The University of California is suing five major retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, IKEA, and Bed Bath & Beyond, for infringing on four patents related to "filament" LED light bulbs. Reuters reports: These patents relate to what the university called the "reinvention of the light bulb" by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara led by professor Shuji Nakamura, who won the 2014 Nobel prize for physics. The university is seeking unspecified damages, including royalties, in lawsuits filed with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, and wants the retailers to enter license agreements. It has also asked the U.S. International Trade Commission to open a probe into the retailers' conduct, saying the retailers have failed to require their suppliers to honor the university's patents.

Filament LED light bulbs are sometimes called "Edison" or "vintage" bulbs because they resemble light bulbs created by Thomas Edison that have glowing filaments visible inside. According to the university's lawyers at Nixon Peabody, the litigation is the first-of-its-kind "direct patent enforcement" campaign against an entire industry. The university said it was intended "to spearhead a broader, national response to the existential threat" posed by the "widespread disregard" for the patent rights of universities, including when schools encourage the private sector to develop commercial products containing their research.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers have demonstrated a new algorithm for detecting so-called deepfake images -- those altered imperceptibly by AI systems, potentially for nefarious purposes. Initial tests of the algorithm picked out phony from undoctored images down to the individual pixel level with between 71 and 95 percent accuracy, depending on the sample data set used. The algorithm has not yet been expanded to include the detection of deepfake videos.

One component of the algorithm is a variety of a so-called "recurrent neural network," which splits the image in question into small patches and looks at those patches pixel by pixel. The neural network has been trained by letting it examine thousands of both deepfake and genuine images, so it has learned some of the qualities that make fakes stand out at the single-pixel level. Another portion of the algorithm, on a parallel track to the part looking at single pixels, passes the whole image through a series of encoding filters -- almost as if it were performing an image compression, as when you click the "compress image" box when saving a TIFF or a JPEG. These filters, in a mathematical sense, enable the algorithm to consider the entire image at larger, more holistic levels. The algorithm then compares the output of the pixel-by-pixel and higher-level encoding filter analyses. When these parallel analyses trigger red flags over the same region of an image, it is then tagged as a possible deepfake. The deepfake-detecting algorithm has been described in a recent IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

Millions of first-time internet consumers from the Ivory Coast to India and Indonesia are connecting to the web on smart feature phones that cost only about $25. "[T]hese hybrid phones, fueled by inexpensive mobile data, provide some basic apps and internet access in addition to calling and texting," the Wall Street Journal reports. From the report: While global smartphone sales began sliding last year as markets became saturated, smart feature phone shipments tripled to around 75 million from 2017, according to research firm Counterpoint. Some 84 million are likely to be shipped this year. Even as rich nations start to roll out 5G technologies, some 3.4 billion people around the world remain cut off from the internet, according to We Are Social, another research firm. Most of them already use traditional, unconnected mobile phones, meaning they can easily make the transition to similarly shaped devices capable of high-speed web connections.

Smart feature phones aren't only inexpensive, but they also have physical keypads that are less intimidating than touch screens for those new to the technology. Meanwhile, their batteries last for days, a bonus in places where electricity is unreliable. There is a trade-off for the low price. The devices typically have slower and less powerful components, only basic cameras and their screens are usually just a few inches in size, factors that contribute to their longer battery life. There also are fewer apps available for smart feature phones.

Google researchers have shared details of five flaws in Apple's iMessage software that could make its devices vulnerable to attack. The BBC reports: In one case, the researchers said the vulnerability was so severe that the only way to rescue a targeted iPhone would be to delete all the data off it. Another example, they said, could be used to copy files off a device without requiring the owner to do anything to aid the hack. Apple released fixes last week. But the researchers said they had also flagged a sixth problem to Apple, which had not been rectified in the update to its mobile operating system.

Apple's own notes about iOS 12.4 indicate that the unfixed flaw could give hackers a means to crash an app or execute commands of their own on recent iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches if they were able to discover it. Apple has not commented on this specific issue, but has urged users to install the new version of iOS, which addresses Google's other discoveries as well as a further range of glitches and threats. One of the two Google researchers involved - Natalie Silvanovich - intends to share more details of her findings at a presentation at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas next month.

An anonymous reader shares a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Chrome 76 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. The release includes Adobe Flash blocked by default, Incognito mode detection disabled, multiple PWA improvements, and more developer features. You can update to the latest version now using Chrome's built-in updater or download it directly from google.com/chrome. Google has been taking baby steps to kill off Flash for years. In 2015, Chrome started automatically pausing less important Flash content. In 2016, Chrome started blocking "behind the scenes" Flash content and using HTML5 by default. In July 2017, however, Adobe said it would kill Flash by 2020. With Chrome 76, Flash is now blocked by default. Users can still turn it on in settings, but next year, Flash will be removed from Chrome entirely.

According to a recent financial report from Sony, the PlayStation 4 has become the fastest home console to reach 100 million sales. Geek.com reports: The 100 million mark is an impressive milestone for any console no matter how long it takes to reach it. Sony previous hit it with the original PlayStation and set the total sales record with the PlayStation 2's 155 million sales. Meanwhile, Nintendo also achieved this with the original Wii, the Game Boy line of handhelds, and the 154 million sales of the Nintendo DS. But after failing to hit the target with the beleaguered (albeit still successful) PlayStation 3, Sony has bounced back with the PlayStation 4. And since the PS4 has only been on the market for five years and seven months, it beat the record two months earlier than the previous fastest seller the PS2.

As end of support for the still-popular Windows 7 draws near, risks of unpatched operating systems are likely to be a significant security concern in the near future. intensivevocoder writes: There is a relatively old -- though still fundamentally true -- adage about Windows: Microsoft's biggest competition is Microsoft, as a specific subset of users (and businesses) only upgrade to the latest version of Windows kicking and screaming. According to SpiceWorks' Future of Network and Endpoint Security report, published Tuesday, 32% of organizations still have at least one Windows XP device connected to their network, despite extended support for XP ending in 2014. (Notably, the last variant of XP, Windows POSReady 2009, reached end of life in April 2019 .)

With the looming end of free support for Windows 7, this reticence of users and enterprises to upgrade to newer versions of Windows is likely to create significant security issues. Presently, 79% of organizations still have at least one Windows 7 system on their network, according to SpiceWorks, which also found that two thirds of businesses plan to migrate all of their machines off Windows 7 prior to the end of support on January 14, 2020, while a quarter will only migrate after that deadline. Separately, a Gartner market forecast from April forecasted that only 75% of professional PCs will be on Windows 10 by 2021.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Baseball's future has arrived in the Atlantic League, a collection of eight independent professional teams that span from New Britain, Conn., to Sugar Land, Texas. Last week marked the introduction of the most significant innovation: an automated strike zone, shifting responsibility for calling balls and strikes from a person to an emotionless piece of technology free of the biases and inconsistencies of mere humans. And if the test goes well, the days of big-league players imploring umps to schedule an eye exam could soon come to an end.

Ducks manager Wally Backman predicted that MLB will adopt the system within five years. "It's going to happen," he said. "There have been a few pitches that are questionable, but not as many as if it was a human. The machine is definitely going to be more right than they are." Every Atlantic League stadium, including the Patriots' TD Bank Ballpark in Central New Jersey, now features a TrackMan device perched high above the plate. It uses 3-D Doppler radar to register balls and strikes and relays its "decision" through a secure Wi-Fi network to the umpire, equipped with an iPhone in his pocket connected to a wired earbud. That umpire, positioned behind the plate as normal, hears a man's voice saying "ball" or "strike" and then signals the verdict.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than two years ago, Facebook revealed it was working on a project for typing words onto a computer right from your brain, without requiring invasive surgery to make it work. The company has been working with several universities on the effort, including the University of California, San Francisco. Facebook helped pay for UCSF researchers to study whether electrodes placed in the brain could help us learn to "decode" speech from brainwaves in real time. As it turns out, this is possible: A study published Tuesday showed that researchers could instantly see -- as text on a computer screen -- a word or phrase that a participant was thinking from brain activity, as long as it was a response to a limited set of questions. The study includes three epilepsy patients voluntarily implanted with electrodes.

Facebook is also footing the bill for a new, year-long study that UCSF is currently conducting where it will try to use brain activity to help a person who can't speak communicate. The social network hopes the efforts could help reveal which brain signals are key for that non-invasive wearable that it's planning for in the years ahead. "We expect that to take upwards of 10 years," Mark Chevillet, a research director at Facebook Reality Labs who runs its brain-computer interface group, told CNN Business of the overall project. "This is a long-term research program."

A new bill, sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), targets snapstreaks, YouTube autoplay, and endless scrolling that, the bill alleges, are designed in a way to make services "addictive." Reader Zorro writes: Hawley's Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act, or the SMART Act, would ban these features that work to keep users on platforms longer, along with others, like Snapstreaks, that incentivize the continued use of these products. If approved, the Federal Trade Commission and Health and Human Services could create similar rules that would expire after three years unless Congress codified them into law. "Big tech has embraced a business model of addiction," Hawley said. "Too much of the 'innovation' in this space is designed not to create better products, but to capture more attention by using psychological tricks that make it difficult to look away."

Deceptive design played an enormous part in last week's FTC settlement with Facebook, and Hawley's bill would make it unlawful for tech companies to use dark patterns to manipulate users into opting into services. For example, "accept" and "decline" checkboxes would need to be the same font, color, and size to help users make better, more informed choices. "Social media companies deploy a host of tactics designed to manipulate users in ways that undermines their wellbeing," said Josh Golin, executive director of campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.

wiredmikey writes: The DHS has issued a security alert for small planes, warning that modern flight systems are vulnerable to hacking if someone manages to gain physical access to the aircraft. The alert stems from research done by security firm Rapid7, which found that an attacker could potentially disrupt electronic messages transmitted across a small plane's network, for example by attaching a small device to its wiring, that would affect aircraft systems. Engine readings, compass data, altitude and other readings "could all be manipulated to provide false measurements to the pilot," according to the DHS alert.

Truecaller, a service that helps users screen robocalls, has rolled out an update to its app in India, its largest market, after a previous software release covertly signed up an unspecified number of users to its payments service. From a report: A number of users in India began to complain late Monday that Truecaller, which has amassed over 100 million daily users in the country, had registered them to its payments service without their consent. In a statement to TechCrunch, Truecaller acknowledged the error and said a bug in the previous software update caused the issue. The bug led the app to quietly send a text message to a bank to verify their account -- which is part of the procedure to sign up to the payments service.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: At least 200 law enforcement agencies around the country have entered into partnerships with Amazon's home surveillance company Ring, according to an email obtained by Motherboard via public record request. Ring has never disclosed the exact number of partnerships that it maintains with law enforcement. However, the company has partnered with at least 200 law enforcement agencies, according to notes taken by a police officer during a Ring webinar, which he emailed to himself in April. It's possible that the number of partnerships has changed since the day the email was sent. The officer who sent the email told Motherboard that the email was a transcribed version of handwritten notes that he took during a team webinar with a Ring representative on April 9. Additional emails obtained by Motherboard indicate that this webinar trained officers on how to use the "Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal." This portal allows local police to see a map with the approximate locations of all Ring cameras in a neighborhood, and request footage directly from camera owners. Owners need to consent, but police do not need a warrant to ask for footage. "This doesn't surprise me at all, and it's the perfect example of how corporate surveillance and government surveillance are inextricably linked," Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, told Motherboard. "Amazon is building a for-profit surveillance dragnet and partnering with local law enforcement agencies in ways that avoid any form of oversight or accountability that police departments might normally be required to adhere to."

"It's time to come to grips with the fact that the 1984 dystopian future we all fear isn't something a future authoritarian government might impose," Greer told Motherboard, "it's something that's being built right now, in plain sight, through partnerships between private companies and government agencies."

Uber confirmed Monday that around 400 of the roughly 1,200 people in its marketing unit are being let go as part of a broader restructuring of the department. CNN reports: In an email sent by Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi to staff and seen by CNN Business, he says, "we are not making these changes because Marketing has become less important to Uber. The exact opposite is true: we are making these changes because presenting a powerful, unified, and dynamic vision to the world has never been more important." The news, first reported by the New York Times, comes as the company faces pressure to clean up its finances following a lackluster Wall Street debut in May. Uber has a history of steep loses and its revenue growth is slowing.

Uber lost $1.01 billion in the first three months of this year, according to the company's first earnings report as a public company. Revenue from its core ridesharing business grew just 9% from the year prior. The company is set to report its second quarter earnings results next week. The layoffs are just the latest turbulence inside Uber in the less than three months since it went public.

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: It may sound strange at first, but a team of researchers in Australia has come up with a method to predict your personality traits using just the accelerometer in your phone. Well, that and your call and messaging activity logs. Also, the system works for some traits better than others. But it's an interesting take on how we may find connections through such seemingly unrelated things. In this case, we start at the Big Five personality traits. These have been used in psychology since the 1980's to help classify five dominant parts of our personalities. These five traits are extraversion (outgoing vs reserved), openness (curious vs cautious), neuroticism (confidence vs nervous), agreeableness (compassionate vs detached) and conscientiousness (organised vs easy-going).

The researchers analysed 52 people's phone habits between March 2010 and July 2011. Each participant was given a phone with sensing and collection software on it, which gave the researchers information on when and how much the phone was moving (accelerometer data), as well as the number and time of day of all calls and messages. The participants were also asked to complete a Big Five survey to score their personalities on the five traits. Then, the team also created a list of features related to the aspects of phone use they measured, that might potentially determine personality traits; for example, physical activity on weekend nights might predict extraversion, or the number of calls one makes might predict agreeableness. After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that some of the phone features really did predict some of the personality traits for the 52 participants. The phone data best predicted neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion, but had trouble predicting the other two traits, especially openness. "There's also the issue of whether the team were actually looking at personality traits, or if the personality traits could be masked by other factors," the report adds. "For instance, neuroticism may be associated with different regularity of activity intensity in the night, however we cannot rule out many other possible explanations (e.g. neurotic people are more prone to stress and therefore - if this is the case, anyone with different personality traits that are stressed will still exhibit the same results)."

The study has been published in the journal Computer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: For the first time, doctors in the U.S. have used the powerful gene-editing technique CRISPR to try to treat a patient with a genetic disorder. "It is just amazing how far things have come," says Victoria Gray, 34, of Forest, Miss. "It is wonderful," she told NPR in an exclusive interview after undergoing the landmark treatment for sickle cell disease. Gray is the first patient ever to be publicly identified as being involved in a study testing the use of CRISPR for a genetic disease. "I always had hoped that something will come along," she says from a hospital bed at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, Tenn., where she received an infusion of billions of genetically modified cells. "It's a good time to get healed." But it probably will take months, if not years, of careful monitoring of Gray and other patients before doctors know whether the treatment is safe and how well it might be helping patients. "For the study, doctors are using cells taken from patients' own bone marrow that have been genetically modified with CRISPR to make them produce a protein that is usually only made by fetuses and by babies for a short time following birth," the report adds. "The hope is this protein will compensate for the defective protein that causes sickle cell disease and will enable patients to live normally for the rest of their lives."

Scientists at the University of California San Diego have created a contact lens, controlled by eye movements, that can zoom in if you blink twice. "In the simplest of terms, the scientists measured the electrooculographic signals generated when eyes make specific movements (up, down, left, right, blink, double blink) and created a soft biomimetic lens that responds directly to those electric impulses," reports CNET. "The lens created was able to change its focal length depending on the signals generated." From the report: Incredibly, the lens works regardless of whether the user can see or not. It's not about the sight, it's about the electricity produced by specific movements. The researchers believe this innovation could be used in "visual prostheses, adjustable glasses, and remotely operated robotics in the future."

A CBS News investigation found that some companies that are hired to make negative web pages disappear appear to be forging judges' signatures to trick Google into changing its search results. From the report: One of the only ways to get Google to permanently remove a link from its search results is with a court order from a judge. CBS News sorted through thousands of these court orders and spotted small businesses from all across America trying to clean up their reputations. But we also spotted a problem: Dozens of the court documents were fakes. "It never even crossed my mind that people would have the guts to actually go out there and just forge a court document," said Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who specializes in internet law. Volokh points out that forging a court document is criminal. "Part of it is just how brazen it is. They take a judge's signature and they copy it from one order to another order and they pretend something is a court order. It's cheaper and it's faster -- if they don't get caught," Volokh said.

CBS News worked with Volokh and identified more than 60 fraudulent court orders sent to Google. Some are obviously fake, like one with a case number of "1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9." Others are more sophisticated, and appear to be drawn from nine different federal courts across the country. The most recent fake court document we identified was submitted in April. It's not just about making a bad review of a local restaurant disappear. CBS News uncovered bogus court documents submitted on behalf of two convicted criminals who wanted Google to forget about their crimes. Both were child sex offenders. Of the more than 60 phony documents, we found that 11 had signatures forged from judges in Hamilton County, Ohio.

The New York Times reports that Amazon is quietly exploring a new grocery store chain with a reimagined format for selling food (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). From the report: In early 2017, a memo circulated inside Amazon that imagined an ambitious new grocery chain. The document was written like a news release, a common practice for ideas being weighed inside the company, with the title "Grocery Shopping for Everyone." The new stores, the document envisioned, would have robust sections for produce, fresh food and prepared meals. Nonperishable products, like paper towels or canned beans, would be stored on a separate floor, away from customers. Shoppers could order those items with an app, and while they shopped for fresh food, the other products would be brought down in time for check out. There would also be an area to pick up groceries ordered online and to manage packages for delivery drivers. The faux news release, which has not previously been reported, cited a fictional grocery expert named Hal Apenyo, as in the chili pepper, declaring success in just six months. "The conversion from offline grocery shopping to mixed format shopping has been massive," the character was quoted as saying. A few months later, in June 2017, Amazon barged into the grocery business in a different way, by announcing a blockbuster deal to buy Whole Foods for $13.4 billion. The purchase catapulted Amazon near the top of the $700 billion grocery industry, and sank stocks of traditional grocers on fears that they would be outmaneuvered into oblivion. The memo and other big grocery proposals stopped circulating inside Amazon, as Whole Foods demanded everyone's attention.

But two years later, instead of Whole Foods being the answer to Amazon's grocery ambitions, it seems to have only whetted executives' appetites. The marriage has made clear the difficulties of selling fresh food inexpensively, either in a physical store or through delivery. Bananas are not the same as books. But the combination has also shown glimmers of success, particularly in delivery. And that has provided some fuel to Amazon executives pushing to add another food-selling option -- one built from the ground up that would change how people buy groceries. The company is now quietly exploring an ambitious new chain, probably separate from Whole Foods, that is not far removed from the one outlined in the old memo. It would be built for in-store shopping as well as pickup and delivery. As the discussions heated up this year, employees passed around a slightly updated version of the memo.

In a YouTube video and blog post, Google revealed that its upcoming Pixel 4 smartphone will feature face unlock technology and a feature called "Motion Sense," which confirms that it will have a Project Soli chip that uses radar to detect hand gestures near the phone. The Verge reports: Adding face unlock puts the Pixel 4 on par with modern iPhones for unlocking, and it's (at least in theory) more convenient than an in-screen fingerprint sensor. Google also confirmed that the Pixel 4 will use the face unlock feature for payments: "face unlock works in almost any orientation -- even if you're holding it upside down -- and you can use it for secure payments and app authentication too." As with the iPhone, Google says that biometric data will be stored locally in a secure chip and never share with other Google services. The Pixel 4's face unlock feature will use a variety of sensors to identify your face, including depth, infrared, and RGB. That should mean that it will work in a variety of lighting situations and also work with a diverse set of faces. Google has told me that it has done "field research" to ensure both of those things.

As for the "Motion Sense" feature, there's not a ton that we can glean from Google's article. Earlier rumors have pointed to it being related to Project Soli, which uses radar to detect tiny hand or finger movements above the device. For example, Google has demoed rubbing your thumb and index finger together to simulate turning a dial on a smartwatch. Some code found in the next version of Android has suggested it could be used for media controls at the very least. Google's post cites a possible use case where the Soli chip could detect your hand reaching for the phone, which would automatically turn on "the face unlock sensors." If it all works, the phone would automatically unlock itself and be ready by the time you're looking at it.