it's the fourth or fifth country in terms of internet prices."

WhatsApp has become a workaround. The messaging app has a deal with some carriers to offer free data on the app, and poorer users found that this offered them a way around YouTube's unaffordability. They would share snippets of YouTube videos that they found on WhatsApp, where the videos can be watched and shared for free. Ms. Cordova suspected that the WhatsApp-spread misinformation had often come from videos that first went viral on YouTube, where they had been boosted by the extremism-favoring algorithms that we documented in our story earlier this week... It was like an infection jumping from one host to the next.
Some of the videos blame the mosquito-bourne Zika virus on vaccines or suggest an international conspiracy, while some were "staged to resemble news reports or advice from health workers," the Times reports -- adding that as of Thursday the videos were still being recommended by YouTube's algorithm. (A spokesperson for YouTube "called the results unintended, and said the company would change how its search tool surfaced videos related to Zika.")

Researchers say conspiracy videos were even shown to people who'd searched for reputable information on the virus, the Times reports. "The videos often spread in WhatsApp chat groups that had been set up to share information and news about coping with Zika, turning users' efforts to take control of their families' health against them."

YouTube told the Times that their recommendation system now drives 70% of total time spent on YouTube -- and according to their article Thursday, Dr. Brito estimates that she now receives serious threats on her life about once a week.

Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr writes: In World War II, pilots would air-drop messages onto ships using bean-bags. Just as with sextants a few years ago, the Navy is bringing back old tech, because it works.

Just as during the Doolittle Raid of Tokyo, the purpose is to prevent eavesdropping. You can read more about the modern bean-bag-drop on Military.com or Popular Mechanics. There's a video about the Doolittle Raid hosted at archive.org with bean-bag-drops at 2:39 and 5:19 into the video. I wonder how many high-density SSD drives fit in a standard Navy bean-bag?
"In a future conflict with a tech-savvy opponent, the U.S. military could discover even its most advanced, secure communications penetrated by the enemy," notes Popular Mechanics. "Secure digital messaging, voice communications, video conferencing, and even chats could be intercepted and decrypted for its intelligence value.

"This could give enemy forces an unimaginable advantage, seemingly predicting the moves and actions of the fleets at sea with uncanny accuracy."

"JPEG XL looks very promising as a next gen replacement for JPEG, PNG and GIF," writes icknay (Slashdot reader #96,963): JPEG was incredibly successful by solving a real problem with a free and open format. Other formats have tried to replace it, notably HEIF which will never by universal due to its patent licensing.

JPEG XL combines all the modern features, replacing JPEG PNG and GIF and has free and open licensing. The linked slides from Jon Sneyers review the many other attempts at replacing JPEG plus the obligatory XKCD standards joke.

In July Google was sued by Tulsi Gabbard, one of 23 Democrats running for president, after Google mistakenly suspended her advertising account.

"I believe I can provide assistance on where to focus your discovery efforts," posted former YouTube/Google senior software engineer Zach Vorhies (now a harsh critic of Google's alleged bias against conservatives). He says he witnessed the deactivation of another high-profile Google account triggered by a malicious third party. I had the opportunity to inspect the bug report as a full-time employee. What I found was that Google had a technical vulnerability that, when exploited, would take any gmail account down. Certain unknown 3rd party actors are aware of this secret vulnerability and exploit it.

This is how it worked: Take a target email address, change exactly one letter in that email address, and then create a new account with that changed email address. Malicious actors repeated this process over and over again until a network of spoof accounts for Jordan B. Peterson existed. Then these spoof accounts started generating spam emails. These email-spam blasts caught the attention of an AI system which fixed the problem by deactivating the spam accounts... and then ALSO the original account belonging to Jordan B. Peterson!

To my knowledge, this bug has never been fixed.
"Gabbard, however, claims the suspension was based on her criticism of Google and other major tech companies," reports the Verge. But they also quote the campaign as saying that Gmail "sends communications from Tulsi into people's Spam folders at a disproportionately high rate."

"Google may blame this on automated systems, but the reality is that there is no transparency whatsoever, which makes it difficult to determine the truth."

reg (Slashdot user #5,428) writes: A Windows security patch in June broke the display of many Windows Metafile graphics across all supported versions of Windows, resulting in many old PowerPoint files and Word documents not displaying figures, and graphics from some popular applications not displaying, including at least some ESRI GIS products and files created using the devEMF driver in R. This likely also impacts EMF files created with Open Source Office suites. While the problem can be fixed by recreating the files using a newer set of options, or resorting to using bitmaps, it means that presentations or documents that used to display perfectly no longer do. Microsoft promised a fix in July, but there is still no news of when it will be available.

"This week's Windows updates fix critical 'wormable' [Bluekeep] flaws but may also break Visual Basic apps, macros, and scripts," warns ZDNet: "After installing this update, applications that were made using Visual Basic 6 (VB6), macros using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and scripts or apps using Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) may stop responding and you may receive an 'invalid procedure call error'," Microsoft says. The issue affects all supported versions of Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and their corresponding server versions. "Microsoft is presently investigating this issue and will provide an update when available," the company said.

Microsoft didn't offer an explanation for the problem but it did flag earlier this month that it will move ahead with sunsetting VBScript, by disabling it in IE11 by default via an update in this week's patch. "The change to disable VBScript will take effect in the upcoming cumulative updates for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 on August 13, 2019," Microsoft warned in a blog post. The change brought these versions of Windows in line with Windows 10. However, it's not clear that the issues under investigation are related to this measure. Regardless of the cause, the error could be a hassle for organizations that rely on Microsoft's various incarnations of Visual Basic...
In a blog post shared by Slashdot reader CaptainDork, Microsoft warned that "any future malware that exploits these could propagate from vulnerable computer to vulnerable computer without user interaction."

"The affected versions of Windows are Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, and all supported versions of Windows 10, including server versions."

"Upcoming changes in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox may finally spark the end for Extended Validation certificates as the browsers plan to do away with showing a company's name in the address bar," reports Bleeping Computer. When connecting to a secure web site, an installed SSL/TLS certificate will encrypt the communication between the browser and web server. These certificates come in a few different flavors, with some claiming to offer a more thorough verification process or extra perks. One certificate, called EV Certificates, are known for having a browser display the owner of the certificate directly in the browser's address bar. This allegedly makes the site feel more trustworthy to a visitor.

In reality, the different types of SSL/TLS certificates all serve a single purpose and that is to encrypt the communication between a browser and web site. Anything extra is seen by many as just a marketing gimmick to charge customers for a more expensive "trustworthy" certificate. In numerous blog posts, security researcher Troy Hunt has stated that EV Certificates will soon be dead as more and more sites switch away from them, because they are much harder to manage due to extra verification times, and because people have become to associate a padlock with a secure site rather than a company name.

With Safari already removing EV Certificate company info from the address bar, most mobile browsers not showing it, and Chrome and Mozilla desktop browsers soon to remove it, Hunt's predictions are coming true. EV Certificates will soon be dead.
AmiMoJo shared this post from Google's Chromium blog: Through our own research as well as a survey of prior academic work, the Chrome Security UX team has determined that the EV UI does not protect users as intended. Users do not appear to make secure choices (such as not entering password or credit card information) when the UI is altered or removed, as would be necessary for EV UI to provide meaningful protection. Further, the EV badge takes up valuable screen real estate, can present actively confusing company names in prominent UI, and interferes with Chrome's product direction towards neutral, rather than positive, display for secure connections. Because of these problems and its limited utility, we believe it belongs better in Page Info.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Commerce Department is expected to extend a reprieve given to Huawei Technologies that permits the Chinese firm to buy supplies from U.S. companies so that it can service existing customers, two sources familiar with the situation said. The "temporary general license" will be extended for Huawei for 90 days, the sources said.

Commerce initially allowed Huawei to purchase some American-made goods in May shortly after blacklisting the company in a move aimed at minimizing disruption for its customers, many of which operate networks in rural America. An extension will renew an agreement set to lapse on August 19, continuing the Chinese company's ability to maintain existing telecommunications networks and provide software updates to Huawei handsets. The situation surrounding the license, which has become a key bargaining chip for the United States in its trade negotiations with China, remains fluid and the decision to continue the Huawei reprieve could change ahead of the Monday deadline, the sources said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Excess heat given off by smartphones, laptops and other electronic devices can be annoying, but beyond that it contributes to malfunctions and, in extreme cases, can even cause lithium batteries to explode. To guard against such ills, engineers often insert glass, plastic or even layers of air as insulation to prevent heat-generating components like microprocessors from causing damage or discomforting users. Now, Stanford researchers have shown that a few layers of atomically thin materials, stacked like sheets of paper atop hot spots, can provide the same insulation as a sheet of glass 100 times thicker. In the near term, thinner heat shields will enable engineers to make electronic devices even more compact than those we have today, said Eric Pop, professor of electrical engineering and senior author of a paper published Aug. 16 in Science Advances. "To make nanoscale heat shields practical, the researchers will have to find some mass production technique to spray or otherwise deposit atom-thin layers of materials onto electronic components during manufacturing," adds Phys.Org.

"But behind the immediate goal of developing thinner insulators looms a larger ambition: Scientists hope to one day control the vibrational energy inside materials the way they now control electricity and light. As they come to understand the heat in solid objects as a form of sound, a new field of phononics is emerging, a name taken from the Greek root word behind telephone, phonograph and phonetics."

According to the state-owned China Daily, Huawei is working on a Google Maps alternative with Yandex and Booking.com. The service is expected to be unveiled in October. CNET reports: It's apparently designed to use a tool for software developers to create apps based around its mapping capabilities, rather than for consumer use. It'll connect to local mapping services, cover 150 countries and regions, and be available in 40 languages, the report said.

Huawei didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, but the company's ability to access Google's services has been threatened since President Trump blacklisted it in May. That came as a result of U.S. lawmakers' concerns about Huawei's tight relationship with the Chinese government and fears that its equipment could be used for spying. Trump has since said the ban will be eased.

Runkeeper this week announced that it will discontinue its Wear OS app in the next few weeks. From a report: The update was emailed to users this week, where the company told users that it decided to end support because "the integration didn't work well / work consistently for most users." In a response to users, Runkeeper elaborated that only a small percentage of Runkeeper users were actually using the Wear OS app. "It was a very buggy experience and difficult for us to maintain and fix," a representative said in an email. "Because we're a small team with limited resources, and having done our research, we ultimately concluded that trying to maintain a partnership that wasn't working well would not be good practice for us."