An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has revealed technical details of its in-house data transfer tool, called Effingo, and bragged that it uses the project to move an average of 1.2 exabytes every day. As explained in a paper [PDF] and video to be presented on Thursday at the SIGCOMM 2024 conference in Sydney, bandwidth constraints and the stubbornly steady speed of light mean that not even Google is immune to the need to replicate data so it is located close to where it is processed or served.

Indeed, the paper describes managed data transfer as "an unsung hero of large-scale, globally-distributed systems" because it "reduces the network latency from across-globe hundreds to in-continent dozens of milliseconds." The paper also points out that data transfer tools are not hard to find, and asks why a management layer like Effingo is needed. The answer is that the tools Google could find either optimized for transfer time or handled point-to-point data streams -- and weren't up to the job of handling the 1.2 exabytes Effingo moves on an average day, at 14 terabytes per second. To shift all those bits, Effingo "balances infrastructure efficiency and users' needs" and recognizes that "some users and some transfers are more important than the others: eg, disaster recovery for a serving database, compared to migrating data from a cluster with maintenance scheduled a week from now."

Microsoft said Delta Air Lines turned down repeated offers for assistance following last month's catastrophic system outage, echoing claims by CrowdStrike in an increasingly contentious conflict between the carrier and its technology partners. From a report: Microsoft employees reached out to Delta to give technical support every day from July 19 through July 23, and "each time Delta turned down Microsoft's offers to help," according to a letter Tuesday from the technology giant's attorneys to Delta's representatives. Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella also personally emailed Delta CEO Ed Bastian and never heard back. "Even though Microsoft's software had not caused the CrowdStrike incident, Microsoft immediately jumped in and offered to assist Delta at no charge," according to the letter, which was signed by Mark Cheffo of Dechert LLP. The claims, in response to Delta's hiring of attorney David Boies, heighten the tension after Delta suggested it would try to seek compensation for a breakdown it expects to cost it $500 million this quarter. The airline was slower to recover than competitors after an errant software update from CrowdStrike affected Microsoft systems, creating a cascading effect that led Delta to cancel thousands of flights over several days.

Google today unveiled its new Google TV Streamer, a $99.99 set-top box replacing the Chromecast. The device, shipping September 24, boasts improved performance with a 22% faster processor (over its predecessor), doubled RAM, and 32GB storage. It integrates Thread and Matter for smart home control, featuring a side-panel accessible via the remote. The Streamer supports Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos and includes an Ethernet port. Design changes include a low-profile form factor in two colors and a redesigned remote with a finder function. Software enhancements use Gemini AI for content summaries and custom screensavers.

Mainframe computers, stalwarts of high-speed data processing, are finding new relevance in the age of AI. Banks, insurers, and airlines continue to rely on these industrial-strength machines for mission-critical operations, with some now exploring AI applications directly on the hardware, WSJ reported in a feature story. IBM, commanding over 96% of the mainframe market, reported 6% growth in its mainframe business last quarter. The company's latest zSystem can process up to 30,000 transactions per second and hold 40 terabytes of data. WSJ adds: Globally, the mainframe market was valued at $3.05 billion in 2023, but new mainframe sales are expected to decline through 2028, IDC said. Of existing mainframes, however, 54% of enterprise leaders in a 2023 Forrester survey said they would increase their usage over the next two years.

Mainframes do have limitations. They are constrained by the computing power within their boxes, unlike the cloud, which can scale up by drawing on computing power distributed across many locations and servers. They are also unwieldy -- with years of old code tacked on -- and don't integrate well with new applications. That makes them costly to manage and difficult to use as a platform for developing new applications.

Mozilla, the non-profit behind the Firefox browser, faces an uncertain future following Monday's landmark antitrust ruling against Google. The decision, which found Google illegally maintained its search monopoly, puts Mozilla's primary funding source at risk. In 2021-2022, Mozilla received $510 million from Google out of $593 million total revenue, according to its latest financial report. Fortune adds: You can be sure that critics of the judge's ruling will highlight the potentially devastating impact on Mozilla to make the case that the antitrust ruling will have unintended consequences on smaller tech industry players. Others might argue that Mozilla hasn't done enough with those spoils to differentiate its Firefox browser, or that it could cut a deal with another search engine like Bing if its Google deal goes away completely. Either way, Google will appeal the suit so a long battle may ensue. And there's another big domino to fall: the judge will rule on the remedy or remedies -- essentially, the business-model penalties -- that Google will face. Apple also stands to lose more than $20 billion a year that Google pays the iPhone-maker to be the default search engine on Safari. But as Fortune notes, "Apple is a large, diversified company with many sources of revenue."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hackers delivered malware to Windows and Mac users by compromising their Internet service provider and then tampering with software updates delivered over unsecure connections, researchers said. The attack, researchers from security firm Volexity said, worked by hacking routers or similar types of device infrastructure of an unnamed ISP. The attackers then used their control of the devices to poison domain name system responses for legitimate hostnames providing updates for at least six different apps written for Windows or macOS. The apps affected were the 5KPlayer, Quick Heal, Rainmeter, Partition Wizard, and those from Corel and Sogou.

Because the update mechanisms didn't use TLS or cryptographic signatures to authenticate the connections or downloaded software, the threat actors were able to use their control of the ISP infrastructure to successfully perform machine-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks that directed targeted users to hostile servers rather than the ones operated by the affected software makers. These redirections worked even when users employed non-encrypted public DNS services such as Google's 8.8.8.8 or Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 rather than the authoritative DNS server provided by the ISP. "That is the fun/scary part -- this was not the hack of the ISPs DNS servers," Volexity CEO Steven Adair wrote in an online interview. "This was a compromise of network infrastructure for Internet traffic. The DNS queries, for example, would go to Google's DNS servers destined for 8.8.8.8. The traffic was being intercepted to respond to the DNS queries with the IP address of the attacker's servers."

In other words, the DNS responses returned by any DNS server would be changed once it reached the infrastructure of the hacked ISP. The only way an end user could have thwarted the attack was to use DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS to ensure lookup results haven't been tampered with or to avoid all use of apps that deliver unsigned updates over unencrypted connections. As an example, the 5KPlayer app uses an unsecure HTTP connection rather than an encrypted HTTPS one to check if an update is available and, if so, to download a configuration file named Youtube.config. StormBamboo, the name used in the industry to track the hacking group responsible, used DNS poisoning to deliver a malicious version of the Youtube.config file from a malicious server. This file, in turn, downloaded a next-stage payload that was disguised as a PNG image. In fact, it was an executable file that installed malware tracked under the names MACMA for macOS devices or POCOSTICK for Windows devices. As for the hacked ISP, the security firm said "it's not a huge one or one you'd likely know."

"In our case the incident is contained but we see other servers that are actively serving malicious updates but we do not know where they are being served from. We suspect there are other active attacks around the world we do not have purview into. This could be from an ISP compromise or a localized compromise to an organization such as on their firewall."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Distracted driving isn't only a result of drivers using their phones when they should be paying attention. But it is a significant cause of the problem, accounting for at least 13 percent of distracted driving deaths and rising to 1 in 5 for young drivers. Now, a study conducted with customers of the Progressive insurance company has tested different strategies to get those drivers to put their phones down in the car, and it found two that significantly reduced handheld use, with the effect persisting after the end of the study. The study recruited 1,653 customers already enrolled in its Progressive Snapshot program, which involves the use of a smartphone app that detects phone use while driving. Before the start of the trial, the participants all averaged more than 6.4 minutes per hour of handheld use while driving -- Progressive says its safest customers have handheld usage of less than 1 minute per hour while driving. [...] Paying drivers on top of competitive gamification was the most effective way to get them to put down their phones. This group reduced its handheld usage by 27.6 percent, or 89 seconds/hour, compared to the control. That reduction was maintained at the same level throughout the post-intervention period for this arm.

With Windows 10's end-of-life update coming next October, it appears that users are finally making the jump to its successor. As spotted by Neowin, Windows 11 crossed the 30% market share mark for the first time since its release. From the report: According to Statcounter's latest findings, last month, Windows 11 reached a new all-time high of 30.83%, gaining 1.08 points in just one month or 7.17 points year-over-year (it was at 23.66% in July 2023). Just as Windows 11 climbs, Windows 10 loses its market share. It is now below 65%, or 64.99%, to be precise, or -1.06 points in one month. Year-over-year change is 11.15 points (it was at 71.14% in July 2023). [...]

Other Windows versions, which are now long unsupported, still have a fair share of customers who refuse to jump-ship. Windows 7, for one, is the third most popular Windows with a 3.04% market share (+0.08 points). Windows 8.1 is fourth with 0.42% (+0.02 points), and Windows XP is fifth with 0.38% (-0.01 points).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On July 19, Yelp informed select indie developers that they would have to switch to paid accounts, due to high API usage. Developers were given four days to make the change, in a move that echoes recent communication bungles by Reddit and Twitter. When the developers replied to the July 19 email, Yelp sent a deck of pricing tiers with base pricing starting from $229 per month for a limit of 1,000 API calls per day. Developers were concerned that other, more affordable options weren't mentioned in the deck. Yelp said the pricing is equivalent and simply presented in different ways. The method of communication and lack of transparency has angered developers, some of whom shuttered their services, even after Yelp gave them a 90-day leeway and apologized. While the company has issued an apology email to developers and extended their free usage by 90 days, it may not be enough to keep these frustrated developers from moving to new platforms.

"We apologize for last week's abbreviated transition that impacted a small percentage of developers and have extended access to these users," a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Yelp sunsetted free, commercial, unlimited use of the Yelp Fusion API in 2019 and has been in the process of migrating developers to a paid program over the last several years. The developer community is important to Yelp, and we've heard their feedback about the transition period from the free Yelp Fusion API to our paid program."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indonesia said it has banned the privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo, citing concerns that it could be used to access pornography and online gambling websites which are illegal in the country, the communications ministry said on Friday. Indonesia, with the world's biggest Muslim population, has strict rules that ban the sharing online of content deemed obscene. Social media platform Reddit and video-hosting platform Vimeo are blocked.

Usman Kansong, a communications ministry official, told Reuters that DuckDuckGo had been blocked "because of the many complaints made to us about the rampant online gambling and pornography content in its search results." The ministry did not say how DuckDuckGo differs from other search engines such as Alphabet's Google but on its website, DuckDuckGo said it offered several products intended to "help people protect their online privacy" including the search engine, which it said has been praised by privacy advocates.

Google's payments to make its search engine the default on smartphone web browsers violates US antitrust law, a federal judge ruled Monday, handing a key victory to the Justice Department. From a report: Judge Amit Mehta in Washington said that the Alphabet unit's $26 billion in payments effectively blocked any other competitor from succeeding in the market. Antitrust enforcers alleged that Google has illegally maintained a monopoly over online search and related advertising. The government said that Google has paid Apple, Samsung and others billions over decades for prime placement on smartphones and web browsers. This default position has allowed Google to build up the most-used search engine in the world, and fueled more than $300 billion in annual revenue largely generated by search ads.

Nvidia scraped videos from YouTube, Netflix and other online platforms to compile training data for its AI products, 404 Media reported Monday, citing internal documents. The tech giant used this content to develop various AI projects, including its Omniverse 3D world generator and self-driving car systems, the report said. Some employees expressed concerns about potential legal issues surrounding the use of such content, the report said, adding that the management assured them of executive-level approval. Nvidia defended its actions, asserting they were "in full compliance with the letter and the spirit of copyright law" and emphasizing that copyright protects specific expressions rather than facts or ideas.

CrowdStrike says that it isn't to blame for Delta Air Lines' dayslong meltdown following the tech outage caused by the cybersecurity company, and that it isn't responsible for all of the money that the carrier says it lost. From a report: In a letter responding to the airline's recent public comments and hiring of a prominent lawyer, CrowdStrike said Delta's threats of a lawsuit have contributed to a "misleading narrative" that the cybersecurity company was responsible for the airline's tech decisions and response to the outage. "Should Delta pursue this path, Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions -- swiftly, transparently, and constructively -- while Delta did not," wrote Michael Carlinsky, an attorney at law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.

The letter to Delta's legal team Sunday evening is the latest move in a growing conflict between the cybersecurity firm and the airline, which was thrown into several days of disarray following the outage. Delta Chief Executive Ed Bastian said in an interview on CNBC last week that the outage cost the airline about $500 million, including lost revenue and compensation costs. The airline has alerted CrowdStrike and Microsoft that it is planning to pursue legal claims to recover its losses, and has hired litigation firm Boies Schiller Flexner to assist, according to a memo Bastian sent to Delta employees last week. CrowdStrike said Sunday that its liability is contractually capped at an amount in the "single-digit millions."

Charles Schwab and other retail brokerage users reported outages as a global stocks selloff surged when trading in the US market opened on Monday. From a report: More than 14,000 users reported an outage at Schwab at 9:50 a.m. in New York, according to the website Downdetector. The outage comes at a time when global financial markets are experiencing a significant downturn as a widespread sell-off intensified following Friday's disappointing US employment data, which heightened concerns about a potential recession in the world's largest economy. The turbulence was particularly pronounced in Asian markets, with Japanese stocks leading the decline, while cryptocurrencies, oil prices, and European equities also suffered losses. The volatility spread to the US, where stocks plummeted at the opening bell, and the yield curve briefly inverted as investors increased their bets on imminent Federal Reserve interest rate cuts.

OpenAI has developed a sophisticated anticheating tool for detecting AI-generated content, particularly essays and research papers, but has refrained from releasing it due to internal debates and ethical considerations, according to WSJ.

This tool, which has been ready for deployment for approximately a year, utilizes a watermarking technique that subtly alters token selection in ChatGPT's output, creating an imperceptible pattern detectable only by OpenAI's technology. While boasting a 99.9% effectiveness rate for substantial AI-generated text, concerns persist regarding potential workarounds and the challenge of determining appropriate access to the detection tool, as well as its potential impact on non-native English speakers and the broader AI ecosystem.

A CNN reporter spent more than two hours waiting for EV chargers — thanks to "ill-mannered charger hogs who don't respect EV etiquette." [T]o protect batteries from damage, charging speeds slow way down once batteries get beyond 80% full. In fact, it can take as long, or even longer, to go from 80% charged to completely full than to reach 80%. Meanwhile, lines of electric vehicles wait behind almost-full cars. I was waiting behind people with batteries that were 92%, 94% and even 97% full, as I could see on the charger screens. Still, they stayed there. I made my own situation worse by giving up on one location and going to another with more chargers, but there were even more EVs waiting there.

Given that a lack of public charging is turning many consumers off to EVs, according to multiple surveys, this is a major issue. Both Electrify America and EVgo said they are rapidly expanding their networks to, as EVgo's Rafalson put it, "skate ahead of the puck," trying to make sure there are enough chargers to meet future demand... "I think what you're seeing is demand for public fast charging is really skyrocketing," said Sara Rafalson, executive vice president for policy at EV charging company EVgo, "and I would say we've been really at an inflection point in the last year, year and a half, with demand...."

Electrify America, one of America's biggest charging companies, is experimenting with a solution to the problem of charger hogs who can make it slow and unpleasant to travel in an EV. At 10 of the busiest EV fast charging stations in California, Electrify America has enacted a strict limit. Once a car's batteries are 85% charged, charging will automatically stop and the driver will be told to unplug and leave or face additional 40-cent-per-minute "idle time" fees for taking the space. It's similar to something Tesla vehicles do automatically. When a Tesla car, truck or SUV plugs into a particularly heavily-used Supercharger station, the vehicle itself may automatically limit charging to just 80% "to reduce congestion," according to Tesla's on-line Supercharger Support web page.

In that case, though, the user can still override the limit using the vehicle's touchscreen. There will be no getting around Electrify America's limit.
Electrify America's president points out an EV driver could need a full charge (if they're travelling somewhere with fewer charges) — or if they're driving an EV with a relatively short range. So the article notes that some EV charging companies "have experimented with plans that charge different amounts of money at different times to give drivers incentives to fill their batteries at less busy hours...

"For the time being, let's just hope that EV drivers who don't really need to fill all the way up will learn to be more considerate."

This week America's Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against the former CEO of the startup social media site "IRL"

The BBC reports: IRL — which was once considered a potential rival to Facebook — took its name from its intention to get its online users to meet up in real life. However, the initial optimism evaporated after it emerged most of IRL's users were bots, with the platform shutting in 2023...

The SEC says it believes [CEO Abraham] Shafi raised about $170m by portraying IRL as the new success story in the social media world. It alleges he told investors that IRL had attracted the vast majority its supposed 12 million users through organic growth. In reality, it argues, IRL was spending millions of dollars on advertisements which offered incentives to prospective users to download the IRL app. That expenditure, it is alleged, was subsequently hidden in the company's books.
IRL received multiple rounds of venture capital financing, eventually reaching "unicorn status" with a $1.17 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch. But it shut down in 2023 "after an internal investigation by the company's board found that 95% of the app's users were 'automated or from bots'."

TechCrunch notes it's the second time in the same week — and at least the fourth time in the past several months — that the SEC has charged a venture-backed founder on allegations of fraud... Earlier this week, the SEC charged BitClout founder Nader Al-Naji with fraud and unregistered offering of securities, claiming he used his pseudonymous online identity "DiamondHands" to avoid regulatory scrutiny while he raised over $257 million in cryptocurrency. BitClout, a buzzy crypto startup, was backed by high-profile VCs such as a16z, Sequoia, Chamath Palihapitiya's Social Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Winklevoss Capital.

In June, the SEC charged Ilit Raz, CEO and founder of the now-shuttered AI recruitment startup Joonko, with defrauding investors of at least $21 million. The agency alleged Raz made false and misleading statements about the quantity and quality of Joonko's customers, the number of candidates on its platform and the startup's revenue.

The agency has also gone after venture firms in recent months. In May, the SEC charged Robert Scott Murray and his firm Trillium Capital LLC with a fraudulent scheme to manipulate the stock price of Getty Images Holdings Inc. by announcing a phony offer by Trillium to purchase Getty Images.

In 2006 MySpace reportedly became America's most-visited web site — passing both Google and Yahoo Mail.

So what happened? TribLive reports: The co-founders, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, sold MySpace to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580 million in 2005, and that company sold it to the online advertising company Specific Media and Justin Timberlake in 2011, which later became the ad tech firm Viant, according to SlashGear. Viant was bought by Time in 2016, which was acquired by Meredith Corporation at the end of 2017, according to The Guardian. Meredith then sold Myspace to Viant Technology LLC, which currently operates the platform, SlashGear said.

During its time under Timberlake, Myspace morphed from a social media platfrom and turned over a new leaf as a music discovery site, SlashGear reported. The once booming online atmosphere has turned into a ghost town, according to The Guardian. Despite the number of people on Myspace dwindling, a handful of devoted users remains.
The glory days of MySpace drew this bittersweet remembrance from TechRadar: Not everyone on the TechRadar team looks back on those early MySpace years fondly, with our US editor in chief Lance Ulanoff recalling that it "it was like peoples' brains had been turned inside out and whatever didn't stick, dropped onto the page and was represented as a GIF".

Many of us do, though, remember picking our Top 8s (the site's weird ranking system for your friends) and decorating our MySpace pages with as many flashing lights as possible.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from Phoronix: The Redox OS project that is a from scratch open-source operating system written in the Rust programming language now has a working web server, among other improvements achieved during the month of July...

Notable new software work includes getting the Simple HTTP Server running as the first web (HTTP) server for the platform. Simple HTTP Server itself is written in Rust as well. There is also an ongoing effort to bring the Apache HTTP server to Redox OS too.

Another app milestone is the wget program now working on Redox OS. There's also been more work on getting the COSMIC desktop apps working on Redox OS, build system improvements, and other changes.

America's Senate "overwhelmingly passed major online safety reforms to protect children on social media," reports the Guardian.

"But with ongoing pushback from the tech industry and freedom of speech organizations, the legislation faces an uncertain future in the House." "It's a terrible idea to let politicians and bureaucrats decide what people should read and view online," freedom of speech group the Electronic Frontier Foundation said of the Senate's passage of Kosa... Advocates of Kosa reject these critiques, noting the bill has been revised to address many of those concerns — including shifting enforcement from attorneys general to the federal trade commission and focusing the "duty of care" provisions on product design features of the site or app rather than content specifically. A number of major LGBTQ+ groups dropped their opposition to the legislation following these changes, including the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD and the Trevor Project.

After passing the Senate this week, the bill has now moved onto the House, which is on a six-week summer recess until September. Proponents are now directing their efforts towards House legislators to turn the bill into law. Joe Biden has indicated he would sign it if it passes. In a statement Tuesday encouraging the House to pass the legislation, the US president said: "We need action by Congress to protect our kids online and hold big tech accountable for the national experiment they are running on our children for profit...."

House speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana has expressed support for moving forward on Kosa and passing legislation this Congress, but it's unclear if he will bring the bill up in the House immediately. Some experts say the bill is unlikely to be passed in the House in the form passed by the Senate. "Given the concerns about potential censorship and the possibility of minors' lacking access to vital information, pausing KOSA makes eminent sense," said Gautam Hans, associate clinical professor of law and associate director of the First Amendment Clinic at Cornell Law School. He added that the House may put forward its own similar legislation instead, or modify KOSA to further address some of these concerns.
The political news site Punchbowl News also noted this potentially significant quote: A House GOP leadership aide told us this about KOSA: "We've heard concerns across our Conference and the Senate bill cannot be brought up in its current form."
TechDirt argues that "Senator Rand Paul's really excellent letter laying out the reasons he couldn't support the bill may have had an impact."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the news.