An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced a bill Monday to nullify the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules. "Few areas of our economy have been as dynamic and innovative as the internet," Lee said in a statement. "But now this engine of growth is threatened by the Federal Communications Commission's 2015 Open Internet Order, which would put federal bureaucrats in charge of engineering the Internet's infrastructure." Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), and James Inhofe (R-Okla.) co-sponsored Lee's bill. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai introduced his own plan last week to curb significant portions of the 2015 net neutrality rules that Lee's bill aims to abolish. Pai's more specific tack is focused on moving the regulatory jurisdiction of broadband providers back to the Federal Trade Commission, instead of the FCC, which currently regulates them.

MojoKid writes: Microsoft is holding an event in New York City tomorrow, the core theme of which is "Microsoft in Education." It's widely expected that the company will be unveiling a new Surface Laptop device running a Windows 10 Cloud version OS. As it turns out, images of a new Surface laptop leaked to the web tonight portray very much that type of product, though it's not necessarily a budget machine. For starters, it has a 13.5-inch PixelSense display with 3.4 million pixels, which appears to retain the 3:2 screen ratio that we've seen with previous Surface-branded products. Given that this is a laptop, there's no detachable keyboard here. The display is permanently attached to the base and features an Alcantara-covered keyboard deck (the same material used on the Surface Pro 4's optional Signature Type Cover). It also appears the Surface Laptop will be available in four colors: Platinum, Burgundy, Cobalt Blue and Graphite Gold. Other images of the machine show an SD slot, a single USB 3.0 port, mini DisplayPort and a headphone jack. Microsoft apparently hasn't equipped the machine with a USB-C port, unfortunately.

After being switched on for the first time last Friday, the UK's newest fusion reactor has successfully generated a molten mass of electrically-charged gas, or plasma, inside its core. Futurism reports: Called the ST40, the reactor was constructed by Tokamak Energy, one of the leading private fusion energy companies in the world. The company was founded in 2009 with the express purpose of designing and developing small fusion reactors to introduce fusion power into the grid by 2030. Now that the ST40 is running, the company will commission and install the complete set of magnetic coils needed to reach fusion temperatures. The ST40 should be creating a plasma temperature as hot as the center of the Sun -- 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit) -- by Autumn 2017. By 2018, the ST40 will produce plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), another record-breaker for a privately owned and funded fusion reactor. That temperature threshold is important, as it is the minimum temperature for inducing the controlled fusion reaction. Assuming the ST40 succeeds, it will prove that its novel design can produce commercially viable fusion power.

An anonymous reader writes: River City Media, the company accused of running a huge spam operation, has filed a lawsuit against the security researcher and the journalist who exposed their activities. In a ludicrous lawsuit complaint, the company claims the security researcher didn't just stumble upon its unprotected Rsync server, but "perpetrated a coordinated, months-long cyberattack," during which it skirted firewall rules to access its server, used a VPN to disguise his identity, deleted critical files, and published his findings to make a name for himself as an elite security researcher. The company claims the researcher accessed Dropbox and HipChat logs, and even its PayPal account, from where it used funds to purchase various domains. The only evidence the company has is that the person who purchased the domains used a ProtonMail email, just like the researcher, who also uses a ProtonMail email. Remind you, this is the same security researcher, Chris Vickery, who discovered a Reuters database of supposed terrorism suspects, national voter databases for various U.S. states and Mexico, and various other companies.

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: If you've used the smartphone application Snapchat, you may have turned a photo of yourself into a disco bear or melded your face with someone else's. Now, a group of researchers has created the most advanced technique yet for building 3D facial models on the computer. The system could improve personalized avatars in video games, facial recognition for security, and -- of course -- Snapchat filters. The team also trained its program to turn casual 2D snapshots into accurate 3D models. The method could be used to view what a criminal suspect caught on camera would look like from a different angle, or 20 years older. One could also flesh out and animate historical figures from portraits. The "large scale facial model," or LSFM, may soon have medical applications, too. If someone has lost a nose, the technology could help plastic surgeons determine how a new one should look, given the rest of the face.

Chris Williams reports via The Register: Intel processor chipsets have, for roughly the past nine years, harbored a security flaw that can be exploited to remotely control and infect vulnerable systems with virtually undetectable spyware and other malicious code. Specifically, the bug is in Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT), Standard Manageability (ISM) and Small Business Technology (SBT) firmware versions 6 to 11.6. According to Chipzilla, the security hole allows "an unprivileged attacker to gain control of the manageability features provided by these products." That means hackers exploiting the flaw can silently snoop on a vulnerable machine's users, make changes to files and read them, install rootkits and other malware, and so on. This is possible across the network, or with local access. These management features have been available in various Intel chipsets for years, starting with the Nehalem Core i7 in 2008, all the way up to Kaby Lake Core parts in 2017. According to Intel today, this critical security vulnerability, labeled CVE-2017-5689, was found and reported in March by Maksim Malyutin at Embedi. To get the patch to close the hole, you'll have to pester your machine's manufacturer for a firmware update, or try the mitigations here. These updates are hoped to arrive within the next few weeks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phone Arena: On Tuesday, Apple is expected to report its fiscal second quarter earnings. In that report, the tech titan will reportedly announce that it is holding $250 billion in cash. If you think that this is a lot of money, you're absolutely right. According to Marketwatch.com, this is more than the foreign currency reserves held by the U.K. and Canada combined. Looking at it another way, at current valuations Apple could purchase all of the outstanding shares of Walmart and Procter & Gamble and still have money left over. It has taken Apple only 4 and half years to double its cash hoard. During the fiscal first quarter of 2017, Apple was adding $3.6 million to its cash position every hour. It finished the quarter ending in December with $246.09 billion in cash. 90% of the money is banked overseas, which means that Apple would be one of the companies to benefit the most from President Trump's plan to offer a one time tax break on repatriated funds.

India's energy minister has unveiled plans for every car sold in the country to be powered by electricity by the year 2030. "The move is intended to lower the cost of importing fuel and lower costs for running vehicles," reports The Independent. From the report: âoeWe are going to introduce electric vehicles in a very big way," coal and mines minister Piyush Goyal said at the Confederation of Indian Industry Annual Session 2017 in New Delhi. "We are going to make electric vehicles self-sufficient... The idea is that by 2030, not a single petrol or diesel car should be sold in the country." Mr Goyal said the electric car industry would need between two and three years of government assistance, but added that he expected the production of the vehicles to be "driven by demand and not subsidy" after that. "The cost of electric vehicles will start to pay for itself for consumers," he said according to the International Business Times. "We would love to see the electric vehicle industry run on its own," he added. An investigation by Greenpeace this year found that as many as 2.3 million deaths occur every year due to air pollution in the country. The report, entitled "Airpocalypse," claimed air pollution had become a "public health and economic crisis" for Indians. It said the number of deaths caused by air pollution was only "a fraction less" than the number of deaths from tobacco use, adding that 3 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was lost to the levels of toxic smog.

Presto Vivace quotes a report from The Intercept: With an estimated one-third of departments using body cameras, police officers have been generating millions of hours of video footage. Taser stores terabytes of such video on Evidence.com, in private servers to which police agencies must continuously subscribe for a monthly fee. Data from these recordings is rarely analyzed for investigative purposes, though, and Taser -- which recently rebranded itself as a technology company and renamed itself "Axon" -- is hoping to change that. Taser has started to get into the business of making sense of its enormous archive of video footage by building an in-house "AI team." In February, the company acquired two computer vision startups, Dextro and Fossil Group Inc. Taser says the companies will allow agencies to automatically redact faces to protect privacy, extract important information, and detect emotions and objects -- all without human intervention. This will free officers from the grunt work of manually writing reports and tagging videos, a Taser spokesperson wrote in an email. "Our prediction for the next few years is that the process of doing paperwork by hand will begin to disappear from the world of law enforcement, along with many other tedious manual tasks." Analytics will also allow departments to observe historical patterns in behavior for officer training, the spokesperson added. "Police departments are now sitting on a vast trove of body-worn footage that gives them insight for the first time into which interactions with the public have been positive versus negative, and how individuals' actions led to it." But looking to the past is just the beginning: Taser is betting that its artificial intelligence tools might be useful not just to determine what happened, but to anticipate what might happen in the future.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report written by Andrew Cunningham via Ars Technica: Apple is working on new desktop Macs, including a ground-up redesign of the tiny-but-controversial 2013 Mac Pro. We're also due for some new iMacs, which Apple says will include some features that will make less-demanding pro users happy. But we don't know when they're coming, and the Mac Pro in particular is going to take at least a year to get here. Apple's reassurances are nice, but it's a small comfort to anyone who wants high-end processing power in a Mac right now. Apple hasn't put out a new desktop since it refreshed the iMacs in October of 2015, and the older, slower components in these computers keeps Apple out of new high-end fields like VR. This is a problem for people who prefer or need macOS, since Apple's operating system is only really designed to work on Apple's hardware. But for the truly adventurous and desperate, there's another place to turn: fake Macs built with standard PC components, popularly known as "Hackintoshes." They've been around for a long time, but the state of Apple's desktop lineup is making them feel newly relevant these days. So we spoke with people who currently rely on Hackintoshes to see how the computers are being used -- and what they'd like to see from Apple.

The Chinese government is recruiting 20,000 people to create an online encyclopedia that will be the country's own, China-centric version of Wikipedia, or as one official put it, like "a Great Wall of culture." From a report: Known as the "Chinese Encyclopedia," the country's national encyclopedia will go online for the first time in 2018, and the government has employed tens of thousands of scholars from universities and research institutes who will contribute articles in more than 100 disciplines. The end result will be a knowledge base with more than 300,000 entries, each of which will be about 1,000 words long. "The Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture," Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the project and the chairman of the Book and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, said. He added that China was under pressure from the international community to produce an encyclopedia that will "guide and lead the public and society."

An anonymous reader shares a report from marketing research firm eMarketer: Thanks to multitasking, US adults' average daily time spent with major media will slightly exceed 12 hours this year, according to eMarketer's latest report. But while our reports early in the decade told a story of robust gains -- with increases in digital usage more than compensating for declines in time spent with nondigital media -- growth has been petering out. Of course, media multitasking is what has made so much usage possible. That is how the figure for time spent can add up to 12 hours a day.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Leaked documents from Facebook's team in Australia allegedly show the social giant's ability to help advertisers target teens who feel "worthless." The documents, first revealed by The Australian, say Facebook can spot when teens "need a confidence boost." The documents reportedly get even more specific, saying Facebook's algorithm can pinpoint when teens feel "useless," "stressed," "failure," "silly," "stupid," "worthless" and "defeated." Using Facebook's tools as well as image recognition, advertisers would be able to find teens in some of their lowest moments -- and then target ads to them. The leaked documents also detailed how advertisers could use Facebook's algorithms to find teens who were interested in "working out and losing weight" and promote health products, according to The Australian. Facebook's team in Australia was reportedly looking to capitalize on 6.4 million teens who use the social network in their region.

A federal appeals court on Monday declined to rehear a challenge to the Obama administration's landmark "net neutrality" rules requiring internet providers to guarantee equal access to all websites. From a report: The decision by the full appeals court in Washington not to reconsider a three-judge panel's decision that upheld the ruling comes days after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai proposed to undo the 2015 net neutrality that reclassified internet providers like public utilities. The 2015 order bars internet providers from blocking, throttling or giving "fast lanes" to some websites. Pai has proposed reversing the reclassification and scrapping internet conduct standards, and has asked for comment on whether the FCC can or should retain any of the rules barring blocking, throttling or "fast lanes." Judge Sri Srinivasan said in a written opinion reviewing the decision "would be particularly unwarranted at this point in light of the uncertainty surrounding the fate of the FCC's order."