Facebook is being applauded for a new "bold experiment" in content decision-making by tech journalist Larry Magid, a founding member (for the last 10 years) of what he describes as "the less powerful Facebook Safety Advisory Board, which is composed of safety experts mostly representing nonprofit organizations in several countries....

"We are not empowered to overrule Facebook's management." Facebook is a company, not a government, but its user base is bigger than the population of any country in the world and the decisions made by its staff affect people in some of the same ways as decisions made by legislatures and courts in many countries. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way Facebook regulates speech. What it allows and forbids affects people's ability to communicate, but also impacts their safety, privacy, security and human rights... [W]hen it comes to some decisions, even Zuckerberg realizes that the stakes are too high for one person or one company to hold all the cards, and that's one of the reason's Facebook is in the process of putting together an Oversight Board for Content Decisions.

That board, which will be made up of a diverse group of about 40 people from around the world, will be like what The Verge called a "Supreme Court for content moderation." The board, according to Facebook, will serve as an "independent authority outside of Facebook," and have the power to "reverse Facebook's decisions when necessary...." This is an extraordinary and mostly unprecedented undertaking from a private company which recognizes the potential impact of its decisions. If the board operates as planned, it will have the ability to overrule Zuckerberg himself on matters of what content is and isn't allowed on the service... If Facebook does a good job in creating a board which is both representative and independent and if it faithfully abides by its decisions, even when they are in conflict with what executives like Zuckerberg want, it will be at least a partial shift in the nature of corporate governance by creating a body that is neither controlled by the corporation itself or the governments in countries where the corporation operates.

At the end of the day, local law in each jurisdiction will trump any decisions by this board and -- I suppose -- Facebook could change its mind and fail to implement one or more of the board's decisions, but if we take the company at its word, that isn't supposed to happen... Although Facebook is not completely rewriting the rules of corporate governance, it is making a bold move that changes the way some of its most important decisions will be made by empowering people who represent those affected by the company who -- without such a board -- would have no power over how the company operates. It is, to an extent, taking on powers held by governments as well as powers held by stockholders and board members. It's a bold experiment.

schwit1 writes: A former University of Chicago medical patient filed a class-action lawsuit against the University of Chicago and Google, claiming that the University of Chicago Medical Center is giving private patient information to the tech giant without patients consent.

About two years ago, the university medical center partnered with Google with the hope of identifying patterns in patient health records to help predict future medical issues.

Now, former patient Matt Dinerstein is filing a lawsuit on behalf of the medical center's patients, alleging that the university violated privacy laws by sharing sensitive health records with Google from 2009 to 2016, aiding Google's goal of creating a digital health record system, according to the student newspaper of the University of Chicago.

The associate director of research at the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a new warning in the Opinion section of the New York Times this week, calling Slack the only unicorn going public this year "that has admitted it is at risk for nation-state attacks" and saying there's a simple way to minimize risk -- that Slack has so far refused to take:

Right now, Slack stores everything you do on its platform by default -- your username and password, every message you've sent, every lunch you've planned and every confidential decision you've made. That data is not end-to-end encrypted, which means Slack can read it, law enforcement can request it, and hackers -- including the nation-state actors highlighted in Slack's S-1 -- can break in and steal it...

Slack's paying enterprise customers do have a way to mitigate their security risk -- they can change their settings to set shorter retention periods and automatically delete old messages -- but it's not just big companies that are at risk... Free customer accounts don't allow for any changes to data retention. Instead, Slack retains all of your messages but makes only the most recent 10,000 visible to you. Everything beyond that 10,000-message limit remains on Slack's servers. So while those messages might seem out of sight and out of mind, they are all still indefinitely available to Slack, law enforcement and third-party hackers...

Slack should give everyone the same privacy protections available to its paying enterprise customers and let all of its users decide for themselves which messages they want to keep and which messages they want to delete. It's undeniably Slack's prerogative to charge for a more advanced product, but making users pay for basic privacy and security protections is the wrong call. It's time for Slack to step up, minimize the amount of sensitive data hanging around on its servers and give all its users retention controls.
The article notes that Slack's stock filings acknowledge that it faces threats from "sophisticated organized crime, nation-state, and nation-state supported actors."

The filings even specifically add that Slack's security measures "may not be sufficient to protect Slack and our internal systems and networks against certain attacks," and that completely eliminating the threat of a nation-state attack would be "virtually impossible."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from AP News: France's lower house of parliament approved Thursday a small, pioneering tax on internet giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook -- and the French government hopes other countries will follow suit. The bill aims to stop multinationals from avoiding taxes by setting up headquarters in low-tax EU countries. Currently, the companies pay nearly no tax in countries where they have large sales like France. The bill foresees a 3% tax on the French revenues of digital companies with global revenue of more than $847 million, and French revenue over $28 million. The bill adopted by the National Assembly goes to the Senate next week, where it is expected to win final approval. The French government estimates that the tax will raise about $566 million this year, and considerably more next year.

While France failed to persuade EU partners to impose a Europe-wide tax on online giants, the favorite to become Britain's next prime minister, Boris Johnson, indicated his support for similar proposals in the UK. "In October, Chancellor Philip Hammond said the UK would tax 2% of British user-generated revenue in a new 'digital services tax,' which could bring in up to $502 million a year for the Treasury," reports Business Insider. "Johnson appears to like the idea."

Amazon is asking the FCC for permission to launch 3,236 satellites that would be used to establish a globe-spanning internet network. Seeking Alpha reported that Amazon expects "to offer service to tens of millions of underserved customers around the world" via the network, which the company is developing under the codename Project Kuiper. Tom's Hardware reports: So what does this plan to offer space internet with a weird name actually involve? Amazon explained in April: "Project Kuiper is a new initiative to launch a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites that will provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world. This is a long-term project that envisions serving tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet. We look forward to partnering on this initiative with companies that share this common vision."

Nuclear power plant manufacturers, such as Westinghouse and Framatome, are developing safer nuclear reactors that use so-called accident-tolerant fuels that are less likely to overheat -- and if they do, will produce very little or no hydrogen. As Scientific American reports, commercial reactors use small pellets of uranium dioxide stacked inside long cylindrical rods made of zirconium alloy, which "allows the neutrons generated from fission in the pellets to readily pass among the many rods submerged in water inside a reactor core, supporting a self-sustaining, heat-producing nuclear reaction." The problem is that if the zirconium overheats, it can react with water and produce hydrogen, which can explode. From the report: In some of the variations, the zirconium cladding is coated to minimize reactions. In others, zirconium and even the uranium dioxide are replaced with different materials. The new configurations could be slipped into existing reactors with little modification, so they could be phased in during the 2020s. Thorough in-core testing, which has begun, would have to prove successful, and regulators would have to be satisfied. In a bonus, the new fuels could help plants run more efficiently, making nuclear power more cost-competitive -- a significant motivation for manufacturers and electric utilities because natural gas, solar and wind energy are less expensive.

Russia is also deploying other safety measures; recent installations at home and abroad by the state-run company Rosatom have newer "passive" safety systems that can squelch overheating even if electrical power at the plant is lost and coolant cannot be actively circulated. Westinghouse and other companies have incorporated passive safety features into their updated designs as well. Manufacturers are also experimenting with "fourth generation" models that use liquid sodium or molten salt instead of water to transfer heat from fission, removing the possibility of dangerous hydrogen production. China reportedly intends to connect a demonstration helium-cooled reactor to its grid this year.

An anonymous reader writes: "The Tor Project is preparing a fix for a bug that has been abused for the past years to launch DDoS attacks against dark web (.onion) websites," reports ZDNet. "Barring any unforeseen problems, the fix is scheduled for the upcoming Tor protocol 0.4.2 release." The bug has been known to Tor developers for years, and has been used to launch Slow Loris-like attacks on the web servers that run the Tor service supporting an .onion site. It works by opening many connections to the server and maxing out the CPU. Since Tor connections are CPU intensive because of the cryptography involved to support the privacy and anonymity of the network, even a a few hundreds connections are enough to bring down dark web portals. A tool to exploit the bug and to automate DDoS attacks has been around for four years, and has been used by hackers to extort dark web marketplaces all spring. At least two markets selling illegal products have shut down after refusing to pay attackers. To get the bug fixed, members of a dark web forum banded together and donated to the Tor Project to sponsor the bug's patch.

Waymo has received a new permit from the California Public Utilities Commission to shuttle passengers in its self-driving cars. Before this, Waymo was not allowed to transport passengers. CNET reports: In order to be eligible for this permit, the company in question must already have an AV testing permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which Waymo has had since 2014. It operates a fleet of Chrysler Pacifica and Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, both of which are outfitted with the hardware and software capable of autonomy. This doesn't mean Waymo One has begun operation in California. That may change in the future, though. There's a second tier of the CPUC pilot program that allows members of the public to be shuttled around in driverless vehicles, but that tier requires a DMV permit for driverless testing, and what do you know, Waymo has one of those already. All the company needs to do is start testing its driverless vehicles in California to be eligible for this next stage of the CPUC's pilot.

According to the CPUC website, only four companies have been granted access to the first tier of the pilot program: AutoX, Pony.ai, Waymo and Zoox. Waymo is the only company of the four to receive an exemption to use a third party for contracting the safety operators required in every vehicle. In its letter to the CPUC requesting the exemption (PDF), the company said that "operating and scaling a meaningful pilot requires a large group of drivers who are more efficiently engaged through Waymo's experienced and specialized third-party staffing providers." All of its test drivers go through the same training program, the letter says.

SonicSpike shares a report from Computer Weekly: Almost a third (30%) of the world's top virtual private network (VPN) providers are secretly owned by six Chinese companies, according to a study by privacy and security research firm VPNpro. The study shows that the top 97 VPNs are run by just 23 parent companies, many of which are based in countries with lax privacy laws. Six of these companies are based in China and collectively offer 29 VPN services, but in many cases, information on the parent company is hidden to consumers. Researchers at VPNpro have pieced together ownership information through company listings, geolocation data, the CVs of employees and other documentation. In some instances, ownership of different VPNs is split amongst a number of subsidiaries. For example, Chinese company Innovative Connecting owns three separate businesses that produce VPN apps: Autumn Breeze 2018, Lemon Cove and All Connected. In total, Innovative Connecting produces 10 seemingly unconnected VPN products, the study shows. Although the ownership of a number of VPN services by one company is not unusual, VPNpro is concerned that so many are based in countries with lax or non-existence privacy laws.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Toyota is testing a new and improved version of the solar power cells it previously launched on the Japan-exclusive Prius PHV, in a pilot along with partners Sharp and Japanese national research organization NEDO. This demo car's prototype cells can convert solar energy at 34% and up, which is much better than the existing commercial version's 22.5%. And, unlike its predecessor, it also can charge the car's driving battery while the car is actually moving, recouping significant range while the vehicle is in use. The new system will provide up to 44.5 km (27.7 miles) of additional range per day while parked and soaking up sun, and can add up to 56.3 km (35 miles) of power to both the driving system and the auxiliary power battery on board, which runs the AC, navigation and more.

Using a redesigned solar battery cell film that measures only 0.03 mm (that's 0.001 inches), the vehicle's engineers could put the film over a much broader surface area of the vehicle compared to the existing production version, with solar cells that wrap around covered body components, the rear door and the hood with relative ease. And as mentioned, the system can now work while the car is actually driving, thanks to changes in how generated power is fed to the system, which is a huge step up from the last generation, which could only push power to that auxiliary battery to run the radio, etc. when in motion. This new test vehicle will hit the road in Japan in late July, and perform trials across a range of different regions to test its abilities in different weather and driving conditions.

Ford and Volkswagen have reached an outline agreement to share electric and autonomous car tech, extending their alliance beyond a cooperation on commercial vehicles. Reuters reports: VW will share its MEB electric vehicle platform [a part bin and toolkit for building electric vehicles] with Ford, the source said. Volkswagen's supervisory board is due to discuss deepening the alliance at a meeting on July 11, 2019, a second source told Reuters. A Ford spokeswoman said, "Our talks with Volkswagen continue. Discussions have been productive across a number of areas. We'll share updates as details become more firm."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: London's police force has conducted 10 trials of face recognition since 2016, using Japanese company NEC's Neoface technology. It commissioned academics from the University of Essex to independently assess the scheme, and they concluded that the system is 81% inaccurate (in other words, the vast majority of people it flags for the police are not on a wanted list). They found that of 42 matches, only eight were confirmed to be correct, Sky News reports. The Met police insists its technology makes an error in only one in 1,000 instances, but it hasn't shared its methodology for arriving at that statistic.

App-based services have made our lives easier in so many ways. But when things go awry, they offer few paths to real assistance [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: There's a trade-off between the speed of apps and their ability to provide timely help. Customer service isn't dead, it's just hiding very well, often under a maze of preset menu options that seem designed to make you want to chuck your phone out the window. I recently ordered a Lyft ride from the airport. As the driver loaded my bag into the trunk -- something he didn't seem happy about -- he started talking under his breath. I asked if he was talking to me. His eyes got wide, and he said no, he wasn't. Then he removed my bag and told me I had the wrong car. His license plate matched my app, but he said, "I'm not your ride, baby," before driving off.

Part of me was relieved. But to let Lyft know, I had to spend probably 20 minutes going through endless options for pre-written problems I didn't have. "Something happened during my ride" got me a drop-down menu with a bunch of inapt scenarios: "Demanding cash?" Nope. "Refusing my service animal?" Also no. Lyft can foresee these issues, but not "Acting unprofessional"? [...] Except for safety issues, there's no helpline to get a live person with Uber or Lyft. Ditto Spotify, Instagram and many other apps. Airbnb customer support has a phone number where actual humans answer. Instacart's app has an email address with a field to include details about your problem. It's also got a number you can ring 24/7.

As previously announced, Mozilla has started to tease the launch of a new $5 monthly subscription to a variety of online news publishers that involves no ads. The idea is that a single, low subscription fee gives you access to a number of sites with the ads removed. From a report: You pay a monthly fee to Mozilla, and this money is shared with its partners to help fund an ad-free internet experience. More than this, Mozilla says that the subscription fee will also grant access to audio versions of articles, article synchronization and more. In a page which promises people the chance to "support the sites you love, avoid the ads you hate", Mozilla says: "We've partnered with some of the world's greatest publishers to bring you a better journalism experience. We share your payment directly with the sites you read. They make more money which means they can bring you great content without needing to distract you with ads just to keep the lights on.

Over ten million users have been duped in installing a fake Samsung app named "Updates for Samsung" that promises firmware updates, but, in reality, redirects users to an ad-filled website and charges for firmware downloads. From a report: "I have contacted the Google Play Store and asked them to consider removing this app," Aleksejs Kuprins, malware analyst at the CSIS Security Group, told ZDNet this week in an interview, after publishing a report on the app's shady behavior earlier today. The app takes advantage of the difficulty in getting firmware and operating system updates for Samsung phones, hence the high number of users who have installed it. "It would be wrong to judge people for mistakenly going to the official application store for the firmware updates after buying a new Android device," the security researcher said. "Vendors frequently bundle their Android OS builds with an intimidating number of software, and it can easily get confusing."

Todd Haselton, reporting for CNBC: In May, I wrote up something weird I spotted on Google's account management page. I noticed that Google uses Gmail to store a list of everything you've purchased, if you used Gmail or your Gmail address in any part of the transaction. If you have a confirmation for a prescription you picked up at a pharmacy that went into your Gmail account, Google logs it. If you have a receipt from Macy's, Google keeps it. If you bought food for delivery and the receipt went to your Gmail, Google stores that, too. You get the idea, and you can see your own purchase history by going to Google's Purchases page.

Google says it does this so you can use Google Assistant to track packages or reorder things, even if that's not an option for some purchases that aren't mailed or wouldn't be reordered, like something you bought at a store. At the time of my original story, Google said users can delete everything by tapping into a purchase and removing the Gmail. It seemed to work if you did this for each purchase, one by one. This isn't easy -- for years worth of purchases, this would take hours or even days of time. So, since Google doesn't let you bulk-delete this purchases list, I decided to delete everything in my Gmail inbox. That meant removing every last message I've sent or received since I opened my Gmail account more than a decade ago. Despite Google's assurances, it didn't work.

K.K. Rebecca Lai, Jin Wu and Lingdong Huang, writing for the Times: Crowd estimates for Hong Kong's large pro-democracy protests have been a point of contention for years. The organizers and the police often release vastly divergent estimates. This year's annual pro-democracy protest on Monday, July 1, was no different. Organizers announced 550,000 people attended; the police said 190,000 people were there at the peak. But for the first time in the march's history, a group of researchers combined artificial intelligence and manual counting techniques to estimate the size of the crowd [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled], concluding that 265,000 people marched. The high density of the crowd and the moving nature of these protests make estimating the turnout very challenging. For more than a decade, groups have stationed teams along the route and manually counted the rate of people passing through to derive the total number of participants. Though the use of A.I. does not make the calculation definitive, the technology helps produce a more precise estimate because it uses computers to try to count every person.

Since 2003, Paul Yip, a social sciences professor at Hong Kong University, has been producing a count of the size of protests held annually on July 1, the anniversary of Hong Kong's 1997 handover from Britain to China. With the hopes of creating a more robust estimate this year, Mr. Yip teamed up with Edwin Chow from Texas State University and Raymond Wong from C&R Wise AI, a local technology company, to use artificial intelligence to count the crowd at the march. Using open source software, The New York Times developed a computer model to illustrate how artificial intelligence could be used to recognize people and objects moving within a video. Analyzing a short video clip recorded on Monday, The Times's model tried to detect people based on color and shape, and then tracked the figures as they moved across the screen. This method helps avoid double counting because the crowd generally flowed in one direction.

From a report: Google's Chrome now reigns as the biggest browser on the block, and the company is facing challenges similar to Microsoft's from competitors, as well as government scrutiny. But Google faces a new wrinkle -- a growing realization among consumers that their every digital move is tracked. "I think Cambridge Analytica acted as a catalyst to get people aware that their data could be used in ways they didn't expect," said Peter Dolanjski, the product lead for Mozilla's Firefox web browser, referring to the scandal in which a political consulting firm obtained data on millions of Facebook users and their friends.

And in something of a poetic role reversal, Microsoft is positioning itself to pick up the slack from people who may be fed up with Google's Chrome browser and its questionable privacy practices. Microsoft is expected to release an overhaul of its latest browser, called Edge, in the coming months. Microsoft is just one of a number of companies and organizations looking to take a piece out of Google -- some using the company's own open-source software. One name that might be familiar to most consumers -- Mozilla's Firefox browser -- is also a veteran of the "browser wars" of two decades ago. The nonprofit Mozilla, which has been biting at the heels of leading browsers for most of its existence, is introducing more aggressive privacy settings to try to stand out and take advantage of the privacy stumbles by Google and other tech giants.

An anonymous reader shares a report: China's war on garbage is as digitally savvy as the country itself. Think QR codes attached to trash bags that allow a municipal government to trace exactly where its trash comes from. On July 1, the world's most populated city Shanghai began a compulsory garbage sorting program. Under the new regulations (in Chinese), households and companies must classify their wastes into four categories and dump them in designated places at certain times. Noncompliance can lead to fines. Companies and properties that don't comply risk having their credit rating lowered. The strict regime became the talk of the city housing over 24 million residents, who criticized the program's inflexibility and confusing waste categorization. Gratefully, China's tech startups are here to help.

Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, is not happy with how the internet has evolved in the nearly two decades since then. From a report: "It's appalling frankly," he said in an interview with CNBC this week. Sanger's main gripe is with big social media platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter. These companies, he says, exploit users' personal data to make profits, at the expense of "massive violations" of privacy and security. "They can shape your experience, they can control what you see, when you see it and you become essentially a cog in their machine," he said. Sanger launched a "social media strike" this week to draw attention to his concerns.

In a "Declaration of Digital Independence" published on his personal blog, he said "vast digital empires" need to be replaced by decentralized networks of independent individuals. [...] Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded to seemingly endless concerns about privacy and security on the platform with a new vision for the company, highlighting measures like encrypted messaging. Sanger questioned whether Zuckerberg's intentions are "sincere" and blasted the Facebook executive for abusing the company's power online. "The internet wouldn't have been created by people like Mark Zuckerberg, or any of the sort of corporate executives in Silicon Valley today," he said. "They wouldn't be capable, they don't have the temperament, they're too controlling. They don't understand the whole idea of bottom up."