India may have plans to follow France's footsteps in building a chat app and requiring government employees to use it for official communications. From a report: The New Delhi government is said to be pondering about the need to have homegrown email and chat apps, local news outlet Economic Times reported on Thursday. The rationale behind the move is to cut reliance on foreign entities, the report said, a concern that has somehow manifested amid U.S.'s ongoing tussle with Huawei and China. "We need to make our communication insular," an unnamed top government official was quoted as saying by the paper. The person suggested that by putting Chinese giant Huawei on the entity list, the U.S. has "set alarm bells ringing in New Delhi." India has its own ongoing trade tension with the U.S. Donald Trump earlier this month removed the South Asian nation from a special trade program after India did not assure him that it "unfortunate," and weeks later, increased tariffs on some U.S. exports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A community-run operation named NYC Mesh is on a mission: to deliver better, cheaper broadband service to New York City. The locally-run nonprofit project says it's engaging in a dramatic expansion that should soon deliver a new, more open broadband alternative to big ISPs to a wider swath of the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. With the installation of a new "supernode," NYC Mesh has greatly expanded its coverage area to much of western Brooklyn, as well as much of lower Manhattan.

Born out of frustration in 2013, NYC Mesh isn't a traditional business. It's built on the backs of volunteers and donors who dedicate their time, money, bandwidth, hardware, and resources to building an alternative to the abysmal logjam that is shoddy US broadband. Initially, the mesh network was powered by a single "Supernode" antenna and hardware array located at 375 Pearl Street in Manhattan. This gigabit fiber-fed antenna connects 300 buildings, where members have mounted routers on a rooftop or near a window. These local "nodes" in turn connect to an internet exchange point -- without the need for a traditional ISP. Unlike a traditional ISP, users don't pay a fixed monthly rate, and there are no costly monthly usage caps or overage fees. A NYC Mesh rate sheet notes the project is funded by optional monthly member donations of $20 or $50 for a residential users, or $100 for a business. Users also pay $110.00 for a WiFi router and rooftop antenna, and a $50 installation fee. The organization announced that it will install a new Supernode 3 antenna and hardware array at Industry City in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. "According to NYC Mesh, this new supernode will have 50 times the capacity of the original node, allowing the project to extend availability to Sunset Park, South Slope, Park Slope, Gowanus, Red Hook, and beyond," reports Motherboard.

Ericsson announced its plans to build a 5G factory in the U.S. sometime early next year. "The factory will be the Swedish telco equipment maker's first fully-automated factory, the company said, and will be used to produce 5G radios designed for urban areas," reports ZDNet. "It will also make Advanced Antenna System radios that it said are components for large-scale deployments of 4G and 5G networks for both rural and urban coverage." From the report: Ericsson did not provide details about where the factory will be located, but the company has plans to initially employ around 100 people at the factory, which will have "highly automated operations." Ericsson is currently signed on by T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, US Cellular, and GCI to help build out their respective 5G mobile networks. According to the Ericsson's latest mobility report, North America is expected to lead in the adoption of 5G, with the company predicting that 63% of North American mobile subscriptions will be 5G-based in 2024. Fierce Wireless says the company has made a direct investment of about $100 million, "which will kick in during the third quarter of this year."

Tekla Perry writes: When WYSIWIG pioneer Charles Simonyi went to space, he couldn't but help notice the awkward user interface on the rocket's control panel. It was a case of legacy systems, not wanting to change training and documentation, and an emulator that ran Unix on a 386 chip, he reported during a recent discussion on space software held at the Computer History Museum. "They liked the older chips because of radiation resistance and the feature set," he pointed out, noting how operation of the virtual interface was trickier than it seemed. "There are rows and columns," he said, "and you move the cursor over the button and use another button to push the virtual button."

"On the right side," he said, "there are these windows that are numbers you type in by pushing virtual buttons below them. You use the cursor keys to go to the virtual buttons then push an entry button that is virtual." He added: "You can see that even as the technology changes, they want to keep as many things the same as possible."

After an emergency alert was accidentally sent to Hawaii residents last year, warning of an impending nuclear ballistic missile attack, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder were prompted to ask the question: How easy would it be to exploit the nation's emergency alert systems, wreaking havoc on the American public via fake or misleading alerts? In short, they found that it wasn't very difficult at all. Motherboard reports: Their full study was recently unveiled at the 2019 International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys) in Seoul, South Korea. It documents how spoofing the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) program to trick cellular users wasn't all that difficult. To prove it, researchers built a mini "pirate" cell tower using easily-available hardware and open source software. Using isolated RF shield boxes to mitigate any real-world harm, they then simulated attacks in the 50,000 seat Folsom Field at the University. 90 percent of the time, the researchers say they were able to pass bogus alerts on to cell phones within range. The transmission of these messages from the government to the cellular tower is secure. It's the transmission from the cellular tower to the end user that's open to manipulation and interference, the researchers found. The vulnerability potentially impacts not just US LTE networks, but LTE networks from Europe to South Korea.

The FCC has granted Verizon a partial waiver to start SIM locking new handsets to its network for 60 days. "This news out of the FCC is the response to Verizon requesting back in February that it be allowed to lock devices to help deter fraud and theft," reports Droid Life. From the report: Why did they need to ask the FCC about locking? As we have explained a couple of times now, Verizon agreed to specific usage terms when it licensed 700MHz C Block spectrum for its LTE network years ago. One of the individual terms concerned handset locking, where Verizon had to acknowledge that it would leave its phones open for use on other networks at all times. Unlike AT&T or T-Mobile phones, where you have to fulfill a number of criteria in order to get either to unlock a phone for use elsewhere, Verizon's phones were to remain unlocked.

The FCC's partial waiver permits Verizon to lock a customer's handset for 60 days from the date someone activates it on Verizon's network. Once the 60 days are up, this is what should happen: "After the expiration of the 60-day period, Verizon must automatically unlock the handsets at issue here regardless of whether: (1) the customer asks for the handset to be unlocked, or (2) the handset is fully paid off. Thus, at the end of the initial 60 days, the unlocking rule will operate just as it does now, and Verizon's customers will be able to use their unlocked handsets on other technologically compatible networks." The only exception is for fraud. "Verizon will not have to automatically unlock handsets that it determines within the 60-day period to have been purchased through fraud," the FCC says. Verizon has since issued a statement thanking the FCC and confirming that this new 60-day lock policy will go live "very soon."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Transient Plasma Systems has its roots in pulsed power technology developed for the Department of Defense at the University of Southern California, specifically nanosecond-duration pulses of power. Since 2009, it has been working on commercializing the technology for the civilian market in a number of applications, but obviously it's the automotive one that interests me. In a conventional four-stroke internal combustion gasoline engine, which works on the principle of suck-squeeze-bang-blow, the bang is created by a spark plug igniting the fuel-air mixture in the cylinder. That spark typically lasts several milliseconds, and although the control of that spark is now controlled electronically rather than mechanically, the principle is the same today as it was in 1910 when Cadillac added it to its engines.

TPS's system does away with the conventional coil-on-plug approach. Instead, much shorter pulses of plasma -- several nanoseconds -- are used to ignite the fuel-air mix inside the cylinder. These have a much higher peak power than a conventional spark; thanks to their much shorter duration, however, the ignition is actually still rather low-energy (and therefore lower temperature). Consequently, it's possible to achieve better combustion at high compression ratios, more stable lean burning, and lower combustion temperatures within the cylinder. And that means a more efficient engine and one that produces less nitrogen oxide. TPS says that using its system, it can increase the thermal efficiency of an already very efficient internal combustion engine like the one Toyota uses in the current Prius (which is ~41 percent) up to 45 percent -- similar to the turbulent jet ignition systems that have recently seen Formula 1 gasoline engines reach that level. TPS has designed the system to replace existing spark plugs, so companies don't have to redesign their engines to use it, the report says. With that said, you can forget about fitting it to your own car as "TPS's going-to-market strategy is to work with an established tier-one supplier to leverage existing relationships with OEMs as well as existing manufacturing capacity."

The r/The_Donald subreddit has been "quarantined" by Reddit administrators after a series of threats against police were posted there. Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares an excerpt from The Daily Beast: "Recent behaviors including threats against the police and public figures is content that is prohibited by our violence policy," a Reddit spokesperson said in a statement. "As a result, we have actioned individual users and quarantined the subreddit." The new quarantine was brought on by anti-police threats posted on The_Donald. Some users had apparently encouraged violence against law enforcement, angry that officials in Oregon were trying to bring back GOP state senators who fled the state to avoid voting on a climate-change bill. In a note to The_Donald moderators, Reddit administrators said they had "observed this behavior in the form of encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon." The report notes that The_Donald has roughly 754,000 subscribers and is "one of the largest forums for Trump fans on the internet, and by far the largest on Reddit." Donald Trump himself answered questions from the forum's members during the 2016 campaign.

Apple has hired one of ARM's top chip engineers as the iPhone maker looks to expand its own chip development to more powerful devices, including the Mac, and new categories like a headset. Bloomberg reports: The company hired Mike Filippo in May for a chip architect position, according to his LinkedIn profile. At ARM, Filippo was a lead engineer behind chip designs that power the vast majority of the world's smartphones and tablets and was leading a new push into parts for computers. ARM, owned by SoftBank, designs microprocessors and licenses technology that is fundamental to the chip development efforts of Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm and Huawei.

Prior to his work at ARM, Filippo was also a key designer at chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel. For Apple, the hire could help fill the void left by the departure of Gerard Williams III earlier this year. Williams was Apple's head architect of chips used in the iPhone and iPad. Apple's A series chips power its mobile devices using ARM technology. Its Mac computers have used processors from Intel for nearly two decades.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A new flaw has been discovered in the computer system for the Boeing 737 Max that could push the plane downward, according to two sources familiar with the testing, an issue that is expected to further delay the aircraft's return to service. A series of simulator flights to test new software developed by Boeing revealed the flaw, according to one of the sources. The latest versions of Boeing's popular jet were grounded in March after two crashes -- Lion Air flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 -- that killed 346 people.

While the crashes remain under investigation, preliminary reports showed that a new stabilization system pushed both planes into steep nosedives from which the pilots could not recover. The issue is known in aviation vernacular as runaway stabilizer trim. In simulator tests, government pilots discovered that a microprocessor failure could push the nose of the plane toward the ground. It is not known whether the microprocessor played a role in either crash. When testing the potential failure of the microprocessor in the simulators, "it was difficult for the test pilots to recover in a matter of seconds," one of the sources said. "And if you can't recover in a matter of seconds, that's an unreasonable risk." Boeing engineers are now trying to address the issue, which has led to another delay in recertifying the 737 Max.

Security through obscurity is out, security through tomfoolery is in. From a report: That's the basic philosophy sold by Track THIS, "a new kind of incognito" browsing project, which opens up 100 tabs crafted to fit a specific character -- a hypebeast, a filthy rich person, a doomsday prepper, or an influencer. The idea is that your browsing history will be depersonalized and poisoned, so advertisers won't know how to target ads to you. It was developed as a collaboration between mschf (pronounced "mischief") internet studios and Mozilla's Firefox as a way of promoting Firefox Quantum, the newest Firefox browser. [...] Just a warning -- if you use Track THIS it may take several minutes for all 100 tabs to load. (I used Chrome as my browser.) But when as it gradually loads, it's like taking a first-person journey through someone else's consciousness.

YouTube said it will let users override automated recommendations after criticism over how the online video service suggests and filters toxic clips. From a report: "Although we try our best to suggest videos you'll enjoy, we don't always get it right, so we are giving you more controls for when we don't," Essam El-Dardiry, a product manager at YouTube, wrote in a blog on Wednesday. Users will now be able to tell YouTube to stop suggesting videos from a particular channel by tapping the three-dot menu next to a video on the homepage or Up Next, then choosing "Don't recommend channel." After that, viewers should no longer see videos from that channel, El-Dardiry said. The move comes after Susan Wojcicki and other YouTube executives were criticized for being either unable or unwilling to act on internal warnings about extreme and misleading videos because they were too focused on increasing viewing time and other measures of engagement.

Facebook said it has agreed to give the names of French users who are suspected of using hate speech on its platform to the local courts when requested. The deal is believed to be the first of its kind in the world. From a report: The decision by the world's biggest social media network comes after successive meetings between Zuckerberg and Macron, who wants to take a leading role globally on the regulation of hate speech and the spread of false information online. So far, Facebook has cooperated with French justice on matters related to terrorist attacks and violent acts by transferring the IP addresses and other identification data of suspected individuals to French judges who formally demanded it. Following a meeting between Nick Clegg, Facebook's head of global affairs, and Cedric O (France's minister for digital affairs) last week, the social media company has extended this cooperation to hate speech. "This is huge news, it means that the judicial process will be able to run normally," O told Reuters in an interview. "It's really very important, they're only doing it for France."

Google today began rolling out location history deletion tools to Android and iOS, giving users a relatively simple way to limit the scope of Google's location tracking. Users can only choose between deleting data after three or 18 months. In a blog post, Google wrote: Choose a time limit for how long you want your activity data to be saved -- 3 or 18 months -- and any data older than that will be automatically deleted from your account on an ongoing basis. These controls are coming first to Location History and Web & App Activity and will roll out in the coming weeks.

Local TV is trusted and is still the preferred method of getting news (thanks mostly to people 50 and up). But viewership for local TV news continues to decline, according to research released by Pew this week. Pew also took a look at cable and network news.

The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) today announced that it has released version 2.0 of the DisplayPort (DP) audio/video standard. DP 2.0 is the "first major update to the DisplayPort standard since March 2016, and provides up to a 3X increase in data bandwidth performance compared to the previous version of DisplayPort (DP 1.4a), as well as new capabilities to address the future performance requirements of traditional displays," it said in a statement. From a report: These include beyond 8K resolutions, higher refresh rates and high dynamic range (HDR) support at higher resolutions, improved support for multiple display configurations, as well as improved user experience with augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) displays, including support for 4K-and-beyond VR resolutions. The advantages of DP 2.0 are enjoyed across both the native DP connector as well as the USB Type-C connector, which carries the DP audio/video signal through DisplayPort Alt Mode. DP 2.0 is backward compatible with previous versions of DisplayPort and incorporates all of the key features of DP 1.4a, including support for visually lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC) with Forward Error Correction (FEC), HDR metadata transport, and other advanced features.

The increased video bandwidth performance of DP 2.0 carried over the USB-C connector enables simultaneous higher-speed USB data transfer without compromising display performance. DP 2.0 leverages the Thunderbolt 3 physical interface (PHY) layer while maintaining the flexibility of DP protocol in order to boost the data bandwidth and promote convergence across industry-leading IO standards. In addition, the new data rates of DP 2.0 come with a display stream data mapping protocol common to both single-stream transport and multi-stream transport. This common mapping further facilitates multi-stream transport support of DP 2.0 devices for a single DP port on the source device to drive multiple displays either via a docking station or daisy-chainable displays. First products incorporating DP 2.0 are projected to appear on the market by late 2020.

Intel is working with rival Arm to create a new industry standard for an important issue in the Internet of Things market: making sure that devices are properly configured and connected to the cloud. From a report: The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker announced on Wednesday that the company is a founding member of the new IoT Technical Working Group within the FIDO Alliance, an industry consortium founded by PayPal, Lenovo and others in 2012 to develop standards for password-less authentication. The goal of FIDO's IoT Technical Working Group, which will also include experts from Microsoft, Google and Amazon, is to create a standard specification for "large-scale IoT onboarding," the process in which devices are configured and connected to IoT cloud management services at the time of installation. Lorie Wigle, the executive in charge of Intel's platform security efforts, told CRN that it is important to create a standard around IoT onboarding because many companies currently face challenges with the practice when it comes to handling large-scale deployments and security. [...] Once FIDO develops the standard, market forces will compel companies to adhere and participate, according to Wigle, who said it will also increase device variety, lower costs and accelerate deployments.

A new study by Oxford Economics, a private British-based research and consulting firm, says robots are expected to take over some 20 million manufacturing jobs worldwide by 2030, extending a trend of worsening social inequality while boosting overall economic output. "The forecast set to be released Wednesday highlights growing concerns that automation and robots, while offering economic benefits, are disproportionately killing low-skill jobs and aggravating social and economic stress," reports France 24. From the report: Robots have already taken over millions of manufacturing jobs and are now gaining in services, helped by advances in computer vision, speech recognition and machine learning, the study noted. In lower-skilled regions, job losses will be twice as high as those in higher-skilled regions, even in the same country, the study concluded. According to the latest study, the current wave of "robotization" is likely ultimately to boost productivity and economic growth, generating roughly as many new jobs as it destroys. At the high end of the forecast, the researchers see a $5 trillion "robotics dividend" for the global economy by 2030 from higher productivity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A number of the United States' biggest chip makers have sold millions of dollars of products to Huawei despite a Trump administration ban (alternative source) on the sale of American technology to the Chinese telecommunications giant, according to four people with knowledge of the sales. Since the Commerce Department enacted the ban in May, American companies including Intel and Micron have found ways to sell technology to Huawei, said the people, who spoke on the condition they not be named because they were not authorized to disclose the sales. The components began to flow to Huawei about three weeks ago, the people said. Goods produced by American companies overseas are not always considered American-made, and the suppliers are taking advantage of this. The sales will help Huawei continue to sell products such as smartphones and servers.

A new system to assess the performance of employees is claimed to be more objective and thus more accurate by utilizing smartphones and fitness trackers. New Atlas reports: The passive system incorporates an app known as PhoneAgent, which was developed by Prof. Andrew Campbell at New Hampshire's Dartmouth College. Using the smartphone's own sensors, that app continuously monitors factors such as the worker's phone usage, physical activity level, geographical location, and the ambient light levels of their environment. PhoneAgent is also Bluetooth-linked to a fitness bracelet worn by the employee, which transmits data including their heart functions, sleep quality, stress levels, and calorie consumption. Additionally, Bluetooth locational beacons in the person's home and workplace monitor how much time they spend at each place, and how often they leave their workstation.

All of the phone, bracelet and beacon data is transmitted to a cloud-based server, where it's processed via machine-learning algorithms that were "trained" on the habits of people already known to be high- or low-level performers. When tested on 750 workers across the U.S. over a one-year period, the system was reportedly able to distinguish between individuals' performance levels (in a variety of industries) with an accuracy of 80 percent. That number should rise as the system is developed further.