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Last August, 50 employees at Three Square Market got RFID chips in their hands. Now 80 have them. From a report: The idea came about in early 2017, president of Three Square Market Patrick McMullan says, when he was on a business trip to Sweden -- a country where some people are getting subcutaneous microchips to do things like enter secure buildings or book train tickets. It's one of very few places where chip implants, which have been around for quite a while, have taken off in some fashion. The chips he and his employees got are about the size of a very large grain of rice. They're intended to make it a little easier to do things like get into the office, log on to computers, and buy food and drinks in the company cafeteria. Like many RFID chips, they are passive -- they don't have batteries, and instead get their power from an RFID reader when it requests data from the chip. A year into their experiment, McMullan and a few employees say they are still using the chips regularly at work for all the activities they started out with last summer. Since then, an additional 30 employees have gotten the chips, which means that roughly 80 of the company's now 250 employees, or nearly a third, are walking, talking cyborgs. "You get used to it; it's easy," McMullan says. As far as he knows, just two Three Square Market employees have had their chips removed -- and that was when they left the company.

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Cache me outside, how 'bout dah?

BSides Manchester Websites can be compromised to turn their caches into exploit delivery systems.…

Two anonymous readers share a report: When the ground-services employee who stole a turboprop airliner last week declined air-traffic controllers' piloting advice, saying he had played videogames, it was no surprise to some devotees of intricate home flight-simulation programs [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; an alternative source wasn't immediately available.]. Such software can mimic many phases of aircraft operations, including takeoffs, as well as how to respond to heavy weather and emergencies, pilots and software makers say. The simulators are also more affordable than pursuing a pilot's license and can help satisfy a lifelong obsession with flying. Last year, two million units of vehicle-simulation games for PCs and consoles were sold world-wide, the most common being flight simulators, according to the market-research firm NPD Group. Home programs have evolved over more than three decades. They can represent all types of aircraft, from wartime bombers to modern-day passenger airliners. A setup can cost a few dozen dollars for a videogame to thousands for software with intricate renderings of cockpits and real-world environments. A new conference called FlightSimExpo held in Las Vegas in June drew around 1,100 people, its organizers said. FlightSimCon held its sixth annual gathering in Dallas in June, according to its website. Many hobbyists say they don't think of simulators in the same vein as traditional videogames, because they aren't trying to rack up points or compete. They simply focus on flying.

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Smartphone brand Motorola has been criticised for revealing a "shameless" copy of the iPhone X as its new model. BBC: Many phone-makers have copied the look of the iPhone X, which has a smaller bezel around the screen and a "notch" at the top that houses a camera. However, reviewers said the new Motorola P30 was a "brazen" and "egregious" rip-off of Apple's flagship device. Lenovo, which owns the Motorola brand, has not yet responded to the criticism. [...] Commenting on the similarity between the Motorola P30 and the iPhone X, technology blogger Marques Brownlee called it the "most shameless rip yet." News site Mashable said Motorola "even went so far as to adorn the screen with a wallpaper that's a dead ringer for Apple's default wallpaper." News and reviews site Technobuffalo said the design was an "egregious clone" that was "nearly impossible to distinguish" from the iPhone X. Tech news site The Verge pointed out that Google's image recognition algorithms described photos of the P30 as "iPhone."

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But just for a month - and what a month September will be for its directors

The directors of the company at the heart of the ZX Spectrum reboot scandal have been ordered to pay yet more legal costs as they keep trying to kick their financial woes into the long grass.…

The scorching temperatures and forest fires of this summer's heatwave have finally stirred the world to face the onrushing threat of global warming, claims the climate scientist behind the recent "hothouse Earth" report. Following an unprecedented 270,000 downloads of his study, Johan Rockstrom, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, said he had not seen such a surge of interest since 2007, the year the Nobel prize was awarded to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Guardian: "I think that in future people will look back on 2018 as the year when climate reality hit," said the veteran scientist. "This is the moment when people start to realize that global warming is not a problem for future generations, but for us now." The heatwave has dominated headlines across the northern hemisphere this summer. New temperature records have been set in Africa and cities in Australia, Taiwan, Georgia and the west coast of US. Heat stroke or forest fires have killed at least 119 in Japan, 29 in South Korea, 91 in Greece and nine in California. There have even been freak blazes in Lapland and elsewhere in the Arctic circle, while holidaymakers and locals alike have sweltered in unusually hot weather in southern Europe. Coming amid this climate chaos, the "hothouse Earth" paper by Rockstrom and his co-authors struck a chord with the public by spelling out the huge and growing risk that emissions are pushing the planet's climate off the path it has been on for 2.5m years.

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Think tank calls for open standards, interoperability

Government departments should mandate interoperability when procuring systems and establish audit trails to track data use in order to benefit from data sharing, a think tank has said.…

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has removed 23 Firefox add-ons from its add-on store that snooped on users and sent data to remote servers, a Mozilla engineer told Bleeping Computer Friday. The list of blocked add-ons includes "Web Security," a security-centric Firefox add-on with over 220,000 users, which was at the center of a controversy this week after it was caught sending users' browsing histories to a server located in Germany. "The mentioned add-on has been taken down, together with others after I conducted a thorough audit of [the] add-ons," Rob Wu, a Mozilla Browser Engineer and Add-on review, told Bleeping Computer via email. "These add-ons are no longer available at AMO and [have been] disabled in the browsers of users who installed them," Wu said.

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Time for cyber-security firm to pull up the baggywrinkle?

Security slinger Symantec is facing a bruising battle with activist investor Starboard Value, which has nominated five directors to the security firm's board after having amassed a 5.8 per cent shareholding.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google announced today that it's working with Danish hearing aid manufacturer GN Hearing to create a new hearing aid spec for Android smartphones called ASHA, or Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids. It's designed to be battery-efficient, while providing high quality audio with low latency. Hearing aids utilizing this spec will be able to connect to and stream from Android devices without having to use another intermediate device. ASHA will enable Bluetooth hearing aids to be utilized the same way as headphones, used to call friends or listen to music. Google has published the new protocol specifications online for any hearing aid manufacturer to build native hearing aid support for Android. GN Hearing has announced that the ReSound LiNX Quattro and Beltone Amaze will be the first hearing aids to receive direct streaming support in a future update.

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It's turtles all the way down

The British government this week unveiled plans for an ambitious AI simulator to be used to test self-driving cars. It's part of a stated mission to make the UK the world's leading destination for testing autonomous vehicles.…

You’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you

UK trade union the TUC is lobbying to gain a legal right to be consulted on surveillance in the workplace, as it opened up on staffers’ growing concerns about their bosses snooping on them.…

Contract notice reveals yet another UK.gov systems migration to Bezos cloud

The Home Office wants to dump all of Britain’s national-level police IT onto Amazon Web Services' public cloud.…

Just when you thought it was safe to hang out at the water cooler

Just as DXC Technology workers thought they’d escaped a summer redundancy session the perennial cost-cutter has asked for volunteers to form an orderly queue to the exit door.…

The digital entropy of death

BSides Manchester What happens to the numerous user logins you've accumulated after you die or become too infirm to manipulate a keyboard?…

harrymcc writes: If you ever watched anything on videotape, you have Silicon Valley pioneer Ampex -- which invented the technology -- to thank. And for years, the company's vintage sign has stood alongside Highway 101 as a tribute to its historical significance. But Stanford University, which owns the land the sign sits on, is in the process of dismantling it -- an act which Redwood City could have prevented but didn't. I wrote about this dismaying example of cultural shortsightedness at Fast Company.

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At first they started out real cool...

On-Call Friday is upon us once more, which can mean only one thing: it’s time for On Call, our weekly instalment of Reg readers’ tech support frustrations.…

Processes, Services, Installations: One UI to rule them all. Almost.

An attempt to cure the headache of a Windows 10 desktop festooned with Linux distributions has arrived in the form of WSLTools from Opsview.…

Buy your conference and workshop place now and save hundreds

Our early bird ticket offer for Minds Mastering Machines expires this evening, so act now if you want to enjoy three days of conference and workshops showing how real organisations can exploit machine learning and artificial intelligence.…

£100k to sort borders, immigration, biometrics systems by 2019. Did we mention it's in Croydon?

The reality of the mammoth task facing the Home Office in preparing for Brexit appears to have sunk in – the department is seeking a technology lead for the UK’s exit from the European Union.…