Television

Apple's Upcoming TV Service To Launch In Over 100 Countries In 2019, Starting With the US (macrumors.com) 42

Posted by BeauHD from the ready-or-not-here-it-comes dept.
A new report from The Information says that Apple's upcoming TV service that is in the works to showcase its original TV shows will be available in more than 100 countries next year. The service will launch in the United States in the first half of 2019, with a global expansion to follow later in the year. MacRumors reports: According to The Information, Apple's original content will be made available for free to Apple device owners, a rumor we heard earlier this month from CNBC. While Apple's content will be available at no cost, Apple will encourage users to sign up for television subscriptions from other cable networks such as HBO or STARZ. Apple has reportedly started negotiating with content providers about what it will pay to carry TV shows and movies, but programming is not expected to be the same in each country. It is also not quite clear how Apple content will be positioned alongside content from third-party services.
Bitcoin

Coinbase Lets You Buy and Sell USDC Stablecoin (techcrunch.com) 53

Posted by BeauHD from the tightly-regulated dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A few weeks after Circle announced the launch of USD Coin (or USDC for short), Coinbase also announced that customers can now buy, sell, send and receive USDC on Coinbase. A USDC is a token that is worth exactly 1 USD. Its value is going to stay stable against USD -- hence the name stablecoin for this type of coins. Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies, you can be sure that the value of your USDC wallet isn't going to fluctuate like crazy. It opens up new possibilities and use cases.

While Coinbase lets you hold USD in your Coinbase account, this isn't safe. If somebody hacks into your account, you could end up with an empty wallet. That's why you should always try to control the keys of your wallet and transfer your coins to a safer wallet, such as a Ledger wallet or at least a software solution like MyEtherWallet. But if you want to short cryptocurrencies without sending your USD back to your bank account, you can now convert your tokens to USDC. This way, it'll be easier to buy cryptocurrencies again in the future. And maybe you can avoid paying taxes by hiding your tokens from taxation authorities USDC is an ERC-20 token that leverages the Ethereum blockchain and ecosystem. In an effort to regulate USDC, Circle, Coinbase and others have created the CENTRE consortium to define the policies around stablecoins. "For instance, if you want to handle stablecoins on your exchange, you need to send regular audited reports that prove that you have as many USD sitting on a bank account as issued tokens," reports TechCrunch.
Apple

Multiple iCloud Services Experiencing Issues (macrumors.com) 31

Posted by msmash from the call-it dept.
Several iCloud services are experiencing problems this afternoon, users reported. While Apple PR has not issued a statement yet, the status page of Apple services reflect the issues, too. Citing people and the status page, news outlet MacRumors reports that Cloud Drive, iCloud Mail, iCloud Keychain, iCloud Contacts, iCloud Calendar, Mail Drop, Find My iPhone, and more services are performing "slower than normal" for some users.
AI

DARPA Wants To Build 'Contextual' AI That Understands the World (venturebeat.com) 79

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies, is one of the birthplaces of machine learning, a kind of artificial intelligence (AI) that mimics the behavior of neurons in the brain. Dr. Brian Pierce, director of DARPA's Innovation Office, spoke about the agency's recent efforts at a VentureBeat summit. From the report: One area of study is so-called "common sense" AI -- AI that can draw on environmental cues and an understanding of the world to reason like a human. Concretely, DARPA's Machine Common Sense Program seeks to design computational models that mimic core domains of cognition: objects (intuitive physics), places (spatial navigation), and agents (intentional actors). "You could develop a classifier that could identify a number of objects in an image, but if you ask a question, you're not going to get an answer," Pierce said. "We'd like to get away from having an enormous amount of data to train neural networks [and] get away with using fewer labels [to] train models." The agency's also pursuing explainable AI (XAI), a field which aims to develop next-generation machine learning techniques that explain a given system's rationale. "[It] helps you to understand the bounds of the system, which can better inform the human user," Pierce said.
Android

Almost 9 in 10 Android Apps Are Able To Share Data With Google, Says Study (ft.com) 33

Posted by msmash from the unprecedented-reach dept.
A peer-reviewed study [PDF] of almost one million Android apps has revealed how data from smartphones are harvested and shared, with nearly 90 percent of apps set up to transfer information back to Google. From a report: Researchers at Oxford university analysed approximately a third of the apps available in Google's Play Store in 2017 and found that the median app could transfer data to 10 third parties, with one in five apps able to share data with more than 20. This year has seen unprecedented scrutiny over how websites use the data they collect from their users, but little attention has so far been paid to the sprawling and fast-growing world of smartphone apps. Reuben Binns, the computer scientist who led the project, said that because most apps have now moved to a "freemium" model, where they make revenues from advertising rather than sales, data sharing has spiralled out of control.

Users, regulators and sometimes even the app developers and advertisers are unaware of the extent to which data flow from smartphones to digital advertising groups, data brokers and intermediaries that buy, sell and blend information, he said. "This industry was growing already on the webâ...âwhen smartphones came along, that was a new opportunity," he said. "It feels like this legitimate business model has gone completely out of control and created a kind of chaotic industry that is not understood by the people who are most affected by it."
Facebook

Facebook's Ex Security Boss: Asking Big Tech To Police Hate Speech is 'a Dangerous Path' (technologyreview.com) 223

Posted by msmash from the various-perspectives dept.
Like many people, Alex Stamos, former Facebook chief security officer, thinks tech platforms like Facebook and Google have too much power. But he doesn't agree with the calls to break them up. And he argues that the very people who say Facebook and Google are too powerful are giving them more power by insisting they do more to control hate speech and propaganda. From a report: "That's a dangerous path," he warns. If democratic countries make tech firms impose limits on free speech, so will autocratic ones. Before long, the technology will enable "machine-speed, real-time moderation of everything we say online." In attempting to rein in Big Tech, we risk creating Big Brother. So what's the solution? I spoke to Stamos at his Stanford office to find out.

Technology Review: So is the disinformation/propaganda problem mostly solved?
Stamos: In a free society, you will never eliminate that problem. I think the most important thing [in the US] is the advertising transparency. With or without any foreign interference, the parties, the campaigns, the PACs [political action committees] here in the US are divvying up the electorate into tiny little buckets, and that is a bad thing. Transparency is a good start. The next step we need is federal legislation to put a limit on ad targeting. There are thousands of companies in the internet advertising ecosystem. Facebook, Google, and Twitter are the only ones that have done anything, because they have gotten the most press coverage and the most pressure from politicians. So without legislation we're just going to push all of the attackers into the long tail of advertising, to companies that don't have dedicated teams looking for Russian disinformation groups.

Technology Review: Facebook has been criticized over Russian political interference both in the US and in other countries, the genocide in Myanmar, and a lot of other things. Do you feel Facebook has fully grasped the extent of its influence and its responsibility?
Stamos: I think the company certainly understands its impact. The hard part is solving it. Ninety percent of Facebook users live outside the United States. Well over half live in either non-free countries or democracies without protection for speech. One of the problems is coming up with solutions in these countries that don't immediately go to a very dark place [i.e., censorship]. Another is figuring out what issues to put engineering resources behind. No matter how big a company is, there are only a certain number of problems you [can tackle]. One of the problems that companies have had is that they're in a firefighting mode where they jump from emergency to emergency. So as they staff up that gets better, but we also need a more informed external discussion about the things we want the companies to focus on -- what are the problems that absolutely have to be solved, and what aren't. You mentioned a bunch of a problems that are actually very different, but people blur them all together.

Technology Review: How do you regulate in a world in which tech is advancing so fast while regulation moves so slowly? How should a society set sensible limits on what tech companies do?
Stamos: But right now, society is not asking for limits on what they do. It's asking that tech companies do more. And I think that's a dangerous path. In all of the problems you mentioned -- Russian disinformation, Myanmar -- what you're telling these companies is, "We want you to have more power to control what other people say and do." That's very dangerous, especially with the rise of machine learning. Five or ten years from now, there could be machine-learning systems that understand human languages as well as humans. We could end up with machine-speed, real-time moderation of everything we say online. So the powers we grant the tech companies right now are the powers those machines are going to have in five years.
Android

Apps Installed On Millions Of Android Phones Tracked User Behavior To Execute A Multimillion Dollar Ad Fraud Scheme (buzzfeednews.com) 68

Posted by msmash from the catch-me-if-you-can dept.
A new investigation uncovers a sophisticated ad fraud scheme involving more than 125 Android apps and websites, some of which were targeted at kids. From a report: Last April, Steven Schoen received an email from someone named Natalie Andrea who said she worked for a company called We Purchase Apps. She wanted to buy his Android app, Emoji Switcher. But right away, something seemed off. "I did a little bit of digging because I was a little sketched out because I couldn't really find even that the company existed," Schoen told BuzzFeed News. The We Purchase Apps website listed a location in New York, but the address appeared to be a residence. "And their phone number was British. It was just all over the place," Schoen said. It was all a bit weird, but nothing indicated he was about to see his app end up in the hands of an organization responsible for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in ad fraud, and which has funneled money to a cabal of shell companies and people scattered across Israel, Serbia, Germany, Bulgaria, Malta, and elsewhere.

Schoen had a Skype call with Andrea and her colleague, who said his name was Zac Ezra, but whose full name is Tzachi Ezrati. They agreed on a price and to pay Schoen up front in bitcoin. "I would say it was more than I had expected," Schoen said of the price. That helped convince him to sell. A similar scenario played out for five other app developers who told BuzzFeed News they sold their apps to We Purchase Apps or directly to Ezrati. (Ezrati told BuzzFeed News he was only hired to buy apps and had no idea what happened to them after they were acquired.) The Google Play store pages for these apps were soon changed to list four different companies as their developers, with addresses in Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Russia, giving the appearance that the apps now had different owners.

But an investigation by BuzzFeed News reveals that these seemingly separate apps and companies are today part of a massive, sophisticated digital advertising fraud scheme involving more than 125 Android apps and websites connected to a network of front and shell companies in Cyprus, Malta, British Virgin Islands, Croatia, Bulgaria, and elsewhere. More than a dozen of the affected apps are targeted at kids or teens, and a person involved in the scheme estimates it has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from brands whose ads were shown to bots instead of actual humans. (A full list of the apps, the websites, and their associated companies connected to the scheme can be found in this spreadsheet.)

One way the fraudsters find apps for their scheme is to acquire legitimate apps through We Purchase Apps and transfer them to shell companies. They then capture the behavior of the app's human users and program a vast network of bots to mimic it, according to analysis from Protected Media, a cybersecurity and fraud detection firm that analyzed the apps and websites at BuzzFeed News' request. This means a significant portion of the millions of Android phone owners who downloaded these apps were secretly tracked as they scrolled and clicked inside the application. By copying actual user behavior in the apps, the fraudsters were able to generate fake traffic that bypassed major fraud detection systems. Response from Google.
Businesses

Silicon Valley's Dirty Secret: Using a Shadow Workforce of Contract Employees To Drive Profits (cnbc.com) 177

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: As the gig economy grows, the ratio of contract workers to regular employees in corporate America is shifting. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber and other Silicon Valley tech titans now employ thousands of contract workers to do a host of functions -- anything from sales and writing code to managing teams and testing products. This year at Google, contract workers outnumbered direct employees for the first time in the company's 20-year history. It's not only in Silicon Valley. The trend is on the rise as public companies look for ways to trim HR costs or hire in-demand skills in a tight labor market. The U.S. jobless rate dropped to 3.7 percent in September, the lowest since 1969, down from 3.9 percent in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some 57.3 million Americans, or 36 percent of the workforce, are now freelancing, according to a 2017 report by Upwork. In San Mateo and Santa Clara counties alone, there are an estimated 39,000 workers who are contracted to tech companies, according to one estimate by University of California Santa Cruz researchers. Spokespersons at Facebook and Alphabet declined to disclose the number of contract workers they employ. A spokesperson at Alphabet cited two main reasons for hiring contract or temporary workers. One reason is when the company doesn't have or want to build out expertise in a particular area such as doctors, food service, customer support or shuttle bus drivers. Another reason is a need for temporary workers when there is a sudden spike in workload or to cover for an employee who is on leave.
China

World's Longest Sea Bridge Opens After 9 Years of Construction (go.com) 108

Posted by msmash from the for-the-record dept.
Chinese President Xi Jinping inaugurated China's latest mega-infrastructure project on Tuesday: The world's longest sea crossing. From a report: The 34.2-mile bridge and tunnel that have been almost a decade in the making for the first time connect the semi-autonomous cities of Hong Kong and Macau to the mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai by road. The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge spans the mouth of the Pearl River and significantly cuts the commuting time between the three cities. The previously four-hour drive between Zhuhai and Hong Kong will now take 45 minutes. One section of the crossing dives underwater into a 4.2 mile tunnel that creates a channel above for large cargo ship containers to pass through. The project came in over budget -- with Hong Kong alone investing $15 billion in it -- and delayed, as it was originally slate to open in 2016.
Cloud

Amazon's Move Off Oracle Caused Prime Day Outage in One of its Biggest Warehouses, Internal Report Says (cnbc.com) 130

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Amazon is learning how hard it can be to move off of Oracle's database software. From a report: On Prime Day, while the e-retailer was dealing with a major website glitch that slowed sales, the company was also dealing with a technical problem in Ohio at one of its biggest warehouses, leading to thousands of delayed package deliveries, according to an internal report obtained by CNBC. The problem was in large part due to Amazon's migration from Oracle's database to its own technology, the documents show. The outage underscores the challenge Amazon faces as it looks to move completely off Oracle's database by 2020, and how difficult it is to re-create that level of reliability. It also shows that Oracle's database is more efficient in some aspects than Amazon's rival software, a point that Oracle will likely emphasize during this week's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.
Hardware

Motorola Becomes First Smartphone Company To Sell DIY Repair Kits To Its Customers (vice.com) 78

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
As Apple continues to fight independent repair, Motorola has partnered with iFixit and pledged to support the right to repair movement. From a report: It is excellent news that Motorola has decided to make it as easy as possible for you to repair your phone. The company announced that it would begin selling replacement parts for all of its recent phones to customers, and it has partnered with iFixit to sell repair kits for phones like the Moto X, Z, G4, G5, and Droid Turbo 2. The kits come with tools, genuine Motorola-branded replacement parts, and instructions on how to fix your device. iFixit is currently selling replacement batteries, screens, and digitizer assemblies. "Motorola is setting an example for major manufacturers to embrace a more open attitude towards repair," iFixit wrote in a blog post announcing the partnership. "For fixers like us, this partnership is representative of a broader movement in support of our Right to Repair. It's proof that OEM manufacturers and independent repair can co-exist. Big business and social responsibility, and innovation and sustainability, don't need to be mutually exclusive."
GNU is Not Unix

Richard Stallman Announces GNU Kind Communication Guidelines (gnu.org) 448

Posted by msmash from the for-further-communications dept.
AmiMoJo writes: Richard Stallman has announced the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines, an effort "to start guiding people towards kinder communication." The Guidelines differ from a Code of Conduct in that it's trying to be proactive about kindness around free software development over being rules with possible actions when breaking them.

These new GNU communication guidelines can be found at GNU.org along with Stallman's commentary. From the guidelines: A code of conduct states rules, with punishments for anyone that violates them. It is the heavy-handed way of teaching people to behave differently, and since it only comes into action when people do something against the rules, it doesn't try to teach people to do better than what the rules require. To be sure, the appointed maintainer(s) of a GNU package can, if necessary, tell a contributor to go away; but we do not want to need to have recourse to that. The idea of the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines is to start guiding people towards kinder communication at a point well before one would even think of saying, "You are breaking the rules." The way we do this, rather than ordering people to be kind or else, is try to help people learn to make their communication more kind. I hope that kind communication guidelines will provide a kinder and less strict way of leading a project's discussions to be calmer, more welcoming to all participants of good will, and more effective.
Firefox

Firefox 63 Arrives With Enhanced Tracking Protection, Search Shortcuts, and Picture-in-Picture on Android (venturebeat.com) 83

Posted by msmash from the marching-forward dept.
Mozilla today launched Firefox 63 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The release brings Enhanced Tracking Protection, performance improvements on Windows and macOS, search shortcuts, and Picture-In-Picture on Android. From a report: Firefox 63 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. According to Mozilla, Firefox has about 300 million active users. In other words, it's a major platform that web developers must consider. Firefox 63 for desktop brings support for Enhanced Tracking Protection. [...] Firefox 63's Enhanced Tracking Protection blocks cookies and storage access from third-party trackers, which Mozilla says targets the problem of cross-site tracking without breaking sites and impacting revenue streams like the original Tracking Protection. It does this by preventing known trackers from setting third-party cookies -- the primary method of tracking across sites -- but still gives you the option to block all known trackers (under Firefox Options/Preferences).

[...] Search shortcuts essentially pins sites like Google and Amazon on the new tab page. When you click or tap them, you're redirected to Firefox's awesome bar, which automatically fills the corresponding keyword (@google or @amazon in this case) for the search engine. This way, you can type your query, hit enter, and get your search results without having to first load the Google or Amazon homepage. [...] The only major new feature for this Firefox for Android release is a picture-in-picture mode (Android Oreo and up). This means that if you're watching a video in full-screen, when you switch away from Firefox it will move the video into a small floating window, which you can tap to return to the full video player.
Government

White House Wants To Borrow Tech Workers From Google and Amazon, Says Report (cnet.com) 208

Posted by BeauHD from the tours-of-duty dept.
"According to CNET, TechCrunch and others, the Trump administration reportedly wants tech giants to make it easy for workers to take leaves of absence to help the government modernize," writes Slashdot reader kimanaw. From a report: White House officials on Monday planned to meet with tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM, to discuss ways to make it easier for employees to take leaves of absence to help with government projects, according to The Washington Post. The administration reportedly hopes tech industry workers will be able to help modernize state and federal agencies and tackle challenges such as upgrading the veterans' health care system. Attracting tech talent may prove difficult for the Trump administration, which hasn't always seen eye to eye with Silicon Valley on issues such as the president's ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries. However, White House officials believe tech workers are willing to "put politics aside." "This event on Monday is not just about our efforts, it's about our successor, and their successor after that," said one unnamed official, according to the Post. The White House didn't respond to a request for comment.
Mozilla

Mozilla Is Reportedly Going To Sell VPN Subscriptions Within Firefox (trustedreviews.com) 112

Posted by BeauHD from the goods-and-services dept.
Mozilla is reportedly preparing to offer a VPN service for Firefox users to help protect them when surfing the web. According to Trusted Reviews, Mozilla has partnered with the ProtonVPN service, "with a new notification piping-up when the browser detects an unsecured connection, or in a scenario when VPN might be preferable to users." From the report: However, it appears Firefox users will have to pay for the privilege. Austrian site Soeren-hentzschel reports the premium VPN service will be $10 a month, which is what ProtonVPN charges its users. Users will receive a "Firefox Recommends" pop-up when browsing an unsecured wireless network. The pop-up says the VPN service will provide a "private and secure' internet connection. According to the reports, a subset of Firefox 62 users in the United States will begin receiving the pop-up from today. Mozilla will reportedly get a cut of any subscription fee handed over by users to access the VPN service. MSPowerUser points out that this will be the first advertised service that costs money for Firefox users.

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