TechCrunch reports: Countless popular websites including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, and news outlets CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC and Financial Times are currently facing an outage. A glitch at Fastly, a popular CDN provider, is thought to be the reason, according to a product manager at Financial Times. Fastly has confirmed it's facing an outage on its status website. Update: the issue has been resolved.

An unmanned aircraft successfully refueled a U.S. fighter jet in midair for the first time, officials said Monday. CBS News reports: A Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and a Boeing-made drone were briefly connected by a hose as the drone transferred jet fuel to the aircraft in the skies over the Midwest during Friday's test flight. During the flight, the Super Hornet approached the drone, known as a MQ-25 Stingray, from behind and were as close as 20 feet from each other, Boeing said. The hose extended from the drone, and the Super Hornet connected with the drogue at the end of the hose to receive the fuel. The Navy posted video of the test flight to Twitter.

For the first time, you can code, iterate and build apps on the iPad itself. 9to5Mac reports: Using Swift Playgrounds on iPadOS 15, customers will be able to create iPhone and iPad apps from scratch and then deploy them to the App Store. It remains to be seen how limited or not the development experience will be. It is probably notable that Apple chose not to rebrand this as "Xcode," signifying that you aren't going to be able to do everything you can do with Xcode on the Mac. TechCrunch highlights some of the other new features available in iPadOS 15: iPadOS 15 retains the overall look and feel of the current iPad operating system. The updates in the new OS are mostly centered around multitasking. The iPad's widget support gets a big update with iPadOS 15. The widgets are larger, more immersive and dynamic. And, iOS's App Library is finally available on the iPad, where it tweaks the overall user experience. The feature, added to the iPhone in 2020, presents the user with an organized view of the apps on the iPad.

Also added to iPadOS 15 is a new multitasking system. Called Split View, a drop-down menu at the top of the screen unlocks several multitasking, multiwindow options. The system seems much smoother than the current multiscreen option on iPad OS, which is clunky and hidden. With Split View a feature called Shelf makes it easy to switch between different screens and screen grouping.

prz writes: PGP just hit its 30th birthday. Before 1991, the average person had essentially no tools to communicate securely over long distances. That changed with PGP, which sparked the Crypto Wars of the 1990s. "Here we are, three decades later, and strong crypto is everywhere," writes PGP developer Phil Zimmermann in a blog post. "What was glamorous in the 1990s is now mundane. So much has changed in those decades. That's a long time in dog years and technology years. My own work shifted to end-to-end secure telephony and text messaging. We now have ubiquitous strong crypto in our browsers, in VPNs, in e-commerce and banking apps, in IoT products, in disk encryption, in the TOR network, in cryptocurrencies. And in a resurgence of implementations of the OpenPGP protocol. It would seem impossible to put this toothpaste back in the tube."

He continues: "Yet, we now see a number of governments trying to do exactly that. Pushing back against end-to-end encryption. [...] The need for protecting our right to a private conversation has never been stronger. Many democracies are sliding into populist autocracies. Ordinary citizens and grassroots political opposition groups need to protect themselves against these emerging autocracies as best as they can. If an autocracy inherits or builds a pervasive surveillance infrastructure, it becomes nearly impossible for political opposition to organize, as we can see in China. Secure communications is necessary for grassroots political opposition in those societies."

"It's not only personal freedom at stake. It's national security," says Zimmermann. "We must push back hard in policy space to preserve the right to end-end encryption."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announced that the social media company will wait until at least 2023 before taking a cut of revenue from creators who use the site to distribute their work or promote events. From a report: Specifically, the company will not take a cut of any revenue generated by paid online events, fan subscriptions, badges and Facebook's upcoming independent news product, Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook. Zuckerberg also used his post to jab at Apple, which kicks off its WWDC annual developers conference Monday. "When we do introduce a revenue share, it will be less than the 30% that Apple and others take," Zuckerberg wrote, referring to the cut Apple takes on all products sold through apps that users have downloaded through its App Store. "We're also launching a new payout interface so creators can see how different companies' fees and taxes are impacting their earnings."

One of the biggest new features of macOS Monterey, the next version of macOS announced at WWDC, is the ability to share a keyboard and mouse across an iMac, MacBook, and iPad. It's called "Universal Control" and it's coming this Fall. Ars Technica reports: Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi demonstrated the ability to simply set an iPad near a Mac, move the cursor of the latter toward the former, and have the iPad automatically recognize it. This means users can directly drag and drop files between devices, for instance. Apple demonstrated this feature across an iMac, MacBook, and iPad in concert. Beyond that, macOS Monterey will make it possible to AirPlay video, audio, documents, and other items from an iPad or iPhone directly to a Mac.

The update also brings the Shortcuts feature first seen on iPhones and iPads, allowing users to access automated tasks and workflows on the Mac. Apple says the existing Automator app will continue to be supported with Monterey and that users will be able to import existing Automator workflows into Shortcuts. Safari will also receive something of a makeover with Monterey, bringing a thinner and visually cleaner toolbar alongside more compact tabs. Active tab bars will now house the traditional URL and search bar, and tabs can now be grouped together and accessed through Safari's sidebar. These tab groups can then be accessed and updated across Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

The update will include a number of features from the newly announced iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 updates as well. This includes a SharePlay feature that lets users share content or their current device screen over a FaceTime call and a Focus feature that filters and minimizes notifications when users indicate they are in the middle of a particular activity ("coding," "gaming," etc.).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The latest Notepad++ release has removed support for Bing search from the app after the "tank man" fiasco Microsoft had to deal with on Friday afternoon. "Microsoft Bing is removed from Notepad++ settings for Search on Internet command, due to its poor reliability," the Notepad++ v8 announcement reads. Don Ho, the creator of Notepad++, one of the most popular open-source Notepad replacements, revealed on GitHub that the motivation behind this decision is Bing censoring results instead of doing "its job." "When a search engine does the censorship instead of its job, the search result loses its quality and it's not reliable anymore," Don Ho said in the GitHub commit removing Bing support. "Hence, Microsoft Bing is removed from Notepad++ for "Search on Internet" command." "While there was no immediate explanation to the problem, it is a widely known fact that China forces companies with businesses within its borders to abide by its censorship rules requiring to block references to China's 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protests," notes BleepingComputer. A Microsoft spokesperson said it was "due to an accidental human error."

In August 2020, China banned Notepad++ after Don Ho protested against China's human rights violations of the Uyghur people and the Hong Kong political unrest by releasing two versions dubbed 'Stand with Hong Kong' and 'Free Uyghur.'

AmiMoJo writes: Mozilla Ideas is a new platform by Firefox-maker Mozilla to improve communication with the Firefox userbase. At its core, Ideas works similarly to Uservoice and other services of its kind. Firefox users and developers may post new content on the platform, and everyone else may comment and vote on the idea. Users may access the latest, top voted, most discussed or even random topics on the Ideas platform. Current ideas include re-adding the compact interface option, improving the master password protection, or providing a higher contrast default theme.

Android and Windows users will finally be able to join FaceTime calls. From a report: During its WWDC keynote, Apple announced that FaceTime is going to be available on the web so users can call in from Android devices and Windows PCs. The video calling service was previously only available on iOS and Mac devices. Apple is turning FaceTime into a bit more of a Zoom-like video calling service with this update. FaceTime is also going to allow you to grab a link to a scheduled call, so that you can share it with people in advance and join in at the right time.

Lisa Hone, a longtime Federal Communications Commission attorney with deep expertise in broadband policy, has joined the National Economic Council team to steer the Biden administration's broadband expansion efforts. From a report: Expanding broadband internet service to all Americans is a top priority for the Biden White House. Hone's primary focus is ensuring that money Congress allocated through the American Rescue Plan Act is spent appropriately. The administration is trying to include broadband in infrastructure legislation, as the pandemic underscored the importance of reliable and affordable broadband connections to Americans' ability to participate in remote school, work, tele-health and e-commerce. Hone, who officially started her job as as senior adviser for broadband and technology policy last week, is now the White House's point person on broadband deployment efforts happening across the government.

Google's Stadia is heading to new devices. On Monday the search giant announced that it will begin rolling out the cloud-based video game service to its Chromecast with Google TV streaming stick as well as a handful of other Android TV-powered televisions and devices on June 23. From a report: Those devices include: Hisense U7G, U8G and U9G Android TVs, Nvidia Shield TV and Shield TV Pro, Walmart's Onn FHD Streaming Stick and UHD Streaming Device, Philips 8215, 8505 and OLED 935/805 Android TVs, and Xiaomi Mi Box 3 and Mi Box 4.

France's competition watchdog, L'Autorite de la concurrence, has fined Google up to $268M in a case related to self-preferencing within the adtech market which the watchdog found constituted an abuse by Google of a dominant position for ad servers for website publishers and mobile apps. From a report: L'Autorite began looking into Google's adtech business following complaints from a number of French publishers. Today it said Google had requested a settlement -- and is "not disputing the facts of the case" -- with the tech giant proposing certain 'interoperability' commitments that the regulator has accepted, and which will form a binding part of the decision. The watchdog called the action a world first in probing Google's complex algorithmic ad auctions.

Commenting in a statement, L'Autorite's president, Isabelle de Silva, said: "The decision sanctioning Google has a very special meaning because it is the first decision in the world to look into complex algorithmic processes. Auctions through which online display advertising works. The investigation, carried out particularly quickly, revealed the processes by which Google, relying on its considerable dominant position on ad servers for sites and applications, was favored over its competitors on both ad servers and SSP platforms. These very serious practices penalized competition in the emerging online advertising market, and have enabled Google not only to preserve but also to increase its dominant position. This sanction and these commitments will make it possible to restore a level playing field for all players, and the ability of publishers to make the most of their advertising space."

The U.S. Air Force wants to invest $38 million next year in projects under the heading "Rocket Cargo." Ars Technica reports that Air Force is already spending $9.7 million on the projects, "but seeks to increase that total for the coming year as it moves into the test phase of the program. The funds will have to be approved by Congress as part of its budget deliberation process this summer and fall."

The Air Force's 462-page budget-justifying document says their branch of the military "seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to develop the largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver Air Force cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity."

Although this does not refer to Starship by name, this is the only vehicle under development in the world with this kind of capability. The Air Force does not intend to invest directly into the vehicle's development, the document says. However, it proposes to fund science and technology needed to interface with the Starship vehicle so that the Air Force might leverage its capabilities. Clearly, some Air Force officials are intrigued by the possibility of launching 100 tons of cargo from the United States and having the ability to land it anywhere in the world about an hour later.

Today ZDNet's "Technically Incorrect" columnist Chris Matyszczyk discussed a new pop-up message that's now appearing in Windows 10's notification center.

It's warning Windows users that "Microsoft recommends different browser settings. Want to change them?" The notification adds that you'll get "Search that gives you back time and money." And "fast and secure search results with Bing." Oh, yes. Bing, the MySpace to Google's Facebook, is still being pushed.

I learned that this Bing-pushing is pushing Windows users' buttons. There's a little Reddit thread where you'll see laments such as: "You're not the first to have this Microsoft Annoyance. Apparently, there are thousands in front of you." The most poignant, perhaps, was this: "Miserably I get this despite using Edge AND having Bing set as my default search engine... (the latter of which for Microsoft Rewards). I think the 'problem' is that not ALL of my browsers had Bing as the default search engine? Which is ridiculous because I never use Chrome or Firefox anyway. But after clicking the popup, it ludicrously opened up all my browsers...."

What's most distressing is the lack of any attempt at charm or humor in these notifications. Are they all written by engineers? Or robots, perhaps...? Perhaps Microsoft believes that irritation works. Perhaps it simply has no better ideas to persuade anyone to try Bing.

And really, it's not as if Redmond is alone in pursuing this sort of communication. Why, I've even had Apple notifying me of its angry feelings whenever I open, oh, Microsoft Edge.

The EFF's senior staff attorney and their legal intern are warning that a bad copyright decision by a district court judge could lead many Americans to lose their internet access.

"In going after ISPs for the actions of just a few of their users, Sony Music, other major record labels, and music publishing companies have found a way to cut people off of the internet based on mere accusations of copyright infringement." When these music companies sued Cox Communications, an ISP, the court got the law wrong. It effectively decided that the only way for an ISP to avoid being liable for infringement by its users is to terminate a household or business's account after a small number of accusations — perhaps only two. The court also allowed a damages formula that can lead to nearly unlimited damages, with no relationship to any actual harm suffered.

If not overturned, this decision will lead to an untold number of people losing vital internet access as ISPs start to cut off more and more customers to avoid massive damages...

The district court agreed with Sony that Cox is responsible when its subscribers — home and business internet users — infringe the copyright in music recordings by sharing them on peer-to-peer networks. It effectively found that Cox didn't terminate accounts of supposedly infringing subscribers aggressively enough. An earlier lawsuit found that Cox wasn't protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) safe harbor provisions that protect certain internet intermediaries, including ISPs, if they comply with the DMCA's requirements. One of those requirements is implementing a policy of terminating "subscribers and account holders... who are repeat infringers" in "appropriate circumstances." The court ruled in that earlier case that Cox didn't terminate enough customers who had been accused of infringement by the music companies.

In this case, the same court found that Cox was on the hook for the copyright infringement of its customers and upheld the jury verdict of $1 billion in damages — by far the largest amount ever awarded in a copyright case.

The District Court got the law wrong... An ISP can be contributorily liable if it knew that a customer infringed on someone else's copyright but didn't take "simple measures" available to it to stop further infringement. Judge O'Grady's jury instructions wrongly implied that because Cox didn't terminate infringing users' accounts, it failed to take "simple measures." But the law doesn't require ISPs to terminate accounts to avoid liability. The district court improperly imported a termination requirement from the DMCA's safe harbor provision (which was already knocked out earlier in the case). In fact, the steps Cox took short of termination actually stopped most copyright infringement — a fact the district court simply ignored.

The district court also got it wrong on vicarious liability... [T]he court decided that because Cox could terminate accounts accused of copyright infringement, it had the ability to supervise those accounts. But that's not how other courts have ruled. For example, the Ninth Circuit decided in 2019 that Zillow was not responsible when some of its users uploaded copyrighted photos to real estate listings, even though Zillow could have terminated those users' accounts. In reality, ISPs don't supervise the Internet activity of their users. That would require a level of surveillance and control that users won't tolerate, and that EFF fights against every day.

The consequence of getting the law wrong on secondary liability here, combined with the $1 billion damage award, is that ISPs will terminate accounts more frequently to avoid massive damages, and cut many more people off from the internet than is necessary to actually address copyright infringement...
They also argue that the termination of accounts is "overly harsh in the case of most copyright infringers" — especially in a country where millions have only one choice for broadband internet access. "Being effectively cut off from society when an ISP terminates your account is excessive, given the actual costs of non-commercial copyright infringement to large corporations like Sony Music." It's clear that Judge O'Grady misunderstood the impact of losing Internet access. In a hearing on Cox's earlier infringement case in 2015, he called concerns about losing access "completely hysterical," and compared them to "my son complaining when I took his electronics away when he watched YouTube videos instead of doing homework."

"It's kind of embarrassing to say, but the social media app TikTok figured out I had ADHD before I did," writes 23-year-old Australian journalist Matilda Boseley in The Guardian.

"For 23 years my parents, my teachers, my doctor, my psychologist and my own brain all missed the warning signs, yet somehow it only took that app's algorithm a few days to accidentally diagnose me..." Growing up I had always had a nagging feeling that everyone else in the world was coping better than I was. Somehow they could remember appointments and deadlines, they had the discipline to keep an updated planner and they didn't drift off daydreaming in the middle of important conversations... I just felt like there were 10 TVs constantly switched on in my head, and with so much going on, all the small things would fall through the cracks. It wasn't until I downloaded TikTok that I truly considered I might have the disorder.

See, the app is based around the "for you" page which curates a stream of videos for you. It starts out pretty generic, but as you "like" some videos, and quickly scroll past others, the app's algorithm builds a profile of you and your interests. And that profile is scarily accurate sometimes. It genuinely knew me better than I knew myself. What I think happened is that the algorithm noticed that every time a video titled something like "Five little known signs of ADHD in women" showed up on my feed I would watch it, fascinated, all the way to the end.

So, like the dystopian capitalism machine it is, the app showed me more and more of these videos desperate to keep me on the app and extract every possible advertising cent my eyeballs could buy. But, as a side effect, all of a sudden I was seeing ADHD content made by women and for women, for the very first time. It was like someone putting everything that always felt weird in my brain into words. Forgetting something exists if you can't see it could be a problem with "object permanence". Being unable to stand up and tidy my apartment, despite desperately wanting to, might not be laziness; it could be "executive dysfunction". Suddenly it occurred to me, maybe I wasn't somehow just "worse at being a person" than everyone else. Maybe I simply didn't have enough dopamine in my brain. I can't overstate how liberating that felt.

So I booked a doctor's appointment, and three referrals, four months and about $700 later my new psychiatrist looked straight into the webcam and said: "Yes, I think you clearly have ADHD and you've had it for your whole life." I cried from joy when he said it.

Mental health experts told me it wasn't actually that surprising that hearing first-hand accounts of neurodivergence is what finally made the pin drop. In fact, Beyond Blue's lead clinical advisor Dr Grant Blashki said social media could be an extraordinarily powerful tool for increasing what the medical community refer to as "mental health literacy". In fact "learning you have ADHD on TikTok" is now such a common phenomenon that it's become its own meme on the app. There isn't any hard and fast data on the phenomenon but just from my own experience, since telling my friends about my diagnosis, no less than four people have come back to me saying they reckon they might have it too...

At the end of the day I am so grateful for TikTok, and the creators that make ADHD videos. That algorithm has profoundly changed my life, undoubtedly for the better.

The New York Times' "On Tech" newsletter observes that Microsoft releasing a new version of Windows is now "basically a nonevent."

"This shows technology has evolved from a succession of Big Bang moments to something so meshed into our lives that we often don't notice it." The last version of Windows as we knew it was arguably released in 2012. I was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal at the time, and my professional life that year was dominated by the unveiling of Windows 8 — including the anticipation, the strategy around it, and its eventual reception. But that was basically the end of an era. New releases of Windows since then have become progressively less major. A significant reason is that personal computers are no longer the center of our digital lives. A new iPhone model gets a lot of attention — although it shouldn't get so much — but a refresher to Windows doesn't.

Still, the supremacy of smartphones is an insufficient explanation. Windows beginning around 2015 began to get regularly tweaked under the hood — just like Netflix, Facebook, and every app on your smartphone as well as the software that runs the phone itself. In other words, Windows just changes in dribs and drabs all of the time without most people noticing. Instead of waiting years to get a fresh computer, we're effectively getting a new PC with every tweak. The new edition of Windows will remodel the look of the software and improve features like reordering apps. But because Microsoft incrementally revises Windows, new versions of the software matter less to most people.

This shift for Windows was part of a remarkable transformation at Microsoft. The company's obsession with Windows threatened to relegate Microsoft to tech irrelevancy. Then Microsoft hired a new chief executive in 2014, and suddenly Windows wasn't the beating heart of the company anymore. That shows just how much institutions can change.

But more than that, a Windows launch morphing from a big thing to something a professional tech writer didn't see coming reflects what technology has become. It's no longer strictly the shiny new object that comes out of a box every once in a while. Technology is all around us all the time, and it's perfectly normal.

Slashdot reader ochinko (user #19,311) shares The Register's report about a recent presentation by Google engineer Peter Hochschild. His team discovered machines with higher-than-expected hardware errors that "showed themselves sporadically, long after installation, and on specific, individual CPU cores rather than entire chips or a family of parts." The Google researchers examining these silent corrupt execution errors (CEEs) concluded "mercurial cores" were to blame CPUs that miscalculated occasionally, under different circumstances, in a way that defied prediction...The errors were not the result of chip architecture design missteps, and they're not detected during manufacturing tests. Rather, Google engineers theorize, the errors have arisen because we've pushed semiconductor manufacturing to a point where failures have become more frequent and we lack the tools to identify them in advance.

In a paper titled "Cores that don't count" [PDF], Hochschild and colleagues Paul Turner, Jeffrey Mogul, Rama Govindaraju, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, David Culler, and Amin Vahdat cite several plausible reasons why the unreliability of computer cores is only now receiving attention, including larger server fleets that make rare problems more visible, increased attention to overall reliability, and software development improvements that reduce the rate of software bugs. "But we believe there is a more fundamental cause: ever-smaller feature sizes that push closer to the limits of CMOS scaling, coupled with ever-increasing complexity in architectural design," the researchers state, noting that existing verification methods are ill-suited for spotting flaws that occur sporadically or as a result of physical deterioration after deployment.

Facebook has noticed the errors, too. In February, the social ad biz published a related paper, "Silent Data Corruption at Scale," that states, "Silent data corruptions are becoming a more common phenomena in data centers than previously observed...."

The risks posed by misbehaving cores include not only crashes, which the existing fail-stop model for error handling can accommodate, but also incorrect calculations and data loss, which may go unnoticed and pose a particular risk at scale. Hochschild recounted an instance where Google's errant hardware conducted what might be described as an auto-erratic ransomware attack. "One of our mercurial cores corrupted encryption," he explained. "It did it in such a way that only it could decrypt what it had wrongly encrypted."
How common is the problem? The Register notes that Google's researchers shared a ballpark figure "on the order of a few mercurial cores per several thousand machines similar to the rate reported by Facebook."

From today's edition of Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column: If you've been using open source software for any amount of time, then you're well aware of the tangled web of dependencies often involved in such projects. If not, there's any number of tools out there that explore just how interconnected everything is, and this week Google has jumped into the game with its own offering — an exploratory visualization site called Open Source Insights that gives users an interactive view of dependencies of open source projects.

Now, Google isn't the first to get into the game of trying to uncover and perhaps untangle the dizzying dependency graph of the open source world, but the company argues that it is more so trying to lay everything out in a way that developers can see, visually, just how, well, hopelessly screwed they really are.

"There are tools to help, of course: vulnerability scanners and dependency audits that can help identify when a package is exposed to a vulnerability. But it can still be difficult to visualize the big picture, to understand what you depend on, and what that implies," they write.

The Open Source Insights tool — currently "experimental" — gives users either a table or graphical visualization of how a project is composed, allowing them to explore the dependency graph and examine how using different versions of certain projects might actually affect that dependency graph. One of the benefits, Google notes, is that it allows users to see all this information "without asking you to install the package first. You can see instantly what installing a package — or an updated version — might mean for your project, how popular it is, find links to source code and other information, and then decide whether it should be installed."

Currently, the tool supports npm, Maven, Go modules, and Cargo, with more packaging systems on the way soon...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from AppleInsider: The new WebExtensions Community Group will try to forge a common architecture for future web extensions, and is inviting developers to join the effort. The new group, shortened WECG, consists of members from each of the major browser developers. Member chairs are held by Timothy Hatcher of Apple and Simeon Vincent of Google. Current participants include employees from Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft.

The WebExtensions Community Group has two goals: Make extension creation easier for developers by specifying a consistent model and common core of functionality, APIs, and permissions; and Outline an architecture that enhances performance and is even more secure and resistant to abuse. The group doesn't want to specify every aspect of the web extensions platform or stifle innovation. Each browser vendor will continue to operate independently with their own policies. Developers and browser vendors interested in contributing to the group can join via the W3C website. The WECG has a dedicated GitHub repository with the community charter and work.