Facebook

Facebook Plans To Hire 10,000 In Europe To Build 'Metaverse' (apnews.com) 67

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: Facebook said it plans to hire 10,000 workers in the European Union over the next five years to work on a new computing platform that promises to connect people virtually but could raise concerns about privacy and the social platform gaining more control over people's online lives. The company said in a blog post Sunday that those high-skilled workers will help build "the metaverse," a futuristic notion for connecting online that uses augmented and virtual reality. Facebook executives have been touting the metaverse as the next big thing after the mobile internet, though their track record is spotty on predicting future trends. "As we begin the journey of bringing the metaverse to life, the need for highly specialized engineers is one of Facebook's most pressing priorities," according to the blog post from Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs, and Javier Olivan, vice president of central products. Facebook's recruiters are targeting Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands and Ireland for the hiring drive. The company as of June reported having more than 63,000 employees worldwide, up 21% from the same time last year.

The metaverse essentially is a massive virtual world that can be accessed in real time by millions of people using avatars, who can use it to hold virtual meetings or buy virtual land and clothing or other digital assets, often paying with cryptocurrencies. The social network isn't the only one working on the metaverse, and Facebook acknowledged that no single company will own and operate it. Other players include Fortnite maker Epic Games, which has raised $1 billion from investors to help with its long-term plans for building the metaverse. "There's not going to be specific metaverses to specific companies. There's only going to be one metaverse," said Tuong Nguyen, an analyst who tracks immersive technologies for research firm Gartner. But there are concerns Facebook and a handful of other Silicon Valley giants would end up monopolizing the metaverse and use it to collect and profit from personal data, mirroring the situation now with the internet.

OS X

macOS Monterey Is Finally Rolling Out On October 25th (gizmodo.com) 87

Along with new MacBook Pro models, Apple announced during its Mac event today that macOS Monterey will be available on Monday, Oct. 25. Gizmodo reports: As with macOS Big Sur before it, Monterey represents a renewed effort by Apple to streamline its operating systems, with new Focus profiles for limiting notifications and helping you be more productive just like in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15. Shortcuts, Apple's automation app, is now available on desktop for the first time. Monterey also represents the first time users will be able to AirPlay content from a Mac, a function that iPhone users have long enjoyed. If you've already downloaded iOS 15, updating to Monterey just makes sense -- these devices are so much more functional when they work seamlessly with each other.

But perhaps the most anticipated feature Monterey is supposed to bring us is Universal Control, which allows you to use a single mouse/trackpad and keyboard to control multiple Macs and iPads simultaneously. While the new feature wasn't initially included in the public beta rollout of Monterey, that omission has only allowed the hype to grow. It's unclear when Universal Control will come to macOS, only that it won't be available to use at launch. FaceTime's new SharePlay feature, which is also expected to arrive in iOS 15, will also not be ready to try at launch. That feature will allow you to share music or watch shows with folks over FaceTime.
The devices that support macOS Monterey include: iMac (late 2015 and newer), iMac Pro (2017 and newer), Mac Pro (late 2013 and newer), Mac Mini (late 2014 and newer), MacBook Pro (early 2015 and newer), MacBook Air (early 2015 and newer), and MacBook (early 2016 and newer).

Further reading: macOS Monterey Release Candidate Undoes Safari Changes, Reintroduces Old Tab Design
Security

Sinclair TV Stations Disrupted Across the US After Ransomware Attack (therecord.media) 59

TV broadcasts for Sinclair-owned channels went down Sunday across the US in what the stations have described as technical issues, but which multiple sources told The Record to be a ransomware attack. From the report: The incident occurred in the early hours of the day and took down the Sinclair internal corporate network, email servers, phone services, and the broadcasting systems of local TV stations. As a result of the attack, many channels weren't able to broadcast morning shows, news segments, and scheduled NFL games, according to a barrage of tweets coming from viewers and the TV channels themselves. "Internally, it's bad," a source who had to call Sinclair employees on their personal numbers to get more details about the attack, told The Record earlier today in a private conversation.
AI

New Internal Documents Contradict Facebook's Claims that AI Can Enforce Its Rules (livemint.com) 71

Today in the Wall Street Journal, Facebook's head of integrity, Guy Rosen, admitted that from April to June of this year, one in every 2,000 content views on Facebook still contained hate speech. (Alternate URL here, with shorter versions here and here.)

Head of integrity Rosen was calling that figure an improvement over mid-2020, when one in every 1,000 content views on Facebook were hate speech. But at that same moment in time Mark Zuckerberg was telling the U.S. Congress that "In terms of fighting hate, we've built really sophisticated systems!" "Facebook Inc. executives have long said that artificial intelligence would address the company's chronic problems keeping what it deems hate speech and excessive violence as well as underage users off its platforms," reports the Wall Street Journal.

"That future is farther away than those executives suggest, according to internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Facebook's AI can't consistently identify first-person shooting videos, racist rants and even, in one notable episode that puzzled internal researchers for weeks, the difference between cockfighting and car crashes." On hate speech, the documents show, Facebook employees have estimated the company removes only a sliver of the posts that violate its rules — a low-single-digit percent, they say. When Facebook's algorithms aren't certain enough that content violates the rules to delete it, the platform shows that material to users less often — but the accounts that posted the material go unpunished.

The employees were analyzing Facebook's success at enforcing its own rules on content that it spells out in detail internally and in public documents like its community standards. The documents reviewed by the Journal also show that Facebook two years ago cut the time human reviewers focused on hate-speech complaints from users and made other tweaks that reduced the overall number of complaints. That made the company more dependent on AI enforcement of its rules and inflated the apparent success of the technology in its public statistics.

According to the documents, those responsible for keeping the platform free from content Facebook deems offensive or dangerous acknowledge that the company is nowhere close to being able to reliably screen it. "The problem is that we do not and possibly never will have a model that captures even a majority of integrity harms, particularly in sensitive areas," wrote a senior engineer and research scientist in a mid-2019 note. He estimated the company's automated systems removed posts that generated just 2% of the views of hate speech on the platform that violated its rules. "Recent estimates suggest that unless there is a major change in strategy, it will be very difficult to improve this beyond 10-20% in the short-medium term," he wrote.

This March, another team of Facebook employees drew a similar conclusion, estimating that those systems were removing posts that generated 3% to 5% of the views of hate speech on the platform, and 0.6% of all content that violated Facebook's policies against violence and incitement.

Facebook does also take some other additional steps to reduce views of hate speech (beyond AI screening), they told the Journal — also arguing that the internal Facebook documents the Journal had reviwed were outdated. But one of those documents showed that in 2019 Facebook was spending $104 million a year to review suspected hate speech, with a Facebook manager noting that "adds up to real money" and proposing "hate speech cost controls."

Facebook told the Journal the saved money went to better improving their algorithms. But the Journal reports that Facebook "also introduced 'friction' to the content reporting process, adding hoops for aggrieved users to jump through that sharply reduced how many complaints about content were made, according to the documents."

Facebook told the Journal that "some" of that friction has since been rolled back.
Transportation

New Study Finds Ridesharing Actually Increases Pollution, Congestion (nytimes.com) 187

Greg Bensinger of the New York Times editorial board argues ridesharing companies haven't delivered on their promises of well-paying driver jobs with less traffic congestion (let alone their predictions of an end to car ownership — or even of a sustainable, profitable, business model).

And he adds that now a new study "is punching a hole in another of Uber and Lyft's promised benefits: curtailing pollution." The companies have long insisted their services are a boon to the environment in part because they reduce the need for short trips, can pool riders heading in roughly the same direction and cut unnecessary miles by, for instance, eliminating the need to look for street parking. It turns out that Uber rides do spare the air from the high amount of pollutants emitted from starting up a cold vehicle, when it is operating less efficiently, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found. But that gain is wiped out by the need for drivers to circle around waiting for or fetching their next passenger, known as deadheading. Deadheading, Lyft and Uber estimated in 2019, is equal to about 40 percent of rideshare miles driven in six American cities.

The researchers at Carnegie Mellon estimated that driving without a passenger leads to a roughly 20 percent overall increase in fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions compared with trips made by personal vehicles.

The researchers also found that switching from a private car to on-demand rides, like an Uber or Lyft, increased the external costs of a typical trip by 30 percent to 35 percent, or roughly 35 cents on average, because of the added congestion, collisions and noise from ridesharing services. "This burden is not carried by the individual user, but rather impacts the surrounding community," reads a summary of the research conducted by Jacob Ward, Jeremy Michalek and Constantine Samaras. "Society as a whole currently shoulders these external costs in the form of increased mortality risks, damage to vehicles and infrastructure, climate impacts and increased traffic congestion."

Moon

The Moon Will Soon Have Its Own Internet (autoevolution.com) 59

"Humanity will return to the lunar surface in 2024 as part of the Artemis program," writes the Auto Evolution site. "However, before NASA begins shuttling people to our natural satellite, it has to build a network there that will go beyond Earth's low orbit and connect space to Earth in a sort of Internet connection..." The network's name? LunaNet: Astronauts will be able to use the LunaNet via numerous nodes and communicate with the crew on and around the Moon in the same manner that we use Wi-Fi here on Earth. In addition, missions using the network will have access to position and time signals, allowing astronauts and rovers to navigate the rugged lunar terrain and return to their base. LunaNet will also use space-weather instruments to identify potentially dangerous solar activity, such as flares that erupt from the Sun and send harsh radiation towards the astronauts. With this new connectivity, the crew can be directly alerted. This will cut down the time it takes for network management on Earth to do so. These warnings will be comparable to the ones we receive on our phones when there is hazardous weather. The architecture's capabilities will also include a lunar search and rescue capability...

Researchers could also use LunaNet antennas to peer into deep space and search for radio signals from distant celestial objects. Altogether, the architecture's capabilities will give scientists a new platform to test space theories, allowing them to extend their scientific knowledge. Recently, NASA released the "Draft LunaNet Interoperability Specification" in order to kickstart the development of this new "lunar internet." Technical discussions among industry experts from around the world are expected to follow.

AI

5G Lobbyist Argues It May Be a Long Time Before Autonomous Vehicles Reach Cities (eetimes.com) 20

Slashdot reader dkatana shares IoT Times interview with Dr. Johannes Springer, Director General for the 5G Automotive Association, an EU lobbying group pushing for the inclusion of short-range 5G wireless technology in autonomous vehicles for vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Springer describes some of the services already being tested (like in Hamburg, Germany, where even traffic lights can communicate with vehicles for "optimal speed advisories" for avoiding red lights): We have, for instance, an initiative in Europe called a European Data Task Force, or data task force for world safety. And in this activity, millions of vehicles are already sharing safety-related data between the different car manufacturers. Of course, this data sharing exists via cellular networks. One vehicle that detects, for instance, a black ice warning, or produces a black ice warning, sends this warning via the cellular networks to other vehicles. And this consensus, the data sharing via the cellular networks, creates a lot of benefits for other traffic participants, not, by the way, just the vehicles, but also to other vulnerable road users, cyclists, pedestrians, and so on...
But they also discuss the prospects for automous vehicles beyond highway/intercity driving — and the idea of restricting them in cities to dedicated "safe corridors": Of course, the whole thing starts on a broad scale with restricted areas... And also, the private car industry is going heavily in this direction. If you take, for instance, the example of valet parking, automated parking. So, the automated driving task is restricted to a parking spot, to a parking garage: you can leave your car in front of the parking garage, and the car finds the free parking space by itself. And the same upon returning the vehicle. So this is something which takes place in the city but within a restricted area.

Suppose it goes, for instance, to buses or something like that. In that case, you can also see two examples during the ITS World Congress, two different, let's say, technical setups, where automated driving buses happen in the city. One is in a, let's say, non-controlled environment, and the vehicle drives entirely on its own, yeah? So this is shown by Easy Drive, part of Continental, a company that produces these types of systems. Of course, there is still the need to have a backup driver in the bus, which directly destroys the business case for the bus operator. And secondly, the driving speed is relatively low; I think 30 kilometers per hour or something like that.

The second example is, which is shown by Siemens, called the Heat Project, where the whole environment is completely controlled by roadside infrastructure. You have cameras and all these things equipped at the road to assess the situation and things around the bus. Personally, I don't believe that it can happen in cities or other open urban areas. Maybe, of course, if you have an airport, it might be different. But we cannot afford the necessary infrastructure, let's say, for monitoring the situation around the vehicle in real-time, whether it's a bus or another vehicle. No city is willing to pay for such an infrastructure just for the benefit of autonomous driving. So I'm pretty sure that this will not happen.

In the comments on the original submission, long-time Slashdot reader Gravis Zero discounts this as the opinion of a lobbying group advocating for specific 5G technologies (rather than using WiFi for direct vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication).

But for what it's worth, the IoT Times interviewer also says "I've been talking to some experts in smart cities and some vehicle manufacturers... They say that certain types of autonomous driving have been going around for some time... But they are mainly focusing on motorways and intercity driving. We still have many problems allowing full autonomous driving in cities because of the number of different things that can happen."
China

Surprising US Intelligence, China Tested a Hypersonic Missile (livemint.com) 146

"China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August," reports Reuters, "showing a capability that caught U.S. intelligence by surprise, the Financial Times reported, citing five unnamed sources."

AFP explains what's uniquely threatening about hypersonic missiles: Ballistic missiles fly high into space in an arc to reach their target, while a hypersonic flies on a trajectory low in the atmosphere, potentially reaching a target more quickly. Crucially, a hypersonic missile is maneuverable (like the much slower, often subsonic cruise missile), making it harder to track and defend against. While countries like the United States have developed systems designed to defend against cruise and ballistic missiles, the ability to track and take down a hypersonic missile remains a question.
Business Insider highlights this assessment from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the US/Canada organization providing North America's aerospace warnings: In August, General Glen VanHerck, head of NORAD, said that China's advanced hypersonic capability would "provide significant challenges to my Norad capability to provide threat warning and attack assessment," the Financial Times said... Sources also told the paper that the Chinese weapon could theoretically fly over the South Pole, another cause for concern for the US military, whose missile systems focus on the northern polar route.
Bloomberg reports that the missile missed its target (by over 32 kilometers — about 20 miles), "and the test doesn't necessarily mean China will deploy such a weapon, the Financial Times said..."

They also point out that "Along with China, the United States, Russia and at least five other countries are working on hypersonic technology." (Reuters adds that "last month North Korea said it had test-fired a newly-developed hypersonic missile.")
Medicine

Drones Have Now Been Used To Deliver Lungs For Medical Transplant (extremetech.com) 22

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: The world's first drone delivery of lungs has gone down in history as a success. Unither Bioelectronique, a bioengineering firm focused on organ transportation, recently completed a "proof-of-concept" flight in which a pair of human lungs were shipped via drone to the transplant site in about six minutes. The lungs were flown from the Toronto Western Hospital to Toronto General Hospital, where Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, surgeon-in-chief of Canada's University Health Network, received the cargo at about 1 a.m. He needed the lungs for a transplant he was performing that very day on a male engineer who'd soon become the first transplant patient to receive his "new" lungs by drone.

Though the circumstances of the trip were urgent, the trip itself was 18 months in the making. Organs have been shipped by drone before, but lungs are particularly sensitive to environmental shifts during transport, with a majority of donated lungs rendered unusable by insufficient oxygenation. In order to make the trip worthwhile, engineers at Unither Bioelectronique had to design a lightweight carbon fiber shipping container that could withstand vibrations and in-flight changes in elevation and barometric pressure. Preparation involved practice flights and drop tests using simulation lung packages. The drone and its container counterpart were fitted with a parachute and an advanced GPS system, as the drone would fly through the air unmanned.
"This innovation in the transportation of organs has the potential to significantly increase the transfer efficiency between donors and recipients, especially in congested urban areas," Unither Bioelectronique says of the trip on their website. "Through this project, we have established an important stepping stone for future organ delivery that ultimately will open the door for large-scale adoption of larger fully autonomous, electrically-powered, environmentally-friendly drones... for transplant across trans-continental distances."
Facebook

Researchers Show Facebook's Ad Tools Can Target a Single User (techcrunch.com) 23

A new research paper written by a team of academics and computer scientists from Spain and Austria has demonstrated that it's possible to use Facebook's targeting tools to deliver an ad exclusively to a single individual if you know enough about the interests Facebook's platform assigns them. TechCrunch reports: The paper -- entitled "Unique on Facebook: Formulation and Evidence of (Nano)targeting Individual Users with non-PII Data" -- describes a "data-driven model" that defines a metric showing the probability a Facebook user can be uniquely identified based on interests attached to them by the ad platform. The researchers demonstrate that they were able to use Facebook's Custom Audience tool to target a number of ads in such a way that each ad only reached a single, intended Facebook user.

The research raises fresh questions about potentially harmful uses of Facebook's ad targeting tools, and -- more broadly -- questions about the legality of the tech giant's personal data processing empire given that the information it collects on people can be used to uniquely identify individuals, picking them out of the crowd of others on its platform even purely based on their interests. The findings could increase pressure on lawmakers to ban or phase out behavioral advertising -- which has been under attack for years, over concerns it poses a smorgasbord of individual and societal harms. And, at the least, the paper seems likely to drive calls for robust checks and balances on how such invasive tools can be used. The findings also underscore the importance of independent research being able to interrogate algorithmic adtech -- and should increase pressure on platforms not to close down researchers' access.

Google

Google Modernizes US Mobile Search Results With Continuous Scrolling (techcrunch.com) 25

Google has announced that it's changing the way search works on mobile devices, initially in the U.S. From a report: Now, when you reach the bottom of a set of search results on your phone, you won't have to tap to go to the next page. Instead, the next set of results will automatically load so you can continuously scroll down to see more information. The change will roll out on the mobile web and will be supported on the Google mobile app for both iOS and Android in the U.S. for most English-language searches for the time being. Because it's a staggered release, you may initially encounter some results which scroll and others that do not.
Privacy

Moscow Says It is First To Launch Large-scale Metro Facial ID Payment System (reuters.com) 19

Moscow's sprawling metro network on Friday launched a fare payment system using facial recognition technology at its more than 240 stations, an initiative the authorities said was the first of its kind in the world. From a report: Moscow, a city of 12.7 million, has one of the world's largest video-surveillance systems. It has used facial recognition technology to enforce COVID-19 quarantines, and protesters attending political rallies have also said police have used it to make preventive arrests and detentions. The authorities are now giving commuters the option to use facial recognition to pay their fare with a system called "Face Pay" at turnstiles equipped with cameras. "Moscow is the first city in the world where this system is operating on such a scale," Maxim Liksutov, head of the Russian capital's transport department, said in a statement.
News

New Zealand Council Ends Contract With Wizard After Two Decades of Service (theguardian.com) 48

The official Wizard of New Zealand, perhaps the only state-appointed wizard in the world, has been cast from the public payroll, spelling the end to a 23-year legacy. From a report: The Wizard, whose real name is Ian Brackenbury Channell, 88, had been contracted to Christchurch city council for the past two decades to promote the city through "acts of wizardry and other wizard-like services," at a cost of $16,000 a year. He has been paid a total of $368,000.

The Wizard, who was born in England, began performing acts of wizardry and entertainment in public spaces shortly after arriving in New Zealand in 1976. When the council originally tried to stop him, the public protested. In 1982, the New Zealand Art Gallery Directors Association said he had become a living work of art, and then, in 1990, the prime minister at the time, Mike Moore, asked that he consider becoming the Wizard of New Zealand. "I am concerned that your wizardry is not at the disposal of the entire nation," Moore wrote on his official letterhead.

Firefox

PowerPC Fork of Firefox Reaches End of the Road (arstechnica.com) 50

Andrew Cunningham writes via Ars Technica: It has been well over a decade since PowerPC Macs roamed the earth -- so long that the Intel Macs that replaced them are themselves being replaced by something else. But to this day, there's a small community of people still developing software for PowerPC Macs and Mac OS 9. One of those projects was TenFourFox, a fork of the Firefox browser for G3, G4, and G5-based PowerPC Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5. Maintained primarily by Cameron Kaiser, the TenFourFox project sprang up in late 2010 after Mozilla pulled PowerPC support from Firefox 4 during its development. And amazingly, the browser has continued to trundle on ever since.

But continuing to backport Firefox features to aging, stuck-in-time PowerPC processors only got more difficult as time went on. And in March of this year, Kaiser announced that TenFourFox updates would be ending after over a decade of development. The final planned release of TenFourFox was earlier this month. Kaiser's full post is long, but it's worth a read for vintage-computer enthusiasts or anyone who works on software -- Kaiser expresses frustration with the realities of developing and supporting a niche app, but he also highlights TenFourFox's impressive technical achievements and ruminates on the nature of the modern Internet and open source software development [...].

Kaiser doesn't intend to fully halt work on the browser, but he is downshifting it into what he calls "hobby mode." He will continue to backport security patches from newer ESR releases of Firefox and post them to the TenFourFox Github page, but anyone who wants to use these will need to build the app themselves. Kaiser also won't commit to providing support for these additions or providing them on any kind of schedule. Other developers are also welcome to continue to release TenFourFox builds on their own.

Businesses

Site Allowing You To 'Skip the Interview' Launches, Then Promptly Shuts Down (protocol.com) 54

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Protocol: A company proposing job-seekers ask past coworkers to pay money and "sponsor" them for a new job launched, and rather immediately shut down, its website on Wednesday. The main idea behind the site, called "Skip the Interview," was to partner with companies who would set sponsorship amounts for job postings. The job-seeker would then ask current or former coworkers to contribute to this sponsorship fund, controlled by Skip The Interview. The first person to raise the funds gets the job. It seems that Skip The Interview thinks people are willing to back up job references with money. Quite a few people on Twitter and Reddit disagree.

After being roasted on Twitter, an account with the handle @skipinterview responded to some concerns on developer Angie Jones' thread. "We decided to take the site down, as we clearly didn't talk to enough people before launching, and are going to talk to a lot more people before moving forward," the account wrote. The account later tweeted on the thread: "Hi everyone. This is Chris the founder. Our goal is definitely not to be discriminatory in any way. We actually won't do junior roles for that reason. We think anyone who has worked in a role for 3+ years before can raise funds from colleagues." An account named "Chris_Evans_1112" also responded to a negative thread on Reddit, saying the company had launched solely to receive feedback. According to their website, Skip The Interview is processing the negative feedback and refining their pitch. It appears they have more research to do.

Communications

Elon Musk Says Starlink Will Provide Faster Internet Speeds On Airlines (cnbc.com) 53

Elon Musk touted SpaceX's plan to use Starlink for in-flight Wi-Fi, saying in a tweet on Thursday that the service could add "low latency ~half gigabit connectivity in the air!" CNBC reports: Starlink is the company's plan to build an interconnected internet network with thousands of satellites, known in the space industry as a constellation, designed to deliver high-speed internet to consumers anywhere on the planet. SpaceX has launched 1,740 Starlink satellites to date, and the network has more than 100,000 users in 14 countries who are participating in a public beta, with service priced at $99 a month.

Airlines work with satellite broadband providers for inflight Wi-Fi, with Viasat and Intelsat -- the latter of which purchased Gogo's commercial aviation business -- two such companies that add connectivity on flights by airlines including Delta, JetBlue, American Airlines and United. But, while existing services use satellites in distant orbits, Starlink satellites orbit closer to the Earth and could boost the speeds that passengers see inflight. SpaceX Vice President Jonathan Hofeller earlier this year said that the company is "in talks with several" airlines about adding Starlink in-flight Wi-Fi, noting that it has an "aviation product in development." Hofeller also emphasized that Starlink "provides a global mesh," so that "airlines are flying underneath that global mesh have connectivity anywhere they go."

IT

A Newspaper Informed Missouri About a Website Flaw. The Governor Accused it of 'Hacking' (washingtonpost.com) 120

On Thursday, Gov. Michael Parson (R) called a news conference to warn his state's citizens about a nefarious plot against a teachers' database by a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. From a report: "Through a multistep process," Parson said with great solemnity, "an individual took the records of at least three educators, decoded the HTML source code and viewed the Social Security number of those specific educators."

[...] The Post-Dispatch report explains what their reporter, Josh Renaud, did to view the Social Security numbers of Missouri teachers on a website run by the state education department. (The website has been taken down; you can view an old version of it at the Internet Archive.) "Though no private information was clearly visible nor searchable on any of the web pages," the Post-Dispatch's report stated, "the newspaper found that teachers' Social Security numbers were contained in the HTML source code of the pages involved." In other words, it seems, a search tool for teacher credentials responded to searches by including a bunch of information, some of which was embedded in the source code of the page but not visible when just reading the page.

Facebook

One of Facebook's Earliest Investors Says People Have Lost Trust in Company (bloomberg.com) 57

Facebook has lost people's trust "for good reasons" and isn't responding well to whistle-blower claims that the social-media giant prioritizes profit over user safety, according to one of its earliest investors, Reid Hoffman. Bloomberg: "I'm disappointed," Hoffman said Wednesday in an interview. Facebook should have been more proactive in response to troubling signs revealed in its own research, he said. "Good for Facebook for doing the research," Hoffman said. "You discovered some things that are harmful -- what are you doing about it?" [...] Hoffman, who is a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners and a co-founder of LinkedIn, said he hasn't yet spoken to Zuckerberg but has offered his help with the crisis that the company is facing. To regain trust, Facebook has to be "extra transparent," he said. "They have to come forward and say, 'Look, here's our dashboards, here's our metrics, here is the ways we are trying to work on this and do things."
AI

Dead-End SF Street Plagued With Confused Waymo Cars Trying To Turn Around 'Every 5 Minutes' (cbslocal.com) 117

A normally quiet neighborhood in San Francisco is buzzing about a sudden explosion of traffic. Neighbors say their Richmond District dead end street has suddenly become crowded with Waymo vehicles. From a report: "I noticed it while I was sleeping," says Jennifer King. "I awoke to a strange hum and I thought there was a spacecraft outside my bedroom windowï." The visitors Jennifer King is talking about don't just come at night. They come all day, right to the end of 15th Avenue, where there's nothing else to do but make some kind of multi-point turn and head out the way they came in. Not long after that car is gone, there will be another, which will make the same turn and leave, before another car shows up and does the exact same thing. And while there are some pauses, it never really stops. "There are some days where it can be up to 50," King says of the WayMo count. "It's literally every five minutes. And we're all working from home, so this is what we hear." At several points this Tuesday, they showed up on top of each other. The cars, packed with technology, stop in a queue as if they are completely baffled by the dead end. While some neighbors say it is becoming a bit of a nuisance, everyone finds it a little bizarre.

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