A change made in the Google Chrome browser in October has impacted the performance of the Google Fonts service for millions of websites. From a report: The change is an update to Chrome's internal cache system. A browser's cache system works by serving as a temporary storage system for images, CSS, and JavaScript files used by websites. Files stored in the cache are typically reused across multiple sites instead of having the browser re-download each file for every page/tab load. But with the release of Chrome 86 in early October 2020, Google has overhauled how Chrome's entire caching system works. Instead of using one big cache for all websites, Google has "partitioned" the Chrome cache, which will now be storing resources on a per-website and per-resource basis. While this is a big win for user security, preventing some forms of web attacks, this change has affected web services designed around the old cache system.

Cortana may not be the personal assistant she once was, but a new update as part of the Windows Insider Dev Channel means that her capabilities to find files have improved. From a report: The new "File Skill" in the Cortana app appears in the new Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 20270, part of the Dev Channel. (Dev Channel releases publish test code that may or may not end up in a future release.) In this experimental app, Cortana's skills have been honed to the point where she can find files in the cloud, with a better understanding of what you're looking for. If your PC is enrolled in the Windows 10 May 2020 Update or later, some of these capabilities will already be available. As long as you have speech recognition enabled on your PC, you can ask Cortana "find my recent files," and it should unearth the last two or three files you've used on your PC. What Microsoft is trying with Cortana in this beta is the ability to search corporate SharePoint and OneDrive files stored in the cloud on a work account. (You'll need to be signed into a work account, too.)

What if your digital assistant could battle rap? That may sound far-fetched, but Gil Weinberg, a music technologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has adapted a musical robot called Shimon to compose lyrics and perform in real time. From a report: That means it can engage in rap "conversations" with humans, and maybe even help them compose their own lyrics. Shimon, which was intentionally designed to sound machinelike (listen here), is meant to be a one-of-a-kind musical collaborator -- or an inhuman rap-battle opponent. Computer-generated music dates back to the 1950s, when early computers used algorithms to compose melodies. Modern robots can use machine learning to ad-lib on instruments including the flute and drums. One such machine was an earlier version of Shimon, which could play the marimba and sing. The recently updated robot looks the same; it still consists of a ball-shaped "head," with saucy movable eyebrows above visor-covered eyes, perched at the end of a mechanical arm. But now Weinberg claims Shimon is the first improvising robot to foray into rap, with its distinct stylistic features that pose unique programming challenges.

The crowning glory of rap lies in the lyrics. On top of semantic content, the words need to adhere to an aesthetically pleasing beat and rhythm, all while delivering multiple layers of poetic complexity. In a recent paper, published in the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Creativity 2020, Weinberg's research team outlines the technical advances that brought a rapping Shimon to life. When Shimon battle raps, software converts its human opponent's spoken lyrics into text. The robot's system identifies keywords from this, and generates new lyrics based on several custom data sets of words that Shimon has been trained on (using deep-learning models). These data sets can come from any text: the work of Lil Wayne, JAY-Z or other rappers; lyrics from other genres; or even nonmusical literary works. Imagine how Shakespeare or Jane Austen might sound if they rapped; Shimon could simulate that for you.

German divers searching the Baltic Sea for discarded fishing nets have stumbled upon a rare Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazi military during World War Two which they believe was thrown overboard from a scuttled submarine. From a report: Thinking they had discovered a typewriter entangled in a net on the seabed of Gelting Bay, underwater archaeologist Florian Huber quickly realised the historical significance of the find. "I've made many exciting and strange discoveries in the past 20 years. But I never dreamt that we would one day find one of the legendary Enigma machines," said Huber. The Nazi military used the machines to send and receive secret messages during World War Two but British cryptographers cracked the code, helping the Allies gain an advantage in the naval struggle to control the Atlantic. At Bletchley Park codebreaking centre, a British team led by Alan Turing is credited with unravelling the code, shortening the war and saving many thousands of lives.

Ant Group and a venture led by Grab won licenses to run digital banks in Singapore, paving the way for the technology giants to expand their financial services in the Southeast Asian hub. From a report: Sea is also among the four winners announced Friday by the Monetary Authority of Singapore after almost a year of deliberation. A consortium involving China's Greenland Financial is the other successful candidate. Singapore joins the U.K. and Hong Kong in opening up its banking system to purely digital entrants, as it seeks to inject innovation and competition into a market dominated by traditional lenders. The permits are coveted given the city's status as a rapidly growing wealth management center and a gateway to Southeast Asia, where the digital lending market is expected to quadruple in five years.

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order that aims to guide how federal agencies adopt artificial intelligence (AI) as part of efforts to build public trust in the government using this technology. From a report: The order itself directs federal agencies to be guided by nine principles when designing, developing, acquiring, and using AI. These principles emphasise that AI use by federal agencies be lawful; purposeful and performance-driven; accurate, reliable, and effective; safe, secure, and resilient; understandable; responsible and traceable; regularly monitored; transparent; and accountable. To implement these principles, the order directs the Office of Management and Budget to create a roadmap by the end of May 2021 for how the government will better support the use of AI. This roadmap will include a schedule for engaging with the public and timelines for finalising relevant policy guidance. The order also calls on agencies to continue to use voluntary consensus standards developed with industry participation. "This order recognises the potential for AI to improve government operations, such as by reducing outdated or duplicative regulations, enhancing the security of federal information systems, and streamlining application processes," Trump said in a statement. Federal agencies will also be required to prepare an inventory of AI use cases, as well as review and assess these use cases for consistency. The General Services Administration, meanwhile, has been directed to establish an AI track within the Presidential Innovation Fellows program to attract experts from industry and academia to work within agencies to further the design, development, acquisition, and use of AI in government.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Privacy concerns in Europe have led to some of the world's toughest restrictions on companies like Facebook and Google and the ways they monitor people online. The crackdown has been widely popular, but the regulatory push is now entangled in the global fight against child exploitation, setting off a fierce debate about how far internet companies should be allowed to go when collecting evidence on their platforms of possible crimes against minors. A rule scheduled to take effect on Dec. 20 would inhibit the monitoring of email, messaging apps and other digital services in the European Union. It would also restrict the use of software that scans for child sexual abuse imagery and so-called grooming by online predators. The practice would be banned without a court order. European officials have spent the past several weeks trying to negotiate a deal allowing the detection to continue. But some privacy groups and lawmakers argue that while the criminal activity is abhorrent, scanning for it in personal communications risks violating the privacy rights of Europeans.

"Every time things like these unbelievable crimes are happening, or there is a terrorist attack, it's very easy to say we have to be strong and we have to restrict rights," said Birgit Sippel, a German member of the European Parliament. "We have to be very careful." Of the more than 52 million photos, videos and other materials related to online child sexual abuse reported between January and September this year, over 2.3 million came from the European Union, according to the U.S. federal clearinghouse for the imagery. If the regulation took effect, the rate of reports from Europe would drop precipitously, because automated scanning is responsible for nearly all of them. Photo- and video-scanning software uses algorithms to compare users' content with previously identified abuse imagery. Other software targeted at grooming searches for key words and phrases known to be used by predators. Facebook, the most prolific reporter of child sexual abuse imagery worldwide, said it would stop proactive scanning entirely in the E.U. if the regulation took effect. In an email, Antigone Davis, Facebook's global head of safety, said the company was "concerned that the new rules as written today would limit our ability to prevent, detect and respond to harm," but said it was "committed to complying with the updated privacy laws."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Carmakers have sold more than 500,000 battery electric cars in Europe during 2020, a milestone in the automotive industry's move away from fossil fuels. Sales of all plug-in cars, including hybrids, have surpassed 1m during the year in the UK and the largest 17 European markets, according to data collated by Schmidt Automotive Research. During the whole of last year only 354,000 battery electric sales were recorded across the region.

In the UK, the sale of new cars that run solely on petrol or diesel will be banned in 2030 -- although new hybrids will be legal until 2035. Other countries including France and Norway have also introduced plans to ban new internal combustion engines over varying timeframes. However, the car industry still faces a steep uphill journey away from fossil fuels. Total UK and European new car sales in the year to October were 13.3m, the vast majority of which had petrol and diesel engines, which are expected to be more profitable than battery cars until about 2024.

British consumers bought more than 75,000 electric cars in the year to October, well over double the sales in the previous year, plus another 50,000 plug-in hybrids, but the UK market share of battery electric cars was still only 5.5%. Data for the whole of November will be published on Friday. None of the 10 most popular cars in the UK in 2020 have been electric, although some are available as hybrid or plug-in hybrid models, such as the Mercedes A-Class.

Timnit Gebru, one of the best-known AI researchers today and co-lead of an AI ethics team at Google, said she was fired Wednesday for sending an email to "non-management employees that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager." VentureBeat reports: She said Google AI employees who report to her were emailed and told that she accepted her resignation when she did not offer her resignation. According to Casey Newton's Platformer, who reportedly obtained a copy, Gebru sent the email in question to the Google Brain Women and Allies listserv. In it, Gebru expresses frustration with the lack of progress in hiring women at Google and lack of accountability for failure to make progress. She also said was told not to publish a piece of research and advised employees to no longer fill out diversity paperwork because it didn't matter. No mention is made of resignation.

"There is no way more documents or more conversations will achieve anything. We just had a Black research all hands with such an emotional show of exasperation. Do you know what happened since? Silencing in the most fundamental way possible," the email reads. When asked by VentureBeat for comment, a Google spokesperson provided a link to the Platformer article with a copy of an email sent Thursday by Google AI chief Jeff Dean to company research staff. In it, Dean said a research paper written by Gebru and other researchers was submitted for publication at a conference before completing a review process and addressing feedback. In response, Dean said he received an email from Gebru.

"Timnit wrote that if we didn't meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google," he said. "Given Timnit's role as a respected researcher and a manager in our Ethical AI team, I feel badly that Timnit has gotten to a place where she feels this way about the work we're doing. I also feel badly that hundreds of you received an email just this week from Timnit telling you to stop work on critical DEI programs. Please don't. I understand the frustration about the pace of progress, but we have important work ahead and we need to keep at it."

According to Bloomberg, Google is set to win conditional European Union approval for its $2.1 billion takeover of Fitbit this month. From the report: The deal could be approved as soon as next week after national competition authorities give their opinion, said the people who asked not to be named because the procedure isn't public. The EU usually consults the so-called advisory committee on mergers days before it issues approval. Google announced its plans to buy Fitbit in November 2019, noting that it would use the smartwatch maker to improve its lagging hardware business. Clearing regulatory obstacles for the deal come in a tough climate when the company is facing mounting global scrutiny of big technology companies and potentially restrictive regulation in the EU and other regions. While Google has agreed to concessions to allay EU antitrust concerns about its move into wearable fitness devices, its final pledge to European authorities hasn't been disclosed.

An anonymous reader shares a report from Techdirt: Last last week, a report out of the UK topped the trending news items at Hacker News. The report found that U.S. broadband speeds -- historically the poster child for mediocrity -- jumped roughly 90% during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The improvements weren't consistent geographically, and the report was quick to note that by and large, the U.S. remains relatively mediocre when it comes to broadband speeds (in large part due to limited competition): "The US stills lags behind many European and developed nations worldwide, and its major cities also often lag behind their European equivalents. That said, there is cause for celebration in Dallas, Seattle and Austin, after our analysis has shown that these cities are performing extremely well relative to most European capital cities."

I spoke briefly to study author Thomas Buck after he reached out to note that folks were misinterpreting his study. Yes, the study shows U.S. broadband speeds jumped 90% in 2020. But Buck also notes this likely isn't because of policy decisions at the FCC, or because ISPs did much of anything differently. It's most likely because when consumers were forced to stay home to work and attend school during COVID lockdown, they were simply willing to pay more money for already available, faster speeds because they realized faster broadband was essential. Buck put it this way: "... the findings are more likely to suggest increased consumer spending on high-speed plans for working from home than anything else...speed test data is fascinating and helpful, but using it as proof that net neutrality was bad is a giant stretch by any means. When looking at broadband data, I think it's more important to discuss the dark spots (subscriber data, full capacity testing at scale, same-year fiber build data) than what we have (hundreds of thousands of speed tests, most of them showing results a fraction of what ISPs advertise)."

Yet a number of folks (including commenters at Hacker News) set to work trying to claim that this sudden boost in speed was courtesy of the FCC's decision to kill net neutrality and effectively self-immolate at telecom lobbyist behest. It's part of a fairly relentless attempt to proclaim that because killing net neutrality didn't immediately result in a rainbow-colored explosion, the repeal itself must have somehow been a good thing. [...] Yes, many activists and supporters of net neutrality were hyperbolic in trying to explain the very real, very negative impact the net neutrality repeal would have over the longer term. That doesn't mean it wasn't a terrible idea done in exclusive service to telecom monopolies.

A reader shares a report from The Verge: Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released shocking footage of the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The video, captured on December 1st, shows the moment when support cables snapped, causing the massive 900-ton structure suspended above Arecibo to fall onto the observatory's iconic 1,000-foot-wide dish.

The videos of the collapse were captured by a camera located in Arecibo's Operations Control Center, as well as from a drone located above the platform at the time of collapse. The operator of the drone was able to adjust the drone camera once the platform started to fall and capture the moment of impact. NSF, which oversees Arecibo, had been doing hourly monitoring of the observatory with drones, ever since engineers warned that the structure was on the verge of collapsing in November. The footage highlights the moment when multiple cables snapped, causing the platform to swing outward and hit the side of the dish. The collapse also brought down the tops of the three support towers surrounding Arecibo, where the cables had been connected to keep the platform in the air. Slashdot reader joshgs shares a petition to rebuild the Arecibo Observatory. "On December 1, the platform of the 305-meter radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory suffered a catastrophic collapse," the petition states. "This telescope had many capabilities that cannot be replaced by any existing or planned facility. It had the world's most powerful and most sensitive planetary radar system, providing unparalleled capacity to track and characterize near-Earth asteroids. The telescope was also a source of tourism, education, and pride for the people of Puerto Rico, inspiring many to pursue careers in science and technology."

"We ask Congress to allocate funding to build a new Arecibo radio telescope with greater capabilities than the previous telescope -- to maintain American leadership in planetary defense, astronomy, and ionospheric studies; and to inspire a new generation of scientists."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The government has interpreted a high-profile provision of the Patriot Act as empowering F.B.I. national security investigators to collect logs showing who has visited particular web pages, documents show. But the government stops short of using that law to collect the keywords people submit to internet search engines because it considers such terms to be content that requires a warrant to gather, according to letters produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The disclosures come at a time when Congress is struggling with new proposals to limit the law, known as Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The debate ran aground in the spring amid erratic messages from President Trump, but is expected to resume after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes the oath of office in January.

In May, 59 senators voted to bar the use of Section 215 to collect internet search terms or web browsing activity, but negotiations broke down in the House. During that period, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and one of the sponsors of the proposal ban, wrote to the director of national intelligence seeking clarity about any such use. Six months later, the Trump administration finally replied -- initially, it turned out, in a misleading way. In a Nov. 6 letter to Mr. Wyden, John Ratcliffe, the intelligence director, wrote that Section 215 was not used to gather internet search terms, and that none of the 61 orders issued last year under that law by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court involved collection of "web browsing" records. Mr. Wyden's office provided that letter to The New York Times, arguing that it meant Mr. Wyden's proposal in May -- which he sponsored with Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana -- could be enacted into law without any operational costs.

But The Times pressed Mr. Ratcliffe's office and the F.B.I. to clarify whether it was defining "web browsing" activity to encompass logging all visitors to a particular website, in addition to a particular person's browsing among different sites. The next day, the Justice Department sent a clarification to Mr. Ratcliffe's office, according to a follow-up letter he sent to Mr. Wyden on Nov. 25. In fact, "one of those 61 orders resulted in the production of information that could be characterized as information regarding browsing," Mr. Ratcliffe wrote in the second letter. Specifically, one order had approved collection of logs revealing which computers "in a specified foreign country" had visited "a single, identified U.S. web page." Mr. Ratcliffe expressed regret "that this additional information was not included in my earlier letter" to the senator, and suggested his staff might take further "corrective action." In a statement, Mr. Wyden said the letters raise "all kinds of new questions, including whether, in this particular case, the government has taken steps to avoid collecting Americans' web browsing information." "More generally," Mr. Wyden continued, "the D.N.I. has provided no guarantee that the government wouldn't use the Patriot Act to intentionally collect Americans' web browsing information in the future, which is why Congress must pass the warrant requirement that has already received support from a bipartisan majority in the Senate."

YouTube is taking new steps to weed out bullying, hate speech and other kinds of nasty comments. From a report: The company introduced a new feature that will remind users to "keep comments respectful," when its automated systems detect a comment may be offensive. The change is rolling out now on Android, and will eventually move to other platforms, though it's not clear when. The feature is similar to one recently implemented by Instagram. Before a comment is posted, a pop-up will appear with a reminder to "keep comments respectful." The user will then be able to edit the comment or post it anyway. The company notes that seeing the reminder doesn't necessarily mean a comment has violated its rules or that it will be removed. The update is part of a larger effort by YouTube to reduce hate speech and make its platform more equitable for all its creators. In addition to the new pop-ups, it will also test a new feature for YouTube Studio that automatically filters out "potentially inappropriate and hurtful comments" to make it easier for video creators to avoid seeing them.

Residents of Shenzhen saw truly driverless cars on the road today. From a report: AutoX, a four-year-old startup backed by Alibaba, MediaTek and Shanghai Motors, deployed a fleet of 25 unmanned vehicles in downtown Shenzhen, marking the first time any autonomous driving car in China tests on public roads without safety drivers or remote operators. The cars, meant as robotaxis, are not yet open to the public, an AutoX spokesperson told TechCrunch. The milestone came just five months after AutoX landed a permit from California to start driverless tests, following in the footsteps of Waymo and Nuro. It also indicates that China wants to bring its smart driving industry on par with the U.S. Cities from Shenzhen to Shanghai are competing to attract autonomous driving upstarts by clearing regulatory hurdles, touting subsidies and putting up 5G infrastructure. As a result, each city ends up with its own poster child in the space: AutoX and Deeproute.ai in Shenzhen, Pony.ai and WeRide in Guangzhou, Momenta in Suzhou and Baidu's Apollo fleet in Beijing, to name a few. The autonomous driving companies, in turn, work closely with traditional carmakers to make their vehicles smarter and more suitable for future transportation.

The Trump administration has sued Facebook, accusing the social-media company of illegally reserving high-paying jobs for immigrant workers it was sponsoring for permanent residence, rather than searching adequately for available U.S. workers who could fill the positions. From a report: In a 17-page complaint filed Thursday, the Justice Department's civil-rights division said Facebook inadequately advertised at least 2,600 positions between 2018 and 2019 that were filled by immigrants on H-1B high-skill visas when the company was applying to sponsor those workers for permanent residency, known as green cards. Companies sponsoring workers for employment-based green cards are required to show as part of the federal application process that they couldn't find any qualified American workers to fill the job. The suit said Facebook didn't advertise the reserved positions on its website and required candidates to mail in their applications rather than accepting them online. "And even when U.S. workers do apply, Facebook will not consider them for the advertised positions," the suit alleges. "Simply put, Facebook reserves these positions for temporary visa holders."

AstraZeneca and Oxford University have given conflicting accounts of how they came upon the most effective dosing pattern for their COVID-19 vaccine, a rare instance of public dissension between major institutions collaborating on a pivotal project. From a report: The discrepancy, reported for the first time by Reuters, centres on the regimen administered to a smaller group of volunteers in the late-stage trials, of half a dose followed by a full dose. This diverged from the original plan of two full doses, given to the majority of participants. The half-dose pattern was found to be 90% effective, versus the 62% success rate of the two-full-dose main study, based on interim data. AstraZeneca's research chief told Reuters 10 days ago, when interim trial data was released, the half-dose was given inadvertently as a first shot to some trial participants, and emerged as a stroke of fortune -- "serendipity" -- that scientists expertly harnessed.

This narrative was refuted by a leading Oxford University scientist, however, who told Reuters on Monday that the half-dose shot was given deliberately after thorough consultations. Uncertainty over how the dosing regimen came about raises questions about the robustness of the data, according to some experts who said it risked slowing down the process of gaining regulatory approval for the shot and denting public confidence. "These differing accounts are worrying," Eleanor Riley, a professor of immunology and infectious disease at the University of Edinburgh, told Reuters. "Trust is at a premium when it comes to vaccines and we must not do anything that might in any way undermine it."

With vaccines against Covid-19 on the verge of being rolled out around the world, Facebook said it will start removing false claims about the immunizations that have been debunked by public health experts. From a report: The move announced Thursday adds to Facebook's policy of taking down misinformation about the deadly virus that could lead to imminent physical harm. The type of posts that could be removed on Facebook or Instagram include false claims about the safety, efficacy, ingredients or side effects of the vaccine, Facebook said. These could include claims that the vaccines contain microchips or anything else not on the official ingredient list. In October, Facebook said it would ban ads that discourage people from getting vaccines in general, not just for Covid.

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtualization engineer has shown what Windows 10 on Arm could be like if Microsoft licensed its Arm-based OS to the public rather than just to Windows 10 manufacturers. From a report: With Apple's new M1 Arm-based system on chip, Mac users who need to use Windows 10 can't run Microsoft's Arm-based version of Windows using Apple's Bootcamp. The key obstacle is that Microsoft doesn't license Windows 10 on Arm to any entities other than its own Surface group and Windows 10 on Arm OEMs like HP, Asus and Lenovo. Technically, there's nothing stopping owners of the M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13-inch or Mac mini from running Windows 10 on Arm, as Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi recently pointed out. [...]

But Microsoft's reluctance to create a license for Windows 10 on Arm for end users hasn't stopped creative engineers from putting together a working example of what things could be like if it did. AWS principal engineer Alexander Graf did just that, using the open-source QEMU virtualization software for Windows on Arm. QEMU emulates access to hardware such as the CPU and GPU. [...] "Who said Windows wouldn't run well on #AppleSilicon? It's pretty snappy here," Graf wrote in a tweet. Graf previously worked on the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) for Linux distribution SUSE for over a decade. Now he's a KVM developer at AWS, which this week announced new Mac instances for AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) based on Nitro System, an AWS hypervisor for EC2 instances. [...] A developer using the handle @imbushuo on Twitter has posted Geekbench versions 4 and 5 scores that compare Windows 10 on Arm on an M1 computer with the Microsoft-made Surface Pro X. Windows on an M1 got a single-core score of 1,288 and multi-core score of 5,685 whereas the Surface Pro X's scores were roughly 800 and 3,000 in those respective benchmarks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A group of U.S. states led by New York is investigating Facebook for possible antitrust violations and plans to file a lawsuit against the social media giant next week, four sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday. The complaint would be the second major lawsuit filed against a Big Tech company this year. The Justice Department sued Alphabet's Google in October. More than 40 states plan to sign on to the lawsuit, one source said, without naming them.

It is not known what the states plan to include in their complaint. One allegation often made against Facebook is that it has strategically sought to buy small potential rivals, often at a big premium. These include Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has argued in congressional testimony that the company has a range of competitors, including other tech giants. He has defended controversial acquisitions like Instagram and WhatsApp by saying the social media platform helped them expand from small, insignificant companies into powerhouses.