Amazon Web Services has secured a five-year contract with the US Navy for cloud services, just weeks after scoring its share of a major US Department of Defense deal for cloud computing. From a report: The cloud division of online marketplace Amazon has been awarded a contract worth $723.9 million by the Department of the Navy as a single-award fixed-price enterprise software license blanket purchase agreement. The details were disclosed in a contract notice posted on the Department of Defense website. According to the notice, the agreement is for AWS to provide the Department of the Navy with access to its commercial cloud environment, Professional Services, and AWS training and certification courses. The Department of the Navy indicated that the purchase agreement will not obligate funds at the time of award, but instead these will be committed as task orders are issued using a variety of Navy funding types, including operation and maintenance and working capital funds.

Facebook parent Meta does not expect to seal its acquisition deal with Within Unlimited, maker of the popular fitness app "Supernatural", before Jan. 31, according to a court filing from Tuesday. From a report: Meta has agreed to push back the closing by one month or until the first day after the court rules on U.S. Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) preliminary injunction trial, according to the filing with the United States District Court for the Northern District Of California. In August, Meta had agreed not to close the deal until 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31. The FTC had filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the deal in July, calling Facebook a "global technology behemoth," noting its ownership of popular apps including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, and said its "campaign to conquer VR (virtual reality)" began in 2014 when it acquired Oculus, a VR headset manufacturer.

The United States Postal Service said it expects to buy more than 66,000 electric vehicles by the end of 2028 in a significant change from previous plans. From a report: In February, the USPS said it would purchase 5,000 fully electric versions of the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, with gas-powered trucks accounting for the remaining 45,000 of the initial order. After pushback from the Biden administration and resistance to that from the USPS, the agency has gradually increased the proportion of EVs in the order.

Now, the postal service aims to buy at least 60,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles by 2028, at least 75 percent of which will be electric models. Starting in 2026, the USPS expects that all NGDV acquisitions will be electric versions. The NGDVs are expected to start operating on delivery routes late next year. In addition, the agency plans to buy another 21,000 off-the-shelf EVs through 2028. Overall, the USPS plans to buy 106,000 delivery vehicles by the end of 2028 to start replacing its aging, inefficient and not-as-safe fleet of more than 220,000 vehicles. That means the agency still expects to buy around 40,000 gas-powered models over the next six years. The USPS said in a statement that the feasibility of fully electrifying the fleet "will continue to be explored." However, it believes there will be more EV availability in the future, which will certainly help.

Mark Zuckerberg considered saying in a 2017 speech that Facebook was looking into "organizations like Cambridge Analytica," according to details from a deposition of him by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. From a report: But he decided to remove reference to the political consultancy which harvested data on millions of Facebook users ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a previously unreported move that could add fuel to shareholder allegations that Zuckerberg and other executives hid information from the public about one of its biggest privacy scandals. When Meta executives learned of issues related to Cambridge Analytica, and how they responded, is central to lawsuits in California and Delaware in which shareholders allege the executives breached fiduciary duties and consumers allege mishandling of their private information.

Tech platforms spent millions opposing sweeping antitrust reforms, and their lobbyists may soon be able to breathe a giant sigh of relief -- at least for the next few years. From a report: Early Tuesday morning, the House Committee on Appropriations released a more than 4,000-page bill stacked with congressional priorities. But notably, a pair of antitrust bills that received broad bipartisan support was not included in the final measure. The bills were approved out of the Senate Judiciary Committee nearly a year ago, but they haven't yet been brought up for a floor vote. As part of a last-ditch effort to approve the bills, lawmakers tried to attach them to the must-pass spending bill, but the effort did not receive the backing necessary from congressional leadership.

For more than three years, lawmakers have held dozens of hearings and introduced a number of bipartisan bills to reform the tech industry. But the Open App Markets Act (OAMA) and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO) saw the most support, despite expensive lobbying campaigns from tech companies opposing them. Sen. Richard Blumenthal's (D-CT) timely OAMA would ban tech giants like Google and Apple from strong-arming third-party developers to enter into anticompetitive agreements to be hosted on their company app stores. The AICO, spearheaded by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), would have stopped Big Tech companies from providing preferential treatment to their own products and services across their platforms.

Taiwan's government has opened a probe into Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok on suspicion of illegally operating a subsidiary on the island, though the company's owner denied the accusation. From a report: TikTok, which is not widely used in Taiwan, has come under pressure mostly in the United States on concerns about China getting access to users' personal data, which the company denies. In a statement late on Sunday, Taiwan's China-policy making Mainland Affairs Council said that on Dec. 9 a working group under the Cabinet had discovered that TikTok was suspected of "illegal commercial operations" in Taiwan.

Taiwan's Liberty Times newspaper reported that TikTok's owner, ByteDance, had set up a subsidiary on the island to tout for business, contravening Taiwanese law that Chinese social media platforms are not allowed commercial operations on the island. The Mainland Affairs Council, responding to that report, said the Cabinet's working group had discovered that there was indeed a suspected breach of the law, and legal authorities were investigating.

Tumblr is adding support for livestreaming via the video platform Livebox. The Verge reports: Tumblr has supported streaming in the past, but it did so by letting people share streams from other services like YouNow and YouTube. The new option is described as a native Tumblr streaming service powered by Livebox. (Livebox is operated by the Meet Group, a subsidiary of the dating app company ParshipMeet Group.) Livebox allows users to tip streamers, and by the same token, Tumblr will let you pay creators in a virtual currency called "Diamonds." Livebox provides AI- and human-powered moderation for streams, according to a press release; the service also lets streamers designate trusted viewers as moderators. The streaming service is so far only supported for people's primary Tumblr blog, not any side blogs under the same account.

The feature is being rolled out to US users on iOS and Android now, and a release for global users and the desktop site is planned for the future. More details are outlined in a blog post, which dubs the service Tumblr Live.

Google Workspace is rolling out a new security update on Gmail, adding end-to-end encryption that aims to provide an added layer of security when sending emails and attachments on the web. From a report: The update is still in the beta stages, but eligible Workspace customers with Enterprise Plus, Education Standard, and Education Plus accounts can fill out an application to test the program through Google's support center. Once the encryption update has been completed, Gmail Workspace customers will find that any sensitive information or data delivered cannot be decrypted by Google's servers.

According to the support center, the application window will be open until January 20, 2023, and once users have accessed the feature, they will be able to choose to turn on the additional encryption by selecting the padlock button when drafting their email. But once activated, some features will be disabled, including emojis, signatures, and Smart Compose. The encryption feature will be monitored and managed by users' administrators and comes after Google started working to add more encryption features to Gmail. The report notes that client-side encryption, or CSE, "is already available for Google Drive, including in apps like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. It's also in Google Meet, and is in the beta stage for Google Calendar."

IEEE Spectrum: In 2000, at a trade fair in Germany, an obscure Singapore company called Trek 2000 unveiled a solid-state memory chip encased in plastic and attached to a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector. The gadget, roughly the size of a pack of chewing gum, held 8 megabytes of data and required no external power source, drawing power directly from a computer when connected. It was called the ThumbDrive. That device, now known by a variety of names -- including memory stick, USB stick, flash drive, as well as thumb drive -- changed the way computer files are stored and transferred. Today it is familiar worldwide. The thumb drive was an instant hit, garnering hundreds of orders for samples within hours. Later that year, Trek went public on the Singapore stock exchange, and in four months -- from April through July 2000 -- it manufactured and sold more than 100,000 ThumbDrives under its own label.

Before the invention of the thumb drive, computer users stored and transported their files using floppy disks. Developed by IBM in the 1960s, first 8-inch and later 5 1/4-inch and 3 1/2-inch floppy disks replaced cassette tapes as the most practical portable storage media. Floppy disks were limited by their relatively small storage capacity -- even double-sided, double-density disks could store only 1.44 MB of data. During the 1990s, as the size of files and software increased, computer companies searched for alternatives. Personal computers in the late 1980s began incorporating CD-ROM drives, but initially these could read only from prerecorded disks and could not store user-generated data. The Iomega Zip Drive, called a "superfloppy" drive and introduced in 1994, could store up to 750 MB of data and was writable, but it never gained widespread popularity, partly due to competition from cheaper and higher-capacity hard drives.

Computer users badly needed a cheap, high-capacity, reliable, portable storage device. The thumb drive was all that -- and more. It was small enough to slip in a front pocket or hang from a keychain, and durable enough to be rattled around in a drawer or tote without damage. With all these advantages, it effectively ended the era of the floppy disk. But Trek 2000 hardly became a household name. And the inventor of the thumb drive and Trek's CEO, Henn Tan, did not become as famous as other hardware pioneers like Robert Noyce, Douglas Engelbart, or Steve Jobs. Even in his home of Singapore, few people know of Tan or Trek. Why aren't they more famous? After all, mainstream companies including IBM, TEAC, Toshiba, and, ultimately, Verbatim licensed Trek's technology for their own memory stick devices. And a host of other companies just copied Tan without permission or acknowledgment.

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms will continue to devote about 20% of its overall costs and expenses to Reality Labs in 2023, despite questions about the business division focused on augmented and virtual reality and the so-called metaverse. From a report: The projection, given by CTO Andrew Bosworth in a blog post Monday, is little changed from the 18% of spending Meta devoted to Reality Labs in the third quarter. Meta stock is down nearly 65% this year, and some have questioned Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's expensive bet on the metaverse which comes as the company has cut other costs, including widespread layoffs. Reality Labs reported a loss from operations of $9.4 billion through the first nine months of the year; Meta's family of apps, by comparison, brought in roughly $32 billion in profit during that same period. A 20% investment in futuristic technologies is a "level of investment we believe makes sense for a company committed to staying at the leading edge of one of the most competitive and innovative industries on earth," Bosworth said. Alternative, non-paywalled source: Axios.

Confidential data of about 112,000 taxpayers inadvertently published by the IRS over the summer was mistakenly republished in late November and remained online until early December, the IRS disclosed last week. From a report: Form 990-T data that was supposed to stay private had been taken offline but made its way back to the IRS site when a contractor uploaded an old file that still included most of the private information, a letter sent Thursday to congressional leaders said. The agency is required to make Form 990-Ts filed by nonprofit groups available online but is supposed to keep the form filed by individuals private; in both cases, the agency made that information available too.

An internal programming error caused the September release of private forms along with the ones filed by nonprofit groups, the letter said. This time, the contractor tasked with managing the database reuploaded the older file with the original data instead of a new file that filtered out the forms that needed to be kept private. The IRS shared corrected data with the contractor on Nov. 23, but the old files had not been purged from their system. A third-party researcher alerted the IRS the files were back online on Dec. 1, and the IRS ordered the contractor to take them down immediately. Roughly 104,000 of the 106,000 forms disclosed in September were redisclosed this time. The agency is reconsidering its relationship with the contractor Accenture on this project, the report added, citing a person familiar with the matter.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Since Februrary, Amazon has been playing Santa Claus to Ukraine, delivering planeloads of goods, including blankets, hygiene kits, diapers, food and toys, for the war-torn nation and refugees in Poland and other parts of Europe. But long term, what's more important to Ukrainians than the gifts coming in is what's going out: massive amounts of government, tax, banking and property data vulnerable to destruction and abuse should Russian invaders get their hands on it. Since the day Russia launched its invasion Feb. 24, Amazon has been working closely with the Ukrainian government to download essential data and ferry it out of the country in suitcase-sized solid-state computer storage units called Snowball Edge, then funneling the data into Amazon's cloud computing system.

"This is the most technologically advanced war in human history," said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's 31-year-old vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, referring not just to weapons but data too. Amazon Web Services' "leadership made a decision that saved the Ukrainian government and economy." Amazon has invested $75 million so far in its Ukraine effort, which includes the data transfer via the Snowballs. Fedorov, speaking at a tech conference in Las Vegas this month, called it "priceless." The data, 10 million gigabytes so far, represent "critical information infrastructure. This is core for operation of the economy, of the tax system, of banks, and the government overall," he said. The data also include property records whose safekeeping can help prevent theft of Ukrainian homes, businesses and land.

Through history, invaders have "come in and staged fake referendum and parceled out the land to their chums," said Liam Maxwell, head of government transformation at Amazon Web Services, the company's highly profitable cloud computing arm. "That kind of thing has been happening since William the Conquerer." The Odessa Journal newspaper reported in June that residents of the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol whose homes had been destroyed were being moved into the homes of citizens who had fled the area, and were being forced to find those who left and pressure them to cooperate in some fashion with the Russians. Maxwell, who's based in London, had already been working with Ukraine for years when it became clear by January that Russia planned to attack the country.

Keylogger-like behavior has some Corsair K100 keyboard customers concerned. Several users have reported their peripheral randomly entering text into their computer that they previously typed days or weeks ago. However, Corsair told Ars Technica that the behavior is a bug, not keylogging, and it's possibly related to the keyboard's macro recording feature. From a report: A reader tipped us off to an ongoing thread on Corsair's support forum that a user started in August. The user claimed that their K100 started typing on its own while they use it with a MacBook Pro, gaming computer, and KVM switch. "Every couple of days, the keyboard has started randomly typing on its own while I am working on the MacBook. It usually seems to type messages that I previously typed on the gaming PC and it won't stop until I unplug the keyboard and plug it back in," the user, "brendenguy," wrote.

Ten users seemingly responded to the thread (we can't verify the validity of each claim or account, but Corsair confirmed this is a known issue), reporting similar experiences. [...] Corsair confirmed to Ars that it's received "several" reports of the K100 acting like this but affirmed that "there's no hardware function on the keyboard that operates as a key logger." The company didn't immediately respond to follow-up questions about how many keyboards were affected. "Corsair keyboards unequivocally do not log user input in any way and do not have the ability to log individual keystrokes," Corsair's rep told Ars Technica.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A large number of doctors write medicine prescriptions in haste, making it nearly impossible for their patients to understand what they scribbled. This problem has been around for decades and many tech firms have attempted to solve it with little to no success. Now Google is having a go at translating those unfathomable texts.

The search giant announced at its annual conference in India Monday that it is working with pharmacists to work out the handwriting of doctors. The feature, which will be rolled out on Google Lens, will allow users to either take a picture of the prescription or upload one from the photo library. Once the image is processed, the app detects and highlights the medicines mentioned in the note, a Google executive demonstrated.

Meta Platforms was hit with a formal complaint from European Union antitrust watchdogs for allegedly squeezing out classified ad rivals by tying the Facebook Marketplace to its own social network. From a report: The European Commission said Monday it issued a so-called statement of objections to Meta, paving the way for potential fines or changes to the firm's business model. "With its Facebook social network, Meta reaches globally billions of monthly users and millions active advertisers," EU Antitrust Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in an email announcing the escalation of the case. "Our preliminary concern is that Meta ties its dominant social network Facebook to its online classified ad services called Facebook Marketplace," meaning "Facebook users have no choice but to have access to Facebook Marketplace."

The EU watchdog said it's also concerned that Meta imposes unfair trading conditions which allow it to use data on competing online classified ad services. The case is the latest in a long-running Europe-wide crackdown on the market power of tech firms such as Google, Apple and Amazon that's led to multiple probes, fines and beefed-up laws. The EU previously fined Facebook for failing to provide correct information in the merger review of the WhatsApp takeover. Meta is also the subject of investigations in the UK and Germany.

"Content of every type disappears from the internet all the time..." writes Popular Photography's long-time "gear editor" (for photography equipment).

But someone's doing something about it: the newly-founded Flickr Foundation, which has announced plans "to make sure Flickr will be preserved for future generations." Or, as Popular Photography puts it, to stop photos "from suffering the same ill fate as our MySpace photos" — providing the example of important historical photos.

One particular collection their article notes is The Flickr Commons, "started back in 2008 as a collaborative effort with the Library of Congress to make publicly held photography collections readily available online for people seeking them out." It's a massive, eclectic, fascinating archive that pulls images and content from around the world. This new organization hopes to integrate more partners and ensure that everything remains available and easily accessible.... If you're not already familiar with The Commons, it's a really fascinating online resource. It grants access to everything from historical portraits to scientific images and everything in between. It's easy to get lost in the sheer volume of images available on the site, but Flickr relies on curators in order to bring notable images to the forefront and keep things organized and available.

With the establishment of the new foundation, Flickr hopes that it can keep this archive running to 2122 and beyond. It will doubtlessly add countless more images along the way.
Flickr is currently hiring a new archivist, according to their announcement (which also points out that the Flickr API was one of the first public APIs ever).

Among other things, it says that the foundation hopes to "investigate preservation strategies that could last for the next century,"

Slashdot reader SoftwareArtist writes: Terminal emulators have barely changed in 30 years. They're still just scrolling windows of unstructured text. Why is there so little innovation in an application we use every day?

There are so many ways they could be modernized to help us be more productive. For example:

- If I type ls to show a directory listing, I should be able to right-click on a filename and get a list of operations to perform on that file, just like a file browser.

- If I start to type a filename and press tab twice, it shouldn't just print a list of possible completions. It should provide a popup to select the one I want.

- Why can't I cat an image file and see the image right in the terminal window?


Are there any modern terminals that update this important tool for the 21st century? And if not, what prevents them?

Long-time Slashdot reader wattersa is a lawyer in Redwood City, California, "and a Slashdot reader since 1998.

"I recently concluded a three-year missing person investigation that unfortunately turned into an overseas homicide in Taiwan. I was authorized by my client to publish the case study on my website, which is based on our recent court filings..." And yes, he writes that the case was solved with a subpoena to Google: I filed that case in late 2019 and then used the subpoena power to try to solve the disappearance, which seemed appropriate. We solved the case in late 2020 due to a fake "proof of life" email that the suspect sent from the victim's email account, which he sent from a hotel where he testified he was staying alone on the night of the disappearance — after (according to him) dropping off the victim at the local train station. The victim could not have sent the email from the other side of Taiwan, which is where the email indicated it was from.... The suspect in my case is a Tony Stark-level supergenius with a Ph.D. and dozens of patents, who works at a prominent engineering company in California. He is currently wanted in Taiwan.

The case was solved with a subpoena to Google for the login/logout history of the victim's Gmail account and the originating IP address of the proof of life email. Although Google does not include the originating IP address in the email headers, it turns out that they retain the IP address for some unknown length of time and we were able to get it. When it became clear that this case was a homicide, co-counsel and I dismissed the conservatorship case and filed a wrongful death case against the suspect in 2021.

We continue to gather information through subpoenas, depositions, and interviews, all of which show that the victim died in a 10-hour window on November 29, 2019. The wrongful death case goes to trial in late 2023 in Santa Clara County. This is a rare case in which the family can afford an expensive, lengthy, attorney-led private investigation.
The original submission includes additional details about a rarely used statute in California that allows conservatorship of a missing person's estate — and apparently grants subpoena power. And it was in response to such a subpoena that Google produced the originating IP address of that crucial proof of life email.

"This obscure statute in the Probate Code was instrumental in solving the case because we didn't have to wait for law enforcement to take action, and we were able to aggressively pursue our own leads. This gave the family a sense of agency and closure, as well as the obvious benefit of solving the disappearance. Also, Taiwan law enforcement could not do subpoenas from Taiwan, so we ended up contributing to their investigation to some extent as well."

On Friday, long-time Slashdot reader NewtonsLaw wrote: Manufacturers of drones made after 16 September 2022 must, from today (16 December), ensure that those drones are "Standard Remote ID" compliant. This means that the drones must broadcast packets of data once per second (using Bluetooth or Wifi) that contain the position speed and path of the drone, a unique identifier and the operator's position including height above ground....

Already, several companies have announced their intention to build networks of receivers that will create a realtime database of all drone activity in the USA, showing the positions of the drones and their operators and flagging any non-compliant craft.

By September 16, 2023, all U.S. hobbyists must fit "broadcast remote ID" modules to their RC model aircraft or older drones which also make them Remote ID compliant (unless they are under 250g in mass or are flown in pre-approved areas called FRIAs)....

Drone and radio-controlled model aircraft users must register with the FAA [unless they weigh less than 0.55 pounds], sit (and pass) a knowledge test and soon have this Remote ID technology installed on all their craft.
"Remote ID helps the FAA, law enforcement, and other federal agencies find the control station when a drone appears to be flying in an unsafe manner or where it is not allowed to fly," argues an FAA web page. This week the top intelligence official at the U.S. Department of Defense told reporters that drones, including drones operated by amateur hobbyists and by foreign adversaries, account for many of the reports of Unidentified Flying Objects, according to the Washington Post.

They quote Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of America's new UFO-tracking agency, as saying that "Some of these things almost collide with planes. We see that on a regular basis...."

"John Carmack, the programmer who brought us Doom, Quake and Oculus/Meta virtual reality products, has resigned from his executive consultant post for virtual reality at Meta," reports VentureBeat.

"This is the end of my decade in VR," Carmack wrote in an internal post (which he later reposted on Facebook).

"I have mixed feelings." Quest 2 [Meta's VR headset] is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning — mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.

The issue is our efficiency.... We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort....

It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.

This was admittedly self-inflicted — I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.

Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.

Make better decisions and fill your products with "Give a Damn"!