In November GM recalled 69,000 of its "Bolt" electric cars after five reported fires and two minor injuries. Last month they issued a second recall "after at least two of the electric vehicles that were repaired for a previous problem erupted into flames," CNBC reported.

And then Friday the company expanded that recall "due to potential fire risk." The recall expansion is expected to cost the automaker an additional $1 billion, bringing the total to $1.8 billion to replace potentially defective battery modules in the vehicles. GM said about 73,000 vehicles in the U.S. and Canada are being added to the recall from the 2019-2022 model years, including a recently launched larger version of the car called the Bolt EUV...

The expanded recall now includes all Bolt EV models ever produced, casting a shadow over GM's first mainstream electric vehicle, as it attempts to transition to exclusively sell EVs by 2035...

The expansion follows the companies finding that the batteries for these vehicles may have two manufacturing defects — a torn anode tab and folded separator — present in the same battery cell, which increases the risk of fire. GM has confirmed one fire in the new population of recalled vehicles. That's in addition to at least nine previous confirmed fires in the first round of vehicles that were recalled.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: On Wednesday, Facebook released a report about what content was most viewed by people in the US last quarter. It was the first time it had released such a report. But according to The New York Times, Facebook was working on a similar report for the first quarter of 2021 that it opted not to share because it might have reflected poorly on the company. The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the report, says that the most-viewed link in the first quarter had a headline that could promote COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, which has been an issue on the social media platform. The headline read, "A 'healthy' doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine; CDC is investigating why." The article was published by The South Florida Sun Sentinel and republished by The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times says.

Facebook was working on releasing this report, but executives, including Alex Schultz, Facebook's CMO and VP of analytics, apparently "debated whether it would cause a public relations problem, according to the internal emails" and ultimately decided not to publish it, The New York Times reported. "We considered making the report public earlier but since we knew the attention it would garner, exactly as we saw this week, there were fixes to the system we wanted to make," Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement. Stone also clarified Schultz's opinion on if Facebook should release the report, saying that Schultz "advocated for putting out the report."
UPDATE: Later Saturday Facebook relented and released the report online.

For the first time, Google has published the number of geofence warrants it's historically received from U.S. authorities, providing a rare glimpse into how frequently these controversial warrants are issued. ZDNet's Zack Whittaker reports: The figures, published Thursday, reveal that Google has received thousands of geofence warrants each quarter since 2018, and at times accounted for about one-quarter of all U.S. warrants that Google receives. The data shows that the vast majority of geofence warrants are obtained by local and state authorities, with federal law enforcement accounting for just 4% of all geofence warrants served on the technology giant. According to the data, Google received 982 geofence warrants in 2018, 8,396 in 2019 and 11,554 in 2020. But the figures only provide a small glimpse into the volume of warrants received and did not break down how often it pushes back on overly broad requests.

Geofence warrants are also known as "reverse-location" warrants, since they seek to identify people of interest who were in the near vicinity at the time a crime was committed. Police do this by asking a court to order Google, which stores vast amounts of location data to drive its advertising business, to turn over details of who was in a geographic area, such as a radius of a few hundred feet at a certain point in time, to help identify potential suspects. Google has long shied away from providing these figures, in part because geofence warrants are largely thought to be unique to Google. Law enforcement has long known that Google stores vast troves of location data on its users in a database called Sensorvault, first revealed by The New York Times in 2019. Google spokesperson Alex Krasov said in a statement: "We vigorously protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement. We developed a process specifically for these requests that is designed to honor our legal obligations while narrowing the scope of data disclosed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Google's ambitions in the car led to Android Auto being redesigned a couple of years ago, mostly to positive feedback. However, the version of Android Auto on phone screens was meant to shut down at the time and has been on life support ever since. Now, that version has stopped working for some users. The aptly named "Android Auto for Phone Screens" was launched in 2019 as Google was forced to delay Google Assistant Driving Mode. That feature, which finally started rolling out in 2020, continued into earlier this year, and has expanded since, was supposed to replace the experience on phone screens. At the time, Google called this app a "stopgap" for users who needed an in-car experience but lacked a vehicle compatible with Android Auto.

In speaking with Google, we are able to confirm that Android Auto for Phone Screens is, indeed, shutting down with the release of Android 12. The experience will not be available for users on Android 12, but still on older versions of the OS. Google says that Assistant Driving Mode will be "the built-in mobile driving experience" on Android 12. Google's full statement follows: "Google Assistant driving mode is our next evolution of the mobile driving experience. For the people who use Android Auto in supported vehicles, that experience isn't going away. For those who use the on phone experience (Android Auto mobile app), they will be transitioned to Google Assistant driving mode. Starting with Android 12, Google Assistant driving mode will be the built-in mobile driving experience. We have no further details to share at this time."

RoccamOccam writes: After many months of development, the memfd_secret() system call was finally merged for the upcoming 5.14 release of Linux. There have been many changes during this feature's development, but its core purpose remains the same: allow a user-space process to create a range of memory that is inaccessible to anybody else -- kernel included. That memory can be used to store cryptographic keys or any other data that must not be exposed to others. Reportedly, it is even safe from processor vulnerabilities like Spectre because secret memory is uncached mapped.

Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare disclosed today that it mitigated the largest volumetric distributed denial of service attack that was recorded to date. From a report: The attack, which took place last month, targeted one of Cloudflare's customers in the financial industry. Cloudflare said that a threat actor used a botnet of more than 20,000 infected devices to flung HTTP requests at the customer's network in order to consume and crash server resources.

Called a volumetric DDoS, these are different from classic bandwidth DDoS attacks where threat actors try to exhaust and clog up the victim's internet connection bandwidth. Instead, attackers focus on sending as many junk HTTP requests to a victim's server in order to take up precious server CPU and RAM and prevent legitimate users from using targeted sites. Cloudflare said this attack peaked at 17.2 million HTTP requests/second (rps), a figure that the company described as almost three times larger than any previous volumetric DDoS attack that was ever reported in the public domain.

Google is adding an option to its Calendar service to let you show where you're working on any given day of the week, the company has announced. From a report: The feature will start rolling out from August 30th for users on select Google Workspace plans, and will be accessible via Calendar's settings menu alongside its existing working hours options, as well as on the weekly calendar view below where it shows each day's dates. Available work locations include "Office," "Home," "Unspecified," or "Somewhere else."

According to Google, the option is being added so it's "easier to plan in-person collaboration or set expectations in a hybrid workplace." It follows a surge in the popularity of home and hybrid working due to the pandemic. This has meant employees increasingly have to keep track not just of people's working hours, but also their location, when planning in-person meetings and other events. Google Calendar's new feature should help here.

Nvidia's planned $40 billion takeover of chipmaker Arm should get a longer antitrust probe, British regulators warned after rejecting potential concessions. From a report: In the first reaction on the deal from a major antitrust watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority said in a statement that it was concerned the deal would give Nvidia too much control over semiconductors used in data center services, smart devices and gaming consoles. Lengthy regulatory reviews can add risk to closing a deal that looks set to overshoot Nvidia's initial target to close in March 2022. Nvidia hasn't yet filed for European Union approval, where an extended review takes at least five months.

Nvidia's move to buy Arm from Japan's SoftBank Group Corp. initially raised antitrust concerns from rivals and customers such as Qualcomm and Alphabet's Google over how Nvidia might control Arm's licenses for essential chip technology. U.K. Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden must still decide whether the CMA should open an in-depth probe. Dowden is also separately weighing whether the deal should be blocked over potential risks to national security. The U.K. is leaning toward a veto, according to a person familiar with the matter earlier this month.

A newly unredacted sections of Epic's antitrust complaint against Google reveal new details on the lengths to which Google went to undermine third-party app stores on the Android platform. From a report: According to the new text, starting in 2019, Google ran a "Premier Device Program" that gave Android phone makers a greater share of search revenue than they would normally receive. In exchange, the OEMs agreed to ship their devices without any third-party app stores preinstalled. Specifically, they followed a rule that prohibited "apps with APK install privileges" without Google's approval, leaving the Play Store as the only built-in digital marketplace for software.

As noted by Leah Nylen, products that qualified as a Premier Device would receive a 12 percent share of Google search revenue compared to the 8 percent they'd normally earn. Google sweetened the deal further for companies like LG and Motorola, offering them between 3 and 6 percent of what customers spent in the Google Play Store on their devices. "Google's Premier Device Program was not publicly known, and was not known to Epic, before Google recently began producing relevant documents in this litigation," Epic's lawyers wrote in the complaint. "Google has sought to conceal its most restrictive anticompetitive conduct by, among other things, including in the agreements themselves a provision restricting signatories from making 'any public statement regarding [the] Agreement without the other party's prior written approval.'"

On Twitter, Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay shared a teaser video for "the beautifully redesigned Paint app," with the promise that Windows Insider Program members would be able to start testing the app for themselves in the near future. PCMag reports: The video is light on details -- which isn't all that surprising given that eight seconds of its 18-second runtime are devoted to the intro and outro -- but it does show off a new user interface with dark mode support that matches other Windows 11 apps. Windows Central also noticed something missing from Paint's new interface: An option to edit the current file in Paint 3D. Could this mean that Paint has emerged victorious from the 4-year-long battle that's raged between the competing apps?

The conflict began when Microsoft released Paint 3D alongside the Windows 10 Creators Update in 2017, then announced just a few months later that it was planning to deprecate the original Paint with the Fall Creators Update. Many feared that would be the end of Paint, but Microsoft later clarified that it was simply moving the app to the Windows Store instead of bundling it with Windows 10. It then decided to continue shipping it with the operating system anyway. It seemed like Paint and Paint 3D would coexist indefinitely. That changed again in March when Microsoft stopped bundling Paint 3D with Windows 10 and moved it to the Microsoft Store instead. The tables had finally turned.

Three of every five voters in Oregon and Washington support a regional, high-speed rail line, according to a poll released by proponents of a proposed high-speed rail system to carry passengers from Eugene, Ore., to Vancouver, B.C. GeekWire reports: The survey, conducted by California-based FM3 and released by rail-advocacy coalition Fast Forward Cascadia, shows that 43% of voters surveyed from the two states strongly support high-speed rail and another 19% somewhat support it. Conversely, a total of 27% either strongly oppose or somewhat oppose a new high-speed rail project. Rachel Smith, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce president and CEO, said the polling indicates the necessary political support for additional modes of mass transportation in the Pacific Northwest. Broady, Northwest voters appear highly concerned about traffic, transportation infrastructure, and climate. And they see high-speed rail as a partial solution to those issues, the data indicates.

In 2019, Microsoft gave $223,667 to study the possibility of building a high-speed rail line connecting Vancouver, B.C., Seattle, and Portland, bringing the company's total donation to study the feasibility of the idea to $573,667. If completed, trains would hit speeds of 250 mph and carry up to 3.3 million passengers annually in the Pacific Northwest, according to one initial study. A study completed in 2018 estimated the project cost would range from $24 billion to $42 billion.

Rachel Smith said with the federal government currently willing to pour billions of dollars into Washington's infrastructure with the new legislation approved by the U.S. Senate, the time to push a project along is now. "There are significant resources becoming available," she said. "The (decisions) we make now we wish we could have made 20 years ago." Smith said the backers of the Cascadia line have closely analyzed mistakes made by the other projects and have a good accounting of the potential pitfalls. "We have confidence we can deliver on this project," she said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: In a new blog post for the International Monetary Fund, four researchers presented their findings from a working paper that examines the current relationship between finance and tech as well as its potential future. Gazing into their crystal ball, the researchers see the possibility of using the data from your browsing, search, and purchase history to create a more accurate mechanism for determining the credit rating of an individual or business. They believe that this approach could result in greater lending to borrowers who would potentially be denied by traditional financial institutions. At its heart, the paper is trying to wrestle with the dawning notion that the institutional banking system is facing a serious threat from tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. The researchers identify two key areas in which this is true: Tech companies have greater access to soft-information, and messaging platforms can take the place of the physical locations that banks rely on for meeting with customers.

The concept of using your web history to inform credit ratings is framed around the notion that lenders rely on hard-data that might obscure the worthiness of a borrower or paint an unnecessarily dire picture during hard times. Citing soft-data points like "the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases" that could be incorporated into evaluating a borrower, the researchers believe that when a lender has a more intimate relationship with the potential client's history, they might be more willing to cut them some slack. [...] But how would all this data be incorporated into credit ratings? Machine learning, of course. It's black boxes all the way down. The researchers acknowledge that there will be privacy and policy concerns related to incorporating this kind of soft-data into credit analysis. And they do little to explain how this might work in practice.

Toyota is to slash worldwide vehicle production by 40% in September because of the global microchip shortage. The BBC reports: The world's biggest carmaker had planned to make almost 900,000 cars next month, but has now reduced that to 540,000 vehicles. Volkswagen, the world's second-biggest car producer, has warned it may also be forced to cut output further. Toyota's other rivals, including General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Daimler, BMW and Renault, have already scaled back production in the face of the global chip shortage. Until now, Toyota had managed to avoid doing the same, with the exception of extending summer shutdowns by a week in France the Czech Republic and Turkey.

New cars often include dozens of microchips but Toyota benefited from having built a larger stockpile of chips - also called semiconductors - as part of a revamp to its business continuity plan, developed in the wake of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami a decade ago. The decision to reduce output now has been precipitated by the resurgence of coronavirus cases across Asia hitting supplies. The company will make some cuts in August at its plants in Japan and elsewhere. The bulk of the cuts -- 360,000 -- will come in September and affect factories in Asia and the US. The aim for Toyota as a whole is to make up for any lost volume by the end of 2021.

Apple's Mac has long been an afterthought for the video game industry, and few think of Google as a games company -- despite running Android, one of the biggest game platforms in the world. But Google had a plan to change those things in October 2020, according to an explicitly confidential 70-page vision document dubbed "Games Futures." From a report: The "need-to-know" document, which was caught up in the discovery process when Epic Games hauled Apple into court, reveals a tentative five-year plan to create what Google dubbed "the world's largest games platform." Google imagined presenting game developers with a single place they can target gamers across multiple screens including Windows and Mac, as well as smart displays -- all tied together by Google services and a "low-cost universal portable game controller" that gamers can pair with any device, even a TV.

A fugitive who Justice Department officials say had scammed more than 20 people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars was sentenced to four years in prison on Friday, after being on the run for almost 15 years. From a report: Austrian authorities were able to identify Randy Levine, 54, of Boca Raton, Florida, due to a facial recognition system according to the DOJ, after he tried to use an alias to open a bank account, leading to his arrest in June 2020. Levine fled the US in 2005, after authorities seized his passport as part of an investigation into an alleged scam he had been running, the DOJ said in a release. According to Levine's plea agreement, which he signed in May, he would offer to set up gambling accounts for people if they sent him money. To help sell the idea that he really could help people make bets, Levine reportedly played a recording of casino sounds while he was on calls with victims (which he made using a Las Vegas phone number). Levine came under investigation by the FBI, but was able to get a replacement for the passport that law enforcement officials seized, by claiming the passport had simply been lost. He eventually ended up in Poland, where he was arrested in 2008. There was, however, a legal battle over whether he could be extradited to the US, which continued until late 2011. By the time Polish courts had decided that he could be extradited, Levine had already slipped away.

For those who don't think Zoom meetings are a good enough substitute for the real thing, Facebook has another idea: a virtual reality app that lets you and your coworkers feel like you're sitting around a table in a conference room. From a report: On Thursday, Facebook unveiled Horizon Workrooms, a free app for users of its Oculus Quest 2 headset, a device that starts at $299. The app stands out as the company's most ambitious effort yet to enable groups to socialize in VR and move the still niche medium beyond entertainment uses such as gaming. Workrooms allows up to 16 VR headset users to meet in a virtual conference room, with each of them represented by a customizable cartoon-like avatar that appears as just an upper body floating slightly above a virtual chair at a table. The app supports up to 50 participants in a single meeting, with the rest able to join as video callers who appear in a grid-like flat screen inside the virtual meeting room.

Headset-wearing meeting participants can use their actual fingers and hands to gesticulate in VR, and their avatars' mouths appear to move in lifelike ways while they speak. A virtual whiteboard lets people share pictures or make presentations. "The pandemic in the last 18 months has only given us greater confidence in the importance of this as a technology," Andrew Bosworth, VP of Facebook Reality Labs, said while addressing a (virtual) room of about a dozen people on Tuesday. He said Facebook has been using the app internally for about a year.

TikTok's plans to collect biometric identifiers from its users has prompted concern among U.S. lawmakers, who are demanding the company reveal exactly what information it collects and what it plans to do with that data. From a report: In a letter sent earlier this month addressed to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Thune, (R-SD) say they are "alarmed" by the recent change to TikTok's privacy policy, which allows the company to "automatically collect biometric data, including certain physical and behavioral characteristics from video content posted by its users."

TechCrunch first reported details of the new privacy policy back in June, when TikTok said it will seek "required permissions" to collect "faceprints and voiceprints" where required by law, but failed to elaborate on whether it's considering federal law, states laws, or both (only a handful of U.S. states have biometric privacy laws, including Illinois, Washington, California, Texas and New York). Klobuchar and Thune's letter asks TikTok to explicitly explain what constitutes a "faceprint" and "voiceprint," as well as to explain how this data will be used and how long it will be retained. The senators also quizzed TikTok on whether any data is gathered for users under the age of 18; whether it makes any inferences about its users based on the biometric data it collects; and to provide a list of all third parties that have access to the data.

More than 90 policy and rights groups around the world published an open letter on Thursday urging Apple to abandon plans for scanning children's messages for nudity and the phones of adults for images of child sex abuse. From a report: "Though these capabilities are intended to protect children and to reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material, we are concerned that they will be used to censor protected speech, threaten the privacy and security of people around the world, and have disastrous consequences for many children," the groups wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Reuters. The largest campaign to date over an encryption issue at a single company was organized by the U.S.-based nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). Some overseas signatories in particular are worried about the impact of the changes in nations with different legal systems, including some already hosting heated fights over encryption and privacy.

U.S. antitrust officials on Thursday refiled their monopoly lawsuit against Facebook, seeking to salvage the landmark case that a judge threw out in June. From a report: The Federal Trade Commission filed the new complaint in federal court in Washington, alleging that Facebook violated antitrust laws by buying Instagram and WhatsApp in order to eliminate them as competitors. The agency is trying to revive the case after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in June dismissed it, saying the agency failed to provide enough detail to support its claim that Facebook has a monopoly in the social-media market. Boasberg had given the FTC 30 days to fix the error and refile, and the commission won an extension until Aug. 19.

The Facebook case, first filed in December, presents an early test for FTC Chair Lina Khan, who was named head of the agency in June by President Joe Biden. Khan is a leading advocate for taking a more forceful antitrust stance against companies and is already taking steps to bolster the agency's authority. Facebook is seeking to bar Khan from participating in the case, arguing that her academic writing about the company and her work on the House antitrust panel, which investigated Facebook and other tech platforms, showed she is biased.

More owners of the first-generation Nest Hub are receiving the update to Google's Fuchsia operating system as it expands beyond the Preview program. 9to5Google reports: Back in May, Google formally released Fuchsia, its effort to develop a "not Linux" operating system from scratch, which has been years in the making. The first device to receive the new OS was Google's 2018 smart display, the Nest Hub -- not to be confused with the second generation Nest Hub with sleep tracking released earlier this year -- taking it permanently off of the existing Linux based "Cast OS" without negatively affecting the UI or experience. At the time, the rollout of Fuchsia was limited to a select few devices that were enrolled in the "Preview program" available to all devices via the Google Home app. Over time, the number of Nest Hubs running Fuchsia was expanded, with Google no doubt watching carefully for any issues with the upgrade.

Late last week, Google updated a support page to reflect that the Nest Hub has received a new firmware update for both the Preview program and all other devices. Specifically, the first-gen Nest Hub is now receiving firmware version 1.52.260996. Google confirmed to us that this update does indeed include the upgrade to Fuchsia. All goes well, this means in a matter of days, all first-gen Nest Hub devices in households around the world should be running Fuchsia.