A new card specification has been announced by the SD Association that should let you store your entire media collection on one SD card. Technically speaking, the new card specification should increase maximum storage on SD cards to 128 terabytes with faster transfer speeds of 985 megabytes per second. The Verge reports: Right now the maximum storage space on an SD card is 2TB, and that limit was promised as far back as 2009, but still hasn't been reached. In 2016, SanDisk unveiled a prototype 1 terabyte SD card that would make it the biggest in the world, but it's still not available to purchase. At the time, SanDisk said that the advancement was necessary to match ever-increasing data-heavy formats like 4K video and VR. However, creating SD cards with massive amounts of storage is cost-prohibitive. SanDisk's 512GB SD card used to cost $800, and though it's dropped in price, is still priced around $300.

How many exclamation points does it take to exclaim something? One, a human of sound mind and a decent grasp of punctuation might say. But, on the internet, it often doesn't. The Atlantic: Not anymore. Digital communication is undergoing exclamation-point inflation. When single exclamation points adorn every sentence in a business email, it takes two to convey true enthusiasm. Or three. Or four. Or more. I noticed this in my own social circles recently. Multiple exclamation points were popping up in mundane places, not attached to hyperbole or any kind of frenzied emotion. A simple work email might yield a "Sounds good!!!" I find myself doing it, too. "All of these quirks of social media -- that would include exclamation points, and all caps, and repetition of letters, those are the three main ones that show enthusiasm -- people use more of them," says Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. This sort of inflation is a natural linguistic phenomenon that regularly happens to words, like how awesome was once reserved for that which truly struck awe into a quavering heart and is now scarcely more than a verbal thumbs up. But this time it's happening to punctuation.

According to a new Pew Research Center study, 72 percent of those polled (from a sample of 4,594 adults) think it's likely companies such as Facebook and Twitter actively censor political views that they consider objectionable. The study finds that Americans don't trust those companies to be impartial when it comes to partisan politics. Bloomberg reports: Republicans, more than their Democratic counterparts, displayed concern over perceived political bias. Eighty-five percent of Republicans and those who labeled themselves conservative independents said it's likely that social media platforms censor political speech. And 64 percent of Republicans think technology companies support the views of liberals over conservatives. The majority of Democrats, meanwhile, think it's likely that social media platforms censor political viewpoints, coming in at 62 percent. But only about a quarter of Democrats worry that these companies support the views of conservatives over liberals.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A week after appointing a CEO for its healthcare joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan, Amazon today announced an acquisition that underscores how it also hopes to have a more direct -- and more commercial -- role in the world of healthcare in the coming years. The company has purchased PillPack, an online pharmacy the lets users buy medications in pre-made doses. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed by Amazon, but sources close to the deal say it was for just under $1 billion.

PillPack has a license to operate in all 50 states in the U.S. and has other accreditations such as URAC AND VIPPS, but it doesn't seem to be operational in international markets. Its PharmacyOS -- the system it has built that forms the basis of the company -- is a platform that helps manage patient data and figure out how to balance meds together in safe doses for its customers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A major privacy bill on the table in California on Thursday could reshape how Silicon Valley does business. If the bill becomes law, people living in the Golden State can tell companies to stop collecting or selling their personal data. In two votes Thursday, the state's Senate and Assembly both passed the bill in an effort to get it on Gov. Jerry Brown's desk by the end of the day. The tight deadline comes courtesy of an even stricter voter initiative that will appear on California ballots this November if lawmakers can't get the bill through by 5 p.m. PT Thursday. The bill -- AB 375, or the California Consumer Privacy Act -- turns the tech world's business model on its head by letting regular internet users ask for the data a company has collected on them and who it's sold that data to. That alone could be eye-opening for consumers. Most people understand their online activity is being tracked for targeted advertising, but we don't have a broad understanding of what data's being used. If Gov. Jerry Brown signs this bill on Thursday, Californians will have increased control over their personal data -- and one less thing to vote on in November.

AT&T revamped its two unlimited mobile plans this week, and in the process it raised the price for the entry-level plan by $5 a month while removing the free HBO perk. The entry-level unlimited plan now starts at $70 instead of $65. ArsTechnica adds: Existing customers can keep their old plan and the free HBO, but new customers or those who switch plans will have to buy the more expensive unlimited plan to get HBO at no added cost. AT&T did add some video options to both plans, however. Both unlimited plans get AT&T's new "WatchTV" streaming service that comes with more than 30 channels, and buyers of the more expensive unlimited plan can choose to get HBO or another premium add-on. While "HBO is no longer included on the lower-priced plan," "customers who remain on their existing plan won't see any change and will keep the HBO benefit for as long as they remain on their current plan," AT&T told Ars. Further reading: AT&T Is Screwing Customers By Almost Tripling a Bogus Fee.

A security failure in a popular quiz app on Facebook left millions of people's data exposed for almost two years, a cybersecurity activist revealed Thursday. From a report: The application, called Nametests.com, has run Facebook quizzes for years, but it left unprotected the personal data of Facebook users taking such a quiz on its website, allowing third parties to read and steal the data, the activist said. The leak was discovered by Belgian hacker Inti de Ceukelaire, who published his findings in a blog post. "There was a security leak at one of the most popular quiz apps that was accessible for at least two years," De Ceukelaire told POLITICO. "I can only note that Facebook didn't see this." He added that the data exposed included pictures, status updates, friends lists and more.

You've probably never heard of the marketing and data aggregation firm Exactis. But it may well have heard of you. And now there's also a good chance that whatever information the company has about you, it recently leaked onto the public internet, available to any hacker who simply knew where to look. From a report: Earlier this month, security researcher Vinny Troia discovered that Exactis, a data broker based in Palm Coast, Florida, had exposed a database that contained close to 340 million individual records on a publicly accessible server. The haul comprises close to 2 terabytes of data that appears to include personal information on hundreds of millions of American adults, as well as millions of businesses. While the precise number of individuals included in the data isn't clear -- and the leak doesn't seem to contain credit card information or Social Security numbers -- it does go into minute detail for each individual listed, including phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses, and other highly personal characteristics for every name. The categories range from interests and habits to the number, age, and gender of the person's children.

"It seems like this is a database with pretty much every US citizen in it," says Troia, who is the founder of his own New York-based security company, Night Lion Security. Troia notes that almost every person he's searched for in the database, he's found. And when WIRED asked him to find records for a list of 10 specific people in the database, he very quickly found six of them. "I don't know where the data is coming from, but it's one of the most comprehensive collections I've ever seen," he says.

If you have $10,000 and want to be your own boss, Amazon has a deal for you. From a report: Starting Thursday, you can apply to start your very own small business, delivering Amazon Prime packages in Amazon branded vans and uniforms. The company wants to help launch small businesses in the United States dedicated to taking its packages on the last step of their journey: from local Amazon sorting centers to the customers who ordered them. It announced the new program on Wednesday at a press event in Seattle.

It's the latest attempt by Amazon to gain greater control of the delivery network at the core of its Prime business, which ships 5 billion packages a year globally. [...] Amazon's new "Delivery Service Partners" and their staff members won't be employed by the tech company. The initial $10,000 costs will go to helping them start an independent business that has to begin with at least five delivery vans and ramp up to 20 vans over an undisclosed period of time.

Amazon on Thursday introduced software and accessories that will turn its Fire HD tablets into a portable Echo. From a report: The company on Thursday unveiled a new case and stand for the Fire HD 8 and Fire HD 10 tablet so those devices will act almost just like the Amazon Echo Show, a larger gadget that has a touch display. You can call up recipes in the kitchen, see song lyrics for music that you're playing, place video calls to friends, start movies and more, all without touching the tablet and with a visual interface that was previously available only on the Echo Show and Echo Spot.

Almost all Android devices released since 2012 are vulnerable to RAMpage bug, an international team of academics has revealed today. From a report: The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-9442, is a variation of the Rowhammer attack. Rowhammer is a hardware bug in modern memory cards. A few years back researchers discovered that when someone would send repeated write/read requests to the same row of memory cells, the write/read operations would create an electrical field that would alter data stored on nearby memory. In the following years, researchers discovered that Rowhammer-like attacks affected personal computers, virtual machines, and Android devices. Through further researcher, they also found they could execute Rowhammer attacks via JavaScript code, GPU cards, and network packets.

ProtonMail, a secure email service provider used by more than two million users and references of which has been made in shows like Mr. Robot, has been facing outages for the last two days as it fights numerous DDoS attacks. "The attacks went on for several hours, although the outages were far more brief, usually several minutes at a time with the longest outage on the order of 10 minutes," a ProtonMail spokesperson told BleepingComputer, adding that it has tracked the attack to a group that claims to have ties to Russia. But things are more complicated than that, and it appears ProtonMail users, who are already annoyed at the frequent outages over the last few days, are up for more such downtimes in the coming days. BleepingComputer: But in reality, the DDoS attacks have no ties to Russia, weren't even planned to in the first place, and the group behind the attacks denounced being Russian, to begin with. Responsible for the attacks is a hacker group named Apophis Squad. In a private conversation with Bleeping Computer today, one of the group's members detailed yesterday's chain of events. The Apophis member says they targeted ProtonMail at random while testing a beta version of a DDoS booter service the group is developing and preparing to launch.

The group didn't cite any reason outside "testing" for the initial and uncalled for attack on ProtonMail, which they later revealed to have been a 200 Gbps SSDP flood, according to one of their tweets. "After we sent the first attack, we downed it for 60 seconds," an Apophis Squad member told us. He said the group didn't intend to harass ProtonMail all day yesterday or today but decided to do so after ProtonMail's CTO, Bart Butler, responded to one of their tweets calling the group "clowns."

This was a questionable response on the part of the ProtonMail CTO, as it set the hackers against his company even more. "So we then downed them for a few hours," the Apophis Squad said. Subsequent attacks included a whopping TCP-SYN flood estimated at 500 Gbps, as claimed by the group.

United Therapeutics, a startup that sells drugs to treat lung ailments, plans to use a 3-D printer to manufacture human lungs in "unlimited quantities." Bioprinting isn't a new idea. 3-D printers can make human skin, even retinas. Yet the method has been limited to tissues that are very small or very thin and lack blood vessels. From a report: United instead is developing a printer that it believes will be able, within a few years, to manufacture a solid, rubbery outline of a lung in exquisite detail, including all 23 descending branches of the airway, the gas-exchanging alveoli, and a delicate network of capillaries. A lung made from collagen won't help anyone: it's to a real lung what a rubber chicken is to an actual hen. So United is also developing ways to impregnate the matrix with human cells so they'll attach and burrow into it, bringing it alive.

[...] United has already made some risky organ bets. One of its subsidiaries, Revivicor, supplies surgeons with hearts, kidneys, and lungs from genetically engineered pigs (these have been used in baboons, so far). Another, Lung Bioengineering, refurbishes lungs from human donors by pumping warm solution into them. About 250 people have already received lungs that would otherwise have been designated medical waste. Don't expect fully manufactured organs soon. United, in its company projections, predicts it won't happen for another 12 years. United CEO Martine Rothblatt acknowledges that the printed structure I saw is just a start. "It's only two branches and no cells," she says.

Sample this: Me: So that's the marshmallow but you're going to eat it with this graham cracker and chocolate.
[My son looks at me like I am the dumbest person alive.]
Sebastian: No, I'm going to eat it with my MOUTH.
[End of play.] That's from "S'MORES. A Real-Life One-Act Play", a conversation between Hamilton impresario Lin-Manuel Miranda which his young son Sebastian. In that brief interaction, young Sebastian Miranda inadvertently hit upon a kind of ambiguity that reveals a great deal about how people learn and process language -- and how we might teach computers to do the same.

The misinterpretation on which the s'mores story hinges is hiding in the humble preposition with. Imagine the many ways one could finish this sentence: I'm going to eat this marshmallow with ... If you're in the mood for s'mores, then "graham cracker and chocolate" is an appropriate object of the preposition with. But if you want to split the marshmallow with a friend, you could say you're going to eat it "with my buddy Charlie." The Atlantic elaborates: Somehow speakers of English master these many possible uses of the word with without anyone specifically spelling it out for them. At least that's the case for native speakers -- in a class for English as a foreign language, the teacher likely would tease apart these nuances. But what if you wanted to provide the same linguistic education to a machine?

As it happens, just days after Miranda sent his tweet, computational linguists presented a conference paper exploring exactly why such ambiguous language is challenging for a computer-based system to figure out. The researchers did so using an online game that serves as a handy introduction to some intriguing work currently being done in the field of natural language processing (NLP). The game, called Madly Ambiguous , was developed by the linguist Michael White and his colleagues at Ohio State University. In it, you are given a challenge: to stump a bot named Mr. Computer Head by filling the blank in the sentence Jane ate spaghetti with ____________. Then the computer tries to determine which kind of with you intended. Playful images drive the point home. [Editor's note: check the article for corresponding images.]

In the sentence Jane ate spaghetti with a fork, Mr. Computer Head should be able to figure out that the fork is a utensil, and not something that is eaten in addition to the spaghetti. Likewise, if the sentence is Jane ate spaghetti with meatballs, it should be obvious that meatballs are part of the dish, not an instrument for eating spaghetti.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A leading security camera-maker has sent footage from inside a family's home to the wrong person's app. Swann Security has blamed a factory error for the data breach -- which was brought to its attention by the BBC -- and said it was a "one-off" incident. The BBC first learned of the problem on Saturday, when a member of its staff began receiving motion-triggered video clips from an unknown family's kitchen. Until that point, Louisa Lewis had only received footage from her own Swann security camera, which she had been using since December. The development coincided with Ms Lewis's camera running out of battery power and requiring a recharge. A Swann spokeswoman said that "human error" had caused two cameras to be manufactured that shared the same "bank-grade security key -- which secures all communications with its owner." "This occurred after the [family] connected the duplicate camera to their network and ignored the warning prompt that notified: 'Camera is already paired to an account' and left the camera running," she added.