The Apple executive who led the Siri team since 2012 has been removed as head of the project in a sweeping strategy shift favoring long-term research. Apple Insider reports: The Information reports Apple executive Bill Stasior is no longer in charge of Apple's virtual assistant team, though the executive is still employed at the company. Apple SVP of machine learning and AI strategy John Giannendrea reportedly made the decision in an attempt to shift the Siri program toward research rather than incremental updates. Giannandrea is anticipated to start a search for a new head of Siri, the report said.

Hired by former Apple executive Scott Forstall to run point on Siri, Stasior was previously attached to Amazon's A9 search arm. Stasior's removal as head of Siri comes at a critical point in the voice-enabled assistant's timeline. The first AI assistant to see wide adoption thanks to its inclusion in 2011's iPhone 4S, Siri's capabilities have fallen behind competing systems marketed by Amazon and Google. Apple is looking to Giannandrea to rectify the situation. Hired early last year, Giannandrea previously worked on artificial intelligence projects at Google. In December, he was promoted to SVP and put in charge of Apple's AI and Machine Learning programs, including Core ML and Siri.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Family Tree DNA, one of the largest private genetic testing companies whose home-testing kits enable people to trace their ancestry and locate relatives, is working with the FBI and allowing agents to search its vast genealogy database in an effort to solve violent crime cases, BuzzFeed News has learned. Federal and local law enforcement have used public genealogy databases for more than two years to solve cold cases, including the landmark capture of the suspected Golden State Killer, but the cooperation with Family Tree DNA and the FBI marks the first time a private firm has agreed to voluntarily allow law enforcement access to its database. While the FBI does not have the ability to freely browse genetic profiles in the library, the move is sure to raise privacy concerns about law enforcement gaining the ability to look for DNA matches, or more likely, relatives linked by uploaded user data.

The Houston-based company, which touts itself as a pioneer in the genetic testing industry and the first to offer a direct-to-consumer test kit, disclosed its relationship with the FBI to BuzzFeed News on Thursday, saying in a statement that allowing access "would help law enforcement agencies solve violent crimes faster than ever." While Family Tree does not have a contract with the FBI, the firm has agreed to test DNA samples and upload the profiles to its database on a case-by-case basis since last fall, a company spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. Its work with the FBI is "a very new development, which started with one case last year and morphed," she said. To date, the company has cooperated with the FBI on fewer than 10 cases. The Family Tree database is free to access and can be used by anyone with a DNA profile to upload, not just paying customers.

chicksdaddy shares a report from The Security Ledger: The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) imposed its stiffest fine to date for violations of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) cybersecurity regulations. But who violated the standards and much of what the agency found remains secret. In a heavily redacted 250-page regulatory filing, NERC fined undisclosed companies belonging to a so-called "Regional Entity" $10 million for 127 violations of the Critical Infrastructure Protection standards, the U.S.'s main cyber security standard for critical infrastructure including the electric grid. Thirteen of the violations listed were rated as a "serious risk" to the operation of the Bulk Power System and 62 were rated a "moderate risk." Together, the "collective risk of the 127 violations posed a serious risk to the reliability of the (Bulk Power System)," NERC wrote.

The fines come as the U.S. intelligence community is warning Congress of the growing risk of cyber attacks on the U.S. electric grid. In testimony this week, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats specifically called out Russia's use of cyber attacks to cause social disruptions, citing that country's campaign against Ukraine's electric infrastructure in 2015 and 2016. The extensively redacted document provides no information on which companies were fined or where they are located, citing the risk of cyber attack should their identity be known. Regional Entities account for virtually all of the electricity supplied in the U.S. They are made up of investor-owned utilities; federal power agencies; rural electric cooperatives; state, municipal, and provincial utilities; independent power producers; power marketers; and end-use customers. However, details in the report provide some insight into the fines. For example, violations of a CIP statue that requires companies to "manage electronic access to (Bulk Electric System) Cyber Systems by specifying a controlled Electronic Security Perimeter" is rated a serious risk. So too are violations of CIP requirements calling for covered entities to "implement and document" access controls for "all electronic access points to the Electronic Security Perimeter(s)." Specific requirements that were violated suggest that the companies failed to implement access controls that "denies access by default," "enable only ports and services required for operations and for monitoring Cyber Assets within the Electronic Security Perimeter," and ensure the authenticity of parties attempting to remotely access the company's "electronic security perimeter."

Citing a phone conversation with President Trump, Foxconn said it will proceed with plans to build a government-subsidized plant in Wisconsin to make liquid crystal display screens. The news capped a week of reversals about the Taiwanese company's plans in the state. CBS News reports: Foxconn drew headlines in 2017 when it said the company would invest $10 billion in Wisconsin and hire 13,000 people to build a factory to make screens for televisions and other devices. State leaders offered nearly $4 billion in tax incentives to help seal the deal. Last year Foxconn said it would reduce the scale of the factory from what is known as a "Gen 10" factory to "Gen 6". But this week, Foxconn executive Louis Woo seemed to move away from a factory altogether, saying the company couldn't compete in the TV screen market and would not be making LCD panels in Wisconsin.

On Friday, in yet another twist, Foxconn said that, after discussions with the White House and a personal conversation between Mr. Trump and Foxconn chairman Terry Gou, it will proceed with the smaller manufacturing facility. Woo told Reuters earlier this week that about three-quarters of workers in Wisconsin would be in research and development, not manufacturing, and that the facility would be more of a research hub. Foxconn, the world's largest electronics company, said Friday the campus would house both an advanced manufacturing facility and a center of "technology innovation for the region."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Snopes, a fact-checking organization, announced on Friday its decision to end its partnership with Facebook, which has been ramping its efforts to curb misinformation on its services since the 2016 U.S. election. Facebook and Snopes had been working together since December 2016 to fact check content on the social network. The company in 2017 paid Snopes as much as $100,000 for the work, according to Snopes. "At this time we are evaluating the ramifications and costs of providing third-party fact-checking services, and we want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff," Snopes said in a statement.

Snopes said it has not closed the door on working with the company again, but it encouraged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to meet "with fact-checkers as part of his recently announced series of public discussions" in 2019. The partnership is ending weeks after a report by The Guardian, in which multiple former Snopes employees criticized Facebook's efforts to stop fake content on its services.

One of the most important takeaways from Amazon's 2018 fourth-quarter and full-year earnings report, released Jan. 31, had little to do with the usual financial results. Amazon disclosed in the report that it received a record 850,000 work applications for hourly jobs in the US in October 2018 after announcing it would raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour starting Nov. 1. From a report: The company said that was more than double its previous record for job applications received in a single month. Amazon said the new $15 minimum affects more than 250,000 employees in the US and 17,000 employees in the UK (where the increase was 10.50 pound in the London area and 9.50 pound everywhere else), plus more than 200,000 workers who were hired for the holiday season. As of Dec. 31, Amazon had 647,500 full- and part-time employees, up 14% from the same period a year earlier.

In the basement of MIT's Building 3, a robot is carefully contemplating its next move. It gently pokes at a tower of blocks, looking for the best block to extract without toppling the tower, in a solitary, slow-moving, yet surprisingly agile game of Jenga. From a report: The robot, developed by MIT engineers, is equipped with a soft-pronged gripper, a force-sensing wrist cuff, and an external camera, all of which it uses to see and feel the tower and its individual blocks. As the robot carefully pushes against a block, a computer takes in visual and tactile feedback from its camera and cuff, and compares these measurements to moves that the robot previously made. It also considers the outcomes of those moves -- specifically, whether a block, in a certain configuration and pushed with a certain amount of force, was successfully extracted or not. In real-time, the robot then "learns" whether to keep pushing or move to a new block, in order to keep the tower from falling.

Details of the Jenga-playing robot are published in the journal Science Robotics. Alberto Rodriguez, the Walter Henry Gale Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, says the robot demonstrates something that's been tricky to attain in previous systems: the ability to quickly learn the best way to carry out a task, not just from visual cues, as it is commonly studied today, but also from tactile, physical interactions.

After resisting local government's mandates for years, Apple appears to have agreed to store Russian citizens' data within the country, a report says. From a report: According to a Foreign Policy report, Russia's telecommunications and media agency Roskomnadzor has confirmed that Apple will comply with the local data storage law, which appears to have major implications for the company's privacy initiatives. Apple's obligations in Russia would at least parallel ones in China, which required it turn over Chinese citizens' iCloud data to a partially government-operated data center last year. In addition to processing and storing Russian citizens' data on servers physically within Russia, Apple will apparently need to decrypt and produce user data for the country's security services as requested.

Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) said today he would "soon" introduce a bill to permanently reinstate the net neutrality rules that were repealed by the Federal Communications Commission, led by chairman Ajit Pai, in 2017. From a report: Markey's announcement comes as a federal court is set to hear oral arguments over the FCC's repeal of net neutrality regulations in 2017. Markey, who is a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, has previously introduced a bill that would permanently reinstate net neutrality as a member of the House of Representatives, although the measure ultimately failed.

It's unclear when the bill would be formally introduced, but Markey said it was imminent. "We will soon lay down a legislative marker in the Senate in support of net neutrality to show the American people that we are on their side in overwhelming supporting a free and open internet." Further reading: Net Neutrality Repeal at Stake as Key Court Case Starts: Oral arguments are set to begin Friday in the most prominent lawsuit challenging the federal government's repeal of broadband access rules known as net neutrality. The Federal Communications Commission approved the rules in 2015 to ensure internet users equal and open access to all websites and services. The commission, under new leadership, rolled the rules back in 2017. The plaintiffs in the suit to be argued Friday, led by the internet company Mozilla and supported by 22 state attorneys general, say the commission lacked a sound legal reason for scrapping the regulations. The government is expected to argue that the rules were repealed because of the burden they imposed on broadband providers like Verizon and Comcast.

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange based on trading volume, now lets users spend money they don't have thanks to the additional support for credit cards from Visa and Mastercard. From a report: The exchange announced Thursday that it has partnered with Israel-based payments processing firm Simplex to enable purchases with Visa and MasterCard credit cards. At launch, the exchange is supporting credit card purchase for bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), litecoin (LTC) and XRP. These can then be traded against up to 151 other tokens offered by the exchange. "The crypto industry is still in its early stages and most of the world's money is still in fiat," said Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao. "Building fiat gateways is what we need now to grow the ecosystem, increase adoption and introduce crypto to more users."

Telecom company Bell urged the Canadian government to formulate rules that would make some VPN services illegal in the country ahead of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations. The rationale behind the request? It doesn't want people in the country to use VPNs to access the US catalog of some streaming services like Netflix. TechDirt, quotes a paywalled report: "In its submission, Bell argued that Canadians accessing content from a US service with a VPN 'unjustly enriches the US service, which has not paid for the Canadian rights' but nonetheless makes that content available to Canadians. Bell's media arm reportedly spends millions on content for it streaming service, Crave TV, which allows Canadians to stream content from American networks such as HBO and Showtime."

Again though, it's not the VPN doing that. And if you want to stop users from flocking to better content catalogs elsewhere on the continent, you should focus your ire on the things causing that to happen -- like increasingly dated and absurd geo-viewing restrictions, and your own substandard content offerings that fail to adequately match up.

Ubisoft, the game studio behind upcoming title "Tom Clancy's The Division 2", has apologized for an email that made light of the U.S. government shutdown that ended a week ago. From a report: Ubisoft sent out a marketing email for The Division 2 earlier Thursday which prompted a quick retraction. The email was an invitation to the game's private beta, with the subject line: "Come see what a real government shutdown looks like in the Private Beta".

Not long after the email was issued, the publisher sent a retraction. "A marketing email promoting Tom Clancy's The Division 2 was sent in error today. This was a grave breakdown in process and we apologize for this error and the offensive subject line of the email. We recognize the very real impact of the United States government shut down on thousands of people and did not intend to make light of the situation."

A new website exposes the extent to which Apple cooperates with Chinese government internet censorship, blocking access to Western news sources, information about human rights and religious freedoms, and privacy-enhancing apps that would circumvent the country's pervasive online surveillance regime. The Intercept: The new site, AppleCensorship.com , allows users to check which apps are not accessible to people in China through Apple's app store, indicating those that have been banned. It was created by researchers at GreatFire.org, an organization that monitors Chinese government internet censorship. In late 2017, Apple admitted to U.S. senators that it had removed from its app store in China more than 600 "virtual private network" apps that allow users to evade censorship and online spying. But the company never disclosed which specific apps it removed -- nor did it reveal other services it had pulled from its app store at the behest of China's authoritarian government.

The Firefox browser will soon come with a new security feature that will detect and then warn users when a third-party app is performing a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack by hijacking the user's HTTPS traffic. From a report: The new feature is expected to land in Firefox 66, Firefox's current beta version, scheduled for an official release in mid-March. The way this feature works is to show a visual error page when, according to a Mozilla help page, "something on your system or network is intercepting your connection and injecting certificates in a way that is not trusted by Firefox." An error message that reads "MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_MITM_DETECTED" will be shown whenever something like the above happens.

Apple said Friday morning that it had a fix for a bug discovered in Apple's video and audio chat service FaceTime this week, which had allowed callers to access the microphone and front-facing video camera of the person they were calling, even if that person hadn't picked up. The security issue is fixed on its servers, the company said, but the iPhone software update to re-enable the feature for users won't be rolled out until next week. From a report: "We have fixed the Group FaceTime security bug on Apple's servers and we will issue a software update to re-enable the feature for users next week," Apple said in an emailed statement to BuzzFeed News. "We thank the Thompson family for reporting the bug. We sincerely apologize to our customers who were affected and all who were concerned about this security issue. We appreciate everyone's patience as we complete this process."