An anonymous reader shares a report: When he received the notification from Google he couldn't quite believe it. Cleroth, a game developer who asked not to use his real name, woke up to see a message that all his Google accounts were disabled due to "serious violation of Google policies." His first reaction was that something must have malfunctioned on his phone. Then he went to his computer and opened up Chrome, Google's internet browser. He was signed out. He tried to access Gmail, his main email account, which was also locked. "Everything was disconnected," he told Business Insider. Cleroth had some options he could pursue: One was the option to try and recover his Google data â" which gave him hope. But he didn't go too far into the process because there was also an option to appeal the ban. He sent in an appeal.

He received a response the next day: Google had determined he had broken their terms of service, though they didn't explain exactly what had happened, and his account wouldn't be reinstated. (Google has been approached for comment on this story.) Cleroth is one of a number of people who have seen their accounts suspended in the last few days and weeks. In response to a tweet explaining his fear at being locked out of his Google account after 15 years of use, others have posted about the impact of being barred from the company that runs most of the services we use in our day-to-day lives. "I've been using a Google account for personal and work purposes for years now. It had loads of various types of data in there," said Stephen Roughley, a software developer from Birkenhead, UK. "One day when I went to use it I found I couldn't log in." Roughley checked his backup email account and found a message there informing him his main account had been terminated for violating the terms of service. "It suggested that I had been given a warning and I searched and searched but couldn't find anything," added Roughley. "I then followed the link to recover my account but was given a message stating that my account was irrecoverable." Roughley lost data including emails, photos, documents and diagrams that he had developed for his work. "My account and all its data is gone," he said.

On Tuesday Massachusetts will vote on expanding the state's right-to-repair law to include more access to car data, in an initiated state statute known as "Question 1."

Wired reports: The measure is meant to address how data sharing will work as cars start to suck in and share more wireless data. The Coalition for Safe and Secure Data, backed by giant automakers, is urging state residents to vote No, arguing that easier access to this data poses security risks.

At the core of the issue is the not-insignificant question of what expanded access to wireless car data might look like and how secure that is. It's not just a question of who can repair a car and access the data, but who owns the data in the first place. The answer could ripple across the industry for years to come, which is why both sides of Question 1 have poured millions of dollars into the fight. And because the U.S. has been slower to address these issues in federal legislation, Question 1 could have impact beyond Massachusetts state lines. Ultimately, the measure "could set the national standard for cars," according to Kyle Wiens, the founder of California-based iFixit and a vocal right-to-repair advocate...

If a majority of Massachusetts residents vote Yes on Question 1 this fall, carmakers would have to install standardized, open data-sharing platforms on any cars with telematics systems starting with model year 2022. "Owners of motor vehicles with telematics systems would get access to mechanical data through a mobile device application," the ballot summary reads...

Early polling suggests the state of Massachusetts will vote overwhelmingly in favor Question 1...
"Hopefully this means we have an open-standard development process," Wiens tells Wired, "with all cars in the U.S. using the same standard, and a new world of innovation around mobile apps."

NASA's 322-foot rocket "Space Launch System" rocket "would be the most powerful rocket ever flown, eclipsing both the Saturn V that flew astronauts to the moon and SpaceX's Falcon Heavy," reports the Washington Post.

But "it's not the rocket's engines that concern officials but the software that will control everything the rocket does, from setting its trajectory to opening individual valves to open and close." Computing power has become as critical to rockets as the brute force that lifts them out of Earth's atmosphere, especially rockets like the SLS, which is really an amalgamation of parts built by a variety of manufacturers: Boeing builds the rocket's "core stage," the main part of the vehicle. Lockheed Martin builds the Orion spacecraft. Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman are responsible for the RS-25 engines and the side boosters, respectively. And the United Launch Alliance handles the upper stage. All of those components need to work together for a mission to be successful. But NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel recently said it was concerned about the disjointed way the complicated system was being developed and tested...

Also troubling to the safety panel was that NASA and its contractors appeared not to have taken "advantage of the lessons learned" from the botched flight last year of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, which suffered a pair of software errors that prevented it from docking with the International Space Station as planned and forced controllers to cut the mission short. NASA has since said that it did a poor job of overseeing Boeing on the Starliner program, and has since vowed to have more rigorous reviews of its work, especially its software testing...

NASA pushed back on the safety panel's findings, saying in a statement that "all software, hardware, and combination for every phase of the Artemis I mission is thoroughly tested and evaluated to ensure that it meets NASA's strict safety requirements and is fully qualified for human spaceflight." The agency and its contractors are "conducting integrated end-to-end testing for the software, hardware, avionics and integrated systems needed to fly Artemis missions," it said.

ZDNet reports: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on a conference call Thursday evening that the company plans to post notices at the top of users' news feeds on November 3rd discrediting any claims by either candidate in the U.S. presidential election that they have won the election if the site deems the claim premature... The move, said Zuckerberg, is being made because "There is a risk of civil unrest across the country, and given this, companies like ours need to go well beyond what we've done before."

The conference call with analysts followed a third-quarter earnings report Thursday afternoon in which Facebook's results topped expectations, helped by gains in active users that also were higher than Wall Street expected.

Zuckerberg said Facebook "helped 4.4 million people register [to vote] exceeding the goal that we set for ourselves this summer."

UPI reports: Space Force's vice chief of space operations tested positive for COVID-19 Wednesday, Space Force announced.

According to a press release issued jointly by the Space Force and the Air Force, Gen. David D. Thompson took a test for the virus after learning that a close family member had tested positive. Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said Thompson has not shown symptoms of COVID-19 so far and was on leave last week, but returned to the Pentagon for work on Monday and Tuesday to address a virtual symposium for the National Defense Industrial Association and Texas A&M University. He is now self-isolating and working from home...

As of Thursday morning a total of 55,443 COVID-19 cases had been reported in the [U.S.] military since the beginning of the pandemic, with 8,839 of those reported among Air Force personnel.

CNN describes the reactions posted online by six beta testers of Tesla's "full self-driving" software, saying they "appear to be both delighted and alarmed by what they've experienced so far." "Turn left. Come on. What are you doing?" said one frustrated Tesla owner as his car appeared slow to change lanes during a trip he posted on YouTube last week. "I swear I'm not drunk you guys, I'm not drunk, it's my car...."

CNN Business reviewed hours of footage and found early impressions of the software are a mixed bag. At times the testers are impressed with the "full self-driving" technology, in other cases they say it's overly cautious. The videos also show unsafe situations that appear to result from the car not understanding traffic well enough.

Brandon McGowen, one of the beta testers, has posted videos online in which his Tesla nearly drives off the road or into a median. He's not the only driver who claims to have experienced trouble while testing the software. Beta testers Zeb Hallock, James Locke, Rafael Santoni, Kim Paquette, and a YouTuber who goes by "Tesla Raj," have highlighted concerns. In videos reviewed by CNN Business, Teslas appear to blow through red lights, stop well short of intersections, miss turns, nearly rear-end a parked car, make a turn from the wrong lane, and speed over speed bumps...

Tesla has warned current drivers to pay extra attention to the road, and keep their hands on the wheel. "Do not become complacent," Tesla warned the drivers in a message displayed when they installed the software, which CNN viewed in multiple videos posted by people testing the software. "It may do the wrong thing at the worst time...."

The cars...have shown a pattern of coming to a full stop when entering a roundabout, even when no car is blocking their path. Videos show that full self-driving often slows for speed humps, but won't necessarily slow down for speed bumps. In at least one case, the Tesla "full self-driving" software appeared to confuse a one-way street for a two-way street, according to the video.

Paquette estimated in her Talking Tesla interview that her Tesla might be as good a driver as her, if she'd had "maybe three bourbons."

Forbes reports that TikTok "cannot be shut down in the United States next month, a U.S. District Court judge ruled Friday afternoon, the latest setback in President Donald Trump's push to force the Chinese-owned app to be transferred to American ownership." In an August executive order that labeled TikTok a national security threat, Trump required Beijing-based tech company ByteDance to sell its popular short-form video app to an American firm by Nov. 12, or else the federal government would enforce restrictions on data transfers that effectively make the app unusable. Pennsylvania Judge Wendy Beetlestone blocked that order Friday, issuing a preliminary injunction while the court considers a lawsuit brought by several TikTok content creators.

Beetlestone said Trump probably doesn't have the power to block TikTok: he tried to force a sale using a 43-year-old law that gives him broad power over international transactions that pose threats to national security, but that law exempts "informational materials" like artwork and news, a category Beetlestone said includes TikTok videos...

The U.S. Department of Commerce plans to comply with Beetlestone's injunction, but it will "vigorously defend" Trump's executive order from this legal challenge, a spokesperson told Forbes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Amazon.com said it now has about 1 million employees after hiring 250,000 workers in the third quarter, part of a growth spurt driven by booming ecommerce sales during the coronavirus pandemic and a milestone for a company founded in 1995 by Jeff Bezos as an online bookseller. Despite its rapid ascent, Amazon still has fewer workers than the nation's biggest private employer, Walmart, which has 2.2 million global workers.

Even so, Amazon's explosive growth underscores the historic shift in financial might from manufacturers such as General Motors, U.S. Steel and General Electric. In the 1950s, these three corporations were the country's biggest employers, with a combined workforce of more than 1 million employees at the time. Today, the three employ about 400,000 workers as the U.S. economy has shed factory jobs in favor of service-oriented work. In a conference call on Thursday, Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said the company hired "a lot more people to support the strong customer demand." After hiring 250,000 full-time and part-time workers in the quarter ended in September, Amazon has hired another 100,000 workers in October, he said. The jobs pay a minimum of $15 an hour and include benefits such as health insurance, retirement benefits and parental leave, he added.

In Shanghai's latest effort to preserve historic structures, engineers have relocated an 85-year-old, five-story building in its entirety using new technology dubbed the "walking machine." CNN reports: [E]ngineers attached nearly 200 mobile supports under the five-story building, according to Lan Wuji, chief technical supervisor of the project. The supports act like robotic legs. They're split into two groups which alternately rise up and down, imitating the human stride. Attached sensors help control how the building moves forward, said Lan, whose company Shanghai Evolution Shift developed the new technology in 2018. "It's like giving the building crutches so it can stand up and then walk," he said. A timelapse shot by the company shows the school inching laboriously along, one tiny step at a time.

According to a statement from the Huangpu district government, the Lagena Primary School was constructed in 1935 by the municipal board of Shanghai's former French Concession. It was moved in order to make space for a new commercial and office complex, which will be completed by 2023. Workers had to first dig around the building to install the 198 mobile supports in the spaces underneath, Lan explained. After the pillars of the building were truncated, the robotic "legs" were then extended upward, lifting the building before moving forward.

Over the course of 18 days, the building was rotated 21 degrees and moved 62 meters (203 feet) away to its new location. The relocation was completed on October 15, with the old school building set to become a center for heritage protection and cultural education. The project marks the first time this "walking machine" method has been used in Shanghai to relocate a historical building, the government statement said.

Your iPhone got a new button last month, and you may not have even noticed. The Verge reports: No, Apple didn't sneak into your house and secretly superglue a button onto your smartphone. But it did release iOS 14, the latest version of its iPhone software, which includes a feature called Back Tap. Back Tap adds a fascinating new "button" to your phone that blurs the line between hardware and software. Back Tap turns the entire back of your iPhone into a giant touch-sensitive button that you can double or triple tap to trigger specific functions on your phone. There's a good chance that you haven't noticed it yet. Apple slipped the settings for Back Tap into its Accessibility menu.

Its intended purpose is to give users more options for interacting with their devices. Most of Back Tap's options reflect that, with settings to open the app switcher, notification menu, or control center; scroll through an app or webpage; trigger Siri; or take a screenshot. But Back Tap also ties into Apple's incredibly robust Shortcuts app, which means you can effectively make those new buttons do almost anything you can imagine. It's a fascinating kind of button: entirely invisible to the naked eye, completely nonfunctional until it's enabled through software, but can be tasked to open, interact with, or accomplish nearly any task on your smartphone with just a quick tap.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: In its first report on its autonomous vehicle operations in Phoenix, Arizona, Waymo said that it was involved in 18 crashes and 29 near-miss collisions during 2019 and the first nine months of 2020. These crashes included rear-enders, vehicle swipes, and even one incident when a Waymo vehicle was T-boned at an intersection by another car at nearly 40 mph. The company said that no one was seriously injured and "nearly all" of the collisions were the fault of the other driver. The report is the deepest dive yet into the real-life operations of the world's leading autonomous vehicle company, which recently began offering rides in its fully driverless vehicles to the general public. ... [I]n this paper, and another also published today, the company is showing its work. Waymo says its intention is to build public trust in automated vehicle technology, but these papers also serve as a challenge to other AV competitors.

The two papers take different approaches. The first outlines a multilayered approach that maps out Waymo's approach to safety. It includes three layers: Hardware, including the vehicle itself, the sensor suite, the steering and braking system, and the computing platform; The automated driving system behavioral layer, such as avoiding collisions with other cars, successfully completing fully autonomous rides, and adhering to the rules of the road; Operations, like fleet operations, risk management, and a field safety program to resolve potential safety issues.

The second paper is meatier, with detailed information on the company's self-driving operations in Phoenix, including the number of miles driven and the number of "contact events" Waymo's vehicles have had with other road users. This is the first time that Waymo has ever publicly disclosed mileage and crash data from its autonomous vehicle testing operation in Phoenix. Between January and December 2019, Waymo's vehicles with trained safety drivers drove 6.1 million miles. In addition, from January 2019 through September 2020, its fully driverless vehicles drove 65,000 miles. Taken together, the company says this represents "over 500 years of driving for the average licensed US driver," citing a 2017 survey of travel trends by the Federal Highway Administration. "This is a major milestone, we think, in transparency," said Matthew Schwall, head of field safety at Waymo, in a briefing with reporters Wednesday. Waymo claims this is the first time that any autonomous vehicle company has released a detailed overview of its safety methodologies, including vehicle crash data, when not required by a government entity. "Our goal here is to kickstart a renewed industry dialogue in terms of how safety is assessed for these technologies," Schwall said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The RIAA is ramping up the pressure on a wide range of platforms allegedly involved in music piracy. Two DMCA subpoenas obtained against Cloudflare and Namecheap require the companies to hand over all information they hold on more than 40 torrent sites, streaming portals and YouTube-ripping services. Also included in the mix are several file-hosting platforms.

Security researchers from Google have disclosed today a zero-day vulnerability in the Windows operating system that is currently under active exploitation. From a report: The zero-day is expected to be patched on November 10, which is the date of Microsoft's next Patch Tuesday, according to Ben Hawkes, team lead for Project Zero, Google's elite vulnerability research team. On Twitter, Hawkes said the Windows zero-day (tracked as CVE-2020-17087) was used as part of a two-punch attack, together with another a Chrome zero-day (tracked as CVE-2020-15999) that his team disclosed last week. The Chrome zero-day was used to allow attackers to run malicious code inside Chrome, while the Windows zero-day was the second part of this attack, allowing threat actors to escape Chrome's secure container and run code on the underlying operating system -- in what security experts call a sandbox escape.

Facebook revealed Thursday how internal technical glitches had disrupted the delivery of some ads from the Joe Biden and Donald Trump campaigns, but said it made changes to resolve those hiccups in the run-up to the November U.S. presidential election. From a report: The social media giant's admission followed complaints from the Biden camp about how thousands of its ads had been blocked. Facebook said in a blog post it spotted "unanticipated issues" affecting both campaigns, including technical flaws that caused a number of ads to be "paused improperly." "No ad was paused or rejected by a person, or because of any partisan consideration," Facebook said in its post. "The technical problems were automated and impacted ads from across the political spectrum and both Presidential campaigns."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Unless you're a physicist or an engineer, there really isn't much reason for you to know about partial differential equations. I know. After years of poring over them in undergrad while studying mechanical engineering, I've never used them since in the real world. But partial differential equations, or PDEs, are also kind of magical. They're a category of math equations that are really good at describing change over space and time, and thus very handy for describing the physical phenomena in our universe. They can be used to model everything from planetary orbits to plate tectonics to the air turbulence that disturbs a flight, which in turn allows us to do practical things like predict seismic activity and design safe planes. The catch is PDEs are notoriously hard to solve. And here, the meaning of "solve" is perhaps best illustrated by an example. Say you are trying to simulate air turbulence to test a new plane design. There is a known PDE called Navier-Stokes that is used to describe the motion of any fluid. "Solving" Navier-Stokes allows you to take a snapshot of the air's motion (a.k.a. wind conditions) at any point in time and model how it will continue to move, or how it was moving before.

These calculations are highly complex and computationally intensive, which is why disciplines that use a lot of PDEs often rely on supercomputers to do the math. It's also why the AI field has taken a special interest in these equations. If we could use deep learning to speed up the process of solving them, it could do a whole lot of good for scientific inquiry and engineering. Now researchers at Caltech have introduced a new deep-learning technique for solving PDEs that is dramatically more accurate than deep-learning methods developed previously. It's also much more generalizable, capable of solving entire families of PDEs -- such as the Navier-Stokes equation for any type of fluid -- without needing retraining. Finally, it is 1,000 times faster than traditional mathematical formulas, which would ease our reliance on supercomputers and increase our computational capacity to model even bigger problems. That's right. Bring it on.

New submitter B1948J writes: It's interesting that Honeywell is once again emerging as a computing hardware vendor. Over 50 years ago, Honeywell established itself as one of the big 3 computer mainframe manufacturers (Honeywell, Burroughs and IBM). Some say the Honeywell-200 introduced "channel architecture" before IBM "announced" it for their 360 series computers. Now, Honeywell is announcing its H1 Quantum Computer capable of a Quantum Value of 128 through 10 fully connected qubits.

WhatsApp, the popular instant messaging app owned by Facebook, is now delivering roughly 100 billion messages a day, the company's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at the quarterly earnings call Thursday. From a report: For some perspective, users exchanged 100 billion messages on WhatsApp last New Year's Eve. That is the day when WhatsApp tops its engagement figures, and as many of you may remember, also the time when the service customarily suffered glitches in the past years. (No outage on last New Year's Eve!) At this point, WhatsApp is just competing with itself. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp together were used to exchange 60 billion messages a day as of early 2016.

While the rest of the U.S. economy languished earlier this year, the tech industry's biggest companies seemed immune to the downturn, surging as the country worked, learned and shopped from home. From a report: On Thursday, as the economy is showing signs of improvement, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Facebook reported profits that highlighted how a recovery may provide another catalyst to help them generate a level of wealth that hasn't been seen in a single industry in generations. With an entrenched audience of users and the financial resources to press their leads in areas like cloud computing, e-commerce and digital advertising, the companies demonstrated again that economic malaise, upstart competitors and feisty antitrust regulators have had little impact on their bottom line. Combined, the four companies reported a quarterly net profit of $38 billion.

Amazon reported record sales, and an almost 200 percent rise in profits, as the pandemic accelerated the transition to online shopping. Despite a boycott of its advertising over the summer, Facebook had another blockbuster quarter. Alphabet's record quarterly net profit was up 59 percent, as marketers plowed money into advertisements for Google search and YouTube. And Apple's sales rose even though the pandemic forced it to push back the iPhone 12's release to October, in the current quarter. On Tuesday, Microsoft, Amazon's closest competitor in cloud computing, also reported its most profitable quarter, growing 30 percent from a year earlier. "The scene that's playing out fundamentally is that these tech stalwarts are gaining more market share by the day," said Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities. "It's 'A Tale of Two Cities' for this group of tech companies and everyone else."

In preparation for next year's Xe HPG graphics cards, Intel's open-source developers have begun publishing their patches enabling their "ANC" Vulkan Linux driver to support Vulkan ray-tracing. Phoronix reports: Jason Ekstrand as the lead developer originally on the Intel ANV driver has posted today the initial ray-tracing code for ANV in order to support VK_KHR_ray_tracing for their forthcoming hardware. Today is the first time Intel has approved of this open-source code being published and more is on the way. The code today isn't enough for Vulkan ray-tracing but more is on the way and based against the latest internal Khronos ray-tracing specification. At the moment they are not focusing on the former NVIDIA-specific ray-tracing extension but may handle it in the future if game vendors continue targeting it rather than the forthcoming finalized KHR version.

Among other big ticket items still to come in the near-term includes extending the ANV driver to support compiling and dispatching OpenCL kernels, new SPIR-V capabilities, and generic pointer support. Also needed is the actual support for compiling ray-tracing pipelines, managing acceleration structures, dispatching rays, and the platform support. The actual exposing of the support won't come until after The Khronos Group has firmed up their VK_KHR_ray_tracing extension. Some of this Intel-specific Vulkan ray-tracing code may prove useful to Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver as well. Intel engineers have been testing their latest ray-tracing support with ANV internally on Xe HPG.

User growth in the United States in Canada -- the company's most lucrative ad market -- has declined, Facebook reported as part of its third-quarter earnings. Engadget reports: The company now has 196 million users in North America, down slightly from 198 million last quarter. In a statement, the company said the decrease was expected, and could continue through the end of the year. "As expected, in the third quarter of 2020, we saw Facebook DAUs and MAUs in the US & Canada decline slightly from the second quarter 2020 levels which were elevated due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic," Facebook wrote in a press release. "In the fourth quarter of 2020, we expect this trend to continue and that the number of DAUs and MAUs in the US & Canada will be flat or slightly down compared to the third quarter of 2020."

The company had previously reported a large surge in growth at the start of the year due to widespread coronavirus lockdowns. Facebook isn't seeing the same slowdown everywhere, though, and the social network is continuing to add new users in Asia and its "rest of world" markets. The company also continued to tout its "family of apps" metrics, which combines Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. That number rose to 2.54 billion "daily active people" in September, according to the company. The slowdown also doesn't seem to have affected Facebook's revenue, which was up to $21.4 billion for the quarter, an increase of 22 percent from last year and better than analyst expectations for the company.