Chinese intelligence agents acquired National Security Agency hacking tools and repurposed them in 2016 to attack American allies and private companies in Europe and Asia [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], a leading cybersecurity firm has discovered. The episode is the latest evidence that the United States has lost control of key parts of its cybersecurity arsenal. From a report: Based on the timing of the attacks and clues in the computer code, researchers with the firm Symantec believe the Chinese did not steal the code but captured it from an N.S.A. attack on their own computers -- like a gunslinger who grabs an enemy's rifle and starts blasting away. The Chinese action shows how proliferating cyberconflict is creating a digital wild West with few rules or certainties, and how difficult it is for the United States to keep track of the malware it uses to break into foreign networks and attack adversaries' infrastructure.

The losses have touched off a debate within the intelligence community over whether the United States should continue to develop some of the world's most high-tech, stealthy cyberweapons if it is unable to keep them under lock and key. The Chinese hacking group that co-opted the N.S.A.'s tools is considered by the agency's analysts to be among the most dangerous Chinese contractors it tracks, according to a classified agency memo reviewed by The New York Times. The group is responsible for numerous attacks on some of the most sensitive defense targets inside the United States, including space, satellite and nuclear propulsion technology makers. Now, Symantec's discovery, unveiled on Monday, suggests that the same Chinese hackers the agency has trailed for more than a decade have turned the tables on the agency.

EA Access -- Electronic Arts' unlimited game subscription service that lets players access a massive library of EA games -- is finally coming to the PlayStation 4 this July, almost five years after it launched on the Xbox One. From a report: Like the current Xbox offering, EA Access for the PS4 costs either $4.99 per month or $29.99 per year. In addition to unlimited access to EA's vault of games, Access also comes with other perks, including a 10 percent discount on full-priced EA game purchases as well as early trials of upcoming EA games. EA Access for PS4 will be a separate account from EA Access for Xbox One. So if you're already paying for Access on your Xbox, you will have to pay a second monthly fee to play those games on your PS4.

Microsoft Solitaire, bundled with the Windows operating system since 1990, has been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame for its popularity and influence on other video games and society in general. It joins classic titles like Doom, Tetris, World of Warcraft, and Halo: Combat Evolved. The Verge reports: The World Video Game Hall of Fame is a relatively new institution, created in 2015 and overseen by educational institute The Strong. Its official home is in The National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, and each year it selects a handful of new inductees. Solitaire may be a video game for the ages, but its inclusion in Windows had a higher purpose. The developers of the operating system felt that the familiar game was the perfect way to introduce users to relatively new computing concepts, like using a mouse and drag-and-drop. By playing Solitaire, users honed more than their card skills: a win-win for all.

Solitaire was first bundled with Windows 3.0 and appeared in every subsequent version of the software up until Windows 8.1. It was removed from the base level operating system, but was returned in Windows 10 after Microsoft admitted that Solitaire, along with Minesweeper and Hearts, still have "devoted followings." Because of its inclusion in the world's most popular PC operating system, lowly Solitaire has likely been installed on more than one billion devices, says the Strong Museum, making it one of the most popular video games of all time. "Microsoft Solitaire demonstrated that there existed a vast market for games that appeal to people of all types, paving the way for the growth of the casual game market," said the institute in a press statement. "We are humbly honored to have the opportunity to work on a game that has such broad appeal, is localized into 65 languages, and played in over 200 markets around the world, including Antarctica," said Microsoft's Paul Jensen, studio manager for Microsoft Casual Games.

"Interstellar Technologies has successfully launched its MOMO-3 sounding rocket into space, with the vehicle easily crossing the Karman line (62 miles in altitude) before splashing into the Pacific," reports Engadget. This is the first time a private rocket launched from Japan has reached space. From the report: There was a fair amount riding on the mission. Interstellar's ultimate aim is to ferry small satellites into orbit at a fraction of the cost of government launches, and this takes the company one step closer to achieving its dream. It also relieves some of the pressure on Interstellar founder Takafumi Horie. There had been skepticism about the Livedoor creator's spaceflight chops given his controversial entrepreneurial history (including a conviction for accounting fraud). This shows that his initiative can work on a basic level -- the challenge is translating a test like this into a full-fledged business. You can watch the launch here.

New submitter Schnapple writes: Back in 2009, id Software put Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM on the App Store, but once iOS 11 started phasing out 32-bit apps, they stopped working. Since their source code was published under the GPL, I went in and fixed them up so they would run on modern devices, and also added game controller support and ported them to tvOS so they could run on Apple TV. Then over the last year I did the same for DOOM II and Final DOOM, Quake, Quake II, Quake III: Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and finally DOOM 3. I've chronicled the adventures on my blog. I can't publish them to the App Store for obvious reasons and you'll need to provide your own copy of the game data, but if anyone's interested in trying them out on Apple devices I've posted the sources to GitHub.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Amazon is already capable of offering same-day and next-day delivery to 72% of the total U.S. population, including almost all of the households (95% or more) in 16 of the wealthiest and most populated states and Washington, D.C., according to a report published in March by RBC Capital Markets. The vast delivery network is the result of significant investments over the past four years, a period during which Amazon built out fulfillment centers across the country, nearly tripling its U.S. logistics infrastructure, RBC said. Amazon has added roughly double the amount of distribution space Home Depot currently owns.

That means the company has a huge head start in fulfilling its plan laid out in its latest earnings report to shorten the current two-day free shipping plan by one day for Prime members, who pay $119 a year for fast delivery as well as services like unlimited music, access to the video catalog and exclusive deals. The map below from RBC shows the four-year change in Amazon's distribution footprint. It already covers most of the coastal cities, as well as Texas and major metropolitan areas in the Midwest.

In a blog post detailing new features coming to Edge, Microsoft has started teasing what Edge will look like on macOS. The Verge reports: During the company's Build 2019 developer conference, Microsoft is announcing new features for Edge on Windows and teasing the upcoming macOS release. We understand that the release will be available very soon, and Mac users should be able to access both the Canary and Dev builds of Edge just like Windows. Microsoft's implementation of Chromium on Edge has so far seen good performance improvements and reliability on Windows. It's not clear if we'll see similar improvements on the macOS side versus Chrome, but at least it gives Mac users another Chromium option with some Microsoft services and sync integration. MacRumors notes that Edge "will be Microsoft's first web browser on the Mac since Internet Explorer received its last feature update nearly 16 years ago."

Facebook uses thousands of third-party staffers around the world to look at Facebook and Instagram posts to help train its AI and to inform new products. "But because the contractors see users' public and private posts, some view it as a violation of privacy," reports Engadget. From the report: According to Reuters, as many as 260 contract workers in Hyderabad, India have spent more than a year labeling millions of Facebook posts dating back to 2014. They look for the subject of the post, the occasion and the author's intent, and Facebook told Reuters, the company uses that information to develop new features and to potentially increase usage and ad revenue. Around the globe, Facebook has as many as 200 similar content labeling projects, many of which are used to train the company's AI.

The contractors working in Hyderabad told Reuters they see everything from text-based status updates to videos, photos and Stories across Facebook and Instagram -- including those that are shared privately. And even as Facebook embarks on its "the future is private" platform, one Facebook employee told Reuters he can't imagine the practice going away. It's a core part of training AI and developing the company's products.

Alongside sharing updates on many of its platforms, Microsoft said at its Build developer conference today that is also getting ready to release several new tools to shore up security for political parties and candidates and at the ballot box. From a report: Microsoft announced an ambitious effort it says will make voting secure, verifiable and subject to reliable audits. Two of the three top U.S elections vendors have expressed interest in potentially incorporating the open-source software into their proprietary voting systems. The software kit is being developed with Galois, an Oregon-based company separately creating a secure voting system prototype under contract with the Pentagon's advanced research agency, DARPA. Dubbed "ElectionGuard," the Microsoft kit will be available this summer, the company says, with early prototypes ready to pilot for next year's general elections. CEO Satya Nadella announced the initiative Monday at a developer's conference in Seattle. Nadella said the project's software, provided free of charge as part of Microsoft's Defending Democracy Program, would help "modernize all of the election infrastructure everywhere in the world." Microsoft also announced a cut-rate Office 365 application suite for political parties and campaigns for what it charges nonprofits. Both Microsoft and Google provide anti-phishing email support for campaigns. Three little-known U.S. companies control about 90 percent of the market for election equipment, but have long faced criticism for poor security, antiquated technology and insufficient transparency around their proprietary, black-box voting systems.

Google is set to launch new tools to limit the use of tracking cookies, a move that could strengthen the search giant's advertising dominance and deal a blow to other digital-marketing companies, WSJ reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.] From the report: After years of internal debate, Google could as soon as this week roll out a dashboard-like function in its Chrome browser that will give internet users more information about what cookies are tracking them and offer options to fend them off, the people said. This is a more incremental approach than less-popular browsers, such as Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox, which introduced updates to restrict by default the majority of tracking cookies in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Google's move, which could be announced at its developer conference in Mountain View, Calif., starting Tuesday, is expected to be touted as part of the company's commitment to privacy -- a complicated sell, given the torrent of data it continues to store on users -- and press its sizable advantage over online-advertising rivals.

Windows 10 is getting a new terminal for command-line users, Microsoft announced at its Build developer conference today. The new so-called "Windows Terminal" will launch in mid-June and promises to be a major update of the existing Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell experience. From a report: Indeed, it seems like the Terminal will essentially become the default environment for PowerShell, Command Prompt and Windows Subsystem for Linux users going forward. The new terminal will feature faster GPU-accelerated text rending and "emoji-rich" fonts, because everything these days needs to support emojis, and those will sure help lighten up the command-line user experience. More importantly, though, the Windows Terminal will also support shortcuts, tabs, tear-away windows and theming, as well as extensions. It also will natively support Unicode and East Asian fonts. Microsoft also unveiled a new update to WSL, a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables natively on Windows. From a report: WSL 2 is based on a Linux 4.19 kernel coming soon to Windows. This kernel uses technology built for Azure. In both cases, it helps to reduce Linux boot time and streamline memory use. In fact, Microsoft is promising developers "twice as much speed for file-system heavy operations, such as Node Package Manager install." WSL 2 will also support running Linux Docker containers natively, so that VMs are no longer required. WSL 2, like Windows Terminal, is coming in mid-June.

Krystalo writes: At its developer conference Build today, Microsoft previewed new Visual Studio features for remote work, the .NET roadmap, and launched ML.NET 1.0. In April, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2019 for Windows and Mac. Two notable features were Visual Studio Live Share, a real-time collaboration tool included with Visual Studio 2019, and Visual Studio IntelliCode, an extension offering AI-assisted code completion. At Build 2019, Microsoft shared that IntelliCode's capabilities are now generally available for C# and XAML in Visual Studio 2019 and for Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python in Visual Studio Code. And IntelliCode is now included by default in Visual Studio 2019, starting in version 16.1 Preview 2. The company also previewed an algorithm that can locally track your edits -- repeated edit detection -- and suggest other places where you need that same change. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft is experimenting with features that let developers work from anywhere, on any device. The company today announced a private preview for three such new capabilities: Remote-powered developer tools, cloud-hosted developer environments, and a browser-based web companion tool. If the future of work is remote, Microsoft wants to be ready.

[...] Microsoft also announced that it is skipping .NET 4 to avoid confusion with the .NET Framework, which has been on version 4 for years. Going forward, developers will be able to use .NET to target Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS, WebAssembly, and more. .NET Core 3 will be succeeded by .NET 5, featuring new .NET APIs, runtime capabilities, and language features. Calling it .NET 5 makes it the highest version Microsoft has ever shipped and indicates that the company hopes it is the future for the .NET platform. .NET Core 3 closes much of the remaining capability gap with .NET Framework 4.8, enabling Windows Forms, WPF, and Entity Framework 6. .NET 5 will build on this work, Microsoft says, combining .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin, and Mono (the original cross-platform implementation of .NET) into a single platform. .NET 5 will provide both Just-in-Time (JIT) and Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation models. JIT has better performance for desktop/server workloads and development environments. AOT has a faster startup and a small footprint, which is required for mobile and IoT devices. .NET 5 will offer one unified toolchain supported by new SDK project types and a flexible deployment model (side-by-side and self-contained EXEs).

diegocg writes: Linux 5.1 released has been released. The main feature in this release is io_uring, a high-performance interface for asynchronous I/O; there are also improvements in fanotify to provide a scalable way of watching changes on large file systems; it also adds a method to allow safe delivery of signals in presence of PID reuse; persistent memory can be used now as hot-plugabble RAM; Zstd compression levels have been made configurable in Btrfs; there is a new cpuidle governor that makes better power management decisions than the menu governor; all 32 bit architectures have added the necessary syscalls to deal with the y2038 problem; and live patching has added support for creating cumulative patches. There are many other features and new drivers in the changelog.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is facing an antitrust investigation that could have been predicted the moment it announced it was getting into the music streaming business four years ago. The company can most likely expect a similar investigation down the road after it launches its video streaming service later this year. The first investigation follows a complaint lodged by music streaming leader Spotify earlier this year, according to the Financial Times. Citing sources, the newspaper reported that the European Commission's competition division has officially opened the case, which will likely involve talking to other services that have been quietly chafing under Apple's App Store rules.

[...] One can debate the relative merits of Apple Music and Spotify in terms of their design, subscription models, and payment to artists. But the reality is that there is nothing revolutionary about Apple Music. Had it been launched by another startup, it certainly wouldn't have 56 million subscribers by now. In Silicon Valley, leveraging one's platform is standard practice and applauded. The EU takes a very different view. European regulators believe it is their job to protect consumers from such practices, which they argue harm innovation, and therefore indirectly limit choice.

"Facebook knew there was a problem when a string of people used the platform to publicly broadcast their suicides in real time," reports Business Insider, raising questions about what the company has done since: Facebook has a suicide-monitoring tool that uses machine learning to identify posts that may indicate someone is at risk of killing themselves. The tool was involved in sending emergency responders to locations more than 3,500 times as of last fall. A Harvard psychiatrist is worried the tool could worsen health problems by homing in on the wrong people or escalating mental-health crises... "We as the public are partaking in this grand experiment, but we don't know if it's useful or not," Harvard psychiatrist and tech consultant John Torous told Business Insider last week....

Without public information on the tool, Torous said big questions about Facebook's suicide-monitoring tool are impossible to answer... "It's one thing for an academic or a company to say this will or won't work. But you're not seeing any on-the-ground peer-reviewed evidence," Torous said. "It's concerning. It kind of has that Theranos feel...." Because of privacy issues, emergency responders can't tell Facebook what happened at the scene of a potential suicide, said Antigone Davis, Facebook's global head of safety. In other words, emergency responders can't tell Facebook if they reached the scene too late to stop a death, showed up to the wrong place, or arrived only to learn there was no real problem.

Torous, a psychiatrist who's familiar with the thorny issues in predicting suicide, is skeptical of how that will play out with regard to the suicide monitoring tool. He points to a review of 17 studies in which researchers analyzed 64 different suicide-prediction models and concluded that the models had almost no ability to successfully predict a suicide attempt. "We know Facebook built it and they're using it, but we don't really know if it's accurate, if it's flagging the right or wrong people, or if it's flagging things too early or too late," Torous said.

"When Boeing began delivering its 737 Max to customers in 2017, the company believed that a key cockpit warning light was a standard feature in all of the new jets. But months after the planes were flying, company engineers realized that the warning light worked only on planes whose customers had bought a different, optional indicator," reports the New York Times.

"In essence, that meant a safety feature that Boeing thought was standard was actually a premium add-on.... Because only 20 percent of customers had purchased the optional indicator, the warning light was not working on most of Boeing's new jets."

An anonymous reader quotes their report: After discovering the lapse in 2017, Boeing performed an internal review and determined that the lack of a working warning light "did not adversely impact airplane safety or operation," it said in its statement. As a result, Boeing said it did not inform airlines or the Federal Aviation Administration about the mistake for a year. Only after the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 last October did Boeing discuss the matter with the F.A.A. The company then conducted another review and again found the missing alert did not pose a safety threat, and told the F.A.A. as much...

Boeing detailed its initial confusion about the warning light in a statement released on Sunday, adding new details to what was already known about the flawed design and introduction of the 737 Max, its best-selling jetliner. The initial lack of knowledge about the feature's functionality, along with the delayed disclosure, add to the concern about Boeing's management of the Max's design... This light could have provided critical information to the pilots on two flights that crashed shortly after takeoff in recent months.
Boeing also apparently told pilots in one meeting that their alert would work on the ground before takeoff, so pilots would have time to abort the takeoff, according to the Times.

But now Boeing is telling pilots that the system won't alert pilots until the aircraft is 400 feet above the ground.

An anonymous reader quotes CNET: "Mozilla on Sunday began distributing new Firefox updates to fix a problem that broke extensions for many browser users on Friday," reports CNET: Mozilla had released an update Saturday, but Sunday's fix should help more people who were still affected. "There are some issues we're still working on, but we wanted to get this release out and get your add-ons back up & running before Monday," Mozilla said in a tweet Sunday... "No active steps need to be taken to make add-ons work again. In particular, please do not delete and/or reinstall any add-ons as an attempt to fix the issue," Kev Needham, Mozilla's product manager for add-ons, said in a blog post about the problem.

This week Facebook announced a new feature that let's you tell the service that you have a "secret crush" on up to nine Facebook friends, reports the Bay Area News Group: Facebook will send you a notification if a person has added you as one of their secret crushes. However, you don't get to know who that person is unless you happened to have put them on your crush list. At that point, Facebook -- because it really does know everything about everything you do at all times -- will then match you together and reveal your crushed to one another. You also have to be signed up for a Facebook Dating profile in order to get the crush notifications....

Facebook Dating and Secret Crush won't be available in America until later this year. But if you live in Canada, Mexico, Argentina or 16 other countries... well, you can let the crushing begin now.
The Guardian describes it as "harking back to Facebook's humble beginnings as a tool for ranking strangers' attractiveness... Or you could always, you know, try telling them in person." And other sites also gave the feature a negative review. BGR says Facebook's new feature "isn't cute, it's creepy," adding "it would be foolish to trust the company with even more sensitive data about yourself."

But the harshest response came from Mashable, which writes that "the whole point of a secret crush is obviously to keep it a secret. The term really could not be clearer." They call Facebook's proposed solution "truly, madly, deeply sad... We as a society rely on tech for so much, but we shouldn't rely on it for declarations of love. We have to be braver than that."

Or, in the words of one Twitter user, "this is dumb as shit just tell them you like them cowards."

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: As Microsoft promised in early April, Windows 10 is gaining a new option that gives users better control over when its twice-yearly major feature updates are installed. That option is called 'Download and install now' and should help Windows 10 users avoid unintentionally accepting a feature update after using Windows Update to check for new patches. While clicking 'Check for updates' could mean checking for monthly or security updates, historically it's also triggered the installation of a feature update, which can be a major disruption...

Choosing to download and install when offered a feature update is taken as confirmation that the user wants that update. From that point on, the feature update can then only be paused for up to 35 days. By not clicking on 'Download and install now', the new feature update can be avoided so long as the version of Windows 10 currently running is supported and not nearing end of support.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Verge: Verizon is seeking a buyer for Tumblr, the blogging platform it acquired along with other Yahoo assets in 2017... The platform hosts 465.4 million blogs and 172 billion posts, according to its about page... On Thursday evening, Pornhub VP Corey Price claimed in a statement to BuzzFeed News that his company is "extremely interested" in buying Tumblr and "very much looking forward to one day restoring it to its former glory with NSFW content..."

Price is referring to a major change implemented late last year, when Tumblr took the controversial step of banning porn on its platform. The company has been using AI to detect and automatically block images and videos that contain certain adult content. Existing posts containing porn were made private and are no longer publicly accessible.
Both Fortune and TechCrunch warned the acquisition might actually have bad consequences for adult content producers, since PornHub's owner MindGeek has been accused of ignoring piracy on its streaming sites, "a significant factor in the deflation of salaries for performers in the industry."

In a thread on Twitter, Engadget's senior news editor added "I guess the good news is that things PornHub announces as a publicity stunt don't usually happen, so..."