In an effort to create a "simplified experience," Google said in a blog post today that Google Photos will stop syncing to Drive in July. Digital Trends reports: The change is sure to be controversial. For many, the fact that Photos automatically syncs to Google Drive is a favorite feature, as it allows for much easier organization of photos. Of course, the change will avoid some confusion. According to Google, the change is aimed at helping "prevent accidental deletions of items across products." In other words, it seems like some users were confused about the fact that deleting a copy of a photo in Photos also means that the image is deleted in Drive, and vice versa. The blog post notes that the two services will still work together to an extent. The company announced a new feature called "Upload from Drive," which will allow users to manually select photos and videos to be imported into Photos. Once the items are uploaded, the files won't be connected, so you can delete the file in one without it being removed in the other.

Additionally, Backup and Sync will continue to work on both Windows and Mac, "so if you store your photos locally and want to then sync them to either Google Drive or Google Photos, you'll still be able to do so," reports Digital Trends. Google also notes that existing photos and videos will stay in both Photos and Drive, but the Google Photos folder in Drive will no longer update automatically.

SpaceX successfully launched and deployed three RADARSAT Canadian satellites into orbit this morning. Despite heavy fog, the company also landed the Falcon 9 rocket on the California coast. The Verge reports: The trio of satellites going up on today's flight are part of the RADARSAT Constellation developed by the Canadian Space Agency. The spacecraft are meant to operate nearly 400 miles up, where they will observe Canada's land and waters, as well as the Arctic. The goal is to gather data on sea ice in nearby oceans and the Great Lakes, as well as the changing ecosystems within Canada. Such information will be useful for many groups, including mariners who navigate in Arctic waters and scientists who want to understand the impact of climate change in the region. Satellite imagery from RADARSAT could also help with disaster relief.

SpaceX is using one of its used Falcon 9 rockets for the mission, a vehicle that previously flew the company's Crew Dragon capsule on its very first flight to the International Space Station back in March. After that launch, the Falcon 9 landed on one of SpaceX's drone ships off the coast of Florida in the Atlantic, but now it's ready to make a ground landing on the opposite coast. The first and only time that SpaceX has landed a Falcon 9 rocket on California land was in October of 2018. Nearly all of the company's attempts to land on solid ground have been successful, save for one that missed its pad in Florida and landed in the ocean instead.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For the first time in about 40 years, the guts of the U.S. model got swapped out for something new today. The upgrade brings us a new "Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere" (or FV3) dynamical core, which simulates the basic atmospheric physics at the heart of this endeavor, a change that has been in the works for a while. The new core had its origins in simulating atmospheric chemistry but ended up being adapted into other models. A few years ago, it was selected to replace the old core in the U.S. Global Forecast System model. And for more than a year now, the new version of the model has been running in parallel so its results could be compared to the operational model.

The results have been a little mixed. The new core improves computational efficiency and allows some processes to be simulated at a higher resolution -- unequivocal improvements. It also simulates the physics of water vapor more realistically. In a press conference today, NOAA scientists cited a number of areas where forecast improvements have been seen. Forecast tracks of hurricanes and the mid-latitude storms that frequently sweep across the U.S. have both improved, they said, along with forecasts of hurricane strength. Forecast precipitation amounts were also cited as a key area of progress. But there have also been grumblings in the weather community over the past year about results that didn't seem so hot. For example, surface temperatures have been biased low in some situations, throwing off forecasts.

Psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson announced a subscription-based free speech platform called 'Thinkspot' on Wednesday that promises to provide users the best features of other social media platforms, but without censorship. From a report: It's being marketed as a free speech alternative to payment processors like Patreon in that it will "monetize creators" and as provide a social media alternative to platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Peterson discussed Thinkspot with podcaster Joe Rogan on June 9, emphasizing a radically pro-free speech Terms of Service. He described that freedom as the "central" aspect saying, "once you're on our platform we won't take you down unless we're ordered to by a US court of law."

CERN is best known for pushing the boundaries of science and understanding, but the famed research outfit's next major experiment will be with open-source software. From a report: The European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, and also known as home of the Large Hadron Collider, has announced plans to migrate away from Microsoft products and on to open-source solutions where possible.

Why? Increases in Microsoft license fees. Microsoft recently revoked the organisations status as an academic institution, instead pricing access to its services on users. This bumps the cost of various software licenses 10x, which is just too much for CERN's budget.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In April, Google announced a groundbreaking technology that could allow Android users to use their smartphones as hardware security keys whenever logging into Google accounts on their laptops or work PCs. Initially, the technology was made available for Chrome OS, macOS, and Windows 10 devices. Today, Google announced it is expanding this technology to iOS as well. Today's news means that iPhone and iPad users can now use their (secondary) Android smartphones as a security key whenever logging into their Google accounts on an iOS device. The technology works basically the same, as Google explained in April, at the Cloud Next 2019 conference.

India said on Wednesday it will launch its second lunar mission in mid-July, as it moves to consolidate its status as a leader in space technology by achieving a controlled landing on the moon. From a report: The mission, if successful, would make India only the fourth country behind the United States, Russia and China to perform a "soft" landing on the moon and put a rover on it. China successfully landed a lunar rover in January. The unmanned mission, called Chandrayaan-2, which means "moon vehicle" in Sanskrit, will involve an orbiter, a lander and a rover, which have been built by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The mission is scheduled to launch on July 15 aboard ISRO's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III. It will cost about 10 billion rupees ($144 million), ISRO said. After a journey of more than 50 days, ISRO's lander will attempt a "soft," controlled landing on the lunar surface on around Sept. 6.

Facebook uncovered emails that appear to show Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg's connection to potentially problematic privacy practices at the company, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Within the company, the unearthing of the emails in the process of responding to a continuing federal privacy investigation has raised concerns that they would be harmful to Facebook -- at least from a public-relations standpoint -- if they were to become public, one of the people said. The potential impact of the internal emails has been a factor in the tech giant's desire to reach a speedy settlement of the investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, one of the people said. Facebook is operating under a 2012 consent decree with the agency related to privacy, and the emails sent around that time suggest that Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior executives didn't make compliance with the FTC order a priority, the people said.

It couldn't be determined exactly what emails the agency has requested and how many of them relate to Mr. Zuckerberg. The FTC investigation began more than a year ago after reports that personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users improperly wound up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked on President Trump's 2016 campaign. The FTC is investigating whether that lapse violated the 2012 consent decree with the agency in which Facebook agreed to better protect user privacy. Since the Cambridge Analytica affair, other privacy missteps have come to light, adding to Facebook's headaches.

A distributed denial of service attack may sound like hacker talk, but there's a simple explanation behind it. Secure messaging app Telegram said it had to endure one Wednesday, and it gave an explanation that almost anyone could understand. From a report: Telegram tweeted Wednesday morning that it was dealing with a DDoS attack. The app was down for many users across the globe, according to DownDetector. The downtime period was just a little over an hour, and while it was going on, Telegram explained how a DDoS attack works.

"Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald's in front of you -- and each is ordering a whopper," Telegram tweeted. "The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place -- but there are so many of them that the server can't even see you to try and take your order." The tweets then went on to describe how hackers accomplish a DDoS attack. "To generate these garbage requests, bad guys use 'botnets' made up of computers of unsuspecting users which were infected with malware at some point in the past. This makes a DDoS similar to the zombie apocalypse: one of the whopper lemmings just might be your grandpa," the company said in another tweet.

Tired of taking the flak for helping spread fake news, WhatsApp will start suing parties it finds flouting its rules. Till now, it was only using machine learning to flag accounts that were abusing its anti-spam policies. From a report: The messaging platform, used by more than 1.5 billion users, confirmed on Tuesday that starting December 7 it will start considering signals off its platform to pursue legal actions against those who are abusing its system. The company will also go after individuals who -- or firms that -- falsely claim to have found ways to cause havoc on the service.

Huawei has ditched a product launch for the first time since the US placed it on a trade blacklist. From a report: Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's consumer division, told CNBC that the firm had formally planned to launch a new product in its Matebook series without giving a date, but it had been indefinitely put on hold. He said that being on the U.S. Entity List, which restricts American companies from selling products to Huawei, had caused the cancellation. "We cannot supply the PC," Yu said, adding that the situation is "unfortunate." When asked if the laptop could be launched at a later date, Yu said it "depends on how long the Entity List will be there." He acknowledged that, if Huawei is on the blacklist for a long time, the laptop will not be able to be launched.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Tesla is currently installing its solar roof product in eight states, according to Elon Musk, speaking at the Tesla Annual Shareholder Meeting on Tuesday. The solar roof-tile project has had a relatively long genesis since being unveiled three years ago, in 2016. In addition to having installations run in eight states, Musk said the solar roof product is currently on version three, and that this version is very exciting to him because it offers a chance of being at cost parity with an equivalent entry-level cheap traditional tile, when you include the cost of utilities you'd be saving by generating your own power instead. Regarding timelines for wider rollout of the solar roof products at the costs he anticipates, his own words probably say it best: "I'm sometimes a little optimistic about time frames -- it's time you knew," he joked at the meeting.

JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from Live Science: An neural network named "Speech2Face" was trained by scientists on millions of educational videos from the internet that showed over 100,000 different people talking. From this dataset, Speech2Face learned associations between vocal cues and certain physical features in a human face, researchers wrote in a new study. The AI then used an audio clip to model a photorealistic face matching the voice, and the results are surprisingly close to the actual faces of the people whose voices it listened to. The faces generated by Speech2Face didn't precisely match the people behind the voices. But the images did usually capture the correct age ranges, ethnicities and genders of the individuals, according to the study. The findings have been published in the preprint journal arXiv but have not been peer-reviewed.

Socguy writes: The Uno-X hydrogen station in Sandvika in Baerum exploded on Monday and resulted in two injuries in a nearby non-fuel cell vehicle. The company operating the station has suspended operation at its other locations following the explosion. With the refueling network crippled, Toyota and Hyundai have announced that they are temporarily halting sales of fuel cell vehicles. Jon Andre Lokke, CEO of Nel Hydrogen, the company operating those hydrogen refueling stations, commented: "It is too early to speculate on the cause and what has gone wrong. Our top priority is the safe operation of the stations we have delivered. As a precaution, we have temporarily put ten other stations in standby mode in anticipation of more information."

Here's what Toyota Norway manager Espen Olsen had to say: "We don't know exactly what happened on the Uno-X drive yet, so we don't want to speculate. But we stop the sale until we have learned what has happened, and for practical reasons, since it is not possible to fill fuel now." He added: "This does not change our view of hydrogen, and it is important for us to point out that hydrogen cars are at least as safe as ordinary cars. The hydrogen tanks themselves are so robust that you can shoot them with a gun without knocking them."

samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: Two artists and an advertising company created a deepfake of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saying things he never said, and uploaded it to Instagram. The video [...] shows Mark Zuckerberg sitting at a desk, seemingly giving a sinister speech about Facebook's power. The video is framed with broadcast chyrons that say "We're increasing transparency on ads," to make it look like it's part of a news segment.

The original, real video is from a September 2017 address Zuckerberg gave about Russian election interference on Facebook. The caption of the Instagram post says it's created using CannyAI's video dialogue replacement (VDR) technology. When a doctored video of Nancy Pelosi spread on Facebook, the company said that if someone posted a manipulated video of Zuckerberg like the one of Pelosi, it would stay up. Now that there's a deepfake of Zuckerberg implying he's in total control of billions of people's stolen data and ready to control the future, on Facebook-owned Instagram, that stance will be put to the test.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Dozens of U.S. government websites appear to contain a flaw enabling anyone to generate URLs with their domains that redirect users to external sites, a handy tool for criminals hoping to infect users with malware or fool them into surrendering personal information. Gizmodo first reported a year ago that a wide variety of U.S. government sites were misconfigured, allowing porn bots to create links that redirected visitors to sites with colorful names like "HD Dog Sex Girl" and "Two Hot Russians Love Animal Porn." Among those affected was the Justice Department's Amber Alert site, links from which apparently redirected users to erotic material.

Gizmodo first reported a year ago that a wide variety of U.S. government sites were misconfigured, allowing porn bots to create links that redirected visitors to sites with colorful names like "HD Dog Sex Girl" and "Two Hot Russians Love Animal Porn." Among those affected was the Justice Department's Amber Alert site, links from which apparently redirected users to erotic material. The ability to generate malicious links that appear to lead to actual government websites can be a handy pretense for criminals conducting phishing campaigns. What's more, these malicious redirects may be used to send users to websites masquerading as official government services, encouraging them to hand over personal information, such as names, addresses, and Social Security numbers.

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today introduced a new Firefox family of logos, a rebranding effort it kicked off more than 18 months ago. For most people, Firefox refers to a browser, but the company now wants the brand to encompass the entire Firefox family of apps and services. "The 'Firefox' you've always known as a browser is stretching to cover a family of products and services united by putting you and your privacy first," Mozilla explained. "Firefox is a browser AND an encrypted service to send huge files. It's an easy way to protect your passwords on every device AND an early warning if your email has been part of a data breach. Safe, private, eye-opening. That's just the beginning of the new Firefox family."

Holding, selling or dealing in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin could soon land people in India in jail for 10 years. From a report: The "Banning of Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill 2019" draft in the nation has proposed 10-year prison sentence for persons who "mine, generate, hold, sell, transfer, dispose, issue or deal in cryptocurrencies." Besides making it completely illegal, the bill makes holding of cryptos a non-bailable offence, too. Given the high chances of cryptocurrencies being misused for money laundering, various government bodies in the country such as the Income Tax Department and the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) had endorsed banning of cryptocurrencies.

Troy Hunt, the owner and founder of the well-known and respected data breach notification website "Have I Been Pwned," announced today that he's actively looking for a buyer.

"To date, every line of code, every configuration and every breached record has been handled by me alone. There is no 'HIBP team,' there's one guy keeping the whole thing afloat," Hunt wrote. "It's time for HIBP to grow up. It's time to go from that one guy doing what he can in his available time to a better-resourced and better-funded structure that's able to do way more than what I ever could on my own." Motherboard reports: Over the years, Have I Been Pwned has become the repository for data breaches on the internet, a place where users can search for their email address and see whether they have been part of a data breach. It's now also a service where people can sign up to get notified whenever their accounts get breached. It's perhaps the most useful, free, cybersecurity service in the world. Hunt said he's already had informal conversations with some organizations that might be interested in buying the service. Hunt said he's engaged the financial consulting firm KPMG to look for a buyer.

In the post, Hunt shared some staggering numbers that explain just how big Have I Been Pwned has become: 8 billion breached records, nearly 3 million people subscribed to notifications, who have been emailed about a breach 7 million times, 150,000 unique visitors to the site on a normal day, 10 million on an abnormal day. Regardless of who buys the site, Hunt made a series of commitments on the future of Have I Been Pwned: searches should remain free for consumers, the platform should expand and grow, and, finally, he wants to stay involved in some capacity.

A team of academics from the US, Austria, and Australia, has published new research today detailing yet another variation of the Rowhammer attack. From a report: The novelty in this new Rowhammer variety -- which the research team has named RAMBleed -- is that it can be used to steal information from a targeted device, as opposed to altering existing data or to elevate an attacker's privileges, like all previous Rowhammer attacks, have done in the past. [...] In a research paper [PDF] published today, academics unveiled RAMBleed, the first Rowhammer attack that can actively deduce and steal data from a RAM card. To do this, researchers had to come up and combine different techniques, which, when assembled, would permit a RAMBleed attack to take place.