one app developer revealed to Congress that it — just like WordPress — had been forced to monetize a largely free app. That developer testified that Apple had demanded in-app purchases (IAP), even though Apple had approved its app without them two years earlier — and that when the dev dared send an email to customers notifying them of the change, Apple threatened to remove the app and blocked all updates.
That developer was ProtonMail, makers of an encrypted email app, and CEO Andy Yen had some fiery words for Apple in an interview with The Verge this week.
We’ve known for months that WordPress and Hey weren’t alone in being strong-armed by the most valuable company in the world, ever since Stratechery’s Ben Thompson reported that 21 different app developers quietly told him they’d been pushed to retroactively add IAP in the wake of those two controversies. But until now, we hadn’t heard of many devs willing to publicly admit it. They were scared.
And they’re still scared, says Yen. Even though Apple changed its rules on September 11th to exempt “free apps acting as a stand-alone companion to a paid web based tool” from the IAP requirement — Apple explicitly said email apps are exempt — ProtonMail still hasn’t removed its own in-app purchases because it fears retaliation from Apple, he says.
He claims other developers feel the same way: “There’s a lot of fear in the space right now; people are completely petrified to say anything.”
He might know. ProtonMail is one of the founding partners of the Coalition for App Fairness, a group that also includes Epic Games, Spotify, Tile, Match, and others who banded together to protest Apple’s rules after having those rules used against them. It’s a group that tried to pull together as many developers as it could to form a united front, but some weren’t as ready to risk Apple’s wrath.
That’s clearly not the case for Yen, though — in our interview, he compares Apple’s tactics to a Mafia protection racket.
“For the first two years we were in the App Store, that was fine, no issues there,” he says. (They’d launched on iOS in 2016.) “But a common practice we see … as you start getting significant uptake in uploads and downloads, they start looking at your situation more carefully, and then as any good Mafia extortion goes, they come to shake you down for some money.”
“We didn’t offer a paid version in the App Store, it was free to download … it wasn’t like Epic where you had an alternative payment option, you couldn’t pay at all,” he relates.
Yen says Apple’s demand came suddenly in 2018. “Out of the blue, one day they said you have to add in-app purchase to stay in the App Store,” he says. “They stumbled upon something in the app that mentioned there were paid plans, they went to the website and saw there was a subscription you could purchase, and then turned around and demanded we add IAP.”
“There’s nothing you can say to that. They are judge, jury, and executioner on their platform, and you can take it or leave it. You can’t get any sort of fair hearing to determine whether it’s justifiable or not justifiable, anything they say goes.”
This is what monopolies will do for you. I have been talking about how big tech is involved in this since 2019 and it’s good to see it finally really coming out of the woodwork
There are few things as revealing as a person’s search history, and police typically need a warrant on a known suspect to demand that sensitive information. But a recently unsealed court document found that investigators can request such data in reverse order by asking Google to disclose everyone who searched a keyword rather than for information on a known suspect.
In August, police arrested Michael Williams, an associate of singer and accused sex offender R. Kelly, for allegedly setting fire to a witness’ car in Florida. Investigators linked Williams to the arson, as well as witness tampering, after sending a search warrant to Google that requested information on “users who had searched the address of the residence close in time to the arson.”
The July court filing was unsealed on Tuesday. Detroit News reporter Robert Snell tweeted about the filing after it was unsealed.
Court documents showed that Google provided the IP addresses of people who searched for the arson victim’s address, which investigators tied to a phone number belonging to Williams. Police then used the phone number records to pinpoint the location of Williams’ device near the arson, according to court documents.
The original warrant sent to Google is still sealed, but the report provides another example of a growing trend of data requests to the search engine giant in which investigators demand data on a large group of users rather than a specific request on a single suspect.
“This ‘keyword warrant’ evades the Fourth Amendment checks on police surveillance,” said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “When a court authorizes a data dump of every person who searched for a specific term or address, it’s likely unconstitutional.”
The keyword warrants are similar to geofence warrants, in which police make requests to Google for data on all devices logged in at a specific area and time. Google received 15 times more geofence warrant requests in 2018 compared with 2017, and five times more in 2019 than 2018. The rise in reverse requests from police have troubled Google staffers, according to internal emails.
Facebook is using its vast legal muscle to silence one of its most prominent critics.
The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group established last month in response to the tech giant’s failure to get its actual Oversight Board up and running before the presidential election, was forced offline on Wednesday night after Facebook wrote to the internet service provider demanding the group’s website — realfacebookoversight.org — be taken offline.
The group is made up of dozens of prominent academics, activists, lawyers, and journalists whose goal is to hold Facebook accountable in the run-up to the election next month. Facebook’s own Oversight Board, which was announced 13 months ago, will not meet for the first time until later this month, and won’t consider any issues related to the election.
In a letter sent to one of the founders of the RFOB, journalist Carole Cadwalladr, the ISP SupportNation said the website was being taken offline after Facebook complained that the site was involved in “phishing.”
[…]
It’s unclear what evidence Facebook presented to support its claim that RFOB was operating a phishing website.
Typically, ISPs have a dispute resolution process in place that allows the website operator to challenge the allegations. This process can normally take months and ultimately result in a court order being obtained to take a site offline. In this case, there was no warning given.
[…]
Facebook had previously forced another website the group set up — realfacebookoversight.com — offline over alleged copyright infringement.
Facebook denied that it was responsible for the website being taken offline. “This website was automatically flagged by a vendor because it contained the word “facebook” in the domain and action was taken without consulting with us,” a spokesperson told VICE News.
But, an email from the ISP, SupportNation, sent to the Real Facebook Oversight Board and viewed by VICE News, links to a message from the original complainant sent in the early hours of Friday morning after the website was taken offline.
The message tells SupportNation that “notices of trademark abuse/trademark infringement were sent out in error.” The message comes from what appears to be a Facebook email address.
Facebook said that while normally the ISP would confirm requests like this with Facebook first but “in this instance that did not happen.” A spokesperson added that the message to SupportNation was sent by “a generic email address used by the vendor.”
John Taylor, a spokesperson for Facebook’s actual Oversight Board told VICE News that the takedown wasn’t something it was “aware of or had any involvement in.” Taylor added that the group doesn’t “think this is a constructive approach. We continue to welcome these efforts and contributions to the debate.”
On Wednesday night, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone responded to Cadwalladr’s post, saying: “Your fake thing that accuses us of fake things was caught in our thing to prevent fake things.”
Stone did not immediately respond to requests for comment to clarify what he meant by “fake things” in these instances.
“The most extraordinary thing about this whole affair is how it’s exposed the total Trumpification of Facebook’s corporate comms,” Cadwalladr told VICE News. “There is a brazen shamelessness at work here. It’s not just that a company that has used ‘free speech’ as a protective cloak would go after our ISP and drive us off the internet but that its official spokesman responds to such criticism by attacking and trolling journalists.”
TouchFree is a software application that runs on an interactive kiosk or advertising totem. It detects a user’s hand in mid-air and converts it to an on-screen cursor.
Easy to integrate, deploy, and use
• Runs invisibly on top of existing user interfaces
• Add touchless interaction without writing a single line of code
• Familiar touchscreen-style interactions
How users interact
• A user’s hand is detected, and shown as a cursor displayed on the screen
• Users can select items without touching the screen using a simple “air push” motion, similar to tapping a screen but in mid-air.
NVIDIA Research has invented a way to use AI to dramatically reduce video call bandwidth while simultaneously improving quality.
What the researchers have achieved has remarkable results: by replacing the traditional h.264 video codec with a neural network, they have managed to reduce the required bandwidth for a video call by an order of magnitude. In one example, the required data rate fell from 97.28 KB/frame to a measly 0.1165 KB/frame – a reduction to 0.1% of required bandwidth.
The mechanism behind AI-assisted video conferencing is breathtakingly simple. The technology works by replacing traditional full video frames with neural data. Typically, video calls work by sending h.264 encoded frames to the recipient, and those frames are extremely data-heavy. With AI-assisted video calls, first, the sender sends a reference image of the caller. Then, instead of sending a stream of pixel-packed images, it sends specific reference points on the image around the eyes, nose, and mouth.
A generative adversarial network (or GAN, a type of neural network) on the receiver side then uses the reference image combined with the keypoints to reconstruct subsequent images. Because the keypoints are so much smaller than full pixel images, much less data is sent and therefore an internet connection can be much slower but still provide a clear and functional video chat.
In the researchers’ initial example, they show that a fast internet connection results in pretty much the same quality of stream using both the traditional method and the new neural network method. But what’s most impressive is their subsequent examples, where internet speeds show a considerable degradation of quality using the traditional method, while the neural network is able to produce extremely clear and artifact-free video feeds.
The neural network can work even when the subject is wearing a mask, glasses, headphones, or a hat.
With this technology, more people can enjoy a greater number of features all while using monumentally less data.
But the technology use cases don’t stop there: because the neural network is using reference data instead of the full stream, the technology will allow someone to even change the camera angle to appear like they are looking directly at the screen even if they are not. Called “Free View,” this would allow someone who has a separate camera off-screen to seemingly keep eye contact with those on a video call.
NVIDIA can also use this same method for character animations. Using different keypoints from the original feed, they can add clothing, hair, or even animate video game characters.
Using this kind of neural network will have huge implications for the modern workforce that will not only serve to relieve strain on networks, but also give users more freedom when working remotely. However, because of the way this technology works, there will almost certainly be questions on how it can be deployed and lead to possible issues with “deep fakes” that become more believable and harder to detect.
The “Baby Boom” is finally here. After six years of development, Boom Supersonic is unveiling its XB-1 demonstrator. The craft is the company’s first supersonic plane, designed to prove the technology ahead of a full-size airliner, Overture.
[…]
As we reported on back in August, Boom is looking to build the first supersonic civilian airliner for half a century. The first step on that road is the construction of a demonstrator plane that can be used to test the various components and designs a supersonic airliner would need. Say hello to the single-seater XB-1, tail number N990XB.
The XB-1’s carbon-composite frame (for added heat-resistance) measures 71 feet long, with a delta wing shake that, the company says, has been optimized for maximum efficiency. It’s powered by a trio of General Electric J85-15 engines, rated to provide more than 12,000 pounds of thrust. The J85 is a warhorse engine that has been powering craft since the 1950s, including the supersonic T-38 Talon training plane. Boom says that the engine has been tweaked to improve its efficiency, important given the company’s focus on a carbon-neutral test program.
NATHAN LEACH-PROFFER
Boom has looked to lean on new manufacturing methods to reduce costs and dramatically shrink its production time. It leaned heavily on 3D-printing, both for prototyping and to make parts for the XB-1 itself. Boom worked with both Stratasys and Velo 3D to produce prototypes, parts and tooling for the process and the craft itself. Mike Jageman, manufacturing head, said that several parts were built this way “right here, in the hangar.”
One other big technical innovation involves abandoning one of Concorde’s most famous features, its drooping nose. Rather than employ a system like that, XB-1 uses a high-resolution video camera in the nose to help pilots navigate the tricky landing. The company says that the result is to offer a “virtual window through the nose,” although we’ll have to wait for testing to see if that’s a fair claim.
NATHAN LEACH-PROFFER
Naturally, the real work begins now, ensuring that XB-1 is ready to begin test flights in the Mojave Desert next year, everything-else-going-on permitting. As founder Blake Scholl says, XB-1 is “an important milestone towards the development of our commercial liner, Overture.” The company expects the first manufacturing facility to be built by 2022, and the first Overture to be completed by 2025. It’s a very ambitious goal, especially given that the company hopes to have the first passenger flight in the air by 2029.
The UK’s privacy watchdog has wrapped up its probe into Cambridge Analytica, saying it found no hard evidence to support claims the controversial biz used data scrapped from people’s Facebook profiles to influence the Brexit referendum nor the US 2016 presidential election. There was no clear evidence of Russian involvement, either.
However, the UK’s privacy watchdog acts in the interests of the UK and so it may be in their best interest to say: nothing to see here, carry on please…
In a letter [PDF] this month to Julian Knight – chairman of Parliament’s Digital, Culture and Media and Sport Select Committee – the Information Commissioner’s Office detailed the findings of its investigation, having gone through 700TB and more than 300,000 documents seized from the now-defunct company.
Crucially, the watchdog said Cambridge Analytica pretty much dealt with information and tools that anyone could have purchased or used if they had the right budget and know-how: there were no special techniques nor hacking. Its raison d’etre – profiling voters to target them with influential ads – was achieved by tapping into Facebook’s highly problematic Graph API at the time, via a third-party quiz app people were encouraged to use, and downloading data from their profile pages and their friends’ pages.
Facebook subsequently dynamited its overly leaky API – the real scandal here – to end any further such slurpage, was fined half a million quid by the ICO, and ordered to cough up $5bn by America’s consumer protection regulator, the FTC. If Cambridge Analytica achieved anything at all, it was blowing the lid off Facebook’s slipshod and cavalier approach to safeguarding netizens’ privacy.
Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham’s team characterized Cambridge Analytica, and its related outfit SCL Elections, as a bit of a smoke-and-mirrors operation that lacked the sort of game-changing insight it sold to clients, who were told they could use the database of Facebook addicts to micro-target particular key voters with specific advertising to swing their political opinion in one direction or another.
“In summary, we concluded that SCL/CA were purchasing significant volumes of commercially available personal data (at one estimate over 130 billion data points), in the main about millions of US voters, to combine it with the Facebook derived insight information they had obtained from an academic at Cambridge University, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, and elsewhere,” the ICO wrote. Kogan and his company Global Science Research (GSR) was tasked with harvesting 87 million Facebook users’ personal data from the aforementioned quiz app.
“In the main their models were also built from ‘off the shelf’ analytical tools and there was evidence that their own staff were concerned about some of the public statements the leadership of the company were making about their impact and influence.”
El Reg has heard on good authority from sources in British political circles that Cambridge Analytica’s advertised powers of online suggestion were rather overblown and in fact mostly useless. In the end, it was skewered by its own hype, accused of tangibly influencing the Brexit and presidential votes on behalf of political parties and campaigners using Facebook data. Yet, no evidence could be found supporting those claims.
On Brexit, the ICO reckoned Cambridge Analytica just had information on Americans from the social network:
It was suggested that some of the data was utilised for political campaigning associated with the Brexit Referendum. However, our view on review of the evidence is that the data from GSR could not have been used in the Brexit Referendum as the data shared with SCL/Cambridge Analytica by Dr Kogan related to US registered voters.
Cambridge Analytica did appear to do a limited amount of work for Leave.EU but this involved the analysis of UKIP membership data rather than data obtained from Facebook or GSR.
For what it’s worth, the ICO observed that a Canadian outfit called AggregateIQ, which was closely linked to Cambridge Analytica, was recruited by pro-Brexit campaigners to target adverts at British Facebook users.
And on the US elections, we’re told a database of voters was assembled from Facebook records, and that “targeted advertising was ultimately likely the final purpose of the data gathering but whether or which specific data from GSR was then used in any specific part of campaign has not been possible to determine from the digital evidence reviewed.”
And as for Russia: “We did not find any additional evidence of Russian involvement in our analysis of material contained in the SCL / CA servers we obtained,” the ICO stated, adding that this is kinda outside its remit and something for the UK’s National Crime Agency to probe.
Were Cambridge Analytica still around, we imagine some details of the report would be a little embarrassing. Alas, it shut down all operations (sort of) back in 2018.
Their models were also built from ‘off the shelf’ analytical tools and there was evidence that their own staff were concerned about some of the public statements the leadership of the company were making about their impact and influence
The ICO report noted how Cambridge Analytica was probably also less than honest with the sales pitches it made to both the Trump and Leave EU campaigns, overstating the amount of data it had collected.
“SCL’s own marketing material claimed they had ‘Over 5,000 data points per individual on 230 million adult Americans’,” the ICO noted. “However, based on what we found it appears that this may have been an exaggeration.”
The company was also taken to task for poor data practices that, even had the political marketing stuff not blown up in public, likely would have landed it in hot water with the ICO.
While Cambridge Analytica may be gone and the ICO investigation concluded, Denham also warned that the tools and techniques it claimed could tip elections are not going away, and are likely to be used in the very near future… and may even work this time.
“What is clear is that the use of digital campaign techniques are a permanent fixture of our elections and the wider democratic process and will only continue to grow in the future,” the commissioner wrote. “The COVID-19 pandemic is only likely to accelerate this process as political parties and campaigns seek to engage with voters in a safe and socially distanced way.”
In the chart here we see global transport emissions in 2018. This data is sourced from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Road travel accounts for three-quarters of transport emissions. Most of this comes from passenger vehicles – cars and buses – which contribute 45.1%. The other 29.4% comes from trucks carrying freight.
Since the entire transport sector accounts for 21% of total emissions, and road transport accounts for three-quarters of transport emissions, road transport accounts for 15% of total CO2 emissions.
Aviation – while it often gets the most attention in discussions on action against climate change – accounts for only 11.6% of transport emissions. It emits just under one billion tonnes of CO2 each year – around 2.5% of total global emissions [we look at the role that air travel plays in climate change in more detail in an upcoming article]. International shipping contributes a similar amount, at 10.6%.
Rail travel and freight emits very little – only 1% of transport emissions. Other transport – which is mainly the movement of materials such as water, oil, and gas via pipelines – is responsible for 2.2%.
Guardicore discovered a new attack vector on Comcast’s XR11 voice remote that would have allowed attackers to turn it into a listening device – potentially invading your privacy in your living room. Prior to its remediation by Comcast, the attack, dubbed WarezTheRemote, was a very real security threat: with more than 18 million units deployed across homes in the USA, the XR11 is one of the most widespread remote controls in existence.
WarezTheRemote used a man-in-the-middle attack to exploit remote’s RF communication with the set-top box and over-the-air firmware upgrades – by pushing a malicious firmware image back the remote, attackers could have used the remote to continuously record audio without user interaction.
The attack did not require physical contact with the targeted remote or any interaction from the victim – any hacker with a cheap RF transceiver could have used it to take over an XR11 remote. Using a 16dBi antenna, we were able to listen to conversations happening in a house from about 65 feet away. We believe this could have been amplified easily using better equipment.
We worked with Comcast’s security team after finding the vulnerability and they have released fixes that remediate the issues that made the attack possible.
You can download our full research paper for the technical details of the WarezTheRemote project. You’ll find much more information on the reverse-engineering process inside, as well as a more bits-and-bytes perspective on the vulnerability and the exploit.
The Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit, announced this week, is a single-board computer – like the Raspberry Pi – though geared towards machine learning rather than general computing. If you like the idea of simple AI projects running on a dedicated board, such as building your own mini self-driving car or an object-recognition system for your home, this one might be for you.
It runs Nvidia CUDA code and provides a Linux-based environment. At only $59 a pop, it’s pretty cheap and a nifty bit of hardware if you’re just dipping your toes in deep learning. As its name suggests, it has 2GB of RAM, plus four Arm Cortex-A57 CPU cores clocked at 1.43GHz and a 128-core Nvidia Maxwell GPU. There are other bits and pieces like gigabit Ethernet, HDMI output, a microSD slot for storage, USB interfaces, GPIO and UART pins, Wi-Fi depending on you region, and more.
“While today’s students and engineers are programming computers, in the near future they’ll be interacting with, and imparting AI to, robots,” said Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of Edge Computing at Nvidia. “The new Jetson Nano is the ultimate starter AI computer that allows hands-on learning and experimentation at an incredibly affordable price.”
Europe’s top court has delivered another slap-down to indiscriminate government mass surveillance regimes.
In a ruling today the CJEU has made it clear that national security concerns do not exclude EU Member States from the need to comply with general principles of EU law such as proportionality and respect for fundamental rights to privacy, data protection and freedom of expression.
However the court has also allowed for derogations, saying that a pressing national security threat can justify limited and temporary bulk data collection and retention — capped to ‘what is strictly necessary’.
While threats to public security or the need to combat serious crime may also allow for targeted retention of data provided it’s accompanied by ‘effective safeguards’ and reviewed by a court or independent authority.
#ECJ: Judgment in cases C-511/18 La Quadrature du Net, C-512/18 French Data Network, C-520/18 Ordre des barreaux francophones et germanophone and C-623/17 Privacy International pic.twitter.com/eB95ymLyCt
The reference to the CJEU joined a number of cases, including legal challenges brought by rights advocacy group Privacy International to bulk collection powers baked into the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act; a La Quadrature du Net (and others’) challenge to a 2015 French decree related to specialized intelligence services; and a challenge to Belgium’s 2016 law on collection and retention of comms data.
Civil rights campaigners had been eagerly awaiting today’s judgements from the Grand Chamber, following an opinion by an advisor to the court in January which implied certain EU Member States’ surveillance regimes were breaching the law.
At the time of writing key complainants had yet to issue a response.
Of course a government agency’s definition of how much data collection is ‘strictly necessary’ in a national security context (or, indeed, what constitutes an ‘effective safeguard’) may be rather different to the benchmark of civil rights advocacy groups — so it seems unlikely this ruling will be the last time the CJEU is asked to clarify where the legal limits of mass surveillance lie.
3) For instance it is huge that the Court says that while States have the possibility to order general retention of data in some exceptional cases, this decision “must be subject to effective review by a court or an independent administrative body WHOSE DECISION IS BINDING”…
Additionally, the judgement raises interesting questions over the UK’s chances of gaining a data protection adequacy agreement from the European Commission — as it leaves the EU in 2021 at the end of the brexit transition process this year — something it needs for digital data flows from the EU to continue uninterrupted as now.
The problem is the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) gives government agencies broad powers to intercept and retain digital communications — but here the CJEU is making it clear that such bulk powers must be the exception, not the statutory rule.
So, again, a battle over definitions could be looming…
[…]
Another interesting component of today’s CJEU judgement suggests that in EU states with indiscriminate mass surveillance regimes there could be grounds for overturning individual criminal convictions which are based on evidence obtained via such illegal surveillance.
On this, the court writes in a press release: “As EU law currently stands, it is for national law alone to determine the rules relating to the admissibility and assessment, in criminal proceedings against persons suspected of having committed serious criminal offences, of information and evidence obtained by the retention of data in breach of EU law. However, the Court specifies that the directive on privacy and electronic communications, interpreted in the light of the principle of effectiveness, requires national criminal courts to disregard information and evidence obtained by means of the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data in breach of EU law, in the context of such criminal proceedings, where those persons suspected of having committed criminal offences are not in a position to comment effectively on that information and evidence.”
Update: Privacy International has now responded to the CJEU judgements, saying the UK, French and Belgian surveillance regimes must be amended to be brought within EU law.
In a statement, legal director Caroline Wilson Palow said: “Today’s judgment reinforces the rule of law in the EU. In these turbulent times, it serves as a reminder that no government should be above the law. Democratic societies must place limits and controls on the surveillance powers of our police and intelligence agencies.
“While the Police and intelligence agencies play a very important role in keeping us safe, they must do so in line with certain safeguards to prevent abuses of their very considerable power. They should focus on providing us with effective, targeted surveillance systems that protect both our security and our fundamental rights.”
Smart Bluetooth male chastity lock, designed for user to give remote control to a trusted 3rd party using mobile app/API
Multiple API flaws meant anyone could remotely lock all devices and prevent users from releasing themselves
Removal then requires an angle grinder or similar, used in close proximity to delicate and sensitive areas
Precise user location data also leaked by API, including personal information and private chats
Vendor initially responsive, then missed three remediation deadlines they set themselves over a 6 month period
Then finally refused to interact any further, even though majority of issues were resolved in migration to v2 API, yet API v1 inexcusably left available
We haven’t written about smart adult toys in a long time, but the Qiui Cellmate chastity cage was simply too interesting to pass by. We were tipped off about the adult chastity device, designed to lock-up the wearer’s appendage.
There are other male chastity devices available but this is a Bluetooth (BLE) enabled lock and clamp type mechanism with a companion mobile app. The idea is that the wearer can give control of the lock to someone else.
We are not in the business of kink shaming. People should be able to use these devices safely and securely without the risk of sensitive personal data being leaked.
The security of the teledildonics field is interesting in its own right. It’s worth noting that sales of smart adult toys has risen significantly during the recent lockdown.
What is the risk to users?
We discovered that remote attackers could prevent the Bluetooth lock from being opened, permanently locking the user in the device. There is no physical unlock. The tube is locked onto a ring worn around the base of the genitals, making things inaccessible. An angle grinder or other suitable heavy tool would be required to cut the wearer free.
Location, plaintext password and other personal data was also leaked, without need for authentication, by the API.
We had particular problems during the disclosure process, as we would usually ask the vendor to take down a leaky API whilst remediation was being implemented. However, anyone currently using the device when the API was taken offline would also be permanently locked in!
As you will see in the disclosure timeline at the bottom of this post, some issues were remediated but others were not, and the vendor simply stopped replying to us, journalists, and retailers. Given the trivial nature of finding some of these issues, and that the company is working on another device that poses even greater potential physical harm (an “internal” chastity device), we have felt compelled to publish these findings at this point.
The body tasked with oversight of the IRS announced in a letter that it will investigate the agency’s use of location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on peoples’ phones, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Motherboard.
The move comes after Senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren demanded a formal investigation into how the IRS used the location data to track Americans without a warrant.
“We are going to conduct a review of this matter, and we are in the process of contacting the CI [Criminal Investigation] division about this review,” the letter, signed by J. Russell George, the Inspector General, and addressed to the Senators, reads. CI has a broad mandate to investigate abusive tax schemes, bankruptcy fraud, identity theft, and many more similar crimes. Wyden’s office provided Motherboard with a copy of the letter on Tuesday.
In June, officials from the IRS Criminal Investigation unit told Wyden’s office that it had purchased location data from a contractor called Venntel, and that the IRS had tried to use it to identify individual criminal suspects. Venntel obtains location data from innocuous looking apps such as games, weather, or e-commerce apps, and then sells access to the data to government clients.
A Wyden aide previously told Motherboard that the IRS wanted to find phones, track where they were at night, use that as a proxy as to where the individual lived, and then use other data sources to try and identify the person. A person who used to work for Venntel previously told Motherboard that Venntel customers can use the tool to see which devices are in a particular house, for instance.
The IRS’ attempts were not successful though, as the people the IRS was looking for weren’t included in the particular Venntel data set, the aide added.
But the IRS still obtained this data without a warrant, and the legal justification for doing so remains unclear. The aide said that the IRS received verbal approval to use the data, but stopped responding to their office’s inquiries.
Facebook Chief Revenue Officer David Fischer said Tuesday that the economic models that rely on personalized advertising are “under assault” as Apple readies a change that would limit the ability of Facebook and other companies to target ads and estimate how well they work.
The change to Apple’s identifier for advertisers, or IDFA, will give iPhone users the option to block tracking when opening an app. It was originally planned for iOS 14, the version of the iPhone operating system that was released last month. But Apple said last month it was delaying the rollout until 2021 “to give developers time to make necessary changes.”
Fischer, speaking at a virtual Advertising Week session Tuesday, spoke about the changes after being asked about Facebook’s vulnerability to the companies that control mobile platforms, such as Apple and Google, which runs Android.
Fischer argued that though there’s “angst and concern” about the risks of technology, personalized and targeted advertising has been essential to help the internet grow.
“The economic model that not just we at Facebook but so many businesses rely on, this model is worth preserving, one that makes content freely available, and the business that makes it run and hum, is via advertising,” he said.
“And right now, frankly, some of that is under assault, that the very tools that entrepreneurs, that businesses are relying on right now are being threatened. To me, the changes that Apple has proposed, pretty sweeping changes, are going to hurt developers and businesses the most.”
Apple frames the change as preserving users’ privacy, rather than as an attack on the advertising industry, and has been promoting its privacy features as a core reason to get an iPhone. It comes as consumers are increasingly wary about their online privacy following scandals with various companies, including Facebook.
Just as you suspected, Big Tech is dominated by monopolies, a House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee found.
After more than a year of investigating Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon’s behavior, lawmakers released a 449-page report with their findings on Tuesday, complete with recommendations that the four companies be broken up to make the market more competitive.
The committee found that each company dominated its respective markets—Facebook in social networking, Google in general online search and search advertising, Amazon in online retail, and Apple in mobile operating systems—to such an extent as to be anticompetitive. The companies “abuse their power by charging exorbitant fees, imposing oppressive contract terms, and extracting valuable data from the people who rely on them,” the Democratic-led committee’s report outlined.
The report goes on to eviscerate the four companies: “To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons. Although these firms have delivered clear benefits to society, the dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google has come at a price. These firms typically run the marketplace while also competing in it — a position that enables them to write one set of rules for others, while they play by another, or to engage in a form of their own private quasi regulation that is unaccountable to anyone but themselves.”
Not only do those companies acquire smaller ones, either to hire their talent or to kill or incorporate their products, but their mere existence chills potential investment to start-ups that may be considered competitive, the committee found.
The committee also noted that Big Tech’s acquisitions haven’t been closely vetted by regulators. For example, Facebook has snatched up nearly 100 smaller companies over the years, and just one, its deal to acquire Instagram in 2012, received scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission.
That lack of oversight, according to the findings, has degraded the user experience in many cases because tech companies don’t have any competition to do better—particularly when it comes to privacy.
“In the absence of adequate privacy guardrails in the United States, the persistent collection and misuse of consumer data is an indicator of market power online,” the committee noted. “Online platforms rarely charge consumers a monetary price—products appear to be ‘free’ but are monetized through people’s attention or with their data. In the absence of genuine competitive threats, dominant firms offer fewer privacy protections than they otherwise would, and the quality of these services has deteriorated over time. As a result, consumers are forced to either use a service with poor privacy safeguards or forego the service altogether.”
In addition to recommending that the companies effectively be broken up, the committee recommended that antitrust laws and federal antitrust agencies be restored “to full strength.” Specifically, the committee advised that strengthening Section 7 of the Clayton Act and Section 2 of the Sherman Act would go a long way toward giving antitrust legislation more teeth.
Of course, the Big Four aren’t going to take this lying down. Amazon released a lengthy statement in which it argued that being a big company doesn’t necessarily make it an anticompetitive one, and that it comprises just 4% of the U.S. retail market. (Frankly, I am not at all sure how it arrived at that number—the antitrust committee pegged Amazon as controlling more than 40% of all online U.S. retail sales.) The company also argued that it helps consumers find low prices and small businesses find new markets. The committee noted that 37% of all third-party sellers on Amazon rely on the platform exclusively for income.
I have been talking about exactly this since the beginning of 2019 – it’s good to see others agree with me!
They are effectively accountable to no one and as a result “wield their dominance in ways that erode entrepreneurship, degrade Americans’ privacy online, and undermine the vibrancy of the free and diverse press. The result is less innovation, fewer choices for consumers, and a weakened democracy.”
[…]
It uses Facebook’s internal documents to argue that its “monopoly power is firmly entrenched and unlikely to be eroded by competitive pressure from new entrants or existing firms.” And it attacks the social network, arguing that “in the absence of competition, Facebook’s quality has deteriorated over time, resulting in worse privacy protections for its users and a dramatic rise in misinformation on its platform.”
Google, it says upfront, “has a monopoly in the markets for general online search and search advertising.” And, it finds, it has “maintained its monopoly over general search through a series of anti-competitive tactics,” including undermining other search providers, stealing content “to boost Google’s own inferior vertical offerings,” and penalizing competitors.
By growing into ever more services and connecting them together, Google “increasingly functions as an ecosystem of interlocking monopolies,” the report states.
Amazon has “engaged in extensive anti-competitive conduct in its treatment of third-party sellers” and has abused its role as both seller and marketplace controller, the report states. Both its Alexa digital assistant and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are identified as potential targets of antitrust activity and possible diversification.
And Apple “exerts monopoly power in the mobile app store market, controlling access to more than 100 million iPhones and iPads in the US.”
The reports notes: “In the absence of competition, Apple’s monopoly power over software distribution to iOS devices has resulted in harms to competitors and competition, reducing quality and innovation among app developers, and increasing prices and reducing choices for consumers.”
The report is also heavy on the impact of these monopolies: it accuses Facebook and Google of being a significant factor in “the decline of trustworthy sources of news, which is essential to our democracy.”
It argues that collectively the tech giants have “materially weakened innovation and entrepreneurship in the US economy.” And that they have undermined Americans’ basic right to privacy by developing and driving business models that work by selling personal data rather than accepting payment directly.
Give me liberty or give me… the FTC
And, in a final punch to the face, the report accuses them of “undermining both political and economic liberties” by instilling fear through the use of their “unaccountable and arbitrary power,” and using their massive resources to direct and influence policy-making “further shaping how they are governed and regulated.”
In order to counteract all these negative impacts, the report makes a long series of recommendations, including, most significantly, “structural separations and prohibitions of certain dominant platforms from operating in adjacent lines of business.” In other words, breaking up companies.
[…]
And it wants the Big Four to feel the force of the US legal system by “strengthening private enforcement, through eliminating obstacles such as forced arbitration clauses, limits on class action formation, judicially created standards constraining what constitutes an antitrust injury, and unduly high pleading standards.”
What now?
In short, the report is everything that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google feared it would be; the only surprise however is that what had become obviously during the committee’s investigations was watered down significantly in the final report.
Of course, there is still a long way to go before any of the report’s recommendations become a reality. Even within the committee, there is not unanimity, with some Republican members expressing concerns over breaking up companies in particular. Republicans will also be more ideologically opposed to adding regulations or removing companies’ ability to arbitrate disputes themselves, rather than through the courts.
And then of course there is the enormous collective power of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google – some of the world’s largest and richest corporations – who will be willing and able to do anything to protect their markets and profits.
The Air Force was already familiar with the possibilities of the ‘SmartShooter’ smart aiming system. The only thing that was unknown was whether it is also effective in combination with the Colt C7 5.56mm long-range automatic rifle.
Operation
The system uses video analysis. A shooter aims his weapon at the target with the SmartShooter. So far, it is the same as with a normal aiming system. With the SmartShooter, the shooter selects the target by pulling the trigger, and holds the pulled trigger while continuing to aim at the target.
As soon as the system ‘sees’ that the target will be hit, the SmartShooter automatically will fire the weapon. So, it does not work autonomously, and the shooter selects the target, aims and pulls the trigger.
Effective
When the Dutch Army organized a shooting day to experiment with the SmartShooter system, the Air Force joined in to test its effectiveness against drones. A section of the top ten UAS detected by the Air Force in the Netherlands was fired.
The Colt rifle in combination with the SmartShooter system proved to be very effective: all targets were eliminated with a few rounds.
For years, you may recall that we would write about the insane nature of forum shopping for patent trolls, in which the trolls would flock to the federal courts in East Texas. Going back nearly 15 years, we wrote about how East Texas courts became grand central for patent troll cases, leading to all sorts of sketchy behavior. There are a bunch of empty office buildings setup in small Texas cities (mainly Marshall and Tyler) just to “pretend” to have offices there. Companies engaged in many patent cases started to try to suck up to residents of those small cities, in case they might be on a jury. TiVo literally bought a “Grand Champion Steer” just weeks before a jury was set to rule on a massive TiVo trolling case. Samsung threw so much money at the local “Stagecoach Days” event that it was renamed “Samsung Stagecoach Days,” and built a Samsung ice rinkright next to the courthouse in Marshall.
For years, people pressured Congress to fix this mess, but instead, the Supreme Court finally stepped in, with the TC Heartland ruling, and said that the proper jurisdiction should be where defendants actually are incorporated. Of course, this seemed to have the reverse effect — as companies no longer want to be in East Texas. Apple shut down its stores there to avoid the jurisdiction.
Of course, if you thought that the judges would go quietly, you’d be wrong. It’s always felt like a few judges in East Texas loved the reputation they’d built up as being super friendly to patent trolls. For a while it was Judge T. John Ward. And when he left the bench (to become a patent lawyer, natch), Judge Rodney Gilstrap stepped into the gap he left. He even tried to ignore the Supreme Court’s TC Heartland decision (though the Federal Circuit appeals court was not impressed).
However, as Patent Progress notes, there’s a new judge vying to be at the top of the patent troll’s Christmas list, and he’s in West Texas. Judge Alan Albright, a former patent litigator, was appointed to the bench in 2018 — and he literally went on a tour to convince companies to bring patent cases in his court:
U.S. District Judge Alan Albright and attorneys who predicted last year that Waco’s federal court would become a hotbed of patent and intellectual property litigation missed their prediction just a bit.
With Albright traveling the country drumming up business and patent attorneys spreading the word that Waco’s new federal judge, a longtime patent litigator, will provide the expertise to create an efficient and welcoming environment in Waco, the response in the past year actually exceeded those predictions.
Since Albright took office in September 2018, more than 250 patent cases have been filed in the federal Western District of Texas, which includes Waco. That total eclipses the number for the previous four years combined and has made the Western District among the busiest in the country for patent cases.
Amazon-owned smart home appliance maker Ring has won the world record for biggest game of “ding dong ditch” after a software glitch broadcast erroneous doorbell chimes to countless users yesterday.
The global game of Ring and run (as it’s known in the US) coincided with software issues that prevented owners from viewing archived footage or receiving push notifications. Customers in markets including the UK and US were believed to be affected.
The Timely Information Transmission Suffered Unpredictable Ping-time (TITSUP) led some to believe that Ring’s systems were being targeted deliberately by a malicious third party. “Are the Ring doorbells being hacked? Mine are going off non-stop,” tweeted one confused punter.
“You’re [sic] network has been down for hours. Now I am getting phantom ‘rings’ and it’s driving my Great Dane crazy,” complained another.
Your humble hack also experienced the glitch when a random chime from his overpriced doorbell disturbed a post-work nap. More accurately, it startled his dogs, who then leapt onto his chest.
Speaking to El Reg, Ring’s Europe head of communications, Claudia Fellerman, confirmed the problem and said it has since been fixed.
“Our processing infrastructure was running behind which caused some delays in receiving in-app notifications and Chime motion and ding notifications. However, this has been resolved,” she said.
According to Ring’s status page, no user data was lost, and a fix was applied by late evening. The company warned that users may encounter delayed chimes and notifications while the back-end catches up.
Ring also urged punters to check the battery levels on their devices as the outage may have caused a higher-than-usual power drain.
Tokyo’s Stock Exchange (TSE) went offline for most of Thursday, its longest-ever outage and a very unwelcome one as it is the world’s third-largest bourse, when measured by market capitalisation.
The exchange yesterday morning posted news that “a technical glitch occurred to distribution of market data,” and the market therefore stopped all trading. Later in the day the bourse also took down its after-hours trading platform, ToSTNeT, and then issued warnings that some market data distributed to investors was invalid.
The exchange explained the cause of the outage in a statement that said it experienced “hardware failure,” followed by a failure-to-failover.
The statement continued: “the switchover from the failed device to the backup device did not work properly, and as a result, market information could not be distributed.”
Which sounds very like someone hasn’t run a disaster recovery simulation for a while.
While the exchange thought it could replace the hardware and resume trading, doing so would have required a reboot that it felt “would cause confusion for investors and market participants, which would make it difficult to execute smooth trading.”
After talks with stakeholders, it was decided to just give up on the day and resume on Friday. At the time of writing – a few minutes after Friday’s opening bell – that plan appears to have worked.
The exchange has apologised for the outage, and taken responsibility for the situation, and also made it plain that mess was the result of its own mistakes and key technology provider Fujitsu was not at fault.
Fujitsu promotes TSE’s use of “approximately 200” of its Primergy servers and the Primesoft in-memory data management software.
That combo can apparently handle 100 million orders a day, at a rate of 1.4 million order-per-minute, all with transaction time of 300 microseconds apiece. Well, sometimes.
Fujitsu has reportedly apologised for its role in the outage.
The exchange continues to do so at every opportunity, with its notification that it expects normal trading today ending with: “We would like to express our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience caused by the system failure of Tokyo Stock Exchange, and we would like to ask for your continued support and cooperation in the operation of the market.”
The US government’s Department of Justice has won its multi-million-dollar claim to Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record book royalties as well as any future related earnings.
A federal district court in eastern Virginia this week ruled that Uncle Sam was entitled to the proceeds of Snowden’s bestseller, an estimated $5.2m, and “any further monies, royalties, or other financial advantages derived by Snowden from Permanent Record.” It can also grab Snowden’s appearance fees from 56 speeches, thought to exceed $1m.
The court came to this conclusion after deciding Snowden broke his non-disclosure agreements with the NSA and CIA. It noted the super-leaker did not offer up his book for a review by official censors nor did he clear speeches on intelligence matters with the US government as required by his employment contract from the time he worked for Uncle Sam.
“The United States’ lawsuit did not seek to stop or restrict the publication or distribution of Permanent Record,” the Dept of Justice’s spokespeople said on Thursday of the decision.
“Rather, under well-established Supreme Court precedent, Snepp v. United States, the government sought to recover all proceeds earned by Snowden because of his failure to submit his publication for pre-publication review in violation of his alleged contractual and fiduciary obligations.”
That the US government would crack down on Snowden is hardly unexpected. Officials filed suit in September 2019 to claim a cut of Snowden’s public persona on the grounds he broke his agreement with the No Such Agency by going public.
“Edward Snowden violated his legal obligations to the United States, and therefore, his unlawful financial gains must be relinquished to the government,” said Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.
“As this case demonstrates, the Department of Justice will not overlook the wrongful actions of those who seek to betray the trust reposed in them and to personally profit from their access to classified national security information.”
Wow, apparently these employment contracts are more like permanent indenture – last I looked, Snowden wasn’t exactly in the employ of the NSA any more… in as much as he was ever as a contractor…
Grindr, one of the world’s largest dating and social networking apps for gay, bi, trans, and queer people, has fixed a security vulnerability that allowed anyone to hijack and take control of any user’s account using only their email address.
Wassime Bouimadaghene, a French security researcher, found the vulnerability and reported the issue to Grindr. When he didn’t hear back, Bouimadaghene shared details of the vulnerability with security expert Troy Hunt to help.
The vulnerability was fixed a short time later.
Hunt tested and confirmed the vulnerability with help from a test account set up by Scott Helme, and shared his findings with TechCrunch.
Bouimadaghene found the vulnerability in how the app handles account password resets.
To reset a password, Grindr sends the user an email with a clickable link containing an account password reset token. Once clicked, the user can change their password and is allowed back into their account.
But Bouimadaghene found that Grindr’s password reset page was leaking password reset tokens to the browser. That meant anyone could trigger the password reset who had knowledge of a user’s registered email address, and collect the password reset token from the browser if they knew where to look.
Secret tokens used to reset Grindr account passwords, which are only supposed to be sent to a user’s inbox, were leaking to the browser. (Image: Troy Hunt/supplied)
The clickable link that Grindr generates for a password reset is formatted the same way, meaning a malicious user could easily craft their own clickable password reset link — the same link that was sent to the user’s inbox — using the leaked password reset token from the browser.
With that crafted link, the malicious user can reset the account owner’s password and gain access to their account and the personal data stored within, including account photos, messages, sexual orientation and HIV status and last test date.
“This is one of the most basic account takeover techniques I’ve seen,” Hunt wrote.
We are living in a golden age of flight and space simulation, with Flight Simulator, Star Wars Squadrons just out and Elite Dangerous and No Mans Sky fully established and finally Star Citizen playable to some degree. This means you can take out that old flight stick and throttle and TrackIR 5 that have been gathering dust for the last ten years and get it working again. Or you can buy a new one, together with a set of VR goggles.
What doesn’t show on the pictures though, is the amount of desk space these things take up and the tangle of wires that comes along with it. Ergonomically, having them on your desk is not the best place to have them as you sit to attention in order the get to them.
There are basically three philosophies to having a better home HOTAS setup: mounting them on your office chair, mounting them on your table and buying a dedicated chair setup.
Buying a dedicated chair (and not quite going the full cockpit route)
The nicest system I have seen is the Obutto, which is a system of not just chair, keyboard, mouse, joystick and throttle mounts, but also of monitor and speaker mounts. Expect to start at around EUR 900.
Wolf Hardware has blue and Red chairs as well as an armrest kit that will set you back around $375,-
In this category, Monstertech has a stand as well for EUR 255,-
This can be combined with the GT Omega ART Racing Simulator Cockpit RS6 Gaming Console Seat for Logitech G920, G29, G27, G25 Steering Wheel Pedals & Shifter Mount V2 PS4 Xbox One 360 TMX, with Stand & Reclinable for GBP 360,- if you really want to go the cockpit route
Your stick / throttle manufacturer will sell you under desk mounts but these can be prohibitively large and expensive.
Fortunately there are aftermarket sellers. Undoubtably the main player in this realm is Monstertech. They have attachment arms for your HOTAS but also for your MFD’s and tablets as well as a mount to put up your joystick in the centre position
Their table mounts are sized for the specific joystic / throttle that you have and start at EUR 89,- for silver and EUR 109,- for black.
Predator mounts offers a selection of very solid desk mounts with accessories in both silver and black. Plates are ordered custom to the jostick model. They will also sell accessories such as cable clips to keep your cabling nice, as well as an attachment plate for the VKB hanging box (in different colours), so that can be neatly clipped to the back of the mount. To unclip these you push downwards, so you knee won’t accidentally bang into them and assembly is very easy. Edit: Sadly, Predator Mounts has gone into receivership. Do not send money that way any more.
A new player to the game is AlphaBravoTango who offers Stowaway Mounts. These fold away easily under your desk when you are not using them. They are metal where it counts and 3d printed covers. The maker has a reddit thread here and you can buy them on Etsy.
AliExpress has similar mounts going for EUR 50,- a piece though that come with a mousepad
J-PEIN costs around $90 and is supposed to be solid too
There’s a company called Foxxmount which makes mounts that look a lot like the old Predator ones.
Amazon US has the J-PEIN (upgraded) desk mount for $70,-. This is the goto Korean cheaper version. These come with a lot of bolts.
Hikig is another manufacturer that looks like J-PEIN selling for around EUR 80,- on Amazon.
MEZA has a set of two mounts for $179,99 at Amazon, which look a lot like the J-PEIN. You can find the Meza website here. These come with a lot of bolts.
THTL-1v2 Stowable Fold-Away HOTAS Throttle Mount (Qty 1)
€164.12
Reddit user Sessine has an excellent writeup of a DIY HOTAS under desk folding attachment system which can be stowed away easily
Reddit User dlongwing has an alternate method of having a foldaway HOTAS rig under his desk
SciMonster has created a Thingiverse rail which you can 3D print yourself and allows you to slide the hotas to the sides and lock the joystick to the right and in the centre
Mount your Virpil Throttle and Stick to linear rails so you can slide them along your desk. This allows you to move your HOTAS aside when you use the computer for other work. When flying your aircraft or spaceship, a spring-loaded locking meachanism holds your HOTAS securely in place.
An adapter plate for Virpil Flightsticks (VPC WarBRD Base) is included (with and without a mounting option for the 15 button Elgato Stream Deck (MK.1). MongoosT Base untested.
For around GBP 55 you can buy a generic table bolting system from Amazon
Attaching your throttle and stick to your chair
This is the cheapest route which you can do with a fair amount easy of DIY. Although it’s ergonomically very comfortable, the downside, however, is that the wiring moves with your chair and you will always be in a tangle of wires all over the place.
Microsoft’s Exchange Online service fell over in the early hours of this morning.The company’s status orifice initially figured that the problem mainly affected users in India as its engineers noted the wobbling at around 0700 BST. Just under an hour later Microsoft had to admit it was another global outage.It is the latest in what appears to be a battle of who can annoy their users more. Azure suffered a major outage earlier this week. Rival Apple then hit back with its own wobble before Microsoft continued the TITSUP* tit-for-tat this morning.The mystery issue afflicted apps using Exchange Online protocols, including Outlook on the desktop, mobile devices, and “those dependant on REST functionality,” Microsoft said. The company was taking a long hard look at what it might have changed in recent days that might have broken something.
[…]
Microsoft eventually pinned the blame on a “recent configuration update”, rolled it back and, at time of writing, was “monitoring the service” for signs of life.
[…]
Users reported problems sending and receiving mails, accessing folders and attachments, or even being able to log into their services. Some noted difficulty synchronising between Azure Active Directory and Exchange Online while there were also isolated reports of SharePoint and Teams struck by the curse of bork.
More than 150 startups and firms in India are working to form an alliance and toying with the idea of launching an app store to cut their reliance on Google, five people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The list of entrepreneurs includes high-profile names, such as Vijay Shekhar Sharma, co-founder and chief executive of Paytm (India’s most valuable startup), Deep Kalra of travel ticketing firm MakeMyTrip, and executives from PolicyBazaar, RazorPay, and Sharechat. The growing list of founders expressed deep concerns about Google’s “monopolistic” hold on India, home to one of the world’s largest startup ecosystems, and discussed what they alleged was unfair and inconsistent enforcement of Play Store’s guidelines in the country. Their effort comes days after a small group of firms including Epic Games, Spotify, Basecamp, Match Group, ProtonMail forged their own coalition to pressure Apple and Google to make changes to their marketplace rules. The conversations in India, which began in recent weeks, escalated on Tuesday after Google said that starting next year developers with an app on Google Play Store must give the company a cut of as much as 30% of several app-related payments. Dozens of executives “from nearly every top startup and firm” in India attended a call on Tuesday to discuss the way forward, some of the people said, requesting anonymity. A 30% cut to Google is simply unfeasible, people on the call unanimously agreed.
. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which launched in 2018, has snapped hundreds of thousands images of the night sky using its four cameras in the hopes of finding exoplanets. That’s too much data for professional astronomers to pore over, and NASA doesn’t trust computer-vision algorithms to do all the work, so they’ve decided to look to the public for help.
“Automated methods of processing TESS data sometimes fail to catch imposters that look like exoplanets,” said project leader Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and the SETI Institute. “The human eye is extremely good at spotting such imposters, and we need citizen scientists to help us distinguish between the look-alikes and genuine planets.”
[…]
A similar scheme called Planet Hunters TESS, run by the University of Oxford, led to a graduate student finding a binary-star planet at the start of the year.
“Planet Hunters TESS asks volunteers to look at light curves, which are graphs of stars’ brightness over time,” Marc Kuchner, the citizen science officer for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, noted. “Planet Patrol asks them to look at the TESS image directly, although we plan to also include light curves for those images in the future.”
