An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Apple has a well-earned reputation for security, but in recent years its Safari browser has had its share of missteps. This week, a security researcher publicly shared new findings about vulnerabilities that would have allowed an attacker to exploit three Safari bugs in succession and take over a target's webcam and microphone on iOS and macOS devices. Apple patched the vulnerabilities in January and March updates. But before the fixes, all a victim would have needed to do is click one malicious link and an attacker would have been able to spy on them remotely.

The bugs Pickren found all stem from seemingly minor oversights. For example, he discovered that Safari's list of the permissions a user has granted to websites treated all sorts of URL variations as being part of the same site, like https://www.example.com, http://example.com and fake://example.com. By "wiggling around," as Pickren puts it, he was able to generate specially crafted URLs that could work with scripts embedded in a malicious site to launch the bait-and-switch that would trick Safari. A hacker who tricked a victim into clicking their malicious link would be able to quietly launch the target's webcam and microphone to capture video, take photos, or record audio. And the attack would work on iPhones, iPads, and Macs alike. None of the flaws are in Apple's microphone and webcam protections themselves, or even in Safari's defenses that keep malicious sites from accessing the sensors. Instead, the attack surmounts all of these barriers just by generating a convincing disguise.

BeerFartMoron writes: Recently there has been a proliferation of modeling work which has been used to make the point that if we can stay inside, practice extreme social distancing, and generally lock down nonessential parts of society for several months, then many deaths from COVID-19 can be prevented. But what happens after the lockdown? In an article studying the possible effects of heterogeneous measures, academics presented examples of epidemic trajectories for COVID-19 assuming no mitigations at all, or assuming extreme mitigations which are gradually lifted at 6 months, to resume normal levels at 1 year.

"Unfortunately, extreme mitigation efforts which end (even gradually) reduce the number of deaths only by 1% or so; as the mitigation efforts let up, we still see a full-scale epidemic, since almost none of the population has developed immunity to the virus," writes Wesley Pegden, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. "There is a simple truth behind the problems with these modeling conclusions. The duration of containment efforts does not matter, if transmission rates return to normal when they end, and mortality rates have not improved. This is simply because as long as a large majority of the population remains uninfected, lifting containment measures will lead to an epidemic almost as large as would happen without having mitigations in place at all." "This is not to say that there are not good reasons to use mitigations as a delay tactic," Pegden adds. "For example, we may hope to use the months we buy with containment measures to improve hospital capacity, in the hopes of achieving a reduction in the mortality rate. We might even wish to use these months just to consider our options as a society and formulate a strategy."

"But mitigations themselves are not saving lives in these scenarios; instead, it is what we do with the time that gives us an opportunity to improve the outcome of the epidemic."

sixoh1 shared this story from the Wall Street Journal: Home internet and wireless connectivity in the U.S. have largely withstood unprecedented demands as more Americans work and learn remotely. Broadband and wireless service providers say traffic has jumped in residential areas at times of the day when families would typically head to offices and schools. Still, that surge in usage hasn't yet resulted in widespread outages or unusually long service disruptions, industry executives and analysts say. That is because the biggest increases in usage are happening during normally fallow periods.

Some service providers have joked that internet usage during the pandemic doesn't compare to the Super Bowl or season finale of the popular HBO show "Game of Thrones" in terms of strain on their networks, Evan Swarztrauber, senior policy adviser to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said this week on a call hosted by consulting company Recon Analytics Inc.Broadband consumption during the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m . has risen by more than 50% since January, according to broadband data company OpenVault, which measured connections in more than one million homes. Usage during the peak early-evening hours increased 20% as of March 25. OpenVault estimates that average data consumption per household in March will reach nearly 400 gigabytes, a nearly 11% increase over the previous monthly record in January....

Some carriers that use cells on wheels and aerial network-support drones after hurricanes or tornadoes are now deploying those resources to neighborhoods with heavy wireless-service usage and places where health-care facilities need additional connectivity. Several wireless carriers including Verizon, T-Mobile US Inc. and AT&T Inc. have been given temporary access to fresh spectrum over the past week to bolster network capacity.
While Netflix is lowering its video quality in Canada, the Journal reports Netflix isn't as worried about the EU: Netflix Vice President Dave Temkin, speaking on a videoconference hosted by the network analytics company Kentik, said his engineers took some upgrades originally planned for the holiday season near the end of 2020 and simply made them sooner. A European regulator earlier this month asked Netflix to shift all its videos to standard-definition to avoid taxing domestic networks. Mr. Temkin said Netflix managed to shave its bandwidth usage using less drastic measures. "None of it is actually melting down," he said.
And the article also has stats from America's ISPs and cellphone providers:

• AT&T said cellular-data traffic was almost flat, with more customers using their home wi-fi networks instead -- but voice phone calls increased as much as 44%.
• Charter saw increases in daytime network activity, but in most markets "levels remain well below capacity and typical peak evening usage."
• Comcast says its peak traffic increased 20%, but they're still running at 40% capacity.

NPR is reporting that some Wuhan residents in China who had tested positive earlier and then recovered from the disease are testing positive for the virus a second time. It's raising concerns of a possible second wave of cases, as China prepares to lift quarantine measures to allow residents to leave the epicenter of its outbreak next month. From the report: Based on data from several quarantine facilities in the city, which house patients for further observation after their discharge from hospitals, about 5%-10% of patients pronounced "recovered" have tested positive again. Some of those who retested positive appear to be asymptomatic carriers -- those who carry the virus and are possibly infectious but do not exhibit any of the illness's associated symptoms -- suggesting that the outbreak in Wuhan is not close to being over.

NPR has spoken by phone or exchanged text messages with four individuals in Wuhan who are part of this group of individuals testing positive a second time in March. All four said they had been sickened with the virus and tested positive, then were released from medical care in recent weeks after their condition improved and they tested negative. One of the Wuhan residents who spoke to NPR exhibited severe symptoms during their first round of illness and was eventually hospitalized. The second resident displayed only mild symptoms at first and was quarantined in one of more than a dozen makeshift treatment centers erected in Wuhan during the peak of the outbreak. But when both were tested a second time for the coronavirus on Sunday, March 22, as a precondition for seeking medical care for unrelated health issues, they tested positive for the coronavirus even though they exhibited none of the typical symptoms, such as a fever or dry cough. The time from their recovery and release to the retest ranged from a few days to a few weeks. One theory is that they were first given a false negative test result. Another theory is that, because the test amplifies tiny bits of DNA, residual virus from the initial infection could have falsely resulted in that second positive reading.

Linus Torvalds himself "changed around the kernel's pipe code to use exclusive waits when reading or writing," reports Phoronix.

"While this doesn't mean much for traditional/common piping of data, the GNU Make job-server is a big benefactor as it relies upon a pipe for limiting the parallelism" -- especially on high-core-count CPUs.

This drew an interesting follow-up from Slashdot reader rockyb, who was wondering if anyone could verify that GNU Make 4.3 speeds up build times: I updated and released a fork of that called remake which includes hooks to profile a build, and has a complete debugger in it (although most of the time the better tracing that is in there is enough).

The most recent version has a feature though that I really like and use a lot which is adding an option to look in parent directories for a Makefile if none is found in the current directory.

You can download the source code from either github or sourceforge. Both have a full list of the release notes.

Sorry, at the time of this writing no packagers have picked up the newest release. Repology has a list of packages for older versions though.

Linus Torvalds tells ZDNet what he's learned about working remotely: Torvalds admits that when he started, "I worried about missing human interaction -- not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it."

Of course, just saying "'don't be social' isn't much of a great tip, is it?" Nor, as many extroverts are now finding out, is working from home necessarily at all comfortable. So, Torvalds suggests that you take "advantage of the 'real' upside of working from home: flexibility... Torvalds says, "if you make your new life a '9-5, but from home' kind of thing, I think you're just going to hate your home, yourself and your life. All the downsides, none of the upsides...." He believes that instead of using "video conferencing instead to recreate exactly what we used to do before, you should" try to really change how you work. Use asynchronous communication models: messaging, email, shared calendars, whatever.
Torvalds also recommends carefully tracking the things that you need to do, but argues that if you're spending hours in online meetings from home instead of hours in real-world meetings, "you've just taken the worst part of office life, and brought it home, and made it even worse..."

And the article also includes some tips from James Bottomley, an IBM Research Distinguished Engineer and senior Linux kernel developer who works closely with Torvald. For videoconferencing Bottomley uses NextCloud Talk and Zoom, which he calls a "horrible proprietary app" -- but notes that it does have binaries for every Linux distro.

Brave has filed a formal complaint against Google with the lead GDPR enforcer in Europe. The complaint comes after Dr. Johnny Ryan, Brave's chief policy and industry relations officer, promised to take Google to court if it didn't stop abusing its power by sharing user data collected by dozens of its distinct services, and creating a "free for all" data warehouse. Cointelegraph reports: Now, the complaint is with the Irish Data Protection Commission. It accuses Google of violating Article 5(1)b of the GDPR. Dublin is Google's European headquarters and, as Dr. Ryan explained to Cointelegraph, the Commission "is responsible for regulating Google's data protection across the European Economic Area." Article 5(1)b of the GDPR requires that data be "collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes." According to Dr. Ryan: "Enforcement of Brave's GDPR 'purpose limitation' complaint against Google would be tantamount to a functional separation, giving everyone the power to decide what parts of Google they chose to reward with their data."

In addition to filing a formal complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission, Brave has reportedly written to the European Commission, German Bundeskartellamt, UK Competition & Markets Authority, and French Autorite de la concurrence. If none of these regulatory bodies take action against Google, Brave has suggested that it may take the tech giant to court itself.

First known U.S. case offers lessons in how and how not to fight the outbreak. From a report: The man who would become Patient Zero for the new coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. appeared to do everything right. He arrived Jan. 19 at an urgent-care clinic in a suburb north of Seattle with a slightly elevated temperature and a cough he'd developed soon after returning four days earlier from a visit with family in Wuhan, China. The 35-year-old had seen a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alert about the virus and decided to get checked. He put on a mask in the waiting room. After learning about his travel, the clinic drew blood and called state and county health officials, who hustled the sample onto an overnight flight to the CDC lab in Atlanta. The patient was told to stay in isolation at home, and health officials checked on him the next morning.

The test came back positive that afternoon, Jan. 20, the first confirmed case in the U.S. By 11 p.m., the patient was in a plastic-enclosed isolation gurney on his way to a biocontainment ward at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington, a two-bed unit developed for the Ebola virus. As his condition worsened, then improved over the next several days, staff wore protective garb that included helmets and face masks. Few even entered the room; a robot equipped with a stethoscope took vitals and had a video screen for doctors to talk to him from afar. County health officials located more than 60 people who'd come in contact with him, and none developed the virus in the following weeks. By Feb. 21, he was deemed fully recovered. Somehow, someone was missed. All the careful medical detective work, it's now clear, wasn't enough to slow a virus moving faster than the world's efforts to contain it.

The Brave browser is working on a feature that will randomize its "fingerprint" every time a user visits a website in an attempt to preserve the user's privacy. From a report: Brave's decision comes as online advertisers and analytics firms are moving away from tracking users via cookies to using fingerprints. [...] "The unfortunate truth about all these approaches is that, despite being well-intentioned, none of them are very effective in preventing fingerprinting," the Brave team said of other browser makers' approaches. "The enormous diversity of fingerprinting surface in modern browsers makes these 'block', 'lie' or 'permission' approaches somewhere between insufficient and useless, unfortunately," they added. "Brave's new approach aims to make every browser look completely unique, both between websites and between browsing sessions," Brave developers said.

Apple is trying really, really hard to always come off as the good guys. From a report: According to Rian Johnson, director of Knives Out, Apple won't let villains use iPhones on-screen. Apple is so obsessed with how the public conceptualizes its products that the company has taken steps to ensure none of the bad guys ever use its phones in movies. Johnson told Vanity Fair in an interview, "Also another funny thing, I don't know if I should say this or not... Not cause it's like lascivious or something, but because it's going to screw me on the next mystery movie that I write, but forget it, I'll say it. It's very interesting. Apple... they let you use iPhones in movies but -- and this is very pivotal if you're ever watching a mystery movie - bad guys cannot have iPhones on camera."

Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued. From a report: Programmer, musician, and copyright attorney Damien Riehl, along with fellow musician/programmer Noah Rubin, sought to stop copyright lawsuits that they believe stifle the creative freedom of artists. Often in copyright cases for song melodies, if the artist being sued for infringement could have possibly had access to the music they're accused of copying -- even if it was something they listened to once -- they can be accused of "subconsciously" infringing on the original content. One of the most notorious examples of this is Tom Petty's claim that Sam Smith's "Stay With Me" sounded too close to Petty's "I Won't Back Down." Smith eventually had to give Petty co-writing credits on his own chart-topping song, which entitled Petty to royalties.

Defending a case like that in court can cost millions of dollars in legal fees, and the outcome is never assured. Riehl and Rubin hope that by releasing the melodies publicly, they'll prevent a lot of these cases from standing a chance in court. In a recent talk about the project, Riehl explained that to get their melody database, they algorithmically determined every melody contained within a single octave. To determine the finite nature of melodies, Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers use to guess passwords: Churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained. Riehl says this algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second. Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it's considered copyrighted. And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.

The first results from NASA's quake-hunting InSight Mars lander just came out, and they reveal that Mars is a seismically active planet. Space.com reports: Martian seismicity falls between that of the moon and that of Earth, [says InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. "In fact, it's probably close to the kind of seismic activity you would expect to find away from the [tectonic] plate boundaries on Earth and away from highly deformed areas," he said. InSight's observations will help scientists better understand how rocky planets such as Mars, Earth and Venus form and evolve, mission team members have said. The mission's initial science returns, which were published today (Feb. 21) in six papers in the journals Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications, show that InSight is on track to meet that long-term goal, Banerdt said.

The new studies cover the first 10 months of InSight's tenure on Mars, during which the lander detected 174 seismic events. These quakes came in two flavors. One hundred and fifty of them were shallow, small-magnitude tremors whose vibrations propagated through the Martian crust. The other 24 were a bit stronger and deeper, with origins at various locales in the mantle, InSight team members said. (But even those bigger quakes weren't that powerful; they landed in the magnitude 3 to 4 range. Here on Earth, quakes generally must be at least magnitude 5.5 to damage buildings.) That was the tremor tally through September 2019. InSight has been busy since then as well; its total quake count now stands at about 450, Banerdt said. And all of this shaking does indeed originate from Mars itself, he added; as far as the team can tell, none of the vibrations were caused by meteorites hitting the Red Planet. So, there's a lot going on beneath the planet's surface. What's interesting to note is that unlike Earth, where most quakes are caused by tectonic plates sliding around, Mars' quakes are caused by the long-term cooling of the planet since its formation 4.5 billion years ago. "As the planet cools, it contracts, and then the brittle outer layers then have to fracture in order to sort of maintain themselves on the surface," Banerdt said. "That's kind of the long-term source of stresses."

"A wealth of information can be gleaned from InSight's quake measurements," reports Space.com. "For example, analyses of how the seismic waves move through the Martian crust suggest there are small amounts of water mixed in with the rock, mission team members said." They can't say one way or the other whether there are large underground reservoirs of water at this point, but the research is convincing.

The new papers also mention a variety of other discoveries as well. "For example, InSight is the first mission ever to tote a magnetometer to the Martian surface, and that instrument detected a local magnetic field about 10 times stronger than would be expected based on orbital measurements," the report says. "InSight is also taking a wealth of weather data, measuring pressure many times per second and temperature once every few seconds. This information helps the mission team better understand environmental noise that could complicate interpretations of the seismic observations, but it also has considerable stand-alone value."

Recently a well-respected UI consulting firm (the Nielsen Norman Group) published their analysis of academic studies on the question of whether Dark Mode or Light Mode was better for reading? Cosima Piepenbrock and her colleagues at the Institut für Experimentelle Psychologie in Düsseldorf, Germany studied two groups of adults with normal (or corrected-to-normal) vision: young adults (18 to 33 years old) and older adults (60 to 85 years old). None of the participants suffered from any eye diseases (e.g., cataract)... Their results showed that light mode won across all dimensions: irrespective of age, the positive contrast polarity was better for both visual-acuity tasks and for proofreading tasks...

Another study, published in the journal Human Factors by the same research group, looked at how text size interacts with contrast polarity in a proofreading task. It found that the positive-polarity advantage increased linearly as the font size was decreased: namely, the smaller the font, the better it is for users to see the text in light mode. Interestingly, even though their performance was better in the light mode, participants in the study did not report any difference in their perception of text readability (e.g., their ability to focus on text) in light versus dark mode — which only reinforces the first rule of usability: don't listen to users...

While dark mode may present some advantages for some low-vision users — in particular, those with cloudy ocular media such as cataract, the research evidence points in the direction of an advantage of positive polarity for normal-vision users. In other words, in users with normal vision, light mode leads to better performance most of the time... These findings are best explained by the fact that, with positive contrast polarity, there is more overall light and so the pupil contracts more. As a result, there are fewer spherical aberrations, greater depth of field, and overall better ability to focus on details without tiring the eyes...

That being said, we strongly recommend that designers allow users to switch to dark mode if they want to — for three reasons: (1) there may be long-term effects associated with light mode; (2) some people with visual impairments will do better with dark mode; and (3) some users simply like dark mode better.
The long-term effects associated with light mode come from an "intriguing" 2018 study they found which argued that reading white text from a black screen or tablet "may be a way to inhibit myopia, while conventional black text on white background may stimulate myopia..."

The researchers wrote that myopia "is tightly linked to the educational status and is on the rise worldwide."

Ring's promotional video includes the police chief of the small Florida suburb of Winter Park saying "we understand the value of those cameras in helping us solve crimes." But over the last 22 months, their partnership with Ring hasn't actually led to a single arrest, reports NBC News.

The only crime it solved was a 13-year-old boy who opened two delivered packages, decided he didn't like what was inside, and rode away on his bike. "Eventually the boy was sent to a state diversion program for first-time offenders in lieu of being formally charged in court."

Ring promises to "make neighborhoods safer" by deterring and helping to solve crimes, citing its own research that says an installation of its doorbell cameras reduces burglaries by more than 50 percent. But an NBC News Investigation has found -- after interviews with 40 law enforcement agencies in eight states that have partnered with Ring for at least three months -- that there is little concrete evidence to support the claim. Three agencies said the ease with which the public can share Ring videos means officers spend time reviewing clips of non-criminal issues such as racoons and petty disagreements between neighbors. Others noted that the flood of footage generated by Ring cameras rarely led to positive identifications of suspects, let alone arrests.

Thirteen of the 40 jurisdictions reached, including Winter Park, said they had made zero arrests as a result of Ring footage. Thirteen were able to confirm arrests made after reviewing Ring footage, while two offered estimates. The rest, including large cities like Phoenix, Miami, and Kansas City, Missouri, said that they don't know how many arrests had been made as a result of their relationship with Ring -- and therefore could not evaluate its effectiveness -- even though they had been working with the company for well over a year... None of the departments said they collect data to measure the impact of their Ring partnership in terms of reducing or deterring crimes, nor did they consistently record when Ring footage was helpful in identifying or arresting a suspect...

"There's a deafening lack of evidence that any city has been made safer," Liz O'Sullivan, the technology director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit that fights excessive local and state-level surveillance, told NBC News. The lack of evidence that Ring reduces crime adds to a list of concerns that have plagued the company in recent months, ranging from bad security practices to privacy questions surrounding the company's plans to incorporate facial recognition, among other biometric characteristics.
NBC News also spoke to Ben Stickle, a professor of criminal justice at Middle Tennessee State University (and a former police officer) who published an academic study analyzing the effectiveness of Ring cameras as a deterrent. "If you expect the camera to deter people, you're assuming that they see it and that they care. Those are two big assumptions."

Ring's claim that its doorbell cameras reduce crime seem to be based on a 2015 report by a police captain in Los Angeles' wealthy Wilshire Park neighborhood of a 55% drop in burglaries after Ring cameras were installed on 10% of the doors. But in an overlooked follow-up, MIT's Technology Review reported that in 2017, Wilshire Park "suffered more burglaries than in any of the previous seven years."

An anonymous reader quotes The Wrap: "Sonic the Hedgehog" is giving Paramount its best box office news in over a year, with a currently 3-day opening weekend of $55 million to become the best opening weekend ever for a video game adaptation... The delayed release of this film prompted by an intense rejection of Sonic's initial design is turning out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise. Moved from last November to this extended Presidents' Day weekend, "Sonic" is standing out in the movie marketplace as a popular family offering with no major competition currently in theaters and none coming until Pixar's "Onward" arrives in three weeks.

Audience reception, driven by both families and hardcore Sonic fans, has been very strong with an A on CinemaScore, 4/5 on Postrak, and 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Even critics have been fairly positive with a 65% Rotten Tomatoes score... If this weekend's estimates hold, "Sonic" will have an opening weekend that's more than double any of Paramount's 2019 films, including the $29 million opening of "Terminator: Dark Fate." In fact, it has the highest opening weekend for the studio since "Mission: Impossible — Fallout," which opened to $61.2 million in July 2018.
The Wrap's article also includes a list ranking "all 46 videogame movies" from best to worst. They rank 2001's "Tomb Raider" just ahead of 2018's "Tomb Raider" (at #14 and #15, respectively), and also remember several forgotten early-1990s films based on videogames (including "Street Fighter," "Mortal Kombat" and "Super Mario Bros.")

An anonymous organization called the Earnest Project is offering the chance to own DNA samples of a handful of world leaders and celebrities. The group claims it has surreptitiously collected items discarded by attendees of the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that may contain their DNA. President Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Elton John all attended the conference. From a report: The group has compiled these artifacts -- napkins, paper coffee cups, a glass parfait jar, cigarette butts, and other items -- in an online catalog it calls the "Davos Collection." Each has an estimated dollar value: A strand of human hair is listed at $1,200 to $3,000. A used breakfast fork has an estimated worth up to $36,500. And a wine glass is valued at up to $65,000. None of the items are identified with names, but it's assumed they come from the leaders or celebrities at the forum. The Earnest Project is planning to auction off the items to raise awareness about "surveillance capitalism," the practice of monetizing people's personal data. They fear that our genetic data could eventually end up in the hands of tech companies like Facebook and Google, which already harvest a lot of personal data.

"By collecting and selling vital and sensitive data harvested from the most powerful people on the planet, we hope to encourage a visceral reaction against surveillance capitalism among the elite," the Earnest Project told OneZero in an email. "We're all constantly depositing our DNA around us and on discarded items. Once you start paying attention, it's really quite easy to collect a target's DNA." Now that genetic testing is getting cheaper and companies are developing hand-held DNA sequencing devices, it's no longer a far-off possibility that someone could take your DNA, get it analyzed, and use it against you for blackmail, extortion, or discrimination. The Earnest Project had planned to hold the auction in New York on February 20 but is postponing the sale due to "unresolved legal issues," according to a statement emailed to OneZero.

Greg Miller, reporting for Washington Post: For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software. The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company's devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages. The decades-long arrangement, among the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War, is laid bare in a classified, comprehensive CIA history of the operation obtained by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German public broadcaster, in a joint reporting project. The account identifies the CIA officers who ran the program and the company executives entrusted to execute it. It traces the origin of the venture as well as the internal conflicts that nearly derailed it. It describes how the United States and its allies exploited other nations' gullibility for years, taking their money and stealing their secrets. The operation, known first by the code name "Thesaurus" and later "Rubicon," ranks among the most audacious in CIA history.

"I had an uneasy feeling about the Google commercial," writes Larry Magid in his column for the San Jose Mercury News. "But I couldn't put it into words until I read a blog post from tech strategic adviser Shelly Palmer."

In the post Palmer describes Google's Super Bowl ad as "a three-hanky, heart-tugging spot that has us eavesdropping on an elderly widower hoping that Google Assistant will help him remember the highlights of his life with his late wife." The ad is beautiful, poignant, thoughtful, sentimental, informative and... evil. It may be the most evil advertisement I've ever seen. What Google doesn't tell you about the service is what it will do with all of the extra data this widower has given it: how much better it will be able to target him, who they will be able to "sell" him to, etc., all without any warning. The service is "free" — not because the widower is the "product" that Google is selling, but because this man is a worker in the mines of Google.

Where is the product labeling? Where is the disclaimer that when you tell Google Assistant everything about the best parts of your life, the algorithm enriches your profile and Google becomes more profitable at your expense?

None of this would bother me if the ad had a disclaimer, or if the ad started with a younger relative adjusting the widower's privacy settings in advance of his experience. This was an ad designed to make people who have no idea what Google does for a living (or how Google works) give Google their private data.

I don't remember a non-political television commercial making me this angry — ever. Shame on you, Google, for this invidious attack on the uninitiated. They deserve better from you. We all do!
The ad has now also been viewed over 37 million times on YouTube. The San Jose Mercury News columnist calls it "another indication of the conflicting emotions I have when it comes to what tech companies know about us." I love that I can use Google to bring up important moments in my life, but I hate that this information is being stored in servers and being used to serve me ads, even though I admit that — if I have to look at ads — I prefer those that are relevant to those that I'm completely uninterested in. So, to borrow a word from this commercial, "remember" that free services like Google and Facebook aren't completely free. We pay with our information, our attention and — depending on how the information is used — our privacy.
Ironically, the columnist is CEO of a non-profit internet safety group that "receives financial support from Google, Facebook and other tech companies."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Viruses are some of the most mysterious organisms on Earth. They're among the world's tiniest lifeforms, and because none can survive and reproduce without a host, some scientists have questioned whether they should even be considered living things. Now, scientists have discovered one that has no recognizable genes, making it among the strangest of all known viruses. But how many viruses do we really know? Another group has just discovered thousands of new viruses hiding out in the tissues of dozens of animals. The finds speak to 'how much we still need to understand' about viruses, says one of the researchers, Jonatas Abrahao, a virologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte.

Abrahao made his discovery while hunting down giant viruses. These microbes -- some the size of bacteria -- were first discovered in amoebae in 2003. In a local artificial lake, he and his colleagues found not only new giant viruses, but also a virus that -- because of its small size -- was unlike most that infect in amoebae. They named it Yaravirus. (Yara is the "mother of waters" according to Indigenous Tupi-Guarani mythology.) Yaravirus's size wasn't the only thing weird about it. When the team sequenced its genome, none of its genes matched any scientists had come across before, the group reports on the bioRxiv preprint server.

The brand keeping BlackBerry phones alive across most of the globe, TCL Communications, plans to stop selling BlackBerry phones later this year. From a report: In a tweet this morning, TCL announced that it "will no longer be selling" BlackBerry-branded phones as of August 31st, 2020, because it will no longer have the rights to design and manufacture them. Existing devices will continue to be supported. BlackBerry decided in 2016 to stop making its own phones, after years of failures, and to license its brand out instead. The biggest licensing deal was with TCL, which since December 2016 has had the near-global rights to design and sell BlackBerry-branded phones. It's done a decent job of it, pairing classically BlackBerry-style designs with the functions of modern Android phones. None of the devices have been blockbuster hits, though, and recent devices have received poor reviews.