Internet services has long been slow for the Winnebago Tribe in the state of Nebraska, reports the Wall Street Journal. Now the U.S. government "plans to fix that by crisscrossing the reservation with fiber-optic cable — at an average cost of $53,000 for each household and workplace connected."

While that amount exceeds the assessed value of some of the 658 homes getting hookups — at a cost of $35.2 million — "the tribe is also starting an internet company to run the network, creating jobs and competing with an existing provider known for slow customer service." While most connections will cost far less, the expense to reach some remote communities has triggered concerns over the ultimate price tag for ensuring every rural home, business, school and workplace in America has the same internet that city dwellers enjoy... The U.S. has committed more than $60 billion for what the Biden administration calls the "Internet for All" program, the latest in a series of sometimes troubled efforts to bring high-speed internet to rural areas... Providing fiber-optic cable is the industry standard, but alternative options such as satellite service are cheaper, if less reliable. Congress has left it up to state and federal officials implementing the program to decide how much is too much in hard-to-reach areas...

Defenders of the broadband programs say a simple per-location cost doesn't capture their benefits. Once built, rural fiber lines can be used to upgrade cell service or to add more connections to nearby towns...

Some of the differences can be explained by the distinct geographic areas the programs are targeting. While the FCC program included some suburbs and excluded remote locations such as Alaska, the programs run by Commerce and USDA specifically targeted far-flung regions with difficult construction conditions. "These are some of the most challenging locations that there are to reach in America," said Andy Berke, administrator of the USDA's Rural Utilities Service. He cited one project in Alaska that involves a 793-mile undersea fiber cable to reach remote villages.

Dennis Austin, the principal software developer of PowerPoint, passed away from lung cancer on Sept. 1. He was 76. The Washington Post reports: Released in 1987 by Forethought, a small software firm, PowerPoint was the digital successor to overhead projectors, transforming the labor-intensive process of creating slides -- a task typically assigned to design departments or outsourced -- to one where any employee with a computer could point, click and rearrange information with a mouse. "Our users were familiar with computers, but probably not graphics software," Mr. Austin wrote in an unpublished history of the software's development. "They were highly motivated to look their best in front of others, but they weren't savvy in graphics design."

Working alongside Robert Gaskins, the Forethought executive who conceived the software, it was Mr. Austin's job as the software engineer to make PowerPoint (originally called Presenter) easy to operate. He accomplished this with a "direct-manipulation interface," he wrote, meaning that "what you are editing looks exactly like the final product." Originally targeted for Macintosh computers, which had a graphical interface, Presenter included ways for users to incorporate graphics, clip art and multiple fonts. In addition, the slides could be uniform with graphic borders, corporate logos and slide numbers. The goal, Mr. Austin wrote, was "to create presentations -- not simply slides."

In his book "Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint" (2012), Gaskins wrote that "Dennis came up with at least half of the major design ideas," and was "completely responsible for the fluid performance and the polished finish of the implementation." "It's a good bet," Gaskins added, "that if Dennis had not been the person designing PowerPoint, no one would ever have heard of it."

Siddharth Vikram Philip, Sabah Meddings, and Supriya Singh, reporting for Bloomberg News: As chief commercial officer of aircraft-parts supplier AOG Technics, Ray Kwong can look back on a well-rounded career at A-list companies including All Nippon Airways, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Nissan Motor. That, at least, is Kwong's two-decade corporate journey on what appears to be his LinkedIn profile, from which the self-proclaimed executive beams with a broad smile and striped tie in blue hues. Trouble is that -- much like the company for which Kwong now claims to work -- not all is as it seems. Kwong, if he even exists, was never employed at Nissan, or at ANA for that matter. Neither company has records of him as a former worker, they said in response to queries by Bloomberg News. His employment history could also not be verified at Mitsubishi. What is used as his profile picture turns out to be a stock photo that's also washed up elsewhere on the Internet, from promotional material for a German textile startup to a clinic in Northbrook, Illinois.

After Bloomberg reported on the case of bogus jet-engine repair parts being investigated by regulators, a deeper dive into AOG revealed that the fabrication not only concerned components, but extended to major aspects of the company behind the scandal. The proliferation of undocumented parts has sent shock waves through an industry where every component requires verification to ensure aircraft safety, leaving manufacturers, operators and authorities scrambling to determine the fallout. The parts supplied by AOG went into engines that power many older-generation Airbus SE A320 and Boeing 737 planes, by far the most widely flown category of commercial aircraft. These single-aisle jets are used by millions of passengers each day and by most airlines, mainly on short-haul flights. Airbus said it's aware of media reports surrounding AOG, while Boeing said it will defer to regulators on the topic.

Microsoft is rolling out a new feature to Windows Insiders that lets you remove an image's background in Paint with a single click. The Verge reports: To use the tool, testers can open an image with Paint and then hit the background removal button on the left side of Paint's toolbar. From there, Paint will automatically detect the subject of an image and cut away the background. Microsoft notes that you can also manually select the portion of the background that you want to remove.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Chinese state-aligned influence and disinformation campaigns are impersonating U.S. voters and targeting political candidates on multiple social media platforms with improved sophistication, Microsoft said in a threat analysis report Thursday. Chinese Communist Party-affiliated "covert influence operations have now begun to successfully engage with target audiences on social media to a greater extent than previously observed," according to the report, which focused on the rise in "digital threats from East Asia." The Microsoft report also cautioned that some Chinese influence campaigns are now using generative artificial intelligence to create visual content that's "already drawn higher levels of engagement from authentic" users, a trend the company said began around March.

Chinese influence campaigns have historically struggled to gain traction with intended targets, who in this case are U.S. voters and residents. But since the 2022 midterm elections, those efforts have become more effective, Microsoft warned. Microsoft found content from Chinese influence campaigns on multiple apps, including Meta's Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, and X. In August, Facebook parent Meta announced it had disrupted the largest ever identified disinformation campaign and linked it to China state-affiliated actors. Microsoft's report included screenshots of two different X posts in April that were identified as CCP-affiliated disinformation. Both were about the Black Lives Matter movement and had the same graphic. The first came from an automated CCP-affiliated account. The second, Microsoft said, was uploaded by an account impersonating a conservative U.S. voter seven hours later.

Google is killing off the last vestiges of Google Play Movies & TV, a service that sold premium Hollywood films and TV shows as part of Google's once-cohesive string of Google Play content stores. From a report: The company emailed users of Android TV to say that the "Google Play Movies & TV app will no longer be available on your Android TV device from 05 October 2023. You can continue to buy or rent movies directly through the Shop tab on your Android TV." Play Movies has been going through a slow death as Google shuffles around its media content. The smartphone Play Movies app became "Google TV" in 2022, and that same year, the Play Store app was stripped of movie and TV sales.

On third-party smart TVs (this is a different category than today's Android TV announcement) the app was killed in 2021. On Android TV, the new "Shop" tab seems to just be an OS-integrated Google TV content store. If you think this sounds confusing, you're not alone. Google's support page reflects the ridiculous state of Google's video apps, instructing users that "in Your Library, you can find content that you bought from: Google Play Movies & TV, YouTube, Android TV, Google TV." How any normal person is supposed to understand that pile of Google media brands, and how it works across phones, the web, and various smart TV OSes, is beyond me.

BMW has made a U-turn on a controversial subscription service that saw drivers pay a fee to activate the heated seats already fitted to their car. From a report: First announced in 2020, the subscription was intended to be one of many ways to offer flexibility to customers, who could opt in to pay for vehicle functions when it suited them, then stop paying when they were no longer wanted. But instead of options like increased electric car performance -- as was later offered by Mercedes -- or other technology-driven functions like autonomous parking or a 5G data connection, BMW drew criticism for charging a subscription for heated seats already installed at the factory. Now though, BMW will no longer offer such a service.

In a press release today, the Federal Aviation Administration said UPS delivery drones are now allowed to fly longer distance flights beyond the sight of ground operators. "This is the kind of move that opens the door for drone delivery companies like Wing, FedEx, and Zip to deliver packages across a wider area and service more customers," reports The Verge. From the report: UPS Flight Forward, a UPS subsidiary focused on drone delivery, can now deliver small packages beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) without spotters on the ground monitoring the route and skies for other aircraft, using SwissDrones SVO 50 V2 drones. The FAA also announced authorizations for two other companies to fly beyond sight for commercial purposes. That includes uAvionix Corp. and, last week, infrastructure inspection company Phoenix Air Unmanned.

UPS first received government approval to operate its drone service in 2019, the same year the FAA authorized Alphabet's Wing service to operate commercially. The company first focused on building a drone delivery network for US hospital campuses.

According to Mozilla's *Privacy Not Included project, every major car brand fails to adhere to the most basic privacy and security standards in new internet-connected models, and all 25 of the brands Mozilla examined flunked the organization's test. Gizmodo reports: Mozilla found brands including BMW, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, and Subaru collect data about drivers including race, facial expressions, weight, health information, and where you drive. Some of the cars tested collected data you wouldn't expect your car to know about, including details about sexual activity, race, and immigration status, according to Mozilla. [...] The worst offender was Nissan, Mozilla said. The carmaker's privacy policy suggests the manufacturer collects information including sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic data, though there's no details about how exactly that data is gathered. Nissan reserves the right to share and sell "preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes" to data brokers, law enforcement, and other third parties.

Other brands didn't fare much better. Volkswagen, for example, collects your driving behaviors such as your seatbelt and braking habits and pairs that with details such as age and gender for targeted advertising. Kia's privacy policy reserves the right to monitor your "sex life," and Mercedes-Benz ships cars with TikTok pre-installed on the infotainment system, an app that has its own thicket of privacy problems. The privacy and security problems extend beyond the nature of the data car companies siphon off about you. Mozilla said it was unable to determine whether the brands encrypt any of the data they collect, and only Mercedes-Benz responded to the organization's questions.

Mozilla also found that many car brands engage in "privacy washing," or presenting consumers with information that suggests they don't have to worry about privacy issues when the exact opposite is true. Many leading manufacturers are signatories to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation's "Consumer Privacy Protection Principles (PDF)." According to Mozilla, these are a non-binding set of vague promises organized by the car manufacturers themselves. Questions around consent are essentially a joke as well. Subaru, for example, says that by being a passenger in the car, you are considered a "user" who has given the company consent to harvest information about you. Mozilla said a number of car brands say it's the drivers responsibility to let passengers know about their car's privacy policies -- as if the privacy policies are comprehensible to drivers in the first place. Toyota, for example, has a constellation of 12 different privacy policies for your reading pleasure.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Toyota says a recent disruption of operations in Japan-based production plants was caused by its database servers running out of storage space. On August 29th, it was reported that Toyota had to halt operations on 12 of its 14 Japan-based car assembly plants due to an undefined system malfunction. As one of the largest automakers in the world, the situation caused production output losses of roughly 13,000 cars daily, threatening to impact exports to the global market.

In a statement released today on Toyota's Japanese news portal, the company explains that the malfunction occurred during a planned IT systems maintenance event on August 27th, 2023. The planned maintenance was to organize the data and deletion of fragmented data in a database. However, as the storage was filled to capacity before the completion of the tasks, an error occurred, causing the system to shut down. This shutdown directly impacted the company's production ordering system so that no production tasks could be planned and executed.

Toyota explains that its main servers and backup machines operate on the same system. Due to this, both systems faced the same failure, making a switchover impossible, inevitably leading to a halt in factory operations. The restoration came on August 29th, 2023, when Toyota's IT team had prepared a larger capacity server to accept the data that was partially transferred two days back. This allowed Toyota's engineers to restore the production ordering system and the plants to resume operations.

The UK's worst air-traffic outage in a decade was caused by an anomaly in the airspace manager's software system, which confused two geographical checkpoints separated by some 4,000 nautical miles. From a report: The UK's Civil Aviation Authority said Wednesday it will conduct an independent review of the incident, which forced hundreds of flights to be canceled or delayed last week after an error in processing an airline's flight plan. The glitch triggered a shutdown of the software system run by NATS for safety reasons, according to a preliminary report from the public-private partnership formerly called National Air Traffic Services. This forced air-traffic staff to input flight plans manually, drastically reducing the amount of air traffic that could be processed.

The event sent airlines and airports in the UK into turmoil on Aug. 28, leaving planes out of position and passengers stranded. Nearly 800 flights leaving UK airports were canceled, with a similar number of arrivals scrapped, according to analytics firm Cirium. The report by NATS showed that on the day of the incident, an airline entered a plan into the system which led through UK airspace. NATS Chief Executive Officer Martin Rolfe declined to discuss details of the flight, such as its route or the airline involved, saying the specifics weren't pertinent to the outage. While the flight plan wasn't faulty, it threw off the system because the software used by NATS received duplicate identities for two different points on the map. There are an infinite number of flight-plan waypoints in the world, and duplicates remain despite work to remove them, according to Rolfe.

An exploit for a bug in Windows appears to increase the performance of File Explorer in Microsoft's flagship operating system. From a report: Spotted over the weekend by Xitter user @VivyVCCS, the hack is triggered by a swift jab of the F11 key to switch File Explorer in and out of full-screen mode. According to the post, load performance is improved markedly.

Slash_Account_Dot writes: An artificial intelligence company, whose founder Forbes included in a 30 Under 30 list recently, promises to use machine learning to convert clients' 2D illustrations into 3D models. In reality the company, called Kaedim, uses human artists for 'quality control.' According to two sources with knowledge of the process interviewed by 404 Media, at one point, Kaedim often used human artists to make the models. One of the sources said workers at one point produced the 3D design wholecloth themselves without the help of machine learning at all.

The news pulls back the curtain on a hyped startup and is an example of how AI companies can sometimes overstate the capabilities of their technology. Like other AI startups, Kaedim wants to use AI to do tedious labor that is currently being done by humans. In this case, 3D modeling, a time consuming job that video game companies are already outsourcing to studios in countries like China.

schwit1 writes: The Justice Department has spent three years over two presidential administrations building the case that Google illegally abused its power over online search to throttle competition. To defend itself, Google has enlisted hundreds of employees and three powerful law firms and spent millions of dollars on legal fees and lobbyists. On Tuesday, a judge in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will begin considering their arguments at a trial that cuts to the heart of a long-simmering question: Did today's tech giants become dominant by breaking the law?

The case -- U.S. et al v. Google -- is the federal government's first monopoly trial of the modern internet era, as a generation of tech companies has come to wield immense influence over commerce, information, public discourse, entertainment and labor. The trial moves the antitrust battle against those companies to a new phase, shifting from challenging their mergers and acquisitions to more deeply examining the businesses that thrust them into power. Such a consequential case over tech power has not unfolded since the Justice Department took Microsoft to court in 1998 for antitrust violations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: At its Cloud Next conference today, Google revealed a handful of new AI-powered features coming soon to Meet. One of the biggest new AI-enabled features is the ability for Google's Duet AI to take notes in real time: click "take notes for me," and the app will capture a summary and action items as the meeting is going on. If you're late to a meeting, Google will be able to show you a mid-meeting summary so that you can catch up on what happened. During the call, you'll be able to talk privately with a Google chatbot to go over details you might have missed. And when the meeting is over, you can save the summary to Docs and come back to it after the fact; it can even include video clips of important moments. These AI-enabled features could be a way to free up people from being dedicated meeting-note scribes and make it easier to catch up both during and after calls.

Another new Meet feature lets Duet "attend" a meeting on your behalf. On a meeting invite, you can click an "attend for me" button, and Google can auto-generate some text about what you might want to discuss. Those notes will be viewable to attendees during the meeting so that they can discuss them. This could be another handy time-saving feature. If you're double-booked or suddenly have to bail on a meeting because of something going on in your life, I can see the value in sharing some notes about what you'd planned to bring up. But I worry that people might use this feature to dodge meetings they really should attend and add an unnecessary burden to the people who actually show. (If everyone in the meeting sends their AI assistant, I'm told, Meet will figure it out and quickly end the call.) This feature is a little ways out, arriving sometime next year to Labs.

According to Arm's IPO documents, Apple has signed a new deal with the chipmaker for technology that "extends beyond 2040." Reuters reports: Arm unveiled pricing on Tuesday for what it hopes will be a $52 billion initial public offering, which would be the largest such deal in the U.S. this year. Arm owner SoftBank plans to offer 95.5 million American depository shares of the United Kingdom-based company for $47 to $51 apiece, Arm said in a filing. Arm owns the intellectual property behind the computing architecture for most of the world's smartphones, which it licenses to Apple and many others. Apple uses Arm's technology in the processes of designing its own custom chips for its iPhones, iPads and Macs.

The two companies have a long history -- Apple was one of the initial companies that partnered to found the firm in 1990, before the release of its "Newton" handheld computer in 1993, which used an Arm-based processor chip. The Newton flopped, but Arm went on to become dominant in mobile phone chips because of its low power consumption, which helps batteries last longer. The deal disclosed on Tuesday was not mentioned in Arm's previous IPO filing documents made public on Aug. 21, implying that the deal was signed between then and Sept. 5.

Starting in December, Facebook users in the U.K., France and Germany will no longer see a dedicated section for news articles. CNBC reports: Meta said Tuesday that it is plans to "deprecate" the Facebook News tab in early December for users in those European countries as "part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most." The company added that it plans to spend more time and money on short-form video, as best exemplified by its TikTok-like Reels product.

News represents less than 3% of what people see in their Facebook feeds, Meta said. Meta said it would honor the Facebook News obligations it had made to publishers in those countries, but said it won't enter into new deals and has no plans to offer new products for news publishers. In June, Meta removed all news content from Facebook and Instagram for users in Canada, following the passage of a bill requiring big tech companies to compensate news businesses when their content is made available on their services.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta Platforms' releases of its large-language models, Llama and Llama 2, in the past six months have won the company praise for offering free, open-source alternatives to models from OpenAI and Anthropic. But for some of the scientists and engineers who worked on Llama, that praise was too little, too late. Many have quit, embittered by a previously unreported internal battle over computing resources with another Meta research team working on a rival model that the company ultimately abandoned, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Their departures are a reminder of the simmering tensions over shortages of computing power that both big and small tech companies are grappling with in developing generative AI, which requires specialized chips that aren't freely available. Big tech firms have more computing resources than most, and some, like Meta, highlight that fact when recruiting AI researchers. But even they are limited in what they can supply. The exodus also highlights the challenges for big tech companies in retaining highly prized AI researchers as demand for AI talent surges. More than half the 14 authors of the original Llama research paper published in February have left the company, several for AI startups or other big companies, the people with direct knowledge said.

Microsoft will finally stop forcing Windows 11 users in Europe into Edge if they click a link from the Windows Widgets panel or from search results. From a report: The software giant has started testing the changes to Windows 11 in recent test builds of the operating system, but the changes are restricted to countries within the European Economic Area (EEA). "In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links," reads a change note from a Windows 11 test build released to Dev Channel testers last month. Microsoft has been ignoring default browser choices in its search experience in Windows 10 and the taskbar widget that forces users into Edge if they click a link instead of their default browser. Windows 11 continued this trend, with search still forcing users into Edge and a new dedicated widgets area that also ignores the default browser setting.

Telecom operators in India, the second largest wireless market, would like internet companies to compensate for using their networks, a recommendation they've made to the local regulatory body, echoing a viewpoint that is gaining some momentum in other parts of the world but also stoking fears about violation of net neutrality. From a report: Jio, India's largest telecom operator with more than 450 million subscribers, recommended to the local regulator that internet companies should be made to "contribute" towards telecom network costs based on the traffic they consume, their turnover and number of users.

"We suggest that TRAI [India's telecom regulator] should recommend for OTT providers contributing in the network development and building a backbone for the country. In this effort, the Other OTT service providers should also be required to pay their fair share," said the unit of Reliance, which is run by Asia's richest man Mukesh Ambani. Reliance, which carries 55% share of India's total data traffic, contends that requiring internet companies to compensate for network usage will ensure a level playing field. Jio said there is a "near consensus" among telecom operators across the globe on this subject.