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An anonymous reader writes: Google this week released Chrome 75 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. The release includes hint for low latency canvas contexts, files supported in the Web Share API, numeric separators, and more developer features. [...] Next, files are now supported by the Web Share API. For years, Google has been working to bring native sharing capabilities to the web. The Web Share API allows web apps to invoke the same share dialog box as a native app. The implementation brings a new method and a new shareData property. Numeric literals now allow underscores (_, U+005F) as separators to make them more readable. Underscores can only appear between digits, and consecutive underscores are not allowed. There is also a reader mode that is not enabled by default. From a report: The big feature included with Chrome 75 is the addition of a hidden Reader Mode, similar to the one included with Firefox. This new Reader Mode is not active by default and must be turned on using one of Google Chrome's experimental flags -- which until recently has only been available in the Chrome Canary distribution. To enable and test Chrome's new Reader Mode, users must visit the chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode section, and enable the Reader Mode option, as in the screenshot below. Chrome for Android includes these two features: 1. Generate strong and unique passwords with Chrome's built-in password manager. 2. Quickly look up your passwords by tapping any password field and using the new keyboard option.

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Then-CEO also told Mike Lynch's people to 'grow up'

Autonomy Trial Meg Whitman told London's High Court that she regretted saying she was "happy to throw Leo [Apotheker] under the bus in a tit-for-tat" during the fallout over HP's purchase of Autonomy.…

Absolutely criminal behavior – unrestricted file upload, really?

Exclusive Phishing kits – used by miscreants to build webpages that steal victims' personal information and money by masquerading as legit websites – harbor vulnerabilities that can be exploited by other miscreants to pilfer freshly stolen data.…

McGruber shares a report from American City Business Journals: A retired Georgia Tech professor is suing ride-sharing giant Uber, claiming he invented the technology that "is absolutely core to the way in which Uber operates its business." In a complaint filed May 31 in federal court, Stephen Dickerson charges that Uber is infringing on a patent he won in 2004 for a "communications and computing based urban transit system." "The core of Uber's business and technical platforms for its rideshare, bikeshare, and scooter sharing services practice the transportation system of Professor Dickerson's invention; without that system, Uber literally cannot operate. Throughout its existence, Uber has egregiously infringed [Dickerson's] patent without paying any compensation for such use," Dickerson's lawsuit alleges. Last July, Dickerson sued Lyft in federal court in New York, making the same allegations he is making against Uber. In a court filing, Lyft denies it infringed on Dickerson's technology. The lawsuit is continuing. To clarify, Dickerson's company, RideApp, filed the suit because it "developed in 1999 the idea of bringing cell phones, the global positioning system and digital payments together to get people around congested Atlanta," reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The patent was apparently owned by Georgia Tech, but the college failed to act on it and reassigned the patent back to him in 2018.

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Historic St Paul's digs amongst 270 offices offloaded

BT is shuttering more than 270 UK offices as part of a three- to five-year grand plan to carve out £1.5bn in expenses.…

Promises to give EU the goods by 2021

After just six months, the EU-funded project attempting to build home-grown CPUs that would power future European supercomputers has delivered its first architectural designs.…

Not even a video link, lawyers tell judge

Autonomy Trial Sushovan Hussain, former chief financial officer of Mike Lynch’s Autonomy, will not testify in his defence to London’s High Court.…

Azure Active Directory integration and super secret APFS volumes? Oh my

WWDC Amid the hoo-ha surrounding Apple's WWDC announcements were some nuggets aimed at encouraging enterprises to get snuggly with the fruity firm's devices.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A group of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) has clarified a 2018 mystery in the field of extragalactic astrophysics: The supposed existence of a galaxy without dark matter. Galaxies with no dark matter are impossible to understand in the framework of the current theory of galaxy formation, because the role of dark matter is fundamental in causing the collapse of the gas to form stars. In 2018, a study published in Nature announced the discovery of a galaxy that apparently lacked dark matter. Now, according to an article published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) a group of researchers at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) has solved this mystery via a very complete set of observations of KKS2000]04 (NGC1052-DF2). The researchers, perplexed because all the parameters that depended on the distance of the galaxy were anomalous, revised the available distance indicators. Using five independent methods to estimate the distance of the object, they found that all of them coincided in one conclusion: The galaxy is much nearer than the value presented in the previous research. The original article published in Nature stated that the galaxy is at a distance of some 64 million light years from the Earth. However, this new research has revealed that the real distance is much less, around 42 million light years. Thanks to these new results, the parameters of the galaxy inferred from its distance have become "normal," and fit the observed trends traced by galaxies with similar characteristics.

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Speaker identification and more listening in: welcome to the future of voice assistants

Amazon has submitted a patent application which suggests the firm plans to capture your speech and send it to the cloud for processing before as well as after hearing a "wakeword" trigger.…

Today in current affairs...

Video Scientists studying the degradation of lithium-ion batteries believe fast charging will damage the power packs faster than one might expect.…

Inoffensive, nondescript logo just screams 'building a safer world'

Logowatch The strategy boutique opened a pop-up shop on the wild steppe of Kaspersky Lab yesterday as the Russian antivirus developer revealed a daring redesign that involves dropping the word "Lab".…

Claims of country and western music, cowboy management, cooking the books to be aired

Autonomy Trial Meg Whitman will enter the High Court’s witness box today to give evidence about HP’s controversial purchase and $8.8bn writedown of Mike Lynch’s British software firm Autonomy.…

Snouts in the trough for The Great British Brand Sell-off

Special report Nominet, the operator of the dot-UK domain-name registry, has been accused of designing a scheme to give its largest members a £100m payday.…

Ikea has partnered with American furniture startup Ori Living to develop a new robotic furniture system for people living in small spaces. Called Rognan, the collection includes a large storage unit that can slide across a room via a touchpad to divide a room into two living spaces, a bed, desk, and a couch for people to pull out when needed. It will launch first in Hong Kong and Japan in 2020. The Verge reports: Rognan is built on Ori's robotic platform, and works with Ikea's Platsa line of storage furniture. It's also compatible with Ikea's Tradfri line of cabinet and wardrobe smart lighting. Ikea says the Rognan can save an extra eight square meters (about 86 square feet) of living space. That might not sound like much, but if you live in a tiny home, it could make all the difference. The Verge notes that Ori's line of automated furniture started as a concept from MIT's CityHome concept project in 2014. It launched for real estate developers and Airbnbs for $10,000 as Ori Systems.

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The ruddy things are getting in the way of our radio telescopes!

The International Astronomical Union has warned against the rise of satellite constellations in Earth's night sky, such as SpaceX's Starlink system, since their brightness and noise could hamper future scientific research.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: The Energy Department's most environmentally important and technically ambitious project to clean up Cold War nuclear weapons waste has stalled, putting at jeopardy an already long-delayed effort to protect the Columbia River in central Washington. In a terse letter last week, state officials said the environmental project is at risk of violating key federal court orders that established deadlines after past ones were repeatedly missed. Two multibillion-dollar industrial facilities intended to turn highly radioactive sludge into solid glass at the Hanford nuclear site have been essentially mothballed. Construction was halted in 2012 because of design flaws and Energy Department managers have foundered in finding alternatives, according to the letter that threatens new litigation. The department has committed to removing and disposing all of the underground tank waste by 2047, though Washington's Department of Ecology director Maia Bellon said the state doesn't think that is possible at current funding levels. The six-page letter was addressed to Anne White, chief of environmental management at the Energy Department. The Times obtained the letter from Hanford Challenge, a watchdog group that has closely monitored the contaminated facility. "This is clearly setting the table for litigation," said Tom Carpenter, executive director of the group. "The Energy Department is going to miss all of these deadlines." Carpenter noted that in February, the Energy Department issued a new cost estimate to remediate the entire Hanford site, taking it from $110 billion to as much as $660 billion, a cost increase that has staggered Congress and has fueled sentiment to cut short the cleanup goals. "They are walking away from important elements of the cleanup," he said. Bellon has a two-part proposal for the Energy Department to consider. "First, there would be a new round of negotiations over the next six to nine months," the report says. "Second, the state wants a low-level treatment system operating by no later than 2023, full production of high-level waste glass by 2036 and renewed commitments to removing all tank waste." If the Energy Department doesn't accept the state's proposal or the negotiation does not result in an acceptable cleanup program, the state "reserves our right" to pursue action in court, Bellon said in the letter.

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Physicists at the Swiss Nanoscience Institute at the University of Basel have now developed a method by which they can spatially determine the geometry of electrons in quantum dots. Space Daily reports: A quantum dot is a potential trap which allows to confine free electrons in an area which is about 1000 times larger than a natural atom. Because the trapped electrons behave similar to electrons bound to an atom, quantum dots are also known as "artificial atoms." The electron is held in the quantum dot by electric fields. However, it moves within the space and, with different probabilities corresponding to a wave function, remains in certain locations within its confinement. The scientists use spectroscopic measurements to determine the energy levels in the quantum dot and study the behavior of these levels in magnetic fields of varying strength and orientation. Based on their theoretical model, it is possible to determine the electron's probability density and thus its wave function with a precision on the sub-nanometer scale. "We are able to not only map the shape and orientation of the electron, but also control the wave function according to the configuration of the applied electric fields. This gives us the opportunity to optimize control of the spins in a very targeted manner," says one of the researchers. The spatial orientation of the electrons also plays a role in the entanglement of several spins. Similarly to the binding of two atoms to a molecule, the wave functions of two electrons must lie on one plane for successful entanglement. With the aid of the developed method, numerous earlier studies can be better understood and the performance of spin qubits can be further optimized in the future. The research has been published in two papers in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review B.

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No one has complained so far, fed honcho protests

Three years ago, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the FBI had very limited metrics about the accuracy of its face-recognition technology.…

"Apple's Dashboard is getting quietly removed from the company's upcoming macOS Catalina update," reports The Verge, citing Appleosophy and MacRumors. "The Dashboard first launched seven years ago with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2005 and saw its final update in 2011 with the launch of OS X 10.7 Lion." From the report: The app first introduced the concept of widgets to Apple's desktop operating system and became a hallmark of OS X design for more than a decade. In particularly, Dashboard became well known for its desktop Sticky Note feature and its overall skeuomorphic approach best emphasized by the clock, stocks, and calculator widgets, a design philosophy that formed the foundation of the first version of iOS that launched a few years after OS X Tiger. It wasn't until iOS 7 in 2013 that Apple would abandon that aesthetic for a flatter, more modern one that eventual carried back over to its desktop approach. Since 2011, Dashboard has been accessible in various forms, but it's had none of its widget design or UI updated, making it a bit of an anachronism existing behind the scenes on macOS. With OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Apple disabled the application by default, but still allowed users to access it either as a hotkey overlay or its own separate space within Mission Control. Now, in macOS Catalina, it appears Dashboard is going away for good. Appleosophy tried to disable and enable the Dashboard via Terminal only for the system to show it as missing even after a forced reboot. The Launchpad overlay also shows the Dashboard app icon as a question mark, the same as with the broken up and effectively killed off iTunes.

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