David Pierce writes via The Verge: In the summer of 2019, Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu started meeting with investors to pitch their new app. They had this big idea about reshaping the way users' personal information moves around the internet, coalescing all their data into a single tool in a way that could actually work for them. But they quickly ran into a problem: all of their mock-ups and descriptions made it seem like they were building a note-taking app. And even in those hazy early days of product development -- before they had a prototype, a design, even a name -- they were crystal clear that this would not be a note-taking app. Instead, the founders wanted to create something much bigger. It would encompass all of your notes but also your interests, your viewing history, your works-in-progress. "Imagine if you had a Google search bar but for all nonpublic information," Xu says. "For every piece of information that was uniquely relevant to you."

That's what Moody and Xu were actually trying to build. So they kept tweaking the approach until it made sense. At one point, their app was going to be called NSFW, a half-joke that stood for "Notes and Search for Work," and for a while, it was called Supernote. But after a few meetings and months, they eventually landed on the name "Mem." Like Memex, a long-imagined device that humans could use to store their entire memory. Or like, well, memory. Either way, it's not a note-taking app. It's more like a protocol for private information, a way to pipe in everything that matters to you -- your email, your calendar events, your airline confirmations, your meeting notes, that idea you had on the train this morning -- and then automatically organize and make sense of it all. More importantly, it's meant to use cutting-edge AI to give all that information back to you at exactly the right time and in exactly the right place. [...]

So far, Mem is mostly a note-taking app. It's blisteringly fast and deliberately sparse -- mostly just a timeline of every mem (the company's parlance for an individual note) you've ever created or viewed, with a few simple ways to categorize and organize them. It does tasks and tags, but a full-featured project manager or Second Brain system this is not. But if you look carefully, the app already contains a few signs of where Mem is headed: a tool called Writer that can actually generate information for you, based on both its knowledge of the public internet and your personal information; AI features that summarize tweet threads for you; a sidebar that automatically displays mems related to what you're working on. All this still barely scratches the surface of what Mem wants to do and will need to do to be more than a note-taking app...

Australia has confirmed an incoming legislative change will significant strengthen its online privacy laws following a spate of data breaches in recent weeks -- such as the Optus telco breach last month. From a report: "Unfortunately, significant privacy breaches in recent weeks have shown existing safeguards are inadequate. It's not enough for a penalty for a major data breach to be seen as the cost of doing business," said its attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, in a statement at the weekend. "We need better laws to regulate how companies manage the huge amount of data they collect, and bigger penalties to incentivise better behaviour."

The changes will be made via an amendment to the country's privacy laws, following a long process of consultation on reforms. Dreyfus said the Privacy Legislation Amendment (Enforcement and Other Measures) Bill 2022 will increase the maximum penalties that can be applied under the Privacy Act 1988 for serious or repeated privacy breaches from the current AUS $2.22 million (~$1.4M) penalty to whichever is the greater of:
AUS $50 million (~$32M);
3x the value of any benefit obtained through the misuse of information; or
30% of a company's adjusted turnover in the relevant period.

"Tesla has launched a new virtual power plant in partnership with PG&E in California that will pay Powerwalls owners to help stabilize the electric grid and end brownouts in California," reports Electrek. A virtual power plant (VPP) consists of distributed energy storage systems, like Tesla Powerwalls, used in concert to provide grid services and avoid the use of polluting and expensive peaker power plants.
PC Magazine notes the program was launched in conjunction with California power utility Pacific Gas and Electric Company: As well as the personal feeling of satisfaction for helping to stabilize California's grid, you'll receive $2 for every additional kilowatt-hour delivered during designated "events," such as any time grid operator CAISO issues an energy alert, warning, or emergency. Contributors will receive push notifications before and during an event with details of its expected start and finish times. Once an event is over, each Powerwall will automatically resume normal operation.
Electrek adds that "The $2 per kWh amount is quite significant and reflects just how much value a Virtual Power Plant can add to the grid in case of an emergency event where the grid needs more capacity. Depending on the events and the number of Powerwalls homeowners have, they could earn anywhere from $10 to $60 per event or even more for bigger systems."

But in addition, "Tesla will dispatch your Powerwall when the grid is in critical need of additional power. That is when the least efficient generators would typically come online."

And you get the distinction of being pat of "the largest distributed battery in the world — potentially over 50,000 Powerwalls.... Tesla said that it has about 50,000 Powerwalls that could be eligible for this VPP, which add up to a significant 500 MWh of energy capacity than can be distributed in any event... [I]t is basically going to turn the company into a major decentralized electric utility. It's already in operation in Australia. Now it's in California, and soon it is going to be in Texas."

What did you think of Twitter Data Dash?

The Guardian describes it as "a Super Nintendo-style browser game that recaps Twitter's private policy."

And the Verge applauds the game — released Wednesday — for its "delightful pixel art aesthetic." "Welcome to PrivaCity!" reads a description of the game on the site. "Get your dog, Data, safely to the park.

"Dodge cat ads, swim through a sea of DMs, battle trolls, and learn how to take control of your Twitter experience along the way...."

The game itself is a pretty straightforward side-scrolling platformer. Each level is themed around what I can best describe as Twitter Things — one features cats wearing ad boards, another has you avoiding trolls — and your goal is to collect five bones as quickly as you can. If you get the bones, the game will explain something about Twitter's privacy settings related to that level and even offer a button linking to Twitter's settings. When you beat the cat ad level, for example, you'll see a message about how Twitter customizes your experience on the platform and points to where you can turn personalized ads on or off....

Twitter introduced the game as part of a bigger push around its privacy policy, which the company has rewritten. "We've emphasized clear language and moved away from legal jargon," Twitter said on its Safety account.
Gizmodo calls the game "adorable," but also "buggy". And they also have some quibbles with its ultimate message: It's a bit rich that Twitter made a game about avoiding faceless advertisers when the platform is actively doing everything it can to make ads tougher to avoid....

[A]fter watching our personas bounce from level to level with our lil blue dog in tow, it became clear that this game is less for us — or any Twitter user, really — and more for the company itself. It's a way to paper over uncomfortable topics like "privacy" and "consent" and "ownership of our personal data" with a lil blue dog, collecting lil bones by hopping across lil stages. Just promise you won't think about where those bones came from in the first place.

"After 9/11, I took the threat of terrorism seriously, still do," U.S. Senator Ron Wyden tells Fast Company. "But also I was concerned about how the new surveillance authorities might be abused..."

From Fast Company's report: After the 9/11 attacks, one big concern was connecting the dots. Failing to do so was why we missed the warning signs of the attacks and how we would prevent the next ones, the thinking went. One solution, according to the Pentagon, was a project to gather as much data as possible, to look for signs of future bad behavior. It was called Total Information Awareness...

Since the 1970s, Congress has been charged with preventing further abuse of the government's surveillance powers, particularly when it comes to spying on Americans. And few in Congress have questioned these powers as vigorously as Sen. Ron Wyden...

Sen. Wyden: Total Information Awareness was an ominous sounding idea to put together as much data on Americans as possible, and when used with what was then so-called predictive technology, identify who to watch as a way to stop terrorism. In the fight in Congress, here's the lesson that goes to the concerns we had 20 years ago: Total Information Awareness made it clear that the threat is not just surveillance through the aggressive collection, amalgamating, and mining of information through existing authorities. The bigger problem now is the amount of data on Americans that's available commercially or on social media... the threat to people's privacy is just as great. And the job of getting people's attention is still very, very challenging...

This is a national security issue: The personal data of Americans that the data brokers are selling is a gold mine for foreign intelligence services who can exploit it, to target supercharged hacking, blackmail, and influence campaigns. So I'm leading an effort right now that encompasses the biggest online advertising companies, to ask if they're sharing Americans' web browsing and location data with foreign companies.

Linus Torvalds gave a long new email interview to Jeremy Andrews, founding partner/CEO of Tag1 (a global technology consulting firm and the second all-time leading contributor to Drupal). Torvalds discusses everything from the creation of Git, licenses, Apple's ARM64 chips, and Rust drivers, to his own Fedora-based home work environment — and how proud he is of the pathname lookup in Linux's virtual filesystem. ("Nothing else out there comes even close.")

But with all that, early on Torvalds also reflects that Linux began as a personal project at the age of 21, "not out of some big dream to create a new operating system." Instead it "literally grew kind of haphazardly from me initially just trying to learn the in-and-outs of my new PC hardware.

"So when I released the very first version, it was really more of a 'look at what I did', and sure, I was hoping that others would find it interesting, but it wasn't a real serious and usable OS. It was more of a proof of concept, and just a personal project I had worked on for several months at that time..."

This year, in August, Linux will celebrate its 30th anniversary! That's amazing, congratulations! At what point during this journey did you realize what you'd done, that Linux was so much more than "just a hobby"?

Linus Torvalds: This may sound a bit ridiculous, but that actually happened very early. Already by late '91 (and certainly by early '92) Linux had already become much bigger than I had expected.

And yeah, considering that by that point, there were probably just a few hundred users (and even "users" may be too strong — people were tinkering with it), it probably sounds odd considering how Linux then later ended up growing much bigger. But in many ways for me personally, the big inflection point was when I realized that other people are actually using it, and interested in it, and it started to have a life of its own. People started sending patches, and the system was actually starting to do much more than I had initially really envisioned....

That "anybody can maintain their own version" worried some people about the GPLv2, but I really think it's a strength, not a weakness. Somewhat unintuitively, I think it's actually what has caused Linux to avoid fragmenting: everybody can make their own fork of the project, and that's OK. In fact, that was one of the core design principles of "Git" — every clone of the repository is its own little fork, and people (and companies) forking off their own version is how all development really gets done.

So forking isn't a problem, as long as you can then merge back the good parts. And that's where the GPLv2 comes in. The right to fork and do your own thing is important, but the other side of the coin is equally important — the right to then always join back together when a fork was shown to be successful...

I very much don't regret the choice of license, because I really do think the GPLv2 is a huge part of why Linux has been successful.

Money really isn't that great of a motivator. It doesn't pull people together. Having a common project, and really feeling that you really can be a full partner in that project, that motivates people, I think.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: Clearview AI has amassed a database of more than 3 billion photos of individuals by scraping sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Venmo. It's bigger than any other known facial-recognition database in the U.S., including the FBI's. The New York company uses algorithms to map the pictures it stockpiles, determining, for example, the distance between an individual's eyes to construct a "faceprint." This technology appeals to law enforcement agencies across the country, which can use it in real time to help determine people's identities.

It also has caught the attention of civil liberties advocates and activists, who allege in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that the company's automatic scraping of their images and its extraction of their unique biometric information violate privacy and chill protected political speech and activity. The plaintiffs -- four individual civil liberties activists and the groups Mijente and NorCal Resist -- allege Clearview AI "engages in the widespread collection of California residents' images and biometric information without notice or consent."

This is especially consequential, the plaintiffs argue, for proponents of immigration or police reform, whose political speech may be critical of law enforcement and who may be members of communities that have been historically over-policed and targeted by surveillance tactics. Clearview AI enhances law enforcement agencies' efforts to monitor these activists, as well as immigrants, people of color and those perceived as "dissidents," such as Black Lives Matter activists, and can potentially discourage their engagement in protected political speech as a result, the plaintiffs say. [...] The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction that would force the company to stop collecting biometric information in California. They are also seeking the permanent deletion of all images and biometric data or personal information in their databases.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Tattoos are usually considered a form of personal expression, but a team of researchers in Europe have created what they're calling the world's first light-emitting tattoo based on OLED screen technology that, besides presumably looking kind of cool, could also serve as a visible warning about potential health concerns. In a recently published paper in the Advanced Electronic Materials journal, "Ultrathin, UltraConformable, and FreeStanding Tattooable Organic LightEmitting Diodes," scientists from the University College London in the UK and the Italian Institute of Technology detail how their new approach to tattoos relies on the same organic light-emitting diode technology featured in devices like more recent iPhones, as well as the recent crop of mobile devices featuring folding screens. The flexibility of an OLED display is important for this application given human skin is so pliable and flexes and folds as the body moves.

The actual electronics of the light-emitting tattoos, made from an extremely thin layer of an electroluminescent polymer that glows when a charge is applied, measure in at just 2.3-micrometers thick, which, according to the researchers, is about one-third the diameter of a red blood cell. The polymer layer is then sandwiched between a pair of electrodes and sits atop an insulating layer, which is bonded to temporary tattoo paper through a printing process that isn't prohibitively expensive. The tattoos can be easily applied to surfaces using the same wet transfer process that temporary tattoos designed for kids use, and can be easily washed off when no longer needed or wanted using soap and water.

With a current applied the OLED tattoos in their current form simply glow green, but eventually could produce any color using the same RGB approach that OLED screens use. However, while the researchers acknowledge that the potential for glowing tattoos is there, taking that art in a whole new direction, they also see even more potential for them as a medical tool. When combined with other wearable technologies the light-emitting tattoos could start flashing when an athlete needs to rehydrate, or change color when applied to foods providing obvious warnings when expiration dates have passed. The researchers note that the OLEDs polymers can quickly degrade when exposed to the air, and "there's an even bigger issue of finding a way to power them using tiny batteries or supercapacitors, as so far in the lab they've been wired to an external power source," adds Gizmodo.

Elon Musk made rare comments about a new Tesla vehicle to be designed in Berlin, adding that the reason behind the new vehicle program is to attract new talent from Europe: "I think there's a lot of talent, talented designers and engineers, in Europe. And a lot of the best people, they want to work somewhere where they are doing original design work. They don't want to just be doing the European version of something that was designed in California. So, I think it's important in order to attract the best talent to do original design." Electrek reports: Tesla has been putting a lot of efforts into attracting top talent and it has been successful at it in its home country. Furthermore, Musk commented on the vehicle segment that Tesla plans to address with a locally designed vehicle: "In Europe, I think it would make sense to do I guess a compact car -- perhaps a hatchback or something like that. Something that answers "what do most people want?' in a given region. In the US, cars tend to be bigger for personal taste reasons and in Europe, it tends to be smaller. If you try to park in dense urban environments, having a car that fits in tight parking spaces is important."

Musk didn't offer a timeline for Tesla to design and build the new electric car in Germany, but it's not expected to hit the market for at least a few more years as Tesla focuses on bringing the European Model Y to production at Gigafactory Berlin next year. You can watch the interview where Musk makes the new comments here.

Last week, Apple released macOS Big Sur and the rollout was anything but smooth. The mass upgrade caused the Apple servers responsible for checking if a user opens an app not downloaded from the App Store to slow to a crawl. Apple eventually fixed the problem, "but concerns about paralyzed Macs were soon replaced by an even bigger worry -- the vast amount of personal data Apple, and possibly others, can glean from Macs performing certificate checks each time a user opens an app that didn't come from the App Store," writes Dan Goodin via Ars Technica. From the report: Before Apple allows an app into the App Store, it must first pass a review that vets its security. Users can configure the macOS feature known as Gatekeeper to allow only these approved apps, or they can choose a setting that also allows the installation of third-party apps, as long as these apps are signed with a developer certificate issued by Apple. To make sure the certificate hasn't been revoked, macOS uses OCSP -- short for the industry standard Online Certificate Status Protocol -- to check its validity. [...] Somehow, the mass number of people upgrading to Big Sur on Thursday seems to have caused the servers at ocsp.apple.com to become overloaded but not fall over completely. The server couldn't provide the all clear, but it also didn't return an error that would trigger the soft fail. The result was huge numbers of Mac users left in limbo.

The post Your Computer Isn't Yours was one of the catalysts for the mass concern. It noted that the simple HTML get-requests performed by OCSP were unencrypted. That meant that not only was Apple able to build profiles based on our minute-by-minute Mac usage, but so could ISPs or anyone else who could view traffic passing over the network. (To prevent falling into an infinite authentication loop, virtually all OCSP traffic is unencrypted, although responses are digitally signed.) Fortunately, less alarmist posts like this one provided more helpful background. The hashes being transmitted weren't unique to the app itself but rather the Apple-issued developer certificate. That still allowed people to infer when an app such as Tor, Signal, Firefox, or Thunderbird was being used, but it was still less granular than many people first assumed. The larger point was that, in most respects, the data collection by ocsp.apple.com wasn't much different from the information that already gets transmitted in real time through OCSP every time we visit a website. [...] In short, though, the takeaway was the same: the potential loss of privacy from OCSP is a trade-off we make in an effort to check the validity of the certificate authenticating a website we want to visit or a piece of software we want to install.

In an attempt to further assure Mac users, Apple on Monday published this post. It explains what the company does and doesn't do with the information collected through Gatekeeper and a separate feature known as notarization, which checks the security even of non-App Store apps. The post went on to say that in the next year, Apple will provide a new protocol to check if developer certificates have been revoked, provide "strong protections against server failure," and present a new OS setting for users who want to opt out of all of this. [...] People who don't trust OCSP checks for Mac apps can turn them off by editing the Mac hosts file. Everyone else can move along.

A game critic for the Los Angeles Times remembers his reaction to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. "What a disappointment — if only it had been built for video game consoles." This leads to this epiphany: For all the deserved attention "The Mandalorian" series on Disney+ has received, the just-released game "Star Wars: Squadrons" reminds us that some of the best "Star Wars" stories in recent years have been in the video game space.... This is a work, in fact, that doesn't suffer from an action-focused, little-narrative approach — every second I've spent with this game has fulfilled the sort of personal "Star Wars" fantasy that's enhanced by giving the audience a bit of autonomy. It's also, for those privileged enough to own a virtual reality headset, the VR experience I've had at home that most represents what it's like to be in a theme park.

Rather than throwing spectacle after spectacle at me, it lets me partake in them, to scratch the itch of being in the center of intergalactic, aerial dogfights. But less than emphasizing awe, "Squadrons" centers on the feel of controlling a ship, making me feel a part of something bigger. Sure, that's just digital, fictional warfare, but "Squadrons" understands the appeal of "Star Wars" is that it's open to everyone, and any of us can be ace pilots if given the chance. We don't admire; we act.

There is nostalgia at play. The game recalls some of the LucasArts spaceflight simulators of yore that I obsessed with in my suburban Chicago basement, but there's a sense of swiftness and polish that makes this game as appealing as a coin-op arcade machine. And yet it's also in possession of confidence, a depth that I'll need to master if I really want to go hard in multiplayer battles. As a solo player without many friends who play multiplayer games — OK, fine, none — I'm not so sure I'll take the time to learn each individual ship and its advantages or disadvantages. But I'm not sure I need that because "Squadrons" has me smiling throughout, even if I accidentally turn my X-wing into an asteroid. While throwing me into larger-than-life moments — disable a giant, Imperial starship and help lead a capture of it — "Squadrons" succeeds in making them feel livable and conquerable.

In other words, by focusing so intently on the act of spaceflight, I don't feel like a tourist in the "Star Wars" universe, thrown a litany of "greatest hits" moments. Instead, "Squadron's" single-focus obsession allows my imagination to run free rather than have to wonder where I am, who I am or what I'm supposed to do now. I can just fly. And shoot. And it feels great.

Google today unveiled two Pixel smartphones. First is the $349 Pixel 4A, which is available for preorder now and will ship on August 20th. And second, there's the Pixel 4A 5G, which will cost $499 and also ship sometime this fall. From a blog post: With the same incredible camera experiences from Pixel 4 and a redesigned hole-punch design, Pixel 4a brings the same features that have helped millions of Pixel owners take great shots. HDR+ with dual exposure controls, Portrait Mode, Top Shot, Night Sight with astrophotography capabilities and fused video stabilization -- they're all there. The Pixel 4a comes in Just Black with a 5.8-inch OLED display. It has a matte finish that feels secure and comfortable in your hand and includes Pixel's signature color pop power button in mint. Check out the custom wallpapers that have some fun with the punch-hole camera. In addition to features like Recorder, which now connects with Google Docs to seamlessly save and share transcriptions and recordings (English only), Pixel 4a will include helpful experiences like the Personal Safety app for real-time emergency notifications and car crash detection.

Pixel 4a also has Live Caption, which provides real-time captioning (English only) for your video and audio content. New with the Pixel 4a launch -- and also rolling out for Pixel 2, 3, 3a and 4 phones -- Live Caption will now automatically caption your voice and video calls. The Pixel 4a has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G Mobile Platform, Titan M security module for on-device security, 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage with an even bigger battery that lasts all day1. [...] This fall, we'll have two more devices to talk about: the Pixel 4a (5G), starting at $499, and Pixel 5, both with 5G2 to make streaming videos, downloading content and playing games on Stadia or other platforms faster and smoother than ever. Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 will be available in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan and Australia. In the coming months, we'll share more about these devices and our approach to 5G.

Slashdot reader SmartAboutThings writes: While Microsoft Edge is right on track to replace Internet Explorer, it seems that the last one is a bigger security liability then you may think. In a newly released advisory, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) [an agency within America's Department of Homeland Security] is warning users about an IE vulnerability.

To keep your personal data safe and don't expose your PC to dangerous malware, the agency further recommends "Consider using Microsoft Edge or an alternate browser until patches are made available." As a reminder, this is not the first international agency that ranks IE's security very low, as Germany's BSI shared a couple of months back a similar study.
Lifehacker's senior technology editor notes that the new vulnerability affects "various permutations of Internet Explorer 9, 10, and 11 across Windows 7, 8.1, and Windows 10 (as well as various editions of Windows Server).

"The bad news is that Microsoft won't likely patch this problem until February -- when the next major batch of security updates hits." But they offer a work-around of their own until then which involves opening an administrative command prompt to restrict access to the deprecated JScript library used by the exploit.

Otherwise, don't click on links from strangers, and if you're using IE switch to Edge. And Microsoft explains what will happen if you used Internet Explorer to visit a web site designed to exploit the vulnerability. "If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could take control of an affected system.

"An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights."

Credit-scoring company Fair Isaac is making changes that will create a bigger gap between consumers deemed to be good and bad credit risks [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: Changes in how the most widely used credit score in the U.S. is calculated will likely make it harder for many Americans to get loans. Fair Isaac, creator of FICO scores, will soon start scoring consumers with rising debt levels and those who fall behind on loan payments more harshly. It will also flag certain consumers who sign up for personal loans, a category of unsecured debt that has surged in recent years. The changes will create a bigger gap between consumers deemed to be good and bad credit risks, the company says. Consumers with already-high FICO scores of about 680 or higher who continue to manage loans well will likely get a higher score than under previous FICO versions. Those with already-low scores below 600 who continue to miss payments or accumulate other black marks will experience bigger score declines than under previous models.

Millions of consumers could see their scores rise or fall as a result of the changes, the company said. The changes are an about-face from recent years, when FICO and credit-reporting companies made changes that helped increase scores for some consumers, such as removing some negative information, including civil judgments, from credit reports. Credit scoring and reporting companies also recently started factoring in such information as bank account balances and utilities payments to help give consumers with limited credit histories a better shot at getting loans. Those recent moves can help revenue-hungry lenders identify more creditworthy consumers and make it easier for them to be approved for loans. Average FICO scores have been rising steadily following some of these changes and an improving economy.

At Microsoft's Ignite conference this month, the company announced a new vision for its personal productivity assistant, Cortana -- one which aimed to make it more useful in your day-to-day work, including email, but one which also saw Microsoft scaling its ambitions back from Cortana as a true Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant competitor. Now, the other shoe has dropped, as Microsoft says it's planning to shut down its standalone Cortana mobile apps across a number of markets. From a report: The company quietly revealed its plans to wind down support for Cortana on iOS and Android in several regions, with an end-of-life date of January 31st, 2020. After this point, Cortana mobile app will no longer be supported. Microsoft also said it will release an updated version of its Microsoft Launcher, that will have Cortana removed. Microsoft tells us the impacted markets include Great Britain, Australia, Germany, Mexico, China, Spain, Canada, and India. While the U.S. isn't in this list today, it would not be surprising to see its support pulled at a later date. The Cortana app for iOS is only ranked No. 254 in the Productivity category on the App Store, and only No. 145 on Google Play, according to current data from Sensor Tower.

The personal records of most of Ecuador's population, including children, has been left exposed online due to a misconfigured database, ZDNet reported Monday. From the report: The database, an Elasticsearch searver, was discovered two weeks ago by vpnMentor security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, who shared their findings exclusively with ZDNet. Together, we worked to analyze the leaking data, verify its authenticity, and contact the server owner. The leaky server is one of the, if not the biggest, data breaches in Ecuador's history, a small South American country with a population of 16.6 million citizens. The Elasticsearch server contained a total of approximately 20.8 million user records, a number larger than the country's total population count. The bigger number comes from duplicate records or older entries, containing the data of deceased persons.

"Neuroscientists can now see that brain behavior changes when people rely on turn-by-turn directions," says science writer M.R. O'Connor, citing a study of personal GPS devices co-authored by Kent-based cognitive neuroscience researcher Amir-Homayoun Javadi: What isn't known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time. Javadi said the conclusions he draws from recent studies is that "when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation is less used, and consequently their brain areas involved in navigation tend to shrink."

How people navigate naturally changes with age. Navigation aptitude appears to peak around age 19, and after that, most people slowly stop using spatial memory strategies to find their way, relying on habit instead. But neuroscientist Veronique Bohbot has found that using spatial-memory strategies for navigation correlates with increased gray matter in the hippocampus at any age. She thinks that interventions focused on improving spatial memory by exercising the hippocampus -- paying attention to the spatial relationships of places in our environment -- might help offset age-related cognitive impairments or even neurodegenerative diseases. "If we are paying attention to our environment, we are stimulating our hippocampus, and a bigger hippocampus seems to be protective against Alzheimer's disease," Bohbot told me in an email.
This piece originally appeared in the Washington Post's opinion section -- under the headline "Ditch the GPS. It's Ruining Your Brain."

At its Google I/O developer conference today, the company announced that Google and Nest are combining into a single smart home brand aptly called Google Nest. For now, the newly announced Google Nest Hub Max and Google Home Hub, which will now be called the Google Nest Hub, are the only products that will carry the new name in their official branding. CNET reports: Other products are expected to be rebranded in the future. All of Nest's smart home products will fall under this brand, which includes the company's famous smart thermostats and security cameras, although their names won't change retroactively. Google's smart speakers, including the Google Home; smart displays such as the Google Home Hub; Google Wifi routers and Google Chromecast streamers will also fit under the purview of Google Nest. Several products under the new brand are getting a price cut, including the Google Home Max, which now costs $100 less than before at $299.

As part of the new unified brand, customers with Nest accounts will be encouraged to merge them into Google accounts. You can control your Nest devices with the Google Home app. You won't be able to set up new Nest devices using that app yet, so customers can't remove the separate Nest app from their phones entirely. Nest accounts will be moved to a maintenance mode, where they will still get security updates, but Google will provide new features only to Google accounts. Similarly, companies that had joined the Works with Nest program will be encouraged to use Actions on Google -- a platform that allows third-party developers to create commands for Google Assistant -- to be compatible with the new joined brand. As for the Google Nest Hub Max, it's basically a big Google Assistant smart display with a camera on top that can be used for video calls and home security monitoring. It's coming this summer, and it will retail for $229. The Verge reports: Like the smaller $149 Google Home Hub, the Nest Hub Max has a matte display that adjusts its color temperature to match the room. The 10-inch screen often looks more like a regular photo in a frame than a standard LCD panel. It comes in both gray and white, though the bezel around the display will always be white. Also, it lets Google know when you're home, and it can recognize your face so it can show customized personal information on the screen. [...] The other thing that's bigger is the sound. There are two front-firing 10W tweeters and one 30W woofer on the back. I wasn't able to do a real sound-quality test in the couple of hours I spent with the Hub Max, but I can tell you that it's definitely louder than the smaller Hub, and it didn't obviously distort at high volumes. But a Sonos One or Apple HomePod this is not...

pgmrdlm shares a report from CBS News: Half of American parents are unable to save as much as they'd like to for retirement, and their grown offspring -- whom they still count as dependents -- are to blame, according to a new Bankrate.com study. While they likely mean well, parents who support children into young adulthood often end up encumbered when they reach retirement age. They can inadvertently hamstring their kids, too.

Seventeen percent of the couples surveyed by Bankrate.com said that they sacrificed their own retirement savings by "a lot" to help their adult children. Another 34 percent said they'd "somewhat" sacrificed their savings plans. Not surprisingly, the lowest earners saved the least. Seventeen percent of couples making less than a combined $50,000 a year and have at least one child who is 18 or older said they were helping pay their adult children's bills but not setting aside any money for retirement. The study found a generational divide when it comes to perceptions of parents supporting adult children. "Millennials between the ages of 23 and 38 believe they should be supported for longer, and expect some expenses, like student loans, to be covered up to the age of 23," reports CBS News. "Baby boomers, meanwhile, think parents should wean children off their bank accounts sooner across almost every category of expense, including cell phone bills, car payments and travel costs." Millennials and baby boomers both agree that young adults by age 23 should be wholly response for bigger ticket expenses like health insurance.

Economic analyst Mark Hamrick says the 2008 financial crisis, Great Recession and lack of substantial wage growth are to blame for this dynamic. Changing societal norms also come in to play, as many young adults are "opting to pursue higher education, thereby delaying their entries into the workforce," the report says. "And by the time these degree-holders enter the workforce, they're saddled with student debt..."

Freshly Exhumed writes: Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has revealed that senior White House advisor Jared Kushner's lawyer admitted in December that his client "continues to use" WhatsApp to conduct official White House business. The chairman also said that a lawyer for Ivanka Trump and Mr. Kushner told the committee late last year that they additionally used private email accounts for official White House business in a way that may have violated federal records laws. Mr Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell could not say whether his client used WhatsApp to share classified information. Regardless, Cummings says the communications raise questions about whether Kushner and other officials violated the Presidential Records Act, which requires the president and his staff "take all practical steps to file personal records separately from Presidential records." As for Ivanka's use of a personal email account to conduct official business, her lawyer says she sent the emails before she was briefed on the rules.

If you're not familiar with WhatsApp, here's what you should know about it: "As of January 2019, more than 1.5 billion users in over 180 countries use WhatsApp, created in 2009 as an alternative to text messaging," reports USA Today. "Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 to make a bigger play in the rapidly-growing messaging market, along with its own Messenger platform, which also boasts 1.5 billion users." The service features end-to-end encryption, meaning the sender and recipient are the only ones who can view the messages.