With the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro models no longer shipping with a power adapter, Apple has started selling the 20W USB-C power adapter that was first introduced with the iPad Air on a standalone basis for $19. From a report: The 20W power adapter is included in the box with the iPad Air, but those who want one for use with the new iPhone models will need to shell out $19. All of the new iPhone 12 models and older iPhone models ship only with a USB-C to Lightning cable, with customers expected to provide their own power adapters. Most people likely have several USB-C power adapters on hand from past device purchases, but this will be an inconvenience for those who have few power adapters available already.

At the end of September, Amazon debuted two especially futuristic products within five days of each other: a small autonomous surveillance drone, called Ring Always Home Cam, and a palm recognition scanner, called Amazon One. "Both products aim to make security and authentication more convenient -- but for privacy-conscious consumers, they also raise red flags," reports Wired. From the report: Amazon's latest data-hungry innovations are not launching in a vacuum. The company also owns Ring, whose smart doorbells have had myriad security issues and have been widely criticized for bringing unprecedented surveillance to traditionally semi-private spaces. Meanwhile, the biometric data that Amazon Go will collect is particularly sensitive, because unlike a password you can't simply change it if a hacker steals it or it gets unintentionally exposed. Amazon has a strong record for maintaining the security of its massive cloud infrastructure, but there have been lapses across the sprawling business. The stakes are already phenomenally high; the more data the company holds the more risk it takes on. "Amazon has a major genomics cloud platform, so maybe they hold your DNA and now they're going to have your palm as well? Plus all of these devices inside your house. And your purchase history on Prime. That's a lot of information. That's a lot of personal information," says Nina Alli, executive director of Defcon's Biohacking Village and a health care security researcher. "When you give away this data you're giving a company the ability to access and manage you, not the other way around."
[...]
Additionally, while companies like Apple and Samsung have brought biometric fingerprint and face scanners to the masses by making sure the data never leaves the device, Amazon One takes the opposite approach. Kumar writes that "palm images are never stored" on Amazon One itself. Instead they are encrypted and sent to a special high security area of Amazon's cloud to be converted into "palm signatures" based on the unique and distinctive features of a user's hand. Then the service compares that signature to the one on file in each user's account and returns a match or no match answer back down to the device. It makes sense that Amazon doesn't want to store databases of people's palm data locally on publicly accessible machines that could be manipulated. But the system could perhaps have been set up to generate a palm signature locally, delete the image of a person's hand, and send only the encrypted signature on for analysis. The fact that all of those palm images will be going for cloud processing creates a single point of failure. "I'm worried that people could read your palm vein pattern in other ways and construct an analog. It's only a matter of time," says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a longtime security and privacy researcher and a senior vice president at the nonprofit Internet Society. "Both the home drone and the palm payment are going to rely heavily on the cloud and on the security provided by that cloud storage. That's worrying because it means all the risks -- rogue employees, government data requests, data breach, secondary uses -- associated with data collection on the server-side could be possible. I'm much more comfortable having a biometric template stored locally rather than on a server where it might be exfiltrated."

An Amazon spokesperson told WIRED, "We are confident that the cloud is highly secure. In addition, Amazon One palm data is stored separately from other personal identifiers, and is uniquely encrypted with its own keys in a secure zone in the cloud."

"Most users don't seem to realize the severity of the risks they're subjecting themselves to while using hotel Wi-Fi networks," writes Windows Report, noting that America's FBI "issued a Public Service Announcement concerning the risks of using hotel Wi-Fi networks while teleworking." Apparently, more and more U.S. hotels started advertising room reservations during the daytime for those who seek a distraction-free environment. This comes as a blessing for teleworkers who can't seem to focus on their work environment while at home. On the other hand...there are a few quite serious risks you may expose yourself to while using Wi-Fi networks in hotels:

- Traffic monitoring: Your network activity could be exposed to a malicious third-party

- Evil Twin attacks: Cloning the hotel network, misleading clients to connect to the fake one instead

- Man-In-The-Middle attacks: Intercepting and stealing sensitive information from one's device

- Compromising work" Facilitating cybercriminals to steal work credentials or other similar resources

- Digital identity theft

- Ransomware
Among other things, the FBI points out: Guests generally have minimal visibility into both the physical location of wireless access points within the hotel and the age of networking equipment. Old, outdated equipment is significantly more likely to possess vulnerabilities that criminal actors can exploit. Even if a hotel is using modern equipment, the guest has no way of knowing how frequently the hotel is updating the firmware of that equipment or whether the hotel has changed the equipment's default passwords. The hotel guest must take each of these factors into consideration when choosing whether to telework on a hotel network.
Or, as Slashdot reader SmartAboutThings puts it, "Using hotel Wi-Fi, in general, is not safe at all, and if you have no other choice, then you might as well give VPN services a try."

Or, just don't use the hotel's wifi (using your cellphone as a mobile hotspot instead).

"Google LLC is reportedly planning to relinquish direct control over its open-source Knative project to a five-seat steering committee that will have rules to prevent any single organization from having more than two seats," reports SiliconANGLE.

"The plan is designed to stymie criticism that Google is secretly planning to retain control over key open-source projects it has developed, according to a report today on the tech news website The Protocol." Knative is an open-source project first developed by Google that provides components for deploying, running and managing serverless, cloud-native applications on top of Kubernetes, a container management platform that was also built by Google and open-sourced in 2015... Google is planning to make some major changes to Knative's governance structure, according to the report. Seats on the committee will now be held by individuals rather than specific companies, and elections will be held later this year to select two new members. In addition, the report said, Google is considering eventually expanding the committee to seven members as a way to include representatives from Knative's user community.

The plan comes just a few months after Google angered some members of the open-source software community when it reneged on a promise to hand over control of another project, Istio, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a Linux Foundation project that was founded in 2015 to help advance container technology. In July Google said that it instead of transferring Istio to the CNCF, it would create a neutral organization called Open Usage Commons to manage its trademark policies, while control would be maintained by the project's steering committee.

That decision upset many of Google's partners, most notably IBM Corp., which has also contributed greatly to the development of Istio.

French company Nawa technologies says it's already in production on a new electrode design that can radically boost the performance of existing and future battery chemistries, delivering up to 3x the energy density, 10x the power, vastly faster charging and battery lifespans up to five times as long. NewAtlas reports: Nawa is already known for its work in the ultracapacitor market, and the company has announced that the same high-tech electrodes it uses on those ultracapacitors can be adapted for current-gen lithium-ion batteries, among others, to realize some tremendous, game-changing benefits. It all comes down to how the active material is held in the electrode, and the route the ions in that material have to take to deliver their charge. Today's typical activated carbon electrode is made with a mix of powders, additives and binders. Where carbon nanotubes are used, they're typically stuck on in a jumbled, "tangled spaghetti" fashion. This gives the charge-carrying ions a random, chaotic and frequently blocked path to traverse on their way to the current collector under load.

Nawa's vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, on the other hand, create an anode or cathode structure more like a hairbrush, with a hundred billion straight, highly conductive nanotubes poking up out of every square centimeter. Each of these tiny, securely rooted poles is then coated with active material, be it lithium-ion or something else. The result is a drastic reduction in the mean free path of the ions -- the distance the charge needs to travel to get in or out of the battery -- since every blob of lithium is more or less directly attached to a nanotube, which acts as a straight-line highway and part of the current collector. "The distance the ion needs to move is just a few nanometres through the lithium material," Nawa Founder and CTO Pascal Boulanger tells us, "instead of micrometres with a plain electrode."

"The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music's previous eras," argues Kyle Devine, in his recent book, "Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music."

The New Yorker's music critic writes: He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions — some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000... Exploitative regimes of labor enable the production of smartphone and computer components. Conditions at Foxconn factories in China have long been notorious; recent reports suggest that the brutally abused Uighur minority has been pressed into the production of Apple devices. Child laborers are involved in the mining of cobalt, which is used in iPhone batteries. Spotify, the dominant streaming service, needs huge quantities of energy to power its servers. No less problematic are the streaming services' own exploitative practices, including their notoriously stingy royalty payments to working musicians...

When the compact disk entered circulation, in the nineteen-eighties, audio snobs attacked it as a degradation of listening culture — a descent from soulful analog sound to soulless digital. In environmental terms, however, the CD turned out to be somewhat less deleterious [than vinyl records]. Devine observes that polycarbonate, the medium's principal ingredient, is not as toxic as polyvinyl chloride. Early on, the widespread use of polystyrene for CD packaging wiped out that advantage, but a turn toward recyclable materials in recent years has made the lowly CD perhaps the least environmentally harmful format on the market.

In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: "The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like." This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless. In much the same way, it has convinced us not to think too hard about the regime of mass surveillance on which the economics of the industry rests.... At the end of "Decomposed," Devine incorporates his ecology of music into a more comprehensive vision of anthropogenic crisis. "Musically, we may need to question our expectations of infinite access and infinite storage," he writes. Our demand that all of musical history should be available at the touch of a finger has become gluttonous. It may seem a harmless form of consumer desire, but it leaves real scars on the face of the Earth.

Ben Wood and Geoff Blaber, commenting on Google's new Pixel smartphones at research firm CCI Insight: Historically, Google has been one of the leaders in developing and implementing computational photography, mixing optics with digital sleight of hand to make imaging magic. And again, Google is promising great photography by using software smarts. The camera on the new phones has an ultrawide lens, a Night Sight feature that works in portrait mode, and a setting that lets users adjust the lighting in post-processing. The challenge for Google is that its camera capabilities are no longer unique, as all leading smartphone makers focus on camera and imaging tech to try and make their latest and greatest devices stand out.

[....] Given Google's scale, the progress of the Pixel business has been disappointing, particularly in light of the difficulties Huawei has faced. Mobile operators, retailers and consumers would benefit from a credible alternative to Apple and Samsung. On paper Google should fit the bill, but the company has consistently failed to live up to expectations. Sadly, it's hard to see how these new devices will do anything to address these shortcomings. Google's smartphone hardware strategy is in need of a reset. The company either needs to deliver differentiated flagship Android experiences or mass-market products with broad distribution. Right now, it provides neither and sits awkwardly within a vibrant ecosystem of Android players led by Samsung. Google must prove that Pixel still has a role.

"In previous years, [Google] launched Call Screen to vet your incoming calls, Duplex for restaurant reservations, and just this month, a feature called Verified Calls that will tell you who is calling and why," reports TechCrunch. Today, Google introduced a feature called "Hold For Me," which will make the Google Assistant stay on the line for you when you're placed on hold, then alert you when someone picks up. From the report: In the short demo of "Hold for Me," Google showed how a Pixel device owner is able to activate the new feature after they've been placed on hold. This is done by tapping a new button that appears on the phone screen above the buttons for muting the call, turning on speakerphone, and the other in-call phone controls. Once activated, you're alerted with a message that says "Don't hand up," where you're advised that Google Assistant is listening to the call for you, so you can do other things.

A button is also available on this screen that lets you tap to return to the call at any time, and below that an on-screen message says "music playing" to indicate if the Google Assistant is still hearing the hold music. You can also choose to press the red hang up button to end the call from this screen. When a person comes on the line, the device will alert you it's time to return to the call. Google says the new feature will come to its new Pixel 5 devices, which will soon be followed by its older-generation Pixel phones via the next "Pixel feature drop" roll out.

Amazon accounts for nearly 40 percent of e-commerce sales in the US today, and it takes a cut of even more online shopping by selling payments services and other technologies to external shopping sites. Now, the online retail giant is making a play to grab a piece of brick-and-mortar shopping, too -- and it wants customers to literally lend a hand to do it. From a report: Amazon on Tuesday is unveiling a new biometric technology called Amazon One that allows shoppers to pay at stores by placing their palm over a scanning device when they walk in the door or when they check out. The first time they register to use this tech, a customer will scan their palm and insert their payment card at a terminal; after that, they can simply pay with their hand. The hand-scanning tech isn't just for Amazon's own stores -- the company hopes to sell it to other retailers, including competitors, too.

The technology will be available at the entrance of two of the company's Amazon Go cashierless convenience stores in Seattle, Washington, starting Tuesday, and will roll out to the rest of the chain's 20-plus stores in the future, Amazon Vice President Dilip Kumar told Recode in an interview Monday. Recode reported in December that Amazon had filed a patent application for such a hand-payment technology. The technology could also show up in Whole Foods stores, with Amazon hinting in a press release that it will introduce palm payments in the coming months at its other stores beyondtAmazon Go locations. Kumar wouldn't comment on a potential Whole Foods implementation, though the New York Post reported a year ago that such a plan was in the works.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The past seven months have been a big strain on families like Mandi Boren's. The Borens are cattle ranchers on a remote slice of land near Idaho's Owyhee Mountains. They have four kids -- ranging from a first grader to a sophomore in high school. When the lockdown first hit, Boren first thought it might be a good thing. Home schooling temporarily could be more efficient, plus there'd be more family time and help with the chores. "I thought, I'll be able to get my kids' schooling done in a few hours and then they'll be to work with dad, and no problem it will be great," Boren says, chuckling. "Well, it didn't turn out so great." That's because all four kids -- in addition to Boren, who telecommutes -- were suddenly plugged into the family's satellite Internet, which is spotty on a good day. You can forget trying to use Zoom or Google Classroom. "I soon found out that our Internet speeds were so slow, we had to spread it out all week long actually," Boren says. "We were doing schooling on Saturdays and Sundays as well." Her kids started back to school in person, at least for now.

Across the country as American schools struggle with whether to reopen or stay virtual, many rural districts are worried their students will fall even further behind than their city peers. This pandemic has shone a glaring light on a lot of inequalities. The federal government estimates that more than a third of rural America has little or no Internet. In numerous recent interviews, educators have told NPR they're concerned the rural-urban divide will only worsen if kids can't get online to learn. This past spring, when the lockdowns began, many rural districts amid the crisis had to resort to delivering paper copies of school work to students who didn't have Internet or cell phone service at home. "I don't know why anybody would rationally think 'we can just hand you a packet, and here you're going to go teach yourself,' that's basically what was going on," says Dr. Leslie Molina, principal at McDermitt Combined Schools in northern Nevada. She says all 105 of her students qualify for free or reduced lunch. Most live on the Fort McDermitt Reservation and about 75% have no Internet access at home.

"A Raspberry Pi, a USB SDR dongle, an LCD a buzzer and a little bit of coding in Python and C has created a very useful alarm for drone and RC model aircraft operators," explains long-time Slashdot reader NewtonsLaw . The device allows users to set an "alarm" perimeter around their operating area and automatically alert them whenever a manned aircraft with ADSB fitted intrudes into that area. While there are apps like FlightRadar24 that allow you to monitor ADSB-equipped air traffic, this is the first stand-alone hand-held unit that isn't reliant on cellular or Wifi data and which not just monitors aircraft movments but also sounds an alarm according to user-defined parameters.
sUAS News reports: "As an avid proponent of safety within the drone and RC communities, I decided to put my background in electronics engineering and computer software to good use by developing a device that has the potential to ensure the skies remain safe," said Kiwi drone and RC model enthusiast Bruce Simpson.

"The alarm I've developed is not a silver bullet but it is an extremely valuable tool for improving safety... I will be publishing some DIY videos showing people how they can build their own from readily available parts. This will ensure it remains cheap enough to be used by everyone..."

Drone users now call on the manned aviation community to ensure that they play their part by equipping their aircraft with the ADSB technology that has become such an important part of safety in the 21 st century.

A giant Gundam in Japan's Port of Yokohama is now able to "pick up its legs to walk, bend its knees, turn its head, and contort its fingers to mime hand signals," reports Popular Mechanics. The 60-foot robot is the largest in the world. From the report: Inspired by the fictional Japanese robot of the same name -- which has appeared in over 50 TV series and movies since 1979, as well as many manga comics and video games -- this Gundam features a staggering 24 degrees of freedom. People in Japan have caught and shared a few glimpses of the engineering marvel. Considering the Gundam weighs about 25 tons, it's pretty insane to watch it raise both arms in the air and pick itself back up after kneeling.

Those efficiencies are thanks to precise engineering and design work, as outlined in a series of YouTube videos from Gundam Factory Yokohama. In one installment, the engineers give a tour of where they designed, built, and assembled the Gundam. The videos are a great way to really contextualize the size of this monster; from the metal fingertip to where the wrist will connect, for example, the hand is about 6.5 feet wide.

Plastic face shields are almost totally ineffective at trapping respiratory aerosols, according to modelling in Japan, casting doubt on their effectiveness in preventing the spread of coronavirus. From a report: A simulation using Fugaku, the world's fastest supercomputer, found that almost 100% of airborne droplets of less than 5 micrometres in size escaped through plastic visors of the kind often used by people working in service industries. One micrometre is one millionth of a metre. In addition, about half of larger droplets measuring 50 micrometres found their way into the air, according to Riken, a government-backed research institute in the western city of Kobe.

This week, senior scientists in Britain criticised the government for stressing the importance of hand-washing while placing insufficient emphasis on aerosol transmission and ventilation, factors that Japanese authorities have outlined in public health advice throughout the pandemic. As some countries have attempted to open up their economies, face shields are becoming a common sight in sectors that emphasise contact with the public, such as shops and beauty salons. Makoto Tsubokura, team leader at Riken's centre for computational science, said the simulation combined air flow with the reproduction of tens of thousand of droplets of different sizes, from under 1 micrometre to several hundred micrometres.

Software engineer Cal Paterson writes: Mozilla recently announced that they would be dismissing 250 people. That's a quarter of their workforce so there are some deep cuts to their work too. The victims include: the MDN docs (those are the web standards docs everyone likes better than w3schools), the Rust compiler and even some cuts to Firefox development. Like most people I want to see Mozilla do well but those three projects comprise pretty much what I think of as the whole point of Mozilla, so this news is a a big let down. The stated reason for the cuts is falling income. Mozilla largely relies on "royalties" for funding. In return for payment, Mozilla allows big technology companies to choose the default search engine in Firefox - the technology companies are ultimately paying to increase the number of searches Firefox users make with them. Mozilla haven't been particularly transparent about why these royalties are being reduced, except to blame the coronavirus. I'm sure the coronavirus is not a great help but I suspect the bigger problem is that Firefox's market share is now a tiny fraction of its previous size and so the royalties will be smaller too - fewer users, so fewer searches and therefore less money for Mozilla.

The real problem is not the royalty cuts, though. Mozilla has already received more than enough money to set themselves up for financial independence. Mozilla received up to half a billion dollars a year (each year!) for many years. The real problem is that Mozilla didn't use that money to achieve financial independence and instead just spent it each year, doing the organisational equivalent of living hand-to-mouth. Despite their slightly contrived legal structure as a non-profit that owns a for-profit, Mozilla are an NGO just like any other. In this article I want to apply the traditional measures that are applied to other NGOs to Mozilla in order to show what's wrong. These three measures are: overheads, ethics and results.

As chip makers have reached the limits of atomic-scale circuitry and the physics of electrons, Moore's law has slowed, and some say it's over. But a different law, potentially no less consequential for computing's next half century, has arisen. WSJ: I call it Huang's Law, after Nvidia chief executive and co-founder Jensen Huang. It describes how the silicon chips that power artificial intelligence more than double in performance every two years. While the increase can be attributed to both hardware and software, its steady progress makes it a unique enabler of everything from autonomous cars, trucks and ships to the face, voice and object recognition in our personal gadgets. Between November 2012 and this May, performance of Nvidia's chips increased 317 times for an important class of AI calculations, says Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research at Nvidia. On average, in other words, the performance of these chips more than doubled every year, a rate of progress that makes Moore's Law pale in comparison.

Nvidia's specialty has long been graphics processing units, or GPUs, which operate efficiently when there are many independent tasks to be done simultaneously. Central processing units, or CPUs, like the kind that Intel specializes in, are on the other hand much less efficient but better at executing a single, serial task very quickly. You can't chop up every computing process so that it can be efficiently handled by a GPU, but for the ones you can -- including many AI applications -- you can perform it many times as fast while expending the same power. Intel was a primary driver of Moore's Law, but it was hardly the only one. Perpetuating it required tens of thousands of engineers and billions of dollars in investment across hundreds of companies around the globe. Similarly, Nvidia isn't alone in driving Huang's Law -- and in fact its own type of AI processing might, in some applications, be losing its appeal. That's probably a major reason it has moved to acquire chip architect Arm Holdings this month, another company key to ongoing improvement in the speed of AI, for $40 billion.

Facebook has unveiled the Oculus Quest 2, including its release date and price, and it promises to be a big leap over the original. Android Authority reports: The second-generation standalone, Android-powered virtual reality headset will be available on October 13 starting at $299 for a model with 64GB of storage, a full $100 below the price of the first Quest. Pre-orders are open now. The Oculus Quest 2 is much more powerful than its predecessor, with a Snapdragon XR2 chip and 6GB of RAM instead of the aging Snapdragon 835 and 4GB of RAM. That should lead to more advanced games and an overall smoother VR experience, although you'll need to wait for titles that take full advantage of the added power.

You may notice the improved display technology right away, however. The Quest 2 boasts the company's sharpest visuals yet, with a single LCD screen providing 1,832 x 1,920 resolution for each eye -- 50% more pixels than the 1,400 x 1,600 displays in the first Quest. It's the highest-resolution Oculus headset to date. The Oculus Quest 2 also supports much more natural-feeling 90Hz refresh rates, although it won't be available upon release. You'll have to settle for 72Hz at first. It could also be the most comfortable. The Quest 2 is both smaller and 10% lighter than before, with a soft head strap that should make for an easier fit. The Touch controllers are improved, too, with upgraded haptic feedback, better hand tracking, and a thumb rest. Add-ons will help, for that matter. A Fit Pack will adapt to different-sized heads, while a $49 Elite Strap and a $129 Elite Strap with Battery Pack offer both more comfort and longer VR sessions.

NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work -- that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled -- all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic. NPR: The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech. Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true. "If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.

In response, industry representative Steve Russell, until recently the vice president of plastics for the trade group the American Chemistry Council, said the industry has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled. [...] Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice. On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It's made from oil and gas, and it's almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh. All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled. But the public has known little about these difficulties.

For those living in or visiting Germany on Thursday, things got loud this morning. At 11 a.m. sharp (0900 GMT) Germany carried out a nationwide test of its civil alarm systems -- with everything from sirens to push notifications on smartphones being tested. The test was slated to run for exactly 20 minutes. It's the first test of its kind since Germany was reunified in 1991. From a report: According to the Office for Protection and Disaster Aid (BBK), the national emergency warning day is intended to test out Germany's warning systems and prepare the public for what to do in the event of a national emergency. "On the one hand, this is about conducting a technical test of the warning systems. The other is that we want to sensitize the population with the warning day. We want to give them an understanding of what such warning signals, such as the sirens, mean," said Christoph Unger, the head of the BBK.

While sirens wailed across many parts of Germany, the emergency test day saw a bumpy roll out in other areas -- particularly with more modern technology. It was the first time that nationwide emergency push notifications were due to be sent out -- but many users reported either not receiving a notification at all or getting one after a delay. "The nationwide MoWaS [Modular warning system] could only be received after a delay. The reason for this was an unscheduled simultaneous triggering of a large number of warning messages via MoWaS," the BBK wrote on Twitter The system uses a satellite system to send out warning messages to public broadcasters, news agencies, critical infrastructure companies -- and smartphone users with so-called "warning apps."

Joe Biden's presidential campaign was hit by an attack that was caught by Microsoft, which reportedly gathered information identifying hackers linked to the Kremlin as the most likely suspects. The Daily Beast reports: Reuters reported Thursday morning that suspected Russian state-backed hackers have attempted to breach the systems at Washington-based SKDKnickerbocker, a strategy and communications firm working hand-in-glove with Joe Biden's campaign. The attacks, which took place over the past two months, were unsuccessful. The failed hacking attempt was brought to SKDK's attention by Microsoft, which reportedly gathered information identifying hackers linked to the Kremlin as the most likely suspects. The attacks are said to have mainly focussed on phishing -- a common hacking method which lures users into disclosing sensitive passwords. That was the method used by Russian hackers to access DNC emails, which were subsequently leaked online, ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

A person familiar with SKDK's repelling to the hacking attempts said the agents didn't get very far, telling Reuters: "They are well-defended, so there has been no breach." Another source said it was impossible to confirm if Biden's campaign was the target, or whether the Russians were trying to gather intel on the long list of other SKDK clients.

Higher ratings are the 'lifeblood' of the smartphone app world but what if they are inflated? From a report: Rating an iPhone app takes just a second, maybe two. "Enjoying Skype?" a prompt will ask, and you click on a 1-5 star rating. Millions of people respond to these requests, giving little thought to their fleeting whim. Behind the scenes, though, an entire industry has spent countless hours and lines of code to craft this moment. The prompt, seemingly random, can be orchestrated to hit your glowing screen only at times when you are most likely to leave a five star review. Gaming apps will solicit a rating just after you reach a high score. Banking apps will ask when they know it's payday. Gambling apps will prompt users after they are dealt the perfect Blackjack hand. A sporting app will give the nudge only when a user's team is winning.

Apple has for a decade clamped down on "ratings farms" and "download bots" that companies use to fraudulently garner five-star scores and manipulate App Store rankings. And it has had some success. But these are blunt instruments trying to cheat the system in clear violation of Apple's rules. The more sophisticated techniques stay within the rules but draw on behavioural psychology to understand your mood, emotions and behaviour -- they are not hacking the system; they are hacking your brain. "The algorithms that are used are very hush-hush," says Saoud Khalifah, chief executive of Fakespot, a service that analyses the authenticity of reviews on the web. "They can target you when you are euphoric, when you have a lot of dopamine. They can use machine learning to determine [when] a user will be more inclined to leave positive reviews."