On Wednesday, the White House launched a new tool for people to use if they feel they've been wrongly censored, banned, or suspended on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. "No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump," the site reads. The Verge reports: The tool asks users for screenshots and links regarding specific enforcement actions, specifying Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube as platforms of interest. (None of the companies immediately responded to a request for comment.) The tool also collects significant personal information from the user, and near the end invites users to opt into email newsletters from President Trump, "so we can update you without relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter." A separate question points users to an extensive user agreement, and makes clear that "you understand this form is for information gathering only."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: At the I/O 2019 developer conference earlier this week, Google launched a new technology called Portals that aims to provide a new way of loading and navigating through web pages. According to Google, Portals will work with the help of a new HTML tag named . This tag works similarly to classic tags, allowing web developers to embed remote content in their pages. Google says portals allow users to navigate inside the content they are embedding --something that iframes do not allow for security reasons. Furthermore, portals can also overwrite the main URL address bar, meaning they are useful as a navigation system, and more than embedding content -- the most common way in which iframes are used today.

For example, engineers hope that when a user is navigating a news site, when they reach the bottom of a story, related links for other stories are embedded as portals, which the user can click and seamlessly transition to a new page. The advantage over using Portals over classic links is that the content inside portals can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to expand into a new page without having the user wait for it to load. In a demo, you can see that Portals allow users to watch/listen to embedded content and then transition seamlessly to its origin page, where they could leave comments or open other media.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Last October, researchers studied population data from more than a million Swedish residents and found that people who had their appendix removed were slightly less likely to develop Parkinson's. But other research has shown that there were no clear link between the two events. So Gregory Cooper and his team at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio decided to look with an even bigger microscope. They studied the electronic health records of more than 62 million Americans. Contrary to the October study, though, they spotted an increased risk of Parkinson's among those who had their appendix removed, roughly three times higher. And while Parkinson's starts becoming much more common in old age, a consistent added risk from appendix removal was even seen in those who developed it younger and across different ethnicities. "This is the largest study to date that's looked at this," Cooper told Gizmodo by phone this week. "And it's the most generalizable to the overall population, we think."

Cooper went on to say that this doesn't mean people shouldn't get an appendectomy if they need it: "Even with that threefold risk, it was still less than 1 percent of individuals who had an appendectomy and went on to develop Parkinson's. So in the grand scheme of things, it's a very low risk, and it shouldn't dissuade anyone from getting an appendectomy."

Microsoft teased its Edge browser for macOS yesterday, but now, download links have appeared online a little early. From a report: Twitter user WalkingCat discovered official Microsoft download links to both the daily Chromium-powered Canary builds of Edge for Mac [warning: direct download link] and the weekly Dev builds [warning: direct download link]. Microsoft has been working to support Mac keyboard shortcuts, and it has been experimenting with button placement so its browser looks and feels like a Mac app. Microsoft is also adding in Touch Bar support, with options for media control sliders and the ability to switch tabs from the Touch Bar. Rounded corners for tabs are also available in the macOS Edge version, and Microsoft is planning to bring this same UI to Windows.

The Verge explains what all the commotion is about: AMP stands for "Accelerated Mobile Pages," and you've probably noticed that those pages load super quickly and usually look much simpler than regular webpages. You may have also noticed that the URL at the top of your browser started with "www.google.com/somethingorother" instead of with the webpage you thought you were visiting. Google is trying to fix that by announcing support for something called "Signed Exchanges." What it should mean is that when you click on one of those links, your URL will be the original, correct URL for the story. Cloudflare is joining Google in supporting the standard for customers who use its services.

In order for this thing to work, every step in the chain of technologies involved in loading the AMP format has to support Signed Exchanges, including your browser, the search engine, and the website that published the link. Right now, that means the URL will be fixed only when a Chrome browser loads a Google search link to a published article that has implemented support.
Mozilla'a official position on signed exchanges is they're "harmful," arguing in a 51-page position paper that there's both security and privacy considerations. Pierre Far, a former Google employee, posted on Twitter that the change "breaks many assumptions about how the web works," and that in addition, "Google is acting too quickly. Other browsers and internet stakeholders have well-founded concerns, and the correct mechanism to address them is the standardization process. Google skipped all that. Naughty." Jeffrey Yaskin, from Chrome's web platform team, even acknowledged that criticism with a tweet of his own. "I think it's fair to say we're pushing it. The question is our motives, which I claim is to improve the web rather than to 'all your base' it, but I would say that either way."

Search Engine Land cited both tweets, and shared some concerns of their own. "The compromise we have to consider before getting on board with Signed HTTP Exchanges is whether we're willing to allow a third party to serve up our content without users being able to tell the difference.

"If we, as digital marketers, want to influence the conventions of our future work environment, we'll have to decide if the gains are enough to disrupt long-standing assumptions of how websites are delivered. If so, we'll also have to cede the ability to judge user intent over to Google and swallow the fact that it skipped over the standardization process to implement a process that one of its own created."

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: A judge in Ecuador has jailed a Swedish software developer whom authorities believe is a key member of WikiLeaks and close to Julian Assange, while prosecutors investigate charging him with hacking as part of an alleged plot to "destabilise" the country's government. Ola Bini, 36, was ordered to held in preventive detention on Saturday pending possible cyber-attack charges and his bank accounts were frozen. Prosecutors were examining dozens of hard drives and other material he had in his possession, according to local media reports...

On Thursday, Ecuador's interior minister, Maria Paula Romo, said they had identified a "key member of WikiLeaks" who was "close to Mr Julian Assange". Secret visitors' logs seen by the Guardian show that Bini was one of Assange's many visitors in Ecuador's embassy in Knightsbridge, west London.... Speaking to local media on Thursday, Romo said Ecuador was at risk of cyber attack, hinting Wikileaks could retaliate for the termination of Assange's asylum. She added the government did not want the country "to turn into an international [cyber] piracy centre"...

Last week, the government of president Lenin Moreno, 66, accused WikiLeaks of being involved in a campaign implicating Moreno and his family in corruption. Moreno, who has long expressed his unhappiness over Assange's asylum status, complained that "photos of my bedroom, what I eat and how my wife and daughters and friends dance" had been circulating on social media.

It's a browser feature few users will have heard of, but forthcoming versions of Chrome, Safari and Opera are in the process of removing the ability to disable a long-ignored tracking feature called hyperlink auditing pings. From a report: This is a long-established HTML feature that's set as an attribute -- the ping variable -- which turns a link into a URL that can be tracked by website owners or advertisers to monitor what users are clicking on. When a user follows a link set up to work like this, an HTTP POST ping is sent to a second URL which records this interaction without revealing to the user that this has happened. It's only one of several ways users can be tracked, of course, but it's long bothered privacy experts, which is why third-party adblockers often include it on their block list by default.

Until now, an even simpler way to block these pings has been through the browser itself, which in the case of Chrome, Safari and Opera is done by setting a flag (in Chrome you type chrome://flags and set hyperlink auditing to 'disabled'). Notice, however, that these browsers still allow hyperlink auditing by default, which means users would need to know about this setting to change that. It seems that very few do.

x_t0ken_407 quotes BleepingComputer: A HTML standard called hyperlink auditing that allows sites to track link clicks is enabled by default on Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Microsoft Edge, but will soon have no way to disable it. As it is considered a privacy risk, browsers previously allowed you to disable this feature. Now they are going in the opposite direction.

Hyperlink auditing is an HTML standard that allows the creation of special links that ping back to a specified URL when they are clicked on. These pings are done in the form of a POST request to the specified web page that can then examine the request headers to see what page the link was clicked on.
The article concludes that "Firefox and Brave win the award" for people who want this click-tracking capability disabled -- since "only Brave and Firefox currently disable it by default, and do not appear to have any plans on enabling it in the future."

dryriver shares a report from the BBC: Tracking airplanes anywhere in the world just got a lot easier. The U.S. firm Aireon says its new satellite surveillance network is now fully live and being trialled over the North Atlantic. The system employs a constellation of 66 (Iridium) spacecraft, which monitor the situational messages pumped out by aircraft transponders. These report a plane's position, altitude, direction and speed every eight seconds. The two big navigation management companies that marshal plane movements across the North Atlantic -- UK Nats and Nav Canada -- intend to use Aireon to transform their operations. The more detailed information they now have about the behavior of airplanes means more efficient routing can be introduced. This ought to reduce costs for airlines. Passengers should also experience fewer delays. Aireon has receivers riding piggyback on all 66 spacecraft of the Iridium sat-phone service provider. These sensors make it possible now to track planes even out over the ocean, beyond the visibility of radar -- and ocean waters cover 70% of the globe. The rapid-fire nature of the messaging also means aircraft visibility is virtually continuous. Existing data links only report ocean-crossing aircraft positions every 14 minutes. '

An anonymous reader shares a report: What better way to replace New York City's thousands of aging pay phones than with 9.5-foot-tall kiosks outfitted with 55-inch HD displays, gigabit internet, and Android tablets preloaded with informational apps? So went the thinking back in 2014, when then-mayor Michael Bloomberg launched a competition -- the Reinvent Payphones initiative -- calling on private enterprises, residents, and nonprofits to submit designs for spruced-up, publicly accessible hubs that would provide advertising-subsidized services to the public. CityBridge's LinkNYC beat out piezoelectric pressure plates, EV charging stations, and other competing proposals for a contract, and the consortium wasted no time in getting to work.

Intersection -- which with Qualcomm and CIVIQ Smartscapes manages the kiosks -- said it plans to spend $200 million laying down 400 miles of new communication cables and installing as many as 10,000 Links that supply free Wi-Fi to passersby within a 150-foot radius. The first kiosk went online in January, though the project has quite a ways to go -- 1,780 Links are active currently, short of the initial goal of 4,500 kiosks by July of this year. [...] And the initial kiosks have really taken off. According to Intersection, the LinkNYC network now has more than 6 million unique users who have used 8.597 terabytes of data collectively -- equivalent to about 1.3 billion songs or 292 billion WhatsApp messages. And the project facilitates 600,000 phone calls every month, up from 500,000 in September of last year. Further reading: Free Municipal Wi-Fi May Be the Next Front In the War Against Privacy.

The concept of the hyperlink was first outlined over 70 years ago and eventually became a central part of the web. But 30 years since the invention of the world wide web, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon have skewed the original ambitions for hyperlinks, who they are for and how far they can lead you. From a feature story: The impact that Google's PageRank algorithms have had on how the commercial web chooses to deploy hyperlinks can be seen in just about any SEO (search engine optimisation) blog. Publishers and businesses are encouraged to prioritize internal links over external links that may boost the competition in Google's rankings. "Since the very moment Google came on the scene, links moved from being the defining characteristic of the web, to being a battleground. Google's core insight was that you could treat every link as, essentially, a vote for the site," says Adam Tinworth, a digital publishing strategist. Tinworth explains that Google tries to minimize the effect of these 'unnatural linking patterns', which includes comment spam and 'guest posts', but it remains part of "how the shadier side of the SEO industry operates."

With clear, financial incentives to serve Google's web spiders, which regularly 'crawl' website content to determine its placement in searches, a common strategy involves placing hyperlinks on specific 'anchor text' -- the actual words that you click on -- that benefit that site's PageRank for keywords rather than tailor links to readers. That's not inherently a problem but research from the University of Southampton, published in February, suggests it doesn't go unnoticed. [...] In the cases of Apple and Facebook, the question isn't so much how we link and how we react to them, as where we can link to and where we can follow links to. Apple News, Facebook's Instant Articles and Google AMP all propose variations on limited systems of linking back to sources of information. As for Instagram, it's based on a two-tier system: users can't add external links to posts (#linkinbio) unless they buy adverts whereas accounts with a large number of followers are able to add external links to Stories.

Long-time Slashdot reader colinwb writes: A team of researchers has published a letter in Nature (2019) estimating the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud" to a precision of one per cent; Arxiv (2019).

The Arxiv abstract: In the era of precision cosmology, it is essential to empirically determine the Hubble constant with an accuracy of one per cent or better. At present, the uncertainty on this constant is dominated by the uncertainty in the calibration of the Cepheid period — luminosity relationship (also known as Leavitt Law). The Large Magellanic Cloud has traditionally served as the best galaxy with which to calibrate Cepheid period-luminosity relations, and as a result has become the best anchor point for the cosmic distance scale. Eclipsing binary systems composed of late-type stars offer the most precise and accurate way to measure the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud. Currently the limit of the precision attainable with this technique is about two per cent, and is set by the precision of the existing calibrations of the surface brightness — colour relation. Here we report the calibration of the surface brightness-colour relation with a precision of 0.8 per cent. We use this calibration to determine the geometrical distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud that is precise to 1 per cent based on 20 eclipsing binary systems. The final distane is 49.59 +/- 0.09 (statistical) +/- 0.54 (systematic) kiloparsecs.

In 2013 a team of researchers (including several of the current researchers) published a letter in Nature (2013) which estimated the distance with a precision of two per cent; Arxiv (2013).

Another team of researchers has also posted their recent research on Arxiv (2019) in which they provide a 1% foundation for the determination of the Hubble Constant.

All the links are to abstracts; the full letters to Nature are paywalled, but the Arxiv abstracts have links to PDFs which seem to be complete and accessible.

Slashdot reader grasshoppa writes: Kyle Bennett, long-time owner/operator of one of the last independent review sites, HardOCP, announced that effective April 1st he will be leaving it behind to start a new career at Intel. "Effective April 1, 2019 I will be taking on the position of Director of Enthusiast Engagement for Intel's Technology Leadership Marketing group," Bennett writes. "Intel wants to reconnect with the top of the high-performance consumer pyramid which contains hardware enthusiasts, overclockers, gamers, and content creators. This is the part of our community that has great influence through word of mouth and online engagement. I'll be focusing on helping Intel get back in touch with this audience and re-establishing a voice and dialog on where the company is going with its future technologies. If you are reading this, you are very likely already part of this group."

He goes on to say that he does not want to sell HardOCP or HardForum and see those properties turned into something that he would not be proud of. Instead, "HardOCP will be 'mothballed,'" he writes. "It will no longer publish news, editorial, or hardware review content. [...] HardForum.com will be sold to a company that I have done business with for years, one that I can trust to run it in the way you are familiar with. HardForum will be demonetized and all advertising and commission links removed. Simply put, HardForum will not make money in any way..."

You can read Bennett's full statement here.

The world's largest scientific publisher, Elsevier, left a server open to the public internet, exposing user email addresses and passwords. "The impacted users include people from universities and educational institutions from across the world," reports Motherboard. "It's not entirely clear how long the server was exposed or how many accounts were impacted, but it provided a rolling list of passwords as well as password reset links when a user requested to change their login credentials." From the report: "Most users are .edu [educational institute] accounts, either students or teachers," Mossab Hussein, chief security officer at cybersecurity company SpiderSilk who found the issue, told Motherboard in an online chat. "They could be using the same password for their emails, iCloud, etc." Motherboard verified the data exposure by asking Hussein to reset his own password to a specific phrase provided by Motherboard before hand. A few minutes later, the plain text password appeared on the exposed server. Elsevier secured the server after Motherboard approached the company for comment. Hussein also provided Elsevier with details of the security issue.

An Elsevier spokesperson told Motherboard in an emailed statement that "The issue has been remedied. We are still investigating how this happened, but it appears that a server was misconfigured due to human error. We have no indication that any data on the server has been misused. As a precautionary measure, we will also be informing our data protection authority, providing notice to individuals and taking appropriate steps to reset accounts."

IBM and some other firms are using at least a million of images they have gleaned from Flickr to help train a facial recognition system. Although the photos in question were shared under a Creative Commons license, many users say they never imagined their images would be used in this way. Furthermore, the people shown in the images didn't consent to anything. From a report: "This is the dirty little secret of AI training sets. Researchers often just grab whatever images are available in the wild," said NYU School of Law professor Jason Schultz. The latest company to enter this territory was IBM, which in January released a collection of nearly a million photos that were taken from the photo hosting site Flickr and coded to describe the subjects' appearance. IBM promoted the collection to researchers as a progressive step toward reducing bias in facial recognition. But some of the photographers whose images were included in IBM's dataset were surprised and disconcerted when NBC News told them that their photographs had been annotated with details including facial geometry and skin tone and may be used to develop facial recognition algorithms. (NBC News obtained IBM's dataset from a source after the company declined to share it, saying it could be used only by academic or corporate research groups.)

"None of the people I photographed had any idea their images were being used in this way," said Greg Peverill-Conti, a Boston-based public relations executive who has more than 700 photos in IBM's collection, known as a "training dataset." "It seems a little sketchy that IBM can use these pictures without saying anything to anybody," he said. John Smith, who oversees AI research at IBM, said that the company was committed to "protecting the privacy of individuals" and "will work with anyone who requests a URL to be removed from the dataset." Despite IBM's assurances that Flickr users can opt out of the database, NBC News discovered that it's almost impossible to get photos removed. IBM requires photographers to email links to photos they want removed, but the company has not publicly shared the list of Flickr users and photos included in the dataset, so there is no easy way of finding out whose photos are included. IBM did not respond to questions about this process.

A new front has opened in the battle between the U.S. and China over control of global networks that deliver the internet. This one is beneath the ocean. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; syndicated source.] From a report: While the U.S. wages a high-profile campaign to exclude China's Huawei from next-generation mobile networks over fears of espionage, the company is embedding itself into undersea cable networks that ferry nearly all of the world's internet data. About 380 active submarine cables -- bundles of fiber-optic lines that travel oceans on the seabed -- carry about 95% of intercontinental voice and data traffic, making them critical for the economies and national security of most countries. Current and former security officials in the U.S. and allied governments now worry that these cables are increasingly vulnerable to espionage or attack and say the involvement of Huawei potentially enhances China's capabilities.

Huawei denies any threat. The U.S. hasn't publicly provided evidence of its claims that Huawei technology poses a cybersecurity risk. Its efforts to persuade other countries to sideline the company's communication technology have been met with skepticism by some. Huawei Marine Networks, majority owned by the Chinese telecom giant, completed a 3,750-mile cable between Brazil and Cameroon in September. It recently started work on a 7,500-mile cable connecting Europe, Asia and Africa and is finishing up links across the Gulf of California in Mexico. Altogether, the company has worked on some 90 projects to build or upgrade seabed fiber-optic links, gaining fast on the three U.S., European and Japanese firms that dominate the industry. These officials say the company's knowledge of and access to undersea cables could allow China to attach devices that divert or monitor data traffic -- or, in a conflict, to sever links to entire nations.

Philip Greenspun:Google purchased Picasa, a super efficient photo editor that offered seamless integration with online publishing (e.g., you add a photo to an album on your desktop computer and it automatically gets pushed to the online version of the album). When they were pushing their Facebook competitor, Google+, they set it up so that Picasa created Google+ albums. They wasted a huge amount of humanity's time and effort by shutting down Picasa.

Now they're going to waste millions of additional hours worldwide by breaking links to all of the Google+ albums that they had Picasa create. People will either have to edit a ton of links and/or, having arrived at a broken link, will have to start searching to see if they can find the content elsewhere.

"I haven't had a nickel, dime, quarter or penny in my pocket for two years," writes USA Today tech columnist Jefferson Graham, adding "Why bother? We're now living in what's quickly becoming a cashless society, where credit cards or electronic payments on your phone rule."

His column is addressed to the mayor of Philadelphia, who this week signed a bill that bans cashless stores. Mr. Mayor. It's happening all over the world, and not just from Amazon. We are going cashless. Maybe not in your lifetime, but certainly for millennials. Banks and credit card companies want this to curb the costs of handling green. Selected merchants are into it now... USA Today's Charisse Jones discovered that cash purchases were down to 30 percent of all retail transactions as of last year compared to 40 percent in 2012. Millennials, she noted here this week, are saying no to cash, with 21 percent of those 23- to 34 years old saying that most of their transactions were in cash in 2016....

Mobile pay is still a sliver of overall retail sales, but it's definitely on the rise. Target, a long holdout, just added Apple Pay to one of its options, following in the footsteps of Best Buy, CVS, Costco and other retail giants who now accept payment via iPhone. The big, lone holdout right now is Walmart, the No. 1 retailer. It does have its own mobile pay app, that links bank payments to QR codes. And Mr. Mayor, good news for you. Walmart still accepts cash, too.

But for how long?

"Japanese police have brought in, questioned, and charged a 13-year-old female student from the city of Kariya for sharing [links to] browser exploit code online," writes ZDNet. An anonymous reader shares their report: The code was a mere prank that triggered an infinite loop in JavaScript to show an "unclosable" popup when users accessed a certain link, Japanese news agency NHK reported yesterday. The popup could be closed in some browsers -- such as Edge and Firefox on desktop -- but couldn't be closed in others, such as Chrome on desktop and the majority of mobile browsers.

The popup was hosted in several places online, and police say the teenager helped spread the links... The teenage girl did not create the malicious code, which had been shared on online forums by multiple users for the past few years. NHK reported that police also searched the house of a second suspect, 47-year-old man from Yamaguchi, and are also looking at three other suspects for the same "crime" of sharing the link on internet forums.
Ars Technica found a tweet suggesting that the code was actually written in 2014.

According to a senior Republican congressional aide, the National Security Agency has quietly shut down a system that analyzes logs of Americans' domestic calls and texts. "The agency has not used the system in months, and the Trump administration might not ask Congress to renew its legal authority, which is set to expire at the end of the year, according to the aide, Luke Murry, the House minority leader's national security adviser," reports The New York Times. From the report: In a raw assertion of executive power, President George W. Bush's administration started the program as part of its intense pursuit for Qaeda conspirators in the weeks after the 2001 terrorist attacks, and a court later secretly blessed it. The intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden disclosed the program's existence in 2013, jolting the public and contributing to growing awareness of how both governments and private companies harvest and exploit personal data. The way that intelligence analysts have gained access to bulk records of Americans' phone calls and texts has evolved, but the purpose has been the same: They analyze social links to hunt for associates of known terrorism suspects.

Congress ended and replaced the program disclosed by Mr. Snowden with the U.S.A. Freedom Act of 2015, which will expire in December. Security and privacy advocates have been gearing up for a legislative battle over whether to extend or revise the program -- and with what changes, if any. Mr. Murry, who is an adviser for Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, raised doubts over the weekend about whether that debate will be necessary. His remarks came during a podcast for the national security website Lawfare. Mr. Murry brought up the pending expiration of the Freedom Act, but then disclosed that the Trump administration "hasn't actually been using it for the past six months." "I'm actually not certain that the administration will want to start that back up," Mr. Murry said. He referred to problems that the National Security Agency disclosed last year. "Technical irregularities" had contaminated the agency's database with message logs it had no authority to collect, so officials purged hundreds of millions of call and text records gathered from American telecommunications firms. A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy's office said that Mr. Murry "was not speaking on behalf of administration policy or what Congress intends to do on this issue."