Businesses often send one-time passwords, account alerts and appointment confirmations via text. But if you've ever received one of those, you know they tend to come from a random number, and bad actors can take advantage of that by disguising phishing scams as one of those messages. To protect users, Google will soon verify SMS messages from registered businesses. From a report: When you receive a message from a verified business, you'll see the company name, logo and a verification badge in the message thread. Businesses must sign up to use Verified SMS, and so far, 1-800-Flowers, Banco Bradesco, Kayak, Payback and SoFi are on-board. Verified SMS is rolling out gradually in the US, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Mexico, Philippines, Spain and the UK. Google is also adding real-time spam detection. When Google suspects a message is phishy or garbage, it will show a spam warning in Messages.

The world's first fully electric commercial aircraft has taken its inaugural test flight, taking off from the Canadian city of Vancouver and flying for 15 minutes. From a report: "This proves that commercial aviation in all-electric form can work," said Roei Ganzarski, chief executive of Australian engineering firm magniX. The company designed the plane's motor and worked in partnership with Harbour Air, which ferries half a million passengers a year between Vancouver, Whistler ski resort and nearby islands and coastal communities. Ganzarski said the technology would mean significant cost savings for airlines and zero emissions. "This signifies the start of the electric aviation age," he said. Civil aviation is one of the fastest-growing sources of carbon emissions as people increasingly take to the skies, and new technologies have been slow to get off the ground. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has encouraged greater use of efficient biofuel engines and lighter aircraft materials, as well as route optimization.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: George Laurer, the U.S. engineer who helped develop the barcode, has died at the age of 94. Barcodes, which are made up of black stripes of varying thickness and a 12-digit number, help identify products and transformed the world of retail. They are now found on products all over the world. The idea was pioneered by a fellow IBM employee, but it was not until Laurer developed a scanner that could read codes digitally that it took off. Laurer died last Thursday at his home in Wendell, North Carolina, and his funeral was held on Monday.

It was while working as an electrical engineer with IBM that George Laurer fully developed the Universal Product Code (UPC), or barcode. He developed a scanner that could read codes digitally. He also used stripes rather than circles that were not practical to print. The UPC went on to revolutionize "virtually every industry in the world", IBM said in a tribute on its website.

A former Oracle employee filed a lawsuit against the database giant on Tuesday claiming that he was forced out for refusing to lie about the functionality of the company's software. The civil complaint, filed on behalf of plaintiff Tayo Daramola in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, contends that Oracle violated whistleblower protections under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, the RICO Act, and the California Labor Code.

According to the court filing, Daramola, a resident of Montreal, Canada, worked for Oracle's NetSuite division from November 30, 2016 through October 13, 2017. He served as a project manager for an Oracle cloud service known as the Cloud Campus BookStore initiative and dealt with US customers. Campus bookstores, along with ad agencies, and apparel companies are among the market segments targeted by Oracle and NetSuite. Daramola's clients are said to have included the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, the University of Texas at Austin, Brigham Young University and the University of Southern California.

The problem, according to the complaint, is that Oracle was asking Daramola to sell vaporware -- a charge the company denies. "Daramola gradually became aware that a large percentage of the major projects to which he was assigned were in 'escalation' status with customers because Oracle had sold his customers software products it could not deliver, and that were not functional," the complaint says. Daramola realized that his job "was to ratify and promote Oracle's repeated misrepresentations to customers" about the capabilities of its software, "under the premise of managing the customer's expectations." The ostensible purpose of stringing customers along in this manner was to buy time so Oracle could actually implement the capabilities it was selling, the court filing states.

As Daramola saw it, his job as project manager thus required him to participate "in a process of affirmative misrepresentation, material omission, and likely fraud."
"We don't agree with the allegations," Oracle told The Register "and intend to vigorously defend the matter."

The article also notes that in 2016 Oracle faced another whistleblower lawsuit, this one brought by a former senior finance manager at Oracle who'd said her bosses directed her to inflate the company's cloud sales. Oracle settled that lawsuit "while denying any wrongdoing."

ProPublica has determined that dozens of state and local agencies have purchased "SCAN" training from a company called LSI for reviewing a suspect's written statements -- even though there's no scientific evidence that it works. Local, state and federal agencies from the Louisville Metro Police Department to the Michigan State Police to the U.S. State Department have paid for SCAN training. The LSI website lists 417 agencies nationwide, from small-town police departments to the military, that have been trained in SCAN -- and that list isn't comprehensive, because additional ones show up in procurement databases and in public records obtained by ProPublica. Other training recipients include law enforcement agencies in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa and the United Kingdom, among others...

For Avinoam Sapir, the creator of SCAN, sifting truth from deception is as simple as one, two, three.

1. Give the subject a pen and paper.
2. Ask the subject to write down his/her version of what happened.
3. Analyze the statement and solve the case.

Those steps appear on the website for Sapir's company, based in Phoenix. "SCAN Unlocks the Mystery!" the homepage says, alongside a logo of a question mark stamped on someone's brain. The site includes dozens of testimonials with no names attached. "Since January when I first attended your course, everybody I meet just walks up to me and confesses!" one says. [Another testimonial says "The Army finally got its money's worth..."] SCAN saves time, the site says. It saves money. Police can fax a questionnaire to a hundred people at once, the site says. Those hundred people can fax it back "and then, in less than an hour, the investigator will be able to review the questionnaires and solve the case."
In 2009 the U.S. government created a special interagency task force to review scientific studies and independently investigate which interrogation techniques worked, assessed by the FBI, CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense. "When all 12 SCAN criteria were used in a laboratory study, SCAN did not distinguish truth-tellers from liars above the level of chance," the review said, also challenging two of the method's 12 criteria. "Both gaps in memory and spontaneous corrections have been shown to be indicators of truth, contrary to what is claimed by SCAN."
In a footnote, the review identified three specific agencies that use SCAN: the FBI, CIA and U.S. Army military intelligence, which falls under the Department of Defense...

In 2016, the same year the federal task force released its review of interrogation techniques, four scholars published a study on SCAN in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The authors -- three from the Netherlands, one from England -- noted that there had been only four prior studies in peer-reviewed journals on SCAN's effectiveness. Each of those studies (in 1996, 2012, 2014 and 2015) concluded that SCAN failed to help discriminate between truthful and fabricated statements. The 2016 study found the same. Raters trained in SCAN evaluated 234 statements -- 117 true, 117 false. Their results in trying to separate fact from fiction were about the same as chance....

Steven Drizin, a Northwestern University law professor who specializes in wrongful convictions, said SCAN and assorted other lie-detection tools suffer from "over-claim syndrome" -- big claims made without scientific grounding. Asked why police would trust such tools, Drizin said: "A lot has to do with hubris -- a belief on the part of police officers that they can tell when someone is lying to them with a high degree of accuracy. These tools play in to that belief and confirm that belief."
SCAN's creator "declined to be interviewed for this story," but they spoke to some users of the technique. Travis Marsh, the head of an Indiana sheriff's department, has been using the tool for nearly two decades, while acknowledging that he can't explain how it works. "It really is, for lack of a better term, a faith-based system because you can't see behind the curtain."

Pro Publica also reports that "Years ago his wife left a note saying she and the kids were off doing one thing, whereas Marsh, analyzing her writing, could tell they had actually gone shopping. His wife has not left him another note in at least 15 years..."

The company behind Lyrics website Genius, Genius Media Group, is suing Google for "unethical, unfair and anticompetitive" behavior. From a report: Genius alleges that traffic to its site started to drop because its lyrics -- which are annotated by its contributors -- are being copied, and then published by Google via the tech giant's lyrics partner, LyricFind. The lawsuit was filed in New York on Tuesday (December 3) and seeks "no less than $50 million" in "combined minimum damages" from both Google and Canada-based LyricFind. "Defendants Google LLC and LyricFind have been caught red-handed misappropriating content from Genius's website, which they have exploited -- and continue to exploit -- for their own financial benefit." The suit reads: "One of Genius's primary services is the development and maintenance of a vast repository of annotated music lyrics, some of which are artist-supplied and many of which are transcribed and refined by a community of over two million Genius contributors."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Greenhouse gas emissions have risen steadily for the past decade despite the current and future threat posed by climate change, according to a new United Nations report. The annual report compares how clean the world's economies are to how clean they need to be to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change -- a disparity known as the "emissions gap." However, this year's report describes more of a chasm than a gap. Global emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases have continued to steadily increase over the past decade. In 2018, the report notes that global fossil fuel CO2 emissions from electricity generation and industry grew by 2%.

"There is no sign of [greenhouse gas] emissions peaking in the next few years," the authors write. Every year that emissions continue to increase "means that deeper and faster cuts will be required" to keep Earth from warming more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. [...] The United States is currently not on track to meet its greenhouse gas reduction commitments under the Paris Agreement, which the United States ratified and is technically still part of until its withdrawal takes effect in November 2020. According to the new report, six other major economies are also lagging behind their commitments, including Canada, Japan, Australia, Brazil, the Republic of Korea and South Africa. What's interesting is that China's per capita emissions are now "in the same range" as the European Union, thanks to the country's large investments in renewable energy such as solar and wind.

Some of the recommendations for how the world's top economies could cut emissions include: banning new coal-fired power plants, requiring all new vehicles to be CO2-free by 2030, expanding mass transit and/or requiring all new buildings to be entirely electric.

Freshly Exhumed shares a report from AeroTime: In a growing line of whistleblowers and skeptics voicing their concerns before the expected re-certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, another rogue agent has emerged. In an email sent to regulators in the U.S., Europe and Brazil, a Transport Canada safety official called for the entire removal of the MCAS system from the 737 MAX. The official believes that the U.S. plane maker should remove the software, largely blamed for the two deadly 737 MAX 8 crashes, before the aircraft is cleared to fly again.

"The only way I see moving forward at this point is that the MCAS has to go," Jim Marko, manager of Aircraft Integration and Safety Assessment at Canada's aviation regulator -- Transport Canada -- wrote in the email, according to The New York Times, which first reported the news. In the email, sent to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and Brazil's National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) on November 19, 2019, Marko expressed his "uneasiness" about Boeing's attempts to fix the MCAS software. "Judging from the number and degree of open issues that we have, I am feeling that final decisions on acceptance will not be technically based," he was quoted as saying by Canada's National Post. "This leaves me with a level of uneasiness that I cannot sit idly by and watch it pass by..." Marko continues to say that, according to him, the only feasible option at this point is to remove the MCAS software altogether, with all the compliance issues that such move would entail, if regulators and the public were to regain confidence in the sign-off on the 737 MAX.

A group of major broadcasters and telco giants, including Rogers and Bell, have obtained the first Canadian pirate site blocking order. TorrentFreak reports: Last year, a coalition of copyright holders and major players in the telco industry asked the Canadian Government to institute a national pirate site blocking scheme. The Fairplay coalition argued that such measures would be required to effectively curb online piracy. Canada's telco regulator CRTC reviewed the request but eventually denied the application, noting that it lacks jurisdiction. The driving forces behind the request, Bell, Rogers, and Groupe TVA, were not prepared to let the blocking idea slip away, however. A few months ago the companies filed a lawsuit against the operators of a 'pirate' IPTV service GoldTV.ca. The companies argued that the service provides access to their TV content without licenses or authorization. Among other things, the rightsholders requested an interim injunction to stop the operators, who remain unidentified, from continuing to offer the allegedly-infringing IPTV service. This was granted, but despite the order, some of the infrastructures remained available.

This resulted in a follow-up request from the media giants, which became the setup for the first-ever pirate site blocking order in Canada. Specifically, the companies requested an interlocutory injunction order that would require several Canadian ISPs to block GoldTV domain names and IP-addresses. Late last week this request was granted by a Federal Court in Ontario. An order, issued by Judge Patrick Gleeson, requires most of Canada's largest ISPs, including Cogeco, Rogers, Bell, Eastlink and, TekSavvy, to start blocking their customers' access to GoldTV within 15 days. The order is unique in North America and relies heavily on UK jurisprudence, can be extended with new IP-addresses and domain names, if those provide access to the same IPTV service. The court doesn't prescribe a specific blocking method but mentions DNS and IP-address blocking as options.

Aggrieved that their matches aren't "quality" enough, some men share techniques to cheat the dating app's algorithm and raise their status. An anonymous reader shares a report: Like most apps that have a pay function, the easiest path to a better Tinder experience is with cash. Super Likes, according to the app, will triple your chances of getting a match as they're a manual override of the algorithm, forcing you to the head of someone's swipe queue. You still have to earn a right swipe, but the person is all but guaranteed to see your profile. Then, of course, there's the various DIY swipe combos and techniques, like my friend's, that people are convinced will result in better matches. "I cracked Tinder," redditor joikol exclaimed on the Tinder subreddit a year ago [sic throughout]. "I had cracked how to not only get the hottest girls to appear, but also how to make my profile appear on their Tinder. The trick: for every girl you like, reject 5 girls. Or, in simple terms, have very high standards for liking girls. The Tinder algorithm will see that you're not satisfied with the lot you've gotten and improve its delivery. It will also think that you're some hotshot and make you appear more on girls' Tinder."

But alas, he continued, "Then I realized that this strategy was a fail because when you do this, you need to be 11/10 as well. The hot girls won't swipe right on you, and the average ones won't be available as you swipe left on them." Two other popular alleged algorithm hacks: 1. Resetting your account (especially via a Google number or burner phone), since Tinder gives new users a first-day boost. (This can definitely backfire, though, since it's something Tinder knows people are doing and punishes them for it with a shadowban.) 2. Changing your location or expanding your geographical range. "I used to have it so that my distance was like 200 kilometers and then leave it like that for a few hours," says 24-year-old Kelly from Canada. "Then I'd change it back to 10-kilometers distance. I'd immediately get a ton of guys who were 10 kilometers away swiping right on me! It was quite the confidence booster!"

At Microsoft's Ignite conference this month, the company announced a new vision for its personal productivity assistant, Cortana -- one which aimed to make it more useful in your day-to-day work, including email, but one which also saw Microsoft scaling its ambitions back from Cortana as a true Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant competitor. Now, the other shoe has dropped, as Microsoft says it's planning to shut down its standalone Cortana mobile apps across a number of markets. From a report: The company quietly revealed its plans to wind down support for Cortana on iOS and Android in several regions, with an end-of-life date of January 31st, 2020. After this point, Cortana mobile app will no longer be supported. Microsoft also said it will release an updated version of its Microsoft Launcher, that will have Cortana removed. Microsoft tells us the impacted markets include Great Britain, Australia, Germany, Mexico, China, Spain, Canada, and India. While the U.S. isn't in this list today, it would not be surprising to see its support pulled at a later date. The Cortana app for iOS is only ranked No. 254 in the Productivity category on the App Store, and only No. 145 on Google Play, according to current data from Sensor Tower.

Microsoft has added more than 50 new games to the preview of its Project xCloud game streaming service, including Devil May Cry 5, Tekken 7 and Madden 2020. Engadget reports: In a blog post today, Microsoft said it'll send out a new wave of xCloud preview invites to gamers in the US, UK and South Korea. Starting next year, it also plans to expand the preview to Canada, India, Japan and Western Europe. If you live in one of those countries, you can sign up for the preview here and hope you get selected.

For now, the xCloud preview is only available for Android phones and tablets, but Microsoft says next year it'll also be headed to Windows PCs and other devices. I'm sure Roku owners would be pleased, but it'd be even more intriguing if Microsoft could eventually bring the xCloud preview to smart TVs and Apple devices. While testers need to use Xbox controllers with the service now, Microsoft also says it'll work with other bluetooth controllers next year, including Sony's Dual Shock 4 and Razer's entries. Yes, you'll soon live in a world where you can play Halo with a PlayStation branded gamepad. Among other tidbits, the xCloud preview will also let gamers stream titles they already own next year, as well those made available through Xbox GamePass for subscribers.

Instagram is making Like counts private for some users everywhere. From a report: Instagram tells TechCrunch the hidden Likes test is expanding to a subset of users globally. Users will have to decide for themselves if something is worth Liking rather than judging by the herd. The change could make users more comfortable sharing what's important to them without the fear of people seeing them receive an embarrassingly small number of likes. Instagram began hiding Likes in April in Canada and then brought the test to Ireland, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand in July. Facebook started a similar experiment in Australia in September. Instagram said last week the test would expand to the US, but now it's running everywhere to a small percentage of users in each country.

Disney Plus launched early Tuesday, and users are already complaining of service failures. From a report: So far, Disney Plus complaints are clustered in big cities in the Eastern US and Canada, lining up with the the areas likely to experiencing peak demand early Tuesday morning, according to outage tracker DownDetector. The tracker also showed complaints in the Netherlands, where Disney Plus launched as a subscription service Tuesday after operating as a free beta app for weeks. Disney said that demand for Disney Plus has exceeded its "high expectations."

"We are pleased by this incredible response and are working to quickly resolve the current user issue. We appreciate your patience," the company said in a statement. The complaints run a gamut of errors, including difficulties logging in, inability to stream, app failures, shows and movies disappearing from the library and other problems.

The IRS's criminal division identified "dozens" of potential cryptocurrency tax evaders or cybercriminals after a meeting this week with tax authorities from four other countries. Bloomberg reports: Officials from the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and the Netherlands -- known as the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement -- shared data, tools and tax enforcement strategies to find new leads in a quest to mitigate cross-border money-laundering, tax evasion and cybercrime. The IRS's cybercrime unit has developed expertise in "who is moving the money and where it's going," Ryan Korner, a senior special agent in the IRS's Criminal Investigations office in Los Angeles, said in a call with reporters Friday. "We have tools in place that we didn't have six months or a year ago."

The effort is part of the Internal Revenue Service's renewed focus on fighting tax evasion tied to cryptocurrency as digital currency has become more popular and gained in value. The agency has struggled in recent years to enforce tax laws and keep up with criminals as technology has advanced. "Tax fraud is not a new crime, but the sophistication with which criminals commit tax fraud has significantly increased through cyber-related activities in recent years," the joint chiefs said in a statement. "Data breaches, intrusions, takeovers and compromises are the new tools that criminals use to commit tax crimes." The IRS is preparing for a new wave of cryptocurrency audits. The agency sent letters to more than 10,000 people earlier this year, warning that they might be subject to penalties for skirting taxes on their virtual investments. The IRS and its partners are using data from previous enforcement activities to find new criminals, Korner said. Using the data from the five countries gives them a broader view of how accounts, money and people are connected.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Enterprise information management (EIM) company OpenText is acquiring cloud data backup and protection service Carbonite in a deal worth $1.42 billion. Carbonite, which offers a number of data backup and protection services for consumers and businesses, had become the subject of significant takeover rumors over the past few months after its revenue dropped. CEO Mohamad Ali stepped down in July and was replaced on an interim basis by board chair Steve Munford.

Carbonite's announcement was timed to coincide with its Q3 2019 financials, which revealed a net loss of $14 million, compared to a small net income of $600,000 during the same period last year. Founded in 1991, OpenText is among Canada's biggest software companies, specializing in helping enterprises manage all their content and unstructured data in the cloud or on-premises. The company has made a number of other notable acquisitions in the recent past, including Dell EMC's enterprise content division, which it bought for $1.6 billion in 2017, and file-sharing service Hightail, formerly YouSendIt, which it bought for an undisclosed amount last year. OpenText hasn't offered any specifics around how it will leverage Carbonite's technology post-acquisition. But the latter's focus on backing up and protecting data stored in the cloud makes it easy to imagine the two platforms complementing each other as a growing number of businesses migrate to the cloud. "Following expressions of interest from multiple parties, the Carbonite board conducted a thorough and comprehensive process, which included contact with a number of strategic and financial parties, to identify the best way to maximize shareholder value," Munford said in a press release. "The board strongly believes that a transaction with OpenText delivers compelling, immediate, and substantial cash value to shareholders."

An unspecified number of smart TVs manufactured by Samsung will lose native support for Netflix next month, the companies said in an announcement this week. From a report: Netflix app installed -- or available for -- Samsung smart TVs manufactured in 2010 and 2011 (C and D lineups) -- and likely sold for many years after that -- will stop functioning December 2, Samsung alerted customers this week. In a statement, a company spokesperson said these TV models were sold only in the U.S. and Canada. In its statement, the top smart TV manufacturer advised affected customers to look for a game console, streaming media player, set-top box or other devices that still support Netflix app to continue their binge-watching sessions. A Netflix spokesperson cited technical limitations for the change. The developement comes weeks after Netflix alerted several Roku customers that they, too, will lose access to the streaming service on December 1.

Something strange is happening with text messages in the US right now. Overnight, a multitude of people received text messages that appear to have originally been sent on or around Valentine's Day 2019. From a report: These people never received the text messages in the first place; the people who sent the messages had no idea that they had never been received, and they did nothing to attempt to resend them overnight. Delayed messages were sent from and received by both iPhones and Android phones, and the messages seem to have been sent and received across all major carriers in the US. Many of the complaints involve T-Mobile or Sprint, although AT&T and Verizon have been mentioned as well. People using regional US carriers, carriers in Canada, and even Google Voice also seem to have experienced delays. At fault seems to be a system that multiple cell carriers use for messaging. A Sprint spokesperson said a "maintenance update" last night caused the error.

Earlier this year at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft announced the second generation of its HoloLens augmented reality visor. Today, the $3,500 HoloLens 2 is going on sale in the United States, Japan, China, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Australia and New Zealand, the same countries where it was previously available for pre-order. From a report: Ahead of the launch, I got to spend some time with the latest model, after a brief demo in Barcelona earlier this year. Users will immediately notice the larger field of view, which still doesn't cover your full field of view, but offers a far better experience compared to the first version (where you often felt like you were looking at the virtual objects through a stamp-sized window). The team also greatly enhanced the overall feel of wearing the device. It's not light, at 1.3 pounds, but with the front visor that flips up and the new mounting system that is far more comfortable. In regular use, existing users will also immediately notice the new gestures for opening up the Start menu (this is Windows 10, after all). Instead of a 'bloom' gesture, which often resulted in false positives, you now simply tap on the palm of your hand, where a Microsoft logo now appears when you look at it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Last month was the hottest ever October on record globally, according to data released Friday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, an organization that tracks global temperatures. The month, which was reportedly 1.24 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average October from 1981-2010, narrowly beat October 2015 for the top spot. According to Copernicus, most of Europe, large parts of the Arctic and the eastern U.S. and Canada were most affected. The Middle East, much of Africa, southern Brazil, Australia, eastern Antarctica and Russia also experienced above-average temperatures. Parts of tropical Africa and Antarctica and the western U.S. and Canada felt much colder than usual, however. While all major oceans experienced unusually low temperatures, air temperatures over the sea were still much higher than average.

October is following a 2019 trend. The hottest-ever September follows a record-setting summer, which included the hottest-ever June and July and the second-hottest August. Overall, 2019 will make history as one of the top five warmest years on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Temperatures from November 2018 to October 2019 were above average for "virtually all of Europe," and most other areas of land and ocean, Copernicus said.