According to Bloomberg, Apple and Meta "provided customer data to hackers who masqueraded as law enforcement officials." Bloomberg's William Turton reports: Apple and Meta provided basic subscriber details, such as a customer's address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged "emergency data requests." Normally, such requests are only provided with a search warrant or subpoena signed by a judge, according to the people. However, the emergency requests don't require a court order. Snap Inc. received a forged legal request from the same hackers, but it isn't known whether the company provided data in response. It's also not clear how many times the companies provided data prompted by forged legal requests.

Cybersecurity researchers suspect that some of the hackers sending the forged requests are minors located in the U.K. and the U.S. [...] The fraudulent legal requests are part of a months-long campaign that targeted many technology companies and began as early as January 2021. The forged legal requests are believed to be sent via hacked email domains belonging to law enforcement agencies in multiple countries. The forged requests were made to appear legitimate. In some instances, the documents included the forged signatures of real or fictional law enforcement officers. By compromising law enforcement email systems, the hackers may have found legitimate legal requests and used them as a template to create forgeries. Further reading: Hackers Gaining Power of Subpoena Via Fake 'Emergency Data Requests'

T-Mobile said Wednesday that its shutdown of Sprint's 3G network is proceeding as planned, beginning on March 31st. The Verge reports: As part of the shutdown process, the company said in a statement emailed to The Verge, it will migrate customers over the next 60 days "to ensure they are supported and not left without connectivity, and the network will be completely turned off by no later than May 31." Earlier reports suggested that the actual shutdown date was being pushed to May 31st, which would have been the second delay; originally, T-Mobile was going to phase out the network in January but said in October that it would extend the deadline to March 31st.

Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving unit, has begun offering its San Francisco employees fully autonomous rides, the company said Wednesday. From a report: Waymo will begin its rider-only operations within its "initial San Francisco service territory," which spans from the Presidio to the farthest corner of Candlestick Point, and gradually ramp up from there. The news comes nearly a month after Waymo said it would soon begin charging Bay Area residents for robotaxi rides with a human operator on board after securing a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). It also follows the kick-off of Waymo's Trusted Tester program back in August, which involved San Franciscans signing up to hail one of Waymo's all-electric Jaguar I-Paces equipped with the Waymo Driver -- again, with a human operator onboard -- for free.

happy monday writes: Dyson has announced its first wearable product that builds the firm's air purification expertise into a set of Bluetooth noise cancelling headphones aimed at city dwellers wanting to avoid polluted air. Quite unlike anything the company has made before, the Dyson Zone is sure to draw quizzical looks. It is a set of large, plush headphones with a plastic mask-type contraption that connects from ear-to-ear across the wearer's mouth and looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. It delivers purified air to the mouth and nose while simultaneously tackling noise pollution through its active noise cancelling technology. Chief engineer Jake Dyson said: "Air pollution is a global problem -- it affects us everywhere we go. In our homes, at school, at work and as we travel, whether on foot, on a bike or by public or private transport. The Dyson Zone purifies the air you breathe on the move. And unlike face masks, it delivers a plume of fresh air without touching your face."

The eyebrow-raising design has a motor, compressor fan and air purifying dual-layer filter in each ear cup. The air is drawn through the filters cleaning it of 99% of particles as small as 0.1 microns, including pollen, bacteria and dust, as well as gas pollutants such as sulphur or nitrogen dioxide. The filtered air is then pushed along the inside of a visor, which sits just in front of the mouth and nose without making contact with the skin, creating a pocket of clean air for the wearer to breathe. The headphones have sensors that detect how fast the wearer is moving, automatically adjusting the airflow between three intensity levels to ensure they deliver up to 5 litres of clean air a second, the equivalent breathing rate of a jog.

Several readers have shared this report: Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post. Targeted Victory needs to "get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using," a director for the firm wrote in a February email. Campaign operatives were also encouraged to use TikTok's prominence as a way to deflect from Meta's own privacy and antitrust concerns. "Bonus point if we can fit this into a broader message that the current bills/proposals aren't where [state attorneys general] or members of Congress should be focused," a Targeted Victory staffer wrote.

The emails, which have not been previously reported, show the extent to which Meta and its partners will use opposition-research tactics on the Chinese-owned, multibillion-dollar rival that has become one of the most downloaded apps in the world, often outranking even Meta's popular Facebook and Instagram apps. In an internal report last year leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, Facebook researchers said teens were spending "2-3X more time" on TikTok than Instagram, and that Facebook's popularity among young people had plummeted. In one email, a Targeted Victory director asked for ideas on local political reporters who could serve as a "back channel" for anti-TikTok messages, saying the firm "would definitely want it to be hands off." In other emails, Targeted Victory urged partners to push stories to local media tying TikTok to dangerous teen trends in an effort to show the app's purported harms. "Any local examples of bad TikTok trends/stories in your markets?" a Targeted Victory staffer asked.

"Ukrainian special forces teamed up with IT professionals on ATV four-wheelers to target the infamous Kiev convoy," writes longtime Slashdot reader darkseid. "Every Help Desk Geek's Walter Mitty fantasy!" The Guardian reports: One week into its invasion of Ukraine, Russia massed a 40-mile mechanized column in order to mount an overwhelming attack on Kyiv from the north. But the convoy of armored vehicles and supply trucks ground to a halt within days, and the offensive failed, in significant part because of a series of night ambushes carried out by a team of 30 Ukrainian special forces and drone operators on quad bikes, according to a Ukrainian commander.

The drone operators were drawn from an air reconnaissance unit, Aerorozvidka, which began eight years ago as a group of volunteer IT specialists and hobbyists designing their own machines and has evolved into an essential element in Ukraine's successful David-and-Goliath resistance. [...] The unit's commander, Lt Col Yaroslav Honchar, gave an account of the ambush near the town of Ivankiv that helped stop the vast, lumbering Russian offensive in its tracks. He said the Ukrainian fighters on quad bikes were able to approach the advancing Russian column at night by riding through the forest on either side of the road leading south towards Kyiv from the direction of Chernobyl.

The Ukrainian soldiers were equipped with night vision goggles, sniper rifles, remotely detonated mines, drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras and others capable of dropping small 1.5kg bombs. "This one little unit in the night destroyed two or three vehicles at the head of this convoy, and after that it was stuck. They stayed there two more nights, and [destroyed] many vehicles," Honchar said. The Russians broke the column into smaller units to try to make headway towards the Ukrainian capital, but the same assault team was able to mount an attack on its supply depot, he claimed, crippling the Russians' capacity to advance. "The first echelon of the Russian force was stuck without heat, without oil, without bombs and without gas. And it all happened because of the work of 30 people," Honchar said. "The Aerorozvidka unit also claims to have helped defeat a Russian airborne attack on Hostomel airport, just north-west of Kyiv, in the first day of the war," adds the Guardian. Similar to the convoy ambush, they "[used] drones to locate, target and shell about 200 Russian paratroopers concealed at one end of the airfield."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some Internet traffic in and out of Twitter on Monday was briefly funneled through Russia after a major ISP in that country misconfigured the Internet's routing table, network monitoring services said. The mishap lasted for about 45 minutes before RTCOMM, a leading ISP in Russia, stopped advertising its network as the official way for other ISPs to connect to the widely used Twitter IP addresses. Even before RTCOMM dropped the announcement, safeguards prevented most large ISPs from abiding by the routing directive. A visualization of what the event looked like is illustrated on this page from BGPStream.

Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at network analytics company Kentik, said that what little information is known about Monday's BGP event suggests that the event was the result of the Russian government attempting to block people inside the country from accessing Twitter. Likely by accident, one ISP made those changes apply to the Internet as a whole. "There are multiple ways to block traffic to Twitter," Madory explained in an email. "Russian telecoms are on their own to implement the government-directed blocks, and some elect to use BGP to drop traffic to certain IP ranges. Any network that accepted the hijacked route would send their traffic to this range of Twitter IP space into Russia -- where it likely was just dropped. It is also possible that they could do a man-in-the-middle and let the traffic continue on to its proper destination, but I don't think that is what happened in this case."

Microsoft is finally making it easier to change your default browser in Windows 11. A new update (KB5011563) has started rolling out this week that allows Windows 11 users to change the default browser with a single click. After testing the changes in December, this new one-click method is rolling out to all Windows 11 users. From a report: Originally, Windows 11 shipped without a simple button to switch default browsers that was always available in Windows 10. Instead, Microsoft forced Windows 11 users to change individual file extensions or protocol handlers for HTTP, HTTPS, .HTML, and .HTM, or you had to tick a checkbox that only appeared when you clicked a link from outside a browser. Microsoft defended its decision to make switching defaults harder, but rival browser makers like Mozilla, Brave, and even Google's head of Chrome criticized Microsoft's approach.

UnknowingFool writes: Google has proposed a change on how Linux kernel handles shutdowns specifically when NVMe drives are used. The issue that Google is finding is that the current NVMe drivers use synchronous APIs when shutting down and it can take 4.5 seconds for each NVMe drive. For a system with 16 NVMe drives that could take more than a minute longer. While this is a problem that only large enterprise systems face currently, more enterprises are replacing their mechanical disk RAID servers with SSD ones.

[...] The proposed patches from Google allow for an optional asynchronous shutdown interface at the bus level. The new interface maintains backwards compatibility with the synchronous implementation. As part of the patches, all PCI Express based devices are moved to use the async interface, implements the changes at the PCIe level, and then the changes to the NVMe driver to exploit the async shutdown interface.

Alphabet's Google was fined 2 million euros ($2.2 million) by the Paris Commercial Court over abusive practices toward developers on its app store. From a report: The U.S. tech giant will also have to change seven clauses from its contracts dating back to years 2015 and 2016, that included a 30% commission on revenues generated by developers on the Google Play Store, according to a text of Monday's ruling. Google, as well as Apple, were taken to court in 2018 by the French Ministry of Finance, for imposing a "significant imbalance in the rights and obligations" concerning app developers, including the right for Google to unilaterally modify or terminate the contracts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Collecting satellite data for research is a group effort thanks to this app developed for Android users. Camaliot is a campaign funded by the European Space Agency, and its first project focuses on making smartphone owners around the world part of a project that can help improve weather forecasts by using your phone's GPS receiver. The Camaliot app works on devices running Android version 7.0 or later that support satellite navigation. Researchers think that they can use satellite signals to get more information about the atmosphere. For example, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere can affect how a satellite signal travels through the air to something like a phone.

The app gathers information to track signal strength, the distance between the satellite and the phone being used, and the satellite's carrier phase, according to Camaliot's FAQs. With enough data collected from around the world, researchers can theoretically combine that with existing weather readings to measure long-term water vapor trends. They hope to use that data to inform weather forecasting models with machine learning. They can also track changes in Earth's ionosphere -- the part of the atmosphere near space. Creating better ionospheric forecasts could be relevant in tracking space weather and could eventually make Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) more accurate by accounting for events like geomagnetic storms. Camaliot could eventually expand to include more attempts at collecting data on a massive scale using sensors present in "Internet of Things" connected home devices. According to The Verge, these are the steps to take to begin using the Camaliot app on your Android phone:

1. Select "start logging" and place your phone in an area with a clear sky view to begin logging the data
2. Once you have measured to your liking, select "stop logging"
3. Then, upload your session to the server and repeat the process over time to collect more data. You can also delete your locally-stored log files at this step.

"In addition to being able to view your own measurements against others accumulated over time, you can also see a leaderboard showing logging sessions done by other participants," adds The Verge. "Eventually, the information collected for the study will be available in a separate portal."

"A reputed expert in the quantum computing field puts it in black and white: as of today, quantum computing is a paper tiger, and nobody knows when (if ever) it will become commercially practical," writes Slashdot reader OneHundredAndTen. "In the meantime, the hype continues."

In an opinion piece for MIT Technology Review, Sankar Das Sarma, a "pro-quantum-computing" physicist that's "published more than 100 technical papers on the subject," says he's disturbed by some of the quantum computing hype he sees today, "particularly when it comes to claims about how it will be commercialized." Here's an excerpt from his article: Established applications for quantum computers do exist. The best known is Peter Shor's 1994 theoretical demonstration that a quantum computer can solve the hard problem of finding the prime factors of large numbers exponentially faster than all classical schemes. Prime factorization is at the heart of breaking the universally used RSA-based cryptography, so Shor's factorization scheme immediately attracted the attention of national governments everywhere, leading to considerable quantum-computing research funding. The only problem? Actually making a quantum computer that could do it. That depends on implementing an idea pioneered by Shor and others called quantum-error correction, a process to compensate for the fact that quantum states disappear quickly because of environmental noise (a phenomenon called "decoherence"). In 1994, scientists thought that such error correction would be easy because physics allows it. But in practice, it is extremely difficult.

The most advanced quantum computers today have dozens of decohering (or "noisy") physical qubits. Building a quantum computer that could crack RSA codes out of such components would require many millions if not billions of qubits. Only tens of thousands of these would be used for computation -- so-called logical qubits; the rest would be needed for error correction, compensating for decoherence. The qubit systems we have today are a tremendous scientific achievement, but they take us no closer to having a quantum computer that can solve a problem that anybody cares about. It is akin to trying to make today's best smartphones using vacuum tubes from the early 1900s. You can put 100 tubes together and establish the principle that if you could somehow get 10 billion of them to work together in a coherent, seamless manner, you could achieve all kinds of miracles. What, however, is missing is the breakthrough of integrated circuits and CPUs leading to smartphones -- it took 60 years of very difficult engineering to go from the invention of transistors to the smartphone with no new physics involved in the process.

Ukraine's state-owned telecommunications company Ukrtelecom experienced a disruption in internet service on Monday after a "powerful" cyberattack, according to Ukrainian government officials and company representatives. Reuters reports: The incident is the latest hacking attack against Ukrainian internet services since Russian military forces invaded in late February. "Today, the enemy launched a powerful cyberattack against Ukrtelecom's IT-infrastructure," said Yurii Shchyhol, chairman of the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection of Ukraine. "The attack was repelled. And now Ukrtelecom has an ability to begin restoring its services to the clients." "Currently, the attack is repulsed, the provision of services is gradually resumed," said Ukrtelecom spokesperson Mikhail Shuranov.

NetBlocks, which monitors internet service disruptions, posted on Twitter earlier on Monday that it saw "connectivity collapsing" with an "ongoing and intensifying nation-scale disruption." A similar incident took place earlier this month with Triolan, a smaller Ukrainian telecom company, Forbes previously reported. That company suffered a hack that reset some internal systems, resulting in some local subscribers losing access.

A "powerful" cyberattack has hit Ukraine's biggest fixed line telecommunications company, Ukrtelecom. Described as the most severe cyberattack since the start of the Russian invasion in February, it has sent the company's services across the country down. From a report: Victor Zhora, deputy head of the State Service for Special Communications and Information Protection, confirmed to Forbes that the government was investigating the attack. He said it's not yet known whether Ukrtelecom -- a telephone, internet and mobile provider -- has been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack or a deeper, more sophisticated intrusion. The attack has only been acknowledged by Ukrtelecom in responses to customer comments on Facebook. In one, it responded by saying that services were down as a result of a "powerful cyber attack of the enemy." When Forbes messaged Ukrtelecom over Facebook, an automated response was provided, reading, "Currently, there are difficulties in using the internet service from Ukrtelecom. Our specialists are doing everything possible to resolve this issue as soon as possible. Due to the abnormal load and problems with internal systems, the operators of the contact center and Facebook can not process customer requests." NetBlocks, which tracks internet downtimes across the world, found Ukrtelecom had been dealing with a disrupted service since this morning, "collapsing to 13% of pre-war levels."

An anonymous reader shares a report: "To wake up to one of these things is pretty special -- to have a Leonardo at home," said Joe Kennedy, the director of the contemporary art dealership Unit London, enthusing recently about an elaborately framed LED screen with a digital replica of Leonardo da Vinci's "Portrait of a Musician" glowing on his gallery wall. The original was 800 miles away in the Ambrosiana museum in Milan. The Leonardo was one of six ultra-high-resolution copies of famous paintings from across the centuries in Unit's moodily lit "Eternalizing Art History" exhibition, which closed on Saturday. The show was the latest attempt by cash-poor museums to generate money by selling nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. Last year, NFTs, usually pegged to the high-flying but volatile Ethereum cryptocurrency, took the market for art and collectibles by storm, with sales estimated in the tens of billions.

Pandemic-related lockdowns and reprioritized government spending have put the world's public museums under financial pressure. Yet so far, despite the formidable sales figures being achieved by NFTs, few institutions have explored this digital asset as a fund-raising mechanism. Unit and its Florence-based technology partner Cinello forged licensing agreements with several prominent Italian museums to create a hybrid offering of limited edition LED reproductions in period-style wooden frames, each accompanied by a unique NFT. Same-size digital versions of the Leonardo portrait, Caravaggio's "Bowl of Fruit" (also in the Ambrosiana) and Raphael's "Madonna of the Goldfinch" (in the Uffizi in Florence) were offered in editions of nine, ranging in price from 100,000 euros to $549,000 per piece (around $110,000 to $550,000). Fifty percent of sales proceeds went back to the licensing museums. By the Friday after the show closed, seven sales had been confirmed up to $274.5,000, which included at least one of the Leonardo NFTs.

The Finnish company played a key role in enabling Russia's cyberspying, documents show, raising questions of corporate responsibility. From a report: Nokia said this month that it would stop its sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine. But the Finnish company didn't mention what it was leaving behind: equipment and software connecting the government's most powerful tool for digital surveillance to the nation's largest telecommunications network. The tool was used to track supporters of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. Investigators said it had intercepted the phone calls of a Kremlin foe who was later assassinated. Called the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, it is also most likely being employed at this moment as President Vladimir V. Putin culls and silences antiwar voices inside Russia.

For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM to Russia's largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. While Nokia does not make the tech that intercepts communications, the documents lay out how it worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot the SORM system's connection to the MTS network. Russia's main intelligence service, the F.S.B., uses SORM to listen in on phone conversations, intercept emails and text messages, and track other internet communications. The documents, spanning 2008 to 2017, show in previously unreported detail that Nokia knew it was enabling a Russian surveillance system. The work was essential for Nokia to do business in Russia, where it had become a top supplier of equipment and services to various telecommunications customers to help their networks function. The business yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, even as Mr. Putin became more belligerent abroad and more controlling at home.

In early March, contractors working for Google to translate company text for the Russian market received an update from their client: Effectively immediately, the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine could no longer be referred to as a war but rather only vaguely as "extraordinary circumstances." The internal email, obtained by The Intercept, was sent by management at a firm that translates corporate texts and app interfaces for Google and other clients. From the report: The email passed along instructions from Google with the new wording. The instructions also noted that the word "war" should continue to be used in other markets and that the policy change was intended to keep Google in compliance with a Russian censorship law enacted just after the invasion of Ukraine. Asked about the guidance, Google spokesperson Alex Krasov told The Intercept, "While we've paused Google ads and the vast majority of our commercial activities in Russia, we remain focused on the safety of our local employees. As has been widely reported, current laws restrict communications within Russia. This does not apply to our information services like Search and YouTube." According to a translator who spoke to The Intercept, the orders apply to all Google products translated into Russian, including Google Maps, Gmail, AdWords, and Google's policies and communications with users. (The translator asked for anonymity to avoid reprisal by their employer.) The internal memo helps explain why some Google web pages, including an advertising policy and video help document found by The Intercept, use euphemistic terms like "emergency in Ukraine" in their Russian version but âoewar in Ukraineâ in the English version.

The Washington Post reports Russian troops in Ukraine "have relied, with surprising frequency, on unsecured communication devices such as smartphones and push-to-talk radios."

But this is leaving Russia's units "vulnerable to targeting...further underscoring the command-and-control deficiencies that have come to define Moscow's month-long invasion, observers say." The Russian military possesses modern equipment capable of secure transmission, but troops on the battlefield have reached for simpler-to-use but less-secure lines because of uneven discipline across the ranks, an apparent lack of planning for conducting a sustained fight over long distances, and Russian attacks on Ukraine's communication infrastructure that it, too, has relied on, experts say.

A European intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss NATO's battlefield assessments, said that since the invasion began in late-February, there have been multiple instances of Russian commanders confiscating their subordinates' personal phones for fear they would unwittingly give away a unit's location.... There is evidence that the United States and other NATO countries have provided Ukrainian forces with electronic warfare equipment capable of interrupting Russian transmissions and allowing them to target Russian command posts, said Kostas Tigkos, a Russian military expert at the defense analysis firm Janes Group. By destroying Russia's communication nodes, the Ukrainians could pressure their adversaries to use less-secure equipment, he said, increasing the likelihood their conversations will be intercepted or their positions triangulated....

There is anecdotal evidence that Russia's unsecured communications have led to battlefield losses. One Russian general was purportedly killed in an airstrike after his cellphone was detected by the Ukrainians, the New York Times reported earlier this month.
The Post reports that Russian military transmissions over unsecured lines are now even being listened to by amateur radio enthusiasts at online sites like WebSDR (a software-defined radio receiver connected to the internet).

"Don't say the last names on air!" one Russian service member was apparently overheard saying by Shadow Break International, a U.K.-based open-source intelligence consultancy.

"Microsoft has been struggling to reach a state of convergence between tablet and desktop ever since Windows 8 and the original Surface," argues Neowin, adding "If we're using Windows 11 as a barometer of their progress, they'll likely never get there...."

But meanwhile, writes Slashdot reader segaboy81, "KDE's new swipe gesture is awesome. It's about 1000% smoother than the overview in Windows 11 and the swiping mechanism is easier, too. Is KDE getting better for tablets?"

From Neowin's report: Starting in KDE Plasma 5.25, users with touch screen devices will be able to enter their tasks and virtual desktops overview by simply swiping down from the top edge, but with a special twist. The scale of the windows directly follows the path of your finger. The result is every bit as fluid as you might imagine. While you can achieve the same result in Windows 11 with a simple three-finger swipe up, this implementation looks great and performs great too.

Protocol reports: The web is overrun with junk. This is so obvious, I almost don't need to say it. But I will: Between the pop-ups, the autoplaying videos, the cookie banners, the incessant calls for sign-ups, the coupon offers, the "Don't forget to subscribe!" reminders on top of the other "Don't forget to subscribe!" reminders, the in-line ads slowing the page down, the slew of trackers also slowing the page down ... you get the idea. For lots of reasons, some good and some bad, much of the internet has become totally unusable.

Plain Text Sports is nothing like any of those sites. The site, created by developer Paul Julius Martinez (who you might know as CodeIsTheEnd all over the internet), is more like something out of the 1970s, a wall of monospaced plain text with ASCII-art boxes surrounding real-time scores for all the professional sports games happening right now. It has no images, no pop-ups, no trackers. It loads practically instantly, even on a bad connection. I've been refreshing it obsessively the last few weeks, through the end of the NBA seasons and the beginning of March Madness. Not only is it a useful site for sports fans, but it feels like a harbinger of things to come....

He loves that Plain Text Sports is simple. "There's no cookie banner, there's no GDPR banner, there's no asking-you-to-donate banner...." Plain Text Sports manages to be that simple on the front end with a surprising amount of complexity on the back end, making sure the whole sports world is represented in real time on that page.

In general, we're starting to see developers and designers rebel against the general overwhelm of the internet, as sites and apps ditch their cruft and complications for things that load faster and work more intuitively. Social networks are bringing back chronological feeds; reading modes are now everywhere in browsers. Even apps like Obsidian, a favorite among productivity obsessives, are based primarily on plain text.

They don't look like much, but that's kind of the point.