An anonymous reader writes: Last month, news broke that Microsoft was killing off Cortana for Android and iOS and was removing Cortana from its Launcher app for Android. On January 31, 2020, Microsoft will end support for the Cortana app in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the U.K. Microsoft refocusing Cortana for the enterprise, and specifically for Windows and Office, is not new. Nonetheless, killing off the Cortana app was a bold move. VentureBeat sat down with Andrew Shuman, who has been leading the Cortana team since Javier Soltero's departure last year, to find out why Cortana for Android and iOS is being killed off, what to expect with Cortana for Windows, his thoughts on natural language and typing, what's going on with the Alexa integration, and more.

Italy soon will join France in applying a new tax on large tech companies, a move that could deepen trans-Atlantic trade tensions and snarl up already-faltering negotiations over how best to tax companies such as Facebook and Google parent Alphabet. From a report: The new tax, passed this week by Italy's parliament, will take effect Jan. 1. Similar to the tax implemented this year in France, Italy's imposes a 3% levy on some digital revenue for companies with more than $835 million in global revenue, including least $6.1 million in Italy. The Italian announcement, combined with the French tax, complicates a broader effort among more than 100 countries to overhaul corporate taxation for the digital age. Many countries say U.S. tech companies pay too little income tax in the territories where they have users. Until now, most have held off on imposing their own national taxes. That reluctance may be fading, however, with others such as the U.K. or Canada potentially ready to follow suit.

Tesla is closing the year by filing a patent on a new chemistry for better, longer-lasting and cheaper batteries. The new patent is related to the new battery cell that Tesla's battery research partner, Jeff Dahn, and his team at Dalhousie University unveiled earlier this year. The new cell "should be able to power an electric vehicle for over [1 million miles] and last at least two decades in grid energy storage," Dahn said in a paper released at the time. Electrek reports: The automaker, through its "Tesla Motors Canada" subsidiary, filed a new international patent called "Dioxazolones and nitrile sulfites as electrolyte additives for lithium-ion batteries." They wrote in the patent application: "This disclosure covers novel battery systems with fewer operative, electrolyte additives that may be used in different energy storage applications, for example, in vehicle and grid-storage. More specifically, this disclosure includes additive electrolyte systems that enhance performance and lifetime of lithium-ion batteries, while reducing costs from other systems that rely on more or other additives."

The patent application says that the new two-additive mixtures in an electrolyte solvent can be used with lithium nickel manganese cobalt compounds, also known as an NMC battery chemistry. It is commonly used in electric vehicles by many automakers, but not by Tesla. The company used the technology in its stationary energy storage systems, but it uses NCA for its vehicle battery cells. The patent filed by Tesla's battery research group mentions that the technology would be useful for both electric vehicles and grid-storage.

"Travis Casagrande, a research associate at the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy at Hamilton's McMaster University has created the smallest gingerbread house ever built," writes long-time Slashdot reader Mr.Fork, "even smaller than the one made in France last year by nanorobotics researchers at the Femto-ST Institute in BesanÃon."

"Decking the halls is a whole lot harder when you're decorating something 10 times smaller than a human hair," reports the CBC: Casagrande's creation is a home for the holidays -- a gingerbread house complete with a wreath over the door, a cheery brick chimney, Christmas tree details carved into the walls and a patriotic Canadian flag doormat.

"Compared to the size of a typical gingerbread house that you might buy in a grocery store kit, mine is 20,000 times smaller," he explained... Zoom out slightly from the silicon structure and you'll see it's actually perched atop a smiling snowman that's giving a mischievous wink. Pull back even farther and a seemingly massive cylinder appears -- believe it or not, that's a human hair... "The point of that was sort of to make some jaws drop when you realize even the snowman, which is much bigger than the house, is extremely tiny compared to the hair you see next...."

Casagrande used a focused ion beam microscope to etch out the microscopic details with a beam of charged gallium ions, which he compared to a sandblaster... " I wanted to spark some curiosity of science because that leads to better science literacy."

The BBC reports: President Donald Trump has officially funded a Pentagon force focused on warfare in space -- the U.S. Space Force.

The new military service, the first in more than 70 years, falls under the U.S. Air Force.

The funding allocation was confirmed on Friday when the president signed the $738bn (£567bn) annual U.S. military budget. The launch of the Space Force will be funded by an initial $40m for its first year.
Those figures indicate that Space Force will now receive $1 out of every $18,450 in the U.S. military budget -- or .0054 percent. Here's what that looks like as a pie chart.

Newsweek's report includes the president's remarks at the signing ceremony: "That is something really incredible. It's a big moment. That's a big moment, and we're all here for it. Space. Going to be a lot of things happening in space."

The president added: "Because space is the world's newest warfighting domain. Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital. And we're leading, but we're not leading by enough. But very shortly, we'll be leading by a lot."

As noted by the BBC, the department's mission is not intended to blast troops into space, but will focus on protecting American assets like satellites from hostile attacks. The creation of the Space Force comes as China and Russia are increasingly focusing on the skies above, it noted. The Space Force website says responsibilities include "developing military space professionals, acquiring military space systems, maturing the military doctrine for space power."
In response to the news, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted "Starfleet begins."

The US Department of Agriculture listed Wakanda as a free-trade partner -- despite it being a fictional country. From a report: A USDA spokesperson said the Kingdom of Wakanda was added to the list by accident during a staff test. The department's online tariff tracker hosted a detailed list of goods the two nations apparently traded, including ducks, donkeys and dairy cows. In the Marvel universe, Wakanda is the fictional East African home country of superhero Black Panther. The fictional country was removed soon from the list after US media first queried it, prompting jokes that the countries had started a trade war.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People living with air pollution have higher rates of depression and suicide, a systematic review of global data has found. Cutting air pollution around the world to the EU's legal limit could prevent millions of people becoming depressed, the research suggests. This assumes that exposure to toxic air is causing these cases of depression. Scientists believe this is likely but is difficult to prove beyond doubt. The particle pollution analyzed in the study is produced by burning fossil fuels in vehicles, homes and industry. The researchers said the new evidence further strengthened calls to tackle what the World Health Organization calls the "silent public health emergency" of dirty air.

The research, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, used strict quality criteria to select and pool research data from 16 countries published up to 2017. This revealed a strong statistical link between toxic air and depression and suicide. [...] The data analyzed in the new research linked depression with air pollution particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers (equivalent to 0.0025 millimeters and known as PM2.5). People exposed to an increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter (ug/m^3) in the level of PM2.5 for a year or more had a 10% higher risk of getting depression. Levels of PM2.5 in cities range from as high as 114ug/m^3 in Delhi, India, to just 6ug/m^3 in Ottawa, Canada. In UK cities in 2017, the average PM2.5 level was 13ug/m^3. The researchers estimated that lowering this to the WHO recommended limit of 10ug/m^3 could reduce depression in city dwellers by about 2.5%. The available data on suicide risk was for particles ranging up to 10 micrometers (PM10). The researchers found a short-term effect, with a 10ug/m^3 increase over three days raising the risk of suicide by 2%. "The results show strong correlations, but research that would prove a causal link is difficult because ethical experiments cannot deliberately expose people to harm," the report notes.

"The studies analyzed took account of many factors that might affect mental health, including home location, income, education, smoking, employment and obesity. But they were not able to separate the potential impact of noise, which often occurs alongside air pollution and is known to have psychological effects."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A nuclear fusion start-up backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos raised more than $100 million to help design and build a demonstration power plant. The company lined up $65 million in Series E financing led by Singapore's Temasek Holdings Pte, and is getting another $38 million from Canada's Strategic Innovation Fund, General Fusion Inc. said in a statement Monday. It's now attracted more than $200 million in financing.

Canada-based General Fusion is one of about two dozen companies seeking to commercialize nuclear fusion technology. It relies on the same process that powers stars, generating huge amounts of energy by fusing small atoms into larger ones. While it holds out the promise of cheap, carbon-free energy, researchers have been working for decades to overcome significant technical hurdles. Firms pursuing such designs are hoping they can start generating power sooner than the 35-nation, $25 billion Tokamak fusion reactor known as ITER. Collaborators on that facility -- the largest research project in history -- have been laboring on a gigantic demonstration reactor in France since 2010.

How is the boom in online shopping influencing how much good product just goes to waste? Adria Vasil, an environmental journalist and managing editor of Corporate Knights magazine, answers: It's pretty staggering. The increase of the volume of returns has exploded by 95 per cent over the last five years. And in Canada alone, we are returning $46 billion worth of goods every year. And you think, OK, what's the big deal? Well, the problem is that -- especially when we're returning online -- a lot of these products end up going in landfills.
Why? You're returning something that's new and fine?
It actually costs a lot of companies more money to put somebody on the product, to visually eyeball it and say, is this up to standard, is it up to code? Is this going to get us sued? Did somebody tamper with this box in some way? And is this returnable? And if it's clothing, it has to be re-pressed and put back in a nice packaging. And for a lot of companies, it's just not worth it. So they will literally just incinerate it, or send it to the dumpster.
Do you have an example of something that we might all be doing that could lead to this kind of a waste?
Have you ever bought any clothes online? Further reading: The Painful, Costly Journey of Returned Goods -- and How You End Up Purchasing Some of Them Again.

An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Two programmers in Las Vegas recently admitted to running two of the largest illegal television and movie streaming services in the country, according to federal officials... An FBI investigation led officials to Darryl Polo, 36, and Luis Villarino, 40, who have pleaded guilty to copyright infringement charges for operating iStreamItAll, a subscription-based streaming site, and Jetflix, a large illegal TV streaming service, federal officials said Friday.

With roughly 118,000 TV episodes and 11,000 movies, iStreamItAll provided members with more content than Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and Vudu, according to prosecutors. Polo urged members of iStreamItAll via email to cancel licensed services in favor of pirated content, according to his plea agreement. He also admitted to earning $1 million from his piracy operations, officials said. He also admitted to downloading the content from torrent websites. "Specifically, Polo used sophisticated computer programming to scour global pirate sites for new illegal content; to download, process, and store these works; and then make the shows and movies available on servers in Canada," officials said.

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!"