An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google's Pixel Visual Core, the hidden image-processing chip inside the Pixel 2 family of phones, is getting an update today that lets it work its machine learning magic in third-party apps. Already enabled via Android 8.1 for the Pixel 2's main camera app, the Visual Core is now going to be operational within any other camera app that employs the relevant Google APIs. That means your Instagram photography and Snapchat Stories will get the benefit of the same improvements in processing speed and efficiency. I have been using a Google Pixel 2 XL since before the Android 8.1 update that initially flipped the Visual Core to being active, and I can't say I've noticed a huge difference in the speed or operation of the camera. It was sterling before 8.1, and it's been the same since. But the way Google explains it, the Visual Core is likely to be more helpful and impressive in third-party apps because it will allow the company to run its proprietary HDR+ algorithm in those other apps: "Pixel Visual Core is built to do heavy-lifting image processing while using less power, which saves battery. That means we're able to use that additional computing power to improve the quality of your pictures by running the HDR+ algorithm."

Seattle's election authority said on Monday that Facebook is in violation of a city law that requires disclosure of who buys election ads, the first attempt of its kind to regulate U.S. political ads on the internet. From a report: Facebook must disclose details about spending in last year's Seattle city elections or face penalties, Wayne Barnett, executive director of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, said in a statement. The penalties could be up to $5,000 per advertising buy, Barnett said, adding that he would discuss next steps this week with Seattle's city attorney.

SpaceX this week is preparing to launch Falcon Heavy, the biggest rocket in the company's history, for the first time. From a report: The 230-foot-tall three-booster launcher is scheduled to blast off Tuesday between 1:30 and 4:30 p.m. ET. SpaceX says Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket in the world. SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk, wanted this test launch to happen as early as 2013, though he recently said it could end in an explosion. Instead of putting a standard "mass simulator" or dummy payload atop Falcon Heavy, Musk -- who once launched a wheel of cheese into orbit -- will put his personal 2008 midnight-cherry-red Tesla Roadster on top of the monster rocket. In an Instagram post over the weekend, Musk also revealed that the car would carry a dummy driver, which Musk is calling "Starman," wearing a SpaceX space suit. "Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring," Musk said in an Instagram post in December, adding that the company "decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel." However, all rocket payloads need a permit from the Federal Aviation Administration to launch, and Musk's sleek electric car is no exception. The FAA granted SpaceX that permission on Friday in a staunchly formal notice, which Keith Cowing posted on NASA Watch.

While Sci-Hub is praised by thousands of researchers and academics around the world, copyright holders are doing everything in their power to wipe the site from the web. From a report: Last weekend another problem appeared for Sci-Hub. This time American Chemical Society (ACS) went after CDN provider Cloudflare, which informed the site that a court order requires the company to disconnect several domain names. "Cloudflare has received the attached court order, Case 1:17-cv-OO726-LMB-JFA," the company writes. "Cloudflare will terminate your service for the following domains sci-hub.la, sci-hub.tv, and sci-hub.tw by disabling our authoritative DNS in 24 hours." According to Sci-Hub's operator, losing access to Cloudflare is not "critical," but it may "cause a short pause in website operation."

Digital currencies such as bitcoin demand increased oversight and may require a new federal regulatory framework, the top U.S. markets regulators will tell lawmakers at a congressional hearing on Tuesday. From a report: Christopher Giancarlo, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and Jay Clayton, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), will provide testimony to the Senate Banking Committee amid growing global concerns over the risks virtual currencies pose to investors and the financial system. Giancarlo and Clayton will say a patchwork of rules for cryptocurrency exchanges may need to be reviewed in favour of a rationalised federal framework, according to prepared testimony published on Monday. Congressional sources told Reuters the hearing will largely be a fact-finding exercise focusing on the powers of the SEC and CFTC to oversee cryptocurrency exchanges, how the watchdogs can protect investors from volatility and fraud, and the risks posed by cyber criminals intent on stealing digital tokens.

Apple Music is about to overtake Spotify as the most popular streaming music service in the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend. Gizmodo: [...] Here's where the inevitability comes into play. Because all Apple devices come preloaded with Apple Music, countless consumers start using Apple Music without knowing any better. It's effectively become the streaming music analogue of Microsoft pushing people to surf the web with Internet Explorer. The big difference is that people eventually have to pay for Apple Music, which is the same price as Spotify. As many suspected when it launched three years ago, Apple Music was bound to succeed simply because Apple is big enough and rich enough to will it so. Think about it this way: Spotify gained traction quickly after its 2011 launch, largely because music enthusiasts had seen its streaming model succeed globally and wanted to try this neat new thing. After all, there wasn't anything quite like it at the time, and Americans love to feel innovative.

But eventually, Spotify would cease to feel special and new. As the years passed, practically every major tech company launched its own music streaming service. And then, in 2015, Apple unveiled Apple Music in 2015 -- which was really just a rebranded version of Beats Music. Because Apple could preload the service on iPhones, Watches, and Macs, the company could effectively tap into a new revenue stream without actually inventing anything.

Mark Wilson writes: A number of iPhone X users are complaining about a bug that leaves them unable to answer incoming calls. Reports of the bug are spreading through Apple's support forums, and the company says it is looking into the problem. People who are experiencing the bug say that when they receive a call, their iPhone X rings, but the screen does not wake up. While the problem has been around for a couple of months, complaints seem to be growing in number at the moment.

The tablet market has now declined year-over-year for 13 quarters straight. From a report: Q4 2017 saw a 7.9 percent year-over-year decline: 49.6 million units shipped worldwide, compared to 53.8 million units in the same quarter last year. The only silver lining is that declines for 2017 haven't been in the double-digits, like they were in 2016.

A high court ruling blocking extradition to the US of Lauri Love, a student accused of breaking into US government websites, has been welcomed by lawyers and human rights groups as a precedent for trying hacking suspects in the UK in future. From a report: The decision delivered by the lord chief justice, Lord Burnett of Maldon, is highly critical of the conditions Love would have endured in US jails, warning of the risk of suicide. Lawyers for the 33-year-old, who lives in Suffolk, had argued that Love should be tried in Britain for allegedly hacking into US government websites and that he would be at risk of killing himself if sent to the US. There was cheering and applause in court on Monday when Burnett announced his decision. He asked supporters to be quiet, saying: "This is a court, not a theatre." In his judgment, Burnett said: "It would not be oppressive to prosecute Mr Love in England for the offences alleged against him. Far from it. Much of Mr Love's argument was based on the contention that this is indeed where he should be prosecuted

From a report on Reuters: Mick Mulvaney, head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has pulled back from a full-scale probe of how Equifax failed to protect the personal data of millions of consumers, according to people familiar with the matter. Equifax said in September that hackers stole personal data it had collected on some 143 million Americans. Richard Cordray, then the CFPB director, authorized an investigation that month, said former officials familiar with the probe. But Cordray resigned in November and was replaced by Mulvaney, President Donald Trump's budget chief. The CFPB effort against Equifax has sputtered since then, said several government and industry sources, raising questions about how Mulvaney will police a data-warehousing industry that has enormous sway over how much consumers pay to borrow money. The CFPB has the tools to examine a data breach like Equifax, said John Czwartacki, a spokesman, but the agency is not permitted to acknowledge an open investigation. "The bureau has the desire, expertise, and know-how in-house to vigorously pursue hypothetical matters such as these," he said.

In a poll of 20,000 European workers released Monday, Microsoft, which became one of the world's most profitable companies by marketing office productivity software, acknowledges new digital technology can, in some circumstances, make businesses less productive. From a report: Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft joins a growing number of prominent Silicon Valley companies and entrepreneurs that are starting to question the social benefits of the technology they once championed. Facebook warned in December that its social network might, in some cases, cause psychological harm. Microsoft identifies a number of possible reasons for this negative impact, including: workers who are too distracted by a constant influx of e-mails, Slack messages, Trello notifications, texts, Tweets -- not to mention viral cat videos -- to concentrate for sustained periods; workers who aren't properly trained to use the new technology effectively; tech that isn't adequately supported by the business, forcing workers to lose time because "the computers are down;" and workers who suffer burnout because, with mobile devices and at-home-working, they feel tethered to the job around-the-clock.

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for BleepingComputer: A security researcher has ported three leaked NSA exploits to work on all Windows versions released in the past 18 years, starting with Windows 2000. The three exploits are EternalChampion, EternalRomance, and EternalSynergy; all three leaked last April by a hacking group known as The Shadow Brokers who claimed to have stolen the code from the NSA. Several exploits and hacking tools were released in the April 2017 Shadow Brokers dump, the most famous being EternalBlue, the exploit used in the WannaCry, NotPetya, and Bad Rabbit ransomware outbreaks.

Chipmaker Intel is eyeing the smart glasses market, too. The Verge was invited to the company's lab where it got to play with Vaunt, a prototype of the company's smart glasses. The Vaunt looks very much like a normal pair of glasses, and uses retinal projection to put a display in your eyeball. The Verge: The most important parts of Intel's new Vaunt smart glasses are the pieces that were left out. There is no camera to creep people out, no button to push, no gesture area to swipe, no glowing LCD screen, no weird arm floating in front of the lens, no speaker, and no microphone (for now). From the outside, the Vaunt glasses look just like eyeglasses. When you're wearing them, you see a stream of information on what looks like a screen -- but it's actually being projected onto your retina.

An anonymous reader calls it "the never-ending stupidity of copyright wars." TorrentFreak reports: Blizzard Entertainment is taking a stand against a popular World of Warcraft legacy server. The fan-operated project allows gamers to experience how the game was played over a decade ago and to revive old battles... In recent years the project has captured the hearts of tens of thousands of die-hard WoW fans. At the time of writing, the most popular realm has more than 6,000 people playing from all over the world... Blizzard, however, sees this as copyright infringement and has asked GitHub to pull the site's code offline.
The article notes the DMCA notice came "just weeks after several organizations and gaming fans asked the US Copyright Office to make a DMCA circumvention exemption for 'abandoned' games."

An anonymous reader quotes Quartz: A new alliance made up of former Silicon Valley cronies has aseembled to challenge the technological Frankenstein they've collectively created. The Center for Humane Technology is a group comprising former employees and pals of Google, Facebook, and Mozilla. The nonprofit launches today (Feb. 4) in the hopes that it can raise awareness about the societal tolls of technology, which its members believe are inherently addictive. The group will lobby for a bill to research the effects of technology on children's health... On Feb. 7, the group's members will participate in a conference focused on digital health for kids, hosted by the nonprofit Common Sense.
The group also plans an anti-tech addiction ad campaign at 55,000 schools across America, and has another $50 million in media airtime donated by partners which include Comcast and DirecTV.

The group's co-founder, a former Google design ethicist, told Quartz that tech companies "profit by drilling into our brains to pull the attention out of it, by using persuasion techniques to keep [us] hooked." And the group's web page argues that "What began as a race to monetize our attention is now eroding the pillars of our society: mental health, democracy, social relationships, and our children."