simpz writes: Does anyone know of a fairly inexpensive webcam that doesn't depend on a cloud service? A few years ago, you could buy a cheap webcam (with the usual pan/tilt and IR) for about $50 that was fully manageable from a web browser. Nowadays the web interfaces are limited in functionality (or non-existent), or you need a phone app that doesn't work well (maybe only working through a cloud service). I've even seen a few cheap ones that still need ActiveX to view the video in a web browser, really people!

I'd like to avoid a cloud service for privacy and to allow this to operate on the LAN with no internet connection present. Even a webcam where you can disable the cloud connection outbound would be fine and allow you to use it fully locally. I guess the issue is this has become a niche thing that the ease of a cloud service connection probably wins for most people, and other considerations don't really matter to them.

I had a brief look at a Raspberry Pi solution, but didn't see anything like a small webcam form factor (with pan/tilt etc). Alternatively, are there any third-party firmwares for commercial webcams (sort of a OpenWRT-, DD-WRT-, or LineageOS-style project for webcams) that could provide direct local access only via a web browser (and things like RTSP)?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: For the past week, a new ransomware strain has been wreaking havoc across Germany. Named GermanWiper, this ransomware doesn't encrypt files but instead it rewrites their content with zeroes, permanently destroying users' data. As a result, any users who get infected by this ransomware should be aware that paying the ransom demand will not help them recover their files. Unless users had created offline backups of their data, their files are most likely gone for good. For now, the only good news is that this ransomware appears to be limited to spreading in German-speaking countries only, and with a focus on Germany primarily.

According to German security researcher Marius Genheimer and CERT-Bund, Germany's Computer Emergency Response Team, the GermanWiper ransomware is currently being distributed via malicious email spam (malspam) campaigns. These emails claim to be job applications from a person named "Lena Kretschmer." A CV is attached as a ZIP file to these emails, and contains a LNK shortcut file. The LNK file is boobytrapped and will install the GermanWiper ransomware. When users run this file, the ransomware will rewrite the content of various local files with the 0x00 (zero character), and append a new extension to all files. This extension has a format of five random alpha-numerical characters, such as .08kJA, .AVco3, .OQn1B, .rjzR8, etc.. After it "encrypts" all targeted files, GermanWiper will open the ransom note (an HTML file) inside the user's default browser. The ransom note looks like the one below. A video of the infection process is also available here. Victims are given seven days to pay the ransom demand. It is important to remember that paying the ransom note won't help users recover their files.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Billions of people use the messaging tool WhatsApp, which added end-to-end encryption for every form of communication available on its platform back in 2016. This ensures that conversations between users and their contacts -- whether they occur via text or voice calls -- are private, inaccessible even to the company itself. But several recent posts published to Forbes' blogging platform call WhatsApp's future security into question. The posts, which were written by contributor Kalev Leetaru, allege that Facebook, WhatsApp's parent company, plans to detect abuse by implementing a feature to scan messages directly on people's phones before they are encrypted. The posts gained significant attention: A blog post by technologist Bruce Schneier rehashing one of the Forbes posts has the headline "Facebook Plans on Backdooring WhatsApp." It is a claim Facebook unequivocally denies.

"We haven't added a backdoor to WhatsApp," Will Cathcart, WhatsApp's vice president of product management, wrote in a statement. "To be crystal clear, we have not done this, have zero plans to do so, and if we ever did, it would be quite obvious and detectable that we had done it. We understand the serious concerns this type of approach would raise, which is why we are opposed to it."
UPDATE: Later Friday technologist Bruce Schneier wrote that after reviewing responses from WhatsApp, he's concluded that reports of a pre-encryption backdoor are a false alarm. He also says he got an equally strong confirmation from WhatsApp's Privacy Policy Manager Nate Cardozo, who Facebook hired last December from EFF. "He basically leveraged his historical reputation to assure me that WhatsApp, and Facebook in general, would never do something like this."

International Business Machines (IBM) has fired as many as 100,000 employees in the last few years in an effort to boost its appeal to millennials and make it appear to be as "cool" and "trendy" as Amazon and Google, according to a deposition from a former vice president in an ongoing age discrimination lawsuit. From a report: The technology company is facing several lawsuits accusing it of firing older workers, including a class-action case in Manhattan and individual civil suits filed in California, Pennsylvania and Texas last year. "We have reinvented IBM in the past five years to target higher value opportunities for our clients," IBM said in a statement. "The company hires 50,000 employees each year." Big Blue has struggled with almost seven straight years of shrinking revenue. In the last decade, the company has fired thousands of people in the U.S., Canada and other high-wage jurisdictions in an effort to cut costs and retool its workforce after coming late to the cloud-computing and mobile-tech revolutions. The number of IBM employees has fallen to its lowest point in six years, with 350,600 global workers at the end of 2018 -- a 19% reduction since 2013.

Electric scooter companies like to tout their green credentials, frequently reminding riders that every two-wheeled trip they take can help reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change -- but the truth is much more complicated. From a report: A new study from North Carolina State University found that shared e-scooters may be more environmentally friendly than most cars, but they can be less green than several other options, including bicycles, walking, and certain modes of public transportation. Riders tend to think they're making the right move by hopping on a scooter that's electric and thus carbon-free. But what they don't see are all of the emissions that are produced by the manufacturing, transportation, maintenance, and upkeep of dockless scooters. If you only think about the segment of the life cycle you can see, which would be standing on the scooter where there's no tailpipe, it's easy to make that assumption," said Jeremiah Johnson, corresponding author of the study and an associate professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at NC State. "But if you take a step back, you can see all the other things that are a bit hidden in the process."

Google is working to make it easier for callers to share details with 911 responders in the event of an emergency. From a report: In a blog post this week, the tech giant announced a feature heading to select Android devices that will allow users to provide information about the assistance they require -- and their location -- to operators silently. Google says the feature will become available in the U.S. in the coming months starting with Pixel smartphones via the Phone app. "A quick, informative conversation with an operator during an emergency call is critical, but in some cases, people are unable to verbally communicate, whether they're injured, in a dangerous situation or have a speech impairment," wrote product manager Paul Dunlop. "We've been collecting feedback from public safety organizations, including the National Emergency Number Association, to make this feature as helpful as possible."

Google has opened up an auction to allow alternative search engines to become the default providers on mobile devices in Europe. From a report: Beginning in early 2020, anyone setting up a new Android device in the European Economic Area (EEA) will see a choice screen, where they will be asked to select which search engine they wish to use as a default. Four options (Qwant, Ecosia, Google, Yahoo) will be available, including Google, and these will vary from country to country, depending on which companies apply for inclusion. The move comes a year after Google was hit with a record $5 billion fine by EU antitrust regulators for the way it bundled its services on Android, with claims that Google forced manufacturers to preinstall certain Google apps to gain access to others.

The Google Project Zero team said that around 95.8% of the security bugs they find in other software and report to their respective vendors get fixed before the 90-day deadline for a public disclosure expires. From a report: That's quite the batting average for one of world's most infamous cybersecurity programs. In a statistic shared on Wednesday, Google's elite security team said that during its whole history -- from July 17, 2014, when Project Zero was created and until July 30, this week -- its researchers found and reported a total of 1,585 vulnerabilities to a wide range of hardware and software vendors. Of these, Google said that vendors failed to deliver a patch before the final deadline expired only for 66 reports. As a result, its researchers were forced to make vulnerability technical details public before a fix was made available to users.

The Linux Mint project today released the Linux Mint 19.2 "Tina", which is now available for download as Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions. From a report: If your computer is fairly modern, take my advice and opt for the excellent Cinnamon. MATE and Xfce are solid choices too, although they are more appropriate for computers with meager hardware. For new users, choosing amongst three interfaces can be confusing -- thankfully, the Mint developers stopped using KDE almost two years ago. Linux Mint 19.2 "Tina" is based on the wildly popular Ubuntu operating system, but on 18.04 rather than the new 19.04. Why use an older version of Ubuntu as a base? Because 18.04 is an LTS or "Long Term Support" variant. While version 19.04 will be supported for less than a year, 18.04 is being supported for a mind-boggling 10 years! The Linux kernel is version 4.15 and not part of the newer 5.x series.

mfilion writes: Want to use the GNOME or KDE Linux desktops on your virtual-reality headset? A new open-source project aims to let you play games and use your Linux desktop with your VR head-mounted display. Xrdesktop is an open-source project "designed to let you work with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR," reports ZDNet. "It does this by making window managers aware of VR. It then uses VR runtimes to render desktop windows in 3D space. Once there, you'll be able to work on the desktop using VR controllers in place of a mouse and keyboard."

You can find installation instructions on xrdesktop Wiki. The Valve-backed program is available in packages for Arch Linux and Ubuntu Linux. You can also install it on other distributions, but you'll need to install xrdesktop from source.

Several startups and nonprofit organizations are using methane-tracking microsatellites to help companies understand the emissions levels of their business operations, and hold the worst polluters accountable. The satellites focus on tracking methane as it has 80 times the warming power of CO2, and is blamed for more than a quarter of the earth's 0.8 degree Celsius temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution. Scientific American reports: Historically, if scientists wanted detailed readings of emissions, ground-based sensors placed close to a source were the only option. Yet these are limited to particular sites unless teams of scientists drive around conducting time-consuming surveys, which are impractical on a large scale and are only deployed to measure known emitters. Satellites, however, survey large swaths of the planet. Their use of a single sensor also provides more consistency, making measurements from different spots directly comparable. Until recently, though, satellites have been prohibitively expensive and their spectroscopic sensors have lacked the precision of those closer to the ground.

That dynamic started to change within the past decade, as broader industry demands drove the miniaturization of electronics and shrank the costs of rocket launches. This made it possible to develop smaller, cheaper satellites that carry sensors capable of zooming in on individual sites to capture high-resolution methane measurements. Companies and one environmental group have leaped at harnessing such satellite capabilities for industries and policymakers eager to pinpoint individual local methane sources. But governments and large aerospace companies, encumbered by lengthy planning processes, have been slower to pivot away from a focus on measuring methane emissions on a regional and global scale. In 2016 the Montreal-based company GHGSat was the first to get off the ground with a proof-of-concept satellite called Claire, which successfully detected methane emissions from specific sites. A handful of other groups have followed suit. The nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund has enlisted several companies to develop what it calls MethaneSAT, which could provide weekly coverage of up to 80 percent of the world's major oil and gas production sites once it launches in 2021. Its data would be made freely available to policymakers who want reliable, independent emissions measurements. And its wide global coverage means it can complement higher-resolution satellites, such as future ones planned by GHGSat that would focus on particular areas.

In a move intended to de-escalate a standoff between scientists and native Hawaiians blocking the construction of a massive telescope on a mountaintop they believe to be sacred land, Gov. David Ige on Tuesday night rescinded an emergency proclamation that was issued to help remove demonstrators. NPR reports: Ige made the announcement at a press conference saying there are no immediate plans to move heavy construction equipment onto Mauna Kea, the intended site of the Thirty Meter Telescope, which is expected to be the largest in the world, looking farther back into space and time than any other instrument is capable of doing. "Because TMT construction is not imminent, I am withdrawing the emergency proclamation effective immediately," Ige said in a tweet. "I remain committed to moving forward with this project in a peaceful way and will continue efforts to engage the community."

He cautioned the large crowds who have gathered in protest at the base of the mountain since mid-July, when construction was set to start, of hazardous conditions "in light of the potential bad weather." Ige's move followed a decision by the Department of Land and Natural Resources to grant a two-year extension of the Conservation District Use permit deadline for the initiation of construction.

Apple says it will temporarily suspend its practice of using human contractors to grade snippets of Siri voice recordings for accuracy. The move follows a report in The Guardian where a former worker detailed the program, claiming that contractors "regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex" as part of their job. The Verge reports: "We are committed to delivering a great Siri experience while protecting user privacy," an Apple spokesperson says in a statement to The Verge. "While we conduct a thorough review, we are suspending Siri grading globally. Additionally, as part of a future software update, users will have the ability to choose to participate in grading." Apple did not comment on whether, in addition to pausing the program where contractors listen to Siri voice recordings, it would also stop actually saving those recordings on its servers. Currently the company says it keeps recordings for six months before removing identifying information from a copy that it could keep for two years or more.

Gizmodo has learned that Amazon's Ring home security system is pursuing contracts with police departments that would grant it direct access to real-time emergency dispatch data. From the report: The California-based company is seeking police departments' permission to tap into the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) feeds used to automate and improve decisions made by emergency dispatch personnel and cut down on police response times. Ring has requested access to the data streams so it can curate "crime news" posts for its "neighborhood watch" app, Neighbors. Ring says it does not provide the personal information of its customers to the authorities without consent. To wit, the company has positioned itself as an intermediary through which police requests access to citizen-captured surveillance footage. When police make a request, they don't know who receives it, Ring says, until a user chooses to share their video. Users are also prompted with the option to review their footage before turning it over.

But how often is one the victims of a crime in their own neighborhood? Likely not enough to stay engaged with the app for too long. Ring's solution is to push out alerts about alleged criminal activity reported nearby in real-time, according to company documents obtained by Gizmodo. Hiring people to monitor police scanners all day, however, is presumably too costly and inefficient. To pull off this trick, Ring needs something better: direct access to raw police dispatch data. Through its police partnerships, Ring has requested access to CAD, which includes information provided voluntarily by 911 callers, among other types of data automatically collected. CAD data is typically compromised of details such as names, phone numbers, addresses, medical conditions and potentially other types of personally identifiable information, including, in some instances, GPS coordinates. Ring confirmed on Thursday that it does receive location information, including precise addresses from CAD data, which it does not publish to its app. It denied receiving other forms of personal information.

According to internal documents, police CAD data is received by Ring's "Neighbors News team" and is then reformatted before being posted on Neighbors in the form of an "alert" to users in the vicinity of the alleged incident. The document states that Ring's team only posts alerts for eight different crimes: burglary, vehicle break-in and theft, robbery, shots fired, shootings, stabbing, hostage, and arson.

Amazon said Thursday that it will turn off the capabilities of all its Dash buttons worldwide on August 31st. "The decision follows Amazon's move in February to stop selling new buttons," reports CNET. "At the time, the company let folks with existing Dash buttons continue to order stuff with them, but an Amazon spokesperson said usage "has significantly slowed" since then, resulting in the company pulling the plug completely on the program. CNET reports: The Dash button, the ultimate single-use device, lets you buy an item on Amazon with one click. [...] Amazon has replaced the physical buttons with virtual Dash buttons on its website, which will continue to be available. The company said it's seen growth in other options, too, such as voice shopping through Alexa as well as Dash Replenishment Service, which allows appliances to automatically reorder items like printer ink when they're running low. Subscribe & Save is another popular option that should help fill the shopping void left for any longtime Dash button enthusiasts. While those buttons will no longer work by month's end, folks will notice Dash's core concept of more seamless shopping remains alive in just about every smart home.

The FCC voted today to collect more accurate data about which parts of the U.S. have broadband and which parts lack high-speed connectivity. "From now on, home Internet providers will have to give the FCC geospatial maps of where they provide service instead of merely reporting which census blocks they offer service in," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The FCC's current broadband mapping system has serious limitations. The Form 477 data-collection program that requires ISPs to report census-block coverage lets an ISP count an entire census block as served even if it can serve just one home in the block. There are millions of census blocks across the US, and each one generally contains between 600 and 3,000 people. Perhaps even worse, ISPs can count a census block as served in some cases where they don't provide any broadband in the block. That's because the FCC tells ISPs to report where they could offer service "without an extraordinary commitment of resources." An ISP could thus count a census block as served if it's near its network facilities, but in practice ISPs have charged homeowners tens of thousands of dollars for line extensions.

Pai's mapping order (full text) says it "will collect geospatial broadband coverage maps from Internet service providers," and create a crowdsourcing system to collect public input on the accuracy of ISP-submitted maps. ISPs could still count homes that aren't currently connected to their networks, but the FCC has tightened the criteria for doing so. ISPs may only count an area as served if the ISP "has a current broadband connection or it could provide such a connection within ten business days of a customer request and without an extraordinary commitment of resources or construction costs exceeding an ordinary service activation fee." The new requirements are limited to fixed broadband providers, those that offer non-mobile service in homes and businesses.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC An artificial intelligence system should be recognized as the inventor of two ideas in patents filed on its behalf, a team of academics says. The AI has designed interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and a warning light that flashes in a rhythm that is hard to ignore. Patents offices insist innovations are attributed to humans -- to avoid legal complications that would arise if corporate inventorship were recognized. The academics say this is "outdated." And it could see patent offices refusing to assign any intellectual property rights for AI-generated creations. As a result, two professors from the University of Surrey have teamed up with the Missouri-based inventor of Dabus AI to file patents in the system's name with the relevant authorities in the UK, Europe and US. Dabus is designed to develop new ideas, which is "traditionally considered the mental part of the inventive act," according to creator Stephen Thaler.

Law professor Ryan Abbott told BBC News: "These days, you commonly have AIs writing books and taking pictures - but if you don't have a traditional author, you cannot get copyright protection in the US. So with patents, a patent office might say, 'If you don't have someone who traditionally meets human-inventorship criteria, there is nothing you can get a patent on.' In which case, if AI is going to be how we're inventing things in the future, the whole intellectual property system will fail to work." He suggested an AI should be recognized as being the inventor and whoever the AI belonged to should be the patent's owner, unless they sold it on.

"The New York Police Department (NYPD) has been loading thousands of arrest photos of children and teenagers into a facial recognition database despite evidence the technology has a higher risk of false matches in younger faces," reports The New York Times. Some of the children included in the database are as young as 11, but most are teenagers between 13 and 16 years old. From the report: Elected officials and civil rights groups said the disclosure that the city was deploying a powerful surveillance tool on adolescents -- whose privacy seems sacrosanct and whose status is protected in the criminal justice system -- was a striking example of the Police Department's ability to adopt advancing technology with little public scrutiny. Several members of the City Council as well as a range of civil liberties groups said they were unaware of the policy until they were contacted by The New York Times.

Police Department officials defended the decision, saying it was just the latest evolution of a longstanding policing technique: using arrest photos to identify suspects. The New York Police Department can take arrest photos of minors as young as 11 who are charged with a felony, depending on the severity of the charge. And in many cases, the department keeps the photos for years, making facial recognition comparisons to what may have effectively become outdated images. There are photos of 5,500 individuals in the juvenile database, 4,100 of whom are no longer 16 or under, the department said. Teenagers 17 and older are considered adults in the criminal justice system. Civil rights advocates say that including their photos in a facial recognition database runs the risk that an imperfect algorithm identifies them as possible suspects in later crimes. A mistaken match could lead investigators to focus on the wrong person from the outset, they said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Netflix thought I was four different people. I was being paid through an app to watch its trailers over and over again, racking up digital points I could eventually trade for Amazon gift cards or real cash. But rather than just use my own phone, I bought four Android devices to churn through the trailers simultaneously, bringing in more money. I made a small "phone farm," able to fabricate engagement with advertisements and programs from companies like Netflix, as well as video game trailers, celebrity gossip shows, and sports too. No one was really watching the trailers, but Netflix didn't need to know that. The goal was to passively run these phones 24/7, with each collecting a fraction of a penny for each ad they "watched."

Hobbyists and those looking to make a bit of money across the U.S. have been doing the same, buying dozens or hundreds of phones to generate revenue so they can afford some extra household goods, cover a bill, buy a case of beer, or earn more income without driving for Uber or delivering for Grubhub. The farms are similar to those found overseas, often in China, where rows and rows of phones click and scroll through social media or other apps to simulate the engagement of a real human. Every few months, a video of these Chinese farms goes viral, but in bedroom cupboards, stacks in corners of living rooms, or custom setups in their garage, American phone farmers are doing a similar thing, albeit on a smaller scale. Motherboard spoke to eight people who run farms of various sizes, most of whom are located in the U.S.

Five years after Google acquired DeepMind, the health and artificial intelligence group is unveiling its biggest breakthrough yet in health care. Its technology is able to predict if a patient has potentially fatal kidney injuries 48 hours before many symptoms can be recognized by doctors. From a report: In a paper published this week in the journal Nature, DeepMind researchers said their algorithms correctly predicted 90 percent of acute kidney injuries that would end up requiring dialysis. The work was the result of a project with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs to help doctors get a head start on treatment. "We've been really excited for the potential of using AI to support clinicians moving care from reactive to proactive and preventative," said Dominic King, DeepMind's co-founder and clinical lead, in an interview. About 2 million people die every year across the globe from acute kidney injury, according to researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The condition, which involves a sudden episode of kidney failure or damage, can be tricky for doctors to diagnose because there aren't always immediate and clear symptoms. Studies have shown that catching it early can decrease the likelihood of serious injury or death.