prz writes: PGP just hit its 30th birthday. Before 1991, the average person had essentially no tools to communicate securely over long distances. That changed with PGP, which sparked the Crypto Wars of the 1990s. "Here we are, three decades later, and strong crypto is everywhere," writes PGP developer Phil Zimmermann in a blog post. "What was glamorous in the 1990s is now mundane. So much has changed in those decades. That's a long time in dog years and technology years. My own work shifted to end-to-end secure telephony and text messaging. We now have ubiquitous strong crypto in our browsers, in VPNs, in e-commerce and banking apps, in IoT products, in disk encryption, in the TOR network, in cryptocurrencies. And in a resurgence of implementations of the OpenPGP protocol. It would seem impossible to put this toothpaste back in the tube."

He continues: "Yet, we now see a number of governments trying to do exactly that. Pushing back against end-to-end encryption. [...] The need for protecting our right to a private conversation has never been stronger. Many democracies are sliding into populist autocracies. Ordinary citizens and grassroots political opposition groups need to protect themselves against these emerging autocracies as best as they can. If an autocracy inherits or builds a pervasive surveillance infrastructure, it becomes nearly impossible for political opposition to organize, as we can see in China. Secure communications is necessary for grassroots political opposition in those societies."

"It's not only personal freedom at stake. It's national security," says Zimmermann. "We must push back hard in policy space to preserve the right to end-end encryption."

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an interview The Guardian conducted with Microsoft's Kate Crawford. "Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence," writes Zoe Corbyn via The Guardian. "She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what's at stake as it reshapes our world." Here's an excerpt from the interview: What should people know about how AI products are made?
We aren't used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, "Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls," invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet... We've got a long way to go before this is green technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorizing data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.

Problems of bias have been well documented in AI technology. Can more data solve that?
Bias is too narrow a term for the sorts of problems we're talking about. Time and again, we see these systems producing errors -- women offered less credit by credit-worthiness algorithms, black faces mislabelled -- and the response has been: "We just need more data." But I've tried to look at these deeper logics of classification and you start to see forms of discrimination, not just when systems are applied, but in how they are built and trained to see the world. Training datasets used for machine learning software that casually categorize people into just one of two genders; that label people according to their skin color into one of five racial categories, and which attempt, based on how people look, to assign moral or ethical character. The idea that you can make these determinations based on appearance has a dark past and unfortunately the politics of classification has become baked into the substrates of AI.

What do you mean when you say we need to focus less on the ethics of AI and more on power?
Ethics are necessary, but not sufficient. More helpful are questions such as, who benefits and who is harmed by this AI system? And does it put power in the hands of the already powerful? What we see time and again, from facial recognition to tracking and surveillance in workplaces, is these systems are empowering already powerful institutions -- corporations, militaries and police.

What's needed to make things better?
Much stronger regulatory regimes and greater rigour and responsibility around how training datasets are constructed. We also need different voices in these debates -- including people who are seeing and living with the downsides of these systems. And we need a renewed politics of refusal that challenges the narrative that just because a technology can be built it should be deployed.

One of the biggest new features of macOS Monterey, the next version of macOS announced at WWDC, is the ability to share a keyboard and mouse across an iMac, MacBook, and iPad. It's called "Universal Control" and it's coming this Fall. Ars Technica reports: Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi demonstrated the ability to simply set an iPad near a Mac, move the cursor of the latter toward the former, and have the iPad automatically recognize it. This means users can directly drag and drop files between devices, for instance. Apple demonstrated this feature across an iMac, MacBook, and iPad in concert. Beyond that, macOS Monterey will make it possible to AirPlay video, audio, documents, and other items from an iPad or iPhone directly to a Mac.

The update also brings the Shortcuts feature first seen on iPhones and iPads, allowing users to access automated tasks and workflows on the Mac. Apple says the existing Automator app will continue to be supported with Monterey and that users will be able to import existing Automator workflows into Shortcuts. Safari will also receive something of a makeover with Monterey, bringing a thinner and visually cleaner toolbar alongside more compact tabs. Active tab bars will now house the traditional URL and search bar, and tabs can now be grouped together and accessed through Safari's sidebar. These tab groups can then be accessed and updated across Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

The update will include a number of features from the newly announced iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 updates as well. This includes a SharePlay feature that lets users share content or their current device screen over a FaceTime call and a Focus feature that filters and minimizes notifications when users indicate they are in the middle of a particular activity ("coding," "gaming," etc.).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The latest Notepad++ release has removed support for Bing search from the app after the "tank man" fiasco Microsoft had to deal with on Friday afternoon. "Microsoft Bing is removed from Notepad++ settings for Search on Internet command, due to its poor reliability," the Notepad++ v8 announcement reads. Don Ho, the creator of Notepad++, one of the most popular open-source Notepad replacements, revealed on GitHub that the motivation behind this decision is Bing censoring results instead of doing "its job." "When a search engine does the censorship instead of its job, the search result loses its quality and it's not reliable anymore," Don Ho said in the GitHub commit removing Bing support. "Hence, Microsoft Bing is removed from Notepad++ for "Search on Internet" command." "While there was no immediate explanation to the problem, it is a widely known fact that China forces companies with businesses within its borders to abide by its censorship rules requiring to block references to China's 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protests," notes BleepingComputer. A Microsoft spokesperson said it was "due to an accidental human error."

In August 2020, China banned Notepad++ after Don Ho protested against China's human rights violations of the Uyghur people and the Hong Kong political unrest by releasing two versions dubbed 'Stand with Hong Kong' and 'Free Uyghur.'

"Apple's tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams," argues a 3,000-word exposé in Sunday's Washington Post

"Among the 1.8 million apps on the App Store, scams are hiding in plain sight. Customers for several VPN apps, which allegedly protect users' data, complained in Apple App Store reviews that the apps told users their devices have been infected by a virus to dupe them into downloading and paying for software they don't need. A QR code reader app that remains on the store tricks customers into paying $4.99 a week for a service that is now included in the camera app of the iPhone. Some apps fraudulently present themselves as being from major brands such as Amazon and Samsung. Of the highest 1,000 grossing apps on the App Store, nearly two percent are scams, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. And those apps have bilked consumers out of an estimated $48 million during the time they've been on the App Store, according to market research firm Appfigures.

The scale of the problem has never before been reported. What's more, Apple profits from these apps because it takes a cut of up to a 30 percent of all revenue generated through the App Store.

Even more common, according to The Post's analysis, are "fleeceware" apps that use inauthentic customer reviews to move up in the App Store rankings and give apps a sense of legitimacy to convince customers to pay higher prices for a service usually offered elsewhere with higher legitimate customer reviews...

Apple has long maintained that its exclusive control of the App Store is essential to protecting customers, and it only lets the best apps on its system. But Apple's monopoly over how consumers access apps on iPhones can actually create an environment that gives customers a false sense of safety, according to experts... Apple isn't the only company that struggles with this issue: They're also on Google's Play Store, which is available on its Android mobile operating system. But unlike Apple, Google doesn't claim that its Play Store is curated. Consumers can download apps from different stores on Android phones, creating competition between app stores...

When it comes to one type of scam, there's evidence that Apple's store is no safer than Google's. Avast analyzed both the Apple and Google app stores in March, looking for fleeceware apps. The company found 134 in the App Store and 70 on the Play Store, with over a billion downloads, about half on Android and half on iOS, and revenue of $365 million on Apple and $38.5 million on Android. Most the victims were in the United States.

Slashdot reader Charlotte Web summarizes a Department of Justice press release: The U.S. Department of Justice says "millions" of computers around the world were infected with the Trickbot malware, which was used "to harvest banking credentials and deliver ransomware."

In February they arrested a 55-year-old woman in Miami, Florida, saying she and her associates "are accused of infecting tens of millions of computers worldwide, in an effort to steal financial information to ultimately siphon off millions of dollars through compromised computer systems," according to Special Agent in Charge Eric B. Smith of the FBI's Cleveland Field Office. In October ZDNet was calling Trickbot "one of today's largest malware botnets and cybercrime operations."

Yesterday that woman — Alla Witte, aka "Max" — was arraigned in federal court in Cleveland, Ohio. According to the indictment, Witte worked as a malware developer for the Trickbot Group and wrote code related to the control, deployment, and payments of ransomware.

From the Department of Justice announcement:

The ransomware informed victims that their computer was encrypted, and that they would need to purchase special software through a Bitcoin address controlled by the Trickbot Group to decrypt their files. In addition, Witte allegedly provided code to the Trickbot Group that monitored and tracked authorized users of the malware and developed tools and protocols to store stolen login credentials... Witte and her co-conspirators allegedly worked together to infect victim computers with the Trickbot malware designed to capture online banking login credentials and harvest other personal information, including credit card numbers, emails, passwords, dates of birth, social security numbers and addresses. Witte and others also allegedly captured login credentials and other stolen personal information to gain access to online bank accounts, execute unauthorized electronic funds transfers and launder the money through U.S. and foreign beneficiary accounts...

If convicted, Witte faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison for conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud; 30 years in prison for each substantive bank fraud count; a two-year mandatory sentence for each aggravated identity theft count, which must be served consecutively to any other sentence; and 20 years in prison for conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The indictment alleges that "beginning in November 2015, Witte and others stole money and confidential information from unsuspecting victims, including businesses and their financial institutions in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and Russia through the use of the Trickbot malware." The AP reports the group is now accused of targeting high-reward victims which included hospitals, schools, public utilities, and governments, as well as real estate and law firms and country clubs.

Interestingly, this case is part of the U.S. Department of Justice's "Ransomware and Digital Extortion Task Force," with its Criminal Division working with the U.S. Attorneys' Offices and prioritizing the disruption, investigation, and prosecution of ransomware "by tracking and dismantling the development and deployment of malware, identifying the cybercriminals responsible, and holding those individuals accountable for their crimes," according to the department's statement. "The department, through the Task Force, also strategically targets the ransomware criminal ecosystem as a whole and collaborates with domestic and foreign government agencies as well as private sector partners to combat this significant criminal threat."

"These charges serve as a warning to would-be cybercriminals," said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco, "that the Department of Justice, through the Ransomware and Digital Extortion Task Force and alongside our partners, will use all the tools at our disposal to disrupt the cybercriminal ecosystem."

A new column in Inc. argues that 14 years ago, Steve Jobs sent the most important email in the history of business — a one-sentence email to Bertrand Serlet, the company's senior vice president of Software Engineering, that's just recently been made public (through Apple's trial with Epic): It reveals a conversation about the things Apple needs to be able to accomplish in order to allow third-party apps on the iPhone. Until that point, the iPhone only ran 16 apps pre-installed on every device. Jobs had famously said told developers that if they wanted to create apps for the iPhone, they could make web apps that ran in Safari... Except web apps aren't the same as native apps, and users immediately set about finding ways to jailbreak their devices in order to get apps on them.

Apple had really no choice but to find a way to make it possible to develop apps through some kind of official SDK. Serlet lays out a series of considerations about protecting users, creating a development platform, and ensuring that the APIs needed are sustainable and documented. The list only has 4 things, but the point Serlet is trying to make is that it is important to Apple to "do it right this time, rather than rush a half-cooked story with no real support."

Steve Jobs' reply was only one sentence long: "Sure, as long as we can roll it all out at Macworld on Jan 15, 2008."

That's it. That's the entire response.

Serlet's email is dated October 2, 2007. That means Jobs was giving him just over three months... Three months to do what the software engineer no doubt believed were critical steps if Apple was going to support apps on a platform that would eventually grow to over 1 billion devices worldwide and become one of the most valuable businesses of all time. As if that wasn't enough pressure, two weeks later, on October 17, Jobs publicly told developers that there would be an SDK available by February of 2008. It turns out it would actually be made available in March, and the App Store would launch later in July of that year.

At the time, Apple's market cap was around $150 billion. Today, it's more than $2 trillion, largely based on the success of the iPhone, which is based — at least in part — on the success of the App Store. For that reason alone, I think it's fair to say — in hindsight — that one-sentence reply has no doubt proven to be the most important email in the history of business.

The New York Times' "On Tech" newsletter observes that Microsoft releasing a new version of Windows is now "basically a nonevent."

"This shows technology has evolved from a succession of Big Bang moments to something so meshed into our lives that we often don't notice it." The last version of Windows as we knew it was arguably released in 2012. I was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal at the time, and my professional life that year was dominated by the unveiling of Windows 8 — including the anticipation, the strategy around it, and its eventual reception. But that was basically the end of an era. New releases of Windows since then have become progressively less major. A significant reason is that personal computers are no longer the center of our digital lives. A new iPhone model gets a lot of attention — although it shouldn't get so much — but a refresher to Windows doesn't.

Still, the supremacy of smartphones is an insufficient explanation. Windows beginning around 2015 began to get regularly tweaked under the hood — just like Netflix, Facebook, and every app on your smartphone as well as the software that runs the phone itself. In other words, Windows just changes in dribs and drabs all of the time without most people noticing. Instead of waiting years to get a fresh computer, we're effectively getting a new PC with every tweak. The new edition of Windows will remodel the look of the software and improve features like reordering apps. But because Microsoft incrementally revises Windows, new versions of the software matter less to most people.

This shift for Windows was part of a remarkable transformation at Microsoft. The company's obsession with Windows threatened to relegate Microsoft to tech irrelevancy. Then Microsoft hired a new chief executive in 2014, and suddenly Windows wasn't the beating heart of the company anymore. That shows just how much institutions can change.

But more than that, a Windows launch morphing from a big thing to something a professional tech writer didn't see coming reflects what technology has become. It's no longer strictly the shiny new object that comes out of a box every once in a while. Technology is all around us all the time, and it's perfectly normal.

Slashdot reader ochinko (user #19,311) shares The Register's report about a recent presentation by Google engineer Peter Hochschild. His team discovered machines with higher-than-expected hardware errors that "showed themselves sporadically, long after installation, and on specific, individual CPU cores rather than entire chips or a family of parts." The Google researchers examining these silent corrupt execution errors (CEEs) concluded "mercurial cores" were to blame CPUs that miscalculated occasionally, under different circumstances, in a way that defied prediction...The errors were not the result of chip architecture design missteps, and they're not detected during manufacturing tests. Rather, Google engineers theorize, the errors have arisen because we've pushed semiconductor manufacturing to a point where failures have become more frequent and we lack the tools to identify them in advance.

In a paper titled "Cores that don't count" [PDF], Hochschild and colleagues Paul Turner, Jeffrey Mogul, Rama Govindaraju, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, David Culler, and Amin Vahdat cite several plausible reasons why the unreliability of computer cores is only now receiving attention, including larger server fleets that make rare problems more visible, increased attention to overall reliability, and software development improvements that reduce the rate of software bugs. "But we believe there is a more fundamental cause: ever-smaller feature sizes that push closer to the limits of CMOS scaling, coupled with ever-increasing complexity in architectural design," the researchers state, noting that existing verification methods are ill-suited for spotting flaws that occur sporadically or as a result of physical deterioration after deployment.

Facebook has noticed the errors, too. In February, the social ad biz published a related paper, "Silent Data Corruption at Scale," that states, "Silent data corruptions are becoming a more common phenomena in data centers than previously observed...."

The risks posed by misbehaving cores include not only crashes, which the existing fail-stop model for error handling can accommodate, but also incorrect calculations and data loss, which may go unnoticed and pose a particular risk at scale. Hochschild recounted an instance where Google's errant hardware conducted what might be described as an auto-erratic ransomware attack. "One of our mercurial cores corrupted encryption," he explained. "It did it in such a way that only it could decrypt what it had wrongly encrypted."
How common is the problem? The Register notes that Google's researchers shared a ballpark figure "on the order of a few mercurial cores per several thousand machines similar to the rate reported by Facebook."

From today's edition of Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column: If you've been using open source software for any amount of time, then you're well aware of the tangled web of dependencies often involved in such projects. If not, there's any number of tools out there that explore just how interconnected everything is, and this week Google has jumped into the game with its own offering — an exploratory visualization site called Open Source Insights that gives users an interactive view of dependencies of open source projects.

Now, Google isn't the first to get into the game of trying to uncover and perhaps untangle the dizzying dependency graph of the open source world, but the company argues that it is more so trying to lay everything out in a way that developers can see, visually, just how, well, hopelessly screwed they really are.

"There are tools to help, of course: vulnerability scanners and dependency audits that can help identify when a package is exposed to a vulnerability. But it can still be difficult to visualize the big picture, to understand what you depend on, and what that implies," they write.

The Open Source Insights tool — currently "experimental" — gives users either a table or graphical visualization of how a project is composed, allowing them to explore the dependency graph and examine how using different versions of certain projects might actually affect that dependency graph. One of the benefits, Google notes, is that it allows users to see all this information "without asking you to install the package first. You can see instantly what installing a package — or an updated version — might mean for your project, how popular it is, find links to source code and other information, and then decide whether it should be installed."

Currently, the tool supports npm, Maven, Go modules, and Cargo, with more packaging systems on the way soon...

Version 9.4 of the GNU Compiler Collection "encompasses more than 190 bug fixes for GCC 9.3, which has been available since March 2020," reports DevClass.

But they add that in addition, "Developers who want to contribute to the GNU Compiler Collection but don't feel like signing over copyright to the Free Software Foundation can get busy committing now." GCC Steering Committee member David Edelsohn informed contributors via the mailing list that the committee "decided to relax the requirement to assign copyright for all changes" to the FSF. Speaking for the committee, he wrote that the GCC project "will now accept contributions with or without an FSF copyright assignment", a practice thought of as consistent with that "of many other major Free Software projects, such as the Linux kernel". GCC "will continue to be developed, distributed and licensed" under the GPLv3, so nothing should change for those adding to the project under the old assumptions.

There are those who have had troubles with that arrangement before, with Apple often cited as a popular example. They are now free to contribute utilising the Developer Certificate of Origin instead of agreeing to an FSF Copyright Assignment.

A reason was not given, though the last sentence of the statement, which affirms the principles of Free Software, might give a clue. In March 2021, the committee commented on the removal of Richard Stallman from the project's steering committee website with a similar declaration... [T]hey felt like an association with Stallman was not serving the best interests of the GCC developers and user community, given that the "GCC Steering Committee is committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all."
The Register notes that Red Hat senior principal engineer Mark Wielaard asked why there was no public discussion before making the change.

WhatsApp will soon let you use the popular instant messaging app simultaneously on multiple devices, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said. The instant messaging app, used by more than 2 billion users, also plans to add more options to its disappearing messages feature, top executives said. TechCrunch reports: Zuckerberg confirmed to news outlet WaBetaInfo that multi-device support will be arriving on the instant messaging service "soon." WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said users will be able to connect up to four devices to one account. The messaging firm is also working to introduce a dedicated WhatsApp app for the iPad, he said. The instant messaging service, which last year introduced the ability to set a seven-day timer on messages (disappearing mode), is now planning to expand this feature to let users share pictures and videos that can only be viewed once. WhatsApp users will also get an option to enforce disappearing mode across the app for all new chats. Zuckerberg and Cathcart told the news outlet -- and it's indeed the two of them talking -- that these features will be available to users in public beta "in the next month or two."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A scammer who convinced some of the world's biggest tech businesses to send him replacement kit has been sentenced to seven years and eight months in the U.S. prison system. Justin David May, 31, used stolen hardware serial numbers, a plethora of fake websites and online identities, social engineering tactics, and a network of associates, to scam Cisco out of nearly $3.5m in hardware in just 12 months. Microsoft lost 137 Surface laptops (retail cost $364,761) to the crew, with Lenovo US also losing 137 replacement hard drives worth $143,000 and APC (formerly American Power Conversion) getting scammed out of a few uninterruptible power supplies. May pled guilty to 42 counts of mail fraud, 10 counts of money laundering, three counts of interstate transportation of goods obtained by fraud, and two counts of tax evasion.

In the largest scam against Cisco, run from April 2016, according to court documents [PDF] filed in eastern district court of Pennsylvania, May and the team set up domains and email addresses to mimic cisco.com user IDs and harvested serial numbers of legit machinery. They then used these to trick Cisco into sending out replacement kit, such as a Cisco Catalyst 3850-48P-E Switch worth around $21,000 at the time, and a couple of Cisco ASR 9001 routers priced at over $100,000 for the pair. The same scam worked well for Microsoft and Lenovo too, it seems. The court docs note that May was skilled at picking imaginary faults that weren't remotely repairable, such as basic software issues, but which were more obvious as serious flaws needing a replacement unit. In addition the crew digitally altered images of their supposed kit and serial numbers to fool support staff. Once the hardware was received, usually via UPS or FedEx, the companies never got the faulty kit back because it never existed. Meanwhile the packages were picked up, sold on eBay and other second-hand sites, and the cash pocketed, or in the case of Microsoft, some of the hardware shipped to Singapore for resale.

The three major carriers in the U.S. have now agreed to start providing vertical location data for 911 calls, which will help first responders quickly locate 911 callers in multi-story buildings. XDA Developers reports: The FCC wrote in its announcement, "FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel today announced breakthrough agreements with America's three largest mobile phone providers to start delivering vertical location information in connection with 911 calls nationwide in the coming days. This information will help first responders quickly locate 911 callers in multi-story buildings, which will reduce response times and ultimately save lives."

The FCC first announced in 2015 that carriers would be required to start sharing vertical location data. The original deadline was June 2nd, 2021, but AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon wanted an 18-month extension (allegedly due to issues testing the functionality during the COVID-19 pandemic). With the deadline rapidly approaching, the FCC began an investigation in April to find out what was taking carriers so long. All three major carriers have now agreed to start providing vertical location data to 911 call centers within the next seven days, and each company will pay a $100,000 settlement. The agreement also increases the scope of the vertical location data; instead of the data only being provided in select areas, vertical location information will be provided by carriers across the entire United States. However, it will likely take longer than a week for the vertical data to be used in most 9-1-1 call centers, as the change will require updated software and (possibly) additional training for emergency dispatchers.

Marco Arment, a widely respected programmer, app developer and commentator on Apple, has analyzed Apple's arguments and its thinking as officially portrayed in its lawsuit against Epic. He writes: Apple's leaders continue to deny developers deny developers of two obvious truths: 1. That our apps provide substantial value to iOS beyond the purchase commissions collected by Apple.
2. That any portion of our customers came to our apps from our own marketing or reputation, rather than the App Store.

For Apple to continue to deny these is dishonest, factually wrong, and extremely insulting -- not only to our efforts, but to the intelligence of all Apple developers and customers. This isn't about the 30%, or the 15%, or the prohibition of other payment systems, or the rules against telling our customers about our websites, or Apple's many other restrictions. (Not today, at least.) It's about what Apple's leadership thinks of us and our work. It isn't the App Store's responsibility to the rest of Apple to "pay its way" by leveraging hefty fees on certain types of transactions. Modern society has come to rely so heavily on mobile apps that any phone manufacturer must ensure that such a healthy ecosystem exists as table stakes for anyone to buy their phones. Without our apps, the iPhone has little value to most of its customers today.

If Apple wishes to continue advancing bizarre corporate-accounting arguments, the massive profits from the hardware business are what therefore truly "pay the way" of the App Store, public APIs, developer tools, and other app-development resources, just as the hardware profits must fund the development of Apple's own hardware, software, and services that make the iPhone appeal to customers. The forced App Store commissions, annual developer fees, and App Store Search Ads income are all just gravy. The "way" is already paid by the hardware -- but Apple uses their position of power to double-dip. And that's just business. Apple's a lot of things, and "generous" isn't one. But to bully and gaslight developers into thinking that we need to be kissing Apple's feet for permitting us to add billions of dollars of value to their platform is not only greedy, stingy, and morally reprehensible, but deeply insulting.

Samsung is killing the first-generation SmartThings Hub at the end of the month, kicking off phase two of its plan to shut down the SmartThings ecosystem and force users over to in-house Samsung infrastructure. "Phase one was in October, when Samsung killed the Classic SmartThings app and replaced it with a byzantine disaster of an app that it developed in house," writes Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo. "Phase three will see the shutdown of the SmartThings Groovy IDE, an excellent feature that lets members of the community develop SmartThings device handlers and complicated automation apps." From the report: The SmartThings Hub is basically a Wi-Fi access point -- but for your smart home stuff instead of your phones and laptops. Instead of Wi-Fi, SmartThings is the access point for a Zigbee and Z-Wave network, two ultra low-power mesh networks used by smart home devices. [...] The Hub connects your smart home network to the Internet, giving you access to a control app and connecting to other services like your favorite voice assistant. You might think that killing the old Hub could be a ploy to sell more hardware, but Samsung -- a hardware company -- is actually no longer interested in making SmartThings hardware. The company passed manufacturing for the latest "SmartThings Hub (v3)" to German Internet-of-things company Aeotec. The new Hub is normally $125, but Samsung is offering existing users a dirt-cheat $35 upgrade price.

For users who have to buy a new hub, migrating between hubs in the SmartThings ecosystem is a nightmare. Samsung doesn't provide any kind of migration program, so you have to unpair every single individual smart device from your old hub to pair it to the new one. This means you'll need to perform some kind of task on every light switch, bulb, outlet, and sensor, and you'll have to do the same for any other smart thing you've bought over the years. Doing this on each device is a hassle that usually involves finding the manual to look up the secret "exclusion" input, which is often some arcane Konami code. Picture holding the top button on a paddle light for seven seconds until a status light starts blinking and then opening up the SmartThings app to unpair it. Samsung is also killing the "SmartThings Link for Nvidia Shield" dongle, which let users turn Android TV devices into SmartThings Hubs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [T]he routing algorithm designed for its Flex app by Amazon's research scientists often makes [Amazon delivery drivers cross two- or three-lane highways], according to a source with direct knowledge of Amazon's routing algorithm. In North America and Europe, roughly 85,000 contracted delivery drivers rely on this algorithm to do their jobs. While crossing the street in a quiet suburban neighborhood is probably safe, doing so on a 50 mph highway can be deadly. Motherboard spoke to Amazon delivery drivers who work in Florida, Illinois, Michigan, South Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, and California who described sprinting across the street -- or the highway -- to follow the Flex app's directions.

This app determines delivery routes for both Amazon's contracted delivery drivers, who drive Amazon-branded vans, and members of its independent contractor workforce, known as Amazon Flex drivers, who drive their own cars. When a driver has to make deliveries to several addresses that are clustered together, the Flex app combines them into a single stop, rather than make a stop at each address. Drivers call these "group stops," while Amazon research scientists and engineers tasked with optimizing routes that incorporate hundreds of stops per shift refer to this routing mechanism as "stop consolidation." These stops often include addresses on both sides of a street -- or highway. Rather than directing drivers to make a U-turn and deliver packages on one side of the street and then the other, the app instructs drivers to cross the street on foot. Depending on the size and number of packages, the driver might have to walk across the street multiple times, or run in order to meet Amazon's delivery quotas.

Amazon's contracted delivery drivers must use the app and follow its directions to make deliveries, meanwhile Amazon's gig workers -- who are independent contractors -- can manually change Amazon's routing order, but must use the app to make their deliveries. At Amazon, which pays delivery companies a fixed rate per delivery route each day regardless of how long it takes, the goal is to squeeze in as many deliveries as possible on a route, the source with internal knowledge of how Amazon creates its delivery routes said. "The main goal [at Amazon] is to make them deliver the most packages as possible in [a shift] because then we have to hire fewer drivers," the source familiar with Amazon's routing algorithm said. Hiring fewer drivers means the employer can pay less into worker's compensation, disability, and other employment benefits. Alexandra Miller, a spokesperson for Amazon Logistics, denied that Amazon delivery drivers frequently jaywalk across busy intersections and run across high-speed rural highways, and said that if the company identifies data quality issues or defects in its maps, it fixes them promptly.

"Our routing system is designed to make the delivery experience as easy as possible for drivers and prioritizes same side of the street deliveries, unless the road is safe to cross," Miller said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Hart InterCivic Inc., one of the largest voting machine makers in the U.S., will incorporate Microsoft's vote-tracking system into its in-person machines, adding a layer of security that may help reduce heightened attacks on the legitimacy of U.S. election results. The program will allow people to confirm their votes were counted after they're cast. The partnership makes Hart the first manufacturer in the U.S. to allow local voting jurisdictions to incorporate ballot-tracking software into machines, the companies said Thursday in a joint statement. The program will let voters track their choices and offer security experts using Hart's system the opportunity to independently audit results using Microsoft's ElectionGuard software.

The technology would not change the process for voters. In most cases, voters would still fill out their ballots the same way they did in November 2020, either using a touchscreen or by hand-marking a ballot. Once they submit their ballots, voters will receive a piece of paper with a verification or QR code, which they can input into their local election jurisdiction's website to track their ballot through the tabulation process. The process is done without revealing the content of the voter's ballot while maintaining the privacy and secrecy of their selections, according to the statement. The system will also allow third-parties, including political parties or news organizations, to write their own programs to confirm election tallies.

NortonLifelock has added the ability to mine Ethereum cryptocurrency directly within its Norton 360 antivirus program as a way to "protect" users from malicious mining software. BleepingComputer reports: This new mining feature is called 'Norton Crypto' and will be rolling out tomorrow to Norton 360 users enrolled in Norton's early adopter program. When Norton Crypto is enabled, the software will use the device's graphics card (GPU) to mine for Ethereum, which will then be transferred into a Norton wallet hosted in the cloud. It is not clear if every device running Norton Crypto is mining independently or as part of a pool of users for a greater chance of earning rewards of Ethereum.

As the difficulty of mining Ethereum by yourself is very high, Norton users will likely be pooled together for greater chances of mining a block. If Norton is operating a pool for this new feature, they may take a small fee of all mined Ethereum as is common among pool operators, making this new feature a revenue generator for the company. "As the crypto economy continues to become a more important part of our customers' lives, we want to empower them to mine cryptocurrency with Norton, a brand they trust," said Vincent Pilette, CEO of NortonLifeLock. "Norton Crypto is yet another innovative example of how we are expanding our Cyber Safety platform to protect our customers' ever-evolving digital lives."

Two years into its ban from the US Government and, in turn, access to the Play Store on its Android-powered devices, Huawei is unveiling HarmonyOS. The platform is an alternative to Android that powers TVs, smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches. 9to5Google reports: Announced at an event today, Huawei is positioning HarmonyOS as an operating system that can handle just about everything, from the smartphone in your pocket to IoT devices such as "power sockets and lamps." The company says the goal of the platform is to have one set of code that can be used across virtually any device, saying that it is not aware of "any other operating system in the world" that can cover such a wide range of devices. Leaning into this ability, Huawei developed a "Control Panel," which gives users the ability to connect multiple devices together, with the example of using the "music widget" to throw audio playback to nearby speakers or TVs. A "Super Device" widget shows icons for other nearby devices and enables a quick and easy pairing mode.

On smartphones, the HarmonyOS homescreen can use a swipe-up gesture on apps developed for the platform to see a widget pulling information from that app. Those widgets, apparently, can also be used across devices because of the shared codebase Huawei says HarmonyOS offers. The homescreen can also intelligently add apps to a folder based on the category. Interestingly, Huawei says HarmonyOS devices will also be able to move running apps from one device to another, which is really neat and unique. Moving apps between devices apparently also works between watches and TVs, with a workout app being used on both simultaneously given as an example. A video calling app was also shown moving between devices. Huawei says that performance of HarmonyOS is "superior" to Android with EMUI, specifically calling out long-term use.

While there are certainly new elements in HarmonyOS, it appears to be a "fork" of Android. The Verge spent time with the HarmonyOS-powered MatePad Pro and described the act of installing Android APKs as "though I was using an Android device." Visually, there are also a tremendous number of similarities between HarmonyOS and Android, though there are some distinct elements of Apple's iPad OS in the platform's tablet-optimized homescreen, seen below as Evan Blass posted to Twitter. Android Authority further described HarmonyOS as "ultimately a spin on Android 10" with a "slight rebrand." TechRadar said the software was "clearly" based on Android. These findings from the media appear to back up a previous report from ArsTechnica, which showed the developer preview as basically a clone of EMUI-skinned Android.