An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, Facebook board member and billionaire investor Peter Thiel accused Google of working with China's government. Today, The Wall Street Journal reports that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he and President Trump have no national security concerns about Alphabet's work in China. Thiel used the stage at National Conservatism Conference in Washington DC to call for the FBI and CIA to investigate Google's China ties. Thiel specifically cited Google's work on AI. But the same day Google confirmed that it killed plans for its controversial search engine, Dragonfly. The timing raised suspicion, and Trump tweeted that his administration would "take a look." "The president and I did diligence on this issue, we're not aware of any areas where Google is working with the Chinese government in any way that raises concerns," Mnuchin said today. He noted that Google continues to work with the US Department of Defense and that its work with China is "very, very limited."

The man behind Twitter's "Retweet" button -- which is pretty much the foundation of the whole site -- now thinks he screwed up big time, telling BuzzFeed News in an interview that he recalled thinking, "We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon." From a report: "That's what I think we actually did," added Chris Wetherell, the developer in question. Wetherell, who helped build the now-defunct Google Reader platform before he joined Twitter in 2009, told BuzzFeed that at the time, adding the function seemed like a simple way to streamline the process of spreading another tweet. Before the retweet button, users had to manually copy other tweets. According to BuzzFeed, Wetherell said that Twitter staff working on the feature in 2009 were more concerned about its utility in situations like "earthquakes" and fully unprepared for how it would change engagement on the platform: "Only two or three times did someone ask a broader and more interesting social question, which was, 'What is getting shared?'" Wetherell said. "That almost never came up." After the retweet button debuted, Wetherell was struck by how effectively it spread information. "It did a lot of what it was designed to do," he said. "It had a force multiplier that other things didn't have."... "We would talk about earthquakes," Wetherell said. "We talked about these first response situations that were always a positive and showed where humanity was in its best light."

Microsoft has accidentally released an internal-only version of Windows 10 to testers, revealing a new Start menu design. From a report: The software giant has distributed Windows 10 build 18947, meant for internal Xbox development, to Windows Insider testers using 32-bit devices. It's an internal-only build from the company's canary branch, and yet Microsoft has published it to all Windows 10 testers whether they're in release preview, fast ring, or even slow ring testing. Thankfully, it's only released to 32-bit systems, which aren't widely used, but it's an embarrassing mistake for Microsoft's Windows 10 testing efforts. This internal build appears to include a new Start menu design, that's very early in testing, without Microsoft's Live Tiles. It's something Microsoft is testing internally, but it's not clear whether Windows 10 will fully drop Live Tiles in the Start menu anytime soon.

One more consequence of the FTC's investigation of Facebook, which culminated in a record $5 billion settlement announced today: it's finally tightening another string in its privacy policy by cutting off access to friend data for Microsoft and Sony, the company announced today. From a report: It described having allowed them access up to now as "our mistake" after limiting similar access for about 10 other companies at the end of last year. It also noted that it has "not found evidence that any data was used in violation of our policies" as a result of the continuing access. [...] The announcement specifically impacting Microsoft and Sony comes as the company is also announcing a larger overhaul of its API. This will impact "dozens" of partners, the company said, which had been using it to build Facebook experiences on their own apps or devices "that should have been wound down."

Yesterday, a New York Times reporter reported on how some delivery apps like DoorDash use your tip to make up the worker's base pay -- essentially stealing the money you're trying to give someone to maximize their profits. Following the backlash from that report, as well as others that exposed the controversial pay policy, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu announced his company will change its policy. Engadget reports: Without getting into specifics, which he said will be announced "in the coming days," Xu tweeted that his company misunderstood "that some customers who *did* tip would feel like their tip did not matter." So now, "the new model will ensure that Dashers' earnings will increase by the exact amount a customer tips on every order." Or, the way you probably thought tips worked.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A report published by the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) on Monday found that language related to climate change has disappeared at an alarming pace since Trump took office in 2016. Across 5,301 pages -- ranging from websites belonging to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) -- the use of the terms "climate change," "clean energy," and "adaptation" plummeted by 26 percent between 2016 and 2018. Of the pages where "climate change" was stricken, more than half belong to the EPA. The EPA homepage was the 1,750th most-visited website in the U.S. in early 2019, according to the report, giving it more reach than Whitehouse.gov. But "unlike the much-discussed White House effort to question climate change findings, website changes go unannounced and are often beyond immediate public recognition," the report argues. "They insidiously undermine publicly-funded infrastructure for knowledge dissemination."

According to the report, clear scientific terminology on government websites was often replaced with politicized language such as "energy independence," a buzzword ripped directly from Trump's "America First Energy Plan" which demands an increase in fossil fuel production. The watchdog also found evidence of "diminished connections" between climate change and its effects on government websites, or quite literally, the breaking of links between public information about the topic.

The United Parcel Service (UPS) announced it has submitted an application to the FAA to operate commercial delivery drones in the U.S., through a new subsidiary called UPS Flight Forward. Quartz reports: The company has been working closely with the FAA over the last year; in 2018, the agency launched a program to test out drones in a range of autonomous flying situations, and UPS was one of the accepted applicants. It's been couriering lab samples around the WakeMed hospital campus in Raleigh, North Carolina, in partnership with the drone startup Matternet. Bala Ganesh, head of UPS's advanced technology group, says that once the FAA has certified the new company, it plans to build upon the work it's been doing in healthcare deliveries.

UPS is hoping to get its certification later this year, at which point Ganesh says the company will expand its drone activities in three ways. First, it wants to replicate the work it's done at WakeMed at other large medical facilities that need lab work ferried around as quickly as possible. It then wants to begin flying farther, using autonomous drones to potentially fly between five and ten miles from their point of origin. (Right now, most drone operations in the US need to be conducted within the line of sight of a pilot.) After that's been mastered, UPS wants to fly its drones at night. UPS doesn't plan, at least for the near future, to offer drone deliveries to regular customers, so don't expect to be getting your next online order delivered to your house by drone. For now, it's concentrating on small payloads for healthcare

Air passengers may have to pay an extra "carbon charge" on flights as part of a UK government initiative to reduce CO2 emissions and tackle the climate crisis. From a report: Passengers could choose to pay more for travel tickets, which would then be used to offset greenhouse gas emissions. Or the scheme could work on an "opt-out" basis and also be applied to trains, buses and ferries. Ministers hope the plans will raise awareness about the effects of public transport on the environment. The extra funds could be used to spearhead eco-friendly projects such as planting trees to reduce the carbon footprint. The government said it hoped the initiative would "drive consumer choices towards less polluting journey options."

However, the transport secretary, Chris Grayling, has launched a call for evidence on offsetting carbon emissions produced by public transport. In addition, the government has expressed concerns consumers may not trust that their payments are supporting worthwhile causes. Grayling said on Thursday: "Climate change affects every one of us and we are committed to ensuring that transport plays its part in delivering net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: In 2017, Ford announced that it would sell an all-electric version of its best-selling F-150 pickup truck. It plans to start selling a hybrid version in 2020, and as a way to start priming the pump (or plug, as it were) for a vehicle that will no doubt be a very big deal, the company released a video Tuesday demonstrating the electric truck's remarkable towing capacity. The electric prototype is seen pulling 10 double-decker rail cars over 1,000 feet. It does it once when the rail cars are empty and a second time with them loaded with 42 regular, gas-burning F-150s. The latter stunt puts the entire load at 1.25 million pounds, according to Linda Zhang, chief engineer on the electric truck project. In the fine print, Ford describes the towing stunt as a "one-time short event demonstration" and claims it is "far beyond any production truck's published capacity." Right now, Tesla holds the record for pulling the heaviest load, when a Model X towed a 287,000-pound Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner nearly 1,000 feet on a taxiway at the Melbourne Airport in Australia last year. In June, Elon Musk teased Tesla's upcoming Pickup truck and took a swipe at Ford and other truck companies, saying: "It's going to be a truck that is more capable than other trucks. The goal is to be a better truck than a [Ford] F-150 in terms of truck-like functionality and be a better sports car than a standard [Porsche] 911. That's the aspiration."

He also said in a tweet that the towing capacity would be 300,000 pounds.

tripleevenfall writes: At numerous points during my career in the tech industry, my workplaces have been affected by the suicide of an employee. Usually beginning with the receipt of a vague email that management has been "saddened" that someone had "passed away" recently, the truth soon becomes known and the questions begin circulating again. Why does suicide seem to be more common among tech workers? Is it due to lifestyle choices commonly associated with tech workers that lead to isolation? Are the personality types that choose tech work more prone to mental illnesses?

Lawmakers in Congress are expected to introduce landmark legislation this week that will ban facial recognition technology from public housing. Called the No Biometric Barriers to Housing Act, the proposed bill would prohibit housing units that receive funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development from using technology like facial recognition. It would also require HUD to submit a report on facial recognition, detailing its impact on public housing units and their tenants. CNET reports: This would be the first federal bill that looks at what technology landlords can impose on tenants. While the law would only affect HUD housing, it could raise awareness for a broader set of landlords and tenants, and it comes as people are increasingly questioning the threats to privacy that stem from facial recognition. The only other federal bill on facial recognition is the Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act, introduced in March by Sens. Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, and Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii. There also aren't any laws on technology that landlords can impose on tenants. More than 20,000 homes in the last two years have been converted into smart homes by landlords, even as tenants complain about privacy concerns and issues with faulty locks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Dropbox now opens a new file browser and an associated Dock icon every time it starts, even if you don't want it to. If you're not familiar with Macs, the Dock is the line of applications on the bottom of the screen (or the side, if you've moved it in the settings) and serves the same function as the Windows Taskbar. If my computer restarts or if Dropbox restarts, the new Dropbox window that I don't want pops up in the Dock. This isn't a huge deal, as I can quit Dropbox's new file browser and get rid of that Dock icon each time my computer starts up. I'm not going to stop using Dropbox -- I've been paying the company $138 a year for 2TB of storage and for 12 months' worth of file history, which saves all deleted files and revisions to files. (It's going up to $158 next time I get billed, in February.) It's worth it to me because Dropbox still works great, while the alternatives have always been unreliable or disappointing in other ways when I've tried them. I'll get into that more later in this article.

But the Dock icon and window is a major change in how Dropbox presents itself to users. Dropbox has always been the kind of application that is there when you need it and gets out of the way when you don't. Dropbox's syncing and file-sharing features are integrated with the Finder (the Mac file manager), and there's a little icon in the Mac's Menu Bar at the top of the screen for when you need to change a setting. But now, Dropbox wants to be front and center at all times. The company built its own file browser to replace what's already available in the Mac Finder, and it opens that new file manager every time Dropbox starts. We wrote about it last week when Dropbox started rolling it out to more users. I've had it for more than a month since I somehow ended up in Dropbox's Early Access program. Ars' Jon Brodkin, the author of the article, also discovered that "there are numerous Dropbox support employees who apparently have never used their company's Mac application and do not understand how it works." Specifically, the employees Brodkin talked to didn't know "that it's possible for Mac applications to run without a Dock icon even though that's exactly how Dropbox worked for a decade... And they've been giving bad advice to users who want to change back to the old way of doing things."

BMW will turn Apple CarPlay into a subscription service beginning with its 2019-model-year vehicles. From a report: The German automaker currently charges a one-time $300 to add Apple CarPlay capability to navigation-equipped BMW models. Going forward, though, navigation-equipped BMWs will come with CarPlay at no charge for one year. Following that first year, customers will need to pay an annual fee of $80 to maintain the relationship between their Apple device and their BMW's infotainment system. BMWs currently are not compatible with Android Auto, although the company did announce its plans to integrate Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa services into its vehicles. [...] Regardless, BMW's decision to charge a yearly fee for CarPlay is contrary to industry norms, as all other automakers include the service as a standard or optional feature that spans the life of the vehicle, similar to a sunroof or AM/FM radio. We'll see if other manufacturers follow BMW's lead in the future or whether the market will force the automaker to fall back into line and provide it at no extra cost.

schwit1 shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: The Justice Department is opening a broad antitrust review into whether dominant technology firms are unlawfully stifling competition (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), according to department officials, adding a new Washington threat for companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The review is geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media and retail services, the officials said.

The new antitrust inquiry is the strongest signal yet of Attorney General William Barr's deep interest in the tech sector, and it could ratchet up the already considerable regulatory pressures facing the top U.S. tech firms. The review is designed to go above and beyond recent plans for scrutinizing the tech sector that were crafted by the department and the Federal Trade Commission. Justice Department officials said they would use the new antitrust review to seek extensive input and information from industry participants, and eventually from the dominant tech firms themselves. It isn't yet known whether much of the information-gathering will be done on a voluntary basis or if companies eventually could be compelled by the government to turn over materials. "There is no defined end-goal yet for the Big Tech review other than to understand whether there are antitrust problems that need addressing, but a broad range of options are on the table," the report adds. "The department's inquiry could eventually lead to more focused investigations of specific company conduct."

An anonymous reader shares a report: "There's no justice in air travel," an airline industry insider once told me. A third of passengers on planes get stuck with a middle seat, getting smushed for hours at a time in a chair that costs exactly the same ticket price as a window or aisle. That just stinks. But what if we could rethink the middle seat to be more comfortable? In 2017, we wrote about a landmark airplane seat called the S1. Its design is unique in that it staggers the typical three-seat arrangement, so that middle-seat passengers sit slightly behind others in their row. Last month, the S1 received FAA approval to be installed on planes; an undisclosed U.S .airline will be putting them on 50 planes by the end of 2020.

The S1 has been in development for five years, and the team behind it at Molon Labe Seating is a mere six people, including sales and operations staff. Designed for commuter flights of only a few hours max, the S1 moves the middle seat a few inches lower than, and back from, the aisle and window seat. It also widens the seat by about three inches. This allows your arms, shoulders, thighs, and elbows to spread just a bit more than they otherwise could, without giving the seat more legroom or reducing a plane's seating capacity (which translates to profit margins for airlines). "We have discovered that what looks like a small stagger actually makes a huge difference. The trick is to actually sit in the seat. In fact our main sales tool is to ship seats to airlines so they can sit in them," says Molon Labe founder Hank Scott. "I have watched this several times -- airline executives see the seat, nod their head and then say they get it. Then we ask them to actually sit down, next to a big fella like our head sales guy Thomas [6-foot-6, 250 pounds]. Within a few seconds they [really] get it -- they stop being an airline executive and switch into passenger modes."

The Federal Trade Commission plans to allege that Facebook misled users' about its handling of their phone numbers as part of a wide-ranging complaint that accompanies a settlement ending the government's privacy probe, Washington Post reported Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the matter. From the report: In the complaint, which has not yet been released, federal regulators take issue with Facebook's earlier implementation of a security feature called two-factor authentication. It allows users to request one-time password, sent by text message, each time they log onto the social-networking site. But some advertisers managed to target Facebook users who uploaded those contact details, perhaps without the full knowledge of those who provided them, the two sources said. The misuse of the phone numbers was first identified in media reports and by academics last year [PDF]. The FTC also plans to allege that Facebook had provided insufficient information to users -- roughly 30 million -- about their ability to turn off a tool that would identify and offer tag suggestions for photos, the sources added. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity. The facial recognition issue appears to have first been publicized earlier this year by Consumer Reports.

Widespread electricity outages could become the new normal in Venezuela, experts have warned, as the country struggled to restore power after a massive blackout that left millions without power or access to the internet. From a report: The energy minister, Freddy Brito, said on Tuesday morning that power had been restored in Caracas and at least five states after the outage which the government blamed on an "electromagnetic attack" at hydroelectric dams in the south of the country. About 80% of Venezuela's grid is served by hydropower. But energy analysts were deeply suspicious of government claims, arguing instead that years of corruption and mismanagement have eroded Venezuela's energy capacity. "This blackout is the result of negligent mis-operation of the power grid," said Jose Aguilar, a Venezuelan energy and risk consultant based in the US. "These will keep happening and it will get worse before it gets better."

Other analysts express similar incredulity. "It's hard to believe that it was an electromagnetic attack, when you've seen years of theft and corruption in the energy sector," said Geoff Ramsey, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America. "This blackout shows government doesn't have the tools to return to normalcy." Some supporters of Nicolas Maduro have claimed that US sanctions aimed at Venezuela's oil industry have hampered his government's ability to keep the lights on, but many of those sanctions target individuals accused corruption.

An anonymous reader writes: LinkedIn today announced it is swapping out its data centers for the public cloud. The Microsoft-owned company is moving its infrastructure to Azure as part of a multi-year migration. VentureBeat sat down with Mohak Shroff, LinkedIn's SVP of engineering, to discuss one of the biggest technological transformations in the company's history. LinkedIn plans to migrate its 645 million members over several years so as not to compromise the site's accessibility, reliability, and performance. "We think probably at least three years till we're done, possibly longer than that," Shroff confirmed. "It will be a gradual migration. We'll see increasing workloads on Azure over time, with a pretty significant inflection point, about a year and a half, two years out from now. And then kind of an accelerated migration post that."

Telecommunications firms and mobile-based apps make billions of dollars per year by selling customer location data to marketers and other businesses, offering a vast window into the whereabouts of cellphone and app users, often without their knowledge. That practice, which has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism in recent years, is now the subject of proposed legislation in New York [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. If passed, it is believed that the city would become the first to ban the sale of geolocation data to third parties. From a report: The bill, which will be introduced on Tuesday, would make it illegal for cellphone companies and mobile app developers to share location data gathered while a customer's mobile device is within the five boroughs. Cellphone companies and mobile apps collect detailed geolocation data of their users and then sell that information to legitimate companies such as digital marketers, roadside emergency assistance services, retail advertisers, hedge funds or -- in the case of a class-action lawsuit filed against AT&T -- bounty hunters. "The average person has no idea they are vulnerable to this," said Councilman Justin L. Brannan, a Brooklyn Democrat who is introducing the bill. "We are concerned by the fact that someone can sign up for cell service and their data can wind up in the hands of five different companies."

The UK will shortly have a new prime minister after the Conservative Party membership overwhelmingly voted to elect Boris Johnson as their new party leader, passing over his sole rival for the post, Jeremy Hunt. From a report: Johnson received 92,135 votes, a full 45,497 more than Hunt. He replaces Theresa May who announced she would step down in May after failing to achieve backing from parliament for her EU withdrawal deal -- the second PM to be topped by Brexit in just under three years. Whether Johnson can outlast even May's brief tenure very much remains to be seen. [...]

Giving his Conservative leadership acceptance speech this afternoon there was little of policy substance on show from Johnson. In his usual showman style, he preferred to stroke sitting Tory egos with a confection of positive projections and feel-good sentiments -- principally about 'getting brexit done' (though nothing on how he will actually get it done). He also dropped a few enthusiastic words vis-a-vis infrastructure, education and broadband -- going longest on the latter by claiming that "fantastic full fiber broadband" would be "sprouting in every household," before falling back on the safe and fuzzy ground of non-specific cheerleading of party and country. On the surface the fiber broadband pledge looks like a rinse and repeat of an existing government policy -- announced in last year's digital strategy -- to put all UK households in reach of fibre to the premise (FTTP) by 2033.