An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Joe Bowser is a computer scientist based in Port Moody, British Columbia, who has long loved Raspberry Pis. He uses the low-cost, single-board computers, which were launched in February 2012 by a UK-based company of the same name, for many of his tech projects. Those include linking the Raspberry Pi up to a 3D printer, and using the Pi to run a machine-learning demo. There's one use case that Bowser described as "the most important": using a Raspberry Pi to identify the use of IMSI catchers -- telephone eavesdropping devices that snoop on phone calls and text messages -- by law enforcement. Protesters opposing new oil pipelines happen to pass by Bowser's house regularly. He thinks cops shouldn't spy on them. So he's trying to help out the protesters using his tech knowledge. To do that, he uses Raspberry Pis. Or more accurately, he did. Bowser has forsworn using the computers ever again. He and many others are expressing their displeasure with the company on social media.

The controversy began yesterday when Raspberry Pi posted an announcement on Twitter and Mastodon: "We hired a policeman and it's going really great." The company linked to a laudatory blog post on its website announcing it had hired an ex-police officer, Toby Roberts, as its maker-in-residence. "I was a Technical Surveillance Officer for 15 years, so I built stuff to hide video, audio, and other covert gear," Roberts is quoted as saying in the post. "You really don't want your sensitive police equipment discovered, so I'd disguise it as something else, like a piece of street furniture or a household item. The variety of tools and equipment I used then really shaped what I do today." A subsection of the Raspberry Pi community expressed concern about the blase way the company presented intrusive covert surveillance. (The news caused particular ire on Mastodon, leading some to describe Roberts as the burgeoning social media platform's first "main character.") [...]

Liz Upton, Raspberry Pi's cofounder and chief marketing officer, told BuzzFeed she believes that much of the issue stems not from the hiring of the former police officer who admitted to using Raspberry Pis for covert surveillance, but instead from a picture the account posted to Mastodon a day earlier showing pigs in blankets. "We didn't put a content warning on it, because we don't put a content warning on meat," Upton said. "There were quite a few people who tried to start dogpiling on that." She also claimed that part of the vitriolic response could be because Raspberry Pi is struggling with supply chain difficulties at present, and people "were already cross." "I think what we're looking at is a dogpile that's being organized somewhere," Upton said. "There's obviously a Discord or a forum somewhere." She did not provide evidence to support that claim. "I don't think this is organic, but it's very unpleasant, and extraordinarily unpleasant for the people involved," she said. Upton claimed both Roberts and Raspberry Pi's social media manager have been doxxed and received death threats. "I am disgusted that [Raspberry Pi's] official post on Toby Roberts' hiring promotes his use of their products to surveil individuals without their consent," Matt Lewis, a Denver-based site reliability engineer, wrote via Twitter DM. "In my eyes, this behavior is completely unethical and the work Toby has done for 15 years is indefensible. I'm also upset that they have chosen to double down on this position against the community outrage."

"I think this event will mark a turning point in the organization's reputation," added Wikipedia consultant Pete Forsyth in a Twitter DM. "It's hard to see how they can recover the trust they seem to have almost willfully dismantled today."

Not everyone is downbeat about the future of the company. University of Surrey cybersecurity professor Alan Woodward called Roberts an "interesting hire" for Raspberry Pi. "His previous uses of the Pi shows just what a versatile device it is: I'm sure he's not the only one using the smallest variants to make covert devices," Woodward said. "You find that you have to be very creative to build these types of covert devices, so hopefully he can now bring that to his new role, for a wider variety of applications."

"It's not as if he is going to corrupt any of the Pis -- like all technology, it has some uses some people will object to," he said. Rather, Woodward believes "the loudest objectors are taking it a bit far. Maybe they could look at it as a glass-half-full situation: Think of the unusual innovations he might bring."

U.S. telecom providers, under a new FCC order, will have to take "all necessary steps" to block calls from a shady communication company engaged in a mass robocall scam preying on people seeking student loan forgiveness. From a report: The scammer company, called Urth Access, LLC, would reportedly spam users with calls urging them to forfeit their personal information or pay a fee in order to receive up to around $10,000 in student loan debt relief. Many of the scams reportedly referred to the Biden Administration's student loan forgiveness plan to give the messages a semblance of credibility. Though numerous fraudsters took part in the scam, an investigation conducted by the FCC and its private partner YouMail said Urth Access stood apart as the largest, accounting for around 40% of the robocalls in October.

"Scam robocalls try to pull from the headlines to confuse consumers," FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. "Trying to take advantage of people who want help paying off their student loans. Today we're cutting these scammers off so they can't use efforts to provide student loan debt relief as cover for fraud." The new order asks telecommunications companies to cease accepting phone calls coming from Urath Access, or report efforts they are making to limit Urath's reach in an effort to shut down the scams.

Microsoft today announced that it acquired Lumenisity, a U.K.-based startup developing "hollow core fiber (HCF)" technologies primarily for data centers and ISPs. From a report: Microsoft says that the purchase, the terms of which weren't disclosed, will "expand [its] ability to further optimize its global cloud infrastructure" and "serve Microsoft's cloud platform and services customers with strict latency and security requirements." HCF cables fundamentally combine optical fiber and coaxial cable. They've been around since the '90s, but what Lumenisity brings to the table is a proprietary design with an air-filled center channel surrounded by a ring of glass tubes. The idea is that light can travel faster through air than glass; in a trial with Comcast in April, a single strand of Lumenisity HCF was reportedly able to deliver traffic rates ranging from 10 Gbps to 400 Gbps.

"HCF can provide benefits across a broad range of industries including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail and government," Girish Bablani, CVP of Microsoft's Azure Core business, wrote in a blog post. "For the public sector, HCF could provide enhanced security and intrusion detection for federal and local governments across the globe. In healthcare, because HCF can accommodate the size and volume of large data sets, it could help accelerate medical image retrieval, facilitating providers' ability to ingest, persist and share medical imaging data in the cloud. And with the rise of the digital economy, HCF could help international financial institutions seeking fast, secure transactions across a broad geographic region."

Robots may be the future, but robotic arms are apparently no good at using an old and steadfast form of technology: the barcode. Barcodes can be hard to find and might be affixed to oddly shaped products, Amazon said in a press release Friday, something robots can't troubleshoot very well. As a result, the company says it has a plan to kill the barcode. From a report: Using pictures of items in Amazon warehouses and training a computer model, the e-commerce giant has developed a camera system that can monitor items flowing one-by-one down conveyor belts to make sure they match their images. Eventually, Amazon's AI experts and roboticists want to combine the technology with robots that identify items while picking them up and turning them around.

"Solving this problem, so robots can pick up items and process them without needing to find and scan a barcode, is fundamental," said Nontas Antonakos, an applied science manager in Amazon's computer vision group in Berlin. "It will help us get packages to customers more quickly and accurately." The system, called multi-modal identification, isn't going to fully replace barcodes soon. It's currently in use in facilities in Barcelona, Spain, and Hamburg, Germany, according to Amazon. Still, the company says it's already speeding up the time it takes to process packages there. The technology will be shared across Amazon's businesses, so it's possible you could one day see a version of it at a Whole Foods or another Amazon-owned chain with in-person stores.

People in Europe can get Google to delete search results about them if they prove the information is "manifestly inaccurate," the EU's top court has ruled. From a report: The case kicked off when two investment managers requested Google to dereference results of a search made on the basis of their names, which provided links to certain articles criticising that group's investment model. They say those articles contain inaccurate claims. Google refused to comply, arguing that it was unaware whether the information contained in the articles was accurate or not. But in a ruling Thursday, the Court of Justice of the European Union opened the door to the investment managers being able to successfully trigger the so-called "right to be forgotten" under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. "The right to freedom of expression and information cannot be taken into account where, at the very least, a part -- which is not of minor importance -- of the information found in the referenced content proves to be inaccurate," the court said in a press release accompanying the ruling.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has released new guidance, requiring companies that issue securities to disclose to investors their exposure and risk to the cryptocurrency market. From a report: The guidance comes about a month after FTX, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, filed for bankruptcy after loan customer funds to a risky trading company that was founded by FTX's former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Over 100,000 customers were affected by the exchange's failure.

On Wednesday, SEC Chair Gary Gensler fended off accusations that the agency has failed to prevent crypto firms from misusing customer funds. Gensler also said the SEC would take more enforcement actions if the firms fail to comply with existing rules. Under the new guidance, companies will have to include crypto asset holdings as well as their risk exposure to the FTX bankruptcy and other market developments in their public filings. The company's bankruptcy filings indicate the company has over 1 million creditors.

A three-year-old NASA satellite lost touch with ground controllers two weeks ago and is now wandering through low Earth orbit without supervision. Sadly, the space agency fears the worst. Gizmodo reports: NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) mission has not communicated with ground stations since November 25 due to some sort of glitch the space agency is yet to identify, NASA wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. The spacecraft is equipped with an onboard command loss timer that's designed to reset ICON in the event that contact is lost for eight days, but the reset seemingly did not work as the team was still unable to communicate with the spacecraft on December 5 after the power cycle was complete.

Although silent, the ICON spacecraft is still intact. NASA used the Department of Defense's Space Surveillance Network to confirm that ICON is still out there in one piece, according to the space agency. But communication is obviously key for orbiting spacecraft, as it allows the mission team to send commands to satellites and also receive data through downlinked signals. "The ICON mission team is working to troubleshoot the issue and has narrowed the cause of the communication loss to problems within the avionics or radio-frequency communications subsystems," NASA wrote in the blog post. "The team is currently unable to determine the health of the spacecraft, and the lack of a downlink signal could be indicative of a system failure." Oof, that doesn't sound good.

Microsoft is finally bringing a built-in screen recorder to Windows. The Verge reports: The Snipping Tool in Windows 11 will soon be updated to include screen recording, meaning Windows users won't have to rely on the Xbox Game Bar or third-party tools just to record their screens. Windows 11 testers will start getting access to the updated Snipping Tool today, and the new record option will allow you to record an entire screen or even a section that gets cropped. The update comes more than four years after Microsoft first introduced a new screenshot experience for Windows. [...] Microsoft has only just started testing this with Windows 11 testers in the Dev Channel, so it's likely some weeks or months before this Snipping Tool is released to everyone using Windows 11.

Vivaldi recently became the first browser to have its own Mastodon instance, Vivaldi Social. Now, the new version on the desktop is the first to integrate Mastodon into the browser itself, along with the ability to pin tab groups and other UI improvements. From a blog post: We believe in providing alternatives to Big Tech while putting your privacy first and launched Vivaldi Social, our Mastodon instance. And today we are integrating Vivaldi Social into the sidebar of our desktop browser becoming the first browser to offer this functionality.

The new version -- Vivaldi 5.6 -- also allows you to pin your tab stacks. We've added a new private search engine You.com for select countries, helping to broaden your choices for searching the web. Vivaldi's sidebar of icons links to a number of utility functions. And now it integrates Vivaldi Social, our Mastodon instance.

Alphabet's Google plans to combine the team working on the mapping service Waze with the group overseeing the company's Maps product, as the search giant faces pressure to streamline operations and cut costs. From a report: Google plans to merge Waze's more than 500 employees with the company's Geo organization, which oversees the Maps, Earth and Street View products, beginning on Friday, according to a Google spokeswoman. Waze CEO Neha Parikh will exit her role following a transition period, the spokeswoman said. Google said it planned to maintain Waze as a stand-alone service and didn't plan to conduct any layoffs as part of the reorganization.

Google expects the restructuring to reduce overlapping mapmaking work across the Waze and Maps products, the company said. "Google remains deeply committed to Waze's unique brand, its beloved app and its thriving community of volunteers and users," the spokeswoman said in a statement. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has looked for areas to improve efficiency following a slowdown in advertising growth this year. In September, Mr. Pichai said he wanted Google to become 20% more productive and indicated the company could merge teams working on overlapping products.

Google today announced two new performance settings in its Chrome browser: Memory Saver and Energy Saver. From a report: The Memory Saver mode promises to reduce Chrome's memory usage by up to 30% by putting inactive tabs to sleep. The tabs will simply reload when you need them again. The Energy Saver mode, meanwhile, limits background activity and visual effects for sites with animations and videos when your laptop's battery level drops below 20%.

We finally have a final official deadline for when new phones sold in the European Union -- including future iPhones -- will have to use USB-C for wired charging: December 28th, 2024. From a report: That's because the EU's new USB-C legislation has just been published in the bloc's Official Journal, making it formally binding. Now we know the rules will officially enter into force in 20 days' time, and individual EU member states will then have a maximum of 24 months to apply them as national law. The date is more or less in line with previous forecasts from politicians, but until now, the exact date has remained vague given the number of stages each piece of EU legislation has to go through. When lawmakers reached an initial agreement on the legislation in June, they announced it would be applicable in "autumn 2024," but in October, a press release said the rules would apply "by the end of 2024."

Federal prosecutors are investigating whether FTX's founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, manipulated the market for two cryptocurrencies this past spring, leading to their collapse and creating a domino effect that eventually caused the implosion of his own cryptocurrency exchange last month, The New York Times reports, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan are examining the possibility that Mr. Bankman-Fried steered the prices of two interlinked currencies, TerraUSD and Luna, to benefit the entities he controlled, including FTX and Alameda Research, a hedge fund he co-founded and owned, the people said. The investigation is in its early stages, and it is not clear whether prosecutors have determined any wrongdoing by Mr. Bankman-Fried, or when they began looking at the TerraUSD and Luna trades. The matter is part of a broadening inquiry into the collapse of Mr. Bankman-Fried's Bahamas-based cryptocurrency empire, and the potential misappropriation of billions of dollars in customer funds.

Federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission have been examining whether FTX broke the law by transferring its customer funds to Alameda. Last month, a run on deposits exposed an $8 billion hole in the exchange's accounts, causing the company to collapse. Mr. Bankman-Fried stepped down as FTX's chief executive when the company filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11. FTX is also under investigation for violating U.S. money-laundering laws that require money transfer businesses to know who their customers are and flag any potentially illegal activity to law enforcement authorities, three people familiar with the investigation said. That investigation, first reported by Bloomberg News, began several months before the bankruptcy of FTX. Investigators are also looking into the activities of other offshore cryptocurrency trading platforms.

The newly elected government in Pacific island nation of Vanuatu encountered a serious problem from the very first day of its term on Nov. 6 -- no one could use their government email accounts. But then the situation got worse. Much worse. From a report: Officials could not use any government computer services, from renewing a drivers' license to paying taxes or accessing medical and emergency information. They were forced to turn to 20th century technology -- pen and paper. That's a major problem in a nation where the population of around 320,000 people is distributed across dozens of islands north of New Zealand. "Imagine if in the U.S. or the U.K. or Australia, a new government has started and there's a whole changeover ... you can't even allocate email addresses to your new staff, you can't coordinate what's happening between ministers," Glen Craig, managing partner of the consulting firm Pacific Advisory, told NPR in a phone interview.

"We're the first country in the world that this has happened to. ... It's not a good time in Vanuatu, I can assure you," continued Craig, who also serves as chairman of the Vanuatu Business Resilience Council. After more than three weeks of working on the problem, Prime Minister Alatoi Ishmael Kalsakau told local news outlets Wednesday that services were 70 percent restored. However, the disruption continues. Vanuatu's government officials first discovered suspicious activity on their networks, many of which are centrally connected, on Nov. 6. They revealed the breach to local media several days later, but have so far been fairly tight lipped about the extent of the damage, the possible culprits, and what's being done to recover service. Some sources have suggested the attack was ransomware, in which cybercriminals break in and take data hostage in exchange for payment, though the government has not officially confirmed whether that's the case or addressed whether a ransom payment was made.

Coinbase Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong said the cryptocurrency exchange's revenue is set to be cut by half or more this year as declining prices and the collapse of rival FTX rattle investors' confidence. From a report: The rapid downfall of FTX capped what was already a brutal year for the cryptocurrency industry, with speculators in retreat as prices of some of the most frequently traded tokens tumbled. Coinbase's shares have fallen more than 80% in 2022 and the company's third-quarter revenue was about one-fourth of what it was during the last three months of 2021, when the price of Bitcoin peaked.

"Last year in 2021, we did about $7 billion of revenue and about $4 billion of positive EBITDA, and this year with everything coming down, it's looking, you know, about roughly half that or less," Armstrong said in a wide-ranging interview on Bloomberg's "David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations," when asked about the company's revenue. In additional comments provided after the interview, a Coinbase spokesperson further clarified that they expect 2022 revenue to be less than half of 2021 revenue. Coinbase has previously indicated it may see a 2022 loss of no more than $500 million based on adjusted EBITDA, a measure of earnings that excludes certain costs like interest and depreciation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Major privacy complaints targeting the legality of Meta's core advertising business model in Europe have finally been settled via a dispute resolution mechanism baked into the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The complaints, which date back to May 2018, take aim at the tech giant's so-called forced consent to continue tracking and targeting users by processing their personal data to build profiles for behavioral advertising, so the outcome could have major ramifications for how Meta operates if regulators order the company to amend its practices. The GDPR also allows for large fines for major violations -- up to 4% of global annual turnover.

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), a steering body for the GDPR, confirmed today it has stepped in to three binding decisions in the three complaints against Meta platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The trio of complaints were filed by European privacy campaign group noyb as soon as the GDPR entered into application across the EU. So it's taken some 4.5 years just to get to this point. [...] What exactly has been decided? The EDPB is not disclosing that yet. The protocol it's following means it passes its binding decisions back to the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), Meta's lead privacy regulator in the EU, which must then apply them in the final decisions it will issue. The DPC now has one month to issue final decisions and confirm any financial penalties. So we should get the full gory details by early next year.

The Wall Street Journal may offer a glimpse of what's to come: It's reporting that Meta's ad model will face restrictions in the EU -- citing "people familiar with the situation." It also reports the company will face "significant" fines for breaching the GDPR. "The board's rulings Monday, which haven't yet been disclosed publicly, don't directly order Meta to change practices but rather call for Ireland's Data Protection Commission to issue public orders that reflect its decisions, along with significant fines," the WSJ wrote, citing unnamed sources. [...] The company was recently spotted in a filing setting aside 3 billion euros for data protection fines in 2022 and 2023 -- a large chunk of which has yet to land. "In line with Art. 65 (5) GDPR, we cannot comment on the content of the decisions until after the Irish DPC has notified the controller of its final decisions," said a spokesperson for the EDPB. "As indicated in our press release, the EDPB looked into whether or not the processing of personal data for the performance of a contract is a suitable legal basis for behavioral advertising, but at this point in time we cannot confirm what the EDPB's decision in this matter was."

The DPC also declined to comment on the newspaper's report -- but deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to TechCrunch that it will announce binding decisions on these complaints in early January.

A Meta spokesperson issued the following statement to TechCrunch: "This is not the final decision and it is too early to speculate. GDPR allows for a range of legal bases under which data can be processed, beyond consent or performance of a contract. Under the GDPR there is no hierarchy between these legal bases, and none should be considered better than any other. We've engaged fully with the DPC on their inquiries and will continue to engage with them as they finalize their decision."

A growing number of GOP-led states are barring state employees and contractors from using TikTok on government-issued devices as the FBI warns of possible threats to national security posed by the Chinese-owned social media platform. Texas became the latest to do so on Wednesday, joining South Dakota, South Carolina and Maryland, all of which banned the app on government devices in the past week. Wisconsin Republicans are urging their Democratic governor to do the same. Axios reports: "[U]nder China's 2017 National Intelligence Law, all businesses are required to assist China in intelligence work including data sharing, and TikTok's algorithm has already censored topics politically sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party," Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a letter to state officials Wednesday.

"There may be no greater threat to our personal safety and our national security than the cyber vulnerabilities that support our daily lives," Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, whose directive also banned certain Russia-based platforms, said in a statement.

"Protecting our State's critical cyber infrastructure from foreign and domestic threats is key to ensuring the health, safety, and well-being of our citizens and businesses," South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster wrote in a letter requesting that the state's Department of Administration block access to the app.

"South Dakota will have no part in the intelligence gathering operations of nations who hate us," South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said in a press release.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For the brave people running Linux on Apple Silicon, their patience has paid off. GPU drivers that provide desktop hardware acceleration are now available in Asahi Linux, unleashing more of the M-series chips' power. It has taken roughly two years to reach this alpha-stage OpenGL driver, but the foundational groundwork should result in faster progress ahead, writes project leads Alyssa Rosenzweig and Asahi Lina. In the meantime, the drivers are "good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games."

The drivers offer non-conformance-tested OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all M-series Apple devices. That's enough for desktop environments and older games running at 60 frames per second at 4K. But the next target is Vulkan support. OpenGL work is being done "with Vulkan in mind," Lina writes, but some OpenGL support was needed to get desktops working first. There's a lot more you can read about the interplay between OpenGL, Vulkan, and Zink in Asahi's blog post.

Microsoft is launching a new communities feature for Microsoft Teams today, designed for consumers to use the best parts of Teams free of charge to create and organize groups. From a report: The new community feature will allow groups to use the calendar, meeting, and chat features of Teams. Features like group chat, calling, and file / photo sharing are all supported, and groups will also be able to use a shared calendar (which includes Google Calendar integration) to organize community events. This new community integration is really aimed at groups like sports clubs or even virtual community groups for small businesses and simple groups like a carpool for co-workers to organize transportation. Facebook, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, Twitter, and many other services already provide a variety of ways to organize groups online, so Microsoft is entering a crowded market, but it believes Teams has something different to offer.

Boeing's final 747 rolled out of the company's cavernous factory north of Seattle Tuesday night as airlines' push for more fuel-efficient planes ends the more than half-century production run of the jumbo jet. From a report: The 1,574th -- and last -- 747 will later be flown by a Boeing test pilot, painted and handed over to cargo and charter carrier Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings early next year.

"It's a very surreal time, obviously," said Kim Smith, vice president and general manager of Boeing's 747 and 767s programs out of the assembly plant here. "For the first time in well over 50 years we will not have a 747 in this facility."