Researchers from Ghent University were able to detect climate change impacts on trees in Belgium by analyzing nearly four decades of archive footage from the Tour of Flanders. The findings were published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Phys.Org reports: Focusing on trees and shrubs growing around recognizable climbs and other 'landmarks' along the route of this major annual road cycling race in Belgium, the team looked at video footage from 1981 to 2016 obtained by Flemish broadcaster VRT. They visually estimated how many leaves and flowers were present on the day of the course (usually in early April) and linked their scores to climate data. The ecologists found that the trees had advanced the timing of leafing and flowering in response to recent temperature changes. Before 1990, almost no trees had grown leaves at the time of the spring race. After that year, more and more trees visible in the television footage -- in particular magnolia, hawthorn, hornbeam and birch trees -- were already in full leaf. These shifts were most strongly related to warmer average temperatures in the area, which have increased by 1.5 degrees Celsius since 1980.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Outline: As if they weren't already doing the absolute most, the die-hard fans of the rap group Insane Clown Posse have become accidental heroes for people concerned about facial recognition tech: According to Twitter user @tahkion, a computer science blogger for WonderHowTo, Juggalo makeup outmatches the machine learning algorithms that govern facial recognition technology.

In a series of follow-up tweets, @tahkion explained that facial recognition works by pinpointing the areas of contrast on a human face -- for instance, where a nose is located, or where the chin becomes the neck. As it happens, juggalo makeup often involves applying black paint below the mouth, but above the chin. That makes facial recognition vulnerable to misidentifying the placement of the jaw. Face-painting styles like "corpse" makeup also obscure the face. However, they don't create enough contrast to effectively confuse most facial recognition systems. Dramatic styles of feminine makeup, like heavy eyeliner, also are generally not enough to confuse facial recognition systems, @tahkion claims. However, facial recognition tech such as Apple's Face ID, which does not rely on visible light and uses depth perception, would not be tricked by juggalo makeup.

Greg LeRoy and Maryann Feldman from The Guardian discuss some alternative strategies for cities that want large tech companies like Amazon and Apple to invest locally but don't want to offer huge subsidies. They advise against using "old economy" incentives for "new economy" firms, which are more susceptible to disruption, because it can be costly and counterproductive. Unfortunately, many politicians continue to mismatch incentives "especially because some tech companies have become very aggressive about demanding big tax breaks," reports The Guardian. From the report: Here are two proven alternative strategies. The first could be called "back to basics." A regional government inventories existing small- and medium-sized firms, the backbone of many local communities. Typically family-owned and located in micropolitan and rural areas, these firms are often neglected by policymakers and shortchanged by incentive programs. A regional government asks: which industry sectors are we already comparatively good at? Which of those sectors have the best futures? How can our public systems help those promising firms grow? Do they need export assistance? Customized training? Technology diffusion? More engineering-school graduates? There are some simple fixes that could go a long way.

The second alternative takes this same approach and applies it to very young companies and to emerging technologies with more speculative prospects. This was North Carolina's successful strategy from the 1950s until the mid-1990s. Making no big bets on any one company, the state invested in all levels of education, created its community college system and upgraded the state universities. It also focused on highway upgrades and other infrastructure investments. [...] Austin, Texas, currently the hottest tech-led economy in the U.S., provides a model: there, local entrepreneurs became local champions, creating early incubators, reinvesting their gains and working with local government.

A Chinese court temporarily banned Micron Technology chip sales, cutting the U.S. company off from the world's largest semiconductor market. The news comes from Taiwanese rival United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC). Bloomberg reports: In a patent ruling in favor of UMC, the Fuzhou Intermediate Peopleâ(TM)s Court of the Peopleâ(TM)s Republic of China issued a preliminary injunction stopping Micron from selling 26 products, including dynamic random access memory and Nand flash memory-related products, UMC said in a statement Tuesday. Micron said it hasnâ(TM)t been served with the injunction and wonâ(TM)t comment until it does.

The case is part of a broader dispute between the two companies centering on accusations that UMC acted as a conduit for the theft of Micronâ(TM)s designs in an attempt to help China grow its domestic chip industry and replace imports that rival oil in total value. A Chinese antitrust regulator is already investigating Micron and its Korean rivals, the companies have said. Local media has reported that authorities are looking into increases in chip prices.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Malware authors are frantically trying to weaponize a new infection vector that was revealed at the start of June. The trick relies on using Windows Settings (.SettingContent-ms) shortcut files in order to achieve code execution on Windows 10 PCs. Ever since SpecterOps security researcher Matt Nelson published his research on the matter three weeks ago, malware authors have been playing around with proof-of-concept code in attempts of crafting an exploit that can deploy weaponized malware on a victim's system. With each passing day, more and more exploits are being uploaded on VirusTotal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, is back. And he is connected to an autonomous trucking company that is still in stealth mode, TechCrunch has learned. The company, called Kache.ai (pronounced like cache), has kept a low profile since paperwork registering it as a corporation was first filed with the California Secretary of State nearly seven months ago. And at first glance, there's no indication that Levandowski is even tied to the company.

Little is known about Kache.ai. The word "Kache" in Chinese means truck, which could signal a connection to China. Although TechCrunch was not able to independently verify if Kache.ai has any outside partners or backers yet. [T]he Kache.ai website said the company was working on "the next generation of autonomous vehicle technology for the commercial trucking industry." It appears the company is hiring at every level, from mapping and database experts to people with robotics and simulation skills. The website also noted that the company is looking for software engineers with experience in convolutional neural networks as well as computer vision and machine learning algorithms.

Michael Zhang, reporting for PetaPixel: A Virginia federal court has made a decision that photographers won't be happy to hear: the court ruled that finding a photo on the Internet and then using it without permission on a commercial website can be considered fair use. The copyright battle started when photographer Russell Brammer found one of his long-exposure photos of a Washington, D.C. neighborhood cropped and used by the website for the Northern Virginia Film Festival on a page of "things to do" in the D.C. area.

Brammer then sent a cease and desist letter to Violent Hues Productions, the company behind the festival, and it responded by immediately taking the photo down. Brammer then sued the company for copyright infringement, and it responded by claiming fair use. In his ruling, the judge said, "Violent Hues' use of the photograph was transformative in function and purpose. While Brammer's purpose in capturing and publishing the photograph was promotional and expressive, Violent Hues' purpose in using the photograph was informational: to provide festival attendees with information regarding the local area. Furthermore, this use was noncommercial, because the photo was not used to advertise a product or generate revenue."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the last year, gadget and software makers have developed ways for users to better manage their relationship with technology. They make it easier to ignore notifications or quiet all but the most important stuff. But even the latest mobile OS updates don't address the entire problem. In this always-on era, we are assumed to be near our phones all the time, and there is no good way to signal to the world when we are not. There is no way to proclaim, "I'm not available, I won't see your notification, and I won't care until next Sunday." The solution isn't complicated. In fact, it has been around since the '90s. It is called an "away" message, and we need it now more than ever.

Most people's first experience with an away message came on AOL Instant Messenger. Those were the days before mobile, when you could only be online while sitting at the computer -- probably a wheezing beige colossus running Windows 95. Rather than log off every time you had to run to the store, AIM allowed you to change a small icon next to your name from green, which signified you were online and available, to red, which meant you were temporarily indisposed. [...] Away messages helped users understand why their buddies weren't responding. More important, away messages offered permission to actually go away. If someone needed you urgently, they would try another route, but mostly they would leave you alone. You weren't ignoring them on purpose; you were just gone.

India has asked Facebook-owned WhatsApp messenger to take steps to prevent the circulation of false texts and provocative content that have led to a series of lynchings and mob beatings across the country in the past few months. From a report: With more than 200 million users in India, WhatsApp's biggest market in the world, false news and videos circulating on the messaging app have become a new headache for social media giant Facebook, already grappling with a privacy scandal. So far this year, false messages about child abductors on WhatsApp have helped to trigger mass beatings of more than a dozen people in India -- at least three of whom have died. In addition, five people were beaten to death by a mob on Sunday in a fresh incident of lynching in India's western state of Maharashtra on suspicions that they were child abductors. "Deep disapproval of such developments has been conveyed to the senior management of WhatsApp and they have been advised that necessary remedial measures should be taken," India's IT ministry said in a strongly-worded statement on Tuesday. From a report published on The Washington Post earlier this week: As India's government weighs what to do, local authorities have been left to tackle fake news as best they can, issuing warnings and employing low-tech methods such as hiring street performers and "rumor busters" to visit villages to spread public awareness. One such "rumor buster" was killed by a mob Thursday in the eastern state of Tripura.

Kasmir Hill, reporting for Gizmodo: It's the smartphone conspiracy theory that just won't go away: Many, many people are convinced that their phones are listening to their conversations to target them with ads. [...] Some computer science academics at Northeastern University had heard enough people talking about this technological myth that they decided to do a rigorous study to tackle it. For the last year, Elleen Pan, Jingjing Ren, Martina Lindorfer, Christo Wilson, and David Choffnes ran an experiment involving more than 17,000 of the most popular apps on Android to find out whether any of them were secretly using the phone's mic to capture audio. The apps included those belonging to Facebook, as well as over 8,000 apps that send information to Facebook. Sorry, conspiracy theorists: They found no evidence of an app unexpectedly activating the microphone or sending audio out when not prompted to do so. Like good scientists, they refuse to say that their study definitively proves that your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but they didn't find a single instance of it happening. Instead, they discovered a different disturbing practice: apps recording a phone's screen and sending that information out to third parties.

Governments are using migrants' smartphones to deport them. From a report: Across the continent, migrants are being confronted by a booming mobile forensics industry that specialises in extracting a smartphone's messages, location history, and even WhatsApp data. That information can potentially be turned against the phone owners themselves. In 2017 both Germany and Denmark expanded laws that enabled immigration officials to extract data from asylum seekers' phones. Similar legislation has been proposed in Belgium and Austria, while the UK and Norway have been searching asylum seekers' devices for years.

Following right-wing gains across the EU, beleaguered governments are scrambling to bring immigration numbers down. Tackling fraudulent asylum applications seems like an easy way to do that. As European leaders met in Brussels last week to thrash out a new, tougher framework to manage migration -- which nevertheless seems insufficient to placate Angela Merkel's critics in Germany -- immigration agencies across Europe are showing new enthusiasm for laws and software that enable phone data to be used in deportation cases. Admittedly, some refugees do lie on their asylum applications.

Instead of uploading a trailer of "Khali the Killer," an upcoming move from Sony Pictures Entertainment, the conglomerate accidentally uploaded the entire movie on Google's video platform, according to users. TorrentFreak: When we started writing this article the movie had around 8,000 views. Just a few paragraphs later that had swelled to almost 11,000. However, while news may be traveling quickly, those numbers probably won't reach epic levels anytime soon.

As usual, the comments on YouTube are absolutely brutal. The section includes gems such as "Trailer gave the whole plot away. Pass," "It's just the trailer the whole movie will be 4 hours," and the rather blunt "Someone's getting the sackï."

A team of former FBI investigators is claiming to have proof of the real identity of D.B. Cooper, the notorious airplane hijacker who has remained at large since he parachuted out of a Seattle-bound plane with $200,000 in November 1971. From a report: According to filmmaker and author Thomas Colbert -- who has led the independent investigation into the cold case for the last seven years -- the real Cooper is a 74-year-old Vietnam veteran named Robert Rackstraw. And the proof is hidden in a series of letters allegedly written by Cooper in the months after the hijacking and his disappearance. Rackstraw -- a former Special Forces paratrooper, explosives expert and pilot with about 22 different aliases -- was once a person of interest in the case, but was eliminated as a suspect by the FBI in 1979. His elimination was controversial amongst the investigating agents, and he remained, for many, the most viable suspect in what remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in the United States. In 2016, the FBI announced they were ending their investigation into the case.

A federal probe into Facebook's sharing of user data with Cambridge Analytica now involves the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department, a report said. AP: Representatives from these agencies have joined the Federal Trade Commission in the inquiry, The Washington Post reported, citing five unnamed people familiar with the matter. The probe reportedly centers on what Facebook knew in 2015, when it learned that the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly accessed the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users. Facebook didn't disclose the incident with the political firm, which later worked for the Trump campaign and other Republican candidates, until this March.