Companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, as well as banks, police services and government departments, shred millions of data-storing devices each year, the Financial Times has learnt through interviews with more than 30 people who work in and around the decommissioning industry and via dozens of freedom of information requests. From the report: This is despite a growing chorus of industry insiders who say there is another, better option to safely dispose of data: using computer software to securely wipe the devices before selling them on the secondary market. "From a data security perspective, you do not need to shred," says Felice Alfieri, a European Commission official who co-authored a report about how to make data centres more sustainable and is promoting "data deletion" over device destruction. Underpinning the reluctance to move away from shredding is the fear that data could leak, triggering fury from customers and huge fines from regulators.

Last month, the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined Morgan Stanley $35mn for an "astonishing" failure to protect customer data, after the bank's decommissioned servers and hard drives were sold on without being properly wiped by an inexperienced company it had contracted. This was on top of a $60mn fine in 2020 and a $60mn class action settlement reached earlier this year. Some of the hardware containing bank data ended up being auctioned online. While the incident stemmed from a failure to wipe the devices before selling them on, the bank now mandates that every one of its data-storing devices is destroyed -- the vast majority on site. This approach is widespread. One employee at Amazon Web Services, who spoke on condition of anonymity, explained that the company shreds every single data-storing device once it is deemed obsolete, usually after three to five years of use: "If we let one [piece of data] slip through, we lose the trust of our customers." A person with knowledge of Microsoft's data disposal operations says the company shreds everything at its 200-plus Azure data centres.

Tools helping China's netizens to bypass the Great Firewall appear to be facing a fresh round of crackdowns in the run-up to the country's quinquennial party congress that will see a top leadership reshuffle. From a report: Greater censorship is not at all uncommon during countries' politically sensitive periods, but the stress facing censorship circumvention tools in China appears to be on a whole new level. "Starting from October 3, 2022 (Beijing Time), more than 100 users reported that at least one of their TLS-based censorship circumvention servers had been blocked," writes GFW Report, a censorship monitoring platform focused on China, in a GitHub post.

TLS, or transport layer security, is a ubiquitous internet security protocol used for encrypting data sent across the internet. Because data shared over a TLS connection is encrypted and cannot be easily read, many censorship circumvention apps and services use TLS to keep people's conversations private. A TLS-based virtual private network, or VPN, directs internet traffic through a TLS connection instead of pushing that traffic to one's internet provider. But Chinese censors seem to have found a way of compromising this strategy. "The blocking is done by blocking the specific port that the circumvention services listen on. When the user changes the blocked port to a non-blocked port and keeps using the circumvention tools, the entire IP address may get blocked," GFW Report says in the post.

Alphabet's Google on Thursday said its new Pixel phones will deliver improved voice and camera features while bringing back facial recognition for unlocking the device as it seeks to better compete with Apple and Samsung Electronics. From a report: The company's Pixel 7 and 7 Pro devices offer more affordable prices than the dominant duo of the mobile market, coming in at $599 and $899, respectively, and introduce the second generation of Google's in-house Tensor chip. The 6.7-inch Pro version has an additional zoom camera, better display and more memory than the 6.3-inch Pixel 7.

Google's Pixel phones every year serve as the showcase for the company's latest Android software and artificial intelligence-based services, such as the Google Assistant. They demonstrate how Google hopes device-making partners will best use its operating system. Google continues developing its own hardware, which has only ever sold in small numbers, in part as insurance against missteps by Samsung, the only credible Apple rival in the US. Google AI shows up in the upgraded language-processing capabilities of its latest software. The Recorder app for voice memos can now automatically label different speakers in transcriptions, and transcriptions are also being added to audio messages in the new Pixels' messaging app.

An obscure software system synchronizes the network's clocks. Who will keep it running? From a report: To solve the problem of time synchronization on the arpanet, computer scientist David Mills built what programmers call a protocol -- a collection of rules and procedures that creates a lingua franca for disparate devices. The arpanet was experimental and capricious: electronics failed regularly, and technological misbehavior was common. His protocol sought to detect and correct for those misdeeds, creating a consensus about the time through an ingenious system of suspicion. Mills prided himself on puckish nomenclature, and so his clock-synchronizing system distinguished reliable "truechimers" from misleading "falsetickers." An operating system named Fuzzball, which he designed, facilitated the early work. Mills called his creation the Network Time Protocol, and N.T.P. soon became a key component of the nascent Internet. Programmers followed its instructions when they wrote timekeeping code for their computers. By 1988, Mills had refined N.T.P. to the point where it could synchronize the clocks of connected computers that had been telling vastly differing times to within tens of milliseconds -- a fraction of a blink of an eye. "I always thought that was sort of black magic," Vint Cerf, a pioneer of Internet infrastructure, told me.

Today, we take global time synchronization for granted. It is critical to the Internet, and therefore to civilization. Vital systems -- power grids, financial markets, telecommunications networks -- rely on it to keep records and sort cause from effect. N.T.P. works in partnership with satellite systems, such as the Global Positioning System (G.P.S.), and other technologies to synchronize time on our many online devices. The time kept by precise and closely aligned atomic clocks, for instance, can be broadcast via G.P.S. to numerous receivers, including those in cell towers; those receivers can be attached to N.T.P. servers that then distribute the time across devices linked together by the Internet, almost all of which run N.T.P. (Atomic clocks can also directly feed the time to N.T.P. servers.) The protocol operates on billions of devices, coÃrdinating the time on every continent. Society has never been more synchronized.

Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook leaders have given many hints that a reorganization is coming. Now, a specific number of workers are to be deemed "needs support," Insider has learned. From the report: The company is already telling some to find other jobs, leaving workers to call it "quiet layoffs." It told staff last week in a weekly Q&A with CEO Mark Zuckerberg that it was extending a hiring freeze that's been in place since May. Just before this meeting, executives told directors across the company that they should select at least 15% of their teams to be labeled as "needs support" in an internal review process, one of the people who spoke with Insider said.

All the workers asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information. This was also discussed last week in a post from a Meta worker on Blind, an app popular with tech workers that requires a valid company email address to use anonymously. "These 15% will likely be put on PIP and be let go," the person wrote. The post prompted hundreds of comments from many other Meta workers who debated how many people would be let go. In Facebook's employee-review process, someone deemed in need of support is ostensibly dipping below performance goals. It is broadly seen by workers as a "performance-improvement plan," or PIP, and a precursor to losing your job. In July, Maher Saba, Meta's head of engineering, told managers they needed to identify everyone on their teams who fell into the "needs-support" category but did not specify a percentage of people who should be labeled that way.

The NOEMA radio telescope, located on the Plateau de Bure in the French Alps, is now equipped with twelve antennas, making it the most powerful radio telescope of its kind in the northern hemisphere. Phys.Org reports: Eight years after the inauguration of the first NOEMA antenna in 2014, the large-scale European project is now complete. Thanks to its twelve 15-meter antennas, which can be moved back and forth on a specially developed rail system up to a distance of 1.7 kilometers long, NOEMA is a unique instrument for astronomical research. The telescope is equipped with highly sensitive receiving systems that operate close at the quantum limit. During observations, the observatory's twelve antennas act as a single telescope -- a technique called interferometry. After all the antennas have been pointed towards one and the same region of space, the signals they receive are combined with the help of a supercomputer. Their detailed resolution then corresponds to that of a huge telescope whose diameter is equal to the distance between the outermost antennas.

The respective arrangement of the antennas can extend over distances from a few hundred meters to 1.7 kilometers. The network thus functions like a camera with a variable lens. The further apart the antennas are, the more powerful is the zoom: the maximum spatial resolution of NOEMA is so high that it would be able to detect a mobile phone at a distance of over 500 kilometers. NOEMA is one of the few radio observatories worldwide that can simultaneously detect and measure a large number of signatures -- i.e., "fingerprints" of molecules and atoms. Thanks to these so-called multi-line observations, combined with high sensitivity, NOEMA is a unique instrument for investigating the complexity of cold matter in interstellar space as well as the building blocks of the university. With NOEMA, over 5,000 researchers from all over the world study the composition and dynamics of galaxies as well as the birth and death of stars, comets in our solar system or the environment of black holes. The observatory captures light from cosmic objects that has traveled to Earth for more than 13 billion years. NOEMA has "observed the most distant known galaxy, which formed shortly after the Big Bang," notes the report. It also "measured the temperature of the cosmic background radiation at a very early stage of the universe, a scientific first that should make it possible to trace the effects of dark energy driving the universe apart."

Following another quarter that saw marketers pull back on their ad spending, Meta today announced it's increasing its ad load on Instagram with the launch of two new ad slots. TechCrunch reports: Amid a slew of product updates for advertisers, including a music catalog for advertisers and a new ad format for Facebook Reels, the company said it will now allow advertisers to run ads on the Explore home page and in profile feeds. Meanwhile, though Instagram Reels began rolling out 30-second ads globally last year, followed by Reels ads on Facebook earlier in 2022, the new format now being tested will involve shorter ads on Facebook Reels, specifically.

Called "post-loop" ads, these 4- to 10-second skippable ads and standalone video ads will play after a Reel has ended. When the ad finishes playing, the Reel will then resume and loop again. Like TikTok, many Reels are designed to be watched more than once -- but stuffing an ad at the end could see users instead choosing to scroll to a new video instead of watching the same one again. This is a risky move, as people will also likely consider this a poor user experience.

Meta also said it will test "image carousel" ads in Facebook Reels starting today. These are horizontally scrollable ads that can include anywhere from two to 10 image ads and are shown at the bottom of Facebook Reels content. In addition, the company is introducing new Instagram ad placements as a way to increase the surface for ads as it struggles to monetize its TikTok competitor, Reels. This is being done through the addition of ads on the Explore home page and in the profile feed. [...] Historically, Instagram had only placed ads on Explore within the Explore feed -- that is, when a person taps on a post and scrolls. But now, it's expanding to the Explore home page itself, as it says it sees users spending meaningful time there, Instagram told TechCrunch. This is already rolling out globally.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Tech giant Google has today announced the launch of a cloud region in South Africa, its first in the continent, playing catch-up to other top providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, which made inroads into the continent a few years ago. Google said it is also building Dedicated Cloud Interconnect sites, which link users' on-premises networks with Google's grid, in Nairobi (Kenya), Lagos (Nigeria) and South Africa (Capetown and Johannesburg), in its quest to provide full-scale cloud capabilities for its customers and partners in Africa.

Google plans to tap its private subsea cable, Equiano, which connects Africa and Europe, to power the sites. Equiano has been under development since 2019 and has so far made four landings -- in Togo, Namibia, Nigeria and South Africa. South Africa now joins Google's global network of 35 cloud regions and 106 zones worldwide, and the announcement follows the recent preview launch of regions in Malaysia, Thailand and New Zealand. Google Cloud regions allow users to deploy cloud resources from specific geographic locations, and access several services including cloud storage, compute engine and key management systems.

The decision to set up a region in South Africa was informed by the demand for cloud services and the market's potential. Still, the company is looking to launch in more markets within the continent as demand for its products soars. Its early adopters include large enterprise companies, and e-commerce firms like South Africa's TakeAlot and Kenya's Twiga. According to research by AlphaBeta Economics, commissioned by Google Cloud, the South Africa cloud region will contribute over $2.1 billion to South Africa's GDP and support the creation of more than 40,000 jobs by 2030. Google Cloud, Azure by Microsoft and AWS are the three biggest public cloud storage players in the world, according to data from Gartner, but it's unclear why, until now, Google has been absent in Africa. "We are excited to announce the first Google Cloud region in Africa. The new region will allow for the localization of applications and services. It will make it really easier for our customers and partners to quickly deploy solutions for their businesses, whereby they're able to leverage our computer artificial intelligence or machine learning capabilities, and data analytics to make smarter business decisions as they go forward," said Google Cloud Africa director, Niral Patel.

"What we're doing here is giving customers and partners a choice on where they'd like to store their data and where they'd like to consume cloud services, especially in the context of data sovereignty. This allows customers to then store the data in the country should they choose to do so... I guess for me the most important element is that it gives customers the element of choice."

A new version of a quarter-century-old window manager shows that there's still room for improvement and innovation, even in established, mature tools. The Register reports: IceWM is [...] a traditional stacking window manager allowing you to open, move, and resize windows. It's relatively simple, easy, and quick to learn. By default, it also provides an app launcher and an app switcher, using the familiar Windows 95 model: a hierarchical start menu and a taskbar. If you do a minimal install of openSUSE, you get IceWM. It's also one of the defaults in the lightweight antiX and Absolute Linux distros.

With such a relatively simple remit, it's good to see that development is still going on. Version 2.0 appeared late in 2020, removing a legacy protocol and adding a new image rendering engine. Now version 3.0 is out with a whole new feature: tabbed windows. Reminiscent of one of The Reg FOSS desk's favorite OSes, the late and great Be OS, tabbed windows turn the title bar into a tab that is less than the full width of the window. In IceWM 3, this allows you to attach windows together to form one entity that can be moved and sized in a single operation â" but the contents of the different windows can be accessed individually using each one's tab. In other words, it works like browser tabs, but the different windows don't need to be from the same parent application. "IceWM's new tabbed windows are the sort of relatively simple improvement to the very well-established metaphor of window management that this vulture really likes to see: small, elegant, and yet helpful," adds The Register's Liam Proven. "We feel that there's plenty more room for improvement within this space. For instance, very few window managers offer the choice of where the title bar (or tab) is located; on a widescreen, placing them on the side, as wm2 and wmx do, would save valuable vertical pixels."

Longtime Slashdot reader and tech historian, Kay Savetz, shares a blog post about the Internet Archive's efforts to build a library of amateur radio broadcasts. Here's an excerpt from the report: Internet Archive has begun gathering content for the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), which will be a massive online library of materials and collections related to amateur radio and early digital communications. The DLARC is funded by a significant grant from the Amateur Radio Digital Communications Foundation (ARDC) to create a digital library that documents, preserves, and provides open access to the history of this community. The library will be a free online resource that combines archived digitized print materials, born-digital content, websites, oral histories, personal collections, and other related records and publications. The goals of the DLARC are to document the history of amateur radio and to provide freely available educational resources for researchers, students, and the general public. [...]

The DLARC project is looking for partners and contributors with troves of ham radio, amateur radio, and early digital communications related books, magazines, documents, catalogs, manuals, videos, software, personal archives, and other historical records collections, no matter how big or small. In addition to physical material to digitize, we are looking for podcasts, newsletters, video channels, and other digital content that can enrich the DLARC collections. Internet Archive will work directly with groups, publishers, clubs, individuals, and others to ensure the archiving and perpetual access of contributed collections, their physical preservation, their digitization, and their online availability and promotion for use in research, education, and historical documentation. All collections in this digital library will be universally accessible to any user and there will be a customized access and discovery portal with special features for research and educational uses.

Not to be outdone by Meta's Make-A-Video, Google today detailed its work on Imagen Video, an AI system that can generate video clips given a text prompt (e.g., "a teddy bear washing dishes"). From a report:While the results aren't perfect -- the looping clips the system generates tend to have artifacts and noise -- Google claims that Imagen Video is a step toward a system with a "high degree of controllability" and world knowledge, including the ability to generate footage in a range of artistic styles. As my colleague Devin Coldewey noted in his piece about Make-A-Video, text-to-video systems aren't new. Earlier this year, a group of researchers from Tsinghua University and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence released CogVideo, which can translate text into reasonably-high-fidelity short clips. But Imagen Video appears to be a significant leap over the previous state-of-the-art, showing an aptitude for animating captions that existing systems would have trouble understanding. "It's definitely an improvement," Matthew Guzdial, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta studying AI and machine learning, told TechCrunch via email. "As you can see from the video examples, even though the comms team is selecting the best outputs there's still weird blurriness and artificing. So this definitely is not going to be used directly in animation or TV anytime soon. But it, or something like it, could definitely be embedded in tools to help speed some things up."

While Meta funnels billions into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's pitch for the metaverse, Apple CEO Tim Cook thinks most people couldn't even define the metaverse, let alone spend long periods of time living their lives inside of it. From a report: "I always think it's important that people understand what something is," Cook told Dutch publication Bright (via Google Translate). "And I'm really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is." In other words, despite persistent reports of Apple's interest in building all manner of AR and VR hardware, Cook isn't ready to claim that the company is working towards any so-called "metaverse." Mark Zuckerberg has a different view. Earlier this year, the Meta CEO told his employees that the company is in a "very deep, philosophical competition" with Apple to build the metaverse. "This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience," Zuckerberg said, contrasting what he says is Apple's closed approach with Meta's more interoperable development.

A $200 billion corner of the hedge funds industry dominated by computer-driven algorithms has been making the most of wild swings in global markets, putting many of those funds on course for a record year of gains. From a report: Aspect Capital's Diversified Programme returned 5.2% last month to bolster its gains for this year to nearly 44%, according to an investor document. Tulip Trend Fund rose more than 58% through September, while the Lynx fund was up in excess of 45%, according to updates on their websites. The funds, which use computing power to analyze vast amounts of data to predict the direction of stocks, bonds, currency and commodities markets, are emerging as one of the biggest winners among hedge fund strategies this year as soaring inflation and rising interest rate spark the volatility they thrive on.

A former Seattle tech worker convicted of several charges related to a massive hack of Capital One bank and other companies in 2019 was sentenced Tuesday to time served and five years of probation. From a report: U.S. District Judge Robert S. Lasnik said sentencing former Amazon software engineer Paige Thompson to time in prison would have been particularly difficult on her "because of her mental health and transgender status," the Department of Justice said in a statement.

U.S. Attorney Nick Brown said his office was "very disappointed" with the sentencing decision, adding prosecutors had asked for Thompson to serve seven years in prison. "This is not what justice looks like," Brown said in the statement. In June, a Seattle jury found her guilty of wire fraud, unauthorized access to a protected computer and damaging a protected computer. The jury acquitted her of other charges, including access device fraud and aggravated identity theft.

Intel laptop users running Linux are being advised to avoid running the latest Linux 5.19.12 stable kernel point release as it can potentially damage the display. From a report: Intel Linux laptop users on Linux 5.19.12 have begun reporting "white flashing" display issues with one user describing it as "[the] laptop display starts to blink like lights in a 90's rave party." Intel Linux kernel engineer Ville Syrjal posted this week on the kernel mailing list: "After looking at some logs we do end up with potentially bogus panel power sequencing delays, which may harm the LCD panel."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google will pay $85 million to resolve a consumer privacy suit by Arizona claiming the technology giant surreptitiously collects data on users' whereabouts for targeted advertising. The settlement comes as Google is facing similar complaints by a group of state attorneys general, including Texas, Indiana and Washington D.C., in their respective state courts, over user location data. Arizona accused Google in a May 2020 complaint of violating the state's Consumer Fraud Act by gathering location data even after users opt out of a feature that records location history through other settings such as "Web & App Activity." Google, in its defense, had argued that the state consumer protection law requires that alleged fraud is connected to a sale or advertisement. In January, an Arizona state judge denied Google's request to dismiss the case. The settlement represents the largest amount per individual user Google has paid in "a privacy and consumer-fraud lawsuit of this kind," Attorney General Mark Brnovich's office said in a statement on Tuesday. "I am proud of this historic settlement that proves no entity, not even big tech companies, is above the law."

Meanwhile, a Google spokesperson said Arizona's suit was based on old product policies that the company changed years ago. "We provide straightforward controls and auto delete options for location data, and are always working to minimize the data we collect," they said. "We are pleased to have this matter resolved and will continue to focus our attention on providing useful products for our users."

"This Monday, the first set of patches to enable Rust support and tooling was merged for Linux 6.1," writes Slashdot reader sabian2008, sharing an update from longtime kernel developer Kees Cook: The tree has a recent base, but has fundamentally been in linux-next for a year and a half. It's been updated based on feedback from the Kernel Maintainer's Summit, and to gain recent Reviewed-by: tags. Miguel is the primary maintainer, with me helping where needed/wanted. Our plan is for the tree to switch to the standard non-rebasing practice once this initial infrastructure series lands. The contents are the absolute minimum to get Rust code building in the kernel, with many more interfaces[2] (and drivers -- NVMe[3], 9p[4], M1 GPU[5]) on the way.

The initial support of Rust-for-Linux comes in roughly 4 areas:
- Kernel internals (kallsyms expansion for Rust symbols, %pA format)
- Kbuild infrastructure (Rust build rules and support scripts)
- Rust crates and bindings for initial minimum viable build
- Rust kernel documentation and samples Further reading: Linux 6.0 Arrives With Support For Newer Chips, Core Fixes, and Oddities

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Over the past decade, rightsholders have asked [Google] to remove six billion links to alleged copyright-infringing content. The majority of these requests were indeed removed or put on a preemptive blacklist. The six billion links were reported by 326,575 copyright holders who identified 4,041,845 separate domain names. These domains also include many false positives, including websites of The White House, the FBI, Disney, Netflix, the New York Times, and even TorrentFreak. Overall, we can say that a relatively small number of rightsholders are responsible for a disproportionate number of takedown requests. The ten most active senders reported nearly 2.5 billion URLs, more than 40% of the total. Similarly, as we previously highlighted, most of the removed URLs belong to a small group of websites. Just 400 domains are responsible for 41% of all links removed by Google over the years.

Google continues to remove more than a million URLs per day but the trend started to change a few years ago. The frequency at which new links were reported started to decline. At the same time, Google started to cooperate more with rightsholders. For example, Google began to accept takedown notices for links that are not indexed by the search engine yet. These links, which are also counted in the six billion figure, are put on a preemptive blocklist. That prevents the links from being added to search results in the future. Google also actively demotes pirate sites in its search results when it receives an unusually high number of takedown requests for a domain. In addition, the search engine chose to voluntarily comply with third-party site-blocking orders by removing entire domain names from its index. These proactive anti-piracy measures have started to improve the relationship between Google and rightsholders. And it wouldn't be a surprise to see this trend continue going forward.

The Pixel 4 is officially hitting its end of life this month after three short years of service. We sometimes see these dead Google phones get one more wrap-up update before Google cuts the cord, but the Android October 2022 update is the end of the line here. From a report: The Pixel 4 was a big batch of Google experiments passed off as a consumer product, and we did not take kindly to it. It was the first (and only) Google phone to attempt to copy Apple's FaceID by using a grid of IR dots and extra hardware to scan the user's face. The system was much slower than the fingerprint reader on the Pixel 3, and it oddly worked on sleeping people for several months after launch.

The Pixel 4 was the first and only Google phone to integrate "Project Soli," a tiny Google radar chip that can detect motion. The laboratory versions of Soli promised that the technology could capture "sub millimeter motions of your fingers," but the commercial implementation in the Pixel 4 could only (sometimes) capture giant arm movements. Soli lives on in Google smart displays for sleep tracking, but the phone version is dead. Combine that with very high prices for the two device sizes ($800 and $900) and very small batteries (2800 mAh and 3700 mAh), and you have the makings of a very bad device.

A quarter of a century after it began collecting web pages, the Internet Archive is adapting to new challenges. From a report: Within the walls of a beautiful former church in San Francisco's Richmond district, racks of computer servers hum and blink with activity. They contain the internet. Well, a very large amount of it. The Internet Archive, a non-profit, has been collecting web pages since 1996 for its famed and beloved Wayback Machine. In 1997, the collection amounted to 2 terabytes of data. Colossal back then, you could fit it on a $50 thumb drive now.

Today, the archive's founder Brewster Kahle tells me, the project is on the brink of surpassing 100 petabytes -- approximately 50,000 times larger than in 1997. It contains more than 700bn web pages. The work isn't getting any easier. Websites today are highly dynamic, changing with every refresh. Walled gardens like Facebook are a source of great frustration to Kahle, who worries that much of the political activity that has taken place on the platform could be lost to history if not properly captured. In the name of privacy and security, Facebook (and others) make scraping difficult.