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Was your anti-surveillance letter sinkholed? Write a blog about it

Seemingly annoyed at being ignored, an anonymous person claiming to be an Amazon employee has repeated demands for the online behemoth to stop selling its Rekognition product to American police agencies.…

Techie called in after computer always starts the day with a go-slow

On-Call Welcome once more to On Call, The Register’s regular foray into the freaky world of tech support.…

Never-closed browsers and persistent session tickets make tracking a doddle

Analysis Transport Layer Security underpins much of the modern internet. It is the foundation of secure connections to HTTPS websites, for one thing. However, it can harbor a sting in its tail for those concerned about staying anonymous online.…

OneHundredAndTen writes: A new article in Nature reports of a new, extremely precise measurement of the electric dipole moment of the electron. The conclusion is that, within the margin of error of the measurement, the electron remains a perfect sphere. This implies that supersymmetric theories keep running out of corners to hide, that another nail is driven into their coffin, and that string theory looks less and less compelling. By lighting up the molecules with lasers, "the scientists were able to interpret how other subatomic particles alter the distribution of an electron's charge," reports Scientific American. "The symmetrical roundness of the electrons suggested that unseen particles aren't big enough to skew electrons into squashed oblong shapes, or ovals. These findings once again confirm a long-standing physics theory, known as the Standard Model, which describes how particles and forces in the universe behave."

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Quadcopter slinger rudely palms folk off to .apk download

Drone manufacturer DJI is under fire because the "Get it on Google Play" button on its website for its smartphone app does anything but that.…

Turns out getting diet advice from popular internet images is a bad idea

Plus-sized pea-brained progenies, sorry, impressionable youths pile on the pounds because they're using internet memes as a handbook for living life.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from National Geographic: New research shows microplastics in 90 percent of the table salt brands sampled worldwide. Of 39 salt brands tested, 36 had microplastics in them, according to a new analysis by researchers in South Korea and Greenpeace East Asia. Salt samples from 21 countries in Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia were analyzed. The three brands that did not contain microplastics are from Taiwan (refined sea salt), China (refined rock salt), and France (unrefined sea salt produced by solar evaporation). The study was published this month in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The density of microplastics found in salt varied dramatically among different brands, but those from Asian brands were especially high, the study found. The highest quantities of microplastics were found in salt sold in Indonesia. Asia is a hot spot for plastic pollution, and Indonesia -- with 34,000 miles (54,720 km) of coastline -- ranked in an unrelated 2015 study as suffering the second-worst level of plastic pollution in the world. In another indicator of the geographic density of plastic pollution, microplastics levels were highest in sea salt, followed by lake salt and then rock salt. Even though the study found that the average adult consumes approximately 2,000 microplastics per year through salt, it's not clear what the health consequences are.

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Targeted ads, coming to a galaxy nowhere near you

Google Cloud has teamed up with NASA’s Frontier Development Lab to search for extraterrestrial life using simulations and machine-learning technology.…

The U.S. Army is getting ready to send driverless trucks into combat. "Next fall, [the Army's] 'Leader-Follower' technology will enable convoys of autonomous vehicles to follow behind one driven by a human," reports VICE News. "It's a direct response to the improvised explosive devices that caused nearly half the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan." From the report: Much of the research and development of these technologies has been done at TARDEC, the Army's Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, in Warren, Michigan. Typically human-driven trucks are outfitted with sensors and cameras through a TARDEC-created applique kit. They're not exactly robots, just regular military trucks that have been made a lot smarter. The technology is expected to be ready for field use in September 2019.

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AmiMoJo shares a report from Boing Boing: To enable "further research of information operations on Twitter," the company today published a dataset of tweets posted by known Russian and Iranian troll farms. "These large datasets comprise 3,841 accounts affiliated with the IRA, originating in Russia, and 770 other accounts, potentially originating in Iran," the blog post reads. "They include more than 10 million Tweets and more than 2 million images, GIFs, videos, and Periscope broadcasts, including the earliest on-Twitter activity from accounts connected with these campaigns, dating back to 2009." You can download the Russian and Iranian datasets here. The Russian dataset is comprised of 1.24GB of tweets and 300GB of media, while the Iranian dataset is comprised of 168MB of tweets and 65.7GB of media.

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Also: AWS on avoiding state machine slips

Updated Network box maker F5 has shipped some firewall gear that is potentially vulnerable to the libssh authentication-bypass bug.…

Also: AWS talks how to avoid TLS state machine slips

Network box maker F5 says it has shipped load balancers that are vulnerable to the libssh authentication-bypass bug – meaning anyone who can reach the devices over the network or internet can potentially log in simply by asking nicely.…

samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: The parental controls in the iPhone's new iOS 12 are blocking innocuous sexual education content on Safari, while allowing websites like the white supremacist Daily Stormer and searches for bomb-making instructions through its filter. The settings, found under Screen Time in the new iOS 12, are meant to give parents greater control over how their kids use their phones unsupervised, including filters for "explicit" content and content ratings and restrictions, with the option to "limit adult websites." As tested by Motherboard, the filter blocks longstanding educational sites like Scarleteen and O.school, but allows sites like The Daily Stormer, an extremist neo-Nazi white supremacist platform. The filter in question "limits adult websites" on Safari. When Motherboard tested this filter, we found several similarly blocked searches and websites: The searches "how to say no to sex," "sex assault hotline," and "sex education" were all restricted, but the results for the searches "how to poison my mom," "how to join isis," and "how to make a bomb" were allowed. 4chan and 8chan are blocked, but Reddit -- including many NSFW and porn-focused subreddits, are not. The subreddit r/gonewild, which is pornographic, is not caught by the filter, which even allows users to click through Reddit's own age-gating.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Five industry groups representing major internet providers and cable companies filed suit on Thursday seeking to block a Vermont law barring companies that do not abide by net neutrality rules from receiving state contracts. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Vermont by groups representing major providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. It followed a lawsuit by four of the groups earlier this month challenging a much broader California law mandating providers abide by net neutrality rules. The trade associations are also challenging an executive order on the issue signed by Vermont Governor Phil Scott. The Vermont lawsuit was filed by the American Cable Association; CTIA -- The Wireless Association; NCTA -- The Internet & Television Association; USTelecom -- The Broadband Association and the New England Cable & Telecommunications Association. The lawsuit argues that states cannot regulate "indirectly through their spending, procurement, or other commercial powers what they are forbidden from regulating directly."

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Internet piracy crackdown looms over Google and search engines, file-sharing sites in proposed legislation

Australia's federal government hopes to expand the piracy-blocking regime it introduced in 2015 to include injunctions against search engines, include file drop-sites in bans, and catch so-called “alternative pathways” to pirated content that emerge after a primary site has been blocked.…

The 45th version of the OpenBSD project has been released, bringing more hardware support (Radeon driver updates, Intel microcode integration, and more), a virtualization tool that supports the disk format qcow2, and a network interface where you can quickly join and switch between different Wi-Fi networks. Root.cz also notes that audio recording is now disabled by default. If you need to record audio, it can be enabled with the new sysctl variable. An anonymous Slashdot reader first shared the announcement. You can download it from any of the mirrors here.

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Five quadrillion solar masses – and you'll need a Farcaster to get there

An international team of astronomers have stumbled upon the largest and oldest galaxy supercluster found to date, measuring more than four quadrillion solar masses.…

With the latest Windows 10 build 18262, Microsoft is allowing you to remove apps such as Mail, Calendar, Movies & TV, and the Groove Music app. Ars Technica reports: The ability to remove these apps doesn't really mean much in terms of disk space or convenience, as none of them are very big. The move may be of more interest to corporate deployments; an organization that has standardized on Outlook, for example, might want to remove the Mail and Calendar apps to reduce user confusion. Elsewhere, the new build also updates Task Manager; an optional column in the Details tab will show which applications handle mixed DPI systems and what API level they use for that support. Microsoft is also planning, but has not yet enabled, a new Windows troubleshooter. This will examine diagnostic data and automatically perform any fixes or reconfigurations that appear to be necessary.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: EBay has filed a lawsuit against Amazon, accusing the U.S. retail giant of using illegal tactics to recruit sellers. It says Amazon representatives abused eBay's internal email system to contact sellers -- a violation of the marketplace's policies. Amazon declined to comment on the case, which follows a letter from eBay demanding an end to the activity. It had previously said that it was investigating the claims. In the lawsuit filed in Santa Clara County, California, eBay says Amazon representatives created eBay accounts to solicit sellers, often sending messages within minutes of setting up their profiles. The activity dates back to at least 2015 and involved dozens of Amazon representatives, who each sent hundreds of emails, it says. EBay was alerted to the issue a few weeks ago by a seller and asked Amazon to stop.

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El Reg vulture gets his claws into Canonical's latest OS

Ubuntu 18.10 is about to make its scheduled appearance: Cosmic Cuttlefish will take centre stage from previous incumbent, Bionic Beaver.…