Mary Meeker, the general partner at venture capital firm Bond Capital, delivered a 333-page slideshow that looked back at every important internet trend in the last year and looks forward about what these trends tell us to expect in the year ahead. Some takeaways: 51% of the world -- or 3.8 billion people -- were internet users last year, up from 49% (3.6 billion) in 2017 and only 24% in 2009. Growth slowed to about 6% in 2018.
The percentage of U.S. adults who say they're "almost always online" has grown from 21% three years ago to 26%.
The percentage of U.S. adults trying to limit personal smartphone use has grown from 47% in 2017 to 63% in 2018.
Apple, Google, Facebook, and YouTube have all rolled out tools to help users monitor their usage.
People are more concerned about privacy than a year ago (but these high concerns are moderating).
Encrypted messaging and Web traffic are rising.
And yet, U.S. users still view the internet as a positive for themselves (88%) and society (70%), though both metrics have slightly decreased since 2014.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Web blog hosting platform WordPress.com is currently facing a significant technical issue that has resulted in premium blogs going down or reverting to using default themes. Impacted sites include major news outlets like BBC America, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, 9to5Google, VentureBeat, DroneDJ, and Electrek; but also many companies that were using the WordPress.com's VIP offering to host corporate blogs, such as Facebook, the Wikimedia Foundation, and others. Automattic, the company behind the WordPress.com service has admitted to the technical issue in a series of tweets and a blog post from its engineering staff.

As stand-up electric scooters have rolled into more than 100 cities worldwide, many of the people riding them are ending up in the emergency room with serious injuries. Others have been killed. From a report: There are no comprehensive statistics available but a rough count by The Associated Press of media reports turned up at least 11 electric scooter rider deaths in the U.S. since the beginning of 2018. Nine were on rented scooters and two on ones the victims owned. With summer fast approaching, the numbers will undoubtedly grow as more riders take to the streets. Despite the risks, demand for the two-wheeled scooters continues to soar, popularized by companies like Lime and Bird. In the U.S. alone, riders took 38.5 million trips on rentable scooters in 2018, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials. Riders adore the free-flying feel of the scooters that have a base the size of a skateboard and can rev up to 15 miles per hour. They're also cheap and convenient, costing about $1 to unlock with a smartphone app and about 15 cents per minute to ride. And in many cities, they can be dropped off just about anywhere after a rider reaches their destination. But pedestrians and motorists scorn the scooters as a nuisance at best and a danger at worst.

Facebook shut down its Research and Onavo programs after a report exposed how the company paid teenagers for root access to their phones to gain market data on competitors. Now Facebook is relaunching its paid market research program, but this time with principles -- namely transparency, fair compensation, and safety. From a report: The goal? To find out what other competing apps and features Facebook should buy, copy, or ignore. Today Facebook releases its "Study From Facebook" app for Android only. Some adults 18+ in the US and India will be recruited by ads on and off Facebook to willingly sign up to let Facebook collect extra data from them exchange for a monthly payment. They'll be warned that Facebook will gather what apps are on their phone, how much time they spend using those apps, the app activity names of features they use in other apps, plus their country, device, and network type.

Shazam, the Apple-owned app that helps users identify songs playing around them, can now recognize songs you're listening to through your headphones when using an Android phone or tablet. From a report: Acquired by Apple for $400 million last year, the company introduced a feature called 'Pop-Up Shazam' to its Android app recently, which when enabled, works with any other Android app to track and identify songs playing externally or internally on the phone. It's a feature that many users have requested for years. Prior to this, when a user would chance upon a music track in say a YouTube video, they only had two inconvenient ways to shazam the song. They could either unplug the earphones from the phone and let the audio play through the built-in speakers, or draw an earpiece close to the mic of the phone. The new feature enables Shazam to track the audio signal beaming off of other apps, thereby not completely relying on just output from the surrounding and a phone's speaker. The app is tapping the audio signal by using a persistent notification that floats around and could be dragged -- like the ones from Facebook Messenger -- and can be activated by a single tap.

Opera Software, the company behind the Opera browser, today launched a custom version of its browser dedicated to online gamers and streamers on Windows platform. From a report: Named Opera GX, the browser comes with dedicated features that let users limit the browser's access to computer resources such as CPU (processor) and RAM (memory). The idea is to provide gamers with a way to navigate the web while leaving resources available for games or streaming applications that the gamer might also be running at the same time. "Running a game might require a lot of effort from your machine. Even more so if you are streaming while you play," said Maciej Kocemba, product director of Opera GX. "Before Opera GX, gamers often shut down their browsers to not slow down their gaming experience. We came up with the GX Control feature to make people's games run more smoothly without requiring them to compromise on what they do on the Web." Besides the GX Control Panel that lets users manage CPU and RAM usage limits, Opera GX also comes with Twitch integration, meaning users can log into their Twitch accounts via the browser's sidebar.

The Raytheon Co. and United Technologies Corp. are merging in an all-stock deal that the two companies say is a merger of equals. The new company's name will be Raytheon Technologies Corp. -- and it's expected to have nearly $74 billion in annual sales. NPR reports: The new defense and aerospace company would be second only to Boeing in the U.S., according to the latest Forbes 500 rankings by annual revenue. On that list, Boeing had more than $101 billion in revenue while another rival, Lockheed Martin, racked up $53.7 billion, according to Forbes. "The combination of United Technologies and Raytheon will define the future of aerospace and defense," United Technologies Chairman and CEO Greg Hayes said in a statement about the deal. Hayes is set to become the leader of the new company: He'll take the titles of chairman and CEO two years after the merger is finalized.

Under the deal, United Technologies' shareholders will own about 57% and Raytheon shareholders will own about 43% of the merged company. Both Raytheon's and United Technologies' board of directors have unanimously approved the merger, which is expected to close during the first half of 2020. The headquarters of Raytheon Technologies will be in the Boston metro area, the companies say. Raytheon is currently based in Waltham, Mass., while United Technologies is based in Farmington, Conn. Under the deal, the new Raytheon Technologies will consolidate its operations into four businesses. One will be based on intelligence and aerospace and another based on defense and missile systems. Those entities will join Collins Aerospace (the recently acquired Rockwell Collins Inc.) and jet engine-maker Pratt & Whitney -- two of United Technologies' high-revenue divisions.

MojoKid writes: AMD let loose today with a number of high profile launches at the E3 2019 Expo in Los Angeles, CA. The company disclosed its full Zen 2 Ryzen 3000 series microarchitecture, which AMD claims offers an IPC uplift of 15% generation over generation, thanks to better branch prediction, higher integer throughput, and reduced effective latency to memory. Zen 2 also significantly beefs up floating point throughput with double the FP performance of the previous generation. AMD also announced a 16-core/32-thread variant, dubbed Ryzen 3950X, that drops at $750 -- a full $950 cheaper than a similar spec 16-core Intel Core i9-9960X. On the graphics side, AMD's RDNA architecture in Navi will power the company's new Radeon RX 5700 series, which is said to offer competitive performance to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070 and 2060 series. The Navi-based GPU at the heart of the upcoming Radeon RX 5700 series is manufactured on TSMC's 7nm process node and features GDDR6 memory, along with PCI Express 4.0 interface support. Versus AMD's previous generation GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture, RDNA delivers more than 50% better performance-per-watt and 25% better overall performance. Greater than 50% of that improvement comes from architecture optimizations according to AMD; the GPU also gets a boost from its 7nm process and frequency gains. Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT cards will be available in market on July 7th, along with AMD Ryzen 3000 chips, but pricing hasn't been established yet for the Radeon GPUs.

The human rights and war crimes community is up in arms over Facebook's decision to turn off a set of advanced features in its graph search product, which is "a way to receive an answer to a specific query on Facebook, such as 'people in Nebraska who like Metallica,'" reports BuzzFeed News. "Using graph search, it's possible to find public -- and only public -- content that's not easily accessed via keyword search." The decision, which was not announced publicly, was likely made in an effort to limit data scandals and improve privacy. From the report: When Mark Zuckerberg personally introduced graph search in early 2013, he billed it as equal in importance to Facebook's News Feed and profile timeline. On launch day, the company also published a post offering journalists tips on how to use graph search. Over the years, graph search became a valuable tool for investigators, police officers, and journalists. At the same time, social media became a key source for uncovering war crimes, disinformation campaigns, child exploitation, and other crimes and abuses.

The move raised even more concern in the human rights and investigative journalism communities because Facebook appeared to thwart attempts to find workarounds. Henk van Ess, an investigator and trainer who works with Bellingcat, operates a tool that uses graph search to enable powerful searches of public content. After Facebook turned off some searches, he was able to find workarounds -- until the company blocked them. "I patched my tools 5 times and each time, after 2 hrs, the tools were crippled by FB," he wrote in a Twitter direct message. "Other toolmakers experienced the same." Van Ess now requires people to request permission from him to use his tool; he says he's been flooded with requests from people pursuing investigations "involving human rights abuses, war crimes, terrorism, extremism, white collar crime ... corruption, disinformation campaigns, environmental crimes, cybercrime -- the list just keeps on going." A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to BuzzFeed News: "The vast majority of people on Facebook search using keywords, a factor which led us to pause some aspects of graph search and focus more on improving keyword search. We are working closely with researchers to make sure they have the tools they need to use our platform."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Controversial internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has begun a final appeal to halt his extradition from New Zealand to the U.S. on copyright-related charges. The FBI claims Mr Dotcom's Megaupload site earned millions of dollars by facilitating illegal file-sharing. But his lawyers told New Zealand's Supreme Court on Monday it was never meant to encourage copyright breaches. Mr Dotcom, who denies the charges, could face a lengthy jail term in the U.S. if extradited and found guilty.

Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batatom -- all former Megaupload executives -- stand accused of the same charges, which include conspiracy to commit racketeering, copyright infringement, money laundering and wire fraud. The US Department of Justice has been trying to extradite the men since 2012, and in 2015 a New Zealand district court said it would permit the move. The defendants have since lodged unsuccessful appeals at the High Court and Court of Appeal, leading to a final push this week at the Supreme Court. "In 2005 I created a website that allowed people to upload files to the cloud. At the time only small files could be attached to emails. Megaupload allowed users to email a link to a file. That's it," Dotcom wrote on Twitter yesterday. "In 2019 the NZ Supreme Court decides if I should be extradited for this 'crime.'"

Google Maps is rolling out a new feature that will tell you if your taxi driver goes off-route in an attempt to rack up a higher fare. Sure, you could always use Google Maps to pick the shortest route possible, but the newest feature does the work for you. BGR reports: The feature is especially useful in cities you don't know, but also at home, allowing you to get live updates on your route. Google Maps will send an alert to your phone every time you're off-route by 500 meters, xda-developers explains. Moreover, your route will not be rerouted automatically, which is what happens when deviating from your route while using Google Maps for regular navigation. That's because the feature will help you stick to your chosen route rather than continuously adapting it.

Once you start receiving the alerts, you should notify the driver that you're aware of the changes he or she made, and ask to revert to the shortest route possible. It's unlikely they'll try to cheat again once it's clear you're keeping tabs on the journey. And don't believe them when they say that traffic is the reason for the detour unless you can verify it with Google Maps, which should give you an idea of what traffic to expect on your route. It's unclear whether the feature will be available in other markets or when it'll launch. You'll want to be on the lookout for new Maps buttons that says Stay safer and Get off-route alerts in the navigation menu to take advantage of it.

The Supreme Court will consider whether a black television producer can pursue racial discrimination claims against Comcast for declining to carry his programming channels on its cable system (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). The Wall Street Journal reports: The Comcast case stems from the cable operator's decision not to carry Pets.TV, Recipes.TV and other channels from Entertainment Studios Networks Inc. The Los Angeles company is solely owned by Byron Allen, who gained celebrity as co-host of "Real People," a 1980s reality show. Comcast has carried channels owned mostly or substantially by African-Americans, such as Magic Johnson's Aspire and Sean "Diddy" Combs's music channel, Revolt TV, as well as Black Entertainment Television, whose African-American founder, Robert Johnson, sold to Viacom in 2001.

The suit, filed under Reconstruction-era law affording "the same right" to contract "as is enjoyed by white citizens," alleges, however, that Comcast discriminated against "100% African American" owned media such as Entertainment Studios. A federal appeals court in San Francisco allowed the suit to proceed. "If discriminatory intent plays any role in a defendant's decision not to contract with a plaintiff, even if it is merely one factor and not the sole cause of the decision, then that plaintiff has not enjoyed the same right as a white citizen," Judge Milan Smith wrote for the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Comcast denies the allegations and says it was concerned the Entertainment Studios programming wouldn't draw enough of an audience to justify allotting it bandwidth. The cable operator argues that federal law requires the plaintiff to show that he or she would have gotten the contract absent racial bias.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: U.S. Customs and Border Protection has confirmed a data breach has exposed the photos of travelers and vehicles traveling in and out of the United States. The photos were stolen from a subcontractor's network through a "malicious cyberattack," a CBP spokesperson told TechCrunch in an email. "CBP learned that a subcontractor, in violation of CBP policies and without CBP's authorization or knowledge, had transferred copies of license plate images and traveler images collected by CBP to the subcontractor's company network," said an agency statement. "Initial information indicates that the subcontractor violated mandatory security and privacy protocols outlined in their contract," the statement read. he agency first learned of the breach on May 31. When asked, a spokesperson for CBP didn't say how many photos were taken in the breach or if U.S. citizens were affected. The agency also didn't name the subcontractor. The database that the agency maintains includes traveler images, as well as passport and visa photos. Congress has been notified and the CBP said it is "closely monitoring" CBP-related work by the subcontractor.

Huawei is reportedly inviting Google Play Store developers to publish apps for the Huawei EMUI AppGallery, a month after it was reported that future Android handsets from the Chinese group won't support Google Play Store. From a report: An anonymous developer on Monday showed the email to XDA Developers, with Huawei apparently sending out invitations to join AppGallery and saying it has 270 million monthly active users across 350 million phones, and a community of 560,000 developers. "In order to guarantee a smooth usage of your app for our users, Huawei is committed to provide you with full support, to help you publish your app into AppGallery," the emailed invitation reportedly says. It also offers access to join the Huawei Developer portal for free, XDA Developers reported.

The world's seed-bearing plants have been disappearing at a rate of nearly 3 species a year since 1900 -- which is up to 500 times higher than would be expected as a result of natural forces alone, according to the largest survey yet of plant extinctions. From a report: The project looked at more than 330,000 species and found that plants on islands and in the tropics were the most likely to be declared extinct. Trees, shrubs and other woody perennials had the highest probability of disappearing regardless of where they were located. The results were published on 10 June in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The study provides valuable hard evidence that will help with conservation efforts, says Stuart Pimm, a conservation scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The survey included more plant species by an order of magnitude than any other study, he says. "Its results are enormously significant."

The work stems from a database compiled by botanist Rafael Govaerts at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London. Govaerts started the database in 1988 to track the status of every known plant species. As part of that project, he mined the scientific literature and created a list of seed-bearing plant species that were ruled extinct, and noted which species scientists had deemed to be extinct but were later rediscovered. In 2015, Govaerts teamed up with plant evolutionary biologist Aelys Humphreys at Stockholm University in Sweden and others to analyse the data. They compared extinction rates across different regions and characteristics such as whether the plants were annuals that regrow from seed each year or perennials that endure year after year. The researchers found that about 1,234 species had been reported extinct since the publication of Carl Linnaeus's compendium of plant species, Species Plantarum, in 1753. But more than half of those species were either rediscovered or reclassified as another living species, meaning 571 are still presumed extinct.

A map of plant extinctions produced by the team shows that flora in areas of high biodiversity and burgeoning human populations, such as Madagascar, the Brazilian rainforests, India and South Africa, are most at risk. Humphreys says that the rates of extinction in the tropics is beyond what researchers expect, even when they account for the increased diversity of species in those habitats. And islands are particularly sensitive because they are likely to contain species found nowhere else in the world and are especially susceptible to environmental changes, says Humphreys.

Volkswagen AG luxury brand Audi is recalling its first all-electric vehicle due to the risk of a battery fire. From a report: The company issued a voluntary recall of approximately 540 E-Tron SUV models sold in the U.S. because of a risk that moisture can seep into the battery cell through a wiring harness glitch, spokesman Mark Dahncke said. The company isn't aware of any fires or injuries because of the flaw, which affects a total of 1,644 models, he said. The E-Tron, which went on sale in the U.S. in April, is Audi's first fully-electric car and one in a wave of contenders from traditional automakers looking to challenge Tesla's dominance of the segment. While electric vehicles are no more prone to accidents or fires than gasoline-powered cars -- and might be less so, according the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration -- the lithium-ion battery technology that powers them is still evolving, and there is no consensus on safe system design.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Saturday, June 22, SpaceX plans to launch its Falcon Heavy Rocket out of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The reusable craft is coming off two successful flights; its maiden launch in early 2018 and a satellite delivery trip in April 2019. For its third adventure, the Falcon Heavy will ferry a trove of precious cargo up into space. Around two dozen satellites are going along for the ride this time. But the rocket's most interesting passenger has to be the Orbital Test Bed satellite. Its main payload is an experimental, toaster-sized gizmo called the Deep Space Atomic Clock (DSAC). If the thing works properly, future missions to Mars, Jupiter and beyond could become a whole lot easier -- and less expensive.

Some of the world's biggest tech companies have told their employees to stop talking about technology and technical standards with counterparts at Huawei in response to the recent U.S. blacklisting of the Chinese tech firm, Reuters reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: Chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm, mobile research firm InterDigital and South Korean carrier LG Uplus have restricted employees from informal conversations with Huawei, the world's largest telecommunications equipment maker, the sources said. Such discussions are a routine part of international meetings where engineers gather to set technical standards for communications technologies, including the next generation of mobile networks known as 5G.

The U.S. Department of Commerce has not banned contact between companies and Huawei. On May 16, the agency put Huawei on a blacklist, barring it from doing business with U.S. companies without government approval, then a few days later it authorized U.S. companies to interact with Huawei in standards bodies through August "as necessary for the development of 5G standards." The Commerce Department reiterated that position on Friday in response to a question from Reuters.

Scottish Power is to undertake the most ambitious battery power project in Europe in an attempt to unlock the potential of the UK's wind and solar farms. From a report: The company will connect an industrial-scale battery, the size of half a football pitch, to the Whitelee onshore windfarm early next year to capture more power from its 215 turbines. The first major onshore wind power storage project will lead the way for a string of similar projects across at least six of Scottish Power's largest renewable energy sites over the following 18 months. It claims the 50MW battery systems promise a "significant step" on the road towards renewable energy, providing baseload, or continuous electricity supply, for the UK energy system. The battery has more than double the power capacity of any existing battery in the UK. It would take an hour to fully charge and could release enough electricity over an hour to fully charge 806 Nissan Leaf vehicles over a total of 182,000 miles, according to a spokesman for Scottish Power.

Despite sharing a common Chromium codebase, browser makers like Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi don't have plans on crippling support for ad blocker extensions in their products -- as Google is currently planning on doing within Chrome. From a report: The three browsers makers have confirmed to ZDNet, or in public comments, of not intending to support a change to the extensions system that Google plans to add to Chromium, the open-source browser project on which Chrome, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi are all based on.