Facebook is rolling out a new "Tributes" section for memorialized accounts that will allow people to leave messages that are separate from the rest of the profile's timeline. "Depending on a memorialized account's privacy settings, friends can currently still post on its timeline, including in the comments of posts the person made before they died," reports TechCrunch. "If a memorialized account has a Tributes section, however, posts made after the day it was memorialized (which prevents anyone else from logging in) will be placed there." From the report: Some Facebook users who have designated "legacy contacts" to manage their accounts after they die were alerted to the new feature by a notification today that contained the euphemistic phrase "if your account is memorialized." A page on Facebook's Help Center describes the new tributes section "as a space on memorialized profiles where friends and family can post stories, commemorate a birthday, share memories and more."

"Legacy contacts" will have more leeway over tribute posts than they do over the rest of the account. For example, they have the ability to decide who can see and post tributes and can delete posts. They can also change who can see posts the deceased person is tagged in or remove the tag. If the account had timeline review turned on, the legacy contact will be able to turn it off for tribute posts. Posts made to a profile after it is memorialized will be separated into the tributes section. The feature's help page says "we do our best to separate tribute posts from timeline posts based on the info we're given." Legacy contacts still can't log into accounts, read private messages or remove and add friends.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google's AI research division today open-sourced GPipe, a library for "efficiently" training deep neural networks (layered functions modeled after neurons) under Lingvo, a TensorFlow framework for sequence modeling. It's applicable to any network consisting of multiple sequential layers, Google AI software engineer Yanping Huang said in a blog post, and allows researchers to "easily" scale performance. As Huang and colleagues explain in an accompanying paper ("GPipe: Efficient Training of Giant Neural Networks using Pipeline Parallelism"), GPipe implements two nifty AI training techniques. One is synchronous stochastic gradient descent, an optimization algorithm used to update a given AI model's parameters, and the other is pipeline parallelism, a task execution system in which one step's output is streamed as input to the next step.

Most of GPipe's performance gains come from better memory allocation for AI models. On second-generation Google Cloud tensor processing units (TPUs), each of which contains eight processor cores and 64 GB memory (8 GB per core), GPipe reduced intermediate memory usage from 6.26 GB to 3.46GB, enabling 318 million parameters on a single accelerator core. Without GPipe, Huang says, a single core can only train up to 82 million model parameters. That's not GPipe's only advantage. It partitions models across different accelerators and automatically splits miniature batches (i.e., "mini-batches") of training examples into smaller "micro-batches," and it pipelines execution across the micro-batches. This enables cores to operate in parallel, and furthermore accumulate gradients across the micro-batches, thereby preventing the partitions from affecting model quality.

Microsoft's next iteration of the Xbox One may not have a disc at all, and it might be coming sooner than you think. From a report: That's at least according to rumors from Windows Central, which says a disc-less Xbox One S "All-Digital Edition" will be offered for preorders in April. The new device, said to be code-named Maverick, will offer a "disc-to-digital" program, letting fans turn in physical game discs and convert them to digital downloads, Windows Central added.

One benefit of this new Xbox, Windows Central said, would be that it could push the price of an Xbox down. The Xbox One S starts at $299 and is typically bundled with a game. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment. The move could mark a turning point for the video game industry, which has sold video games on discs and cartridges for decades. Some people still prefer to buy physical copies of their games, in part to share them with friends or trade them in at retailers like GameStop.

A seemingly complex set of characters like "ji32k7au4a83" is a very common password among users, it turns out. From a report: This interesting bit of trivia comes from self-described hardware/software engineer Robert Ou, who recently asked his Twitter followers if they could explain why this seemingly random string of numbers has been seen by Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) over a hundred times.

Have I Been Pwned is an aggregator that was started by security expert Troy Hunt to help people find out if their email or personal data has shown up in any prominent data breaches. One service it offers is a password search that allows you to check if your password has shown up in any data breaches that are on the radar of the security community. In this case, "ji32k7au4a83" has been seen by HIBP in 141 breaches. Several of Ou's followers quickly figured out the solution to his riddle. The password is coming from the Zhuyin Fuhao system for transliterating Mandarin. The reason it's showing up fairly often in a data breach repository is because "ji32k7au4a83" translates to English as "my password."

Linux 5.1 continues the massive undertaking in preparing the kernel for the Year 2038 problem. Phoronix: The Linux kernel has been seeing "Y2038" work for years and the effort is far from over. Thomas Gleixner (a Linux kernel developer who serves as a member of the technical advisory board at The Linux Foundation) sent in the latest Y2038 work for the Linux 5.1 kernel, which after a lot of ground work in previous kernels has introduced the first set of syscalls that are Year 2038 safe.

Exploit vendor Zerodium said today it would pay up to $500,000 for zero-days in popular cloud products and services such as Microsoft's Hyper-V and (Dell) VMware's vSphere. From a report: Both Hyper-V and vSphere are what experts call virtualization software, also called hypervisors -- software that lets a single "host" server create and run one or more virtual "guest" operating systems. Virtualization software is often found in cloud-powered data centers. Hyper-V is the technology at the core of Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, while VMware's vSphere is used by Amazon Web Services and SAP.

With cloud services growing in adoption, especially for hosting websites and crucial IT infrastructure, the importance of both technologies has been slowly increasing in recent years. This paradigm shift hasn't gone unnoticed in the exploit market, where Zerodium -- a Washington, DC-based exploit vendor -- is by far the leading company. In a tweet earlier today, Zerodium announced plans to pay up to $500,000 for fully-working zero-days in Hyper-V and vSphere that would allow an attacker to escape from the virtualized guest operating system to the host server's OS.

A bill that's progressing through Russia's legislature could grant local authorities deeper control over internet access. The so-called "Sovereign Internet" bill seeks to set up a centralized hub officials can use to manage the flow of information in the nation. From a report: Putin is touting the initiative as a defensive response to the Trump Administration's new cyber strategy, which permits offensive measures against Russia and other designated adversaries. But industry insiders, security experts and even senior officials say political upheaval is the bigger concern. "This law isn't about foreign threats, or banning Facebook and Google, which Russia can already do legally," said Andrei Soldatov, author of "The Red Web: The Kremlin's Wars on the Internet" and co-founder of Agentura.ru, a site that tracks the security services. "It's about being able to cut off certain types of traffic in certain areas during times of civil unrest."

Speaking of Volvo, the Swedish carmaker announced today that it has partnered with Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and unveiled a full-size autonomous electric bus for testing this year in the city state. From a report: High-density Singapore has been encouraging the development of driverless technology in hopes that its residents will use more shared vehicles and public transport. Tests with one bus on the university campus could begin in a few weeks to months, before moving to public roads after regulatory approvals, NTU President Subra Suresh told reporters. He hoped the tests could be extended to public roads in a year. A second bus will undergo tests at a city bus depot.

The 12-metre (39 ft) vehicle can carry up to 80 passengers and is the world's first full-size, autonomous electric bus, Volvo and NTU said. "This is the type of vehicle that real operators would use and that's why it is a milestone," Hakan Agnevall, president of Volvo Buses, told reporters.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Online, you'll find people who use hashtags like "#digitalhoarder" and hang out in the 120,000-subscriber Reddit forum called /r/datahoarder, where they trade tips on building home data servers, share collections of rare files from video game manuals to ambient audio records, and discuss the best cloud services for backing up files. The often stereotyped hoarders letting heaps of physical items of questionable utility dominate their homes and lives often suffer social stigma and anxiety as a result. By contrast, many self-proclaimed digital hoarders say they enjoy their collections, can keep them contained in a relatively small amount of physical space, and often take pleasure in sharing them with other hobbyists or anyone who wants access to the same public data.

[...] Many people active in the data hoarding community take pride in tracking down esoteric files of the kind that often quietly disappear from the internet -- manuals for older technologies that get taken down when manufacturers redesign their websites, obscure punk show flyers whose only physical copies have long since been pulled from telephone poles and thrown in the trash, or episodes of old TV shows too obscure for streaming services to bid on -- and making them available to those who want them.

A study into the amount people pay for mobile data has found that the UK has some of the most expensive prices in Europe. From a report: The research, from price comparison site Cable.co.uk, found that one gigabyte (GB) of data cost $0.26 in India but $6.66 in the UK. The US had one of the most expensive rates -- with an average cost of $12.37 for the same amount of data. The results were "disappointing" said Cable's telecoms analyst Dan Howdle. "Despite a healthy UK marketplace, our study has uncovered that EU nations such as Finland, Poland, Denmark, Italy, Austria and France pay a fraction of what we pay in the UK for similar data usage. It will be interesting to see how our position is affected post-Brexit," he said. The study compared mobile data pricing in 230 countries around the world. The UK ranked 136th in the list. The global average was $8.53 for 1GB.

Two-fifths of Europe's AI startups do not use any AI programs in their products, according to a report that highlights the hype around the technology. From a report: Out of 2,830 startups in Europe who were classified as being AI companies, only 1,580 accurately fit that description according to the eye-opening stat on page 99 of a new report from MMC, a London-based venture capital firm. The label, which refers to computer systems that can perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, was simply wrong.

"We looked at every company, their materials, their product, the website, and product documents," says David Kelnar, head of research for MMC which has $400 million under management and a portfolio of 34 companies. "In 40% of cases we could find no mention of evidence of AI." In such cases, he added, "companies that people assume and think are AI companies are probably not."

An anonymous reader writes: A security researcher has uncovered a ring of malicious GitHub accounts promoting over 300 backdoored Windows, Mac, and Linux applications and software libraries. The malicious apps contained code to gain boot persistence on infected systems and later download other malicious code -- which appeared to be a "sneaker bot," a piece of malware that would add infected systems to a botnet that would later participate in online auctions for limited edition sneakers.

All the GitHub accounts that were hosting these files -- backdoored versions of legitimate apps -- have now been taken down. One account, in particular, registered in the name of Andrew Dunkins, hosted 305 backdoored ELF binaries. Another 73 apps were hosted across 88 other accounts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Patently Apple: Firefox browser-maker Mozilla is considering whether to block cybersecurity company DarkMatter from serving as one of its internet security gatekeepers after a Reuters report linked the United Arab Emirates-based firm to a cyber espionage program. Reuters reported in January that DarkMatter provided staff for a secret hacking operation, codenamed Project Raven, on behalf of an Emirati intelligence agency. The unit was largely comprised of former U.S. intelligence officials who conducted offensive cyber operations for the UAE government. Former Raven operatives told Reuters that many DarkMatter executives were unaware of the secretive program, which operated from a converted Abu Dhabi mansion away from DarkMatter's headquarters.

Those operations included hacking into the internet accounts of human rights activists, journalists and officials from rival governments, Reuters found. DarkMatter has denied conducting the operations and says it focuses on protecting computer networks. While Mozilla had been considering whether to grant DarkMatter the authority to certify websites as safe, two Mozilla executives said in an interview last week that Reuters' report raised concerns about whether DarkMatter would abuse that authority. Mozilla said the company has not yet come to a decision on whether to deny the authority to DarkMatter, but expects to decide within weeks. Further reading available via Reuters

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists from Heriot-Watt University have welded glass and metal together using an ultrafast laser system, in a breakthrough for the manufacturing industry. Various optical materials such as quartz, borosilicate glass and even sapphire were all successfully welded to metals like aluminum, titanium and stainless steel using the Heriot-Watt laser system, which provides very short, picosecond pulses of infrared light in tracks along the materials to fuse them together. The new process could transform the manufacturing sector and have direct applications in the aerospace, defense, optical technology and even healthcare fields. Professor Duncan Hand, director of the five-university EPSRC Center for Innovative Manufacturing in Laser-based Production Processes based at Heriot-Watt, said: "Traditionally it has been very difficult to weld together dissimilar materials like glass and metal due to their different thermal properties -- the high temperatures and highly different thermal expansions involved cause the glass to shatter. Being able to weld glass and metals together will be a huge step forward in manufacturing and design flexibility."

He added: "The parts to be welded are placed in close contact, and the laser is focused through the optical material to provide a very small and highly intense spot at the interface between the two materials -- we achieved megawatt peak power over an area just a few microns across. This creates a microplasma, like a tiny ball of lightning, inside the material, surrounded by a highly-confined melt region. We tested the welds at -50C to 90C and the welds remained intact, so we know they are robust enough to cope with extreme conditions."

Chronicle, a security start-up owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, plans on sharing what it learned from a cyberattack against Google nearly ten years ago. The hack was conducted by the Chinese military and was "one of the most starting cyberattacks on an American company by government-affiliated agents," reports The New York Times. The lessons it learned from that incident will be brought to other companies through a widely anticipated new product called Backstory. From the report: The idea, company executives said, is simple: Backstory will make Alphabet's vast storage, indexing and search abilities available to other companies, allowing them to search through giant volumes of data, going years back, to trace the back story of a malicious attack. Chronicle is hardly the only company doing this. Dozens of companies promise so-called big data threat intelligence and storage. But many of their customers can't afford to pay to search through huge amounts of information. Chronicle will charge customers by their number of employees.

The hack on Google, called Operation Aurora, was historic for an unusual reason: It was the first time a Chinese government hacking victim confronted its attacker. Inside the company, Sergey Brin, one of Google's co-founders, made it his personal mission to make sure something like Aurora never happened again. Google, known for its motto "Don't Be Evil," had a new motto about its cybersecurity: "Never again." Google poached cyberexperts from the National Security Agency and Silicon Valley. It built a threat analysis group on a par with those at the top intelligence agencies and designed a new security infrastructure. It also created a new team, called Google Project Zero, to hunt for critical security flaws in technology outside Google. Chronicle was founded by Mike Wiacek, who started Google's threat analysis group after studying threats at the N.S.A., and Stephen Gillett, the former chief information officer at Starbucks and chief operating officer at Symantec.

MIT Technology reports of how Huawei's technology road map, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, is progressing more rapidly than any other business in the world. "The [Chinese] government and private sector approach is to build companies that compete across the full tech stack," says Samm Sacks, who specializes in cybersecurity and China at New America, a Washington think tank. "That's what Huawei is doing." Huawei's AI strategy "will also raise a host of new security issues," the report notes. "The company's technological ubiquity, and the fact that Chinese companies are ultimately answerable to their government, are big reasons why the U.S. views Huawei as an unprecedented national security threat." From the report: In an exclusive interview with MIT Technology Review, Xu Wenwei, director of the Huawei board and the company's chief strategy and marketing officer, touted the scope of its AI plans. He also defended the company's record on security. And he promised that Huawei would seek to engage with the rest of the world to address emerging risks and threats posed by AI. Xu (who uses the Western name William Xu) said that Huawei plans to increase its investments in AI and integrate it throughout the company to "build a full-stack AI portfolio." Since Huawei is a private firm, it's tricky to quantify its technology investments. But officials from the company said last year that it planned to more than double annual R&D spending to between $15 billion and $20 billion. This could catapult the company to between fifth and second place in worldwide spending on R&D. According to its website, some 80,000 employees, or 45% of Huawei's workforce, are involved in R&D.

Machine-learning services are a new source of risk, since they can be exploited by hackers, and the data used to train such services may contain private information. The use of AI algorithms also makes systems more complex and opaque, which means security auditing is more challenging. As part of an effort to reassure doubters, Xu promised that Huawei would release a code of AI principles in April. This will amount to a promise that the company will seek to protect user data and ensure security. Xu also said Huawei wants to collaborate with its international competitors, which would include the likes of Google and Amazon, to ensure that the technology is developed responsibly. It is, however, unclear whether Huawei might allow its AI services to be audited by a third party, as it has done with its hardware. In other Huawei-related news, Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou is suing Canada for violating her constitutional rights when border officials detained and interrogated her for hours. "Meng, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecom firm Huawei, was arrested by Canadian officials in December at the request of the United States," reports NPR. "The U.S. had sought Meng's arrest on charges of fraud, arguing Huawei had violated U.S. sanctions on Iran."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Monday that Democrats will introduce a net neutrality bill to replace the open internet rules that were repealed in 2017. In a letter to her Democratic colleagues, Pelosi said a bill called the "Save the Internet Act" will be unveiled Wednesday and will be introduced in the Senate as well. The text of the legislation has not been released, and it's unclear what will be included in the bill. Democrats have railed against the Trump administration's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) vote to repeal the net neutrality rules, which happened more than a year ago. The 2015 regulations prohibited internet service providers from blocking or throttling websites or creating internet fast lanes.

Microsoft is officially killing off its Microsoft Band and Microsoft Health Dashboard apps and services on May 31st. "The software giant already discontinued its wrist-worn Band fitness tracker more than two years ago, but the company has kept the Band apps running to support existing users," reports The Verge. "That will now change on May 31st, with the backend services ending and the apps being removed from the Microsoft Store, Google Play, and Apple's App Store." From the report: Existing Band users will be able to export their data before the end of May, and services powered by the cloud will cease to function in June. Band users should still be able to record daily steps, heart rate, and workouts, alongside activity data, sleep tracking, and alarm functionality. If a Band user resets a device then it will be "impossible to set up the device again" according to Microsoft.

Some Microsoft Band users will be eligible for a refund from the software giant, though. Microsoft is letting active users who have synced data from a Band to the Health Dashboard between December 1st 2018 and March 1st 2019 apply for a refund on their hardware. Surprisingly, Microsoft is offering $79.99 for Band 1 owners, and $175 for Band 2 devices. If your Microsoft Band is also covered under warranty, the same refund values will be available.

tedlistens writes: Vermont's newly enacted data broker law is the only law of its kind in the U.S. so far, and it's forced any company collecting data on its citizens to register with the state. Fast Company wrote about the limitations of the law and compiled a list of the companies, what they do, and tips for opting-out if possible.

The Vermont law only covers third-party data firms -- those trafficking in the data of people with whom they have no relationship -- as opposed to "first-party" data holders like Amazon, Facebook, or Google, which collect their own enormous piles of detailed personal data directly from users. It doesn't require data brokers to disclose who's in their databases, what data they collect, or who buys it. Nor does it require brokers to give consumers access to their own data or opt out of data collection. Brokers are, however required to provide some information about their opt-out systems under the law -- assuming they provide one. "The registry is an expansive, alphabet soup of companies, from lesser-known organizations that help landlords research potential tenants or deliver marketing leads to insurance companies, to the quiet giants of data," reports Fast Company. "Those include big names in people search, like Spokeo, ZoomInfo, White Pages, PeopleSmart, Intelius, and PeopleFinders; credit reporting, like Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion; and advertising and marketing, like Acxiom, Oracle, LexisNexis, Innovis, and KBM. Some companies also specialize in 'risk mitigation,' which can include credit reporting but also background checks and other identity verification services."

The report lists all the companies that have registered under Vermont's data broker law, with descriptions drawn from their websites or other sources where noted.

Volvo will limit the top speed to 112mph on all its new cars from 2020 in an attempt to reduce the number of accidents. "The cap will prevent drivers from accelerating to the top speeds of up to 155mph many Volvos can reach," reports The Guardian. From the report: Volvo is believed to be the first carmaker to install the cap across its entire range. Police vehicles will be exempt. Similar technology has been installed on several high-performance cars in Germany, but at a much higher speed limit. The general speed limit for motorways in EU member states is 75-80mph (120-130km/h). Germany does not have a general cap for motorways but recommends a speed of up to 80mph. Speeding remained one of the main contributors to road deaths, Volvo said, along with drug and drink intoxication and mobile phone use. Volvo is also exploring how geofencing -- a virtual geographic boundary defined by GPS technology -- can be used to automatically limit speeds around schools and hospitals. Hakan Samuelsson, Volvo's president and chief executive, said: "While a speed limitation is not a cure-all, it's worth doing if we can even save one life. We want to start a conversation about whether carmakers have the right or maybe even an obligation to install technology in cars that changes their driver's behavior."