Canonical announced on Friday that Microsoft's PowerShell Core is now available on Linux platform as a Snap. From a report: If you aren't familiar, a Snap is essentially a packaged version of a program that can be easily installed on many Linux distributions. Many see it as the future of Linux, as it has the potential to reduce fragmentation. "Built on the .NET Framework, PowerShell is an open source task-based command-line shell and scripting language with the goal of being the ubiquitous language for managing hybrid cloud assets. It is designed specifically for system administrators and power-users to rapidly automate the administration of multiple operating systems and the processes related to the applications that run on those operating systems," says Canonical.

Facebook has always nudged truant users back to its platform though emails and notifications. But recently, those prods have evolved beyond comments related to activity on your own profile. From a report: Now Facebook will nag you when an acquaintance comments on someone else's photo, or when a distant family member updates their status. The spamming has even extended to those who sign up for two-factor authentication -- which is a great way to turn people off to that extra layer of security. "The part of it that bugs me is that two-factor authentication is something [Facebook] should be encouraging people to use, but instead the way this is working here is that they're driving people away from two-factor and making people less secure," says Matt Green, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, who has done contracted security work for Facebook in the past.

"It's abusive, people's attention is deliberately tweaked by what looks like a two-factor authentication message." Green says he's received near-daily SMS messages from Facebook since January alerting him that one of his friends performed some action on the platform. Before he started receiving the messages, Green says he hadn't logged into Facebook for a long time and had actually forgotten his password. The weirdest part about the SMS notifications is what happens if you reply to them. If you respond, your message is posted to your own profile. Further reading: Facebook Really Wants You To Come Back, Facebook Is Spamming Users Via Their 2FA Phone Numbers, and Facebook Makes Moves On Instagram's Users.

An anonymous reader writes: Six times per week, an empty plane used to fly from London's Heathrow Airport to Cardiff, Wales. The next day, the plane would make the return trip without a single passenger. Half As Interesting, the second channel from Planelopnik-approved Wendover Productions, details why ghost flights like this sometimes operate from Britain's biggest airport in his new video. Despite being one of the most crowded airports in the world, Heathrow operates with only two runways. As a result, it's extremely difficult to get a "slot pair" -- rights for airlines to land and take off at a certain time. Only 650 slot pairs exist per day, so airlines are prepared to drop massive cash in order to get prime slot pairs. And they can trade and sell them, too. [...] Should an airline fail to use their slot at least 80 percent of the time, Heathrow will reassign it to the next company on the waiting list.

Venmo, the mobile payments app, won't say why it exposes users' data to the world whenever they make a transaction. ZDNet: Hang Do Thi Duc, a Berlin-based privacy researcher found that every time someone sent or received money using the PayPal-owned mobile app (which had over seven million users in 2017), the transaction was "public" by default and was broadcast on Venmo's API. In other words, everyone can see your transactions -- even without the app. The company did not respond to ZDNet's queries, but in a blanket statement said it takes privacy of users seriously.

Further reading: People Are Using Venmo To Spy On Cheating Spouses.

Commenting on the record $5 billion fine on Google by the European Commission, privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo said this week it welcomes the decision as it has "felt [Google's] effects first hand for many years and has led directly to us having less market share on Android vs iOS and in general mobile vs desktop." The company said: Up until just last year, it was impossible to add DuckDuckGo to Chrome on Android, and it is still impossible on Chrome on iOS. We are also not included in the default list of search options like we are in Safari, even though we are among the top search engines in many countries. The Google search widget is featured prominently on most Android builds and is impossible to change the search provider. For a long time it was also impossible to even remove this widget without installing a launcher that effectively changed the whole way the OS works. Their anti-competitive search behavior isn't limited to Android. Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they'd like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension. Google also owns http://duck.com and points it directly at Google search, which consistently confuses DuckDuckGo users. "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is google," wrote security researcher Mikko Hypponen, summing up the story.

Update: Google makes amends.

Hashflare, one of the largest bitcoin mining companies, said on Friday it is disabling its SHA-256 hardware and also discontinuing support for mining services on the active SHA-256 contracts. The move comes as Hashflare continues to struggle with generating revenues, the company said, putting the blame on market fluctuations. In an email to active customers, the company added: For over a month our users encountered a situation when the payouts were lower than the maintenance fees, resulting in zero accruals to the balance. As of 18.07.2018, the payouts were lower than maintenance for 28 consecutive days. BTC mining continues being unprofitable, in light of which we would like to inform you that on 18.07.2018 (July 18) we were forced to start disabling SHA hardware and today, on 20.07.2018 (July 20), stop the mining service of active SHA-256 contracts in accordance with clause 5.5 of our Terms of Service, which are required to be accepted when creating a purchase and are the basis of concluding the contract. We expect that the cryptocurrency market situation will stabilize in the nearest future and we will be able to offer our users new advantageous solutions. Customers are understandably furious.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Inside a sealed clean room near Toulouse, France, Maurice Sylvestre points out something called SuperCam. Sylvestre is outfitted in Tyvex and hairnets, necessary to keep out dust, skin particles, and dirt that could mar the super-smooth surface of his device. SuperCam sits underneath a ventilator hood, glimmering inside a golden-metallic housing. The device is designed to scan the Martian surface with a camera, laser, and spectrometer in hopes of finding organic compounds that could be related to early life on Mars. In two years, this 12-pound, microwave oven-sized unit will blast off as part of the Mars 2020 mission, a spacecraft/lander/rover combo by NASA and its partners that will replace the long-serving Curiosity mission.

Sylvestre is a planetary scientist at France's Institute for Research and Planetary Astronomy, and deputy principal investigator for SuperCam. But he's an international collaborator: Over the years, he's worked on missions to Saturn, the moon, and Mars with NASA colleagues. Sylvestre's lab is currently building an instrument similar to SuperCam that will fly to Mercury on the European-Japanese BepiColombo mission, as well as one called Eclair that is part of a joint French-Chinese satellite. Notably, that makes him one of a small number of planetary scientists who are working with China to boost their science, while doing his best to keep Western technology from getting pilfered. It's a tightrope that not everyone is willing to walk. "We are careful what we are doing," Sylvestre says.

"We understand the security issues. We understand that we should be careful and not be too naive. But at the same time I feel the idea of planetary exploration is for everyone." Working with both NASA and China may seem like a contradiction, or even a conflict. The two superpowers are butting heads on trade, military, and cybersecurity issues. Congress has banned NASA officials and NASA money from going to China. That might be because of a recent history of Chinese espionage targeting US military, aerospace, and technological secrets.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter have teamed up for a new open source project that strives to make it easier to transfer your data between online services. From a report: The Data Transfer Project (DTP) was officially founded last year, and there have been whisperings about it on the likes of GitHub, but the initiative was officially unveiled today with its first four members. The DTP is actively seeking other members too. The ultimate aim of the Data Transfer Project is to improve data portability, allowing users to not only download their data but transfer it directly to any other service.

In Singapore's worst cyber attack, hackers have stolen the personal particulars of 1.5 million patients. Of these, 160,000 people, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and a few ministers, had their outpatient prescriptions stolen as well. From a report: The hackers infiltrated the computers of SingHealth, Singapore's largest group of healthcare institutions with four hospitals, five national speciality centres and eight polyclinics. Two other polyclinics used to be under SingHealth. At a multi-ministry press conference on Friday, the authorities said PM Lee's information was "specifically and repeatedly targeted." The 1.5 million patients had visited SingHealth's specialist outpatient clinics and polyclinics from May 1, 2015, to July 4, 2018. Their non-medical personal data that was illegally accessed and copied included their names, IC numbers, addresses, gender, race and dates of birth.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The New Zealand company behind a landmark trial of a four-day working week has concluded it an unmitigated success, with 78% of employees feeling they were able to successfully manage their work-life balance, an increase of 24 percentage points. Two-hundred-and-forty staff at Perpetual Guardian, a company which manages trusts, wills and estate planning, trialled a four-day working week over March and April, working four, eight-hour days but getting paid for five. Jarrod Haar, professor of human resource management at Auckland University of Technology, found job and life satisfaction increased on all levels across the home and work front, with employees performing better in their jobs and enjoying them more than before the experiment. Work-life balance, which reflected how well respondents felt they could successfully manage their work and non-work roles, increased by 24%. In November last year just over half (54%) of staff felt they could effectively balance their work and home commitments, while after the trial this number jumped to 78%. Staff stress levels decreased by 7 percentage points across the board as a result of the trial, while stimulation, commitment and a sense of empowerment at work all improved significantly, with overall life satisfaction increasing by 5 percentage points.

Los Angeles startups Arrivo and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies have reportedly secured financing from Chinese state-backed companies. "Lining up potential funding helps solve one of the biggest obstacles for hyperloop systems: They will be extremely expensive to build," reports Bloomberg. From the report: Arrivo, founded by a former senior engineer at Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said it secured a $1 billion credit line with Genertec America Inc., a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned entity based in Beijing that has helped finance and build high-speed rail and other infrastructure projects in Iran, Turkey and elsewhere. The credit line will go to backers of a future project using Arrivo technology, not to the startup itself. [The Genertec debt could be used to construct a project using the company's technology anywhere in the world, not necessarily in China.] Separately, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies said it plans to work on a 10-kilometer test track in Tongren, part of China's Guizhou province, at an initial cost of about $300 million. State entity Tongren Transportation & Tourism Investment Group will provide half the funds and seek private investors for the other half, HyperloopTT said. The precise route is yet to be determined.

A team of researchers at Glasgow University have built a robot that uses machine learning to run and analyze its own chemical reaction. The system is able to figure out every reaction that's possible from a given set of starting materials. Ars Technica reports: Most of its parts are dispersed through a fume hood, which ensures safe ventilation of any products that somehow escape the system. The upper right is a collection of tanks containing starting materials and pumps that send them into one of six reaction chambers, which can be operated in parallel. The outcomes of these reactions can then be sent on for analysis. Pumps can feed samples into an IR spectrometer, a mass spectrometer, and a compact NMR machine -- the latter being the only bit of equipment that didn't fit in the fume hood. Collectively, these can create a fingerprint of the molecules that occupy a reaction chamber. By comparing this to the fingerprint of the starting materials, it's possible to determine whether a chemical reaction took place and infer some things about its products.

All of that is a substitute for a chemist's hands, but it doesn't replace the brains that evaluate potential reactions. That's where a machine-learning algorithm comes in. The system was given a set of 72 reactions with known products and used those to generate predictions of the outcomes of further reactions. From there, it started choosing reactions at random from the remaining list of options and determining whether they, too, produced products. By the time the algorithm had sampled 10 percent of the total possible reactions, it was able to predict the outcome of untested reactions with more than 80-percent accuracy. And, since the earlier reactions it tested were chosen at random, the system wasn't biased by human expectations of what reactions would or wouldn't work. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Smooth or hairy, pungent or tasteless, deep-hued or bright: new versions of old fruits could be hitting the produce aisles as plant experts embrace cutting-edge technology, scientists say. While researchers have previously produced plants with specific traits through traditional breeding techniques, experts say new technologies such as the gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9 could be used to bring about changes far more rapidly and efficiently. Among the genes flagged in the new study in the journal Trends in Plant Science are those behind the production of a family of substances known as MYBs, which are among the proteins that control whether other genes are switched on or off.

"MYBs are great targets because they are central to several consumer traits or features like color, flavor [and] texture," said Andrew Allan, a co-author of the review from the University of Auckland whose own projects include working on red-fleshed apples and changing the color of kiwi fruits. "Russet skin in apple and pear [is linked to MYBs]. Hairs on peaches but not nectarines -- another type of MYB." Dr Richard Harrison, head of genetics, genomics and breeding at the horticultural organization NIAB EMR, who was not involved in the article, said tweaking MYB genes or the way such genes are themselves controlled was a fruitful approach. Gene-editing of MYB genes and other genes could bring a host of benefits, Harrison said, adding: "There is a large opportunity to improve the nutritional profile of fruits and vegetables in the future using gene-editing technology, as well as other techniques." Such techniques, he said, introduce the same sort of DNA changes as plant breeders have introduced by artificially selecting traits that cropped up through spontaneous DNA mutation -- but much faster. Next week, the European Court of Justice will decide if or how plants that have been gene-edited will be regulated, and whether they will be treated like genetically modified plants. In April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will no longer regulate genetically altered plants, so long as the changes could have been produced through traditional plant-breeding techniques.

iFixit tore apart the new 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard to see how well the silicone membrane works to protect the butterfly mechanism from dust and debris. After showering a 2017 and 2018 MacBook Pro in dust particles, the repair site found the newer generation holds up surprisingly well. 9to5Mac reports: As shown in the photo, the blue paint particles coat the outside of the keycaps and the edges of the membrane, but the silicon covers stop most of the particles from getting into the key mechanism -- which is what causes the sticky key issues on the previous models. However, the silicon covers have to have holes in them to allow the keycap clips to attach. Naturally, dust can and will get through these holes over time. iFixit placed some sand particles into the "danger zones" of the keycaps, and confirmed the keys will break/become-unreliable when that happens, just like the second-generation butterfly keys. The non-cocooned 2017 keyboard was "almost immediately flooded" in the particles, unsurprisingly. Clearly, the 2018 model is greatly improved in regard to reliability, but it remains to be seen just how much better it is in real-world use. Over time, you only need a couple specks of dust to get in the keycaps and the keys will get stuck. It's just the chances of dust getting in are greatly reduced with the 2018 models.

Best Buy is turning to in-home consultants to help distinguish it from Amazon. The advisors act as "personal chief technology officers," helping people make their homes smart or merely more functional. "Unlike the Geek Squad and blue shirts working in stores, they'll be paid an annual salary instead of an hourly wage," reports Bloomberg. "Their house calls are free and can last as long as 90 minutes. [...] They're supposed to establish long-term relationships with their customers rather than chase one-time transactions." From the report: With more than 1,000 big-box stores in North America and about 125,000 employees, Best Buy was supposed to have succumbed to the inevitable. "Everyone thought we were going to die," says Hubert Joly, who was hired as chief executive officer in August 2012 after profits shrunk about 90 percent in one quarter and his predecessor resigned amid an investigation into his relationship with an employee. Instead, Best Buy has become an improbable survivor led by an unlikely boss.

The in-home advisors went national in September. When one of the trainees at the session in Minneapolis asked Joly how big he hoped the program could become, he said: "I don't have a specific goal. I don't think it would be helpful. McKinsey never had a goal of how many clients. It was how good was the work." Another employee said: "This is why Amazon can't compete with us. They can't dispatch an army of in-home agents." Joly wasn't as sure. "Amazon is an amazing company," he replied. "They kill companies. Maybe they will do this. But we have an incredible opportunity. If someone wants to copy, that's fine." Amazon has started offering free smart-home consultations and installations. It doesn't have a chain of big-box stores in which to meet customers, but that didn't bother investors. Best Buy's stock dropped 6.3 percent when Amazon announced its plans a year ago.