Researchers say they have found fake apps in Google Play that masqueraded as legitimate ones for the Signal and Telegram messaging platforms. The malicious apps could pull messages or other sensitive information from legitimate accounts when users took certain actions. ArsTechnica: An app with the name Signal Plus Messenger was available on Play for nine months and had been downloaded from Play roughly 100 times before Google took it down last April after being tipped off by security firm ESET. It was also available in the Samsung app store and on signalplus[.]org, a dedicated website mimicking the official Signal.org. An app calling itself FlyGram, meanwhile, was created by the same threat actor and was available through the same three channels. Google removed it from Play in 2021. Both apps remain available in the Samsung store.

Both apps were built on open source code available from Signal and Telegram. Interwoven into that code was an espionage tool tracked as BadBazaar. The Trojan has been linked to a China-aligned hacking group tracked as GREF. BadBazaar has been used previously to target Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic minorities. The FlyGram malware was also shared in a Uyghur Telegram group, further aligning it to previous targeting by the BadBazaar malware family. Signal Plus could monitor sent and received messages and contacts if people connected their infected device to their legitimate Signal number, as is normal when someone first installs Signal on their device. Doing so caused the malicious app to send a host of private information to the attacker, including the device IMEI number, phone number, MAC address, operator details, location data, Wi-Fi information, emails for Google accounts, contact list, and a PIN used to transfer texts in the event one was set up by the user.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NASA officials sounded an alarm Tuesday about the agency's Deep Space Network, a collection of antennas in California, Spain, and Australia used to maintain contact with missions scattered across the Solar System. Everything from NASA's Artemis missions to the Moon to the Voyager probes in interstellar space rely on the Deep Space Network (DSN) to receive commands and transmit data back to Earth. Suzanne Dodd, who oversees the DSN in her position at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, likes to highlight the network's importance by showing gorgeous images from missions like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Perseverance rover on Mars. "All these images, and all these great visuals for the public, and all the science for the scientists come down through the Deep Space Network," Dodd said Tuesday in a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's Science Committee.

But Dodd doesn't take a starry-eyed view of the challenges operating the Deep Space Network. She said there are currently around 40 missions that rely on the DSN's antennas to stay in communication with controllers and scientists back on Earth. Another 40-plus missions will join the roster over the next decade or so, and many of the 40 missions currently using time on the network will likely still be operating over that time. "We have more missions coming than we currently are flying," Dodd said. "We're nearly doubling the load on the DSN. A lot of those are either lunar exploration or Artemis missions, and a lot of Artemis precursor missions with commercial vendors. So the load is increasing, and it's very stressful to us." "It's oversubscribed, yet it's vital to anything the agency wants to do," she said.

Vint Cerf, an Internet pioneer who is now an executive at Google, sits on the committee Dodd met with Tuesday. After hearing from Dodd and other NASA managers, Cerf said: "The deep space communications system is in deep -- well, let me use a better word, deficit. There's a four-letter word that occurs to me, too." Because astronauts are involved, the Artemis missions will come with unique requirements on the DSN. "We're not going to have bits of data. We're going to have gigabits of data," said Philip Baldwin, acting director of the network services division at JPL. "I don't want 1080p for video resolution. I want 8K video." Each of the three stations on the Deep Space Network has a 70-meter (230-foot) dish antenna, the largest antennas in the world for deep space communications. Each location also has at least three 112-foot (34-meter) antennas. The oldest of the large antennas in California entered service in 1966, then was enlarged to its 70-meter diameter in 1988. "We have reached a really critical point on the DSN's aging infrastructure," said Sandra Cauffman, deputy director of NASA's astrophysics division.

An anonymous reader writes: A Guangdong-based state-backed enterprise in charge of e-government projects in the Southern Chinese province has apologized after admitting that its "home-developed" software was based on open-source code from US tech giant Microsoft. Digital Guangdong, known as DigitalGD, published an apology last week after it was revealed that its CEC-IDE software application, which helps programmers write code, was based on Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code), with just minor modifications and certain functions added.

VS Code is available under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology licence, a permissive open source licence allowing for reuse even for commercial purposes. DigitalGD said this fact was not disclosed due to "negligence," and admitted that its description of its software as "self-developed" has met scrutiny and doubt from Chinese programmers. "We are deeply sorry and humiliated for this, and relevant teams have been ordered to make rectifications," the company said. "Chinese authorities have repeatedly demanded 'safe and controllable' hardware and software for key infrastructure, rewarding businesses for indigenous innovations, but this has motivated some companies to make false claims about their products," notes the South China Morning Post.

A similar incident happened in May when a Shenzhen-based Powerleader announced a "home developed" Powerstar P3-01105 CPU that was later revealed to be Intel's Core i3-10105 Comet Lake CPU.

The federal government of Australia will not force adult websites to bring in age verification due to concerns around privacy and security of the technology. The Guardian reports: On Wednesday, the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, released the eSafety commissioner's long-awaited roadmap for age verification for online pornographic material, which has been sitting with the government since March 2023. The federal government has decided against forcing sites to bring in age verification technology, instead tasking the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, to work with the industry to develop a new code to educate parents on how to access filtering software and limit children's access to such material or sites that are not appropriate.

"It is clear from the roadmap at present, each type of age verification or age assurance technology comes with its own privacy, security, effectiveness or implementation issues," the government's response to the roadmap said. The technology must work effectively without circumvention, must be able to be applied to pornography hosted outside Australia, and not introduce the risk to personal information for adults who choose to access legal pornography, the government stated. "The roadmap makes clear that a decision to mandate age assurance is not yet ready to be taken."

The new tranche of codes will be developed by eSafety following the implementation of the first set of industry codes in December this year. The government will also bring forward an independent statutory review of the Online Safety Act in 2024 to ensure it is fit for purpose and this review will be completed in this term of government. The UK's approach to age assurance will also be monitored as the UK is "a key likeminded partner." The report suggested to trial a pilot of age assurance technologies, but this was not adopted by the government. The report also noted the government's development of a digital ID in the wake of the Optus and Medibank data breaches, but said it was not suggesting the government ID be used for confirming ages on pornographic websites.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: A Saudi court has sentenced a man to death over his posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, and his activity on YouTube, the latest in a widening crackdown on dissent in the kingdom that has drawn international criticism. The judgement against Mohammed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, seen Wednesday by The Associated Press, comes against the backdrop of doctoral student Salma al-Shehab and others facing decades-long prison sentences over their comments online. The sentences appear part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's wider effort to stamp out any defiance in the kingdom as he pursues massive building projects and other diplomatic deals to raise his profile globally.

According to court documents, the charges levied against al-Ghamdi include "betraying his religion," "disturbing the security of society," "conspiring against the government" and "impugning the kingdom and the crown prince" -- all for his activity online that involved re-sharing critics' posts. Saudi officials offered no reason for why they specifically targeted al-Ghamdi, a retired school teacher living in the city of Mecca. However, his brother, Saeed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, is a well-known critic of the Saudi government living in the United Kingdom. "This false ruling aims to spite me personally after failed attempts by the investigators to have me return to the country," the brother tweeted last Thursday. Saudi Arabia has used arrests of family members in the past as a means to pressure those abroad into returning home, activists and those targeted in the past say. [...]

Saudi Arabia is one of the world's top executioners, behind only China and Iran in 2022, according to Amnesty International. The number of people Saudi Arabia executed last year -- 196 inmates -- was the highest recorded by Amnesty in 30 years. In one day alone last March, the kingdom executed 81 people, the largest known mass execution carried out in the kingdom in its modern history. However, al-Ghamdi's case appears to be the first in the current crackdown to level the death penalty against someone for their online behavior.

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday rejected requests to eliminate an upcoming requirement that Internet service providers list all of their monthly fees. From a report: Five major trade groups representing US broadband providers petitioned the FCC in January to scrap the requirement before it takes effect. In June, Comcast told the FCC that the listing-every-fee rule "impose[s] significant administrative burdens and unnecessary complexity in complying with the broadband label requirements." The five trade groups kept up the pressure earlier this month in a meeting with FCC officials and in a filing that complained that listing every fee is too hard. The FCC refused to bend, announcing yesterday that the rules will take effect without any major changes.

"Every consumer needs transparent information when making decisions about what Internet service offering makes the most sense for their family or household. No one wants to be hit with charges they didn't ask for or they did not expect," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. Yesterday's order "largely affirms the rules... while making some revisions and clarifications such as modifying provider record-keeping requirements when directing consumers to a label on an alternative sales channel and confirming that providers may state 'taxes included' when their price already incorporates taxes," the FCC said.

OpenAI has responded to a pair of nearly identical class-action lawsuits from book authors -- including Sarah Silverman, Paul Tremblay, Mona Awad, Chris Golden, and Richard Kadrey -- who earlier this summer alleged that ChatGPT was illegally trained on pirated copies of their books. From a report: In OpenAI's motion to dismiss (filed in both lawsuits), the company asked a US district court in California to toss all but one claim alleging direct copyright infringement, which OpenAI hopes to defeat at "a later stage of the case." The authors' other claims -- alleging vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment -- need to be "trimmed" from the lawsuits "so that these cases do not proceed to discovery and beyond with legally infirm theories of liability," OpenAI argued.

OpenAI claimed that the authors "misconceive the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence." According to OpenAI, even if the authors' books were a "tiny part" of ChatGPT's massive dataset, "the use of copyrighted materials by innovators in transformative ways does not violate copyright." Unlike plagiarists who seek to directly profit off distributing copyrighted materials, OpenAI argued that its goal was "to teach its models to derive the rules underlying human language" in order to do things like help people "save time at work," "make daily life easier," or simply entertain themselves by typing prompts into ChatGPT.

The purpose of copyright law, OpenAI argued is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by protecting the way authors express ideas, but "not the underlying idea itself, facts embodied within the author's articulated message, or other building blocks of creative," which are arguably the elements of authors' works that would be useful to ChatGPT's training model. Citing a notable copyright case involving Google Books, OpenAI reminded the court that "while an author may register a copyright in her book, the 'statistical information' pertaining to 'word frequencies, syntactic patterns, and thematic markers' in that book are beyond the scope of copyright protection."

Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more... and although it's aimed at a micro-VM, the gains should benefit everyone. From a report: MicroVMs are a hot area of technology R&D in the last half decade or so. The core idea is a re-invention of some of concepts and technology that IBM invented along with the hypervisor in the 1960s: designing OSes specifically to run as guests under another OS. This means building the OS specifically to run inside a VM, and to talk to resources provided by a specific hypervisor rather than to fake hardware.

This means that the guest OS needs next to no support for real hardware, just VirtIO drivers which talk directly to facilities provided by the host hypervisor. In turn, the hypervisor doesn't have to provide an emulated PCI bus, emulated power management, emulated graphics card, emulated network interface cards, and so on. The result is that the hypervisor itself can be much smaller and simpler. The result of ruthlessly chopping down both the hypervisor, and the OS that runs inside it, is that both ends can be much smaller and simpler. That means that VMs can use much fewer resources, and start up much quicker.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is discontinuing its Pixel Pass subscription service that allowed people to get a Pixel phone combined with premium services including YouTube Premium, Google Play Pass, and YouTube Premium for a monthly fee. The company said on its support page that it will stop offering purchases or renewals for the Pixel Pass.

Mark Zuckerberg posted a video to his personal Instagram profile showing clips of himself and Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth trying a surface-locked virtual keyboard in a Quest 2 headset. UploadVR reports: Zuckerberg claims he was able to achieve around 100 words per minute, while Bosworth says he reached 119 words per minute. The average person types at around 40 words per minute on a traditional keyboard, whereas professional typists reach between 70 and 120 words per minute depending on their skill level. If future headsets could turn any flat surface into a virtual keyboard, it would bring partial haptic feedback and allow you to rest your wrists as with physical keyboards, without the need to carry around a physical keyboard.

Developers can technically already build surface-locked virtual keyboards on Quest today, by using hand tracking and getting the user to tap the surface to calibrate its position. But in practice, even the slightest deviation of the virtual surface height from the real surface results in false key presses. Meta didn't share yet exactly how its research solves this issue. However, fiducial markers can be seen on the desk in the clip. If the system is preprogrammed with the exact dimensions of these markers, this may act as a robust dynamic calibration system.

Quest 3 will add a depth sensor to a Meta headset for the first time, and a leaked setup clip shows the headset generating a 3D mesh of its environment. If this mesh is precise enough, Quest 3 could potentially eventually support this kind of virtual keyboard. For now though, Meta is solely describing this as research, not a demo of a near term product experience. Meta will likely show off more of its VR and AR research at Meta Connect, which starts September 27 this year.

SonicSpike shares a report from NASA: In 2023, NASA is sending a technology demonstration known as the Integrated LCRD Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) to the space station. Together, ILLUMA-T and the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), which launched in December 2021, will complete NASA's first two-way, end-to-end laser relay system. With ILLUMA-T, NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program office will demonstrate the power of laser communications from the space station. Using invisible infrared light, laser communications systems send and receive information at higher data rates. With higher data rates, missions can send more images and videos back to Earth in a single transmission. Once installed on the space station, ILLUMA-T will showcase the benefits higher data rates could have for missions in low Earth orbit.

"Laser communications offer missions more flexibility and an expedited way to get data back from space," said Badri Younes, former deputy associate administrator for NASA's SCaN program. "We are integrating this technology on demonstrations near Earth, at the Moon, and in deep space." In addition to higher data rates, laser systems are lighter and use less power -- a key benefit when designing spacecraft. ILLUMA-T is approximately the size of a standard refrigerator and will be secured to an external module on the space station to conduct its demonstration with LCRD. Currently, LCRD is showcasing the benefits of a laser relay in geosynchronous orbit -- 22,000 miles from Earth -- by beaming data between two ground stations and conducting experiments to further refine NASA's laser capabilities. "Once ILLUMA-T is on the space station, the terminal will send high-resolution data, including pictures and videos to LCRD at a rate of 1.2 gigabits-per-second," said Matt Magsamen, deputy project manager for ILLUMA-T. "Then, the data will be sent from LCRD to ground stations in Hawaii and California. This demonstration will show how laser communications can benefit missions in low Earth orbit."

ILLUMA-T is launching as a payload on SpaceX's 29th Commercial Resupply Services mission for NASA. In the first two weeks after its launch, ILLUMA-T will be removed from the Dragon spacecraft's trunk for installation on the station's Japanese Experiment Module-Exposed Facility (JEM-EF), also known as "Kibo" -- meaning "hope" in Japanese. NASA's Laser Communications Roadmap. Following the payload's installation, the ILLUMA-T team will perform preliminary testing and in-orbit checkouts. Once completed, the team will make a pass for the payload's first light -- a critical milestone where the mission transmits its first beam of laser light through its optical telescope to LCRD. Once first light is achieved, data transmission and laser communications experiments will begin and continue throughout the duration of the planned mission.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Companies increasingly see the value in mining their data for deeper insights. According to a NewVantage survey, 97.6% of major worldwide organizations are focusing investments into big data and AI. But challenges stand in the way of executing big data analytics. One recent poll found that 65% of organizations feel they have "too much" data to analyze. Google's proposed solution is BigQuery Studio, a new service within BigQuery, its fully managed serverless data warehouse, that provides a single experience to edit programming languages including SQL, Python and Spark to run analytics and machine learning workloads at "petabyte scale." BigQuery Studio is available in preview as of this week.

"BigQuery Studio is a new experience that really puts people who are working on data on the one side and people working on AI on the other side in a common environment," Gerrit Kazmaier, VP and GM of data and analytics at Google, told TechCrunch in a phone interview. "It basically provides access to all of the services that those people need to work -- there's an element of simplification on the user experience side." BigQuery Studio is designed to enable users to discover, explore, analyze and predict data. Users can start in a programming notebook to validate and prep data, then open that notebook in other services, including Vertex AI, Google's managed machine learning platform, to continue their work with more specialized AI infrastructure and tooling.

With BigQuery Studio, teams can directly access data wherever they're working, Kazmaier says. And they have added controls for "enterprise-level" governance, regulation and compliance. "[BigQuery Studio shows] how data is being generated to how it's being processed and how it's being used in AI models, which sounds technical, but it's really important," he added. "You can push down code for machine learning models directly into BigQuery as infrastructure, and that means that you can evaluate it at scale."

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols shares what's new in the release of Linux 6.5: The biggest news for servers -- and cloud Linux users -- is AMD Ryzen processors' P-State support. This support should mean better performance and power use across CPU cores. Intel Alder Lake CPUs have also received improved load balancing in a related development. RISC-V architecture fans will be pleased to find Linux now has Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) support. ACPI is used in Linux and other operating systems for power management. It's vital for laptops and other battery-powered systems.

For better security, people using virtual machines or sandboxes based on Usermode Linux for testing, or running multiple versions of Linux at once, now have Landlock support. Landock is a Linux Security Module that enables applications to sandbox themselves by selecting access rights to directories. It's designed to be used by unprivileged processes while following the system security policy. To make talking with the rest of the world easier, Linux 6.5 now supports USB 4v2. This new USB-C standard will support up to an eye-watering 120Gbps. And while we're still getting used to Wi-Fi 6E, the Wi-Fi Alliance is already working on bringing us Wi-Fi 7. When Wi-Fi 7 arrives, with its theoretical maximum speed of 46Gbps, Linux will be ready. As usual, the new Linux has many more built-in audio and graphics drivers. The Bcachefs filesystem didn't make it into Linux 6.5, notes Vaughan-Nichols. "While the Bcachefs filesystem looks good, there's been a lot of developers fighting about the development process. These personal arguments have led Torvalds to decide not to incorporate Bcachefs into Linux 6.5."

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 6.5's delivery in a brief post on August 27.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Sports leagues are urging the US to require "instantaneous" takedowns of pirated livestreams and new requirements for Internet service providers to block pirate websites. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 requires websites to "expeditiously" remove infringing material upon being notified of its existence. But pirated livestreams of sports events often aren't taken down while the events are ongoing, said comments submitted last week by Ultimate Fighting Championship, the National Basketball Association, and National Football League.

The "DMCA does not define 'expeditiously,' and OSPs [online service providers] have exploited this ambiguity in the statutory language to delay removing content in response to takedown requests," the leagues told the US Patent and Trademark Office in response to a request for comments on addressing counterfeiting and piracy. The leagues urged the US "to establish that, in the case of live content, the requirement to 'expeditiously' remove infringing content means that content must be removed 'instantaneously or near-instantaneously' in response to a takedown request." The leagues claimed the change "would be a relatively modest and non-controversial update to the DMCA that could be included in the broader reforms being considered by Congress or could be addressed separately." They also want stricter "verification measures before a user is permitted to livestream."

The UFC separately submitted comments on its own, urging the US to require that ISPs block pirate sites. The UFC said that a "significant and growing" number of websites, typically operated from outside the US, don't respond to takedown requests and thus should be blocked by broadband network operators. The UFC wrote: "Unlike many other jurisdictions around the world, the US lacks a 'site-blocking' regime whereby copyright owners may obtain no-fault injunctions requiring domestic Internet service providers to block websites that are primarily geared at infringing activity. A 'site-blocking' regime, with appropriate safeguards to prevent abuse, would substantially facilitate all copyright owners' ability to address piracy, including UFC's." Website-blocking is bound to be a controversial topic, although the Federal Communications Commission's now-repeated net neutrality rules only prohibited blocking of "lawful Internet traffic." While the UFC said it just wants "websites that are primarily geared at infringing activity" to be blocked, a site-blocking regime could be used more expansively if there aren't strict limits.

Google DeepMind has launched a new watermarking tool that labels whether images have been generated with AI. From a report: The tool, called SynthID, will initially be available only to users of Google's AI image generator Imagen, which is hosted on Google Cloud's machine learning platform Vertex. Users will be able to generate images using Imagen and then choose whether to add a watermark or not. The hope is that it could help people tell when AI-generated content is being passed off as real, or help protect copyright. [...] Traditionally images have been watermarked by adding a visible overlay onto them, or adding information into their metadata. But this method is "brittle" and the watermark can be lost when images are cropped, resized, or edited, says Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind.

SynthID is created using two neural networks. One takes the original image and produces another image that looks almost identical to it, but with some pixels subtly modified. This creates an embedded pattern that is invisible to the human eye. The second neural network can spot the pattern and will tell users whether it detects a watermark, suspects the image has a watermark, or finds that it doesn't have a watermark. Kohli said SynthID is designed in a way that means the watermark can still be detected even if the image is screenshotted or edited -- for example, by rotating or resizing it.

Google is making some big changes to Google Chat, its answer to Slack and Microsoft Teams. The messaging app -- aka the product formerly known as hangouts -- is getting a new design, some features that will feel distinctly familiar to Slack and Teams users, and a lot of Google's new Duet AI collaboration tools. From a report: Most of the new features are rolling out later this year and early next, but they add up to a much more useful and competitive Chat platform. Duet is the flagship new feature and potentially a reason for a lot of Workspace users to start using Chat. You can use Duet to search and ask questions about all your stuff in Drive and Gmail and summarize both documents and conversations. You'll also be able to use AI-powered autocorrect in Chat, and thanks to Smart Reply, you might never have to manually talk to your co-workers again. You'll be able to talk to Duet in a one-on-one chat or invoke it in a group chat or a space to help get stuff done. "You essentially have a co-worker who has infinite memory and amazing recall at your fingertips," says Vamsee Jasti, Google's product lead for Chat.

Outside of the AI integrations, Chat is also getting a facelift. The app has, until now, looked like a fairly barebones messaging app, with a list of conversations on the left and the active chat on the right; now, it's going to have a lot more going on. (And, yes, it will look a lot more like Slack and Teams.) There will be a new home view with all your recent conversations, plus dedicated ways to see all your starred conversations and mentions. For now, everything will be reverse-chronological, but Google says it plans to start more intelligently organizing and ordering things next year. The interface as a whole is getting a bit of cleanup, too, with larger buttons and aesthetics borrowed from Google's Material You design language.

When employees leave Google to join the artificial intelligence startup race, the search giant still has a way to benefit -- by keeping those former workers as cloud customers. From a report: More than half of venture-backed generative AI startups pay for Google's cloud computing platform, Alphabet, Google's parent company, said Tuesday. Of the startups valued at over $1 billion, 70% are Google Cloud customers, and about a third of those are helmed by former employees, including Anthropic, Character.ai and Cohere, the company said. That gives Google a way to extend its influence in the field even when it sheds talent.

Google's cloud unit, which reported a profit for the first time this year, has emerged as one of the company's best bets for growth as its core search business matures. Google still trails Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure in the market. But startups in the field of generative AI -- programs that can spin up images, text and video from simple prompts -- are increasingly turning to the company, said James Lee, Google Cloud's general manager for startups and AI. "We're seeing strong momentum in our business, and we see Google Cloud as the preferred choice for startups building generative AI," Lee said in an interview. Google Cloud customers have the option to use AI models from Google itself as well as other companies, a degree of flexibility that appeals to startups, Lee said.

Meta's decision to block news links in Canada this month has had almost no impact on Canadians' usage of Facebook, data from independent tracking firms indicated on Tuesday, as the company faces scorching criticism from the Canadian government over the move. From a report: Daily active users of Facebook and time spent on the app in Canada have stayed roughly unchanged since parent company Meta started blocking news there at the start of August, according to data shared by Similarweb, a digital analytics company that tracks traffic on websites and apps, at Reuters' request. Another analytics firm, Data.ai, likewise told Reuters that its data was not showing any meaningful change to usage of the platform in Canada in August. The estimates, while early, appear to support Meta's contention that news holds little value for the company as it remains locked in a tense standoff in Canada over a new law requiring internet giants to pay publishers for the news articles shared on their platforms.

Under an ambitious program, dubbed Replicator, the Pentagon aims to field thousands of autonomous systems within two years to counter China. The effort is being spearheaded by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. Politico reports: Hicks said the time is right to push to rapidly scale up innovative technology. The move comes as the U.S. looks to get creative to deter China in the Indo-Pacific and Pentagon leadership has taken stock of how Ukraine has fended off Russia's invasion. "Industry is ready. The culture is ready to shift," Hicks said. "We have to drive that from the top, and we need to give it a hard target." "The great paradox of military innovation is you're going to have to make big bets and you've got to execute on those bets," she added.

With Replicator, the Pentagon aims to have thousands of autonomous systems across various domains produced and delivered in 18 to 24 months. Hicks declined to discuss what specific platforms might be produced under the program -- such as aerial drones or unmanned ships -- citing the "competition landscape" in the defense industry as well as concerns about tipping DOD's hand to China. The Pentagon will instead "say more as we get to production on capabilities."

Autonomous weapons are seen as a potential way to counter China's numerical advantages in ships, missiles and troops in a rapidly narrowing window. Fielding large numbers of cheap, expendable drones, proponents argue, is faster and lower-cost than exquisite weapons systems and puts fewer troops at risk. Another major aim of the Replicator initiative is to provide a template for future efforts to rapidly field military technology. She said lessons from the Replicator program could be applied throughout the Pentagon, military services and combatant commands.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Cities across the country are suing Kia and Hyundai for failing to install basic anti-theft technology, with a subsequent massive surge of stolen cars burdening police departments, according to lawsuits filed in recent months. Since the beginning of the year, Seattle, Baltimore, Cleveland, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Columbus have all sued Kia and Hyundai, which are owned by the same parent company, for selling cars without engine immobilizers, a technology that has served as a major contributor to the plummeting rate of stolen vehicles in the U.S. As the rest of the industry adopted immobilizers, Kia and Hyundai didn't, with only 26 percent of their cars including them in 2015, compared to 96 percent for other manufacturers.

Without the immobilizers, the cars are trivially easy to steal, requiring just a USB cable. A viral Youtube and Tiktok trend instructed people how to steal the cars. Kia and Hyundai cars manufactured without the immobilizers between 2015 and 2020, especially lower-end models like the Accent, Rio, and Sportage, are especially vulnerable. A lawsuit filed by dozens of insurance companies against Kia and Hyundai allege the lack of immobilizers violated federal regulations. The surge in Kia and Hyundai thefts in cities around the country has been staggering and it shows no sign of abating. In a lawsuit filed last week, the City of Chicago said that in 2022, more than 8,800 Kia and Hyundai vehicles were stolen in the city, which accounts for 41 percent of all of Chicago's car thefts, despite Kia and Hyundai making up just seven percent of the city's vehicles. In a press release announcing the lawsuit, the city said it is getting even worse in 2023, with Kias and Hyundais making up more than half of all stolen cars in the city this year. Chicago is hardly alone. [...]

In statements to Motherboard, Kia spokesperson James Bell said the lawsuits filed by cities against the company are "without merit" and that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration determined it did not violate any regulations or safety standards. In June, NHTSA's acting associate director of enforcement Cem Hatipoglu responded to 18 state attorneys general that asked for a recall of the cars by saying, "At this time, NHTSA has not determined that this issue constitutes either a safety defect or noncompliance requiring a recall." A NHTSA spokesperson told Motherboard the agency has been meeting with Kia and Hyundai about the issue but wouldn't say if it agreed with Kia's interpretation. Hyundai spokesperson Ira Gabriel similarly said that all its vehicles are "fully compliant with federal anti-theft requirements." Hyundai and Kia owners can get steering wheel locks from their local police departments or through dedicated websites. Both companies also offer a free software patch that they say removes the threat of theft, which requires visiting a dealer. Bell of Kia says the company has distributed more than 190,000 wheel locks and that 650,000 vehicles have gotten the software update, out of three million total. Both companies now include immobilizers on all their new cars.