An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, Japanese railway company JR East showed off its new Alfa-X, a high-speed bullet train that is designed to achieve a top speed of 400kph, or 249mph, which would make it the fastest commercial train in the world. In day-to-day operations, the train would shuttle passengers at 360kph, or roughly 224mph. On Friday, JR East will begin testing the Alfa-X, without passengers, on its railways. According to Bloomberg, the 10-car train will make the trip "between the cities of Aomori and Sendai at night" for the next three years during a testing phase. JR East hopes to use the Alfa-X commercially by 2030. Japan News says the line will eventually be extended to Sapporo. Bloomberg's report notes that there's a magnetically-levitated train in the works that may win the top-speed crown. It's been built between Tokyo and Nagoya and takes advantage of a tunnel-heavy route to achieve a top speed of 505kph (314mph). If all things go according to plan, it'll open in 2027.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Facebook is unwittingly auto-generating content for terror-linked groups that its artificial intelligence systems do not recognize as extremist, according to a complaint made public on Thursday. Researchers at the National Whistleblowers Center found that the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda were "openly" active on the social network and that Facebook was automatically creating "celebration" and "memories" videos for extremist pages that had amassed sufficient views or "likes." The Whistleblower's Center said it filed a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on behalf of a source that preferred to remain anonymous.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: At the I/O 2019 developer conference earlier this week, Google launched a new technology called Portals that aims to provide a new way of loading and navigating through web pages. According to Google, Portals will work with the help of a new HTML tag named . This tag works similarly to classic tags, allowing web developers to embed remote content in their pages. Google says portals allow users to navigate inside the content they are embedding --something that iframes do not allow for security reasons. Furthermore, portals can also overwrite the main URL address bar, meaning they are useful as a navigation system, and more than embedding content -- the most common way in which iframes are used today.

For example, engineers hope that when a user is navigating a news site, when they reach the bottom of a story, related links for other stories are embedded as portals, which the user can click and seamlessly transition to a new page. The advantage over using Portals over classic links is that the content inside portals can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to expand into a new page without having the user wait for it to load. In a demo, you can see that Portals allow users to watch/listen to embedded content and then transition seamlessly to its origin page, where they could leave comments or open other media.

The loss of the U.K.'s financial power and expertise as a result of Brexit is likely to exacerbate the European Union's lag in the global technological arms race, according to Anders Borg, a former Swedish finance minister and senior adviser at artificial intelligence company Ipsoft. From a report: "Brexit entails several layers of problems," Borg said in an interview in Stockholm. "Technological development is being driven by the financial sector and, to a large extent, Europe's financial sector is London. So it's not the British financial system that is now being put on hold, it's Europe's." Britain is home to a third of artificial-intelligence startups in Europe, according to a report by MMC Ventures in association with Barclays, which dubs the country "the powerhouse" of European AI. Europe is already slipping behind China and the U.S., which invest much more in AI systems, Borg said. Another key issue involves 5G, which provides the additional bandwidth needed to carry the vast amounts of data necessary for AI development. The networks will form the "backbone" of the new digital economy, Borg said.

According to the findings of Pen Test Partners, a U.K.-based cybersecurity firm, the "unhackable" eyeDisk, an allegedly secure USB flash drive that uses iris recognition to unlock and decrypt the device, is hackable. From a report: In its Kickstarter campaign last year, eyeDisk raised more than $21,000; it began shipping devices in March. There's just one problem: it's anything but "unhackable." Pen Test Partners researcher David Lodge found the device's backup password -- to access data in the event of device failure or a sudden eye-gouging accident -- could be easily obtained using a software tool able to sniff USB device traffic.

Google says it will soon introduce a "dedicated placement" in Google Search for AMP Stories in specific categories, like travel, along with components that let AMP Story creators embed interactive content. From a report: The dedicated placement -- a carousel of visual covers from Stories -- will appear beneath the Search bar on mobile for queries like "Things to do in Tokyo" and "The top 10 places to go in Tokyo." Tapping on any of the covers will launch the corresponding AMP Story, which you'll be able to navigate using swipe gestures and scroll gestures. Swiping far enough to the left will open the next Story on the list. The new discoverability feature will roll out in the coming months on Search. AMP Story categories like gaming, fashion, recipes, movies, and TV shows will follow afterward, Google says.

The physical key has prevailed over the smart lock for a group of tenants with privacy concerns. From a report: In a settlement released Tuesday, a judge ordered landlords of an apartment building in New York to provide physical keys to any tenants who don't want to use the Latch smart locks installed on the building last September. The settlement is a first, as there's no legal precedent or legislation deciding how landlords can use smart home technology. Since the technology is relatively new, lawmakers haven't had time to catch up with smart home devices, and this case in New York is one of the few legal challenges to appear in court. It won't set a legal precedent because it's a settlement, but it represents a win for tenants who had issues with smart locks and landlords installing them against their will.

After almost a decade of disruption, Uber is finally a public company. The company is the highest valued tech IPO since Facebook and Alibaba, and it's part of a wave of Silicon Valley "unicorns" to go public this year, including Airbnb, Zoom, and Slack. While today's debut represents a new chapter for the money-losing, scandal-prone Uber, it also likely signals the end of an era of cheap rides for millions of drivers and riders across the globe.

In the wake of the mass disablement of Mozilla Firefox's add-on ecosystem last weekend, Mozilla has committed to improving its asset tracking and developing a mechanism that can quickly push updates to users when needed. From a report: Due to an intermediate certificate expiring on May 4 at 1AM UTC, users found their browser add-ons were switched off and could not be re-enabled. Thanks to timezones and the rotation of the planet, users on the western side of the Pacific were the first hit. Writing in a blog post, Firefox CTO Eric Rescorla detailed some initial thoughts and announced a formal post-mortem would be published next week. "First, we should have a much better way of tracking the status of everything in Firefox that is a potential time bomb and making sure that we don't find ourselves in a situation where one goes off unexpectedly. We're still working out the details here, but at minimum we need to inventory everything of this nature," Rescorla wrote. "Second, we need a mechanism to be able to quickly push updates to our users even when -- especially when -- everything else is down.

Ivan Mehta, writing for The Next Web: Last year, Netflix reportedly published a whopping 1,500 hours of original content. And with the launch of streaming services from Apple and Disney, the on-demand video market is getting very competitive. Media houses and companies are already looking towards the next solution for producing content to keep up with the trend: AI avatars. Here's one sample: Last year in November, Chinese state-run media company Xinhua debuted an AI anchor that looked exactly like its real-life counterpart Zhang Zhao. The company said that the avatar speaks both in Mandarin and English. Xinhua said at that time that AI anchors are now officially a part of their team; aiming to provide "authoritative, timely and accurate news" round the clock, through its apps and social channels like WeChat. A report from Tencent news published in February stated that the first batch of AI Anchors has produced more than 3,400 news reports, with a cumulative time of more than 10,000 minutes. It even debuted a female AI anchor named Xin Xiaomeng in February. These numbers indicate that at this rate, AI anchors can outwork their human counterparts very soon.

More than 95 percent of the smartphones that ship in India run Android operating system, according to industry estimates. Now the Indian antitrust watchdog is convinced that the nation should investigate if Google is abusing the dominant position of its mobile operating system to hurt local rivals. From a report: The Competition Commission of India (CCI), the local antimonopoly regulator, began looking at Google's Android business in India last year after it received a complaint from unspecified people. In mid-April, the regulator decided that there was merit in the accusations and ordered its investigation unit to conduct a full-investigation, according to a report by Reuters, which cites unnamed sources. In a statement to TechCrunch, a Google spokesperson said that it looks forward to working with the CCI on the probe. "Android has enabled millions of Indians to connect to the internet by making mobile devices more affordable. We look forward to working with the Competition Commission of India to demonstrate how Android has led to more competition and innovation, not less."

Zorro shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: The U.S. government has developed a specially designed, secret missile for pinpoint airstrikes that kill terrorist leaders with no explosion (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), drastically reducing damage and minimizing the chances of civilian casualties. Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have used the weapon while closely guarding its existence. A modified version of the well-known Hellfire missile, the weapon carries an inert warhead. Instead of exploding, it is designed to plunge more than 100 pounds of metal through the tops of cars and buildings to kill its target without harming individuals and property close by.

To the targeted person, it is as if a speeding anvil fell from the sky, the officials said. But this variant of the Hellfire missile, designated as the R9X, also comes equipped with a different kind of payload: a halo of six long blades that are stowed inside and then deploy through the skin of the missile seconds before impact, shredding anything in its tracks. The R9X is known colloquially to the small community of individuals who are familiar with its use as "the flying Ginsu," for the blades that can cut through buildings or car roofs and kill the target. The nickname is a reference to the popular knives sold on TV infomercials in the late 1970s and early 1980s that showed them cutting through both tree branches and tomatoes. The weapon has also been referred to as the Ninja bomb.

the_newsbeagle writes: While the Google spinoff Wing is just launching its first commercial service in Australia (scones and coffee are on the menu) and getting FAA clearance to operate in the United States, a company called Zipline is already offering a nationwide service in Rwanda. Zipline currently uses its fixed-wing drones to deliver blood products to hospitals across the country, and will soon begin delivering other medical supplies as well.

Medical supplies seem like they could be a killer app for delivery drones, since they're often lightweight and urgently needed. But Zipline hasn't yet proven that its business model is sustainable. So two technology reporters from IEEE Spectrum traveled to Rwanda to embed themselves in a Zipline operations center, and produced an in-depth report and a 360 video about the company's logistics and technology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: Violent crime in the U.S. is at its lowest rate in decades. But you wouldn't know that from a crop of increasingly popular social media apps that are forming around crime. Apps like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Ring's Neighbors -- all of which allow users to view local crime in real time and discuss it with people nearby -- are some of the most downloaded social and news apps in the U.S., according to rankings from the App Store and Google Play.

Nextdoor was the ninth most-downloaded lifestyle app in the U.S. on iPhones at the end of April, according to App Annie, a mobile data and analytics provider; that's up from No. 27 a year ago in the social networking category. (Nextdoor changed its app category from social to lifestyle on April 30; on April 29 it was ranked 14th in social, according to App Annie.) Amazon Ring's Neighbors is the 36th most-downloaded social app. When it launched last year, it was 115th. Citizen, which considers itself a news app, was the seventh most-downloaded news app on iOS at the end of April, up from ninth last year and 29th in 2017. These apps have become popular because of -- and have aggravated -- the false sense that danger is on the rise. Americans seem to think crime is getting worse, according to data from both Gallup and Pew Research Center. In fact, crime has fallen steeply in the last 25 years according to both the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. David Ewoldsen, professor of media and information at Michigan State University, says these apps foment fear around crime, which feeds into existing biases and racism and largely reinforces stereotypes around skin color. As Steven Renderos, senior campaigns director at the Center for Media Justice, put it, "These apps are not the definitive guides to crime in a neighborhood -- it is merely a reflection of people's own bias, which criminalizes people of color, the unhoused, and other marginalized communities."

A recent Motherboard article found that the majority of people posted as "suspicious" on Neighbors in a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood were people of color.

"San Francisco voters this November will be asked to approve a corporate tax increase on stock-based compensation from 0.38% to 1.5%," reports Axios. Since the rate hike would be retroactive to May 7, it would apply to Uber's recent $8 billion IPO. From a report: San Francisco Board of Supervisor Gordon Mar said six supervisors are supporting the ordinance -- the minimum number needed to get the measure on the Nov. 5 ballot. The full board is expected to vote on the plan within the next two months. At least two-thirds of voters would need to support the proposal for it to pass. Mar's proposal calls for raising the stock-based compensation tax from 0.38 percent to 1.5 percent. That increase would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the city. The tax is levied on San Francisco companies when employees who receive stock as part of their compensation decide to cash in those shares on the public markets or on secondary markets.

But Mar's proposed ordinance concerns the Bay Area Council, which advocates for businesses. "There's no version of this poorly conceived scheme that would get our support," said Rufus Jeffris, a spokesman for the Bay Area Council. "And if the BOS approves putting this misguided proposal on the ballot, we believe voters will communicate the same message." The Bay Area Council is concerned that the higher tax would discourage investment, innovation and jobs in the region.

At Google's I/O developer conference this past week, Android and Chrome chief Hiroshi Lockheimer offered some rare insight into Fuchsia, albeit at a very high level, in front of public audiences. The Verge reports: What we do know about Fuchsia is that it's an open source project, similar to AOSP, but could run all manner of devices, from smart home gadgets to laptops to phones. It's also known to be built on an all-new, Google-built kernel called "zircon," formerly known as "magenta," and not the Linux kernel that forms the foundation of Android and Chrome OS.

"We're looking at what a new take on an operating system could be like. And so I know out there people are getting pretty excited saying, 'Oh this is the new Android,' or, 'This is the new Chrome OS,'" Lockheimer said. "Fuchsia is really not about that. Fuchsia is about just pushing the state of the art in terms of operating systems and things that we learn from Fuchsia we can incorporate into other products." He says the point of the experimental OS is to also experiment with different form factors, a hint toward the possibility that Fuchsia is designed to run on smart home devices, wearables, or possibly even augmented or virtual reality devices. "You know Android works really well on phones and and you know in the context of Chrome OS as a runtime for apps there. But Fuchsia may be optimized for certain other form factors as well. So we're experimenting." Lockheimer provided some additional details at a separate Android fireside chat held at Google I/O today. "It's not just phones and PCs. In the world of [the Internet of Things], there are increasing number of devices that require operating systems and new runtimes and so on. I think there's a lot of room for multiple operating systems with different strengths and specializations. Fuchsia is one of those things and so, stay tuned," he told the audience.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via The Verge: Google Duplex was arguably one of Google's biggest announcements in 2018, but the AI faded into the background this week at the same I/O developer conference that introduced it just one year ago. Rather than an update on how the AI has been improved since its official release, Google CEO Sundar Pichai simply noted that the technology has gotten "great feedback," then he quickly moved on to announce that Duplex would be coming to the web -- no human impersonation necessary. Instead of the stunning voice-calling AI that garnered a mix of excitement and ethical criticism, Duplex is now also a fancy autofill tool that helps move you through a webpage to quickly reserve movie tickets and car rentals.

But Google's machines don't seem to be taking over yet. As the U.S. continues to deal with an onslaught of spammy robocalls, it seems that many restaurant employees are inadvertently shielding themselves from Duplex by ignoring incoming calls that do not display a person's name. Mark Seaman, a manager at two-year-old restaurant Queens Bully, in Forest Hills, New York, says he often tries to avoid calls from businesses that look like they could be pitching the restaurant on a product or service. "Most of our growth comes from our own social media efforts and the parties we throw," Seaman tells me. "We get calls all the time from people trying to sell us something [we don't need]." Although Google does not personally call businesses to convince them to buy ads, it stands to reason why many restaurant employees would shy away from answering calls that list the company in its caller ID in the first place. [...] One year later, Duplex is still limited and, at least for now, has minimal impact on service workers aside from occasionally freaking them out, but there is perhaps an unintended byproduct of AI replacing humans: politeness.

MikeChino writes: Yves Behar, ICON, and New Story just unveiled plans to build the world's first 3D-printed community this summer in Latin America. The project will provide over 50 homes for impoverished families who typically live on less than $200 per month. ICON has developed a portable printer that will print the walls of each home in just 24 hours with nearly zero waste. "Each site-specific house will feature an outdoor kitchen and an expanded outdoor area for raising chickens and crops," reports Dwell. "The open-plan interior living areas are optimized for natural ventilation and flexibility. The 3D printer will allow for built-in elements ranging from countertops in the kitchen and bathroom to seating and shelving."

ICON has made a video about the plans with mockups of what the homes will look like.

In a rare article detailing insights about its staff's efforts in securing its own internal infrastructure, Microsoft has shared some very insightful advice on how companies could reduce the risk of having a security breach. From a report: The central piece of this article is Microsoft's recommendation in regards to how companies should deal with administrator accounts. Per Microsoft's Security Team, employees with administrative access should be using a separate device, dedicated only for administrative operations. This device should always be kept up to date with all the most recent software and operating system patches, Microsoft said. "Provide zero rights by default to administration accounts," the Microsoft Security Team also recommended. "Require that they request just-in-time (JIT) privileges that gives them access for a finite amount of time and logs it in a system." Furthermore, the OS vendor also recommends that administrator accounts should be created on a separate user namespace/forest that cannot access the internet, and should be different from the employee's normal work identity.

In a report published Thursday, researchers at the threat-research company Advanced Intelligence (AdvIntel) revealed that a collective of Russian and English-speaking hackers are actively marketing the spoils of data breaches at three US-based antivirus software vendors. From a report: The collective, calling itself "Fxmsp," is selling both source code and network access to the companies for $300,000 and is providing samples that show strong evidence of the validity of its claims. Yelisey Boguslavskiy, director of research at AdvIntel, told Ars that his company notified "the potential victim entities" of the breach through partner organizations; it also provided the details to US law enforcement. In March, Fxmsp offered the data "through a private conversation," Boguslavskiy said. "However, they claimed that their proxy sellers will announce the sale on forums."