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It's Game Over For FarmVille, as Flash Also Buys the Farm Published on January 01, 2021 at 11:00AM The last day of the year was also the last day for FarmVille, one of the original addictive Facebook games. From a report: FarmVille, which allowed players to cultivate colorful cartoonish farms by tending crops and caring for livestock, had 30 million daily players at its peak. But game developer Zynga announced in September it would shut down the game on Dec. 31, a victim of Adobe's decision to stop distributing and updating its Flash Player for web browsers, which in turn led Facebook to announce an end to support for Flash games on its platform. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NYSE To Delist Chinese Telco Giants on US Executive Order Published on January 01, 2021 at 08:00AM The New York Stock Exchange said it will delist three Chinese companies to comply with a U.S. executive order that imposed restrictions on companies that were identified as affiliated with the Chinese military. From a report: China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom Hong Kong will be delisted between Jan. 7 and Jan. 11, according to a statement by the exchange. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet Unit Wing Blasts New US Drone ID Rule, Citing Privacy Published on January 01, 2021 at 07:08AM Alphabet's drone delivery unit Wing criticized Trump administration rules issued this week mandating broadcast-based remote identification of drones, saying they should be revised to allow for internet-based tracking. From a report: On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued rules that will allow small drones to fly over people and at night in the United States and mandate remote identification technology for nearly all drones. The rules eliminate requirements that drones, known formally as unmanned aerial vehicles, be connected to the internet to transmit location data but requires them to broadcast remote ID messages via radio frequency broadcast. "This approach creates barriers to compliance and will have unintended negative privacy impacts for businesses and consumers," Wing said Thursday in a blog post, adding "an observer tracking a drone c...

Trade-in Site Gazelle is Ending Trade-ins Published on January 01, 2021 at 03:30AM Gazelle, one of the longest-running used smartphone buyers in the US, has announced the end of its core trade-in program, which let phone owners mail in phones and other electronics devices in exchange for cash. From a report: The news, revealed in an email Gazelle sent to some customers this week, means any prospective Gazelle customers will have to receive a quote and initiate the trade-in process by January 31st, 2021 (allowing 30 days to mail in the phone) if they want to take advantage of the program. The service will shut down officially on February 1st, while any active trade-ins will be honored, the company says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

T-Mobile Data Breach Exposed Phone Numbers, Call Records Published on January 01, 2021 at 02:30AM T-Mobile has announced a data breach exposing customers' proprietary network information (CPNI), including phone numbers and call records. From a report: Starting this week, T-Mobile began texting customers that a "security incident" exposed their account's information. According to T-Mobile, its security team recently discovered "malicious, unauthorized access" to their systems. After bringing in a cybersecurity firm to perform an investigation, T-Mobile found that threat actors gained access to the telecommunications information generated by customers, known as CPNI. The information exposed in this breach includes phone numbers, call records, and the number of lines on an account. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Says SolarWinds Hackers Viewed Source Code Published on January 01, 2021 at 01:30AM The hackers who carried out a sophisticated cyberattack on government agencies in the US and private companies were able to access Microsoft's source code, the company said Thursday. From a report: A Microsoft investigation turned up "unusual activity with a small number of internal accounts" and that "one account had been used to view source code in a number of source code repositories," the company said in a blog post. Microsoft said the account didn't have the ability to modify code and that no company services or customer data was put at risk. "The investigation, which is ongoing, has also found no indications that our systems were used to attack others," the company said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ten-Year Long Study Confirms No Link Between Playing Violent Video Games as Early as Ten Years Old and Aggressive Behavior Later in Life Published on January 01, 2021 at 12:30AM An anonymous reader shares a report: A ten-year longitudinal study published in the Journal of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking on a group in early adolescence from as young as ten years old, investigated how playing violent video games at an early age would translate into adulthood behavior (23 years of age). Titled "Growing Up with Grand Theft Auto: A 10-Year Study of Longitudinal Growth of Violent Video Game Play in Adolescents" the study found no correlation between growing up playing video games and increased levels of aggression ten years later. This particular study utilized a more contemporary approach for analyzing its data, known as the person-centered approach. Traditional studies use a variable-centered approach whereby researchers treat each variable, or characteristic, ...

Apple Took Three Years to Cut Ties With Supplier That Used Underage Labor Published on December 31, 2020 at 11:30PM An anonymous reader shares a report [the story is behind a paywall; alternative source]: Seven years ago, Apple made a staggering discovery: Among the employees at a factory in China that made most of the computer ports used in its MacBooks were two 15-year-olds. Apple told the manufacturer, Suyin Electronics, that it wouldn't get any new business until it improved employee screening to ensure no more people under 16 years of age got hired. Suyin pledged to do so, but an audit by Apple three months later found three more underage workers, including a 14-year-old. Apple, which has promised to ban suppliers that repeatedly use underage workers, stopped giving Suyin new business because of the violations. But it took Apple more than three years to fully cut its ties with Suyin, which continued to make HDMI, USB and other ports for older MacBooks under previous contract...

Mitsubishi Heavy To Build Biggest Zero-Carbon Steel Plant Published on December 31, 2020 at 10:30PM Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will soon complete in Austria the world's largest steel plant capable of attaining net-zero carbon dioxide emissions. Mitsubishi Heavy, through a British unit, is constructing the pilot plant at a complex of Austrian steelmaker Voestalpine. Trial operation is slated to begin in 2021. From a report: The plant will use hydrogen instead of coal in the reduction process for iron ore. The next-generation equipment will produce 250,000 tons of steel product a year. The global steel industry generated about 2 billion tons of CO2 in 2018, according to the International Energy Agency -- double the volume in 2000. The steel sector's share among all industries grew 5 percentage points to 25%. Iron ore reduction accounts for much of the CO2 emissions in steelmaking. Japanese steelmakers including Nippon Steel are developing hydrogen-consuming reducti...

'Companies Are Fleeing California. Blame Bad Government.' Published on December 31, 2020 at 09:30PM Bloomberg Editorial Board: Amid raging wildfires, rolling blackouts and a worsening coronavirus outbreak, it has not been a great year for California. Unfortunately, the state is also reeling from a manmade disaster: an exodus of thriving companies to other states. In just the past few months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it was leaving for Houston. Oracle said it would decamp for Austin. Palantir, Charles Schwab and McKesson are all bound for greener pastures. No less an information-age avatar than Elon Musk has had enough. He thinks regulators have grown "complacent" and "entitled" about the state's world-class tech companies. No doubt, he has a point. Silicon Valley's high-tech cluster has been the envy of the world for decades, but there's nothing inevitable about its success. As many cities have found in recent years, building such agglom...

The ESPN+ Annual Subscription is Going Up by $10 Published on December 31, 2020 at 08:30PM For the first time since the service arrived in April 2018, the ESPN+ annual plan is getting a price increase. From January 8th, it'll cost new members $59.99 instead of $49.99. Existing annual subscribers will have until at least March 2nd to renew their plan for $50. From a report: The monthly plan went up by $1 to $5.99 in August, so opting for an annual subscription instead of going month-to-month will save you $12 over a year. Of course, you'll save more if you lock in an annual plan before the increase. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CISA Updates SolarWinds Guidance, Tells US Govt Agencies To Update Right Away Published on December 31, 2020 at 07:30PM The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has updated its official guidance for dealing with the fallout from the SolarWinds supply chain attack. From a report: In an update posted late last night, CISA said that all US government agencies that still run SolarWinds Orion platforms must update to the latest 2020.2.1HF2 version by the end of the year. Agencies that can't update by that deadline are to take all Orion systems offline, per CISA's original guidance, first issued on December 18. The guidance update comes after security researchers uncovered a new major vulnerability in the SolarWinds Orion app over the Christmas holiday. Tracked as CVE-2020-10148, this vulnerability is an authentication bypass in the Orion API that allows attackers to execute remote code on Orion installations. This vulnerability was being exploited in the wild to ins...

Adobe Now Shows Alerts in Windows 10 To Uninstall Flash Player Published on December 31, 2020 at 05:00PM With the Flash Player officially reaching the end of life tomorrow, Adobe has started to display alerts on Windows computers recommending that users uninstall Flash Player. From a report: When Flash Player is installed, it creates a scheduled task named 'Adobe Flash Player PPAPI Notifier' that executes the following command: "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\FlashUtil32_32_0_0_465_pepper.exe" -update pepperplugin. When this command is executed, it is now displaying an alert thanking users for using Adobe Flash Player and then recommending that they uninstall the program due to its looming end of life. Further reading: Adobe Flash is about to die, but classic Flash games will live on. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most-Played Song of 2020? For Many It's White Noise Published on December 31, 2020 at 02:30PM An anonymous reader shares a report: In an average year, Spotify Wrapped is a sharing-optimized novelty hinging on nostalgia for a time that's barely passed. But in 2020, this data mirror instead presented many users with unexpected empirical evidence of their pandemic coping mechanisms: a strange hit parade of ambient music, background noise and calming sound effects that soothed them through an unusually anxious and sleepless time. While thousands of users posted in disbelief about their stress-inflected results, the situation made sense to Liz Pelly, a cultural critic who has written extensively about how Spotify and its competitors work to shape our listening habits. "It says a lot about the ways that corporate streaming services have ingrained themselves into our lives and facilitated music listening becoming more of a background experience," she said. [...] The findin...

Ticketmaster Pays $10 Million Criminal Fine for Invading Rival's Computers Published on December 31, 2020 at 11:30AM Ticketmaster will pay a $10 million criminal fine to avoid prosecution on U.S. charges it repeatedly accessed the computer systems of a rival whose assets its parent Live Nation Entertainment Inc later purchased. From a report: The fine is part of a three-year deferred prosecution agreement between Ticketmaster and the U.S. Department of Justice, which was disclosed at a Wednesday hearing before U.S. District Judge Margo Brodie in Brooklyn federal court. Ticketmaster's agreement resolves five criminal counts including wire fraud, conspiracy and computer intrusion. It also requires the Beverly Hills, California-based company to maintain compliance and ethics procedures designed to detect and prevent computer-related theft. Ticketmaster primarily sells and distributes tickets to concerts and other events. Prosecutors said that from August 2013 to December 2015, T...

SpaceX Will Attempt To Recover Super Heavy Rocket by Catching it With Launch Tower Published on December 31, 2020 at 07:55AM SpaceX will try a significantly different approach to landing its future reusable rocket boosters, according to CEO and founder Elon Musk. It will attempt to 'catch' the heavy booster, which is currently in development, using the launch tower arm used to stabilize the vehicle during its pre-takeoff preparations. From a report: Current Falcon 9 boosters return to Earth and land propulsively on their own built-in legs -- but the goal with Super Heavy is for the larger rocket not to have legs at all, says Musk. The Super Heavy launch process will still involve use of its engines to control the velocity of its descent, but it will involve using the grid fins that are included on its main body to help control its orientation during flight to 'catch' the booster -- essentially hooking it using the launch tower arm before it touches the ground at all. ...

Spotify's Podcasting Problem: Loophole Allows Remixes and Unreleased Songs To Hide in Plain Sight Published on December 31, 2020 at 06:30AM Spotify has joined the ranks of streaming services like SoundCloud and YouTube as a hub for bootlegs of popular songs. From a report: With obscured titles like "Jocelyn Flores but you're in the bathroom at a party" by eraylandin, a new take on XXXTentacion's popular "Jocelyn Flores," and "Dead To Me -- Kali Uchis (slowed + bass boosted)" by user Unreal sounds, a rework of Uchis' popular track from her 2018 album "Isolation," these underground remixers have chosen to upload their creations as podcast episodes, hoping to circumvent copyright infringement detection by the platform. Using simple keywords and terms like "chopped and screwed," "slowed and reverbed," "remix," and "mashup" in Spotify's search bar, users can track down bootlegged reworks of...

Private Party App Pulled From App Store by Apple Published on December 31, 2020 at 04:30AM Eric Bangeman, writing for ArsTechnica: Despite over 82 million cases and over 1.75 million deaths due to COVID-19, many people are bound and determined to carry on with normal life. For some, that includes attending Saturday night ragers, just like they did in the Before Times. Reports of yet another secret party being broken up by law enforcement have become distressingly common. Getting guests for these secret parties is at least slightly more difficult now that Apple has pulled Vybe Together -- an app with a tagline that invited users to "get their party on" -- from the App Store. The Verge pointed out that the app had largely been flying under the radar until a tweet from Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times brought some unwelcome, but much-needed scrutiny to the app. One of Lorenz's tweets highlighted Vybe Together's TikTok account, which had posted videos of unmasked peo...

New Train Hall Opens at Penn Station, Echoing Building's Former Glory Published on December 31, 2020 at 03:00AM The Moynihan Train Hall, with glass skylights and 92-foot-high ceilings, will open Jan. 1 as an area for Amtrak and Long Island Railroad riders. The New York Times: For more than half a century, New Yorkers have trudged through the crammed platforms, dark hallways and oppressively low ceilings of Pennsylvania Station, the busiest and perhaps most miserable train hub in North America. Entombed beneath Madison Square Garden, the station served 650,000 riders each weekday before the pandemic, or three times the number it was built to handle. But as more commuters return to Penn Station next year, they will be welcomed by a new, $1.6 billion train hall complete with over an acre of glass skylights, art installations and 92-foot-high ceilings that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who championed the project, has likened to the majestic Grand Central Terminal. After nearly three years of...

VP and Head Scientist of Alexa at Amazon: 'The Turing Test is Obsolete. It's Time To Build a New Barometer For AI' Published on December 31, 2020 at 01:58AM Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Head Scientist of Alexa at Amazon, writes: While Turing's original vision continues to be inspiring, interpreting his test as the ultimate mark of AI's progress is limited by the era when it was introduced. For one, the Turing Test all but discounts AI's machine-like attributes of fast computation and information lookup, features that are some of modern AI's most effective. The emphasis on tricking humans means that for an AI to pass Turing's test, it has to inject pauses in responses to questions like, "do you know what is the cube root of 3434756?" or, "how far is Seattle from Boston?" In reality, AI knows these answers instantaneously, and pausing to make its answers sound more human isn't the best use of its skills. Moreover, the Turing T...

Amazon To Buy Podcast Maker Wondery Published on December 31, 2020 at 01:00AM Amazon announced Wednesday that it's acquiring podcasting company Wondery, expanding its catalog of original audio content. From a report: As part of the deal, Wondery will join Amazon Music, the e-commerce giant's music streaming business. Amazon Music in September added podcasts to its platform, looking to carve out a share of the increasingly competitive podcasting market, in which Spotify, Apple and others have gained ground. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Wondery, founded in 2016, has produced some of the most popular podcasts in recent years, including true crime series like "Dirty John," "Dr. Death" and "Over My Dead Body." The podcast producer and network says it counts more than 10 million unique listeners each month. WSJ reported earlier this month that Amazon was valuing Wondery at over $300 million in advanced stages of talks before the acquisition...

Amazon Still Hasn't Fixed Its Problem With Bait-and-Switch Reviews Published on December 31, 2020 Some sellers on Amazon are tricking the ecommerce platform into displaying thousands of reviews for unrelated products to boost their ranking and mislead customers, ArsTechnica writer Timothy Lee reports. Lee discovered the issue, which has been documented by the media in recent years, after he went to check the review of a drone he had purchased for his children. The product page of drone had glowing reviews for honey. Lee reached out to Amazon, which confirmed that this practice is in violation of its terms and conditions and quickly took down thousands of bogus reviews. He writes: Whatever action Amazon ultimately takes against these particular vendors Amazon's broader efforts leave a lot to be desired. A company shouldn't be able to secure a top slot in search results with such obvious subterfuge. The top-reviewed drones in Amazon's search results came from brands wit...

NSO Used Real People's Location Data To Pitch Its Contact-Tracing Tech, Researchers Say Published on December 30, 2020 at 11:10PM Spyware maker NSO Group used real phone location data on thousands of unsuspecting people when it demonstrated its new COVID-19 contact-tracing system to governments and journalists, researchers have concluded. From a report: NSO, a private intelligence company best known for developing and selling governments access to its Pegasus spyware, went on the charm offensive earlier this year to pitch its contact-tracing system, dubbed Fleming, aimed at helping governments track the spread of COVID-19. Fleming is designed to allow governments to feed location data from cell phone companies to visualize and track the spread of the virus. NSO gave several news outlets each a demo of Fleming, which NSO says helps governments make public health decisions "without compromising individual privacy." But in May, a security researcher told TechCrunch that he...

A Year After Microsoft Ended All Support for Windows 7, Millions of Users Are Still Not Upgrading Published on December 30, 2020 at 10:05PM Ed Bott, writing at ZDNet: With a heartfelt nod to Monty Python, Windows 7 would like you all to know that it's not dead yet. A year after Microsoft officially ended support for its long-running OS, a small but determined population of PC users would rather fight than switch. How many? No one knows for sure, but that number has shrunk substantially in the past year. On the eve of Microsoft's Windows 7 end-of-support milestone, I consulted some analytics experts and calculated that the owners of roughly 200 million PCs worldwide would ignore that deadline and continue running their preferred OS. That was, admittedly, a rough estimate. During the holiday lull at the end of 2020, I decided to go back and run the latest version of those analytics reports. They tell a consistent story. Let's start with the United States Government Digital ...

Study Finds More Than $100 Billion Spent on App Stores in 2020 Published on December 30, 2020 at 09:03PM A new report by Sensor Tower reveals that 2020 has been a record-setting year for worldwide spending on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, which collectively passed $100 billion in a single year for the first time ever in November. From a report: The trend of increased spending continued over Christmas, when consumers around the world spent an estimated $407.6 million across Apple's App Store and Google Play. This represents a 34.5 percent year-on-year growth from approximately $303 million in 2019. At the same time in 2019, spending only increased by 17.1 percent year-on-year. Spending on Christmas day constituted 4.5 percent of December's total spending so far, which reached nine billion dollars globally on December 27. The majority of holiday spending was on mobile games, which climbed by 27 percent from $232.4 million at the same time last year to $295.6 millio...