Google says it has fixed a major Chrome OS bug that locked users out of their devices. Google's bulletin says that Chrome OS version 91.0.4472.165, which was briefly available this week, renders users unable to log in to their devices, essentially bricking them. From a report: Chrome OS automatically downloads updates and switches to the new version after a reboot, so users who reboot their devices are suddenly locked out them. The go-to advice while this broken update is out there is to not reboot. The bulletin says that a new build, version 91.0.4472.167, is rolling out now to fix the issue, but it could take a "few days" to hit everyone. Users affected by the bad update can either wait for the device to update again or "powerwash" their device -- meaning wipe all the local data -- to get logged in. Chrome OS is primarily cloud-based, so if you're not doing something advanced like running Linux apps, this solution presents less of an inconvenience than it would on other operating systems. Still, some users are complaining about lost data.

New submitter Goatbot writes: Another day another telco failure. Freedom Mobile repeatedly reassigned a customer's phone number. From the report: A Toronto-area woman says Freedom Mobile is still assigning her cell number to other people, even though she took the number with her when she moved to a new provider last year. Tsahai Carter, 22, made the switch last August. Since then, she says, on three separate occasions she's received phone calls and text messages intended for other people who'd been assigned the same number by Freedom Mobile. Carter, who lives north of Toronto in Markham, Ont., has also fielded phone calls from frustrated customers, wondering why someone else is getting their calls and messages. "They're getting mad at me for taking over their phone number, when really I had nothing to do with it," said Carter. "So it's a bit stressful." This isn't the first time Freedom Mobile customers have complained about a mix-up in phone numbers. In 2019, CBC reported on another customer who'd been given a number by Freedom Mobile that was still in use by someone else: a man who'd ported the number with him when he moved from Freedom to Fido.

Alphabet's Google will now show its search engine users more information about why it found the results they are shown, the company said on Thursday. From a report: It said people googling queries will now be able to click into details such as how their result matched certain search terms, in order to better decide if the information is relevant.

Many websites -- including banking pages, brokerages, and gaming services -- have been affected by what looks to be a major internet outage. From a report: As website owners and companies that run services that provide the backbone of the web scramble to solve the issue, consumers have been left unable to access services like Ally Bank, Fidelity, Sony's PlayStation Network, Airbnb, and more. Several airline sites are also having issues: Delta, British Airways, and Southwest's sites are all having major issues. At the moment, it's unclear what's causing the outage, though DownDetector reports that both AWS and Akamai, a pair of content delivery networks that host much of the internet, are both experiencing issues. Akamai's status page reports that the company is currently investigating an issue with its DNS service. Cloudflare's CEO has chimed in to say that its service isn't to blame.

A new video investigation by the Wall Street Journal finds the key to TikTok's success in how the short-video sharing app monitors viewing times. From a report: TikTok is known for the fiendishly effective way that it selects streams of videos tailored to each user's taste. The algorithm behind this personalization is the company's prize asset -- and, like those that power Google and Facebook, it's a secret. WSJ created a batch of individualized dummy accounts to throw at TikTok and test how it homed in on each fake persona's traits. TikTok responds most sensitively to a single signal -- how long a user lingers over a video. It starts by showing new users very popular items, and sees which catch their eyes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Threatpost: Researchers have released technical details on a high-severity privilege-escalation flaw in HP printer drivers (also used by Samsung and Xerox), which impacts hundreds of millions of Windows machines. If exploited, cyberattackers could bypass security products; install programs; view, change, encrypt or delete data; or create new accounts with more extensive user rights. The bug (CVE-2021-3438) has lurked in systems for 16 years, researchers at SentinelOne said, but was only uncovered this year. It carries an 8.8 out of 10 rating on the CVSS scale, making it high-severity.

According to researchers, the vulnerability exists in a function inside the driver that accepts data sent from User Mode via Input/Output Control (IOCTL); it does so without validating the size parameter. As the name suggests, IOCTL is a system call for device-specific input/output operations. "This function copies a string from the user input using 'strncpy' with a size parameter that is controlled by the user," according to SentinelOne's analysis, released on Tuesday. "Essentially, this allows attackers to overrun the buffer used by the driver." Thus, unprivileged users can elevate themselves into a SYSTEM account, allowing them to run code in kernel mode, since the vulnerable driver is locally available to anyone, according to the firm.

The printer-based attack vector is perfect for cybercriminals, according to SentinelOne, since printer drivers are essentially ubiquitous on Windows machines and are automatically loaded on every startup. "Thus, in effect, this driver gets installed and loaded without even asking or notifying the user," explained the researchers. "Whether you are configuring the printer to work wirelessly or via a USB cable, this driver gets loaded. In addition, it will be loaded by Windows on every boot. This makes the driver a perfect candidate to target since it will always be loaded on the machine even if there is no printer connected." Affected models and associated patches can be found here and here.

"While HP is releasing a patch (a fixed driver), it should be noted that the certificate has not yet been revoked at the time of writing," according to SentinelOne. "This is not considered best practice since the vulnerable driver can still be used in bring-your-own-vulnerable-driver (BYOVD) attacks." Some Windows machines may already have the vulnerable driver without even running a dedicated installation file, since it comes with Microsoft Windows via Windows Update.

Clubhouse announced Wednesday that it would end its waitlist and invite system, opening up to everyone. TechCrunch reports: Clubhouse is also introducing a real logo that will look familiar -- it's basically a slightly altered version of the waving emoji the company already used. Clubhouse will still hold onto its app portraits, introducing a new featured icon from the Atlanta music scene to ring in the changes. "The invite system has been an important part of our early history," Clubhouse founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth wrote in a blog announcement. They note that adding users in waves and integrating new users into the app's community through Town Halls and orientation sessions helped Clubhouse grow at a healthy rate without breaking, "but we've always wanted Clubhouse to be open."

According to new data SensorTower provided to TechCrunch, Clubhouse hit its high point in February at 9.6 million global downloads, up from 2.4 million the month prior. After that, things settled down a bit before perking back up in May when TikTok went live on Android through the Google Play Store. Since May, new Android users have accounted for the lion's share of the app's downloads. In June, Clubhouse was installed 7.7 million times across both iOS and Android -- an impressive number that's definitely in conflict with the perception that the app might not have staying power.

Clubhouse's success is a double-edged sword. The app's meteoric rise came as a surprise to the team, as meteoric rises often do. The social app is still a wild success by normal metrics in a landscape completely dominated by a handful of large, entrenched platforms, but it can be tricky to maintain healthy momentum after such high highs. Opening up the app to everybody should certainly help.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Federal Trade Commission unanimously voted Wednesday to pursue policies that will make it easier for people to repair their own things. In a vote of 5-0 during a Commission Meeting, the FTC agreed to adopt a policy paper outlining how it planned to enforce rules that keep manufacturers from restricting aftermarket repair. It plans to enforce existing warranty law, coordinate with state and local lawmakers to ensure open markets, and investigate the current repair monopolies for violations of antitrust law. The move comes just weeks after President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the commission to create right-to-repair rules.

The FTC policy paper outlined a five-pronged approach to the problem. First, it's asking for comments and complaints from the public about bad experiences it's had with repair issues and violated warranty. It's long been illegal under federal law for companies to void warranties based on aftermarket repairs. The problem is that those laws often aren't enforced, though the FTC did take some action on manufacturers who put warranty-void-if-removed stickers on their devices after Motherboard reported on the problem several years ago. "While current law does not provide for civil penalties or redress, the Commission will consider filing suit against violators of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act to seek appropriate injunctive relief," the policy paper said.

Next, the FTC said it will look over current repair restrictions for violations of existing antitrust and anti-competition laws. "Finally, the Commission will bring an interdisciplinary approach to this issue, using resources and expertise from throughout the agency to combat unlawful repair restrictions," the policy paper said. "The FTC will also closely coordinate with state law enforcement and policymakers to ensure compliance and to update existing law and regulation to advance the goal of open repair markets." "Manufacturers, be warned: It's time to clean up your act and let people fix their stuff," Nathan Proctor, U.S. PIRG Right to Repair Senior Campaign Director, told Motherboard in an email. "With unanimous support from commissioners, there's a new sheriff in town. The FTC is ready to act to stop many of the schemes used to undermine repair, while support is increasing for new legislation to further crack down."

Google is expanding the number of cities where Maps offers information about public transport crowding. The number of cities covered is increasing from around 200 today, to "over 10,000 transit agencies in 100 countries," the company says. As well as crowdedness, Google says Maps is also being updated to offer more information about past travel. From a report: Google Maps' crowdedness information originally launched pre-pandemic in 2019, but over the past year social distancing has made it more important than ever. Crowdedness information is generated from a mixture of historical location data, as well as self-reporting from Maps users on individual trains. Google says it anonymizes the location history data used. As well as expanding the crowdedness predictions to more cities, Google is also making them more granular in New York and Sydney. In these cities users will see how crowded individual train carriages are instead of just general crowding on the transit line. The feature works using data provided by transit agencies themselves, and Google says it plans to expand the capability to more cities soon.

Mobileye, the company that specializes in chips for vision-based autonomous vehicles, is now testing its AVs in New York City -- a difficult and rare move given the state's restrictions around such testing. The Verge reports: The announcement was made by Amnon Shashua, president and CEO of the Intel-owned company, at an event in the city on Tuesday. Shashua said the company is currently testing two autonomous vehicles in New York City, but plans to increase that number to seven "in the next few months." New York City has some of the most dangerous, congested, and poorly managed streets in the world. They are also chock-full of construction workers, pedestrians, bicyclists, and double- and sometimes even triple-parked cars. In theory, this would make it very difficult for an autonomous vehicle to navigate, given that AVs typically rely on good weather, clear signage, and less aggressive driving from other road users for safe operation. But Shashua said this was part of the challenge in deciding where to test Mobileye's vehicles.

"I think for a human it's very, very challenging to drive in New York City," Shashua said, "not to mention for a robotic car." While other states have become hot beds for AV testing, New York has been a bit of a ghost town. Part of the reason could be the state's strict rules, which include mandating that safety drivers keep their hands on the wheel at all times and requiring state police escort at all times to be paid for by the testing company. A spokesperson for Mobileye says the company has obtained a permit from the state to test its vehicles on public roads and is currently the only AV testing permit holder in the state. The spokesperson also said that police escorts were no longer required.

China has unveiled its new maglev train that's being touted as the fastest ground vehicle in the world with a maximum speed of 372 mph (600 kph). USA Today reports: The train uses electro-magnetic force, making it "float" so there is no contact between the rail and the body, Reuters reported. The debut of the super fast train could cut down time for people traveling from Beijing to Shanghai to only 2.5 hours. That's a distance of 754 miles and currently a 4.5-hour train ride on one of China's bullet trains. China's newest train is expected to be ready for commercial use within the next decade.

Venmo announced it's removing its global social feed on Tuesday, the payment appâ(TM)s notorious feature that allows strangers to potentially view payments you make and receive on Venmo. From a report: Now Venmo's social elements will be limited to your actual friends on the app in the "friends feed" without you having to toggle any features in the app. The company buried the change in a blog post detailing an update to the Venmo app. [...] Until recently, Venmo also offered users no control over who saw their friends list within the app, which is potentially incriminating in an entirely separate way from seeing the content of a transaction. After Buzzfeed News discovered President Biden's Venmo account and the accounts of people in his inner circle via the friends list, the company added additional privacy controls for the visibility of your Venmo contacts.

HAM radio operators in Florida have said that Cuba is jamming radio frequencies that prevent them from communicating with operators in the country since anti-government protests began last week. Now, the Federal Communications Commission says it has started an investigation into the issue. From a report: "Too many people around the world are fighting uphill battles to be able to use technology to expand economic opportunity, express themselves, and organize without fear of reprisal," an FCC Spokesperson told Motherboard. "The FCC is committed to supporting the free flow of information and ensuring that the internet remains open for everyone. We are assessing these reports in conjunction with our field agents and communicating with the Department of State as this issue develops." The Cuban government has notoriously controlled communications on the island; until recently there was little internet connectivity in the country and during the protests the government has taken steps to shut down the internet. Cuban exiles living in Florida and other parts of the country often use HAM radio to talk to the mainland.

President Joe Biden plans to nominate Jonathan Kanter as head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, Bloomberg Law reported Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the matter, the latest sign that the administration is preparing a broad crackdown on large technology companies. From the report: Kanter, who left one of the country's biggest law firms last year to start his own firm, is a long-time foe of Alphabet's Google, representing companies that have pushed antitrust enforcers to sue the search giant.

DuckDuckGo is launching a new email privacy service meant to stop ad companies from spying on your inbox. From a report: The company's new Email Protection feature gives users a free "@duck.com" email address, which will forward emails to your regular inbox after analyzing their contents for trackers and stripping any away. DuckDuckGo is also extending this feature with unique, disposable forwarding addresses, which can be generated easily in DuckDuckGo's mobile browser or through desktop browser extensions.

The personal DuckDuckGo email is meant to be given out to friends and contacts you know, while the disposable addresses are better served when signing up for free trials, newsletters, or anywhere you suspect might sell your email address. If the email address is compromised, you can easily deactivate it. These tools are similar to anti-tracking features implemented by Apple in iOS 14 and iOS 15, but DuckDuckGo's approach integrates into iOS, Android, and all major web browsers. DuckDuckGo will also make it easier to spin up disposable email addresses on the fly, for newsletters or anywhere you might share your email.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this week, I bought a month of Starz for a fraction of its typical asking price. Instead of paying $9 per month, I paid $3.24. Then I added a subscription to Spotify for $3.49, and a Disney Plus subscription for just $3. All told, my bill comes to about $10 per month for $28 worth of services. Those cut-rate subscriptions come courtesy of Together Price, a service that lets people rent out access to a share of their digital subscriptions. In exchange for a cut of each transaction, Together Price essentially serves as a marketplace for organized password sharing. The service, which started five years ago in Europe and has 80,000 paying customers, just launched in the U.S. last week.

While Together Price isn't the first service to make password sharing easier, it's definitely the most brazen. Still, CEO Marco Taddei insists that the service is legal and that it technically honors each subscription's terms of use. He also believes the service is helping companies retain users that they'd otherwise lose. "We are targeting the very specific audience that needs to share," he says. "If [subscription providers] are not going to allow them do so so, they are going to drop the subscriptions." After signing up for Together Price, you can browse a "network" of users offering to share their subscriptions. Most major streaming video and music services are available, including Netflix, Spotify, Disney Plus, HBO Max, and Hulu, but sharing isn't limited to media. Some users are also peddling subscriptions to software tools such as Canva Pro and Surfshark VPN, and the site lets you set up custom subscriptions for pretty much anything by listing the service name, price, and sharing rules. For each service, you send a request to the subscription owner and submit credit card information to Together Price. Once the owner accepts the request, Together Price processes the payment, and you're allowed into a group where you can view login details and chat with the other members.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: [Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata] along with those at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur decided to focus on developing something that is harder than conventional self-healing material, as reported by The Telegraph India. The researchers used a piezoelectric organic material, which converts mechanical energy to electrical energy and vice versa, to make needle-shaped crystals that aren't more than 2 mm long or 0.2 mm wide, according to the experimental results which were published in the journal Science. Due to their molecular arrangement in the specially designed crystals, a strong attractive force developed between two surfaces. Every time a fracture occurred, the attractive forces joined the pieces back again, without needing an external stimulus such as heat or others that most self-healing materials would need.

"Our self-healing material is 10 times harder than others, and it has a well-ordered internal crystalline structure, that is favored in most electronics and optical applications," lead researcher Professor Chilla Malla Reddy of IISER said. "I can imagine applications for an everyday device," said Bhanu Bhushan Khatua, a member of the team from IIT Kharagpur." Such materials could be used for mobile phone screens that will repair themselves if they fall and develop cracks."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: iFixit co-founder and CEO Kyle Wiens has exposed how companies including Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft manipulate the design of their products and the supply chain to prevent consumers and third-party repairers from accessing necessary tools and parts to repair products such as smartphones and laptops. Speaking during the Productivity Commission's virtual right to repair public hearing on Monday, Weins took the opportunity to draw on specific examples of how some of the largest tech companies are obstructing consumers from a right to repair.

"We've seen manufacturers restrict our ability to buy parts. There's a German battery manufacturer named Varta that sells batteries to a wide variety of companies. Samsung happens to use these batteries in their Galaxy earbuds ... but when we go to Varta and say can we buy that part as a repair part, they'll say 'No, our contract with Samsung will not allow us to sell that.' We're seeing that increasingly," he said. "Apple is notorious for doing this with the chips in their computers. There's a particular charging chip on the MacBook Pro ... there is a standard version of the part and then there's the Apple version of the part that sits very slightly tweaked, but it's tweaked enough that it's only required to work in this computer, and that company again is under contractual requirement with Apple."

He continued, highlighting that a California-based recycler was contracted by Apple to recycle spare parts that were still in new condition. "California Apple stops providing service after seven years, so this was at seven years and Apple have warehouses full of spare parts, and rather than selling that out in the marketplace -- so someone like me who eagerly would've bought them -- they were paying the recycler to destroy them," Wiens said. Weins also pointed to an example involving a Microsoft Surface laptop. "[iFixit] rated it on our repairability score, we normally rate products from one to 10; the Surface laptop got a zero. It had a glued-in battery ... we had to actually cut our way into the product and destroyed it in the process of trying to get inside," he said.

A new study argues crappy U.S. broadband is an active policy choice -- and a direct result of pathetically weak U.S. lobbying and corporate finance laws. From a report: Over the last few years big internet service providers have killed net neutrality, eliminated most FCC oversight of broadband providers, derailed efforts to pass meaningful privacy rules, and thwarted a wide variety of proposals designed to deliver faster, cheaper fiber broadband competition. A new joint study by Common Cause and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union found that the telecom industry spent $234 million on lobbying during the 116th Congress alone, or nearly $230,000 a day. Comcast was the biggest spender at more than $43 million, with AT&T not far behind at $36 million. "The powerful ISP lobby will seemingly spend whatever it takes to keep politicians beholden to them and maintain a status quo that leaves too many Americans on the wrong side of the digital divide," the groups said.

It's a game that encourages people to 'get a life' -- build a house, make a Sim and fulfil their dreams. So why are so many players intent on murder? From a report: The Sims has far evolved from its humble beginnings in 2000, where you created characters and tended to their needs, like a slightly more demanding Tamagotchi. As the games became more advanced, The Sims provided opportunities for the lives of your characters to more closely mirror reality: they now have lifetime goals and desires, can feel disappointment and joy, and now even do their own laundry. But whether they live a rich and fulfilling life, or an existence defined by endless suffering, the Sims' destiny is entirely in your hands. Of course many players choose not to be benevolent Gods in the Sims world -- and instead aim to kill and torture as many Sims as possible. Death has hugely evolved over 21 years of gameplay; we're no longer just sticking Sims in a swimming pool and selling a ladder to watch them drown. Instead, we're watching them explode in rocket ships, choke on pufferfish or even be eaten by the 'Cowplant' -- a mutant Venus flytrap with a cow head for a face.

"The Sims see you controlling a little society, but that doesn't mean you're making it better. It reminds me of Bruce Almighty, where the role of God is handed over but that doesn't necessarily mean that's strictly a good thing. It's rather therapeutic just killing Sims, and being quite an irresponsible God," 26-year-old Dubliner RTGame (real name Daniel), who has 2.6 million subscribers on YouTube says. "I feel like a kid with a magnifying glass on the small ants. It sounds quite twisted but it's quite fun to do things like that in games like The Sims to see what happens. But yes, I do have a lot of Sims blood on my hands." He's far from alone. While many in the Sims streaming community focus their content on cutesy legacy-style playthroughs or intricate design challenges, there's an increasing interest in more boundary-pushing content. RTGame credits the popularity of his bizarre Sims series for helping him jump into streaming as a full-time career, while other YouTubers such as CallMeKevin and Plumbella count speed runs where they kill entire neighbourhoods among some of their most viewed content.