Apple will ask developers to position a new "Sign in with Apple" button in iPhone and iPad apps above rival buttons from Alphabet's Google and Facebook, according to design guidelines released this week. From a report: The move to give Apple prime placement is significant because users often select the default or top option on apps. And Apple will require apps to offer its button if they want to offer options to login with Facebook or Google. Apple unveiled its login button on Monday, emphasizing users' privacy and also introducing a feature that randomly generates an email address to avoid revealing the person's true email. Many consumers choose to sign in to independent apps using their accounts from Google or Facebook because it saves the trouble of having to create and remember separate user names and passwords for dozens of different apps. [...] In a press release about updates to its App Store review guidelines, Apple said its login button "will be required as an option for users in apps that support third-party sign-in when it is commercially available later this year."

PC gaming platform BlueStacks has launched BlueStacks Inside that enables mobile game developers to publish their games on Steam with no porting to the PC required. From a report: BlueStacks inside has a one-step software development kit (SDK) that lets developers take existing mobile games to Steam and Discord. The initial launch will include several high-profile developers like KOG, Funplus, Fabled Game Studio, and many others whose games will be available directly on Steam. Mobile developers have started allocating large budgets to game development, and that means mobile games can be competitive on Steam without a ton of modification.

With games like Lineage 2: Revolution and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, graphics and gameplay push the limits of what a mobile device can do. On the other hand, gamers are caught in a struggle to maintain devices that can keep up with demanding games. BlueStacks Inside gives developers an opportunity to reach a much wider and valuable PC-based audience without the need to hire a separate PC development team. Players can use their PCs to do the heavy lifting for games their phones would otherwise not be able to run well.

Amazon's drone ambitions took another step forward on Wednesday as the tech giant revealed its latest delivery drone design. From a report: At Amazon's re:MARS Conference, Amazon executive Jeff Wilke showed off a fully-electric drone that can fly up to 15 miles and deliver packages under five pounds in less than 30 minutes. The new drone will start making deliveries to customers "within months," Wilke said, but did not provide further details. The new hexagonal design looks quite different than the experimental drones that made Amazon Prime Air's first aerial drop-offs in England in 2016 and in California in 2017. "Our newest drone design includes advances in efficiency, stability and, most importantly, in safety," Wilke wrote in a blog post. "It is also unique, and it advances the state of the art. How so? First, it's a hybrid design. It can do vertical takeoffs and landings -- like a helicopter. And it's efficient and aerodynamic -- like an airplane. It also easily transitions between these two modes -- from vertical-mode to airplane mode, and back to vertical mode." Amazon added that these drones are going to use "stereo vision in parallel with sophisticated AI algorithms" to detect people and animals from above. "A customer's yard may have clotheslines, telephone wires, or electrical wires. Wire detection is one of the hardest challenges for low-altitude flights. Through the use of computer-vision techniques we've invented, our drones can recognize and avoid wires as they descend into, and ascend out of, a customer's yard," the company added in a statement.

A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander. From a report: The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as "a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization" and sets out a plausible scenario of where business-as-usual could lead over the next 30 years. The paper argues that the potentially "extremely serious outcomes" of climate-related security threats are often far more probable than conventionally assumed, but almost impossible to quantify because they "fall outside the human experience of the last thousand years." On our current trajectory, the report warns, "planetary and human systems [are] reaching a 'point of no return' by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order."

YouTube said on Wednesday that it plans to remove thousands of videos and channels that advocate for neo-Nazism, white supremacy and other bigoted ideologies in an attempt to clean up extremism and hate speech on its popular service. From a report: The new policy will ban "videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion," the company said in a blog post. The prohibition will also cover videos denying that violent incidents, like the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, took place. YouTube did not name any specific channels or videos that would be banned. "It's our responsibility to protect that, and prevent our platform from being used to incite hatred, harassment, discrimination and violence," the company said in the blog post. The decision by YouTube, which is owned by Google, is the latest action by a Silicon Valley company to stem the spread of hate speech and disinformation on its site. A month ago, Facebook evicted seven of its most controversial users, including Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of InfoWars. Twitter banned Mr. Jones last year.

The companies have come under intense criticism for their delayed reaction to the spread of hateful and false content. At the same time, President Trump and others argue that the giant tech platforms censor right-wing opinions, and the new policies put in place by the companies have inflamed those debates. The tension was evident on Tuesday, when YouTube said that a prominent right-wing creator who used racial language and homophobic slurs to harass a journalist in videos on YouTube did not violate its policies. The decision set off a firestorm online, including accusations that YouTube was giving a free pass to some of its popular creators.

Google has filed a legal appeal against the $1.7 billion antitrust penalty the European Commission laid against on its search ad brokering business three months ago. Antitrust officials found that, in contracts with major sites between 2006 and 2016, Google included restrictive contracts that could be seen as it trying to muscle rivals out of the market. The clauses reportedly included exclusivity measures, restrictions on how sites displayed ads from Google's rivals and requirements to give its ads better visibility and more prominent placement.

From a report: Google is appealing both earlier penalties but has also made changes to how it operates Google Shopping and Android in Europe in the meanwhile, to avoid the risk of further punitive penalties. In the case of AdSense, the Commission found that between 2006 and 2016 Google included restrictive clauses in its contracts with major sites that use its ad platform which Commission's current antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager said could only be seen as intending to keep rivals out of the market. [...] Reached for comment, a Commission spokesperson told us: "The Commission will defend its decision in Court."

An anonymous reader writes: Google this week released Chrome 75 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. The release includes hint for low latency canvas contexts, files supported in the Web Share API, numeric separators, and more developer features. [...] Next, files are now supported by the Web Share API. For years, Google has been working to bring native sharing capabilities to the web. The Web Share API allows web apps to invoke the same share dialog box as a native app. The implementation brings a new method and a new shareData property. Numeric literals now allow underscores (_, U+005F) as separators to make them more readable. Underscores can only appear between digits, and consecutive underscores are not allowed. There is also a reader mode that is not enabled by default. From a report: The big feature included with Chrome 75 is the addition of a hidden Reader Mode, similar to the one included with Firefox. This new Reader Mode is not active by default and must be turned on using one of Google Chrome's experimental flags -- which until recently has only been available in the Chrome Canary distribution. To enable and test Chrome's new Reader Mode, users must visit the chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode section, and enable the Reader Mode option, as in the screenshot below. Chrome for Android includes these two features: 1. Generate strong and unique passwords with Chrome's built-in password manager. 2. Quickly look up your passwords by tapping any password field and using the new keyboard option.

McGruber shares a report from American City Business Journals: A retired Georgia Tech professor is suing ride-sharing giant Uber, claiming he invented the technology that "is absolutely core to the way in which Uber operates its business." In a complaint filed May 31 in federal court, Stephen Dickerson charges that Uber is infringing on a patent he won in 2004 for a "communications and computing based urban transit system." "The core of Uber's business and technical platforms for its rideshare, bikeshare, and scooter sharing services practice the transportation system of Professor Dickerson's invention; without that system, Uber literally cannot operate. Throughout its existence, Uber has egregiously infringed [Dickerson's] patent without paying any compensation for such use," Dickerson's lawsuit alleges. Last July, Dickerson sued Lyft in federal court in New York, making the same allegations he is making against Uber. In a court filing, Lyft denies it infringed on Dickerson's technology. The lawsuit is continuing. To clarify, Dickerson's company, RideApp, filed the suit because it "developed in 1999 the idea of bringing cell phones, the global positioning system and digital payments together to get people around congested Atlanta," reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The patent was apparently owned by Georgia Tech, but the college failed to act on it and reassigned the patent back to him in 2018.

Ikea has partnered with American furniture startup Ori Living to develop a new robotic furniture system for people living in small spaces. Called Rognan, the collection includes a large storage unit that can slide across a room via a touchpad to divide a room into two living spaces, a bed, desk, and a couch for people to pull out when needed. It will launch first in Hong Kong and Japan in 2020. The Verge reports: Rognan is built on Ori's robotic platform, and works with Ikea's Platsa line of storage furniture. It's also compatible with Ikea's Tradfri line of cabinet and wardrobe smart lighting. Ikea says the Rognan can save an extra eight square meters (about 86 square feet) of living space. That might not sound like much, but if you live in a tiny home, it could make all the difference. The Verge notes that Ori's line of automated furniture started as a concept from MIT's CityHome concept project in 2014. It launched for real estate developers and Airbnbs for $10,000 as Ori Systems.

"Apple's Dashboard is getting quietly removed from the company's upcoming macOS Catalina update," reports The Verge, citing Appleosophy and MacRumors. "The Dashboard first launched seven years ago with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2005 and saw its final update in 2011 with the launch of OS X 10.7 Lion." From the report: The app first introduced the concept of widgets to Apple's desktop operating system and became a hallmark of OS X design for more than a decade. In particularly, Dashboard became well known for its desktop Sticky Note feature and its overall skeuomorphic approach best emphasized by the clock, stocks, and calculator widgets, a design philosophy that formed the foundation of the first version of iOS that launched a few years after OS X Tiger. It wasn't until iOS 7 in 2013 that Apple would abandon that aesthetic for a flatter, more modern one that eventual carried back over to its desktop approach.

Since 2011, Dashboard has been accessible in various forms, but it's had none of its widget design or UI updated, making it a bit of an anachronism existing behind the scenes on macOS. With OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Apple disabled the application by default, but still allowed users to access it either as a hotkey overlay or its own separate space within Mission Control. Now, in macOS Catalina, it appears Dashboard is going away for good. Appleosophy tried to disable and enable the Dashboard via Terminal only for the system to show it as missing even after a forced reboot. The Launchpad overlay also shows the Dashboard app icon as a question mark, the same as with the broken up and effectively killed off iTunes.

For years, Tesla has hauled in revenue by selling credits to other carmakers that needed to offset sales of polluting vehicles to U.S. consumers. While these transactions have largely been shrouded in secrecy, Bloomberg reports that General Motors and Fiat Chrysler have recently disclosed to the state that they reached agreements to buy federal greenhouse gas credits from Tesla. The filings "represent the first acknowledgments from carmakers that they're turning to Tesla for help to comply with intensifying U.S. environmental regulations," the report says. From the report: The deal with GM will come as a surprise to those who thought years of sales of plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volts and all-electric Chevy Bolts would leave the largest U.S. automaker in the clear with regard to regulatory compliance. But while sales of those models have put GM in a position where it doesn't need extra credits today, demand for its battery-powered vehicles are dwarfed by its gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. And the company wants to bank the credits for future years when emissions rules get tougher -- especially if a Democrat beats President Donald Trump in 2020.

The filings don't give specific terms of Tesla's credit sales to GM or Fiat Chrysler, whose past purchases of credits haven't been disclosed directly but could be inferred from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports. GM's agreement to buy greenhouse gas credits was dated Feb. 25 and reported to Delaware the following day. Pat Morrissey, a GM spokesman, said the company is buying the credits as insurance against "future regulatory uncertainties." Fiat Chrysler disclosed agreements to buy credits from Tesla that were reached in 2016, 2018 and earlier this year, in four separate filings. Eric Mayne, a spokesman for the Italian-American automaker, said U.S. standards are getting stricter at a pace that "far exceeds" the level of consumer demand for electric cars that is required for compliance. "Until demand catches up with regulatory requirements, and there is regulatory relief, we will use credits as appropriate," Mayne said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Mozilla today announced a slew of privacy improvements. The company has turned on Enhanced Tracking Protection, which blocks cookies from third-party trackers in Firefox, by default. Mozilla has also improved its Facebook Container extension, released a Firefox desktop extension for its rebranded Lockwise password keeper, and updated Firefox Monitor with a dashboard for multiple email addresses.

If you download a fresh copy of Firefox today, Enhanced Tracking Protection will be on by default as part of the Standard setting. That means third-party tracking cookies are blocked without users having to change a thing. You will notice Enhanced Tracking Protection working if there is a shield icon in the address bar. If you click on the shield icon and open the Content Blocking section and then Cookies, you'll see a Blocking Tracking Cookies section. There you can see the companies listed as third-party cookies and trackers that Firefox has blocked. You can also turn off blocking for a specific site. The feature focuses on third-party trackers (the ad industry) while allowing first-party cookies (logins, where you last left off, and so on). Mozilla says it is enabling Enhanced Tracking Protection by default because most users don't change their browser settings.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines announced that it will help fund the development of a V-shaped, fuel-efficient airplane design known as the Flying-V. CNN reports: Intended to improve the sustainability of air travel, the Flying-V was conceived by Justus Benad, then a student at the Technical University of Berlin, and developed by researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, also known as TU Delft. Its futuristic design incorporates the passenger cabin, fuel tanks and cargo hold into the wings. It's claimed the plane will use 20% less fuel than the Airbus A350-900 while carrying a similar number of passengers -- the Flying-V will seat 314, while the Airbus A350 seats between 300 and 350. The design also mirrors the A350's 65-meter (213 feet) wingspan, enabling it to use existing airport infrastructure.

TU Delft project leader Roelof Vos said such innovation was needed as a stepping stone to greater efficiency while technology was still being developed to create large-scale electric airplanes. The plane's increased fuel efficiency is largely a result of its aerodynamic design, Vos explained, although its reduced weight also contributes. The researchers hope to fly a scale model this September, Vos said, while a mock-up of the new cabin design will be open to the public at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport in October, as part of KLM's 100th anniversary celebrations. The completed plane is expected to enter service between 2040 and 2050.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple's truly transforming into a privacy-as-a-service company, which shows in the way that it's implementing both the new single sign-on account service, as well as its camera and location services updates in iOS 13. The SSO play is especially clever, because it includes a mechanism that will allow developers to still have the relevant info they need to maintain a direct relationship with their users -- provided users willingly sign-up to have that relationship, but opting in to either or both name and email sharing.

Apple's work with camera providers is also unique -- providing actual on-device analysis of footage captured by third-party partners to deliver things that security device makers have typically offered as a value-add service themselves. That includes apparent identification of visitors to your home, for instance, and sending alerts when it detects people, as well as being able to differentiate that from other kinds of motion. That's going above and beyond simply protecting your data: It's replacing a potential privacy-risk feature with a privacy-minded one, at a service level across an entire category of devices. The new location services feature also makes it possible to provide single-use location permissions to apps, putting all the control with users instead of with service providers.

"Other new features, including HomeKit firewalling of specific services and devices, are similar in tone, and likely indicate what Apple intends to do more of in the future," the report adds. "Combined with its existing efforts, this begins to paint a picture of where Apple plans to play in offering a comprehensive consumer services product that is substantially differentiated from similar offerings by Google and others."

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: A government watchdog says the FBI has access to about 640 million photographs -- including from driver's licenses, passports and mugshots -- that can be searched using facial recognition technology. The figure reflects how the technology is becoming an increasingly powerful law enforcement tool, but is also stirring fears about the potential for authorities to intrude on the lives of Americans. It was reported by the Government Accountability Office at a congressional hearing in which both Democrats and Republicans raised questions about the use of the technology.

The FBI maintains a database known as the Interstate Photo System of mugshots that can help federal, state and local law enforcement officials. It contains about 36 million photographs, according to Gretta Goodwin of the GAO. But taking into account the bureau contracts providing access to driver's licenses in 21 states, and its use of photos and other databases, the FBI has access to about 640 million photographs, Goodwin told lawmakers at the House oversight committee hearing. Kimberly Del Greco, a deputy assistant director at the FBI, said the bureau has strict policies for using facial recognition. She said it is used only when there is an active FBI investigation or an assessment, which can precede a formal investigation.

Apple is taking a new step to combat spam calls in iOS 13. Today, you can already install third-party spam call screeners on your iPhone, but if that's not good enough (or something you don't want to do), iOS 13 will add a new solution this fall. From a report: iOS 13 will be able to automatically silence any calls coming in from an unknown number. Even better, it'll automatically send them to voicemail. The new "silence unknown callers" option can be toggled on or off based on your preference, but I'm thinking most people will enable it right after updating and leave it that way. The feature is explained on this page of what's new in iOS 13. So many of the spam calls we're bombarded with on a daily basis are spoofed to look like a local number. But Apple says that iOS 13 will "use Siri intelligence to allow calls to ring your phone from numbers in Contacts, Mail, and Messages." Any number that can't be found in one of those places will be routed to voicemail.

Microsoft reportedly has shown off a dual-screen version of a Surface device, in what sounds like a smaller version of the "Twin Rivers" concept Intel showed off at Computex in late May. From a report: Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans tell The Verge that the company recently held an all hands event for its devices team, where it showed a sizzle video for new Surface devices and dual-screen prototype hardware. Employees even formed long lines to get a closer glimpse at this new Surface device. Microsoft has been building a new dual-screen device, codenamed Centaurus, for around two years, and it's designed to be the hero device for a wave of new dual-screen tablet / laptop hybrids. Windows Central first reported on the Centaurus codename back in December, and we understand it's more similar to Microsoft's Courier tablet concept than the company's previous Andromeda effort. Microsoft was working on a smaller "pocketable" Surface device codenamed Andromeda, but the company has halted its work in favor of pushing for something larger (Centaurus).

YouTube is taking additional steps to restrict the possibility that children will be targeted by predators on the video platform -- including banning young kids from live-streaming with adult supervision. From a report: The Google-owned video platform, in a blog post Monday, also said it is limiting recommendations of videos that depict "minors in risky situations." The updated policies come after YouTube in February announced that it would disable the ability to leave comments on nearly all videos featuring kids. The announcement also comes in the wake of a New York Times report Monday, citing research that YouTube's recommendation system has been suggesting videos of "prepubescent, partially clothed children" to users who had watched sexually themed content. According to YouTube, it has applied new restrictions to the algorithm-based recommendations system curbing recommendations of videos with minors to "tens of millions of videos." However, it will continue recommending many videos with children because an all-out ban would hurt creators who rely on the recommendation engine to generate views, according to YouTube.

An anonymous reader writes: The Russian government has added dating service Tinder on a government database that legally forces the company to hand over user data and private communications to the country's law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The database is called ORI, or the Register of Information Dissemination Organizations. According to Russian laws 97-FZ and 374-FZ, companies added to this database must hand over data to Russian police or Russian intelligence agencies like the FSB, upon request, with or without a court order, in order to help with investigations into terrorist and national security cases.

Prior to today, the ORI database contained 175 companies, from both Russia and foreign countries. Tinder's addition to the ORI database was announced earlier today in a press release published by Roskomnadzor, the Russian government's telecommunications watchdog, and the agency in charge of maintaining ORI. According to Roskomsvoboda, a Russian non-governmental organization for the protection of digital rights of Internet users, Tinder is the fourth dating service added to ORI, after Mamba, Wamba, and Badoo's dating portal.

Apple announced this week that its new Mac Pro starts at an already pricey $6,000, but the company neglected to mention how much the top-of-the-line model will cost. From a report on The Verge: So we shopped around for equivalent parts to the top-end spec that Apple's promising. As it turns out: $33,720.88 is likely the bare minimum -- and that's before factoring in the four GPUs, which could easily jack that price up to around $45,000. For all that dough, big-budget video editors and other creative types get a lot of firepower: a 28-core Intel Xeon W processor, an almost-impossible-to-comprehend 1.5TB of RAM, 4TB of SSD storage, and four AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo GPUs -- assuming you can afford one. Add in a Pro Display XDR monitor (and a Pro Stand to go with it), and you're looking at a workstation that could clear $50,000. Keep in mind too that these estimates are based on market prices for these (or similar) parts: Apple historically has charged far more for its pre-built configurations than for a computer you'd build on your own.