Facebook "unintentionally" harvested the email contacts of about 1.5 million of its users during the past three years. From a report: The activity came to light when a security researcher noticed that Facebook was asking users to enter their email passwords to verify their identities when signing up for an account, according to Business Insider, which previously reported on the practice. Those who did enter their passwords then saw a pop-up message that said it was "importing" their contacts -- without first asking permission, BI reported. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that 1.5 million people's contacts were collected in this manner since May 2016 to help build Facebook's web of social connections and recommend other users to add as friends.

A former student of The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, has pled guilty to charges that he destroyed tens of thousands of dollars worth of campus computers using a USB device designed to instantly overwhelm and fry their circuitry. The plea was announced today by the Department of Justice, FBI, and Albany Police Department. The Verge reports: Vishwanath Akuthota, the former student, now faces up to 10 years in prison (with up to three years of supervision after release) and a fine totaling up to $250,000. He was arrested and taken into custody in North Carolina on February 22nd, just over a week after he went on a spree of inserting the "USB Killer" device into 66 of Saint Rose's computers around various locations on campus. Such devices can be easily and freely purchased online and can overload the surge protection in many PCs.

Akuthota, 27, apparently made video recordings of himself inserting the malicious USB device into the computers and said "I'm going to kill this guy" as the PCs were overloaded and permanently ruined. So it's fair to say the FBI and APD had all the evidence they needed. In total, Akuthota caused $58,471 worth of damage. As part of his guilty plea, he has agreed to pay back that amount to the college, a small private school in New York's capital city. The Verge reached out to The College of Saint Rose for a statement on today's news, but a spokesperson said the college had been asked by law enforcement to refrain from commenting.

So-called "bad bots," tasked with performing denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or other malicious activities like automatically publishing fake content or reviews, are estimated to make up roughly 37.9 percent of all internet traffic. "In 2018, one in five website requests -- 20.4 percent -- of traffic was generated by bad bots alone," reports ZDNet, citing Distil Networks' latest bot report, "Bad Bot Report 2019: The Bot Arms Race Continues." From the report: According to Distil Networks' latest bot report, the financial sector is the main target for such activity, followed by ticketing, the education sector, government websites, and gambling. Based on the analysis of hundreds of billions of bad bot requests over 2018, simple bots, which are easy to detect and defend against, accounted for 26.4 percent of bad bot traffic. Meanwhile, 52.5 percent came from those considered to be "moderately" sophisticated, equipped with the capability to use headless browser software as well as JavaScript to conduct illicit activities.

A total of 73.6 percent of bad bots are classified as Advanced Persistent Bots (APBs), which are able to cycle through random IP addresses, switch their digital identities, and mimic human behavior. Amazon is the leading ISP for bad bot traffic origins. In total, 18 percent of bad bot traffic came from the firm's services, a jump from 10.62 percent in 2017. Almost 50 percent of bad bots use Google Chrome as their user agent and 73.6 percent of bad bot traffic was recorded as originating from data centers, down from 82.7 percent in 2017. The United States outstrips all other countries as a generator of bad bots. In total, 53.4 percent of bad bot traffic came from the US, followed by the Netherlands and China. The most blocked country by IP is Russia, together with Ukraine and India.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Microsoft recently rejected a California law enforcement agency's request to install facial recognition technology in officers' cars and body cameras due to human rights concerns, company President Brad Smith said on Tuesday. Microsoft concluded it would lead to innocent women and minorities being disproportionately held for questioning because the artificial intelligence has been trained on mostly white and male pictures. AI has more cases of mistaken identity with women and minorities, multiple research projects have found.

On the other hand, Microsoft did agree to provide the technology to an American prison, after the company concluded that the environment would be limited and that it would improve safety inside the unnamed institution. Smith explained the decisions as part of a commitment to human rights that he said was increasingly critical as rapid technological advances empower governments to conduct blanket surveillance, deploy autonomous weapons and take other steps that might prove impossible to reverse. Smith also said at a Stanford University conference that Microsoft had declined a deal to install facial recognition on cameras blanketing the capital city of an unnamed country that the nonprofit Freedom House had deemed not free. Smith said it would have suppressed freedom of assembly there.

Slashdot reader xavdeman writes: Hot on the heels of its announcement of the specifications of the next PlayStation, Sony has revealed a new crackdown on explicit content. Citing "the rise of the #MeToo movement" and a concern of "legal and social action" in the USA, Sony has said it wants to address concerns about the depiction of women in video games playable on its platform as well as protect children's "sound growth and development." The new rules were reportedly already responsible for puritan cutscene alterations in the Western PS4 release of the multi-platform title Devil May Cry 5, where lens flares were used to cover up partial nudity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Gamers of a certain age probably remember being wowed by the quick, smooth scaling and rotation effects of the Super Nintendo's much-ballyhooed "Mode 7" graphics. Looking back, though, those gamers might also notice how chunky and pixelated those background transformations could end up looking, especially when viewed on today's high-end screens. Emulation to the rescue. A modder going by the handle DerKoun has released an "HD Mode 7" patch for the accuracy-focused SNES emulator bsnes. In their own words, the patch "performs Mode 7 transformations... at up to 4 times the horizontal and vertical resolution" of the original hardware.

The results, as you can see in the above gallery and the below YouTube video, are practically miraculous. Pieces of Mode 7 maps that used to be boxy smears of color far in the distance are now sharp, straight lines with distinct borders and distinguishable features. It's like looking at a brand-new game. Perhaps the most impressive thing about these effects is that they take place on original SNES ROM and graphics files; DerKoun has said that "no artwork has been modified" in the games since the project was just a proof of concept a month ago. That makes this project different from upscaling emulation efforts for the N64 and other retro consoles, which often require hand-drawn HD texture packs to make old art look good at higher resolutions.

Four Samsung Galaxy Fold review units in the hands of major US tech journalists all experienced device-breaking display failures today. AndroidPolice: Steve Kovach of CNBC, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, and Dieter Bohn of The Verge have reported major failures of their phones' display panels, just two days after receiving them. To say this is a disaster for Samsung is probably underselling it. Well-known YouTuber MKBHD claims to be having similar problems, but hasn't posted any images. Bohn and Kovach claim their displays failed without removing the panel's protective film (Samsung says not to take it off), but both Gurman and Brownlee did. The company has yet to begin shipping the device to consumers. So far it has only handed the phone to select journalists, most of whom reported issue with it today.

pgmrdlm shares a report: Calls between T-Mobile users and Comcast's Xfinity Voice home subscribers will now be "verified," the latest move in the ongoing fight against robocalls. The two companies announced Wednesday that they have launched cross-network verification, allowing users to know that the calls they are receiving is from an actual person and not a spammer or robocaller.

They use a handoff system recommended by the FCC where the caller's network verifies that a legitimate call is being made with a "digital signature." The recipient's network then confirms the signature on its side. A number of major wireless and traditional home voice providers have pledged support for the verification method, including Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Charter, Cox and Vonage, with several announcing plans to roll out or test the feature in 2019.

Trailrunner7 shares a report: The discovery of a new, sophisticated team of hackers spying on dozens of government targets is never good news. But one team of cyberspies has pulled off that scale of espionage with a rare and troubling trick, exploiting a weak link in the internet's cybersecurity that experts have warned about for years: DNS hijacking, a technique that meddles with the fundamental address book of the internet. Researchers at Cisco's Talos security division on Wednesday revealed that a hacker group it's calling Sea Turtle carried out a broad campaign of espionage via DNS hijacking, hitting 40 different organizations.

In the process, they went so far as to compromise multiple country-code top-level domains -- the suffixes like .co.uk, or .ru, that end a foreign web address -- putting all the traffic of every domain in multiple countries at risk. The hackers' victims include telecoms, internet service providers, and domain registrars responsible for implementing the domain name system. But the majority of the victims and the ultimate targets, Cisco believes, were a collection of mostly governmental organizations including ministries of foreign affairs, intelligence agencies, military targets, and energy-related groups, all based in the Middle East and North Africa. By corrupting the internet's directory system, hackers were able to silently use "man-in-the-middle" attacks to intercept all internet data from email to web traffic sent to those victim organizations.

[...] Cisco Talos said it couldn't determine the nationality of the Sea Turtle hackers, and declined to name the specific targets of their spying operations. But it did provide a list of the countries where victims were located: Albania, Armenia, Cypress, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Cisco's Craig Williams confirmed that Armenia's .am top-level domain was one 'of the "handful" that were compromised, but wouldn't say which of the other countries' top-level domains were similarly hijacked.

The UK's age verification system for online pornography will become mandatory on 15 July, the government has confirmed. From a report: From that date, commercial providers of online pornography will be required to carry out "robust" age verification checks on users, in order to keep children from accessing adult content. Websites that refuse to implement the checks face being blocked by UK internet service providers or having their access to payment services withdrawn.The digital minister, Margot James, welcomed the introduction of the rules, saying: "Adult content is currently far too easy for children to access online."

She added, "The introduction of mandatory age verification is a world first, and we've taken the time to balance privacy concerns with the need to protect children from inappropriate content. We want the UK to be the safest place in the world to be online, and these new laws will help us achieve this." Will Gardner, the chief executive of Childnet, said: "We hope that the introduction of this age verification will help in protecting children, making it harder for young people to accidentally come across online pornography, as well as bringing in the same protections that we use offline to protect children from age-restricted goods or services."

Microsoft has lost control over a crucial subdomain that Windows 8 and Windows 10 use to deliver RSS-based news and updates to Live Tiles -- animated Windows start menu items. From a report: The subdomain (notifications.buildmypinnedsite.com) is currently under the control of Hanno Bock, a security researcher and journalist for German tech news site Golem.de. The subdomain was part of the buildmypinnedsite.com service that Microsoft set up with the launch of Windows 8, and more specifically to allow websites to show live updates inside users' Start pages and menus.

[...] Today Bock said the service no longer works. "The host that should deliver the XML files -- notifications.buildmypinnedsite.com -- only showed an error message from Microsoft's cloud service Azure," the researcher said. "The host was redirected to a subdomain of Azure. However this subdomain wasn't registered with Azure." Bock registered this subdomain on his Azure account and is currently sinkholing any requests it receives. He also notified Microsoft of the issue but said the company did not reply. "We won't keep the host registered permanently. There's a decent amount of traffic reaching this host and running up costs," the researcher said. "Once we cancel the subdomain a bad actor could register it and abuse it for malicious attacks," he warned.

The in-flight moving map, object of fascination for travel geeks and impatient fliers, is going in a new direction. But have your credit card ready: The beloved map will become one more revenue-generator for airlines [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled.], reports the Wall Street Journal. From the story: Maps are the most popular elements of in-flight entertainment systems, capturing passenger attention by posting live updates about a trip, most importantly when you'll arrive. Airlines offer movies, TV shows, podcasts and games on entertainment systems, but the boring map, which made its debut over 30 years ago, turns out to be the most useful, maybe even anxiety-reducing, focus of bored passengers. The map gives you a sense of control, showing not only exactly where you are, but altitude, airspeed, time zone, temperature, distance traveled and miles left to go. For some, there's a sense of adventure built in: You may never visit the Faeroe Islands, but you feel like you've been there when your flight draws a line over them.

Now manufacturers are giving maps a makeover. You'll be able to get encyclopedic details on Mount Fuji as you fly past, track your spouse's flight from your seat and zoom in for details on points of interest like the top 10 rides at Disneyland compiled from social media. The map will be loaded with data about your flight, down to which languages flight attendants onboard speak, when dinner will be served and how long you'll be in Brazilian airspace. And guess what? Airlines will be using the maps to sell you things like tickets to those popular amusement park rides. Hotels, theme parks, restaurants or other attractions may be throwing advertising onto your route. Shopping malls and stores, too. After all, they know where you're going.

At a TED conference, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the social media company needs to rethink how they incentivize user behavior to combat abuse and misinformation. "He suggested that the service works best as an 'interest-based network,' where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, no matter who posted it -- rather than a network where everyone feels like they need to follow a bunch of other accounts, and then grow their follower numbers in turn," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Dorsey recalled that when the team was first building the service, it decided to make follower count "big and bold," which naturally made people focus on it. "Was that the right decision at the time? Probably not," he said. "If I had to start the service again, I would not emphasize the follower count as much ... I don't think I would create 'likes' in the first place." Since he isn't starting from scratch, Dorsey suggested that he's trying to find ways to redesign Twitter to shift the "bias" away from accounts and toward interests.

And while Dorsey said he's less interested in maximizing time spent on Twitter and more in maximizing "what people take away from it and what they want to learn from it," TED's Chris Anderson suggested that Twitter may struggle with that goal since it's a public company, with a business model based on advertising. Would Dorsey really be willing to see time spent on the service decrease, even if that means improving the conversation? "More relevance means less time on the service, and that's perfectly fine," Dorsey said, adding that Twitter can still serve ads against relevant content. In terms of how the company is currently measuring its success, Dorsey said it focuses primarily on daily active users, and secondly on "conversation chains -- we want to incentivize healthy contributions back to the network."

Volkswagen will use Chinese software developers to help design a global autonomous vehicle architecture thanks to the prevalence of qualified programmers which carmakers are struggling to hire elsewhere, senior executives said on Monday. Reuters reports: As carmakers scramble to develop advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving functions, carmakers are struggling to find qualified engineers to build the software algorithms needed to teach cars the right reflexes. Volkswagen has 4,000 engineers in China, with an average age of 29, spread over five research and development sites and a rapidly growing number of software engineers. "In a short period from now they will be able to do 15 to 20 million lines of programming code on an annual basis," Volkswagen China's passenger cars chief Stephan Woellenstein said in Shanghai on Monday.

The prevalence of software engineers, combined with the country's willingness to roll out the infrastructure for connected and self-driving cars, will make China one of the first markets in which autonomous cars gain widespread acceptance, VW managers said. As a result, Chinese suppliers will help Volkswagen Group to design a global autonomous vehicle architecture, he said.

Apple is poised to begin mass production of iPhones in India this year, according to Foxconn Technology Group Chairman Terry Gou. This marks a big shift for the largest assembler of Apple's handsets that has long concentrated production in China. Bloomberg reports: Gou said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has invited him to India as his Taiwanese company plans its expansion in the country. Apple has had older phones produced at a plant in Bangalore for several years, but now will expand manufacturing to more recent models. Bloomberg News reported this month that Foxconn is ready to start trial production of the latest iPhones in the country before it starts full-scale assembly at its factory outside the southern city of Chennai.

India has become the fastest-growing smartphone market in the world, while China stagnates and Apple loses share to local competitors such as Huawei Technologies Co. and Xiaomi Corp. Apple has been a minor player in India, in part because of its high prices, but local manufacturing would help the Cupertino, California-based company avoid import duties of 20 percent. It's not yet clear how Apple's steps into India will affect its China operations. China has been the company's most important manufacturing base for years, home to Foxconn's biggest facilities and hundreds of other partners.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Electric vehicles, still a small percentage of the total automotive market in the U.S., are beginning to gain ground, according to analysis by IHS Markit. There were 208,000 new registrations for electric vehicles in the U.S. last year, more than double the number filed in 2017, IHS said Monday. That growth in EVs was heavily concentrated in California as well as nine other states that have adopted the Zero Emission Vehicle program. California was the first to launch the ZEV program a state regulation that requires automakers to sell electric cars and trucks there. Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont are also ZEV states.

California accounted for nearly 46 percent, or 95,000, of new EV registrations in 2018, IHS said. California has 59 percent of market share of registered electric vehicles in the U.S. More than 350,000 new EVs will be sold in the US in 2020. Those figures will give EVs a still tiny 2 percent share of the total U.S. fleet. By 2025, that figure is expected to rise to more than1.1 million vehicles sold or a 7 percent share, according to recent IHS Markit. The Tesla's Model 3 is the top selling all-electric in the U.S. so far this year, followed by the Chevy Bolt, Tesla Model X, Tesla Model S and the Nissan Leaf, according to estimates by Inside EVs.

According to a report by Brad Sams at Thurrott, Microsoft is going to expand its range of audio hardware with the introduction of a set of wireless earbuds. They will accompany the Surface Headphones, a premium-priced pair of wireless headphones that Microsoft released last year. Ars Technica reports: Microsoft has shipped earbuds before: the Zune media player came with earbuds with a feature that sounds simple but is actually ingenious: the earbuds were magnetic and would stick together back to back. The result? Much less cable tangling when you put them in your pocket or bag. Surface Headphones seem to be competitive with other noise-cancelling over-the-ear headphones: their wireless range is great, the noise cancelling is solid, and their volume and noise-cancelling dials are a joy to use, but their battery life and Bluetooth audio standard support are both weak. As such, Microsoft is not totally without experience in this area and has shown that it can engineer thoughtful, compelling designs. How the putative earbuds will stand out from the crowd remains to be seen, of course.

The existing Surface Headphones were codenamed Joplin, raising the question: Janis or Scott? The earbuds make the answer to that question clear; they're apparently codenamed Morrison, as in Jim, meaning that the over-the-ear headphones are clearly named for Janis. Sams says that "Surface Buds" has been mooted as their retail name, with a possible launch in 2019.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: Russia's lower chamber of parliament has adopted a bill that would expand government control over the internet, raising fears of widespread censorship. The State Duma on Tuesday overwhelmingly voted to support the bill, which still has to be approved by the upper chamber of Russian Parliament and signed into the law by the president.

The bill requires internet providers to install equipment to route Russian internet traffic through servers in the country. That would increase the power of state agencies to control information while users would find it harder to circumvent government restrictions, and the quality of the connection may suffer. Proponents of the bill say it is a defense measure in case the United States or other hostile powers cut off the internet for Russia.

Twitter has verified more than 10,000 accounts in recent months, despite putting its verification program on hold. From a report: The company has said little publicly about verification, which it suspended in 2017 following backlash over its verification of a white supremacist. But data viewed by Mashable suggests the company is verifying a flurry of accounts each month despite the supposed break. Celebrities, and others with backchannel connections to the company, are able to become verified as Twitter ignores everyday users and those without insider access. In many ways, this secretive process is now more opaque and unfair than it was when anyone could apply on Twitter's website. At a time when Twitter says it's trying to be more transparent about its rules, the lack of an official verification policy is hurting groups already susceptible to abuse, critics say. Further reading: 'Verified' Is Now a Derogatory Term on Twitter.

Google has pulled popular video app TikTok from the Play Store in India following a local court's direction, stoking fear among some activists that this could set a dangerous precedent. From a report: TikTok, which has amassed over 120 million monthly active users in India, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. TikTok, operated by Chinese conglomerate Bytedance, has come under hot water in India in recent weeks after some users complained about inappropriate content, including pornography, on the video service. A high court in Southern state of Tamil Nadu urged the central government to ban the download of TikTok in India earlier this month, alleging that TikTok "encouraged pornography" and risked spoiling the "future of the youngsters and mindset of the children."

Bytedance challenged the state court's order in India's apex Supreme Court last week, asserting that such a move would undermine freedom of speech in the nation. The Supreme Court referred the case back to the state court on Tuesday, thereby rejecting Bytedance's appeal to call off the ban. The government sent a notice to Google and Apple earlier today to pull the app from their respective app stores, preventing any more downloads, as first reported by The Economic Times. Google's Android mobile operating system runs on more than 95% of smartphones in India, according to estimates from research firm Counterpoint. Notably, users who already have TikTok app installed on their Android smartphone can continue to use the service.