Samsung is working on a pair of new foldable smartphones to follow its Galaxy Fold, a smartphone with dual screens that fold in half like a notebook, and another that works just like any other. Bloomberg reports: The South Korean manufacturer is said to be developing a clamshell-like device, and another that folds away from the user similar to Huawei's Mate X, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified discussing internal plans. The $1,980 Galaxy Fold that Samsung plans to release in April folds inward like a notebook. While it's still too early to gauge how much demand there will be for smartphones with flexible screens, Samsung and other rivals are eager to gain an edge over Apple Inc. in the $495 billion industry, especially amid cooling sales.

Samsung plans to unveil the vertically folding phone late this year or early next year, and is using mock-ups to fine-tune the design, the people said. The gadget is designed with an extra screen on the outside, but the manufacturer may remove it depending on how customers respond to a similar display on the Galaxy Fold, they said. The outfolding device, which already exists as a prototype after being considered as Samsung's first foldable gadget, will roll out afterward, the people said. It will be thinner because it has no extra screen, they said. Samsung may also incorporate an in-display fingerprint sensor for its foldable lineup, as it did for the Galaxy S10 model announced last month, they said. The report also touched on the Galaxy Fold's screen imperfection. Apparently, a crease "appears on the panel after it's been folded about 10,000 times, and Samsung is considering offering free screen replacements after releasing the product."

"The Galaxy Fold's screen imperfection develops on a protective film covering the touch sensor bonded with the display underneath," the report adds. "That's one reason why Samsung kept the phone inside a glass case at MWC in Barcelona last month."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRadar: Could Samsung be on the cusp of a fully wireless TV? A recent patent hints that a Samsung TV without any pesky cables could be around the corner. Spotted by LetsGoDigital, the patent was filed in March 2018 but only released publicly in late February of this year. The patent revolves around a wireless power transceiver, which would make the prospective television the first of its kind to transmit power across the room rather than relying on a power cable -- increasingly seen as an eyesore next to Samsung's premium design sets. The transceiver takes the form of a magnetic bar attached to the rear of the television, given that panels themselves are too thin to house anything of this kind. It would then require a separate power transmitter (plugged into the mains) to keep the TV running.

Last month, the U.S. Army asked private companies for ideas about how to improve its planned semi-autonomous, AI-driven targeting system for tanks. "In its request, the Army asked for help enabling the Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System (ATLAS) to 'acquire, identify, and engage targets at least 3X faster than the current manual process,'" reports Gizmodo. "But that language apparently scared some people who are worried about the rise of AI-powered killing machines. And with good reason." Slashdot reader darth_borehd summarizes the U.S. Army's response: Robot (or more accurately, drone) tanks will always have a human "in the loop" just like the drone plane program, according to the U.S. Army. The new robot tanks, officially called the Multi Utility Tactical Transport (MUTT), will use the Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System (ATLAS). The Department of Defense assures everyone that they will adhere to "ethical standards." Here's the language the Defense Department used: "All development and use of autonomous and semi-autonomous functions in weapon systems, including manned and unmanned platforms, remain subject to the guidelines in the Department of Defense (DoD) Directive 3000.09, which was updated in 2017. Nothing in this notice should be understood to represent a change in DoD policy towards autonomy in weapon systems. All uses of machine learning and artificial intelligence in this program will be evaluated to ensure that they are consistent with DoD legal and ethical standards."

Directive 3000.09 requires that humans be able to "exercise appropriate levels of human judgement over the use of force," which is sometimes called being "in the loop," as mentioned by above.

According to a new paper from the Georgia Institute of Technology, autonomous cars could disproportionately endanger pedestrians with darker skin, a troubling sign of how AI can inadvertently reproduce prejudices from the wider world. Futurism reports: [In the paper, the researchers] detail their investigation of eight AI models used in state-of-the-art object detection systems. These are the systems that allow autonomous vehicles to recognize road signs, pedestrians, and other objects. They tested these models using images of pedestrians divided into two categories based on their score on the Fitzpatrick scale, which is commonly used to classify human skin color. According to the researchers' paper, the models exhibited "uniformly poorer performance" when confronted with pedestrians with the three darkest shades on the scale. On average, the models' accuracy decreased by 5 percent when examining the group containing images of pedestrians with darker skin tones, even when the researchers accounted for variables such as whether the photo was taken during the day or at night. Thankfully, the researchers were able to figure out what was needed to avoid a future of biased self-driving cars: start including more images of dark-skinned pedestrians in the data sets the systems train on and place more weight on accurately detecting those images.

Hackers and security researchers use rare "dev-fused" iPhones created for internal use at Apple to bypass Apple's protections and security features to uncover iPhone vulnerabilities and other sensitive info, Motherboard reported Wednesday, citing two dozen security researchers, current and former Apple employees, rare phone collectors, and members of the iPhone jailbreaking community. From the report: These rare iPhones have many security features disabled, allowing researchers to probe them much more easily than the iPhones you can buy at a store. Since the Black Hat talk, dev-fused iPhones have become a tool that security researchers around the world use to find previously unknown iPhone vulnerabilities (known as zero days), Motherboard has learned. Dev-fused iPhones were never intended to escape Apple's production pipeline have made their way to the gray market, where smugglers and middlemen sell them for thousands of dollars to hackers and security researchers. Using the information gleaned from probing a dev-fused device, researchers can sometimes parlay what they've learned into developing a hack for the normal iPhones hundreds of millions of people own.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Wall Street Journal reporter Takashi Mochizuki took a Wednesday opportunity to review one game maker's financial reports: CyberAgent Inc, maker of smartphone games like the Nintendo-published Dragalia Lost. This report, published at the end of January, made vague allusions to a single smartphone game dragging the company down. Quoting from the company's own English-language press release: "At the time of the original earnings forecast announcement on October 25, we looked a new game title made a good start [sic]. However, its performance is being slower than we expected as of today." That resulted in a whopping 20-percent drop in revenue expectations in the company's gaming sector, from 50 billion yen to 40 billion. Mochizuki pressed the company to confirm which game that was, and CyberAgent confirmed the game in question was indeed Nintendo's Dragalia Lost.

The company clarified things even further to the WSJ, alleging that Nintendo responded to players' complaints about Dragalia's loot box economy by asking the developer to "adjust the game" to reduce how much a player might spend in the game to progress normally. "Nintendo is not interested in making a large amount of revenue from a single smartphone game," a CyberAgent representative told the WSJ. "If we managed the game alone, we would have made a lot more." When asked by the WSJ, Nintendo's Japanese arm replied with a statement that apparently confirms CyberAgent's allegation. "We discuss various things, not just limited to payments, to deliver high-quality fun to consumers," the Nintendo rep told the WSJ. The report says the reason why Nintendo's revenue goals for its entire smartphone-gaming sector are considered modest compared to other large Japanese publishers may be "because its smartphone games are positioned less to make oodles of cash and more to raise awareness of Nintendo's IP (which Nintendo will soon leverage with theme park attractions and a feature-length film)."

As expected, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House and Senate Democrats on Wednesday introduced the Save the Internet Act, which aims to restore open internet rules that were repealed in 2017. From a report: The Obama-era rules, which lasted from 2015 to 2018, banned broadband providers from slowing or blocking access to the internet or charging companies higher fees for faster access. Democrats in Congress have said the repeal allows for large broadband and wireless companies to "control people's online activities." "86 percent of Americans opposed Trump's assault on net neutrality, including 82 percent of Republicans," said Pelosi during the press conference on Wednesday. "With 'Save The Internet Act,' Democrats are honoring the will of the people." Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey tweeted out a copy of the bill on Wednesday, saying nearly every Democrat in the Senate had joined him to introduce it.

Facebook will increasingly shift its focus away from public posts to encrypted, ephemeral communications on its trio of messaging apps, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today in a significant new blog post. From a report: In a 3,200-word missive, Zuckerberg says that encryption will be one of the keys to Facebook's future -- and that the company is willing to be banned in countries that refuse to let it operate as a result. "As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today's open platforms," Zuckerberg writes. "Today we already see that private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication." [...] "I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever," Zuckerberg says. "This is the future I hope we will help bring about."

Google today released a learning app for primary school children in India as part of an effort to cement its grip on the world's fastest-growing internet market. From a report: The Android app, called Bolo, aims to help young kids improve their reading comprehension and vocabulary skills in Hindi and English. Bolo (the Hindi word for "speak") features a range of games, and tasks, and it rewards kids as they progress.

Bolo, which is powered by Google's speech recognition and text-to-speech technology, first asks kids to read sentences. The app then listens to the efforts and reviews them, and an animated voice assistant -- called Diya -- suggests pronunciation and vocabulary corrections wherever applicable. The app comes preloaded with several stories -- Google says 90 stories in Hindi and English are available at launch. Children can engage with the app at a pace they are comfortable with, and their progress can be shared with their parents. [...] Google is releasing Bolo in India first, with plans to bring it to other countries in the future. The company said it will also add support for more languages soon.

An 18-year-old from Ohio who famously inoculated himself against his mother's wishes in December says he attributes his mother's anti-vaccine ideology to a single source: Facebook [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: Ethan Lindenberger, a high school senior, testified Tuesday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and underscored the importance of "credible" information. In contrast, he said, the false and deep-rooted beliefs his mother held -- that vaccines were dangerous -- were perpetuated by social media. Specifically, he said, she turned to anti-vaccine groups on social media for evidence that supported her point of view. In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, Lindenberger said Facebook, or websites that were linked on Facebook, is really the only source his mother ever relied on for her anti-vaccine information.

A new computing tool developed by Google will let developers build AI-powered apps. The upside is it's doing so without sucking up all of your information. From a report: Google on Wednesday released TensorFlow Federated, open-source software that incorporates federated learning, an AI training system. It works by using data that's spread out across a lot of devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to teach itself new tricks. But rather than send the data back to a central server for study, it learns on your phone or tablet itself and sends only the lesson back to the app maker.

Federated learning runs "part of the machine learning algorithm right next to where the data is on the device," Alex Ingerman, a product manager at Google Research, said in an interview. The algorithm applies what it already knows to the data on your phone, such as suggesting replies to emails, and creates a summary of what it learned in the process to send back.

Jessica Roy, writing for LA Times: Thirty years ago, Maxis released "SimCity" for Mac and Amiga. It was succeeded by "SimCity 2000" in 1993, "SimCity 3000" in 1999, "SimCity 4" in 2003, a version for the Nintendo DS in 2007, "SimCity: BuildIt" in 2013 and an app launched in 2014. Along the way, the games have introduced millions of players to the joys and frustrations of zoning, street grids and infrastructure funding -- and influenced a generation of people who plan cities for a living.

For many urban and transit planners, architects, government officials and activists, "SimCity" was their first taste of running a city. It was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned, and that it was someone's job to decide where streets, schools, bus stops and stores were supposed to go.

An anonymous reader writes: At the RSA security conference this week, the National Security Agency released Ghidra, a free software reverse engineering tool that the agency had been using internally for well over a decade. The tool is ideal for software engineers, but will be especially useful for malware analysts first and foremost, being similar to other reverse engineering tools like IDA Pro, Hopper, HexRays, and others.

The NSA's general plan was to release Ghidra so security researchers can get used to working with it before applying for positions at the NSA or other government intelligence agencies with which the NSA has previously shared Ghidra in private. Ghidra is currently available for download only through its official website, but the NSA also plans to release its source code under an open source license in the coming future.

Reader AmiMoJo writes: Jibo was a "social robot" startup that burned through $76 million in venture capital and crowdfunding before having its assets were sold to SQN Venture Partners late last year. Earlier this week, reporter Dylan J Martin tweeted a video of a $899 Jibo robot bidding its owner farewell, announcing that the new owners of his servers were planning to killswitch it; the robot thanked him "very very much" for having it around, and asked that "someday, when robots are more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said 'hello.'" Then, the Jibo performed a melancholy dance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: According to Wired, glass-maker Corning is "working on ultrathin, bendable glass that's 0.1 millimeters thick and can bend to a 5 millimeter radius" that may be usable for smartphone displays within two years. Corning produces Gorilla Glass used in Apple's iPhones, as well as in phones made by other manufacturers like LG, Asus, OnePlus, Nokia, Samsung, and more. Developing Gorilla Glass that can bend or fold like the materials used for the Samsung Galaxy Fold display or other foldable phone concepts could address some shortcomings endemic to these early designs.

The folding phones you see in headlines and gadget blog galleries today rely on plastic polymers that may scratch easier or have other undesirable properties. Generally, smartphone-makers that have announced foldable phones have not allowed us to test-drive these phones, which is otherwise normal practice for traditional smartphone product unveilings. That may be primarily because the software is not there yet, but it could also be that the companies anticipate negative reactions to the plastic displays, which have not been standard in flagship phones for a decade. [...] John Bayne, Corning's head of Gorilla Glass, and another expert Wired spoke with believe that Corning (or a competitor like ACG) will have foldable glass ready for use in foldable smartphones within a couple of years. But it's a difficult journey. "We have glasses we've sampled to customers, and they're functional," Bayne told Wired. "But they're not quite meeting all the requirements. People either want better performance against a drop event or a tighter bend radius. We can give them one or the other; the key is to give them both."

Uber is not criminally liable in a March 2018 crash in Tempe, Arizona, in which one of the company's self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian, prosecutors said on Tuesday. "The Yavapai County Attorney said in a letter made public that there was 'no basis for criminal liability' for Uber, but that the back-up driver, Rafaela Vasquez, should be referred to the Tempe police for additional investigation," reports Reuters. From the report: Vasquez, the Uber back-up driver, could face charges of vehicular manslaughter, according to a police report in June. Vasquez has not previously commented and could not immediately be reached on Tuesday. Based on a video taken inside the car, records collected from online entertainment streaming service Hulu and other evidence, police said last year that Vasquez was looking down and streaming an episode of the television show "The Voice" on a phone until about the time of the crash. The driver looked up a half-second before hitting Elaine Herzberg, 49, who died from her injuries. Police called the incident "entirely avoidable."

Yavapai County Attorney's Office, which examined the case at the request of Maricopa County where the accident occurred, did not explain the reasoning for not finding criminal liability against Uber. Yavapai sent the case back to Maricopa, calling for further expert analysis of the video to determine what the driver should have seen that night. The National Transportation Safety Board and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are still investigating.

Google Maps is warning drivers in Canada as they approach some photo radar camera locations. "The feature, which is currently being rolled out by Google, allows users to see speed limits, speed cameras and mobile speed cameras on the map before they leave," reports HuffPost Canada. "It also gives a verbal warning -- an automated voice saying 'speed camera ahead' -- when drivers are near a fixed speed camera." From the report: Police in Calgary say the feature is useful to them. "The biggest thing we love ... is we place those (cameras) by collision statistics," said Sgt. Joerg Gottschling of the Calgary Police Service traffic section. "If we do a new site, if we are going to install a new camera, the next site is always selected by the next highest crash site. "Our intersection locations are all determined where we are trying to eliminate collisions."

Gottschling said they've had up to a 50 per cent reduction in collisions in some areas where those cameras are stationed. With Google Maps, he noted, all drivers approaching the fixed camera intersection get the warning. "That camera is only facing one way," said Gottschling. "Let's say it's only facing northbound, but you can approach southbound or eastbound ... you are still going to get Google telling you caution. "So you're going to go slowly and cautiously through there which, lo and behold, is actually what we want." Google said in an email that there will also be an ability for android users to report mobile speed cameras and stationary cameras.

Slashdot reader Lije Baley writes: As the unusually long cold snap in the Pacific Northwest has both increased electric demand while decreasing snow melt and stream flows needed for hydroelectric generation, local power companies are asking their customers to conserve energy. Meanwhile, the region's last remaining nuclear plant has been a critical low-carbon resource for keeping the lights and heat on, as Forbes reports. "As reported by Annette Cary of the Tri-City Herald, the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the electricity produced at the nuclear plant near Richland, asked Energy Northwest, the operator of the power plant, not to do anything that would prevent the plant from producing 100% power at all times during an unusually cold February across the state that increased the demand for electricity â" no maintenance activities, even on its turbine generator and in the transformer yard," reports Forbes. "Don't do anything that would stop the reliable and constant power output of nuclear."

"'No Touch' is requested by BPA when unusually hot or cold weather increases the demand for electricity, notes Mike Paoli, spokesman for Energy Northwest," the report adds. "Many regional transmission and system operators across the United States ask nuclear plants to keep running during extreme weather because nuclear plants are the least affected by bad weather. Columbia Generating Station has the capability to produce 1,207 MW, which is enough energy to power Seattle. And it is usually putting out all of this power at all times. Energy Northwest already has a diverse mix of non-fossil fuel generating systems that, in aggregate, produce over 10 billion kWhs of electricity each year while emitting less than 20 gCO2/kWh. The No Touch order at the Columbia Generating Station is expected to be lifted soon, although continued cold weather could require it to keep producing max power."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Encryption should have limits. That's the message FBI Director Christopher Wray had for cybersecurity experts Tuesday. The technology that scrambles up information so only intended recipients can read it is useful, he said, but it shouldn't provide a playground for criminals where law enforcement can't reach them. "It can't be a sustainable end state for there to be an entirely unfettered space that's utterly beyond law enforcement for criminals to hide," Wray said during a live interview at the RSA Conference, a major cybersecurity gathering in San Francisco. His comments are part of a back-and-forth between government agencies and security experts over the role of encryption technology in public safety. Agencies like the FBI have repeatedly voiced concerns like Wray's, saying encryption technology locks them out of communications between criminals. Cybersecurity experts say the technology is crucial for keeping data and critical computer systems safe from hackers. Letting law enforcement access encrypted information just creates a backdoor hackers will ultimately exploit for evil deeds, they say.

Wray, a former assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice who counts among his biggest cases prosecutions against Enron officials, acknowledged Tuesday that encryption is "a provocative subject." As the leader of the nation's top law enforcement agency, though, he's focused on making sure the government can carry out criminal investigations. Hackers in other countries should expect more investigations and indictments, Wray said. "We're going to follow the facts wherever they lead, to whomever they lead, no matter who doesn't like it," he said. To applause, he added, "I don't really care what some foreign government has to say about it."

Last December, Microsoft announced that it has embraced Google's Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop, a move that shocked many. We now have some leaked screenshots of the browser in its current state, and they appear to show a browser resembling Google Chrome. Neowin reports: A lot of the design language and icons have remained similar to what they were like before, but there are definitely many changes that will be familiar to Chrome users. For one, the options to see all your tabs and to set aside the currently open tabs have been removed compared to the current version of Edge. To the right of the address bar, you'll be able to find your extensions, as well as your profile picture similar to what Chrome looks like. Bing is integrated into the browser -- as you'd expect of a Microsoft-made browser -- and the New Tab background can be set to rotate based on Bing's image of the day. Scrolling down will reveal a personalized news feed powered by Microsoft News, similar to the old Edge. The layout of the feed can be customised based on your preference from among a number of options.

The settings options for the browser have also changed. While Edge settings are currently available via a slide-out menu from the right, the new Edge's settings are accessible through a new tab similar to Chrome. It'll show the Microsoft account you're logged into, as well as the usual array of toggles and tidbits you'd expect. Ominously, the about page for the browser now acknowledges the contributions of the Chromium project, as well as other open source software, a stark reminder that this isn't the Microsoft of yesteryear. This is a new browser, and a new Microsoft.