An anonymous reader shares a report: "Make memories": That's the slogan on the website for the photo storage app Ever, accompanied by a cursive logo and an example album titled "Weekend with Grandpa." Everything about Ever's branding is warm and fuzzy, about sharing your "best moments" while freeing up space on your phone. What isn't obvious on Ever's website or app -- except for a brief reference that was added to the privacy policy after NBC News reached out to the company in April -- is that the photos people share are used to train the company's facial recognition system, and that Ever then offers to sell that technology to private companies, law enforcement and the military. In other words, what began in 2013 as another cloud storage app has pivoted toward a far more lucrative business known as Ever AI -- without telling the app's millions of users.

The FCC has voted unanimously to deny China Mobile's application to provide telecommunications services in the U.S. due to concerns about national security and law enforcement risks. From a report: China Mobile's application, submitted in 2011, requested permission to provide telecom services in the U.S., including connecting calls between the U.S. and the vast majority of countries, which would involve interconnecting with American internet networks. FCC officials say China Mobile USA is indirectly and ultimately owned and controlled by the Chinese government. It's a subsidiary of global telecom giant China Mobile Limited. U.S. officials saw risks that China Mobile would comply with government espionage requests or that information about U.S. communications networks and users could be exploited. There were also concerns that Chinese government officials could use its access to U.S. networks to block or interfere with communications traffic should an issue arise between the two countries.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A small Cessna soared high above the Mojave Desert recently, its engine growling in the choppy morning air. As the aircraft skirted the mountains on the edge of Death Valley National Park, a clutch of passengers and environmentalists peered intently at a broiling salt flat thousands of feet below. The desolate beauty of the Panamint Valley has long drawn all manner of naturalists, adventurers and social outcasts -- including Charles Manson -- off-road vehicle riders and top gun fighter pilots who blast overhead in simulated dogfights.

Now this prehistoric lake bed is shaping up to be an unlikely battleground between environmentalists and battery technologists who believe the area might hold the key to a carbon-free future. Recently, the Australia-based firm Battery Mineral Resources asked the federal government for permission to drill four exploratory wells to see if the hot, salty brine beneath the valley floor contains economically viable concentrations of lithium. The soft, silvery-white metal is a key component of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and is crucial to the production of electric and hybrid vehicles.

The drilling request has generated strong opposition from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and the Defenders of Wildlife, who say the drilling project would be an initial step toward the creation of a full-scale lithium mining operation. They say lithium extraction would bring industrial sprawl, large and unsightly drying ponds and threaten a fragile ecosystem that supports Nelson's bighorn sheep, desert tortoises and the Panamint alligator lizard, among other species.

According to research by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, the NAND flash industry this year is clearly exhibiting signs of oversupply, and SSD suppliers have gotten themselves into a price war, causing SSD prices for PC OEMs to take a dive. From a post: Average contract prices for 512GB and 1TB SSDs have a chance to plunge below $0.1 per GB by the end of this year, hitting an all-time low. This change will cause 512GB SSDs to replace their 128GB counterparts and become market mainstream, second only to 256GB SSDs. We may also look forward to PCIe SSDs achieving 50% market penetration, since PCIe SSDs and SATA SSDS are nearly identical in price.

TrendForce points out that SSD adoption among notebooks had already come above the 50% threshold in 2018. Contract prices for mainstream 128/256/512GB SSDs have fallen a long way by over 50% since peaking in 2017, and those for 512GB and 1TB SSDs have a chance to fall below US$0.1 per GB by year-end. This will stimulate demand from those seeking to replace their 500GB and 1TB HDDs. SSD adoption rate is expected to land between 60 and 65% in 2019. According to TrendForce's latest investigations, 2Q19 marks the 6th consecutive quarter of average contract price decline for mainstream PC-Client OEM SSDs, with the average contract price for SATA SSDs falling QoQ by 15-26%, and PCIe SSDs by 16-37%.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for Vice's Motherboard: I'm waiting for the subway when the phone rings. On the other end of the line an angry woman is shouting at me about her Facebook account. I hang up. A few hours later, I'm walking to get some lunch when someone calls. "I forgot my Facebook password," the man says. I sigh, and -- once again -- explain that I can't help. [...] This keeps happening. In the last three days, I've gotten more than 80 phone calls. Just today, in the span of eight minutes, I got three phone calls from people looking to talk to Facebook. I didn't answer all of them, and some left voicemails.

Initially, I thought this was some coordinated trolling campaign. As it turns out, if you Googled "Facebook phone number" on your phone earlier this week, you would see my cellphone as the fourth result, and Google has created a "card" that pulled my number out of the article and displayed it directly on the search page in a box. The effect is that it seemed like my phone number was Facebook's phone number, because that is how Google has trained people to think. Considering that on average, according to Google's own data, people search for "Facebook phone numberâ tens of thousands of times every month, I got a lot of calls.

At Google I/O in Mountain View, Google said "all devices [Chromebook] launched this year will be Linux-ready right out of the box." From a report: In case you've missed it, last year, Google started making it possible to run desktop Linux on Chrome OS. Since then, more Chromebook devices are able to run Linux. Going forward, all of them will be able to do so, too. Yes. All of them. ARM and Intel-based.

Krystalo writes: The last day of Google's developer conference tends not to have any news, but this year was a little overloaded. Google announced today that it's working on bringing Electronic IDs to Android. Separately, the company also confirmed that all new Android Q devices will be required to encrypt user data. Replacing ID cards, such as driver's licenses and club memberships, has been the last major piece of the digital wallet puzzle. We're not talking about securely logging into web pages -- this is for identifying yourself in "physical world transactions." Wallet apps can replace plane tickets, loyalty cards, and credit cards, but they still can't pass for valid ID. Google is looking to add Electronic ID support so developers can build mobile apps that can be securely used as an ID.

Amazon.com was hit by an "extensive" fraud, revealing that unidentified hackers were able to siphon funds from merchant accounts over six months last year. schwit1 shares a report: Amazon believes it was the victim of a "serious" online attack by hackers who broke into about 100 seller accounts and funneled cash from loans or sales into their own bank accounts, according to a U.K. legal document. The hack took place between May and October 2018, Amazon's lawyers said in a redacted filing from November that can now be made public. Amazon said it was still investigating the compromised accounts and believed that hackers managed to change details of accounts on the Seller Central platform to their own at Barclays and Prepay Technologies, which is partly owned by Mastercard, according to the filing. The case highlights how the world's biggest online retail platform -- designed to be automated with minimal human input -- can be misused and how difficult it is for Amazon to find perpetrators. Lawyers for Amazon asked a London judge to approve searches of account statements at Barclays and Prepay, which "have become innocently mixed up in the wrongdoing," it said.

Chris Hughes helped Mark Zuckerberg transform Facebook from a dorm-room project into a real business. Now, he's calling for the company to be broken up. From a report: "The Facebook that exists today is not the Facebook that we founded in 2004," Chris Hughes, who started Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg in their Harvard dorm, told NBC News following the publication of his op-ed article on the same topic. "And the one that we have today I think is far too big. It's far too powerful. And most importantly, its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is not accountable," Hughes said of his former business partner, whom he still called a "friend." "I have been friends with Mark and a lot of the other folks at Facebook for a long time. And you know, who knows? We may still be friends, we may not be friends. There are some kinds of friends that you can have disagreements with. And then there are some friends that you can't," Hughes said.

According to CNBC estimates, Zuckerberg and a small group of insiders control almost 70 percent of all voting shares in Facebook. Zuckerberg personally controls nearly 60 percent. If he quit as CEO tomorrow, he would still control the company through his stock ownership. But Hughes said there's one power Zuckerberg won't exercise. "I don't think that Mark Zuckerberg can fix Facebook," Hughes said. "I think only government can -- by making the market more competitive, by breaking it up, and by creating these privacy restrictions." Hughes called for the government to step in and take several drastic actions: First, reversing the mergers with Instagram and WhatsApp, which he said the FTC "incorrectly approved," spinning them out as private companies that would compete with Facebook. Second, creating a new agency to regulate technology in addition to the FTC.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has rejected a request to have the FCC investigate Frontier Communications' business practices in Minnesota, despite evidence that the company has failed to properly maintain its telecom network. An investigation by the Minnesota Commerce Department already found that Frontier's network has "frequent and lengthy" phone and Internet outages, that Frontier has failed to provide refunds or bill credits to customers even when outages lasted for months, that Frontier is guilty of frequent billing errors that caused customers to pay for services they didn't order, and that it has failed to promptly provide telephone service to all customers who request it. When we wrote about the investigation in January, Frontier said it "strongly disagrees" with the findings but did not dispute any of the specific allegations.

The Minnesota Attorney General's office is investigating whether Frontier violated state consumer-protection laws, and the state's two U.S. senators asked Pai to have the FCC investigate as well. When Pai wrote back to the senators, he said that he has asked his staff to "monitor" the state investigation but made no commitment to have the FCC investigate, too. Pai's response and the senators' letter were posted on the FCC's website this week. "For a chairman who is so concerned with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse, it's baffling that the commission tasked with overseeing billions of dollars in public money is declining to investigate the more than a thousand allegations of poor service by a company that receives that public money to provide those services," U.S. Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told Ars in a statement today. (The Minnesota investigation was based partly on more than 1,000 consumer complaints and statements.)

Google announced today it's making a change to how its Play Store app ratings work. "[I]nstead of giving developers the choice of when ratings will reset, it will begin to weight app ratings to favor those from more recent releases," reports TechCrunch. Milena Nikolic, an engineering director leading Google Play Console, said that soon the average rating calculation for apps will be updated for all Android apps on Google Play.

"With this update, users will be able to better see, at a glance, the current state of the app -- meaning, any fixes and changes that made it a better experience over the years will now be taken into account when determining the rating," reports TechCrunch. "On the flip side, however, this change also means that once high-quality apps that have since failed to release new updates and bug fixes will now have a rating that reflects their current state of decline." In response to the announcement, Slashdot reader shanen writes: Basically I regard this as a good news story, though in relative terms. Of course the old data should get discounted if newer data is available. Too bad today's Google is certain to mangle the implementation, probably claiming they need more layers of secrecy to prevent more clever gaming of the new ratings system. However, the change I REALLY want to see would be more exposure of the developers' financial models for the apps. Following the money really works.

Augmented reality is coming to Google Search, allowing you to "check out a pair of shoes in the 'real world' while you're shopping online or put an animated shark in your living room," reports The Verge. From the report: At I/O, Google offered a few different examples of how its AR search options might work. If you search for musculature, for instance, you can get a model of human muscles -- which you can either examine as an ordinary 3D object on your screen or overlay on a camera feed, letting you "see" the object in the real world. If you're looking at shopping results, you can preview a piece of clothing with your existing wardrobe.

3D AR objects will start showing up in search results later this year, and developers can add support for their own objects by adding "just a few lines of code." It's apparently already working with NASA, New Balance, Samsung, Target, Volvo, and other groups to add support for their 3D models.

One year after banning all blockchain-related ads, Facebook is updating its ad policies for financial services and products and allowing ads for "blockchain technology, industry news, education or events related to cryptocurrency" without the need for pre-approval. TechCrunch reports: Facebook's goal was to prevent users from getting scammed by Initial Coin Offerings and other cryptocurrency deals where providers had little to no accountability. In January 2018 at the height of the crypto craze, it blocked all blockchain related ads. In June 2018 it began allowing some if they received pre-approval. When Facebook users get scammed, they don't just blame the scammer but the social network too. Facebook initially cast a wide net in its ban to prevent this.

Users began seeing ads for blockchain education yesterday. Additionally, beginning June 5th Facebook will ban ads for "promoting contracts for difference (CFDs), complex financial products that are often associated with predatory behavior. These products, due to their complexity, often mislead people."

Tencent has pulled the plug on its wildly popular video game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) in China, a likely victim of government restrictions on gaming. From a report: Instead, the company is migrating users over to a similar title, Heping Jingying or Elite Force for Peace. Heping Jingying has already been approved for monetization by the Chinese Communist party, thanks in no small part to its patriotic overtones. One analyst described the game as "a tribute to the People's Liberation Army Air Force" -- part of China's national military -- with anti-terrorism themes. PUBG Mobile launched in March last year, and has become one of the world's most popular video games, with as many players as Fortnite. According to estimates from China Renaissance, the game had roughly 70 million domestic players, which would have allowed Tencent to generate annual revenues from in-app purchases of roughly $1.18 billion to $1.48 billion.

In what is being called "the single most significant law enforcement disruption of the darknet to date" by U.S. Attorney Scott Brady, the Justice Department has shut down a major directory of dark web drug marketplaces and arrested the alleged owners. NBC News reports: DeepDotWeb was a regular searchable website that provided a directory with direct access to a host of darknet marketplaces selling illegal narcotics including fentanyl, cocaine, heroin and meth. The website also provided access to marketplaces for firearms, including assault rifles, and for malicious software and hacking tools. The alleged owners, Tal Prihar, 37, and Michael Phan, 34, both from Israel, were arrested Monday, Prihar in France and Phan in Israel, where they remain in custody. They each face a single count of money laundering conspiracy in the U.S. Phan also faces charges in Israel.

Prihar and Phan allegedly received kickback payments through bitcoin when someone purchased an item on the darknet sites found through the directory, earning more than $15 million in fees since October 2013, according to prosecutors. These "referral bonuses" allegedly came from darknet marketplaces including AlphaBay Market, Agora Market, Abraxas Market, Dream Market, Valhalla Market, Hansa Market, TradeRoute Market, Dr. D's, Wall Street Market and Tochka Market. The closing of a directory like DeepDotWeb is significant, Brady said, because it should stifle hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal purchases.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: When Microsoft launched UWP in 2015, officials promised that the platform would provide apps with better performance and security because they'd be distributable and updatable from the Microsoft Store. Developers would be able to use a common set of programming interfaces across Windows 10, Windows Phone, HoloLens and more, officials said, when selling the UWP vision. The downside: UWP apps would work on Windows 10-based devices only. Developers would have to do work to get their apps to be UWP/Store-ready. And Win32 apps wouldn't get UWP features like touch and inking. Arguably, [Kevin Gallo, Corporate Vice President of the Windows Developer Platform] told me, "we shouldn't have gone that way," meaning creating this schism. But Microsoft execs -- including Gallo -- continue to maintain that UWP is not dead. Over the past year or so, Microsoft has been trying to undo some of the effects of what Gallo called the "massive divide" between Win32 and UWP by adding "modern desktop" elements to Win32 apps.

"By the time we are done, everything will just be called 'Windows apps,'" Gallo told me. "We're not quite there yet." But the ultimate idea is to make "every platform feature available to every developer." In short, Microsoft's new goal is to try to make all features available to all of the Windows frameworks. Saying that Microsoft is dropping or deprecating any of the Windows frameworks seems to have been declared from on-high as a big no-no. Instead, Win32, UWP, Windows Presentation Foundation are all "elevated to full status," as Gallo told me. What about the Microsoft Store? Gallo says it's not dead. In Gallo's view, "the Store is about commerce. It's another channel for distribution." But it's not the only way Windows users will be able to get apps. "You can trust apps differently. They don't need to be in the Store. People really just want to know if Microsoft considers an app good," he said.

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley says "it sounds like Microsoft may be moving toward a model of getting apps Microsoft-certified and trusted and then allowing Windows developers to decide how best to distribute them -- via the Microsoft Store, the Web or other methods of their choosing."

Intel provided an update regarding its upcoming fabrication technologies at its 2019 Investor Meeting today. From a report: The company is on track to produce server-class products using its 10 nm manufacturing technology already in the first half of 2020. What is relatively surprising is that the company intends to start production of chips using its 7 nm process already in 2021. Intel's 7 nm production technology had been in development independently from the 10 nm process and by a different crew, so this one is closer than one might think. The node technology is set to use extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) with laser wavelength of 13.5 nm for select layers, so it will not heavily rely on multipatterning, the source of problems with Intel's 10 nm process. In fact, the use of EUV will simplify development of products, make it easier to produce them, and will likely shorten production cycle times too.

Google plans to add support for two new privacy and security features in Chrome, namely same-site cookies and anti-fingerprinting protection. From a report: The biggest change that Google plans to roll out is in regards to how it treats cookie files. These new controls will be based on a new IETF standard that Chrome and Mozilla developers have been working on for more than three years. This new IETF specification describes a new attribute that can be set inside HTTP headers. Called "SameSite," the attribute must be set by the website owner and should describe the situations in which a site's cookies can be loaded.

[...] Google engineers also announced a second major new privacy feature for Chrome. According to Google, the company plans to add support for blocking certain types of "user fingerprinting" techniques that are being abused by online advertisers. Google didn't go into details of what types of user fingerprinting techniques it was planning to block. It is worth mentioning that there are many, which range from scanning locally installed system fonts to abusing the HTML5 canvas element, and from measuring a user's device screen size to reading locally installed extensions.

Members of the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday called on Congress to create a national privacy law that would regulate how big tech companies like Facebook and Google collect and handle user data. From a report: In testimony before the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection, commissioners also asked Congress to strengthen the agency's ability to police violations, and for more resources and greater authority to impose penalties. Lawmakers are considering a national privacy law to regulate the collection and handling of user data, the most valuable currency of the internet economy. That debate is taking place while the F.T.C. is in settlement talks with Facebook after a 13-month investigation into privacy violations. The agency is expected to levy a $5 billion penalty on Facebook for violating a 2011 privacy settlement with the regulator.

Ninety percent of blockchain-based supply chain projects are faltering because they cannot figure out important uses for the technology, research firm Gartner said this week. From a report: As a result of this inability to identify strong use cases, "blockchain fatigue" will begin setting in over the next five years, according to "Predicts 2019: Future of Supply Chain Operations," a survey of the wants and needs of more than 300 executives involved in blockchain projects worldwide. In large part, this is due to blockchain suppliers' inability to live up to the technology's hype, said Alex Pradhan, a senior principal research analyst at Gartner.

Despite the great amount of time and effort invested in pilot projects aiming to use distributed ledgers to verify authenticity, improve traceability, and build more trust into supply chain transactions, only 19% of respondents ranked blockchain as a very important technology for their business, the company said in a release. Only 9% have invested in it. Most of these projects "have remained pilot projects due to a combination of technology immaturity, lack of standards, overly ambitious scope, and a misunderstanding of how blockchain could, or should, actually help the supply chain," Pradhan said. "Inevitably, this is causing the market to experience blockchain fatigue."