An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: U.S. government investigators have lost a case to force Facebook to wiretap calls made over its Messenger app. A joint federal and state law enforcement effort investigating the MS-13 gang had pushed a district court to hold the social networking giant in contempt of court for refusing to permit real-time listening in on voice calls. According to sources speaking to Reuters, the judge later ruled in Facebook's favor -- although, because the case remains under seal, it's not known for what reason. The case, filed in a Fresno, Calif. district court, centers on alleged gang members accused of murder and other crimes. The government had been pushing to prosecute 16 suspected gang members, but are said to have leaned on Facebook to obtain further evidence.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Ars Technica: Today, roughly 25 percent of the European Union's power currently comes from nuclear sources, with coal and gas each delivering a little above 20 percent. Wind constitutes 10 percent of the European Union's energy mix. But by 2027, IEA's forecasts (PDF) put wind just beating all other electricity sources with a 23-percent share of the energy mix. "Other Renewables" like biomass plants contribute a little over 20 percent, gas adds 20 percent, nuclear contributes just a little below 20 percent, and coal declines to just over 10 percent. Solar energy contributes about six or seven percent in the IEA's 2027 scenario. The European Union has a wealth of wind energy, especially offshore wind energy, a sector in which the EU is the global leader. Offshore wind allows turbines to be built bigger, and coastal winds are often stronger and more consistent than onshore winds. [The IEA forecasts 200 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity by 2040.]

secwatcher shares a report from Threatpost: A passcode bypass vulnerability in Apple's new iOS version 12 could allow an attacker to access photos and contacts (including phone numbers and emails) on a locked iPhone. The hack allows someone with physical access to a vulnerable iPhone to sidestep the passcode authorization screen on iPhones running Apple's latest iOS 12 beta and iOS 12 operating systems. Threatpost was tipped off to the bypass by Jose Rodriguez, who describes himself as an Apple enthusiast and "office clerk" based in Spain who has also found previous iPhone hacks.

Rodriguez posted a video of the bypass on his YouTube channel under the YouTube account Videosdebarraquito, where he walks viewers through a complicated 37-step bypass process in Spanish. Threatpost has independently confirmed that the bypass works on a number of different iPhone models including Apple's newest model iPhone XS. The process involves tricking Siri and Apple's accessibility feature in iOS called VoiceOver to sidestep the device's passcode. The attack works provided the attacker has physical access to a device that has Siri enabled and Face ID either turned off or physically covered (by tape, for instance).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Electrek has learned that Tesla already achieved the goal for a new record production with two days still to go before the end of the quarter. As we reported last week, Tesla achieved a new record day of Model 3 production, but it was cutting it close for the quarterly goal. The automaker had been guiding a production of 50,000 to 55,000 Model 3 vehicles for the third quarter. According to a reliable source familiar with Tesla's production, the automaker had a strong week of production and managed to bring the total number Model 3 produced to over 51,000 vehicles. For the first time in months, Tesla was able to produce about 5,000 Model 3 vehicles over seven days. The total production for the week was at around 6,700 vehicles -- bringing the total for the quarter to about 77,400 vehicles. Tesla was able to maintain production of about 1,100 cars per day over four days this week and about 800 Model 3's per day over three of those days. It's one of the highest levels of production that Tesla was ever able to maintain.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee in November, following the midterm elections. He met with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other senior Republicans Friday to discuss accusations that Google is biased against conservatives (a charge the company has denied). From a report: "I think we've really shown that there is bias, which is human nature, but you have to have transparency and fairness," McCarthy said. "As big tech's business grows, we have not had enough transparency and that has led to an erosion of trust and, perhaps worse, harm to consumers." Alphabet's Google unit has repeatedly denied accusations of bias against conservatives. Pichai left the meeting without comment. Pichai wrote in an internal email last week that suggestions that Google would interfere in search results for political reasons were "absolutely false. We do not bias our products to favor any political agenda." [...] Asked if Republicans will push to break up Google, McCarthy said: "I don"t see that." He said the hearing will look at privacy, bias issues, China and other matters.

BitTorrent and Tron, following the acquisition, hope to successfully integrate blockchain technology with the popular file-sharing protocol. From a report: Both companies were built around decentralization, which makes for a good match. However, it doesn't stop there. BitTorrent and Tron plan to integrate blockchain technology into future releases of their torrent clients. In short, they want to make it possible for users to 'earn' tokens by seeding. At the same time, others can 'bid' tokens to speed up their downloads. The new plan is dubbed "Project Atlas" and BitTorrent currently has seven people working on it full-time. In theory, the incentives will increase total seeding capacity, improving the health of the torrent ecosystem.

"By adding tokens we'll make it so that you can effectively earn per seeding and create incentives for users not only to seed longer but to dedicate more of their bandwidth and storage overall," Project Atlas lead Justin Knoll says. The idea to merge the blockchain with file-sharing technology isn't new. Joystream, previously implemented a similar idea and Upfiring is also working on incentivized sharing. BitTorrent itself also considered it before Tron came into the picture. "Even before the Tron acquisition, our R&D team was looking at ways to add blockchain based incentives to the protocol. Now with the addition of Tron's expertise, we can accelerate that effort," Knoll says. BitTorrent says it will start implementing the technology in its desktop clients, such as uTorrent. After that, it intends to bring it to mobile. The company is additionally encouraging developers of other BitTorrent clients to follow suit. "We'll release the details of our implementation and encourage third-party clients and the whole ecosystem to implement this," Knoll was quoted as saying.

After breaking into the top three most popular programming languages for the first time this month, behind C and Java, Python has also won the hearts of hackers and web nasties, according to attack statistics published this week by web security biz Imperva. From a report: The company says more than a third of daily attacks against sites the company protects come from a malicious or legitimate tool coded in Python. Imperva says that around 77 percent of all the sites the company protects, have been attacked by at least one Python-based tool. Furthermore, when the company looked at the list of tools that hackers used for their attacks, more than a quarter were coded in Python, by far the attackers' favorite tool. "Hackers, like developers, enjoy Python's advantages which makes it a popular hacking tool," the Imperva team says.

There's something mysterious coming up from the frozen ground in Antarctica, and it could break physics as we know it. From a report: Physicists don't know what it is exactly. But they do know it's some sort of cosmic ray -- a high-energy particle that's blasted its way through space, into the Earth, and back out again. But the particles physicists know about -- the collection of particles that make up what scientists call the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics -- shouldn't be able to do that.

Sure, there are low-energy neutrinos that can pierce through miles upon miles of rock unaffected. But high-energy neutrinos, as well as other high-energy particles, have "large cross-sections." That means that they'll almost always crash into something soon after zipping into the Earth and never make it out the other side. And yet, since March 2016, researchers have been puzzling over two events in Antarctica where cosmic rays did burst out from the Earth, and were detected by NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) -- a balloon-borne antenna drifting over the southern continent.

ANITA is designed to hunt cosmic rays from outer space, so the high-energy neutrino community was buzzing with excitement when the instrument detected particles that seemed to be blasting up from Earth instead of zooming down from space. Because cosmic rays shouldn't do that, scientists began to wonder whether these mysterious beams are made of particles never seen before. Since then, physicists have proposed all sorts of explanations for these "upward going" cosmic rays, from sterile neutrinos (neutrinos that rarely ever bang into matter) to "atypical dark matter distributions inside the Earth," referencing the mysterious form of matter that doesn't interact with light.

Spotify is emailing some users on family plans asking for their GPS locations in order to confirm that they live in the same location. From a report: Subscribers who don't confirm their home address could lose access to their plan, according to the email. The move is an apparent attempt by Spotify to crack down on groups of friends who save money on individual subscriptions by sharing discounted plans intended for families. The emails, which have been sent to a limited number of "Premium for Family" subscribers in at least the US and Germany, have been received with scorn by some who rightly point out that not all families live together. However, Spotify's small print does say that the family plan is available for "you and up to five people who reside at your same address." The amount of people subscribed to family plans suggests not all of them abide by Spotify's definition.

Facebook shared the following security announcement Friday: On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 25, our engineering team discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. We're taking this incredibly seriously and wanted to let everyone know what's happened and the immediate action we've taken to protect people's security. Our investigation is still in its early stages. But it's clear that attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook's code that impacted "View As", a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people's accounts. Access tokens are the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook so they don't need to re-enter their password every time they use the app. Here is the action we have already taken.

First, we've fixed the vulnerability and informed law enforcement. Second, we have reset the access tokens of the almost 50 million accounts we know were affected to protect their security. We're also taking the precautionary step of resetting access tokens for another 40 million accounts that have been subject to a "View As" look-up in the last year. As a result, around 90 million people will now have to log back in to Facebook, or any of their apps that use Facebook Login. After they have logged back in, people will get a notification at the top of their News Feed explaining what happened. Third, we're temporarily turning off the "View As" feature while we conduct a thorough security review. The company added it has yet to determine whether these impacted accounts were misused or any information was accessed. Senator Mark Warner has issued a stern reprimand to Facebook over the security incident revelation today. "This is another sobering indicator that Congress needs to step up and take action to protect the privacy and security of social media users. As I've said before -- the era of the Wild West in social media is over," he wrote.

Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century. From a report: A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 4 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe. But the administration did not offer this dire forecast as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet's fate is already sealed. The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump's decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.

Intel interim CEO Bob Swan publicly addressed the company's CPU shortage issue for the first time since July, when he acknowledged that meeting additional demand would be Intel's "biggest challenge." From a report: In a message posted to Intel's website Friday, Swan said the "surprising return" to growth in the PC market "has put pressure on [the company's] factory network." He added, "We're prioritizing the production of Intel Xeon and Intel Core processors so that collectively we can serve the high-performance segments of the market. That said, supply is undoubtedly tight, particularly at the entry-level of the PC market."

Intel partners and at least one distributor previously told CRN they were seeing a shortage of Intel's current generation, 14-nanometer CPUs, most notably in lower-end client processors.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The problem of energy storage has led to many creative solutions, like giant batteries. For a paper published today in the journal Chem, scientists trying to improve the solar cells themselves developed an integrated battery that works in three different ways. It can work like a normal solar cell by converting sunlight to electricity immediately, explains study author Song Jin, a chemist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It can store the solar energy, or it can simply be charged like a normal battery. It's a combination of two existing technologies: solar cells that harvest light, and a so-called flow battery. The most commonly used batteries, lithium-ion, store energy in solid materials, like various metals. Flow batteries, on the other hand, store energy in external liquid tanks. This means they are very easy to scale for large projects. Scaling up all the components of a lithium-ion battery might throw off the engineering, but for flow batteries, "you just make the tank bigger," says Timothy Cook, a University at Buffalo chemist and flow battery expert not involved in the study. "You really simplify how to make the battery grow in capacity," he adds. "We're not making flow batteries to power a cell phone, we're thinking about buildings or industrial sites.

theodp writes: Last fall, Microsoft and the Green Bay Packers announced a $10 million partnership to build TitletownTech, "an innovation center focused on developing and advancing scalable, technology-enabled ventures," which aims to bring an economic boost to the area near Lambeau Field (Microsoft President Brad Smith hails from the region). Unfortunately for them, they failed to secure their venture's namesake domain name ahead of time. GeekWire reports on the fate of a Wisconsin family that was sitting on the coveted titletowntech.com domain name and offered to give it up in exchange for $750,000 cash, 8 lifetime Packers season tickets, 2 parking passes, and 8 Microsoft Surface Pro tablets (with lifetime MS-Office licenses). The family said the admittedly-ridiculous demand wasn't meant to be taken seriously but was intended to send a message after they received a suspicious $5,000 buyout offer from an anonymous "service" that the Packers engaged to try to recover the fumbled domain. Not amused, Green Bay Packers, Inc. flexed its legal muscle, filing a domain dispute complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which ordered the disputed domain name to be transferred to the team shortly after the USPTO issued a Notice of Allowance to the NFL team for a trademark on TitletownTech, leaving the Wisconsin family with zilch. And so the old titletowntech.com ("TitleTown Tech Solutions") was just a bad memory by the time Microsoft returned to Green Bay last week to give an update on the joint venture, including the news that Microsoft will play a key role in the leadership team at TitletownTech, which will also house its TEALS program employees. [...] And as for the domain name, the NFL franchise with more titles than any other team ultimately did what it has done for years -- win.

An indie Taiwanese hacker has proclaimed he'll broadcast an attempt to wipe out Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook page this Sunday -- live. From a report: Self-professed bug bounty-hunter Chang Chi-yuan, who ferrets out software flaws in return for cash, says he'll live-stream an endeavor to delete the billionaire's account at 6 p.m. local time from his own Facebook page. He didn't get into details or respond to an online query. "Broadcasting the deletion of FB founder Zuck's account," the lanky youngster, who turns 24 this year based on past interviews, told his 26,000-plus followers on Facebook this week. "Scheduled to go live." Cyber-enthusiasts from India to the U.S. routinely expose loopholes in corporate websites and software, earning small financial rewards. It's unusual however for so-called white-hat hackers to do so in real time. Chang, a minor celebrity at home who's gone on talk shows to discuss his exploits, was reportedly sued by a local bus operator after infiltrating their systems and buying a ticket for just NT$1 (3 cents). He's published a gamut of claims -- none of which could be independently verified -- including attacks on Apple and Tesla. And his Facebook account was listed among eight "special contributors" in Line's 2016 bug-hunters' hall of fame. Update: He has backpedalled on the claim.