Remember when Netflix used to be a DVD-by-mail company? Well, for 2.7 million subscribers in the US, it still is. From a report: The familiar red envelopes have been arriving in customers' mailboxes since 1998 and helped earn the company a healthy $212 million profit last year. Why are so many people still using this old-school service in the age of streaming? There are a number of reasons. Streaming Netflix video requires a lot of bandwidth -- so much so that Netflix consumes 15% of all US internet bandwidth, according to a 2018 industry report. But many rural areas of the country remain without broadband access. The Federal Communications Commission estimates 24 million Americans fall on the wrong side of this digital divide. The US Postal Service, however, can reach every ZIP code with those red envelopes. One such customer is Dana Palmateer, who lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

"Streaming movies was a no-go, so I just went with the disc service that Netflix offers," she says. "As all of us are doing it in these parts." But Netflix also has plenty of DVD customers in urban areas who prefer the service for its convenience and selection of movies, spokeswoman Annie Jung says. "People assume that our customers must either be super seniors or folks that live in the boonies with no internet access," she says. "Actually, our biggest hot spots are the coasts, like the Bay Area and New York." In 2017, the number of people who subscribed to Netflix's DVD subscription was about 4 million.

Online retail giant Amazon and the governments of eight South American countries have been given a final deadline to reach an agreement over how to use the ".amazon" web address extension after a seven-year dispute. From a report: What will happen next? It's a name that evokes epic proportions: the world's largest rainforest; a global tech company; and now a diplomatic saga nearing its end. This is the battle of the Amazon and it starts back in 2012. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that polices the world wide web's address system, decided to expand its list of generic top-level domains (gTLD) - the bit that comes after the dot in a web address. The new rules allowed companies to apply for brand new extensions, offering internet users and businesses more ways to personalise their website name and addresses. But eight countries containing the Amazon rainforest objected to the retail giant's plans concerning the new .amazon domain name.

The U.S. saw its highest level of layoffs in a first quarter since 2009, data from staffing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas released this week showed. From a report: Employers cut 190,410 jobs in the first 3 months of the year -- 10.3% higher than the number of layoffs announced in the fourth quarter of 2018 and 35.6% higher than job cuts announced in the same quarter of 2018. It's the highest number of job cuts in a quarter since 2015. The financial industry saw the third highest number of layoffs and the year-to-date total was 239% higher than it was in 2018.

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. BBC: 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.

It might seem innocuous enough to the passenger -- after all, what it can mean is that even though you take off late, you're pleasantly surprised to arrive on time at your destination. However, this global trend poses multiple problems: not only does your journey take longer but creating the illusion of punctuality means there's no pressure on airlines to become more efficient, meaning congestion and carbon emissions will keep rising. "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 US Department of Transportation's Air Travel Consumer Report.

Facebook is connecting not only old friends, but also new criminals. Researchers uncovered more than 70 Facebook groups openly selling black-market cyberfraud services, some of which they say had been running for up to eight years. From a report: The now-removed groups had more than 385,000 members in total and offered a variety of illegal services, from credit card information and identity theft to website hacking and email phishing, according to cybersecurity researchers at Talos, the threat intelligence division for the technology company Cisco. By searching for a few well-known fraud terms, the researchers exposed a sizable online black market hiding in plain sight on the world's most popular social media site. "Selling CVV fresh $5" read one post for stolen credit card numbers. "100k mail list fresh" touted another from the "Professional Spammer's and Hacker's [sic]" page. Both posts included purported screenshots of their wares.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: For the past three months, a cybercrime group has been hacking into home routers -- mostly D-Link models -- to change DNS server settings and hijack traffic meant for legitimate sites and redirect it to malicious clones. The attackers operate by using well-known exploits in router firmware to hack into vulnerable devices and make silent changes to the router's DNS configuration, changes that most users won't ever notice. Targeted routers include the following models (the number to the side of each model lists the number of internet-exposed routers, as seen by the BinaryEdge search engine): D-Link DSL-2640B - 14,327; D-Link DSL-2740R - 379; D-Link DSL-2780B - 0; D-Link DSL-526B - 7; ARG-W4 ADSL routers - 0; DSLink 260E routers - 7; Secutech routers - 17; and TOTOLINK routers - 2,265.

Troy Mursch, founder and security researcher at internet monitoring firm Bad Packets, said he detected three distinct waves during which hackers have launched attacks to poison routers' DNS settings --late December 2018, early February 2019, and late March 2019. Attacks are still ongoing, he said today in a report about these attacks. A normal attack would look like this:

1. User's computer or smartphone receives wrong DNS server settings from the hacked router.
2. User tries to access legitimate site.
3. User's device makes a DNS request to the malicious DNS server.
4. Rogue server returns an incorrect IP address for the legitimate site.
5. User lands on a clone of the legitimate site, where he might be required to log in and share his password with the attackers. Update: 04/05 16:45 GMT by M : The story adds, "According to Stefan Tanase, security researcher at Ixia, these campaigns have hijacked traffic meant for Netflix, Google,PayPal, and some Brazilian banks, and have redirected users to clone sites, hosted over HTTP, on the networks of known bulletproof hosting providers."

Amazon has been granted a patent that describes an "unmanned aerial vehicle with inflatable membrane" that would allow it to approach homes silently. The UAV "would have a balloon hidden inside the chasis," reports Slashgear. "That could be inflated using compressed gas, via a tank or chamber also carried on the drone. When the UAV roamed into an area where noise levels needed to be cut -- such as the delivery location, Amazon suggests -- the balloon could be inflated." From the report: In the process it would mean that the traditional drone propellers would have less work to do, since the UAV's buoyancy would be taken care of by the balloon. All the motors would be required for is general positioning. Amazon doesn't envisage flying the drone like a miniature zeppelin, however. Instead, the balloon system would be used to raise and lower the UAV to and from the delivery location. In that way it could help reduce the noise -- and energy -- involved in achieving a cruising altitude, whereupon the balloon would be deflated and gathered back into its dock.

The drone would proceed to the delivery destination, and then the balloon would be reinflated. That could be used to then gently lower the aircraft to the ground, to leave behind its package. Of course, having an inflating balloon near a system of fast-spinning propellers seems like a recipe for disaster, and so part of Amazon's patent outlines the retracting mechanism by which the two elements would be kept apart. The whole thing would be handled by an onboard autopilot, with the balloon reeled back into the storage area. The drone could either return the gas used for inflation to the compression chamber, or allow it to escape. Indeed, another possibility that Amazon suggests is a completely detachable balloon. That, the patent describes, might then float away, or biodegrade, rather than being reused.

After facing criticism for including two controversial members in its AI ethics board, Google told Vox that it's pulling the plug on the board altogether. "The inclusion of drone company CEO Dyan Gibbens reopened old divisions in the company over the use of the company's AI for military applications," reports Vox. But it's Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James who proved most controversial due to her company's hard line stance on immigration and LGBTQ rights. Thousands of Google employees signed a petition earlier this week calling for her removal. From the report: The board survived for barely more than one week. Founded to guide "responsible development of AI" at Google, it would have had eight members and met four times over the course of 2019 to consider concerns about Google's AI program. Those concerns include how AI can enable authoritarian states, how AI algorithms produce disparate outcomes, whether to work on military applications of AI, and more. But it ran into problems from the start.

Board member Alessandro Acquisti resigned. Another member, Joanna Bryson, defending her decision not to resign, claimed of James, "Believe it or not, I know worse about one of the other people." Other board members found themselves swamped with demands that they justify their decision to remain on the board. The panel was supposed to add outside perspectives to ongoing AI ethics work by Google engineers, all of which will continue. Hopefully, the cancellation of the board doesn't represent a retreat from Google's AI ethics work, but a chance to consider how to more constructively engage outside stakeholders. Here is Google's statement on the matter: "It's become clear that in the current environment, ATEAC can't function as we wanted. So we're ending the council and going back to the drawing board. We'll continue to be responsible in our work on the important issues that AI raises, and will find different ways of getting outside opinions on these topics."

One of Google's top minds in artificial intelligence has joined Apple in a director role. Ian Goodfellow said on his LinkedIn profile that he switched employers in March. He said he's a director of machine learning in the Special Projects Group. CNBC reports: Goodfellow is the father of an AI approach known as generative adversarial networks, or GANs. The approach draws on two networks, one known as a generative network and the other known as a discriminative network, and can be used to come up with unusual and creative outputs in the form of audio, video and text. GAN systems have been used to generate "deepfake" fake media content.

Goodfellow got his Ph.D. at the University of Montreal in 2014, and since then he has worked at OpenAI and Google. At OpenAI he was paid more than $800,000, according to a tax filing. His research is widely cited in academic literature. At Google Goodfellow did work around GANs and security, including an area known as adversarial attacks. People working on AI at Apple have previously done research that drew on the GAN technology.

Researchers from Northeastern Unviersity, the University of Southern Carolina, and tech accountability non-profit Upturn have released a paper that says Facebook's ad delivery system itself can steer ads intended to be inclusive toward discrimination without explicit intent. "In a paper titled, 'Discrimination through optimization: How Facebook's ad delivery can lead to skewed outcomes,' co-authors Muhammad Ali, Piotr Sapiezynski, Miranda Bogen, Aleksandra Korolova, Alan Mislove, and Aaron Rieke find that advertiser budgets and ad content affect ad delivery, skewing it along gender and racial lines even when neutral ad targeting settings are used," reports The Register. From the report: The researchers found that Facebook ads tend to be shown to men because women tend to click on ads more often, making them more expensive to reach through Facebook's system. That divide becomes apparent when ad budgets are compared, because the ad budget affects ad distribution. As the paper explains, "the higher the daily budget, the smaller the fraction of men in the audience." Such segregation may be appropriate and desirable for certain types of marketing pitches, but when applied to credit, employment and housing ads, the consequences can be problematic.

Ad content -- text and images -- also has a strong effect on whether ads get shown to men or women, even when the bidding strategy is the same and gender-agnostic targeting is used. In particular, the researchers found images had a surprisingly large effect on ad delivery. Ad URL destination has some effect -- an ad pointing to a bodybuilding site and an ad pointing to a cosmetics site had a baseline delivery distribution of 48 percent men and 40 percent men respectively. The addition of a title and headline doesn't change that much. But once the researchers added an image to the ad, the distribution pattern changed, with the bodybuilding site ad reaching an audience that was 75 percent male and the cosmetics ad reaching an audience that was 90 percent female. According to the researchers, their tests suggest, "Facebook has an automated image classification mechanism in place that is used to steer different ads towards different subsets of the user population." "In terms of credit, employment and housing ads, the problem with this system is that it discriminates where it shouldn't: Five ads for lumber industry jobs were delivered to an audience that was more than 90 percent men and more than 70 percent white; five ads for janitorial work were delivered to an audience that was more than 65 percent women and 75 percent black," the report adds. "Housing ads also showed a racial skew."

The latest findings come after years of criticism of Facebook's ad system. Last month, Facebook announced changes to the platform intended to prevent advertisers from deploying unfair credit, employment and housing ads. One week later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sued Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act.

Google is testing a new "Pilot Program" that puts a row of advertisements on the Android TV home screen. XDA Developers, which was the first to report the program, says: "We're currently seeing reports that it has shown up in Sony smart TVs, the Mi Box 3 from Xiaomi, NVIDIA Shield TV, and others." Ars Technica reports: The advertising is a "Sponsored Channel" part of the "Android TV Core Services" app that ships with all Android TV devices. A "Channel" in Android TV parlance means an entire row of thumbnails in the UI will be dedicated to "sponsored" content. Google provided XDA Developers with a statement saying that yes, this is on purpose, but for now it's a "pilot program."

Sony has tersely worded a support page detailing the "Sponsored channel," too. There's no mention here of it being a pilot program. Sony's page, titled "A sponsored channel has suddenly appeared on my TV Home menu," says, "This change is included in the latest Android TV Launcher app (Home app) update. The purpose is to help you discover new apps and contents for your TV." Sony goes on to say, "This channel is managed by Google" and "the Sponsored channel cannot be customized." Sony basically could replace the entire page with a "Deal with it" sunglasses gif, and it would send the same message.

The Internet Archive has come to the rescue once again. The nonprofit digital library this week unveiled the MySpace Music Dragon Hoard, a collection of 490,000 MP3 files from 2008 to 2010 on the long-abandoned social media site. From a report: While the recovered tracks make up less than one percent of the music lost by some 14 million artists, it is still a sizable cache weighing in at 1.3TB. The lost songs were given to the Internet Archive by an "anonymous academic group" that had downloaded the music over a three year period to study. When the group learned of the data loss last month, it offered all it had to be preserved.

The United Kingdom is working on legislation that would hold social media executives liable for harmful content distributed on their platforms. The leaked white paper comes less than 24 hours after Australia passed sweeping legislation that threatens huge fines for social media companies and jail for their executives if they fail to rapidly remove "abhorrent violent material" from their platforms. From the report: Under plans expected to be published on Monday, the government will legislate for a new statutory duty of care, to be policed by an independent regulator and likely to be funded through a levy on media companies. The regulator -- likely initially to be Ofcom, but in the longer term a new body -- will have the power to impose substantial fines against companies that breach their duty of care and to hold individual executives personally liable.

The scope of the recommendations is broad. As well as social media platforms such as Facebook and search engines such as Google they take in online messaging services and file hosting sites. Other proposals in the online harm white paper include:

- Government powers to direct the regulator on specific issues such as terrorist activity or child sexual exploitation.
- Annual "transparency reports" from social media companies, disclosing the prevalence of harmful content on their platforms and what they are doing to combat it.
- Co-operation with police and other enforcement agencies on illegal harms, such as incitement of violence and the sale of illegal weapons. "Companies will be asked to comply with a code of practice, setting out what steps they are taking to ensure that they meet the duty of care -- including by designing products and platforms to make them safer, and pointing users who have suffered harm towards support," the report says. "The code of practice is also likely to include the steps companies will be expected to take to combat disinformation, including by using fact-checking services, particularly during election periods, and improving the transparency of political advertising. Regulated firms will be expected to comply with the code of practice -- or explain what other steps they are taking to meet the duty of care. However, many questions are left to the regulator to determine."

Last year, Google announced that YouTube Music would be the company's primary streaming service that would eventually replace Play Music. We have now learned that in anticipation of this change, Google will close the Google Play Artist Hub that musicians use to directly interact with the Play Store. 9to5Google reports: Smaller, indie artists that were not signed by labels could use the Google Play Artist Hub to manage their presence on the Play Store and upload/sell songs. In an email today, Google told these musicians that the Artist Hub is shutting down on April 30th. YouTube Music is cited as the reason by Google: "With the launch of YouTube Music last year, we eventually plan to replace Google Play Music with YouTube Music. In anticipation of this change, we are shutting down the Artist Hub."

This portal allowed smaller artists to directly interact with Google to see statistics, and get paid for streams/purchases. Musicians can still sell their content in the Play Store and have content available for streaming in Play Music, but must now sign-up with a third-party distributor to handle that entire process. At the end of this month, all existing songs and albums uploaded through the Google Play Artist Hub will "no longer appear in the Google Play Store or Google Play Music service (including the paid streaming and free radio service)." Artists that would still like to "make [their] music available for purchase/download" have to republish, with Google providing a list of "YouTube partners," including AWAL, Believe, CD Baby, DistroKid, Stem, and TuneCore.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday rejected Republican attempts to weaken a bill that would restore net neutrality rules. The House Commerce Committee yesterday approved the "Save the Internet Act" in a 30-22 party-line vote, potentially setting up a vote of the full House next week. The bill is short and simple -- it would fully reinstate the rules implemented by the Federal Communications Commission under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler in 2015, reversing the repeal led by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in 2017.

Commerce Committee Republicans repeatedly introduced amendments that would weaken the bill but were consistently rebuffed by the committee's Democratic majority. "The Democrats beat back more than a dozen attempts from Republicans to gut the bill with amendments throughout the bill's markup that lasted 9.5 hours," The Hill reported yesterday. Republican amendments would have weakened the bill by doing the following: Exempt all 5G wireless services from net neutrality rules; Exempt all multi-gigabit broadband services from net neutrality rules; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that builds broadband service in any part of the U.S. that doesn't yet have download speeds of at least 25Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3Mbps; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that gets universal service funding from the FCC's Rural Health Care Program; Exempt ISPs that serve 250,000 or fewer subscribers from certain transparency rules that require public disclosure of network management practices; and Prevent the FCC from limiting the types of zero-rating (i.e., data cap exemptions) that ISPs can deploy. An additional Republican amendment "would have imposed net neutrality rules but declared that broadband is an information service, [preventing] the FCC from imposing any other type of common-carrier regulations on ISPs," reports Ars Technica. "The committee did approve a Democratic amendment to exempt ISPs with 100,000 or fewer subscribers from the transparency rules, but only for one year."

U.S. authorities gathered information about Huawei through secret surveillance that they plan to use in a case accusing the Chinese telecom equipment maker of sanctions-busting and bank fraud, prosecutors said on Thursday. From a report: Assistant U.S. Attorney Alex Solomon said at a hearing in federal court in Brooklyn that the evidence, obtained under the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), would require classified handling. The government notified Huawei in a court filing on Thursday of its intent to use the information, saying it was "obtained or derived from electronic surveillance and physical search," but gave no details. The United States has been pressuring other countries to drop Huawei from their cellular networks, worried its equipment could be used by Beijing for spying. The company says the concerns are unfounded. Brian Frey, a former federal prosecutor who is not involved in the Huawei case, said FISA surveillance, which requires a warrant from a special court, is generally sought in connection with suspected espionage.

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, is calling for the ban of popular battle royale game "Fortnite." The prominent member of the British royal family visited a YMCA in West London and spoke to mental health experts about addictive games and social media, saying that the latter is more addictive than drugs or alcohol. From a report: "[Fortnite] shouldn't be allowed," he said. "Where is the benefit of having it in your household? It's created to addict, an addiction to keep you in front of a computer for as long as possible. It's so irresponsible. It's like waiting for the damage to be done and kids turning up on your doorsteps and families being broken down." He also suggested that social media is "more addictive than alcohol and drugs." Further reading: Fortnite Creator Sees Epic Games Becoming as Big as Facebook, Google; and 'Fortnite' May be a Virtual Game, But It's Having Real-life, Dangerous Effects.

Microsoft has announced that starting with the Windows 10 May 2019 Update, which will hit general availability late next month, users will no longer be forced to install new Windows 10 feature updates as they become available. From a report: This comes after feedback from users who have had countless issues with updates breaking programs, losing files, and installing at inconvenient times. Microsoft has been working hard to improve Windows Update, and while the system is better than it was at launch in 2015, it's still not perfect. Now, users will have the option to not have to deal with feature updates when they are released.

What Microsoft is doing here is splitting Windows Update in two. The normal "check for updates" button will now only function for security and monthly patches. Feature updates now get their own area in Windows Update where the user can initiate the download and install process for the latest feature update available. If the user doesn't want to initiate that process, they don't have to. The user will be alerted that a new feature update is available every now and then, but at no point will the user be forced to install that update, as long as the version of Windows 10 they're currently running is still in support.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ComputerWorld : Of course, at one time, to get any work done with a computer, you first had to learn a lot, about computers, operating systems, commands and more. Eventually, "friendly" became the most important adverb in computing circles, and we've reached the point in user-friendliness that people don't even talk about it anymore. Today, Google has shown with its Chrome OS that most of us can pretty much do anything we need to do on a computer with just a web browser. But Google's path is not Microsoft's path. Instead, it's moving us first to Windows as desktop as a service (DaaS) via Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD). This bundles Windows 10 Enterprise, Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security and cloud-based system management into Microsoft 365 Enterprise.

The next step, Windows Virtual Desktop, enables companies to virtualize Windows 7 and 10, Office 365 ProPlus apps and other third-party applications on Azure-based virtual machines. If all goes well, you'll be able to subscribe to Windows Virtual Desktop this fall. Of course, Virtual Desktop is a play for business users -- for now. I expect Virtual Desktop to be offered to consumers in 2020. By 2025, Windows as an actual desktop operating system will be a niche product. Sound crazy? Uh, you do know that Microsoft already really, really wants you to "rent" Office 365 rather than buy Office 2019, don't you?

But what about games, you say? We'll always have Windows for games! Will we? Google, with its Google Stadia gaming cloud service, is betting we're ready to move our games to the cloud as well. It's no pipe dream. Valve has been doing pretty well for years now with its Steam variation on this theme. So where is all this taking us? I see a world where the PC desktop disappears for all but a few. Most of us will be writing our documents, filling out our spreadsheets and doing whatever else we now do on our PCs via cloud-based applications on smart terminals running Chrome OS or Windows Lite. If you want a "real" PC, your choices are going to be Linux or macOS.

WhatsApp announced this week that it is rolling out changes to its messaging app to give users more control over how they engage with groups, thereby addressing one of the most pronounced privacy issues on the platform. From a report: The Facebook-owned service said users will now have an option to control who can add them to groups. Users can choose between Nobody, My Contacts (people whose phone numbers they have saved in their phone), and Everyone -- assuming they don't have any reservations about random people adding them to different groups. To add someone who has restricted access, users will be required to send a private message to the person with an invite link. That individual can then decide whether they wish to join the group through the invite link, which will be active for 72 hours.