UK-based chip designer ARM has told staff it must suspend business with Huawei, according to internal documents obtained by the BBC. ARM instructed employees to halt "all active contracts, support entitlements, and any pending engagementsâ with Huawei and its subsidiaries to comply with a recent US trade clampdown. From a report: ARM's designs form the basis of most mobile device processors worldwide. In a company memo, it said its designs contained "US origin technology." As a consequence, it believes it is affected by the Trump administration's ban. One analyst described the move, if it became long-term, as an "insurmountable" blow to Huawei's business. He said it would greatly affect the firm's ability to develop its own chips, many of which are currently built with ARM's underlying technology, for which it pays a licence.

SpaceX is planning to launch test flights of its Starhopper test vehicle to a height of up to 16,400 feet. "The short tests, which will take place out of SpaceX's launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, will send the rocket to just under 1,640 feet (500 meters) high for its low-altitude flights and up to 16,400 feet (5,000 meters) high for its high-altitude flights," reports The Verge, citing a modified application filed with the FCC. The heights match those that the company indicated in a similar filing last year. From the report: The Starhopper is a very basic version of Starship, the massive passenger rocket that SpaceX wants to build to send people to the Moon and Mars. In order to prepare for the first Starship's flight to space, SpaceX has been tinkering with the test Starhopper in Boca Chica. The vehicle boasts a similar structure to the final rocket, though it's slightly smaller in size. Starhopper's most important task is to test out the new, powerful Raptor engines that SpaceX has developed for the future deep-space rocket.

SpaceX fired up a Raptor engine on the bottom of the Starhopper for the first time in April. It only lifted a few inches since the vehicle was tethered to the ground. But now, SpaceX plans to perform what are known as "hop" tests with the vehicle (hence the nickname Starhopper), which will send the rocket to a low altitude above the Earth. The company will then attempt to touch the Starhopper back down on the ground with the vehicle's three landing legs. The idea is to test out the landing capabilities the rocket's going to use to touch down on Earth and other worlds. SpaceX performed similar tests with a vehicle known as Grasshopper back in 2012 and 2013 to try out the landing technique its Falcon 9 rockets now use.

Bill Hanvey, president and CEO of the Auto Care Association, argues that car owners (or lessees) should be the only ones who can control their car's data. "He or she should be aware of the data the car transmits, have control over it and determine who can see it," Hanvey writes. Many have argued this position for the privacy angle, but Harvey takes a different facet of this conversation, pointing out that carmakers control our data to limit where we get repairs or services done. If policymakers don't act on behalf of consumers, Hanvey writes, car and truck owners may be forced to go to select service centers for repairs, circumventing the more than 180,000 independent repair shops across the country that have all the tools needed to work on today's newest cars, but lack access to the necessary diagnostic information needed to complete the job. An anonymous reader shares the report: Because of the increasing complexity of cars and the Internet of Things, data is critical to repair and service. When carmakers control the data, they can choose which service centers receive our information. They're more likely to share our data exclusively with their branded dealerships than with independent repair shops, which could have the edge in price and convenience. However, independent repair shops currently make 70 percent of outside warranty repairs throughout the country. There are more than 180,000 independent repair shops across the country; most have all the tools needed to work on today's connected and complex cars, and most of today's highly trained service technicians can perform anything from basic tuneups to sophisticated electronic diagnostics. But without access to car data, they're working blindfolded, unable to see the diagnostic information they need. The solution is simple. The only person who should control car data is the car owner (or lessee). He or she should be aware of the data the car transmits, have control over it and determine who can see it.

Digitization of the auto industry is, ultimately, a good thing. Today's connected cars are paving the way for autonomous vehicles and vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and eventually vehicle-to-infrastructure communications making our roads safer. But unlike Alexa and Nest, consumers are unaware of the degree to which their own car collects and processes data. It's clear, because of its value -- as high as $750 billion by 2030 -- carmakers have no incentive to release control of the data collected from our vehicles. Policymakers, however, have the opportunity to give drivers control -- not just so that they can keep their data private but also so that they can share it with the people they want to see it. This will let car owners maintain what they've had for a century: the right to decide who fixes their car.

Netflix and other online video services have expanded their customer-satisfaction lead over cable and satellite TV, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) found in its annual telecommunications report released today. Ars Technica reports: Streaming-video services averaged a score of 76 on the ACSI's 100-point scale, up from 75 last year. Meanwhile, the traditional subscription-TV industry's score remained unchanged at 62. "For the past six years, customer satisfaction with subscription TV has languished in the mid-to-low 60s, not recovering enough to effectively compete with streaming services," the ACSI report said. "In 2018, subscription sales declined 3 percent to $103.4 billion. Customer service remains poor, and cord cutting is accelerating. As video-streaming services gain traction, a growing number of households may never subscribe to pay TV in the first place."

Pay-TV and broadband -- two services that are generally offered in bundles by the same companies -- each posted an industry average of 62, which is again in "last place among all [46] industries tracked by the ACSI," the report said. Pay-TV's satisfaction score peaked at 68 in 2013 and has dropped steadily since. Streaming services rated significantly higher than cable and satellite in many categories, including the ease of understanding bills, mobile app quality and reliability, and call-center satisfaction. Comcast remained near the bottom of pay-TV rankings with a score of 57, while AT&T's U-verse led the ranking despite dropping from 70 to 69. Coincidentally, AT&T's streaming service -- DirecTV Now -- also fell from 70 to 69. But while the AT&T U-verse TV score of 69 was good enough to lead all cable and satellite TV providers, the DirecTV Now score of 69 was in second-to-last place among streaming providers. Netflix took the top spot in streaming satisfaction by raising its score from 78 to 79.

Chevrolet is introducing a feature, specifically for teen drivers, that will temporarily block the auto from shifting into gear if their seat belt isn't buckled. A message will alert the driver to buckle up in order to shift into gear. After 20 seconds, the vehicle will operate normally. NPR reports: The feature, which Chevrolet says is an industry first, will come standard in the 2020 models of the Traverse SUV, Malibu sedan and Colorado pickup truck. It will be part of the "Teen Driver" package, which can also be used to set speed alerts and a maximum speed, among other controls, and give parents "report cards" tracking a teen's driving behavior. Chevrolet explains how it works: "To use Teen Driver mode, a parent can enable the feature by creating a PIN in the Settings menu that allows them to register their teen's key fob. The Teen Driver settings are turned on only when a registered key fob is used to start the vehicle."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice: A collection of unelected lawyers [from the American Law Institute] this week is quietly pushing a new proposal that could dramatically erode your legal rights, leaving you at the mercy of giant corporations eager to protect themselves from accountability. Occasionally, this coalition (including all the members of the Supreme Court) meets to create "restatements," effectively an abridged synopsis or reference guide for the latest established precedents and legal trends. While restatements themselves aren't legally binding, they're very influential and often help shape judicial opinions. Seven years ago, the ALI began pondering a new restatement governing consumer contracts -- and your legal rights as a consumer. Today, the ALI meets to vote on the approval of this latest restatement. But a long line of legal experts have been blasting the group's updated language governing consumer contracts.

Specifically, they noted that the updated draft language proclaims that consumers would not need to read a contract to be bound by its terms. The draft states as long as consumers received "reasonable notice" and had "reasonable opportunity to review" it, the contract would be legally binding. Under this model, consumers wouldn't need to even understand the contract to be bound by it, a problem given data suggests such agreements are often incomprehensible to the average user. The language was problematic enough to result in a letter this week by 23 state attorneys general, criticizing the ALI's proposal as a major threat to consumer rights. "To call boilerplate language that consumers never read (or if they did read, could not understand) a 'contract' simply has the effect of locking consumers in to terms that are likely to be stacked against them," John Bergmayer, Senior Counsel at consumer group Public Knowledge, said in an email.

Traditionally, "contracts" are legal documents that are mutually agreed to after negotiation between two parties. Functionally, this isn't how Terms of Service, which few people read and few people can be expected to read and understand, work in the real world. "For some reason, everything you learn about contracts in the first year of law school gets tossed out the window when it comes to large companies unilaterally setting terms for consumers," Bergmayer added.

Comcast is reportedly working on a device designed to closely monitor a user's health. "The device will monitor people's basic health metrics using ambient sensors, with a focus on whether someone is making frequent trips to the bathroom or spending more time than usual in bed," reports CNBC. "Comcast is also building tools for detecting falls, which are common and potentially fatal for seniors." The Verge reports: Many products on the market today already have the motion sensors, cameras, and other hardware that allow for what Comcast seems to be envisioning -- but not even Amazon or Google have directly sought to keep such a close eye on their customers' personal health with their respective Echo and Home devices. Comcast itself already offers home security services, and the company's much-touted X1 voice remote for its Xfinity cable platform has helped Comcast make advancements in recognizing and processing voice commands.

According to CNBC, Comcast's device won't offer functionality like controlling smart home devices, nor will it have the ability to search for answers to a person's questions on the internet. But it will reportedly "have a personality like Alexa" and be able to place calls to emergency services. In an email to The Verge, a Comcast spokesperson said the company's upcoming device "is NOT a smart speaker" and "is purpose-built to be a sensor that detects motion." It's said that Comcast aims to offer the device and a companion health tracking service to "at-risk people, including seniors and people with disabilities." The company is also in discussions with hospitals about potentially "using the device to ensure that patients don't end up back in the hospital after they've been discharged."

In a blog post, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Julie Brill says the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been very effective in changing the way that tech companies handle personal data, and feels the U.S. should enact something similar at the federal level. TechSpot reports: "[Companies] have adapted, putting new systems and processes in place to ensure that individuals understand what data is collected about them and can correct it if it is inaccurate and delete it or move it somewhere else if they choose," she wrote. Brill points out that the GDPR has inspired other countries to adopt similar regulations. She also pats her company on the back for being "the first company to provide the data control rights at the heart of GDPR to our customers around the globe, not just in Europe."

However, such self-regulation is not good enough. While some states such as California and Illinois have strong data protection laws in place, Brill feels the US needs something similar to the GDPR at the federal level. "No matter how much work companies like Microsoft do to help organizations secure sensitive data and empower individuals to manage their own data, preserving a strong right to privacy will always fundamentally be a matter of law that falls to governments," Brill states. "Despite the high level of interest in exercising control over personal data from U.S. consumers, the United States has yet to join the EU and other nations around the world in passing national legislation that accounts for how people use technology in their lives today." Brill suggests the federal government should enact regulation that models the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which goes into effect next year.

"Brill says that consumers have the right to control their information and that companies need to be held to a higher degree of accountability and transparency with how they collect and use customer data," reports TechSpot. "The new laws also need to have teeth."

It's technically "late May." So it's not too surprising that Microsoft's promised late May rollout of the Windows 10 May 2019 Update (also known as 1903) is kicking off today, May 21. From a report: As of today, mainstream consumer and business users who want to manually download and install the May feature update may do so. The May 2019 Update/1903 is available on WSUS, Windows Update for Business as of today. Users who aren't already on Windows 10 1809 (either because they weren't "offered" it or didn't proactively grab it) will be able to just skip over 1809 and go straight to 1903, since Windows 10 feature updates are cumulative.

There are a quite a number of new features in the May 2019 Update/1903. Microsoft is providing users -- including Home users -- with more control over how and when Windows 10 feature updates will install with this release. Microsoft is adding the ability for Home users to pause updates for up to 35 days.

The U.S. Postal Service today started a two-week test transporting mail across three Southwestern states using self-driving trucks, a step forward in the effort to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology for hauling freight. From a report: San Diego-based startup TuSimple said its self-driving trucks will begin hauling mail between USPS facilities in Phoenix and Dallas to see how the nascent technology might improve delivery times and costs. A safety driver will sit behind the wheel to intervene if necessary and an engineer will ride in the passenger seat. If successful, it would mark an achievement for the autonomous driving industry and a possible solution to the driver shortage and regulatory constraints faced by freight haulers across the country. The pilot program involves five round trips, each totaling more than 2,100 miles (3,380 km) or around 45 hours of driving. It is unclear whether self-driving mail delivery will continue after the two-week pilot.

Does the overcrowded and cut-throat music streaming business have room for an additional player? The world's most valuable startup certainly thinks so. From a report: Chinese conglomerate ByteDance, valued at more than $75 billion, is working on a music streaming service, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The company, which operates popular app TikTok, has held discussions with music labels in recent months to launch the app as soon as the end of this quarter, one of the sources said. The app will offer both a premium and an ad-supported free tier, one of the sources said. Bloomberg, which first wrote about the premium app, reported that ByteDance is targeting emerging markets with its new music app. Further reading: Chinese Video Sensation TikTok Surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube in Downloads in October 2018.

Mozilla today launched Firefox 67 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. From a report: The 10th release since Mozilla's big Firefox Quantum launch in November 2017 doubles down on performance and privacy. Firefox 67 includes deprioritizing least commonly used features, suspending unused tabs, faster startup, blocking of cryptomining and fingerprinting, Private Browsing improvements, voice input in the Android search widget, and more. [...] Firefox 67 is better at performing tasks at the optimal time, resulting in faster "painting" of the page. Specifically, the browser deprioritizes least commonly used features and delays set Timeout to prioritize scripts for things you need. Mozilla says Instagram, Amazon, and Google searches now execute between 40% and 80% faster. Firefox also now scans for alternative style sheets after page load and doesn't load the auto-fill module unless there is a form to complete. Next, Firefox 67 detects if your computer's memory is running low (under 400MB) and suspends unused tabs. If you do click on a tab that you haven't used or looked at in a while, it will reload where you left off. Finally, Firefox 67 promises faster startup for users that customized their browser with an add-on.

Tim Cook told graduates at Tulane University that his "generation has failed" them by fighting more than making change on issues including immigration, criminal justice and, pointedly, climate change. From a report: "We've been too focused on the fight and not enough on the progress," the Apple chief executive said Saturday at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans. "You don't need to look far to find an example of that failure." He was referring to the Superdome, which sheltered thousands from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He then criticized, without naming, politicians who raise doubts about climate change or its cause, a group that includes President Donald Trump.

"I don't think we can talk about who we are as a people and what we owe to one another without talking about climate change," he said. Cook, 58, said the solution to climate change won't be found based on whose side wins or loses an election. "It's about who has won life's lottery and has the luxury of ignoring this issue and who stands to lose everything," he said. "I challenge you to look for those who have the most to lose and find the real, true empathy that comes from something shared," Cook said. "When you do that, the political noise dies down."

As automation changes the way factories operate, some U.S. companies are training workers in programming and robotics, letting machinists get a taste of coding. From a report: Competition from China was among the reasons Drew Greenblatt, chief executive of manufacturing firm Marlin Steel Wire Products, purchased $2 million worth of robots in the past 15 months. The Baltimore-based maker of wire baskets is training employees on operating the robots and using laser-cutting software. The company's machinists develop code so robots can make parts to specifications, replacing several workers who physically created parts. Other employees use collaborative software to interact with customers on real-time design changes, helping the company manufacture higher-quality steel products, charge more for them and create unique intellectual property, he said. Marlin Steel is on track to generate $8 million in revenue this year, up from about $5 million the previous year.

[...] Radwell International, a manufacturing and repair firm based in Willingboro, N.J., identified workers with an aptitude for learning and decent knowledge of processes and systems and trained them in skills such as programming on Visual Basic to build software tools to handle tasks like purchasing. Radwell IT staff who learned Python, a programming language used widely in artificial intelligence and data science, built an AI system to sort incoming parts. The system helps recognize parts based on rough contours, differentiating a circuit breaker from a motor. The staff is now developing a machine-vision-based AI system to recognize parts. Employees are also being trained on manufacturing techniques like 3-D printing to make replacement parts for customers.

Huawei said it's working on its own operating system for its mobile handsets and will consider rivals to Google's Android, after the U.S. blacklisted the company, threatening its partnerships with chip, component and software suppliers. From a report: The Chinese telecom equipment giant said Tuesday it was in talks with the Alphabet about how to proceed after Google confirmed it would cut access to some of Huawei's operating system features for the company's new devices in response to the announcement. Should Google's system no longer be available, "then the alternative option will naturally come out -- either from Huawei or someone else," Abraham Liu, Huawei's representative to the European Union institutions, said at an event in Brussels on Tuesday. Liu said Huawei had been working on its own operating system but that he didn't have the details about when this would be ready. Huawei would do everything in its power to mitigate the impact of the U.S. decisions, Liu said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Daily Dot: A consumer advocacy group has found that not all Facebook users have been given the ability to opt out of the company's facial recognition. According to Consumer Reports, despite Facebook rolling out a new privacy setting last year allowing users to choose whether the company can use such technology to detect them in photos, some users say they have never been granted the option. After analyzing the accounts of 31 users throughout the U.S., Consumer Reports discovered that 8 accounts, or roughly 25 percent, did not have the face recognition setting. Consumer Reports set up its own test accounts to determine whether the privacy setting would be available but found that around half a dozen did not have the ability to disable face recognition.

Google AI researchers working with Northwestern Medicine created an AI model capable of detecting lung cancer from screening tests better than human radiologists with an average of eight years experience. VentureBeat reports: When analyzing a single CT scan, the model detected cancer 5% more often on average than a group of six human experts and was 11% more likely to reduce false positives. Humans and AI achieved similar results when radiologists were able to view prior CT scans. When it came to predicting the risk of cancer two years after a screening, the model was able to find cancer 9.5% more often compared to estimated radiologist performance laid out in the National Lung Screening Test (NLST) study.

Detailed in research published today in Nature Medicine, the end-to-end deep learning model was used to predict whether a patient has lung cancer, generating a patient lung cancer malignancy risk score and identifying the location of the malignant tissue in the lungs. The model will be made available through the Google Cloud Healthcare API as Google continues trials and additional tests with partner organizations. The model was trained using more than 42,000 chest CT screening images taken from nearly 15,000 patients, 578 of whom developed cancer within a year, during a low-dose computed tomography LDCT study the National Institutes of Health (NIH) conducted in 2002. Results were then validated with data sets from Northwestern Medicine.

Phoronix has conducted a series of tests to show just how much the Spectre and Meltdown patches have impacted the raw performance of Intel and AMD CPUs. While the patches have resulted in performance decreases across the board, ranging from virtually nothing to significant depending on the application, it appears that Intel received the short end of the stick as its CPUs have been hit five times harder than AMD, according to ExtremeTech. From the report: The collective impact of enabling all patches is not a positive for Intel. While the impacts vary tremendously from virtually nothing to significant on an application-by-application level, the collective whack is about 15-16 percent on all Intel CPUs without Hyper-Threading disabled. Disabling increases the overall performance impact to 20 percent (for the 7980XE), 24.8 percent (8700K) and 20.5 percent (6800K).

The AMD CPUs are not tested with HT disabled, because disabling SMT isn't a required fix for the situation on AMD chips, but the cumulative impact of the decline is much smaller. AMD loses ~3 percent with all fixes enabled. The impact of these changes is enough to change the relative performance weighting between the tested solutions. With no fixes applied, across its entire test suite, the CPU performance ranking is (from fastest to slowest): 7980XE (288), 8700K (271), 2990WX (245), 2700X (219), 6800K. (200). With the full suite of mitigations enabled, the CPU performance ranking is (from fastest to slowest): 2990WX (238), 7980XE (231), 2700X (213), 8700K (204), 6800K (159). In closing, ExtremeTech writes: "AMD, in other words, now leads the aggregate performance metrics, moving from 3rd and 4th to 1st and 3rd. This isn't the same as winning every test, and since the degree to which each test responds to these changes varies, you can't claim that the 2990WX is now across-the-board faster than the 7980XE in the Phoronix benchmark suite. It isn't. But the cumulative impact of these patches could result in more tests where Intel and AMD switch rankings as a result of performance impacts that only hit one vendor."

united_notions writes: Last year, The Guardian ran an opinion article arguing that everyone should be allocated "an air mile allowance -- say enough for one long-haul return flight a year, or three short-haul flights. [...] If you don't want to use your allowance, you could sell it off in a government-regulated online marketplace. If you're keen to do a holiday a month, you'll have to buy your allowance from someone else." But despite continuing concerns over the environmental harm caused by air travel, this idea has not found much subsequent support. Instead, serious air time is given to meager plans like weighing passengers. Do Slashdotters think rationing would work? Could serious coordinated inter-governmental restrictions on air travel change our behavior? Might it just spur corporations into finishing up carbon-neutral passenger planes?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A new network of 3D-printed gun advocates is growing in America -- and this time things are different. Unlike previous attempts to popularize 3D-printed guns, this operation is entirely decentralized. There's no headquarters, no trademarks, and no real leader. The people behind it reckon that this means they can't be stopped by governments. Known only by his online moniker, Ivan the Troll is the de facto spokesman of an underground wave of 3D-printing gunsmiths. Ivan says he knows of at least 100 people who are actively developing 3D-printed gun technology, and he claims there are thousands taking part in the network. This loose-knit community spans across the whole world.

They communicate across several digital platforms, including Signal, Twitter, IRC, and Discord. They critique each other's work, exchange 3D gun CAD files, offer advice, talk theory, and collaborate on future blueprints. These 3D-printed gun enthusiasts -- who share similar ideas and political viewpoints on gun control -- mostly found each other online via gun control subreddits and forums. Ivan is just one small part of this network. He says he is from Illinois, and is of "college age," but otherwise he remains mostly anonymous, to lie low. At the same time though, he's launched bombastic PR videos demonstrating the new 3D-printed gun parts he's created in his garage, including a Glock 17 handgun frame. Ivan's group says the legal challenges around Defence Distributed and the company's founder Cody Wilson are irrelevant. According to the report, the group is uploading their files individually on services such as Spee.ch, a media-hosting site underpinned by the LBRY blockchain, "and they aren't waiting for anyone to give them permission." It adds: "They've made their own 3D-printed gun designs, modified old ones, and are keeping all the Defence Distributed ones available for free too."