Border Gateway Protocol has served the internet well for decades. But when it goes wrong, you notice it. From a report: In a weeks-long stretch in 2014, hackers stole thousands of dollars a day in cryptocurrency from owners. In 2017, internet outages cropped up around the United States for hours. Last year, Google Cloud suffered hours of disruptions. Earlier this month, a large swath of European mobile data was rerouted through the state-backed China Telecom. And on Monday, websites and services around the world -- including the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare -- experienced hours of outages. These incidents may sound different, but they actually all resulted from problems -- some accidental, some malicious -- with a fundamental internet routing system called the Border Gateway Protocol. The web is distributed, but it's also interconnected. It needs to be so that data can move around worldwide without all being controlled by a single entity. So every time you load a website or send an email, BGP is the system responsible for optimizing the route that data takes across these sprawling, intertwined networks. And when it goes wrong, the whole internet feels it.

Originally conceived in 1989 (on two napkins), the version of BGP used today remains largely unchanged since 1994. And though BGP has scaled surprisingly well, there's no denying that the internet is very different than it was 25 years ago. In fact, the way BGP was designed introduces risk of outages, manipulations, and data interception -- all of which have come to pass. The internet's backbone routers -- massive industrial nodes usually run by internet service providers, not the Linksys at your house -- each control a set of IP addresses and routes. ISPs and other large organizations use BGP to announce these routes to the world and calculate paths. Think of it like planning a cross-country drive: You need to know the different route options in each area, so you can stop at all the right corn mazes and the world's largest rocking chair without adding too much extra driving each day. But if your GPS is outdated, you could wind up at a dead end or on a new road that totally bypasses the salt flats.

Internships have long been an opportunity for inexperienced workers to try out different industries and build valuable contacts. For companies, it is a way to attract future talent. But increasingly interns are being asked to sign noncompete, nondisclosure and forced arbitration agreements, restrictions once reserved for higher-ranking employees [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: Advocates say legal covenants for interns help safeguard trade secrets such as customer lists in an era when it is easy to download information and share it, for instance on social media or with a competitor. But critics argue the agreements hamper young people's job opportunities and mobility even before they get a foot on the career ladder. [...] Ms. Dunne's [anecdote in the story] noncompete agreement stated that she couldn't work for a competitor in software or banking within 15 miles of Wilmington for a year after leaving TekMountain. Ms. Dunne said she was given the agreement on her first day. "I had no idea what I signed, they didn't explain it to me."

After leaving TekMountain, she did a separate three-month internship with nCino, a financial technology company in Wilmington. In a May 7 letter, TekMountain's parent, CastleBranch, laid out her obligations under the noncompete agreement, described the confidentiality of its proprietary information as "very serious," and asked for details about her relationship with nCino. Ms. Dunne said she didn't respond. The noncompete "eliminated a good portion of the companies in town in the industry I wanted to be in," said Ms. Dunne, who is relocating to the Washington, D.C., area for a new job. "I have to leave all of my friends behind and start over."

Reader GeorgeK writes: Despite documented overwhelming opposition by the public, ICANN has lifted all fee caps on .org domain names. As discussed in a prior Slashdot article in April when the public comment period was open, this would permit unlimited fee increases for .org registrants, and may set the stage for higher fees on owners of .com domain names. This decision demonstrates an enormous disconnect between ICANN, which is supposed to serve the public interest as a non-profit overseer of domain name regulations, and the public it purports to serve.

Consumer tech reporter Gordon Kelly describes "an important new Windows 10 warning (and the failure behind it)" for all 800 million of Microsoft's Windows 10 users: What Microsoft confirms it did was quietly switch off Registry backups in Windows 10 eight months ago, despite giving users the impression this crucial safeguarding system was still working. As Ghacks spotted at the time, Registry backups would show "The operation completed successfully", despite no backup file being created...

Microsoft has now spelt out what was actually happening: "Starting in Windows 10, version 1803, Windows no longer automatically backs up the system registry to the RegBack folder. If you browse to the WindowsSystem32configRegBack folder in Windows Explorer, you will still see each registry hive, but each file is 0kb in size...."

So why has Microsoft done this? In the company's own words: "to help reduce the overall disk footprint size of Windows". And how big is a registry backup? Typically 50-100MB.
The article notes that this issue was flagged in Microsoft's Feedback Hub -- last October -- but "only now is the company coming clean about what happened."

The Ghacks blog points out that the Registry backup option "has been disabled but not removed according to Microsoft. Administrators who would like to restore the functionality may do so by changing the value of a Registry key."

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Google appears to have misused its dominant position in India and reduced the ability of device manufacturers to opt for alternate versions of its Android mobile operating system, Indian officials found before ordering a wider probe in an antitrust case. A 14-page order from the Competition Commission of India (CCI), reviewed by Reuters this week, found Google's restrictions on manufacturers seemed to amount to imposition of "unfair conditions" under India's competition law....

The Indian case is similar to one Google faced in Europe, where regulators imposed a $5 billion fine on the company for forcing manufacturers to pre-install its apps on Android devices. Google has appealed against the verdict.

By making pre-installation of Google's proprietary apps conditional, Google "reduced the ability and incentive of device manufacturers to develop and sell devices operated on alternate versions of Android", the CCI said in the order. "It amounts to prima facie leveraging of Google's dominance".

The Brave web browser "claims to have delivered a '69x average improvement' in its ad-blocking technology using Rust in place of C++" reports ZDNet.

They cite a blog post by Brave performance researcher Dr. Andrius Aucinas and Brave's chief scientist Dr. Ben Livshits: The improvements can be experienced in its experimental developer and nightly channel releases... "We implemented the new engine in Rust as a memory-safe, performant language compilable down to native code and suitable to run within the native browser core as well as being packaged in a standalone Node.js module," the two Brave scientists said. The new engine means the Chromium-based browser can cut the average request classification time down to 5.6 microseconds, a unit of time that's equal to a millionth of one second.

Aucinas and Livshits argue that the micro-improvements in browser performance might not seem significant to end users but do translate to good things for a computer's main processor. "Although most users are unlikely to notice much of a difference in cutting the ad-blocker overheads, the 69x reduction in overheads means the device CPU has so much more time to perform other functions," the pair explain.
Their blog post notes that loading a web page today can be incredibly complex. "Since loading an average website involves 75 requests that need to be checked against tens of thousands of rules, it must also be efficient."

NPR notes today's "supercomputer-driven" weather modelling can crunch huge amounts of data to accurately forecast the weather a week in advance -- pointing out that "a six-day weather forecast today is as good as a two-day forecast was in the 1970s."

Here's some highlights from their interview with Andrew Blum, author of The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast : One of the things that's happened as the scale in the system has shifted to the computers is that it's no longer bound by past experience. It's no longer, the meteorologists say, "Well, this happened in the past, we can expect it to happen again." We're more ready for these new extremes because we're not held down by past expectations...

The models are really a kind of ongoing concern. ... They run ahead in time, and then every six hours or every 12 hours, they compare their own forecast with the latest observations. And so the models in reality are ... sort of dancing together, where the model makes a forecast and it's corrected slightly by the observations that are coming in...

It's definitely run by individual nations -- but individual nations with their systems tied together... It's a 150-year-old system of governments collaborating with each other as a global public good... The positive example from last month was with Cyclone Fani in India. And this was a very similar storm to one 20 years ago, that tens of thousands of people had died. This time around, the forecast came far enough in advance and with enough confidence that the Indian government was able to move a million people out of the way.

Lancaster University has announced a "universal computer memory" breakthrough combining the fast, low-energy storage of DRAM memory with the robustness of flash memory. They're now envisioning ultra-low energy consumption computers which would never need to boot up -- and can "instantaneously and imperceptibly" slip into an energy-saving sleep mode.

Long-time Slashdot reader Hrrrg pointed us to this announcement: A U.S. patent has been awarded for the electronic memory device with another patent pending, while several companies have expressed an interest or are actively involved in the research. The inventors of the device used quantum mechanics to solve the dilemma of choosing between stable, long-term data storage and low-energy writing and erasing... [Specifically, "by exploiting the quantum-mechanical properties of an asymmetric triple resonant-tunnelling barrier."]

Physics Professor Manus Hayne of Lancaster University said, "Our device has an intrinsic data storage time that is predicted to exceed the age of the Universe, yet it can record or delete data using 100 times less energy than DRAM."
The announcement predicts the technology could reduce peak power consumption in data centers by 20%.

Wikpedia co-founder Larry Sanger is also Slashdot reader #936,381.

He has an announcement: "Humanity has been contemptuously used by vast digital empires," says my new Declaration of Digital Independence, which you can sign. So I'm calling a massive social media strike for July 4-5 to raise awareness of the possibility of decentralizing social media, which is wildly popular whenever proposed.

Read the FAQ use the resources to learn and spread the word far and wide. Look for lots of news about this soon. And get ready! Maybe we can make a long-held geek dream finally come true.

Nokia's CTO Marcus Weldon "told the BBC that the UK should be wary of using the Chinese hardware" -- though Nokia rushed to assure the BBC that Weldon's remarks do "not reflect the official position of Nokia."

Forbes reports: On the security front, Weldon referred to analysis suggesting Huawei equipment was far more likely to have vulnerabilities than technology from Nokia or Ericsson. "We read those reports and we think okay, we're doing a much better job than they are," Weldon said, describing Huawei's failings as serious and claiming Nokia's alternatives to be a safer bet. "Some of it seems to be just sloppiness, honestly, that they haven't patched things, they haven't upgraded. But some of it is real obfuscation, where they make it look like they have the secure version when they don't...."

The comments from Nokia's CTO came in light of research from Finite State, which published a scathing report claiming that "Huawei devices quantitatively pose a high risk to their users. In virtually all categories we examined, Huawei devices were found to be less secure than those from other vendors making similar devices." And this included the potential backdoors that lie at the heart of the U.S. government's security case against the Chinese company. "Out of all the firmware images analyzed, 55% had at least one potential backdoor," Finite State found. "These backdoor access vulnerabilities allow an attacker with knowledge of the firmware and/or with a corresponding cryptographic key to log into the device."
Nokia's later statement insisted that their company "is focused on the integrity of its own products and services and does not have its own assessment of any potential vulnerabilities associated with its competitors."

"The golden age of streaming is over," writes Stuart Heritage in the Guardian, arguing that TV "will become more elitist, tiered and fragmented than it already is." One report last year said that The Office accounts for 7% of all U.S. Netflix viewing. So, naturally, NBC wants it back. This week, it was announced that Netflix had failed to secure the rights to The Office beyond January 2021. The good news is that it will still be available to watch elsewhere. The bad news is that "elsewhere", means "the new NBCUniversal streaming platform". As a viewer, you are right to feel queasy. The industry-disrupting success of Netflix means that everybody wants a slice of the pie...

Friends is likely to disappear behind a new WarnerMedia streaming service -- along with Lord of the Rings films, the Harry Potter films, anything based on a DC comic and everything on HBO -- that it is believed will cost about £15 a month... Facebook is making shows, for crying out loud. And this sucks. Watching television is about to get very, very expensive.... There's a huge difference between not being able to watch everything because there's too much choice and not being able to watch everything because you don't have enough money.

The Netflix model was great for viewers, but it couldn't last. The content creators got greedy and scared, and now they're determined to drag things back to the bad old ways. They will force everyone to pay for everything separately, and the subscriber base will split, and the providers will have to recoup the money they are spending to take on Netflix -- such as the $500m that NBCUniversal spent to get The Office back, the $250m Amazon is spending on a Lord of the Rings series and the $500m that Warner just spent to win the services of JJ Abrams -- which means that subscriptions will rise. Make no mistake: we're the ones likely to get stiffed here. The golden age of television may be going strong, but the golden age of streaming is dead.

hackingbear tipped us off to a breaking news story.

CNN reports: US President Donald Trump has appeared to soften his tone on Chinese communications giant Huawei, suggesting that he would allow the company to once again purchase U.S. technology. Speaking at a press conference in Osaka, Saturday, Trump said that the U.S. sells a "tremendous amount of product" to Huawei. "That's okay, we will keep selling that product," said Trump. "The (U.S.) companies were not exactly happy that they couldn't sell."
Forbes points out "While it's not a lifting of the blanket ban, it will significantly benefit the Chinese manufacturer."

ZDNet reports: This news just broke with comments made by Trump, including "U.S. companies can sell their equipment to Huawei. We're talking about equipment where there's no great national security problem with it." The details of this statement are still pending, but it is likely that 5G infrastructure equipment may still not be part of this access deal while the smartphone segment may be where we see open access.
One Daily Beast contributor argues the action "appears to be a surrender to publicly issued Chinese demands."

But TechCrunch writes that "any mutual trust has been broken and things are unlikely to be the same again."

Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed quotes the CBC: Boeing staff falsified records for a 787 jet built for Air Canada which developed a fuel leak ten months into service in 2015. In a statement to CBC News, Boeing said it self-disclosed the problem to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration after Air Canada notified them of the fuel leak.

The records stated that manufacturing work had been completed when it had not.

Boeing said an audit concluded it was an isolated event and "immediate corrective action was initiated for both the Boeing mechanic and the Boeing inspector involved." Boeing is under increasing scrutiny in the U.S. and abroad following two deadly crashes that claimed 346 lives and the global grounding of its 737 Max jets.

puddingebola writes: In May, security researcher Filippo Cavallarin made public a vulnerability in macOS's Gatekeeper. The vulnerability can allow an attacker to use a symlink and an NFS server to bypass Gatekeepers authentication and run malicious code. The malware has been named OSX/Linker and has been tied to the same group that operates the OSX/Surfbuyer adware. All macOS versions are affected, including the latest 10.14.5, and Apple has yet to release a patch to this day, a full month after Cavallarin's public disclosure.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing's 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors. The Max software -- plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw -- was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs. Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India.

Italy's data protection watchdog has slapped Facebook with a $1.1 million fine for violations of local privacy law attached to the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal. TechCrunch reports: Last year it emerged that up to 87 million Facebook users had had their data siphoned out of the social media giant's platform by an app developer working for the controversial (and now defunct) political data company, Cambridge Analytica. The offences in question occurred prior to Europe's tough new data protection framework, GDPR, coming into force -- hence the relatively small size of the fine in this case, which has been calculated under Italy's prior data protection regime. (Whereas fines under GDPR can scale as high as 4% of a company's annual global turnover.) A Facebook spokesperson issued the following statement: "We have said before that we wish we had done more to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica in 2015. However, evidence indicates that no Italian user data was shared with Cambridge Analytica. Dr Kogan only shared data with Cambridge Analytica in relation to U.S. users. We made major changes to our platform back then and have also significantly restricted the information which app developers can access. We're focused on protecting people's privacy and have invested in people, technology and partnerships, including hiring more than 20,000 people focused on safety and security over the last year. We will review the Garante's decision and will continue to engage constructively with their concerns."

Last week, Apple launched a voluntary recall and replacement program for the 15-inch 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina Displaying, saying that batteries on some of these devices could overheat and "may pose a fire safety risk." Thanks to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), we now know that Apple has received 26 reports of batteries overheating in affected notebooks, and that about 432,000 potentially affected MacBook Pro units were sold in the U.S., plus 26,000 in Canada. MacRumors reports: The CPSC has since indicated that Apple has received 26 reports of batteries overheating in affected notebooks, including five reports of minor burns and one report of smoke inhalation, as well as 17 reports of minor damage to nearby personal property. About 432,000 potentially affected MacBook Pro units were sold in the United States, plus 26,000 in Canada, according to a joint recall announcement from the CPSC and Health Canada. As of June 4, 2019, Apple has received one report of a consumer incident and no reports of injuries in Canada. Apple has asked customers to stop using affected MacBook Pro models and to contact the company to initiate a replacement. Apple's recall program page provides further details and instructions.

Mozilla is adding a random password generator to Firefox. From a report: The Firefox random password generator is expected to become publicly available for all Firefox users with the release of Firefox 69, scheduled for release in early September, roughly a year after Chrome 69. Currently, the random password generator is only available in Firefox Nightly, a Firefox version for testing new features before they land in the stable branch. When Firefox 69 will be released, the random password generator is expected to be available as a checkbox in the Firefox settings section, under "Privacy & Security," under "Logins and Passwords."

Apple is manufacturing its new Mac Pro computer in China (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), shifting abroad production of what had been its only major device assembled in the U.S. The Wall Street Journal reports: The tech giant has tapped Taiwanese contractor Quanta Computer Inc. to manufacture the $6,000 desktop computer and is ramping up production at a factory near Shanghai, the people said. Apple can save on shipping costs for components given the proximity of many of its suppliers to Shanghai, rather than having to supply a factory in the U.S. While the Mac Pro isn't one of Apple's higher-volume products, the decision on where to make it carries outsize significance. Apple's reliance on factories in China to manufacture its products has been an issue for the company, especially under President Trump, who has pressured Apple and other companies to make more in the U.S. An Apple spokesman said the new Mac Pro is designed and engineered in the U.S. and includes U.S.-made components. Apple said it supports manufacturing in 30 U.S. states and spent $60 billion last year with more than 9,000 U.S. suppliers.

"Final assembly is only one part of the manufacturing process," the spokesman said, adding that the company's investments support two million American jobs.

Hal Hodson, a correspondent for Economist writes in a Twitter thread: Something really massive is happening, and I feel like society is barely grasping the tendrils of the implications. Technology is eroding one of the great levees of human society -- the ability to move around the physical world anonymously. This is happening because computers are getting better at spotting patterns in data, and the cost of capturing data that contain patterns about human beings is plummeting. Most adult humans have a device in their pocket capable of recognizing the patterns in another human's face. Face recognition is just the most obvious side of this new reality. It's easy to grasp that a computer can remember what your face looks like, because humans can do that too (not that well though). But computers don't care what data is used to tag you, only that the data is unique.

You can measure someone's: heartbeat with a laser; breathing with the RF-waves in wifi; walking gait with a camera; geographical movements through their phone; and voice and emotional state through a microphone. These datasets all hold patterns which uniquely ID a person. Pretty much anyone can "scan" anyone at this point. The hard bit is matching the patterns in that data with a person's legal identity, figuring out to whom a pattern belongs. This means that control of and access to identity systems is more important than it has ever been before.

The issue is that currently the world does not expect to be identified anywhere at any time, by anyone. Society runs on the assumption that people are unknowable in some spaces. I don't know what happens as that disappears, but I am worried. It's easy to imagine bad actors gathering all the data they can on everyone they can get their hands on. Doesn't matter if it isn't linked with an ID right now. Store it, and when someone becomes a threat, do the work to ID them in stored data, find something to get them with. Legal systems need to recreate and/or reinforce some of the levees that cheap compute and sensing are washing away. Maybe folks want to live in a world where anyone can set a drone or autonomous agent to track a person around town and report their movements. I don't think so. Addedum: the direction of travel is crystal clear here. Cheaper sensors, closer to the body and mind, coupled with ever-cheaperbetter computation. You can't rely on nature for "privacy" any more. You have to do it for ourselves, if you want.