SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule returned safely to Earth early Friday, wrapping up its inaugural mission to the International Space Station and signaling that the U.S. may soon be able to ferry astronauts to and from space without relying on Russian spacecraft. From a report: The uncrewed capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, off the east coast of Florida, at 8:45 a.m. ET after spending almost a week at the space station. The spacecraft undocked from the orbiting outpost Friday at 2:32 a.m. ET to begin its descent. "This is an amazing achievement in American history," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said from the space agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "These are all capabilities that are leading to a day where we are launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil." The Crew Dragon capsule was lofted into orbit March 2 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The flight was a crucial test of the new spacecraft, a seven-passenger vehicle that SpaceX has been developing for the past five years.

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is proposing to break up technology companies, including Amazon.com, Google and Facebook, calling them anti-competitive behemoths that are crowding out competition. From a report: "Twenty-five years ago, Facebook, Google, and Amazon didn't exist. Now they are among the most valuable and well-known companies in the world," Warren wrote in a post on the blogging platform Medium. "It's a great story -- but also one that highlights why the government must break up monopolies and promote competitive markets." Warren's call also comes as Democrats have begun to plan for increased oversight of tech companies after winning control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections. On Wednesday, House and Senate Democrats introduced legislation to establish strong net neutrality protections that would look to prevent major service providers from using their power to manipulate how users experience the internet. Update: In a statement, Warren's team said that the proposal would also apply to Apple. "They would have to structurally separate -- choosing between, for example, running the App Store or offering their own apps," a spokesperson said.

Spotify, Google, Pandora and Amazon have teamed up to appeal a controversial ruling by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board that, if it goes through, would increase payouts to songwriters by 44%, Variety is reporting. From the report: A joint statement from the first three of those companies reads: "The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), in a split decision, recently issued the U.S. mechanical statutory rates in a manner that raises serious procedural and substantive concerns. If left to stand, the CRB's decision harms both music licensees and copyright owners. Accordingly, we are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to review the decision."

The four companies all filed with the court separately. Sources say that Apple Music is alone among the major streaming services in not planning to appeal -- as confirmed by songwriters' orgs rushing to heap praise on Apple while condemning the seemingly unified front of the other digital companies.

Security researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia discovered an unprotected MongoDB database containing 150GB of detailed, plaintext marketing data -- including hundreds of millions of unique email addresses. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares Diachenko's findings, which were made public today: On February 25th, 2019, I discovered a non-password protected 150GB-sized MongoDB instance. This is perhaps the biggest and most comprehensive email database I have ever reported. Upon verification I was shocked at the massive number of emails that were publicly accessible for anyone with an internet connection. Some of data was much more detailed than just the email address and included personally identifiable information (PII). This database contained four separate collections of data and combined was an astounding 808,539,939 records. As part of the verification process I cross-checked a random selection of records with Troy Hunt's HaveIBeenPwned database. Based on the results, I came to conclusion that this is not just another "Collection" of previously leaked sources but a completely unique set of data. Although, not all records contained the detailed profile information about the email owner, a large amount of records were very detailed. We are still talking about millions of records.

In addition to the email databases, this unprotected Mongo instance also uncovered details on the possible owner of the database -- a company named "Verifications.io" -- which offered the services of "Enterprise Email Validation." Unfortunately, it appears that once emails were uploaded for verification they were also stored in plain text. Once I reported my discovery to Verifications.io the site was taken offline and is currently down at the time of this publication.

AmiMoJo writes: Tesla has been selling "full self-driving" capability since 2016, promising that "you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere," and that "once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else en route [sic] to your destination." Last week Tesla shifted the goalposts, redefining "full self-driving" as a number of Level 2 driver assistance features that were already available, and a few new tricks to be delivered later. All will require a qualified driver behind the wheel, paying attention at all times and ready to take over if the car can't handle the situation. Worse, owners who bought the previous full self-driving feature paid $8,000 for it. Tesla is now offering owners who bought their cars prior to the change the same package for $5,000. Owners who paid the $3,000 higher price are unsure if the previously promised technology has been abandoned and Level 2 is now the most they can expect.

Version 6.50 of the PlayStation 4's firmware now allows you to remotely play your PS4 games from an iPhone or iPad. "To access it, you'll need to download the Remote Play app for your iOS device, and then pair it with your console," reports The Verge. "Compatible games can then be played over Wi-Fi using the on-screen buttons." From the report: Announced back in 2013, Remote Play originally let you stream games from a PS4 console to the handheld PlayStation Vita, but later in 2016, Sony released Remote Play apps for both Windows and Mac. Although Sony has yet to announce a broader Android version of the service, the existence of an Android version of the app that's exclusive to Sony Xperia phones suggests there aren't any technical barriers. Bringing the functionality to iOS is a huge expansion for Remote Play, although it's a shame that you're not officially able to pair a DualShock 4 controller with the app via Bluetooth for a more authentic experience (although some users have reported being able to get the controller working via a sneaky workaround). If you're prepared to use a non-Sony controller, then you'll be happy to know that MacStories is reporting that other MFi gamepads (such as the SteelSeries Nimbus) work just fine with the iOS app. Other limitations with the functionality are that you'll need an iPhone 7 or 6th-generation iPad or later to use it, and it's also only available over Wi-Fi. You can't use Remote Play from another location over a mobile network.

PS4 version 6.50 also adds the ability for you to remap the X and O buttons on the controller.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Facebook has removed a network of more than 100 accounts and pages for "coordinated inauthentic behavior" on its social networks -- the first time it has done so for UK-based operations seeking to influence British citizens. The operation was spread over Facebook and Instagram and used a network of fake accounts to pose as both far-right activists and their opponents. It ran pages and groups whose names frequently changed in order to drum up more followers and operated fake accounts to engage in hate speech and spread divisive comments on both sides of UK political debate, Facebook says.

The pages, with names like "Anti Far Right Extremists", "Atheists Research Centre", and "Politicalized", attracted about 175,000 followers on Facebook, and a further 4,500 on Instagram, according to the company's head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher. The pages shared content from mainstream news sources, such as the BBC and the New York Times, but also shared original content, even including administrators actively engaging in debate with users. "We are constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don't want our services to be used to manipulate people," Gleicher said. "We're taking down these pages and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they posted. In each of these cases, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.

hackingbear writes: A suit filed by Huawei in Texas, where an American subsidy is located, this week is the latest maneuver in the Chinese telecommunications giant's global offensive against American pressure and persistent criticisms that it poses a national security risk. The company's lawsuit contends that the law which bans Huawei equipment without evidence and trial is a violation of the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. also argues that Huawei poses an unacceptable security risk due to its tie with the Chinese government, though a 2003 due diligence by Motorola in a merger talk found Huawei was independent (Warning: source paywalled) of Chinese government or military (the merger failed after Motorola board thought the $7.5 billion price tag for Huawei was too high.) In the lawsuit announcement, Huawei Chairman Guo Ping also accused U.S. agencies of hacking Huawei servers and stealing emails and source code. In a similar case, China's Sanyi sued the Obama administration and forced CFIUS to determine that the the company's acquisitions "have not raised national security objections."

Google's bug-hunting researchers known as Project Zero have revealed a fresh zero-day vulnerability in macOS called "BuggyCow." "The attack takes advantage of an obscure oversight in Apple's protections on its machines' memory to enable so-called privilege escalation, allowing a piece of malware with limited privileges to, in some cases, pierce into deeper, far more trusted parts of a victim's Mac," reports Wired. "The trick's name is based on a loophole the hackers found in the so-called copy-on-write, or CoW, protection built into how MacOS manages a computer's memory." From the report: Some programs, when dealing with large quantities of data, use an efficiency trick that leaves data on a computer's hard drive rather than potentially clog up resources by pulling it into memory. That data, like any data in a computer's memory, can sometimes be used by multiple processes at once. The MacOS memory manager keeps a map of its physical location to help coordinate, but if one of those processes tries to change the data, the memory manager's copy-on-write safeguard requires it to make its own copy. Which is to say, a program can't simply change the data shared by all the other processes -- some of which could be more highly privileged, sensitive programs than the one requesting the change.

Google's BuggyCow trick, however, takes advantage of the fact that when a program mounts a new file system on a hard drive -- basically loading a whole collection of files rather than altering just one -- the memory manager isn't warned. So a hacker can unmount a file system, remount it with new data, and in doing so silently replace the information that some sensitive, highly privileged code is using. Technically, as a zero-day vulnerability with no patch in sight, BuggyCow applies to anyone with an Apple laptop or desktop. But given the technical skill and access needed to pull it off, you shouldn't lose much sleep over it. To even start carrying out this Rube Goldberg -- style attack, a hacker would need a victim to already have some form of malware running on their computer. And while BuggyCow would allow that malware to potentially mess with the inner workings of higher-privileged parts of the computer, it could do so only if it found a highly privileged program that kept its sensitive data on the hard drive rather than memory. Project Zero says it warned Apple about BuggyCow back in November, but Apple hadn't acted to patch it ahead of last week's public reveal.

Instagrammers love the colorful homes in Paris's Rue Cremieux. But residents of Rue Cremieux have now had enough and are calling on the city council to restrict access at certain times. From a report: Residents have asked the city council to provide a gate that can be closed at peak times -- evenings, weekends and at sunrise and sunset, when good light attracts people searching for a perfect Instagram picture. One resident told radio station France Info: "We sit down to eat and just outside we have people taking photos, rappers who take two hours to film a video right beneath the window, or bachelorette parties who scream for an hour. Frankly, it's exhausting."

Yesterday, Tesla launched the next generation Supercharger V3 with higher charging capacity, better efficiency, and more. The biggest new feature is the ability to deliver a new 250 kW of peak power thanks to an "all-new liquid cooled cable design." Electrek reports: According to the company, the cable is "significantly lighter, more flexible, and more efficient" than their current air-cooled cable found on the V2 Superchargers. Other than the cable, the Supercharger V3 should be undifferentiated from V2 at the station. The company didn't even release new pictures for V3. The new 250 kW peak at the station is also enabled by a new 1 MW power cabinet. Instead of using onboard chargers staked together, the new Supercharger is built using technology Tesla developed for its massive grid energy storage system. With the new technology, there will be no power share between stalls like in the current version.

On Tesla's most efficient vehicles, like the Long Range Model 3, the company says that the new Supercharger V3 can add up to 75 miles of range in 5 minutes and charge at a peak rage of 1,000 miles per hour of range. A new 'On-Route Battery Warmup' software feature was also announced. When entering a Supercharger station in your navigation system, the vehicle's software will "intelligently heat the battery to ensure you arrive at the optimal temperature to charge." That's assuming you have enough charge in the battery when you come in. The new feature alone should reduce "average charge times for owners by 25%," according to the automaker. Model S and X owners may be disappointed to hear that the new peak charging rates won't be available for their vehicles at launch. Instead, they will have to wait for a software update "in the coming months." Model 3 vehicles will be the first to receive the software update to support the new speeds.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Generative AI models have a propensity for learning complex data distributions, which is why they're great at producing human-like speech and convincing images of burgers and faces. But training these models requires lots of labeled data, and depending on the task at hand, the necessary corpora are sometimes in short supply.

The solution might lie in an approach proposed by researchers at Google and ETH Zurich. In a paper [PDF] published on the preprint server Arxiv.org ("High-Fidelity Image Generation With Fewer Labels"), they describe a "semantic extractor" that can pull out features from training data, along with methods of inferring labels for an entire training set from a small subset of labeled images. These self- and semi-supervised techniques together, they say, can outperform state-of-the-art methods on popular benchmarks like ImageNet.

"In a nutshell, instead of providing hand-annotated ground truth labels for real images to the discriminator, we ... provide inferred ones," the paper's authors explained. In one of several unsupervised methods the researchers posit, they first extract a feature representation -- a set of techniques for automatically discovering the representations needed for raw data classification -- on a target training dataset using the aforementioned feature extractor.

Microsoft's Windows 10 is getting bigger. The operating system for desktop PCs, internet-connected devices and other systems is now running on more than 800 million devices. From a report: The total is up from 700 million as of September last year, and it suggests that the newest rendition of Windows could now be the most widely deployed version of Windows, ahead of Windows 7 and other versions. Although Microsoft -- the most valuable publicly traded company in the world -- has shifted to focus more on cloud and third-party platforms under CEO Satya Nadella, Windows is still a key element of the company, contributing almost 15 percent of total revenue in the fourth quarter. It's also a notable contributor of operating income, as former CEO Steve Ballmer pointed out last year.

Chinese smartphone maker Meizu generated some headlines in January after it unveiled Zero, a $1300 smartphone that doesn't have a headphone jack, or a charging port, or a physical SIM card slot, or any buttons, or a speaker grill. The company said it would make the phone available to consumers via Indiegogo crowdfunding platform. Well, the market has spoken. AndroidPolice: Meizu set itself an eminently reasonably bar for the campaign, too, at $100,000. That may sound like a fair bit of cash, but Meizu would only have had to sell 77 phones in order to meet this goal. It managed just 29. It's unclear how many of those were Meizu employees, other than to say "not enough."

An anonymous reader shares a report: All the bad press about Facebook might be catching up to the company. New numbers from Edison Research show an an estimated 15 million fewer users in the United States compared to 2017. The biggest drop is in the very desirable 12- to 34-year-old group. Marketplace Tech got a first look at Edison's latest social media research. It revealed almost 80 percent of people in the U.S. are posting, tweeting or snapping, but fewer are going to Facebook.

Research firm IDC projects: The smartphone market continues to be challenged and 2019 is projected to experience its third consecutive year of declining shipments. Worldwide smartphone volumes are forecast to fall by 0.8% in 2019 with volumes dipping to 1.39 billion. However, the smartphone market will begin to pick up momentum this year with year-over-year growth of 2.3% expected in the second half of the year. Over the long term, smartphone shipments are forecast to reach 1.54 billion units in 2023.

The current year is expected to witness a new high for technological innovation with the introduction of foldable devices and 5G smartphones. Marketing buzz around 5G is in its early stages but expected to ramp up quickly. And while use cases for upgrading to a 5G device/service remain unclear, it is evident that after 2019 the adoption will begin to attain significant numbers. IDC currently expects 5G smartphone shipments to account for roughly 1 out of every 4 smartphones shipped globally in 2023.

Google is expanding its Duplex reservation system to a total of 43 US states. It will work on Pixel phones in those 43 states, but it should be expanding to more Android phones and iPhones "in the coming weeks." From a report: To be clear, it's not quite the Duplex experience Google demoed at its I/O 2018 developers conference in May -- Google Assistant isn't booking haircut appointments just yet. But importantly, it's no longer limited to businesses with which Google has explicitly partnered. And for restaurants which use an online booking service that partners with Google (like Bookatable, Chef's Club, Reserve, Resy, Seatninja, Dinetime, or Easydiner), the Assistant works directly with Reserve with Google, the company's cross-platform service that makes it easier to manage bookings through Google Search, Maps, and other apps and portals.

Bruce Schneier, a well-known security guru, this week called on technologists to become lawmakers and policy makers so countries can deal with issues such as the governance of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. From a report: "The future is coming," Schneier said, speaking at the RSA security conference in San Francisco. "It's coming faster than we think. And it's coming faster than our existing policy tools can deal with. And the only way to fix this is to develop a new set of policy tools. With the help of the technologists, you understand the technologies." The issues are a lot larger than just computer security. Schneier wants more public interest technologists in all areas.

[...] We saw the policy makers and technologies talk past each other when the FBI wanted Apple to break into an iPhone that belonged to a terrorist shooting suspect, Schneier said. The debate over Edward Snowden's disclosure of the National Security Agency's eavesdropping programs was another flash point. The need for policy makers to understand technology is clear. "This is no different than any other part of our complex world," he said. "We don't expect legislators to be experts in everything. We expect them to get and accept expertise. The second thing we need is for technologists to get involved in policy, and what we need is more public interest technologists" -- those who focus on social justice, the common good, and the public interest.

Mozilla is scheduled to add a new user anti-fingerprinting technique to Firefox with the release of version 67, scheduled for mid-May this year. "Called 'letterboxing,' this new technique adds 'gray spaces' to the sides of a web page when the user resizes the browser window, which are then gradually removed after the window resize operation has finished," reports ZDNet. From the report: Advertising networks often sniff certain browser features, such as the window size to create user profiles and track users as they resize their browser and move across new URLs and browser tabs. The general idea is that "letterboxing" will mask the window's real dimensions by keeping the window width and height at multiples of 200px and 100px during the resize operation -- generating the same window dimensions for all users -- and then adding a "gray space" at the top, bottom, left, or right of the current page.

The advertising code, which listens to window resize events, then reads the generic dimensions, sends the data to its server, and only after does Firefox remove the "gray spaces" using a smooth animation a few milliseconds later. In other words, letterboxing delays filling the newly-resized browser window with the actual page content long enough to trick the advertising code into reading incorrect window dimensions. The feature was first developed for the Tor Browser, and can be seen in action here. In order to enable the feature in Firefox, "users will first need to visit the about:config page, enter 'privacy.resistFingerprinting' in the search box, and toggle the browser's anti-fingerprinting features to 'true,'" reports ZDNet.

MikeChino writes: The world's first home designed, planned, and built with mainly digital processes just opened its doors in Switzerland. Developed by eight ETH Zurich professors, DFAB House is a pilot project showcasing futuristic building technologies that may someday work their way into our homes. It's topped with a solar array that generates, on average, 1.5 times more energy than the unit needs (an intelligent control system eliminates the risk of load peaks), [and there are waste heat recovery systems to recycle heat from shower trays back into the boiler.] Some of the pioneering ETH-developed construction processes include: "Mesh Mould technology, in which an autonomous 'In Situ Fabricator' robot builds a 3D mesh formwork for concrete load-bearing walls; Smart Slab, a lightweight concrete slab with 3D-printed sand formwork that's less than half the weight of a conventional concrete slab; Smart Dynamic Casting, an automatic robotic slip-forming process; and Spatial Timber Assemblies, a digital prefabrication process that uses a dual robot system to create timber frame modules," reports Dwell, adding that people "manually filled in formwork, bolted CNC-milled and 3D-printed pieces into place, and tweaked the digital design process."