Over the last day or two, there have been a growing number of reports by people who own certain Canon Pixma printers that the devices either won't turn on at all or, once turned on, get stuck in a reboot loop, cycling on and off as long as they're plugged in. The Verge reports: Verge reader Jamie pointed us to posts on Reddit about the problem and Canon's own support forum, citing problems with models including the MX490, MX492, MB2010, and MG7520. Some believe their problem is due to a software update Canon pushed to the printers, but that hasn't been confirmed yet. In response to an inquiry from The Verge, corporate communications senior director and general manager Christine Sedlacek said, "We are currently investigating this issue and hope to bring resolution shortly as customer satisfaction is our highest priority."

Until there is an official update or fix, some people in the forums have found that disconnecting the printers from the internet is enough to keep them from rebooting, with control still possible via USB. To get the printers to work while maintaining your connection to the internet and their connection to local network devices, one reply from a customer on Canon's support forum suggests a method that many people report has worked for them.

Capital One, a major player in America's banking industry with $434 billion in assets and more than 100 million customers, is launching Capitol One Software, "a business that develops and sells software products to companies scaling up their use of data and cloud computing," reports Forbes. From the report: The new venture, which has been created by Capital One's CEO and founder, Rich Fairbank, is based at the company's headquarters in McLean, Virginia, and has its own dedicated personnel as well as access to software developers in Capital One's 12,000-strong technology team. Its first product, Capital One Slingshot, helps companies speed up their adoption of Snowflake, a popular cloud data platform, and manage costs associated with it. [...] Ravi Raghu, the head of Capital One Software, says executives at Capital One see its creation as a natural evolution of the overall company's digital journey. "We've been talking of Capital One as a technology company for a while now. The best proof of that is [to become] a technology company that's actually selling software. That innovation just runs in our DNA."

Still, making Capital One Software a success will be no slam dunk. The markets the new business is targeting are big but they are also full of formidable competitors whose sole focus is on software and there are significant costs associated with things such as building teams that consult with customers to help them get the most out of the products they buy. Capital One may also need to reassure investors, who have seen its share price fall by almost 12% this year to $127.86 at close of trading on May 31, that its move into the software business will not distract executives from its core finance ones, especially as the economy shows signs it may be tilting towards recession.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: Ahead of the upcoming midterm elections, Connecticut is hiring a "security analyst" tasked with monitoring and addressing online misinformation. The New York Times first reported this new position, saying the job description will include spending time on "fringe sites like 4chan, far-right social networks like Gettr and Rumble and mainstream social media sites." The goal is to identify election-related rumors and attempt to mitigate the damage they might cause by flagging them to platforms that have misinformation policies and promoting educational content that can counter those false narratives.

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont's midterm budget (PDF), approved in early May, set aside more than $6 million to make improvements to the state's election system. That includes $4 million to upgrade the infrastructure used for voter registration and election management and $2 million for a "public information campaign" that will provide information on how to vote. The full-time security analyst role is recommended to receive $150,000. "Over the last few election cycles, malicious foreign actors have demonstrated the motivation and capability to significantly disrupt election activities, thus undermining public confidence in the fairness and accuracy of election results," the budget stated, as an explanation for the funding.

While the role is a first for Connecticut, the NYT noted that it's part of a growing nationwide trend. Colorado, for example, has a Rapid Response Election Security Cyber Unit tasked with monitoring online misinformation, as well as identifying "cyber-attacks, foreign interference, and disinformation campaigns." Originally created in anticipation of the 2020 presidential election, which proved to be fruitful ground for misinformation, the NYT says the unit is being "redeployed" this year. Other states, including Arizona, California, Idaho, and Oregon, are similarly funding election information initiatives in an attempt to counter misinformation, provide educational information, or do both.

Mike Bouma writes: Version 1.7 of AROS One for x86 has just been released and it's a distro of the "AROS Research Operating System," originally "Amiga Research Operating System." It's a standalone, free and open-source multi-media centric operating system that's designed to be portable, flexible, efficient and lightweight and can be seen dual booting with Windows 10 on an Acer laptop here. The most popular AROS specific community portal is AROS Exec.

Parts of AROS were used to create the commercial PowerPC based Amiga-like operating system MorphOS, which has recently seen a new release as well, version 3.17. The most popular MorphOS specific community portal is MorphZone.

Google announced today that it's combining two of its video-calling apps, Duo and Meet, into a single platform. The Verge reports: Pretty soon, there will be only Google Meet, and Google's hoping it can be the one calling app users need for just about everything in their lives. By bringing them both together, Google's hoping it can solve some of what ails modern communication tools. [...] Over the last couple of years in particular, Meet has become a powerful platform for meetings and group chats of all kinds, while Duo has stayed more of a messaging app. Google promises it's bringing all of Duo's features to Meet going forward and seems convinced it can offer the best of both worlds.

It's not quite right to say that Duo's being killed, though. The app, which Google originally launched in 2016 as an easy way to make one-to-one video calls, does a number of useful things that Meet doesn't. For one thing, you can call someone directly -- including with their phone number -- rather than relying on sending links or hitting that giant Meet button in your Google Calendar invite. Duo has always been more like FaceTime than Zoom in that sense. (Google also launched an iMessage competitor, Allo, at the same time as Duo. Allo didn't turn out so great.)

As the two services become one, Google is leaning on Duo's mobile app as the default. Pretty soon, the Duo app will get an update that brings an onslaught of Meet features into the platform; later this year, the Duo app will be renamed Google Meet. The current Meet app will be called "Meet Original," and eventually deprecated. This sounds... confusing, but Google claims it's the best way forward.

Smartphone cameras and DSLRs have been moving in opposite directions for the past few years, and image quality from phones will finally trump that of their single-lens reflex rivals by 2024, according to Sony. From a report: As reported by Nikkei Japan, the President and CEO of Sony Semiconductor Solutions (SSS), Terushi Shimizu, told a business briefing that "we expect that still images [from smartphones] will exceed the image quality of single-lens reflex cameras within the next few years." Some fascinating slides presented during the briefing were even more specific, with one slide showing that, according to Sony, "still images are expected to exceed ILC [interchangeable lens camera] image quality" sometime during 2024. Those are two slightly different claims, with 'ILCs' also including today's mirrorless cameras, alongside the older DSLR tech that most camera manufacturers are now largely abandoning. But the broader conclusion remains -- far from hitting a tech ceiling, smartphones are expected to continue their imaging evolution and, for most people, make standalone cameras redundant.

Meta Platforms's Sheryl Sandberg, who became one of the most recognized figures in global business after helping Facebook transform from a startup into a multibillion-dollar advertising powerhouse, is stepping down as chief operating officer. From a report: Sandberg, 52, will remain on the board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, according to a post on the social network Wednesday. Javier Olivan, who has led the company's growth efforts for years, will take Sandberg's place as COO when she formally steps down in the fall.

The US chipmaker Qualcomm wants to buy a stake in Arm alongside its rivals and create a consortium that would maintain the UK chip designer's neutrality in the highly competitive semiconductor market. From a report: Japanese conglomerate SoftBank plans to list Arm on the New York Stock Exchange after Nvidia's $66 billion purchase collapsed earlier this year. However, the IPO has sparked concern over the future ownership of the company, given its crucial role in the global technology sector. "We're an interested party in investing," Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm's chief executive, told the Financial Times. "It's a very important asset and it's an asset which is going to be essential to the development of our industry." He added that Qualcomm, one of Arm's biggest customers, could join forces with other chipmakers to buy Arm outright if the consortium making the purchase was "big enough." Such a move could settle concerns over the corporate control of Arm after the upcoming IPO. "You'd need to have many companies participating so they have a net effect that Arm is independent," he said.

On Monday night, some Spotify users went to download their favorite podcasts and were met with an error. By Tuesday morning, the issue was resolved. What was the source of the massive disruption impacting some of the platform's biggest producers? An expired security certificate. From a report: The SSL security certificate is what keeps a website secure by enabling encryption, giving it the "s" in HTTPS. For Megaphone, the podcast advertising and publishing platform Spotify acquired in 2020, the certificate expired Monday evening. Shortly thereafter, publishers and listeners for Megaphone-hosted podcasts experienced service disruptions. "Megaphone experienced a platform outage due to an issue related to our SSL certificate," a Spotify spokesperson told NPR. "During the outage, clients were unable to access the Megaphone CMS and podcast listeners were unable to download podcast episodes from Megaphone-hosted publishers. Megaphone service has since been restored." The entire outage lasted for about nine hours, with Megaphone publishing real-time updates of the issue. Some podcast publishers took to Twitter to express their frustration business implications of the outage, according to Verge.

A group of renowned technologists has joined forces to urge US lawmakers to crack down on the burgeoning cryptocurrencies industry, marking the first concerted effort to counter well-financed lobbying by blockchain companies. From a report: Harvard lecturer Bruce Schneier, former Microsoft engineer Miguel de Icaza and principal engineer at Google Cloud Kelsey Hightower, are among 26 leading computer scientists and academics who have signed a letter delivered to US lawmakers heavily criticising crypto investments and blockchain technology. While individuals have made similar warnings about the safety and reliability of digital assets, it marks a more organised effort to challenge the growing influence of crypto advocates who want to resist attempts to regulate the frothy sector. "The claims that the blockchain advocates make are not true," said Schneier. "It's not secure, it's not decentralised. Any system where you forget your password and you lose your life savings is not a safe system," he added. "We're counter-lobbying, that's what this letter is about," said signatory and software developer Stephen Diehl. "The crypto industry has its people, they say what they want to the politicians."

A recent analysis of the US Congressional Lobbying Disclosure database by Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, revealed the number of lobbyists representing the crypto industry increased from 115 to 320 between 2018 and 2021, and the money spent on lobbying for the crypto sector quadrupled from $2.2mn to $9mn in the same period. US-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase led the effort with 26 lobbyists and $1.5mn spent on lobbying in 2021. Companies with growing interest in the crypto sector, include Meta, Visa and PayPal, have also lobbied for the industry. Meanwhile, leading crypto exchanges such as FTX, Binance and Crypto.com have also spent heavily on endorsement deals with sports stars and entertainment venues to promote their products to the public.

Meta Platforms accused the European Union's antitrust authority of acting like "a fishing super trawler" by netting vast amounts of "wholly irrelevant" documents in an attempt to build a case against the U.S. tech giant. From a report: The commission was "hoovering up the whole sea bed -- with the intention that it will later see what species of rare fish it finds within its vast nets," Daniel Jowell, a lawyer for Meta, told a five-judge panel of the EU General Court in Luxembourg on Wednesday in a clash that turns the tables on regulators who often express concerns over data-collection practices of Meta's Facebook social network.

Meta accused the commission of refusing to engage with the firm and ignoring its suggested alternatives to render the data requests more "proportionate" and limited to what is necessary. Instead, the commission "sailed obliviously onward," using a "mechanical application of its search terms despite being on notice of the vast number of irrelevant documents this was bound to give rise to," Jowell told the court.

The Dutch consumer technology firm TomTom announced on Wednesday that it is "resetting" the organization as a result of improvements in its mapmaking technology. The firm said: Engineering investments have resulted in an advanced automated mapmaking platform, which leads to a material change in mapmaking activities. [...] The improvement in our mapmaking technology will lead to material efficiency gains. Combined with a better map, this will strengthen our competitive position. Regrettably, this will have an intended impact on approximately 500 employees in our Maps unit, equivalent to around 10% of our total global headcount.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Big Brother is listening. Companies use "bossware" to listen to their employees when they're near their computers. Multiple "spyware" apps can record phone calls. And home devices such as Amazon's Echo can record everyday conversations. A new technology, called Neural Voice Camouflage, now offers a defense. It generates custom audio noise in the background as you talk, confusing the artificial intelligence (AI) that transcribes our recorded voices.

The new system uses an "adversarial attack." The strategy employs machine learning -- in which algorithms find patterns in data -- to tweak sounds in a way that causes an AI, but not people, to mistake it for something else. Essentially, you use one AI to fool another. The process isn't as easy as it sounds, however. The machine-learning AI needs to process the whole sound clip before knowing how to tweak it, which doesn't work when you want to camouflage in real time.

So in the new study, researchers taught a neural network, a machine-learning system inspired by the brain, to effectively predict the future. They trained it on many hours of recorded speech so it can constantly process 2-second clips of audio and disguise what's likely to be said next. For instance, if someone has just said "enjoy the great feast," it can't predict exactly what will be said next. But by taking into account what was just said, as well as characteristics of the speaker's voice, it produces sounds that will disrupt a range of possible phrases that could follow. That includes what actually happened next; here, the same speaker saying, "that's being cooked." To human listeners, the audio camouflage sounds like background noise, and they have no trouble understanding the spoken words. But machines stumble. The work was presented in a paper last month at the International Conference on Learning Representations, which peer reviews manuscript submissions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple's Safari web browser has more than 1 billion users, according to an estimate by Atlas VPN. Only one other browser has more than a billion users, and that's Google's Chrome. But at nearly 3.4 billion, Chrome still leaves Safari in the dust. It's important to note that these numbers include mobile users, not just desktop users. Likely, Safari's status as the default browser for both the iPhone and iPad plays a much bigger role than its usage on the Mac. Still, it's impressive given that Safari is the only major web browser not available on Android, which is the world's most popular mobile operating system, or Windows, the most popular desktop OS. "The statistics are based on the GlobalStats browser market share percentage, which was then converted into numbers using the Internet World Stats internet user metric to retrieve the exact numbers," explains Atlas VPN in a blog post.

The /e/OS-powered Murena One is the first smartphone from Murena that does its best to free you from Google without sacrificing too many core features. There are no Google apps, Google Play Services, or even the Google Assistant. It's all been replaced by open-source software alternatives with privacy-respecting features. ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports: Murena and Mandrake Linux founder Gael Duval was sick of it by 2017. He wanted his data to be his data, and he wanted open-source software. Almost five years later, Duval and his co-developers launched the Murena One X2. It's the first high-end Android phone using the open-source /e/OS Android fork to arrive on the market. The privacy heart of the Murena One is /e/OS V1. There have been many attempts to create an alternative to Google-based Android and Apple's iOS -- Ubuntu One, FirefoxOS, and Windows Mobile -- but all failed. Duval's approach isn't to reinvent the mobile operating system wheel, but to clean up Android of its squeaky Google privacy-invading features and replace them with privacy-respecting ones. To make this happen, Duval started with LineageOS -- an Android-based operating system, which is descended from the failed CyanogenMod Android fork. It also blends in features from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source-code trees.

In the /e/OS, most (but not all) Google services have been removed and replaced with MicroG services. MicroG replaces Google's libraries with purely open-source implementations without hooks to Google's services. This includes libraries and apps which provide Google Play, Maps, Geolocation, and Messaging services for Android applications. In addition, /e/OS does its best to free you from higher-level Google services. For instance, Google's default search engine has been replaced with Murena's own meta-search engine. Other internet-based services, such as Domain Name Server (DNS) and Network Time Protocol (NTP), use non-Google servers. Above the operating system, you'll find Google-free applications. This includes a web browser; an e-mail client; a messaging app; a calendar; a contact manager; and a maps app that relies on Mozilla Location Service and OpenStreetMap. While it's not here yet, Murena is also working on its own take on Google Assistant, Elivia-AI. You can also run many, but not all Android apps. You'll find these apps on the operating system's App Lounge. [...]

There's still one big problem: the App Lounge still relies on you logging in with your Google account. In short, the App Lounge is mainly a gateway to Google Store apps. Munera assures me that the Lounge anonymizes your data -- except if you use apps that require payment. Still, this is annoying for people who want to cut all their ties with Google. The fundamental problem is this: Muena does all it can to separate its operating system and applications from Google, but it can't -- yet -- replace Google's e-commerce and software store system. As for hardware specs, the $379 Murena One features a 6.5-inch IPS LCD display, eight-core MediaTek Helio P60 processor, side-mounted fingerprint scanner, three rear cameras (48MP + 8MP + 5MP) and 25MP front camera, and 4,500mAh battery. It also features a microSD card slot for expandable storage and headphone port.

Work is afoot to free up several internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) address ranges which have been unroutable as reserved, invalid or used for loopback networks since the 1980s. Reader Bismillah shares a report: Seth Schoen, who co-founded the free transport layer security digital certificate provider Let's Encrypt is working on an IPv4 clean-up project that would take address currently not routed on the public Internet, and make them generally usable. Presenting on the IPv4 Unicast Extensions Project at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT), Schoen said decisions taken during the 1980s to keep several IPv4 address ranges as "special", has led to a substantial amount of numbering resources going to waste. This "even though the reasons behind the those decisions has not been borne out," Schoen said. Taking the 240/4, 0/8, 127/8, 225/8-232/8 ranges, and making them available as ordinary unicast numbering resources for networks would add some 419 million IPv4 addresses. Due to the rapid growth of the Internet, the number of 32-bit IPv4 addresses has become scarce, with some regional registries being unable to allocate additional blocks to networks. The scarcity has caused IPv4 address hoarding, high prices for sub-allocations and even fraud to get more space.

Itochu, Mitsubishi and other companies are investing in Evering (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), a chip-embedded smart ring that can act as a wallet and a key [...]. Bloomberg reports: Evering is backed by MTG, a listed Japanese health and beauty company. MTG struck a contract with Visa last year and began selling rings in Japan, which cost about 20,000 yen ($158) apiece, including tax. As retailers around the world seek ways to make it easier for consumers to shop seamlessly without touching anything, Evering and MTG are betting that their smart ring will resonate with early adopters. Made out of zirconia, the finger-worn gadget lets people do things such as lock and unlock doors, as well as pay for drinks in stores. More than 10 investors are considering investing a total of around 1 billion yen in Evering, which may eventually seek a public listing [...]. Potential backers include Daiwa House Industry and Toppan, with an announcement due soon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The next generation of Starlink satellites are going to be larger, and more powerful, designed to provide internet access to remote parts of the world, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The space billionaire recently discussed the details of the Starlink Gen2 System on the popular YouTube show, Everyday Astronaut. In the 32 minute clip, Musk reveals that SpaceX has already produced the first Starlink 2.0 satellite. The new generation satellite is 7 meters (22 feet) long and weighs about 1.25 tons (approximately 2,755 pounds or 1,250 kilograms). Starlink 1.0, by comparison, weighs about 573 pounds (260 kilograms). The extra weight accounts for a more effective satellite, according to Musk. "Just think of it like how many useful bits of data can each satellite do," Musk said during the interview. "Starlink 2.0 in terms of useful bits of data is almost an order of magnitude better than a Starlink 1.0."

Starlink satellites are lifted to low Earth orbit on board a Falcon 9 rocket, but the rocket will not be capable of carrying Starlink 2.0. "Falcon neither has the volume nor the mass [for the] orbit capability required for Starlink 2.0," Musk said. "So even if we shrunk the Starlink satellite down, the total up mass of Falcon is not nearly enough to do Starlink 2.0." Instead, SpaceX is banking on Starship, a heavy lift launch rocket that is currently under development, but has already suffered from numerous delays. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been working on an environmental review of the Starship program for months to assess its impact, and the report is expected in mid June, although it has been repeatedly pushed forward, much to Musk's dismay. "We need Starship to work and fly frequently or Starlink will be stuck on the ground," Musk said during the interview.

The Supreme Court blocked a controversial Texas social media law from taking effect in a decision released (PDF) on Tuesday, after the tech industry and other opponents warned it could allow for hateful content to run rampant online. CNBC reports: The law, HB20, prohibits online platforms from moderating or removing content based on viewpoint. It stems from a common charge on the right that major California-based social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are biased in their moderation strategies and disproportionately quiet conservative voices. The platforms have said they apply their community guidelines evenly and it's often the case that right-leaning users rank among the highest in engagement.

In the 5-4 decision, Alito dissented from the decision to lift the stay, issuing a written explanation for his vote, which was joined by two other conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, also voted against vacating the stay. Alito's dissent opened by acknowledging the significance of the case for social media companies and for states that would regulate how those companies can control the content on their platforms. "This application concerns issues of great importance that will plainly merit this Court's review," Alito wrote. "Social media platforms have transformed the way people communicate with each other and obtain news. At issue is a ground-breaking Texas law that addresses the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day." The Supreme Court's decision has implications for other states that may consider legislation similar to that in Texas. Florida's legislature has already passed a similar social media law, but it has so far been blocked by the courts.

Germany's parliament has set summer train fares at 9 euros per month in a bid to slash pollution and curb imports of Russian oil by spurring drivers to take public transit. From a report: The initiative takes effect on June 1, with 9 euros covering the cost of all buses, trams, subways, and regional trains, effectively cutting fares by more than 90 percent in some cities. Berlin commuters will save 98 euros on their monthly travel pass, while commuters in Hamburg will save more than 105 euros, Bloomberg reported. Deutsche Bahn is adding 50 additional trains to absorb the expected increase in users. The reduced fares come with an estimated price tag of 2.5 billions euros, the cost to the German government of reimbursing transit companies for lost revenue. Critics have said the plan is too expensive and warned that a surge in travelers could overwhelm mass transit and rail lines. Some, however, have suggested that the initiative should go further.