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• Andrew Yang Takes Lead Role In California Data Privacy Campaign
• Elon Musk Passes Mark Zuckerberg To Become Third-Richest Person In the World
• Twelve Years Later, Apple Is Still Trying To Erase Mac.com Email Addresses
• Facebook and Google Serve As Vectors For Misinformation While Hobbling Local Journalism and Collecting Taxpayer Subsidies, Group Says
• Qualcomm Doubles 5G mmWave Range To 2.36 Miles For Broadband Modems
• FBI Worried Ring and Other Doorbell Cameras Could Tip Owners Off To Police Searches
• AT&T, Ready For Your $30 Billion DirecTV Haircut?
• The Blurred Lines and Closed Loops of Google Search
• New Chinese Restrictions on Tech Exports Could Complicate TikTok Sale
• Google Images Launches 'Licensable' Badge and Search Filter
• Big Oil Is in Trouble. Its Plan: Flood Africa With Plastic.
• Apple Mistakenly Approved a Widely Used Malware To Run on Macs
• CenturyLink Outage Led To a 3.5% Drop in Global Web Traffic
• Apple Says App Store Appeals Process is Now Live, So Developers Can Start Challenging Decisions
• China Again Boosts Research and Development Spending By More Than 10%

Andrew Yang Takes Lead Role In California Data Privacy Campaign Posted: 31 Aug 2020 07:02 PM PDT Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang is throwing his weight behind California's November data privacy ballot measure -- not just endorsing the initiative but chairing its advisory board, the Proposition 24 campaign announced Monday. Politico reports: Yang's involvement could bring more visibility and cachet to the effort, given the tech entrepreneur's national profile and popularity among younger voters. It could also help counter the negative messaging from some consumer and civil rights groups that are opposing it. Yang lives in New York, thousands of miles from where voters will cast their ballots in November. But the initiative, like the law it would rewrite, could be the nation's de facto privacy law in the absence of federal action. Prop. 24 would rewrite parts of the California Consumer Privacy Act, which gave Californians new rights over their personal data when it took effect in January. The new measure would create a regulatory agency to manage California's privacy regime, add protections for "sensitive data," and eliminate the 30-day window that companies now have to correct problems before the attorney general can take them to court. It also would make it harder for the Legislature to roll back its protections in the future; any changes would need to further the law's aims. Alastair Mactaggart, a Bay Area real estate developer whose 2018 initiative compelled the Legislature to pass the CCPA that year, is behind the effort to amend it. "The California Consumer Privacy Act was a major win for the state of California and the country, but we have to do more," says Yang. "Technology is changing more rapidly than ever before, and tech corporations are already lining up to undermine the CCPA. It's up to us to protect consumers and strengthen our privacy rights to global standards. Our data should be ours no matter what platforms and apps we use. That's why I hope California voters will join me in supporting Prop 24 by voting YES in November." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk Passes Mark Zuckerberg To Become Third-Richest Person In the World Posted: 31 Aug 2020 06:25 PM PDT Elon Musk is now the third-richest person in the world. Musk passed Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg Monday as shares of Tesla continued their unrelenting rally after undergoing a forward stock split. Musk is now worth $115.4 billion compared with $110.8 billion for Zuckerberg. Yahoo Finance reports: Also Monday, Jeff Bezos's ex-wife MacKenzie Scott became the world's richest woman, passing L'Oreal SA heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers. Scott, 50, who received a 4% stake in Amazon.com Inc. as part of her divorce from founder Bezos, is now worth $66.4 billion. Musk, 49, has seen a meteoric rise in his wealth, with his net worth growing by $87.8 billion this year as Tesla shares surged almost 500%. Also helpful: an audacious pay package -- the largest corporate pay deal ever struck between a chief executive officer and a board of directors -- that could yield him more than $50 billion if all goals are met. Tesla's $464 billion market value now exceeds that of retail behemoth Walmart Inc., the largest company in the U.S. by revenue. Last week, Musk joined Zuckerberg, Bezos and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates in the rarefied centibillionaire club as tech stocks rose. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twelve Years Later, Apple Is Still Trying To Erase Mac.com Email Addresses Posted: 31 Aug 2020 05:45 PM PDT Apple is steadily removing references to the old @mac.com and slightly less old @me.com addresses from its support documents. AppleInsider reports: It used to be that if your email addressed ended in @mac.com, you were telling the world that you are an Apple user. Now while it's only that part of the world which is extremely geeky, you're actually telling them that you were an Apple user on or before July 9, 2008. This email address was once championed by Apple as part of its iTools service back in 2000, and if you still have one, you have some bruises from the days of iTools, .Mac, and MobileMe before you got to today's iCloud. If your email ends in @mac.com then you got it somewhere between 2000 and 2008. If it ends in @me.com, you got it during the briefer opportunity between then and 2012. To be exact, you have still got an @mac.com address because you had it and were actively using it on July 8, 2008, plus you kept your MobileMe account and - there's more - you moved to iCloud before August 1, 2012. [...] Your Apple ID is tied to an email address and Apple gives you some flexibility about this, because it recognizes that we sometimes lose access to a previous address. You can change the address associated with your Apple ID and there's a current support document about how and why you might do that. For some years, though, that page has said you're out of luck if you want to change to an @mac.com or @me.com address. You can't do it unless you somehow already have that address associated with your account. And then in late August 2020, even that helpful information is gone. That same support page still lists what you can do with third-party email addresses. But gone are any references to @mac.com and @me.com. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook and Google Serve As Vectors For Misinformation While Hobbling Local Journalism and Collecting Taxpayer Subsidies, Group Says Posted: 31 Aug 2020 05:02 PM PDT An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Facebook and Google are hollowing out local communities by serving as vectors for misinformation while hobbling local journalism and collecting taxpayer subsidies, a new paper from progressive think tank the American Economic Liberties Project charges. Both companies cite benefits their platforms offer small businesses as a key defense against critiques of their size and power. The paper, dated Aug. 30, is sure to presage further scrutiny of the impact they've had on local communities. The brief, by Pat Garofalo, the group's director of state and local policy, argues that: Google doesn't do enough to protect against fraud, allowing scammers to get their own numbers and websites listed on Google to the detriment of legitimate businesses. Facebook, by design, boosts shoddy and sensationalist content, crowding out legitimate local news and information, all as it and Google have come to dominate the local advertising market that was long the lifeblood of community journalism. Both have sucked up potentially billions in local taxpayer dollars via tax breaks as well as subsidies and discounts on utilities they've gotten in exchange for building data centers. Garofalo recommends remedies including more antitrust enforcement at the federal and state levels and an end to preferential treatment by states and localities, either voluntarily or under force of law. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Qualcomm Doubles 5G mmWave Range To 2.36 Miles For Broadband Modems Posted: 31 Aug 2020 04:20 PM PDT As 5G networks have continued to spread across the world, the biggest issue with ultra-fast millimeter wave (mmWave) towers has been their short transmission distance, which is generally measured in city blocks rather than miles. Today, Qualcomm announced a breakthrough in mmWave transmission range, successfully achieving a 5G data connection over a 3.8-kilometer (2.36-mile) distance -- over twice the range originally promised by its long-range QTM527 antenna system last year. VentureBeat reports: It's important to put today's news into perspective, as the record is specific to broadband modems rather than smartphones. Qualcomm is touting the achievement as evidence of mmWave's viability as a fixed wireless access solution, enabling carriers to offer fiber-speed 5G coverage in rural, suburban, and urban communities that might have had poor wired home broadband options in the past. The successful test was conducted in Regional Victoria, Australia, presumably with minimal physical interference between the sending and receiving devices. The test relied on two existing Qualcomm hardware solutions -- the Snapdragon X55 modem and QTM527 antenna -- inside a consumer premises equipment broadband modem, communicating with Ericsson's Air5121 and Baseband 6630 tower hardware, enhanced by extended-range software. No details were provided on speeds or other details of the connection, but Qualcomm characterized the successful range test as "the first step in utilizing mmWave for an extended-range 5G data transfer," hinting that there may have been compromises in speed or other areas. The company previously noted that carriers would be able to deliver up to 7Gbps download speeds if the QTM527 could access a full 800MHz of mmWave spectrum. Existing tower hardware has hit 4.3Gbps for a single device or 8.5Gbps for two devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FBI Worried Ring and Other Doorbell Cameras Could Tip Owners Off To Police Searches Posted: 31 Aug 2020 03:40 PM PDT FBI documents warned that owners of Amazon's Ring and similar video doorbells can use the systems -- which collect video footage sometimes used to investigate crimes -- in order to watch police instead. The Verge reports: The Intercept spotted the files in the BlueLeaks data trove aggregated from law enforcement agencies. One 2019 analysis describes numerous ways police and the FBI could use Ring surveillance footage, but it also cites "new challenges" involving sensor- and camera-equipped smart home devices. Specifically, they can offer an early warning when officers are approaching a house to search it; give away officer locations in a standoff; or let the owner capture pictures of law enforcement, "presenting a risk to their present and future safety." These are partly hypothetical concerns. The standoff issue, for instance, was noted in a report about motion-activated panoramic cameras. But the FBI points to a 2017 incident where agents approached the home of someone with a video doorbell, seeking to search the premises. The resident wasn't home but saw them approach by watching a remote video feed, then preemptively contacted his neighbor and landlord about the FBI's approach. He may also have "been able to covertly monitor law enforcement activity" with the camera. This isn't necessarily more information than a security camera would capture. But doorbells like the Ring or Google Nest Hello are pitched as more mainstream devices, and they've also created controversy around police use of the footage. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AT&T, Ready For Your $30 Billion DirecTV Haircut? Posted: 31 Aug 2020 03:02 PM PDT An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: AT&T is once again looking to sell its DirecTV unit, a business that has lost billions of dollars in value since the wireless carrier acquired it in 2015. The sooner it waves goodbye, the better. The question is, who wants it? DirecTV has faded into the background at AT&T, a company now entirely focused on competing in 5G wireless connectivity and online television. Any DirecTV user can attest to how the service has been neglected in recent years, and the business might be forgotten by investors if it weren't for the headline-grabbing subscriber losses it's mounted each quarter. AT&T, which also owns the U-Verse brand, has lost about 6 million traditional pay-TV customers overall in just the last two years. The Covid-19 pandemic is causing cord-cutting to accelerate as consumers look to save money by switching to streaming-video services such as Netflix and AT&T's own HBO Max. So while AT&T paid $49 billion when it bought DirecTV, it'd be lucky to fetch even half that now. One analyst, John Butler of Bloomberg Intelligence, estimates a potential sale price of just $20 billion. Some may be wondering, what on earth would any buyer want with a satellite-TV business anyway? The answer is cash. DirecTV still throws off quite a bit of it, which explains why private equity firms including Apollo Global Management Inc. and Platinum Equity are said to be taking a look. Financial suitors want businesses that generate lots of cash because they can support dividends and the debt load needed to take them private -- although DirecTV's ability to do so is certainly diminishing. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Blurred Lines and Closed Loops of Google Search Posted: 31 Aug 2020 02:24 PM PDT Early this year, Google pushed out a seemingly tiny tweak to how it displays search ads for desktop computers. From a report: Previously, the search engine had marked paid results with the word "Ad" in a green box, tucked beneath the headline next to a matching green display URL. Now, all of a sudden, the "Ad" and the URL shifted above the headline, and both were rendered in discreet black; the box disappeared. The organic search results underwent a similar makeover, only with a new favicon next to the URL instead of the word "Ad." The result was a general smoothing: Ads looked like not-ads. Not-ads looked like ads. This was not Google's first time fiddling with the search results interface. In fact, it had done so quite regularly over the last 13 years, as handily laid out in a timeline from the news site Search Engine Land. Each iteration whittled away the distinction between paid and unpaid content that much more. Most changes went relatively unnoticed, internet residents accepting the creep like the apocryphal frog in a slowly boiling pot. But in January, amid rising antitrust drumbeats and general exhaustion with Big Tech, people noticed. Interface designers, marketers, and Google users alike decried the change, saying it made paid results practically indistinguishable from those that Google's search algorithm served up organically. The phrase that came up most often: "dark pattern," a blanket term coined by UX specialist Harry Brignull to describe manipulative design elements that benefit companies over their users. That a small design tweak could inspire so much backlash speaks to the profound influence Google and other ubiquitous platforms have -- and the responsibility that status confers to them. "Google and Facebook shape realities," says Kat Zhou, a product designer who has created a framework and toolkit to help promote ethical design. "Students and professors turn to Google for their research. Folks turn to Facebook for political news. Communities turn to Google for Covid-19 updates. In some sense, Google and Facebook have become arbiters of the truth. That's particularly scary when you factor in their business models, which often incentivize blurring the line between news and advertisements." Google's not the only search engine to blur this line. If anything, Bing is even more opaque, sneaking the "Ad" disclosure under the header, with only a faint outline to draw attention. [...] But Google has around 92 percent of global search marketshare. It effectively is online search. Dark patterns are all too common online in general, and January wasn't the first time people accused Google of deploying them. In June of 2018, a blistering report from the Norwegian Consumer Council found that Google and Facebook both used specific interface choices to strip away user privacy at almost every turn. The study details how both platforms implemented the least privacy-friendly options by default, consistently "nudged" users toward giving away more of their data, and more. It paints a portrait of a system designed to befuddle users into complacency. [...] That confusion reached its apex a few months later, when an Associated Press investigation found that disabling Location History on your smartphone did not, in fact, stop Google from collecting your location in all instances. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New Chinese Restrictions on Tech Exports Could Complicate TikTok Sale Posted: 31 Aug 2020 01:41 PM PDT New export controls on technologies that Beijing deems sensitive are threatening to derail efforts by American companies to acquire TikTok's U.S. operations from its Chinese parent company ByteDance, the Wall Street Journal reports. From a report: The regulations were unveiled on Friday and prevent "technology based on data analysis for personalized information recommendation services" -- which would likely apply to TikTok's AI content-recommendation engine -- from being exported without a license, according to the New York Times. On Saturday, the Chinese state-owned Xinhua News Agency published commentary from a trade professor and government adviser suggesting that ByteDance "seriously and cautiously" consider whether to suspend TikTok negotiations after reviewing the new rules. The state-owned English-language newspaper Global Times published a similar story quoting Chinese experts as saying the restrictions could help ByteDance "prevent its core algorithms used in video-sharing app TikTok from falling into US companies' hands." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Images Launches 'Licensable' Badge and Search Filter Posted: 31 Aug 2020 01:04 PM PDT Google today launched new features in Google Images "to help people use images on the web responsibly." From a report: The features should benefit photographers, as they help people both identify photos that can be licensed as well as find out how to properly license them. Google Images' new "Licensable" badge, which had been in beta testing since February 2020, is now live. "[W]ith a seemingly infinite number of images online, finding the right image to use, and knowing how to use that image responsibly, isn't always a simple task," Google says. Google's new Licensable badge aims to make it easier for photo buyers to find photos they can license. Whenever a publisher or photographer provides licensing information for a photo (by providing structured data or IPTC photo metadata), Google will display a badge that says "Licensable" over the photo in search results. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Big Oil Is in Trouble. Its Plan: Flood Africa With Plastic. Posted: 31 Aug 2020 12:21 PM PDT Confronting a climate crisis that threatens the fossil fuel industry, oil companies are racing to make more plastic. But they face two problems: Many markets are already awash with plastic, and few countries are willing to be dumping grounds for the world's plastic waste. The industry thinks it has found a solution to both problems in Africa. From a report: According to documents reviewed by The New York Times, an industry group representing the world's largest chemical makers and fossil fuel companies is lobbying to influence United States trade negotiations with Kenya, one of Africa's biggest economies, to reverse its strict limits on plastics -- including a tough plastic-bag ban. It is also pressing for Kenya to continue importing foreign plastic garbage, a practice it has pledged to limit. Plastics makers are looking well beyond Kenya's borders. "We anticipate that Kenya could serve in the future as a hub for supplying U.S.-made chemicals and plastics to other markets in Africa through this trade agreement," Ed Brzytwa, the director of international trade for the American Chemistry Council, wrote in an April 28 letter to the Office of the United States Trade Representative. The United States and Kenya are in the midst of trade negotiations and the Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has made clear he is eager to strike a deal. But the behind-the-scenes lobbying by the petroleum companies has spread concern among environmental groups in Kenya and beyond that have been working to reduce both plastic use and waste. Kenya, like many countries, has wrestled with the proliferation of plastic. It passed a stringent law against plastic bags in 2017, and last year was one of many nations around the world that signed on to a global agreement to stop importing plastic waste -- a pact strongly opposed by the chemical industry. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Mistakenly Approved a Widely Used Malware To Run on Macs Posted: 31 Aug 2020 11:42 AM PDT Apple has some of the strictest rules to prevent malicious software from landing in its app store, even if on occasion a bad app slips through the net. But last year Apple took its toughest approach yet by requiring developers to submit their apps for security checks in order to run on millions of Macs unhindered. From a report: The process, which Apple calls "notarization," scans an app for security issues and malicious content. If approved, the Mac's in-built security screening software, Gatekeeper, allows the app to run. Apps that don't pass the security sniff test are denied, and are blocked from running. But security researchers say they have found the first Mac malware inadvertently notarized by Apple. Peter Dantini, working with Patrick Wardle, a well-known Mac security researcher, found a malware campaign disguised as an Adobe Flash installer. These campaigns are common and have been around for years -- even if Flash is rarely used these days -- and most run unnotarized code, which Macs block immediately when opened. But Dantini and Wardle found that one malicious Flash installer had code notarized by Apple and would run on Macs. Wardle confirmed that Apple had approved code used by the popular Shlayer malware, which security firm Kaspersky said is the "most common threat" that Macs faced in 2019. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CenturyLink Outage Led To a 3.5% Drop in Global Web Traffic Posted: 31 Aug 2020 10:24 AM PDT US internet service provider CenturyLink has suffered a major technical outage on Sunday after a misconfiguration in one of its data centers created havoc all over the internet. From a report Due to the technical nature of the outage -- involving both firewall and BGP routing -- the error spread outward from CenturyLink's network and also impacted other internet service providers, ending up causing connectivity problems for many more other companies. The list of tech giants who had services go down today because of the CenturyLink outage includes big names like Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft (Xbox Live), EA, Blizzard, Steam, Discord, Reddit, Hulu, Duo Security, Imperva, NameCheap, OpenDNS, and many more. Cloudflare, which was also severely impacted today, said CenturyLink's outward-propagating issue led to a 3.5% drop in global internet traffic, which would make this one of the biggest internet outages ever recorded. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Says App Store Appeals Process is Now Live, So Developers Can Start Challenging Decisions Posted: 31 Aug 2020 09:45 AM PDT Apple on Monday announced that its new App Store appeals process, first revealed at WWDC in June, is now live, meaning developers can challenge Apple over whether their app is in fact violating one of its guidelines. In addition to that, Apple says developers can also suggest changes to the App Store guidelines through a form submission on its online developer portal. From a report "For apps that are already on the App Store, bug fixes will no longer be delayed over guideline violations except for those related to legal issues. You'll instead be able to address guideline violations in your next submission," reads a note posted to Apple's developer website. "And now, in addition to appealing decisions about whether an app violates guidelines, you can suggest changes to the guidelines." These changes were introduced at WWDC on the heels of a rather public feud with software maker Basecamp, the creator of a new email service called Hey. Basecamp openly challenged Apple over whether it could distribute an iOS companion app to its email service without including in-app sign-up options, as Hey costs $99 a year and Basecamp felt it unnecessary to give Apple its standard 30 percent cut of that revenue (although Apple does only take 15 percent of in-app subscription revenue after one year of service). Apple, in response, held up the company's bug fixes and update capability. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China Again Boosts Research and Development Spending By More Than 10% Posted: 31 Aug 2020 09:05 AM PDT China continued its yearslong run of double-digit percentage increases in spending on R&D in 2019, but the nation is likely to fall short of a long-standing goal of increasing R&D expenditures to 2.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) by this year. From a report: But not hitting the target "should not be considered a failure, as China has been increasing its R&D expenditure over the past several decades at a rate higher than GDP growth," says Cao Cong, a science policy specialist at the University of Nottingham's Ningbo, China, campus. Total public and private science and technology expenditures in 2019 rose 12.5% over the previous year to 2.21 trillion Chinese yuan ($322 billion), the National Bureau of Statistics reported yesterday. Spending on basic research accounted for 6% of the total; applied research, 11.3%; and development, 82.7%. The spending amounted to 2.23% of GDP, an increase of 0.09 percentage points from the previous year. The 2.5% of GDP by 2020 goal was spelled out in China's most recent Five Year Plan and in a 15-year Medium- and Long-Term Program for Science and Technology Development. For comparison, the United States spent 2.83% of GDP on R&D in 2018, according to the 5 August Main Science and Technology Indicators of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), which covers 37 of the world's largest national economies. OECD as a whole spent 2.38% of GDP on R&D in 2018. Israel and South Korea spent 4.9% and 4.5% of GDP, respectively, in 2018. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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