Vodafone denied a Bloomberg report on Tuesday that stated it had found "backdoors" hidden in Huawei equipment supplied to its Italian business dating back years, per BBC . From a report: What they're saying: Vodafone said the "backdoors" in the report were actually a common industry protocol: "The 'backdoor' that Bloomberg refers to is Telnet, which is a protocol that is commonly used by many vendors in the industry for performing diagnostic functions. It would not have been accessible from the internet. Bloomberg is incorrect in saying that this 'could have given Huawei unauthorised access to the carrier's fixed-line network in Italy.' In addition, we have no evidence of any unauthorised access. This was nothing more than a failure to remove a diagnostic function after development."

A reader shares a report: In a tense and steely news conference, his first since two deadly crashes of 737 MAX airplanes, Boeing Chairman and CEO Dennis Muilenburg faced sharp questioning but refused to admit flaws in the design of the airplane's systems. "We have gone back and confirmed again, as we do the safety analysis, the engineering analysis, that we followed exactly the steps in our design and certification processes that consistently produce safe airplanes," he said. "It was designed per our standards. It was certified per our standards."

In the case of the MAX, those processes certified as safe a new flight-control system that was triggered on both the Lion Air and Ethiopian crash flights by a single faulty sensor and then engaged repeatedly to push the nose of each airplane down. Boeing is currently flight testing a software redesign of this system -- Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). Yet Muilenburg would not concede that there was anything wrong with the original MCAS design, saying only that the system is being "improved" with the software redesign. He said airplane accidents are typically due to "a chain of events," and that "it's not correct to attribute that to any single item."

AmiMoJo shares a report: NBC (and the other broadcasters) provides copies of its shows to YouTube's Content ID filter, which is supposed to protect copyright by blocking uploads of videos that match ones in its database of claimed videos. That means that if you own the copyright to something that is aired on NBC, any subsequent attempts by you or your fans to upload your work will be blocked as copyright infringements, and could cost you your YouTube account. The latest casualty of this is the video game Beat Saber. Jimmy Fallon played part of one of Beat Saber's levels, and so no one else cold upload their own gameplay of that level to YouTube without being accused of copyright infringement and blocked. After a lot of fast work by Beat Saber, they managed to get the ban lifted.

Hackers have broken into an internet infrastructure firm that provides services to dozens of the world's largest and most valuable companies, including Oracle, Volkswagen, Airbus, and many more as part of an extortion attempt, Motherboard reported Tuesday. From the report: The attackers have also threatened to release data from all of those companies, according to a website seemingly set up by the hackers to distribute the stolen material. Citycomp, the impacted Germany-based firm, provides servers, storage, and other computer equipment to large companies, according to the company's website. Michael Bartsch, executive director of Deutor Cyber Security Solutions, a firm Citycomp said was authorized to speak about the case, confirmed the breach to Motherboard in an email Tuesday. "Citycomp has been hacked and blackmailed and the attack is ongoing," Bartsch wrote. "We have to be careful as the whole case is under police investigation and the attacker is trying all tricks."

For months, Huawei has faced U.S. allegations that it flouted sanctions on Iran, attempted to steal trade secrets from a business partner and has threatened to enable Chinese spying through the telecom networks it's built across the West. Now Vodafone Group has acknowledged to Bloomberg that it found vulnerabilities going back years with equipment supplied by Shenzhen-based Huawei for the carrier's Italian business. From the report: While Vodafone says the issues were resolved, the revelation may further damage the reputation of a major symbol of China's global technology prowess. Europe's biggest phone company identified hidden backdoors in the software that could have given Huawei unauthorized access to the carrier's fixed-line network in Italy, a system that provides internet service to millions of homes and businesses, according to Vodafone's security briefing documents from 2009 and 2011 seen by Bloomberg, as well as people involved in the situation.

Anki, the San Francisco startup behind AI-imbued robotics toys like Overdrive, Cozmo, and Vector, today shuttered its doors after raising close to $200 million in venture capital from Index Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, J.P. Morgan, Andreessen Horowitz, and other investors. From a report: According to Recode , it'll lay off its entire workforce of just over 200 employees, each of whom will receive a week of severance. A failed round of financing was reportedly to blame. CEO Boris Softman told employees last week that a deal failed to materialize "at the last minute," as did acquisition interest from companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Comcast. Anki claimed to have sold 6.5 million devices total, and 1.5 million robots last August alone. (Cozmo was the top-selling toy on Amazon in 2017 with a community of more than 15,000 developers.) And in fall 2018, the company revealed that revenue was close to $100 million in 2017, a figure it expected to beat the subsequent year.

An anonymous reader writes: The Android developer website hosts a distribution dashboard that details the adoption of Google's mobile operating system versions. With over 2 billion active Android devices out there, this is useful information that Google updates on a monthly cadence. But Google stopped updating the page last year -- today marks the six-month mark. We've reached out to Google multiple times in the past half a year. In January, Google told us that the dashboard was undergoing site maintenance and that we'd hear back when it's fixed. In April, the company declined to comment.

Apple has issued a rare public statement following a report by the New York Times on Saturday that alleged Apple was cracking down on apps that its Screen Time feature emulates. From a report: The Times story says that over the past year, Apple has removed or restricted at least 11 of the 17 apps that offer Screen Time-like features. Screen Time is a feature on iOS 12 and later that allows a user to see how much time they spend on their iPhone, what apps they use the most, and the ability for the user or parents of the users to set limitations on the apps. While it's true that Apple has removed some of the apps from the App Store since the company introduced its Screen Time software, the company's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, said the Times did not publish the full reason Apple gave them as to why some of the competing apps were pulled. From Apple's response: Over the last year, we became aware that several of these parental control apps were using a highly invasive technology called Mobile Device Management, or MDM. MDM gives a third party control and access over a device and its most sensitive information including user location, app use, email accounts, camera permissions, and browsing history. We started exploring this use of MDM by non-enterprise developers back in early 2017 and updated our guidelines based on that work in mid-2017.

MDM does have legitimate uses. Businesses will sometimes install MDM on enterprise devices to keep better control over proprietary data and hardware. But it is incredibly risky -- and a clear violation of App Store policies -- for a private, consumer-focused app business to install MDM control over a customer's device. Beyond the control that the app itself can exert over the user's device, research has shown that MDM profiles could be used by hackers to gain access for malicious purposes.

The latest addition to Samsung's TV range is the Sero, a 43-inch TV that was designed with the millennial generation in mind and therefore pivots between horizontal and vertical orientations. From a report: It's a much smarter idea than the phrase "vertical TV" would lead you to believe. Acknowledging that most mobile content is vertical, Samsung says the Sero is designed to encourage young people to project more of their smartphone stuff onto the TV by allowing it to go vertical. Throwing in 4.1-channel, 60W speakers along with an integrated navy stand and a minimalist rear design, Samsung seems to hope this TV will function as both a music streaming hub and a handsome piece of furniture. When it's not used as a conventional TV or a phone enlarger, the Sero can also serve as a huge digital photo frame or a music visualizer, and Samsung's Bixby voice assistant will be on hand, too. Samsung intends to put the Sero on sale for 1.89m KRW (around $1,600) in its home market of South Korea at the end of May.

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute predict the dead may outnumber the living on Facebook within 50 years -- with as many as 4.9 billion no-longer-living users before the end of the century.

And then what? "These statistics give rise to new and difficult questions around who has the right to all this data, how should it be managed in the best interests of the families and friends of the deceased and its use by future historians to understand the past," said lead author Carl Ohman, a doctoral candidate at the OII.... "The management of our digital remains will eventually affect everyone who uses social media, since all of us will one day pass away and leave our data behind. But the totality of the deceased user profiles also amounts to something larger than the sum of its parts. It is, or will at least become, part of our global digital heritage."

Co-author David Watson, also a DPhil student at the OII, explained: "Never before in history has such a vast archive of human behaviour and culture been assembled in one place. Controlling this archive will, in a sense, be to control our history. It is therefore important that we ensure that access to these historical data is not limited to a single for-profit firm. It is also important to make sure that future generations can use our digital heritage to understand their history... Facebook should invite historians, archivists, archaeologists and ethicists to participate in the process of curating the vast volume of accumulated data that we leave behind as we pass away. This is not just about finding solutions that will be sustainable for the next couple of years, but possibly for many decades ahead."
Ohman adds that the issues don't end there, since Facebook "is merely an example of what awaits any platform with similar connectivity and global reach."

A reader tipped us off to a scathing editorial by the senior editor of Tom's Guide: Consider the F8 conference from a year ago that began with a prolonged apology over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a data mining firm got a hold of the personal data of 50 million Facebook users... Zuckerberg promised a Clear History feature that would let you easily delete information about apps and websites you've interacted with, sort of like erasing your browser history. "It's not enough to build powerful tools," Zuckerberg said at last year's F8. "We have to make sure they're used for good, and we will." So what's changed in the last year? Well, the Clear History feature never launched -- it's coming later in 2019, Facebook now says...

If we sat around previewing everything that's gone wrong for Facebook since last year's F8 conference, we'd wrap up just in time for the 2020 version to begin.
Meanwhile, a Forrester Research analyst complains the ongoing stream of news stories about Facebook's issues "proves they've never prioritized privacy over their business model," and the article argues there's just one way for Facebook to regain trust: If Zuckerberg wants to prove just how serious Facebook is about guarding user privacy...he should it prove it by announcing he's quitting.... [W]ith Zuckerberg still at the helm of Facebook, it will be hard to believe that the social media company is doing more than just paying lip service to the notion that it must do a better job of respecting the privacy and personal data of its users... Incidents where Facebook was too cavalier with user data stretch back years, and while the particulars change from scandal to scandal, the one constant is the guy sitting in the CEO chair.
The article's last line?

"Expect another apology a few months later when word of yet another breach leaks out."

An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: Southwest Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials who monitor the carrier were unaware that a standard safety feature, designed to warn pilots about malfunctioning sensors, on Boeing 737 Max jets was turned off when Southwest began flying the model in 2017, reported Andy Pastzor of the Wall Street Journal... Like other airlines flying the Max, Southwest didn't learn about the change until the aftermath of the Lion Air crash [in October of 2018], Pastzor reported.

According to WSJ's investigation, which reviewed documents, the carrier then asked Boeing to reactivate the alerts on its Max fleet, causing FAA inspectors to contemplate grounding the Max fleet until it was determined whether or not pilots needed additional training -- but the idea was quickly dropped. Once the feature was reactivated, some FAA officials again considered grounding Southwest's 737 Max fleet to determine whether pilots needed new training -- and again, the discussions, which happened via email, were dismissed after a few days, Pastkor reported.

Driving an electric vehicle in Germany produces more CO2 emissions than driving a diesel vehicle, a new study claims. schwit1 quotes the Brussels Times: When CO2 emissions linked to the production of batteries and the German energy mix -- in which coal still plays an important role -- are taken into consideration, electric vehicles emit 11% to 28% more than their diesel counterparts, according to the study, presented at the Ifo Institute in Munich.

Mining and processing the lithium, cobalt and manganese used for batteries consume a great deal of energy... The CO2 given off to produce the electricity that powers such vehicles also needs to be factored in, they say. When all these factors are considered, each Tesla emits 156 to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometre, which is more than a comparable diesel vehicle produced by the German company Mercedes, for example.
Instead the study suggests "Natural gas combustion engines are the ideal technology for transitioning to vehicles powered by hydrogen or 'green' methane in the long term."

United Airlines "has covered all the cameras in entertainment systems embedded in the backs of the airline's premium seats," reports BuzzFeed News. In a statement, a United Airlines spokesperson said: "As with many other airlines, some of our premium seats have in-flight entertainment systems that came with cameras installed by the manufacturer. None of these cameras were ever activated and we had no plans to use them in the future, however we took the additional step to cover the cameras. The cameras are a standard feature that manufacturers of the system included for possible future purposes such as video conferencing." United will continue to cover the cameras as it adds premium seats on additional aircraft, the spokesperson said....

A viral photo showing a camera in a Singapore Airlines in-flight TV display sparked an uproar online. After that, BuzzFeed News reported that some seatback screens on American Airlines, United Airlines, and Delta flights included cameras too.

American Airlines and Delta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Verge adds that Panasonic executives claimed the cameras "could one day provide improved entertainment features like seat-to-seat video calling and even gaming.

"United claims it did not specially order its screens with webcams."

"The equation is simple: The heavier the plane, the more environmentally unfriendly the trip is," notes one report -- yet airplanes are still relying on estimates for their total weight.

"A British tech start-up thinks it has a solution: weighing customers to more accurately calculate fuel costs..." "The capture of passenger weights is not complicated," says Roy Fuscone, Chairman & CEO of Fuel Matrix Limited. "A simple weighing device added to the current equipment will capture the weight and the software will register and transmit it in relation to a flight but not necessarily identified to a particular passenger...." The company's website states that benefits from this system include statistically robust information feedback based on airlines' data, significant reduction of CO2 emissions, significant fuel savings, and reduced mechanical stress on aircraft. If you're worried about this data being made public, Fuscone says that the company plans to enable the passenger to retain direct control of their own data so that they can delete it once it has been "employed in the interests of fuel efficiency."
It seems like it'd be easier to just weigh the plane after everyone's onboard -- or find some way to calculate weights using the boarding ramp. But the current plans aren't that simple, CNN reports: One proposal is for passengers to supply the information ahead of arriving at the airport, in the same way that they supply passport details. Otherwise, it could be made part of the security process before boarding. "You stand in a scanner that goes round you -- now, clearly while you're standing there being scanned, you could also be being weighed -- very discreetly -- if you haven't wanted to supply your information ahead of time," says Fuel Matrix CEO Roy Fuscone. "It would be very discreet, very private and very confidential."

Fuscone stresses that Fuel Matrix has been working with GDPR consultants to ensure the data would remain classified. He points out that airports already collect a lot of information on passengers. This would be just one more element to the equation. "Airports already use biometric data on passengers because they associate an image of your face with your boarding card, so that means that when you buy a ticket it's already in the contract that they can do that," says Fuscone. "So there's no problem with us introducing this, it can be done at various places during the journey through the airport and so we're starting to discuss with people involved in those various phases of the airport. If this is all done properly [...] it will alleviate carbon in the atmosphere and climate change and air pollution."

"Uber took down the taxi industry and now it wants a piece of public transit," reports CNN, in an article shared by dryriver: For years, as it aggressively entered new markets, Uber has maintained that it is a complement and ally of public transit. But that messaging changed earlier this month, when Uber released its S-1 ahead of its upcoming initial public offering. In the regulatory filing, Uber said its growth depends on better competing with public transportation, which it identifies as a $1 trillion market it can grab a share of over the long-term. Uber, which lost $1.8 billion in 2018, said it offers incentives to drivers to scale up its network to attract riders away from personal vehicles and public transportation.

Transportation experts say that if Uber grabs a big chunk of its target market -- 4.4 trillion passenger miles on public transportation in the 63 countries in which it operates -- cities would grind to a halt, as there would literally be no space to move on streets....

Uber's rival Lyft didn't describe public transportation as a competitor in its S-1. But while the corporate mission may be different, in practice there's little difference, experts say.
"Try to imagine the island of Manhattan, and everyone taking the subway being in a rideshare. It just doesn't function...." said Christof Spieler, who teaches transportation at Rice University and wrote the book Trains, Buses, People. "It's a world in which large cities essentially break down."

And transportation consultant Jarrett Walker tells CNN that while it may make business sense for Uber and Lyft to pursue this strategy, "it may also be a strategy that's destroying the world."

"Free apps marketed to people with depression or who want to quit smoking are hemorrhaging user data to third parties like Facebook and Google -- but often don't admit it in their privacy policies, a new study reports..." writes The Verge.

"You don't have to be a user of Facebook's or Google's services for them to have enough breadcrumbs to ID you," warns Slashdot schwit1. From the article: By intercepting the data transmissions, they discovered that 92 percent of the 36 apps shared the data with at least one third party -- mostly Facebook- and Google-run services that help with marketing, advertising, or data analytics. (Facebook and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.) But about half of those apps didn't disclose that third-party data sharing, for a few different reasons: nine apps didn't have a privacy policy at all; five apps did but didn't say the data would be shared this way; and three apps actively said that this kind of data sharing wouldn't happen. Those last three are the ones that stood out to Steven Chan, a physician at Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, who has collaborated with Torous in the past but wasn't involved in the new study. "They're basically lying," he says of the apps.

Part of the problem is the business model for free apps, the study authors write: since insurance might not pay for an app that helps users quit smoking, for example, the only ways for free app developer to stay afloat is to either sell subscriptions or sell data. And if that app is branded as a wellness tool, the developers can skirt laws intended to keep medical information private.
A few apps even shared what The Verge calls "very sensitive information" like self reports about substance use and user names.

UPDATE (4/28/19): Friday CNN reported that four different Boeing employees called the whistleblower hotline at America's Federal Aviation Administration after a fatal crash in March. But by Saturday the Wall Street Journal was reporting that "about a dozen" current and former Boeing employees and FAA staff members were alleging safety issues at Boeing.

Here's CNN's report on those first four whistleblowers from Boeing: A source familiar with the matter says the hotline submissions involve current and former Boeing employees describing issues related to the angle of attack sensor -- a vane that measures the plane's angle in the air -- and the anti-stall system called MCAS, which is unique to Boeing's newest plane.... The FAA tells CNN it received the four hotline submissions on April 5, and it may be opening up an entirely new investigative angle into what went wrong in the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max commercial airliners -- Lion Air flight 620 in October and Ethiopian Air flight 302 in March.

Among the complaints is a previously unreported issue involving damage to the wiring of the angle of attack sensor by a foreign object, according to the source. Boeing has reportedly had previous issues with foreign object debris in its manufacturing process; The New York Times reported metal shavings were found near wiring of Boeing 787 Dreamliner planes, and the Air Force stopped deliveries of the Boeing KC-46 tanker after foreign object debris was found in some of the planes coming off the production line.

Other reports by the whistleblowers involve concerns about the MCAS control cut-out switches, which disengage the MCAS software, according to the source.
CNN reminds readers that all of Boeing's 737 Max planes worldwide are still grounded

Tesla stock price "slumped 5% on Friday to its lowest in two years," reports Reuters, citing in part "a pitch by Chief Executive Elon Musk on autonomous cars that failed to win over investors." Musk is still battling to convince investors that demand for the Model 3, the company's first car aimed at the mass consumer market, is "insanely" high, and that it can be delivered efficiently to customers around the world.... On Wednesday, Tesla posted a worse-than-expected loss of $702 million for the March quarter. Musk said Tesla would return to profit in the third quarter and that there was "some merit" to raising capital....

Tesla's stock has now fallen 29 percent in 2019 and the company's market capitalization has declined to $41 billion from $63 billion in mid-December. After overtaking the market capitalizations of General Motors and Ford Motor in 2017, Tesla slipped back below GM in January, and on Friday it dipped back below the market value of Ford, which saw its stock surge 10% after reporting a better-than-expected quarter. Analysts now expect Tesla's revenue to expand 19% in 2019, compared with 83% growth in 2018 and 68% growth in 2017, according to Refinitiv.
MarketWatch helpfully illustrated the -5.04% drop in Tesla's stock price over three days by animating it over a picture of Elon Musk's face in front of a bullseye.

The world's top asteroid experts are gathering on Monday, April 29 at the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference in Washington D.C. to take part in a hypothetical asteroid impact exercise that will test how Earth responds to the threat of a potentially devastating space rock. CNET reports: NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office developed the exercise along with the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency. "The point is to investigate how NEO observers, space agency officials, emergency managers, decision makers, and citizens might respond to an actual impact prediction and evolving information," NASA said. The ESA Operations Twitter account is now live-tweeting the entire scenario, from the discovery of the asteroid (named 2019PDC) to the increasingly grim odds it might hit Earth. The first tweet sounds innocuous. It's a casual mention of international news reports confirming the asteroid's discovery.

The team is appending each tweet with the all-caps hashtag #FICTIONALEVENT so no one will freak out. It's still sobering to follow the events, which recently worsened from a 1 in 250 chance of impact to 1 in 100. ESA Operations will continue to update the plot in the coming week. Participants will receive daily briefings and must role-play the responses from astronomers, space agencies and governments. In reality, we know of no imminent threats from asteroids, but NASA is constantly tracking their movements through space.