An executive at Google said the company's plan to launch a censored search engine in China has been "terminated." The project was reportedly put on hold last year but rumors that it remained active persisted. From a report: "We have terminated Project Dragonfly," Google executive Karan Bhatia told the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Buzzfeed, which reported the new comments, said it was the first public confirmation that Dragonfly had ended. A spokesman for Google later confirmed to the site that Google currently had no plans to launch search in China and that no work was being done to that end.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Amazon faces a formal European Union antitrust investigation (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) into its dealings with merchants that sell goods on its site, marking an expansion of a multi-pronged regulatory push that has ensnared other U.S. tech giants like Facebook and Google. The European Commission, the EU's top antitrust enforcer, said Wednesday that its investigation will examine whether Amazon is abusing its dual role as a marketplace where independent sellers can offer products and as a retailer of products in its own right. In particular, the probe will study whether Amazon is using nonpublic data from independent merchants to compete unfairly against them. Investigators will also examine what data Amazon uses to pick a seller as the default option for a given product when a user clicks the "buy" button -- and whether Amazon has an unfair advantage to be designated the default for products it sells. The probe could eventually lead to formal charges, fines and orders for the company to change business practices, but it could also be dropped.

Starting in Firefox 70, Mozilla aims to have the browser report when any of your saved logins were found in data breaches. This will be done through their partnership with the Have I Been Pwned data breach site. From a report: Mozilla is slowly integrating their independent Firefox Monitor service and the new Firefox Lockwise password manager directly into Firefox. Mozilla is also considering premium services based around these features in the future. As part of this integration, Firefox will scan the saved login names and passwords and see if they were exposed in a data breach listed on Have I been Pwned. If one is found, Firefox will alert the user and prompt them to change their password. This new feature will only work, though, for data breaches that exposed passwords and when the password was saved prior to an associated data breach.

It was the first killer app, the spark for Apple's early success and a trigger for the broader PC boom that vaulted Microsoft to its central position in business computing. And within a few years, it was tech-industry roadkill. From a report: The story of VisiCalc, a humble spreadsheet program that set the tech world ablaze 40 years ago, has reverberated through the industry and still influences the decisions of executives, engineers and investors. Its lessons include the power of simplicity and the difficulty of building a hypergrowth company in a hypergrowth industry. Indeed, its lessons have been so internalized by today's tech titans that they have significantly inoculated themselves against that sort of tumultuous, competitive dynamism -- aka disruption.

VisiCalc was unveiled on June 4, 1979, and shipped that October. Dan Bricklin first dreamed it up in a classroom at Harvard Business School -- the room now bears a plaque commemorating his idea -- and partnered with Bob Frankston, who coded VisiCalc and collaborated in its design. When users opened VisiCalc, they would see a character-based grid where numbers or text could be manipulated. It was handy for budgeting, financial projections, bookkeeping and making lists. Today it's instantly recognizable as a spreadsheet, as familiar to us as a blinking cursor, but at the time it was a novel idea that had to be experienced to be understood. Initially VisiCalc ran only on the Apple II, a then-revolutionary new personal computer and Apple's first major consumer product. While some Apple II models had just 4 kilobytes of RAM, VisiCalc demanded a whopping 32KB. (Even the cheapest of today's iPhones have tens of thousands of times as much RAM.) Further reading: VisiCalc Turns 25, Creators Interviewed (June, 2004).

President Trump said this week his administration will "take a look" into Google following statements made earlier this week by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. From a report: "Billionaire Tech Investor Peter Thiel believes Google should be investigated for treason," Trump said in a tweet. "He accuses Google of working with the Chinese Government... A great and brilliant guy who knows this subject better than anyone! The Trump Administration will take a look!" On Sunday, Thiel, a Facebook board member, said that the FBI and the CIA should investigate Google to see if it has been infiltrated by Chinese intelligence.

"Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI (artificial intelligence)?" Thiel said, according to Axios. "Number two, does Google's senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence? Number three, is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military," Thiel said during the National Conservatism Conference in Washington.

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens passed away Tuesday evening of complications following a stroke he suffered on July 15. He was 99 years old. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares a lightly edited version of Ars Technica's 2010 story that originally marked his retirement from the Supreme Court: In April 2010, the Supreme Court's most senior justice, John Paul Stevens, announced his retirement. In the weeks that followed, hundreds of articles were written about his career and his legacy. While most articles focus on 'hot button' issues such as flag burning, terrorism, and affirmative action, Stevens' tech policy record has largely been ignored. When Justice Stevens joined the court, many of the technologies we now take for granted -- the PC, packet-switched networks, home video recording -- were in their infancy. During his 35-year tenure on the bench, Stevens penned decisions that laid the foundation for the tremendous innovations that followed in each of these areas.

For example, Stevens penned the 1978 decision that shielded the software industry from the patent system in its formative years. In 1984, Hollywood's effort to ban the VCR failed by just one Supreme Court vote; Stevens wrote the majority opinion. And in 1997, he wrote the majority opinion striking down the worst provisions of the Communications Decency Act and ensuring that the Internet would have robust First Amendment protections. Indeed, Justice Stevens probably deserves more credit than any other justice for the innovations that occurred under his watch. And given how central those technologies have become to the American economy, Stevens' tech policy work may prove one of his most enduring legacies. In this feature, we review Justice Stevens' tech policy decisions and salute the justice who helped make possible DRM-free media devices, uncensored Internet connections, free software, and much more. As the report mentions, Stevens was the Supreme Court's cryptographer. "Stevens attended the University of Chicago, graduating in 1941. On December 6 -- the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor -- Stevens enrolled in the Navy's correspondence course on cryptography."

"Stevens spent the war in a Navy bunker in Hawaii, doing traffic analysis in an effort to determine the location of Japanese ships," the report adds. "He was an English major, not a mathematician, but he proved to have a knack for cryptographic work."