An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Uber is destroying thousands of electric bikes and scooters, after selling its Jump business to Lime. Videos of its red bikes being crushed at a recycling centre were shared on social media, angering cycling advocates. Uber said it had decided to destroy thousands of its older-model vehicles due to maintenance, liability and safety concerns. In 2018, Uber said it would focus more on its electric bike and scooter business than on cars. But on May 7 this year, Uber announced a deal that saw Lime take over the Jump bike business. As part of the deal, Uber invested $170 million in Lime, while Lime acquired "tens of thousands" of Uber's Jump bikes -- and the associated intellectual property. Lime's chief executive Wayne Ting has said he prefers the design of Uber's bikes and will deploy more of them in the future. However, there were also "tens of thousands" of older-model bikes that Lime did not inherit as part of the deal. Videos shared on Twitter show the bikes arriving at a recycling facility in North Carolina to be destroyed. "We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes," Uber said in a statement. "But given many significant issues -- including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment -- we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them." The decision to destroy these bikes comes amid a national bike shortage. "We have never seen anything like this in a very long time," said Dave Nghiem at College Park Bicycles in College Park, MD. "We have never locked down half the planet like this so they can't do their jobs to build bikes. So, no one has been building bikes for three months. If no one is building bikes, there's no bikes on the continent," said Dave. Kurt of Bike Share Museum seems to think it is all about killing Jump, "destroying every bike they can, and slowly taking Lime down in the process." He adds: "We also can't emphasize enough how disgusting it is for UBER to scrap 20,000 bicycles in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic where bicycles have literally become an object of survival. Heavy as they are, these could be transportation for the many who have been brought to financial ruin during COVID-19."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In response to a cyberattack on the German Parliament in 2015, Germany wants to impose a European travel ban and asset freeze on those responsible. Reuters reports: Russia has rejected allegations that its military intelligence was behind the cyber attack after media reported that data had been stolen, including emails from Chancellor Angela Merkel's constituency office. State Secretary Miguel Berger told the ambassador that the government would call for the EU's cyber sanctions mechanism to be invoked against those responsible for the attack, said the German ministry in a statement. The EU last year approved a system to freeze hackers' assets in the bloc and banning them from entry. Federal prosecutors issued an arrest warrant on May 5 for Russian national Dmitry Badin over the attack and the German ministry said there was credible evidence that he was part of the GRU military intelligence service at the time of the attack. "The arrest warrant against Mr Badin was issued on the basis of the strong suspicion that the accused conspired with other hitherto anonymous persons to carry out intelligence activities against Germany on behalf of the secret service of a foreign power," said the ministry. In a statement on Wednesday, the Russian embassy in Berlin said German officials so far had not been able to present facts to underpin the accusations against Moscow.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday sued the facial recognition start-up Clearview AI (alternative source), which claims to have helped hundreds of law enforcement agencies use online photos to solve crimes, accusing the company of "unlawful, privacy-destroying surveillance activities." The New York Times reports: In a suit filed in Illinois, the A.C.L.U. said that Clearview violated a state law that forbids companies from using a resident's fingerprints or face scans without consent. Under the law, residents have the right to sue companies for up to $5,000 per privacy violation. "The bottom line is that, if left unchecked, Clearview's product is going to end privacy as we know it," said Nathan Freed Wessler, a lawyer at the A.C.L.U., "and we're taking the company to court to prevent that from happening." The suit, filed in the Circuit Court of Cook County, adds to the growing backlash against Clearview since January, when The New York Times reported that the company had amassed a database of more than three billion photos across the internet, including from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Venmo. This trove of photos enables anyone with the Clearview app to match a person to their online photos and find links back to the sites where the images originated. People in New York and Vermont have also filed suits in against the company in recent months, and the state attorneys general of Vermont and New Jersey have ordered Clearview to stop collecting residents' photos. According to the A.C.L.U. suit, "Clearview has set out to do what many companies have intentionally avoided out of ethical concerns: create a mass database of billions of face prints of people, including millions of Illinoisans, entirely unbeknownst to those people, and offer paid access to that database to private and governmental actors worldwide." The company's business model, the complaint said, "appears to embody the nightmare scenario" of a "private company capturing untold quantities of biometric data for purposes of surveillance and tracking without notice to the individuals affected, much less their consent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has been hit by a lawsuit filed by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, alleging the search giant deceived its users in order to collect location data from their phones. From a report: The company generates the vast majority of its revenue through its massive advertising operation, which is buttressed by personal information Google collects when people use its products. But users were "lulled into a false sense of security" because Google led users to believe they disabled settings for location data gathering, when they were still turned on, Brnovich wrote on Twitter. "Google collects detailed information about its users, including their physical locations, to target users for advertising," Brnovich wrote. "Often, this is done without the users' consent or knowledge." The lawsuit seeks damages, but the amount is unclear. Brnovich's office didn't respond to a request for comment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today launched Android Studio 4.0, the latest version of its integrated development environment (IDE). Android Studio 4.0 is supposed to help developers "code smarter, build faster, and design apps." Version 4.0 includes a new Motion Editor, a Build Analyzer, and Java 8 language APIs. Google also overhauled the CPU Profiler user interface and improved the Layout Inspector. [In the article] you'll find Android Studio 4.0 features broken down by category: design, develop, and build. The new version also includes the usual performance improvements and bug fixes on top of the new features (full release notes). Google didn't share its plans for the next version. Normally we'd get hints at the company's I/O developer conference, but 2020 is a weird year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube sparked widespread speculation about its moderation policies this week after it admitted to accidentally deleting comments that contained phrases critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Today, the company told The Verge that the issue was not the result of outside interference -- an explanation for the error floated by many. The Verge reports: The phrases that triggered automatic deletion included "communist bandit" and "50-cent party," a slang term for internet users paid to defend the CCP. Some speculated that an outside group, perhaps connected to the CCP, manipulated YouTube's automated filters by repeatedly reporting these phrases, causing the algorithm to tag them as offensive. Speaking to The Verge, YouTube spokesperson Alex Joseph denied that this happened and said that, contrary to popular belief, YouTube never removes comments only on the basis of user reports. "This was not the result of outside interference, and we only remove content when our enforcement system determines it violates our Community Guidelines, not solely because it's flagged by users," said Joseph. "This was an error with our enforcement systems and we have rolled out a fix."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. National Security Agency on Thursday warned government partners and private companies about a Russian hacking operation that uses a special intrusion technique to target operating systems often used by industrial firms to manage computer infrastructure. Reuters reports: "This is a vulnerability that is being actively exploited, that's why we're bringing this notification out," said Doug Cress, chief of the cybersecurity collaboration center and directorate at NSA. "We really want... the broader cybersecurity community to take this seriously." Cress declined to discuss which business sectors had been most affected, how many organizations were compromised using the Russian technique, or whether the cyber espionage operation targeted a specific geographic region. The NSA said the hacking activity was tied directly to a specific unit within Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate, also known as the GRU, named the Main Center for Special Technologies. The cybersecurity research community refers to this same hacking group as "Sandworm," and has previously connected it to disruptive cyberattacks against Ukrainian electric production facilities. A security alert published by the NSA on Thursday explains how hackers with GRU, Russia's military intelligence, are leveraging a software vulnerability in Exim, a mail transfer agent common on Unix-based operating systems, such as Linux. The vulnerability was patched last year, but some users have not updated their systems to close the security gap.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Believers of 5G conspiracy theories have apparently been buying a $350 anti-5G USB key that -- not surprisingly -- appears to just be a regular USB stick with only 128MB of storage. As noted by the BBC today, the "5GBioShield" USB stick "was recommended by a member of Glastonbury Town Council's 5G Advisory Committee, which has called for an inquiry into 5G." The company that sells 5GBioShield claims it "is the result of the most advanced technology currently available for balancing and prevention of the devastating effects caused by non-natural electric waves, particularly (but not limited to) 5G, for all biological life forms." The product's website charges 283 British pounds for a single 5GBioShield, which converts to nearly $350. That's what it costs to get "protection for your home and family, thanks to the wearable holographic nano-layer catalyser, which can be worn or placed near to a smartphone or any other electrical, radiation or EMF emitting device." The USB stick apparently doesn't need to be plugged in to anything to work its magic. "It is always ON and working -- that's why we used quantum nano-layer technology," the company says in an FAQ. But what does the 5GBioShield actually consist of? The BBC pointed to a recent teardown by security company Pen Test Partners, which found that the device is just a USB stick with 128MB of storage. The company wrote: "When plugged in to our test machine we may have missed the bubble of 'quantum holographic catalyzer technology' appearing. The stick comes loaded with a 25 page PDF version of the material from 5GBioShield's website. It included a Q&A of distances for the "bubble" and how to know if it is working. It's an "always on" system apparently, is always working, powered or not, so no visual checks needed. A review of the stick's properties revealed nothing more than what you'd expect from a regular 128MB USB key. We weren't even sure that 128s are still in production!" The report says that the London Trading Standards has launched a probe to investigate this product. How will the company defend itself? BioShield Distribution Director Anna Grochowalska told the BBC, "We are in possession of a great deal of technical information, with plenty of back-up historical research," and "we are not authorized to fully disclose all this sensitive information to third parties, for obvious reasons."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has doubled the maximum amount of RAM available in the Raspberry Pi 4 to 8GB with a new device it's selling for $75. An anonymous reader writes: To take advantage of the RAM increase, the foundation is also releasing a new 64-bit version of its operating system in early beta. The new Raspberry Pi 4 is otherwise identical to the device that was announced in June last year, meaning it has the same ARM-based CPU, and HDMI, USB 3, and Ethernet ports. 8GB is a lot of RAM considering the Raspberry Pi's size and price. It's the same as many flagship smartphones released this year, and enough for an entry-level gaming PC. The Raspberry Pi Foundation says the additional memory should be useful for compiling large pieces of software, running heavy server workloads, or maybe just having more browser tabs open at once. We're sure that it won't take long for the community to come up with many interesting uses.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS: Because force-quitting apps and restarting or shutting down devices are necessary only to fix unanticipated problems, there are two notable downsides to engaging in such behavior as a matter of habit: reduced battery life and wasted time. Why would these behaviors reduce battery life? Remember, iOS is a modern operating system that's built on top of Apple's proprietary hardware. Apple has put a great deal of effort into ensuring that iOS knows the best ways to manage the limited hardware resources within your iPhone or iPad. No one, possibly short of an iOS systems engineer armed with Apple's internal diagnostic and debugging tools, would be able to outguess iOS itself on issues like memory usage, power draw, and CPU throttling. When you invoke the App Switcher in iOS, you can swipe right to see all the apps you've used, possibly since you got your device. (The very first app in my iPhone 11 Pro's App Switcher is Apple's Tips, which I think came up automatically when I turned the iPhone on last year and hasn't been touched since. It's difficult to count apps in the App Switcher, but I probably have at least a hundred in there.) As the number of apps in the App Switcher should indicate, those apps are not necessarily running -- they merely have run at some point in the past. They're much more like the contents of the Mac's Apple > Recent Items menu. In normal usage, iOS devotes the lion's share of CPU and memory resources to the app that you're using. That's sensible -- the performance of that app is paramount. However, the next few apps in the App Switcher may also be consuming some CPU and memory resources. That's because iOS correctly assumes that you're most likely to return to them, and it wants to give you the best experience when you do. The screen shouldn't have to redraw multiple times, Internet-loaded content shouldn't have to update, and so on. [...]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday designed to limit the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for the content users post on their platforms. Axios reports: "Currently, social media giants like Twitter received unprecedented viability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform, which they are not," Trump said in the Oval Office. "We are fed up with it. It is unfair, and it's been very unfair." The order comes after the president escalated his attacks against Big Tech in recent days -- specifically Twitter, which fact-checked him for the first time this week over an unsubstantiated claim that mail-in voting drives voter fraud. The order focuses on a portion of the Communications Decency Act known as Section 230, which grants broad liability protections to tech platforms from civil suits when it comes to what users post, and would press regulators to create new rules aimed at pulling back that shield, Trump said at the White House Thursday. It also asks the Federal Trade Commission to report on acts of political bias collected by the White House, he added. Attorney General Bill Barr said that the administration is preparing legislation as well. The Trump administration has long mulled reining in Section 230, and the Justice Department convened a workshop earlier this year on the topic. Trump said he expects the executive order to draw a lawsuit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon plans to offer permanent jobs to about 70% of the U.S. workforce it has hired temporarily to meet consumer demand during the coronavirus pandemic, the company told Reuters on Thursday. From a report: The world's largest online retailer will begin telling 125,000 warehouse employees in June that they can keep their roles longer-term. The remaining 50,000 workers it has brought on will stay on seasonal contracts that last up to 11 months, a company spokeswoman said. The decision is a sign that Amazon's sales have increased sufficiently to justify an expanded workforce for order fulfillment, even as government lockdowns ease and rivals open their retail stores for pickup. Amazon started the hiring spree in March with a blog post appealing to workers laid off by restaurants and other shuttered businesses, promising employment "until things return to normal and their past employer is able to bring them back."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese scientists in recent days said they had ruled out both a laboratory and an animal market in the city of Wuhan as possible origins of the coronavirus pandemic, in their most detailed pushback to date against allegations from U.S. officials and others over what might have sparked it. From a report: The director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, at the center of allegations around a potential laboratory accident, Wang Yanyi, over the weekend told China Central Television that the coronavirus was significantly different from any live pathogen that has been studied at the institute and that there therefore was no chance it could have leaked from there. Separately, China's top epidemiologist said Tuesday that testing of samples from a Wuhan food market, initially suspected as a path for the virus's spread to humans, failed to show links between animals being sold there and the pathogen. Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in comments carried in Chinese state media, "It now turns out that the market is one of the victims." The comments, aimed at countering what Beijing perceives as efforts from top U.S. officials to focus solely on China, are unlikely to pacify critics. The Chinese officials didn't address fundamental issues, such as widespread evidence that China initially covered up the extent of the outbreak. In their calls for more global scientific collaboration to track the source of the virus, they also stopped short of endorsing widespread scientific belief that the coronavirus originated in China.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jon Hamilton, reporting for NPR: Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared. The evidence comes from tests that detect antibodies to the coronavirus in a person's blood rather than the virus itself. The tests are finding large numbers of people in the U.S. who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous. "The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%," says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. That's in contrast with death rates of 5% or more based on calculations that included only people who got sick enough to be diagnosed with tests that detect the presence of virus in a person's body. And the revised estimates support an early prediction by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force. In an editorial published in late March in The New England Journal of Medicine, Fauci and colleagues wrote that the case fatality rate for COVID-19 "may be considerably less than 1%." But even a virus with a fatality rate less than 1% presents a formidable threat, Rivers says. "That is many times more deadly than seasonal influenza," she says. The new evidence is coming from places such as Indiana, which completed the first phase of a massive testing effort early in May. Further reading: Antibody Tests and Accuracy Issues Leave Some Americans With More Questions Than Answers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A global natural experiment examines the time warp of life under quarantine. From a report: In April Jenny Rappaport sat down to inspect her calendar because she could not tell how many days had passed since New Jersey's stay-at-home order took effect. Before COVID-19, her life had structure and a pace, and she knew the day of the week without giving it a second thought. The pandemic has changed all of that. Several research groups have taken advantage of this unplanned natural experiment to gauge the psychological impacts of time distortions and, in turn, their effects on mental health. Psychologists know that time sense links to well-being. Its perceived slower passage can represent signs of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Rappaport's feelings jibe with the findings of preliminary studies. Overall, people seem to be experiencing time more slowly, according to data that are beginning to be compiled. In a not yet peer-reviewed preprint paper, Sylvie Droit-Volet, a time perception researcher at the University of Clermont Auvergne in France, and her colleagues show that people there report the clock moving more slowly during the lockdown. The researchers also document feelings of sadness and boredom and tie them to the overall feeling of deceleration. "Their findings directly support the emotional connection with time perception," says Philip Gable of the University of Alabama. He is also using survey data to examine how people across the U.S. experience time during the pandemic. "It's a societal event that's going to have a profound psychological influence on us," Gable says, adding that the temporal shift is an integral part of our feelings about what is happening. He plans to collect data over the next nine months, but so far has found evidence that the everyday tempo now lags. Nearly 50 percent of people experienced time dragging during March, whereas about 24 percent perceived it to be speeding up.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bug bounty platform HackerOne announced today that it has paid out $100,000,000 in rewards to white-hat hackers around the world as of May 26, 2020. From a report: Since it started delivering vulnerability reports to its customers, HackerOne bug bounty hunters have found roughly 170,000 security vulnerabilities according to the company's CEO Marten Mickos. Over 700,000 ethical hackers are no using the bug bounty platform to get paid for security bugs in the products of more than 1,900 HackerOne customers. "It is impossible to know exactly how many cyber breaches have thereby been averted but we can estimate that it is thousands or perhaps over ten thousand," Mickos said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The hits came this week in rapid succession: A cyclone slammed into the Indian megacity of Kolkata, pounding rains breached two dams in the Midwestern United States, and on Thursday came warning that the Atlantic hurricane season could be severe. It all served as a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 325,000 people so far, is colliding with another global menace: a fast-heating planet that acutely threatens millions of people, especially the world's poor. From a report: Climate change makes extreme weather events more frequent and more intense. Now, because of the pandemic, they come at a time when national economies are crashing and ordinary people are stretched to their limits. Relief organizations working in eastern India and Bangladesh, for instance, say the lockdown had already forced people to rely on food aid by the time the storm, Cyclone Amphan, hit. Then, the high winds and heavy rains ruined newly sown crops that were meant to feed communities through next season. "People have nothing to fall back on," Pankaj Anand, a director at Oxfam India, said in a statement Thursday. The worst may be yet to come. Several other climate hazards are looming, as the coronavirus unspools its long tail around the world. They include the prospect of heat waves in Europe and South Asia, wildfires from the western United States to Europe to Australia, and water scarcity in South America and Southern Africa, where a persistent drought is already deepening hunger. And then there's the locusts. Locusts. Abnormally heavy rains last year, which scientists say were made more likely by the long-term warming of the Indian Ocean, a hallmark of climate change, have exacerbated a locust infestation across eastern Africa. Higher temperatures make it more inviting for locusts to spread to places where the climate wasn't as suitable before -- and in turn, destroy vast swaths of farmland and pasture for some of the poorest people on the planet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: AI for news production is one of the areas that has drawn contrasting opinions. On one hand, it might help media houses produce more news in a better format with minimal effort, on the other, it might take away the human element of journalism or take people out of jobs. In 2018, an AI anchor developed by China's Xinhua news agency made its debut. Earlier this month, the agency released an improved version that mimics human voices and gestures. There's been advancement in AI with text-based news with algorithms writing great headlines. China's search giant Baidu has developed a new AI model called Vidpress that brings video and text together by creating a clip based on articles. The company has currently deployed Vidpress on its short videos app Haokan and only works with Mandarin language. It claims that the AI algorithm can produce up to 1,000 videos per day, which is a whole lot more than the 300-500 its human editors are currently putting out. Vidpress can create a two-minute 720p video in two and a half minutes, while human editors take an average of 15 minutes to do that task. To train this model, Baidu used thousands of articles online to understand context of a news story. Additionally, the company had to train AI models for voice and video generation separately. However, in the final step, the algorithm syncs both streams for a smooth final video. When you feed the AI algorithm a URL, it automatically fetches all related articles from the internet and creates a summary.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stack Overflow has released the results of its 2020 survey of nearly 65,000 developers, revealing their favorite and most dreaded programming languages, tools and frameworks. From a news writeup: The survey shows that TypeScript, Microsoft's superset of the widely-used JavaScript programming language, has overtaken Python as the second most beloved programming language behind Rust. This year 86% of respondents say they are keen to use Rust, while 67.1% want to use TypeScript, and 66.7% want to use Python. Stack Overflow attributes TypeScript's rising popularity to Microsoft's embrace of open source software as well as the existence of larger and more complex JavaScript and Node.js codebases. Rust has been the most loved programming language for five years running, despite few developers having experience with it. This year, just 5.1% developers report having used Rust, compared with the 68% who use JavaScript, which is the most commonly used language. [...] Meanwhile, the top 10 most dreaded programming languages are VBA, Objective-C, Perl, Assembly, C, PHP, Ruby, C++, Java and R. The report also looks at average salaries of each developer role. In the US, engineering managers attract the highest salary at $152,000 per year, followed by site reliability engineers who earn $140,000 per year. Salaries across the globe for these roles are lower, at $92,000 for an engineering manager and $80,000 for a site reliability engineer. Other high-paying roles with an average salary of at least $115,000 in the US include data scientist and machine learning specialist, DevOps specialist, engineer, back-end developer, embedded application developers, mobile developers, scientist, desktop application developer, and educator.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he does not think social networks should be fact-checking what politicians post. From a report: Zuckerberg's comment came after CNBC asked him for thoughts on Twitter's decision to start fact-checking the tweets of President Donald Trump. Twitter's move came on Tuesday after Trump tweeted that mail-in ballots would be "substantially fraudulent." Earlier Tuesday, Twitter declined to censor or warn users after Trump tweeted baseless claims that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough should be investigated for the death of his former staffer. "I don't think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth," Zuckerberg said. "Political speech is one of the most sensitive parts in a democracy, and people should be able to see what politicians say."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.