A group of programmers and device hackers are working to bring proper support for Ubuntu to Arm-powered Windows laptops, starting with first-generation Snapdragon 835 systems, like the HP Envy x2 and Asus NovaGo. From a report: The aarch64-laptops project provides prebuilt images for the aforementioned notebook PCs, as well as the Lenovo Miix 630. Although Ubuntu and other Linux distributions support aarch64 (ARMv8) by default, various obstacles including the design and configuration of Qualcomm Snapdragon processors make these default images not practically usable. The aarch64-laptops project developers are aiming to address these difficulties, though work is still ongoing. Presently, the TouchPad does not work properly on the Asus, with all three lacking proper support for on-board storage and Wi-Fi, which rely on UFS support. According to their documentation, this is being worked on upstream.

"China's top search engine company Baidu made a smart cat shelter in Beijing that uses AI to verify when a cat is approaching and open its door," writes Slashdot reader AmiMoJo. "The cat shelter is heated and also offers cats food and water." Mashable reports: It can accurately identify 174 different cat breeds, as to let them enter and exit as they please. A door will slide open if the camera spots a cat, but it won't work on dogs. Multiple cats can fit inside the space. Another neat camera feature is that it can be also used to detect if the cat is sick -- it can identify four common cat diseases, such as inflammation, skin problems, and physical trauma. Once a cat is identified as needing care, associated volunteers can be informed to come and collect it. "Homeless cats often struggle to survive the winter in Beijing, and even though volunteers feed them their water bowls freeze over in the cold," adds AmiMoJo. "Due to many people living in apartments that don't allow pets, they can't simply bring the cats home."

Baidu has a blog post detailing the shelter and its use of artificial intelligence.

"It's the end of the line for the biggest passenger jet ever built: the A380 is going to cease production," writes Slashdot reader Required Snark, citing a report from CNN. From the report: The European plane maker said Thursday that it will stop delivering A380s in 2021 after its key customer, Dubai-based airline Emirates, slashed its orders for the huge jetliner. "We have no substantial A380 backlog and hence no basis to sustain production, despite all our sales efforts with other airlines in recent years," Airbus CEO Tom Enders said in a company statement. The company has delivered 234 of the superjumbos to date, less than a quarter of the 1,200 it predicted it would sell when it first introduced the double-decker aircraft. Its plans were undermined by airlines shifting their interest to lighter, more fuel efficient passenger jets that have reduced the need to ferry passengers between the big hubs. "Passengers all over the world love to fly on this great aircraft. Hence today's announcement is painful for us and the A380 communities worldwide," Enders said. "But keep in mind that A380s will still roam the skies for many years to come and Airbus will of course continue to fully support the A380 operators."

Photo-sharing service 500px has announced that it was the victim of a hack back in July 2018 and that personal data was exposed for all the roughly 14.8 million accounts that existed at the time. PetaPixel reports: In an email sent out to users and an announcement posted to its website, 500px states that it was only on February 8th, 2019, that its team learned of an unauthorized intrusion to its system that occurred on or around July 5th, 2018. The personal data that may have been stolen by the intruder includes first and last names, usernames, email addresses, password hashes (i.e. not plaintext passwords), location (i.e. city, state, country), birth date, and gender. The company has reset all 500px account passwords, so to get back into your account you'll need to pick a new one using the recovery email system. "At this time, there is no indication of unauthorized access to your account, and no evidence that other data associated with your user profile was affected, such as credit card information (which is not stored on our servers), if used to make any purchases, or any other sensitive personal information," 500px says. "We recommend you change your password on any other website or app on which you use a password that is the same as or similar to your password for your 500px account," 500px says.

Zorro shares a report from The Register: Older satnavs and such devices won't be able to use America's Global Positioning System properly after April 6 unless they've been suitably updated or designed to handle a looming epoch rollover. GPS signals from satellites include a timestamp, needed in part to calculate one's location, that stores the week number using ten binary bits. That means the week number can have 210 or 1,024 integer values, counting from zero to 1,023 in this case. Every 1,024 weeks, or roughly every 20 years, the counter rolls over from 1,023 to zero. The first Saturday in April will mark the end of the 1,024th week, after which the counter will spill over from 1,023 to zero. The last time the week number overflowed like this was in 1999, nearly two decades on from the first epoch in January 1980. You can see where this is going. If devices in use today are not designed or patched to handle this latest rollover, they will revert to an earlier year after that 1,024th week in April, causing attempts to calculate position to potentially fail. System and navigation data could even be corrupted, we're warned. U.S. Homeland Security explained the issue in a write-up this week. GPS.gov also notes that the new CNAV and MNAV message formats will use a 13-bit week number, so this issue shouldn't happen again anytime soon. The site recommend users consult the manufacturer of their equipment to make sure they have the proper updates in place.

A reader shares a report from Ars Technica: Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University published a paper in Nature Sustainability this week that looks at the emissions and economic costs associated with recycling automotive batteries. They specifically addressed batteries with three types of cathode chemistry: nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC), nickel cobalt aluminum oxide (NCA), and iron phosphate (LFP). The first two cathode chemistries are common in passenger vehicles, and LFP is common in buses (bus maker BYD uses LFP batteries, for example). Since the packaging of batteries is important to the recycling method, cylindrical batteries (the types of cells that Tesla makes) are compared to pouch cell batteries in the analysis. The researchers also compared recycling methods. These include pyrometallurgical recycling (exposing the valuable parts of the battery to high temperatures and then recovering those metals as alloys), hydrometallurgical recycling (leaching valuable metals from batteries and separating the desired metals from the resulting solution), and "direct cathode recycling," where the battery's cathode is retained as-is, but new lithium is added in such a way that the battery regains its original performance.

Ultimately, LFP-cathode batteries were not able to avoid additional emissions under any recycling circumstances. The iron materials used in those bus batteries are already efficient to mine, the paper notes. This results "in a smaller GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions offset from the recovered materials that is insufficient to offset the energy and GHG emissions associated with the recycling processes considered." For now, new bus batteries seem to be cheaper and better for the environment than recycled bus batteries. The story is more complicated for electric passenger vehicle batteries, however. For both NMC and NCA cells, hydrometallurgical and direct cathode removal recycling methods do result in a reduction of GHG emissions, but only recycling via direct cathode removal with pouch cells shows a statistically significant reduction in emissions.

In a blog post today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is building new data centers and offices and expanding several key locations across the U.S., spending $13 billion this year. CNBC reports: Pichai outlined the plans, which include opening new data centers in Nevada, Ohio, Texas and Nebraska, the first time the company will have infrastructure locations in those states. The company is also doubling its workforce in Virginia, providing greater access to Washington, D.C., with a new office and more data center space, and expanding its New York campus at Hudson Square.

Google is showing its willingness to further open its wallet, after a year in which capital spending more than doubled to $25.46 billion. The company didn't say home much each location will cost or provide information on tax incentives from local communities. Pichai said the plans will likely create tens of thousands of construction jobs across Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas and Virginia, as well as Oklahoma and South Carolina, where the company is expanding existing data centers. Google didn't say how many new jobs the data centers and business offices would create. Pichai also said that the company is adding new office buildings in Texas and Massachusetts, building out more space in Illinois, Wisconsin, Washington state and Georgia, and redeveloping California locations near Los Angeles and in the Bay Area, including the Westside Pavillion and Spruce Goose Hangar.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The U.S. Department of Justice unsealed today espionage-related charges against a former U.S. Air Force service member who defected to Iran and helped the country's hackers target her former Air Force colleagues. Besides charges and an arrest warrant issued in the name of the former USAF service member, the DOJ also indicted four Iranian hackers who supposedly carried out the cyber-attacks acting on information provided by Witt. The most notable of the four Iranian hackers is Behzad Mesri, who U.S. authorities also charged in November 2017 with hacking HBO, stealing scripts for unaired episodes of season 6 of the hit series Game Of Thrones TV show, and later attempting to extort HBO execs for $6 million.

But at the heart of today's indictment stands Monica Elfriede Witt, 39, a former US Air Force counter-intelligence special agent specialized in Middle East operations, who served for the Air Force between 1997 and 2008, and later worked as a DOD contractor until 2010 --including for Booz Allen Hamilton, the same defense company where Edward Snowden worked. [...] The DOJ claims Witt has been working ever since with IRGC hacking units to craft and fine-tune cyber-operations against her former Air Force colleagues, some of whom she knew personally. [...] All the five suspects named in the indictment are still at large, believed to be located in Iran. The DOJ says Witt now goes by the names of Fatemah Zahra or Narges Witt.

A new variant of the multi-stage Shlayer malware known to target macOS users has been observed in the wild, now being capable to escalate privileges using a two-year-old technique and to disable the Gatekeeper protection mechanism to run unsigned second stage payloads. Bleeping Computer reports: This new Shlayer variant unearthed by Carbon Black's Threat Analysis Unit (TAU) targets all macOS releases up to the latest 10.14.3 Mojave, and will arrive on the targets' machines as a DMG, PKG, ISO, or ZIP files, some of them also signed with a valid Apple developer ID to make them look legitimate. Shlayer samples found by TAU also use malicious shell scripts to download additional payloads just like older installments did, and, in the case of samples distributed as DMG images, will surreptitiously launch a .command script in the background after the user launches the fake Flash installer. The malicious script included in the DMG is encoded using base64 and will decrypt a second AES encrypted script which will be executed automatically after being decrypted.

One it successfully downloads the second stage malware payload, Shlayer will "to escalate privileges with sudo using a technique invoking /usr/libexec/security_authtrampoline," presented by Patrick Wardle in his Death by 1000 Installers talk at DEFCON 2017. The next step is to download extra payloads which all contain adware according to TAU and it makes sure they'll be able to run on the compromised Mac by disabling the Gatekeeper protection mechanism. After this is accomplished, all extra payloads downloaded and launched by Shlayer will be seen as whitelisted software because the OS will no longer check if they are signed with an Apple developer ID. Also, just in case the malware is not able to disable Gatekeeper on the infected Mac, some of the second stage payloads are also signed with valid developer IDs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: On September 7, 2017, the world heard an alarming announcement from credit ratings giant Equifax: In a brazen cyber-attack, somebody had stolen sensitive personal information from more than 140 million people, nearly half the population of the U.S. It was the consumer data security scandal of the decade. The information included social security numbers, driver's license numbers, information from credit disputes and other personal details. CEO Richard Smith stepped down under fire. Lawmakers changed credit freeze laws and instilled new regulatory oversight of credit ratings agencies. Then, something unusual happened. The data disappeared. Completely.

CNBC talked to eight experts, including data "hunters" who scour the dark web for stolen information, senior cybersecurity managers, top executives at financial institutions, senior intelligence officials who played a part in the investigation and consultants who helped support it. All of them agreed that a breach happened, and personal information from 143 million people was stolen. But none of them knows where the data is now. It's never appeared on any hundreds of underground websites selling stolen information. Security experts haven't seen the data used for in any of the ways they'd expect in a theft like this -- not for impersonating victims, not for accessing other websites, nothing. Most experts familiar with the case now believe that the thieves were working for a foreign government, and are using the information not for financial gain, but to try and identify and recruit spies.

In a year-in-review announcement today, Google said Play Store app rejections went up 55% last year after the OS maker tightened up its app review process. From a report: Similarly, stats for app suspensions also went up, by more than 66%, according to Google, which the company credited to its continued investment in "automated protections and human review processes that play critical roles in identifying and enforcing on bad apps." One of the most significant roles in the automated systems cited by Google in identifying malware is the Google Play Protect service, which is currently included by default with the official Play Store app. Google said this service now scans over 50 billion apps per day, and even goes as far as downloading and scanning every Android app it finds on the internet.

[...] Play Store's automated systems are now getting better and better at detecting threats, so much so that Google is now seeing clear patterns. "We find that over 80% of severe policy violations are conducted by repeat offenders and abusive developer networks," Ahn said. "When malicious developers are banned, they often create new accounts or buy developer accounts on the black market in order to come back to Google Play."

The Federal Communications Commission will consider "regulatory intervention" if the major telecommunications carriers don't set up a system this year to stop spoofed robocalls, FCC chairman Ajit Pai said Wednesday. "It's time for carriers to implement robust caller ID authentication," Pai said in a statement, noting that some companies have already committed to carrying out protocols, known as the SHAKEN/STIR framework, in 2019. A report adds: Pai sent letters to major wireless carriers in November demanding that they adopt industry-wide frameworks to crackdown on the practice of "spoofing," where robocallers mask a call's origin with a fraudulent number on their caller ID. On Wednesday, the FCC chair followed up with another demand that they implement caller authentication systems this year and a threat over the repercussions if they don't comply. You can read responses from carriers FCC's website.

Reader schwit1 shares a report: When you're browsing online, who sets the prices? An algorithm, most likely. A study from 2015 showed that a third of all items on Amazon [PDF] had prices set by an algorithm, and chances are that percentage has only risen. A new study shows how easy it would be for price-setting algorithms to learn to collude with each other and keep prices at a disadvantage for customers.

This sort of collusion would stem from a certain type of algorithm, the researchers say. Reinforcement algorithms learn through trial and error. In the simplest terms, a walking robot would take a step, fall, and try again. These algorithms have often been used to teach algorithms to win games like Go.

"From the antitrust standpoint," say professors Emilio Calvano, Giacomo Calzolari, and others from the University of Bologna in Italy, "the concern is that these autonomous pricing algorithms may independently discover that if they are to make the highest possible profit, they should avoid price wars. That is, they may learn to collude even if they have not been specifically instructed to do so, and even if they do not communicate with one another."

hackingbear writes: The world is literally a greener place than it was twenty years ago, and data from NASA satellites has revealed a counterintuitive source for much of this new foliage. A new study shows that China and India -- the world's most populous countries -- are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect comes mostly from ambitious tree-planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries. Ranga Myneni of Boston University and colleagues first detected the greening phenomenon in satellite data from the mid-1990s, but they did not know whether human activity was a chief cause. The research team found that global green leaf area has increased by 5 percent since the early 2000s, an area equivalent to all of the Amazon rainforests. At least 25 percent of that gain came in China. "China and India account for one-third of the greening, but contain only 9 percent of the planet's land area covered in vegetation," said lead author Chi Chen of Boston University. "That is a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from overexploitation." China's outsized contribution to the global greening trend comes in large part from its programs to conserve and expand forests (about 42 percent of the greening contribution). These programs were developed in an effort to reduce the effects of soil erosion, air pollution, and climate change.

Raspberry Pi is finally ready for the full Windows 10 experience. From a report: A new installer lets you put Windows 10 on Arm, including the Pi. And it's made by the same people who got Windows 10 on Arm onto Lumia 950 and 950 XL handset. You can find the Github page here, in which developer Jose Manuel Nieto Sanchez call the tool "super easy to use" and "no-hassle." It requires a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B or B+, a microSD card (he recommends an A1 rating) and a Windows 10ARM64 image, which is linked to from the page where you get the download instructions.

The Swiss government is offering bug bounties of up to CHF 50,000 (around $50,000) to anyone who can expose vulnerabilities in its internet-based e-voting system in a test later this month. From a report: In total, 150,000 CHF (around $150,000) will be up for grabs for any white hat hackers who register for the "Public Intrusion Test" (PIT). The Swiss Post system will be open for a dummy election between February 24th and March 24th, the length of a typical Swiss federal vote, during which time any registered "white hat" hackers will be free to discover and report vulnerabilities.

This PIT comes as the Swiss government is planning to expand its e-voting capabilities by October 2019 to two thirds of the 26 cantons that make up the Swiss Confederation. The country has conducted more than 300 trials of e-voting systems over the past 14 years, but current rules limit the amount of electronic votes to 10 percent of the total for referendums and 30 percent for constitutional amendments. However, the expansion plans have been met by opposition by politicians who claim current e-voting systems are insecure, expensive, and prone to manipulation.

Amazon's Alexa Skills Blueprints are free online templates that let you create custom Alexa tricks without needing to code. Now, the online retailer is giving those blueprints some new tricks of their own. From a report: Announced in a blog post Wednesday morning, the newest Skill Blueprints are "built specifically for content creators, bloggers, and organizations so they can reach anyone with an Alexa-enabled device." Skills created with any of Amazon's blueprints can now be submitted to Amazon for certification and publication in the Alexa app's Skills Store in the US. "Keep your skill personal to Alexa-enabled devices associated with your Amazon account, share it with friends and family, or publish it so anyone can discover, use and review your skill," Amazon says. That open approach might help bolster the number of Alexa skills available in the Alexa app.

Google plans to unveil its first lower-priced smartphone this year as part of an aggressive push into hardware that it hopes will draw more users into its ecosystem, Nikkei Asian Review reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: The U.S. internet giant is moving quickly to exploit the troubles currently besetting Apple, which has suffered disappointing sales of its new premium iPhone as consumers migrate to cheaper models and global smartphone sales tumble, industry sources say. Google's new smartphone will be its first non-premium model aimed at price-sensitive customers and those in emerging markets.

It is expected to be priced lower than Apple's cheapest iPhone, the XR, which starts at $749. The latest model in Google's own Pixel range, released last October, started at $799. Midrange to highend phones are priced at between $150 and $700, while low end models sell for less than $150, industry sources said. The new phone will be the spearhead of Google's drive to expand the hardware using its operating systems. New products planned for this year include smart speakers, wearables and web cameras, sources familiar with the company's plans told the Nikkei Asian Review. Google also plans to launch a new premium phone in its Pixel range, as usual.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Any sports fan will know, or at least appreciate, the disappointment of going to watch your team only to find that a top player has been left out. But what if you could pay an extra bit of money for your ticket -- say, 5-15% on top of the normal price -- and insure the cost of your ticket against such a situation? If your favourite player does not play, for whatever reason, you get your money back. That's the intriguing premise behind Fansure, a start-up currently based in Belmont, California. When I spoke to the firm's marketing manager, Tara Fan, she explained it in the context of a basketball game: "Some tickets are $300-$400 to go to a game. Typically, you're paying that to see someone like LeBron James, or Kevin Durant, or someone like that." It works like this: You buy the ticket as normal. Then, at least 48 hours before the game, you go to Fansure, and you pay them an added percentage. The amount reflects what Fansure thinks is the likelihood of your selected player appearing or not.

Someone like Durant for instance, rarely misses a game for the Golden State Warriors and so the premium would be relatively low. "It would only be, I would say, 8% of your ticket price," Ms Fan explained. "It's like... $30 to cover a $400 ticket. And so that's where the benefit rolls out." If Durant plays, you've wasted your $30, which Fansure pockets. If he doesn't, you still get to go and enjoy the game, and Fansure will refund you the entire amount of the ticket (but keeps the bit you paid for insurance).

An anonymous reader shares a report: Twitter wants to be the place for the most important public conversations online. It still has some serious work to do. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Recode co-founder Kara Swisher agreed to conduct an interview Tuesday on Twitter, and it had all the makings of a great read: The CEO of one of the most influential and controversial tech platforms in the world taking questions from one of the industry's most ferocious reporters. The only problem? No one could follow along.

Despite the public interview, and a dedicated hashtag (#karajack) for the event, it didn't take long before the dozens of tweets between the two started to get confusing. They were listed out of order, other users started chiming in, and there was no way to properly follow the conversation thread. Swisher's questions about Twitter's complex abuse policies, and Dorsey's subsequent responses, were floating around my timeline along with the regular tech news and opinions I always look at. If you wanted to find a permanent thread of the chat, you had to visit one of either Kara or Jack's pages and continually refresh. It made for a difficult and confusing experience.

Dorsey even admitted so himself. "I am going to start a NEW thread to make it easy for people to follow (@waltmossberg just texted me that it is a "chaotic hellpit")," Swisher tweeted, referencing Recode's other co-founder, the now-retired Walt Mossberg. "Ok. Definitely not easy to follow the conversation," Dorsey replied. "Exactly why we are doing this. Fixing stuff like this will help I believe."