Is the ocular product EyeDetect a leap ahead of the polygraph? Or just the same dubiousness in a more high-tech box? From a report: In 2018, John Rael, a volunteer track coach in Taos, N.M., was on trial for allegedly raping a 14-year-old girl when his lawyer made an unusual request. He wanted the judge to admit evidence from "EyeDetect," a lie-detection test based on eye movements that Rael had passed. The judge agreed, and five of the 12 jurors wound up voting not to convict. A mistrial was declared. EyeDetect is the product of the Utah company Converus. "Imagine if you could exonerate the innocent and identify the liars ... just by looking into their eyes," the company's YouTube channel promises. "Well, now you can!" Its chief executive, Todd Mickelsen, says they've built a better truth-detection mousetrap; he believes eye movements reflect their bearer far better than the much older and mostly discredited polygraph. Its popularity may be growing: the company says EyeDetect has gone from 500 customers in 2019 to 600 now.

Its critics, however, say the EyeDetect is just the polygraph in more algorithmic clothing. The machine is fundamentally unable to deliver on its claims, they argue, because human truth-telling is too subtle for any data set. And they worry that relying on it can lead to tragic outcomes, like punishing the innocent or providing a cloak for the guilty. EyeDetect raises a question that draws all the way back to the Garden of Eden: Are humans so wired to tell the truth we'll give ourselves away when we don't? And, to a more 21st-century query: Can modern technology come up with the tools to detect those tells? An EyeDetect test has a subject placed in front of a monitor with a digital camera and, as with the polygraph, lobbed generically true-false queries like "have you ever hurt anybody" to establish a baseline. Then come specific questions. If the subject's physical responses are more demonstrative there, they are presumed to be lying; less demonstrative, they're telling the truth.

In 2018, the team at Facebook had a puzzle on their hands. Cambodian users accounted for nearly 50% of all global traffic for Messenger's voice function, but no one at the company knew why, according to documents released by whistleblower Frances Haugen. From a report: One employee suggested running a survey, according to internal documents viewed by Rest of World. Did it have to do with low literacy levels? they wondered. In 2020, a Facebook study attempted to ask users in countries with high audio use, but was only able to find a single Cambodian respondent, the same documents showed. The mystery, it seemed, stayed unsolved. The answer, surprisingly, has less to do with Facebook, and more to do with the complexity of the Khmer language, and the way users adapt for a technology that was never designed with them in mind. In Cambodia, everyone from tuk-tuk drivers to Prime Minister Hun Sen prefers to send voice notes instead of messages. Facebook's study revealed that it wasn't just Cambodians who favor voice messages -- though nowhere else was it more popular. In the study, which included 30 users from the Dominican Republic, Senegal, Benin, Ivory Coast, and that single Cambodian, 87% of respondents said that they used voice tools to send notes in a different language from the one set on their apps. This was true on WhatsApp -- the most popular platform among the survey respondents -- along with Messenger and Telegram.

One of the most common reasons? Typing was just too hard. In Cambodia's case, there has never been an easy way to type in Khmer. While Khmer Unicode was standardized fairly early, between 2006 and 2008, the keyboard itself lagged behind. The developers of the first Khmer computer keyboard had to accommodate the language's 74 characters, the most of any script in the world. It was a daunting task. Javier Sola, a Spanish-born, Phnom Penh-based computer scientist, was part of the team working on the initial KhmerOS project in 2005. "There are many, many more symbols in Khmer than in [the] Latin script," Sola, now executive director of Cambodian NGO the Open Institute, told Rest of World. On a Latin keyboard, a user could see all of the alphabet at once, making typing intuitive. But in Khmer, each key hosted two different characters, which required flipping repeatedly between two keyboard layers. Not only that, but limited fonts meant that some messages failed to appear if the recipient's computer lacked the same font as the sender's. Still, users made it work. Facebook became popular in Cambodia around 2009, just at the same time as cheap smartphones and internet access, which meant that its usage exploded. Today, it's still the country's most popular overall platform. But on a small smartphone screen, that same typing system became nearly impossible.

Miramax filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing Quentin Tarantino of copyright infringement by selling NFTs based on the screenplay for "Pulp Fiction." From a report: Tarantino announced the sale at a recent crypto-art convention in New York. "I'm excited to be presenting these exclusive scenes from 'Pulp Fiction' to fans," Tarantino said in a Nov. 2 press release. The plan is to auction off NFT -- non-fungible tokens -- based on excerpts from Tarantinoâ(TM)s original handwritten script for the film, accompanied by commentary. The NFT is pitched as "secret," meaning that its contents will be viewable exclusively by the owner. But according to the suit, Tarantino did not consult beforehand with Miramax -- which still owns the rights to the director's 1994 classic. Miramax's attorneys have sent a cease and desist letter seeking to block the sale, but that has not stopped Tarantino and his team from moving forward. Miramax alleges that Tarantino's actions have interfered with the studio's own plans to enter the market for "Pulp Fiction" NFTs. In a statement, Miramax attorney Bart Williams accused Tarantino's team of a "deliberate, pre-meditated, short-term money grab."

Microsoft has confirmed that x64 emulation will no longer be offered in future Windows 10 Insider Preview builds (or release builds). Paul Thurrott reports: "We have received questions about the status of x64 emulation in Windows 10," a Microsoft spokesperson told me. "Microsoft wants to share an update that x64 emulation for Windows is only generally available in Windows 11. For those interested in experiencing x64 emulation, a PC running Windows 11 on Arm is required. Microsoft is committed to supporting customers on Windows 10 on Arm through October 14, 2025."

Microsoft announced the availability of x64 emulation in Windows 10 on ARM in the Windows Insider Program last December, before Windows 11 existed, but the original post has now been updated to note that this support is only available in Windows 11 on ARM. "x64 emulation for Windows is now generally available in Windows 11," Microsoft says. "For those interested in experiencing this, a PC running Windows 11 on Arm is required." And let's get real here. Windows on ARM won't be viable until Qualcomm ships its next-generation Nuvia-based chipsets for PCs anyway. And today, the firm revealed that that won't happen until the end of 2023 at the very earliest.

Along with the release of Windows 10's November 2021 update, Microsoft announced that it will no longer provide Windows 10 updates twice per year. Instead, it's switching to a once-per-year schedule. As Ars Technica notes, "This is meant to sync Windows 10's update schedule with Windows 11's, which is also going to receive major feature updates once per year." From the report: Microsoft hasn't committed to the number of yearly updates it will provide for Windows 10, but the company will support "at least one version" of the OS until update support ends in October of 2025. Microsoft is promising 18 months of support for Windows 10 21H2, so it seems safe to assume that we'll at least see 22H2 and 23H2 releases for Windows 10. For businesses using Windows 10 Enterprise, version 21H2 is also a Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) update and will receive update support for five years instead of 18 months. While more Windows 10 updates will be welcome news for anyone who isn't ready to move to Windows 11 or whose hardware doesn't support the new OS, it's not clear what "feature updates" will entail for an operating system that has been replaced.

Google Chrome 96 was released yesterday, and users are reporting problems with Twitter, Discord, and Instagram caused by the new version. BleepingComputer reports: The issues have been reported to Google in a Chromium bug post where Google employees have started to investigate the problems. "We're continuing to see user reports about this behavior, including reports from our social team," notes Google product manager Craig Tumblison. "One user has shared that disabling the "chrome://flags/#cross-origin-embedder-policy-credentialless" flag resolves the behavior. Another report shares a specific error message: "The connection was rejected at https://cards-frame.twitter.com". Test team, would you be able to try enabling that flag to see if the behavior appears?"

The 'chrome://flags/#cross-origin-embedder-policy-credentialles' flag is related to a new Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy feature released with Chrome 96. Google states that you can fix these bugs in some cases by setting the "chrome://flags/#cross-origin-embedder-policy-credentialless" to disabled. If you are affected by these issues, you can copy and paste the above chrome:// address into the Google Chrome address bar and press enter. When the experimental flag appears, please set it to Disabled and relaunch the browser when prompted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Lucid Air, the first model from California-based electric car start-up company Lucid Motors, has been named MotorTrend's 2022 Car of the Year. It's the first time any automaker has won the award with its first car. MotorTrend's panel of judges lauded the Lucid Air for its extraordinary range and efficiency -- some versions can go up to 520 miles on a single charge -- as well as its performance and luxurious interior. In its announcement, MotorTrend called the Air "the new [electric vehicle] benchmark." While the judges generally liked the Air's interior design, they did criticize what they saw as an over-reliance on touch screens for many basic controls. The judges praised the car's Lucid-designed stereo-system.

It's not the first time a start-up automaker has won the award. The Tesla Model S won it in 2012. But the Model S was Tesla's second car, after the Tesla Roadster. The Air is Lucid's first car, and it only recently went into production. Despite its high cost, MotorTrend's judges thought the Lucid Air represented a strong value. They tested the Grand Touring version with a starting price around $140,000. Less expensive versions, with prices starting around $77,000, will be available later, but they won't have the driving range and power of the pricier cars. Lucid's CEO, Peter Rawlinson, once worked at Tesla and helped engineer the Model S. In creating the Lucid Air, he has said, efficiency has been a primary focus. The Lucid is actually the most energy efficient electric car sold in America, according to EPA estimates.

U.S. aviation regulators are having "very productive discussions" with the Federal Communications Commission and the telecommunications industry over concerns that 5G technology could interfere with aircraft equipment, an official said. From a report: At the same time, Federal Aviation Administration chief Steve Dickson on Tuesday said that the agency is considering safety measures including possible flight restrictions if necessary. Aviation industry officials have said that it's possible that the signals could disturb safety equipment on airliners and helicopters, while the FCC and the telecommunications industry has said there is no evidence of a problem.

Microsoft has created a new Media Player app for Windows 11, and it's beginning to test the app with Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel today. The redesigned Media Player app will support both audio and video, and it includes a design that better matches Windows 11's UI improvements. From a report: "At the heart of Media Player is a full-featured music library that allows you to quickly browse and play music, as well as create and manage playlists," explains Dave Grochocki, a senior program manager lead for Microsoft's Windows inbox apps team. "The update to the new Media Player will replace the Groove Music app."

The playback view in this new Media Player app includes album art or artist imagery, which will appear both in full-screen modes and the mini player option. Media Player will also support video, which is usually handled in Windows 10 and Windows 11 in a separate Films & TV app. "All your content in the music and video folders on your PC will appear automatically in your library, but you can also tell Media Player where to look for additional content in app settings," says Grochocki.

Google, Instagram, AWS, Twitter, Spotify, Discord, Etsy, Shopify, TikTok and dozens of other services are facing outages, according to several users report on DownDetector. It's unclear at this time what has caused the issue and how widespread it is.

Cloudflare says it has blocked a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at just under 2 Tbps, making it one of the largest ever recorded. From a report: The internet company said in a blog post that the attack was launched from approximately 15,000 bots running a variant of the original Mirai code on exploited Internet of Things (IoT) devices and unpatched GitLab instances. The DDoS attack comes just two weeks after Rapid7 warned of a GitLab vulnerability -- rated a full 10.0 on the CVSS severity scale -- that could be exploited to allow an attacker to remotely run code, like botnet malware, on an affected server. Rapid7 found that at least half of the 60,000 internet-facing GitLab instances remain unpatched, and warned that it expected "exploitation to increase" as details of the bug became public. The company wasn't wrong; Cloudflare said it blocked the massive DDoS attack just one week later. From its analysis of the attack, Cloudflare believes that it was a multi-vector attack that combined both DNS amplification attacks along with UDP floods.

Qualcomm is looking to seriously beef up its PC processors, with the company announcing plans for a next-generation Arm-based SoC "designed to set the performance benchmark for Windows PCs" that would be able to go head to head with Apple's M-series processors. From a report: Dr. James Thompson, Qualcomm's chief technology officer, announced the plans for the new chips at the company's 2021 investor day event, with the goal of getting samples to hardware customers in about nine months ahead of product launches with the new chip in 2023. The new chip will be designed by the Nuvia team, which Qualcomm had bought earlier this year in a massive $1.4 billion acquisition. Nuvia, notably, was founded in 2019 by a trio of former Apple employees who had previously worked on the company's A-series chips. The company is making big promises, too: in addition to offering competition to Apple's stellar M-series chips (which power its latest MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops and iMac and Mac Mini desktops), Qualcomm is aiming to lead the field for "sustained performance and battery life," too.

Mozilla launched Firefox Relay as a free product that gives you five email aliases you can use every time you need to sign up for a random account online. From a report: Now, the organization has introduced a paid Premium tier for the service that will give you access to even more aliases. You'll get your own subdomain (yourdomain.mozmail.com) when you subscribe, and you'll be able to create an unlimited number of emails. The tier will also give you access to a summary dashboard with the emails you make, the option to use your aliases when you reply to messages and a 150 kb attachment allowance. After you sign up for Relay, you'll have to install its Firefox extension to be able to take advantage of its features. Every time you visit a website that asks for an email address, the Relay icon will appear on your browser, and you can click it to generate a random address.The service will forward messages you get using your aliases to your primary email account, and you can block all messages from coming in or even delete the alias when it starts getting spam. Mozilla didn't say how much a Premium subscription will cost in the future, but it's offering the tier at an introductory price of $1/EUR1 per month for a limited time.

Google was so worried about Epic Games sidestepping its app store with Fortnite that it created a task force to confront the issue, according to a legal filing by the game developer. From a report: The task force was created after Epic began offering an Android version of the hugely popular game through Samsung Electronics's Galaxy Store and directly through Epic's website in 2018, giving users a way to bypass the Google Play store, according to the filing. Epic's efforts to avoid paying commissions on app stores from Google and Apple reached a flashpoint last year when both companies removed Fortnite and the game's creator sued them. The legal showdown has help draw criticism and regulatory scrutiny to the app store policies of Alphabet's Google and Apple, which are seen as a dominant force in mobile software. In October, Google countersued, arguing that Epic pushed an "unapproved" version of Fortnite on Android phones that placed users at risk. Google has said that its app store isn't a monopoly since the company allows other stores to run on Android devices, unlike Apple.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: The Emotet malware botnet is back up and running once again almost ten months after an international law enforcement operation took down its command and control servers earlier this year in January. The comeback is surprising because after taking over Emotet's server infrastructure, law enforcement officials also orchestrated a mass-uninstall of the malware from all infected computers on April 25, effectively wiping out the entire botnet across the internet.

[O]ver the weekend, security researcher Luca Ebach said he spotted that another malware botnet named TrickBot was helping the Emotet gang get back on its feet by installing the Emotet malware on systems that had been previously infected with TrickBot. "We used to call this Operation ReachAround back when Emotet was dropped by Trickbot in the past," a spokesperson for Cryptolaemus, a group of security researchers who tracked Emotet in the past, told The Record today. [...]

Cryptolaemus said that right now, the Emotet gang is not sending out any new email spam but relying on the TrickBot gang to help them create an initial footprint of their new botnet incarnation before ramping up spam operations again. But if Emotet's comeback will succeed remains to be seen. It would be very hard for Emotet to reach its previous size any time in the coming months; however, the malware strain itself remains a very sophisticated and capable threat that shouldn't be ignored.

If Apple can't improve the reliability of its software, the next big thing won't matter, argues Dan Moren in an opinion piece for Macworld. From the report: Uneven distribution: As sci-fi writer William Gibson famously said, "the future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed." While Gibson's comment resonates mostly on a socio-economic level that is borne out by Apple's not inexpensive technology, it's also embodied geographically by the company's work: if you're interested, you can see which Apple features are available in which regions. Many of these, of course, are due to restrictions and laws in specific regions or places where, say, Apple has not prioritized language localization. But some of them are cases where features have been rolled out only slowly to certain places. [...] It's surely less exciting for Apple to think about rolling out these (in some cases years old) features, especially those which might require a large degree of legwork, to various places than it is for the company to demonstrate its latest shiny feature, but it also means that sometimes these features don't make it to many, if not most of the users of its devices. Uneven distribution, indeed.

To error is machine: It's happened to pretty much any Apple device user: You go to use a feature and it just doesn't work. Sometimes there's no explanation as to why; other times, there's just a cryptic error message that provides no help at all. [...]

Shooting trouble: Sometimes what we're dealing with in the aforementioned situations are what we call "edge cases." Apple engineers surely do their best to test their features with a variety of hardware, in different places, with different settings. [...] Nobody expects Apple to catch everything, but the question remains: when these problems do arise, what do we do about them? One thing Apple could improve is the ease for users to report issues they encounter. Too often, I see missives posted on Apple discussion boards that encourage people to get in touch with Apple support... which often means a lengthy reiteration of the old troubleshooting canards. While these can sometimes solve problems, if not actually explain them, it's not a process that most consumers are likely to go through. And when those steps don't resolve the issues, users are often left with a virtual shrug.

Likewise, while Apple does provide a place to send feedback about products, it's explicitly not a way to report problems. Making it easier for users to report bugs and unexpected behavior would go a long way to helping owners of Apple products feel like they're not simply shouting their frustrations into a void (aka Twitter). If Apple can't improve the reliability of its software [...] it at least owes it to its users to create more robust resources for helping them help themselves. Because there's nothing more frustrating than not understanding why a miraculous device that can contact people around the world instantaneously, run incredibly powerful games, and crunch data faster than a supercomputer of yesteryear sometimes can't do something as simple as export a video of a vacation. While Moren focuses primarily on unfinished features to help make his case, "there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse," says HN reader makecheck. "When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They're in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps, not creating huge new ones."

An example of this would be the current UX of notifications. "A notification comes up, I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it," writes noneeeed. "But then some time later I unlock my machine or something happens and apparently all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multiple groups."

"Don't get me started on the new iOS podcast app," adds another reader.

AskWaves explains how the gap between air and ocean freight transport has narrowed during the pandemic. From the report: The air rate from China to the U.S. West Coast during the first week of November was about $14 per kilogram, double what it was a year ago, according to the Freightos Air Index. Shipping by air to the East Coast cost about $13, also twice as much as in 2020. [...] Air is usually the mode of last resort, limited to perishables and high-value goods with margins that can cover the extra expense. Incredibly, airfreight has become a bargain relative to ocean shipping for many companies, especially when measured against the cost of stockouts and lost sales. That's what happens when supply chains are turned upside down by constant chaos.

Ocean shipping demand to North America is up more than 20% compared to 2019. Carriers and ports have been overwhelmed, resulting in huge delays and port backlogs demonstrated most clearly by the 80 container vessels waiting last week for a berth at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Glitches in the system -- from COVID outbreaks to accidents -- created more havoc because the system is so stretched. Spot tariffs -- for immediate transactions not subject to more favorable long-term contracts -- can cost upwards of $20,000 for a forty-foot equivalent unit from China to the West Coast when a host of premiums and surcharges are included. That's 10 times greater than pre-pandemic rates and doesn't even include domestic transportation to move a shipment across the country.

Many companies, especially retailers worried about product shortages for big holiday shopping events, are trying to make up for lost time by shifting goods that normally move by ocean to air. The decision to convert ocean freight to air is easier for shippers because air transport is much more cost-competitive than it has ever been. Pre-pandemic, the average price to move air cargo was about 13 to 15 times higher than ocean, but now it is only three to five times more expensive, according to the International Air Transport Association and industry experts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The seven astronauts and cosmonauts onboard the International Space Station sheltered inside their respective spacecraft, a Crew Dragon and Soyuz, on Monday morning as the orbiting laboratory passed through an unexpected debris field. This was not a pre-planned collision avoidance maneuver in low Earth orbit, in which the station would use onboard propulsion to move away. Rather, the situation required the astronauts to quickly take shelter. Had there been a collision during the conjunction, the two spacecraft would have been able to detach from the space station and make an emergency return to Earth. Ultimately that was not necessary, and the astronauts reemerged into the space station later Monday. However, as the crew on board the station prepared for their sleep schedule, Mission Control in Houston asked them to keep as many of the hatches onboard the space station closed for the time being, in case of an unexpected collision during subsequent orbits.

It appears likely that the debris field that had alarmed flight controllers on Monday was caused by an anti-satellite test performed by Russia's military early on Monday. [...] It appears that Russia launched a surface-to-space Nudol missile on Monday, between 02:00 and 05:00 UTC, from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the northern part of the country. The missile then struck an older satellite, Cosmos 1408. Launched in 1982, the satellite had been slowly losing altitude and was a little more than 450 km above the Earth. This is a large satellite, with a mass of about 2,000 kg. As of Monday afternoon, US Space Command said it was already tracking more than 1,000 pieces of new debris. Although the satellite's altitude is higher than the International Space Station, which is about 400 km above the surface, a kinetic impact would spread a large cloud of debris. Satellite expert Jonathan McDowell believes the Cosmos 1408 satellite is the likely candidate for the space station's ongoing debris event.

During a daily briefing today, US State Department Spokesman Ned Price said the test had created more than 1,500 pieces of trackable debris and hundreds of thousands of pieces of un-trackable debris. "The Russian Federation recklessly conducted a destructive satellite test of a direct-ascent anti-satellite missile against one of its own satellites," Price said. "This test will significantly increase the risk to astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station as well as to other human spaceflight activities. Russia's dangerous and irresponsible behavior jeopardizes the long-term sustainability of outer space."

Ohio's largest public pension system filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the social media giant misled investors and breached the public's trust. From a report: Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, which manages $125 billion on behalf of 1.1 million Ohioans, says it purchased Facebook stock "at artificially inflated prices" in 2021 and suffered damages because of Facebook's violations of federal securities laws. "Defendants were aware that Facebook's platforms facilitate dissension, illegal activity, and violent extremism, and cause significant harm to users, especially children, but Facebook refused to correct these issues," the federal lawsuit alleges. "All told, these disclosures erased more than $100 billion in shareholder value and subjected Facebook to immense reputational harm." The lawsuit comes after former Facebook project manager Frances Haugen testified before Congress that the company "put their astronomical profits before people."

Apple is making U.S. states foot part of the bill and provide customer support for its plan to turn iPhones into digital identification cards, according to confidential documents obtained by CNBC. From the report: The company requires states to maintain the systems needed to issue and service credentials, hire project managers to respond to Apple inquiries, prominently market the new feature and push for its adoption with other government agencies, all at taxpayer expense, according to contracts signed by four states. Apple announced in June that its users could soon store state-issued identification cards in the iPhone's Wallet app, billing it as a more secure and convenient way for customers to provide credentials in a variety of in-person and remote settings. The feature, when combined with Apple's biometric security measures like Face ID, could cut down on fraud.

But the move has brought questions from industry observers about why local authorities are ceding control of citizens' identities to a $2.46 trillion private corporation. Beyond that, the integration of identity into powerful mobile devices has drawn concern from privacy experts about the risk of dystopian scenarios involving surveillance. The contracts between Cupertino, California-based Apple and states including Georgia, Arizona, Kentucky and Oklahoma provide a rare glimpse into the dealings of the powerful company. Apple is known for its obsession with secrecy. It typically forces potential partners to sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent its documents from spilling into public view.