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El Reg listened to the whole depressing folly so you don't have to

Comment Tech vendors: don't worry about Australian law enforcement demanding you decrypt user messages. It's OK, because we're not a communist regime.…

Some users on Reddit and Google's support forums are reporting an issue in which taking a photo using Google Camera occasionally fails to save. The issue appears to be widespread, "affecting original Pixel phones as well as the Pixel 2 / 2 XL," reports The Verge. From the report: The issue occurs specifically in cases when the user takes a photo with Google Camera, and switches to another app or locks the phone immediately after. Users are able to see a thumbnail of the photo in the Camera gallery circle, but upon tapping it, the photo disappears. In some occasions, the photo doesn't appear at all at first, but it will reappear in their gallery a day later. There's also some reports of Galaxy S9, Moto Z2, Moto E4, and Nexus 5X owners experiencing the issue after using Google Camera, so it's unclear whether the issue is limited to Pixel phones or if it's connected to a larger Android bug. For now, users have come up with a workaround for an issue they believe is related to HDR photo processing time. Reddit user erbat suggests leaving the camera app open until HDR processing completes or turning off the HDR function completely.

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Liquavista, a screen tech company Amazon acquired five years ago, has shut down. Rumblings of Liquavista's potential closure have been bouncing around the e-reader community for more than six months. It remains unclear if Liquavista's work has been brought inside Amazon and moved to other parts of the organization, or if it was shut down entirely. Amazon declined to release further details. From a report: Launched in 2006 as a spin off from Philips, Liquavista had been developing a unique type of screen tech that was based on running an electric current through a liquid. This is called electrowetting technology, which is a fancy way of saying that each pixel in a Liquavista screen contained 3 liquids (red, green, blue), and that the color shown by a pixel depended on the amount of power fed into each liquid. [...] The screens were originally being developed as a solution to the battery life issue. Mobile battery life was terrible back in the pre-iPad, pre-iPhone, and pre-netbook era, and people were willing to pay a premium for a screen which used less power than typical LCD screens.

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NYC biz boss gets nine months in the clink for profound idiocy

A New York business owner will be spending the next nine months behind bars after he was convicted of forging court orders to take down unflattering online reviews.…

Steam VR is introducing a new feature called "Motion Smoothing" that will give PCs with low-end hardware the power to deliver VR experiences more smoothly. "It functions like Motion Smoothing for TV and Asynchronous Spacewarp for Oculus devices, which are frame-rate smoothing techniques that generate synthetic frames between two real ones in order to avoid a stuttery experience," notes Engadget. From the report: When Steam VR determines that an experience is lagging or dropping frames, Motion Smoothing automatically kicks in. It drops an app's framerate from 90FPS to 45FPS and generates a synthetic frame for every real one to mimic real 90FPS. If things get especially bad, it can generate two to three frames for every real one instead. Steam explains that the feature "dramatically [lowers] the performance requirements," allowing PCs with lower end hardware to "produce smooth frames." Take note, however, that the feature will not work with the Oculus Rift or with Windows Mixed Reality headsets. You can only take advantage of it if you have an HTC Vive or a Vive Pro, and if you're running Windows 10 -- all you need to do is right-click on Steam VR and select beta under Tools in Library.

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WikiLeaks overlord challenges housemate rules in court

Housemate from hell Julian Assange is taking his landlord, the government of Ecuador, to court to stop its officials from, allegedly, running roughshod over his human rights.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Elon Musk took to Twitter on Thursday evening to inform his followers of a new addition to the Model 3 lineup. This is not the long-awaited $35,000 version, however; the mid-range Model 3 starts at $45,000. Musk also revealed that the Model 3 ordering process has been simplified and now has fewer options. One that's missing -- from all new Tesla orders, not just the Model 3 -- is the controversial "full self-driving" option. The reason? It was "causing too much confusion," Musk tweeted. The mid-range Model 3s will be rear-wheel drive only, prompting some to wonder if the company was using software to limit battery capacity on existing RWD inventory in order to get it out of the door. But Tesla says it's able to build these slightly cheaper cars by using the same battery pack as the more expensive, longer-range cars but with fewer cells inside (so no future software upgrades can increase their range at a later date). While Tesla is promoting the car as costing as little as $30,700 by factoring in "gas savings" and all federal and local tax incentives, it did also announce last week that any new Tesla delivered after October 15th might not ship before the beginning of next year. As Ars Technica notes, "Any new Tesla delivered after January 1st 2019 (but before July 1st 2019) is only eligible for a $3,750 IRS credit."

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So solid crew confirm old idea by spotting tiny waves

The Earth’s core is solid, according to a pair of geophysicists who claim to have solved an 80-year-old conundrum concerning the planet's center.…

Like fingerprints, no 3D printer is exactly the same. That's the takeaway from a new University at Buffalo-led study that describes what's believed to be the first accurate method for tracing a 3D-printed object to the machine it came from. From the study: The advancement, which the research team calls "PrinTracker," could ultimately help law enforcement and intelligence agencies track the origin of 3D-printed guns, counterfeit products and other goods. "3D printing has many wonderful uses, but it's also a counterfeiter's dream. Even more concerning, it has the potential to make firearms more readily available to people who are not allowed to possess them," says the study's lead author Wenyao Xu, PhD, associate professor of computer science and engineering in UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. [...] To understand the method, it's helpful to know how 3D printers work. Like a common inkjet printer, 3D printers move back-and-forth while "printing" an object. Instead of ink, a nozzle discharges a filament, such as plastic, in layers until a three-dimensional object forms. Each layer of a 3D-printed object contains tiny wrinkles -- usually measured in submillimeters -- called in-fill patterns. These patterns are supposed to be uniform. However, the printer's model type, filament, nozzle size and other factors cause slight imperfections in the patterns. The result is an object that does not match its design plan.

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High-value servers targeted by cyber-weapons dumped online by Shadow Brokers

Miscreants are using a trio of NSA hacking tools, leaked last year by the Shadow Brokers, to infect and spy on computer systems used in aerospace, nuclear energy, and other industries.…

Security researchers have found flaws in four popular connected storage drives that they say could let hackers access a user's private and sensitive data. From a report: The researchers Paulos Yibelo and Daniel Eshetu said the software running on three of the devices they tested -- NetGear Stora, Seagate Home and Medion LifeCloud -- can allow an attacker to remotely read, change and delete data without requiring a password. Yibelo, who shared the research with TechCrunch this week and posted the findings Friday, said that many other devices may be at risk. The software, Hipserv, built by tech company Axentra, was largely to blame for three of the four flaws they found. Hipserv is Linux-based, and uses several web technologies -- including PHP -- to power the web interface. But the researchers found that bugs could let them read files on the drive without any authentication. It also meant they could run any command they wanted as "root" -- the built-in user account with the highest level of access -- making the data on the device vulnerable to prying eyes or destruction.

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Louis Rossmann says US Customs and Border Patrol seized $1,000 worth of laptop batteries, claiming they were counterfeit. From a report: Earlier this year, Louis Rossmann, the highest-profile iPhone and Mac repair professional in the United States, told Motherboard that determining "the difference between counterfeiting and refurbishing is going to be the next big battle" between the independent repair profession and Apple. At the time, his friend and fellow independent repair pro, Jessa Jones, had just had a shipment of iPhone screens seized by Customs and Border Patrol. Rossmann was right: His repair parts were also just seized by the US government. Last month, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized a package containing 20 Apple laptop batteries en route to Rossman's store in New York City. The laptop batteries were en route from China to Rossmann Repair Group -- a NYC based repair store that specializes in Apple products. "Apple and customs seized batteries to a computer that, at [the Apple Store], they no longer service because they claim it's vintage," Rossmann, the owner and operator of Rossmann Repair Group, said in a YouTube video. "They will not allow me to replace batteries, because when I import batteries that are original they'll tell me the they're counterfeit and have them stolen from by [CBP]." CBP seized the batteries on September 6, then notified Rossmann via a letter dated October 5. Rossmann produced the letter in its entirety in his video.

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The Justice Department on Friday charged a Russian woman for her role in a conspiracy to interfere with the 2018 U.S. election, marking the first criminal case prosecutors have brought against a foreign national for interfering in the upcoming midterms. From a report: Elena Khusyaynova, 44, was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. Prosecutors said she managed the finances of "Project Lakhta," a foreign influence operation they said was designed "to sow discord in the U.S. political system" by pushing arguments and misinformation online about a whole host of divisive political issues, including immigration, the Confederate flag, gun control, and the NFL national anthem protests. The charges against Khusyaynova came just as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned that it was concerned about "ongoing campaigns" by Russia, China and Iran to interfere with the upcoming Midterm elections and even the 2020 race -- an ominous warning that comes just weeks before voters head to the polls.

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Eurocrats reckon that anti-competitiveness from Redmond would be a massive foot-shooting exercise

The European Commission has given the thumbs up to Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub.…

But about that loss...

Atlassian, the collaboration outfit responsible for inflicting Jira on the world, has announced a jump in revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2019 and an equally eyewatering jump in losses.…

A new report sheds some light on the issue of paid click farms gaming Apple's long-running list of Top Podcasts. From a report: Earlier this month, Apple's long-running list of Top Podcasts began to exhibit some unusual issues -- no-name podcasts vaulting over popular, well-established ones -- but the company appeared to quickly fix its chart. Unfortunately, the problems have popped up again, and an analysis from podcast industry tracker Chartable suggests that paid click farms are now gaming the list, which it calls "the closest thing to the Billboard Top 100 in the podcast world." In theory, Apple's podcast popularity rankings might not matter -- podcasts are free, and Apple's only one source of such rankings. But after introducing its Podcast Directory in 2005, Apple became the world's largest aggregator of such programming, and its rankings serve two purposes: showing listeners what's hot, and helping advertisers determine which shows to support, thereby keeping their creators afloat. The core problem is that Apple's Top Podcasts chart appears to use a poor and easily manipulated ranking metric. Chartable believes that it's based entirely upon a podcast's total number of new subscribers over the past week, with weights assigned to movement in the past one to three days.

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Your weekly dose of networking

Coming off a long string of losses, Ericsson probably hoped to turn in some good news, but at its latest financial results, the company announced the sacking of 50 people in response to a corruption scandal.…

Plus: 7nm LLP, QLC, stacked RDIMMS and brainy drives

Among a blizzard of news from Samsung's Tech Data, El Reg has spotted smaller processor nodes, FPGAs added to SSDs, stacked and cubed memory, quad-level cell flash and object-storing SSDs on the way.…

John Paczkowski and Joseph Bernstein, reporting for BuzzFeed News: Apple CEO Tim Cook, in an interview with BuzzFeed News, went on the record for the first time to deny allegations that the company was the victim of a hardware-based attack carried out by the Chinese government. And, in an unprecedented move for the company, he called for a retraction of the story that made this claim. Earlier this month Bloomberg Businessweek published an investigation alleging Chinese spies had compromised some 30 US companies by implanting malicious chips into Silicon Valley bound servers during their manufacture in China. The chips, Bloomberg reported, allowed the attackers to create "a stealth doorway" into any network running on a server in which they were embedded. Apple was alleged to be among the companies attacked, and a focal point of the story. [...] "We turned the company upside down," Cook said. "Email searches, datacenter records, financial records, shipment records. We really forensically whipped through the company to dig very deep and each time we came back to the same conclusion: This did not happen. There's no truth to this." A Bloomberg spokesperson said, "We stand by our story and are confident in our reporting and sources."

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Julian Assange is suing Ecuador's government for violating his "fundamental rights and freedoms," despite the fact he is still being sheltered in the country's UK embassy. From a report: It comes after Ecuador cut off communications for Mr Assange, who has been living inside the country's London embassy for more than six years. Baltasar Garzon, a lawyer for WikiLeaks, has arrived in Ecuador to launch the case, which is expected to be heard next week in a domestic court. WikiLeaks claims Mr Assange's access to the outside world has been "summarily cut off" and says Ecuador has threatened to remove the protection he has had since being given political asylum. The site said Ecuador's government has refused to allow a visit by Human Rights Watch general counsel Dinah PoKempner and prevented several meetings with Mr Assange's lawyers. A statement said: "Ecuador's measures against Julian Assange have been widely condemned by the human rights community."

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