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In addition to Daydream, Google is discontinuing its AI-powered Google Clips, a small camera designed to leverage modern technology in order to automatically capture and preserve life's most memorable moments. "The product page for the device is still featured on the Google Store website, but it now redirects users to other available devices," reports SlashGear. From the report: Put simply, Google Clips was a small square camera designed to automatically record memorable moments during your day. This ability relied on artificial intelligence, the idea being that by the time something interesting happens, it'll likely already be over by the time you pull out your phone to record it. Google Clips was unlike any other camera consumers were likely to encounter, one with the appeal of promising a hands-free experience (for the most part). Users could browse through the 7-second clips captured by the camera -- they were assembled from individually captured still images -- to see what Google's algorithm thought was interesting. Ultimately, there were some issues with the device. For starters, the entire philosophy of the device required it to be worn or carried around frequently, otherwise it wouldn't have the opportunity to capture spontaneous moments. Many people report feeling uncomfortable interacting with others while a camera is present to watch the moment. Beyond that, many users and official reviews found that the camera didn't function quite as well as they'd hoped it would, resulting in many clips that weren't terribly interesting, ones completely devoid of audio. The utility of what was essentially a GIF-capturing device didn't appeal to many; years later, the product is officially discontinued.

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You could say the US has... stiffened its defenses. Get it? Sti – OK, you got it

The US Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) has reportedly replaced the ancient eight-inch floppy disks it uses to store data on the US nuclear arsenal.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A bipartisan pair of senators has introduced legislation to drastically limit the use of noncompete agreements across the U.S. economy. "Noncompete agreements stifle wage growth, career advancement, innovation, and business creation," argued Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) in a Thursday press release. He said that the legislation, co-sponsored with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), would "empower our workers and entrepreneurs so they can freely apply their talents where their skills are in greatest demand." Noncompete agreements ban workers from performing similar work at competing firms for a limited period -- often one or two years. These agreements have become widely used in recent decades -- and not just for employees with sensitive business intelligence or client relationships. "We heard from people working at pizza parlors, yogurt shops, hairdressers, and people making sandwiches," Massachusetts state Rep. Lori Ehrlich told us in an interview last year. Ehrlich was the author of 2018 Massachusetts legislation limiting the enforcement of noncompete agreements. Several other states -- including Oregon, Illinois, and Maryland -- have passed bills on the subject. These state reforms focused on reining in the worst abuses of noncompete agreements. Some prohibit the use of noncompete clauses with low-wage workers. Others require employers to give employees notice of the requirement at the time they make a job offer. The Young and Murphy bill goes much further, completely banning noncompete agreements outside of a few narrow circumstances -- like someone selling their own business.

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Reddit-born hyperloop and engineering collective rLoop has bought the intellectual property of Arrivo, a fellow hyperloop startup that went out of business last December, The Verge has learned. rLoop co-founder Brent Lessard confirmed the sale, but he would not disclose how much the group paid. From the report: Lessard said rLoop might try to revive some of the deals that Arrivo had been working on, like a test track outside of Denver, Colorado, and that it may hire back some of Arrivo's former employees. But, Lessard said, rLoop is still only in the "final stages" of assessing the progress Arrivo's employees had made toward developing a type of hyperloop that relies on magnetic levitation (as opposed to the vacuum-based solution that was originally proposed by Elon Musk when he introduced the hyperloop idea in a 2013 white paper). rLoop was founded in 2015 after SpaceX announced plans to hold a hyperloop competition. Lessard and other members of the SpaceX subreddit eventually pulled together some 140 engineers and designers and became the only non-university team to advance out of the design round and into the final competition where they ultimately won an "innovation award." "We've had a fairly close relationship over the years with Brogan, and we were disheartened when we heard that they were closing up shop," Lessard said. "We were in talks with [Arrivo] since that point to figure out exactly what they've been working on, what was happening with the IP, and so we ended up acquiring it earlier this year." Lessard said rLoop has had "conversations with a number of key [Arrivo] employees" and that "many of them have expressed the desire to see the concept through."

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DoNotPay, a free chatbot that offers AI-powered legal counsel, is launching a new feature that will call you when it's your turn in a customer service phone queue. TechCrunch reports: The app today is launching "Skip Waiting On Hold." Just type in the company you need to talk to, and DoNotPay calls for you using tricks to get a human on the line quickly. Then it calls you back and connects you to the agent so you never have to listen to that annoying hold music. And in case the company tries to jerk you around or screw you over, the DoNotPay app lets you instantly share to social media a legal recording of the call to shame them. Skip Waiting On Hold comes as part of the $3 per month DoNotPay suite of services designed to save people time and money by battling bureaucracy on their behalf. It can handle DMV paperwork for you, write legal letters to scare businesses out of overcharging you and it provides a credit card that automatically cancels subscriptions when your free trial ends. For Skip Waiting On Hold, DoNotPay built out a database of priority and VIP customer service numbers for tons of companies. For legality, if you opt in to recording the exchanges, the app automatically plays a message informing both parties they'll be recorded. A human voice detection system hears when a real agent picks up the phone, and then rings your phone. It's like having customer service call you.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Firefox is the only browser that received top marks in a recent audit carried out by Germany's cyber-security agency -- the German Federal Office for Information Security (or the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik -- BSI). The BSI tested Mozilla Firefox 68 (ESR), Google Chrome 76, Microsoft Internet Explorer 11, and Microsoft Edge 44. The tests did not include other browsers like Safari, Brave, Opera, or Vivaldi. The audit was carried out using rules detailed in a guideline for "modern secure browsers" that the BSI published last month, in September 2019. The BSI normally uses this guide to advise government agencies and companies from the private sector on what browsers are safe to use. The article includes a list of all the minimum requirements required for the BSI to consider a browser "secure." It also lists the areas where the other browsers failed, such as: Lack of support for a master password mechanism (Chrome, IE, Edge); No built-in update mechanism (IE), and No option to block telemetry collection (Chrome, IE, Edge).

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Scientists have directly observed the rocky guts of exoplanets, which are worlds from different star systems, by watching the fallout of these objects crashing into the corpses of dead stars. From a report: This mind-boggling technique has revealed that exoplanets are similar in composition to planets in our own solar system, implying that worlds like Earth may be plentiful in our galaxy, according to a study published on Thursday in Science. "It's pretty cool because this is really the only way to measure the geochemistry of exoplanetary bodies directly," said lead author Alexandra Doyle, a graduate student of geochemistry and astrochemistry at UCLA, in a phone call. Co-author Edward Young, a professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry at UCLA, added that the study represents "the first time such an advanced way of looking at the geochemistry of these bodies has been used," in the same call. We are living through a golden age of exoplanet discoveries. Thousands of exoplanets have been detected, including an Earth-sized world orbiting the closest star to the Sun. But it is still extremely difficult to capture details about the interior composition and dynamics of these worlds. Unlike other planetary properties such as mass or atmospheric composition, a planet's geochemistry cannot be deduced just by looking at an object passing in front of its host star. White dwarfs, as it turns out, can help plug this information gap. These objects are the remains of stars that have blown up and collapsed into tiny, dense spheres about the size of Earth (our own Sun will embark on this transition in about five billion years). The pyrotechnic deaths of these stars scramble the orbits of many objects in our solar system, such as asteroids and planets. Some of these worlds may end up hurtling toward the star's posthumous white dwarf, which tears them apart over the course of about 100,000 to one million years.

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Personal car ownership in the US has increased in the past 10 years, even in the frenzied urban places where Uber and car-share have become verbs. From a report: According to research from former New York City transportation official Bruce Schaller, the number of vehicles has grown faster than the population in some of the cities where ride-hail is most popular: Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Moreover, some services targeted to the aspirationally or actually car-free have hit the skids. Car2Go, the car-sharing company now jointly owned by Daimler and BMW, said earlier this month it would pull out of half of the North American cities where it operates. (The company, which allows users to pick up and drop off cars at regular street parking spaces, says it will focus its firepower on its remaining North American cities: New York, Montreal, Seattle, Vancouver, and Washington.) BMW-owned ReachNow, a wide-ranging experiment in ride hailing and car rental, folded in the US this summer. The scooter-share folks at Lime last month killed their experimental LimePod car-share service in Seattle. General Motors wound down its Maven car-sharing service in eight of its 17 North American cities this summer. Uber and Lyft, now public companies, are losing gobs of money, and the services' most popular times are Friday evenings, which seems to indicate less that people are ditching their personal cars than ditching their personal cars while drinking.

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There's a line somewhere and we may just draw it, says code-hosting biz

GitLab today had a change of heart after facing withering criticism for directing employees not to talk politics at work and declaring it would do business with any customer not banned by law regardless of moral considerations.…

A joint investigation between Motherboard and the German broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) has uncovered new details about a spate of so-called "jackpotting" attacks. From a report: A joint investigation between Motherboard and the German broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) has uncovered new details about a spate of so-called "jackpotting" attacks on ATMs in Germany in 2017 that saw thieves make off with more than a million Euros. Jackpotting is a technique where cybercriminals use malware or a piece of hardware to trick an ATM into ejecting all of its cash, no stolen credit card required. Hackers typically install the malware onto an ATM by physically opening a panel on the machine to reveal a USB port. In some cases, we have identified the specific bank and ATM manufacturer affected. Although a European non-profit said jackpotting attacks have decreased in the region in the first half of this year, multiple sources said the number of attacks in other parts of the world has gone up. Attacked regions include the U.S., Latin America, and Southeast Asia, and the issue impacts banks and ATM manufacturers across the financial industry. "The U.S. is quite popular," a source familiar with ATM attacks said. Motherboard and BR granted multiple sources, including law enforcement officials, anonymity to speak more candidly about sensitive hacking incidents.

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Whoever implemented this wasn't a star pupil. Smartphone is an eye-groan. Face off with tech. And so on and so forth

Pixel 4 owners can unlock their smartphones with their faces even if they have their eyes closed. That's not good.…

Current machine learning models aren't yet up to the task of distinguishing false news reports, two new papers by MIT researchers show. From a report: After different researchers showed that computers can convincingly generate made-up news stories without much human oversight, some experts hoped that the same machine-learning-based systems could be trained to detect such stories. But MIT doctoral student Tal Schuster's studies show that, while machines are great at detecting machine-generated text, they can't identify whether stories are true or false. Many automated fact-checking systems are trained using a database of true statements called Fact Extraction and Verification (FEVER). In one study, Schuster and team showed that machine learning-taught fact-checking systems struggled to handle negative statements ("Greg never said his car wasn't blue") even when they would know the positive statement was true ("Greg says his car is blue"). The problem, say the researchers, is that the database is filled with human bias. The people who created FEVER tended to write their false entries as negative statements and their true statements as positive statements -- so the computers learned to rate sentences with negative statements as false. That means the systems were solving a much easier problem than detecting fake news.

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Any Reg readers have a solution? The web payment giant doesn't care

A Register reader says that for months he has been dealing with unwanted emails and alerts because a domain he purchased is connected to someone else's PayPal account, and PayPal doesn't seem to care.…

Chime, an online banking startup with more than 5 million customers, has been suffering an outage for much of past 24 hours that has left customers without access to their money. From a report: The startup blamed the disruption on an unspecified issue with a payments processor and said data was not at risk. The downtime comes as the digital bank has been growing quickly -- the number of customers has almost doubled since March, to about 5 million. Chime is also in the process of raising a new funding round that could value it at more than $5 billion. [...] San Francisco-based Chime is part of a growing digital banking sector that has seen rising interest from customers and global investors in recent years. Chime's target market, according to the company, is a younger demographic whose income ranges from $35,000 to $70,000 a year and who are frustrated by the fees charged by larger brick and mortar banks. It's a group that may be more likely to trust a startup with their money.

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Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview he worries "about an erosion of truth" online but defended the policy that allows politicians to peddle ads containing misrepresentations and lies on his social network, a stance that has sparked an outcry during the 2020 presidential campaign. From a report: "People worry, and I worry deeply, too, about an erosion of truth," Zuckerberg told The Washington Post ahead of a speech Thursday at Georgetown University. "At the same time, I don't think people want to live in a world where you can only say things that tech companies decide are 100 percent true. And I think that those tensions are something we have to live with." Zuckerberg's approach to political speech has come under fire in recent weeks. Democrats have taken particular issue with Facebook's decision to allow an ad from President Trump's 2020 campaign that included falsehoods about former vice president Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Sen. Elizabeth Warren responded to Facebook's decision by running her own campaign ad, satirically stating that Zuckerberg supports Trump for re-election. Zuckerberg framed the issue as part of a broader debate over free expression, warning about the dangers of social networks, including Facebook, "potentially cracking down too much." He called on the U.S. to set an example for tailored regulation in contrast to other countries, including China, that censor political speech online. And Zuckerberg stressed Facebook must stand strong against governments that seek to "pull back" on free speech in the face of heightened social and political tensions. Zuckerberg's appearance in Washington marks his most forceful attempt to articulate his vision for how governments and tech giants should approach the Web's most intractable problems. The scale of Facebook and its affiliated apps, Instagram and WhatsApp, which make up a virtual community of billions of users, poses challenges for Zuckerberg and regulators around the world as they struggle to contain hate speech, falsehoods, violent imagery and terrorist propaganda on social media.

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If Chrome for Android users visit a site where they enter passwords, Chrome will isolate that site from all the other tabs in a separate Android process, keeping the user's data safe from Spectre-like attacks, Google said today. From a report: Furthermore, Site Isolation, which has been available for desktop users since July 2018, has also been expanded for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS users, which now receive protection against more attacks than the original Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Site Isolation is a Chrome security feature that Google started developing as a way to isolate each website from one another, so malicious code running on one site/tab couldn't steal data from other websites/tabs. Site Isolation was developed to act as a second layer of protection on top of Same Origin Policy (SOP), a browser feature that prevents websites from accessing each other's data. Google developed Site Isolation because browser bugs often allowed sites to jump the SOP barrier and steal user data stored in the browser, created by other sites.

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Building blocks for devs. Because you can't be all Waity K8-y when Google's all-in

Ahead of Microsoft's Ignite conference next month, the company has announced Dapr, now available as an Alpha preview, a runtime to simplify developing microservices.…

The U.K.'s new deal for leaving the European Union hasn't given companies any certainty about how they should handle the movement of personal data out of the bloc and into Britain. From a report: The country has until at least the end of next year to clinch an agreement with Europe that will allow organizations to freely move data about customers to and from the EU without breaching data protection rules, according to the agreement released on Thursday. Violating the EU's General Data Protection Regulation policy can lead to fines of as much as 4% of annual sales. A so-called adequacy decision would add the U.K. to a list of countries whose data laws are accepted as in harmony with Europe's. But while the U.K. currently adheres to the bloc's laws, it isn't a shoe-in. Its data-collection practices for national security purposes are likely to come under heavy scrutiny during a review process that may take years, lawyers have said.

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Aging water treatment systems, failing pipes and a slew of unregulated contaminants threaten to undermine water quality in U.S. cities of all sizes. Still, with only a handful of exceptions, "water systems aren't designed to focus on health, they're focused on cost-containment," says Seth Siegel, whose book "Troubled Water," released this month, examines the precarious state of water infrastructure in the U.S. From a report: Whatever goes down the sink, shower, washing machine and toilet is transferred to one of about 14,000 U.S. wastewater treatment plants. While those plants are good at neutralizing sewage microorganisms that can make people sick or pollute waterways, they can miss chemicals that are linked with our changing lifestyles. The biggest change since most treatment plants were designed? The explosion of pharmaceutical use by Americans, Siegel told me during an interview in Axios' office. About 60% of American adults take at least one prescription pill every day, per the National Center for Health Statistics. Residue from those pills travels to treatment plants and waterways. Water testing often doesn't accurately reflect the risks of tap water, and testing processes can be manipulated to show passing results.

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Mass-mailing your customers today? Read this first

Thames Water found itself in warm, er, water this week after a clunky migration effort left customers receiving emails that looked like a particularly sophisticated spear-phishing attack.…