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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Charter Communications won't be kicked out of New York after all. Nine months after a New York government agency ordered Charter to leave the state over its alleged failure to comply with merger conditions, state officials have announced a settlement that will let Charter stay in New York in exchange for further broadband expansions. The settlement will enforce a new version of the original merger conditions and require a $12 million payment, about half of which could help other ISPs deploy broadband. The State Public Service Commission (PSC) had voted in July 2018 to revoke its approval of Charter's 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC), saying Charter failed to meet interim deadlines for broadband-expansion requirements. The order, which came just a month after a $2 million fine, would have required Charter to sell the TWC system to another provider. But the PSC never enforced the merger revocation order as it repeatedly granted deadline extensions to Charter while the sides held settlement talks. The result is a proposed settlement between Charter and the state Department of Public Service (DPS) that was announced Friday. "Pursuant to the agreement, Charter would expand its network to provide high-speed broadband service to 145,000 residences and businesses entirely in Upstate New York; the network expansion would be completed by September 30, 2021 in accordance with a schedule providing frequent interim enforceable milestone requirements; and Charter will pay $12 million to expand broadband service to additional unserved and underserved premises," a DPS statement said. Half of the $12 million could go back to Charter but they'd "have to use it to deploy broadband to locations in addition to the 145,000 already required," the report notes. "The other $6 million would fund broadband deployment projects in a competitive bidding process, and it could thus end up going to Charter's competitors -- although Charter would be eligible to bid for the funding, too."

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Plus: Employee unrest over diversity, harassment reported within Microsoft, Google this week

Special report Three of the five people axed from JavaScript package management biz NPM Inc last month claim that bosses got rid of them for trying to form a union.…

The Tesla computer, a new custom chip designed to enable full self-driving capabilities, is now in all new Model 3, X and S vehicles, CEO Elon Musk said during the company's Autonomy Day. From a report: Tesla switched over from Nvidia's Drive platform to its own custom chip for the Model S and X about a month ago and for the Model 3 about 10 days ago, Musk said. "All cars being produced all have the hardware necessary -- computer and otherwise -- for full self-driving," Musk said. "All you need to do is improve the software." Work is also already underway on a next-generation chip, Musk added. The design of this current chip was completed "maybe one and half, two years ago." Tesla is now about halfway through the design of the next-generation chip. Musk wanted to focus the talk on the current chip, but he later added that the next-generation one would be "three times better" than the current system and was about two years away.

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Two employee activists at Google say they have been retaliated against for helping to organize a walkout among thousands of Google employees in November, and are planning a "town hall" meeting on Friday for others to discuss alleged instances of retaliation. Wired: In a message posted to many internal Google mailing lists Monday, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google's Open Research, said that after Google disbanded its external AI ethics council on April 4, she was told that her role would be "changed dramatically." Whittaker said she was told that, in order to stay at the company, she would have to "abandon" her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University. Claire Stapleton, another walkout organizer and a 12-year veteran of the company, said in the email that two months after the protest she was told she would be demoted from her role as marketing manager at YouTube and lose half her reports. After escalating the issue to human resources, she said she faced further retaliation. "My manager started ignoring me, my work was given to other people, and I was told to go on medical leave, even though I'm not sick," Stapleton wrote. After she hired a lawyer; the company conducted an investigation and seemed to reverse her demotion. "While my work has been restored, the environment remains hostile and I consider quitting nearly every day," she wrote.

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Luminary, a $100 million venture-backed podcasting company, will debut its service tomorrow. It offers two tiers to customers: subscription-based shows without ads or podcasts for free but deal with ads as a price. But it has already ruffled some feathers. From a report: When it rolls out to the public on iOS, Android, and the web, Luminary's podcast app will be missing some of the industry's biggest shows, including The New York Times's The Daily and Gimlet Media shows like Reply All and Homecoming. Shows by Anchor's network of smaller creators won't be on the app, nor will series from Parcast, both of which are owned by Spotify. By withholding their shows, the Times and Spotify are setting Luminary up to fail -- or at least struggle to get off on the right foot with users. It certainly seems like the first shot fired in the inevitable premium podcast war and could destabilize one of the first buzzy, well-funded entrants before it can make a dent in the industry. The decisions that happen now will reshape the way podcasts are distributed in the future.

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You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run

Samsung has confirmed that its dual-screen Galaxy Fold handset, which was due to go on sale for $1,980 apiece later this month in the US, has been delayed due to the touchscreen easily breaking quality control issues.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: A boarding technology for travelers using JetBlue is causing controversy due to a social media thread on the airline's use of facial recognition. Last week, traveler MacKenzie Fegan described her experience with the biometric technology in a social media post that got the attention of JetBlue's official account. She began: "I just boarded an international @JetBlue flight. Instead of scanning my boarding pass or handing over my passport, I looked into a camera before being allowed down the jet bridge. Did facial recognition replace boarding passes, unbeknownst to me? Did I consent to this?" JetBlue was ready to offer Twitterized sympathy: "You're able to opt out of this procedure, MacKenzie. Sorry if this made you feel uncomfortable." But once you start thinking about these things, your thoughts become darker. Fegan wanted to know how JetBlue knew what she looked like. JetBlue explained: "The information is provided by the United States Department of Homeland Security from existing holdings." Fegan wondered by what right a private company suddenly had her bioemtric data. JetBlue insisted it doesn't have access to the data. It's "securely transmitted to the Customs and Border Protection database." Fegan wanted to know how this could have possibly happened so quickly. Could it be that in just a few seconds her biometric data was whipped "securely" around government departments so that she would be allowed on the plane? JetBlue referred her to an article on the subject, which was a touch on the happy-PR side. Fegan was moved, but not positively, by the phrase "there is no pre-registration required."

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Amazon is now making its delivery drivers take selfies, in a bid to reduce fraud. Using facial recognition, the company will verify drivers' identities to make sure they are who they say they are. From a report: The new requirements appeared on the Amazon Flex app to drivers, notifying them that they needed to take a selfie before continuing work. Of course, Amazon warns drivers to "not take a selfie while driving." By asking drivers to take selfies, Amazon could be preventing multiple people from sharing the same account. These efforts could screen out anyone who is technically unauthorized from delivering packages, such as criminals who are attempting to use Amazon Flex as an excuse to lurk in front of people's homes.

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A popular hotspot finder app for Android exposed the Wi-Fi network passwords for more than two million networks. From a report: The app, downloaded by thousands of users, allowed anyone to search for Wi-Fi networks in their nearby area. The app allows the user to upload Wi-Fi network passwords from their devices to its database for others to use. That database of more than two million network passwords, however, was left exposed and unprotected, allowing anyone to access and download the contents in bulk. Sanyam Jain, a security researcher and a member of the GDI Foundation, found the database and reported the findings to TechCrunch. We spent more than two weeks trying to contact the developer, believed to be based in China, to no avail. Eventually we contacted the host, DigitalOcean, which took down the database within a day of reaching out. "We notified the user and have taken the [server] hosting the exposed database offline," a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

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A buggy update for Nokia 9 PureView handsets has apparently impacted the smartphone model's in-screen fingerprint scanner, which can now be bypassed using unregistered fingerprints or even with something as banal as a pack of gum. From a report: Multiple users have complained about this problem over the weekend, after installing an OS update (v4.22) released on April 18. The update was meant to improve the phone's in-screen fingerprint scanner module -- so that users won't have to press their fingers too hard on the screen before the phone unlocks -- yet it had the exact opposite effect the company hoped for. While initially, the reported issues appeared to be new, a video recorded by another user showed the same problem (unlocking phones with unregistered fingerprints) even before the v4.22 update, meaning that the update just made the unlocking bug worse than it already was.

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Samsung Electronics is delaying the expected Friday rollout of its Galaxy Fold smartphone [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] until at least next month, WSJ reported Monday citing people familiar with the matter, the latest fallout from a product headache that began with tech reviewers reporting their test devices had malfunctioned. From the report: The Galaxy Fold phone -- priced at nearly $2,000 and the industry's first mainstream foldable-screen device -- was slated to hit shelves this week in the U.S. But problems with phones being used by reviewers have changed those plans, the people said. The new rollout is expected in the coming weeks, though a firm date has yet to be determined, they said. Though the company's internal investigation remains ongoing, the Galaxy Fold phone's reported issues stem from problems affecting the handset's hinge and extra pressure applied to the internal screen, the people said. A Samsung spokeswoman didn't have immediate comment. The company had previously said it would adhere to its plans for the Galaxy Fold phones to hit shelves on April 26 in the U.S. The delayed launch came hours after Samsung abruptly scrapped prerelease media events planned for Hong Kong on Tuesday and Shanghai on Wednesday.

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As Apple and Amazon compete for a greater share of consumer dollars and attention, they also have a particularly intimate business relationship: Apple is spending more than $30 million a month on Amazon's cloud, CNBC reported Monday, citing citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Apple's cloud expenditure reflects the company's determination to deliver online services like iCloud quickly and reliably, even if it must depend on a rival to do so. [...] In a February job posting, Apple said it was looking for someone who could "lead and architect our growing AWS footprint." Indeed, that expenditure is on track to expand. At the end of March, Apple's spending was on track to average more than $30 million per month in the first quarter of 2019. That would be more than 10 percent higher than a year earlier, according to two people familiar with the spending. If Apple's AWS use stays at those levels for the rest of 2019, its annual spending would exceed $360 million. Apple spent approximately $350 million in 2018, one of these people said.

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The European Parliament voted last week to interconnect a series of border-control, migration, and law enforcement systems into a gigantic, biometrics-tracking, searchable database of EU and non-EU citizens. From a report: This new database will be known as the Common Identity Repository (CIR) and is set to unify records on over 350 million people. Per its design, CIR will aggregate both identity records (names, dates of birth, passport numbers, and other identification details) and biometrics (fingerprints and facial scans), and make its data available to all border and law enforcement authorities. Its primary role will be to simplify the jobs of EU border and law enforcement officers who will be able to search a unified system much faster, rather than search through separate databases individually. "The systems covered by the new rules would include the Schengen Information System, Eurodac, the Visa Information System (VIS) and three new systems: the European Criminal Records System for Third Country Nationals (ECRIS-TCN), the Entry/Exit System (EES) and the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS)," EU officials said last week.

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elainerd (Slashdot reader #94,528) shares an article from The Next Web: Scientists from Cornell University have successfully constructed DNA-based machines with incredibly life-like capabilities. These human-engineered organic machines are capable of locomotion, consuming resources for energy, growing and decaying, and evolving. Eventually they die. That sure sounds a lot like life, but Dan Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell, who worked on the research, says otherwise. He told The Stanford Chronicle, "We are introducing a brand-new, lifelike material concept powered by its very own artificial metabolism. We are not making something that's alive, but we are creating materials that are much more lifelike than have ever been seen before." Just how lifelike? According to the research they're on par with biologically complex organisms such as mold.... "Dynamic biomaterials powered by artificial metabolism could provide a previously unexplored route to realize 'artificial' biological systems with regenerating and self-sustaining characteristics." Basically, the Cornell team grew their own robots using a DNA-based bio-material, observed them metabolizing resources for energy, watched as they decayed and grew, and then programmed them to race against each other... Lead author on the team's paper, Shogo Hamada, told The Stanford Chronicle that "ultimately, the system may lead to lifelike self-reproducing machines."

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Sh*t! Sh*t sh*t sh*t

Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who, Me? where readers share their panic-inducing moments of tech support cock-ups.…

"I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I'm not doing it anymore," said Kallee Forslund, 16, a 10th grader in Wellington. The New York Times reports on a "rebellion" that started in Kansas against an online "personalized learning" program funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, and developed by Facebook engineers -- including a classroom walk-out, a sit-in, and parent protests at public school board meetings. Read the Times' pay-walled original article or this free alternate version. Some highlights: Eight months earlier, public schools near Wichita had rolled out a web-based platform and curriculum from Summit Learning... Many families in the Kansas towns, which have grappled with underfunded public schools and deteriorating test scores, initially embraced the change. Under Summit's program, students spend much of the day on their laptops and go online for lesson plans and quizzes, which they complete at their own pace. Teachers assist students with the work, hold mentoring sessions and lead special projects. The system is free to schools. The laptops are typically bought separately. Then, students started coming home with headaches and hand cramps. Some said they felt more anxious. One child began having a recurrence of seizures. Another asked to bring her dad's hunting earmuffs to class to block out classmates because work was now done largely alone. "We're allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies," said Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, who visited his son's fourth-grade class. In October, he pulled the 10-year-old out of the school. In a school district survey of McPherson middle school parents released this month, 77 percent of respondents said they preferred their child not be in a classroom that uses Summit. More than 80 percent said their children had expressed concerns about the platform... The resistance in Kansas is part of mounting nationwide opposition to Summit, which began trials of its system in public schools four years ago and is now in around 380 schools and used by 74,000 students. In Brooklyn, high school students walked out in November after their school started using Summit's platform. In Indiana, Pa., after a survey by Indiana University of Pennsylvania found 70 percent of students wanted Summit dropped or made optional, the school board scaled it back and then voted this month to terminate it. And in Cheshire, Conn., the program was cut after protests in 2017... By [this] winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit's program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen. The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy says the program also "demands an extraordinary amount of personal information about each student and plans to track them through college and beyond." But the real concern is whether the programs are effective. The Times also spoke to a senior scientist at the RAND corporation who's studied digital customized learning programs, who acknowledges "There has not been enough research." And a Wellington city councilman told them that 12 parents actually pulled their children out of the school system after this year's first semester -- and nearly 40 more plan to do so by summer vacation. One church secretary (with two school-age children) even coined a pithy slogan for her yard sign: "Don't Plummet With Summit."

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CNN tells the story of 24-year-old "social media influencer" Rossi Lorathio Adams II who'd wanted his domain to be the slogan of his social media sites (which at one point had over a million followers on Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter). Unfortunately, that domain was already owned by another man in Iowa -- but Adams came up with a solution: In June 2017, Adams enlisted his cousin to break into the domain owner's home and force him to transfer it. The cousin drove to the domain owner's house and provided a demand note [which contained "a series of directions on how to change an Internet domain name from the domain owner's GoDaddy account to one of Adams' GoDaddy accounts."] After entering the home, the intruder grabbed the victim's arm and ordered him to connect his computer to the internet. He put the firearm against the victim's head and ordered him to follow the instructions. "Fearing for his life, the victim quickly turned to move the gun away from his head. The victim then managed to gain control of the gun," court records show. The victim shot the intruder multiple times and called the police. The intruder, Adams' cousin Sherman Hopkins Jr., was sentenced to 20 years in prison last year. Now it's Adams' turn. He will remain in custody pending sentencing. He faces a maximum 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release.

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Fast Company shares an essay from an anthropologist who researches human agency, algorithms, AI, and automation in the context of social systems: With the advent of computational tools for quantitative measurement and metrics, and the development of machine learning based on the big data developed by those metrics, organizations, Amazon among them, started to transition through a period of what I refer to as "extreme data analysis," whereby anything and anyone that can be measured, is. This is a problem. Using counting, metrics, and implementation of outcomes from extreme data analysis to inform policies for humans is a threat to our well-being, and results in the stories we are hearing about in the warehouse, and in other areas of our lives, where humans are too often forfeiting their agency to algorithms and machines. Unfortunately, after decades of building this quantitative scaffolding, a company such as Amazon has pretty much baked it into their infrastructure and their culture.... As the world continues to automate things, processes, and services, humans are put in positions where we must constantly adapt, since at the moment, automation cannot, and does not, cooperate with us outside of its pre-programmed repertoire. Thus, in many instances we must do the yielding of our agency and our choices, to the algorithms or robots, to reach the cooperative outcomes we require.... If every process is eventually automated and restricts human agency, while simultaneously requiring our servitude to function, we will be pinned to the wall with no choices, nothing left to give, and no alternatives for coping with it. One example provided was the Amazon worker who complained the warehouse temperatures were always kept too hot -- to accommodate the needs of Amazon's robots. But the article argues we also forfeit agency "Every time we use a computer, or any computationally based device... "We do this by sitting or standing to use a keyboard, by typing, clicking, scrolling, checking boxes, pulling down menus, and filling in data in a way that the machine can understand."

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Alex Gaynor is a software engineer at Mozilla working on Firefox, after previously serving as a director of both the Python Software Foundation and the Django Software Foundation. In a new blog post today, he argues that memory unsafe languages, "principally C and C++," induce an exceptional number of security vulnerabilities, and that the industry needs to migrate to memory-safe languages like Rust and Swift by default. One of the responses I frequently receive is that the problem isn't C and C++ themselves, developers are simply holding them wrong. In particular, I often receive defenses of C++ of the form, "C++ is safe if you don't use any of the functionality inherited from C" or similarly that if you use modern C++ types and idioms you will be immune from the memory corruption vulnerabilities that plague other projects. I would like to credit C++'s smart pointer types, because they do significantly help. Unfortunately, my experience working on large C++ projects which use modern idioms is that these are not nearly sufficient to stop the flood of vulnerabilities... Modern C++ idioms introduce many changes which have the potential to improve security: smart pointers better express expected lifetimes, std::span ensures you always have a correct length handy, std::variant provides a safer abstraction for unions. However modern C++ also introduces some incredible new sources of vulnerabilities: lambda capture use-after-free, uninitialized-value optionals, and un-bounds-checked span. My professional experience writing relatively modern C++, and auditing Rust code (including Rust code that makes significant use of unsafe) is that the safety of modern C++ is simply no match for memory safe by default languages like Rust and Swift (or Python and JavaScript, though I find it rare in life to have a program that makes sense to write in either Python or C++). There are significant challenges to migrating existing, large, C and C++ codebases to a different language -- no one can deny this. Nonetheless, the question simply must be how we can accomplish it, rather than if we should try. The post highlights what he describes as "completely modern C++ idioms which produce vulnerabilities" -- including an example of dangling pointers "despite our meticulous use of smart pointers throughout..." "Even with the most modern C++ idioms available, the evidence is clear that, at scale, it's simply not possible to hold C++ right."

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An anonymous reader quotes The Next Web: As stunning and ground-breaking as it is, the EHT project is not just about taking on a challenge. It's an unprecedented test of whether Einstein's ideas about the very nature of space and time hold up in extreme circumstances, and looks closer than ever before at the role of black holes in the universe. To cut a long story short: Einstein was right.... His general theory of relativity has passed two serious tests from the universe's most extreme conditions in the last few years. Here, Einstein's theory predicted the observations from M87 with unerring accuracy, and is seemingly the correct description of the nature of space, time, and gravity. The measurements of the speeds of matter around the center of the black hole are consistent with being near the speed of light. The advanced computing research center at the University of Texas at Austin says the data for the photo "was collected during a 2017 global campaign, after decades of scientific, engineering, and computational research and preparation." And their own facility played a role in the finished photo, according to an article shared by aarondubrow: Helping to lay the groundwork for the black hole imaging, and providing the theoretical underpinnings that enabled the researchers to interpret the mass, underlying structure, and orientations of the black hole and its environment, were supercomputers at The University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) -- Stampede1, Stampede2 and Jetstream -- all three of which were supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which also provided key funding for the EHT... "We are doing finite difference, three-dimensional simulations with not just gas dynamics, but also magnetic fields," said Harvard University professor and EHT researcher Ramesh Narayan. "That includes radiation and what is called two-temperature physics in a general relativistic framework. For these, we really do need the TACC's Stampede system with lots of cores and lots of hours.... The simulations are computationally very expensive and supercomputers are definitely needed...." Alongside the simulation and modeling effort, another group of researchers from the University of Arizona (UA) were using Jetstream -- a large-scale cloud environment for research located both at TACC and Indiana University -- to develop cloud-based data analysis pipelines that proved crucial for combining huge amounts of data taken from the geographically-distributed observatories, and sharing the data with researchers around the world. "New technologies such as cloud computing are essential to support international collaborations like this," said Chi-kwan Chan, leader of the EHT Computations and Software Working Group and an assistant astronomer at UA. "The production run was actually carried out on Google Cloud, but much of the early development was on Jetstream. Without Jetstream, it is unclear that we would have a cloud-based pipeline at all."

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