An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The U.S. Senate today confirmed the nominations of Republican Brendan Carr and Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel to fill the two empty seats on the Federal Communications Commission. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai congratulated the commissioners in a statement. "As I know from working with each of them for years, they have distinguished records of public service and will be valuable assets to the FCC in the years to come," Pai said. "Their experience at the FCC makes them particularly well-suited to hit the ground running. I'm pleased that the FCC will once again be at full strength and look forward to collaborating to close the digital divide, promote innovation, protect consumers, and improve the agency's operations."

Carr served as Pai's Wireless, Public Safety and International Legal Advisor for three years. After President Trump elevated Pai to the chairmanship in January, Pai appointed Carr to become the FCC's general counsel. Rosenworcel had to leave the commission at the end of last year when the Republican-led US Senate refused to re-confirm her for a second five-year term. But Democrats pushed Trump to re-nominate Rosenworcel to fill the empty Democratic spot and he obliged. FCC commissioners are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. esides Pai, Carr, and Rosenworcel, the five-member commission includes Republican Michael O'Rielly and Democrat Mignon Clyburn.

New submitter Zorro shares a report from Patch.com: When it comes to global warming, Fido and Fluffy are part of the problem, a new study by UCLA indicates. Pet ownership in the United States creates about 64 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, UCLA researchers found. That's the equivalent of driving 13.6 million cars for a year. The problem lies with the meat-filled diets of kitties and pooches, according to the study by UCLA geography professor Gregory Okin. Dogs and cats are responsible for 25 to 30 percent of the impacts of meat production in the United States, said Orkin. Compared to a plant-based diet, meat production "requires more energy, land and water and has greater environmental consequences in terms of erosion, pesticides and waste," the study found. And what goes in, must come out. In terms of waste, Okin noted, feeding pets also leads to about 5.1 million tons of feces every year, roughly equivalent to the total trash production of Massachusetts. The study has been published in the journal PLOS One.

Mark Wilson shares a report from BetaNews: Google has relaxed its rules surrounding real-money gambling apps in Google Play -- in some countries, at least. There has been a ban on apps and games that allow users to gamble with real money since 2013, but that has now changed. While there was previously a ban in place due to the difficulty in policing ages and complying with different gambling laws around the world, real-money gambling apps are now permitted in the UK, France and Ireland. The new rules stipulate that developers must submit their gambling apps for a special vetting process, and they must have an IARC content rating. Other rules include a ban on the use of Google payment services, a requirement to display information about responsible gambling, and a requirement to block underage use. The full list of requirements [can be viewed here].

Danny Hakim reports via The New York Times (Warning: article may be paywalled; alternate source): Documents released Tuesday in a lawsuit against Monsanto raised new questions about the company's efforts to influence the news media and scientific research and revealed internal debate over the safety of its highest-profile product, the weed killer Roundup. The active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, is the most common weed killer in the world and is used by farmers on row crops and by home gardeners. While Roundup's relative safety has been upheld by most regulators, a case in federal court in San Francisco continues to raise questions about the company's practices and the product itself.

The documents underscore the lengths to which the agrochemical company goes to protect its image. Documents show that Henry I. Miller, an academic and a vocal proponent of genetically modified crops, asked Monsanto to draft an article for him that largely mirrored one that appeared under his name on Forbes's website in 2015. Mr. Miller could not be reached for comment. A similar issue appeared in academic research. An academic involved in writing research funded by Monsanto, John Acquavella, a former Monsanto employee, appeared to express discomfort with the process, writing in a 2015 email to a Monsanto executive, "I can't be part of deceptive authorship on a presentation or publication." He also said of the way the company was trying to present the authorship: "We call that ghost writing and it is unethical." Mr. Miller's 2015 article on Forbes's website was an attack on the findings of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization that had labeled glyphosate a probable carcinogen, a finding disputed by other regulatory bodies. In the email traffic, Monsanto asked Mr. Miller if he would be interested in writing an article on the topic, and he said, "I would be if I could start from a high-quality draft." The article appeared under Mr. Miller's name, and with the assertion that "opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own." The magazine did not mention any involvement by Monsanto in preparing the article.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Bleeping Computer: The Juscutum Attorneys Association, a Ukrainian law firm, is rallying NotPetya victims to join a collective lawsuit against Intellect-Service LLC, the company behind the M.E.Doc accounting software -- the point of origin of the NotPetya ransomware outbreak. The NotPetya ransomware spread via a trojanized M.E.Doc update, according to Microsoft, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, Cisco, ESET, and Ukrainian Cyber Police. A subsequent investigation revealed that Intellect-Service had grossly mismanaged the hacked servers, which were left without updates since 2013 and were backdoored on three different occasions. On Tuesday, Ukrainian Cyber Police confirmed that M.E.Doc servers were backdoored on three different occasions in an official document. The company is now using this document as the primary driving force behind its legal action. Juscutum says that victims must pay all court fees, must provide evidence or help with the collection of evidence, and agree to a 30% cut in the case of any awarded damages. The lawsuit is in its incipient stages. Juscutum representatives are currently spreading their message and encouraging victims to join the lawsuit via social media posts and articles in local Ukrainian press.

Intel's upcoming Coffee Lake CPUs won't work with existing 200-series motherboards that support Kaby Lake, a manufacturer confirmed on Wednesday. In a Twitter post by Asrock last Saturday, the company confirmed the news when asked if "the Z270 Supercarrier [will] get support for the upcoming @intel Coffee Lake CPUs." Their response: "No, Coffee Lake CPU is not compatible with 200-series motherboards." PCWorld reports: According to at least one reliable source outside of Intel, the new Coffee Lake CPU will indeed not be compatible with Z270 boards, even though the chipsets with the upcoming Z370 appear to be the same, PCWorld was told. The source added that there are hopes in the industry that Intel will change its mind on compatibility. Tomshardware.com said it had independently confirmed the news with Asrock officials as well.

Why this matters: The vast majority of new CPU sales are in new systems, and they likely won't be impacted by the incompatibility. However, there's also a very large and very vocal crowd of builders and upgraders who still swap out older, slower CPUs for newer, faster CPUs to maximize their investment. An upgrade-in-place doesn't sell an Intel chipset, but it at least keeps them on the Intel platform. If consumers are forced to dump an existing Z270 motherboard for a newer Z370 to get a six-core Coffee Lake CPU, Intel risks driving them into the arms of AMD and its Ryzen CPUs.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Uber knowingly rented recalled Honda sports utility vehicles to its drivers in Singapore, where at least one of which caught fire. USA Today reports: The paper reported Uber's Singapore office bought more than 1,000 Honda Vezel sports utility vehicles to rent to its drivers there. The cars contained a faulty electrical part that could catch on fire and Honda had recalled in Japan and elsewhere. There had been at least six reports of fires in the Vezel. In a statement Uber said that as soon as it learned of a Honda Vezel catching fire, it took swift action to fix the problem, coordinating with Singapore's Land Transport Authority as well as technical experts. However it acknowledged that it could have done more. The company said it has since introduced robust protocols and hired three dedicated experts in Singapore to ensure that it is fully responsive to safety recalls.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from King 5, a local news station for Seattle, Washington: On June 8 approximately 350 Hanford workers were ordered to "take cover" after alarms designed to detect elevated levels of airborne radioactive contamination went off. It was quickly determined that radioactive particles had been swept out of a containment zone at the plutonium finishing plant (PFP) demolition site. The work is considered the most hazardous demolition project on the entire nuclear reservation. At the time Hanford officials called the safety measure "precautionary." Officials from the U.S. Dept. of Energy, which owns Hanford, and the contractor in charge of the demolition, CH2M Hill, downplayed the seriousness of the event with statements including, it appeared "workers were not at risk", "(the alarm went off) in an area where contamination is expected" and there was "no evidence radioactive particles had been inhaled" by anyone.

The KING 5 Investigators have discovered those statements are incorrect. An internal CH2M Hill email sent to their employees on July 21 was obtained by KING. It states that 301 (test kits) have been issued to employees and of the first 65 workers tested, a "small number of employees" showed positive results for "internal exposures" (by radioactive plutonium). Sources tell KING the "small number of employees" is twelve. Twelve people out of 65 is 20 percent. Still outstanding are 236 tests. A communication specialist with CH2M Hill sent a statement that more positive results are expected. "We expect additional positive results because analytical tests like a bioassay can detect radiological contamination at levels far lower than what field monitoring can detect," said Destry Henderson of CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company.

Facebook is rolling out "Related Articles" that appear below news links to stories lots of people are posting about on Facebook, or that are suspected to be false news and have been externally fact checked by Facebook's partners. "Appearing before someone reads, Related Articles will surface links to additional reporting on the same topic to provide different view points, and to truthiness reports from the fact checkers," reports TechCrunch. From the report: If users see drastically different angles when they compare a story to its Related Articles, they might deem it suspicious and skip it, be less likely to believe or share it, or could click through the Related Articles and make up their own mind. That could reduce the spread and impact of false news without Facebook itself having to be the honesty police. Related Articles could also balance out some of the radical invective that can subtly polarize the populace. Pre-click Related Articles are rolling out in the U.S., Germany, France, and Nederlands today. These countries were chosen to get the roll out first because Facebook has established fact checking partnerships there. "We don't want to be and are not the arbiters of the truth. The fact checkers can give the signal of whether a story is true or false" says Facebook News Feed integrity product manager Tessa Lyons. Meanwhile, Facebook's machine learning algorithm has improved its accuracy and speed, so the social network will now have it send more potential hoaxes to fact checkers.

Google today announced it's rolling out a change to its Play Store so that better-performing apps -- meaning those that experience fewer crashes and those that don't drain your smartphone battery -- will be ranked higher than apps with bugs and other performance issues. From a report: The goal with this new ranking algorithm is to ensure that the best apps are being promoted, which in turn leads to increased app usage and engagement, the company says. The impetus for this change came after Google realized that around half of the 1-star reviews on the Google Play Store were about app stability problems. Apps that don't work well frustrate users, who often turn to the reviews to leave a complaint. Over time, a number of bad reviews and low star ratings can impact the app's place in the charts and search results. But if an app is popular enough, a large number of installs can still, to some extent, override its negative reviews and push the app back up into a higher position than it rightly deserves.

After Charter closed the acquisitions of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in May 2016, it moved 30 percent of the customers it acquired onto new pricing plans, resulting in many people paying higher prices. "Before the merger, Charter had about 6.8 million customers; afterward, Charter had 25.4 million customers in 41 states and became the second-largest U.S. cable company after Comcast," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Charter came up with new prices and packages, and many customers saw their bills rise when their previous discounts expired and they were switched to non-promotional pricing. Now, 30 percent of the ex-TWC and ex-Bright House customers are paying different -- and often higher -- prices. Charter CEO Thomas Rutledge provided the update in an earnings call last week (hat tip to FierceCable). According to a Seeking Alpha transcript, Rutledge said: "In June, we finished the rollout of our new pricing, packaging, and branding across our national footprint with the last launch of Spectrum in Hawaii. We now offer a simple, straightforward, high-value product using a consistent and uniform approach across our 50 million passings under one brand, Spectrum. The new product is succeeding with consumers across our footprint. In the second quarter, our customers and PSU [primary service unit] connects were higher year-over-year. And as of the end of the second quarter, 30 percent of Time Warner Cable and Bright House legacy customers were in our new pricing and packaging, up from 17 percent at the end of last quarter. In areas where we've had Spectrum in place for at least three quarters, 43 percent of our residential customers have Spectrum package products."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: WikiLeaks has released a new set of documents in the CIA Vault 7 leak, outlining the "Dumbo" hacking tool which allows control of webcams and microphones. The release explains that the tool is capable of completely suspending processes on webcams and corrupting video recordings. Dumbo's is tasked specifically with gaining and exploiting physical access to target computers used in CIA field operations, the release notes. According to WikiLeaks, the tool allows for the identification, control and manipulation of monitoring and detection systems, such as webcams and microphones, running the Microsoft Windows operating system. The technology first identifies all installed devices, whether they are connected locally, wirelessly, or across wired networks. Once Dumbo has detected all of these devices, it identifies all the related processes, which may include recording, monitoring or detection of video, audio and network streams. These operations can then be suspended by the operator. "By deleting or manipulating recordings the operator is aided in creating fake or destroying actual evidence of the intrusion operation," the release added. Dumbo does require direct access to the target computer and is run from a USB stick. The release states that it supports 32bit Windows XP, Windows Vista, and newer versions of Windows operating system. However, 64bit Windows XP and Windows versions prior to XP are not supported.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For the last 10 years, H.264/AVC has been the dominant video codec used for streaming but with Apple adopting H.265/HEVC in iOS 11 and Google heavily supporting VP9 in Android, a change is on the horizon. Next year the Alliance for Open Media will release their AV1 codec which will again improve video compression efficiency even further. But the end result is that the codec market is about to get very fragmented, with content owners soon having to decide if they need to support three codecs (H.264, H.265, and VP9) instead of just H.264 and with AV1 expected to be released in 2019. As a result of what's take place in the codec market, and with better quality video being demanded by consumers, content owners, broadcasters and OTT providers are starting to see a massive increase in encoding costs. New codecs like H.265 and VP9 need 5x the servers costs because of their complexity. Currently, AV1 needs over 20x the server costs. The mix of SD, HD and UHD continues to move to better quality: e.g. HDR, 10-bit and higher frame rates. Server encoding cost to move from 1080p SDR to 4K HDR is 5x. 360 and Facebook's 6DoF video are also growing in consumption by consumers which again increases encoding costs by at least 4x. If you add up all these variables, it's not hard to do the math and see that for some, encoding costs could increase by 500x over the next few years as new codecs, higher quality video, 360 video and general demand increases.

Teens today are more likely to be lonely, depressed and immature than any previous generation, according to analysis published in The Atlantic. According to the professor of psychology who did the analysis, who also has been researching generational differences for 25 years, the culprit is the smartphone. From the article: The advent of the smartphone and its cousin the tablet was followed quickly by hand-wringing about the deleterious effects of "screen time." But the impact of these devices has not been fully appreciated, and goes far beyond the usual concerns about curtailed attention spans. The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers' lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone. What do you folks think?

An anonymous reader writes: A hacker says he turned finding and exploiting flaws in popular MMO video games into a lucrative, full-time job. Manfred's character is standing still in the virtual world of the 2014 sci-fi online multiplayer game WildStar Online. Manfred, the real life person behind the character, is typing commands into a debugger. In a few seconds of what seems to be an extremely easy hack, Manfred's virtual currency skyrockets up to more than 18,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 18 quintillion. I'm watching this hack in a demo video recorded by Manfred as I stand next to him in a Las Vegas bar on Thursday. Manfred, who asked me not to reveal his real name, says he has been hacking several video games for 20 years, making a real-life living by using hacks like the one I just witnessed. His modus operandi has changed slightly from game to game, but, in essence, it consisted of tricking games into giving him items or currency he doesn't have a right to have. He would then sell those items and currency to other players (for real money) or wholesales them to online gray markets, such as the Internet Game Exchange, that then would sell those goods to individual players. At the current exchange rate, Manfred estimates he has $397 trillion worth of WildStar gold. This is obviously an outlandish number, but, essentially, his income was only limited by the real-life market for the in-game currency. When I spoke to Manfred ahead of his talk at the Def Con hacking conference, he said he wanted to go in, give his demo, and go out "as a ghost," never to be seen or heard from again. He said he wanted to be "invisible," just like he's been for the past two decades. He said he's found more than 100 publicly unknown vulnerabilities in more than 20 online video games, making hacking and trading virtual goods into his full time job.