dryriver shares a report from the BBC: In the 1960s it took five hours to fly from New York to Los Angeles, and just 45 minutes to hop from New York to Washington, DC. Today, these same flights now take six-plus hours and 75 minutes respectively, although the airports haven't moved further apart. It's called "schedule creep," or padding. And it's a secret the airlines don't want you to know about, especially given the spillover effects for the environment. Padding is the extra time airlines allow themselves to fly from A to B. Because these flights were consistently late, airlines have now baked delays experienced for decades into their schedules instead of improving operations.

"On average, over 30% of all flights arrive more than 15 minutes late every day despite padding," says Captain Michael Baiada, president of aviation consultancy ATH Group citing the U.S. Department of Transportation's Air Travel Consumer Report. The figure used to be 40% but padding -- not operational improvements -- boosted on-time arrival rates. 'By padding, airlines are gaming the system to fool you." He says if instead airlines tackled operational issues, customers would directly benefit. "Padding drives higher costs in fuel burn, noise and CO2 which means if airline efficiency goes up, costs go down, benefitting both the environment and fares."

The surveillance tool dubbed "Exodus" has been ported to the Apple iOS ecosystem. According to Threatpost, the spyware "can exfiltrate contacts, take audio recordings and photos, track location data and more on mobile devices." From the report: Earlier this month, word came that Google had booted a raft of Exodus-laden apps. According to Lookout Security, it turns out that iOS versions had become available outside the App Store, through phishing sites that imitate Italian and Turkmenistani mobile carriers. These are notable in that they abused the Apple Developer Enterprise program. According to Lookout and other research from Security Without Borders, the spyware appears to have been under development for at least five years. It's a three-stage affair, starting with a lightweight dropper that then fetches a large second-stage payload that contains multiple binaries with most of the spy goods housed within them. Finally, a third stage typically uses the Dirty COW exploit (CVE20165195) to obtain root privileges on a targeted device. In delving into the technical details, Lookout saw evidence of a fairly sophisticated operation, suggesting that it may have been initially marketed as a legitimate package for the government or law-enforcement sectors.

In order to spread the iOS app outside of the official App Store, the cybercriminals abused Apple's enterprise provisioning system, which allowed them to sign the apps using legitimate Apple certificates. Lookout's analysis found that the iOS variant is a bit cruder than its Android counterpart, and it lacks the ability to exploit device vulnerabilities. However, the apps were still able to use documented APIs to exfiltrate contacts, photos, videos and user-recorded audio recordings, device information and location data; and, it offered a way to perform remote audio recording, though this required push notifications and user interaction. The good news is that Apple has revoked the affected certificates for this particular crop of apps.

MDMurphy writes: While people have good and bad things to say about Tesla, one consistent thing has been that the cars emit zero emissions when operating. But in Europe, in exchange for cash, Tesla is merging its fleet with that of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA). The amount FCA is paying Tesla is presumably less than they would in fines if they were on their own. With this merging of the fleets, in Europe at least, a Tesla is no more clean than a diesel Fiat. "The Italian-American carmaker is behind on meeting the new standard, and the so-called open pool option available at the EU allows automakers to group their fleets together to meet the targets," reports Bloomberg. "Payments to Tesla, whose electric cars don't produce CO2 emissions, may amount to over 500 million euros, according to Jefferies."

Ars Technica reports on the strict new EU regulations: "From 2020, 95 percent of an automaker's new cars sold in the EU have to meet this target, with the remaining 5 percent falling under the law in 2021. And the penalties for failing are draconian: a $107 'excess emissions premium' per gram of CO2 over the target, for every single car registered in the EU that year. For some OEMs, this has the potential to be ruinous; if FCA's portfolio were the same in 2021 as it was in 2018, the automaker would have to pay some $3.12 billion, out of total net global profits of $4.1 billion."

A total of 14 HTC apps have been removed from the Play Store in the last three months. "Looking at the latest HTC Corporation activity in App Brain, we can see that the Sense Home launcher and contacts app People were unpublished just this month," reports Android Police. "12 more apps, including Calendar, Dot View, and Speak suffered a similar fate in February, while the Mail app that went and then returned is once again conspicuous by its absence." From the report: A few of the unpublished apps hadn't been updated in months, so it's likely they simply weren't being used or supported any longer and therefore had no reason to still be on the Play Store. However, apps like Mail, Contacts, and People are supposedly key alternative apps that come preinstalled on HTC devices, so it's a little strange to see those removed.

It's not clear exactly why this is happening, but there are a few possible reasons. HTC's smartphone business hasn't been doing all that well in recent years, and supporting a bunch of apps that few people are using doesn't make much sense. That said, there are still plenty more apps from the Taiwanese company still live on the Play Store. Perhaps the new phones HTC plans to launch in 2019 will ship with Android One, thus eliminating the need for its own stock apps altogether.

There has been an uptick in reports of video doorbells getting stolen, according to local news reports. A story adds: According to the reports, residents are waking up in the morning or coming home at night only to find their video doorbell devices stolen. Typically the devices are screwed into place on the outside of a house, often with mounts or braces to hold them in place. While they are wired into the wall, thieves don't seem to care too much about that. In most cases, residents appear to report the devices have been pried off the side of their home. In some cases, the cameras are able to capture an image of the perpetrator as they are stealing the device. Those images are usually available through mobile apps connected to the doorbell, which might help police track down the person responsible for the theft. However, there's no guarantee that officers will be able to find the thieves, especially if they steal the device while keeping their face and other identifying features covered while on camera. Police are suggesting that people keep track of the serial number on their devices in order to keep track of them and watch in case the devices appear on Craigslist, eBay, or other online marketplaces.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After April 15, inmates at the Adult Detention Center in Lowndes County, Mississippi will no longer be allowed to visit with family members face to face. Newton County, Missouri, implemented an in-person visitor ban last month. The Allen County Jail in Indiana phased out in-person visits earlier this year. All three changes are part of a nationwide trend toward "video visitation" services. Instead of seeing their loved ones face to face, inmates are increasingly limited to talking to them through video terminals. Most jails give family members a choice between using video terminals at the jail -- which are free -- or paying fees to make calls from home using a PC or mobile device.

Even some advocates of the change admit that it has downsides for inmates and their families. Ryan Rickert, jail administrator at the Lowndes County Adult Detention Center, acknowledged to The Commercial Dispatch that inmates were disappointed they wouldn't get to see family members anymore. Advocates of this approach point to an upside for families: they can now make video calls to loved ones from home instead of having to physically travel to the jail. These services are ludicrously expensive. Video calls cost 40 cents per minute in Newton County, 50 cents per minute in Lowndes County, and $10 per call in Allen County. Outside of prison, of course, video calls on Skype or FaceTime are free. These "visitation" services are often "grainy and jerky, periodically freezing up altogether," reports Ars. As for why so many jails are adopting them, it has a lot to do with money. "In-person visits are labor intensive. Prison guards need to escort inmates to and from visitation rooms, supervise the visits, and in some cases pat down visitors for contraband. In contrast, video terminals can be installed inside each cell block, minimizing the need to move inmates around the jail." The video-visitation systems also directly generate revenue for jails.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations does a poor job at notifying victims of a cyber-attack, a US government report released last week said. A story adds: FBI notifications arrive either too late or contain insufficient information for victims to take action, a report from the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General (DOJ-OIG) has concluded. The report analyzed Cyber Guardian, an FBI application for storing information about tips and ongoing investigations. The system also allows agents to enter details about suspected victims, which Cyber Guardian can later notify via automated messages. But the DOJ-OIG report said FBI agents are not using the system as it is intended. For example, interviews with 31 agents revealed that 29 entered victim information in a lead category called "Action," rather than the standard "Victim Notification."

A significant majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities across their lives, their locations, on other sites, and on other platforms. Jason Kint, writing for Nieman Lab: Our findings show that many of Google's data practices deviate from consumer expectations. The results of the study are consistent with our Facebook study: People don't want surveillance advertising. A majority of consumers indicated they don't expect to be tracked across Google's services, let alone be tracked across the web in order to make ads more targeted. Nearly two out of three consumers don't expect Google to track them across non-Google apps, offline activities from data brokers, or via their location history.

There was only one question where a small majority of respondents felt that Google was acting according to their expectations. That was about Google merging data from search queries with other data it collects on its own services. They also don't expect Google to connect the data back to the user's personal account, but only by a small majority. Google began doing both of these in 2016 after previously promising it wouldn't.

Working remotely can be really tough. To get some insight into how to do it better, Google conducted a two-year study involving data from 5,600 employees across the U.S., Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. From a report: Approximately 30% of the company's meetings involve staff in more than two time zones, and 39% involve more than two cities. Veronica Gilrane, manager of Google's People Innovation Lab, oversaw the study and has written a guide for how to make the most of distributed teams. Last week, she released a report of her findings. On the outset of the study, the team hypothesized that distributed teams might not be as productive as their centrally located counterparts. "We were a little nervous about that," says Gilrane. She was surprised to find that distributed teams performed just as well. Unfortunately, she also found that there is a lot more frustration involved in working remotely. Workers in other offices can sometimes feel burdened to sync up their schedules with the main office. They can also feel disconnected from the team. Gilrane says there are three key tricks to optimizing a remote workforce.

The first is being flexible about time zones. For her own teams meetings, which has people on the West Coast and East Coast, she makes sure meetings are at different times every week and are equally convenient for workers in each time zone. If workers extend into more varied time zones, like Greenwich mean time or China standard time, she says to make sure that a manager should alternate meeting times so that one time zone isn't inconvenienced more than another. Next, she suggests making time for team members across the globe to get to know one another. She thinks managers should be really thoughtful about when they use technology for meetings and when its more appropriate to fly out team members to meet in person. Though distributed teams cannot meet in person often, she thinks managers should encourage workers to get to know one another. Her team meets once a week for 30 minutes with no express agenda over video chat.

The European Commission has launched a pilot project intended to test draft ethical rules for developing and applying AI technologies to ensure they can be implemented in practice. It's also aiming to garner feedback and encourage international consensus building for what it dubs "human-centric AI" -- targeting among other talking shops the forthcoming G7 and G20 meetings for increasing discussion on the topic. From a report: The Commission's High Level Group on AI -- a body comprised of 52 experts from across industry, academia and civic society announced last summer -- published their draft ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI in December. A revised version of the document was submitted to the Commission in March. It's boiled the expert consultancy down to a set of seven "key requirements" for trustworthy AI, i.e. in addition to machine learning technologies needing to respect existing laws and regulations -- namely:

Human agency and oversight: "AI systems should enable equitable societies by supporting human agency and fundamental rights, and not decrease, limit or misguide human autonomy."
Robustness and safety: "Trustworthy AI requires algorithms to be secure, reliable and robust enough to deal with errors or inconsistencies during all life cycle phases of AI systems."
Privacy and data governance: "Citizens should have full control over their own data, while data concerning them will not be used to harm or discriminate against them."
Transparency: "The traceability of AI systems should be ensured."
Diversity, non-discrimination and fairness: "AI systems should consider the whole range of human abilities, skills and requirements, and ensure accessibility."
Societal and environmental well-being: "AI systems should be used to enhance positive social change and enhance sustainability and ecological responsibility."
Accountability: "Mechanisms should be put in place to ensure responsibility and accountability for AI systems and their outcomes."

EU data protection authorities are investigating whether the European Commission and other EU institutions comply with the bloc's strict data privacy rules in their software deals with Microsoft. From a report: The 28-country European Union adopted the landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) about a year ago, giving Europeans more control over their online information and privacy enforcers the power to impose hefty fines. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), which monitors the bloc's 70 institutions on their GDPR compliance, launched its investigation on Monday. The probe will look into the Microsoft products and services used by the institutions and whether the contractual agreements between them and the U.S. software company are GDPR-compliant. "When relying on third parties to provide services, the EU institutions remain accountable for any data processing carried out on their behalf," said Assistant EDPS Wojciech Wiewiorowski

If you stream Netflix on your iPhone or iPad, the app will no longer support Apple AirPlay. A report adds: This means that you won't be able to cast shows on Netflix from your iOS device to your Apple TV. Netflix's note says AirPlay is "no longer supported" due to "technical limitations." "With AirPlay support rolling out to third-party devices, there isn't a way for us to distinguish between devices (what is an Apple TV vs. what isn't) or certify these experiences. Therefore, we have decided to discontinue Netflix AirPlay support to ensure our standard of quality for viewing is being met," a Netflix spokesperson said in an email.

Viber, the chat and messaging app acquired by Japanese ecommerce titan Rakuten for $900 million five years ago, is introducing a new subscription service that lets users pay to have a local phone number that anyone can call. From a report: Founded in 2010, Viber has grown to claim more than 1 billion "registered users" globally, though the company doesn't reveal how many of those are active on the platform. As with similar messaging apps such as WhatsApp, users sign up to Viber using their own mobile phone number, which allows them to easily connect with other friends and contacts who have joined Viber. With Viber Local Number, which has been in closed beta until now, users can pay $4.99 per month to access a local telephone number for anyone outside of Viber to call or text (SMS).

For the caller, it costs whatever their network rates are for calling a local number, while the Viber user doesn't pay anything extra beyond their monthly subscription. There are caveats with the service for now, though: Viber users can't call out using their local number, and they can't respond to text messages using their local number. So if someone messages you on your special Viber number asking a question, you won't be able to respond. The company told VentureBeat that it plans to make the number function bidirectionally in the future.

New Zealand's privacy commissioner has lashed out at social media giant Facebook in the wake of the Christchurch attacks, calling the company "morally bankrupt pathological liars." From a report: The commissioner used his personal Twitter page to lambast the social network, which has also drawn the ire of prime minister Jacinda Ardern for hosting a livestream of the attacks that left 50 dead, which was then copied and shared all over the internet. "Facebook cannot be trusted," wrote Edwards. "They are morally bankrupt pathological liars who enable genocide (Myanmar), facilitate foreign undermining of democratic institutions. [They] allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target 'Jew haters' and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm. "They #dontgiveazuck" wrote Edwards. He later deleted the tweets, saying they had prompted "toxic and misinformed traffic."

An anonymous reader writes: This week marks the 50th anniversary for the Internet "Request for Comments" (RFC) series, which started in April 1969 with the publication of RFC1 titled "Host Software" authored by Stephen D. Crocker. The early RFCs were meant to be requests for comments on ideas and proposals, says Heather Flanagan, RFC Series Editor. Today over 8500 RFCs have been published, ranging from best practice information, experimental protocols, informational material, to Internet standards. An RFC has been published to mark the fiftieth anniversary to include retrospective material from individuals involved at key inflection points, as well as a review of the current state of affairs.

Salon just published a new interview with Susan Crawford, the author of "Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution -- And Why America Might Miss It." Crawford has spent years studying the business of these underground fiber optic cables that make fast internet possible. As it turns out, the internet infrastructure situation in the United States is almost hopelessly compromised by the oligopolistic telecom industry, which, due to lack of competition and deregulation, is hesitant to invest in their aging infrastructure... This is going to pose a huge problem for the future, Crawford warns, noting that politicians as well as the telecom industry are largely inept when it comes to prepping us for a well-connected future...

"The decay started in 2004 when -- maybe out of gullibility, maybe out of naivety, maybe out of calculation -- then-chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell, now the head of cable association -- was persuaded that the telcos would battle it out with the cable companies, that their cable modem services would battle it out with wireless, and all of that competition would do a much better job than any regulatory structure could at ensuring that every American had a cheap and fantastic connection of the internet. That's just turned out that's just not true. Since then, he deregulated the entire sector -- and as a result, we got this very stagnant status quo where in most urban areas -- usually the local cable monopoly has a lock in the market and can charge whatever it wants for whatever type of quality services they're providing, leaving a lot of people out."
"Because Americans don't travel," she adds, "you don't get the sense of what a third-world country the U.S. is becoming when it comes to communications."

"Snapchat pioneered Stories, the popular feature where users create and share ephemeral posts that disappear within 24 hours," reports Business Insider. "And now, it's taking them everywhere." Users are now able to share their Stories on third-party partner apps like Tinder -- and Snap is also sharing its Bitmoji's with Venmo and Fitbit.

TechCrunch reports: For 2.5 years, Snapchat foolishly tried to take the high road versus Facebook, with Evan Spiegel claiming "Our values are hard to copy". That inaction allowed Zuckerberg to accrue over 1 billion daily Stories users across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook compared to Snapchat's 186 million total daily users. Meanwhile, the whole tech industry scrambled to build knock-offs of Snap's vision of an ephemeral, visual future.

But Snapchat's new strategy is a rallying call for the rest of the social web that's scared of being squashed beneath Facebook's boot. It rearranges the adage of "if you can't beat them, join them" into "to beat them, join us". As a unified front, Snap's partners get the infrastructure they need to focus on what differentiates them, while Snapchat gains the reach and entrenchment necessary to weather the war. Snapchat's plan is to let other apps embed the best parts of it rather than building their own half-rate copies. Why reinvent the wheel of Stories, Bitmoji, and ads when you can reuse the original?

A high-ranking Snap executive told me on background that this is indeed the strategy. If it's going to invent these products, and others want something similar, it's smarter to enable and partly control the Snapchatification than to try to ignore it. Otherwise, Facebook might be the one to platform-tize what Snap inspired everyone to want.
The article concludes that Snap "needs all the help it can get if the underdog is going to carve out a substantial and sustainable piece of social networking."

jwhyche (Slashdot reader #6,192) tipped us off to some interesting speculation about AMD's upcoming Zen 2-based EPYC Rome server processors. "The new Epyc processor would be Gen 4 PCIe where Intel is still using Gen 3. Gen 4 PCIe features twice the bandwidth of the older Gen 3 specification."

And now Tom's Hardware reports: While AMD has said that a single EPYC Rome processor could deliver up to 128 PCIe lanes, the company hasn't stated how many lanes two processors could deliver in a dual-socket server. According to ServeTheHome.com, there's a distinct possibility EPYC could feature up to 162 PCIe 4.0 lanes in a dual-socket configuration, which is 82 more lanes than Intel's dual-socket Cascade Lake Xeon servers. That even beats Intel's latest 56-core 112-thread Platinum 9200-series processors, which expose 80 PCIe lanes per dual-socket server.

Patrick Kennedy at ServeTheHome, a publication focused on high-performance computing, and RetiredEngineer on Twitter have both concluded that two Rome CPUs could support 160 PCIe 4.0 lanes. Kennedy even expects there will be an additional PCIe lane per CPU (meaning 129 in a single socket), bringing the total number of lanes in a dual-socket server up to 162, but with the caveat that this additional lane per socket could only be used for the baseboard management controller (or BMC), a vital component of server motherboards... If @RetiredEngineer and ServeTheHome did their math correctly, then Intel has even more serious competition than AMD has let on.

After their Instagram accounts were hijacked, two different users say they contacted Instagram ten times -- and even proved their identity by submitting selfies -- but received no response.

And one Silicon Valley newspaper points out that If your account is hijacked at Instagram, Google, Facebook, or Twitter, "there's nobody to call... your options are limited to submitting an automated online form and hoping an actual human being gets back to you." In his book "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe," longtime Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee criticized tech companies' approach to user service: "The customer service department is reserved for advertisers. Users are the product, at best, so there is no one for them to call." That's by design at most companies that offer free online services. In "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59," a 2011 book by Douglas Edwards, he wrote that as Google was beginning to grow, co-founder Sergey Brin asked, "Why do we need to answer user email anyway?"

Problems have multiplied as the companies' user bases have skyrocketed. Instagram cited its scale (1 billion users, a spokeswoman pointed out) as one reason all user questions are routed first to an automated system. Facebook, Twitter and Google said they use a combination of humans and automation -- but mostly automation, and in Google's case, forums made up of other users -- to respond to users' concerns. A Google spokesman said the company focuses on making sure user accounts don't get hacked in the first place...
One woman discovered her Instagram account had been hijacked and was now posting pornography. "My grandma and cousins are going to block me..." she complained in a tweet, adding "Thanks for nothing!" And the article also cites another woman in California who says she lost access to more than 600 photos she'd posted on Instagram -- only half of which were backed up. Her response? She created a new Instagram account, this one with two-factor authentication, "and plans to change her password more often."

James Plouffe, a lead security architect at a Silicon Valley security software company, also suggests that if you ever do regain access to a hijacked account, "check the account recovery procedures to make sure they're yours, not your attacker's!"

This weekend SlashGear published "Reasons to Abandon Windows For Linux," making their case to "Windows users who are curious about the state of Linux for mainstream computing." It tries to enumerate specific reasons why Linux might be the better choice, arguing among other things that:

• Updates on Linux are fast and "rarely call for a restart" -- and are also more complete. "Updates are typically downloaded through a 'Software Updater' application that not only checks for operating system patches, but also includes updates for the programs that you've installed from the repository."

• Windows "tries to serve a variety of markets...cramming in a scattered array of features" -- and along those lines, that Microsoft "has gradually implemented monetization schemes and methods for extracting user data." And yet you're still paying for that operating system, while Linux is less bloated and "free forever."

• "Because less people use Linux, the platform is less targeted by malware and tends to be more secure than Windows"

The article also touches on a few other points (including battery life), and predicts that problems with Windows are "bound to get worse over time and will only present more of a case for making the switch to Linux."

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen shared the article, along with some new thoughts on why people really stay with Windows:

I think the main "excuse" is the perception of reliability, which is really laughable if you've actually read the EULA. Microsoft certainly doesn't have to help anyone at all. I would argue that Windows support is neither a bug nor a feature, but just a marketing ploy.

Their original submission suggests that maybe Linux needs to buttress the perception of its reliability with a better financial model -- possibly through a new kind of crowd funding which could also be extended to all open source software, or even to journalism).