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Microsoft is overhauling Excel with the ability to support custom live data types. The Verge reports: You could import the data type for Seattle, for example, and then create a formula that references that single cell to pull out information on the population of Seattle. These data types work by cramming a set of structured data into a single cell in Excel that can then be referenced by the rest of the spreadsheet. Data can also be refreshed to keep it up to date. If you're a student who is researching the periodic table, for example, you could create a cell for each element and easily pull out individual data from there. Microsoft is bringing more than 100 new data types into Excel for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscribers. Excel users will be able to track stocks, pull in nutritional information for dieting plans, and much more, thanks to data from Wolfram Alpha's service. This is currently available for Office beta testers in the Insiders program. Where these custom data types will be most powerful is obviously for businesses that rely on Excel daily. Microsoft is leveraging its Power BI service to act as the connector to bring sources of data into Excel data types on the commercial side, allowing businesses to connect up a variety of data. This could be hierarchical data or even references to other data types and images. Businesses will even be able to convert existing cells into linked data types, making data analysis a lot easier. Power BI won't be the only way for this feature to work, though. When you import data into Excel, you can now transform it into a data type with Power Query. That could include information from files, databases, websites, and more. The data that's imported can be cleaned up and then converted into a data type to be used in spreadsheets. If you've pulled in data using Power Query, it's easy to refresh the data from its original source. [...] These new Power BI data types will be available in Excel for Windows for all Microsoft 365 / Office 365 subscribers that also have a Power BI Pro service plan. Power Query data types are also rolling out to subscribers. On the consumer side, Wolfram Alpha data types are currently available in preview for Office insiders and should be available to all Microsoft 365 subscribers soon.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: China's Communist Party emerged from four days of meetings behind closed doors in Beijing declaring the country's leader, Xi Jinping, a "helmsman" who would lead "the ship of socialism sailing into the wind and waves with determination." At a time when other world leaders remain consumed by the coronavirus pandemic, China promised an economic revival, greater technological self-reliance and a stronger military to protect the country's economic and political interests. The meeting underscored Mr. Xi's seemingly boundless political control, as well as his ambitions to propel China out of the current crisis into a new phase of growth, less vulnerable to external risks. Here are the main outcomes from the meeting, which outlined policy priorities for the coming years. Economic revival: After the shock from the coronavirus crisis of the first months of this year, China's economy returned to4.9 percent growth in the July-to-September quarter, and exports have revived strongly. In its five-year plan, China aims to expand domestic markets and encourage innovation across the economy -- from cutting-edge technology to more efficient farming -- the party leaders said in an official summary of their meeting. That summary did not offer specific growth projections from 2021. Homegrown technology: The meeting of the party's Central Committee declared that China would make enhanced technological self-reliance a priority over the next 15 years. "Insist on the core status of innovation across all of our national modernization," the leaders said. "Make technological self-sufficiency a strategic pillar of national development." Military modernization and security: The Central Committee declared that China's military -- one of Mr. Xi's core priorities since taking office in 2012 -- had improved greatly, even as it promised to make still more "major steps" to enhance the country's security. The committee did not detail any new programs but called for "comprehensively strengthening military training and preparedness."

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Top banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, are battening down their technology hatches for next week's presidential election. From a report (paywalled): Around next Tuesday, the final day of voting, JPMorgan and Goldman will both halt software updates to the retail and investment banking systems their customers use to manage accounts, The Information has learned. It's a precaution intended to minimize the risk of outages of their services during a period of potential market volatility surrounding the election. Banks have good reason to institute these software code "freezes." Faulty software updates are one of the main culprits behind online service outages. While suspending software updates is common for banks during times of heightened market volatility, this year's election could be especially turbulent, with wide fears over civil unrest and contested election results.

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Long-time Slashdot reader imAck writes: Glenn Greenwald announced via Twitter recently that he has resigned from The Intercept (and First Look Media), the former being a media outlet that he co-founded [in February 2014]. Purportedly, a recent attempt to constrain his editorial freedom was the incident that pushed him to make the decision. "Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication," an anonymous Slashdot reader quotes him as saying. As The New York Times notes, Mr. Greenwald is "best known for his role in making public the National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013," which Slashdot covered extensively. "For now, Mr. Greenwald will be part of a growing number of journalists who have left major media outlets to try their luck at Substack, a group that includes Andrew Sullivan, formerly of New York Magazine, and Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone." Betsy Reed, Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept, responded to Greenwald's departure, saying there's a "fundamental disagreement over the role of editors in the production of journalism and the nature of censorship."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're a Google One subscriber, there's a new reason to consider the service's $10 per month 2TB plan. Google is adding built-in virtual private network (VPN) functionality to the Google One app, but you'll need to subscribe to the 2TB and above plans to access the perk. While the feature is built into Google One, the company says you can take advantage of it while using any other app on your Android phone to protect your online privacy. Moreover, with the family sharing feature that comes with Google One, five other people can get access to a VPN as well.

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Netflix is introducing price hikes for its US subscribers today, increasing its standard plan to $14 a month and its premium tier to $18 a month. From a report: The new pricing for the standard plan is a $1 price increase (from $13 a month), while the new premium tier cost is a $2 increase (from $16 a month). New subscribers will have to pay the updated monthly fees, while current subscribers will see the new prices over the next few weeks as they roll out with customer's billing cycles. Industry insiders have long anticipated another round of price hikes at Netflix, which last increased subscription fees in the United States in January 2019. Recently, Netflix increased the cost of some plans in Canada. Netflix rolls out price changes on a country-by-country basis and the change "in the US does not influence or indicate a global price change," a Netflix spokesperson told The Verge.

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Two restaurants have initiated a potential class-action lawsuit against GrubHub for allegedly listing 150,000 restaurants to its site without the businesses' permission. From a report: The Farmer's Wife in Sebastopol, California and Antonia's Restaurant in Hillsborough, NC filed the suit with Gibbs Law Group, accusing Grubhub of adding their restaurants to its site despite not entering into a partnership, which causes "significant damage to their hard-earned reputations, loss of control over their customers' dining experiences, loss of control over their online presence, and reduced consumer demand for their services." Grubhub has explicitly made this false partnership part of their business strategy. Last October, CEO Matt Maloney said the company would be piloting a new initiative of adding more restaurants to its searchable database without entering into an official partnership with them, so customers would believe they had more delivery options with Grubhub, and wouldn't switch to competitors. It works like this: if you happened to order from a non-partnered restaurant, "the order doesn't go directly to the restaurant," says the lawsuit. "It goes instead to a Grubhub driver, who must first figure out how to contact the restaurant and place the order. Sometimes it's possible to place orders with the restaurant by phone, but other times the restaurant will only accept orders in person. The extra steps often lead to mistakes in customers' orders and often the restaurant won't receive the order at all." Grubhub also wouldn't warn restaurants before they were listed, which led to restaurants suddenly being inundated with Grubhub orders they never expected. Often, Grubhub would list outdated menus with the wrong prices, or include restaurants that don't even offer take-out, leading to canceled orders. The lawsuit includes screenshots from the pages Grubhub created for The Farmer's Wife and Antonia's, using their respective names and logos. The Farmer's Wife alleges the pages are "inaccurate and suggests that The Farmer's Wife is offering to make food that it does not actually make and has never made," which the lawsuit claims hurts the restaurant's reputation, and leads customers to become frustrated with service the restaurant never agreed to provide in the first place. And both restaurants say the language Grubhub uses suggests a partnership that doesn't exist, and in Antonia's case, was actively declined when Grubhub approached them.

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united_notions writes: As reported in Sweden's The Local, Amazon has just launched in the nordic nation, and all the listings are in Swedish... just, not always the right Swedish. For example, "A greetings card depicting a duckling in a field was named söta-ansikte-kuk or 'sweet-face-dick'." Oops.

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Sony's PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X haven't hit stores yet, but the video game console showdown has already begun in the online black market. From a report: Demand for the PlayStation 5 on resale websites is outstripping that of the new Xbox, and shoppers are paying more to get their hands on the first run of products, market research shows. The vibrant market for scalpers offers a preview of next month's contest when the two rival game companies will release their new consoles to a global audience with a seemingly endless appetite for home entertainment. In the U.S., consumer spending on video game hardware, content and accessories is at record highs. The pandemic triggered a surge in players and engagement through the spring and summer months, at times depleting inventory of the current generation of consoles, according to research firm NPD Group. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and X, the first major console releases from Sony and Microsoft in seven years, are among the most highly anticipated gadgets of the holiday season. Spending on games over the holidays is expected to jump 24% from last year. "Units will be tough to find," wrote Mat Piscatella, an analyst at NPD.

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Taiwan's second-largest contract chipmaker United Microelectronics Corp has agreed to pay a $60 million fine to settle an industrial espionage lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Justice, bringing to an end a two-year legal dispute that also involved American memory chip giant Micron Technology and a Beijing-backed Chinese chip manufacturer. From a report: The Justice Department said UMC, the world's No. 4 largest contract chipmaker, pleaded guilty to criminal trade secrets theft. In addition to the fine, UMC has also agreed to cooperate with the American government "in the investigation and prosecution of its co-defendant, a Chinese state-owned-enterprise," the department said in a statement. The Chinese company in question is Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co., a homegrown DRAM chip maker once expected to eventually challenge market leaders such as Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. Fujian Jinhua is part of Beijing's ambition of achieving self sufficiency in vital semiconductor components and slashing the country's dependence on foreign suppliers. Back in 2016, UMC said it would develop DRAM chips with Fujian Jinhua but later suspended the partnership after the U.S. indicted both entities on charges of industrial espionage. UMC later significantly scaled down the project, Nikkei earlier reported. Fujian Jinhua was banned from receiving any American tech and support following the U.S. indictment, which came in late 2018.

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ByteDance on Thursday unveiled its first consumer hardware product, a smart light lamp with a display and camera, that it says is part of its education technology portfolio as the Chinese internet giant continues to expand to categories beyond social video. From a report: The Dali smart lamp features a display, camera, and a built-in digital assistant. The Dali smart lamp, which starts at $119, is aimed at school-going children who can use the device to finish their homework, ByteDance said at a press conference. The camera will enable parents to tutor their kids and check in remotely via a mobile app.

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Hackers stole $2.3 million from the Wisconsin Republican Party's account that was being used to help reelect President Donald Trump in the key battleground state, the party's chairman told The Associated Press on Thursday. From a report: The party noticed the suspicious activity on Oct. 22 and contacted the FBI on Friday, said Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt. Hitt said the FBI is investigating. The attack was discovered less than two weeks before Election Day as both Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden made their final push to win Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes. Trump won the state by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016 and planned his third visit in seven days on Friday. Biden also planned to campaign in Wisconsin on Friday. Polls have consistently shown a tight race in the state, usually with Biden ahead by single digits and within the margin of error.

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Several federal agencies on Wednesday warned hospitals and cyber-researchers about "credible" information "of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to U.S. hospitals and health-care providers." From a report: The FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security and known as CISA, said hackers were targeting the sector, "often leading to ransomware attacks, data theft and the disruption of health-care services," according to an advisory. The advisory warned that hackers might use Ryuk ransomware "for financial gain." The warning comes as Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations surge across the country. The cybersecurity company FireEye said multiple U.S hospitals had been hit by a "coordinated" ransomware attack, with at least three publicly confirming being struck this week. [...] The attack was carried out by a financially motivated cybercrime group dubbed UNC1878 by computer security researchers, according to Charles Carmakal, FireEye's strategic services chief technology officer. At least three hospitals were severely affected by ransomware on Tuesday, he said, and multiple hospitals have been hit over the past several weeks. UNC1878 intends to target and deploy ransomware to hundreds of other hospitals, Carmakal said.

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Amazon and Apple face German antitrust scrutiny over a policy that excludes independent sellers of brand products on the online market place. From a report: Germany's Federal Cartel Office, the country's antitrust regulator, is probing both companies over a policy at Amazon called "brandgating," the authority said in an emailed statement. The policy allows makers of branded products such as iPhones to have independent sellers removed from the platform as long as Amazon can sell the items, according to the statement. "Brandgating agreements can help to protect against product piracy," the Cartel Office said. "But such measures must be proportionate to be in line with antitrust rules and may not result in eliminating competition." Amazon and Apple are among the tech giants under intense scrutiny by regulators across the world, including in the European Union, which is poised to propose sweeping new laws to rein in Silicon Valley. Authorities are wrestling with how to act against companies that critics say run a rigged game when they set the rules for platforms that also host their rivals.

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An anonymous reader shares a report from the BBC: Facebook is being sued for failing to protect users' personal data in the Cambridge Analytica breach. The scandal involved harvested Facebook data of 87 million people being used for advertising during elections. Mass legal action is being launched against Facebook for misuse of information from almost one million users in England and Wales. Facebook said it has not received any documents regarding this claim. The group taking action -- Facebook You Owe Us -- follows a similar mass action law suit against Google. Google You Owe Us, led by former Which? director Richard Lloyd, is also active for another alleged mass data breach. Both represented by law firm Millberg London, the Google case is being heard in the Supreme Court in April next year. The Facebook case will argue that by taking data without consent, the firm failed to meet their legal obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998. Representative claimant in the case Alvin Carpio said: "When we use Facebook, we expect that our personal data is being used responsibly, transparently, and legally. By failing to protect our personal information from abuse, we believe that Facebook broke the law. Paying less than 0.01% of your annual revenue in fines -- pocket change to Facebook -- is clearly a punishment that does not fit the crime. Apologizing for breaking the law is simply not enough. Facebook, you owe us honesty, responsibility and redress. We will fight to hold Facebook to account."

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tsa shares a report from MacRumors: Starting early next year, iOS 14 will require apps to get opt-in permission from users to collect their random advertising identifier, which advertisers use to deliver personalized ads and track how effective their campaigns were. Ahead of this change, The Wall Street Journal reports that advertising companies and publishers have filed a complaint against Apple with France's competition authority, arguing that the enhanced privacy measures would be anticompetitive. According to the report, the complaint alleges that the wording of Apple's permission prompt will lead most users to decline tracking of their device's advertising identifier, which could result in lost revenue. In August, Facebook warned advertisers that the prompt could lead to a more than 50 percent drop in Audience Network publisher revenue. In a statement, Apple reiterated its belief that "privacy is a fundamental right," adding that "a user's data belongs to them and they should get to decide whether to share their data and with whom." Apple said that its own data collection doesn't count as tracking because it doesn't share the data with other companies.

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Iwastheone shares a report from Observer: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a rare, heavy and immensely valuable asteroid called "16 Psyche" in the Solar System's main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Asteroid Psyche is located at roughly 230 million miles (370 million kilometers) from Earth and measures 140 miles (226 kilometers) across, about the size of West Virginia. What makes it special is that, unlike most asteroids that are either rocky or icy, Psyche is made almost entirely of metals, just like the core of Earth, according to a study published in the Planetary Science Journal on Monday. Given the asteroid's size, its metal content could be worth $10,000 quadrillion ($10,000,000,000,000,000,000), or about 10,000 times the global economy as of 2019. Using ultraviolet spectrum data collected by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope during two observations in 2017, researchers deduced that Psyche's surface could be mostly pure iron. However, they recognized that the presence of an iron composition of as small as 10 percent could dominate ultraviolet observations. Psyche is the target of the NASA Discovery Mission Psyche, expected to launch in 2022 atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Further facts about the asteroid, including its exact metal content, will hopefully be uncovered when an orbiting probe arrives in early 2026. The asteroid is believed to be the dead core left by a planet that failed during its formation early in the Solar System's life or the result of many violent collisions in its distant past.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: An enormous coral reef has been found at the northern tip of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the first such discovery in 120 years, scientists say. At 500m (1,640ft) high, the reef is taller than New York's Empire State Building and the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Scientists on a 12-month mission found the structure, detached from the Great Barrier Reef off Cape York, last week. They were conducting 3D mapping of the sea floor in the area. A team aboard a research vessel owned by the Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI), a non-profit group based in California, used an underwater robot to explore the reef. The reef is the first of its kind to be found in the region since the late 1800s, scientists said. There are known to be seven other tall reefs in the region, including the one at Raine Island -- the world's most important green sea turtle nesting area. While the reef is bedded to the ocean floor off North Queensland, it is detached, meaning it is not part of the main body of the Great Barrier Reef. Described as "blade-like," the reef is 1.5km wide (one mile), then rises 500m to its shallowest depth of only 40m below the sea surface. Researchers are expected to continue surveying the northern Great Barrier Reef until 17 November.

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Qusi Alqarqaz writes via IEEE Spectrum: In August I spoke with Philipp Sinn, founder of Sinn Power, a German green-energy startup founded in 2014. This year he and his colleagues began building and testing the world's first ocean hybrid platform. The floating platform uses a combination of wave, wind, and solar energy to harness renewable energy on the open seas, Sinn says. The company has been testing the structure, which has attracted investors, energy experts, scientists, and government officials from all over the world to Heraklion, the largest city on the Greek Island of Crete. The wind, wave, and photovoltaic platform is scalable in capacity and can be designed to generate 80 kilowatts to power small houses by the coast and up to 2 megawatts to industrial buildings, Sinn says. The technology can be adapted to customers' needs and location requirements, he adds. He acknowledges that the maritime environment is challenging. All the energy systems on the platform contain sensitive components and power electronics that must not be exposed to any fluids, he says. To cope with such conditions, the company developed a product family consisting of electric machines, power electronics, and storage solutions, all of which comply with International Protection Code 68, which classifies and rates degrees of protection provided by mechanical casings and electrical enclosures against intrusion, dust, accidental contact, and immersion in deep water. "We see [our company's] technologies as a movement toward a sustainable future," Sinn says. "The goal is to provide people all over the world with clean, reliable, and affordable energy harnessed from the power of the ocean." "Development of ocean-energy production -- from concept to commercial release -- has been a slow, expensive process," writes Alqarqaz in closing. "For the industry to succeed, it is essential to get financial support from governments all over the world. It is also important to strengthen the cooperation between countries, especially with regard to joint projects and the exchange of technology."

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The U.S. National Security Agency is rebuffing efforts by a leading Congressional critic to determine whether it is continuing to place so-called back doors into commercial technology products, in a controversial practice that critics say damages both U.S. industry and national security. Reuters reports: The NSA has long sought agreements with technology companies under which they would build special access for the spy agency into their products, according to disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reporting by Reuters and others. These so-called back doors enable the NSA and other agencies to scan large amounts of traffic without a warrant. Agency advocates say the practice has eased collection of vital intelligence in other countries, including interception of terrorist communications. The agency developed new rules for such practices after the Snowden leaks in order to reduce the chances of exposure and compromise, three former intelligence officials told Reuters. But aides to Senator Ron Wyden, a leading Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, say the NSA has stonewalled on providing even the gist of the new guidelines. The agency declined to say how it had updated its policies on obtaining special access to commercial products. NSA officials said the agency has been rebuilding trust with the private sector through such measures as offering warnings about software flaws. "At NSA, it's common practice to constantly assess processes to identify and determine best practices," said Anne Neuberger, who heads NSA's year-old Cybersecurity Directorate. "We don't share specific processes and procedures." Three former senior intelligence agency figures told Reuters that the NSA now requires that before a back door is sought, the agency must weigh the potential fallout and arrange for some kind of warning if the back door gets discovered and manipulated by adversaries.

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