"Microsoft's Bing search engine reportedly still served up child porn, nearly a year after the tech giant said it was addressing the issue," reports CNET: The news comes as part of a Saturday report in The New York Times that looks at what the newspaper says is a failure by tech companies to adequately address child pornography on their platforms.... [A] former Microsoft executive told the Times that it now looks as if the company is failing to use its own tools. The Times' Saturday report notes that 10 years ago, Microsoft helped create software called PhotoDNA that "can use computers to recognize photos, even altered ones, and compare them against databases of known illegal images." But, the Times said, Bing and other search engines that use Bing's results are serving up imagery that doesn't pass muster with PhotoDNA....

The Bing news is part of a larger story from the Times about how various tech companies are dealing with child porn on their platforms.
The Times criticizes a tech industry which they say is looking the other way: Amazon, whose cloud storage services handle millions of uploads and downloads every second, does not even look for the imagery. Apple does not scan its cloud storage, according to federal authorities, and encrypts its messaging app, making detection virtually impossible. Dropbox, Google and Microsoft's consumer products scan for illegal images, but only when someone shares them, not when they are uploaded. And other companies, including Snapchat and Yahoo, look for photos but not videos, even though illicit video content has been exploding for years. (When asked about its video scanning, a Dropbox spokeswoman in July said it was not a "top priority." On Thursday, the company said it had begun scanning some videos last month.)

The largest social network in the world, Facebook, thoroughly scans its platforms, accounting for over 90 percent of the imagery flagged by tech companies last year, but the company is not using all available databases to detect the material. And Facebook has announced that the main source of the imagery, Facebook Messenger, will eventually be encrypted, vastly limiting detection.

The streaming giant is having to navigate different political and moral landscapes, and calls for government oversight, as it seeks subscribers worldwide. From a report: In September, Netflix released a trailer for the "Breaking Bad" sequel "El Camino." In it, a character sits in a car, lights a cigarette and holds it out the window, its orange tip glowing. The next day, Netflix Turkey released its own version. In it, the character sparks a lighter and puts his hand out of the window. But there's a difference: The cigarette has been edited out. It wasn't the first time Netflix had censored one of its trailers here. In January, the streaming giant edited one for "Sex Education," a series about a teenage sex therapist, to blur a character's hands so you couldn't see the raised middle fingers. These changes may seem small, but they are a sign of Netflix trying to get ahead of regulation it could soon face in Turkey.

[...] In Turkey, and in other countries, Netflix must navigate different political and moral landscapes, and calls for censorship, as it expands worldwide. Its 2018 annual report lists both "censorship" and "the need to adapt our content and users interfaces for specific cultural and language differences" as business risks. India is another country where Netflix has been embroiled in debates around regulation and censorship. In 2017, the company offered viewers "Angry Indian Goddesses," a movie that had been released in Indian theaters in a censored form to avoid offending religious sensibilities.ï Netflix, which is not subject to India's movie theater code, initially showed the censored version anyway, to avoid a backlash from religious viewers. But complaints came instead from viewers who wanted to see the movie uncut. Netflix made that version available and released a statement: "Our members reached out to us and we listened."

Andy Rubin, the former Google senior vice president whose $90 million exit package caused a worldwide employee walkout at the search giant last year, quietly left Playground Global, the venture firm he founded in May, BuzzFeed News reported today citing internal documents. From the report: The revelation comes as Rubin, who was accused of coercing a subordinate into sexual acts while at Google before being given a hero's send-off in 2014, attempts to make a public comeback with Essential Products, the mobile device company he founded. On Tuesday, Rubin tweeted images of Essential's new phones, some of his first public statements since late 2018 when news broke on the circumstances surrounding his exit from Google. Those circumstances caused an uproar at Google, which was already dealing with several stories of executive harassment and misbehavior, and provided direct proof that Larry Page, the CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, and his board members had intentionally tried to cover up misdeeds at the top.

Not only were Google executives aware of allegations of sexual misconduct at the time of Rubin's exit, but they failed to notify employees, lauded him in a departure announcement, and sent him off with a $90 million exit package. Rubin's departure from Playground was also accompanied by a payout, with a source familiar placing the amount at more than $9 million. Documents related to his exit, which were seen by some investors and the company's leadership, but not all of Playground's staff, were reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

Andy Rubin, the controversial mobile industry executive who co-founded Android, left Google amid allegations of sexual misconduct while retaining a huge severance package, and went on to create the Essential Phone, has tweeted photos teasing an upcoming device with an elongated design and very tall UI composed of card-like apps. The Verge reports: It look extremely small in his hands, too. The device has a large button and volume rocker on the right edge and a fingerprint divot around back, below what appears to be a single main camera. And as you can see, these devices have some decidedly flashy finishes that change color when you view them at different angles -- a sea green that shifts to yellow and blue, for example.

An Essential spokesperson confirmed to the The Verge that this is the company's new phone, adding: "We've been working on a new device that's now in early testing with our team outside the lab. We look forward to sharing more in the near future." A couple hours later, Essential tweeted some slightly more official images of the new phone, which it's calling Project Gem. XDA-Developers also spotted some leaked code that mentions the divot on the rear of the device may activate its voice assistant when you tap your finger to it. They also suggest it runs Android and packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 730 processor.

dryriver shares a report from CNN: Sports brand Asics has issued an apology after "objectionable content" played on the screens above its store in Auckland, New Zealand. Pornographic videos were shown on promotional screens for hours outside an Asics store in Auckland, New Zealand on Sunday morning, the New Zealand Herald reported. The Japanese sportswear brand apologized Sunday, saying the material had been played above its central Auckland store due to a hack. "This morning an unknown person gained access to the screens above our Central Auckland store and some objectionable content was displayed on the screens," said the statement published on Asics New Zealand's Facebook page. Security officer Dwayne Hinagano told the New Zealand Herald that an explicit sex video played for hours and was seen by startled passers-by. "The video ran for a long time, maybe two hours from 8am until the shop staff arrived at about 10am. Some people were shocked, but others just stopped and watched," Hinagano told the news outlet, which also cited witnesses who said the video had been running since 1 a.m. Over the weekend, two hackers managed to upload a porn video to an interstate billboard outside Detroit. According to news reports, the pornography played for about 20 minutes before it was removed.

"Police in the suburb of Auburn Hills said in a statement that the unidentified pair, who appear to be young white men, were captured by video shortly before 11 p.m. Saturday breaking into a building at the base of the electronic billboard on Interstate 75," reports NBC News. "The building, which is surrounded by a six-foot fence and is unstaffed, houses the computer that controls the sign, a police official told NBC affiliate WDIV."

"An electric patch makes hairless mice grow fur and may reverse balding in men when fitted inside a specially designed baseball cap," reports New Scientist: At the moment, men who don't want to go bald can treat hair loss using minoxidil lotion, finasteride pills or hair transplant surgery. But minoxidil doesn't work for everyone, finasteride can reduce sex drive and fertility, and surgery is painful and expensive. Stimulating the scalp with electric pulses has also been shown to restore hair growth. However, it isn't a very practical treatment because it involves being hooked up to a machine or battery pack for several hours a day.

To overcome this hurdle, Xudong Wang at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues have developed a wireless patch that sticks to the scalp and generates electric pulses by harnessing energy from random body movements. The 1-millimetre-thick plastic patch contains layers of differently-charged materials that produce electricity when they come into contact and separate again -- a phenomenon known as the triboelectric effect. When the flexible patch was attached to the backs of rats, their movements caused it to bend and stretch, activating the triboelectric effect. The resulting electric pulses stimulated faster hair re-growth in shaved rats compared with minoxidil lotion and inert saline solution...

Wang also tested the patch on his father, who has been going bald for the past few years. "It helped him to grow a lot of new hairs after one month," Wang says. His team has now designed a baseball cap that encases the whole scalp in the triboelectric materials to stimulate hair growth, and is seeking approval to test it in men in a clinical trial... However, the hat will only work in men who are currently losing their hair or have recently become bald, because the skin loses its ability to generate new hair follicles after many years of baldness, Wang says.

When an artificially intelligent chatbot that used Twitter to learn how to talk unsurprisingly turned into a bigot bot, Taylor Swift reportedly threatened legal action because the bot's name was Tay. Microsoft would probably rather forget the experiment where Twitter trolls took advantage of the chatbot's programming and taught it to be racist in 2016, but a new book is sharing unreleased details that show Microsoft had more to worry about than just the bot's racist remarks. Digital Trends reports: Tay was a social media chatbot geared toward teens first launched in China before adapting the three-letter moniker when moving to the U.S. The bot, however, was programmed to learn how to talk based on Twitter conversations. In less than a day, the automatic responses the chatbot tweeted had Tay siding with Hitler, promoting genocide, and just generally hating everybody. Microsoft immediately removed the account and apologized.

When the bot was reprogrammed, Tay was relaunched as Zo. But in the book Tools and Weapons by Microsoft president Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne, Microsoft's communications director, the executives have finally revealed why -- another Tay, Taylor Swift. According to The Guardian, the singer's lawyer threatened legal action over the chatbot's name before the bot broke bad. The singer claimed the name violated both federal and state laws. Rather than get in a legal battle with the singer, Smith writes, the company instead started considering new names.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: It was beginning to look like Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, might weather a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But less than a day after a scathing new expose in the New Yorker by Ronan Farrow alleged the Media Lab had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than previously acknowledged and attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him, Ito resigned from his position. "After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately," Ito wrote in an internal e-mail.

In a message to the MIT community, MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote, "Because the accusations in the story are extremely serious, they demand an immediate, thorough and independent investigation," and announced that MIT's general counsel would engage an outside law firm to oversee that investigation.

Ronan's damning New Yorker story began: "Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as 'disqualified' in MIT's official donor database, the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds, and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university. Perhaps most notably, Epstein appeared to serve as an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors, soliciting millions of dollars in donations from individuals and organizations, including the technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black."
"The effort to conceal the lab's contact with Epstein was so widely known," reports the New Yorker, that some of Ito's staff "referred to Epstein as Voldemort or 'he who must not be named.'"

Steven Fabrizio, a top executive at the Motion Picture Association of America, has been fired following charges of second degree sexual abuse and blackmail. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Techdirt report, written by Mike Masnick: Beyond being the MPAA's top legal attack dog for nearly a decade, the Sony Pictures email leak showed that Fabrizio was the mastermind behind Hollywood's Project Goliath to use MPAA/Hollywood Studio funds to pay for having state Attorney's General and news media owned by those studios, to attack Google to try to pressure it into some sort of "deal" with the studios. Fabrizio was also formerly the top litigator at the RIAA, and led its charge against Napster. Fabrizio was deeply involved in key copyright lawsuits, including the fights against Grokster, Hotfile, and Aereo. Basically, much of the history of "anti-piracy" litigation and "anti-piracy" efforts regarding the internet, was somehow touched by Steve Fabrizio. And, of course, the usual line that people would give in supporting these positions is that it was necessary is because "piracy is illegal" and so on.

Anyway, that's why it's a bit shocking to discover that Fabrizio has now been arrested in DC (and fired by the MPAA) for alleged sexual assault and blackmail. Variety's story on the charges is really quite incredible: "According to a police affidavit, Fabrizio is accused of threatening a woman he met on a 'sugar daddy' dating site. The police allege that Fabrizio and the woman had consensual sex once on Aug. 19, after which he paid her $400. After that, she did not want to see him again. According to the affidavit, Fabrizio sent numerous texts insisting on a second meeting, and threatening to expose her if she did not comply. 'I know where you live,' he allegedly wrote. 'I know where you work. Don't think -- Hospital would be happy to know that it's young nurses are having sexual for money / Same for your landlord.' Fabrizio allegedly used those threats to coerce her into having sex again, according to the affidavit. The police allege that he then sent additional texts threatening to tell her parents if she did not continue to have sex with him a couple times a month. The woman called the police. After arranging for another meeting, Fabrizio was arrested outside the woman's apartment on Friday morning, according to the document."

"While many users are abandoning Facebook, fed up with what seems like a never-ending series of privacy violations, a small cohort find themselves in the opposite position," reports New York Times enterprise reporter Kashmir Hill. [Alternate source here.] "They've been kicked off the platform, and no matter how hard they try -- and they try really, really hard -- they can't get back on..." In Facebook's version of a justice system, users are told only that their accounts have been disabled for "suspicious activity." If they appeal -- via a terse form that will accept only a name, contact information and an image of an ID -- a mysterious review process begins. The wait can be endless, and the inability to contact a Facebook employee maddening. Increasingly agitated, Facebook castaways turn for help to Twitter, Reddit, Quora, message boards and, well, me. Because I have a history of writing about (and sometimes solving) people's troubles with the platform, profoundly addicted Facebook users have found their way to my inbox, emailing multiple times a day for updates about their cases, which I do not have...

With more than 2 billion active members, Facebook has long been criticized for allowing bad actors to proliferate on its platform, from violent extremists to identity thieves. In May, the company announced that it disabled more than 3 billion "fake accounts" over a six-month period. "Our intent is simple: find and remove as many as we can while removing as few authentic accounts as possible," wrote Alex Schultz, Facebook's vice president for analytics, in an accompanying post... But the number of people complaining about disabled Facebook accounts has been going up for years, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission, which tracked three such complaints in 2015, 12 in 2016, and more than 50 in each of the last two years.

Once Facebook disables an account, Mr. Schultz wrote, it keeps the person behind it from rejoining by deploying "advanced detection systems" that look for "patterns of using suspicious email addresses, suspicious actions, or other signals previously associated with other fake accounts we've removed...." When Facebook reviewed 14 disabled accounts belonging to users contacted by The New York Times, the company said that just five had been banned with cause. Facebook suggested that the others should simply go through the appeals process again; most did, but none of their accounts have been reactivated so far.
According to the article, Facebook's voicemail system tells callers to press one for phone support -- then plays a recording saying "Thank you for calling Facebook user operations. Unfortunately, we do not offer phone support at this time." Then it hangs up.

According to The Verge, citing a report from the Irish Examiner, Apple used human contractors to listen to an arduous 1,000 Siri recordings every day to help make the digital assistant better at giving you what you want. Some of those recordings included personal data and snippets of conversations, one contractor says. An anonymous reader shares the report: Apple's Siri assistant currently records and sends snippets of your voice requests back to Apple to be studied so that Apple can try to make Siri better at giving you what you want. In July, The Guardian reported that contractors also hear some rather personal things, like "confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex." A contractor that spoke with the Irish Examiner said his job involved noting when Siri could actually help or if Siri was triggered accidentally. The Guardian said contractors "regularly" hear confidential information, but the contractor speaking with the Irish Examiner said the recordings "occasionally" had "personal data or snippets of conversations." There's a reason why we're likely learning more details about the contractors' work now: they may be out of a job. Apple has temporarily stopped using contractors to listen to Siri conversations, and the Irish Examiner reports that Apple no longer needed the services of Cork, Ireland-based contracting company GlobeTech, which employed the contractor who spoke to the Irish Examiner.

Neither Apple nor GlobeTech is denying that there may have been layoffs: GlobeTech merely referred the Irish Examiner to a statement that said it ended a "client project" early. Apple said in a statement to the paper that it is "working closely with our partners" as it reviews its processes around grading Siri conversations. Apple has not replied to a request for comment from The Verge. The work Siri contractors reportedly did sounds similar to how Microsoft contractors transcribe Cortana recordings to help train Microsoft's voice assistant. One of the Cortana contractors told Motherboard that contractors are expected to transcribe and classify roughly three "tasks" every minute. For the Siri contractors, transcribing 1,000 voice commands means they likely had to do about two per minute, assuming they were working an eight-hour day.

America's lawmakers are scrutinizing the blanket protections in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which lets online companies moderate their own sites without incurring legal liability for everything they host.

schwit1 shared this article from the New York Times: Last month, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said in a hearing about Google and censorship that the law was "a subsidy, a perk" for big tech that may need to be reconsidered. In an April interview, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California called Section 230 a "gift" to tech companies "that could be removed."

"There is definitely more attention being paid to Section 230 than at any time in its history," said Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the United States Naval Academy and the author of a book about the law, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet .... Mr. Wyden, now a senator [and a co-author of the original bill], said the law had been written to provide "a sword and a shield" for internet companies. The shield is the liability protection for user content, but the sword was meant to allow companies to keep out "offensive materials." However, he said firms had not done enough to keep "slime" off their sites. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Wyden said he had recently told tech workers at a conference on content moderation that if "you don't use the sword, there are going to be people coming for your shield."

There is also a concern that the law's immunity is too sweeping. Websites trading in revenge pornography, hate speech or personal information to harass people online receive the same immunity as sites like Wikipedia. "It gives immunity to people who do not earn it and are not worthy of it," said Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at Boston University who has written extensively about the statute. The first blow came last year with the signing of a law that creates an exception in Section 230 for websites that knowingly assist, facilitate or support sex trafficking. Critics of the new law said it opened the door to create other exceptions and would ultimately render Section 230 meaningless.
The article notes that while lawmakers from both parties are challenging the protections, "they disagree on why," with Republicans complaining that the law has only protected some free speech while still leaving conservative voices open to censorship on major platforms.

The Times also notes that when Wyden co-authored the original bill in 1996, Google didn't exist yet, and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old.

A victim of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein testified that she was forced to have sex with MIT professor Marvin Minsky, as revealed in a newly unsealed deposition. The Verge reports: Minsky, who died in 2016, was known as an associate of Epstein, but this is the first direct accusation implicating the AI pioneer in Epstein's broader sex trafficking network. The deposition also names Prince Andrew of Britain and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, among others. The accusation against Minsky was made by Virginia Giuffre, who was deposed in May 2016 as part of a broader defamation suit between her and an Epstein associate named Ghislaine Maxwell. In the deposition, Giuffre says she was directed to have sex with Minsky when he visited Epstein's compound in the U.S. Virgin Islands. As part of the defamation suit, Maxwell's counsel denied the allegations, calling them "salacious and improper." Representatives for Giuffre and Maxwell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A pivotal member of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, Marvin Minsky pioneered the first generation of self-training algorithms, establishing the concept of artificial neural networks in his 1969 book Perceptrons. He also developed the first head-mounted display, a precursor to modern VR and augmented reality systems. Minsky was one of a number of prominent scientists with ties to Jeffrey Epstein, who often called himself a "science philanthropist" and donated to research projects and academic institutions. Minsky's affiliation with Epstein went particularly deep, including organizing a two-day symposium on artificial intelligence at Epstein's private island in 2002, as reported by Slate. In 2012, the Jeffrey Epstein Foundation issued a press release touting another conference organized by Minsky on the island in December 2011.
UPDATE (8/10/2019): Jeffrey Epstein "died by suicide early Saturday in his Lower Manhattan prison cell, three law enforcement officials told ABC News."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceDaily: Scientist have identified a link between exposure to high levels of oestrogen sex hormones in the womb and the likelihood of developing autism. The findings are published today in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. In 2015, a team of scientists at the University of Cambridge and the State Serum Institute in Denmark measured the levels of four prenatal steroid hormones, including two known as androgens, in the amniotic fluid in the womb and discovered that they were higher in male fetuses who later developed autism. These androgens are produced in higher quantities in male than in female fetuses on average, so might also explain why autism occurs more often in boys. They are also known to masculinize parts of the brain, and to have effects on the number of connections between brain cells.

Today, the same scientists have built on their previous findings by testing the amniotic fluid samples from the same 98 individuals sampled from the Danish Biobank, which has collected amniotic samples from over 100,000 pregnancies, but this time looking at another set of prenatal sex steroid hormones called oestrogens. This is an important next step because some of the hormones previously studied are directly converted into oestrogens. All four oestrogens were significantly elevated, on average, in the 98 fetuses who later developed autism, compared to the 177 fetuses who did not. High levels of prenatal oestrogens were even more predictive of likelihood of autism than were high levels of prenatal androgens (such as testosterone). "This new finding supports the idea that increased prenatal sex steroid hormones are one of the potential causes for the condition," said Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Center at the University of Cambridge and author of the study. "Genetics is well established as another, and these hormones likely interact with genetic factors to affect the developing fetal brain."

The team cautioned that these findings cannot and should not be used to screen for autism.

Apple says it will temporarily suspend its practice of using human contractors to grade snippets of Siri voice recordings for accuracy. The move follows a report in The Guardian where a former worker detailed the program, claiming that contractors "regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex" as part of their job. The Verge reports: "We are committed to delivering a great Siri experience while protecting user privacy," an Apple spokesperson says in a statement to The Verge. "While we conduct a thorough review, we are suspending Siri grading globally. Additionally, as part of a future software update, users will have the ability to choose to participate in grading." Apple did not comment on whether, in addition to pausing the program where contractors listen to Siri voice recordings, it would also stop actually saving those recordings on its servers. Currently the company says it keeps recordings for six months before removing identifying information from a copy that it could keep for two years or more.

A CBS News investigation found that some companies that are hired to make negative web pages disappear appear to be forging judges' signatures to trick Google into changing its search results. From the report: One of the only ways to get Google to permanently remove a link from its search results is with a court order from a judge. CBS News sorted through thousands of these court orders and spotted small businesses from all across America trying to clean up their reputations. But we also spotted a problem: Dozens of the court documents were fakes. "It never even crossed my mind that people would have the guts to actually go out there and just forge a court document," said Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who specializes in internet law. Volokh points out that forging a court document is criminal. "Part of it is just how brazen it is. They take a judge's signature and they copy it from one order to another order and they pretend something is a court order. It's cheaper and it's faster -- if they don't get caught," Volokh said.

CBS News worked with Volokh and identified more than 60 fraudulent court orders sent to Google. Some are obviously fake, like one with a case number of "1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9." Others are more sophisticated, and appear to be drawn from nine different federal courts across the country. The most recent fake court document we identified was submitted in April. It's not just about making a bad review of a local restaurant disappear. CBS News uncovered bogus court documents submitted on behalf of two convicted criminals who wanted Google to forget about their crimes. Both were child sex offenders. Of the more than 60 phony documents, we found that 11 had signatures forged from judges in Hamilton County, Ohio.

Alex Hern, reporting for The Guardian: Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex, as part of their job providing quality control, or "grading," the company's Siri voice assistant, the Guardian has learned. Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world.

They are tasked with grading the responses on a variety of factors, including whether the activation of the voice assistant was deliberate or accidental, whether the query was something Siri could be expected to help with and whether Siri's response was appropriate. Apple says the data "is used to help Siri and dictation ... understand you better and recognise what you say." [...] Apple told the Guardian: "A small portion of Siri requests are analysed to improve Siri and dictation. User requests are not associated with the user's Apple ID. Siri responses are analysed in secure facilities and all reviewers are under the obligation to adhere to Apple's strict confidentiality requirements." The company added that a very small random subset, less than 1% of daily Siri activations, are used for grading, and those used are typically only a few seconds long." Further reading: Google Contractors Are Secretly Listening To Your Assistant Recordings; and Amazon Workers Are Listening To What You Tell Alexa.

The Consumer Electronics Show will allow sex toys to win awards and be presented on the show floor next year under the show's health and wellness section. "The Consumer Technology Association, which runs the show, says they're being included on a 'one-year trial basis,' meant to assess how they fit into the category," reports The Verge. The group is also cracking down on "sexually revealing" clothing. From the report: The CTA is also updating the dress code policy for CES in an attempt to further crack down on companies hiring models to wear revealing clothing as a way to bring visitors to their booths. This kind of behavior has generally been banned already, but the CTA is now adding a punishment for violators: they risk losing rank in a tenure system that helps them attain a good position on the show floor. The new rules say that companies can get in trouble for outfits that are "sexually revealing or that could be interpreted as undergarments." If clothing reveals "an excess of bare skin" or "hugs genitalia," it will be banned as well. The guidelines apply to all staff. Pornography will remain banned on the show floor. The CTA says the ban will now be "strictly enforced with no exceptions," whereas some has slipped through in previous years.

CES has maintained confusing policies around sex tech for years, and those rules have never seemed to be evenly enforced. Some companies, like the sex toy company OhMiBod, have been able to find a place on the show floor for years; others, like the porn studio Naughty America, have been able to show VR demoes in private booths. But the show's policies have seemingly prohibited all of this, and it's meant that other companies interested in showing their sex-related products have been unable to present at the enormous annual convention.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Dozens of U.S. government websites appear to contain a flaw enabling anyone to generate URLs with their domains that redirect users to external sites, a handy tool for criminals hoping to infect users with malware or fool them into surrendering personal information. Gizmodo first reported a year ago that a wide variety of U.S. government sites were misconfigured, allowing porn bots to create links that redirected visitors to sites with colorful names like "HD Dog Sex Girl" and "Two Hot Russians Love Animal Porn." Among those affected was the Justice Department's Amber Alert site, links from which apparently redirected users to erotic material.

Gizmodo first reported a year ago that a wide variety of U.S. government sites were misconfigured, allowing porn bots to create links that redirected visitors to sites with colorful names like "HD Dog Sex Girl" and "Two Hot Russians Love Animal Porn." Among those affected was the Justice Department's Amber Alert site, links from which apparently redirected users to erotic material. The ability to generate malicious links that appear to lead to actual government websites can be a handy pretense for criminals conducting phishing campaigns. What's more, these malicious redirects may be used to send users to websites masquerading as official government services, encouraging them to hand over personal information, such as names, addresses, and Social Security numbers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Smithsonian: A new study is shining troubling light on the quantity of microplastics Americans are consuming each year -- as many as 121,000 particles, per a conservative estimate. A research team led by Kieran Cox, a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria and a former Link Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute, looked at 26 papers assessing the amount of microplastics in commonly consumed food items, among them seafood, sugars, salts, honey, alcohol and water. The team also evaluated the potential consumption of microplastics through inhalation using previously reported data on microplastic concentrations in the air and the Environmental Protection Agency's reported respiration rates. To account for factors like age and sex, the researchers consulted dietary intakes recommended by the U.S. Health Department.

Based on this data, the researchers calculated that our annual consumption of microplastics via food and drink ranges between 39,000 and 52,000 particles, depending on age and sex. Female children consume the least and male adults consume the most, the team reveals in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. When microplastics ingested through inhalation are taken into account, the range jumps from 74,000 to 121,000 particles per year.