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Microsoft

Microsoft is Testing Ads in WordPad in Windows 10 (betanews.com) 184

Posted by msmash from the here-comes-the-money dept.
BetaNews: Over the years Microsoft has taken numerous controversial decisions with Windows 10, including installing sponsored apps, using the Start menu to advertise apps it thinks you might be interested in, and -- of course -- the various forms of data-collecting telemetry. Now it has been discovered that more ads could be on their way. A Windows researcher has uncovered ads in WordPad encouraging people to try out Word, Excel and PowerPoint online. News of the ads was shared on Twitter by Rafael Rivera, and it was met with a mixture of indignation and reluctant acceptance. Reaction was mixed because while some people saw little wrong with Microsoft advertising a free service rather than trying to encourage people to part with money, there was still a widespread feeling that it was an invasive move.
Youtube

YouTube Masthead, Rolling Out To All Users, is a Massive Auto-Playing Video Ad for TV (9to5google.com) 58

Posted by msmash from the let's-make-some-money dept.
Speaking of YouTube ads, the Google-owned company is rolling out a new ad format for its TV experience, dubbed Masthead, to all users. The company tested this new ad format with some users earlier this year. From a report: Announced in a brief post, YouTube says that its beta test of this new ad format was successful in select markets leading to the now global rollout of the Masthead ad format. The new format is available to all advertisers on a CPM basis as part of a cross-screen advertising campaign on YouTube. YouTube's Masthead ad format is not subtle by any means, appearing over the entire top portion of the TV app. Further, that ad auto-plays silently and expands to full-size when the user hovers over the ad. Advertisers, such as FOX, call this "first of its kind" initiative a "fantastic way" to promote its content. The TV network has been using the YouTube Masthead to promote its hit show The Masked Singer.
The Courts

French Court Rules that Steam's Ban on Reselling Used Games is Contrary To European Law (polygon.com) 126

Posted by msmash from the bravo dept.
A French high court this week delivered a blow to Valve, ruling that European consumers are legally free to resell digital games bought on Steam, just as they're able to resell packaged, physical games. From a report: The ruling was delivered by the High Court of Paris (Tribunal de grande instance de Paris) two days ago, according to a report on French games site Numerama. In a statement released today, Valve pledged to appeal the decision. The court's ruling is a victory for French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir, which filed a suit against Steam four years ago, alleging anti-consumer rights activities. The court rejected Valve's defense that argued Steam is a subscription service. According to Numerama, the court found that Steam sells games in perpetuity, and not as part of a subscription package. The ban on reselling games is therefore counter to European Union laws on digital goods that are designed to block prohibitions on "the free movement of goods within the Union." According to EU law, all goods, including software, can be sold used without the permission of the maker or the original seller.
Privacy

Google, Industry Try To Water Down First US Data-Privacy Law (bloomberg.com) 28

Posted by BeauHD from the pushing-for-changes dept.
Google and its industry allies are making a late bid to water down the first major data-privacy law in the U.S., seeking to carve out exemptions for digital advertising, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg and people familiar with the negotiations. Bloomberg reports: A lobbyist for Google recently distributed new language to members of California's state legislature that would amend the California Consumer Privacy Act. As currently drafted, the law limits how Google and other companies collect and make money from user data online, threatening a business model that generates billions of dollars in ad revenue. It's due to kick in next year and there are only a few more days to amend the law. The lobbying push seeks legislative approval to continue collecting user data for targeted advertising, and in some cases, the right to do so even if users opt out, according to the documents and the people familiar with the negotiations.

It's unclear if the language circulating in the state capitol's corridors was drafted by Google, and other lobbyists are likely asking for similar changes. Industry groups, such as the California Chamber of Commerce and the Internet Association, often help write legislation and have been the face of industry during two years of debate over the CCPA. It's also common for interested parties to suggest late changes to bills. The Google representative, who distributed the revised language in recent weeks, has yet to find a lawmaker to sponsor the amendments, according to people familiar with negotiations. The proposal must be in a bill by Sept. 10 to be eligible for lawmakers to vote on it before they adjourn for the year on Sept. 13. One of the proposals would let Google and others use data collected from websites for their own analysis, and then share it with other companies that may find it useful. Currently, the CCPA prohibits the sale or distribution of user data if the user has opted out, with limited exceptions.

Another proposal would loosen the definition of "business purpose" when it comes to selling or distributing user data. The law currently defines this narrowly and has a list of specific activities, such auditing and security, that will be allowed. Google's lobbyist shared new language that significantly broadens the rule by replacing the phrase "Business purposes are" with "Business purposes include," before the list of approved activities.
Power

Wind Is Outpacing Coal As a Power Source In Texas For the First Time (cnn.com) 276

Posted by BeauHD from the fast-growing-source-of-power dept.
A new report (XLSX) from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas says wind power has surpassed coal for the first time in the state. CNN reports: Wind has generated 22% of the state's electrical needs this year. It just edged out coal, which provided 21% of the Lone Star State's power, according to the Electrical Reliability Council of Texas, which manages electrical flow on about 90% of the Texan grid. Sixteen years ago, in 2003, wind made up just 0.8% of the state's power, and coal satisfied 40% of electrical needs, the council documents show. By 2010, wind accounted for 8% of the state's energy, and it steadily inched forward to 19% last year and now 22% in the first half of 2019. At the same time, coal's portion of the energy mix has declined over the past several years, from 37% in 2013 to 24% last year and just 21% this year. Yet while wind has soared and coal-generated power has cooled, natural gas still accounts for the largest share of the state's energy mix, generating 46% of its power in 2003 and staying strong at 44% last year.
Movies

Sony Blunders By Uploading Full Movie To YouTube Instead of Trailer (torrentfreak.com) 113

Posted by msmash from the oops-i-did-it-again dept.
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."
Power

Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry (bloomberg.com) 303

Posted by BeauHD from the chip-away dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Electric buses were seen as a joke at an industry conference in Belgium seven years ago when the Chinese manufacturer BYD showed an early model. Suddenly, buses with battery-powered motors are a serious matter with the potential to revolutionize city transport -- and add to the forces reshaping the energy industry. With China leading the way, making the traditional smog-belching diesel behemoth run on electricity is starting to eat away at fossil fuel demand. The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country's entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters -- the equivalent of London's entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance. All this is starting to make an observable reduction in fuel demand. And because they consume 30 times more fuel than average sized cars, their impact on energy use so far has become much greater than the than the passenger sedans produced companies from Tesla to Toyota. For every 1,000 battery-powered buses on the road, about 500 barrels a day of diesel fuel will be displaced from the market, according to BNEF calculations. This year, the volume of fuel buses take off the market may rise 37 percent to 279,000 barrels a day, about as much oil as Greece consumes, according to BNEF.
Iphone

With Camera Permission, iPhone Apps Can Surreptitiously Take Pictures and Videos (vice.com) 69

Posted by msmash from the security-woes dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Whenever you give iPhone apps permission to access your camera, the app can surreptitiously take pictures and videos of you as long as the app is in the foreground, a security researcher warned on Wednesday. This is not a bug, but keep it in mind when a random app asks you for permission to access your camera. What this means is that even if you don't see the camera "open" in the form of an on-screen viewfinder, an app can still take photos and videos. It is unknown how many apps currently do this, but Krause created a test app as a proof-of-concept. This behavior is what enables certain "spy" apps like Stealth Cam and Easy Calc - Camera Eye to exist. But even if this behavior is well-known among iOS developers and hardcore users, it's worth remembering that all apps that have camera permission can technically take photos in this way. "It's something most people have no idea about, as they think the camera is only being used if they see the camera content or a LED is blinking," Krause told Motherboard in a chat over Twitter direct message. Krause currently works at Google, but performed and published this research independently of his work there.
Privacy

Amazon Is Reportedly Building a Doorbell That Lets Drivers Into Your House (cnbc.com) 203

Posted by BeauHD from the home-invasion dept.
According to CNBC, Amazon is working with Phrame, a maker of smart license plates that allow items to be delivered to a car's trunk, to build a smart doorbell that would give delivery drivers one-time access to a person's home to drop off items. From the report: Phrame's product fits around a license plate and contains a secure box that holds the keys to the car. Users unlock the box with their smartphone, and can grant access to others -- such as delivery drivers -- remotely. The new initiatives are part of Amazon's effort to go beyond convenience and fix problems associated with unattended delivery. As more consumers shop online and have their packages shipped to their homes, valuable items are often left unattended for hours. Web retailers are dealing with products getting damaged by bad weather as well as the rise of so-called porch pirates, who steal items from doorsteps. Amazon also has an incentive to reduce the number of lost packages, as they can be costly.
Transportation

The Intelligent Intersection Could Banish Traffic Lights Forever (arstechnica.com) 305

Posted by BeauHD from the always-in-the-loop dept.
Jonathan M. Gitlin reports via Ars Technica: With a degree of coordination -- between vehicles, and with traffic infrastructure -- traffic chaos should theoretically be banished, and less congestion means fewer pollutants. Clemson researcher Ali Reza Fayazi has provided a tantalizing glimpse at that future, a proof-of-concept study showing that a fully autonomous four-way traffic intersection is a hundred times more efficient at letting traffic flow than the intersections you and I currently navigate. Because cars don't sit idling at the lights, Fayazi calculated it would also deliver a 19 percent fuel saving. Fayazi designed an intersection controller for a four-way junction that tracks vehicles and then uses an algorithm to control their speeds such that they can all pass safely through the junction with as few coming to a halt as possible. What makes the study particularly interesting is that Fayazi demonstrated it by interspersing his own physical car among the simulated traffic -- the first use of a vehicle-in-the-loop simulator for this kind of problem. Fayazi drove his real car at the International Transportation Innovation Center in Greenville, South Carolina, where a geofenced area was set up to use as the simulated intersection. Using GPS sensors, his car was just as visible to the intersection controller as the virtual autonomous vehicles that were also populating its memory banks. Ideally, Fayazi says he'd like to have tested it with an autonomous vehicle, but they are hard to come by, particularly in South Carolina. Instead, the intersection controller directly governed his speed in the study (as it did with the simulated vehicles), and this controller sent him a speed to maintain in order to safely cross the junction. Over the course of an hour, the intelligent intersection only required 11 vehicles to come to a complete halt. By contrast, when the simulation was run with a traffic light instead, more than 1,100 vehicles had to stop at the junction over the course of an hour.
Robotics

Slashdot Asks: Do We Need To Plan For a Future Without Jobs And Should We Resort To Universal Basic Income? (vox.com) 917

Posted by msmash from the jobless-future dept.
Andy Stern (former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which today represents close to 2 million workers in the United States and Canada) has spent his career organizing workers. He has a warning for all of us: our jobs are really, really doomed. Stern adds that one of the only way outs of this is a universal basic income. Stern has been arguing about the need for a universal basic income (UBI) for more than a year now. Stern pointed out that people with college degrees are not making anywhere near the kind of progress that their parents made, and that it's not their fault. He adds: The possibility that you can end up with job security and retirement attached to it is statistically diminishing over time. The American dream doesn't have to be dead, but it is dying. All the resources and assets are available to make it real. It's just that we have a huge distribution problem. Unions and the government used to play an important part at the top of the market, but this is less true today. The market completely distributes toward those at the top. Unions simply aren't as effective in terms of their impact on the economy, and government has been somewhat on the sidelines in recent years.Making a case for the need of universal basic income, he adds:A universal basic income is essentially giving every single working-age American a check every month, much like we do with social security for elderly people. It's an unconditional stipend, as it were. The reason it's necessary is we're now learning through lots of reputable research that technological change is accelerating, and that this process will continue to displace workers and terminate careers. A significant number of tasks now performed by humans will be performed by machines and artificial intelligence. He warned that we could very well see five million jobs eliminated by the end of the decade because of technology. He elaborates: It looks like the Hunger Games. It's more of what we're beginning to see now: an enclave of extremely successful people at the center and then everyone else on the margins. There will be fewer opportunities in a hollowed out and increasingly zero-sum economy. If capital trumps labor, the people who own will keep getting wealthier and the people who supply labor will become less necessary. And this is exactly what AI and robotics and software are now doing: substituting capital for labor.What's your thoughts on this? Do you think in the next two-three decades to come we will have significantly fewer jobs than we do now?

Comment Re:Hmm..... (Score 1) 175

In my case, the phone problem pretty much belongs to my wife. She has either lost or destroyed 5 phones so far. (Tracking software helped recover most, but they were usually in bad shape) Insurance covered 4 of them (they definitely did NOT make money off of her). Now I just get her not-so-high-end phones...cheaper than paying the insurance premiums and deductibles when she has a loss. She loses credit cards too. Yes, she isn't very aware of her surroundings sometimes. My 13 year old daughter lost her phone once (and I still think it's in the house somewhere). Luckily it was a cheap android (intentional on my part). I then got her another very cheap android telling her "This one is on me. The next one is on you". She doesn't use it much, though. Myself and my 16 year old son have yet to lose a phone. That's why he has his precious iPhone...because he's responsible. Eventually I'll upgrade my Nexus 5 (2013) but it's still serving me well right now.
Earth

UAE To Build Artificial Mountain To Improve Rainfall (engadget.com) 216

Posted by BeauHD from the changing-the-environment dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The United Arab Emirates is in the early stages of developing an artificial mountain that would force air upwards and create clouds that could produce additional rainfall. While the Middle East and Africa continues to get hotter, researchers are further motivated and more desperate for solutions to maximize rainfall. "Building a mountain is not a simple thing," said NCAR scientist and lead researcher Roelof Bruintjes. "We are still busy finalizing assimilation, so we are doing a spread of all kinds of heights, widths and locations [as we simultaneously] look at the local climatology." The specific location has yet to be decided on as the team is still testing out different sites across the UAE. "If [the project] is too expensive for [the government], logically the project won't go through, but this gives them an idea of what kind of alternatives there are for the long-term future." Bruintjes said. "If it goes through, the second phase would be to go to an engineering company and decide whether it is possible or not."

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