Rhode Island is one of about a dozen states that prohibit the release of 911 recordings or transcripts without the written consent of the caller or by court order. The goal generally is to protect the privacy of callers in what may be one of the most stressful moments of their lives. From a report: But Rhode Island's restrictive law also keeps families in the dark about how the state's 911 system has responded to calls involving their loved ones, and it has left the public oblivious to troubling gaps in how the system is performing, according to an investigation by The Public's Radio and ProPublica. In March, the news organizations reported on the 2018 death of a 6-month-old baby in Warwick after a Rhode Island 911 call taker failed to give CPR instructions to the family. The lapse came to light after a family member who took part in the 911 call requested a copy of the recording.

In June, the news organizations reported on the death of Rena Fleury, a 45-year-old woman who collapsed while watching her son's high school football game in Cumberland last year. Four unidentified bystanders called 911. But none of the 911 call takers recognized that Fleury was in cardiac arrest. And none of them instructed the callers to perform CPR. The 911 recordings for Fleury were never made public. An emergency physician who treated Fleury testified about what happened during a state House committee hearing in March. Across the country, recordings of 911 calls for accidents, medical emergencies, mass shootings and natural disasters have provided insight into the workings of public safety systems and, in some cases, revealed critical failings.

US mobile network operator Sprint said hackers broke into an unknown number of customer accounts via the Samsung.com "add a line" website. From a report: "On June 22, Sprint was informed of unauthorized access to your Sprint account using your account credentials via the Samsung.com 'add a line' website," Sprint said in a letter it is sending impacted customers. "The personal information of yours that may have been viewed includes the following: phone number, device type, device ID, monthly recurring charges, subscriber ID, account number, account creation date, upgrade eligibility, first and last name, billing address and add-on services," the US telco said. Sprint said the information hackers had access to did not pose "a substantial risk of fraud or identity theft," although, many might disagree with its assessment. The company said it re-secured all compromised accounts by resetting PIN codes, three days later, on June 25.

Amazon.com faces a full-blown European Union antitrust probe as the bloc's competition chief Margrethe Vestager prepares for a summer finale to her five-year crackdown on U.S. technology giants. From a report: The Dane, who heads the EU's competition division, is poised to open a formal investigation into Amazon within days, according to two people familiar with the case, who asked not to be named because the process isn't public. Vestager has hinted for months that she wanted to escalate a preliminary inquiry into how Amazon may be unfairly using sales data to undercut smaller shops on its Marketplace platform. By ramping up the probe, officials can start to build a case that could ultimately lead to fines or an order to change the way the Seattle-based company operates.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Our workplaces are set up for convenience, not to get the best out of our brains, says Cal Newport, bestselling author of books including Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, and a Georgetown University professor. In knowledge sector jobs, where products are created using human intelligence rather than machines, we must be switched on at all times and prepared to multitask. These are two things that are not compatible with deep, creative, insightful thinking. "In knowledge work, the main resource is the human brain and its ability to produce new information with value," says Newport. "But we are not good at getting a good return." Being switched on at all times and expected to pick things up immediately makes us miserable, says Newport. "It mismatches with the social circuits in our brain. It makes us feel bad that someone is waiting for us to reply to them. It makes us anxious."

Because it is so easy to dash off a quick reply on email, Slack or other messaging apps, we feel guilty for not doing so, and there is an expectation that we will do it. This, says Newport, has greatly increased the number of things on people's plates. "The average knowledge worker is responsible for more things than they were before email. This makes us frenetic. We should be thinking about how to remove the things on their plate, not giving people more to do." What might being wired for work at all times lead to? Inevitably, burnout. Newport describes this way of working as a "hyperactive hivemind." Unstructured conversations on messaging apps and meetings dropped into diaries on the fly congest our day. His objective, to give people the space to do their best work without distraction, is the subject of his next book: The World Without Email. Newport's idea is to allow workers to do less work, but better. Cutting out unnecessary chatter is important but only if the organization's culture allows for slower communication. Newport advocates for a more linear approach to workflows. "People need to completely stop one task in order to fully transition their thought processes to the next one," reports the BBC. "However, this is hard when we are constantly seeing emails or being reminded about previous tasks. Some of our thoughts are still on the previous work -- an effect called attention residue."

While it is very convenient to have everyone in an ongoing conversation, such as in a Slack thread, Newport says convenience is never the goal in business, it is value. "The assembly line revolutionized car production but it is not a convenient system -- it is the system that produces the most cars quickly."

Jiaming Luo and Regina Barzilay from MIT and Yuan Cao from Google's AI lab in Mountain View, California, have developed a machine-learning system capable of deciphering lost languages, and they've demonstrated it on a script from the Mediterranean island of Crete. The script, Linear B, appeared after 1400 BCE, when the island was conquered by Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland. MIT Technology Review reports: Luo and co put the technique to the test with two lost languages, Linear B and Ugaritic. Linguists know that Linear B encodes an early version of ancient Greek and that Ugaritic, which was discovered in 1929, is an early form of Hebrew. Given that information and the constraints imposed by linguistic evolution, Luo and co's machine is able to translate both languages with remarkable accuracy. "We were able to correctly translate 67.3% of Linear B cognates into their Greek equivalents in the decipherment scenario," they say. "To the best of our knowledge, our experiment is the first attempt of deciphering Linear B automatically."

That's impressive work that takes machine translation to a new level. But it also raises the interesting question of other lost languages -- particularly those that have never been deciphered, such as Linear A. In this paper, Linear A is conspicuous by its absence. Luo and co do not even mention it, but it must loom large in their thinking, as it does for all linguists. Yet significant breakthroughs are still needed before this script becomes amenable to machine translation. For example, nobody knows what language Linear A encodes. Attempts to decipher it into ancient Greek have all failed. And without the progenitor language, the new technique does not work.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: Screen time -- and social media in particular -- is linked to an increase in depressive symptoms in teenagers, according to a new study by researchers at Montreal's Sainte-Justine Hospital. The researchers studied the behavior of over 3,800 young people from 2012 until 2018. They recruited adolescents from 31 Montreal schools and followed their behavior from Grade 7 until Grade 11. The teenagers self-reported the number of hours per week that they consumed social media (such as Facebook and Instagram), video games and television. Conrod and her team found an increase in depressive symptoms when the adolescents were consuming social media and television. The study was published on Monday in JAMA Pedatrics, a journal published by the American Medical Association. The researchers "found that the increased symptoms of depression are linked to being active on platforms such as Instagram, where teens are more likely to compare their lives to glitzy images in their feeds," the report says. "They also tested to see if the additional screen time was taking away from other activities that might decrease depressive symptoms, such as exercise, but found that was not the case."

Surprisingly, time spent playing video games was found to not be contributing to depressive symptoms. "The study suggests the average gamer is not socially isolated, with more than 70 percent of gamers playing with other people either online or in person," CBC.ca reports.

New submitter HansiMeier33 shares a report from The Guardian: France's annual Bastille Day parade showcased European military cooperation and innovation on Sunday, complete with a French inventor hovering above Paris on a jet-powered flyboard. The former jetskiing champion and military reservist Franky Zapata clutched a rifle as he soared above the Champs-Elysees on his futuristic machine, which the French military helped to develop. The board, which was first created to fly above water, can reach speeds of up to 190km/h and can run for 10 minutes. The French armed forces minister, Florence Parly, said before the parade that the flyboard could "allow tests for different kinds of uses, for example as a flying logistical platform or, indeed, as an assault platform."

phalse phace writes: Earlier this month, there was a report that Broadcom was in advance talks with Symantec about a possible buyout. It's being reported that those talks have now ended. "Symantec and Broadcom have ceased deal negotiations, sources tell CNBC's David Faber," reports CNBC. "The people familiar with the matter added that Symantec would not accept less than $28 a share. People familiar with the matter added that Broadcom indicated in early conversations that it would be willing to pay $28.25 per share for Symantec, but that following due diligence knocked that figure down below $28."

Ajit Pai is proposing a plan that would stop cities and towns from using their authority over cable TV networks to regulate internet access. His proposal, which is scheduled for a vote on August 1st, "would also limit the fees that municipalities can charge cable companies," reports Ars Technica. "Cable industry lobbyists have urged the FCC to stop cities and towns from assessing fees on the revenue cable companies make from broadband." From the report: If approved, Pai's proposal would "Prohibit LFAs [local franchising authorities] from using their video franchising authority to regulate most non-cable services, including broadband Internet service, offered over cable systems by incumbent cable operators." Pai's proposal complains that "some states and localities are purporting to assert authority" to collect fees and impose requirements that aren't explicitly allowed by Title VI, the cable-regulation section that Congress added to communications law with the Cable Act of 1984.

Despite the Oregon Supreme Court ruling against Comcast, Pai's plan says "the majority of courts... have interpreted section 622(b) to prohibit states and localities from charging fees that exceed those expressly permitted by Title VI." Section 622 prevents local authorities from collecting more than 5 percent of a cable operator's gross revenue in any 12-month period. Pai's proposal also declares that "in-kind" contributions required by local franchising authorities must count toward that 5 percent cap, "with limited exceptions, including an exemption for certain capital costs related to public, educational, and governmental access (PEG) channels." But does the FCC have the power to preempt these local fees and requirements? "Having classified broadband as an information service (as part of its repeal of net neutrality rules), the Commission has determined that it is an unregulated service that it lacks regulatory authority over," consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge wrote in a November 2018 filing that urged the FCC to drop the plan. The FCC cannot regulate or preempt local regulation of "any service that does not fall within its Title II jurisdiction over common carrier services or its Title I jurisdiction over matters 'incidental' to communication by wire," the group said.

In a press conference Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Facebook's proposed digital currency, Libra, "could be misused by money launderers and terrorist financiers" and that it was a "national security issue." CNBC reports: "Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have been exploited to support billions of dollars of illicit activity like cyber crime, tax evasion, extortion, ransomware, illicit drugs and human trafficking," Mnuchin said, adding that he is "not comfortable today" with Facebook's launch. "They have a lot of work to do," he said. The press conference comes days after President Donald Trump said in a tweet that he was "not a fan" of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. He also suggested Facebook, which plans on launching the global cryptocurrency next year, would need a bank charter to do so. Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday following the president's criticism on Twitter. The world's first and most valuable digital currency fell roughly 10% to a low of $9,872 to start the week.

"The president does have concerns as it relates to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies -- those are legitimate concerns that we have been working on for a long period of time," Mnuchin said. In response to the Treasury secretary's comments, Facebook told CNBC that "they anticipated critical feedback from regulators, central banks, lawmakers around the world." The tech giant also said they announced Libra a year before its anticipated launch date, "so that we could have those conversations."

Amazon workers around the world are going on strike today to bring attention to the working conditions they endure. "Some are arguing that buying from Amazon during Prime Day is akin to crossing a picket line," reports Quartz. From the report: As the two-day bacchanal of discounted Amazon offerings begins, workers at its fulfillment centers around the U.S. continue to complain of extremely odious quotas, limited bathroom breaks, mandatory holiday shifts, and the need for pain medication just to get through their 10-hour work days.

The U.S.: Workers at a Shakopee, Minnesota fulfillment center will be walking out during a six-hour period that overlaps with the end of the facility's morning shift and the start of its evening shift. There are about 1,500 full-time employees at the facility, according to the Daily Beast.

Germany: Hundreds of employees at seven facilities will be striking today and tomorrow, over longstanding issues with employee pay. âoeWhile Amazon holds a giant Prime-Day bargain hunt, employees are deprived of a living wage,â Orhan Akman, a representative from the German labor union Ver.di, said in a statement shared with Quartz.

The UK: The GMB trade union will be staging protests at Amazon facilities across the country. Some of the most shocking accounts issues of issues faced by Amazon warehouse workers have come out of the UK. One undercover writer said they witnessed co-workers urinating in bottles to avoid missing quotas by taking bathroom breaks.

Elsewhere in Europe: Workers in Spain and Poland will also be organizing demonstrations at Amazon facilities across their countries throughout the week. Here's what Amazon had to say about the demonstrations and walkouts: "Events like Prime Day have become an opportunity for our critics, including unions, to raise awareness for their cause, in this case, increased membership dues. These groups are conjuring misinformation to work in their favor, when in fact we already offer the things they purport to be their cause -- industry leading pay (full-time employees at our Shakopee facility make $16.25 - $20.80), benefits, and a safe workplace for our employees. We can only conclude that the people who plan to attend the event on Monday are simply not informed. If these groups -- unions and the politicians they rally to their cause -- really want to help the American worker, we encourage them to focus their energy on passing legislation for an increase in the federal minimum wage, because $7.25 is too low."

Robert Epstein, an American psychologist, professor, author and journalist critical of Google, argues that Google's monopoly on search can be broken by making its index public. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report via Bloomberg: Different tech companies pose different kinds of threats. I'm focused here on Google, which I've been studying for more than six years through both experimental research and monitoring projects. (Google is well aware of my work and not entirely happy with me. The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Google is especially worrisome because it has maintained an unopposed monopoly on search worldwide for nearly a decade. It controls 92 percent of search, with the next largest competitor, Microsoft's Bing, drawing only 2.5%. Fortunately, there is a simple way to end the company's monopoly without breaking up its search engine, and that is to turn its "index" -- the mammoth and ever-growing database it maintains of internet content -- into a kind of public commons.

Doesn't Google already share its index with everyone in the world? Yes, but only for single searches. I'm talking about requiring Google to share its entire index with outside entities -- businesses, nonprofit organizations, even individuals -- through what programmers call an application programming interface, or API. Google already allows this kind of sharing with a chosen few, most notably a small but ingenious company called Startpage, which is based in the Netherlands. In 2009, Google granted Startpage access to its index in return for fees generated by ads placed near Startpage search results. With access to Google's index -- the most extensive in the world, by far -- Startpage gives you great search results, but with a difference. Google tracks your searches and also monitors you in other ways, so it gives you personalized results. Startpage doesn't track you -- it respects and guarantees your privacy -- so it gives you generic results. Some people like customized results; others treasure their privacy. In closing, Epstein writes that dozens of Startpage variants would turn up within months of opening up access to Google's index. "Many would target niche audiences -- some small, perhaps, like high-end shoppers, and some huge, like all the world's women, and most of these platforms would do a better job of serving their constituencies than Google ever could," he writes.

"These aren't just alternatives to Google, they are competitors -- thousands of search platforms, each with its special focus and emphasis, each drawing on different subsets of information from Google's ever-expanding index, and each using different rules to decide how to organize the search results they display. Different platforms would likely have different business models, too, and business models that have never been tried before would quickly be tested."

In one of his first public speaking appearances since joining Facebook to lead its AI initiatives, VP Jerome Pesenti expressed concern about the growing amount of compute power needed to create powerful AI systems. From a report: "I can tell you this is keeping me up at night," Pesenti said. "The peak compute companies like Facebook and Google can afford for an experiment, we are reaching that already." More software innovation will be required if artificial intelligence is to grow unhindered, he said, and optimization of hardware and software -- rather than brute force compute -- may be critical to AI in years ahead. [...] "We still see gains with increase of compute, but the pressure from the problem is just going to become bigger," Pesenti said. "I think we will still continue to use more compute, you will still net, but it will go slower, because you cannot keep pace with 10 times a year. That's just not possible."

During the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Electronics Resurgence Initiative 2019 summit in Detroit, Michigan, Intel unveiled a system codenamed "Pohoiki Beach," a 64-chip computer capable of simulating 8 million neurons in total. From a report: Intel Labs managing director Rich Uhlig said Pohoiki Beach will be made available to 60 research partners to "advance the field" and scale up AI algorithms like spare coding and path planning. [...] Pohoiki Beach packs 64 128-core, 14-nanometer Loihi neuromorphic chips, which were first detailed in October 2017 at the 2018 Neuro Inspired Computational Elements (NICE) workshop in Oregon.

They have a 60-millimeter die size and contain over 2 billion transistors, 130,000 artificial neurons, and 130 million synapses, in addition to three managing Lakemont cores for task orchestration. Uniquely, Loihi features a programmable microcode learning engine for on-chip training of asynchronous spiking neural networks (SNNs) -- AI models that incorporate time into their operating model, such that components of the model don't process input data simultaneously. This will be used for the implementation of adaptive self-modifying, event-driven, and fine-grained parallel computations with high efficiency.

An anonymous reader writes: Twitter today began rolling out a new version of Twitter.com, rebuilt "from the ground up." The company says the project, which impacts the front end and the back end, has been years in the making. Twitter's biggest redesign in nearly seven years is meant to be a clean slate that will help the team more quickly bring new features and functionality to the site. On the front end, that means a faster and more personalized experience. On the back end, that means serving the right experience based on the user and device.

The front end redesign brings Twitter's Explore feature from its apps to the website. That translates to more content like live video and local moments personalized to your location, context with profile information within conversations, and Top Trends in any view. Bookmarks, Lists, and Profile now have their own spots on the side navigation. Whether you have one profile or multiple, the site handles switching between accounts faster, also from the side navigation. You no longer have to login and logout. [...] Twitter has rebuilt the back end to support a site that is "personalized, efficient, faster, and more conversational." The Twitter web team says it needed to rebuild the back end from scratch because many of the problems stemmed from old architectural decisions.

Facebook's stock went up after news of a record-breaking $5 billion FTC fine for various privacy violations broke last week. From a report: That, as The New York Times' Mike Isaac points out, is the real story here: the United States government spent months coming up with a punishment for Facebook's long list of privacy-related bad behavior, and the best it could do was so weak that Facebook's stock price went up. From some other perspectives, that $5 billion fine is a big deal, of course: it's the biggest fine in FTC history, far bigger than the $22 million fine levied against Google in 2012. And $5 billion is a lot of money, to be sure. It's just that like everything else that comes into contact with Facebook's scale, it's still entirely too small: Facebook had $15 billion in revenue last quarter alone, and $22 billion in profit last year. The largest FTC fine in the history of the country represents basically a month of Facebook's revenue, and the company did such a good job of telegraphing it to investors that the stock price went up.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Europe's Galileo satellite network -- used by satnavs, financial institutions and more -- is in the throes of a huge outage. The system has been down since Friday meaning that travelers (and others) in Europe have instead had to fall back on the American Global Positioning System (GPS) -- or even Russia or Chinese systems. Galileo has been struck by what is being described as a "technical incident related to its ground infrastructure", and it's not clear when the situation will be remedied. The European GNSS Agency (Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency, or GSA) says that the incident affects only the Galileo initial navigation and timing services. It stresses that "the SAR service -- used for locating and helping people in distress situations for example at sea or mountains -- is unaffected and remains operational".

We're reviving an old Slashdot tradition -- the review. Whenever there's something especially geeky -- or relevant to our present moment -- we'll share some thoughts. And I'd like to start with Jonathan Coulton's amazing 2017 album Solid State, and its trippy accompanying graphic novel adaptation by Matt Fraction. I even tracked down Jonathan Coulton on Friday for his thoughts on how it applies to our current moment in internet time...

"When I started work on Solid State, the only thing I could really think of that I wanted to say was something like, 'The internet sucks now'," Coulton said in 2017 in an epilogue to the graphic novel. "It's a little off-brand for me, so it was a scary place to start..."

So what does he think today? And what did we think of his album...?

"An American organization founded by tech giants Google and IBM is working with a company that is helping China's authoritarian government conduct mass surveillance against its citizens," the Intercept reports.

The OpenPower Foundation -- a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to "drive innovation" -- has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently. Shenzhen-based Semptian is using the devices to enhance the capabilities of internet surveillance and censorship technology it provides to human rights-abusing security agencies in China, according to sources and documents. A company employee said that its technology is being used to covertly monitor the internet activity of 200 million people...

Semptian presents itself publicly as a "big data" analysis company that works with internet providers and educational institutes. However, a substantial portion of the Chinese firm's business is in fact generated through a front company named iNext, which sells the internet surveillance and censorship tools to governments. iNext operates out of the same offices in China as Semptian, with both companies on the eighth floor of a tower in Shenzhen's busy Nanshan District. Semptian and iNext also share the same 200 employees and the same founder, Chen Longsen. [The company's] Aegis equipment has been placed within China's phone and internet networks, enabling the country's government to secretly collect people's email records, phone calls, text messages, cellphone locations, and web browsing histories, according to two sources familiar with Semptian's work.
Promotional documents obtained from the company promise "location information for everyone in the country." One company representative even told the Intercept they were processing "thousands of terabits per second," and -- not knowing they were talking to a reporter -- forwarded a 16-minute video detailing their technology. "If a government operative enters a person's cellphone number, Aegis can show where the device has been over a given period of time: the last three days, the last week, the last month, or longer," the Intercept reports.

Joss Wright, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford's Internet Institute, told the Intercept that "by any meaningful definition, this is a vast surveillance effort."

Read what the U.S. companies had to say about their involvement with Chinese surveillance technology:

PolygamousRanchKid quotes Reuters: A proposal to prevent big technology companies from functioning as financial institutions or issuing digital currencies has been circulated for discussion by the Democratic majority that leads the House Financial Services Committee, according to a copy of the draft legislation seen by Reuters. In a sign of widening scrutiny after Facebook Inc's (FB.O) proposed Libra digital coin aroused widespread objection, the bill proposes a fine of $1 million per day for violation of such rules....

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump criticized Libra and other cryptocurrencies and demanded that companies seek a banking charter and make themselves subject to U.S. and global regulations if they wanted to "become a bank." His comments came after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told lawmakers that Facebook's plan to build a digital currency called Libra could not move forward unless it addressed concerns over privacy, money laundering, consumer protection and financial stability.
The article concedes this proposal "would likely spark opposition" in the House and Senate, but adds that "Nevertheless, the draft proposal sends a strong message to large tech firms increasingly eyeing the financial services space."

The draft legislation's title? The "Keep Big Tech Out Of Finance Act."