Forbes reports: In July, members of the federal Senate Judiciary Committee chose to move forward with a bill targeting copyright abuse with a more streamlined way to collect damages, but critics say that it could still allow big online players to push smaller ones around -- and even into bankruptcy.

Known as the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (or CASE) Act, the bill was reintroduced in the House and Senate this spring by a roster of bipartisan lawmakers, with endorsements from such groups as the Copyright Alliance and the Graphic Artists' Guild. Under the bill, the U.S. Copyright Office would establish a new 'small claims-style' system for seeking damages, overseen by a three-person Copyright Claims Board. Owners of digital content who see that content used without permission would be able to file a claim for damages up to $15,000 for each work infringed, and $30,000 in total, if they registered their content with the Copyright Office, or half those amounts if they did not.
"Easy $5,000 copyright infringement tickets won't fix copyright law," argues the EFF, in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike: The bill would supercharge a "copyright troll" industry dedicated to filing as many "small claims" on as many Internet users as possible in order to make money through the bill's statutory damages provisions. Every single person who uses the Internet and regularly interacts with copyrighted works (that's everyone) should contact their Senators to oppose this bill...

[I]f Congress passes this bill, the timely registration requirement will no longer be a requirement for no-proof statutory damages of up to $7,500 per work. In other words, nearly every photo, video, or bit of text on the Internet can suddenly carry a $7,500 price tag if uploaded, downloaded, or shared even if the actual harm from that copying is nil. For many Americans, where the median income is $57,652 per year, this $7,500 price tag for what has become regular Internet behavior would result in life-altering lawsuits from copyright trolls that will exploit this new law.

Scientists at the University of California San Diego have created a contact lens, controlled by eye movements, that can zoom in if you blink twice. "In the simplest of terms, the scientists measured the electrooculographic signals generated when eyes make specific movements (up, down, left, right, blink, double blink) and created a soft biomimetic lens that responds directly to those electric impulses," reports CNET. "The lens created was able to change its focal length depending on the signals generated." From the report: Incredibly, the lens works regardless of whether the user can see or not. It's not about the sight, it's about the electricity produced by specific movements. The researchers believe this innovation could be used in "visual prostheses, adjustable glasses, and remotely operated robotics in the future."

Online gaming may be popular and fun, but it's not without pitfalls. More than 70% of online gamers have experienced some form of harassment, according to a survey released Thursday from the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Technology and Society. From a report: And 65% of players said they've experienced "severe harassment," including physical threats, stalking and sustained harassment. "Online hate causes real harm," ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a release. "Every time someone in an online multiplayer game physically threatens or harasses another player repeatedly because of who they are or what they believe, that experience doesn't just end for that individual when the game is over."

Among online gamers who experience harassment, 53% reported being targeted based on their race, religion, ability, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity, according to the ADL. Nearly 30% also report being doxed, which means having their contact or other personal information published online. The ADL also said that some gamers reported being exposed to "extremist ideologies and hateful propaganda."

The Federal Trade Commission plans to allege that Facebook misled users' about its handling of their phone numbers as part of a wide-ranging complaint that accompanies a settlement ending the government's privacy probe, Washington Post reported Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the matter. From the report: In the complaint, which has not yet been released, federal regulators take issue with Facebook's earlier implementation of a security feature called two-factor authentication. It allows users to request one-time password, sent by text message, each time they log onto the social-networking site. But some advertisers managed to target Facebook users who uploaded those contact details, perhaps without the full knowledge of those who provided them, the two sources said. The misuse of the phone numbers was first identified in media reports and by academics last year [PDF]. The FTC also plans to allege that Facebook had provided insufficient information to users -- roughly 30 million -- about their ability to turn off a tool that would identify and offer tag suggestions for photos, the sources added. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity. The facial recognition issue appears to have first been publicized earlier this year by Consumer Reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: To be an employee of a large company in the U.S. now often means becoming a workforce data generator -- from the first email sent from bed in the morning to the Wi-Fi hotspot used during lunch to the new business contact added before going home. Employers are parsing those interactions to learn who is influential, which teams are most productive and who is a flight risk. Companies, which have wide legal latitude in the U.S. to monitor workers, don't always tell them what they are tracking. [...] It's not just emails that are being tallied and analyzed. Companies are increasingly sifting through texts, Slack chats and, in some cases, recorded and transcribed phone calls on mobile devices.

Microsoft Corp. tallies data on the frequency of chats, emails and meetings between its staff and clients using its own Office 365 services to measure employee productivity, management efficacy and work-life balance. Tracking the email, chats and calendar appointments can paint a picture of how employees spend an average of 20 hours of their work time each week, says Natalie McCollough, a general manager at Microsoft who focuses on workplace analytics. The company only allows managers to look at groups of five or more workers. Advocates of using surveillance technology in the workplace say the insights allow companies to better allocate resources, spot problem employees earlier and suss out high performers. Critics warn that the proliferating tools may not be nuanced enough to result in fair, equitable judgments. The report says that "U.S. employers are legally entitled to access any communications or intellectual property created in the workplace or on devices they pay for that employees use for work." Companies are getting smarter by analyzing phone calls and conference room conversations. "In some cases, tonal analysis can help diagnose culture issues on a team, showing who dominates conversations, who demurs and who resists efforts to engage in emotional discussions," the report says.

While Google stopped selling its augmented-reality glasses to customers due to privacy concerns, Google Glass lived on as something to be used by researchers and businesses. The New York Times reports of a new effort from Stanford researchers to use Google Glass to help autistic children understand emotions and engage in more direct ways with those around them. The glasses could also be used to measure changes in behavior, something that has historically been difficult to do. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: When Esaie Prickett sat down in the living room with his mother, father and four older brothers, he was the only one wearing Google Glass. As Esaie, who was 10 at the time and is 12 now, gazed through the computerized glasses, his family made faces -- happy, sad, surprised, angry, bored -- and he tried to identify each emotion. In an instant, the glasses told him whether he was right or wrong, flashing tiny digital icons that only he could see.

Esaie was 6 when he and his family learned he had autism. The technology he was using while sitting in the living room was meant to help him learn how to recognize emotions and make eye contact with those around him. The glasses would verify his choices only if he looked directly at a face. He and his family tested the technology for several weeks as part of a clinical trial run by researchers at Stanford University in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. Recently detailed in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Pediatrics, the trial fits into a growing effort to build new technologies for children on the autism spectrum, including interactive robots and computerized eyewear.

Facebook's stock went up after news of a record-breaking $5 billion FTC fine for various privacy violations broke last week. From a report: That, as The New York Times' Mike Isaac points out, is the real story here: the United States government spent months coming up with a punishment for Facebook's long list of privacy-related bad behavior, and the best it could do was so weak that Facebook's stock price went up. From some other perspectives, that $5 billion fine is a big deal, of course: it's the biggest fine in FTC history, far bigger than the $22 million fine levied against Google in 2012. And $5 billion is a lot of money, to be sure. It's just that like everything else that comes into contact with Facebook's scale, it's still entirely too small: Facebook had $15 billion in revenue last quarter alone, and $22 billion in profit last year. The largest FTC fine in the history of the country represents basically a month of Facebook's revenue, and the company did such a good job of telegraphing it to investors that the stock price went up.

Fight for the Future, the digital rights advocacy group, is calling for a nationwide ban on government use of facial recognition. Fast Company reports: The group says the technology is just too dangerous to civil liberties to allow government agencies to use it, even with regulation. It launched a website where people can contact their legislators and urge them to support a ban. "Imagine if we could go back in time and prevent governments around the world from ever building nuclear or biological weapons. That's the moment in history we're in right now with facial recognition," said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, in a statement. "This surveillance technology poses such a profound threat to the future of human society and basic liberty that its dangers far outweigh any potential benefits. We don't need to regulate it, we need to ban it entirely."

News blog TorrentFreak spoke with a member of piracy group "The Scene" to understand how they obtain -- or rip -- movies and shows from sources such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. The technique these people use is different from hardware capture cards or software-based 'capping' tools. From the report: "Content for WEB releases are obtained by downloading the source content. Whenever you stream a video online, you are downloading chunks of a video file to your computer. Sceners simply save that content and attempt to decrypt it for non-DRM playback later," the source said. When accessing the content, legitimate premium accounts are used, often paid for using prepaid credit cards supported by bogus identities. It takes just a few minutes to download a video file since they're served by CDNs with gigabits of bandwidth.

"Once files are downloaded from the streaming platform, however, they are encrypted in the .mp4 container. Attempting to view such video will usually result in a blank screen and nothing else -- streams from these sites are protected by DRM. The most common, and hard to crack DRM is called Widevine. The way the Scene handles WEB-releases is by using specialized tools coded by The Scene, for The Scene. These tools are extremely private, and only a handful of people in the world have access to the latest version(s)," source noted. "Without these tools, releasing Widevine content is extremely difficult, if not impossible for most. The tools work by downloading the encrypted video stream from the streaming site, and reverse engineering the encryption." Our contact says that decryption is a surprisingly quick process, taking just a few minutes. After starting with a large raw file, the finalized version ready for release is around 30% smaller, around 7GB for a 1080p file.

"From JFK's real motives to the Soviets' secret plot to land on the Moon at the same time, a new behind-the-scenes view of an unlikely triumph 50 years ago," writes schwit1 sharing a new article from Smithsonian magazine titled "What You Didn't Know About the Apollo 11 Mission."

It's an excerpt from the recently-released book ONE GIANT LEAP: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon. The Moon has a smell. It has no air, but it has a smell... All the astronauts who walked on the Moon noticed it, and many commented on it to Mission Control.... Cornell University astrophysicist Thomas Gold warned NASA that the dust had been isolated from oxygen for so long that it might well be highly chemically reactive. If too much dust was carried inside the lunar module's cabin, the moment the astronauts repressurized it with air and the dust came into contact with oxygen, it might start burning, or even cause an explosion. (Gold, who correctly predicted early on that the Moon's surface would be covered with powdery dust, also had warned NASA that the dust might be so deep that the lunar module and the astronauts themselves could sink irretrievably into it.) Among the thousands of things they were keeping in mind while flying to the Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin had been briefed about the very small possibility that the lunar dust could ignite....

The Apollo spacecraft ended up with what was, for its time, the smallest, fastest and most nimble computer in a single package anywhere in the world. That computer navigated through space and helped the astronauts operate the ship. But the astronauts also traveled to the Moon with paper star charts so they could use a sextant to take star sightings -- like 18th-century explorers on the deck of a ship -- and cross-check their computer's navigation. The software of the computer was stitched together by women sitting at specialized looms -- using wire instead of thread. In fact, an arresting amount of work across Apollo was done by hand: The heat shield was applied to the spaceship by hand with a fancy caulking gun; the parachutes were sewn by hand, and then folded by hand. The only three staff members in the country who were trained and licensed to fold and pack the Apollo parachutes were considered so indispensable that NASA officials forbade them to ever ride in the same car, to avoid their all being injured in a single accident. Despite its high-tech aura, we have lost sight of the extent to which the lunar mission was handmade...

The space program in the 1960s did two things to lay the foundation of the digital revolution. First, NASA used integrated circuits -- the first computer chips -- in the computers that flew the Apollo command module and the Apollo lunar module. Except for the U.S. Air Force, NASA was the first significant customer for integrated circuits. Microchips power the world now, of course, but in 1962 they were little more than three years old, and for Apollo they were a brilliant if controversial bet. Even IBM decided against using them in the company's computers in the early 1960s. NASA's demand for integrated circuits, and its insistence on their near-flawless manufacture, helped create the world market for the chips and helped cut the price by 90 percent in five years. NASA was the first organization of any kind -- company or government agency -- anywhere in the world to give computer chips responsibility for human life. If the chips could be depended on to fly astronauts safely to the Moon, they were probably good enough for computers that would run chemical plants or analyze advertising data.
The article also notes that three times as many people worked on Apollo as on the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.

America's FBI and its Customs Enforcement agency "have turned state driver license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through hundreds of millions of Americans' photos without their knowledge or consent," reports the Washington Post.

They cite thousands of newly-released facial-recognition requests, internal documents, and emails from the last five years, revealed after a public-records request from researchers at Georgetown University, saying state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) databases have been transformed into "the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure."
Police have long had access to fingerprints, DNA and other "biometric data" taken from criminal suspects. But the DMV records contain the photos of the majority of a state's residents, most of whom have never been charged with a crime. Neither Congress nor state legislatures have authorized the development of such a system, and growing numbers of Democratic and Republican lawmakers are criticizing the technology as a dangerous, pervasive and error-prone surveillance tool...

Since 2011, the FBI has logged more than 390,000 facial-recognition searches of federal and local databases, including state DMV databases, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said last month, and the records show that federal investigators have forged daily working relationships with DMV officials... They detailed the regular use of facial recognition to track down suspects in low-level crimes, including cashing a stolen check and petty theft. And searches are often executed with nothing more formal than an email from a federal agent to a local contact, the records show...

The FBI's facial-recognition search has access to local, state and federal databases containing more than 641 million face photos, a GAO director said last month... The search capability was offered not just to help identify criminal suspects, but also to detect possible witnesses, victims, bodies, and innocent bystanders and other people not charged with crimes.
The Post concludes that the newly-released documents "show that the technology already is tightly woven into the fabric of modern law enforcement."

A senior counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight tells their reporter that "It's really a surveillance-first, ask-permission-later system. People think this is something coming way off in the future, but these (facial-recognition) searches are happening very frequently today."

Three dummy bombs have been accidentally dropped over Florida on July 1st. "The incident is suspected to have happened at around 1:15 p.m. about 54 miles southwest of Moody Air Force Base about a mile-and-a-quarter west of Highway 129 near Suwannee Springs," reports The Epoch Times, citing a media release by the Moody Air force Base in Central Georgia. From the report: "During a routine training mission, an A-10C Thunderbolt II assigned to the 23d Fighter Group suffered a bird strike which caused an inadvertent release of three BDU-33s, a small non-explosive training munition," said the 23rd Wing Public Affairs. Authorities are investigating the incidence and no injuries or damages have been reported. The air force base said the dummy bomb released is a 25-pound training munition used to simulate the M1a-82 500-pound bomb.

"It is approximately 22-and-a-half inches long and is blue in color. Although the training munition is inert, it is equipped with a small pyrotechnic charge and should not be handled," it said. The authorities have cautioned people not to touch the munition if they come across it. "If the training munition is found, do not approach it, take note of the location, leave the area and keep others away," said the 23rd Wing Public Affairs. Anybody who sights the munition or has any information about it can contact the 23d Wing Command Post at (229) 257-3501 or their local authorities.

iOS 13's third developer beta includes a new feature that makes it look like you're staring directly at your front-facing camera during FaceTime calls, even when looking away at the person on your screen. The Verge reports: Normally, video calls tend to make it look like both participants are peering off to one side or the other, since they're looking at the person on their display, rather than directly into the front-facing camera. However, the new "FaceTime Attention Correction" feature appears to use some kind of image manipulation to correct this, and results in realistic-looking fake eye contact between the FaceTime users.

On Twitter, Dave Schukin explains that the effect is being achieved using ARKit, which is used to map a user's face and adjust the positioning of their eyes accordingly. Using the arm from a pair of glasses, Schukin shows how the software is warping the eye area slightly to achieve the effect. The same effect also appears to be present when wearing sunglasses.

The year is 2019, and the brainy engineers of Silicon Valley are hunkered down, working on transformative, next-generation technologies like self-driving cars, digital currencies and quantum computing. Meanwhile, the buzziest start-up in San Francisco is ... an expensive email app? From a report: A few months ago, I started hearing about something called Superhuman. It's an invitation-only service that costs $30 a month and promises "the fastest email experience ever made." Marc Andreessen, the influential venture capitalist, reportedly swore by it, as did tech bigwigs like Patrick and John Collison, the founders of Stripe. The app was rumored to have a waiting list of more than 100,000 people. "We have the who's who of Silicon Valley at this point," Superhuman's founder, Rahul Vohra, told me in an interview. The waiting list is actually 180,000 people long, he said, and some people are getting desperate. He showed me a photo of a gluten-free cake sent to Superhuman's office by a person who was hoping to score an invitation. "We have insane levels of virality that haven't been seen since Dropbox or Slack," Mr. Vohra added.

Last month, Superhuman raised a $33 million investment round, led by Mr. Andreessen's firm, Andreessen Horowitz. That valued the company at roughly $260 million -- a steep valuation for an app with fewer than 15,000 customers, but one apparently justified by the company's trajectory and its support among fans, which borders on evangelical. [...] Signing up for Superhuman is not easy. First, you fill out a long questionnaire about your email habits and work flow. Then, if you're approved for access, there's a mandatory session in which a representative gives you a videoconference tutorial. In my case, Mr. Vohra spent a full hour teaching me how to use the app's features. Superhuman, which plugs into your existing email account, works with only Gmail and Google G Suite addresses for now, but the company plans to expand to other providers soon. Some of the app's features -- such as ones that let users undo sending, track when their emails are opened and automatically pull up a contact's LinkedIn profile -- are available in other third-party email plug-ins. But there are bells and whistles that I hadn't seen before.

Like "instant intro," which moves the sender of an introductory email to bcc, saving you from having to manually re-enter that person's address. Or the scheduling feature, which sees that you're typing "next Tuesday" and automatically pulls up your calendar for that day. Superhuman promises to help V.I.P.s get through their inboxes twice as fast. Partly, that's because every command has a keyboard shortcut, so a busy power broker never has to waste precious seconds reaching for the mouse. And partly it's because the app itself is built for speed -- it stores information locally in a user's browser rather than retrieving it from Google's servers, which cuts down on the time required to surf between emails. Further reading: Superhuman is Spying on You.

In honor of FreeDOS's 25th birthday, project founder and coordinator Jim Hall agreed to answer the 10 best questions submitted by Slashdot readers. You asked and he answered! Read on for Jim's interview.

Last week, Apple launched a voluntary recall and replacement program for the 15-inch 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina Displaying, saying that batteries on some of these devices could overheat and "may pose a fire safety risk." Thanks to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), we now know that Apple has received 26 reports of batteries overheating in affected notebooks, and that about 432,000 potentially affected MacBook Pro units were sold in the U.S., plus 26,000 in Canada. MacRumors reports: The CPSC has since indicated that Apple has received 26 reports of batteries overheating in affected notebooks, including five reports of minor burns and one report of smoke inhalation, as well as 17 reports of minor damage to nearby personal property. About 432,000 potentially affected MacBook Pro units were sold in the United States, plus 26,000 in Canada, according to a joint recall announcement from the CPSC and Health Canada. As of June 4, 2019, Apple has received one report of a consumer incident and no reports of injuries in Canada. Apple has asked customers to stop using affected MacBook Pro models and to contact the company to initiate a replacement. Apple's recall program page provides further details and instructions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A new device, developed for the Pentagon after U.S. Special Forces requested it, can identify people without seeing their face: instead it detects their unique cardiac signature with an infrared laser. While it works at 200 meters (219 yards), longer distances could be possible with a better laser. "I don't want to say you could do it from space," says Steward Remaly, of the Pentagon's Combatting Terrorism Technical Support Office, "but longer ranges should be possible." Contact infrared sensors are often used to automatically record a patient's pulse. They work by detecting the changes in reflection of infrared light caused by blood flow. By contrast, the new device, called Jetson, uses a technique known as laser vibrometry to detect the surface movement caused by the heartbeat. This works though typical clothing like a shirt and a jacket (though not thicker clothing such as a winter coat).

JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from Boing Boing: For years, Paul Hansmeier terrorized internet users through his copyright trolling racket Prenda Law, evading the law through shell companies and fraud, until, finally, he was brought to justice and pleaded guilty last August. Now, Hansmeier has been sentenced to 14 years in prison and must pay $1.5 million in restitution to his victims -- the same people he accused of being copyright infringers and then bullied into paying "settlement" fees to avoid being dragged through expensive litigation. Any Prenda Law victim can contact the Minnesota DA to apply for compensation. Prenda's tactics included identity theft, entrapment (uploading their own files to The Pirate Bay in order to generate downloads that they could threaten people over), and several kinds of fraud. Hansmeier and his co-defendant, John Steele, were indicted for money laundering, perjury, mail and wire fraud. Both men entered into plea agreements.

Some of the world's biggest tech companies have told their employees to stop talking about technology and technical standards with counterparts at Huawei in response to the recent U.S. blacklisting of the Chinese tech firm, Reuters reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: Chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm, mobile research firm InterDigital and South Korean carrier LG Uplus have restricted employees from informal conversations with Huawei, the world's largest telecommunications equipment maker, the sources said. Such discussions are a routine part of international meetings where engineers gather to set technical standards for communications technologies, including the next generation of mobile networks known as 5G.

The U.S. Department of Commerce has not banned contact between companies and Huawei. On May 16, the agency put Huawei on a blacklist, barring it from doing business with U.S. companies without government approval, then a few days later it authorized U.S. companies to interact with Huawei in standards bodies through August "as necessary for the development of 5G standards." The Commerce Department reiterated that position on Friday in response to a question from Reuters.

Amazon's home surveillance company Ring is using video captured by its doorbell cameras in Facebook advertisements that ask users to identify and call the cops on a woman whom local police say is a suspected thief. From a report: In the video, the woman's face is clearly visible and there is no obvious criminal activity taking place. The Facebook post shows her passing between two cars. She pulls the door handle of one of the cars, but it is locked. The video freezes on a still of the woman's face from two different angles: "If you recognize this woman, please contact the Mountain View Police Department ... please share with your neighbors," text superimposed on the video says. In a post alongside the video, Ring urges residents of Mountain View, California to contact the police department if they recognize her.