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Updated: 13 min 16 sec ago

Bug Allowed Hijacking Other Firefox Mobile Browsers on the Same Wi-Fi Network

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 20:34
"Mozilla has fixed a bug that can be abused to hijack all the Firefox for Android browsers on the same Wi-Fi network and force users to access malicious sites, such as phishing pages," reports ZDNet: The bug was discovered by Chris Moberly, an Australian security researcher working for GitLab. The actual vulnerability resides in the Firefox SSDP component. SSDP stands for Simple Service Discovery Protocol and is the mechanism through which Firefox finds other devices on the same network in order to share or receive content (i.e., such as sharing video streams with a Roku device). When devices are found, the Firefox SSDP component gets the location of an XML file where that device's configuration is stored. However, Moberly discovered that in older versions of Firefox, you could hide Android "intent" commands in this XML and have the Firefox browser execute the "intent," which could be a regular command like telling Firefox to access a link... The bug was fixed in Firefox 79; however, many users may not be running the latest release. Firefox for desktop versions were not impacted.

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Bored Developer Creates 'DOS Subsystem For Linux'

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 19:34
Long-time Slashdot reader Bismillah quotes iTnews: A software engineer in Melbourne is whiling away the city's lockdown by creating a tool that DOS users so far have lacked: an integrated Linux environment similar to what Windows 10 users enjoy... "I first started out just seeing if I could get Linux booting from the DOS command line, and that turned out to be straightforward enough so I thought it'd be fun to see if I could continue executing DOS once Linux was running," Charlie Somerville said. "I'm mostly surprised by how smoothly the whole thing works given how *dodgy* it all is haha," he added. DOS Subsystem for Linux runs a real copy of MS-DOS under the QEMU virtual machine, and starts up from that, Somerville said... "Helpfully Linux seems to leave the first megabyte of memory (where DOS lives) intact during its own boot process, so it's just a matter of jumping back to the right place to continue DOS execution," he added. Somerville had it pointed out to him that this approach of running DOS under vm8086 is actually how early Windows worked. "Kinda cool to rediscover the technique so many years later," Somerville said.

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While Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube Announce Hate Speech Action, Some Advertisers Remain Skeptical

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 18:34
"Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have agreed on first steps to curb harmful content online, big advertisers announced on Wednesday, following boycotts of social media platforms accused of tolerating hate speech," Reuters reports: Under the deal, announced by the World Federation of Advertisers, common definitions would be adopted for forms of harmful content such as hate speech and bullying, and platforms would adopt harmonized reporting standards... The platforms agreed to have some practices reviewed by external auditors and to give advertisers more control over what content is displayed alongside their ads. "This is a significant milestone in the journey to rebuild trust online," said Luis Di Como, executive vice president of global media at Unilever, one of the world's biggest advertisers. "Whilst change doesn't happen overnight, today marks an important step in the right direction..." The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, one of America's largest groups opposing hate speech, told Reuters there were many details that still need to be resolved. "These commitments must be followed in a timely and comprehensive manner to ensure they are not the kind of empty promises that we have seen too often from Facebook." And in a follow-up article, Reuters notes that despite the agreement, advertisers who'd boycotted Facebook and other social media sites "are not all rushing back". Unilever, one of the world's biggest advertisers, told Reuters the move this week was "a good step in the right direction," but would not say whether it would resume paid advertising on Facebook in the United States next year after stopping over the summer. Coca-Cola also remains paused on Facebook and Instagram and declined to say if this changed its view. Beam Suntory, maker of Jim Beam bourbon and Courvoisier Cognac, plans to stay away from paid advertising for the rest of 2020 and reassess in 2021 based on how Facebook adjusts its approach... "Brands are very concerned about having any affiliation with the disinformation that runs through the big tech platforms," said Michael Priem, CEO of advertising technology firm Modern Impact... Campaign organizers remain skeptical and pledged to keep up the heat. "We cannot assume progress from yet another commitment to change until we see the impact and breadth of policy enforcement by these companies," said Rashad Robinson, president of Color Of Change, a backer of the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, which organized the boycott. "As long as these companies continue to abdicate their responsibility to their most vulnerable users, we will continue to call on Congress and regulatory agencies to intervene." The chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble tells Reuters that with half of all media spending now devoted to digital ads, "It's time for digital platforms to apply content standards properly." A Facebook spokersperson pointed out that 95% of hate speech removed by Facebook is now detected before being reported — whereas in 2017, that number was just 23%.

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Imprisoned 'Anonymous' Hacktivist Martin Gottesfeld Files His First Appeal

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 17:34
In early 2019, Martin Gottesfeld of Anonymous was sentenced under America's "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" to 10 years in federal prison for his alleged role in the 2014 DDoS attacks on healthcare and treatment facilities around Boston. (Gottesfeld was sentenced by the same judge who oversaw the Aaron Swartz case.) Gottesfeld has just filed his first appeal, and Slashdot reader Danngggg shares this new interview with Gottesfeld's attorney Brandon Sample. The upshot? Brandon Sample: If the court agrees with our arguments, for example, on the Speedy Trial Act, then that would result in dismissal of the indictment against him. And so, he would have no conviction at that point. There's a variety of different outcomes that could potentially flow from the arguments that have been raised in the appeal. If he wins, say for example, the argument that his lawyer should have been allowed off the case, well, then that would undo the conviction as well, and he would be entitled to another trial. If the indictment is dismissed, then the government is going to have to make a decision about whether or not this is really a case that they want to prosecute all over again... Daily Wire: Do you see this being successful, a strong case? Brandon Sample: The appeal? I think we have a really good chance. I do.

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Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 Vaccine Produces Strong Immune Response in Early Trial

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 17:04
Newsweek reports: Pharmaceutical manufacturer Johnson & Johnson announced Friday that early trials of a COVID-19 vaccine showed a 98 percent success rate in showing a boost in the immune system. According to research from Johnson & Johnson, the vaccine enabled 98 percent of those who took it to create antibodies that fight off the coronavirus infection. Those neutralizing antibodies were present 29 days after receiving the vaccination... Currently, four U.S. vaccines are in the final trial stages. Vaccines from other pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Moderna are administered in two doses while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine only requires one. "Based on the current results, Johnson & Johnson on Wednesday kicked off a final 60,000-person trial," reports Reuters, "which could pave the way for an application for regulatory approval. The company said it expects results of that so-called Phase 3 trial by the end of the year or early next year."

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Vaccine Maker Novavax Enters Final Large-Scale Testing of Its Covid-19 Vaccine

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 16:34
The New York Times reports: Vaccine maker Novavax said Thursday that it would begin the final stages of testing its coronavirus vaccine in the United Kingdom and that another large trial was scheduled to begin next month in the United States. It is the fifth late-stage trial from a company supported by Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to speed a coronavirus vaccine to market, and one of 11 worldwide to reach this pivotal stage. Novavax, a Maryland company that has never brought a vaccine to market, reached a $1.6 billion deal with the federal government in July to develop and manufacture its experimental vaccine, which has shown robust results in early clinical trials. The new study, known as a Phase 3 trial, is expected to enroll up to 10,000 people in the United Kingdom. Half of the volunteers will receive two doses of the experimental vaccine, 21 days apart, and the others will receive a placebo. Although Novavax is months behind the front-runners in the vaccine race, independent experts are excited about its vaccine because its early studies delivered particularly promising results. Monkeys that were vaccinated got strong protection against the coronavirus. And in early safety trials, published early this month in The New England Journal of Medicine, volunteers produced strikingly high levels of antibodies against the virus. It is not possible to make a precise comparison between early clinical studies of different vaccines, but John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, said that the antibodies from Novavax were markedly higher than any other vaccine with published results. "You just can't explain that away," he said. The Phase 3 trials will determine if Novavax can live up to that promise.

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Emacs Developers (Including Richard Stallman) Discuss How to Build a More 'Modern' Emacs

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 15:34
LWN.net re-visits the emacs-devel mailing list, where the Emacs 28 development cycle has revived discussions about how to make the text editor more "modern" and attractive to new users: A default dark theme may not be in the future, leading one to think that there may yet be hope for the world in general. But there does seem to be general agreement that Emacs could benefit from a better, more centralized approach to color themes, rather than having color names hard-coded throughout various Elisp packages. From that, a proper theme engine could be supported, making dark themes and such easily available to those who want them... Another area where Emacs is insufficiently "modern", it seems, has to do with keyboard and mouse bindings. On the keyboard side, users have come to expect certain actions from certain keystrokes; ^X to cut a selection, ^V to paste it, etc. These bindings are easily had by turning on the Cua mode, but new users tend not to know about this mode or how to enable it. Many participants in the discussion said that this mode should be on by default. That, of course, would break the finger memory of large numbers of existing Emacs users, who would be unlikely to appreciate the disruption. Or, as Richard Stallman put it: It is not an option to change these basic key bindings to imitate other, newer editors. It would create a different editor that we Emacs users would never switch to. It is unfortunate that the people who implemented the newer editors chose incompatibility with Emacs.... The situation with mouse behavior is similar; as several participants in the discussion pointed out, users of graphical interfaces have come to expect that a right-button click will produce a menu of available actions. In Emacs, instead, that button marks a region ("selection"), with a second click in the same spot yanking ("cutting") the selected text. Many experienced Emacs users have come to like this behavior, but it is surprising to newcomers. The right mouse button with the control key held down does produce a menu defined by the current major mode, but that is evidently not what is being requested here; that menu, some say, should present global actions rather mode-specific ones. Stallman suggested offering a "reshuffled mode" that would bring the context menu to an unadorned right-button click, and which would add some of the expected basic editing commands there as well. This would be relatively easy to do, he said, since mouse bindings are separate from everything else. Besides, as he noted, the current mouse behavior was derived from "what was the standard in X Windows around 1990"; while one wouldn't want to act in haste, it might just be about time for an update. Other proposed changes involved "discoverability," including the default enabling of various modes, although to incorporate them into GNU Emacs "would often require the author to sign copyrights over to the Free Software Foundation, which is not something all authors are willing to do..."

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Rat That Sniffs Out Land Mines Receives Award For Bravery

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 14:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The medal awarded on Friday lauded the "lifesaving bravery and devotion to duty" for work detecting land mines in Cambodia. Its recipient: a rat named Magawa. Magawais the first rat to receive the award -- a gold medal bestowed by the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals, a British charity, that is often called the "animal's George Cross" after an honor usually given to civilians that recognizes acts of bravery and heroism. Not since the fictional Remy of the 2007 Disney-Pixar film "Ratatouille" has a rat done so much to challenge the public's view of the animals as creatures more commonly seen scuttling through sewers and the subway: Magawa has discovered 39 land mines and 28 pieces of unexploded ordnance, and helped clear more than 1.5 million square feet of land over the past four years. More than five million land mines are thought to have been laid in Cambodia during the ousting of the Khmer Rouge and internal conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s. Parts of the country are also littered with unexploded ordnance dropped in United States airstrikes during the Vietnam War, a 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service found. Since 1979, more than 64,000 people have been injured by land mines and other explosives in Cambodia, and more than 25,000 amputees have been recorded there, according to the HALO Trust, the world's largest humanitarian land mine clearance charity. Magawa, the most successful rat to have taken part in the program, was trained to detect TNT, the chemical compound within explosives. The ability to sniff out TNT makes him much faster than any person in searching for land mines, as he can ignore scrap metal that would usually be picked up by a metal detector. He can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, whereas a person with a metal detector would usually take four days to search an area of that size. When he finds a mine, he signals to his handler by scratching at the earth above it. Unlike humans, Magawa is too light to detonate a mine, so there is minimal risk of injury.

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Google Maps To Block Users From 'Virtual Visits' of Australian Uluru

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 11:00
misnohmer writes: In 2019, the Australian site of Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock, has been closed to tourists "after the Anangu people said it was being trashed by visitors eroding its surface, dropping rubbish and polluting nearby waterholes," according to CNN. Parks Australia has now has asked Google to remove all imagery of the site uploaded by the community, as per the wishes of the Uluru's owners -- the Anangu Aboriginal people. Google agreed. "Google is "supportive of this request and is in the process of removing the content," Parks Australia said in a statement. "Parks Australia alerted Google Australia to the user-generated images from the Uluru summit that have been posted on their mapping platform and requested that the content be removed in accordance with the wishes of Anangu, Uluru's traditional owners, and the national park's Film and Photography Guidelines," the statement added.

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Cats Can Imitate Humans, Scientists Show For First Time

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 08:00
sciencehabit writes: A number of animals, from dogs to chimpanzees, can imitate human behavior. Now scientists have shown that cats can too. Under controlled conditions, a Japanese cat named Ebisu copied the movements of her owner when she touched a cardboard box and rubbed her face against it. Researchers say it's evidence of complex cognition, because the cat must be able to "map" the human's body parts onto her own. The finding may also suggest that the ability to imitate arose earlier in mammalian evolution than previously thought. The study has been published in the journal Science.

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MS Treatment a Step Closer After Drug Shown To Repair Nerve Coating

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 04:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Doctors believe they are closer to a treatment for multiple sclerosis after discovering a drug that repairs the coatings around nerves that are damaged by the disease. A clinical trial of the cancer drug bexarotene showed that it repaired the protective myelin sheaths that MS destroys. The loss of myelin causes a range of neurological problems including balance, vision and muscle disorders, and ultimately, disability. While bexarotene cannot be used as a treatment, because the side-effects are too serious, doctors behind the trial said the results showed "remyelination" was possible in humans, suggesting other drugs or drug combinations will halt MS. "It's disappointing that this is not the drug we'll use, but it's exciting that repair is achievable and it gives us great hope for another trial we hope to start this year," said Prof Alasdair Coles, who led the research at the University of Cambridge. The drug had some serious side-effects, from thyroid disease to raised levels of fats in the blood, which can lead to dangerous inflammation of the pancreas. But brain scans revealed that neurons had regrown their myelin sheaths, a finding confirmed by tests that showed signals sent from the retina to the visual cortex at the back of the brain had quickened. "That can only be achieved through remyelination," said Coles.

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Crows Possess Higher Intelligence Long Thought a Primarily Human Attribute, New Research Shows

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 03:02
Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals. STAT reports: "Together, the two papers show that intelligence/consciousness are grounded in connectivity and activity patterns of neurons" in the most neuron-dense part of the bird brain, called the pallium, neurobiologist Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University, who wrote an analysis of the studies for Science, told STAT. "Brains can appear diverse, and at the same time share profound similarities. The extent to which similar properties present themselves might be simply a matter of scale: how many neurons are available to work." The study shows that neurons in the most complex part of the crows' brain, the pallium, "do have activity that represents not what was shown to them, but what they later report," said Herculano-Houzel. Neurons "represent what the animals next report to have seen -- whether or not that is what they were shown," she said. The neurons figure this out, so to speak, during the time lapse between when Nieder tells the birds the rule and when they peck the target to indicate their answer. "That's exactly what one would expect from neurons that participated in building the thoughts that we later report," she said, suggesting that corvids "are as cognitively capable as monkeys and even great apes." A second study, also in Science, looked in unprecedented detail at the neuroanatomy of pigeons and barn owls, finding hints to the basis of their intelligence that likely applies to corvids', too. STAT reports: Specifically, the pigeons' and owls' neurons meet at right angles, forming computational circuits organized in columns. "The avian version of this connectivity blueprint could conceivably generate computational properties reminiscent of the [mammalian] neocortex," they write. "[S]imilar microcircuits ... achieve largely identical cognitive outcomes from seemingly vastly different forebrains." That is, evolution invented connected, circuit-laden brain structure at least twice. "In theory, any brain that has a large number of neurons connected into associative circuitry ... could be expected to add flexibility and complexity to behavior," said Herculano-Houzel. "That is my favorite operational definition of intelligence: behavioral flexibility." That enables pigeons to home, count, and be as trainable as monkeys. But for sheer smarts we're still in the corvid camp.

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Facebook's Oversight Board Won't Launch In Time To Oversee the Election

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 02:25
"On Friday, a coalition of academics and legal experts announced the formation of the 'Real Facebook Oversight Board,' an informal group that will publicly call out Facebook's slow action in advance of the election, including early Facebook investor Roger McNamee and Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff," reports The Verge. The only problem is that it won't launch in time to hear cases related to the U.S. election. From the report: The group plans to hold regular "board meetings" to discuss failures of platform policy, with the first scheduled to be hosted by Kara Swisher on October 1. In a statement, Zuboff described Facebook as "a roiling cauldron of lies, violence and danger destabilizing elections and democratic governance around the world." The group also include Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr, known for her work on the Cambridge Analytica story. "This is an emergency response," Cadwalladr told NBC News this morning. "We know there are going to be a series of incidents leading up to the election and beyond in which Facebook is crucial." The board will hold no power and is largely meant as a symbolic gesture. Still, it has placed new pressure on Facebook's Oversight Board, which was initially scheduled for launch this summer. Oversight Board members now estimate that the project will launch in October. That will be too late to hear cases related to the US election, given the months-long process for fully adjudicating a case. "We are currently testing the newly deployed technical systems that will allow users to appeal and the Board to review cases," the Oversight Board said. "Assuming those tests go to plan, we expect to open user appeals in mid to late October. Building a process that is thorough, principled and globally effective takes time and our members have been working aggressively to launch as soon as possible."

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Amid the Pandemic's Urban Quiet, a Song That Makes Sense

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 01:45
"Every musician knows that when the performers can hear one another, the performance is always better than otherwise," writes Slashdot reader nightcats. "This principle applies in nature as well, and has been anecdotally witnessed amid the quiet imposed by COVID-19 on cities around the world. In San Francisco, behavioral ecologist Liz Derryberry has been able to deliver a dramatic scientific demonstration of the changes to the songs of the white-crowned sparrow amid the quiet of 2020." National Geographic reports: With most San Franciscans staying at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, she decided to seize an unprecedented opportunity to study how this small, scrappy songbird responded when human noises disappeared. By recording the species' calls among the abandoned streets of the Bay Area in the following months, Derryberry and colleagues have revealed that the shutdown dramatically improved the birds' calls, both in quality and efficiency. The research, published today in Science, is among the first to scientifically evaluate the effects of the pandemic on urban wildlife. It also adds to a burgeoning field of research into how the barrage of human-made noise has disrupted nature, from ships drowning out whale songs to automobile traffic jamming bat sonar.

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The Best Chrome Extensions To Prevent Creepy Web Tracking

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 01:02
Wired has highlighted several browser extensions that "are a simple first step in improving your online privacy." Other steps to take include adding a privacy-first browser and VPN to further mask your web activity. An anonymous reader shares the report: Privacy Badger is one of the best options for blocking online tracking in your current browser. For a start, it's created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US-based non-profit digital rights group that's been fighting online privacy battles since 1990. It's also free. Privacy Badger tracks all the elements of web pages you visit -- including plugins and ads placed by external companies. If it sees these appearing across multiple sites you visit then the extension tells your browser not to load any more of that content. DuckDuckGo is best-known for its anonymous search engine that doesn't collect people's data. DuckDuckGo also makes an extension for Chrome. The Privacy Essentials extension blocks hidden third-party trackers, showing you which advertising networks are following you around the web over time. The tool also highlights how websites collect data through a partnership with Terms of Service Didn't Read and includes scores for sites' privacy policies. It also adds its non-tracking search to Chrome. The Ghostery browser extension blocks trackers and shows lists of which ones are blocked for each site (including those that are slow to load), allows trusted and restricted sites to be set up and also lets people you block ads. The main Ghostery extension is free but there's also a paid for $49 per month subscription that provides detailed breakdowns of all trackers and can be used for analysis or research. There are Ghostery extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Opera. Unlike other tools here, Adblock Plus is primarily marketed as an ad blocking tool -- the others don't necessarily block ads by default but aim to be privacy tools that may limit the most intrusive types of ads. Using an ad blocker comes with a different set of ethical considerations to tools that are designed to stop overly intrusive web tracking; ad blockers will block a much wider set of items on a webpage and this can include ads that don't follow people around the web. Adblock Plus is signed up to the Acceptable Ads project that shows non-intrusive ads by default (although this can be turned off). On a privacy front Adblock Plus's free extensions block third party trackers and allow for social media sharing buttons that send information back to their owners to be disabled.

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Apple Backs Down on Taking 30% Cut of Paid Online Events on Facebook

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 00:25
Facebook has temporarily shamed Apple out of taking a 30 percent cut of paid online events organized by small businesses and hosted on Facebook -- things like cooking classes, workout sessions, and happy hours. Demand for these kinds of online events has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic. From a report: Apple says that it has a longstanding policy that digital products must be purchased using Apple's in-app payments system -- and hence pay Apple's 30 percent tax. In contrast, companies selling physical goods and services are not only allowed but required to use other payment methods (options here include Apple Pay, which doesn't take such a big cut). For example, an in-person cooking class is not a digital product, so a business selling cooking class tickets via an iPhone app wouldn't have to give Apple a 30 percent cut. But if the same business offers a virtual cooking class, Apple considers that to be a digital product and demands a 30 percent cut -- at least if the customer pays for the class using an iOS device. Last month, Facebook announced it would start offering a new feature for small businesses to host paid online events. Facebook has waived any fees for the first year, allowing small businesses to pocket 100 percent of the revenue. But Apple refused to budge on its 30 percent take.

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Microsoft's New Xbox App Will Let You Stream Xbox One Games To Your iPhone

Sat, 09/26/2020 - 00:00
Microsoft is about to release a big Xbox app update for iOS that includes the ability to stream Xbox One games to an iPhone. The Verge reports: A new Xbox app will arrive in the App Store soon that includes a remote play feature, which lets Xbox One console owners stream their games to an iPhone. Remote play is different to Microsoft's xCloud service, which streams games directly from servers instead of your own Xbox One console. This Xbox remote play feature will only connect to your own Xbox console, not to xCloud. It's similar to Sony's own PS4 Remote Play feature that's also available on Android and iOS. You will be able to access an Xbox console over Wi-Fi, or even an LTE or 5G connection, too. As this app takes control of your home Xbox, you can remotely start your console outside of your home. The Xbox will start up without a sound or the Xbox light at the front, and when you disconnect, it goes back into standby after a brief period of inactivity. A new Xbox app arrived on Android recently, and this updated iPhone version includes the same new design and new features.

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Hydrogen-Powered Passenger Plane Completes Maiden Flight In 'World First'

Fri, 09/25/2020 - 23:40
ZeroAvia's hydrogen fuel-cell plane that's capable of carrying six passengers completed its maiden flight this week. The aircraft has been retrofitted with a device that combines hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity. CNBC reports: ZeroAvia has said the trip, described as a "hydrogen fuel cell powered flight of a commercial-grade aircraft," is a "world first." Other examples of hydrogen-fuel cell planes that can host passengers do exist, however. Back in 2016, the HY4 aircraft, which is able to carry four people, undertook its first official journey when it flew from Stuttgart Airport in Germany. The HY4 was developed by researchers at the German Aerospace Center alongside "industry and research partners." Thursday's ZeroAvia flight was carried out at the company's research and development site at Cranfield Airport, in England -- 50 miles north of London. The airport is owned by Cranfield University. "While some experimental aircraft have flown using hydrogen fuel cells as a power source, the size of this commercially available aircraft shows that paying passengers could be boarding a truly zero-emission flight very soon," Val Miftakhov, the CEO of ZeroAvia, said in a statement. The next step of the HyFlyer project will see ZeroAvia work toward carrying out a flight of between 250 and 300 nautical miles from the Orkney Islands, an archipelago located in waters off the north coast of mainland Scotland. The plane on this flight will use hydrogen-fuel cells. It's hoped this trip will happen before the end of 2020.

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Twitter Is Bringing Its 'Read Before You Retweet' Prompt To All Users

Fri, 09/25/2020 - 23:02
Twitter says it's working on bringing its "read the article before you retweet it" prompt to all users "soon." The Verge reports: The company began testing the prompt in June, which shows up when people go to retweet a story they haven't clicked through to actually read. Twitter says its motivation is to "help promote informed discussion." Headlines often don't tell the whole story and can even be actively misleading. Encouraging people to at least read the article they're sharing seems like a smart way to promote media literacy and stop some of the knee-jerk reactions that can make misinformation viral. The company shared some results from its initial test of the feature, which was limited to Twitter users on Android. It says people shown the prompt opened articles 40 percent more often and that the overall proportion of people opening articles before retweeting increased by 33 percent. The company also said that "some people" (a statistically meaningless phrase!) didn't retweet the article after opening it up.

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Amazon Employee Warns Internal Groups They're Being Monitored For Labor Organizing

Fri, 09/25/2020 - 22:25
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An Amazon Web Services employee emailed a series of internal Amazon listservs and told them that their communications were being monitored for labor organizing efforts and processed in a data farming project by the company's Global Security Operations, according to an internal email obtained by Motherboard. The emails were sent -- at least -- to the employee listservs "Indigenous@amazon.com" and "transgender@amazon.com," and mentioned a handful of other listservs the employee believed were being watched. "If you are a moderator or user of this list, please note that it is being explicitly watched by an internal monitoring team," the Amazon Web Services employee wrote to members of at least two of the listservs. "This is part of a wider project to generate and curate data on internal employees and external entities." "While we may be under the impression that everything we write at Amazon is at least saved somewhere for review, it is important that those on this list know that they are being explicitly watched and processed in a data farming project from GSO [Global Security Operations]," the employee continued. According to the email, listservs being monitored include black-employee-network@, we-wont-build-it@, transgender@, indigenous@, arabs@, persians@, glamazon@, latinos@, colombianos@, asians-at-amazon@, coronavirusvolunteers@, and dozens of others. An Amazon spokesperson said that the company uses "several methods to gather feedback at scale," which includes "anonymized feedback that is sometimes shared from these open email forums." "We continually work to improve the Amazon employee experience, and with hundreds of thousands of employees located around the world, we use several methods to gather feedback at scale," the spokesperson said. "The anonymized feedback that is sometimes shared from these open email forums has helped us improve our employee benefits, further strengthen our COVID-19 procedures, and improve the overall Amazon employee experience."

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