Facebook users who watched a newspaper video featuring black men were asked if they wanted to "keep seeing videos about primates" by an artificial-intelligence recommendation system. From a report: Facebook told BBC News it "was clearly an unacceptable error", disabled the system and launched an investigation. "We apologise to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations." It is the latest in a long-running series of errors that have raised concerns over racial bias in AI.

ProtonMail, a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. From a report: The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn't log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation -- in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn't cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users. For the past year, a group of people have taken over a handful of commercial premises and apartments near Place Sainte Marthe in Paris. They want to fight against gentrification, real estate speculation, Airbnb and high-end restaurants. While it started as a local conflict, it quickly became a symbolic campaign. They attracted newspaper headlines when they started occupying premises rented by Le Petit Cambodge -- a restaurant that was targeted by the November 13th, 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

On September 1st, the group published an article on Paris-luttes.info, an anticapitalist news website, summing up different police investigations and legal cases against some members of the group. According to their story, French police sent an Europol request to ProtonMail in order to uncover the identity of the person who created a ProtonMail account -- the group was using this email address to communicate. The address has also been shared on various anarchist websites. The next day, @MuArF on Twitter shared an abstract of a police report detailing ProtonMail's reply. According to @MuArF, the police report is related to the ongoing investigation against the group who occupied various premises around Place Sainte-Marthe. It says that French police received a message on Europol.

Automated resume-scanning software is contributing to a "broken" hiring system in the US, says a new report from Harvard Business School. Such software is used by employers to filter job applicants, but is mistakenly rejecting millions of viable candidates, say the study's authors. It's contributing to the problem of "hidden workers" -- individuals who are able and willing to work, but remain locked out of jobs by structural problems in the labor market. From a report: The study's authors identify a number of factors blocking people from employment, but say automated hiring software is one of the biggest. These programs are used by 75 percent of US employers (rising to 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies), and were adopted in response to a rise in digital job applications from the '90s onwards. Technology has made it easier for people to apply for jobs, but also easier for companies to reject them. The exact mechanics of how automated software mistakenly reject candidates are varied, but generally stem from the use of overly-simplistic criteria to divide "good" and "bad" applicants.

Abundant, easily processed silicon has been the material of choice for decades in the semiconductor industry, but electric vehicles are helping chip away at its dominance in the pursuit of energy efficiency. From a report: Tesla has been a catalyst for this change. The U.S. automaker became the first of its peers to use silicon carbide chips in a mass-produced car, incorporating them into some of its Model 3s. This move gave the power-saving material a boost of momentum in the EV supply chain, with ramifications for the chip industry. "Thus far, chipmakers have worked together to build up the silicon carbide market, but we've reached the stage of competing with each other," said Kazuhide Ino, chief strategy officer at Japanese chipmaker Rohm. Silicon carbide, abbreviated SiC, contains silicon and carbon. With chemical bonds stronger than those in silicon, it is the world's third-hardest substance. Processing it requires advanced technology, but the material's stability and other properties let chipmakers cut energy loss by more than half compared with standard silicon wafers.

SiC chips also dissipate heat well, allowing for smaller inverters -- a crucial EV component that regulates the flow of power to the motor. "The Model 3 has an air resistance factor as low as a sports car's," said Masayoshi Yamamoto, a professor at Nagoya University in Japan. "Scaling down inverters enabled its streamlined design." Tesla's move jolted the chip industry. In June, German chipmaker Infineon Technologies introduced an SiC module for electric vehicle inverters. "The timing of the expansion of SiC has clearly moved closer than what we had expected," said Takemi Kouzu, manager at Infineon's Japan unit. Hyundai Motor will use Infineon-made SiC chips in its next-generation EV. These chips are said to enable a more than 5% increase in vehicle range compared with silicon. French automaker Renault signed a deal in June with Switzerland-based STMicroelectronics for a supply of SiC chips beginning in 2026. The agreement also covers chips made with gallium nitride, another alternative material for semiconductor wafers.

"Tech companies have long encouraged putting listening devices in homes and pockets..." reports the Washington Post. "But some are growing concerned that these devices are recording even when they're not supposed to — and they're taking their fears to the courts." (Alternate URLs here and here.) On Thursday, a judge ruled that Apple will have to continue fighting a lawsuit brought by users in federal court in California, alleging that the company's voice assistant Siri has improperly recorded private conversations... [H]e ruled that the plaintiffs, who are trying to make the suit a class action case, could continue pursuing claims that Siri turned on unprompted and recorded conversations that it shouldn't have and passed the data along to third parties, therefore violating user privacy. The case is one of several that have been brought against Apple, Google and Amazon that involve allegations of violation of privacy by voice assistants...

The voice assistants are supposed to turn on when prompted — saying "Hey, Siri," for example — but the lawsuit alleges that plaintiffs saw their devices activate even when they didn't call out the wake word. That conversation was recorded without their consent and the information was then used to target advertisements toward them and sent on to third-party contractors to review, they allege... The lawsuits ask the companies to contend with what they do once they hear something they weren't intended to. Nicole Ozer, the technology and civil liberties director of the ACLU of California, said the suits are a sign that people are realizing how much information the voice technology is collecting.

"I think this lawsuit is part of people finally starting to realize that Siri doesn't work for us, it works for Apple," she said.
An Amazon spokesperson told the Post only a "small fraction" of audio is manually reviewed, and users can opt-out of those reviews or manage their recordings. Apple told the Post that isn't selling its Siri recordings, and that its recordings are not associated with an "identifiable individual." And Google pointed out that they don't retain audio recordings by default "and make it easy to manage your privacy preferences."

But there's still concerns. "A Washington Post investigation in 2019 found that Amazon kept a copy of everything Alexa records after it thinks it hears its name — even if users didn't realize," the Post adds. In a 2019 video, Post reporter Geoffrey A. Fowler even spliced together all of Amazon's recordings of his voice, into a spoken-word anthem titled "Your voice now belongs to Amazon. "Eavesdropping is an invasion," Fowler argues in the video, adding that Amazon "is putting its profits over our privacy. It's also a sign of a bold data grab that's going on in our increasingly connected homes."

Ideas from 4chan (including its paranormal section) have percolated into the "dead internet" theory, writes the Atlantic, with a seminal post on another forum by "IlluminatiPirate" now arguing that the internet is almost entirely overrun by artificial intelligence: Like lots of other online conspiracy theories, the audience for this one is growing because of discussion led by a mix of true believers, sarcastic trolls, and idly curious lovers of chitchat... Peppered with casually offensive language, the post suggests that the internet died in 2016 or early 2017, and that now it is "empty and devoid of people," as well as "entirely sterile." Much of the "supposedly human-produced content" you see online was actually created using AI, IlluminatiPirate claims, and was propagated by bots, possibly aided by a group of "influencers" on the payroll of various corporations that are in cahoots with the government. The conspiring group's intention is, of course, to control our thoughts and get us to purchase stuff... He argues that all modern entertainment is generated and recommended by an algorithm; gestures at the existence of deepfakes, which suggest that anything at all may be an illusion; and links to a New York story from 2018 titled "How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually."

"I think it's entirely obvious what I'm subtly suggesting here given this setup," the post continues. "The U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population." So far, the original post has been viewed more than 73,000 times...

The theory has become fodder for dramatic YouTube explainers, including one that summarizes the original post in Spanish and has been viewed nearly 260,000 times. Speculation about the theory's validity has started appearing in the widely read Hacker News forum and among fans of the massively popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips. In a Reddit forum about the paranormal, the theory is discussed as a possible explanation for why threads about UFOs seem to be "hijacked" by bots so often. The theory's spread hasn't been entirely organic. IlluminatiPirate has posted a link to his manifesto in several Reddit forums that discuss conspiracy theories... Anyway ... dead-internet theory is pretty far out-there. But unlike the internet's many other conspiracy theorists, who are boring or really gullible or motivated by odd politics, the dead-internet people kind of have a point... [Y]ou could even say that the point of the theory is so obvious, it's cliché — people talk about longing for the days of weird web design and personal sites and listservs all the time. Even Facebook employees say they miss the "old" internet. The big platforms do encourage their users to make the same conversations and arcs of feeling and cycles of outrage happen over and over, so much so that people may find themselves acting like bots, responding on impulse in predictable ways to things that were created, in all likelihood, to elicit that very response.
That 2018 article in New York magazine had argued that (at that time) a majority of web traffic was probably coming from bots — including especially high bot traffic on YouTube — while even the engagement metrics for major sites like Facebook had been gamed or inflated.

But whether or not that's changed, the Atlantic shares a compelling argument from a forum poster arguing that their very presence in this discussion proves they must be a bot. "If I was real I'm pretty sure I'd be out there living each day to the fullest and experiencing everything I possibly could with every given moment of the relatively infinitesimal amount of time I'll exist for instead of posting on the internet about nonsense."

"For years, Facebook has been under scrutiny for the violent and hateful content that flows through its site...." reports the New York Times. "But behind the scenes, Facebook has quietly paid others to take on much of the responsibility. Since 2012, the company has hired at least 10 consulting and staffing firms globally to sift through its posts, along with a wider web of subcontractors, according to interviews and public records."

Facebook's single biggest partner for content moderating is Accenture, the Times adds. "Facebook has signed contracts with it for content moderation and other services worth at least $500 million a year, according to The Times's examination." Accenture employs more than a third of the 15,000 people whom Facebook has said it has hired to inspect its posts... Their contracts, which have not previously been reported, have redefined the traditional boundaries of an outsourcing relationship. Accenture has absorbed the worst facets of moderating content and made Facebook's content issues its own. As a cost of doing business, it has dealt with workers' mental health issues from reviewing the posts. It has grappled with labor activism when those workers pushed for more pay and benefits. And it has silently borne public scrutiny when they have spoken out against the work.

Those issues have been compounded by Facebook's demanding hiring targets and performance goals and so many shifts in its content policies that Accenture struggled to keep up, 15 current and former employees said. And when faced with legal action from moderators about the work, Accenture stayed quiet as Facebook argued that it was not liable because the workers belonged to Accenture and others. "You couldn't have Facebook as we know it today without Accenture," said Cori Crider, a co-founder of Foxglove, a law firm that represents content moderators. "Enablers like Accenture, for eye-watering fees, have let Facebook hold the core human problem of its business at arm's length...."

The firm soon parlayed its work with Facebook into moderation contracts with YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and others, executives said. (The digital content moderation industry is projected to reach $8.8 billion next year, according to Everest Group, roughly double the 2020 total.) Facebook also gave Accenture contracts in areas like checking for fake or duplicate user accounts and monitoring celebrity and brand accounts to ensure they were not flooded with abuse...

Each U.S. moderator generated $50 or more per hour for Accenture, two people with knowledge of the billing said. In contrast, moderators in some U.S. cities received starting pay of $18 an hour.

"Two-and-a-half years after the deadly Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash, with the final investigation report into the accident still pending, the airline's management has reached a settlement with Boeing and said it expects to resume flying the jet again by January," reports the Seattle Times: The financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed. The Seattle Times reported exclusively in January that Boeing had then offered an amount on the order of $500 million to $600 million, a large portion of which was not cash but concessions, including discounts on future airplane sales and waivers on maintenance costs... A person with knowledge of the final settlement said Saturday that it included a payment of $280 million in cash, discounts on future planes, free maintenance and parts for three years, and replacement of the aircraft that crashed — with an estimated value for the total package less than $600 million.

The settlement comes as Ethiopia is torn by a bloody civil war in the northern region of Tigray that has frayed relations with the U.S. and undermined its economy. Meanwhile, the state-owned airline has struggled for 18 months with the extreme downturn in air travel due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Parallel to the settlement over the MAX, Ethiopian Airlines this week made public a related agreement: Boeing will partner with Ethiopian to make the airline's base in Addis Ababa "Africa's aviation hub" and to set up a manufacturing facility there to make airplane parts.
The Times also looks at what's changed for Boeing since their two fatal crashes: This summer, the FAA slowed certification of Boeing's next new plane, the 777X; directed Boeing to rework its flight manuals for both the 777X and MAX 10 to include detailed emergency pilot procedures; and ordered Boeing to improve the independence of engineers working on airplane certification, after a third of those surveyed by the FAA said they feel they cannot raise safety concerns without interference... With deliveries of the 787 suspended, restoring the MAX to market acceptance is now central to Boeing's cash generation.

The jet has been back in service since late December, and more than 300 MAXs are now carrying passengers globally. Even as the pandemic continues to suppress air travel, Boeing is building new MAXs at a rate of 16 jets per month with a plan to increase production to 31 per month early in 2022. By year end, Boeing hopes to deliver more than 200 of the MAXs that were parked during the prolonged grounding...

In January, Boeing escaped serious consequences from a criminal investigation into the MAX crashes when the Department of Justice imposed a fine of $244 million, a relatively small amount for Boeing. Boeing's ongoing estimate of the total cost of the MAX crisis in financial filings has stabilized at about $21 billion, of which almost $9 billion is compensation to airline customers. Wall Street doesn't expect that to grow...

The upgraded flight controls on the MAXs flying today include fixes to the MCAS design flaws. And all MAX pilots undergo simulator training specific to the system before they fly the aircraft.

The New York Times tells the story of a pervasive new nuisance: public videography with smartphones: Recently I saw eight seconds of video that capture this problem in its most extreme form. A boy and a girl, who appear to be of high school age, are walking into Panda Express when a third teenager with blond hair stops them in the doorway. He brings with him the energy of the hustler or the man-on-the-street interview host, and the couple are temporarily frozen, caught between suspicion and courtesy. It is a space where things could go either way. "Hey, hold on, excuse me — I have something really important to ask you," the blond kid says to the girl. "The moment I saw you, my eyes were just — oh, my God, I love you, please could — bleagh!" The "bleagh" is the sound he makes when the other boy punches him in the face...

But perhaps what is most remarkable is the distinct moment of resignation that he and his girlfriend share when they realize what the blond kid is doing. Around the time he gets to "my eyes," she turns away and steps inside, while Overalls Kid calmly sets his smoothie on the ground in preparation to jack his interlocutor in the mouth. The sound of the impact is meaty. The video ends with both of them stumbling out of the frame, Blond Kid reeling and Overalls Kid winding up for another blow. It's an efficiently cut bit of action that rewards repeat viewings, but it left me with one question: How do we feel about that punch?

I think we can agree that a punch would not be justified if Blond Kid were professing his love sincerely. But he isn't. He's professing his love while an unidentified fourth party records the whole thing, presumably as part of the "hit on another guy's girlfriend" internet challenge. In this context, he is using other people as props, a bad behavior that society should discourage. But what are we willing to condone in order to discourage it? Our collective culture has just begun to decide how we feel about this kind of activity, which has been invented by new technology and will only become more prevalent in the future.
The article ultimately argues that internet video apps belong to generation Z "the way heroin belongs to junkies. Seen from this perspective, Overalls Kid is part of a history of violent resistance to foreign influence that Americans will recognize in everything from the Boston Tea Party to Al Qaeda to the Ewoks.

"Our reams of fretting essays about how much the kids love phones tend to ignore who gave them phones in the first place."

Long-time Slashdot reader Nkwe shares an article about AT&T's "Flying COW" drones — their Cell (tower) On Wings drone technology that's helped restore cellphone service after Hurricane Ida and other natural disasters.

"The device is a cell site situated on a drone engineered to beam wireless LTE coverage across an area of up to 40 square miles." The weather-resistant drone can withstand extreme conditions, and its thermal imaging can help search and rescue teams find people in buildings, tree cover, and thick smoke... The drone has the potential to hover over 300 feet and is connected by a tether attached to the ground.

When someone texts, calls, or uses data, the signal is sent to the drone and transferred through the tether to a router. The router pushes information through a satellite, into the cloud, and finally into the AT&T network. The tether also provides constant power to the Flying COW via a fiber, giving the drone unlimited flight time.

Its flying capabilities allow it to soar 500% higher than a terrestrial Cell-on-Wheels mast, expanding how far the signal reaches, though more drones can be added to widen the coverage area. The drone is small and versatile, making it easy to set up, deploy, and move during rapidly changing conditions, like firefighters chasing a wildfire.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Beijing's municipal government has proposed an investment in Didi Global Inc. that would give state-run firms control of the world's largest ride-hailing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Under the preliminary proposal, Shouqi Group -- part of the influential Beijing Tourism Group -- and other firms based in the capital would acquire a stake in Didi, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information. Scenarios under consideration include the consortium taking a so-called "golden share" with veto power and a board seat, they added.

The U.S. Navy has successfully invented a special electronic device that is designed to stop people from talking. Interesting Engineering reports: A form of non-lethal weapon, the new electronic device effectively repeats a speaker's own voice back at them, and only them, while they attempt to talk. It was developed, and patented back in 2019 but has only recently been discovered, according to a report by the New Scientist. The main idea of the weapon is to disorientate a target so much that they will be unable to communicate effectively with other people.

Called acoustic hailing and disruption (AHAD), the weapon is able to record speech and instantly broadcast it at a target in milliseconds. Much like an annoying sibling, this action will disrupt the target's concentration, and, in theory, discourage them from continuing to speak. As for the technical details of the device, a quick review of its patent is very interesting indeed. "According to an illustrative embodiment of the present disclosure, a target's speech is directed back to them twice, once immediately and once after a short delay. This delay creates delayed auditory feedback (DAF), which alters the speaker's normal perception of their own voice. In normal speech, a speaker hears their own words with a slight delay, and the body is accustomed to this feedback. By introducing another audio feedback source with a sufficiently long delay, the speaker's concentration is disrupted and it becomes difficult to continue speaking."

Qualcomm says it's figured out a way to deliver lossless audio over Bluetooth, yielding quality that should be indistinguishable from uncompressed sources. And it's calling it aptX Lossless, the next generation of Qualcomm's proprietary audio format. From a report: Taking a "systems level approach," was the key, the company says, as it's "optimized a number of core wireless connectivity and audio technologies, including aptX Adaptive, which work together to auto detect and scale-up and are designed to deliver CD lossless audio when a user is listening to a lossless music file and the RF conditions are suitable." So, yes, there are a few caveats, and you'll need new hardware to get the full aptX Lossless experience -- that goes for the device you're streaming from (a phone, for instance), as well as your listening device, typically a pair of headphones. Qualcomm says devices that support aptX Lossless are expected to be available in early 2022. Its key specs are: Supports 44.1kHz, 16-bit CD lossless audio quality
Designed to scale-up to CD lossless audio based on Bluetooth link quality
User can select between CD lossless audio 44.1kHz and 24-bit 96kHz lossy
Auto-detects to enable CD lossless audio when the source is lossless audio
Mathematically bit-for-bit exact
Bit-rate : ~1Mbps

The US Air Force's first ever chief software officer has quit the job after branding it "probably the most challenging and infuriating of my entire career" in a remarkably candid blog post. The Register reports: Nicolas Chaillan's impressively blunt leaving note, which he posted to his LinkedIn profile, castigated USAF senior hierarchy for failing to prioritise basic IT issues, saying: "A lack of response and alignment is certainly a contributor to my accelerated exit." Chaillan took on his chief software officer role in May 2019, having previously worked at the US Department of Defense rolling out DevSecOps practices to the American military. Before that he founded two companies.

In his missive, Chaillan also singled out a part of military culture that features in both the US and the UK: the practice of appointing mid-ranking generalist officers to run specialist projects. "Please," he implored, "stop putting a Major or Lt Col (despite their devotion, exceptional attitude, and culture) in charge of ICAM, Zero Trust or Cloud for 1 to 4 million users when they have no previous experience in that field -- we are setting up critical infrastructure to fail." The former chief software officer continued: "We would not put a pilot in the cockpit without extensive flight training; why would we expect someone with no IT experience to be close to successful? They do not know what to execute on or what to prioritize which leads to endless risk reduction efforts and diluted focus. IT is a highly skilled and trained job; staff it as such."

Chaillan went on to complain that while he had managed to roll out DevSecOps practices within his corner of US DoD, his ability to achieve larger scale projects was being hampered by institutional inertia. "I told my leadership that I could have fixed Enterprise IT in 6 months if empowered," he wrote. Among the USAF's sins-according-to-Chaillan? The service is still using "outdated water-agile-fall acquisition principles to procure services and talent", while he lamented the failure of the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) to secure its required $20m funding in the USAF's FY22 budget. He was also quite scathing about the USAF's adoption -- or lack thereof -- of DevSecOps, the trendy name for efforts to make developers include security-related decisions at the same time as product-related decisions when writing new software. It appears the service wasn't quite as open-minded as its overseers in the wider DoD.

Yesterday after releasing new Windows 11 builds in the Dev and Beta channels, Insiders reported that their Start Menu and taskbar were crashing. As it turned out, it was caused by Windows 11 delivering ads, as was reported by Daniel Aleksandersen, who dug into the issue. XDA Developers reports: First of all, Microsoft did publish a fix. [If your PC is in an unusable state and you're reading this in an effort to get out of it, the article includes a step-by-step guide to fix the problem.] The ad itself is for Microsoft Teams, and how it's integrated into Windows 11. As with most of the ads that are injected into Windows, this should still pop up as a notification even if you have all notifications turned off.

While we know the cause, the bigger question that Aleksandersen dives into is how the Windows 11 shell can be so fragile that ads can crash it. Windows in 2021 has a ton of components in it that have to grab content from the cloud at any given time, from the Bing lockscreen wallpaper to Windows Update to advertisements that come from Microsoft. It's pretty wild that when one of them isn't functioning correctly, this could happen. There are clearly two issues here. One is that a cloud service can break Windows 11. The other is that Microsoft is injecting ads into the OS in the first place, a sure pain point for many. One thing is for sure; Microsoft isn't going to scale back on its advertisements in Windows any time soon. Instead, it's just going to fix the glitch, and if that makes you draw a parallel to Office Space, that's fine too.

What if your smartphone or laptop started charging as soon as you walked in the door? Researchers have developed a specially built room that can transmit energy to a variety of electronic devices within it, charging phones and powering home appliances without plugs or batteries. Scientific American: This system "enables safe and high-power wireless power transfer in large volumes," says Takuya Sasatani, a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Engineering and lead author of the new study, which was published this week in Nature Electronics. The room relies on the same phenomenon as short-range wireless phone chargers: a metal coil, placed in a magnetic field, will produce an electric current. Existing commercial charging docks use electricity from a wall outlet to produce a magnetic field in a small area. Most recent smartphones are equipped with a metal coil, and when such a model) is placed on the dock, the interaction generates enough current to power the phone's battery. But today's commercial products have a very limited range. If you lift a phone off the dock or swathe it in a case that is too thick, the wireless power transfer ceases. But if a magnetic field filled a whole room, any phone within it would have access to wireless power.

"The prospect of having a room where a variety of devices could just receive power anywhere is really compelling and exciting," says Joshua Smith, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the new study. "And this paper takes another step toward making that possible." In the study, the researchers describe a custom test room of about 18 cubic meters (roughly equivalent to a small freight container), which Sasatani built from conductive aluminum panels with a metal pole running down the middle. The team furnished the room with a wirelessly powered lamp and fan, as well as more prosaic items, including a chair, table and bookshelf. When the researchers ran an electric current through the walls and pole in a set pattern, it generated a three-dimensional magnetic field within the space. In fact, they designed the setup to generate two separate fields: one that fills the center of the room and another that covers the corners, thus allowing any devices within the space to charge without encountering dead spots.

By carrying out simulations and measurements, Sasatani and his co-authors found their method could deliver 50 watts of power throughout the room, firing up all of the devices equipped with a receiving coil that they tested: a smartphone, a light bulb and a fan. Some energy was lost in the transfer, however. Delivery efficiency varied from a low of 37.1 percent to a high of about 90 percent, depending on the strength of the magnetic field at specific points in the room, as well as the orientation of the device. Without precautions, running current through the room's metal walls would typically fill it with two types of waves: electric and magnetic. This presents a problem, because electric fields can produce heat in biological tissues and pose a danger to humans. So the team embedded capacitors, devices that store electric energy, in the walls. "It confines the safe magnetic fields within the room volume while confining hazardous parts inside all the components embedded inside the walls," Sasatani explains.

New submitter throx shares a report from Android Police: For months users of the three-year-old Pixel 3 series have been complaining of a common and dreadful problem: seemingly random shutdowns that completely lock their devices. The Pixel 3 and 3 XL have been plagued by the "EDL Mode" bug, which locks the device with no screen or button inputs and makes it more or less impossible to use. To date there's no clear solution to this problem, at least not one that's easily available to even advanced users.

Google's official support channels are aware of the issue, and that it seems to be accelerating in terms of users in the last few months. But since more or less every Pixel 3 and 3 XL sold is out of warranty at this point, options are limited. You can start an official support ticket with Google and pay for a repair, or (as one volunteer on the Google support forums suggests) take it into an authorized repair shop to see if their Qualcomm tools can get the phone to wake up. At the time of writing there doesn't seem to be any indication of a user-accessible fix for the EDL issues.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon.com plans to take a more proactive approach to determine what types of content violate its cloud service policies, such as rules against promoting violence, and enforce its removal, according to two sources, a move likely to renew debate about how much power tech companies should have to restrict free speech. Over the coming months, Amazon will hire a small group of people in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division to develop expertise and work with outside researchers to monitor for future threats, one of the sources familiar with the matter said. It could turn Amazon, the leading cloud service provider worldwide with 40% market share according to research firm Gartner, into one of the world's most powerful arbiters of content allowed on the internet, experts say.

AWS already prohibits its services from being used in a variety of ways, such as illegal or fraudulent activity, to incite or threaten violence or promote child sexual exploitation and abuse, according to its acceptable use policy. Amazon first requests customers remove content violating its policies or have a system to moderate content. If Amazon cannot reach an acceptable agreement with the customer, it may take down the website. Amazon aims to develop an approach toward content issues that it and other cloud providers are more frequently confronting, such as determining when misinformation on a company's website reaches a scale that requires AWS action, the source said. The new team within AWS does not plan to sift through the vast amounts of content that companies host on the cloud, but will aim to get ahead of future threats, such as emerging extremist groups whose content could make it onto the AWS cloud, the source added.

Starting on Monday, General Motors will temporarily halt production at all but four of its North American factories due to chip supply constraints. Engadget reports: The halt in production will affect many of the automaker's most profitable vehicles, including the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra. "During the downtime, we will repair and ship unfinished vehicles from many impacted plants, including Fort Wayne and Silao, to dealers to help meet the strong customer demand for our products," a spokesperson for GM told the Detroit Free Press. "Although the situation remains complex and very fluid, we remain confident in our team's ability to continue finding creative solutions to minimize the impact on our highest-demand and capacity-constrained vehicles."

Yahoo and AOL, formerly known as Verizon Media, have officially been acquired by their new owners and renamed as simply "Yahoo." The Verge reports: Verizon announced it was selling the properties to Apollo Global Management in May in a deal said to be worth $5 billion, around half of the nearly $9 billion the telecom giant originally paid for them, and a fraction of the hundreds of billions the two companies were worth at their peaks.

Yahoo will now be run by CEO Guru Gowrappan, and will operate as a standalone company under Apollo Funds. Apollo is a private equity firm that owns assets like crafts retailer Michaels, Chuck E. Cheese restaurants, and the Venetian resort in Las Vegas. "The close of the deal heralds an exciting time of renewed opportunity for us as a standalone entity," Gowrappan said. "We anticipate that the coming months and years will bring fresh growth and innovation for Yahoo as a business and a brand, and we look forward to creating that future with our new partners."