The Federal Trade Commission is examining Facebook's acquisitions as part of its antitrust investigation into the social-media giant -- to determine if they were part of a campaign to snap up potential rivals before they could become a threat [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], WSJ reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The company's acquisition practices are a central component of the FTC probe, the people said. Facebook disclosed the FTC's antitrust investigation in its earnings announcement last week, but provided few details. FTC investigators are looking for evidence on whether Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg purchased startup technology firms to keep them from challenging Facebook's empire, the people said. The FTC has begun reaching out to people who founded companies that Facebook purchased, some of the people said.

Google has been testing a new app subscription bundle that gives users access to premium apps for one monthly price. From a report: Google Play Pass, as the subscription offering is being called, promises users "all play, no interruptions," according to a promotional graphic unearthed by Android Police. A Google spokesperson confirmed that the company is currently testing the subscription, but declined to comment further. Google Play Pass, at is it being tested right now, costs $4.99 per month, and promises access to "hundreds of premium apps and games without ads, download fees or in-app purchases."

Bruce Schneier: This article points out that Facebook's planned content moderation scheme will result in an encryption backdoor into WhatsApp: "In Facebook's vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These algorithms will be continually updated from a central cloud service, but will run locally on the user's device, scanning each cleartext message before it is sent and each encrypted message after it is decrypted. The company even noted. that when it detects violations it will need to quietly stream a copy of the formerly encrypted content back to its central servers to analyze further, even if the user objects, acting as true wiretapping service. Facebook's model entirely bypasses the encryption debate by globalizing the current practice of compromising devices by building those encryption bypasses directly into the communications clients themselves and deploying what amounts to machine-based wiretaps to billions of users at once."

Once this is in place, it's easy for the government to demand that Facebook add another filter -- one that searches for communications that they care about -- and alert them when it gets triggered. Of course alternatives like Signal will exist for those who don't want to be subject to Facebook's content moderation, but what happens when this filtering technology is built into operating systems? Separately The Guardian reports: British, American and other intelligence agencies from English-speaking countries have concluded a two-day meeting in London amid calls for spies and police officers to be given special, backdoor access to WhatsApp and other encrypted communications. The meeting of the "Five Eyes" nations -- the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand -- was hosted by new home secretary, Priti Patel, in an effort to coordinate efforts to combat terrorism and child abuse.
UPDATE: 8/2/2019 On 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."

Have you ever been in a public place and hopped onto a public WiFi network? From a report: We conducted a survey of 1,195 US residents over the past two weeks asking about internet connectivity and one interesting trend stood out. 82% of respondents (980 total) said they connect to any freely available network while out in public. When asked about the security implications of such a decision, the majority of the respondents said they didn't think about such things, and that it wasn't a concern for them.

As open source software grows more popular, and important, developers face an existential question: How to make money from something you give away for free? An anonymous reader shares a report: The Open Source Initiative standards body says an open source license must allow users to view the underlying source code, modify it, and share it as they see fit. Independent developers and large companies alike now routinely release software under these licenses. Many coders believe open collaboration results in better software. Some companies open their code for marketing purposes. Open source software now underpins much technology, from smartphone operating systems to government websites.

Companies that release software under open source licenses generate revenue in different ways. Some sell support, including Red Hat, which IBM acquired for $34 billion earlier this month. Others, like cloud automation company HashiCorp, sell proprietary software based on the open source components. But with the rise of cloud computing, developers see their open source code being bundled into services and sold by other companies. Amazon, for example, sells a cloud-hosted service based on the popular open source database Redis, which competes with a similar cloud-hosted service offered by Redis Labs, the sponsor of the open source project. To protect against such scenarios, companies behind popular open source projects are restricting how others can use their software. Redis Labs started the trend last year when it relicensed several add-ons for its core product under terms that essentially prohibit offering those add-ons as part of a commercial cloud computing service.

That way, Amazon and other cloud providers can't use those add-ons in their competing Redis services. Companies that want the functionality provided by those add-ons need to develop those features themselves, or get permission from Redis Labs. [...] Analytics company Confluent and database maker CockroachDB added similar terms to their licenses, preventing cloud computing companies from using some or all of their code to build competing services. Taking a slightly different tack, MongoDB relicensed its flagship database product last year under a new "Server Side Public License" (SSPL) that requires companies that sell the database system as a cloud service also release the source code of any additional software they include.

Many of California's local law enforcement agencies have access to facial recognition software for identifying suspects who appear in crime scene footage, documents obtained through public records requests show. From a report: Three California counties also have the capability to run facial recognition searches on each others' mug shot databases, and others could join if they choose to opt into a network maintained by a private law enforcement software company. The network is called California Facial Recognition Interconnect, and it's a service offered by DataWorks Plus, a Greenville, South Carolina-based company with law enforcement contracts in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Santa Barbara. Currently, the three adjacent counties of Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino are able to run facial recognition against mug shots in each other's databases. That means these police departments have access to about 11.7 million mug shots of people who have previously been arrested, a majority of which come from the Los Angeles system.

According to The Planetary Society, LightSail 2 has successfully raised its orbit using solar sailing, making it the first small spacecraft to demonstrate the concept. From the report: Since unfurling the spacecraft's silver solar sail last week, mission managers have been optimizing the way the spacecraft orients itself during solar sailing. After a few tweaks, LightSail 2 began raising its orbit around the Earth. In the past 4 days, the spacecraft has raised its orbital high point, or apogee, by about 2 kilometers. The perigee, or low point of its orbit, has dropped by a similar amount, which is consistent with pre-flight expectations for the effects of atmospheric drag on the spacecraft. The mission team has confirmed the apogee increase can only be attributed to solar sailing, meaning LightSail 2 has successfully completed its primary goal of demonstrating flight by light for CubeSats.

The milestone makes LightSail 2 the first spacecraft to use solar sailing for propulsion in Earth orbit, the first small spacecraft to demonstrate solar sailing, and just the second-ever solar sail spacecraft to successfully fly, following Japan's IKAROS, which launched in 2010. LightSail 2 is also the first crowdfunded spacecraft to successfully demonstrate a new form of propulsion. The mission team will continue raising LightSail 2's orbit for roughly a month, until the perigee decreases to the point where atmospheric drag overcomes the thrust from solar sailing. During the orbit-raising period, the team will continue optimizing the performance of the solar sail.

An anonymous reader shares a report from The Guardian about the questionable decision in the 1950s to get rid of Sydney's trams in favor of private cars. From the report: In the late 1950s Sydney ripped up its tram network, once one of the largest in the world. Nearly 1,000 trams -- some only a few years old -- were rolled to the workshops in the city's eastern suburbs and stripped of anything that could be sold, before being unceremoniously tipped on their sides, doused with sump oil and set ablaze. Barely a decade before its closure, Sydney's tram system had carried 400 million passenger journeys a year on a network of more than 250km, primarily serving the eastern, southern and inner-west suburbs, and stretching as far north as Narrabeen at its peak. But the explosion of car traffic in the postwar years persuaded the New South Wales government that urban freeways were the way of the future (the first in Australia, the Cahill Expressway, opened in 1958), and trams were an impediment to that vision.

The destruction of the network from the mid-50s was swift and brutal. In 1958 the bizarre castellated Fort Macquarie depot at Circular Quay was demolished to make way for the Opera House, and the lines along George Street were torn up. The last Sydney tram ran on 25 February 1961 from Hunter Street to La Perouse (along much of the same route now being rebuilt), packed to the rafters and greeted by crowds of people, before it joined the dismal procession to "burning hill" at Randwick. Mathew Hounsell, a senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, has called the destruction of the network "the largest organized vandalism in our nation's history." He says the decisions made in the 50s had a disastrous long-term effect. "When the trams were removed from Sydney, mass transport patronage plummeted and private car usage soared. Our space-saving trams were replaced with ever-more space-hungry cars, causing ever-worsening traffic. That wasn't how the planners saw it at the time. They were strongly swayed by powerful international influences, which chimed with the unstoppable rise of private car ownership in Australia. The trams are slowly returning, as the city painfully rebuilds a tiny part of its old system. "The construction of 12.8km of light rail from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kingsford will cost $2.7 billion at the latest estimate, has caused untold misery to shops and other businesses in its path and will be almost a year overdue by the time even the first section is open," the report says.

"The new line hardly represents a fundamental shift in Sydney's transport thinking, coming as it does alongside the vast 'congestion-busting' WestConnex freeway project, and further investment in metro rail (a separate light rail link is also under construction at Parramatta). But it is a reminder that the city might have looked very different today but for the decision taken in the 1950s -- and ruthlessly carried out -- to prioritize motor transport."

Researchers from Tsinghua University in China and University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new kind of soft robot that looks like a bent strip of paper, but is able to move at 20 body lengths per second and survive being stomped on. The robot has been presented in the current issue of Science Robotics. IEEE Spectrum reports: This prototype robot measures just 3 centimeters by 1.5 cm. It takes a scanning electron microscope to actually see what the robot is made of -- a thermoplastic layer is sandwiched by palladium-gold electrodes, bonded with adhesive silicone to a structural plastic at the bottom. When an AC voltage (as low as 8 volts but typically about 60 volts) is run through the electrodes, the thermoplastic extends and contracts, causing the robot's back to flex and the little "foot" to shuffle. A complete step cycle takes just 50 milliseconds, yielding a 200 hertz gait. And technically, the robot "runs," since it does have a brief aerial phase.

The researchers also put together a prototype with two legs instead of one, which was able to demonstrate a potentially faster galloping gait by spending more time in the air. They suggest that robots like these could be used for "environmental exploration, structural inspection, information reconnaissance, and disaster relief," which are the sorts of things that you suggest that your robot could be used for when you really have no idea what it could be used for. But this work is certainly impressive, with speed and robustness that are largely unmatched by other soft robots. An untethered version seems possible due to the relatively low voltages required to drive the robot, and if they can put some peanut-sized sensors on there as well, practical applications might actually be forthcoming sometime soon.

Cisco has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle a claim that it sold video surveillance software it knew was vulnerable to hackers to hospitals, airports, schools, state governments and federal agencies. SFGate reports: The tech giant continued to sell the software and didn't fix the massive security weakness for about four years after a whistleblower alerted the company about it in 2008, according to a settlement unsealed Wednesday with the Justice Department and 15 states as well as the District of Columbia.

Hackers could use the flaw not just to spy on video footage but to turn surveillance cameras on and off, delete footage and even potentially compromise other connected physical security systems such as alarms or locks - all without being detected, according to Hamsa Mahendranathan, an attorney at Constantine Cannon, which represented whistleblower James Glenn. The settlement marks the first time a company has been forced to pay out under a federal whistleblower law for not having adequate cybersecurity protections.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: About 5,000 euros ($5,600) are set to buy your 10-year-old combustion clunker an electric makeover -- and offer a cut-price way to avoid driving bans across European cities. French startup Transition-One has developed retrofitting technology that adds an electric engine, batteries and a connected dashboard into older models of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, Volkswagen AG, Renault SA and PSA Group for about 8,500 euros, or 5,000 euros after government subsidies in France.

In the prototype Twingo, three battery packs are fitted in front and two in what used to be the gas tank. The whole pack, bought from a Tesla Inc. parts reseller, weighs 120 kilograms (265 pounds). To compare, Renault's electric Zoe has a 290 kilogram battery for a 210 kilometer driving range. Prices start at around 23,000 euros excluding battery rental battery. The transition takes less than a day, leaving the original stick shift and gear box and installing the plug behind the hatch that drivers usually pop open to refill the tank. Founder Aymeric Libeau, whose previous experiences include co-founding software company Pentalog Group, has worked on retrofitting for two years, and tested the method with a French business school. He is looking to raise 6 million euros to build a factory he says would be capable of churning out as many as 4,000 vehicles next year.

Libeau expects French and European regulator approval by the end of the year and will start pre-orders in September to test demand.

Citing threats to free speech and civil rights, the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts on Tuesday moved to prohibit local government from using facial recognition. Three other cities in the country have already instituted such bans over concerns that the technology is biased and violates basic human rights. Gizmodo reports: In December of last year, the Cambridge City Council passed the Surveillance Technology Ordinance which requires the council's approval prior to the acquisition or deployment of certain surveillance tech, which included facial recognition software. The order was passed on Tuesday by the council and will next be sent to the Public Safety Committee, Mayor Marc McGovern and Councillor Sumbul Siddiqui both confirmed to Gizmodo in an email. This marks one step closer to banning the city's use of the tech altogether.

The amendment, sponsored by Cambridge Mayor Marc McGovern and two city councilmembers, argued that, given recent reports, it's evident this tech can discriminate against women and people of color. They also argued that facial recognition technology violates a person's civil rights and civil liberties. "The use of face recognition technology can have a chilling effect on the exercise of constitutionally protected free speech, with the technology being used in China to target ethnic minorities, and in the United States, it was used by police agencies in Baltimore, Maryland, to target activists in the aftermath of Freddie Gray's death," the amendment states.

Samsung is one of the only companies still producing tablets to rival Apple's iPad. Today the company announced the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6, its latest high-end tablet, for $649. Pre-orders start August 23, and the device ships September 6. Samsung says there will be an LTE version available later. Ars Technica reports: The Samsung Tab S6 features a 10.5-inch 2560x1600 OLED display, a 2.84GHz Snapdragon 855, and a 7040mAh battery. The base version has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, with a higher tier of 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. For cameras, there's an 8MP front camera, while the rear gets a 13MP main camera and a 5MP wide-angle lens. The device is down to 5.7mm thick and weighs 420 grams. This is Samsung's first-ever tablet with an in-screen fingerprint reader. Interestingly, it's an optical reader instead of the ultrasonic tech that the Galaxy S10 uses. Somehow, on a 10-inch tablet, Samsung couldn't find room for a headphone jack. Even Apple, which ditched the headphone jack two years ago, still puts a headphone jack on iPads. Samsung is apparently declaring war on the headphone jack with this round of updates -- the Galaxy Note 10, launching next week, is expected to dump the headphone jack, too.

The S-Pen comes with the tablet but doesn't stow away inside the body; instead, a groove on the back of the tablet gives it a spot to magnetically attach to. Of course, don't expect the tablet to sit flat on a table with a big pen attached to the back. As with other newer Samsung devices, the S-Pen now comes with a battery and some Bluetooth functionality, allowing it to do things like work as a remote shutter button for the camera. A new "Air action" gesture system lets you do things like change the camera mode or scroll through pictures with a flick of the pen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Amazon's home security company Ring has garnered enormous control over the ways in which its law enforcement partners are allowed to portray its products, going as far as to review and even author statements attributed to police in the press, according to emails and documents obtained by Gizmodo. This summer, Ring even urged a Florida police department to delay announcing its partnership with the company for weeks, telling officials that it preferred to keep the spotlight on a separate initiative launched by the city, designed to incentivize the purchase of its home surveillance products.

Because there are already thousands of Ring users in major cities across the U.S., one of Ring's primary goals in its police partnerships is encouraging existing customers to download Neighbors. To ensure that police stay on message when promoting the app, or answering questions about it, Ring not only provides police departments with talking points but widely seeks to secure contracts that grant it the absolute right to approve all police statements about its services. Contracts and other documents obtained from police departments in three states show that Ring pre-writes almost all of the messages shared by police across social media, and attempts to legally obligate police to give the company final say on all statements about its products, even those shared with the press. (In exchange, police are also given the ability to approve any Ring press releases that directly reference the partnering police agency.) Ring's so-called "press packets" to partnering agencies include a "Press Release Template," "Social Media Templates," and "Key Talking Points," as well as high-resolution Ring and Neighbors App logos "to incorporate with PR materials as needed." Furthermore, according to Gizmodo, "the packets are accompanied by instructions dictating that final drafts of public remarks must be sent to Ring so that the company's PR team can 'review and sign off' before they're sent to local news outlets."

Motherboard recently reported that Ring has partnered with 200 law enforcement agencies across the U.S.

Facebook has declared it is not "our role to remove content that one side of a political debate considers to be false" in a final, positive, self-assessment of its actions in response to the death tax misinformation circulating on the platform during the May federal election. From a report: In correspondence seen by Guardian Australia, Simon Milner, the Singapore-based vice-president of the social media giant in the Asia-Pacific, tells Labor's outgoing national secretary, Noah Carroll: "I understand that your preference would be for Facebook to remove all content that you believe constitutes misinformation -- which in this instance mean all content that discussed whether or not Labor intends to introduce a death tax -- rather than demote it; however Facebook only removes content that violates our community standards. "We do not agree that is is our role to remove content that one side of a political debate considers to be false," Milner says in the letter sent a month after election day.

The data breach at Capital One may be the "tip of the iceberg" and may affect other major companies, according to security researchers. From a report: Israeli security firm CyberInt said Vodafone, Ford, Michigan State University and the Ohio Department of Transportation may have also fallen victim to the same data breach that saw over 106 million credit applications and files stolen from a cloud server run by Capital One by an alleged hacker, Paige Thompson, a Seattle resident, who was taken into FBI custody earlier this week. Reports from Forbes and security reporter Brian Krebs indicating that Capital One may not have been the only company affected, pointing to "one of the world's biggest telecom providers, an Ohio government body, and a major U.S. university," according to Slack messages sent by the alleged hacker.

Krebs posted a screenshot of a list of files purportedly stolen by the alleged hacker. The stolen data contained filenames including car maker "Ford" and Italian financial services company "Unicredit." The Justice Department said Thompson may face additional charges -- suggesting other companies may have been involved. Further reading: Capital One's Breach Was Inevitable, Because We Did Nothing After Equifax.

Google on Wednesday announced it's making its Titan Security Key available via the Google Store in multiple new countries: Canada, France, Japan and the United Kingdom. Google launched the second-factor security key last year, starting with availability in the US. From a report: Google touts the Titan Security Key as one of the best ways to protect Google Accounts from hacking and phishing, especially high-value accounts that are regularly probed and attacked. The key is used as part of Google's Advanced Protection Program. Based on FIDO open standards, the security key comes in both USB and Bluetooth varieties. Back in May, Google had to issue replacements for the Bluetooth keys due to a vulnerability in the pairing process.

No country on earth has benefited from President Trump's trade fight with China more than Vietnam. From a report: The country's factories have swelled with orders as American tariffs cause companies to reconsider making their products in China. Now, more big technology firms are looking to bulk up their manufacturing operations in Vietnam, lifting the ambitions of a nation already well on its way to becoming a powerhouse maker of smartphones and other high-end gadgets. First, though, Vietnam needs to get better at making the little plastic casings on your earbuds.

Vu Huu Thang's company in the northern city of Bac Ninh, Bac Viet Technology, produces small plastic parts for Canon printers, Korg musical instruments, and Samsung cellphones and phone accessories, including earbuds. He said it would be hard for his firm to compete against Chinese suppliers as long as he had to buy 70 to 100 tons of imported plastic material every month, most of it made in China. "Vietnam cannot compare with China," Mr. Thang said. "When we buy materials, it's 5, 10 percent more expensive than China already." And the Vietnamese market is too small, he said, to entice plastic producers to set up plants here.

Andy Greenberg, writing for Wired: When Alex Stamos describes the challenge of studying the worst problems of mass-scale bad behavior on the internet, he compares it to astronomy. To chart the cosmos, astronomers don't build their own Hubble telescopes or Arecibo observatories. They concentrate their resources in a few well-situated places and share time on expensive hardware. But when it comes to tackling internet abuse ranging from extremism to disinformation to child exploitation, Stamos argues, Silicon Valley companies and academics are still trying to build their own telescopes. What if, instead, they shared their tools -- and more importantly, the massive data sets they've assembled?

That's the idea behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, part of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center where Stamos is a visiting professor. Founded with a $5 million donation from Craigslist creator Craig Newmark, the Internet Observatory aspires to be a central outlet for the study of all manner of internet abuse, assembling for visiting researchers the necessary machine learning tools, big data analysts, and perhaps most importantly, access to major tech platforms' user data -- a key to the project that may hinge on which tech firms cooperate and to what degree.

"Misinformation is not just a computer science problem. It's a problem that brings in political science, sociology, psychology," Stamos says. "Part of the idea of the Internet Observatory is to build a place for these people to work together, and we want to build the infrastructure necessary to allow all the different parts of the political and social sciences to study what's happening online." Stamos says the observatory is currently negotiating with tech firms -- he names Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit as examples -- that it hopes will offer access to user data via API in real time and in historical archives. The observatory will then share that access with social scientists who might have a specific research project but lack the connections or resources to grapple with the immensity of the data involved.

Freshly Exhumed writes: When Linus Torvalds first created Linux in 1991, he built it on a 386-powered PC with a floppy drive. Things change. In 2012, Torvalds bid the i386 processor adieu saying, "I'm not sentimental. Good riddance." Now, it's the floppy drive's turn to bid Linux adieu. Torvalds has declared the floppy drive project "orphaned." Why? Because floppy drives have become historical relics. No one's using them. Indeed, Jiri Kosina, the Czech Linux kernel developer in charge of the floppy drive driver, said he "no longer has working hardware." Torvalds continued, "Actual working physical floppy hardware is getting hard to find, and while Willy was able to test this, I think the driver can be considered pretty much dead from an actual hardware standpoint. The hardware that is still sold seems to be mainly USB-based, which doesn't use this legacy driver at all."