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The Federal Trade Commission today sued Facebook, alleging that the company is illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct. FTC: Following a lengthy investigation in cooperation with a coalition of attorneys general of 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam, the complaint alleges that Facebook has engaged in a systematic strategy -- including its 2012 acquisition of up-and-coming rival Instagram, its 2014 acquisition of the mobile messaging app WhatsApp, and the imposition of anticompetitive conditions on software developers -- to eliminate threats to its monopoly. This course of conduct harms competition, leaves consumers with few choices for personal social networking, and deprives advertisers of the benefits of competition. The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp; prohibit Facebook from imposing anticompetitive conditions on software developers; and require Facebook to seek prior notice and approval for future mergers and acquisitions. "Personal social networking is central to the lives of millions of Americans," said Ian Conner, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition. "Facebook's actions to entrench and maintain its monopoly deny consumers the benefits of competition. Our aim is to roll back Facebook's anticompetitive conduct and restore competition so that innovation and free competition can thrive."

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At Chrome Dev Summit 2020 today, Google announced it will change how extensions access data and how extension permissions work in 2021. On January 18, a day before the release of Chrome 88, Google will require that every extension publicly display its privacy practices and will limit what developers can do with the data they collect. From a report: The first change means that Chrome users next year will determine which websites an extension can access when they browse the web. Once you grant an extension permission to access a website's data, that preference can be saved for that domain. Today, the extension makes that call. In 2021, you will still be able to grant an extension access to all the websites you visit, but that won't be the default. Google outlined the second change last month: "each extension's detail page in the Chrome Web Store will show developer-provided information about the data collected by the extension, in clear and easy to understand language." The company also updated its user data privacy policy with an addition to how extension developers use data they collect.

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Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]: In 2014, Apple executives became alarmed when China enacted a new labor law meant to protect workers' rights. The law required that no more than 10% of a factory's workforce be temporary workers. Typically these employees have fewer benefits and legal protections than permanent ones, but Apple's suppliers increasingly relied on them in China's tightening labor market. Apple surveyed 362 of its supplier factories in China that year and discovered that nearly half were over the quota for temporary workers. Eighty factories used temporary workers for more than half their labor force, according to an internal Apple presentation reviewed by The Information. Apple asked its suppliers to come up with plans to reduce their use of temporary workers by a March 2016 deadline, when a two-year grace period for the law expired. However, by the time the law went into effect, little progress had been made. According to four former Apple employees familiar with its labor issues, Apple for years took no major action against its suppliers for violating the temp-worker labor law out of concerns it would create costs, drain resources and delay product launches. Three of the ex-Apple employees were members of its supplier responsibility team, which is in charge of monitoring violations and enforcing penalties, while the fourth was a senior manager familiar with its operations in China. The former employees, as well as a review of internal Apple presentations and the company's own data on factory hiring between 2013 and 2018, suggests that Apple's strategy for managing its supply chain made it difficult for its three biggest contract manufacturers -- Foxconn Technology, Quanta Computer and Pegatron -- to remain compliant with the labor restrictions. The issue surfaced again publicly last year when Apple admitted that Foxconn had broken the law at its massive iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, which can employ as many as 300,000 workers. Apple says it requires suppliers to abide by local laws and pledges to remove those that won't comply.

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YouTube is taking belated action on election misinformation: The company said it would now remove misleading videos that claim widespread fraud or other errors changed the outcome of the US presidential election. From a report: Google-owned YouTube announced that it would begin enforcing against this content on Wednesday, citing Tuesday's safe harbor deadline for the US election, which is the date after which state election results cannot effectively be challenged. YouTube said that enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. National news outlets have universally projected that Joe Biden will be the next President. As an example of content that would be banned, YouTube said it would take down videos claiming that a presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or errors in counting votes. It will begin enforcing the policy starting Wednesday, and said it would "ramp up" efforts in the weeks to come. It will still allow videos including news coverage and commentary to remain on the platform if they have enough context. Any videos in violation of the policy that were posted prior to Wednesday, will remain up even though they now break YouTube's rules. They will feature an information panel that says election results have been certified.

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sciencehabit writes: It's not just your storage unit that's packed to the gills. According to a new study, the mass of all our stuff -- buildings, roads, cars, and everything else we manufacture -- now exceeds the weight of all living things on the planet. And the amount of new material added every week equals the total weight of Earth's nearly 8 billion people. "If you weren't convinced before that humans are dominating the planet, then you should be convinced now," says Timon McPhearson, an urban ecologist at the New School who was not involved with the research. "This is an eye-catching comparison," adds Fridolin Krausmann, a social ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, who also was not involved in the work. There are many measures of humanity's impact on the planet. Fossil fuels have sent greenhouse gases soaring to levels not seen in at least 800,000 years. Agriculture and dwellings have altered 70% of land. And humans have wiped out untold numbers of species in an emerging great extinction. The transformations are so great that researchers have declared we're living in a new human-dominated age: the Anthropocene.

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theodp writes: As the 8th annual Hour of Code kicked off this week, the College Board released 2020 AP national and state score breakouts for AP CS program participants. As in past years, this year's results still showed striking gaps in performance and participation across gender and ethnicity segments. Passing rates across major ethnic group segments ranged from 39.8%-78.6% for the Java-based AP CS A course, and 52%-83% for the newer "language agnostic" AP Computer Science Principles (CSP) course. Across gender segments, females accounted for 25% of AP CS A scores (16.2K of 64.9K total students) and 33.9% of AP CSP scores (38.6K of 113.9K students). Asian students accounted for 47% of all passing female AP CS A students. Due to pandemic-related school closures, the overall number of students completing AP STEM-related courses in 2020 declined for all subjects except CS. AP CS A, which had an abbreviated taken-at-home final exam, saw a modest 1.5% YOY increase in completions, while AP CSP saw a whopping 21.5% YOY increase in completions, no doubt helped by the cancellation of its end-of-course exam, which was to have counted for 60% of scores (students were instead assessed only by their portfolio submissions).

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Amazon.com has added a competitor to its year-old coalition of companies pledging to reduce their contribution to climate change: Microsoft. From a report: The two technology giants, neighbors in the Seattle area and rivals in cloud computing and business software, have each spent much of the last two years announcing increasingly aggressive climate targets, including dueling umbrella organizations for companies willing to do their part to avert the catastrophic warming of the planet. On Wednesday, Microsoft said it had signed onto Amazon's pact, alongside consumer products giant Unilever and several other new signatories. Amazon, long a laggard among its peers in publicly addressing its impact on the environment, reversed course in recent years, bolstering an internal sustainability team and vowing to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. The company also invited others interested in matching that commitment to sign on to what it calls the Climate Pledge, a forum for comparing notes on best practices and climate-friendly investment opportunities.

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Microsoft has shared some details about the roadmap for its cloud gaming service. In addition to Android devices, the company confirms that it plans to add support for more platforms. In Spring 2021, Microsoft will launch its cloud gaming service on iOS and on computers. From a report: Originally called Project xCloud, Microsoft's cloud gaming service lets you play Xbox games on non-Xbox devices. The games run on a server in a data center near you. The video is streamed to your device, and your interactions are relayed to the server in real time. Xbox cloud gaming isn't a separate subscription. People who subscribe to the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for $14.99 per month can access cloud gaming as part of their subscription. The plan also includes access to a library of games, EA Play and Xbox Live Gold. When it comes to new devices, you'll soon be able to launch a game on Xbox cloud gaming from a PC. The service will be available in the Xbox app and using a web browser.

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Twitter's timeline is currently overrun with ads for some users, in what at first appeared to be a glitch involving the distribution of Promoted Tweets. From a report: Typically, a Promoted Tweet -- which is just a regular tweet an advertiser has paid to promote more broadly -- will appear just once at the top of a user's timeline, then scroll through the timeline like any other tweet. Now, however, Promoted Tweets are popping up with increased frequency. Some users report seeing them as often as every four to six tweets, in fact. Others are reporting seeing the same Promoted Tweet more than once. This seemed to have indicated some sort of issue with Twitter's ad system, as the company generally intends for Promoted Tweets to be targeted and relevant to the end user, without being an overly frequent part of users' timelines. As Twitter's Business website explains, "we're thoughtful in how we display Promoted Tweets, and are conservative about the number of Promoted Tweets that people see in a single day." That's obviously not the case when it seems like nearly every other tweet is now an ad -- and often, a repeated ad. Twitter says the change is not a glitch, however -- it's intentional.

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Singapore is set to host the world's first electric-powered air taxi service by the end of 2023, according to Volocopter GmbH, which is developing the vertical-takeoff craft. From a report: The German manufacturer is committed to starting operations within three years once it completes flight trials, evaluation and certification in collaboration with the city-state, it said in a statement Wednesday. Tickets for a 15-minute trip costing 300 euros ($364) are already on sale. Volocopter completed a demonstration flight over Singapore's Marina Bay area in October last year, and the first commercial route is likely to fly tourists over the same district, offering spectacular views of the skyline, the company said. Later services could including cross-border journeys. Singapore is at the forefront of plans to introduce flying taxis thanks to a more welcoming regulatory regime than in some other countries. While the craft could replace helicopters and light aircraft on some routes, they'd also be small and nimble enough to fly deep within cities and land with minimal space. "Singapore is renowned for its leading role in adapting and living new technologies," Volocopter Chief Executive Officer Florian Reuter said, adding that local capabilities in battery research, material science and route validation for autonomous operations will be central to the project.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Germany, France, Spain and ten other EU countries have joined forces to invest in processors and semiconductor technologies, key to internet-connected devices and data processing, in a push to catch up with the United States and Asia. Europe's share of the 440-billion-euro ($533 billion) global semiconductor market is around 10%, with the EU currently relying on chips made abroad. The 13 countries said they would work together to bolster Europe's electronics and embedded systems value chain. The group will reach out to companies to form industrial alliances for research and investment into designing and making processors and look into funding for such projects. It will also come up with a European-wide scheme known as an Important Project of Common European Interest which allows for funding under looser EU state aid rules. The group will seek to set up common standards and certification for electronics. The signatories include Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovenia.

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Right after the Apple event in October, Samsung mocked the company for not including the power adapter in the iPhone 12 box and also removing it from the older models. Now, as some rumors have predicted, the Galaxy S21's documentation suggests that it will also not come with a charger included in the box. 9to5Mac reports: As reported by Brazilian website Tecnoblog, the new Galaxy S21, Galaxy S21+, and Galaxy S21 Ultra have just been approved by ANATEL in Brazil, which is the equivalent agency to the FCC in the United States. The new devices have the codenames SM-G991B/DS, SM-G996B/DS, and SM-G998B/DS, respectively. While the documentation filed at ANATEL doesn't reveal much detail about upcoming Galaxy smartphones, it does reveal a noteworthy change in the lineup of Samsung's phones for the next year. ANATEL says that all three new Galaxy S21 models will not have a charger included in the box. Headphones will not be included either.

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China and Nepal say they have determined the "most accurate height of Everest that we have ever had," calculating it to be about 8,848.86 meters (29,031.7 feet) high. That's almost a meter taller than the mountain's previous recognized height. CNET reports: The two countries, which border each other at the mountain's summit, shared the news in a joint virtual briefing Tuesday that was streamed live online. Nepal began remeasuring the mountain in 2017, and China began its own work after Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Nepal in 2019. As part of the complicated measurement, researchers placed signal receivers on the mountain and measured the amount of time it took signals to travel between the receiver and satellites to figure out the new height. Global positioning devices and ground-penetrating radar were also used. Nepal's lead surveyor Khimlal Gautam ended up with damaged toes due to frostbite he suffered while installing the measuring equipment. A 2015 earthquake in Nepal helped inspire the re-measurement of Everest. The BBC notes that some geologists thought that quake could've shrunk the mountain's snow cap, while others note that Himalayan peaks can actually grow taller over time as shifting tectonic plates push them upward.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: In a high-stakes mission that could take five years to complete, NASA wants to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s. Transporting enough oxygen and fuel on a spacecraft to sustain the mission for anywhere near that length of time, however, isn't currently viable. The way NASA plans to address this problem is by deploying MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen in Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. This system is in the testing phase on the Mars Perseverance rover, which launched in July. The apparatus will convert the carbon dioxide that makes up 96% of the gas in the red planet's' atmosphere into oxygen. On Mars, oxygen is only 0.13% of the atmosphere, compared to 21% of the Earth's atmosphere. The MOXIE system essentially produces oxygen like a tree -- pulling in the Martian air with a pump and using an electrochemical process to separate two oxygen atoms from each molecule of carbon dioxide, or CO2. The experimental technique proposed by Vijay Ramani and his colleagues uses a completely different resource -- salty water in lakes beneath the Martian surface. "The presence of the brine is fortuitous because it lowers freezing point of the water. You take the salty, brackish water and electrolyze that. Our process takes the water and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen," Ramani said. The method proposed in the new paper, however, assumes that these brines are readily available on Mars, said Michael Hecht, NASA's principal investigator for MOXIE and associate director for research management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory. The study has been published in the journal PNAS.

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France will build a new, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to replace its Charles de Gaulle carrier by 2038, French President Emmanuel Macron announced Tuesday. The Associated Press reports: Macron framed the decision to use nuclear reactors to propel the future warship as part of France's climate strategy, stressing its lower emissions compared to diesel fuel. Speaking at a nuclear facility in the Burgundy town of Le Creusot, he called France's nuclear weapons and atomic energy industry "the cornerstone of our strategic autonomy," and said the nuclear sector plays a role in France's "status as a great power." One of his advisers noted that having an aircraft carrier also helps France project its global influence. Only a few countries in the world maintain the huge, costly vessels. The new French aircraft carrier will be about 70,000 tons and 300 meters long, roughly 1.5 times the size of the Charles de Gaulle, which has been deployed for international military operations in Iraq and Syria in recent years, according to French presidential advisers. Its catapults will be electro-magnetic, and American-made, and the ship will be designed to accommodate next-generation warplanes and serve until around 2080, the advisers said. They didn't provide a price tag but French media estimate it will cost around 7 billion euros ($8.5 billion).

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Toyota announced today that they will be unveiling a new all-electric SUV in the coming months. Electrek reports: The automaker, which has been seen as a lagger when it comes to all-electric vehicles, says that it's their 'first step' for battery-electric vehicles. Toyota has yet to launch an all-electric vehicle outside of China. Toyota announced a new midsize electric SUV today: "Toyota announced today that it will preview a brand-new model for its European Battery Electric line-up -- a mid-sized battery-electric SUV based on the forthcoming the e-TNGA platform." For now, they are only showing the silhouette (pictured above), but the automaker says that more details are coming in the next few months. The un-named preview model will be based on Toyota's new e-TNGA platform. Thanks to its clever design the new platform is both highly versatile and easily adaptable for a range of product types. They unveiled this image with the announcement -- showing a dual motor all-wheel-drive powertrain and modular battery pack. The automaker confirmed that the vehicle is already being readied for production.

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Macthorpe writes: Game Informer journalist Liana Ruppert has recounted her experiences with "braindances" (abbreviated as "BD's) in Cyberpunk 2077 that led to her experiencing a grand mal epileptic seizure. From her article and PSA: "When 'suiting up' for a BD, especially with Judy, V will be given a headset that is meant to onset the instance. The headset fits over both eyes and features a rapid onslaught of white and red blinking LEDs, much like the actual device neurologists use in real life to trigger a seizure when they need to trigger one for diagnosis purposes. If not modeled off of the IRL design, it's a very spot-on coincidence and because of that this is one aspect that I would personally advise you to avoid altogether. When you notice the headset come into play, look away completely or close your eyes. This is a pattern of lights designed to trigger an epileptic episode and it very much did that in my own personal playthrough." Cyberpunk 2077 does not include a standard boilerplate epilepsy warning on launch, and instead places this in the games EULA. Regardless, one wonders why a game of this nature needs to simulate an IPS diagnostic device this accurately when the average player won't know the difference, and when it will cause severe harm to some players without warning? UPDATE: Developer CD Projekt Red has responded with its plans on addressing the concerns. In a tweet, CDPR wrote that it's "working on adding a separate warning in the game." The development team is also looking into a permanent solution it will implement "as soon as possible." Hopefully, that will include a way to turn off strobing effects.

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Pornhub is making major changes to its service following a New York Times article that highlighted how the site's lax enforcement of its policies has enabled child exploitation. Engadget reports: Among the changes: Pornhub is ending uploads from unverified users and banning the ability of users' to download much of the site's content. The company is also implementing new moderation policies and will release a transparency report in 2021. The changes come a day after Visa and Mastercard pledged to "investigate" their relationship with Pornhub parent company MindGeek. Developing...

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times : For years, the cybersecurity firm FireEye has been the first call for government agencies and companies around the world who have been hacked by the most sophisticated attackers, or fear they might be. Now it looks like the hackers -- in this case, evidence points to Russia's intelligence agencies -- may be exacting their revenge. FireEye revealed on Tuesday that its own systems were pierced by what it called "a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities." The company said hackers used "novel techniques" to make off with its own tool kit, which could be useful in mounting new attacks around the world. It was a stunning theft, akin to bank robbers who, having cleaned out local vaults, then turned around and stole the F.B.I.'s investigative tools. In fact, FireEye said on Tuesday, moments after the stock market closed, that it had called in the F.B.I. The $3.5 billion company, which partly makes a living by identifying the culprits in some of the world's boldest breaches -- its clients have included Sony and Equifax -- declined to say explicitly who was responsible. But its description, and the fact that the F.B.I. has turned the case over to its Russia specialists, left little doubt who the lead suspects were and that they were after what the company calls "Red Team tools." These are essentially digital tools that replicate the most sophisticated hacking tools in the world. FireEye uses the tools — with the permission of a client company or government agency -- to look for vulnerabilities in their systems. Most of the tools are based in a digital vault that FireEye closely guards. The hack raises the possibility that Russian intelligence agencies saw an advantage in mounting the attack while American attention -- including FireEye's -- was focused on securing the presidential election system. At a moment that the nation's public and private intelligence systems were seeking out breaches of voter registration systems or voting machines, it may have a been a good time for those Russian agencies, which were involved in the 2016 election breaches, to turn their sights on other targets. The hack was the biggest known theft of cybersecurity tools since those of the National Security Agency were purloined in 2016 by a still-unidentified group that calls itself theShadowBrokers. [...] The N.S.A.'s tools were most likely more useful than FireEye's since the U.S. government builds purpose-made digital weapons. FireEye's Red Team tools are essentially built from malware that the company has seen used in a wide range of attacks. Still, the advantage of using stolen weapons is that nation-states can hide their own tracks when they launch attacks.

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New submitter RealNeoMorpheus shares a Google blogpost about Fuchsia -- a new open source operating system that has been in the works for several years: Fuchsia is a long-term project to create a general-purpose, open source operating system, and today we are expanding Fuchsia's open source model to welcome contributions from the public. Fuchsia is designed to prioritize security, updatability, and performance, and is currently under active development by the Fuchsia team. We have been developing Fuchsia in the open, in our git repository for the last four years. You can browse the repository history at fuchsia.googlesource.com to see how Fuchsia has evolved over time. We are laying this foundation from the kernel up to make it easier to create long-lasting, secure products and experiences. Starting today, we are expanding Fuchsia's open source model to make it easier for the public to engage with the project. We have created new public mailing lists for project discussions, added a governance model to clarify how strategic decisions are made, and opened up the issue tracker for public contributors to see what's being worked on. As an open source effort, we welcome high-quality, well-tested contributions from all. There is now a process to become a member to submit patches, or a committer with full write access. In addition, we are also publishing a technical roadmap for Fuchsia to provide better insights for project direction and priorities. Some of the highlights of the roadmap are working on a driver framework for updating the kernel independently of the drivers, improving file systems for performance, and expanding the input pipeline for accessibility.

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