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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: British Airways announced that it is testing out virtual reality headsets for the rest of this year on flights between London's Heathrow and New York City's John F. Kennedy airport. The airline is tapping SkyLights for the VR eyewear headsets that will be available for its first-class passengers. The AlloSky hardware can present 3D views even when the viewer is lying flat. As far as programming, British Airways will have options. The VR headsets will offer visual entertainment in 2D, 3D, or 360-degree formats. The airline will also provide more therapeutic programs to help people who have a fear of flying. These VR experiences include guided meditation and sound therapy. This marks the first time British Airways is bringing virtual reality onto its aircrafts. The company also used SkyLights' hardware at its ticket counters in Heathrow to show passengers the experience of its first-class travel in an effort to encourage upgrades.

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Mostly the public adversely affected

A young man who DoSed two British police forces' websites has been sentenced to 16 months in a young offenders' institution.…

'Automated and manual' data processing – so humans, yeah?

Microsoft has responded to the furore over its use of humans to listen in on Skype and Cortana recordings by tweaking its privacy policy a bit.…

Axe fell on sales, marketing and product development

One in 15 IBM jobs in the UK were rubbed out during calendar 2018 despite local financials returning to growth.…

Goldsmiths, a part of the University of London, is fighting climate change by taking beef off the menu. "[The university] will no longer serve beef burgers, beef burritos and the like on its campus," reports CBS News. From the report: Goldsmiths will take beef products off the menu starting in September, it announced Monday. The effort is part of a mission to become carbon neutral by 2025. Removing beef products on campus isn't the only action the university is taking. It also plans to install more solar panels, switch to a 100% clean energy supplier, plant more trees and make climate change education more accessible to students. Perhaps the biggest change the university is making aside from the elimination of beef is a fee of 10 pence (12 cents) on bottled water and single-use plastic cups. The goal is to "discourage use, with the proceeds directed into a green student initiative fund," the college's new warden, Professor Frances Corner, said.

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Jumpin' Jupiter smash, it's a gas, gas, gas

Jupiter may have started life as a dense rocky planet that only became more gas-like after a massive newborn planet smashed right into it 4.5 billion years ago, according to new research.…

TripAdvisor said what now?

A Victorian public convenience in Hull has made Lonely Planet's list of the best 500 places to visit in the UK.…

Clickjacking code found on sites with 43 million daily visits total

Analysis Clickjacking, which came to the attention of security types more than a decade ago, continues to thrive, despite defenses deployed since then by browser makers.…

Scientists who discovered aging appears to be related to the stiffness of the environment where cells live have reversed the process in rat brain stem cells. Newsweek reports: Researchers studied oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) in young and old rat brains, and found they were affected by stiffness in the organ caused by aging. These stem cells, meaning they can turn into other types of cell, are found in the central nervous system. Researchers studied oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) in young and old rat brains, and found they were affected by stiffness in the organ caused by aging. These stem cells, meaning they can turn into other types of cell, are found in the central nervous system. Kevin Chalut, a biophysicist at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the study published in the journal Nature told Newsweek: "The study tells us that aging, at least for stem cells we studied, is not driven by anything intrinsic to the cell. It is instead driven by the environment. This was already known to be a factor, but the true significance here is to show that it is the stiffness of the environment alone that drives the aging of the stem cells. "This is rather remarkable because it suggests an entirely new way of thinking about what controls aging in stem cells, and furthermore, since stiffness is a single factor from the environment, it suggest a means to straightforwardly reverse aging in stem cells'" Chalut explained.

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Thinking US again? You'd be wrong

Comment In a report that has left lawmakers across the globe reeling, the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday claimed a smartphone maker helped government officials in Uganda access encrypted texts on a handset used by one of its own citizens, and track the device's whereabouts.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: People unjustly kept away from feline companionship due to an allergy are rejoicing this week, after news resurfaced of a potential vaccine that makes cats less able to cause allergies. But while this research is promising, a finished product won't be available any time soon. The vaccine in question is being developed by Swiss-based Hypocat and is the company's lead experimental and namesake drug. This April, Hypocat published results from a study on the vaccine. And it's this news that the internet has, for reasons lost to the void, started to buzz about again. The study, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, details a very clever strategy to tackle cat allergies. The vaccine doesn't try to desensitize the immune system of people allergic to cats, as other existing immunotherapies like allergy shots do. Rather, it attempts to train the immune system of cats to go after a specific protein, or allergen, that they naturally produce called Fel d 1. It's supposed to accomplish this trick by hitching a genetically modified version of the protein to a virus-like particle derived from a plant virus (only being a particle, it shouldn't be capable of causing disease). Some 90 percent of people with a cat allergy produce antibodies to Fel d 1. So if successful, the vaccine would basically turn cats hypoallergenic by greatly reducing the amount of Fel d 1 they make and eventually spew into our noses and mouths. While the company behind the vaccine says it's been in discussions with both U.S. and European drug approval agencies, Gizmodo notes that "even if these trials started today and the vaccine passed them with flying colors, you'll still have to wait years before it could hit the market."

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Freshly Exhumed shares a report from The Guardian: Automatic license plate readers, which use networked surveillance cameras and simple image recognition to track the movements of cars around a city, may have met their match, in the form of a T-shirt. Or a dress. Or a hoodie. The anti-surveillance garments were revealed at the DefCon cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas on Saturday by the hacker and fashion designer Kate Rose, who presented the inaugural collection of her Adversarial Fashion line. To human eyes, Rose's fourth amendment T-shirt contains the words of the fourth amendment to the U.S. constitution in bold yellow letters. The amendment, which protects Americans from "unreasonable searches and seizures," has been an important defense against many forms of government surveillance: in 2012, for instance, the U.S. supreme court ruled that it prevented police departments from hiding GPS trackers on cars without a warrant. But to an automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system, the shirt is a collection of license plates, and they will get added to the license plate reader's database just like any others it sees. The intention is to make deploying that sort of surveillance less effective, more expensive, and harder to use without human oversight, in order to slow down the transition to what Rose calls "visual personally identifying data collection." "It's a highly invasive mass surveillance system that invades every part of our lives, collecting thousands of plates a minute. But if it's able to be fooled by fabric, then maybe we shouldn't have a system that hangs things of great importance on it," she said.

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IG Metall, Europe's largest trade union with 2.3 million members, has joined forces with a German YouTuber who set up a Facebook group called The YouTubers Union after his videos started getting "de-monetized." The German metalworkers union is throwing itself in the battle between Google and the millions of people whose income derives from uploading videos to the site. It's inviting YouTubers to become members and is running a campaign called FairTube to press for better terms. IG Metall has "given Google a deadline of August 23 to come to the negotiating table," reports Bloomberg. "If it refuses, IG Metall plans to use its deep pockets and army of lawyers to pursue legal options." From the report: So what exactly can IG Metall do? A lawsuit is the most likely next step. The union claims that decisions made to de-monetize a video with no explanation contravene the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. One strand of the rules, introduced last year, gives people the right to know whether their personal data is being processed, for what purpose, and to request a copy of it all. The union argues that algorithms deciding to stop ads being attached to a clip generate such data. It's a smart play. With the deep pockets afforded by its huge membership, IG Metall is able to contest issues where an individual would struggle. Notably, the union is trying to use the same tool of its members' atomization -- the online platform -- to organize them. Even before it joined forces with the YouTubers Union Facebook group, IG Metall had launched an initiative called FairCrowd, a website where gig economy workers provide feedback on the apps they work for. It's not that far from its home turf: IG Metall already represents employees at tech companies like SAP SE.

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Researchers said they have found a publicly accessible database containing almost 28 million records -- including plain-text passwords, face photos, and personal information -- that was used to secure buildings around the world. Ars Technica reports: Researchers from vpnMentor reported on Wednesday that the database was used by the Web-based Biostar 2 security system sold by South Korea-based Suprema. Biostar uses facial recognition and fingerprint scans to identify people authorized to enter warehouses, municipal buildings, businesses, and banks. vpnMentor said the system has more than 1.5 million installations in a wide range of countries including the U.S., the UK, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka. According to vpnMentor, the 23-gigabyte database contained more than 27.8 million records used by Biostar to secure customer facilities. The data included usernames, passwords and user IDs in plaintext, building access logs, employee records including start dates, personal details, mobile device data, and face images. The researchers said the data also included more than 1 million records containing actual fingerprint scans, but the report provided no data to support the claim. "The vpnMentor researchers said they discovered the exposed database on August 5 and privately reported the finding two days later," reports Ars Technica. "The data wasn't secured until Tuesday, six days later."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Apple, Google, Amazon, and most recently Facebook have been found hiring human workers to transcribe audio captured by their own products. Motherboard found Microsoft does the same for some Skype calls, and is still doing so despite other companies suspending their reliance on contractors. A cache of leaked documents obtained by Motherboard gives insight into what the human contractors behind the development of tech giants' artificial intelligence services are actually doing: laborious, repetitive tasks that are designed to improve the automated interpretation of human speech. This means tasks tech giants have promised are completed by virtual assistants and artificial intelligence are trained by the monotonous work of people. The work is magnified by the large footprint of speech recognition tools: Microsoft's Cortana product, similar to Apple's Siri, is implemented in Windows 10 machines and Xbox One consoles, and is also available as on iOS, Android, and smart speakers. The instruction manuals on classifying this sort of data go on for hundreds of pages, with a dizzying number of options for contractors to follow to classify data, or punctuation style guides they're told to follow. The contractor said they are expected to work on around 200 pieces of data an hour, and noted they've heard personal and sensitive information in Cortana recordings. A document obtained by Motherboard corroborates that for some work contractors need to complete at least 200 tasks an hour. The pay for this work varies. One contract obtained by Motherboard shows pay at $12 an hour, with the possibility of contractors being able to reach $13 an hour as a bonus. A contract for a different task shows $14 an hour, with a potential bonus of $15 an hour. A Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in an emailed statement, "We're always looking to improve transparency and help customers make more informed choices. Our disclosures have been clear that we use customer content from Cortana and Skype Translator to improve these products, we engage third party expertise to assist in this process, and we take steps to de-identify this content to protect people's privacy."

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Stock price back up to, er, just below IPO level

Dell-owned VMware is in talks to acquire Dell-owned Pivotal Software, the hypervisor giant announced Wednesday.…

The headphone jack is increasingly being omitted from smartphones and tablets, but what about laptops? When Apple launched the redesigned MacBook Pro in 2016, it decided to remove the SD card slot, full-sized USB Type A ports, and Thunderbolt 2 ports -- but keep the 3.5mm headphone jack, even though it axed the headphone jack in the 2016 iPhone 7. The reason, Apple said, had to do with the lack of wireless solutions for pro audio gear that many users use with their MacBooks. "If it was just about headphones then it doesn't need to be there," said Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller. "We believe that wireless is a great solution for headphones." He added: "But many users have set-ups with studio monitors, amps and other pro audio gear that do not have wireless solutions and need the 3.5mm jack." While most laptops today still retain the headphone jack, that trend doesn't seem like it'll last for too much longer as the industry moves to embrace wireless audio. Laptop alternatives like Apple's iPad Pro and Samsung's Galaxy Tab S5e have both ditched the 3.5mm port, meaning it's only a matter of time until laptops themselves lose the port. Our question to you is: do you use the headphone jack on your laptop? Would you mind if a manufacturer removed the port to make room for a bigger battery or make the device slimmer and more portable? Let us know your thoughts below.

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Stock price dives as Wall St learns of trouble overseas and weak outlook

Cisco warned of problems on the horizon as it wrapped up it fiscal 2019 financial results [PDF].…

Users of credit monitoring site Credit Karma have took to Reddit and Twitter to complain that they were served other people's account information when they logged in. TechCrunch has confirmed several screenshots that show other people's accounts, including details about their credit card accounts and their current balance. When contacted, a Credit Karma spokesperson said these users "experienced a technical malfunction that has now been fixed," and that there's "no evidence of a data breach." The company didn't say for how long customers were experiencing issues. TechCrunch reports: One user told TechCrunch that after they were served another person's full credit report, they messaged the user on LinkedIn "to let him know his data was compromised." Another user told us this: "The reports are split into two sections: Credit Factors -- things like number of accounts, inquiries, utilization; and Credit Reports -- personal information like name, address, etc.. The Credit Reports section was my own information, but the Credit Factors section definitely wasn't. It listed four credit card accounts (I have more like 20 on my report), a missed payment (I'm 100% on time with payments), a Honda auto loan (never had one with Honda), student loan financing (mine are paid off and too old to appear on my report), and cards with an issuer that I have no relationship with (Discover)." Another user who was affected said they could read another person's Credit Factors -- including derogatory credit marks -- but that the Credit Report tab with that user's personal information, like names and addresses, was blank. One user said that the login page was pulled offline for a brief period. "We'll be right back," the login page read instead.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: When she joined a trial of new tuberculosis drugs, the dying young woman weighed just 57 pounds. Stricken with a deadly strain of the disease, she was mortally terrified. Local nurses told her the Johannesburg hospital to which she must be transferred was very far away -- and infested with vervet monkeys. "I cried the whole way in the ambulance," Tsholofelo Msimango recalled recently. "They said I would live with monkeys and the sisters there were not nice and the food was bad and there was no way I would come back. They told my parents to fix the insurance because I would die." Five years later, Ms. Msimango, 25, is now tuberculosis-free. She is healthy at 103 pounds, and has a young son. The trial she joined was small -- it enrolled only 109 patients -- but experts are calling the preliminary results groundbreaking. The drug regimen tested on Ms. Msimango has shown a 90 percent success rate against a deadly plague, extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis. On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration effectively endorsed the approach, approving the newest of the three drugs used in the regimen. Usually, the World Health Organization adopts approvals made by the F.D.A. or its European counterpart, meaning the treatment could soon come into use worldwide. Typically, patients in South Africa treated with this deadly strain of tuberculosis are required to take up to 40 daily pills for up to two years. "But in the trial Ms. Msimango joined, nicknamed Nix-TB, patients took only five pills a day for six months," the report says. "The pills contain just three drugs: pretomanid, bedaquiline and linezolid. Someday, the whole regimen might come in just one pill, as H.I.V. drugs do, one expert said."

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