Facebook said it's banning a number of controversial far-right figures, including Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos and Laura Loomer, for violating the social-media company's policies on hate speech and promoting violence. From a report: The company is also blocking religious leader Louis Farrakhan, who is known for sharing anti-Semitic views; Paul Nehlen, a white nationalist who ran for Congress in 2018; and conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson. All of these individuals and accounts that represent them are also banned from photo-sharing app Instagram. "We've always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology," a Facebook representative said Thursday in a statement. "The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today." Facebook is often chided for failing to stop the spread of harmful speech and misinformation on its platform, and Thursday's bans show that the company is taking a firmer hand in enforcing its own service terms.

DarkRookie2 writes: As Mozilla continues to try to make it safer than ever to use Firefox, the organization has updated its Add-on Policy so that any updates that include obfuscated code are explicitly banned. Mozilla has also set out in plain terms its blocking process for add-ons and extensions. While there is nothing surprising here, the clarification should mean that there are fewer causes for disputes when an add-on is blocklisted. The updated Add-on policy comes into force on June 10, so add-on developers have a little more than a month to take note of the changes and comply. Mozilla says that the move is designed to help it better deal with malicious extensions. Mozilla also plans to be more aggressive towards taking down extensions that break its policies, with a heavy focus on security issues. ZDNet adds: [...] Starting with June 10, Mozilla's team will also be more aggressive in blocking and disabling Firefox add-ons in users' browsers that are found to be violating one of the company's policies."We will continue to block extensions for intentionally violating our policies, critical security vulnerabilities, and will also act on extensions compromising user privacy or circumventing user consent or control," Nieman said.

Russia is one step closer to creating its own, independent internet -- at least legally speaking. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law new measures that would enable the creation of a national network, able to operate separately from the rest of the world, according to documents posted on a government portal this week. From a report: For now, the network remains largely theoretical though, with few practical details disclosed. In concept, the new law aims to protect Russia from foreign online restrictions by creating what the Kremlin calls a "sustainable, secure and fully functioning" local internet. The legislation takes effect in November, state news agency RIA-Novosti reported. According to a summary from RIA-Novosti, the law calls for the creation of a monitoring and a management center supervised by Roskomnadzor, Russia's telecoms agency. The state agency will be charged with ensuring the availability of communication services in Russia in extraordinary situations. During such situations, it would also be empowered to cut off external traffic exchange, creating a purely Russian web.

Blue Origin successfully performed another test launch of its New Shepard system today. Both the New Shepard rocket and capsule touched down safely back at the company's West Texas facility around 10 minutes after liftoff. The capsule reached about 346,000 feet, or more than 65 miles, eclipsing the recognized boundary of space. Some context: Before today, New Shepard has landed nine out of the 10 times it's flown, and the vehicle has proven that it can keep people safe even in emergency scenarios. However, there still isn't a solid timeline for when the first test passengers will fly on the vehicle, and the company has not started selling tickets to customers yet. The rocket flying this week is the third iteration of the New Shepard vehicle, and the company has built a fourth version that will take the first crews to space. That rocket is supposed to fly sometime this year, according to Blue Origin, but exactly when is still unclear.

Electric scooters are becoming just as common in many cities as Lyft and Uber cars. While they may be a step in the right direction to improve transportation options, a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a surge in emergency room visits due to e-scooter accidents. From a report: The CDC has found that head injuries topped the list of accident-related incidents involving e-scooters at 45%. The study determined that many e-scooter injuries could have been prevented if riders wore helmets and were more careful around cars, according to summary of the study released on Wednesday. "A high proportion of e-scooter related injuries involved potentially preventable risk factors, such as lack of helmet use, or motor vehicle interaction," a preliminary summary of the study said.

Amazon dismissed the idea of running a fully automated warehouse in the near future, citing the superior cognitive ability of humans and limitations of current technology. From a report: Scott Anderson, director of Amazon Robotics Fulfillment, said technology is at least 10 years away from fully automating the processing of a single order picked by a worker inside a warehouse. There is a misperception that Amazon will run fully automated warehouses soon, Anderson said during a tour of Amazon's Baltimore warehouse for reporters on Tuesday. The technology for a robot to pick a single product from a bin without damaging other products or picking multiple products at the same time in a way that could benefit the e-commerce retailer is years away.

Huawei is planning to launch an 8K 5G TV as soon as this year, a new report from Nikkei claims. The set would include a 5G modem to allow it to stream remote content directly without the need for a cable box or fixed-line internet connection, and it could even act as a router for other internet-connected devices in your home, the report added.

Lyft's effort to overturn New York City's first-in-the-nation minimum wage law for drivers was blocked by a state judge Wednesday, according to Business Insider . From a report: Judge Andrea Masley ruled that Lyft's lawsuit, which was filed in January, was insufficient to overturn the law that went into effect February. Under the law that went into effect in February, ride-hail companies must pay drivers at least $17.22 an hour after expenses. The pay formula uses a so-called utilization rate, which accounts for the share of time a driver spends with passengers in their vehicles compared to time spent idle and waiting for a fare. Lyft claims that it supports the spirit of the law to raise wages for drivers, but opposes the formula used to ensure higher payouts.

To not a lot of surprise compared to the world of proprietary graphics drivers on Windows where once the support is retired the driver releases stop, old open-source Linux OpenGL drivers are found to be better maintained. From a report: Blender developers working on shipping Blender 2.80 this July as the big update to this open-source 3D modeling software today rolled out the Linux GPU requirements for this next release. The requirements themselves aren't too surprising and cover NVIDIA GPUs released in the last ten years, AMD GCN for best support, and Intel Haswell graphics or newer. In the case of NVIDIA graphics they tend to do a good job maintaining their legacy driver branches. With the AMD Radeon and Intel graphics, Blender developers acknowledge older hardware may work better on Linux.

Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su said during her remarks on AMD's first quarter earnings conference call with analysts today that she was confident about the state of competition with rivals like Intel and Nvidia in processors and graphics chips. She also pointed out that the company gained market share in processors for the 6th straight quarter. From a report: AMD's revenue was $1.27 billion for the first quarter, down 23% from the same quarter a year ago. But Su noted that Ryzen and Epyc processor and datacenter graphics processing units (GPUs) revenue more than doubled year-over-year, helping expand the gross margin by 5 percentage points. If there was a lag in the quarter, it was due to softness in the graphics channel and lower semi-custom revenue (which includes game console chips). Su said AMD's unit shipments increased significantly and the company's new products drove a higher client average selling price (ASP).

On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel demanded answers from AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon on their sale of customers' phone location information to data aggregators. From a report: As Motherboard has shown in multiple investigations, this data, which sometimes included highly precise assisted-GPS data, ended up in the hands of bounty hunters, bail bondsmen, or private investigators. The demands are the latest move to pressure telecom companies, who said they would stop the sale of location data to third parties after Motherboard's coverage. AT&T and T-Mobile previously told Motherboard that sale has ended, and Sprint said it would stop at the end of May. But there are still serious concerns about how that data may have been stored and accessed. The letters from Commissioner Rosenworcel to the heads of each telco asked that the companies clarify whether data aggregators or others were allowed to save phone location data they received, and what steps the telcos are going to take to ensure the deletion of any shared data.

Google has announced that it is giving users greater control over how long the company holds on to location history and activity data. From a report: A new time-limiting feature makes it possible to have information such as account activity and location data automatically deleted after a period of time. The privacy-focused move comes after feedback to Google which found users wanted the company to provide simpler ways to manage or delete the private data it holds. The announcement comes months after Associated Press reported that a number of Google apps store the timestamped locations of the devices on which they're installed.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A ransomware infection has crippled the operations of a US-based web hosting provider for almost eight days now, several of the company's disgruntled customers have told ZDNet today. Impacted are all Windows-based servers owned by A2 Hosting, a provider of virtual private servers (VPS) and WordPress hosting services. The infection, which took place last week on April 23, has led to a week-long downtime that A2 staff has struggled to fix, leading to an unending stream of complaints and desperate pleas for help from customers bleeding money with each passing day of downtime.

For the past three years, a mysterious hacker has been selling Windows zero-days to at least three cyber-espionage groups, as well as cyber-crime gangs, researchers from Kaspersky Lab have told ZDNet. From a report: The hacker's activity reinforces recent assessments that some government-backed cyber-espionage groups -- also known as APTs (advanced persistent threats) -- will regularly buy zero-day exploits from third-party entities, besides developing their own in-house tools. APT groups believed to be operating out of Russia and the Middle East have often been spotted using zero-days developed by real-world companies that act as sellers of surveillance software and exploit brokers for government agencies. However, Kaspersky's recent revelations show that APT groups won't shy away from dipping their toes in the underground hacking scene to acquire exploits initially developed by lone hackers for cyber-crime groups, if ever necessary.

A metals manufacturer faked test results and provided faulty materials to NASA, causing more than $700 million in losses and two failed satellite launch missions, according to an investigation by the U.S. space agency. From a report: The fraud involved an Oregon company called Sapa Profiles, which falsified thousands of certifications for aluminum parts over 19 years for hundreds of customers, including NASA. The bad parts were used in the making of Taurus XL, a rocket that was supposed to deliver satellites studying the Earth's climate during missions carried out in 2009 and 2011. The launch vehicle's fairing, a clamshell structure that carries the satellite as it travels through the atmosphere, didn't fully open, causing the unsuccessful launch, according to a statement from NASA.

In a new support document, Apple has indicated that its legacy photo editing suite Aperture will not run in future versions of macOS after macOS Mojave. From a report: The support document provides users with steps to migrate Aperture libraries to Apple's newer Photos app for Mac or Adobe Lightroom Classic. Apple ceased development of Aperture in June 2014 and removed the software from the Mac App Store in April 2015 after the launch of the Photos app for Mac. However, the application continues to function on macOS Mojave for users who still have it installed, albeit with some performance limitations.

Canonical's real money comes from the cloud and Internet of Things, but AI and machine learning developers are demanding -- and getting -- Ubuntu Linux desktop with enterprise support. From a report: In a wide-ranging conversation at Open Infrastructure Summit, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and its corporate parent Canonical, said: "We have seen companies signing up for Linux desktop support, because they want to have fleets of Ubuntu desktop for their artificial intelligence engineers." This development caught Shuttleworth by surprise. "We're starting actually now to commercially support the desktop in a way that we've never been asked to before," he said. Of course, Ubuntu has long been used by developers, but Shuttleworth explained, "Previously, those were kind of off the books, under the table. You know, 'Don't ask don't tell deployments.' "But now suddenly, it's the AI team and they've got to be supported."

Fedora 30, the newest release of the venerable Linux distribution that serves (in part) as the staging environment for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, was released Tuesday, bringing with it a number of improvements and performance optimizations. From a report: he most exciting aspect, for workstation/desktop users at least, is the update to GNOME 3.32. Of course, that is hardly the only notable update -- the DNF package manager is getting a performance boost, for instance. In other words, this is a significant operating system upgrade that should delight both existing Fedora users and beginners alike. "Fedora 30 brings enhancements to all editions with updates to the common underlying packages, from bug fixes and performance tweaks to new versions. In Fedora 30, base updates include Bash shell 5.0, Fish 3.0, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 9 and Ruby 2.6. Fedora 30 also now uses the zchunk format for data compression within the DNF repository. When metadata is compressed using zchunk DNF will only download the differences between earlier copies of metadata and the current versions, saving on resources and increasing efficiency," says The Fedora Project.

An anonymous reader shares a report: There were rumors that Facebook was going to make its messaging products interoperable, but now it appears they're about to be a reality. At F8, Messenger's head of consumer product Asha Sharma said that in the future, users will soon be able to send messages across Facebook's three different messaging platforms: Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. "We believe people should be able to talk to anyone anywhere," she said.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he's committed to turning his company around. Onstage at Facebook's F8 developer conference, the chief executive said that privacy will be the defining pillar of his social network's sprawling empire going forward. From a report: His opening statements build on the massive shift in Zuckerberg's vision for the company that he first outlined early last month when he announced that Facebook would transition away from the News Feed and public posts and toward a "privacy-focused communications platform" that unified its messaging products around concepts like ephemerality and encryption. "The future is private," Zuckerberg told the crowd, noting that Facebook's most dominant vision over the last decade was to build global communities that would bring the world together, for better or worse. "Over time, I believe that a private social platform will be even more important to our lives than our digital town squares. So today, we're going to start talking about what this could look like as a product, what it means to have your social experience be more intimate, and how we need to change the way we run this company in order to build this."