An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Australia has declared its national broadband network (NBN) is "built and fully operational," ending a saga that stretches back to the mid-2000s. Minister for communications, cyber safety and the arts Paul Fletcher declared the build complete in a Wednesday statement that admitted 35,000 premises remain unable to connect to the network, but seeing as that number was over 100,000 in August 2020 and over 11.86 million premises have been wired, he's happy to say the job's been done.

The statement also pointed out that legislation governing the NBN build requires a declaration the job is done before December 31st. "New premises are being built all the time," the minister said. "This means that there will always be a number of premises around Australia that are not yet 'ready to connect.' The fact that there is a certain number of premises which are not ready to connect is not of itself evidence that the network cannot be treated as 'built and fully operational.'" Thus ends a saga that began in the mid-2000s when Australia figured out that ubiquitous broadband access was a good idea. Dominant telco Telstra proposed to build the network and operate as both a wholesaler to rivals and a retailer, but as that arrangement had stifled competition for years the government of the day wasn't keen on the idea. At the 2007 election the left-of-center Australian Labor Party swept to power in part due to its plans to build a fast national broadband network. That promise evolved into a commitment to build a fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network...

France's top administrative court has backed privacy campaigners by imposing a ban on police use of drones for covering public protests in Paris. The BBC reports: The Council of State said Paris police prefect Didier Lallement should halt "without delay" drone surveillance of gatherings on public roads. The ruling comes weeks after MPs backed a controversial security bill that includes police use of drones. Its main aim is to regulate how people share film or photos of police.

Privacy rights group La Quadrature du Net (LQDN) has argued that the bill's main measures violate freedom of expression and that drones equipped with cameras cannot keep the peace but track individuals instead. The Council of State ruled there was "serious doubt over the legality" of drones without a prior text authorizing and setting out their use. LQDN said the only way the government could legalize drone surveillance now was in providing "impossible proof" that it was absolutely necessary to maintain law and order. The decision is the second setback in months for Parisian authorities' drone plans. In May, the same court ruled that drones could not be used in the capital to track people in breach of France's strict lockdown rules.

On Tuesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he considered selling his electric car company to Apple in recent years, but Apple CEO Tim Cook was not even interested in taking a meeting. CNBC reports: Specifically, Musk wrote in a tweet on December 22: "During the darkest days of the Model 3 program, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value). He refused to take the meeting." It was a rare admission from the mercurial CEO that he once considered giving up control of the company he helped build and take to a market value that's more than the top nine automakers combined. Tesla has not discussed a sale in any financial filing.

On Tuesday, Musk also made remarks about lithium iron phosphate batteries that Apple is reportedly developing for use in vehicles, per a Reuters report on Monday. "Strange, if true," Musk wrote. "Tesla already uses iron-phosphate for medium range cars made in our Shanghai factory.- A monocell is electrochemically impossible, as max voltage is ~100X too low. Maybe they meant cells bonded together, like our structural battery pack?"

The Wall Street Journal: To keep customers happy, which Mr. Bezos has long said is Amazon's fixation and growth strategy, executives behind the scenes have methodically waged targeted campaigns against rivals and partners alike -- an approach that has changed little through the years, from diapers to footwear. No competitor is too small to draw Amazon's sights. It cloned a line of camera tripods that a small outside company sold on Amazon's site, hurting the vendor's sales so badly it is now a fraction of its original size, the little firm's owner said. Amazon said it didn't violate the company's intellectual-property rights. When Amazon decided to compete with furniture retailer Wayfair, Mr. Bezos's deputies created what they called the Wayfair Parity Team, which studied how Wayfair procured, sold and delivered bulky furniture, eventually replicating a majority of its offerings, said people who worked on the team. Amazon and Wayfair declined to comment on the matter.

Amazon set its sights on Allbirds, the maker of popular shoes using natural and recycled materials, and last year launched a shoe called Galen that looks nearly identical to Allbirds' bestseller -- without the environmentally friendly materials and selling for less than half the price. "You can't help but look at a trillion-dollar company putting their muscle and their pockets and their machinations of their algorithms and reviewers and private-label machine all behind something that you've put your career against," said Allbirds Co-CEO Joey Zwillinger. "You have this giant machine creating all these headwinds for us." This year, Amazon has zeroed in on Shopify, a fast-growing Canadian company that helps small merchants create online shops. Amazon has established a secret team, "Project Santos," to replicate parts of Shopify's business model, said people familiar with the project. Amazon executives often initiated efforts like these on their own, though in some cases examined by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bezos himself was involved, according to former Amazon executives and internal emails.

From its start as an online bookstore 26 years ago, Amazon has expanded into an online retailer with a presence in nearly every major category. It is also the leading provider of cloud-computing services, a gadget maker, a major entertainment player and a rival to United Parcel Service and FedEx. Mr. Bezos is the world's richest man, with a net worth Forbes estimates at $187 billion. He still exhorts employees to consider Amazon a startup. "It is always day one," he likes to say. Day two is "stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death." Mr. Bezos originally considered calling his company Relentless, and www.relentless.com still redirects to Amazon's site.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a bill Tuesday suspending the use of facial recognition and other kinds of biometric technology in schools in New York, also directing a study of whether its use is appropriate in schools. The legislation places a moratorium on schools purchasing and using biometric identifying technology until at least July 1, 2022 or until the report is completed and the state Education Department commissioner authorizes its use. The rule applies to both public and private schools in New York.

In a statement, ACLU said. "This is a victory for student privacy and students of color, who are disproportionately harmed by this flawed and biased technology. New York has led the way, and now other states should follow."

Digital rights group Fight for the Future has unveiled an open letter signed by 2,000 parents calling on McGraw-Hill Publishing to end its relationship with Proctorio, one of many proctoring apps that offers services that digital rights groups have called "indistinguishable from spyware." From a report: As the pandemic has pushed schooling into virtual classrooms, a host of software vendors have stepped up to offer their latest surveillance tools. Some, like Proctorio, offer technologies that claim to fight cheating by tracking head and eye movements, without any evidence that their algorithms do anything but make students anxious (and thus perform worse). Others rely on facial recognition technology, which is itself rife with racial bias, and have regularly failed to verify the identities of students of color at various points while taking state bar exams, forcing the test to end.

Proctorio is one of a few companies that has come under scrutiny from privacy groups not only for invasive surveillance, but exhaustive data extraction that collects sensitive student data including biometrics. The company is perhaps unique in its attempts to silence critics of its surveillance programs. Proctorio has deployed lawsuits to silence critics, forcing one University of British Columbia learning technology specialist to exhaust his personal and emergency savings due to a lawsuit meant to silence his online criticisms of the company. Proctorio has also targeted students and abused Twitter's DMCA takedown process to further suppress valid criticisms of its proctoring software. Further reading: Proctoring Software Company Used DMCA To Take Down a Student's Critical Tweets; and Cheating-Detection Software Provokes 'School-Surveillance Revolt'.

Small advertisers that rely on Facebook to spread marketing messages are up in arms over the social network's automated ad systems, complaining that inflexible account blocking tools and a lack of customer assistance are hurting business. From a report: One digital marketer, Chris Raines, was setting up an advertising campaign on Facebook last week when his account abruptly stopped working. Raines uses his account to manage ads for clients' Facebook Pages. Without it, he couldn't do his job. The lockout was a nuisance, but then Raines noticed something more concerning: A $3,000-per-day ad campaign that he'd set up for a client before his account was locked continued to run even though he could no longer manage it. Raines was spending his client's money without any way to control how.

Raines tried to confirm his identity using Facebook's automated systems, but received an error message. Eventually, he called the advertiser and asked if they would make his wife an administrator to the company-owned Facebook Page. Using her account, he was finally able to log in and manage the Facebook ads, which includes adjusting details like who sees the ad and how much to spend. "The actual injury, especially for advertisers and marketers, is immense," said Raines, who runs a digital media company called Bullhorn Media. "Had I not had that workaround, my business would have went away."

Tech giants, including Microsoft and Google, have joined Facebook's legal battle against hacking company NSO, filing an amicus brief in federal court that warned the Israeli firm's tools were "powerful, and dangerous." From a report: The brief, filed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, opens up a new front in Facebook's lawsuit against NSO, which it filed last year after it was revealed that the cyber surveillance firm had exploited a bug in Facebook-owned instant messaging program WhatsApp to help surveil more than 1,400 people worldwide. NSO has argued that because it sells digital break-in tools to police and spy agencies, it should benefit from "sovereign immunity" -- a legal doctrine that generally insulates foreign governments from lawsuits. NSO lost that argument in the Northern District of California in July and has since appealed to the Ninth Circuit to have the ruling overturned. Microsoft, Alphabet-owned Google, Cisco, Dell Technologies-owned VMWare, and the Washington-based Internet Association joined forces with Facebook to argue against that, saying that awarding sovereign immunity to NSO would lead to a proliferation of hacking technology and "more foreign governments with powerful and dangerous cyber surveillance tools."

Facebook and Google agreed to "cooperate and assist one another" if they ever faced an investigation into their pact to work together in online advertising, according to an unredacted version of a lawsuit filed by 10 states against Google last week. From a report: The suit, as filed, cites internal company documents that were heavily redacted. The Wall Street Journal reviewed part of a recent draft version of the suit without redactions, which elaborated on findings and allegations in the court documents. Ten Republican attorneys general, led by Texas, are alleging that the two companies cut a deal in September 2018 in which Facebook agreed not to compete with Google's online advertising tools in return for special treatment when it used them. Google used language from "Star Wars" as a code name for the deal, according to the lawsuit, which redacted the actual name. The draft version of the suit says it was known as "Jedi Blue." The lawsuit itself said Google and Facebook were aware that their agreement could trigger antitrust investigations and discussed how to deal with them, in a passage that is followed by significant redactions. The draft version spells out some of the contract's provisions, which state that the companies will "cooperate and assist each other in responding to any Antitrust Action" and "promptly and fully inform the Other Party of any Governmental Communication Related to the Agreement." In the companies' contract, "the word [REDACTED] is mentioned no fewer than 20 times," the lawsuit says. The unredacted draft fills in the word: Antitrust.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Firefox 85, scheduled to be released next month, in January 2021, will ship with a feature named Network Partitioning as a new form of anti-tracking protection. The feature is based on "Client-Side Storage Partitioning," a new standard currently being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium's Privacy Community Group. "Network Partitioning is highly technical, but to simplify it somewhat; your browser has many ways it can save data from websites, not just via cookies," privacy researcher Zach Edwards told ZDNet in an interview this week. "These other storage mechanisms include the HTTP cache, image cache, favicon cache, font cache, CORS-preflight cache, and a variety of other caches and storage mechanisms that can be used to track people across websites." Edwards says all these data storage systems are shared among websites.

The difference is that Network Partitioning will allow Firefox to save resources like the cache, favicons, CSS files, images, and more, on a per-website basis, rather than together, in the same pool. This makes it harder for websites and third-parties like ad and web analytics companies to track users since they can't probe for the presence of other sites' data in this shared pool. The Mozilla team expects [...] performance issues for sites loaded in Firefox, but it's willing to take the hit just to improve the privacy of its users.

Yesterday, Elon Musk told Twitter followers that Tesla's Full Self-Driving subscription rollout will arrive "early next year." Engadget reports: In theory, you could add the autonomous (currently semi-autonomous) features without a steep up-front cost in a matter of months. You might not want to plan your schedule around that timetable. Tesla previously hoped to offer a Full Self-Driving subscription by the end of 2020, and that's clearly not happening.

Whenever the monthly plan arrives, it could be key to boosting adoption. If you lease your Tesla, you might not have to pay as much to use Full Self-Driving for the useful life of your EV. It could also give you an opportunity to try the features as long as you like without committing to a full purchase. It's safe to say the usual $10,000 price (as of this writing) is daunting if you're not completely sold on the technology.

An algorithm determining which Stanford Medicine employees would receive its 5,000 initial doses of the COVID-19 vaccine included just seven medical residents / fellows on the list, according to a December 17th letter sent from Stanford Medicine's chief resident council. The Verge reports: Stanford Medicine leadership has since apologized and promised to re-evaluate the plan. "We take complete responsibility for the errors in the execution of our vaccine distribution plan," a Stanford Medicine spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. "Our intent was to develop an ethical and equitable process for distribution of the vaccine. We apologize to our entire community, including our residents, fellows, and other frontline care providers, who have performed heroically during our pandemic response. We are immediately revising our plan to better sequence the distribution of the vaccine." The residents' letter also alleges that the error in the algorithm was found on Tuesday but that leadership opted not to make changes to the plan ahead of its December 17th release.

The initial plan led to demonstrations from medical staff in addition to the letter sent by the chief resident council. Here's how the algorithm reportedly worked, according to NPR: "According to an email sent by a chief resident to other residents, Stanford's leaders explained that an algorithm was used to assign its first allotment of the vaccine. The algorithm was said to have prioritized those health care workers at highest risk for COVID infections, along with factors like age and the location or unit where they work in the hospital. Residents apparently did not have an assigned location, and along with their typically young age, they were dropped low on the priority list."

According to Reuters, Apple is moving forward with self-driving car technology and is targeting 2024 to produce a passenger vehicle that could include its own breakthrough battery technology. From the report: The iPhone maker's automotive efforts, known as Project Titan, have proceeded unevenly since 2014 when it first started to design its own vehicle from scratch. At one point, Apple drew back the effort to focus on software and reassessed its goals. Doug Field, an Apple veteran who had worked at Tesla Inc, returned to oversee the project in 2018 and laid off 190 people from the team in 2019. Since then, Apple has progressed enough that it now aims to build a vehicle for consumers, two people familiar with the effort said, asking not to be named because Apple's plans are not public. Apple's goal of building a personal vehicle for the mass market contrasts with rivals such as Alphabet Inc's Waymo, which has built robo-taxis to carry passengers for a driverless ride-hailing service.

Central to Apple's strategy is a new battery design that could "radically" reduce the cost of batteries and increase the vehicle's range, according to a third person who has seen Apple's battery design. [...] As for the car's battery, Apple plans to use a unique "monocell" design that bulks up the individual cells in the battery and frees up space inside the battery pack by eliminating pouches and modules that hold battery materials, one of the people said. Apple's design means that more active material can be packed inside the battery, giving the car a potentially longer range. Apple is also examining a chemistry for the battery called LFP, or lithium iron phosphate, the person said, which is inherently less likely to overheat and is thus safer than other types of lithium-ion batteries. [...]

Two people with knowledge of Apple's plans warned pandemic-related delays could push the start of production into 2025 or beyond. Apple has decided to tap outside partners for elements of the system, including lidar sensors, which help self-driving cars get a three-dimensional view of the road, two people familiar with the company's plans said. Apple's car might feature multiple lidar sensors for scanning different distances, another person said. Some sensors could be derived from Apple's internally developed lidar units, that person said. Apple's iPhone 12 Pro and iPad Pro models released this year both feature lidar sensors.

T-Mobile has been asked to stop advertising its 5G network as more reliable than the competition by the National Advertising Review Board (NARB), which investigated T-Mobile's claims made primarily in an ad featuring celebrity scientist Bill Nye after complaints from Verizon earlier this year. From a report: But the NARB also says T-Mobile shouldn't have to mention the speed of its network when broadly discussing coverage superiority in future ads. T-Mobile has said it will comply with the recommendation. But it cast the recommendations as a partial win in a statement saying it "appreciates that the panel agreed that T-Mobile can continue to advertise its superior 5G coverage without qualification." T-Mobile's compliance is notable because telecom giants don't have to follow the recommendations offered by the NARB, which, as a self-regulatory body under the umbrella of a nonprofit organization, has no governmental regulatory power. For instance, AT&T flatly ignored a request it stop using its misleading "5G E" logo to reference a superior form of 4G.

Browser makers Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, have banned a root certificate that was being used by the Kazakhstan government to intercept and decrypt HTTPS traffic for residents in the country's capital, the city of Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana). From a report: The certificate had been in use since December 6, 2020, when Kazakh officials forced local internet service providers to block Nur-Sultan residents from accessing foreign sites unless they had a specific digital certificate issued by the government installed on their devices. While users were able to access most foreign-hosted sites, access was blocked to sites like Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Netflix, unless they had the certificate installed. Kazakh officials justified their actions claiming they were carrying out a cybersecurity training exercise for government agencies, telecoms, and private companies. Officials cited that cyberattacks targeting "Kazakhstan's segment of the internet" grew 2.7 times during the current COVID-19 pandemic as the primary reason for launching the exercise. The government's explanation did, however, make zero technical sense, as certificates can't prevent mass cyber-attacks and are usually used only for encrypting and safeguarding traffic from third-party observers. After today's ban, even if users have the certificate installed, browsers like Chrome, Edge, Mozilla, and Safari, will refuse to use them, preventing Kazakh officials from intercepting user data.

After months of deliberation, congressional leaders reached a $900 billion coronavirus relief deal on Sunday, including billions in funding for broadband internet access. From a report: Congress' latest relief measure provides $7 billion in funding for broadband connectivity and infrastructure. That figure includes $3.2 billion for a $50-per-month emergency broadband benefit for people who are laid off or furloughed during the pandemic, according to a press release from Sen. Ron Wyden's (D-OR) office on Sunday. "Broadband connections are essential for Americans seeking to get new jobs, and to access school, health care and other government services," Wyden said in a statement Sunday night. "Ensuring working families can stay online will pay massive dividends for kids' education, helping people find jobs and jump starting the economic recovery next year."

The military news site Task and Purpose reports: The U.S. military's youngest branch, the Space Force, just trounced its sibling services, as well the United Kingdom's military, in the second annual Call of Duty Endowment Bowl.

The transatlantic Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War tournament pit eight teams from the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Marine Corps, along with the British Army, Royal Navy, and Royal Air Force, against each other. Each team was captained by a civilian gamer and popular streamer who offered guidance and tips to players in real-time as they vied for the top spot...

The tournament was put on by the Call of Duty Endowment, which has placed more than 77,000 veterans into full-time jobs since its inception in 2009. This year alone, the endowment placed 11,000 veterans in jobs amidst the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

"Space Force isn't even a year old so this may have been their very first win in anything competitive against any of the other services," Dan Goldenberg, the endowment's executive director said during the event, according to Business Insider. "So it's a heck of a great way to start off their history."

This week Google "quietly acquired a company called Neverware Inc. that sells software to transform old personal computers and Macs into Chromebook devices," reports SiliconANGLE: The acquisition was announced by Neverware on Twitter, and Google later confirmed the news in a statement. Google had taken part in the company's Series B funding round three years ago.

Neverware's software is called CloudReady OS, and though it's primarily aimed at schools and enterprises that want to transform fleets of machines into Chromebooks, there's also a free Home edition that anyone can use... Google's plan is to make CloudReady an official product. "We can confirm that the Neverware team is joining the Google Chrome OS team," Google said in a statement.

The MacRumors site writes: Facebook's recent criticism directed at Apple over an upcoming tracking-related privacy measure is "laughable," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit organization that defends civil liberties in the digital world.

Facebook has claimed that Apple's new opt-in tracking policy will hurt small businesses who benefit from personalized advertising, but the EFF believes that Facebook's campaign against Apple is really about "what Facebook stands to lose if its users learn more about exactly what it and other data brokers are up to behind the scenes," noting that Facebook has "built a massive empire around the concept of tracking everything you do...." According to the EFF, a number of studies have shown that most of the money made from targeted advertising does not reach app developers, and instead goes to third-party data brokers like Facebook, Google, and lesser-known firms.

"Facebook touts itself in this case as protecting small businesses, and that couldn't be further from the truth," the EFF said. "Facebook has locked them into a situation in which they are forced to be sneaky and adverse to their own customers. The answer cannot be to defend that broken system at the cost of their own users' privacy and control."
"This is really about who benefits from the normalization of surveillance-powered advertising..." argues the EFF. And they ultimately come down in support of Apple's new privacy changes.

"Here, Apple is right and Facebook is wrong."

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. military's Space Force branch celebrated its one-year anniversary Friday by announcing that its members would now be known as "guardians". But the name was not universally greeted with respect and appreciation. Gizmodo announced the news with a headline which read "Space Force Personnel Will Be Called 'Guardians' Because Sure, Whatever," in an article which jokingly asks how this will affect the other ranks of this branch of the military. "Does someone get promoted from Guardian to Sentinel to Space Paladin to Tython, The Secessionist King Of Mars or something?" (Their article also suggests other names the U.S. military could have considered — like "moon buddies" or "rocketeers" — even at one point proposing "starship troopers".)

Forbes wrote that "The mockery arrived instantly and in great rivers..." But there was an interesting observation from a British newspaper (which is in fact, named The Guardian). "As the Associated Press put it, delicately: 'President-elect Joe Biden has yet to reveal his plans for the space force in the next administration.'" In fact, New York magazine called the new name for members of Space Force the "strongest case yet for its demise," in an article headlined "Abolish the Space Force." ("Maybe 'stormtrooper' was too obvious...")

In an apparent bid to be taken more seriously, on Friday the Space Force also shared an official anniversary greeting they'd received from Lee Majors, the actor who'd played a cybernetically-enhanced Air Force colonel in the 1970s action series The Six Million Dollar Man (who, in later seasons, befriended Bigfoot and the alien community who'd brought him to earth).

But Mashable added sympathetically that "It's been a long year, though. If people want to draw some nerdy joy from a U.S. military branch inadvertently referencing comic books and video games, let them have their fun."