Amid a growing measles outbreak in the United States, the role of powerful tech companies like YouTube and Facebook in spreading vaccine misinformation is under heavy scrutiny. But there is another massive platform offering spurious anti-vaccination content to people seeking information: Amazon, the world's largest online marketplace. CNN Business: And, asked about it, an Amazon spokesperson only pointed CNN Business to the company's content guidelines page, which says the following: "As a bookseller, we provide our customers with access to a variety of viewpoints, including books that some customers may find objectionable. That said, we reserve the right not to sell certain content, such as pornography or other inappropriate content." A recent search for "vaccine" on Amazon yielded a search page dominated by anti-vaccination content. Of the 18 books and movies listed on the search page, 15 contained anti-vaccination content. The first listing was a sponsored post -- that is, an ad for which Amazon was paid -- for the book "Vaccines on Trial: Truth and Consequences of Mandatory Shots" by Pierre St. Clair, which Amazon was also offering for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
UPDATE (3/2/2019): Amazon "has apparently started removing anti-vaccine documentaries from its Amazon Prime Video streaming service," CNN reports.

However, "a number of anti-vaccine books were still available for purchase on Amazon.com when CNN Business reviewed search results on Friday afternoon, and some were still being offered for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers."

Later today, the first six of OneWeb satellites are expected to be launched.[Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] from a remote launch site in French Guiana, a key step toward building out a constellation that could eventually reach nearly 2,000. From a report: If OneWeb's founder Greg Wyler plans are successful, what he and his fellow executives at OneWeb envision is nothing short of revolutionary: becoming one of the world's largest providers of Internet service by building the architecture in space, allowing the billions without access to WiFi to finally use the Web. Wyler founded the British-based company in 2012.

"The ultimate goal is to connect every school in the world, and bridge the digital divide," Wyler said in an interview after his pep talk. "We're bringing connectivity and enabling it for people around the world, and in rural populations." If successful, remote areas all over the world, from Alaska to Africa, that are out of reach of fiber optic cables could suddenly join the world of Google and YouTube, a feat Wyler and others believe could be transformative. But building the backbone of the Internet in orbit is no easy task. Others have tried to put up constellations of communications satellites, only to fail spectacularly. The enormous cost is only outmatched by the risks of putting up hundreds of spacecraft in orbit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When the government comes for your data, tech companies can't always tell you. But thanks to a legal loophole, companies can say if they haven't had a visit yet. These so-called "warrant canaries" -- named for the poor canary down the mine that dies when there's gas that humans can't detect -- are a key transparency tool that predominantly privacy-focused companies use to keep their customers aware of the goings-on behind the scenes. Where companies have abandoned their canaries or caved to legal pressure, Cloudflare is bucking the trend. The networking and content delivery network giant said in a blog post this week that it's expanding the transparency reports to include more canaries.

To date, the company: has never turned over their SSL keys or customers' SSL keys to anyone; has never installed any law enforcement software or equipment anywhere on their network; has never terminated a customer or taken down content due to political pressure; and has never provided any law enforcement organization a feed of customers' content transiting their network. Now Cloudflare's warrant canaries will include: Cloudflare has never modified customer content at the request of law enforcement or another third party; Cloudflare has never modified the intended destination of DNS responses at the request of law enforcement or another third party; and Cloudflare has never weakened, compromised, or subverted any of its encryption at the request of law enforcement or another third party. It has also expanded and replaced its first canary to confirm that the company "has never turned over our encryption or authentication keys or our customers' encryption or authentication keys to anyone." Cloudflare said that if it were ever asked to do any of the above, the company would "exhaust all legal remedies" to protect customer data, and remove the statements from its site. According to Cloudflare's latest transparency report out this week, the company responded to just seven subpoenas of the 19 requests, affecting 12 accounts and 309 domains. Cloudflare also responded to 44 court orders of the 55 requests, affecting 134 accounts and 19,265 domains. They received between 0-249 national security requests for the duration, but didn't process any wiretap or foreign government requests for the duration.

Bismillah writes: Researchers have published the results of exploring how vulnerable Thunderbolt is to DMA attacks, and the answer is "very." Be careful what you plug into that USB-C port. Yes, the set of vulnerabilities has a name: "Thunderclap." "Thunderbolt, which is available through USB-C ports on modern laptops, provides low-level direct memory access (DMA) at much higher privilege levels than regular universal serial bus peripherals," reports ITNews, citing a paper published from a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, Rice University and SRI International. "This opens up laptops, desktops and servers with Thunderbolt input/output ports and PCI-Express connectors to attacks using malicious DMA-enabled peripherals. The main defense against the above attacks is the input-output memory management unit (IOMMU) that allows devices to access only the memory needed for the job to be done. Enabling the IOMMU to protect against DMA attacks comes at a high performance cost however. Most operating systems trade off security for performance gains, and disable the IOMMU by default."

"Apple's macOS uses the IOMMU, but even with the hardware defense enabled, the researchers were able to use a fake network card to read data traffic that is meant to be confined to the machine and never leave it," the report adds. "The network card was also able to run arbitrary programs at system administrator level on macOS and could read display contents from other Macs and keystrokes from a USB keyboard. Apple patched the vulnerability in macOS 10.12.4 that was released in 2016, but the researchers say the more general scope of such attacks remains relevant."

A startup called Veo Robotics is preparing to roll out sensor technology that lets industrial robots work safely side-by-side with humans. "Veo's proprietary technology uses lidar sensors to create real-time maps of factory work spaces, so that robots can slow or stop completely when human workers get too close," Bloomberg reports. From the report: There are more than 2 million industrial robots in operation worldwide, mostly toiling inside metal safety cages. The seclusion is fine for repetitive tasks that can be done entirely by machines, such as arc welding, but the majority of work even in the most automated factories requires involvement of people. Embedding force sensors into industrial limbs is one way to prevent them from plowing through obstacles, but the same technology that makes the arms safe also makes them weak. Most so-called cobots cannot handle weights heavier than 10 kilograms (22 pounds). Computer vision offers a way to get robots into more complex environments, without compromising their strength. Another obstacle is that manufacturers increasingly have to make multiple products on the same assembly line and are constantly retooling their production to accommodate shifting consumer tastes. There are also not enough workers to do the job.

Veo, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, is working closely with the world's biggest robot makers Fanuc Corp., Yaskawa Electric Corp. and Kuka AG. But Veo's first customers are likely to be car companies, manufacturers of durable goods such as household appliances and oil and gas equipment makers, where the shale revolution created demand for more customization. The technology could be used to get machines to present parts to human workers, for loading and unloading fixtures and in palletizing.

Facebook's Patreon-like Fan Subscriptions feature lets people pay a monthly fee for access to a creator's exclusive content. But, as TechCrunch reports, it greatly differs from Patreon in that the social network "plans to take up to a 30 percent cut of subscription revenue minus fees, compared to 5 percent by Patreon, 30 percent by YouTube which covers fees, and 50 percent by Twitch." "Facebook also reserves the right to offer free trials to subscriptions that won't compensate creators," TechCrunch reports. "And Facebook demands a 'non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use' creators' content and 'This license survives even if you stop using Fan Subscriptions.'" From the report: Distrust of Facebook could scare creators away from the platform when combined with its significant revenue share and ability to give away or repurpose creators' content. Facebook has consistently shown that it puts what it thinks users want and its own interests above those of partners. It cut off game developers from viral channels, inadequately warned Page owners their reach with drop over time, decimated referral traffic to news publishers, and most recently banished video makers from the feed. If Facebook wants to win creators' trust and the engagement of their biggest fans, it may need a more competitive offering with larger limits on its power.

Facebook began testing Fan Subscriptions a year to give creators a financial alternative to maximizing ad views after watching the rise of Patreon which now has 3 million patrons who'll pay 100,000 artists, comedians, models, and makers over $500 million this year. This month Facebook expanded the test to the UK, Spain, Germany, and Portugal to allow users to pay $4.99 per month to a creator for exclusive content, live videos, and a profile badge that highlights them as a subscriber. While Twitch owns gamers, YouTube rules amongst videographers, and Patreon is a favorite with odd-ball creators, Facebook may see an opportunity to popularize Fan Subscriptions internationally and turn mainstream consumers into paid supporters. The terms for Fan Subscriptions are not publicly available, and only visible on Facebook's site to Pages it's invited to test the feature. But TechCrunch has published the full policy document [in their report].

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Study after study continues to show that the best approach to tackling internet piracy is to provide these would-be customers with high quality, low cost alternatives. That idea was again supported by a new study this week out of New Zealand first spotted by TorrentFreak. The study, paid for by telecom operator Vocus Group, surveyed a thousand New Zealanders last December, and found that while half of those polled say they've pirated content at some point in their lives, those numbers have dropped as legal streaming alternatives have flourished.

The study found that 11 percent of New Zealand consumers still obtain copyrighted content via illegal streams, and 10 percent download infringing content via BitTorrent or other platforms. But it also found that users are increasingly likely to obtain that same content via over the air antennas (75 percent) or legitimate streaming services like Netflix (55 percent). "In short, the reason people are moving away from piracy is that it's simply more hassle than it's worth," says Vocus Group NZ executive Taryn Hamilton said in a statement. "The research confirms something many internet pundits have long instinctively believed to be true: piracy isn't driven by law-breakers, it's driven by people who can't easily or affordably get the content they want," she said.

technology_dude writes: Google's DeepMind can predict wind patterns one day in advance. "Beginning last year, [Google and DeepMind] fed weather forecasts and existing turbine data into DeepMind's machine learning platform, which churned out wind power predictions 36 hours ahead of actual power generation," Engadget reports. "Google could then make supply commitments to power grids a full day before delivery." According to the report, this makes the energy generated by its wind turbines more valuable (by roughly 20%). Is this a blow to Big Blue who purchased The Weather Channel's Weather.com to showcase Watson, or is it news just because it's Google?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Since the initial release of Windows 10 nearly four years ago, Microsoft has been tweaking its approach to automatic updates, adding Active Hours settings to ensure that mandatory restarts are less likely to be intrusive. Recent feature updates have also made notifications of pending updates more obvious. Are those changes enough to ease the pain? A new study from a group of UK-based researchers suggests Microsoft has more work to do. The study, titled "In Control with No Control: Perceptions and Reality of Windows 10 Home Edition Update Features," was presented this week at the Workshop on Usable Security (USEC) 2019 in San Diego, California. Researchers Jason Morris, Ingolf Becker, and Simon Parkin of University College London, built a detailed model of Microsoft's update process as of Windows 10 version 1803 and then surveyed a group of 93 Windows 10 Home users.

The overall conclusions were a mixed bag. In general, the survey respondents think that the Windows 10 update approach is an improvement over that found in previous Windows versions. Among participants who had experience with earlier Windows versions 53 percent reported they felt updating Windows 10 is easier, versus only 8 percent who found the process more difficult. Similarly, a majority of respondents agreed that the Windows 10 update process causes fewer interruptions than in previous versions (43 percent agreed, 21 percent disagreed). Where Microsoft has fallen down, the researchers argue, is in building an update system that is "dependent on a complex range of user and system properties." That system, illustrated by the flowchart shown here, is simply too complicated for the average home user to understand.

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), this week announced a rebranding of the USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 specifications, under the USB 3.2 specification. USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 will now be considered previous generations of the USB 3.2 specification. From a report: Going forward, USB 3.1 Gen 1 (transfer speeds up to 5Gb/s), which used to be USB 3.0 prior to a separate rebranding, will be called USB 3.2 Gen 1, while USB 3.1 Gen 2 (transfer speeds up to 10Gb/s) will now be known as USB 3.2 Gen 2. What used to be considered USB 3.2 will now be USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 because if offers twice the throughput speeds of USB 3.1 Gen 2, now USB 3.2 Gen 2. If the swap between USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2 to USB 3.2 wasn't confusing enough, each of these specifications also has a marketing term. The new USB 3.2 Gen 1 with transfer speeds up to 5Gb/s is SuperSpeed USB, while USB 3.2 Gen 2 with transfer speeds up to 10Gb/s is known as SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps. The USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 specification with transfer speeds up to 20Gb/s is known as SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, cryptocurrency industry giant Coinbase sparked outrage when it announced that it had purchased a small startup called Neutrino. Normally, such an acquisition wouldn't make many waves, but Neutrino isn't your average startup. The company was founded by three former employees of Hacking Team, a controversial Italian surveillance vendor that was caught several times selling spyware to governments with dubious human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. Neutrino develops technology for law enforcement and financial institutions to investigate and track transactions on the blockchain, the shared public ledger that tracks the movement of tokens in the ecosystem. Coinbase is one of the largest platforms for buying and selling cryptocurrencies in the world, so it sees a lot of transactions on its exchange.

The company claims to be able to monitor and track not just Bitcoin -- a relatively straightforward endeavor -- but also supposedly privacy-oriented (and harder to track) coins such as Monero. In 2017, the company was able to conclude that the North Korean hackers behind the destructive ransomware WannaCry cashed out their Bitcoin and turned it into Monero. [...] In a statement to Motherboard, a Coinbase spokesperson said that the company "does not condone nor will it defend the actions of Hacking Team." "We are aware that Neutrino's co-founders previously worked at Hacking Team, which we reviewed as part of our security, technical, and hiring diligence," the spokesperson said. But Neutrino's technology was just too important for Coinbase to pass on, the spokesperson explained.

Children's charity the NSPCC has accused YouTube of failing to tackle dangerous content on its youth channel. From a report: YouTube Kids, dubbed as a safer, child-friendly version of the video-sharing site, has been criticised by parents for failing to remove cartoons that contain clips depicting suicide methods on its platform. The clips show a YouTuber demonstrating a suicide method. Google told the BBC it works hard to remove such content. "We have strict policies that prohibit videos which promote self-harm. We rely on both user-flagging and smart-detection technology to flag this content for our reviewers," the firm said in a statement. "We are always working to improve our systems and to remove violat[ing] content more quickly." It is unclear how or why the clips depicting suicide methods were embedded in children's cartoons. The BBC has received no response from the YouTuber. It also asked Google, which owns YouTube, if it had spoken to him directly but did not get a reply.

An anonymous reader writes: We've seen companies big and small build everything from AI-driven developer tools to AI-powered developer environments. But what if instead of having AI merely help developers write code, it did all the heavy lifting? Dry.io, a developer playground that helps you write web apps using just a few lines of code, began accepting signups today for its first wave of external testing. The programmable software platform lets you set the parameters of what you want to build, "and the AI takes care of the rest."

The Federal Trade Commission will be launching a task force to monitor competition in the US's technology markets, commissioners announced today. From a report: The task force will include current officials working in the agency's Bureau of Competition in order to "enhance the Bureau's focus on technology-related sectors of the economy, including markets in which online platforms compete." It will also include 17 staff attorneys who will be tasked with investigating anti-competitive behavior in the tech industry. "The role of technology in the economy and in our lives grows more important every day," FTC Chairman Joe Simons said. "As I've noted in the past, it makes sense for us to closely examine technology markets to ensure consumers benefit from free and fair competition."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. military blocked Internet access to an infamous Russian entity seeking to sow discord among Americans during the 2018 midterms, several U.S. officials said, a warning that the group's operations against the United States are not cost-free. The strike on the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, a company underwritten by an oligarch close to President VladiÂmir Putin, was part of the first offensive cyber campaign against Russia designed to thwart attempts to interfere with a U.S. election, the officials said. "They basically took the IRA offline," according to one individual familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information. "They shut 'em down." The operation marked the first muscle-flexing by U.S. Cyber Command, with intelligence from the National Security Agency, under new authorities it was granted by President Trump and Congress last year to bolster offensive capabilities.

The Register: IBM has apologized after its recruitment webpages asked applicants whether their ethnicity was, among other options, the racial slurs Yellow and Mulatto. In online application forms for positions within the US tech giant, in among other questions ranging from military veteran status, and eligibility to work in America, a bizarre drop-down menu asked whether jobseekers were Caucasian, Black, or Indigenous, as well as the aforementioned insults. The Register was first alerted to the baffling error on Monday by an engineer who tried to apply for a technical role at IBM earlier this month, and was stunned by the slurs listed for a mandatory input field labeled: "Please state your ethnic group."

Ivan Ivanitskiy: People are resorting to blockchain for all kinds of reasons these days. Ever since I started doing smart contract security audits in mid-2017, I've seen it all. A special category of cases is 'blockchain use' that seems logical and beneficial, but actually contains a problem that then spreads from one startup to another. I am going to give some examples of such problems and ineffective solutions so that you (developer/customer/investor) know what to do when somebody offers you to use blockchain this way.

1. Supply chain management
Let's say you ordered some goods, and a carrier guarantees to maintain certain transportation conditions, such as keeping your goods cold. A proposed solution is to install a sensor in a truck that will monitor fridge temperature and regularly transmit the data to the blockchain. This way, you can make sure that the promised conditions are met along the entire route.
The problem here is not blockchain, but rather sensor, related. Being part of the physical world, the sensor is easy to fool. For example, a malicious carrier might only cool down a small fridge inside the truck in which they put the sensor, while leaving the goods in the non-refrigerated section of the truck to save costs.

You can tell a lot of things from the way someone walks. Chinese artificial intelligence start-up Watrix says its softwares can identify a person from 50 meters away -- even if they have covered their face or have their back to a camera -- making it more than a match for Sherlock Holmes. From a report: Known as gait recognition, the technology works by analyzing thousands of metrics about a person's walk, from body contour to the angle of arm movement to whether a person has a toe-in or toe-out gait, to then build a database. "With facial recognition people need to look into a camera -- cooperation is not needed for them to be recognized [by our technology]," said Huang Yongzhen, co-founder and chief executive of Watrix, in an interview in Beijing. Features like this have given Watrix an edge in catching runaway criminals, who tend to avoid surveillance, said Huang. Police on the streets of Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing, have already run trials of gait recognition technology, said Huang, and the company officially launched its 2.0 version last week, which supports analysis of real-time camera feeds at a mega-city level.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Peter Bright: Ever since the first Xbox was released, an obvious question has been hanging in the air: Microsoft already owns one of the premier gaming platforms, the PC, and both the original Xbox and the current Xbox One are more or less PCs anyway, so when is Microsoft going to bring the two together and let us play Xbox games on Windows? With the new Windows 10 builds, it looks like the company is taking some big steps in that direction. Microsoft has put big chunks of the Xbox infrastructure into Windows 10. This starts right from the moment you download the game: it's coming from the Xbox distribution servers, not the usual ones for Store apps. The game package itself uses a format called .xvc, which is used for Xbox One games, and there are PowerShell commands to work with these .xvc files and install .xvc games. Microsoft Gaming Services includes portions of this Xbox infrastructure; it includes a couple of drivers ("Microsoft Gaming Filesystem Driver" and "Microsoft Gaming Install Filter Driver"), along with a number of libraries that provide Xbox APIs.

The last few Windows 10 preview builds have included some vague instructions from Microsoft to install a special edition of a game, State of Decay, and report any problems with the process. There are no problems with playing the game but, rather, problems with installing and launching it. The instructions didn't give any indication as to why or what to look for. Naturally, people have been taking a closer look to see what's special about State of Decay and figure out why Microsoft is having Windows Insiders test it. Nazmus Khandaker, Rafael Rivera, and the pseudonymous WalkingCat have been poking around both the special edition of State of Decay and a helper application called Microsoft Gaming Services that insider machines are running. Brad Sams wrote up his findings. [...] The State of Decay package does nonetheless contain PC-oriented elements. In particular, it tries to install and update the DirectX runtime during its setup. We the users don't seem to be at the stage of simply running Xbox games unmodified on our PCs, or at least, not yet. But it looks as if the groundwork is being laid. The strange preview of a 2020 Windows release looks like it contains even more of this infrastructure, with signs of a layer to support Xbox's Direct3D variant on PC. "Microsoft could go the whole hog and simply make a Windows 10 PC with a suitable hardware spec into an Xbox that can play any Xbox game," writes Bright, adding: "it might just be there as a simple option for developers to enable if they choose."

According to a new report from The Verge, Facebook moderators in Phoenix, Arizona reportedly make just $28,800 a year and use sex and drugs to deal with the stress. "The report published on Monday detailed the experiences of current and former employees who worked at professional services company Cognizant, a company they say Facebook outsources its moderating efforts to," Gizmodo summarizes. "According to the report, employees experienced severe mental health distress, which they coped with by having sex at the office and smoking weed. Some even began believing the conspiracy theories they were tasked with reviewing. One quality assurance manager said he began bringing a gun to work in response to threats from fired workers." From the report: "There was nothing that they were doing for us," one former moderator told The Verge, "other than expecting us to be able to identify when we're broken. Most of the people there that are deteriorating -- they don't even see it. And that's what kills me." "Randy," a quality assurance worker at Cognizant charged with reviewing posts flagged by moderators, said that several times over his year at the company he was approached and intimidated by moderators to change his decisions. "They would confront me in the parking lot and tell me they were going to beat the shit out of me," Randy told The Verge. He also said that fired Cognizant employees made what he believed to be genuine threats of harm to their former colleagues. Randy started to bring a concealed gun to the office to protect himself.

Employees told The Verge that moderators in the Phoenix office dealt with the hellish reality of their jobs by having sex in the office -- in stairwells, bathrooms, parking garages, and a lactation room -- smoking weed on breaks, and joking about suicide. A former moderator claimed that there was a joke among colleagues that "time to go hang out on the roof" was subtext for wanting to jump off the building. Moderators for Facebook have to review graphic posts containing violence, dehumanizing speech, and child abuse, but they also have to weed through the conspiracy theories that run rampant on the web. It's well-reported that the former has resulted in moderators developing PTSD and other debilitating mental health issues, but Monday's report from The Verge indicates that the latter may be causing them to develop fringe beliefs.