Instant messaging service Telegram has added a feature that lets a user delete messages in one-to-one and/or group private chats, after the fact, and not only from their own inbox. From a report: The new 'nuclear option' delete feature allows a user to selectively delete their own messages and/or messages sent by any/all others in the chat. They don't even have to have composed the original message or begun the thread to do so. They can just decide it's time. Let that sink in. All it now takes is a few taps to wipe all trace of a historical communication -- from both your own inbox and the inbox(es) of whoever else you were chatting with (assuming they're running the latest version of Telegram's app).

"My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications," brags New York Times technology writer Mike Isaac. "When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web.

"That's because my new social network is an email newsletter." Every week or so, I blast it out to a few thousand people who have signed up to read my musings. Some of them email back, occasionally leading to a thoughtful conversation. It's still early in the experiment, but I think I love it. The newsletter is not a new phenomenon. But there is a growing interest among those who are disenchanted with social media in what writer Craig Mod has called "the world's oldest networked publishing platform." For us, the inbox is becoming a more attractive medium than the news feed...

For me, the change has happened slowly, but the reasons for it were unmistakable. Every time I was on Twitter, I felt worse. I worried about being too connected to my phone, too wrapped up in the latest Twitter dunks... Now, when I feel the urge to tweet an idea that I think is worth expounding on, I save it for my newsletter... It's much more fun than mediating political fights between relatives on my Facebook page or decoding the latest Twitter dustup...

"You don't have to fight an algorithm to reach your audience," Casey Newton, a journalist who writes The Interface, a daily newsletter for technology news site The Verge, told me. "With newsletters, we can rebuild all of the direct connections to people we lost when the social web came along."
The article suggests a broader movement away from Facebook's worldview to more private ways of sharing, like Slack . "We felt this growing sense of despair in traditional social media," says the CEO of Substack, makers of a newsletter-writing software. "Twitter, Facebook, etc. -- they've all incentivized certain negative patterns."

eatmorekix quotes Vice: It only took around ten seconds. On Wednesday, I created a fresh Instagram account, and followed 'Beware the Needle', a user with 34,000 followers which posts a steady stream of anti-vaccination content. I also followed the user's "backup" account mentioned in its bio, the creator clearly aware that Instagram may soon ban them. Instagram's "Suggested for You" feature then recommended I follow other accounts, including "Vaccines are Genocide" and "Vaccine Truth." I followed the latter, and checked which accounts Instagram now thought would be a good fit for me: another 24 accounts that were either explicitly against vaccinations in their profile description, or that posted anti-vaccine content.

They included pseudo-scientists claiming that vaccines cause autism; accounts with tens of thousands of followers promising the "truth" around vaccinations through memes and images of misleading statistics, as well as individual mothers spouting the perceived, but false, dangers of vaccinating children against measles, polio, and other diseases.
"Instagram told Motherboard it will be looking at different ways to minimize these sorts of recommendations," the article reports, but "did not give a more specific timeframe for this change...."

"For the moment, however, Instagram remains a hot bed of easy to discover misinformation on vaccinations."

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: As most of the world condemned last week's mass shooting in New Zealand, a contrary story line emerged on 8chan, the online message board where the alleged shooter had announced the attack and urged others to continue the slaughter. "Who should i kill?" one anonymous poster wrote. "I have never been this happy," wrote another. "I am ready. I want to fight...." The persistence of the talk of violence on 8chan has led some experts to call for tougher actions by the world's governments, with some saying the site increasingly looks like the jihadi forums organized by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda...

8chan's founder, Fredrick Brennan, said Jim Watkins [8chan's sole administrator] owns other Internet businesses and has built a technical fortress to guard 8chan from potential takedowns: He owns nearly every component securing the site to the backbone of the Web, including its servers, which are scattered around the world. "You can send a complaint, but no one's going to do anything. He owns the whole operation," Brennan said. "It's how he keeps people confused and guessing...." Watkins is content to lose money, Brennan said, because he sees it as a pet project: "8chan is like a boat to Jim. It doesn't matter if it makes money. He just enjoys using it...."

8chan, however, is shielded in another way: the U.S. web-services giant Cloudflare, which helps websites guard against "distributed denial of service," or DDoS, attacks that online vigilante groups have used to target 8chan in the past.
The Post reports that Brennan "worries there are no true technical solutions beyond a total redesign of the Web, focused around identification and moderation, that could undermine it as a venue for free expression." Brennan tells the Post that "The Internet as a whole is not made to be censored. It was made to be resilient. And as long as there's a contingent of people who like this content, it will never go away."

On Tuesday, 8chan posted tips on Twitter for what to do "If your ISP is blocking a website you'd like to browse" -- a tweet which is now pinned to the top of its feed.

An airline passenger "passed a security checkpoint with a loaded gun magazine," reports the Associated Press, citing information from an airport duty manager: Bob Rotiski said the passenger who apparently had visited a shooting range packed a loaded magazine in his carry-on bag. He said an officer identified the magazine during security screening, but the wrong bag was pulled from the line. By that time, the passenger had already left the checkpoint with the bag containing the magazine....

Security lines were closed and flights were temporarily grounded at a San Francisco International Airport terminal...for nearly an hour, and United Airline flights out of Terminal 3 were grounded Saturday morning as TSA officers looked for the passenger.
"Rotiski said the lines reopened after officers located the passenger and brought him back for re-screening."

Citing new warnings from several analysts, Fortune reports that Facebook's business model now faces threats from "a growing array of bi-partisan criticism and fresh regulatory issues." Analysts are now flagging an opinion piece in The New York Times, by Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, a Democrat who's chairman of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. Cicilline wrote about the company's "pattern of misconduct" and called for "an investigation into whether Facebook's conduct has violated antitrust laws."

"Investors should pay attention to the fact that there are people sitting in some very relevant seats that are attacking Facebook in ways that we have not seen in our almost two decade history of covering internet companies," Stifel's Scott Devitt wrote in a note. Recent issues may be transient, Devitt said, and Facebook shares may prove cheap relative to the company's earnings power, but "something feels very different to us this time." He flagged Cicilline's item as "further evidence that this may be more than a passing fad." He rates Facebook shares hold.

Beacon Policy Advisors said in a note that "the potential action that regulators at the FTC could take against Facebook is far more significant" than rhetoric from Congress about reining the company in, whether via forced separation of Instagram or WhatsApp or by taxing companies that collect user data. A "substantial financial penalty," along with other remedies, may be part of a settlement with the FTC in the coming weeks regarding user data provided to Cambridge Analytica, they said.

Court documents unsealed Tuesday showed just how much information America's FBI was able to gather on Donald Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen -- from both Google and Apple products. An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Notably, the FBI made use of Cohen's use of Touch ID and Face ID on his Apple devices, which allow users to quickly log into iPhones and computers by scanning their face or fingerprint rather than typing in a password... But that gives law enforcement an additional means to access those devices. In one warrant application for Cohen, an FBI agent requested authorization "to press the fingers (including thumbs) of Cohen to the Touch ID sensors of the Subject Devices, or hold the Subject Devices in front of Cohen's face, for the purpose of attempting to unlock the Subject Devices via Touch ID or Face ID...."

One warrant requested not simply access to three of Cohen's Gmail accounts, as well as other email accounts, but also some of the wide array of information Google keeps for its users by default, including search history, web cookies associated with an account, device information, and a host of other metadata categories. One affidavit describes how the FBI narrowed down Cohen's temporary location at the Loews Regency Hotel in New York through his cell phone location data. Agents then used a "triggerfish" -- a reference to a stingray, or IMSI catcher, a suitcase-sized device that mimics a cell tower to convince a cell phone to connect and reveal its location...

Prosecutors also made use of a new law that Trump recently signed. Investigators in the Southern District of New York compelled Google to turn over some documents on Cohen, but the tech giant initially "declined to produce data that it stored on computer servers located outside of the United States," according to an affidavit submitted to the court by an FBI agent working on Cohen's case. Weeks later, Trump signed the CLOUD Act into law, which gave US law enforcement more legal pathways to pursue data stories overseas.... In an April 2018 affidavit, the FBI agent argued that "providers are required to disclose data even if it is stored abroad" under the new law. The judge approved the new search warrant later that day, giving investigators access to additional information from Google, including Cohen's emails, attachments, address book and files stored on Google Drive.
One technology law expert told CNN that police now seek access to more and more information.

"I think any of the electronic debris that people leave online on these services is all potentially subject to being used against you."

In what may be his final year of technology predictions, columnist Robert X. Cringely argues "I can't say that we're going to see anything beyond more beta tests of self-driving cars in 2019... We simply aren't ready and probably won't be for years to come...."

"The problem isn't with the self-driving cars, it's with the cars that aren't self-driving, cars that are driven by idiots like me." It will eventually happen. Once half the fleet has been replaced with cars that could be self-drivers if we allowed them to be, then there will be a huge financial incentive to get the other half off the street. This will be especially the case if climate change is still accelerating. I'm guessing that most cars from 2020-on could be self-driving with only a software upgrade, which is why Elon Musk is predicting Tesla will have full autonomy by the end of 2019. But notice that Elon isn't predicting Tesla will be allowed to have its cars drive themselves everywhere...

So why is the world talking so much about self-driving cars and full autonomy? Some of it is Tesla hype, some of it is marketing as the car companies try to get us to buy cars that will eventually be self-driving, but probably not until their second owners. And the other reason why we're talking so much about self-driving cars is because Uber is planning to go public later this year...an IPO that will go smoother if the driving public thinks autonomous cars are something that we'll be seeing soon. Uber has a labor problem. If it can spin a story that surly and expensive human drivers are soon to be replaced with electrons, that will be very reassuring to Wall Street. But as I explained, it also isn't true.

The world isn't yet ready -- something Uber and Tesla and all the others will suddenly admit in about a year (post-IPO).
Cringely also argues that the problem isn't just the "millions of drivers who are still controlling their vehicles the old fashion way, which is often in a barely competent fashion..."

"We keep our cars longer because they don't rust and we can't afford to replace them so often. The result is that while we could expect a complete turnover in car technology every decade, now it takes closer to two decades."

Google's Play Store made a bad mistake on Tuesday, long-time Slashdot reader sombragris writes: KDE Connect, a project designed to enable seamless communcation and control between a desktop computer and a mobile phone, was suddenly removed from Android's Google Play store. According to a Twitter thread by Albert Vaca, KDE Connect's maintainer, the removal was allegedly because the app was in breach of Google's new SMS policy.

There's an exemption which applies to KDE Connect, but the maintainer was unable to contact anyone at Google to provide support. "There is simply no way to talk to a human being at @Google", he said.
Cintora also announced on Twitter that while trying to comply with the Play Store's new policy, he'd initially been stopped again by technical problems. "The @GooglePlay console gives me an internal error, so I can't upload the version without SMS support."

But on Thursday Cintora tweeted that KDE Connect "finally got approved, and SMS support is back in version 1.12.4, both on the Play Store and F-Droid!" Cintora credits this resolution partly to his Twitter thread, which got over half a million impressions.

Its last tweet now features a picture of a celebrating parrot.

Several major ISPs in Australia temporarily blocked access to 8chan, along with "dozens" of web sites that hosted video of last week's mass shooting in Christchurch New Zealand, Ars Technica reports -- noting that the ISPs acted on their own in response to "community expectations."

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan (who "cut ties" with the site in December) is now criticizing 8chan moderators for their slowness in removing posts inciting violence, including last week's post from the Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant: Their reluctance to do so, along with the proliferation of posts on 8chan praising Tarrant's actions, have persuaded Brennan that the toxic, white-supremacist culture that lives on parts of the site could someday be linked to another mass shooting....

Brennan, 25 years old, expressed regret that the site had consumed so much of his life. "I didn't spend enough time making friends in real life," he said. High-school events and classes in upstate New York didn't matter to him at all. What mattered was the community of like-minded provocateurs, trolls, libertarians and conservative thinkers he discovered online as a boy and that formed his identity as a young man. "I just feel like I wasted too much time on this stuff," he said.
Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell (in a Post video) argues that 8chan "has grown from this central place for tech libertarians, trolls, just people looking to get a rise out of other people online, and it's really radicalized into this place of overt neo-Nazi, white supremacist, racist, sexist, anti-everything discourse...

"We haven't really reckoned with how to deal with the negative parts of easy and free and anonymous connectivity around the world, and there's no real good mechanism for solving a problem like that."

New York magazine's Intelligencer remembers last month's crash of a Boeing 767 carrying cargo for Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service -- and shares a new theory that its cause wasn't a suicidal pilot or an autopilot malfunction: In online pilot discussion forums, a third idea has been gaining adherents: that the pilots succumbed to a phenomenon called somatogravic illusion, in which lateral acceleration due to engine thrust creates the sensation that one is tipping backward in one's seat. The effect is particularly strong when a plane is lightly loaded, as it would be at the end of a long flight when the fuel tanks are mostly empty, and in conditions of poor visibility, as Atlas Air 3591 was as it worked its way through bands of bad weather. The idea is that perhaps one of the pilots accidentally or in response to wind shear set the engines to full power, and then believed that the plane had become dangerously nose-high and so pushed forward on the controls. This would cause a low-g sensation that might have been so disorienting that by the time the plane came barreling out of the bottom of the clouds there wasn't enough time to pull out of the dive.

It has been speculated that this might have been the cause of another bizarre and officially unsolved accident from three years ago: Flydubai Flight 981, which crashed 2016 in Rostov-on-Don, Russia.... While it's still too early to draw any kind of conclusions about Atlas Air 3591, the possibility exists that a firm conclusion will never be drawn -- and if it is, the cause could turn out not to be a design flaw or software malfunction that can be rectified, but a basic shortcoming in human perception and psychology that cannot be fixed as long as humans are entrusted with the control of airplanes.

"The fight against robocalls can even bring telecom rivals together," reports USA Today: AT&T and Comcast said Wednesday that they can authenticate calls made between the two different phone providers' networks, a potential industry first and the latest in the long-running battle against spam calls... The system, which uses a method developed in recent years, verifies that a legitimate call is being made instead of one that has been spoofed by spammers, scammers or robocallers with a "digital signature." The recipient network then confirms the signature on its side. The companies said consumers will get a notification that a call is verified, but exactly what that will look like is not yet known.

Both AT&T and Comcast will roll out the system to home phone users later this year at no extra charge. AT&T also said it will introduce the feature to its mobile users this year... Other major wireless and traditional home voice providers have pledged support for the verification method, including Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Charter, Cox and Vonage, with several announcing plans to roll out or test the feature in 2019.
The day Comcast and AT&T made their announcement, AT&T's CEO was giving a live interview that was interrupted by a robocall.

"More than 3 million people have signed a petition to cancel Brexit on the U.K. government's official petitions website -- so many that the website crashed multiple times," reports Time: The petition had received some 600,000 signatures at a rate of 1,500 every 60 seconds before the site crashed at about 9 a.m. U.K. time on Thursday, the Guardian reported. By mid afternoon, the site was back online but suffering intermittent outages. There were 2 million signatures by Thursday evening and 3 million by midday Friday...

The U.K. government must now allow a debate on the petition's contents in parliament.
The Guardian notes that the CTO of company that built the petition site had bragged in a tweet Wednesday that the 1,000 signatures per minute was "Not too bad, but nowhere near crashing the site --you all need to try harder tomorrow."

By the next morning he had tweeted âoeWell done everyone -- the site crashed because calculating the trending count became too much of a load on the database."

A new study finds that states with bans on texting while driving saw an average 4% reduction in emergency department visits after motor vehicle crashes, an equivalent of 1,632 traffic-related emergency department visits per year. CNN reports: Researchers examined emergency department data across 16 US states between 2007 and 2014. The states were picked based on the availability of information regarding motor vehicle accident injuries for which emergency department treatment was needed. In the United States, 47 out of 50 states currently have laws restricting texting while driving. Of the 16 states researchers looked at in the study, all but one (Arizona) had one of these laws.

The states that had texting bans, regardless of the type or who it applied to, saw a 4% average reduction in emergency department visits, according to the results published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health. The states that chose to implement primary bans on all drivers saw an 8% reduction in crash-related injuries. Drivers of all ages, even those older 65, who are typically not known for texting while driving, saw reductions in the number of injuries following crashes.

Freshly Exhumed writes: Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has revealed that senior White House advisor Jared Kushner's lawyer admitted in December that his client "continues to use" WhatsApp to conduct official White House business. The chairman also said that a lawyer for Ivanka Trump and Mr. Kushner told the committee late last year that they additionally used private email accounts for official White House business in a way that may have violated federal records laws. Mr Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell could not say whether his client used WhatsApp to share classified information. Regardless, Cummings says the communications raise questions about whether Kushner and other officials violated the Presidential Records Act, which requires the president and his staff "take all practical steps to file personal records separately from Presidential records." As for Ivanka's use of a personal email account to conduct official business, her lawyer says she sent the emails before she was briefed on the rules.

If you're not familiar with WhatsApp, here's what you should know about it: "As of January 2019, more than 1.5 billion users in over 180 countries use WhatsApp, created in 2009 as an alternative to text messaging," reports USA Today. "Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 to make a bigger play in the rapidly-growing messaging market, along with its own Messenger platform, which also boasts 1.5 billion users." The service features end-to-end encryption, meaning the sender and recipient are the only ones who can view the messages.

Earlier this month, Microsoft made the source code for its Windows calculator available on GitHub. This has spurred developers to add new features to the app, like a new graphing mode that will make its way to the official Windows Calculator app. The "Graphing Mode" is one of 30+ suggestions that open-source contributors have proposed so far. The ZDNet reports: As its name implies, Graphing Mode will allow users to create graphs based on mathematical equations, in a similar way to Matlab's (way more advanced) Plotting Mode. The feature was proposed by Microsoft engineer Dave Grochocki, also a member of the Windows Calculator team. In a GitHub issue Grochocki submitted to support his proposal, he argued that a graphing mode would help students learn algebra easier.

"High school algebra is the gateway to mathematics and all other disciplines of STEM," Grochocki said. "However, algebra is the single most failed course in high school, as well as the most failed course in community college." By adding a Graphing Mode to Windows Calculator, an app included with all Windows 10 versions, the Microsoft engineer hopes to provide students and teachers with a free tool to help schools across the world. "Physical graphing calculators can be expensive, software solutions require licenses and configuration by school IT departments, and online solutions are not always an option," he added. "Graphing capabilities in their daily tools are essential for students who are beginning to explore linear algebra as early as 8th grade. [...] At present, Windows Calculator does not currently have the needed functionality to meet the demands of students."

There's no timeline for when the new graphing mode will arrive, but it should arrive soon.

dmoberhaus writes: In a major breakthrough for DNA computing, researchers from UC Davis, Caltech and Maynooth University developed a technique for creating molecular algorithms that can be reprogrammed. Prior to this research, molecular algorithms had to be painstakingly designed for specific purposes, which is "like having to build a new computer out of new hardware just to run a new piece of software," according to the researchers. This new technique could blow open the door for a host of futuristic DNA computing applications -- nanofactories, light-based computers, etc. -- that would've been impossible before. The paper was published this week in Nature.

schwit1 writes: Evaldas Rimasauskas, a Lithuanian citizen, concocted a brazen scheme that allowed him to bilk Facebook and Google out of more than $100 million. The crime defrauded Google of $23 million and Facebook of $99 million. Rimasauskas committed the crimes between 2013 to 2015, an indictment was issued in 2017, and he was formally indicted Wednesday in New York after he pleaded guilty to wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and three counts of money laundering.

"As Evaldas Rimasauskas admitted today, he devised a blatant scheme to fleece U.S. companies out of over $100 million, and then siphoned those funds to bank accounts around the globe," said U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman in a DoJ press release. How did he do it? The indictment reveals that he simply billed the companies for the amounts and they paid the bills. Rimasauskas was able to trick company employees into wiring the money to multiple bank accounts that he controlled and had set up in institutions in Cyprus, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Latvia.

More than 100 police officers were deployed to break up a mass brawl reportedly organized by two rival YouTube stars in Berlin. The BBC reports: The fight broke out on Thursday evening on Alexanderplatz square in the German capital, police said, adding that nine people were arrested. More than 400 people had gathered after two social media influencers reportedly urged their fans to join a face-off. As tensions escalated, a large melee involving around 50 people erupted. Officers used pepper spray and tear gas after attempts to disperse the crowds with loudspeakers failed. As police intervened, clashes spilled over in a nearby subway, where rocks picked up from railway lines were reportedly thrown. The YouTubers who reportedly started this mess are named "Thatsbekir" and "Bahar Al Amood," both of which denied that they were at fault for the brawl in social media posts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams and other activists warned on Thursday that fully autonomous weapons could be deployed in just 3-4 years and urged Germany to lead an international campaign for a ban on so-called "killer robots." Williams, who won the Nobel in 1997 for leading efforts to ban landmines, told reporters Germany should take bold steps to ensure that humans remained in control of lethal weapons. "You cannot lead from the rear," she said. Critics fear that the increasingly autonomous drones, missile defense systems and tanks made possible by new artificial intelligence could turn rogue in a cyber-attack or as a result of programming errors.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas called last week for action to ensure human control of lethal weapons, but is pushing a non-binding declaration rather than a global ban, given opposition by the United States, Russia and China. The United Nations and European Union have called for a global ban, but discussions so far have not yielded a clear commitment to conclude a treaty. Activists from over 100 non-governmental groups gathered in Berlin this week to pressure Maas and the German government to take more decisive action after twice endorsing a ban on fully autonomous weapons in their 2013 and 2018 coalition accords.