Group of 20 finance ministers agreed over the weekend to compile common rules to close loopholes used by global tech giants such as Facebook to reduce their corporate taxes, a copy of the bloc's draft communique obtained by Reuters showed. From the report: Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other large technology firms face criticism for cutting their tax bills by booking profits in low-tax countries regardless of the location of the end customer. Such practices are seen by many as unfair. The new rules would mean higher tax burdens for large multinational firms but would also make it harder for countries like Ireland to attract foreign direct investment with the promise of ultra-low corporate tax rates. "We welcome the recent progress on addressing the tax challenges arising from digitization and endorse the ambitious program that consists of a two-pillar approach," the draft communique said. "We will redouble our efforts for a consensus-based solution with a final report by 2020." Britain and France have been among the most vocal proponents of proposals to tax big tech companies that focus on making it more difficult to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions, and to introduce a minimum corporate tax.

Salesforce on Monday decided to buy big data firm Tableau Software for $15.3 billion, marking the biggest acquisition in the company's history as it looks to offer more data insights to its clients. From a report: Seattle-based Tableau has more than 86,000 customers, including tech heavyweights such as Verizon and Netflix. As part of the all-stock deal, Tableau shareholders will get 1.103 Salesforce shares, valuing the offer at $177.88 per share, representing a premium of 42% to Tableau's Friday closing price. Salesforce's deal comes days after Alphabet's Google big-data analytics company Looker for $2.6 billion and surpasses the $5.9 billion that the cloud-based software company paid to buy U.S. software maker MuleSoft in 2018.

Hotstar, India's largest video streaming service with more than 300 million users, disabled support for Apple's Safari web browser last week to mitigate a security flaw that allowed unauthorized usage of its platform, TechCrunch reports, citing sources. From the report: As users began to complain about not being able to use Hotstar on Safari, the company's official support account asserted that "technical limitations" on Apple's part were the bottleneck. "These limitations have been from Safari; there is very little we can do on this," the account tweeted Friday evening. Sources at Hotstar told TechCrunch that this was not an accurate description of the event. Instead, company's engineers had identified a security hole that was being exploited by unauthorized users to access and distribute Hotstar's content -- including the premium catalog. Hotstar, which assumes the global record for most concurrent views on a live event, is operated by Star India, a media conglomerate in India that was part of 20th Century Fox that Disney acquired earlier this year.

Project Scarlett is the next Microsoft video game console. Phil Spencer, executive vice president of gaming at the company, announced the hardware during Microsoft's E3 2019 press briefing. From a report: "The console should be optimized for one thing and one thing only," said Spencer, "gaming." Spencer explained the console has been developed by the team responsible for the Xbox One X. A promotional video featuring various Xbox employees promised variable refresh rates, real-time ray tracing, 8K resolution and frame rates up to 120 frames per second, and a new SSD that has upwards of 40 times better performance over the current generation. The tech at the heart of the console -- which Microsoft said is four times as powerful as the Xbox One X -- will be a custom chip based on AMD's Zen 2 and Navi technology.

FreeDOS was originally created in response to Microsoft's announcement that after Windows 95, DOS would no longer be developed as a standalone operating system, according to Computerworld's 2016 interview with FreeDOS's founder and project coordinator, Jim Hall. "I packaged my own extended DOS utilities, as did others," he explains on the FreeDOS web site, "and we found other public domain or open source programs that replaced other DOS commands."

But that was back in 1994, when Jim Hall was still a college student. He went on to spend 11 years as a CIO in local government and the public sector, and served a year on the GNOME Foundation's board of directors. Now it's been 25 years, and as a prominent free software advocate, Hall contacted Slashdot to remind us that the FreeDOS Project "will turn 25 years old on June 29, 2019. This is a huge milestone for any open source software project, and especially for an open source DOS project."

So in honor of FreeDOS's 25th birthday, he's agreed to answer the 10 best questions submitted by Slashdot readers. Leave your questions in the comments. (Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment.) We'll pick the very best questions and forward them along for answers.

What else has Jim been up to? "I've decided I want to focus on coaching, advising, and mentoring IT Leaders," explains his page on the FreeDOS site. "I am starting an IT Executive Consulting practice, IT Mentor Group LLC, to help IT Leaders with strategic planning and organizational turnarounds. I am really excited for this new opportunity. It's not every day that you start your own business!"

Jim Hall is also Slashdot reader #2,985...

"Jim isn't rich or famous," wrote RobLimo back in 2000, "just an old-fashioned open source contributor who helped start a humble but useful project back in 1994 and still works on it as much as he can." At this URL you can read the questions he was asked by Slashdot users in 2000 -- and the answers he gave, just six years into the FreeDOS project.

Then leave your own best questions in the comments below -- one question per comment -- and we'll send them along to Jim to answer for the 25th anniversary of FreeDOS.

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press: Boeing Co. planned to wait three years to fix a non-working safety alert on its 737 Max aircraft and sped up the process only after the first of two deadly crashes involving the planes. The company acknowledged that it originally planned to fix a cockpit warning light in 2020 after two key U.S. lawmakers disclosed the company's timetable Friday...

The feature, called an angle of attack or AoA alert, warns pilots when sensors measuring the up-or-down pitch of the plane's nose relative to oncoming air might be wrong. The sensors malfunctioned during a Lion Air flight in Indonesia in October and an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa in March, causing anti-stall software to push the planes' noses down. Pilots were unable to regain control, and both planes crashed, killing everyone aboard -- 346 people in all. It is not clear whether either crash could have been prevented if the cockpit alert had been working... Boeing and the head of the FAA both say the alert is not critical for safety. Boeing says all its planes, including the Max, give pilots all the flight information -- including speed, altitude and engine performance -- that they need to fly safely.

The pilots' union at American Airlines expressed unhappiness about the matter, however, and said Boeing's assurance about the cockpit alert was a factor in the union standing behind Boeing after the first Max crash, in October. Jason Goldberg, an American Airlines pilot and union spokesman, said Boeing told pilots that the alert could pinpoint a faulty sensor even on the ground, before takeoff. "That is one of the things that made us confident initially to make the statement that we were happy to continue to fly the aircraft," he said. "It turned out later that that wasn't true."

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: Uber Technologies Inc. is testing a helicopter service in New York City, according to documents outlining the program obtained by Bloomberg. Passengers will be able to use the Uber app to book a flight through the service, called Uber Copter, the documents show. Tests flights took off from a Manhattan heliport near Wall Street to John F. Kennedy International Airport.

After Bloomberg asked Uber for comment Wednesday, the New York Times published a story about the program. It says customers will be able to book flights starting July 9 in New York City and that the average ride will cost $200 to $225 a person. Eric Allison, the head of Uber's flight business, told the Times that the company plans to eventually offer helicopter rides in other cities... Each helicopter can accommodate five passengers, and like Uber car rides, prices will fluctuate based on demand and other factors.

This week The Street ran a new article arguing that "Breaking Up Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook Is Not the Solution": The Microsoft anti-trust case twenty years ago showed that judges are reluctant to break up companies even when there are definite signs of market abuse... Technology is a better solution to create competition. Things such as open-source software have made a difference in breaking through technology monopolies. And the third reason is that there are perverse incentives on Wall Street that will always reward winner-take-all scenarios such as that of Amazon, even if they mean massive financial losses for years. An attempt to break up companies or unwind mergers won't cure that impulse on Wall Street that pushes companies to "go big or go home."
Meanwhile, the associate technology editor at Barron's argues that breaking up companies like Google and Facebook "won't solve the real issues facing tech," arguing that surveillance capitalism "is not an antitrust issue" and that "bigness alone is not a sin." Microsoft is the reigning market-cap champ, and it has been left out of the discussion this time. By revenues, all four [Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon] pale next to Walmart , but no one wants to break it up. Exxon Mobil has more revenue than the tech giants -- should we break it up? Some of the big-is-bad sentiment reflects societal resistance to change (ah, the good old days) -- and a "revenge of the losers" response from those getting disrupted by digitization.

We're now living in a wrold where customers "can download smartphone apps and rent privately owned cars, usually parked a short walk away in urban areas or residential neighborhoods," reports the Orlando Sentinel, noting that the rates can be as cheap as $5 an hour -- or $400 a day if you want to spend a day driving a Ferrari, Aston Martin or Bentley: Car-sharing companies say they offer benefits that young users find particularly appealing: Shared cars reduce congestion and parking shortages in cities. They reduce carbon emissions by making fewer cars necessary. They make it easier to live without owning cars. Car-sharing platforms are also easy to use: Your smartphone's GPS will navigate you to where the car is located, then you use the app to activate a remote entry system to get access to the key, or wait for the owner to bring it to you, and you're on the road.

Using a car-sharing app eliminates trips to the airport or in-town car rental agency office. "Skip the Rental Car Counter," beckons the website for Turo, the nation's largest car-sharing platform... Just as Airbnb allows private home owners to generate extra income from short-term rentals, the car-sharing platforms say their apps help car owners cover ownership costs by making their vehicles available for rent when they would otherwise be sitting in a driveway or parking spot.
The article cites two 10-year-old companies, Turo and Getaround, noting both companies "have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capitalists in recent years to finance aggressive expansion efforts."

"As a consumer, the idea of Apple sign-in is genuinely an exciting one..." writes developer/tech journalist Owen Williams at Char.gd.

"As a person in digital marketing, as well as a coder and startup founder, the feature terrifies me... I don't have a choice. Apple plans to force developers using third-party signin features to add its signin along any competing ones, rather than allowing them to make the choice. Essentially, Apple will force its success..." [B]y selling the tool as a privacy-focused feature, the company is building a new identity system that it owns entirely. Because it is a powerful privacy feature, it makes it hard to debate this move in any constructive way -- personally, I think we need more tools like this, just not from the very platforms further entrenching their own kingdoms... All of the largest tech companies have switched gears to this model, including Google, and now sell a narrative that nobody can be trusted with your data -- but it's fine to give it all to them, instead. There's bitter irony in Apple denouncing other companies' collection of data with a sign-in service, then launching its own, asking that you give that data to them, instead. I definitely trust Apple to act with my interests at heart today, but what about tomorrow, when the bottom falls out of iPhone sales, and the math changes?

I'm not arguing that any of these advertising practices are right or wrong, but rather that such a hamfisted approach isn't all that it seems. The ad industry gets a bad rap -- and does need to improve -- but allowing a company that has a vested interest in crippling it to dictate the rules by forcing developers to implement their technology is wrong...

This feature, and the way it's being forced on developers, is a fantastic example of why companies like Apple and Google should be broken up: it's clearly using the App Store, and its reach, to force the industry's hand in its favor -- rather than compete on merit.

"The Facebook shareholder revolt just got bloody," reports Business Insider: It's now clear that independent Facebook investors voted overwhelmingly in support of proposals last week to fire Mark Zuckerberg as chairman and scrap the firm's share structure. According to the results of votes at Facebook's annual shareholder meeting, 68% of outside investors want the company to hire an independent chairman. The majority was up from 51% last year.

Despite the revolt, the proposals did not pass because of Zuckerberg's voting control of the stock, which means he can swat away shareholder demands. "Arrogance is not a substitute for good corporate governance," Michael Connor, who helped coordinate action among activist Facebook investors, said.
"Facebook's voting rights are tilted heavily in favor of B-class shareholders, which consist almost exclusively of Zuckerberg and his small coterie," explains Slashdot reader schwit1. "Which means that the company's founder enjoys all the cash from being publicly-held, but none of the discipline from shareholders."

Facebook's investors are now demanding an independent investigation into Zuckerberg's "outsized" power, according to the article, which notes that 83.2% of outside shareholders also backed a proposal to scrap Facebook's dual-class share structure altogether.

In a new essay Friday, technology pundit Robert Cringely remembers the day he got his first home fax machine in 1986, arguing that broadcast television is like a fax machine -- in that "they are both obsolete."

Then he offers a quick history of television, cable TV, and the rise of Netflix, concluding "I'll be surprised if broadcast TV in the U.S. survives another decade" -- also predicting the end of cable TV packages: 5G wireless networking, as I've written here before, has pretty much nothing to do with mobile phones. It has to do with replacing every other kind of data network with 5G wireless. No more land lines, no more cable systems, no more wires. Going all-wireless almost completely eliminates customer-facing labor. No more guy with a tool belt to keep you waiting for service. No more truck rolls. There will be 5G and there will be content, that's all.

Content can mean a phone call or a movie, a game, or anything else that involves electrons in motion. And given that we'll all have voracious and completely different demands for high-resolution content, 5G will suck-up all available bandwidth and then some. Legacy broadcast license holders like broadcast TV and radio stations will sell their airspace to 5G carriers and retire to Florida. They'll get offers they can't refuse....

Cable TV packages will fall apart with every network fighting for itself in an a la carte programming world.
"There's nothing sacrosanct about a broadcast network paradigm that we've been riding for a century," he concludes. "This too shall pass."

AmiMoJo shares an article by Cory Doctorow: Wednesday, Youtube announced that it would shut down, demonetize and otherwise punish channels that promoted violent extremism, "supremacy" and other forms of hateful expression; predictably enough, this crackdown has caught some of the world's leading human rights campaigners, who publish Youtube channels full of examples of human rights abuses in order to document them and prompt the public and governments to take action....

Some timely reading: Caught in the Net: The Impact of "Extremist" Speech Regulations on Human Rights Content, a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Jillian C York: "The examples highlighted in this document show that casting a wide net into the Internet with faulty automated moderation technology not only captures content deemed extremist, but also inadvertently captures useful content like human rights documentation, thus shrinking the democratic sphere. No proponent of automated content moderation has provided a satisfactory solution to this problem."
A British history teacher living in Romania complained Wednesday that his YouTube channel had been banned completely from YouTube, possibly over its documenting of propaganda speeches from World War II. He tweeted that he was frustrated that "15 years of materials for #HistoryTeacher community have ended so abruptly."

Later that same day, his account was restored -- but he's still concerned about other YouTube accounts. "It's absolutely vital that @YouTube work to undo the damage caused by their indiscriminate implementation as soon as possible," he tweeted Wednesday. "Access to important material is being denied wholesale as many other channels are left branded as promoting hate when they do nothing of the sort."

"Neuroscientists can now see that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions," says science writer M.R. O'Connor, citing a study of personal GPS devices co-authored by Kent-based cognitive neuroscience researcher Amir-Homayoun Javadi: What isn't known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time. Javadi said the conclusions he draws from recent studies is that "when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation is less used, and consequently their brain areas involved in navigation tend to shrink."

How people navigate naturally changes with age. Navigation aptitude appears to peak around age 19, and after that, most people slowly stop using spatial memory strategies to find their way, relying on habit instead. But neuroscientist Veronique Bohbot has found that using spatial-memory strategies for navigation correlates with increased gray matter in the hippocampus at any age. She thinks that interventions focused on improving spatial memory by exercising the hippocampus -- paying attention to the spatial relationships of places in our environment -- might help offset age-related cognitive impairments or even neurodegenerative diseases. "If we are paying attention to our environment, we are stimulating our hippocampus, and a bigger hippocampus seems to be protective against Alzheimer's disease," Bohbot told me in an email.
This piece originally appeared in the Washington Post's opinion section -- under the headline "Ditch the GPS. It's Ruining Your Brain."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Researchers from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Oklahoma State University this week released a new study again tying better broadband to lower unemployment. The study tracked broadband availability and unemployment rates across 95 counties in Tennessee from 2011 to 2016, and found that counties with access to high speed broadband had a 0.26 percentage point lower rate of unemployment compared to low speed counties. Early adoption of faster speeds also aided unemployment rates, researchers found. The researchers concluded that "better quality broadband appears to have a disproportionately greater effect in rural areas" that have been historically neglected by private ISPs, many of which received countless billions in taxpayer subsidies over the last decade. Disinterested with the slow return on investment, many private ISPs have let their networks literally fall apart.

Starting July 1st, electric vehicles with four or more wheels must be fitted with an "Acoustic Vehicle Alert System" (AVAS) if they want to be able to legally drive in the European Union. With AVAS, vehicles would make a continuous noise of at least 56 decibels if the car's going 20 km/h (12 mph) or slower. New Atlas reports: Designed to address the public's fear of quiet electric vehicles, the new laws require cars -- not motorcycles -- to make some kind of noise at slower speeds. The noise, which isn't prescribed to be any particular sound, must rise and fall in pitch to signal whether the vehicle is accelerating or decelerating.

Fifty-six decibels isn't particularly loud, mercifully -- it's about the sound level of a running air con unit or electric toothbrush. A diesel truck, for example, will make about 85 decibels when it passes, and the rules state that the warning sounds can't be any louder than 75 decibels, or about the noise level of a regular dinosaur burning car. So the AVAS systems will make no difference at all to people who walk around with earphones in. Jaguar has decided to go with a "weird kind of spaceship sound," while BMW has gone with something that sounds more like a traditional engine. Nissan "seems to have gone for a bit of a jet airliner feel," writes Loz Blain for New Atlas.

At an event in Montreal earlier this week, Michelin and General Motors unveiled a new airless wheel prototype called the Uptis Prototype, which stands for "Unique Puncture-proof Tire System." The prototype looks like an old-fashioned tire, but has treads in the middle and no sidewalls. Interesting Engineering reports: "Uptis" as it is more simply called, was first unveiled at the Movin'On Summit for sustainable mobility in 2017. The aim is for a complete reshuffle of conventional wheels and tires, so that they are fully replaced as an assembly unit for passenger cars. GM's plan is to start tests at the end of this year on their Michigan-based Bolt Electic Vehicles (EVs).

The airless tire has all-round benefits: less raw material and energy are used in their production, the amount of scrapped tires due to punctures or damage will dramatically minimize, wear and tear issues due to over or under inflation will be eliminated, and roads will become safer with fewer blowouts or flat tires. Michelin has been on the case since 2005 when it unveiled its Tweel system. The Uptis is a production-ready version of the Tweel system. For those not navigating such large vehicles, the Uptis will be just the ticket. Michelin further states that these airless tires won't feel any different to our current, very air-filled ones.

A new strain of malware intercepts and tampers with internet traffic on infected Apple Macs to inject Bing results into users' Google search results. The Register reports: A report out this month by security house AiroAV details how its bods apparently spotted a software nasty that configures compromised macOS computers to route the user's network connections through a local proxy server that modifies Google search results. In this latest case, it is claimed, the malware masquerades as an installer for an Adobe Flash plugin -- delivered perhaps by email or a drive-by download -- that the user is tricked into running. This bogus installer asks the victim for their macOS account username and password, which it can use to gain sufficient privileges to install a local web proxy and configure the system so that all web browser requests go through it. That proxy can meddle with unencrypted data as it flows in and out to and from the public internet.

A root security certificate is also added to the Mac's keychain, giving the proxy the ability to generate SSL/TLS certs on the fly for websites requested. This allows it to potentially intercept and tamper with encrypted HTTPS traffic. This man-in-the-middle eavesdropping works against HTTP websites, and any HTTPS sites that do not employ MITM countermeasures. When the user opens their browser and attempts to run a Google search on an infected Mac, the request is routed to the local proxy, which injects into the Google results page an HTML iframe containing fetched Bing results for the same query, weirdly enough. As for why, "it's believed the Bing results bring in web ads that generate revenue for the malware's masterminds," the report says.

Maine Governor Janet Mills has signed a law banning internet service providers from using, selling, or distributing consumer data without their content. The Hill reports: The Act to Protect the Privacy of Online Consumer Information would prohibit any ISPs in Maine from refusing to serve a customer, penalizing them or offering a discount in order to pressure consumers into allowing the ISP to sell their data. The law will take effect on July 1. Mills described the new law as "common sense," adding that "Maine people value their privacy, online and off." "The internet is a powerful tool, and as it becomes increasingly intertwined with our lives, it is appropriate to take steps to protect the personal information and privacy of Maine people," Mills said in a statement. "With this common-sense law, Maine people can access the internet with the knowledge and comfort that their personal information cannot be bought or sold by their ISPs without their express approval."

Some privacy activists say the Maine law is even stronger than the law California passed last year because it mandates that ISPs require explicit consent from customers to sell their personal data, while the California law requires consumers to request that their data not be sold by their own volition.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast yesterday was ordered to refund nearly 50,000 customers and pay a $9.1 million fine when a judge ruled that it violated Washington state consumer protection law hundreds of thousands of times. Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued Comcast in August 2016, accusing the nation's largest cable company of tricking customers into buying a "near-worthless 'protection plan' without disclosing its significant limitations." Buying the $5-per-month plan ostensibly prevented customers from having to pay each time a Comcast technician visited their home to fix problems covered by the plan. But in reality, the plan did not cover the vast majority of wiring problems, the AG's lawsuit said. Moreover, Washington state attorneys said that Comcast led customers to believe that they needed to buy a Service Protection Plan (SPP) to get services that were actually covered for free by the company's "Customer Guarantee."

In yesterday's ruling, King County Superior Court Judge Timothy Bradshaw found that "Comcast violated the Consumer Protection Act more than 445,000 times when it charged tens of thousands of Washingtonians for its Service Protection Plan without their consent," Ferguson's announcement said. Each wrongful monthly charge was a separate violation, so there were multiple violations per customer. Washington state attorneys sought more than $171 million, asking the judge to order Comcast to pay $88 million in restitution to customers and $83 million in fines. The $9.1 million fine Comcast was ordered to pay is a fraction of the amount sought by Washington. But Comcast's refunds to customers are separate from the fine, and it's not clear exactly how much they'll amount to.