An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Shekinah and Orlandria Lennon were sitting at their kitchen table this fall, taking online classes, when video of their teachers and fellow students suddenly froze on their laptop screens. The wireless antenna on the roof had stopped working, and it could not be fixed. Desperate for a solution, their mother called five broadband companies, trying to get connections for their home in Orrum, N.C., a rural community of fewer than 100 people with no grocery store or traffic lights. All the companies gave the same answer: Service is not available in your area. The response is the same across broad stretches of Robeson County, N.C., a swath of small towns and rural places like Orrum dotted among soybean fields and hog farms on the South Carolina border. About 20,000 of the county's homes, or 43 percent of all households, have no internet connection.

The technology gap has prompted teachers to upload lessons on flash drives and send them home to dozens of students every other week. Some children spend school nights crashing at more-connected relatives' homes so they can get online for classes the next day. [...] Millions of American students are grappling with the same challenges, learning remotely without adequate home internet service. Even as school districts like the one in Robeson County have scrambled to provide students with laptops, many who live in low-income and rural communities continue to have difficulty logging on. "About 15 million K-12 students lived in households without adequate online connectivity in 2018," the report notes, citing a study of federal data by Common Sense Media, an education nonprofit group that tracks children's media use.

"[T]he pandemic turned the lack of internet connectivity into a nationwide emergency: Suddenly, millions of schoolchildren were cut off from digital learning, unable to maintain virtual 'attendance' and marooned socially from their classmates."

Yesterday, Apple released the latest version of macOS: macOS Big Sur (also known as macOS 11.0) and the rollout was anything but smooth. Many users have complained about Apple services such as iMessage, or even Apple Pay, not working for them. Personally, my 5K iMac (2013), which isn't even compatible with Big Sur, ground to a halt yesterday, as I was unable to open up Google Chrome or any of my Adobe Creative Cloud apps. Even navigating my system preferences was painfully slow.

According to developer Jeff Johnson, the reason apps were failing to launch was because a process called "trustd" failed to attempt to connect to Apple's Online Certificate Status Protocol website (oscp.apple.com). "[D]enying the connection between "trustd" and oscp.apple.com fixes the issue, as does disabling a Mac's connection to the internet," notes Apple Insider. Slashdot reader shanen shares their experience: The story is about different problems, so I'll just start with my own anecdote. The 12GB download was amazingly slow. I'm being charitable and willing to attribute that to high demand. Eventually it did finish. The installation process didn't seem to be too bad. Then I did something with the Mac and it immediately wanted another upgrade. Turned out to be a double upgrade of two slightly different versions of some tools, but another (slow) GB bites the dust. Meanwhile, it decided to do that double-upgrade again? One of those two must have succeeded, because the third attempt failed with the appropriate notice that it had succeeded.

Bottom line? Not reassuring, but it seems to be okay now. I should have made a note about what triggered the extra GB, but I don't think I did anything unusual that should have required an OS-level extension of the system. Ergo, whatever was going on, I think it belonged in the original 12 GB download... Disclaimer needed: I just had an extremely negative interaction with Apple about the battery swelling problem in the course of attempting to consider whether or not I should upgrade my old MacBook Pro. It started on the Apple website, which was amazingly unhelpful even after it dangled a trade-in offer of some kind. Then it continued with a long phone call to a very kind and friendly person who seemed to know not so much, though he eventually led me to the search that revealed "Optimized Battery Charging" as an option that my old Mac cannot use. By the way, new iPhones apparently have it, too. So right now I think Apple finally figured out how to stop the battery swelling, but I am still screwed. I regard the Mac as a sunk cost, and the second rule of sunk cost is to NOT throw good money after bad. The first rule is that no one wants to talk about their mistakes, eh?

So did your upgrade to Big Sur go better than mine? I really hope so. Why share the misery? We have plenty of that with "He whose name need not be mentioned" anymore.

Researchers at Google claim to have developed a machine learning model that can separate a sound source from noisy, single-channel audio based on only a short sample of the target source. In a paper [PDF], they say their SoundFilter system can be tuned to filter arbitrary sound sources, even those it hasn't seen during training. From a report: The researchers believe a noise-eliminating system like SoundFilter could be used to create a range of useful technologies. For instance, Google drew on audio from thousands of its own meetings and YouTube videos to train the noise-canceling algorithm in Google Meet. Meanwhile, a team of Carnegie Mellon researchers created a "sound-action-vision" corpus to anticipate where objects will move when subjected to physical force. SoundFilter treats the task of sound separation as a one-shot learning problem. The model receives as input the audio mixture to be filtered and a single short example of the kind of sound to be filtered out. Once trained, SoundFilter is expected to extract this kind of sound from the mixture if present.

Volkswagen has raised its planned investment on digital and electric vehicle technologies to 73 billion euros ($86 billion) over the next five years as it seeks to hold onto its crown as the world's largest carmaker in a new green era. From a report: Under a plan presented on Friday, Volkswagen said it would allocate nearly half its investment budget of 150 billion euros on e-mobility, hybrid cars, a seamless, software-based vehicle operating system and self-driving technologies. In last year's plan, the German car and truck maker, which owns brands including VW, Audi, Porsche, Seat and Skoda, had earmarked 60 billion euros for electric and self-driving vehicles out of the 150 billion budget. A global clampdown on emissions, partly triggered by VW's diesel pollution scandal in 2015, has forced carmakers to accelerate the development of low-emission technology, even for their low-margin mainstream models.

theodp writes: What if we could build a better world through code?", begins the just-released teaser video for Microsoft's 2020 Hour of Code: A Minecraft Tale of Two Villages . "Help us bring two villages together through the power of code! [...] You will experience empathy and compassion for your neighbor while embracing the diversity that makes us all uniquely special." Intended for ages 7-and-up, the accompanying Educator Guide suggests opening the 45-minute coding lesson (using Blocks or Python) with a 10-minute discussion of unconscious and conscious bias, including "prejudice based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, gender identity, physical ability, religion, and body weight." The Guide also suggests how teachers might explain to students the harm biases can cause: "Both conscious and unconscious biases can cause us to behave negatively or discriminate against people. When we stereotype people based on their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or some other characteristic, it can be detrimental to us and our community. On a larger and extreme scale, bias can lead to oppression, genocide, and even slavery." The Guide notes that this year's Hour of Code lesson adheres to five Social Justice Standards. The use of Minecraft, Microsoft Education suggests, will help keep students developing and applying social and emotional skills during the pandemic.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has apologised to Europe's industry chief Thierry Breton over a leaked internal document proposing ways to counter the EU's tough new rules for technology companies. From a report: Pichai and Breton exchanged views in a video-conference call late on Thursday, the third this year, according to a statement from the European Commission. "The Internet cannot remain a 'Wild West': we need clear and transparent rules, a predictable environment and balanced rights and obligations," Breton told Pichai. The call came after a Google internal document outlined a 60-day strategy to counter the European Union's push for the new rules by getting U.S. allies to push back against Breton. The call was initiated by Google before the document was leaked. Breton brought up the leaked document and showed it to Pichai during the call and said that there was no need to use old century tactics and to play one unit at the Commission against another, a person familiar with the call said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told an all-staff meeting on Thursday that former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon had not violated enough of the company's policies to justify his suspension when he urged beheading two senior U.S. officials, according to a recording heard by Reuters. Zuckerberg acknowledged criticism of Facebook by President-elect Joe Biden but said the company shared some of the Biden team's same concerns about social media. He urged employees not to jump to conclusions about how the new administration might approach regulation of social media companies.

Bannon suggested in a video posted on Nov. 5 that FBI Director Christopher Wray and government infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci should be beheaded, saying they had been disloyal to U.S. President Donald Trump, who last week lost his re-election bid to Biden. Facebook removed the video but left up Bannon's page, which has about 175,000 followers. Twitter banned Bannon last week over the same content. "We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely," Zuckerberg said. "While the offenses here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line." Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said the company would take further action against Bannon's page "if there are additional violations." Last Friday, independent activist network Avaaz alerted Facebook to a network of misinformation pages that Steve Bannon was involved with.

"We're a small team run with small donations," Quran told Gizmodo. "If we can spot this stuff, a multi-billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees focused on the election and disinformation most certainly can. We are tired of doing their job for them." Quran added that Avaaz has been alerting Facebook to its problems all year. "If 2016 was an accident," Quran added, "2020 has been negligence."

VICE has highlighted six reasons why Google Maps is the creepiest app on your phone. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: 1. Google Maps Wants Your Search History: Google's "Web & App Activity" settings describe how the company collects data, such as user location, to create a faster and "more personalized" experience. In plain English, this means that every single place you've looked up in the app -- whether it's a strip club, a kebab shop or your moped-riding drug dealer's location -- is saved and integrated into Google's search engine algorithm for a period of 18 months. Google knows you probably find this creepy. That's why the company uses so-called "dark patterns" -- user interfaces crafted to coax us into choosing options we might not otherwise, for example by highlighting an option with certain fonts or brighter colors.

2. Google Maps Limits Its Features If You Don't Share Your Search History: If you open your Google Maps app, you'll see a circle in the top right corner that signifies you're logged in with your Google account. That's not necessary, and you can simply log out. Of course, the log out button is slightly hidden, but can be found like this: click on the circle > Settings > scroll down > Log out of Google Maps. Unfortunately, Google Maps won't let you save frequently visited places if you're not logged into your Google account. If you choose not to log in, when you click on the search bar you get a "Tired of typing?" button, suggesting you sign in, and coaxing you towards more data collection.

3. Google Maps Can Snitch On You: Another problematic feature is the "Google Maps Timeline," which "shows an estimate of places you may have been and routes you may have taken based on your Location History." With this feature, you can look at your personal travel routes on Google Maps, including the means of transport you probably used, such as a car or a bike. The obvious downside is that your every move is known to Google, and to anyone with access to your account. And that's not just hackers -- Google may also share data with government agencies such as the police. [...] If your "Location History" is on, your phone "saves where you go with your devices, even when you aren't using a specific Google service," as is explained in more detail on this page. This feature is useful if you lose your phone, but also turns it into a bonafide tracking device.

4. Google Maps Wants to Know Your Habits: Google Maps often asks users to share a quick public rating. "How was Berlin Burger? Help others know what to expect," suggests the app after you've picked up your dinner. This feels like a casual, lighthearted question and relies on the positive feeling we get when we help others. But all this info is collected in your Google profile, making it easier for someone to figure out if you're visiting a place briefly and occasionally (like on holiday) or if you live nearby.

5. Google Maps Doesn't Like It When You're Offline: Remember GPS navigation? It might have been clunky and slow, but it's a good reminder that you don't need to be connected to the internet to be directed. In fact, other apps offer offline navigation. On Google, you can download maps, but offline navigation is only available for cars. It seems fairly unlikely the tech giant can't figure out how to direct pedestrians and cyclists without internet.

6. Google Makes It Seem Like This Is All for Your Own Good: "Providing useful, meaningful experiences is at the core of what Google does," the company says on its website, adding that knowing your location is important for this reason. They say they use this data for all kinds of useful things, like "security" and "language settings" -- and, of course, selling ads. Google also sells advertisers the possibility to evaluate how well their campaigns reached their target (that's you!) and how often people visited their physical shops "in an anonymized and aggregated manner". But only if you opt in (or you forget to opt out).

Facebook's ban on political ads, which was initially projected to last just one week, is being extended for at least another month. The decision is aimed at limiting the misinformation that's spreading rampantly over its platform in the wake of the U.S. election. The Guardian reports: "We are keeping the ad pause and other temporary election protection measures in place as that result moves towards certification next month," said Rob Leathern, director of product management at Facebook. "We are keeping the ad pause and other temporary election protection measures in place as that result moves towards certification next month," said Rob Leathern, director of product management at Facebook. "We know that people are disappointed that we can't immediately enable ads for runoff elections in Georgia and elsewhere," Leathern added. "It's taken years to build the infrastructure that supports the Facebook Ad Library and ensure that political ads are transparent. We do not have the technical ability in the short term to enable political ads by state or by advertiser, and we are also committed to giving political advertisers equal access to our tools and services."

With political adverts banned across the US, neither Democrats nor Republicans can take advantage of Facebook in their campaigns in Georgia, where both Senate seats are up for grabs on 5 January in a pair of runoff elections. According to Facebook's own research, the ban is likely to hurt Democrats slightly more, as the company says advertising on its site provides, on average, a proportional advantage to challengers against incumbents. Google is also continuing its political advertising ban, though it hasn't given a definite end date to the suspension.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica : In 2008, researcher Dan Kaminsky revealed one of the more severe Internet security threats ever: a weakness in the domain name system that made it possible for attackers to send users en masse to imposter sites instead of the real ones belonging to Google, Bank of America, or anyone else. With industrywide coordination, thousands of DNS providers around the world installed a fix that averted this doomsday scenario. Now, Kaminsky's DNS cache poisoning attack is back. Researchers on Wednesday presented a new technique that can once again cause DNS resolvers to return maliciously spoofed IP addresses instead of the site that rightfully corresponds to a domain name.

On Wednesday, researchers from Tsinghua University and the University of California, Riverside presented a technique that, once again, makes cache poisoning feasible. Their method exploits a side channel that identifies the port number used in a lookup request. Once the attackers know the number, they once again stand a high chance of successfully guessing the transaction ID. The side channel in this case is the rate limit for ICMP, the abbreviation for the Internet Control Message Protocol. To conserve bandwidth and computing resources, servers will respond to only a set number of requests from other servers. After that, servers will provide no response at all. Until recently, Linux always set this limit to 1,000 per second. To exploit this side channel, the new spoofing technique floods a DNS resolver with a high number of responses that are spoofed so they appear to come from the name server of the domain they want to impersonate. Each response is sent over a different port.

When an attacker sends a response over the wrong port, the server will send a response that the port is unreachable, which drains the global rate limit by one. When the attacker sends a request over the right port, the server will give no response at all, which doesn't change the rate limit counter. If the attacker probes 1,000 different ports with spoofed responses in one second and all of them are closed, the entire rate limit will be drained completely. If, on the other hand, one out of the 1,000 ports is open, then the limit will be drained to 999. Subsequently, the attacker can use its own non-spoofed IP address to measure the remaining rate limit. And if the server responds with one ICMP message, the attacker knows one of the previously probed 1,000 ports must be open and can further narrow down to the exact port number. Linux kernel developers responded by introducing a change that causes the rate limit to randomly fluctuate between 500 and 2,000 per second, preventing the new technique from working. Cloudflare also introduced a fix where its DNS service will fall back to TCP, "which is much more difficult to spoof," reports Ars.

The researchers' press release is available here.

Samsung LSI today announced the new Exynos 1080 SoC (system on chip), a successor to last year's Exynos 980. This year's 1080 is seemingly positioned a little above the 980 in terms of performance as we're seeing some quite notable gains in features compared to the 980. From a report: It's to be remembered that this is a "premium" SoC, meaning it's not a flagship SoC, but it's also not quite a mid-range SoC, fitting itself in-between those two categories, a niche which has become quite popular over the last 1-2 years. The new SoC is defined by having a new 1+3+4 CPU configuration, as reasonably large GPU, and full 5G connectivity integrated, and is the first publicly announced SoC to be manufactured on Samsung's new 5LPE process node. On the CPU side of things, this is the first time we've seen Samsung adopt a 1+3+4 CPU configuration, now adopting the Cortex-A78 architecture on the part of the performance cores. One core is clocked at 2.8GHz while the three others are running at 2.6GHz. Qualcomm had first introduced such a setup and it seems it's become quite popular as it gives the benefit of both performance and power efficiency. The four big cores are accompanied by four Cortex-A55 cores at 2.0GHz.

Apple on Thursday released the latest version of macOS: macOS Big Sur (also known as macOS 11.0), which is available to download now -- assuming you have a compatible Mac. From a report: Big Sur is one of the biggest updates to Apple's laptop and desktop software in years, featuring a top-to-bottom redesign of the interface, icons, and menu bar, a new control center UI borrowed from iOS, widgets (also borrowed from iOS), and a variety of other improvements (see here for the full list). It's such a big change that Apple is actually moving on from the OS X / OS 10 branding that it's been using for Macs for almost 20 years. Apple's also adding some new privacy-focused features, including better tracking information in Safari and new privacy data in the Mac App Store for any apps you download. ArsTechnica has published a comprehensive review of the new operating system. An excerpt from their conclusion: The Good
The bright, fresh visual style mostly looks pretty good.
The Control Center (and other changes to the upper-right section of the Menu Bar) are genuinely useful additions.
The Messages app finally catches up to its iOS/iPadOS counterpart, thanks to Catalyst.
The APFS version of Time Machine seems like an improvement, though we'll need to wait to see what its long-term reliability is like.
Aside from the old AFP file-sharing protocol and the Network Utility, Big Sur doesn't remove too many things or add many new security settings that will break apps. There may be some visual issues, but my experience has actually been that Apple breaks a lot fewer apps moving from Catalina to Big Sur than it did moving from Mojave to Catalina.

The Bad
A general reduction in contrast makes it harder to discern the difference between many buttons and controls at a glance.
If you want to fix any of these contrast issues in the Accessibility settings, it should be possible to increase contrast or reduce transparency in certain places without making it an all-or-nothing setting. Some of the new buttons and icons are nice. Some of them are less nice.
Big Sur on Apple Silicon Macs will give up the ability to run Windows in a virtual machine or on a separate partition, though Intel Macs can still do both things.

The Ugly
As usual, Apple is just a year or two more aggressive about dropping support for old Macs than I think they really need to be.

Mark Di Stefano, reporting for The Information (paywalled): A few years back, two Brussels-based lobbyists from midsize tech companies were out for drinks, and in the course of the conversation they realized they had a common problem. Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook were sucking all of the oxygen out of European debates about regulating the internet, leaving out the voices of smaller companies -- despite the fact that those policies can have a very different impact on them. The European lobbyists and policy officers from other companies -- a motley array that included Mozilla, Stripe, Transferwise, Etsy, Dropbox and Spotify -- began meeting regularly in Brussels, often in bars and restaurants, to share their experiences, according to two people familiar with the matter. Some of them jokingly referred to the outings, which haven't been previously reported, as "whine and dines." The companies, which have continued to gather during the pandemic over video calls, even have a name for their informal network, the two people said: the challenger group. "It was really soothing to meet up with other companies doing the same thing," Raegan MacDonald, policy chief of Mozilla, said during an interview with The Information. "We finally said, let's do stuff together.... The work together has been helpful and fruitful, not just cathartic."

While members of the group won't say much about what that "stuff" is exactly, one of their priorities is having a voice in the upcoming overhaul of internet regulations in Europe, the biggest since the early 2000s. The European Commission -- the executive branch of the European Union, responsible for its legislation and policies -- plans to release the first drafts of this overhaul in the coming weeks, which will introduce sweeping new powers for competition regulators to intervene in tech markets.

An anonymous reader shares a report: His trademark grin. The giant, oversized coffee mug. The time he ignored the public, killed net neutrality at the request of telecom lobbyists, then gleefully danced with a pizzagater thinking it made him look good. But with a Joe Biden win, Pai's controversial tenure as head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon be coming to an end. Traditionally, the party in control of the Presidency enjoys a 3-2 majority over the FCC and the top chairman spot. With a Biden win, the FCC majority reverts to Democratic control next January. As such, Pai will lose his top spot at the FCC, and experts say he's likely to leave the agency altogether. Pai's tenure was a minefield of controversy. In no small part due to Pai's repeal of net neutrality, which not only eliminated rules preventing ISPs from behaving anti-competitively, but much of the FCC's authority to police widely-disliked telecom monopolies at all. Instead, that responsibility fell to the FTC, an agency experts say lacks the authority or resources to hold telecom giants accountable (the entire point of the telecom industry gambit).

Pai repeatedly and falsely claimed that net neutrality had stifled sector innovation, job growth, and U.S. broadband investment. He then repeatedly claimed that repealing the rules would drive a massive investment in new broadband networks. But earnings reports, independent research and CEO statements alike made it clear that never actually happened. [...] With a 3-2 majority the Biden FCC is widely expected to restore both net neutrality and the FCC's authority to hold giant ISPs accountable. A Biden FCC is also likely to reverse Pai's repeated attacks on media consolidation rules that have slowly allowed giants like Sinclair Broadcasting to dominate the local news ecosystem to the detriment of local journalism. A Biden FCC is also expected to reverse many of Pai's attacks on programs designed to bring broadband to low-income households, and to take a far more active role in protecting consumers from problematic monopoly behavior during the Covid crisis.

An anonymous reader shares a column: Google Music is dead, and with it one of the few remaining connections I have to the company that doesn't feel like a gun to my head. The service, now merged haphazardly with YouTube Music, recalled the early days of Google, when they sometimes just made cool internet things. It made it nearly a decade, though -- pretty impressive for a one of their products. I'll just say it up front: I'm a lifelong music pirate. Oh yes, I've reformed in recent years, but I've got a huge library of tracks that I've cultivated for decades and don't plan to abandon any time soon (likewise you can pry Winamp from my cold, dead hands). So when Google announced back in 2011 I could stream it all to myself for free, it sounded too good to be true. And indeed it was a relic of the old Google, which was quite simply all about taking things that are difficult to do yourself (find things online, set up a new email address, collaborate on a spreadsheet) and make them easier. Google Music -- as we'll call it despite it having gone through several branding changes before the final indignity of being merged into another, worse service as a presumably short-lived tab -- was not first to the music-streaming or downloading world by a long shot, but its promise of being able to upload your old music files and access them anywhere as if they were emails or documents was a surprisingly generous one. Generous not just in that it was providing server space for 20,000 songs (!) for free and the infrastructure for serving those songs where you went, but in its acknowledgement of other models of owning media. It didn't judge you for having 20,000 MP3s -- they weren't subjected to some kind of legitimacy check, and they didn't report you to the RIAA for having them, though they certainly could have. No, Google Music's free media locker was the company, or at least a quorum of the product team, announcing that they get it: not everyone does everything the same way, and not everyone is ready to embrace whatever business model tech companies decide makes sense. (Notably it has shifted several times more since then.)

A group of journalists has built a browser extension, called Simple Search, to show you what Google search would look like without the information panels, shopping boxes, and search ads. The Verge reports: Introducing the extension, Maddy Varner and Sam Morris describe it as a conscious throwback to an earlier version of Google search, before the integration of the Knowledge Graph and its accompanying information boxes. "The extension lets you travel back to a time when online search operated a little differently," they write. "Nowadays, you don't always have to click any of the 'blue links' to get information related to your search -- Google gives you what it thinks is important in info boxes of information pulled from other websites." The extension works on Google and Bing searches and is available for both Firefox and Chrome browsers.

Anmar Frangoul writes via CNBC: Work has started on a liquid air energy storage site in the northwest of England, with the team behind the project stating it will be one of the largest energy storage systems in Europe. Highview Power's 50 megawatt facility in Greater Manchester will harness technology that uses something called "air liquefaction." The system involves a number of steps: excess or off peak electricity powers an air liquefier. This cleans, compresses then cools ambient air, turning it into a liquid at -196 degrees Celsius (around -320 Fahrenheit). According to the company, this liquid air is "stored at low pressure and later heated and expanded to drive a turbine and generate power."

The technology being deployed by Highview Power stems from an idea developed by Peter Dearman, the brains behind the concept of a "liquid air engine." According to the U.K. government, Dearman -- who's been described by the BBC as a "self-taught backyard inventor" -- worked alongside a team from the University of Leeds to develop the idea of "using air as a form of energy storage" when compressed and liquefied. The new site, which is scheduled to open in 2023, will be operated by Highview Power in partnership with another firm called Carlton Power.

The official Google Play Store has been identified as the primary source of malware installs on Android devices in a recent academic study -- considered the largest one of its kind carried out to date. From a report: Using telemetry data provided by NortonLifeLock (formerly Symantec), researchers analyzed the origin of app installations on more than 12 million Android devices for a four-month period between June and September 2019. In total, researchers looked at more than 34 million APK (Android application) installs for 7.9 million unique apps. [...] The results showed that around 67% of the malicious app installs researchers identified came from the Google Play Store. Google did not respond to a request for comment made by ZDNet almost three weeks ago.

Come June 1, 2021, Google will change its storage policies for free accounts -- and not for the better. Basically, if you're on a free account and a semi-regular Google Photos user, get ready to pay up next year and subscribe to Google One. From a report: Currently, every free Google Account comes with 15 GB of online storage for all your Gmail, Drive and Photos needs. Email and the files you store in Drive already counted against those 15 GB, but come June 1, all Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms or Jamboard files will count against the free storage as well. Those tend to be small files, but what's maybe most important here, virtually all of your Photos uploads will now count against those 15 GB as well. That's a bid deal because today, Google Photos lets you store unlimited images (and unlimited video, if it's in HD) for free as long as they are under 16MP in resolution or you opt to have Google degrade the quality. Come June of 2021, any new photo or video uploaded in high quality, which currently wouldn't count against your allocation, will count against those free 15 GB. [...] In addition to these storage updates, there's a few additional changes worth knowing about. If your account is inactive in Gmail, Drive or Photos for more than two years, Google 'may' delete the content in that product.

Google will deploy a new security feature in Chrome next year to prevent tab-nabbing, a type of web attack that allows newly opened tabs to hijack the original tab from where they were opened. From a report: The new feature is scheduled to go live with Chrome 88, to be released in January 2021. While the term "tab-nabbing" refers to a broad class of tab hijacking attacks [see OWASP, Wikipedia], Google is addressing a particular scenario. This scenario refers to situations when users click on a link, and the link opens in a new tab (via the "target=_blank" attribute). These new tabs have access to the original page that opened the new link. Via the JavaScript "window.opener" function, the newly opened tabs can modify the original page and redirect users to malicious sites. This type of attack has powered quite a few phishing campaigns across the years. To mitigate this threat, browser makers like Apple, Google, and Mozilla have created the rel="noopener" attribute.